The Lowdham Book Festival 2007

I received yet another Festival brochure through the post the other day. When I first started taking poetry seriously, back in the mid-nineties, there were only a small number of large-scale literary or poetry festivals a year. Cheltenham, of course. Hay-on-Wye. Ledbury. Brighton. Swindon had just started.

These days, it seems there’s a literary festival on somewhere in the UK every fortnight. Not a hole in the corner of the field affair, with mud-covered backpackers and dusty church-based events featuring local poets. These are mostly all singing, all dancing festivals with 9 - 8pm book tents, major authors on tap, Friends of the Festival specials, children’s events with quirky themes like ‘jungle balloonists’ or ‘pirate ballerinas’, plus, of course, the essential accessory for any self-respecting Lit Fest, substantial public and private funding.

This latest brochure - neat, attractive and very professional-looking - is for the Lowdham Book Festival, 22 - 30 June 2007.

Who? Where?

It turns out that Lowdham is a village, no less, in sunny Nottinghamshire, and that this is their eighth literary festival. Clearly I’ve been sleeping for the past decade, because I had no idea that this festival existed until their brochure arrived. But they do exist and some of these events look rather tasty.

For a start, they have a festival bar and cafe - always a major pulling point for punters, who are invariably more interested in beer or cream teas than in the latest literary idol. Then there are various sporting activities which seem to have no connection with books at all (erm, tennis? three-legged world cup egg & spoon race? T’ai Chi?) followed by readings from a book of cricketing anecdotes and an anthology in which I myself have a poem, a book of sporting poetry entitled Not Just A Game.

But as far as individual poets are concerned, the Lowdham Book Festival is only featuring two this year, from what I could see. The first is Faber’s most recent acquisition Daljit Nagra, whose debut collection Look We Have Coming to Dover! is reviewed by me in the forth-coming summer issue of Poetry Review (due to be launched next month at - yes, you’ve guessed it - Ledbury Poetry Festival). The other poet on offer is Pauline Prior-Pitt, who will apparently be reading from her latest collection ‘Ironing with Sue Lawley’. Cue smiley face.

Other events which caught my eye include this:

Blog-Talk with Mike Atkinson
WI Hall, Main Street
Saturday 30th June
12.50 - 1.35pm

What do you write about? What is it safe to say? Why is blog writing different to other writing? Bloggers with book deals - how come they get them but I don’t?

-- I love this finishing time of 1.35pm. It reminds me of Maggie Smith’s cool contempt in the film version of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: ‘She thinks to intimidate me by the use of quarter hours.’ Okay, this isn’t a quarter hour, but you know what I mean. 1.35pm. Oddly precise for a public event. --

Then there’s this charming delicacy, which I would dearly love to attend:

Folklore in the age of stag nights & blogs, with Bob Trubshaw
Rhyme/Reason Tent
Saturday 30th June
12.40 - 1.35pm (again!)

Bob Trubshaw, author of Explore Folklore and folklore publisher at Heart of Albion Press, argues that folklore is a continuous creation, not something frozen forever in the days of unicorns and morris-dancers. What are our current folk traditions? What will be saved for later generations? www.hoap.co.uk

There’s also a magazine launch clashing with this event, a bumper spring and summer edition of long-established lit mag Staple, featuring editor Wayne Burrows and guest poet Douglas Houston, plus local contributors.

So it seems as though the literary festival is bigger business than ever this year, collectively pulling in millions of book-browsers and poetry-lovers across the land, and its meteoric rise looks set to continue into the tail-end of this decade. Unless, of course, the advent of the London Olympics starts having a slow-down effect on the funding of literary events like this, as many writers and event organisers fear it might ...

Beautiful Scary Darkness: Tamar Yoseloff's 'Fetch' (Salt Publishing, 2007)

Some poetry collections seem to meander in several directions at once, a loose hotchpotch of styles. Others stick to a party line, eyes fixed on a particular prize, accolade or literary coterie. Then there are those rare poetry collections, like Tamar Yoseloff’s Fetch, which seem both artful and true to life’s variety; bundled tightly together in this handsome book from Salt, the poems feel as real and atmospheric as your own memories, as here when she describes foraging for 'Fungi':

The smell -
wet anorak, fusty books, disturbed dust
of long unopened doors -
like the basement of your childhood,
beautful scary darkness.

Fetch is Tamar Yoseloff’s third collection. Her first collection Sweetheart (Slow Dancer Press 1998) was a PBS Special Commendation and won the Aldeburgh Festival Prize. American-born, she lives in London and is a tutor for the Poetry School. No stranger to the technical side of poetry, then. Nor to the idea of leitmotifs, which she uses to great effect in this latest collection.

The odd-sounding title, Fetch, is variously defined by Yoseloff as a stratagem; a trick; an artifice; the double of a living person; a wraith. Correspondingly, there are five sequenced poems here entitled ‘Fetch’, which, along with a series of woodcuts by Linda Karshan, mark off five divisions in the book. All five poems are quite similar in form and tone, with an other worldly quality, a film noir sensibility that stops just short of the reveal.

This film noir shiver is compounded by the narrative voice, which acts like a voice-over at times, an inclination towards metanarrative that makes me think of a screenwriter at work on a manuscript; sitting alone, maybe slumped over a desk in the early hours of the morning, she sends her character out into this darker world of the imagination, masterminding her every move, following the action as though with a hidden camera.

So the 'Fetch' sequence becomes a sort of poetic Chinatown, a world reeking of fear, suspense and erotic tension, yet highly aware of itself as it operates within that genre. Eventually, in a sinister fashion, the female ‘fetch’ of these poems begins to subtly take on the narrator’s appearance, to disobey orders, do her own thing, threatening to leave her creator behind.

My overriding impression when reading Fetch was a contradictory one of delicate craft combined with an over-saturation of the senses. Not an easy book to read in one sitting, but certainly one to return to, enjoying the smooth poetry of the middle sections, discovering dark corners and previously unseen footage.

Yoseloff’s lyrical gift comes to the fore primarily in strong, sensuous poems like ’Tiger‘, ’Vaporetto in Winter’, and the painterly ‘Interior with a Woman Playing the Virginals’. One short poem, 'Spring', is written ‘after Barbara Hepworth’, the talented British sculptor and artist who made her home at St. Ives in Cornwall. In 'Spring', the poet points to the complications of modern life, where ‘We pull strings/taut, construct ourselves, little puzzles’ - which sounds very like her poetry, with its intricately built walls and pyramids of sound and image. They are not forbidding places, though. Tamar Yoseloff is always inviting the reader beyond her artifical constructs into an interior where life continues just out of sight, real and intimate, yet still suggestive of some cinematic mise-en-scene, as here in the final lines of 'St. Ives':

From this window: curtains
partly drawn, the coffee in the mugs
stone cold, the tiny union jack
the only colours in the world.*

This restless connection with the visual - both filmic and from the world of art - is echoed throughout the collection. First, there is Tamar Yoseloff’s ability to pick out all this delicate imagery in painstakingly selected and placed words. Then there’s the matter of her framing references - the titles of these poems - which often reveal her inspirations. In ‘Portrait of a Couple Looking at a Turner Landscape’, she plays with structural echoes as she describes the damp-haired couple who ‘stand, not quite touching’, shifting the left-hand margin to accommodate ‘vast plains of emerald and gold’ in the painting, employing the theatrical aside of parenthesis, her lines held in exquisite tension until the final climactic ‘the sky opens and it pours’.

Elsewhere, a poem called ‘Marks’ gets full ones from me. Reminiscent of Pauline Stainer’s best work, this long sequence glows with medieval-like fragments of spiritual poetry - ‘angel of dust’, ‘the ice breaks/a song in the trees’, ‘Blade of grass through snow’, ‘hieroglyphs/in a field’, ‘a little morse of blood’, ‘delicate crevice of ice’. The entire poem feels modernist in its experimental form, yet almost romantic in tone, her voice ‘just audible/between broken frequencies’.

