Tom Pickard Update

The British poet Tom Pickard is presently traveling across the United States (from West to East) on a reading tour to support his recent publication, Ballad of Jamie Allan. Tom’s reading at Berkeley can be seen on YouTube. A report (by Don Share) on his Chicago reading with Elizabeth Arnold can be found here. 

The remainder of his tour schedule is as follows:

September 25 (Thursday), 4 pm: Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

September 29 (Monday), 6:30 pm: Roger Williams University. Bristol, Rhode Island.

October 2 (Thursday), 6:30 pm: CUE Art Foundation, 511 West 25th Street, New York.

October 5 (Sunday), 5:30 pm: Old Goat Pub, 33 Main Street, Richmond, Maine.

October 7 (Tuesday), 4:15 pm: Bates College, Maine.

October 8 (Wednesday), 8 pm: Minsky Recital Hall, University of Maine at Orono.

His readings have included heartbreaking ballads, documentary poetry, and erotic lyrics of “terrific economy, swiftness and obscene (and alas unquotable) directness” (Maureen McLane, Chicago Tribune); as well as a good joke about Dick Cheney and a duck.

Black Mountain College Celebration

 

For those of you in or near Hickory, North Carolina, let us recommend a weekend of events (September 25-27) celebrating the 75th anniversary of the founding of Black Mountain College. The schedule includes readings by Flood authors Lisa Jarnot (Black Dog Songs, Night Scenes) and Thomas Meyer (Daode Jing), musical performances (of Erik Satie and John Cage), films, an art exhibition, and more. (Charles Olson, rector of BMC during its final years, pictured above.)

John Taggart’s There Are Birds

John Taggart’s There Are Birds is now available through Small Press Distribution and directly from the publisher.

In There Are Birds, John Taggart explores the meaning of being singular though a range of American precursors: poets such as Marianne Moore and Louis Zukofsky, “nature boys” John and William Bartram, musicians, photographers, and private detectives. At once discursive and musical, familiar and strange, There Are Birds offers both a critical response to modernism and a “free weaving” of its many songs.

“Beautifully, indelibly, There Are Birds advances a notational method and measure all its own—part flight, part aesthetic tractatus, part lab report. More compunction than consolation but a long sorrow song as well, it plies a bracing, severe tonic both iterative and terse, a work of uncanny stretch and compression.” Nathaniel Mackey  

Tom Pickard on Tour

The British poet Tom Pickard will be on a reading tour of the U.S. for September and October. Here are some of his events:

 September 4 (Thursday), 8 pm: Observable Readings, Schlafly Tap Room, St. Louis.

September 8 (Monday), 7:30 pm: Moe’s Books, Berkeley, California.

September 10 (Wednesday), 7:30 pm: St Mary’s College, Moraga, California.

September 11 (Thursday), 6:30 pm: University of California, Berkeley.

September 17 (Wednesday), 7:30 pm: Danny’s Reading Series, Chicago (with Elizabeth Arnold).

September 20 (Saturday), 7 pm: Woodland Pattern Book Center, Milwaukee (with Elizabeth Arnold and Anselm Hollo).

September 25 (Thursday), 4 pm: Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

September 29 (Monday), 6:30 pm: Roger Williams University. Bristol, Rhode Island.

October 2 (Thursday): CUE Art Foundation, 511 West 25th Street, New York.

October 5 (Sunday), afternoon: Gulf of Maine Books, Brunswick, Maine.

October 6 (Monday): Bates College, Maine.

October 8 (Wednesday): University of Maine at Orono.

 Pickard lives at the edge of Fiend’s Fell in the North Penine Hills on the English-Scottish border. He is the author of ten books of poetry and prose, including The Dark Months of May (Flood Editions, 2004) and Ballad of Jamie Allan (Flood Editions, 2007). A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Ballad of Jamie Allan was written as a libretto for the composer John Harle and performed at the Sage Gateshead in Durham, England (and recently released as a CD). It concerns an eighteenth-century gypsy musician who died in Durham jail where he was serving a life sentence for stealing a horse at the age of seventy. His reputation as a great musician was matched by his reputation as an outlaw, or to quote Walter Scott, “a desperate reprobate.”

 “Pickard’s erotic lyrics have a terrific economy, swiftness and obscene (and alas unquotable) directness, conjuring remembered sex, shared blankets, beds, knives and regret.” Maureen McLane, Chicago Tribune