I have said nothing about the reasons for my silence, painful family reasons. And nothing about seismic world events and local difficulties. Sometimes we just end up, for no particular reason, resounding from the last loud noise. To my loyal follower, I can only apologise.
With regard to recent events, Prévert had the sense of it, years ago. He was writing about an escape from what we then called Borstal in the UK (forerunner of Young Offenders Institution):
Hunting the kid
Mugger! burglar! layabout! scum!
They can see birds on the island
all round the island is water
Mugger! burglar! layabout! scum!
What's all this baying for blood?
Mugger! burglar! layabout! scum!
It's a pack of the silent majority
out hunting the kid
who's had a bellyful of Borstal
So the screws used their keys on his teeth
and left him out cold on the concrete
Mugger! burglar! layabout! scum!
Now he's broken out
on the run in the night
like a hunted beast
and everyone's galloping after -
policemen tourists shareholders artists
Mugger! burglar! layabout! scum!
A pack of the silent majority
out hunting the kid
You don't need a permit
all real men do it
What is it swimming out there in the night
What are all these noises and lights
A kid on the run
They're firing their guns
Mugger! burglar! layabout! scum!
All these chaps on the beach
empty-handed – they're gagging with rage
Mugger! burglar! layabout! scum!
Come back to shore come back to shore!
They can see birds on the island
and all round the island is water.
Jacques Prévert (trans AB)
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
12 August 2011
09 August 2010
Blurb
The poems have no purpose, though their author is happy should others find them interesting to read. This book collects some early works missing from the Collected Poems (2003). The rest were written since then. They will help the reader lose weight, have an attractive smile, be at ease with members of the opposite (or their own) sex, have relief from constipation, speak in tongues, fillet herrings and ultimately boost the Nation's economy.I might have to buy this book.
30 July 2010
Seamus Heaney Centre
The shortlist has been announced for the inaugural Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for the best first collection published in UK and Ireland during 2009:
I am honoured and delighted to be on the list.
Siân Hughes reads from The Missing
Lorraine Mariner reads from Furniture
Tom Mathews reads from The Owl and the Pussycat:
Andrew Philip reads from The Ambulance Box (and explains the title)
I interviewed Andy last year, and his book was one of my choices for the year on Peony Moon.
Hmm, seems I'm the only one without a Youtube presence (except for this one as part of Joy of Six). Maybe I should do something about that.
(In alphabetical order)
Anne Berkeley, The Men from Praga (Salt)
Siân Hughes, The Missing (Salt)
Lorraine Mariner, Furniture (Picador)
Tom Mathews, The Owl and the Pussycat (Dedalus)
Andrew Philip, The Ambulance Box (Salt)
I am honoured and delighted to be on the list.
Siân Hughes reads from The Missing
Lorraine Mariner reads from Furniture
Tom Mathews reads from The Owl and the Pussycat:
Andrew Philip reads from The Ambulance Box (and explains the title)
I interviewed Andy last year, and his book was one of my choices for the year on Peony Moon.
Hmm, seems I'm the only one without a Youtube presence (except for this one as part of Joy of Six). Maybe I should do something about that.
18 July 2010
Oriole
Down in the woods he sings: oriole, oriole. It's haunting, alluring, maddening. I've seen pictures of the bird but never the actual thing. I wonder if he is Edward Thomas's Unknown Bird. Thomas was a keen naturalist, and if the poem was prompted by a real bird (and why not? All the proof is-- I told men/ What I had heard) it's inconceivable it could have been any regular visitor to the UK, at least in his part of it, at his time. I write this from deepest France, where the oriole is regular but not exactly common. The oriole has been a rare East Anglian visitor for best part of a hundred years. It's not a bird of Thomas country.
A lot depends on how you hear "La-la-la". Whenever I have heard anyone read this poem they place equal weight on all three syllables. But give it a bit of song, la-la-la, and it starts to become possible.
The Unknown Bird
Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
If others sang; but others never sang
In the great beech-wood all that May and June.
No one saw him: I alone could hear him
Though many listened. Was it but four years
Ago? or five? He never came again.
Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
Nor could I ever make another hear.
La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off--
As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,
As if the bird or I were in a dream.
Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes
Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still
He sounded. All the proof is--I told men
What I had heard.
I never knew a voice,
Man, beast, or bird, better than this. I told
The naturalists; but neither had they heard
Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,
I had them clear by heart and have them still.
Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then
As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:
Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say
That it was one or other, but if sad
'Twas sad only with joy too, too far off
For me to taste it. But I cannot tell
If truly never anything but fair
The days were when he sang, as now they seem.
This surely I know, that I who listened then,
Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering
A heavy body and a heavy heart,
Now straightway, if I think of it, become
Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.
A lot depends on how you hear "La-la-la". Whenever I have heard anyone read this poem they place equal weight on all three syllables. But give it a bit of song, la-la-la, and it starts to become possible.
The Unknown Bird
Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
If others sang; but others never sang
In the great beech-wood all that May and June.
No one saw him: I alone could hear him
Though many listened. Was it but four years
Ago? or five? He never came again.
Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
Nor could I ever make another hear.
La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off--
As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,
As if the bird or I were in a dream.
Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes
Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still
He sounded. All the proof is--I told men
What I had heard.
I never knew a voice,
Man, beast, or bird, better than this. I told
The naturalists; but neither had they heard
Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,
I had them clear by heart and have them still.
Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then
As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:
Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say
That it was one or other, but if sad
'Twas sad only with joy too, too far off
For me to taste it. But I cannot tell
If truly never anything but fair
The days were when he sang, as now they seem.
This surely I know, that I who listened then,
Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering
A heavy body and a heavy heart,
Now straightway, if I think of it, become
Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.
14 July 2010
Just One (more) Book
Does contemporary poetry make a difference to you? Do you relish fiction that makes you think? Do you value truly independent publishers? Then you can help. Despite heroic efforts last year, my publisher, Salt, has been having a hard time in the recession and desperately needs to sell more books to stay afloat until the new grant kicks in. Word is that they have less than one week's cash left in the kitty. Chris Hamilton-Emery writes:
I hoped I'd never have to write this note. The recession has continued to have a very negative impact on sales at Salt and we're finally having to go public to ask you to help support us.
Our sales are now 60% down on last year and have wiped out our grant and our cash reserves as we continue to market and publish what we can from what we believe is a great list. We've plans in place to help secure the business from November 2010 — though the books we'll be publishing won't deliver any real revenue until 2011. We're sorry to ask, embarrassed to ask, but we need your help to survive until then and if you were considering purchasing a Salt book, we'd dearly love you to do it right now. We've less than one week's cash left.
If you can help us, please do two things:
1. Buy one book from us — we don't mind from where, it can be from your local bookstore (they need your support, too), it can be from Amazon or the BookDepository. It can even be directly from us. But please buy that book now.
2. Please tell everyone you know to do the same. Buy just one book and pass it on.
If money is tight for you, too, you can simply write a review of any Salt book you love on Amazon. Or recommend a book to a friend.
You can visit our Web site right now, simply go to
http://www.saltpublishing.com/
and buy JustOneBook.
Remember too, that every book you buy directly from us gets a raffle ticket in our Big Summer Raffle — and you could win one copy each of the next 20 books we publish from 1 September.
Thanks for continuing to support us.
Chris
I bought two more Salt books just now: Wena Poon's novel Alex y Robert and Tom Chivers's Crashaw Prize-winning debut How to Build a City. Oh, and my book's still available if you're interested - just click on the image on the sidebar.
12 July 2010
Ledbury
Just back from Ledbury Poetry Festival. I was there for the second weekend, reading on Saturday with Mick Wood, managing to grab a few other events en route. The first was Meirion Jordan, reading with Ruth Bidgood - quite a contrast of voices. He's good, this is a very accomplished first collection. Sarah Crown called it "a startling, lubricious debut". He reads well, too.
That night, I heard Aoife Mannix at last, accompanied by Janie Armour with great wit and intelligence. Very accomplished, thoughtful and all with such a light, sassy touch. Deserved a much bigger audience.
As for my reading with Mick Wood on the Saturday morning, it was a blast. A lovely, responsive audience. And Mick was wonderful, a real star. A seasoned thesp, he had the audience in his hand. His poems have a keen dramatic intelligence, and the audience respond to that. His delivery values the reading as a dramatic encounter, not just voiced words on a page. Couldn't be much further from the grey armchair school of poetry reading - one I've never subscribed to anyway. When poets profess to eschew a dramatic reading and "let the words speak for themselves" they are too often copping out. A performance that prefers one interpretation over another doesn't preclude those other interpretations for all time; it's questionable whether it erases the possibility of other readings even during the performance itself. The performer's first duty is to the audience, and the Ledbury audience hugely appreciated that.
An honour to be reading with him.
I took the rest of the afternoon off, going with friends up the Malverns, to sit in sunshine and the western wind surveying Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Wales, while eating strawberries and consuming lashings of ginger beer, while far below we could hear strains of tuning up for the Jools Holland concert. (Thanks, Gary!)
Rather than Jools Holland, I chose to hear Martin Figura debut Whistle, the show he is taking to Edinburgh. Based on the collection published earlier this year by Arrowhead, the poems, delivered with Mart's inimitable confidence, nous and warmth, layered and textured with slide show and recordings, earned a standing ovation. You don't get that so often at poetry readings. The story the poems tell is heartbreaking, but Mart tackles it with courage and humour. It was an intimate, generous experience. As a fellow Sixer, I've known Mart for quite a while, and enormously value his emotional intelligence vis à vis audience.
As I said, the performer's first duty is to the audience. He's a fabulous reader. I wish him every success in Edinburgh, and if Ledbury is anything to go by they will be crowding it out before he's through.
As for Ledbury, I was torn between going to lots of events and preserving my sanity. There is just too much to do.
The last event I managed to get to was Roz Goddard and Penny Shuttle (standing in for Dan Chiasson, who was indiposed). Roz's Soprano sonnets were witty and astute, and I know I missed a lot from being a TV-phobe. She's a good reader, with a lovely rapport with the audience. As for Penny Shuttle, I have heard her read loads of times, but don't tire, even of poems like "Filth", which I've heard so often I probably know by heart.
09 June 2010
A hard chair
And there was I thinking it was going to be nem con.
There are ten remaining candidates for the Oxford Poetry Professorship. Paula Claire withdrew on 7 June, in protest over "serious flaws" in the election process, and favouritism shown to Hill.
