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POETRY SOCIETY
THE STANZA
No. 39 Spring 2009 (nb under construction)
poems — news — reviews
2009 ― 250th Anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796)
Auld Lang Syne 1788
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And auld lang syne!
Chorus ― For auld lang syne, my dear, For auld lang syne. We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet, For auld lang syne.
And surely ye'll be your pint stowp! And surely I'll be mine! And we'll tak a cup o'kindness yet, For auld lang syne.
We twa hae run about the braes, And pou'd the gowans fine; But we've wander'd mony a weary fit, Sin' auld lang syne. etc. Contributors
Mike Brewer Caroline Cook Colin Cook Gisela Hoyle Karin Koller Graham Norman
Poems Robert Burns Alice Beer D A Prince
2008 Open Competition
1st Prize Roger Elkin 2nd Prize James Taylor 3rd Prize Kate Rhodes Runners-up David Grubb Gisela Hoyle Charles Lauder
Deadline
for the next copy of The Stanza (No. 40) is Friday, 15th May. Please submit interesting material ― news, views and/or poems in any genre. I would welcome volunteers for Reviews. There will be room for members’ poems, so please continue to submit them, always remembering that I cannot include everything.
Editor
Cover photograph: The Aurora Borealis.
On Growing Old
Like mice in the night the years that pass are gnawing at our life ahead.
Bit by bit the paths our life takes seem narrower, steeper and more rugged.
The ruts get deeper, the woods more dense, the bright star before us brighter.
February Afternoon
Pastel blue sky, low full moon behind bare branches raised as in prayer.
Alice Beer
Both these poems are from the collection, “Talking of Pots, People & Points of View”.
More poems by Alice appear in the new anthology, A Twist of Malice, pub. by Grey Hen (2008). TED HUGHES – A CELEBRATION British Library, Monday 20th October 2008
Having discovered this evening event coincided with a day when I was going to be in London for work reasons, imagine my disappointment to find the event had been sold out for months. Hardly surprising considering the line-up: Michael Morpurgo, Simon Armitage, Alice Oswald, Tom Paulin and Seamus Heaney. But luck was on my side, and there were a few last-minute returns, which was how I found myself sitting among the great and the good in one of the comfiest poetry venues I’ve ever been to ― the new Conference Centre at the British Library, with its bright red banked rows of plush seating looking down on a stage where a lectern and five empty leather swivel chairs promised much. By 6.30pm every one of the 255 seats were taken, and yet the atmosphere was far more restrained that I’d expected. Here was a large audience about to listen to a once-in-a-lifetime line up celebrating the poetry of one of our greatest poets ― but where was the buzz?
Things moved from restrained politeness to darkly sombre when Tom Paulin came onto the stage, dressed in black, head bent, clutching a sheaf of papers, turning to peer out at the audience in that pessimistic doom and gloom way he specialises in. It took a further five minutes before the rest of the line-up appeared, including Matthew Evans (Labour MP and former Faber and Faber Chairman) who was billed to do the introductory address. But at least they weren’t all wearing black. In fact Michael Morpurgo was eye-catchingly uplifting in a rusty orange jacket and matching trousers, though Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald kept to the current ‘poets wear dark colours’ image and didn’t smile or look particularly at ease. We were clearly going to be in for a pretty serious celebration. I’ve never seen Seamus Heaney in the flesh before, and he didn’t disappoint. He’s much taller and broader than I’d expected, and the atmosphere lifted as he greeted the others on stage and settled into the remaining swivel seat with an air of bonhomie and goodwill.
The event had been arranged by Carol Hughes, Ted Hughes wife for the last 28 years of his life. I’ve no idea if she was in the audience or not. There was no interaction between speakers and audience, which was not just a disappointment for the audience, but also a major reason for the rather precious atmosphere of the whole event. It was as if the speakers felt weighed down by their responsibility towards Ted Hughes’ legacy, and there was going to be no time for any light-heartedness.
