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Stanza 28, February 2005
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Editorial:
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Sally Festing
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Articles / Reviews:
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Huw Watkins (1) (2), Caroline Cook (1) (2), Brian Fewster, Ken Berry, Sally Festing
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Poems:
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Alex Milloy, Anne Kind, Sally Festing, Mark Mawson, D A Prince
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Caroline Cook, Alice Beer, Pam Thompson
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Translation:
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John Hartley Williams
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Poets & Critics Reviewed:
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Alex Milloy, Nick Swingler, Guy Russell, David Duncombe, Rosie Garner, John Hartley Williams, Anne Kind, Norman Harrington, Pam Thompson, Don Paterson
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Alex Milloy
Before introducing the two poets at the January Reading, Sally said, "Sadly, one person will be missing tonight," referring, of course, to Alex who died unexpectedly on January 2nd. Sally went on to say that if she had a particularly difficult review to do for Stanza, she asked Alex, who always obliged and was so careful in all he did, and so loyal.
I first met Alex before he came to the Society. My wife introduced us one late afternoon when I went to pick her up at Wigston College. Nancy, who lectured at Scraptoft, came to Greenacres School a few times to teach some of our badly inflicted pupils. Alex did some painting. I remember commenting on the energy in one of his seascapes, but he did not carry on, which I felt was a pity.
The first of his poems I read was in the Observer (or Saturday Guardian ). It was about Armistice Day, loss, and an unmarked gravestone in France. I cut it out. His poems were also published in New Lines from Leicestershire, edited by John Lucas, and in Exit 21, selected by lan McMillan. I remember, too, Alex reading his poems at Leicester Writers' Club, where he was asked, from time to time, to introduce one of the guest speakers. He did this in his quiet, understated, humorous way, with a natural assurance that made it all look easy. For many years he was Evington Correspondent for Leicester Mercury and wrote in the Evington Echo.
My favourite poem by Alex is his Villanelle. Many poets use this form. After all, the structure is seductive and the repetitions roll unhindered off the tongue. In reality the villanelle is very difficult and very few poets write memorable ones. The secret, I believe, is mainly to do with the two repeated lines. It is the meaning in these that gives a villanelle its distinction. Alex's villanelle is not quite as powerful as Dylan Thomas's Rage, rage against the dying of the light, but for me it is on that same exclusive track.
Soon after Leicester Poetry Society started Members' Readings, we asked Alex if he would take part. Eventually, after persuasion, he agreed, and to our pleasure; though, I remember, with a kind of diffidence about his performance! I remember, too, after his reading, saying I was disappointed he did not include his Villanelle, and hoped he would read it next time. That, sadly, will not happen.
We have lost three members in the past two years - Jimmy, Denys, and Alex. The Society is much thinner and weaker and less warm because of their absence. Our sympathies go to Nancy.
Huw Watkins
Alex Milloy
Villanelle
Half the allotted span: too young to die,
You should have lived, not turned away your head,
Leaving so much undone and still to try.
A young child, full of promise, and the high
Hopes of parents not yet aware of dread -
Half the allotted span: too young to die -
Becomes a youth familiar with the lie,
Who fell into a life with danger spread,
Leaving so much undone and still to try.
A separate life ensues, without the tie
That binds and might have healed the rupture red;
Half the allotted span: too young to die.
The path continues down, soft as a sigh
The drugs take over, soon all sense is sped,
Leaving so much undone and still to try.
The struggle grows too hard, breath but a sigh,
The body yields at last - a man is dead;
Half the allotted span: too young to die,
Leaving so much undone and still to try.
Making Lists
In her filofax we found
a list, a list of things she'd take,
a column for each journey.
Each item ticked or blank
dependent on the journey's end
and double ticked for coming back.
Only the final column clear
no longer needed for the journey
on which she carried nothing out.
Editorial
This is the chilly term, and we've lost Alex. It was good to see many LPS faces bidding him a formal farewell on January 19, an occasion for which our thanks reach out to Nancy. As I have already said, we just don't want to be without him.
A welcome message I've received on your behalf is mail from a well-wisher, poet and computer expert; Paul Hurt writes, 'The activities of LPS interest me a great deal - the quality of the poetry in Stanza is certainly high and the programme of activities is varied and very interesting indeed I hope to travel from Sheffield to attend the GS Fraser lecture to be given by Andrew Duncan next May.'
