Methuen's Anthology of Modern Verse

I've just been indulging myself with An Anthology of Modern Verse (Methuen, 1921). My Oxfam copy is from 1940, the 30th edition. Staggering to think of how popular it must have been. It's full of the famous: Chesterton and Belloc, Kipling, Hardy, Thomas. And people I've never heard of - and on this meagre evidence, rightly so: Fyleman, Hopewood, Turner. This anthology, obviously enormously popular, has one striking omission: Housman. It is curious but oddly satisfying to see Eliot, Hopkins, Graves, Lawrence, Hardy, Owen, Thomas, Yeats rubbing shoulders with Kipling, Masefield, Stevenson. But why no Housman? His work was current, hugely popular.

92 poets, of whom there are 14 women, most of whom are justly neglected - as indeed, are most of the men.

Chapeau

Was in Ribérac, down a back street. The shop was shut, with its grille down - you can see it in the photograph, along with the reflection of the wall opposite. The model is in a dream within a dream: she's not real; she's in a shop; the shop is closed. She is beyond reach, and from another time.

Tuscan whole milk

It's good milk if you drink it right away, but I'm only giving it one star because it spoiled when I left it [on] the counter when I went away for the weekend. They really should put this in the description. I've bought a lot of products from Amazon (books, CD's, etc.) and I've never had this problem with anything else.

Human creativity knows no bounds. Any new technology will quickly attract populations to exploit it beyond its original purpose, whether they use it to sell things, to rob people blind, to perform new acts of vandalism, or simply to have fun. While facebook attracts its share of spammers, spivs and satirists, it's heartening to know that the wilder reaches of amazon.com have their own colony of creative writers squatting in Gourmet Food.

I was in two minds blogging about it - it's like a small microclimate one hesitates to disturb by sending tourists trampling over it. I've hardly begun to explore its wilder reaches myself yet, but I love the way people adapt creatively to hostile environments. A quick google reveals that I'm late to the party as usual: Boing Boing blogged about it nearly two years ago.

perms

Why isn't it simple? Why can't I just write a straight sheaf of addresses off the stack, and bung the same things into each envelope? Indeed, why do I have to write the addresses by hand - surely any competent organisation would have them on the computer?

Um. I do have them on the computer.
But.

Well. There are contributors. They get first crack of the whip. With a light heart, I start sending mags out to the valiant souls who make it happen. I am glad to, and very grateful to them. And to you, with your sparky poems, and to you and your lightsome reviews.

Then there are the contributors who are also subscribers (less than a handful) - and subscribers are our lifeblood - and they get an extra copy, which is a different postal rate. Then there is the contributor who is also a subscriber whose sub is up for renewal, who gets a reminder because I am hardnosed like that. Then there are the contributors who live abroad, and you have to queue up to get it weighed, and does the scrawled comps slip mean that it no longer counts as 'printed matter'?

And indeed, there are the contributors who are subscribers whose subs lapsed with the last issue, but whom (for obvious reasons) I don't want to let go, so I have a special letter to send to them.

And the impecunious contributors who are also subscribers who prefer not to have a second copy of the mag but to roll over their sub to the next issue. I don't like to think about what this tells me about how they value this particular issue.

And then there are the subscribers, the vast majority of course, who fit into none of those categories. Including those whose subs are due, and those whose subs have lapsed. And those in each category who live abroad.

There are 16 permutations...

And then there are the inserts. Do I send them willy nilly to everyone, including the subscriber who asked me to include them, and who probably has inserts up the ying-yang? And to those abroad? (Well, not if it tips it into a different price band.) Do I send Soundblast Performance Poetry flyers to Mrs Trellis of North Wales?

Is it even worth my time wondering about such things?

