We liked it but not quite enough

Gazing at Stars, Schrodinger's Cat and Nanomagnetics

2012-01-20T21:30:00.007Z

So where did January almost go to, same place as Christmas and New Year I expect, same place as that other sock, the biro kept by the phone for messages,that fuse you could have sworn was in the corner of the kitchen drawer for that moment when the kettle plug pops, the same place as that New Year promise 2011 that you can’t even remember now but which at the time you really believed you would keep, the same place as the full stop in this sentence , but then oh no here it comes, glory be there is something finite in this fleeting, constantly moving, fey yet at the same time precise universe.

Perhaps you can see that I am just recovery from Stargazing Live on the TV. I love the way they tacked Live on the end to ensure everyone knows that Professor Brian Cox, the rock and roll, cool astro-physicist will be speaking without the intervention of an editor and some things may be less than exciting if it gets cloudy. I was rather disappointed for the Exmoor Village that consented to put all their lights out so the stars could be seen more clearly in all their glory and alas it rained and the cloud cover was so low even small children were ducking to avoid cumuli concussion.

I like science programmes, I like trying to get my head around concepts that are so huge I need someone to reduce them to the size of an orange orbiting a grape or should that be vice versa? In Cambridge next week I have been invited to an event at Cavendish Laboratory ( home of the split atom) which promises to tick all my boxes for bite sized pieces of fruity knowledge.

It is a competition akin I feel to a slam poetry event but here those involved in physics research of all kinds have three minutes to explain their research in a cogent and hopefully entertaining way and be voted on by a panel of judges, I presume mainly on delivery and content but also maybe on the wow factor.

Having seen some of the research topics I am looking forward to seeing if I understand anything. Some of the research projects up for 3 minute explanation are I gather

Measuring the Evolution of the Universe,
High force magnetic levitation using superconducting bulks,
Making solar cells better with Buddhist singing bowls,
Simulating planet formation,
Extreme Engineering: Nanopillar Lasers
CP violation in D(s)->KS0h decays,
Electrodeposition of Copper Nanowire Interconnects,
Controlling and Understanding DNA Transport with Optical Tweezers
Bacteria and the immune system in the human gut
Plastic Electronics
Multi-target ADSR: an innovative concept for a safer nuclear energy production Nanomagnetics
Mobile Human Monitoring
The Beauty of Bottoms

Personally I think the Beauty of Bottoms may just be a catchy title to hide something quite technical involving probes of some kind and the Solar cells and Buddhist singing bowls may be a bum steer as to what the actual research is. However I will be there trying to grasp with my little grey cells the magnitude of man’s capacity for exploring what is already out there and what could be out there. I am waiting to see if someone can come up with an app that gives you the dummy's guide to the explanation of everything. Some would say that already exists and is called an encyclopaedia or wikipedia or the internet in general.

One day we may all be chipped with a small interface with the internet and global wi-fi cover and speeds with be increased to the point where we can be walking around knowing everything almost instantly and then the intelligent will be all of us but the really intelligent will be those with the capacity to use that knowledge well and what well means will still be in the realms of social philosophy and politics …..but wait a minute we are probably there now , only a tiny step from the iphone3 to a chip in the head..

And finally in anticipation of this up coming evening here is a poem by Peter Howard, physicist and poet, a sestina no less, about , Schrodinger's cat, his hypothetical cat in the hypothetical box.

Some Flash Poetry pieces also by Peter can be found here, as we are in the area of technology , science and poetry. I particularly recommend Smoke. You have to have flash on your computer and be prepared to click on the poems and make things happen.

Bread Sauce, Guilty Pleasures and Money

2011-12-19T23:09:00.010Z

It is the week before Christmas and all round the house not a creature was stirring not even a mouse. Well that is actually a lie because a week before there should be much stirring to ensure everything is done and ready for the holiday. Who am I trying to impress apart from vegetables from the farmers market ( brussel sprouts on the stem have always held tales of freshness for me) and some presents wrapped nothing is stirring much but not in the Christmas eve quiet way. I have had a poem accepted for a really good publication and have made myself sit down and send out some more to competitions and magazines.

There is something can happen to the brain between writing a poem and sending it out. I tend to keep mine after editing, let them compost under the bed for quite a while and sneak up on them and try and take myself and the poem by surprise. I do savour that feeling you can get when you read a poem, think it is someone else’s that you have downloaded decide it’s quite interesting and then recall it is actually one of your poems. This may sound like an exercise in madness and maybe it is but I do think distance rather than the white hot heat of the writing can allow you to re-read your work with fresh eyes. Sometimes you think, “Bloody hell I’m glad I didn’t send this one out..”. Sometimes you get the ‘rubbish’ self- feedback but know something is fixable or can be salvaged from the wreckage . Now and then you think, this one says something I think is worthwhile. There is always that tightrope of retaining the initial energy of the words and ensuring the words don’t pirouette for the reader and draw attention to themselves just for the hell of it.

Language can, of course and should always dance but like a good ballet the experience is in something transcendent that the human body can channel. Think I am sending a bit ‘Ommmm’ maybe and trailing my sixties roots like and old hippy but I do believe all the arts at their very best help the individual transcend the moment or maybe be so in the moment that you can touch something almost inexplicable in its power or beauty. Sometimes in poems the experience of engaging with that power or beauty is when the words are at their simplest and cleanest and without artifice.

So I shall be composting some new poems for a while whilst I make a mountain of bread sauce which my daughter and I think is one of the highlights of Christmas and a bread sauce sandwich on Boxing Day can’t be beaten. Yes I do know, dear reader, that a bread sauce sandwich amounts to a bread sandwich; but mushed bread between two slices of bread maybe with a bit of cranberry sauce thrown in and a little chicken is a guilty pleasure. Then why should I be guilty and what the hell is a guilty pleasure, one that you feel you shouldn’t indulge in? These days it seems to be used as a phrase to describe something that is not exactly ‘good taste’ but you can’t help but like. So who are the good taste police that might catch you pleasuring yourself by watching Extreme House Make Over and crying, listening to Carmina Burana because of that advert. Surely pleasure can only be guilty if it involves hurting or degrading others or if it involves the use of some unsuspecting animal life for sexual purposes?

Guilt can be attached to most things especially if adamant religion of any kind plays a part in your upbringing. Then there is the added twist of guilt becoming a pleasure in itself if you’re not careful. I have decided that maybe my New Years Resolution should be not to use the phrase guilty pleasures I will simply have pleasures and a bread sauce sandwich is fine, just fine….was that the sound of the good taste police knocking at the door?

While we are talking about guilt, now that John Kinsella and Alice Oswald have asked to be removed from the short list for the T S Eliot prize because of the financial support a Hedge Fund is giving it this year I wonder if any money or funding comes guilt free. An Art Council award is the life blood for the arts and its income comes from the tax payer. This is the price society, at this moment in time, deems the tax paying public feel able to allocate towards funding the Arts. Of course the highest tax payers may well be those engaged in businesses that may be less than squeaky clean, they could be engaged in activities that might be less than PC, should the tax derived from such businesses be deemed laundered of guilt because they have come via the public purse? I struggle with that because I am happy for a small portion of my taxes to go not only to social welfare, education the health service, transport infrastructure, national security, but also to the funding of the arts. I suspect a poll amongst tax payers would reveal many less than happy about funding the arts and poetry in particular.

I have had an Arts Council grant, two in fact, one as an individual and one as a group, I have been prepared to accept money from a government whose policy in invading Iraq I marched against, so am I a hypocrite? I don’t honestly know. I can tell myself the story that funds for the arts is untouched or unsullied by other government policies; it lives in the higher cultural planes of social organisation in a so called civilised democratic society. I will continue to struggle about the concept of good money, bad money, good sources of funding, bad sources of funding.

I fully accept these two poets made a personal statement of where their line in the sand was about this particular source of funding. I expect that from now on their sources of funding for future work or projects will be interrogated by some for signs of hypocrisy; if you refuse to sup with the devil once any cup you put to your lips from then on has to be seen as equally ‘clean’ from contamination. Hedge funds may be the spawn of the devil they may not be, they may be various shades of grey veering almost to lily white, I don’t profess to have the expertise to fathom the nuances of ethical financial dealings and of course we all come at such things with belief systems that are deeply rooted in who we are. Judging what is right in these circumstances probably comes down to what you feel to be right and the rest of the short list for the T S Eliot have, I am sure, had to go through the dark night of the soul to know where they stand on the matter. I wish them well, I am saddened for them as whoever wins is going to be seen as being the winner in the year Oswald and Kinsella pulled out because of the stand they were taking against a hedge fund backed prize.

Who wins in this maelstrom? I think free thinking, and a national poetry forum where hopefully it is shown that debate around such things can be pursued without personal rancour. And of course very few people care except those that care about poetry and arts funding and those, dear reader, are few and far between in the great scheme of things, who knows it may in be only you and me and a handful of others.

A Woman of Age

2011-12-02T20:56:00.006Z

I now feel myself to be 'A Woman of Age'. Such a description holds a certain ring to it, suggests certain virtues as well as vices and hints at losses and strengths that only age may endow you with. I have had a big birthday since we last met dear reader, I can now get free prescriptions and eye tests and may have the ability to make younger people feel guilty on the bus for not surrendering their seat to me. Stop, stop, I don’t require congratulations , unless it is to extend your good wishes at having made it thus far up the slippery pole called life. One wonders how far you can shimmy up before you start slipping back into those years you thought you’d left behind.

I was told the other day by someone that a cure for stress and anger was to squeeze a lemon ( the real variety not the plastic kind as that might result in the top shooting off and hitting some unsuspecting passer-by, although that may in itself be stress reducing). However it is not just the squeezing that helps, afterwards you are meant to smell your hand and this smell then becomes linked with the reduction of stress so thereafter throughout the day ( barring a savage soap and water hand washing session) just sniffing your hand makes you feel a little less angry or stressed. Putting aside the image of people sniffing their hand as their blood pressure rises, which in itself could lead to some encountering a less than positive response, there was a rider added to the advice. One of the early signs of Alzheimer’s is the inability to smell common things such as lemons.

Of course I immediately rushed home and smelt the lemon I had lurking at the back of the fridge but its rather green moldiferous state made it less than fragrant. Then I decided that it would be better to just let the smell of lemons waft my way one day by acident and the smell would be the more fragrant simply for the notion that it may be a sign my noodle is still firing on most pistons.

Ageing is not a bad thing, the longer a writer and poet lives the more they have to write about and the more they can mess up which is usually the source of many a decent poem. A good friend sent me a book of poems by the poet Ruth Stone, who has recently died at the age of 96. Her last collection was published when she was 93. She was sharp, funny, irreverent and had the ability to write poems that touched on the 'big' things with a lightness of touch.

Connections

What my eye sees
Goes into the dark
And passes, packet by packet
Along the ledge over the abyss
Between the lobes.
It goes so far
I think I cannot get it back
And when I least expect
Some of it returns
Not simple
as it was
Or seemed
But now complex
And freighted with the universe.

What we may think we forget may return with something added; now that’s a motto to embrace when next I go upstairs then wonder what I went up for.

I note that the adverts on my Facebook Page seem to have reset themselves to the default position of second guessing what women of a certain age may need or want. Wrinkle creams, dating sites for the over 50s and randomly, coats for dogs, cheese and free coupons for meals at distant cafes. I suspect there is, somewhere, a woman of sixty eating cheese at the kitchen table, cutting out free coupons for dinner in Glasgow and dreaming of meeting someone on a dating site whilst staring at her Chihuahua dressed in a fetching Versace number.

I Want To Tell You a Story, Are You Sitting Comfortably?

2011-10-23T17:15:00.006+01:00

So, dear reader, it is the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness yet again. the garden centres are now displaying Christmas decorations and chocolate advent calendars are available in shops. Harvest festivals have come and gone and not only is everything safely gathered in , as the words of the hymn go, but it is put away, pickled, salted, frozen or generally preserved for the winter days ahead. I have yet to turn on the central heating, donning extra jumpers and warm slippers, instead. Every year I go through a phase of defying the elements. I nurture the wild notion that one day I will be able to last out until the first snows and if they keep coming earlier and earlier I might be able to. The dog days of Autumn always get me feeling nostalgic but also help me justify time spent writing and reading in bed because I am not wasting precious sunshine by remaining indoors.

Reading in sunlight however has always been a tiring occupation but I am now assured by those that have Kindles that reflection and bounced light is a thing of the past and that text is available despite all levels of sunshine intensities. Laying by the pool or on the beach reading has never been so available and easy. Holiday reading is now not bought at the air port but downloaded in some Internet Café in Malaga, Sorrento or Florida. No longer will the traveller have to frequent the aisles of W H Smith at the airport looking for a good read to take onto the plane, the Kindle can be slipped into the hold luggage along with the 3,000 books it is holding. It is a bit like taking the local library onto Easy Jet and whilst wonderfully life enhancing I don’t want to do it , not just yet, I want to feel the paper between my fingers.

I am no Luddite, I just have a paper fetish, I like a spine, a sense of weight. Don Quixote is fat and heavy and gave me a strong sense of accomplishment when I finished it. Not that I am suggesting we should measure books by the kilo but the physicality of the book adds to my experience of it. Where on a Kindle can you experience those wonderful hand crafted poetry chap books, the quality of the paper, the delight of vellum that adds to my reading pleasure. Hopefully such things will continue to exist long after pupils sit at their desk, browses the virtual school library and download their next book and the system logs and notes their choices automatically. I am sure the system could also be set so that only books at the pupil’s level of ability could be shown to them in the catalogue. I know we are not even far from a child reading out loud to their Kindle type notebook and the notebook halting and correcting them when they make a mistake perhaps sounding the word out so the pupil can make a correct stab at synthesis. No longer will there be children stacked and waiting to land with an adult so they can read to them. However where will be the warmth, the human contact and shared excitement of opening a book and looking through it, wondering what it might contain. Reading is not just a lone art it can be a shared experience.

Those children that have had a fun and warm fuzzy feeling from snuggling up to an adult and being read a story regularly, usually learn to read faster and maintain the habit of reading far into their adult life. I listened to a radio programme that was investigating the marketing of programmes to children such as Peppa Pig. The TV series immediately has the spin off of toys, DVDs, clothes, lunch boxes and books. Something that makes any child want to read is good but I wonder whether such marketing destroys something as wel,l in its ready packed consumer experience. I heard someone on the radio ( yes dear reader along with a paper fetish I am a Radio 4 groupie) talk about the fact that in some ways the art of the story was destroyed by the written word. That writing a story down fossilised it. In the era of the oral tradition stories were passed on and people would miss out the boring bits, extend and slightly tweak the exciting bits or add to the vividness of the setting. This process kept the story as an organic living thing that responded to its audiences’ interests, needs and lives. I am becoming involved in some story telling projects in schools and I find it fascinating how much, even very young children, want the opportunity to tell their story, to stand before a class and recount a story they have heard.

I am toying with the idea of getting someone to make me a story teller’s staff, one adult sized, one child sized. It is common practice for some story tellers to put on a special coat or cloak to give a visual prompt to the idea that now you are listening to a story. Allowing children to do the same thing is very empowering and very young children have no problem in telling the same story over and over again to each other adding their own little embellishments. You don’t have to be a Saxon elder huddled round the camp fire with other villagers to want to embellish and improve on the story of Beowulf to entertain and captivate your audience. A short incantation that children and adults say before telling a story can also be a great lead in to signal that now we are in the land of the imagination. “Let those that have ears to hear draw near and listen to my tale of a time when there were princes, princesses, animals that could talk and adventures to be had by those who were daring and brave,” is always a great attention grabber before you even launch into any fairy story. I have even used that tactic in another form when introducing children to poems especially ballads such as The Highwayman or The Listeners. I would never describe myself as a story teller but I am passionate about children being excited by them and sometimes you don’t need gadgetry, technology or devices to engage children with a story you just need the skills of one human being telling a story well to another and giving them the space and time to pass that story on to another. In such a way can the story thrive and grow and become part of the fabric of our society. The written word them becomes another doorway to a world children have already been excited by.

So much thought about stories and story telling is going on at Blogspot Towers. This also seems to be feeding into my poetry head and poetry tutor head as well so all things are useful that excite you about words.

If you want to listen to a consummate story teller listen to Eamon Kelly, a master of the art

I do know that momentous things are going on in the world, Gaddafi is dead, the European Market is wobbling, a Defence Minister is amazingly stupid …would you invite a friend to work and let them sit in on private meetings even when the higher management at work have specifically told you not to.. the man must have a blind spot the size of the House of Commons or an ego as large. Anything else …well all seems to be quiet and calm now at The Poetry Society, wounds may still be being licked but business as usual or rather as it should be seems to be being resumed. The small Dingly Dell that is the Poetry Village is more tranquil and no episode of Midsummer Murders will now be filmed there.

Net-Kipple and My Secret Life at The Dump.

2011-09-04T14:39:00.008+01:00

I have not blogged during August and late July because it is the summer holidays and I had set myself the task of catching up on the novel, some poems and reading for my next Poetry School Course on Point of View.

I did this but not necessarily as much as I would have wished to. Why not? Because I got distracted. By what you may ask dear reader? And I will reply by saying, nothing much.

I am a great follower of tangents; I can go off on one quite easily. Tangents present an opportunity to find out all manner of things I don’t really have to know. The things I don’t have to know, I tell myself, may be precisely those things I might find useful one day, like the piece of string, the AA battery (power status unknown) , the small blunt blue crayon, found at the back of a kitchen drawer. The small detritus (detriti?) of knowing could one day prove useful or at the very least help my team win at Quiz night at the local pub.

I spent some time this summer trying to throw away or give to charity shops items and books I did not need or use any more. The men at my local Refuse Recycling Centre started to call me by my first name and enquire if I was moving house, so frequent were my visits. Even whilst at the dump, I kept spotting other people’s items in skips I longed to rescue and take home, so profligate did their abandonment seem.

I exercised restraint; I hurled black bags away like a champion shot putter. I assuaged my guilt and environmental consciousness by advertising things on the local Freecycle web site and four big bags of novels went to The British Heart Foundation. Old mice chewed discards extracted from my garden shed, however, were piled into the back of the Clio and ejected from my life.

I have written about kipple before, as Philip K Dick coined it and at the end of the blog given you a scene from the novel ( Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep..which was adapted into the film Bladerunner) in which he writes about it.

I can recognise that stuff can gather around us in an almost sinister way, it mounts up without serving any useful purpose. Yet still I can watch ‘Life of Grime’ and empathise slightly with the man who allows newspapers to stack up over the years, the woman who rescues old battered dolls to a point where she has only one seat she can sit in, the twins who never let a milk bottle escape from the house.

This is, in the extreme, a psychiatric condition I know but I nurture the seeds of this in my own life. I have stuff therefore I am. By stuff I don’t mean a rampant display of materialism but those items that are generated just by being. There must be an existential angst associated with identity and things we surround ourselves with, both intentionally and unintentionally.

Do Facebook friends sometimes count as kipple? Those with over a 2,000 such friends can only be intent on self advertising and serious networking in order to achieve an end. They must have realised very early on that the word friend means something totally different on this site. Does the use of the word kipple now have to be extended to cover all forms of internet accumulation? Is there net-kipple? Is this blog just another example of net-kipple, something that just hangs in the ether once read or even without being read and takes up some notion of space ( but not as we know it Jim)?

I was astounded when I cleaned my browsing history out, how many sites I had visited in the space of just a month. My browsing history was leaning heavily towards kipplisation. I now set my history time span to just one day and even that can, at times, produce visits that seem randomly bizarre.

I needed to research mortuaries in St Petersburg for my novel and that alone generated twenty four sites and pages examined. The physical ability to wander tangentially by following links probably increases exponentially the detritus in my computer’s cache. If things that accumulate randomly on my computer were translated into paper I would have to camp out in the garden and give the whole house over to them.

I have been editing some poems and fiction recently and realised how much kipple can accumulate in the written language. Do I need that word, does the reader need that word, that paragraph, how much wordage have I accumulated because I can rather than because I need to?

The old adage of ‘show not tell’ can leave you giddy with loss but there are also words that build up without the writer’s conscious intent. I have word ‘tics’ that accumulate and which my brain strangely doesn’t even seem to register, there are probably some in this blog post, in fact I know there must be some.

Not all poets and writers choose to use the short punchy sentence. The lyricism of the longer line or sentence can serve the writer’s individual voice better but I am trying to discipline myself to recognise what I need rather than what I think I need. I am also working harder at seeing the things that by constant presence become unseen. I am sure the elderly twins don’t see their thousands of milk bottles in the same way others see them. Perceiving and seeing are two different things, the former being ties in more closely to the vagaries of emotional reasoning.

The era of the assiduous editor who lovingly trawls through every line and sends his or her notes to the poet or writer is a luxury many publishers cannot afford, especially in the small independent presses. This then makes the role of writer as editor even more crucial and highlights the importance of ongoing workshops for writers and their access to good feedback from knowledgeable individuals. I suspect quite a few Arts Council grants are in part used to pay for such feedback.

Now if I could de-kipple more easily in life I wouldn’t be on first name terms with the men at the dump. However I embrace and am thankful for all those good souls out there who give me feedback on my work and allow me to see my ‘stuff’ as others see it.

Extract from
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
J.R.Isidore explaining kipple to Pris

- Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers of yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.
- I see.
- There's the First Law of Kipple, "Kipple drives out non-kipple." Like Gresham's law about bad money. And in these apartments there's been nobody there to fight the kipple.
- So it has taken over completely. Now I understand.
- Your place, here, this apartment you've picked - it's too kipple-ized to live in. We can roll the kipple-factor back; we can do like I said, raid the other apartments. But -
- But what?
- We can't win.
- Why not?
- No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and non-kipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization. Except of course for the upward climb of Wilber Mercer.

'Don't Ask What Poetry Can Do for You, Ask What.....'

2011-07-17T16:34:00.011+01:00

I spent last week end at the Ledbury Poetry Festival and closed the festival with Joy of Six. I was put up by a lovely local family who made myself and a fellow Sixer more than welcome. I never ceased to be amazed at the kindness of strangers (she says taking a Blanche Dubois pose) who are willing to invite poets into their homes, we are a strange breed often with stranger habits and yet these good souls open their homes to us; so three cheers for all the unsung heroes who put up poets all over the country.

Ledbury is a great festival with a healthy ‘broad church’ of poets from pink fairy ladies enticing children in to create poetry cup cakes, to full-on performance such as the Anti Poet, to Anthony Thwaite, who would not feel aggrieved at being described as not the 'Anti-poet'. The resident poet for the Festival was Ian Duhig who produced some really interesting work as a result of that residency. One of the stars for me was Helen Mort reading from her new pamphlet the 'Lie of the Land' especially a sequence of poems about the Miners strike in 1984 and in particular the Battle of Orgreave. She talks about where this sequence ‘Scab’ comes from on her own blog here so I won’t reinvent the wheel by outlining its background suffice it to say she drew in part on her experience of watching a re-make documentary film made by Jeremy Deller. It was a good reading, in fact I was so slow out of the starting blocks at the end I missed buying a copy of the pamphlet as it sold out in a flurry of eager poetry punters.

I found listening to this sequence engendered a mix of emotions; my uncle was a miner but significantly a Nottinghamshire miner. Mention the Nottinghamshire miners in some parts of South Wales, County Durham or Yorkshire and they may well spit in your face for what was seen as their treachery in not coming out on strike in 84. In fact I happened to mention that my uncle was a miner when once doing a reading in South Wales and when the penny dropped that he was a Nottinghamshire miner the air went distinctly frosty. If you listen to these audio memoirs of Nottinghamshire miners you can hear the very real dilemma these Nottinghamshire miners found themselves in as their region had balloted not to join the strike and they eventually formed their own union.

By then my uncle had died in his fifties of cancer and silicosis brought on by years at the pit. I don’t know whether he would have ever crossed a picket line if he had still been working but I tend to think he wouldn’t have, not because I want to have a ‘rosy’ PC view of my families socialist credentials but because he would have hated to be called a scab by anyone, in those mining communities that word holds such enormous power and baggage that it still has the ability to separate whole families to this day.

As a couple they both understood what the cohesive power of a trade union could achieve. My aunt, his wife, was one of the first female shop steward at the Players cigarette factory and she had fought long and hard not only for female representation in the union but for better pay and conditions for female workers. I listened for years to her tales and my mother’s tales (she also worked there before she married) of the conditions in that factory for women in the thirties and forties. I wrote a sequence of poems about her experience and my mother's using an old copy of the regulations issued by the employers at that time. It was part of the way of thinking for them that a union was the surest safeguard against exploitation.

Thankfully the coal dust made the decision for my uncle before he had to face the dilemma of whether to come out on strike and now all the pits have gone in Nottinghamshire and the slag heap from the pit that you could see from my aunt and uncle’s house is now greened over and part of a new park.

So to rewind, I found Helen Mort’s sequence very moving and also very exciting because it managed to combine real poetry with social commentary without becoming polemic which it can so often do. I wonder whether poetry on the whole has tended to offload strong social commentary onto the singer song writers these days. Poetry in the past has always been at the fore front of political and social commentary and in many other countries throughout the world it still is. If we English (and I am being specific here) write about it we often dress it up in irony or satire , this is a well established tradition, political views should only be inferred from poems. Perhaps poets (and I include myself in this) are a little afraid of appearing a little too self-righteous because poetry is supposed to show not tell, is supposed to somehow remain unsullied by the poets own strongly held views. These views are meant to be inferred by how the poet writes or the subject matter the poet chooses. Palestinian poets, Balkan poets, North Korean poets, all poets who have written poems of direct confrontation that have made them at risk of imprisonment or worse, they have created work of great courage, probing the status quo. Around the world words are important as they carry the weight of certain freedoms.

Here in the UK , well probably in Western societies in the main, we can write whatever we like within the current laws against slander, libel , racism and sexual discrimination and very little happens. Consequences are minimal, even Ezra Pound is still regarded as within the poetry ‘church’ despite his fascism and racism; he even wrote that his imprisonment was conducive to writing, with unwanted visitors kept from his door and a place assigned to him for his writing. The Welsh, Scots and Irish have produced twentieth and twenty-first century poets who were and are formed and informed by their political context, political freedoms are still a burning issue and continue to influence poetry. Sometimes I long for a bit more passion and fire in English poetry at present. Of course I know there are a number of poets who have written poems that contain aspects of real ‘social blood and guts’ without resorting to rant but they seem to be few and far between. Of the ‘bigger’ names’ , Farley, Tony Harrison and Armitage can pull out the political stops in a beautifully crafted way when they put their minds to it. Sometimes I want to feel that a poem is really important to the poet, that it comes from a passionate place, that if they didn’t create the poem they would be eaten up by the need to write it.

The governance of the Poetry Society is still up for debate and an EGM may help or hinder the better running of that society. A lot of poets or those interested in poetry have been tweeting, blogging, Facebooking, emailing, Youtubing and generally addressing the issues from various viewpoints. To take a step back I find it healthy that people want to take their freedoms and their rights seriously, that those currently in power are questioned and held accountable and that people are passionate about how poetry can best be made a thriving part of society . However I doubt whether how anyone votes at the EGM will resonate down through the years as strongly as the outcomes of votes for the Miners Strike in 84. There may be a bit of finger pointing, general bitchiness for a while and some may come out of the whole affair worse or better than they went into it. If the whole edifice comes tumbling down then it will be difficult for a number of people but not for as many as a local factory closing, as has happened near me. Poets will continue to write, some will get published and a few will be read and the best of them may be remembered into the next generation and perhaps beyond. I suppose to misquote Kennedy the question is ‘Don't ask what poetry can do for you but what poetry can do for society’. Writing poems about what really matters most to people in their lives, be that emotionally, socially or politically, may be a small part of that doing.

Caesar's Wife and Elvis Wander Betterton Street.

