Ken Edwards is the editor and publisher of Reality Street. In addition to his own Reality Street books, detailed below, he has had numerous books and pamphlets published by other presses, including: Good Science: Poems 1983-1991 (Roof Books, NY, 1992) No Public Language: Selected Poems 1975-1995 (Shearsman Books, 2006) Songbook (Shearsman Books, 2009) For a fuller biblio-biography please scroll down. Ken's blog can be accessed here. |  |
Ken Edwards: NOSTALGIA FOR UNKNOWN CITIES |
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£ 8.50The unnamed portagonist of this anti-narrative compares the city of his birth to a dream he later awakes from, "located in the realm of dreams that bears no obvious resemblance to any actual city that may exist or might have existed". He goes on to catalogue, obsessively, his real and imagined experiences in a succession of real and imaginary cities. Situated midway between poetic prose and narrative fiction, this is in the tradition of Breton, Sebald, Kafka. Illustrated with 21 of the author's black & white photographs. Read an extract here (Golden Handcuffs Review site). And read Paul A Green's extended essay on the book. "...hypnagogic derangement as the urban dream dissolves before our eyes."- Iain Sinclair, The Observer "Really a great sustained resilient and berserk piece of work." - Fanny Howe 2007, 978-1-874400-40-0, 110pp, price £8.50 |
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Ken Edwards: EIGHT + SIX |
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£ 7.50eight+six was Ken Edwards’ first poetry collection for nearly ten years, an integrated sequence of 98 personal poems that maintain a fractal energy at all levels. "Like
Ted Berrigan before him, Edwards has written sonnets that actualise the
blur between reading, remembering, perceiving and thinking, by collage
(or perhaps I should say by assemblage – you can glue in lines from a
Wyatt poem, or from a lecture by Hejinian, but can't you glue in a
conversation or how you observed a man "up to his wrists in engine" –
you have to stand these next to the others.)" “These wild and virtuoso sonnets undermine the usual volta to produce amazing and unique constellations”. 2003, 1-874400-25-3, 112pp, price: £7.50 |
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Ken Edwards: FUTURES |
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£ 6.99Only a very few copies remain of Ken Edwards’ first published novel. It traces the paths taken on her bicycle by the protagonist, Eye, across and out of an unnamed city in the wake of an event she can’t remember. Her quest is to face her terror and retrieve the fragments of her life, which lie in the future that never quite arrives, until it does. An extended response by JH Prynne to this book is available online at Golden Handcuffs Review.
1998, 1-874400-13-X, 156pp, £6.99 |
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Ken Edwards - full biographical details
Books in print
Good Science (Roof Books, New York, 1992)
Futures (Reality Street, London 1998) - novel (see above)
Eight+six (Reality Street, London, 2003) (see above)
No Public Language: Selected Poems 1975-95 (Shearsman Books, Exeter, 2006)
Bird Migration in the 21st Century (Spectacular Diseases, Peterborough, 2006)
Nostalgia for Unknown Cities (Reality Street, Hastings, 2007) (see above)
Red & Green (Oystercatcher Press, Hunstanton, 2009)
Songbook (with Elaine Edwards, Shearsman Books, Exeter, 2009)
Online books and publications
The Glory Boxes in onedit issue 7
Chaconne (at www.shearsman.com)
Us and Them (story posted at Douglas Messerli's EXPLORINGfictions
Poetry, fiction, translations, criticism in magazines
These include: And, Angelaki, Bananas, Big Allis, Boundary 2, Critical Quarterly, Exact Change Yearbook, Five Fingers Review, Fragmente, The Gig, Golden Handcuffs Review, Jacket, Kiosk, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, The Many Review, New American Writing, Ninth Decade, Oasis, Object Permanence, Pages, PN Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Sulfur, Talisman, Transatlantic Review, Veer Off, West Coast Line
My essay "The Two Poetries" is available as a download at the Great Works site.
An extended response by JH Prynne to Futures is available at Golden Handcuffs Review.
An interview was published by Signals magazine.
An article on small press publishing is at the Electronic Poetry Centre - since updated for Mimeo Mimeo magazine.
