Poetry Wars I

I'm reading Peter Barry's Poetry Wars: 'British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court' this week, published by Salt. It's an absolutely excellent read and I highly recommend it for anyone even remotely interested in the politics of poetry, each page containing fresh hilarities and salacious gossip from the world of 1970s British poetry.

I'm still only partway through it so will probably blog about this again, once finished, but I couldn't resist a few juicy comments now.

Poetry Wars is not a linear read but a satisfying dip in and out read, as recommended by the author, who has constructed the book in several parts. First, you have the linear narrative of how, in the 1970s, the 'radicals' (i.e. those avant-gardists who consider themselves to have descended in a direct line from the gods of early modernism like Eliot and Pound) beat off the 'conservatives' (i.e. the poetic backlash against modernism, advocating a return to normalcy, traditional forms and cucumber sandwiches) to take over the Poetry Society London HQ, then situated in fading gentility in Earls Court. Then you have chapters devoted to various 'themes' connected to that - almost decade-long - battle, with further chapters at the back consisting of dated lists, relevant documents, explanations of terms etc.

Reading this book has clarified for me, in a matter of hours, the terrible enmity that still exists between these two main strands within British poetry. Taking the bulk of its material from Poetry Society and Arts Council archives, memoirs, personal statements, plus a full account of the Witt Panel investigation of the Poetry Society's operations in 1976 - think full-blown McCarthyism in Piccadilly! - this book details, often meticulously, who said what to whom and when. There's rather less discussion of 'why' than I would like, but I suppose these memories must still be raw enough in some people's minds for that question to be approached with delicate circumspection.

And it's not all one-sided. Although Peter Barry is firmly on the 'side' of the radicals, by his own admission, he has tried to present evidence and anecdote in as unbiased a manner as is possible with such difficult material, not trying to hide mistakes by his own party even as he highlights occasionally underhand actions by the more conservative element as they attempted to get back into power.

So here's a quick taster of life at the Poetry Society in the mid-70s, in a marvellous anecdote apparently related by Peter Finch:

'We're sitting in the White House, the hotel bar next to the Poetry Society in Earls Court Square. Criton Tomazos is standing on the mantel piece ripping bits out of a book and chanting. Bob [Cobbing] has drunk almost half a bottle of whiskey and is still standing, or leaning. Jennifer [Jennifer Pike, Cobbing's wife] arrives in her small car to take us home. The vehicle is full of boxes, papers and bits of equipment. We push Bob into the front seat but there's no room for me in the back. I climb onto the roof rack. We drive. Somehow we get back.'

More of this later.

You can buy 'Poetry Wars' online at Salt Publishing.

Unlocking the Bodleian

"The largest single cash donation ever made to a university library in the UK has been given to the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

Julian Blackwell has donated £5m towards the redevelopment of the New Bodleian Library in Oxford City centre. The renovation will transform the housing of the Bodleian’s priceless collections and will open up its treasures to the public. The 10,000 square feet main hall of the redeveloped New Bodleian Library will be named Blackwell Hall in honour of Julian Blackwell."

-- March 7th, OULS announcement

A fascinating story, this. Julian Blackwell's five million pound donation will provide public access to what is probably the single most important treasure house of academic learning in the world. So is this unprecedented move really what it seems, or will access to the majority of those books still be reserved for those in possession of an official Reader's card?

Visit the Oxford University Library Services website for the full story, or the BBC news site.

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.

Light & Shade

Tonight I attended a lively poetry night in Coventry at the Liquid Cafe Bar. Colin Dick, local artist and poet, was one of the readers, even though he's now experiencing serious problems with mobility. Jane Commane read too, graduate of the Warwick Creative Writing Programme and heavily involved in Heaventree Press in Coventry; she was also MCing the event in Jon Morley's absence. Various other local writers came to the mic. Myself included.

It was a good evening. The next one is being held on April 3rd, when Mario Petrucci will be the guest reader.

Then, on my way home, luckily only a mile or so from my house, my car abruptly and spectacularly died.

The exhaust started smoking as I left Coventry; twenty minutes later, there was a strong smell of burning, steam billowing about the car. Then the engine died as I slowed for a corner and wouldn't restart for a few minutes.

I had driven maybe another hundred yards when the needle spiked dramatically into the red. The stench of burning was incredible, steam pouring from under the bonnet and out of the exhaust. It was after midnight by then. I pulled onto a rough track and rang my husband, who turned up some fifteen minutes later armed with oil, water, a tow-rope.

