Sunday and All Next Week

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

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?

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?

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.