book meme

The book I am reading: Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin (Penguin). Subtitle: Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street. Gripping and trashy, seems headed for Hollywood. There's a sly wit, too. It fleshes out the personalities in that excellent documentary, Inside Job. Sample extract:

Ben Shalom Bernanke was born in 1953 and grew up in Dillon, South Carolina, a small town permeated by the stench of tobacco warehouses. As an eleven-year-old, he traveled to Washington to compete in the national spelling championship in 1965, falling in the second round when he misspelled "Edelweiss."

Wait, no, here's a better example:

John Mack and Colm Kelleher, Morgan Stanley's chief financial officer, were sitting in the backseat of Mack's Audi, having hurried to the car just ten minutes earlier after Mack's secretary had instructed them to get down to the Fed as soon as possible. "This must be Lehman," Kelleher had said as they rushed out.
Not only was the rain pelting the roof furiously, but they were sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the West Side Highway, still miles away from their destination.
"We're not fucking moving," said Mack, repeatedly checking his watch.
"We're never going to get there," Kelleher agreed.
Mack's driver, John, a former police officer, noticed the bicycle lane running alongside the highway -- a project of the Bloomberg administration to encourage walking and cycling.
"Boss, that bike lane on the right, where does it go?"John asked, craning his neck back at them.
Mack's face lit up. "It goes all the way down to the Battery."
"Fuck it!" the driver said, as he found a break in the street divider and inched the car onto the bike lane, speeding down it.

Delightful people.
The book I am writing: Some short stories. Don't know if this counts as a book.
The book I love most: At the moment, Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes.
The last book I received as a gift: A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor, based on the outstanding radio series.
The last book I gave as a gift: Hisham Matar's Anatomy of a Disappearance, purchased at the launch last week. It opens:

There are times when my father's absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest. Other times I can barely recall the exact features of his face and must bring out the photographs I keep in an old envelope in the drawer of my bedside table. There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resem­blance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy.

I do not see him in the mirror but feel him adjusting, as if he were twisting within a shirt that nearly fits. My father has always been intimately mysterious even when he was present. I can almost imagine how it might have been coming to him as an equal, as a friend, but not quite.

Like de Waal, Matar is also a poet.
The nearest book on my desk: I don't have a desk as such at the moment, but the nearest book to where I'm typing this is the catalogue of the John Stezaker exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery. I've been meaning to post about the Stezaker exhibition but am still mulling over what it means. The critics in the Guardian, The Independent, The Times, and The Evening Standard have a lot to say that is thoughtful and well worth reading. I liked the exhibition a lot more than I thought I was going to, hence the purchase of the catalogue. Reading about it beforehand, I'd assumed it was facile and gimmicky, but it touches and disturbs on a deep level, and I'm not sure how. Is it simply the assault on integrity? My infant son was upset by a broken biscuit and the eclipse of the moon. He crawled away in horror when he saw me with wet hair. Another small child I know was terrified by the Mother and Toddlers Santa Claus, who was really her own father. It is disturbing when something is different from what we expect. Stezaker's interventions are witty and profound, sometimes utterly mysterious, but they are technically adept. He has a fantastic visual memory, that enables him to match up totally disparate images (eg, the distance between two lovers and a wild ravine) so the disjunction is thematic rather than simply linear.

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?

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

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.

Antidote

[Emily asks: Did you enjoy the Blytons? Yes, like a drug. When I wasn’t reading them I’d be trying to work out how I could get away in secret for my next fix. It was the summer holiday, and my mother thought I should be out of doors. Normally I needed no encouragement, so she must have worked out that something was amiss. Inevitably, she discovered me in the act.]



