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Stanza 34, June 2007
Dear Members, Many thanks to those of you who have contributed to this Summer edition. Please do start — or continue — to send me your poems (published or not), letters, reviews, thoughts — anything, in fact, with a poetry connection which may be of interest, or give enjoyment. I would also like to take this opportunity in The Stanza to thank Sally Festing, our former Editor and Chair, for all her long-standing efforts and her success in maintaining and promoting the Society. I am sure we all wish her well in her new milieu, and hope that she will continue to keep in touch with us. Might she even contribute to The Stanza occasionally? I hope so. Since February there has been a lot on offer poetry-wise in Leicester. One couldn't possibly attend all the events. I find this surprising when I read of the death of poetry, as I frequently do. The annoyingly labelled "cultural eXchanges" festival at DMU continued to provide a formidable programme of literary speakers in many spheres. Poetry was well represented. Spoken poetry (slams etc.) are on the increase too, I notice. On a more sobering note though, dear members, a society (and, yes, there is still such a thing as Leicester Poetry Society) needs the active support of members, and so I would ask you to be innovative in your thoughts as to how we might increase our membership for the coming year. An outline programme of events is on the back page of this copy of The Stanza. The first official meeting after the Summer break is the AGM/Read-around on Friday, 14 September. Do come! Enjoy the Summer! Caroline Cook
Emma Tindall (née Gleadall) — as remembered by Anne Kind
We met again at a Women’s week at the Haymarket Theatre some years later. “Come and join my creative writing group at Countesthorpe College,” she said, after hearing that I was looking for a challenge at the age of 59. I was reluctant, I’d never written poetry but I thought I’d give it a try. For the first few weeks I just listened and marvelled at the clever work which the class produced. Then Emma said: “It’s time you wrote something.” I replied, “I don’t know where to start, they’re all so good, I feel inadequate.” Encouraged by Emma whose advice I followed (“while you’re washing up, look out of the window — what do you see, hear, smell. Write the words that come into your mind, one word on a line, like a shopping list” …) That’s how I started more than 30 years ago. She was the inspiration, the catalyst. She was very good at it, giving praise and constructive criticism. By then we had become firm friends. I remember the poetry readings way back at the Percy Gee Building, Leicester University. She encouraged me to keep going to them although I had problems understanding modern poetry. Each year we would go to the Poetry Picnic at the Manor at Wistow kindly organised by Jo Goddard. Emma enjoyed parties. She always attended the New Year “do”, even if she didn’t come to all the Readings in the last few years. She had a great sense of humour which is very obvious in her poetry. She did a lot for the Leicester Poetry Society, was its Secretary for many years in the early days. Emma had much tragedy in her life but somehow managed to cope in her own special way. Her sense of humour and her faith in the goodness of humanity gave her strength. We often went out for lunch and the conversation was never dull. She was always interested in the person she was with. When I went to visit her in Hospital and in the Nursing Home I told her how grateful I am to her and what she had done for me and many others. I do hope she could hear me. I shall miss her and I’m sure I’m not alone. Anne Kind Bury Me Green Charm Against the Heat Come in, Sailor, my room is shady. Emma Gleadall On Monday, 26th February and Friday, 2nd March Lydia Finlay and I took part in readings by the Iraqi poets Abdulkareem Kased & Awar Nasir at the Shree Jalaram Community Centre on Narborough Rd., Leicester. The events, which were held in collaboration with De Montfort University’s “cultural eXchanges” festival also housed an art exhibition and Lydia’s and my role was to read given English translations of the Arabic poems. It was a fascinating experience: innocent of Arabic though we were, the musicality, the sonority of the original texts climbed into our ears and, although alas the English translations did not convey, carry that over, we did devise, intuit, a way of suggesting that cornucopia of sound by not only reading — reading the poems in alternate voices, male contrapunto female — but reading successive sections, stanze, lines or even phrases within lines, individually, but in harmony, so that too at times we read in unison together, in