Surroundings

'Fleck and the Bank' Cover

2012-01-30T11:28:00.000Z

The cover of my forthcoming chapbook, which will be published as part of the Salt Modern Voices series. It features a guy called Fleck, a bank, and poems which riff around themes of collapse, disintegration and disappearance via friends, virtual friends and obscure notes. Orignal lines square up to stolen ones, money makes a cameo appearance as a ghost, politicians leap into cauldrons of boiling fat, theology is done by mobile phone, and the Patron Saint of Plainsong Maledictions turns up with a little advice in song, which readers are welcome to singalong to if they wish. I also have a full collection coming out in 2013, although none of the poems in the chapbook will also feature in the collection.

There's not yet a definite publication date, but I'll let you know when that becomes clear. A good number of the other chapbooks in the series can be found here. So far, I've read Neil Addison's Apocapulco (for some reason, this doesn't seem to have its own page on the site) and Mark Burnhope's The Snowboy, both of which were really good.

Two Manuscripts and Three Magazines

2012-01-15T09:16:00.000Z

I’ve been trying not to neglect this blog. I have ideas, no shortage of things to write about. But the last week or two have been so busy that I’ve had to prioritise other poetry-related activities.

First of all, I did a bit of work on a chapbook manuscript and then decided it was finished (or as finished as it was going to be before submitting it). I now have submitted it for publication and will just have to wait and see what happens.

Secondly, I’ve been hard at work on reading and evaluating Magma 53 submissions. I’ve enjoyed it at times but it’s been hard going too. The submissions never stop flooding in – a good thing, I guess – but there’s only so many I can read each night without my brain turning into mulch. I have to stop as it’s hardly fair to consider poems after that point. It’s been hard rejecting friends and people whose work I actually quite enjoyed, but it has to be done.

Thirdly, I’ve been sent three poetry publications I haven’t been able to resist reading. Richard Price sent me the new copy of Painted, Spoken (issue 22) and so far I’ve enjoyed some excellent poems by Chris McCabe, Dorothy Lawrenson and Gerry Loose, and a review of PolyPly, an event which involved innovative poetry and film. I’m a fan of Chris and Gerry and expect to enjoy their stuff. But I was also struck by Dorothy Lawrenson’s poetry, which seemed to me far tighter and more affecting than anything she was doing 5 or 6 years ago – what any writer wants to happen, I guess. No doubt I’m going to find out she wrote these ones 6 years ago now! I read through the latest edition of Poetry magazine – always one of my favourite reads of the month. And Chris Hamilton-Emery sent me the manuscript of his new book, which will be published in March. Yesterday was my day off and I took advantage by reading through the first 20 pages – some fantastic, distinctive poems in there.

Anyway, I have managed a blog post, even if not a particularly focused one. I have meant to write about BBC1’s recent adaptation of Dickens's ‘Great Expectations’, about the Scottish independence referendum, about Michael Gove’s cultural vandalism, about a Denis Johnson poem... So far, you have been spared.

All the Rooms of Uncle's Head: Fact and Fiction

2012-01-05T12:32:00.000Z

My review of All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head by Tony Williams (Nine Arches press, 2011, £6) is up at Sphinx issue 19, together with reviews of the same pamphlet by Jon Stone and Nikolai Duffy. Oddly, the same Nikolai Duffy review, slightly extended, also appears at Stride magazine.

One issue that emerges from the reviews is whether the background to the poems is fact or fiction. The description on the pamphlet’s back cover says:

The maker of these strange pieces was an inmate of an asylum somewhere in Central Europe in the first decades of the 20th century. His fevered versions of the sonnet form were painted on to ceramic tiles, since smashed, and now pieced together.

Sounds like historical fact – if that’s as far as you read. But I was convinced from the outset that this was a fiction – even if a fiction interweaved with certain historical facts. My reasons are as follows:

1. The pamphlet’s cover clearly asserts Tony Williams as sole author.

2. Nowhere does the pamphlet ever suggest itself to be a work of translation. The poems are © Tony Williams and no one else.

3. The pamphlet’s introduction says that in 1986, the building occupied by German psychiatrist, Hans Prinzhorn, was stripped for renovation, and it was during this that the ceramic poem-tiles were discovered. Prinzhorn, his landmark book on ‘outsider art’, and his accommodation in Munich, are all historically verifiable, but a Google search for ‘Prinzhorn ceramic tiles 1986’ or any other similar search directs the searcher only to Tony Williams’s pamphlet.

4. There is no reference to those tiles anywhere, or to their previous publication in their original language. That means Tony must have worked with the original tiles, which no one else had ever thought to publish either within a book or online. Surely that’s impossible, given their obvious literary quality.

5. The back cover description above continues with, “Inspired by the great artists celebrated by Hans Prinzhorn in his famous work The Artistry of the Mentally Ill, Tony Williams has explored what it might mean to create literature under such conditions of stress.” This seals it for me: those phrases, “Tony Williams has explored...” and “inspired by...”. In other words, these are original poems by Williams, inspired by his research into ‘outsider art’.

I am a fan of literary hoaxes. Ern Malley springs to mind, and I know of a few other brilliantly conceived hoaxes. But I don’t think Tony Williams is hoaxing anyone here. All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head is a fiction, not a hoax. The poems are obviously by Tony Williams but are written in a convincing persona and, like any strong work of fiction, it draws the reader into a spell so that he/she enters a world that feels absolutely real. One thing that makes this pamphlet so convincing is how well Williams evokes the style of central European poetry of the early 20th century and yet still manages to make it sound something like Tony Williams. I’d definitely recommend you get yourself a copy, particularly if you like poems that offer new discoveries with every read.

A Politically Correct Nativity

2011-12-22T13:58:00.003Z

Joseph and Mary, in strict alphabetical order, which does not in any way imply that earlier letters are superior to those which turn up later in the alphabet or vice-versa, were on their way to Bethlehem, a small town in an area today known as the Holy Land, also known as the Non-Denominational Land, which includes all those who prefer through choice not to belong to any particular denomination. Moreover, we acknowledge that this is a positive choice as opposed to a failure to consider fully which particular religious or secular system or any other system of any description happens to suit them.

Mary and Joseph, this time in order of age at the time of travelling – remembering that ageism is wrong and that if a three-year-old proved able and willing to do the job of an atomic physicist, that’s OK – were going to Bethlehem because Augustus, democratically-elected Enabler of the People, had suggested that, if people were so-minded without any coercion on his part, there would be a census; a census that asked no invasive personal questions and gave full protection under current privacy and civil liberties regulations, which are fine as they go but are always open to suggestions for improvement.

Joseph and Mary – in order as their names appeared when written on rubber balls, spun around in a machine and drawn by electronic means live on BBC television with an independent arbiter present at all times in a manner acceptable to the International Code of Ethics and Fairness, directive 5/1.237 – were promised in marriage to one another. Marriage was not the only solution for them to work towards the aims and goals set out in their pre-birth, ideology-free mission statement, nor are religion, politics, gender, love, attraction, faithfulness, compatibility, or a shared interest in the scientific preservation of corn in tin ever relevant in discussion of marriage or its equal and entirely acceptable alternatives. Staying single, through choice or necessity, is also an equally valid lifestyle and we aim to affirm those lifestyles and all variations thereupon. A recently excavated document whose complete historical authenticity is maintained by formerly down-on-his-luck and now best-selling author, Bran Down, suggests that the ‘couple’ were in fact known to one another only through social networking opportunities and travelled virtually as tenuously-linked avatars.

Mary and Joseph – in the order necessary to balance up the ‘Joseph and Mary/Mary and Joseph’ thing, as we are committed to equal opportunities for all men and women and women and men, no matter what gender the men and women and women and men are or claim to be – travelled to Bethlehem and were in possession of the correct license and necessary permissions as recorded under the Freedom of Movement Act, section 4, part 3 sub-section 759. When they arrived in Bethlehem, the time came for Mary to have a baby. It would have been equally acceptable for Joseph to have had the baby or indeed for any other man or woman present in the town or other towns without reference to age, race, gender or other arbitrary measures of suitability, to have had the same baby.

There was no room at the inn, so Mary gave birth to the a baby in a stable, which had undergone the relevant health and safety checks as required under the Health Act of a non-specific year; non-specific to avoid offending individuals who prefer their own methods of calculating time, space and distance and who alone know where and when they are in relation to everything else. And that’s OK... We aim to meet the academic and emotional needs of anyone who evidences a challenging way of life. The stable’s work surfaces, appliances and hygiene were deemed to be of an acceptable standard, and a fire inspection and drill also took place several times during the labour.

