BEGINNING a. Can I borrow your stapler?
I do still believe in the term ‘experimental’, yeah. I’m pretty sure I don’t know what it means but I think there are probably plenty of poets who could accurately be called ‘experimental’. I don’t think I’d call myself one. When I think of experimental poets I, correctly or otherwise, think of P. Inman, Caroline Bergvall, those kind of people… Everything I’ve seen of Inman’s, for example, has struck me as being part of some big, properly coherent project to push poetry – and by extension: language – forward. And I think that’s maybe a defining characteristic of an experimental poet: that everything they do is motivated by the desire to push things on. Now, although I do utilise certain experimental practices I’m often also moved to write by another impulse. Maybe one directly contrary to experimentation. I don’t know. Often I just want to communicate a feeling in the simplest way possible.
Tom Jenks interviews the poet Richard Barrett.
Two Poems
Somewhere thousands of miles away
I stared down at my half-smoked cigarette
waiting for a point
waiting for the fire to smolder the end
into a crooked peak
to know that you missed me too
Taryn,
you were there for me when I wasn’t there at all
even for myself…
You were there when all the voices turned to static
and my mouth turned to cinder
so I could no longer kiss you on my mouth…
By Zoe Alexandra.
3:AM Cult Hero: Ivor Cutler
By Darran Anderson. “Voiding bowels in those days was unheard of. People just kept it in.” The Sixth Beatle. Fan of bacteria. Enemy of loud noises. Ivor Cutler. Creator of the finest gallows humour this side of Beckett. An accidental Scotsman born after his Jewish parents, fleeing the pogroms of Russia for the promise of […]
Everyone’s a Critic?
Thursday 23 September, 6.30pm Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Road, London, EC1R 3GA Free, but booking essential. The book pages of UK newspapers are under threat. Literary editors are facing huge changes in the way that they review books, yet at the same time our choice of reading matter is bigger than ever before. Whose […]
Out of the Mouth of Babes
The more you read, the more you get carried away with the novel’s flow. This is what immersing yourself into David Foster Wallace feels like, but where the great American magician bores his reader, characters and himself senseless to tell a truly fascinating story the way only he can, Pierre teases and befuddles, creating the stream of a-consciousness that makes us want to swim with rather than sink in it. The sheer electricity of the author’s word is enough to shock us into believing that we no longer need good prose.
Anna Aslanyan on DBC Pierre‘s Lights Out in Wonderland.
3:AM Cities Presents
September 7 2010, 7pm – ***PLEASE NOTE REVISED DATE*** 1 Fitzroy Square London W1T 5HE Discussants: 3:AM contributors Owen Hatherley (The New Ruins of Great Britain) and John Houghton (Jigsaw Cities). The discussion will cover patterns of contemporary urbanism and assess the worth of its building programmes and design standards, as well as the legacy […]