2011-07-02T15:33:00.011+01:00

I have been quiet for a while as things to do and the amount of time available seem to have somehow got out of sync and an hour for Peter has been robbed to pay Paul and the blog got well and truly mugged. So I make up for that now by assuring you dear reader that I may be gone but you have not been forgotten entirely.
Of course the buzz in the poetry world at the moment or in small parts of it at least is about The Poetry Society and what is transpiring there. What is truly transpiring I have no idea, one can simply go on the facts; The Chairman of the board Peter Carpenter has resigned, the president Jo Shapcott has resigned, the Finance Officer Paul Ranford and the Director Judith Palmer have also resigned. No one at the Poetry Society has clearly stated why there has been a spate of resignation leaving it to blogs, Facebook and general gossip to make the rounds all of which contains some clear facts, some innuendo, some considered speculation and some wild allegations. Some has been anonymous; some from those well placed to know what is going on, although those two groups are not mutually exclusive.
Kate Clanchy is organising a petition to call for an EGM to address the concerns Poetry Society Members have and the Society itself has announced a meeting on the 22nd July to address the way forward and future plans for the Society. There is a big Arts Council grant at stake here, although it is doubtful if that will just disappear in a puff of smoke should the furore become even more public and vitriolic. However public funds for poetry have been slashed in other areas, so the Arts Council will want to know that they are not casting their bread upon decidedly choppy if not stormy waters.
I left the Poetry Society last year to join English Pen, which fights for the rights of writers, journalists and poets who are in countries where free speech is a very precious commodity. I would have liked to have remained a member but I couldn’t afford both. However I am a tax payer so as such I do have a stake in how public funds are spent. I would be suspicious of money being poured into any organisation, particularly one that is also a registered Charity where key figures have resigned, there is obvious unrest amongst members and the board is doing a heavy spin on lets look to the future rather than past events. If a public company acted like that I would not be comfortable about my widow’s mite going into their coffers without some public, reasonable debate in which I could hear all sides of the situations and place the flurry of resignations in context.If someone rattled a charity tin in front of me and I knew the charity was experiencing such difficulties then I would think twice before dropping a coin into the box.
It may be that everything comes down to personality clashes, it may come down to a clash of deeply held opposing views about how the Poetry Society should promote poetry, it may be due to genuine misunderstandings, it may be down to some kind of power struggle between various factions. It is probably a mix of all of these yet none of these reasons is beyond debate, especially in a publicly funded charity.
There may well be a clear divide about certain things but the trustees have to be seen to be even-handed and part of the facilitation of a solution rather than the source of the problem. The very name trustee implies a person in which we have full trust.No one will ever agree how £360,000 pounds can best be spent to encourage and support poetry in the UK. However the Arts Council by its actions in supporting The Poetry Society to this financial extent whilst closing the door in the face of other poetry organisations have clearly made a statement about the best use of the public purse. Those negotiations as far as I know have not yet been completed and I will want to know what questions the Arts Council have asked the Poetry Society about their organisation, the management, the board and the cohesive support they have for their current state of being, let alone their future plans. The money is obviously being given on the basis of specific goals they intend to achieve and have put in writing; anything else would be a reckless use of public money. What assurances can the board and the management give to the Arts Council that they are in a position to put in place strategies to achieve those goals with the support of the majority of its members and its current team (two of which, Board Chairman and Director are only temporary placements). They may be very well placed, they may not but they have to be seen to be at least striving to be in that place.
I have been a public activist all my life, I have a stake in society and in any government that seeks to run it. I vote at all levels of government and encourage others to do so. Whether or not I am a member of the Poetry Society is irrelevant, I still have a stake in any organisation or charity which seeks public funding by the democratically elected government. I expect such organisations to be as open and transparent as I would wish my government to be. That is not always possible, the law sometimes is used to protect those who might be harmed by such transparency but there has to be a very good reason why the behaviour and views of people in a publicly funded organisation is not accountable to the public as well as its members and to the trustees. I would hope that reasons for people’s resignation are clearly stated and are open and honest. It may be that their view of a situation is at odds with other views but any organisation should be robust and healthy enough to withstand even the harshest of critics and be able to counter the arguments with measured and clear ripostes Such good reasons for this not happening may well exist, they may not. I cannot believe poetry needs to go down the Murdoch and Gigg’s road of gagging but if it does then it should state clearly why it does and if it does.

There may be an element that believe that today’s news is tomorrows chip-paper and that simply keeping a dignified silence will eventually lead to the situation returning to a relative normal and business as usual status. An EGM or a GM may well not bring forth a solution it may even inflame the situation, if not handled well, but I hope the Arts Council are keeping a close eye on events and attending those meetings because other Arts and Poetry organisations have lost out spectacularly to keep HMS Poetry Society afloat and if the ship is actually holed below the water line and slowly sinking under the weight of either apathy or gainsayers to its current policies and management styles then I for one would withhold any payment until the situation is clearer and as a tax payer I shall be writing to the Chair of the Arts Council to that effect. This may well cause hardship and pain now but other organisations in the Arts have had to face such times and I don’t think The Poetry Society should be immune from the same sort of close scrutiny other organisations have had to bear. Woolly goals such as promoting and supporting poetry and poets can avoid the question of the way something is done. The ethos of clear, decisive and fair management and substantial support from the board and members has to be seen to be in operation. Caesar’s wife has to be above suspicion but has to be seen to be so.The Poetry Society has done some amazingly good things for poetry and poets and I hope it continues to do so in a way that all can support whole heartedly, if not that, then in a way the majority can embrace whole heartedly, that's the way it goes in a democratic society. Poetry will survive come what may, I think it is not a delicate flower , more a spectacular beautiful tenacious weed that can grow out of street pavements and on wastelands but lets not get to a situation when the poetry gets trampled under foot in the wrangling for what is best for it.

And here is a bit of music to end on from the king that might be appropriate

Let’s hope it all doesn’t all end up like this.

Tag wrestling: Eurovision versus Emily Dickinson and Mozart

2011-05-15T19:28:00.014+01:00

I am in post Eurovision Song Contest mode. I always think it is a little like watching a car crash involving loads of people from a variety of countries squashing into buses that career into each other and then observing who will help out who. Mid Europeans, Balkans, ex Russian countries, Scandinavians there is no end to how each country's ‘voting panel’ rise to the challenge of ensuring old grudges are born out, alliances confirmed and the odd song shambles its way through the wreckage to win. This year Azerbaijan won, which is still fairly oil rich so staging the fest next year won’t put a dent in their balance of payments. Indeed perhaps the various juries bore in mind who could afford to run it when voting. No point voting for a country that hasn’t got a couple of goats to rub together when the Continent’s whole press descend and demand running water, flush toilets and MacDonalds, not to mention a stage big enough to accommodate a small army. At least this year there would uni-cycles and Jedwood to ensure the ridiculous continued to be represented.

I have been working on two poems at the moment, one of which sprung out of the BBC call for submissions for a poem about one of the pieces being performed at this years proms. I noticed Mahler’s Ninth was being performed and as I have a very particular memory associated with that piece I thought I would have a go. Memory is such a tricky thing and writing about a piece of music can either start pushing you down the autobiographical route or as I was tempted down the path of locating the piece in the biographical life of the composer. Mahler’s Ninth was his last full symphony, a work he never got to hear performed, dying in his forties before it could be played by an orchestra. I presume that Mahler must have heard it all in his head but in that I may be influenced by scenes from Amadeus where Mozart is dictating his great Requiem mass to Salieri… the notes were merely written down as a form of dictation from everything he could hear in his head, each instrument each musical line. I think I have been overly influenced by films when I think of how great composers work. This scene from Amadeus has always stuck in my head, such a beautifully crafted piece of writing and acting and comes close to getting under the skin of how great art is not just made but lives almost like an overwhelming animal inside one person.

A friend has a short story collection called True North. The story which the collection is named for is loosely based on the pianist Glen Gould and is well worth a read at how fiction and music can weave together.Gould's playing and interpretation of Bach is world renowned and it is interesting to see some of the traits displayed in the portrayal of Mozart in Amadeus is reflected a little in Glenn Gould’s quixotic approachto music. I am not saying that Gould was in any way close to Mozart on genius but that sometimes there is a passion, a talent so trapped inside the frailness of a human body that there is almost sensory overload. It takes discipline to compose and play well but it takes a dark fire to drive that discipline beyond mere magnificent to sublime. I suppose the old understanding of the word sublime as something transcendent is interesting.

Music has this way of expressing its genius in a way beyond itself, it can be externalised in an instrument or an orchestra. A writer, however, only has the same currency as the medium he works in to try and convey something beyond words.
It was interesting at Wordfest at Cambridge that Hisham Matar said after his talk and reading that it is always difficult to explain how one writes using the same medium as the art itself.

Musicians have been inspired by words for centuries; the earliest Latin masses inspired a musical interpretation in plainsong and later was a source of inspiration for many composers in great choral works. Poems have often been set to music by great composers but making that exchange a two way street is always difficult. Writing a poem about music has to rely on the evocation of something beyond words that engages with how a piece of music operates in the human psyche but which still has to be captured by them. Therein lies the skill.

The fascinating chill that music leaves
Is Earth's corroboration
Of Ecstasy's impediment --
'Tis Rapture's germination
In timid and tumultuous soil
A fine -- estranging creature --
To something upper wooing us
But not to our Creator –

Emily Dickinson

One of the best poems I know about music and what it can do is by Philip Levine about Charlie Parker. Personally I think Levine and Dickinson are singing the same song but in two part harmony.

Call It Music by Philip Levine

Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song
in my own breath. I'm alone here
in Brooklyn Heights, late morning, the sky
above the St. George Hotel clear, clear
for New York, that is. The radio playing
"Bird Flight," Parker in his California
tragic voice fifty years ago, his faltering
"Lover Man" just before he crashed into chaos.
I would guess that outside the recording studio
in Burbank the sun was high above the jacarandas,
it was late March, the worst of yesterday's rain
had come and gone, the sky washed blue. Bird
could have seen for miles if he'd looked, but what
he saw was so foreign he clenched his eyes,
shook his head, and barked like a dog--just once--
and then Howard McGhee took his arm and assured him
he'd be OK. I know this because Howard told me
years later that he thought Bird could
lie down in the hotel room they shared, sleep
for an hour or more, and waken as himself.
The perfect sunlight angles into my little room
above Willow Street. I listen to my breath
come and go and try to catch its curious taste,
part milk, part iron, part blood, as it passes
from me into the world. This is not me,
this is automatic, this entering and exiting,
my body's essential occupation without which
I am a thing. The whole process has a name,
a word I don't know, an elegant word not
in English or Yiddish or Spanish, a word
that means nothing to me. Howard truly believed
what he said that day when he steered
Parker into a cab and drove the silent miles
beside him while the bright world
unfurled around them: filling stations, stands
of fruits and vegetables, a kiosk selling trinkets
from Mexico and the Philippines. It was all
so actual and Western, it was a new creation
coming into being, like the music of Charlie Parker
someone later called "glad," though that day
I would have said silent, "the silent music
of Charlie Parker." Howard said nothing.
He paid the driver and helped Bird up two flights
to their room, got his boots off, and went out
to let him sleep as the afternoon entered
the history of darkness. I'm not judging
Howard, he did better than I could have
now or then. Then I was 19, working
on the loading docks at Railway Express
coming day by day into the damaged body
of a man while I sang into the filthy air
the Yiddish drinking songs my Zadie taught me
before his breath failed. Now Howard is gone,
eleven long years gone, the sweet voice silenced.
"The subtle bridge between Eldridge and Navarro,"
they later wrote, all that rising passion
a footnote to others. I remember in '85
walking the halls of Cass Tech, the high school
where he taught after his performing days,
when suddenly he took my left hand in his
two hands to tell me it all worked out
for the best. Maybe he'd gotten religion,
maybe he knew how little time was left,
maybe that day he was just worn down
by my questions about Parker. To him Bird
was truly Charlie Parker, a man, a silent note
going out forever on the breath of genius
which now I hear soaring above my own breath
as this bright morning fades into afternoon.
Music, I'll call it music. It's what we need
as the sun staggers behind the low gray clouds
blowing relentlessly in from that nameless ocean,
the calm and endless one I've still to cross.

Village of the Dolls, Garden Centres Out to Get You

2011-04-20T00:13:00.010+01:00

Tonight I watched a documentary film called Village of the Dolls, it is about Mark Hogancamp, an American man who built a whole small universe of dolls in his back garden. He does this as a means of expressing something about his life after he was brutally attacked and left severely injured outside a bar. His World War 2 village is called Marwencol and within it he creates scenes that his dolls play out which he then photographs. If you haven’t seen this documentary, it is astounding. Its view of how a man, so badly physically and emotionally damaged by others, struggles to make sense of that event, had me wondering at times whether this was just a voyeuristic look into the life of a man who may not be fully able to protect himself from the intrusion of others. By watching was I colluding with this intrusion? This is of course the old chestnut that is served up with documentaries about vulnerable people but it is still a question I feel I have to at least acknowledge and address. I think the tenderness and poignancy of his work however and his need to talk about it, makes the documentary a study in the triumph of what the human psyche is beautifully capable of when it attempts to heal itself. The fact that Mark is a cross dresser and pours so much of himself into his girl dolls as well as into his alter ego male doll representation, is touching, particularly when placed into the context of the attack which was triggered by his cross dressing Here is a link to a trailer about the documentary which gives you some flavour of it. The one thing I found important about the documentary was Hogancamp’s emphasis on how the building of his world was the way he could make sure that those who beat him so badly could not rob him of his imagination, the thing that made him most himself.

Sunshine has been conspicuous by its presence. Always a good way to feel that soon it will be skies filled with aerobatic swallows and sharpened elbows at the garden centre for bedding plants. I have an intimate knowledge of garden centres as my mother loved them. In the last few years of her life, even when the Alzheimer’s had a firm foothold she would love an afternoon being pushed in her wheelchair down aisle after aisle displaying all things garden . When garden centres embraced coffee shops and crafts, clothes and even pets her joy was complete. We could spend hours moving from hamsters to geraniums, passing jumpers and jigsaws on the way to a frothy coffee and cake. We could also add to her stock of hoarded packets of sugar, sachets of tomato sauce and mustard, she was a contented woman in the presence of potted plants.

I do not have green fingers, I am a poor gardener and sometimes plants flourish in spite of, not because of my care. I am not likely to be pastoral poet, I might be able to spot a host of golden daffodils but anything more difficult botanically than that and I am reaching for my Guide to Wildflowers and blowing the dust off it. This is not to say I don’t rejoice in the wonders of nature but more that I can’t put a name to them and don’t seem able to nurture them personally. However my garden does grow, not just with silver bells and cockle shells but elder, hawthorn, Camellia, ivy, a lot of ivy, brambles, dandelions, orange blossom, honeysuckle, bluebells, holly, convolvulus, ceanothus, daisies, buttercups and grass – so many types of grass, more types of grass than you would believe grasses. Nature given a clear run can manage just fine without the use of grow bags and all purpose plant food. Let be and there would be ivy covering Canary Wharf in no time, daisies on the M25, dandelions on the hallowed lawns of Wimbledon. That’s what I most love about nature sometimes it is always out to get you of course this is written by the woman who was bitten by a squirrel and returned from six weeks away to find convolvulus and ivy half way up all the drainpipes.

Hyperthymesia involving Shatner, Heaney and Strange Things My Mother Said

2011-04-11T22:11:00.011+01:00

I watched a rather dodgy American comedy programme called Sh*t My Father Says which is loosely based on a Twitter feed that gained a lot of followers. I am still recovering from watching William Shatner deliver I’m too Sexy for My Shirt at a kari-oke night, the man is eighty which cuts him some slack.

However I started to think about all those bizarre pieces of information or sayings my mother chose to pass on to me, sometimes at inopportune moments, sometimes with some strange twisting of vocabulary. Here is just a small sample.

Never go out with a man with thin lips.
Never wash your hair when it’s a new moon or you have a period and definitely not if both coincide.
Never carry an umbrella around nervous dogs.
You can’t buy experience you have to pay for it.
A long green dress is likely to make you look like a stick of rhubarb, specially as you blush easily.
Sitting on cold concrete will give you piles.
Your granny could read Guinness froth like the tea leaves but only saw a four leaf clover once and then the man got knocked over by a coal lorry the next day.
You’re only tall because I overdosed you on Rosehip syrup.
If they are too neat they are probably German.
Too much coffee can undo all the good a Guinness does you.(Bit of a theme here)
Robins bring a message of imminent loss ( that one was a bit of a nightmare at Christmas as cards with chirpy robins dropped onto the mat).
No red and white flowers together, unless there is ivy in the house.
All brass ornaments off window sills during thunderstorms as they attract lightening.
Over jiggled babies can become cross eyed.
Swearing in cold blood in like kissing an old uncle. ( Never fathomed that one)
Wearing a vest is essential for the health of your kidneys.
Tripe soothes the stomach.
You probably failed your driving test because the examiner looked Welsh.
Going into hospital on a Saturday is never a good idea, all the doctors are tired by then.
Your granny had more cats than money.
She ended up in Mapperley (a psychiatric hospital) because she was having celluloid delusions.
The car won’t start because there is condescension under the bonnet.
You can tell he loves her, he gets constipated when she’s in hospital.
Your granddad went to the barber’s to get his hair cut and that led to pneumonia.
Their neighbours sit naked in the conservative.
She had pantomime poisoning and just blew up.
I can remember the Battenburg disaster, it was all over the papers.

I am researching memory for my second novel. I studied psychology at University both for my first and Master’s degree and have always found it a fascinating subject. Some traumatic experiences may be blocked out for emotional reasons, others experiences may be so small as to be immediately discarded. However under hypnosis the mind can summon up minute details that we think we have forgotten. There are those that would argue that these retrieved memories can in fact be constructed after the event and like eyewitness statements can be compiled unknowingly from a mish-mash of clues or expectations and bare only a small resemblance to the actual event. There are some who believe everything we experience is stored in the brain somewhere but that good memory is the art of retrieval, some can do it more easily than others. How we store information is embedded in all the memory skill exercises that you can find in books and on the internet. Attaching information to items along an imagined walk or as you move through a house is a tried and trusted memory aid going back to Socrates, yet everyday pieces of information and experiences cannot easily be recalled in such a precise and practised manner.

I was fascinated to find a programme that examined the phenomenon of super autobiographical memory when researching. There are a handful of people (five in this programme but probably more who don’t even realise they possess it) who have perfect recall of everything that they have experienced usually from ten to twelve years old onwards. Ask them what happened on 22nd March 1991 and they can recall with perfect clarity, what day of the week it was, what they did, the weather, any important event that happened in the news etc. They were all subject to a battery of tests that verified that they could do this accurately. Everything is filed away, stored and accessible with immediate vividness. One person who has this kind of memory finds this constant torrent of memory almost intolerable whereas the others in this programme seemed to be quite pleased and comfortable with their ability. They seem to be able to put the memories in the library and only visit it when they want or need to.

The neuroscientist involved in the study presumed he would find nothing special in their MRI scans of their brains and was surprised to find they had significantly bigger temporal lobes (the place where memory usually happens) and large caudate nucleus, a site deep in the brain associated with higher order motor control and sometimes with those suffering from OCD. It could be that some people can develop an obsession with memory to the point where nearly everything gets stored and recalled yet this does not seem to become dysfunctional. There may be others who exist with this kind of super memory yet have not been identified, some younger people may not even be aware that we do not all have this ability and others may hide the ability in case they may be seen as some kind of freak. We may be in X men territory here, powers that some may hide or channel into acceptable channels. The concept of photographic or eidetic memory has been dismissed by many scientists but those with this super autobiographic memory (Hyperthymesia) have something that comes pretty close, this ability coupled with high intelligence to channel it may be as good.

The constant accurate recall of past events may be a blessing or a curse, to the poet or the writer it certainly makes autobiography easier but all those poems about their own past would probably be no different, no matter how vividly something in conjured up or rerun like a DVD, complete with emotion and smell; the art is always in the way we see it and the way we tell it. The poem does not rely on accuracy, the truth of a poem never lies on perfect recall, it is not important if Seamus Heaney ever really watched his father digging, or Wordsworth happened on a lot of daffodils.

When I was giving out The selected Works of Seamus Heaney for World Book Night, I was distributing some in a sheltered housing accommodation complex. I came across a very elderly man, who turned out to be Irish, digging in his tiny garden (a strange coincidence). He asked me to read one of the poems from the book, so I chose

The Old Smoothing Iron

Often I watched her lift it
from where its compact wedge
rode the back of the stove
like a tug at the anchor.

To test its heat she’d stare
and spit in its iron face
or hold it up next her cheek
to divine the stored danger.

Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing iron

like a plane into linen,
like the resentment of women.
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass

through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

After I finished reading it, his eyes filled with tears and he told me about watching his mother do exactly the same thing when he was a boy. Then he said how touched he was that someone could use such a simple thing and simple words to make something so beautiful and real. So the right words in the right place and the memory is more than just a finely detailed description of a past event and yet it is also that. The tension between what the moment was and what the moment still is creates something dynamic and universal.

Have You Heard The One About Bishop, Marquez and the Whale

2011-03-29T21:36:00.009+01:00

I have been busy researching in preparation for the series of workshops I am running for The Poetry School with Jane Monson. It is exploring the concept and practice of narrative in the poem. This subject has always fascinated me as the story is something that has been with mankind for as long as we have used language. I am sure the story was part of Neolithic man’s life. Cave paintings suggest that man understood the power of the imagination wrapped as it was in concepts of sympathetic magic. Perhaps all stories are forms of sympathetic magic a conjuring of the ‘what if’ for us to try on for size. Stories do have a purpose not necessarily as in a moral as such but as a playing out of scenarios. Are stories sometimes our way of being the kittens swiping away and a dangled piece of string in order to hone the skills of catching our prey? Do we unconsciously rehearse our own reactions to situations through the medium of a story? How would we cope with that eventuality, why is someone behaving in a particular way, do we think he or she should have done that. Of course the old great stories, the ballads pin us to our history, to where we have come from, what we owe, what we admire in ourselves and others. Beowulf told tales of monsters, what hides in the dark , what we fear and what we can aspire to in courage, how we can overcome fear. Such things were important in times when fear and death were constant companions. Fairy tales, even putting aside Jungian interpretations, hold universal themes, a certain kind of rough mirror up to our sophisticated faces.
Exploring poems for their narrative always seems to tempt me, what story do we create from the best of words in the very best place? I do not of course suggest that poems are always stories dressed up or cloaked from the reader but it is surprising how we cannot help but join up the dots sometimes; create a whole from the sum of the parts. There can be a ghost narrator in the machine now and then. I know a couple of well known poets who often speak about listening to what the poem has to tell them, sometimes that may be a story.

Here is a sestina by Elizabeth Bishop that manages to make that often difficult and boring form play to the strengths of what a story might demand; a series of events, a tantalising suggestion of who the ‘we’ might be, a switch of perspective from we to I and back, a beautifully described clear setting but with a surreal quality to it, gestures towards another story ( The Sermon on the Mount), the back history, if you care to investigate, of it having been written during the depression. What also sets this poem apart is that the sestina form can often just whirl around like an interminable carousel; this word, that word and here they come again, which can play against any sense of linear advance.

A Miracle at Breakfast

At six o'clock we were waiting for coffee,
waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb
that was going to be served from a certain balcony
--like kings of old, or like a miracle.
It was still dark. One foot of the sun
steadied itself on a long ripple in the river.

The first ferry of the day had just crossed the river.
It was so cold we hoped that the coffee
would be very hot, seeing that the sun
was not going to warm us; and that the crumb
would be a loaf each, buttered, by a miracle.
At seven a man stepped out on the balcony.

He stood for a minute alone on the balcony
looking over our heads toward the river.
A servant handed him the makings of a miracle,
consisting of one lone cup of coffee
and one roll, which he proceeded to crumb,
his head, so to speak, in the clouds--along with the sun.

Was the man crazy? What under the sun
was he trying to do, up there on his balcony!
Each man received one rather hard crumb,
which some flicked scornfully into the river,
and, in a cup, one drop of the coffee.
Some of us stood around, waiting for the miracle.

I can tell what I saw next; it was not a miracle.
A beautiful villa stood in the sun
and from its doors came the smell of hot coffee.
In front, a baroque white plaster balcony
added by birds, who nest along the river,
--I saw it with one eye close to the crumb--

and galleries and marble chambers. My crumb
my mansion, made for me by a miracle,
through ages, by insects, birds, and the river
working the stone. Every day, in the sun,
at breakfast time I sit on my balcony
with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.

We licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee.
A window across the river caught the sun
as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony.

This poem has always reminded me of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story. One of his quotes I have had in my journal for years is, “What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” He also very famously remarked that fiction was invented the day Jonah got home and explained his lateness to his wife by saying he was swallowed by a whale.

The Führer of the Streptococcracy

2011-03-06T15:35:00.006Z

I have a cold, the Full Monty of a cold, pounding head, blocked nose, sore throat, sore eyes, temperature, cough, general weighty sense of self pity that usually descends with most colds. I stress this is a cold, not flu, Avian or Swine. It is just a common cold yet at the point of experience most colds do not feel at all common; they are uncommon, particular to you, always a cut above the average, run of the mill cold. I have long felt some sympathy for men when women mock their hypochondria, calling it ‘man-flu’ as if the fact that women bare children or have periods allows women the moral high ground on the cold. I think women may soldier on with a bad cold because of circumstances but secretly we would all like to take to our bed, be brought chicken soup, soft boiled eggs with soldiers, all the drugs the pharmacy can muster that purports to alleviate symptoms that prevent us raising our throbbing head from an unplumped pillow.

No one in Hollywood films seem to have colds, indeed the common cold in singularly absent form most movies. Would Norman Bates have turned out to knife Janet Leigh in the shower if he was suffering from a bad cold? Gary Cooper might have postponed his shoot out in High Noon if he couldn’t stop sneezing. John Wayne certainly couldn’t have held his reins in his teeth in True Grit if he was so bunged up with a cold, breathing was impossible except through his mouth. Kate Winslet would never have climbed out onto that prow of the Titanic if she was full of snot, indeed would she have ever managed an affair with Jack if she was confined to her cabin with a box of tissues and a hot water bottle. Arnie never has a cold, Rambo didn’t sneeze once, since 1988 John McLane in the Die Hard movies has never caught a cold from running around in just a vest in all weathers.

In literature, the odd women in Austen novels may take to her bed with a snivel so some gallant can angst or pace floors but indisposed never seemed to cover looking like shit and having a nose that can glow in the dark . No one seems to deliver their greatest speeches with a bunged up croaky voice, could Mark Anthony have got away with it if he had sounded like someone from Birmingham with acute adenoidal overtones? How would Lincoln have got away with the Gettysburg address if he had to stop to keep blowing his nose, would Elizabeth I have cheered on her troops before The Armada so well if she had to admit that she had the heart of a lion but with a bit of a bunged up nose? The common cold seems to have avoided the pivotal moments in history, if Arch Duke Ferdinand hadn’t gone to Sarajevo because he had a headache and couldn’t cope with his bunged up sinuses then World War I might have been delayed a little at least. If Lee Harvey Oswald had sneezed maybe his aim would have been off? The three hundred Spartans may never have fought so bravely and gone down in history or myth as brave men if they had managed to all have colds spread by their use of communal drinking bowls and shared washing facilities?

So I apologise dear reader that this blog is not the best blog I or anyone has ever written, it could have been if it weren’t for the fact that I had to stop to blow my nose, thence losing my thread amidst the grey cells that seem to be wrapped in a grey cotton wool at present .

I leave you with Ogden Nash, whose light humourous verse is sometimes dismissed by the poetry community. His surreal creation of rhyme by word invention has sometimes been under appreciated, I think a poet that understands my cold so well and can even invent the phrase The Führer of the Streptococcracy deserves some praise.

