Poetry Society EGM - Broadsheets to the Wind

An interesting thing happened a couple of days ago. I read an article in Civil Society with the headline Poetry Society Issues Full and Frank Explanation of Dispute. The 'Full and Frank Explanation' being referred to was the one read by John Simmons at the EGM... the one that was subsequently picked apart and scrutinised as a whitewash of trustee incompetence. That full and frank explanation.

I wrote to Civil Society, asking if their article had taken into consideration Judith Palmer's statement or indeed the audio-recording from the EGM. And guess what happened next...

The article was instantly modified to include a more even-handed account of events which referred to Palmer's statement and the secondary sources surrounding it... and I got an e-mail of thanks from the article's writer. "I have been in touch with the press officer all morning and all of yesterday and they neglected to advise me that this had ever been posted".

It would appear that Civil Society is not the only periodical to allow for a modified stance on the situation. I draw your attention to the following pieces:

1. Guardian Letters - Betrayal of Trust at the Poetry Society
2. The Independent - A row that shouldn't hide and important truth: poetry matters
3. Civil Society - The Poetry Society Issues Full and Frank Explanation of Dispute

Whichever stance you choose to take in this debate, I think it serves as a fascinating example of how PR and the work done by PR companies has shifted from solid to liquid to gas in the age of Web 2.0 where the long tail wags the dog.

If you have not already, then I suggest you read Kate Clanchy on paranoid poets and this message from Anne-Marie Fyfe, former chair of the Board of Trustees. Both are important, well-written documents in and of themselves, but there is equal value in the representations of conflicting opinions occurring in the comments sections. Irrespective of people's personal bias, everyone involved in this conflict cares about the future of poetry.

NB. At time of writing the petition to reinstate Judith Palmer has 874 signatures.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Poetry Society EGM Reflections

Following yesterday's historic and fraught meeting of the Poetry Society's Board of Trustees and some of its members, many fine people have felt compelled to write on the topic. I shall attempt here, to compile all the relevant responses so that the various opinions can be easily sourced.

1. Jane Holland - A New Dawn for the Poetry Society
2. George Szirtes - The Poetry Society: What Have We Learned
3. Christine Michael - Dysfunction, disharmony, dissarray
4. Jon Stone - But Can't We All Just Get Along
5. Richard Fair - The Poetry Society EGM
6. Kate Fox - Why being bored on a Board is a Good Thing
7. Stephen Bates - Guardian Article
8. Charlie Ashley-Roberts - #posocegm (poem)
9. Polly Clark - Poetry Society EGM
10. Michelene Wandor - Prêt à poetry in the Surgeons’ Hall 
11. Katy Evans-Bush - #PoSocEGM: The Post-Mortem
12. Fiona Moore - Counting: Poets, Butterflies
13. Rob Sharp - Article for The Independent (with open 'Comments' section)
14. Niki May Young - Article for Civil Society Finance

Please do let me know if I've missed any out or if new ones pop up that you want added into the list.

Phil Brown
Poetry Editor

Poetry Society EGM Special

Follow Friday's Poetry Society EGM live on Twitter

It is a month when the literary world dances to a tune synchronised with the downfall of tabloid journalism. Silkworms Ink is not here to add to the argument, but we do think that it is important to help others keep track of it.

Friday 22^nd July 2011 will be an historic day in British Poetry. At 2PM at the Royal College of Surgeons there will be a Poetry Society EGM (Extraordinary General Meeting).

For those of you with no knowledge of the build-up to this event, I have provided wider reading at the end of this post. I shall summarise the issues as I see them as succinctly as possible here:

• The Poetry Society has recently been granted a large increase in funding from the government, and there is disagreement as to how this money should be deployed.
• Several high-ranking members of the Poetry Society and its Board of Directors have recently resigned and there has been no lucid explanation as to the reasons for this.
• Some people have publicly expressed a concern that the Editor of the Poetry Review is moving towards a level of autonomy from the Poetry Society that is unconstitutional.
• Dispute exists between whether the Poetry Society’s primary goal should be in broadening the audience of poetry or promoting poetry’s most achieved practitioners.

My engagement with these issues is, at present, purely as a bystander so please do contact me if you feel that I have misrepresented the issue.

My only stake in this is that I love poetry, Poetry Review and The Poetry Society. As a paid-up member of the Society and as a taxpayer, I am paying for these things to exist and have every faith that they will endure and continue to do a very important and admirable job.

