Category Archives: blog post

A week is a long time in poetry

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This time last week I braved the floods to go to Hull for the Lightship Literary awards, where I was a runner up with one of my London poems, which is now in the Lightship’s gorgeous anthology.

I met some lovely fellow-writers, including some who had travelled from America and Australia to attend the awards, and had a chance to take a good look around Hull – a city I had never been to before – well, it’s not really on the way to anywhere else. The refurbished marina was quite splendid, and I loved The Deep – a beautiful building housing a spectacular aquarium. And here, in Larkin’s words, is the place ‘where Lincolnshire, and sky and water meet’.

Then on Monday night, it was a great pleasure to go along to the venerable Troubadour coffee house in West Brompton, to read one of my poems as a finalist in their annual poetry awards, curated by Anne-Marie Fyfe, and judged by Jane Draycott and Bernard O’Donoghue, who read 3,300 competition entries in five weeks.  It was good to meet Vanessa Gebbie, the over all winner, who is a friend of a friend on facebook, and Judy Brown, whose poetry collection, Loudness, I recently bought from Seren. Our smiling faces, and our poems, are all shown here.

Last night, a few of us from the new Poetry Society Reading Stanza group went along to a Christmas reading at Reading University. Jeff Hilson and Tim Atkins explained their own personal poetics and each read from three collections.  They are definitely on the more experimental end of the poetry spectrum. Atkins said he rejects lyricism, and also tries to steer clear of metaphor and simile.  I was glad of the explanations behind the poems, which helped me make sense of them.  I wonder how well I would have got on without those explanations! But certainly I’m going to look up more of their work.

American Poetry

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Jorie Graham, who was in the UK recently to pick up her Forward Prize for a collection called P L A C E , took the opportunity while she was here to make some comments about American versus British poetry.

PN Review reports her interview with Guardian writer Nicholas Wroe.  Allegedly, Graham:

compared the health of British Poetry favourably with that of the United States, likening it to “a kind of canary down the mine. Very few cultures in the history of humanity have survived if their poetry disappears.  The fact that it is astonishingly healthy in the UK should reassure people who, just as in the US, are worried about the culture. But with a poetry culture as vivid and alive as it is in the UK, your canary seems to be doing OK in your mine. Our canary is running out of breath and croaking a little.”

A few days after I read that, I had a conversation with a poet friend who happens to be part of a workshop group populated by both British and American poets.  She and I agreed on a lot of things.  American poetry seems close to prose-chopped-into-short-lines.  My friend says it looks like someone has ‘vomited on the page’.  She bewails the lack of craft the American writers display.  ‘They feel that once they’ve got everything that was in their head down on to the page, they’ve finished.’ There’s also a hugely confessional aspect to American poetry, in which raw and unprocessed emotions splurge out. We don’t really like it much.  By contrast, British poetry seems more crafted, more thoughtful, more worked and finished, slightly more oblique.

The whole schism began around the time of Walt Whitman. British poets based their work on their public school classical educations, imitating Shakespeare and Milton, while, in America, Whitman celebrated the huge American outdoors with long, expansive lines based on psalms and preaching styles.  I can see a line traced from Whitman to Ginsberg, to the “I have a dream” speech of Martin Luther King, to poets like Jorie Graham. Eliot crossed the pond, bringing a free verse style that transfused British poetry to some extent, but we still hark back to metre and sonics in a way that the Americans seem to have left behind.

At least, that’s the way it seems to me now. Next term in Roddy Lumsden’s “Here, There and Now” classes at the Poetry School, we are going to be studying contemporary American poets. Either I will learn to appreciate the wheezing of their gasping canary, or I’ll try to throttle it.

New Statesman

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New Statesman magazine has an enviable history of publishing poetry. (It published (Edward Thomas’ “Adlestrop” three weeks after the poet was killed in world War I.)  It has recently renewed its commitment to poetry.

So I am delighted that last week it printed a poem of mine, and you can now read it here:

http://www.newstatesman.com/2012/09/deposition

Like many poems this one derives from a collision of two ideas.  The first was that last year I had the chance to visit Northern Ireland, a place that held my earliest memories.  Although born in the English midlands, I spent two years living in Antrim as a toddler. When my family returned to England, my pre-school peer group had plenty to say about the way I spoke.  The second was a TV documentary which explained how archaeologists can use the minerals deposited in a skeleton’s teeth to deduce where it’s owner spent his or her formative years; the Amesbury Archer, for example, was found in Wiltshire, but grew up in the Alps.  The poem is about prejudice, but also about the different ways a place can leave its mark on a person.

