J&K in Edinburgh

I promise we'll get back to more interesting bits and pieces soon, but just a note to say that both Kirsty and I will be special guests at Poetry at the ..., reading at the GRV on Guthrie Street in Edinburgh this Sunday night. The event runs from 7.45pm to 9.45pm, £4 entry (£3 concessions).

Other readers on the night are David Kinloch, Marion McCready and Phillis Levin. You can read about them and see samples of their work at the Poetry at the... blog. The event is run by past Fuselit contributor Rob Mackenzie.

Obviously we'll both be reading some kickass new poems!

Days of Roses @ Oliver's Bar

There's been a meeting of minds between London poets Declan Ryan, who runs the regular Days of Roses readings, and Christopher Horton, who runs The Hold in Greenwich. As a result, tonight will be the last The Hold event and it's been renamed Days of Roses, since the two of them are going on to run nights together under the Days of Roses banner from hereon in, or herein on, whichever you prefer.

Whatever the name, tonight is certainly the last event, for the time being, at Oliver's Bar on Nevada Street, Greenwich, with its charming underground cellar. I'll be reading alongside Eric Gregory winners James Brookes and Luke Heeley, and Oxfam poet-in-residence/Eyewear blogger Todd Swift. There's also music from Jaycub. I'm frantically trying to finish some new poems in time for it! 7pm start time.

Birdsong Zine

If you like gorgeous handmade magazines, you would do well to investigate Birdsong Zine. I was very kindly sent a copy of this lovingly produced journal to have a sneak peek at. At a tiny $6 plus postage, it's absolutely worth a flutter. Bagfuls of beautiful art in many forms, bushels of energy for promoting creative adventures and an obvious love of what they do. These guys make a fine tome.

Find out more at birdsongmag.com/
and on Facebook.

Eurovision 2010 - 100 Word Review

The measure of a country's commitment being not so much the effort put into the writing of the song, but the proportional discrepancy between GDP and video/show budget. Germany's cute-as-a-Dr-Who-assistant singer Lena, with her quirkcore handclaps, has been bundled into a shed for the video with fairy lights and told to shuffle, while Romania, who came 3^rd, recreated Terminator via Reboot for the video, and gave us latex, operatics, Shaninda Twainlisle, fire and a double piano on the night. Other notes this year: sexy robot, cybermullets, pretty men, surprise wings and Graham Norton sneaking the odd barb under the radar.

2010 General Election - 100-word review

I didn’t review this as it was happening because the sands were constantly shifting. Now it’s all done with and we’ve a new government in place, I think the whole event can be neatly summed up thus: the British public did not ‘clearly want’ or ‘vote’ for or against anything as a conglomerate. Most people probably didn’t even vote for a party they actually wanted to govern. No one really knew what was at stake and nobody got what they wanted. So maybe what we’ve ended up with is the best we could hope for, given our lack of consensus.

Forthcoming Events

Next week I'll be reading at two events, both of which I'm looking forward to.

On Monday (May 31st) it's Poets at the Pub, with Ernest Hillbert, Richard Price and Katy Evans-Bush. It's from 7.00pm to 9.00pm at the Lamb Pub on Holborn (Dickens' old boozer), WC1N 3LZ. I'll probably read some homophonic translations of Celan and a few poems from Scarecrows.

Then on Wednesday (June 2nd) Penned in the Margins are launching Simon Barraclough's Bonjour Tetris at the Lata Ri in Rivington Street, EC2A 3BE from 6.30pm. Heather Phillipson and I are in support slots.

Bonjour Tetris is a collection of Simon's commissioned poems which includes, of course, those he wrote for our micro-anthology Coin Opera. I'll likely be reading some of my own computer game and film-themed poems for this one.

The Golden Hour + Forest Chapbooks

Kirsty read at The Golden Hour on Monday, playing at The Green Note in Camden as part of their nationwide tour. It was great to see the place packed out, particularly when it was competing with the second Faber New Poets launch event, which is sure to have drawn a healthy tranche of the London poetry crowd. Then again, The Golden Hour isn't just poetry - there's music and prose too, much like Declan Ryan's monthly Days of Roses event. I arrived a little late but every act I saw was intimidatingly good, from Sam Taradash's beguiling boxing story to Jonny Berliner's super spoof blues/folk songs. Berliner also teamed up with host Ryan van Winkle for a witty hybrid poem/tune entitled 'Toast'.

It's also worth mentioning the Forest chapbook series, published by the same people who run The Golden Hour. Chapbooks are always cheap but at £2 each, no recession-based excuse will do for not investigating this series. We traded a copy of Coin Opera for three of 'em, and each one is radically different from the next.

Lardermania Friday 14 May!

Munch munch...Me and Jon are reading at Lardermania, the latest of Roddy Lumsden's perennially-popular platter of multi-poet events! Come along - it's always a delicacy.

Where: upstairs at The Betsey Trotwood.

When: 8pm sharp, Friday 14th May

What: On Friday, BroadCast's latest multi-poet event sees 26 poets perform an alphabet of new poems on the subject of food. Plus Don Share, poet and senior editor of Poetry magazine and a few readings from the work of food-loving poet Craig Arnold, who died in an accident a year ago.

