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Biography
Caleb was born in Birmingham in 1983. He has worked as an environmental sustainability consultant, a freelance writer and editor and a teaching assistant at the University of Texas at Austin. Currently, he works for Zamyn [www.zamyn.org ], an independent analytical agency focussed on international development, based in London. His poetry has most recently appeared online in Granta and The Manchester Review, and is forthcoming in the print anthology Lung Jazz: Young Poets for Oxfam and Stand magazine.
The Interview
So where did the book begin for you, how did the book come to be written?
The book’s made up of five sections, mostly written separately – so there have been five beginnings, over the last few years, more if you include the many poems I thought might grow into sequences, or lead to others like themselves, but didn’t. The most recent beginning – of it as a book – came about a year ago. The parts change when put together, so there was lots of redrafting and moving about to get it to be something of a whole.
What was going on in your life while you were writing it?
I was living between Texas and the UK – studying and teaching in Austin during term time, then spending holidays with my girlfriend in London, Birmingham and Yorkshire, with a road trip across Texas and New Mexico in there too.
What do you think were the real driving elements within the book — the things that moved it all forward for you?
The summer before last, I read in a footnote on a blog the title of a book that sounded intriguing. It was called Bookmen’s Bedlam: an Olio of Literary Oddities, written by Walter Hart Blumenthal and published in 1955. The next morning I cycled into campus, to the brutalist Perry-Castañeda Library (a building not designed to be seen from below but above – looking down you see that it’s shaped like Texas) and found a dusty copy of Bookmen’s Bedlam amongst rows of outdated encyclopedias. When I’d carried it across an eight-lane highway home, and read chapters on very small books, very large books, and books bound with human skin, I came across an account of the ‘discovery’ of the oldest known printed book – the Diamond Sutra – lifted by a British explorer from a monastic cave that had been sealed for centuries, in Western China. Having never been to China, I kept reading – making my way through the explorer Aurel Stein’s diaries of his trek across the desert, and of sweet-talking the hapless monk appointed to look after the cave, then inevitably going back online to look at tourists’ photographs of themselves in the painted Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, and then more books in the many sharp corners of the PCL. The Diamond Sutra is now kept in the British Library, where my girlfriend went to work every day while I was writing the book.
How long did it take to bring it all together?
About six months – from gathering together the poems to feeling like I had something that could be given a title of its own.
Who was important to you in developing your writing life?
My dad’s a writer and has always taken me seriously as one too.
Where do you think you’ll go to next in your writing — what are you working on now?
I’d like to be writing an epic poem on Haile Selassie’s exile in Bath. The Emperor fled there after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia.
Postcards of Stein’s Trip.
[After the British . . .]
After the British, the French and the Russian collectors,
more Russians made it to the Mogao caves,
emigrants sent there by Chinese bureaucrats
who didn’t know what else to do with them.
They had left together because they were unwanted
not because they were friends;
half had stopped talking to the other half,
who slept in the upper caves, in shifts.
In one cave a smiling statue is dressed in robes
painted with pictures of rooms
in which men sit cross-legged facing statues
dressed in men-in-rooms pattern,
the surface repeated, revealed,
inside itself and so on like gossip.
The emigrants wrote their names all over the statue,
carved genitals into its mouth
and cut out its eyes. “The kind of shit people do
to find out where they are”,
my friend would say after biting his wife
in his sleep. “In my dream I was in a house
with no walls”, he’d tell me, out getting his bearings,
in an open space, on his own.
He once woke under a desk
on the eighteenth floor of an empty office block.
The panicked guard sat him down
in front of the security tapes
and they had silently watched nothing happen
in silent grey rooms for an hour
by the time my friend saw himself
slip through the back door.
Nobody had ever seen the cave behind the water.
”Please don’t show it in your film”,
requested the elder tribesman. “We would rather not pry
where the swifts go. It is their place,
not ours”. The elder and the director shook hands.
