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About
Robert Peake's poems have appeared in Iota, North American Review, Poetry International, Rattle, and are forthcoming in Magma Poetry.
Articles in the Category of Readings
“A Game of Sevens” (Film-Poem)
28 January 2012
“Same-Day Return” (Film-Poem)
21 January 2012
This evening, we collaborated on another film-poem. We live near the end of the Northern Line, and our evenings are pleasantly haunted by the sound of the train.
Long Poem Magazine Launch Reading
19 January 2012
Readers will know I don’t generally consider myself a long poem poet. At the T.S. Eliot Shortlist Reading last weekend, Sean O’Brien remarked that one of the most dreaded phrases in a poetry reading is (said darkly), “and now for something longer.” Recalling this, I descended the stairs of the brutalist Barbican Theater into the music library, recalling the Vogon dungeon from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in which the protagonist is forced to listen to the “third worst poetry in the universe” as torture.
Fortunately, owing to great variety, imagination, and craft, the evening was anything but a Vogon experience. I was pleased to read my own poem, “In Pieces”, after The Lewis Chessmen, alongside nearly a dozen others. Continue Reading “Long Poem Magazine Launch Reading”
“Upon Arrival” (A Film-Poem)
7 January 2012
From the window of my office in Holborn, I watch the changing light of the London skyline with fascination.
Yesterday, with the help of an iPhone app, I propped my phone by the window for several hours and set it to take pictures six times per minute. I composited these images into video at 24 frames per second using Quicktime, then looped the clip back-and-forth, adjusted the colour, and added a panning and zooming effect using iMovie.
Valerie and I collaborated this morning on some accompanying words and music, combining it all together into another film-poem.
“Piece Work” (A Film-Poem)
2 January 2012
This evening, Valerie and I collaborated on our first film-poem. She wrote an excellent summary of the process on her own website. Here is the video and the poem:
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”