Flogo

Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG posts about the nascent ability to print clouds – using a buoyant "mixture of soap-based foams and lighter-than-air gases such as helium" to create logos and messages that float like clouds across the sky until they disintegrate up to an hour later. Geoff, creative optimist that he is, writes:

there is an obvious (and, frankly, rather uninteresting) reaction to all this – i.e. please save us from yet another form of corporate advertising, we don't need logos in the sky – but there are also artistic, and even literary, implications here that go beyond mere outrage

before proceeding to riff on the glorious possibilities.

Me, I'm down there with the obvious and frankly uninteresting, trying to console myself that there will be parts of the sky unflogoed so long as there are parts of the world insufficiently inhabited and/or rich and/or influential. There are times when I even resent vapour trails. Don't get me wrong, I love the built environment, but I am cynical about what money does.

Actually, BLDGBLOG is one of my favourites, and I love Geoff's thought experiments. Many of his commenters take him to task on practicalities while ignoring the principle he's exploring. I'm guilty of this myself, here.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Factoid

H drew to my attention a recent (31 March) letter in the FT. In response to some bad press about Icelandic banks, Sigrún Davídsdóttir makes the point that Icelanders are a very homogenous and small community with a mostly shared experience and outlook. She says: "It is easy to lie with statistics, but difficult to tell the truth without them."
And then the money quote:

It is dangerous to extrapolate from statistics: an Icelandic poet can count on selling 500 copies of his book of poetry in Iceland - although the ratio of English inhabitants to Icelandic is 200:1, an English poet cannot expect to sell 100,000 copies.

Davídsdóttir is a novelist and woman of letters as well as an economist, so that may be one reason she used that particular example. But 500 books! to 313,000 people! 500 copies is a good number for an English poet to sell, unless they are really famous. Curiosity led me to this article (from 1996, when the population was smaller):

With the multiple and seemingly inexhaustible blandishments of the electronic age, poetry still holds pride of place among the seven arts with close to a hundred collections of poems published annually -- in a population of just over 260,000. Poetry may not be as politically potent today as it was during the struggle for independence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nor is it as commonly quoted in everyday conversation as it used to be, yet it is very much a living part of our existence, both at home and at public gatherings. `The President never makes a speech without quoting copiously from poems old and new, nor does a politician worth his salt ever deliver a festive talk without rich poetic ingredients. At private parties, on the radio (or even television), and in the press there are not infrequently poetic contests eliciting interest from all classes and categories of society.

Why all this interest in poetry? Attempts at explication should be made. The tradition is very old and very strong. Some of the most engrossing visions of Iceland, both past and future, have been expressed in lyric form. The natural scenery is imposing and lends itself easily to poetic descriptions. The language is sonorous, flexible and highly translucent, making it a supple instrument for poetry.

I've heard that in Korea, poetry books sell as fast as cookery books. (Co-incidentally, another very homogenous society. And there again, poems about the seasons and the weather are very popular.) Are there other places in the world where poetry sells as well?

Blimp

Already sounds like a word from a poem by Edwin Morgan. I love this idea. Never mind the impracticality of pumping water. Let gravity take care of sewage. Electricity will be conducted by astonishingly fine, astonishingly conductive rare metals. Winds will blow, and people will talk nostalgically of being grounded.

Cantuar

It's not clear from the press what Dr Williams had in mind, but it won't be the sort of thing the mad dogs have been howling over. There is no way even he, with his knees on a hassock and head in the clouds, could seriously suggest applying sharia law to anyone who doesn't consent. So it couldn't apply in matrimonial cases (children to consider, even if women can be assumed to be giving free consent) or family inheritance cases (what about potential beneficiaries who don't consent to the sharia court?) let alone in criminal cases.

There may - just - be an argument for using a sharia court as an agreed arbitrator in contract cases, much as one might have the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors written into a contract as arbiter for development disputes. Consenting adults should be able to decide how to settle their disputes. However, this would be fair only between bargainers of equal bargaining power. And even then, just imagine the hoohah when someone appeals against the decision of such a sharia court because it's partial (judges related to plaintiff), incompetent (judges comatose) or capricious (judges didn't consider evidence), just to take three examples that might happen in any tribunal. In such a case, the appeal would lie to the civil courts in the usual way. "English Law Overrules Sharia!" "English Rules OK!" Just imagine. And heaven forfend that it's a Jewish judge in the Appeal Court.

