Submission Accomplished!

Check out Submission Accomplished, an article K's written for the fantastic Young Poets Network on submitting to magazines. Comments appreciated!

Tickets please! Fuselit: Contraption is out at last!

After a long, long time under tarpaulin, attended by sinister figures in black, we unleash upon you, the public, not only a gorgeous new website, courtesy of Jon's tireless graftery, but also Fuselit's 17th issue, Contraption!



Available to read online, or as a free (or pay-what-you-want-if-you-like) download for your Kindle or e-book reader, as well as in its traditional paper/card/ribbon/unicorn toenail hand-made format, it's a modern marvel!

Head to www.fuselit.co.uk for a closer inspection.

Imminent Activity

New Fuselit website will be up in the next couple of days, with Contraption ready to buy.

The Boar reviews 'Confronting the Danger of Art'

Award-winning university newspaper The Boar has reviewed Ian McLachlan and Phil Cooper's 'Confronting the Danger of Art' thus:

"Imagine a world in which artistic expression is suppressed and condemned by the government. Not too difficult, is it, considering the cuts we have suffered in recent years. Both wonderfully relevant therefore and also intriguing in its portrayal of the thing is Ian McLachlan's 'Confronting The Danger Of Art', a short poetry pamphlet that talks about how to survive an influx of creative types and their work in the style of a 70s nuclear safety information booklet. It is a marriage of ideas that does not sound quite as effective as it actually is; the poetry within providing a hilarious and searing look at the way people do sometimes treat the arts, and how it is a slippery slope potentially towards more totalitarian views ... perfectly crafted and delightfully witty."

Buy 'Confronting the Danger of Art' here, and make an old alchemist marginally wealthier.

Various logos

Wait, I'm not a graphic designer. How did I end up having to do this much work just for some crummy logos for various arms of Sidekick?

Fuselit/Sidekick Books Selected Poems at the V&A

Much like St Gundebert, we're very much looking forward to 21 February. Unlike St Gundebert, we don't get an entire day dedicated to our work, and nobody, to my knowledge, prays to us on a regular basis.

So why are we stoked? Fuselit and Sidekick Books, in collaboration with Selected Poems, are all set for a night of poetry-based frolics to launch Fuselit Contraption and celebrate our ramshackle brand of collaborative poetry!





As well as Jon and K, Dr Fulminare's ambassadors for the night will be:
•the winsome and whimsical Chrissy Williams, whose collection, The Jam Trap, is due in March from Soaring Penguin;
•Department for Public Safety spokespoet and co-author of the recently released report, Confronting the Danger of Art, Ian McLachlan;
•schmoove raconteuse and crafter of poetic contraptions, Sophia Blackwell;
•Fuselit and Birdbook formal firestarter, M.P. Dean.

Come down and say hello!

Facebook event here. Past events have hit capacity, so get in quick.
Follow Selected Poems on Twitter.

A week at the flicks

Hello! I hope you're well. Sorry I haven't seen much of you this week, but I have been to the cinema twice. Watching films at the cinema costs skywards of £12 these days, so I'm going to effing and jeffing well write about them.

Coriolanus. Peculiar film, but that's OK as it's a strange play full of the kind of strange lines that have you going "Really, Shakespeare? Really? There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger?" It's not exactly a play about making a balls-up of getting your message across. It's more a play about having something to get across that isn't a message.

That said, as a film it's still odder than it needs to be. Normally the advantage of screen over stage is being able to use more than a dozen people to represent the entire population of Rome. Not here. Here the entire population of Rome meets for tea in each other's flats. In the Jeremy Kyle banishment scene they even jeer in single file, and when Ralph Fiennes is having his Arthur-stealing-the-Christmas-Club-money flip-out, they don't muster a titter between them. Rome feels like England when there's a moderate kerfuffle, but reverts to Serbia when it really kicks off. After Coriolanus and Aufidius have been peeled off each other in Corioles, Gerard Butler wanders over to a car full of corpses to open the Tupperware lunchbox that contains his monologue, and suddenly you're watching the classiest but ugliest episode of Rab C Nesbitt you'll ever see.

James (C?) Nesbitt is pitched right as a Scottish Labour apparatchik, as is his colleague, who might actually have been Des Browne. Jon Snow is a welcome addition, although the news never seems quite so bad when Jon Snow's in command of it. The chip just won't stay on his shoulder. John Humphrys would have been a better choice. Jon Snow has sat in a jet beside a sleeping Idi Amin and contemplated shooting him in the head, but concluded the shot might bring the plane down. Humphrys would have suffocated the bugger with an antimacassar.

Volumnia is ice-cream delicious as a military matriarch: a Stannah Stalinist who'd eat Lady Macbeth for breakfast if only Lady Macbeth could haul herself out of bed for 5:15 when Volumnia eats her breakfast. Her army family, and Coriolanus' second army family that flocks around him when he returns to Corioles and it all goes a bit Apocalypse Now, build up such a backcloth of strangeness that the "unnatural scene they laugh at" fits right in. The stomach speech, and all the lines of that other woman that hangs around (Virginia? Valeria?) get cut and can count themselves lucky. Menenius quietly bleeds himself to death to get out of having to do any acting.

The Artist, though: good film, and good clean fun film. It's black and white and wordless, but it will still be the most conventional film you've ever seen Malcolm McDowell in. Don't be put off by the lack of dialogue: be put slightly off by the surplus of dialogue, because a proper 20s film wouldn't have had nearly as many title cards. Really, don't be put off at all.