Matthew Evans set the scene by explaining that each of the poets had been invited because they had given the Ted Hughes Memorial Lecture at some point in the last ten years, and would give their contributions in the order they had done the Memorial Lecture. Evans clearly knew Ted Hughes very well, and counted him a close friend. He talked of Ted Hughes’ constant battle to increase the typeface font size of his books and how Hughes was always over-ruled by the book designer. He ended his introduction with a reading of the poem Stern which Seamus Heaney had written and dedicated to Ted Hughes.
First of the poets was Tom Paulin, who said little about Hughes himself, but used his time to read a number of poems: October Dawn, Wind, Snowdrop, Thistles, The Warriors of the North, Feeding out ― Wintering Cattle at Twilight and Roe Deer. He did let drop that Ted Hughes had known all of Yeats’s poetry by heart, and spoke of the close relationship Ted Hughes had with his father-in-law, Jack Orchard, to whom he had dedicated his collection Moortown. He believed Ted Hughes had looked upon Jack Orchard as a ‘Devonian Robinson Crusoe’.
Michael Morpurgo read next, and focussed on Ted Hughes work for the young. I had come to the event expecting to enjoy the contributions by Seamus Heaney and Alice Oswald the most. But it was Michael Morpurgo who left the most lasting impression. He worked with Ted Hughes on a number of projects over the years, and the respect and affection he had for Hughes was palpable. He spoke of the impact Ted Hughes had made with his Poetry in the Making radio series, and read a number of his poems for children, including Dog and The Harvest Moon. For me the highlight of the evening was his reading of a long extract from Ted Hughes’s story The Iron Woman. When Morpurgo read it was close to hearing Ted Hughes read ― he had the same deep intonation, and beautifully paced sense of suspense. It was spell-binding. Simon Armitage had a hard act to follow. He concentrated on reading a number of poems from Remains of Elmet, Ted Hughes’s collaboration with the photographer Fay Godwin, and spoke briefly about Ted Hughes magical shamanic view of poetry.
Next up was Alice Oswald, clutching a weighty collection of books and papers. She spoke about the prose writing of Ted Hughes, and called him a ‘brilliant dramatist’, illustrating this with an excerpt from his translation of The Oresteia. Water is a major theme in much of Oswald’s own writing, and she read his poem Spring ― the River in March, and extracts from Moortown Diary, comparing the composition of his poem Skylarks to the way Beethoven composed music.
The evening came to a close with Seamus Heaney’s contribution. He described two different life stories, both of which could have been summarising aspects of the life of Ted Hughes, and then revealed that the first story had been describing the life of Virgil, the second the life of Dante. He went on to read The Bull Moses and spoke of the ‘virgilian aspect’ to Hughes’s poems such as The Day he Died (about his father in law, Jack Orchard) and the ‘visionary dantesque’ quality of poems such as We came that morning. The evening ended with a brief thank you to the poets by Matthew Evans, and then the polite and somewhat elderly audience dispersed and it was all over. I left with Ted Hughes’s poetry ringing in my head, but was no wiser about the man himself. How wonderful if the stage curtains behind the speakers had pulled back, and we had been treated to a short film clip of him reading his poetry, or talking about his poetry. What a lost opportunity.
Karin Koller, October 2008
OPEN POETRY COMPETITION 2008
RESULTS
The First Prize of £200 was awarded to Roger Elkin of Stoke-on-Trent for the poem “There’s this memory“.
The Second Prize of £100 was awarded to James D. Taylor of Rossendale, Lancs. for the poem “Castaways“.
The Third Prize of £50 was awarded to Kate Rhodes of Cambridge for the poem “Portrait of my Husband as a Silver Lining“
The following (in alphabetical order) were Runners-up:
David Grubb of Henley-on-Thames for “The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo” Gisela Hoyle of Leicester for “A thing divine” Charles Lauder of Upper Bruntingthorpe, Leicestershire, for “Entombed” Lynn Roberts of Tunbridge Wells for “Tempus fugit …” Howard Wright of County Armagh, N. Ireland for “TRUE COLOURS”
The 8 poems will appear in The Stanza Nos. 39 and 40.
ENTOMBED
Temptress
Her raw flesh bled not of its own accord but from leeches heated glass. The priest thought tempest its soul-searing howl bone and tissue could not contain.
