From: VAX::POETSOC 20-JAN-1988 18:17 To: ARCHIVE Subj: Typeset on a Monotype Lasercomp at OUCS Printed at Dot Press A-3 is the thrice termly publication of the Oxford Poetry Society, distributed to members. Dues are #2.50 a term or #6.00 for three terms. Subscriptions, contributions (typed, please), listings, criticism, help very welcome: Oxford Poetry Society, Secretary, Jo Lloyd, Balliol College, Oxford, UK. 2.3, 4/12/1986 A-3 2.3 II.3 II.III A-3 2.3 II.3 II.III 4/12/1986 A-3 2.3 II.3 II.III 4/12/86 LISTINGS Events Workshops OUPoetSoc Workshop. Led by Cathy Stonehouse (Wadham) and Bill Herbert (BNC). Every second Monday (starting 2nd week), 8:00 pm, KA2, Wadham College. Free. Old Fire Station Poetry Workshop. Led by Helen Kidd. Every second Friday, (21/11, 5/12), 8:00 pm, #2.40. Contests Anglo-Welsh Poetry Society. First prize #50. Forms from: The Secretary, Anglo-Welsh Poetry Society, The Flat, Cronkhill, Cross Houses, Shrewsbury SY5 6JP (send SAE). Deadline: 31/12/86. Kent and Sussex Poetry Society Open Poetry Competition. Prizes to total #150. Details (SAE please) from: Bill Headdon, 41 Harries Road, Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Deadline: 31/1/87. Lancaster Literature Festival: National Poetry Competition: Poems 87. Entry fee 60p per poem. 30-40 prizes of #10. Details from: Poems 87, Lancaster Literature Festival, 67 Church Street, Lancaster, LA1 1ET. Deadline: 19/1/87. Leek Arts Festival. First prize #500. Details from: Roger Elkin, 44 Rudyard Road, Biddulph Moor, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffs. ST8 7JN. Deadline: 30/4/87. Peterloo Poets Open Poetry Competition. First prize #1,000; Afro-Caribbean or Asian prize #500. Details from: The Administrator, Peterloo Poetry Competition, Treovis Farm Cottage, Upton Cross, Liskeard, Cornwall PL14 5BQ. Deadline: 2/2/87. Welsh Arts Council _ "A Poem for Today'; a new competition for poets in Wales who write in English. Prizes #500, #300, #200. Details from: The Literature Department, Welsh Arts Council, Museum Place, Cardiff, Wales. Deadline: 2/87. Yorkshire Open Poetry Competition for 1987. Prize money to total #275. Details from: Leslie Richardson, Crossfields, Upper Poppleton, York. Deadline: 17/1/87. Nine New Poets (OUPoetSoc). Including Robert Carver, Reyahn King, Andy Peters, Cathy Strickland, Russell Whitehead, Richard Wood. For those who don't know the format, there will be up to nine poets reading for about ten minutes each, plus a number of shorter slots available for even newer poets. If you want to read, turn up and give your name. Thursday, 4/12, 8:00 pm, Morris Room, Exeter College. Notice An Organizational Meeting of OUPoetsoc was held on Thursday 20 November in Exeter College, incorporating a committee re-shuffle. It might be helpful for members of the society to know which of the committee are responsible for the various aspects of the running of the society, though this list shouldn't be taken to imply a particularly rigid structure. President: Bill Herbert, BNC (archives and expertise). Secretary: Jo Lloyd, Balliol (membership and enquiries). Treasurer: Richard Rook, St Johns (keeping us in the black). A-3: Mick Herron and Jo Lloyd (publishing). Bookings: Keith Jebb, St Catz (rooms and readings). Liaison: Helen Kidd, Wolfson (links within and without the university). Publicity: Cathy Taylor (selling the society). Workshop: Cathy Stonehouse, Wadham (construction and destruction). There are also a number of committee members "without portfolio', and there's always room for more help. If anyone out there is interested in helping run things, get in touch with a member of the committee. Christopher Reid, 16/11, Old Fire Station As the last in this term's Writers And Readers series at the Old Fire Station, Christopher Reid was something of an anti-climax. The usual format was followed _ readings in the first half, then questions and answers in the second _ but somehow neither part really came alive. The first poem he read was his latest, the as yet unpublished "Memories of Alfred Stoker', ^"a poem about getting things wrong as much as anything else^'. A 100 year old reminisces about his life, his character showing itself in his constant spelling mistakes more than in what he has to say. Explaining the purpose of these misspellings, Reid referred us to the notes of the painter Alfred Wallis, ^"with no artfulness about them except real art.^' Unfortunately, neither the suggestive drone of the mispronunciations nor the all-too-brief glimpses offered of an upbringing in fundamentalist religion were sufficient to give the poem substance through its 23 parts. The same effect, of an interesting experiment laboriously overworked into monotony, was created by the only other set Reid read from, Katerina Brac (Faber). Again written through a persona, the ploy in these poems was to write as if translating poems from another, unspecified, language. The facts about the "author' were left for the reader to deduce. There were love poems, reminiscences and "riddles', but not enough interest, despite the ingeniousness of the book's enigma. Reid stressed that the use of these personae stemmed from a wish to avoid falling into self-imitation, but I was left wishing that he had taken more risks. Outside of the discussion section of the evening, his own voice was hardly heard. Richard Wood Ken Smith and Jenny Joseph, 13/11, Exeter College (OUPoetSoc) Ken Smith claimed to have worked at an Oxford Pub, Jenny Joseph claimed to have (almost) done so. Looking at them both, it would be hard to imagine that they were similar kinds of establishments. The gruff, take-it-or-leave-it manner of Smith, as against the dapper, bird-like presentation of Joseph left one wondering whether the arbitrary yoking-together of such diverse poets under the banner of a shared publishing company is altogether wise. The first half did prove somewhat disappointing. Smith opened with some rambling remarks and fairly random pieces linked with Oxford itself. Being aware of some of the gems of his most recent collection, it was rather frustrating to have most of them passed over. Joseph then took over and backtracked through her earlier collections now out of print, and most of the material proved somewhat dated and even twee. The second half showed both poets more at their ease, Ken Smith for one having spent forty minutes in Exeter bar in the meantime. Joseph opened with a selection of the wealth from Persephone, and it was only her delivery which took away from the quality of the writing. Ken Smith finished with, perhaps, the most memorable section of the reading. He read new work written since he took up the post of writer in residence at Wormwood Scrubs: some excellent, moving pieces, if rather too orientated around the "I' of the poet himself. Altogether a diverse evening, valuable for that very reason, as well as for the better moments of the second half. Cathy Stonehouse Denise Riley and Cathy Stonehouse, 27/11, Exeter College (OUPoetSoc) Two very different feminist poets read, alternated across two halves. For me the evening started to centre on whether there is a female language; is language gendered. Cathy Stonehouse used a very traditional "linear' syntax, the (male?) language of consecutive argument embedded with often striking images distorting the features of patriarchal myth: female stigmata, a fig leaf over a woman's mouth, wounded speech of the Other. She read slowly, seriously, with an unrelieved flat intonation, the lines seeming uniformly endstopped, and this mechanical effect was heightened by a reliance on a stock of "sensuous' body images/nouns attached to abstract "poetic' words, shot thru with a nostalgia for origins, unity, spontaneity, dreams of dancing naked in a garden, that came over as simple lament. Denise Riley dispensed with the stagey pronouns of lyric utterance, ^"the courtly "we'^', and asserted that language is not gendered, there is no innate biological fit: ^""she' is "I'^'. Language is out there in the world and you have to use it, break it up a bit, or get a nice mass produced tourist carving of yourself handed to you at the airport. She read in a hurried staccato broken by measured pauses, employing an impressive variety of poetics: relentless concatenations of metaphors, semblances of some lost original term; discrete series of imagistic fragments; poems teasing a sentence along quietly fractured lines of syntax. The "connections' between love and economics were at times glib, the "economic' being that which invades the lyric near the end: ^"wading knee deep in pound notes^'. But there was a gentle wit (some very sharp and funny "advice' poems), ^"the furious tenderness of buried words/ or interference from the streets^' in a lively and terse idiom that insisted on the commonplace, the collective against the vaunted literary ego, and some poems not in Dry Air which were like telegrams from the ^"hot modern personal world^' Denise Riley superbly (re)creates. Andrew Lawson Joe Kelleher WINTER I The watermeadow flooded and frozen, we come to look and aren't we walking on water like you said we would? See _ beneath our feet bubbles have stopped rising between the grass that's waving bye-bye, as if waiting to finish, holding its breath. Half a mile this way, half a mile that, the ice has spread a clean sheet over the dirty facts of life. II Its present tense has no interest in us _ predicating past and future as a green field, common land for grazing, from the Tyne to the Thames _ but not to be got to grips with, even as it reaches towards us. You said, "You'd need a sense of history to survive here, a sense of what can be retrieved and what can be achieved, if anything can.' III We take a last look lingering, as if we'd freeze into these shapes looking back for good. We won't. The wind whips up the salt in our blood, our moving parts tingle and the sun says, "Go' _ bowling, bold as brass a yellow stripe straight towards us and over the edge. And yes, before the grass inherits the earth again, we will be gone. IV Say we are learning to live unfinished lives, to fall short of the Pole, as if we'd reached, once, outside time towards some crystal consummation of white light, before the ordinary days split open, the spectrum spewed the primary colours out and all their permutations left us colourblind, our hands too few, too warm and clumsy, to put them back. Keith Jebb AMITABHA the fingerings, these things, I don't know what to do with you, places I have crossed and crassed out, my detachments, as we unwrapped the icecream from the paper so and very soon only the paper remains, dis guarded in some memory's exordium, crusts. And what if I really don't hold on, if any these things like limpet finger bells of taste, dismaterialise, fog up upon a question no renunciation can complete, compete with and the days come sunny and rain and love is very good and very bad; but love. W.N. Herbert REMBRANDT 1 Summer has locked itself inside September and keeps painting; its creditors are hammering to be let out of all the trees, to reclaim the light, but it can paint the dead leaves too. It studies its unique skull, turns it this way and that, lets the last of light slip out of it, paints two women, carry_ ing shattered jugs to the well of ochre turpentined with burgundy. Soon it must agree to be locked under light, into the corridor of sleep, its nacre. Soon its palettes will be scrubbed and auctioned, the buildings it has etched on handed over to print out winter in its metres and metres of loss. Soon its heart will saturate. 