As Though We Were Flying

We made it through the blizzard for this month's Poetry Cafe.  We had a close reading of a couple of Matthew Hollis's Ground Water poems, which was good fun.

The book for the next Poetry Cafe at Bank Street Arts is Andrew Greig's As Though We Were Flying.  Here's a link to the online magazine Antiphon, and a review by Rosemary Badcoe.


The next meeting is Wednesday 2nd May, 12pm as usual.  Bring copies of your poem.

See you then.

@cafebankstreet

More Ground Water

We ran out of time at the March cafe, and so we'll be discussing the Matthew Hollis collection, Ground Water, at the April meeting.  We're meeting on 4th April, 12pm, as usual.

See you then.

Ground Water

A small group in February, but we spent 3 hours talking about poetry and writing.  It was wonderful.

The next workshop at the Bank Street Arts Poetry Cafe is 7th March, 12pm until around 3pm.  Bring copies of your poem as usual.  We'll be discussing Matthew Hollis's Ground Water in the reading group, which I'm looking forward to.  This is a link to his poem "Wintering" on the Poetry Archive website.

And here is an interview with Matthew Hollis soon after Ground Water was published, posted on the Textualities Wordpress site.

We've got a couple of new reviews going up soon, so keep an eye out on the reviews page.

See you in March!

@cafebankstreet

Changeling

It's good to be back after the Christmas holidays. We met last week and it was great to have the conversation around each other's poems spread out to discuss broader ideas of poetry. For example, in tutorials, or writing groups, you might hear someone say that a poem with stanzas of unequal length should be revised into a more regular pattern. Equally, you might ask why someone writing in free verse would use a regular stanza length form. Lots of ideas, preferences, etc, can seem like rules, and it was good to have the chance to break down these ideas and question them.

We were reading Rimbaud's Illuminations (trans: Ashbery) in the reading group. There was a really mixed response, as I guess you might expect, with some people enjoying the read, others struggling with it (me), and others just not excited by it, questioning why Rimbaud is still being read and translated; what does his work do for the contemporary reader?

I found the Illuminations difficult because I couldn't remember what I was reading once I closed the page, I wanted to come away with something more than confusion, but I would question whether my own reading history has left me with a certain way of approaching texts, a way of making sense of it, which these poems don't lend themselves to (and perhaps are trying to avoid). I'd be interested to spend more time with the poems, and more time reading around them.

The next Bank Street Arts Poetry Cafe workshop is Wednesday 1st February - 12pm start.

The reading group is looking at Clare Pollard's Changeling. Here's a review by Ben Wilkinson from the Guardian last July.

See you then.

Illuminations

Bank Street Arts will be closed over Christmas from 18th December, reopening 10th January. Today is the last day this year, and the last Christmas Craft Fair, so don't miss it for some original ideas for stocking fillers.

The Poetry Cafe will be back in the new year, and the first workshop will be Wednesday 11th January. We'll meet as usual to get started at 12pm. Bring copies of your poem to workshop.

The book group is reading Ashbery's translation of Illuminations by Rimbaud. Here's a link to The New York Times, where Lydia Davis writes about Rimbaud's life and writing, and Ashbery's approach to translating his work.

Have a merry Christmas!

See you next year.

the Deleted World

We're looking forward to the next session on the 7th. Here are a couple of links to some of Transtromer's poems from the Deleted World:

Out in the Open

Face to Face

Solitude (1), To Friends Behind a Border, Fire Grafitti

Sketch in October

And here's a link to The Poetry Foundation's pages for him.

Hope to see you next week.

December meeting

Nine poets met for a great workshop last week.

Our next workshop, the last before the new year, will be on Weds Dec 7th, at Bank Street as usual. As time always seems to be tight, we're going to vary arrangements a little this time. Please arrive around 11.45 if you want to eat or chat generally, then we should be able to begin on at 12.00 on the dot. We'll continue the workshop till 2.40, sharing the time as equitably as possible.

Then at 2.40 we'll begin the book discussion, and continue till around 3.15, if people wish to.

This time we've chosen Tomas Transtromer in the translation by Robin Robertson. (You can order this through Blackwells if you need to). If you can't get this translation, there's another good collection translated by Robin Fulton. These are very different translations, but we can always incorporate discussion of the differences of translation in the workshop.

On a separate note, I'd like to invite contributions to the second issue of Antiphon. Rosemary and I were really pleased with the number of readers and the very positive feedback on the first issues, so we want Issue #2 to be even better (and hopefully bigger, too). See antiphon.org.uk

Noel