Days of Roses has made its mark as one of the most varied, constantly surprising and entertaining poetry nights on the London circuit. Co-hosted by Declan Ryan and Chris Horton, each night features a generous helping of poetry, storytelling and music, and while there are definitely house favourites, DoR introduces the audience to lots of fantastic new writers and musicians.

Dec and fellow poet Malene Engelund have now edited and put together an anthology to celebrate the acts who have played Days of Roses so far, and are going to be launching this rocket of delight on Wednesday 23 February at the Three Blind Mice, London, EC2A 4QW (lots of buses or nearest tubes Liverpool Street, Old Street or Shoreditch High Street). Just look for a big number 5 - it's a bit hard to spot at first but worth discovering!

The launch will feature readings from Jo Shapcott, Chris Horton,
Dec Ryan, Dominic McLoughlin, Gareth Jones, Liz Berry, Lydia Macpherson, Malene Engelund, Marianne Burton, Maximilian Hildebrand, Robert Selby and William Searle, as well as music from Fiona Bevan and Mr Dupret Factory and friends.

Copies will be available on the night with 15 different signed and numbered covers created by Ross McNicol and Amelia Newton Whitelaw.


Facebook event page here!

On top of everything else, Kirsty and I are putting together a sampler booklet, containing extracts from the newest issue of Fuselit, Coin Opera, Obakarama and our imminent micro-anthology Pocket Spellbook. 

This is s'posed to be a sort of introductory thing to get new people interested in what we're doing. The plan is (oh god - me and 'plans') to get it distributed as far and wide as possible, which means the balance between quality and cheapness is a delicate one. We want it to look 'nice', worth keeping, but we also have to run off hundreds of them.

Incidentally, you can now buy Sidekick Books products at The Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green. If you don't know it, it's a wonderful little shop owned by a charismatic pair of gentlemen who really know their stuff. You should all totally buy some poetry books from their poetry section in order to counteract their negative experiences with selling poetry. It's not all Romantics anthologies and Wordsworth - I spied some Caroline Bird when I was there last time.

The final stages of putting Fuselit together always seem to take forever, but today, I've put the pdf of the inside pages on my flash drive and we're taking it to the print shop to run off some pages and make up some test copies, which I hope will be perfecto.

Here's a sample snip of the cover of 'Hijacks', the extra booklet that comes with each issue:

I'm glad you asked. These are French boules with the faces of various famous Jacks on them. They relate to poems by Roddy Lumsden, Declan Ryan, Whitney Wish Johnson and Francine Rubin. There are two more not shown in this snip, relating to two more Jacks.

Why boules? Um. Well, there's a 'jack' in a game of boules and I just happened to remember those Madballz toys from the nineties. It all seemed to be pointing somewhere.

Jet Payne, formerly headbosschief of Arts Pneumonia, has engaged in a most intriguing sport, launching a zine that encourages your synapses to run riot - the Mind Map Review!

A freely distributed London arts review magazine based around a simple concept, Mind Map Review covets reviews in the form of a ‘mind map’, 'brain storm', ‘spider diagram’, ‘flow chart’ or similar diagram, with the aim of simplifying the reviewing process, stripping it back to the essential points as they would appear at a planning stage.

The London Mind Map Review launches in May, and Londoners should submit reviews of art exhibitions, spoken word events, theatre, gigs and other arts events.

Further specifics can be found here.

Deadline for the May issue is 1 May with the 1st of each following month marking the deadline for that month’s issue.

Contact themindmapreview@googlemail.com

The Private Press do the most fantastic anthologies of poetry, with a number based around the work of director David Lynch. If you're not acquainted with his work, it's bizarre, gothic, terrifying, surreal and grotesque, not to mention weirdly sexy.

Already out are the collections 'A Slice of Cherry Pie' (based on cult series Twin Peaks) and 'We Don't Stop Here' (based on Mulholland Drive), and this year should see the release of 'Deep River Apartments'. a collection based on the chilling and dyfunctional mystery Blue Velvet.

Currently the first two are sold out, but they promise more soon!





Make friends with the Private Press on Facebook.

Kirsty will be taking part in a poetry reading and interview with Sydenham Radio between 8 and 9pm on Thursday 4 March. The show will look at spring, love, new beginnings and similar themes, which K will probably interpret as a cross between the sex, the outbreak of war and The Wicker Man. Who knows?

Tune in here!