It was warming to start 2005 with two memorable readers at relatively young stages in their poetic careers -an event aptly encapsulated by Caroline (p8). And three Members are perceptively evoked by Huw (p 25). I always know I'm going to enjoy Members' Readings.
Brian, who reads the New Statesman, tells me that each year they publish a table of their competition winners for witty poems or short prose pieces on a contemporary theme. We would like to congratulate DA Prince: not only is she a fine poet, she is one of the NS's most successful entrants, hardly ever out of their top ten.
De Montfort University's week of Cultural Xchanges runs from 21-25 February, featuring James Kelman, and EA Markham and Jackie Kay, both of whom you may have heard at LPS events. Frontline Bookshop include Pam Thompson among 8 readers, at 7.30 on 10 Feb. Tickets include food & drink. Book now at 0 116 251 2002 for £8.00 or £10 on the night.
By the time this reaches you, the party will have come and gone. We look forward to more bringing and listening to poems, more writing and especially to seeing you.
Sally Festing
Anne Kind
Ward Ninety-Nine
Patients scrutinise their notes
heavy folders speak volumes.
Families of red and white corpuscles
old friends greet each other.
I am a new cog in the vast wheel
of National Health
I’ve joined those
who don’t want to die.
In this department
all we have and they want is...blood.
“At last I come galloping back “
says the Zimmer frame.
She’s been through the marrow.
We all smile, laugh loudly. Fear speaks.
Surrounded by blood, plasma, bare arms.
Syringes look for veins.
A blood transfusion has joined the party.
Doctors, nurses, patients on first name terms.
Diagnosis, prognosis, treatment
discussed, exchanged, real matey.
Different from the days when Matron
“And how are we today?” measured corners of beds
sailed the wards, terrified nurses
while patients lay silently to attention
Highly commended Faber Competition
Ottokar Loughborough Bookshop. 1998
L.P.S. Reading: Nick Swingler and Guy Russell — 14.01.2005
Nice guys — both of them — clever, too, self-deprecating, fun. Both treated serious matters — life, love, death — but with a twist, and each in his own special way.
Nick Swingler had a learned air, but struck an immediate rapport with the audience. His reading was clear, gave time and space to his poems. He looked sober, but he twinkled, too, and explained.
Guy Russell was younger, seemed more laid-back, casual even. He was engaging, popular, if rather — by his own admission — over-fast when reading — "when nervous". How appearances deceive! Surprising, too, to learn he was, amongst other things, a classicist.
Nick was meticulous. His work was spare, measured, and spaced. He was particularly interested in how his poems looked, in the "tension between poetry on the page and performance". He read mainly from his "Dream of the Condom" (2002).
Guy, whose poem "Calling" won First Prize in the L.P.S. competition in 2002, read mainly from his pamphlet "Like Basically" (2004). His poetic style might be described as ‘freeflow’ — informal musing in surreal reality as conveyed in poems such as "Friends on the Smart Side of Town", "The Supermarket in Paradise" and "Everyday America". His poems were busy — crowded with objects and action but conveyed with the loose feel of much transatlantic verse. I wondered if some of his work might be termed "bloke-ish", "Everybody Knows", for example, and "Calling". It was certainly often humorous and perceptive.
Nick offered various themes from the political "Blair’s Conference Speech", through the quotidian "Hairdresser", to the deadly seriousness of a planned suicide in "Logistic". His tone was sardonic, his style concise — ideas tightly packed. There was a tension in his serious poems. Often death was his inspiration. (He is poet-in-residence with the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery). I thought the poem "Obituary" particularly fine in its inventiveness and finesse. I was also much impressed by "The World Tonight" — a chosen smattering of unfinished soundbites so characteristic of the current times.
Two sets of very different poems, then, to make an entertaining and absorbing reading. Two views of life lived now — in its strangeness, its tragicomedy.
Caroline Cook
Sally Festing
Sphinx
for I.M.B.
Hummingbird hawkmoths in
the garden
complement the news
that you've returned from hospital.
I missed the almost-bullying lure
of your cultural ashram,
rush and vortex of your humour,
puritanism and wickedness;
blue-blue eyes that take away
half your world, dislocate your wings;
resigning you to art absorbed
through extrasensory probosces.
A painting's effluence thrills
like flowers' fragrance
you say, quivering
the dimness of your days.
Linnaeus called them Sphingidae
after the caterpillars' sphinx-like self-protection
though the moth outshines a unicorn
for glamour.