Turns out the head gasket had blown, there was a leak somewhere and the cooling system was completely empty. And the car had only been back on the road for six weeks after a spell of some five months on SORN, due to too-expensive repairs to the exhaust and the heater matrix. So once again, Jane is without wheels.

However, checking my emails when I finally stumbled in, I discovered that a piece of short fiction I wrote for the US market a few years ago had been shortlisted for some American fiction award in 2007. It didn't win, unfortunately, but it's always nice to know you were shortlisted for some prize or other. Something nice and something nasty to round off a complicated week.

Looks like the kids and I will be walking to school for the foreseeable future.

The Forward Book of Poetry 2008

In his foreword to the Forward Book of Poetry 2008, Chair of the judges, Michael Symmons Roberts, describes the anthology as 'a snapshot of this year's poetry'.

But what sort of snapshot is it? Certainly not 'Six Young Men', but the more typical contemporary assortment of styles, themes and voices, jostling for space in a book running to some 150 pages. And is it possible to pick out predominant or repeated themes over this extended body of poetry? Michael Symmons Roberts mentions 'water', and that's easily confirmed at a glance. But what of styles, forms and themes as opposed to pure content?

I see, in the foreground of this snapshot anthology, two things: firstly, a preference for narrative rather than simple lyricism, closely followed by a tendency towards elegy, in tone as much as actual content.

We may have safely entered the twenty-first century, but we are still in the noughties, the uncomfortable era of zero, in an age where we still have two rather than one to contend with. The noughties would appear to be an occasion for story-telling, to look back at the past, attempting to celebrate, lament or understand it. And as we near the teens, we'll be increasingly under pressure to look ahead rather than back, to break established ties with the poetry of the last century (indeed, the last millennium) and forge new themes, new poetries.

But for now, in this see-saw between nothing and something, our keywords appear to be nostalgia and, perhaps not so surprisingly, conservatism.

For those who missed the memo, the poets shortlisted for the last Forward Prizes Best Collection were Eavan Boland, John Burnside, Luke Kennard, Jack Mapanje, Sean O'Brien (eventual winner, with The Drowned Book), and Adam Thorpe. Best First Collection shortlist consisted of: Joanna Boulter, Melanie Challenger, Daljit Nagra (eventual winner, with Look We Have Coming to Dover), and Eleanor Rees.

The Best Individual Poem was won by Alice Oswald with her beautiful and epic 'Dunt', a poem for a nearly dried-up river. The other shortlisted poets in that category were: David Harsent, Lorraine Mariner, Carole Satyamurti, Myra Schneider, and Jean Sprackland.

Obviously, I can't possibly discuss all these poets, nor the extensive list of commended poems. Nor am I interested in discussing the winners in particular (I've already covered The Drowned Book on this blog, reviewed Daljit's debut in last summer's Poetry Review, and consider 'Dunt' to be one of the most important single poems of this century so far). Instead, I'm going to focus on those highlights which tap into my own thoughts and prejudices about contemporary poetry.

Going back to my observations on narrative, elegy and nostalgic conservatism as keynotes of these Forward Prizes, how do two new(ish) poets, Luke Kennard and Eleanor Rees, fit into that?

At first glance, they don't appear to, except perhaps for the category of narrative. Kennard is adventurous, nonsensical and entertaining, Rees is hard-edged and pithy: in this short selection, Kennard writes about ... well, your guess is as good as mine ... while Rees creates a quasi-mythological landscape where terrible things happen to passive, indifferent women. And in this selection at least, both poets lean towards the story-telling element of poetry.

Luke Kennard's work though does demonstrate conservative tendencies too - if you take conservative here in its associated meaning of controlled and limited; his frivolity appears excessive at first, but it's not the emotional excess of a Ginsberg, howling and letting it all 'hang out'. It reminds me in places of some of TS Eliot's playful non-sequiturs (c.f. 'Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree' from Eliot, versus Kennard's 'May I never have to bury another leopard' in a list-style poem called 'The Journalist's Prayer'). His poetry mocks serious intent with delightful frothy nonsense, and not even the 'nonsense' we're used to from the likes of Ashbery and Prynne - it lacks that complex allusive density and air of academic pretension. Rather, Luke Kennard is a dazzling young descendant of Frank O'Hara, out to lunch with Ionesco and other proponents of the Absurd, and unlikely to be footing the bill.

