Leave the libraries alone!

At a public meeting earlier this month, Philip Pullman delivered a speech / critique of Oxfordshire county council's plans to stop the funding of nearly half of its 43 public libraries and have them instead run by community volunteers. And it went further and deeper, including commentary on publishers' increasing reliance on market forces to make editorial decisions. The speech has picked up a lot of attention, and has already been translated into French with the title 'Laissez nos bibliothèques en paix!'

The issue concerns me thrice over: as writer, reader and public library worker. Although it relates to specific developments in Britain, the broader forces at work apply to much of the world - particularly to regions under financial pressures.

Credit is due to the False Economy and Open Democracy sites for first co-publishing the speech.

Patience (After Sebald)

Written and directed by filmmaker Grant Gee (Meeting People is Easy, Demon Days, Joy Division), Patience (After Sebald) is described as an essay-film on landscape, art, history, life and loss. It offers an exploration of the life, work and influence of WG Sebald via a long walk through coastal East Anglia that tracks his book The Rings of Saturn, and features contributions from Tacita Dean, Robert Macfarlane, Katie Mitchell, Rick Moody, Andrew Motion, Chris Petit, Iain Sinclair and Marina Warner.

Patience (After Sebald) will premiere at Aldeburgh Music, Snape, Suffolk on Friday 28 January, during After Sebald - Place and Re-Enactment: A Weekend Exploration, which also includes an exclusive new work performed live by Patti Smith. After the screening, Grant Gee will be in conversation with Robert Macfarlane.

I'd love to travel for this, but it looks like I'll have to settle for a future screening of the film elsewhere...

Poetry in Motion at the Droichead Arts Centre

On Wednesday 26 January I will be reading as guest poet at the Poetry in Motion monthly series of readings at the Droichead Arts Centre.

These sessions start at 7.30pm with short readings from members of the the Saltwater Scribblers writing group (who have now taken over the running of the series). I'm told that guest writer readings can lead to dicussions about the writing craft.

Admission is free. Sean-Nos Singing sessions follow the readings - these start at around 9.30pm and are also free of charge.

My thanks to the previous organiser of the Poetry in Motion series, Emer Davis, for arranging this reading.

Twelve Beds for the Dreamer, by Máighréad Medbh / Catfish, dir. Ariel Schulman & Henry Joost

How beneficial or detrimental to the reading of the poetry is personal acquaintance with the poet? I have known Máighréad Medbh for some years, as a fellow poet and as a colleague, as well as in a social context. While reading her latest collection Twelve Beds for the Dreamer (Arlen House, 2011) I found it difficult to keep my awareness of the circumstances of her life from entering the reading of the work.

I began to write these notes while waiting for the lights to dim for a screening of the film Catfish. Unlike The Social Network, this is a film about Facebook and its considerable impact. And it raises questions about lots more besides: identity, deception, life vs. art, invention, dreams vs. reality… But mostly I see it as being about the idea of personas, an individual’s separate and variable faces, about the fragmentation of the self.

At times, Máighréad Medbh’s poetry sizzles on the page. It is fearless and it is elemental. It is unapologetically feminine, intellectually agile, and it derives from the body. As might be expected from the work of someone primarily identified – for better or for worse, there’s little she can do about that now – as a ‘performance’ poet, there are great rewards in reading these poems aloud. There are turns of phrase and linguistic somersaults that delight. And the collection glitters in its tight unity: as the poet notes in her introduction, this is a quasi-scientific attempt to record her dreams at each stage of the moon’s monthly cycle – while staying more faithful to poetry than to astrology. A sense lingers that this book is the record of a journey out of the domestic – of an un-domestication, or a de-domestication. I’m not sure which.

Am I subconsciously reading these poems as autobiography? How much do we gain or miss by knowing the poet personally? When she writes as the poetic ‘I’, we know that this is not the ‘I’ of the historical person Máighréad Medbh speaking: at most – even in the work of the most ‘confessional’ of poets – this may be an approximation of a particular facet of her. Do the poems in which the speaker addresses a ‘you’ or invokes a ‘she’ achieve a distancing effect? Both ‘you’ and ‘she’ appear closer to the Máighréad Medbh I know – and not because of any specific pieces of information relayed. How many versions of ‘Máighréad Medbh’ are writing here – if any at all? The question seems to be one of construct.

I’m not totally convinced that Catfish is as pure a documentary as it purports to be. After all, isn’t it a film about artifice? For me it makes no difference whether it is ‘real’ or a hoax. Whether one knows ‘the truth’ about how the film was made, the personal circumstances of Yaniv Schulman specifically or of Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, whether Angela Wesselman-Pierce really exists as we see her or whether she was in on the project from the start – this is all immaterial. The crucial thing here is whether the film’s themes and the questions it attempts to raise are constructed in a persuasive manner.

The main one of these seems to be whether Facebook (or any social network) forces its users to appear as the sum of their fragmented selves – a rather reductive state. Or, as it simultaneously seems to promise, whether they can be as many different parts of themselves – or the person(s) they have invented – as they want to be. I emerged from both screening and book with a heightened awareness that what remains undeniable is the body itself, corporeal matter – which is the medium we respond to the world with. That our perceptions begin and end in the body. These are issues that would speak to anyone with an online presence – and more generally to anyone who has more than one way of addressing the world. Which is not just poets, filmmakers and artists, but practically everyone.

3:AM Magazine's 'Maintenant' Series

For the 43rd edition of 3:AM Magazine's Maintenant series of features on contemporary European poets, I am being interviewd by the series editor, Steven Fowler. As is the usual practice, the interview is accompanied by a number of my poems.

Each featured poet is assigned to a country, and as such I was the first to have fallen into the category marked 'Cyprus'. I comment on distinctions on the basis of nationality in the interview.

I was delighted to have been approached for this feature. I think the series is a terrific and necessary initiative from 3:AM Magazine, through which I've become aware of the work of some really exciting poets.