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Stanza 32, November 2006
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Editorial:
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Sally Festing and Brian Fewster
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Articles / Reviews:
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Mark Borg, Caroline Cook, Brian Fewster, Mark Mawson, Stuart Snowden
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Poems:
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Alice Beer, Caroline Cook, Pat Corina, Sally Festing, D A Prince, Marilyn Ricci, Pam Thompson, Huw Watkins
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Interview:
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Sally Festing interviews M R Peacocke
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Pat Corina
Yarn
For years I’ve gathered it, stuffing great plastic sacks
under the stairs, in the spare room,
below the house where the boiler coughs and damp
weeps down the walls. Even now
if I pass the one shop in the city selling it still
I want to dive in, bury my hands
in the hanks and skeins and balls and loops
of cotton or mohair or silk or wool in colours
to dye for.
Of course I’ve tried
creating those up-to-the-minute confections displayed
in the pattern books and magazines. If I delved
I’d unearth an account of the life I tried to shape,
from fully fashioned to dropped sleeve, from garter stitch
to twisted rib, in every unsuitable shade you could find,
but finished results rarely are. There’s something
amiss in the hang or the fit, or the tension’s slipped,
so it’s gone to the back of the cupboard and stayed
till I find the heart to finish it off.
First published in Staple
Speaking to Silence
In those few seconds waiting for the tone –
and for your rather toneless message to run out –
I wonder where my words will go
once I release them. My muddled physics sees
them funnelled down a microphone,
transmuted by some tiny processor (the sort
with blades) that flings their fragments down
the vortex of a twisted wire, then hurls them out
onto a sticky verbal fly-paper.
How will they reassemble? How
can adjectives seek out their nouns,
nouns home onto verbs? Will they make sense,
these deconstructed particles of thought?
I’ve never been a resurrectionist,
finding it far too much to hope
that bones could summon back the flesh,
thread it with nerves and blood, clothe
it with skin. And yet I know
later you'll call me back, confirm
that we can meet, that all these blown-
to-bits minutiae of speech
have reached you whole.
Editorial
I'd like to welcome in the 2006/7 season with Pat Corina's pleasure at being offered life membership to the Society. 'I am honoured,' she said over the telephone. 'I only wish I could participate'. We will think of Pat when we turn up to the readings and workshops she led and joined in for many years.
It was a busy AGM, indeed so busy that resolutions threatened to squeeze out a read-around, and Brian called for an Extraordinary General Meeting on 19 January to allow time for further discussion.
At Meg Peacocke's reading, four newcomers joined the Society to make what Milton, called a 'fit audience, though few'. Two LPS members described the poems as 'gentle' and 'soothing'. MP’s measured delivery and evident belongingness to her Cumbrian fells does indeed give this impression, yet some of her poems crackle with electricity, others are unsettling (see Mark’s review). Is a poet’s performance almost as important as content to its audience? Can it mislead?
Favourable reports of Mangeot's readings in Cambridge and at the Kings Lynn Poetry Festival, precede his appearance in Leicester. At Aldeburgh, tickets for his performance group, Joy of Six, sold out months in advance. We hope to see you all when he comes to the Phoenix on 10 November.
I didn't need to hear Jean Binta Breeze coping gallantly with LAEC's cavernous and echoey Large Hall nor Pam Thompson's Inky Fish group in the noisy, narrow, small Lecture Theatre at De Montfort, to realise how important venue is. While views within the Society differ about moving out of LAEC, it has been my thrust that to attract new members, we need to get off our hind lex from time to time!
The Phoenix will be a new move. A second joint reading at De Montfort, with Anne Stevenson, will not be in the lecture theatre but a more intimate ground-floor room. There is moreover, parking space in Bonners Lane that we can use.
I have enjoyed being chair of the society for the last three years, and wish the new Committee well. This, is my fifteenth and last Stanza, a point at which to pass the editorial to Brian, and Stanza editorship, henceforth, to Caroline and Colin.
Sally Festing
Sally asked me to share this editorial with her, and my first priority must be to thank her for the huge amount of work she has done over the past three years, amounting at times to what must have felt like a full-time job. She has not only been our Chair but has also, in the absence of anyone else to do it, filled the role of Secretary.
