Gawain, Again

I'm rather relieved this week because, after months of impasse on my Gawain and the Green Knight sequence, I am finally clear about its structure and general direction.

It all happened rather suddenly. I was just browsing my file of poems, tidying things up and pondering the shape my fourth collection might take, when it struck me that instead of just vaguely picking out key moments in the poem, or key emotions, and writing poems around them in an ad hoc fashion, I should follow the traditional division of the poem into four Fitts and restrict myself to writing only three or four poems for each Fitt.

For this new-and-improved sequence, I selected four of the poems I had already written and jettisoned the rest. Then I started writing some new poems in a more linear way, choosing key scenes rather than floating about the topic.

I was also concerned to change the style of the poems themselves. To regiment my earlier disorganised margins, I pulled in all off-set lines to the left-hand margin and capitalised the first word of each line. This seemed to give the growing sequence an air of "difference" from the other poems I've written this year, and also some faked, much-needed gravitas.

Having done that, and written some new poems in this new format, I then discarded the capitalisation, which had served its purpose, and allowed some of the lines to drift back into their earlier positions, away from the left-hand margin. But I am keeping the majority of lines flush with the left for the moment, as that formal discipline does seem to be working on the whole.

I'm still not sure whether the sequence is any good, by which I mean worth publishing. But it has some good moments. It's definitely something to keep tinkering with, on and off, with a spanner and an oily rag. My Sunday sequence.

One more from Gawain

One more from the putative Gawain sequence; this time, contemporaneous with the original setting of the poem, i.e. Britain in the Dark Ages.

Still not sure how the two times - medieval and modern - would or even could merge in the finished sequence, but that's not worrying me too much at the moment. The whole thing may not get written at all, so finer details like that - how far can I push this idea? will it work? what am I trying to do here? - are entirely academic at this early stage. Better just to concentrate on getting the poems out.

That's the point of a sequence, after all. To squeeze the poems out like a litter of kittens, not worry about how they'll get on together once they're older.

So here's another Gawain poem for those who may be interested (and one specially aimed at all those Hughes fans out there, she adds shamelessly).

Did the indent this time. It looked too odd without it.

Wind’s eye narrows on mud-ruts and fields

Wind’s eye narrows on mud-ruts and fields
frowsy with hoar-frost.

Battlements.

Air bitters deep snow-sallies
bleak over crenellations.

Arthur, hood back, brisk in white ermine,
paces the hall at Camelot.

Young man, new king.

A draught ripples the curtains.

Still his, still perfect, not yet lost to him,
she enters the hall.

                      Becomes light

a shadow aslant tables.

So love lifts out of the dull evening
a star

glimpsed
through the flood of the dark.

A "Wild" Gawain

I mentioned a while back that I was interested in translating Gawain, since it's one of my favourite pre-Modern English texts, but that since everyone is doing it these days, there seemed little point in jumping on an overcrowded bandwagon.

Well, I've suddenly found an "in" to the project, and written ten poems towards it so far, mostly over the past week or so. Sequences always flow well for me once I'm into the thick of them, and although other work has now interrupted my writing, I have good hopes of getting back to this one soon without losing interest.

What I've done is not started a translation, per se, but written some short sequential responses to Gawain. Though perhaps a better description would be to call it a "wild" or parallel version.

My "wild" version mixes past and present - one of my favourite gimmicks at the moment - so I have a contemporary Gawain story and a medieval Gawain story, interwoven in a sequence of new poems. These poems both follow the thread of the original narrative and depart from it by showing scenes that don't appear there but are mentioned - off-stage scenes, as it were - or that are entirely new.

Sometimes I throw in phrases from the medieval text, or hint at them in passing, but generally, this is all original work. As usual, no guarantees that the sequence will work out and be published in the future. But it's started me writing again with energy after a dry period, and I'm happy enough with that.

Left to mature for a decade

*

The Language of Desire

When their faces took her
into that swimming heat,
it was all iron and alcohol.

The first step crushed her.

The second step woke her.

The third step came over

like a wave on the shore,
beating its silvery tongue
against her lungs, filling her
with the ache of recognition.

She was a catamaran,
arching her delicate blues
into the hull of an ocean.

The sea stumbled
and parted, floating her fine net
like a windsail before it.


*

This short poem, with one minor revision, comes directly from my lost poem sequence Umbra.