2 There's no autumn to these darknesses, these greasy lights that wobble like oil on a soup; they shall not cool, but be found frozen, in the courtyard's ribs, like a butchered ox found hanging in a bedroom; long syllables of blood are slowly depending on the stained boards. Still we prop ourselves on pillows, find joy has been flayed to a flute we cannot play, for fear we hear songs of bone, winter; the tunes we can't control, that make our lungs expand, our lives contract, a satyr, black-queued, that dances before us down the ocean tongues of lanes, demanding closer tunes that wither our veins like curing roses. From: VAX::POETSOC 20-JAN-1988 18:17 To: ARCHIVE Subj: Typeset on a Monotype Lasercomp at OUCS Printed at Dot Press A-3 is the thrice termly publication of the Oxford Poetry Society, distributed to members. Dues are #2.50 a term or #6.00 for three terms. Subscriptions, contributions (typed, please), listings, criticism, help very welcome: Oxford Poetry Society, Secretary, Jo Lloyd, Balliol College, Oxford, UK. 2.2, 11/11/1986 A-3 2.2 II.2 II.II A-3 2.2 II.2 II.II 11/11/1986 A-3 2.2 II.2 II.II 11/11/86 @Q @Q @Q @R @R @R @Q @Q @Q R @R @R OUPOETSOCOU POETSOCOUPoetSocOU PoetSocoupoetsocou poetsoc OUPOETSOCOU POETSOCOUPoetSocOU PoetSocoupoetsocou poetsoc Typeset on a Monotype Lasercomp at OUCS Printed at Dot Press A-3 is the thrice termly publication of the Oxford Poetry Society, distributed to members. Dues are #2.50 a term or #6.00 for three terms. Subscriptions, contributions (typed, please), listings, criticism, help very welcome: Oxford Poetry Society, Secretary, Jo Lloyd, Balliol College, Oxford, UK. 2.2, 11/11/1986 A-3 2.2 II.2 II.II A-3 2.2 II.2 II.II 11/11/1986 A-3 2.2 II.2 II.II 11/11/86 LISTINGS Events Jenny Joseph and Ken Smith (OUPoetSoc). Two from Bloodaxe. Ken Smith's most recent books are Terra and Book of Chinese Whispers. Currently poet in residence at Wormwood Scrubs, he has been described as "a very necessary poet indeed' who "threatens even Larkin as a leading social poet.' Jenny Joseph published Persephone earlier this year to much critical acclaim. Moving and shocking by turns, "excellently simple' and "deeply serious,' it is a book not easily forgotten. Two poets with much to say about the myths and media of contemporary society. Thursday, 13/11, 8:00 pm, Morris Room, Exeter College. Christopher Reid (OFS Writers and Readers), Sunday, 16/11, 8:00 pm, Old Fire Station, George Street. Monday Seminars: The Effect of Modernism on Post-War English Poetry _ Robert Crawford (St Hughs); Monday, 17/11, 5:00 pm, Holywell Manor, Manor Road. OUPoetSoc, Organisational Meeting, Thursday, 20/11, 8:00 pm, Morris Room, Exeter College (see below). Monday Seminars: Frank O'Hara, His Knees _ W.N. Herbert (Brasenose); Monday, 24/11, 5:00 pm, Holywell Manor, Manor Road. Denise Riley plus Oxford poet Cathy Stonehouse (OUPoetSoc). Feminist, socialist, modernist, the author of Marxism for Infants, No Fee and the Virago collection, Dry Air writes of the entangling links between "love and economics' with poems that are "at once savage, funny, lyric and analytic' (Cora Kaplan). Political poetry at its very best. Thursday, 27/11, 8:00 pm, Morris Room, Exeter College. Tribute to Larkin. Elizabeth Jennings and John Wain, Thursday, 27/11, St Pauls, Walton Street. Notice There will be an organisational meeting of OUPoetSoc on Thursday, 20/11, 8:00 pm, Morris Room, Exeter College. If you're interested in running the Poetry Society, helping to run it, or otherwise contributing, do come along. An opportunity to gain valuable practical experience in a wide range of possible fields from typesetting to flyposting. It's just like being on a YTS scheme except more fun. There has been some interest in holding a reading of dead poets next term. If anyone is interested in helping to organise this event, or wishes to read at it, please get in touch with Jo Lloyd, Balliol College, or come to the meeting above. Is Edward Jones out there? If you send us your address we will be able to send you your copy of the broadsheet! Typeset on a Monotype Lasercomp at OUCS Printed at Dot Press A-3 is the thrice termly publication of the Oxford Poetry Society, distributed to members. Dues are #2.50 a term or #6.00 for three terms. Subscriptions, contributions (typed, please), listings, criticism, help very welcome: Oxford Poetry Society, Secretary, Jo Lloyd, Balliol College, Oxford, UK. 2.2, 11/11/1986 A-3 2.2 II.2 II.II A-3 2.2 II.2 II.II 11/11/1986 A-3 2.2 II.2 II.II 11/11/86 LISTINGS Events Nine New Poets (OUPoetSoc). For those who don't know the format, there will be up to nine poets reading for about ten minutes each, plus a number of shorter slots available for even newer poets. If you want to read, turn up and give your name. Thursday, 4/12, 8:00 pm, Morris Room, Exeter College. Workshops OUPoetSoc Workshop. Led by Cathy Stonehouse (Wadham) and Bill Herbert (BNC). Every second Monday (starting 2nd week), 8:00 pm, KA2, Wadham College. Free. Old Fire Station Poetry Workshop. Led by Helen Kidd. Every second Friday, (21/11, 5/12), 8:00 pm, #2.40. Contests Anglo-Welsh Poetry Society. First prize #50. Forms from: The Secretary, Anglo-Welsh Poetry Society, The Flat, Cronkhill, Cross Houses, Shrewsbury SY5 6JP (send SAE). Deadline: 31/12/86. Guildford & Wey Poets annual poetry competition. First prize #50, 2 other prizes. Details (SAE please) from: Poetry Competition, 1 Shere Court, Hook Lane, Shere, Surrey. Deadline: 30/11/86. Kent and Sussex Poetry Society Open Poetry Competition. Prizes to total #150. Details (SAE please) from: Bill Headdon, 41 Harries Road, Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Deadline: 31/1/87. Leek Arts Festival. First prize #500. Details from: Roger Elkin, 44 Rudyard Road, Biddulph Moor, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffs. ST8 7JN. Deadline: 30/4/87. 1986 National Poetry Competition. First prize #2,000. Forms from: National Poetry Centre, 21 Earls Court Square, London SW5 9DE. Deadline: 30/10/86. Peterloo Poets Open Poetry Competition. First prize #1,000; Afro-Caribbean or Asian prize #500. Details from: The Administrator, Peterloo Poetry Competition, Treovis Farm Cottage, Upton Cross, Liskeard, Cornwall PL14 5BQ. Deadline: 2/2/87. Welsh Arts Council _ "A Poem for Today'; a new competition for poets in Wales who write in English. Prizes #500, #300, #200. Details from: The Literature Department, Welsh Arts Council, Museum Place, Cardiff, Wales. Deadline: 2/87. Yorkshire Open Poetry Competition for 1987. Prize money to total #275. Details from: Leslie Richardson, Crossfields, Upper Poppleton, York. Deadline: 17/1/87. Craig Raine, 26/10, Old Fire Station ^"Poetry makes sense,^' insisted Raine. He might have added ^"And it's fun, too^'; he's an entertaining reader. Surprisingly, but pleasingly, he concentrated on uncollected material. An elegy for a friend was touching and musical; it would not have been out of place in Rich. The long "1926: Ronniger' (I think) was more striking. Unusually for him, it seemed intent on narrative drive rather than verbal gymnastics; concerning refugees, telling jokes, it made me want to read it. "A Chest of Drawers' was set more firmly in Raine territory; taking off, perhaps, from Mr. Y's song in Electrification, it aimed at encompassing as much of everything as possible, romping through disparate "unpoetic' objects, taking in lit. crit. (Bellow's prose style) and rage at Time Out reporters along the way, and returning again and again to the image of a friend's (Heaney's) mother, dying in front of her children. It's this last I find important in Raine's work: this ability to move the reader, usually overlooked by his detractors _ too keen to scold him for his Martian label and "Mafia connections,' they ignore the lyric tenderness apparent in his recent work. He must be used to this. A high profile attracts flak, along with some pretty odd criticism _ ^"He's not what I expected a Faber editor to be,^' a member of the audience commented. But his poems hold the attention even on first hearing _ a rare accomplishment _ and they make sense too. Mick Herron Creation for Liberation: Michael Smith, John La Rose, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mervyn Morris, Jean "Binta' Breeze, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, 28/10, Lambeth Town Hall (Race Today Publications) The posthumous launch of Michael Smith's (1954-1983) It A Come (ed. Mervyn Morris, Race Today Publications) was celebrated with this free reading. The show opened with videos of "Mikey' on large monitors flanking the stage. I doubt there is a living poet, nor many others dead, who could equal the virtuosity seen in these contrasting recorded performances. Smith commanded a vast linguistic heritage: Nation Language, redemption preaching, cosmopolitan avant-garde, schools' academic. Reciting his own redemption songs at the Radical (Black and Third World) Movement Book Fair, and then giving a devestating performance of Shelley's "Song to the Men of England' in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, his scope and breadth were blatantly asserted. The videos were followed by John La Rose's appreciation of Smith and then by the other poets. Linton Kwesi Johnson was slightly disappointing, giving subdued readings of his remarkable elegy for his father and one of Smith's poems. Mervyn Morris read a wide selection from the "fighter's' work, to much applause. The best performances of the evening came from Jean "Binta' Breeze, who read Smith with as much power and music as the man himself, and followed this with her own "Riddym Ravings (the Mad Woman's Poem),' a witty, moving and singable long poem on the trials of a country girl come to town, proving once again that politics and poetry are a potent mix. Edward Kamau Brathwaite closed the evening, with an intricately-metaphored formal elegy to Smith. This night, the potential of new English sprung from many roots was realised. George Roberts Oliver Reynolds, Paul Groves, Richard Murphy, Carol Rumens, TLS Poets' Progress, 30/10, St Cross Building (TLS and OUPoetSoc) ^"I suppose this is an odyssey in pursuit of elusiveness itself, a quest for the resurrection of beauty.^' These lines used by Paul Groves to describe his TLS prize-winning poem "Greta Garbo' capture both mood and frame of this TLS sponsored reading. The audience responded warmly to the four poets' different ways of pursuing the elusiveness of experience, transforming it into the beauty of their poetry. Whereas Oliver Reynolds' poem-narratives are often created around incidents in his past, Paul Groves developed the plot of my favourite poem of the evening from a classified ad in Poetry Review. Richard Murphy recited with obvious pleasure from various of his collections which reflect his fascination for the wildlife of his native Ireland. Finally, Carol Rumens talked of her interest in the Eastern bloc and read poems which reflected this, alongside some anecdotes of modern life. All the poets, elegantly introduced by a bravely-smiling Jeremy Treglown, editor of the TLS, enhanced their readings by revealing comments on the background to their poetry. But it was the poems themselves which captured that elusiveness most beautifully and successfully. Clare Inhelder John Tranter and Mark O'Connor, 2/11, Exeter College (OUPoetSoc) Two of Australia's leading poets flew into Oxford for an evening and read to an audience largely made up of Australians _ make of that what you will; as Tranter said, ^"This is Oxford, after all.^' He read a number of what he described as ^"fairly formal^" poems, relying heavily on the sort of literary jokes (Foucault at Surfers' Paradise, Leavis at. . . .etc) which he presumably felt appropriate to this city of polite chuckles. A good reader, he recited polished, articulate, impressive poetry in what I felt was an international style of quiet irony, for all the references to verandahs and the bush, and seemed surprised at the warmth of the applause. O'Connor had even more references to things Australian _ God as a great white shark, the oral sex life of the bush _ but again seemed to me to have learnt his poetic voice from Britain. His references were far less of the European and Classical tradition than Tranter's, and he talked of finding a language to write Australia, but the retreat into scientific vocabulary that marked his poetry didn't seem a wholly adequate response to that challenge. As to what would constitute an adequate response, I have no idea, but I would very much like to see it. Jo Lloyd Andrew Lawson from FACTORIES (from Sun Dial Log) Chris whitecoat stutter or speech impediment over roar explaining faster machines Terry stuff yr stinking job & walks out comes back drunk punches the foreman pinned down on the shopfloor shouting after the nightshift saying he might go down the lake had been in borstal that's youth custody dawn was always cool meaning morning out the gate brilliant i was 18 - - - - - Eddy's a diamond his Thai wife drinks makes him moody quiff 42 plastered orange tinted specs spent two weeks in Armley before he'd cough up alimony sez i've accepted it now Wally birdlike Jap PoW voice quavery cockney reads his paper quiet with the skilled men always sez g'night mate cycling slowly past Peter i can take my whitecoat off with impunity Dave's tatooes zinging round the drill the other Dave squints & can't get the paint right so they cart the lot out the yard giltedged thousands still won't dry Neil you cunt you know fuckall you'll be in a whitecoat breathing in the fine grey paintdust Norman shows me american soulslap skingraft from when he clutched a fire crushed under sheet perspex a day's pain a day's lost pay always the same ones lose at cards Ken Smith PROBLEMS OF A NORTHERN BOYHOOD (from Book of Chinese Whispers, Bloodaxe) Three men mow a meadow at time and a half for four hours of a September Sunday. One of them, the foreman, earns one tenth more than the other man, his brother, but the third man _ but a boy out of school _ earns one third less than the foreman, who is his uncle on his mother's side, but no matter. Between them they earn, cash in hand, #46.86, with which they will supplement their labourer's wages, with never a nod to the taxman. What is each man's hourly rate? If the foreman invested his afternoon earnings in national savings bonds at 15% compound interest, how much would he be worth at the end of five years, and would he be worth mugging? If the youth gave most of his money to his mother for lodging and she bought bread, butter, jam, ham, spam, lamb and a wee dram would she see any change from a five pound note? And if the other man lost his money on a horse running 17-1 in a race the next morning how much would he have won if he'd won, if the horse hadn't stumbled, the weather