Diary 26th To 28th March 2019

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Diary Tuesday 26th March 2019 A day in, writing press and media releases about my book, and learning that it is now available for pre-ordering on the publisher’s website. Many people now saw the front cover art for the first time, and many who saw the project as some minor achievement for me now realize how serious a venture it is. A radio station told me that an interview I recorded with them about the book would go on the air tomorrow. I fired off several excited e-mails telling people to tune in. Diary Wednesday 27th March 2019 I got some very good feedback on the book launch progress and a good friend who is himself a successful writer has sent me a back cover recommendation for the readers too. In the afternoon I attended a very good lecture on The Poetic Circle in Stalin-Era Russia, given by scholar, Professor Katherine Hodgson, through Olga Tabachnikova’s marvellous Vladimir Vysotsky Centre For Russian Studies, centred at the University Of Central Lancashire. (UCLan). Professor Hodgson talked of how strictly disciplined poetry circles, such as the Futurists, were largely closed down or conscripted into writing very Conservative safe pro-state propaganda material. Writers were expected to belong to the Writer’s Union, and writing material not approved by the State could lead to expulsion from the Union and worse. Other organizations were also crushed in Russia under Stalin including Esperanto study groups and the Boy Scouts. A few groups of poets continued to write independently however, meeting to read and critique one another’s output, up to the German invasion of Russia in the Second World War. Much of their work and notes from their meetings has survived and it is now undergoing translation and sharing. Some of the new poetry groups concentrated on translating international verse. Another, the group of Four People, started c.1929, stayed active until the war and though not allowing their love of poetry to be controlled, they remained staunch, loyal Communists. The groups were known to the authorities and though monitored they were generally left unchallenged, as they largely kept their work among themselves, with only one known public performance offered and recorded. A younger group of poets, mostly students, proved to be more experimental and subversive, disregarding established rules of metre and form, and exploring more challenging content. I felt they seemed like an earlier version of America’s later Beat Generation poets like Kerouac and Ginsberg. I got home from this terrific event in time to hear the radio show I was expecting to be on, only to find it wasn’t airing at all. I found out from the producers that the extended coverage of the latest Brexit fiasco news had meant my story had to be postponed. I don’t know yet when it will now air. I sent out apologies to everyone I’d told to listen in to it, including my Mum, though she hadn’t been able to tune her radio in to the station anyway. Diary Thursday 28th March 2019 Job searching, more promotional work on my book launch and a regional newspaper promises to run a double-paged feature on me on Wednesday 3rd April (hopefully not doomed to being postponed like the radio broadcast). Arthur Chappell