Healthy Food Riddles for Tescos

Sometimes I run and drip,
sometimes I’m still and cloudy.
You may have seen me with a bear.
I wish I could fly
like those who made me.
I’m the only comb
you mustn’t put in your hair.

What am I?


This riddle is intended for 5-10 yr olds, so shouldn't be too tricky!

More riddle poems, written for Tescos as part of my Warwick Poet Laureateship, here.

Having Been Tagged

I've been tagged, apparently! From what I can tell, being tagged is the blogging (or should that be 'blogal'?) equivalent of playing paint-ball and getting hit in the backside with a large splodge of pink.

So I'm supposed to link to the person who 'tagged' me. Write 6 random things about myself here. Then 'tag' six other victims.

I'm going to write the 6 random things below, because I'm a raving egotist and it's always fun for me to talk about myself. But I'm going to shy clear of tagging another six people, as I'm vaguely worried that I'll tag someone who'll consider me a damn nuisance and never speak to me again because of it.

Luckily for Bo, who tagged me, I could never consider him a nuisance, being one of my oldest friends now (in the nicest sense), and besides which I owe him a dinner. Several dinners, if truth be told.

So he gets away with it ...

Meanwhile, 6 random facts about myself, starting with the most obvious:

I was once ranked 24th in the world for women's snooker

I can't make pastry. Well, I can, but few would want to eat the results.

I've flown at Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound) on Concorde - London to New York - and seen the curvature of the earth. How many people will ever be able to say that?

My all-time favourite book is probably A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin. (Harry Potter's an interesting character, but he can't compete with Ged.)

I used to run a secondhand bookshop called 'The Little Camel Bookshop'.

Family aside, given the choice between being in company and being alone, I nearly always prefer solitude.

Camper Van Blues

My third full-length collection, Camper Van Blues, has now been launched by Salt Publishing!

There should be an official reading from it at some point but for now I will be reading at the Troubadour (Old Brompton Road, London) next Monday 3rd November, as part of the Seam Magazine launch, and again on December 3rd, which is a Wednesday, with Ride the Word at The Old Foundry, also in London.

If anyone can make the Troubadour reading on Monday, I'd be pleased to see you there. Though it sounds like it may be a very popular night, so do get there early, which means by about 7.30, I think.

Other readers at the Troubadour this Monday include: Anne Berkeley, Michael Laskey, Helen Ivory, Chris Beckett, Katy Evans-Bush, John Greening, Esther Morgan, Peter Howard and Hisham Matar.

Is Verse Drama Dead?

Becket, pictured in a stained glass window at Canterbury Cathedral
We hear occasionally of new verse dramas being produced on radio or on the stage but never with any great trumpeting along the lines of 'Verse drama is back!'

Many of us would think of T.S. Eliot's 'Murder in the Cathedral' as one of the last critically acclaimed verse dramas; not exactly a recent work though, is it? Verse drama simply isn't popular. It makes people uncomfortable.

Speaking verse? As a character in a play? The concept itself sounds old-fashioned and highfalutin. As though the playwright is a little too big for his/her costume drama boots. None of us are Shakespeare or Racine, after all.

So although verse drama is still being written, it tends to be sidelined whenever it resurfaces in public - nothing of any real importance, pleasantly arty and worthwhile, perhaps, but not to be lingered over by the critics.

Can we shake off that 'worthy but dull' image of the verse drama? How do we turn around the predictable 'lovely but I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole' reaction of so many producers and publishers?

Is the effort worth making, or is verse drama irretrievably dead?

Forget technique, forget impressing us: write from the heart, write with your own voice

I won't embarrass the poets by naming them, but at a London poetry reading the other night I really did want to leave before the end. Which is rare for me, someone who has sat through some of the most excruciatingly bad poetry ever produced on this planet. But it really was almost more than I could bear.

Sitting at the back, where a hurried exit would have been spotted by friends, including some of the poets themselves, there were moments when I felt like an animal caught in a trap, desperate enough to consider gnawing my own leg off in order to escape.

The poets whose work particularly offended me were introduced to us as brilliant, innovative, talented, highly thought of, the best young ... etc.

And then they stood up and read reams of tiresome poetry clotted with pointlessly arcane references, foreign words they embarrassingly couldn't pronounce correctly, Latinate phrases for the simplest thoughts - 'ambulate' was used instead of 'walk' at one stage - and all of it in tones of such grave, deliberative pretention, I feared they were in fact eighty-year-old retired church wardens trapped in the bodies of healthy twenty-somethings.

