Really worth a punt https://hesterglock.net/Vik-Shirley Vik Shirley’s new book from the always brilliant Hesterglock press is powerful poetry and an important work in the 21st century take up of photo poetry and it’s possibilities.
I was happy to offer a quote onto the back of the book, proud even, and had the pleasure to publish some of these works on 3am magazine a few years ago https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/poem-brut-74-disrupted-blue-on-sepia/
Thanks to everyone who has supported our digital festival over the last two weeks! To close European Poetry Festival 2020, we’re delighted to partner with the longstanding public video poetry project "Messages from the Other Side", founded and curated by Max Höfler. www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/messages
Six poets from Graz and London each have written short poems for public screening in both cities. These video-poems or kinetic texts are styled as literary "news" for the other city, London to Graz, Graz to London. Projected onto the side of the Forum Stadtpark in Graz and Hardy Tree Gallery in London, passing civilians have witnessed the ludic newscasts of Natascha Gangl, Ghazal Mosadeq, Stefan Schmitzer, Vik Shirley, Thomas Antonic & Steven J. Fowler. The films have been screened publicly November 18th to December 11th 2020 and are available to view at the link above and vimeo.com/channels/nachrichtenvondrueben with German language versions.
The entire digital European Poetry Festival 2020 can be viewed www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2020 and we will return, in physical proximity, in 2021.
I have often said I am lucky to have got into poetry, by accident, around 2010. I came into British poetry just at a moment when dozens of genuinely open, intelligent, energetic independent presses arrived. More than that, it seems to me, I came around when hundreds of poets from the UK are out working at material that is contemporary because it is innovative. Poetry that is responding to the world as it changes. As it changes seismically, fundamentally, in language.
Lockdown brains us. If we are the fortunate unaffected, physically, as I am (I am mega-fortunate in all ways, I believe). It has inevitably turned many of us in. We reflect and find understandable negative and positive in what we are doing. I have been candid in telling many people I think I am wasting my life writing poetry, because that very well might be true, but not in a catastrophic way. I do not dislike myself for doing it, I am just suspicious of what I am doing, as I try to be suspicious about everything, in order to be more aligned / balanced / decent, and more contented.
I have then had many chats with peers, friends, who feel unappreciated. This is an existential reality. But it is often, in the context of British Innovative Poetry (The BIP) true. I can make a long list of people whose work should be lauded. What is lauding? I wrote something here I then deleted. All I’ll say is, the poets overlooked because they are complex, I read them, I see them, I fucking appreciate them. I appreciate the presses who keep working, keep digging in, keeping sharing. It is proper impressive. I know. People just keep doing the work. It’s brilliant.
I work abroad a lot and bring to these European citizens this UK poetry they have never heard of. They think the UK scene is 5 poets. I share with them the people I admire and I see, dozens of them, through their eyes, I am right.. And I reflect on this and realise further how lucky I am to know the work of these poets, to get the books, to follow their ideas and experiments. And there is no longer the concentric “scenes” where poets are represented by their tribe as well as their work, I don’t think, and brilliant. Who wants that? Petty patty. The internet has scuppered it. We are often alone working and connected briefly. But this is why I put on events, curate, to make those connections, but not make solid any movements, group or crew. Because that is naff.
How often have I shared a friend’s book with someone outside of the BIP to see them say surprised “this is amazing, why isn’t this in shops?” yes yes yes, because you don’t buy it mate. But it exists, it’s good. This cannot be denied. I see it. I see it. Do my eyes not count? Yes they do. I have made sure they do.
All this is leading to me saying simply, it’s a golden time for interesting, innovative British poetry. We are lucky. Many don’t know it but if they looked, they’d see. Here are some books out recently or coming out soon which prove what I’m saying. All you need do is get them and find out. iF YOU BOUGHT EVERY ONE OF THESE, IT’S 100 SQUID, AND IF YOU READ THEM, THE IDEAS, THE THOUGHTS THAT WOULD FLOW. WOULDN’T THAT MAKE LIVING BETTER? TO BE GROWING THROUGH THE LANGUAGE OF THE EARTH REFLECTED BACK AT YOU BUT CLEVER LIKE? IT DOES FOR ME. TRY IT NOW! JUST ONE HUNDRED SPONDULICS
HARBOUR EQUINOX by AARON KENT from SAMPSON LOW
Vik Shirley is a poet whom I think is proper good. Vik recently released a really good thing, called Corpses, from Sublunary Editions and I happily wrote about it. https://sublunaryeditions.com/?product=Corpses
"What is the word for the end of our bodies? What is the sound of the corp singing? Vik Shirley is really such a brilliant writer to be able to evoke the absurdity of what death might be, beyond us, beyond what we can conceive, and what language might do with that, in such a darkly funny, wry, vivid set of poetic texts. This is doing the work poetry needs to be doing, its about language itself as much as it about the absurdity of our own physical lives and non-lives."
Vik also did an interview with another excellent poet Matt Haigh where she generously mentioned my interest in actually funny poetry https://www.matthewhaigh.net/vik-shirley
Your most recent chapbook is Corpses from Sublunary Editions. Corpses is a pretty dark title for a poetry collection. What would you say is the role of poetry that is perhaps darker in tone than the usual declarations of love or breathlessness at nature?
People expect poetry to be about love or breathlessness at nature and that stereotype makes my skin crawl. Working against that expectation is what interests me, whether that's Matthew Welton's series on colour, in the style of university marking schemes, or Gabriel Guddings' poem 'On the Rectum of Peacocks'. There was something that Steven Fowler was discussing in his Lunar Poetry interview last year, about certain bands of aesthetics that are often missing in poetry, one being 'genuinely funny poetry', as opposed to unfunny, supposedly 'comic' poetry, the other being negative aesthetics, the equivalent of a horror film in poetry, something that makes you feel 'bad as a pleasure'. There is something undoubtedly grotesque about being human. There is something undoubtedly grotesque about the world we live in …