What’s wrong with poetry?

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that nobody makes money out of poetry. One excellent, established poet I know tells me she makes £3,000-£4,000 per year from her books and readings.  All her other income comes from teaching poetry and judging competitions.  Publishers can’t make a profit from poetry books.  Sometimes they subsidise their poetry list from their literary fiction; sometimes they themselves are subsidised by the Arts Council.  The excellent poet Sean O’Brien helped me understand why this is, when he suggested that the audience for poetry in this country is between 5,000 and 10,000 readers – and most of them also write it.  Why is that?  What’s wrong with poetry that it should be so unpopular?  In this soundbyte generation, something short, pithy and memorable ought to be the art form of the day, but it is so not the case.

It’s actually worse than that.  I studied life sciences at University, not English Literature, and spent 25 years of my life among scientists, medics, marketeers, accountants, managers.  During that time I never heard a single one of them talk about a poem.  They went to the theatre, they read literary fiction, they raved about movies, they took in the big art shows at the major galleries, but never ever had anything to do with poetry. I once asked a few friends which contemporary poets they might know of, hoping for names like Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion, Carol Ann Duffy or even Roger McGough, most of them drew a blank.  One or two ventured; “Pam Ayres?”.

When I said that after taking redundancy I was going to study poetry, it closed down the conversation immediately.  Nobody ever asked me if they could see my poems; on the other hand if I mentioned my (still half-baked) novel it was all “Can I see it?  Am I in it? What’s it about?”  One friend of mine, who was an English Literature graduate, offered the view that going to study poetry was “What you do when you are having a nervous breakdown”.  I countered that with assuring her that studying poetry was going to save me from having that nervous breakdown.

So what has gone wrong?  Why is poetry such a minority sport?  Is there something wrong with the way poetry is taught in schools that turns people off?  Is it about the way it is marketed and sold?  Or is it such an acquired taste that it simply does not speak to anyone who hasn’t studied it in depth?

Is there something wrong with the poetry?

Ledbury

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We caught the tail end of the Ledbury festival on Sunday.  For once, it wasn’t raining, and the little Herefordshire town looked stunning.  First event was Simon Armitage, talking about his new book Walking Home in which he describes walking the Pennine Way, contrarily from north to south.  He’s an engaging speaker and very funny too.  He read a few of his Stone Stanza poems which are about water, in all its forms, and how it shapes the landscape.  He has a great turn of phrase, for example, describing mist as ‘water in its ghost state’.  Brilliant.

 

Next was my Prof, Andrew Motion, speaking about his new novel Silver, a sequel to Treasure Island.  I’ve read it and enjoyed it, it’s very true to the Stevenson original in tone; a Ripping Yarn with deeper issues to consider.  Motion says he gets up at 5.30 every morning to write.  I’m full of admiration for people who do this in order to get at some of the things in their subconscious mind.  I struggle with that time of day.

Sophie Hannah was funny and quirky; Helen Dunmore was thoughtful and elegant.  Lastly we saw a group of poets reading together in a show called ‘What We Should Have Said’.  Hannah Silva works with sound, right at the edge of meaning.  Some of my friends don’t think this is poetry at all.  I’m still mulling it over.

Boling For Broke

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Last night, via i-player (a wonderful institution, especially because we can get it on our living-room TV) I caught up with the new BBC production of Richard II – the first of “The Hollow Crown” series of Shakespeare’s history plays. Maybe it was because it was a wonderful production, or maybe it is because my ear is now more attuned to verse, it made total sense to me – I knew who was who and what was going on, although I’ve never seen this play before and didn’t know the history.

Ben Wishaw was marvellously camp and Jesus-like as Richard. The scene where he reluctantly gives up the crown was a marvel.

And Rory Kinnear was terrific as Bolingbroke, the new Duke of Lancaster after the death of Jean-Luc Picard John of Gaunt.  Except that he seemed to have eyes that were different colours.  I checked Google Images and Rory Kinnear doesn’t appear to have different coloured eyes, so what was that about?

