Tip out that old tea

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New places:

Fiction and miscellaneous: jolindsaywalton.blogspot.com.
Poetry: sadpresspoetry.wordpress.com.
Poetry and miscellaneous: franciscrot.tumblr.com.
Games: sadpressgames.blogspot.com.
Twitter: www.twitter.com/jolwalton.
"Economic Humanities": economichumanities.wordpress.com.

Last night at The Foundry & Tipcake hotladies

Openned / Land for Lajee Fundraiser. We heard around fifteen poets read in three-minute slots, all relevant & some intentionally so, & we saw a short film about the Aida camp & heard some short talks about the camp and the Lajee Centre.  We were taken at our stations by the reverie wherein Steve Willey psyches himself up with Cobbing glossolalia strapping on his brown shinpads for another full day's football against the camp children.  There was an auction and other stuff.

The only thing that didn't make me fucking ecstatic was the sense of a special occasion.  Openned & other itinerary bezoars, like The Blue Bus, Utter!, Xing the Line, Penned in the Margins, Chlorine, and the stuff which happens in Cambridge, should regularly schedule mixtures of poetry and direct prosaic political and activist-administrative address.  New nights too.  If you want concrete suggestions, backchannel me.

Also, in a limited edition of 20, 'Recovery', by Jonty Tiplady, 28pp, LARGE FORMAT, roller skates on the cover, 17 all new unpublished or unemailed out poems, adult themes, Nicholas Lyndhurst, ghetto smurfs, £5, cash, or cheque payable to JT Iplady at F16, 75 Montpelier Road, Brighton, East Sussex, BN1 3BD.

OK.

From "Poetic Speciation and Diversification"

By Peter Philpott.

[...] So, I’m sure you can get my drift here. My assumption is the non-academic one that poetry has survived as a cultural activity through its relative ease of access, and its direct relationship with human needs involving the range of functions language plays in our lives. It is readily produced, readily consumed. It is at root unspecialised. There’s plainly a form of it, or range of forms of it, I feel, as I daresay you do, important and worthy of survival and further development. Its value is that it is also at root unspecialised, highly variable and adaptable. Even British Innovative Poetry must be approachable on terms that don’t necessitate academic training and in places that are separate from higher education.

It seems dangerous to me that the academic ecological niche is becoming so important. I have overheard people commenting that they needed to do an MA to become a writer. This fills me with despair [...]