Jeffrey is our first North American Editor. Anat will be taking charge of this space – writing and commissioning commentary, interviews and other writings on poetry and collaboration.

We’re also in the process of a rethink and redesign, which will result in an improved site, with new conversations, sometime in February.

In the meantime, recordings from our event at the V&A Reading Rooms last year are up here, if you haven’t found them yet. Thanks again to Aidan Semmens, Frances Presley and Alex MacDonald for all that.

This is a great chance for a keen reader of contemporary poetry to help bring about poems that would never happen otherwise.

We’d like to work with someone who has broad tastes, who will take pleasure in expanding the site, and be committed to keeping it active and updated.

The editor will:

·        commission new conversations between poets;

·        read submissions;

·        write and commission blog posts;

·        help develop the site.

We are based in London, so an editor needs to be happy to work independently, and liaise by email and Skype.

Some experience with editing, preferably online, is an advantage, but not necessary. Neither is being a writer of poems.

If you are interested, please send an email to caleb@likestarlings.com explaining why you’d like to be an editor. Please include five pairings (ten names of poets) that you’d love to see on the site.

Deadline: Nov 30th, 2011.

Likestarlings editor pdf

Summer has been unhurried on Likestarlings. We have been taking our time reading and contacting poets. And, as ever, have been pleased to read submissions. Do send us poems and/or propositions if you’re interested in collaboration.

But I’m very pleased to say that two new conversations are just getting going and will be here to read in the next few weeks: GC Waldrep & Toby Martinez de la Rivas, and Caroline Manring & Ahren Warner.

Also, keep 24th November free. We’re hosting a night at the V&A Reading Rooms as the grateful guest of Alex MacDonald of Selected Poems. There’s not much more to say about it yet, except that it’s going to involve video projections and intimacy.

At least that’s how I’ve treated it, and I’ve been grateful to Caleb Klaces, our host, and to Alasdair Paterson for his poems as poems on their own, and as prompts for me. His “road to ruin” became the Ramones’ Road to Ruin, his terse consideration of advancing age, of a road all too securely taken, became for me an excuse to revisit the teen years when all roads seem scary, and most of them enticing, and none irrevocably taken. It’s also of course a poem about gender dysphoria, with more facts, about the Ramones and about myself, than I’ve put into other similar poems, though the details do not exactly fit my life (I wasn’t yet in my teens when the album came out).

Like so much, perhaps too much, of my other poems and prose, this sequence with two authors has turned into a way to think about the life course, about the overlaps and contradictions among its supposed stages—childhood, adolescence or youth, irresponsible young adults, supposedly responsible middle-aged adults, and those older than they. Thus Alasdair took, from my poem about Road to Ruin and the back of a teenager’s bus, a reason to address the back end of rockers’ careers, almost never the most illustrious part: adult poets may wonder whether we are more like historians, who tend to do their best work late (since they gather more data throughout their adulthood), or more like rockers or athletes. We may never know.

I wasn’t satisfied with my own “Rue,” because it seemed too thick with quotations, as if to armor an otherwise too vulnerable poem. Rather than set up another contrast between other people’s words and those supposedly all my own, for my next segment I wrote a persona poem, in which each word seemed mine but not mine. And after Alasdair’s references to pop stars who must have felt old in middle age (Julian Cope, Mick Hucknall), I wanted to speak for a singer who seemed at once too old and very young. Avril Lavigne, and her entourage, must have feared losing her fans, and her public image, by the time she reached the American drinking age. I really do like most of her songs, almost as much as I like the Shop Assistants and the Fastbacks, and for most of the same reasons. (The first sentence in stanza three is actually hers, from the booklet included with Goodbye Lullaby.)  I’m also interested in the way that her persona, any celebrity persona, might be like the persona, the created figure, behind the “I” of any poem; I think both might count as collaborations. We think of celebrities as manufactured, poetic voices as genuine, but is that fair either to the craft of poetry, or to what celebrity pop artists think they can do? Is it always fair? Is it ever fair? What’s the difference between a celebrity performer whose work comes from multiple collaborations (songwriters, producers, makeup artists, stage techs) and a poet who works as Eliot said poets work, by incorporating herself, like a catalyst, into a preexisting tradition? And where better to ask those questions than a venue that’s already collaborative?

