Lidija Dimkovska and George Szirtes

Posted on September 13, 2011 by CHRISSYPL

We’re delighted to be able to post an audio extract here from a recent “Special Edition” event at the Poetry Library which featured readings and discussion by Lidija Dimkovska and George Szirtes.

In this extract from the Q and A led by Joint Librarian Chris McCabe, Macedonian-Slovenian poet Lidija Dimkovska talks about the way in which post-1991 eastern European culture prompted a young generation of poets to start focusing on their own urban environments and realities, rather than on escapist poetries. George Szirtes uses the example of the forthcoming Salt Anthology of Younger Hungarian Poets to talk about his experience of younger poets’ work: “Everything is available. You can play with everything. You construct your sense of the world out of a whole series of miscellaneous pieces and it requires, if you like, a strong organic imagination to hold to hold them together.”

You can listen to the full event, with readings by both featured poets, by visiting the Poetry Library at Southbank Centre.

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Petals in the metro of your mind

Posted on July 7, 2011 by LizzieApi

Paris Metro. Photo Copyright L.Apichella

Ezra Pound Evening

Wednesday 6 July, 8pm

The Poetry Library

Last night was an evening dedicated to the imagist poet Ezra Pound. My expectation had been that we would hear a talk on his work, perhaps listen to a few of his poems, but what actually happened was exciting in a different way; an evening of poetry inspired by Pound’s. 

Brtish poets Keston Sutherland and Tim Atkins briefly discussed the importance of Pound in contemporary poetry but the evidence was in the reading of their own, progressive work. Sutherland opened proceedings by explaining he would rather ‘channel Pound rather than answer him’.

Listening to the verses of these poets who cite Pound as master, I remember discovering Pound for myself in an early film lecture at the University of Kent. The lights were dimmed, the projector switched on and somebody read Pound’s haiku to the room, ‘In a Station of the Metro’ with its central image likening a crowd of commuters’ faces to flower petals. Cue darkness: a sound, whirr, yellow light burst from behind a silhouetted building – the New York City skyline. The chug of a subway train filled my ears, suddenly, a trumpet to herald shadowy figures rushing to their train in the early morning light. We were being shown D.A. Pennbaker’s short film Daybreak Express, which Pennebaker has said was inspired by the Pound haiku. It felt like watching a poem get up and walk about – the fusion of Duke Ellington’s rhythms and Pennebaker’s phantasmagoria of imagery pulsed with the beat of New York City. The combination of this film and the Pound haiku was unforgettable, and the memory was reawakened by last night’s event.

Sitting in the Poetry Library is like looking at a road map and having the means to go wherever you want. Their ever-growing collection is one of it’s kind and offers the most comprehensive and accessible collection of poetry from 1912 in the UK. Browsing the shelves during the interval it struck me how much can be communicated in so few words. In poetry words hover above the page, they hit you in places you had forgotten you had, and take you into different worlds. It would take a lifetime to get through the 100,000+ titles, neatly categorised on their shelves, but that is not a good enough reason not to start now.

Inspiration is unpredictable and exhilarating – there is no telling where a sound, a word or a reflection in a window may take you. I encourage anyone in the vicinity of the Southbank Centre to go to the Poetry Library on the 5th floor, to re-visit an old favourite or to discover something new.

I look forward, in this rich festival of literature, to seeing how inspiration grows.

Click to see more events at the Poetry Library.

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Art on the Poetry Library Window

Posted on June 16, 2011 by CHRISSYPL


photo: Michaela Nettell

If you’ve been into the Poetry Library recently, you may have noticed someone painting on two of our large windows. Her name is Meghana Bisineer, and she’s an artist currently doing a residency here as part of the KALEID editions‘ “Art on Poetry” series. If you can visit us this week, you’ll be able to watch her drawing the final frames of a short animation film in response to  the Library and the view across the Thames.

Meghana is creating this new drawn animation by painting directly onto the Library windows with black carbon ink every day, altering it bit by bit and shooting each iteration using her digital camera. The completed film will be exhibited here in August along with an artists book.

photo credit: Sarah Roesnik

While she works at the Library window, you can also see some of Meghana’s earlier films on display. These exemplify her work in creating large scale animations using windows and spaces and include a collaboration with Michaela Nettell, Window Study, and Always for the first time, with sound design by Tom Simmons. There is also a video installation called Dog which shows a large charcoal and chalk on paper animation projected onto the turning pages of an old phone book.

She describes her recent work as realising “the possibility of the window” and incorporates not just the physical window itself into the work, but also the buildings and the view behind the glass. The window to her defines the mysterious space between the inside and the outside, between emotional and physical geography. The window is intended to record the conversation between the artist and the city over a sustained period of time.

