Ken Edwards

I was born in Gibraltar in 1950, and grew up there. From 1966-68 I did my A levels at a boarding school in England, then went to King's College London in 1968, where I owed a great deal to my sometime tutor, the late Eric Mottram, graduating with a BA in English in 1971. My parents and my sister joined me in London around that time. I studied for a PGCE at Goldsmiths' College, which only served to convince me I didn't want to be a teacher. During the 1970s and 80s I worked for a publishing company, as a reluctant teacher of English to foreign students, and for a small voluntary body in the field of homelessness. I became a journalist for the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, and on being made redundant there, continued to earn my living in health and social care freelance journalism for the next 10-12 years. Since 2001, I have worked full-time as an editor for the Royal College of Nursing.

In 1999 I got married to Elaine, and in 2004, moved with her from London to Hastings, East Sussex, on the south coast. We live in Hastings Old Town, which is a really lovely place near the seafront, but we don't want to make too much of that, in case a load of moneyed people move here and spoil it (this is already starting to happen). I continue to do my full-time job for the RCN remotely from here (thank you, internet).

That's my life; now to writing and publishing. The first thing to make clear is that Reality Street Editions is very much a part-time activity. It does not make any money. I got into small press publishing because there were few outlets for the kind of writing I was doing and was interested in. Share Publications was a tiny operation I ran in the 1970s, publishing home-made pamphlets of poetry. I also co-edited a magazine called Alembic, originally an offspin of a regular poetry workshop with Robert Hampson and Peter Barry. We were reading and talking about Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, JH Prynne, Tom Raworth, Roy Fisher, Allen Fisher and many others. In 1978 I started a magazine called Reality Studios, a forerunner of Reality Street, which ran for 10 years and among other achievements was the first UK outlet for many of the US Language writers. In 1993, Reality Studios amalgamated with Street Editions to form Reality Street Editions ( see here for more on this).

I started out as a writer of fiction. I had short stories published in Transatlantic Review, Bananas and an Arts Council anthology, New Stories 2, among others, during the 1970s. I was interested in Kafka, Beckett and the speculative fiction writers of the British SF New Wave, but somehow all that seemed to come to nothing. I had encouragement to write a novel from people who compared me to Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, then little known but a year or two ahead of me in a putative career. But I couldn't find a way forward that I could respect. The poets seemed to be the only ones doing interesting new things in writing. So most of my published writing since then has been poetry (or prose) in small press editions - see below. But I have got back to speculative narrative and non-narrative prose in recent years.

Music is very much part of my life. I have never had much formal training, and started playing the guitar in my 20s and the violin in my 30s (a recent project has been learning the bass guitar, and subsequently playing with The Moors of Hastings – more about this soon!). Thanks to friends I met through COMA, I have composed music and had it performed, and collaborated with musicians, including Elaine, who is a music teacher and plays flute, tenor and soprano sax and keyboard). Again, see below for a list of projects.

Contact me via Reality Street or email ken at realitystreet dot co dot uk

Books in print

Good Science (Roof Books, New York, 1992)

Futures (Reality Street, London 1998) - novel

Eight+six (Reality Street, London, 2003)

No Public Language: Selected Poems 1975-95 (Shearsman Books, Exeter, 2006)

Bird Migration in the 21st Century (Spectacular Diseases, Peterborough, 2006)

Nostalgia for Unknown Cities (Reality Street, Hastings, 2007)

Online books

The Glory Boxes in onedit issue 7

Chaconne (at www.shearsman.com)

Poetry, fiction, translations, criticism in magazines

These include: And, Angelaki, Bananas, Big Allis, Boundary 2, Critical Quarterly, Exact Change Yearbook, Five Fingers Review, Fragmente, The Gig, Golden Handcuffs Review, Kiosk, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, The Many Review, New American Writing, Ninth Decade, Oasis, Object Permanence, Pages, PN Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Sulfur, Talisman, Transatlantic Review, West Coast Line

My essay "The Two Poetries" is available as a download at the Great Works site.

An extended response by JH Prynne to my novel Futures is available at Golden Handcuffs Review.

Poetry, fiction and essays in anthologies

New Stories 2 (Arts Council, 1977)

Angels of Fire (Chatto & Windus, 1986)

The New British Poetry (Paladin Books, 1988)

Floating Capital: new poets from London (Potes & Poets Press, 1991)

Poets on Writing (Macmillan, 1992)

Other: British & Irish Poetry since 1970 (Wesleyan University Press, 1999)

Binary Myths 2: correspondences with poet/editors (Stride, 1999)

News for the Ear: a homage to Roy Fisher (Stride, 2000)

As editor

Currently editor/publisher of Reality Street Editions
Editor of Reality Studios magazine (1978-88)

Co-editor of Alembic (1973–79)

Co-editor of The New British Poetry (Paladin Books, 1988)

Music

Four Simultaneous Movements for mixed ensemble, premiered by COMA Sussex at the opening of Brighton Library, 2006.

Co-writer (with Alan Taylor, Ann Wolff + 2 others) of the opera To the Edge, premiered at the Steiner Theatre, London, November 2004.

Spiral Music - incidental music for Fanny Howe's poem "Spiral", published with collages by Tom Raworth, Artery Editions, 2004.

Text for John Tilbury piece for piano, voice & electronics: There's something in there, premiered at Leeds Town Hall, July 2003.

Bruised Rationals (text/music piece, for speaker and large ensemble), 1996.

Ornettology (for string quartet) - selected by SPNM for performance by the Sorrel Quartet at the Cheltenham Festival, July 1997.

Performances and readings

These include:

Tears in the Fence festival, Dulwich College, London; Crossing the Line at the Poetry Café and at The Plough, London; SubVoicive Poetry, various venues, London; Camden People's Theatre, London; VI series, London; King's College, London; Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer, London; CCCP, Cambridge; rem press readings, Cambridge; Cambridge Series; University of Plymouth at Exmouth; The Language Club, Plymouth; Exeter Literary Festival; Bath Music Festival; Oxford Music Festival; Brighton Fringe Festival; Edge Hill College, Liverpool; Huddersfield Poetry Festival; Morden Tower, Newcastle upon Tyne; Colpitts, Durham; Sussex University, Falmer; The Winding Stair Bookshop, Dublin; Anglo-French Poetry Festival, Paris; Globe Bookstore, Prague; Druskininkai Poetic Autumn Festival, Lithuania; Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver, BC, Canada; The Ear Inn, New York, USA; Small Press Traffic, San Francisco, USA; Johnny Otis Café, Sebastopol, USA