Showing Tag: ""ken edwards"" (Show all posts)

Dead Level

Posted by Ken Edwards on Friday, November 1, 2013, In : writing 
Two youths – the one, a hoodie, the other, a beanie – were observed at 10:57 sharing a plastic bottle of cider behind the electricity pylons. White Lightning. They moved hardly at all. The weather was clement, if still chilly. At the road junction for Deadmans Beach just beyond the Barbican Gate was an emptied pub (the Barbican Inn in fact, the faded sign said), half-timbered and lead-latticed, advertised as being for sale, with temporary wire mesh fencing mounted on breeze blocks barring...

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Down With Beauty on Stride

Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, July 31, 2013, In : Reality Street 
Forgot to mention earlier that Andy Brown has reviewed Down With Beauty at Stride Magazine. He says nice things. Thank you, Andy.



By now, copies of the two most recent Reality Street titles - Allotment Architecture by Peter Hughes and Cut From the Rushes by Andrea Brady - should have reached most Supporters. They will be on general sale pretty shortly. The official launch date is 7 September.


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There's something in there...

Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, March 6, 2013, In : music 
To Oxford last week (the proof copy of Philip Terry’s tapestry arrived just as we were leaving) to hear a rare performance of "There's something in there" - a piece composed a few years ago by John Tilbury using my words. 

Maybe a dozen or so red kites wheeling and hovering over the M40 around Beaconsfield, their forked tails slanting like rudders, as the sun started to emerge. I've never seen one before, and didn't realise they had got quite so common in this part of the world.

The concert w...

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Back to life

Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, February 19, 2013, In : Reality Street 
Reality Street is stirring back into life. Reality Street would support a parliamentary bill to abolish January and February, but it's nearly over. We've had the flu, and before that, the less said about the norovirus the better. Believe me. 

Philip Terry's weird and wonderful post-1066 novel tapestry, using the Bayeux images to weave stories in an alternative Middle English about alternative histories of the Norman Conquest, is almost ready to go to press.

My own Down With Beauty follows short...
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Songwriting in Hastings

Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, October 3, 2012, In : music 
There's an interview with me at Hastings Online Times. It's mainly about songwriting, but there's a bit about poetry and Reality Street too.

Working on some more stuff to upload here: a response to Peter Riley, recent poetry publications, and previews of the forthcoming Reality Street books: The Alchemist's Mind and White, both being printed now for release next month. (Apologies to those contributors to The Alchemist's Mind who got advance copies - these contain an out-of-date list of Support...
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Bardo complete

Posted by Ken Edwards on Monday, December 12, 2011, In : writing 
Those who have followed the progress of my "Bardo" project (the sixth of its seven sequences was serialised on this blog the summer before last) may be interested to know that it is now out as a book from Knives Forks & Spoons Press in a handsome edition with seven colour plates. 



You can order it from their website for £8. (Also I think it's available as part of a three-for-£10 deal.)

Essentially the book is an irreverent/serious rewrite of the devotional work known in the West as the Tibeta...
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Reality Street is grilled

Posted by Ken Edwards on Sunday, February 13, 2011, In : Reality Street 
20 questions mainly about Reality Street are answered by me as best I can on Rob McLennan's blog. I hope I got them right.
 
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end of Bardo

Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, January 19, 2011, In : writing 
I meant to post by now a consideration of Allen Fisher's Proposals. While I am still striving to do justice to this fine book, a dozen copies of my little pamphlet millions of colours are delivered in the post. It comprises the final section of "Bardo: forty-nine prose pieces over seven days". It's a lovely little cream letterpress handmade thing bound with red thread, and you can get one from Richard Parker at Crater Press. You will need, as he says, a letter knife or similar utensil.


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Past-loving gaze

Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, October 20, 2010, In : writing 
The Review of Contemporary Fiction has run a review of my Nostalgia for Unknown Cities, by A D Jameson. (You can, of course, should you wish, buy this book on this very site, I mean here.)

The magazine itself arrived this morning, and it looks like another interesting issue, "Slovak Fiction", to follow spring 2010's "Writing from Postcommunist Romania". We in the Anglophone West are so abysmally ignorant of literary developments elsewhere, so I am grateful to RCF for its continuing endeavours....

