Reading this Wednesday at Berkeley Books

junipersonal

"My over-riding impression of Quintavalle’s work, for all of his highly enjoyable formal experimentation, is that he is a poet who is willing to look at the world square on, for better or for worse, not because he can necessarily change it, but because the poet has no other choice if he is to be a poet at all." 

This is from David Clarke's very positive review of my new collection, Weather Derivatives.  The review is published in the latest number of Lunar Poetry which you can purchase here (paper copies cost £3, .pdf is pay-what-you-like).  

Weather Derivatives is published by Eyewear Publishing.

slap
clap
clam
slam
slap

if it makes
a difference

then by all means;

the slightest living
thing is life

IVY WRITERS PARIS 
vous invite à une soirée de lectures bilingues

le 23 septembre 2014 à 19h30 avec les poètes:

Rufo Quintavalle

Pansy Maurer-Alvarez

Anne Talvaz

mardi 23 Septembre 2014

à 19h30

Delaville Café (1er étage)

34 bvd bonne nouvelle

75010 Paris

M° Bonne nouvelle (ligne 8 ou 9)

http://ivywritersparis.blogspot.fr/ 

punctuation: now then, now then

It is 8:00 am and they
are hosing down the city park;

it smells amazing:
a big wet lick

of geosmin.

so I throw myself again at what I can't control
and throw it, like a potter, in that which I can.

if all explaining
is explaining away

and telling merely
telling tales

I still will
favor speech

to silence;

truth is out there
is a thing

and briefly
we inhabit it

the fat kids with rat-tails
the fat kids with mullets

Into the woods

I will be taking part in a one day poetry, performance and visual art event this Sunday in the forest of Auvers St George.  It's an hour or so from Paris by RER.  Full details here.

home tonnight

Four o'clock and a taste of glue

    

my lips are heavy;

they wake me from sleep

I am breathing the air of the future.

anyone for anymore

My long poem, anyone for anymore, has been published as a free ebook by Red Ceilings Press in Derbyshire.  You can download a copy here.

Emma Lee has written a review of my chapbook, moral hazard and the chemical sweats, for the current issue of The Journal.  Go here to purchase the magazine and here to purchase the chap.

A review and photos of Wednesday's launch at Le Bal are now available on the Paris Lit Up website.  Thanks to Kate and Jason.  And thanks too to all the folks at Le Bal for letting us use their space.

Videos from the reading at the London Review Bookshop are now up on YouTube, courtesy of SJ Fowler.  

 

Wednesday 25th June

Le Bal

20:30

A bilingual evening of poetry featuring

Ian Monk

Joe Ross

Rufo Quintavalle

with translations by Jérémy Robert

Le Bal, 6 Impasse de la Défense, 75018 Paris

Cover design is by Edwin Smet. Cover photo by Renaud Monfourny. Poems are by me. You can buy the book here.

the girl in the sea with the city-stained eyes

and headed out across the square
looking at nothing, the diffident noon;

for what shall it profit a man

Book launch at LRB Bookshop

I will be launching my new collection, Weather Derivatives, at the London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury on Wednesday May 21st.  Also reading will be Penny Boxall, Mandy Kahn, Marion McReady and SJ Fowler along with the winner of the 2014 Melita Hume Poetry Prize.  The reading starts at 19:00 and details can be found here.

i willnot stop

Why are all the poets
writing dross about
buses and the death
of their imagination?

I'd change shop

if a baker sold me
half-baked bread
embodying bread'
s irrelevance or
my vintner wine
that didn't work.

The acrid smog
is burning my eyes;

and the clever boys
start start-ups
to sell us crap
we do not need

and cannot
as a race
afford.

I wish the world were more like the world
they had dreamt of when they were young

All the geraniums, some are dead
suffice, along with all the pigeons

iincluding

icecap

The sun is out and last year's rain
has fuzzed the roof's diagonal with moss

Nearly there…

One week left and Eyewear's crowd funding campaign is 85% financed.  If you haven't yet given anything please consider doing so; donations of £20 or more entitle you to a complimentary copy of the forthcoming anthology, The Poet's Quest for God.

hip and plasma

FIELD/Shelf 90:40

FIELD is a twice yearly journal of poetry and poetics published by Oberlin College Press in Ohio.  They have been putting out new work since 1969 and I am honored that they have chosen to feature work of mine in issue 90 which has just been released.

the swamp of causality

Of the sun

When the sun comes up
the equation

will come out right

provided you
or the many like you

were there
to bear witness

when the sun came up

the powers that been

Funny Valentine

On Friday 14th February I will be taking part in an evening of poetry and jazz organized by Paris Lit Up, hosted by the Atelier Sainte Marthe and featuring the Italian jazz quintet, Omit Five.  I will be joined on the poetry side of things by Annie Brechin, Dareka Daremo and Winona Linn.  Admission is free, donations are encouraged and purchases (books, drinks, CDs) are all but obligatory….

Doors open at 20:00, the event starts at 21:00 and full details can be found here.

Eyewear crowd funding hits 40%

Eyewear's WeFund campaign to pre finance an anthology of poetry called The Poet's Quest for God is a week old and has breezed past the 40% mark.  This is good news for Eyewear - who discovered recently that they had lost all of their funding for the coming year - and good news for those who have already contributed as they will be receiving a copy of the anthology at a special discount rate of £15.  There are still 100 copies of the anthology available but at the standard price of £20.

Eyewear Publishing is that rare beast in the poetry world: a small independent publisher but with top-notch production and distribution standards.  This means that their books look great and also manage to find their way out of the online poetry ghetto and into real brick and mortar bookshops.  They are well worth supporting so please do consider contributing to their crowd-funding campaign and/or buying a book from their back catalogue.

Hammock in a limousine…

The Poet's Quest for God

Eyewear Publishing in the UK will be bringing out an anthology later this year called The Poet's Quest for God.  It promises to be a fascinating book not just because of the quality and number of poets included but also because the editorial line has been to include poets of all faiths and none, so agnostics and atheists rub shoulders with the true believers.  So far as I am aware no previous anthology has done this so kudos to them.

They are currently running a crowd funding campaign at WeFund.  Donations of £15 or more get you a copy of the book, a nice discount on the £19.99 cover price.

Everything is free now

For those who read French, here is a thought-provoking article by William van den Broek about how to go about remunerating intellectual activity in the digital age.  It is worth reading the comments at the bottom too which explore possible alternative solutions.

My worry about freely distributed intellectual production is that while it is free in the sense that no transaction takes place between the producer and the consumer of the art work it is nevertheless not genuinely free - the social medias by which we distribute and consume material freely are all used to gather information and sell advertising.  I've not necessarily got anything against that - the pros to me seem to outweigh the cons - but we should at least call a spade a spade and acknowledge that by consuming art "freely" we are (indirectly) paying.  And paying people who don't really need the money.

One solution I have always favored is to make the objects in which intellectual production is housed as beautiful as possible.  That way people will pay for the object even though they could theoretically get hold of its content for free and all the people who have participated in its creation will receive some remuneration.

If you want to take part in this alternative economy by buying a beautiful book AND getting hold of some free intellectual property then go and order one of the exquisite hand-made chapbooks that are put out by Greying Ghost Press in Salem, Massachusetts.  My poem "A week, a year, whatever" will be included as a free hand-out with every purchase.  And I promise you that neither I nor any multinationals will earn a penny.  Ora et Labora…

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