A son was born, although it could have been a daughter or perhaps neither or both, and in no sense implies preference for one gender over another or any difference between genders. The child was wrapped in strips of cloth, and a social worker was appointed due to concerns over the parents’ inability to provide generally accepted accoutrements necessary in today’s competitive childcare market. A contract of care was agreed between the family and the Department of Community Education committing the parents to attend Government-sponsored parenting classes over a fifteen month period.

Angels appeared and sang a joyful song, although this part of the story has now been recognised as unacceptable to tone-deaf, depressed creatures without wings or halos. The term, ‘angels’, has been replaced in the story’s most recent editions with ‘journalists’ and the over-emotional reactions have become tabloid headlines which, as ever, maintain a careful neutrality in all matters. The music is now handled by the X Factor crew, featuring Little Mix's live concept album of Leonard Cohen covers.

The journalists soon left the couple and child to pass their days making sure they didn't get on the wrong side of anybody. At one point, the son, aged 12, got ideas above his station, but parents and child created a mutual agreement in which they agreed to tow the prevailing line, whatever that was at any given moment. They regularly visited the non-denominational and/or secular temple, in which all religious and/or humanist symbols were banned, and sat between the whitewashed and blackwashed walls thinking about nothing much until it was time to go home again. No one knew how it was all going to pan out.

*

(photo from the photoscreen of Klearchos Kapoutsis, used under a Creative Commons License)

My Favourite Poetry Collections of 2011

2011-12-21T10:33:00.002Z

Well, these may be my favourite reads of 2011, but I may well have chosen a slightly different line-up yesterday and might feel tempted to change some of it by tomorrow. However, they are all good books and come warmly recommended by me, whatever that means.

10 Notable Collections

Notes for Lighting a Fire – Gerry Cambridge (HappenStance)
Hurt - Martyn Crucefix (Enitharmon)
Pandorama – Ian Duhig (Picador)
Six Children – Mark Ford (Faber)
Selected Poems – Jaan Kaplinski (Bloodaxe)
Finger of a Frenchman – David Kinloch (Carcanet)
The Frost Fairs – John McCullough (Salt)
Unfinished Ode to Mud – Francis Ponge, translated by Beverley Bie Brahic (CB Editions)
Illuminations – Arthur Rimbaud, translated by John Ashbery (Carcanet)
A Stone Dog – Aidan Semmens (Shearsman)

7 Notable Pamphlets

The Snowboy – Mark Burnhope (Salt)
Incense - Claire Crowther (Flarestack)
The Son – Carrie Etter (Oystercatcher)
What to Do – Kirsten Irving (HappenStance)
Apocrypha – AB Jackson (Donut)
Scarecrows – Jon Stone (HappenStance)
All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head – Tony Williams (Nine Arches)

A Notable Anthology

The Best British Poetry 2011 – ed. Roddy Lumsden (Salt)

Do We Need the TS Eliot Prize?

2011-12-14T21:44:00.001Z

I’ve been watching the furore around the TS Eliot Prize develop and have been wondering what’s it’s all really about. The administration of the prize is funded by Aurum (it used to be funded by the Poetry Book Society, whose arts council funding was abolished earlier this year), an investment company which specialises in hedge funds. Two shortlisted poets have pulled out in protest: first to go was Alice Oswald, closely followed by John Kinsella. The other eight nominees have stayed in.

Alice Oswald gave her views here in The Guardian. Gillian Clarke, head of the panel of judges, responded. John Kinsella released a manifesto in the New Statesman to outline his own position. In the Independent, David Lister attacked those who had pulled out (in what I'd regard as a rather bad tempered article).

Now, I am no fan of the banks or investment companies or hedge funds, particularly those individuals and groups whose recklessness, greed, and desire to win bonuses by meeting short-term targets have largely caused the current crisis, which we are now all paying for. So my instinct is to support the two poets who have pulled out, and I can understand their reasons for doing so. However, I am equally sure that poets such as Carol Ann Duffy and Sean O’Brien will feel similarly to me about the crisis and yet don’t feel any need to pull out of the TS Eliot Prize. I can understand their reasons too (of course, I am guessing those reasons).

I don’t care about the TS Eliot Prize, and my support (or lack of it) will make no difference to anyone. It’s easy to be a cheerleader for one side or another and quite another thing to play for real. Not that I am suggesting anyone is “playing” here, and those who accuse Oswald and Kinsella of pulling out simply to create publicity for themselves and their books are, frankly, talking bollocks. Some people do still have principles, y'know! Equally, those who say Aurum’s money is inherently “dirty” better remove all their money from their personal current accounts right now. All banks deal in dirty money, some to an alarming degree.

Some commentators have asked who would fund poetry if the financial sector walked away (tacitly criticizing Oswald and Kinsella for putting such funding at risk). I’d ask, in reply: would we miss the TS Eliot Prize if it weren’t there? Do we need a prize propped up by private funds now that a government hostile to poetry (hostile to thought of any kind, it seems to me) has pulled the plug? I think most people, including most poets and readers, wouldn’t miss it in the slightest. It does, of course, mean a nice surprise and a £15,000 payout for one lucky poet, a rare moment of recognition – but, in years to come, no one will miss it if it doesn’t exist, and we may even have a healthier poetry scene as a result.

I was struck (and I’m sure I’m not the only one) by Gillian Clarke’s insistence that the TS Eliot shortlist represents the 10 best books published this year. That is also complete bollocks. I really like some of the books, and I’m sure advocates could be found for every one of them, but the choices represent such a small range of titles and publishers that it’s impossible to take her statement seriously.

Poets, Reviewers and the Broadsheets

2011-12-12T08:40:00.001Z

Two short reviews appeared in The Guardian a day or two ago, both written by Ben Wilkinson. The first is a positive review of Simon Barraclough’s Neptune Blue. The second is quite a negative review of Mark Waldron’s The Itchy Sea. I’d make the following observations:

1. Neptune Blue is a very interesting book. There are similarities to Simon Barraclough’s first collection, but he’s definitely not just treading the same ground. I’m not altogether convinced by the Armitage comparison, even if I recognise the similarities Ben points out. I think Neptune Blue does resist the pigeonholing and contains some decidedly odd, mysterious poems. Anyway, it’s just the book you need for a cold, clear winter evening.

2. Some people may not have liked Ben’s criticism of The Itchy Sea, and I can understand why. I don’t know Mark Waldron and have no idea what Mark himself thinks of this review (and silence is usually the best reaction in such circumstances). If it had been my book, I wouldn’t be applauding. When a poet spends years writing and revising poems and publishing them in a book, it’s perfectly natural if they feel aggrieved when dismissed inside a short paragraph in the Guardian. I know some people say we should all consider negative reviews carefully etc, but poets are human and get cross and upset as much as anyone else.

3. On the other hand, the sting doesn’t last. The next review might be highly favourable. Someone (a reader you don’t know, not a critic or reviewer) will email you to say how much they’ve enjoyed the book. Your book will be selected by the Poetry School staff as one of their top ten books of the year – such as, this year, Mark Waldron’s The Itchy Sea! A future reviewer will ‘get’ what you’ve been trying to do, which is a good feeling. Such experiences are fun but adulation doesn't tend to come the way of poets often. Those who crave it ought to stop writing poetry and instead take up the guitar or enter the Big Brother house or try to be photographed often with a celebrity.

4. The Guardian is often criticized for publishing anodyne, positive reviews without any hint of real criticism. We can’t express a wish for a more rigorous reviewing style and then get annoyed when Ben says what he genuinely thinks. It’s not his fault that the word count he is offered doesn’t allow him to make his points more fully. It’s also clear that there’s no personal motive here. After all, he does recommend Mark Waldron’s first book, and feels that some poems in the second book are “very good”. He had reviewed Mark’s first collection very positively in the Times Literary Supplement.

5. But on the other hand again, the bland, anodyne style usually comes into play when the book under review is that of an ‘established’ poet (hard to find the right word here but ‘established’ will have to do). It’s tricky to work out why that is. It could be because the established poet is being reviewed by another established poet who would cause major controversy by writing a negative review (and consequently may elect not to review books by fellow established poets whose work they don’t like much). I’m not sure whether established poets feel that way or not, but would be interested to know. I could certainly understand why they might feel that way. It could also be that poet and reviewer are friends and review one another with regular positivity. Or it could be that the reviewer isn’t an established poet but would like to be and feels intimidated to write a negative review of someone they imagine (usually erroneously) holds massive influence in the poetry world and will nurse their grudge for decades. Or it could be that the newspaper broadsheets don’t want negative reviews of established poets and won’t publish them when they’re written.

