Three Triumphant Tangerines

Right so there's the Paxman furore to start with, isn't there? For anyone who isn't aware, Jeremy Paxman, Newsnight host who loves to stick his stick in nests of any sort and, until fairly recently, facial hair experimenter extraordinaire was chosen to be one of the Forward Prize judges. Well, now quite a lot of poetry people seem to thing he's a bit of a twat for saying uncultured things like, "[poetry] has connived at its own irrelevance," and that he wishes poetry in general would just, "raise its game a little bit."

A lot of his remarks seem extremely sensible to the President of R.O.Y. (i.e. me) and I was also pleased to read Ms Baroque's post 'Paxman, poets, and the 'pellety nest'', which is as balanced but biting as her best.

It's worth reading Michael Symmons Roberts' response to Paxo's comments too. I thought his most sensible remark to be: "we have lost the sense that poetry sits halfway between prose and music - that you can't expect to read it like a novel. We are quite used to downloading an album and listening to certain tracks ... poetry needs to be consumed in that way." Must admit I'm not a fan of the nasal haughtiness detectable in Roberts ('we are quite used', 'you can't expect') but I agree completely with this. Still, don't think many poetry people think twice of simply how unnatural it is to be self-conscious about language. It would also be nice to see more practical experimentation with feasible/marketable audio productions.

How best to achieve this? Single poems being available for download is excellent, pricing them sensibly too?

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Mr Ben Wilkinson's new pamphlet 'For Real' has been launched and it looks spectacular in Liverpool red. Hopefully be reading my own copy before too long as sent a cheque sometime last week through the post. Don't want to think about how long it will take to traipse its way to my doorstep though.

There's a nice 'next big thing' Q&A on Ben's blog, which is worth a gander.

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Thirdly, one of my poems has been accepted by Helen Ivory for publication on IS&T so that's good. If you don't know the magazine then check it out. Lots and lots of poems, a huge archive and editors. Editors that I believe to be good, which is a statement I make completely without bias of any kind.