Tamar Yoseloff manages to yoke both these traditions here, keeping her hands light on the reins. She also writes well of the hard-edged realities of modern life - bus journeys in the dark, the news ‘full of war again’, and impersonal foreign trips, where

He stalks the wilds of the duvet
in this nil-star hotel room,
just a double bed and a bidet.

Then, without losing credibility, she speaks in a more Hughesian tongue of ‘the fox crying to no one,’ ‘the invisible sun within us’, and turns a fairy tale eye on the cautionary poem about ‘Fungi’ with which I began this review:

They poke
their tiny heads through dirt,
explorers from another age, and find
a world glassy with rain, a forest
thick with leaf mulch.

This combination of sharp urban ennui with sensuous lyricism, deployed in a language steeped in rich imagery, makes Tamar Yoseloff a poetic force to be reckoned with. Worth buying if you don't already own it.

***

Remember, you can invest in poetry by buying Fetch direct from Salt Publishing here.

*Still unable to manage the HTML for inset lines, I'm afraid. This line should start above the last 'f' in coffee.

Inarticulate? Try A Raid on the Thesaurus

It's a difficult thing to say, "Pass the thesaurus." Especially after a few glasses of wine or in the early hours of the morning, hunched over some poem or other which won't come right. But it's not cheating, I'm told, to beat through its thousand-strong pages, looking for le mot juste. Nor am I alone in reaching for it when the dull or pedestrian is all my brain seems able to turn up on its own. Even one of the most word-rich poets of the last century, Sylvia Plath, is said to have regularly relied on her thesaurus for inspiration, needing to access its wide-ranging and eclectic vocabulary when her own was stumbling about in the dark.

I have long been an admirer of the strange and highly involved delights of the thesaurus, my own 1982 paperback copy of Roget's Thesaurus looking a little worn around the edges now, pages browned and fading, curling up in places. It belonged to my mother before me - another thesaurus-beater and a prolific novelist - who has written in a neat hand on the flyleaf:

This book belongs to Sheila Holland and anyone who borrows or steals it will be CURSED. Signed S. Holland

Opposite, underlined in blue pen, is this sinister addition: DO NOT REMOVE FROM MY STUDY!

She knew her children well. Sorry, mother, but my need was greater. And since you are now dead, I have felt able to write my own name on the flyleaf above yours, as the new and probably not so careful owner.

Of course, it's important not to get sucked down into the bewildering nexus of the thesaurus when you're supposed to be writing. You turn to the book briefly to look something up and become horribly sidetracked. All you wanted was a strong Anglo-Saxon or Latinate word for patterned fabric, and suddenly you have a dozen or more, some needing to be looked up, some marvellously antique, not to mention a few which, if used, might lead your poem off into an entirely new and unanticipated direction. And if you're really lucky, one will be perfect and you can close the book and get on with your writing.

It doesn't always work like that, unfortunately. Sometimes I feel impelled to stop and write some of the word sequences down, perhaps to be used later in the same poem, perhaps to jolt my imagination at some point in the future or remind me of avenues not taken, or perhaps because I'm a little odd in my habits: tracery, filigree, gridiron, lattice, fishnet, seine, trawl, plexus, mesh, reticle, bolt, jute, hessian; or simply for the love of these words, the ridiculous sprawling nonsense of language divorced from context, nothing but sounds in the mind and the images they conjure up: gunny, hopsack, sailcloth, candlewick, shalloon, brocatelle, serge, nankeen, fustian, seersucker, and the currently miraculous moleskin (see earlier post on moleskin notebooks and the proliferation of poems).

If, like me, you need to update your thesaurus and access all those juicy new coinages alongside the more traditional words in our ever-expanding language, there's a new 150th Anniversary edition of Roget's Thesaurus available, pictured above.

And if you are currently without thesaurus - and if so, why? - try this instead: Word of the Day.

The Writer's Voice by Al Alvarez

I've always believed in the existence of a writer's 'voice', and was frankly amazed when I discovered that many writers don't. It seems a touch perverse to claim there's no such thing, when we all have our little foibles as writers and when it's often possible to spot a writer simply by examining an extract from their work. Some defend their opinion by calling it style instead. The writer's personal style, they insist. Yet what is that if not a 'voice'?

So it was good to find The Writer's Voice by Al Alvarez (Bloomsbury, 2005 edition) on the bookshelf in my local library this week, a book which practically begged me to take it home. 'For a writer, voice is a problem that never lets you go,' it declares succinctly on the inside cover, 'and I have thought about it for as long as I can remember - if for no other reason than that a writer doesn't properly begin until he has a voice of his own.'

Now that's more like it.

The poet, writer and critic Al Alvarez has been around the British literary scene for decades. He was - perhaps most famously - a friend of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath around the time of her tragic suicide, whilst working as poetry editor and critic for the Observer. He wrote an in-depth study of suicide called The Savage God which I have often re-read and taken inspiration from (sounds odd, I know, but just go with it). He also, very kindly, sent me a note when my first collection was published, praising one of my poems, a short piece called 'Sleep', one of those odd poems that arrive fully-formed in your head without you really understanding what it's about. So I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Alvarez.

After a quick flick-through, The Writer's Voice was tucked under my arm and taken home. I read it cover to cover the first night, dropping into bed at 4am with new aphorisms and kernels of literary wisdom detonating in my brain.

This is Alvarez:

On the authentic voice:
'[It] reveals itself in details the eye doesn't easily take in - in some unexpected hesitation or cunning adverb or barely audible inflection that makes you sit up and take notice.'
(Chapter Two, 'Listening', p. 75)

On the legacy of the Beat poets, which is:
'the belief that any old confession or self-revelation is intrinsically artistic because an artist ... is a public personality, a performer whose primary work of art is himself and whose ambition is to make himself known.'
(Chapter Three, 'The Cult of Personality and the Myth of the Artist', p. 107)

On criticism:
'True criticism ... comes without much theoretical baggage and with little to prove. In order to find out what's going on in a work of art, the critic must let go of his own sensibility and immerse himself in that of another writer, without theories and without preconceptions.'
(Chapter One, 'Finding a Voice', p. 10)

Naturally, the three quotations I've chosen highlight literary issues and theories which I already believed in prior to reading The Writer's Voice. So, as far as this particular reader is concerned, Alvarez is preaching to the converted. But I defy anyone, even those opposed to his rather stern views on current poetic practice, to find this book anything but a riveting read. Alvarez has a studied dryness of tone which, coupled with his fascinating anecdotes about the great and good of twentieth century literature, makes this book an absolute delight.

I shall have to return to The Writer's Voice in future blog posts. In particular, perhaps, with reference to that authentic voice which Alvarez describes, knowing it to be difficult at times to adopt, even frightening, but wholly unavoidable if a writer wishes to write genuinely. As he says, 'The authentic voice may not be the one you want to hear', reminding us that 'feelings ... are expressed less in imagery than in movement, in the inner rhythm of the language', which sounds very near to Mina Loy's famous dictum: 'Poetic rhythm, of which we have all heard so much, is the chart of a temperament.'

Having been thoroughly seduced by its easy intelligence and vividly illustrated insights into the 'why' rather than the usual 'how' of poetry, I need to take The Writer's Voice back to the library for others to enjoy, and buy my own copy. That way I can re-read it at leisure, and maybe even pull from it a few of those clever magical objects we all need occasionally in order to keep writing.

And now for something completely pointless

Before we leave the fraught topic of Annie Freud, here's a dainty morsel from You Tube which I found when googling her name in an attempt to discover something beyond the fact that she "works as a teacher and embroiderer" ...

now I know that she too likes Moleskin notebooks.

