For 25 years Peter Reading has been one of Britain’s most original and controversial poets: angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious, and heartbreaking. In Spring 2001 we traveled to England and recorded Peter Reading reading his entire body of poetry. In celebration of the publication of his third Collected Poems by Bloodaxe Books, we are delighted to bring the voice and work of Peter Reading to a wide audience.
Peter Reading is one of Britain’s most original and controversial poets: angry, gruesomely ironic, hilarious and heartbreaking. He is probably the most skilful and technically inventive poet writing today, mixing the matter and speech of the gutter with highly sophisticated metrical and syllabic patterns to produce scathing and grotesque accounts of lives blighted by greed, ignorance and political ineptness.
Recent books by Neil Roberts, Sean O’Brien and Antony Thwaite have discussed Peter Reading’s work; Isabel Martin’s definitive Reading Peter Reading has marked out in detail the scholarly territory; and Bloodaxe have, in 1995, 1996, and 2003, published his three-volume Collected Poems, bringing together his numerous volumes of poetry published over the previous quarter of a century. This is a remarkable rate of productivity, made partly possible by Reading’s willingness to rework and retry his central themes, styles and experiments.
Below are selected recordings from Lannan’s visit to Mr. Reading in 2001. You will need Real Audio software to listen to these files. Please visit www.real.com for a free download if you do not already have this software on your computer.
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1974, The Municipality's Elderly, Peter Reading
1974, The Municipality's Elderly, Peter Reading
Publisher: Secker & Warburg
Peter Reading’s book, The Municipality’s Elderly, shows evidence of Reading’s literary mentors, Frost, Hopkins, Auden, Eliot, and Larkin amongst others, as well as a distinctively individual voice and style. The poems’ interest in decay and death presages Reading’s permanent themes of transcendence through nature alone, and the all-pervasiveness of death. The book also contains almost all the poems included in the Outpost Publications book (1970), Water and Waste. Mr. Reading has said, “Amongst the places I tried to bombard with stuff was Outposts Magazine. Howard Sergeant wrote to me saying, ‘I don’t want to use the enclosed, but….would you like to produce a small book?’….That was how Water and Waste came about.”
The Municipality’s Elderly
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1976, The Prison Cell, Peter Reading
Publisher: Secker & Warburg
Reading has said, “In spite of the fact that the poems…are about love, I trust that I have been sensible, throughout the volume, of Auden’s cautionary words, inasmuch as I have earnestly endeavoured to avoid the difficulties which attend this somewhat thorny topic. What is said in a poem is not necessarily journalistically accurate, though it aims, of course, at being the truth. Lying about people and events, then, can be a most useful poetic device (though it enrages and estranges acquaintances by the dozen.”
Prison Cell
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1977, Nothing for Anyone, Peter Reading
1977, Nothing for Anyone, Peter Reading
Publisher: Secker & Warburg
The epigram for Nothing for Anyone says, ‘Mercifully, we’re only/ molested by the Big Issue/ in the watches of the night;/ in daylight hours we busy/ourselves with the Trivial.’ A mixture of poems and prose works full of social satire, “….Reading’s book is an oasis of intellect and wit. Experimenting with styles and word games, he achieves some very entertaining and interesting effects. A bitter wit marks all these poems.”
Nothing for Anyone
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1979, Fiction, Peter Reading
Publisher: Secker & Warburg
Fiction was Peter Reading’s fourth published volume of poems and contains 23 poems. The epigraph sets the central theme: “Verse is not Fiction/ Ask any librarian.” “Reality” and fiction are always in question and the work deals with the absence of centers of meaning, even including this last line in the first poem, Fiction, ‘Even one’s self is wholly fictitious.’
Fiction
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1981, Tom O'Bedlam's Beauties, Peter Reading
1981, Tom O'Bedlam's Beauties, Peter Reading
Publisher: Secker & Warburg
Tom O’Bedlams’s Beauties was the first Reading volume to garner a long review in the Times Literary Supplement. The TLS review was positive, ….Reading has ‘steadily made his way into a territory explores by no one lese in contemporary British poetry.’ The volume is also considered by Isabel Martin as the first “typical Reading: variations on one large, unusual theme are bound into a mosaic structure by novelistic devices.”
