Highgate Poets Website

Articles in the Category of Community

Highgate Poets Website

13 December 2011

In 2006, after moving to Ojai, California from Los Angeles, I helped redesign the Ojai Poetry Festival website. Drawing inspiration from print designs by the late Hope Frasier, I outfitted the site with a newsletter, RSS news feed, and online ticket sales system, as well as information about headliner poets and photos from past events. The site served the group well for several seasons, until the festival recently went into hibernation for financial reasons.

Having recently moved to North London and joined the Highgate Poets, I seized the opportunity to help them put up their new website soon after being accepted into the group. What took weeks of custom programming to create the content management system for the Ojai Poetry Festival only took a matter of hours this time, owing to advances in the WordPress blog software.

Thanks also to a host of software plugins, the site not only features member news, but has a calendar of events, newsletter, integration with the group’s Twitter account, and much more. Going forward, options for selling anthologies on the site or enriching the list of members with more detail is just clicks away.

It is a pleasure to be associated with such a fine group of poets, actively writing and publishing in the UK, and remarkable to see how open source software such as WordPress makes setting up a dynamic website easier all the time.

By Robert Peake | Also posted in Marketing, PHP, Poetry, Technology | Tagged Highgate Poets, Ojai Poetry Festival | Comments (5)

Highgate Poets Reading at Torriano Meeting House

27 November 2011

I made my way down to Kentish Town this evening to hear four members of The Highgate Poets read their work. As a newly-accepted member of the group, I was treated to a brief history lesson about the venue by coordinator Anne Ballard before the evening got underway. It turns out that Torriano House is synonymous with Hungarian Anarcho-Communist Poet John Rety, who founded and ran it as a centre of poetry and social change in North London for many years before his death.

The open reading portion of the evening was just as eclectic as those I had attended in California. The flavour, though, was different. Two older gentlemen sang folk songs a cappella. Themes of opera, atheism, and of course anti-war sentiment peppered the poems from the floor. David Floyd promoted his new pamphlet entitled “Protest.” The walls were lined with ink drawings depicting the horrors associated with capitalist greed for oil. And at the back table, a periodical called Peace News replaced what had typically been promoted at Torriano House–The Daily Worker.

The featured poets themselves took up less directly political themes. Continue Reading “Highgate Poets Reading at Torriano Meeting House” »

By Robert Peake | Also posted in Poetry, Readings | Tagged Anne Ballard, David Floyd, Dennis Evans, Diana Bishop, Highgate Poets, John Rety, Ruth Igram, Sarah Doyle, Torriano Meeting House | Comments (2)

Overcoming Poetic Culture Shock

5 November 2011

“We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.”

-Oscar Wilde, 1887

Oscar Wilde would be pleased to know that, based on my experience so far as an American in London, Britain and America are still very much separated by a common language. More than this, as a transplanted poet beginning to send down roots into unfamiliar ground, I am discovering that the set of poetic impulses that find favour in the UK differ from those enriched by my native soil. This makes sense: so much about art is a matter of taste, and so much about taste can be cultural.

And so, even as I have been experiencing culture shock in my ordinary life, I am also going through a kind of poetic culture shock as I find my way in this new literary terrain. One of the best ways I have found to get through culture shock of any kind is to articulate and embrace what is unique about the new environment. While it would be impossible to describe, universally and categorically, what distinguishes British and American poetics, I recognise certain differences on instinct. The Americas could not have made a Seamus Heaney; the British Isles could not produce a Sharon Olds.

And so, I have been making a personal and highly subjective investigation into the strengths of each culture’s contemporary poetry, by reading and re-reading two books: The Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner) and The Best British Poetry 2011 (Salt). I took note of the poems I liked most, then listed the qualities held in common by my favourites from each book.

Qualities of Contemporary British and American Poetry
British	American
Context and Continuity	Invention and Spontaneity
Focus on Music	Focus on Narration
Overt Intellectual Core	Overt Emotional Core
Academic Influence	Psychological Influence

Continue Reading “Overcoming Poetic Culture Shock” »

By Robert Peake | Also posted in Insights, Life, Poetry | Tagged Anglo-American Anthropology, Culture Shock | Comments (7)

A Bird Black as the Sun

1 November 2011

I came home tonight to a lovely surprise: my contributor’s copy of A Bird Black as the Sun: California Poets on Crows & Ravens (Green Poet Press, 2011). If being a poet in California was like being in High School, this anthology would be my yearbook. The table of contents reads like a trip down memory lane.

Who knew these dark muses could set the quills of so many fine poet-friends a-quiver? I know what I will be reading on the tube for the rest of this week–poems like Jackson Wheeler‘s “Crow Sings Jazz” and a promising-sounding one by Paul Fericano, ever obsessed with The Three Stooges, entitled “Curly Howard Misreads Edgar Allen Poe.”

My own poem, “Shelf Road, Ojai” (originally titled “Crow”) qualified me first for an honourable mention in the Atlantic Monthly Student Poetry Competition, then as a runner-up in the Indiana Review Poetry Prize–but has never actually been published before. Re-reading it brings me back to the eponymous trail in a Shangri-La now some six thousand miles away. Perhaps all along these messages-in-a-bottle I call poems were only ever meant to return to me on the shores of a different island, to remind me of who I was, and who was with me, everywhere that I have been.

The anthology is now available at local bookstores or on Amazon.com.

By Robert Peake | Also posted in Poetry, Publications | Tagged Anthologies, California, Crows, Ojai | Comments (1)

A Poet’s Tube Map

8 October 2011

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

-Genesis 2:19 (KJV)

There are many ways to settle in to a new place. One is to give them names of one’s own. Inspired by parodies giving alternate names to tube stations in London, I have produced a map whose stations take into account the poetic landscape. This is not intended to be the poet’s tube map, but rather a poet’s tube map–mine, representing my own thoughts and experiences at the intersection between London and the lyre.

Click to view the map.

By Robert Peake | Also posted in Humor, Insights, Life, Poetry, Travel | Tagged Culture Shock, London | Comments (2)

First Poetry Event in London

15 September 2011

I recently attended my first poetry reading since moving to London, and wrote about the experience for the Silk Road Review Blog:

As I travelled by tube to the Southbank Centre to attend the first event of the London Literature Festival, and my first poetry reading since moving to London two months ago, I took with me my American expectations about poetry venues: coffee shops, small community centers, the occasional well-appointed-but-out-of-the way theater or library hall. Seated facing the podium on the sixth floor of this clean, bright temple to art, I kept examining the layers of the backdrop as if it were a painting. First, a Union Jack. Then the London Eye. And on the far side of the Thames, the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. This was not a painting, however, but a window. The statement was clear: art, and for this evening, poetry, commands a central place in Britain. However, centrality means anything but homogeneity, as the four readers in this “Poetry of Place” event demonstrated.

Read the full article online at the Silk Road Review Blog.