James Byrne (poet)

James Byrne in Mexico City, 2018. Photo by Tania Victoria. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

James Byrne (born 1977) is an English poet and translator.

Life

Byrne was born in Buckinghamshire in 1977.

He lives in England after 2 years in New York City, where he received a Stein scholarship and an M.F.A. from New York University.

He edited The Wolf magazine from 2002 to 2017.

He was poet in residence at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, from 2011 to 2012 and is a senior lecturer at Edge Hill University, where he teaches poetry and poetics.

Recent poetry collections include Everything Broken Up Dances, published by Tupelo Press in the United States and White Coins, both in 2015. Other published collections include Blood/Sugar by Arc Publications in 2009, and he has also published pamphlets, including SOAPBOXES and Myth of the Savage Tribes, Myth of Civilised Nations, a collaborative work with poet Sandeep Parmar.

In 2009 his New and Selected Poems: The vanishing house was published by Treci Trg (in a bilingual edition) in Belgrade. He is the editor of The Wolf: A decade (Poems 2002-2012) and the co-editor with Clare Pollard of Voice Recognition: 21 poets for the 21st Century, an anthology of British poets, under 35, published by Bloodaxe in 2009. As sole editor of The Wolf from April 2006, James broadened the international reach of the magazine and this has affected some of his editorial work.

In June 2012, Bones Will Crow: 15 contemporary Burmese poets was co-edited and co-translated by James Byrne and ko ko thett and is widely recognised as the earliest anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry available in the West. Atlantic Drift: An anthology of poetry and poetics was co-edited by Byrne and Robert Sheppard in 2017, publishing leading innovative poets from the UK and North America.

Byrne's poems have been translated into several languages, including Arabic, Burmese, Chinese, Slovenian, Spanish, Serbian, and French.

In 2009 he was invited by the British Council in Damascus to participate in the Al-Sendian arts festival in Syria. In 2012 he read his work at the inaugural Tripoli Poetry Festival in Libya and, in 2013 he opened the Irrawaddy Literature Festival in Yangon, Burma. His work has been recommended by the Poetry Book Society (SOAPBOXES).

Writing

Of Everything Broken Up Dances, American poet and translator Forrest Gander said: "Reading James Byrne is like gulping firewater shots of the world. The variety of poetic forms and lineations — in couplets, prose poems, anaphoric lists, singular lyrics, and sequences — acts out the author’s insistent concern for diversity, for internationality. The extraordinary and deftly employed lexicon derives from everywhere."

Poet John Kinsella wrote on the jacket for Blood/Sugar: 'James Byrne is a phenomenon and Blood/Sugar is astonishing. Byrne has a razor-sharp wit, an acute intellect and a superb facility with language. The poetry he writes is both culturally and intellectually ‘learned’, but also rhetorically and lyrically confident. He is a complete original."

Recognition

Byrne was included by The Times in the 10 rising stars of British poetry in April 2009.

He won Tupelo's July Open Reading Competition in 2013 in the U.S., making him one of the earliest poets of his generation with a developed transatlantic profile.

Publications

Poetry

• Blood/Sugar. Todmorden, UK: Arc, 2009.
• Soapboxes. Newton-le-Willows, UK: Knives Forks And Spoons Press, 2014.
• Everything Broken up Dances. North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2015.
• The Caprices. Todmorden, UK: Arc, 2019.

Edited

• Voice recognition: 21 poets for the 21st century (with Clare Pollard). Tarset, Northumberland, UK: Bloodaxe, 2009.
• Bones Will Crow: 15 contemporary Burmese poets (edited with ko ko thett). Todmorden, UK: Arc, 2012
  • also published as Bones Will Crow: An anthology of Burmese poetry. DeKalb, IL: NIU Press, 2013.
• Atlantic Drift: An anthology of poetry and poetic (edited with Robert Sheppard). Todmorden, UK: Arc / Ormskirk, UK: Edge Hill University Press, 2017.
• The Robert Sheppard companion (edited with Christopher Madden). Bristol, UK: Shearsman, 2019.

James Byrne - Apprentice work

• I Am a Rohigya: Poetry from the camps and beyond (edited with Shehzr Doja). Todmorden, UK: Arc, 2019.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of British poets

External links

Poems

• Three 'Caprichos' poems in Granta
• Poems in Mascara Literary Review, 2015
• Four poems, 2014
• 5 Poems (in Slovenian and English)
• James Byrne at Poetry International (9 poems)

Audio / video

• James Byrne at YouTube
• / Poems recorded by James Byrne for Archive of the Now

About

• Tupelo author page
• Author page at Arc Publications
• Staff profile at Edge Hill University