They understood one another.
But how could he not still take a camera
through the falls, just once, to turn
on himself, to star in what wasn’t really there?
Discover more about Caleb Klaces
Poems
The Sun in a Box (Granta) [http://www.granta.com/new-writing/new-poet-caleb-klaces]
Towards Selection (Horizon Review) [http://www.saltpublishing.com/horizon/issues/06/text/Klaces_Caleb.htm]
As a Request for Permission (Clinic) [http://clinicpresents.com/2012/01/16/asarequestforpermissio/]
Painting over Aya Sofia (Poetry Foundation) [http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/237718]
Language is Her Caravan (Poetry Foundation) [http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/237720]
All Safe All Well (Flarestack Poets) [http://www.flarestackpoets.co.uk/page9.htm]
Prose
Letters from One Young Poet to Another (Granta) [http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Letters-from-one-Young-Poet-to-Another]
Three Variations on Quotation (Notes from the Underground) [http://www.nftu.co.uk/2011/11/22/three-variations-on-the-theme-of-quotation/]
Three Poets and the World (The White Review) [http://www.thewhitereview.org/features/three-poets-and-the-world/]
As Editor
Likestarlings [http://www.Likestarlings.com]
Bat City Review [http://batcityreview.com/]
Biography
I just got back from Antarctica – 24-hour daylight, and an ice shelf the size of France. It’s strange for a girl who grew up in a beach town in New Zealand, and moved to dusty Iowa City to study writing. But camping on the Ross Ice Shelf under an active volcano is much like reading a great poem: it launches you out of the world, and also drags you deeper into it. Now I’m back in Wellington, where I live with an opera director in a falling-down mansion, and I write, drink wine, and pretend I can play football.
The Interview
So where did the book begin for you, how did the book come to be written?
It really began when I moved back home from America, back from little Iowa City, Iowa, and suddenly I wasn’t at school anymore. I missed the structure and the stimulation, and hanging out with other anxious workaholics who also believed Yeats was a superhero. After two Masters degrees, I came back to New Zealand and realized I was alone, and mortal, and I sure as hell better write something that was risky and true.
What was going on in your life while you were writing it?
I was trying to stay still. I’d come back to New Zealand but I kept escaping back to the States, or to London, or to see a friend in China. People kept asking me where I was living. I tried to date some lovely men, but I was always darting off to some shiny city or museum or cornfield. So, the poems’re about escape… and about trying to exist in the present.
What do you think were the real driving elements within the book — the things that moved it all forward for you?
What isn’t moving forward? The other day it snowed here for the first time in twenty years. And a guy died in a parking lot drain, trying to retrieve his carkeys. It seems to me that we’re constantly inventing systems to understand the world, models which overflow their bounds, collide, break their own rules.
How long did it take to bring it all together?
I started seriously writing poems six years ago, but most of the poems in the book were written in the last couple of years.
Who was important to you in developing your writing life?
Writers! – those I’m lucky enough to know personally, but also, those who I feel I know: George Eliot, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Shakespeare, Virgil, Didion … all of whom, in different ways, understand the way humans function and malfunction. When I feel miserable, I pick up Middlemarch at a random page and read. And I feel immense gratitude for the earth again.
Where do you think you’ll go to next in your writing — what are you working on now?
I recently visited Antarctica, courtesy of Antarctica New Zealand, and I find it difficult to convey how bloody astounding it was. I’m writing a book of essays in response, generously supported by Creative New Zealand, that rips open landscape, the mind, and desire.
“Suggested tools to wrestle with poems (Scott’s hut at Cape Evans, Antarctica)”
Orbit
Thanks to The Boston Review, in which the publication of this poem is forthcoming.
I drive an icy valley towards you, where the mountains
alone’re worth a thousand errors; where trees
shake slowly as if on film. Earth’s curtains have built
a frame for us that for once I can’t act myself
out of. I tried to write our bodies in a play; but I confused
our parts; and had to try to flee the stage
under the gold, torn walls of the ballroom.