For pity's sake, I wanted to say, write from the heart. Forget technique, forget Greek prosody, forget trying to impress us with your erudition. Life is what impresses us. Give us life in your poetry, raw and beautiful and - above all - honest, and we will forgive you any number of faults.

The voice you need is your own. So use it; not someone else's, least of all poets who have been dead for hundreds or even thousands of years.

But of course, they wouldn't have listened even if I'd stood up there and then to tell them. Because other teachers had been there before me, well-meaning but not up to the task teachers, and poisoned their minds and their talent, to the extent that their poetry has - not surprisingly - died. All that's left is the fossilised husk they read out to us that night, and the instinct to bolster their own work with the words of other, more dynamic, long-dead poets.

I hope to hear them again in the future and be proved wrong.

"Start the Week" this Monday, 9am

Just to let you know I'll be talking about Horizon Review on "Start the Week" this Monday, 20th October - at 9am, if you're ever up that early on a Monday! - which is BBC Radio 4's flagship arts programme.

The other guests with me this Monday are Rupert Goold, theatre director - who's currently directing Pete Postlethwaite in King Lear, along with Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Audience at the Gielgud Theatre, Pinter at the Duke of York AND Oliver! at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane - also Duncan Wu, writer and biographer (his most recent work is a biography of William Hazlitt) and Jackie Wullschlager, chief art critic for the Financial Times, who's just written a comprehensive tome on the Russian emigré artist Chagall.

If you miss it on Monday, "Start the Week" should be available for about a week using the Listen Again facility on the BBC Radio 4 website.

I'll be visiting the Poetry Library at the South Bank afterwards, having lunch with poet, critic and creative writing tutor George Ttoouli at the Poetry Society, and generally swanning about London in search of lattés and good poetry.

Ah, the life of a literary editor ...

To Translate or Innovate?

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x

It may be possible to do both, but I've been wondering recently whether I should do some translation work next or write something completely new.

I'm studying Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the original Middle English this month, so of course my fingers are itching to write a new and truly contemporary version of that - sure, everyone says of each new translation of SGGK that it's 'contemporary' but I mean genuinely so, with contemporary references instead of axes and helmets etc. and not following the original form - but whenever I start to consider how I might come at that poem in an original way, I remember someone saying to me recently that everybody seems to be translating these ancient and venerable poems at the moment instead of writing brand new epics. Almost as though poets are scared of pushing ahead into new poetic territories right now, and prefer to look back instead at what's already been achieved.

So part of me is keen to make a new translation or version of some ancient work, and part of me is excited by the thought of creating something utterly new.

But what?

End of the Laureateship

So, about a week ago, I very cheerfully handed over the Warwick Poet Laureateship to Cathy Whittaker, who will hold that post from 2008 - 09, and am now free as a bird. She says, ironically. In fact, I have so many irons in the fire right now, I'm in serious danger of burning my little pinkies.

I'm now studying at Warwick part-time (part-time has actually worked out as four days a week though, so it's more like full than part-time), sending out my teen fantasy novel in the hope of finding a buyer, continuing to work on new poems, editing issue two of Horizon Review, and possibly adapting my long poem "On Warwick Castle" for the stage.

In other words, life is challenging at the moment (especially when it comes to finding somewhere to park at Warwick University!) and far more pressured than before. Hence the absence of blogging in recent weeks.

Indeed, I've had to turn down several offers of work this month alone because I simply don't have time to squeeze in any more commitments. But no doubt as the year moves on I'll grow accustomed to this more rapid pace of life and feel able to take on new projects. For which, watch this space!

During my Laureateship, I wrote my long poem, "On Warwick Castle", and published that last week along with other Warwick-related poems in a pamphlet from Nine Arches Press, plus wrote several locally commissioned pieces, as well as six riddle poems for Tescos and sixteen poems to accompany Anand Chhabra's photographs in the Warwick Words Poetry & Photography Exhibition. I also visited a few schools in the region as Poet Laureate, and performed at a number of social events, including a rather delicious fish and chip fund-raising supper at the medieval Lord Leycester Hospital in Warwick.

