Niall O'Sullivan – Poet

official website of London poet Niall O'Sullivan

The Party Jar

Posted on | April 10, 2013 | No Comments

You started on the day that she left Downing Street, a penny for the Poll Tax, a penny for the miners, and carried on throughout the Blairite decade, a penny for Hillsborough, a penny for Privatisation, when such barbed thoughts of her became passé, a penny for the Chilean disappeared, a penny for the Belgrano, now the Devil wore a smile instead of a bouffant, a penny for Brixton, a penny for the steel mills, and carried on when the Etonians claimed back the country, claimed back their party from all Grocers’ daughters, a penny for the toddlers’ milk, a penny for the nurses, when the news came in, you emptied the jar onto the kitchen floor,  didn’t head down the offy, swallowed each coin one by one instead, a penny for old age, a penny for the fact we die alone, so that, in a few hours time, you could shit out her legacy and all your hate, before placing a sparkly new coin into the empty jar, a penny for ATOS, a penny for the bedroom tax…

Niall O’Sullivan 10/04/13

Category: poems
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Daylight Music at the Union Chapel, 6/4/13

Posted on | April 5, 2013 | No Comments

I will be doing a set at the Union Chapel tomorrow for an event called Daylight Music. I’ll be on for about 25mins with a set consisting of material from my one man show. The event runs from 12-2pm and is free with optional donations.

A few of my old non poetry mates will be coming down, not to see their old mate read his poems at the venue that Time Out called the beat in London, oh no. They’re coming down because Jim Bob, formerly of Carter USM, is headlining the bill.

So, that leaves you, my slightly irregular and awkward followers, to come down and say you’re there to see me, even if you aren’t.

Comedy troop The Birthday Girls will also be performing at what looks to be a quality afternoon of pre-pub entertainment.

Category: A Life in Poetry
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Scratch Night Upstairs at The Poetry Cafe

Posted on | March 13, 2013 | No Comments

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Hello my lovelies.

I will be scratching my one man show, Now Is Not The Time For Politics upstairs at the Poetry Cafe studio this Monday 18th of March. The show basically features some of my favourite Cantos from The Mundane Comedy worked into a loose narrative arc about my experience of becoming a dad for the first time.

However, the whimsical nature of the blog is also represented in poems about journeyman boxers, racists on the tube, chow mein, my dislike of The Shard and pregnancy week by week guides that compare foetal growth rates to exotic fruit and vegetables. It’s only on looking at the script that I’ve been working on for a few months that I see certain tropes and themes popping up throughout – such as London, class, masculinity, the Hegelian return and rain, lots of rain.

I’ve no plans for any multi-media malarkey, nor will I be trying out my thespian chops. I’m not having a pop at all those that do, I’ve just always been into the spoken word performances where the speaker is able to engage and hold an audience’s attention for an extended period of time, not as a derivative of theatre or performance art but simply by being a good talker. Spalding Gray did it with a desk and a glass of water, Henry Rollins does it with the mic wire wrapped round his fist and a bottle of water a this feet that he never takes a sip from over the course of two hours. If my big fat gob gets a few laughs, stirs a few thoughts and tugs at a few heartstrings over the course of 40mins, then that will be good enough for me.

The evening will also feature Dan Simpson scratching his new show, We Are All Orange Ghosts. Admission will be free but a hat might be passed around a couple of times. We will also beg you for your merciless feedback so that we can beat our shows into Fringe Festival shape. The event will start at 7.30pm and my show will be up first so don’t be late!

Further details can be found on the Facebook Event page. It really would be a pleasure to see you there.

Niall

Category: Now Is Not The Time For Politics

Who will protect us from poetry’s protectors?

Posted on | February 2, 2013 | 1 Comment

I don’t know how you whippersnappers reel off your blogs so quickly, so I arrive at the pitchfork party for Nathan A Thompson a little late. Earlier, a wave of virtual sabers were shaken throughout the twittersphere after Thompson’s ill informed and reference free diatribe against Slam appeared in today’s Independent. Most of us started by asking who the hell Nathan A Thompson actually was? The online buzz of the national performance poetry scene was unanimous in this respect before our subsequent Googling unveiled an individual that had previously praised Slam poetry in the Guardian, but also appeared to have built a career in Slam poetry workshops.

Poejazzi and Raymond Antrobus didn’t break a sweat when taking Thompson’s non argument apart; while Dave Bryant penned a brilliant satirical pair of blogs pinpointing the mainstream press’s editorial flop flopping about whether the occasional vocalisations from the poetry world were birthing pangs or a death rattle.