joint and common chant, on a song-branch perched, as it were. A pleasing fillip and off shoot and upcome of all this was that we have been invited to have our own work translated into Arabic and thus published in Iraq and the Arab world. I confess I quite like the idea of some of my poems, unrecognisable to me, wandering around Baghdad. David Bircumshaw Claire Tomalin at De Montfort University, 27th February 2007 Claire Tomalin, acclaimed author of several biographies, gave a lecture on her most recent book, “Thomas Hardy: The Time-torn Man”. Her lecture was intelligent and learned, yet accessible and entertaining. She described herself as a ‘historical’ biographer rather than a ‘literary’ biographer. In truth, she combines both approaches and it is this that makes her a writer of such widespread appeal. In this book she illuminates much of Hardy’s family background — the ambition and ideas from his mother, the appreciation of music from his father. She also gives us a real sense of conditions in Dorset and London during his lifetime. In particular, she emphasises Hardy’s painful awareness of his class origins. With few advantages or connections, Hardy became a successful nineteenth century novelist. Later, he became an influential twentieth century poet. Tomalin’s treatment is well-balanced in that she concentrates on his poems just as much as his prose. And she argues that although his poetic output varied in quality, his best poems are a match for anyone’s. During the lecture she read both extracts and full poems. Such as this, from ‘I Found Her Out There’: I found her out there and from ‘The Voice’: Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Nearly all her selections were from his pivotal collection, ‘Poems of 1912-13’, produced shortly after the death of his first wife, Emma. Tomalin considers these to be amongst his best poems. Hardy himself said that he was ‘in flower’ at that time. By now, he was in his seventies. That is surely a heartening fact for any living poets who happen to be past their first flush of youth! (“Thomas Hardy, The Time-torn Man” by Claire Tomalin is published by Penguin - Viking) Mark Mawson Arrowhead Press Event — 09/02/07
David’s Arrowhead collection is “The Animal Subsides”. He read several poems from a varied menu; titles give a flavour — “Amoroso Moments”, “Raskolnikov Sleeps”, “Scattering His Mother’s Ashes”. He is an arresting poet and performer. Robin and Joanna read from their Arrowhead collections. Speaking as Poetry Editor, Joanna was kind and humorous but also frank about some poor poetry that she received. She advised hopeful poets to read more contemporary poetry before submitting. I would also advise anyone to consult the website: www.arrowheadpress.co.uk Forward! On 9th March several intrepid members of LPS met to read and discuss the six poems short-listed for the annual Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2007. These poems appear in The Forward Book of Poetry 2007, which also contains many other short-listed poems which are being considered for other prizes. If you are interested in contemporary poetry and wonder what to buy, buy this book every year! It is good value (£8.99 for 66 poems) and gives an excellent overview of the current scene. It is also available in the Central Library, Leicester. I know it is; I ordered it. The judges this year were John Burnside, Moniza Alvi, Sam Leith and Sebastian Faulks. The six poems under discussion were: John Hartley Williams Requiem for a Princess The poems were very contrasting in theme, style and tone. Most of us had prepared them to some extent in advance — which was necessary as most were not straightforward! — but we were not familiar with the work of the poets. We did our best to be objective and positive. The Hartley Williams poem, Requiem for a Princess, we decided, was about the funeral of Princess Diana. It was wry, amusing, surreal, — quite risky. Kinsella's was long, long, personal, historical, ecological, political, difficult. The Cheapjack on the other hand was short and comparatively simple. In Trumpeldor Beach Fiona Sampson paints a word-picture of one of the beaches of Tel Aviv. Blaenafon Blue has as its theme an evocation of childhood some time ago in the mining area of South Wales, some concomitant health problems and the work of a midwife,. The sixth poem by Sean O'Brien, Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright, is concerned with the fate of miners after the end of mining in the USA. This was the poem which, we later discovered, had been awarded the prize for Best Single Poem. As we expected, considering the length of most of the poems, and the fact that we did them the justice they deserved by having each one read out loud, we found