6. Perhaps, broadsheets need to search harder for reviewers who are fair but who aren’t concerned with what anyone thinks – independent critics, poets who have stopped writing poetry, poets who couldn’t care less about their own ‘careers’ (but who aren’t, without good reason, simply out to diss those who have had mainstream success).

7. It seems wrong that critical engagement seems only to be allowed in the broadsheets when a book is written by a poet published by an independent publisher. There are occasional exceptions, almost all of them written by critics rather than poets e.g. Kate Kellaway’s review of Carol Ann Duffy’s The Bees.

8. I had read some of Mark Waldron’s The Itchy Sea. He’s a good writer. One concern I had with it was that it seemed similar to his first collection, although I’m basing that impression on a random read through a fairly small number of poems – so it’s not something to pay any attention to. Interestingly (to me) Ben clearly implies in his review that The Itchy Sea isn’t like the first collection. That actually makes me want to get hold of The Itchy Sea and read it properly – so a negative review may not have the negative consequences people might expect.

9. Ben writes one thing that struck me as of particular interest. Whether it correctly applies to The Itchy Sea is another matter, but it does sound like a feature of many contemporary poems, those which are:

“... latching on to outlandish similes in the hope that they might lead somewhere new. You have to admire the intention...”

I’m quite fond of outlandish similes when they do lead somewhere new. Or when, as in John Ashbery et al, their outlandishness fits perfectly within the little engine of the poem. But when they are merely fashionable attention-seeking beacons or empty vessels designed to sound meaningful (Ashbery's aren't), that’s not so good.

10. I’m definitely going to read The Itchy Sea over the next few weeks and see what I think.

X Factor 2011 - Semi Final: Live Blog

2011-12-03T19:50:00.001Z

I notice I haven't blogged since last Saturday and this is supposed to be a poetry blog, not an X Factor one, but I have been busy reading submissions for Magma 53 and and things like that. Back tonight though for the live X Factor semi-final, which I'll update as usual as the show progresses. We are minus Janet Devlin this week, as expected. It was getting clear that Janet wasn't interested in the songs she was being asked to sing. Her outburst after her elimination that the show had turned her into a 'karaoke singer' is fair enough. I suppose she ought to have known this would happen before applying, mind you, but on the other hand, she is only 16 and may have thought the show was actually about talent. And, indeed, that they would recognise her talent and allow her to put more of a personal stamp on her material, play guitar, maybe even try one of her own songs. However, the show is not about talent (I saw a gospel choir the other week and several of them had as much vocal talent as any of the current X Factor finalists). For the show's producers, it surely has to be mainly about viewer ratings and money. For the audience, it's all about family entertainment on a Saturday night. Talent may be a by-product now and again. But good luck to Janet, easily the most 'talented' of the finalists. Let's see if she can recast herself as herself again. Last week, Kelly recommended she sing some Cranberries songs. No, Janet. That would be such a bad idea, although I reckon you'll know that anyway. Don't be a Dolores version II, as even version I was no great shakes. You could do better if you set your mind to it.

So to this week. Show just about to start...

It’s Motown night. First tonight is Misha B. The judges keep putting her through, but people don’t seem to like her. So she’s gone to a children’s hospice this week. Do you see the psychology behind that? Thought so! She may be genuine, but the marketing behind her is transparent. Imagine a world without music, she says. Uh... yes, let’s do that. OK, done that? Let’s move on now. She’s whooping and clucking through ‘Dancing in the Street’, rather forced I think. Trying too hard to be ‘Misha B’ the way she’s been asked to by the judges over the last couple of weeks. Yellow and black suited dancers, like Partick Thistle on an cloudy day at East Fife. The judges love it. I thought it was bland. I’ll give that 5, wife says 7, daughter says 8.

'Ain’t No Mountain High Enough', from Amelia Lily. Tartan dancers this time. Who makes those decisions? Is it because we have high mountains here in Scotland, at least in British terms. The difficulty tonight is that Motown songs are well known and also 40-50 years old, so freshening them up isn’t easy. Amelia has gone for the big sound. But I’m not that interested. She sang it well, but I don’t know. I’ll give her 6, wife went off somewhere and missed it, and daughter says 9.

Now it’s Little Mix. They will have fun with Motown surely. Fun! That’s what I need at this point of the show. They went to a movie premiere and saw Charles and Camilla this week – that’s what it’s all about girls! Not... They’re doing the Supremes, ‘You Just Keep Me Hanging On’, and I’m actually enjoying this more than the other performances. There’s an energy...oh, one of them forgot the words. Criminal, of course in the X Factor. Louis didn’t like it much. He is a plonker. Gary and Louis want one of them to be the focal lead singer. Tulisa disagrees and wants all of them to take their turn. Kelly says there’s always a lead singer in a group. Don’t be different, girls! Be the same as everyone else! And then whenever Louis calls anyone ‘original’, wonder about that just a bit. I’ll say 7, wife says 7, daughter says 9.

Marcus really ought to have an advantage this week, given that he’s a soul man and this is Motown. He’s doing ‘My Girl’. He’s smiling a lot. Almost as much as Marti Pellow from Wet Wet wet used to do. That always used to annoy me for some reason. Too much smiling makes me distrust people e.g. Tony Blair. A good scowl does the trick every time. Marcus kind of strolled through that song. Very safe choice. The judges liked it. Smooth. I’ll give that 7 as well. Wife says 9, daughter says 9.

Round 2. Misha B is going to have to pull something out of the bag now if she’s to survive, I think. She is sitting on her own personal smoke bomb. She’s ballading now. And this is certainly better. Towards the end it’s getting a bit histrionic, but I liked the first half. Louis says she stands out from the crowd. Depends who is in the crowd. Gary says she was previously wrongfully accused of being a bully and she won’t win because of that, not because she isn’t good enough. He might be right. But it’s also because she somehow doesn’t always connect with her material (and therefore with audience). She did there though. I’ll say 6. Wife says 8, daughter says 8.

Amelia says ‘I want this so much’ like so many X Factor hopefuls before her, and indeed she has used that phrase on several shows herself. As though, if she wants something enough, it might come true. She is power ballading. It’s so not my kind of music. But I think she is really singing this well. From quiet to loud, intense to explosive, precision. Tulisa says it’s one of her favourite songs of all time, which shows what a very strange and different planet she lives on. Gary says her shouty voice is great but her soft voice isn’t quite there, which I think is complete nonsense. Perhaps a bit of politicking? Anyway, I’ll give her 8. Wife says 9, daughter says 9.

Gary wants Marcus in the final because it would change his life. But it would change anyone's life, so no argument there. It’s ‘Can You Feel it’? Hmmmm, not really. Don't feel much, maybe a faint pinprick on my left ankle. Sounds a bit dodgy, and the sound balance might be a wee bit off, or maybe it's the wrong key for Marcus. but he seems to have settled down. Took him about 30 seconds to get going but he’s doing OK now. The judges all agree this wasn’t one of his best performances. They said it was the wrong song. I don’t know, I think he didn’t sing it all that well. I’ll say 6. Wife says 8. Daughter says 8.

Finally, it’s Little Mix. Wonder why they were third in the first half and last in the second half? SyCo TV are trying to disorientate us, like being in the center of Bucharest after lights out. The first girl singing here looks a bit drunk, although I’m sure she’s not. Something about the way she was swaying with a detached look on her face, like she was having a sudden out of body experience. It’s a Beyonce song. And another decent performance. Gary says the vocals weren’t good enough. I think he’s trying to erode their vote, so that his act, Marcus, can win. Mainly I think that because I didn’t hear anything wrong with the vocals. I’ll give them 7, wife says 9, daughter says 8.

Ok, I think Misha B will be leaving us tomorrow after a sing-off with Amelia (if there is a sing-off in the semi-final? Can't remember). As for the final, that's anyone's guess. There is no obvious winner this year, which does make it a little more exciting than normal, but the lack of a real stand-out also raises the suspicion that...well...no one is a stand out. Except, every now and then, Janet who is no longer with us.

X Factor 2011 - Week 8: Live Blog

2011-11-26T19:53:00.001Z

I am back with the live X Factor blog this week after missing out on week 7. This week, everyone has to sing two songs, which means I will keep my comments as succinct as possible. As ever, I will update as the programme progesses. Four minutes to go...

