pasta fences
An odd night yesterday. And the run-up to christmas looks like it could be more of the same.
I went along to see Alec Newman and others read at Central Library. This had been in my calendar for some time. Unfortunately it meant I had to miss the launch event for a CD from fourmill plus quarterinch the duo of Ben Gwilliam and Helmut Lemke. From the information I've seen they work with tapes on this project. It took place in the Castlefield Gallery at exactly the same time as the reading.
But my walk from Trafford to Central Library took me past the Castlefield Gallery although there was no plan to do so. As it happened Ben was outside when I passed the gallery so I stood and had a quick chat with him and Hulmut before heading off to the library.
The first I'd known about Ben and Helmut's event was when The Other Room posted information about it just before last weekend. Excepting Alec even before the reading I would have far preferred to have been at the Castlefield. After yesterday I'm glad I saw Alec read, and glad the evening was slightly odd, just a bit annoyed at missing something.
The committee room used for reading in the library always strikes me as a weird space, and never very helpfully arranged. It's a long thin room and the readers are always in front of the large fireplace with a pisspoor oil painting overhead on one of the long walls with a lectern available for them to hide behind. To me it would make more sense to put the poet against one of the shorter end walls.
Also getting in the way (or enhancing) on this occasion was what sounded like a christmas party or aerobics class playing cock-awful pop hits at a volume that often competed with the readers.
Both John G Hall who read first and Simon Rennie who read last (the event was billed as Simon Rennie and Friends) were good confident readers. Simon particularly seemed at home. Neither read poems that were of much interest to me, although a couple of John's could have been more interesting if they'd been stranger and more rigorous. They were poems from an exercise in which the second poem was required to use words with opposite meanings to those in the first. This was neither as thoroughgoing or alienating as it could have been. In fact conventional and relatively uninteresting poems derived from workshop exercises were something of a theme in both John and Simon's work.
Alec Newman was less confident and would have benefitted from slowing down his delivery. The poetry however was a lot stronger. While John G Hall relied very much on a persona to carry the poems, and Simon Rennie used the superstructure of conventional poetic form, Alec's poetry made greater use of language as a central feature. The vocabularies, the techniques used (repetition, humour, scholarly allusion, contrasts in vocabularies etc.), the ideas investigated give the poems an integrity that's less reliant on more traditional effects. While there is nothing wrong in having a strong performance and/or authorial voice, or in utilising formal constraint, they are approaches that can easily lead to an impressive surface with not much going on beneath.
After the reading concluded there was a question and answer session with Simon. The questions were along the lines of 'how autobiographical is your work?', and 'how important is form?'. Some of the answers were surprisingly informative. For instance he is evidently very aware of the artificiality of poetry, and suspicious of claims to poetry being perhaps more truthful tha prose fiction. These are opinions with which I have no argument.
After the Q&A and still soundtracked by the Central Library Mobile Disco Simon received one of the largest rounds of applause I've ever heard at a poetry reading, which was followed by someone leading three cheers. Fearing that the evening was already much too weird I left shortly after for a brief stay in The City Arms with Tom Jenks and Richard Barrett. They sensibly left after a while but I stayed to meet up with a friend, Helen. We then had a drink in The Vine next door before heading off to the new Kraak gallery space in the Northern Quarter. There'll be a lot more on Kraak shortly.
I stayed at Kraak until around 1 and spoke to Helen and to Lou from Blood Moon who's one of the brains behind Kraak. It was very pleasant despite the presence of some very average and uninteresting bands. One of them sounded like Radio 4 if they'd been described to a stupid person, the other were even worse. And if you're in/friends with/shagging either band please don't bother telling me I'm wrong, it's a personal opinion and it's my blog. By 1 I was pretty knackered, pretty hammered, pretty sick of performers I wasn't interested in, aware I was in work the next day and had to be up around 7, and my sciatica was starting to threaten back spasms. So I left and ended up taking a taxi home.
In all the evening was peculiar from beginning to end. I haven't even mentioned the fact that The City Arms was crowded out with very small very old people, or that there were slightly sleazy presumptuous men at both The Vine and Kraak, which I guess isn't news - they're everywhere.
Kraak is a really interesting space, it looks like a fairly standard room where weaving might have been carried out, subsequently converted to other light industrial uses, neglected, and now rescued by highly motivated artists. As I've said I'll write in more detail about it very soon and keep you up to date with some of the things going on there.
