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Stanza 33, February 2007
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Editorial:
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Caroline Cook
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Articles / Reviews:
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Steve Morgan, Brian Fewster, Siobhan Logan (1) (2)
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Poems:
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Eddie Lunt, Marilyn Ricci, Pat Corina, B J Walklate, Norman Harrington, Huw Watkins, Anne Kind, Jill Cunningham, M M Henderson, Stuart Snowden, Mike Brewer, Caroline Cook, Maxine Linnell, Tina Bass, D A Prince
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Poets and Critics reviewed
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Andre Mangeot, Anne Stevenson, Stuart Snowden, Caroline Cook, James Harbour, Alice Beer
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Editorial
Dear Members,
At this time of year, like Janus, we look backwards and forwards. AGMs and EGMs (like OGMs) modify structures, and LPS has changed, and will continue to change, whilst remaining, in essence, the same. Our programme continues to present a variety of ways of enjoying poetry.
Following the guest readings it was good to get together again in January for a "Read-Around Social". I always enjoy sharing these personal selections in a relaxed atmosphere.
Workshops at LAEC continue to provide regular opportunities for all to bring and listen to poems, also to discuss and to exchange opinions. They help to make better listeners, readers and writers. All LPS members are welcome at these Friday workshops, whether they bring a poem of their own or not. Their involvement would be valued.
Please do continue send me your poems (max. 2), reviews, letters and suggestions as you see fit. I will certainly read them, possibly also publish them in the Summer edition of The Stanza, the deadline for which is 11th May, the evening of the G.S. Fraser Lecture.
I hope you enjoy reading this copy of The Stanza.
Have a creative New Year!
Reading – André Mangeot 10th November 2006
It looked most encouraging to see so many young people attending a Poetry Society event in the Phoenix Cafe – until, just before Andre Mangeot started reading, they all disappeared into the main Theatre to watch Puppets and Mime!
However, we had a respectable turnout in a new venue that had the advantage of being free and allowing liquid refreshment to those who desired it. In the beginning our poet did well to compete with the bangs and crashes of washing up!
André Mangeot is a lively, dynamic and charming man and poet; and his set was consistently entertaining, and often humourous. His presentation was slick and confident, very well rehearsed and professional. His diction was clear and audible, even without electronic aids. But this is not light verse, concerning itself with many aspects of the human condition. Living in Cambridge, and often performing poetry with the Joy of Six (now actually 5 poets), he claimed to be a Leicester City supporter. So it is impossible to be continually optimistic.
He started with The Bridge, examining aspects of the links between the poet and his audience, moving on to Natural Causes, the title “found” poem of his 2003 collection. This posed the question as to how far things have changed in America when we examine deaths in 19th century Tombstone, Arizona.
I loved the poem Garryowen, remembering rugby football and the monks at Ampleforth with André’s fond reminiscences of the late and blessed Cardinal Basil Hume: “Catholic Fury” and “the worldly men of God” versus “the shaven-headed…..backstreet bruisers.”
His latest collection Mixer is part poetry-book and part cocktail recipe-book, a neat idea for linking poems. Some of the poems deal with the consumption of alcohol and the society of bars. Why do people visit bars, asks Thistle? Poetic drunks appear including the inevitable Dylan Thomas in Brainstorm with the appropriate initials D.T. This examines the often-observed thin line between creative genius and self-destruction. This poem has the memorable line — “Whatever night you went into, you never went gently.”
Googleism, another “found” poem, this time on Dante, is consistently humourous through its apparent randomness. Throughout the reading, Andre gave much evidence of a Catholic sensibility, and a genuine empathy and sensitivity towards all humankind, whether sober or alcoholic. I noted the line from a poem, a villanelle I think called Jerusalem, “the road to heaven is paved with selfishness and sin.” How rarely one hears the last word used in that line in these secular, post-Christian days.
Before the interval, André performed a veritable tour-de-force called Biography, a moving and self-aware story of his life in just 52 seconds!
After a revealing and open question and answer session, we were treated to 3 more poems, concluding with Frisbee, about friends rarely seen, but with whom there is always common ground – “memories and sadness and love”.
For me this was one of the most enjoyable readings we have had for some time – entertaining, but also humane and poignant, a natural poetic voice.