Little Mix are up first. The theme of part 1 is ‘guilty pleasures’ – songs you’re not supposed to like but do. They’re doing Justin Bieber with a sprinkling of Diana Ross. I thought that was pretty boring. Awful Bieber song. One you're not supposed to like because it's ...well... so overwhelmingly unlikeable. Nothing cute about it. Gary liked it. Louis says we need some ‘girl power’. Little Mix is all about ‘having fun’ says one of the band. Well, that wasn’t much fun... I’ll give that 5. Daughter says 8.

Janet is next. She sounded as if she was auditioning to be a Cranberries vocalist last week. This week it sounds cheesy, which is the idea, I guess, but somehow lifeless as well, and she forgot her words. She’s really lost the fragile intensity of her first audition completely. Ooh bop dibbeedap a doo bop. Along with Janet, that’s about all I can say. Gary says it’s a “real mess”. There’s always a second song, says Kelly. Oh dear. I’ll say 4. Daughter says 8. Daughter keeps faith no matter what!

Here comes Misha B. Can she bring some class to the show. She’s doing ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’. Don’t think her voice really suits the song - almost too powerful. She can rap though! That ought to bring in a few teenage votes. It’s got better towards the end. “Now the show has started,” says Gary. So much better than the first two. I’ll say 7. Daughter says 7 as well.

Apparently Marcus is doing a Wham song. He is the best performer left in the competition, I think. Odd white-suited people writhing away behind him – a bit unnerving. “If you’re going to do it, do it right (do it with me).” I’m your man, says Marcus, and he is really. The dancers are annoying and unnecessary. Marcus could carry this by himself, no problem. I do wonder, mind you, how boring a Marcus album would be. He’s a fun performer though. I’ll give him 7. Daughter says 9.

Finally Amelia is up. She says she was disappointed by her performance last week of Aretha Franklin’s ‘Freedom’ (or whatever it’s called) which left her in the bottom two. I thought it was pretty good. Maybe it wasn’t a big crowd-pleaser and Tulisa had somehow never heard it before (Aretha! Tulisa). Tonight it’s T’Pau’s ‘China in Your Hands’, which I hated at the time and it doesn’t sound any better now. But Amelia can sing and she’s giving us those huge-voice licks tonight. Tulisa says she loves Amelia’s passion and that her face (when she sings) looks as if it’s in a music video – what a weird comment! Gary says he’s glad to hear the song sung in tune – a barb at the original. Ha ha. Dermot gasps slightly. OK, I’ll say 7. Daughter says 10.

It’s round two, and they’re singing songs by their heroes. Little Mix say their hero is Christine Aguilera. Well, I suppose someone in the world must feel that way. Doesn’t make it any less astonishing when it actually happens though. Must be ’Beautiful’, I suppose. And yes, it is. Started well – very moving. But now they’ve lost it – going for vocal histrionics rather than sheer intensity. But they do clearly mean it. Louis again says we need ‘girl power’. No, we don’t, because the phrase means nothing whatsoever. Apparently they’ve had a bad time with the press slagging them off because they don’t look like models. The same papers who run shock reports on size zero models being a bad example for young women etc. Hypocrite journalists, as ever! I’ll give that 6. Daughter says 9.

Now, can Janet rescue her evening after her initial disaster? Well, this is certainly better, but it’s not that good. She sounds like she means this song just as much as it was obvious she couldn’t have cared less about the earlier one. It’s Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Mind you, she’s never been in the bottom two and must have a large fanbase. That might save her yet even though the judges seem to have decided to put the pressure on. I was bored again, to be honest. I’ll give her 5. Daughter says 6.

Misha B again. Her dress looks like it’s made been made from strips of black gaffa tape arranged in a random collage. It’s Killing Me Softly (with his Song), the dance version. This is good, I reckon. I’d go as far as to say I’m genuinely enjoying this performance. Real quality. Louis says ‘consistent’, but I thought it was better than that. I’ll say 8. Daughter says 9.

Marcus is doing Stevie Wonder. That’s no surprise. I hope it’s good SW as opposed to later boring SW. Ah yes, this is how I like Marcus. Drop the silly dance routines please and let Marcus sing. He is a soul man. He’s getting real feeling into this. Great performance, which did Stevie proud. I think Marcus has pulled ahead of the pack this week. Gary says people know him as the entertainer but now as the voice. I much prefer the voice side of Marcus... I’ll say 9 as well. Daughter says 10.

Finally, Amelia returns. Oh dear... Amelia’s hero is Kelly Clarkson. She is only 17. I suppose she will find better heroes given a bit of time. She has a rare quality of seeming very nice and humble and yet also incredibly driven. The pink trousers don’t suit her. Not that they would suit me either. At least she had the courage to wear them. It’s huge-voice territory again and she does this as well as anyone - soft MOR rock this time, as opposed to power ballad. It’s definitely not my kind of thing. In fact, I can't stand it. But she can sing it. Not much to say here. I‘ll give her 7. Daughter says 10.

Who is in and who is out? Janet should be out. But... she must have people voting for her in large numbers not to have been in the bottom two ever, even after some dodgy performances before tonight. I think Marcus and Little Mix will get through. Misha B and Amelia, despite doing very well tonight, have both been in the bottom two before and can't be counted as safe.

Edinburgh Needs Trams!

2011-11-21T14:14:00.001Z

If you’ve driven around Edinburgh recently, you’ll have noticed that every second street seems to be blocked or partially blocked by roadworks, traffic cones and temporary lights. Even Princes Street, the main road through the city centre, is entirely closed. Roads that remain open and free of obstruction are jammed with slow-moving traffic. Serious delays have become a way of life. I must admit, I am surprised that no one has worked out how to fix the travel chaos, as the answer is obvious. What Edinburgh needs is a modern, cost-efficient, ecologically-sound tram system – preferably one extending from Haymarket train station to the shopping mall at Ocean Terminal.

Why has no one thought of this before? Well, I don’t know. As I walked around Princes Street last week, I noticed that there are already ancient tram tracks on the road! Many of them are in appalling condition and will need to be re-laid and some of them are clearly inadequate for the weight of a modern tram, but I’m sure we can trust the council to do its homework right. Let’s say we import the wrong weight of tram from Spain and have to send them all back. It would cost around £300,000 to send them here and (I suppose) about the same to return them. That’s only £600,000, which is not bad for a bit of ill-researched speculation! Even if that doesn’t include the costs of the trams themselves...

It amounts, in fact, not even to a “small glitch”, which a bigwig at Edinburgh City Council has set at £200 million. Losing that amount of money in a major public project is only a “small glitch”, quite normal and not a problem, she seemed to say, which is a great relief. For one minute, I thought losing £200 million of taxpayers’ money might be grounds for mass council resignations, but it’s reassuring to learn that such losses are unimportant. We can always pay more council tax and shred spending on public services like education, rubbish collection and health services, and we’ll have that £200 million back in no time.

Some people have pointed to one of the best bus services in Britain and questioned the need for trams, especially as they will end up costing more than £1 billion. That’s not the point. Buses can’t get round the dug-up streets and temporary lights any better than a car. But with trams, you can build the tracks anywhere. For instance, there’s a patch of land down by Broomhouse which was dug up and tram tracks were indeed placed there – must have been some bizarre social experiment. There’s now no question of trams going anywhere near there and the land is now being dug up again for no apparent reason (although it has created employment, don’t forget that). The point is that it proves digging up random wasteland is possible and if a tram theoretically could go down there one day, it’s been worth doing as far as I’m concerned.

Others I have spoken to about this have looked at me with a glazed expression and argued that building the tram tracks will close off even more streets. This is true, but tram tracks are easy and quick to lay. I’d estimate – if we started now – the trams would be up and running by summer 2013 at a cost of only £545 million. There may be several “glitches” (I’m not sure how many “small glitches” are normal and acceptable, but let’s say five are acceptable – that’s only an extra £1 billion) and there’s always the possibility of contractual disputes, but I can recommend a German company who specialise in sorting these out and will not tolerate the inconvenience of work taking place until everyone is happy. Even if establishing mutual happiness takes years. And happiness is what it’s all about, right?

Finally, it is really important that not everyone is allowed to use the trams. Pensioners shouldn’t be allowed to use their passes. We don’t want old people on those beautiful new forms of transport. Nor do we want habitual bus-users – carriers of colds and wearers of old clothes – to soil the trams, so season tickets for buses shouldn’t cover tram-use. Trams should be reserved for people who have cars with four-wheel drive, especially those who currently drive them to work with no one in the passenger seats. They will, of course, continue to do this when the trams are built, but it’s all about opportunity. I believe strongly in creating further opportunities for people who already have more that they can realistically cope with. That’s the measure of a developed society, after all. It's also vital that trams stop as infrequently as possible, so that no one gets taken where they want to go. Long brisk walks will cut the current strain on the National Health Service.