Then Alasdair wrote another poem about music (harmonica music, “folk” music) that gets old while seeming young, that recurs and follows us through the years while seeming still unripe (like green tomatoes): and so I wanted to write another poem about adolescence, without any names for real people this time out (though it does name some gods). All poems involve an internal collaboration—there is the part of the poet the poem represents, the persona (the word means “mask”), and then there is the once-removed maker, producer, who must detach herself at some point from the work of art to make sure (are we ever sure?) that she got it right. I wrote about frustrated love and lust, resignation and friendship and loyalty, here again (I think the poem points back to “Rue”). I imagine a disconnection, here,  between the figures in the collaboration. There is the maker, the frustrated blacksmith god, the cuckold of myth, the responder, the sad boy who won’t mind if we see him as sad, as long as we like what he makes. And there is the figure who comes first, the performer, the beauty, the goddess, who may quarrel with all her lovers, who may never be satisfied with herself.

The poems turn over several answers: adulthood; a washed-up rocker; lost objects and landscapes; an ‘awkwardly solicitous’ god at a party.  For the teenage boys that ‘drew / on almost everything’ of Burt’s “Rue”, ‘the ruin of boy is man’. And in my favourite lines, one boy wants to be a girl because, it seems, girls can ruin themselves better:

What else I heard I would not say,

.

wishing I were a girl,

or had ever been a girl,

or like a girl had secrets for some body to betray.

The ‘old rocker’ in Paterson’s “Like, so” has no secrets left. There is also subtle gender and sexual ambiguity here, in the bleak and funny end that the man (whose father was Burt’s boy) comes to:

[...] found dead

in a hotel room in downtown Vladivostok,

his czarina-sized bed stacked with empty

vodka bottles and the kind of Russian

who knocks at your door in the small hours

wearing nothing but a bad fur coat…

Burt’s “For Avril Lavigne” inverts Paterson’s relentlessly relaunching washed-up star. Lavigne wonders who she should be, and in the final stanza, covets the person she was before she was famous. In contrast to the rocker who ‘can’t let go’, she wants to keep the ‘planner in the mirror [...] who wanted to learn’. In these last lines, the regular rhyme breaks down: itself back in training.

Responding to the superabundant personalities of Lavigne, Paterson’s “Exile variations 1-3″ has its own, restrained list of brilliant particulars. They suggest the people those in exile might previously have been, and remind me of Robinson Crusoe’s knife that ‘reeked of meaning’ in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem  (except Crusoe was back home). Lavigne is defined by her ‘black lace / and tennis shoes’. The poem of exile looks for lessons in a mouth-organ, a song, the river, pickle, seeds and tomatoes. Nobody is named here and the objects become archetypal rather than singular – an elaboration on Burt’s theme: identity as a choice between types.

But all these poems, and the sum of their reciprocal parts, don’t reduce easily to themes. How then to end the exchange? (Ruining everything must have been tempting.) Part of the pleasure of reading a poem comes from knowing it is going to end. The poem is always running out. So is an exchange – and here the final poem has to speak for two poets. It ends all the other poems as well as itself. Burt’s “To Aphrodite” has a wonderfully light touch in what I take to be a description of characters and their attitudes from the previous poems:

And at the camp

fire where you will make your

debut—forever

renewed, forever

naive, or pretending (nobody can tell) [.]

Its Greek gods also hark back to Paterson’s great (and probably marketable) idea of a sequel to the Odyssey – itself a sequel -, in which ‘blind Homer rattled to his feet [...] to launch Odyssey II’. “Like, so”, that poem’s title, is both something that the teenagers of Burt’s poems might say, and a description of Paterson’s poem’s structure – paragraph-long stanzas which begin with ‘like’ then ’so’. This is more than neatness. Both poets are writing about enjoyment (and what might ruin it); both are clearly taking it in what they write. Between Aphrodite – the god of sexuality and beauty – and Hephaestos, the gods’ blacksmith – , between desire and craft, lie these poems.

Thanks go to both poets. And to Burt for ‘camp fire’, which seems a great metaphor for Likestarlings itself.

Speaking of endings, I am looking forward to the final poem of the conversation between Dan Beachy-Quick & Matthew Gregory. More thoughts on that excellent conversation when it is over.

And, finally…new conversations will be starting soon. Do send us an email with some poems if you would like to be considered for the site.

Another transatlantic pairing has also just started between Stephen Burt and Alasdair Paterson. Poems will follow very soon.

Jane Yeh and H.L.Hix are distinguished American poets living on either side of the Atlantic (Jane is based in London). Their conversation began with baseball and has moved swiftly onto airports and crossing the sea that separates the two poets.

Vidyan Ravinthiran and Jenny Holden are young English writers based in Oxford. In a first for the site, it is a pairing of poetry and prose. We’re excited to see how it works, and may pair more writers of different mediums in the future.

Many thanks to the writers for agreeing to join in. I look forward to seeing where the conversations take us.

