Jubilee Lines

There’s much to enjoy in Faber and Faber’s new anthology, Jubilee Lines – 60 Poets for 60 Years, edited by Carol Ann Duffy.  Each of the last 60 years is represented by one poem and one poet, many of them very familiar names. Just four poems in, for 1956 there’s Class Photograph from Douglas Dunn, looking back at “pensioners in disguise”. And the roll call from StAnza 2012 just past includes Grace Nichols (1965), Christopher Reid offering “The Clearing for 1969, followed by John Burnside (1981), Robert Crawford (1984), Lachlan Mackinnon (1988), Michael Symmons Roberts (1996), Don Paterson (1997), Jackie Kay (1999) and Lavinia Greenlaw (2001).  

To accompany the book, Faber and Faber have collaborated with  Somethin’ Else and The Space to produce a groundbreaking interactive digital platform, which brings together actors’ readings, sound-based generative design and archive footage to create an exciting new way to experience poetry. At its heart are audio readings of the poems in Jubilee Lines, read evocatively by distinguished actors Dan Stevens, Samantha Bond, Lyndsey Marshal and Alex Lanipekun. Graphic designer Stefanie Posavec has produced visualisations of the audio readings using generative design techniques. Derived from characteristics such as the length of the recording and its decibel level, she has created unique artworks for each of the 60 poems.

The twenty poems that most vividly evoke our collective memory are enhanced with rich archive material, including film footage and audio uncovered in the BBC and British Movietone archives, as well as newspapers, adverts and photographs. It includes many items transferred from telecine for the first time, with material that ranges from the iconic (Michael Fish’s weather report in 1987), to the unseen (Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova preparing for her first space flight in 1963), and from the jubilant (children eagerly awaiting the end of sweet rationing in 1953) to the turbulent (miners clashing with police during the strike in 1984).

We are invited to navigate the poems by year, by poet, through archive or by theme (eg. remembrance, identity, vigilance), plotting your own path through 60 years of history, by going to their website at  www.jubileelines.com

(NB  at the time of posting this the link doesn’t seem to be working, we have let them know.)

Kona Macphee wins major poetry prize with ‘Perfect Blue’

Congratulations to Kona Macphee, who has just won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, for her collection ‘Perfect Blue’, published by Bloodaxe. Kona gave a reading at StAnza back in March. The Australian born poet now lives in Perthshire and this is her second collection. The judges praised it thus: ‘It was a book that we found ourselves returning to. What impressed us most of all was the way that Macphee’s work combined clarity and depth with a surprising and sometimes unsettling view of the world.’

Celestial success for StAnza volunteer

We’ve mentioned before that StAnza volunteer Rachael Boast has just had her first collection published by Picador. And we’ve been following its success with great delight. ‘Sidereal’ has already created a buzz in the last few weeks, with poems and/or reviews in the Times, and the Independent and her book was reviewed this weekend by  the Guardian.  She will be reading at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August.

New Jersey, jazz and a traveller’s tales: August Kleinzahler in St Andrews

August Kleinzahler in St Andrews, May 2011

Not many poets can bring Marlene Dietrich, Nietzsche and WC Fields together in one poem and act out the speaking parts. Or, more darkly, to imitate the cry of a hawk in the air ‘terrible in his dismay’ as he reads another. August Kleinzahler made a stop in St Andrews on Friday and his reading included all of these moments, in a set that ranged from biting satire to surreal humour and a thoughtful lyricism about time, memory and the past.

His visit was part of a tour of the UK and Ireland to mark the paperback publication  of Sleeping it off in Rapid City: New and Selected Poems, (Faber & Faber), an award-winning retrospective of four major collections and recent work.

Kleinzahler has a reputation for being a poetic pugilist with an ability to shock. His work is described as a ‘modernist swirl of sex, surrealism, urban life and melancholy, with a jazzy backbeat.’ But there is also that deep lyricism, most evident in poems about the New Jersey of his childhood. This was evoked in ‘Closing Down on the Palisades’, prompted by the sale of his family home and in ‘Portrait of my Mother in January’, a delicate observation of aging.

In conversation with the Scottish poet Alexander Hutchison, Kleinzahler reminded the audience of his own attitude to poetry as something ‘thrilling and upsetting, not at all comfortable and predictable.’ He recalled his mentors Thom Gunn and Basil Bunting, whose method was simply to read poetry to his students and play them Renaissance and Baroque music.  And he recalled the effect of hearing Gregory Corso’s poetry for the first time, ‘full of vitality, exciting’. It was the effect of Beat poetry which sent the student on the road, and his restlessness, living on both sides of the American continent and crossing the Atlantic frequently, lends itself to themes of displacement and dislocation that reverberate through his writing.

Hutchison asked the poet to which of his poems he felt would last – his Desert Island list, in effect. After some thought, he named two of his recent New Jersey poems, plus ‘The Strange Hours Travellers Keep’ and ‘Anniversary’ – the hawk poem.  But there were many contenders  in the second half of the evening: the Baudelaire-dark ‘Retard Spoilage’, ‘Christmas in Chinatown’ and the mesmerising poem about jazz giant Thelonius Monk, with which he finished.  Kleinzahler’s sharp wit and rebellious streak combines to create poetry of serious intent. It made for a sublime reading.

The event was held in association with the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts and Faber & Faber.

StAnza Special Event: August Kleinzahler, 13 May 2011

One of the highlights of StAnza 2008 was the energetic presence of  August Kleinzahler (left), the New Jersey-born, Beat-influenced poet.  His volume of new and selected poems Sleeping It Off in Rapid City had just been published by Faber & Faber and Kleinzahler’s reputation in the UK had, by then, gone beyond the pages of the London Review of Books (where he had been published regularly through the Nineties) to reach an appreciative international, audience. Kleinzahler’s verbal energy and wild humour, was accompanied by sharp observation and sometimes controversial opinions – he enlivened one StAnza Discussion panel in particular with his provocative contributions. And his centre stage reading to a packed house at the Byre Theatre was electric.

StAnza is delighted to welcome Kleinzahler back to St Andrews on 13 May. As well as treating us to a reading in that inimitable, performative style, he’ll also be In Conversation with fellow poet Alexander Hutchison. Born and brought up in Fort Lee, a tough gangster neighbourhood in New Jersey, Kleinzahler’s early life combined the restless lifestyle of the Beats – travelling across the states doing odd jobs – with a period studying under poets Basil Bunting and Thom Gunn. Since 1978 he has published ten collections of poetry.

The slow but steady rise of his reputation was galvanized with the publication of The Strange Hours Travellers Keep (Faber, 2004), which won the International Griffin Prize – listen here to August reading a poem from the collection.  Critics call him a ‘pugilist poet’, but as this essay from the Poetry Foundation, points out, ‘his poetry’s gruff language and fondness for off-color subject matter doesn’t overshadow his formal control and innovation…and he is highly praised for his mastery of vocabulary, syntax and line.’

Kleinzahler’s prose includes a memoir about his childhood, Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004) and ‘Music I-LXXIV’ (Pressed Wafer, 2009), a collection of his music journalism. He writes a music column for the San Diego Reader and subjects range from jazz to country and classical – with witty diversions via Liberace and Tina Turner.

Tickets for the August Kleinzahler reading will be available from The Byre Theatre Box Office, Abbey Street, St Andrews, 01334 475000; email boxoffice@byretheatre.com or online at www.byretheatre.com.

The event is being held in association with the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts and Faber & Faber.