I hope Edinburgh City Council are listening. And Alex Salmond and the Scottish parliament. I know new ideas like trams will take a bit of getting used to, but I’d recommend councillors take a number of trips to beautiful cities in southern Europe where trams are already established and, over a few glasses of Rioja, sign up for trams and make sure the cost of getting out of the contracts is astronomical. That way there’s no temptation to turn back if things are going disastrously. Until the trams arrive, I also demand that they provide every household with computer-generated images of trams gliding silently down a Princes Street without traffic cones, wire fences and the constant racket of pneumatic drills. There are, as all theologians argue, trams in heaven for those who believe.

(acknowledgement: I got the photo at the top from this site)

Facebook, Poets and Writers

2011-11-15T10:33:00.001Z

Facebook is fun. There’s no doubt about that and the number of users testifies to it. You’ll never get millions of people to sign up voluntarily for something that takes up time and bores the pants of everyone. For writers, it’s also an effective way of putting people in touch with one another, of making new links and cementing old ones, of keeping up with what’s going on in the literary world via a multitude of links, videos and status updates.

But there are problems. Serious problems. Everyone bangs on about privacy issues, sometimes with good reason and sometimes as knee-jerk reaction. The amount of time it can swallow is colossal, even if you think you’re on top of things; it’s hard to stay out of a debate you’ve contributed to for long, and good newspaper headlines make effective links you just can’t help clicking on. Some people talk about being addicted, but it’s often less of an addiction and more a feeling that you need to know what people are saying about what you’ve said, so that you can respond.

And so much of what’s on Facebook is interesting! Within fifteen minutes your head can be swimming with David Cameron’s latest idiotic soundbite, an atrocity in Uganda, a murder in Essex, the latest Guardian blog on why literary prizes mean everything/nothing, the discovery of ancient lakes on Mars, a new chocolate bar, glowing reviews of the latest Faber effort in all the broadsheets, an old Pavement video, an interesting fact about a little-known marsupial, A.N. Other’s latest poem about eating breakfast cereal while looking out a window at clouds...

And this is the real problem, I think. To write poetry requires focus, not a narrow focus, but focus that leaves space for the unexpected intruder. Intrusion has to come from a deeper place than fifteen minutes worth of noisy and tangled links, videos and discussions. A poem often begins to work when it is focused and then shoots off at a tangent, a tangent that somehow feels inevitable by the end of the poem. Social networking gets in the way both of the focus and of the welcome intruder. Instead there’s a crowd jostling at the walls of your brain for entry and, really, almost none of that stuff should have an invitation. The one intruder who matters usually gets lost in the baying crowd.

In the latest Magma, issue 51, Maitreyabandhu writes:

For a poem to communicate profound thought, the poet needs to think deeply; for a poem to express deep emotion, the poet needs to feel deeply; for a poem to be beautiful the poet needs to experience beauty.

Social networking can be detrimental to depth of thinking and I’m beginning to think that it can also act to limit our emotional depth too. I suppose it’s the same with any form of information overload: we may feel many things in quick succession about a huge variety of events and facts, but we’re denied the chance to go deeper into how we feel about anything. We might discuss things and learn things and discuss how we feel about things, but it’s all instant, buzzing communication, and usually has nothing to do with the specific piece of writing we’re trying to get done. Expressing how we feel in poetry without resorting to cliché, obscurity (always good for hiding the fact that we’re not saying anything! Although I am not suggesting that all obscurity implies this...) and overblown sentiment is one of the most difficult things to carry off in a poem, and social networks have made it that bit more difficult.

I’m not sure what the answer is. One solution is to abandon all social networks, and some writers I know have gone that way, but they do, I think, have value. Another solution is radically to limit time spent using them, but this is notoriously difficult to achieve and it only takes a few minutes for your head to be clogged with every subject under the sun. Emptying it of all that stuff can take hours. Maybe going for a run or taking up squash could help. Anyway, I’ll now post this article and, of course, link it to my Facebook wall...

The X Factor - Week 6: Live Blog

2011-11-12T20:10:00.001Z

I haven't bothered to do this up until now this year but I think it's about time I started this blog's X Factor round-up. As in previous years, I'll update it in live time as the show goes on. So if you can't be bothered to watch or indeed can't face it, then have no worries. With some acts, this blog will be better fun in any case.

It’s Queen and Lady Gaga week – help m’boab. No one can sing Queen and anyone can sing Gaga, so the Queen-mob are going to be at a disadvantage. But first they have to replace Frankie Cocozza, who is supposed to have broken the rules of the competition by taking cocaine. The tabloids have portrayed this as shocking and transgressive, but Frankie came over to me as a complete prat, about as ‘transgressive’ as Plastic Bertrand. How many people have taken cocaine? Millions probably. Join the back of the queue, Frankie. Bye.

First up is Kitty singing Queen. Kitty is another who thinks she is original and transgressive. She wanted to sing ‘Born this Way’ and is emotional about not getting to sing it – I’m rather glad, I must admit. It would have been an ego-fest of a song for her. She has a lion-mane on her head. What’s that about? Her vocal limitations are really being shown up by ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’. Terrible. Do stop her. Please! Tulisa likes it. So does Kelly. Maybe the volume of the live show has obscured how weak some of that was? I’d give that 3 out of 10. Wife says 7. Daughter says 7. They are in a generous mood!

Now it’s Craig, who wants to be “unique” and “have his own sound.” You’re on the wrong show, Craig. Maybe you should have joined a band and written some songs and played in grotty wee pubs for a few years to develop uniqueness. He’s doing Paparazzi. He’s singing it well enough as a ballad. But Lady G’s original had a degree of fun about it, which this entirely lacks. However, Craig at least seems like a nice guy and he is a good singer. The judges are all saying how great it was. It wasn't 'great' by any stretch of the imagination, but at least he tried to do it differently from the original. I’ll give that 8. Wife says 8. Daughter says 9.

It’s Little Mix now. They can at least sing in tune. However that doesn’t help them become any more than a-girl-next-door version of The Saturdays. Here they come, astonishingly with Radio Ga Ga!! No, they were fooling us, they’re doing Lady Gaga’s Telephone. That’s more like it! That’s what we expect and they’re doing it in exactly the way we expect. And they are doing it well. Louie loves everything about it. Kelly says the vocals were shaky at the beginning (and she is right, although they did get better). Gary says it was predictable, which is putting it mildly. Oddly, two of the girls who looked nothing like one another at the beginning of the series now seem to get more alike with every week. Spooky. I’ll say 6. Wife says 9. Daughter says 10. Crikey...

Now we have Janet. She started really well in the competition, but her first audition sounds far better to me than anything she’s done since. And they’ve styled her all wrong too. Ha... Kelly seems to have realised that and wants her to "go back to who she was" (and actually is). She’s singing a very strange version of Somebody to Love. It’s like they’ve taken a Queen song and Clannad-ed it or something! She is singing OK, but I don’t really like it. Louis loved it. Tulisa says she’d have to be in a certain kind of mood to listen to her. Gary says he’s bored. I’d have to be semi-comotose to appreciate that performance. A shame, as I genuinely like her. I’d say 6. Wife says 9 for her voice, as opposed to the arrangement. Daughter says 10 (she loves Janet).

Now it’s Markus. Now, Markus really is good. He has real soul, although we’ll see how long it takes for Cowell to knock that out of him. Sounds like Another One Bites the Dust crossed with Phil Collins singing Motown. Can you imagine? Who writes these arrangements? The song arranger should be locked away with bread and water for week. Markus is singing well, but really they all sing well at this stage. The arrangement is truly awful. Ugh... People in leather trousers are dancing weirdly in the background. Some tactical comments from the judges who want to elimintae the stronger acts so their own acts benefit. Naughty, but they're all at it. Oh, I’d give Markus 7 for his performance. Wife says 10 for his vocals. Daughter says 10.

Misha B is next. They gave her a nice hairstyle last week, very natural, and she looked all the better for it. Sometimes they’ve put a curious modernist sculpture on her head, which I’m told may have been made from her hair. I hope it’s the natural look tonight. It is. Good, as I’m sure it helps. She’s singing Born this Way and I’m sure she’ll make a better job of it than Kitty. The clattering drum sound is really annoying. What are the dancers? Glam traffic wardens with shiny pyjama bottoms? She sang it well though (yawn, as ever). All the judges loved it. I’d give her 8 for the performance. The arrangement isn’t her fault. Wife says 8. Daughter says 9.

