August - a Cultural Month

Hello lady readers.

Just checking in from the Edinburgh Fringe!. Tragically, my slot on the Poetry Takeaway 'slam' stage on the Royal Mile (due to take place now) has been cancelled due to gross mismanagement (cancellation notification through Twitter? I ask you Tim Clare) so I've taken a moment to fill you in on all my exciting going-ons in Edinburgh, city of arts, theatre and meddlesome twenty-somethings.

I began my tenure in Edinburgh (I'm staying at the Malmaison, no student hovels for me, sharing a bed with a sweaty Tamburlaine from the Cambridge ADC this decade, thank you very much) with a trip to The Kitchin, Edinburgh's only Michelin starred restaurant (can you believe it?) I ate fois gras at least twice, once in my starter and once in my main, and was unable to move by the time the lemon and sorrel tart was effortlessly deposited in front of me by another ninja sommelier. I would heartily recommend the experience, and the food, for anyone of appropriate incomes - don't go if you can only just afford it, it'll be 'a total bum-out', as Melody said when I refused her a second bottle of claret. I could (of course) afford it, it's just important to stall such dependency in one's middling income friends (Melody's landscape gardening company has been hit pretty hard by the recession, and with so many parties to go to on the weekend, she finds it hard to get started at the beginning of the week, and tends to write off all work until Wednesday. It is the Summer after all. Thank god I don't have a job!)

I digress. After stuffing myself silly with bulimic duck, I found myself in a late night stand up session by Dutch rude man Hans Teeuwen . The misogynist gaffaws some of his more risque jokes raised in the baby-testosterone emitting teenagers affront of me belied the complexities of his politics (he's a real defender of free speech and ranted against religion in a eulogy for assassinated Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh - YouTube it I dare you), he is probably a feminist, after all, and made everyone who laughed sound very stupid indeed.

The next day I saw Paper Bird's production Others a play about how bloody easy it is to 'other' other women. For those of you who have just been born, or didn't take a degree in the humanities, 'othering' is a term found in Lacanian, postcolonial and feminist theory predominently. It is a way of designating someone as 'other' from yourself and shoring up your own fragile identity in relation, or against, how you perceive your other. My other, for example, is probably some kind of post-feminist, or, god forbid, one of those women for whom feminism is simply not an option. Yuk. And if this play taught me anything, it's to be extremely careful about who you other, because it's desperately important that women try to achieve solidarity rather than marginalising one another in order to feel good about themselves. The play script was put together from letters written by real women who the play writers/actors had previously designated as others. After having explained the concept of othering to these 'real' women (who obviously had not taken a degree in the humanities) they asked them questions like how they felt about themselves, what are they afraid of etc, in order to find ways to identify with them. It was a moving and inventive piece, I immediately liked the actors (not others) but did feel that too little was made of the texts sent up the real women. At moments it came perilously close to dance theatre, something which I will absolutely not abide, and there were a few too many scenes where they repeated the initial premise of the play (Hello, I'm going to ask you a few questions to find out how to understand you) instead of using proper dialogue, which seemed like wasted space (of course I had grasped the premise in the play's first moments, and didn't need it explained to me, although I am very intelligent...). I would ultimately recommend it.

I think now I must leave this computer. I ran into the delightful Armchair Books on West Port because it was raining and begged to use the computer to find out about the cancelled poetry reading (read his bloody tweet if you want to be shocked by human indifference. Too ill to text me Tim Clare? But have enough energy to recommend the play you saw last night you careerist fuck). Anyway, the bookshop people have just offered me tea but I don't think they mean it. Better leave soon.

More reviews to follow - I'm about to head to Climate Camp! Hunter wellies in tow.

London Cross-Genre Festival!

Experimental women writers (and their multi-gender audience) crowded the halls of Greenwich University yesterday, and indeed they will be crowding it now, as I write this on my new mauve tortoise shell covered laptop in the back of Aunt Lily's Bentley. We're racing toward Hampshire to begin this weekend's celebrations in honour of the virgin saint, Marcellina, and if it weren't for my prior commitments and raging (although somewhat lapsed) Catholicism, I would have been delighted to stay for the entirity of the festival, which goes on until the last female poet finishes her noodles in a Greenwich eatery on Friday night. If you're not similarly occupied or don't, god forbid, have to work, I strongly advise you to 'tfl' your route at once and go along in time for the lunchtime recess. A menagerie of delights await you, and I'm not just talking about the sandwiches.