Writing in Pencil, Writing in Code

I blogged a few weeks back about buying a superb ink pen which I was using for poetry. But all that has changed in the past fortnight, for I have discovered the Moleskin notebook. I'm told many writers have used the moleskin notebook, with its twangy elastic cord for holding in loose pieces of paper or photographs and a discreet little pocket at the back of the book for hiding away love letters, documents or tickets. But I'd never been a convert to the moleskin book until roughly two weeks ago when I was caught short in Costa Coffee at a Birmingham branch of Waterstones - not needing the toilet, but having forgotten my usual notebook! - and was forced to buy a notebook there.

I didn't care for any of the over-priced spiral-bound notebooks they had on display there, with their twirling patterns and bright colours, and decided to spend a few pounds extra on one of the 'famous' moleskin notebooks - as used, apparently, by people like Hemingway and Picasso. That annoying little promotional fact was enough to put me off, but I was surprised by how quickly I fell in love with the brownish-white paper and the feel of the thing in my hand, its simplicity, its sleek black cover.

Now I've found it's actually helping me to write. Since buying the moleskin notebook I've written a poem a day, pencilled out in draft in the notebook, usually out at some noisy cafe or other, then edited and rewritten as I transfer it to the computer at home. Pencil seems so much softer and forgiving than pen when drafting a poem; there's a sense that nothing is final, that the poem is more of a rough artistic sketch than a piece of writing. And after not writing more than one or two poems a month for several years, and before that no poems at all for more than three years, being able to write poetry every single day is miraculous. At least, it feels miraculous, but are the poems I'm writing at such speed now any good?

I've been reading Jacob Polley's new collection of poetry over the past few days, as well as writing these new poems of my own. The book is from Picador. It's called Little Gods and is a truly lovely collection of poems. It never really steps beyond the traditional short lyric, but what it does within those limitations is tremendous.

Re-reading Little Gods in bed this morning, it struck me what a gulf there is between different 'types' of poetry being written today. Yesterday on Raw Light I blogged about Annie Freud's debut collection, The Best Man That Ever Was, also from Picador, and what I'd taken away from it as a reader, in particular the title poem itself. Naturally enough, I made certain assumptions about that poem based on what I had read and was able to understand. I then received an email from Roddy Lumsden late last night, a friend of the poet's, pointing out that the title poem is in fact about Hitler.

(Latest update: I had assumed this meant it must therefore be written in the voice of Eva Braun, as you might expect from a poem about Hitler and a woman, but I now realise that the woman in the poem clearly finishes the relationship with the man in the last stanza, which means she can't be Eva Braun, who dies by his hand. So I'm even more confused now, as I can't imagine how anyone can be expected to know who this poem is about, under these circumstances. Maybe someone with some inside information could explain, since it's been made clear that the background history to this poem is common knowledge, but I'll be damned if I've got a clue what it's about now.)

Reading the poem again with Hitler in mind, I soon saw the hints that I had missed. Too subtle for me, I'm afraid, as someone who has never felt the need to study that topic in depth and whose knowledge of Hitler's love life is strictly limited to what I've seen in the occasional film. But I also saw that my comments on the voice in the poem had been, by and large, accurate and in keeping with the tone of this woman's secret relationship with Hitler. However, I did feel that the subject of the poem was not made at all obvious, either in the title or in the poem itself. No names are mentioned, and although there is a single line in German - not a language I speak - and some mention of 'Party rings', that last reference meant nothing to me and I did not pick up on the significance of other hints dropped along the way.

It seems to me that poetry which deals with a subject taken from public life, rather than the poet's life, especially a subject as fraught with emotionally and politically sensitive baggage as this, but which does not specifically position itself as such for readers who may not know the topic as intimately as the poet, must become a poetry of code. Coded poetry is essentially elitist and thrives on making the clued-up reader feel like they've cracked it, they're 'in the know', and that others out there are still struggling with an impossible riddle - impossible because, unless you have those particular social, cultural or political references hot-wired into your brain, you will never understand the deeper implications of that poem without support or guidance from someone who does.

Reading Jacob Polley's Little Gods this morning, a book I'd like to discuss in greater depth at some point, I realised that I was not having to struggle at any point with obscure or unfamiliar 'popular' references, classical whatnot or political clever-clever, that none of his poems seem to rely on the reader being 'clued up' on any particular topic except the universal one of being alive and knowing how it feels to be alive, fighting against the constant threat of a failure of nerve, waist-deep in the human condition.

It's clear to me that a book of poems - especially from a 'mainstream' press like Picador - needs to work for everyone, or at least for a pretty broad cross-section of readers, not just a small group of people able to decipher the very specific field of coded references within which the poems operate. If it doesn't do this, then it runs the risk of failing as poetry, i.e. something beyond ourselves which we can nevertheless all relate to and identify with. I'm talking in general here, of course, rather than pointing a finger at Annie Freud's debut collection as an obscure book, which it isn't.

But this is a new face, if you like, to the age-old problem of poetry that's too personal to be universal. Aunty May's rambling homage in verse to her dead cat. The poem about the marriage break-up which speaks to no one but the two unfortunate individuals involved. Something I've always loved about more abstract poets like Yves Bonnefoy, for instance, is that their work is purified down to that point of simplicity where the language is transparent, not opaque, and the reference points are those which are universal: water, stone, light, dark, love, death, desire.

So perhaps I missed the point in The Best Man That Ever Was. But I'm not convinced that it's my fault that I missed the point. I was not aware of the details of their relationship mentioned in the poem. I was not aware that Hitler beat his women with birch twigs. I tried googling Hitler - Eva Braun - sadism and turned up nothing but a few thousand porno sites. I tried googling Hitler - Best Man That Ever Was, in case that was a nickname which I should have known, but got nothing of any relevance back.

Perhaps being less deliberately evasive in the text of the poem would have helped me decipher those clues, as someone whose knowledge of Hitler's private life is probably on a level with that of the average British poetry reader. Perhaps a judicious subtitle would have been in order. Or some elucidatory notes at the back of the book.

These things matter. Poetry should not be a code based on a key which is not given, a series of impossible ciphers hidden beneath an apparently innocent text. I accept that some poetry will always be difficult, and that the 'hard' in poetry can sometimes be breathtaking. But it would be even better if the code was universal and needed no key except the general life experience that any reader brings to the poem in question, if the poetry could work on both a 'hard' and 'simple' level at the same time, as it tends to do in those classics that we learnt as children, the poems that last.

It would be interesting to know how many people, picking up that book in Waterstones and reading the title poem, would know instantly what it was about. I certainly didn't, and still didn't even after having read it with some attention. There was failure on my part there, agreed. But it was a failure which was 'set-up' for me in advance by the text itself, a trap of sorts, a test designed to reward the code-breakers and expose the outsider.

I shall be going out later tonight to do a reading at Birmingham University. They have asked me to read some poems and discuss any women who may have influenced me in my writing career, though not necessarily writers. Amongst others, I have chosen my late mother, who was the romantic novelist Charlotte Lamb. Her novels were universal in that they spoke to women in a way that all women could understand, even if some were sceptical of her methods as a writer. She was always at pains to make sure that the average reader would not be put off by her writing, that her prose was as transparent and simple as she could make it, whilst simultaneously describing a highly complicated and painful emotional hinterland, the internal landscape of a woman in love ...

The Best Man That Ever Was, a debut poetry collection from Annie Freud

I recently bought The Best Man That Ever Was, Annie Freud's debut poetry collection from Picador, and have been reading it. Reading poetry collections takes time, and I don't imagine that one - or even two - fairly rapid read-throughs is enough for anyone to comment wisely on a poet or their work. But I'm going to attempt to comment to some extent on what I've read, in particular the title poem, and you'll have to forgive any fuzziness now or subsequent shifts in opinion as I come back to the book in the future.