I was approached recently by the publisher of West Life, a West Leicester A5 free sheet. They wanted a regular poetry spot and I agreed to supply a short poem by a local poet each month. So far, I’ve been raiding past and future issues of Stanza, but do get in touch if you think you’ve got something suitable.
Remember, we depend on your subscriptions. Sally, like Bruce’s spider, persisted through two rejections to secure a modest Arts Council grant that is helping us through this year. In the longer term, however, we need either to obtain a steadier source of funding or to limit our activities to what can be financed from membership subscriptions and the occasional collaborative event (such as the invitation to Ann Stevenson, paid for with the help of De Montfort University). This is why the Committee decided, reluctantly and controversially, to increase membership subs and workshop fees.
Brian Fewster
Alice Beer
How to demonstrate facts or a principle
With a pencil
make 2 dots on a piece of paper
one above the other, some distance apart.
Join them by a straight line.
This is your statement.
At about the middle of the distance
put another point just a fraction
of a millimetre to the right.
Draw a new line through these three points,
nobody will see any difference.
Repeat this process several times.
Your line now will show
a small but definable divergence
from the original one.
If anyone notices explain
it is seen from a different angle
or a new perspective.
You can repeat this process
indefinitely.
Call it politics.
Envoi 143, Spring 2006
Episode on a train
One day, my Father, on a journey
sat opposite a Bishop in his robes,
a rather heavy man with greying beard.
My Father, fresh faced, red-fairish hair,
sprinkled with grey, bluey-grey eyes,
an ordinary middle aged man
returning from a business trip.
As Austrians will, they soon
struck up a conversation. ‘You going to Vienna?’
Asked the Bishop. ‘Yes your Eminence’, replied my Father
I’m going home.’ ‘Not going to
the Eucharistic conference, then?’
‘Oh no, your Eminence, I am a Jew’.
The Bishop shook his head: ‘What, you, a Jew?
I’d never have believed it.
You don’t look like a Jew!’
‘Really?’ Replied my Father, ‘what did
your Eminence believe a Jew
looked like?’ Then for half a minute
he quite enjoyed the other’s
embarrassment, muddled apologies,
his consternation. But then, being
a civilised, good-natured person,
he quickly led the conversation on
to other things.
This happened in the nineteen-twenties
before being a Jew meant
having no rights, your very life
in danger.
The Coffee House, 2004
Caroline Cook
Comedians
The best found their way here by chance
through a wrong door and are surprised to see us.
They have dressed in the dark. Strangers,
they appear in a state, fazed by the map,
the foreign parts,the lingo. The ray that falls
on them amazes them. The best are children,
who have seen the Emperor’s bare bum
and tell. They mock themselves in snapshots — little glimpses
they replay from right to left. The best illuminate.
Sparked by a whim the unreel of a spool begins,
and where will fancy end? Postcards from God,
alive and well and gay in Weymouth. Tales
of vengeful fruit, that, rock-hard, when we leave
the room ripen the minute that we turn our backs.
The best warm us, and we fill like little loaves,
rise from our dough, turn golden, and we live
until they take themselves away again
into the night — fortuitous.
Anon Four, 2006
Black Snow
I am Pavel.
If I die I don’t care.
With a knife in my hands I would cut their throats.
It’s impossible to get enough revenge.
When we heard the shots we thought it was our balloons popping.
We thought the bombs were cameras taking photos of us on our way to school.
It was our First Day at School Number One Beslan.
I walked with Oleg, my very best friend.
I really, really miss him.
If you could measure it in volts it would be 9 million.
I put eggs and cakes on his grave — water and chocolate by his picture.
I hate God.
He let the best children die.
I believe in Russia — in our armed forces.
We sat and waited.
Seconds were as big as barns — truckloads of minutes.
People were shrivelling like strings in a fire.
I had 5 roubles and I said to a masked man,
“Take my money. Let us go!”
He laughed. His eyes were black — like glass.
We didn’t know what terrorists were.
More than anything we wanted water.
Oleg said, “Imagine there is a fountain pouring over us.”
Some people were drinking pee.
They even quarrelled over their pee.
Someone’s leg blew off — someone’s head.
The brains covered me and I wiped them off with my shirt.
They killed my Dad and threw his body out of the window.
How gleefully the sun shone that morning when I was happy.
Why? Now everything is all messed up.