Evidently, Thompson seems to have unwittingly established himself as a bete noir for the performance poetry community, almost on a par with the plagiarist Christian Ward, which is not entirely fair seeing as all he has done is write a stupid article.

I myself am left pondering the same old questions such as: how do people that are seemingly unknown on the poetry scene always pop up as experts in the subject on the pages of national newspapers? Will we ever get a decent critical engagement with live poetry other than the usual swing between hagiography by journalistic friends of the scene and hatchet jobs by senior figures that just don’t get it?

I’m also wondering when people will stop talking about Slam as if it was something that suddenly arrived and needs to be quickly summed up or dealt with. It’s nearly thirty years old fer feck’s sake. Attacks on Slam are getting pretty old too, with Harold Bloom’s dismissal of it as “the death of art” still knocking about cyberspace since he mumbled it as an unguarded aside to the Paris Review in 2000.

Thompson’s attack on Slam seems to take the same form as most others: an anecdotal remembrance of Slams they didn’t enjoy rather than a serious engagement with the three decades of the art form. In a similar but far more nuanced way, Lemn Sissay attacked Slam in the Poetry Review a few years back. Sissay’s essay mainly focused on his own negative experience in witnessing the audience turn on a poet during a TV recording of a Slam that he was hosting. However, Sissay appeared to change his mind about Slam after watching We Are Poets, a powerful documentary that followed a team of British, inner city youths as they took part in a major US tournament.

When we speak of Slam, we don’t just speak of something that is barely a decade younger than punk and hip hop; we speak of a phenomena that has caught on in every corner of the globe. Whole books have been written about the differences between the New York and Chicago Slam scenes, let alone the differences between Slams in Denmark and Singapore. The spread of Slam has enabled vibrant spoken word cultures to spring up where there wasn’t even a back room open mic and added a bit more choice in cities where the live poetry culture is long established.

I am far from a seasoned Slam performer and yet I have had the pleasure of taking part in Slams at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark, the Cheltenham All Comers Slam at the Cheltenham Literature Festival and squared up against the Bristol Slam team at the Bristol Old Vic. I didn’t win in the first two and was a fair to middling component in the winning team in the latter. But I got to perform alongside poets from all over Europe at Roskilde and got to showboat in front six hundred paying punters over two rounds, or six minutes, in Cheltenham Town Hall. I have also judged a fair few Slam type contests, indulging my evil, snobbish Saint persona at the Roundhouse Page Match and I’ll be once again be judging the Anti Slam this February, the Slam where the worst poem really is meant to win.

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I mention all these not just to reiterate how wonderful I am, but also to make one particular point. With all these experiences I retain memories of the poets and their poems and tactics, the audience and their unguarded expressions of approval or malevolence and the truly surreal foibles of the judges themselves. The thing that I always forget is who actually won the damn thing. It’s the theatricality of the format, and the way in which everyone, from host to poet to judge to audience member, plays their role, that lingers. Something about the drama of competition seems to pack in the punters, not just for Spoken Word poets either: those “Ivory Tower” types pack in the crowds when shortlisted poets for the TS Eliot Prize sell out the Royal Festival Hall every year.

The carcass of Thompson’s missive has almost already been picked clean. His strange assertion that nob jokes win slams is dismissed with a cursory glance at female slam champions such as Holly McNish, Lucy English and 2012′s Farrago UK Slam winner Stephanie Dogfoot Chan. Thompson’s risible dictum that a poem should be sampled like a fine wine could only be outdone in the buttock clenching department by saying that writing one is like making love to a beautiful woman.

No, instead I’ll reference Thompson’s erroneous statement that Slam was “named after a brutal wrestling move”. The founder of Slam, the Slampappy himself, Marc “So What?” Smith chose the term Slam because of a sporting connection but not wrassling, it was more in the spirit of the basketball Slam Dunk: the moment of virtuosity, weightlessness and sheer power that hushes the crowd for a moment before they scream out their fanatical appreciation.

But let’s stick with wrestling for a moment. While the body slam seems like a brutal assault, it is actually a potentially lethal move (a botched slam can, and has led to paralysis or death) carried out with great care by two skilled professionals. Personal injury is actually the one thing that the two wrestlers are most eager to avoid. They are there to tell a story. They are there to thrill the crowd and help them forget the rigours of their lives for a moment.