We are used to arguments about what does or does not constitute poetry, but Roger Lewis doesn't draw a distinction between the patterned words and the metaphor. Like Geoffrey Hill (for whom Professor Dame Averil Cameron, Warden of Keble, has posted an encomium), Lewis hasn't written a manifesto. His case is extravagantly pleaded by Rebecca Nicolson (St Hugh's 1985). Tantalisingly,
Michael Horovitz stands much more of a chance. It doesn't signify, but his facebook group has more supporters than Hill's. I just don't get his allegation that his religion is against him because it seems irrelevant to me - but maybe it's true that Christians are voting for Hill because he's a Christian... Have literature, and Oxford, come to this? I applaud Horovitz's manifesto:
Other candidates include poetryfundamentalist traditionalist Michael George Gibson
Seán Haldane if elected wants
Stephen Moss is the Monster Raving Looney whose candidacy has been well documented in the Guardian.
Full Candidate statements here
I haven't voted yet.
There are ten remaining candidates for the Oxford Poetry Professorship. Paula Claire withdrew on 7 June, in protest over "serious flaws" in the election process, and favouritism shown to Hill.
We are used to arguments about what does or does not constitute poetry, but Roger Lewis doesn't draw a distinction between the patterned words and the metaphor. Like Geoffrey Hill (for whom Professor Dame Averil Cameron, Warden of Keble, has posted an encomium), Lewis hasn't written a manifesto. His case is extravagantly pleaded by Rebecca Nicolson (St Hugh's 1985). Tantalisingly,
If elected to the Chair of Poetry, Lewis' subjects may well include - Ezra Pound: Poetry and / or Politics; The Ramification of Richard Ellmann's 1,500 Factual Errors in his Biography of Oscar Wilde; The Nineteenth Century View of Shakespeare and Jesus and Great Cryptograms; Sullivan Without Gilbert; Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes: Sex, Violence and Difficulties with Girls; Poets of the Appetites: M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth David; The End of England: Eric Ravilious, Barbara Jones and Edward Bawden; and Dick & Liz at Oxford: The Burtons and Doctor Faustus.But he won't be.
Michael Horovitz stands much more of a chance. It doesn't signify, but his facebook group has more supporters than Hill's. I just don't get his allegation that his religion is against him because it seems irrelevant to me - but maybe it's true that Christians are voting for Hill because he's a Christian... Have literature, and Oxford, come to this? I applaud Horovitz's manifesto:
Let the Oxford professorship's authority be revived as a platform for authentic poetry ticket-bookings, scheduling ever newer departures and in-depth arrivals way beyond mere careerist arrivism. Anyone voting for me is assured that I will continue striving to emulate Chaucer's Clerk of Oxenford: "Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche, / And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche."Ruth Padel supports both Hill (with a damning qualification about his stamina) and Horovitz. (Snarky article in Camden New Journal at the link.)
Other candidates include poetry
The literary and verbal things now presented and published as 'poems' are so varied that a fresh and fundamental examination of what was and is 'poetry' is well worth making.[Edit: amended following a complaint from Mr Gibson's agent - see comments]
Seán Haldane if elected wants
to talk about the neuropsychology of poetry, poetry and verse, poetry and 'more-than-coincidence', poetry in different languages, and what Hardy called its 'sustaining power'.Chris Mann, a former Newdigate prizewinner, offers samples of his work, including
DragonflyMaybe that wasn't such a good idea.
Rafting the Zambezi River,
I saw your filigree shimmer
on a boulder's bulky sphinx…
Stephen Moss is the Monster Raving Looney whose candidacy has been well documented in the Guardian.
So why I am standing? It's a good question. The idea came to me over a curry at the Hay Literary Festival last year.... What will I do if I win? Well, I will give the stipend away to needy poets and writers, and to good literary causes. I will set up an annual two-week poetry festival in Oxford. I will fight against the marginalisation of poetry, literature's perennial poor relation. I will buy anyone who votes for me a drink. I will, if necessary, go into coalition with Geoffrey Hill. I will back proportional representation in future elections. I will lecture on the role of poetry in society, starting with the Greeks and ending about a week last Tuesday. And I faithfully promise not to publish too many of my execrable poems. Can we win it? YES WE SCAN!Sanskrit scholar Vaughan Pilikian's ambitions are as wide ranging as Lewis's, if harder to visualise.
I intend a lecture series to range across some, if not all, of the following topics: the poetics of science in the atrocity exhibition; antiaesthetics, esoterrorism and metempsychosis; the rhythm of the dig in the Negro spiritual; Japanese death poetry; rhymed trajectories to heaven in the Iliad and the Mahabharata. My aim in this august office will be to pull poetry from the drawing rooms and the garrets and the palaces, and send it forth. For poetry is a weapon, bloodsoaked and glinting. It is a gnostic heresy, a counterattack on all that holds us captive, a challenge to the cruel symmetries and stifled laughter of the Demiurge. It is only through poetry that we might revenge ourselves on time.It is only through poetry that we might revenge ourselves on time. I could almost be persuaded of that.
Full Candidate statements here
I haven't voted yet.
08 June 2010
A soft chair
So I read to a private group of students in Cambridge tonight. Nice audience, fit but few.
I didn't do a lot of gab, but did once utter those terrible words "this next poem". It was because we were très intime and it would have been wrong to be too polished, somehow. I read from a chair because everyone else had done so - and if I'd stood up to read it would have looked a) precious and b) like an implicit criticism of everyone else who'd read sitting down. I could have stood on the chair, I suppose, to make a comic point - but they didn't look as if they were expecting comedy, and indeed, it would have been practically the only comedic moment in the performance so everything would have been downhill thereafter. Besides, it was a soft chair. At times like this I wish I had more comic poems in my repertoire.
As for the seated position, I can't say I favour it. I recall once seeing Carol Ann Duffy reading from a chair, and she was much criticised for it. I hadn't been to many readings at the time so couldn't see what was wrong. And now, I have a lot of sympathy for anyone who wants to read seated. Who is to know what unspeakable ailment they might be suffering?
No question, it makes a difference. I felt underpowered. It's true about not being able to breathe so deeply, but there's more to it than that. I also felt a certain loss of status. It's an impression that doesn't withstand close scrutiny, but is nevertheless mildly disconcerting. It's something to do with delivery. One feels obliged to curb the slightest tendency to perform rather than read. There is an equality about the situation, particularly with tiny numbers. The audience is seated too: how easily the roles could be reversed. And they were, because to begin with we had poems from people who'd attended the workshop prior to the reading. I'm totally OK with that - but the last thing you want to do in that situation is come on as the Big I Am. So there was a chair, from which the readers read, and other chairs seated around in a horseshoe and we took turns, me last and longest as the guest.
Do I have a poetry voice? Probably, though the thought appals me. Nobody likes to admit they've got one. Most people do, even if it's understated. Duffy does. Robin Robertson does. A poetry voice can be at the other extreme: just think of Thomas Lux.
It reminded me of the time when I went to look round an old merchant's house in Ledbury. No one else had turned up for the guided tour, but the guide nevertheless treated me as if I were an audience of many. She pitched her voice high to reach the back of the crowd, and went into spiel mode, never catching my eye. I think she was too shy to do it any differently, though she seemed embarrassed too. But when I asked questions she answered quite normally.
A poem isn't a normal thing, though. It's not something you've just thought of that you're telling someone, though some poets - eg John Hegley, Michael Rosen - tell theirs so seamlessly you can't tell the join between poem and gab. And there were some of my poems that wouldn't have felt right in front of a tiny audience, at least while I was sitting down, because they are too rhythmical and not at all like ordinary speech.
And yet and yet. This still doesn't explain it. Sometimes I go and read to groups of blind (and invariably old) people; I read them favourites like The Listeners, Cargoes - anything they request that I happen to have in my bag. And I read sitting down, and they will join in if they know it. These are almost invariably rhythmical poems unlike ordinary speech, and I'm expected to ham it up a bit. Is it easier to do a cover version, because the voice is not one's own?
I didn't do a lot of gab, but did once utter those terrible words "this next poem". It was because we were très intime and it would have been wrong to be too polished, somehow. I read from a chair because everyone else had done so - and if I'd stood up to read it would have looked a) precious and b) like an implicit criticism of everyone else who'd read sitting down. I could have stood on the chair, I suppose, to make a comic point - but they didn't look as if they were expecting comedy, and indeed, it would have been practically the only comedic moment in the performance so everything would have been downhill thereafter. Besides, it was a soft chair. At times like this I wish I had more comic poems in my repertoire.
As for the seated position, I can't say I favour it. I recall once seeing Carol Ann Duffy reading from a chair, and she was much criticised for it. I hadn't been to many readings at the time so couldn't see what was wrong. And now, I have a lot of sympathy for anyone who wants to read seated. Who is to know what unspeakable ailment they might be suffering?
No question, it makes a difference. I felt underpowered. It's true about not being able to breathe so deeply, but there's more to it than that. I also felt a certain loss of status. It's an impression that doesn't withstand close scrutiny, but is nevertheless mildly disconcerting. It's something to do with delivery. One feels obliged to curb the slightest tendency to perform rather than read. There is an equality about the situation, particularly with tiny numbers. The audience is seated too: how easily the roles could be reversed. And they were, because to begin with we had poems from people who'd attended the workshop prior to the reading. I'm totally OK with that - but the last thing you want to do in that situation is come on as the Big I Am. So there was a chair, from which the readers read, and other chairs seated around in a horseshoe and we took turns, me last and longest as the guest.
Do I have a poetry voice? Probably, though the thought appals me. Nobody likes to admit they've got one. Most people do, even if it's understated. Duffy does. Robin Robertson does. A poetry voice can be at the other extreme: just think of Thomas Lux.
It reminded me of the time when I went to look round an old merchant's house in Ledbury. No one else had turned up for the guided tour, but the guide nevertheless treated me as if I were an audience of many. She pitched her voice high to reach the back of the crowd, and went into spiel mode, never catching my eye. I think she was too shy to do it any differently, though she seemed embarrassed too. But when I asked questions she answered quite normally.
A poem isn't a normal thing, though. It's not something you've just thought of that you're telling someone, though some poets - eg John Hegley, Michael Rosen - tell theirs so seamlessly you can't tell the join between poem and gab. And there were some of my poems that wouldn't have felt right in front of a tiny audience, at least while I was sitting down, because they are too rhythmical and not at all like ordinary speech.
And yet and yet. This still doesn't explain it. Sometimes I go and read to groups of blind (and invariably old) people; I read them favourites like The Listeners, Cargoes - anything they request that I happen to have in my bag. And I read sitting down, and they will join in if they know it. These are almost invariably rhythmical poems unlike ordinary speech, and I'm expected to ham it up a bit. Is it easier to do a cover version, because the voice is not one's own?
07 March 2010
John Rety, RIP
Poet, publisher, impresario, chess fiend, émigré, anarchist.