- Said, said, said, said, said! My mother jabs her finger down the page. It’s so boring! She looks exasperated.
- But it’s not boring! It’s very exciting! I want to know what happens next.
- Said Julian, said Dick, said George. Didn't you notice? Proper reading is when you read the words.
She’s right. Why hadn’t I noticed?
- Look at this. She produces another red-covered book, the same size as Five Go to Smuggler's Top. My spirits lift for a moment, then I see the title: Just William. Richmal? Why do these writers all have funny names? The pictures aren’t as good as Eileen Soper’s. The boy doesn't look much older than me. He’s very scruffy. There isn’t anyone who looks as sensible as Julian. At least there’s a dog, but he’s not powerful like Timmy. I don’t think these children will be able to deal with grownup situations like smugglers and spies. But the print is small, which suggests it's for older children. It is confusing. I look again at the boy with his cap askew and his socks around his ankles. His face is grinning and dirty.
- That boy doesn’t look very reliable.
- He's got more life in his little finger than all this lot together.
I stare at his little finger, which is just a blur.
- I think you'll enjoy his company. But you can’t have it yet. Finish that Famous Five and come and tell me all about it. Then we’ll see.

* * *

My mother is right of course. She is always right. There is an art to writing that doesn’t draw attention to itself. But now she’s pointed it out, I can’t help noticing the saids, and that’s done for it.

William hardly ever just “says” anything. He’s forever exclaiming, proclaiming, conjecturing, expostulating, reasoning, arguing, protesting and even ejaculating. (Ah that will get me some Google traffic. But those were the days when social intercourse was polite.) I get the impression of a boy with a very mobile face.

Sometimes I need to ask the meaning of a word, and the tubby, child-sized COD has become a dear friend. But that's another story.

Torch under bedclothes

By balancing the stool on the chair, I can just reach the top of the wardrobe. I know it’s silly and dangerous, but I’m sensible and a good climber. I’ll get into trouble if anyone catches me.

It’ll be worth it.

Up there under the ceiling is a cardboard box full of books the new vet carried into our kitchen when he arrived for supper yesterday, announcing: Anne would like these. Out of politeness he’s allowed to show what’s in there: a glimpse of maroon, occasionally light blue bare boards, dust jackets long gone: a dozen fat volumes – twenty perhaps. All the same size, the same but different. A collection! On the bottom right hand corner is impressed an almost illegible signature, which seems to say Cuid Blyton. Cuid is a funny name, I think, but the titles are irresistible: Five on a Treasure Island, Five Go to Smugglers’ Top. For me! All night, and all the next day, unread adventures torment me: Five Go to Mystery Moor, Five Go Off to Camp, Five Go to Billycock Hill.

My mother deems them “unsuitable”. You can read them when you’re old enough, she says.

It’s not fair. She knows I am a good reader. The headmaster calls us in for reading tests. He says, I don’t know why I bother with you and Christine Simpson, I only call you in to cheer myself up. He puts his arm round me in a fatherly way. I have a reading age of fourteen.

It is only years later that I realise my mother meant when you’re old enough to recognise them for the trash they are.

Meanwhile, here I am, tiptoe on the stool balanced on the chair, stretching for the forbidden books in the cardboard box just too high for me to reach. I try jumping. The stool rocks alarmingly. Only by tugging and tearing a corner of the cardboard can I get a hold on one. It’s alright, no one will look on top of the wardrobe until Christmas time, by when I’ll be old enough to say I was much younger when I committed the crime. They might even think the box was torn already. So I dip in and grab a book.

Five On a Treasure Island. The vet is a methodical man. It’s the first in the series.

Look like if the words are bleeding

Photo and artwork: Theodore Diran Lyons III

A US college art teacher makes an art installation of his students' abandoned essays - which he marked but they never bothered to pick up - to illustrate his thesis that too many people are admitted to higher education without adequate literacy skills. For the purposes of the display he anonymises and red-pens the uncollected essays to highlight the errors.

Commenters are outraged that he has appropriated students' work, that he is not showing proper respect to his students, that he is not teaching writing in an effective way, that he is misdefining "mistakes" as illiteracy, and that in concentrating on the medium rather than the message he is focusing on an irrelevant skill. He engages his critics with surprising stamina.

The USA is not alone in having a problem with poor language skills. According to The National Literacy Trust, "one in six people in the UK struggle to read and write." Hmm. They don't give a source for that figure. "Dismal", says the chair of the Public Accounts Committee. Here in the UK Lyons would be similarly criticised for using students' work like this. But it doesn't make the problem go away.