It was first published in Steven Waling's now defunct poetry magazine Brando's Hat in the spring of 1998 - i.e. ten years ago! - under the title 'When their faces took her'.

The only reason this poem survived the loss of the physical manuscript is because 'Brando's Hat' is now fully accessible online, so I was able to retrieve five poems from that source. The rest - some 30-odd poems - appear to be lost forever.

It will appear under this new title, 'The Language of Desire', in my third collection, Camper Van Blues, due out from Salt Publishing later this year.

Last Oak

Last Oak

Soot sunk oak tree, tarred question mark
trying-to-be-trunk,
it had stood
since the last forest burnt, blind old man
surrounded by stumps
still smoking creosote, an unlit tower
scoured and bare
yet proud in its final hours as mad Lear
in his wreath of dead weeds
or Ginsberg’s locomotive sunflower,
peering through red mist
to where sun was,
its last leaf-memory of green,
green things and wild.


*


This poem was published in Seam poetry magazine last autumn. The new issue of Seam is due out in the next few months (it's published twice yearly) so I'm hoping the editor - also a poet, Anne Berkeley – won't mind too much if I reproduce that poem now on Raw Light.

'Last Oak' was originally intended to form part of a book-length poem sequence based around a quasi-eschatological and environmental theme. That's how I envisaged it during the act of writing, anyway. This link will take you to a previous blog post about the Seam launch last year, by the way, where I discuss that unfinished sequence further.

In the end, of course, only four or five poems from that sequence - provisionally entitled End of Days - were ever written. And of that meagre handful, I imagine that only two will make the cut for Camper Van Blues, my third poetry collection, due out later this year from Salt Publishing.

'Last Oak' is definitely one of them ...

Warwick Castle: a first visit

My version of The Wanderer continues. Slowly, painstakingly. About four lines a day on average. This must be the longest it's ever taken me to write a single poem. Perhaps I ought to be worried. Still, this being a translation/version, I suppose it should be possible to take a good month over the composition without losing the thread ... after all, this poem's been kicking about for so many hundreds of years, it's not going anywhere.

The big news is, I finally organised myself to visit Warwick Castle this weekend. And I was impressed. The place had an immediate and profound effect on me; I could feel lines and phrases carving themselves out on the air as I wandered about its high-ceilinged halls and narrow stone passageways.


For those unsure what this visit is all about, I decided back in October - on becoming Poet Laureate for Warwick - that I wanted to write some poems about Warwick Castle - once in decline, now beautifully restored and one of the best examples of a 'working' medieval castle in England.

My friend Julie Boden, based here in Warwickshire and herself a former Birmingham Poet Laureate, advised me early on to decide what sort of legacy I wanted to leave behind once my stint in the Laureateship was over. And while I had all sorts of grandiose schemes in mind, the only one that's really stuck has been this simple idea of writing about Warwick Castle.


Oddly enough, David Morley was also there this weekend, a major Warwickshire poet and the writer in charge of the creative writing programme at Warwick University; I spotted him in the 'medieval' cafeteria, lunching with his family, and went over to say hello.

Apparently fancying himself as the man from Porlock, David stopped for a quick word a few minutes later while I was scribbling down some notes and phrases over a latté. Luckily, I have no intention of starting to write any of the Warwick poems until much later this year, so his efforts were in vain!

Basically, my visits this weekend have been purely preliminary, just looking about the place and setting my mind in motion. But it's proved an extremely worthwhile thing to do, far beyond what I had initially envisaged.

At first, I thought Warwick Castle might provide inspiration for two or three poems. But having received such strong vibes both from the castle and its grounds, I've got a hunch this could easily become a much longer-term project.

Time to start blocking in 'Warwick Castle poems' on the calendar, perhaps.

Hearing Voices

I was at the Seam 27 launch last night in Foyles, which went very well indeed - although they did make us wait until the interval for the wine, which I thought a little unkind. It was quite warm in London and I was thirsty! But perhaps in the past they've suffered the horrors of poets slurring their way through a series of incomprehensible poems and decided to make us wait for the booze. Sitting hazily through guest poet Sheenagh Pugh's reading - she came after the interval - was no doubt preferable to that.

It was all excellent fun, however. I met Claire Crowther and various other poets I'd wanted to meet for ages, and some of us retired to a nearby pub afterwards for more wine and gossip, so I shall certainly go again if asked!

