Focus: Jenni Mac (Narc Magazine)
Who are you and where are you from?
I am Jenni Mac, and this is my left thumb.
What is it you do?
I am fortunate enough to fix breakfast every morning. Before, after and during that I make drawings, songs, poems and performances.
How long have you been doing it?
I had a feeling early on and it all went from there. I forgot how to draw for years, then remembered in late 2020. I am a recovering diarist and writing poems is my inherent vice in lieu of that habit – that ended/began now around fifteen years back. With music I ebb and flow muscularly, but I’ve been singing since I found a voice somewhere in the mid-1990s. I am part of Perhaps Now performance troupe, formed 2023, and now I have six sets of collarbones.
What inspires you?
Rhythm. Beauty. Fluctuating prices of gasoline. Precarity. Tenderness. Low quality American Mustard. Good paintings. Bad dreams. My cat, Penny.
Tell us about your work.
Across the things I do, I seek to fool with expectation – I want to mesmerise with curiosity, the uncanny, & chance. I make character of object, of sentiment, of dissonance, and introduce these characters as a strange and fascinating relative. The unfamiliar is always familiar if you consider it properly. l/logic, contemplation. An impossibly wet rubber hand to everyday absurdity, coping mechanisms & the traditions of the surreal.
What have you got coming up in the future?
My book ‘I Watch a Fish Die in the 1950s’ is coming out on July 29th, published by Kulvert Press. I am frequently in lots of different places. In August, I and the Troupe will be in Scotland making new work. In September I will be in Yorkshire a while making an album, then the Netherlands making a clown show. I have plans to perform from the book in Bristol. Brighton, and London, but dates of these shows are tbc.
Where can people find out more about you?
Any and all are welcome to find an early internet rendition of a website at www.jennimac.hotglue.me, can follow my whereabouts on Instagram via @gotohell_jm, and can consider the book via www.kulvertbooks.com/
'Late Sketches & Studies' Tony Towle - reviewed by Dr Michael Marcinkowski for The Poetry Review
So I’ve told this story to Edmund English from Kulvert Press a few times now, mostly because I like to repeat myself and even though at this point I know Ed and feel pretty comfortable with him I never have anything to say when I see him (which is just the same as when I see anybody), so I just repeat myself, and what I usually tell him is that I got a copy of Towle’s first big book, North, when Miles Champion, taking pity on me, led me down to the basement of St Mark’s Church in the Bowery and loaded me up with what in my mind is still the greatest single stack of books ever assembled. Between Raworth’s Ace (which in its Ariel/Edge edition remained in my back pocket for months) and Ted Greenwald’s Word of Mouth (we should all take a minute to deeply breath in the volume’s sweet pot-infused abstraction in honour of Ted) there was Towle’s North, his first big book and from Colombia University Press. It was a portentous
debut: Awarded the Frank O’Hara memorial prize and published only four or five year’s after O’Hara’s death, it must have been quite a moment, with everyone in that so-much over-socialised scene still grieving Frank but wanting to celebrate Tony nevertheless. And Jasper Johns did the cover, just like Towle would have Robert Motherwell do another for him five or six years later.
There’s an amazing review of North from the November 1972 San Francisco Book Review that Towle has on his website:
“Towle has a wife and daughter and supposedly good eyes,
but all he gives us are combinations of Frank
O’Hara and Milton.”
Which, as reviews go, isn’t really that bad (or maybe it’s great), but there’s an even better one from Jon M. Warner from the Hunter College Library: “I can find nothing in it that excites, inspires, invigorates, or in any way strikes the imagination.” Obviously, there’s no accounting for taste, but if those are indeed real review (is it wrong of me to doubt?), I think they show something about the snail’s pace of cultural dispersion in the early 1970s: some people just didn’t know what was going on, even if you were just down the street at Hunter College. It’s hard to remember, or I guess to understand in retrospect, that the New York poets of the 1960s or so were doing something unique in American poetry, and for as much as they liked to mime like they were ripping off the French, they were doing something unique for poetry in general. There’s a line that’s maybe from Frank O’Hara, but I can’t remember, that in NY in the 1950s and 1960s if you had something to say to someone you could pick up the telephone or just as easily you could write them a poem. Whatever it exactly was, the point is that the poems were bound up in the social scene, with talking, and, even as maybe the youngest of the original NY scene (or maybe it was the more uptown NY scene), Towle was always right there. I remember probably around 2004 having someone at St Mark’s whisper “that’s Tony Towle” to me.
Read the full review here.
Late Sketches & Studies - Tony Towle
Review (Crack Magazine)
Tony Towle was born and raised in New York City. Now in his 80s, he’s published numerous collections of poems and this, his latest, is brought to us by a Newcastle-based press. It’s a collection that wears its philosophising lightly: “To the next person who asks how I am, / I will respond: “As young as I’m / ever going to be, but I hope not as old,” / because that’s what an old person / might have quipped in the old days”.
Read the full article here.
Olly J. Taylor interviewd on BBC Upload with Leo Ulph - Radio Transcript 05/06/2025
Kairen Kemp - Interviewer
Oliver Taylor - Interviewee
Kairen: When was it you first started writing?
Oliver: At the beginning of lockdown when I had all that time to myself. I was in a band previously, before lockdown had happened, but I was awful at writing music.
Kairen: (Laughter)
Oliver: But, I kind of realised that the lyric side of music I really enjoyed, and I spent all of my time on that as opposed to any other element. I didn’t like being in a band, I much preferred doing my own thing, and the most accessible way of self-expression for me was poetry, particularly in the form I write which is prose poetry. So, it was that and just being bored really...