When we dance I understand an orbit’s pull and circle.
Ours is a life worth losing; let’s unlace it
from its post and see what creature it becomes.
I fear our brains’ geology: their strike-slip faults;
their symmetry. But when driving
an island to see you, the roads open
the earth. And I want to know no other.
Discover more about Alice Miller
Author website http://ackmiller.com/
Dark energy beyond the reception rooms: The Mind, Love, and Tolstoy http://www.listener.co.nz/commentary/dark-energy-beyond-the-reception-rooms-the-mind-love-tolstoy/, essay in the New Zealand Listener, 2010, winner of the Royal Society of New Zealand Manhire Prize.
Radio New Zealand interview http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/summernights/audio/2507017/alice-miller-antarctic-experience about Antarctica, January 2012.
The Windmill http://www.bnz.co.nz/static/www/docs/2009-KMA-The-Windmill-Premier.pdf, story courtesy of BNZ, 2009, winner of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Premier Award.
Best New Zealand Poems http://www.nzetc.org/iiml/bestnzpoems/BNZP07/contents.html, 2007.
Biography
Born in bombed out Bristol, UK, now based on the windswept Surf Coast, Australia, I go back every summer to see my mother in Bath, and friends from school and college days.
When I heard the word charabanc at the age of three, I fell about laughing. That was it; the beginning of a love affair with language. My folks kept me (not only from children who were rough) but also from newspapers when they discovered I could read at four, thanks to Dick and Jane, Pip and Spot.
I progressed to nonsense poetry at 5 (thanks, Spike) and won my first prize at 9, when I memorised GM Hopkins Spring and recited it in front of the class. Still can, never get asked.
Teaching English, Dance and Drama was the obvious career choice because I was a show-off and party gal. I knew the words of every Shirley Bassey number and Sound of Music lyrics by the time I was 12.
When the price of cigarettes went up in 1976, I came to Oz on a whim. I joined theatre groups, playing dubious women like Eliza Doolittle, Dulcinea from Man of la Mancha, Lady Macbeth and Elizabeth I. Too often a dancing girl in cabaret shows.
When my son was a baby I left teaching but later worked for a community group that had me recruiting the long term unemployed in the manufacturing industry, and later working with new arrivals, refugees and disadvantaged youth. Now that my son is at uni, I’ve been able to go back to my first love; poetry. I also write love stories for couples marrying on beaches along the Great Ocean Road, as a celebrant.
The Interview
So where did the book begin for you, how did the book come to be written?
Poems in Burlesque have been written over the last 15 years, the majority in the last five. I enrolled in a Creative Writing course where my poet teachers were inspirational. When I submitted poems to journals and they were selected I was encouraged to keep going but sadly, my personal life was in trouble.
What was going on in your life while you were writing it?
Misery around the breakdown of a relationship and the fact that I had a young son to care for had contrasting outcomes. I produced a turbo-charged blood jet of writing, but had to go back to full-time work and give up study. I stopped writing for a few years.
What do you think were the real driving elements within the book — the things that moved it all forward for you?
A busy life and curiosity have always provided plenty to write about, but the greatest boost that got me going again was having a poem selected for Best Australian Poems 2008 (UQP). I didn’t appreciate how significant that was at the time, too busy worrying about my teenage son enjoying his own colourful private life. It wasn’t until 2009 that I got serious, and decided to start performing and blitz competitions. I performed at several slams and Poetry Idol final with Les Murray watching on and learned that slams are not my style. I much prefer reading to an audience that appreciates the word and not the act. My son settled into study like a good boy.
How long did it take to bring it all together?
In 2011, I had enough finished pieces for a full length collection. It took weeks to order, cull, edit and decide on a title. So many incarnations. So hard to kill your darlings. And can I ever be happy with it? No. I want to put all my new stuff in it and fiddle.
