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Web Pages & Websites Useful for Understanding British Innovative Poetry
Useful Lists for British Innovative Poetry
Anthologies, Literary Histories & Critical Texts
Poetry And Me: A Writing Biography
Quick Links to British Innovative Poetry Sites
Readings in London
Links to British Innovative Poetry Sitesresources, lists and other foci of information
British & Irish online magazines and e-publishers
online magazines and e-publishers with British & Irish writing
writers' homepages and blogs
audio and video sites
print publishers and magazines
readings &c
bookshops and booksellers
This list is taken from the very full international listing on the Great Works Links page, with the entries slightly re-edited. This listing last completely updated Easter Sunday 2012; given smaller update (sites added) July 2012 (=new listing). See Quick Links to British Innovative Poetry Sites for a links page which lists names, no packdrill, & slightly more analytically than here.
Most recent upload: November 11, 2013.
I regret I can't see my way to carrying on with this site. I will maintain its presence online for the next year; then turn the switch on it. Users are reminded the site is under a Creative Commons license for its non-commercial sharing (I couldn't give a fuck about attribution), so if anything is useful it can be reused & carried on elsewhere. The domain name is a good one; if anyone wishes to carry on its use for any purpose, email me to discuss your plans, and I'll simply arrange transfer.
Whatever it is, we're against it
looks to contemporary Europe, to a grungy beat USA, and to British Bohemia, in a likeable and quirky late modernist (and post) literary mix. A vital and necessary resource for British poets is the astonishing series of 80+ Maintenant Interviews by SJ Fowler – interviews with + (translated) poems by contemporary European poets, slewed interestingly away from the familiar to cover a wide range of states and cultures, (even Britain and Ireland, including Tom Jenks and Holly Pester). Read it! Use it! Crush Little-Englandism now! Look out too for events linked with these interviews, often at Rich Mix, 35–47 Bethnal Green Road E1 6LA
has had its website labelled "Under Construction" since 2011, with no working links from the homepage, while much work we hope is being done (though as often in such situations why everything else is inaccessible – it's not a real buuilding-site, remember?). In the meantime, its exhaustive data-base of Living Published Women Poets in the UK is accessible at http://a-gender.org/poets/. It is, simply, exhaustive, wide-ranging and produced by volunteers, with brief info on the poets.
The Academi is the Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency and Society for Authors.
It has a very inclusive policy, of born in or living in Wales, and an equally inclusive literary approach, so its informative Database contains many innovative poets.
is an online and print collection of recordings, printed texts and manuscripts, focused on innovative contemporary poetry being written or performed in Britain. It is hosted by Queen Mary College, London. At present, the Archive consists of readings by over 100 mainly UK-based poets. It is a very necessary place to visit, a truly massive resource. Well done, Andrea! I cannot praise this site highly enough.
Arduity was launched in 2010 by John Armstrong who recognised the need for a user-friendly guide to reading difficult poetry. It is hoped that this resource will consist of a mix of factual information and site users' own experiences of difficult verse.
This is a fascinating resource for readers of contemporary innovative poetry. The site is being worked upon, even as you read this, but there is a fine start to the project. Poets covered are J H Prynne, Geoffrey Hill, Paul Celan, John Ashbery, Charles Olson, Keston Sutherland, John Matthias, David Jones, Geraldine Kim and Wallace Stevens, with a range of issues, problematics, contexts and strategies discussed on the site, with a call for response and contribution by readers. Interestingly, Arduity is not coming from a position within what current language would call the Innovative Poetry Community, nor the academic universe. Bits aren't quite good enough yet (eg very limited and dated discussion of "critical difficulty" that doesn't really engage with the full-blown Theory any current academic likes to play with, and use of the delightful phrase "Conceptual Verse"). But direct questions are raised and the beginning of possible responses pointed at. Perhaps the real problematic is: not to how to clarify difficult things (the poetic equivalents of The Offside Law or The Duckworth-Lewis Method), but how to respond to an ever-increasing range of ways of presenting language for our fascination and delight, how to take part in a game with totally fluid rules the players transform through their poetic acts.
The website for Beat Scene magazine has a lot of information on books, news, and pix of the beat writers, from whose mighty loins we are all sprung.
The Centre for Fine Print Research at the University of the West of England has a major interest in book art and artists' books across all media and formats, with a wealth of practical, theoretical and illustatory material on the site.
Discussion and news list for practitioners and readers of current poetry and poetics, with emphasis on recent postmodern and innovative poetries in Britain and Ireland.
Centred more on discussion of writing than posted writing. Link is for archive. Open access: you can apply to join (from the page linked to — but check archive first to make sure it is your sort of place!)
This site, a joint venture of the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, the Poetic Practice Group at Royal Holloway College, and the Department of English, University of Southampton, is a reference guide to the work of contemporary British poets from the parallel tradition
. Parallel? Hmmm. 35 parallel traditional poets so far. There is now a number of readings added as .msv files.
This is a thorough and wide-ranging listing, that gives access to a wealth of worthwhile sites. It helped inspire the greatworks.org.uk website.
is a collaborative, cross-institutional research centre founded in 2006, and run by the English departments of: Aberystwyth University (Co-ordinator, Peter Barry); Bangor University (Co-ordinator, Ian Davidson); University of Brighton (Co-ordinator, John Wrighton). Through a program of videolink seminars and poetry performances (see the schedule) we aim to develop knowledge about contemporary poetic practices, about the interface between the word and the visual, and to examine differences in practice between the experimental and traditional poetic forms.
at Birkbeck College is a forum for the study and performance of contemporary poetries, and research into their historical, political and theoretical contexts
. They host poetry readings, performances, workshops, exchanges, seminars, lectures, and conferences (details on site), run two web journals and have developed a very active publishing venture, Veer Books, and are committed to fostering the whole range of poetic practice, including sound, visual, and digital poetry, with particular emphasis upon work that is innovative in its materials and forms. Will Rowe and Carol Watts are the good people responsible for all this. Most recent big online Veer activity is Veer About 2010–2011 – a magnificently well loaded online mini-anthology of current British Innovative Poetry.
is a user generated world map of poetry, upload your poetic photos, audio, text or videos and make your mark on the global poetry map.
It's based on the idea that poetry is all around us, from gravestones to graffiti, from birthday cards to blogs, in the landscape and in our memories. GPS invites you to take a fresh look at where you are and find the poetry that inspires you. Photograph it, video it, audio record it or write it down — tell the world where it is on the map.
OK, good idea — thank you, Lemn Sissay. And how has it panned out? Yeah, well, some of it unfortunately very predictable; some, on the other hand, submitted by Ryan Ormonde. We should join him & take part.
is an online compendium of new writing and literary reviews
, published by Tom Chivers' penned in the margins enterprise. It has an openness to a range of currents in the current mesh of competing British poetry networks which is rare, and should be encouraged. There are news blogs, reviews, some poems, some resources listed and longer articles, eg Steven Waling's An English Objectivist: Elaine Randell. This enterprise has a rare openness and seriousness. Embrace it!
This is a site with a lot of potential — a range of poetry (by many names unknown to me, though often interesting, and including Paul Holman and Sascha Akhtar), plus some very good links of interest to anyone writing poetry.
a small think and do tank based in London exploring the potential of new media for creative readers and writers & investigating the evolution of cultural discourse as it moves from printed page to networked screen.
Download
read:write, an if:book report on digital possibilities for literature, commissioned by Arts Council England, or Songs of Imagination & Digitisation, an illuminated book for the digital age
. Check activities on the bookfutures blog. A useful site for changing times and changing media.
is based at Nottingham Trent University, with Dr. David Miller, Research Fellow in English, as the Chief Investigator for the project. The historical — and contemporary — importance of little magazines is unquestionable. ... Bibliographical entries will be provided for around 2,000-2,500 magazines from the post-1945 period, with details of titles, places of publication, dates and issue numbers (first and last), editors, ISSNs, and any additional bibliographic information (such as variant titles or subtitles). In many cases, more information will be added as it becomes available, and entries will be updated where appropriate. ... Descriptions of the magazines, with details of typical contributors, have been added in some cases, and it is intended that more will be added in due course. ... In addition to the bibliographies, we will be providing full indexes for various magazines, providing the means for a multiplicity of perspectives on the literary and creative activity in this period, and helping researchers to trace individual and group developments
.
is an internet listing opportunity open to little presses of the U.K., mainly print material. Inaugurated by Bill Griffiths, Bob Trubshaw, and Peter Finch, in March 2000. Now with involvement of Peter Manson. A wide range of little presses (including Dreadful Work Press, Psychic Tymes and Kropotkin's Lighthouse), but with a very good listing of recently published poetry, with snippets and how to get hold of it.
is a vast and exhaustive listing of Internet sites relevant to poetry and literature (with a UK bias). It is very thorough, uptodate & wide-ranging, with a huge range of resources. A noble and useful work! Tim Love's essays are also very interesting — try The poetry mainstream.
Peter Howard's site of poems and poetry resources has a real wealth of material.
Informed and amusing blog — bless it!
a joint project of Brown University and the University of Tulsa
can act as a reminder that the poetic avant-garde did once dwell and act upon these shores — early Twentieth Century English literature wasn't all Hardy and Thomas, but the site of an Anglo-American modernist movement. The boundless riches and generosity of American academia give you pdfs of a range of early Twentieth Century magazines, especially but not solely the heroic modernists (eg Blast, the English Review, The New Age, Rhythm, Wheels), plus brief biographies of contributors, a series of essays, and pdfs of some chapters from books in their collection. Back to your roots, British poets!
aims to refine and enhance the record through the production of a scholarly resource and comprehensive critical and cultural history of modernist magazines in the period 1880-1945. So-called 'little magazines' were small, independent publishing ventures committed to new and experimental work. Literally hundreds of such magazines flourished in this period, providing an indispensable forum for modernist innovation and debate. They helped sustain small artistic communities, strengthened the resolve of small iconoclastic groups, keen to change the world, and gave many major modernists their first opportunities in print. Many of these magazines existed only for a few issues and then collapsed; but almost all of them contained work of outstanding originality and future significance.
A joint product of University of Sussex and De Montfort University. A range of British magazines, as jpegs.
A forum for anonymous reviews, edited by Keston Sutherland and jUStin!katKO. Disappointingly dead for a potentially good idea.
An excellent scene! A superb website! The superb reading series has ended, but the website is packed with rich and useful material, well-presented. Though activity is quieter recently, Openned remains a major focus of poetic activity in the UK. Openned is linked with The Other Room readings in Manchester. The site carries an archive of its activities and projects 2006–2011 (including much audio & video), which provides a key guide to the recent blossoming of British Innovative Poetry, in which Openned is a key player. There are deeply useful and well-organised links. Do sample the huge Openned Anthology. Well done, Steve Willey & Alex Davies! This is how things should be. I should retire.
Experimental poetry in Manchester
, organised by James Davies, Tom Jenks and Scott Thirston, was at first linked with Openned, but centered on a very lively Northern scene. Important readings continue regularly, and the site contains much news, many links, and lots of video and photos. Major!
a project by Albert Pellicer, looks into the textual and sonic space provided by kite flying and its potential to reach and connect. It aims to 'publish' poetry on the kites and play sounds using aeolian instruments attached to the kites so as to discover new dynamics in poetics through the freedom of the wind. It also envisages to help children, young people, adults and communities in general reach their readers/viewers/listeners clear and high as they 'raise' their 'voices'. The final result is an orchestrated poetic event which is filmed both from the ground and from a camera attached to a helium balloon. The project has received an UnLtd Millennium Award.
Tom Chivers' organisation that publishes, arranges events and projects, even manages artists (including Chris McCabe). This could be the start of something big; but I'm not sure the percentages will work out
I wrote — that it's surviving and expanding is very interesting, very positive indeed. Penned in the margins now has a good number of books also, from such as Emily Critchley, Steve Spence, Michael Egan, James Wilkes, George Ttouli, David Caddy, Rob Stanton, and the excellent anthology of essays on the future of poetry, Stress Fractures.
The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) was created by Green Integer and its publisher, Douglas Messerli, in 2000. The Project publishes regular anthologies of major international poets and actively archives biographies of poets and listings of their titles.
A huge number of modernist/contemporary poets from around the world, with bibiography, brief account, and texts and/or links. Really, really good, useful and wide-ranging. British poets are to date: Helen Adam, David Barnett, Kelvin Corcoran, T S Eliot, Ronald Firbank, Roy Fisher, Robin Fulton, Alan Halsey, Peter Hughes, David Kinloch, Sarah Law, D H Lawrence, Mina Loy, Rupert Loydell, Christopher Middleton, Maggie O'Sullivan, Frances Presley, Tom Raworth, Ian Seed, Rob Stanton, John Wilkinson.
showcase for contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland
, is solidly based in the commercial mainstream, but with odd flashes of interest. There is an online journal, Limelight, and discussion forums.
Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and poetics, promoting specific projects for internet and print publication, and providing a forum for you to debate your own critical and creative work.
Much original writing posted as well as discussion of writing. Link is for archive. Open access: you can apply to join (from the page linked to — but check archive first to make sure it is your sort of place!)
Set up by Sebastian Hayes, this new venture looks interesting, with a blog website with a lot of material and examples on on poetry translation (from European languages), and regular events also. Much potential.
This is an Amsterdam-based attempt at setting up a worldwide poetry site, using national subsites, which at present range from Australia to Zimbabwe, and in between. The United Kingdom material includes now Alan Halsey, Denise Riley, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Frances Presley, Lee Harwood, Penelope Shuttle, Peter Riley, Richard Price and Vahni Capildeo, with introductions, bibliographies, links etc, and some general links to British poetry-related websites. The range of British poets featured is now getting perhaps genuinely representative.
is the national public library devoted to poetry on the South Bank. There are a lot of information and many links on its website. Their listing of events is national and catholic (– no, not like Generalissimo Franco, but it's very very good & wide-ranging).
gives access, with search facility, to some back issues from a range of UK magazines, eg Angel Exhaust; 10th Muse; Ambit; Erbacce; Fire; Oasis; Painted, spoken; Poetry Nation; Shearsman; The Interpreter's House; The London Magazine, Tolling Elves; many more! From the Poetry Library's archives. Just noticed they've got some issues of Strange Faeces – go see what fun we used to have!
This is an interesting site, which gives a space and webpresence to a large number of contemporary British poets. These include Chris Gutkind, Chris Hardy, André Mangeot, David Miller, Sharon Morris, Christopher North and Stephen Watts.
Peter Manson has handily compiled this as a specialised Google search engine focusing on 70 poetry websites, mainly focusing on innovative poetry, and with a British bias.
We're a database for all live poetry, spoken word events, and poetry in performance coming up in the next 14 days.
A genuinely wide range of events listed. Likewise the forums are lively and useful.
Earlier this year my father died, at the age of 85. He left behind a little book that he had written, about poets and poetry readings in the North East of England. It was never published, but it may be of interest to people who enjoy modern poetry, or who are interested in the history of culture in the North East.
Photos taken at readings from the 1960s to the 80s at places like the Morden Tower, Colpitts, Ceolfrith and Castle Chare events, of both performers and audiences. Plus a handy list of googled links to people and places! A little time capsule! Thank you, Jeremy James.
This is the very useful section of the huge Salt website, though its coverage is a little patchy and unfiltered. But a listing of Agents, Archives, Authors, Blogs, Bookstores, Centres, Competitions, Conferences, Courses, Directories, Festivals, Funding, Libraries, Magazines, Organisations, Prizes, Publishers, Radio Shows, Television Programmes, Venues, Workshops, worldwide but anglophone, has huge potential. Especially if the site can access its database more effectively: guys, the Next buttons aren't working!
has an engaging site, with yearly selections online of the best Scottish poems, an interactive map with contemporary poems on places, and a bookshop. Now includes the Edwin Morgan Archive.
does what is says: image of book clicks through to publisher's website, with publisher and poet indexes. A simple and effective site, with books from bad press, barque press, default publishing, home'baked books, if p then q, Kater Murr, leafe press, ninerrors, Oystercatcher Press, Reality Street, Skysill Press, The Arthur Shilling Press, The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, The Red Jasper, veer books, Wild Honey Press, yt comms & zimZalla.
run at The Guesthouse, 10 Chapel Street, Shandon, Cork, and presumably spinning off at some stage from the Soundeye Festival, have two fascinating blogs: this one posts links to material (poems, poetics, audio and video) used by the Workshop, and is therefore worth diligent study, and the other, Default, publishes texts produced by the Workshop, also well worth your time. James Cummins and Rachel Warriner are those largely running the Workshop.
is a great institution listing magazines, print & online, across world (though mainly US based).
Carrie Etter's blogsite has examples, information and an excellent set of links. Very useful for this curious and and expanding area.
on Dee Sunshine (formerly Dee Rimbaud)'s website has many lists of addresses and links in connection with poetry. Very good coverage of the whole British poetry scene(s), if weak on the avant-garde. A series of quick interviews, What Makes Poets Tick? includes Robert Sheppard, Martin Stannard and Norman Jope, and lengthier interviews include one with Rupert Loydell.
provided by the British Library in association with the UK Web Archiving Consortium, is the archive of sites being preserved (including a fair sprinkling of those concerned with innovative poetry).
This is a [Facebook] page for publishers dedicated to the dissemination of poetry. Privacy type: Closed: Limited public content. Members can see all content.
So join if you are a small press publisher!
is a handy blog of poetry events — Jow Lindsay & Nat Raha main posters, bless 'em.
is a dynamic collection of short, personal articles about practical aspects of poetic process and technique, written by poets and people who work with poetry, and organised for convenience's sake as a multi-author blog.
Frances Leviston's enterprise has a lot of potential, as Geraldine Monk: "The Madness of Sonnets" and Jane Holland: "Notes Towards Authenticity" both show.
Connections of language, writing, reading and art practice, inside and outside the VerySmallKitchen.
A fascinating David Berridge project, including epublishing, which provides a good entry to the world of "art writing", generously conceived of by Mr Berridge. A stimulating site!
are a fascinating and informative (but now not very current) listing of poetry on CD and Cassette by David Kennedy, part of Cortland Review: An Online Literary Magazine in RealAudio.
Published by Compost and Height, . . . a journal which publishes the parallel practices of musicians, artists and listeners of contemporary music.
paper magazine, but available for download. Improvised music and sound art, with some interesting pieces in the magazine (and a world to explore from the collective's (?) website). I find writing about such music more stimulating than most writing about poetry.
Emphasis is on performance poetry in broadest terms, but huge, active and well-organised site gives a good view of an area of poetry that any non-mainstream poet (or reader) ought to be able to find something of potential interest in. Gig guide is thorough. Inspect the Poets' Showcase — fascinating, various, and they don't have academic positions. Cross Cultural Poetry discussing differences between different cultures' poetries is interesting and useful.
connecting the community of writers and writing industries professionals across the UK and beyond. WIN is a project of Charnwood Arts with the support of Arts Council England.
I hear muttered and despairing obscenities at the label "writing industries professionals"; predictably and fortunately, the site is actually half-dead, with one posting I can see this year. There is interesting material from Mark Godwin on sound poetry using SoundCloud, and stuff on digital writing etc. Maybe more one day.
Our aim is to help writers in ALL genres, and at all stages in their development, to steer a course through the complexities of the writing life and build and sustain their careers.
Provided by the National Association of Writers in Education, and formerly branded as "literaturetraining". At base, useful. Don't go get a Poetic Career, please, or become a Creative Professional — but you may find some support.
Part of an international grouping of Alba projects(Paris, Beijing, Berlín, Cochabamba and Londres
are claimed. In Alba Londres we publish articles on Spanish/Latin-American culture in England – or in English – and original poetry in translation. We work with different languages including Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, Euskera, Occitan and English. Given the interest in Hispanic culture and the constant cultural exchanges taking place in London in its booming literary-artistic-intellectual arena, we believe that Alba Londres will fill a void and invite the production of new material of this sort.
Editorial team is Guillermo Bravo, Noèlia Diaz Vicedo, Gregorio Fonten, Richard Parker & Jessica Pujol i Duran. The main event so far has been the production of Alba Magazine, with some poetry also online.
is devoted entirely to poetry and poetics. It publishes non-mainstream poetry, and features essays and interviews related to it. By non-mainstream, I mean poetry that is aware of the plasticity of language and which places connotation and ambiguity over denotation and precision of meaning. This sort of poetry invites interpretation and allows for plurality of meaning as opposed to hermeneutic closure.
I can't agree with all of editor Jeffrey Side's credo — I'd aim for some impossible combination of precision and ambiguity — but it's a brave nailing of colours to the mast for an heroic e-zine which contains a very wide range of poets, eg Rupert Loydell, Geoff Stevens, Ashok Niyogi, Peter Riley, John M. Bennett (including also an excellent essay, Reading John M. Bennett: How to Read and Think About the Poetry of John M. Bennett by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino), Allen Fisher, Catherine Daly, Diana Magallon, Christopher Mulrooney, Chris McCabe, Jeff Harrison, John Seed, Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, Ron Silliman. Adam Fieled, Peter Finch, Mairéad Byrne, jUStin!katKO, plus an equally wide range of articles and interviews, and a huge list of links. And now an ever-increasing number of ebooks, widely varied in technique but always innovative. It also includes fascinating series of
interviews with songwriters on songwriting and poetry and editors (US and UK) on the Future of Poetry Publishing. It is a wonderful site, near perfection in its inclusiveness and boldness. Jeffrey Side also has a blog, Jeffrey Side: Occasional comment on the appalling state of mainstream poetry, with very interesting material. Jeffrey's very consistent and rigorously argued reader-response critical position I find always very challenging. It is put simply and boldly in the essay Poetry in Turbulence (or how to enjoy poetry without really understanding it).
is an experimental arts organisation based in the UK. We help marginalised people to find their creative voice, using a mix of art and poetry. We've worked with older hospital patients, holocaust survivors, excluded schoolchildren, children who have special needs
and are directed by artist Lois Blackburn and poet Philip Davenport. Astonishing work, documenting & empowering, using techniques of late modernist/postmodernist poetry. It's hugely important: the opposite of the academicisation of contemporary writing. Follow their arthur+martha blog, full of information. Major projects include:
using the stuff of the ordinary the found to make poems. Allowing ordinary voices to be privileged: allowing both patient's own voices (their clean language, dialect, slang, spelling, their sound) and their physical condition (dementia, forgetfulness, non-linear logic, physical difficulties) to be part of the poem-making
is an online forum with a slant towards innovative poetry that has prose, narrative, or sequences in its sights.
