Sam Riviere

For readers of Roberto Bolaño's Savage Detectives and Muriel Spark's Loitering with Intent, this metaphysical mystery disguised as a picaresque romp follows one poet's spectacular fall from grace to ask a vital question: Is everyone a plagiarist? A scandal has shaken the literary world. As the unnamed narrator of Dead Souls discovers at a cultural festival in central London, the offender is Solomon Wiese, a poet accused of plagiarism. Later that same evening, at a bar near Waterloo Bridge, our narrator encounters the poet in person, and listens to the story of Wiese's rise and fall, a story that takes the entire night--and the remainder of the novel--to tell. Wiese reveals his unconventional views on poetry, childhood encounters with "nothingness," a conspiracy involving the manipulation of documents in the public domain, an identity crisis, a retreat to the country, a meeting with an ex-serviceman with an unexpected offer, the death of an old poet, a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost, an entanglement with a secretive poetry cult, and plans for a triumphant return to the capital, through the theft of poems, illegal war profits, and faked social media accounts--plans in which our narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated. Dead Souls is a metaphysical mystery brilliantly encased in a picaresque romp, a novel that asks a vital question for anyone who makes or engages with art: Is everyone a plagiarist?

Dead Souls

All three-dimensional objects can be experienced in two dimensions: it just takes some careful unpicking of the seams. Witty, comic, plaintive, touching, acerbic, droll, cavalier, caffeinated, irreverent, stringent: Austerities, the mind-altering substantial debut from Sam Riviere, seems to achieve the impossible in being all things at once. Initially conceived as a response to the 'austerity measures' implemented by the coalition government in 2011, the poems quickly began taking on a life in kind: 'cutting' themselves on levels of sentiment, structure and even subject matter. Not content to merely build a series of freethinking poems, these remarkable pieces seem eagerly and mischievously to analyze their moment of creation, then weigh their worth, then consign their excess to the recycling bin thereafter. Experience is speedy, the poems seem to say, so dizzyingly fast that the poetry will inevitably be running to catch up - often arriving at a scene the moment after the moment has gone. The effect is as funny and it is startling, beguiling as it is surprising, and makes Austerities a vivid reminder that deprivation, as Leonard Cohen put it, can be the mother of poetry.

81 Austerities

The Epigrams of Martial

After Fame

For readers of Roberto Bolaño's Savage Detectives and Muriel Spark's Loitering with Intent, this "sublime" and "delightfully unhinged" metaphysical mystery disguised as a picaresque romp follows one poet's spectacular fall from grace to ask a vital question: Is everyone a plagiarist? (Nicolette Polek, author of Imaginary Museums). A scandal has shaken the literary world. As the unnamed narrator of Dead Souls discovers at a cultural festival in central London, the offender is Solomon Wiese, a poet accused of plagiarism. Later that same evening, at a bar near Waterloo Bridge, our narrator encounters the poet in person, and listens to the story of Wiese's rise and fall, a story that takes the entire night—and the remainder of the novel—to tell. Wiese reveals his unconventional views on poetry, childhood encounters with "nothingness," a conspiracy involving the manipulation of documents in the public domain, an identity crisis, a retreat to the country, a meeting with an ex-serviceman with an unexpected offer, the death of an old poet, a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost, an entanglement with a secretive poetry cult, and plans for a triumphant return to the capital, through the theft of poems, illegal war profits, and faked social media accounts—plans in which our narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated. Dead Souls is a metaphysical mystery brilliantly encased in a picaresque romp, a novel that asks a vital question for anyone who makes or engages with art: Is everyone a plagiarist?

