Other Lives

Charles Wright showed up on my reading radar only four or five years ago. Since then I have sometimes wondered why I persist in reading anyone else. His publisher in the States is Farrar, and as far as I know, only Stride has published his work over here. Laudable though that is, the Stride books are of poor quality and scattered with misprints - particularly damaging to a poet like Wright who uses the line so creatively. Wouldn't it be good if Bloodaxe furthered there reputation for bringing eminent U.S. poets to these shores by publishing a nice big selected? Or is that more up Carcanet's street? Anyway, here's a short one I pulled off the net. Clear Night Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky. Moon-fingers lay down their same routine On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys. Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls. I want to be bruised by God. I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out. I want to be stretched, ...

As well as learning to blog I have also written three poems in the past week. On Friday evening I was reading Zbigniew Herbert in the bath, feeling playful, unpunctuated and anti-poetic. The result was a mental draft of 'On Haemorrhoids' I had simply to commit to paper once I'd dried off. Sunday night I shifted a few words about for ease of reading, and finished it off. The style isn't typically mine but I think the humour and delight in linking a disparate bunch of sufferers definitely are. On an only marginally more meaningful level the poem is also about achievement being frustrated by physicality. I don't send poems off to magazines as regularly as I used to but I'd be interested to know which ones would consider such a poem. I suspect like many other poets I have squirreled away dozens of poems over the years because they appear at variance with most of the rest of my published work. Perhaps eventually they will make up a collection of their own. 'Undis...

As some of you will know, the U.S. equivalent of the U.K.'s annual Forward Book of Poetry is The Best American Poetry published by Scribner. Each year the series editor, David Lehman, invites an American poet to choose his or her favourite new poems that have appeared in magazines in the previous year. So in 2009, for instance, the guest editor was David Wagoner and in 2008 it was Charles Wright. I've picked up a couple of these over the years but the reason I'm blogging about it is because the other day I discovered that many of the years before 2007 are available from Amazon for only 1p(+p&p)! I've just ordered the one when Charles Simic was editor and can't wait to see what he selected. For a tenner you could get a fairly good overview of American poetry in the last 3 decades.