Cold
Ogden Nash

Go hang yourself, you old M.D.!
You shall not sneer at me.
Pick up your hat and stethoscope,
Go wash your mouth with laundry soap;
I contemplate a joy exquisite
I'm not paying you for your visit.
I did not call you to be told
My malady is a common cold.

By pounding brow and swollen lip;
By fever's hot and scaly grip;
By those two red redundant eyes
That weep like woeful April skies;
By racking snuffle, snort, and sniff;
By handkerchief after handkerchief;
This cold you wave away as naught
Is the damnedest cold man ever caught!

Give ear, you scientific fossil!
Here is the genuine Cold Colossal;
The Cold of which researchers dream,
The Perfect Cold, the Cold Supreme.
This honored system humbly holds
The Super-cold to end all colds;
The Cold Crusading for Democracy;
The Führer of the Streptococcracy

Bacilli swarm within my portals
Such as were ne'er conceived by mortals,
But bred by scientists wise and hoary
In some Olympic laboratory;
Bacteria as large as mice,
With feet of fire and heads of ice
Who never interrupt for slumber
Their stamping elephantine rumba.

A common cold, gadzooks, forsooth!
Ah, yes. And Lincoln was jostled by Booth;
Don Juan was a budding gallant,
And Shakespeare's plays show signs of talent;
The Arctic winter is fairly coolish,
And your diagnosis is fairly foolish.
Oh what a derision history holds
For the man who belittled the Cold of Colds!

Despite the cold I managed to give out all my Seamus Heaney books for World Book Night and had some interesting conversations with people along the way. I also managed to host an event in the evening which was fun and brought back to me again how important the reader is, without them books are merely paper with marks on.

Off now to watch Spartacus on the TV, nothing like a cuppa and an old film on a Sunday afternoon to help your cold feel loved and nurtured. That’s another one, imagine the famous ‘I am Spartacus’ scene if everyone was unable to get the words out for sneezing or a sore throat.
If you want to hear Ogden Nash read one of his poems that always struck a chord with me you can find it here.

Courage

2011-02-23T13:19:00.006Z

Sometimes I wonder what the hell the world is about. Here we are this tiny rock spinning around an inconsequential giant ball of hot gas with a few other rocks, some smaller some larger. We spin around just quickly enough to ensure most things stick onto the surface without floating off, including us. We inhabit this rock and organise ourselves roughly by geography, political, belief and monetary systems. Sometimes we decide that one of these systems is not fair or not working to meet our needs and we attempt to change it. Sometimes that attempt is successful through the ballot box, sometimes it fails because a fair and democratic system is not in operation but the interesting thing is we still keep trying. Those who are most invested in a current system try to ensure that those who want change are ignored, silenced or generally marginalised. Fear and bullets are the quickest way to silence those who want change but many still keep trying.

Change of course is not always good, sudden change can mean instability, more conflict, a situation that seems worse than the one people at first sort to change but in some circumstances people will still fight for change because there is no alternative other than to try and make something intolerable better; the cost of not doing so outweighs the huge price that might have to be paid in human life and dignity.Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain are moving towards change, some may succeed in establishing a fairer, better system, others may fail, but the thing that impresses me is that people are willing to still keep on trying.

I don’t know whether I would have the physical courage to go out onto the streets and face the forces of authority that may seek to humiliate me, beat me, kill me. I went on the march against the war in Iraq because I was fervently against that war but it didn’t require any courage on my part, there was no danger of having to sacrifice my life to protest against something. However I did feel part of something bigger than just myself on that march surrounded by those who felt like I did, as I did way back when I marched against the war in Vietnam and Cruse missiles being based at Greenham Common. This may just be a tiny fraction of what protestors in Egypt and Libya and other countries may currently feel. Some may cite phrases such as ‘mob mentality’ but if a sense that nothing matters more than achieving change and striving for something fairer and better is shared by enough people there is a group will that comes into operation that might just be strong enough to bring about that change. And if bullets, tanks and planes prove too strong some will still be willing to keep on trying.

Of course there are as many reasons for protesting and wanting change as there are protestors. There will be some protestors who act out the worst that humanity is capable of(looting, random acts of violence, rape) and there will be many who act out the best that humanity can aspire to. Just because you want change does not automatically make you a better person but maybe what it does do is make you a person who is prepared to believe that change can be brought about through the sum of individual actions.

I have been re reading Anne Sexton’s last Collection of poems, ‘An Awful Rowing Towards God’, published after her death by suicide. She is of course one of the great confessional poets. She was encouraged to write poetry by her therapist to help her through her bipolar mood swings. She struggled with mental illness and writing poetry helped her with that struggle and out of that came poems that won her prestigious prizes and huge international recognition. I always let this be a touchstone when some tend to see poetry as a form of therapy as somehow a 'lesser species'. Survivors Poetry can produce poems that demand to be heard not just for the witness of the content but for their use of language and craft. One poem by Sexton jumped out at me, as I was reading it just after another news update from Tripoli in Libya speaking of people still protesting despite the attacks made upon them by Security Forces. The second and third stanzas remind me of all those men and women in Libya willing to still protest despite the danger, to swallow that hot coal of courage to die for each other and a cause. They have felt despair for too long and perhaps now it can at last awake to the wings of roses and be transformed

Courage

Anne Sexton

It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

In the Closet Rummaging for a Vampire Villanelle

2011-02-10T19:38:00.006Z

So I think I should come out of the closet, I like urban fantasy involving supernatural powers, vampires, werewolves, the odd Zombie, maybe a demon or angel or two thrown into the mix. Don’t get me wrong if it is poor writing driven by clichéd situations and the odd splash of gore and sex thrown into the mix just to titillate or tick the box then I can easily dismiss it as tosh …such a nice word tosh feels more rounded than rubbish. Yet written well and acted well it can be a real joy to watch or read (although I must admit I tend to watch it rather than read it).

I have always been intrigued with why the concept of the vampire can have such a hold on the human psyche. There are Jungian and Freudian interpretations abounding…young girls and blood is always a good bet for something deeply meaningful going on in involving the unconscious. Some deep seated concerns with menstruation and becoming a woman and growing older and then along comes a vampire than not only drains you of blood (that nasty monthly reminder that you can now be a mother) but here is this creature that does not grow old has all sorts of powers but yet put them in the clear light of day or near any religious paraphernalia and they can be vanquished. They can only enter a house if invited which could be a metaphor for the fact the events that they bring about are somehow colluded with. We invite our own destruction at times.

Vampires and werewolves are big business, the media abounds with such programmes which can easily be overlooked as the equivalent of moving wall paper but thousands tune in to see someone transform into something beyond our normal understanding with fangs or hair and uncontrollable feral urges. Over the years the genre has built up a whole universe of vampiric rules and regulations which many fans guard jealousy. They can do this but they can’t do that, they can die in only very specific ways, stakes, silver bullets, daylight. Sometimes the rules are broken to serve the plot, to make the genre just that bit more flexible but you do so at the risk of some hard core readers shaking their heads in disbelief at such liberties. What interests me is that there are some things that remain central to what is essentially only an imagined world no matter who the writer is. Vampires crave human blood, werewolves transform during the full moon( again another menstrual cycle allusion). Vampires can beget other vampires and werewolves other werewolves. Everything stems from these things, plots, character everything has certain fixed points in a shared understanding of how this world works. That is almost what I love about this genre writing it generates a huge investment by the reader in the details of imagination. You are asked not just to suspend disbelief and believe in vampires etc but you are asked to invest in the establishment of boundaries and rules and an intricate yet shared interwoven set of beliefs about how they can act. All fiction demands of the reader a certain leap of faith into the writer’s world but in this genre there are a myriad of leaps of faith that are almost choreographed into an intricate dance that aficionados are willing to join in. I don’t look down my nose at such lovers of the genre I just love that they are so engaged in serial acts of imagination. There are probably as many badly written urban fantasy novels, televisions programmes and films as there are badly written literary, romance, crime or thriller novels or films. Somehow it is a genre that is often ridiculed as Goth, geek and plain weird territory despite the fact that in the publishing industry such books are out selling almost every other genre world wide and is also attracting an increasing number of women of all ages where is has a strong fast growing market. This is a genre that is probably not going to go away and it is the genre that statistics are saying is attracting people who would not normally consider reading a book. So I think something that gets non readers reading it great, it builds a reading habit that might start to extend to other books. There has also been the Harry Potter phenomenon whereby readers of that series have naturally morphed into readers of urban fantasy. If you have consumed wizardry and dark forces at work at Hogwarts its only a short stretch to a werewolf in your garden shed and a charismatic vampire turning up at your book reading group. I feel I should be out and proud about my predilection, I watch Being Human and enjoy it , there I’ve said it, do I need a sponsor to ensure I don’t go on a Twilight Trilogy DVD bender one day?

One of the earliest vampire stories is Vampyr by Doctor Polidori written in that rain sodden holiday in 1816 at Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont. Out of this came Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or a Modern Prometheus and Vampyre. Polidori based it on unfinished extract of a story by Byron and did little to dispel the belief that the very famous and huge celebrity Byron wrote the story…it helped his sales no end. The vampire in the story Lord Ruthven is almost modelled on Byron who himself worked hard at his mad, bad and dangerous to know image and who flouted conventions especially sexual ones with great panache. His connection with Hell Fire Clubs did little to dispel his demonic persona that he worked hard at promoting. There had always been folklore tales bout vampire like creatures and Poliadori simply packaged it up for the dark gothic tastes of the era.

There are countless vampire websites containing poetry that quite frankly rivals Vogon poetry for craft and tone but let’s not get too snotty, Goethe wrote a vampire poem and whilst it may not have been his finest work he is hardly a poetic dullard. I think poetry draws heavily on myth and legends for subject matter or metaphor yet somehow the world of vampires and other supernatural beings is consigned to some fanzine ghetto. Such tales are almost regarded as too chavish, too ‘poor popular taste’, to write serious or even ironic poems about, other than perhaps the odd tasteful homage to a classic Dracula film. If any one knows of a modern poet who has written a good vampire or werewolf poem I’d like to know about it.

How strange that a topic that can be an enormous part of the cultural zeitgeist at the moment and sparks endless poems on fan sites can be virtually unrepresented in modern poetry. I typed that and suddenly stopped , what a snob I’m turning into, there I am saying there is a huge amount of vampire poetry on innumerable vampire, werewolf or Goth fanzine type sites and then saying it is not to be found in modern poetry as if real poetry was something only defined by a very narrow criteria. There is the argument about what is just taste and what is ‘good poetry’ ( whatever that is) but to discount it all in such a cavalier way is a bit harsh. I must go up to my room and write in blood one hundred times, I must not be a poetry snob, I must not be a poetry snob.

A Smattering of Mattering. Darwish and Ayyappan.

2011-01-30T19:23:00.008Z

There have been awards doing the rounds, Costa to Jo Shapcott, Eliot to Walcott, Picador to Richard Meier. All very worthy winners and everyone on the short and long list are worthy of some recognition from, not just other poets, but other people ( I sometimes wonder whether other poets and other people inhabit the same universe). If you want the low down from someone who was at the Eliot reading you should go and have a read of Baroque in Hackney’s blog

I live in the sticks and don’t get up to London a great deal so I regard myself as an outsider and observer of such things. You read about them and you may have a little bet with yourself about possible winners or hope certain collections do well because you enjoyed the poems or were moved by them but even as a published poet I don’t feel that involved with the world of the big prizes and media attention.

Now I may be saying that because I have no hope of achieving any or I might be saying it because it is true and of course both may be true at the same time. I will not go into any navel gazing about this only to say that I might be more involved if the prize business helped poetry matter more to people in general. I sometimes wonder if ‘mattering’ matters at all. Something really matters if its absence threatens your physical survival; food, water, warmth, shelter being the basics. Things really matter if they threaten you emotional well being; nurturing, love, a sense of worth to validate your existence. Poetry and literature in general may inhabit the grey areas that filter into and help establish not just an individual’s sense of worth but a society’s.

In some of the poorer countries in the world, poets are revered, they are part of the fundamental fabric of society, poetry does matter to many people other than a select few. Ok here a few poets get media coverage but somehow it always seems very polite, a tad nice and respectful, even a tad quirky as if writing about a poet is being slightly eccentric. Where is the fervour that poets in some parts of the world can generate? Take the death of the poet A. Ayyappan in Kerala. He virtually lived on the streets, always a bit disheveled, drunk on occasions but he had twenty collections of poems to his credit and thousands came to pay their respects when he died three months ago. Likewise when Mahmud Darwish, the Palestinian poet died, thousands came to his state funeral. Their work mattered to people and continues to matter, and perhaps poetry matters the most when you have less to loose and so much more to gain than a prize.

Opening Your Presents Before the Party and Keeping it Simple

2011-01-25T22:20:00.012Z

Well what have I been up to, nothing much, then again a lot of reading which is far from nothing, in fact it is the creation of whole worlds. There are as many reasons why people read as there are books and we read different books for different reasons. However why I read fiction is mostly to experience a story, hopefully told in a way that makes me suspend my current reality and enter another one yet bring back from that something that makes my current reality just a little better. To be convinced to the point of letting go is something almost akin to a chemical high, in fact I wonder if we could look at the brain chemistry of the fiction reader there would be a correlation between what we are reading and the release of adrenalin, endorphins and the like. Is our visual cortex firing up as we read a description of a landscape or a character? I never think of the reader as a passive recipient of words but someone who actively engages with the words, who creates and paints images on an internal screen, hears whole dialogues, arguments, orchestras playing, tastes the food, feels the velvet dress a character smoothes down. A good book takes you to a place you and the writer have created together. When you look up from the page just for a second you forget where you are, that is the kind of feeling a good book gives me.

Not only are you there, you are desperate to want to know the future but not enough to spoil the delight of finding out page by page. As a child I never ‘cheated’ and read the end of a book, it felt a bit like opening your birthday presents that you find at the back of the wardrobe and then wrapping them up again to feign surprise on the day of the party just to please your parents. The present is not just about the having of it, it is about the ritual and delight of receiving it and so with a good book the reading is not all about having it ticked off on your ‘I have read this’ list it is about the whole experience of it coming into your inner world. I love books, so with World Book Night upon us in March, I and a friend are busy organizing an event to celebrate this, to celebrate books and libraries and the right every individual has to have access to books. Without books seems to underline the old biblical saying of 'Where there is no vision the people perish', Ezekial's vision of the valley of dry bones might as well be a vision of a world without books, without libraries.

I sometimes wonder if we can get too analytical about poetry, too eager to show how cleverly we can dissect a poem to find what makes it tick .Isn’t it just enough and everything to say we simply loved reading the poems, that the experience of letting them into our inner world was something special? Perhaps not, perhaps we have to ensure every last drop of what the poem has to offer us is squeezed out of it until the pips squeak but sometimes I just want to let the poem tell me its own story in its own words and keep it simple.

Do readers ‘get’ you? was a question posted on Facebook by Roddy Lumsden which generated many comments. Here is mine

I think sometimes readers 'get' themselves in a poem or a poet ..they come up to you after a reading and say I loved that poem about x' and I ponder on that and think I didn't read a poem about x. Everyone brings something to a poem and takes something away,... a mish mash of themselves, their personal iconography of words, the poet, the poetic form, even the context in which it is read. They may not get me at all, they may get something not me, more them but I think the important thing is the process of 'getting' rather than being got, that dialogue between reader and poems where all the creative spark lies. If no one can even be bothered to try getting even one of my poems then I worry. I am on the whole seen as an accessible poet but actually I do strive for something underpinning that and that's the process I want to engage in with the reader, digging underneath. As I say there might not even be a 'me' to get but the fact that a reader or listener might be bothered to dig is heartening. I could get all mystical and propose that poems are more than the sum of their parts and thus the ghost in the machine is what the poet may hanker to be got ...well ghosts and poets can sometimes be quite difficult to get hold of, slippery little buggers.

That Scottish Play, the Wholeness of the Poem or is it a Polo Mint ?

2011-01-15T17:50:00.016Z

There have been some very interesting and challenging posts by George Szirtes on his blog about ‘subject’ in poetry plus some interesting comments. They run from January 4th 2011 to Saturday January 8th

They are well worth reading and then re-reading again more slowly in order to digest the points more carefully. It made me think a lot about subject, about ‘the about’ of a poem.

I have just finished watching the film of Macbeth with Patrick Stewart an shown on BBC 4 (you can still see it on BBC iplayer if you are quick at the time of posting, it’s well worth a watch). The Scottish play is of course always seen as a study of power and corruption and what constitutes destiny, do we shape our own or is it already mapped out for us? Do the witches create or simply see the future? Without their prediction would Macbeth have become king, would his wife have embraced the prediction with such ardour that it becomes the engine that drives them to regicide which propels them over the edge, literally in the case of Lady Macbeth? Macbeth loses all sense of any morality in his fight to retain power and even the murder of children in seen as a necessary evil. So I found myself re-examining what this play is about, what is its subject?

Subject and purpose may not be the same thing, purpose implies a considered intent. The dramatist’s intent may be solely to tell us a cracking good story with a few spooky witches and walking woods thrown in as crowd pleasers, a wife who nags and nags and appears very ballsy but who cracks under the pressure and a central character that accepts that the acquisition and retention of power requires that his moral compass always points to the self. However does the beauty and use of the language in which the story is told demand that it becomes in itself embedded in ‘the subject’ of the play? How Shakespeare tells us the story is as intrinsic to the play as are the themes which may or may not underlie it; the plot or story drives the language and vice versa. It may read as if I am simply stating the obvious, Shakespeare uses words so well in his plays that they can come to encapsulate something we acknowledge as important to life itself, that they can exist and be embraced out of the context of the play itself, hence so many Shakespearean quotes that have found their way into everyday parlance without many having any notion of the play they came from.

“Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Yet it is the whole play, that makes of that language something ‘other’, makes it greater than the sum of its wordy parts.

If we take this experience of Shakespeare and apply it to the poem any poem, for me it serves to clarify something. What the poem is about, its obvious subject and its underlying themes have to merge with the how, the wonder of the language, in order to become a ‘whole’ poem. I like the concept of the ‘wholeness’ of a poem, the poem with its own gestalt. Some could argue, and I am more than open to this argument, that the experience of unique and wonderful language is sufficient. There does not have to be a narrative, a subject, an intent, a purpose other than to excite the synapses that connect all those areas of the brain that are capable of dancing and firing in glorious technicolour. There are poems such as The Windhover that I loved as a teenager long before I had any idea about what they might be about, the subject was immaterial or sufficient explanation was as simple as ‘it’s about a man looking at a bird’, the lush language rolled around in my mouth and brain and yet I knew that it was underpinned by something other than the title and the words. There was something that contributed to the ‘wholeness’ of the poem, its life in the world. Hopkins created all that glorious sound and rhythm to be a joy to the senses yet also to praise what he believed was a Christian spiritual experience without the ghost in that language machine the poem is less that it can be for the poet if not the audience. The gestalt of the poem maybe requires an honest exploration of intent, even if that intent is not clear to the reader and sometimes the poet themselves.

How the poem becomes ‘a whole’ perhaps require something as small and as vast as a sense of the total engagement by the poet with the poem. The search for meaning may be the meaning in itself. Sometimes I have written poems which are sometimes more than I meant and frequently less than I meant but I always try and use the best words I can and have the full intent of not cheating the poem or the reader of my full attention. Even if a poem is not ostensibly ‘about’ anything, if is solely about the sound and the use of language then that in itself gives it a meaning, some point of engagement.

Just thinking out loud about it all and need to go and apply this thinking to the collection I am re-reading at the moment...The Complete Works of Amy Clampitt. An American, she published her first poem in the New Yorker at 58 and her first collection at 63 and followed it up with four more before she died eleven years later...my sort of girl in terms of being a late starter like myself. Brought from Beyond is one I am hoping to fathom a little more, but not once do I sense a throw away line or word, Amy is giving me her full attention. I might be being picky but sometimes there are poems I read that seem to leave you wondering what's missing.

I am sounding a bit pompous, off now to watch Star Wars as I have never seen Attack of the Clones, although all those prequels were probably less than Lucas meant them to be.There was a hole in there where something better should be..the film as polo mint. Will be on the look out for polo mint poems

Into 2011 with bread slicers, suitcases and serotonin

2011-01-05T21:01:00.012Z

Greetings dear reader and a happy new year to you, here's hoping it will be a good one, however you may define good. I think I switched off slightly through that strange period betwixt and between Christmas and New Year which many treat as an extended holiday. The sales were on in the shops and the nearest large town seemed full of focused women with sharpened elbows homing in on hot bargains like heat seeking missiles. I usually avoid crowds although I did queue for 20 minutes at my local bakers because they do make the best bread and I am slightly enamoured of their ancient jiggling bread slicing machine with three different settings. I love a good useful piece of engineering, something that man’s ingenuity has created in order to meet a simple need. I suppose a bread knife and a bread board would do but the bread slicing machine does have something enticing about it. As we watched some news about a Noble Prize being awarded my aged mother once announced that she thought there ought to be a Noble Prize for the invention of something small and useful like Velcro or bike clips. She had a point but then small pieces of domestic engineering can hardly compare with the discoveries of DNA, insulin or quantum physics and of course big inventions and discoveries filter down into society and have a myriad of useful applications. I have lost track of the times someone interested in such things has told me that we owe the ceramic hob to the space race. However after again watching the bread slicer vibrate its blades through my loaf in less than 5 seconds I have to say it deserves just a moment of recognition amidst the tidal wave of Ipads and Hadron Colliders.

I listened to the serialisation of Finishing the Hat a programme about Stephen Sondheim’s lyric writing on Radio 4. I was taken by how much of what he said about good lyric writing applies to poetry. Lyrics too tightly packed or not packed enough are something to be avoided. I thought about just how a poem can be fully packed with many levels of meaning and reference yet not be too dense. We often talk about ‘unpacking’ a poem in workshops as if the poem is somehow a suitcase with meaning, images, metaphors and language all crammed into it. You open it up and pull out all the contents, examine it, fold and unfold some and then shove them all back in. This process supposedly makes the poem clearer, more enjoyable, yet the language is the suitcase and also the contents. Some poems defy unpacking, so intrinsic is the language to what it contains. Michael Donaghy believed that the key word to analysing his poetry is "negotiation"; the poem is a matter of form in perpetual negotiation with content. The poem as suitcase feels a little too static and literally contained, I tend to agree with Donaghy that there is something more fluid going on in a great poem. A sound, a rhythm, a line break is seemingly not dictated and fixed by the form but appears to exist entirely to create that one poem. Form for instance in the hands of a great poet exists because it needs to in order for a particular poem to be and say what the poet intends.

Of course in the hands of a poet with less skill rhymed form can seem like the ugly sister desperately trying to cram her large foot into the glass slipper. Tony Harrison’s, Book Ends is obviously a well known and formally rhymed poem. However Harrison is the master of strong rhyme that at its best does not overwhelm the poem in its sheer insistence. The poignancy of this poem is supported rather than sunk by the rhyme.. If you listen to Harrison read his poem the sounds that draw the ear in are not lent upon so that the rhyme becomes the sudden dull thud of the other shoe dropping. The music of it is weighty yet still playful, the rhyme between smithereens for example and between’s could on the page seem strained but once you hear him read it it does have a strange ‘rightness’ as if the second rhyming word is already forged in the first one.

I am fascinated by the concept of how the concept of rhyme works. The ability to hear a rhyme is essential to develop phonological awareness which in turn supports our ability to learn to read. If a child cannot produce even a nonsense rhyming word to follow cat, mat, sat and instead looks at you with a sense that you are somehow slightly deranged in thinking he or she can possibly work out the relationship between those three words yet alone produce another one, then here be dragons! Bun, fun, fat does not auger well for reading but is never insurmountable, however most children, even very young ones hear and love rhyme, that wonderful way that sound can produce the possibility of prediction is a strange comfort but one nonetheless. The concept that we are hardwired for narrative and metaphor is put forward by the linguist Lakoff but I also think in a large number of languages rhyme is almost embedded in our psyche. Rhyme is a basic building block of prediction, if we hear ‘Twinkle twinkle little star how I wonder what you is’ even if you don’t know the correct word it can prove irritatingly unsatisfactory not to have that aural completion. Semantics allow for a level of prediction but once the ear is tuned into a rhyme scheme there is hope that all will be well.

Some languages such as Korean and Japanese have no concept of rhyme and I believe even early Anglo Saxon poetry relied heavily on assonance rather than rhyme. So rhyme is a relatively recent concept in language and its existence can be geographically particular but it is such a fundamental concept in European poetry that it is hard not to believe that it underpins how we assimilate language itself. I did find a tiny bit of research that showed that the serotonin levels in the linguistic areas of the brain were raised more when test subjects were exposed to heavily rhymed poems than to free verse even when the subject expressed a personal preference for the free verse poem, which would seem to suggest that the brain itself finds rhyme physically pleasurable. The skillful use of rhyme is part of the craft of poetry even if we choose not to use it, how sound works with meaning is not old fashioned or ‘establishment’ it is for me part of the excitement involved in creating a poem.

I have had several people contact me wanting to read my Bear story ( see previous post) so here is the link to open it from my public folder.

Spirit Bears, Clear-Cutting and Bed Nesting

2010-12-21T13:24:00.010Z

So the snow hasn't gone away, it is now rather like a guest that outstays its welcome, although just turning out the lights and going to bed doesn't seem to make it disappear as it does the odd guest. Going to bed is of course an option which I find appealing especially in winter. I am very good at nesting in my bed surrounded by all the detritus of what constitutes early winter bed upgrading. Cosy over sized pyjamas and industrial strength bed socks for the coldest of feet (tick), Portable TV (tick), laptop(tick), good book(tick), DVD box set of some ilk that you always meant to get through (tick), cup of hot chocolate with mini marshmallows on top (tick), biscuits of all shapes and sizes and dunkability (tick), wind, snow, sub zero temperatures, icy rain outside (tick), microwave.....no that would be going a bit too far although I do know someone who has a microwave in the bedroom specifically for pot noodles and ready meals but he is way past nesting and more into total hibernation with the odd surface for food and the toilet. However come to think of it the microwave doesn't leave the bedroom and migrate back to the kitchen in Spring. So may I wish you the best of Christmas and the greatest of years in 2011 dear reader.

Yesterday I sent a copy of a Christmas bear story to someone in Canada. I wrote this story because the arrival of some singing Canadians and some work with a small boy coincided. The small boy has come to like bears and trees and worries about them both. The bits that are personal to him I have edited out of course but I have hopefully retained some of those ideas and images we arrived at together. We researched Canadian bears and clear cutting by the logging industry in Canada. Have a look at this space satellite photograph of just one area in British Columbia and you may get some idea of what it can mean in real terms to an environment. Some progress has been made between the logging industry in Canada and the environmental lobby but it is still an uphill struggle. We found a story about the Kermode Bears called 'Spirit Bears' by the Native Americans in British Columbia due to their white colouring. They are totally unique, it is believed only five hundred of them still exist in the wild and they are now in danger from an oil pipeline that is to skirt the B.C. rainforest they inhabit. The risk of a major oil spill is minimal and highly unlikely says one smug oil executive, perhaps the events in the Gulf of Mexico may have made him just a little more circumspect.Here is the news story on Youtube if you want to see it
However the brown bear won out as the main characters of the story. The boy felt the bears should be ordinary yet extraordinary bears. Stories written for and with children have such a responsibility not to lose the magic of how a child sees. Hopefully something of that magic remains. If you would like to read it let me know and if I think you aren't one of those spammers that keeps leaving anonymous comments on the blog that I have to reject I'll send you a link to where you can read it on my Dropbox public folder. I have just deleted comments from someone linking to a black girl escort agency, someone to do with concrete ( yes truly someone singing the praises of decorative concrete in the garden) and a number of others who look extremely shady. So ask if you are not shady and the link may be opened unto you.

