Jeremy Reed

Jeremy Reed's output has been prodigious. Since 1975 he has published more than forty books of poems, besides countless pamphlets and fugitive pieces, and many novels, biographies and books on cultural history. The full range of his poetry will never be truly known, for he often writes in public places, and if someone expresses interest may give them the poem. By the time this selection appears his tally will have grown further, because he writes continuously. His poems are his diary, his autobiography, his therapy, his addiction. Reed has moved from publisher to publisher, often writing for several at the same time, and his style has evolved continuously over more than four decades. Formalist, symbolist, language poet, nature-poet, modernist, post-modernist, performance poet: Reed has been all these and more.So who is Jeremy Reed, and why is his work important? He was born in 1951 in Jersey, and educated there and at Essex University. Since finishing postgraduate work at Essex, he has lived mainly as a freelance writer, with all the determination and insecurity that implies. His origins may have some bearing on his work. Jersey is much closer to France than to England; it's probably no accident that Reed's early affinities were with the European Symbolists: he completely bypassed the drab 'Movement' poetry which dominated (and still influences) British writing. Possibly the same factor contributed to Reed's permanent sense of being an outsider in British society.

Who is he? What is his real name? Is he a reincarnation, a time-traveller, or someone made from chopped up DNA on a USB stick? In Surrender to a Stranger, British cult author Jeremy Reed offers a Burroughsesque Elizabethan drama in the super-exposure of contemporary London streets, in which our mysterious hero, Mr. W.H., along with a queer coterie of characters, soak up the ambience of sexy story telling. A daring and provocative novel of poetic brilliance, Surrender to a Stranger is a glitter-worded Marlovian comedo-tragedy in which every sentence is written as if it has been lived.

Jeremy Reed's Bad Boys rehabilitates some of his personal obsessions with poets and rock musicians into a rich assemblage of challenging, provocative assessments, in which the field of writing, London's Soho, is also integrated as place into the conceptualisation of the text, as a physical involvement in the work's dynamic.From John's Ashbery's monumental surprises, to the intransigent figure of Kit Marlowe brawling in St Giles, to Hart Crane's sensational suicide, Reed partners his themes with unique sensitivities that expand his focus into what are perceptual relationships, extending by poetic design the art of essay writing into the art of thematically acute empathy.Always the passionate advocate of subcultures, lovers of Jeremy Reed's poetry and fiction will find in these essays the same quintessential motivations of extraordinary imagination that had JG Ballard, himself the subject of one of these pieces, describe Reed's talent as "almost extraterrestrial in its brilliance."

In "Dungeness Blues", the wonderful Jeremy Reed pays homage to Derek Jarman (1942-1994), one of the most influential filmmakers, authors and artists of post-war Europe.

"Bandit Poet" by Jeremy Reed is an outrageously controversial memoir, about his life in London from the early eighties, which celebrates the brilliant losers and a life lived on the edge of the edge.Called by the Independent 'British poetry's glam spangly shape-shifting answer to David Bowie' Jeremy Reed is a unique phenomenon in poetry - a romantic bandit fuelled with Rimbaud's visionary impulse.

In A Girl Loves a Girl, British poet Jeremy Reed revamps ­Sappho, the legendary archaic Greek lyric poet from the island of ­Lesbos. As with all his audaciously frontline poetry and fiction, Reed places history as now in the present, mediated over by update, rather than consigned to the irretrievable past. As a pioneering reaction to academic attempts to literally recreate a poetry that exists only in fragmentary form, he remakes and expands on the possibilities of meaning in predominantly same-sex motivated poetry in a way that will bring one of the greatest poets of ancient Greece alive to 21st-century readers. Only Jeremy Reed would dare override scholars from the viewpoint of presenting Sappho in a legacy that extends to new generations of her admirers, as a symbol of love and desire between women.

