The Hare with Amber Eyes

This extraordinary book by Edmund de Waal operates on many levels. The Hare of the title is a netsuke, an intricately carved ivory toggle from Japan, from a large collection put together by one of De Waal's forebears, a man who knocked around with the likes of Renoir and Proust. De Waal is a potter, and his tactile appreciation of these objets de vertu is eloquently expressed. He writes about form and function, the wit and punning of the carvers, the feel of these puzzles designed for the hand, and how such things came to be collected and displayed. By a circuitous route, the collection comes into his possession, and the book is a detective story - the account of how he tracked down the collection's previous owners. He devotes a year to the task, and in the process of reading letters, essays, newspapers, accounts, is able to reimagine them with their passions and foibles. It's a family history told against the backdrop of enormous wealth and privilege, and the growing horrors of anti-Semitism.

The subtitle, "A Hidden History" puzzled and annoyed me - it seemed both fey and extravagant - until, unexpectedly, the meaning was revealed. I won't spoil it for you. The waiting is worth it, and prepare to shed tears.

Last words

If you value words, this is worth your attention.

Vowel sounds and sibilant consonants slide out of my mouth, shapeless and inchoate even to my close collaborator. The vocal muscle, for sixty years my reliable alter ego, is failing. Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my weakest assets. Translating being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.

Even while dying, Tony Judt's passion for words and scrupulousness remained undimmed. What a beautiful writer.

Obituary here.

How to Write Badly Well

Joel Stickley makes me weep with laughter. Frex:

When writing radio drama, use dialogue to set the scene

Present your research in the form of dialogue

Always use a thesaurus

Joel is one of the poetry boyband Aisle 16.

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
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?

I 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:

don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.

But he is wrong. Seductive, but wrong. The poem ends like this:

and if you have been chosen,
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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Danger

The book is due out in April.

The Act of Making

George Szirtes asks about the Act of Making. I interrogate myself about the need to shout back at the PC monitor, its blue self-sufficiency. Sometimes it's possible to believe you're the only person in the world.

When I write, which I do rarely these days, it is more of a listening than a writing. I don't know what sort of listening. Nothing as explicit as Name That Tune, but hoping to hear something. That sounds precious. It isn't really - the first poetry I heard was nursery rhymes and the shipping forecast, and prayers. Always troubled by what I didn't understand, I still find an edge of anxiety* in that listening.

There can be a cadence to it, rather as you can tell through a closed door without hearing the words, whether it's a sports report or Thought for the Day. (I don't want to write poems like either of those, by the way.)

First off, particularly if I'm asked to write something (rather than responding to a simple(!) urge to write), there may be a stage when I'm brainstorming, just jotting down odd lines and whatnot on scraps of paper, rewriting bits that interest me, shuffling them around, trying to see if they speak to each other. At this stage I have only the vaguest idea of what I might be listening out for. In fact the point is usually that I don't know - I'm hoping to be surprised, like the impatient child mixing up the components of the chemistry set behind the sofa, hoping for an explosion - but not anticipating that it will ruin the wallpaper. With luck, what I'm feeling at this point is a sense of recklessness, and ignorance: I can try anything, no-one's going to see it, no-one's going to judge my competence by this playing around. It's just words and shapes of words, lists of words, alternative words, arrows, squiggles, underlinings, verbal patterns, notes of echoes, influences.

But sometimes it feels forensic. There must be something here: it's a question of finding it, whatever it is. Often I give up at this stage, because it just seems like a heap of dry leaves. Or a load of responsibilities.

But if it starts to look promising, I may go to the computer and print off ten pages of draft stuff, because it's easier to cut up and shift around and keep track of. At this stage, whether it started as work or play, I'll feel more like a child on a wet Sunday with scissors, cardboard, glue and a nice empty kitchen table, but no clear plan. (Oh, and a mother, who has a very clear aesthetic... Who isn't going to like what I do. Too bad!)