On the train home from London, I had intended to browse the estimable Duckworth Greek Primer - recommended to me by a friend and purchased in Foyles whilst waiting for the reading to start - but although there was much useful information to be gleaned therein, the tiny print defeated me, particularly in the matter of breathings and accents, and I decided to wait before tackling it.

Instead, I took out my little black notebook and started fiddling with some poem ideas. At the Seam launch, I read a short poem entitled 'Last Oak' from a (possibly book-length) sequence on the general theme of 'Apocalypse'. I began writing this sequence shortly after my second collection Boudicca & Co was published last October. To date though, I have only managed to write three poems towards it. This is ostensibly because other poems and themes keep getting in the way, but also perhaps because I'm finding it very hard to get a grip on the 'tone' or 'voice' of this new sequence.

Some people don't believe in a poet's voice, but I do, absolutely. To me, 'voice' is the very essence of a poet; it's an extension of their personality, and is what makes them write the way they do and make the often difficult choices we see in their work. Voices change, of course. A young poet's voice changes over the years into a mature poet's voice, and poets with revolving obsessions may change their 'voice' to suit a particular theme or subject matter. But deep down, that voice should still be recognisably their own. Even juvenilia tends to display the trademarks of the poet to come, roughly and unevenly, in embryo as it were.

Most of the poems I start writing for this new sequence fail early on and refuse to be 'fixed' because the voice I'm trying for in these poems keeps eluding me. I suspect this is because I'm not 100% convinced that I should be writing the sequence. Or, at least, not from the angle I've chosen. The 'voice' is that of a female character - a narrator, of sorts - but I can't get a fix on her. The poetry which emerges in her wake is loose, occasionally experimental, sometimes brutal and far too close to prose for my liking. There are other characters too whose voices I wish to employ in this sequence - though deploy might be a more accurate word - but I can't seem to reach their stories until I've connected more intimately with this elusive woman's voice.

What I can't work out is whether that's because I'm trying for a voice that's too far divorced from my own natural writing voice, or whether the sequence is overly ambitious in its scope and I'm a little lost and out of my league. One poem at a time is probably what I should be advising myself; make it seem a less ambitious task by cutting it into bite-sized chunks that can be tackled individually. But each poem written for a book-length sequence which may never happen is one more poem that can't go towards my next collection, and writing time for poetry is always scarce here.

My third collection is due out next summer. It will hopefully contain another sequence - a shorter one - which I'm still working on, and a larger number of individual poems, some loosely gathered around particular themes. I find it easier to work with poetry in a themed way, even if only for my own purposes rather than with any official label attached to them. As the date for that next collection comes closer though, I'll start to look at the shape of the collection more closely and possibly mark out some formal areas or divisions within the overall book if that seems appropriate. Rather like dividing knives, forks and spoons into different sections of a cutlery drawer.

Ted Hughes used to say that writing a sequence helped get the poems 'out' and I know what he meant by that. Sometimes you can stare at the blank page or screen for hours and feel utterly empty. But when that happens, if you give yourself permission to hook into a theme or a sequence which demands a different voice or character to emerge, you may perhaps sidestep the horror of 'writing yourself' and more easily write someone else instead. That's how sequences work for me, certainly. By giving me permission to thoroughly explore a theme, idea or character without necessarily requiring too much reference to my own reality.

But when the voice for the sequence doesn't come either, or comes too hard and haltingly, what then?

Answers below, if any spring to mind.

Arthur: from the Mabinogion to John Heath-Stubbs' Artorius

Being slightly closer to Birmingham now - all of five miles closer! - I took a trip there this week and bought a newish guide from the Oxford stable, this time the Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend, by Alan Lupack.

This respectably thick paperback weighs in at just under 500 pps of dense text and covers more or less everything you could possibly want to know about King Arthur and his associated knights, relatives and hangers-on. Most interestingly, it also includes details of how these stories have been retold and repackaged through the centuries, from the Middle Ages (i.e. the likes of Marie de France and Chretien de Troyes) through to the latest (up to about 2004, that is) versions of the stories, including Arthurian-related poems like Gawain and the Green Knight. Different versions of some of the most popular stories and legends are compared for similarities and differences, and some explanation for each differing version is usually given.