I don’t forget.
I draw the terrorists, then burn them.
We few children left are like black snow
— little piles of dirtied snow.
Because we didn’t die, we remind everyone of the dead children.
All our life we will do this.
First Prize Fosseway Writers’ Competition 2006
Sally Festing
Children on a windy mountain
They could be six black arum lilies blowing
from the summit of Wetherlam,
rooted to fissured rock.
Look again:
anoraks bloom
above heads to wind-funnelled silhouettes.
Four flowered fairly,
lightly spilling pollen.
Ben went like lightning, big boots into oblivion.
Alice faded from her season.
Poetry Nottingham 60/2, Summer 2006
Appreciating Gaudi
A shell fortress rocky as an oyster,
they call Casa Batllo 'House of Bones'.
No buttresses or steel struts,
a dwelling spun round treetrunks,
towers and finials wrapped in coloured skins.
Inside, polished until fish and lizard entering,
see themselves as in a mirror.
Gaudi wanted us to love
the God he many-splendoured.
Transcended Thoreau for embalming nature.
But touring feels too long
inside a whale. Ask Jonah,
he'd understand the need for space to fly.
No subterranean hero,
footsore
from tramping corridors
between the ribs,
I couldn't live
where freedom's based on logic
and the parabolic arch.
*
Last night, Barcelona,
6.15 behind the old cathedral,
a student playing Vivaldi on accordion
while around, enshrined,
one of the most wilful geniuses
who ever lived, swung on ropes of light,
leaping from cloud to cloud,
turning the angels in his mind to dreamwork.
Shell. Cave. Subterranean chamber.
Den.
The Wolf, issue 12, Spring 2006
D A Prince
Coats
Then there's the one for dead of winter,
the funeral coat, that doesn't hang
among the walking jackets for weekends
or the weekday raincoats,
but breathes the silence of the wardrobe.
It was never in fashion. Its must-have
came from need, out of that first
black urgency, prescribing
how all the later funerals would be dressed.
it was never comfortable (too tight
round the neck) and now
it's fitting closer. There's less give
across the shoulders, and the hem
has thickened, grown misshapen
and after all the crumpled salt of old tissues
its pockets are never empty.
Poetry News, April 2005
Red Interior: Still life on a blue table
1947 - the year when snow
blanking out colour, form, feature
became its own landmark -
Henri Matisse splurged a whole ration book of red and blue.
Red walls, crazy with colour,
cracking with heat; tomatoes fat with sun,
spilling from the pool of a blue dish.
What is not red is blue is gold is green.
Three delphiniums
angle for air in a liquid vase,
and beyond the golden shutter a shaded green garden
throbs with loud summer,
greedy with living, its language
blazing this brilliant primary yes,
dazzled and hard-edged. It flames
with never knowing snow,
never being born into drifting whiteness,
not crying with milky cold
or slush-grey skies.
Instead, this red interior -
already grown-up, confident of its own palate -
is steeped in sunlight, its bones
warm and supple as willow,
free with unlimited heat, its red
shouting through open windows to blue sky.
Orbis 135, Winter 2005
Marilyn Ricci
Dads
Mine has blue eyes and coal-black hair.
His laugh makes the windows shake,
anger rumbles - at the war, the Tories,
every bleddy boss who ever lived.
Yours is bloated on Shipstone’s Ale.
An early morning breeze told him
she was pregnant. Whispers to the lads:
‘Don’t trust women’.
On Saturdays at dawn, he goes shooting,
doffs his cap to the local lord.
All hot air in the pub with his dogs,
never says no to another draught.
Fingers sturdy as broad bean pods,
mine lifts the spade on Sundays,
slices into clay. Wipes his brow
with the heel of his hand,
remembers hot days in Italy -
children buried in rubble.
He levers, hauls himself up,
turns the ground over and over.
In the field, in clear winter,
yours watches his breath fade away,
feels the blood pulse irregular,
blows home on a cloud of resentment.
The Picture Palace Tea-room
Outside, rain taps the windows.
Blurs the signs.
The waitress brings stainless pots,
milk, steaming jugs, plates of fancies.
The young woman chooses meringue,
nibbles into crisp snow, her first lipstick
pink on the white - struggling
to keep it intact. Suspenders pinch.
Her father cleans his spectacles,
mops his creased brow.