Who was important to you in developing your writing life?
There have been many inspirations apart from men, friends, stupidity and dead things. Mum, who helped me with the first nonsense poem. Dad, who walked me to the library once a week. Winning the Oxford Book of Verse when I was 9 took me to my love, The Lady of Shalott, and delight in The Night Mail, all rhythm and begging to be read aloud.
Then Plath, McGough and Beckett, ahhh! Beckett. Wrist-slashing with a smile.
Ania Walwicz and her streams of consciousness affected me deeply. Now I read so many beautiful new poets.
I have to mention my old English teacher, Miss Pittaway, who liked my hippy poem in year 10 and now, Dr Cassandra Atherton, a dynamic poet and writer who encouraged me to put the manuscript together last year and get it out.
Where do you think you’ll go to next in your writing — what are you working on now?
Continuing to write poetry, some short and longer fiction. There is also a script I’d like to develop in which Plath and Hughes reunite on the Queen Mary 2. Homage with humour. Also reading in preparation for a study tour to Scandinavia in June.
In the background I’ve been thinking about a multi-genre autobiography for my disinterested son but perhaps a poetry manuscript is memoir enough. He won’t read it until I’m dead. He knows he’ll get a shock.
“This is me and the other, stained with red wine, in usual happy state, and nasty collection of dead, weird things.”
Kathy K
First appeared in Wet Ink in 2007. Selected for Best Australian Poems 2008 (UQP Editor David Brooks).
she milks twelve cows in the bare-arsed raw,
pays the plumber’s bill with a grimy rut
on tie-dyed sheets
breeds two stud boys
to ‘see how it feels’
and with the delicate hands
of an aristocrat
gathers her hair into a comb
driving home alone through ghost gums
3 a.m. New Year’s Day out of Castlemaine
her foxy dog catches the whiff of
kebab wrapper under the accelerator and
with the reflex of a hunter short
on thrills, leaps into a role play
she tries to brake, takes the bend too fast
and whacks into the nearest tree
it’s legend for Miss Bush Tragedy and
in the words of someone not close,
‘I don’t believe that story about the dog,
I think she was pissed.’
and now she stands there, and not there
in the same crepe dress
cherokee hair, terracotta skin.
‘There’s something jarring between you and I,’ says the Lady K.
‘You’re dead,’ I say.
but from the next room
I hear her sigh.
Discover more about Julie Maclean
Poetry
http://www.styluspoetryjournal.com/main/master.asp?id=792
http://www.styluspoetryjournal.com/main/master.asp?id=184
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6655/is_2_33/ai_n29414514/
http://192.232.128.225/Centres/VocationalAccessandEducation/Divan/Divan7Proof/html/bag_lady.html
http://rabbitpoetry.com/
http://www.southerncrosstango.com.au/docs/Tango%20Australis%202011%20January.pdf
http://www.southerncrosstango.com.au/docs/Tango%20Australis%20June%202011.pdf
Shortlisted in Chapbook Prizes
http://laurasmithisbeingapoet.blogspot.com.au/2010_08_01_archive.html
http://www.wellsprungproductions.com.au/PressPress/PressPress_Home.html
Broadcast memoir
http://search.abc.net.au/search/search.cgi?form=simple&num_ranks=20&collection=abcall&query=julie+maclean
Biography
I was born and grew up in a small town in the American South: Jacksonville, Texas. I wasn’t actually a big reader when I was a kid; I was more interested in math. But I did, for whatever reason, start writing poetry in early adolescence. I’d write really terrible nature poems and send them to sham organizations who tried to get you to buy their anthology with your poem in it for $100. After high school, I moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where I thought I wanted to study to be a physician, but decided to study literature instead. Now I know, like Keats and Williams, I could’ve done both, but I would’ve made a tragically bad doctor. So thank god literature intervened. When I was deciding whom to take classes with, I came across the poetry of Mary Jo Bang who was a faculty member. One of her poems got me interested in contemporary poetry, where before, the most contemporary poet I’d read was Auden. After that, I couldn’t do much without being distracted by ideas for poetry. I worked for a couple of years after college before I decided I needed more time to write than a full-time job would allow. So I enrolled in the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which was an incredible experience that permitted me to finish a book and make a lot of like-minded friends. Now I’m still teaching in Iowa City on a postgraduate fellowship and living here with my wife, a soon-to-be-famous librarian-book-artist.