The prelate espouses a misguided pluralism, to put it mildly. Nevertheless, it doesn't take too much imagination to foresee this as encouragement and sanction for enclaves of sharia law in the sort of place where young men like Abu Izzadeen can say to the Home Secretary: "How dare you come here, to a Muslim area, after you have arrested Muslims..." It's already happening informally. There are tribal areas in New Zealand which apply tribal law with the consent of the state, and I believe there are many other places around the world with such enclaves, where colonisers have exempted certain areas from application of their Law. Should it make any difference whether such enclaves are indigenous or immigrant? Personally, I deplore that sort of separation whatever its genesis, but then I'd do away with faith schools and the established church and -- don't get me started. Let's keep one law for all, please.


Update
Here's what he said.

Rant

On one of the forums where I lurk, someone is complaining that the editors of a magazine suggested changes to their submission which would have radically altered the poem, nay changed the whole tenor. The poster adds that they never had much faith in those editors' judgement anyway.

So why are they sending their poems there?

It is easy to get enraged over exchanges like this, so I won't. It can be very dodgy offering unsolicited crit. Some people are adult enough to welcome it, but others are prickly as hell. Why do they send stuff in the first place if they don't value the editor's judgement?

As for solicited crit, you know it's going to be a disaster from the off. Anyone who needs to ask isn't going to like what you're going to say. Anyone with an ounce of sense knows that editors won't have time to write a word more than they have to unless they want to. It takes too long to work out a tactful way to tell someone their work is crap. Or just boring.

Some would-be contributors have an attitude problem: they seem to think that there's a kind of bar of general competence they have to clear.
Er, NO.
They have to write a poem that the editor thinks other people are prepared to pay money to read.

Plus, that poem has to fit in with the other poems on the shortlist. So the ten millionth brilliant poem about Alzheimer's probably ain't going to cut it.

The editor's judgement may be a bit idiosyncratic, but the editor's best placed to know the sort of people lined up prepared to pay for poems in that particular magazine, and how far to push their tolerance - so like it or not, the would-be contributor has got to accept that judgement. Anyway, why are they sending their precious poems there in the first place if they don't?

I'm well into my second year editing at Seam. It feels like a hundred. When I started out, I was more liberal with my comments than I am now. One classic response was from a man who wrote that he'd taken on board my suggestions, and had sent his revised poem to a competition where it had won a prize... (Thanks, mate, you're welcome.)

I don't know about other editors, but the biog is the last thing I read. And I'm trying to draft a catch-all rejection slip that is somewhat more gracious than the one I got from Brando's Hat, years ago, after about six months. We are sorry you have not been successful - a thin line of type crudely scissored from thirtynine identical others on a page of A4.

E J Thribb writes

So hello then 2008.
What will you bring? I can hardly wait
As Greenland doffs its ice-cap to the sea.

Create your own zoo

I should apologise for this, but found it inexplicably hilarious.

the cost of selling

I go to one of the bookshops with a rather late batch of the magazine and a delivery note. It is late, and I am apologetic, so instead of just leaving the package at the information desk, I go in search of D, who is responsible for the poetry section. He's a poet himself, and we have published poems of his occasionally. We gossip about what's about, what people are buying. Cat Haiku, obviously. It's an opportunity for me to riffle through what he has new in stock ... There are magazines I haven't seen for a long time, such as The Journal (formerly ~ of Anglo-Scandinavian Poetry). He starts telling me about new books in; we get to talking about the Costa list, the TS Eliot list, which he regards as "predictable". We agree that John Burnside might have been included. He shows me Moya Cannon, Kenji Miyazawa. I buy half a dozen magazines I don't actually subscribe to (though I should) and when my purchases are totted up, they are over £50. D isn't even on commission.