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Growing up in Jersey in the seventies, before I left to do American Studies at Essex University, wasn't easy as an anomalous poet living in a largely pedestrian, materialistic society. My escape came by way of finding part--time employment with John Berger, part of the Berger Paints family, who patented Prussian Blue, the first modern synthetic pigment. John Berger, a wealthy, reclusive aesthete and compulsive bibliophile and antiques hoarder, kept his mother mummified in the living room of his property Tivoli, and my unusual introduction to his eccentric, serendipitous lifestyle forms the basis of this sequence. If arson had torched a property of his, left as a ruin in Waterworks Valley, then the shell of the house and the adjoining fields were used by a group of friends of mine to do LSD, and to set up large speakers in the ruin through which to play psychedelic music and the seminal rock albums of the period. We called the place Psychedelic Meadow as it was regularly coloured and shaped by acid. Paula Stratton's LSD documentation of her experience of the drug became a seminal influence on my poetry. When she committed suicide in the late seventies at a squat in Chester Gate, Regent's Park a big light went out in me, and my poem `Elegy for Paula Stratton' can be found in the collection This Is how You Disappear, my book of elegies for dead friends. Nobody I know has ever come more beautiful. (Jeremy Reed)

The third edition of this vibrant poetry magazine showcases some of the finest and most original voices in contemporary poetry today

Isthmus was Jeremy Reed's first collection, produced in a finely-printed edition by Asa Benveniste's Trigram Press in 1980. Overwrought, perhaps even over-written, it shows the author struggling with a gamut of new influences - some of them provided by Benveniste - and trying to find his way in a brane new world of poetry. The book has an American theme, and shows much American influence, albeit undigested in places, but Reed's individuality brings it all together.

Asa Benveniste (1925-1990) who founded the legendary Trigram Press in London in 1965, ostensibly to publish Anglo-American cutting-edge poetry, was not only a self-taught, one-off maverick genius as a printer, typographer and book-designer, but also a superbly innovative language poet, whose own poetry tended to be obscured by his merits as a publisher. Throughout its duration, 1965-1978, the Trigram list epitomised ultimate hipster cool, as a leading independent. Jeremy Reed's deeply personal tribute to Benveniste as his enduring poetic avatar, and the encourager and publisher of his early poetry informs a book that is both an appraising memoir and a significant evaluation of Trigram Press. The book also includes a reprint of Benveniste's collection, Edge (1975).

In "Voodoo Excess," Jeremy Reed charts in poetry and prose the astonishing career of the Rolling Stones from the band s early days in 1962 to the 50th anniversary tour in 2012 and its extension in 2013. With great originality he examines why the Stones have been a musical and cultural phenomenon, and everything public and mythical, anecdotal and apocryphal about the larger-than-life individual band members, shaping the raw material into memorable lyric poetry. This new volume is introduced by Mick Taylor, the musician who left the band only to rejoin it, to great acclaim, for their recent anniversary tour."

In Waiting For The Man, Jeremy Reed focuses on Lou Reed as rock's principal literary avatar, paying special attention to his controversial lyrics and prototypical garage sound. Lou Reed influenced generations of copyists that took note of his outlaw status, ambiguous sexual orientation characterised by his seventies relationship with the transvestite Rachel, his implacable mystique, cool and defiant attitude as the narrator of subcultures. Finally the book examines the transcendent, if reluctant calm, that Reed arrived at in later life. Taking in the sweep of Reed's career from Velvet Underground to the variants of forty years of resistant solo pioneering, Waiting For The Man accesses the man and his music, with the extraordinary perception and attention to detail.

Sooner or Later Frank finds Jeremy Reed optimising his London quarter of Soho and the West End, its outlaws, opportune strangers and rogue mavericks condensed into poems coloured by an imagery that pushes pioneering edges towards final frontiers. Right on the big city moment, and with an eye for arresting acute visual detail, Reed makes the capital into personal affairs. His characteristic love of glamour, rock music, seasonal step-changes, and a Ballardian preoccupation with the visionary render this new PBS Recommendation, in John Ashbery's words on Reed's recent work, 'a dazzling tour de force.'

The first book of Jeremy Reed's uncompromising, explicitly autobiographical expose of his life as a leading London poet from the 1980s to the present day, a major long poem written in the shop, while managing Red Snapper Books in the period 2007-2008, takes in an acutely personalised retrieval of the Piccadilly Circus ethos in the eighties, including meetings with the artist Francis Bacon, bohemian Soho, an index of personal obsessions including rock music and fashion, a defiant colour block of personal friends, patrons, pick-ups and demi-monde outlaws, all generously characterised for their individual importance and contribution to the poet's life, and a direct full-on involvement with unstoppable big-city momentum in the capital, intensely lived on a day to day basis. The book is a highly courageous and cutting edge poet's autobiography, explicit and detailed in a way few poets would dare celebrate quite literally the uncensored resources of a highly individual and sustained personal creativity.