Free Verse poetry book fair
September 11, 2012
Best thing about Saturday: satisfying my usually frustrated hunter-gatherer instincts, as a reader/buyer of poetry books. Where else can one do this? Even the best bookshops have nothing like the range we got on Saturday in Islington. From �1 pamphlets to the collected works of Veronica Forrest-Thompson for �32 (I think). From Picador to Pighog Press. But mostly, and most importantly, small publishers and pamphlets, the former talkative, the latter, for once, browsable.
Then there were the readings, in a side room full of sunlight from a high window and draped in crimson satin; and the lovely courtyard caf�, staffed singlehandedly by a Spanish waitress who deserved a poetry medal for her many trips up and down a vertiginous iron fire escape to keep us all in caffeine.
There was Spanish wine and ham too. Now I�ll boast about my haul. I bought Tasting Notes, Matthew Stewart's HappenStance pamphlet that was launched with the wine and ham; Matt Merritt�s hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica, from Nine Arches; Jacqui Saphra�s The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions, from Flipped Eye; a book of poems by Helen Macdonald, Gael Turnbull and Nicholas Johnson from Etruscan Books; Xelis de Toro�s The Book of Invisible Bridges, which does brain-twistingly unexpected things with text, from Pighog; and Caasha Lul Mohamud Yusuf�s poems from the Poetry Translation Centre.
There were stalls, like Shearsman and Reality Street, that I�d have liked more time to look at. There were stalls for publishers I�d never heard of, that I�d like to have spent time at. I was there for around 5 hours; at one point I did a time check with a couple of friends and we couldn�t believe the day was going so fast. What about a 2-day fair next year, with an evening event/reading? Easy for me to say � I don�t have to organise it, or take a financial risk. A big thank you to Charles Boyle, Chrissy Williams and the volunteers: you gave us a great day out.
CB has written about the fair on his blog. Some interesting observations about the different attitudes of large publishers � Picador comes out of it very well, the others don�t. And now CB�s thinking of pop-up shops, again as part of the mission to give readers access to small presses, and small presses to readers. Yes!!!
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This blog is going on holiday. To Greece, with walking boots and swimsuit, to an old house on a wild island where I used to spend the winter weekends when I lived in Greece in the 90�s. I haven�t been back for around 15 years. I hope it hasn�t changed too much, but there is sure to be illegal and/or corrupt building, and new roads that lead nowhere.
I want to visit my favourite Greek temple, which is like no other. It�s at the top of a mountain, hence the walking boots. I hope the goat-and-sheep farmer up the hill from the house will still be whistling his tune, part folk and part Bach fugue. I hope there will be blackberries in the lane (yes, blackberries. It�s too early for pomegranates.) And I hope much else � memories have come back in the last couple of weeks, drawn out of nowhere by thinking about the visit.
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