Plump as mouse or bat but no mammal,
hawk, nor hummingbird; rather
some evolutionary spin
that amazes entomology.
'What Is It Like To Be A Bat, asked Thomas Nagel.
Hovering between experience and uncertainty.
Trapped in my own skin, I -
prescient chrysalis can only guess.
Poetry Nottingham, Summer 2004
Playing with Fire
Today the rose bay willows flush
through ragwort into innocence of sky.
Pods explode to bottle-brushes, fly
away their floss; from flame to ash.
Prolific after harmless grass
is kindled and charred, 'fireweed' sings
to sun in thrusts of coloured rings,
changes like stripy caterpillars.
Ep-il-o-bi-um, the child
wrote cursive, feeling the ping of sound
on palate. Mixing mauvish pink. Bound
by circumstance and shape, she held
her breath till almost faint before impelled
to dip, she painted tongues, lips, wounds.
Frogmore Papers, Autumn 04
David Duncombe and Rosie Garner
December's reading, devoted to two East Midland poets, had more to offer – in both content and performance – than some of our more prestigious bookings.
David Duncombe is a very physical writer, not only in his subject-matter (which includes boxing, flying, motorcycling and hill-walking) but also in the trim muscularity of his language. Each line is a workout for tongue, teeth, lips and palate, each poem a rucksack packed tight with wordplay and images.
A recent piece, Mountain Hare, illustrates this tactile quality:
This is a land where the wind sculpts the rocks
amongst the sodden peat bogs
and tugs me off balance in the gullies
that sough and drag at my boots,
while red grouse crackle and flap
in and out of the heather.
On this occasion I was hearing it for the second time, having enjoyed it at a joint read-around a year earlier and engaged in a brief email correspondence with David about the pronunciation of the word “sough”. He wrote:
'Sough' is an interesting word. certainly. In my Shorter Oxford, it allows 'sou' or 'suf' for 'murmuring, rustling' and separately 'sighing deeply'. The other meaning for 'sewer', 'drain' or the like can also be a verb, meaning to 'reach or get into a sough' ….... Verbal conflation, I believe, is very useful to us, particularly with words that are most often, or solely used as nouns in everyday language and able to be used in poetry as verbs with some strength. However, I'm not sure this is a very conscious process at the time.
Some of his images are about the relationship of body and machine: the lone motorcyclist, “headlight hosing away the darkness” (Joy Rider); the 1930s aviation pioneer, reaching
to curl
and stretch those finely adjustable
fingers to switch and grip and turn,
to shift and lift and lower flaps
and ailerons, the carpal bones
articulating with steel hinges.
(Flyer, a poem about Amelia Earhart)
Rosie Garner is an engaging young poet who has yet to publish a full collection, but has won many prizes. Her work is clear and accessible, with a strong sense of the here and now (several poems in the reading arose from a project to write one for every bus route in Nottingham) but able to surprise with a sideways look at experience, as in the juxtaposition of images at the end of Boy.
Wisteria banging against the window,
The rattle of the cat on the ironing board,
The restless huff of the dog and the sound
Of a boy, growing.
Fourteen and a Half, a poem about an adolescent girl, provokes a sympathetic skin-prickle even in a male hearer:
Grown men watch as she passes, with eyes
Like damp hands heavy on her back.
Some poems are about borderlines between different existences: Separation, about a boy pulled between two fathers; Dog and I, about the overlapping of past and present. Sometimes there is a sense of fragile personality and routine held together by an effort of will, but with a centrifugal force pushing it apart. The longest poem, read at breakneck speed, evoked an imagined plane crash experienced from inside the plane.
Brian Fewster
Sign and Symbol in Poetry
Kandinsky has written that: “Modern art can only be born when signs become symbols.” Poetry is also an art form, and it may be that there is an analogy here between the visual and the verbal. Linguistic signs and semantic symbols convey meaning and may point, as Susanne K. Langer has recognised, through the medium of the ‘non-discursive symbol’ to the domain of the supersensible, transcendental or ineffable.
In ‘CIose-up:symbolism’ (Poetry News, the newsletter of the Poetry Society, spring 2004), A.B. Jackson argues that symbolism may be public or private, and he points out that: “The great difficulty for poetry is that words are also symbols, abstract marks signifying something other than themselves.”
