first, fast, last vispo

Like olden days when great beat generation US 45rpm singles couldn't make the British hit parade because Tin Pan Alley ruled the charts - The Someday Funnies has not yet hit radar UK - neither comics fandom nor liberal arts media.

Short extract year-old post here . Similar observation can arguably be made about The Last Vispo Anthology; a fairly new tome produced by Fantagraphics (vispo's own independent website here)

With David Miller's and Chris McCabe's Visual Poetics exhibition at London's Saison Poetry Library extended until May 5, due to popularity, and The Last Vispo Anthology physically dominating small poetry section of UK's chain bookstores, it begs question - if this is the last "vispo" anthology, what was the first? With vispo's start date 1998, was Cobbing and Upton edited Word Score Utterance Choreography (Writers Forum,1998) in editors' mind?

Doesn't seem to be large crossover between Poetry Library's current exhibition display and international contributors to Fantagraphics book, suggesting book and exhibition have been conceived and curated in separate bubbles on both sides of the pond. Like pre-Liverpool beat group/Mersey poet days, with largely different hit parades and music/publishing industries on each side of the Atlantic- except this isn't 1961.

The UK doesn't have comics publishers doing poetry. Ghostly influence of Bob Cobbing and his Writers Forum looms like 20th century giant within and above these two comparable, current, very welcome "vispo" endeavours.

gleewarrrd

"...only can die once, right sir..."

'cover' song our teachers learn us on youtube

Letter on Thatcherspeak

Twenty-five years ago the present writer was scribblin' letters, articles, cartoons for British (stalin lite) communist weekly  
7 Days // picture from the past March 25 1988.

Sean Bonney's letters on harmony sounded -
https://soundcloud.com/sean-bonney/letters-on-harmony

Margaret Thatcher is all around us

Margaret Roberts and a film star

Photograph taken at Dartford Conservative fête 1951.  (from Bromley Times 26/1/12 reviewing The Iron Lady movie)

  

Meryl Streep

'political verse' extract - Songs Our Teachers Learn Us, 
or, Lessons To Be Taught (Michael John Weller's HomeBaked Books PDF, 2013) slight return...