Via.

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.

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http://www.saltpublishing.com

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:

Brian Turner (real name Briony) has never been in the Army, but writes copy for mail order catalogues.
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.

(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.

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

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

A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.

Katy Evans-Bush thinks much can be learned from an unsuccessful poem about what makes poems fail. She shows us the other Ozymandias, written by Shelley's friend Horace Smith in that famous competition. One can only hope that Smith himself saw instantly how outclassed he was. Do go there and read it - it's most instructive.

I've long had a fantasy of editing an anthology of bad poems, with a commentary, as a tool of instruction, but Nicholas Parsons got there first with his Joy of bad Verse. Lack of imagination, failure of nerve, and above all a lack of sensitivity to language are the commonest failings. McGonagall is treasured for his tin ear and his heroic mastery of bathos. Smith isn't in this sort of class either. He's just not terribly good.

But perhaps it's not so much what makes Smith's poem fail, as noticing, as Katy does, that it has a couple of good bits. And it's a question of what makes Shelley's poem so good. Where Shelley makes things up, and visualises them for us, Smith's poem is for the most part literal, unimaginative. He doesn't recognise the potential in the data. Starting with the same material as Shelley, almost every decision he makes is conventional:

Here's the fragment of statue, all alone; the Leg is all that's left of the civilisation; it could be the same for London one day. Civilisations pass. Smith takes Ozymandias for granted, is uninquisitive about the nature of power, save for its transience.

The first good bit - and I concur with her judgement - is the image of the Hunter "[thro' the wilderness/ where London stood,] holding the Wolf in chace". I don't know why Katy likes this bit, but I like it because it gives us an identifiable agent in the poem in contrast to the undefined and almost abstract "We"), and a new perspective of time, a sense of the altered state of London now a forest; that lovely period diction "holding the Wolf in chace" manages to suggest a relationship between the Hunter and hunted, some kind of controlled distance, like a dog on a lead. The Hunter is skilled. There is something intimate about it.

And how distracting that Hunter would find "some fragment huge", so ill-defined and unexpected, on his purposeful quest. It distracts us too: I wondered how a bit of statue had got from Egypt to London - via the British Museum perhaps? - before I pulled myself together. Oh, and I have a weakness for post-apocalyptic scenarios.

The second good bit she identifies is the closing couplet, and I must admit it raised a smile to my lips too. The polysyllabic adjectives cling to monosyllabic, simplistic rhymes. The second adjective, in the last line, is even longer than the first, so when the second shoe drops there is a fitting sense of build-up and bathos. It's interesting that Smith felt the need to relate the desert statue back to the situation of the assumed reader. He couldn't trust the statue itself, or the reader, to do the work, but had to draw an explicit moral: "some Hunter may express/ Wonder like ours..." The switched focus leaches energy from the original image. Not that the original image is very clear; it's treated as a given. There is something almost comic about the "gigantic Leg" because it could be anything. Actually there is one other almost good bit, which is the "[gigantic Leg], which far off throws/ The only shadow that the Desart knows".

Shelley lets the statue be the focus. His Ozymandias is a story, "I met a traveller... who said..." and it is the traveller who describes the statue. By putting the words into his mouth, he manages to give it an oral immediacy, both an authority (literally) and mythic status, a distance and a reason for being told.

And thereafter the focus is on the statue. Well, not exactly - because in piecing the statue together, Shelley conjures the subject of the statue himself, zooming in on the "frown,/ And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command" and even the hapless sculptor. We are right there with the antique traveller, seeing a tyrant's statue. And its empty boast. The poem is filmic in its attention. One could use Shelley's poem as a shooting script for a short. And the genius of the ending, which leaves the poem at the point where Horace Smith started his: the bare and level sands stretch far away.

Cambridge poets

I thought Plane Debris was terrific, in the top Heliogabalus class. Sweat ran out of my ears, and still does, a sheer delirium.