The Interview
So where did the book begin for you, how did the book come to be written?
The book began with a painting, Duccio’s “The Madonna and Child,” in which neither subject looks particularly happy, and the child looks like he’s about to gouge out the eye of his mother. The mother has a look of utter malaise, while the child looks at her with consummate contempt. I appreciated how Duccio could queer the conceits of a traditional Madonna and child painting without resorting to iconoclasm. This began a series of poems largely concerned with queering conceits as a way into tradition.
What was going on in your life while you were writing it?
I was transitioning. I was jobless. Then I was working a job. Then I quit the job in the middle of a global recession to become a graduate student in a poetry writing workshop. Then I was married. Now I’m trying to figure out how to support myself. Along the way I met a lot of new poets, made a lot of new friends, went to a lot of readings, read a lot of books, spent a lot of money. Packed my apartment with books while my bank account dwindled of funds. And most recently, I’ve been teaching and reviewing books.
What do you think were the real driving elements within the book — the things that moved it all forward for you?
The things that propelled the book for me were just the things I was thinking about as both a young poet and as a kind of adolescent. The title, Bastard Star, not only comes from a line in the book, but to me means a star that somewhat refuses to constellate. So I was thinking about the individual poet’s relationship to the canon as well as my own relationships to traditions, good or bad, that I was born into – namely, patriarchy. In different ways, most of the poems can be said to be about parentage, which can give shape, support, and direction, but can also set one on terrible trajectories that in the book lead to ennui, or at worst, fatal crimes. In short, the driving elements in the book were issues of tradition and the individual talent, patriarchy and gender, and also mainstream mediation.
How long did it take to bring it all together?
I wrote the earliest poem in the collection in 2006, and the last in 2011: five years, though the actual work came on and off. There was probably a whole year in there during which I didn’t write a single poem. Then probably half or more came from the final year of the five year period. And I’m still restless when it comes to rearranging and editing.
Who was important to you in developing your writing life?
I’m not sure I have a writing life. I’m the most undisciplined writer I know. I have no good habits that I can recommend, and honestly, I’d love suggestions for good role models in this respect. The poems in this collection came spasmodically over the course of five years. I’d write nothing for three months, then several poems in a week, then nothing again for three more months, or sometimes longer. But there were writers and works I’d return to loyally over this time. When I felt creative impulses but didn’t know how to get started, I could always begin by responding to Hamlet, for instance, or Wallace Stevens or T.S. Eliot. And a lot of inducement came from belonging to a writing community in Iowa City, Iowa, where people actually cared to see (or seemed to care) what (or that) I was producing, which is rare for a poet.
Where do you think you’ll go to next in your writing — what are you working on now?
Right now I’m working on a series of acrostics of words one might see in books that introduce children or language-learners to the municipal world: BANK, HOSPITAL, FIRETRUCK, MAILMAN, MAINSTREET, etc. It’s the first formal project I’ve ever done as well as the first time I’ve ever made myself sit down and write poems without feeling particularly compelled. There’s a phantom of a concept behind the immediate formal constraint that I can’t quite articulate yet but I can talk about. The form of the acrostic is in keeping with a child’s conception of the world. The idea implies that one’s surroundings are codified less arbitrarily – that each concrete noun is not just a reference to or stand-in for a thing, its referent, but further an acronym of descriptors of that thing. So far I’m just seeing where it goes, and I’m not trying to write descriptors of the marginal word; I’m only using the word as a primer, so my lines tend to organize around it as a more abstract concept. For me, this is a demonstration of how modern poets operate generally – one is always guided by an idea just to the left of the margin. I’m also thinking about a book of nonfiction, lyrical prose.
