Save Salt Publishing…
June 1st, 2009 • News • No comments
If you follow any poetry related news (beyond Ruth Padel and Derek Walcott) Chris and Jen (Salt Directors) have been struggling to keep Salt moving since June last year when the economic downturn began to affect their press. Their three year funding ends this year, and they cannot apply through Grants for the Arts for further funding for Salt’s operations. Spring sales were down nearly 80% on the previous year, and despite April’s much improved trading, the past twelve months has left them with a budget deficit of over £55,000. It’s proving to be a very big hole and they’re having to take some drastic measures to save their business.
They’re asking you to buy just one book, right now. They don’t mind from where, you can buy it from them or from Amazon, your local shop or megastore, online or offline. If you buy just one book now, you’ll help to save Salt. Timing is absolutely everything here. They need cash now to stay afloat. If you love literature, help keep it alive. All it takes is just one book sale. Go to their online store and help keep them going.
It’s often said that there are many more writers of poetry than there are readers of poetry. Salt is responsible for publishing a few Metaroar/FYI favourites, including Anthony Joseph, whose new collection (http://bit.ly/X1JOE) launches officially on the 3rd of June (http://bit.ly/JbNKo). Support your independent presses!
Exhibiting You - The International Museum of Women seeks submissions
May 29th, 2009 • Submissions • No comments
From January to September 2009, I.M.O.W. is Exhibiting You! As the museum prepares to debut a new online exhibition in October 2009, the I.M.O.W. Web site is showcasing the talents of our global online community. They are looking for submissions that relate to I.M.O.W.’s mission to value the lives of women around the world.
Submit your work for consideration and share your art, creative writing, journalism, music, audio, photography, video and animation with a global audience.
They’ll post new stories on a regular basis. Twice a month, they will announce Museum Picks in their email newsletter. Submissions that receive the highest star ratings and the most views will also be listed as the most popular stories.
From time to time, they’ll also invite submissions on a specific theme.
Read more »
London Word Festival team honoured with award
May 29th, 2009 • News • No comments
The team behind the London Word Festival team has been honoured with an award for ‘exceptional cultural entrepreneurs’.
Sam Hawkins, Marie McPartlin and Tom Chivers, founders and co-directors of the London Word Festival, are one of the five recipients of the 2009 Paul Hamlyn Foundation Breakthrough Fund, as announced on the 26th of May.
The three producers will receive a grant of £141,000 over the next three years to develop the festival’s vision and their careers.
Founded in 2007 and inspired by the popularity of their early experiments in mixed-bill live-literature, Sam, Tom and Marie came up with the idea of an annual multi-arts, multi-venue festival with a focus on literature, poetry, comedy, music and audience interactivity. Now in only its second year, it aims to push the boundaries of words in performance across art-forms and in predominantly non-traditional venues throughout East London.
Read more »
Chapter One Promotions - Poetry Competition
May 20th, 2009 • Competitions • No comments
CHAPTER ONE PROMOTIONS - POETRY COMPETITION
Deadline: 1 Jun, 12am
Reply to: info@chapteronepromotions.com
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Chapter One Promotions are looking for original and unpublished poems that vividly create a moment in time, evoke an emotion or just entertain. The form and content of the poem is open allowing you to tap into your creative resourcefulness and not be hindered. The only stipulation is that the poem be no more than 30 lines long.
The judge is the renowned poet and artist Linda Lee Welch. Linda is the winner of the Bridport Poetry Competition and will have the exciting task of selecting the top twenty poems which will be displayed on the Chapter One website. The public will then vote for their favourite poem thus determining the top three winners.
The entry fee is £5 per poem and the prize money is £1000 for the first placed winner, £500 for the second postition and £250 for the third most popular poem. Online voting takes place from 1 - 15 July and one lucky voter, selected at random, will win £100 just for voting!
Chapter One Promotions, 19 - 35 Sylvan Grove, SE15 1PD.
For more info: 0845 456 5364 / info@chapteronepromotions.com
www.chapteronepromotions.com
BBC Poetry Season
May 19th, 2009 • News • No comments
Let poetry into your life, says the BBC.