Meanwhile, although I shall miss being so closely involved with poetry in the Warwickshire region, I'm excited to be turning back to my own personal writing projects, and wish the new Laureate, Cathy Whittaker, all the very best in her year ahead!

How on earth do you pronounce that?

Okay, yes, I'm ridiculously snowed under with work and study, and can't blog, even to bring you up to speed with the great sea-changes that have taken place in my life recently.

Instead, with apologies, I bring you a site I stumbled across today when checking how to pronounce a French place-name: Forvo.

All the words in the world. Pronounced correctly.

How useful is that?

The TLS, Horizon Review, and Throckmorton's Bookshop

I'm very happy to say that Horizon Review made the back page of the TLS this week. My colourful past as editor was flagged up for comment rather than any of the many excellent - some of them award-winning - poets, writers and critics in this first issue, but all publicity is good publicity, as they say.

I'm now selecting new poetry for the second issue, commissioning new critical articles, and looking for literary reviewers. This last is proving harder than I'd imagined. It appears I know only poets and poetry-lovers.

So if you're highly literate and critically engaged - or at least prepared to be - and fancy a crack at reviewing some brand-new literary novels later this year or early next, give me a shout.

I read some of my new work at the Atherstone Arts Festival, Warwckshire, today. Wine was enjoyed afterwards by myself, my fellow readers, and some of the audience in Throckmorton's Bookshop. An excellent bookshop to visit if you're in the area, and not least because they stock several of my books!

Critics Inc.

CHROMA: Want to learn how to review Poetry?

Found this fascinating. A London-based Poetry School course on how to review poetry, with well-known critic Charles Bainbridge. A very worthy thing, I suspect, teaching people how to review.

If it was even remotely possible, which it isn't, I'd take this course myself. It sounds marvellous and I bet some of the post-class pub conversations would be worth the trip too. If you think cramming fifteen poets onto one table at the pub could make for a bitchy conversation, just imagine the potential ding-dong between fifteen poetry critics.

On the Delicate Art of Blurb Writing

Found this deliciously ironic blurb on the back of Faber's Poet-to-Poet Series edition of Hart Crane's poetry selected by Maurice Riordan:

Harold Hart Crane was born in 1899. He spent much of his life in New York City, where he worked irregularly as a copywriter. White Buildings, his first collection, appeared in 1926 and his most famous work, The Bridge, in 1930. A reaction against the pessimism in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, it is a love song to the myth of America and its optimism encapsulates the excitement and energy of the Jazz Age. Hart Crane committed suicide in 1932.

"Leap from the crags, brave boy"

The Dhoon

Leap from the crags, brave boy
The musing hills have kept thee long
But they have made thee strong
And fed thee with the fullness of their joy
And given direction that thou might'st return
To me who yearn
At foot of this great steep
Leap! Leap!
So the stream leapt
Into his mother's arms
Who wept
A space

Then calmed her sweet alarms
And smiled to see him as he slept
Wrapt in that dear embrace
And with the brooding of her tepid breast
Cherished his mountain chillness
O, then what a rest!
O, everywhere what stillness.


That was the Victorian Manx poet T.E. Brown writing about one of the Isle of Man's most secluded but spectacular National Glens, the Dhoon.

I'm afraid that I can't be bothered to get the formatting right - I could be here all night, fiddling with it - so apologies to dear old TE, for whom 'A garden is a lovesome thing, god wot!'

The photograph above shows me sitting 'midst the bluebells in Dhoon Glen and was taken in the spring of 2000 by the late Roly Drower, musician, poet and political activist, with whom I was in a relationship at the time.

I was recently contemplating changing that photograph as the 'official' picture on my home page - since it's nearly ten years out of date now - and felt rather sad, remembering the happy circumstances in which it was taken and knowing I couldn't hang on to it forever.

The TE Brown poem seemed startling apposite when I came across it on the Dhoon Glen site, which is why I've reproduced it here, unashamedly corny though it is: 'Leap from the crags, brave boy/The musing hills have kept thee long ... //O, then what a rest!/O, everywhere what stillness.'

5000 page views in the first 48 hours

The first issue of Horizon Review appears to have been well-received so far and is certainly bringing in the hits.

Some excellent stats here from Chris Hamilton-Emery on the Booktrade info page.