Now we're going to find out who has been chosen to replace Frankie. It should be Amelia Lily, I think, as she should never have been put out in the first place. But I heard some tabloid rumour that it will be '2 Shoes'. God save us...

Here we go. Who has won the public vote to re-enter the competition? With 48% of the vote the winner is Amelia! Well, at least that’s justice. Now can she cement her place? She’s singing The Show Must Go On. She singing it on stage all by herself, no dancers in ridiculous costumes in sight. Perhaps they didn’t have time to rehearse an idiotic stage show with the ‘possibles’. And all the better for it. She is in the Leona Lewis mould. Not my kind of music, to put it mildly, but she sang it with passion and conviction. I’d give her 8. Wife says 9. Daughter says 10.

And that’s it for tonight. It's a fairly middling line-up, I'd say, even for the X Factor. No one is obviously favourite, which is different from most previous years, but may also point to a worrying lack of something. Markus, Craig, Little Mix and Misha B could all steal it. I reckon Kitty and Janet are in trouble after tonight and will sing off tomorrow.

Short Update with Three Books

2011-11-09T09:19:00.000Z

It’s been a month since I last blogged and here are my excuses...

No, I’ll save you all that. Being sorry for not blogging is faintly ridiculous. Since my last foray into blogland, I read some of my poems at the University of Basel, Switzerland along with Katy Evans-Bush (at the kind invitation of Andrew Shields) and then went out to try one of the region’s sausage delicacies with a few members of the audience. I stayed in Basel Youth Hostel, which had an affordable bar (in Swiss terms) and a buffet breakfast, and also an inevitable snorer in the room. I walked the cobbled streets and admired the window shutters. I walked along the Rhine and brought back chocolate for the family. A very enjoyable couple of days! I also took part in the Bugged! event at the fabulous West Port Festival in Edinburgh, which went really well. I read a few pieces from the anthology and later that evening went to see a fine reading by Rachael Boast and J.O. Morgan. And the submissions period has opened for Magma 53, which means that Kona Macphee and I have spent the last ten days working out a strategy for keeping up with the poems that flood the inbox daily. Working out strategies is always a good way to spend time.

But this post is really to recommend three books as much as anything else. First of all, Mark Burnhope’s The Snowboy, a Salt pamphlet of real quality. Any poet who can address a wheelchair with, “O wing-black, spectral-silver mass;/ crass imposition upon the meadow” (‘Wheelchair, Recast as a Site of Special Pastoral Interest’) deserves to be read widely, and there are many other poems which make this small collection an exciting experience. Burnhope’s ability to create memorable phrases and recast language in imaginative ways mark him out.

Secondly, Ian Duhig’s Pandorama (Picador) is a great read with a wide variety of forms and styles. You can never quite guess where Duhig is going to take you next. He seems to know about things that few people have ever thought about knowing and uses his learning lightly but with genuine emotional and intellectual impact. This collection is satirical, funny, disturbing and mysterious, often simultaneously. Moving elegies for David Oluwale, a Nigerian immigrant who died following years of racial harassment by police, line up alongside navvies, seed-fiddles, and ‘Closed Enquiry’ which celebrates “Santon Bridge’s Annual Lying Championship”; politicians may be barred from entering but agriculture holds plenty of scope:

cattle so huge they need individual postcodes,
rams’ horns winding up in different time-zones.

And finally, there’s Gabriel Josopovici’s Touch, which is described as a prose essay musing over “the central question of how we can feel at home in the world.” In fact, it’s a fascinating group of essays clustered around that theme, probing ideas of distance with reference to Charlie Chaplin, transgression and self-delusion with reference to Proust, power with reference to the $50m trade in Nazi memorabilia, and the difference between walking in England and walking in Egypt with a nod to Tristram Shandy (which, by coincidence, Ian Duhig also references). Touch, not mere observation, binds the essays into one. Josopovici deals with complex ideas without resorting to jargon or meaningless abstraction and there’s a passionate and intelligent engagement with the world behind every enquiry.

The Forward Prizes 2012: Predictions

2011-10-05T17:10:00.000+01:00

Tonight the results will be announced for the Forward Prizes (or Backward Prizes as they are now popularly called) for Best Collection, Best First Collection and Best Poem. I haven’t said anything about this up until now. The more I look at the poetry awards in the UK, the more I realise the whole thing is caught up in the poetry biz. Awards sometimes resemble ‘rewards’ or mutual back-slapping parties between judges and recipients. Maybe tonight will prove otherwise. ‘Outsider’ figures have won awards occasionally in the past and there is always that chance.

But predictions are always fun. The shortlists are here. I predict that John Burnside will win Best Collection. Sean O’Brien and David Harsent will both have a strong appeal for the judges, but I guess they may feel John Burnside’s time has come: he hasn’t won it before. Geoffrey Hill hasn’t won it before either, but he will no doubt divide the judges down the middle.

I predict that Rachael Boast will win Best First Collection, although I am particularly unsure of my guess in this category. Anything on the shortlist could win.

The Best Poem category contains two poems from Poetry Review (the editor is one of the judges, although there are five judges. Can't make the judging process easy, mind you), one from the London Review of Books, and one from Poetry London. I have only read Sharon Olds’s poem in the Best Poem category, but that won’t stop me having a guess. I predict Alan Jenkins will win.

I am not very good at guessing winners of anything, by the way, so don’t rush down to the bookies and place money on account of my tips.

*Edit: actually, my advice at the end was wrong. You should have gone to the bookies and invested your life-savings on my first two predictions - as John Burnside and Rachael Boast both won*

Poetry and Emotional Impact

2011-09-28T10:56:00.001+01:00

Just spotted this curious review of Lavinia Greenlaw’s new collection, The Casual Perfect, in The Independent. Its curiosity isn’t altogether the reviewer’s fault. She’s obviously been given a maximum word count and 281 words is hardly sufficient to review a poetry collection with any real insight. It may even have been edited down by someone else to emphasise an attitude that might not have been prevalent in its original draft. Maybe. It’s impossible to tell. The attitude is represented by:

"There is some emotion to be gleaned from these cool, opaque poems."

So the reviewer is analysing the poems to glean emotion from them and largely isn’t succeeding. When she does glean some emotion from a poem, she writes:

"Nicely earthy, it contrasts with the cerebral tone of much of this collection."

Now, a poem’s emotional impact is one measure of a poem’s success. But it is hardly the only measure. We can enjoy poems because they turn our brains inside out, because they transform the way we’ve always looked at something, because their words sing in a way which isn’t merely clever but somehow invigorating, because they coolly hit the nail on the head, because they connect ideas and themes in ways we’d never before imagined, and so on and so on.

I have read some of The Casual Perfect and I think “cool” and “opaque” are both fair words to describe the poems I’ve read, but their payback doesn’t depend so much on a gleaning of emotion as a surrender to and engagement with mystery. Why demand emotional impact when a poem is offering something else entirely?

On Katharine Kilalea's 'Hennecker's Ditch'

2011-09-26T08:48:00.001+01:00

One poem I didn’t write about in my review of The Best British Poetry 2011 was Hennecker’s Ditch by Katharine Kilalea, and perhaps that’s just as well, as Don Share has just posted a fascinating reading of it at the Carcanet New Poetries blog, a better way of reading it than I would have managed. The text of the poem is also at the link and, although it’s long, it’s well worth taking time to read it.

I read it a couple of times when going through the anthology and felt taken aback. I had read (indeed, had reviewed) her first collection, One Eye’d Leigh and had liked it a lot, but I didn’t remember it containing anything quite in this mould. It felt like a step forward rather than a repeat of what she’d already done. There was so much going on, so much that wasn’t obvious, that I mentally filed it under Go Back to Read Again Later. I now have done and am intrigued, as I often am, to reflect on why I can enjoy a poem when I don’t understand much of what’s actually happening in it. Each phrase is in itself entirely clear – nothing muggy or vague about them – and the syntax is relatively standard. But the poem doesn’t occupy a linear time-scheme and it took a few reads before details of the world it creates began to map themselves in my head. So what makes the poem so effective?

Partly it must be memorable lines and images (“the trees walk backwards into the dark”, “the washing machine shook so badly/ that a man asleep four floors down reached out to hold it”), partly the sound, rhythm and the music Don Share mentions. The language, with its shifting tones, is is never predictable – the first section alone contains the lyrical “pages of a book/whose words suddenly start to swim”, the informal “Wow. The rain”, the strange “Ickira trecketre stedenthal, said the train”, and the consciously poetic, “Dear Circus...the painèd months are coming for us”. Perhaps, also, it feels like I am being taken to a half-lit world and shown something beautiful, haunting, and intimate, and then I’m left there to build my associations at first hand – the dark, the many different kinds of light that emerge, the trees and coastline, the human relationship(s), the bath and water, the dog, the moon, the different winds, the bakery, the house and the surrounding houses and gardens, the curious addresses to the Circus. Some obscure poems send me to sleep. Nothing about them draws me in, but the world of Kilalea’s poem feels like a place I am happy to spend time in.