Immured its winds bit scratched against brick pummeled the foundation of these law-rendered walls faith-forged chains stormed at the poverty of light
strengthened by the darkness that threatened to rend the rosary from his wrist the greasy black cassock off his back.
Anchoress
Her cell attached to the church’s side she dwelled as if within him an embryo nourished on his passion how he bled to give her new life:
a vessel that would not suffer or leak barred from touch its heartbeat could be felt through stone as shining example of devotion.
The finite world filtered through: a view of the altar eucharist and food whispers for benediction the temptation of gifts and gossip.
3. Muse
The blank page is on the verge of giving birth. This is you the other side of the wall pressed for inspiration squeezed-out fantasy:
rescued from the room I sentenced you that unaging eighteen-year-old body gives itself freely fingers at the throat pause to undo the first button.
My hand chained to the mystery of how we could have been goes no further resists breaking free and all that could be imagined perish.
Charles G. Lauder, Jr
A note from the poet:
Entombed has many points of origin, the main one being the imprisonment of women. I’ve always been fascinated with the ‘woman-in-the-attic’ idea, where one’s irrational, emotional, uncontrollable, passionate, hysterical side is kept under lock and key, particularly in men. Often viewed as feminine traits and formerly linked with the womb, historically they once served as reasoning for barring women from education, reading, voting, and political and religious power. The first two parts of the poem explore this. ‘Temptress’, inspired from a past-life experience (but never verified), describes physical imprisonment of an emotionally unstable woman during late medieval times, while ‘Anchoress’ explores a spiritual imprisonment around the same time period. The third part turns the tables — although the poet has entrapped a woman (or a memory of her) as his muse for many years, it is actually him who is imprisoned to the idea of what might-have-been. “A thing divine” from “The Tempest”, Shakespeare
Of your eyes I remember not their colour but the probing, questioning look which flamed when I answered into glad astonishment. I remember a greedy and generous mouth and how much your honey-tongue beguiled. I remember your spoilt academic’s idle, well-kept hands: their weight and eloquence and smell.
In the indulgent contours of a body loving life I found unexpected courage, which revealed a new and radiant world.
I remember the clumsy, legs-up beetle-ness of your self, floored by my laughter and delight, half in mockery the other half desire, love perhaps, and wonder that you should let me see these small vulnerabilities by which I could trace my way to the root of you; be hopelessly entangled in the you-ness of you; and remember the joy of you.
Gisela Hoyle The Mothers Of Plaza de Mayo
The mothers of Plaza de Mayo no longer believe in dawns even a glass of water looks different and the taste of bread and wild grass will cover everything including dreams.
What are the dreams for? What is the point of blue? The door lets nothing in and each room is about things that cannot be said without the sensation of burning.
There used to be songs and between the dances jokes and the way a child went up to a horse ready to tell about names and the stories of their lives.
Sometimes at the meal table we know that they are here; dead or alive they have come back and sit down with us; silence of a spoon, the way the sliced pear shines.
Each night their bed is ready in a room filled with moon. There will be time to embrace the body, read the letter, talk to the child who will never arrive.
David Grubb
Review of Reading by Michael Haslam 17th October 2008
Michael Haslam at Friends Meeting House, Leicester
Did the Americans really go to the moon and return? Just compare the effort and backup involved in getting a manned rocket into orbit round the earth with the puny effort they would have us believe is all that is needed to get into orbit round the moon ― with no backup. You kidding? Can the gravity difference make so much difference to the effort involved?
Michael Haslam went to what sounded like a very enlightened school in Bolton where you did English Language at ‘O’ level, but not English Literature. Poetry was something to be indulged in without the prospect of an exam like a dead weight round your ankles. So Michael soared into the atmosphere without any constraints and just enjoyed himself. It showed in his reading. He told us that if we drifted off to our own dreams that was fine. He was just going to start and keep going. And he did, with hardly any pause for breath, until the break. Thirty pages. Surely no speaker in the history of the LPS has delivered so much with such energy! Rich language, reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins:
“You see a figure dancing on the fire-escape, and rings of minnowy or moony quickness shimmer on reflection from the roofslates echoing an endlessly diminishing dilemma on imperfect cadence, broken by a flourish finish, fusion, pluming through a fist of tears.”