Meanwhile, back at the word-face, this week I have:

offered some new poetry books for review to various magazines

started - but not yet finished - a tongue-in-cheek 1000 word article on poem titles for Mimesis

written two more poems

emailed 10 finished poems across to the organisers for the Warwick Festival Photography and Poetry Exhibition that's planned for early October

enrolled at Warwick University for a BA in English & Cultural Studies

made final arrangements to read at the Atherstone Arts Festival on Saturday 27th September

continued reading Simon Barraclough's Los Alamos Mon Amour (which I'm reviewing for Under the Radar)

blogged up some Warwick Words Festival and Birmingham Books Festival events on my Warwick Poet Laureate blog

booked a restaurant for Friday night - my husband's 43rd birthday! - which will be our first meal out together in months

emailed all publishers with books under review in HR with a link to the reviews pages

begun commissioning articles and reviews for the second issue of Horizon Review

set myself to learn some deponent verb forms in Latin - OU examination coming up on October 8th!

printed out the first three chapters of my Young Adult fantasy novel, for some last minute revisions before it wings its way to a highly recommended literary agent next week

managed to slot in some new last-minute names to read at next month's Festival Poetry Cafe in Warwick

groaned over forgetting again to review Brendan Cleary's pamphlet for Write out Loud

got more than five hours' sleep on at least TWO occasions so far!

Ultima Thule, from CVB

Ultima Thule

Cool, the lochside road and still. Leaves already lifting at my approach, frail under the shedding trees; sheer plenitude of road, a brim-filled bowl of light spilling white into the distance. The stag’s head swivels to an antlered mask, broad-legged, sinewy centaur’s neck: lord of silence, archangel above a stubbled field.

He leaps out from the plot, heart muscle singing with blood, springing from statue to flesh-arrow slicing blue shadows. Afterwards, in winged mirrors, the road at my back blanches and steadies.

A new prose poem of mine, to be published in Camper Van Blues, Salt Publishing, October 2008

Horizon Review: launch issue now online

The new arts magazine I'm editing for Salt Publishing, Horizon Review, is now live online.

Forgive me while I collapse into a corner and dribble for a few hours.

Then it's back to work.

I wrote a poem yesterday which I suspect may turn out to be the cornerstone of my next collection. It came to me abruptly, right out of left field, while I was desperately busy doing something else, as the best poems so often do. And it's kind of fitting that it should arrive this weekend, as I not only see Horizon Review launched but also a stunning advertisement for my next full-length poetry collection, Camper Van Blues, go up on the Salt website.

Los Alamos Mon Amour

Reading this new Forward-shortlisted debut poetry collection by Simon Barraclough at the moment, and also sharing it with my husband, who keeps surreptitiously stealing it from me in moments of domestic distraction, i.e. while wrestling with the preparation of a typically late supper or collecting the children's school uniforms for washing.

Can't say much else, as I'm reviewing Los Alamos Mon Amour for Under the Radar, and would prefer to keep my thoughts for that sparkly new publication.

But I certainly admire the title. And this hardback with its stunning cover illustration, as a physical object, is beautiful to behold and own.

Ride the Word: New Writing from Salt hits London

Back to Babel: Tomlinson's "Poetry and Metamorphosis"

We began talking about metaphor and allegory over on the poetry forum this week, but events overtook us and the thread had to be closed. Before that happened, I had intended to quote from Charles Tomlinson's Clarke Lectures on Poetry and Metamorphosis, but since the thread's no longer with us, I thought Raw Light was as good a place as any to kick off a discussion of metaphor in that context.

Tomlinson's Clark Lectures were published by Cambridge University Press in 1983 - I found a nice First Edition on the secondhand book stall at last year's Aldeburgh Festival on our wild eastern coastline, hence the gratuitous photograph above of a giant, metal Coquille St Jacques - and I'm taking the liberty of quoting quite a substantial amount from his essay 'T.S. Eliot: Meaning and Metamorphosis' in the hope that it will spur people into seeking out a copy of the book for themselves.

Please note, I've also taken the liberty of breaking Tomlinson's rather dense paragraphs here into shorter paragraphs for ease of reading on-screen. You can buy the book itself, in a 2003 edition from Carcanet Press, here.

