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.

China blue

Collected the magazines from the printers today. The blue I'd hoped to be indigo is paler and bluer, more like a china blue. Not what I intended, but it looks all right. It's very hard to guess how it's going to turn out from the swatch. The printers can't do a sample, because it means inking up specially and the cost would be silly.

Accept what you can't change, eh?

The poems still please me, and that's the most important thing.

'prosthetic landscape'

I love this sort of thing.

Michael Cook is a thoughtful urban explorer. The interview is full of gems and insights. I liked this bit:

I think, even among explorers, that we don’t pay enough attention to process. I think every piece of infrastructure – every building – is on a trajectory, and you’re experiencing it at just one moment in its very extended life.

We see things, but we don’t often ask how they came about or where they’re going to go from here – whether there will be structural deterioration, or if living things will colonize the structure. We tend to ignore these things, or to see them in temporal isolation. We also don’t give enough time or consideration to how this infrastructure fits into the broader urban fabric, within the history of a city, and where that city’s going, and whose lives have been affected by it and whatever may happen to it in the future. I think these are all stories that really need to start being told.

And there are some fabulous photographs.

Hat-tip to Heraclitean Fire.

PS. Cook's website the Vanishing Point is back up again - and very handsome it is too. The piece on the William B. Rankine G.S. Tailrace is thrilling.

Why does it do that?

Perhaps I shouldn't complain too loudly, making use of free software. But why does the formatting change after a blockquote on this blogger template? There's nothing obviously amiss in the code for the individual post, so presumably it's buried deep somewhere in the template, where I haven't the patience to look and wouldn't recognise it if I saw it. It's not just my blog it happens to; I've seen it with other people's on this template. It's a new thing, since Google acquired it, and didn't happen with the old version. I've checked.

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?

Blacker

I'm surprised no-one seems to have picked this up. Terence Blacker can be as pugnacious as the next journalist, but he's usually well-informed and fair. But in yesterday's Independent he was fulminating against the appointment of Sally Crabtree as poet-in-residence for First Great Western Railways:

Crabtree, described in the press as a "pink-wigged pocket Venus from Cornwall", will perform for passengers as part of what the rail company calls "our annual engagement with our public".

Leaving aside (though why should I?) the lookist comment there, it's easy to get concerned at this development. When even leaky headphones from other customers can be a nuisance, I'm not sure the whole business with a guitar will go down well. Personally, I prefer looking out of the window and daydreaming when I'm on the train - or occasionally looking out of the window and scribbling in my notebook. Blacker continues:

The fashion for hiring poets as a way of illustrating corporate respectability, rather as developers and supermarkets plant trees when they are up to no good, had seemed to have passed a couple of years ago. Companies quickly discovered that modern poets, with their fluting voices and studied eccentricities, merely ratchet up irritation levels.

'Fluting voices'? 'Studied eccentricities'? Who on earth can he have in mind?

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.

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.

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

farewell

Up to Kettle's Yard yesterday hoping to get a last look at the de Waals. The gallery was shut; black-clad staff inside were squatting, wrapping things. There were cartons stuffed with bubble wrap and bound with parcel tape, boxes of curious dimensions, some very long and thin, unwieldy. Two men paused amid the ruins of the Wunderkammer, of which nothing remained but the base, some stacked sections of plywood, and cardboard boxes. A high scaffold stood next to where 'All you can see' had cheered the empty wall. The young men and women in their black t-shirts looked like rude mechanicals, and I wanted to watch but that's rude. I'm even now wondering if de W has decreed how the installations should be dismantled.

Oh, come on, I tell myself. This is just taking down an exhibition. These people are used to it.