It is a new poetry ezine with a lot of potential, and a very wide range of material, including work from Charles Bernstein, Medbh McGuckian, Alistair Noon, David Annwn, Vahni Capildeo, Christine Kennedy, David Kennedy, Rupert Loydell, Tom Leonard, Peter Manson, Sophie Mayer, Peter Minter, Leo Mellor, Redell Olsen. Most recent issue includes a Translation section that includes Tim Atkins, Poems from Petrarch, Vahni Capildeo, Four Departures from 'Wulf and Eadwacer', Michael Kindellan, after Baudelaire, Pound, Char, Rod Mengham, versions of Sosnowski & Archilochus, Keston Sutherland,
Marx & Espitallier, Geoff Ward, from Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies.
is out of Edge Hill University, carrying fiction and poetry.
This is really fun! Lots of poetry from a wide range of good poets: Alan Halsey, Susan Banks, Alex Willie Singerman, Emily Critchley, Harry Godwin, John Muckle, Juha Virtenen, Susana Gardner, Mark Smith, Sarah Kelly, Alan Hay, James Harvey, Andrew Spragg and me in most recent issue. The cup runneth over! Stephen Emmerson, you have done well.
is most engaging, more than it ought to be. It is part overly self-assured cultural establishment, part superb total independence and sheer creative quirkiness. For such pleasure, try Tom Lowenstein's From Culbone Wood to Xanadu: An Extract from the Journal of a Poet, with a dysentery, in Remission, who the Previous Afternoon near Culbone Wood had written Kubla Khan (A Fragment).
was published as part of Openned, as an online magazine, most recently featuring Ken Edwards, Jeff Hilson, slmendoza (aka Linus Slug) and Timothy Thornton.
elegantly designed magazine edited by David Bircumshaw, current issue featuring poetry by Tim Allen, Peter Riley, Pierre Joris, special feature on German language poetry (with essay by Andrew Duncan), translation from the Dutch by Andrew Duncan & Karlien van den Breulen, and some of a very complex text from David Bircumshaw. Also on the site are two collections of poems by David Bircumshaw: Parousia and Painting Without Numbers. The whole ensemble comprises Spectare's Web — a remarkable monument!
Collaborative work will appear on this site in May and June 2012, leading up to a performance on 7th July 2012 at the Rich Mix, Bethnal Green, London. This collaboration is part of SJ Fowler's ongoing Camarade project.
Rich, dirty fun, kneading together classic British comedy and (largely) Modernist literature into seaside postcards, presided over by The Laughing Betjeman and a large sausage. I missed the performance; but these are superb. And for sale, with Union Jack ribbon!
a contemporary poetry foldable/printable ezine
by Rhys Trimble. Current issue includes Nik Scott, Rhys Trimble, Johan De Wit, Chris Torrance, and fair amazes in its energy. There is a video guide to folding it the right way! Ingenious and praiseworthy, and the 'Carshalton MOB' special edition is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of British alternative poetry, to correct many common assumptions about where 60s and 70s British innovative poetry sprang from: in many cases far, far from Cambridge. There's also a ctrl+alt+del blog, with some good typewriter poems, and a Richard Barrett poem to download.
contains a wide range of reviews of films, texts, TV drama, plus audio/multimedia work by Paul A Green, Lawrence Russell and others. A whole complex cultural nexus is laid out. The account of the Poetry Buzz for Allen Fisher is wonderful, as are Brother Paul's review essay on Iain Sinclair's anthology London: City of Disappearances, and his detailed and discursive reading of Ken Edwards' Nostalgia for Unknown Cities. And I've just found Paul A Green's excellent review of M John Harrisson's Light, that gorgeous and haunting reworking of SF.
set up by Sophie Robinson as an integral part of National Poetry Month, April 2009 (didn't you feel it?), provides a superb collection of poems and textual submissions from the current most upcoming generation of (mainly) London poets.
I'm not sure totally what's going on here; but it is certainly very worth attention. Imagine a prolonged riff on phrases such as Proud Flesh and Wound Response (John Wilkinson & JH Prynne titles in case . . .), with, of course, Bataille circulating around. And Archilochus (the dirty old bugger!). A group blog from the look of it. Only name I recognised Joe Luna. (Also connected site Poetic Vitrectomy, with images, I think meant to be transgressive etc: v v boring.)
is a complex series of hypertext poems by Anne Berkeley, Peter Howard and André Mangeot, written in response to an exhibition on city life at Kettle's Yard Gallery in Cambridge (and to Cambridge itself). It is a powerful and engaging construction. More of these writers' work can be found on the website of the group they belong to, The Joy of Six.
Different skies is a home for words which are alive and full of images. There are places where it's inevitable (although in some cases still intolerable) that words should serve an instrumental purpose: empirical research, political agitation, news bulletins. But what we are talking about is the other side of words.
It's not from the same sources as much else here listed; but it's innovative, angry, energetic & necessary. A very promising ezine.
is a linguistic and visual experiment which provides a base and a springboard for the experimental, the new, the newer
. A little blogzine which published some interesting poems, including in its mix both Sarah Ahmad and Peter Finch.
If in some way this be not poetry, I know not what is. Dreaming Methods is a fusion of writing and atmospheric new media that explores digital storytelling, imaginary memories and dream-inspired states.
Like sad nightmares, or hypnagogic poems, or intelligent but insane computer games. Dreaming Methods, known also as Digital Fiction, evolved from obscure, floppy disk-based collections of short stories that were available for free in the Amiga Public Domain during mid 1990s. It is now an experimental venture into combining fictional narratives with atmospheric multimedia designed to be read and experienced on-screen. Dreaming Methods is inspired largely by abstract concepts that would perhaps be difficult to capture using writing alone. The multi-layered complexity of dreams/nightmares and real/imagined memories that feature in many of the narratives are represented by a heavy mix of media that is designed to be compulsive and immersive. Projects are inspired by music, film and web design as much as literature, and attempt to take strands of each and weave them into something entirely new. Dreaming Methods is however experimental. Our plan is to continue to attempt to produce challenging hybrid fiction projects that push the boundaries of digital writing.
is a poetry e-zine edited by Susana Gardner, an American expat in Switzerland, publishing a range of good poets, usually in pdf form. The most recent issue is from her support group, Das Kollectiv, ranging antialphabetically from Zompa, Workman, Watts, Wallace, Thurston to Benson, Behrendt, Behm-Steinberg, Allegrezza. A Dusie Isles Reader is an excellent online anthology of current British & some Irish writing, including David Annwn, Tim Atkins, Tina Bass, Caroline Bergvall, David Berridge, Anne Blonstein, Andrea Brady, Mairéad Byrne, David Caddy, Vahni Capildeo, Emily Critchley, James Cummins, James Davies, Andrew Duncan, Carrie Etter, Allen Fisher, Melissa Flores, Amelia Gilmore, Giles Goodland, Mark Goodwin, Alan Halsey, Robert Hampson, Edmund Hardy, Peter Hughes, Sarah Jacob, Susan Johanknecht, Luke Kennard, Christine Kennedy, David Kennedy, Ira Lightman, Rupert Loydell, Geraldine Monk, Marianne Morris, Redell Olsen, Peter Philpott, Ernesto Priego, Tom Raworth, Peter Riley, Sophie Robinson, Gavin Selerie, Jeffrey Side, Zoë Skoulding, Martin Stannard, Rob Stanton, Laura Steele, Sandra Tappenden, Scott Thurston, Anna Ticehurst, Simon Turner, Steven Waling, Carol Watts. Basically — the best online anthology of contempory British poetry. There's also a little blog.
was a very fine US based ezine, with a very inclusive policy, whose final issue has now been published. Issue 6 includes 13 British Poets ("In memory of Richard Caddel: 1949–2003"): Caroline Bergvall, Richard Caddel, Martin Corless-Smith, Allen Fisher, Bill Griffiths, Alan Halsey, Elizabeth James, Christopher Logue, Geraldine Monk, Frances Presley, Christopher Reid, Peter Riley, & Harriet Tarlo.
from Alec Newman's The Knives Forks and Spoons Press (hurray!) and available thru issuu.com is edited by Jo Langton, runs adverts for readings & presses (with hyperlinks), and exhibits as pleasing a wide range of poets as you would expect.
is, yes, a deliberate revival of Trollope's Victorian journal, as up-to-date and magisterial, and with much interest in curent poetry. Genetically modified, review of American Hybrid, edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John, by Peter Riley, is well worth reading, as are all his regular Poetic Notes: What, after all, do we ask of this privileged activity but that it furnish some grounds for hope in the condition of the world, for which we need to know the possible varieties of experience, and which can only stand on this scale of recognition. I hope to examine these issues further in The Fortnightly Review by attention to particular publications, personalities and events in the poetry world.
All sorts of interesting stuff elsewhere in it, including Tom Lowenstein, mMartin Sorrell on Nicholas Moore and Alana Shilling on The e-Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.
Half magazine, half collaborative art project, Fuselit is a London-based journal of poetry, short fiction, art and sounds. The contents of every issue are dictated by a spur word, with contributions supplied by an international array of writers and artists, both new and established.
Was a beautifully crafted little magazine, now also available in all sorts of digital editions. Really quite pleasurable.
edited by George Ttoouli and Simon Turner is an interesting and worthwhile blogzine, with good poems and other relevant postings.
is a gothic-interested literary webzine edited by Stephanie Robinson from darkest Lancashire. Her poetry, and that of Kerrie Orton, make it very worthwhile.
seeks to publish works of excellence and assumes that excellence is always the offspring of experimentation.
Look at the
back issue containing a big West House Anthology, with authors from Thomas Lovell Beddoes to Peter Riley, via Ric Caddel, Kelvin Corcoran, Johan de Wit and West House Books publisher Alan Halsey himself. American site.
is an anthology of poems and songs written by over 50 poets celebrating and exploring the contemporary resonances of medicinal plants and herbs for the Urban Physic Garden.
Summer 2011, edited and organised as a reading by James Wilkes, with a beautiful florilegium of poets. All texts on the site, and lost of videos (thank you, Steve Fowler). A good collection of contemporary poetry by mainly younger, London-based poets.
A review sheet
, edited by Joe Luna & Jow Lindsay. It's good!
is an online Salt magazine, consciously (heaven help us!) referring back to Cyril Connolly's Horizon. Editor is Katy Evans-Bush, with a quite eclectic but not always demanding mixture, eg in latest issue Michael Horovitz on Blake (yes, he likes him), three literaryish blokes on menswear, and poems by Carrie Etter, Alistair Noon, Ira Lightman, Tom Bell.
exploring non-traditional directions in poetry and scholarship by women
, is full of excellent material, including in the current issue Strictly Speaking on Caroline Bergvall, curated and co-ordinated by Sophie Robinson, and Reading Carla Harryman, curated and co-ordinated by Laura Hinton, plus much else, including poems by Jessica Wilkinson, Emily Critchley and Karen Sandhu. In the stupendous archives, poems and papers from the Cambridge Experimental Women's Poetry Festival (October 2006), Pantoume by Kai Fierle-Hedrick and Marianne Morris (image & text), a feature on Archive of the Now, including a valuable interview with Andrea Brady (and video of Andrea reading Wildfire), "quickflip: a HOW2 e-chap" (lots of good writing!) compiled and edited by Frances Kruk, who has also curated "Welcoming Space: Susana Gardner and Dusie Books". This site hosts a tremendously exciting range of writing and talking/thinking about writing. It is exemplary.
contains poems, and very interestingly, records of workshop discussions on these, by members of the Poetry Workshop: Cahal Dallat, Jane Draycott, Hugh Epstein, Christopher Hedley-Dent, Elizabeth James, Duncan McGibbon, Leona Esther Medlin, Kim Morrissey, Richard Price, and Sudeep Sen. A very well designed site, which gives a great deal of context for these poets' work.
provides poetry postcards for free download and printing.
Regrettably, on Google Documents. But excellent poets: from the top, Joe Luna, Richard Parker, Marianne Morris, Carol Watts, Justin Katko & A Gilmore, the fascinating Maruyama Gondazaemon, the definitely not-unfascinating Francesca Lisette, usw. Well done, Andrew Spragg.
The Institute of Electric Crinolines is housed in a small tent at the crossing of the art / life divide. We want to believe in the intellectual everyday every day and in the struggle to make happenings family and family happen. We seek to investigate, explore and to write: art, life, noise, concept, criticism, poetics, to invite participation. Unlearn and Produce!
They are Drew Milne and Redell Olsen. They atre always checking what they're up to.
Intercapillary Space is a continually unrolling magazine. You will find book reviews, poems, essays and capsules. The magazine is curated and largely edited by Edmund Hardy
, with as contributors virtually everyone with something interesting to say about contemporary British poetry, on a varied range of topics. From strength to strength! – now with some excellent ebooks also, including Dilemmatic boundaries: constructing a poetics of thinking, an essay by Emily Critchley, Joshua Stanley, Litany, Berlioz, a poem by Peter Hughes, and John Harington's 1591 translation of Orlando Furioso. There are many good interviews, and as well important gatherings of responses by a variety or people, mainly poets, to the work of
Doug Oliver,
Peter Riley,
Alice Notley, and Seán Rafferty. Now a book publisher (both as Intercapillary Editions online and paper, and as Capsule Editions), poetic event organiser too: (Intercapillary Places, and record label (Tusk Records: Marianne Morris's Solace Poem is highly enjoyable). Vital!
is a rather over-designed e-zine (sorry! but the texts are all so constrained in little boxes; keep it simple and readable, please!), with a very wide range of writers, with a very wide range of writers, including Anne Stevenson, Lee Harwood, John Hegley, Bill Griffiths, Ira Lightman and others in back issues. A recent issue was dedicated to Bill Griffiths
My goodness me! The times they are a-changing again it seems. Same mixture of crap, fakery, madness, independence and genius as before. So, bloody look at it! In terms of poetry: Ginsberg still there, Bill Sherman, Alan Morrison, David Gascoyne and more (and very strong Paula Rego images).
Jacket2 offers commentary on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics. We publish articles, reviews, interviews, discussions and collaborative responses, archival documents, podcasts, and descriptions of poetry symposia and projects. We also publish discursive explorations and transcripts of material in the PennSound archive. Features in Jacket2 present a wide range of materials about and responses to the work of a single poet or group, and might include reissued or original poems. Jacket2 is also committed to preserving a full, searchable archive of Jacket Magazine issues 1–40, published between 1997 and 2010 by John Tranter, a database of more than a thousand pieces of criticism on contemporary poetry in addition to more than a thousand original works by poets from around the world.
[W]e will publish content as it is ready
, so not separate issues. Currently featured are 'Fifty-one contemporary poets from Australia' and 'Look and look again; Twelve New Zealand poets'. There seems less UK input or interest under the new regime, amongst whose huge archive, recommended are Jeffrey Side's quite astounding essay linking formal devices with reader-response theory,
Empirical and Non-Empirical Identifiers, Laurie Duggan, On Gael Turnbull's Collected Poems: with a digression on his aleatory, kinetic and other off-the-page practices, plus
Post-Marginal Positions: Women and the UK Experimental/Avant-Garde Poetry Community: A Cross-Atlantic Forum, moderated by Catherine Wagner, and including contributions from Andrea Brady, Geraldine Monk and Jow Lindsay. And there is the poetry, of course (try Laurie Duggan, Two poems from 'The skies over Thanet'). If you are interested in looking at some of the antecedents of contemporay British Innovative poetry, I would also refer you to Issue 20, on Cambridge, with vast amounts of material on Veronica Forrest-Thompson and Hugh Sykes Davies, Andrew Duncan on A Various Art and "the Cambridge Leisure Centre" (and on Trevor Joyce), Rod Mengham on "Bourgeois News: Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge", material from Quid and Parataxis magazines, a large amount of material on and from Perfect Bound magazine (including a long interview with Peter Robinson), and poems from Bob Cobbing and Robert Sheppard, Robert Hampson, Tony Lopez, David Marriott, Drew Milne, and Peter Robinson; there is an informative if slightly pointed review by Robert Sheppard of Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court by Peter Barry, detailing the nakba of avant-garde British poetry; or more positively John Welch's memoir
Getting it Printed: London in the 1970s. On the other hand, you can discover the joys of flarf in the Jacket Flarf feature.
wants to provide a space for poets, primarily, but also for other kinds of creative and critical practitioners, to talk about the world, themselves and the others, in a free and category-open fashion. We declare a bias in favour of the exploratory, the reactive, the immediate, what one might call a spirit of unprepossession, as against reflections in tranquility on carefully packaged residues of experience. By means of essays, reviews, improvisations, anecdotes, eruptions, interviews, manifestoes and the like, Junction Box will attempt to get under the skin of a small portion of the cultural universe, to reveal the swarming inter-cellular activities that make it glow.
Edited by Lyndon Davies, latest issue includes Scott Thurston on his dancing classes, Geraldine Monk on Dorothea Tanning, Gavin Selerie on "Ekphrasis and Beyond: Visual Art in Poetry", a postcard from Greece by Kelvin Corcoran, and much else.
David Miller's small press is now happily back on-line, with a site allowing access to many of its beautiful little cards and pamphlets.
is an ongoing series in which commissioned writers respond to the same visual encoding of landscape
, set up by Amy Cutler. First response by geographer; second by poet, so far Peter Larkin, Mark Dickinson, Giles Goodland. Fascinating.
is an online literary magazine featuring interviews with luminaries of the literary world, articles, reviews and exciting new creative works.
A very unpartisan approach, with poems from as well as John Fuller and Simon Armitage, Anne McKerrow, Iain Brittain and Sean Bonney, with excellent interviews with Sean Bonney and Sophie Mayer. Worth keeping an eye on, and well done to Kit Toda and all.
is the e-zine of Leafe Press, who publish booklets by Kelvin Corcoran, Alan Baker, Tilla Brading, Lee Harwood, Peter Dent, Martin Stannard, with poems online. Litter has masses of good stuff, work from, among others, John Welch (his essay SOMETHING ABOUT IT is true), Janet Sutherland, Carrie Etter, Laurie Duggan, Mark Goodwin, Tilla Brading, Lee Harwood's essay My Heart Belongs to Dada, Christine Kennedy and David Kennedy's Intelligence Report — Evidence of the Enemy, Gavin Selerie, Poems from Le Fanu's Ghost, Fances Presley, Poems from the sequence Myne, big Peter Dent and Martin Stannard features, Kelvin Corcoran, Rupert Loydell and Alan Halsey. There are also good interesting blogs from the two Leafe Press editors, Alan Baker and John Bloomberg-Rissman.
is an international academic publisher based in Prague, with a lot of attention paid to poetry and poetics. It has many books available for free on Issuu, including eds. Robin Purves & Sam Ladkin, Complicities: British Poetry 1945-2007, ed. Louis Armand, Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde under "Post-" Conditions, and issues of a new magazine, VLAK: Contemporary Poetics & the Arts. All good things (especially VLAK)!
Brian Lewis's small press (Poetry from the Edgelands
) has an elegant and useful site with poems by its authors on it. Poets published include Kelvin Corcoran, Mark Goodwin, Lee Harwood, Alastair Noon.
An on-line and soon to be print publication dealing with the best in typography and poetry.
A fine tumblr blog out of Liverpool interested in visual and concretish poetry.
was a three day participatory event which looked to expand the notion of the academic conference, by asking participants to present and respond. Our hope was that this direct and primary response-led work would open up discussion and offer productive cross-discipline exchange. We provided a performative academic forum: to explore the place of text in practice; the making and unmaking of the text; and the questioning of academic protocols by this destabilising of the text. We hoped participants would see how text functions in different practice-based disciplines and how to contextualise different notions of textuality.
Oh God! Well, beyond the academic shite, good things were done & here enshrined with superb images and some amusing project descriptions. Text was indeed made and unmade very satisfactorily by a range of interesting people.
's current issue is Poetry etc: Poems and Poets — an anthology edited by Andrew Burke and Candice Ward of writing from members of this well-established poetry listserv, with an interesting historical introduction by Alison. The range of contributors is very wide: John Kinsella (the list's founder), David Bircumshaw, Randolph Healy, lots and lots, and the whole shebang is downloadable as a pdf. An interesting back issue contains a Feature on Irish Poetry, with, among others, Mairéad Byrne, Brian Coffey, Trevor Joyce, Medbh McGuckian, Maggie O'Sullivan, Maurice Scully, and Catherine Walsh. Masthead's editor, Alison Croggon, has also a varied & interesting personal website with links to her own very varied writing. Australian site.
Meshworks is a site dedicated to documenting and preserving video and sound recordings of writing in performance.
It contains performances from a large number of British writers, including Tim Atkins, Lee Harwood. Sean Bonney, Tom Raworth, and Randolph Healy, as Quicktime movies amd mp3s. Meshworks is on the Miami University site (no, not Florida, Oxford — Ohio; base of Keith Tuma, and thus of the study and encouragement of contemporary British and Irish writing). Gawd bless you, guv!
came out of a Birkbeck-held Seminar in May 2013, and represents hard and impassioned thinking by a number of innovative British poets.
edited by Aidan Semmens, continues a somewhat misborn print title of 1980 (born of a dispute over the continued use of the name Perfect Bound
), with an issue combining much of the original with more recent work from its contributors or from others who seem to inhabit the same world of thought and language, or share, as Peter Riley has described it, "a shaky solidarity of the innovative"
(eg Catherine Hales, Geoff Ward, Peter Riley, Tony Baker, Kelvin Corcoran, Rosmarie Waldrop, Lee Harwood, Wendy Mulford, Alan Baker, Chris Hunt, Aidan Semmens).
This issue of an absolutely vital magazine: Our contributors explore the links between a global glut of financial liquidity and the capitalist self-cannibalisation that sustains it. Tracing the impact of financialised and looted social existence from the micropolitics of student debt and lifelong labour, via the reign of fictitious capital, to the geopolitics of US militarism and reactionary anti-imperialism, this issue asks us to reimagine crisis as a political question with an open outcome: Are we about to pick up the tab for the financial elite's decades long free lunch? And if total monetary collapse is a way off, is this because the social crisis and repression we already face are deepening? Whose crisis is it anyway, and if it comes, who is going to come out on top?
contains poems by Andrea Brady, Keston Sutherland, John Wilkinson, William Fuller, Howard Slater, in addition to the best analysis of that state we're in, and some hints at getting out of it. Read the poems in their context – they work superbly!
is an online magazine dedicated to publishing new fairy tales.
