This week’s newsletter is a little more self-centred than most, but given I only publish a book every few years I hope you will forgive me.
Here’s the TL:DR: I have a new book of poems out NOW. I put a lot of effort and thought into it. You’d make me happy if you buy it or order it via your nearest library. We’re launching it and other Smokestack books on Sunday February 25th. PS Listen to Iris Dement.
The Infinite Town
Last week marked the publication of my new poetry collection The Infinite Town by Smokestack Books. It’s my fifth full-length collection – in addition to some early or incidental pamphlets – and comes almost 30 years after my first, The Horse Burning Park, which was published on my 30th birthday. (Doesn’t time fly when you’re enjoying yourself?) You can order it now. Go on go on go on.
After Smokestack published my New and Selected Poems How I Learned to Sing in 2013, there were times I thought it would be my last publication. I felt more and more distant from the culture of publishing and reception of poetry, for all that poetry remained central to my life. Putting out another book didn’t seem important to me.
Until it did. There were a few particular factors in this I think.
Firstly, in the year I was 55, late 2019- late 2020, my alterego Longarmstapler made 55 pieces of music each lasting 55 seconds – or variants thereupon. This led me to writing song lyrics for the first time in many years. Poetry and fragments of poems flowed into the songs and then out of them back into poems. The process broke something of a dam for me creatively. One idea leads to another idea, craft makes them better. These are important lessons I ought to have learnt earlier, I guess.
I was also able to put publishing poetry into a healthier, less significant place for me. I could make the work as best I could, then make it available without too much interference from my ego and let the universe do the rest without worrying too much about it. This may just be a form of surrender I’m more comfortable with, I’ll grant you. Disappointment is a corrosive thing for which you need a strong container.
Meanwhile, some people like Anthony Wilson wrote really generous things about old books which also helped me want to share new work. My first book – written out of a scene/moment when (mainly) Northern small presses briefly flourished which is mainly forgotten or overlooked now, due to a successful response by the centre - is the equivalent of some unknown 80s-90s indie classic to a handful of people I respect, like a record by someone you’ve only barely heard of. (Maybe The Apartments The Evening Visits...and Stays for Years? Or Hip Hip by Hurrah!?)
Then I was commissioned by Stellar Projects to create public poetry, building on my experience of creating the poem The Infinite Town for a plinth on Stockton High Street. I had also been invited by other people to write for events or anthologies. These persuaded me that poetry could be part of some kind of public conversation or imagination, and that my contribution in that way was welcome. Seeing people read (or at least look at) the poem on the plinth as Rob Higgs’ animatronic train emerges every day at 1pm, bolstered my faith. (Every day bar over Xmas when the Council put reindeer on the plinth.)
That lyrical/musical turn and the public function of poetry then started to come together in what I was preoccupied with when writing, or trying to write, or working on the poems. (I used to write and edit poems, I think, now I would probably say I make them, and then expand the patterns out to the sequence. Whether this is progress or not is moot.) Writing Tactics for the Tightrope for Future Arts Centres also helped me realise that my tiny poetry practice and my full-time Thinking Practice work in the cultural sector were different aspects of the same project.
It’s a truism that the personal is political, but you hear the mirror image less often: the political is personal. The Infinite Town (the book) – a tiny nod to the Wilco fans there – is, as we put it on the back, about what happens when the news gets into your dreams and unravels the work of the day. It’s a book reflecting grief both personal and political, but also the infinite possibilities of the everyday, and love.
The collection tries to explore responses to one of the words of the era: solastalgia. I heard about this direct from the creator of the neologism, Glenn Albrecht, when we shared a house and a session at the Regional Arts Australia conference in Goolwa in 2012. Glenn defines solastalgia as a kind of grief, “an emplaced or existential melancholia experienced with the negative transformation (desolation) of a loved home environment”. I remember in his keynote he showed devastating/devastated images of Western Australia, but the pattern is global.
Where I live, in Teesside in Northern England, we also have lost much of the industrial and natural landscape that felt like home, so we miss it, even when we are here, and as we welcome new members of the community, forced to leave their homes by war and climate change. This tangles up environmental, political and social concerns, and The Infinite Town includes poems which allude directly to the Freeport ‘developments’. (Did Michael Gove delay last week’s Teesworks Report to coincide with my book? We’ll never know…)
You can read two Teesside poems – “Full Title Guarantee” and “Freeport” - in the sample on the Smokestack website. The latter begins:
Mandalas of dead crabs bloom on the sands
to sign off unspoken deals, the grift and graft
of two hundred years burning to an end.
And ends:
The turbines wave and watch and are not heeded.
We live by the comings and goings of
such long-term contracts as the sea will hold.
Have a listen
30 years ago, the sound of poems was only a small part of my aim, which is a frustration when I look back to my first book. Now, I am obsessed with finding or making some music that reflects what I hear in my head and in my conception over the whole sequence. I’ll be doing recordings of all the poems over time, but you can hear the first few poems here, just to give you a taste.
Teesside Launch Event
We will be launching the book as part of a bumper Smokestack evening at The Waiting Room in Eaglescliffe, a place I’ve been a regular for 30 years, alongside the brilliant Bob Beagrie and Bill Herbert, on Sunday February 25th at 7.30. It would be great to see local readers of this newsletter there.
Tactics Tomato
Here is a 25 minute pomodoro playlist of songs that are either referenced in The Infinite Town or were important to me in the making of it. I’ll say no more about it other than that I would pay large sums of money to see Iris Dement and Mavis Staples sing together, so if someone could make that happen, I’d be eternally grateful.
(By the way, if you don’t have Spotify, click on the playlist name and it will open in a browser, no subscription needed. I use Spotify for ease of sharing but I have paid good money for hard copies of all but the earliest of these songs. Support your artists no matter old-fashioned it makes you look!)