Poetry and audiece

How often have you heard poets wish for the sort of audiences that the visual arts command? How often have you heard poets complain that Guardianistas will flock to any exhibition, will engage in the quite abstruse language of art appreciation, but will run a mile when confronted with the prospect of listening to a line or two of concatenated words? Even if penned by the Poet Laureate himself?
(Um, well, perhaps that's not the precise superlative I was looking for.)

Well, be careful what you wish for. The incomparable Ms Baroque has a post (no, dammit, it's not that post - which post is it? Anyway -) which castigates quite even-handedly both the lumpen proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

But look again at her castigations. Which one of us can honestly claim that we have never been guilty of any of the following, mutatis mutandis:

• Considering the poet's clothing, his habit of scratching his nose each time he tells a joke
• Wondering if he's making out with that pretty young poet sharing the platform, with whom he's exchanging knowing glances as the middle-aged, heavily maquillaged female poet (with whom they are both sharing the platform) relays dithyrambic sexual confessions
• Wondering if you will get to the pub before it shuts
• Seeing X over the room, a publisher whose attention you've been hoping to attract
• Seeing Y over the room, a poet from the next parish who's always trying to get you to read his manuscript
• Seeing Z over the room, with whom you thought you were good friends until the day you had a blazing row about Bukowski, and who has never spoken to you since
• Wishing the poet's subject matter were more varied
• Wishing the poet told more jokes
• Wishing the poet's poems were shorter
• Wishing it were a different poet altogether?

blond balladeer

So Boris is writing verse? Perhaps he has been studying Stephen Fry's How To book. All of this is so depressing.

God's plaything

Ted Hughes put in a dramatic appearance at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. The "Poet on Poet" lecture was Christopher Reid reading from the Letters, which he's just edited. The event opened with Huge himself, his dark brown voice out of the ether growling the opening verses of Crow. With extraordinary sangfroid CR stood alone at the podium looking self-deprecating, took a draught of water as God was being challenged, then owned that the more alert of us would have realised that he wasn't engaging in some extraordinary act of ventriloquism. He wanted us to keep Ted's voice in our head when he read the letters.

Terrific stuff. He started with the first letter in the book, an extraordinary teenage love letter in which the poetic imagination was stretching its wings. Then there were letters from Cambridge, the letter to Olwyn where he tells about winning the poetry competition (p 93), a letter to Olwyn about America (p 106) where everything is wrapped in cellophane and transported great distances...

It was while he was reading part of a letter to Ben Sonnenberg (pp 586-589) where Hughes is talking about his jaguar, and how he tried to capture that curl of the lip, like a dog bothered by the fly - and in fact the whole passage is about work, revision, and the inspiration that comes with work and alertness - that the surely by now famous visitation occurred. Reid was reading:

The image that came to my head, to give the idea, was - memory of a fly landing on a dog's nose

and something rose across my vision from bottom left to top right, and I tilted my head a few times to try and get it again, thinking it was a trick of the light on the inner surface of my glasses. CR read on for almost half a minute, describing how the dog might react to the fly, and how he was trying to get the description right, and now:

To intensify my idea and make the point of irritation more of an impossible, inaccessible fixture...

and we realised there was a butterfly onstage.

Probably: as if it had a fly up its nostril [laughter from the audience] while I was actually writing these words...

For now the butterfly was in full view, under the spotlight, fluttering over Reid's head. Still laughter

...an average size bluefly came straight acorss that very cold room - where no fly could have moved since November at the latest -

more laughter -

and went straight up my nostril, where it lodged.

The butterfly landed on Reid's head, to general hilarity. He felt something and brushed at it, so it left again and fluttered around, and he saw it, but not before he'd read:

I extracted it, and pressed it in my Shakespeare.

And as he finished the sentence, he was laughing too, and pointing at the butterfly, and said what we were all thinking, if only in jest: "He's here!" After a bit it fluttered onto one of the cardboard boxes bearing the legend "Words", where it stayed until the end of the lecture.

