New (or newish) News
and like Announcements
3/11/11: I've just discovered that 3 of my
current 'discontinual songs' (accepted for some sort of publication
over a year ago) have in fact been (online) published: http://badpress.infinology.net/Cleaves/issue3/northwest/10.jpg
25/9/11: So I read at The White Lion, yesterday. It was good. The other readers were John, Sarah, and Phil. It was part of something called 100,000 poets for change. I don't know who the other 100,994 poets reading yesterday were, nor who was counting. This one was organised by Alison O'Brien, who got the idea from (quondam HB residents) Aggie Falk and Jack Hirschman. Good to hear of them.
23/9/11: Oh. I'm reading at The White Lion, Hebden Bridge, 7pm tomorrow (Saturday), with three other poets, named Siddique, Corbett, and Foster. OK.
8/8/11: Rare news: New Haslam magazine publication: Old Lad (4pp) in Cambridge Literary Review 5 (Trinity Hall, Cambridge CB2 1TJ). An interesting university-based mag.
http://www.cambridgeliteraryreview.org/
I'm happy enough with Old Lad (part of a projected
'discontinual songs'), but for that my theme now seem to be nostalgia
and decrepitude. I'm only 64, but the Muse seems to be leading me by
the nose towards the crematorium.
21/6/11: The Bridlington Poetry Festival, Sewerby Hall, on the 12th, has been and gone: I enjoyed myself, and so did the audience. Two days later I lost my boast (which I may have made elsewhere on this site), that I'd won neither prizes nor awards, when I found myself receiving a cheque for £2500 from Joanna Trollope, as a Cholmondeley Award, on behalf of The Society of Authors, at The Cavalry & Guards Club, Piccadilly. This was a (pleasant) shock, but not, it turns out, entirely inexplicable.
9/6/11: On Saturday the 4th I went down to London to attend and read
at the memorial for poet R F Langley. For this I rewrote a thing, Party Spirits, previously in Sneak's Noise and in A Sinner Saved by Grace.
This 3rd attempt, I think it the best. I've put it up today, with a
postscript wrtitten on news of his death on Current Scribble.
Upcoming: reading at Sewerby Hall, Bridlington (Poetry Festival), 2.15pm Sunday 12th inst. With Peter Riley.
9/5/11: On May Day I gave a poetry reading to a large audience in a
large hall, in Rostrevor, Co.Down, N. Ireland: A successful if somehow
'unlikely' event --- the mid-point of a day celebrating the wedding of
Carl Wilson to Anca Rosales, between Warrenpoint Methodist Church and
Killowen Yacht Club. The hall was in premises run by some American
Christian Missionaries. I read in front of a large wooden cross. The
audience were, if we can include spiritually-minded Rudolf Steinerites,
were probably not the usual poetry-minded atheists, and maybe not
particularly poetry-minded, but I was well-received. I still disagree
with Ian Pople (see below) ---- I don't think I'm 'religious' at all,
but perhaps, and despite the opinion of some arts administrators, I'm
'accessible' after all.
Ahead: Reading (with Peter Riley) at Bridlington Poetry Festival, Sewerby Hall, 2.15 pm, 12th June.
4pp in the next Cambridge Literary Review.
29/11/10: News and no news: the only update this date has been the removal of a couple of sentences deep in the Notes to Continual song: they might just have upset someone. (If anyone is personally offended by some spillage from that wormy can of beans, let me know, and I'll censor myself).
12/11/10: The reading at the Little Theatre (see below) went
happily. The other poet, Elizabeth Barrett, was interesting, especially
when she got her teeth into Geology.
Meanwhile, there's a perspicacious review of Woodness by Peter Riley in Tears in the Fence
--- a worthy mag, costing £7 from Peter Caddy, 38 Hod View,
Stourpaine, Blandford Forum, Dorset DT11 8TN. There are a couple of
errors in what Riley quotes from the book: the schooner is always
stranded on and not in the bar; and in quoting some lines from a poem he makes my bodiless read bodily --- the same rhythm, happily, but a slight difference in meaning.
20/10/10: At 2.30 pm (and not at 7.30 pm, as on the extant publicity) I shall be reading with Elizabeth Barrett, at The Little Theatre, Hebden Bridge, as part of the Hebden Bridge Bookshop Literature Festival.
In the Saturday Guardian for 9/10/10 there was a gratifying review of A Cure for Woodness by Paul Batchelor (I don't think I know him):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/09/michael-haslam-cure-for- woodness-review
I like that, but might question his apparent aspersion that I've
lived a life of alcoholic and sexual excess. With alcohol (cask ales)
I've certainly exceeded Government Guidelines, but I've probably stayed
within them as regards sexual activity. Still, that might balance Ian
Pople's strange assertion (see below) that I'm 'deeply religious'.
21/8/10: I've resumed some unresolved current scribble.
I think I might try to say something more about
whether "Haslam is deeply religious", somewhere, as 'Loose Talk'.
Perhaps, after all, I am, though it's news to me.