had held, the barley grown ripe and the farmer paid up, and what will he say to his wife? Helen Kidd DURING THE CONKER SEASON (for Ros, with love) The duller shades of afternoon are given up to porpoises; there is a stately grace about this lost bespectacle, the sharp drop of the rooted shore. All the gardens kick at my heels with ambrosia; nothing stirs on the lawns, or dreams them. I swing like a weather-glass, whiskied away like hair. You shine more than enamel or a breath; could pattern a don or two, or disconcert like Boadicea, the terracotta warriors, clay generals, complicated despots. It all seems uncertain to me, simulacrum, florentine shawls, new sense-adventures. (In the lesson of increasing weeks, falling calendars, I found myself naked, knitting pages; the hands crossing spread-eagled books, borders, binders, and themselves, each other. Lost formality _ the silver tea-tray, a continental skin; making a bric-a-brac of movement, neither definite nor cold, but a necklace.) Bookcases move volumes, but here in Mercia the suburban mead-hall hunches like a whale-hut, and the ghosts might keep us in order; and close to our heads the wretched belfry, the bridge suspended like a swinging ladder, councillors from under Wychwood, the flying spider machine, gothic patios. Well, and well again, what of the house, the house drawn inwards, folded against itself like a snail, scrolled figures, hollyhocks, or maybe keener attic air? Laughing over our shoulders, we might have eaten a library I'm planting spells for you and the honeyed mass, for you and the ambrose hat, for you and golden gorse in bloom, amber roses. Muzzy eyed, or sneezing, I'll open the shutters, cake-candles shattering the half-empty light. You let in the busy piazza of the night, the dancing vines, the distant murmur of the sea, tides turning thought-pebbles like a tongue. Denise Riley NO (from Dry Air, Virago, 1985) All the towels are red the navy towel and the black blood-soaked and the white dress has slipped to the bloodied floor. This one you lose you could not love. You were deceived, your flat blood knew to open its bright factual eye. This that you leak you never grew. The officer is at the scarlet door. Here is his evidence. Some body lied. That body's mine but I am it. And I am it and I have lied. Mike Coleman LET'S CALL IT A DAY this the recharge, the repeat, where feel meets the wall, bounces back to time of heart, and the cataract clears its seal, the light refires within the glow without, this the reparation, my self, my hold as less than sulphur rain. purify, tonight my dry mind, as to be mine. From: VAX::POETSOC 20-JAN-1988 18:18 To: ARCHIVE Subj: Typeset on a Monotype Lasercomp at OUCS Printed at Dot Press A-3 is the thrice termly publication of the Oxford Poetry Society, distributed to members. Dues are #2.50 a term or #6.00 for three terms. Subscriptions, contributions, listings, criticism, help very welcome: Oxford Poetry Society, Secretary, Jo Lloyd, Balliol College, Oxford, UK. 2.1, 16/10/1986 A-3 2.1 II.1 II.I A-3 2.1 II.1 II.I 16/10/1986 A-3 2.1 II.1 II.I 16/10/86 Euge*0nio de Andrade, (translations read by Craig Raine), 28/5/1986, St John's College, (OUPoetSoc) A lecture given by the University Lector, Lui*0s Miguel Nava, the evening before Euge*0nio de Andrade's recital of a representative anthology of his whole oeuvre, limited itself to the theme of "Eroticism and Nature', the central double element in the Portuguese laureate's work. At the well attended reading, most seemed fascinated or awed, so that they were less disturbed than the poet by the noise outside. I was more concerned over the question of who should read the English translations. I do not doubt the importance of Craig Raine's poetry in Britain, but the poem and the poet hold a different status in Portugal. Raine's rather more explicit, Anglo-Saxon, even stark eroticism contrasts with the enormously lyrical, obsessively Portuguese version (with its "honeysuckle' and "roses' rather than "semen' and "bolus') which dominated de Andrade's personal selection as much as Dr Nava's talk. Even the poets' styles of delivery were at odds, failing to achieve communication _ surely the aim of translation. I hope that this will not be Oxford's last contact with de Andrade nor with Portuguese poetry. Literary output in this musical language par excellence is too often overlooked. And what, in de Andrade's case, Marguerite Yourcenar called "ce clavecin si bien tempe*0re*0' deserves a more earnest ear. A.W. Benson Michael Longley and Medbh McGuckian; Irish Week, 19/6/1986, Blackfriars "A Lambent drone' (Longley on Longley), soothing and musical, heightens the poetry's cadences, makes even dull old "munificence' sound beguiling, and proves that the magic of certain vocal timbre can enhance what may fail to engage the reader of the work on the page. A mellow and charming man, Mr Longley, handling some striking images, particularities of village life, washing drying by the lough, shore birds, but my response was to poetry from an Irish pastoral context rather than to a compellingly unique talent. Which brings me to Medbh McGuckian and her intricate, slippery, enigmatic writing. Oddly enough what arrests the reader, texture, compression, elusiveness, is lost in a live reading. Such a self-effacing performance fails to do the work justice. At its best her poetry is charged, erotic and sensuous, but, by her own admission, she does not enjoy reading aloud. The better of the two poets, one might have been forgiven for not noticing. Altogether an odd pairing, which seems to prove that categories such as Irish, though necessary for literary visibility, can lead to unfortunate mismatches. Nevertheless a worthwhile event, and a valuable evening in the rich, exciting, eventful and much needed Irish Week. Helen Kidd Poetry Olympics, 21/6/1986, Oxford Union Debating Chamber, organized by Michael Horovitz The stars glittered a moment, then went to do something more important. Tom Paulin set up straw dogs and knocked them down with his Faber Anthology of Political Poetry, but established the hope of the evening: the voice of the people is the voice of God. Valerie Bloom shone. She nearly succeeded in getting the audience of almost 200 to chant a mesmeric antiphonal invocation _ the God of Abraham yielding to a primordial deity _ but many embarassed eyes checked if it was alright. Horovitz, a manic munchkin Ginsberg breathless, read his Jog Log. In endless lines broken by forced inhalation he gasped what he had to say. He also brought his improved kazoo for show-and-tell. Heathcote Williams juggled badly and isn't voting SDP. R.D. Laing should stay where he gained his eminence. Crossover hits are rare in Nashville, though the platitudes could be used there. How much I love Kathy Acker, let me count the ways she makes it difficult. It is very New York for a woman to read graphic passages and whine about her boyfriend, but does the appropriation of masculine styles and pornographic images serve a good cause? Would she really slay for the prisoner of her needs? Benjamin Zephaniah bore himself above most of this, only once unkindly suggesting a sharecropper in the audience had been lecturing in Brixton. Controlling the room as only Valerie Bloom had done, sometimes speaking over dub tracks, he told a message of strife and hope. Attila the Stockbroker struck next as a Libyan student from Hell (...and they smell...). He ranted quickly with the dissipation of having performed the material too often, but entertained with a heart. Finally John Cooper Clark, suffering worse than Attila from post-punk malaise, droned rapidly out the night, break-neck and very polished _ he has had time to polish the material. What did the audience get? Some popular poets and poetry sanitized by and for the clean botty set. Though Mr Horovitz kow-towed saying the bar was only for "members', thankfully the staff there work for their living. With the exception of the West Indians and a few look-ins, there was little life on Olympus. George Roberts Frank O'Hara: A Sixtieth Birthday Tribute, 27/6/1986, Useless Room, St Johns College I had to climb through a window to get at this event which set the tenor of the whole evening. Crossing like Alice through her mirror into a surreal nursery landscape figments of the psyche focussed before my eyes and I saw a dream of reality unfold _ Gandalf, Keaton, Pierrot and Papageno crossed and recrossed in tentative cabbalistic mosaic while bubbles drifted near the ground emphasising the delicacy and texture of the poetry. For this was about poetry. Or was poetry. What was the net for? Or the teddy bear? Or the children wielding a plastic claymore? Or the violinists? Elements of masque unmasked a stream of words counterpointing the visual realisations of the players _ a metasemantic fountain of intoxication from the source of the id. Funny. Yes. Sad. Yes. Touching even. At the end of it all the person I was with drew me anxiously to one side and asked: "Tell me honestly _ did it mean anything?' Such crass redundancy was out of place. It was a joie de vivre defamiliarising experience. I don't think Frank O'Hara was there, but he might have been. Meaning stayed firmly on the other side of the window where it belonged. B.R. Ivor Cutler, "Gruts', 22/8/1986, Edinburgh Fringe, Assembly Rooms In an attempted interview in the Fringe Program, the interviewer, admitting his ignorance of Ivor Cutler's work, annoyed, or perhaps bored his subject with epithets like "quirky' and found himself very politely steered into a discussion of his own inadequacy. He came away feeling "more human'. Asked to talk about his self-and-work, Cutler had answered with another performance. On stage this same courteous, almost self-effacing persona handles himself with a warming dignity: "Give us the one about the giraffe', demanded one of a depressingly ill-mannered percentage of the audience. Cutler slowly sipped his water, paused, and delivered a gently withering "...No.' A Scotsman reviewer regretted how many of his audience turn up only for a good laugh. It's a moot point, as many of his minimalist song-poems are simply beautiful; but with a beauty always on a knife edge between naivety and wryness, absurd and serious at the same time. Keith Jebb Shrewsbury Poetry Festival, 12/9/1986-21/9/1986, Shrewsbury Under the steadily glowering gaze of a bronze Charles Darwin, seated outside the public library, atop the hilly tudor town of Shrewsbury, flows the Severn river in a long, almost ouroboric "S' bend. Like a symbol of the severance from wholeness which poetry strives to heal, the town where Sir Philip Sidney passed his boyhood was an idyllic setting for the third international Shrewsbury poetry festival. The range of authors and material across the geographical and philosophical spectrums, from Australia's Richard Kelly Tipping through John Ashbery to Levi Tafari's Liverpool dub poetry, with Dannie Abse and Norman MacCaig and a feast of many other English language luminaries in between, complemented by an extraordinarily strong Spanish reading from the Chilean poet-in-exile Roberto Rivera-Reyes, inspired this listener to feel that once again poetry can matter, that it is at its best, deserving of the title "liberator' the Greeks bestow upon it, and that the courage and outstanding clarity of many of the voices heard at Shrewsbury may signal the end of the post-modernist reaction and its accompanying insularity and stagnation so piteously reflecting the literary cost of Thatcherism. There's a light at the end of the tunnel. Blake G. Wright A-3 BROADSHEET Welcome to the second volume of A-3. As last year, the broadsheet will be appearing about three times a term, with its unique mix of new poetry, plus listings and reviews of local events. If you want to know what's happening in poetry in Oxford, this is the place to look. If you have views on what should be happening, then get in touch with us and make it happen! OUPoetSoc arranges readings, New Poets' readings and runs a workshop, as well as publishing A-3. It all takes time and energy, so anyone who wants to help in any way will be welcomed with gratitude and (if necessary) grovelling. Jo Lloyd LISTINGS Events Introductory Drinks Party. More free wine than one person can drink. Thursday, 16/10, 8:00 pm, Morris Room, Exeter College. Siegfried Sassoon, The Story of the Young Soldier Poet, featuring Peter Barkworth; Sunday, 19/10, 8:00 pm, Oxford Playhouse, Beaumont St. Festival of Regional Poetry (OUPoetSoc). Accents Caribbean, Irish, Lancs, Scottish, Welsh; Saturday, 25/10, 2:00 _ 6:30 pm, Long Room, New College. Craig Raine (OFS Writers and Readers Series), Sunday, 26/10, 8:00 pm, Old Fire Station, George Street. Monday Seminars in English: Some Versions of Parody: Metafiction & Intertextuality in George Herbert _ Anthony Martin (Merton); Monday, 27/10, 5:00 pm, Praefectus's Study, Holywell Manor, Manor Road. Translation Group: Pidgin & Translation _ Dr P. Muhlhausler; Tuesday, 28/10, 5:00 pm, Van Heyningen Room, St Cross College. Wolfson Literary Society: Poetry, Feminism & Politics _ Helen Kidd; Tuesday, 28/10, 8:00 pm, Wolfson College, Linton Road. TLS