Maybe Nathan A Thompson wasn’t wrong about everything after all…

Category: A Life in Poetry, Cul-cha!
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Missive 27/11/12

Posted on | November 27, 2012 | No Comments

The change of season has finally elicited a bit of a cleanup of this website. Gone are the hominid skulls and primate portraits; the multimedia section has been replaced by sidebar feeds for my Youtube and SoundCloud accounts; the yellow typewritten logo has been crushed into a ball and bounced off the outside rim of the wastepaper basket. I’ll probably replace the ink splodge banner thingy above, rest assured it won’t be another image of me.

Incidentally, the image of me just to the right in a three piece whistle is also a bit inaccurate as I have recently shorn my locks. I might have to change that image too as I look like I’m presenting one of those execrable TED talks. It’s actually me hosting Book Slam at the Tabernacle, a fine event that is miles away from the smug, mild cultishness of TED.

Oh, the website is still stupidly slow, a result of some epically inefficient coding from yours truly that would be an absolute pain to tidy up. Well, when I say coding, I mean the simple uploading of the pre-existing WordPress software. I can imagine someone saying in their best Willliam Hurt in A History of Violence accent, “How do you f**k that up?” It’s a talent, that’s what it is.

Read Me Something You Love

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So, after dissing TED, here I am trying to sound clever in an interview. Steve Wasserman runs a fantastic podcast called Read Me Something You Love and I am the latest reader. In this episode I read August Kleinzahler’s poem, The Strange Hours Travellers Keep. It is a poem that I never tire of reading every now and again, maybe because it is such a resistant little beastie. I like poems that are more interested in being experienced than understood, even though I don’t write too many of those myself. Rest assured, you will be none the wiser by the end of the podcast as to what the poem’s about but I hope it’s as fun to listen to as it was to record.

Upcoming Gigs

I have a few interesting little shows coming up in the next month. First up, this Friday I will be reading at a night devoted to bad love poetry. I have written a poem in the style of those awful erotic Slam/Spoken Word pieces that silly men write. I have called it “Woman”. It’s “for the ladies…”

Then I’ll be getting all socialistic as I read a few poems for The Morning Star at the Mascara Bar in Stoke Newington alongside Tim Wells, Annie Brechin, Sophia Blackwell and many more. My Father Christmas is a Capitalist Canto (now entitled The Red Menace) will almost certainly be making an appearance.

In December I will be reading at Paper Tiger Poetry, an monthly event hosted by Alain English that is now celebrating its 1st anniversary. I’ll be reading alongside the rambunctiously satirical Catherine Brogan, who seems to be the go to guy on squatters rights these days. More power to her elbow, says I. There will also be a Slam held at the event with a £50 prize. We all need that kind of money at this particular time of year.

Renegotiating the Mundane

I know I haven’t blogged much here, nor anywhere else since the end of The Mundane Comedy. Fatherhood, current projects and my current job lecturing on Poetry and Performance at London Metropolitan University have put a lot of other things on the back burner for now. Rest assured, an edited selection of the Cantos will eventually materialise, as will a one person show based on the same material. I’ll pull on your coat nearer the time.

If you read all of this, I’ll send you a lock of my hair.

Category: A Life in Poetry
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Express Excess, This Wednesday

Posted on | October 23, 2012 | No Comments

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This Wednesday,  I will be reading at the London Spoken Word institution that is Express Excess. Hosted by the effervescently quifftastic Paul Lyalls,  Express must be approaching its 20th year of operation and is still going from strength to strength.  Keep reading for more info about who’s on the bill,  door damage and location:

We are thrilled to announce that we will be joined by JACQUELINE SAPHRA Her first full collection, The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions was published by flipped eye in June 2011 and nominated for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. SAM EDWARDS   Fuses feisty barbed poems with a Powerful re-telling. Her new collection ‘Sodium’ is going down a storm. NIALL O’SULLIVAN Has released 3 collections of poetry ‘Your not singing anymore’ ‘Ventriloquism for Monkeys’ &‘Sonnet Hack’(2010). In 2009, Niall featured on BBC Radio
and Television as Poet-in-res at the Wimbledon Championships.
JASMINE COORAY Writes with soul and precision, transforming intimate everyday relationships and painting the world into something you want to look at twice, and SITRON reading from his first collection ‘In these great Democracies’  “confessional, honest, intimate and uncanny” – 032c Magazine

Hosted by Paul Lyalls ‘Very, very, funny & very, very feel good’ – NUS Magazine.

BUT beware, beware, Camden’s new draconian parking laws (11pm res or meters only around the Enterprise) but down Adelaide Rd and all its off roads – still within sight of the gig, you can still get 6.30pm yellow line goodwill   happy Festival of Valentines    Paul & da team.