Snow; Graphic and Poetic

2010-12-05T18:56:00.006Z

So dear reader it has snowed, in some places more than others, the offering of snow this way has been meagre but some have made huge fattened white bullocks of snow offerings, snow that bellows at you through the windows and through the television screen. I went to the American Poetry Foundation to mull over snow as I was in search of a Wallace Steven’s poem I recall, and because the Americans know about snow , deep and cold. It is often dumped on the Eastern seaboard and other places regular as annual clockwork, so the Americans, and I have to add, the Canadians know their snow, they can contemplate it without surprise. Here is the Steven’s poem, The Snow Man, beautiful, crisp and all one long sentence. Perhaps the English are more uptight about punctuation than the American poets but that is probably a sweeping generalisation that you can throw back in my face like a huge snowball round a brick.

The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

That last stanza is worth a few rail disruptions alone, but then I haven’t been that disrupted by the weather so I can say that. I have slithered and slid across some icy back roads in the fens though, deep dykes on both sides tend to keep you focused but snow here has only amounted to a dusting of icing sugar on dark rich Christmas pudding soil in the hinterlands of the fens.
No schools shut but then elsewhere all those children are shaking the shackles free for a while

Snow Day

by Billy Collins

Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,
its white flag waving over everything,
the landscape vanished,
not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,
and beyond these windows

the government buildings smothered,
schools and libraries buried, the post office lost
under the noiseless drift,
the paths of trains softly blocked,
the world fallen under this falling.

In a while, I will put on some boots
and step out like someone walking in water,
and the dog will porpoise through the drifts,
and I will shake a laden branch
sending a cold shower down on us both.

But for now I am a willing prisoner in this house,
a sympathizer with the anarchic cause of snow.
I will make a pot of tea
and listen to the plastic radio on the counter,
as glad as anyone to hear the news

that the Kiddie Corner School is closed,
the Ding-Dong School, closed.
the All Aboard Children’s School, closed,
the Hi-Ho Nursery School, closed,
along with—some will be delighted to hear—

the Toadstool School, the Little School,
Little Sparrows Nursery School,
Little Stars Pre-School, Peas-and-Carrots Day School
the Tom Thumb Child Center, all closed,
and—clap your hands—the Peanuts Play School.

So this is where the children hide all day,
These are the nests where they letter and draw,
where they put on their bright miniature jackets,
all darting and climbing and sliding,
all but the few girls whispering by the fence.

And now I am listening hard
in the grandiose silence of the snow,
trying to hear what those three girls are plotting,
what riot is afoot,
which small queen is about to be brought down.

Then browsing snow in these American archives I found Charles Tomlinson, an English poet who has never quite had the recognition here that he deserves I think. He is in The Bristish Poetry Archives but I prefer the selection of his poems they have available on the American Foundation site. He is also a painter and his work is full of visual images and landscapes as well as being deeply influenced by American poets. His poem Snow Signs resonates with his understanding and close observation of landscape and the image of the ‘simplification of the snow’ is for me absolutely spot on.

Snow Signs

by Charles Tomlinson

They say it is waiting for more, the snow
Shrunk up to the shadow-line of walls
In an arctic smouldering, an unclean salt,
And will not go until the frost returns
Sharpening the stars, and the fresh snow falls
Piling its drifts in scallops, furls. I say
Snow has left its own white geometry
To measure out for the eye the way
The land may lie where a too cursory reading
Discovers only dip and incline leading
To incline, dip, and misses the fortuitous
Full variety a hillside spreads for us:
It is written here in sign and exclamation,
Touched-in contour and chalk-followed fold,
Lines and circles finding their completion
In figures less certain, figures that yet take hold
On features that would stay hidden but for them:
Walking, we waken these at every turn,
Waken ourselves, so that our walking seems
To rouse some massive sleeper out of winter dreams
Whose stretching startles the whole land into life,
As if it were us the cold, keen signs were seeking
To pleasure and remeasure, repossess
With a sense in the gathered coldness of heat and height.
Well, if it's for more the snow is waiting
To claim back into disguisal overnight,
As though it were promising a protection
From all it has transfigured, scored and bared,
Now we shall know the force of what resurrection
Outwaits the simplification of the snow.

So I went from that, following footsteps in the snow, to a Kenneth Patchen poem from the forties that a graphic novelist had taken and run with as part of the American Poetry Foundation's project called The Poem as Comic Strip. This, after looking through the various responses seems a great project, I would like to let some British graphic novelists loose on a few poems and see what comes out of it. Not to self must talk to the Boo ( Beloved Only Offspring) who is both a writer and comic book illustrator about this). We have talked now and again about doing a collaboration as we have done another project together quite successfully. There is a graphic novel of The Wasteland by the way if anyone is interested by Martin Rowson

The Snow Is Deep on the Ground

by Kenneth Patchen

The snow is deep on the ground.
Always the light falls
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.

This is a good world.
The war has failed.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the snow waits where love is.

Only a few go mad.
The sky moves in its whiteness
Like the withered hand of an old king.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the sky knows of our love.

The snow is beautiful on the ground.
And always the lights of heaven glow
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.

If you want to see the comic strip version by Ron Rege here is the link

By way of an after thought here is Fiona Shaw reading a tiny section from the Wasteland, she is a bit like Marmite , some like her, others hate her take on the Wasteland, personally I quite like the humanity she brings to it.

Sunday and All Next Week

2010-11-27T15:30:00.003Z

Sorry to have been incommunicado dear reader. I have been trying to write 50,000 words of a second novel in a month, an arbitrary target I know but I find deadlines so irritating I tend to try and meet them just to prove who's in control, the deadline or me. Of course it is simply a mind game as I have set the deadline in the first place ( well more or less I registered for the worldwide National Novel Writing Month) where the foolhardy are encouraged to write a whole novel in a month or 50,000 words.

I have much to talk about which may or may not interest you when I come back to the blog planet, Aldeburgh Festival, the prose poem, a night spent at Little Gidding, a performance of Journey’s End, a night spent listening to M R James ghost stories by candlelight in an 11th century Manor house near here,. Treat this as one of those trailers you used to get before films, Sunday and all next week. Trailers now seem more general rather than time specific as if we need weeks, even months to get whipped into buying a ticket for the show by the hype.

In the meantime if you want to read a review I wrote about Phantom Noise by Brian Turner you can find it here

Letters, Sonnets, Out of Body Experiences and Jumping the Synaptic Tracks

2010-10-16T14:44:00.008+01:00

So long time, no blog reader. Busy, busy writing, reading, working, sleeping, walking, having visitors.

My friend from Philadelphia, S, came to stay whilst she visited her elderly mother and celebrated her 95th birthday (they build them to last in the fens). One evening I unearthed the sheaf of letters she has written to me in the 32 years she has lived in the States. We in fact only knew each other for a little over two years before she found love with a lovely American and moved stateside. She has an equally big pile of my letters back at home. Strangely she felt re-reading them wouldn’t feel right and I think I would feel the same if she gave me my letters. Our younger selves, our lives, up and downs were all poured into these letters. Things and people we have long forgotten or consigned to some box way back in the storage depot of our brains are held in blue biro. She always wrote either on airmail paper, that tissue bordered in white, red and blue or on yellow lined legal notepad paper. The physicality of them so easily fixed in the brain, the handwriting hardly changed and the English spellings doggedly refusing to give way to color or center.

What is it about our own old letters that appeals and yet at the same time seems dangerous, I have to admit to hanging onto a number of old love letters but never reading them. Maybe it is their fixed nature, the moment of writing pinned to the paper for all time or until they fade or are destroyed. Barthes often talks about photographs in this way, a moment pinned like a butterfly for constant re-examination. Letters have this same quality but words are somehow different. A photograph is I know never totally objective but certain things are available to every eye. A letter contains a striving for conversation; a striving for the creation of a dialogue that can only be one sided. Even a response from the recipient is delayed and often changed by the passage of time it takes for it to materialise as an answer. Is a personal letter a monologue to an audience of one whose response you invite or predict from past knowledge? Placing some things on paper can quantify and qualify experience, words becoming not the butterfly itself but the pins which try to hold it down in the cabinet of curiosities.

That’s why those Christmas summary letters that some send you , whilst being welcome as news about someone can also jar as you know you are not the sole audience. This person did not sit down and write this solely for me, they did not take time, effort, or go through the whole physical experience of writing and posting a letter just for me.

I have just re-read some of Elizabeth Bishop’s and Robert Lowell’s letters to each other and sometimes in them I detect that they too were writing for an audience bigger than one, for posterity or whatever they saw as passing for that.

Do we write a poem for an audience of one, a sole recipient or are they those Christmas round robin missals? Are or should we write with an audience or reader in mind at all? Are poems a letter to ourselves that we allow others to be privy to in some game we play with our own mind set that avoids the question of readership altogether? Would we really like to be Emily Dickinson and place them in a trunk for no-one or posterity, which ever is the first, to give them credence?

As I read at the Toddington Poetry Society this week to a lovely audience I did at one point have one of those out of body experiences that I am sure other poets have ( or if they do I’d be interested to hear from them as it may highlight that this is not some peculiarity of my own). The experience in brief is that moment when you find yourself standing at the back of the audience watching yourself read your poem and being acutely aware of the moment, the feeling, the whole physical process that brought that poem here to this place, at this time and coming out of your mouth. This is not something to do just with very personal ‘memoir poems’. In this case it was a poem that had sprung from one of those synaptic connections that happen in a blink of an eye that you manage to catch before it bleeds away into the brain or the ether. A chance conversation lurching into something I was reading and the poem whilst not written had some private and individual moment of fertilisation.

At the reading I had one of those, ‘Where do you get the ideas for your poems from?’questions. This openness to those moments when two synaptic pathways in the brain suddenly jump their own track and make a third, is maybe the only true answer I can give. Even if writing about something you think is heavily focused on one thing the best poems have some element of something other weaving into it.

I have just been reading Don Paterson’s article in the Guardian about Shakespeare’s sonnet and have thought that form can sometimes be the way we are made to discipline ourselves to be open to the something other. It makes us observe and focus in such a precise way that rather than closing ourselves down to other thoughts it pushes us to engage with them via its very structure thus opening up those serendipity synaptic cross overs.

I have a feeling Shakespeare , being a genius, was able to engineer those crossovers at will and yet his social context alone made him have to write one thing in terms of another, love for another man, how he felt about women, politics etc. This conceptual juggling in order to stay this side of the law and public condemnation must have led him into areas he may not otherwise have gone. The Dark Lady of the sonnet may be one person, several people, a concept, and several concepts all at once but in the end it is the reader’s experience of the poem that counts. Some would get more if they take it apart, strive for the minutiae of meaning ; others are happy without that knowledge to exalt in the language and what it means to them alone. Here’s a link to a website that has all of Shakespeare’s sonnets with commentaries ( which I can’t necessarily vouch for as insightful) if you want to look some of them up.

I started my reading at Toddington with something Dylan Thomas wrote in 1961 in his Poetic Manifesto which always gives me pause for thought.

‘You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick.... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.’

Shakespeare knew all about holes and gaps. He must also have had those out of body experiences standing at the back of the Globe listening to himself coming out of another’s mouth.

What Matters in Poetry, the Poems, the Poet or the Times in Which we Live?

2010-09-03T16:05:00.012+01:00

Have had an invite to a friends' launch which I hope to attend, I know she reads this blog so it is belt and braces so she knows I am coming if I can. The book Second Exile by Jane Kirwan and Ales Machacek is out with Rockingham Press, I'll review it here as I know this is going to be a fascinating read, can't wait to get my hands on a copy.This promises to be a really important book, reminding us that what we are and what we may become is woven into the narrative of where we have been and what we have experienced. This may seem blindingly obvious but sometimes we forget that individual personal histories are what creates History with a capital H. Poetry pundits are always harping on about going from the particular to the universal and never is that so important as when particular lives become woven into the fabric of important moments in history.

Jacqueline Saphra came up with a thoughtful blog post about Middle Aged Women Poets to which I responded on Facebook but thought it would be useful to post it on the blog here as well
I agree that MAWPs (Middle Aged Women Poets) are coming in for a lot of stick at the moment. I, like you, work on the presumption that a poem about anything should be judged on its own merits not its choice of subject matter or the age and gender of the poet just as I would expect it not to be judged on the basis of ethnic origin of the writer. I am absolutely in favour of encouraging anyone to write poetry but it feels offensive when my very existence as a MAWP is seen as one of the reasons that poetry is seen as a 'twee' exclusive 'coffee-morning club’ that makes poetry less accessible and meaningful to others.

There are indeed a great many of us in workshops, audiences, buying in bookshops, reading poetry, writing it etc. If all women between the ages of 40 and say 65 withdrew from all participation in anything poetical would this then kick start a great renaissance of writing and reading poetry amongst other members of society and allow younger talented poets to gain more recognition and rejuvenate and refresh the art. I tend to think not but then I would wouldn't I? And what happens when the current brilliant generation of younger poets hit middle-age, does their talent fade into the ether as they become reduced to writing about all those events and situations that becoming older presents? Are these no longer opportunities to explore what it means to explore the full story of what it means to be human but obstacles to be steered around at all costs?

In the end all I can do each time I stare at a blank page is try and write what I hope will be the best poem I can and let that speak for me. If the voice happens to be that of a woman's and middle-aged it doesn't automatically negate or belittle what is being said or drown out the voice of others. However I refuse to be paranoid I think most have no problem with MAWPs and those that do have a problem are probably right to stir up the waters to ensure we never become self satisfied or smug or just plain entrenched in the 'Well it has always been like this' school of thought. It wasn't that long ago when the male domination of all poetry was being railed against and questioning any sense of the status quo disempowering others can only be good.

Interestingly when I did a Google image search just keying in ‘middle aged woman poet’ the first image offered was the one above of Michael Palin. I have to say I don’t know any poet, male or female, that looks like that.

I am busy trying to sort out the synopsis of my novel, which has changed enormously since its first draft and now even has a change of name to match. I will be sending it out soon onto the mean streets of publishing, in her new dress and high heels. I hope I have given it enough to survive out there; I will tuck a can of mace into her stocking top just in case. Strangely, like cars and boats this novel feels like a she.

By the way the answer to my own question that heads this post? Everything matters, every single atom, every single moment.

Sarah Waters and Larkin and Unreliable Narrators. Do We Really Know What Truth Is?

2010-08-16T18:06:00.016+01:00

I am off to the North East on Wednesday (burglars please note) and am reviewing what to take with me to read. I am two thirds of the way through Sarah Waters latest The Little Stranger which is a post second world war quasi ghost story. It has been discussed in the Guardian over the past four weeks but I have tried not to read the comments and write ups in order to come at the book without preconceptions. One thing that strikes me forcefully is the choice of era; the time when post Second World War everything was changing, the NHS was being formed and council houses rising at a rate of knots. I suppose I was a child that arrived in 1951 in time to benefit from that first hurrah of Labour when the social fabric seemed to be changing, gaining just a tad more texture.My brother who is nine years older bore the full brunt of expectations. Better health, better education raised the bar and becoming successful was just a tad more achievable and thus the pressure to do the high jump over this bar grew. This was a time when many parents who had been born at the end of the depression aspired to get out of pits and factories, aspired better fro their children and the lower middle class opened its arms to them. Education as a means to escape the working class was just a little more available and a grammar school place augured well for something that would set you up in the middle classes for life. A steady job with a pension seemed more open to those who could pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Even my parents who, whilst economically, would be labelled as lower middle class, by the time I was born contemplated the education of a daughter with slightly more enthusiasm as a means of social mobility and white collar nirvana.

Sarah Water’s book explores the flux in social class that was happening around that time in the late 1940s. The class system was not so much under attack as being sniped at from the higher moral ground of the Bevanites. She mirrors this class system with the fortunes of an old country house and the family that inhabit it in Warwickshire. The house seems to be falling about the ‘toff’ family's ears and the war injured emotionally fargile eldest son and the jolly hockey sticks sexually confused (I had a taste of freedom in the Wrens) daughter are sucked into servicing the needs of the house whilst the mother retreats gradually into the old times when clothes, life, everything was so much better, easier and predictable.

Into this tale of social class is weaved happenings which you can choose to explain away using a mix of cod psychology and objective/scientific reasoning or can take as a sign of things emanating from some dark and sinister ghostly presence or a poltergeist. The narrator, the doctor, working class boy made good by the sacrifice of parents from the servant classes is interesting. He is continually describing things in other terms making leaps of interpretation or connection. He describes behaviour of the daughter or the son of the house in quite minute observational detail and then adds the rider of ‘it is as if…’ then goes on to some explanatory planet where everything always seems as if it is something else.

The unreliable narrator, as I think the doctor is in Sarah Water’s book, is I think an interesting phenomenon. Sometimes you have to woo your readers into trusting the narrator as being objective and then gradually throw in small seeds of doubt about their viewpoint being slightly, if not totally, skewed and altered by their own needs and beliefs. I was pondering this and thinking how it might apply to the ‘voice’ in poetry. So often poetry is seen as either truly autobiographical, especially in its more ‘confessional’ mode. However more and more we come to accept that an assumed voice might be taken on by the poet. I am racking my brains to think of poems where the deliberate unreliable narrator voice is used (suggestions welcome). Where is a poem written in a first person voice and then the reader becomes aware that the voice is totally or waveringly unreliable?

Of course there is the surrealist approach when what happens in the poem is obviously taking us via another kind of reality but are there poems where the I voice has time even in a short poem to draw us in as speaking some truth (not necessarily factual truth) and then is discovered by the end or on re-reading to be viewing that ‘truth’ from an unreliable angle. Maybe it is not useful to think of the point of view in poetry and reliable and unreliable narrators but it is something I am exploring at present. Of course in older works such as The Iliad or The Canterbury Tales the ‘story’ nature of the work allows the reader to explore point of view. However if I took for instance at a modern poem such as Mr Bleaney by Larkin the POV may become important. Because we know Larkin, we probably have things we feel about him as a person stored away in our head we tend to see this as almost autobiographical or Larkin imagining himself as the next tenant of Mr Bleaney’s room. Larkin as the poet brings with it a tremendous baggage that it is sometimes difficult not to haulinto the poem. However nowhere in this poem are we told whether the narrator is male or female for instance, we tend to arrive at the gender from knowing who the poet is and maybe assumptions that only a man would smoke or this landlady would only take in male lodgers. The narrator tells us things about Mr Bleaney that he gleans from the landlady and from the room but what he or she chooses to tell us are perhaps only those things that speak to the narrators own feelings of alienation and ennui with life. He may only be choosing to tell us those things about Mr Bleaney that confirm or lead us to the final question of the poem, do we measure ourselves by our surroundings (social and physical). Perhaps the narrator does not tell us anything about Mr Bleaney that would not speak to that question or prod us in that direction. Mr Bleaney may have been a very jolly, happy man who adored his sister in Stoke and was more than happy to go to Frinton each year and lived a small but content private life.

Is Larkin, as the poet, deliberately making the narrator of his poem unreliable so the reader has to question the whole premise of his approach to Mr Bleaney? Is he , on the other hand, expecting the reader to accept that whilst he narrates facts about Bleaney, the tone and the facts chosen are there to push us towards an assumption that Bleaney lead a small sad life that didn’t amount to much if he at no point questioned his existence. The ‘I don’t know’ at the end seems somehow less than genuine as the whole tone of the poem pushes you to make a value judgement.

Does the poet want us to believe everything he tells us about Bleaney? Are the details of Bleaney’s life important at all and only in so far as they tell us what it is the narrator finds noteworthy. Is the poet just telling us about himself? If for instance we were told that Mr Bleaney was written by Sylvia Plath would our understanding and enjoyment of the whole poem be altered? Can we disassociate Larkin’s personal autobiography and well known lugubrious nature from his narrator? Is the form of the poem saying something about the narrator,the poet, or both? Quatrains rhyming abab, neat strict predictable boxes to mirror the small predictable box room, to mirror the small predictable life. Don’t tell me Larkin didn’t want us to feel hemmed in, claustrophobic, feel a longing to break out of the strait jacket that he places the poem in. He tells us he doesn’t know whether Bleaney questioned his existence but if he didn’t question it he ‘warranted no better’. Is he condemned by his unquestioning state to box-room hell or is he merely held in the limbo of blandness that the narrator believes the undeserving people who exist by routines inhabit anyway? Is the poet or the narrator being rather sneeringly judgemental about Bleaney?

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread

That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don't know.

I have tried to use the concept of unreliable narrator to interrogate just this one well known poem, shake it up a little. It doesn't add much to the world of literary criticism and is less than scholarly but it made me think just a little harder about what the POV of a poem can covey to the reader and whether unreliability of the narrator is something we don’t question enough in poems or incorporate deliberately into our writing.

On Being Out of Kilter. Bowie, Hunter S Thompson, Asperger's and my Dizzy Self can be made to connect

2010-08-11T13:58:00.010+01:00

I have Labyrinthitis, no not a constant urge to watch that old film with David Bowie in it, but something to do with the inner ear. It involves dizziness, vertigo and having a brain that feels stuffed full of cotton wool and being on a ship that is navigating quite a rough sea. Strangely the only time I feel balanced is when I am driving which I am told is something to do with forward visual concentration, so hurrah there is some light at the end of this queasy tunnel. I am also managing to type this by adopting the same forward concentration on the screen but I have to admit the back lit nature of it is making it quite a challenge and I am not entirely sure if Microsoft word has a tilt text facility which I have somehow engaged inadvertently
It is strange to say the least to have to doubt your experience of the world…no the floor is not moving….no the corridor is not tipping to starboard and the supermarket aisle is not narrowing and than expanding. I just wonder at how Hunter S Thompson managed to get through the world in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegaswhen so much of the out there was not computing correctly or rather computing as something else entirely.

So in the interests of my remaining a balanced person I will keep this post short.
I have been working on an article about Autism and the Creative Mind and have a collection of similes and definition of words gleaned over the years made by children who have been diagnosed with Asperger’s or are somewhere on the Autistic Spectrum. I suspect many creative people are on there somewhere, including myself, but some are just further along than others. Indeed this is a proposal I investigate in the article.
I have posted the quotations below. I find the specific nature of them or the lateral approach quite refreshing.As many who are diagnosed with some form of Asperger's can testify they see the world just a little a kilter which ties in well with things being a little out of whack for me at present.

Some Similies and Definitions written by Children between 7 and 12 in mainstream schools who have been diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Condition or Asperger’s Syndrome

A

Angry as a waste of paper
Angry as a ‘No right turn’
Angry as two bulls in a field
Awkward as a Zombie at a birthday party that's not fancy dress.

B

Beautiful is something certain
Big as Mrs Cook’s dog.
Black as liquorice, but not the red sort.

C

Careful as a cat on stubble [Boy lives on farm. He explained how feral cats won’t walk on stubble if they can avoid it as it is very sharp and can cut their paws]
Crazy as a windy playground.
Clumsy as raspberry Slush Puppy on a new carpet

D

Deliberate as a right spelling
Drunk as my Nan on Bailey’s at Christmas
Dark as a drove road dyke

E

Empty as a box of nicked chocolates
Excited as bullocks and a yappy dog
Endless as the middle

F

Frightening as the fire alarm bell when you are standing underneath it
Frightening as things that hide
Friendly as a daft dog

G

Germy as the toilets at the bus station that my Mum won’t let me go in
Green as Dad’s best wellies that he only keeps for shows.
Grey as Hunstanton and Nan’s face after the crab.

H

Happy is things being right.
Happy as my Mum when she’s throwing snails into next doors garden
High as the things they don’t want you to touch, even if you stand on a chair.
Hot as the chippie’s fat by closing time.
Hopeful as a BP garage scratch card

I

Interesting as a Tyrannosaurus Rex even though they’re dead but why they’re dead is just as interesting as well [Guess what his particular obsession is]
Ideal is the thing you’ve got when you want it.
Itchy as a bite at night in Newquay.

J

Jolly as Mr Benson pretending to be Santa when he’s already too jolly
Jumpy as Nan waiting by the phone for the hospital to ring

K

Kind is a quiet voice
Kind as shoes that fit
Knotty as old bale twine

L

Lazy as smoked bees
Lumpy as old rice at the back of the fridge
Late as the Number 14

M

Magical as birds in your sleeves
Mean is anything less that a quid
Musical is sounds that make sense in your head
Many is more that a few but not too much, if that’s what you want.

N

New as a baby. Our baby is even newer because she was early.
New as the first time
Nice is a biscuit, a real biscuit, that isn’t very nice.
Nasty as sticking a pencil up your sister’s nose

O

Odd is not being in a two.
Odd is not being in the right jigsaw box.
Odd as black turning white because it’s always the other way round
Old as Romans and ration books
Ordinary is being different in disguise

P

Poorly as a day on the sofa
Private is a sign to keep out
Proud is showing off and having a big head about something but it’s ok for about a day.
Prickly as a row of ones

Q

Quarrelsome as Aunty Sue and Maureen about the pork pie at the wedding
Quiet is waiting for a noise
Quick is almost missing it

R

Regular as crap work [Mishearing I think!]
Round as a year [Boy explained that he sees years as round because the season’s keep recurring in a circle, days are triangles; morning, afternoon, night and weeks are long thin oblongs. many ASC children have wonderful islets of synaesthesia]
Rough as blue sandpaper pants.
Reliable is when you are there, at the time you are meant to be there even if you don’t want to be there and you try to pretend you want to be there and do it the same as if you are glad you are there. But if you hate being reliable after a while you are allowed to stop being reliable because it would be stupid to carry on being reliable about something you hate doing.

S

Suspicious as a fierce dog and a BMW.
Silent as a broken iPod
Still as dead glasses in our pub
Secret as a gun in a sock drawer

T

Tight as my Nan’s chest
Terrible as losing when you are three goals up
Twisted as words when you’re tired
Tubby as a Tudor [Boy doing Henry VIII and I think ‘Tubby the Tuba’ was something they had listened to that week in assembly]

U

Urgent is when you can’t wait until the next services.
Unhappy as a hen on china eggs
Unwanted as nits in Class Four
Unexplained is them not wanting to tell you.

V

Violent as broken teeth and windows
Virtual is a thing made by a computer to be real but it isn’t real, although if it feels real to me it is my real but not your real. Things can be definitely unreal but make you have real feelings and other things are really real, it’s when you don’t know the difference that my Mum has to take the pills and sometimes go into hospital because she doesn’t know what is really real anymore. Our brain is just a computer really and Mum has to go and get rebooted.
Vague as sometime

W

White as washing on the adverts about Persil
Worried is when you keep thinking about something you’d rather not think about.
Wishful as a man with a lamp

XYZ

Yellow as Grandad’s fag fingers
Yappy as my Gran on the bus

Random collections of comments

The day was as grey and thin as my sister in her faded Scooby Do pyjamas.
The sky was full of clouds that were like someone had stuck bones in a liquidiser.
She cried like she was trying to wash it all away.
He smelt as if he were trying not to smell of anything.
No door can ever shut enough to be safe, the outside can always be inside.

If anyone is interested there is a wonderful lecture by Dr Temple Grandin on YouTube which looks at how she, as someone diagnosed with severe autism as a child, views the world. Worth watching, for any poet or writer as it reveals how pain,anxiety,vindication and joy, not necessarily a god, is in the detail.
May post the article up on the blog later this year if I don't find a home for it elsewhere.

Wandering Simon Armitage, Gandalf, Praise Singers and Zombie Haiku

2010-07-26T12:27:00.007+01:00

So Simon Armitage is wandering the spine of England, living off poetry, kindness and reputation. He finishes in Edale today I believe. The old troubadours no doubt had regular halts from their travels at villages where a tale or ballad, full of assonance, rhythm and cliff hangers would ensure at least a mug of ale and some cheese. Poets these days may also require somewhere to charge up their GPS and iphone as well as a bed of straw. I always imagine a good stout stick a la Gandalf would not only be helpful out on the moors to test for bogs but somehow also endow the poet with some gravitas and slight magic.