First off, The Best Man That Ever Was is an intelligent collection, darkly humorous, loaded with grand ideas and impressive metaphors, written by a poet with oodles of raw talent and a sure ear.

But there are flaws here, and most of them are connected, in my opinion, to Annie Freud’s decision to sidestep the sticky issue of gender in poetry by writing so frequently over the shoulder of a man (i.e. ‘He’ does this or that, rather than ‘She’) or actually in the first person voice of a man. Which is problematic in itself, because it raises another sticky issue for poets, which is authenticity.

You could argue that it’s in the nature of things for a poet to be a ventriloquist, speaking in the voice of an object or another person, regardless of gender. But you could also argue that when it becomes noticeable it’s no longer in the nature of things, but is a stylistic nervous tic.

Which brings me to the question of style.

‘One of the most startlingly original poets to have emerged in recent years’ declares the Picador-generated blurb on the back cover of this handsome book.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when I found myself struck by these - often very witty - poems’ similarity to work by, say, John Stammers, Roddy Lumsden, and other London-based poets tonally influenced by - among others, agreed - the same Frank O'Hara/New York School tradition. There's also more than a touch of well-known American poet Sharon Olds here, with the long, loose-limbed rhythms of some poems and their peculiarly detailed note of intimacy, the psychological touch [though often veering away into a blokeish humour, as though Freud flirts with but doesn't want to get too close to any kind of female love poem tradition, even one as densely textured and metaphysical as Olds'].

This is a poetry with two distinct moods, neither of them unusual in contemporary poetry. It either undulates, like the I Claudius-style snake on the cover, in syllabic-heavy American-influenced lines dripping with semi-colons and subordinate clauses, or trots in sharp urban stanzas like this:

Fucking great to have done my bird
and get the heat of the sun on my neck,
no longer to hear the hooter’s howl
and live in fear of the cunting screws.

Which is where you may spot the problem I mentioned earlier: Annie Freud’s liking for poems written from a man’s point of view.

I can see that writing poetry in the voice of a man can be liberating for a woman, allowing her to say all sorts of things she might feel uncomfortable with as a woman and to use a few techniques native to male poets, like the snide or brutal closing one-liner, blowing right down the British line from Simon Armitage, which makes a frequent appearance in this collection.

It’s a fabulous trick if you’re trying to achieve humour – and these poems can be very funny – but it’s a trick that’s right there on the surface of the work, not concealed by the magician, as here in the final statement of The Maskmaker of Wanstead, its deliberately empty 'You ain't seen nothing yet.'

Authenticity. It’s not so much that we have to consider biography whenever we read, relating each poem back to the poet’s life. It’s more that the poem must seem authentic in the reading, that it must strike the reader as being ‘true’.

Indications for me that a poem is ‘true’ in this sense may include a raised heart beat, a sharp intake of breath, the urge to re-read those particular lines, and a strong desire to instantly rush off and write something myself, because the spark of authenticity ignites something in me as a writer, a sort of internal wick that’s always there, dry tinder, waiting to catch light.

Ambition is another word on the list of things I tend to look for first in a poem, including my own work. I constantly find myself writing unambitious poems, perhaps having been influenced by others in the same tradition to the extent where I don't always notice how a poem is going, the way it's shaping up, until it's too late to do anything about it.

There can be a randomness about this, but I see no other reason for wanting to write poetry than to leave behind work that will last. Anything less and we might as well give up the attempt and work a supermarket check-out. Or write fiction.

Annie Freud's The Best Man That Ever Was announces its ambition up-front with its title. Or does it?

Two things here: ‘best’ and ‘man’, the first being obvious in its claim, the second striking at first glance, gender-wise. But is Freud the ‘best man that ever was’, you may wonder, picking up the book in Waterstones? Or is this the inverse of female poetic ambition, tugging a forelock to the male tradition in the hope that it treats you kindly?

As though to completely throw out of kilter this initial impression, the title poem turns out to be one of the most complex and interesting pieces in the book. Like the collection itself, it plays with the reader, suggesting one interpretation, then unexpectedly revealing another, and yet another. It's also unusual for its content: 'The Best Man That Ever Was' tells the story of a woman who is beaten - or enjoys being beaten - in a ritualistic and theatrical manner by a man in a hotel room. **

Five stanzas of twelve lines, alternate lines slightly indented as though to create a see-sawing, swaying or dancing motion for the eye, each stanza recognisably different in tone. The first two stanzas left me confused, forced to retrace the earlier lines to find the thread I suspected I’d missed.

Having regained some sort of stability in the middle section, I then found the poem pulling me on compulsively to the end, by which time I felt a prurient interest in the interior world of the poem, its hinterland, its past, its truth or otherwise, not to mention intrigued and a little flustered by the content of the poem.

Here's the middle section, the rhythmic core of the poem, with no hesitations and the narrative voice superbly poised:

And having washed and dried his hands with care
and filled our flutes like any ordinary man,
the night's first task would come into his mind.
He'd bark his hoarse articulate command
and down I'd bend across the ornamented desk,
my mouth level with the inkstand's claws,
my cheek flat against the blotter; I'd lift my skirts,
slip down my panties and sob for him
with every blow.

[I can't do the inset for alternate lines here: anyone with the correct HTML please email me!]

I loved this particular stanza, could feel the authenticity zinging off it. Yet after the poem had finished I still felt confused, questioning the logistics of the poem's voice and set-up, like someone who walks out of the cinema after watching a film and feels unable to stop going over and over the plot and its closing moments in her mind. Re-writing, perhaps, or just trying to come to a better understanding.

In this title poem, Freud’s tone - and this applies to many of the longer poems in the book - is beautifully managed and maintained. Like a formal garden. Indeed, there’s something Edwardian about 'The Best Man That Ever Was', its narrative voice old-fashioned in an ironic and highly self-conscious way. We have the stilted self-importance of the wealthy man who beats his mistress (or wife, or prostitute, I’m not quite sure which) with birch twigs in a grand hotel, referring to the birch twigs as -

A Thing of Nature, so he said, so fine, so pure.
He’d turn away and smooth his thinning hair,
lost as he was in some vision of grandeur

- at that moment complementing the tone of the woman being beaten, in other places contrasting with it.

The narrator's voice sounds slightly deranged at the beginning of the poem, off-balance, with truncated clauses cluttering the first stanza. The narrative develops quite suddenly into eloquence after that, imbued with a sense of calm resignation about the woman’s ritual beating and its effect on both of them, Freud’s sentences lengthier and more urbane as the poem reaches its middle section.

Then her manner changes abruptly at the end, becoming Plath-like in its declamatory rhetoric, short clauses falling over themselves to reach the finishing tape, the tone unexpectedly triumphant as she celebrates rather than decries her oppressor/lover:

It’s over. But it is still good to arrive at a fine hotel
and reward the major-domo’s gruff punctilio
with a smile and a tip and let the bellboys slap my arse
and remember him, the man who thrashed me,
fed me, adored me. He was the best man that ever was.
He was my assassin of the world.

I can hear the true voice of the woman here. The throwaway finality of ‘It’s over’, the bite in these shortened syllables, the hint of barely controlled hysteria behind ‘assassin’.

Submission. Domination. The cruel, complicated, often unfathomable mental and sexual games that men and women play together. The see-sawing motion of the alternately indented lines: first one, then another. The dual face of desire. These are the things which inform the title poem.

And perhaps the deliberate textual confusions sprinkled throughout 'The Best Man That Ever Was' - who’s speaking? who is the best man? who’s doing what to whom, and why? - reflect the playful and duplicitous nature of Annie Freud’s first book. Another word to describe this might be artful. Which is to say - authentic, good. Which is to say there may be hope yet for my inadequate reading of this complex, multi-layered, tongue-in-cheek collection, and plenty more for Annie Freud herself.

But I still wish she hadn’t written quite so many poems from the point of view of a man ...