The Enterprise, 2 Haverstock Hill, NW3 (opposite Chalk Farm Tube station) CAMDEN, doors 8.30pm show 9pm we aim to finish well in time for last orders. info/res 020 7 485 2659 tickets £5/3  join us on facebook

Category: A Life in Poetry
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Missive 10/4/12

Posted on | April 10, 2012 | No Comments

BANG BANG! BANG BANG!

If you see a man ambling about South London talking to himself, but his random tergiversations seem to be in iambic terza rima: that’s probably me trying to memorise my Cantos for my gig at Bang Said the Gun this Thursday.

If you haven’t yet been to BANG then you really need to go. As a perfomer I really feel that it is one of the few venues in London where I can be myself. This isn’t so much a cuss of the other gigs; due to my precarious freelancer existence I do a lot of gigs that have to be family friendly, or shows that reflect a certain theme. These are great fun most of the time and they help me to stretch my horizons and meet new challenges. Bang, however, is one of those rare gigs where I can really let rip and not hold back a thing. The audiences are always boisterous and friendly, the host Dan Cockrill and the rest of the gunslingers know how to put on a show and keep the energy levels high and the line ups are always top drawer. The Raw Meat Stew segment at the end of the evening pilfers from what’s best about open mic and Slam and ensures that the floor spot segment that ends the night is a true burst of entertainment intensity rather than an anticlimactic afterthought.

I’ll be sharing the bill with Dan Simpson, the witty, denonaire and effervescent wordsmith that was part of the Apples and Snakes team that romped to victory at this year’s Page Match at the Roundhouse.

So, make it down to Bang Said the Gun at The Roebuck in Borough this Thursday night, and if dire circumstances prevent you from doing so, make it down some other Thursday and soon.

WHEN THREE TRIBES GO TO WAR

My last entry about mainstream poetry and Dave Bryant’s excellent feature in the Morning Star brought about a ripple of opinion from some of the bubbles within poetry’s multiverse (pun wasn’t intended but I’ll take credit for it anyway). This week Jon Stone expressed his thoughts on the tribalism of poetry, something he’s been mulling over for a while. The three tribes he focused on were the tribes of Spoken Word, Avant Garde and Mainstream. Perhaps the cleverest part of the essay focuses on defining these tribes—he firstly defines them by how they may view themselves and then defnes each by how their detractors see them, very much a Hegelian thesis and antithesis which in turn invite an attempt at a synthesis.

However, some Hegelians, such as Slavoj Zizek, see the synthesis as very tension between these two rather than a friendly meeting of minds. This seems to be a poignant argument to how Spoken Word and the Avant Garde define themselves: very much as an opposition or alternative to the whipping boy of the Mainstream. This antagonism in turn allows the mainstream to define itself as the middle ground, the true neutral reference to which the others are derivatives or alternatives. Figureheads from all three are very cosy with this antagonism, it ensures their roles as poster children. The antagonism is also very useful to cultural commentators and arts correspondents  who always need an angle.

I part with Hegel in his vision that history is some kind of progression of humanity to more enlightened climes, I’m much more of the the “what goes around comes around” mindset. Things got very interesting around the time of the death of Performance Poetry (I’d say early to mid noughties). Around this time many previous figureheads of Performance Poetry began to think more seriously about their written output, with some crossing over into the Mainstream and others skillfully straddling the ground between them. At the same time, many other big names of Performance Poetry became less visible.

However, nature abhors a vacuum while the Arts love vacuums of the creative variety so Spoken Word sprung up in the niche that Performance Poetry left behind. Many Spoken Word artists know nothing of the era that preceded them and are genuinely convinced that they are part for something new. They are half right, SW is a different beast to PP in many ways, yet many of the arguments that the Spoken Worders make are carbon copies of their forgotten predecessors (the page/stage dichotomy, youth, the need for a poem to make its point on the first listening, the inclusion at festivals and the links to contemporary popular music).

So, what’s an unfashionable Spoken Word/Mainstream hybrid like yours truly to do in times when crossover is passée?

Nothing. I’ve been here before. I know what’s coming.

If you read all of this, you missed out on how it sounds in performance.