Don’t worry about pages numbering forwards and backwards: “From front to back there is a development of life in time; from back to front an adventure in fiction and abstraction; from the centre to the peripheries, two versions of the illustrations of an impulse.”
So how many LPS members drifted off to their own dreams? Dunno. Not me. Just wallowed in the lushness. I never believed that the Yanks landed on the moon in a take-off position and then with no back-up rendezvoused with their mother ship and flew home. Now I’m not so sure. It’s amazing what you can do when there are few constraints.
Michael has had several collections published, including: “Continual Song” (pub. Open Township, 1986), and “Mid Life” (pub.Shearsman Books Ltd, 2007)
“Continual Song” is also the project name given to what has become his sole poetic subject: living at Foster Clough, near Hebden Bridge.
Mike Brewer
Portrait of My Husband as a Silver Lining
I keep it wrapped in tissue paper dove grey, parachute silk, tucked in the bottom of my drawer. I never unfold it. There’s no need, I know exactly how it feels to plunge my hands into its worn out softness.
But I think about it sometimes at night. It has never been tested. I can only hope that in an emergency its canopy will unfurl ― capturing the air, cheating gravity, swinging me back and forth to earth, like the pendulum of an old-fashioned clock.
Kate Rhodes Review of the Reading by Marianne Boruch 7th November 2008
Three days after the American Presidential election we were treated to a more personal contact with an American cousin, Marianne Boruch. She currently teaches at Purdue University in Indiana and is a poet of standing with six published collections to her name. She brought her joy and excitement at the Obama victory (shared by the audience in a spontaneous round of applause) and then set about quietly entrancing and startling us with readings from her latest collection, “Grace, Fallen from” and her “New and Selected Poems”.
Visual imagery is central to her poetry, conveyed to the listener in light rhythms; personal, thoughtful poetry that induces a state of alert receptiveness in the listener. We saw ‘Snowfall in G minor’, heard of ‘the eternal bliss of the about to be’. There is an earthy realism about her work as well and she talked of the tackiness of lawn ornaments in small yards owned by “butt families”. In the poem entitled, ‘The Luxor Baths’, a narrative poem, she recollects a youthful experience in a steam bath where she is struck by the strangeness and diversity of women’s bodies. In ‘The Body’ we are wryly entertained,
“The Body has its little hobbies. The lung likes its air best after supper, goes deeper there to trade up for oxygen, give everything else away. (And before supper, yes, during too, but there’s something about evening, that slow breath of the day noticed: oh good, still coming, still going ... )”
In between her poems and afterwards, Marianne Boruch talked about writing and how her poems emerge. She keeps an ‘image book’ and much of her poetry arises from images recollected in a meditative state of mind. Her view is that we only control the surfaces of our mind where the “beloved particulars” reside and that meaning comes along unbidden. She prefers unrhymed free verse and uses a conversational style expressed in a rhythmic vernacular. She is a big reviser of her work and sees revision as the ‘slow developing of a photographic negative, mystery arrived at through clarity’. She has a modesty that claims that most creative truth comes from luck or the unconscious mind. ‘Sometimes, I’m just in my car and see things’, she says, and,’ I put out my begging bowl – things drop in – and I’m grateful’. That modesty fails to hide an energetic intellect, a craftsmanship and an authoritative desire to share her apprehensions and comprehensions of life. She knows that good writing is not easy. In ‘The Deer’ she says, ‘beauty’s not generous, isn’t anything but its passage’. In ‘Black Night’, a deliberately constructed poem, as she told us, she alludes to the toxicity of these plants yet to ‘delphinium, the true gift, perpetually offered’.
Her views on god are those of a lapsed catholic ― profoundly lapsed, she declared bravely, waiting for the thunderclap! She asks, ‘What did god know when he knew nothing? When god knew nothing, it was better, wasn’t it? Was god up all night before there was night?’ Happiness is the secular version of religion and Marianne gave us three definitions of happiness in her poem of that title. There are, however, more questions than answers.