I went along to see Alec Newman and others read at Central Library. This had been in my calendar for some time. Unfortunately it meant I had to miss the launch event for a CD from fourmill plus quarterinch the duo of Ben Gwilliam and Helmut Lemke. From the information I've seen they work with tapes on this project. It took place in the Castlefield Gallery at exactly the same time as the reading.
But my walk from Trafford to Central Library took me past the Castlefield Gallery although there was no plan to do so. As it happened Ben was outside when I passed the gallery so I stood and had a quick chat with him and Hulmut before heading off to the library.
The first I'd known about Ben and Helmut's event was when The Other Room posted information about it just before last weekend. Excepting Alec even before the reading I would have far preferred to have been at the Castlefield. After yesterday I'm glad I saw Alec read, and glad the evening was slightly odd, just a bit annoyed at missing something.
The committee room used for reading in the library always strikes me as a weird space, and never very helpfully arranged. It's a long thin room and the readers are always in front of the large fireplace with a pisspoor oil painting overhead on one of the long walls with a lectern available for them to hide behind. To me it would make more sense to put the poet against one of the shorter end walls.
Also getting in the way (or enhancing) on this occasion was what sounded like a christmas party or aerobics class playing cock-awful pop hits at a volume that often competed with the readers.
Both John G Hall who read first and Simon Rennie who read last (the event was billed as Simon Rennie and Friends) were good confident readers. Simon particularly seemed at home. Neither read poems that were of much interest to me, although a couple of John's could have been more interesting if they'd been stranger and more rigorous. They were poems from an exercise in which the second poem was required to use words with opposite meanings to those in the first. This was neither as thoroughgoing or alienating as it could have been. In fact conventional and relatively uninteresting poems derived from workshop exercises were something of a theme in both John and Simon's work.
Alec Newman was less confident and would have benefitted from slowing down his delivery. The poetry however was a lot stronger. While John G Hall relied very much on a persona to carry the poems, and Simon Rennie used the superstructure of conventional poetic form, Alec's poetry made greater use of language as a central feature. The vocabularies, the techniques used (repetition, humour, scholarly allusion, contrasts in vocabularies etc.), the ideas investigated give the poems an integrity that's less reliant on more traditional effects. While there is nothing wrong in having a strong performance and/or authorial voice, or in utilising formal constraint, they are approaches that can easily lead to an impressive surface with not much going on beneath.
After the reading concluded there was a question and answer session with Simon. The questions were along the lines of 'how autobiographical is your work?', and 'how important is form?'. Some of the answers were surprisingly informative. For instance he is evidently very aware of the artificiality of poetry, and suspicious of claims to poetry being perhaps more truthful tha prose fiction. These are opinions with which I have no argument.
After the Q&A and still soundtracked by the Central Library Mobile Disco Simon received one of the largest rounds of applause I've ever heard at a poetry reading, which was followed by someone leading three cheers. Fearing that the evening was already much too weird I left shortly after for a brief stay in The City Arms with Tom Jenks and Richard Barrett. They sensibly left after a while but I stayed to meet up with a friend, Helen. We then had a drink in The Vine next door before heading off to the new Kraak gallery space in the Northern Quarter. There'll be a lot more on Kraak shortly.
I stayed at Kraak until around 1 and spoke to Helen and to Lou from Blood Moon who's one of the brains behind Kraak. It was very pleasant despite the presence of some very average and uninteresting bands. One of them sounded like Radio 4 if they'd been described to a stupid person, the other were even worse. And if you're in/friends with/shagging either band please don't bother telling me I'm wrong, it's a personal opinion and it's my blog. By 1 I was pretty knackered, pretty hammered, pretty sick of performers I wasn't interested in, aware I was in work the next day and had to be up around 7, and my sciatica was starting to threaten back spasms. So I left and ended up taking a taxi home.
In all the evening was peculiar from beginning to end. I haven't even mentioned the fact that The City Arms was crowded out with very small very old people, or that there were slightly sleazy presumptuous men at both The Vine and Kraak, which I guess isn't news - they're everywhere.
Kraak is a really interesting space, it looks like a fairly standard room where weaving might have been carried out, subsequently converted to other light industrial uses, neglected, and now rescued by highly motivated artists. As I've said I'll write in more detail about it very soon and keep you up to date with some of the things going on there.
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