Niall

Category: A Life in Poetry, Uncategorized

On the Record…

Posted on | March 22, 2012 | 7 Comments

Dave Bryant’s interview with me appears in today’s Morning Star. You can read it online right here but I’d recommend that you also head out and buy it, it is one of the last true left wing papers in distribution and often struggles to maintain its existence. It’s a lovely piece by Dave which captures the spirit and ethos of Poetry Unplugged. However, word limits and editorial craftiness have rendered one of the final paragraphs a little problematically for me. Here’s the paragraph quoted in full:

“The kind of elitism I think does exist is in mainstream poetry – or what is called ‘mainstream poetry,’ which is written by TS Eliot Prize nominees and Poetry Review regulars, but read by very few people. Their response to the government cuts, the Occupy movement and the summer riots has been nothing, but then none of it touched them. The only vocalisation you get is from Carol Ann Duffy doing a poem about Arts Council cuts, rather than about the people who handed the cuts down to the Arts Council,” he continues disgustedly.

Now, I think a valid point is being made here but people could take the wrong impression. Firstly, I didn’t add anything “disgustedly” (this was the work of a sub editor rather than the author), that comment implies something far stronger than what I actually feel. I’m not disgusted with Carol Ann Duffy for writing a poem referencing many organisations that did not succeed in securing National Portfolio funding from ACE. If anything, Duffy’s laureateship has been the most radical in many ways. Not only should we not lose sight of her being the first woman in the post, we should also make note that she has not written any sycophantic odes to the Royal Family, instead choosing to measure the pulse of the nation with poems about the Stephen Lawrence murder and the death of Tariq Jahan during the English riots.

However I do stand by my assertion that mainstream poetry has not done anything to address the Occupy movement or the subjective, class aspects of the London Riots. We should take the laudable withdrawals of Alice Oswald and John Kinsella from the Aurum supported TS Eliot prize as handwashing, denunciatory gestures rather than overt, proactive strikes against the forces of free market capitalism. We heard more noise from mainstream poets in support of Aurum’s modest contribution to the TS Eliot Prizes administration costs. We heard more protest from mainstream poets about the non inclusion of some literary organisations for National Portfolio funding than against the coalition government that cut the public money available to the arts. Many acted as if poetry itself was under threat if the TS Eliot prize went under (no one seems to be looking at what the future of Valerie Eliot’s stipend, tied to the commercial success of the musical Cats, may be).

Mainstream poetry is mainly concerned about its own survival. This is not the same as the survival of poetry itself. Many statements about the declining health of poetry rely on the unexamined and snobbish assumption that hip hop isn’t poetry. “Mainstream Poetry” as a category is a slippery fish to handle and my offhand comments about the Poetry Review and the TS Eliot Prize don’t help. Poets I admire such as Ian Duhig and Annie Freud are TS Eliot nominees. My own best man, Nii Parkes and fellow Flipped Eye poet Malika Booker have had poems published in the Poetry Review. But these are exceptions rather than the rule. Mainstream poetry is an Islingtonian, dinner party mentality that permeates the social structures and stylisitic tropes that prop up the triad of literary prize, mainstream publisher and Guardian columnist.

Mainstream poets can enjoy relatively high profiles despite the fact that Spoken Word performers outsell them considerably with the CDs and pamphlets that they shift at gigs. Mainstream poetry is mainly white and middle/upper class, no matter how loudly it heralds the occasional exception to the rule. Poets from non white or working class backgrounds often have to ventriloquise the rhetorical aspects of the mainstream in order to gain mainstream recognition. In a recent speech to the Oxbridge bods, Tim Wells compared this practice to English actors that play characters with American accents on American films and TV shows.

Mainstream poetry eschews overt political expression, portraying poetry as something that transcends the political and connects to the timeless universality of the human condition—as all poetries that channel ruling ideologies are wont to do. Poets that dare to say something are often cattily chastised for their lack of sophistication in the hatchet-job roundups that bookend mainstream poetry quarterlies ( see Todd Swift’s review of Luke Wright’s The Vile Ascent of Lucian Gore in the Poetry Review).

I do not for a second feel that the kind of poetry that I attack in this article should be hidden away or supplanted. I wish all the best to the TS Eliot Prize, the poets that wish to be nominated and those that do not. All I really want to banish is the idea that these are representative of poetry and, by implication, the best of poetry as a whole. Then we may simply shrug at the all white shortlist, or the occasional all male shortlist such as last year’s Forward Prize—as long as those involved don’t utter the usual lines about how they honestly tried to simply choose the best collection.