Rumpled, principled, opinionated, informed, generous, challenging, uncompromising. Occasionally bloody rude.
And much loved. Having been away for a while, I only learned of John Rety's death today, when I read Harry Eyres's tribute in the FT. Rety was part of the poetry landscape, always there.
A quick search revealed a couple of good obits in The Camden New Journal and The Daily Telegraph. (Don't laugh - the torygraph has well informed poetry obits.) I wonder what Rety, an anarchist since the ("rather late") age of 13, would have thought about his coverage in the right wing capitalist broadsheets. If the Guardian has published an obituary, it hasn't hit Google yet. There are one or two generous appreciations on blogs, but I'm surprised that there hasn't been more coverage.
His press, Hearing Eye, and the readings at the (tiny) Torriano Meeting House seemed to punch way above their weight in terms of influence. The Torriano readings commanded top readers, such as Dannie Abse, John Hegley, Adrian Mitchell, while the famously inclusive "readings from the floor" were a template for many other venues.
Even as I write a Torriano session seems to be in full swing. All but one of the chairs are occupied, and latecomers lean against the walls, listening intently. I recognise at least half the audience. John has made some preliminary announcements, and has berated poets in general for their lack of response to the political situation. Several have already leapt up onto the wooden stage and unfolded a scrap of paper from a pocket. There have been sonnets and doggerel, rants and lullabys. It's been a mixed experience, shall we say, with some gemstones on the beach. Most of us are waiting for the featured poets. Heavily laden and swathed in many layers against the cold, an elderly woman comes in late, excusing herself past knees and folded overcoats to the least accessible seat in the house, by the wall. The singing man carries on singing, oblivious. She settles herself dramatically (but wordlessly so as not to draw attention). Surreptitiously, she rummages in her crackling carrier bags throughout the rest of the session. What does she have in there? Poems? Knitting? Fish?
Although I read for him a couple of times I didn't know him well, or visit Torriano that often - regular engineering works make London a nightmare Sunday destination by rail. Now I wish I had. And I wish I'd taken seriously his offer to publish one of my pamphlet-length pieces.
I heartily recommend Marius Kociejowski's lively and astonishing minibiography in PN Review 187, last May. Among many fabulous anecdotes, that story about the writing desk is going to come around again and again.
Rumpled, principled, opinionated, informed, generous, challenging, uncompromising. Occasionally bloody rude.
And much loved. Having been away for a while, I only learned of John Rety's death today, when I read Harry Eyres's tribute in the FT. Rety was part of the poetry landscape, always there.
A quick search revealed a couple of good obits in The Camden New Journal and The Daily Telegraph. (Don't laugh - the torygraph has well informed poetry obits.) I wonder what Rety, an anarchist since the ("rather late") age of 13, would have thought about his coverage in the right wing capitalist broadsheets. If the Guardian has published an obituary, it hasn't hit Google yet. There are one or two generous appreciations on blogs, but I'm surprised that there hasn't been more coverage.
His press, Hearing Eye, and the readings at the (tiny) Torriano Meeting House seemed to punch way above their weight in terms of influence. The Torriano readings commanded top readers, such as Dannie Abse, John Hegley, Adrian Mitchell, while the famously inclusive "readings from the floor" were a template for many other venues.
Even as I write a Torriano session seems to be in full swing. All but one of the chairs are occupied, and latecomers lean against the walls, listening intently. I recognise at least half the audience. John has made some preliminary announcements, and has berated poets in general for their lack of response to the political situation. Several have already leapt up onto the wooden stage and unfolded a scrap of paper from a pocket. There have been sonnets and doggerel, rants and lullabys. It's been a mixed experience, shall we say, with some gemstones on the beach. Most of us are waiting for the featured poets. Heavily laden and swathed in many layers against the cold, an elderly woman comes in late, excusing herself past knees and folded overcoats to the least accessible seat in the house, by the wall. The singing man carries on singing, oblivious. She settles herself dramatically (but wordlessly so as not to draw attention). Surreptitiously, she rummages in her crackling carrier bags throughout the rest of the session. What does she have in there? Poems? Knitting? Fish?
Although I read for him a couple of times I didn't know him well, or visit Torriano that often - regular engineering works make London a nightmare Sunday destination by rail. Now I wish I had. And I wish I'd taken seriously his offer to publish one of my pamphlet-length pieces.
I heartily recommend Marius Kociejowski's lively and astonishing minibiography in PN Review 187, last May. Among many fabulous anecdotes, that story about the writing desk is going to come around again and again.
02 March 2010
More gab about gab
In a comment on the last post I casually remarked that actors and musicians rely solely on their art to communicate with the audience. Poets, on the other hand, tend to gab.
Even as I clicked Publish, I realised I was wrong about musicians. How could I have forgotten? When I was a kid way back, folk song was popular and every little town had its folk club with regulars and itinerant performers. Ours was in The Bull on Friday nights, and in its heyday there would have been well over 100 people there. And musicians did links. They might tell something of the background to the song (fishing, canal-digging, mining, political struggle) or its origins (trad, Ewan MacColl), where they first heard it, or what they might have done to adapt it to the voices and instruments at hand.
It's not just folk singers, it's other popular forms like country and western, crooners and, sometimes, jazz. Even rockers might pause in the middle of a gig to ask the audience "Are you having a good time?" if they could be sure the answer would be a resounding "Yes!" (OK, maybe that was just to distract the audience from the retuning of guitars.)
I'd thought the habit was a feature of popular music, but in a recent Independent, there's a letter from Judy Vero, correcting an earlier article I'd missed:
Music, like poetry and theatre, is a temporal art. The curatorial notes* in art galleries are often written precisely because (most) visual art outstays the moment and context of its creation. For the same reason, they're easier to ignore: they occupy visual space, not temporal space.
But note how the curatorial can shift into the personality:
The music becomes far more personal when he explains what it means to him and how he interprets it. (Vero)
... Barenboim's charisma was only part of the reason that the audience was rapt... (Lister)
Conductors are some of the greatest personalities in the world of music, and by virtue of what they have to do with an orchestra, some of the greatest communicators, yet we never hear them speak or even see their faces. (Lister)
... would it be so terrible to have a screen above the orchestra so that one could see the facial expressions of the conductor, his or her glances at various sections of the orchestra, rather than just staring at a back all evening? (Lister)
(My bold. And yes, it would be so terrible.)
It was a treat to be addressed at all by a conductor at a classical music concert. One can imagine a few aficionados being disdainful of anything that mediated between them and the music, but perhaps they would stay at home anyway, just reading the score. More profess resentment of the curatorial notes at art exhibitions (and a fortiori those recorded Walkman tours), which they regard as patronising and limiting. I haven't hired one for years: surely they have improved. But I always read the notes. They are always informative. Sometimes they have a wonderful lightness and wit. For some brilliant curatorship, where the talk virtually takes the place of the object (cf poem, symphony, song), listen to Neil MacGregor on Radio 4: A History of the World in A Hundred Objects. MacGregor is the Director of the British Museum, and in each programme chooses one of its exhibits to cast light on the society from which it emerged. When he places the Olduvai artefact into the hands of someone like David Attenborough to respond to and interpret, it's beautiful radio.
Some poets' gab tends more to the curatorial than the charismatic. I suspect the poetry audience tolerates more of the latter than the former. And not much of that. They particularly resent being instructed how to interpret the poem. The Author is Dead, remember?
I'm straying from the point. I started looking at gab as an overlooked part of the performance, and it's led to the point where the gab is the performance, with the referent playing a supporting role - offstage, in the case of A History of the World.
I'm still developing my theory of gab. Meanwhile here are a few more thoughts.
Our receptivity to gab relies on
• the relevance of the gab
• the authority of the gabber
• the skill of the gabber
• the personality of the gabber
• our expectation that there will be gab
* I'm interested in the idea of museum object by way of contrast to performed art: immutable but open to interpretation the way a music score or a poem is - or at least the idea that the interpretation of it can be artistic as well as scholarly. How far can the museum artefact be distinguished from a contemporary work of art, like a painting or a poem? Of course it has a historic provenance and purpose which, however disputable, are in theory knowable. Or in another theory, perhaps not. I don't know the first thing about curatorship theory, but it must be as rife with different factions and revisions as any other area of intellectual effort.
Even as I clicked Publish, I realised I was wrong about musicians. How could I have forgotten? When I was a kid way back, folk song was popular and every little town had its folk club with regulars and itinerant performers. Ours was in The Bull on Friday nights, and in its heyday there would have been well over 100 people there. And musicians did links. They might tell something of the background to the song (fishing, canal-digging, mining, political struggle) or its origins (trad, Ewan MacColl), where they first heard it, or what they might have done to adapt it to the voices and instruments at hand.
It's not just folk singers, it's other popular forms like country and western, crooners and, sometimes, jazz. Even rockers might pause in the middle of a gig to ask the audience "Are you having a good time?" if they could be sure the answer would be a resounding "Yes!" (OK, maybe that was just to distract the audience from the retuning of guitars.)
I'd thought the habit was a feature of popular music, but in a recent Independent, there's a letter from Judy Vero, correcting an earlier article I'd missed:
David Lister asks why conductors do not address their audiences more often (6 February). Here in Birmingham it happens regularly.So I looked up the David Lister article:
Sir Simon Rattle began the trend many years ago, and it has now become an established feature of concerts by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Our dynamic and highly talented young Latvian conductor, Andris Nelsons, has clearly set out to build a rapport with his audience. We look forward to the moment when he turns to face us and addresses us as "Dear ladies and gentlemen..." The music become far more personal when he explains what it means to him and how he interprets it.
...Before conducting the Schoenberg piece, Barenboim gave what was described as an "illustrated talk" from the podium, introduced the various themes from sections of the orchestra, explained how they fitted together and how the motifs were subtly altered and repeated. This prelude to a 21-minute piece lasted nearly half an hour. The audience was rapt, partly because this was a master showman at work, with a sense of comedy and timing to be envied by many a stand-up comedian. By the end of the talk he had the audience, not quite whistling Schoenberg as he had promised, but at least learning to love him, which is quite an achievement.It's worth reading the whole article. It's instructive that Lister cites charisma and entertainment, but the main purpose of Barenboim's address was instruction. The talk lasted half an hour. That's not gab, that's a lecture. Clearly a lot of thought and preparation had gone into it. It was billed as an "illustrated talk", so they were expecting it. Even the most devoted Barenboim fan would have started to get a bit restless if they'd gone there expecting only music.
But Barenboim's charisma was only part of the reason that the audience was rapt. I also think it was because it was a treat to be addressed at all by a conductor at a classical music concert...