Review of Anne Stevenson Reading
8th December 2006
(invited by LPS in partnership with De Montfort University and with financial support from Leicester Council)
Speaking to a packed audience at the University’s Clephan Building, Anne began with Making Poetry, the first piece (other than the dedication) in her new Collected Poems 1955-2005.
To make poetry, she says,
........you have to inhabit it:
To be in the habit of, to wear
words….
As well as the play of words in ‘inhabit’, Anne explained a less obvious layering of meaning in the word ‘crosses’ at the end of the poem (‘crosses we have to find’). Packed into this portmanteau we can find not only the idea of crucifixion but also lovers’ crosses, crossroads, crossing over to a different way of being.
One whole section of her Collected Poems is entitled Border Crossings, and the first half of the evening threw up a number of borderland concepts: now/then, here/elsewhere, possessing/being possessed.
The now/then crux is central to both The Fiction Makers and A Marriage. The Fiction Makers is like a compressed history of twentieth century literature, with sections on writers who were once at the cutting edge: Hemingway, Pound, Bloomsbury, etc. Each stanza ends with a variation on the couplet:
In the fine poem A Marriage, Anne describes how her mother broke the news to her father that her cancer was inoperable and terminal.
Later, on the porch, alive in the dark together,
How solid the house must have felt, how sanely familiar
The street-lit leaves, their shadows patterning the street.
The house is still there. The elms and the people, not.
It was now, and it never was now. Like every experience
Of being entirely here, yet really not being.
They couldn’t imagine the future that I am seeing,
For all his philosophy and all her common sense.
Another verbal knot is the concept of ownership and possession, which with paradoxical variations pervades Poem for a Daughter.
Heart’s needle, hostage to fortune,
Freedom’s end. Yet nothing’s more perfect
Than that bleating, razor-shaped cry
That delivers a mother to her baby.
Notice the unexpected reversal in the last line of the extract. Anne told us that she can remember the gestation of every poem she has conceived and delivered: what words were found and by what means, what words were thrown away. It was a fine and illuminating reading.
Colour Catchers
Tuesday 12th December 2006
‘a northern night poised for possible collisions, a million colour whispers …’
What they told us about the Northern Lights
For centuries, people in the northern hemisphere have been entranced by this eerie display of lights in their winter sky.
From a cold December night in Leicester Siobhan's "Colour Catchers" transported its audience to the Far North and held us spellbound in a synthesis of poems, voices, lights and images.
I hope there will be further opportunities to enjoy such Gesamtkunstwerke!
Colour Catchers — A Poem Takes a Walk
Through the dark days of last January, rambling along Leicester’s canals, I was imagining more northerly treks. Local writer/ visual artist Jackie Stanley wanted to create a digital film to exhibit with my poems in Leicester University’s Physics Department. It was to focus on the Aurora Borealis and the treasure hoard of stories peoples in the Arctic Circle have produced about these eerie illuminations. Her invitation opened for me a fascinating journey.
Walking, I rake the clinkers
of burned cold stories
from the north, to kindle
flame words, amber voices.
The writing came in a rush; 12 poems drafted in three weeks. I was enjoying the larger canvas of a sequence, the interplay of images and themes. It made me think of Heaney’s Bog poems building layers of meaning (I too worked from photographs.) Then there was the variety of voices and forms. Poems came in dialogues and monologues, in free verse or traditional forms like a terza rima. For a ghost story I chose Old English alliterative style:
To the frost-locked forests of Lapland’s north
a lad came once, unfledged, afraid
At the same time, I was exploring the science, a particular challenge. To me, scientific accounts of the cosmic journey of solar plasma crashing through earth’s atmosphere are as fabulous as any myth:
In the end, we were unable to stage the exhibition at the University. But by May 2006, Jackie had exhibited a beautiful film based on my Auroral Football poem. (The Inuits believed the lights were spirits playing football with a walrus skull.) As December approached, I decided to stage my own Colour Catchers event. Borrowing some co-performers, we dramatised the poems, adding visuals. Electric torches created simple but stark lighting effects. Shared voices transformed poems like Seeing Red:
three days after skies of blood
my grandfather was dead
the lights did that, they said
Poetry was once at the heart of a tradition of oral storytelling. These poems were about communities and generations, about living and dying and recognising the presence of ancestors. At break-time, we shared out home-made cake; audience and performers alike had a ball. At the end of an extraordinary year, I realised that every poem is a journey. Enjoy the walk and the unexpected destinations.