Poetry and magic were always closely associated. The spell, the chant, the rhythmic naming of names was once seen as part of the deepest magic. Words were always seen as having the power to conjure. In Africa Praise Singers would recite the history of the tribe in such a way as, not only to be an earlier version of ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’, but also as an invocation of the power of the ancestors to remain a force within the present. When a Praise Singer died one tradition in West Africa dictated that their body was placed in the hollow trunk of a particular kind of tree. This was deemed the only way to contain their magical powers as the wordsmith that could summon the ancestors and spirits. Mind you the Praise Singer Zolani Mkiva, who officiated at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration is being used to advertise a bank in South Africa and the Football World Cup so perhaps even hard bitten capitalists take their power seriously these days.

Nowadays for our most famous of ‘Praise Singers’ we don’t resort to hollow trees but have Poets Corner in St Pauls’, an obituary in The Times and sometimes elegies written by others who also know the power of words to evoke and summon and have given their lives to it. However perhaps their power is contained not by trees but by paper when they are made the subject of GCSE’s and taught sometimes without vision and passion to the next generation who may be driven solely by the necessity to tick the boxes in order to get an A* grade.

I suspect that way back the early European wandering bard/poet was still imbued with a little of the mystery and magic of the spoken word. People may have felt that if you shunned them their words might rain misfortune on you, your family, the village, the crop. Perhaps now we rely on Arts Council Grants to keep the poets going, that as a community micro or macro we believe someone else will ensure we pay our dues to the power of those who make their living by the word. Now the Arts Council is less well funded maybe we have to find other ways of keeping the weavers of words and stories in cheese and ale.

Sometimes I think that despite the advent of the printing press and education that allows more people to read and access the word there is still a special kind of reverence reserved for those who can stand up before a group of people and hold them literally spellbound just by the spoken word. I am not necessarily referring to ‘performance poets’ but those few who can make the authority and beauty of words such a communal experience that you know something powerful has happened, not just in your own head but almost in the air the audience breathes. I think I have been to a few readings (not necessarily big well attended ‘posh’ or prestigious ones) where you feel something has happened. There must be a strange conjunction in the stars now and then when poet, poem, listeners and venue all converge at some point where everything is right, absolutely right and something bigger than the sum of the parts is created.

If I try to define or describe that rightness it is always elusive, neither can you or I as a poet or writer strive for it, it is a moment of unexpected grace. That may sound as if I am likening it to a religious experience but that would be to confine it to a particular small box. I am aware that many will say this is all mumbo jumbo nonsense and that a brilliant well written poem, well read before an attentive, open minded audience in a venue that allows the poem to be delivered clearly and without hindrance is a very definable and repeatable recipe. I think I would still have to say that there is something not mystical, not magic but ‘other’ that can happen now and then at a reading. It is probably this rare experience that keeps me going to readings, perhaps I am always searching for that ‘fix’ of rightness.

From the sublime to the ridiculous or just plain wierd. The Boo has passed on a link about a book called Zombie Haiku in which a man charts his experience of becoming a Zombie in the form of haikus. This may well rival the wonderful Spam (as in pork luncheon meat) haikus as the most bizarre and poor taste juxtaposition of form and content. I note that Billie Collins has contributed a Zombie haiku to the website and the section of Zombie haikus in the style of famous poets I admit had me come up with a Tennyson and Charge of the Light Brigade offering.

Half a brain, bad breath
into the valley of death
rode the six hundred

I am off now to buy a Gandalf replica staff on a website, a snip at $99 this may add something to my readings, a certain power, authority and je ne sais crois. However the staff might only work if the poems are worthy of it.

Salt's Tenth Birthday Flash Blog Mob

2010-07-17T14:51:00.008+01:00

At exactly 3pm at the Royal Festival Hall supporters of Salt Publishing will be celebrating the tenth anniversary of the press by reciting Neruda's Ode to Salt. It will be a flash mob with poetry instead of dancing, although some may dance who knows? As I can't make it to dance and recite I am joining in the Flash blog mob instead. Enjoy the poem, celebrate the joy of having a good independant publisher reach 10 years of being in the fray and as they are always needing support buy a book from them. In hard times when the recession can push under many Arts projects a strong bunch of good presses putting forward fantastic work that may otherwise never see the light of day is important.

Ode to Salt

This salt
in the salt cellar
I once saw in the salt mines.
I know
you won’t
believe me
but
it sings
salt sings, the skin
of the salt mines
sings
with a mouth smothered
by the earth.
I shivered in those
solitudes
when I heard
the voice
of
the salt
in the desert.
Near Antofagasta
the nitrous
pampa
resounds:
a
broken
voice,
a mournful
song.

In its caves
the salt moans, mountain
of buried light,
translucent cathedral,
crystal of the sea, oblivion
of the waves.
And then on every table
in the world,
salt,
we see your piquant
powder
sprinkling
vital light
upon
our food.
Preserver
of the ancient
holds of ships,
discoverer
on
the high seas,
earliest
sailor
of the unknown, shifting
byways of the foam.
Dust of the sea, in you
the tongue receives a kiss
from ocean night:
taste imparts to every seasoned
dish your ocean essence;
the smallest,
miniature
wave from the saltcellar
reveals to us
more than domestic whiteness;
in it, we taste finitude.

Here is another celebratory poetry flash mob , just in case you think Salt has taken leave of its senses. Maya Angelou celebrated mob style.

To update here is an audio report of Jen Hamilton Emery (one of Salt's founders, editors and general heroes) reporting on the events of the afternoon

Neruda in Heat and Those Spies that Came In or Out of the Cold

2010-07-11T15:03:00.013+01:00

A mixed random bag of thoughts today dear reader, it’s hot and I don’t function well in heat and it tends to make concentration on one thing hard.

It could be climate that sometimes fosters a difference in the literary tradition of nations. I have been reading and listening to a lot of Neruda recently and perhaps his love poems in particular could only be a product of a man who understood heat. This is not to say that love and passion is not to be found in colder climes but that landscape and weather are so deeply embedded in the psyche they cannot help but permeate the poet. Then here to contradict myself I have picked Merwin’s translation of Neruda’s famous Poem 20 which mentions snow in line 14 which I believe must be a typo on the website for 'soul' ( spot the deliberate translation mistake). I suggest you read it and then listen to the poem read by Neruda himself here in order to get a feel for the heat in his poem. This is one reason why I have promised myself that I will start to learn Spanish before the little grey cells become stodgy, clustered and unable to absorb.

The Americans have just swapped ten Russian spies for four spies which seems like a bit of a good deal. Living near Cambridge I am always interested in spies. The University, in the thirties in particular, was the nursery for many a spy. The famous elite and secret debating society called The Apostles based around Trinity and Kings afforded Anthony Blunt (later Sir Anthony, art historian to her Majesty) and others, scope to recruit. Burgess, McClean, Philby, Cairncross, the list goes on, all trod the hallowed grass in Kings’ College and Trinity quadrangles. Here, in the elitist of all institutions they decided a communist regime offered more hope than high table suppers, punting and tutorials in seventeenth century studies accompanied by the smell of toasting crumpets and the merry banter of bedders cajoling Hooray Henrys out of their pits, where they would lay until mid afternoon recovering from jolly japes and parties.

I had forgotten how fantastic Prunella Scales was as the Queen until I came across this encounter between her and Sir Anthony whilst he was still in the closet ( spy wise that is) but on the cusp of being unmasked. It’s eight minutes plus if you look at Part 2 as well but well worth it. We tend to produce a far more educated and posh spy than the Americans. One of the Russian spies recently swapped was in real estate and was on Facebook for heaven’s sake, no self respecting Cambridge spy, one likes to think, would have even contemplated something like Facebook. Tea would be at the Ritz not at Burger King.

Of course we can also do grubby spies quite well, listening to Richard Burton’s little tirade in The Spy who Came in from the Cold about sums that gene of spy up. I like to think though that spies have some sense of irony, (a la Orson Wells in The Third Man).

I wonder if those returned Russian spies will miss apple pie, Wal-Mart, Oprah and free refills of coffee in diners. What occupies me most about it all is the fact that some of the couples had children conceived and brought up solely in America. They are currently being held by child welfare in the States. The younger ones will probably be returned to their parents but what about the teenagers? Will an American teenager who had no idea his parents are Russian spies want to be dropped down in the middle of a tower block apartment assigned to returning spies in some wind blown seedy suburb of Moscow? There is a whole novel, film, anything you care to think about in that. When everything you have believed to be true becomes a lie on such a mammoth scale how do you possibly cope with that. Your Mum and Dad may love you, you may love them but all the time they were leading another life or maybe playing so hard at leading another life that it became their real life and the spying some sort of half repressed fantasy. How do you square the circle or come to grips with that. I shall be interested to see if the older children choose to join their parents in exile or actually I suppose it is join their parents back home, although home is something unknown.

Bundled up with Richard Branson, Dean Parkin and Martin Figura

2010-07-03T17:17:00.016+01:00

I have somehow skipped an entire month not in life but in blog posts. Are blog months somehow different to real months, are they like dog years; one month missed equivalent to seven months in the passing of internet time? I am told that the art of blogging is to do little and often so you keep on the radar of those that follow blogs. I seem a bit of a binge blogger, weeks without then maybe a few posts all bunched together. This is how life is sometimes; famine and plenty, all or nothing, three buses at once or hours waiting for one…all the clichés you can imagine to describe bunching. No doubt there may be a serious mathematician out there who can tell me that you could actually produce some formula if you gathered enough data from blogs about frequency of posts that would indicate the likelihood of long silences and then a bundle of blogs all at once.

Speaking of bundles I have been having a Victor Meldrew moment with Virgin my broadband provider. I seem to be paying far more for just my broadband than other people; I discussed it in my office. They all suggested I phoned and said I was thinking of leaving them and this should trigger a flurry of better offers from them as they became twitchy meerkats at the thought of losing your custom entirely. But no, dear reader, it thrust me into a strange Kafkaesque conversation with a young man who was probably reading from a script but who couldn’t seem to grasp what I was saying or perhaps what I was saying did not make any sense in the media services world view.

I would have to continue paying £20 for 10MB of broadband no matter what but, and now he beamed down the line at me, but what I can do is offer you 20MB of broadband for the same price. I pointed out I didn’t need 20MB, I don’t live with several teenagers all downloading as if their life in the Matrix depended on it. I, as he confirmed from the data he was obviously accessing on screen, am a very light user. Offering me more was like offering to deliver me three bottles of milk per day when I could only consume 2 bottles per week. Even my milkman who due to lack of light and sleep and the resultant vitamin D deficiency could sometimes be a little slow on my scribbled messages now and then, could understand that argument. So I told him I did not want to pay the same for more I wanted to pay less for the same. This did not compute. I asked if it cost Virgin anything to upgrade my speed to 20MB, he couldn’t answer this as he knew it was the Catch 22 question……If he could give me 20MB at no extra cost to the company why did the company not give me this facility as a matter of course? If it did cost the company something if only a pound or so why couldn’t I have this amount deducted from my bill and stay the same as technically I was saving the company money by saying no thanks to 20Mb at the same price. This seemed logical to me, not to him because he said he did not have the ability to offer me that or it wasn’t in his script.

Then he says, well for £29.99 you could have broadband, phone and television. So I say phone and TV must cost £9.99 if broadband at my speed had to cost £20. No, he said, Broadband bought in a bundle costs far less than that. So says I, leaping onto this statement, like a lioness on a wounded gazelle, I want that bundle minus the TV and Phone. But, he whines, Broadband only costs less if you have it in a bundle, it is not possible to unbundle anything and buy individual components. The clue is in the name of the deal…BUNDLE. I could tell he was getting testy with me by now. So I say by way of final clarification. So I can have more for the same, far more for a little bit more but never the same for less, despite the same costing less when bundled. Exactly, he sighs, as if at last I had grasped some great economic and philosophical truth. Thank you, I reply, I will go away and think about it (…and write about it in my blog as well…and keep an eye out for Richard Branson if he ever passes within hailing distance of me). I may have a Jack Nicholson in a diner moment with him

Brief pause for a slurp pf tea and a deep breath whilst I take off my grumpy old woman head and step down from the soap box.

Went to see Dean Parkin do his one man show called Dean’s Dad’s Ducks. This was his trial run before its appearance at the Edinburgh Festival in August. It was fabulous; by turns funny and poignant and even downright heart breaking. You found yourself laughing and then suddenly thinking, wait a minute this is really sad should I really be laughing? It mixes poems, monologue, sound effects, songs, audience participation and a plastic duck all to serve the real life tale of Dean’s dad’s world in which he makes toys and lives a strange shuttling life between his family and a woman called Denise. Life in a small Suffolk village has never been so closely and bizarrely observed and at times it makes the world of The League of Gentlemen seem rather ordinary and tame. Go and see it if you happen to be at the Festival or live that way, if you don’t find out where you can see it in the future, it is worth the effort.

The one man (or woman show) and poetry seems to be on the rise at the moment. Martin Figura under the Apples and Snakes banner is also launching his show called Whistle at Ledbury Festival next week-end. His is a serious look at how his world fell apart when his father murdered his mother, it uses poems, photographs and monologue but also letters to tell the story. As I know Martin I have known many of the poems used in this show for some time but I have yet to see it brought together with the full experience of photographs etc.

I think the key word in both these shows, different as they are, is the word ‘story’. Each of them draw you in, not only because we are listening to a well constructed and suprising narrative but also that it is a tale of real life. Neither show would, I think, work at all if these were fictional, a dramatic fictional monologue would somehow be almost distastefully inauthentic. However the heightened language of poetry allows you to thread through these memoir pieces a sense of observation, of stepping back and regarding the world they both experienced as a child and later reflect on as an adult. Of course lies are told, the truth is always something elusive, even unobtainable, when we talk about family. We all have our own truths about how we survived and flourished inside one or despite one. A fact is not the same as truth; how we interpret fact or even perceive it at all, is the mystery of how we come to see ourselves and forge our own identities.

It is good to see the Arts Council putting money into these shows, in times of huge financial cutback it is good to see them funding work that reaches beyond the usual poetry audience and allows people to see that poems can truely be a part of real life, anyone's real life. Go see these shows; I think they will both leave you thinking about what you believe to be true in your own life and not just about the life of the person delivering their life and truths up there in the spotlight.

PS I have. for those who have popped in for a look before, changed the blog template. Variety may not be the spice of life but I thought I'd just see how this felt for a while. If anyone hates it or thinks this template is too busy and unreadable I am more than open to persuasion. I did resist the template marked ethereal that had twee flowers etc on it and also the one that was very dark and all crisp design lines. This may be because I am neither a flowery person nor a cutting edge design sort of person. Rain on a window pane seemed ok, well for now at least; it reminds me of the bizarre variety of postcards and adverts stuck up on the window of my local corner shop. I like the thought of a blog being like a changing postcard advertising for a lost cat, lost poem, lost something or other plus also mingled in with those wierd self revelatory adverts in the 'room to let in a clean, nicely appointed, non smoking home for a professional only, must not be allergic to cats. An interest in Andrew Lloyd Weber musicals and Cage Fighting would be an advantage' ilk. ( True newsagent postcard advert I once spotted in a nearby town and had to write down)

Answers for the Children on the Danish Island of Sejer

2010-05-23T19:04:00.004+01:00

How did you start writing poetry?

From a small child I always loved reading. I loved the way you could just put marks on a piece of paper and people could find in them another world, perhaps a pretend one or perhaps a real one that I would never be able to see for myself. The children of Sejer may find it strange but reading helped me also find out things about myself, even when I was very young. In a story I would think, what would I do if I was in the same situation as some of the story characters? So I began by loving reading, loving books and then I eventually came across some poetry books and a teacher that loved to read poems to the class at the end of the day.
So I started out by reading as all poets and writers should do, reading everything I possibly could. Then I thought I wanted to try writing some stories and poems and so I began to write them down, just to please myself.

I kept writing things down and eventually I decided to show some poems to others who’s opinion I valued and they said they were good, so I sent things out to magazines and a few got published. I got many turned down but with all writing and with life you have to keep going and not give up and I began to win some prizes in poetry competition and then eventually I published a small book of poems that a play writer turned into a radio play that was broadcast on national radio which was very successful. Then a big publisher agreed to publish a big collection of my poems and that was published last year.

I work with lots of children in different schools as my day job but I also spend a lot of time going to places all over the country to read my poetry to people. I am also in a poetry group, we are five poets who go to all sorts of different places and festivals and read our poetry in different ways so that people can see that poetry does not have to be boring.

Why poetry?

Just the sound of the words can be very exciting, and if a poem has words that rhyme or nearly rhyme the sound of the poem feels right and makes me feel as if it is a piece of music. The rhythm of the words also adds to the excitement, just like a good modern ‘rap artist’ can use rhythm and rhyme to make a song work and stick in your head so can all the good poets. For instance there is a poem called Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll who wrote Alice in Wonderland that is full of nonsense words that he made up but still the sound and rhythm of them feels right as if they should be real words.
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Here is the link to the Muppets performing Jabberwocky Don’t worry if you don’t understand it, just listen to the sound and rhythm of the words.

Poems also make you think very hard about the words you choose because the idea is to use the best possible word in the best possible place so that no word, no sound is out of place. Sometimes a very good poem can say something in just one or two lines that you think would take pages of writing to say. It can be a way of making something very clear and at the same time very beautiful and complex.
It is one of the oldest arts, for thousands of years people have made poems, even before writing was invented people used poems to tell others stories or histories of their tribe. The rhythm and use of the words was a way of making people really listen and also of making it memorable. Tribes from all over the world from Europe to Africa to the Americas and even the aborigines in Australia understood about rhythm and sound and saying a story or something in a poetic rhythmic way so others could experience it and almost feel it in their bodies. Before musical instruments were made people used the beat of a drum or just a stick banging on a hollow log to keep the poem rhythmic. So poetry is very old and I think somewhere deep inside all of us we can feel a good poem almost like a piece of music.

Why do we need poetry for in a modern society?

We don’t need poetry; we don’t need music or art. We just need food, shelter, warmth and air and all the other things we need to survive but if we want to be more than just an animal that survives we may need these other things to make us better people. Music and poetry make us listen; make us think about things in a way we may never have thought about. Art and painting makes us look at things in a different way.

When I was invited to New York with other poetry friends to read our poetry it was just a year after the twin towers had collapsed and the city was still in shock. Everybody felt sad, frightened and most people knew someone who had died in the disaster. All around the city in the big railway stations and on boards near the site of the twin towers, poems started to appear. There were hundreds and hundreds of poems about friends or relatives who had died that day the towers collapsed. Some poems were famous ones written by poets of long ago but many were written by the relatives or friends themselves, simple little poems about how much they loved that person and what they wanted others to know about them.

I think it is common in times of real hurt or pain that people turn to poetry and why is that? I think it is because not only is there comfort to be found in a poem but there is something magical about how words can make some idea or someone live on in your head, it is a way human beings can connect with each other, how they can experience something common and human together.

Poems must also be important and powerful because in countries where freedom and liberty are threatened the poets and writers are often the first people to be arrested as governments know the power of poems and how they can inspire and move people. A long time ago in Chile many people were fighting for freedom against a bad government In one prison cell a poet wrote on the wall in his own blood, ‘The poets are the first to be taken.’

That shows that poetry is not just an old fashioned dead thing but a living thing which can give people hope and courage even when the world seems without hope. A famous Russian woman poet a long time ago had to commit all her poems to memory and then burn them (and she had many of them) because if the government found any paper with her poems on they would arrest her. Later when she was in prison she taught her poems to other women so that when they were released from prison they could tell these poems to others and somehow the outside world would hear how badly people were being treated. If poems were not important in a modern world why would people still put their lives in danger to write them and risk getting others to read them?

It can also help people hear what they are losing and what they need to fight for. Many poets now write about global warming, the loss of species of animals and their poems fly round the world so that others can hear them and perhaps try to change what is happening.

How do you learn to write poetry?

I think the best way to learn to write poetry is to read and listen to it as much as possible. Always keep a little notebook and when you hear something interesting or just a word you like always write it down. Poets have to be very good at listening to others and watching them and the world around them.

When you are older you may want to go on a poetry writing course, I went on many of these. Find out if there is a local poetry club or sometimes a café or place where people go to read or talk about poetry. I go to a café in a town near me every month where people bring poems to read and we chat and talk about poems. The best way to learn to do anything is just by trying to do it. What you write may not be good at first but there is always something to be learnt by looking at it and saying what could you change about it to make it better. Talk about poems you like to others, share your favourite poems with them. I know many people who you think would not like poetry but when you talk to them often they secretly write poems themselves or have a favourite poem. On a train once I happened to sit with a lot of football supporters going to see their team playa match a long way from home. It was a long journey and we started talking to each other and when these young men found out I was a poet they started to tell me all about the poems they liked and two or three told me that they wrote poems themselves including love poems for their girlfriends. So don’t think only certain types of people like poetry, it may surprise you how many people do like it.

What's your favourite poem?

This is very difficult for me as I love so many poems for so many reasons but I suppose one of the first poems that made me really love what poetry could do was written a long time ago in 1684 by an English poet called John Donne. It is very famous here.

Meditation 17

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

I like this poem because in just fourteen lines it doesn’t tell me things it just shows me a picture in my head of all of us being like little islands and how that seems slightly mad. It makes me think about how each of us is connected in some way and that we cannot ignore others and what happens to them no matter how far away they seem. If we do ignore them and what happens to them, it makes us die just a little inside. We are involved in the world even if we want to think we can live in our own little island and think that what is happening outside in the world will never be anything to do with us. This poem was written nearly four hundred years ago yet I think it is still very powerful and in a time of global warming and other global events it still has a message for us.

If I were to translate this poem into more modern easier English I would perhaps say it like this.

Thought Number 17

No one can be like a little island
all on their own,
everyone is part of the whole world,
the whole thing.
Even if a tiny bit of mud is washed away,
the earth is made a tiny bit smaller
just as much as if a big headland
or your own home
or your friend’s home were swept away.
Each person’s death makes me smaller,
because I am part of all humanity.
Don’t ask why the alarm is ringing,
it is ringing for all of us, you and me.

Your favourite author?

Again I like so many authors but I have always liked Charles Dickens and Jane Austen but I also like many American authors like Raymond Chandler who wrote detective novels many years ago. I also like reading old myths and legends and stories like the Odyssey, which is actually a great adventure story about a soldier trying to get home to his wife and all the ways some of the gods try to stop him getting home. It is a story about how using our wits and your mind is sometimes better than being the best or strongest soldier. Poets I like are too many to list and I think I love particular poems more than everything a poet writes. If I had to choose a modern poet then maybe it would have to be Pablo Neruda a Chilean poet or an American woman poet called Elizabeth Bishop.

Overheard at the Polling Station

2010-05-06T19:13:00.004+01:00

So today is polling day and I expect that you dear reader will already know the result and are girding your loins at this very moment for the cut-backs and the long dark night not only of the soul but public spending.

After work I walked down to the polling station, in my case a church hall. The sun was shining and people lingered outside to chat and there were various people armed with clipboards approaching voters before they went in. One local councillor whose job is also up for grabs today was caught in a pincer movement by two old ladies who demanded to know how he had the audacity to ask for them for their support when he hadn’t bothered to knock on their door and explain his policies and what he stood for. Other candidates shrank back; no doubt glad they hadn’t been the subject of the ladies spirited attack. I had to linger to listen as they had got into their stride and lambasted the unfortunate candidate with all the ills of their world, many of which he had little control over as a Local Authority Councillor. The lack of suitable equipment for the troops in Afghanistan ( one of the ladies had a grandson in the Army, the cost of petrol and duck houses, The NHS, the state of the pavements, pensions all were grist to their mill. He tried to explain that as a local councillor (and an Independent Councillor at that) he had little control over anything governmental but at the mention of pavements he clung to that like a drowning man.
“I have a good track record on pressing for compensation for elderly people who have been injured due to poor pavement maintenance” he beamed at the ladies.
They looked at each other then at him, “What does that mean when it’s at home? You haven’t come knocking on our door telling us all about what you’ve done for old people who can’t stay upright.” they paused for only a millisecond, “Exactly how many people have you helped?”
You could see the man was struggling with the reply. “Well one, an eighty year old lady but she got, five hundred pounds for a broken ankle caused by some paving slabs sticking up.”
“I wouldn’t fall out of bed for five hundred pounds,” replied the tightly permed one. “If you break your ankle when you are over eighty like us, you know what you can look forward to …..hours hanging around in casualty, MRSA probably and pneumonia because you have to sit around in a freezing cold house unable to move even to keep yourself warm because you can’t afford to turn the bloody fire on. The bloody guided bus is millions of pounds over budget and isn’t even opened because you can’t get that right and all you can manage is £500 quid for a life threatening injury. I suppose she got less because the powers that be thought she didn’t have much time left anyway so no point giving her lots of money if she was going to die soon?”

The Councillor was on the back foot well and truly now and looking for a way out, he decided to take the simple route out.
“So will you be voting for me?” It was said as a means of ending the conversation rather than a genuine enquiry.
“Oh yes love, we always vote for someone who lives in the town no matter how useless they are, at least you aren’t an in-comer.” The smaller of the two old ladies said as if the man was stupid even thinking that they would not be voting for him. I inwardly groaned at the on coming immigrant rant.
“Yes some of that lot from the next town can’t be trusted,” agreed the other woman.
The would be re-elected Councillor retreated no doubt as mystified as me about the psyche of the voting public.

I am off this weekend to the Poetry-Next-the-Sea festival in Wells, sun, sea, poems and delights of fish and chips. It may be to lick wounds or celebrate but what ever the outcome of the election there are hard times ahead, The times they are a changin' as Mr Dylan once pointed out.

Thank You Letter

2010-04-18T02:04:00.004+01:00

Dear Literature,
As I have been reading various letters written by the great and the good and the not so good to each other lately I thought it about time that I wrote to you just to acknowledge the debt I owe you. So often we become so used to something or someone being always there, part of the furniture in our emotional house, that we take them for granted. We have been friends for a long time now and I have never ceased to wonder at your capacity to inspire, infuriate, console, stimulate, perplex, bore and sustain me. I read voraciously as a child , books being a constant bolt-hole from real life. However I found something more profound and exciting than mere escape in the form of poetry, when I was thirteen. Rather it was the case that you found me when a new young English teacher read the class Prayer Before Birth by Louis MacNeice and did not dissect it or interrogate it or come with any educational agenda other than to help us engage with the words and the tumbling sound of them. Then through these words and images they created to the feelings they engendered. She read it in a way I had never heard a poem read before, in a way that did not make a straight –jacket of received BBC pronunciation but in her robust Lancashire accent. For a Midland girl who had been suddenly parachuted into the alien vowels of the posh south only a year previously this experience was revelatory. Poetry did not require you to be posh, nor did it demand you totally understand what it all meant, that could come later, but what it did demand was that you close your eyes and just listen, really listen. This same teacher managed to make Dickens as exciting as any TV soap and Richard III positively oozed with all the twisted thrill and urgent barely repressed sexuality that any bad boy with long hair and the gift of the gab had for any one of us installed in an all girls High School. I even managed to find literature walking the streets of my old Midland home town when she lent me copy of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe

Almost from then on, Literature, we came to an understanding you and I, that we would be connected in some way. You would give me something I needed even at times when I did not know I needed it myself and I would give you at the very least, time. At fifteen I told a man who was very old, very wise, very well published and very kind that I wanted to be a poet or a writer some day. He did not laugh, he told me that what I needed to do first was read as that the greatest way to learn how to write. So I read as I had as a small child ,voraciously, for nearly thirty-five years. I read anything I could get my hands on that seemed at first glance to be worthwhile. At first I did not know what to make of what I was reading and quantity might have outstripped quality however I always found something that excited me enough to make me read on. After thirty-five years I eventually decided that I might be ready to write something other than private meanderings. This was in itself quite a difficult decision as the more I read the more I realised I had so much yet to read and whilst I wrote for my own private consumption I wondered whether with so much poetry and fiction out there I really needed to add to the amount available. Maybe this wise man did not intended that I should read for quite so long before I wrote for an audience of any kind but time spent reading is never wasted even if you throw a book across the room in disgust or fail to get past the half way mark in a book because you realise the author and you have diverged on what you deem to be good writing.