But mostly, it's listening. Saying words over and over. If I'm lucky, I can get into a stride, into some sort of fluency - I agree with Helyer here - though I distrust what's easily won. If I can have clear space and time, and can work it through, there will be that self-forgefutlness.... Ice-skating, if I could do that, but for me - more like playing a fish. Yes, there's a fish there, but you can't see yet if it's a perch or a trout. You can eat a trout, if it's big enough. If you can land it.

No, that's a rubbish analogy. Fish aren't ours; we don't conjure them up. They are themselves. Here, they are only a metaphor. Words might allude to something believable, like a perch or a trout. It's more that the elements of preparation and luck can combine in a way that's similar to fishing. Chance favours the prepared mind. And standing out there in the drizzle, in oilskins, somewhere in Scotland, mind in neutral, can be pleasurable in itself, whether or not anything is landed.

Analogies with chemistry sets don't work. The poem is, ideally, something other. Often (in my case, anyway) it's not what I was hoping for. I might be looking and listening out for something deep and significant about that "eye-on-the-object-look" but end up with some drollerie about ironing. The language will have deflected me. And that's not something arbitrary, really, is it? In the end, it's my language, my own lack of seriousness, that sends me off into the undergrowth instead of up into the spare foothills.

Now please tell us, George, about your ploys for unblocking. In particular, do you have any simples against Fear?

*I really mean that. (I am so up for a cheap pun.)
Update
Perhaps I should stress that I'm talking here about the very start of writing, the point before I know what manner of thing I might be dealing with. The clearer it becomes, the more technical the approach. But at the very outset, it's difficult to know what is happening, or about to happen, and even less how to describe it.

Gender

I've just been looking at The Poetry School's latest brochure. Some interesting courses on offer. This caught my eye, but I don't think I'll sign up for it:

A woman’s voice cannot escape its sex, so female poets who write ‘I’ will be read as writing either about their own experience, or the experience of other women. Does this matter and, if it does, why? Vicki Bertram will discuss some of the ideas explored in her book Gendering Poetry: contemporary women and men poets.

Oh, really? So where does that leave 'The River-Merchant's Wife'? Or the farmer, for that matter, in 'The Farmer's Bride'?

It is not what she meant at all, that is not it at all. Why should female poets be constrained this way? Why should male poets be constrained? Aren't we free to choose the voice we use in a particular poem? Doesn't the reader who wants to pin it down biographically need to get out more?

PS - later I read the actual heading and discover she's writing about the lyric voice. Hmm. I'm no longer sure what 'lyric' means.

Marketing the art

A provocative post by Chris Hamilton-Emery over on Poets on Fire Forum. I should really post my reply there, but I'm too shy.

1. How many poets should be published?

As many as you can sell. And there are others who won't make any money for anyone, but occasionally some mad, altruistic publisher who believes in the work will attempt delay its oblivion. And they will be read long after they're dead, and no mark on their living face will have foretold who they are.

2. What do people think makes them choose one new volume of poetry over another? If there are, let's say, 20,000 new volumes of poetry in English a year

That many? I will probably know about only a few dozen English and a smattering of US. One or two others. They are already well-sifted by the time I get to hear of them.

I'm influenced by people I respect. For example, I got the New Collected WS Graham because Matthew Francis edited it. I've found Graham difficult in the past and would have ignored the book if it weren't for his imprimatur.

Like most people, I buy a lot of books because they've been recommended, or because I'm interested in the writer. Or because I've heard them read and been impressed. I also borrow and lend a lot of books.