'I am no longer concerned with metaphors but with metamorphosis.' Thus Georges Braque in Cahiers D'Art. His words might stand as epigraph not only to the modernist phase in painting, fragmenting reality to reconstitute it in non-imitative forms, but also to certain aspects of the collage-poems of Pound and Eliot. Literature will go on to concern itself with metaphors, of course, though what Braque seems to mean by metaphor in painting is that by realistically imitating the appearance of an object, by letting your imitation stand in place of that object, you are denying the creative mind its full plastic power.

By metamorphosis, as distinct from metaphor in Braque's sense, the mind could transform that object into a less predictable, a more variously faceted image. Music, which does not concern itself in any exact sense of the meaning, also, in the hands of Schoenberg, followed the way of fragmentation, building new wholes out of its atonalized constituents, venturing on new sound paths. In both visual and literary art, the notions of fragmentation and metamorphosis travel together, as at the climax of The Waste Land within sight of Babel:

Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon - O swallow swallow
Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
                     Shantih shantih shantih

Do we hear that any longer, or have we lost the Babelic din it makes to the rumble of a thousand commentaries? Five languages, and their differing metrical forms - or bits of them. Read aloud like this, without warning, the famous climax recalls, perhaps, our forgotten first reading, as the mind re-adjusts itelf to take in and differentiate all that sheer noise, and attempts to reconstitute noise as meaning. In the reconstituting, we help to complete a metamorphosis.

Literary art was always like this - to some degree; so that what we are reading now reshapes what we have read up to this point. But Eliot foreshortens the process, speeds it up, involves you in the crisis of it, and the languages are a part of that. From our first reading, scarcely possible to recall, perhaps what still remains in the memory is a sense of pleasant bewilderment, and something of that same sense returns each time we re-hear these lines and re-focus their meaning. If our act of reading is an act of metamorphosing the fragments towards a whole, metamorphosis also belongs in the passage as a directly stated theme:

nel foco che gli affina

- into the fire which refines them. This Dantescan fire changes and purified - in a word, metamorphoses; and the sliver of Dante gives place immediately to another myth of metamorphosis, that of Philomela and Procne:

Quando fiam uti chelidon

- when shall I become like the swallow?

Some interesting things here. In particular there is some useful discussion to be had from this section: 'In the reconstituting, we help to complete a metamorphosis ... what we are reading now reshapes what we have read up to this point.' The act of reading, in other words, is itself about transformation. How does a poet read? In particular, how does a poet read his or her own work, as well as that of other poets? Because it seems to me that Tomlinson is referring here to the mysterious process of poetic influence as much as to the impact on a reader that such deeply layered and complex poetry might have.

Influence is about individual memory, after all, and this idea of retaining a residual memory of our first impressions of such important texts - important for ourselves, that is, not merely in terms of a literary value judgement - has enormous implications for the poet. It means that language and cadence and all the various supportive structures of the poetic line become entangled with one particular moment, one proto-reading, which may or may not even be an accurate or sensitive one, but which may be involuntarily recalled, resurrected, on later readings or brought back to life in our own work with the deliberate twist of a phrase into something hauntingly familiar yet at the same time defiantly different - "So I assumed a double part, and cried / And heard another's voice cry: 'What! are you here?'" - or - in a less self-aware poet's work - the unconscious copying of a style so powerful it has swamped and subsumed the individual voice.

My own eye, falling on 'Quando fiam uti chelido' ('When shall I become as the swallow?) couldn't help but resurrect my early brushes with Italian, pulling the word 'fiamma' out of the ether - 'flame'. Did that particular connection between 'fiam' and 'fiamma' come about because I was thinking of Dante's Inferno, Eliot's purifying fire, or simply because the mind has to worry at these partial words - or what may seem to us like partial words, presented in a language we don't know as fluently as our own - until a possible solution or meaning presents itself?

Whichever it is, this combination of eye, ear and memory amounts to a powerful influence over the individual mind and to the continuing synthesis of such influences - linguistic, poetic, or ranging wider, philosophical, historical, spiritual - until we are nothing but a mass of idea and language-producing nerve-endings constantly reacting to the inferences and echoes of words, words, words. A Babelic existence, in fact, as Tomlinson puts it.

And could that be a definition of the metaphor? Substituting one thing for another, making these tenuous but dynamic connections which may or may not be there in reality, always looking at things aslant rather than head-on, in case we're turned to stone in some foolish attempt to take language too literally ...

Thoughts?

Poetry: Not Funny?

And just when I begin to suspect there's no humour left in poetry, I'm proven wrong. How refreshing!