Skip to main content

Poets For Oxfam Autumn Reading Last Night

The Autumn Poetry Reading for the Oxfam Poetry series went well last night - about 75 in the audience, we raised over £550. Seven poets read, their bios are below. There's one last reading in the series, on december 6.
---
Chris Beckett grew up in Ethiopia in the days of Haile Selassie. He studied languages at Oxford, then worked in Australia and Japan at various jobs ranging from shipping clerk to prawn-warehouse manager and beef importer. For the last 15 years, he has been living in London and trading sugar on the international market. Chris won first prize in the Poetry London competition in 2001 and his first collection, The Dog Who Thinks He's a Fish was published by Smith Doorstop in 2004.

Mario Petrucci has degrees in optoelectronics and ecology. Now a poet, broadcaster, educator and RLF Fellow, he has created ground-breaking residencies at the Imperial War Museum, BBC Radio 3 and Southwell Workhouse. Heavy Water (2004) won the Arvon Prize and was the basis of an award-winning film on Chernobyl. He reads tonight from Flowers of Sulphur (2007), winner of both an Arts Council and New London Writers award.

Fleur Adcock was born in New Zealand but has lived in England since 1963. Her previous collections of poetry, now out of print, have been replaced by Poems 1960-2000 (Bloodaxe, 2000). She has also published translations from Romanian and Medieval Latin poetry, and edited several anthologies, including The Faber Book of 20th Century Women's Poetry. She has two sons, six grandchildren, and a great-granddaughter. In 2006 she was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Chris McCabe was born in Liverpool in 1977. His first collection The Hutton Inquiry was published by Salt Publishing, in 2005. He discussed and read some of his poetry on BBC World Service on Armistice Day 2005 and featured a poem on the Oxfam CD Life Lines. A forthcoming pamphlet called The Borrowed Notebook will be published by Landfill this autumn. He currently works as Assistant Librarian at the Poetry Library, London.

Giles Goodland's last book was Capital published by Salt in 2006. Before that was A Spy in the House of Years (Leviathan, 2001).

Julia Bird works for the Poetry School and as a freelance literature promoter. She is currently working on a tour of poets and short story writers heading for arts centres and theatres in autumn 2007. Her poems have been published in various magazines and websites including Smiths Knoll, The Wolf, Tears in the Fence, and Limelight.

Matthew Sweeney. Most recent collection of poems Black Moon (Cape, 2007), and prior to that, Sanctuary (Cape, 2004), Selected Poems (Cape, 2002) and several earlier books of poetry. His work for children includes Up on the Roof: New and Selected Poems (Faber & Faber, 2001) and a novel, Fox (Bloomsbury, 2002). He is co-author, with John Hartley Williams of a chapbook, Writing Poetry (Hodder & Stoughton, 1997 – updated in 2002 and 2008) and has edited or co-edited a number of poetry anthologies including, The New Faber Book of Children’s Verse (Faber & Faber, 2001) and, with Jo Shapcott, Emergency Kit (Faber & Faber, 1996). He is currently working on a book of short stories. Born in Donegal in 1952, he has recently been resident in Berlin, Graz and Timişoara.


Oxfam Books & Music Shop
91 Marylebone High Street, W1

Comments

Ms Baroque said…
I wrote this up a little Todd. Just a little, mind! It was lots of fun, a splendid evening.

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".