If you were there yesterday, you might not have seen me, as I was crouching in the back row behind Justin Katko who, thank goodness, is so tall that he didn't notice me! You'll excuse my reticence, fellow wordwrights, but due to an unfortunate incident involving a bottle of Frangelico, my face and the floor, I am partially disfigured at the moment (Emmeline says it is merely a 'largish bruise along one side of my face', but I won't let my fans down by letting them see me not 'at my best').

Amongst the wholly enjoyable performances, I was delighted by Caroline Bergval, who seems to be able to unmake and remake language at will, like an illogical egg, opening up all of its little foibles to scrunity and exploring its political and sexual connotations, like a comprehensible Derrida. Marianne Morris' utopian love and disgust soared in a delightful Canadian lilt above electronic beats like the thinking (and then thinking and then smoking and then some more thinking) woman's George Pringle, and if it is possible to want to take out a rental on a Brooklyn appartment with someone purely based upon their solo performance of a multi-voice play after a nine hour transatlantic flight, then Corina Copp would be the woman to do it with. I would simply like to have a conversation passing her in the hall to the bathroom in the morning, She has some of the best sentences I have ever heard.

In other news, Mike Weller was there with the best shirt I have ever seen (apart from one I have seen on Jow Lindsay which depicted a fountain) and Luke Roberts managed to field the most ridiculous questions I have ever misheard from an audience with a level of humility and restaint rarely seen in today's distopian times (ps. yes men were allowed to speak at the conference, we're feminists, not monsters!)

I am only sorry that I have missed (because it is probably taking place now) or will miss performances by fellow lady poets Sophie Robinson, Francesca Lisette and Frances Kruk who are as feminist as it is possible to be without being, well, me. Emily Critchely is a genius (she is the conference's organiser, along with Carol Watts) and will be given the keys to a feminist poetry city in the heavens when we all finally reach it.

Perhaps I will dedicate this weekend's celebration of St. Marcellina to female poets everywhere. If I had not been given freedom of my pen, who knows, maybe I would have turned to the spiritual life instead. There is clearly a connection between female creativity and faith, if only because a religious life was one of the few escapes from the mind-deadening baby-farm of marriage in the middle ages and beyond and before. Even though I suffered the perils of a Catholic schoolhood (and the subsequent breakdowns) I would happily consign my body to Christ to avoid hideous ownership by a patriachal Lord, or even worse, a peasant. Although I would look the part, in the citadel of my mind, I would be writing poetry!

feminist wall chart

For all of you out there who just find the baffilingly high amounts of different feminist traditions a tad confusing I have included a link to a fabulous wall chart that explains it all for you! Life hasn't been this easy since Mummy forgot to pick me up from Tumble Tots one afternoon and the sports instructor drove me all the way home and gave me a drumstick lollipop to subside my tears.

Feminist Wall Chart (hang it on your pink Smeg fridge with pride)

Hugs and Pugs x

Hitler's cat's mistresss

Emmeline and I have been looking through her old family photo album and we stumbled across this sensational snap of her old Aunt Ratzingher III, a mistress to Hitler's cat.

Look at this shot of her yawning on the pussy grave of Kempa, Hitler's pet.

Charming. Sometimes I think Emmeline's family herstroy might be more thrilling than my own, but it's not of course.

Will keep you posted with any more kitty shots.

Toodles!

Pt 4: The fact that there are no women in the tournament

No one ever talks about the FIFA Women's bloody World Cup do they? Why isn't that covered more in the media? Sexism, that's why.

Toodles! x

Pt 3: Racist World Cup Sexism

It didn't take long to spot another case of World Cup Sexism. This time, childish alcopop for infants WKD have charmed us with their 'women can't watch football' advertising campaign, of which I have found this shocking example.

