Many thanks to everyone who came to Livestarlings last night, and especially to the readers. This will give you a flavour of the evening:

Person One: I like the one with the nice reading voice reading with the posh tall one

Person Two: I like the lady with PVA glue on her trousers reading with the foreign lady

…It was brilliant, and there’ll be more in the future. Photos to follow.

I’m delighted to welcome you to the brand new Likestarlings site. It’s the work of Oliver Smith, with a lot of help from Luke Gaffney.

We hope the site is easier to navigate, read poems on, and a bit busier – with a feed from Palaver and us on Twitter, as well news of things we like on the homepage. Have a nosy and tell us what you think.

As you can see, the site now includes a Pictures section, and the first conversation with photographers is midway through.

And one final plug for the London event this evening. Do come and celebrate with readings from poets, 8pm onwards, upstairs at the Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Rd, Clerkenwell, London, EC1R 3BL. It’s going to be great.

CK

The first four poems between Jennifer Wainwright and Loveday Why are now up. One noticeable thing about this sequence is how meticulously, and distinctively, the poems are paced. The ‘reeling’, ‘cantering’, ‘tangible speed’ of Why’s ‘Copeland’ is countered by a slowed-up sense of attendance in Wainwright’s ‘Just Visiting’, and ‘Hunger’. As well as sharing this command of momentum, there are recurring images of eyeballs, tongues and gullets; and there are hot things cooling down.

On the screen, you can see how both poets have their stanzas bulge about the middle. We’ve been planning the re-launch of the website this week, and thinking about the representation of these visual aspects on a screen, as well as the mechanics of reading sequences of poems online.

A couple of forthcoming exhibitions – Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. at the ICA, and Harland Miller at the Baltic – take the way words look as their subject matter. Artist and novelist Miller has imagined books with glib northern titles like ‘Gateshead Revisited’, and ‘Scarborough: Have Faith in Cod’. These are painted as reproductions of iconic Penguin paperbacks – an ultimate textual / graphic brand. Meanwhile, the ICA’s exhibition of text-based art practices is inspired by the concrete poetry movement, which explored the literary and graphic potential of language.

Here’s Philip Larkin being surly in his Paris Review interview, making a defence of looking at poetry, as opposed to listening to it:

Hearing a poem, as opposed to reading it on the page, means you miss so much – the shape, the punctuation, the italics, even knowing how far you are from the end. Reading it on the page means you can go at your own pace, taking it in properly.

We’ll be putting that to the test at our Livestarlings event, with readings from the site a week on thursday at the Betsy Trotwood pub in London. Do come.

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We want to broaden this blog out into celebrating and asking questions of all forms of collaboration, by providing a space for more voices too. More on that in due course – with a brand new site and blog coming later in the month.

In the meantime do have a look at Popshot, a brilliantly simple new magazine of poetry and illustration collaboration. A selection of very good new poems are sent to illustrators to illustrate as they wish, and the results are published together in a full-colour, matte, slim volume. Each given ample page space, the words and pictures happily talk to one another.

Read more and buy a copy here.

We just posted the last poem from Chris McCabe to complete the conversation with Claire Crowther.

It’s a brilliant conversation and one that’s difficult to write about – one of the most subtly responsive we’ve had. Chains work in very different ways, and in this one each poet seems to have disassembled the last poem, then reassembled it to form their own. Interlinking images of clothing, marriage, cosmology and trains, come together in surprisingly violent encounters. The focus of each poem might be different (McCabe finishes up in a very specific place, attending a concert of The Fall), but they feel like members of the same family.

Huge thanks to them for taking part.

Crowther-McCabe was the only conversation in progress, and therefore marked with a star* [hence throwaway title]. But there is plenty more to come. We’re really excited about three new conversations which are just beginning, between Luke Kennard & Richard Price, Tom Chivers & Emily Berry, and Jen Wainwright & Loveday Why. We’re pleased to have recruited poets by approaching those we are familiar with and respect, and from expressions of interest emailed in. The standard of submissions is very high.

Poems from Jen Wainwright & Loveday Why will be up on the site very soon. But for Luke Kennard & Richard Price, Tom Chivers & Emily Berry you’ll have to wait until our Livestarlings event in London on 25th June, where they’ll be exclusively unveiled. They’ll be up on the site after that.

CK