In his prose-poem, ‘White-Horn’ Kandinsky takes dadaist liberties with grammar, introducing multiple word-meanings between rhinoceros’s horn , the German for rhinoceros is ‘Nashorn’ or ‘nose-horn’ and the white circle’s metamorphosis into a horn and ant’s eye:
Ken Berry
Mark Mawson
Migrants
When the sun
cannot be seen
they do not stop
but carry on
by way of rivers,
coastline, hills
and other marks
that act as guides
or failing those
they use their sense
for magnetism
in the earth
then gaze at stars
throughout the night
and carry on.
Poetry Monthly, issue 104 - November
D A Prince
Brendan Behan’s typewriter
Under glass now, ‘though the fellow
more than once shed it through a window,
jet-propelled rage or the drink as fuel.
He gave it wings, sent it flying,
‘though it had never the knack of it,
always crash-landing close at hand.
On whether the windows were open or closed
the museum keeps silence. No glaziers’ bills
(To: reglazing one sash - lower...); no claims
from passers-by showered by splinters or
suffering concussion; no irate letters
to local papers (Sir, Hasn ‘t a man
the right to walk this city free
from attack by malignant typewriters ...)
Lack of research? Perhaps.
Tough as the words it swallowed, made to last.
No repair bills either, but was Behan a man
to pay up, neatly date, and file receipts?
Chipped, stubborn, squatting toad-like, now it’s mute,
all its fine fingering done. It’s played out,
keys silent, ribbons coiled. At rest.
Links, Vol.2, No.2. September 2002
Cormorants
Out there, a sand bar black with solid sound
screaming a goal for the home team,
the fans gone wild, winging their yah-yah-yah
on every wave.
They're clamouring
for air, sea, space, fish - the dan,
a cormorant wall of outstretched wings
shaking their feathers free of the silky bay,
this couple of hundred supporters, beaks
yelling wide, come-on-on-on.
And the tide
rolling in time, splashing their cries
across an estuary of eels and dabs;
a rough incessant rise and dive,
scrawling equations in a restless sea.
Today the winning formula brings them down,
webbed and sure-footed, cheering, insisting;
hurrahs gleaming like liquorice, a wet
and glistening chorus of success.
Runner-up - BBC Wildlife Magazine competition,
October 2004
John Hartley Williams
TO SOSIUS SENECIO
This year has proved extremely fertile in poetical productions: during the whole month of April, scarce a day has passed wherein we have not been entertained with the recital of some poem. It is a pleasure to me to find, notwithstanding there seems to be so little disposition in the public to attend assemblies of this kind, that literary pursuits still flourish, and men of genius are not discouraged from producing their performances. The greater part of the audience which is collected upon these occasions seat themselves in the ante-chambers; spend the time of the recitation in talk and send in every now and then to enquire whether the author is come in, whether he has read the preface, or whether he has almost finished the piece. Not till then, and even then with the utmost deliberation, they just look in, and withdraw again before the end, some by stealth, and others without ceremony. It was not thus in the time of our ancestors. It is reported that Claudius Caesar, one day hearing a noise as he walked on the Palatine, inquired the occasion of it, and being informed that Nonianus was reciting a composition of his, went immediately to the place, and surprised the author with his presence. But now, were one to bespeak the company even of the most idle man living, and remind him of the appointment ever so often, or ever so long beforehand, either he would avoid it, or, if not, would complain of having lost a day; and for no other reason, but because he had not lost it. So much the rather do those authors deserve our encouragement and applause, who have resolution to persevere in their studies, and exhibit their performances, notwithstanding this indolence or pride of their audience. For my own part, I scarce ever refuse to be present upon such occasions. Though, to say truth, the authors have generally been my friends; as indeed there are few friends of learning who are not.
It is this has kept me in the town longer than I intended. I am now however at liberty to withdraw to my retirement, and write something myself: but without any intentions of reciting in my turn. I would not have it thought that I rather lent than gave my attendance; for in these, as in all other good offices, the obligation ceases the moment you seem to exact a return. Farewell.
Trans from Pliny the Elder
As this translation reports, small numbers at poetry readings has a long history. The quality of listeners is what matters!
SF
Caroline Cook
Pasiphaë
Blind, black mole has her galleries,
sunk-spire shell her bed.
I stretch out my worm-life here
in this daedal den, in his labyrinth.
I, and my son, Asterion,
whom they call Monster.