J H Prynne


Back in the early nineties I joined a workshop run by Stephen Rodefer, who was then Judith E Wilson Fellow at Magdalene. (At the time, he'd only published in the States, but recently Carcanet has brought out a Selected, Call it Thought.) At our first seminar, he wrote on the board the names of some English poets with whom we should all be familiar. I've still got the notes somewhere, but from memory they included John Wilkinson, Denise Riley, John Riley, Tom Raworth, Veronica Forrest-Thompson, Rod Mengham... there were about a dozen names, and I hadn't heard of any of them - though I was familiar with names in the PBS catalogue, Poetry Review and so on. I can't for the life of me remember whether Prynne's name was on the list or whether he was taken as a given - certainly he was a presiding spirit, and Rodefer was glad to be breathing the Cambridge air. Most of my fellow students were familiar with many of these poets (a couple were Prynne's students), and with Americans like Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley etc, whom I'd never heard of. [Shamed.] My reading in those days was random, and I had a sense it was a bit restricted which is one of the reasons I joined this course.

(It was another 6-7 years before I got online, and people tend to forget what it was like back in those days.)

It was an enriching experience. It was there that I first encountered a personification of OuLiPo, the legendary Harry Mathews, who featured in the terrific series of readings that Rodefer organised for us. We also heard Rod Mengham, John Wilkinson, Denise Riley, Christopher Middleton, Wendy Mulford and others. It was wider than L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, though all his guests had that passion for words as words first, rather than simply as means to an end. For the first time since student magazines, I was brought face to face with poetry that didn't make sense in any obvious way. Some of it was non-linear, some was syntactically disrupted, some played with the sounds words made:

An error is mirror to the truth
than any statement claiming to be true.

Rodefer, Plane Debris (Four Lectures)

At one seminar Rodefer produced for especial scorn a recent TLS with a poem by (let's call him) JG. Although it was quite vivid it wasn't, to be honest, a remarkable poem, particularly in retrospect now I have read so many other poems a bit like it - about dealing with the effects of an elderly relative as a consequence of their going into a nursing home. It began with an image of the narrator and his siblings picking over the household effects like gulls. "See!" said Rodefer, "that's what I really hate about this sort of poem: it gets a little movie camera going in your head" [here he makes cranking motions with his hand near his ear] - "poets should leave that kind of thing to the movies. Movies do it much better. We can't be satisfied with the visual now. Poets have to move on. It's our duty to foreground language."

(Of course he was a real film buff, and fascinated by the interaction between poem and film - but that's another story.)

So while we have our mainstream workshops urging things like Show don't Tell and all the other orthodox mantra, LangPo is doing something rather different. I read quite a lot of stuff around then, and went to a lot of readings, but on the whole it didn't excite me enough. I could never work out how to tell whether it was being done well or badly, because I never really "got" the point of much of it. At the same time, I was keen to pick up anything that might be useful, but heaven knows whether it shows. I doubt it. (I try to remember his advice: "Be bolder along the axis of selection.")

What I couldn't bear was the animosity that so often went with LangPo - that the Mainstream had sold out to Mammon, that the Mainstream pandered to the lowest common denominator, that the Mainstream was capitalist and anti-socialist, that the Mainstream perpetuated archaic values, that Mainstream writers were beneath contempt. At the same time, I was going to mainstream poetry readings and it was interesting in Q & A sessions to drop my bit of sodium into the water by asking them what they thought of Prynne.

The loathing was mutual, and it still baffles me. It may well be a testosterone thing, as it's not simply political. Now Bloodaxe has published Prynne's Collected (a book whose purchase-to-reading ratio must be close to A Brief History of Time) perhaps the barriers have come down a bit. While they remain, it's sad and an impoverishment of poetry. There are poets who earn respect from both sides, such as Geoffrey Hill, Roy Fisher, WS Graham, John Kinsella, Christopher Middleton, Denise Riley....

Hell, this is worth more than a cursory anecdote. I'll return to the subject when I've collected my thoughts more intelligently.

Blind crit and first impressions

Intriguing post over on Poets on Fire, trying to get us to see what we can make of the first two lines of anonymous contemporary poems. I should be posting there but will only make an idiot of myself, particularly when the authors are revealed.

