Extra Tour Date!

Unoccupied as I am and have been, I've added another date to the Ambulance Box virtual tour: on 5 August, I'll be at fellow Salt poet Anne Berkeley's blog Squared.

Spark Plugs, Squirrels and Slams

Others may be going on a summer holiday, but here at Tonguefire the Ambulance Box virtual tour bus keeps chugging along. It's a remarkable engine, managing to pull me over the Atlantic and back in a week with barely a dampened spark plug to speak of.

Today, it pulls into Cadwallender, the eponymous blog of Edinburgh-based poet and editor Kevin Cadwallender, whose Dances With Vowels: New and Selected Poems came out on Smokestack last month. Kevin asks me 10 rather intriguing questions. Where else would Adrian Mitchell, Willam Dunbar, John Ashberry, Ian Hamilton Finlay and slam be likely to turn up in the same post?

Next week, it's another hop over the pond for a few questions at Jilly Dybka's Poetry Hut blog. Chug, chug!

The Words are Wild

Just finished reading Shira Wolosky's The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem, which I borrowed from the Scottish Poetry Library. Good book, I thought; one I'd certainly recommend as a general overview of poetic form and rhetoric. I might well buy a copy for reference. Only once or twice did really think she'd missed something or got it slightly wrong about a poem, but she knows a lot more than I do. But I was amused by the following sentence, which closes a brief assessment of Poe and is the book's only comment on poetry in a language other than English:

Such poems [those that "try to block the process of signification altogether"] remain, however, rather extreme cases, although they are wildly influential in France.

(p 193, emphasis mine.)

Dear me, whatever will those French folk think of doing next?

Duffy, Hughes, Eliot and Translation

This week, Carol Ann Duffy launched her new poetry prize: the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for

the most exciting contribution to poetry in that year.

It's a generous gesture from the new laureate, though questions have been asked about whether we need another poetry award. The test will be the shortlists: if they copy those of the other prizes, the Ted Hughes Award will be pointless; if they're as broad as the outlined criteria, it could be worthwhile:

Eligible works include, but are not limited to, poetry collections (for adults or children), individual published poems, radio poems, verse translations, verse dramas, libretti, film poems, and public poetry pieces.

It's particularly encouraging that translations will be in the running. Translation is an art largely unsung in the UK. Indeed, the rules for the TS Eliot Prize stipulate:

Books which contain more than twenty percent (20%) translations (including versions, imitations or any poetry inspired by the work of one or more other writers) will not be eligible. Percentages should be calculated on the total number of lines of poetry in a book.

A translation award could too easily reinforce the ghettoisation of translated poetry but, by including it along with untranslated work, I sincerely hope Duffy's new prize helps to raise the status of translating in the British poetry scene.

Reviews Bubbling Up

The first print review of The Ambulance Box is in! It's part of a piece in Magma 44, where Rosie Shepperd reviews it alongside Paula Meehan’s Painting Rain (Carcanet) and River Wolton’s The Purpose of Your Visit (Smith/Doorstop Books). The review is thorough and extremely positive. Here's a headline quote:

delights readers with a dance through images and words that express powerful visionary and and spiritual experiences.

The issue also contains reviews of several friends' books: Ben Wilkinson reviews Rob A Mackenzie's The Opposite of Cabbage enthusiastically alongside no lesser names than Mark Doty and John Agard; there's a mixed review of Lorraine Mariner's fresh quirky and moving Furniture that nonetheless includes some high praise indeed; and another fine poet, Claire Crowther, provides a very positive review of Polly Clark's Farewell My Lovely.

Click the cover image above to go to the page for this issue of the magazine, though you can't read the review online. It's a great encouragement to be reviewed so warmly in such a good publication.

Bridging the Pond

My Cyclone virtual book tour skips over the Atlantic today to stop in Ojai, California at poet Robert Peake's blog. Thanks to the wonders of Skype and Robert's technical know-how, you can see and hear us discuss the surprises of publication; language; the music of poetry; the importance of the page; and grief and hope. You can also hear me read "Berlin/Berlin/Berlin" and "Pedestrian" from The Ambulance Box.