I've always been interested in the Arthurian complex of stories, and I'm not alone in that, of course. At the moment, I think it might be interesting to take one or even several of these Arthurian stories and reinvent them for the twenty-first century, either in poetry or prose, as so many other writers have done, but hopefully putting my own individual stamp on them.

My personal inclination is towards creating a collection of poems around one central character or theme. Probably one of the less well-known female characters, but not necessarily. It all depends on what I need to say at the time of writing and how well the story or character in question fits that need. With Boudicca, the choice was simple. But with Arthurian legend, writers wanting to work with such well-worn material soon find themselves drowning in a sea of other versions, with no clear way 'in' to something original and worthwhile.

I'm still reading, researching and mulling this over, of course. When the right idea strikes me, or rather when the right angle into the legend opens up for me, one which will fit my style and voice as a poet, that will be the moment when I can finally start work. And there's no hurrying that process ...

Sequences and Stand-Alones

The poet Ted Hughes considered the poem sequence an excellent way of getting 'at' the poetry, as though poetry is a rich seam of ore and the poet, through his or her working methods and inspiration, is simply chipping away at the dense rock that covers it.

I've always felt that Hughes's attitude towards the poem sequence indicates that he, like me, needed a bit of a run-up to writing poetry. That cold-calling poetry central is almost guaranteed to result in an engaged tone, or the phone being slammed down on you.

The good stand-alone poem is a miracle. It comes seemingly out of nowhere and finishes in a place no poet can envisage whilst scribbling the first line on the back of an envelope in a crowded train carriage. It doesn't happen often, that astonishing coup de foudre that results in the good one-off poem. Certainly not to a poet like me, anyway.

So in order to generate 'good' poems, to get up a powerful head of steam writing-wise, I tend to work my way gradually towards the poetry through the narrative structure of a sequence. Maybe partway into the sequence, or towards the end of it, I will stumble across a good poem. Or it will find me. And I'll know that it was worth the time and sheer effort involved in building a complicated narrative around it.

That's how my last sequence, Boudicca, evolved, and there are several poems there which work outside the narrative sequence: 'A Handful of Bones', 'Driving the Tribes', 'War Paint', 'History', maybe 'Purification.' Of course, it helps the poet to readily establish the premise of a sequence when the narrative is linked, as Boudicca is, to a well-known historical, legendary or mythological figure or story.

Often a poem like that will lose its peculiar power by being removed from the sequence and examined as a stand-alone poem. But sometimes it won't. And that test is usually one of memorability. Does that one poem stay in the mind long after the sequence around it has been forgotten?

I'm working on a sequence for my third collection. Not a lengthy sequence, at this stage. Maybe 20 poems. The number rises and falls as I cut earlier less-sustainable efforts or insert shiny new works. But it's already yielded two or three poems which might survive their inception to be lifted out of the sequence later and considered as stand-alone pieces.

I also have two other ideas for sequences, with a few poems already written for each. But nothing is decided. Those poems may appear as stand-alones in my third book, simply because the sequence never grew into something workable. Or I may jettison them altogether, perhaps returning to them another year, if I have enough time and it feels right to move back into that territory.

That's the beauty of sequences. They can grow with the poet or be laid aside and returned to, where stand-alone poems are either completely there from the beginning, all of a piece, or they tend never to be quite right. With the sequence, you can fuss and fiddle about under the hood for years, if necessary, without ever losing the initial impetus behind the story. But the stand-alone poem is a more fragile creation; if the initial inspiration dissipates for any reason before the poem can be completed, the poem has often lost its chance of authentic life.

Think of poor Coleridge and that ill-timed knock at the door ...

Woods etc., Rejection, and Elementals

I feel dreadful because I've been so busy posting on my POETS ON FIRE blog that I haven't been posting here on RAW LIGHT. This is not very good and accordingly I shall make amends by writing the following:

a.) Having finally got hold of a copy of Alice Oswald's Woods etc., I've been reading it with, at first, incredulity and, after a while, great interest. Although it seems at first glance like a collection containing all the usual suspects - stone, river, moon, stars, woods etc. - this book actually indicates a huge progression by Oswald as she swings even further along the line Hughes was beginning to take in his later 'nature' books, for want of a better description, such as Cave Birds and River, both of them marvellous books which slipped restlessly and ambitiously away from the mainstream wherever possible. It's a line I suppose could be described in places as working within the modernist or avant-garde traditions, but which in strong and rather eccentric hands like those of Hughes and Oswald becomes something uncategorisable. I wasn't sure of it, as I said before, at first, but then I think you get used to the voice and begin to trust it, allowing Oswald to lead you into darker and less obvious waters where you - or at least I - can see new possibilities for language and old possibilities given a new twist.