In the smoky dark below, Cliff sets out
for his Summer Holiday - again,
leaning out of a double decker,
waving goodbye.
The young man adjusts his tie, watches
the waitress in her skimpy apron,
half listening to his mother who thought
the B film far better.
He can smell damp hair, sees the girl
with fresh cream on her lips.
Downstairs, Cliff leaps off
the bus,
cartwheels down the road.
Envoi 144, June 2006
Pam Thompson
The House Across the Road
Looking back, I can tell how you really
liked it, the house, I mean, despite
the 'seventies sit-com décor, cake-brown
and cream, and paisley patterned curtains.
Sliding doors hid the tv; he kept the lawn
like a carpet, and carpets, stair, landing,
hall, like close-cropped lawns. His former wife
resembled his current lover,
both there, framed on the desk, and you
found him sweeping leaves when there were no leaves
left to sweep. Soon, though, he was unsealing
rooms for you, would-be-buyer,
who brandished the rolled up house- spec
like a fly swat. Was it in his study,
where those photographs radiated
eagerness to please, a kind of 'fifties
tennis-star jouissance, that your heart
truly skipped or in the stage-set bedroom;
white bedspread, books as props - Kate Atkinson's
stories, on her side; on his, Tom Jones - where you
imagined those fingers unpicking flesh,
unstringing laces? Or when you
navigated a tide of (our) leaves
to reach his door and spied your old
disorderly life through our neighbour's
latticed window, that the deal was nearly clinched?
He's now in Melton Mowbray with his lover
and a family's moved in. I've burnt
paint charts, curtain swatches, ditched samples
of kitchen tiles. You allow me to
present our children in the evenings,
as long as the light is soft, and they are clean
and do not speak. I think you are nearly well.
Woman Writing
A woman writes at a desk in a study. Furiously
awake at five a new theorem buzzing, she constructs it
with her pen- Thermodynamics and the Heartbeats of Tree-
Frogs in Sarawak. Her hair is electromagnetic:
why brush it, it is white thought. Behind her a model:
molecules, a tree of them, primaries, red, yellow.
Today is blue. She allows it to happen. This is not
a woman writing her memoirs . She is writing off the edge
of the planet. What mirror? What toothpaste?
She is newly painted vibrant criss-cross dashes:
her sweater, glasses, the lines on her face.
This hour could have been a century blasting
away a stockade of men in white coats.
Today she is eighty-five. So much to do. So far to go.
Images of Women (by contemporary women poets),
eds. Myra Schneider/Dilys Wood, Arrowhead Press
The House Across the Road – Poetry Nottingham, Spring 2006
Huw Watkins
Nettles
They were the first injustice.
Learned about them bitterly, awash
from all sides
on my first journey through the woods
tempered at a later year
when I tasted small beer,
my mother’s stone jar wine
nettle still, but now nature’s anodyne.
It was favourite on a hot summer day,
pungent with a delicacy, but heady.
The taste has always remained the same.
Red, white, any of that with fancy name
I have never taken to. The rough,
the simple uncomplicated stuff
has always been a preference
which may be a matter of chance
as much as breeding. The sting, of course
is still as chronic. Took years
to discover that where the beautiflul Nymphalis io flies
the common nettle multiplies.
[Nymphalis io - the peacock butterfly.]
The Interpreter’s House no 31, February 2006
Wheels
The wheel can only do two things -
rotate, stay still -
It has progressed from individual
to multi-lateral.
Despite its own simplicity
its history is so complex
not all the libraries in the world
can satisfy its self-enormity
from simple wheel-barrow customised
to soil; to man's imposed atrocities
redeemed by help for the infirm,
the dying, dead; to wheels towering
to rescue; wheels of fate; from tanks,
planes to mighty scooters, and even
can-openers for Crosse and Blackwell beans.
How we could fill our time out
with immaculate histories of the wheel.
Today, I saw you cycle down Hallam's lane,
past fields of corn; ragwort, flowering
hedgerow grasses, twitch-like razor blades
on the verge; two simple wheels
rotating at a comfortable speed
and you with Persil blouse and dark brown hair
and that is where I leave it now,
that early recollection which
I confirm in sepia photographs;
here, both standing side by side, wheels
still as the Chilwell air
as if they were never meant to be,
later, unkindly separate.