Review of Members’ Reading, 12th January 2007
A January night was enlivened by this reading by three LPS members. Stuart Snowden opened with a poignant childhood memory of ‘six months sentence’ on The TB Ward and moved through a wide range of subjects. He drew on life in working class communities, ‘old hands that trembled / in their own back-yards’. Christianity was a recurring theme, as well as general philosophy. ‘The Problem of Zen’ brought my favourite end-rhyme of his set:
Stuart was fond of rhymes and rhythms too were hammered out as he leaned urgently into the reading with preacher-like intensity. But then this effect was broken by a sly giggle as he dedicated a comic poem about cricket to Norman Harrington. His final joky verse about ‘The Banning Landlord’ drew us back to pubs and rhymed ‘So do not get too frisky’ with the inevitable ‘whisky’.
Caroline Cook’s opening brought a complete change of style. Directly addressing her listeners, she drew us in with an intimate, confidential tone to the world of a hotel chain room. Objects were transformed by her observation; the mini-bar ‘neat as a doll’s house,’ ‘the little kettle standing at its post’. Her voice was precise, consonants etched out in a wry, knowing delivery. She read several local-based poems but it was the Leicester New Walk Centre poem which stayed with me long after. Like other of her poems, it began with a daring idea – the buildings themselves speak to us and to each other. This paean to Leicester’s Twin Towers (or Fawlty Towers) was surprisingly mournful: ‘how dirt and debris pile against us’. The device of personification produced moving effects;
‘once upon a time
before we grew up and realised
once we were only air castles …
bear it, my little sister …’
Her subjects, like the humour, were quirky and laced with a certain melancholy. I was delighted to hear Ken Dodd make an appearance in ‘Trouper’:
‘by Jove it’s hard knowing
what’s real and what’s not, missus …’
James Harbour’s clowning was also deceptive. He had us in stitches first with saved-up snippets of real (?) council complaint letters – a good warm-up act for his deft, quick-fire verses. I didn’t catch titles but this Wildean advice to would-be poets stuck:
His subjects included affectionate studies of grandchildren, several poems showing a connection being made across generations. A moving poem about a nephew threw up an example of family language and private codes in the word ‘snibbed’:
His amiable delivery also slipped us unprepared into poems of loss and bereavement:
‘if you must, overtake with care
when conditions are right …
as you fumble past someone overtaken
by silence and distance …’
This series of readings was a good example of the benefits of juxtaposing poets from different ages and genders, each with their own distinctive voice. I’m hoping to find some of these gems to re-read on the pages of The Stanza.
Alice Beer
Locally, and now nationally known, our member Alice continues to make waves. In November 2005 her new collection, "Talking of Pots, People and Points of View" was published by poetrypf.co.uk and many enjoyed the launch in May 2006 at Browsers Bookshop, Stoneygate.
In December 2006 she was featured in the Guardian by Michele Hanson because of her participation in the Faslane 365 Campaign — a peaceful blockade of the Trident base from October 2006 to September 2007:
Her poetry is characterised by an unfailing tough optimism and gentle humour.
Below from her new collection is the poem: ‘March’
Resting on a seat
on New Walk, I see many
people passing by,
watch the sunshine bring
out their incipient smile, see
it spread from their lips
all over their face, reach
me, including me in their
joy of nascent spring.
A Kielder Fisherman
Here on the north shore of the lake,
where the pines nuzzle down to the rocks,
there's a little beach we fish from off the shale.
Good sport to be had under the right wind.
One day as I cast and reeled,
caught one or two, maybe eight or nine,
watched my reflection in the brown water,
suddenly, with a start I realised
the shadow fisherman anchored down there
was fishing with a net, whilst I had rod and line.
Then I remembered as my flesh ran cold
my father when a young man — he looked
like me, they say, line for line,
wave of the hair, even the hooked nose —
was a lepidopterist, and at his trade,
caught butterflies and moths upon this very spot;
it was dry then, of course, before the dam's tears
watered the valley; as I watched,
his movements matched my own, then all at once
the net vanished, and my shape and gear
replaced it. A trick of light or mind — perhaps,
but even so, I still shiver when I think
what things are held within that mesh tonight,
and who my father works for nowadays.
Stowaway
I was five when I climbed into the lifeboat,
wedged myself under the bench,
comforted by canvas battened overhead.
From cast off lines, I learned to speak,
repeating phrases through salty lips;
to sing by the beat of the rain.
