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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