Poetry Review Volume 100: 2 Summer 2010 is out, with poems from Alfred Corn, Ruth Fainlight, Alan Jenkins, John Kinsella, Sarah Maguire, Chris McCabe, Daljit Nagra, myself, and others. Also, a few good articles on slam poetry. Having been involved with bringing slam poetry to Canada fifteen years ago (in the summer of 1994 I believe) via the nationally-infamous cabaret nights of Vox Hunt, that led to YAWP! and the emergence of an entire slam domination in Montreal of the art form, for a few years, I then anthologised slam poets and poems alongside major page poets like Glyn Maxwell, Michael Donaghy, and others, calling the new wave of poets that read well on and off the page Fusion Poets, with co-editor Regie Cabico, when we put out the 1998 anthology Poetry Nation. Good to see the British finally taking to their own indigenous slam artists, and welcoming them in, off the stage, onto the page. Meanwhile, my own working practice has moved on, and I collaborate far less with rap artists and musicians, as I used to do at Club di Salvio (origin of Bran Van 3000 - and I may be the Todd of "Drinking in LA", or not) - these days I am, I suppose, a lover of high modernist formal practice, and the lyric, disrupted more, or less. The page rules the head, the stage the heart. The eyes may have it. But a voice can still win the day.
THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
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