The taste of milk and honey cloys; the cork on my wine smells of diapers.

The speed of mice's brown eyes is fast but the speed of my gun is faster.

POETS LIVE

tonight at 19h

featuring

IAN MONK

AMY HOLLOWELL

MEGAN FERNANDES

at Carr's Pub

1 rue de Mont Thabor (75001)

http://poets-live.com/

pigs

will.

Interview and reading

An extract from my poem Shelf along with a French translation by Oulipian poet, Ian Monk, has just been published in the Swiss newspaper, La Cité. There is also an interview with me and some original artwork by Israel Garcia Montero.

In the good old tradition of poetic back-scratching I will be hosting Ian at the next Poets Live reading on the 22nd November. Paris-resident, Amy Hollowell and former Paris-resident, Megan Fernandes will also be reading. More on all three readers can be found here.

New poetry at nthposition

There is new work up at nthposition. This month sees poems from:

Bob Brooks

James McLaughlin

Gary J. Shipley

Hicham Bensassi

John Dutterer

Anyone wishing to submit work should do so at rquintav AT gmail DOT com. Maximum of six poems plus a short biographical note. No attachments please.

slowth

ohwoul

dntitbe

Some recent extracts from my work-in-progress, Shelf, are now online at Ian Seed's excellent webzine, Shadowtrain.

7 billion

These are the sweetest Lucretian days;

the balance of atoms shifts towards man,

who watches, exquisite, as his own ship goes down.

clench and surrender

From where I am/

................................/sitting I can see eight shoes

New poetry up at nthposition

October's selection of poetry is up at nthposition, featuring work by

Corey Wakeling

Gail Hanlon

Vincent Basso

Lucy Burnett

Michael Aird

Anyone wishing to submit work should send a maximum of six poems plus a brief bio to me at rquintav AT gmail DOT com. No attachments please.

Deus homo

if that than which then I

A river drove and that was rot

IVY WRITERS PARIS

PRÉSENTE

une lecture-rencontre (READING) en anglais

with VERSAL MAGAZINE of Amsterdam

&

Poets-Live

Including readings by the authors:

Anna Arov

Megan M. Garr

Sarah Ream

Jane Lewty

Kate Foley

&

Lars Palm

Le 11 Octobre

at 19h30 (doors open at 19h)

AT: Le Next,

17 rue Tiquetonne,

75002 Paris,

Metro Etienne Marcel/ RER Les Halles.

Free/ Entrée libre

IVY Writers Paris 2011-2012 season begins with this POETS-LIVE and VERSAL MAGAZINE all-English reading. Anna Arov, Megan M. Garr, Kate Foley, Sarah Ream and Jane Lewty—visiting authors & editors of Versal Magazine—will read with award-winning Swedish-Anglophone poet and translator Lars Palm, a POETS-LIVE invitee.

Liquiddity

My new chapbook, Liquiddity, is now available from Oystercatcher Press. It costs £4 (plus postage) and it does what it says on the tin: fluids, identity and a bit of financial stuff too.

Sleepingit

offinapark

Poets Live tonight

Tonight at 7 o'clock in the basement of Carr's Pub (1 rue du Mont-Thabor, 75001) three fine poets will be treating us to their work:

Peter Hughes (UK)

Pearl Pirie (Canada)

Bonny Finberg (US/France)

All three poets will have books to launch so come in numbers with bulging wallets.

More details here.

rough age

Recording up online

A recording of the Paris launch of Dog, cock, ape and viper is now online. You can listen to it here.

transit story

an iceberg

.................lettuce

sandwich

New poetry up at nthposition

After an August break nthposition is back with work by:

Jonny Reid

Bill Howell

Stuart Barnes

Vernon Frazer

Michael Monroe

Anyone wishing to submit work should do so at rquintav AT gmail DOT com. Six poems maximum plus a brief bio. No attachments please. And anyone waiting for a reply, my apologies. I've got a bit of a backlog to get through but you will hear from me. Everyone gets a response.

tofurkey dildo

Sarah Riggs, Claire Trévien and Dylan Harris

I recently inherited the reading series Poets Live off wandering troubadour/photographer/computer programmer, Dylan Harris. My second evening at the helm is tonight when three fine poets will read: Sarah Riggs, Claire Trévien and Mr Harris himself. The event starts at 7 o'clock in the basement room of Carr's Pub (1 rue de Month-Thabor, 75001 Paris) and more information about the readers can be found here.

bed bed bed bed

fichidindia

pigeon shit anemone

liver and bacon, and eggs

nthposition translation special issue

I am very pleased to announce the new translation special issue over at nthposition featuring English versions of German, French, Spanish, Greek and Russian originals.