For her residency project she has taken her cue from writers who explore our relationship with places and spaces, some of them being  Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and Derek Jarman, and has spent a lot of time listening to the Library’s CD recording of T.S. Eliot reading The Waste Land. Her starting point for this artwork has been the image of a diver. This was inspired particularly by Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, a sort of travelogue where the writer explores the UK by swimming through its various waterways. The work has taken shape from here, spilling out from a little sketchbook onto the large windows and across the landscape of the river and the City of London beyond.

You can see Meghana at work in the Poetry Library for the rest of this week, and then more sporadically until 3rd July. The finished piece will be back here on display in August as part of the ongoing “Art on Poetry” series. You can also find more of Meghana’s videos and older work online.

photo credit: Michaela Nettell

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Aisle 16′s Animal Magic in the Poetry Library

Posted on February 23, 2011 by CHRISSYPL


Yesterday was busier than most days in the Poetry Library as poets Tim Clare, John Osborne and Ross Sutherland, from the Aisle 16 collective, were here running a series of Animal Magic workshops for us as part of the Southbank Centre’s Imagine Children’s Festival.

John Osborne with the Monophilin

They started with a performance, reading some poems about animals. One particular hit was Tim Clare’s poem about penguins and polar bears (“No!” he cried, “They don’t both live at the South Pole! They live about as far away from each other as any two animals possibly could!”). Then the workshop proper started, which involved getting suggestions from the audience for animal body parts, so that an entirely new creature (such as a yellow elephant who could breathe fire) could be constructed in poetry from the parts of others.

The spontaneous innovation that came from the audience often yielded the most delightful results. When building up a beast that came from Africa, the audience was asked whereabouts in Africa it had come from: “Preschool!” the audience replied. So, from deep in the preschools of Africa a new creature was born, with the head of a giraffe, the head of a monkey and the tail of a dolphin (see below for the finished poem).

These new animal descriptions were all turned into poems that the workshop leaders then read out, with all the children chiming in with the name of the beast at the relevant moment. Much fun was had and many liberties were taken with the animal kingdom, but then as the poets themselves said, “One of the great things about writing poems is that you get to make stuff up.”

The Hippinake!

Head of a pig!
Body of a hippo!
Tail of a snake!

The Hippinake!

From the preschools of Africa,
107 years of oinking and hissing through classes,
Teachers shielding their eyes
From its glorious technicolour body!

The Hippinake!

Stroke it if you like,
But don’t think you can keep it as a pet –
Some say it grows to fifty metres long and ten metres high,
Tall as a giraffe –
It can fill a house! You’ll have to feed it
Leaves and twigs through the chimney,
Plus stones, pencil cases and Pritt Sticks for pudding.

The Hippinake!

As heavy as 10 lions standing on each others’ backs!
As heavy as 100 horses standing on a rock!
Summon it with a bad trumpet solo

The Hippinake!

Aisle 16

You can read the rest of the poems on the Poetry Library’s website.

The Aisle 16 collective itself was founded in 2000. As well as doing spectacular children’s workshops they’ve also taken poetry shows to Edinburgh and Glastonbury. You can find out more about Aisle 16 here.

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Children’s Poetry Lounge Opens Tomorrow

Posted on February 16, 2011 by CHRISSYPL

Illustration © Spencer Wilson

The Imagine Children’s Festival is already in full swing at the Southbank Centre, with lots of magical events to entertain children and parents alike. Here at the Saison Poetry Library, we’re getting ready to open our Children’s Poetry Lounge tomorrow!

We’d like to invite all families to come along to our specially created Imagine Poetry Lounge to relax and enjoy a variety of children’s poetry books and activities. The Lounge itself will be just outside the main doors of the Library on Level 5 of Royal Festival Hall. There will be books to read, activity booklets and comfy seating – and it’s all free!

The Poetry Lounge will be open from 11am – 3pm from Thursday 17th – Sunday 27th February. And if you want to borrow any books to take home with you, you can become a member of the Poetry Library for free by bringing along proof of your UK address. (The Library itself is open 11am-8pm every day except Mondays.)

We’ll look forward to seeing you in the Poetry Lounge soon! Find out more by clicking here.

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World AIDS Day Books on Display

Posted on December 1, 2010 by CHRISSYPL

World AIDS dayWorld AIDS Day is on December 1. To observe it this year the Poetry Library has a special collection of books on display written by poets in response to AIDS and HIV. The books on show include anthologies such as Poets for Life, How can you Write a Poem when you’re Dying of AIDS? and Fingers Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora. Poets whose collections are features include Thom Gunn, Mark Doty and Paul Monette.

This collection will be on display for the next week in the Poetry Library, Royal Festival Hall. (Open Tuesday-Sunday, 11-8) There is more information about World AIDS Day here.

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LAUREN LAVERNE LOVES POETRY!