Music, like poetry and theatre, is a temporal art. The curatorial notes* in art galleries are often written precisely because (most) visual art outstays the moment and context of its creation. For the same reason, they're easier to ignore: they occupy visual space, not temporal space.
But note how the curatorial can shift into the personality:
The music becomes far more personal when he explains what it means to him and how he interprets it. (Vero)
... Barenboim's charisma was only part of the reason that the audience was rapt... (Lister)
Conductors are some of the greatest personalities in the world of music, and by virtue of what they have to do with an orchestra, some of the greatest communicators, yet we never hear them speak or even see their faces. (Lister)
... would it be so terrible to have a screen above the orchestra so that one could see the facial expressions of the conductor, his or her glances at various sections of the orchestra, rather than just staring at a back all evening? (Lister)
(My bold. And yes, it would be so terrible.)
It was a treat to be addressed at all by a conductor at a classical music concert. One can imagine a few aficionados being disdainful of anything that mediated between them and the music, but perhaps they would stay at home anyway, just reading the score. More profess resentment of the curatorial notes at art exhibitions (and a fortiori those recorded Walkman tours), which they regard as patronising and limiting. I haven't hired one for years: surely they have improved. But I always read the notes. They are always informative. Sometimes they have a wonderful lightness and wit. For some brilliant curatorship, where the talk virtually takes the place of the object (cf poem, symphony, song), listen to Neil MacGregor on Radio 4: A History of the World in A Hundred Objects. MacGregor is the Director of the British Museum, and in each programme chooses one of its exhibits to cast light on the society from which it emerged. When he places the Olduvai artefact into the hands of someone like David Attenborough to respond to and interpret, it's beautiful radio.
Some poets' gab tends more to the curatorial than the charismatic. I suspect the poetry audience tolerates more of the latter than the former. And not much of that. They particularly resent being instructed how to interpret the poem. The Author is Dead, remember?
I'm straying from the point. I started looking at gab as an overlooked part of the performance, and it's led to the point where the gab is the performance, with the referent playing a supporting role - offstage, in the case of A History of the World.
I'm still developing my theory of gab. Meanwhile here are a few more thoughts.
Our receptivity to gab relies on
• the relevance of the gab
• the authority of the gabber
• the skill of the gabber
• the personality of the gabber
• our expectation that there will be gab
* I'm interested in the idea of museum object by way of contrast to performed art: immutable but open to interpretation the way a music score or a poem is - or at least the idea that the interpretation of it can be artistic as well as scholarly. How far can the museum artefact be distinguished from a contemporary work of art, like a painting or a poem? Of course it has a historic provenance and purpose which, however disputable, are in theory knowable. Or in another theory, perhaps not. I don't know the first thing about curatorship theory, but it must be as rife with different factions and revisions as any other area of intellectual effort.
03 February 2010
Gab
Bernard O'Donoghue, to whom I owe the title of this post, self-deprecatingly dismisses his entertaining interstitial chat as "just gab". I’ve never heard him use those killer words "This next poem..." His intros are tangential. They may illuminate the poem from a distant place, but make no attempt to explain it, let alone render a prose version. The prose version gab is a betrayal of the poem.
Gab between poems. Like it/don't like it? How much? What sort?
These questions are prompted by a recent reading where some readers gabbed and others took the piano recital approach of reverential silence. (Knowing chuckles from the audience, coughing, shifting and recrossing legs permitted.) Odd, really, because some of their poems are so dense they need recovery time. And sometimes I'd appreciate it if they gave the occasional poem a leg-up, given that this was a rare chance to hear the poet in person, rather than just the tape running in my head when I hold the book.
One non-gabber even prefaced his reading with a brief gab-denouncing gab. I thought I detected a certain froideur between the two camps.
Although I’ve been thinking about it for a while, it’s not easy to formulate a critique of gab. While there is a lot of commentary on reading the poem itself, I haven't found much about the bits in between. Here are some fairly inchoate initial thoughts on a large and divisive subject.
What is gab?
Anything which isn’t a poem - whether a few introductory remarks, or a long chat between poems. It includes modes of speech known by more polite terms, such as conversation, talk, chat, anecdote, aside, reminiscence, yarn, joke, ad lib, etc. Proponents of gab will say that it’s a perfectly natural interaction between performer and audience. You might wonder why on earth I’m angsting about it, but bear with me. It also gets called more derogatory names, such as patter, spiel, waffle. By using this term I’m trying to be dispassionate about it for a bit.
We’ve come to hear the poems, so why gab?
Gab has complex and overlapping functions, both informative and phatic, not always consciously employed (and not always successful):
• To acknowledge courtesies.
• To get the audience used to the sound of the poet’s voice.
• To establish goodwill.
• To establish or adjust status – eg I may have a reputation for being difficult to understand but I’m just an ordinary person like you really. To democratise.
• To provide context for something arcane, to explain an unfamiliar reference.
• To release tension, eg after poems about highly emotive subjects. Done badly, it can drain energy from the performance.
• To provide breathing space between poems. This is the most commonly cited. There is a perception – which may be wrong – that some audiences cannot bear too much non-stop poetry, that they need to pause and consider what they’ve just heard. Gab requires a much lower level of attention, but it may undermine the period of reflection it’s intended to provide. A short period of silence may work better.
• To avoid monotony.
• To entertain.
• To deal with interruptions.
• To establish or re-establish control.
Critics of gab might add further categories such as:
• To disarm or befriend. Those who favour a conversational style of reading will slip more naturally into chat with the audience.
• To control interpretation of the poem.
• To let the poet off the hook. To evade commitment to the poem.
• Habit
• Fear
• Vanity
I wonder too if the prevalence of gab is something to do with the growing requirement of the market. Like other writers, poets are expected by publishers these days to market themselves as personalities. This doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but when audiences start looking for personalities and newspapers can publish two-page interviews with a poet without quoting a single line of poetry, gab is hardly a surprising by-product.
Some audiences ask for gab. On occasion, when invited to read I’ve been specifically asked to give background to the poems. (Younger listeners know very little about the Cold War, and no one knows much about V bombers.)
How prevalent is gab?
It's so widespread it’s almost taken for granted in some quarters and doesn't get the attention it deserves. Less experienced readers are inclined to absorb the performance style of people they admire. When I first started reading to an audience the perceived requirement to say something non-fatuous between poems was far more anxiety-inducing than speaking the poems themselves. I’d have saved myself some agony early on if I’d realised that saying nothing at all was an option.
About ten years ago we formed Joy of Six. I’ll blog about that one day, but for now the relevant thing is that we read our poems without any gab in between, often without even giving a title. We choose poems that can withstand a quickfire delivery. It doesn’t matter if the audience doesn’t get everything as it wings past, so long as the poem delivers something: a promise, a mystery, a teasing sound. The next poem will aim for another effect, intensifying or contrasting. We often read to audiences who aren’t used to hearing much poetry. Our enthusiastic comments book suggests that the “breathing space” theory doesn’t necessarily apply to multi-voice performances.
Gab is not always appropriate
The TS Eliot readings allow only 8 minutes a poet, so there's no time for it. Anyway, that occasion seems to require solemnity. Nevertheless, a creeping gabbiness can be detected. It was clear a few years back that performers had been warned off any gab whatsoever, because nobody said a word but their poems. It was oddly formal, but not displeasing. I can understand the injunction against gab, because poets famously have no idea how long it takes. But this year, almost everyone had something to say that wasn't a poem. Even the rigorously non-gabby Alice Oswald felt constrained to comment on how Weeds and Wildflowers had come about as a collaboration.
The gabless performance
Foregrounds the poem.
Foregrounds the language.
Foregrounds the voice as performance.
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets favour it.
Poets with a sculptural sensibility, such as Elizabeth James, favour it.
Poets with a dramatic sensibility, such as Paul Durcan and Alice Oswald, favour it.
It takes courage.
Gab as performance
Poet, wit and raconteur: Michael Donaghy was an exemplar of gab. Simon Armitage*, when he's on form, can give Ian McMillan a good run for his money. John Cooper Clarke blends poetry with standup. John Hegley adds a mandolin. Michael Rosen has it down to such a fine art you can't tell where the gab ends and the poem begins. That's not actually a criticism, since the whole thing is about giving a performance. At a very basic level it's about holding the tribe’s attention, whether with stories, jokes, political rhetoric, music or the language of the poems themselves.
We are talking about many different sorts of performance and venue here: the concert hall, the SCR, the pub. It would have been weird and alienating, I think, if John Burnside hadn’t chatted to the audience at the intimate reading at Toppings.
Gab or pure poetry?
I was talking to a couple of poet friends about this last night. S said he had no time for gab. It's self-indulgent and boring. He hates it when poets give the background to a poem, and he hates it when they tell tangential stories. Or else it shows lack of confidence in the work: above all, he hates it when the poet tries to give the impression he's an ordinary bloke like them, and tries to be their friend. He doesn't need to like the poet. He doesn't need to know anything about him. He has come to hear the poems. He cited a reading recently where each of the readers had chatted away between poems: it virtually sent him to sleep. When he gives a reading, he doesn’t feel the need to address the audience other than through the poem, because everything he wants to say is in the poem.**
J completely disagreed. She thought the poet could seem arrogant and rude if she didn't address the audience. She cited the example of a well known poet years ago at the Troubadour, when the performance space was half the size it is now. In refusing to engage with the audience he came across as contemptuous of them. The audience are people, individual human beings, not disembodied intellects. Some are listening with their heads, some with their heads and their hearts. Some audiences are not just randomly collected, but bonded communities.
She thinks too, that people need downtime between poems, otherwise it all gets too intense.
Bad gabbers?
This is a public space.
Oh, all right then:
A few years ago at Aldeburgh a distinguished foreign poet felt obliged to introduce each poem. Although it’s very common, gab is not a universal expectation there. Unable to trust herself to ad lib, she read from a script. It drained all the energy from her performance.
Archie Markham. His gab was fascinating, and the only reason he is here on the bench where he can't defend himself is that when I heard him I found myself wondering when he was going to read an actual poem. However interesting the gab (and it was), people had come to hear his poems.
People have very different reactions to gab. It can be seen as an integral part of performance, or an aesthetic insult. Surrounding the poems with silence like piano études can be seen as either professional or arrogant. Some people insist they go to hear the poems; they don't want the poems explained or undermined, and they certainly don't want the poet trying to ingratiate himself. If the poem is baffling in places, the language should carry it through, and in any case there will be another one along in a minute. In fact, this is the theory behind our Joy of Six performances - to keep the energy level high. Yet when we perform individually, we all gab. Appropriateness of gab depends on the audience and venue.
