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BRITISH-IRISH-POETS  July 2008

BRITISH-IRISH-POETS July 2008

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Subject:

Re: SoundEye 2008: Part 3

From:

RUPERT MALLIN <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 01:50:16 +0100

Content-Type:

text/plain

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Dear Randolph

A wonderful report back from SoundEye. The enthusiasm around the festival 
and the straightforward 'report backs' have really enthused me about poetry 
again. I'd been promised a reading at the big Latitude Festival here this 
weekend but it didn't happen and have been a bit down, so your enthusiasms 
and insights - along with Mairead's - have found me putting pen to paper 
again after months without. Thanks both.

***

I'm researching my father's work presently. Tom Mallin lived a brief life, 
1927-77. Was a painter, sculptor, leading picture restorer, and then a 
novelist and playwright. 'Dodecahedron,' (Allison & Busby 1970) was his best 
novel, written in a film script style and almost became a 'block buster' 
film (rights bought three times in the US). Was about Christ returning as a 
woman, which found amazing reviews likening his "terrible imagination" to 
Genet's and Blake's.

This is by the by for in researching my father's era from 1947 to 1977, 
however complex the painting or writing, reviewers and academics seemed 
determined to bring the work to the wider world. What happened in the 
following thirty years to hinder this transmission belt between artistic 
production and the wider world?

I'm hopeful that postmodernism is dying; and that Modernism is the agenda 
and continuity rejoined.

Top line is, through your review I really want to engage in/with Tom 
Pickard's work again. You've enthused in concrete terms and that's so 
important.

Thanks, Rupert


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Randolph Healy" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 7:30 PM
Subject: SoundEye 2008: Part 3


Friday 4^th July
4 p.m.  Peter Manson, Catherine Wagner and Tom Pickard.

Outside the Firkin Crane theatre the rain was coming down in stair rods.
Inside, every square millimetre was occupied by high velocity higher
decibel miniature dancers whose class had just finished. We were ushered
to a side room while parents of the above mentioned drove to the doors
to collect them. Eventually the rescue operation was accomplished and we
trooped into the theatre for the reading.

Peter Manson (http://www.petermanson.com/ ) kicked off, reading from his
new book  _Between Cup and Lip_ published by Miami University Press
(http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/mupress/details/manson_cupandlip.htm ). He
read the long poem, ­_Snail Book_ which could be crudely characterised
as a sustained fine-detailed view of minimally intelligent spineless
creatures living in their own filth entirely at the expense of others.
Allegories on a postcard please. This interleaved with some great asides
and one-liners. Three extracts:

Eat your dinner or we rehydrate The Fonz!

Zebra snail masturbating on aquarium air-stone.

…

Mascara isn’t important for the team as a whole, so we need to sort this
out.

Pond snail performing the Indian Rope Trick with a length of its own
excrement, lifting further off the tank floor as the turd lengthens.

…

You sit back, afraid that you might be having a stroke, more afraid of
being discovered dead on your knees with your trousers down, like the
girl from the heroin advert.

Cyclops population outstrips daphnia, and I’m told they smell.

Extracts, no matter how sparkling, don’t do justice to a poem where
extension is an essential element. Peter’s soft-spoken, nuanced delivery
had me captivated. A great reading. BTW, if anyone should have concerns
over the standard of care Peter gives his invertebrates, just glance at
his Snail Cam ( http://www.petermanson.com/snailcam.htm ). Sparkling!



Next to read was Cathy Wagner (
http://www.units.muohio.edu/english/People/Faculty/Q_Z/WagnerCatherine.html

 ).

Cathy read a from a new poem provisionally entitled _Mercury Vectors: A
Romance_

It began with the cast list:

/Clair /(/Lucy/, /Lair/)—in public relations

/Damaris/ (/Dam/,/ Damn/,/ Tamarisk/)—in public relations

/Proctor/—executive

/Gambol/ (/Gamble/)—executive

/Noman/ (/Nomad/)—a god

Various security guards and revolutionaries

Others TBA





Procter and Gamble, a global corporation based, like Cathy, in Ohio,
started off manufacturing candles and soap. Their range now extends to
pharmaceuticals and nappies. There’s some great riffing on this, with
lines like:

“Oh I love the jungle
It’s where the medicine comes from”



And of course the mercury in the title, and body, of the poem more than
hints at the sale of skin lightening soap containing the toxin mercury.
Thus color enters the tale. This is explored from all sorts of angles,
from Lucy being all the way black, Clair all the way white – but the
same person, to colorblind men buying a green phone believing it’s a
blood phone, to an utterly astonishing section with Noman rising from
polluted foam and, well I’d better not spoil the surprise.


The counterpoint holding all this and far more has a logic and dynamism
all of its own.

And music, music. At one point in the reading Cathy sang.



( In an interview with Zoe Ward
 http://www.bookslut.com/features/2007_06_011222.php she credits Lee Ann
Brown with getting her started singing her poems. )

The verve and imagination with which these attractive verses juggle and
transmute such multiplicities is really something.  Clair indeed.



The last reader was Tom Pickard
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Pickard ), founder with Connie Pickard
of the legendary Morden Tower readings (http://mordentower.org/) .Tom is
the highest poet in England, living at an altitude of over 2000 feet in
Alston. He told me a hilarious story about one night which climaxed with
a hurricane blowing the roof off his house.


Tom read from a number of books, notably _The Ballad of Jamie Allan_.


Judith Ann Murphy describes Allen in these terms
(http://balladofjamieallan.blogspot.com/ )



QUOTE

Jamie Allan - famed piper, gypsy, serial army enlister and deserter,
horse thief, and jailbird - had all the qualities that ensured
notoriety. He followed the Romantic template of being mad, bad and
dangerous to know, his talent appealed to rich benefactors like the
Countess of Northumberland, and his life provided a cocktail of stories,
gypsy lore and landscapes that prompted three rather fanciful
biographies within eighteen years of his 1810 death in a Durham prison
cell. UNQUOTE

Tom conducted meticulous research in the National Archive for this book,
studying police files, military service records etc pertaining to Allan,
his relatives, friends and patrons. Not bad for someone who left school
at 14.

It was a powerful reading. Tom’s obvious empathy with the character
shining through. An empathy which did not amount to naive hero-worship.
There’s a very disturbing poem detailing a burglary in which the victims
were an elderly couple. Tom’s voicing of the brutal robbers was haunting
to say the least.



Hard not to see this as a major book.

He finished his reading with a poem, I think it was called _Hidden
Agenda_ which was initially banned by New Statesman and later published
by them with an apology. Read it if you want to know why. A real
showstopper.


best

Randolph

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