A Novel

Frederick Seidel

Kathryn Maris

Occasional Wild Parties brings together Sam Riviere, one of the most discussed of the new generation of British poets, whose 'post-internet' poetry sees him acting now as scribe, now as DJ, taking in everything from technologized romance to celebrity culture as filtered through Kim Kardashian's make-up routine; the 'elegant ghoul' Frederick Seidel, zooming through the dark underbelly of international high society on his Ducati racing bike; and the wonderfully observant Kathryn Maris, whose work ranges with a dark wit over incomprehensible deities, wayward mothers, the politics of children's sports contests, and psychoanalysis. All three lift the lid on their corners of civilized society to show the less glittering realities that lie just beneath the surface. "On the verge of perpetrating acts of artistic barbarism "I perceived a spoon as the title of a plate of food" - SAM RIVIERE, 'Mindfulness' "Deer garter-belt across our vision And stand there waiting for our decision. "Our only decision was how to cook the venison. I am civilized but I see the silence And write the words for the thought balloon." - FREDERICK SEIDEL, 'Kill Poem' "The man in the basement wrote stories about heroin. The woman in the attic read stories with heroines. The woman in the attic noticed a bruise that ran from the top to the base of her thigh. The bruise looked like Europe. The man in the basement was in love with the sister of the secretive man who loved him more. He whooped to the woman, 'You killed your student?' To himself he wept, 'I killed my father.'" - KATHRYN MARIS, 'The House with Only an Attic and a Basement'

Occasional Wild Parties

Penguin Modern Poets 5

Fiction. SAFE MODE is Sam Riviere's first book-length prose text. Framed as an 'ambient novel', a term coined by the American writer Tan Lin, SAFE MODE abandons the traditional novel's temporal logic in favour of spatial and atmospheric dispersal, combining intensely personal material with unacknowledged appropriated content to explore the narratives made possible by mood, or the moods made possible by narrative. Which is which? Does it even matter?

Safe Mode

Fiona Sampson

Clare Pollard

Polly Clark

George Gömöri

John Mole

Carol Rumens

Attila József

Derek Adams

John McAuliffe

Wayne Holloway-Smith

Tom Warner

Anthony Dunn

Jacqueline Gabbitas

Ágnes Lehóczky

Tim Liardet

The Balassi Institute Hungarian Cultural Centre London launched its new project ‘Inspired by Hungarian poetry: British poets in conversation with Attila József’ in celebration of the Hungarian Culture Day on 22 January 2013. On 22 January 1823 Ferenc Kölcsey – one of the most important literary fi gures in Hungarian history – completed his manuscript of the Hungarian National Anthem. Since 1989 Hungarian culture is celebrated on this day. To mark this special event, the Balassi Institute Hungarian Cultural Centre London invited British poets to contribute to its new project with a poem of their own written in response to the poems of the Hungarian poet Attila József (1905-1937). The original idea of the ‘British poets in conversation with Attila József ’ project came from Tibor Fischer, the internationally renowned British writer of Hungarian origin. The aim of the project is to raise awareness and appreciation of Hungarian poetry among readers in the UK through initiating a poetic conversation between renowned British poets and selected poems of the outstanding Hungarian poet Attila József. The Hungarian Cultural Centre asked British poets to respond to a selection of Attila József’s poems in English translation, put into English beautifully by John Bátki, Edwin Morgan, George Szirtes and Peter Zollman. The present online anthology, published on 11 April 2013 – the birthday of Attila József and the National Poetry Day in Hungary – is the product of the poetic ‘conversation’ between Attila József and more than a dozen of his present-day British counterparts. A gala reading in London on 11 April 2013 celebrates the occasion of the launch of the anthology, Attila József’s work and poetry.

British poets in conversation with Attila József

Inspired by Hungarian poetry

The 72 poems in Kim Kardashian's Marriage mark out equally sharpened lines of public and private engagement. Kim Kardashian's 2011 marriage lasted for 72 days, and was seen by some as illustrative of celebrity life as a performance, as spectacle. Whatever the truth of this (and Kardashian's own statements refute it), Sam Riviere has used the furor as a point of ignition, deploying terms from Kardashian's make-up regimen to explore surfaces and self-consciousness, presentation and obfuscation. His pursuit is toward a form of zero-privacy akin, perhaps, to Kardashian's own life, that eschews a dependence upon confessional modes of writing to explore what kind of meaning lies in impersonal methods of creation. The poems have been produced by harvesting and manipulating the results of search engines to create a poetry of part-collage, part-improvisation. The effect is as refractive as it is reflective, and disturbs the slant on biography through a bricolage of recycled and cross-referenced language, until we are left with a pixellation of the first person.

Kim Kardashian's Marriage

Joe Dunthorne

Welcome to The Truth About Cats & Dogs, a failed collaboration between novelist Joe Dunthorne and poet Sam Riviere. Switch between their diaries, their poems, their private resentments and public enthusiasms. Though there is no right way to read the story, someone must have the last word.

Sam Riviere

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