Could be found a little winsome; but Poetry Editor is Anna McKerrow, so with some interesting material.
with the name Linus Slug attached is based on his niner poems, with others added, including of course "the Poets of the Nine " published in the first freaklung magazine, plus more since.
Philip Rowland's website will carry on from a print journal, which aimed, between 2004 and 2009, to put some of the most interesting English-language haiku in conversation with other innovative short poetry.
The result, to judge from the sample pdf on the site, will be very engaging, combining contemporary pets such as Alan Halsey, Jesse Glass, Rufo Quintavalle, David Berridge, Carrie Etter, actually, all sorts, bless them, with translations from Japanese.
contains a range of fascinating journalism, from the political to the fortean, as well as an interesting range of poetry, eg John Welch, Peter Riley, Maurice Scully, Kevin Higgins, Alexis Lykiard. You can download from the site 100 poets against the war, Poems for Lord Hutton, and other free and controversial collections of topical poems. Poetry section now includes the Reilluminations series by Steven Fowler, reconsidering unjustly overlooked European poets, with an essay by him and poems (translated) — including Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a major actor within New York Dada.
challenges poets to re-write one of their poems whilst navigating a number of obstacles.
Stephen Emmerson has so far put Richard Barrett and Tom Jenks through this interesting process. He should do it to some more!
edited by Tim Atkins, is a very fine-tuned e-zine, whose most recent issue includes, among others, a gorgeous line-up including Emily Critchley, Gareth Durasow, Alec Finlay, Allen Fisher, Elizabeth Guthrie, Ralph Hawkins, Elffish Jon (yes!), Kevin Killian, Richard Parker, Petrarch (a real ace with Photoshop), Jonty Tiplady and Robert Sheppard — also a ferocious set of links, and good reviews.
will archive recordings of poets reading poems by other people - i.e. not their own.
A simple and useful idea, for which we thank David Grundy, Ian Heames and Lisa Jeschke. But why aren't more people using the site? Hmm, probably because there don't seem to be any links to the recordings yet. Hmm, indeed.
Yes, out of Oxford. Interesting litertary ezine, especially contributions of Joe Kennedy, poems and reviews, most especially a fine and well-seserved axe-job on Dr Fiona Sampson's Beyond the Lyric.
A blogzine of investigative, exploratory, avant-garde, innovative poetry and poetics edited by Robert Sheppard
is a superb blog. The previous series of posts, focused on answering the question What have been the most significant developments in the alternative British and Irish Poetries (however you define those) over the last 7 years?
has ended with a range of interesting responses to the debate as a whole. Its archives contain essay-length reviews, prose and poems, with work from or concerning Robert Sheppard, Iain Sinclair, John Muckle, Lee Harwood, Sheila E Murphy, Clark Allison and Bill Griffiths.
is Richard Price's excellent magazine, available for a couple of stamps — and increasingly also on his hydrohotel website as pdfs (with reduced quality from the print, note!).
This is an excellent little ezine, edited by Jim Goar out of Norwich, with a wide coverage of good poetry. Issue 6: Some innovative poetry and prose of Ireland and Britain, edited by Marcus Slease and Jim Goar was an interesting selection.
is the website of Alan Dent's magazine, with taglines The eclectic North-West based magazine of poetry, prose, reviews and comment
and A quarterly for the poor pocket and rich mind
, and a lot of good material online. This is writing with a direct line to the beginnings of British alternative poetry, with Alexis Lykiard, Gael Turnbull and the wonderful Jim Burns featured, and as well as poems, material on modernism and politics.
Plus-que-Parfait is an evolving, open-ended text created by Emily Howard, Mark Cobley & Simon Howard. Emily is a musician & writer & the founder of Ensemble Youkali, Mark blogs at the blue ceilings, Simon at walking in the ceiling. Mark & Simon have recent books from The Arthur Shilling Press. The three are not related, except where they are related; they do not live in the same place/space except when two of them do.
A long-winded explanation — but it's well worth it. Completed work to date put by The Red Ceilings on Issu. Guest contributors to date: Harry Godwin, Peter Philpott, Richard Barrett, Sarah Ahmad, Stephen Emmerson, Tom Watts. Keep an eye on this!
As you've probably noticed, I'm weak on audiovisual digital presentations of poetry. This looks authoritative and useful, and Mark Goodwin recommends it — so go hear to find more useful information!
began from the premise that 'beyond' does not simply imply transcendence, nor the non-textual. Rather, it implies an exploration of the dynamic relations (at the level of creation and reception) between poetry as text and other elements of poetic works. These other elements include visual images which may be combined with poems (such as photographs, prints, drawings), but also the visual and material properties of poetry itself: the shape of the words on the page (especially in Concrete and Visual Poetry); the feel and structure of the book or other material form (notably in Artists' Books); the code and intermedial processes of poetry in digital media; the temporal and material aspects of time-based poetic works, including Text Film and Digital Poetry. In another sense, 'beyond' also implies the cognitive processes and constraints which enable and frame our responses to poetry, as well as the imaginative and creative processes involved in its making and its reflective interpretation.
Academics involved appear Dundee & Kent based; result was this interesting website shwing and discussing techniques and findings, with a beautiful gallery of work by such as Jim Andrews, Robert Sheppard & Pete Clarke, Leena Namari & Robert Hapmpson, Thomas A Clark, Guy Begbie & Lawrence Upton; and the notes on the Research are well worth looking at in detail.
And yet of course you are partisan. As a reader, as an editor (who is a certain kind of reader, maybe not Ideal-ised, but certainly an attentive one), you do want certain things from the poems (and the critical reception of those poems) you come across. I am, for example, somewhat uncomfortable with cults and the status of effective unreadability they confer on their objects. I mistrust homogeneity. I've an appetite for the collisions, rather than collusions, of international writing: internationalism is one of Poetry Review's longest traditions. In a Britain where even the arts establishment can look shifty when it comes to poetry, where access to contemporary poets in libraries and on syllabuses is increasingly rationed, Poetry Review — whose readers and subscribers include not only individuals with absolute poetic commitment but those for whom it's their only contact with what's going on — has a robustly colourful role to play in presenting the best of poetry today, in cajoling poets into particular forms of writing, and in nursing contemporary poetry-critical discourse. There may be easier jobs. Few offer such peculiarly sweet rewards.
Robustly colourful: my arse. The back issues of the run edited by David Herd & Robert Potts are still accessible for a wide range of interesting poems and reviews, eg poems by Keston Sutherland, and Andrea Brady on Denise Levertov. Other good stuff includes Andrew Duncan on the Keith Tuma 20th Century British and Irish Poetry anthology, and reviews of texts such as John James, Collected Poems, J H Prynne, Unanswering Rational Shore and Wendy Mulford, And Suddenly, Supposing, and poems by writers including Tony Lopez, Lee Harwood and Michael Haslam.
Editor: Will Rowe. The site has been revived and remade, with current isue centered on Introduction: Poetry & Public Language, edited by Tony Lopez, as record of an academic seminar held at the Centre for Contemporary Poetics, Birkbeck, and Text and Music, also based on a symposium. (though now quiet again — a typical pattern with academic sites.) More varied material in the archives, eg poems by Frances Presley and a review by Allen Fisher of Redell Olsen's Secure Portable Space, and an essay by Alan Halsey, "An Open Letter to Will Rowe" on the current situation of poetry in England.
this is our online archive for pdh and related activities. PDH-Recs is a tenement industry releasing LPs and an ongoing series of compilations documenting the borderless constellations that make up the UK underground. There are also occasional Psykick Dancehalls in the real. Our arms are always open.
Let me explain — interfacing via performance between music and both poetry and art. Vinyl recordings for sale — a few tracks audible/downloadable on their MySpace. A lot of interesting documents, ie their magazine Dancehall, hosted on issuu. Glasgow-based, though the name Ben Watson often crops up, and Lawrence Upton was involved in Dancehall 4 Scan Chant, concerned with creative use of the photocopier — gorgeous fun.
is a UK-based webzine, whose most recent issue includes work by Rupert M Loydell and Mark Goodwin, plus in The Repository, a series of illustrated poems that are well worth investigating, with work from Mr Loydell (including collaborations with Sheila Murphy), Andrew Nightingale, Yann Lovelock (there's a name I hadn't heard for many a long year) and others. Unreadable colour on black colour-scheme; but you can't have everything.
Editors: Piers Hugill, Aodhán McCardle, & Stephen Mooney. This contains secondary material. It covers a wide range of responses, from the obviously academic to others that relate more to the writing of poetry, and is worth a lot of attention. Interesting recent pieces are Lawrence Upton on Non-determinist responses, which is an excellent introduction to Writers Forum poetics, and Harry Godwin's 4 Experiments in Deconstruction (response to Johan de Wit's Statements). Previous issues include responses to the Forum on Women Writers, by eg Frances Presley, John Hall and the editors, plus other stuff such as Jon Clay on Geraldine Monk, Lawrence Upton on Alaric Sumner's Waves on Porthmeor Beach & Niall McDevitt on Maggie O'Sullivan. It is supported by Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, School of English & Humanities, Birkbeck College.
is Alan Morrison's ezine: In terms of poetry, we have a preference for work that deviates from the mainstream. We particularly like political, social and polemical poetry. We wish to promote non-conformist work, in other words, that which does not submit to the ease of contemporary trend.
Among the poets are Richard Barrett, Martin Jack, David Kessel, Alan himself, Alistair Noon. Plus prose and much else.
Nice blog of poems and photos, edited by Mark Cobley — well done!
The editors of this blog plan to publish a poem a week (or thereabouts); some brand spanking new, some not so. There will also be the occasional review.
Jimmy Cummins, Sarah Hayden and Rachel Warriner are not quite gettingg there; but to have published Stephen Emmerson, Michael Kindellan, Trevor Joyce and Sophie Robinson so far is pretty flawless really.
AFTER-WORDS : Response : imitation : riff : homage : voices in dialogue : lines spidering between authors : letterspace : connectors : weavings : sound-offs : TEXTUAL PING-PONG
: all of these on a very active collective blog, including names I recognise, like Alistair Noon, Rufo Quintavalle, Dusie, Pansy Maurer-Alvarez (suggesting anglophone expats in Europe?), and many more I don't.
struck me as the most interesting site I've encountered dealing with hypertext writing, containing some fascinating work and a wealth of links out to this quite specific world of writing. The most recent issue is dedicated to the memory of Alaric Sumner. But unfortunately nothing seems to have happened to the site since I first encountered it.
Strong writing from outside the usual oh so predictable boxes. Fall on this and feed greedily! Free ebooks (Nikki Dudley, Sarah Ahmad, R C Miller, Yossarian Hunter & Newamba Flamingo and more) + little magazine + little blog, Our Private Acre (mainly critical).
likes pamphlets, small presses, poetry and fiction magazines, manifestos, online journals, stapled pieces of paper, installation poetry, performed poetry . . . In other words, those ephemeral works that are often created on a small budget and distributed to a limited amount of people.
There's a wide list of reviewers. including Sophie Mayer, Billy Mills and Charles Whalley, and a very wide range of publications and events, not all of which will interest you. Which is good, isn't it? You will find the curious McCabe/Reed collaboration, Whitehall Jackals, Rupert Loydell, Linda Black, but no interesting performance poetry — slammy-whammy stuff.
catalogue (with specimens of writing) for a serious and major press whose titles include work by David Chaloner, Simon Smith, JH Prynne, Andrew Duncan, Rod Mengham, Anna Mendelssohn, Sophie Levy & Leo Mellor, John James, John Temple & John Kinsella (one of the two editors/publishers) — virtually everyone! — plus also a useful set of international poetry and poetics links. There is a very useful News section, with bulletin boards. Plus Salt Magazine (edited by John Kinsella). And doubleplus, a useful and informative blog, and an online magazine, Horizon Review, with a wide range of poets represented (another opening by Salt to more mainstream currents, but still worthwhilish).
Ian Seed's e-zine is a very classy and consistent production, with work from a wide range of poets and some informative and engaged reviews. Most recent issue includes Andy Brown, Jeremy Over, James Davey, Lucy Hamilton, Mark Goodwin, Celia Baines, Hillary Lyon, Rufo Quintavalle, Nathan Thompson. Professionally regular in meeting its deadline (unlike me!), there is a huge and valuable archive of current British poetry.
including Shearsman Magazine site contains much good writing in pdf samplers from issues online, with also Tony Frazer's highly reliable and wide-ranging Recommendations for reading. Also on the Shearsman Books site are a series of e-books and the similar Gallery, including Anne-Marie Albiach, Flammigère and The line . . . the loss. Ken Edwards, Chaconne, Stephen Vincent, Triggers, An Introduction to the Work of Michael Ayres, John Muckle, Firewriting, a reprint of Richard Burns, Avebury, Rupert M. Loydell, MULTIPLE EXPOSURE (Ballads of the Alone 2) and John Hall, Through the Gap, plus details of Shearsman books (including some texts), eg Peter Riley, The Dance at Mociu and Trevor Joyce with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold: A Body of Work 1966-2000. A useful and glorious site. And the publisher now in English of Vallejo and Pessoa.
is an attractively wide-ranging little e-zine: eg, the current issue includes Amy De'Ath, Kai Fierle-Hedrick, Sarah Kelly, D. S. Marriott, Timothy Thornton. An earlier interview with Andrew Duncan (I find some Cambridge poetry utterly obscure. There is this social background of a very strict power hierarchy based on intelligence rankings set by competitive tests. The poem works as one of these tests. It does not matter if no-one understands your poem because that means you've won!
) is too good not to quote from. A lot of good material here now.
This is a new little ezine from Leeds, now with a lively poetry scene. Its taste is original. Most recent issue with d a Levy, Jack Micheline, Richard Barrett,Iain Britton, Amy De'Ath, David Rushmer, Nicolas Spicer and S J Fowler.
Featuring poets, flash fiction writers, authors, musicians, and artists – we aim to bring you the finest in Brutalist writing from across the globe.
None of the names are familiar to me, but this blogzine is pretty funky. The Brutalists seem mired in unoriginal knee-jerk jerk-off post-punk self-publicity; but straightfromthefridge is worth your detailed perusal, and gives indications of yet another nexus of would-be alternative poets (who are so hard and real! And in limited hand-made art editions too!).
online magazine from two ex-Roehampton students with a wide range of writers. Current issue of Billy Cancel, J.R. Clarke, Trini Decombe, Nikki Dudley (these two the editors), Caroline England, Jo Langton, Sean Neville, Steve Toase, Serena Wilcox — most of whom I hadn't heard of, but are pretty good, so that's encouraging.
makes a tremendously effective and varied site, including work by Richard Burns, Tom Chivers and Rupert Loydell, a very involving review of Martin Corless-Smith's Swallows and Radical Spaces, where David Kennedy reviews three new critical books (ed. Tom Chivers, Stress Fractures: Essays on Poetry; ed. Louis Armand, Hidden Agendas, Unreported Poetics; Ian Davidson, Radical Spaces of Poetry). Full of good things; reviews particularly to be recommended.
is an online magazine of texts and visuals, occasionally overlapping and melting into each other
, edited by Rupert Mallin from Norwich, with a very elegant site. The first issue has material from Claire Hamburger, Gerald Nason, Ian Seed, Linda Chapman & Rupert Mallin, Lisa D'Onofrio, Martin Stannard, Michael Fenton, Peter Hughes and Tim Lenton.
aims to provide a forum for discussion and debate in poetics, specifically regarding verse as a feature of writing, and the different kinds of thinking—aesthetic, linguistic, philosophical—that verse engenders and necessitates. In particular, it seeks to reconcile a close attention to the technical aspects of verse art with these wider questions for thinking, broadly conceived. As well as publishing essays by literary critics, it posts recordings of poets discussing and reading the works of other poets.
The use of the word "verse" tends to induce projectile vomiting in me. Despite the poisonously prissy academicism such language indicates, this is potentially fascinating and serious. Material includes Simon Jarvis, 'Why Rhyme Pleases' and Henri Meschonnic, 'The Rhythm Party Manifesto', plus John Wilkinson reading Gerald Manley Hopkins and Denise Riley John Milton.
UK Poetry is a website for the discussion, dissemination and regurgitation of news, events, recordings, opinions and digressions about UK Poetry. Its inception occurred via openned.com, though it remains an entirely new beast.
So it's like a newslist, on an open website, though you need to register to comment or post. Useful source of information!
is an interview based blogzine, starting (and ending!) with Geraldine Monk.
is a collaboration between Melanie Bush, Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design, The University of Northampton and Emma Powell, Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design, De Montfort University in association with Louise Bird, Lecturer in Graphic Design, The University of Northampton. As well as teaching bookmaking and making our own experimental books we collaboratively curate a yearly international and experimental artists' book exhibition. This is open to all. Our exhibitions are 'not for profit' — we do them because we love books.
Delightful! The site is full of jpegs of the books, plus details of the exhibitions.
run by Alan Halsey and Geraldine Monk. It includes details of publications (from such as Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Sean Bonney, Kelvin Corcoran, Johan de Wit, Mercurialis the Younger, Peter Riley, Gavin Selerie, Glenn Storhaug, and their own work). Plus excerpts from Geraldine and Alan's work (including sound files and images). Plus an extensive second hand catalogue specialising in modernist poetry from small presses. This is a good place to visit.
run by Randolph Healy includes work on its website (some on RealAudio) by (among others) Randolph, Allen Fisher, Mairéad Byrne, Trevor Joyce & David Miller. There is a great range of activity going on — buzzy & professional, & superb & fascinating writing. Material also from projects based on the PoetryEtc listserv.
is a publishing project organised by Tom Jenks intermittently releasing objects. We are interested in progressive, experimental work that explores new forms and ideas.
Opposable Dumbs by Tina Darragh, and Object 002: James Davies, Julius Kalamarz, Holly Pester are free pdf & pay-for-it paper respectively. Now up to eight or nine fascinatingly different embodiments of textuality.
is a London, UK based website showcasing a selection of artists' books from around the world in our online gallery, plus mail art projects, events and listings.
Fascinating material.
publish in paper, but also online, with some excellent e-books, including South Wales Echo by Gerard Casey, Christine Kennedy & David Kennedy, Ovid's Keyholes, Peter Riley, Greek Passages (1st Part) and Kelvin Corcoran, I Know the Songs of all the Birds. The site is expanding, with a blog, and video also. American site.
has a lot of interesting writing, presented very directly. You may be interested in work by Alan Halsey, Pete Smith, Ralph Hawkins, Ken Edwards, Andrew Nightingale, Drew Milne, Allen Fisher, Peter Manson, Alan Halsey, Trevor Joyce, Tony Lopez, Peter Middleton, Geraldine Monk & Laurence Upton. American site. Now archived by National Library of Canada Electronic Collection.
Brian Kim Stefans' site is a very rich source of material, including superb animations and other visual material, chapbooks and other epublications (including The White Wish by Andrea Brady, and Nicholas Moore's famous and astonishing versions of Baudelaire's Spleen). Brian Kim Stefans' weblog, Free Space Comix: The Blog is a fascinating starting point. Of great interest and value is his new Introduction to Electronic Literature: a freeware guide: an exhaustive and authoritative guide to anyone interested in this area of contemporary writing. American site. Note that the site is at present undergoing a major rejig, with the links here working, but the material not by Stefans not readily findable other than by searching.
is committed to publishing quality chapbooks by liberated poets from Anywhere. We do not discriminate against non-human or post-human artists.
Human artists include David Berridge, Mark Cunningham and Giles Goodland. All as non-copyright pdfs. American site.
The intent of the Journal is to provide a venue for creative literary content that explores the potential of network-based creativity.
There is a wide range of different ways of using the Web for multimedia and hypertext works, some banal, much haunting. The archive includes work from Lawrence Upton and Peter Howard. Not at present active site. American site.
a literary magazine published in Gloucester Massachusetts, 1975–1981
, edited by Fred Buck, Paul Kahn and Thorpe Feidt, and mailed out. Now available as pdfs on Paul Kahn's business website, bless him. Relive a Golden Age! And yet, so like our own — try John Freeman's Cambridge Poem. Astonishing range of names, including many British poets (Buck had spent some time in UK).
A magazine of poetry and everything else
is a delightful site, including much fun, and poetry from, eg, Jeffrey Side, Giles Goodland, Andrew Nightingale, Simon Pettet. American site.
edited by Michael Glover, is now a repository of rolling news, views and commentary about the ever richly farcical and deeply serious world of contemporary poetry, and it will also contain what the old Bow-Wow Shop contained — poems, features, interviews and reviews.
Little yet, but it's still a wee puppy. There's a useful link to the UK Web Archive for the back issues, full of all sorts of wonderful things (& some that aren't!), of which my favourite is Tom Lowenstein's From Culbone Wood to Xanadu: An Extract from the Journal of a Poet, with a dysentery, in Remission, who the Previous Afternoon near Culbone Wood had written Kubla Khan (A Fragment).
No prisoners taken. The avant-garde doing hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches. An Anglo-American Joint Production (like, you know, all that internet intelligence snooping). It's both up itself & all over itself as theoretically, politically & textually aware surface & a fertile & disgusting mess that I am growing to love. Go there! — I dare you.
So many, so beautifully produced, so full of so many different names, these American websites. Ah, the land of plenty! XConnect is a good site, with some interesting material — Giles Goodland in the current issue.
Some of us wished the women poets we admired would write more about poetry and poetics, experimental, post-avant.
Lively American blogzine, with a beautiful tradition of online Advent calendars of female poets reading, including many British women poets. Enjoy!
has connections with the American feminist blogzine Delirious Hem , exploring This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like.
Tim Atkins and Tony Frazer are among the respondents.
is a curatorial platform that provides the tools of a socialised internet for the development and presentation of contemporary art and literature.
It's a large complex site presenting a range of material, seemingly more image-based than language-based, as flexible constellations and as work in progress. There's a tendency towards academic/artspeak jargon, but concept, execution and the work within it could point to a new way of presenting creative work on the Web. Of more immediate interest is Andrea Brady's long poem Tracking Wildfire.
is an exercise in asymmetrical publishing
and published as an Ahadada Books cooperative publication
. A component of "Wave Two", is William Blake and the naked tea party, edited by Philip Davenport, dealing with touch (the haptic), and with many UK poets' and artists' work, eg Alan Halsey, Benjamin Gwilliam, Carol Watts, Carolyn Thompson, Darren Marsh, Dave Griffiths, David Tibet, Robert Sheppard, Sean Bonney, Tony Lopez, Tony Trehy, and others, including Robert Grenier and Jesse Glass; and of "Wave Three", after oulipo, edited by Philip Terry, with more British poets represented than I'd care to list.