There is a lot more to say about all of this, and if anyone can recommend some studies, please let me know.
There are some things that everyone agrees on:
• People have come to hear poems.
• It's a mistake to assume that anyone will be interested in your domestic arrangements. (Well, they probably will if you are someone famous.)
• It’s a mistake to explain the poem. This next poem is my attempt to show the transience of beauty, and the irony that... (Sorry, I already nodded off.)
• The prose version gab is a betrayal of the poem.
• It’s fatal to apologise for the poem.
• It is better to be silent than to gab badly.
*"Simon began to read and immediately had the audience in the palm of his hand. The first two poems he picked were hilarious; the first on the surreal musings of a sperm whale and the second on the quasi biblical crossing of a causeway before the tide was properly out. He had his rather staid audience rolling with laughter. His ad libbed comments between the poems were also funny, and his timing when reading was like watching the best of comic actors. Having got us totally onside he moved on to a range of poetry covering a great mix of styles and emotions. His preambles before each poem made everything quickly accessible even if you had not heard that poem before, or if the poem proved difficult."(Juxtabook)
**Which, come to think of it, sounds just like the attitude some men have to sex
Gab between poems. Like it/don't like it? How much? What sort?
These questions are prompted by a recent reading where some readers gabbed and others took the piano recital approach of reverential silence. (Knowing chuckles from the audience, coughing, shifting and recrossing legs permitted.) Odd, really, because some of their poems are so dense they need recovery time. And sometimes I'd appreciate it if they gave the occasional poem a leg-up, given that this was a rare chance to hear the poet in person, rather than just the tape running in my head when I hold the book.
One non-gabber even prefaced his reading with a brief gab-denouncing gab. I thought I detected a certain froideur between the two camps.
Although I’ve been thinking about it for a while, it’s not easy to formulate a critique of gab. While there is a lot of commentary on reading the poem itself, I haven't found much about the bits in between. Here are some fairly inchoate initial thoughts on a large and divisive subject.
What is gab?
Anything which isn’t a poem - whether a few introductory remarks, or a long chat between poems. It includes modes of speech known by more polite terms, such as conversation, talk, chat, anecdote, aside, reminiscence, yarn, joke, ad lib, etc. Proponents of gab will say that it’s a perfectly natural interaction between performer and audience. You might wonder why on earth I’m angsting about it, but bear with me. It also gets called more derogatory names, such as patter, spiel, waffle. By using this term I’m trying to be dispassionate about it for a bit.
We’ve come to hear the poems, so why gab?
Gab has complex and overlapping functions, both informative and phatic, not always consciously employed (and not always successful):
• To acknowledge courtesies.
• To get the audience used to the sound of the poet’s voice.
• To establish goodwill.
• To establish or adjust status – eg I may have a reputation for being difficult to understand but I’m just an ordinary person like you really. To democratise.
• To provide context for something arcane, to explain an unfamiliar reference.
• To release tension, eg after poems about highly emotive subjects. Done badly, it can drain energy from the performance.
• To provide breathing space between poems. This is the most commonly cited. There is a perception – which may be wrong – that some audiences cannot bear too much non-stop poetry, that they need to pause and consider what they’ve just heard. Gab requires a much lower level of attention, but it may undermine the period of reflection it’s intended to provide. A short period of silence may work better.
• To avoid monotony.
• To entertain.
• To deal with interruptions.
• To establish or re-establish control.
Critics of gab might add further categories such as:
• To disarm or befriend. Those who favour a conversational style of reading will slip more naturally into chat with the audience.
• To control interpretation of the poem.
• To let the poet off the hook. To evade commitment to the poem.
• Habit
• Fear
• Vanity
I wonder too if the prevalence of gab is something to do with the growing requirement of the market. Like other writers, poets are expected by publishers these days to market themselves as personalities. This doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but when audiences start looking for personalities and newspapers can publish two-page interviews with a poet without quoting a single line of poetry, gab is hardly a surprising by-product.
Some audiences ask for gab. On occasion, when invited to read I’ve been specifically asked to give background to the poems. (Younger listeners know very little about the Cold War, and no one knows much about V bombers.)
How prevalent is gab?
It's so widespread it’s almost taken for granted in some quarters and doesn't get the attention it deserves. Less experienced readers are inclined to absorb the performance style of people they admire. When I first started reading to an audience the perceived requirement to say something non-fatuous between poems was far more anxiety-inducing than speaking the poems themselves. I’d have saved myself some agony early on if I’d realised that saying nothing at all was an option.
About ten years ago we formed Joy of Six. I’ll blog about that one day, but for now the relevant thing is that we read our poems without any gab in between, often without even giving a title. We choose poems that can withstand a quickfire delivery. It doesn’t matter if the audience doesn’t get everything as it wings past, so long as the poem delivers something: a promise, a mystery, a teasing sound. The next poem will aim for another effect, intensifying or contrasting. We often read to audiences who aren’t used to hearing much poetry. Our enthusiastic comments book suggests that the “breathing space” theory doesn’t necessarily apply to multi-voice performances.
Gab is not always appropriate
The TS Eliot readings allow only 8 minutes a poet, so there's no time for it. Anyway, that occasion seems to require solemnity. Nevertheless, a creeping gabbiness can be detected. It was clear a few years back that performers had been warned off any gab whatsoever, because nobody said a word but their poems. It was oddly formal, but not displeasing. I can understand the injunction against gab, because poets famously have no idea how long it takes. But this year, almost everyone had something to say that wasn't a poem. Even the rigorously non-gabby Alice Oswald felt constrained to comment on how Weeds and Wildflowers had come about as a collaboration.
The gabless performance
Foregrounds the poem.
Foregrounds the language.
Foregrounds the voice as performance.
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets favour it.
Poets with a sculptural sensibility, such as Elizabeth James, favour it.
Poets with a dramatic sensibility, such as Paul Durcan and Alice Oswald, favour it.
It takes courage.
Gab as performance
Poet, wit and raconteur: Michael Donaghy was an exemplar of gab. Simon Armitage*, when he's on form, can give Ian McMillan a good run for his money. John Cooper Clarke blends poetry with standup. John Hegley adds a mandolin. Michael Rosen has it down to such a fine art you can't tell where the gab ends and the poem begins. That's not actually a criticism, since the whole thing is about giving a performance. At a very basic level it's about holding the tribe’s attention, whether with stories, jokes, political rhetoric, music or the language of the poems themselves.
We are talking about many different sorts of performance and venue here: the concert hall, the SCR, the pub. It would have been weird and alienating, I think, if John Burnside hadn’t chatted to the audience at the intimate reading at Toppings.
Gab or pure poetry?
I was talking to a couple of poet friends about this last night. S said he had no time for gab. It's self-indulgent and boring. He hates it when poets give the background to a poem, and he hates it when they tell tangential stories. Or else it shows lack of confidence in the work: above all, he hates it when the poet tries to give the impression he's an ordinary bloke like them, and tries to be their friend. He doesn't need to like the poet. He doesn't need to know anything about him. He has come to hear the poems. He cited a reading recently where each of the readers had chatted away between poems: it virtually sent him to sleep. When he gives a reading, he doesn’t feel the need to address the audience other than through the poem, because everything he wants to say is in the poem.**
J completely disagreed. She thought the poet could seem arrogant and rude if she didn't address the audience. She cited the example of a well known poet years ago at the Troubadour, when the performance space was half the size it is now. In refusing to engage with the audience he came across as contemptuous of them. The audience are people, individual human beings, not disembodied intellects. Some are listening with their heads, some with their heads and their hearts. Some audiences are not just randomly collected, but bonded communities.
She thinks too, that people need downtime between poems, otherwise it all gets too intense.
Bad gabbers?
This is a public space.
Oh, all right then:
A few years ago at Aldeburgh a distinguished foreign poet felt obliged to introduce each poem. Although it’s very common, gab is not a universal expectation there. Unable to trust herself to ad lib, she read from a script. It drained all the energy from her performance.
Archie Markham. His gab was fascinating, and the only reason he is here on the bench where he can't defend himself is that when I heard him I found myself wondering when he was going to read an actual poem. However interesting the gab (and it was), people had come to hear his poems.
People have very different reactions to gab. It can be seen as an integral part of performance, or an aesthetic insult. Surrounding the poems with silence like piano études can be seen as either professional or arrogant. Some people insist they go to hear the poems; they don't want the poems explained or undermined, and they certainly don't want the poet trying to ingratiate himself. If the poem is baffling in places, the language should carry it through, and in any case there will be another one along in a minute. In fact, this is the theory behind our Joy of Six performances - to keep the energy level high. Yet when we perform individually, we all gab. Appropriateness of gab depends on the audience and venue.
There is a lot more to say about all of this, and if anyone can recommend some studies, please let me know.
There are some things that everyone agrees on:
• People have come to hear poems.
• It's a mistake to assume that anyone will be interested in your domestic arrangements. (Well, they probably will if you are someone famous.)
• It’s a mistake to explain the poem. This next poem is my attempt to show the transience of beauty, and the irony that... (Sorry, I already nodded off.)
• The prose version gab is a betrayal of the poem.
• It’s fatal to apologise for the poem.
• It is better to be silent than to gab badly.
*"Simon began to read and immediately had the audience in the palm of his hand. The first two poems he picked were hilarious; the first on the surreal musings of a sperm whale and the second on the quasi biblical crossing of a causeway before the tide was properly out. He had his rather staid audience rolling with laughter. His ad libbed comments between the poems were also funny, and his timing when reading was like watching the best of comic actors. Having got us totally onside he moved on to a range of poetry covering a great mix of styles and emotions. His preambles before each poem made everything quickly accessible even if you had not heard that poem before, or if the poem proved difficult."(Juxtabook)
**Which, come to think of it, sounds just like the attitude some men have to sex
31 January 2010
The real thing and the bar room manoeuvre
I went to hear John Burnside read in Ely the other night. We were upstairs at Toppings, a real bookshop. I've been meaning to go there for ages: they have an excellent programme of readers. Twenty chairs just about packed the place. It's a welcoming den to idle away a few hours, in case you haven't already got enough books in the house. I was racking my brains to recall what the shop had been when I lived there back in the 80s. A bakers, a gentlemen's outfitters perhaps? There's no trace; Toppings have made it completely their own, and it feels as if they have been there forever. Fabulous! I shall be back.
