Simon Smith

What is Counterculture? – It’s an alternative lifestyle... – The ideas that spark a revolution... – A movement that changes the world... This new collection of essays celebrates the incredible originality of British post-war culture. British art, film, theatre, dance, literature and music have attracted international recognition, from the Angry Young Men to the Sex Pistols to Grayson Perry. Now gaming, the internet and social media enable creative communities to flourish and either fight for social justice – or just be entertained. Can we find the creative inspiration to succeed in a postcapitalist future?

This book argues that a reflexive awareness of our semiotic style, our grasp on the world as it rolls over, can be empowering when our normal ways of going on come unstuck, opening up choices that are more event-shaping than we realise. Stylistic orientations enact metachoices: choices that set the criteria for subsequent ones, setting up a cascade of conditioned, but not wholly determined, choices. Switching semiotic styles constitutes an appeal to broaden our usual repertoire of semiotic practice, channelling a common multimodal listening competence into a perspective interplay which changes the parameters of what can be known. Smith develops a research style constructively opposing the narrative and sonic turns in the social sciences, which he then uses to analyse three examples of communication from the Covid-19 pandemic: advice-giving by the WHO, legal disputes about public health restrictions and vaccine promotion videos. The work shows how individuals and societies arrange ongoingness oriented by both the motivational affordances of transformational goals and the modulating push of music-like patterns of becoming. This book will appeal to scholars interested in semiotics, communication theory, sound studies, organisational communication, health communication, sociology of health and illness, and language in social interaction.

'Municipal Love Poems' is Simon Smith's third collection from Shearsman Books, and is a companion volume to 'Last Morning' (Parlor Press) which appeared in early 2022. "Simon Smith's Municipal Love Poems navigates between the intimately personal, and the impersonally public. Everywhere the expression is musical, presented in tight lines, phrases, couplets and tercets - never longer - although several of these poems sustain their intensity over pages. The form is 'micrometer right / to the exact fit'. Smith's question in these poems centres around song - sound, music, voice, tongue - 'how do you make the ordinary language sing?'. The poems are characterised by word play and slippage, where one word suggests the next, where the link is as much anagrammatic as it is imagistic. For Smith the lyric may be 'lyre', but it is also 'liar'. These poems move from the celebratory to the more complex elegiac realm of hauntology. Often the subject matter is 'municipal', and these poems are as likely to name BBC News 24, email, 3G, Apple, Monsanto, Isis, space junk and algorithms, as they are likely to include the pastoral indicators of herons, nightingales and blackbirds, bluebells, clouds, rain and moonlight. This is a dynamic, exciting, and attuned collection of poetry." -Andy Brown "In these poems, even as they deny the transcendence of love, hope lies in the small details of everyday life. The isolated lines and short stanzas of a voice with a catch in the throat produce poems and songs where love lies somewhere between a Hallmark card and Baudelaire. Poetry may be the result of inspiration, of taking things in, but, as Simon Smith tells us we also sing when we breathe out into the world." -Ian Davidson

Last Morning marks a shift away from poetry of place to the poetry of space: how poetry creates its own space, through its unfolding through time and space, and what kind of a politics, and what kind of a gift that might be.

Seventy years after the adoption of the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UK is guilty of undermining the very principles of asylum, inhumanely detaining those seeking protection and ushering in sweeping changes that threaten to punish refugees at every turn. But the UK’s immigration system is not alone in committing such breaches of human rights. The fourth volume of Refugee Tales explores our present international environment, combining author re-tellings with first-hand accounts of individuals who have been detained across the world. As the coronavirus pandemic defies borders – leaving those who are detained even more vulnerable – this collection shares stories spanning Canada, Greece, Italy, Switzerland and the UK, and calls for international insistence on a future without detention. Featuring a prologue by Baroness Shami Chakrabarti. The fourth volume in the Refugee Tales series, proceeds from the sales of which go to two refugee charities.

The 21 censuses that have been conducted in Britain since 1801, have provided an invaluable insight into Britain’s social, political and economic history over the past 200 years. From their original purpose to assess how many men were fit for military duty in the Napoleonic wars, to being a necessary tool for determining government policy, the 10-yearly census return is a fascinating snapshot of the state of the population on a particular moment in each decade. The growth of Britain’s cities; the movement of population away from the countryside; the variety of people’s occupations; their way of life; and what religious beliefs they hold are all contained within the census reports. With the imminent publication of the 1921 census results, this will prove a useful introduction, both for those interested in general trends in social history, and those researching family history.

An anglers journey through the seasons.

Presupposing no specialist musical knowledge, this book offers a fresh perspective on the dramatic role of music in the plays of Shakespeare and his early seventeenth-century contemporaries. Simon Smith argues that many plays used music as a dramatic tool, inviting culturally familiar responses to music from playgoers. Music cues regularly encouraged audiences to listen, look, imagine or remember at dramatically critical moments, shaping meaning in plays from The Winter's Tale to A Game at Chess, and making theatregoers active and playful participants in playhouse performance. Drawing upon sensory studies, theatre history, material texts, musicology and close reading, Smith argues for the importance of music in familiar and less well-known plays including Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Revenger's Tragedy, Sophonisba, The Spanish Gypsy and A Woman Killed With Kindness.

