Dominic James
Event diary and other news on the poetry front
Monday 29 April 2024
Anand Prahlad
Wednesday 24 April 2024
Rattling good read
I’m reading the latest pamphlet sent with Rattle, George Bilgere’s ‘Cheap Motels of my Youth.’ At the half way point, here’s a mildly acid report on a collection George picked up, with an airgun, from a cardboard moving box unopened for half a century. “An astonishingly debut” says the blurb. Hmm. The new poem, “Insult to Injury” has just the right tone for dealing a blow to, or taking a shot at, a brother poet. Very funny.
Coincidentally trying something like that for a dusty
pamphlet I have just found in the bookcase, mildly disliked from years ago, I’m
reminded the promotional excerpt on the new Rattle pamphlet was misleading. Perhaps
I had been outmanoeuvred. The chapbook prize winner is better than the out-of-context
lines taken from “Misting”
Each day brings more bad weather,
which is another way of saying
I’m in my sixties. But here, in the
frail
September morning, my hands tipped in fog,
the flowers lift their faces to me
with bright, mystifying questions,
and for once I have an answer.
It reads better when you understand misting, means… misting:
a nozzle setting for watering flowers. I had failed the meaning and missed the ‘mystifying’
echo and pun, I thought we had a poetic device not followed through. Too quick to judge.
Following ‘At the Carwash’ by Arthur Russell, here is another collection of blank verse, commonplace
reminiscences from a middle aged man. The
brutal thing itself! And again it is at times,
very touching and in all, totally worthwhile. A privilege to read. Right up the editor’s street I guess.
Rattle’s Timothy Green is a hard-working editor and a powerfully
good essayist on poets. His interview pieces in the journal keep me entering
the competitions while pretty sure my only success will be the subscription
that comes with the fee.
God knows, accessible, clear-headed writing should be lauded
above the common stock. Still, better than the straightforward, confessional
writings of mature men, I would submit, if I dared, that Poetry offers something
more spiritual, more universally embracing, when it is on track, that is more mystical.
And this sort of thing is not. Hey ho, I send submissions, regret my failings
at leisure, happy with my lot.
See Rattle Chapbooks
Wednesday 3 April 2024
Randall Jarrell
Jarrell then, sits well with current companions Mandelstam and Rumi. and CGJung. Blessings be among them.
Wednesday 14 February 2024
Rom
A great sadness to hear Nnorom Azuonye has passed away. Poet and pastor, founder of Sentinel Quarterly he promoted Nigerian literature for more than 20 years and gave many local poets an encouraging lift with SQL and his quarterly competitions which were the model arrangement of such things. Along the way he published my first submitted poems and then, a few years later, invited and accepted my first manuscript. He put me squarely on the first stepping stones of my poetry writing.
A generous, sympathetic and good man. He could talk alright, and I will miss our conversations.
Nnorom died on 21 January and leaves behind his wife Thelma and four children whom he loved very much.
Sunday 31 December 2023
The Party Wall
Pyramus and Thisbe: prompted by last night's rain, a thought led to the marionettes in the oddly poignant 'Being John Malkovich'. One google string leads to another. The Pyramus and Thisbe Society is a body of surveyors and lawyers and, on special occasions, their spouses.
Mari...
full poem once accepted somewhere maybe
...my bones are dead.
No cell retains a strand of life
to edge me on the infinite...
a corpse of balsa boxes fixed
with glue and pin
The more i think of it, the more the history of creating the animate comes to mind, from Pygmalion and Galatea to Shakespeare's human statue and Pinocchio, then Shaw's rather awful funny version of improvement, and a thousand cautionary tales current today. Aye, AI. The captured human heart.
Saturday 11 November 2023
November 23
With other cares aside, appearances and reviews multiply this month, 3rd of 3 city walk poems accepted by Stepaway Outreach, hard on the heels of By Royal Fort, taken for the inaugural edition, i think, of Engine Idling. Station to Station will be in the Gloucestershire Poetry Prize anthology published sometime over winter. Gee, Glos is a hard nut to crack. The Worst Thing appears in the Ofi Press #73. And the Raoul Julia Dracula pictured above is the cover of The Crank #9.
This month's Pulsar reviews will / i understand they will / include my splutterings on a book of poems by Matthias Goritz translated from the German by Mary Jo Bang. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone looking for the current direction in poetry, or for a new direction of their own. And finally,
ACTIVIST ALPHABET, an exhibition of prints and poems by Christine Felce includes 'A memorable evening of poetry with with Adam Horovitz JLM Morton and Dominic James, plus open mic on the theme of climate change (sign up on the night) 7pm, Friday 17 November, The Museum in the Park, Stroud.
Friday 20 October 2023
The Sergeant
As i pick my way through bishops and presbyters of the ancient Christian church: a few lighter thoughts on earlier days of sacrifice and excess bubble to the surface. As a for instance, Alcoholic Husbands is a phrase i hear quite often. Poor men who once were heavy drinkers.
I have a long picked over, short verse on Achilles - The Sergeant - in this week's dearbooze.com and the young god of wine will soon recline on his drunken ship in The Crank, Back on the Wine Dark Sea.
Dear Booze eh? This montage includes Bruegel's Tower as i am put in mind of my early and not-unbalanced verse on grog and separation. 'I recall the vaults of Babel, its palm wine jars and mead...' Skol.