I wish them every success, and they seem to have both the curatorial sense and the critical mass for it. A much smaller bookshop opened in our village in the 90s and flourished until Amazon and Tesco killed it off. The proprietor was keen on poetry, and knew someone at OUP (remember when they published poetry?), so we had a succession of readings: Michael Donaghy, Peter Porter, Anne Stevenson, Stephen Romer - and others who weren't on the Oxford list, like Katrina Porteous and Kevin Crossley-Holland. There was even wild talk of getting Anthony Hecht over. What days! It could seat about a dozen people on various chairs, tables and bar stools. Much wine was consumed (and Michael played the whistle). It closed last year, the poetry-loving proprietor having long since retired.
It's the first time I'd heard Burnside in person, and found him engaging, thoughtful and unpompous. It was interesting to hear him talk about his work as well as read from it. His publicist won't want to know that he read from his latest poetry collection, The Hunt in the Forest, as well as from the second volume of memoir he is really supposed to be promoting, Waking Up in Toytown. But if she's reading this, she should know he was worth travelling for. I'm reading The Hunt in the Forest right now. It's good to have heard his voice so I can put the poems to it.
At the reading I found myself sitting next to G, whom I hadn't seen in twenty years. We went for a swift half to a pub I'd never set foot in during all the years I lived there, as back then it was a bit too spit & sawdust even for me. It's under new ownership, so G wanted to check it out. He stepped through the lobby to the glazed inner door, and couldn't open it. Push, push, this side and that. Standing behind him, I could see what he couldn't: below his eye level, a sign that said Pull. Who ever heard of anyone pulling open the door to a bar room? That's no way to start a brawl.
It's elf and safety, you see. If there's a fire (even less likely now smoking is forbidden) then the panicking customers must be able to get out quickly. But that oddly placed handle should have been a warning.
Everything had been ripped out, every surface levelled and sanitised. There were some low armchairs and there may even have been a potted plant. Perhaps the imagination supplies that, because it resembled nothing so much as the foyer of a modern mid-market commercial hotel. While we stood at the immaculate bar supping our Adnams, reminiscing about the livestock market and trying to ignore the smell of paint, several other punters batted at the door, finding it as baffling as G had. What sort of pub was it? It was near enough. It served decent beer. It was smoke free and there were places to sit down. There was no canned music, no slot machine (but neither, as far as I could tell, dartboard, pool table or jukebox). No ugly behaviour brewing. But all the while, I felt there was something I was not getting about it. I enjoyed my beer, and was in good company, but what was this pub for? It was almost empty. There was a group of young women talking quietly in the corner, one of whom G knew slightly and nodded to. They were subdued and respectable. It didn't seem to be the sort of place where you should raise your voice.
Like a poem that evinces all superficial properties of a poem apart from actual motive, this called itself a pub, and it sold beer. It certainly provided somewhere out of the rain to yarn away with an old acquaintance. But it didn't feel like a pub. The men confounded by the door finally entered, trailing tobacco smoke, and looked round bewildered. You could tell they wouldn't be stopping long.
I wish them every success, and they seem to have both the curatorial sense and the critical mass for it. A much smaller bookshop opened in our village in the 90s and flourished until Amazon and Tesco killed it off. The proprietor was keen on poetry, and knew someone at OUP (remember when they published poetry?), so we had a succession of readings: Michael Donaghy, Peter Porter, Anne Stevenson, Stephen Romer - and others who weren't on the Oxford list, like Katrina Porteous and Kevin Crossley-Holland. There was even wild talk of getting Anthony Hecht over. What days! It could seat about a dozen people on various chairs, tables and bar stools. Much wine was consumed (and Michael played the whistle). It closed last year, the poetry-loving proprietor having long since retired.
It's the first time I'd heard Burnside in person, and found him engaging, thoughtful and unpompous. It was interesting to hear him talk about his work as well as read from it. His publicist won't want to know that he read from his latest poetry collection, The Hunt in the Forest, as well as from the second volume of memoir he is really supposed to be promoting, Waking Up in Toytown. But if she's reading this, she should know he was worth travelling for. I'm reading The Hunt in the Forest right now. It's good to have heard his voice so I can put the poems to it.
At the reading I found myself sitting next to G, whom I hadn't seen in twenty years. We went for a swift half to a pub I'd never set foot in during all the years I lived there, as back then it was a bit too spit & sawdust even for me. It's under new ownership, so G wanted to check it out. He stepped through the lobby to the glazed inner door, and couldn't open it. Push, push, this side and that. Standing behind him, I could see what he couldn't: below his eye level, a sign that said Pull. Who ever heard of anyone pulling open the door to a bar room? That's no way to start a brawl.
It's elf and safety, you see. If there's a fire (even less likely now smoking is forbidden) then the panicking customers must be able to get out quickly. But that oddly placed handle should have been a warning.
Everything had been ripped out, every surface levelled and sanitised. There were some low armchairs and there may even have been a potted plant. Perhaps the imagination supplies that, because it resembled nothing so much as the foyer of a modern mid-market commercial hotel. While we stood at the immaculate bar supping our Adnams, reminiscing about the livestock market and trying to ignore the smell of paint, several other punters batted at the door, finding it as baffling as G had. What sort of pub was it? It was near enough. It served decent beer. It was smoke free and there were places to sit down. There was no canned music, no slot machine (but neither, as far as I could tell, dartboard, pool table or jukebox). No ugly behaviour brewing. But all the while, I felt there was something I was not getting about it. I enjoyed my beer, and was in good company, but what was this pub for? It was almost empty. There was a group of young women talking quietly in the corner, one of whom G knew slightly and nodded to. They were subdued and respectable. It didn't seem to be the sort of place where you should raise your voice.
Like a poem that evinces all superficial properties of a poem apart from actual motive, this called itself a pub, and it sold beer. It certainly provided somewhere out of the rain to yarn away with an old acquaintance. But it didn't feel like a pub. The men confounded by the door finally entered, trailing tobacco smoke, and looked round bewildered. You could tell they wouldn't be stopping long.
18 January 2010
Personation
Just back from the TS Eliot readings. This isn't a post about that, though. It would be boring if I opined on who read well and who less well, and anyway no one would agree with me. Some fine poets didn't read their best poems, or read them well... But it was a vintage evening. Last year was a strong one: if anything this was even stronger. People can argue about whether it was really as diverse as Armitage claims, but it's an impressive sampling of the mainstream (whatever that means).
Not for the first time Sharon Olds was an anomalous American on the list. Not for the first time the work of an absent poet was read by someone else. There were mutterings that it should have been an American voice reading the poems, the English cadences were all wrong.
I don't agree. Jo Shapcott read with controlled passion. It was very English, yes, but she was engaged with the poems. She really cared about them. It surprised me. Although I admire Olds for her skill in shaping experience and sense of drama, I've long had misgivings: about portentousness inclining to bathos (eg Connoisseuse of Slugs, Animal Crackers - and if that's wit I don't get it), about incongruities of vocabulary (eg, how she slips that "gold endorphin light" into The Ride as she shifts gear) - oh, and other things but this isn't a post about Sharon Olds either - and above all her personal involvement with the material. Even as artifices, the poems insist on their fidelity to experience. I'd almost started to think of her as the Tracey Emin of poetry: that what mattered most about her work was that it (sc. the raw material) had happened to her. I ran a thought experiment where the poems were written under a nom de plume by one Shaun O'Leary, a former English major at Iowa, now a lawyer forced by unexpected literary success to perpetuate his fraudulent identity. Nonsense, but I was trying to explore how much a reading might depend on assumed biographical knowledge, even though we know the poems are fictionalised if not complete fiction. (I'm not going to pursue this line of argument into Ern Malley territory tonight.)
What Shapcott's voice did wonderfully for me was to distance the work from the Olds persona. It distanced it (riskily) even from North America - and the poems survived. At last I can hear the words separated from the voice that first spoke them. The poems are released. From whatever cage I've been locking them in.
Another thing: if it had been an American reading the poems, would it have seemed like an impersonation?
And a couple of observations:
It's fantastic to see such a large audience for serious poetry. It gets larger every year, and they'll have to move to the Festival Hall soon at this rate.
And kudos to the sound engineers. We were in the back row, and the sound was fabulous. Music venues don't always work well for spoken word, but this was delicate and crystal clear.
Not for the first time Sharon Olds was an anomalous American on the list. Not for the first time the work of an absent poet was read by someone else. There were mutterings that it should have been an American voice reading the poems, the English cadences were all wrong.
I don't agree. Jo Shapcott read with controlled passion. It was very English, yes, but she was engaged with the poems. She really cared about them. It surprised me. Although I admire Olds for her skill in shaping experience and sense of drama, I've long had misgivings: about portentousness inclining to bathos (eg Connoisseuse of Slugs, Animal Crackers - and if that's wit I don't get it), about incongruities of vocabulary (eg, how she slips that "gold endorphin light" into The Ride as she shifts gear) - oh, and other things but this isn't a post about Sharon Olds either - and above all her personal involvement with the material. Even as artifices, the poems insist on their fidelity to experience. I'd almost started to think of her as the Tracey Emin of poetry: that what mattered most about her work was that it (sc. the raw material) had happened to her. I ran a thought experiment where the poems were written under a nom de plume by one Shaun O'Leary, a former English major at Iowa, now a lawyer forced by unexpected literary success to perpetuate his fraudulent identity. Nonsense, but I was trying to explore how much a reading might depend on assumed biographical knowledge, even though we know the poems are fictionalised if not complete fiction. (I'm not going to pursue this line of argument into Ern Malley territory tonight.)
What Shapcott's voice did wonderfully for me was to distance the work from the Olds persona. It distanced it (riskily) even from North America - and the poems survived. At last I can hear the words separated from the voice that first spoke them. The poems are released. From whatever cage I've been locking them in.
Another thing: if it had been an American reading the poems, would it have seemed like an impersonation?
And a couple of observations:
It's fantastic to see such a large audience for serious poetry. It gets larger every year, and they'll have to move to the Festival Hall soon at this rate.
And kudos to the sound engineers. We were in the back row, and the sound was fabulous. Music venues don't always work well for spoken word, but this was delicate and crystal clear.
25 October 2009
if it doesn't come bursting out of youI was at a reading tonight where a friend read this poem, one of his favourites. The audience cheered. Part of me cheers too, finding congruence with Keats writing to his publisher: if Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all. I certainly feel like cheering when I get to this bit:
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
Charles Bukowski - so you want to be a writer?
don't be dull and boring andBut he is wrong. Seductive, but wrong. The poem ends like this:
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
and if you have been chosen,A dictum that would have condemned Elizabeth Bishop, who spent years looking for the right word, to silence. And think of Plath, whom Hughes described working with a thesaurus on her lap.
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was.