The inestimable Dr Fulminare of (he of Sidekick Books fame/infamy) begs to alert all merchants, mountebanks, bards and footpads to his latest experiment, Irregular Features, a sporadically updated, peer-reviled journal of poetry goings-on, in which the following reactions and imbalances may or not occur:

• Things to Make and Do - games and guides to coerce you into such unatural practices as generating 10,000,000,000 pantoums in but clicks, using fridge magnets to constuct your own poetry blurb, folding your own stanza-stimulating origami swift, crafting the images of famed poets from dots and much more.
• Poetry Top Trumps - pit the varied talents of Ted Hughes, Frank O' Hara, Getrude Stein and Giorgos Seferis against each other in a duel to the (probably car-crash or oven-related) death, with further metersmiths to be added.
• Woe's Woe - a directory of suffering, for when 'blue' won't cut it and 'out-of-sorts' is too infuriatingly non-specific to pinpoint exactly what kind of pain you are feeling. You will be introduced to such diagnoses as Faughstalkery, Lentopression and Repustress and before long, Dr F vouchsafes that you should be able to accurately diagnose misery at a good ten paces!
  
• Plus Articles, Reviews and Interviews with poetry types, as the benevolent Doctor permits.

Dr Fulminare requests contact with any sharp-witted types who, upon spying this literary litany, feel they too may wish to contribute ingredients, or, tangentially, anyone with staunch amounts of scentless sulphur for sale at a reasonable rate. Contact him through the Devil's Wiretangle at drfulminare@googlemail.com

The second micro-anthology, Obakarama, is out, which means Dr Fulminare and Sidekick Books are steaming into the new decade with both produce and plans for the future. Just to recap, here is what the micro-anthologies look like:


That's Obakarama, and here's Coin Opera:


Both are £5 (plus p&p) and can be ordered from the Sidekick Books site. They're pocket-sized and between 40 and 50 pages each, packed with poetry and (in the case of Obakarama) full-colour illustrations. The contributors are a combination of poets we admire and have approached, poets who we have discovered purely through Fuselit and ones we have encountered through the thriving London poetry scene. Although there's a bias towards the capital, there are also contributors from India, Scotland, the US and Finland. We've got a nice gender balance too, with 12 female poets and illustrators to 13 male.

We're very pleased with these books - they may not be handmade in the same way Fuselit is but every bit as much love and attention has gone into making them. The print quality is excellent (thanks to the chaps at Good News Press) and everybody involved has been both enthusiastic and hard-working. I feel like this sort of approach to publishing poetry is genuinely different, taking the emphasis off the individual as demi-popstar and removing the need to slap over-the-top praise and commendation on every interesting new poet in order to get people to read their work. Instead, the focus is on poetry as a way of engaging in an entertaining way with our past and our future, with other cultures and our own. The common theme gives readers an entry point to an individual's work and also operates as a way of getting people outside the usual circles interested in what poets are doing.

At least, that's the theory! And on that basis, we're planning more collections in the new year, aiming for an even broader range of poets and still more fresh and exciting subject matter, as well as continuing the sort of collaborative formal experiments we started with Chimerium and Telemorphics. It will also, I hope, give us a little breathing space with Fuselit - that is, to continue in the tradition we've established of publishing a unique, lovingly put together literary magazine based on the connotations of a single word, but without the pressure to use it as a vehicle for all our new ideas. With any luck, that means we'll be able to settle into a more regular cycle, and our aim is to get three issues out in 2010, starting with Tilt in January, followed by Jack in May and then ... well, the next word will be announced soon - I've already got the CD design done for it, and a plan for the cover.

Anyway, what's left to say is Merry Christmas to everyone out there, and have a fantastic New Year, from all of us at Fuselit!

So Jon's provided you with a sneak peek at Coin Opera, has he? Very well, then I want to scuttle in and whisper some words about the legend of Obakarama!

The second micro-anthology from Sidekick Books, Obakarama contains poems and artwork inspired by Japanese folk monsters. With thanks to the brilliant Obakemono Project, we've rallied a band of wandering ronin to study some of these weird and wonderful beasts and come up with poetry based on their bizarre and sometimes beguiling traits.

Long-necked and long-tongued demons, winged dogs, mysterious children hiding in umbrellas, amphibious tricksters, killer scarves and cloud apparitions are just some of the characters you'll encounter inside.