The whole 35-minute interview is available to view at Robert's post. The lip sync is a bit out in places, but I hope you take as much pleasure in hearing the interview as I took in speaking to him. Alternatively, you could view the five self-contained sections of video if you don't have time to digest it in a oner or simply play the audio of the full chat. Take time to explore Robert's intelligent, sensitive blog too.

Next week, I'm back on virtual home ground when I stop at Kevin Cadwallender's blog.

"The Night" Today

My choice of classic poem has just gone up on the Scottish Poetry Library's Reading Room site. Click here to read my thoughts on Henry Vaughan's "The Night". Don't omit to browse the growing wealth of previous choices too.

Founded and Boxed

Just back online after my trip to London for the Lemon Monkey reading (a fanstastic evening of which more anon) and a brief computer hiatus enforced by redecorating. All of which leaves me with two tour stops to catch up on.

First of all, on Monday, as Rob Mackenzie and I sped southwards on the not yet renationalised east coast mainline, Ivy Alvarez posted her interview with me on Dumbfoundry. Swing by to read about Biblical imagery and myth, the distancing or solidary effect of using Scots and how much distance I put between myself and the floor when I first saw copies of my book.

Today, I'm at Mark Calder's blog Boxolgies for some political and theological blether. Read my thoughts on language as power and resistance, the necessity of saying the impossible to say, and how I would review my own poetry*.

*Little do you know what you're letting yourself in for when you ask folk for these questions!

The Pleasant Sound of Poetry Sales Increasing

A wee while back, I speculated about the preception and truth of poetry sales. This was before the BBC's admirable poetry season and Salt's cash crisis. Now, today, courtesy of Matt Merritt, I found this article on the effect the Beeb's tranche of programmes has had on poetry sales.

Or, to be more precise, the sales of some poetry books. All by dead white poets, though one of them isn't male. Some of the percentages are staggering, and I can't help but wonder whether there was any similar effect on sales for the contemporary poets who featured as talking heads in Owen Sheers's series on BBC4. They each got to read a poem of theirs, but they were largely there to discuss the poet and poem under scrutiny (and a good thing it was too; I'd much rather have fellow poets do that than non-poet academics).

Would a similar run of programmes on living poets have a similar effect on sales of their works? I guess the Beeb might not find it so easy to get hold of knowledgable, articulate, well-known enthusiasts to present flagship programmes for such a season, but it's well worth a shot. (Any commissioning editors reading this?)

In not unconnected news, Chris Hamilton-Emery blogs compellingly about the origins of, and response to, Salt's "Just One Book" campaign. This, like the response to the BBC season, demonstrates that there is a market for poetry*. The problem is 1) tapping it and 2) broadening it. That's where a well-researched, well-produced, well-presented season on contemporary poetry could do the art a world of good. The public, of course, needs a way into any art form, especially when the reality of its practice challenges their perceptions. The Beeb has shown how it can achieve that. The challenge now is to take that into new territory.

*The Ambulance Box is now into its third print run!

Taking Lines for a Walk

Today's tour stop is at the blog of Dundee-born artist Douglas Robertson. Doug has turned our chat via Facebook messages into a fine post about my sequence of "Hebridean Thumbnails", incorporating the poems themselves and beautiful, deft sketches he has created to accompany them. I say it's about the sequence, but that's really only the jumping-off point for a discussion of monostiches and minimalism in art more generally, exploring some of the connections between writing and visual art.

Next week also sees two tour stops: on Monday, Dumbfoundry hosts Ivy Alvarez's interview with me; on Thursday, I'll be getting slightly political and theological over at Mark Calder's Boxologies blog. Owing to the London gig and some redecorating at home, I might not get the chance to link to Ivy's post until Thursday. Should be quicker off the mark with Mark's, though.