Fuselit: Contraption Update

Contraption is, I swear to god, a couple of hours' coding and a session of bonus booklet printing away from being sent out to contributors and subscribers. The presentation boxes are sitting here - here, in this room! - half of them filled with completely sewn and finished copies of the main issue. The peripheries are just undergoing some tweaking. You know how it is - you did the cover to the bonus booklet six months ago but coming back to it today you're sure you can do a better job ...

The code? Oh, that's the game that we're putting on the disk. It's a text adventure! I'm an idiot who decided to write a text adventure for a literary magazine. It mostly works but it's a bit ... er ... arty.

Scrooge, Marley et al + We Eat Poets!

This Wednesday sees the fourth and final We Eat Poets event of the year taking place (see the Facebook event or We Eat Poets website for further details) and as part of that event, we've pulled together a set of six poems, each based on a character from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and printed them onto cream greetings cards. They're now available from the Sidekick Books main page.

Any orders we get in the next few days, we'll be sure to send them out first class post as soon as we're able, but since they can also be used post-Christmas (they're blank inside) or saved until next Christmas, we'll keep them available for the next month or so.

Aiko reads 'Kappa'

A smattering of things for mid-December:

Firstly, a new poem-video from Sidekick Flicks, in which Aiko Harman (recently spied in The Best British Poetry 2011) reads 'Kappa', originally published in Obakarama:

It never ends!

As Simon Furman would say.

Last Thursday the printers told us the Fuselits were printed and would be sent with an invoice the next day. Nothing turned up. Emailed them over the weekend. Still no word.

Story of the year!

Minimum Security Irving

Last week, Kirsty read at the launch of S.J. Fowler's Minimum Security Prison Dentistry, published on 23rd November by Anything Anymore Anywhere and available to purchase from their website. The event took place at The Horse Hospital in London, and was recorded on video. Here's Kirsty's short set:

Leveson Inquiry 28-11-11

Since I'm covering the Leveson Inquriry for the time being, I've decided to appoint myself its unofficial poet-in-residence. The Inquiry is not confidential (or at least I don't think I've seen or been witness to anything confidential), so don't expect any sensational gossip, but I did want to write some pieces in response to the picture that is unfolding.

Also, since I decided this rather late in the day, I will have to backtrack for some of the days I'm missed. I will try to write something for every Monday and Tuesday I have personally covered. Here is today's:

28.11.11
Books

"You were described as 'posh, loved culture and poetry'. You probably do still love culture and poetry. 'Lewd', 'made sexual remarks' and 'creepy'. Then you are described -- you were branded 'a creepy oddball' by ex-pupils."
Mr Jay, questioning Christopher Jefferies

We should have worked it out from all his books.
What normal, law-abiding sort would ever
be caught nose-down, engrossed, on tenterhooks,
in any kind of literary endeavour?
Imagine all the filth and clever-clever
scurrilousness sealed in each plush brick.
We don't go near them - but we get the flavour
from titles like King Leer and Moby Dick.

Camden Art Redemption Miracle

Kirsty and I are supporting award-winning poet Tim Turnbull at the launch of his new limited edition book, The Camden Art Redemption Miracle (Donut Press). Sidekick favourite Wayne Holloway-Smith will also be doing a shift, and Tim himself will be giving us a special half-hour performance in his trademark Yorkshire brogue.

The launch is tonight at regular poetry hang-out pub The Betsey Trotwood (56 Farringdon Road, EC1R 3BL, nearest tube: Farringdon) from 7.00pm.

November Update!

Here's Dr Fulminare as a pumpkin. It's hard to make out, but he's even got his hat on.

So where are we, two months before the end of the year? On the Fuselit front, we are, as ever, somewhat vexed. My creative solution to our long run of failing home printers was to outsource the pages to a printing company, who would print and cut (but not bind) them and send them back to us for sewing and adding the covers. The company we used have always been reliable before, but for a reason not yet entirely clear to us (although initially it was problems with their printers!) it's now coming up to three weeks since we were supposed to see a proof. I guess I'll phone them up again after I've finished writing this update. Hopefully, the curse of Fuselit hasn't destroyed all their equipment as well.

It's fair to say we have to make some changes to people's expectations with Fuselit. So I'll say this now, and convey it clearly in the new site when it goes live: Fuselit cannot keep to a schedule. It is, as I say, cursed. Your poems may be stuck with us for a year or more while we struggle to get the thing rolling. We will get there eventually, but only though sheer bloody-mindedness.

Things are more positive and exciting on the Sidekick Books front. We're just about to launch our first pamphlet (an artist/poet team-up), scheduled at the moment for mid-November. I'm getting towards the finishing stages of a new site that will incorporate its own blog (albeit it will just be a mirror to this one!), feature a new, simpler layout and hopefully be more welcoming to newcomers. There'll be a link on the front page to whatever we've uploaded lately to our Sidekick Flicks youtube channel, which we aim to populate with readings from our books and interesting audio-visual poetical experiments. Dr F is also getting his own Twitter feed.

Bookswise, we're still aiming to realise Coin Opera 2 before Christmas, although I can make no promises. Birdbook 2 commissions are rolling in at a good rate now, which means it's on target for an April/May release next year. After that, it's all top secret but very exciting.

Besides all this, we have begun, in recent months, a very productive relationship with the chaps at giveapoem.com. If I wasn't up to my eyeballs in ... well, everything, I would have blogged a lot more about this recently. Kirsty and I are now programming the poetry content of their amazing We Eat Poets fine-cuisine-and-entertainment nights, and the recent Hallowe'en special was a huge success, with Mike West and Abigail Parry delivering blistering sets. The next one is a Christmas special on 14th December with Simon Barraclough and Niall O'Sullivan.

And that's just the start. Stay tuned for more news, including a very exciting competition we'll be co-running ...