As part of the British Art Show in Nottingham, Christian Marclay’s masterpiece The Clock is showing at the New Art Exchange. This Hyson Green Gallery is right by the Forest Park And Ride, so it’s easy to pop in for a few minutes while going somewhere else, pick up my partner on the way back from work or, as we increasingly do, just go for an extended visit whenever we feel like it. Yesterday was our anniversary. We’ve been together for 27 years. So what better way to spend it than at a movie that celebrates both cinema and time itself? We first dropped in to take a look the day after it opened. When we sat down, we knew nothing about the film. After…
Hard to believe that Joni Mitchell is 67 today. My friend Mike and I were huge Joni Mitchell fans from the age of 16 on. Funny thing is, a kind of retrospective wisdom has evolved that girls from that period were desperate to meet boys who liked Joni Mitchell (see the recent, very fine movie The Kids Are All Right for instance). But all the Joni freaks I knew were male. My partner often professes herself to be thoroughly fed up of having too much Joni played to her by blokes (this since I met her, twenty odd years ago). Professing my love for Joni never got me anywhere with women. There’s no need for me to bang on about Joni’s brilliance as a singer…
Nearly a month away from blogging and there are load of things I’d like to write about. John Lucas’s poetry festival, of course, which was a great success, full of magical moments. The Nottingham opening of the British Art Show. The Hockley Hustle. A great gig by Lloyd Cole on Friday night. The terrific movie we went to see last night, The Kids Are All Right. But I’m on research leave from my university job and have three months to write the first draft of my next novel for adults, so I’m not going to indulge myself by blogging when I could be writing fiction. It’ll be mostly music on Sundays from now on. Yesterday turned out to be Elton John and Leon Russell day.…
Sue and I helped John Lucas (pictured above) to organise the first Beeston International Poetry Festival, which finished last night with a terrific, packed reading by Matthew Welton and Roy Fisher. John also runs Shoestring Press and the Flying Goose Poetry Reading series. I’ve set up a public ( you don’t have to join facebook) facebook group, which currently has 92 members and features photos and single poem videos from most of the readings (two from Roy!), forming a permanent archive. There are currently 18 videos on there, each taken with a hand held Flip video camera. Many thanks to all of the poets who performed and everybody who came. I’m sure you’ll agree that it was a very enjoyable, unique series of readings. I…
In the first of today’s two National Poetry Day posts I want to tell you about a new poetry prize, announced today. It’s for a first collection, in memory of my friend, the fine Irish poet Michael Murphy. If you’d like to read one of Michael’s poems, there’s one in the post that I wrote shortly after his death. Below is the press release about the prize, which has been set up by friends of Michael and is being run by the English Association. The Michael Murphy Memorial Prize To celebrate National Poetry Day, the English Association announces the inauguration of a new biennial prize of £500 for a distinctive first volume of poetry in English published in Britain or Ireland, in the first instance…