Letting it all hang out

I suffer from a major conflict in my poetry writing, between the in-built compulsion to be neat and tidy - to an almost anal extent - and a desire to stuff all that prissy nonsense and just bloody well write.

I was looking a few nights ago at Vidyan Ravinthiran's excellent article on Ted Hughes and Poetic Embarrassment at Frances Leviston's Verse Palace (over a year old now, I think, but well worth a revisit) and thinking, YES! What the hell am I doing, shaving lines to a bare minimum, fussing over commas and spaces and 'poetic tone' in what must ultimately become heavily engineered poems?

I should be writing poems whose truth and meaning are just as important as their look on the page or their sound on the air - if not more important.

It's easy to forget, when lost in the idea of crafting a poem, of being a poet, of not only publishing each poem you write but actively expecting to publish it, that a poem exists for a reason beyond careerism and craft. Or it should do.

In his article, Vidyan describes what I call just bloody well writing the poem as humiliatingly akin to 'heading out to a party with your flies deliberately left undone, bra straps on show, then doing drunken impressions of David Brent. Not fashionably mussed and crumpled – just wrong, embarrassable, vulnerable.'

He then compares the cringe-making but raw and startling electricity of some of Ted Hughes' wilder work with what we tend to see in the better magazines and on well-bred publishers' lists these days: 'so many finicky, unambitious, slightly self-regarding poems, whose aim seems simply to get from the top of the page to the bottom without tripping up, without using any excess adjectives, without putting themselves on the line, being photographed from their less flattering side.'

Vidyan hits it right on the head. I thought about all this at the TS Eliot Prize readings the other night, where the work on show was beautifully-written, resonant, polished, poetic, yet rarely gave me a glimpse of the sheer urgency and violent poetic drive and power that one gets from even the slightest of Ted Hughes' poems. (With the exception of Brian Turner's work, perhaps - though I'd like to see him achieve that sledgehammer effect without having to use the bodies of unknown civilians to do it.)

So, what does this mean? That I should write poetry with my breasts hanging out and my hair unkempt and a slightly Ancient Mariner look to my eyes? Well, maybe I should.

It can't be any worse than writing poems in the mealy-mouthed, cold-sweat fear of the embarrassment of 'getting it wrong'.

TS Eliot Prize Readings: Sunday January 23rd, 2011

So a funny thing happened to me at the TS Eliot readings last night, in London's magnificent Royal Festival Hall.

I was in the bar after the readings, chewing the fat with various poetry practitioners, when a woman leapt up to me and announced that she went to junior school with me - 33 years ago!

When I had recovered from my astonishment, I discovered that we had apparently been planning to write a novel together - just before I was removed from the school, and indeed mainland Britain, and sent off to school in the Isle of Man.

What was truly astonishing was her ability to recognise me after all these years. My memories of junior school are so dim and far-off (probably because I moved away) that I can't even recall teachers' names, though I remember the school itself. Have I changed so little since I was ten years old? What a frightening - and perhaps also comforting - thought.

But to the poetry!

I was in a box - not because I'm insufferably posh; it was all I could get at the last minute - and could see poet and editor Tom Chivers in a box opposite me, live-tweeting for the Poetry Book Society all through the proceedings.

The line-up was as follows: Simon Armitage, John Haynes, Brian Turner, Robin Robertson, Pascale Petit, Fiona Sampson, Sam Willetts, Annie Freud, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott (who couldn't be there, so Daljit Nagra read for him).

All the shortlisted titles can be bought via the Poetry Book Society website. 

Setting my stall out right away, Simon Armitage is my personal favourite to win this year's prize. There's often a perception about Armitage that he's too 'popular' to be taken seriously, and indeed one accusation being levelled at this particular book - Seeing Stars - is that it's composed of fragments or anecdotes or prose poems, not straightforward poetry. I was delighted with his poem about a sperm-whale, loved his delivery, and think Simon opened the evening's proceedings with great aplomb and a vast, almost casual talent. I don't think he'll win this year, but I'd love to see him do it all the same. Go, Simon!

John Haynes surprised me. I'd expected him to be a much younger man, for some unknown reason, but he's not. He has a shock of white hair and a somewhat tremulous way of speaking his (formal) verse from his new book You, and although I wasn't desperately enamoured of the long poem he read, he impressed me with an obviously warm, engaging and honest personality.

