blog.saltpublishing.com

StAnza 2010: Scotland’s International Poetry Festival

Sarah-Jayne — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:26:06 +0000

StAnza 2010 starts this Wednesday, 17th March and runs until 21st March. Salt authors at the festival include Will Stone, Matthew Sweeney, Rob A. MacKenzie, Tom Pow and Victor Rodriguez Núñez.

Check out the full list of events on the official website www.stanzapoetry.org.

You can book tickets through the StAnza Box Office, Byre Theatre 01334 475000 or Online through the website.

Salt authors at the London Word Festival

Sarah-Jayne — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:40:21 +0000

Shad Thames, Broken Wharf by Chris McCabe

Chris McCabe has written a brilliant new piece, a ‘play of voices’ exploring the history of London’s docks, with live music from Bleeding Heart Narrative and original film by Jack Wake-Walker. Iain Sinclair introduces Shad Thames, Broken Wharf on 18th March.

Tickets cost £8 adv / £10 door | Starts 7.30pm at Jamboree, Cable Street Studios.

Performance Poetry Special

Luke Kennard joins Tim Turnbull and Laura Dockrill for a performance poetry special, with an additional gruesome Powerpoint presentation on heartbreak on 24th March.

Tickets cost £6.50 adv / £8 door | Starts 7pm at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club.

The London Word Festival is on until 1st April. Check out the website www.londonwordfestival.com for more details.

A Residency Within a Residency

Sarah-Jayne — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:16:55 +0000

Chrissie Gittins was appointed Writer-in-residence with the borough of Lewisham in January. She has a ‘room of her own’ in the attic at Forest Hill Library. Lewisham Library Service is launching her third children’s poetry collection – A Humpback’s Wail at the Grade II listed Manor House Library on 24th April. She will be working with Lewisham schools and with the Horniman Museum.

In addition, for the month of September, Chrissie will be resident writer with Shetland Arts on the Shetland Islands. She will stay right next to the sea in The Booth in Scalloway. As well as taking part in the 2010 Wordplay Festival and visiting Shetland schools she will have two weeks for her own work.

Chrissie Gittins’ titles I’ll Dress One Night As You and Family Connections are available now from our online store with 20% off.

Charlotte Prince appointed Sales Manager

Chris — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:21:01 +0000

We are delighted to announce that Charlotte Prince has been appointed as Sales Manager. Charlotte will manage accounts with bookstores (both chains and independents) in the USA and Europe. She will continue to take Salt’s list to our established customers in the trade, as well as forging new relationships with booksellers.

Charlotte will now actively working to take Salt titles to a wider range of key independent bookstores across the UK and Ireland, forging new partnerships and alliances. She will gradually extend this role to the USA, Canada and continental Europe.

Beside retail sales, Charlotte will improve and expand Salt’s dealings with library suppliers and wholesale distributor accounts in the UK and USA, in particular developing library sales and schools sales with an emphasis on our fiction, poetry, children’s and academic lists.

As well as controlling Salt’s key trade accounts, Charlotte will continue to develop direct sales strategies and promotions for the front and backlist — working with our several thousand online customers. We congratulate her on this enhanced role within the Salt management team and wish her continued success.

The Salt Companion to Jim Barnes is here!

Charlotte — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:38:46 +0000

Edited by A. Robert Lee, this first book on Jim Barnes’ work, which fully recognises his mix of Anglo-Welsh and Choctaw Oklahoma heritage, could not be timelier – it is a long overdue tribute.

“The one right word,” as he writes in ‘The Poet’s Paradise,’ has long been a Jim Barnes desideratum. Across an illustrious literary career that has produced nine volumes of verse from This Crazy Land (1980) to Visiting Picasso (2007), there can be little doubt of seriously dedicated verve, a craftsman’s eye and ear. His landmark autobiography, On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions(1997) adds its own weight, a life and its imaginative turn running from hard-scrub Oklahoma birth and mixed Anglo-Celtic and Choctaw lineage, through Oregon logging in the 1950s, to an eventual professorial career at Truman State University, Missouri (1970-2003) and Brigham Young University (2003-2006).