"The puzzle of worldly success (not wholly an oxymoron for poets) and how if affects the actual writing of poetry (and indeed what gets published and read), is something we often disavow. Yet it's always with us, and demands that we make peace with it - even if that turns out to be, as Michael Symmons Roberts has it, Bonhoeffer's "costly grace"." - Fiona Sampson

My attendance at Friday’s EGM will not be as a subscriber to a particular side of a false dichotomy, but simply as someone who cares about what is happening. Anyone who has an interest in literature, business ethics or the allocation of public funding should care about what happens at this meeting.

But the Poetry Society’s membership is vast and not everyone is at liberty to attend this meeting – I am fortunate enough to have an employer who values this issue and is willing to let me leave work early to attend. For this reason, I shall be reporting the events of the meeting in real-time on our TwitterFeed and will post a summary the following day on our blog.

For those of you who have not exhausted the public-domain literature on the situation, here is a brief reading list that should give you a sound introduction. It is not in chronological order, but rather logical order (i.e. the narrative that most lends itself to you understanding any insider-speak and obscure references):


Background Reading:

Item 1 An introduction to the dispute from The Guardian

Item 2 Announcement of General Meeting

Item 3 Brief Overview of Petition

Item 4 Agenda for the Meeting

Item 5 A response to the situation from Katy Evans-Bush

Item 6 A response to the situation from Todd Swift

Item 7 A Letter from Ex-Poetry Society Director Judith Palmer to Todd Swift

Item 8 A response to the situation from Lemn Sissay

Item 9 A message from Fiona Sampson

Item 10 Article in the Telegraph

Item 11 A collection of correspondence between Kate Clanchy and ‘The Board’

Phil Brown

Poetry Society Member

Sitcom | Television | Roseanne: No Holds Barred

Roseanne is America's greatest sitcom. There, I've said it.

At least in its early years, the show was a perfectly formed, and perfectly performed, slice of working-class America. It was consistently intelligent and emotionally mature. And (as if this matters) it gave Joss Whedon and Judd Apatow their first writing jobs.

I didn't even watch the show when it aired in the '90s but discovering it on DVD has been a revelation. I was reminded of its subtleties this week when I read Roseanne's fascinating account of the behind-the-scenes ructions, posted on New York Magazine's site. Take a few minutes to go and read it too.

And if you need any convincing, here are a few choice extracts:

'The idea that your ego is not ego at all but submission to the will of the Lord starts to dawn on you as you recognize that only by God’s grace did you make it through the raging attack of idea pirates and woman haters, to ascend to the top of Bigshit Showbiz Mountain.'

'I walked into this woman’s office, held the scissors up to show her I meant business, and said, “Bitch, do you want me to cut you?” We stood there for a second or two, just so I could make sure she was receptive to my POV.'

'Imitation is the sincerest form of show business.'

'Hollywood hates labor, and hates shows about labor worse than any other thing. And that’s why you won’t be seeing another Roseanne anytime soon. Instead, all over the tube, you will find enterprising, overmedicated, painted-up, capitalist whores claiming to be housewives. But I’m not bitter.'

All done? Good, wasn't it! Now, for balance, I recommend this rather po-faced response from The Guardian.

Although the network's worries over Roseanne are legendary, what's amazing is that very little of this tension shows up onscreen. In fact, watching seasons back to back on DVD, it's striking that the show has a coherence that's very rare for this era of TV. (Again, I am choosing not to address the last few seasons, when the show was chasing ratings and its star was struggling with mental illness.)

Look at the way each episode begins. I think we learn a lot about television's preoccupations from studying title sequences (that's how I justify the time I spend on Youtube, anyway). Roseanne's one-shot opening is exemplary in the way that it prepares us not just for the show's thematic concerns, but also for its political challenge.



Sorry about the quality of the video, but hopefully you'll have grasped the boisterous to-and-fro of the family unit, the deft sketching of interpersonal relationships and, most importantly, the way the kitchen table is a locus around which discourse occurs. It's a conversation to which we do not have access, true, but the rasping bluesy harmonica conveys its earthiness and its wit. Offsetting the liveliness of the group, the smooth 360° camera movement speaks to their emotional connection.