Like Angela, I don't think you can evaluate a poem from a couple of lines. There are clues, false scents, irritations, things that will make sense only as the poem develops. Mostly, I have questions which the poem itself would resolve.

As Roddy's bothered to put them before us, that's already some sort of context, so I've spent longer looking at them than I normally would. Of course it's true that with a title, an editor, and the shape of the poem, one might pay more attention anyway, even if the name were unfamiliar.

1. Gents in a landscape hang above their lands.
Their long keen shadows trace peninsulas on fields.

I couldn't work out what was going on here. Is it even set in the present? 'Gents' signals something, perhaps the relative social status of the narrator and those who hang. It's an aggressive, or at least assertive word, and that sort of confidence can be disarming... In what sense do they 'hang above their lands'? In portraits? Maybe the title suggests another group of people. 'Landscape hang' has John Bergerish implications, and I don't know who 'they' are, or whether we're talking paintings, aeroplanes, maps, land tenure, or what. (As well as the shape of the shadows on the ground, the word 'peninsulas' makes me think of Spain, then Malaya, Korea. Exploited soldiers, foreign wars.) Is the 'their' of 'their lands' the Gents? Is it the same as the 'their' of 'Their shadows'? Sloppy writing, or deliberate ambiguity? Ah, it all depends on your point of view. We may be looking at agricultural labourers, rather than rich men in aeroplanes. (Land tenure, then.) And the hanging may be not just pictures, but what the tenant would do to the landlord. The poet is putting us on notice that the poem will be politically engaged; he (I'm sure it's male) will aim to disrupt our cosy expectations of social order and syntax. I might read on, but warily, as I'm having a lot of difficulty following this. I'm not yet convinced the writer is in control of his pronouns.

2 My eyes have chased you over ponds, affinity, silver stations,
the mesh fences parting pastures, orange quells and orchards;

'My eyes have chased' sounds ingénue, overwrought. 'Chased' tries too hard, as if it's avoiding 'seen'. (Mine eyes have seen the glory....) Why the detachment from the eyes, as if they were independent? (Is stanza 2 going to start with 'My ears'?) Why the perfect tense? There's a lot of assonance here, as if the sounds are letting the meaning run away. Is the 'you' a person or an idea/l? The list mixes concrete and abstract in a way that makes sense of neither. What are 'silver stations'? Are they mines in Peru, or Seven Sisters in a heavy frost? Stations of the cross? And what about 'orange quells'? Is 'quells' a verb, or a (new to me) noun? The punctuation insists on the latter. (Questa o quella.) Orange. Are we perhaps in Northern Ireland, or Israel? Perhaps 'the metal fences parting pastures' etc are more than mere interruptions in watching the sun in a winter landscape from a train - perhaps this poem is going to explore political division, from a position of helplessness, where the eyes are all that can chase whatever is sought? (The beloved, peace.) Orchards have apples, and we all know what apples mean. But it doesn't appeal to me so far, as it's too mannered for my taste. This poem sounds female, or else from someone with roots in another culture. (I note Roddy says they are all UK poets.) It seems more like a religious poem than a political one, somehow.

3 Office-bound, the bored despot fingerpads her quilted hours
testing for give; sostenuto clicks the chorus of her bobbins

Texting on the train? Why is it made so complicated? It seems almost desperate to prove itself poetic. Faint echoes of Eliot, but every word is on speed. Like most of the other examples here, you'd never encounter these word sequences outside a poem. The 'despot' is held up as an object of contempt - perhaps I'm betraying my own prejudices here but I sense that 'quilted' and 'bobbins' are an atttempt to put her in her place. Sounds female, as no right on male would dare be so rude, or even so interested. And quite young.

4 A sluggish tide, a small surprising wind.
A zigzag iron stairway still too hot to step on.

Why is the wind 'surprising' if this is the coast? I'm unconvinced. And why is nothing happening? And is it ever going to?

