THE SHOP: POP UP POETRY ON PORTOBELLO ROAD JULY 1-7 FROM CB EDITIONS/EYEWEAR!

Wow - Paddington Bear would have loved to get his paws on this shop's books on the fabled Portobello road he so loved to visit...

COME BY AND ENJOY SOME WINE, SOME POETRY, SOME POETRY BOOK BROWSING/ BUYING. 201 PORTOBELLO ROAD, NOTTING HILL, LONDON, JULY 1-7 2013....

HERE ARE THE COOL EVENTS (POP UP TEN MINUTE READINGS)...

Monday 1st July

Evening: 7 pm-8 pm: Eyewear party, with reading by Mark Ford

Tuesday 2nd July

Day readers: 2.30 pm, Leah Fritz; 3.30 pm, Kimberly Campanello; 4 pm, Christopher Reid; 4.30 pm, Astrid Alben

Wednesday 3rd July

Day readers: 1.30 pm, Tim Dooley; 2.30 Tim Wells; 3 pm, Fiona Curran; 3 pm Andrew Motion; 4 pm, Sandeep Parmar & James Byrne

Evening: Flipped Eye event:

6 pm: Sarah Westcott – runner up in the first Venture Award, reading from her new pamphlet Inklings for followed by Q&A/signing.

6.45pm Introducing The mouthmark Book of Poetry – a hardback anthology of all the single-author pamphlets produced under the mouthmark series, including Jacob Sam-La Rose’s Communion, Denise Saul’s White Narcissi, Inua Ellams’ 13 Fairy Negro Tales and Warsan Shire’s Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth

Thursday 4th July

Day readers: 3.30 pm, Anthony Howell; 5 pm, Harry Man; 5.30 pm, Michael Horovitz and friend

Evening: 6.30 pm, Laura Del Rivo and Cathi Unsworth

Laura Del Rivo has been living in the Portobello Road area for over fifty years. She still runs a market stall. In 2011 Five Leaves reissued her debut novel, The Furnished Room (1961; filmed by Michael Winner in 1963 as West 11): ‘an evocative taste of black-coffee blues ... a perfect encapsulation of that shady, shifting Ladbroke Grove on the cusp of profound social change’ (Guardian). She has a story in the new Salt anthology of Best British Short Stories 2013, and a new collection will be published by Holland Park Press this year.

Cathi Unsworth is also a local author. Her novels include Bad Penny Blues, an exploration of the unsolved ‘Jack the Stripper’ murders of eight working girls in along the Thames in the1960s, The Not Knowing and The Singer (‘Cathi Unsworth has written the Great Punk Novel’ – David Peace). Her most recent novel, The Weirdo, was published in paperback in June. In the book of essays on London Fictions (Five Leaves, 2013) she writes on Lynne Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room (1960).

Friday 5th July

Day readers: 1 pm; Tamar Yoseloff ; 1.30 pm, John Greening; 3.30 pm, Steven Fowler; 4 pm, Michael Horovitz

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....

"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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