Darkness With Noon?

Nine Arches Press and Sidekick Books present…

Poetry Rodeo (London)

Thursday 17th May 2012, at 7.00 p.m.

Big Green Bookshop, 1 Brampton Park Road, Wood Green, London N22 6BG

FREE ENTRY

To celebrate the launch of Alistair Noon’s Earth Records, we welcome you to the Poetry Rodeo….

With special guest poets, Nia Davies, Alistair Noon, Edward Mackay, Andrew Frolish.

Alistair Noon was born in 1970 and grew up in Aylesbury. Besides time spent in Russia and China, he has lived in Berlin since the early nineties, where he works as a translator. His poetry and translations from German and Russian have appeared in nine chapbooks from small presses. Earth Records is his first full-length collection.

Andrew Frolish was born in Sheffield in 1975. After studying politics at Lancaster University, he trained to be a teacher in the Lake District. His poems have been published in a variety of magazines, including PN Review, Acumen, Envoi, Tears in the Fence, The Interpreter’s House, Pulsar, Iota, Orbis and The Agenda Broadsheet. He has received prizes in several competitions and won the Suffolk Poetry Society Crabbe Memorial competition in 2006. His poems for children, along with lesson plans for teachers, have been published by Hopscotch. He now lives with his family in Suffolk, where he is a headteacher.

Edward Mackay lives and writes in east London where he also runs a conflict resolution charity. He was shortlisted for the 2009 Eric Gregory Awards and the inaugural Picador Poetry Prize, and blogs at http://postcardsfromdoggerland.wordpress.com/. Edward's debut pamphlet is forthcoming from Salt in 2012. Find out more at www.edwardmackay.com/.

Nia Davies was born in Sheffield and has been writing poetry and fiction since the age of 14. She won the first Stanmer Prize for poetry and in 2008 was awarded a place on the Academi Mentoring Scheme for writers to develop her novel Polaris. She has lived in Wales and is currently based in London where she works for Literature Across Frontiers – a European platform for literary translation and intercultural dialogue. She is also a project manager for Cyfnewidfa Len Cymru / Wales Literature Exchange – Wales’s hub for literary translation. Nia's poems featured in 2012 anthology The Salt Book of Younger Poets. http://niadavies.wordpress.com/.

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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