The thing that most riles me - for a moment - is the prescriptivism. One of the chosen defines who else is chosen. It would be tempting to discuss the soteriology underlying that word "chosen" if one could have more confidence that the word itself had been chosen rather than simply occurred as, say, leaves to a tree.
Romantics. Men channelling the collective unconscious. Duende. Let them talk for themselves. But they are not simply talking about themselves, they are also talking about the way they would like to write. Or at least, the way they'd like to be seen to write. The skill is in making it look natural. Poetry favours the prepared mind. Those poems that come quickly and seem to need little revision - don't they arouse suspicion? It shouldn't be that easy. That way lets in cliché, lazy thinking, push-button emotions, rhymes that are there for no other reason than the sound.
Keats was one of my first loves. Bukowski bores me. I'm irritated at the dismissal of work. Keats took dictation from his prepared mind. Bukowski, not so much. Bishop took the protestant work ethic to an extreme. Hey, even the sainted Don Paterson claims to write dozens of drafts. There's room for everyone.
Poetry can come from the head, the heart, the toil or the soil - what matters is where it lodges. It doesn't matter how long it took to fashion the arrow, if it finds its mark.
09 October 2009
Andrew Philip
Congratulations to Andrew Philip for making the Aldeburgh shortlist against stiff competition from 92 other first collections.
I highly recommend The Ambulance Box. The Squared interview with Andy is here.
The final winner will be announced at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival on 7 November.
01 October 2009
See How I Land
"Come, talk, laugh and break isolation"- Vahni Capildeo ("Filda's Workshop")
This book collects new writing arising from the Oxford Poets & Refugees project - an initiative of the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre and the Oxford-based charity Asylum Welcome.
In See How I Land the intersection of arts and human rights is vividly demonstrated… It asks us to think again about what it is that we, as humans, value, what it is that we share, and what it is that we desire to protect and to celebrate: freedom, safety, family, and love.– Shami Chakrabarti
Asylum seekers and poets are both searching. Refugees are trying to find a haven for themselves and their families, writers a home for stories, dreams and ideas… When Oxford Brookes brings these two worlds together they give us ‘outsiders’ a place where all our words, and all our lives, are valued.– Benjamin Zephaniah
I'll be writing about it soon.
05 August 2009
At home with the box
Hebridean Thumbnail 1
fo cheò
islands buried in the sky’s white sands
Andrew Philip
(fo cheò: 'mist-covered')
Today I'm delighted to welcome my first ever virtual guest, Andrew Philip. I bought his collection The Ambulance Box back in May when Salt launched their Just One Book Campaign. It's an impressive first collection, assured and purposeful. Nothing idles; the language sings, as alive as his curiosity about the world. His training as a linguist shines through in the precision of his words and his scrupulous awareness of the contingency of everything. This is a book full of questioning, with no easy answers. The salves in the Ambulance Box are astringent.
Note: Andrew Philip was born in Aberdeen in 1975 and grew up near Falkirk. He lived in Berlin for a short spell in the 1990s before studying linguistics at Edinburgh University. He has published two poetry pamphlets with HappenStance Press —Tonguefire (2005, sold out) and Andrew Philip: A Sampler (2008) — and was chosen as a Scottish Poetry Library “New Voice” in 2006.
The Ambulance Box is his first book of poems. It is dedicated to Aidan Michael Philip, the poet's son and first-born child, who died shortly after birth in 2005.
Andrew blogs at Tonguefire. You will find links there to many of his poems and essays, and a Scots glossary.
Since June, Andrew has been on a demanding virtual tour explaining himself to other bloggers. I add to their number with some nerdy questions of my own.
Welcome, Andy, and congratulations to you and Judith on the arrival of Cerys Ilona!
Q When I read the first poem in The Ambulance Box, I thought "here's a man who knows what he's doing!" and was immediately hooked. But as a writer myself, I know it probably took some courage to open with a one-liner. Is there a story behind that?
AP The first poem in a book is obviously an important one, and I spent ages agonising over which was the right piece to place first. I wasn’t happy that any of the poems of more normal length worked as openers and I wanted to thread the Hebridean Thumbnails — the one-line poems in the book — through the collection, using them to link what felt like different sections, so I bit the bullet and put one of them first. I was pleased with the way it worked so I’m delighted it hooked you. I suspect some people will love that approach and others not, but I think it invites readers into the more contemplative aspects of the book from the word go.
Q You have mentioned working with Rob Mackenzie to hone each other's collection before submission. You have quite different styles, and have each produced sharp and distinctive collections. Would your collection have been very different without these exchanges? How do you rate mentoring, workshops and colleagues in your development?
AP It wouldn’t have been so tight at the submission stage, that’s for sure. Rob’s comments were particularly useful in helping me to decide what poems to leave out. There were also a couple he gave me the confidence to include. For example, I felt that “Berlin/Berlin/Berlin” was a strong piece but was uncertain about how well it would come across to most readers. Slightly to my surprise and much to my delight, Rob rated it as one of the best, so I kept it in.
Creative friendships and relationships like that are surely important to all artists. I’m not a member of any formal, regular writing workshop or writer’s group, so such relationships are particularly important to me. I send poems for comment to people I trust and I’ve learnt a lot that way. In the end, you have to trust your own judgment, but a good critical reading by a fellow poet can help to identify strengths or problems you knew were there but couldn’t quite see. In fact, that person needn’t necessarily be a poet; my wife is generally my first reader and often makes astute comments even though she reads very little poetry. You need people around you who will tell you when they think you’re writing rubbish, even if you don’t always agree!
Although I’ve not been in any formal mentoring scheme for my writing, I’ve benefitted enormously from the advice and encouragement of the poet Michael Symmons Roberts. The fact that someone of his stature would take my work seriously was an enormous boost, especially in the early days of constant magazine rejections. But I might never have come across him had it not been for Roddy Lumsden, who encouraged me when I was a student. I happened to be at Edinburgh University at a good time: Matthew Hollis, Sinéad Wilson and Andrew Neilson were active in student poetry at that point, and Roddy took an active interest in our work.
Q You use a lot of formal devices in your work. Is constraint an ignition, or is it a brake?
AP A good constraint is probably both. Even if it isn’t part of the initial impetus for a poem, it can ignite further lines and images at the same time as helping to shape the material. After all, constraint is an integral part of all art, no matter how free. Even aleatoric art involves constraints of some kind.
Q So how does a poem start?
AP Generally with a word, a phrase or an image. Sometimes a formal device suggests itself and then sparks the words and images, but I can’t get down to work without a linguistic hook of some kind.
Q And how do you finish? How do you know when you've finished?
AP That is a trickier question altogether! There’s no easy answer. It’s intuition as much as anything, and one you have to develop. I suppose that, at some point, the impetus leaves the poem and you have to give it up. I sometimes change my mind about whether certain poems are finished, but I’m unlikely to do an Auden and make significant revisions to poems that have already been collected.
Q Some of your poems are in Scots and some in English. Are you a different person in each case, and are you addressing a different audience?
AP It may be that slightly different aspects of me come out in Scots and in English, as is the case in speaking any two languages, but I think I’m largely the same person. I don’t think of myself as addressing a different audience so much as addressing parts of my audience differently. For instance, what really determines how much readers enjoy “The Meisure o a Nation” is how much they get the references that make up the poem’s equations, not the density of the Scots.
Q As a non-Scot, I don't feel shut out from these, though I do feel a guest in foreign territory, without recourse to my usual conventions. So they are disarming in a way that an English poem wouldn't be. Is that a conscious strategy?
AP That’s interesting. I wouldn’t say it was a conscious strategy, but it’s a useful effect. It’s more that I’m inviting non-Scots readers into the language and all my reasons for using it, which I’ve discussed to some extent in previous stops on this tour. In using Scots, English and Gaelic, I aim to be linguistically inclusive and I hope that the reader feels that spirit of inclusion.
Q Salt produce beautiful books. (I would say that wouldn't I, but even on an objective test they are outstanding.) How do you see poetry publishing developing, and are new media a threat, or a promise of a much wider audience?
AP The ease with which writers can now make their work available globally, including through video and audio, is surely a great boost to their efforts to build an audience. Blogging has certainly helped me to widen my audience geographically, but I’m not sure whether it’s had an effect demographically.
If there’s a threat from the new media, it’s the expectation of free content that is associated with their use. How writers manage that without it destroying the meagre income from their work, I’m not sure.
I’m not convinced that e-books will ever replace the hard copy entirely, but they could open up interesting new avenues for enriching the audience’s experience of the poetry. If poetry e-books with embedded or linked audio and/or video became commonplace, that might be very healthy for the art. Perhaps Bloodaxe are already on the way there by bundling DVDs in with their In Person anthology and the new edition of Bunting’s Briggflatts.
Q Well, the free content on the Salt site certainly persuaded me to get this book! So what are you working on right now?
AP I’m always reticent about talking too much about unfinished work in case it robs me of the drive to carry out the ideas. However, I feel like I’ve begun to hit my stride again with a sequence after a rocky patch for new work and am getting excited about what might come of it.
Q What are you reading right now?
AP Mainly Yang Lian’s Concentric Circles and Ray Givans’s Tolstoy in Love. Ray is a long-standing friend and I read with Lian in London at the end of June.
In prose, I’m reading Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love, which is a translation of Julian’s writings by John Skinner. It’s one of those books that have sat on my shelf for ages until what seemed the right time.
Andrew, thank you very much for answering so generously. It's been a privilege having you here. Good luck with your new work - I am very keen to see what you do next.
* * * * * * *
Catch up with Andrew's Cyclone tour - highly recommended.
The Ambulance Box: available from Salt at a 33% discount during August - see below. (Sample poems and podcasts downloadable free.)
A message from Chris at Salt Publishing:
The Just One Book campaign continues with a further sensational August deal.
In order to keep Salt on track through the wet British summer, we're offering you another special deal throughout August. All Salt books are available from us at 33% discount yet again. That's a third off all Salt titles, and free shipping on orders with a cover price of over £30 or $30. Offer ends 31 August 2009.
Simply enter the coupon code HU693FB2 when in the store to benefit.
As before, all we ask is two things—
1. Buy one book. Or perhaps another one ... go on.
2. Pass it on. Share this offer with everyone who loves gorgeous books and likes a bargain (whilst saving independent literature).
http://www.saltpublishing.com
31 July 2009
Biographical fog
At a poetry workshop recently someone brought in a powerful piece of work I wish I could post here. It's not linear let alone narrative, mixing apparently random snatches of sharply sensory observation while it plays with voice and register, including a couple of innocent-seeming lines of tabloid-speak. For any smell or texture it evokes, each reader will have different personal associations. The cumulative effect is disturbing, suggestive of abuse, and I'd say among other things it explores the perspective of time and how that can transfer power from abuser to victim. The effect on the reader is to feel voyeur, complicit, accused.
