"Intercapillary Space"

Poems

[#] 'Bigotry' (at The East Village Poetry Web)

"Consider the bigot, how he spins."

[#] 'A Time of Colonels'

"The colonels dissolve into tortures."

[#] 'On Louise Michel'

[#] 'Louise Seen by Lightning'

"Writing by lightning to the fetish skeletons
a flash: bombazine gown.
Two words where the words don't be yet."                             with Alice Notley

[#] 'Again In Dorset' at CCCP

"Under old caves memory shadowed
rotten teeth of mildewed thatch
again in Dorset of William Barnes
revisiting metaphor and simile after many years
for the sake of those years
House martens' rinsed noise
as white rumps dart in and out of wall nests
on their own summer revisit
Corn laid by storm loses fullness
but earth recuperates the gain
Corn clothed
            cloffed
              corn clothed and dragged, laid against the standing stalks,
corn like an upwards rain"

[#] 'Wealh People', 'Forearms', and 'B.W.I.M. (By Which I Mean)'
at Lynx: Poetry from Bath

"Cirrus on blue above.
Matt black fighter plane
dropped in the road by a child
sets its heel on the sparkling tarmac,
the silhouette of it skids about and becomes
curling tyre marks"



Interview

[#] UNION IN NARRATIVE - John Olson interviews Alice Notley and Douglas Oliver

"I'm intensely concerned about how poetry should now be seeking a more public space"



Prose

[#] 'The School of Bedlam' (from Whisper 'Louise', Jacket)

[#] unedited pages from Whisper 'Louise' in Quid #1 (pdf)

[#] 'Of bigotry and idealism' (from Whisper 'Louise', Masthead)

[#] Introduction to a selection of Diagram Poems in A Various Art



i.m. Douglas Oliver 1937 - 2000

[#] Poem: 'The Heron' in Ecopoetics #1 (pdf)

[#] Farewell to Douglas Dunlop Oliver

Poem: 'Our Generation (for Steve Carey)'

A Lament for Douglas Oliver by Ian Ayres

A reprint of Nicholas Johnson's obituary from The Independent (not The Times as stated at the site):

"Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in Bournemouth in the 1880s, became one of Oliver's heroes, an instructor in 'how to wrestle with the presbyterian background in a way which restores honour to the parents.' Stevenson's house (Shelley's manor), King's Park, where Douglas and his brother Brian watched boxing matches, and Christchurch harbour, where he studied sea and shore birds, were childhood haunts."

[#] Andrew Crozier's obituary in The Guardian

[#] 'WATUSI - In Memoriam Barry MacSweeney and Doug Oliver' by Allen Fisher

"with spacetime talk, in rested weeds"



Archive

[#] Catalogue of the Douglas Oliver archive at the University of Essex

[#] Literary Encyclopedia entry (first 600 words free to view)



Essay on Oliver

[#] 'Ventriloquising Against Harm'
John Hall's essay review of Whisper 'Louise'

"This book can be seen both as an individual component of 'the whole life's work' and as an attempt to summarise and reflect on that whole. For Oliver there could be nothing serene about such an undertaking. The responsibility of engaging with a 'whole view of life ... means that there's this political, historical and personal journey to undertake before I can reach towards a poetics'."



Blog Posts on Oliver

[#] Jon of Posthegemony writes two posts on The Diagram Poems:

[#] Diagram I

"Oliver's poems--and the all-important diagrams--are neither celebration nor condemnation of the Tupamaros. They are, perhaps, an attempt precisely to diagram the forcefields within which they operated, and into which they intervened."

[#] Diagram II

"The diagram is the record of the plan, the virtual marshalling of guerilla forces, but also the record of its actualization, and the way in which actualization entails the elimination of incompossible worlds: the virtual is a garden of forking paths that can enfold divergent outcomes"

[#] Dominic Fox of Poetix:

"Oliver is a great poet, not especially difficult to read but decidedly difficult to pin down, and this is due to something rather paradoxically particular and defining about his poetry: its adherence to poverty. [...] Poverty as a lack or weakness at the heart of some system, be it social or intellectual. This lack appears as a sign of the system's limitations, its inability to systematize absolutely everything."



Reviews

[#] Peter Manson reviews Penniless Politics

"Richness Oliver can do. The poem treats of the 'Voodoo-Haitian' Emen, her Anglo-Scot poet husband Will Penniless, and the birth of Spirit, a new political party for the non-voting U.S. majority ('Make material wealth for other people, spiritual wealth for ourselves')."

[#] Tim Allen reviews Etruscan Reader #8 Tina Darragh / Douglas Oliver / Randolph Healy

"A central piece here is 'Future Circles' in which the Oliver talks to 19th C. French revolutionary, Théophile Ferré, and his girlfriend Louise Michel, at the back of a New York bus."

[#] Tony Frazer reviews Arrondissements at Shearsman

[#] Review of Arrondissements at Terrible Work

"he's invented a spray-paint particle-ray gun which Turnerises its victims into whirls of fog and rainbow smears"

[#] Martyn Everett reviews Whisper 'Louise'

[#] Tim Allen essays Whisper 'Louise'



Bibliography

Whisper 'Louise' (Reality Street, 2005)

Arrondissements (Salt, 2003)

Wendy Mulford & Peter Riley (eds): A Meeting for Douglas Oliver (Poetical Histories, Infernal Methods & Street Editions.) A memorial festschrift which also contains 27 uncollected poems.

A Salvo for Africa (Bloodaxe, 2000)

Etruscan Reader #8 (with Tina Darragh and Randolph Healy) (etruscan, 1998)

Penguin Modern Poets 10 (with Iain Sinclair and Denise Riley) (Penguin, 1996)

Selected Poems (1996, Talisman House)

What Fades Will Be (1993, Poetical Histories)

Penniless Politics (Bloodaxe, 1994, Hoarse Commerce, 1992)

The Scarlet Cabinet (with Alice Notley) (Scarlet Editions, New York 1992)

Three Variations on the Theme of Harm (Paladin, 1990)

Poetry and Narrative in Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 1989)

Kind: Collected Poems (Allardyce, Barnett, 1987)

The Infant and the Pearl (Ferry Press, 1985)

The Diagram Poems (Ferry Press, 1979)

In the Cave of Suicession (Street Editions, 1974)

The Harmless Building (Grosseteste, 1973)

Oppo Hectic (Ferry Press, 1969)




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Links maintained by Edmund Hardy. If you find a broken link or an Oliver page overlooked, please get in touch.