With a poem each by Kirsten Irving / Charlotte Newman / Rowyda Amin / James Goodman / Angela Kirby / Claire Crowther / Samuel Prince / Tim Wells / Mark Waldron / Holly Hopkins / Diana Pooley / David Floyd / Samantha Jackson / Judy Brown / James Brookes / Don Share / Katy Evans Bush / Dzifa Benson / Jack Underwood / Jon Stone / Swithun Cooper / Julia Bird / Sarah Hesketh / Annie Freud / Roddy Lumsden / Jackey Smith.

Cost: £5 sterling

100-Word Reviews: Kororinpa and Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi

Copies of this four year old Wii game take up a whole shelf at my local Blockbuster. I’m guessing that’s because it was a popular renting title - which makes sense, as it’s a thoroughly entertaining game that only takes two or three dedicated evenings to complete. Think of a colourful, increasingly complex, virtual version of a marble-rolling maze game; you tip the Wiimote this way and that in order to tip the whole gaming world this way and that, causing the marble (or watermelon, or football, or sphereised penguin/panda/kitten) to roll. Surprisingly addictive, compelling, tricky and inventive.

Additional notes:
£10 in Blockbuster! Probably cheap as chips on ebay. Only for Wii.

Shadow Dancer was the third Shinobi game to be released on the Mega Drive, bizarrely preceding Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master by three years. Originally an arcade game, it puts you in the role of a shuriken-happy ninja (his name varies between versions) trying to thwart a terrorist plot by rescuing hostages and defeating a variety of enemies (as you do). The key feature that distinguishes it from other Shinobi titles is your white dog, who can be commanded to maul enemies, setting up a diverse range of tactics. This alone makes it worth a quick blast.

Additional notes:
£5.60 on Wii's Virtual Console (800 points). If you have an old Mega Drive, you can get it for roughly the same amount on ebay, give or take a couple of quid.

The Golden Hour Tour

Hello! The Golden Hour, a poetry extravanaganza organised by members of Edinburgh-based collective and Fuselit favourites The Forest, is touring the UK! It's a rare chance to catch the crew outside the Scots capital and promises to be a cracking show.

2010 Dates:
Sheffield - 20 May at The Rude Shipyard
Bristol - 21 May at the Cube Cinema
Brighton - 22 May at the Redroaster
London - 24 May at the Green Note, Camden
Newcastle - 25 May at the Star and Shadow

Readers include Scottish Poetry Library reader-in-residence and Crashaw Prize winner Ryan Van Winkle, Ericka Duffy and Jason Morton. Stacks more - investigate!

The Original of Laura: A Review in Fragments

Where have we gone?

Kirsty and I are extremely distracted this month. As well as getting it together for the Dress Rehearsal Rag event, we're doing the new tradition of a poem a day for April. We've done it the last couple of years, and even though it results in daily banging your head on the table at midnight and beyond, you do come out of it with a lot to work with. Last year and this year, I picked an over-arcing theme and took it as far as I could. Many of last year's poems ended up in Scarecrows, so I'm hoping to generate a similarly rich crop in 2010.

I'm posting them all to this thread as I go along, so if you think you can stand my constant complaining about not having enough time and are interested in what limits I will stoop to in desperation, by all means have a gander. I'm not horribly ashamed of my efforts quite yet. K's thread is here.

When The Hate-Mongering Tart Met Fuselit

One of our favourite poets, E. Kristin Anderson, through her Hate-Mongering Tart blog, is currently putting together an almighty series of features to coincide with National Poetry Month. She dragged me and Jon out of the burning house of NaPoWriMo just long enough to ask us a few questions, and the (frankly gorgeously laid out) results can be viewed here!

Choice extracts include:

"I thought it’d be simple!"

"Extra emphasis on the ludicrous."

"I wish I’d been that good at that age."

"It involves having twelve different pseudonyms."

Dress Rehearsal Rag is tonight!

Londoners, here me!

Tonight, for £3, at 7.30, at the Betsey Trotwood in Farringdon, you can gather around to hear the songs and poems of Leonard Cohen as performed by an array of talented poets and songwriters. There will also be original poems inspired by lines from Cohen songs, a little fiction, and a short talk by music journalist Gavin Martin.

Mind Map Review needs you!

Jet Payne, formerly headbosschief of Arts Pneumonia, has engaged in a most intriguing sport, launching a zine that encourages your synapses to run riot - the Mind Map Review!

A freely distributed London arts review magazine based around a simple concept, Mind Map Review covets reviews in the form of a ‘mind map’, 'brain storm', ‘spider diagram’, ‘flow chart’ or similar diagram, with the aim of simplifying the reviewing process, stripping it back to the essential points as they would appear at a planning stage.

The London Mind Map Review launches in May, and Londoners should submit reviews of art exhibitions, spoken word events, theatre, gigs and other arts events.

Further specifics can be found here.

Deadline for the May issue is 1 May with the 1st of each following month marking the deadline for that month’s issue.

Contact themindmapreview@googlemail.com