If I could laugh
I would laugh at my fate and that Ha!
would go hallo-ing down
in rise and fall
all the wandering walls of our burrow
- all the repeated walls
of the Palace of Minos,
whose name is written, who is my husband,
who does not appear to his Pasiphaë,
she, born of Helios Sun, and of Perseis Moon,
who is hidden, god-forsaken.
I have the art of waiting.
Sometimes a distant moan, half-human,
slides through my ear, and the clash of blades,
but it may not be so.
Sometimes the tang of musk comes
- some olid aroma. It may be fancy
- happen that chimeras
roam the heads of those who spin their moments out
in infinite courtyards, stare
into idle, self-same pools, bear
how the Sun and Moon are forever shrouded
- all the sapphire sea is dust.
I spend my time in meditation,
and I know this:
Those without shame have loaded shame on innocents.
He whom the rabble calls Monster has a soul.
Prizewinners’ Booklet
Lions’ Club 25th Anniversary Open Poetry Competition, June 2004
Story behind the Poem
In Greek mythology Pasiphaë is the wife of King Minos and mother of their seven children (including Ariadne). Because of a feud between Poseidon and Minos, Poseidon made Pasiphaë fall in love with a beautiful white bull and mate with it. From this union came Asterion, a half-bull half-man creature whom we know as the Minotaur.
Minos, feeling angry and humiliated by this event, had the famous “engineer” Daedalus construct for him in Knossos on Crete a labyrinth, in which to conceal Pasiphaë for the rest of her life, and Asterion, until he was slain by Theseus in the labyrinth with the help of Ariadne, Asterion’s half-sister.
Alice Beer
What I learned in my Pottery Class
That this lump of clay on your wheel
behaves like a living being.
That it needs to be centred.
That the quality of your pot depends
on the way you make it grow
from the inside.
That a small bit of clay
flying off the wheel
could spoil your neighbour's master piece.
That it responds to a little,
gentle swearing - uttered under your breath -
but more explicit Anglo-Saxon words
have the opposite effect.
That the experience of other potters
can often be helpful.
That a little cheating is allowed
but don't bank on its success.
That strength counts
though it is not all that's required.
That effort is not always rewarded.
That in pottery round is beautiful;
in exceptional cases however, like love, etc
all shortcomings can be forgiven.
Rialto, May 2004
Wedding Tanka
Congratulations
to your wedding. May you make
each other happy
and your love; prove strong to the
end of your time and beyond.
In the Park
My black puppy's tail
wagging like a metronome
at the tempo of
allegro vivasce as
she brings back her rubber bone.
Passing of Time
"A little earth for
charity". Wolsey's tomb now
lost in Abbey ruins.
Time Haiku, Spring 2004
John Hartley Williams, ‘Blues’ (Cape)
The book looks elegant and seductively compact; a plain cover inscribed with a Chinese ideogram. Woke up this morning it translates. Inside, the poems are sharp and clever, sometimes sexy, often playful with words - and never a spare one. Blues begins and ends with two long poems. The first in memory of Ken Smith who died unexpectedly in 2003. A 'freedom-ferocious' poet, he might almost have been '.. the fox / seen loping / through the cemetery /'. The last is a satirical addendum to the post-war comic strip spaceman-hero, Dan Dare. 'Ah the blindness of the earthling,'. Between them come three blues, a series of political pieces based on travels and residencies in eastern Europe, witty reflections on the way we live, a ballad, another elegy and a Prufrock spoof about social responsibility.
Using a title aerosoled on the Berlin Wall, Magic and Peewee in the Rain uses subversive humour to comment on the implications of the German divide. In The Club, shades of bureaucratic overdrive played out amid the featurlessness of concrete and neon light, fade into something more sinister. 'There are no procedures, they explained, / for resignation ..' . By collaborating, we condone what we know is wrong. I Remember is an autobiographical account in rhythmical prose separated by the repeated titular refrain. First impressions of the poet's journey to a small town north of Belgrade called Novi Sad suggest an innocence that is subsequently battered. Two rather different poems about Sarajevo have passionate intensity. One is free verse, the other in song-like couplets in which the first line is repeated.
‘Put the graves on stilts, so frogs can't jump that high
Here comes the band, they need an alibi'
In a moving tribute to clarinettist Albert Nicholas, a moth and gecko play life and death. 'You send old Crazywing / colliding off towards another candle.' (It's the Unwept Tears). But this is a reductive inventory. For variety and pithiness, the work is a pleasure.