Yet despite his emphasis on the poem as sleight-of-hand entertainment, a political agenda is not entirely missing from Kennard's work. One of the two poems reproduced in the Forward anthology is a lengthy poem about a murderer, split into five page-long sections. This being a Luke Kennard poem, of course - he's almost a brand now, you notice - we're not in Carol Ann Duffy's intense 'Psychopath' territory here. Instead, the concept of the murderer is mocked, as are our knee-jerk reactions to the word, and indeed to the poem qua poem:

I take the murderer for coffee.
'Make sure you don't murder your coffee!'
I joke. He likes my jokes.

Later I swing a plank into his face:
This is to stop him enjoying himself –
Which is integral to the rehabilitation process.

His mouth trickles blood like a tap quarter-turned.
He likes my analogies. 'Hey, Murderer!'
I yell, 'Murdered anyone recently?'

and so on.

This poem develops into a filmic narrative, with the narrator as slightly barmy social commentator, a sinister and uneasy note behind all the jokes. See his full collection from Salt, The Harbour Beyond the Movie, for more of the same. The fractured nature of such narratives, their slippery subtexts and unfunny frivolity, may perfectly capture a certain disturbing note in the Zeitgeist, but is it poetry?

Or rather, since definitions of poetry are no longer definitive and such questions no longer applicable in the minds of most readers, is this the kind of poetry we want to take us forward into the twenty-first century, already war-scarred and in danger of planetary meltdown? Answers on a Martian.

Eleanor Rees' work feels far more like the model the 'reader on the street' - if there were such a thing - would be accustomed to associating with the word 'poetry'. The two selections here from her Salt-published Andraste's Hair demonstrate a lyrical gift that aims to be sparing and allusive, making the most of silence and the white spaces of the page, and in these two poems at least, her intent has a high seriousness. (This is not necessarily a good thing either; I'm merely noting it as I go along.) These two pieces also feel very carefully written, everything controlled, the poem balanced in both hands like a bowl brimming with milk that mustn't on any account be spilt: again, conservative.

If you know Yves Bonnefoy's work, Eleanor Rees - a Liverpudlian - seems to be coming from that rather interesting side of the lyrical tradition, which also shares some territory with Basil Bunting: although potentially an urban poetry, markers that might designate a poem as urban are carefully sidestepped or disguised here, with 'natural' objects taking precedence over the man-made, creating a quasi-mythological feeling of timelessness:

An open moon; burr of grass.
Last reaches of the split day
ending, the last
quiet pitch heard
in deep woods. Wet sod of dirt.
Scent of the sun's fire
passing field ruts and furrows,
seedlings, coiled roots, hedgerows;
flight of night-bird
turning tail into a sea breeze
beak battened to the north.

This poem, entitled Night Vision, has an elegiac tinge to it ('where are your bones, baby? Where are your bones?') and a deeply apocalyptic view of the cityscape (reminding me in places of Jacob Polley's powerful urban imagery) as here, in the closing lines of the poem:

Back alleys of the city burn.
Night boils outside the window.
The streets smoulder as the morning comes.

In terms of narrative technique, there are connections to be made here between Eleanor Rees' poetry and that of Alice Oswald's 'Dunt' - not least in terms of their similarly daring use of white space, hard to reproduce on a blog (particularly in poems from Oswald's last collection 'Woods Etc'). The longer quotation above from Rees' Night Vision displays a desire to get away from 'everyday' conventions of language and to be filmic instead: short bursts of language, concentrated, often lacking definite and indefinite articles, a narrative made up of mini-scenes, mostly uncommented-upon snapshots.

For comparison - though I originally said I wouldn't discuss it! - here is a similar technique at work in Oswald's 'Dunt':

Little hobbling tripping of a nearly dried-up river
not really moving through the fields
having had the gleam taken out of it
to the point where it resembles twilight.
Little grumbling shivering last-ditch attempt at a river
more nettles than water. Try again.

If 'Dunt' is an environmentalist's dream poem, recounting the tenacity and sheer persistence of nature attempting to revive and heal itself even when it appears that all hope must be lost, Rees' title poem for her first collection, 'Andraste's Hair', featured in the anthology, is a complex and unyielding narrative on the fractured relationships between people within a community, and between nature and that community: a woman's hair is burnt in a wood by three unspecified people; she does not struggle; the next day, a plait of hair is lying on a woman's bed, shorn; she carries it through the woods to the river; a boy cries some time later, hearing a song in the woods.

I have a few personal theories about such stylistic and thematic tendencies in current poetry - theories which will no doubt become altered as time passes. Urban and rural traditions within British society are changing and blurring all the time. We can't rely on them anymore for guidance and reassurance. We can no longer second-guess what the future holds by studying the past. The planet is in danger; ergo, we are in danger.