My parents, of course, were frantic.
Asked the same questions over again.
Blamed themselves. Didn't rea1ise
I enjoyed muffled sounds, the damp wood
into which I scratched my life.
Nothing too loud.
At night whilst the ship snored,
I slipped down on deck,
collected lost rings, pens, pins,
examined them in the half-light,
stored them in boxes like tiny anchors,
out of my depth.
Each year the lifeboat got smaller.
In storms it swung on its chains.
One night, scouring the deck,
I saw passengers warm in the bar.
Knew the lifeboat never was safe.
In praise of rain
I'm recollecting rainy days, storing them up
against another glut of sun:
the slip of drops from thatch;
bare-knuckle thrum on corrugated tin;
the slap of summer storms on canvas tents;
those endless childhood afternoons
trapped behind bars of iron-grey;
the drops on glass that hesitate and stall
then race to merge, greeting each other like friends;
and that frisson of joy
at being safe, with all the possibilities
of time let off its leash
like that wire-haired terrier I used to walk
across the park for friends, and how
the unexpected gentle rain of spring
patting my new umbrella made me lift my face
and smile and fall in love unsuitably.
Evening Sun
(for Pat)
in the centred world of the evening sun
clouds brush/blush
red pink purple blue
and you
smile their reflected glory;
your tall gaze resplendent
attendant on the present/past:
and the evening sun
warms the white room
circling centring settling:
crimson rays blush/brushing cheeks
seeks reflecting eye
smiling the present
cornering the past:
the moving patterns of the evening sun
wander the white room
blue-glow washing
dark corner creeping
brow-frown catching;
enfolding this white room
centredly lovingly:
and when the evening sun
turns a blushed dark
this white room reflects
a colour-brushed
absorbed warmth gaze,
in which the present is past
the past present . . .
The Link Bird
Above a sandy soporific shore
A seagull glides ethereal
Carefree with easy graceful arcs
Sailing sunlit in serenity,
Seducing me into drifting
Free from hard land of purpose.
Yet in its nautical cry
A touch of bleakness.
Sweet summer softness swept away,
Gull with movements spare
Symbolizing sparseness,
Discipline of January.
He is seen through dark branches looking down
Searching with his hungry eye.
Marvelling at his ceaseless hope
I am shamed by my loss of aim.
He floats on air currents wheeling
Linking summer shimmer and frosted land,
Lazing and labour, with the stark beauty
Of his pure flight.
Duo
Pigeon and blackbird arrive
at the base of the huge fir.
Pigeon, intent on fattening
his already amplified plumpness,
keeps pecking at something
in the same place.
His white-ringed neck
gives him status,
defining the slimness
that is the ‘wringable’ kind.
You can imagine it snapping
more easily than a chicken’s.
There is a refinement about it
that makes it target for those
who are grossly uncaring.
Blackbird approaches, retreats ...
as if asking for a favour
but is not sure of getting it.
Back and fore he goes
like a ring flyweight.
There is only one explanation,
of which pigeon is ignorant,
but I think I know what it is.
Later, I hear blackbird singing
of things that are bird concerns.
"The glamour of childish days is upon me"
She stopped
outside number sixty-four
looking for roots.
On the Underground
she’d seen the poem
of childhood’s loving
remembered Nana and her voice
the lilt of her accent
the smell of her warmth.
Blue carpeted staircase
half-way up was a platform
for song recitals and plays.
Under the stairs
a fearful dark hide-away
for children's games.
She'd sat under the piano
so black and grand, could feel it sing
pedals moved by Nana's feet
‘Rustle of Spring’.
My father
was the blue eyed boy
only son
of proud academic
scientist.
Boon companions,
they put pennies
on the line
for the Irish Mail
to flatten as it passed.
Until one day
the blue eyed boy
developed no love
for intellectual
pursuits
and became flattened as the penny,
no longer worthy
to be the companion
of so admired
a pioneer in
PHYSICAL ORGANIC CHEMISTRY
Small Holding
Winter and the rime-covered ground is hard,
Ungiving as the soles of working boots.
Swedes are cannon balls, leeks locked in,
Brussels stand, bedraggled band of prisoners
Waiting for release. Fingers clumsy with cold
I struggle with the heavy coil of wire
That twists and springs away from me.
My chapped hands work with painful slowness
Herding in the straying paling stabs,
Fencing us in, fencing the world out
Eagerly my thoughts race on to embrace the dark.