A more shocking example, as yet not available on the internet (which recoils in disgust) says:

THE OFFSIDE RULE FOR THE LADIES: IF THE FLAG'S UP, IT'S OFFSIDE.

Part 2: Wags

Yet more sexism in the World Cup! The Daily Male have taken it upon themselves to bastardly declare that calling WAGs WAGs is sexist; sexists.

A guide issues by the Equalities Commission says the term WAG is "now in danger of overuse and arguably sexist".

A spokesman from the Equalities watchdog said: "You could argue (that the phrase is sexist), in the way in which it was used, if it was being used in a particularly derogatory way or to pejoratively target a group of women."

True, it's just a shame these women happen to be strumpets.

Vagina sofa

just purchased this incredible sofa for my loo.

Pt 1: Sexism and the World Cup

In celebration of the 2010 World Cup, Lynx have launched a series of 'patriarch' posters, each depicting a 'buxom babe' in a familiar celebratory soccer pose. These will be running in several countries, with the respective flag of each waving in the background.

How RUDE! This really is the final straw. Everyone knows sports bras look nothing like this, and that the woman photographed is probably a model, not a real lady footballer.

Once again, when we were tucked up safely in our beds, snoozing away, dreaming of equality, sexism has struck. Never relent ladies: we must maiden on, never surrendering to the so-called 'hand of man'.

To rebel I have decided to monitor the World Cup in close detail - looking out for any slurs against female kind. I am ready to strike!!

Posie and Out x

Home sweet home....

You're probably all wondering where my life's intimations have disappeared to in recent months? Well.. I've been decorating!

That's right Lady readers, as well as throwing myself into my poetry, I have also moved house and decided to make yet another fresh start! Naturally I decided to resettle again in the N1 and I can assure that the area is impeccable. I live opposite an organic cheese shop and an Odbins, although there is admittedly the sad presence of a Sainsbury's Local in between them, like some cursed unstylish philanderer ready to come between you and your man.

And talking of men I cannot stress enough that this re-location has very little, in fact it has nothing at all to do with men, nor does my sudden immersion into the poetic scene (I all know what you're thinking: poesy + Posie / the cathartic forests of verse x genius = Depression). But my reasons for moving are purely theraputic. Spending most of my time penning that incredible literary object: A Year off the Ward, has brought back all kinds of memories that I could really do without.

Indeed, I shall be recounting some of them here on this blog. For instance, do you remember the chapter about my eating too much around Christmas time? Yes well that's just one part of my journey into the recreational boarders of insanity. Heaven.

So, I have been spending the last month or so putting the finishing touches to my new, much larger and opulent abode. I have included some 'design ideas' for your viewing pleasure below. But best of all Melody Wittgenstien has found me the most incredible workwoman's hat to wear as I paint, hammer and drill.

See above.

Isn't it charming? Why, yesterday I went to Hackney for some reason (to be honest I'd rather forget about the entire expereince- incredibly dirty place) and I wore it there as self defence. It worked a treat and some young people were rather complimentary.

Toodles!

P.S.

Not that I would ever take the Megabus of course. It would only be for 'research purposes'. Instead I've persuaded Aunt Lily to attend so we are taking the family's pink helicopter from London. Toodles!

ninerrors Newcastle poetry-fest and sleepover!

Yesterday, on Radio 4, I was listening to one of the 'culture' features (I forget which, although I think I was stuffing Spanikopita at the time, so perhaps it was Front Row). The presenter happened to mention that a lot of very interesting art is being produced in Scotland at the moment, and being exhibited in Glasgow to be precise. This was in relation to the new Saatchi exhibition in London, Newspeak, which, by the way, was described as quite uninspiring. The reviewer mentioned our friends in the Hebrides in order to point out that very little of this art ever makes its way to London, and for this reason, very rarely becomes popular in the Saatchi sense of the word. He also pointed out that the situation might be remedied if art critics from the London-based media ever actually bothered to leave their concrete-soaked environs and make the trek up North (that is, discounting the annual month-long binge that is the Edinburgh festival, in which the entire population of Hampstead is transplanted person-by-person to the leafy urb-suburbs of Stockbridge, leaving poor North London to deteriorate into a less squelchy landscape from Drowned World.)