*
*I had to look up ‘velleity’. It means 1. a low degree of volition not conducive to action, and 2. a slight wish or inclination (Shorter Oxford English). I’m not sure how that fits into its context here.

**I'm grateful to Roddy Lumsden here for letting me know that the man mentioned in this title poem is Hitler. This was not at all clear to me from the title or content, but may be apparent to others. I think, in instances like these where vital contextual material is not immediately obvious in the poem itself, notes should be supplied at the back of the book, or a subtitle given to elucidate the poem. Either that or the poem should be written in such a way that it can stand alone, without notes or subtitles, otherwise alternative readings to the one intended by the poet are inevitable and must be accepted as such.

The Best Man That Ever Was (Picador, 2007), Annie Freud

Too Much Wine & Too Little Money

Too Much Wine, M'Lud

I went to a London party thrown by a poet last night, something I don't think I've ever done before. I anticipated meeting other poets there, as well as 'normal folk' and I was not disappointed. We had the usual smoky delicious offerings from the barbecue, fabulous warm dry weather, and far too much wine - I think everyone who came brought a bottle, including myself, and we did not stint ourselves in the drinking of it. (At least, I certainly didn't, and my fragile head this morning is testimony to that sad lack of forebearance. But I almost never go to parties, so I guess I'm allowed.) And the bulk of the conversations that I rolled into and over were about poetry, poetry publishing and other poets. In reverse order.

It was great fun, though I said some things I shouldn't have said - nothing new there, then! - and ought to have been led gently away by my husband after the first bottle had been consumed. But alas, that didn't happen, and I was only lured away in the end by the promise of chocolate on the long drive home ...

Poetry Book Society & the Rising Cost of Poetry

In a rush of extravagance, I recently re-joined the Poetry Book Society after not having been a member for nearly ten years. Today I received my first posting from them: a Selected by Geoffrey Hill, absolutely free, which was the tempting offer that had encouraged me to re-join, a £10 book voucher to be used when buying more poetry from them in the future, and this quarter's Choice, which is Sarah Maguire's new collection The Pomegranates of Kandahar (Chatto, £9.00), officially published on Thursday June 7th.

The new Maguire book looks intriguing, so I shall be trawling through that later this week (along with a whole deskload of new poetry that I've been buying recently, most of it as cheaply as possible, as poetry is steadily becoming more expensive) and will report back at some point on that acquisition. I shall also enjoy sitting down to admire Hill's Mercian Hymns at leisure, which I've only read in passing before. His Selected is from Penguin and costs £8.99.

But talking of the cost of poetry, at nearly 300 pages, I have to question why Geoffrey Hill's hefty and rather beautifully designed Selected is a penny cheaper than Sarah Maguire's new collection from Chatto, which may also have a beautiful cover but only weighs in at 72 pages.

No doubt it's distasteful of me to question the rising cost of poetry, or to make these potentially odious comparisons between book prices, but as I said to someone at that party last night - on the topic of whether or not it's in bad taste to accept reviewing work if you aren't able to praise the book in question to the skies - I don't have the luxury of being able to ignore such delicate matters and just stump up for the poetry or turn down an offer of paid work, on principle.

I do worry though that poetry is beginning to be priced out of the range of the average reader's pocket (if there is such a thing as an average poetry reader). Popular novels can be found at knockdown prices in supermarkets everywhere, following the demise of the Net Book Agreement, and most new non-fiction can be found online at reasonable prices via Amazon et al. But supermarkets don't stock poetry and if you buy it online at a discount, it usually means either the publisher or the poet is going to suffer for your gain.

As an example of this, the Sarah Maguire 'Choice' from the Poetry Book Society is available currently on Amazon at only £7.20, a saving of 20% on the retail price. And the collection's not even officially out yet! That price will, I'm sure, drop even further once it's been released, and after a few years, like most collections of poetry that have been kicking around the scene for a while, it will be available for only a few pounds at the most. Some poetry collections from earlier than 2000 are now available online for as little as a few pence, plus p&p.

I want to 'do the right thing' in this context and make sure money gets circulated round the poetry scene, which basically means back to the people who wrote the damned stuff in the first place. But with recommended retail prices reaching up to and beyond the £10 mark for most new collections - and often a great deal more for the larger Selected and Collected editions - that desire to do the right thing by poets has to compete with the very real fear of not being able to pay my own household bills if I buy too much undiscounted poetry in any given month.

Poetry Competitions & 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel

Poetry Competitions

Ever since a minor but giddying success last year in the Warwick Words poetry competition, I've decided that poetry competitions may be worth entering after all. In the past I've rarely bothered. The winning poems always seem to possess that bland, small-town air of the ones nobody on the panel of judges really disliked. Either that or, usually in those competitions where there's a single judge with idiosyncratic tastes, they are distinctly unpleasant in some way, the sort of thing one would never write oneself ... !

I'm mocking the poetry competition machine here, of course, but I can't mock the money on offer. The acquisition of money is always a very serious thing, especially for poets, whose usual remuneration for poems published in magazines, books and anthologies tends to be slight to the point of indignity. So I've decided to keep a rolling stock of likely 'poetry competition winners' in hand this year - rather than sending them straight out to magazine editors as I would normally do - and when each poem fails to get placed in a competition, out it will go again in the next wave of entries.

This week I'm putting together an entry for the Poetry London Competition which closes on June 1st. Jo Shapcott is the judge.

First prize £1000
Second prize £500
Third prize £200
Four commendations £75

The money on offer is easily more than you would get in most British poetry magazines or journals, many of which don't pay at all for poetry. But winning a competition does appear to be a lottery, the winners almost randomly selected by a process we can only wonder at from our computer desks. I once judged a competition myself, back in the late nineties in the Isle of Man, as part of an Ottakars National Poetry Day tie-in. My tastes quite naturally informed my own choices of winner and runners-up, but since it was a panel of judges, I then had to persuade the others, not always successfully, that my favourites should make it into the top ten. And their own choices were often inexplicable to me too.

I shall probably enter two poems for this competition, saving a few for other competitions which close later this summer. I don't hold out much hope of being placed though, as both poems are still 'under construction' and I think their unfinished air will be apparent. But I've more or less run out of time to tinker and fidget, so into the envelope they must slip, ready or not ...

13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

One final thing I must mention before closing this blog entry: I've just got hold of Jane Smiley's comprehensive '13 Ways of Looking at the Novel' (Anchor Books, 2006), and am enjoying it vastly.


This is a genuine doorstop of a book, difficult to lose even about the most chaotic of book-strewn households, and it makes fascinating reading. Jane Smiley is not only highly astute as a critic, but her own prose is a delight: highly intelligent and stuffed with fabulous insights and titbits of information about the world of novels and novelists, yet transparent and lacking in pretension at the same time. A real masterpiece of modern criticism and analysis, something my mother would have absolutely loved to read and savour over many sleepless nights, and one which is making my own fingers itch to write.

Bare Bones, Old Friends & Big Guns

I've just had a striking idea for a new novel - 'Lit Lite', I suspect! - which is desperately inconvenient as we're in the middle of being evicted here. I have ideas all the time, of course, like most writers. But this one has particular promise, not least because it makes delicate little connections with some of the emotional hurdles I've faced over the past ten years.

I've put the bare bones of the plot down in a notebook and will revisit it in a few weeks, just to see if it still resonates with me. I'm pleased to have come up with a new idea anyway, even if it ends up being unwritable. I have to finish something else I've been working on before I can start work on a new book, but at least this will mean I have an interesting project lined up for that twilight time just after you've moved house, when your brain is still shifting aimlessly about in the dust and chaos, looking for something solid to cling onto.

