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and always the cutting out and the buggering about and the buggering about and the rewriting and so on

Basil Bunting describing writing Briggflatts.

#briggflatts #basil bunting

From "Briggflatts" by Basil Bunting, 1966

#briggflatts

THE COLLOQUIUM FOR UNPOPULAR CULTURE presents:

BRIGGFLATTS - A group reading and celebration of Basil Bunting's monumental 1965 poem

WHEN: Wednesday 17 April 2019, 6:30pm for 6:45pm WHERE: Room 220, 32 Waverly Place (Silver Building)

Free and open to the public. Refreshments served. Event page

Co-sponsored by the Department of Music

BRIGGFLATTS is a love poem.

BRIGGFLATTS is a poem marinated in memory and mythology and place. Cyril Connolly called it the finest long poem to have been published in England since T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets". Thom Gunn declared it "one of the few great poems of this century. It seems to me greater each time I read it." For Alex Niven, it is "an epic work of northern English nonconformism quite anything like written before or since."

"If Basil Bunting were not remembered for Briggflatts, he might still be remembered as the protagonist of a preposterously eventful 20th-century life. By the age of 50, he had been a music critic, a sailor, a balloon operator, a wing commander, a military interpreter, a foreign correspondent, and a spy. He had lived on three continents (and one boat), survived multiple assassination attempts, and been incarcerated throughout Europe. He had also apprenticed at Ezra Pound's poetic 'Ezuversity' in Rapallo, played an "indifferent game of chess with General Franco in the Canary island, and communicated with Bakhtiari tribesmen in classical Persian.

"Educated in Quaker schools, he was imprisoned for refusing to serve in the First World War - and released after a brief hunger strike - only to high-mindedly rush into the Second, during which he served in the Royal Air Force and MI6. As a London Times correspondent in Tehran, in 1952, he watched as a hired mob congregated outside his hotel and chanted, 'DEATH TO MR BUNTING!' (Christopher Spaide, The New Yorker) 'Poetry," believed Basil Bunting, "like music, is to be heard."

This evening Briggflatts shall be heard.

READERS

MC HYLAND is the founding editor of DoubleCross Press, and produces scholarly and poetic texts, artists' books, and public art projects. Her second full-length book of poems, THE END, is forthcoming this June from Sidebrow. A featured artist in Queens International 2018: Volumes, PAOLO JAVIER is the author of the limited edition chapbook/ cassette Maybe The Sweet Honey Pours and the full-length comic poem OBB (Nightboat Books, 2020) MAUREEN N. McLANE is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Some Say. DAVID MASON composes music under the name of Listening Center, and has released music on Ghost Box, Polytechnic Youth, and A Year In the Country. He works with analogue synthesis and magnetic media and has collaborated with Paolo Javier on several projects.ALEX NIVEN is a writer from Northumberland. He is Lecturer in English Literature at Newcastle University and Editor-at-Large at Repeater Books. His edition of Basil Bunting's letters is forthcoming from OUP. TOM PICKARD has been, variously, a poet, playwright, oral historian, bookseller, radio documentarian, and librettist. In 1965 he organised the first public reading of Bunting's Briggflatts at Morden Tower in Newcastle. S.S. SANDHU directs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture. DON SHARE is the editor of Poetry. He is the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books, including The Poems of Basil Bunting, Bunting's Persia, and a forthcoming selection of Bunting's prose, Basil Says. FIONA WILSON is a poet and teacher. She teaches British literature at Sarah Lawrence College.

--- 16 April: Tom Pickard, Maureen McLane & Don Share discuss Briggflatts at Poets House. --- Supported by the Department of English Literature, NYU --- THE COLLOQUIUM FOR UNPOPULAR CULTURE (est.2007): falling and laughing... --- QUERIES: [email protected]

#Basil Bunting #Briggflatts

Ridiculous and lovely chase hurdling shadows morning into noon.

Basil Bunting, Briggflatts

#basil bunting #briggflatts #poetry #quotations

(via Quaker Meeting House by Ron | Flickr)

#briggflatts #cumbria #meeting house #quaker

so happy to have been apart of the #BasilBunting 50th anniversary events, and for the opportunity to take part in the #Briggflatts reading at #mordentower. (at Morden Tower)

#basilbunting #briggflatts #mordentower

Sweet, smitten boys attached to her dress. Each finger clasping onto fabric desperately, not wanting to let go but it’s hard. Her fingers run through thick, tough hair, dancing from front to rear. Music comes from her mouth to match the rhythm which they follow. On they go, along the cracks, never looking back. Little fingers, gone now, are missed. Dress as rugged as gravel which is stepped on as the search continues. Never give up! Always keep moving, find the little fingers now. Close, maybe. Never looking up, always looking back, she looks for her little sparks that used to light up the dark. Hands that touched soft hair now holds decaying things not worth the mention. Blood is the taste in her mouth, and her long-lasting loves is what she searches for. A furious feeling of frustration fills the day until the end of the road. Hope is just a passing feeling, a lost feeling, and when all hope seems lost, in comes the frost.

Inspired by Briggfatts

(provolone1202)

#poem #mother #briggflatts