You can hear her read part of the poem here on YouTube (where it's called 'Dear Circus'). You can read the full poem online at the link above or on paper in New Poetries V or in The Best British Poetry 2011.

The Troubadour Poetry Prize 2011

2011-09-25T21:20:00.000+01:00

I thought I’d bring the Troubadour Poetry Prize to your attention, if you don’t yet know about it. The deadline is 17 October, judges are Susan Wicks and David Harsent (who both read ALL the poems: no sifters). The first prize is £2500 and there are several other prizes. Full details and entry process is at the link. The entry fee is £5/€6/$8. Your fee, of course, (as well as paying the costs of holding the competition) supports future live poetry at the Troubadour – a good cause.

Review: The Best British Poetry 2011

2011-09-22T12:55:00.000+01:00

I wasn’t sure whether I would like The Best British Poetry 2011. I know some of the poets in it and was fairly sure I would like their poems but I was more interested in what I’d think of the rest. I tended to avoid reading the British mainstream (until, of necessity, I had to engage with it through becoming Magma’s reviews editor) and much preferred to spend time with American and European poetry collections, along with a few Scottish favourites, and I had the fear that an anthology of British poems selected from magazines would contain too much bland and boring work.

I have to say that my eyes have been opened. I really enjoyed some poems in this anthology from writers I knew by name but had somehow bypassed. It’s certainly a positive introduction to contemporary writing in Britain – a far wider range of styles and schools (and both the famous and lesser known, both the established magazines and the new) than is customary in British publications. I will pay more attention in future. Poems that struck me (not counting those by my friends) included those by Emily Berry, Judy Brown, Fred D’Aguiar, Sasha Dugdale, Ian Duhig, Giles Goodland, Patrick McGuinness and Deryn Rees-Jones, and there were several others I much enjoyed. OK, there were also poems that struck me as pretty ordinary, but nowhere near as many as I had expected, and no one is ever going to like everything in such an anthology.

Fred D’Aguiar’s ‘The Rose of Toulouse’ got my attention with its opening section in which the streets are “not a scene for former slaves”:

Or their feisty descendants, wearing their life
Savings, nursing wounds from history, no track
Record in an ocean with bones for a library.

The poem is an evocation of French city life, into which is woven a subtext centring on the poet’s children and another one focusing on justice and domination in history. At the back of the anthology are 40 pages of short author biographies and a few paragraphs on the poets’ impetus for writing their poem. I noted from Fred D’Aguiar’s reflections that the poem seemed to me to be about more or less what he also thought it was about.

That wasn’t always the case. Sasha Dugdale’s ‘Shepherds’, according to its author, “is an elegy for the last dwellers on the [South] Downs, and a hymn of praise to the hills themselves.” Now that she mentions it, I do see how that makes sense. But I felt the poem centred on questions of religious faith. There’s an ambiguity at its heart – the Bible-carrying shepherds also read the earth’s Bible – the one written “in chalk, in rabbit droppings, and lady’s smock” which now has “no meaning for anyone, except the shepherds/ Who are gone.” The pastoral world of the Bible (both the literal one and the metaphorical Bible of the earth) is rendered unreadable in an urban age. That may be a statement of how the poet views the world, but the elegiac tone also suggests to me that something seems lost by this shift.

I found the variance between my own interpretations of poems and those proffered by the poets to be a source of considerable fascination. Both the writer’s and the reader’s ideas are admissible, of course, and a difference between them isn’t evidence of failure on either side. It may even point to a welcome complexity that the poem can’t be summed up in explanatory prose. Several poets expressed a discomfort about offering comment on their poem and I felt an initial scepticism at first glance, but I have been won over. It is simply interesting and doesn’t negate other readings. Now and again, I did realise that I hadn’t read the poem carefully enough and saw it with new eyes after reading the author’s thoughts. Sometimes, the comments were just a little pretentious..., but not as often as you might expect in an anthology of poets.

I am always happy when poets come across as unusual people and when Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch confessed (in her prose comment) that “lining objects up on tables has always fascinated me” and that she attended a “table etiquette course in Somerset three years ago,” I found new reason to trust her advice in her poem, ‘Table Manners’:

..........................Do not remove your shoes or
show any flesh. Tilt your soup’s light towards
her, like an invitation to swim. Sip
as though you’re working on it.

Perhaps not all of that will impress on a first date, but I hope someone puts it to the test. But remember the sting in the tail, that "cutlery is a code" and "ten to five means it's over." Don't say you haven't been warned. So, yes, there are more good things happening in British poetry than I had expected and The Best British Poetry 2011 will offer, to most readers, a number of welcome surprises and send them rounding up the back catalogue of at least a few of the featured poets.

The Best British Poetry 2011, ed Roddy Lumsden, is published by Salt, £7.99

Courtesy of Shiraz: Geoffrey Hill's Clavics - 1

2011-09-20T09:43:00.000+01:00

It’s 10pm, my wife is out being an actress, my daughter is asleep. I have settled down with my laptop, a glass of Shiraz – an inordinately large glass – and a review copy of Geoffrey Hill’s Clavics, posted to me by Enitharmon Press. The collection is described in the dust jacket as “an elegiac sequence for William Lawes, the Royalist musician, killed at the Battle of Chester.” So we’re in the 17th century during the ill-fated reign of Charles I. It isn’t the first time I’ve picked up Clavics, which consists of 32 page-long poems, each in two fetchingly-shaped sections. I’ve read poems at random off and on for some time now. I recognise that certain names, phrases, and ideas slip from one poem to another and several long, coherent, note-taking reads are no doubt necessary to review it properly, but I am not going to review it properly. I am simply going to record a few impressions and I’m going to begin with the first poem. In future posts, I plan to say more. I am intrigued, for instance, by the relationship between the two sections of each poem which sometimes seems tenuous, and this is a question which (strangely?) no previous reviewers have addressed. How can they possibly not address that?! One good thing – in the course of writing this paragraph, the Shiraz, pretty rough at first, now tastes much smoother. This has ridiculous metaphorical possibilities when it comes to discussing a Hill collection, but I will refrain.

All this talk of Shiraz etc will no doubt have got rid of the Hill acolytes who swoon theatrically at every syllable he writes. Not serious enough, y’see. There are people who just can’t fathom why readers find Hill “difficult”. They know it all, are vastly more intelligent than ...well... anyone who suggests that there might be a few complexities to overcome when reading Hill. It is reassuring when they use Hill to assert their intellectual superiority without (of course) offering us the slightest proof of their unique understanding. I always enjoy that. Hill knows very well that he is difficult and thrives on the fact. Anyway, the Shiraz is going down nicely and I feel like raising a toast to Astraea, goddess of justice for whom this world was unendurable. Perhaps that owl with the mouse in its mouth, which adorns the cover of Clavics, was one reason why Zeus placed her within a constellation in the night sky. Cheers, Astraea, wherever in Virgo you are (according to that reliable source, Wikipedia, there is also a ‘La Vida es Sueno’ reference, as one of the characters in that play takes on the name ‘Astraea’ when in court. ‘La Vida Es Sueno’ features heavily in Hill’s ‘The Orchard of Syon’). We really need you down here, by the way, Astraea. And Hill also knows it:

Bring torch for Cabbalah brand new treatise
Numerology also makes much sense,
O Astraea!

Indeed. This is how poem 1 begins, so we’re in the realm of metaphysical digging. The Cabbalah is a way of understanding everything, more or less, although it has no agreed canon and can incorporate internal contradictions with aplomb, which is extremely handy for everyone. Hill adds to the mishmash and invokes the goddess who is watching from her starry haven. I read the invocation as angry, sarcastic. As such, I’m taking a rather different view of this poem to Lachlan Mackinnon in his now infamous “sheerest twaddle” review, where Astraea represents Elizabeth I. Hill is trying his best to get to the truth, to the centre of things, but he is locked into his tradition (as we all are, whether we recognise it or not), and moving things on from it is no easy task. He is unhappy with Astraea’s chilled distance and calls her a “bitch” in his typical politically-correct way. She may have been physically exalted but, in Hill’s eyes, she has returned “rich/ To the low threshold of contemplation”, which at least has given Hill the opportunity to prove himself, as ever, the undisputed master of spitting irony (even rhyming ‘bitch’, ‘ditch’ and ‘rich’ is supremely ironic). I should mention at this point that the poems all rhyme and are technically demanding, to put it mildly – plenty of lines with two (or sometimes one) accented beats. Try the form and see how far you get! Anyway, seeing as Astraea isn’t playing her full part, we’re left with the poet/artist/composer (I presume) as:

Her servile master subsisting on scraps
Keeping station
As one pursuing ethics perhaps.