He is the author of an important comparative study, The Fiction of Malcolm Lowry and Thomas Mann: Structural Tradition (1990), a prize-winning translator of the Munich poet Dagmar Nick, and for over nearly four decades the editor of the poetry journal The Chariton Review. This first-ever volume of essays dedicated to his work is both belated and timely recognition.

The Salt Companion to Jim Barnes includes: ‘Bones Beneath My Feet’, a wide-ranging interview with Barnes, his life and writing. Contributions include a personal salute (Ken Lincoln), an across the board map of his poetry (A. Robert Lee), scrutiny of the early verse (Lance Larsen) and of the verse of the middle years (Samuel Maio), an account of Barnes’s postcard poems (Linda Helstern), and an excavation of the Barnes-Dylan Thomas connection (James Mackay). Three essays link the poetry to Native Grounds: Memoirs and Impressions (Robin Riley Fast, Paul Beekman Taylor and Patricia Clark Smith). “Poetry makes everything happen” said Jim Barnes on being appointed Oklahoma’s poet laureate in 2008. It could not speak better to his own achievement.

BUY NOW at 20% discount from the online shop.

Chris Agee shortlisted for the inaugural Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry

Chris — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 08:58:37 +0000

The Poetry Society announces the shortlist for the inaugural Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry

The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry seeks to recognise excellence in poetry, highlighting outstanding contributions made by poets to our cultural life.

Jackie Kay for Maw Broon Monologues (performed at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow). A full-length performance combining rhythmic verse, music and theatre.
Dannie Abse for New Selected Poems 1949-2009: Anniversary Collection (published by Hutchinson 2009). A celebration of the 60th anniversary of Dannie Abse’s first collection After Every Green Thing.
Paul Farley for Field Recordings: BBC Poems (1998-2008) (published by Donut Press 2009). This work brings together Farley’s broadcast poetry for the BBC over a ten-year period.
John Glenday for Grain (published by Picador 2009). Fourteen years in the making Grain is at times delicately lyrical and at times playful or surreal.
Alice Oswald for Weeds and Wild Flowers (published by Faber and Faber 2009). This is a magical meeting of the visionary poems of Alice Oswald and the darkly beautiful etchings of Jessica Greenman.
Chris Agee for Next To Nothing (published by Salt Publishing 2009). Next to Nothing records the years following the death of a beloved child in 2001.
Andrew Motion for The Cinder Path (published by Faber and Faber 2009). Motion’s collection offers a spectrum of lyrics, love poems and elegies all exploring how people cope with threats to and in the world around them.

With the permission of Carol Hughes, this innovative award is named in honour of Ted Hughes and recognises the many ways poets are working today, in printed forms and beyond. Poetry collections for adults and children were considered alongside radio poems, film poems, public art inscriptions and works for the stage. The £5,000 prize money has been donated by Carol Ann Duffy, funded from the annual honorarium that the Poet Laureate traditionally receives from HM The Queen. Any UK living poet, working in any form, who made the most exciting contribution to poetry between 1 January 2009 – 31 December 2009, was eligible for the award.

Duffy was delighted with the judge’s choices: “The Ted Hughes Award is named in honour of a great laureate and celebrates new work in poetry, in any medium. I am thrilled at the diversity of the shortlist which the judges have announced today.”

Five for Friday — a JustOneBook Special Offer

Chris — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:30:10 +0000

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Simon Barraclough’s Los Alamos Mon Amour out NOW in Paperback

Jen — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:23:48 +0000

Simon Barraclough’s debut collection, Los Alamos Mon Amour, which was shortlisted for the 2008 Forward Prize, has just been released in paperback. We caught up with Simon to find out how things have been since his Forward nomination.

1. When did you get the bug for writing poetry — and at what point did you decide that you were going to pursue having a collection published?

The urge to write goes back further than my interest in poetry. When I was six, I scandalised a primary school teacher by asking for a new exercise book so that I could write her a ‘Dr. Who’ novel. I scrawled many pages and crayoned in a few Dalek space ships but, despite an international bidding war for the rights, I just couldn’t finish it to my satisfaction. The poetry bug hit me when I was about 13 after being ambushed by Ted Hughes, W.H. Auden, D.H. Lawrence, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Mix in a little bit of Robert Smith from The Cure and the conditions were right to trigger that whole teenage poetry thing.