Tom O’Bedlam’s Beauties
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1983, 5x5x5x5x5x, Peter Reading
Publisher: Ceolfrith Press
5x5x5x5x5 was conceived as collaboration with artist, David Butler, and originally published with his images. It consists of 5 sections, each section of 5 units, each unit 5 stanzas, each stanza 5 lines, each line 5 syllables (there is one hypercatalectic line in 2 v). 5 personae are observed in 5 (licensed) locations.
The following is the first two stanzas of Unit 1, Section 1:
A dead wombat, stuffed
with contemptuous
disregard for all
anatomical
possibility,
is nailed to a beam
with a Davy lamp
and a World War I
gas-mask and a glass
fashioned like a boot.
5×5×5×5×5
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1983, Diplopic, Peter Reading
Publisher: Secker & Warburg
For Diplopic, his sixth book, Peter Reading received the Dylan Thomas Award. The judges explained their decision in these words: “The judges’ decision is that the Award should go to Peter Reading for poems in his collection, Diplopic. In these we especially admired the combination of comedy, intellectual inventiveness, fantasy (reaching for a shared reality) and energy of expression.” In explaining the book’s title, Reading wrote, “Diplopic means pertaining to double vision. Every subject is treated from two sides. The funny and the ghastly are symbiotic…..The book is meant to work as a whole, not just a gathering of poems, so that sub-plots recur throughout – a bit like a novel. The book is meant to be funny and horrible.”
Diplopic
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1984, C, Peter Reading
Publisher: Secker & Warburg
C was Reading’s seventh book and the fourth to receive a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. It consists of 100 100-word units, some in prose form, some in diverse verse forms: haiku, sonnet, iambic pentameter, amongst many others. Reading said of it, “ C is about having a terminal illness and ways in which people confront death and dying.”
C
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1986, Stet, Peter Reading
Publisher: Secker & Warburg
Stet, which won the Whitbread Prize, is short, only 40 pages, the poems are untitled, and it is the first Reading book without page numbers. There are 79 “units”, scattered across the pages, in collage format. Here memories of childhood, wars, the arms industry, the state of the British economy, politics, destruction of rainforest are presented as disparate themes in a cohesive vision.
Stet
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1988, Final Demands, Peter Reading
Publisher: Secker & Warburg
Final Demands, Peter Reading’s thirteenth volume, continues with his theme, ‘an on-running meditation on the impotence of his art’. The book has unnumbered pages containing a collage of untitled poems and prose from various voices, including a chapter from a novel (pseudo-found) and letters Reading describes as found material “some reworked, some verbatim.” Reading created visual differentiation of the voices by use of type style, from ornate handwriting to italics, large children’s book typeface, and typewriter print.
Final Demands
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1989, Perduta Gente, Peter Reading
Publisher: Secker & Warburg
Perduta Gente, a Poetry Book Society Choice, garnered international attention for Reading. The book has a strong single vision put forward in untitled poems, prose pieces, photocopied newspapers, and excerpts from secret documents, all on unnumbered pages, so that it can be read in any order. “Perduta Gente is the unmitigated summation of human catastrophe Reading has been moving towards. ….the ills of humanity, unmitigable though inflected by changing times, are reading’s theme, and this time he’s managed to get most of them in.”
Perduta Gente
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1990, Shitheads, Peter Reading
Publisher: Squirrelprick Press
In November 1989, Peter Reading announced a ‘very short limited edition of about a dozen poems, which…I found myself with. They are all slightly separate and they all have titles. I wasn’t going to expand them into anything larger. But they all, as it turned, out, go together. They include some translations of short pieces by Catullus into the original metres…..and some of my own. They’re all about unsatisfactory people. It’s called Shitheads.”
Shitheads
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1992, Evagatory, Peter Reading
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Peter Reading says of this volume. “It started life….as an intention to produce a mixture of a picaresque Odyssey travelogue……..Well, I’ve fallen miserably short of that idea, not least in length, but the idea of wandering and repetitive occurrences of the same voice under different circumstances I have managed to keep.”