You and I will always be life long friends, in poetry at its best I find something almost mystical and yet solid and organic in the way sound and words work together to make something happen for me as the reader. In fiction I can be invited into a world that binds me so closely to something ‘other’ that at times I have been genuinely startled when I have lifted my eyes away from the page to find myself in my own room surrounded by my own things. If books were to vanish from the face of the earth and I could never read another poem or book again I can still be in your company for the best of what I have read has always stayed with me.

So this is by way of a thank-you letter, in case I should never have the opportunity again to ensure you know how I feel. Of course it really is a thank-you letter to all those poets and writers who have struggled, agonised, battled to bring me so much. Some have found neither fame nor riches from their work but nonetheless they have made my life the richer for their words. They may never know this, they may be long dead, but nonetheless thanks are owed to them. It may be that only one poem or one book out of many they have written has allowed me some connection with some thought or experience that I would otherwise have missed but this is more than enough to warrant my thanks. If anything I ever write or have written gives just one person something they feel worth holding onto, then I would be content. In the end Literature, you and I both know that I would be a sadder and maybe a more insular person without you and we still, hopefully, have a long road to travel together.

Sean O'Brien, Robert Creely and thoughts about whether 'In my beginning is my end'.

2010-03-20T17:44:00.005Z

Why haven’t I blogged dear reader, because I had nothing to say, because I had no time, because I have deserted the corridors of blogdom in search of other means of soap boxing? I have no idea, perhaps a mixture of all three. I have been trying to get down to novel number two and am attempting to research to the point that the research will not show in the writing. This can take a long time to achieve. I can always spot the writer who has spent so much time researching the background for a novel that they cannot help but let the reader know they have done their homework. This can take the form of meticulous dress description, the citing of the exact number of the bus that goes to Hackney, the precise recipe for something ancient and decidedly untasty like Ancient Egyptian porridge. Of course where does a solid understanding of the background veer off into information dumping, a type of ‘I know this so I think you should know it as well’ situation?

Is this a phenomenon only encountered in fiction writing, where the scaffolding obscures the house beneath? Having been on a poetry workshop last week-end with Sean O'Brien, I am now equipped with the knowledge that beginnings are very important, ends are important and the middle is also quite important. This may sound like a clip form the Fast Show sending up poetry workshops but the knack, dear reader, is knowing when the beginning , middle and end actually occur in the poem.

I suppose to try a new visual other than the house and scaffolding one perhaps could see a poem as going off on holiday, the beginning may involve packing your bags, getting to the airport ,waiting for hours to get through, the flight, the late night arrival and taxi to the hotel. Then comes the waking up on the first day, opening a window to see a glorious view of sun, and sea or maybe mountains. The week spent exploring new sights and delights is exhilarating and then it’s the end, packing again, getting to the airport arriving home, stuffing your washing in the machine and sitting back with a mug of tea to think about what you have got from the holiday.

Now where is the true beginning of the journey, the moment we open the window and experience the heady rush of newness? So often we are told to get rid of the extraneous stuff that only leads us into the main body of the poem, no one wants to know about your packing and journey to get there unless of course it is intrinsically interesting in its own right and then maybe that alone is the source material. The experience of being on holiday is perhaps another poem in its own right. Where is the end of the poem, do I sometimes have recourse to the moment in the armchair with the mug of tea at the end of the poem where I review what I have experienced and make sense of it or simply absorb it?

It was pointed out at the workshop that endings do not have to be great crescendos but can be a subtle diminuendo but I think the emphasis there may be on the word subtle, it is not just a petering out. So I dived into some of my poems and thought about where the poem began but also where the poem ends and sometimes I came up with a sliver of a poem that began and ended and that’s where I had to angst over the middle, not as padding but as an awareness that a poem does not have to be constant linguistic fireworks or amazing metaphors and imagery but that the journey from a to b can earn its place, each word can earn its place by virtue of the movement it brings to the work.

Sean O’Brien who was leading the workshop pointed us, at one point, to the work of the American Poet Robert Creely which I have enjoyed exploring further. Here is one I thought just wonderful, a definite beginning, a definite end and the journey between exciting by it’s brevity, in fact I think the stanza break is the important middle section the journey between. Sometimes we forget that the white space between stanzas is important it says something both linguistically and physically, it isn’t just there to split the poem into balanced bite sized pieces. I think I could write a whole essay about the white space between stanzas and what it can express.

The Warning
by Robert Creeley
For love—I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.

Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of an amulet
and quick surprise.

You can find more of Creeley’s poems and his biography here.

Poets sometimes these days shy away from the big abstract things like love. We may approach it from subtle angles and metaphors but perhaps we should be a little braver about the right to make authentic statements about the big things. The old adage that all poetry can be reduced down to love or death may be true. However the reverse can be true, that from love and death a poem can be expanded to encompass it.

I shall get back to my research now for the novel. I am being drawn inexorably towards writing a poem though. It is a vice that I can’t quite quit even for a few weeks or days. What I produce may not be worth reading but with every beginning of a poem there is always a hope that by the end I will have arrived somewhere worth the journey.

Here is Robert Creely again reading another of his poems, ‘Please’.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOUlO0J55pE&feature=related

Belief in Love, Brian Pattern, Shakespearean Sonnets and Dreams

2010-02-14T19:08:00.012Z

So having posted about Amy Clampitt, I ransacked my shelves to find her Collected Works to refresh my memory and ensure it wasn’t playing tricks on me. I wish I could say I had tidy alphabetised shelves of books but alas no. I do keep my poetry books more or less together and then everything else has to fight for and its own space. So I search for Clampitt and find her nestled up to Brian Patten’s Love Poems and as it is Valentine’s Day I will indulge myself briefly

That was my moment of chocolate truffle indulgence, if you bothered to follow the link.

I watched Field of Dreams for the umpteenth time yesterday as it was a cold, wet dark afternoon and it happened to be on TV. I cried as usual and as usual also felt resentful as I dealt with the panda eyes caused by the clash of mascara and sentimentality. I am such a gift to manipulative film directors who can so easily press buttons, I try really hard to repeat the mantra,'I am being manipulated, I am being manipulated' but often give in ifonly to clear the sinus', a good weep can be quite cathartic. However the film did make me ponder about the relationship between love and belief. Belief in the power of things unseen and unproven and the nature of love are not so far apart on that continuum that runs between hell and heaven, lost and found, up and down. By belief I do not mean religious belief but belief in the capacity of the self to put another before self, to want the best for the other and in so doing feel the self become the best and strongest it can be through the existence of the other.

It may not be everyone’s experience of love of a partner but it was mine but I know that there is no point in even attempting a definition but surely to experience love at all it must include some echo, something close to this attempt to put the other first without losing the self. It’s an art to love unconditionally whilst still retaining your own integrity. Who you are being not lessened but increased by the existence and relationship with another. Too much other and not enough I and you become a door-mat, or vice versa, too much I and not enough other and you can be a selfish pig. Usually there is a pendulum swinging between both states. All we can hope for maybe is giving it our best shot so in the end some sort of equilibrium is achieved that allows both to be the best they are with whom they are.

This is theory , the practice of love blows all theories, all suppositions out of the water; it is and always will be what it is; unique, totally different for each person. I have long since given up wondering what makes love happen or work. I have even given up trying to know what it is and how it plays out between people. That it can exist at all is good enough for me.

So again as it is Valentine’s day , here is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 read by an old lady called Eleanor on the sofa with her dog…I could have gone for the unctuous voice of Alan Rickman or the lighter slightly more neurotic twitchy tones of David Tennant but actually Eleanor has no art about her, no actorly skills just the words and that's all Mr Shakespeare ever needed.

The Art Of the Migraine, Gabbing and Amy Clampitt

2010-02-06T16:02:00.008Z

Luckily I don’t have migraines that often but when I do they are the Premier League kind, with strange auras and sensations. Expanding black dots, heightened colours, flashing zigzags of light, tingling in lips and hands, a feeling that I am on board a rocking ship. I have the full Monty. As a child I would be laid up for days and have the strategic bucket placed beside the bed which was a sure sign that my mother took me seriously and that vomiting was in the offing. The taking of medicines or painkillers was frowned upon and the mantra of either ‘working it off’ or ‘sleeping it off’ held sway. This was not just my mother’s way of thinking but was held in common by most working class mothers of the day. You only got medicine if it was within the range of ‘home-cures’ or you were deemed exceptionally sick.

Now there is a full range of pills and potions to dose yourself up with and I am happy to use any that work. Whilst a feverfew sandwich may help I am afraid a hefty dose of paracetemol or other such stuff is infinitely more effective. I have observed my migraines for a while now and have discovered that if you can mentally stand back and observe yourself having one it is a mind trick that seems to help. Many famous people have suffered from migraines; Lewis Carroll, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Woolf, Cervantes, Van Gogh, Monet, Sigmund Freud, Frederic Nietzsche, Elvis Presley. Some have attributed Van Gogh’s bright swirling colours and Monet’s impressionistic approach to the experience of migraine auras. I fancy such thinking may simply be down to people wanting to think that migraine auras can in some way feed into the creative mind. Others have even seen the skewed world of Alice in Wonderland as in part a reflection of the strange visual distortions Carroll may have experienced. It is an interesting thought but there is no real evidence to support it, however I have noticed that life when a migraine aura takes over can become strangely weird around the edges so who can say what may have occurred inside Carroll’s mind.

De-constructing the migraine, as I call it for want of a better name, at least allows me to think in that part of my brain set aside from the throbbing and general pain. Pretending to observe and describe pain has been an old technique to manage pain for centuries but of course I am all in favour of drugs, the observation in my case is something to do whilst they work and it can take up to two or three days before the pain subsides. I am typing now with one half of the key board almost totally blacked out and small points of light dancing round the edges of the darkness, it looks like a sparse firework display at a impecunious vilage celebration on a black moonless night. Of course staring at a monitor may not help but in the end it gets boring closing your eyes and lying down, despite the fact I am capable of amusing myself for hours by just thinking. However with a migraine just thinking about anything else seems to require so much energy that you give up and decide to just observe it. Amy Clampitt has a poem called Anatomy of a Migraine, unfortunately I couldn’t find a copy of it but it is in her Selected Works by Faber. I know Helen Ivory also has a poem in her last collection , ‘Dog in the Sky’ about a severe headache, comparing it to a kite. Perhaps if I keep watching more closely I’ll get a poem out of this migraine.

Meanwhile an interesting post on the blog Squared ( 3rd Feb 2010) by Anne Berkeley who I have the pleasure of working with in The Joy of Six

It is about the gab between poems at readings and its function, necessity or art. You can read my response there. Gab is tricky; to gab or not to gab that is the question. The quiet dignity of the non-gabber who just reads their poems in an assured and authoritative way (Paul Durcan for instance) or the delight of the roguish and entrancing gabber (Michael Donaghy) who read equally well and had great poems too. A matter of taste, a matter essentially of how good the poems are. No amount of gab can make a bad poem good but sometimes it cam make a mediocre poem just a little more entrancing, the glitz of great window dressing can sometimes disguise the quality of the clothes. No gab, if badly handled, can leave you feeling read ‘at’ rather than ‘to’ and can appear a little arrogant as if the audience isn’t worth the poet bothering with or taking account of. Often it depends on the audience; a die-hard poetry reading audience (somehow that suddenly conjured up an image of Bruce Willis listening to poetry in his vest…. I am blaming it on the migraine) can go along with the non-gab approach. An audience composed of those who would not usually come to a poetry reading and who read very little poetry may be made more comfortable and be able to feel they can access poems more readily by a poet who is happy to engage with them and give some poems a leg-up by a little explanation.

I am now off to lie down in a darkened room and watch all the pretty lights swirl around even when I close my eyes.

As I couldn’t find Anatomy of a Migraine by Amy Clampitt here is another great poem of hers Nothing Stays Put. It is good to remember that Clampitt did not gain any great recognition until she was well over fifty, so hurray for the late bloomers.

Jack Straw, Cats on Ice and the Silence of Dogs

2010-01-21T22:42:00.005Z

The dog next door is a very likeable Cocker Spaniel but has taken method acting lessons from a pit-bull and managed from behind the security of a fence to give the impression of a savage animal about to rip your throat out. She is a rescue dog and has always had the fixation that anyone approaching the property, including mine, is someone to be warded off by fierce barking and demonstrations of ferocious body hurling. It throws itself regularly at the fence that separates me from my lovely dog-owning neighbour and now the fence has finally given up the fight and fallen down.

The dog is perplexed because she is essentially a real softie and melts into acquiescence once she sees the person who has made the offending approaching footsteps; now she can see who is approaching and doesn’t know whether to bark and hurl or wag and greet. I have never understood the term ‘his bark is worse than his bite’ because quite frankly a bite is always worse than a bark, one breaks the skin the other just breaks the silence.

The two local cats who seem to have decided my garden is their habitat of choice, have no problem with this dog. Cats understand pretence as they deploy it all the time. During the recent cold weather I watched from my window as one of these cats slipped over on the ice and skidded a few feet on its bum. The cat immediately regained its composure and got to its four feet in such a graceful manner and with such aplomb that he conjured up the idea that this was what he intended to do all the time. I once had a three-legged cat who fell over a great deal. She usually managed well but now and then it was as if the rumour of the fourth leg fooled her into trusting to its existence. She would right herself after such a fall and stare around as if checking that no-one had seen her. I have done the same myself when I have fallen over.

The worse thing about falling is the embarrassment at having done so. During the recent snow and ice I walked as carefully as the three legged cat, the memory of my laughing as a child at my mother walking carefully in the ice poking me in the back. Falling not only means you might break something but that you can be seen as silly. Of course we all would rush to help someone who has fallen over but there must be some sort of equation involving age of faller, slipperiness factor of the ice, outcome of no real serious injury that equates to the level of silliness one feels at falling over. A high perceived silliness quotient of say ten could be achieved by someone of 28, slipping in only mildly slippery conditions and sustaining no injury whatsoever. I of course being in my fifties and with a high track record of breaking bones would, in the recent extremely icy conditions, have a very low perceived silliness quotient, this is a comfort even if it is nonsense and we cling to such things when we start to fear falling more than we are embarrassed by it.

To get back to the local cats and the dog; I have no doubt that they wander past under this dog’s nose when there is no one there to see. Frenzied enmity requires far too much energy and showmanship; all that yowling, back-arching, spitting and throat-raking barking is purely for audience consumption I sometimes think. The dog when I came out of the house this morning stared at me through the hole where the high fence used to be. I could see the dilemma in her eyes, bark or wag, bark or wag or both. What she did do, was ignore me, pretend she hadn’t seen me at all and then the dilemma just disappeared for her. Animals intuitively know how to handle angst, if possible they ignore situations that might lead to it. This has to be applauded in some ways.

I have just watched Jack Straw on the news give evidence to the enquiry on Iraq, I was again watching the behaviour of the dog next door, bark or wag and when pushed to respond to the questions asked, pretend that they don’t exist for him, maybe for others, but not for him. Good men do bad things, good men don’t ever like to think that they do bad things, good men have to have a good reason for doing bad things, good men need justification for doing bad things to be indisputable, good men will dispute in such a way as to make them feel that their justification is indisputable. I am not in the camp that believes that all politicians are bad men. I believe many are or would hope to be good, this is the reason why the morality of governance is so complex. Politics is not about telling huge lies to the public I think the thing that really fuels politics is how well and how willingly the politicians can tell lies to themselves in order to achieve an end.

‘I know more than I say. I say more than I know’, was the motto of all politicians, an elderly shrewd trade unionist friend of mine used to say. Mind you it might be a good motto for my family crest along with crossed pints of Guinness and a mongrel rampant or perhaps it should be a cat on ice

Workshops and Six Degrees of Separation from The Valkyrie, Mrs Thatcher, and Sean O'Brien

2010-01-16T15:40:00.016Z

It is a wet Saturday and cold so settling down to do some writing seems enticing as the outside world does not really appeal. I have been putting together a 100 lines of poetry to send off to Sean O’Brien for a master class day workshop I am doing with him in March. I have done such classes before and I am again observing myself go through the usual trauma of what to send. There are two routes, 1) send him work intended to try and impress with your grasp of the craft or 2) send poems that you know need a lot of work and where advice would be welcome. It is an odd sort of dilemma because all poems, no matter how accomplished or finished you think they are could benefit from more work, more thought. I usually do the Camembert method of poetry which is to put a poem away, allow it to ripen and than get it out days, months even years later and see whether it just stinks or whether the stink may still hold something worthwhile and still invites exploration.

I am told by others, because I have been naïve enough to ask, that most people go for the ‘to impress’ route with the proviso that you are more than open to criticism on the poem. Send off the very best you know how to do and see if criticism can push it further. This seems more sensible perhaps than sending off work you know needs a lot of work but somehow the poem won’t let you go. Now and then what you need is someone with an opinion you respect to tell you to put the poem down, step away with your hands up. Learn from the disaster certainly, maybe even salvage one line from a three page epic (not that I write long poems) but don’t flog the dead poem when the glue factory beckons.

Criticism is a strange beast, I know that from those times when I have led a workshop. You have to be true to yourself and the craft of poetry, in all its forms, but at the same time be totally open to your blindspots that spring from your particular tastes and opinions. You also have to be intuitive enough to access what level of criticism people can take. Some are fine and in fact demand that you give their work a robust kicking whilst other more fragile souls need a far more nurturing and gentler approach. Everyone should come away from a workshop feeling that something they have written at least shows real promise. They should also be given something to think about, a take on their work that lets them grow as a writer and become more able to criticise and approach their work in a creative rather than destructive way. The old adage of two specific pieces of praise to one specific criticism is too simplistic but it at least makes you think about what you are doing.Those apocryphal tales of writers and poets haranging students and throwing their work out of windows or setting fire to it with a cigarette was way before Health and Safety and the ubiquitous evaluation forms that participants in the workshop give in under the heading of customer relations. I would have loved to see what some of the evaluation forms would have looked like for Robert Lowell as Philip Levine described him as being a little on the hornery side of testy to say the least.You had to be tough for you or your work to survive some famous workshops or seminar groups in the 'good old days'.No-one saw the student or the attendee as a customer or client back then.If the workshop leader was drunk , all the better for the stories you could tell about the course later and some poets could still give useful feedback even when totally pissed and the feedback did have a whole raft of swearwords laced through it.

I do know writers and poets who are so hard on themselves that they verge on editorial masochism, then there are those who believe that a poem is so intimately connected to who they are that by criticising one you are criticising the other. Taking criticism, no matter how creatively it is shaped, personally is death to any progress you may want to make with your work. I have sat in workshops and wanted the ground to swallow me whole along with my poem because I suddenly realised how far from even adequate a poem I had brought was once others gave me a good critique but I have a solid sense of self and learnt from that.

There are sometimes those that criticise badly, who bring to the experience something other than their knowledge of the craft and their experience as a writer. Sometimes someone can have had a bad day, a row with their husband, wife etc, be in a very bad place emotionally and allow that to spill over into their role as a workshop leader or mentor. Writers and poets are human beings, even the most professional of people can have an off day, unfortunately if this off day coincides with a fragile poet or writer who has no internal resources to cope with what perhaps may be a bit of a mauling of their work, then some real damage can be done. To all those who chant the old ‘If you can’t stand the heat, keep out of the kitchen’, I would raise two fingers because such statements are vacuous and fail to see that we may be writers but we are firstly human beings who should exercise the old doctors motto of ‘first do no harm’.

I know there is a view that writers and poets sometimes have to step way beyond the customary polite boundaries of human interaction in order to produce work that challenges and demands the reader step outside too and see other worlds. I think this is true but care for another’s emotional well being is nothing to do with custom or politeness it is to do with what I personally value in the human experience. There are a few poets who write or who have written work of such genius and amazing insight that it makes you re-explore something in yourself and in the world, these people do not necessarily make good workshop leaders. The art of leading a workshop requires a skill set that poetic genius does not. I have experienced really helpful workshops given by poets and writers who may not be the most lauded of poets or writers, who are not in the premier league of awards, sales or demands for readings. Great poets do not automatically make wonderful workshop leaders, mentors or even teachers of creative writing. Sometimes they do and that is the win/win situation.

A good workshop leader will always admit that they receive as well as transmit in the work-shopping process. If it is all transmit a guru/cult like atmosphere can prevail. I have seen that happen in workshops where people have gone on them solely to meet the person leading it and tick them off on some twitcher list of great writers/poets I have spent a day with etc. That is as valid a reason as any but the mismatch of expectations that everyone has of the workshop can be a recipe for disaster. If half the people who are attending the workshop are happy for the leader to spend most of the session reading from their own work and expounding on it and the other half have come to try and work specifically on producing something themselves, there can be blood on the carpet by coffee time.

I love those sessions when you go round the table saying why you have come and what you want from the day. You could play the game of spotting who is really being totally honest or who is circumventing it diplomatically. No–one, in any workshop I have been to has ever said, ‘I have come just to meet you (workshop leader) as I really admire your work which is lauded by all and sundry. I hope this workshop will make me feel slightly connected in some tenuous way to you so that I may be able to approach you about publishing my work and/or you may be able to further my career in some, as yet undefined, way in the future because now by attending this workshop I just might be on your radar. I have therefore come primarily as a networking exercise and anything else I get from the day is just a lovely bolt-on extra.” This I think I would have to stand up and applaud. I said something along those lines once at a workshop with a novel writer, although I chickened out on total honesty about networking.. The workshop leader came up to me afterwards and told me how refreshing it was to have someone actually voice some of those sentiments as he knew that they were always the elephant in the room at every workshop he gave.

I have thought long and hard about writing this in the blog, especially as I have met and stayed in contact with some wonderful, kind, writers and poets as a result of workshops and courses I have been on. Hopefully they know I am a genuine person who does go through the long dark night ( well more than one night) of the soul if I think I am ‘using‘ anyone and being disingenuous about it all. I suppose it is all balanced by the fact that hopefully I have been more than happy to help others along the way by just knowing a tad more about the writing world than them and being more than happy to help push them in the right direction on practical things. I am not in the league where networking with me is of any earthly use to anyone’s career so I am free of any grandiose expectations on any ones part.

All this is of course put into proportion by the news from Haiti. Huge piles of the dead are being built up, even as I speak more and more are dying through lack of treatment and resources. Any concerns I have about what to send to Mr O’Brien seems of little real consequence. Why bother writing at all in the face of what huge need there is in the world in general? I believe that a good poem, short story or book that people find they can relate to, get something from or simply enjoy for a moment adds something intangible yet important to the world. Even in the face of huge disasters and the small ones ( in the end huge disasters are just the sum total of individual personal ones) adding one tiny feather to the scales on the side of creation rather than destruction has its part to play. I always think of Mr Creosote in that Monty Python film, The Meaning of Life, about the man who kept eating and eating and it was just the wafer thin mint that made him explode. It is the accumulation of all the tiny things (for good or ill) that can cause big things to happen.That scene also makes me think of some bankers as well who just took just one fat cat risk too far before the whole thing exploded in their face and ours, as we are the ones in the end that as tax-payers had to pick up the pieces in some cases. Still I never thought I'd have a share in a bank. WARNING....Don't watch this Youtube video if you are about to eat,are of a delicate disposition or if you have any phobias about vomiting it could seriously damage your psyche not to mention put you off your tea.

I have sent the poems off to Mr O’Brien. I have probably made some terrible gaff, I always do; I have certainly found two punctuation errors and the odd typos since I sent them off but hey-ho. I get to meet Mr O’Brien, whose work I admire and I am curious to know how he goes about reading and critiquing a poem. The title of the workshop is ‘What the poem demands of the poem’ so I am interested to see if he thinks my newer poems have not demanded enough from me or if they are demanding something I have singularly failed to see. There will also be some other fine poets there as well that I can also learn something from on the day.In the end I just want to be a nudge closer to writing one better poem ( I can only think of one poem, writing good poetry en masse feels meaningless) . I am trying to be as honest as I can without sounding sycophantic or cynical.

Sean O’Brien has Dupuytren’s contracture which he has written a poem about. I also have this as did many members of my family on my father’s side. It is sometimes seen as an indication of past Viking blood as it is very prevalent in Scandinavia. Mrs Thatcher also suffers from it, so the image of her in past cartoons as the Valkyrie type figure may not be too far from the truth. Who knows, there may only be six degrees of separation from me and Mrs T, genetically speaking, which is quite worrying but the same might apply to me and Sean O’Brien? You win some, you lose some. Anyway Sean O'Brien does also have a poem about snow which seems approriate, given recent weather conditions.

In my beginning is my end with sky lanterns, Les Murray, Sean O' Brien and Little Gidding.

2010-01-02T19:10:00.011Z

I have returned from northerly climes, where snow lay deep and crisp but uneven. Much time was spent bonding with Beloved Only Offspring and wondering if David Tennant’s Hamlet quite hit the spot and reading Sean O’Brien’s novel Afterlife which made me laugh at the way he puts his finger on some of the more uncomfortable ways poets can network and operate, the poems more in the service of overweening ego than art. From this I returned to read some Les Murray who I have heard read on three or four occasions and each time his sheer hold on the importance of humanity and physical and emotional landscape has always impressed me. It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen is still one of the most agonising honest poems I have ever read, it contains no self pity. It is so minutely observed you almost need to blink yourself to stop the poet’s eyes searching the subject. Yet amidst all this minute close observation there is contained a love so huge it can barely be contained within the poem

I and friends celebrated the arrival of 2010 by setting off eco-friendly sky lanterns with hopes for 2010 written on them. Once we got the knack and we managed to avoid one setting fire to the leylandi and a neighbour’s extension it was an unexpected emotional moment watching those hopes rise up and sail away into a beautiful night, stars, full moon, the way nights are when you imagine beautiful nights.

New Year Resolutions? Research has shown that up to 80% of all New Year Resolutions never stick past mid January. The best way apparently is to plan a resolution well in advance and ensure you tell all and sundry about it and put in small achievable markers of success which you can chart your progress by. Private resolutions whispered to yourself at one minute to midnight on 31st December are doomed before the snowdrops even appear. Some resolutions are full of common sense; give up smoking, diet, lower alcohol consumption, be more resolute about all sorts of things that require constant resolve if they are to flourish.

I wandered off to Little Gidding just before New Year with a friend, it was damp and bone numbingly cold. The sun-roof in my car had leaked overnight so I and friend (who valiantly did not complain of a damp backside until I owned up to having one) sat on slightly cold damp seat until we arrived at our destination. The ride may have been an insight into slight incontinence problems yet to come, although friend is far too young to have to worry about that just yet, other things maybe but not incontinence. The little church there never ceases to work its particular magic on me despite cold, wet and slightly sodden bum. It is a tiny church , its door facing out onto open fields. In 1185 the church there was granted to the Order of Knights Templars and in 1312 when they were disbanded it passed to the Knights Hospitallers . Any mention of the Knights Templars can lead to some going into a frenzy of strange theories courtesy of Mr Dan Brown but the truth is always so much more mundane, they wanted the revenue the small church might bring. No esoteric knowledge was left in code here other than Eliot’s poem maybe. Little Gidding, way back then, was such a tiny impoverished place that the Templars never gained anything from it all and not a single Templar ever set foot there. In I348 the Black Death arrived and everyone in the village died and it became a church without any parishioners. A few households (6) came back in the early 16th century but by 1594 there were no houses left in the village. It was in 1625 that Nicholas Ferrar bought the land, the church and the small manor house and stated to rebuild what had crumbled away.

