I’ve had two very different weekends away in the last month. For my 40th birthday, Richard took me to Madrid for the first time. There was a bit of culture – I posed by a statue of Lorca; read Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station; went to see Picasso’s Guernica at the Museo Reina Sofia; looked at Goya’s palpably evil Black Paintings and Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights at the Prado. Mainly though, it was just a three day tapas crawl through markets and tiled, stand-up bars, washing down polpo served on potatoes, tortilla, croquettes, prawns in bubbling garlic oil, ham (at the Museo del Jamon), sea urchins, gazpacho, chipirones, padron peppers, salt cod and snails with albarino or little glasses of vermouth. A very lovely couple of days (although I definitely felt 40 when I got home)
Then there was Aldeburgh, my favourite poetry festival. Despite an unpleasant cold, I lugged my MPT banner and a suitcase full of copies of the new issue onto rail replacement buses to get there, and it was definitely worth it. The sun was smashing into the sea on my arrival. My New Writing North mentee Maria Isakova Bennett had installed a beautiful exhibition of hand-stitched sea views in The Lookout; poems scribbled on pebbles were piled outside. I caught a few readings, including the marvellous Sophie Herxheimer and Chris McCabe doing their Blakean double act from their new Hercules Editions book The Practical Visionary, managed a quick bag of chips, and then it was time to launch In a Winter City: Focus on Ted Hughes and Hungary, with Chrissy Williams, Zaffar Kunial and George Szirtes all doing sets (and Sasha Dugdale with some amazing revelations about why Ted Hughes’ planned Hungarian issue never happened…) Afterwards I was also really happy with the MPT LGBTQ+ workshop with Kostya Tsolákis, who helped us create a new version of Vassilis Amanatidis’ poem ’09. [escort: the trick]’ over wine and nibbles. And then The Cross Keys, of course, jammed with poets and poetry gossip, where they serve Aspalls cider on tap which I can never resist…
The next morning I had lost my voice, but managed to attend Will Harris’ brilliant lecture on line-breaks and grab a free coffee. If you haven’t been reading Will’s blogs, on everything from the poetry of Yang Lian to shampoo branding and Keanu Reeves, I couldn’t recommend them more highly, he’s such an interesting critic.
A little lull now in my Modern Poetry in Translation schedule, whilst I try and finish up edits for Fierce Bad Rabbits by the end of the month. But soon I’ll be starting putting together the British issue, so please do think about submitting before December the 14th. We’re accepting both translated poems and poems in dialects, and want to represent as many of Britain’s language communities as possible, from Scots to BSL to Angloromani to Arabic to Yiddish to Cockney rhyming slang.
clarepollard 