In the Forward anthology, poets like Oswald, Kennard and Rees seem to be presenting us with their own individually-conceived pictures of life in the twenty-first century rather than an overt message: a series of images, in fact, behaving much like a reel of film. This filmic poetry looks to the past for perspective but can't hold onto it; some of it looks to the future but can't envisage it. Or perhaps dare not. It regrets. It alludes. It entertains. It even confronts, at times, and in its own way.

But does it exude intimacy and passion, the sort of poetry we might - for instance - associate with some of the great political poets of the twentieth century, such as WB Yeats or Allen Ginsberg? Does it need to possess those traits or is it time to leave rawness and strength of feeling behind? Most importantly, does it engage?

TS Eliot: On Influence & the Tyranny of Readers

In discussion with Roddy Lumsden after an ecopoetry debate last week, I put forward the hope that my new book of poetry represented a new direction for me. Roddy, with his usual cynicism, responded that poets often think their latest books represent new directions, when they rarely do.

Looking at my manuscript of Camper Van Blues again in the light of this conversation, I couldn't manage to divide my poetry from my personal desire to move on, and so was unable to reach a decision on the question.

Having to face the possibility that my wish to grow and develop as a poet, although powerful and sincerely felt in itself, might not be enough to make it actually happen, made me turn for comfort and guidance to that old stalwart in my life: literary criticism.

TS Eliot, writing on 'Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry', tells us:

"When a poet alters or develops, many of his admirers are sure to drop off. Any poet, if he is to survive as a writer beyond his twenty-fifth year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express. This is disconcerting to that public which likes a poet to spin his whole work out of the feelings of his youth; which likes to be able to open a new volume of his poems with the assurance that they will be able to approach it exactly as they approached the preceding."

So, if we accept Roddy Lumsden's comment at face value, and take it on board alongside TS Eliot's above, this suggests a certain poetic complicity at work.

If development has stalled at a particular point in a poet's career, has the poet failed to move on because of some inherent limitation, or are they afraid to move on stylistically in case their readers - editors being among the first and most influential of those - refuse to go with them?

The full text of TS Eliot's 'Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry' is available as a free e-book at Project Gutenberg.

Brendan Kennelly: On Poetic Influence

I was at a poetry reading the other night, where a talented friend of mine read some brand-new poems, most of them still only halfway to their final destination.

But one of the phrases in one of these poems made me look up at him suddenly, having heard amidst the ongoing construction work, clear as a church bell across still fields, a snatch of true 'finished' poetry.

Afterwards I went up to my friend and told him how particularly achieved I thought that piece. Rifling through his sheaf of papers, he found the poem in question and handed it to me. To my frustration, it was laid out in incomprehensible fits and starts: here one word, there a brief stanza, great acres of white space, a solitary ampersand below, another couple of words far out to the right margin, all in lower case.

I asked what on earth he was about, laying out the poem like that, and he began to tell me, with great shining enthusiasm, of the avant-garde poets he'd been reading and how important he now realised it was to get the poem's spacing right for the rhythm.

I wanted to punch him.

*

The marvellous Brendan Kennelly, in an essay on Derek Mahon's Humane Perspective (collected in Journey to Joy: Selected Prose, Bloodaxe 1994, p. 129), has this to say about influence:

'There is an influence that is bad, a bad influence. It is born out of unquestioning adulation and encouraged by undiscriminating indifference. Such admiration is no good to anyone. It is rarely a helpful source of imitation. There is an influence that is half-way there, sloppily absorbed and turgidly reproduced. In such instances, the imagination becomes a gaping mouth. This influence is lazy. Periodicals and magazines are full of it. I think it is a peculiar poison of much Celtic Twilight poetry, for example, the fleas that Yeats talks about. And then there's an influence that is worthwhile. Plutarch on Shakespeare; Shakespeare on Shakespeare; Ibsen on Joyce; Blake on Yeats; Hazlitt on Keats; Godwin on Shelley; everybody on Eliot; these are examples of fully absorbed influences which are inseparable from growth. People often talk disparagingly about influence but it should not be so, because any true original is derivative. He is derivative from himself through others. He willingly submits himself to certain instinctively chosen influences until he emerges into himself. The thing is to see where the derivative self ends and the new original self begins.'

My italics.

I wish I had written the above; I have certainly thought it often enough, or something very like it, and to find my own feelings echoed in a book by a poet I know and greatly admire is a wonderful thing.

