Very interesting reading last Tuesday 9 2 99 at SVP by Martin Corless-Smith
and Catherine Wagner.
Corless-Smith read from OF PISCATOR (University of Georgia Press) and THE
GARDEN, A THEOPHANY(Spectacular Books, USA)
Very much in the present but steeped in past pastoral, most sonorous
- seep willow / warbler / rest / three whistles late -
for instance
which is more emphatic in the hearing of his reading than it had been for me
on the page
I look forward to seeing where he takes his poetry next
I had seen Catherine Wagner's MAGAZINE POEMS last autumn - a number of us
commented on it here - and a few typescripts before that. Relatively little
but enough to know it interested me. Shortly before the reading I received a
set of her "Fraction Anthems", some of which were published in the svp
magazine published on 9th - she read from some earlier poems, from magazine
poems and the fraction anthems - and the fraction anthems stood out. All was
good, but the latest was best. There's a tremendous amount going on in the
poems, in how that text got to there that way, but they stand on their own,
for you to make what you will of them. She spoke of her attempt in the
fraction anthems of her attempt to "capture" (my word I think) the moment in
which they were written and the inevitable failure to achieve that although
a poem resulted... In one case the typographical arrangement of the poem
maps the room in which it was written... And then the poems are summarised
with a footnote, after this attempt at some kind of precision, by the
randomising process using her social security number as a key! Blowing it
apart and at the same time generating more
And they're good to hear; they work. Again, one wants to know what she will
do next!
SVP 1999 # 3 publishes work by Dave Chirot and Catherine Wagner and is
available for £1.50 payable to Lawrence Upton from 32 Downside Rd Sutton
Surrey SM2 5HP
The next SVP reading is on 2nd March 1999. Colin Simms. Be there. He's
coming all the way from his Cumbrian isolation...
L
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