If you didn’t already know, the BBC plans to dedicate a large amount of programming to poetry over the coming months. Head to their supporting website to get a sense of the range of poetry they’re planning to showcase. Congratulations to Patrick Neate, who’s been drafted in as a monthly columnist to write about all things spoken word…
Popshot Magazine– call for submissions
May 11th, 2009 • News • No comments
Another call for submissions. This one’s for Popshot. Described as a bi-annual poetry & illustration magazine that aims “to bring poetry to a wider audience and attempt to steal it back from school anthologies and funeral readings,” Popshot is now looking for submissions to their second issue.
Word on the street is that it looks fantastic, and that any poet worth their contemporary salts wants to be found somewhere between the covers. I can’t personally vouch, since I haven’t got my copy yet, but if the shots on the website are to be believed, I’m going to have to detour past the ICA (one of the current stockists) to fix that. As we used to say back in the day– don’t sleep.
More info here: http://www.popshotpopshot.com/
Wheelhouse Magazine - call for submissions
April 30th, 2009 • Competitions, Submissions • No comments
Poets take note….
“Our next regular issue of Wheelhouse Magazine will appear this summer. Submissions are still open (May 30 deadline). Already new work forthcoming from Zachary Schomberg/Emily Frey, Joel Chace, Karen Neuberg, Ryan Daley, Kate Bernadette Benedict, and others. We’re just beginning to see its outline, and we like its outline.
CALL FOR WORK: the Wheelhouse Press E-Chapbook series is now open for submissions. New titles are in the works, from Thom Donovan and Juliet Cook and others. Submissions for chapbooks will be open until May 30, 2009. If you have a chapbook or short cycle (10-24 pp.) and would like to feature it in Wheelhouse, send as DOC or RTF for consideration:
wheelhouse@wheelhousemagazine.com / subject : name/chapbook submission.
–as always, we are looking for critical work that plays with both form as well as subject. Work on contemporary experiments, movements, and trajectories in poetry are welcome, especially work that involves itself in the politics of language, and the poetics of action.”
Come on poets and submit !
The 14th Tale - an interview with Inua Ellams
March 29th, 2009 • Features • No comments
I spoke with poetic wunderkind, Inua Ellams about his accomplished one man show, The 14th Tale. For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity of seeing this breathtaking show there’s a clip below for you to enjoy.
Audience feedback is important to you - is it important to make the whole process more egalitarian?
Most of the time I write poems, I write to clear my head, amuse myself and see what comes. For this writing, I do not care of the audience. But The 14th Tale was written with them in mind, I had to amuse and entertain all. I needed to make sure I had succeeded and feedback was how I gauged the success of the show.
What triggers memory for you ?
My background in graphics means that in much the same way a jazz musician riffs and loops from by a baseline, a simple image starts a ripple, domino, kaleidoscopic daydream, effect and I attempt to trap it in words.
How much is history reinvented in recollection?
The mind does what it will to keep itself from imploding. This includes editing or removing a memory to make it more comfortable to relive, it’s is a type of fiction. We imagine ourselves into stories, flights of imagination take us where we can taste or smell, tell you the colour of the light, then we and shape and invent these stories as our own.
Can you tell me a little more about the devising process for the show
The title came as a way of referencing my first collection of poems, ‘Thirteen Fairy Negro Tales’.
I sat for long while staring at Virginia, my laptop, as I thought about stories and what could tie things together. By the fifth script, I considered throwing the towel in but Roger Robinson, my writing mentor swore at me ‘you ain’t throwing shit, get back to it!’ so I faced Virginia thinking ‘How did I get myself in this?’
I thought about the phrase ‘How did I get myself in this?’ and how many times I had said this, about the troubles I caused as boy. I became obsessed, spent stupid hours laughing as memories came flooding back. I asked questions, realised my father had been as troublesome, as was his father. I saw a pattern, a first line, scribbled it down and the story began.
Can creativity be a form of revenge?