But standing in Borders faced with umpteen unfamiliar collections, and assuming I hadn't heard of any of the poets on the shelves, I'd be influenced by trivial things like titles and jacket design. I might read the list of contents and see if it looked interesting. Poems called 'Revenant' or 'Ward Round' would put me off. I'm shallow like that. Then I'd flip through. I'd probably read the first poem, and not read any further if there was a cliché or a tired trick of the trade like a clever-clever line-break. I'd read the last poem (how did they get there from page 1?), and a random poem. I'd read them quickly, and it's not a fair test of a decent poem, but it's a test it has to pass in a bookshop. Oh, and if Fiona Sampson really does read the 60,000 submissions to Poetry Review, that's 200 a day - or more like 250 if it's a normal working week with 4 weeks' holiday p.a.

And yes, I buy a load from second hand shops, the second chance saloon.

3. Are writers condemned to be middleclass? Or is it just poets that are piss poor?

43% of the population identify themselves as middle class. I'm not sure I understand this question. Does it mean that the act of writing ipso facto condemns one to be middle class (Tony Harrison) - not something the founders of WEA would have subscribed to - or that poets were middle class before they even picked up a pen? (John Burnside, Paul Farley, Kathleen Jamie, John Clare...) Does it mean that middle class people should shut up? Political allegiances are also interesting. Or is it simply that the conditions of the middle class are more conducive to writing?

It's certainly true that no-one's going to get rich from writing poems.

4. Can one write in isolation?

Yes. Dickinson. Hopkins. Sally Purcell. It's not a lot of fun.

5. Is "who you know" still more important in the world of writers than "what you know". More writers are chosen from introductions and recommendations than the K2 sized slush pile. Am I right? Are you going to the right parties?

Yes. Yes. No. Which is a bummer, if you hate parties. See 4 above.

But as an editor of a little magazine, I can tell you that nothing would cheer me more than to find a stunning poem from someone I've never heard of. Being published in a mag helps get you known.

6. ...whether three or four workshops in London are more effective than all the MAs in Creative Writing in the UK at putting poets into lists.

MAs are networks too. But sad if that's all they are. With luck and a fair wind, they might even help people to read and write more thoughtfully. Focus. Or get jobs, of course. I don't think MAs are marketed as about getting into lists, are they?

7. Are sales driven less by writing competence and excellence and more by celebrity and marketing?

I haven't a clue. Although I loathe those lifestyle articles that write about a poet without quoting a line (eg The Independent's infamous puff about John Stammers a few years back), I'm susceptible to some sorts of hype - if Cape or Picador are telling me this is the next big thing, I'll take a look. They have good editors. So the chances are that what they're hyping is well written. (Sometimes that trumps the Borders test in 2 above. Who buys Fabers on the cover design?) But I deeply resent the books that clog my shelves - books I bought because I was told I should like them, and didn't. Perhaps I will learn to like them. Perhaps I should get rid.

Consider how definition of 'writing competence' itself is subjective, and can be formed by marketing and hype.

8. Who are the ten most important people in the world of UK poetry?

Hmmm. Promoters, teachers and gatekeepers spring to mind: Don Paterson, Robin Robertson, Neil Astley, Michael Schmidt, Naomi Jaffa, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Fiona Sampson, Paul Beasley, and whoever gets to write the GCSE syllabus.

9. Can poetry survive by ignoring what people want?

Poetry must survive by educating the demand. Poetry makes its own rules. It deserves to die if it goes down the route of If you liked Seamus Heaney you will love Turnip Snedding on Steroids. Hell, I love Heaney! (OK, tmi.) There's bound to be a gap between what the public wants and what the artist is trying to sell them. A creative bridge. Another question is how poetry keeps on convincing the Arts Council that it's worth supporting... Or how the Arts Council keeps on convincing the government that any arts are worth supporting...

10. Given production exceeds demand, should we stop teaching and developing poets now until a balance is restored?

Only if poetry teachers have a private income. And, er, why should anyone worry about balance? Who is disadvantaged by imbalance? And who is 'we'?

Writing

Writing is an exercise in controlling fear, especially the fear that you're not a writer.

Thomas Kenneally, Desert Island Discs, 22 July 07

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'!