Former US soldier Brian Turner made me want to throw something at him. I restrained myself admirably, of course, but gosh, I was seething by the time he had finished. He came on stage and read a long, detailed, list-style poem from the point of view of hundreds of deeply unfortunate civilians in Iraq - as they fell to their deaths from a bridge during the war: men, women, free-falling children, a heavily pregnant woman whose child 'will never have a name' - or words to that effect. It was highly manipulative and sanctimonious in tone. I found this review quotation from John Bradley online: 'Brian Turner, a veteran of the Iraq war, continues this tradition of using poetry to inform and educate.' To educate is the key phrase there. It was highly disturbing to listen to, and the worst kind of sensationalism - I seriously wanted to put my fingers in my ears at one point, when he began describing the broken bodies of dead children.

The people in my box defended him afterwards, citing a tradition of war poetry by soldiers. But those soldier-poets were, in general, writing from the point of view of soldiers. Not from the point of view of horrifically dying civilians.

To be clear about this, his poem was NOT written like a news bulletin or factual report, which - in an ideal world - does not set out to treat subjects in a personal, emotive or intrusive way. His poem had the audacity and bad taste to enter at length into the mind of a young child falling to his death, a pregnant woman falling to her death, another helplessly watching her child free-fall beside her, and to capitalise on the power and horror of those real experiences. To use them as a springboard for his writing. In those moments, being forced to listen to Brian Turner describe those unfortunate people's deaths in such minute detail, the word 'poem' died a little for me, and became nothing more than one more act of grubby sensationalism in a world of the self-seeking and the desensitised.

Robin Robertson. Well, what can I say? I love his luminous, tightly-worked lyrics, and in the past have often read them in order to find a path back into poetry when feeling lost. However, there's a sparingness about them that has always been a little problematic for me, a quality of under-speak. Like the poetry has been pared away to mere slivers of language by a master craftsman. And while that felt marvellous for me at one stage, looking to such lyricism to save me from a general lack of inspiration, I was waiting to see how Robertson had moved on from his last book, and his reading last night didn't particularly convince me that he had. His subject matter was unrelentingly grim too, even dour, and his poetry 'slivers' seemed to lack some essential spark which they once possessed for me. I thought the same about his book, The Wrecking Light, when I bought it some months back, i.e. that it was a little too much like its predecessors. But he's probably still a strong contender to win this.

Pascale Petit is, of course, a poet of enormous power and imagination. I find her subject matter disturbing as well, but there is a sense of connection there, so strong and human as to be utterly understandable in her case. Some of her imagery is so startling and apposite, you almost wish to applaud it during the poem. I would certainly be happy to see her book What the Water Gave Me win this year's prize.  

The same applies to Fiona Sampson, whose new book Rough Music seems to continue on from where Common Prayer left off. She has a lyricism that falls delicately on the ear, so that her power lies largely in an accumulative effect. This may make her less of a candidate for the prize, which would be a shame, as there is much to be prized in Sampson's subtlety of approach, her musicality and an easy, natural talent for language and its nuances in poetry.

Sam Willetts was unknown to me before last night. I will now seek out his work - New Light for the Old Dark. He can be a gently comic as well as a dark and elegiac poet, and although a win by Willetts would be a shock - this is his debut, after all - I would be perfectly able to see how the judges could come to such a decision. His work possesses both light and shade, subtlety and force, to a powerful and mature degree, and hints at greater things to come. A newcomer to watch!

Annie Freud - well, I already gave her book The Mirabelles a big thumbs-up in the pages of the most recent Poetry Review, so I shall not discuss her at length. But she is another likely candidate for the prize this year. Her work is also mature, powerful, and - most importantly perhaps, as far as long-term success is concerned - is written with personality rather than a desire to be applauded. As compere and poet Ian McMillan mentioned in his introduction, Annie Freud writes what is most dear to her heart and ignores all other considerations. The fact that she couples this determination with a keen understanding of poetic form and structure makes her book another strong contender this year.