To facilitate and promote the writing, publishing, and reading of literature in electronic media.
Based at Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland, College Park. The site has two very useful and varied international anthologies of e-literature, a full directory of e-literature available (and of its precursors), and other material, including the essay Electronic Literature: What Is It? by N. Katherine Hayles. It's really good! British artists/writers include John Cayley, Maria Mencia and Donna Leishman.
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino's E·ratio publishes poetry in the postmodern idioms with an emphasis on the intransitive.
Excellent writing of the highest quality, full of bite. Current issue includes Alan Halsey, David Rushmer, Stephen Emmerson and Dylan Harris, amongst others. The magazine is printable as pdfs. Very good archives, well worth rummaging in, including a sheer blinder of an interview with Alan Halsey, and as an E·ratio Edition, his Beginning to End and other alphabet poems.
does what it claims, in an elegant site. Root around the archives, and find two poems by Peter Riley missing from Lleyn Writings, and a very fine review of Trevor Joyce, What's in Store: Poems 2000-2007 (New Writers' Press & The Gig, 2007). American site.
Glossator publishes original commentaries, editions and translations of commentaries, and essays and articles relating to the theory and history of commentary, glossing, and marginalia (catena, commentum, gemara, glossa, hypomnema, midrash, peser, pingdian, scholia, tafsir, talkhis, tika, vritti, zend, zhangju, et al). The journal aims to encourage the practice of commentary as a creative form of intellectual work and to provide a forum for dialogue and reflection on the past, present, and future of this ancient genre of writing. By aligning itself, not with any particular discipline, but with a particular mode of production, Glossator gives expression to the fact that praxis founds theory.
Archive includes J. H. Prynne, The Night Vigil of Shen Zhou, and the issue (Volume 2) dedicated to the poems of JH Prynne (edited by Ryan Dobran).
is a Norwegian online poetry magazine, with not only much material in or using English, but with in its first issue poets such as Gary J Slipley and Marcus Slease.
has revived to give a good range of writing, and includes in its archives a little downloadable pdf sampler of work by Ric Caddel, as teaser for a then forthcoming edition of his poems by Pressed Wafer of Boston, Mass.
There is no denying that the poetic agendas of the British Poetry Revival, Movement poets, and their respective sons and daughters are so essentially opposed, both aesthetically and ideologically, as to make a mutual treaty a barmy idea resulting in dilution on both sides. What is however important is that anyone with an interest in poetry should be able to make an informed, unbiased and considered decision as to which side, if any, they want to take
declare editors Arabella Currie & Thomas Graham. They do their best to supply this information, though, with this magazine out of Oxford, though confess sympathies perhaps with the phrase primarily devoted to the promotion of innovative and experimental verse.
It still covers a very wide range, with past issues availabel as pdfs. There is also a blog.
publishes responses from poets to a standard range of questions. There is vast number of responses, including one or two British poets, eg David Bircumshaw. American site.
contains work by mIEKAL aND, and collaborations with Elizabeth James — hypertext, pataphysics, patalinguistics: haunting, challenging and beautiful. American site.
is a writer-run centre in Vancouver, with a very exciting policy and series of activities. On their site at present are pdfs of their very thick magazine W, with work from Kevin Nolan. Other series of publications will be added. There are extensive audio files also of talks and readings, eg Tom Raworth, Denise Riley and more. Excellent stuff!
is an independent, nonprofit literary press located in Los Angeles, California. Our mission is to create aesthetic conversation between readers, writers, and artists.
With some complex and interesting results, eg Sophie Robinson's a.
is an online broadside of world literature. We publish original interviews, reviews, & essays as dispatches from world literature. We publish interviews & reviews on a weekly basis, with a commitment to contributing toward the transatlantic and English-language diaspora dialogue.
A lot of varied and good material — rather more Faberish British poetry than the US poetry chosen; but includes Ruth Fainlight, Richard Price, Simon Smith. Also of great interest may be Mathew Timmons' multi-part appreciation of The Burning Deck Press, which . . . will situate TBDP in the literary and cultural landscape of the last half-century by reviewing a large selection of its titles, by detailing its history, and by interviewing its founders and publisher, Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop. The entire series will be archived on its own page – forthcoming – which will include a complete bibliography of the press.
an online journal of poetry and poetics has a wide range of poets represented, including Jeffrey Side, sean burn and Andrew Nightingale, with e-books also. American site.
A narrativity is all encompassing, but open
— a fascinating e-zine concerned with theory-based narrative — sounds bad, tastes very good. Contributors include Trevor Joyce, and Lawrence Upton. American site.
publishes poetry and prose. There is a lot of material by Christopher Barnes in various issues of this American ezine.
A really very fine ezine, with a lot of visual material, including in most recent issue, SJ Fowler (and much else good).
is also a blogzine — e-zine using blogging technology — organised by Adam Fieled. A lot of very interesting material and much good archive material, eg interviews with and poems by Chris McCabe, Andrew Duncan and George Bowering, and Jeffrey Side's essay The Semantic Limitations of Visual Poetry. Adam Fieled also ran a more personal blog,
Stoning the Devil: "Because culture is a conversation". I like this from a post that seems curiously to have been rewritten. (Jerome McGann and the Ideological Challenge): I turn 33 this Saturday; I still (officially) have seven years of young poet-ness to look forward to; what are my ideological assumptions? I am a member of several loose groups of poets. I can say this: we want to keep the "base" of what the Lang-Po crew erected, but we want sensation, sex, humanity, emotion, and narrative again. Implicit in this plural formulation is a critique of Lang-Po that I will not deny. Our basis is a putting back in of what Lang-Po took out. Yet our ideological assumptions have not been formalized; that particular challenge is still ahead of us.
Damned right, young man!
A Greek online magazine, with a range of interesting material, including (and I cannot usefully comment on the Greek material), "The origins and trajectories of English avant garde poetry in the last 40 years", a dialogue between Peter Riley (also poems of his) and Spilios Argyropoulos; poems by RG Gregory.
Anny Ballardini's e-zine has a huge range of poets represented, with little bios, pix & links as well as poems: Douglas Clark, Lawrence Upton, Peter Philpott and Ruth Fainlight are some of the writers. Her blog NarcissusWorks provides an interesting commentary on the site. Italian site.
intermittently publish good little pamphlet mags, which are given away. Details on the website. Figures such as Josh Stanley and Luke Roberts are those I pick up on. US site.
Calvin Pennix's Mission Viejo, Californmia-based ezine claims We are interested in art that pushes, or rather forcefully shoves, the boundaries. If your art exudes thought, we want it. We are looking for poetry, visual poetry, asemic writing, poetic statements, visual art (in all of its glorious forms) and art writing. We strive to be a place for the thinking artist.
It's good, often very visual (always a good way to exude thought), with some UK writers, eg David Berridge & Lawrence Upton in the first issue. Its press, Quarter After Press, works with both hand-made artists' books and Issuu publication, an interesting two-pronged strategy.
is American poet and critic Robert Archambeau's blog, with very well-considered discussion of modernist and contemporary poetry (including discussion on UK poetry, with lively comments made).
is a bi-monthly newsletter of poetry, prose, ideas & opinions, reviews, photo documentaries, b/w artwork and letters of all kinds. It is conceived in the spirit & tradition of THE FLOATING BEAR, FUCK YOU, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, ROLLING STOCK, THE REALIST, THE DIGGER PAPERS, INTERNATIONALE SITUATIONNISTE, THE BLACK PANTHER INTERCOMMUNAL NEWS SERVICE, PROFANE EXISTENCE and any number of lo-fi no-frills PUNK ZINES & COMMUNITY PAPERS.
Available by post from Micah Robbins of Interbirth Books, Dallas; or online (via Google Docs). All sorts of good people, eg Amiri Baraka, Robert Archambeau, Linh Dinh, Kent Johnson, many British, eg Tim Atkins, Keston Sutherland, Emily Critchley, Sean Bonney.
is a literary magazine appearing at irregular intervals, based in Port of Spain, Trinidad. We publish poems and very short prose in two formats: on paper, in broadside editions posted in public locations; and online.
Edited by Nicholas Laughlin, Vahni Capildeo, Anu Lakhan. Also on the site, Ken Edwards' Contemporary Poetry in the UK: An Introduction, Part 1.
A vast wealth of non-writing-based texts: visual, concrete, sound etc. And the downloadable e-books (including Peter Manson, Adjunct: An Undigest). And the Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter plays. Oh and John Berger's Ways of Seeing. This is the actual mainstream of culture: universes of language, vision and sound lie within. Recently added: Ian Hamilton Finlay's Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. magazine as pdfs. American site.
is an online literary journal based in Singapore and published twice a year. It owes its name and mission to the genre of mosaic called the asarotos oikos, or unswept floor. Its overriding interest is in the already-given—not just the canon, but what was published last month, or yesterday, or which has been consigned to the ash heap of literary history—and what writers do with it. The journal seeks to present texts that talk to, about, or behind the backs of other texts; praising or unpraising texts; texts that transform, renovate, reiterate, or pointedly ignore. "Where do our desires come from?" is one question it likes. "What is this bullshit?" is another.
First issue contains much of interest, including Sophie Mayer's "From Sappho's Cookbook" and a short story by the finest British prose-writer I know, M John Harrison.
This section is organised by name of blog or website; equivalent section in Quick Links is organised by name of poet.
contains details of D M Black's poetry, reviews of his work, links to other poetry sites, and details of his publications.
is a collection of 81 poems and promotional material by Sam Riviere, serialised on . . . tumblr mainly between May and July 2011. The poems are organized into 9 parts of 9 poems each, and cycle through 8 themes. The brief is a passive/aggressive response to the 'austerity measures' implemented by the coalition government in the UK in the wake of the late-2000s financial crisis. The project aims to apply 'cuts' preemptively to poetry itself, experiencing this deprivation on the levels of sentiment, structure, and subject matter. The last section appeared on the author's 30th birthday.
A lot of fascinating material on this powerful proiject on the site — and I like Mr Riviere's illustration of eg "POEM IN THE FUCKING NEW STATESMAN" with photos of both the text & the issue cover. Publication forthcoming from penned in the margins
I have just begun posting Francis Crot's exquisite MEAT-FILLED CHAPEL a.k.a. TALKING DONKEY BLOODBATH a.k.a. MALTON, ENGLAND
declares Lara Buckerton in her blog Quiche straight from the Bucket, itself full of delights (very good discussion of political theoretics in Iain M Banks). The text is of the zombie genre. The author's name is one used by Jow Lindsay (or whatever). You may (or may not) regret reading it.
is Tomas Weber's blog.
Sean Bonney's blog presents him as Poet, collagist, polemicist, libertarian marxist, antagonist
. Go there now for the Cramps videos: "Does Your Pussy Do the Dog?" Go there even more now for his poems.
is the second poetry/photo project by Joy as Tiresome Vandalism (James Davies (poetry) & Simon Taylor (photography). Rather than JTV responding to the other's work (as they did in the two aRb projects) they are responding to clues each sets. Starting in April 2009 and finishing March '010 they will produce 6 pairs of work. In the first month of each pair a clue will be set for the other to respond to. JTV will not see the other person's work until the project is over. Then the collection will be turned into a pdf. This site is being maintained by an independent body.
And here it is!
is Stephen Nelson's blog, with examples of his visual and minimal poems. Well worth investigating.
Sarah Ahmad's blog provides quick links to all her published work. Follow them up!
singular complayntes set in lethal contradiction, the dialectics of place, geographic gyna-fascism, failed love poems, gamelan metaphysics, the whole human geography of song.
That's Joe Luna's blog, with his poetry etc, essays, and curiosa of both banality and splendour. An interesting place.
has a blog recently started, with an interesting and largely positive review of Great Works (bless him!)
Andrew Duncan's blog of data related to Angel Exhaust magazine. essays in literary history related to a work called 'Affluence, Welfare, and Fine Words'.
Includes his map of his 7-volume work on modern British poetry, the Affluence work. Plus his "1% digest" as lists of names with comments: Handlist of late 20th century poets (part 1), Handlist of late 20th century poets (part 2:born after circa 1950), Handlist, part 3: Mid century poets — starts with Richard Aldington, ends with persons becoming known c 2000, and is genuinely catholic (in the good sense as it were).
Not your average grime! Enjoy and take note!
Elegant, composed and radiant, like the man's poetry (well done Peter Manson – an exceptionally attractive design). Biography, bibliographies, notes on poems, essays, and uncollected poems. More about and from one of Britain's finest poets.
is Michael Blackburn's own site, has all sorts of stuff on it or linked: video, photos, texts, mixed media projects, and all else, including the
Sunk Island Review, a blogzine for New Writing In Various Forms
, and for Sunk Island Publishing. Try also his podomatic site for a whole mass of audio material by himself and others (including The Smallest Arts Festival In The World), and The Days, How They Pass, daily poems over a year, posted up as podcasts of 20 (with images). Great creative energy here.
expression not convention
— poems, music and art on Dylan Harris's now huge site.
is Roger Day's website, with poems and images
John Armstrong's blog talks intelligently on Timothy Thornton, Geoffrey Hill, JH Prynne, Paul Celan and issues of difficulty in poetry, including a dialogue with Keston Sutherland.
Interesting, very interesting, as Shaun Belcher's complex site gives not only his poetry but his indeed multimedia art (and other art matters), his country-&-western singer persona and his research into digital culture (and other matters), and a blog also: shaun belcher BLOG: random jottings of a generalist. . .. A hell of a lot of interesting stuff is going on here.
heavenly labials in a world of gutturals
Jonathan Jones's blog, written I guess from teaching at a Belgian university, has very perceptive comments on a contemporary poetry (largely American rather than British), plus the odd poem and the odd (also perceptive) comment on TV etc. A good blog! There is also The Sticky Pages Press blog for his publishing activities, very interesting little physical book poems.
I make performances, I write and I make recordings. My work is about the form, feel and falsities of language, and the materiality of the voice. I'm fascinated by what it means to speak here and now, by what this kind of public speech can do, how it can shape an encounter between people, and how it can fail.
A fascinating and important area. Her site has lots of audiovisual material, and there is an older blog, Emma Bennett: Speech, slapstick and the sculptural funny, focused on more physical performance.
has a wickedly designed site, with full information and some pages/images of, plus links to, her subtle and (in this country) pioneering multi-media work.
This writer/artist/bookmaker has a clear and informative website about his work, situated in an Ian Hamilton Finlay, Colin Sackett, Coracle Press universe. Books published by www.johnbevis.com include A Primer of Found Poetry as well as texts, poetic or more broadly non-fiction, by Bevis.
is Bobby Larsson's engaging blog, full of fascinating fragments in English and Swedish.
Has news, information, some older poems and links; Hafta Hafta: leave it to dreams (not lengths) has dreams, poems and musical material
is Steven Waling's blog. I enjoy its at times distanced but always informed view of alternative poetry culture.
is full of Steve Parker's strong and original poems.
Steve Willey's blog on his research project (part of the multimillion pound AHRC-financed Beyond Text programme) may well prove to be a useful resource.
is Andrew Spragg's blog, with poems and news.
of the University of Durham gives a little information, some pix, and a little bit of text.
has a clear and informative website.
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett's website gives info, links, texts and multi-media presentations of her performances and projects. More audio material on her MySpace.
has a very fine and elegant personal site, with a mass of material on it.
Timothy Thornton's blog contains poems by him, quoted by him, essays, music etc etc, plus a homepage. Well worth perusing and studying. He knows what he is doing.
David Caddy's blog contains long prose pieces, with poems, about his personal, literary and regional roots: "So Here We Are: Poetic Letters from England", and some very well-informed critical writing also. These are also available as audio downloads on the site.
contains some interesting, richly textured poems.
is Jim Goar's blog.
is Jeff Hilson's blog, with writings (good review of Sean Bonney reprinted on it).
This being his web-site for past, present and future works {who also makes videos, paintings & novels.}
Mainly the artworks, performance and sculpture, though includes images of his poetry publications.
is Harry Godwin's blog, with poems and things.
The website of this long-practising (visual and sound) poet, an early collaborator with Bob Cobbing. A remarkable body of work.
Not enough poems, too much listing of prizes! But I like his poetry and his blog is interesting.
My name is Bob Cobbing, I died aged 82 and was the major exponent of concrete, visual and sound poetry in Britain.
Visit Bob on MySpace! A good little biography, an mp3, and two links. But he's there!
is Ian Davidson's blog, where you are also invited to collaborate. There are also two short videos on YouTube by Ian Davidson: Harsh 15 and Harsh 30.
the website of Michael Haslam Poet of Foster Clough
has on it a large amount of material of an Haslamic, and therefore quite fascinating and delightful, nature, including poems from this strong and original writer.
Rob Stanton's dailyish poetic poem sequence blog — this is our life. Successor to Issue. Now complete.
Chronological archive of Patrick Coyle's performances, exhibitions and publications.
His background is art writing – well, there's no money & no kudos in just writing these days is there? and you have to show you can use all that luvverly theory – but, yes, if we take it as innovative poetry, very interesting conceptual, formal and textual/textural games are played. Well worth looking at & following.
has a neat little homepage with poems etc.
is a rather intermittent production! But a few crumbs from Ian's table . . .
is a blog from Linus Slug and Edmund Hardy, with material (eg photos, notes) obtained from poetry readings attended.
is Frances Kruk's blog.
' site brings together his activities: his poetry, events he organises, especially The Glasfryn Seminars and the Hay Poetry Jamborees (this event organised with John Goodby), and the excellent online magazine Junction Box. This is heroic activity!
Are all poetry lovers insane?Steve Abbott
is Colin Herd's site, with links to his poems, observations, comments and (interesting) reviews and responses.
is Karen Sandhu's blog on these activities of hers: all good!
is Fiona Moore's blog. I'm bound to say I don't find her poetry very engaging & but I like her blog. So there! I was attracted by pieces like J H Prynne on poetic inspiration (We went out of curiosity, I suppose, and to be entertained... I'd rather have got JHP the poet, but the academic satisfied both motives. One would have cast him for the part: tall, thin, black velvet jacket, energetic, deploying a fair amount of academic wit and charm. One would have cast the audience, too, lots of intense young men (mostly) in an array of woolly jumpers. The faculty didn't seem to have turned out for the occasion, apart from Keston Sutherland who gave a rather sweetly adulatory introduction. . . . I wanted to know why Prynne had come up with this theory. Did he have an imaginary friend himself when small? Does inspiration feel like dialectic for him? I did ask, in the Q&A session at the end, and Prynne gracefully declined my question (twice) and said something else interesting instead. Fair enough. Pocket-sized copies of Pearls That Were were on sale. I asked him to sign mine and got a dedication in the most beautiful black-ink italic script: "This book is for Fiona, who knows how to ask a difficult question". I chose to take this as charming, rather than patronising. The students were all too cool to ask for a signature; or, as one of my companions thought, too scared.
She is open, intelligent & interesting.
is Mike Weller's MySpace site, with images and a video. Visit it and encourage him!
— her blog with her poems and links. Simple!
performs that function very well, with links to work online etc.
Carrie Etter's blog has some interesting comments about her relationship to the poetry culture she encounters in her present environment.
is Jon Clay's blog, well worth looking at.
is the ever active Todd Swift's blog.
has information on his activities and interests, links to poems and audiovisual material. There is also feed from his Lexifetish tumblr blog on the site.
is Tina Bass's MySpace presence.
is Tom Watts' poetry blog, with work in progress (haunting and cryptic fragments). The End of Everything Soft and Kind... is his other blog, lighter on the poetry, with music & photos.
Clive Fencott was a major collaborator with Bob Cobbing, mainly mid 70s to mid 80s, with more interest in computing since. His home page has some fun interactive material as well as information on publications and performances.
's MySpace page has specimens of his spoken word and music work. It's good!
Eirik Steinhoff's tumblr blog is excellent and provoking. He is an American poet, editor (Chicago Review 2000–2005) and academic, with strongly radical politics informing his activities, and thus the blog. It includes material from a number of politically radical innovative British poets also (eg Bonney, Raworth, Kinsella & Milne, Sutherland — his Theses on Antisubjectivist Dogma are most stimulating reading), and also links to pdfs of separate little pamphlets also entitled A Fiery Flying Roule on Dropbox, consecutively numbered. Ah, Abiezer Coppe, thou shouldst be living at this hour, when thou mightst well have found this Anglos-American radical nexus full of fruitful portent (see also The Claudius App).
Peter Finch was leading figure of the fabled but real (like King Arthur) British Poetry Revival of the 60s and early 70s. He remains active yet in Cardiff, as a poet and cultural force. His website is excellent: poems and other writings by Peter F, including much material on Cardiff and Wales. Some excellent writing on British and Welsh poetry, and good advice to asp iring writers.
is an artist, poet & publisher. Born in Scotland in 1966, he now lives in the North-East of England, in Byker.
This site documents and presents some of his work (and that of others), as poems, installations, concepts and other varied and haunting projects.
's Website has on it a wide range of material: images, lists of publications, links, and ordering for his Spanner publications.
A world of disorderly notions, picked out of his books, crowded into his imagination
is the site for Donna Leishman's fairytale-inspired narratives. Class them as e-literature if you want; enjoy them!
is resource base for Peter Manson users and the wider poetry community (featuring Maggie Graham, Robin Purves, Scott Thurston & Lawrence Upton, also a page with Bob Cobbing photos and links) — a model example of a poet's website (and also home to Object Permanence press).
WN Herbert has many online presences, but this is the best starting place (though it is in fact the child of Gairspace). It will lead you to the blog gairnet provides: press of blll (distorted mouthings, as if through thick perspex scored over and over with fine lines, perhaps from the diamond-tipped hairs of space centipedes
), a very live blog including reviews, essays, prose pieces and links to audio. Another live blog is The Lost Notebook (I lost my notebook. Have you seen it? Now I must remember everything that was in it. Argh.
). And there are three collaborative blogs you may find interesting and informative fun: Blogaria (This blog records interactions between two groups of poets, one from the North East of England, and the other from Sofia, Bulgaria.
; Dubious Saints is the blog for a bunch of writers and artists and arts administrators who first met in India in December 2010 at Adishakti, near Pondicherry in Tamil Nadu
(group includes Zoë Skoulding); Tri brodyagi v metro (This blog maps the journeys of three UK writers around the Moscow Metro in search of a book. The writers are Andy Croft, Bill Herbert and Paul Summers, and the book is Troye v metro (Three Men on the Metro
[Five Leaves Publications, 2009]). This isn't mentioning the facebook and MySpace presences either. Informationism — if it weren't so good I'd use the word overload; but no, I certainly wouldn't.
covers all Gareth Durasow's activities and enterprises.
is a damn good personal literary blog, with a wondrous Beckettian interest (and much else) — highly enjoyable — few poems, but highly poetic. Produced by one Pothwuth — David Wheatley. More power to him!