There are moments in Oswald's latest book when I want to kick her - a slavish homage to Hughes' Wodwo, for instance, which seems to add nothing new and should never really have got past the editor - but there are other moments, too numerous to mention, when I was fascinated enough to want to stop reading Oswald's poems and start writing something of my own. And when that happens, you know this has to be the real thing - poetry.

Perhaps that's the real test of poetry; not Astley's hairs rising on the back of his neck, or Schmidt cutting himself shaving, but a restless urge to write, to test yourself against that reaction, to go one better. That's certainly how Harold Bloom would see it ... if you believe in that sort of thing.

b.) After a silence of nearly five years, my work has at last appeared again in the pages of a poetry magazine - this quarter's issue of Poetry Review, in fact, just published this week. This five year absence from publication was due to a combination of writer's block - which seemed at the time more like writer's death than block - and an abrupt failure of nerve, which went hand in hand with the block and effectively prevented me from submitting even previously written work to poetry magazines. The poem that's just appeared in Poetry Review is a direct response poem to a magazine rejection - 'Deciphering the Rejection Letter' - which is sort of ironic, I know, but it does make me feel better to know I've finally broken the silence.

c.) And to finish off this blog entry, and make up for so many days of not bothering to post, here is a four poem sequence of mine, inspired by the elements and published in the excellent poetry magazine Acumen back in the late 90s:

ELEMENTALS

1

West Kennett Long Barrow


Stone womb under an earth belly
too ancient for light.

Rain condenses its euphoric mass
to a single blessing

filtering through
the intestinal silence of rock.

Flies cling
to the mossed edge of a crevice.

She devours their small bodies like offerings.

Once, she could hold her face
up to the moon, watch it

screwing a thin silver bolt
through the deadeye.

Now she eats beetles
and hunts with the night-train

passing the lit windows of women
anxious for conception.





II

Almost Iceland


The house was a standing stone
on the edge of annihilation.

It sat there uncomplaining
while acres of wind

pummelled and rattled windows
and floorboards.

The sea birds shunned it. The bees
rarely came so far north.

The sheep called out to it to move
but it didn’t.

It just sat there.

Its single chimney grinned up at the sky
like a maniac.

For miles around, whole islands lay down
and withered. Stones

stunted themselves in its shadow.
And always the wind

hammering for the house
to be absent.

Finally, its inhabitants packed up
and left.

The house remained,
folding its arms and gritting black teeth.

It had no intention of surrender.

The wind blew on
battering its ram’s head repeatedly

against lintels and uprights

its high battle-cry
prising tiles from the roof

imploding
the senseless resistance of doorways.





III

Holy Island


Pausing
after the genuflection of causeway

salt water puckers a scar
the width of her belly

creased abdomen
folding a damp cloth into sand dunes.

Whatever she gave birth to
dragged itself beyond these coarse grasses

then sloped into wind-blear

turning its back
irascibly on civilisation.

Yet the marks remain. Twice a day
they etch themselves out

along the chevroned gold
of a mackerel stomach.

The sea staggers across here on stilts

ridiculous headdress bouncing
and swaying

exhausted by cold
yet making the pilgrimage.

After it kneels and kisses the earth
sacred light flattens sand

to a blind haze
magnetised by the crawling bodies of cars.

Bare steel hulks
dredging the sun-dust

hump-hump-hump themselves

over her consecrated skein
of striations.




IV

The Stone Henge


A perfect ice-rimmed crucible
tilts itself

against the first geometry of stars.

Vast scalded pockets of fire
empty themselves

through miraculous peepholes.

Obsidian heaven
volcanised light to this glittering sacrament

that drilled ancient fires
through the eye

suggesting bears and archers

the twin shafts
of a ceaseless plough.

Now a wind-blackened cauldron
pitches its song

through these wide openings
to weather

each isolated furnace
linked

by the furious tweak
of identification

the hot craned neck of naming.