ourselves short of time for discussion. Nevertheless, I found this a fascinating and worthwhile venture. Did anyone else? Caroline Cook David Morley - Poetry Reading and Workshop. The reading (midday) came first: why can’t it always be this way round? We went into the workshop (mid-afternoon) knowing something of the poet’s background, the range of his writing, that he prepared his reading meticulously, liking him (a lot), and with the suspicion that he was going to ask a lot from us. He did — but because he’d already shown his own high standards we could accept that, and push ourselves as hard as he directed. It made for an energising day. David Morley wastes no time, and equipped us to be an informed audience. We each had a set of stapled pages — an outline of his biography, and the text of his chosen poems. The same poems appeared on a screen behind him, so he wasn’t reading to a roomful of bent heads and no eye contact. The printout told us the poems would be “read and performed” — ‘performed’ in the sense that that they had been chosen to connect, to illuminate each other and poetic form, and to explain his own relationship with poetry clearly but without self-indulgence. He is part Romani, uses the language in his poems, trained as a natural scientist, and now directs the Warwick Writing Programme at the University of Warwick. He knows how to draw the best from his students — and audience. His poems were always more than merely personal. A poem about Romani language was also a perfect pattern poem; the necessary lies that his mother employed to keep the family solvent became a poem about Fiction, and then a poem about perception of role and race. Delving into his uncle’s past was tightly held in half-rhyme couplets — and half-rhyme came into the rattle of a bingo-caller’s patter (his childhood summer job) in a poem about Wakes weeks. Short poems about birds replicated their song patterns. A pantoum (in a 5-line form), written as a coded love poem and also as a Christmas card, lead into a found poem based on the payment records for the Coventry Mystery plays. Yes, he told us a lot of personal detail, but as background: he put the poems first. The reading was thought through, and delivered with huge and generous energy; the whole room shared the enjoyment of going on a long journey, and covering a lot of ground. A quotation chipped out of a long poem will not do justice to his writing — so this is ‘Snowfinches’, in its entirety: “The musicians are late, delayed by snowdrifts, but nobody minds. The workshop built on the energy of the reading. It was a continuous exercise, involving writing as fast as possible, and then even faster; destroying manuscripts, and then attempting to recover the text; then using part of this text to write our own poems. Running parallel to this was the message of the workshop: you must write fast; you must have high expectations of yourself; if you had a contract from Faber (and I was forcing you to work fast) you would produce a collection; if others have high expectations of you, you will produce more and better work; you can produce better work. An hour, and it was over. We hadn’t spent the usual 10 minutes going round the group introducing ourselves, nor did we have time to read aloud what we had written: it was all about what we, each one of us, could write under pressure — and how we could push ourselves onward. It was a technique for writing — not about particular forms, or wordplay — but how to open up ideas that are waiting to turn into poems. What I retain is the fizz of energy that rapid writing generates. It hasn’t wiped out my bad habits — but it has shown me that I can wipe them out if I try. I envy his students at Warwick. D A Prince Poetry Workshop with Ann and Peter Sansom Thanks must go to Sally Festing for successfully obtaining an Awards for All grant to fund such events as this, and thanks also are due to Kathy Bell, Creative Writing Tutor at De Montfort University, who arranged the venue. Much that is positive can be said about the LPS link with DMU. Not only does it provide LPS with a different, more modern milieu, it also introduces us to young people who are interested in poetry. Consequently on one Saturday in March, when most people apparently were fixated on watching football, a very mixed group of poetry-lovers met to participate in this workshop in a spacious, airy room overlooking the DMU Campus. We were, as usual, well provided with refreshments by Kathy. Peter Sansom is a director of The Poetry Business and Editor of “The North” Magazine and Smith/Doorstep Books. He taught the M.A. Poetry at Huddersfield University for ten years, and has been Fellow in Creative Writing at Leeds. Ann Sansom has taught at Leeds and Sheffield