Poetry Nottingham 60/1, Spring 2006
13th October 2006: M. R. Peacocke
M. R. Peacocke (Meg Peacocke) gave a slightly nervous but unhurried reading, often quietly spoken but audible. Her language was simple and accessible. The few dialect words were explained.
Her poetry was bright and cheerful at times, dark and menacing at others. Death and (sometimes) rebirth were constant themes. She introduced her poems particularly well.
Inspired by a photographic exhibition in New York, her poem ‘A Glass of Water’ sums up how she attempts to write – in a photographic style without elaboration or beautifying. She wants us: “not to perceive it even as a lens but as a plain glass of water”. I was reminded of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Water’ and his “glass of water where any-angled light would congregate endlessly”. Not beautified, but beautiful all the same.
Meg Peacocke certainly achieved a photographic or filmic quality in poems such as ‘Field Head’, an excellent description of a foggy afternoon, with its “monochrome clinging”. There were strong
visual images in ‘Gift Horse’, where the lad “pocketed a ten bob note, grinned, rubbed his bum” and where the mare went uphill with “tail pinned stiff, her milky eye cocked madly”.
Other poems appealed more to our sense of hearing. The poem ‘Bus’, a conversation between two men, was almost like a radio piece. She described the noise of the bus as “chirruping”. In ‘An Evening In New Jersey’, the frogs chanted “many…many” – a comic interlude in an otherwise tense poem.
Unusually, M. R. Peacocke is equally adept with animals or people. She often writes about interactions between the two. Disturbing a wild animal in ‘The Fox in the Borren’. Looking after a fledgling bird in ‘The Fall of the Sparrow’. A novel form of hand-painting in ‘Snail’ – “Once, painted my spread palm with his on an upward slicksilver piste”. One senses that she never forgets that we are animals too. Hence the “slight membranes…between me and the world” in her poem ‘Fall’.
‘Fall’ and some other poems were memories from her childhood. A number of her poems drew heavily on her recent life on a Cumbrian farm. They gave a sense of the seasons, the slow pace of life, the “gain and loss” in a farming community.
Poems set in America, where her brother lives, provided a useful contrast. But Nature was never far away. The poem ‘Parktime’ described a walk in Central Park, New York. It was a testament to the therapeutic power of open space. Somewhere to take your troubles to and “trash[ed] the lot”. And then listen to “the brilliant lingo of every common bird”.
Mark Mawson
Interview with M R Peacocke
Sally Festing: I wasn't sure whether to advertise a reading by MR Peacocke or Meg Peacocke.
Meg Peacocke: This is a problem I wished on myself when I started publishing. I didn't want to use what I'm always called, which is Meg, because I'm not keen on nicknames used publicly, and incidentally half the sheepdogs in Cumbria are called Meg, but I use Margaret only for cheques and stuff. Hence the decision to use initials, which turns out to be a nuisance... I don't mind a bit, so please write what feels least cumbersome to you.
SF: In a way, your Cumbrian cottage, with its unexpected animals that came and went, was a new starting point.
MP: I've lived on a small farm in east Cumbria, on my own, for more than twenty years. I grew up in the country, but then moved about a great deal, for work and during my married life; so to be here is to connect the early and late parts of my life. Making poems is part of the same pattern - I started very early, was mostly blocked from late schooldays onwards, and began again when I came here.
When I was 20 I biked and walked all over the Drôme, and further east, with a half-French friend whose family farmed near Dieulefit. We slept in barns and lived on bread and cheese and apricots and I still remember it like yesterday. The basic connection with animal life, and the transhumance etc., was just part of ordinary local life then.
Three collections are published by Peterloo Poets, and now I'm working on a 'new and selected'. I write a lot about the natural world, though nowadays the poems relate more and more to people; but I never know where a poem is going to come from, and I don't know what I have to say until I've said it. I find out as I go along: words act like the white stones in the dark wood.
SF: I'd like to know more about your process of writing.
MP: Some things take months or years - I often have a phrase or a sentence but have no idea where it belongs, discover the context ages later, and that's because I hardly ever know what a poem wants to be about, I have to find out; and perhaps that's what gives the impression of exactness, I've had to work and work to discover what wants to be said. That sounds a bit daft I think; but it seems as though it's the poem that's wanting to say something, not me. What comes out is quite often a surprise. Though there are poems, occasionally, that just turn up complete and I only need to adjust a bit.