Features poetry by Adham Smart, Wayne Holloway-Smith, Roddy Lumsden, Ian McLachlan, Aiko Harman, Chrissy Williams, Richard Watt, Kirsten Irving and Amy Blakemore, and artwork by Mike Stone, Hanne Härkönen, Seb Manley, Mary Graham, Darnae “Crimsonwolf” Sobolewski, Jd and Jon Stone.

I'll round off with the following poem from the anthology, by Chrissy Williams:

Hainu in Chikugo Fields

Hideyoshi whistles through the tall grass,
katana held low.
Hainu's ears prick up in the azalea bed.
He yawns a wide grin
and stretches his white wings
from shoulder blades to feather tips.

Hideyoshi comes closer.
Hainu springs up in delight
and gives a hearty shake.
The sharpness of his teeth
and glinting of his eyes
form a soft smile on his pantomime-fierce face.

Hideyoshi raises his sword arm.
Hainu starts, then howls a battle cry.
Fierce dog of the skies, defier of gravity, remember:
you must not pay for loyalty
with your life.

Here's the story of the last five months in brief: we love doing the extra booklets with issues of Fuselit. On that basis, we planned out the next two. However, we've found that they add to the weight (and the postage) and take a whole load of extra time to produce, so we decided: rather than package them with Fuselit, let's ramp up the production values and release them separately. You know, as sturdy, perfect-bound, miniature books.

To do that, we'll need ISBNs, so's people can order them from bookshops. And to get ISBNs, we need to be a publisher. Hence, Sidekick Books was born, and will be releasing two debut micro-anthologies just in time for Christmas (we hope). Taking a cue from weekly British comic 2000AD, the chief editor of Sidekick Books will be someone so unlike traditional publisher-types you'd almost suspect him to be imaginary - in this case, Dr Fulminare, self-confessed genius alchemist of the arts. That's him on the cover to Coin Opera there, in the form of a sprite from the Final Fantasy series.

Coin Opera is going to be a 48 page book of poems about or inspired by computer games. Whether or not you think that's a suitably inspiring subject matter depends, I suppose, on your prejudices. I think it's a rich seam, begging to be mined for characters, conceits, formal invention, atmosphere, symbolism, statement and personal reflection, so much so that unless our attempts to get this on the road are a complete disaster, I'll be trying to put together a sequel book next year.

Here are the poets who have contributed to Coin Opera, presented in the form of a Street Fighter II selection screen:


Recognise any? I can't guarantee these are the most arresting likenesses - they're more in the games industry tradition of working within certain constraints. The poets themselves faced a similar task - keeping their pieces suitably nugget-sized, like programmers trying to make sure their fifty hour point and click adventure fits onto a single floppy disk. Economy of language is, after all, a mainstay of both arts. I think the longest pieces in the collection may be Ross Sutherland's sonnets, at a traditional 14 lines each.

I'm going to wrap up the preview now with a piece by David Floyd, based on Championship Manager:

Second half substitution

Jesus is ready to come on
John the Baptist will make way
Jesus comes forward
Jesus plays the ball to Peter’s feet
Peter loses out
Matthew gathers up the loose ball

Matthew hits a 30 yard ball ahead of Jesus
Jesus is free of the last defender
Jesus bears down on goal
Judas brings him down
A free kick is awarded
Jesus will have to go off
The Referee wants a word with Judas

Matthew puts the ball into the six yard box
Peter has the goal at his mercy
Satan puts it behind for a corner
He somehow got his fingertips to it

On Thursday 5 November, Fuselit scuttled to the new open mic night hosted by Abi Palmer at the freshly reopened Topolski Century gallery. It's a great choice of venue, partly because the action takes place in a cosy nook with cushions as well as chairs (leaving less likelihood of disturbance by random amblers) and partly because it introduces Topolski virgins like Jon and me to the Polish artist's work.

With vintage cartoons playing across the wall and a mini-picnic of refreshments, an audience space that has room to expand, but which wouldn't feel too empty on a quieter night, and time in the interval to wander round and view the artwork on display, it's sure to become an open mic favourite.

Our set, a double-headed beast, featured a preview of Bard Games, the bonus booklet to be given away with Fuselit's next issue, Tilt. We've had a bash at writing poetry using tabletop, board and card games to create rules and forms, with varying levels of success. Favourites such as Jenga, Dominoes, Scrabble and Battleships have been mined and turned into verse, accompanied by instructions, in case you want to have a go yourself.