Hallam Universities, and is a regular tutor with the Arvon Foundation and the Poetry Society’s Poetry class. Both Ann and Peter Sansom have recently published collections of poetry. In the morning session we were engaged in various writing exercises focussing on the senses of sight and hearing. It was an incentive to make us more aware of our surroundings, past and present. Another interesting prompt was to encourage us to write about a particular group of people, e.g. doctors etc. All the exercises produced a great variety of writing. After lunch we participated in a workshop session, targetting the individual poems that we had brought. The Sansoms helped by being relaxed and informal. It all made for a useful and pleasant event. Caroline Cook Kevin Crossley-Holland The first revelation of this enjoyable evening, in which Sally Festing returned to Leicester to interview Kevin Crossley-Holland, was that the two were friends from childhood, having grown up on the same stretch of Norfolk coast where Kevin now lives and where Sally still keeps a cottage. When describing the attraction of this part of England, he remarked on the paradox of his having anchored himself in a landscape of constant flux. Kevin grew up in an intensely musical family, his father being Controller of Music for the Third Programme (now Radio 3). As a child, Kevin was not a great reader, and music at that time was more important to him than words. He had his own garden shed museum, to which his grandfather contributed a disreputable-looking old shield bought for £2 in a junk shop — a shield that Kevin carefully polished to reveal the swirls of a 13th century Muslim artefact, probably brought home by a crusader. One influence that revealed to him the magic of words was the study of the “gravelly, cacaphonous but musical” Anglo-Saxon language. He sent some of his early poems to Stephen Spender, who was witheringly non-committal, and to Alan Ross, who advised him to hone his technique so that when he did have something to say “he would be a fit vehicle for it”. When asked how he wrote his poems, his answer was that he worked “very slowly, bittily-piecily, revising and revising”. His prose work “Gatty’s Tale” took two and a half years and went through seven drafts. He quoted himself to the effect that “I don’t know what I think till I see what I write”. Kevin, who had at one time had wanted to be a priest, asked for a section on the life of the spirit to be included in the programme. For him spirit was alien to dogma. He regretted the increasing polarisation of public life and intellectual debate between different forms of absolutism, whether of fundamentalist religion or dogmatic materialism. Truth, he said, is at the top of a pyramid, and there is more than one way of reaching it. He liked collaborating with practitioners of different forms of artistic expression — visual, musical, etc. — for various reasons. He liked it when words aspired to the condition of music or painting, or both. He liked being a team player. He liked the risk-taking of operatic production. And in particular he liked being at “crossing places” — foreshores, midnights, bridges. The most moving moment in the evening came when he spoke of the recent death in action in Iraq of Jo Dyer, who had been his daughter’s best friend, and of how Jo’s last letter, including a witty April Fool wind-up, was received after the news of her death had been released. It was at this point in the evening that Kevin read Yeats’s “Prayer for my Daughter”. Brian Fewster Two Poems by G S Fraser I sing of something gone: G S Fraser I never met George Fraser, although I came quite close to it when he spoke to a group of sixth formers at the John Cleveland College in Hinckley. It must have been between 1976, when I started to teach there, and 1980, when George died. I wasn’t free that period, but I learned afterwards that the talk had followed the genesis and development of one of his poems, Memory, through successive drafts. The colleague who had issued the invitation to George posted the drafts on the staffroom noticeboard. Until that time I’d known him only as a critic, and they gave me the shock of a fresh and powerful poetic voice. I don’t know any other poem by any writer that so strongly enacts the way remembered scenes and events — retrospectively blurred into continuity — can be “gappier than they seem”. The subject is literally and metaphorically just beyond the edge of vision: “out of the slant of sight”. The experience is as if strained through several layers of muslin: from past to present in the poet’s own mind and then through the words of the poem into the minds of its readers. I have only limited confidence in my ability to paraphrase what I think is