Posted on November 4, 2010 by katietoms

Lauren Laverne is raving about the Southbank Centre’s Saison Poetry Library and the Poetry International festival in her Grazia column this week :

‘I also decided to make a pilgrimage to the Poetry Library at London’s Southbank Centre. Just like your local library, it’s free to join, but with over 100,000 books, audiobooks, CDs and magazines, it’s an incomparable archive. If it sounds like your cup of proverbial, this week is a great time to visit as they’re celebrating Poetry International 2010 – a huge festival of modern verse.’

[click the image to view full size]

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Fabric of War Exhibition Now Open

Posted on October 21, 2010 by CHRISSYPL

Samira A'Alamy

Come to the Saison Poetry Library and the Courtauld Books Library to see a collaborative exhibition of work by twenty Palestinian and Israeli women bereaved by conflict.

These members of the Parents Circle-Families Forum have together made paper out of materials associated with their lost ones, and from this fabric of shared experience they have created works that testify silently amid the words and walls that seek to divide them.

The materials used include diary pages, newspaper obituaries, clothes worn in mourning, original photographs of lost loved ones and other deeply personal articles. One artist uses flowers from her garden which she connects to the person she has lost, while another uses red flowers found in a rubbish heap that are devoid of sentiment. Despite the shared nature of the project’s construction, the individual pieces are varied and powerful in their different expressions.

Some of the pages have been left blank and are suspended in front of an array of  bright lights. This display reveals the papers’ intricate textures and the strengths and weaknesses of their crafting, evoking the inherent complexity and fragility of the desire for change and reconciliation in the Middle East.

This is a collaborative project and the exhibition is divided between the Saison Poetry Library and the Books Library in the Courtauld Institute of Art. The two locations are separated by a 10 minute walk across Waterloo Bridge, between Somerset House and the Southbank Centre.

This free exhibition can be viewed until the 1st December at the Poetry Library on Tuesdays-Sundays, 11am-8pm and at the Courtauld Books Library on Mondays-Fridays 9.30am-5.30pm.

There will be a talk given by the Parents Circle-Families Forum in the Saison Poetry Library on Thursday 4th November at 8pm. Tickets for this event are free but booking is imperative. You can book tickets here.

Paula Ierushalmi

 

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Read Oxford Poetry On Our Magazine Archive

Posted on July 22, 2010 by CHRISSYPL

We’ve just added some issues of Oxford Poetry magazine to our free access poetry magazine archive at www.poetrymagazines.org.uk.

Two of the issues added are from last year, and include work by a vast array of poets such as Caroline Bird, Kathryn Simmonds, Les Murray, Adam O’Riordan, C. J. Driver, Maureen Duffy and C. E. J. Simons.

One of these issues was produced in memory of the late Scottish poet and editor Mick Imlah and features many works by Imlah himself, as well as essays, photographs, recollections and poems about him by authors including Andrew Motion, Glyn Maxwell, James Fenton, Mark Ford, Carol Rumens and Tracey Warr, his former Co-Editor on Poetry Review.

Another issue also now available to read on the archive is the 1926 issue of Oxford Poetry that was edited by W. H. Auden. You will find works by many of Auden’s contemporaries, including Cecil Day Lewis, Thomas Driberg and Charles Plumb. Although we are currently unable to reproduce three poems by Auden himself for copyright reasons, you can read through every single other poem in the issue on the archive here, or else come into the Poetry Library and spend some time with the original in person.

 Oxford Poetry 1926 issue

Filed under: Poetry Library, Poetry Magazine Archive | 2 Comments »

Pop up Poetry

Posted on July 2, 2010 by nadiagasper

 THE ROOM was dark, the seats were hard, the drinks were ice cold.
The people were eager, impatient, excited and ready to roll.
And out of nowhere, came the Compare with a mic in his hand.
He belted out a ‘Hello’ and welcomed us to the show with a bit of stand-
up comedy…

Unlike the pop up poetry performers, my rhyming skills are limited so I’ll stick to my usual conversational tone and save the embarrassment.
4Talent award winner Luke Wright compared and performed a selection of poems from his new book ‘High Performance.’ His use of pun, whit and comedy weaved throughout his very intriguing  storytelling. It’s amazing how the lives of ordinary people and grey places like Chip Shops can turn into a Chaucerian-prologue-rhyming couplets-type thing: Very impressive.
Laura Dockril took us to the theatre! She ensured we were all awake (and a tiny bit frightened) with her very loud, extremely vibrant, beautifully dramatized works. She had us sitting at the edge of our seats.
Finally, Kate Tempest strolled on and tricked us! Said, she wouldn’t be very loud and charismatic due to a sore throat but that was far from what we experienced. She belted out her poetic social commentaries in the form of emceeing. She had us all giggling at jokes (she didn’t intend to make). Tempest was a glittering piece of inspirational talent. It’s no wonder she was chosen to take the jam packed event to the finishing line.
We look forward to the next show on 7th July and we look forward to seeing you there.
For more information visit www.southbankcentre.co.uk/udderbelly.

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