Look what I got...

I had a bit of a splurge on Oxfam's online second hand shop (which is brilliant by the way) and I got Under Milk Wood, read by Richard Burton. On tape. Tape - what was I thinking? I don't think I've bought one since that East 17 single when I was 10. I can't even remember the last time I bought a CD for god's sake. Hope we've still got a tape player in the house somewhere...

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Exit wounds: Poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy commissions war poetry for today | Books | The Guardian

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guardian.co.uk poem of the week: Martial Diptych by Glyn Maxwell

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I love the strange rhythmn of this poem - the line break comes before you expect and it just chnages the whole feel of the poem somehow. I'd never heard of Glyn Maxwell before - I'll definitely try and find some more of his petry.

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Video: Nick Cave reads from The Death of Bunny Munro | Books | guardian.co.uk

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52 Poems

I Tweeted about this earlier this week - I thought it was quite a sweet app, I don't think it's going to bring poetry to the digital generation or anything like that, but it' the kind of thing that's nice to have...

Everyday poetry

There's a feature on the BBC website at the moment about everyday, functional poetry that I thought was fantastic. The idea is that if poetry has a purpose and function it might help to breathe new life into an art form that is losing popularity.

So the BBC invited four poets: Ian McMillan, Niall O'Sullivan, Wendy Cope & Joe Hakim to turn the everyday into verse - things like wiring a plug, using a cash machine or getting a speeding ticket. You can hear the Joe Hakin version here - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7988559.stm. They are short, with a Haiku-esque quality and there's something pleasing about seeing the mundane transformed and presented in a different light.

The poems contributed by readers are interesting too - Bill Campbell turns the well-known 'You do not have to say anything, but it might harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in Court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence' into:
Be quiet? Omissions may haunt you
Speak? Admissions may damn you

As a saviour for poetry I'm not convinced this has any future - but it's different and diverting.

The one poem I know off by heart

The one whole poem I know off by heart (except The Owl and the Pussycat, but I'm not sure that counts) is by Emily Dickinson. I decided to learn it off by heart when I was about eighteen, and I have no idea why. Every now and again it comes back to me at the strangest times, like it did today:

I found the words to every thought,
I ever had, but One,
And that defies me,
As a hand did try to chalk the Sun,
To Races nurtured in the Dark,
How would your own begin?
Can Blaze be shown in Cochineal
Or Noon in Mazarin?

I'm not sure why it interests me - the quirky, characteristic, offbeat style, the rhythm that makes it feel like a hymn, or the colonial/missionary overtones in the lines 'As a hand did try to chalk the Sun,/To Races nurtured in the Dark, or the vivid colours and times of day she conjures up with her strange analogies. Whatever it is, its stuck with me this far, and I have a feeling it always will.

Literary events at Brighton festival 2009

I picked up the programme for Brighton Festival today - there are some fantastic events on...not least the literary ones. The whole event is curated by the Indian-born artist, Anish Kapoor - I can remember going to the Tate in Liverpool when I was very young, about 4 or 5 I think and loving his vividly coloured, bold art which reminded me of sand castles. The whole festival seems like a more serious and ambitious endeavour this year, and I can't wait for it to start. Ever since I've lived in Brighton, the coming of the festival has heralded the coming summer, sunny days wandering in the Laines and warm evenings spent on the beach, so in anticipation, I've compiled my book-related Brighton Festival 2009 wishlist....

• City Reads: The Book Thief. I love the idea of this, and I'm going to join in - the concept is to get everyone in Brighton reading Markus Zusak's The Book Thief. the communal reading culminates in the author discussing the project and the book in an event at Brighton Dome on 23rd May. Find out more here.
• Alaa al Aswany. The author of The Yacoubian Building, Alaa al Aswany is one of the most widely-read authors writing in Arabic and will be appearing at the Pavillion theatre on 24th May - more info here.
• Very Hungry Caterpillar Storyplaytime. My favourite book when I was little - this is as good as children's books get and hasn't aged a bit. It's on 10th May at the Jubilee Library, and you can get tickets here.
• Thirteen. So far, to me at least, this is the best sounding event of the festival...based on Thirteen, the cult novel about a tired Brighton taxi driver who experiences an altered state of reality by Sebastian Beaumont, you are picked up by a cabby to experience an adaptation of part of the novel. The event runs hourly during the night of the 10th May and the venue is only revealed when you buy your ticket...but guess what? It's sold out - and I haven't got a ticket.
• Kamila Shamsie & Gavin Esler. Kamila Shamsie, author of Salt & Saffron and Burnt Shadows & Gavin Esler, Newsnight presenter and author of A Scandalous Man, talk about the relationship between history and fiction, reality and storytelling. It's on at the Pavillion Theatre on 17th May - get your tickets here.

Derek Walcott vs VS Naipaul

I'd forgotten about this - but I saw Omeros by Derek Walcott sitting (unfinished) on my shelf, and I remembered reading this poetic assault on Naipaul by Walcott

From 'The Mongoose'

I have been bitten, I must avoid infection
Or else I'll be as dead as Naipaul's fiction
Read his last novels, you'll see just
what I mean
A lethargy, approaching the obscene
The model is more ho-hum than Dickens
The essays have more bite
They scatter chickens like critics, but
each stabbing phrase is poison
Since he has made that snaring style
a prison
The plots are forced, the prose
sedate and silly
The anti-hero is a prick named Willie
Who lacks the conflict of a Waugh or Lawrence
And whines with his creator's
self-abhorrence

These two have a long-lasting, well-documented feud (I'm on Walcott's side) that I'm not going to recount, but I love the idea of two seventy-something Nobel prize winners engaging in a literary smackdown...this poem is a fantastic example of using your intelligence to fight your fight. Walcott definitely gets his point across...I seem to remember being left speechless by the fact that it ended with the line 'He doesn't like black men but he loves black cunt.' I wish I could find the full version of this poem to post - the rest is just as brilliant, but I'm not going to transcribe it - you can listen to it here http://www.radioopensource.org/calabash-08-first-the-fireworks/