Prudence Chamberlain's interesting blog uses Frank O'Hara's poetics to power a contemporary performance poetry.
is an evolving platform short on moorings by appointment to white noise. Game on.
produced by Neil Addison. Cryptic, image-rich, messy and original – ie good. Likewis e the linked tumblr site, go on with your bad self.
is sean burn's website, with examples of his work across art, film, play, prose and poetry — all powerful and effective.
Critic and poet Michael Grant's grapplings with paradox and impossibility in philosophy, language, and the cinema. With reference, potentially, to the works of Maurice Blanchot, T.S.Eliot, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Lacan, Stanley Cavell, David Cronenberg, Lucio Fulci, and Dario Argento, inter alia.
is Laurie Duggan's excellent blog, from exile in furthest Kent.
A huge and staggering site: R G Gregory's life and work as a huge project of action and words.
is David Bircumshaw's blog.
has a very elegant site, with a few texts on it, some sound files and some links.
's MySpace presence, with some excellent music on it.
is Mark Cobley's elegant poem blog.
For some, the matching of creatively transgressive modernism with the occult and powerfully irrational is a cause for embarrassment; for Paul Holman, a crucial mating. He has a small personal site, indicating recent & current interests, publications etc. Yes, check it out, check it out now.
radically inauthentic since 1962
is the slogan; conceptual writer before the Americans tried to patent the idea; writing as totally critical performance. Crucial in every respect!
Mike Weller's self-publishing activities. And linguistically innovative €#*@$?! be his blog.
contains information on Richard Price, full lists of publications and other activities (including Vennel Press and Painted, Spoken magazine), and some poems and soundfiles. Richard also has his own MySpace presence. Recent issues of Painted, Spoken are now available as pdfs on the site.
is the website of Wayne Clements. It gives links to material produced by this visual artist and a writer living in London
, whose digital compositions & decompositions are richly rewarding. There is also his blog, Murifri: Poetry and images by Wayne Clements, used for posting work in progress; I use this blog to help me write new poetry. If the book is published, I delete the old blogs. Then I start a new series. But I keep a selection of the finished poems in PDF form.
John Sparrow's multimedia work upon texts, imaginative and often gloriously diverting, plus a good blog.
has a website with specimens of her poetry and her art and graphics on it.
' website contains information and links, plus a slideshow of text and images from his collaboration Cells with Paul Evans.
homepage contains poems by him. That alone is a reason for visiting it.
Styles J. Kauphmann is an improvising musician in contact with the innovative poetry scene. His blog contains writings on improvisation and some specimens of his work.
Tom Kelly's blog has his (and others') poems, plus articles, reviews and notices about poetry and drama in the North-East.
's homepage includes a large selection of essays and reviews, and a few poems.
has a companionable blog, much concerned with the interests of an English writer, translator and teacher in Italy, which I find quite fascinating, plus also what ought to interest you more, some excellent poems from this escaped member of the Cambridge School. More serious literary material on his Wordpress blog.
's wonderful website, apart from material concerning the Scottish poet, includes also an excellent page with the text of The Six O'Clock News, the poet reading it (RealPlayer or .wav formats), and relevant texts by Leonard.
is Angela Gardner's homepage on her Light-Trap Press artists' book publishing website. She gives a lot of information on her poems and art, plus the text of her long poem, Paradise and Inferno, on the Iraq War.
Michael Blackburn on MySpace.
The website of the Scottish poet Gerry Loose, with poems online or linked. Two interesting blogs, described as journals
and written respectively in Finland and Scotland, are Saari Seasons and Carbeth: the unfinished hut.
Tony Lopez's site covers all the bases: work published and online, criticism, interviews etc listed or linked to, plus a blog.
This blog holds details of all Lee's published poetry: Minimalist poet, minimalist lifestyle has some unpublished poems and more normal bloggy stuff.
is Lydia Towsey's WordPress blog, with her writing and other interesting stuff.
This is a rich and complex site allowing access to the work of Daniel Rourke, involved in art practice and art writing, and thinking good things & doing interesting things about language / image /media / error /entropy.
I enjoyed Paul's poetry greatly when I had contact with him through the 70s, and had it as one of my models. I was delighted to see he is still very active.
has a good site detailing her many activities, with details of her publications. She also has very useful and perceptive review blog, Delirium's Library.
is the MySpace page of Rhys Trimble, with superb sound files of him performing (with music), plus texts on the blog. Excellent stuff! Part of a performance poetry scene at Bangor, POETica.
's website holds examples of and information on her work, ranging from and combining art installations to electronic performance, mainly heavily language-themed. Fascinating.
by Esther Leslie and Ben Watson [aka Out To Lunch] plunges the experiencer into theory and art conspired into existence by the praxis of Walter Benjamin, T.W. Adorno, Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Frank Zappa, J.H. Prynne, and every avant-garde movement from Baudelaire (but even before too — viz. Th. Nash, Sterne, Goethe. . .) through Dada, Vorticism etc onto Punk and the DIY Esemplasm).
Their cultural activities are even richer than that! — also, Disney, Mad Pride, situationism, improvised music, manifestoes. Oh, and poems.
has information (detailed lists of publications), links to some essays and reviews by Drew Milne, plus details of soon-to-be-revived Parataxis publications (wonderfully heavyweight modernist poetry and poetics magazine).
Mirabeau are Ian Kearey, Richard Price and Caroline Trettine, featuring Nancy Campbell.
Formerly The Apollinaires. Very beautiful presentations of music and language.
A site dedicated to interviewing writers and others. While they make soup.
OK. Andy Spragg's blog so far interviews himself, Joshua Jones, Tom Raworth, Sam Riviere, Brian Catling and Mark Burnhope. Very useful use of hyperlinks to refer out. His more personal blog, with poems etc, is brokenloop.
David Berridge's art blog, with writing on a range of art and a particular interest in connections of art and language as well as in new and exploratory forms of art writing and criticism.
Fascinating material, eg piece on Susan Hiller, work by Sarah Jacobs, or FREE PRESS WORKSHOP: THE VISUAL ESSAY OF CLAIRVOYANT CRITICISM or READING AS CRITICISM or TIPPEX AS RADICAL GESTURE, on essays where the visual form of the page was crucial both to the method of composing, the essays subject(s), and the distribution of ideas and experiences.
is the web site dedicated to Scotland's greatest poet. There is a lot of useful information, a place where student essays can be published, and a fair number of poems.
has full information, with some excerpts, from all his books and other writings. Older, now static blog Alan Morrison, Poet has bare links, information and poems.
Maggie O'Sullivan's site contains bibliography and thorough links to all on-line material, with a little text and voice to view and download
contains Michael Egan's poetry and prose, and is therefore a good thing.
I use this blog to help me write new poetry. If the book is published, I delete the old blogs. Then I start a new series. But I keep a selection of the finished poems in PDF form.
So it is a genuine work-in-progress poetry blog (+ information & links connected with Wayne Clements' poetry). His other site, in-vacua.com, indicates more the breadth of his activities and interests, with fuller information and links, eg to his software art, sourcecode for programs, and presentations he has made.
Another reminder of the 70s, though somewhat different from Paul Matthews above. Opal L Nations was a vivid presence in the avant-garde, with total, corrosive neo-dada absurdism. Read his works and despair! The pre-post-avant started & ended up here. With gospel music. Check out the contents of Strange Faeces, oh ye Brighton, Cambridge & Shoreditch poetic hipsters — Opal L did it better first.
is a poet, artist and practice-based researcher
. Her site details and records, with an art-based academic tone, her ruralist performance writing.
Marcus Slease's blog is enthusiastic, informed and perceptive, with Marcus's widely travelled perspective a useful one. Recommended.
is nick-e melville's blog, with some visual poems and some relevant quotations. See Shellsuit Massacre for his more aggressive aural activities. Good things out of Edinburgh, that city of culture and darkness.
Meanderings & mawqifs of poetry, poetics, translations y mas. Travelogue too
is Pierre Joris's blog, with interesting and wide-ranging material. He has also a
homepage, with material and links concerned with his own writing. Though New York based now for many years, an important member of the innovative poetry scene in London in the 70s, and co-editor with Paul Buck of 1984 French anthology of British avant-garde poetry, Matières d'Angleterre.
Andrew Jordan's website contains at present information on his publishing activities, viz 10th Muse magazine, bending oeuvre books and The Listening Voice newsletter (most recent as a pdf).
provides links to his poetry, translations and reviews on the internet.
is an artist and writer. Her work addresses the possibility of reciprocation between art and writing; practice and everyday life; production and circulation. Projects usually take the form of performance, objects or text. Tamarin is currently artist writer in residence at Modern Art Oxford.
Lots of audio, video, some photos — enter the world of art writing.
Annoyingly, I don't know whose blog this is. First person, reflective prose, not always avoiding smudginess & wankiness; but, miraculously, yes, often managing to fly and escape into wherever it is real writing is. And lots of quotations, high current high literature.
has on it biographical and bibliographic information, lots of images by Nuttall, and clips of him reading his poetry, and of him playing jazz. There is a link to complete scans of his famous My Own Mag, hosted by the Burroughs website, Reality Studio.
is Elizabeth James's blog.
is an online experiment that asks: what do we do when we write poetry, does it make any difference if we do it in public and how is a paper notebook different to a virtual one?
Karen McCarthy Woolf's experiment seems worthwhile and interesting to me — a very open approach.
Author of www.orium.org, Kai Fierle Hedrick is a Canadian/American mixed-media writer whose research interests circle around collaborative, community-engaged practices.
Her diverse and fascinating site shows the range of her activities, with creative work in various media combinations and much else, including a blog.
is Chris Gutkind's MySpace presence.
Daniele Pantano's website contains poems, details of publications and all his books, readings etc, plus links to his blog, Mass Graves.
A text, with photos, by Ian Davidson.
Poets and their Cats: links to poetry websites Book Reviews Photos of miffed Cats and slutty Cats Anarchy, Bodily Fluids, Hatred of Boris Johnson and all his ilk, The Bat Plant and other Dark Images. The Black Arts; kitsch images; Black Humour; Against Capitalism; for slackers, Wastrels; Against Dynamic growth; for long-lingering- malingering -cultivation through book reading. Will contain blasphemous images of Jesus. Against religion.
Fair enough — what's not to like here, then? Sharon Borthwick's pleasurable blog, with photos, observations and all.
This excellent poet's site includes poem texts, audio files of poems read, images etc.
This site features samples of original work by Holly Pester. Some texts are fragments of academic work while some are process pieces resting at this site for exploratory means. Holly Pester has been working with live poetry and critical writing for three years.
And to very good effect indeed.
's blog is intensely readable, and includes links to some excellent long poems and sequences by him, and a large series of reviews, A Brief History of Western Culture.
is Andrew Duncan's site — his criticism, his poetry, and more. Go directly to it now! If you want a large-scale view of recent & current (post-War) English poetry, and thus of Duncan's strategic position, try Despairing dialogue: Spectral Investments: Mainstream and original poetry: proposed terms for a future dialogue. There are also back issues of Angel Exhaust, 13-16. More up-to-date material is on his current Angel Exhaust blog.
is Ryan Ormonde's very exploratory blog, of, indeed, his poetic practice, which is useful and interesting. His other blog is text messenger: once a month I discuss one text by one artist.
Dominic Fox is a writer and programmer living and working in London.
Also theorist. Interesting, and rigorous.
is Mike Ruddick's poem blog.
is Marianne Morris's blog, with some wonderfully varied material. Total Literary Stuffheads on TLS junk review of Carrie Etter's anthology Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010) is powerful reading. Her MySpace page, including reading to music, is really impressive! — especially the video.
Poetry editor of the Morning Star. Sometimes writer.
And founder of Zafusy. It has a little about Jody Porter, some poems, and lots of poems (from the Morning Star, by eg Alan Morrison, Alistair Noon), articles etc from a range of others — a good place to encounter a gathering of poets and poetry with a clear political ring.
is Sejal Chad, Becky Cremin, Ryan Ormonde and Karen Sandhu. press free press is a poetic collective. press free press is a restless poetic collective, committed to poetics and performance, yet restless within poetic and performance scenes: committed to dialogue and response, democracy and openness of practice. press free press engage with materiality of text in performance. press free press find, construct, demolish language following the invitation of language poets and fluxus performance artists. press free press do not write verse. press free press write language that is poetry or perform poetry that is language.
Seriously interesting cross-media performance work, which website provides a mere pointer at I fear.
Interesting things happening here. Our 4 best friends: Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Marguerite Duras, Gertrude Stein.
a selection of fiction , poetry and drama by Paul A. Green
, contains poem texts, hypertext works, soundworks, scripts, all that Brother Paul can offer us.
's homepage has on it pictures and news, bibliography, and scans of Infolio magazine, and, sadly, an ever-increasing number of in memoriam pages (eg Edward Dorn, Fielding Dawson, John Wieners, Philip Whalen, Kenneth Koch, Bob Cobbing, Piero Heliczer, Stan Brakhage, Ric Caddel). But with what is effectively a very live and active blog.
News and information on all the varied activities of this varied & interesting poet/performer etc. filmpoems: redell olsen documents with video her performances, films & installations.
James Wilkes has turned his publishing imprint website into his personal website, with full information on his publications, projects and performances, including audio & video material.
is Luke McMullan's new blog, that lives up to what it says, with reports on concepts & events.
is Becky Cremin's blog. As is/was PERFORM-a-TEXT. Both interesting!
Richard Parker's Information Hub, with poems.
Feminism and poetry from Posie Rider of Islington.
the road north is a word-map of Scotland, composed by Alec Finlay & Ken Cockburn as they travel through their homeland, guided by the Japanese poet Basho . . . they will publish 53 collaborative audio & visual poems describing the landscapes they have seen and people they have met.
A delightful project!
The last of the great American ex-pats? Poems, paintings and photos.
Rebecca Rosier's blog has her poems and news.
is full of lively stuff, mainly images and short films of or coming from her performance and live art work.
is Jow Lindsay's current blog. Do check out the sound files available, pick up on the newsfeeds, and also enjoy the extremely full list of Sad Press publications. Links are good, as they ought — I am unmasked thus: compiled by our intern Pete, who later went on to found Modern Poetry.
I would say, though, avoid the "Sad Gaze" page; but that may just be me. Try it if you must. Also online two earlier avatars, of considerable poetological & Lindsayana interest: Everyone's Cup of Tea, with a list of useful links to works thereby, and an even earlier version of blog still online. You will also wish to consult too the very live franciscrot.tumblr.com of course.
is Matt Dalby's blog of avant-garde poetry events Manchester way and indeed way beyond (including his sojourn in Kunming).
A depot for research, commentaries, drafts, notes, reviews, thoughts and other 'joke metal' by Ryan Dobran.
Indeed, and interesting such joke metal is. Information on Ryan Dobrill's publications, plus several detailed review essays, noteworthily on an essay on J H Prynne, and on Keston Sutherland's The Stats on Infinity (Crater, 2010).
Notes and thoughts towards a gathering book dreaming through the web-mirror
is Julie Sampson's blog, indeed centred on women writers in Devon, medieval to modern in precise detail.
is John Alwyine-Mosely's blog for his writings. I like this. I get a sense of someone trying to write good poetry, reflective of his experience of this world, and being both direct and adventurous in his use of language and poetic formal properties. I would like to consider him a part of the British Innovative Poetry community, on the grounds that he possesses "the root of the matter". He has another blog, Haiku & Art: Haikus and other short syllabic poems based on a random word and linked with a picture
, which is also very enjoyable. I hope you like this work.
contains poems, photographs and a blog of journalistic work.
This play for voices, commissioned by London Word Festival 2010, has just been published by Penned in the Margins.
Material on this blog (formerly "The True History of the Working Class") went into the book.
John Cayley's site contains his complex work in interactive multimedia poetry (using QuickTime) — "codework": writing in networked and programmable media. There is a genuinely new linguistic and conceptual space being explored.
Poems, pictures, occasional jottings and other digressions, primarily by Juha Virtanen
has texts and news postings.
has a compelling blog with mainly critical material and reviews.
Visual semiotic deliciousnesses from Gareth Farmer.
's elegant site details her work, with some text present. Hannah has also a splendid MySpace presence.
Official Unofficial Website (Sanctioned by Author)
. All ye faithful need to know, and more! The great man is stalked, and accepts it.
is the site for full listings (and links) of S J Fowler's poems, translations and articles, plus video and audio. There are also poems by Steve Fowler on his blog, blutkitt poetry.
's website gives bibliographic etc info + links
Sophie Robinson's blog. Some powerful poems.
is Nat Raha's blog — yes, poems & stuff: good poems and stuff. See also her poets et al: photos of poets on Flickr.
I am delighted that David Bircumshaw is back in action on the Web, with fresh material on his site.
contains some of Steve Spence's poetry, information on his books etc. Good.
Martin Stannard has a beautiful site. It contains a brief but enlightening biography, a few poems & reviews, details of his books, and his online archive (previous blogzine Exultations & Difficulties and the poetic annotations labelled One Million Elephants Couldn't Begin To Understand — I've given links to the original versions of these sites here, to which in completist fashion I'll add his previous homepage, Martin Stannard's Home from Home). A lot of stuff, all very worthwhile, both poems, and criticism. Recently added, a huge variety of poems from a wide range of poets, collected by networking and simply presented, August 1, 2013, a really nice specimen gathering of current writing.
David Grundy's blog combines his major interest in contemporary music with poetic language creation also, with detailed reviews of readings, and articles, eg on Amiri Baraka and music.
has a website with details of publications and readings etc, plus poem of the month.
is an astonishing game or mechanism from Peter McCarey. It is delighful (or did I say that just above? Trust my adjectives!).
Amy De'Ath has an excellent Wordpress site, with blog, poems, and an excellent, well-informed and well-considered essay on Poetry Publishing: As It Stands: Innovation, the Post-Avant, and Current Publishing Practices.
is his blog of events and activities as poet and publisher (Erbacce Press). Andrew Taylor Poetry contains ditto plus more poetry, visual poetry and images.
is his personal site, complementary to his publishing as Sixties Press.
has a website with full details of her various projects.
Tom Chivers' blog.
has superb images of his visual poetry. Very worthwhile and pleasurable indeed.
Theatre, art, poetry, music, London, the weather, airports, sudden fury, different music, still not cutting down on sugary snacks, film, horses, people doing sin, incidents, refractions, the entire dark dream outside.
The blog of the very and multi-talented Chris Goode, writer, performer, performance-writer, performance-arranger and director, his deeds and his thoughts (always interesting).
Mighty American academic literary monument, The Kenyon Review, hosts a selection of her poems, and some of the academic papers delivered at a 2008 academic symposium on her work as poet and poetic theorist. Hardly entry level material here. but she was an outstandingly original and seminal poet and thinker about poetry — Neil Pattison's "The mirrors are tired of our faces": Changing the Subject in the Poetry of Veronica Forrest-Thomson is probably the clearest introduction to her situation and her importance.
on Tumblr is really rather beautiful, quite complex and very humanly engaging. It's a very worthwhile site to visit and wander in.
has several pages on Anne Bryan's Strange Attractor website, with biography, poems and some books and cards available, plus information on the Beneath the Underground Poetry Festival, reuniting the Carshalton Mob. See Beneath the Underground entry under Readings for further details. In the meantime, here is a man who has kept the faith and kept the poetry going.
presents John Gibbens' remarkable body of work: poems (including many visual poems and a poetic almanac), music (as The Children, with Armorel Weston, and as The Mind Shop, with Armorel Weston and David Miller) and writing on music (especially Dylan). This man is talented and inventive!
Note from John Tranter: This site began in 1998. It is not a weblog, updated every day. Instead, it grows gradually, and is designed to be a long-term useful resource for people wanting to know about my life and my work. It is already over a thousand pages long. Here you can read my poems, and read about my life . . . and what has formed my writing practice. There are interviews with me and reviews of my books (not all the reviews are favourable!) and photos taken at various stages of my life.
John Tranter is a great Australian poet; as founder of Jacket a great online poetry editor and explicator, and creator of a site that presented Innovative British Poetry to a wide audience through the late 90s and the 00s, a crucial period of growth and establishment. Also see the more bloglike Tranter's Journal.
This is a solo performance project that interweaves music and poetry in a kind of poetry slalom. Music frames poems; poems shape music.
More material by and info on Paul Taylor on his MySpace presence.
is the collaboration of poet and artist Kristen Kreider and architect and artist James O'Leary. They operate at the edges of disciplinary boundaries through an integrated visual-spatial-poetic practice. Engaging with sites of architectural and socio-cultural significance, we expose and re-contextualise the site in question through performance, installation and time-based media.
Ie fascinating multi-media environments, in which language plays a major role. Breathtaking and haunting images on the website.
Lawrence has now restored his online presence, with a site full of his material, links to it, and information.
This blog documents James Wilkes's poetry residency at UCL's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, which is ongoing from February to August 2012. It's partly a research log, and partly a forum for people interested in the intersections of speech, poetry, and neuroscience. You'll find notes, thoughts on journal articles, drafts of poems, videos and links, as well as guest posts by scientists and other writers. James will also be organising a number of public events throughout the residency.
Since James Wilkes is one this country's most interesting poets and thinkers about poetry — I'd advise paying attention to what's going on here.
is Simon Howard's blog: poems, info and images.
An experimental poetry and poetics page since 2003. Here I will sporadically post material related to my ongoing research into contemporary poetry and philosophy including readings of poets and philosophers resulting from my seminars at Brunel University, London.
. Some very informed and perceptive commentary on the nature of poetry and the poetic line makes it very appealing. You will like his run through of Charles Bernstein "Girly Man", discussing in shocked horror the elements of normative poetics
. Very detailed recent work uses the ideas of Giorgio Agamben to apply to current avant-garde writing: very rewarding.
's blog is full of John Welch. Excellent!
is interested in poetry & digital publishing, mostly, as his blog shows with a wide range of publications and events reviewed, even unto sadcore dadwave (advanced post-conceptualism I think), always interestingly.