If you have interesting ideas for hybrid forms or weird and wonderful poetic structures, we'd like to hear from you. Comment here or email contact@fuselit.co.uk

Tilt will be out soon - keep 'em peeled.

Salutations crewmates!


Much news from Fuselit Central! First off, MARS is now available to buy! After a six month gestation, the spawn of everybody's efforts is rampaging about causing untold havoc to all space travellers! Check out the poems, pictures, comic, tales, puzzles and sounds of a distant galaxy somewhere near to the starbelts of Whitechapel.

(Please bear in mind that if we get a high number of orders, there may well be a slight delay before you receive your issue, but it will get to you, come meteor storm or Drakzoid war-ship!)

Operation TILT is now officially closed for submissions. Thanks to everybody who's contributed so far - it's going to be a right dizzying experiment. If you're waiting for a reply on a piece, I should be back to you pretty smartish. If you've been furiously trying to make radio contact with your muse and have a piece you meant to send, get it to us in the next couple days and we'll consider it for the issue.

So what does this mean for the future? Well Fuselit is very excited to reveal that our next call is for submissions on the theme of JACK. Skellington or Springheel, Black or White, Sprat or Horner, we want your poetry, prose, artwork and sounds on this one!

Until next time, so long and thanks for all the fish!
Kirsty x

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If you've been keeping an eye on the main Fuselit page you'll have noticed that Fuselit: Aquarium is now out and up for grabs. What we haven't mentioned there is that everyone is entitled to a free Miniquarium, featuring four distinct pieces not printed in the main magazine and which folds out into a colourful A4 sealife poster. We'll be distributing Miniquariums in venues around London in the coming weeks, but you can also download it in pdf format and print it off. If your printer doesn't duplex, simply print page 1 first, then page 2 on the other side.

Download Miniquarium.zip.

The entire Cut Out & Keep posse has been on holiday to Cornwall, where we barbecued on the beach, watched hawks, gorged on cream tea and ice cream, walked along clifftop paths at night and attempted to reconstruct the various broken pieces of board games we found in a cupboard in the cottage we were staying in. I should perhaps have mentioned this before we went. What's important, however, is that we are back and planning future content, as well as beginning to put together Fuselit: Aquarium with a September release in mind. The deadline for submissions is up! However, we are now calling for submissions for Fuselit's 14th issue, which will be entitled Mars. Full submission guidelines here.

Things to look out for on this blog in the near future:

• More poet top trumps.
• A 'behind the scenes' look at the Fuselit sweatshop.
• Another back issue of Fuselit rendered as a Make-Your-Own version. This time it will be issue 2, Catapult.
• More poetry reviews.
• Commemorative paper plates (possibly).
• A downloadable, printoffable adventure board game as a build up to the launch of Aquarium.
• Information about forthcoming shows Kirsty and myself will be performing at.

Keep your ear to the ground!

The 12th issue of Fuselit, Fox is on sale now. Here is what it looks like:















And here is a little of what is contained within:


BROOKLYN COPELAND
No Sons of Liberty

But he did not RSVP.
This was December, glittering cold.

His valise was lady-like. His pockets deep
and bulging with poachlings.

A cough of words
under his breath: no condition

for a Harbour party.
Had he tried to warn us in our sleep?

He was a wolf, but we were not his sheep.
We were foxes,

flicking our thin black wrists
over the map-man’s politics.

For fun, gekkered in the boxing ring.
Our vixens, two years American-

Brahmin, for fun, wore Wampum beads.
Did he know us, our wolf-cousin,

from some transatlantic dream? We
could not place his accent.

True, we ought to have handcuffed and stuffed
him. Asked his name

in the very least.
We ought to have checked our awe

and affection, and served him
Boston Tea. And we would have,

in a heartbeat,
had he only RSVP’d.


~


RAB GREEN
The Man and the Head Cold

Delirious and squinty, giggling with sickness, think nothing to telling stories, toss consequence like food aid – who lands on their feet? who lands on their back? Cast bones best of five, pick fox meat from hen’s teeth, swap futures for superstars and retards. And the lesson to learn, is “Yir aw fucked an wunderful”.

Take a lemsip and rest. Fall back in line. From evolution. To the alphabet.


~


Art by BEK GALLOWAY














~

Screenshot from Foxleigh battles Death in all Its forms part 3 (Death manifested as charred seraphim piloted pedal powered gyrocopter), a game by CLIFF HAMMETT