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Songbook

Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, September 23, 2009, In : writing 
Having a new book out is still a bit of a thrill, I must admit, even when it's a book of work that is not that new. I have to thank Tony Frazer, of Shearsman Books, for the good production job he did on Songbook, which makes its debut around about now.

The title is a bit of a misnomer, I suppose. An intentional misnomer. Let me explain. I have recently been getting back to doing something I last did in my 20s, writing songs - "proper" songs with verses and choruses and middle eights, and much...
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The Sea (7)

Posted by Ken Edwards on Saturday, July 18, 2009, In : writing 


Tide in, blowy breakers, deep grey-green with silt in it. Sky is wet, bent over. A word “crystallised” in it. Drifting, long-lining, seining, trammelling, trawling, again, and always. And above that, more light, and here comes the evaluation: that everything will evaporate into nothing, that this book will capture nothing, that everything that is narrated here has occurred within the space of a split particle, where there’s nothing, where no one can hear you think. Hello! Sorry at this ...
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The Sea (6)

Posted by Ken Edwards on Monday, July 13, 2009, In : writing 


Immense glitter sparkle in the distance. Split particles show splutters in chardonnay. Fishing with Higgs the bo’sun, fielding for godlets. Keep those figures floundering, flittering. So how do you know that you exist? When your whole life flashes? Can you describe this, Jack? They knew him as a fisherman, not as a fiddler. He flew into the light off the edge of the harbour arm on an old clinker craft with an elliptic stern, and was seen no more. What kind of language is that? What are you ...
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The Sea (5)

Posted by Ken Edwards on Friday, July 10, 2009, In : writing 


Turquoise in the lee of the groyne, a white sheet where the sun is upon it. Turns out this is an unnamed paragraph, about nothing, written in a “hotel of real spies”. A trumpet in the shape of a boat. At first glance, it extruded the body language of convergence, then it became convenient, and then a commodity, and so it goes on, day after day, beginning after ending after beginning, persons and events and horizons in a blur. History turns into salt – to what purpose? We are never told....
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The Sea (4)

Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, July 7, 2009, In : writing 


Pale grey-green, almost no waves, tide out. An aircraft disintegrated over mid-Atlantic, very peacefully. Zombies very nice peoples. No, they are vampires. They are Dover sole and plaice, and other flat fish such as dabs, flounders, lemon soles, also brills, turbots, cod and the various types of dogfish, large shoals of mackerel, herring, sprats, lobsters, shrimps and whelks. I love crashing flounders, please. Then your own thoughts start to cluster in. Build your own groyne right here and pu...
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The Sea (3)

Posted by Ken Edwards on Wednesday, July 1, 2009, In : writing 


A twinkling expanse in the morning sunshine. On a portable radio, sweet talk from across the globe. Sounded like she was singing from a nest of wires. Don’t think about it. The downtown retail sector is in a state of devastation. Hungry creatures roam, look like they’ve been punched senseless selling unsustainable debt to each other. I love my black Moorish bass. But I’ve been beaten over my metaphorical head too, and I’m much too nervous to stand up. (Stop it, you’re hyperventilati...
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The Sea (2)

Posted by Ken Edwards on Tuesday, June 23, 2009, In : writing 


Bands of green and blue, little rippling waves. And, may I say, a feather, of diseased appearance. The diseased head of a man. Who gave me the whooping ’flu, you swine? Is that a dog talking? Have we come to this? Take me to the cliff, and drop me there. Let me fall through space, and so become alive. Dolls and ghosts and dogs, daddy and mummy bears, gorillas, pigs and mice and all the hybrids in between. Breeding in a tight corner, sounds almost hooman. I ain’t scared of the sea, but it...
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The Sea

Posted by Ken Edwards on Sunday, June 21, 2009, In : writing 


A dazzling white sheet from afar. A blade shines from horizon to horizon, its light much too white for the eye. Light leaching out of it. Mild, variegated, lacking definition; but with a hard frosty glitter in the distance. Milk and dirt heaving rhythmically, water breathing in and out. Heavy easterly, the water brown with silt inland, and pale green further off, clashing waves in your face. Swirling muck in the shallows. Bumpy and glittering, then clean and clear.

An intending surfer undresse...
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Ken Edwards This blog is written by Ken Edwards, co-founder and editor/publisher of Reality Street, and it's mainly about the press. Ken's personal blog can now be found at http://www.kenedwardsonline.co.uk