It was around my 30th birthday that I decided to knuckle down and take writing poetry more seriously. A few years later, with a couple of dozen poems I felt might be good enough, I started thinking about the possibility of a collection.

2. Are there other writers in your family — were you encouraged to be creative as a child?

No writers, but my dad was a talented musician, my sister is a talented artist and my mum is constantly creative with quilts and fabrics and clothes. We didn’t have a vast library at home but we had some key building blocks: Ulysses, some Shakespeare, Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and Arnold Silcock’s wonderful anthology Verse & Worse. My sister was always drawing and painting, my dad was often composing and I think that this environment, along with some excellent schoolteachers, encouraged a certain amount of creativity in my childhood.

3. Is there something you can say about your love for films and your writing? Do they feed off each other in some way?

The two art forms that impressed me the most as a child were music and cinema. I found both to be overwhelming and shot through with fear and beauty. Somehow my imagination took on a pictorial or cinematic bent and I’m keen to treat cinema, even at its most populist, as one of the highest art forms. It seems to me that some of the greatest poetry from before the time of cinema predicted it or strove, in a funny way, to create it. Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ is incredibly visual and suspenseful and whole swathes of ‘Paradise Lost’ anticipate (maybe create) epic cinema, right down to the elaborate ’special effects’ that we’re only managing to perfect today but which have always been part and parcel of the literary imagination.

4. How did it feel when you found out that you’d been shortlisted for the Forward Prize?

I heard from a friend and I was delighted, of course, but I also felt a little nervous and exposed. You crave coverage and appreciation for your work but at the same time part of you flinches from it. It was an excellent shortlist and I remain very proud to have been part of it.

5. What’s the past year been like for you as a published author?

Since the book came out I’ve been much busier with readings and I’ve also branched out into school and radio work. In 2008, I appeared regularly on Radio 4’s The Film Programme and they set me all kinds of poetic challenges in the manner of Lars von Trier! I got to condense 10 new releases into 60 seconds of poetry, sum up the films of the year in one poem and write a villanelle for Truffaut’s ‘Jules et Jim’. I’ve also been lucky enough to appear on Radio 3’s The Verb a couple of times and they even let me record a prose memoir with music, which was a lovely new challenge. In January The Verb asked me to write a poem in memory of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the amazing man who survived both Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

6. What are your greatest influences?

It’s tricky to define influences because they’re as much about the future as the past. I don’t know yet what will influence me tomorrow or next year. Using very broad strokes I’d say that Ted Hughes, Samuel Beckett, John Berryman, Amy Clampitt, Alexander Pope, Mark Doty, Alfred Hitchcock have all influenced me in one way or another. And then there are the inescapable giants like Shakespeare and Milton who are just ‘always already there’. But I’d also need to factor in the vibrant contemporary poetry scene and stir in places and disciplines like London, New York, Rome, Venice, cinema, astronomy. I fell in love with Italian cinema, which made me fall in love with the Italian language, which now feeds back into my poetry…it’s always in flux.

7. Are you still writing — what are your plans, writerly or otherwise?

Well, I’m very excited to have a pamphlet of commissioned poems coming out from Penned in the Margins in May this year. It’s called Bonjour Tetris and contains all my radio poems to date, along with some other interesting commissions. I’m also working on the next full book and I’m ‘curating’ two poetry events to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. I’ve sliced the film into 12 segments and allotted them to 12 poets, each of whom is writing a 2-minute poem about their segment. Between us we’re creating a strange new poetic version of the film. The piece will be performed at the British Film Institute on Saturday April 10th and at The Whitechapel Gallery on Thursday May 13th.

Los Alamos Mon Amour is available now at the Salt online store at 20% discount: click here

Huge 70% discounts on short stories and poems!

Chris — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:46:20 +0000

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10 classic titles from the women’s avant-garde: all 50% off RRP!

Chris — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:10:01 +0000

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