Then holding your small body close to mine,
Alive to touch of skin on skin, I slide
Towards your warmth, open, moist, relaxed,
Familiar, receptive as our springtime soil.
Your dancing daylight eyes become black hollows
Whose depths arouse, excite me, draw me on.
Equals in desire we push out frontiers together.
East Midlands Soil
Ancestors moved
From a village in Derbyshire
To Nottinghamshire;
From being shoe-makers
To managers.
Two hundred years
Or more
Of sweat and toil;
Of raising families
On East Midlands soil.
Now they travel
Far and wide
And two of the family
Have taken their brides
From Russia.
We have seen an age
Ushered in
Of multi-culturalism,
International ties
And the world-wide web.
But still I will tread
On East Midlands soil,
And when I am dead
My ashes will be scattered
With ancestors.
Recipe for Black Pudding
Take ten to the power ten atoms
And using a pestle and mortar
Collapse their orbits.
Let their neutrons, protons and electrons
Jostle together in a most unfamiliar manner.
Allow to simmer.
The pudding will be distinctly heavy:
A fistful could weigh hundreds of tons,
But that’s according to plan.
The gravitational pull of your pudding
Will be enormous, and will attract,
As ingredients, everything in the vicinity.
It will suck in stars,
Consume comets, prey on planets
And digest gases.
You must be getting the idea now:
Your pudding is like a monster
Whose appetite grows with the feeding.
As it grows in mass, but not size,
A point is reached which
Gives the pudding its flavour:
Such does its power become
That it can suck in light,
But let no light escape.
Mesdames, Messieurs, voilà -
Your pudding (known as a Hole) is ready,
Your Pudding is now Black.
Pantoum to celebrate the first Super Casino
Hail! Welcome, Mammon! And thrice welcome be
in this dim Northern town! Your Grace
bestows on us such blessings. Come, God, fire
your golden stools on to our drooling lips
in this dim Northern town! Your Grace,
Your Mighty Grinningness. Quick! Shoot
your golden stools on to our drooling lips,
so turn this Wasteland into Tinseltown,
Your Mighty Grinningness. Quick! Shoot!
For all we live for is an easy thrill.
So turn this Wasteland into Tinseltown!
Rain Tintinnabulation down!
For all we live for is an easy thrill
of MAYBE: what we're gagging for.
Rain Tintinnabulation down
and douse us in your diarrhoea of FUN,
of MAYBE! What we're gagging for
bestows on us such blessings. Come, God, fire
and douse us in your diarrhoea of FUN!
Hail! Welcome, Mammon! And thrice welcome be!
Mirror mirror
One Sunday she woke up late
got out of bed
glanced in the mirror
instead of the usual faint
sense of disappointment
she saw
nothing.
She touched her face
to see if it was still there
mouth nose hair eyes
looked from odd angles
to catch the mirror
unaware
but nothing
gazed back.
Who was she
without seeing each morning
who she’d been
and who she’d be
and who she wasn’t?
She pressed her face
close to where her reflection
would have been
then she smiled
dragged her lower eyelids down
stuck out her tongue
thumbed her nose
skipped down the stairs
danced into the garden
stark naked for joy.
“There she goes”
said Susan next door.
“Would you look at her out there?
Can’t she see herself?”
Balsam
We walked
everywhere, eyes were soothed
by fragile pinks, flowers loose-jawed
petals low-slung. Seductive,
enticing every winged thing in.
Himalayan balsam a ranger said.
Invasive.
We noticed then remains laid down
at the path's edge —
how delicate blooms belied
well-rounded roots and hardy stems.
Rose
There is some comfort in being alone here
embraced by a curved window-pane
touched by fingers of heat fluttered
from an open grate
As snowflakes fall beyond reach
a smile as the first of them
kisses a rose in bloom
and is gone.
Looking at the view
We don't talk about it, just
that the path's steeper. Perhaps
last winter's melt has sharpened it,
or the frost, getting in underneath,
unsettled its stability.
Let's not time it, hm? We still
have enough light, and home before it's dark.
This could be the day
of the last violet, last primrose —
the shaded, shadowed ones.
There's always gorse being roughly yellow,
and thorn doubled up in the sea wind,
and another round of lambs, learning grass
like every generation.
So much to look at. No one blames you, stopping
more often now, looking at the view.
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