Sally Festing
Members' Reading - 26th November 2004
Anne Kind, Norman Harrington, Pam Thompson
These are very firmly established in our Programme, and each trio continues to offer to their audiences a variation in content, style and presentation - which is not surprising, of course, when you realise how many good poets we have in our relatively small Society and how individual and independent we are.
Anne Kind's poems are very familiar to me because I have listened to and read so many of them over the years. Yet they still come over as fresh and original and, because many of them are about the Holocaust, are very moving. Ann, however, does not make swift political capital out of them but stands her distance.
Anne has been back to Germany three times: first, to look for her grandmother's grave; then to see the place where 'flags and eagles parodied ancient Rome' -
Dear God, my roots are here!;
and in May 1999 to look at the house where, as a small child, she lived
The simple 'Dear God' adds so much to the meaning - pain, despair, distress, historical significance. Take it away, and the rest deteriorates into factual observation. How can two ordinary (almost cliched words) raise a statement into something of such moral intensity?
One aspect of form in poetry is fitting your language to the type of poem you are writing. Anne does this consistently, making her poems so telling (and deceiving) in their simplicity and directness. There is no overworking. Just as the unexpected word in an ordinary line can light up a poem, so an ordinary word in an unexpected place can do the same.
Anne finished by reading some humorous poems. Nothing boisterous, but with that touch of irony and deftness you have come to expect.
I believe the last eight poems in Anne's Footprints and the first eleven in Selective Memories, should have a place in history. As Jeremy Bowen said in a recent documentary on BBC 1, speaking of his time as a War Correspondent, especially in Sarajevo and Israel - facts speak for themselves, and strong pictures in quiet words, (my emphasis)
You, whose loved ones
Have not known Auschwitz
Whose forebears can be seen
To go back a long time
Neatly tucked up in rows
Declaring your present
I expect you
To make up for those
Who ill-treated mine ^
Cutting off my past )
If I am out of humour
Bear with me
I expect you to set
An oyster before me
With its shell open
Showing the pearl
'String of Pearls' from Selective Memories
Norman Harrington delivers his poems with the confidence and assertion of an actor, as we would expect, but without the overstraining of a Brian Blessed! Many of Norman's poems read quietly on the page, often with that unexpected lunge after statement -
When birds shelter,
Polythene bags take flight.
or a pheasant that scurries away to the verge
with a raucous squawk that is shocking,
like yelling 'bloody 'ell' in the abbey.
Norman told us that his first draft dictates the style of a poem. The second takes place after about a week, when he examines the use of words and brings it to the workshop, he then rewrites the poem.
Many of his poems are parochial, and often to do with plants, the garden, birds and observations of people. Sometimes he goes further abroad (in both senses of the word), when what may start as description turns into questions about human behaviour. Some poems are written in a staccato rhythm
The poem I like best is Connie, a moving memory of an aunt. The first stanza, in particular, is a very beautiful piece of writing, not only because of what is said, but the form used to explore the words where repetition and variation of line length are used in great sympathy with the feelings being expressed. The meaning and the rhythmic impulses mesh exquisitely. I doubt if Norman 'worked this out'. The best things just happen in poetry.
These hands .... my hands,
when they were small and white, touched her.
Auntie's hands, white hands, thin hands, embraced me.
She tapped on me to bring me out.
I remained within, overawed by that place
of corridors, beds and dressing gowns.
This is very relaxed writing, but beautifully structured, and Norman continues in this vein. Some of the meanings come from below the surface. I would like to have written this.
Pam Thompson says, 'my poems are a mixture of the real and surreal'. Many of them are also narrative, which often develops into something else as the poem progresses; as is the case in Opening lock gates, where the physical act of doing this feels like a dolt was on the end of it, not an 80ft barge. The poem then takes you into the less familiar territory, and you are led into a dark world ('the deepness of water, green water' I see from a note I made trying to explain it to myself!) Application for a job takes us the same way, where 'job' is almost unimportant, for life is what one makes of it, not only in the real sense but also in the make-believe; not simply escapism, but something one can't escape from.
