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'Having read both these books across a couple of weekends, I’m now clear that I’m reading my current state of mind through them. Of course, contemporary poetry is the perfect genre through which this happens. Abstracted or context-loose signs allow the mind to re-thread what remains concrete, black and white, on the page.'
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A thorough and poignant review of my novel The Wood Pigeons by Billy Mills - https://ellipticalmovements.wordpress.com/2020/11/18/recent-reading-november-2020/. The book is available from great Dostoevsky Wannabe.
Here's an excerpt - 'the opening phrase ‘The living room’ implies a whole world outside, a house, other rooms, a kind of suburban normality. When this changes to ‘The room’, the world narrows to an enclosed box, with the outside present but unknown, and the text takes on something of the nature of a Becket play without words.' My two ‘William Carlos Williams’ poems, entitled The wind was so strong & So the water arose in little splashes, are now published in the excellent Adjacent Pineapple Six, new issue. It’s not often that I manage to write discrete poems anymore and it’s a satisfying feeling to do so. Thanks to Colin Herd for publishing them. The poems are available here - https://www.adjacentpineapple.com/latest-issue
Some recent reviews - The Ten Superstrata of Stockport J. Middleton and Forty-Four Poems and a Volta5/6/2020 Thanks to both reviewers for their generous and interesting reviews of these books which were published recently.
Mark Leahy reviews The Ten Superstrata of Stockport J. Middleton & Forty-Four Poems and a Volta at Stride HERE and Steve Spence reviews Forty-Four Poems and a Volta at Litter Magazine HERE I was the first guest on Stephen Emmerson's new Soundcloud show which asks poets to choose 6 books they'd take into a bunker. Great concept. Watch out for future shows. Listen to the show to find out my choices. https://soundcloud.com/crystalset/post-apocalyptic-poems-ep-1-james-davies
 The wonderful Ma Bibliothèque have published a short story of mine entitled The Ten Superstrata of Stockport J. Middleton.
This is the blurb: In the spirit of Philip K. Dick, The Ten Superstrata of Stockport J. Middleton reworks the first page of Dick’s mind-bending novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritchinto ten alternative illusions, retaining, in each case, the fundamental syntactic code of the original text. ‘He’ becomes ‘she’, ‘she’ becomes ‘they’, ‘they’ becomes ‘robot’, ‘robot’ becomes ‘tiger’, ‘tiger’ becomes ‘it’. Such gentle mutations flip the picture yet also leave uncanny traces, generating weaves and trails similar to Eldritch itself. There are so many great covers of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, making it difficult to choose a single one. A lot of them have a humanoid figure on them. The one pictured above is part humanoid, part outer space and part spaced-out, and therefore represents Dick’s book pretty well. The lead character in my re-write is eponymous Stockport J. Middleton, not Palmer Eldritch. Eldritch doesn’t make an actual appearance in my re-write but I’m sure he’s lurking in there somewhere. My kids are called Middleton, their surnames. It’s a name we preferred to mine, Davies. A yarn then. Because they are called Middleton when abroad the border control think I'm not their dad; an oversight when registering their names. The security guards size me up and imply that I’m a kidnapper. They tell me I should have a letter from the mother of the children (I tell them that would be easy to fake, which doesn’t go down well at all). Stockport Middleton of course is of course inspired by that great name of our age Brooklyn Beckham. It also has the ring of the Grease actress Stockard Channing for good measure. N.B. Neither of our children were conceived in Stockport nor are they named after the town. One may have been conceived in Bury St. Edmunds but that hasn’t got the same ring to it. The Ten Superstrata of Stockport J. Middleton is available here, priced at £5 - https://mabibliotheque.cargo.site/James-Davies-THE-TEN-SUPERSTRATA-OF-STOCKPORT-J-MIDDLETON-2020 I'm looking forward to running this course on March 14th. Below is a description of the course and information to sign up if you're interested.