Then our paid-up member of the awkward squad asked a taboo question: What made you write this? The poem made her feel very uncomfortable, manipulated, she said. She felt as though she were being exploited through sympathy to read something she would rather not. But if she knew that the poem came from personal experience rather than a gratuitous attempt to be sensational, she said, she'd feel less antagonised.
It was an uncomfortable moment. The general rule in our workshop is that the writer doesn't say anything until the crit is over, and anyway this sort of question is off-limits, but the questioner felt that this was an important factor in the analysis. The writer said with dignity that they'd rather just talk about the poem. The questioner wasn't very happy about this, or about the direction our discussion took.
Some of us spoke up for the poem to be taken on its own terms. If the poem were in a magazine, the reader could choose to stop reading as soon as she felt uncomfortable. (Anyway, since when has it been the job of poetry to let people feel comfortable?) In the workshop, she could excuse herself at any time. While it's perfectly OK, helpful even, for a workshop member to explain why they find a particular poem in bad taste, or even offensive, or why for them it misses its mark - it's not on to complain that the poem shouldn't have been written. It's one thing to suggest that a poem strikes the reader as second hand, or manipulative, or any other sort of fault, but quite another to question the bona fides of the poet. That's too personal.
So we got that sorted. In the end.
Sort of.
It leaves me with the perennial puzzle of biographical fog. Time and again I've come across poems in workshops and elsewhere read and misread and excused in the light of biographical knowledge: Oh, this must be about his divorce, or, it can't mean that because he's never had children/been to China. No, it's all about the words. Just read the words.
Well, one learns to be disciplined in reading. Je est un autre. We all know that. We aren't misled by the first person. Poets are fiction writers. To go to a poem in search of biographical truth is to make a category error. Poets will write what they are interested in. Notoriously, they adapt reality to their own ends. The poem has rights of its own, irrespective of any mere biographical happenstance. Yet poetry gets stuck with this authenticity rap more than any other genre. Readers don't quiz PD James about how many murders she's committed.
My introduction to formal criticism at school, years ago now, was I A Richards's Practical Criticism. Aeons ago, and it was ancient even then. His aim was to get students to read closely, just the words on the page, without knowing who'd written them or when. So much can be learned from the text alone. My teachers were disdainful of the baggage of biography, which was only so much tittle-tattle. But there's no escaping it, is there? Close reading is the beginning of reading, not the end. Borges had fun with the idea in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. Menard rewrote Don Quixote word for word, in the same words, and the critic finds his version "much richer in allusion than Cervantes's 'original' work because Menard's must be considered in light of world events since 1602."
Quite so. Il n'y a pas de hors-texte. Or, consider these thought experiments:
Heaney has an essay in Preoccupations (which I can't lay my hands on for the moment) where he describes urging his students to overcome their feelings of delicacy to crit Dulce Et Decorum Est. His students are reading the witness and, he suggests, prepared to let poetry off the hook. Does Owen overplay his hand? Is "coughing like hags", or "His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin" over-writing? Pressing buttons of sentimentality?
(It's tempting to sidetrack into the huge territory of war poetry and whether the poetry lies in the pity as Owen contentiously claimed, or whether it's more accurately the reader's sympathy that lies there. But this post, which is only a knee-jerk stab in the fog, would never get written.)
There is a suggestion that we tend to cut a bit of slack for the witness. A reader who finds she's been cutting slack for an impostor can feel cheated. On the one hand, if the poetry really is in the pity, the work has borne false witness. People who have been relying on whatever truth it purports to deliver feel cheated to discover it's just been pandering to the usual prejudices. Hence the common rage at debunked misery memoirs, marketed as autobiography. On the other is the argument that this can't apply to poetry; if the writing holds us, why should we mind that it isn't true?
Which brings me back to the workshop. The flip side of the coin is the workshop session that ignores, through professional detachment, the person who wrote the poem. If someone writes about despair, or dying, or a sick partner, is this something we should follow up on a personal level after the workshop? I recall reading a letter in The Rialto a while back where a poet complained of what she called insensitivity - her fellow workshoppers gave her a crit on the poem, but ignored the suffering human being who'd written it. I'm not so sure. It depends on the workshop, and the poet, their relationship with fellow members, and their general powers of ordinary communication. Workshops aren't therapy sessions. The poet who expects that is making a category error similar to the reader who expects biographical accuracy. Shouldn't we treat poems as separate entities, and poets as grown-ups who can ask us directly in conversation outside the workshop if they need to offload grief? In fact, isn't the poem sometimes precisely such a formal distancing mechanism for the poet?
And if so, where does that leave poems? Adrian Mitchell once said that he wrote poems because there were some things he could not say directly to the people he cared about.
Then our paid-up member of the awkward squad asked a taboo question: What made you write this? The poem made her feel very uncomfortable, manipulated, she said. She felt as though she were being exploited through sympathy to read something she would rather not. But if she knew that the poem came from personal experience rather than a gratuitous attempt to be sensational, she said, she'd feel less antagonised.
It was an uncomfortable moment. The general rule in our workshop is that the writer doesn't say anything until the crit is over, and anyway this sort of question is off-limits, but the questioner felt that this was an important factor in the analysis. The writer said with dignity that they'd rather just talk about the poem. The questioner wasn't very happy about this, or about the direction our discussion took.
Some of us spoke up for the poem to be taken on its own terms. If the poem were in a magazine, the reader could choose to stop reading as soon as she felt uncomfortable. (Anyway, since when has it been the job of poetry to let people feel comfortable?) In the workshop, she could excuse herself at any time. While it's perfectly OK, helpful even, for a workshop member to explain why they find a particular poem in bad taste, or even offensive, or why for them it misses its mark - it's not on to complain that the poem shouldn't have been written. It's one thing to suggest that a poem strikes the reader as second hand, or manipulative, or any other sort of fault, but quite another to question the bona fides of the poet. That's too personal.
So we got that sorted. In the end.
Sort of.
It leaves me with the perennial puzzle of biographical fog. Time and again I've come across poems in workshops and elsewhere read and misread and excused in the light of biographical knowledge: Oh, this must be about his divorce, or, it can't mean that because he's never had children/been to China. No, it's all about the words. Just read the words.
Well, one learns to be disciplined in reading. Je est un autre. We all know that. We aren't misled by the first person. Poets are fiction writers. To go to a poem in search of biographical truth is to make a category error. Poets will write what they are interested in. Notoriously, they adapt reality to their own ends. The poem has rights of its own, irrespective of any mere biographical happenstance. Yet poetry gets stuck with this authenticity rap more than any other genre. Readers don't quiz PD James about how many murders she's committed.
My introduction to formal criticism at school, years ago now, was I A Richards's Practical Criticism. Aeons ago, and it was ancient even then. His aim was to get students to read closely, just the words on the page, without knowing who'd written them or when. So much can be learned from the text alone. My teachers were disdainful of the baggage of biography, which was only so much tittle-tattle. But there's no escaping it, is there? Close reading is the beginning of reading, not the end. Borges had fun with the idea in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. Menard rewrote Don Quixote word for word, in the same words, and the critic finds his version "much richer in allusion than Cervantes's 'original' work because Menard's must be considered in light of world events since 1602."
Quite so. Il n'y a pas de hors-texte. Or, consider these thought experiments:
Brian Turner (real name Briony) has never been in the Army, but writes copy for mail order catalogues.(Heck, if people can believe they faked the moon landing, they can believe anything.) The power of the writing makes the suggestions bizarre, but can we separate it from what we know of these poets' lives? Would we read the poems differently? Can we avoid asking why someone would write such poems? I've seen a reviewer describe those who write in the first person about second-hand tragedy as "the cockroaches of poetry". He didn't mean to liken them to archy but was suggesting that they hitch a ride on undeserved sympathy.
Sharon Olds is the nom de plume of Shaun O'Leary, a former English major at Iowa, now a lawyer forced by unexpected literary success to perpetuate his fraudulent identity.
Wilfred Owen stayed at home, pruning his roses. He died in obscurity in a retirement home in 1984.
Heaney has an essay in Preoccupations (which I can't lay my hands on for the moment) where he describes urging his students to overcome their feelings of delicacy to crit Dulce Et Decorum Est. His students are reading the witness and, he suggests, prepared to let poetry off the hook. Does Owen overplay his hand? Is "coughing like hags", or "His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin" over-writing? Pressing buttons of sentimentality?
(It's tempting to sidetrack into the huge territory of war poetry and whether the poetry lies in the pity as Owen contentiously claimed, or whether it's more accurately the reader's sympathy that lies there. But this post, which is only a knee-jerk stab in the fog, would never get written.)
There is a suggestion that we tend to cut a bit of slack for the witness. A reader who finds she's been cutting slack for an impostor can feel cheated. On the one hand, if the poetry really is in the pity, the work has borne false witness. People who have been relying on whatever truth it purports to deliver feel cheated to discover it's just been pandering to the usual prejudices. Hence the common rage at debunked misery memoirs, marketed as autobiography. On the other is the argument that this can't apply to poetry; if the writing holds us, why should we mind that it isn't true?
Which brings me back to the workshop. The flip side of the coin is the workshop session that ignores, through professional detachment, the person who wrote the poem. If someone writes about despair, or dying, or a sick partner, is this something we should follow up on a personal level after the workshop? I recall reading a letter in The Rialto a while back where a poet complained of what she called insensitivity - her fellow workshoppers gave her a crit on the poem, but ignored the suffering human being who'd written it. I'm not so sure. It depends on the workshop, and the poet, their relationship with fellow members, and their general powers of ordinary communication. Workshops aren't therapy sessions. The poet who expects that is making a category error similar to the reader who expects biographical accuracy. Shouldn't we treat poems as separate entities, and poets as grown-ups who can ask us directly in conversation outside the workshop if they need to offload grief? In fact, isn't the poem sometimes precisely such a formal distancing mechanism for the poet?
And if so, where does that leave poems? Adrian Mitchell once said that he wrote poems because there were some things he could not say directly to the people he cared about.
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest - that I loved the best -
Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below - above, the vaulted sky.
John Clare
18 July 2009
Andrew Philip
I'll be interviewing fellow Salt poet Andrew Philip here on 5 August, as a coda to the Cyclone tour for his new collection The Ambulance Box.
The Ambulance Box is a timely reminder of the range and power of the lyric – from philosophical exploration to tender and intimate elegies. This is a powerful debut, and Andrew Philip's is a significant new voice.
Michael Symmons Roberts
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