Lannan Foundation is a family foundation dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity and creativity through projects which support exceptional contemporary artists and writers, as well as inspired Native activists in rural indigenous communities. This site is for our audio and video podcasts.
Going On, Peter Reading, 1985 Publisher: Bloodaxe (included in Collected Poems 2: Poems 1985-1996)
“What he [Peter Reading] uniquely had was an obsessive craftsmanship, at ease with every kind of verse-form, matched with a macabre, bizarre sense of humour. He relished the stately and the ceremonial, as much as he kept his ears open for the demotic, the inarticulate, the speechless.” — Anthony Thwaite, The Independent, December 2011
Portions of this podcast are explicit and may contain adult language.
You may learn more about Peter Reading on the Lannan website.
Ukulele Music, Peter Reading, 1985 Publisher: Bloodaxe (included in Collected Poems 2: Poems 1985-1996)
“Like a ventriloquist, in Ukelele Music, Reading intermittently assumes the voice of an obsequious charwoman named Viv, trying to cadge some money from her master, and at other times that of a chronicler of gruesome naval battles and mishaps. What the seemingly unrelated spheres have in common is the dire state of ‘H. sap.,’ or homo sapiens, examined in gruesome detail. His obsession with the gross has led British reviewers to call Reading’s humor ‘too black’–a criticism ushered into his poems, along with a reply: ‘What do they think they’re playing at, then, these Poetry Wallahs?’ The poet proclaims that, ‘this is the Age Of The Greatly Bewildered Granny & Grandad, / shitlessly scared by the bad, mindless and jobless and young.'” —Publisher’s Weekly, August 1994
Portions of this podcast are explicit and may contain adult language.
You may learn more about Peter Reading on the Lannan website.
Vendange Tardive, Peter Reading, 2010 Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
“Vendange Tardive is a late harvest of vintage Reading in disaster mode. Here is a rueful crop of valedictory poems in which man reaps what he sows: shipwreck, ruin, death, war, ignomony and extinction. But somehow, amid all that, there is still the fruit of the vine and the bittersweet spirit of life.” – Bloodaxe Books
“A vendange tardive is a late-harvest wine, and the title poem records the gift of a bottle on the poet’s 62nd birthday. Another poem, ‘All Is Safely Gathered In’, in which he offers thanks for a birthday bottle of champagne, bluntly begins: ‘Morituri te salutant’ (we who are about to die salute you). While this book marks Reading’s return to a collection of individual pieces, it still coheres as he weaves multiple threads in which deaths of family members and friends mix with the deleterious effects of oil-dependent economies, compounded by a day-to-day awareness that not only is the self at the age of ‘late harvest’, but in the face of climate change, so is the whole human race.” – Carrie Etter, The Guardian.
Portions of this podcast are explicit and may contain adult language.
You may learn more about Peter Reading on the Lannan website. You may also watch a video of these poems being read by Peter Reading there as well.
-273.15, Peter Reading, 2005 Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
-273.15 [absolute zero] is a lament, a tirade, a disaster warning, and an anthropologist’s catalogue of our final expedition addressed to an earlier survivor of global catastrophe, Noah of the Flood. “Despair, both environmental and political, is never absent; but this is an appreciative, defiantly humane volume.” – Robert Potts, The Guardian.
Portions of this podcast are explicit and may contain adult language.
You may learn more about Peter Reading on the Lannan website. You may also watch a video of these poems being read by Peter Reading there as well.
Reading’s death statement features his “death mask on the cover.” His own consolations of “verse, viticulture and love” are mirrored in the extended swansong of Chinoiserie, a sequence of versions of the 8th-century Chinese poet Li Po, while the blunter associations of his title are encrypted in the book’s progressively shorter lyrics: obsolete, obscene and obit (he died). Now out of print, this book is included in Collected Poems Volume III: Poems 1997-2003 (2003, Bloodaxe).
Portions of this podcast are explicit and may contain adult language.
You may learn more about Peter Reading on the Lannan website. You may also watch a video of these poems being read by Peter Reading there as well.
This new volume opens with a quote from Charles Darwin: “We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence.” Faunal is a book of poems about animals, or more specifically about Reading’s real or imagined experiences of the beasts of the earth, and of the most powerful beast of all, humanity. The poems are peppered with Latin names which function as tags marking the animal world as the property of the linguistic universe constructed by people, and Reading’s main attention here is to the ways in which people interact with animals, usually to the detriment of the latter. (Courtesy of John Sears)
Portions of this podcast are explicit and may contain adult language.
You may learn more about Peter Reading on the Lannan website.
[Untitled], Peter Reading, 2001 Publisher: Bloodaxe
During his writing residency year in Marfa, Texas, Reading produced three pamphlets which together comprise [Untitled]. Apophthegmatic is inspired by Chinese poetry and in haiku and tankas, muses on the brevity of life and the poet’s anticipated death; Repetitious, only 6 pages long, is a summary of Reading’s themes, and refers to or repeats lines from other volumes; Copla a Pie Quebrado, 4 pages long, featuring Reading’s poems overlaying photographs of Marfa.
Portions of this podcast are explicit and may contain adult language.
You may learn more about Peter Reading on the Lannan website.
Peter Reading called Marfan, a “straightforward topographical travelogue”. The book has photographs by Jay Shuttleworth, collages by Reading, and a single book-length poem, written as a result of a yearlong Lannan Foundation residency in the small, high plains town of Marfa, Texas. The poem investigates, researches, observes and describes–often with great humor–the history, geology, topography, folklore, politics, superstitions, art, commerce and contemporary life in this US/Mexican border area.
Portions of this podcast are explicit and may contain adult language.
You may learn more about Peter Reading on the Lannan website.
This book followed various birding trips to the Gulf of Mexico, Canada, and the mountains of Arizona, where he saw species of birds and migrations on a scale new to him. While many poems celebrate these journeys, others treat death and pseudo-death, suicide, and even a funeral in very personal and introspective terms.
Portions of this podcast are explicit and may contain adult language.
You may learn more about Peter Reading on the Lannan website.
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