poem of the day

I've had Luke Kennard's new (third!) book, The Migraine Hotel, for a little while now. He's the kind of man I'd absolutely detest for being too damn clever if I wasn't so charmed by his wit and intelligence. Overall this collection is dashing, some of the poems border on the sublime. There's one of those quotes on the cover that usually makes one feel a bit ill, but in this particular case, it feels prescient: "It's always thrilling to see a major talent emerging." For once, not an understatement and one thing I especially love about Luke's work is that it's properly new. Too many people in the art world get trapped by the past - they aren't able to create something truly forward looking. Luke's work has a freshness that's novel without being trivial. I find this incredibly exciting. Get your hands on this work: it's the future.

This is one of my favourite poems from the new collection. Happy Friday.

And I Saw

A false prophet slapped in the face by a wave;
A woman screaming at her clarinet,
'What would you have me do then, drown you, too?'
Remaindered novels washed up on the shore.
A cat, baffled by a drowsy lobster, jogged
Over the pebbles towing a little carriage.
And the cat didn't say anything - because
It was a cat. And the carriage was not full
Of tiny men, a watermelon or an
Assembly of diplomatic mice
Because the carriage was an example
Of man's cruelty in the name of research.
The cat belonged to a behaviourist
And had been raised in an environment
Of only black horizontal lines. So
It saw my sprinting across the beach
To dismantle its harness as a whirl
Of fenceposts and orange rubber balls
And was gone faster than the better idea
You had a moment ago. Leaving me
Only the seagull's dreadful anthem:
'I just want to tell you how sad we all feel.'
The airplane trail made the cloud a wick -
I thought I saw it starting to burn down
And I knew we had been lucky to avoid
Disaster so far. I shared a bench with
A man who wanted to redefine us
As victims of one kind or another
Instead of whatever names we'd chose:
Steven victim, Jenny Victim, Franklin
Victim. I disagreed but couldn't speak.
He ate raw mushrooms from a paper bag.
In fact it was a computer game called
The Enormous Pointlessness of it All III.
When you are raised on computer games
You grow accustomed to saying 'I'm dead,'
Several times a day. Which is not to say
We are the fist generation to feel
So comfortable with our mortality.

Salt & Just One Book

I should have blogged about this before, but here I am - better late than never, eh?

For those of you in the know about poetry Salt will be old hat, but newbies to poetry publishing will be less well informed.

Salt has been around for the better part of 10 years and publishes an astonishing number of debut collections from some seriously talented writers. Shirley Dent, writing in the Guardian, said something that really resonated with me: while the poetry community was lapping up the gossip pages drama that was the battle of the Oxford poetry dons, a far more serious issue was receiving little to certainly not enough attention in the 'other place'. Salt, more the victim of bad luck than bad business, was faced with a chunk of debt and an industry smacked by recession.

What's so brilliant about Salt is that instead of letting blind panic drive them further into debt, trying to borrow their way out of a bad situation, they came up with a clever viral marketing campaign that perfectly appealed to the literary community.

The 'Just One Book' campaign is just that: buy one book. Anyone can afford one book and if lots of anyones each by one book, Salt will at the very least buy itself time with suppliers and creditors. But this isn't just a 'please give us money to save us' campaign - Salt is a genuinely important independent publishing house. They support and encourage new authors, publishing fantastic new work by writers who deserve to have their work out in the big wide world. Especially in the web 2.0 age when so many seem to think everything should be online and free, there's something immensely important about supporting a publishing house so clearly committed to produced beautiful works of literature. While every author likes to be published - if it's online, we'll take it - I don't know a single one who doesn't have 'being published' as their ultimate goal. There's still something special about the printed word. Help Salt keep this magic alive.

So. Go. Buy. Just. One. Book.

PS Salt is offering 33% of ALL books until the end of June. Use the promotional code G3SRT453 in the checkout to benefit. And if you spend �30 or $30 you get free shipping. Hey! Go mad! Buy two!