Thank You Letter

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'.

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

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

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.