This is a really nice little site, with full listings, links and information on Steve's creative activities.
records the enthusiasms and publications of this extremely inventive poet and poetry enabler (horrible phrase! but she does Good & Useful Things!). Her Tumblr blog is full of joy too: Needs a Title, Purpose: Mostly poetry, some comics, the occasional dog.
is Amy Cutler's academic blog, with interesting materials concerned with the larger interface between poetry and geography. See the site she has set up, Land Diagrams: twinned studies in landscape. Her other main activity is identifed by PASSENGERFILMS: cinema, mobility and landscape.
His excellent and full-crammed Wordpress site.
is the blog of Christodoulos Makris, Cypriot-born, Irish-based poet, with information on his publications, activities etc, which are, indeed, worth your interest and time. An interesting writer.
Yol's MySpace demonstrates fierce and absolute performance. The Red Plates video is frightening and astonishing.
is one of the blogs of Linus Slug, with various bits of information and poems.
has a clear homepage type site, with full information on activities and writings. Proetics was his poem and personal blog.
is a rich source of both sound-files and poem videos. But: only the Poetry Jukebox is free – the bulk of the material needs to be paid for. There is a lot of emphasis on the more entertainment-end of performance poetry; but work also by Peter Finch, Iain Sinclair, Tom Leonard, Adrian Mitchell, Kamau Braithwaite, Christopher Logue (and a fine essay by Peter Finch on Sound Poetry).
collecting digitally produced sound-&-poetry from around the world ... sound-enhanced or digitally produced and allied to the description: page-poetry that has been lifted into air to be heard
Moderated by Mark Goodwin
was a show on New York based WPS1 Art Radio, which broadcast archive and live readings. Lee Harwood is one of the names you will encounter. And much, much more, on the updated Art International Radio site, which has replaced WPS1.
presents contemporary poets reading poetry that has influenced their own work. Begun in 2011, based in London, the project is designed to allow poets to acknowledge their influences or their contemporaries, and to read work they would not normally have the chance to read. There is no stylistic bias, no dictim of method or direction to the poetry. That being said, many of the poets featured represent the breadth of contemporary British poetry and the remarkable, and often underappreciated, lineage of innovative and avant-garde poetry in the UK.
Another excellent SJ Fowler project!
was founded in 2000 in order to juxtapose, unite and reunite the poetries of France and the United States in a new bi-national, multi-faceted forum. Established as a not-for-profit organization in Paris and with editorial boards in both France and the U.S.
Largely US focus in termsof anglophone poetry, and the most useful online material its film archive of readings, including Redell Olsen; Geraldine Monk, Carol Watts & John Wilkinson; Maggie O'Sullivan; Caroline Bergvall; J H Prynne; Stephen Rodefer; almost anyone you can think of from US late modernist/postmodernist/postavant poetry.
Voice, performance, writing and technology
. Electronic Voice Phenomena have the embryo of a website, but at present the Facebook page is more useful. A range of approaches to their theme, as would be expected from a touring & digital project from two of the UK's most dynamic literature companies: Mercy (Liverpool) and Penned in the Margins (London)
. Watch and wait, eagerly!
FREE IMPROVISATION / MUSIQUE CONCRETE / DISASTROUS EPHEMERA
— improvised music samples from their CDs + some more verbal matter — Stuart Calton aka THF Drenching & Marie-Angelique Bueler aka Sonic Pleasure.
Steven Fowler's YouTube channel has 312 videos of poets reading, uploaded by the indefatigable Mr Fowler, and not just of the many events he has organised. The best collection of UK poetry videos.
There are extensive audio files of talks and readings, eg Tom Raworth, Denise Riley, and so many more, on the audio pages of the The Kootenay School of Writing site. Canadian site.
Walter Wray, Steve Halliwell and Chris Hardy put poems superbly to music. As the Williams Carlos Williams referencing title indicates (A poem is a [large or small] machine made out of words
), their choice is interesting, with a truly superb Red Wheelbarrow. Aargh! — just checked: it's bloody Don "Banjo" Paterson they are quoting: A poem is a little machine for remembering itself
; the Williams quote is far more accurate and fruitful.
the digital and cross-media poetry collective committed to showcasing all kinds of poetic performance in our multimedia live events around the UK and online. We provide space and a platform for experimentation into AV and digital poetry in all shapes and sizes.
Includes picture poems, and various audio, audiovisual and video formats, including a Vimeo channel. Work by Hannah Silva may be found.
has an audio site on SoundCloud, with material from a range of Maintenant Poetry Series events, including Holly Pester, Jeff Hilson, Tim Atkins and European poets; plus video of the Maintenant Reading series at Rich Mix on YouTube. Thank you, Steve Fowler!
Meshworks is a site dedicated to documenting and preserving video and sound recordings of writing in performance.
It contains performances from a large number of British writers, including Lee Harwood, Tom Raworth and Randolph Healy as Quicktime movies amd mp3s. Continually adding to its material. American site.
Mind Online presents a collection of thought-provoking samples from the University [of Chicago]'s intellectual life, both past and present.
Visiting British poets lecturing and reading have been Geraldine Monk and Alan Halsey, and Tom Pickard.
is a project which brings together poetry and music. Poet Richard Price and singer-songwriter Caroline Trettine work with musicians Ian Kearey, Roberto Sainz La Maza, David Chapman and others.
Yes, with audio and video on the site.
Courtesy of University of Southampton, the British Academy (there's institutional acceptance!) and eprints (open source, open access data & document repositories), comes a nice collection of recordings that in fact don't go back beyond 1960 (Hugh McDiarmid), and includes Allen Fisher, Roy Fisher, Maggie O'Sullivan, Denise Riley — lots! all well indexed & searchable.
Yeah, I keep plugging it, because it's good. Lots of audio and video of their own, plus links to yet more! The cup, she runneth over.
Poetry reading series and website in Manchester, UK
, has much video and photos on the site.
produce on CD sound poetry and experimental music, in an electro-acoustic-collage-improvised-voice mix. Bob Cobbing & Lawrence Upton feature in the mix, and there are some mp3s to listen to on the site.
is a huge, no, very huge archive, a project of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, University of Pennsylvania. Of British writers: Tom Raworth, Sean Bonney, Lee Harwood, Michael Haslam, Tom Leonard, Tony Lopez, Hugh McDiarmid, Basil Bunting, Peter Middleton, Drew Milne, chris cheek, Bob Copbbing, Martin Corless-Smith, Redell Olsen. A great resource. American site.
Alex Pryce's far-sighted and heroic project is an excellent site: podcasts of a very wide range of British poets. It has a lot of potential, and is only to be encouraged. Poets range from The Poetry Chicks (Jenni, Pamela and Abby) and Colin Dardis and all at 'Make Yourself Heard' open mike night, to Claire Crowther, Hannah Silva, Chris Gutkind and Richard Price, via Eva Salzman and Alison Brackenbury. Those poets who aren't represented on it – contact Alex Pryce now!
is a site for recordings of poets reading their own work, either from existing recordings, or with specifically commissioned readings. The range is wide, from Lord Tennyson and Rudyard Kipling to Roy Fisher, Tom Raworth, RF Langley and Denise Riley. Well done, Andrew Motion!
podcasting audio theatre, poetry, music and sound by Paul A Green and guests.
is London's first radio art station, brought to you by London Musicians' Collective. Interesting programming for Great Works habitues are:
Wednesday, 14.00-15.00 |
Late Lunch with Out To Lunch | |
Friday, 17.30-19.00 |
The Sound Projector Radio Show; Music and chat. Hosted by Ed Pinsent, sometimes with guest presenters. Linked with The Sound Projector Music Magazine. Material can include virtually any form of contemporary music or sound-art, for example improvised music, drones, modern composition, minimalism, sound poetry, electronica, laptop music, noise, or songs. |
is a series of 15 audio CDs commissioned by the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre at Birkbeck College, London, with readings to date including Lee Harwood and Tom Raworth. There are a few samples on the website, which is part of the Optic Nerve site, who are an independent production company who have produced a range of other poetry-related media projects. The CDs can be purchased from Carcanet Press.
ShellSuit Massacre is two poets, who find their verse in a variety of sources: The Sun, The Guardian, Reader's Digest Book of British Birds, election leaflets, The Wasteland and BBC News, etc. from these disparate strands ShellSuit Massacre create texts that question aspects of contemporary society: ASBOs, government policy, knife crime, social work failure, the media and boredom. The music, created by guitar, sounds 'grimy, a slow dance of 909 beats, dark basslines and studied synths.'
They're great: abrasive in the extreme. One poet is nick-e melville.
David Caddy's blog available as podcast, now easiest from his site itself.
A 36 min documentary made by Steve Willey. The documentary features eleven poets that have been published by Writers forum over a period of 50 years
: Adrian Clarke, John Rowan, Lawrence Upton, Mark Jackson, Mike Weller, Paula Claire, Peter Finch, Robert Hampson, Robert Sheppard, Scott Thurston, Sean Bonney. On the always-to-be-praised Openned site, where you will find much more audio & video, categorised variously under Events, Online, Projects, and Documentation.
broadcasts live each Wednesday (6-7 PM PST) from KWCW, 90.5 FM, Walla Walla, Washington (though off-air at present), and has some choice material available on its website, including Keston Sutherland reading "Forty Third Nature Via Diebold". The show is an activity linked with Tangent Press.
engineers and facilitates the transmission of the written and spoken word. Established in 2011, it is committed to the publication of new work in tangible forms. By generating a network of correspondence, Test Centre documents and circulates the output of an emerging literary scene. Test Centre's launch project is a series of spoken word LPs beginning with Iain Sinclair (Stone Tape Shuffle), Chris Petit, Stewart Home and Tom McCarthy.
A really engaging site, of paired video works (c 1 minuite duration, starting with many by the two running the site, but opening it up: For the first six months, Louise and Eirini have tried out different characters, costumes, locations, accents. For the remaining six months of the project, we open the call to all artists around the world. We invite artists from all over the world to send a one-minute video of any topic/nature for the purpose of creating an online duet. Just upload your video on youtube and send us the URL. We will then collate the videos, and choose two each week to create the duet.
S J Fowler duetting with Lisa Richardson is there. You could be too.
where good poems go bad. We are a rather new press, we independently publish experimental mp3 poets in a very, very cool digital E-Book format.
Jade Hudson and Nathan Kinsman's site has good material, though I find its design irritating rather than cool (but who am I to judge cool?).
's MySpace offers you several tracks from their oeuvre (and a video of them performing at their Sundays at the Oto gig). Alex Walker and Alex Thomas make fine, frightening noises together.
Written and performed by Lydia Towsey; edited and directed by Jean 'Binta' Breeze; music composed and performed by Corey Mwamba, featuring Dave Dhonau and film visuals designed by Keith Allott. What if Venus, the Roman Goddess of love and beauty, were to wash up in the 21st century? What would she do next? The performance combines poetry, music and film with myth, art and contemporary issues — from eating disorders to shopping in Primark.
This looks a fascinating production. Only some images, a poem, reviews etc on the site, plus a blog of its development.
is a huge video community site, with material worth searching for, eg a series of videos from sean burn.
The poet reads "Hot White Andy".
My Golly! On the New Statesman site! Hope in the old Staggers and Naggers yet! Not very accurate copy to video, but corrected by Rich Owens' comment beneath.
This archive has over 200 recordings of writers from all disciplines and includes both readings of their work and discussions which afford an insight into their creative process. From the poetry of the 1970s to the latest Writers at Warwick events, the archive contains recordings of writers such as Basil Bunting, Germaine Greer, Salman Rushdie and Sarah Waters.
An active interest in innovative poetry in the 70s and 80s has given Warwick a large number of interesting recordings of readings and talks.
Note that not all sites in this category contain texts online. The situation should be clear from the explanatory paragraphs.
is Ian Heame's hand press, with beautiful little books, (not done in miniscule editions either!). Ian Heame himself, Ryan Dobran, Mike Wallace-Hadrill and Tom Raworth (a lovely little book) so far. Interesting interview with Ian Heames on Triquarterly Online. Plus No Prizes magazine also.
is concerned with the publication, dissemination and production of the types of experimental writing and cross-artform text work often captured under the term Performance Writing.
Produced by Larry Lynch from Dartington. Among current publications are Tony Lopez's Darwin and John Hall's 13 Ways of Talking About Performance Writing (40 pages for £8 — you can tell it's an art environment). Plus MP3s of recent readings at Dartington by Drew Milne, Marianne Morris and Caroline Bergvall.
Agenda is one of the best known and most highly respected poetry journals in the world, having been founded in 1959 by Ezra Pound and William Cookson.
It is a surviving monument to High Modernism. I pay it respects for that, and in British terms that makes it oppositional, in a now alas quirky and cranky way. There are poems, essays and artwork on its website.
contains the catalogue of Allardyce, Barnett — with information that Anthony Barnett's poetry to 1999 and Veronica Forrest-Thomson's collected poetry without her translations, are accessible online to institutional subscribers to the Chadwyck-Healey database Literature on Line. If you have access — check these out: major, serious poetry. Also to check out is the new print magazine from Allardyce, Barnett, Publishers, Snow, edited by Anthony Barnett and Ian Brinton, including in its first issue Michael Haslam, Peter Hughes, D S Marriott, Alistair Noon, J H Prynne (letter), Denise Riley, Peter Riley, Nick Totton (good grief!), Juha Virtanen, Nigel Wheale and more, all elegantly prresented.
The great poetry magazine of the 90s has a partial existence on the Internet. Andrew Duncan's Pink.org hosts some back issues, 13-16, plus some odd bits, and the Poetry Magazines archive site issues 15 & 16, plus a splendid piece by Andrew Duncan on the magazine. And it has a revived print existence — seek it out! — current issue on the Welsh Avant-Garde is enlightening and authoritative (& fun of course). For current developments, use Andrew Duncan's blog above.
is a large print magazine with an eclectic list of contributors, including nick-e melville, Bobby Larsson, Chris Brownsword, andrew topel and many others.
have a long history of fine poetry publication, with Glenn Baxter & Clark Coolidge, W N Herbert, Chris Emery, John Kinsella and Georg Trakl on their current list, and also specimens of the great Ivor Cutler.
namely, Neil Pattison and Sam Ladkin, of Cambridge, are on the rather static cambridgepoetry.org website, and have pages from work published, including Emily Critchley and Dave Rushmer.
are a Darlington-based poetry publisher, whose list includes David Bircumshaw, Douglas Clark and Robin Hamilton.
Patricia Hope Scanlan's press publishes exquisite books combining poetry with images and often an audio CD. Most recent is Strictly Illegal, a collection of unpublished John Wieners poems, edited by Jeremy Reed, and with images from Gilbert and George. Previous books include Poemes: A Collaboration Between Pierre Martory, John Ashbery, Francis Wishart and Patricia Scanlan, Scheme Poem: A Collaboration Between Philip O'Connor, John Berger, Andrzej Borkowski, and Patricia Scanlan, Spiral: A Collaboration Between Fanny Howe, Ken Edwards (music), Tom Raworth (collages), and Patricia Scanlan, and Gifts Received, a sequence of poems by Lee Harwood with images of the 'gifts', art work by Francis Wishart and a soundscape by Birdie Hall. Website has some information on Wieners book. Address is Artery Editions, The Thatched Cottage, North End Road, Yapton, Arundel, West Sussex BN18 0DL; or email arteryeditions@yahoo.co.uk.
intends to be a prolific publisher of short, innovative poetry sequences within the UK, helping newer poets to get publications under their belt, and, perhaps, the experienced poets an outlet to try something different.
It is run by the poet Harry Godwin. Initial publications were (in alarmingly small editions, but it is promised there will be more copies available) from Harry Godwin, Richard Barrett, Rebecca G Rosier, Linus Slug, Nat Raha and Michael Zand — emergent and innovative talent indeed, with more coming!
specialises in extremist and avant-garde prose writing from the 1890s to the present day. [They] are the largest publisher in English of books on Surrealism and have an extensive list relating to Dada, Expressionism, the Oulipo, the College of 'Pataphysics, among others.
A catalogue only online: but superb material. The site also acts as that of The London Institute of 'Pataphysics, if you like old jokes.
Marianne Morris's Bad Press's new Tumblr page offers their current productions: Amy De'Ath, Caribou, Emily Critchley, When I Say I Believe Women, and Marianne Morris, Luke Roberts, Sophie Robinson, Josh Stanley, UNTITLED COLOSSAL PARLOUR ODES. Plus news of poetic events in Falmouth. Plus Issue Two: the "reality street book of ballots" issue, ed. Stephen McLaughlin & Jim Carpenter [sic]: texts in sonnet form given to a range of largely British poets, following on from the American-focused neo-flarfist provocation of Issue One.
is the site of the excellent Barque Press — publisher of nonconformist poetry
. Publications are listed, and also the excellent Quid magazine, with some material online, including work by Andrea Brady, DS Marriott, John Tranter, Andrew Duncan, Peter Manson, John Wilkinson, Out To Lunch and JH Prynne, and poems from Cambridge Poetry Summit: The Catalogue. You can also get from them the DVD River Pearls, with material from the first Pearl River Poetry Conference, Guangzhou, June 2005. It has the full contributions of Che Qianzi and J.H. Prynne, plus further excerpts and readings.
The future of literature...
is a Canadian publisher with a big list, a fine website, and a general air of creative excitement. Their list is, yes, Canadian, with what looks like some involving and interesting writing, including the frequent visitors to these shores Karen Mac Cormack and Steve McCaffrey (also with audio of them reading), but mainly listed here for New British Poets, a series of chapbooks edited by Stephen Collis and Amy De'Ath that brings new work by British poets to North American readers
, so far Tim Atkins' Petrarch and Davuid Herd's Outwith.
is an interesting literary magazine (Stories, Plays, Creative NonFiction
) that comes out of University of Greenwich in some way. Current issue includes figures such as Anthony Joseph and Sean Borodale. Website holds some snippets of magazine as pdfs.
is a small poetry press out of Liverpool and Bristol, with work on the site from some of the writers, including Peter Robinson, Ralph Pite and Julie-ann Rowell.
is a triannual (termly) magazine of poetry, short fiction, and criticism
, edited by Boris Jardine and Lydia Wilson. The Cambridge is very much the Cambridge of Cambridge poetry, with a wide range of figures published, and the first issue indeed focused on that "school" (or leisure centre). A fair amount of material online.
is dedicated to the revival of the literary essay, publishing new work by leading writers from a variety of fields. Capsule is edited by Edmund Hardy and James Wilkes. Graphic design is by Lina Hakim. We are also interested in poetry and diagrams. Our first publication was an anthology of newly commissioned poems, Herbarium.
That is sadly out-of-print; but new is Denise Riley, Time Lived, Without Its Flow.
One of Britain's specialist poetry and literature publishers, always with a strong interest in high modernism. Current titles include Edwin Morgan's Gilgamesh, Christine Brooke-Rose, Life, End of and ed Mark Ford & Trevor Winkfield, New York Poets II: from Edwin Denby to Bernadette Mayer. A little material online, they want you to subscribe to PN Review to get everything (which is lots!), apart from a large audio resource (poets from John Ashbery to William Carlos Williams, via Kei Miller).
University of Chicago-based magazine, with an emphasis on avant-garde poetry. Very relevant was the issue on British Poetry: co-edited and introduced by Sam Ladkin & Robin Purves – presents 80 pages of poems by Andrea Brady, Chris Goode, Peter Manson & Keston Sutherland, plus critical contributions by John Wilkinson (on Andrea Brady), Jeremy Noel-Tod (on Peter Manson), Sam Ladkin (in conversation with Chris Goode), Simon Jarvis (on Keston Sutherland), & Matt Ffytche (on Keston Sutherland) (some reviews available online), and fifteen reviews of new books of British poetry. There is some interesting material to read on the site from previous issues; and some added material coming from the British Poetry issue in more recent issues (including Peter Riley's listing of important [First Generation] Cambridge School poems), as well an interesting debate centred on Gender and Poetry, with several pieces online, and if you really want to get into differences operating between 1st & 2nd Gen Cambridge poets, a somewhat angry exchange of letters to the Review beteeen Peter Riley & John Wilkinson (for Experienced Poetry Users only). Current issue features features Echolalia in Mrs. Piper, a new poem sequence by Susan Howe, and a biographical essay on Ian Hamilton Finlay. Also available online are, accompanied by editorial notes an introduction by Michael Hansen and Gareth Farmer to a portfolio of three unpublished essays by Veronica Forrest-Thomson (not themselves online), including from "His True Penelope Was Flaubert: Ezra Pound and Nineteenth Century Poetry"; and Stephen Rodefer's Position, by Joshua Kotin and Michael Kindellan, from an issue devoted to the work of Stephen Rodefer, a man not unknown on this island.
The Collective was formed in 1990 to promote and publish contemporary poetry. Funds are raised through a series of poetry events held in and around South Wales.
The real Black Mountain poets! Publishers of Graham Hartill.
have an astonishingly good list, catching up a wide range of poets: Jennifer Cooke, Nicolas Spicer, Nat Raha, Andrew Spragg, matt martin, Elizabeth Guthrie, John Freeman. What passes for "mainstream" publishing is a bloated reptile that needs to die now. We present alternative
— yep! Go for it!
Dylan Harris's press is based in Paris, but publishes largely in English. Authors include Emily Critchley, Anthony Liccione, Pansy Maurer-Alvarez, Rufo Quintavalle, Freke Räihä. It is linked with the Poets Live English-language reading series in Paris (which site has many recordings available).
The website for Richard Parker's excellent letterpress publishing venture has info, you can buy the goods etc, plus some snippets of writing.
Justin Katko's small press is now located in Cambridge, with a list reflecting much current Cambridge writing: Colleen Hind & Pocahontas Mildew, J.H. Prynne, Mike Wallace-Hadrill, Posie Rider, Ian Heames, Marianne Morris, Billy Simms & Keith Tuma, Josh Stanley, Ryan Dobran, Francis Crot (& Nrou Mrobaak), Frances Kruk, Tom Raworth are some of the authors. Available on the site are a few audio files, plus pdfs of two Friends Magazines, with a wide range of poets involved.
Richard Owens' superb magazine has no textual material online, but demands mention for its openness to British poets. His damn the caesars blog is good to follow, and there is a wonderful damn the caesar's YouTube Channel, with material ranging from Slavoj Zizek to Posie Rider, Jow Lindsay and Luke Roberts. The associated Punch Press publishes works by Sean Bonney and Frances Kruk, and as well the first, suppressed, edition of Kent Johnson's genuinely provocative A Question Mark above the Sun.
from Cork do a magazine and so far one book. There is material online, including work by Christopher Mulroooney, Giles Goodland and James Cummins, who runs the press.
