New (or newish) News

and like Announcements

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 grandchildrem. 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