This book examines two new roles that journalists assume in a participatory media environment – the administration (moderation) of online discussion and the monitoring of and engagement in comments below their articles. The author argues that it is precisely because both roles are treated as peripheral and undignified in newsrooms that they are so revealing, following the maxim: to make sense of what professions are and where they are heading, look at their boundaries and their dirty work. Based on a three-year ethnographic study, it offers key insights about the role of the media as democratic intermediaries in political participation, the creative possibilities for ‘amateurs’ as co-producers of digital news, the changing character of the knowledge professions and the dynamics of organisational innovation. The book argues that as media organisations face a crisis in their ability to represent the public, the challenge is to orchestrate participatory journalism as a collective accomplishment in which everyone is not a journalist but everyone can be a contributor. Bridging the divides between communication studies, linguistics, STS, organisational and occupational sociology it will interest social scientists and media studies experts.

This book presents a snapshot of innovative blended learning practices that either stem from the affordances of web 2.0 technologies or illustrate the re-purposing of 'older' ones, like the creation of tailor-made virtual learning environments, to set up telecollaborative projects. It is based on the papers presented at the B-MELTT: Flipping the Blend through MALL, MOOCs, and (Blended) OIL - New Directions in CALL symposium held at Coventry University in June 2017. It is hoped that the work presented here can provide some ideas on pedagogically sound ways of blending technology into higher education curriculums to enhance both the digital literacy and the intercultural awareness of all stakeholders involved.

Simon Smith's series of poetry journals is a plate of spinning, stunning experience. With his renowned poetic skill, Smith quietly and carefully shifts from the panoramic into the still frame of the inner life with its familiar daily worries. . . . Day In, Day Out is washed in the meals of new potatoes, sautEd cabbage leaves, the wine of ChAteau Moulin de Honternieux MEdoc (2012), Dogfish Head IPA, pizza, salad with sparkling wine. It's a delicious journey. --Elaine RandellThere's a history of English language poets transplanted to places ostensibly sharing the same tongue (Ronald Johnson, Jonathan Williams, Kenneth Rexroth in the UK; Charles Tomlinson, Thom Gunn in the USA). For these writers, the ordinary becomes the exotic. Their responses might be like those of a Martial transported from Spain to the Roman capital, with an outsider's ability to detect the fine (or gross) echoes of Empire amid the detritus. Simon Smith joins these ranks - He is a Paul Blackburn for the information age. --Laurie DugganSimon Smith's work continues to be an essential reminder of the possibilities of poetry in the present moment. Day In, Day Out serves up quickly paced journal poems bursting with the details of the everyday life of travel, transience, and self-imposed displacement. Ghosted by his recently deceased father and Paul Blackburn's own journal poetry, Smith generously tells "everything I know" about time, impermanence, and the ordinary scintilla of the moment grasped as at once fleeting and overwhelmingly real. The devil--and the divine--is in the details. --Stephen CollisSIMON SMITH has published five collections of poetry. His third collection, Mercury (Salt Publications), was long-listed for the Costa Prize in 2007. A selected poems, More Flowers Than You Could Possibly Carry, appeared from Shearsman Books in 2016, and his latest pamphlet is Salon Noir (Equipage, 2016). He holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow.

Presupposing no specialist musical knowledge, this book offers a fresh perspective on the dramatic role of music in the plays of Shakespeare and his early seventeenth-century contemporaries. Simon Smith argues that many plays used music as a dramatic tool, inviting culturally familiar responses to music from playgoers. Music cues regularly encouraged audiences to listen, look, imagine or remember at dramatically critical moments, shaping meaning in plays from The Winter's Tale to A Game at Chess, and making theatregoers active and playful participants in playhouse performance. Drawing upon sensory studies, theatre history, material texts, musicology and close reading, Smith argues for the importance of music in familiar and less well-known plays including Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Revenger's Tragedy, Sophonisba, The Spanish Gypsy and A Woman Killed With Kindness.

This book examines two new roles that journalists assume in a participatory media environment – the administration (moderation) of online discussion and the monitoring of and engagement in comments below their articles. The author argues that it is precisely because both roles are treated as peripheral and undignified in newsrooms that they are so revealing, following the maxim: to make sense of what professions are and where they are heading, look at their boundaries and their dirty work. Based on a three-year ethnographic study, it offers key insights about the role of the media as democratic intermediaries in political participation, the creative possibilities for ‘amateurs’ as co-producers of digital news, the changing character of the knowledge professions and the dynamics of organisational innovation. The book argues that as media organisations face a crisis in their ability to represent the public, the challenge is to orchestrate participatory journalism as a collective accomplishment in which everyone is not a journalist but everyone can be a contributor. Bridging the divides between communication studies, linguistics, STS, organisational and occupational sociology it will interest social scientists and media studies experts.

This selection of Smith's work features generous selections from Fifteen Exits, Reverdy Road, Mercury and London Bridge, alongside unavailable early work, and previously unpublished poetry from the sequences, More Ammo and Content. On first receiving Reverdy Road Schwabsky recalls: 'It was a revelation: resembling nothing I was familiar with in American poetry despite name-checking Jack Spicer and clear affinities with the New York School's love of speed, wit, and variousness of tone, it had a music I could tune right into, something very much its own though it has also helped me, I think, hear my way into the work of some of Smith's British contemporaries'.

Rapid advances in computing have enabled the integration of corpora into language teaching and learning, yet in China corpus methods have not yet been widely adopted. Corpus Linguistics in Chinese Contexts aims to advance the state of the art in the use of corpora in applied linguistics and contribute to the expertise in corpus use in China.

'The Waste Land may have been smoothed to automatic for the iPad, but Simon Smith's Gravesend makes the South-East coast of Dickens and Conrad a place worth missing connections again. All the digital landfill of one London poet's life is here, not to mention a book-stopping tribute to Cy Twombly. Line by line, Smith is one of the most exciting poet writing in England: if it weren't for the sweet Thames and the Little Chefs, he might pass for an American.' - Jeremy Noel-Tod