Click here to read:

Osip Mandelstam translated by Alistair Noon
Constantine Cavafy translated by Curt Hopkins
Julia Piera translated by Forrest Gander
Tzveta Sofronieva translated by Chantal Wright
Jacques Demarcq translated by Jennifer K. Dick

clammy meatus

Photoportrait by Renaud Monfourny

In conjunction with tonight's reading there is a portrait of me on the photoblog of legendary rock photographer, Renaud Monfourny. Nico, Paul Bowles, Lou Reed, Jonas Mekas, Lydia Lunch and Thurston Moore have all sat, slumped or sprawled for Renaud and I am honoured to join this illustrious band. Thank you Renaud and thanks too to a certain BV for putting us in touch.

http://blogs.lesinrocks.com/photos/

And then I gave it all away -

the heart, the hired help, the children.

Book launch on the 28th June

I will be launching my new collection Dog, cock, ape and viper at 19h00 on Tuesday, 28th June at Carr's Pub, 1 rue de Mont-Thabor, 75001 Paris. Also reading will be Colin Herd and Suzanne Allen, who each have books of their own to launch. Admission is free but you are encouraged to buy books or Guinness or both. More info here.

plastic resin pellet

bread and pregnancy and circus

caca phony

"Wrong life cannot be lived rightly."

Theodor Adorno

New poetry up at nthposition

This month's selection of poems is now online at www.nthposition.com

June sees work from:

Aseem Kaul

Christopher Mulrooney

Ricky Garni

Emma Lee

Susan Adams

Anyone wishing to submit work should do so at the following address: rquintav AT gmail DOT com. Maximum of six poems embedded in the body of the message. Please include a brief biographical note.

corndwarf

db

d b

and but

my breath is foul, my blood abundant

feelsick/

anddirty

a clown's clown shoes

New book

My new collection, Dog, cock, ape and viper is now available for purchase via the corrupt press website. I will be flogging copies in Berlin in early June (more on that soon) before the official Paris launch on the 28th.

GRÍMSVÖTN

Heaven

The wine so ripe it fills

like egg an egg my mouth.

slow mo bulge

Balak son of Zippor

threnody cunt

pelargonium mulch & gamay

Dear, sacred appetite
rises again: California
rolls and beer
enough to see us through till dinner.

the light is so beautiful; against
the thin blue sky a chestnut branch

Eve's adam's apple bobbed

Reading tonight

George Vance, Jen Dick and Greg Santos will be reading tonight as part of the Poets Live series.

George will be launching his first ever full collection, A SHORT CIRCUIT and Jen will be launching her new chapbook, Betwixt.

19h15 at Carr's Pub & Restaurant, 1 rue du Mont-Thabor, M Tuileries.

May poems up at nth

A new selection of poetry is up at nthposition featuring work by

Les Wicks
Ranjani Murali
Jesse H. McKnight
Christodoulos Makris
Dennis Mahagin

Anyone wishing to submit work should do so via rquintav AT gmail DOT com. No attachments and no more than six poems.

laterite and murram

Easter Iceland

Photos up at Openned

Click here for some scary poet pictures by Luiz Santos. I'm in there somewhere, glowering.

zai

pit

monrachy

And then I tired,

noise downstairs:

noise of wax,

of prosody.

paper-cuts

dichotomy

turmeric shavings

wrapped in a tokay blanket

what

need

you?

Specked with blossom the tarmac melts.

Specked with heaven-sent blossom.