It is a camera movement that begins and ends with Roseanne, capped off (wonderfully) with her laughter: raucous, unself-conscious, enjoying her family and herself. And this is the nature of that political statement - the show dares to suggest that matriarchy, working-class life, irritation and happiness are all compatible. It's simple enough but I'm struggling to think of anything quite so progressive on our screens today.

Nicolas Pillai
Film Editor

Wide Reading | Cut Out & Keep

Jon Stone doing an impression of modern poetry criticism (ie. sucking... hah!)

Really interesting piece on the fantastic Fuselit blog last night about the lacklustre nature of modern literary criticism in poetry world:

"The problem here is this: all these blandishments and upbeat noises cover up real issues, debate and conflict within poetry that, were the separate strands to find their voice, would be far more enticing to the average Guardian reader (and others beyond), since they invite negotiation and navigation. The soft sell results in nothing but the reader noting, perhaps with a warm feeling, that poetry is doing all right for itself, before moving on."

Jon Stone makes some extremely well observed and insightful points in this article, and I firmly suggest that anybody involved in review-writing should go check it out.

One thing that Jon talks about in his piece, is the vagueness with which a poet's subject matter is often covered in reviews. I am almost certain that this is sometimes caused by the internet-literate poet's ability to publicly ridicule people (or at least throw their toys out of the iPram on Facebook), combined with the cryptic nature of many modern poetry collections. 

In a society where internationally accessible public comment is available to almost every poet, and the vast majority of reviews now have a handy little 'comments' section at the bottom of them, wouldn't you be scared of taking any sort of hard line on a collection of poems, for fear that you'd missed something important or entirely misinterpreted a text (I do realise that many people would fire back at me with 'but my dear boy, there IS no such thing as misinterpretation!', but they're wrong)?

With Desmond Swords around every corner and flame-wars imminent with every mildly contestable utterance made, no wonder that poetry reviews are always padded out with such non-commital guff as 'hers is surely a poem of the every day, and of great rarity' and 'one gets the sense of a poet sat contemplating life in this collection'. Best bet is probably for us to stay in our gang-huts until we've crafted the perfect nomenclature with which to discuss poetry in it plainest sense.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Wider Reading | Don Paterson Namechecks Silkworms (sort of)

The Jocks and the Geordies from the Beano, your classic 

farty wee boys in gang-huts

Whilst it’s nice to know you’re even on the radar of a man who, to at least one Silkworms editor’s mind, has written at least three of the ten finest collections of poetry published over the last decade and a half or so, there was an overtone of chastisement in Don Paterson’s acknowledgement of our site in Saturday’s Guardian Review:

Facebook and blogs have helped enormously, though the blogs are still split between responsible, informative and entertaining sites such as Katy Evans-Bush’s excellent Baroque in Hackney, and too many anonymous others which resemble farty wee boys’ gang-huts, and where membership is conditional on hating the right people.

He’s talking about us. I’m certain of it. The sensation is part sadomasochistic thrill, and part reminiscent of a daydream I keep having in which I finally get the opportunity to meet Nick Cave, interviewing him maybe (the nearest I’ve got so far was an interview with the other members of Grinderman a few months back) and he calls me an arsehole or something. The famously hostile Zane Lowe Culture Show interview probably has something to do with this – if you can watch it to the end, you’re more of a vertebrate than I:

ZL: …a bidda Ziggy Stardust, just perhaps conceptually in the record, in the sense that there appears to be a certain character emerging…? I don’t know whether that’s a good observation or a bad one…?

NC: The Grinderman songs are extremely personal. It’s not as though we built some kind of alter-ego, which brings back the Ziggy Stardust thing: it’s not, it’s absolutely NOT our intention.

Nick later looks Lowe in the eye and murmers, ‘interviews are hugely counter-productive.’ It’s a curious thing, suspecting that the people you admire most in the world probably wouldn’t like you.

SKS

Wider Reading | David Lynch Goes Electro

Writing about Guardian article: 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/nov/29/david-lynch-good-day-today

I don't know what I was expecting when I heard that David Lynch had released a single. I suppose part of me was thinking Aphex Twin. Or maybe some of that beautifully weird score we get so much of in Twin Peaks. What I wasn't expecting was this:

Good Day Today by threeminutesthirtyseconds

Honestly, it sounds like something that could be knocked up in Garage Band in twenty minutes. But then, as I have often been told when it comes to David Lynch, I just don't 'get it'. But does anybody else think it sounds like the batshit crazy Aussie animator Wendy Vainity?