I met the editor of established poetry magazine SEAM the other week, the formidable Anne Berkeley. It was at the Cambridge CB1 reading; she very kindly bought a copy of Boudicca & Co., and asked me to send her some poems for the magazine. Of course, I do have some new poems available, but I'm not entirely convinced by them yet. Another month or two, perhaps. They don't seem quite bedded down into themselves, still something a bit provisional about them. But she put me onto an old friend, via email, whom I first met at an Arvon course many years ago: former editor at SEAM, Frank Dullaghan, who now lives and works in Dubai, and has a collection of poetry forthcoming from Cinnamon Press next year. It was good to touch base with him again.

Today someone on the Poem Forum was asking for hints and tips on approaching literary editors about writing reviews for them. Coincidentally I had just been reading some superb past issues of Mslexia - to be picked up for a song via their website if you're a woman writer or interested in women's writing - including one which featured an article on approaching magazine editors as a book reviewer. I've been thinking for some time myself about stepping up a gear in terms of reviewing, but haven't yet motivated myself to send a sample poetry review to the big guns (TLS, LRB etc), so it was a jolt to my ambition to answer the guy's post with some salient points. I've become contented, I think, just to review for the 'usual suspects' and not look any higher. But one of the points Mslexia frequently makes is that women writers tend not to be as ambitious and inclined to aim high as their male counterparts.

Time to do something about that uncharacteristic lack of inclination, I think ...

Evicted!

I had a great reading from Boudicca & Co last night at CB1 in Cambridge. The joint was packed, the audience laughed - and cried, which was a bit weird - in the right places, and I sold a fair number of copies of my new book. Since I'd thought to stow my cue in the boot before setting off, the old husband and I then trolled off for a game of snooker at WT's in nearby central Cambridge, which went on until about 2.30am. The place is run by a guy with an amazing handlebar moustache, like one of the KeyStone cops, and I've known him forever, since he used to referee on the ladies circuit way back when I thought poets were all dead and a good performance meant not getting knocked out until the last 16.

The club was a bit loud and youth-heavy, but after a few embarrassing shots, I somehow managed to find some form and started knocking hell out of the husband. My favourite pastime. It was not until the early hours, after some trouble finding the right road out of Cambridge, that we managed to escape the grips of that ancient place and toppled into bed back in rural Warwickshire just after 4.30am.

Grim as death, I struggled up the next morning to find a notice of eviction had been unexpectedly served on us. The landlord wants to sell up. Our departure date is set at July 16th, following three years of uneventful tenancy. Not the best of days then, after a fantastic evening of poetry & snooker.

We don't have much money at the moment. I have visions of us living in a trailer park soon. Would I be the first British trailer park poet, I wonder?

This is a little taste of where we live now, to give you some idea of why being evicted is particularly unpleasant ...

Is Blogging another form of Blocking?

Poets On Fire is now on MySpace!

Blogging versus Writing Poetry

I seem to spend inordinate amounts of time online these days, mostly blogging - not here on Raw Light, which as you've no doubt noticed rarely gets updated, but generally on Poets On Fire, where I tend to post something up every single day. Sometimes more than one event per day. Sometimes as many as five or six, in fact. Which is a time-consuming business and does effectively mean that I'm not writing as much as I could be if I didn't run Poets On Fire.

But, of course, if I didn't have all these tiring nooks and crannies on the net, and run a resource like Poets On Fire, which is visited by many thousands of poetry-interested people every month, would I have as high a profile in poetry as I do now?

When I was first starting out in poetry, as an ex-snooker player with almost no knowledge of the British poetry scene, or multiple British scenes in fact, the quickest way I could see of getting my name known and actually discovering something about the process of writing and editing poetry was to run a small magazine myself. Which I did, for nearly four years, and its name was Blade.

Now I don't have time to run a magazine, and frankly wouldn't have the patience nor the energy for such a vast undertaking. Complicated and emotionally fraught stuff like dealing with masses of poetry mail every day and putting a 60-odd page magazine to bed every few months seemed easy and fun in my late twenties and early thirties. Hard work, yes. But still fun and not so difficult to do.

In those days I had two daughters around the 10 - 12 years mark. Now I have three young children at home every day, being home schooled, and I just don't have the same levels of energy as I did when I was younger and fitter. So running a magazine is out of the question.

But writing up a few blogs in the wee small hours when all the kids are in bed seems like a fair sacrifice of my time if I get useful publicity in return, and perhaps the odd offer of a reading. After all, there's little point writing poetry all day in your lonesome garret if no one is ever going to hear of your work or offer you a paid spot at their local guest poetry night or literary festival.

Besides, it amuses me to post up all these strange and dynamic live poetry events all over the country, knowing that people actually visit and read the Poets On Fire blog every day, and that most of them will take some sort of useful information away with them. And it pleases me to think I'm providing a free service for other people like myself. Even if I'm sometimes a bit too weary and over-run with kids to provide it until quite late on in the evening.

So blogging probably is another way of blocking the creative outlet. But since buying a laptop recently, I've discovered that I can now write up my hand-scribbled poems on that in another room - even in bed, sometimes! - and not be tempted to go online and start blogging when I should be writing. Then I transfer them back to my Mac via a USB pen at some more convenient time.

Once a Novelist, Always a Novelist ... ?

Poems, blogging, all that is going well at the moment. But when a good friend of mine was recently surprised to hear that I was also a novelist, once published by Sceptre - seven years ago - it struck me that I have done very little by way of pursuing my fiction-writing career lately.

This is not through laziness - I have three full-length manuscripts lurking in dusty computer files, written over the past six or seven years - but simply through feeling very despondent about EVER getting an agent. I send these things off periodically and they come back with a 'No thanks' every time. It's hard not to give up and stick to writing the sort of things I know will get published.

But my friend was right. It's time to push harder at the prose, get back to my roots as a fiction writer.

Onward and upward!

Reading at the Whitechapel Gallery TONIGHT

I'll be in London later today, visiting various favourite haunts and then heading over to the Whitechapel Gallery for my reading there, as part of the Salt in the Margins season.

At the moment I'm in the midst of a spate of readings from my latest poetry collection from Salt, Boudicca & Co - you can read Angela Topping's detailed review of this book online at Stride Magazine - having read in Atherstone this week, a Warwickshire booktown, and in Coventry last night at a launch event for the inaugural Coventry Festival of Literature and Liberty. I'll be reading at CB1 in Cambridge next week, on Tuesday May 8th, and at Warwick University the following Saturday. But going to London always feels like going home to me, having spent much of my early childhood in and around our capital city, so a poetry reading there is something very special for me. Especially this one, since it will be my very first London reading from Boudicca & Co.

If I'm lucky and my train down from Warwickshire isn't delayed, I should have a little spare time to head over to the Poetry Cafe before the reading and write some poetry there. It's been a while since I was able to do that, and since I love writing in cafes in the normal run of things, writing in a cafe specially created as a poetry space has to be a real treat ...


Here are the details of tonight's reading:

Salt Margins @ The Whitechapel Gallery
The Whitechapel Gallery, 80-82 Whitechapel Road, London E1 7QX
First Thursday of every month, 7pm start, Free entry

CAMBRIDGE, UK (Salt Publishing) The UK’s most exciting live literature promoters, Penned in the Margins, are joining forces with creative publishing house, Salt Publishing, for a series of free events at East London’s Whitechapel Gallery.

Heavily seasoned with poetry, storytelling, comedy, live drawing and music, the eclectic Salt Margins line-up is carefully blended to provide one of London’s most innovative performance nights, all in the comfort of The Whitechapel’s chic bar space.

Thursday 3rd May, 7pm, Free
In May, poet and former professional snooker player Jane Holland reads from Boudicca & Co (Salt) and Stuart Taylor premieres his poetic exploration of the city, Metropol. Cult author Amy Prior fuses words and visuals with her latest book I Can’t Believe How Great I Feel, featuring live drawing from Sarah Doyle. Plus, bright young thing Joe Dunthorne reads a selection of poems and stories.