Poetry Tour (TLS and OUPoetSoc). Richard Murphy, Oliver Reynolds, Carol Rumens will be reading, Jeremy Treglowan of the TLS will be talking and answering questions. FREE for PoetSoc members. Thursday, 30/10, 6:00 pm, Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre, St Cross Building, Manor Road. Jenny Joseph reading from Persephone; Friday, 31/10, Beckington Room, Lincoln College. Details from Titles Bookshop, Turl St. Mark O'Connor and John Tranter (OUPoetSoc). Two of Australia's leading poets making a rare appearance in Britain. Sunday, 2/11, 8:00 pm, Morris Room, Exeter College. Lisa St Aubin de Te*0ran (OFS Writers and Readers), Sunday, 2/11, 8:00 pm, Old Fire Station, George Street. Monday Seminars: The Tempest and Education _ Andrew St George (Pembroke); Monday, 3/11, 5:00 pm, Holywell Manor, Manor Road. Malcolm Bradbury (OFS Writers and Readers), Sunday, 9/11, 8:00 pm, Old Fire Station, George Street. Monday Seminars: Tom Paulin _ Bernard O'Donoghue (Magd); Monday, 10/11, 5:00 pm, Holywell Manor, Manor Road. Translation Group: Attitudes to Biblical Translation, Ancient & Modern _ Dr S. Brock; Tuesday, 11/11, St Cross College. Jenny Joseph and Ken Smith (OUPoetSoc). Thursday, 13/11, 8:00 pm, Morris Room, Exeter College. Christopher Reid (OFS Writers and Readers), Sunday, 16/11, 8:00 pm, Old Fire Station, George Street. Monday Seminars: The Effect of Modernism on Post-War English Poetry _ Robert Crawford (St Hughs); Monday, 17/11, 5:00 pm, Holywell Manor, Manor Road. Monday Seminars: Frank O'Hara, His Knees _ W.N. Herbert (Brasenose); Monday, 24/11, 5:00 pm, Holywell Manor, Manor Road. Denise Riley (OUPoetSoc). Thursday, 27/11, 8:00 pm, Morris Room, Exeter College. Tribute to Larkin. Elizabeth Jennings and John Wain, Thursday, 27/11, St Pauls, Walton Street. Nine New Poets (OUPoetSoc). Thursday, 4/12, 8:00 pm, Morris Room, Exeter College. Workshops OUPoetSoc Workshop. Led by Cathy Stonehouse (Wadham) and Bill Herbert (BNC). Every second Monday (starting 2nd week), 8:00 pm, KA2, Wadham College. Free. Old Fire Station Poetry Workshop. Led by Helen Kidd. Every second Friday, (10/10, 24/10, 7/11, 21/11, 5/12), 8:00 pm, #1.80. Contests Anglo-Welsh Poetry Society. First prize #50. Forms from: The Secretary, Anglo-Welsh Poetry Society, The Flat, Cronkhill, Cross Houses, Shrewsbury SY5 6JP (send SAE). Deadline: 31/12/86. Leek Arts Festival. First prize #500. Details from: Roger Elkin, 44 Rudyard Road, Biddulph Moor, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffs. ST8 7JN. Deadline: 30/4/87. 1986 National Poetry Competition. First prize #2,000. Forms from: National Poetry Centre, 21 Earls Court Square, London SW5 9DE. Deadline: 30/10/86. Peterloo Poets Open Poetry Competition. First prize #1,000; Afro-Caribbean or Asian prize #500. Details from: The Administrator, Peterloo Poetry Competition, Treovis Farm Cottage, Upton Cross, Liskeard, Cornwall PL14 5BQ. Deadline: 2/2/87. Performances New York Even in the silly season New York earns its reputation as a Mecca for poets. In one week Russell Whitehead and I found three open readings _ uptown, downtown, across the river _ and read to and heard from a large group of poets. Watch for Elinor Nauen and John S. Hall. Looking for Poetry in NYC? This was my route. Information: St Mark's Poetry Project; 674-0910 The Poetry Calendar; 475-7110 Poets and Writers; 757-1766 NYU Writing Center; 598-3019 Say("The newest paper in town'), edited by Jeff Wright, 340 E. 11th St, NYC, 10003; 673-1152. Very interesting, interested, and helpful _ thanks Jeff. Bookstores: The Strand Bookshop, 828 Broadway, 473-1452. Giant warehouse of remainders, review copies, new, old, and hard to find books. Gotham on 47th between 5th and 6th avenues has a large poetry section and a good current events notice board _ bare floors with a small cat population underfoot and friendly. St Marks on St Marks Place between 2nd and 3rd avenues. East Village touristy-trendy with a good notice board and high prices. Embargo Books on Rivington St in "Alphabet City'. Radical Left. Venues: ABC no Rio, 156 Rivington St, 254-3697 (Peter Kramer) The Back Fence, 155 Bleeker St, 475-9221 (Venerable Greenwich Village bar with peanut shells on the floor. Poetry readings institutionalized here. Ask for Bridget.) Ear Inn, 326 Spring St, 226-9060 Life Cafe, 10th St and Avenue B, 477-8791 (David Life) Literary Hardware, 199 E 4th St, 505-7114 or 799-6159. Maxwells, 1039 Washington St, Hoboken, NJ (Across the river, 75 cents and five minutes in a clean, fast PATH train. A new music club doing fortnightly poetry readings _ stage, PA, good crowd, proper 20 oz. pints of Guinness and bitter! Contact Liza Pille, the Hoboken Poetry Calendar, 201-659-7562) PS 122 (Performance Space) 11th St and 1st Avenue, 477-5288 (Mark Russell) Tin Pan Alley, 48th between Broadway and 8th Avenue, 582-9376 (Maggie) George Roberts Richard Rook A CORNER POEM In the corner of the room Is the corner Which is good and an object Like a rite or a thumb And the standpoint of the middle of the room Is that nothing is And the standpoint of the corner Is that where one corner is Three more must follow And that this is sure And firm And that walls have laws Where space is free (Though nothing knows) Gwyneth Lewis FIRST HAUNTING Your belt spelt serpent on the bedroom floor as an evening bled itself into the blue and we made love. Outside, a siren threw its life-and-death wails up high, like a flare _ wild, lurid music to light us to bed. Flush love-bites blossomed in the dusk, as though the slightest beauty must take root and grow, be forced into the flesh. It was not the dead pressed in on us to take our breath away but unborn children, quickening for fear their bones might harden only in white dreams. So they bore down, wanting us where we lay, too wrapped in each other's strangeness to hear the cut flowers fill the room with scented screams. Mick Herron from Love Life So many things can damage them _ thromboembolism, myocarditis _ we fear each murmur, yet oddly believe in our own firm luck. Something or other consoles us, imagines us more than the sum of our fragile hearts. . . Imagining it would hold mine safe from failure and arrest, I looked for luck in the chance arrangement of paving stones and birds on wires _ one for sorrow, five for silver, and three red cars in a row meant no dice. . . There was no God but coincidence. Let her love me, I'd pray. Give me her heart. OUPOETSOC FESTIVAL OF REGIONAL POETRY A celebration of diversity, dialect and difference in British poetry, from Caribbean, English dialect, Irish, Scottish and Welsh poets, featuring: Catherine Byron Mike Jenkins Amryl Johnson Lancashire Dialect Society Liz Lochead Rob Minhinnick Bill Herbert, Keith Jebb, David Kinloch, Gwyneth Lewis, Bernard O'Donoghue. Saturday 25 October, 2:00 - 4:00 pm and 4:30 - 6:30 pm Long Room, New College Full day tickets #3.50 for PoetSoc members, #4.00 for non-members. Half day tickets #2.50 and #3.00. Tickets can be bought on the door or, at a 50p discount, in advance from Jo Lloyd, Balliol, or Richard Rook, St Johns. From: VAX::POETSOC 20-JAN-1988 18:18 To: ARCHIVE Subj: Typeset on a Monotype Lasercomp at OUCS Printed at Dot Press A-3 is the thrice termly publication of the Oxford Poetry Society, distributed to members. Dues are #2.50 a term or #6.00 for three terms. Subscriptions, contributions (typed, please), listings, criticism, help very welcome: Oxford Poetry Society, Secretary, Jo Lloyd, Balliol College, Oxford, UK. 2.4, 30/1/1986 A-3 2.4 II.4 II.IV A-3 2.4 II.4 II.IV 30/1/1986 A-3 2.4 II.4 II.IV 30/1/1986 LISTINGS Events Stephen Romer (OUPoetSoc). 1986 was a good year for Stephen Romer _ he won a Gregory Award and his first book, Idols (OUP), was published. His poetry has been praised for its ^"emotional candour^' as well as its analytical precision and wit. Critics have compared his work to that of Craig Raine, Derek Mahon, Geoffrey Hill, and counted the references to Modernism _ a range of influences wide enough to intrigue. We are grateful to OUP for their assistance in organising this reading. Thursday, 5/2, 8:00 pm, Morris Room, Exeter College. David Constantine and Tom Rawling (OUPoetSoc). Two poets with strong Oxford connections. Constantine is a lecturer in German at Queen's College. Both his collections have been widely praised and his work can be found in most of the major magazines. Rawling lives in Kidlington and until recently ran the Old Fire Station Workshop, which nurtured many local poets. He has collections out by OUP and Taxus. Thursday, 12/2, 8:00 pm, Morris Room, Exeter College. George MacBeth (OU Literary Society). Wednesday, 18/2, 8:15 pm, Baring Room, Hertford College. Contact: Edward Counsell, Exeter College. New Poets Theatre (OUPoetSoc). Thursday, 26/2. Details to be announced. Live Poets (OUPoetSoc). Something slightly different from our usual end of term event. Thursday, 12/3. Details to be announced. Workshops OUPoetSoc Workshop. Led by Cathy Stonehouse (Wadham) and Bill Herbert (BNC). Watch Daily Info for details of date, time, venue, but it will probably be in Brasenose. Free. Old Fire Station Poetry Workshop. Led by Helen Kidd. Bring copies of poems. Every second Friday, starting 30/1, 8:00 pm, #2.60. STOP PRESS By the time you read this the Old Fire Station may no longer be in existence, as it appears that the City Council in its infinite wisdom has decided to shut it down. OFS is and has been central to the cultural life of Oxford and we can only hope that the situation is rectified as soon as possible, and urge readers to support any protest against this decision. Contests Kent and Sussex Poetry Society Open Poetry Competition. Prizes to total #150. Details (SAE please) from: Bill Headdon, 41 Harries Road, Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Deadline: 31/1/87. Leek Arts Festival. First prize #500. Details from: Roger Elkin, 44 Rudyard Road, Biddulph Moor, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffs. ST8 7JN. Deadline: 30/4/87. Peterloo Poets Open Poetry Competition. First prize #1,000; Afro-Caribbean or Asian prize #500. Details from: The Administrator, Peterloo Poetry Competition, Treovis Farm Cottage, Upton Cross, Liskeard, Cornwall PL14 5BQ. Deadline: 2/2/87. Welsh Arts Council _ "A Poem for Today'; a new competition for poets in Wales who write in English. Prizes #500, #300, #200. Details from: The Literature Department, Welsh Arts Council, Museum Place, Cardiff, Wales. Deadline: 2/87. Yeats Club. Open poetry competition with unspecified cash prizes and commemorative awards. Special consideration will be given to poetry in translation from modern or ancient languages. Details from: The Yeats Club, PO Box 271, Oxford OX2 6DU. Deadline: 1/5/87. Magazines Those out there desperate to see their verse in print may be interested in this brief and more-or-less-objective round up of local magazines which publish poetry. Though their states of health vary, all are confident of another issue at least, and no doubt eager for submissions. The better-known have already been reviewed (A-3 1.3) and so receive shorter shrift here. Oxford Poetry Good-looking and well-established, a mainstream magazine which prints both famous names and lesser known locals, along with interviews, competitions, etc. Contact address: Magdalen College. New Poetry From Oxford Less good-looking, but more consistent in editorial policy; the only local poetry magazine with a commitment to alternatives to the mainstream poetically and politically. Mainly local poets. Contact address: Bill Herbert, Brasenose. Verse Now approaching its 7th issue, Verse is internationalist in outlook and policy, though the lesser known names it publishes do tend to be local. Also prints essays on contemporary poetry. Contact address: Robert Crawford, St. Hugh's, or David Kinloch, St. Anne's. Gloucester Green I suppose a student magazine needs three qualities to excel: longevity, regularity and discrimination. Gloucester Green must be one of the oldest and certainly the most irregular of Oxford magazines, and it is encouraging to see Tom Saul, its new editor, not only referring back to the earliest issues, in search of continuity, but also promising an issue a term. The photocopied format is not very attractive, but we are promised this is temporary. His choice of contributors, however, is limited to fairly bulky selections of fairly slim poets, and a greater range would be desirable. Contact address: Tom Saul, Jesus. Jericho Bugle The Bugle is cast in the mould of countless glossy chic productions, has outlived most of them, and aligns its often pretentious graphics and topics to an audience whose radical naivety it understands very well. Under Alan Velecki, it has also become a platform for a very eclectic range of poetry, and its thrice-termly production makes it a must for poets impatient of the big slow magazines. Contact address: Alan Velecki, Univ. The Oxford Magazine Though hardly aimed at an undergraduate audience, the Oxford magazine contains much that might interest it. A surprisingly open editorial policy has brought us articles on poets like William Barnes, possibly the only major English dialect poet of the nineteenth century, and certainly the only one capable of employing Persian metres. Its poetry section, though edited by the admirable David Constantine, has been a little overloaded by "donnish' poetry, working through a limited range of forms and heavily reliant on pastiche, as I suppose we should expect it to be, but occasionally giving a tart flavour to the dead waste of "academic' "life'. Lilith. This magazine and the next are primarily feminist magazines, which print some poetry (by women only). In Lilith, an energetic layout blurs margins between poetry and articles/info, stresses the poems' function as polemic more than their traditional 'literary' qualities. Accessible feminist poetry. Contact: Lilith, c/o Women's Centre, 35-37 Cowley Road, Oxford. Amazon. A newcomer, which is therefore somewhat presumptuous to call itself ^"The Oxford Women's Magazine^'. Glossier than Lilith, it is also more university-based. The poetry has a feminist slant, and even a touch of radical subversiveness. Contact address: none given, but extensive cross-referencing ascertained that Sophie Davies, one of the editors, is at New College. Argo Though based at the Old Fire Station, this is a national magazine, and gives good-quality verse a high-quality production. Literary editor: David Constantine, OFS. M.H., W.N.H., J.L. Regional and Dialect Festival, 25/10/86, New College (OUPoetSoc) Thomas Hardy calls dialect words ^"those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.