National treasure

In the National Museum in Cardiff there's a gallery round the foyer, given over to Welsh crafts: glass and pottery, silverware and so on. Some of it's fine, but it doesn't interest me much, or at any rate, not as much as it should. Perhaps it's because I'm not feeling 100%. Slipware, oh please; it's nice and homely, but the decoration, the use to which it's put, hardly merits place in a museum. Most of the stuff would be better off in someone's house, being used. What is there about it to be stared at, wondered at? The skill in making? Yes, but it seems skill without purpose: the purpose is curtailed, we are looking only at a small part of the thing's reality. Our imagination must supply context and use, imagine an owner, or at least the hands of the user: this is what it's like to hold, this is how easily it pours, feel its heft, the sound it makes as you place it on the kitchen table. How the light strikes it among the apples and red peppers. The morning sunlight slanting in through the half door, the light reflected off the river, wobbling and shifting.

Somehow it's much easier with something from the past. Contemporary craft is so self-conscious.

And there is a cabinet of de Waals. (That doesn't merit an apostrophe as it's a standard museum cabinet.) Instantly recognisable: two of his tall swaying cylinders placed, I'd have thought, slightly too far apart, and some shallow nested dishes, wide, with straight sides, very thick. Some are nested with their sides touching, some randomly, but they look untidy and haphazard rather than studiedly random. They look as if they have been put in the case by someone other than the artist, someone who's just collected some examples of his work. I can't explain it. If I knew that de Waal had installed it, I'd pay the arrangement a different quality of attention. Instead, they seem to be tired, denatured, uncontextualised. They're pieces in a museum making as much sense as something dug out of a garden when we don't know where the garden is or what the thing is for. The presence of the pots is only part of their meaning. And how naked they are. We can see them, see into them - all except the tall ones, which have their unknowable interiors. Perhaps under the dishes there are marks or colours we will never see. I'd like to think so. And there are no titles - simply 'Edmund de Waal' and some dates, I forget now. I should have made a note. De Waal's captions, titles, are part of how we read his work. So again, I'm wondering if this is after all an installation, if he's deconstructed the museum exhibit to leave the thing stripped down like this, bare, devoid of meaning and context (the title is literally 'con-text'), the unknowable just creeping in when you think you've drained it of meaning. But I doubt it. It's too obvious: it looks as though the museum staff have been able to do that anyway, all by themselves.

facebook

Why is facebook so successful? There are toys to play with, and people to annoy. You can make gangs, and draw attention to yourself. Some people like to compete in the Number of Friends stakes.

I'm amazed how many poets are on there, how many older people one would expect to know better. We write on each other's wall, we poke each other, throw sheep, share tunes. And all in our own time, in the privacy of our home. No need to get dressed up, no need to worry where we will go to meet, or if no-one talks to us when we get there.

Not that I'd dream of throwing a sheep at anyone, but I have written graffiti on a wall.

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.

Mauve

TLS arrived today, and I eagerly turned to see who'd won the poetry competition. I don't know why I was eager, as I'd been lukewarm about the shortlist. It's eagerness about competition tout court, rather than the quality of the contestants. Something unpleasantly atavistic then.

'The Mauve Tam-O'-Shanter' is a depressing poem. Not just because it is about a bereavement. I don't know whether the poet writes from personal experience, but that shouldn't make a difference. (Oh, it seems to in the case of war poetry, and Tim Kendall has written eloquently about that.) Grief shouldn't disarm criticism. What I object to in the poem is cliché, sentimentality, and outright nonsense. And that seems to be what readers of the TLS like - or at least the voters in this competition. As I neither entered nor voted in the competition, I think I can allow myself a little grumble.

'The Examiners' came second. Of its type, it's highly competent, but there is nothing about it that couldn't have been written half a century ago. Why should this matter? I don't think poetry should be that damn' comfortable, even if it's about uncomfortable subjects. The edge of humour here stops the uncomfortable being anything more than a mild unease... And if, as John Hartley Williams claims - nor is he the first to do so - all poetry should be an experiment, it's not clear what this is trying to do, except be clever. Entertain, I suppose.

Freedom

Alan Johnston is free!