Another Rejection

I had a depressing Dear Jane email today, a rejection from the literary agency to which I had sent a partial mss of my children's fantasy novel some 10 weeks ago.

As time stretched on, I had foolishly allowed myself to hope that someone at the agency had actually read my submission and was thinking seriously about asking for the rest. But of course I was wrong. They just hadn't got round to rejecting it yet.

So now I have to go back to the list of literary agents that deal with children's novels and pick another. I feel reasonably philosophical about this latest rejection, since I know it's a common enough thing for writers to get knocked back by agents and publishers, but at the same time I am still human and it is hardly confidence-inspiring. This is only the fourth agency to look at my mss, but since each one takes roughly three months to 'consider' my submission, and I then take another few weeks to do some rewriting and sort out another potential agency to approach, the process could easily take years. By which time I will have little enthusiasm myself for the story.

Of course, I should be hard at work on another novel, not worrying about the one I've already written.

But I have many unshirkable demands on my time, and poetry is uppermost in my mind at the moment, especially with this series of readings from BOUDICCA & CO taking place over the next month, so the opportunity to spend several hours a day writing prose is not exactly easy to come by. I do have an intriguing idea for another novel. Then again, my confidence is so low after all these rejections, I do have to wonder whether I should give up trying to write for children.

On the other hand, children's fantasy fiction is something I have consistently enjoyed reading over the years, so I'm delighted to be writing in that genre. Besides which, I love poetry, and things do seem to be going well for me in that department, but poetry alone is not going to pay the bills ...

Forthcoming Readings from BOUDICCA & CO

Jane will be reading at
THROCKMORTON'S BOOKSHOP
Atherstone
Saturday 28th April
Time: 2pm
- books will be on sale,
plus open mic

Throckmorton's Bookshop
16 Market Place
Atherstone
Warwickshire
CV9 1EX
Tel: 01827 717570
Email: throckmortons @ gmail.com
Web: www.atherstonebooktown.net/throckmortons.htm


*


Jane will be a guest poet at
SALT MARGINS II
Whitechapel Gallery,
London
Thursday May 3rd
7pm
Free entrance

Also reading that night:

Cult author Amy Prior presents her latest book I Can’t Believe How Great I Feel with live drawing by Sarah Doyle. Stuart Taylor premieres Metropol, his poetic exploration of the city. Plus up-and-coming poet and novelist Joe Dunthorne.

Organised by Tom Chivers, Salt in the Margins.


*

CB1 Poetry & Music
Tues 8th May
8pm start
CB1 Cafe (Mill Road, Cambridge)

Guest poet - Jane Holland, reading from her new collection, BOUDICCA & CO, published by Salt.

Plus supporting sets by local poet Nick Jones and musician Patrick Shiel.


*

Jane will be performing as Guest Poet at
THE POETS' CAFE
in Reading,
organised by AF Harrold.
Friday 15th June
Further details to be announced

Why the Pen is Still Mightier than the Keyboard

As I was saying in a previous post to Raw Light, since dragging myself out of childhood I have always written straight to a keyboard; first, onto the humble typewriter as a teenager and young adult, then later onto a computer, drafting straight onto the screen both for poetry and prose. I found it helped me to see - especially with poetry - how the finished work would look on the printed page.

For poetry in particular, line endings and the white spaces created by stanza breaks seem to fall into sharper focus in print or on screen, where on paper they are often all but invisible.

That's down to my dreadful scribble, though. Writers with cleaner handwriting than mine - or who are more disciplined at keeping their lines straight and evenly spaced - probably don't suffer from the same problem, i.e. being unable to decipher their own scrawl at a later date, let alone see how it might translate to the printed page.

But editing a poem is a different matter. There I need to escape from that clinical 'finished' air of the computer screen and get back to my scribble, to free myself up for making those necessary changes before I can start typing again.

So the ink pen comes out, as I'm a visceral sort of creature and find pencil too anaemic a medium for writing - unless making marginal notes in a book where pen marks always look like an act of desecration - and it does have to be good black ink, preferably from a fountain pen. Something that writes boldly, that feels strong and certain in my hand, a pen that means business.

Last week I happened to find some old Selfridges vouchers in the back of a drawer, dating back a couple of Christmases, and we drove into central Birmingham to spend them at the Bullring. I had intended to get my husband an expensive silk tie, something pointlessly extravagant, but then he made the foolish mistake of leaving me alone in the Selfridges stationery department before we reached menswear.

That's when I caught sight of the pen, waiting for me in a glass cabinet like Sleeping Beauty, still and silent. Deep red, naturally enough for a Scorpio, is my favourite colour. And this pen is a real beauty, smooth and red and exquisitely sensual to hold.

The assistant took it out of the cabinet for me to try, my husband's tie was forgotten, and the pen ate up all those vouchers instead ...



To return to my earlier point, I want to explain how that act of revising poems by hand actually works and why it's so important to me. And the easiest way for me to do that is probably to show the act of revision in progress.

So I've leafed through old drafts of published poems - I throw most of them out now because the accumulation of paper is simply too much otherwise - and have found a few that may illustrate what I mean. These are early drafts of a poem called Desert Mother which was published last year in my second collection, Boudicca & Co. (Salt Publishing).

As you will see from the scans I've taken of these early drafts, the title is one of the most revised and agonised over parts of a poem for me. Sometimes the right title comes to me very early on, and that rightness seems to inform the whole process of writing the poem. But in most cases, the working title keeps changing over the life of a poem-in-draft, and is sometimes still in doubt even as a book is going to print.

The body of the poem is also changed as the drafts pile up. Sometimes I return to earlier drafts and reinstate lines which have been cut, but mostly I simply discard those embryo drafts and only work on later versions when revising for publication. What I'm usually looking for are ways of economising with language and sound.

Fewer words, or more specifically, the most telling words. Clean, clear strokes on the page, rather like a striking piece of calligraphy. Also listening for the words which hit the right note at the right pitch and rhythm for that poem. All of which are tremendously difficult to achieve, especially if you're trying to achieve such a stern level of economy and accuracy throughout a poem and not just in those miraculous lines where it came naturally at the first-ever draft.

The first few and last few lines are nearly always the worst troublemakers, as these drafts show. Often a poem will simply sit in a file for several years because I can't satisfy myself with one or two lines. If I'm lucky the right version will eventually present itself. If not, the poem gets thrown away or is lost as I upgrade computers and fail to copy all the older poems on file. I rarely keep paper copies, again because of lack of space for all those fiddly drafts.

No wonder I take so long to put together my poetry collections ...

Here's 'The Rucksack'



NB. To read these drafts more closely, click on the image and a slightly enlarged version should open in a new window.


And here's 'Tomorrow, Lord'




Now here below is the finished poem - if any of my poems can be described as finished! - as it appears in Boudicca & Co. (Salt Publishing, 2006).

As you can see, the title has now become the more self-explanatory 'Desert Mother' and the subtitle clearly indicates where the original inspiration for this poem came from, i.e. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. To emphasise this, but also to give the poem added context, I merged the original rather vague 'mother and father' lines into a more authoritative, framing reference to prominent members of the communities, namely the Sisters and Abba Macarius.

It's a plain-looking poem on the page, maybe even a little clumsy in some of its line ending. But in performance, it can be an extremely effective piece of poetic theatre.


Desert Mother
(After Fortitude 38 and 39, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers)

My cell is the pillar of cloud
where God spoke to Moses.
It’s the furnace I stand in,
morning and evening,
an intolerable column of fire
between me and God.

Each day I pack my rucksack, peer out
at the desert. The Sisters
weep for me. Abba Macarius
prays for me. I press
imaginary footprints into the sand,
my hated cell shrinking
in the distance,
nothing but a hot dusty hell
I’ve crouched in
these seventeen years.

And each night
I lay down my rucksack for a pillow
and praise God
saying, ‘Tomorrow, Lord.
Tomorrow.’