^' What better place than Oxford, then, to unleash the beast of dialect poetry and its marginally more house-trained cousin, writing which is fiercely regional in outlook and voice? Everybody knows class distinctions are back in vogue; exclusion zones are not only topographical these days, they're linguistic with a vengeance and this festival proves the interest in and vitality of dialect still largely unacknowledged by the main publishing houses. There are Amryl Johnson's evocations of the rhythmic loose tongues of Jamaica to match Liz Lochead's monologues by hard-bitten Glaswegian women. Paul Salvesen and Marc Gleeson roll and burr through Lancashire tales of hardship, their characters always ensuring they've a couple of fingers free for the government. Keith Jebb, Bill Herbert and David Kinloch show that dialect need not spring native-born but can be powerfully and touchingly netted from dictionaries of Shropshire and Scots. The Irish contingent, Bernard O'Donoghue and Catherine Byron, add the poignancy of exile, their markedly Englished language contributing to the sense of homesickness. Gwyneth Lewis recites her Welsh verse and could be taken for singing, she tunes the language so melodiously. Alongside her, Mike Jenkins and the excellent Robert Minhinnick, who has a poem in which Welsh villagers loot snow-stranded lorries on the M4. Eliot talks of purifying the dialect of the tribe; these writers are redressing the balance not only by stealth but with grinning impudence, intent on raiding the stalling machineries of the mainstream with outstanding results. Martyn Crucefix Nine New Poets, 4/12/86, Exeter College (OUPoetSoc) The title is a rare example of poetic licence: 8 poets read. The first of these was Michael Glaser, whose accomplished poems explored ^"passageways for worms^' in Edenic apples and dismantled notions of machismo. Richard Wood followed, claiming ^"muted shades suit everyone^', and his monotone suited the muted shades of his poems, addressed to an indefinite and unconvincing "you'. Bob Weedon was more of a performer, less afraid of humour: equally at home with politics (and what constitutes obscenity) and his favourite shirt, he produced the first noticeable (favourable) audience reaction, while Cathy Strickland's commentary on the gilded youth of Oxford and hurt discourse on the other woman also went down well. The second half was equally varied. George Jones opened with some archaically labyrinthine poems replete with peals of Delphic thunder and truths in entrails _ ^"omens in horses' snot^' as George Roberts _ not so much a new as slightly used and very fine poet _ put it during a reading which blew away most of the evening's cobwebs, with poems which came unstrung on LSD and craved real coffee in an instant world. Appropriate, that. Malcolm Povey kept up the new pace especially with his Villonesque ^"Redundant Testament^': rudery, malice and, anti-Thatcherism (all virtues). But the last was best: Russell Whitehead first reduced the audience to painful laughter with selections from the Kev cycle, and then to silence with a collection of harrowing elegies probing a ^"hideous claustrophobia of loss^', proving his poetic voice as versatile as it is sure and individual. ^"Pain should be given more evenly out^' he said; so should talent, but it ain't necessarily so. Mick Herron Cathy Stonehouse SOME WOMAN, SPOKEN FOR (^"FEMALE LANGUAGE^') who is it she loves _ written upon jelly _ what man's dress unbuttons her dark spaces the words kicked knee-jerk into lines grammar the boot her speech the heel-less stilletto still undulating her ^"i'll be daddy^' bracketed she does not wear the trousers of sense and so my mouth _ its shifting location unselving the above _ reaches for the bearded megaphone tears up her ration book the slippery pink dictionary suggests cross-spelling as an exchange of footwear _ these unnarrated images drop like aitches _ the womb speaks i slip into something more silent the phone clicks off what man's dress tells me her dream is constructed like the word ^"job^' unfortunately it has no sleeves i remain provisional she interjects the parentheses are mine. Hers/mine. Adrienne Greer AFTER THE CRASH SHE CAME IN QUOTNG JOHN IRVING and that night we both had the same dream of middle-aged men, nonchalantly sitting on suitcases floating in the middle of the Atlantic _ they were discussing women Sorrow floats so when we got up as usual caressing our imperfections, she spent an hour and a half in the tub re-reading all my letters and when she came out there was ink on her thumbs and prehistoric stains on the carpet where she stood in front of her bureau mirror, asking me questions about romanticism and other things that were insignificant in terms of what we'd become by the _ that is, sometime in April we'd stopped watching one another undress and that was, according to my father and her mother's analyst the beginning of some end, and she started staying in more and I took to reading the Times even in the poshest places at the most in- opportune times like when someone wanted the shower, so then we both had affairs and, of course, I picked a winner and she picked a loser whom she conveniently lost after a month or so when I said I was leaving the country, and then there I was, middle- aged and sitting on a briefcase somewhere between Boston and London wondering when the crash would come and whether my will was valid in international waters (sorrow floats?), and once I managed to plant my feet again I began to write letters to beautiful girls I'd seen in New York in passing, now living in Paris, Mississippi, Texas, married, chaste, and all sorts of drinking, religious, psychological problems all equally divided among them even though, presumably, they'd never met each other, only me, and then there she was, her thin voice floating down trans-Atlantic cables (sorrow...) saying she couldn't this and would it be all right if that, and it was very cold where I was sitting, what with the river being right outside the front door and the windows open so I said yes yes it's all right if you and we can no no not to worry it's all right and when she finally hung up the phone I went and wrote sarcastic poems about the beautiful girls who'd only written back sporadically anyway, and oh oh Sorrow floats 27 October Oxford Steven Chapman AUBADE augury of the east's vivid blaze the simmering of willows ruffles our room's hush through the open glass resurrection of the flesh is in Your handssdnahquiet fingers at the pale groove of my back repairing the broken sequences of love between your ticking wrist and my own hesitant blood the mirrored forms of tidal passion shivering to a tremor our mutable web handsquiet fingers at the pale groove Martyn Crucefix from THREE POEMS AFTER MATSUO BASHO 1. In early evening a large black bird thumps to a precarious perch on a rattling aerial, Come midnight under the city's purple sky a wary cat shakes itself from a ripped refuse sack. I sat at this table alone one frosty morning. I chewed at the leftovers, a pale dry pitta. Tonight, wind struggling at the hedge and gate I hear a leaking rain overspill the gutters. Cars hiss on the hill. My insides are adrift where I gaze into the bright demanding rectangle. 3. From the flat below a man's voice at five o'clock each evening: the thud of music and the lights come on. Four cats _ two from above, two below _ fight for shelter in this first wet spell of the approaching winter. Under the yellow pool of the standard lamp, we eat fish, bread, some late tomatoes. We laugh it all away. Well, if nothing else I've a roof above my head, a thumb-nail garden, a fruitless clockwise plum and the soporific note of these last invading wasps betrays no consciousness of their quick-coming death. Sleepy schoolchildren will soon be trailing one another under sodium streetlights into assembly and like an abandoned car stripped of everything possible I'll sleep on alone (one night of the journey) beyond time to breakfast when TV personalities sit down in complete silence _ confronted by lilies. As I drive-stop-drive my way to work the radio urges me lonelier still with its three-minute worlds. Behind me, in silence, the white-washed walls and some sheets of fresh paper illuminate each other. From: VAX::POETSOC 20-JAN-1988 18:18 To: ARCHIVE Subj: typeset on a monotype lasercomp at oucs printed at dot press a-3 is the thrice termly publication of the oxford poetry society, distributed to members dues are #2.50 a term or #6.00 a year subscriptions, contributions (typed, please), listings, criticism, offers of help to: oxford poetry society, secretary, jo lloyd, balliol college, oxford, uk 2.5, 8/3/1987 A-3 2.5 II.5 II.V A-3 2.5 II.5 II.V 8/3/1987 A-3 2.5 II.5 II.V 8/3/1987 :POETSOC :POETSOC LISTINGS events Please note the re-scheduling of PoetSoc events at the end of term. Live Poets (OUPoetSoc). Poets from Blooming Arts Writers' Group (East Oxford Community Centre) and the Old Fire Station Workshop in Exile will be performing. Depending on numbers, there may be spaces for members of the audience to read their poetry. Thursday, 12/3, 8:00 pm, Morris Room, Exeter College. New Poets Theatre (OUPoetSoc). Thursday, 19/3. Details to be announced. workshops OUPoetSoc Workshop. Led by Cathy Stonehouse (Wadham) and Bill Herbert (BNC). Every Tuesday, 8:00 pm, Old Parlour, Brasenose College. Free. Old Fire Station Poetry Workshop. Contact Helen Kidd at Wolfson College for details of temporary venue and see "Community Arts and the Viking Invasion' elsewhere in this issue. contests Bridport Arts Centre Creative Writing Competition. Poetry or prose. Entry fee #3.00 per item. Prizes: #1000, #500, #250 in both categories. Details from: Competition Secretary, Jessoppe House, 79 East Street, Bridport, Dorset, DT6 3LB. Deadline: 30/6/87. City of Cardiff International Poetry Competition. Not more than 50 lines. Entry fee #1 per poem. Prizes: #500, #300, #200, #50. Details from: The Welsh Academy, Mount Stuart House, Mount Stuart Square, Docks, Cardiff CF1 6DQ. Deadline: 1/3/87. Crabbe Memorial Poetry Competition. Poets must be Suffolk by birth, education, residence or at least 3 years previous residence. Not more than 50 lines. Entry fee #1 per poem. First prize #50 plus the Crabbe Memorial Silver Challenge Rose Bowl for one year. Details from: Competition Secretary, Mr D.J. Wood, 12 Castle Road, Hadleigh, Ipswich, Suffolk IP7 6JH. Deadline: 1/6/87. Leek Arts Festival. Not more than 40 lines. Entry fee #1 per poem. First prize #500. Details from: Roger Elkin, 44 Rudyard Road, Biddulph Moor, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffs. ST8 7JN. Deadline: 30/4/87. The Poetry Business Poetry Pamphlet Competition. Mss. of up to 24pp. The two winning collections will be published as one double booklet. An anthology of the best also to be published. Entry fee #4.75 per ms. Details from: Duncan Curry, The Poetry Business, 51 Byram Arcade, Huddersfield HD1 1ND. Deadline: 31/5/87. Ver Poets Open Competition. Not more than 50 lines. Entry fee #1 per poem. Prizes: #200, #150, #75. Details from: 61/63 Chiswell Grn. Lane, St Albans, Hertfordshire, AL2 3AG. Deadline: 30/4/87. Yeats Club. Open poetry competition with unspecified cash prizes and commemorative awards. Special consideration will be given to poetry in translation from modern or ancient languages. Details from: The Yeats Club, PO Box 271, Oxford OX2 6DU. Deadline: 1/5/87. more events Those who find Oxford increasingly barren of artistic events may be interested in what's happening in London next month. London/Irish Arts Festival (March 13th _ 26th).This annual event revolves around a series of readings by well-known and by no means