Ferrar was a London merchant and Deputy of the Virginia Company that founded the American Company but then as now there was a huge economic downturn and the company was wound up and he faced bankruptcy. From this Nicholas decided that renouncing materialism was the way forward and a plague in London finally pushed them out into the wilds of Huntingdonshire. This redoubtable family within a few years had set up a school for the children of various family members who came to join them, almshouses for some aged and sick people and a dispensary to give medicines and soup to the locals in need. These were people bent on prayer and doing good after the financial world gave them a good kicking. That Protestant ethic of good works was never to be sneered at in the days when they were usually the only source of hope in hard times. I wonder how many bankers and high city fliers will turn to doing good works and living the spiritual life post credit crunch and the fall from grace of the house of money.

As for my New Year resolutions any I make I make in the knowledge that they will require work and what I think I want is not what I may need and purpose in life is sometimes a trickster so I’ll play my resolutions close to my chest. The first section of Little Gidding says something similar.

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment.

Somewhere Over the Gasometer Skies are Blue

2009-12-21T19:00:00.005Z

Having slipped and slithered my way on icy pavements back from town after a dental appointment I settled down with a cup of tea to watch bovine afternoon TV whilst the numbness wore off and I stopped dribbling down my chin. The Ten Commandments was on, Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea and a quick change of wig and beard to demonstrate years wandering in the wilderness. I love an old fashioned Hollywood epic no attempt at all to either be authentic or even nod in the direction of historical or even literary accuracy. I still have the voice of John Wayne in my head as the centurion saying’ Surely this man was the son of Gawwwwd’ in one such film. I can recall with relish Elizabeth Taylor played Cleopatra whilst in real life having an affair with Mark Anthony (Richard Burton) and never quite losing the refined Anglo American accent. Rex Harrison played Julius Caesar in that film ( pre Dr Doolittle and my Fair Lady talk singing days) uttering the immortal lines , often misheard, ‘Those baristas need dealing with send out a turtle !’

A cast of thousands was, in the fifties, sixties and even seventies, a sure fire way to get bums on seats in the cinema. These days we are a bit cynical as casts of thousands can be generated by CGI. Most of the Coliseum audience in the final scenes of Gladiator were generated by a computer they even managed to digitally place the dead Oliver Reed into some scenes. No doubt there may be a time coming when old films could be edited together seamlessly of some long gone great actor to make a whole new film. Paul Scofield could have turned up in an episode of the Tudors compiled of out-takes from a Man for All Seasons.

Gone are the days when a film director had a megaphone and thousands of extras to control and probably only two or three cameras to capture a scene that if not caught on film could not, without huge expense, be replicated. Just now as I watched the Ten Commandments directed by Cecil B de Mille I realised that there must be scores if not hundreds of Americans alive today who were in that film’s cast of thousands and perhaps also other epic films of that era as a child. There was one shot of a girl that sticks in my head, she could have been no more than four or five and she was driving geese before her with a stick. She was leaving Egypt walking just in front of Edward G Robinson as a n’er do well Jewish slave overseer. Where is she now? She must be about my age as the film was made in 1956. Does she have the film on DVD and fast forwards it to that scene with her appearing to show others who doubt her one claim to fame. Now and again does she catch a middle of the night re-run of it and remember the day Mr De Mille shouted action and all these people started moving and pretending to be something they weren’t? Does she even know she is in the film, did her family move from Hollywood to some small town in Iowa and open a shoe shop and never even see the film or think it best not to remember the time they were so hard-up they had to hire themselves out and their little girl as extras? Perhaps this little girl died young of drink and drugs trying to make it as a Hollywood starlet, fixated on achieving greatness in the media that claimed her so young? The life of the extras in those old epics could be fascinating, all stitched together into a backdrop patchwork of the old Hollywood that was. There is a short story or short stories in there somewhere, over and above Ricky Gervais’ take on the extra's life.

The American Film Institute a couple of years back produced a definitive list of the ten best films of all time in particular genres. Here is their list of the top ten for the epic genre.

1 Lawrence of Arabia 1962
2 Ben-Hur 1959
3 Schindler's List 1993
4 Gone with the Wind 1939
5 Spartacus 1960
6 Titanic 1997
7 All Quiet on the Western Front 1930
8 Saving Private Ryan 1998
9 Reds 1981
10 The Ten Commandments 1956

How did Reds get in at Number 9 when Dr Zhivago makes no appearance at all? That is a minor quibble or course, I have to say that looking at this list, the older films that I saw for the first time in the cinema; Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur, Spartacus, The Ten Commandments, Gone with the Wind ( at a re-run show at the local flea-pit when I was ten years old) still remain in my head as moments of ‘wow’. The cast of thousands , the action scenes with real stunt men risking their lives ( I believe 2 at least died making the chariot scenes in Ben Hur), the pan across some vast army, sometimes a literal army, of extras, the attempt to show something on a grand scale, did inspire a particular state of awe in me.

Nowadays I may be amazed at the technical trickery and accomplishments that generate some scenes as in Lord of the Rings, Gladiator etc but I have never again experienced that same sense of real wonder at the power of Hollywood to create something akin to celluloid magic on the grand scale as when I first saw these films. This of course may be because I saw some as a child or adolescent and I had not yet grown cynical or jaded about the moving picture show. It may be a function of the generation I come from. As a child I caught the last gasp flicker of the Hollywood ‘big pictures’, when the move to technicolour still seemed jaw droppingly vivid. In the grey Midland town I lived in then even the green of the grass and the red of a cloak in Spartacus seemed extraordinarily bright,it made you think that America held a whole palette of colours you could never experience anywhere else but there. Colour was so lacking in the fifties and that shift from black and white was still significant. The sudden change from black and white to colour in the film The Wizard of Oz somehow epitomizes it, somewhere over the rainbow or the gasometer at the back of my house and in Hollywood the sky always was truly azure blue. The story may have been important, the acting probably important but the dazzling colour of it all as a child was the most important thing of all. I have seen New York, walked around every corner expecting and sometimes finding familiar gritty backdrop locations of great American films I have seen and loved but I have never been to those locations where those big epics were filmed ( Italy, Spain, Monument valley, California ,etc). I expect that if I ever do go there it will take me back to those times as a child in the cinema soaking up all that colour as if it were a sunlit cure for some ailment I had no name for but today would probably call mind-numbing drabness.

I do hope you have a Happy Christmas and wonderful 2010 dear reader. I shall be back with you anon, probably after New Year.

Floods, The Comfort of Things and the Poet John Lyons' Cooking

2009-11-29T15:04:00.015Z

A wet Sunday but nothing like Cumbria where people must view the rain, any rain now, as an enemy, a taker of homes, possessions, livelihood, lives. Our local river still remains within its banks but the floodplains near the town look sodden as if just another jugful of rain will tip them over the edge into fen mere where no dog walker can pass and the swans and Canada geese float on a memory of meadowland.

I have an 8 minute radio piece up on the Audiotheque website about water and the draining of the fens, it’s called Isle ( scroll down to find it, I can't guarentee this link will work after more updates have been added to the site). This is a experimental sound website run by De Montfort University which has some short play pieces like mine but also some interesting soundscapes etc. Having lived in the fens for many years and been fascinated by it’s history, water, its encroachment and its loss, has been at the core of its social and economic history and still is. There are attempts being made now to return areas back to its original mere and marshland state. Such projects are valuable but they only show you a gnat’s bite of how the area would have looked in the sixteenth century and earlier, pre-drainage. It was a huge undertaking to drain the fens and in fact was never truly successful until the steam engine’s invention that allowed water pumps to be more effective. Windmills were never really up to the job but for a while covered the countryside.

As you drive beside the dykes now the roads are raised up due to the shrinkage of the land once it was sucked dry of water. It always seems odd driving across the fens at night beside a raised drainage dyke on one side and a huge dark drop on the other down to the fields. Sometimes, as it did the other night as I drove back from Ely (The Isle of Eels), it feels as if the world is almost tilting as the camber of the road veers towards the drop. The road snakes across the landscape sometimes letting go its grip on the raised drainage dyke and meandering off to follow old sheep tracks and ways that existed through the meres long before they were drained. As you snake around late at night you can see headlights appearing and disappearing way ahead as they follow the road. The road does indeed resemble an eel more than a snake I feel. eels were once prolific in the fens; one medieval scribe noted that at times they were so plentiful you could almost walk on the backs of eels for three miles across one stretch of the fens. However whilst the snake has been turned into a verb the humble eel hasn’t , although 'to eel' sounds as if it ought to merit a verb especially in wet or sodden landscape. Even in a downpour in the city one has a sense of the mass of people on pavements twisting and turning like eels to avoid each other, shopping bags, umbrellas. They eel down the pavement sounds right to me, it also conjures up that knotted mass of eels and the flow of water. I must find out what the collective noun is for eels, I presume there is one.

I was driving back through the fens from Ely because I had been to the launch of John Lyons’ new book published by Peepal Tree, a great press for all Afro-Caribbean writing. Cook-Up in a Trini Kitchen is joy of a book if you like poetry and food, it contains great recipes for all kinds of Trinidadian dishes, many with a twist on them . John did the launch in a bookshop whilst also cooking some of the dishes. The smell was heavenly, although the smoke detector did have a moment when hit by a waft of steam from sizzling onions herbs and spices. The book contains some of John’s artwork ( he originally trained and continues to be a visual artist of some repute) as well as some prose pieces about his childhood in Trinidad and some poems that speak to the recipes. As John said Trinidadians take their pleasures very seriously and food and having fun is high on their agenda. I tried some of the dishes and can personally recommend the Christmas cake recipe but suggest you don’t eat too much as you may be well over the limit given the amount of rum, cherry brandy and port it contains. It was one of those joyous occasions when poetry nestled so easily into the other delights of the senses and the poems John read just added to the flavour of the evening.

What else have I done this week, well I’ve started reading a wonderful book given to me by a friend written by a social anthropologist who just writes so well that his material jumps off the page at you and some pieces almost make you want to cry at their poignancy and insight into peoples lives.. It is called The Comfort of Things by Daniel Miller. It is book that investigates the things 100 people in an ordinary London street surround themselves with in their homes and what significance these things have for who they are and how these things give meaning to their lives. It is so glib to say materialism is a bad thing, this book shows how stuff or even the absence of stuff can be heartbreakingly meaningful and is not simply an indicator of how a person rates their standing by possessions. The first chapter contains a piece called ‘Empty’ and shows a man 74 years of age who lives in a flat surrounded only by furniture and items that have a functional necessity. The sterility of his surroundings is so marked that when he is asked questions about his past life it is no surprise that his story is quietly desperate and devoid of any real human contact and warmth that began for him from birth. I started to cry as a read it.
The next piece in the book is called ‘Full’ and gives the chaos of an extended family whose possessions are simply an extension of their love and warm contact with each other. The description of their house and all its many decorations at Christmas and all the laughter and stories each decoration and bauble held for the family may seem like some sugary Dickensian Christmas card. However I was left with permission to gaze round my house full of books and objects that many would deem ready for the jumble or Charity shop, from whence some of them actually came, and feel absolutely ok about it (not that I have ever felt not ok but now and then moments of life laundry do creep up on me).

It is that time of year so I have baubled up the willow canes I keep in a pot of sand in the living room and have hung gold and red bunches of grapes and extra cherry red Christmas lights to go with the ones that bedeck it all the year round plus other ornaments that are old friends at Christmas. I have a feeling, as the cherry red lights look so warm and comforting, they may stay up there now past Christmas and add to the stuff of my life. That’s ok. I’m not going anywhere and the Boo will have to clamber over all this when I go or am shuffled off into accommodation for the bewildered and dazed. I have however promised not to collect old newspapers and milk bottles or anything that might attract rats a la Miss Haversham. The Boo is equally squirrelish about some stuff, as was my mother, so this genetic trait may be passed down through the generations. I can travel light when needs be but home for the past twenty-eight always has a sense of people and warmth about it that some stuff of mine signifies. It may be an age thing but I think it is a stuff thing. Ask many of those who have lost things in the floods in Cumbria and on their faces you will see it is not always about the monetary value of possessions it is about all those things that gave home its meaning.

Birthdays, Age and Tightrope Walking with Larkin

2009-11-25T21:45:00.009Z

I had a birthday this week-end, I have no problem with birthdays they roll by whether you want them to or not so I like to embrace them as an increasingly familiar old friend. Twenty was wonderful, thirty was wonderful, forty was fine, fifty was interesting, sixty my next one I shall encounter with a zero will bring a bus pass, heating allowances and best of all I anticipate the feeling of empowerment that I have earned the right to not bother about what people think about me. If truth were told ( and truth is not always best told but probably less damaging that untruths told in the long term) I feel that at fifty –eight ( pause whilst I have to recalculate from last year). It would be a lie to say I did not care how others perceive me, that way lies slight madness and those blouses you find in shops that cater for ladies of a certain age. You know the ones I mean, tiny paisley patterns, maybe with trailing things that can be tied in bows at the neck. I still squeeze myself into jeans that are a triumph of corsetry over breathing and have T-Shirts that have slogans on. I was once told by a very glamorous perfumed and couturier bedecked lady that no woman should ever wear T-Shirts saying anything past twenty-five, unless it is a small discreet designer logo and then only if the designer is expensive enough. This woman was obviously wrapped in silk pashmina as she exited the birth canal and her mother probably only broke into a slight glow throughout labour.

I have little dress sense, no glamour ( as defined by afore mentioned designer woman), I often manage to achieve an effect through sheer serendipity, sometimes in the tumble of the drawers and wardrobe an outfit comes together by some strange law of permutations of what is nearest to hand. It must be a bit like the probability of winning the lottery, now and again you may win a tenner ( a near decent outfit) which makes you feel that a jackpot win( bloody great) is not totally impossible. At 6’ 3”( I’ve lost an inch along the way somewhere) you tend to get noticed when you enter a room, if you then add to that clashing colours and items of clothing from various decades that would make the words ‘an interesting mix of styles’ seem overly generous….. then you have a statement but in my case more of a exclamation ( probably best described by an exclamation mark).

I watched a couple of programmes on TV this week designed to cater to the over sixties. Gok Wan managed to persuade a lady over seventy to wear only iced buns for a photograph by calling her angel and ‘my darling’ every other sentence. In the other programme some doctors revealed the joys of the older body falling apart. Age is a bit of a bugger; it gives with one hand and takes with the other. Of course life is always about balance; the balancing act just gets a little more difficult as you get older, the wire a little thinner, you have to put your glasses on to see where you are going and the drop is a tad more daunting and you wonder if that slight twinge as you walk across the abyss signals a future hip replacement.. Of course I wouldn’t say I was as pessimistic as Larkin though and birthdays, any birthdays should be fun.

PS, The photograph at the top of the page was taken by my friend Martin Figura, a professional photographer and poet. I asked him to take photographs of my mother's bungalow a week after she died and then a few months later after it has been cleared. This may seem macabre but the photographs I knew would be strangely beautiful and continue to remain very poignant for me. You can see more here at his web site with a shortextract from an explanatory text I wrote to accompany the work.

Philip Levine, Seagulls and Keats

2009-11-17T00:07:00.009Z

I don’t seem to have posted for a while dear reader, events have rushed at me like a herd of stampeding wildebeest ( I am imaging that scene from The Lion King when computer generated animals populated the screen). Aldeburgh Poetry festival threw up a lot to be savoured most of all Philip Levine who has been a poetry hero of mine since I was 16 years old. Someone showed me his poem The Horse and I had this epiphany about what poetry can do in the world.

Philip Levine was interviewed about his life and that session alone would have been worth the price of the weekend. He was taught by Lowell and Berryman. Lowell he said was a terrible teacher whilst Berryman never turned up drunk to a lecture and was a brilliant teacher. He recounted a tale of an incident when he and Berryman had gotten very drunk together and fell asleep on Berryman’s bed. In the morning they were awakened by a telegram boy announcing he had a telegram for a 'Mr John Berryman'. Berryman sat up in bed and stared at Levine, “Are you John Berryman?” he asked with no hint of joke in his voice. “No” replied Levine, “In that case the telegram must be for me,” Berryman told the puzzled telegram boy. “I hope it’s from Saul Bellow,” he said, “He has money these days and I need to keep in with him.”

There was an interesting discussion with a panel of the great and the good about whether all poetry is ultimately about sex and death and another one about whether there is anything that could be deemed the female poem. The general answer seemed to be yes and no, which is the usual answer you get from such discussions. Jo Shapcott the chair of the second discussion wrote about this in an article in the Guardian some days later.

I spent a great deal of time watching the gulls wondering if they were engaged in poet spotting, trying to guess by their plumage which walkers along the strand of beach would be looking at them in a poetic way. There were a number who seemed to have been extras in The Hitchcock film the birds as they had obviously engaged in a few method acting lessons and could do menace quite well, digging deep into their inner vulture maybe. The sight of someone with fish and chips sent them into a whirling feeding frenzy and I didn’t help much by hurling them the odd chip which they could take on the wing, like a dog I once had that specialized in grabbing a Frisby in mid air.

So what will I remember from Aldeburgh 2009 .

• Crying after Philip Levine had finished his reading on the Sunday afternoon, as I knew that this would probably be the first and last time I would hear him read. Over forty years since I read The Horse sitting on a bus on the way back from school and suddenly all the noise and yelling on the top deck drifted away and I was somewhere else.
• Being impressed by the enormity and agility of the seagulls
• Tom Paulin giving such a close reading of some poems that it was at an almost sub atomic level, I could almost hear the sound of the rhymes, half rhymes and vowel forming in the movement of the air.
• The people at the quiz who got such high scores that it revealed an almost unhealthy level of poetry knowledge.
• The poor woman who trapped her toe in the chair in front in the hall where the reading were held and let out the most primal of screams that caused everyone in the place to freeze and stare.
• This year making sure I had enough time just to sit and look at the sea without having to rush between events

Since returning from Aldeburgh I have been to a great reading by Roddy Lumsden and Tom Warner

I think I need time to digest all the poetry I have accumulated in my head over the past couple of weeks. There is such a thing as poetry constipation, when so much has been consumed it can cause a blockage. On top of all this I went to see Bright Star, the film about Keats and Fanny, so much angst, so much longing, so much coughing.

Season of Mists, Eliot, Pam Ayres and Question Time.

2009-10-23T14:50:00.008+01:00

I was surprised when T S Eliot was voted as the best loved Poet of all time in the Latest BBC survey. Had the T. S. Eliot Society been block voting, cornering people in the streets, canvassing at poetry readings, doing deals with the supporters of Keats and Coleridge in smoke filled back-rooms like some sleazy Republican Convention in Chicago? However in another way I am not surprised because Eliot for all his tortured emotions and poetic craft was an emigrant, an American who found the old world fitted his temperament more than the new and converts are often more deeply embedded in that which they embrace than those born to it. I have written about Eliot before dear reader I know but surely he and I can withstand another look.

I watched the odious BNP man on Question Time last night and concluded here was a man not of intelligence but of deep cunning mixed with not a little fantasy. Indigenous people of England, for god’s (Christian, Muslim and any other religion or secular way of being that hold to gods of true justice and compassion) sake is the man not aware that all men are mongrels. All of us have DNA coursing in our veins that stem from the four corners of the world; we are all passing migrants in a way on a planet that is so small it will soon burst at the seams. Mr BNP seemed like a huge antediluvian dinosaur peeing in the corners of his territory as if that act itself would keep away those that would take his land and his right to roam it as he sees fit.

So why did this man drive me to read Eliot’s Four Quartets again and in particular Little Gidding; because here is a poem written by an immigrant writing about a place that spoke to him and yet transcended all sense of place and looked to something more important beyond the greater importance of which particular piece of earth our first footsteps trod.

Little Gidding is just a short drive from where I live, I have eaten my lunch in the graveyard there when passing. It is at the end of a tiny single track road that ends with the house and this tiny church. The lovely people that live in the religious community there, who often come from all over the world to stay there bring you tea and homemade cake and ask for no money other than a donation. I can see what Eliot may have felt here because it is also a place where you can go no further so have to turn back on yourself. I go there and find it has a sort of quiet steadfastness (an old fashioned word I know) yet at the same time the people there, some from war torn or chaotic places in the world, bring to it a sense of it being the beginning of something for they usual come not to hide from but to gain strength to run back towards the outside world which they will soon have to cope with and try and change for the better. I am neither a Christian or particularly religious but I do, I hope, understand spirituality, hope and a striving for good in the world. Most religions have been and continue to be the cause of great suffering but that’s like a Martian looking down and thinking Mr BNP, his views and actions, represents everyone in Britain.

Little Gidding in a wonderful place to go to in the autumn as the foliage on the trees is now reaching that critical point of turning to fallen. There is that point when they give off that last fire before they drop. Nothing like the glories of New England of course but still just enough glory to fill a tea cup and that can be enough for anyone. In his poem about Little Gidding Eliot talks a lot about fire and I tend to think he may have those autumn fire colours in mind and not just the metaphor of fire in Christianity and I think he also speaks to earthly love and suffering of all kinds.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

It is strange that Eliot, a complex man not without his fair share of unfathomable blindspots and unkindnesses, not least of which was the ease with which he embraced the Anti-Semitic language current in his day, should write something which I personally find so full of thoughts that not only attempt to understand human emotional suffering in some ways but also to give a kind of solace within that suffering. Thousands of people have read the last stanza of this Quartet to breathe in some sense of peace or at least a measure of hope from it. I think it may be one of those times when the poem is greater than the sum parts of the poet. I have often heard poets speak about the demands a poem makes of them; that in some way it has its own sense of what it is or could be which we ignore at our peril. The old tale that Michelangelo, looking at a block of Carrere marble, spoke of merely releasing the statue already formed from within the stone, is often also related to the poet and the poem being released from a block of words. Perhaps Eliot’s Four Quartets is one of those experiences; writing out of our skin or beyond ourselves is perhaps only an experience the greatest of poets have but I am sure we have all sometimes wondered at the weird way with which a poem can sometimes insist on being other than what you first intended it to be. Judge for yourselves about that last stanza of Little Gidding.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

I apologise dear reader if I have rambled on but the strange conjunction of stars which provide Eliot as the nation’s favourite poet, Mr BNP on Question Time, autumn, the turning of life and seasons and the smell of burning leaves coming from the garden three doors up as I write have put me in this place. Next blog I will try and discuss the phenomenon which is Pam Ayres, which is not a joke, I truly believe the woman is rejected and despised as a vernacular poet by some of the literary glitterati because she packs out venues and is never up her own arse about the importance or historic legacy of her work and is unafraid of rhyming little with peanut brittle.

PS. The Boo has just bought a brand new motor bike (a Suzuki Van Van…what company calls a bike a Van Van!). All positive vibrations for her continued well being and the wish that she does not end up as a smear on the roads of County Durham gratefully received. But, hurrah, as she points out, this one has an electronic ignition not a kick start so things are now retro styled but not retro labour intensive.

Faber New Poets, Jerwood and the J word in Strictly Come Dancing and Poetry

2009-10-16T19:39:00.008+01:00

On Tuesday I was on the door doing my impression of meet and greet and where’s your money please for the opening of the new season of poetry readings at Michaelhouse run by CB1 Poetry. The four winners of the Faber New Poet Award, Fiona Benson, Toby Martinez de las Rivas, Jack Underwood and Heather Phillipson. The Faber Poetry Editor Matthew Hollis introduced them and did a fine short reading himself. There is always something exciting about hearing a young poet beginning to explore their craft. It feels like watching something being planted that could blossom into a magnificent tree, or maybe an orchid or even a hardy shrub or it may never reach its potential and wither in the cold. Who knows but these four new young Faber poets are being carefully nurtured by Faber and the Arts Council, it won’t be for the lack of fertiliser and tending that they don’t grow but then as Sean O’Brien pointed out in his review of their pamphlets in the Guardian it is the next forty years that may hold the proof of their growth. Although I think there are some poets who have been loved and admired through the centuries who never produced a large body of work, who may even only have written two or three great poems that somehow stuck in the national consciousness. There may be the poetic equivalent of one or two hit wonders in contemporary music but that doesn’t mean that the poems themselves are of any less worth if they don’t come from the pen of a poet who has produced collection after collection of good poems. Most poets might I suspect swap their whole career and oeuvre for one perfect magnificent poem because every time you stare at a clean sheet of paper or a black document on the computer screen it is filled with the possibility of magnificence and that is probably what makes you keep writing. There is no holy grail of poetry, no one yard stick by which we can ever measure such a thing but we have a sense of always striving for this elusive cup of words and even if we fail by a mile or a gnats whisker we keep trying and I hope taking risks.
Risk taking is something the young might be more prepared to do, or is the poet with a so called ‘reputation’ under their belt more able to caste aside the safety net and take risks. I think every poem should be a risk of some kind. The safe poem that merely strokes the sleeping dog versus the one that risks waking the wolf is to be applauded. it may not always come off but at least the intent was there. I thought Fiona Benson managed with her pamphlet to pull of the difficult feat of appearing to write very quiet almost studious poem but which were actually infused with huge risk, the quiet swan with the engine feet paddling away underneath and which might break your arm if you get a little too close and assume it safe.

The short list for the Jerwood Prize for best first collection have been announced, my publisher, Salt has two poets in there. Sian Hughes for the Missing and and Andrew Philip for The Ambulance Box. The others poets short listed are J O Morgan, Philip Rush and Dawn Wood. I list them all as in those interviews on the television about at upcoming election in which the BBC interview one candidate but in the interests of even handedness all candidates including those representing the Monster Raving Looney party has to be mentioned, blessings be upon the head of Lord Reith who was a stickler for such things including radio news reader wearing Dinner Jackets. I shall be rooting for Andrew as I think Ambulance Box is a stunning piece of work that floated my boat in terms of what interests me in poetry. Prizes are such odd things, a product of the amalgam of judges opinions.I have been informed by some who have been judges on some other competitions that sometimes if there isn’t a clear winner then a sort of haggling takes place in which the collection everyone is able to live with as the winner comes to the fore. We’d all like to be a fly on the wall at such meetings, I imagine that at Aldeburgh it will be extremely civilised and no one will throw tea cups at each other in the Cragg Sisters tearooms.

I am wondering why I am yet again hooked on Strictly Come Dancing, the parade of minor B celebrities and athletes trying to master the tango or the quickstep and parade the result of their efforts for public consumption and even humiliation on prime time TV. I have come to the conclusion that I should come out of the closet about it because I have managed to convince myself that it is ok be glued to how well people’s frame, heel leads and hip action is coming along. The ‘journey’ is the buzz word; it’s all about travelling and not the arriving and therein lies the metaphor for all things. Is writing about the process, the love of it, the attempt to master it, or the product? It’s about both of course but for those of us that struggle with how you can sometimes be so bad, so mediocre, so clumsy with the words, with the medium you love so much, then that J word can be amazingly relevant. Can she manage to pull off a beautiful waltz, can she manage to conjure up a crafted yet amazing sonnet. Can he really do that fiery tango, is there something that drives the words an underlying controlled passion. I am of course dear reader writing myself towards justification. I should be reading something worthwhile or classy or out there experiencing real life in the fen fast lane. But you know what, a curry in front of the Tele on a cold night watching people trying to do the Viennese Waltz or Jive who usually long jump, box, act like wooden planks in soaps or read the sports news is fine by me. There is always the extraordinary to be found in something ordinary and the journey between those two things can arrive somewhere interesting and visit a few bizarre service stations on the way.

