March 23, 2009

Arse Poo Willy

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I just had a draft eaten. Many naughty words were spoken.

In the meantime, should you want to come watch me curse in person, I’ve got a couple readings coming up. On the 28th (ie this Saturday), I’m reading for the Norwich Festival of Light at the Workshop pub on Earlham Road. The reading starts at 7, I think I’m on at some point after 7:30, along with Stephanie Leal and Agi Lehoczky. I cannot promise my poems will involve as much cheesy goodness as the Workshop’s very excellent pizza, but I’ll do my best.

Then the next day, I’m involved in “Spoken Word at Starbucks St. Stephens,” an all-afternoon poet-a-thon of a whole mess of people, Facebooked here. I say “involved” because I am not only performing, but compere-ing (compering?). I promised Stephanie this while drunk; I will not be able to drink while doing it. This somehow seems unfair. However, we have been told we get free drinks while we’re performing, which in my case is going to be two hours, and as far as I’m concerned that, o my blog readers, is a challenge. I shall be drinking quad lattes all week as a training exercise.

 

March 21, 2009

Now what rhymes with “shove it”?

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So, as promised, Andrew Motion is giving up his gig as Poet Laureate after a ten-year run. This article makes it sound like it wasn’t a lot of fun–writing poems on pointless anniversaries of people he doesn’t know, the inevitable run of “Poet Laureate Writes Poem: And It’s Crap!” articles from newspapers immediately following, etc etc. And I do sympathise; sitting down with a blank sheet of paper knowing I have to fill it with poetic, and very public, musings on the Queen’s Jubilee sounds like a special form of hell.

However. The problem is the sentence that opens the piece:

Andrew Motion, the first poet laureate to retire voluntarily in nearly 400 years, has admitted in a valedictory essay that the eight royal poems he wrote in his 10 years in the post were the most difficult of his life.

…eight? Eight poems in ten years? For 5,000 pounds a year? That works out to 6,250 pounds a poem! (NB: yes, my righteous indignance would be better highlighted by a pound symbol in front of those calculations; alas, my laptop is American, and I’m not dedicated enough to my rage to calculate the exchange to dollars.) Motion’s an established poet and all, so perhaps the trade-off between dignity and lucre is a bit more balanced on his scales, but for six grand a poem, I’ll write whatever the fuck you like. I’ll write a birthday poem for the Queen’s corgis.

I’ll refrain from expanding on my credit crunch howl, but one last buttress for my meanspiritedness: this is another quote from the article.

Motion says he has used the post to publicise poetry and to broaden the remit to write about other issues, such as homelessness, liberty, the Paddington rail disaster, 9/11 and Harry Patch, the last survivor from the trenches of the first world war.

–and there’s the rub. If Nikki Giovanni wanted to get up and bitch about writing poems for the queen, I’d probably be a bit more okay with it. But my line in the sand is that anyone who gets up and says with a straight face that they’ve written “a poem about liberty” is, frankly, a pretentious ne’er-do-well and not to be trusted.

Now to get my CV and that dog poem off in the post; I think “Ode to Corgiville Fair” is going to be a real corker.

 

June 27, 2008

The Unpopular Poem

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I think everyone has these–the poem you like, for personal or impersonal reasons, that no one else seems to have the slightest spot for. Sometimes you end up placing them somewhere–I’ve got one in the next issue of Stop Sharpening Your Knives, and there’s one in an old issue of The Interpreter’s House that, at the time, I was told was indicative of the American impulse to overpersonalise every major environmental disaster. (Not that I’m bitter.)

Anyway, I’m in a mood, and this one gets rejected from everywhere, so behold! Quite an old one; I think I wrote it about two years ago, and it stubbornly refuses to go anywhere. I should probably read into that more than I do.

Bestiary of a Room Tonight

Here are things with eyes open:

Here is a man, and a woman. Here is a spider,
now canvassing the ceiling, its plaster scores of hills
and valleys; now standing still, testing, patient.

Here is a half-full pint of beer,
wasp-trap. One lies against the bottom
of the glass, wings spread. Here are closed windows.

Here is a boy, or a picture of a boy. Here
is a poem–a bad one–of beasts, and hesitating breath,
and growing, flowering things we cannot see.

Here is a bird, at morning.

 

May 13, 2008

New link, new link!

Posted by meghanpurvis under Blog Link, Housekeeping
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If you draw your attention to my Blogroll to your right (I know it’s difficult to tear your eyes away from my prose, but do, if only for a moment), you will notice there’s a new blogger up. Behold, my newest creepy internet friend, Nathalie. She’s another poet/graduate student fleeing the real world, AND she knits. There’s either a battle-to-the-death or a roadtrip for the ages in our future. Actually, combining those two describes pretty much every road trip I’ve ever been on, and that includes family vacations, so…game on, man.

 

May 13, 2008

Quotes to Freak Yourself Out By

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Well thanks, Ms. Lessing, for THE WORST ADVICE EVER:

Discussing her writing, she said: “It has stopped; I don’t have any energy anymore. This is why I keep telling anyone younger than me, don’t imagine you’ll have it forever. Use it while you’ve got it, because it’ll go; it’s sliding away like water down a plug hole.”

Aw, cheer up emo writer.

 

April 29, 2008

Tag-alog.

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So I’ve been tagged in one of those question-answering memes making the blogger rounds. Which poor sod is going to get tagged last and discover he is, in fact, the end of the internet, I wonder? Oh well, NOT ME!