David Morley's Online Workshop

I was very saddened recently to learn that David Morley - see my blog review of his 'Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing' below - has been struck down with Type 1 Diabetes. However, with fighting spirit, he will still be hosting the Guardian's online workshop this month, which you can find here.

There's also another review - rather lengthier than mine! - of his book, amongst several others on creative writing, by Jeremy Treglown, which first appeared in the Financial Times on January 19th 2008 and which David has quoted on his Warwick University blog this week.

Freezing Up; Chilling Out

From the superb 'Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing' by David Morley, Director of the Warwick Writing Programme at the University of Warwick:

'Writers who do not feel self-doubt occasionally are lying to themselves. It comes with the job, like perpetual dissatisfaction. You grow used to the sensation of freezing up when writing, of proceeding in fits of stops, starts, ease and block. You find times when it is not only the words that will not come; the arc of the entire piece disappears in your mind. When self-doubt strikes, you must proceed by nerve alone, and by stealth. This is a moment that is defined in action and boldness by your character, not only as a writer but as a person. No guts; no glory. Your only response, if you wish to continue, is to get used to its distress signal. You are not being held hostage by your work; this is your work; you command the situation. Choose to write with a colder eye, as if the task did not matter up. The feelings of self-doubt will pass: it is an intense but small wave of panic, and does little harm if you do not let it. Self-doubt's fiendish opposite, Overconfidence, should also be shown the door.'

Hard to believe that this marvellous description of creative failure was written by someone who is himself a successful and talented writer, the poet David Morley. And it doesn't stop there; the book is awash with paragraphs like this, engagingly written and packed with good common sense for writers in all disciplines, from poetry and novels to 'creative' non-fiction and academic work.

Highly recommended reading for all those who wish to or absolutely need to write creatively, and particularly perhaps for those who can't stop themselves writing but for whom meaningful publication is still elusive. David Morley's expertise as a creative writing tutor shines through on every page, as does his intelligence and sympathy for the struggling writer, both new and established.

This large, glossy, beautifully-presented book is an invaluable companion for teachers of creative writing; every creative writing department should own a copy, and consult it regularly.

ClickPoetry

I bought a recent issue of Modern Poetry in Translation this morning, online, and almost instantly had a confirmation email through from the company handling the transaction and dispatch, Inpress Books UK.

Chasing up a link in their email, I discovered they sell a large amount of poetry on behalf of the smaller presses (you probably all knew this already and think I'm an idiot, but I mostly buy through individual publishers or via Amazon, so it was a revelation to me).

I highly recommend their poetry pages, which list a fascinating range of recent and older British poetry titles, all of which can be easily bought with a click - well, maybe several clicks and your credit card details - online.

So if you've got a minute or two for browsing poetry, visit the poetry pages of Inpress Books UK.

And no, I'm not getting a commission!

Ecopoetics and Beyond: Can Poetry Make Things Happen?

Today on the Guardian website, the editor of Bloodaxe Books Neil Astley has some pertinent and uncompromising remarks to make about the infamous WH Auden quotation that 'poetry makes nothing happen'.

Describing an RTE radio programme last year in which he discussed poetry with leading Irish politician Trevor Sargent, Neil Astley tells us of Sargent's favourable reaction to ecopoems, including one which the former leader of the Green Party in Ireland felt should be required reading in Irish schools.

Astley writes:

"If our own politicians spent just a couple of minutes each day reading these kinds of poems, they might be better fitted to carry out their duties more responsibly. We might even be able to trust some of them then to act in our interest in what they do to tackle the problems of environmental destruction and global warming."

This article appears in the wake of a new anthology of ecopoems edited by Neil Astley, entitled 'Earth Shattering', and in promotion of a London Word Festival debate at the Bishopsgate Institute this Friday evening, when he'll be taking part in a discussion on 'Making Nothing Happen', chaired by Roddy Lumsden, alongside poets Mario Petrucci and Melanie Challenger, and Caspar Henderson.

You can find the full text of that article here and learn more about the London Word Festival here.

Personally I think poetry has every chance of making things happen, if by that we mean sinking it deep into the psyche of a country so that it emerges in other ways and places: in our politics, our relationships, our methods of child-rearing, our attempts to look after the planet, our attitudes towards foreigners and foreign wars.

Poetry can be propaganda - see much of Rupert Brooke's output, for instance - but the more complex it is, the greater its mental, emotional and political ramifications, the less likely it is that poetry will sink to the level of mere jingoism or eco-rap.