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.

a thing of shreds and patches

Rob MacKenzie has a post today about Poets in Velvet. A chick lit novelist describes the launch of a poetry anthology, quite unlike one I've ever been to.

Several of the contributors [are] mingling nervously with the guests. You can tell that they’re poets as they’re wearing mainly velvet clothing with lots of scarves and some of them have on jaunty hats. [p 183]

So what do poets really wear? In Martin Figura's splendid poem 'Poets' Retreat', the malevolent landlord boasts that his dog Cerberus 'can smell poet. It's the wet corduroy.' Martin himself can be found wearing a leather jacket from time to time, but never a scarf, never a hat. Never velvet.

moving on

The secondhand bookshop on Bridge Street is closing down. I'd popped in there in between chores, to find most shelves completely bare, and the floor covered with cardboard boxes. There were a few expensive old travel books left to pack. For a moment, I lingered over some Victorian travels in China, with engravings - something I didn't need, just covet...

All the poetry had vanished. Just wooden racks where it had been: startlingly clean and bright, simple pitch pine, never expecting to see the light of day.

I've bought so many books there over the years, and been tempted by many times that number. 30 years, they've been there, the proprietor told me, and now they were returning to their origins, going back on the road while they were still fit enough to enjoy it.

Oh, on the road, and enjoying it!

For a moment there, it sounded romantic. But think of it - the draughty church halls, the muddy tents, the packing and unpacking, the awful b&bs.

And meanwhile, the naked shelves, the cardboard boxes. The dither over how to pack the last few, the precious ones. What's it going to be? Another café, another outlet for chichi clothes.

Another piece of mental furniture shifted out with the trash by economic forces.

Identity politics

A great post by Reginald Shepherd on identity politics.

[snip] The impulse to explain poetry as a symptom of its author's biography or its social context is pervasive these days, including among authors themselves. But that has always seemed to me a form of self-imprisonment, neglecting or even negating the possibilities poetry offers not just of being someone else, anyone and/or everyone else, but of being no one at all, of existing, however contingently, outside the shackles of identity and definition. Poetry is, among other things, a way of opening up worlds and possibilities of worlds. It offers a combination of otherness and brotherhood, the opportunity to find the otherness in the familiar, to find the familiar in the other. [/snip]

I agree that identity politics can be boring. That's when it's unambitious for language, and focused on grievance. (And I'm not denying that grievance can be well justified.) But don't you think that people can be included, rather than excluded, by work rooted in identity? Isn't it possible for me, a white hetero woman, to be more than simply a cultural tourist when reading Aime Cesaire, or John Agard, or Lemn Sissay? Or Marilyn Hacker, or Mark Doty, or Thom Gunn? Isn't it possible that the sheer explicitness of the identity can sometimes touch us at a more human level than simple groupthink? I'd be wary of a poetry that insisted one had to cut free of where the poet comes from, in order to achieve some sort of universal poetic sensibility. (And I'd be wary, not least, because of norms that may be taken for granted.) When the reader can trust the voice, through the use of language, s/he can imagine better what it's like to be (say) a Catholic farm boy in Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland, and look at where he's pointing. And the humanity that's touched there is somehow all the deeper for starting in difference.

madness

It's been a mad week. I've judged a poetry competition, performed at a poetry festival, organised a magazine launch... Everything feels so public, exposed. Everything you do is something that someone else can take exception to. Any expression of opinion will offend those holding a different opinion, it seems - and where does it leave us? It is easy for the hegemonical to say: OK, say what you like, fearlessly. I feel exposed and vulnerable because my taste and judgment is open to scrutiny.

Uncomfortable though it may be for me (and it is), it's quite right. Flip the coin on its head, and I'm the one making judgments, and why on earth shouldn't I be challenged? I should be able to defend my choices of prizewinner, poem to read, poem to put in a magazine. Of course it's incredibly subjective. Our tastes are formed by so many things - what we read and like affects the person we become and what that person will read and like. Examples, please.