6/8/10: An update with little to report, but the should be something (3 more 'discontinuals') forthcoming from Cleave.
Meanwhile Woodness has had
some (gratifying) reviews: Ian Pople in The Manchester Review, Steven
Waling in Stride Magazine, and James Sutherland-Smith at The Bow Wow
Shop. These can be read at http://www.arcpublications.co.uk/
There's a correction I must make. Pople writes
"Haslam is deeply religious". That's not true. Folk can read what they
like into my poetry, but Haslam himself is not even shallowly religious. (21/8: but see above).
Another mistake on the Arc site. The blurb for A Sinner Saved by Grace
says that the 'Sinner' stone is a gravestone. Almost certainly it
isn't. It is simply an inscribed cube of stone set in the earth of
Warley Moor. Nobody knows anything about it. It may well be
deeply religious.
25/4/10: Proving that I've not completely stopped making poems, there's 3 pages of 'discontinual song' published in the 2009 Other Room Anthology
Poetical ejaculations, however, are becoming so
rare that I'm at a loss to fulfill some other demands. And there's
nought worth pasting up on Current Scribble. But (I must be still alive) I did a reading last month at the University of Central Lancashire.
The Pennines Spring. I have two grandchildren. I can't utterly despair of Everything.
4/3/10: At last, A Cure for Woodness is available from Arc (£9.99 pb; £12.99 hb). See http://www.arcpublications.co.uk/ . Also (pb only) from myself. See Books.
Also a short prose piece, Pace-Egg: Notes for a History of Doggerel has appeared in Northern Earth 121. See www.northernearth.co.uk This treats the Pace Egg, or St. George folk play as a poem, in the light of a presumed 18th Century date.
17/2/10: Lack of News on this site has been due to lack of News about Woodness (see below). But I've just put a photo up (one taken by Jemimah Kuhfeld).
25/11/09: The Bolton (Octagon) reading went well, I think. Thanks to Laurette Evans and Matthew Welton.
A Cure for Woodness
will carry the date 2010, rather than 2009, confounding a previous
prophecy, but copies may be available before the ens of this year (in
time for Christmas!?), either from me or from Arc:
http://www.arcpublications.co.uk/
There's a nice short sweet blog on The Quiet Works at The Lyre (Jeremy Noel-Tod). And another nice one on Litterbug (Alan Baker).
19/10/09: The Other Room reading (see below) is now up & out on video at http://otherroom.org/
14/10/09: The Other Room reading at the Old Abbey Inn
(7th October) has been and gone. It seemed good to me, and others
seemed to think so too. There was quite a contrast with the
video-linked Craig Dworkin: me hot & wet, and him cool & dry:
each radical poem delivered with an engagingly complacent smirk
The other reading, at the Octagon Theatre, Bolton,
is now definitely 16th November. The other
reader will be Tom Jenks. The other Prophecies (see below) are coming true: A Cure for Woodness is due from Arc at the end of November, 2009.
3/8/09. New Publication: The Quiet Works:
New from
Oystercatcher Press:
The Quiet
Works by Michael
Haslam
A5 16pp colour cover
ISBN: 978-1-905885-21-3
£4 from Peter Hughes, Oystercatcher Press, 4 Coastguard Cottages, Old Hunstanton, Norfolk PE36 6EL. www.oystercatcherpress.com
See Books..
16/7/09. Lost & Found. Here's a link to some fresh old news: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Haslam.php.
Or, something lost and found again at PennSound. Here's the tale:
Continual Song
was being written through the first half of the 1980s. By 1982 I had
determined its basic dimensions, and I read this version into a cheap
radio-cassette machine. But the text was changing all the time, and, in
my terms, the tape was obsolete. Some years later I looked for it,
failed to find it, and assumed it lost. What had happened to it?
It seems that absentmindedly (I mean, perhaps
deliberately erasing traces without utter self-destruction) I'd posted
it to Charles Bernstein in the USA. Now, over a quarter of a century
later, and with my permission, it is posted on Mr Bernstein's PennSound
poetry archive (link above).
It's recognisably the same work as the (stable) 1986
version, and yet utterly different:: barely a sentence, hardly a
stanza, is the same, though the first half is closer than the second to
the printed text. How do I feel about it? Not too embarrassed or
ashamed. The '82 is rather over-soft and flowery, and carries more
overt reference to sources. The poet I hear, though, has a certain
Authenticity, as he embarks upon Continual Song.
10/7/09. A new magazine publication: Wastes of The Picturesque in Angel Exhaust 20, Ed. Charles Bainbridge & Andrew Duncan, from 12, Eliot Hill, Lewisham, London SE13 7EB.
http://www.angelexhaust.com
Wastes is in A Cure for Woodness,
forthcoming (see below). Others in AE20 include Kelvin Corcoran, David
Chaloner, Colin Simms. DS Marriott, John Kinsella, and if you're in and
read this and think I ought to have mentioned you, let me know, and
I'll name you too.