Kairen: I think you’ve got an MA in Creative Writing, haven’t you?
Oliver: Yeah, I did an original degree in Law, but then as I was doing it I wasn’t enjoying it. It was a bit of an unusual choice which I felt I picked simply because I wanted to go to University, but then English was something I should have picked, and then I did end up doing it in a Masters degree.
Kairen: As anyone who is listening will notice, you have this gorgeous accent-
Oliver: Thank you very much (laughter).
Kairen: And a lot of your work seems to be inspired by the area in which you were living. Is the northern voice important to you?
Oliver: 100%. I don’t write as if I am romanticising the town I come from. I really just write about what I am used to, certain people I have met over the years and certain experiences I have had, and it won’t always seem pretty, you know? But I do love writing about where I am from, and the northern voice is incredibly important to me. But, obviously I am here now in Brighton.
Kairen: So, why Brighton?
Oliver: I moved here after university and I’ve been here a few times. The visits were all it took for me to fall in love with it (Brighton). It wasn’t me wanting to get out of the north because of it being not for me, I love it, but I just wanted to move somewhere far away just to see whether I could do it. So far it is going well. I had never been to any of the poetry nights in Brighton, but I knew they were going to be good, you can just kind of tell, and luckily it has been amazing.
Kairen: And of course, I met you at Of The Chest (A Brighton-based poetry event)
Oliver: Yeah, Of The Chest, what a night (laughter)
Kairen: How did it feel the first time you stepped up and read your own stuff?
Oliver: Well, because I haven’t heard any other northern-speaking poets in Brighton, it was always going to be quite vulnerable, as vulnerable as it already is because you are doing poetry. It was scary, but I am used to it now, and I suppose it is a good way to separate yourself and make yourself stand out (the northern accent).
Kairen: Yeah, and I think that if it is a bit scary, it sharpens your delivery, doesn’t it?
Oliver: Yeah, 100%.
Kairen: And... It was brilliant to hear a northern voice, especially because nobody else can read your poetry in the same way that you do.
Oliver: Yeah, I guess so.
Kairen: It is a really interesting form and it is not rhyming poetry, is it?
Oliver: No, where I can help it, I always try to distance myself from rhyming and wordplay, and having a concrete structure. What I do is prose poetry where there is nothing really skillful about it, it is more like you are just writing whatever is on your mind with no limits. There is nothing to prevent you from saying anything you want. It is completely expressive.
Kairen: Your power of miniscule observation is brilliant, and that I really liked. Some of it is dark, but there is always this point where you just sit and smile.
Oliver: I appreciate that. I like making the stuff I write absurd. It’s an absurd country in its own way (England). It’s absurd in ways that English people know, and the people who live in England. I write in a kind of hyper-observant way about these weird little things that only people who live in England will understand.
Kairen: What would you say to young people who are just starting out? (In poetry)
Oliver: The only thing I would say, and it is going to sound very simple, but read as much as you possibly can. To be honest, without besmirching any other writer’s advice, I think you’d be silly to give any advice other than ‘just read’. That is all you can do. In as much of your spare time as possible, read everything,
and read more than you write. If you did it the other way round, you’re at risk of being repetitive. Read everything, whether it is good or bad or whatever. Read anything that you can get your hands on, and it can take a while, but you will see a natural development. It is as simple as that.
Kairen: Are you going to read something for us, she says excitedly (laughter).
Oliver: Yeah (laughter), I have got something which I have from my collection which is out at the moment. It is called First Guinness in a New City. It is a poem about my love for music.
For every poem I write
I’d love for a melody to be attached.
For music
is every way
I listen to sad songs
to remind myself I am still breathing
And I listen to happy songs
to remind myself
I am still breathing
And I listen to music that can boot doors of of hinges
so I can look the pretty girl in the eye
I use music
in every way a decent melody ever intended
I use Shane Macgowan
to write what I could never poetically articulate
I use music
I don’t always need it
and often when my ears are full already
I don't even want it
But as I step of the train
and onto the platform
the music in my ears
has stripped the fat from my beer belly
It has made me walk with my back
coherently straight
into a night
unafraid of the dark.
My Inspiration: Koef Nielsen (NARC Magazine)
Excerpt: Inspirations come in many guises – as poets, Robert Frost and Edward Thomas, not so much as “nature” poetry but in their language and speech patterns, Creeley, Pickard and Bunting for their concision. Yeats for I made it out of a mouthful of air. From people, heroes such as Tony Harrison, whose drive and intelligence unfolding through his career have awed me ever since Newcastle is Peru, the late Martin Turner who introduced me to Pound while were at school together, and, again, Tom Pickard, with whom I worked over 50 years ago in his bookshop, and at the Morden Tower. His uncompromising commitment to his talent through all opposition and adversity has never failed to inspire me. The Morden Tower, which Tom and Connie founded and made work, was a huge catalyst for poetry in the UK. I seriously believe that Newcastle was nearer then to the West Coast and the Black Mountain School in the US than to London – but this independence has always been the city’s strength as a seed bed for talent across all disciplines.
Read the full article here.
'Late Sketches & Studies' Tony Towle - Reviewed by Martin Stannard
Excerpt: Let’s begin this with a quotation:
you come by to type
your poems and write a
new poem instead on my
old typewriter while I sit
and read a novel about
a lunatic’s analysis of
a poem by Robert Frost
it is all suffocating
Frank O’Hara, from “The Light Presses Down” (July 26, 1963)
and point out that the “you” O’Hara is addressing here is Tony Towle.
Read the full article here.