April at nthposition

A new selection of poems is up at nthposition. This month features work by:

Laura McLaughlin

David Cooke

Michael Pedersen

Andrew Shields

r. d. coleman

Anyone wishing to submit work should do so at rquintav AT gmail DOT com. No more than six poems and no attachments.

I itch

I came across this video by the Icelandic poet, Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, in the excellent new magazine, Asymptote. There is an English translation online.

neverthless

creepers

buds like goose

neck barnacles

Strangers in Paris

I've got some work in an anthology of new English-language writing from Paris. It's due out from Tightrope Books in Toronto in May of this year. It features an intriguing mix of big name authors like John Berger, Jorie Graham, Alice Notley and Cole Swensen, and less big name authors like myself, many of whom gravitate around David Barnes' Spoken Word night in Belleville. Copies are now available for pre-order.

sleightmotiv

legerdemain

Apples

The one
with the wurm
in it, innit?

lighten up

meandmylemons

sentant la mort et la morue

Upstairs at Duroc Poetry Reading tonight

Thursday 10th March at 19h30 at The American Library in Paris

To celebrate Le Printemps des Poètes, France’s Poetry Month, four English-language poets will be reading from their work. In the spirit of this year’s theme, “d’infinis paysages,” each reader will offer ways in which the “Infinite Landscapes” of oceans and islands, of seashores, deserts, mountains, fields and city streets are transformed into the landscaped infinities of poetry. The program is brought to you by Upstairs at Duroc, the Paris-based literary journal.

Presenters
Margo Berdeshevsky’s poetry collection, But A Passage In Wilderness, was published by Sheep Meadow Press, who will also publish her new book, Between Soul and Stone, in the fall of 2011. Her short story collection, Beautiful Soon Enough (University of Alabama Press, 2009) received Fiction Collective 2’s American Book Review / Ronald Sukenick Award for Innovative Fiction. Margo has received 6 Pushcart nominations and 2 Pushcart Special Mention citations as well as The Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Award. Originally from NYC, she lives and writes in Paris.

Paula Bohince is the author of 2 poetry collections, both from Sarabande Books: Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods (2008; e-book 2010) and The Children (forthcoming in 2012). She has received the 2010-2011 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation and elsewhere.

Dylan Harris is an English poet who has lived and worked in various EU countries. This sequence of culture changes has come to dominate his poetry. His books include the collection antwerp (wurm press, Dublin), the chapbook Europe (wurm press, 2008) and his recent poetry / photography chapbook smoke, published by the The Knives Forks and Spoons Press in the UK.

Sarah Riggs is a poet, translator and visual artist. She has published Waterwork (Chax Press, 2007) and a book of essays: Word Sightings: Poetry and Visual Media in Stevens, Bishop and O’Hara (Routledge, 2002). Her most recent chapbook is 60 Textos (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). She has translated Isabelle Garron, Ryoko Sekiguchi and Marie Borel (with Omar Berrada). A member of Double Change and the director of Tamaas, she teaches at NYU in Paris.

March at nthposition

New work is up at nthposition. This month sees poetry by James Goodman, Elena E Johnson, David Lawrence and Michael William West, as well as an article by Steven Fowler on the Sicilian aristo-symbolist, Lucio Piccolo.

Poets wishing to submit work should do so at rquintav AT gmail DOT com. Send up to six poems at a time along with a brief biographical note. No attachments please.

Patting the toddler..............made him

sweat..............................grey-veined

delicate.........................fillets of bass

On naming

She said, You're a poet

think of a name

But you don't ask the doctor

to make a disease

I admire

the ones
like Michelangelo
who make it
to old age
despite
the struggle.

It seems
so easy
to fall off the edge
where the job
of its nature
will have
you work

that those who don't
are paradise
to me,
a safe
soft
place
like you
in
bed
forever.

Those who stop
or whose
lives
are punctured
by
silence
I avoid

and the shimmering
early promise
come
to nought
turn
against
like tribes
do albinos.