Good question! It depends on how effective a revenge you want it to be, and who you are targeting. I imagine if half of the characters I talked about in the show they would leave with the definite impression I had the last laugh. So yes, in that sense. It can be an assault on memory, to reinvent and make of art something dark.
The dramatic structure for the show is very tight and elegant - how did that evolve ?
Naturally. In Edinburgh, I saw a show called Melancholia where flash backs were used to such great effect, I knew I’d want to dabble with it. Roger Robinson told of a structure he had worked with and initially I wrote the story in six lines.
But the writing itself, the language and music made a swan ballgown of the scaffolding. I wrote sections of the show set in the hospital knowing it made sense and would act as a bridge between the stories, but I was still unsure how to deliver this in the performance of the text. Enter director Thierry Lawson who made wonders of my words and brought The 14th Tale to life.
How much is the show a homage to your father?
I’d say it is about 50% . I did not set out to write about my father at all, I wanted to write about myself but we have the same names, our lives are both governed by four magnificent women (three sisters and my mother), we both are stubborn, both like to talk and our voices are so similar, my twin sister answers ‘Yes Dad’ sometimes when I call her. The show is tied into my family, into my father. In writing about myself I needed to recognise both my past and the present.
Likestarlings - poets talking in poems…
March 24th, 2009 • News • No comments
Likestarlings is a place for talking in poems. After several months of talking, emailing, writing and walks in the park, the site went live with a chain between David Hart and David Hawkins. Several other chains are in progress and will be posted over the coming weeks.
The idea is simple:
1. Pair poets who don’t know each other
2. Start with a poem by one of them
3. The other writes a poem in response, within a week
4. The first responds to that poem with a poem
5. That exchange happens again, so four new poems, and a conversation of five, are written
The aims of the project are to discover something in writing in response, to produce good poems, and introduce poets, both well-established and new, to one another. It also offers a new way into reading poems. An associated blog, which includes guest essays, provides a forum for discussing the process and meeting new poets.
At the moment, the editors say they’re “approaching poets we really like and think would pair up nicely. But we’d be interested to hear from people who’d like to be paired. Send an email to likestarlings@gmail.com with a bit about yourself and a few poems and we’ll get back to you.”
The next step…
March 17th, 2009 • Development log • No comments
A little note on the future development of Metaroar.com. If you’re new to the site and mailing list, you’d be forgiven for not knowing that Metaroar’s going through a fairly drawn-out period of redevelopment. The Metaroar team currently consists of myself, Jacob Sam-La Rose (founder, Editor-in-Chief and purveyor of fine listings since 1999) and Naomi Woddis (who currently answers to the title of “sous-chef” or “extra pair of hands on deck when Jacob’s furiously busy, which tends to be most of the time, these days…”)
Changes are in motion, despite the apparent snail’s pace. The new domain name was registered earlier this month. The next step is configuration of the next version of the site, which is what most of my Metaroar time is being diverted towards when I’m not turning listings around. Think of any interruptions to the regular FYI service like engineering works on the underground except that, at Metaroar, we love you more than London Transport does, and we don’t get big fat cat bonuses…
Thank you to those of you that have subscribed to the site via the new email service provided by Google. Do let me know how it’s working for you. The listings that coming through the website are currently thin on the ground, but will crank up as I start shifting and updating other parts of the system over the coming months. If you’re still receiving messages from fyi@metaroar.com, you’re signed to the old (and still functional) mailing list, but there’s no need to feel that you’ve been left behind by the other cool kids – I’ll give you plenty of warning when it’s time to jump ship and update your subscription.
If you’re interested in what’s keeping me busy beyond Metaroar, head here for an update: http://www.jsamlarose.com/2009/03/whats-going-on/
I can also be found at odd times of the day (and night) on Miscellany: http://jslr.tumblr.com
Naomi Woddis can currently be found here:
http://poetrymosaic.wordpress.com/
and here: http://bookofquestions.tumblr.com
Remember: our fuel tank is designed to accept kind thoughts, suggestions and good wishes of all shapes and sizes. Thanks for bearing with us during the lengthy transition.