I’ve been tagged by George Szirtes, and was flattered in a very proximal way to notice that he also tagged Linda Grant, whose blog The Thoughtful Dresser has been a regular read of mine for some time. I’m not sure whether this makes me look better by association or worse by comparison, but by god I’ll take it. Anyway, onward:

Six Random Things About Me:

1. I have never been stung by a bee/wasp/etc. As a result, I’ve decided I must be extremely allergic and, if I am ever stung in the future, will die instantly.

2. I hum a lot. Apparently my social cue for “this small talk has become tiresome; please go away” is to start looking away and humming to myself during pauses in the conversation. I am just as rude as that anecdote makes me sound.

3. When I’m particularly stressed, I have two types of stress dreams. One is travelling–I’ve just gotten to America and I have to turn around and come back to England, or I’m trying to pack and my contact lenses are the size of dinner plates, that kind of thing. The other type is super-violent and usually involves having to fight off hordes of people with things like fireplace pokers or a large metal pike. I had a dream about a month ago about having to beat someone to death with a chunk of ice. Suddenly this “Beowulf” thing doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

4. I managed to get through a twenty-minute conversation with Mandy Patinkin without once saying the name Inigo Montoya.

5. I used to be allergic to apples and bananas. Now I’m not. I am, however, sensitive to mushrooms and avocadoes, which I never was before, and yes I miss guacamole like a bitch.

6. I walked out of a showing of “Titanic” twenty minutes in and snuck into “Half Baked” instead. Because “Titanic” is seventy hours long, I watched “Half Baked” a time and a half before my friends and their legion of tissues made their tear-stained way out of the theatre. I still maintain I had the superior cinematic experience.

I’m supposed to tag six other people to continue this thread. I’m tempted to tag Nathan Hamilton six times in a row to make his life a living hell, but I’ll refrain. Since it’s three am, though, I am going to wait until tomorrow to cross-check the six people I’ll tag against the people who have already been tagged. Maybe I’ll troll the NY Times and tag all their new media bloggers; I’m sure those fuckers have got the time.

 

April 24, 2008

The Strikingly-Good-Looking-is Purvis

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So I was obsessively googling my own name exploring the wonderful world of the internets, and happened to look at the cast list on IMDB for “Public Enemies,” the gangster movie with Johnny Depp coming out next year. If you haven’t already clicked the link, allow me to draw your attention to the only bit (okay, except for the Johnny Depp photo) worth looking at:

Christian Bale … Melvin Purvis

That’s right, kids; Christian Bale has joined the family. The eleven-year-old “Newsies” fanatic that still lurks inside me doesn’t know whether to weep from excitement or from incest-related-horror.

 

March 18, 2008

Moar Poetry

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Sad puppyOh yes–the Stop Sharpening Your Knives crew is going to be performing at a reading…arty…thing this Wednesday at the Sainsbury Centre. Details are here. It will undoubtedly be horrible; I have it on good authority there will be puppy-kicking. Those rhyming bastards.

 

March 17, 2008

How to get into poetry magazines: Statistics 101

Posted by meghanpurvis under Article link, Blog Link | Tags: |
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So the folks at the Virginia Quarterly Review tried to write a blog post about how writing about poetic cliches will get you nowhere, only to find it will apparently get you into the VQR. Check out their terrifying (on any number of levels) post about it here; I’ve reproduced their handy table below:

Submitted Published
Water 19.9% 24.8%
Death 14.1 15.2
Blood 11.7 13.8
Stone 11.1 16.0
Bone 9.1 7.8
Poetry 7.6 10.3
Heart 7.5 6.7
Fish 7.0 5.3
Birth 5.5 7.4
Darkness 3.9 17.0
Rust 3.3 2.5
Cat 2.3 2.8

I think the worst part of this for me is realizing how many of these I absolutely am guilty of writing about way too much. Apparently, though, I just haven’t been writing about them in the right combination. So, a poem about a fish boning a cat to death it is…

 

February 29, 2008

Random Thing I Like and Thus So Must You: the poetry edition

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here, bulletI was super-pleased last fall to see that Bloodaxe published a UK edition of Here, Bullet, a collection of poems by Brian Turner, about his experiences in the current (*obligatory liberal grumblings*) war in Iraq. War poems are a funny one for me–it’s one of those subjects where as soon as I hear “oh, a poem about war,” I get a nebulous half-poem in my head made up of cliches from other war poems I’ve read–and, a lot of the time, that nebulous half-poem is what I get on the page. But sometimes a poet comes along and blows that out of the water–Bruce Weigl is another one of these for me, which reminds me to slap him up here sometime–and Turner’s another one. Here, Bullet is a collection I like in short spurts rather than a longhaul reading, because the subject is so focused I think it’s easier to lose perspective; if I read several in a row I start comparing them to each other, rather than thinking “fuck, that’s a good poem,” which is clearly what I should be doing. Observe:

Here, Bullet

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

***

I mean, fuck, that’s a good poem.

Also! If you were a diligent reader and went to Turner’s Wikipage, you will notice he’s from Fresno, that fair boil on the face of California that I know, and love, and returned from about two weeks ago. I have a morbid fascination with poets from Fresno, mostly because I’m in awe of anyone who manages to be arty in the place and not get shot. (I am, mostly, kidding.) I suppose the fact that Turner brings his own firepower probably bought him a bit of protection, but that’s an inappropriate joke for another time.

 

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