“Can you be too happy? Put some In a box. Tape it. Put it on that Shelf over there. Come Sadness, Little dog no one likes But you are sweet, you are In your way……”
This was a warm, sociable woman, a poet who made friends with her audience. We hope that she enjoyed ‘visiting with us’ as much as we enjoyed her company and the gift of herself.
Marianne Boruch’s poetry collections include Grace, Fallen from (Wesleyan University Press, 2008) and Poems: New and Selected (Oberlin College Press, 2004).
Graham Norman Castaways
You’re a brave man, Gormley, all those lonely replicas, naked on Crosby beach, close enough to each other to call out, to call out, eyes fixed straight ahead, boldly scanning the steel grey horizon, too far apart to touch or know much, beyond the shape of your back.
I talked with Number 87 about the wild, cold wind his fingers frozen stiff, played down the benefit of Gortex and gloves. Cast iron he was hardened to the seagulls’ bombardment and the icy spray. ‘Where’s Gormley?’ he whispered.
Down south, scarf knotted tight, warm hands wrapped around a large cappuccino, or on the promenade in dark glasses, counting up to a hundred. My OAP friend patted 87’s bottom for comfort so she said, a few too many times.
Furthest away are the castaways, outcasts on the margins at the sea’s edge, forever drowning, not brave enough to walk on, nor desperate enough to retreat, back into Crosby.
87 is beginning to rust and confessed to hating the endless, winter nights and the relentless tides.
Marianne Boruch in conversation with Nan Samuelson
An American Poet Visits
I'm too susceptible. You wouldn't think so but I'm too suggestible: a couple of her cadences and I'm falling, sliding into a drawl. Does she notice? When I speak I'm turning into her, but I can't help myself. It's that ease she has, her different tempo, some deep sense of having time, and time that stretches out to the horizon.
American poetry: it's an exhalation. It's that feeling when the baby finally nods off, or when you close the door after the visitors. It lets itself out. "Come as you are," it says, the sophist. "Just write it down." (That "just"!) "Let your thoughts flow. Free them on to the paper. Some time you might get round to corralling them, to breaking them in, striking them out. But not now. Not yet. Just for now, forget the end. Write."
Can't you see so clearly how G.I.s turned English girls to jelly? Because there's a charm in looseness, isn't there? What is it? It slides round joints like oil. It warms us, and we never knew how cold and tight we were before, how we needed that oil, that warming: we English, and our poetry, our terse, little laced-up verse.
Symbiosis of language and landscape? Maybe. Maybe it is because they have vistas, where we have back gardens. Maybe living somewhere so vast does free the mind: thinking you've discovered a country, thinking it's new. (It isn't. It's as old as England.) But everyone knows that we have nothing new, we English. We’re famous for it. Nothing new and no space, so we're restrained by nature, and it shows: the weight of past, our confines.
So, an American poet visits, and I'm won over. It's Billy Collins with his playfulness, Ashbery and his outrageous titles, his audacity in ignoring them, e.e. and his quirky haps, Walt conquering the white, leaf after leaf, declaiming like a hero. And yet, and yet ... this American poet is quiet, serious. She doesn't stand to perform, but sits like a teacher, taps her index finger firmly to the word: to indicate her point. Humorous, yes, but no joker, no space-coverer, or declaimer.
And I think about American poetry again: the manic Lowell, poor Hart Crane, Sylvia fingering her black shoe, Emily —— her frozen jags left hanging on the lines.
Caroline Cook
There’s this memory
of you. Little big-man, your parting straight as if it’s been ruled; your medallion face, shining. The rest of you, a compromise. Shirt freed from collar, cuffs rolled up, braces sagging, dangling, your trousers top-button undone, and you’re sitting, square-set but comfortable at the scrubbed scullery table while Gran’s out of your way, clattering at something deep in the kitchen. In front of you, the chicken frame, collapsed, empty wreck of itself. This is Sunday evening, and you’ve put away your workday face, have lost that churchy-important verger look, and you’re you: Granddad. Full-on. All smiles. Fingers in the chicken frame, dibbing, licking glistening lips, and sucking. Lifting gizzard, and mouthing it as if it were harmonica you’re trying your best to get a tune from. Enjoying it.