As we move out of the nebulous noughties, we may be entering a great age for political poetry. Unfortunately it's unlikely that we'll be certain of that until we're at least halfway through it, and maybe not even then. Which means that those of us who wish to write politically, who feel the need to address issues which extend beyond the home or immediate working environment of our lives - assuming we're not already living in a war-zone, that is, where politics rapidly becomes part of the daily structure of life - must press on regardless of criticism or fashion.

The proof of the poetry may well be in the way of happening, as Neil Astley's article suggests, rather than in any immediate changes brought about by individual poems.

Camper Van Blues

I have now officially finished Camper Van Blues, my third poetry collection, and apart from the usual fiddly last minute stuff that manuscripts always seem to demand, I'm free to start work on my next big project. Which is probably going to be a sequence of poems about Warwick Castle, in association with my work as this year's Warwick Laureate, though I haven't yet decided what final shape that will take.

I am also free to post up new review work again on Raw Light. I've got an ever-growing stack of poetry books that I'd like to mention here, so reviewing is near the top of my to-do list for March. I also have some commissioned review work to undertake for a magazine, plus a long critical essay to plan and discuss with another editor. So while I swing out of one tree, there's another creeper waiting for my hand ...

There she is above, my old seven-berth Mercedes camper van. Gone to the great parking lot in the sky now, alas, but she was a wonderful ship.

Creative Redrafting: a poetic methodology

Apologies. This post has been removed to allow the ideas to be published elsewhere.

Email me for a private copy, if desperate!

In Response to a Nude Photograph of Mina Loy, 1905

From a 1917 interview with Loy in the New York Evening Sun

I'm massively engaged with revisions to my third poetry collection, running up against a deadline, so the review I wished to publish on Raw Light today will have to wait a few more days until I have time to type it up.

Meanwhile, here's something for the weekend ...

The following poem, published in Boudicca & Co, discusses and celebrates the nude photograph I found online here of the experimental poet Mina Loy.

*

In Response to a Nude Photograph of Mina Loy, 1905

Women poets are not supposed to look like that,
did nobody tell you? The one
with the cigarette is bullish enough
but this, taken naked, face
against the wall with one arse cheek
suggestively raised
is the portrait of a muse, my dear.
In later years, your beauty was eclipsed by age.
Here your skin’s like frost, that white back
and hourglass waist
crying out to be marked, to be photographed.
Did it feel safer like this, turned away
in your nakedness,
to be stared at, lusted after?
‘Leave off looking to men to find out
what you are not,’ you said.
Then let me take you to to bed, Mina,
to the ostrich feather bed
of our imagination. There we’ll smoke
and make poetry all day, decadent
in our sticky love,
looking each other in the eye, drinking
each other’s blood
like tea from a china dish, steeped
in what it means to be us, spawning
our poems like fish.

*

And to end, here's a rather lovely rough draft of Mina Loy's poem Love Songs I (1915)

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?

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 ...

An Odd Week

Frost and swollen tonsils.
Broken-down cars and confusion.

Too many children with sick bowls.
Putting the third collection to bed.

Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi ad Anglos
(Sermon of the Wolf to the English).
Ovid's Metamorphoses.

And the new Ashes to Ashes:
"The prozzie's about to be rescued
by three armed bastards!"

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.

Back to the Wanderer

Re my recent post about Don Paterson and losing the thread of my Wanderer translation, I'm pleased to report that all the controversy has been absorbed into my bloodstream now and I'm translating the poem again.

Though perhaps I should say versioning, since although many parts of my poem are a straight translation from the Anglo-Saxon, I've taken one drastic step away from the original, with the result that it can only ever be a version now.

Please note though, I haven't changed my opinion of Don Paterson's views on translation. I've simply revised my opinion. Which is entirely in keeping with my character.

Meanwhile, in my capacity as Warwick Poet Laureate this year, I've been commissioned to write a poem on the history of circus elephants in Leamington Spa.

Beat that for sheer randomness.


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Now playing: Julius Katchen, Georg Solti; London Symphony Orchestra - Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18, I. Moderato
via FoxyTunes

Blogging instead of Tinkering

Just a quickie this morning. As the bishop said to the actress.

Trying to avoid tinkering away at my current poetry manuscript - due at Salt Publishing roughly within the next six weeks - I did a random sweep of the blogs this morning, and noticed that Ben Wilkinson's blog, 'Deconstructive Wasteland', is shaping up to be quite an interesting read, poetry-wise.

Check it out here.