Seamus Heaney came on to huge applause, and was probably the most applauded poet of the night, in fact. It was clear from the audience reaction - apparently nearly 2000-strong in the vast arena - that this was the man many of them had come to hear. He looked and sounded a great deal older than when I last saw him read, at the Cheltenham Festival in - I think - 1995, just after he had won the Nobel Prize. But despite that, he was clearly the crowd's favourite by the end of the night. And his poems were sound as ever, always so perfectly formed and rounded. Good luck to him.

Derek Walcott's work was read - very engagingly too - by Daljit Nagra. Daljit threw a few jokes of his own in, but I'm sure Derek wouldn't have minded, and it certainly lightened the evening for the audience. The first sonnet he read was a corker, where the aged poet - in a wheelchair - meets an old flame - also wheelchair-bound - in an airport lounge, as I recall. By turns humorous, wry, despairing, lovesick, and full of the spark of poetic reinitiation, this was the second highlight poem of the evening for me, alongside Simon Armitage's sperm-whale.

Which is where I came in ...

The announcement of this year TS Eliot Prize winner will be made this evening in London.

What Need of Poems in the Dark?

Sean O'Brien's The Drowned Book

I’ve just enrolled on a course at Warwick, examining the influence of Dante in the poems of T.S. Eliot. That may be one reason why I kept catching echoes of both those poets in Sean O’Brien’s latest collection, The Drowned Book. His recent verse translation of Dante's Inferno provides another possible explanation to my feeling that the spirit of Dante presides over these poems, riddled as they are with references to the dead, the underworld and its rivers of darkness.



The Drowned Book is O’Brien’s seventh collection and a Poetry Book Society Choice. No stranger to such accolades, the prolific O’Brien has won the Forward Prize twice, for Ghost Train in 1995 and Downriver in 2001, and is wdely considered one of our most important living British poets. In this latest book, he certainly earns that status, his poetry skilfully written, richly layered and impressively accessible given the difficult themes and topics he tackles here.

O’Brien has, at times, the prophetic ‘tongues of flame’ and ‘knowledge like a skull inside a box’ of the ancient scholar he describes in ‘Serious Chairs’, though he often pretends otherwise, distracting us with the humility of the truly talented, most marked in his elegies for dead poets, as here in ‘Thom Gunn’ (another poet whose work at times signalled the influence of Dante):

Let those of us who longed to board but failed
Salute you in absentia, Captain Gunn,
Now attitude and argosy have sailed
Beyond the west.

Water and death seem inextricably linked in this book, as the title and suitably spooky-looking cover suggest. A glut of watery poem titles continue the theme, with ‘Water-Gardens’, The River in Prose’, ‘By Ferry’, ‘River-doors’, ‘The Mere’, ‘Eating the Salmon of Knowledge from Tins’, and his magnificent elegy for Barry MacSweeney, ‘A Coffin-Boat’. His elegies include work dedicated to the memory of fallen comrades in contemporary poetry: Ken Smith, Julia Darling, Michael Donaghy and Barry MacSweeney (‘... let the man rest by the waters of Tyne’). Within the subterranean world of this book, O’Brien’s erudition brings a fascinating complexity to the work, his diction both eloquent and contemporary: a heady mix for any reader.

In spite of this strongly themed content, however, The Drowned Book doesn’t flag or begin to sound homogeneous as it progresses. Not content to write the same poem twice - or fifty times as a few of his contemporaries have been known to do - Sean O’Brien is happy here to switch forms and voices, experimenting within his own idiom and making each poem new.

So references to Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’ and a heart-felt cry of ‘Thalassa, Thalassa’ (‘Sea, sea!’ from Xenophon’s account of fleeing Greek soldiers at last coming within sight of the sea) jostle for house room with these jaunty Skeltonesque rhyming couplets about death’s inevitability in ‘Timor Mortis’:

Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire
As conscripts of le grand nowhere -
Some on ice and some on fire,
Some with slow piano wire,
Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck
And absolutely out of luck.

In the same poem, O’Brien asks flatly: ‘What need of poems in the dark?’ Yet, whilst reminiscent of Marvell’s stance towards his coy mistress - ‘The grave’s a fine and private place/But none I think do there embrace’ - this question is not without its ambivalence. This is evidenced elsewhere in the collection, most notably perhaps in the superb ‘Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright’ - winner of the 2006 Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem - where the dead (presumably here miners) seem not only in need of such earthly pleasures but are actually still involved in them:

The singing of the dead inside the earth
Is like the friction of great stones, or like the rush

Of water into newly opened darkness.

