Angela Topping: A Poetic Manifesto

RAW LIGHT: the magazine

A Poetic Manifesto

Angela Topping

When Jane Holland invited me to contribute to her excellent poetry blog, I thought it might be useful to do something on how I came to write this poem, which was included in Salt’s anthology Troubles Swapped forSomething Fresh, which is now a set text on a number of Creative Writing degree courses. 

How to Capture a Poem

Look for one at midnight
on the dark side of a backlit angel
or in the space between a sigh
and a word. Winter trees, those
elegant ladies dressed in diamonds
and white fur, may hide another.

Look for the rhythm in the feet
of a waltzing couple one, two, three-ing
in an empty hall, or in the sound
of any heartbeat, the breath of a sleeper,
the bossy rattle of keyboards in offices,
the skittering of paper blown along.

You could find a whole line
incised into stone or scrawled on sky.
Words float on air in buses, are bandied
on street corners, overheard in pubs,
caught in the pages of books, sealed
behind tight lips, marshalled as weapons.

Supposing you can catch a poem,
it won’t tell you all it knows. Its voice
is a whisper through a wall, a streak of silk
going by, the scratch of a ghost, the creaks
of a house at night, the sound of the earth
vibrating in spring, with all its secret life.

You have to listen: the poem chooses itself,
takes shape and begins to declare what it is.
Honour the given, else it will become petulant.

When you have done your best,
you have to let it go. Season it with salt
from your body, grease it with oil from your skin.

Release it. It has nothing more to do
with you. You’re no more its owner
than you hold the wind. Never expect gratitude.

Angela writes: 

Rupert Loydell, who had published my first two collections under the Stride imprint, was editing the anthology Troubles Swapped For Something Fresh, and asked me to submit something. I’d never been much of a one for writing about my own practice but I thought it was about time I had a bash. I struggled to complete the commission, then Rupert sent me a reminder. I tried again. Nothing. 

I gave up and went for a bath. The first phrases came through suds and bubbles, shampoo. Once I was wrapped in my bathrobe, I started to write them down.

The title 'How To Capture A Poem' is because poems are wild animals and it’s hard to tame them. Midnight is the witching hour and poems are a kind of alchemy to me. The dark side of anything, the one not illuminated, is where poems hide. Angels are special to me because of my name. The winter tree image came into my mind when I was driving home from school in the snow. I was trying to think of a new image for snow-covered trees and I took the opportunity to place it in this piece.

Stanza 2 is about rhythm, which is important to me. It’s the tick tock of the poem’s clock, it’s how you know it’s alive.

Stanza 3 brings in some of my subject matter, the quotidian, the words all around us, giving us the sound-track of our thoughts.

Stanza 4 is about my practice, how a poem will gradually reveal itself to me, sometimes just giving me one phrase for free, sometimes much more. And more of my themes come into this stanza as well.

"It’s eccentric of me I know, but I do believe in listening to the poem."

It’s eccentric of me I know, but I do believe in listening to the poem. I was trying to get a poem about my mother’s death right, years ago. What I couldn’t at first see was that it wanted to be a sonnet. As soon as I noticed that two of the lines my right brain had given me were iambic pentameter, the rest of the poem sorted itself out as quick as you like!

Poems have to be let out into the world, they have to fly free. So the title comes full circle. Once you have captured it, it has to go forth on its own. I edit as best I can, and give up when I have made the poem strong enough to survive. Of course it will bear my fingerprints, something of me will reside in it, but it also belongs to the reader. Poems are nothing without readers.

The ending is a nod and a blown kiss towards W.S Graham’s poem ‘Johann Joachim Quantz's Five Lessons’, a poem in five sections about teaching someone the flute, as a metaphor for writing. Graham ends his poem ‘Do not expect applause.’ My ending is ambiguous. Never expect the poem to be grateful to you – in fact I am always grateful to the poem for choosing me to write it. Also, never expect gratitude from anyone else. Or praise, or blame, or even a reaction.

I write poetry because I have no choice in the matter. I do have a choice to go out and do readings, which I love doing, and people have told me they enjoy hearing me read my poems. I have a choice, in a way, to publish. I mostly do that so that those poems leave me alone, I can think of them as completed and move on to the next collection.

This poem is my manifesto. 

Angela Topping

Angela Topping's latest books are Letting Go (Mother's Milk Books) and Paper Patterns (Lapwing).

You can find Angela Topping on wordpress http://angelatopping.wordpress.com/

On Don Paterson's 'Lyric Principle'

Last night I found myself reading the second part of Don Paterson's controversial essay, The Lyric Principle - having found it impossible to wade through when it first appeared (in Poetry Review Vol 97:3 Autumn 2007) - and decided to blog about it.

I had read Part I of The Lyric Principle and enjoyed it (though not as much as Paterson's equally controversial 'Dark Art of Poetry', the 2004 T.S. Eliot lecture, which struck many chords with me). I did try to get into Part II when the magazine came out, but at the time the prose felt torturous and impossibly weighed down with abstruse detail, along with voluminous footnotes worthy of a spoof academic essay. So I gave up the effort.

But last night, flicking through some of last year's poetry magazines in search of a particular poet, I came across the essay again (Part II) and began to read it.

This time, for some reason, the difficulties I'd experienced back in the autumn were no longer apparent. Everything, in fact, made good clear sense.

Indeed, his remarks made such good sense that, aware of the various outraged 'letters to the editor' that had appeared in the wake of their publication, I couldn't work out why The Lyric Principle was so very controversial. After all, what was there to argue about?

Paterson's main point in Part II, very basically, is that good poetry works because it takes account of our innate preference for pattern and surprise. Which is just another way of saying what all good writers know instinctively, that we should 'give them what they want, but not the way they were expecting it'.

I can't recall, and don't have the earlier Poetry Review to hand, how Part I was controversial, though from reactions in the subsequent issue, I suspect the furore may have been caused by claims that poetry should work in the same way as music, and/or that sound can't be separated from sense. I can't see anything to get upset about there either. But perhaps I missed the point ...

I can understand some people being more sceptical about all this, and perhaps feeling ruffled by the occasional note of hubris behind Paterson's writings, but I'm naturally excited by anything that combines the two great obsessions in my life: language (i.e. linguistics) and poetry.

I can't overstate that position, really. I am, and always have been, hugely resistant to anyone setting themselves up as a figure of authority. It's a knee-jerk reaction on my part to distrust whatever they might say, regardless. But to be given carte blanche by an acknowledged expert on contemporary poetry to continue doing precisely what I've been doing since I first started knocking out my own doggerel at c. 9 years of age, i.e. turning the dial until I can't hear the hiss of the static anymore, is both a relief and a great pleasure.

But not only that. Paterson's detailed list of which consonant and vowel sounds complement each other rather than clash in the poetic line leads neatly into my own personal observations on the similarities between languages, those startling correlatives you come across once you start looking in-depth at a number of different languages - even between languages not belonging to the same 'family'. And once you've been working with a heavily stressed medium like Anglo-Saxon poetry for any length of time, you do tend to respond favourably to the idea that some vowel sounds in some words - though this can also vary according to whether they are in a stressed or unstressed position in the line - are simply 'filler' and should be avoided; the poetic equivalent of fish paste.

So if anyone out there has a good idea why so many people seemed to react poorly to The Lyric Principle, perhaps they could enlighten me?

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.

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 ...