There's something in there about form - when once I know what the form of a poem is, I can usually write it quickly. But I don't know how I know what the form is, it's a kind of recognition; and I have wads of stuff that I've had to abandon because I could not find the form, or else I've forced it and it's stiffened up all wrong. I'm wary of thinking until a late stage (almost the editing). I find it necessary (and difficult) not to make judgements, think that the false starts come with deciding too soon what a poem is about/where it begins or ends. Mostly I put down all the scraps that arrive, all over a page, never beginning at the top because my indoctrinated mind will believe that what's at the top is the beginning. It's like collecting scraps of material to make a quilt, you just make a heap. No, I've never made a quilt, and brood on the colours and eventually - sometimes - you see, not decide, that this goes with that and what if... etc. There are decisions to be made, of course, but very late.
SF: Do you go to workshops?
MP: Hardly ever, partly because there aren't any good ones within reach and partly because I can't take a poem till it's almost completely cooked - that is, I know what it's saying or wanting to say - and then it's too late; and it seems invidious to take completed poems to a workshop, it looks like showing off. I do try poems out , usually on one or two people who aren't poets, to find out whether what I've said is clear: that's what I chiefly want...clarity. Usually they pick out the bits that I suspected were not clear but I didn't want to admit to myself.
SF: You seem to do a lot of listening to the landscape, its people, and to yourself.
MP: I suppose I'm an observer - a watcher and listener. When I was fifty I trained as a counsellor: that training makes one a bit more conscious of what one is doing in the listening. I worked in a children's cancer unit for three years, which was good even though painful, because the observing combined with play. Children use words to draw with, not to explain, and I understand that. The good parts of life, I find, are a kind of serious play, and I feel very lucky, getting old but having good health, to be able to live increasingly in that way, a second childhood of the most fortunate kind: not to be relied on but to be enjoyed. You lose a lot - especially friends - but that brings into sharper relief the delight and mystery of what you have and what you have had... I get sucked down the drain at times, there it is, and come out again in due course.
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Paul Muldoon:
‘The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eyes, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feeet, to take our breath away’
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Readings
A student at Warwick University in 1977, I attended a poetry reading by Hugh MacDiarmid and Basil Bunting. MacDiarmid was a Leninist and Scottish Nationalist. Bunting, from the North-East of England, was described as ‘the power-house of English Poetry’. They were poets of the ‘old school’, dignified, ageing men who delivered their verse in an elegant manner and stood no nonsense from hecklers.
Bunting read in a monotone from his long poem, ‘Briggflatts’ He reminded me of recordings of older poets such as Yeats and Pound. MacDiarmid had in a slightly gruff voice which reminded me of Ezra Pound. When he read his poem to Lenin, someone in the audience shouted ‘traitor’. After, he growled, ‘The next poem is a poem on abuse’ That put the heckler in his place.
In London, in 1981, I saw Alan Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky at the Greenwich Theatre. They performed a poem called ‘Don’t Smoke’ which I found ironic, as the Beat Generation spent so much time experimenting with drugs and smoking cannabis.
Ginsberg altered some of his most famous poems for the reading, turning a lament for his dead Mother into a light, humorous poem. Once again, someone in the audience accused Ginsberg of being a traitor to America. He answered courteously, explaining his stance over Vietnam. He came over as a sincere person.
Poetry purists might regard Macdiarmid and Bunting as great poets, but not Ginsberg. I disagree. Ginsberg had a tremendous influence in the Fifties and Sixties. He projected the Blakean image of poet as prophet and visionary.
Stuart Snowden
Simon Armitage, 27 February 2006
De Montfort University scored again this year with its Cultural Exchanges Week, and offered a range of top-class events for free! Amongst these was a Reading by Simon Armitage.
This was my first opportunity to see and hear Simon Armitage in the flesh, and I wasn't disappointed — nor was the rest of the audience, which consisted mainly of young people made familiar with his work by school and college exam syllabuses.
Simon Armitage is a communicator rather than a performer. He read clearly and without artifice. He wanted his audience to understand and enjoy his Reading. His work is for and about people.