Getting stuck in, down to the bone, the chicken grease sleeking up your cheeks, your skin ― and, suddenly, your eyes give signs you’re aware of my staring. If this were Russia, is what they say, but without need for words. You’ve come through the vacuities of trench, the slitherings and founderings of mates, the thirties and their hunger pangs, the second war, Belsen and the bomb, and this is Sunday, after all, in your after-life. And Yes, you say, Yes.
That’s good. Then pile the chicken bones to a bonfire pile, and wipe your fingers on your handkerchief, carefully, carefully, as if there’s still time.
Roger Elkin
Remembering Brian Fewster ― A Celebration and Tribute Saturday, 6th November 2008
When Brian Fewster died on 17th June 2008 it was a great loss to his family, friends, colleagues and fellow poets and poetry lovers. Many of us went to his funeral and felt the sadness and injustice of his premature departure from life. He had given us much of himself and his art and would have had more to give had fate not been so unkind. Many LPS members felt that whilst a funeral can mark a death, a celebration is needed to commemorate a life, so we agreed to hold an event on the 6th December to give all those who knew and respected him an opportunity to enjoy memories, pay tribute and above all read some of his poetry. We met on a bright winter afternoon in the large hall at the Friends Meeting House. The celebration was led with warmth and friendship by James Harbour who introduced the readers and speakers as well as giving a eulogy himself. Norman Harrington, Mike Brewer, Marilyn Ricci, Maimie Henderson, Lydia Finlay, Karin Koller, Jean Harbour, David Bircumshaw, Colin Cook, Caroline Cook, Anne Kind and Graham Norman all spoke and read poems from Brian’s collection, Sympathetic Magic, or poems that they had written for or about Brian. Members also read pieces from Jill Cunningham, Huw Watkins and Davina Prince who could not attend but nevertheless wanted to give their own tributes to Brian. Glyn Haines from the World Development Movement and Geoff Forse from the Green Party spoke eloquently about Brian’s dedication to those causes. We were delighted that Brian’s partner Bernice Lewis and his sister were with us to share in the celebration. It was an afternoon of reflection, good memories and happiness recollected, coloured by the continued sadness at Brian’s departure. All this was expressed through the thoughts and feelings of all present in a communion of friends and in the words and poems. In his poem from Sympathetic Magic titled ‘The Parcel’, Brian wryly describes himself as being labelled by St Peter for ‘Destination Limbo.’ We had felt that we and, possibly, Brian, had been in limbo since his death. Remembering Brian Fewster sent us all towards our proper destinations with less burdened hearts and refreshed by the shared memories.
Graham Norman
A Review of Sympathetic Magic
The shadow of sickness and death is never far away in Brian Fewster’s first full collection, and his measured rhymes contain and concentrate emotion to devastating effect. Extreme suffering and loss are sometimes approached directly, sometimes symbolised by the wildest extremes of nature (for example in Walking on the Glacier). The title poem is a plea for “simplicity and space”, evoking ancient beliefs in totems and charms which acted as a “filter” or sanctuary from the darkness and chaos of the world.
But there are light and playful moments too. Evidently devoted to the strictures ― and rewards ― of formal verse and rhyme, Fewster is nevertheless conscious of the attendant pitfalls and frustrations, as in the hilarious Anti-Sestina: “Won’t someone help me? I’m trapped inside a sestina, Condemned like K for a crime I never committed, Sentenced by an inexorable system To serve without remission seven stanzas ― To watch the same six words keep reappearing In an exercise yard of banal repetition.”
