September 26, 2010 – 3:AM Magazine

The Missing Links

Ben Myers interviewed in the Guardian. * An anthology of conceptual writing. * Larry Clark‘s X-rated Parisian exhibition (see picture: Untitled, 1972). * Georg Trakl. * Remember Chainsaw fanzine? (I still have a copy of this issue.) * The world’s smallest stop-motion animation movie. * Gerry Feehily: “The one true measure for economic growth is […]

Is This Tomorrow or the End of Time?

Another possibility for this fascination is the lost potential. These stars died so early and who knows what they would’ve done had they lived longer. Buddy Holly died at the age of 22, and his career only lasted two years and yet his legacy is so vast that he was one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. James Dean was in only three films – two of them coming out after his death. And he’s the only person to have been nominated for an Academy Award twice posthumously. When Rolling Stone compiled its list of the 100 greatest guitarists, the top two – Jimi Hendrix and Duane Allman – died young. Robert Johnson was #5. “When someone dies so young, we only have good memories,” Martin Wyatt, director of the Handel House, told me. “They’re preserved in amber.”

Robert O’Connor visits London on the 40th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix‘s death.

Full Time Hobby Showcase at the Windsor Festival

Full Time Hobby are an independent label from London and home to Timber Timbre and Let’s Wrestle to name just a couple. They are putting on a showcase for the label in association with The Firestation Arts Centre at The Theatre Royal – as part of the Windsor Festival, next Friday 1st October 2010. Win […]

Maintenant #29: Annie Katchinska

I try to read Russian poetry in Russian. Maybe I do get influenced by it in that sense — reading this different language, hearing the totally different sounds in the poems, even seeing the Cyrillic alphabet shaped into poems on the page — maybe on some subconscious level all this makes me go back to poetry in English and come at it from a different angle. But I find reading poetry in Russian incredibly difficult — Akhmatova I can do, Tsvetaeva is hard, Mayakovsky is practically impossible. Reading a poem in a language you’re less comfortable with obviously requires a totally different kind of mental effort, different areas of your brain probably — maybe at some point all this will have an influence on what I write, but at the moment it feels like a huge forest I’m only just hacking into.

In the 29th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Russian-born English poet Annie Katchinska.

Three Poems

“Here we go” the wiry woman said
opening the door to the insect circus —
this is the place where beetles tremble in autumn
whirring round on sugary nickel hoops

Girls bare furry teeth
and wind up ladybirds on tightropes for me,
a bluebottle towers by a trapdoor, and hums
In a corner marked CLOWNS
they’re feeding a fat mouth candyfloss…
There are fleas of glitter stuck round a mirror
where you can see my hands, with a dirty flying ant
battling my breath’s
clumsy cartwheels…

By Annie Katchinska.

3:AM Reloaded