It must be difficult for a writer to choose when he has so much high quality work, but his selection fitted these listeners like a glove. There was much quiet humour and an obvious delight in sound and rhythm — also power. As for themes — like other excellent poets he is able to make the personal seem universal and the topical seem timeless. His lightness has depth. His rapport with the audience was total, and he answered questions in a sympathetic, straight-forward way.
Simon Armitage is building up an impressive body of work. As well as several poetry collections, he has written song lyrics, drama for TV, two novels and a prose collection. He has also published a superb version of The Odyssey and is currently engaged on a modern re-working of "Sir Gawain and The Green Knight".
These latter works might make you think he had become one of the "glitterati". Not at all! His feet are still firmly on the ground. He is a skilful and insightful writer who believes in the value of engagement with ordinary people, and who, on the evidence of this Reading, has no difficulty in achieving this.
Several of his books are already in Leicester libraries. If you have difficulty in obtaining any, you can always fill in a book request for a library loan, or suggest that the library purchases the book. What a marvellous service public libraries provide! Use them! or lose them!
Caroline Cook, Saturday, 13 May 2006
Update: Since the above piece was written
Simon Armitage has had a new collection published,
Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid.
You could order this at the library too.
Vertigo
Mind led body
to the edge of the precipice.
They stared in desire
at the naked abyss.
If you love me, said mind,
take that step into silence.
If you love me, said body,
turn and exist.
Anne will be reading at the Clephan Building, Oxford Street,
at 7.30pm on December 8,
a joint event between LPS and De Montfort University.
The venue is five minutes’ walk from the Adult Education Centre.
There is also on-site parking.
www.poetryleicester.co.uk
If you enter the words “poetry society” into Google, with or without quotation marks, with or without limiting your search to UK sites, Leicester Poetry Society’s website comes fourth out of more than four hundred thousand results. The only sites that come higher are www.poetrysociety.org.uk (the national body that publishes Poetry Review) and www.poetrybooks.co.uk (the Poetry Book Society). Our site ranks above those of the Open University Poetry Society and the Poetry Society of America, as well as other local societies such as Brighton, Kent and Sussex, etc.
This high profile is largely due to the work of Sally Festing and her husband Michael, who set the site up and very effectively spread the word about it. They have now handed the administration over to me, and I’d like to make it an even more effective tool for publicising events and displaying members’ work.
At the time of writing, it consists of ten sections: Home, About Us, Join Us, Workshops, Programme (a useful place to go if you’ve mislaid your leaflet or Programme of Events), History, Stanza (the last two issues of Stanza are reproduced in full), Publications (If you’ve published a book and it isn’t there, let me know), Social Events and Constitution (something that in its paper form tends to get lost by everyone!)
My next project for the site is to include a web page for every member who would like one. This will be a way to ensure a wider audience for your best work. In the meantime, if you have web access and haven’t yet seen our site, take a look at it. If you have ideas for its further development, please let me know.
Brian Fewster
LPS & its Workshops
I have recently returned to the Leicester Poetry Society after a seven-year gap and I am glad I did. Having moved from Leicester to Stoke, one of the first things I did was to look for another poetry society to join. The saying, 'you don't know what you've got until it's gone' springs to mind here, for I simply couldn't find another society that worked to the same high standards as our own.
As I sit in on workshops again (albeit, not as many as I would like to) I am struck by the levels of skill and experience, craftmanship and creativity on display each week. The thoughtfulness and sensitivity that goes into the critical process is also a pleasure to behold. It's never easy bringing your precious 'masterpiece' to share with your peers, and it is a tough process to hear it broken down and its constituent pieces analysed, but it teaches you more about the art and craft of poetry than any other method I know of, short of an Arvon Foundation poetry course.
I am also struck forcibly by the history of the Society, how many years it has been running, the level of passionate enthusiasm and commitment displayed by so many of its members. Sure, there's something of a debate at present about its constitution, and where its 'heart' lies (i.e. workshops or readings?) but I see this as a healthy sign of a membership that wants more than to write a cheque every year and enjoy other people's hard work.And here is where my one real criticism lies: Where are the volunteers willing to serve on the committee? To misquote President Kennedy, 'ask not what your Society can do for you, but what you can do for your Society'. So, come on you poets, overcome your rugged individualism just this once, and join in!"
Mark Borg
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