5 We've got lavender toilet paper
made in Worksop

The conversational tone is mildly engaging, but there's a snobbery there I didn't warm to, as if we were being invited to laugh at the contrast between the chichi lavender paper and Worksop. (What's wrong with Worksop? Didcot? Penge?) I wonder if this is in the voice of some Hyacinth Bucket figure, and how much more the poem is going to be able to tell us beyond this. Sounds like a man taking the piss.

6 We wake to a world invisibly tangled up in threads
of gypsy bells, to high-speed helium chitter-chatter

'We wake' instantly sets my teeth on edge. Sounds like exclusive, holiday stuff. 'Gypsy bells' - please! (Oh, no, you don't understand, there really were gypsy bells! Are you saying no-one can ever write about gypsy bells?) And why is it necessary to add 'a world invisibly tangled up in threads' to the sound? The poem has already given itself a lot to prove. 'Helium chitter-chatter' is slightly more interesting, as if the complacencies might possibly unravel, but there's a lot of helium about in poems these days. It might be part of a sequence.

7 Impacted gold of the perished and the unborn,
Wayfaring the globe of the body like tiny suns.

'Impacted gold' makes me think more of wisdom teeth with fillings. It's absurd hyperbole. Neo-metaphysical. A Catholic upbringing leads one to value each potential soul; bloke wants girl to value them too. Fetch the tissues. Perhaps it's going to be funny. That pun on 'suns'...

8 The feathers were taken from the front wheel of a juggernaut.
All the colours of a winter morning, hinged with pink and bone.

'Painterly'. Passive voice focuses on the feathers, not the act of removing them - image rather than action. I like that word 'hinged'. I don't agree with Rob M about the order of the lines here. 'Juggernaut' could only work with the matter-of-factness of the first line, where it's a word everyone uses about big lorries. The second line cranks up the poetic rhetoric, and 'juggernaut' would be overladen after that. 'All the colours of a winter morning' is pushing its luck. There are enough poems about roadkill, aren't there? It would have to do something really special to earn its keep. But I do like 'hinged' so might read on.

9 Beneath her white wool pilch, the trial hair shirt
she cut from malt-nets rotted with her tears.

Um - don't get this at all. I had to look up pilch (which is OK, I don't mind doing that) but it left me none the wiser in the context here. It places it elsewhere in time. I liked 'the trial hair shirt' but haven't a clue what 'malt-nets' might be, or why tears should rot them, or why she should make a hair shirt out of them. The woman is clearly upset about something, some sort of martyr, but her tears don't interest me enough yet. (Tears is a push-button that doesn't work for me.) This is the only one I noticed in iambic pentameter. That is tempting in itself, though it feels as if the writer is showing off. It's not Duhig is it? I'd read it if his name was at the bottom of the page.

10 What are you doing here, ghost, among these urns,
These film-wrapped sandwiches and help-yourself biscuits,

I quite liked the contrast between the first line and the second. The ghost among urns could be a classical image, then - whoops- we are down in the refreshment tent. A direct address sets up expectations of something dramatic. But as Rob says, it's hard to see that this one isn't going to go in the usual direction. The language in the second line is flat - or simply unpretentious. Maybe that trick with the urn pulls it off. There's a sense of humour here. (Just think what the author of number 3 would have made of this material.) I reserve judgement until I read on. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say Fanthorpe.

It all makes me wonder if sometimes beginnings are indeed overworked, and we read on despite the first line or two, and forgive them - no, understand them better - if the poem earns our respect. A poem has to establish its rhetorical level right at the outset, and we forget how artificial it is, once we're in it - or at least we accept its artificiality somehow. (And then there are poems whose job is to remind us of their artificiality...)

And the other thing it makes me wonder - unfair to lay this on the first two lines - is whether any but 10 were the product of more than leisure time. What are the imperatives?