A magazine in print for innovative poetry & poetics, for cultural theory & social performance / cultural performance & social theory. A magazine dead set against the dead hand & deadly hands of instrumentalist reason & the banalisation / terrorisation / commodification of everyday life. A situation. Department is edited by Richard Barrett & Simon Howard.
Very, very fine stuff on board from a good range of poets: Iain Britton, JP Duran, SJ Fowler and Anatol Knotek, RTA Parker, Nat Raha, Andy Spragg and Steven Waling most recently. Plus some very, very fine books. A vein of pure gold here! But energies now concentrating on Department Publications at Depart.
is based in Norwich, is linked with the UEA Creative writing MA (oh gosh! The veritable Oxford of them all!!), but, despite emetic language such as the sharpest emerging poets around
(like very painful turds?), does have a wide range of interests. Daniel Kane's and Vahni Capildeo's work are certainly worthwhile.
is a review sheet focusing on the visual arts but with additional texts relating to the greater sphere of contemporary art and thought. ER gives critical coverage of the artistic life of Cork, and situates these developments within both national and international contexts.
And these include many aspects relevant to innovative poetry in the previous articles available as pdfs on its website, eg Derek Beaulieu writing on conceptual petry, and Trevor Joyce on Tom Raworth.
Rod Mengham's long-established Cambridge press exhibits only its wonderful list of titles on the site, part of the cambridgepoetry.org website.
is a magazine and chapbook series edited by Alan Corkish and Andrew Taylor: The word 'erbacce' stems from the Italian word for 'weed', it rhymes with 'apache'. Like weeds we intend to spread, to grow where we choose, to take over the garden.
A diverse and interesting list of poets published (with several back issues available for download on the site).
Julie Johnstone's press publishes small and beautiful booklets of minimalist poetry, by herslef especially (with online versions), but also Richard Price, Hamish Whyte, Alec Finlay, Thomas A Clark, Gerry Cambridge. Also less, a minimalist, and minimal journal exploring the notion of less
, also available as pdfs, with work from Samuel Menashe, Robert Lax, David Miller, Tom Benson, Gerry Loose, Richard Price, Eugen Gomringer and others. And she has a blog.
Edited by James Mclaughlin, this new critical and poetics magazine has its website on the Knives Forks and Spoons Press website, but a different editorial board. We invite essays on teh poetry promoted by Knives Forks and Spoons Press, Red Ceiling, ZimZalla, Department, the Maintenant Series, &c, and The Other Room.
Nicholas Johnson's press lists its publications — an extraordinarily high quality of material, including work from Nicholas Johnson, Ed Dorn, John Hall, Carl Rakosi, Maggie O'Sullivan, Bob Cobbing, Harriet Tarlo.
is the website for American magazine Fence and Fence Press. Most recent issue includes UK Poets: introduction by Barry Schwabsky, Sean Bonney, Andrea Brady, Vahni Capildeo, Simon Smith & Keston Sutherland. Only a little online, unfortunately.
Glenn Storhaug's very fine press publishes work by Alan Halsey, including the astonishing Marginalien and Lives of the Poets, Yannis Ritsos, Paul Matthews, Glenn himself, and Gavin Selerie's Le Fanu's Ghost; Some Business Of Affinity, translations & versions by Paul Merchant, I would also recommend. On the site, an interesting essay "On printing poetry aloud", about the importance of careful and individual typesetting and presentation of poems, and images of superb "broadsides", image poems by Andrew Brewerton, Geraldine Monk and Allen Fisher.
francis + anticham from Ireland and Seoul,Korea. Artists' books and Mail art.
Delightful stuff, in a fluxus-type visual poetry and artists' books sort of way. Lots and lots — attractively busy creative people, with a beautiful spontaneity and humour emanating from all they do. Further sites are Francis Van Maele's Redfoxpress, publishing a large number of visual poetry books, especially the C'est mon dada series from a wide range of poets, and Antic-ham, laden with Antic-ham's gorgeous and prolific works (with a lot of online images). All from Achill Island, too.
is a creative publishing group who formed in 2010 after a poetry reading at 121 Friary Road, London SE15.
They publish, and they do events also. Interesting grouping, with strong art connections.
Sidekick Books publishes collaborative books of poetry and illustration, as well as occasional e-books and other multimedia projects, under the guidance of excommunicated arch-alchemist Dr Fulminare (and his demonic familiar, Bandijcat).
Well, OK. Why not? The books are interesting, including Alistair Noon.
Chris Goode's publishing imprint has produced work by him, and the very useful anthology, Better Than Language.
was started in Cambridge in 2007 by Josh Stanley and Luke Roberts. Grasp is dedicated to printing exciting contemporary poetry in a variety of formats. It has also organised poetry readings in London, Brighton, and Cambridge, and publishes the journals AXOLOTL and HOT GUN!.
Authors include Justin Katko, Francesca Lisette, Luke Roberts, Josh Stanley and Timothy Thornton. Developing well!
publishes poetry and is run by Ian Davidson and Kelvin Corcoran (reviving an earlier imprint). The site gives you a poem from each publication — so far Nathan Thompson, Alistair Noon and Ralph Hawkins.
run by Tom Cheesman and John Goodby, out of, I surmise somewheres in & around Swansea, as HAFAN is a Welsh word meaning haven, sanctuary, asylum. All proceeds go to refugee charities, primarily Swansea Bay Asylum Seekers Support Group
. They have a fine range of Lulu publications (memo to self: this looks like the way back for Great Works into book publishing), and some free downloads. Poets include John Goodby, Rhys Trimble, Graham Hartill, with some translations, including nazim hikmet: on the ship to mars, a 'scenic poem' in 10 segments by Berkan Karpat and Zafer Şenocak, about the Romantic communist poet Nazim Hikmet
.
is a print poetry journal founded in Oxford in 2010 by Tom Graham and Arabella Currie. halfcircle is primarily devoted to the promotion of innovative and experimental verse. halfcircle's original aim was to bring the diverse and often sparring array of contemporary poetic outlooks together in one place.
Issue 2 indeed included Peter Riley, Drew Milne, Steve McCaffrey, Don Paterson and Heathcote Williams — quite dizzying, eh? Issue 3 tippng the balance much more to innovative pets, including amongst others Emily Critchley, Ame De'Ath, John Wilkinson, Jonty Tiplady, Keston Sutherland. Excellent magazine, in other words. Buy it! pdfs available on the site of issues before the current one.
is a small press which publishes poetry that you won't often find in your local bookshop.
, with a range of contemporary Irish innovative writers (which inludes themselves of course), things they distribute, poem cards etc.
run by John Phillips out of 27 Treverbyn Road, St Ives, Cornwall TR26 1EZ doesn't do websites, but little fold up pamphlets posted out to interested parties or distributed free in pubs. John has interesting contacts with American poets (eg published Cid Corman, Richard Owens, Theodore Enslin), but would welcome contact from more British poets. Exchange your publications with his!
is the collaborative art and writing of David and Ping Henningham. We are both Artists and Authors, and we are curious about every aspect of writing, printing and publishing. We complete and represent our writing through fine art printmaking, bookbinding and performance.
They produce fascinating texts, eg an illustrated Bible Commentary. Productions include two collaborations with poets: The Erroneous Disposition of the People: Prose and Poetry Inspired by Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 1646, by James Wilkes, Julie Rafalski, Eddie Farrell, David Henningham, David Barnes, and Clotted Sun, an anthology of lines by poets buried in West Norwood Cemetery (also produced as individually as stones) compiled by Chris McCabe as part of a site-specific work.
Michael Egan's small press (8 at once! – Catherine Woodward, Colette Sensier, Emily Critchley, Jess Green, JT Welsch, Luke Kennard, Richard Watt, Steve Van Hagen) also now runs readings as The Villainelle Poetry Club, meeting at The Ship and Mitre, 133 Dale Street Liverpool L3 2JH. So much good work going on!
is a funky little magazine straight out of Maida Vale, current issue with Jeff T. Johnson, Daniel Remein, Joe Luna, Jasmine Rosenbloom & Mark Francis Johnson. But current issue not very current, alas.
is an occasional journal of poetry + criticism
, edited by Josh Stanley and Ryan Waller straight out of Godalming and Brooklyn, with a pretty cool tone and content, but only two issues to date (one on the work of Ed Dorn). But current issue also not very current, so also alas.
is a publisher of experimental poetry: books, a magazine, downloads, and other forms, based in Manchester, UK. Established in 2008 it is the re-incarnation of Matchbox.
There are a few texts (eg from Tony Trehy and Tom Jenks), and a lot of video (eg from Lucy Harvest Clarke, Joy as Tiresome Vandalism and Tom Jenks) on the site, plus info on Manchester readings and other events. Well done, James Davies, and all at Manchester.
publishes work by artists who use extant material — selecting it and reframing it to generate new meanings — and who, in doing so, disrupt the existing order of things.
By 'eck, they've got the old political function of art thing totally sorted! So much money in anything labelled "art" is one thought; that the work here genuinely alters how one responds to a printed text is another. Ie some fascinating stuff (Peter Jaeger, Derek Beaulieu, Sarah Jacobs); but presentation as part of the art industrial consumption complex disrupts only punters' bank balances.
Bridget Penney and Paul Holman published during the 90s, but have stock available — trading now as a (mainly) second-hand book business. Publications include Anthony Barnett Carp and Rubato, Catherine Walsh, Idir Eatortha and Making Tents, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Selected Poems, Paul Holman, The Memory of the Drift and the wondrous Loose Watch: A Lost And Found Times anthology (ed John M Bennett). They have revived their activities with Twenty Visual Poems by Rea Nikonova.
is Verity Spott's small press, which as publisher of Sean Bonney's Letters on Harmony, is certainly noteworthy. In blog format, there's an interesting post Dear World and Everything in it, in which Keston Sutherland is excoriated for appearing in the Bloodaxe anthology Dear World & Everyone In It, his own words about not wanting his book on the shelves of Waterstones used against him. Look, the little world of little presses is only in fantasy a cosy safe place, as the end of the post where the difficulties of operating within it are expressed; but it is a dangerous and regressive fantasy if it is hostile to contact with the harsh and stupid reality we live within, and restricts good and important poetry to consumption by self-satisfied coteries of the cognoscenti and the illuminati.
I'm sorry to say I don't know whether to say Oh fuck! — at twilight only flies the owl of Minerva
, or, Oh goody, we've got academic status now. We shall live for ever!
Really good people concerned, main editors Professor Robert Sheppard and Dr Scott Thurston. The journal centres on the poetic writings that have appeared in Britain and Ireland since the late 1950s under various categorizations: for example avant-garde, underground, linguistically innovative, second-wave Modernist, non-mainstream, the British Poetry Revival, the parallel tradition, formally innovative, neo-modernist and experimental, while also including the Cambridge School, the London School, concrete poetry, and performance writing. All of these terms have been variously adopted and contested by anthologies such as Children of Albion (1969), A Various Art (1987), The New British Poetry (1988), Floating Capital (1991), Conductors of Chaos (1996), Out of Everywhere (1996), Foil (2000), Anthology of British and Irish Poetry (2001) and Vanishing Points (2004).
There are pdfs available, of talks presented at launch events.
A wondrous force for good! A diverse range of exciting current writings, pouring forth from Newton-le-Willows. Alec Newman, I salute you and all your deeds! Major, major publishing source. The site has been simplified & made more accessible, so no reason not to go there & buy lots.
publish booklets by Kelvin Corcoran, Alan Baker, Tilla Brading, Lee Harwood, Peter Dent, Martin Stannard, Abdellatif Laâbi, Tristan Tzara and others, with poems online (from the out-of-print books). Also on the site is the excellent e-zine Litter (I really like both John Hall's An Essay on Ignorance and poems by Mark Goodwin), and there are too the editors' blogs, Alan Baker's Litterbug: Poetry, Publishing and other worldly affairs, and John Bloomberg-Rissman's Zeitgeist Spam.
Nikolai Duffy's small press from Manchester has some beautiful proposals, including JT Welsch, Waterloo (May 2012), Ian Seed, Threadbare Fables (June 2012), Iain Britton, A Tusitala of White Lies (August 2012), David Berridge, A Pedagogy of Grasses, a book-in-a-box comprising a pamphlet of poetry, postcards, and a fold-out essay (summer 2012), and The Melville Box, a collection of 4 pamphlets, comprising a beautiful hand-printed edition of 'Bartleby the Scrivener,' two essays, and a mosaic of annotations and copyings (Autumn 2012). All to be available on the site as pdfs also. And a wonderful and playful editor's blog: Like This Blog: poems, pictures, curiosities, conversations, found things, & many other things, from likethispress.
That's what it is, and a very open and welcoming place too, with a wide range of poets. There must be over 60 lines of poetry (excluding line spaces) ... The spirit of 'long' is probably more important than length — by which we don't mean it doesn't have to be long — but it also needs substance. ... Ask — is your poem ambitious — does it have a 'big' heart?
— these are the considerations. Editors are Ann-Vaughan-Williams, Linda Black, Lucy Hamilton; most recent edition (no. 9) includes Ian McEwan, Salah Niazi (ed. David Andrew), Chrissy Williams, Carrie Etter, Tim Dooley, David Miller, Nigel Prentice. The website has a little poetry, and reviews from the magazine.
A selection of poetry & articles from the print magazine. Most interesting issue compares two 'Aspects of the Contemporary': David Constantine, What good does it do? (My goodness me, I do wonder. Have a cup of tea.) & Matthew Caley, Neo-hogbutchererbigdriftities: tracing a line out of the mainstream (as much fun as it sounds).
catalogue for John Welch's excellent press and magazine, whose titles include work by Tom Lowenstein, Nigel Wheale and John Welch. A more recent publication listed elsewhere.
James Davies' venture, Manchester-based, is gorgeous: poems in matchboxes, elegantly designed & presented. Current poets include Scott Thurston, Allen Fisher, Tim Atkins, Lisa Jarnot, Craig Dworkin, Bill Griffiths; and with neat original artwork. Little gems! The texts are all on the website; but that's beside the point. Fully interactive 3D presentation we are not yet up to out here in cyberspace.
publishers of poetry, prose, performance texts & polemix, based in cambridge, uk
, and are David Grundy & Lisa Jeschke. Varied & ferocious magazine, also occasional publications including Lest We Forget: A Tribute to Margaret Thatcher. Blog has interesting responses to Keston Sutherland's Odes to TL61P by the editors.
Anthony Rudolf's press primarily publishes translations, listed on its site, which include from Rilke, Paz, Jacottet and Nerval.
is a forum for critical and cultural perspectives on artists' books, fine press printing and the mimeograph revolution.
Blog website for a journal, Mimeo Mimeo, largely centered on the near infinite riches of US small presses; but #4: focuses on the poets, artists, printers, and publications of the British Poetry Revival, a particularly rich period of activity that ran roughly parallel to the New American Poetry of the post-WWII era. On both sides of the Atlantic, the dominant modes of poetics, publishing, and media were being thought anew. Featuring: wide-ranging interviews with Tom Raworth, David Meltzer, and Trevor Winkfield; insightful essays by Richard Price, Ken Edwards, and Alan Halsey; a selection of letters from Eric Mottram to Jeff Nuttall providing a British perspective on the Lower East Side Scene; and a long out-of-print statement by Asa Benveniste, poet and publisher of London's legendary Trigram Press.
has published poetry by Timothy Thornton, Francesca Lisette and Luke Roberts, plus the historically valuable Certain Prose of The English Intelligencer.
is an interesting radical magazine with a wide range of interests. Issue 14 contains a valuable Dossier on Brighton poetry, compiled by Zoe Sutherland, with an long interview by Zoe Sutherland, Danny Hayward and Jonty Tiplady with Keston Sutherland, and poems from Michael Kindellan, Richard Parker, Jonty Tiplady and Chinc Blume. It would be £3 well spent! A few of the poems online.
is a Rugby-based small press, with also a magazine (Under the Radar), and with some video on the site. Poets published in books/pamphlets include Claire Crowther, Mark Goodwin, Peter Hughes, Rupert Loydell, Sophie Mayer, Simon Turner. An interesting publisher, with a good website.
Founded in 2008 by Sara De Bondt and Antony Hudek ... a non-profit publisher of affordable books devoted to the histories of architecture, art, design, film and literature.
Including edited by Nicola Simpson, Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter: The Life and Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard. Interests focus strongly on graphic design & The Book, with an excellent set of links on the site coming from their Post-print Publishing? event at Liverpool Biennial in July 2013.
Tony Lopez has issued Hawthorn, a poem poster dedicated to Brian Haw, Ian Hamilton Finlay & Ernst Schumacher on this site.
Experimental poetry by women
is Frances Presley's press, based at 19 Marriott Road, London N4 3QN, or contactable on fpresley@compuserve.com. Most recent publication the beautiful Stone Settings by Tilla Brading and Frances Presley (jointly with Tilla Brading's Odyssey Press), and with books published from Frances Presley herself, Mary Michaels, Harriet Tarlo and others (often collaborations in one form or another).
Peter Hughes's now huge small press has already got a beautiful list of booklets to its credit. There are brief extracts on the site, and
a section on Peter's own poetry. Some of the most exciting and vivid poetry available in England
(Ian Brinton, 'World Literature Today') is claimed — the claim holds very firm indeed!
publishes contemporary poetry and is based in Cambridge, UK
, it looks to promote the publication and discussion of female poetry
, and is a very high quality little production: poetry by Anna Mendelssohn [Grace Lake], Marianne Morris, Frances Kruk, Alice Notley, Nat Raha, Posie Rider to date. There's also a blog.
is an excellent magazine produced in Manchester, with samples of issues available online, with work from Arlene Ang, Richard Barrett and Lucy Harvest Clarke (+ news of forthcoming readings in Manchester).
Have booklets from Peter Brennan, Adam Simmonds, Christine North, Nicholas Potamitis and Mario Petrucci, with a small sample of each. And now Bill Berkson!
Charging for poetry online! At £36, possibly interesting, for all back issues of PN Review the only "mainstream" British poetry magazine consistently engaging with writing that intersects with this site. But I think I'll hold onto the principle of cybercommunism a little longer. Odd poems etc are accessible unlocked.
is the website of Jeremy Hilton's excellent Fire magazine, with some poems on the site.
has a page on the Seren Books site, with full details of this now very exciting and open magazine, giving a vivid sense of contemporary English language Welsh poetry.
Major UK publisher of innovative poetry (& prose) (proprietor Ken Edwards) — no texts online, but full details of all publications, some links, information on our Ken, and his blog.
Our interest in experimental criticism, text-based art and the performance space of the book infects our process.
Interesting and not at all straight-forward texts in other words — I like that sort. Published to date: Holly Pester & Daniel Rourke.
is a new publisher of innovative/experimental poetics based in Cork City, Ireland. Our aim is to publish new poetry that excites us and not get bogged down in one particular style or school. We want to publish young emerging writers alongside much more established ones. . . . is run by James Cummins, Sarah Hayden, Niamh O'Mahony and Rachel Warriner.
Magazine Foma and Fontanelles has published poetry by Michael Kindellan, Robert Sheppard, Gerry Loose, Jennifer Matthews, Joe Luna, Andrew Spragg, Giles Goodland, and other, plus criticism by Mandy Bloomfield and Aodan McCardle; Eleven Days by Rachel Warriner and the wondrous Sea Adventures, or, Pond Life by Harvey Joseph and Lindsay James
are the only books so far.
are the avant garde of subversive occult publishing. Award winning, uncompromising and truly independent.
OK, and why not? Especially as they publish works including poems by Paul Holman: Datura (also with Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove) and Mandragora – Further Explorations in Esoteric Poesis (including essay On Pessoa by Jose Leitao). Go on, you know this is actually far more subversive to the whole apparatus of the poetry industry than conceptual or "revolutionary" poetry.
is an arts+writing little magazine based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
It looks really good, part of an exciting scene, with work regularly from nick-e melville and Samantha Walton
Wales's leading literary publisher
started out with poetry, and has expanded into a wide range of publishing. Now there's Welsh culture for you. The poetry list is very long, and very broad.
publishes laboriously cheap pamphlets by morally expensive poets, at a bias out of Cambridge UK. We accept cash, cheques, or food of any type.
Christina Chalmers, John Dewitt, Corina Copp, and Ed Luker so far.
publish Australian, Greek and British poets, including Richard Burns, Peter Robinson and even Peter Porter — no texts online, but details of all publications.
Barry Tebb has two sites — this one, which includes poems by other writers, including Michael Haslam, and also Barry Tebb — Poet and Author. Go to them for his strong opinions, his absolute devotion to poetry as a positive, therapeutic and educative experience, and his poems, which work well.
are a major publisher for sean burn, both poetry and prose, plus much other lively prose.
We are a small independent British publisher based in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire (south west England) specialising in literary fiction, drama and poetry, advanced horticulture and the esoteric.
An interesting list,as you can imagine. Of relevance to the context of this listing, forthcoming republication of Iain Sinclair's Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge. Basil King's Learning to Draw / A History also appears extremely interesting, with blurbs from Andrei Codrescu, Laurie Duggan and Amira Baraka. Their blog, Through the Skylight, is informative.
a small press dedicated to publishing innovative poetry and prose.
Interesting, because not-at-present fashionable line: Shannon Tharp, John Phillips, Alan Baker recently, and forthcoming: Theodore Enslin, and beyond, Aaron Tieger, Clark Coolidge, Whit Griffin, Frank Samperi, Chris Torrance, Arlo Quint, Christopher Rizzo, Jeffery Beam, Clive Faust.
Paul Green's Press publishes a strong list, including Bill Griffiths, details of which are given on this site.
Tears in the Fence is an independent literary journal established in November 1984. Our tri-annual publication includes poetry, prose, translations, reviews and essays by well known and emerging writers from around the world. We embrace neo-Romantic, modernist and post-modernist developments in British and American poetry and have been an outlet for prominent poets associated with the British Poetry Revival as well as later generations of British, black and Asian poets. We have editorial bases in UK, France, Australia and USA.
Yes, that good. And finally a proper website, with some material from current issue on it. Also a useful blog. And , rather sweetly, still a MySpace presence
publishes hand-stitched poetry pamphlets on recycled paper
out of Tokyo. Poets include Tomas Weber, Marianne Morris, Laura Kilbride.