Now, this London-centricity struck me as decidedly unsporting - bloody-minded perhaps - and got me thinking that unless we children of the Capital extend an stuffed olive or two up North soonish, our Caledonian compatriots might just as well devolve off entirely (aka claim independence from the English oppressor) and take all their desirable socialist principles with them, leaving Bohemians like me stranded on a mere bit of an island inhabited entirely by Tories. Clearly, this will not do.

Thankfully, these reflections chime with the exciting news that I will soon be heading up North - not to Scotland sadly, but better near than ... never - to the bustling industrial city of Newcastle, which Melody tells me is a cross between a Jules Vernesque cityscape and Reading: FUN!

The occasion is the launch of a poetry collection to mark ten years since the passing of Newky poet Barry MacSweeney, who also wrote a collection called Odes. The title of the new collection, complied by poetry wizard Linus Slug, is no coincidence, although following in MacSweeney's wake has proved tough (I myself am a contributor) due to the complex historical inheritance of the ode form, as well as MacSweeney's own unique interpretations. Some questions raised include what is an antistrophe? What would Sappho have done? Was Elizabeth I altogether fair to Spencer? To find the answer to these questions, you're just going to have to purchase the beautiful book aren't you?

There's a facebook group which contains a beautiful album of photos charting the books' creation, as well as ample information on Slug's ninerrors blog. Oh, and the reading takes place in Morton Tower in Newcastle on Sunday 27th June. Why not come and drink wine with us afterwards? They tell me its grim up North, but with a Megabus heading staight for Pimlico booked for 8am on Monday, who cares?

Posie in public - reading success in Cambridgeshire!

I'm utterly refreshed having returned victorious from a visit to the playground of my late teenage mind, the University of Cambridge. As well as having enjoyed a nostalgic Dolmades Kebab at Gardi's (still standing! still counter-hegemonic!) and a vigorous cycle to Grantchester on a be-basketed bicycle, I had the utmost pleasure in giving a poetry reading to some keen young students who reminded me all too much of myself as a siren of truth circa 2001. The temptation to ink the JCR was quickly dismissed in favour of late talks into the night, over endless bowls of noodles & impossibly weak spliff, concerning Aeschylus, the Utopian potential of renga and the lyrical verse of Kool Keith. I've been so sad since I got back to N1 having left Cambridge's gentle shores that I've returned with a frenzy to the drama I began there as a second year - Put That Woman Down!: the life and times of Meredith Lynchfield, Cambridge Suffragette and Assassin, in three Acts. Emmeline is heartbroken - I promised to take her on a kitty voyage to Eel Pie Island yesterday to throw an effigy of King Charles VII into the Thames to commemorate the capture of Joan of Arc at the Siege of Compiegne, but I told her she'd have to wait until the 30th to commemorate her burning (I thought we'd torch the French Embassy). Needs must when creativity calls.

Here's a nice picture of me in front of a display created by clever techy Mike W-H to accompany a reading from my chapbook, tristanundisolde (Arthur [C]hilling Press (at the moment at least!)) It communicates how I feel better than I ever could do myself in words.




Helpful imp Joe Luna over at All Over the Grid / Fallopianyoutube had this to say about my collaboration that night with shouty-man poet and mere part-time patriarch Jow Lindsay:


"Posie Rider & Jow Lindsay’s reading on Friday night (21st May) assumed much less than it would perhaps be safe to assume a Cambridge Reading Series night of experimental avant-garde poetry would assume, but by this very play was able to open up a space in which the performance of the reading constantly flirted with, insulted, disparaged, castigated, comforted and barely became a means of effecting a communitas based upon what was already there, what we already have, and what we might possibly become. Recent national political discourse was both appropriated and mocked, but also re-constituted into the political space of the reading, tracing a line of constant watchfulness over the machinations universally predicated upon and in the name of the folk whilst at the same time tragically powerless to prevent those machinations from organising/mobilising satirical negations & refutations of constructed collective identity. The creation of the radical experimental "we" through such a gathering was tempered with a dangerously isomorphic "we" of satirical invective and absurdist comedy, the laughter of the audience perhaps the most realistic effect produced by the Wagnerian, mythological, polysemous diatribes flitting between the two barely realistic personas of the poets. The potential for a delineation of a universal WE to be reductive and obscurantist is enormous, and these are the precise means by which corporate advertising and party political affiliation seek to homogenise humanity into demographics and target audiences destined only for differences in the vagaries of their consumption and tactical voting preferences. To say, as I believe I heard Posie Rider say, that "we are the poets laureate" in the midst of an exhausting and increasingly overwhelming dialogic code is a re-appropriation of a political right and the creation of, or at least the exciting image of, a fragile community existing, fleetingly, in the heart of the multi-national flux of assumed identity. What is "assumed", that is, taken as given, a priori, implicit, hereby becomes inverted to be that which is passed over in haste, ignorance or ambivalence, and what must be attested in the act of the reading is the human capacity for engendering caucuses of radical community so that we may attain enough trust to assume in the positive sense once more. The figures of Jow Lindsay and Posie Rider are mythological tricksters, ever playing with our trust in assuming that we are assuming the same thing/s as the poets we heed. We are not simply given to assume that we can all trust each other and can therefore sing together the firmament of the new world, but rather the intimidation and awkwardness these trickster aspects produce in the audience (for example, naming specific people in the audience, something I’ve seen Lindsay do a number of times both in improvised performance and in published work) work to make the sense of place more malleable in order that we may mould new ways of listening to and being with each other. Those moments of joyous augmentation, (self-)plagiarisation and re-organisation result in a mixtape-like quality that presents not only a plurality of voice, but voices of real collective experience and instantaneous memory.

Only by carving difference into the universally reductive notion of humanity itself can we become truly human, and by dint of this, humane. That is the axiom at work on the macro-level of experimental poetry communities and the micro-level of the individual reading.

This is also how readings act theatrically without becoming theatre. The creation of such communitas is contingent upon its only lasting as long as the reading itself, its durational nature perhaps the key to the feeling of common endeavour, even if only articulated negatively. Lindsay’s exhaustive prose performances are, I think, a beautifully doomed attestation of the occasion of the reading as the productive mechanism by which communities are made, defining themselves against both an undifferentiated humanity-at-large replete with built-in sensors to detect love, companionship, truth & beauty as well as by more positivist means declaring a space for the activation of radical subjectivities inexpressible within the nexus of the everyday uses of language. The temporality of the reading as play is therefore the crux of the meaning of the performance in terms of its delineation of our time, our language, our wound, our response. It is the proper occasion of song which frames and therefore reveals the event itself as constitutive of a collective grand narrative forged from the desire of those for whom pre-packaged national, gender, ethnic or sexual identities have become useless and restrictive."

Instructive, n'est pas?
xxx

A belated happy birthday to the pill!

IS FIFTY YEARS OLD (last week)

Whoops I missed a day or two.... (if you'll excuse the pun)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/sarah-boseley-global-health/2010/may/06/pregnancy-maternal-mortality

Suffragettes attack the post! Yet again my brilliance strikes at the core of patriarchy...

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the talk Fe:MAIL – a history of how the suffragettes attacked the post to really ‘get their message across’ (if you’ll excuse the pun). The talk, given by the Scot Dr Norman Watson at the Women’s Library, explored how our suffrage ancestoresses managed to destroy around 8,000 letters during their attacks on post-boxes during the years 1912 to 1918, when WW1 paused the movement and women finally set about running the country themselves for a change.

“But how?” I hear you ask. “Not – how did they run the country – but how did they attack the post-boxes?"

Well, that’s a very good question.

They used ink, pots of ink to be precise, whose corks had been craftily loosened so that when a young lady, incensed by social and political inequality, really had just ‘had enough’, she could throw the ink pot into the post box where the dark liquid would slowly trickle over its contents. Envelopes from the time show that they really did get quite, quite black. As a result people missed their mail and the campaign gained publicity, although it must be said that the postal campaign hardly endeared the public whose correspondence was destroyed; it was a risky move to encourage wider support for the women’s cause.