Some Lines about Last Night’s Weather
Methodically the storm turns,
Recasts, ampler, its vision
Recast. Its periphery glances
The wheat of the plains, say,
Mild flirtation at first, then more aggressive,
Its demonstration as crescendo
Or as tide, sinuous process––wind utters water
Utters wind––a partnership resisted until
Fields of wheat bend to it, bearing the signature of storm
As of a vast intaglio,
The Great Lake gossiping to the air
Before bleating like a beat lamb, waves
Reaching you transformed––like tradition,
Whose passage transcends only itself,
Its consequence inadequate,
Or else the storm is catastrophic.
Discover more about Micah Bateman
http://www.nyqpoets.net/poet/micahbateman
http://english.uiowa.edu/faculty/profiles/bateman.shtml
https://www.facebook.com/micah.bateman
POEMS
http://versemag.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-poem-by-micah-bateman.html
http://www.timberjournal.com/#!__poetry/micah-bateman
http://www.missourireview.org/content/dynamic/view_text.php?text_id=2731
http://www.superarrow.org/IssueTwo/ParableBateman.html
http://www.juked.com/2010/10/soliloquy.asp
http://www.nighttrainmagazine.com/contents/bateman_9_1.php
Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation
After 8 years in post the current Editors have indicated their intention to retire at the end of 2012.
This is an exciting opportunity to become the Editor and the public representative of an internationally important poetry magazine, founded by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort and currently edited by David and Helen Constantine. MPT, one of very few journals specializing in the translation of poetry, has recently been awarded National Portfolio status by Arts Council England.
Proven ability in the translation of poetry and a good knowledge of poetry are essential. You need to have an informed appreciation of MPT’s work, and plenty of ideas for its development. Other essential qualifications are an excellent command of the English language, self-motivation, and the ability to deal with a great variety of people and to make and maintain good contacts in the arts world. You need strong ideas for the future of MPT, and a clear sense of how they may be carried through.
You will also need to have relevant experience in publishing, editing, proofing and copy-editing. You will work in collaboration with the Managing Editor, who is responsible for overseeing all financial and administrative matters. Editor and Managing Editor work together to ensure the bi-annual publication of MPT and of occasional pamphlets, and to hold ‘live literature’ events for their promotion. Both are answerable to the Board of Trustees, which meets quarterly in London.
The Editor will be self-employed and paid 13,500 GBP per annum. The post is part-time, home-based, and could be job-shared, so joint applications for it are also acceptable.
Closing date: 25th March 2012. Interviews: Tuesday 24th April 2012, London.
Please visit www.mptmagazine.com/page/jobs for more information on the job, and to download the application form. Please email the application form to administrator@mptmagazine.com by midnight on 25th March 2012. Applicants shortlisted for interview will be contacted by 16th April 2012. Please assume you have not been successful if you do not hear from us by that date.
Peter Pegnell’s Bright Scarf poetry night
returns this Thursday 16th February
at the Waterman’s Arms pub
on Water Lane in Richmond,
opposite the PictureHouse
Tim Cumming will be reading poems from The Rapture
Peter Pegnell will be previewing work from his forthcoming new collection
The four pounds entry includes a free Thai buffet
Jarvis Cocker reads his song lyrics.
Wednesday 22 February, 7pm.
The Lady Mitchell Hall,
West Road, Cambridge
All welcome. Free.
Includes Q & A
We certainly agree with Samuel Watson that you can’t go wrong with poetry on Valentine’s Day — he features The Salt Book of Younger Poets in his top ten. Don’t miss it, your significant other will simply love it.
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