I thought here of other subterranean worlds, of The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald, and the sinister Mines of Moira in The Lord of the Rings, especially following O’Brien’s marvellously described ‘thud of iron doors sealed once for all’ and the miners themselves, ‘gargling dust’, ‘their black-braided banners aloft’. But are these real human men? Are they memories of those who used to work ‘in the underground rivers/Of West Moor and Palmersville’, or are these the ghosts of fallen miners eternally patrolling the ‘tiny corridors of the immense estate’?

Although most of these poems are not obscure or difficult in themselves, I sometimes felt that a few notes might have elucidated the content or origin of a poem. Not being fully aware of the historical background to ‘Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright’ was an obstacle to enjoying what is otherwise a tremendously powerful and transformative piece of writing. I did perform an internet search on James Wright which gave me some extra information, but should having to google be an expected part of reading a poem now? Some poets don’t mind providing elucidatory notes, others disagree vehemently with the need for them. Personally, I’ve always found more pleasure in collections which are annotated, even if only briefly at the back. In the groping search for understanding, misreadings and missed nuances are always a danger - and a largely unnecessary one, it seems to me.



Many individual lines in The Drowned Book will stay with me a long time, such as this complicated beauty: ‘The city runs like science fiction backwards’. Or this, at once Dickensian and as atmospheric as a Turner oil painting: ‘A boat burning out on the flats’. Echoes of Eliot too, most strongly in the short choral poem ‘Proposal for a Monument to the Third International’, where I couldn’t help thinking of the well-known sequence in Little Gidding, where the narrator is heading home after a long night (Eliot worked as a volunteer rooftop fire warden in London during the war) and meets ‘a familiar compound ghost’ in the street, rather like Dante meeting Virgil, his guide through hell. Is this now Eliot meeting O'Brien or was that not the poet's intention? Even without these inferences, the apocalyptic and other-worldly ‘dream-vision’ quality of the moment, in particular, is what struck me most on reading this:

I rode to the twenty-ninth floor
Of the Hotel Ukraina, then climbed the last steps
To the last locked room
Where a camera obscura portrayed the night sky
As Stalin might dream it himself
From one of the seven dark stars he cast
So high that the heavens themselves
Were extinguished.

I turned to descend and there by the door
Was a wizened old man, sitting smoking.
A red fire-bucket was full of his ash.
He wore two watches and between his eyes
A bullet hole.
He looked indifferently through me.
Brothers, this is all I can recall.


However, the poem which affected me most powerfully in The Drowned Book was ‘A Coffin-Boat’, his quiet-spoken elegy for the poet Barry MacSweeney; not least, perhaps, because I knew the man myself. It’s a slightly longer poem than most, and here, once again, we have to bend our heads to enter its dark landscape - or should that be ‘inscape’? - the sloping low-ceilinged passage that leads down to the underworld:

Today you must go for a walk in the dark. Go in
Where the stream by the graveyard falls
Into the tunnel and hurries off hoarse with graffiti.
You will be hauling a brass-handled narrowboat,
Mounted with twin candelabra, containing
A poet who managed to drink himself dead,
With heroic commitment, at fifty-one.
Packed up with books and manuscripts and scotch,
In his box from the Co-op, a birthright of sorts.

Later in this poem, we get again, foregrounded here, the idea that poetry stops with death. (‘What need of poems in the dark?’) Sean O’Brien makes a good case for that depressing reality - or blessed release? - here:

... down here’s the speechless
History of everything and nothing,
Poetry’s contagious opposite.

An elegant and elegiac book then, but not particularly sinister, in spite of its subject matter. O’Brien has managed to imbue his vision of death and the afterworld with terrible beauty but also a wry sense of humour which refuses to be cowed by its surroundings. To read The Drowned Book cover to cover at one sitting may be a strange and discomforting experience, but it’s one which managed to produce a certain calm inspiration in this poet at least:

On the gathering waters that slide
To the mouth of the Tyne, where the world

Is beginning and ending:
Three lighthouses wearing the weather,
In each of them a table laid

With rosemary and rue,
So that the dead may sit at peace
And watch with us tonight.

*

You can find The Drowned Book online at Amazon.co.uk