Rachel Playforth from The Frogmore Papers, No. 72
LPS OPEN POETRY COMPETITION 2008
REPORT
Early in 2008 Caroline found a leaflet advertising the last LPS Poetry Competition, which had a closing date of 12th April 2003. She suggested that we should arrange another one in order to boost the Society’s income. She and I were put in charge of the 2008 Competition and the Committee decided that we should aim for a closing date of Friday, 17th October 2008 and that Results should be available by 7th November. We prepared flyers for dispatch in August and 831 were posted or delivered to local Poetry Societies, Libraries, etc., and later to Schools and Universities. The Competition was also publicised in Mslexia, in Birmingham, London, Cambridge and on various websites.
Entries
The first entries arrived as early as 24th August. Entries came in from as far away as Washington, USA, and Nafplion, Greece. A few entries were from school children and some from University students (there’s perhaps hope for poetry and for LPS in that).
Origin of entries No. of entrants No. of entries LPS 7 16 Leicestershire 28 55 i.e. Combined 35 71 Elsewhere 90 207 TOTAL 125 278
Four Committee members volunteered to be judges: David Bircumshaw, Caroline Cook, Graham Norman and Andie Wingham. I was asked to be the Competition Secretary. The four judges read all the entries and each selected his/her 10 best. That produced a long-list of 32, which the judges re-read and assessed. After some mathematical calculations a final meeting was held to decide on the three winners and five runners-up. Eventually a consensus was reached!
On 7th November the results were ready to be announced at the Marianne Boruch Poetry Reading, after which results were sent out. On 28th November we had a very successful “Awards Evening”. Only two runners-up were able to attend; the other winning or mentioned poems were read by members of the Committee.
Competition Budget
Through Brian Fewster we received a donation of £500. Apart from that, the income from entries was £835.50, and expenditure £498.79, giving the Society a profit of £336.71, which meant that we didn’t have to draw on that generous donation.
What have we learnt?
That we can run a competition successfully, i.e. with no complaints, no hitches, and with an excellent profit. That we can attract a reasonable number of entries from a wide area. That entrants display a wide range of poetic ability. That judges have differing tastes. That next time we should ask entrants where they found information about the competition.
Some LPS members have already asked why we did not employ an external judge. The answer is simple: to cut costs. If any member knows of a well-known poet/critic who would be a judge for next to nothing, please inform the Committee.
Colin Cook Competition Secretary 2008
A note from D A Prince about her poem:
“This is based on an actual event, at LPS, when after a reading from a major poet Brian, who had been following the text of the poems in his own copy, asked the Big Poet about the small shifts in language ― an interesting area which the B.P. could have explored in the context of his own work and the whole area of revisions ― and got no answer at all, just a ruffle of B.P. feathers and a full-volume reading of his own particular favourite show-off piece. For me, Brian came out the winner with his modesty and genuine interest in the poet's work.”
For Brian, who asked the question
Remember when you asked the Big Poet why the ands and buts shifted as he read, so the words in the air didn’t match, quite, the published print?
How for a moment his eyes flickered ― exposed in all his indecisions, and those final versions scrolling back to first draft, unedited choices, words hot, blotchy, scribbled, under- and over-scored, there as raw ingredients, untrimmed, straight from the garden, soil still clinging round their roots?
Remember how he hedged, and tried to hide their shaky beginnings, how they might have mistaken themselves; gave them a quick brush down and then launched into his Big Set Piece, the winner, the one to prove he’d always got it right?
D A Prince
Review of “Northern Lights”, 12th December 2008
On December 12th, St Lucie’s day (patron saint of light) we set out with Siobhan Logan’s shimmering sari, her backpack and lamp, her Saami hat and tales in hand to find the aurora borealis: showers of incandescent tenderness; a Bridge of light; wonder breath of gods. Sun-particles, lost on journeys into the vast darkness of space beyond imagining.
In their faint projected echoes, we longed to hear stories of people who lived beneath a light so very different To our own, we heard of gods and ancestors: Heavenly, noisy, sporty, divine - both protective and easily angered. We longed to stand on their bridge, to have our hearts set dreaming of rainbow worlds, not merely pots of gold but shimmering, singing, whistling curtains of light cascading about us Changing the world here where the gods and science meet to make a singing light.
And were astonished to find at end of play that despite a full moon peering down through cloudy branches we had not left Leicester at all.
Gisela Hoyle NEWS
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