exclusively Irish names: Muldoon, Longley, McGuckian, D'Aguiar, Lochead, Mahon and MacLaverty are among those taking part. For details, write to the London Irish Commission for Cultural Education, Salisbury Road, London. COMMUNITY ARTS and the viking invasion A short while ago, the City Council gave the Arts Centre a stay of execution until the end of the financial year, at which time it would be reviewed again and either the OFS or St Pauls put on the block. Why then the sudden premature closure of both and the reneging on a promise? These centres have provided a central venue for community arts in a way that no others could. Firstly the very centrality and then the neutrality of their position was congenial to all concerned, many of whom would balk at University sites, fearing intellectual and theoretical domination over the practicalities of "Making'. What the council has perpetrated is little short of a clinical and duplicitous act of cultural vandalism. It is an effective reinforcement of the old, false division between "high' and "low' culture, "town' and "gown'. The cohesion of Oxford's creative community has been disrupted, our hopes arbitrarily dashed. The loss of the OFS in particular is acute. The poetry workshop is just one among many well-known and attended classes which have been uprooted. Since it was originated by Anne Stevenson, it has been run by Tom Rawling and recently by myself. From its ranks have come many successes: Martyn Crucefix (a Gregory Award winner), Andrew Motion (Newdigate Award and Observer/Arvon winner), Peter Forbes (the current editor of Poetry Review), radical poets Blackie Fortuna and Russell Whitehead, Bengali writer Keteki Dyson, Caribbean, Canadian, Pakistani, American, Australian poets, well-known figures on the Oxford poetry scene as well as promising beginners, nurses, unemployed people, social workers, psychologists, micro-biologists, travel writers, translators, artists, cookery columnists and housewives. Until the death of the OFS is confirmed we shall continue to meet at my house (contact me through Wolfson College) but as this runs the danger of cliqueiness, we shall then look for a central venue that will be suitable for the timid newcomers as well as the old hands. There are forty workshops displaced like ourselves. One might be excused for expecting a Labour Council to represent the needs of the people, so let us take them to task for failing to do this. A letter from each PoetSoc member would constitute a sizeable protest. Helen Kidd REVIEWS Dead Poets, 29/1, Exeter College (OUPoetSoc) Despite being well tanked up, most of us approached Erebus timidly and might never have reached it without Kate Bomford, Roland Earl and Cecilia Grayson bravely leading the way. Many thanks to them for that. As we might have expected, things there are not what they used to be. The dead don't line up in the old ranks anymore. Many old friends appeared, but some were starting to whiff a bit, and the healthiest voices on this showing (Hi to Lowell, O'Hara, MacNiece, Dickinson) came from less established members of that community (By Pluto, they aren't even English _ though still mostly male). Maybe the older guard heard those gatecrashers James Fenton and John Cooper Clarke and figured they'd got the wrong party. Maybe they had a point. Or maybe it was us they disapproved of _ the quality of our voices, the quality of our memories _ and maybe we shall regret their disapproval when we sober up. And maybe we won't. Joe Kelleher Stephen Romer, 5/2, Exeter College (OUPoetSoc) A Cultured Young Man Romer produces a well-crafted poem and frequent nice ironies when dealing with emotional textures of experience. Nevertheless, I was disappointed with this reading by O.U.P.'s latest star. It was not so much his pardonable mistake of assuming that PoetSoc is solely an audience of Oxford literati, but the material itself. I felt that it kept any imaginative engagement with its own subject at arms' length. The rhetorical attitudes, narrative modalities and the emphasis on content and neatly sealed conclusions, parcelled in syntactical convolutions and grammatical precision stifled the poem's own attempts at linguistic flight. Cliche*0s such as ^"a lovely responding girl^' or ^"children as bright jewels^' were serendipitously offset by more striking images. He frequently referred to Hopkins, Verlaine, Joyce, Rilke et al as literary background, but they seemed sadly irrelevant as their textual eroticisms and linguistic audacity were much overlooked. However, there is time enough and ability to spare to nourish the hope that Romer will move out from his ^"neutral cafe*0^' into a richer exploration of language. Helen Kidd Urdu-English Poetry: Suahid Hosain, Mahmood Jamal, Saqi Farooqi + Iftiqar Arif, 6/2, Wadham College ^"Silence is the speech of complaint/ the accent of protest^' _ lines from Iftiqar Arif's "All the Same'; yet the project of Modern Urdu poetry tends to claim otherwise. A poetry thrown across twin divides: that between an ancient/literary language and its modern political themes and that of the partition of India itself. Asif is considered a romantic poet, but as with English Romanticism, the foundations are political. Saqi Farooqi is modernist, iconoclastic: eschewing the tone of regret, complaint gives speech to the silent, though he shares his mentor N.M. Rashed's avoidance of propaganda. Instead, sardonic political metaphor imbues small things, spiders, dogs: ^"The carpet's soaking,/ the sofa is afloat,/ I drown in my blood!/ why don't you bark,/ stupid dog!^' ("A Dog Poem'). Both these poets feature in The Penguin Book of Modern Urdu Poetry (1986), edited and translated by fellow-reader Mahmood Jamal. This review takes all its information from that book. I found out about the reading too late, but the event deserves mention here: the PoetSoc is not here just to promote its own activities. Any event we're told about in time will appear in the listings, and we will try to get someone to review it. Keith Jebb David Constantine + Tom Rawling, 12/2, Exeter College (OUPoetSoc) A gratifyingly large crowd turned up to this local event and seemed well satisfied with what it heard. David Constantine began with poems exploring new angles of biblical subjects: the trauma of witnessing miracle was a recurrent theme. The classical backgrounds of other poems left room for contemporary parallels which weren't overworked. Hiroshima and Nagasaki remained an understated presence in a poem about Pompeii, where casts were taken from the shapes of disintegrated bodies caught in ash _ an act of retrieval from a devastated zone. More gifts are recovered in "A Wreck of Oranges', in which a torpedoed vessel upsets ^"an easy killing^' of fruit onto the shores of Scilly. The spoils of war can be unexpected; sometimes they can be poems. Tom Rawling's wartime memories were retrievals in themselves, rescuing an individual experience from the regimented depersonalisation of military life, a life whose ^"doubtful amulets^' of badge and uniform are no protection against horrible boredoms or violent accidents. Days are punctuated by the bawling of ^"superiors^'. A bullet loosed in horseplay opens a head as simply as a soft-boiled egg. The meningitis that ends this military career is arguably the lesser evil. These poems are disturbing but always humane, perhaps Rawling's best to date. Likewise, the uncollected poems read by Constantine promise a fine third collection. Mick Herron Tom Paulin, 26/2, Exeter College (Exeter Arts) Given Paulin's abrasive reputation and habit of involving himself in public arguments on contentious issues, it was something of a surprise to find the man himself quite charming _ perhaps this is the real unifying factor of the contemporary Irish ^"school^'. It was also a surprise to find his self-judgements so harsh: he compared himself unfavourably to Mahon and Muldoon, admiring an ability to ^"evanesce^' he claimed eluded him, and spoke of his own failure to achieve a truly lyric voice. In fact, as readers of Liberty Tree will know, Paulin's finest moments arrive as a marriage of a lyric voice and an historical perspective, a perspective which appears to be becoming increasingly more localised, as the title of his forthcoming collection _ Five-Mile Town _ suggests. For, despite the range of reference and subject-matter of the new poems _ from George Blake to Jackson Pollock _ with the occasional elusive fiction taken in along the way, they kept returning to an unexpected subjectivity, and a far greater freedom of form than I remember seeing from Paulin in the past. Perhaps it's these departures that have made him nervous: he described the new collection as his personal literary defenestration, and predicted that the critics would trash it. Maybe so (there can't be any shortage of critics out there after revenge for a mauling) but it will certainly be taken seriously. Paulin is one of the few poets now writing with a genuinely political imagination, and such an attribute is too scarce to ignore. Mick Herron George Roberts ACT IN DREAM STATES itemising associates this is the simple one node rule a choice not a new beginning to fork a tongue past the lip and wonder full with intrusion no matter how slight sufficient to complete the significant act French kissing a memory teasing out history heroes of another sub genre, uniform fiction or our boys have gone for flowers everyone when will they ever learn when will they ever (TITLE (a no. of contacts (cure (monogamy (pro-life/or (separate legs (old words (of the language reef (where many mean (enough it is (rape (in the USA (the Pueblo incident (spy or romance (Bucher's command (surrender (to graveyards (give up (never Malcolm Povey TO MY MOTHER (In a writing exercise, I was asked to visualize a room from my childhood, to enter it, to look into a mirror and so on; this was the result.) I cannot walk into that room. The thin, pink candlewick, The musty dust beneath the bed, Your warm, white body. There's shouting, slap of slaps. You're fighting with my dad. I kneel outside on the grass, Uneasy in a forgetting game. My brother cracks open my head With a grit-edged building brick. I cannot walk into that room. It hurts, like things we never said And did not say, that long, last summer When, a father now, I sat and watched The cancer chew you down to bone. Your wincing mouth, racking breath, Still banned my brother from your room Who left his child in a foster-home. Robert Albright PAPER PERSPECTIVE she put the paper in the litter bin for tidiness not disposal to be reread; later when the bomb came the paper took flight and alighted on the hedge; flapping on the spikes of the hawthorn it waved yesterday's news to the desolation; the news could be seen in perspective a before the bomb perspective disposing of history to a not there to notice world; when the first bird came it saw the gap in the wall where the blast had escaped and flying elliptically it dropped a feather into the hedge; the paper still fluttered but its courtship display was seen by nothing; only the feather touched it and it too at length took off with the wind and flickered white over the field Robert Albright CHINA APPLES people think Granny Smith strange for polishing the apples each day the light falls differently to find their reflection repeating in a year she wears away their substance with improvement into her cloth their sheen dissolves a caress for a reflection and when she goes will the apples still shine or for them will the light in the room mark time? Reyahn King White, gentle as creamy milk, your skin your shoulders floatingly gossamered, soft edges always just round the corner of my elbow's twist. Square keys of your fingers blistered on the left hand black-inked on the right the print lines of your rough palms. It is as if these hands have sandpapered this back. Impossible as melting honey crust. Looking through the night I see in pieces. Darkness sculpts hands that in sleep hold their prints clear a back wax-calm smooth. Wierded out as the gilt fevers of a triptych on dry wood stilted lilting strangers. Gwyneth Lewis DALTON'S GERANIUM in shocking-pink blossoms and brilliant green ruff shook as he carried the earthenware pot to the workroom table, where he set it down, the better to see her. They gathered round, looking intently at the bright, loud blooms nodding, indulgent of three mens' stares. Dropped petals clashed with the red felt cloth but were left there, while each friend considered in turn what colour he saw there. Deep salmon, was it? or light cerise? Three parts red to two parts blue? Dark coral, tinged with an orange hue _ or red-tinted cyclamen? Someone jolted the table as they fumbled for names, making her quiver, though they all agreed she kept faith with one colour, although colour-fast words they had none, for all of the fleshed-out shades they had lavished upon her. Dalton was silent, dressed in mis-matched clothes. He turned the pot slowly, then blushed as he said that to him she was fickle, that his name for pink changed from sky blue by day to deep red by night. By his lights, blood flowed bottle green; fires burned viridian and