Nietzsche and Hegel and She-Ra in the Closet

2009-10-11T13:43:00.012+01:00

I was wading through a wardrobe in what was The Boo’s bedroom and discovered her Crystal Castle lurking at the bottom. It was a Christmas present given nearly twenty years ago. Of course the uninitiated or too young may not know that The Crystal Castle was home to She-Ra, ‘Princess of Power’. She was never called just plain old She-Ra just as He-man never got away without the tag line of ‘The most Powerful Man in the Universe’ follow him. She-Ra was a revolutionary, the freedom fighter against the domination by all evil forces who would subjugate the ordinary people. She was Obama, our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, our fight against all evils that threaten a democratic way of life rolled into one. Swap Hordak or Skeletor, the baddies in these two cartoons for Ben Laden, the Taliban or generally anything anti-American ( it was made in America) and there you have the right and the wrong of it all, the morality tale that all children want to identify with. She-Ra of course did good by stealth never revealing her true identity but once she lifted that old sword there she was in all her glory, tight figure hugging costume, knee high gold boots and a good legth of thigh showing as she goes out to battle against the evil hoard. As He-Man was the mild mannered Adam (think bumbling Clark Kent to Superman) so the fluffy headed Princess Adora became She-Ra. All this came back to me as I was moving The Crystal Castle, even back then the power of marketing was a thing to behold, I think the Boo had the lunch box too, plus all the action figures. Should I have been encouraging her to play with more politically correct toys but no one was marketing the Marie Curie doll complete with toy laboratory and I certainly wouldn’t have bought her a Thatcher Doll complete with handbag to make her feel girls could be leaders of men. It was all roughly around the ‘girl power’ era when the marketing men realised that girls might not just want baby dolls and Barbies but action figures or pop stars that looked like they might kick a few butts and were generally proactive rather than passive. I think the toy industry was a tad slow on picking up on the feminist revolution but then Mattel etc still wanted to cling to the Stepford Wife concept I expect. They did not have many women on their board of directors until recently and they still have one woman executive in charge of 'girls toys' as if girls and their parents need a special range for them alone.

The finding of the Castle comes at a time when I am in the middle of reading Stephen Dobyn’s Book, 'The Wrestler’s Cruel Study' which I am enthralled with and the She-ra thing and this book collided in my brain. It is a surreal, even bizarre book which is set in a New York full of varying and arcane heretical Christian religious groups who meet to dispute at the top of the Chrysler Building about what is true and the nature of good and evil. The plot (if you can call it that) is driven by the classic hero’s dilemna. A wrestler called Michael Marmaduke who’s wrestling name is Marduk the Magnificent trying to find and rescue his kidnapped girlfriend Rose White. His world weary and philosophic manager, Primus Muldoon, whilst trying to help him and advise also spends time lingering on the nature of ‘the gimmick’ in wrestling and ‘the mask’ and how these relate to how people function in ‘real’ life. He has a love of Nietzsche and relates much of what happens in professional wrestling to our desire to cling to or to look for stereo types and pared down simplicities and our search for power of all kinds but Muldoon has a Hegelian nemesis. I won’t spoil it for you by saying too much but I never though Gnostic heresies, philosophy and wrestling could be brought together in a strange yet satisfying mix. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea but Dobyn’s is a well known poet as well as a novelist and his language and voice is right up my street.
Of course American wrestling seems a tad more violent than the world of Sport 19 70’s version I recall.

I was at The Essex poetry festival yesterday mainly to see an old friend,Joanna Ezekial, from an Arvon Course way back, read. It was wonderful to catch up and talk about where poetry and writing has lead us over the years. I never cease to be amazed by what people are prepared to sacrifice and give up in order to make writing an important part of their lives. Poets especially usually gain no financial reward at all from their writing but have to rely on all the workshops, residencies, teaching etc that brings in a crust. Yet people still give up well paid jobs and potential careers in order to do it. It gladdens my heart that people are still willing to do this and it makes me feel sad that there is so little money in the Arts pot now that such people are going to be fighting hard for what minute amount there is. Of course you can write magnificently even if you have a full time job as a sheep-dipper, cashier, lawyer or water board official but it is a struggle and I sometimes wonder how many great poets or poems may have been lost to the world because they could not juggle earning a living with writing. A brilliant poet will triumph over financial necessity and adversity you could say but then maybe not and society may or may not be the poorer for it. I note that Eliot has been judged the nations favourite poet, I wonder how he would have coped in maintaining his personal writing life in the current financial wasteland when he would have had to pour endless time into keeping a publishing house afloat plus all the networking and endless meetings with the Arts Councils maybe to get grants?

Larissa Miller, Francis Ponge and Conviction in Poetry and Politics

2009-10-02T17:55:00.011+01:00

The Kings’ Lynn Poetry festival was a joy as ever, an interesting mix of poets and the sun shone. This was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the festival so a surprise special anthology was put together to celebrate the event. It contained poems written by poets who had read at the festival over the years. I must say it was an honour to be in there snuggled between Pascale Petit and Peter Porter, a position I doubt I shall ever achieve again and which I only owe to the vagaries of alphabetisation.

Pascale Petit read some of her new poems that she is writing that are based on the work of Frida Kahlo,. These were impressive and as I love Kahlo’s work I shall be looking out for that collection when it comes out. Michael Hulse, Kit Wright, Annie Freud, Moniza Alvi, John Harley Williams, Lachlan Mackinnon were there but I was interested especially in the work of the French Poet Valerie Rouzeau, the Basque poet Eli Tolaretxipi and most of all the Russian poet Larissa Miller
I have included the links to their biographies and websites so you can read some of their work for yourself.

I found the power of Larissa Miller’s work particularly moving but then I am a sucker for that big Russian lyrical melancholy and poems wrung from experience of repression that most of us may never experience. It is worth listening to some of Larissa’s poems read by her in Russian on her website as then you get a true sense of the rhythm, sound and tone. There is something about listening to good poems read out in languages I have no knowledge of that I savour. There is still that sense of sound and rhythm, the moment now and then when you realise the universality of the spoken word, the sound and cadences of a voice saying something that matters. Of course I always have the sense that anything such as the instructions for putting together an IKEA bookcase may sound interesting and somehow beautiful in many languages and I wonder whether the same could be said of English, I shall have to ask an English non-speaker.

Speaking of foreign language poets, I gave a friend a copy of Unfinished Ode to Mud, a new translation of some of Francis Ponge’s poems by CB Editions for her birthday. The man is a superb poet, he looks at the simplest of things in the simplest of language and he never turns away, he keeps looking until everything is seen. To look without blinking is a rare skill. In a notebook, I have had for some years I have an extract from one of his prose poems, Memorandum, which C K Williams translated, in which Ponge writes of ‘the only interesting principle according to which interesting works can be written, and written well.'

“You have first of all to side with your own spirit, and your own taste. Then take the time, and have the courage, to express all your thoughts on the subject at hand (not just keeping the expressions that seem brilliant or distinctive). Finally you have to say everything simply, not striving for charm, but conviction.”

It has always seemed like a good way to tackle writing of any kind to me.

Come to think of it, in this season of the party conferences, Ponge’s Memorandum might be a good thing for politicians to embrace. The Sun has announced grandiosely that it will no longer be backing Labour as if this statement alone ensures that the coming election is a dead cert for the Tories. As we all know the Sun is the great arbiter and dictator of political wisdom and the common man’s opinion, hence the topless models as the essential statement of how women should be viewed. Rupert Murdoch no doubt rests easier knowing he is now in bed with the future government of the UK, as what the Sun says goes of course, elections he probably sees as mere formalities. Perhaps it’s the other way round and David Cameron is relieved to be in bed with Rupert. All that snuggling up on the media mogul’s yacht last year must have paid off and was worth the fuss in other newspapers that attended it about the free flights. Real convictions in politics rather than the snake-charming of the electorate are probably too much to hope for in the run up to the next election. I am sure The Sun will put me right on who is the most likely to be convicted ( I think that’s not the verb from conviction but it sounds about right).

Seven Minutes and Thirty-Two Seconds with Tick Boxes and Peter Porter

2009-09-22T19:34:00.012+01:00

Sorry, sorry, dear reader, she says rushing into the room slightly dishevelled with twigs sticking out of her hair ( think white queen with slightly more empathy). I have been remiss at posting this week–end due to the various things that intrude on time.

We have been asked to keep a blow by blow account at work of every minute of our time, which has to fit into various boxes, ten minutes on this, two hours eleven minutes on that, a second on the other. If you suddenly have to audit your time in close-up you suddenly start to wonder where it goes and what it consists of, it has a habit of sliding through the gaps between the words. It is indeed relative. If I were to do a time audit on my personal life I tend to think the boxes would be myriad and strange. Staring into space or out of the window could perhaps be consumed in the catch all tick box, ‘thinking’. I think I spend a lot of time thinking, I think about other things when I drive ( come on confess it dear reader I am sure you have thought about things other than the road ahead and the mechanics of driving at times) so does ‘drive time’ go in two boxes. I think about lots of things when I listen to music, so if I listen to music as I drive does that tick three boxes; listening to music, thinking and driving? I can check my emails, watch Eastenders, think about a poem I am writing and chew gum all at the same time. We can all multi-task or should it be multi think. I have deliberately been trying to think how I think this past week-end and thinking is indeed the multi layered lasagne of activities. Even as I write this, not only am I thinking about what I am writing but there are thoughts about what to have for tea, when is my next dentist appointment, did the man on the TV just mention William Carlos Williams, why has next door’s cat taken to sitting and watching me from the middle of the lawn as I stand at the sink.

Thinking in a totally focused way, concentrating solely on one thing and one thing alone, is difficult. By this I do not mean thinking in a linear way, one thing after another, but thinking in depth about one thing without the intrusion of any other thought. Try it , it’s hard, the brains natural state for me and I suspect for many is maybe one thing in focus and lots of other things cutting in momentarily like a shaky jump shot in an art house movie.

There are few writers who can actually summon up that jump shot way of thinking in their writing. Some good graphic novels can do it as the genre allows the visual dimension to do several things at once along with text. An image can say six things at once and more once text is thrown into the mix; also the placement of panels, images and text can specifically be used to convey simultaneous occurrence whereas text alone, by its very nature, is linear. The movement from beginning to end of a sentence is the basic building block of language that conveys sense or meaning. Narrative can be blown apart and re-assembled in many ways but few writers other than the avant-garde do that same thing with the sentence and still achieve some sense of the whole.

This does fit in with my time and motion experience as it has made me examine the tick boxes into which we place time in order to make sense of how a day has passed. When someone asks you what you’ve done today, they don’t actually want to know in detail, they are expecting a brief summary of the highlights or low lights of the past few hours. If we were to hand them a written summary of how exactly we have spent a day in a linear way it may be either a conversation stopper or a source of interest. ‘So first you spent seven hours five minutes asleep then two minutes cleaning your teeth, thirty seconds coming down stairs, thirteen minutes eating a croissant, two hours thinking whilst staring at the computer. Not exactly riveting stuff, and the linear nature of explaining how time passes in such a precise way paints something of a grey picture but then as the Scotsman said.

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle. Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Not that gloomy actually, points out that it’s best to get on with it, don’t waste it. Ok the ‘nothing’ kiss-off is a bit of a downer at the end but then the chap was in a bit of a bad place at the time. Of course no one was making him write down how long he spent staring out from the battlements, how much time was involved in seeing ghostly spectres, was the witch thing to be ticked in the meeting box or the future planning one?

I am off to the Kings Lynn Poetry Festival this week-end,
It is an interesting line up, so of that, more next week. Sadly the great Peter Porter has had to pull out due to ill health, so I leave you with this poem of his to savour which seems to fit this post.

Darwin, the American Health Care Bill and Emily Ballou

2009-09-13T17:05:00.004+01:00

The sun shone yesterday and I whiled away the day in Cambridge with two friends. We went to see the Darwin exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, which is well worth a look if you are this way. The things on display are many and various, a few examined the premise of the male of the species’ need to have not only a USP ( Unique Selling Point) to entice the female but that they had to be the best at whatever form of plumage, display or behaviour was deemed essential. Any female of the species that didn’t pick him was not only deeply lacking in taste but would produce inferior ofspring that would not add anything of significance to the gene pool of the species and ensure its survival or ability to adapt to the environment. There was a short video display of a display ritual of a particular bird, lots of long tail feathers fanned out, much like a peacock, was involved. The interesting thing was the way the female being displayed to seemed not in the least bit interested and spent time and energy ignoring the male bird. ‘Here’s a nice bit of corn’ she seemed to be saying to herself most of the time whilst the male shook his tail feathers, hopped almost right under her beak and generally thrust himself and his plumes at her. Nothing new there then, I have been to discos.

The celebrations for the 200th anniversary of the birth of Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of ‘On the Origin of Species’ has spawned innumerable things in Cambridge where he attended Christ College; lectures, readings, workshops, mugs, small rag dolls with white hair and long beards, tea towels, postcards, pop up books etc the list is endless. However there has been some good poetry spawned by the anniversary, so it isn’t all cuddly toys and jigsaws. Here is a wonderful reading by the Australian poet Emily Ballou from her new collection The Darwin Poems, which looks at Darwin’s life in poetry. Well worth looking at if you can get hold of a copy.

The whole exhibition really brought home to me that the publication of ‘On the Origins of Species’ was not only a huge shift in thinking away from creationist thinking but it also offered some people a world view that made sense of what they saw happening around them everyday, not just in nature but within society. Survival of the fittest was what had always happened and in Victorian society that was evident in the infant morality rates and the general conditions of the poor that led to an early death. Of course many of the wealthy and middle-class died young but not in the same numbers. ‘This is the way it has to be’, said some at the time. The concept of ‘the rich man in his castle the poor man at his gate’ and that ‘god ordered their estate’, weren’t lines from the famous and much loved hymn of the time, ‘All things bright and beautiful’ for nothing. The great unwashed, the poor, the ignorant, the feckless, the brutish under class would not survive because this was the way life was designed to be. The rich, educated and wise would always prosper and survive at the top of the heap.

I then read this morning, Obama’s address to Congress about the new Health Care Bill and I couldn’t help thinking about the Darwin exhibition in Cambridge. The constant fight to survive and adapt to meet change. None of the adaption Darwin thought of was conscious, species took thousands of years to adapt and some died out because they did not adapt quickly or well enough. Politics and government doesn’t have thousands of years to adapt systems of governance which will best ensure the survival of the people it governs. Man also has a moral element that interacts with all this adaptation. They may refer to an unseen higher power that dictates or limits the nature of change. They may seek to genuinely do what is best for the majority and thus spend years debating what may constitute the best or simply impose it by political and military means. They may decide that the furtherance of the well being and fortunes of a limited few, who would deem themselves more equipped to survive that other is the best answer, so government is dictated by the few, for the welfare of the few (as some have suggested the latest Afghan elections exemplify). Some may seek to limit the level of governance in order to maximise the moral concept of free will and the individual’s right to live their life as they see fit, unfettered by government dictates. All of them seem to tread the boards in the theatre of Darwinian thoughts on survival as, if you accept that whatever your moral beliefs are, and from whatever source you deem them to come, on the whole they are held to be best for man, the species. They are best to ensure society grows stronger, adapts to whatever is thrown at the species.

The health care bill in the USA raises huge issues about what you deem best for you and your fellow man. Whatever the moral, political or economic viewpoint you have, the task of convincing people about the need for change must boil down to, what do you believe your fellow man is worth to you and to your society? I put that not as a rhetorical question but a real one, how much is the health of Mrs Florence Peabody three doors up worth to you and society, enough to make your tax bill how much higher? In the UK we are lucky in so far as we have not had to debate this question recently, the NHS staggers on and there seems some basic underpinning agreement that the NHS is a good thing. Perhaps further down the road, if the financial burden of the elderly becomes too much to bear, we may be faced with the same question in stark terms. If someone has contributed x to the NHS system through national insurance and taxation are they entitled to x plus 1000% or a greater amount back, should they be unlucky enough to have some chronic or massive medical need. How much of another’s financial burden are you willing to carry? The survival of the fittest may at some point down the road be a very practical guideline to apply when limiting health care.

I will continue to watch the American debate with interest as it may be our debate soon if we have to continue getting a quart of health care out of a pint pot of money. I think the NHS is one of the defining things that makes me relieved and proud to live in the UK. It is, on the whole and for the time being, an example of how our society is at least striving to allow all some shot at survival and not just the fittest. It may have faults , it may not do it superbly well in all instances but at least there seems to be some will still left to help everyone in need.

Stephen Dobyns, Happy Birthdays, In-coming Season and The Yardbirds

2009-09-05T15:26:00.007+01:00

I have just received a copy of a collection of poetry I ordered from the States by the poet Stephen Dobyns. I came across him by accident when a friend Facebooked a link to one of his poems (see Facebook does have uses over and beyond knowing that someone you don't know that well, if at all, is eating biscuits, running in a half marathon or generally mooching). I sat down and read the collection, ‘Mystery, so Long’, this morning after I got back from the farmer’s market in town, where I chatted about the joy of fat marbled beef with the farmer who lives three miles away who breeds beef cattle, commented on the delights of a cheddar mustard and ale cheese made by a cheese-maker four miles distant and bought fresh baked wholemeal bread from a local farmer who grows his own organic wheat and mills his own flour that his wife bakes into glorious loaves the smell of which wafts from the stall and sits on your shoulder whispering, ’ buy me, you know you want to’ . I wandered home probably repellently smug in the knowledge that I had purchased food with such a low carbon footprint. I sat down to the indulgence of lime and elderflower cake (cake making lady just up the road) with a cup of sweet Colombian blend ( I managed to block out the thought of its carbon footprint and mutter the mantra of ‘it’s fair-trade coffee, it’s fair-trade coffee’ to hold on to the smug mode for just a while longer). All this and a good poetry collection to read was a small corner of heaven on a dull fen Saturday.

I had not heard of Dobyns before and it is always a pleasure to explore a poet I wouldn’t normally come across. Dobyns manages to make that conversational style of some American poetry look easy and yet it is a skilled craft which requires more than prose chopped into lines. He tends, in the poems I have read so far, to stroll through life as if it is a huge stage set for the theatre of the absurd and the wry asides seem totally at home with concepts of orang-utans shitting on stage at concerts to liven up the proceedings for those not already into classical music, talking dogs, a parrot attached to a man’s shoulder as he hurries to the city day after day. Dobyns seems not so much part of any surreal school of poetry but grounded in how people really live yet within their lives such things are happening which only the absurd can perhaps depict, such things are happening which makes them unique even in the seeming hum-drumness of their days. Here are a few of his poems, Yellow Beak, It's Like This and Over a Cup of Coffee, see what you think.

I can feel autumn coming in fast now, autumn is a season I love. It is not so much an end of summer but a beginning of things winding into themselves. Dark nights in front of fires. I am not a hot weather woman I like bright cold days, piles of leaves, thick bacon sarnies in front of old black and white films on the TV whilst the wind and rain busy themselves outside. Today is the Boos birthday, I am sure I hung on into September so I could push her out into a world that smelt of autumn, no summer baby for me. A September baby is always one of the oldest in the class in the English educational system, an August birthday consigns you to being one of the youngest. There are always perks to be had in being just that bit older, well that is what I tell myself when my young dentist who I had a conversation with this week whilst my mouth was full of iron mongery and sucking devices, revealed that she can’t even remember Take That first time around let alone that Jimmy Page was in The Yardbirds.

Kiss and Tell or Not Even a Kiss, Sharon Olds and the Desperate Romantics

2009-08-29T15:10:00.011+01:00

I had a committee meeting this past week to try and start to firm up readers for the Poetry Events that CB1 Poetry run in Cambridge. Launch event on the second Tuesday in October looks a cracker Matthew Hollis, the Poetry Editor at Faber introducing four of his newly minted Faber poets; young, talented, innovative. Surely these poets could make the Desperate Romantics look like a boring middle-aged cast from ‘Carry on Up the Easel’?

I have been following this series on BBCTV and am aware that this is a total parody of the lives of the Pre-Raphaelites but quite enjoyed it by taking it at face( or should it be cartoon)value, its knowing style, looks to camera and the ‘nudge, wink, say no more’ jokes. It was no more a serious study of these Pre-Raphaelite artist and writers as The Poseidon Adventure was an insight into the survival and rescue techniques necessary for serious collisions at sea (although I suppose I will head for the propeller shaft should I ever be in an upturned cruise ship ). Rossetti, actually waited a few years before deciding he needed his poems back from his wife's grave and got a legal exhumation order to dig up his wife’s coffin, prise off the lid and retrieve his work. Luckily a back-up disc suffices these days. Of course this still seems to put Mr Rossetti in a bad light, although raking over old bones of past loves and partners for sources of work still occurs today in literary circles but not in such a graphic way. Should you ever be related to a poet or any writer has always been one of those questions the review pages of the broadsheets tend to throw out especially when reviewing some personal memoir or series of ill disguised poems about an ex, a child or a parent. It has been ever thus and is not a new phenomena generated by kiss and tell journalism. I was always a little uneasy that perhaps some relationships are off limits, especially if the power rests solely with the writer. Is writing about someone, who has no right of reply, tantamount to a subtle form of literary bullying?

Sharon Old’s poems that engage with her childhood epitomised by the incident of her being tied to a chair by her parents as a child are a well known current example of writing from life experience ( I am not even going down the Julia Myerson route). Her father or mother if they had been gifted poets or writers might have responded in similar vein with their own ‘take’ on past events, but they weren’t and they didn’t. ‘It wasn’t like that’ is always part of the dialogue between human beings and their own shared histories. Fact and fiction in terms of the operation of memory and social dynamics is a blurred border.

The answer may be of course that the writer or poet is entitled to say ‘Well it felt like that to me and fact is only a small part of the story I want to tell’. Whether you were wearing a blue jumper or a green one when your parents tied you to a chair is irrelevant, even whether they actually did tie you to a chair is irrelevant, if you felt or believed they had tied you to a chair is probably more useful for any discussion of the poem and even if the incident is entirely fictitious, the poem has to stand and fall by its craft, use of language and it’s emotional truth.Poets and writer may have always indulged in some equivalent of False Memory Syndrome, driven by creative forces stronger than mere fact. When is a lie not a lie when it is a magnificent creative lie is perhaps a cynical way of looking at it. I seem to be talking alot about lies at the moment in my blogs perhaps there is something in the air, in politics in what we are all looking for at the moment that makes the telling of lies and what this means to us as individuals important. The whole release of the Libyian bomber is threaded through with the need to know the truth and who is telling lies. The death of Ted Kennedy makes me recall how a man was driven to lie about what happened one dark night and was in many ways absolved of that lie by his life post lie.

What is an emotional truth? I have no idea for you dear reader, because it essentially relies on each individual’s encounter with the poem and what speaks to them. You can critique a poem in many ways, technical use of rhythm, rhyme, form, use of language, simile, metaphor, imagery etc but when you say this poem makes me feel x, it is a difficult one to argue with. You could argue that the reader may not be clear about the poem and is therefore wrong in what they feel simply on the basis of them ‘misreading’ something although sometimes we misread for a purpose because it supports our own need to see something in a particular way. If someone for instance says this poem makes them feel claustrophobic and points to things within the poem that for him or her substantiate this claim then that is an emotional truth for them. The use of the word cupboard maybe, allied with a tight box like form such as a sonnet may trigger some emotional response for the reader…..maybe they have been trapped in a cupboard or a lift, maybe they fear being in a confined space. One person’s nightmare cupboard is another person’s cosy nook etc.

I like Sharon Old’s poetry, she has something interesting to say, she often says it very well in a way that engages me and what if she keeps writing about her childhood and events in it as some have accused her of; if the poems are good she is not a one trick pony but someone who can perform the highest art of advanced dressage with an amazing horse. Space Heater for instance just evokes a moment when you can feel the tension and the emotion within a room going back years. Here is a good article about Sharon Old's work if you have the time and energy.

It is now a bright and sunny bank Holiday week-end. I may join the throng to wander round the huge market that takes over my small fen town. I am now quite good at convincing myself that a bargain is only a bargain if you actually want and need the item. I can even ignore the hard boiled egg slicer that a man with the gift of the gab convinces you can also be used for cutting tomatoes, brushing the dog and bringing about world peace.

Stories about Gender, E. A.Markham and Squirrelising

2009-08-22T20:43:00.011+01:00

I worked in the local community café this morning with a friend. Lots of OAPs, families, the lonely who come in for a chat, visitors who come to look round the town. It is a cheap and cheerful café and you find stories in there. The old lady who comes miles on a bus to visit the local dolls house shop because she is creating a series of houses for a family of dolls who’s back history she has created in her head and she tells me who is married to who and what they do and what they hope for their children and builds up each house according to these histories. The man who travelled on the rural bus in Cambodia with chicken on the roof rack and who had to bribe officials for a visa. Heathrow have a writer in residence now collecting stories and observations . I noticed from an article in the Guardian this morning that a woman has set herself up as a gatherer of stories at a bus station in London.

Anywhere where people have to wait and have time to talk is likely to throw up stories and the strange thing is how many ordinary people are eager to tell you stories from their life if you ask them the right questions and are prepared to listen. I am nosy, I like most people and I am interested in what makes people tick and I am never surprised by how much of the internal mechanism that drives that tick people are willing share with you. The American Story Corp project is an attempt to make recordings of people just talking about some aspect of their life. The are all going to make up a huge oral history archive for the nation. It’s worth a look at some of the stories, I have over the past couple of years listened to them on a regular basis and they have always made me revisit the concept that there is no such thing as an ordinary man or woman.

Speaking of which ,the furore about the South African athlete, Castor Semanya, is causing the ether to overheat. Is she, isn’t she? What she definitely is, is an eighteen years old having to cope with the most mishandled and public of humiliations about the nature of her sexuality. There is no doubt she was brought up as a girl, believes herself to be a girl and was doing nothing wrong in running a superb race as a woman at the World Athletics championship. What ever the outcome, we are told this is a matter of examining an extremely complex set of bio-medical variables that can be interpreted differently according to which scientist you choose to consult. So ok, let’s make a definite ruling about what is male or female so that no-one can have an unfair advantage of their extraordinary genetic make-up (in the sense of not ordinary). Perhaps Usain Bolt has been born with super fast twitch muscle tissue hence his great speed, should he therefore be seen as too ‘genetically enhanced by nature’ to be allowed to compete against other athletes who don’t have this genetic make-up? Michael Phelps, due to his extra ordinary arm reach and build gifted by nature can swim faster than others, is this fair? Ethiopian athletes born at altitude and living at altitude have a greater advantage in distance events, should they be seen as too advantaged by nature to compete. From my reading of the medical opinions that have been flying about, it seems that having ovaries, a womb and female chromosomes is not enough to say you are a woman, giving birth may not be enough to say your are a woman. How many women out there can produce a medical certificate to prove their feminine gender, a birth certificate apparently doesn’t count. Thinking back, how many of you out there as parents were asked to prove your child’s gender when registering their birth? No one asked me to prove my child was a girl, the authorities just presume we 'lay' people know the difference but apparently gender is such a complicated thing that it takes weeks of complicated tests and expert opinion on those results to determine it, yet any Tom, Dick or Harry parent can blithely register their child as male or female without consulting experts beyond the local midwife or doctor who is nowhere near qualified to assign a gender to a child on anything but the crudest of examinations ( penis, no penis). Perhaps therefore there are more people wandering around who have been incorrectly gender assigned than is ever discovered or who themselves never suspect they are anything else other than the gender their parents so blithely assigned them.

In the other gender direction I once went on an Arvon course with the late Archie Markham the wonderful Afro-Caribbean poet and writer. We kept in touch afterwards and he told me that in the sixties he had poems published in various ‘women only’ magazines using a female nom de plume, receiving once, he said, a letter from an editor saying how ‘her’ poem could only ever have been written by a woman as it so beautifully encapsulated the female experience. If you don’t know his work , here’s a link to just one of his poems I love.

On the ongoing subject of squirrels, their ubiquity is now reaching cult status because of that ground squirrel’s appearance on a couple's photograph in Canada. Now a friend has sent me a link to a Squirreliser site where you can paste that same squirrel into any photo you fancy.

It has been seen at The Last Supper, The Yalta Conference, with Obama, Putin, Ben Ladin. Squirrels don’t need this oxygen of publicity, dear reader, it will only serve to further their plans for world domination, while you are laughing you won’t notice them taking over.They are already starting blog wars.

Red Squirrels' fatal addiction

2009-08-15T14:32:00.005+01:00

Re previous post's PS, here is a photograph sent to me by a friend taken at an eccentric B and B in an old manor house in Suffolk. It shows why red squirrels lost out to the grey, too busy playing cards.