I cannot comment at length on Pam's surrealistic poems. I find them too much to hold in one moment's listening. Poems like Jacque Prevert's The Bird, I remember, I found very exciting and new in its imaginative way of looking at our world. All teachers should read it! Day in the Life of Magritte's Bowler-Hatted Man is not itself surreal, but a description of a surreal painting and helps us to enter a surreal world:
he gathers
bits of his identity
then very gently presses them
into a soft grey slab
side by side his apple and his pipe
The poem about her father. The Shipyard Apprentice (the shipyard from where the Titanic was launched) was another descriptive poem that led you away from a sympathetic narrative into a world of alienation. But another poem. Back, is a straightforward evocation of memories of her father and beautiful in its simplicity and use of imagery.
The Boatman's Love Song got a prize in the 2004 Nottingham Poetry Society Open Competition. This is an extraordinary piece or writing that proceeds with sheer technical efficiency and artistry. The last two lines stunningly turn the very clever and relentlessly repetitive, alliterative lines into a completely unexpected (and very moving) love poem.
From all the ale and porter, anvils, bacon, brimstone,
bricks and bones we carried early that year
from Coventry down the Soar, for all the coffee, coke
and cordage, curry-combs, cheese and earthenware;
and all the fly-runs day and night, the speed
of steam, for all the flannels, fire-irons,
flints and frying-pans, gun-barrels, gates and grease:
for all the brushing-boats; the ebbing banks;
all the soot and fumes- the threat
of suffocation; for all the herrings, hides and hinges,
all the fires and fogs; layers of lime; for the best
time through Blisworth Tunnel; for all the shells, sand,
saltpetre; nothing's worth more than the weight of your hair, freed
from its pins, falling safe into the hold of my hands.
And it all sounds so natural!
Huw Watkins
Pam Thompson
Corn Dolly
As the last stems of corn spike the mist
young men seek her out. First they plait
strands of raffia and tying the bows behind
her knees, wed her to the crop. In spring,
when sickles cut the ties, she sinks into a sea
of clods and then sleeps in this sticky
pudding of a field until the wet munch
of cow wakes her.
Then her hair, a stiff bunch
of sprigs, sags. Grey-green mould clogs
her navel. Yet those tense brown hands which reached
inside had stirred dry threads, touching
places the knots would touch and she had heard
that sweetest name, Kirn Baby, being sung to her.
(Kirn Baby - name given to a corn dolly in the northern counties)
Other Poetry Series II No.23 2003
Outbreak
I switch on the hall-light:
My granddad
(never known) on the wall
in his First World War uniform.
Upstairs, in a drawer, the ring -
dark, dull green, silver claws -
filched from a dead Nazi by my dad
who wore it as his wedding ring
It cam back from the coroner’s in a paper bag.
Sometimes, after work, when the kids
are asleep and I’m alone, I walk through
this house, re-visiting each room
as if it were the old house, the one that surfaces
in dreams; where the hand wearing the ring
turned racing-pages, and some of the wars had finished
Smiths Knoll 32, Autumn 03
What Don said
Little ripples the little rivulet of poetry. Still, for some it's water clouded when Don Paterson threw in his pennyworth in the T.S. Eliot lecture (30.10.2004) entitled "The Dark Art of Poetry".
"Only plumbers can plumb, roofers roof and drummers drum; only poets write poetry" he declared, and:
"The result of the inadvertent democratisation of the art (viz. poetry) has been many people feeling that armed with a beer-mat, a pencil, and a recent mildly traumatic experience they are entitled to send 100pp of handwritten drivel into Faber or Cape."
Don is even-handed in his choice of targets. He rubbishes not only the amateur scene with its "nonsensical talk of show-not-tell," its "silly workshop exercises" and "language of self-help", but also the "Avant-garde", and "Postmoderns" whose work he characterises as
"Homophonic translations of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in Lithuanian; poems freakishly juxtaposing archaic and contemporary registers, or mutually exclusive jargons; poems consisting of nothing but five-letter words, or non-sequiturs, or typographical errors; poems whose main subject we ultimately identify as the self-consciousness of their own artifice."
Wonder what the editors of Poetry Review make of that?
He also despises the "populists, who… infantilise our art: chicken-soup anthologies full of lousy poems.." Does he mean Daisy or Neil or both?
So, who is a real pro, then, according to Don:? "Poets are people with an unusual gift for the composition of verses."
You can't argue with that. You might, though, feel inclined to argue with some or all of his other pronouncements, or perhaps to heartily endorse them.
In order to be fair, it is best to read the whole lecture - an unabridged version of which can be accessed by going to http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/news/poetryscene/?id=20.
Caroline Cook
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