The scene where Bolingbroke’s forces approach the castle where Richard is holed up, and Richard is sitting on the ramparts in a pointy gold helmet, made me think, inevitably, of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  If Richard had screamed “Fetchez la vache!” it would not have been out of character.  And the bit where Richard and his bishop wade out of the sea, alone, returning from the Irish wars, was somewhat unbelievable – they needed an armed retinue at the very least.

There aren’t so many really memorable quotations in this play, apart from the wonderful “this sceptred isle” speech delivered movingly by Patrick Stewart.  And the bit about the hollow crown itself:

“Within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and mocking at  his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks”

‘And the best thing of all, the ring of it – sweet as a bell.’

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I spent the whole of yesterday at Poetry Parnassus at the Southbank Centre in London.  I couldn’t be there every day this week without looking like a Simon Armitage stalker, but I treated myself to a day out.  Frank, my other half, gave me a lift as far as Osterley tube station on his way to work, so I got to the south bank about an hour before anything opened.  I was forced to take shelter in a cafe with latte and an organic almond croissant.

The first event was “an intimate reading” by Jo Shapcott of a number of her poems including her “bee poems” ( one of which you can find here at 14:55) which I’m getting more and more out of with re-reading.  I’ve been lucky enough this academic year to be one of Jo’s students at Royal Holloway, and the encouragement of attending her workshops has helped me a lot.  Her editor, Matthew Hollis, at Faber and Faber, described her to me as a “national treasure”, which indeed she is.

Next I attended a workshop with Kate Kilalea on how to tell secrets in poetry.  I struggle with making things up; many of my poems could be prefaced by the words “this is a true story”, which I put down to my training in science.  Somehow, nobody expects a novelist to tell a true story, but when a poet writes a poem, most people think it is strictly autobiographical.  It was fascinating to explore how much of us as poets is visible in our work, versus how much we choose to keep our distance.

During the breaks between events, I just hung out at the Clore Ballroom and watched the poets from 170 countries read their stuff, and there were some very eccentric readings indeed.  I think my favourite “random find” was Minoli Salgado, from Sri Lanka, who read poems that sounded absoutely beautiful, and also made me feel that the world is small – her preoccupations felt very familiar.  Also if I could “speak in tongues” I would choose Georgian.  Maya Sarashvili’s poems sounded like angels speaking; and it was almost a disappointment to find out, thanks to Sasha Dugdale’s beautifully crafted English version, that she was talking about missing her children as she went through airport security.

“Famous Seamus” Heaney is always a highlight, and I was delighted that he read his translation from the Irish of Rua Ó Súilleabháin, “Poet to Blacksmith” which is about how to make a spade, or a poem, in fact.  I love poems about making things.  I’ve written a few myself.

Wole Soyinka is another Nobel Prize winner. I couldn’t hear him so well, but he did read a funny long poem about going to the optician and being told that his eyes had such different prescriptions that they didn’t belong on the same person.  Much mirth ensued when a mobile phone rang in the middle of the performance and turned out to be Wole’s own.

Topping the bill was American former laureate, Kay Ryan, who was witty and thought-provoking and profound, and without any poetic ego.  I really must buy some of her work and see how she does it.

Eleven hours of poetry yesterday has taken its toll.  I was at home, gathering up the washing this morning, announcing:

“Now has come the hour of towels, for to every laundry there is a season”.

 

What’s Brewing?

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For complex reasons, I’m writing a series of beer poems.  I’m obsessed with craft and tradition, and some of my work to date reflects that.  So I embarked on my sequence by interviewing a 91 year old lady who used to go hop-picking on the Kent/Sussex border in the 1930s.  Last week I spent a couple of days watching a batch of beer being made at the fabulous Windsor and Eton Brewery – many thanks to Jim, Paddy and Will for letting me hang around and get in the way.

And just to prove how well beer and poetry go together, here’s the evidence.

Claire Trevien held a packed poetry night at the Jolly Cricketers, Seer Green, the other day.  Readers were Kayo Chingonyi, Emily Hasler, Kirsten Irving and James Byrne.  An impressive line-up of metropolitan poets who trundled to to the Sticks to entertain us. I really hope Claire hosts some more readings in the future.

Kicking and Screaming

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Yesterday I went on a one day WordPress course taught by Jamie Marsland at PootlePress.  As a complete newbie to website design, I achieved something cheap and legible in 24 hours; a place to blog about my writing and showcase some work.

Thank you Jamie! A highly recommended introduction for the Technically Challenged.  All I have to do now is gather some readers.