Poetry Salzburg Review 17

After a delay of some months owing to printer-related problems, the Spring 2010 edition of Poetry Salzburg Review has now been published. Another bumper issue with some 180 pages of poetry, reviews and essays, it notably includes work from several poets based in Ireland.

PSR is always an intriguing read, often inspiring in unexpected ways. This time I particularly look forward to reading new poems from Joanne Limburg, Paula Meehan, Pascale Petit, Will Stone and the recepient of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Rae Armantrout.

'Live the Life', my contribution to Poetry Salzburg Review 17, is essentially a found poem. It was composed using the script of Jean-Luc Godard's film 'Vivre Sa Vie', in particular the sequence that details life in prostitution in 1960s Paris.

Brand 06

Published twice a year out of the University of Greenwich , Brand is a magazine specialising in the short form. There’s short and micro fiction, poems, creative non-fiction, artwork and, refreshingly, performance texts and short plays. It has an edgy, urban aesthetic, and I feel has been getting stronger by the issue.

In her introduction to issue 6 just published, editor-in-chief Nina Rapi writes (in the context of addressing questions of collaborative and cross-genre writing): “Perhaps we should not be looking for either/or solutions but rather for both/and, openended-ness rather than closure, as unsettling as this may often be.” This strikes me as a fairly accurate description of what this magazine is trying to do.

Brand 06 includes a short poem of mine, ‘Measures for the Prevention of Crime’, alongside work by (among others) Gary Allen, Dzifa Benson, Linda Black, Angela Gardner, Sophie Mayer, Anjan Saha and John Saul, a short essay from Mikhail Karikis and an interview with Howard Barker.

There will be a launch of Brand 06 on 8 July at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank, during Text in Context: a Cross-Genre Symposium (part of the London Literature Festival).