From the excellent Association of Musical Marxists, of whom Ben watson is one. The mistake of all hitherto-existing revolutionary lefts was that they believed in theory and practice without poiesis — Dadaist unrespected and disrespectful punkrock-improv productivity i.e. the free exchange of everything happening in our everyday lives and experimental reworking of all tokens. Using the counterculture for what it gives us vs. verdammte 'heritage' culture. We want to liberate the ideas of Karl Marx from their institutional shells and load them in our pea-shooters so we can DEEPEN THE CURRENT WAVE OF UNREST. Something more than a moral stand. Who's that talking about 'redistribution of resources'? We gotta change the WHOLE MODE OF PRODUCTION, the way we work and the way we walk. We want to run the lot, and sod the ruling class. If we don't, we just create more red tape, like the New Labour drones sitting on the councils.
q. To that end, they have published Sean Bonney's Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud.
run by Leona Medlin and Richard Price, publishes modern Scottish poetry, poetry associated with 'The Poetry Workshop' (London), and modernist poetry in translation. Their list includes Richard Price's own work, Elizabeth James, David Kinloch, WN Herbert, and translations of Vallejo and French modernists. Publishing has ceased, but the backlist is still interesting
breaks down the borders between contemporary schools of poetry, to forge a new poetics based on respect for craft, innovation and the challenge of real communication.
Their fine list includes Andrew Duncan, Simon Smith, Nicholas Johnson, Norman Jope, Alan Morrison, Martin Jack, Kenneth Macleod. Excellent production values as well! Some poems and some essays/reviews available online.
is a quarterly arts journal published in print and online. The current print issue is available to buy in bookshops and via the website, or by subscription. The website is updated with new, usually web-only content in the first week of each month. The journal was conceived as an arts and literary journal specialising in artistically or educationally meritorious works of new or emerging artists and writers. Its aim is the promotion of the arts and literature and of advancing education in arts and literature.
IOt's over serious, most of its poetry is so so boring; but there's an interesting interview with Keston Sutherland, and indeed other good interviews.
To celebrate the 250th anniversary of William Blake's birth, on 28th November 2007, artists Felicity Roma Bowers and Helen Elwes and poet Micalef invited over 60 artists and poets inspired by the spirit and work of William Blake to submit a page to be published in a limited edition artists' book.
Available from this webpage, on Felicity Roma Bowers' site, with contributions from a wide range of individuals, including Brian Catling, John Gibbens, Michael Horovitz, John Michell, Adrian Mitchell, Tom Phillips RA, James Wilkes and Robin Williamson, with a beautiful slide-show of pages available.
A quarterly publication for fresh new poetry with a bite
is a little more domesticated than it claims, and is the website for a print magazine, with some material online. Despite my snarksome comment — it does host some interesting writing — current issue includes Carol Watts, Ron Padgett, Clayton Eshleman, Nathan Hamilton, Robert Kelly, Ron Padgett (!), and a piece on Olson at 100.
Sean Bonney and Frances Kruk's blog for their yt communications publishing empire.
For regular updates and details of individual readings in London, check Readings in London. I am not, I am afraid, going to put information needing regular updating on this page.
The only place I find regular information on this event is on the Chris Torrance pages on Strange Attractor, where there is also a report by Chris on the 2008 event (with photos from Val Maillard), and on the 2010 event. The event is a reunion for The Carshalton Mob, a very under-reported constituent of the fabled British Poetry Revival of the 1960s. You can link Lee Harwood with them; you can find connections with Andrew Crozier, who published Chris Torrance, and dedicated The Veil Poem to Jeff Morsman (whose In Patria Desertae was a starting point for the sequence). Buddhist-leaning, Beat-influenced genuinely alternative in writing and life might be a very condensed summing up. I am delighted they are still alive, still writing, still indeed performing. Bill Wyatt, Phil Morsman, Richard Downing, Phil Maillard also need mentioning. These people influenced me, wrote and published good poetry, and have been ignored or slighted by most of the accounts of that time. They were, and it would seem remain, an authentic alternative poetry scene. More goes on I believe, so keep your ears pinned back for interesting doings in South Wales.
arranged by David Miller and Keith Jebb, normally upstairs at The Lamb, 94 Lamb's Conduit Street, London WC1, at 7.30, £5 or £3. I find this series extremely enlightening. Good readings, with a wide range of poets. Usually the third Wednesday in the month. For further details of readings contact David Miller on katermurrATbtinternet.com or check on Readings in London.
London's hottest new music and poetry club brings you the cutting edge of experimental music and poetry
, on a boat (Bar&Co), moored at Temple Pier on the Embankment. The music looks good; but the poetry??? It seems a separate genre of poetry what only gets performed at improv events. The edge here may be bluntish, lads
Lists of and links to some other Cambridge activities, including a lot of publishing, the other Cambridge poetry conference, the Cambridge Poetry Summit, and reading series. But of historical and reference use only at present, as it seems very irregularly updated
This website is both a resource for poetry readings in Cambridge, UK and the homepage for the Cambridge Reading Series, which is an intermittent cycle of free, public poetry readings taking place at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. Each reading features two poets and is accompanied by a pamphlet publication containing work by each poet and a critical response from the CRS. The CRS is graciously supported by the Judith E. Wilson Fund and organised by English graduate students Ryan Dobran, Ian Heames, Justin Katko, Laura Kilbride, Luke Roberts, and Mike Wallace-Hadrill.
Looks like major focus for Cambridge activity at present. The pamphlets are available online. Now branded as "The Foule Readings".
(Francesca Lisette's blog) are a series of readings held in The Hope, Queens' Road, Brighton, and representing a very lively scene now a-going in Brighton. Another vortex of energies! But now replaced by Hi Zero!
is a new series of text-sound-performance events. It takes place on the first Thursday of alternate months. Counting Backwards takes place at Fuel cafe bar in Withington. The first event is on Thursday 3 June 2010.
Featuring Mike Cannell, Holly Pester, THF Drenching. Organizers: Richard Barrett, Matt Dalby, Gary Fisher. Very interesting, as very multidisciplinary, mixing arts and formats and etc. Archive worth visiting (though rather too many shots of blokes bending over electronic equipment!)
arranged by Jeff Hilson and Sean Bonney. At 7.30, £5 or £3 – main venue is The Apple Tree, 45 Mount Pleasant WC1X 2AE. For further details of readings contact J.HilsonATroehampton.ac.uk or check on Readings in London. I find this series also extremely enlightening: very much poets reading to their peers, with a very strong collective sense. Almost always on a Wednesday.
Held in the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, 2013. Huge and generously wide spread of publishers, from Anvil, Allardyce Barnett & Agenda to West House Books & zimZalla. Attend!
The Glasfryn Seminars were initiated as a response to what the organisers perceive as a paucity of opportunities in Wales for writers (as well as interested readers) to come together to exchange ideas on the nature of poetry, literature and the arts in general.
Organised by Lyndon Davies, these have included a Dante-day, an exploration of the work of Charles Olson led by poet and literary-theorist Anthony Mellors, seminars on Mallarmé led by Patrick McGuinness; on Language, Poetries and Place, with Ian Davidson; on Avant-Garde Women's Poetry with Frances Presley; on Responses to the City by Contemporary Poetry by Women, with Zoe Skoulding; a meeting of the Border/Lines group, led by Philip Gross, Alice Entwistle and Kevin Mills; and a series of seminars by Allen Fisher on The Aesthetics of the Imperfect Fit.
held at Oriel Contemporary Art Gallery, Salem Chapel, Bell Bank, Hay on Wye, end of May/early June time. This has a more promising poetry line-up than the big branded festival, and good reports are made of its atmosphere. 2012 line-up (Thursday June 7–Saturday June 9) to include Peter Larkin, Ulli Freer, Harriet Tarlo, Andrea Brady, JP Ward, Tony Lopez, Tim Atkins, Jeff Hilson, Caroline Goodwin, Harry Gilonis, Jeremy Hilton, Philip Terry, Nerys Williams, Sophie Robinson, Laurie Duggan, Steven Hitchens, Andrew Duncan, David Greenslade, Keith Hackwood. It is organised by Lyndon Davies and John Goodby. It is just what you want to go to!
The Hay Poetry Jamboree was conceived as a modest attempt to redress an imbalance. Although there are a number of established poetry festivals in Britain, few provide more than a bare modicum of space for those poetries which operate outside the margins of the mainstream. The Jamboree set out to provide another platform for writers working within a more exploratory ethos.
The Jamboree is partisan, but not doctrinaire – it's chief criteria are "Is it good?" and "Is it interesting?" Our bias is towards the radical, the innovative, the experimental, but these terms are relative and shifting and we are interested in any writer coming from whatever context who is trying new things, making unforeseen connections. Our aim too is to forge new links: between poetries, naturally, but also between poetry and other art practices – visual, musical and performance-based, and between poetry and academic discourses.
The Jamboree is open, unruly and good-natured. It is intimate, responsive, argumentative and undernourished. It asks too much, far too much of everyone, but everyone, performer and spectator has a stake in it; it belongs to them, and they are the substance of the thing.
is based at Torriano Meeting House, an arts and community space in Kentish Town, North London. There are weekly guest readings proceeded by poets from the floor
A wide-ranging series, feeding into publications from Hearing Eye Press, founded by John Rety and Susan Johns in 1987, and again with a wide publication range.
a new run of fiercely fine poetry readings in Brighton, UK
. Organised by Joe Luna.Supported by the School of English and Centre for Modernist Studies, University of Sussex.
Held at The Hope, Queens Road, Brighton. Check out if you're on the South Coast (or can zip down from London). Or you can buy the associated magazine and books, or see lots of videos on the website. Full of fun!
Intercapillary Places is a series of evening events held at the Parasol unit gallery near Old St, London. Each event accompanies an exhibition at the gallery and is either tenuously or strenuously linked to its theme. By combining critical talks with poetry performances and other live arts, we hope to open up a new and interdisciplinary space for creative and critical thought within, around and about poetry.
Parasol unit at 14 Wharf Road N1 7RW. "We" = Felicity Roberts and Edmund Hardy. Very very good. Free magazine too!
Improvisation. Film. Musics. Vocal Acrobatics. Contraptions. Word. Right Weird. Pants.
Improvisation as life practice and blood sport. These largely music-based events often have poetry as part of the mix, of varying natures: you might encounter, if you're lucky Johan de Wit or Mike Weller. First Tuesday of every month at The Olive, 18 Stoke Newington High Street, London N16 7PL. Hugh Metcalfe, he's the man.
Very interesting: younger, less male-dominated and more multiethnic, and with a quite possibly very open policy: Sophie Robinson, Hannah Silva, Caroline Bergvall & Alex Walker have read at events. Follow what they are doing! Videos and audio on the MySpace page. Organised by Anthony Joseph & Sascha Akhtar. Somewhat quiet of late.
does have some interesting readings — thank you Dave Bircumshaw!
Gareth Durasow, Stephen Emmerson and Dave Toffeeman bring you a series of readings (with emphasis on open mic and performance) in Leeds. But also somewhat quiet of late.
is a pioneering, annual celebration of words, text and language; daring in its approach to cross-artform programming, commissioning new work and exploring non-traditional spaces.
Very performance-based, meaning a lot shades into stand-up or live art; but always individual events of great interest – it has a very wide view of what words can do. Last year included Hannah Silva, Chris Goode, and Christian Bök, Luke Kennard, Maria Fusco and others. Resting this year. Await eagerly!
A vital and necessary resource for British poets is the series of Maintenant Interviews by SJ Fowler in 3:AM Magazine with + (translated) poems by contemporary European poets, slewed interestingly away from the familiar (no French or Italian at all), though including Tom Jenks and some other British-based poets. Look out for events linked with these interviews at Rich Mix, 35–47 Bethnal Green Road E1 6LA. The interviews are also available on Poetry International's Weblog (that's the San Diego U magazine, not the Dutch-based website).
is the medieval tower in Newcastle where in the 60s Tom and Connie Pickard arranged seminal readings, eg Basil Bunting's first public reading of Briggflats, and Allen Ginsberg reciting Kaddish for the third and final time. A wide range of readings and events continues, with Connie Pickard still Custodian.
Experimental poetry in Manchester
, organised by James Davies, Tom Jenks and Scott Thirston, was at first linked with Openned, but centered on a very lively Northern scene. Majot readings continue regularly, and the site contains much news, many links, and lots of video and photos. Major!
Manchester based poetry reading series organised by Richard Barrett, Gareth Twose and Rachel Sills
Second Saturday of the month at the Town Hall tavern, Tib Lane, Manchester and is free.
organises Poetry readings and events in and around the city of Plymouth, UK. Contact the Plymouth Language Club at PlymouthLanguageClub@gmail.com
. An excellent series of readings with an excellent group of South-West based writers. Founded by Tim Allen.
The Berlin Festival of Poetry in English's MySpace page. Performance, mainstream and modernist poetry meet to entertain, move and challenge
, with a good and mixed lineup. Event continues, but I can't find any sure web presence for it, annoyingly
An event of the Porlock Arts Festival organised by Tilla Brading, with a wide range of poets from or with connections to the South West (which includes both more narrowly local and innovative poets)+ guest poet. Saturday, September 15 (or thereabouts).
synthetic, synthesising, various, many, folding ... POLYply is a series of events including poetry readings, performances, film screenings and installations foregrounding cross-genre writing. Each event is organised around a particular theme, with a diverse range of practitioners invited to participate including poets, artists, musicians and architects. The aim of POLYply is to promote dialogue and discussion amongst creative practitioners writing in an expanded field by providing a space for the dissemination of new work within poetic practice.
So it's wide-ranging and varied material, vaguely thematic, often challenging, in the delightfully shabby environs of London University's Centre for Collaboration. Professor Robert Hampson, Dr. Kristen Kreider, Dr. Will Montgomery and Dr. Redell Olsen are the organisers. Bless them! It's really enjoyable, somehow relaxed and open, just what academic encounter with current creativity should be. Attend, enjoy, discover!
Collaboration of artists, activists and academics exploring questions of agency, spatiality, and orientation.
The resulting collaborative works will be presented at a final event to take place in May 2012, and are necessarily unpredictable; they may take the form of text, image, sound, or performance, or a combination of these forms.
As group includes Jennifer Cooke, Dez Mendoza and Nat Raha, should prove interesting. May 24, at Centre for Creative Collaboration (c4cc), 16 Acton Street, London WC1X 9NG — see you there!
Mainstream literary festival (always Jo Shapcott!) held at Royal Holloway, director Professor Robert Hampson, and therefore with interesting innovative poetry sessions (2010: Kristen Kreider, Caroline Bergvall, John Hall, Emily Critchley, Frances Presley, Sean Bonney, Frances Kruk) and work from Royal Holloway MA in Poetic Practice student students. Usually March. Event took place Wed 21 Mar to Thu 22 Mar 2012 at Centre for Creative Collaboration (c4cc), 16 Acton Street, London WC1X 9NG — look out for next year!
Evenings of performance poetry murmurings and musical offerings. Analogue communication and artistic appreciation. Dancing and dress-up heartily encouraged.
Looks fun — and has included Sophie Robinson. Also MySpace presence.
A night at the V&A Reading Rooms on a monthly basis, focusing on the best of contemporary independent poetry publications.
Not a very inspiring selection (you can really see the influence of Ian Hamilton & Hugo Williams in his work
), but sometimes they hit upon interesting poets, and the site is a blog also, again with a mixed level of postings. But, yeah, it's worth looking at.
arranged by Shearsman Books, at Swedenborg Hall, Swedenborg House, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH at 7.30 (no admission fee, but donations welcome). Always good poets, of course, Shearsman publish no others! A slightly older, more respectable audience than some readings, with a quiet atmosphere (from its rather curious setting!)
2013 event (31 May–9 June) had a genuinely wide range of events, including opening with Peter Manson & Robert Crawford, plus Alastair Noon, Harriet Tarlo, Geraldine Monk and Alan Halsey. Worth looking out for next event, 2015.
Occasional series of events organised by Jonny Liron in an industrial space in Tottenham. Lively, spontaneous and full of young poets and performers.
This fair is organised by RGAP (Research Group for Artists Publications), who publish artists' books and organise collaborative projects, publications, exhibitions and events. Usually a Friday and Saturday in mid November,, open 11am to 7pm each day, admission free, at the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1. It brings together a range of publishers, concerned mainly either with artists' books and/or small press poetry publications, including eg Bad Press, Bookartbookshop, Coracle (Ireland), Moschatel Press (UK), Poetic Practice (Royal Holloway University), Reality Street Editions, Veer Books, West House Books, Wild Hawthorn Press, yt Communication. There are usually readings through the Saturday. The webpage has on it at the moment some brief QuickTime movies of poets reading, including Alan Halsey, Geraldine Monk, Simon Cutts and Spike Hawkins. An excellent event.
The most important annual festival event in the British Isles recently has been SoundEye, held in Cork in early July, with a range of innovative Irish, British and American poets performing. Participants 2009 included Lila Matsumoto, Trevor Joyce, Sophie Robinson, Redell Olsen, Joel Scott, Andrea Brady, Luke Roberts, Catherine Walsh, Ulf Stolterfoht, Denise Riley, Sarah Hayden and David Lloyd. The poetry readings are free. Started by Trevor Joyce, now mainly by Jimmy Cummins & Rachel Warriner. It is now linked with The Avant, which co-ordinates a range of avant-garde artistic events in Cork at that same time, as a wider experience.
is a usual component of Sounds New Contemporary Music Festival, held in early summer in Canterbury, with good poets.
Organised in Brighton by Keston Sutherland and Sara Crangle, July 1 & 2 in 2011. Last year's line-up included Rod Mengham, Peter Riley, Timothy Thornton, Joe Luna, Laura Gadsden, Jenny Lindop, Nat Raha, Monika Rinck / Alistair Noon (translator), Dell Olsen, Peter Manson, Tom Raworth and many others — so look out hopefully for details for this year.
a unique initiative bringing together writers, musicians, artists and researchers working in, and in response to, digital technologies, new media and evolving network practices. It is organised by Lila Matsumoto, Jo L Walton and Samantha Walton, in collaboration with Inspace and with the support of the Edinburgh Fund's Innovative Initiative Grant.
All sort of good things put on, that live upo to the elgend! And you can download Vile Products 17th April 2013: A Rapid Anthology of Poetry Prose Artwork And Eulogies to Mark This Sad Day — you know There Is No Alternative.
The Text Festival in Bury, Lancashire is an internationally recognised event investigating contemporary language art (poetry, text art, sound and media text, live art).
An important & exciting event. At the last one, events started on Friday 15 April 2011 at The Green Room, Manchester— The Language Moment featuring Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, Maggie O'Sullivan, Phil Minton and Ben Gwilliam & Phil Davenport — end on 3rd June at The Met Arts Centre — Sound and Dark (2) featuring Geraldine Monk, Adeena Karasick, bill bissett), Iris Garrelf — and include Holly Pester, Chrtstian Bök and Ron Silliman (mainly in Bury). I think nothing happening in 2012, but await developments.
Jow Lindsay and Nat Raha now compile this running blog of poetry events in London and elsewhere. Invaluable!
an ongoing project that explores the possibilities and practice of contemporary song in poetry, text, music and sound. We are dedicated to making new and innovative work, and to reflecting on and documenting the collaborative and creative exchange between a new generation of poets, composers and singers.
Current poets: Daniel Barrow, Irum Fazal, Nell Stevens, Ollie Evans, Steven Fowler, Becky Cremin , Edmund Hardy. — this process culminates in performance events in May at both Guildhall School and Wigmore Hall
An annual artists' book event. Our plan for crop is that it will be an exhibition where all the selected entries will be on-line and a cropped selection will appear in cases at The University of Northampton in the reception area and Executive corridor outside the main exhibition space.
The theme for the 2012 creative book-arts open exhibition is: "minute". Submit! Entries may also be placed online.
is a very long-running series of workshops, linked with the Writers Forum Press, founded by the late Bob Cobbing, and now carried on by Lawrence Upton. These are open workshops within an experimental tradition. The site has a lot of information on Writers Forum on it, and details of all events are all given on the blog Writers Forum Information: a vital resource for poetry. Meetings at The Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Rd, Clerkenwell EC1R 3BL, second Saturday in the month usually. For the record, an old blog website carries details of history of event. This group carries on the pioneering and intensely creative Writers Forum publishing activity started by Bob Cobbing. Lawrence Upton has an excellent piece on the ethos and history of Writers Forum on The Poetry Kit.
uhh-Ooh! as my granddaughter likes to say. Whoops. There has been a Split. Many persons previously attending, indeed even in the past chairing, WF have now set up a new series of workshops, with essentially same name, same timing, different location, aiming at carrying on the tradition in a more open and participative way.
Meetings at present at The Fox, 28–30 Paul Street, Shoreditch EC2A 4LB, second Saturday in the month.
"Go forth and multiply!" Active in 2011, with a publication. I'm not sure still active. Stephen Emmerson and Richard Barrett names linked with the website.
Wurm im apfel takes its name from Reinhard Döhl's concrete poem. Wurm events aim to present unusual, different and experimental poetry in an accessible and welcoming way.
Is a series of poetry readings in Dublin, with Maurice Scully and Dylan Harris amongst others. Has lots of recordings on its website. Is a press (Wurm Presscancan: a poezine). Good work! There was a Wurmfest in December 2009.
So few! Please send in more, either online, or dealing in lovable dear old paper, that have a worthwhile stock (any stock?) of the sort of writing on this site. Useful is the page on the Salt site which lists their stockists.
34 Walton Street, Jericho, Oxford OX2 6AA has had very good reports, with poetry readings to live up to its name. A lot of jazz & blues interest also.
an online alternative bookshop. Poetry publishers are The Many Press, Touched Press, bluechrome, West House, Leafe Press and Poetical Histories, plus a nostalgic line in political groupuscules eg International Communist Current.
the artist-run bookstore for books by artists in Amsterdam
is at Berenstraat 16
1016 GH Amsterdam; but fortunately has a huge online catalogue, oveerflowing with good things.
17 Pitfield St, London N1 6HB (020 7608 1333), stock artists' books and small press publications. And now with a bookartbookblog.
at 41 England's Lane, Hampstead, London NW3 4YD comes well recommended.
Some stock at Snooper's Paradise, Kensington Gardens, North Lane, Brighton, but mainly trading on the internet — wide second-hand stock, including some recent poetry.
277 West End Lane, West Hampstead, London NW6 1QS is very well recommended.
West House Books, 40 Crescent Road, Nether Edge, Sheffield S7 1HN, have an extensive second hand catalogue specialising in modernist poetry from small presses, including obviously its own publications.
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