Poetry, fiction and essays in anthologies
New Stories 2 (Arts Council, 1977)
Angels of Fire (Chatto & Windus, 1986)
The New British Poetry (Paladin Books, 1988)
Floating Capital: new poets from London (Potes & Poets Press, 1991)
Poets on Writing (Macmillan, 1992)
Other: British & Irish Poetry since 1970 (Wesleyan University Press, 1999)
Binary Myths 2: correspondences with poet/editors (Stride, 1999)
News for the Ear: a homage to Roy Fisher (Stride, 2000)
The Canting Academy (ISPress, 2008)
As editor
Currently editor/publisher of Reality Street
Editor of Reality Studios magazine (1978-88)
Co-editor of Alembic (1973–79)
Co-editor of The New British Poetry (Paladin Books, 1988)
Music
- Currently playing bass guitar, singing and songwriting with The Moors in Hastings.
- Four Simultaneous Movements for mixed ensemble, premiered by COMA Sussex at the opening of Brighton Library, 2006.
- Co-writer (with Alan Taylor, Ann Wolff + 2 others) of the opera To the Edge, premiered at the Steiner Theatre, London, November 2004.
- Spiral Music - incidental music for Fanny Howe's poem "Spiral", published with collages by Tom Raworth, Artery Editions, 2004.
- Text for John Tilbury piece for piano, voice & electronics: There's something in there, premiered at Leeds Town Hall, July 2003.
- Ornettology (for string quartet) - selected by SPNM for performance by the Sorrel Quartet at the Cheltenham Festival, July 1997.
- Bruised Rationals (text/music piece, for speaker and large ensemble), 1996.
Performances and readings
These include:
Birkbeck College London (performance of "The Glory Boxes"); University of Sussex (performance of Louis/Celia Zukofksy’s “A”-24); "desperate for love", Brighton; Edge Hill University, Ormskirk; The Blue Bus, The Lamb, London; The Calder Bookshop, London; Crossing the Line at the Poetry Café and at The Plough, London; Tears in the Fence festival, Dulwich College, London; SubVoicive Poetry, various venues, London; Camden People's Theatre, London; VI series, London; King's College, London; Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer, London; CCCP, Cambridge; Cambridge Series; rem press readings, Cambridge; University of Plymouth at Exmouth; The Language Club, Plymouth; Exeter Literary Festival; Bath Music Festival; Oxford Music Festival; Brighton Fringe Festival; Huddersfield Poetry Festival; Morden Tower, Newcastle upon Tyne; Colpitts, Durham; The Winding Stair Bookshop, Dublin; Anglo-French Poetry Festival, Paris; Globe Bookstore, Prague; Druskininkai Poetic Autumn Festival, Lithuania; Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver, BC, Canada; The Ear Inn, New York, USA; Small Press Traffic, San Francisco, USA; Johnny Otis Café, Sebastopol, USA
Story of my life
In 1999 I got married to Elaine, and in 2004, moved with her from London to Hastings, East Sussex, on the south coast. We live in Hastings Old Town, which is a really lovely place near the seafront, but we don't want to make too much of that, in case a load of moneyed people move here and spoil it (this is already starting to happen).
That's my life; now to writing and publishing. The first thing to make clear is that Reality Street is very much a part-time activity. It does not make any money. I got into small press publishing because there were few outlets for the kind of writing I was doing and was interested in. Share Publications was a tiny operation I ran in the 1970s, publishing home-made pamphlets of poetry. I also co-edited a magazine called Alembic, originally an offspin of a regular poetry workshop with Robert Hampson and Peter Barry. In 1978 I started a magazine called Reality Studios, a forerunner of Reality Street, which ran for 10 years.
I started out as a writer of fiction. I had short stories published in Transatlantic Review, Bananas and an Arts Council anthology, New Stories 2, among others, during the 1970s. I was interested in Kafka, Beckett and the speculative fiction writers of the British SF New Wave, but somehow all that seemed to come to nothing. I had encouragement to write a novel from people who compared me to Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, then little known but a year or two ahead of me in a putative career. But I couldn't find a way forward that I could respect. The poets seemed to be the only ones doing interesting new things in writing. So most of my published writing since then has been poetry (or prose) in small press editions. But I have got back to narrative and non-narrative prose in recent years.
Music is very much part of my life. I have never had much formal training, and started playing the guitar in my 20s and the violin in my 30s. Thanks to friends I met through COMA, I have composed music and had it performed, and collaborated with musicians, including Elaine, who is a music teacher and plays flute, tenor and soprano sax and keyboard. More recently I have been playing bass guitar, mostly with The Moors of Hastings – more about this here.
