I wrote The End of Poetry in October 2010 in Tampere, Finland. On my return to Manchester I was then buried in the planning and preparation of the 2011 Text Festival and after that went straight into setting up the international projects (most notably in China); so I didn't have time to think about poetry. Thanks to patience and persuasion of Irene Barberis at the Metasenta in Melbourne, with some editing the poems have made it to print. The book will be available via Metasenta shortly, but I have a supply now.
It is a collection which opens with a return to the 'heads' form I used in 50 Heads, followed by my response to Luigi Nono's opera Intolleranza (seen from the grim position we find ourselves in the collapse of capitalism) and then a sequence of 23 poems mirroring the tormented and treacherous last days of Louis Althusser counting down to his murder of Hélène Rytman. In the imperative spirit of stepping outside his/its intense enclosure, the book finishes with an unconnected short poem written in China in October 2011 called "Beijing".
