Art vs Laundry

Our next Poetry Café session at Bank Street Arts is on the 4^th July (all the usual arrangements, bring poems, 12pm start, etc), and to celebrate, or more precisely, by coincidence, we’re reading an American, Elizabeth Bishop. 

We discussed narrowing the reading a little, perhaps just to North and South, from The Complete Poems, but then what about “The Moose”, “Sestina”, etc … So let’s say we’ll read North and South, but then we can throw in any favourites on the day.

Here’s a link to her Poetry Archive and Poets.org pages.

While I was looking around for articles about Bishop, I found this one by Stephen Burt, called "Art vs Laundry", on the Poetry Foundation website, and thought it was interesting.

'More and more, this year—especially since our second child was born—I’ve come to feel that poetry just can’t be as important as most people who write about it now make it seem: that, as Elizabeth Bishop put it in another connection, “Art just isn’t worth that much.”' 


What do you think?

Continental Shelf

The next Poetry Cafe Workshop at Bank Street Arts is Wednesday 13th June, 12pm until about 3pm.  Hope you can make it.

After the workshopping, we'll be reading Fred D'Aguiar's Continental Shelf  for the book group. Here's a link to his page on The Poetry Archive.

You might also be interested in an exhibition and symposium at Bank Street Arts called ArText, which is on this week, and is looking at the relationships between art and text.  Click the links for more information.

Thanks!

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.