Evagatory
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1994, Last Poems, Peter Reading
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Last Poems, written at a time of great change in Peter Reading’s personal life, presents itself as a posthumous collection prepared by ‘John Bilston” after the poet’s suicide. Here the pages have numbers, the poems have titles, for Reading had said he wanted to ‘get back to writing individual poems.’ The death of the last hero, Beowulf, opens the book, and as Isabel Martin writes in Reading Peter Reading, “nothing has changed since then: fraud and disappointment, hunger and misery, havoc and pestilence, murder and slaughter – the apocalypse is on the horizon, accelerated in the 20th century.”
Last Poems
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1996, Eschatological, Peter Reading
Publisher: Bloodaxe (included in Collected Poems 2: Poems 1985-1996)
In her indispensable book, Reading Peter Reading, Isabel Martin writes, “Eschatological as a title is a distillation of the book’s agenda: scatology, classicism, and the contemplation of three of the Last Four Things: Death, Judgement, and Hell. [The book] shows Reading casting last glances over his shoulder and erecting a pyre of all the images of “Last Things” he happens to see on earth.”
Eschatological
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1997, Work in Regress, Peter Reading
Publisher: Bloodaxe
Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and a Poetry Book Society Choice, Work in Regress is still committed to the epic, steeped in and championing the wisdom and poetic forms of the ancient cultures - Greeks, Anglo-Saxons, Chinese. A slim volume of impressive poems, this is a wonderful distillation of Reading’s themes and powers as a poet.
Work in Regress
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1999, Ob, Peter Reading
Publisher: Bloodaxe
This book followed various birding trips to the Gulf of Mexico, Canada, and the mountains of Arizona, where he saw species of birds and migrations on a scale new to him. While many poems celebrate these journeys, others treat death and pseudo-death, suicide, and even a funeral in very personal and introspective terms.
Ob
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2000, Marfan, Peter Reading
Publisher: Bloodaxe
Peter Reading called Marfan, a ‘straightforward topographical travelogue’. The book has photographs by Jay Shuttleworth, collages by Reading, and a single book-length poem, written as a result of a yearlong Lannan Foundation residency in the small, high plains town of Marfa, Texas. The poem investigates, researches, observes and describes – often with great humor – the history, geology, topography, folklore, politics, superstitions, art, commerce and contemporary life in this US/Mexican border area.
Marfan
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2001, [untitled], Peter Reading
Publisher: Bloodaxe
During his writing residency year in Marfa, Texas, Reading produced three pamphlets which togehter comprise [untitled]. Apophthegmatic is inspired by Chinese poetry and in haiku and tankas, muses on the brevity of life and the poet’s anticipated death; Repetitious, only 6 pages long, is a summary of Reading’s themes, and refers to or repeats lines from other volumes; Copla a Pie Quebrado, 4 pages long, featuring Reading’s poems overlaying photographs of Marfa.
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2002, Faunal, Peter Reading
Publisher: Bloodaxe
This new volume opens with a quote from Charles Darwin: “We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence.” Faunal is a book of poems about animals, or more specifically about Reading’s real or imagined experiences of the beasts of the earth, and of the most powerful beast of all, humanity. The poems are peppered with Latin names which function as tags marking the animal world as the property of the linguistic universe constructed by people, and Reading’s main attention here is to the ways in which people interact with animals, usually to the detriment of the latter.
(courtesy of John Sears, www.popmatters.com)
Faunal
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Poet Peter Reading was born on 27 July 1946 in Liverpool, England. He worked as a schoolteacher in Liverpool (1967-68) and at Liverpool College of Art where he taught Art History (1968-70). He was Writer in Residence at Sunderland Polytechnic (1981-83) and he won a Cholmondeley Award in 1978. His collection Diplopic (1983) won the inaugural Dylan Thomas Award. Stet (1986) won the Whitbread Poetry Award and he was awarded a Lannan Award for Poetry in 1990. In 1997 he held the Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. The collection Marfan (2000) was inspired by his tenure as Lannan Foundation Writer in Residence in Marfa, Texas, in 1999. His recent collections of poetry include [untitled] (2001), Faunal (2002), and Collected Poems Volume III: Poems 1997-2003. Reading is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
He is above all an experimental poet, playing with the formal traditions and rhythms of English in liberating ways. Reading has almost single-handedly demonstrated the possibilities of different metrical forms in English, and of the production of works that are densely, complexly interrelated to each other.