being remembered here. There is a vase of flowers on a window ledge, but are we inside the room looking out or outside looking in? And what is the “whirring light” before the bulb switches on? It suggests the flickering of a film projected on a screen. But before we’ve made our minds up about the exact position and status of the flowers, we’re looking out through what is probably a different window on to a fell landscape. The phrasing of it as a question (“What window?”) leaves this ambiguous. Each image metamorphoses into another with a kind of cinematic fade. Indeed the “flash and flake” of the whole poem gives it a cinematic feel — seen, for example, in its use of simile. We proceed by association from a hayfield that is like a Japanese straw mat to an actual straw hat worn by a handyman in a remembered Japanese scene. Then we are looking through a bamboo blind on to a Japanese lake, which becomes a porthole on to a Scottish firth. According to the memoir by his wife Paddy in the online magazine Jacket, some of the images in the poem relate to a breakdown George had while teaching in Japan in 1951. In Paddy’s words, “He had made a desperate and nearly successful attempt to commit suicide but, failing, had jumped out of a moving train, and was found by a farmer in a rice field … He was sent to the American Army hospital where he was receiving five or six electric shock treatments a day, then considered the best treatment, but no attempt was made to diagnose the nature of his illness.” (http://jacketmagazine.com/20/fraser.html). Even after his recovery, the episode was never discussed in depth. According to Paddy, “there was something Scottish about [his] reticence, a feeling that it was indecent to parade your deepest fears, that you must cope with them yourself.” The electric shock treatment he received adds a possibly more sinister meaning to the “whirring light” in stanza 2. This frightening material is strapped into a tight corset of three-stress rhyming quatrains, but there is variation within its structure. The basic pattern is abab or abcb, with the second and fourth lines rhyming, except in stanza 6, which appears to rhyme abca. But further scrutiny reveals an abcb pattern beginning with line 2 of the same stanza and ending with the first line of the following stanza. The second line also rhymes with one in the following stanza. Similar cross-stanza rhyme links stanzas 1 and 2, 4 and 5, and 5 and 6 and, in a slightly different way, 3 and 4. This network of regular and irregular rhyme helps to bind the disparate images into a single aesthetic experience, as the mind itself blurs together the gappiness of its memories. Stanza 6 is transitional, suggesting that these memories haunt the poet in half-remembered dreams (“Remembering no one dream”). In the last two stanzas the poem turns in a different direction, from a past filtered through unreliable dream-memories to a future mediated through ambiguous dream-symbolism. Despite contacting the custodians of the Fraser archive, I wasn’t able to find copies of the earlier drafts of Memory, but there is a note in the archive linking this poem with another late one called Love Poem, which may have taken root in the same material before separating off. Love Poem has a similar formal structure to Memory, and also some correspondences of imagery. Both bring “snow” and “roses” together, and at the end of Memory these are combined in a romantic-erotic trinity with “thighs”. A fourth image, of “doors”, is not found in Love Poem, but that poem, which anticipates the poet’s approaching death, ends with a powerful invocation of the “Shades” of the underworld. One can guess where the doors lead at the end of Memory. Brian Fewster In a reposing hand G.S. Fraser Boy on a Landing Brian Fewster In a seafront hotel a man surprises himself Pat Corina “Afterbirth!” screeches the parrot Mike Brewer — published in Fever no 1 in 1965. You can’t, of course. The velocity’s too great. Graham Norman The squabble stopped James Harbour Calves bared Sky A sky Tina Bass i.m. Emma Gleadall It was a week or two after I’d died David Bircumshaw I came to visit you on Christmas Eve Huw Watkins
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I first met Emma nearly 50 years ago at Vaughan College. “Bubbly,” I thought and different. We were both attending a lecture by John Braine, who was the darling of novel readers at that time. A mutual friend introduced us, Mrs.Tindall/Mrs. Kind. It was very formal in those days. 
Out of interest, and in an attempt to discover more about the world of small press publishing, LPS members enjoyed an evening with the Poetry Editor of Arrowhead Press, Joanna Boulter, and two other Arrowhead poets, David Bircumshaw and Robin Hamilton.