a sepia sun hung over everything. Made cuckold to colour by his faithless eyes! But his dunned world had doubly ravished him and sighted blindness made him lust the more the more he was cheated. Much later, alone, he was drawn again to his vivid plant standing inscrutable, smelling faintly of soil. He made to replace her, lingered, then touched the amber circles on the yielding leaves, hungry for colour in her dusky dyes. Andrew Lawson A SORT OF SONG Whatever your theme the scene mere hurrying of matter The desire to insert political material the whole weight of the world We walk, trip over raised pavingstones carry meat home it's all theatre There is the sky, the laundromat and the desire to insert political material Picture of a tree unending in your mind The scenes, the walk the whole weight of the pavingstones political material a fuel pump called "Plato' There are the clouds There is desire There is the sky, the people and the pavingstones (end with shots of pinetrees, waving From: VAX::POETSOC 20-JAN-1988 18:19 To: ARCHIVE Subj: typeset on a monotype lasercomp at oucs printed at dot press a-3 is the thrice termly publication of the oxford poetry society, distributed to members dues are #2.50 a term or #6.00 a year contributions (typed, please), listings, criticism, offers of help to: the editors, c/o jo lloyd, balliol college, oxford, uk subscriptions and any other poetsoc communications to: oupoetsoc, secretary, c/o bill herbert, brasenose college, oxford, uk 2.6, 30/4/1987 A-3 2.6 II.6 II.VI A-3 2.6 II.6 II.VI 30/4/1987 A-3 2.6 II.6 II.VI 30/4/1987 A-3 2.6 II.6 II.VI 30/4/1987 :POETSOC :POETSOC LISTINGS events POETRY LIVE: oupoetsoc presents an international poetry festival, 4-15 May 1987. Virago Poets: Alison Fell, Stef Pixner. Monday, 4/5, Old Fire Station, George Street. Miroslav Holub. Tuesday, 5/5, Social Science Faculty Building, George Street. Wendy Cope. Wednesday, 6/5, 12:45 pm, Blackwells Bookshop. Open Pub Reading: Bloomin' Arts & Others. Friday, 8/5, King's Arms, or the garden of the Turf if it's fine. John Fuller, Jeremy Reed. Sunday, 10/5, Social Science Faculty Building, George Street. Ken Edwards, Eric Mottram, Wendy Mulford. Monday, 11/5, Social Science Faculty Building, George Street. Magazine Reading: Oxford magazines Argo, NPFO, Verse. Tuesday, 11/5, Social Science Faculty Building, George Street. Robert Creeley. Wednesday, 13/5, Old Fire Station, George Street. The Green Book: Philip Gross, Selima Hill. Thursday, 14/5, Social Science Faculty Building, George Street. Edwin Morgan. Friday, 15/5, Social Science Faculty Building, George Street. With financial assistance from Southern Arts. All events start at 8:00 pm unless otherwise stated. Tickets on the door. For further information: Bill Herbert, BNC or 512276. Christopher Middleton (OUPoetSoc). Provisionally Thursday, 4/6. Details to be announced. workshops OUPoetsoc Workshop. Led by Cathy Stonehouse (Wadham) and Bill Herbert (BNC). Every Tuesday, 8:00 pm, Old Parlour, Brasenose College. Free. Old Fire Station Poetry Workshop. Led by Helen Kidd (Wolfson). Alternate Fridays, OFS, George Street, for the moment at least. contests Bridport Arts Centre Creative Writing Competition. Poetry or prose. Entry fee #3.00 per item. Prizes: #1000, #500, #250 in both categories. Details from: Competition Secretary, Jessoppe House, 79 East Street, Bridport, Dorset, DT6 3LB. Deadline: 30/6/87. Crabbe Memorial Poetry Competition. Poets must be Suffolk by birth, education, residence or at least 3 years previous residence. Not more than 50 lines. Entry fee #1 per poem. First prize #50 plus the Crabbe Memorial Silver Challenge Rose Bowl for one year. Details from: Competition Secretary, Mr D.J. Wood, 12 Castle Road, Hadleigh, Ipswich, Suffolk IP7 6JH. Deadline: 1/6/87. Endocrine Research/Envoi Open Poetry Competition. Not more than 40 lines. Entry fee #1 per poem _ all proceeds to Endocrine Research. Prizes #250, #150, #50 and subscriptions to Envoi. Details from: Chriss (sic) McCallum, P.O. Box 96, Altrincham, Cheshire WA14 2LA. Deadline: 28/8/87. Isle of Wight Festival Open Poetry Competition. Subject: CELEBRATION. Any length. Entry fee #1 per poem. First prize #50. Details from: Isle of Wight Festival, Poetry Competition, c/o Freshwater Library, School Green Road, Freshwater, Isle of Wight PO40 9AP. Deadline: 1/6/87. Leek Arts Festival. Not more than 40 lines. Entry fee #1 per poem. First prize #500. Details from: Roger Elkin, 44 Rudyard Road, Biddulph Moor, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffs. ST8 7JN. Deadline: 30/4/87. The Poetry Business Poetry Pamphlet Competition. Mss. of up to 24pp. The two winning collections will be published as one double booklet. An anthology of the best also to be published. Entry fee #4.75 per ms. Details from: Duncan Curry, The Poetry Business, 51 Byram Arcade, Huddersfield HD1 1ND. Deadline: 31/5/87. Ver Poets Open Competition. Not more than 50 lines. Entry fee #1 per poem. Prizes: #200, #150, #75. Details from: 61/63 Chiswell Grn. Lane, St Albans, Hertfordshire, AL2 3AG. Deadline: 30/4/87. Yeats Club. Open poetry competition with unspecified cash prizes and commemorative awards. Special consideration will be given to poetry in translation from modern or ancient languages. Details from: The Yeats Club, PO Box 271, Oxford OX2 6DU. Deadline: 1/5/87. notice We hope to publish our annual poetry anthology before the end of the summer term. As with Password: Scop, this year's anthology will consist of the best of A-3 as well as new work from a wide range of local poets. We welcome any contributions, which should be typed, one side of the paper only, and sent to the usual address: The Editors, c/o Jo Lloyd, Balliol College, Oxford. REVIEWS Bloomin' Arts & The Old Fire Station Writers' Workshops, 12/3, Exeter College (OUPoetSoc) The meeting of the two groups was something of a clash, but a useful one for all that. The OFS performers were largely University poets (though the OFS w/shop is by no means the University clique that this might imply) and read pieces that exercised and dwelt upon sophisticated mythmaking and lyricism. Hearing Keith Jebb and Helen Kidd was having words dancing _ and a lot of kindness there too; impressive. I haven't enjoyed these two poets in print before, but am now converted. Kev's alter ego, Russell Whitehead, proved that the great man is still capable of giving the people what they want, though one fears that his lifestyle might be bad for his health; perhaps a rest would do him good. Bill Herbert read a lyric he promised would be ^"long, boring and incomprehensible^'. Thankfully it wasn't (well, not boring anyway) and Tom Rawling remembered when everyone at OFS was writing poems about paintings, then read one himself (and very good it was too). Many of the Bloomin' Arts performers relied on prose rather than verse and brought to the PoetSoc an eloquent awareness of the lifestyle and history of people for whom Oxford is a home rather than a few years' University stop-over. Their recent publication Eastside Stories (available at Blackwells), emphasises this line. Mike Newman told us everything we always wanted to know about window-cleaning but were always afraid to ask. Arthur Exell informed us of the mandrakes in Port Meadow (you have to know where to look). Joy Gunstone spoke without self-pity about the frustrations of non-famous writers. Eric Blackburn and Arthur Cherwell introduced us to the strange and wonderful world of Adolf Hitler's feet, and Wendy to the no less strange but somewhat less wonderful etc. of the DHSS. This reviewer's favourites on the night were Bloomin' Arts's Bob Weedon (his nervousness did not undermine the accomplishment of much of his material) and OFS's Greg Sweetman (a welcome new voice _ lucid and honest). On the strength of this showing both groups are alive and kicking, and that is something to be thankful for. Joe Kelleher POETRY LIVE previews For the first two weeks in May, OUPoetSoc plays host to Poetry Live, a festival of international poetry featuring famous writers from America, Czechoslovakia and Britain, the highlights of which include rare readings in this country by Miroslav Holub and Robert Creeley. All the events (with the exception of the Open Pub Reading) take place in either the OFS or the Social Science Faculty building (also on George Street), and all the readers taking part are previewed below. OUPoetSoc would like to thank Southern Arts for their financial assistance in the staging of this festival. Virago Poets: Alison Fell & Stef Pixner, Old Fire Station, 4/5 (OUPoetSoc) This promises to be a good pairing, both poets coming from the sixties New Left into the second wave of Feminism in the thick of political activism: neither shirks the problems and difficulties of contemporary women, but both celebrate their worlds with energy and freshness of image. Pixner is an experienced performer and singer, and Fell a founder member of the Women's Theatre Group and member of Spare Rib's editorial board. On the page Pixner's poetry often has the terse economy of song, but is most effective in her surreal poems such as "high heeled sneekers'. Fell has a broader range of subjects to treat, including women at Greenham, the social construction of gender, world politics, childhood memory... In all her best poems, the sensuous qualities of language become resistance to the masculine world of violence and dominance. Both have a commitment to creating linguistic parallels for women's experiences which can be gratifyingly earthy at times, as in "Border Raids' (Fell). H.K. Miroslav Holub, Social Science Faculty (George Street), 5/5 (OUPoetSoc) Holub is ^"one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere^' (Ted Hughes); he is ^"one of the most original and certainly one of the sanest voices of our time^' (A. Alvarez). So what's he like really? Oddly enough, he's as good as his press. A Czechoslovakian, born in 1923, he is one of his country's leading scientists, and began writing poetry at the age of thirty, when he began his research into immunology. The results bear the marks of both disciplines: his poems are both precise and compassionate, and cover an extraordinarily wide range, from the sly wit of his "Brief Reflections' to the elegaic cadences of "Interferon': ^"Always just one demon in the attic. / Always just one death in the village. And the dogs / howling in that direction... ^' This is a rare opportunity to see him read: not one to be missed. M.H. Wendy Cope, Blackwells, 6/5 (Blackwells Bookshop) Who burst upon an unsuspecting world with her first book, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (Faber, 1986). She has been much praised for her parodies of poetic masters from Eliot to Hughes, which are instantly recognizable and wickedly funny. You've never heard "Hickory Dickory Dock' quite like this before. Less noted are her more serious poems, gentle, wistful lyrics reflecting an affectionate commitment to the less-than-ideal. Please note that this reading is at 12:45 pm. J.L. Open Pub Reading: Bloomin' Arts & Others, 8/5 (OUPoetSoc) The Bloomin' Arts folk are discussed elsewhere (see review); ^"others^' means you... The venue for this reading is either the King's Arms or, in the unlikely event of a fine evening, the Turf Tavern. So come along, get drunk on poetry, and bring some of your own to read out loud. This event is free (though the drinks aren't). M.H. John Fuller & Jeremy Reed, Social Science Faculty (George Street), 10/5 (OUPoetSoc) This is a pairing that seems designed for contrast rather than comfort. Fuller's strength lies in an urbane lyricism, equally apparent in his domestic celebrations and his often bizarre narratives, narratives rather stronger on plot than most other contemporary forays into the genre. This reading coincides with the release of the Fuller/Fenton collaboration Partingtime Hall, which will no doubt be one of the most talked about collections of the year: new readers start here. Reed, on the other hand, is apparently the David Bowie of the verse world (it says here): he dresses in black, wears make up, and describes his work as ^"standing outside the grey streak of mundanity that affects most modern English poetry^'. Bowie is back into rock & roll. Reed's new collection is called Blue Rock. 'Nuff said? M.H. Wendy Mulford, Ken Edwards & Eric Mottram, Social Science Faculty (George Street), 11/5 (OUPoetSoc) OUPoetSoc presents post modernist poets! Lubricate your living room & liberate your ears with Eric Mottram _ is he Britain's most radical prof? Former editor of Poetry Review, Professor of American literature at King's College London, author of books on William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, writer of poetry of extravagant erudition and political rage; references to Jack Kerouac, Antonio Gramsci and Burt Lancaster are not uncommon... Wendy Mulford _ Cambridge poet and collaborator with Denise Riley; feminist writer who takes no such categories for granted: ^"in doubleness & multiplicity, balancing, an ear to this claim, hand to that, fragmentation that by sleight-of-being stays whole for the audience at whatever cost to the performer^' (The ABC of Writing, Torque, 1985)... Ken Edwards _ Fearless editor of Reality Studios, the most innovative, interesting and influential non-^"poetry^' magazine of our times. Author of Intensive Care (Pig Press, 1986) and the dub-wise street-sounds of Drumming and Poems. The John Peel of English poetry. See you there, Craig! A.L. Magazine Reading, Social Science Faculty (George Street), 12/5 (OUPoetSoc) An opportunity to hear local poets as featured in Argo, New Poetry From Oxford, and Verse. Robert Creeley, Old Fire Station, 13/5 (OUPoetSoc) John Ashbery has said, ^"Robert Creeley's poetry is as basic and necessary as the air we breathe; as hospitable, plain and open as our continent itself. He is about the best we have.