In conversation with Jared Stanley

I had a nice chat with that fine fellow Jared Stanley, who must have the best book title of any Salt poet: Book Made of Forest. The full results of our email correspondence are over at the Salt Publishing blog.

Kingsway Tram Tunnel

Last week I went to see Chord, an installation by Conrad Shawcross in Kingsway Tram Tunnel. It was an intriguing experience, a chance to explore a small fragment of London’s forgotten subterranea. Here are some snaps I took on my phone; just the tunnel (the miraculous artwork itself can be seen at Londonist and elsewhere). Arts organisation Measure deserve praise for putting the project together, as do Camden Council for letting them take over the Tunnel, which they normally use for storage.

The cities we walk through

My copy of the Autumn issue of Poetry London popped through the post today (Post, you say? Oh yeah – ) and lo and behold it contains a review – the first in print – of my book How To Build A City. I’m pretty ecstatic. That horribly talented Luke Kennard was tasked with perusing my poems, and found them… to his taste.

Here are some choice cuts:

Worse luck, How To Build A City is so good it scares me. It’s a debut collection which is angry, vital and constantly surprising with a pleasing earthiness to the language.

Chivers’s writing feels refreshing and necessary, a genuine, lyrical appraisal of contemporary life, something about the mediated layers of reality we experience every day.

The lazy reviewer in me just wants to write something like from spam email to urban foxes, Chivers has his finger on the zeitgeist. Which is exactly the opposite of what the work’s trying to do, which it seems to me, is to stop us blithely using terms like zeitgeist at all.

I really admire Luke’s work, so it’s great to get this kind of praise. I still have some signed copies of the book, so message me if you’d like one – and I’ll include a new original poem to boot. Alternatively, nab a copy from my publisher (which is also Luke’s… conspiracy theories start and end here).

Gettin’ ‘Pataphysical

Via reading about the Canadian poet Christian Bok, I found about the mysterious world of ‘Pataphysics. This is from the Wikipedia entry:

‘Pataphysics (French: ‘Pataphysique), a term coined by French writer Alfred Jarry (1873 – 1907), is a philosophy or pseudophilosophy dedicated to studying what lies beyond the realm of metaphysics. It is a parody of the theory and methods of modern science and is often expressed in nonsensical language. A practitioner of ‘pataphysics is a ‘pataphysician or a ‘pataphysicist.

And then I realised that The London Snorkelling Team, who I am seeing tomorrow night at The Bishopsgate Institute, describe their music as a ‘Pataphysics of Sound.

Nice!

This is yogic on this is yogic

First released through Gists & Piths

Exercises in Style

 

Awesome!

Where was my life before this book?

Public Service Announcement

Please note. I have nothing to do with popular author Dan Brown. I did not write this article and I am not this Tom Chivers.

I am, however, the author of The Terrors, which is the subject of a recent triple-review at Sphinx Magazine.

That was Yoruba

I get the fear, a lot. I often think I will never write anything of value ever again. Sometimes, I look back at what I’ve already written and consider it all worthless. Perhaps this is the writer’s lot, or perhaps just a particularly frustrating part of my own psyche.

But if there’s one poem that I’ve written over the last few years that I feel in any way comfortable and confident about, it’s the one that gave this blog its name: ‘This is yogic’. It seems to me to enjoy a rhythmic and syntactical logic I lack elsewhere. It’s a ghazal too – of sorts.

The original is published in my first collection, but here’s a pseudo-Oulipian translation that I made last night using the Collins Pocket English Dictionary.

That was Yoruba

He was fine-tuned in a gum resin, Northbound fedora
and a Belgian ration of sideburns in an archbishop.

That was Yoruba. Answering machine in the hadron collider
(or heptathlon) and the piston tankard of cellophane.

She was a Wapping rambler and he,
well, no veterinarian nor blood sport.

Ergo, the site of fusible beachwear
and pawns the colour of whale tonic.

Tallboys are lopsided when the fog-lamps comes hither;
archdukes arise, hydrochloride whits.

Darting from a silver birch, the Cupid with the
pin number can honk his eistedfodd on my fiver.

 

The Mannahatta Project

I heard about The Mannahatta Project via the latest issue of the TLS. It looks fascinating.

Cyclone Virtual Tour – Legs IV-V

• Yesterday poet and blog-queen Katy Evans-Bush asked me questions for Baroque in Hackney
• Today I waxed lyrical about sci-fi trilogy The Matrix for Mercy Recommends

That’s it. Tour over. Thanks to everyone who made it possible – my agent, my manager, miscellaneous roadies, the big man, &c. &c.

Errata

The Poet of Sparty Lea is being repeated on BBC Radio 4 on Saturday night at 11.30pm.