Peter Barlow’s Cigarette at the Carlton Club

Our favourite “afternoon of alternative poetries” Peter Barlow’s Cigarette is back for the Autumn/Winter season, and it’s bringing a very special bumper four-strong line-up to the Carlton Club in Whalley Range.

Peter Barlow’s Cigarette #49 is a special event celebrating the anthology Arcadian Rustbelt: The Second Generation of British Underground Poetry, published earlier this year with legendary Waterloo Press. PBC’s guest readers this month are poets from the anthology David Annwn, Keith Jafrate and Elizabeth James, and John Goodby, who co-edited the book with Andrew Duncan.

Here’s the book’s blurb: “This anthology is designed to answer a specific question: was there a second generation of alternative poetry in Britain, after the high tide of the Seventies? The inescapable context is poets reacting to Thatcherism. Much of the country was turning into rustbelt. But the enforced leisure could create space in which new art could be made. The design involves a (theoretical) series of anthologies of the Alternative world, within which this volume records a rigorously and specifically defined chronological section. We recover 28 poets from a period (1980 to 1994) in which the Underground had gone into a winter metabolism, while virtually anything that made poetry more innovative and expressive would lead it off the accepted paths and get it excluded from the High Street outlets. This is a moment of emergence into daylight.”

We’re very excited to hear from Elizabeth James, whose poems often start from pre-existing textual clippings. They are often interested in the organisation of space by repeating procedures, including 1 : 50 000 : sixteen short poems (1992) and Renga + (2002), which includes two rengas written in collaboration with Peter Manson, unpredictable and intricate works. Originally from Cardiff, Elizabeth James worked at the Victoria & Albert Museum and her other work includes Neither the one nor the other (1999), a collaboration with Frances Presley and radio poems with Jane Draycott.

Born David Jones, David Annwn worked for many years for the Open University. He has written on Blake and his namesake David Jones and is an authority on Gothic, phantasmagoric magic lantern shows and early horror films. His most recent work, Wonder-rig (2024) is a collaboration with the brilliant Lee Duggan (a previous PBC guest) and the artist Nigel Bird. In turbulent/ /boundaries, ‘get going / camera brittle / councillors Petty’ is part of a sequence written in an eight-year struggle against local council corruption which accompanied the planners’ scheme to build on the last greenbelt fields in Wakefield.

Busy in the Huddersfield area, Keith Jafrate is a jazz musician and “his poetry has a jazz feel of always being in the present moment even as the context constantly shifts”. His poems have been published widely, inclduing in Tears in the Fence and Fire, and his work includes Finding Space (1982), In Heaven (1984), War Poems (1987), Timeless Postcard (1994) and long poem Songs for Eurydice (2004).

Raised in Birmingham, with work taking him to Yorkshire via Cork and Swansea, John Goodby was one of the primary anti-Thatcherite poets and has gone the whole route from Trotskyist-minded alternative history cast in mainstream modes to avant garde process work. He is a Dylan Thomas scholar (see Under the Spelling Wall, 2013) and co-editor, with Lyndon Davies, of The Edge of Necessary (2018), the first anthology of Welsh innovative poetry, and the Hay Poetry Jamborees 2009-12. Works include A Birmingham Yank (1998), uncaged sea (2008), Wine Night White (2010), Illennium (2010) and The No Breath (2018).

We can’t wait as there’s been a bit of a break since the PBC team – Tim Allen, Joey Frances and Rachel Sills – brought us Peter Barlow’s Cigarette #48 in May and their annual open mic fundraiser pop-up at Dulcimer in Chorlton.

BTW, you can also see John Goodby at Manchester Poets, now back in its original home of Chorlton Library, on Friday 17 October, and you should also check out long-running (in fact, ten years!) Speak Easy at Dulcimer – their next is a National Poetry Day Special on Thursday 2 October when they will host a humdinger of an open mic.