The Listener

In Cambridge the other day, I succumbed to an impulse purchase in Oxfam: The Music of What Happens: Poems from The Listener 1965 - 1980 (BBC, 1981). Its 140+ pages are crammed with familiar poems, first published in The Listener. Younger readers might not know that this magazine was a creature of the BBC, and its demise is still mourned. (Budgets, opportunity costs, you know.) It has an astonishing list of contents:

Robert Graves (b.1895)
£.s.d.
Frances Bellerby (1899-1975)
Bereft Child's First Night
Stevie Smith (1902-1975)
The Galloping Cat
Friends of the River Trent
Valuable
C.Day Lewis (1904-1972)
Ballintubbert House, Co. Laois
Geoffrey Grigson (b.1905)
Difficult Season
John Betjeman (b.1906)
A Surrey Crematorium
W. H. Auden 1907-1973)
Lullaby
Nocturne
Stephen Spender (b. 1909)
V. W., 1941
W. R. Rodgers (1909-1969)
Home Thoughts from Abroad
Norman McCaig (b.1910)
Gulls on a Hill Loch
Susanne Knowles (b. 1911)
Diptych: An Annunciation
Roy Fuller (b.1912)
An English Summer
George Barker (b. 1913)
I Met with Napper Tandy
In Memory of Robert MacBryde
Henry Reed (b. 1914)
Returning of Issue
Four People
Gavin Ewart (b. 1916)
2001 - The Tennyson/Hardy Poem
Charles Causley (b. 1917)
Ten Types of Hospital Visitor
Robert Conquest (b.1917)
747 (London - Chicago)
To be a Pilgrim
Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
Iris Murdoch (b. 1919)
Motorist and Dead Bird
P. N. Furbank (b. 1920)
Sundays
D. J. Enright (b. 1920)
The Accents of Brecht
Where I Am
Guest
Edwin Morgan (b. 1920)
A Too Hot Summer
Philip Larkin (b.1922)
Cut Grass
How Distant
The Explosion
The Old Fools
Donald Davie (b. 1922)
Essences
Intervals in a Busy Life
Seeing Her Leave
Kingsley Amis (b. 1922)
Coming of Age
Louis Simpson (b. 1923)
Baruch
Before the Poetry Reading
Chocolates
David Holbrook (b. 1923)
Student Daughter Home for the Weekend
Patricia Beer
Arms
The Estuary
The Eyes of the World
James Berry (b. 1924)
cousin Ralph
Charles Tomlinson (b. 1927)
Tarquinia
Thom Gunn (b. 1929)
Grasses
Expression
The Exercise
Peter Porter (b. 1929)
The Descent into Avernus
Ted Hughes (b. 1930)
A March Calf
Swifts
Crow's First Lesson
Crow's Last Stand
George MacBeth (b. 1932)
The Shell
Eric Milward (b. 1935)
The Girl's Confession
John Fuller (b. 1937)
Aberporth
Dom Moraes (b. 1938)
Speech in the Desert
Ian Hamilton (b. 1938)
Last Waltz
Peter Dale (b. 1938)
Hawk
Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)
First Calf
Limbo
Punishment
Song
Derek Mahon (b. 1941)
A Disused Shed in County Wexford
Veronica Horwell (b. 1948)
Death of a Villager 1200-1740
George Szirtes (b. 1948)
At the Dressing-Table Mirror
Christopher Reid (b. 1949)
We're All in Business by Ourselves
James Fenton (b. 1949)
South Parks Road
Patrick Williams (b. 1950)
Trails
Paul Muldoon
The Cure for Warts
Derryscollop in February
Andrew Motion (b.1952)
The Colour Works

I find this spooky for all sorts of reasons: the fact that so many of them are now dead, the way so many of these poems are now part of the literary landscape, the way some of our most illustrious contemporaries are nudging their way in towards the end, and how few unfamiliar names there are. This isn't just co-incidence: The Listener was one of the places to be published if you wanted to be taken seriously - as a mainstream poet, at any rate. And spooky because when the book was published, the magazine hadn't started the downward spiral that began when the suits started asking the BBC why it was running a literary magazine instead of concentrating on ratings. 1981 still feels like the recent past. But it was a different world.

The editor, Derwent May, was poetry editor of The Listener during 1965-1980. He says the contents represent one in ten of the poems published in the magazine during that period, out of an estimated 20,000 submissions, 'all of which I have looked at, with reactions ranging from delight to outrage.' Some were solicited:

Another morning, Philip Larkin told me on the phone that he hadn't written a poem for over a year; three days later, one of his most beautiful poems arrived for me in the post. Did my phone call, I wondered, precipitate in some strange way the writing of the poem?