Berlusconi

Ben Ali went, Mubarak went, it seems (almost unbelievably) that Gaddafi will go. But one person who will stick it out until the bitter, pitiful end is Italy's criminal-in-chief, the contemptible Silvio Berlusconi. As an Italian I am ashamed of him. And as a European too. What possible moral authority is left to us with a bloated crook like Berlusconi at the helm of one of our nations? Just to recap:

- Berlusconi has never made clear where his money comes from despite parliamentary questions on the topic and suspicions of Mafia collusion. If he has nothing to hide then why not simply come out with the truth?

-He enjoys a near monopoly on the Italian media, a situation that renders open debate and scrutiny (a sine qua non of a democratic society) all but impossible.

-He has repeatedly changed Italian law to protect his own personal interests. How can any citizens respect the rule of law if they see that the law exists to serve the interests of the most powerful of its citizens?

-He abused diplomatic privilege to release an underage prostitute he is alleged to have slept with from police custody, claiming she was a niece of the now deposed Egyptian despot Hosni Mubarak.

-He has fostered close ties with regimes the rest of the world wisely keeps at arm's length. As recently as this Saturday he was refusing to comment on the uprisings in Libya, saying that he did not want to "disturb" his friend, Gaddafi.

The man is a disgrace and must go so that Italy, a country that has given so much to the world, can recover a modicum of pride. And also in the interests of European and even global security. If we, as Europeans, want to avoid the spread of islamism in these newly liberated countries it is vital, now more than ever, that we present a valid and admirable alternative. A Europe that has Silvio Berlusconi in it is precisely what these people have just turned their backs on.

UpStart

I have some work featured in an Irish arts project called UpStart. The goal of the project is to encourage a debate about the role of the arts in public life in the run-up to the Irish general election. To do this the organizers have produced a series of posters featuring poetry and visual art which have been stuck up all over Dublin in the spaces normally reserved for political propaganda. Good luck to them. Ireland has a long tradition of artists engaging in public life - think of Yeats - and a long tradition of using satire to do so - think of Swift, with his Modest Proposal. But it also has a long tradition of boorishness that has forced many of its finest artists to emigrate, and is clearly alive and well if this "article" from the Evening Herald is anything to go by.

I was in Reykjavik this weekend, a city whose new mayor, Jon Gnarr, is a former comedian who was elected along with an assortment of punk musicians, actors and housewives, on a campaign ticket of anarcho-surrealism. Some people dismissed Gnarr as a joker but his party won the elections because of a feeling of disgust with the established order. This is what the foul-mouthed journalist from the Herald fails to understand - it is precisely because Ireland (like Iceland) is on the brink of financial collapse that the arts have a role to play in the political process. Business as usual is no longer an option.

razorbiltong

clingfilm : sparadrap

Back in the days when I used to care

if people said clerk or clerk for clerk.

brash, petunia

A working roadmap for a cash for poinsettia program.

an understood estoppel

I am afraid

of being bored,

fed up

with being empty.

escapt

New poetry up at nthposition

February's poems are up at nthposition. This month has work by:

Mark Dow

Alex Mahoney

Nicola Griffin

Daniel Marsteller

Chris Pusateri

And since I was otherwise engaged at the time and forgot to post an announcement, a word for January's contributors too:

Nazir Ali

Edward Eke

Ditta Baron Hoeber

Steven Fowler

Any poets wishing to submit work should send a brief third person biography and no more than six poems embedded in the body of an email to rquintav AT gmail DOT com.

shapeshipting

February

Outside, midden;

inside, saltpeter.

Mucus and warmth;

my unsettling home.

Religion

Every time
a so-called
martyr dies
religion dies
a little
with him

each fool
with a bomb
in a bus
or plane
drives
hundreds
of good men
from God.

commensurate

cummerbunds

Chimera/Chimère - launch tonight

A bilingual magazine launch tonight at Shakespeare and Company. I will be reading along with Michel Deguy, Katherine Gallagher, Patrick Chapman, Adam Biles and Philip Wilson. Kick-off is at 7:00.

My Thai wife's turned fat, and the loaf I had scattered seems to bring mainly pigeons.

A newish year;

a botched and

blood-flecked

January shave.