{"id":699,"date":"2010-09-20T18:09:48","date_gmt":"2010-09-20T18:09:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/?p=699"},"modified":"2025-02-03T12:09:46","modified_gmt":"2025-02-03T12:09:46","slug":"on-difficult-to-find-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/2010\/09\/20\/on-difficult-to-find-books\/","title":{"rendered":"On Difficult-to-find Books"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Brian Patten\u2019s brilliant BBC radio essay on lost poets \u2013 and the one whose poems astonished me the most was Rosemary Tonks \u2013 made me think of the poets I like who are \u2013 not lost \u2013 but difficult to get hold of. In fact, getting hold of Rosemary Tonks\u2019 two poetry collections has proven, for me anyhow, impossible. Currently unavailable on Amazon, I haven\u2019t found any library copies, couldn\u2019t locate \u2018Badly Chosen Lover\u2019 online or in an anthology and had to transcribe it from the BBC recording of her 1960s reading, in her cool-as-you-like voice, opening with the sock-it-to-them lines: \u2018You took a great piece of my life \/ and you took it under false pretences, \/ that piece of time.\u2019 Wow. This woman isn\u2019t fooling around. \u2018Story of a Hotel Room\u2019 I could at least track down, with its electric, compelling nakedness. People are crying out for this kind of stuff! Some clever publisher should buy the rights for <em>Iliad of Broken Sentences <\/em>and <em>Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms<\/em>, and publish Rosemary Tonks.<\/p>\n<p>About three years ago I went to a <em>tanka <\/em>workshop, and there encountered the poems of Machi Tawara, who I had never heard of but who sold \u2013 wait for it \u2013 two and a half millon copies of her first poetry book and who is so famous in Japan she has her own tv show. Japan is apparently a strange country where poets can sell enough poetry to make a living. Her <em>tanka<\/em> delighted me, and at least I have been able to get hold of <em>Salad Anniversary<\/em>, after three years, and at considerable cost. But it had to be the Jack Stamm translation: that is the best one, I am advised.<\/p>\n<p>So, given these difficulties with accessing wonderful poetry, I am glad that I bought John Adlard\u2019s <em>The Lichfield Elegies<\/em>, published by the Aylesford Press in 1991, before it disappeared from sight forever \u2013 the dumb idea that is touted around that good poetry will survive merely by virtue of it being good I think is nonsense, it is a matter of luck, even in the digital age. So I am even more pleased that Jenny Penberthy has gathered together all of Lorine Niedecker\u2019s pieces which before had been only here and there \u2013 like stray pieces of cut grass \u2013 into the beautiful <em>Collected Works<\/em>. Everyone should have a copy of this edition, available from the University of California Press. Niedecker\u2019s poems are witty, warm, sharp, epic, epigrammatic, experimental, formally rigorous, for the voice, for the page, humorous, surrealist, realist \u2013 often at the same time and with tonal unity:<\/p>\n<p>Ah your face<\/p>\n<p>but it\u2019s whether<\/p>\n<p>you can keep me warm<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Richard Lambert<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Brian Patten\u2019s brilliant BBC radio essay on lost poets \u2013 and the one whose poems astonished me the most was Rosemary Tonks \u2013 made me think of the poets I<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":601,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=699"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12174,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699\/revisions\/12174"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}