You bet.

It's interesting to speculate how many submissions The Listener would get if it were still publishing. Fiona Sampson recently told Woman's Hour that Poetry Review gets more than 60,000 poems a year - all of which she reads, no doubt with similar reactions to May's. If she allows herself weekends off and a bit of holiday, that's an average of over 200 a day. A good many may warrant no more than a glance, but even so, it must take a strong constitution.

I've only dipped in so far, but will read and may report further. Oh, and I had a look on abebooks.com. If your taste runs to historical documents, this Listener collection can be picked up very cheaply.

The Sweeney

Reading Matthew Sweeney’s A Smell of Fish. Some of it’s funny and some is black, but some I just don’t get.

It took a moment for the penny to drop, but I enjoyed 'The Houseboat', which is his take on de la Mare’s 'The Listeners'. It's probably because I recognised the reference, rather than for the poem itself. Even with the switch to the first person plural (which is inspired), it doesn’t make me care much what they wanted Dick Blackstaff for. Probably informing, drugs or some scam or other; maybe we’re supposed to think it’s Belfast rather than Camden, but there’s no clincher... The de la Mare draws on all that fairy story medievalism for atmosphere – a cheat of course, but memorable for all that. And de la Mare’s language was archaic even when he wrote it. Sweeney’s language is contemporary, no-frills (apart from the “blood-red moon”) and the clichés are situational clichés of urban violence and deprivation: houseboat, police siren, howling dog, gunshot, wrecked tanker, curry smells. I’m convincing myself that part of the point (as well as S demonstrating his skill) is in making the threat of violence mundane and unremarkable, displacing the scenario from the turreted building in the middle of a moonlit forest to a litter-strewn urban estuary. This is how some people actually live. Not a fairy story, not even (despite/because of those clichés) a TV copshow, just filthy life.

And how uneasily those de la Marian echoes and anapaests sit:
“But we heard no sound from the cabin,/ no whisper or muffled step” ...
“And these words rang over the water”...
as if he can’t resist them, though he deflates them quickly with a rhythmical challenge. He couldn't leave them long - they would carry you away.

You can imagine him knocking at a houseboat and listening to the quality of the silence and thinking of 'The Listeners', as anyone would who's ever collected door-to-door for Red Cross. And then wanting to do a contemporary version of what is an edgy encounter, or non-encounter. But the curry and police siren etc have a Z-Cars-ish feeling about them, ie. would have been great in the 60s, but feel shopworn now. Is he doing a double send-up? I don't think so; I discovered later he's a huge admirer of de la Mare and has edited the new Faber Selected.

Sweeney likes to operate in what he calls the weird zone: where reality’s skewed but things still have a crazy logic about them. In 'The Zookeeper's Dilemma', Riesfeldt’s constipated elephant is a weird concept, and the ending is OTT, but it’s not irrational.

Difficulty

Reginald Shepherd has a terrific post on difficulty.

One thing that intrigues me is how we are beckoned over that threshold of difficulty, particularly the semantic difficulty of some post-modernist work, when neither sound nor shape helps us through the multiple meanings of 'meaning'. There is an element of trust here - that the reader's time will not be wasted. The poem can look like a random pile of words. Sometimes critics can encourage trust (Vendler's essays on Jorie Graham), but what is it that tempts us out onto the ice when we're on our own? There isn't one answer of course, but I'm aware that sometimes I'm just tempted to go flip-flip-flip through a magazine: that looks random, facile, boring whereas someone like Ron Silliman might encourage me to slow down. Not that I read wholly for meaning - I love formal qualities! Maybe I haven't read enough po-mo, or more likely I'm just incurably shallow.

Oh, and

To say that one doesn’t know what a poem means, if one understands its literal sense, is to say that one doesn’t know why it’s saying what it’s saying. The reader asks, “Why am I being told or shown this?”

- that's how I've felt on the few occasions I've read a Kooser poem. I didn't realise he was 'difficult'!