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

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