^' This applause from across an (apparent) frontier givest the lie to the generally accepted opposition in the U.S. between a Keatsian tradition (icluding Ashbery) and the modernism of the Black Mountain ^"school^' (Creeley/Olson and others). We must widen our view of Creeley's work beyond this crude opposition, and beyond the twentieth century philosophies of language (of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein) which inform (or inform readings of) his work. In a field of writing slipped ambiguously between the lyric and the minimalist, he has human(e)ized implications of these philosophies _ implications seen as crucial to the poet's being-in-the-poem, how to write ^"I^', ^"you^'; the problem of address he is the (uncertain) exponent of the uncertainties of. His commitment to the difficulties of communication avoids both obscurity and pessimism. Because he opens things up, he is about the best we have (not just America). K.J. Philip Gross & Selima Hill, Social Science Faculty (George Street), 14/5 (OUPoetSoc) Saying Hello at the Station is on my top five favourite poetry list. Hill overlaps personal images with external ^"reality^': fact and fragments of speech, letters and mythologies that fold back to the particular, the personal, the relational. This is not mere solipsism but a fluid and well-made parallel for the movement between internal and external worlds. Her quirky angle of vision is constructed through her original and careful juxtapositions of images and associations. She can be tough as well as gently reflective, tackling male dominance and pretensions _ eg. "A Voice in the Garden', which deals with the sinisterly flaccid effect on a young girl of a groping neighbour. "Fathers of the Marshes', a particular favourite, contains the apt phrase for Hill's poetry: ^"This is the weighing of the heart.^' Gross is every bit as robust and economic with language _ his syntax is more clipped and abrupt and he seems more controlled than Hill, but he has an equally keen eye for piling up images to good effect: ^"The snail shoulders his small world like a sack ...^' His Eastern European roots provide a rich source of material for his central themes of uprootedness, but he is equally locatable in the linguistic landscape of the South West of England. Both poets treat language as a pre-eminently sensuous medium, and herein lies their strength and capacity to set the lines singing. H.K. Edwin Morgan, Social Science Faculty (George Street), 15/5 (OUPoetSoc) Edwin Morgan is one of Scotland's foremost living poets, who, since 1952, has produced work demonstrating an international awareness and openness to the opening field of modern poetry. Influenced in the sixties by the spiritual freedom won by the Beats, he also contributed to the austere achievements of concrete poetry, as well as producinga dizzying array of original forms and techniques, from ^"emergent poetry^', playing on the possible messages contained by the letters in a single potent sequence, to the Instamatic Poems, which extended Carlos William's objective vision into the teeming realm of the global village. He has translated extensively into Scots and English poets as divergent as Mayakovsky and Shakespeare, and the expansiveness of his talent is perhaps best conveyed by the title of one of his most powerful collections, From Glasgow to Saturn. W.N.H. Wendy Mulford fromEAST ANGLIAN SEQUENCE 2 Samphire & thrift, sea-aster, salicornia, zostera (eel grass) Sea lavender, shrubby sea blite The sea nourishes & cleanses, twice daily its huswifely scavengingscouringsuccouringunable to let be bygone filters snitches back deposits scraped into rivulets & channels the sea seeding its self own bed. Golden Autumn plump Autumn Autumn fat With hoarded summer facing Winter's pinch Reckless of riches Dropping closing evenings Fires before sharp nights Misty days packing making con_ triving busyness before Winter's lock. Sea's measure reassuring landedness ends Boundary to earth's flap equivocation Springsummerwinter Sea-storm or calm Landfarer's last line to vision Drawn off the map Whose voice is this Beneath the shoals beneath the over falls the knocks imperfectly surveyed the outer dowsing depths unreliable wrecks omitted the enormous ambiguity of depth Selima Hill THE SMALL MAMMAL HOUSE My twin sister Mary leans against a cage where little kinkajous are watching her with interest. Arboreal nocturnal sort of bears with a passion for your chocolate, I see. All I got was bits of chewing-gum _ your ^"sapodilla-gum-tree-juice gum^', chickle. Who took the photo anyway? You shouldn't let them when you look like that. ^"Glissez, mortels, n'appuyez-pas, GLISSEZ!^' Remember Louli, with her ear-muff hair? ^"Tippy-toes, tippy-toes, tall as you can! Reach up to those forbidden chocolates, Mary!^' You were my elective mute, becoming almost elegant in time to Louli's elevating music... It isn't good to watch small mammals by the hour, all hunched-up. Also, funny men go down there, Mummy said. Philip Gross LOVING SPOONFUL Over the top they go, the-do-or-die brigade. They fall in their thousands, feebly threshing. The fittest go bludgeoning on. They spread like spilt milk from a moment's indiscretion. They're a smear on the microscope slide. Wipe it clean. So much for... was it lust or a righteous going-forth-to-multiply? What sort of God whips in this exodus, what grizzle-thighed games-master hacking Go for it, lads! from the touchline? No, it's us, the love we make. Or think we do. It makes us, using me, love, using you. Joe Kelleher GRAPE EXPECTATIONS (for Nic B) Well, that was picking spots off Europe's flaky skin but soon, with any luck, we'll be burrowing the marrowbone (we're going home to England) and already here's Selwyn says these greengages got to be in London nine tomorrow, says to dump our stuff in the back. Call it a dream or a drunk, either way come morning it tasted like a sock in the mouth, but now you're talking (at last we're moving so fast we're almost flying) look, there's Selwyn slowing down outside Toulouse. So we come home, so we wear the same jeans we left in, so our souvenirs are traded for belonging to these markets where everyone's pretending to be buying or be selling something over a bare slab (no greengages, grapes) afraid we'll starve or gag if Selwyn doesn't arrive soon, all our hands to hold you open, England, like a brown-paper bag. G.L. Dasilva TAXI One of those moments when the illusion Of perfect vision arrives. Step aside and listen To the harmony of shape and colour, Feel the exact, the appropriate Confines of space and light _ As in wide-bodied cars Driving at night When roadlights spot the dark interior And we flash into a movie, Wear the losing on our faces, Our desperate silence on our sleeves. Ken Edwards SEPTEMBER 1984: YORKSHIRE DALES The sun shines on the dull snout of the retreating glacier. Contour lines call to one another from great distances. Glacial drift spreads nourishment from the Silurian layers. Thistledown gathers radio space. Somehow, broken wire frames a sheep in lamb. The sound of an enigma breaks the stillness, A greeting is precious beyond all estimation. Time is congealed & unable to circulate among meadows. Sheep challenge visual perception. A dead bird is ^"of the essence^'. On the thread of a distant road, is hung a grey shirt. To follow the line is to lose that lamb. Steam condenses on the window beside corrugated iron. I took a deep breath, & suddenly the room seemed filled. Mick Herron LADY DAY'S TORCH I can't remember where I first heard your voice but think it must have been the casual gift of a casual friend, a half-heard resonance from one of a dozen rooms I flitted through, looking for coffee, and I never imagined until now the knowledge you needed to sing like that: the lifetime of research required to spike those words hunger and love with meaning, and lift them above the cliche of popular song by fitting them into the context of survival _ a survival that blossomed into a revenge against racists, the ones who wanted you offstage while the white boys laid down their stolen solos, and one that carries its own suggestion now of something left unspent _ the rich memory, perhaps, of the sneaky cousin you put in Johns Hopkins with a baseball bat, or of the famous friendships that inspired a generation's legends, of jam sessions in fine pre-war New York whose night clubs stayed open past dawn, and of styles being born on 131st street and copped by the boys downtown, or maybe it was something more _ not just those grainy images from an era laundered by Hollywood, nor even simply the exploitations that subscribe to myth (though the hooking and the smack were part of it) but an altogether different kind of resilience, one that could withstand all that glory, and even rise above onslaughts like this through its heartfelt attention to detail and duty to selfhood _ the knowledge that you were you; the constant flower for the head you held like a torch, and your voice that dipped and weaved around a medley of uncontrolled substances: one hundred kinds of love, and one tough lady. Miroslav Holub IN THE MICROSCOPE (From The Fly, Bloodaxe, 1987) Here too are dreaming landscapes, lunar, derelict. Here too are the masses, tillers of the soil. And cells, fighters who lay down their lives for a song. Here too are cemeteries, fame and snow. And I hear murmurings, the revolt of immense estates. Miroslav Holub FOG (From The Fly, Bloodaxe, 1987) The last road has fallen. From every corner of the breathing fields the triumphant sea draws nearer and rocks in its waves the voices of goldfinches and the voices of the town. We are a long way from space and time, we come upon the bobbing silhouettes of stray dinosaurs and the rayed shadows of Martians who cannot see for fear. You have something more to say, but I do not understand you: between us stretches the enormous body of reality and from its severed head bubble the clots of white blood. Alison Fell AUGUST 6, 1945 (From Kisses for Mayakovsky, Virago, 1984) In the Enola Gay five minutes before impact he whistles a dry tune Later he will say that the whole blooming sky went up like an apricot ice. Later he will laugh and tremble at such a surrender, for the eye of his belly saw Marilyn's skirts fly over her head for ever On the river bank bees drizzle over hot white rhodedendrons Later she will walk the dust, a scarlet girl with her whole stripped skin at her heel, stuck like an old shoe sole or mermaid's tail Later she will lie down in the flecked black ash where the people are become as lizards or salamanders and, blinded, she will complain: Mother you are late, so late Later in dreams he will look look down shrieking and see ladybirds ladybirds Robert Creeley FOR W.C.W. (2) (From Collected Poems 1945 _ 1975, Boyars, May, 1987) The rhyme is after all the repeated insistence There, you say, and there, and there, and and becomes just so. And what one wants is what one wants, yet complexly as you say. Let's let it go. I want _ _ Then there is _ _ and, I want. Robert Creeley MY OWN STUFF (From Memory Gardens, Boyars, May, 1987) ^"My own stuff^' a flotsam I could neither touch quite nor get hold of, fluff, as with feathers, milk- weed, the evasive lightness distracted yet insistent to touch it kept poking, trying with my stiffened fingers to get hold of its substance I had even made to be there its only reality my own. John Fuller BREAKFAST Mornings restore us to the physical With the clink of familiar slight purpose, Toying with a log-jam of All Bran In milk almost blue, like a wrist. The spoon has the weight and arched curve Of a torso prepared for pleasure or pain, Reminding us of dreams where we hunted Free spirits down infinite spaces. But the bowl, though endless, is finite, A perfect white circle, with deceitful flowers, A shape matched by the defining zones Of our weakest spots: collar, belt. Stef Pixner the pain that I find in dust and disorder (From Sawdust and White Spirit, Virago, 1985) the pain that I find in dust and disorder she carries on her back like bread. I asked for a ladder for a gilded stagecoach I asked for the moon I found old tins in the cupboard old tins, old dust and her soft, soft skin. fox colours of rust and brown a nest of yellowed papers and a bed full of books. she gve me bunches of words on a keyring and question marks to open locked doors. the pain that I find in dust and disorder she carries on her back like bread.