Get things in order and explore the many uses of the list form with James Davies. The notion of the list, or the list poem, goes back to our earliest writings, in texts such as the Iliad and countless religious volumes. From poems that we might call “simple cataloguing” to the list’s appearance as a structural device in complex forms, like the sonnet, you’ll find that it’s everywhere in poetry. Indeed, if we take the word to mean that one thing follows another and that what follows is related to what’s passed, and also that most lines in poems can be placed into categories, then the list is ubiquitous to all poems… In this day workshop you will explore the multiple possibilities of the form through close reading, writing, and some in-class collaborations to see that, in poet and critic Larry Fagin’s words, in order to write a successful list poem, you need to find ‘a poetic bump in the road’. While exploring this simple, yet endlessly playful and inventive approach to writing poetry we will take inspiration from contemporary poets, including Caroline Bergvall, Miles Champion, and Matthew Welton, as well as a whole host of poets from the past, and by the end of the day you will have produced a diverse batch of new list poems, covering a variety of different forms and subjects, that will rivet your readers. Saturday 14 March, 10.30am – 4.30pm. https://poetryschool.com/courses/this-goes-there-that-comes-after-list-poems/ All classes will be in our offices at 1 Dock Offices, Surrey Quays Road, Canada Water, SE16 2XU. The venue is a 2-minute walk from Canada Water Station. Take the ‘Lower Road’ exit from the station onto Surrey Quays Road, then walk straight ahead, crossing over Deal Porters Way, and the Dock Offices come up on the left. The door for the school is at the far end of the building.  A new poetry pamphlet has been published by the marvellous Red Ceilings Press. The book contains 45 couplet poems. I have written 178 poems to date using this structure. This is what Scott Thurston has to say about the collection:
In Davies’ multiverse, everything is alive and unpredictable. In a perpetual motion search for a container, tubs, pots, boxes, lids, even a bucket, offer their services: ‘what am i now but someone standing next to a lids’ (sic). Channelling Wittgenstein, Lao Tzu and Robert Grenier, Davies’ double- line form acts as a strange attractor, drawing in quotidian minutiae alongside visionary apprehension. This small book is both heavy and light: ‘notice how good i look in this fire engine’, ‘when the final explosions happened’, and to read it is to walk a fine line between comedy and tragedy: ‘let’s go into those woods / (no)’. The Red Ceilings website is HERE  Written over roughly the space of a year The Wood Pigeons began as a 365 word story. The 261 chapters here represent the removal of words at a rate of roughly one per day. Part Droste effect the result is a narrative that is highly recursive yet just as varied too, leading finally and inevitably to nothing.
What this means is, if you can stand it, you can read from start to finish with some weird deja vu going on. Or dip in at different places for some major shifts in narrative. Here's what David Berridge has to say about it - Is this an obsessive rumination upon a vanished bit of everyday? Do a writer’s revisions push a book to the edge of disappearing? Viewed as a whole its chapters reduce from prolixity to a single word, but from one chapter to the next what gets lost is concealed by narrative’s ability to patch up gaps, plus the typesetter’s arts, at work upon a fiction of C and D, sleep, a glass of wine, a pullover, on repeat. Does a novel decay to develop? Does each micro-adjustment of a novel's code re-figure protagonists, intoxicant on new terms? It spells the “hoo-hooing of the wood pigeons” as well as literature ever could. You can buy it from Dostoyevsky Wannabe here - https://www.dostoyevskywannabe.com/originals/the_wood_pigeons If you've bought When Two Are In Love or As I Came To Behind Frank's Transporter you might find these notes about people and things that appear in the text useful. If you've not got a copy then they give you a flavour of the book, which is available here - http://www.lulu.com/shop/philip-terry-and-james-davies/when-two-are-in-love-or-as-i-came-to-behind-franks-transporter/paperback/product-24097682.html