On a lighter note, postcards (again you must excuse all my witty puns) were also jolly useful to the suffragettes. They ‘postcarded’ comrades about upcoming meetings (sometimes using suffrage code) and sent postcards depicting recent events to raise support for the cause (clever Kodak produced photographic ‘postcard’ film which meant the campaigners could produce images of events within hours). Two suffragettes even travelled to Number 10 as ‘human letters’, i.e. wearing placards, but the patriarch prime minster Asquith described them as ‘dead letters’, or rather letters that were lost, and refused to read them. Oh and it is also probably worth mentioning that they smashed up quite a few post offices too, using stones and hammers- but no one was ‘hurt’.

Dr Watson, a journalist, doctor (in the academic sense that is) and all round renaissance man, has taken it upon himself to explore the history of the suffrage movement in Dundee, and to great effect. For instance did you know that Winston Churchill was the MP for Dundee (isn’t that queer?) and when he gave a speech to his constituency in 1908 the stealthy Pankhurst sisters decided to send him a message (again, another pun) by dropping a pile of slates onto the roof above the patriarch’s head, ruining his address. Hurrah women!

But what the talk really brought home to me was the importance of the suffrage movement at a regional, rather than simply at a national level. The attacks on the postal system really brought this home (unlike those poor inky letters). The attacks on mailboxes were carefully coordinated throughout the country and required the team work and in-depth planning of women’s organisations in all towns and counties, so that their ink pots went flying all the same time in order to create maximum publicity for their cause. Watson bemoaned the lack of research into the activities of WSPU across the country. Indeed he inspired me to research the herstoy of my own town to be entitled, The Feminists of Wo-Hampshire.

HOW TO 'INK' A LETTERBOX

Below I have included a short guide for any of you thinking about ‘inking a letter box’ in protest, although one must remember that it is awfully hard nowadays what with those awful CCTVs everywhere.

(1) Ensure you are carrying a muff in order to disguise your ink.
(2) Ensure the cork in your ink pot is loosened but not totally removed (you want the ink to slowly trickle down the letters), and you should probably carrying a hammer for good measure, possibly some explosives.
(3) Make sure no one is about when you chuck it in, however be sure to choose your time carefully, usually just before the patriarch postman is scheduled to collect.

Run away, fast, after you’ve posted your little protests surprise

Tories threaten to disenfranchise non-middle-or-above class women, single parents and gays. HELP!

the photo below is a mannequinn by the way; its not a real woman.

STAND UP FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS: DO NOT VOTE CONSERVATIVE

TORIES WILL LOWER THE ABORTION TIME LIMIT TO 20 WEEKS. THAT'S REALLY BAD. I URGE YOU LADY READERS: STAND UP FOR YOUR RIGHTS AND VOTE FOR ANYONE BUT THAT EVIL WIZARD DAVID CAMERON.

TODAY THE TIME LIMIT, TOMORROW MORE SEXISM, ALL THE TIME.

A wooly vagina I saw on the F-word- genius!

Shopfront sexism strikes again!

I was wandering home after a delicious meal at a French bistro in Soho last night when I was confronted with this shocking window display in the shoe shop Kurt Geiger on Regent's Street (the store was worryingly close to Hamley's).

As this image demonstrates, the mannequins were lying on their backs with their legs spread high in the air (modelling the frightful shoes) indicating a provocation for sexual intercourse. They were dressed in corsets and bras; some were wearing no knickers.

But it doesn't end there. Inside the shop, visible straight on through the store's glass door, was a electric neon light 'Peep Show' sign that read "Great shoes available downstairs' - ultimately likening the the sale of sex to purchasing some pretty disgusting, over priced strappy sandals.

It was awful. In the middle of central London / a tourist area / next to England's most famous toy shop.

Sexist stilettos, misogynistic mules, lecherous loafers... what's next?

It completely ruined my coq au vin, which I can tell you now was jolly expensive for a supposedly rustic French dish.

Does shopfront sexism know no bounds? We need to take that jump out of its step.

Write in to Kurt Geiger to complain and berate at online.info@kurtgeiger.com.