Writing in Cafes

I love writing in cafes. Writing any old thing, prose or poetry or articles or personal letters. I even enjoy doing my Ancient Greek in cafes, if I can manage to haul all the books I need along to the place in question. Prose can demand research materials to hand, earlier pages, or a synopsis to glance at now and then. But when writing a poem, all you really need is some paper and a pen or pencil. It's the ultimate portable art.

I usually write poetry longhand these days, using a proper ink pen, a fountain pen preferably, with strong black ink, something that will sink into the paper. And the paper doesn't have to be in some beautiful arty loose-leaf book, though I do occasionally use those. Often I find the best poems emerge out of scribbled lines on tattered envelopes, with many false starts and crossings-out, developing later into something worth saving.

I used to write all my poems straight onto the computer, even at the very start of my writing career when I was hammering away at some archaic Amstrad, but at some stage I started to enjoy writing whilst sitting alone in my greenhouse or my camper van and that slowly changed the way I worked. I no longer have either a greenhouse or a camper van - alas, I miss them both terribly! - but I still tend to write first drafts of poems longhand now, usually in a cafe.

Today I was working on a poem for teenagers that I've been commissioned to write. It didn't quite come right, but I've made a start on the idea and there are odd little shreds in this first draft that may appear later in the final poem.

It would have been nice to finish that new poem today. But I've not been well this week - a bad chest cold and a threatened ear infection - so I don't blame myself too much for not getting a poem right at the first attempt. Sometimes you do have to worry at poems, let them go for a few days, maybe chip away at them from time to time, not force them to emerge before they're ready.

So instead I came home and started to draft something up for one of my other blogs, the one I use to document the home educating of my three youngest children. We went off to visit the Anglo-Saxon Reconstruction Village at West Stow in Suffolk last month, and I've now finally posted up the various photos I took, plus some general information about the Anglo-Saxon village, on my 'Home Schoolers in Warwickshire' blog.



If you're interested, you can find that blog at everydayschool.blogspot.com.

A Cyber-Offering to Albion

I was trawling various sites tonight, researching some ideas I have on writing a sequence of British mythology-inspired poems, and found this on the site of a dear friend of mine:

"The bard mediates the past to the present, certainly; but her role is also fundamentally to praise. Though she mediates the past, she lives in the present, and her role is to use metaphor to unconceal the being of things. Using her language, by likening unlike things, she is able to cleanse our vision and let us see the world afresh, letting us feel our way into a new connection with reality. The bard is one who renders-strange; she uses language to defamiliarise the world, only to hand it back to us a second later, made new, so that we can experience its wonder afresh.

This is why cliché is not just bad poetry – it’s the opposite of poetry, because it deadens our experience of the world. This is also why writing bardic poetry isn’t just an attempt to write down your feelings as a kind of therapy; it must break new ground. The bard’s consciousness must revolve and rhapsodise around another being, to reveal its nature, its inner being. It is from metaphor that we can lay hold of something fresh. The bard should lay the world before us in its prismatic brilliance."

Mark Williams: Grove of the Stars


On reading these words, I felt strangely moved to steal them (with permission) and post them up here alongside this photo, taken last week on the edges of the ancient forest of Thetford, and the following poem, written in about 1998-9.

This is by way of a cyber-offering to Albion/Alba towards the successful completion of my new project. Perhaps also for a shift from praising to prophecy, as Mark might put it, which feels like frightening territory to enter, though as I wrote once: "Nothing to be done but the crossing:/a still moon drifting dark water ... '.

Birth of the Medicine Man

Nobody knows how, but I sprang
fully-formed from a hole
in the ground: steam accompanied me
and earth shook
with its legs drawn up
as I was squeezed like toothpaste
out of that great darkness.

Once I started to live
it was seen I had an extra rib
the width of a finger.
But this is not all.
My heart, stomach and liver
were found to be crystal.

When I was old enough to dream
I began to remember
how they took me
away from my family,
told me to run
and shot bullets of quartz crystal
after me. One entered
the white space of my head
and spoke to me. It said

'Fall to the ground, fall down
and let the river run over you.'

So I fell and the fathomless river
ran over and around me. Fish
drummed their heels
on the thin skin of my ankles
and when I emerged
I could breathe fire and see
inside solid objects.
I saw a spirit trapped
in the mountain rocks.
I heard its voice
in the mouth of a cave. It said
'All things have their story.'

Listen to the four winds.
All things have their story.

'Be Mine' anthology of love poems

Just a quickie to let you know that I've got a poem in a brand-new anthology called Be Mine, an anthology of love poems edited by Sally Emerson (Little Brown, 2007). It's the same poem, THEY ARE A TABLEAU AT THE KISSING-GATE, which appeared in Picador's anthology All the Poems you Need to Say I Do.

Sorry not to have been posting here much recently, but if you take a quick peek at one of my other sites, POETS ON FIRE you will immediately see why! I've been very busy changing the look of the site and posting far more photographs (mostly taken by me at poetry gigs across the UK) and little snippets of news and tips about live poetry and spoken word.It's taken some time to change the look of the site, but now things should settle down a bit and maybe I'll actually be able to post here instead!

Let me know if you think the red font on POF is too much. I like it myself but my husband made odd faces ...

Jane x

Poetry readings, chocolate muffins and rhinos.

I was due to travel down to London this weekend for the Penned in the Margins radio show, but recently found out that it's 'resting' for a few months, so I'll have to content myself with the local action, plus an eagerly-awaited Cambridge reading in April and a trip to Whitechapel on May 3rd to read at the Whitechapel Gallery there. I have to admit to keenly looking forward to the Cambridge trip in particular because it will give me an excuse to use my membership cards for Mickey Flynns, the Cambridge-based independent 9-ball pool club!

This may seem a trivial thing to a non-player, but the Uk pool market is more or less dominated by a series of large chains, mostly Rileys - even some of the smaller chains appear to be owned by Rileys, simply operating under another name, so there's not much to choose between any of these UK chain-owned clubs in terms of variety and a different approach to marketing cue sports. In other words, independent clubs are few and far between, and it's always a pleasure to visit one whenever I can. Which isn't very often, as the Midlands - where I currently live - is dominated by Rileys clubs.

But I digress.

So I'm off to do those poetry readings later this spring, and there are a few other interesting gigs lined up too, notably a Reading-based monthly poetry night run by AF Harrold, which I'll be 'doing' in June. I'm also hoping to organise a bookshop reading in a few months' time, but I was ill last week, which kept me away from such business matters due to a loss of voice, and now I keep forgetting to ring the bookshop owner to thrash out the details.

Such organisational skills! Tomorrow, Peter, honestly.

I've also forced myself to seriously re-write - ahem, this is now about my fifth serious re-write on this - the first few chapters of my children's fantasy novel, basically with an eye to sending it off in the next few days to another prospective agent. I've actually only sent this manuscript out three times so far, which means it could still be early days!

But I do get dreadfully knocked back when agents show absolutely no interest in my work and so assume that the book - or whatever - must be dire and only worthy of being binned. But, of course, it may not be. I have to clng to that hope, gird my loins, do some re-writes where I feel necessary, and send the blessed thing out again to another victim. I mean, agent.

The rejection knock takes a few months out of me, in terms of being able to work with confidence, while I recover. Such a long time! Then I tell myself nice things and start the horrible process again.

But at this rate it could take years to place this novel. Maybe decades. And with the amount of doughnuts and double chocolate muffins I'm eating to cope with the stress of it all, I may not have decades! So I have to be strong and make sure that, when/if I get another rejection at this attempt, I will dust myself off more rapidly and get the sample chapters and synopsis out again to another agent within days rather than months.

I'm beginning to think successful writers need to have hides like rhinos. Either that or be completely naive. Now which would I prefer?

Head down, horn up.