Notes Chapter 1: Nissen hut – A cylindrical tin hut used predominantly on military bases Chapter 2: Tom Otter – A murderer from Saxilby - http://www.orpheusweb.co.uk/ynnad/tomo.htm, Captain Jack Sparrow – A fictional pirate film character played by Jonny Depp Chapter 3: Sting – A contemporary pop musician famous for songs like Roxanne, Mike Oldfield – A contemporary pop musician famous for his album Tubular Bells Chapter 4: The Doors – A 1960s rock band famously fronted by Jim Morrison, The Band – A 1960s rock band fronted by Robbie Robertson Chapter 5: Bjorn Borg – A champion tennis player (rival of Ilie Nastase), Ilie Nastase – A champion tennis player (rival of Bjorn Borg), Andy Murray – A champion tennis player, Chantecaille – A manufacturer of lip screen Chapter 6: Buffalo Bill – A nineteenth century American showman Chapter 7: Zmist – A metamorphic computer virus created by the Russian virus writer known as Z0mbie Chapter 9: Liam Gallagher – Lead singer with 1990s rock band Oasis, Ursonate – Epic sound poem by Kurt Schwitters Chapter 10: Beryl Cook – Twentieth Century British painter, Botticelli – Fifteenth Century Italian painter, Captain Cook – British Eighteenth Century explorer, Captain Scarlet – Eponymous character from the 1960s puppet TV series Captain Scarlet, Dr Watson – The sidekick of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes Chapter 11: Tristram Shandy or The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – Eighteenth Century novel by Laurence Sterne recounting the life of its eponymous hero, Other Side of Love – Song by contemporary pop singer Sean Paul Chapter 12: John Boy – Principle character in the TV show The Waltons, Jon Pertwee – British TV actor most famous for his role as scarecrow Worzel Gummidge Chapter 15: Neoprene – specialist material used in the manufacture of wetsuits Chapter 18: Queen – 1980s rock band famous for their song We are the Champions, Crazy Frog – 2000s chipmunk style pop act, We are the World – Charity song written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie, Who wants the World? – Song by the punk group The Stranglers , ‘We want the World’ – Lyric from The Doors song When the Music’s Over, Petmix – A manufacturer of pet food, Belinda Carlisle – 1980s US pop singer Chapter 19: Joe Pesci – US film actor famous for his role as Tommy in Goodfellas Chapter 20: Danilo Dolci – Italian historian and documenter of Sicilian life, Enoch Powell – Tory Politician, Merz – One-man art movement invented by Kurt Schwitters, Justin Vitiello – Translator of Danilo Dolci Chapter 21: Boundary Road – Road that passes through Essex University, Ted Berrigan – 1950s New York School poet who taught at Essex University, Liquid – Nightclub in Colchester, Essex Chapter 24: KFC – A fashionable chain of fried chicken takeaways, Jim Morrison – Lead singer with The Doors, Quasimodo – Protagonist from Victor Hugo’s Nineteenth Century novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame Chapter 27: Fredrikson mobile – Imaginary mobile as if designed by Patrick Fredrikson and Ian Stallard (contemporary designers), New Road and Paul Church – Two locations in Land’s End, A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall – Song by US folk singer Bob Dylan Chapter 28: Sandbourne – Thomas Hardy’s fictional name for Bournemouth, Plantarium – A tank for growing plants and animal life - http://www.theartofscience.eu/en/plantarium.htm, PIL (Pubic Image Limited) – 1980s post-punk band fronted by John Lydon, FSOL (Future Sound of London) – Contemporary electronic musicians Chapter 29: Michael Gove – A fashionable piece of chicken, Grantley Dee – 1960s rockabilly musician, Kevin Lin – Contemporary ultra-marathon runner and star of Running the Sahara Chapter 30: IED – Improvised explosive device, Chuck Berry – 1950s rock and roll musician, Abba – 1970s pop group, Ultimate Abba – UK-based Abba cover band, Ozzy Osbourne – Lead singer with heavy metal band Black Sabbath Chapter 31: Camels – A famous brand of cigarettes Chapter 32: Captain Sensible – bass player and later lead guitarist with 1970s punk group The Damned, Captain Beefheart – Twentieth Century rock musician, Help – Album by the rock group The Beatles, TLC – 1990s R and B pop group |