Category: A Life in Poetry, Cul-cha!
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Missive 29/2/12

Posted on | February 28, 2012 | No Comments

Half Time Report

Wow, it’s been a long time since I put up one of these. I have been busy writing poems rather than verbalising about the state of poetry. The Mundane Comedy has been going for six months. For those of you that haven’t clicked on the links that turn up daily in my twitter feed, The Mundane Comedy is my latest (and most probably final) foray into publishing a poem a day online. Last time, Sonnet Hack saw me writing a sonnet a day for a month, this time The Mundane Comedy sees me posting a poem a day in Terza Rima for a year. Some of these poems have been agonised over for the best part of a day at my desk, others have been dashed off on my phone and published while on a crowded, noisy bus. It shouldn’t really come as a surprise that the former doesn’t always produce better work than the latter.

I am enjoying the project, which is all that I can really try to do. There’s no way a poet with twice my talent (they are legion, don’t appear on too many shortlists) could write a good poem every day in a particular form. Good poems take time, not because they need to be worked on over months but rather because time is the only thing that can allow a poet to get an outsider’s perspective on their own work.

I enjoy seeing how quickly my own limitations become visible, how often I find myself treading the same old ground in the same worn out shoes. I enjoy the fact that technology has taken us from a world where a select few printing presses would place a select few volumes in a select few bookstores in a select few towns to a world where someone can thumb a few thoughts onto a touchscreen and make them visible to a potential, but never actual, audience of millions. I enjoy it when people read my poems, whether they like them or not, even on days when the hits barely rise above twenty. If twenty people have read the whole poem that I just posted then that’s a good day for me as a poet.

Most of all, I enjoy the way that the novelty aspect has worn out very quickly. It’s gone from “Look at me, I’m going to write a poem in terza rima EVERY DAY!!! Nobody’s done that before!” to something that feels as normal to any other daily task. That’s actually reflected in the page views too, there were a fair few spikes where the hits went into the hundreds daily, before crashing back down. Now they potter around the fifty per day mark, which feels like a fair amount of dedicated readers to me. I don’t think for a second that those earlier flurries of hits were the same. They were a whole bunch of people following a link, exclaiming “meh!” and going back to check their facebook. Going viral is for Cats That Look Like Hitler. So, if you’re among those fiftyish people, I humbly salute you. I hope the next six months keep things interesting so that you stick around.

…and the award for most middle brow film goes to…

Awards are for the middlebrow. It is for that which is seemingly cultured enough to atone for its popularity. I enjoyed The Artist for the performances and the dog. It was, in no way, a homage to the most experimental, groundbreaking and magical period in cinema history. Here’s a comment I made beneath a post about The Artist that I’ll share again here:

” I just thought that the Artist came across as a shallow pastiche rather than a loving homage, no matter how well intentioned. I say that out of love for silent cinema and not snobbery against the popular. The popularity of The Artist is all about its Oscar buzz elements, rather than any genuine public groundswell. No film is released in December and January without the expectation of hitting that middlebrow awards vein in the same way that political parties hope to occupy the middle ground during election time.

The Artist may have been stylistically distinct from the homogeneous stirring Oscar winners, but apart from the gimmicky pastiche element, it’s just another heartwarming Oscar nominee. Even Chaplin’s form of crowdpleasing sentimentality was far more believable, subversive and genuinely touching than the Artist. The story of the Artist is not about the redemption of a faded icon, if anything the unconvincing denoument works to try to redeem the fickle studio system and the myth of the redemptive power of fame that it looks to be critiqueing in the middle of the film.

The irony is that silent cinema was truly groundbreaking, it played with rules, expectations, narrative conventions and aesthetics far more than any other era of cinema. I would rather see a film honour these elements of silent cinema rather than simply parrot the shallower aspects of silent cinema’s appearance.”

People would like to see The Artist as important because it could re-engender a love among the general public for silent cinema, but that good work is already being done by Criterion, BFI and Eureka! in producing beautifully restored HD transitions of the greatest cinema ever made. You should check them out.

If you read all of this, I’ll tell you what film the above still is from.

Niall

Category: A Life in Poetry, Cul-cha!
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The Next Step-: Poetry School Workshop, January 2012

Posted on | December 2, 2011 | No Comments

I will be running a ten week course for intermediate level poets from January 2011 at the Poetry School. The course, entitled “The Next Step”, will focus on technical and practical aspects of writing poetry, from formal poetry to performance poetry. The course will also offer practical advice on other aspects of poetry, from reading in public and getting published to networking and using the internet as a way of promoting and publishing your work. You can find out more on the course by clicking on the link to the Poetry School’s website below.

http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/face-to-face/the-next-step.php

Category: Uncategorized
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