–

*of the early release of the new Radiohead album, The King of Limbs.

So, firstly, thanks to those of you who have joined, and we will be throwing some indoor sparklers around very soon. Secondly, thoughts about this new discussion space linked up with others I had this week about endings.

Online conversations never really end (although, it’s true, they can also have very short memories). Things bounce around forever. There are always more comments, other perspectives, retweets etc. I have received four emails while writing these three paragraphs. I’m also half-listening to music. Maybe I’ll check the football scores. I wonder if Julian Assange has published my diary yet. Half a dozen tanks have arrived in Tahrir Square…

Right, so reading a relatively new collection of poetry this week I felt similarly to how I do when I step into one of those online rivers. On first read, Ben Lerner’s The Lichtenberg Figures, which will take me a while to digest, works not by taking the reader through any kind of argument or even progression, but, or so it feels, by throwing a load of avatars into a pit and letting them interact. It feels like a large system of elements, an economy, a field. These things don’t conclude, they tend toward entropy; no, that’s not right in this case, they tend toward ever-greater complexity (at least that’s what it feels like – it’s more heart than head at the moment). But where to end? Where the first-book-competition’s page guidelines say to end? When it feels tiresome?

I’m sure that I’m not saying anything new, but a resurgence of interest in so-called closed forms might be a reaction to this kind of open-endedness. The book is all sonnets, but I reckon they could all be thirteen lines long instead (much as I’m attracted to the sonnet’s fourteen-ness), in that they don’t, that I can see, have much to say to the history of the form, except that it proves these really are poems. Every new line is a volta. The point of the form is that there must be something to end the undendable verse.

The Lichtenberg Figures is really exciting and part of its excitement is the feeling of having somehow found some new dimensions curled within our normal planes. Writing like this privileges individual phrases, marked shifts in tone and subject, in relation to a whole. Except there isn’t really a whole, that I can see. There are a limited number of words, but they don’t give you a new place to sit.

Drawing an analogy with information society is probably a limited way of understanding Lerner’s poetics. But the connection has been explicitly made by other writers, notably the Informationists, a group that included Likestarlings poet Richard Price. He wrote that

one of the ideas of Informationism was to rewire the new of the everyday to itself: as it were, to cross wires, to hot wire, to short-circuit the text-ology of the present. By this I mean to engage with the new worlds and jargon of the information society; to find poetic analogies in form as well as content to technological invention and global discourse.

Price’s poetry, although disjunctive and seeking to rewire, has lyric and narrative elements which allow for more of a sense of coming-to-some-kind-of-end at the end of a poem than do those which make up The Lichtenberg Figures. But I am working my way back through Lerner’s work and will report more on the end at the end. In the meantime, if anyone has any thoughts, I’d love to hear them…

the editors contend that nowhere else in print or on the web can such a concentration of these particular values be found. Various strands of late 20th century thought have done much to problematize these values, but the writings collected in The Winter Anthology are neither sentimental atavisms nor naive attempts at reconstruction.

The scope is international, with writers including Yves Bonnefoy, Jack Gilbert, Lucie Brock-Broido, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Vuyewla Carlin. The editorial intrusion is minimal, the site simple and elegant.

I’m always impressed by people who can define clearly what they value in literature, particularly literature of the moment. But I’m also wary of, in doing so, drawing unnecessary lines between insiders and outsiders. Wary, too, that such decisions might cause us readers to miss precious other things.

Then it occurs to me that that that is precisely what an editor does, isn’t it, choose some things over others. And inside that most general of definitions, there are very different sorts of editorial projects. There are editors looking to represent the greatest possible variety of styles and concern. There are editors who publish things they aren’t sure of precisely because they find that being off-balance exciting – and hope time might prove them right. There are editors deliberately seeking the obscure and esoteric. There are those who, like us here, encourage and facilitate new work through a common process. There are editors seeking to consolidate in order to rectify what they perceive to be a wayward focus in literary taste, a category into which those of The Winter Anthology fall.

The results are exhilarating. There is a consistent sense of the poetic line here; there is History; there are angels, though not rosy cherubim; there are words I had to look up in the dictionary; there are some works that have their arms open, some which offer only a cold handshake. But they all ask for more time to be spent with them. They are works which I will read again, and I heartily recommend them.

Some argue that the internet weakens the role of the editor, as anyone can publish and anyone can search. That doesn’t seem true to me. Indeed, I’ll have, as the internet often allows, both: the possibilities of editorless, or self-edited, content are great; but judicious editing, like that of The Winter Anthology seems as valuable as ever.