Astraea seems to function as a pitiless form of Muse here, an object of devotion who nevertheless feeds the artist only on scraps. It is a particularly religious feeling, a severe Kierkegaardian sense of the utterly transcendent God who can barely be approached, yet must be obeyed humbly by e.g. the pursuit of ethics. Time to fill up my glass, although I note there is not enough left in the bottle to fill it up more than half.

The second section of the poem riffs on the writing process, partly through the metaphor of musical notation. It can be done with “care” (like prayer) or with “flair” (which I suspect is not so good). He makes reference to musical stress marks, also surely a mischievous allusion to the curious stress marks which adorn some of his poems in other books. If these are simply flair, mere affect:

Dump my clavic books in the mire
And yes bid me strut myself off a cliff.

No, don’t do that! I quite like Poem 1 and it’s obviously been written with a great deal of care (and flair too, I think, and just as well). Some readers will be saying, “But that’s quite an ‘easy’ poem, relatively speaking.” And I agree. It is highly compressed writing, a more radical compression than most poets would employ and this, combined with the tight rhyme and accentual scheme, necessitate a degree of odd phrasing and strange syntax, which make certain sections of the poem hard to make sense of – but not impossible. Later poems do present more formidable challenges.

A Few Odds And Ends

2011-09-18T15:37:00.000+01:00

It’s been a strange few months. Not that anything obviously out of the ordinary has happened, but I’ve found myself busy at every turn. There are the usual things which make life busy, none of which are relevant to this blog, but on top of that several reviews had to be written and I found myself writing poems too. I thought I might have enough to draft a new manuscript. When I slotted them together, it turned out I had more than enough – to my considerable surprise. For some reason, I’d been feeling highly unproductive and every poem I tried to write was taking me ages to finish, but I suppose three years of writing adds up.

Then I got involved in writing a cento of a century of Scottish poetry, using 100 lines from Scottish poems, one from each of 100 poets, and fusing them together into something new. I probably don’t need to say that such an undertaking is liable to drive anyone mad. Looking back on it, it seems like I must have had a lot of fun, but I’m certain that wasn’t how I felt during the process of writing the thing.

I went to hardly anything at the Edinburgh Festival and have hardly been out anywhere since. I hardly read a blog post all summer. The poetic side of my life has been writing and revising poetry, along with a few reviews. I couldn’t think of anything to blog about, so I didn’t. Yesterday, I woke up buzzing with ideas for blog posts, so it seems a good time to start up again. Not that I have much more to say today.

It is a rainy Sunday afternoon and the forecast is for rain on each of the next five days. It is the 50th anniversary of my church and I am off to an event there tonight. I am looking forward to finding out how Kona Macphee and Sophie Cooke got on in their week in Lvov and I read a few Zbigniew Herbert poems last night in anticipation. I am listening to the Waterboys playing Yeats. I have just finished The Best British Poetry 2011 edited by Roddy Lumsden and enjoyed it – will say more later. I read the September issue of Poetry and enjoyed that too. I just wish we had a magazine of similar quality and range on this side of the Atlantic. I was pleased with the list of people elected to the Poetry Society board, and I hope they can make a difference. And I have perused a mountain of books sent for review in Magma – still trying in vain to narrow it down to 12. I could tell you what I had for breakfast but that would be pushing at the far margins of what this blog can contain.

Things That Happened When I Was In Turkey

2011-08-02T10:47:00.001+01:00

Firstly, the death of Sam Hoare, the journalist who blew the whistle on the News of the World phone hacking scandal. It appears that his death was self-inflicted, according to police reports, but I believe investigations are still going on.

Secondly, the Poetry Society EGM. I had arranged my proxy vote before I left for Turkey. Since my return, I’ve been catching up with what happened. My jaw has dropped on several occasions. In a previous post, I asked whether the lack of transparency had been caused because either:

1. The Poetry Society had something to hide
2. The Poetry Society was beyond useless at public relations
3. The situation was much worse even than it seemed, so bad that things couldn’t possibly be made public [without severe embarrassment]

It now looks as though all three of these possibilities were accurate! What has happened has been much worse that I could have believed and several questions remain unanswered. The best (and most chilling) summary I have read has been that by George Szirtes. There is a petition to reinstate Judith Palmer as Director, which I have signed. Clearly, the PS needs to get back in line with what the Arts Council expected of it. Whether it can do this with the current board over the next couple of months is open to serious doubt. Also, the question of Poetry Review and of the Editor’s line management both clearly have to be resolved without delay, but I have no confidence in the current board to deal with these matters properly.

Thirdly, the death of Amy Winehouse. I feel sadder about this than some of my friends might expect. It is, of course, the death of a young person in circumstances common to many families and every one of those is a private grief and torment. But, in a more public sense, I feel sad because I don’t think Amy had reached her peak, in contrast, say, to Kurt Cobain – I doubt Kurt could have improved on the final two Nirvana albums if he’d lived to 100. Amy’s Back to Black, on the other hand, contained a few brilliant songs, showing immense talent, but also several fillers. She might have fulfilled her potential if she hadn’t fallen into bad company, bad drugs etc. We’ll never know now.

Fourthly, Norway was all over the Turkish TV channels, as elsewhere. Watching the reports in Turkish, not understanding a word but understanding the images all too well, was a sad and sobering experience.

Meltdown (2011): Poetry Society

2011-07-08T08:54:00.004+01:00

Very funny satire on the Poetry Society's current woes. Not exactly the first attempt to do something with this film(!), but really well done.

Poetry Society: Wheelbarrow and Plums

2011-07-07T08:27:00.000+01:00

I have been taking my customary July break from blogging (is it customary? Well, if not, it should be). I guess anyone wanting to keep up with the Poetry Society story can do so elsewhere, at Baroque in Hackney and Raw Light etc. A General Meeting has been called by the Poetry Society on 22nd July at 2pm, but it’s unclear whether the agenda will address members’ concerns expressed in the requisition (which did achieve far more than the required 10% of signatories to call for an EGM). The red wheelbarrow delivering the signatures was met with a gift of plums. But any attempt to get clarification results in a reply which says more or less nothing except that an agenda for the GM will be produced next week – typical of the way the Poetry Society board have managed this situation from the beginning. They act like politicians, full of evasions and anodyne language, unwilling to provide a direct answer to anything. But, like politicians, they are dependent on an electorate...

Quick Word on Moderator Controls

2011-06-30T09:44:00.004+01:00

I’ve installed moderator controls, more as a precaution than anything else, as I’m out a lot at the moment. But I’ll continue to publish anything that isn’t nasty or libellous. Apologies to all readers for the inconvenience of comments not appearing instantly, but it’s only a temporary measure. Promise.

The Poetry Society Chaos Update

2011-06-28T10:31:00.002+01:00

Since I first posted about the Chaos at the Poetry Society three weeks ago, quite a lot has happened. Or, rather, nothing has happened. Or, I’m not really sure. Katy’s article at Baroque in Hackney sums up pretty much all anyone knows about what’s going on. Three weeks ago, I made a low level plea to the Poetry Society, which now must seem humorous in an uncomfortable kind of way:

“...it becomes important to make some kind of statement. Not a bland statement which says nothing, but a statement which accurately and as fairly as possible tells the story...”

The Poetry Society has released two statements since, one of which said “business as usual”, and another which said, “moving forward”. Three possibilities suggest themselves to me from these statements:

1. The Poetry Society has something to hide
2. The Poetry Society is beyond useless at public relations
3. The situation is much worse even than it seems, so bad that things can’t possibly be made public

It’s hard to know which to go for. Of course, all or none could be true. I am impressed with Fiona Moore’s assessment of the situation from a public relations perspective. It won’t make happy reading for the Poetry Society, who ought to start listening before it’s too late. Into the vacuum has come a great deal of speculation, culminating yesterday with an article in the Daily Telegraph, which suggested the dispute was mainly about money. This explanation may have some truth, but it doesn’t add up. The Poetry Society received an increase in its grant from the Arts Council of England. The application must have been for specific purposes and must have been in accordance with its own stated aims and objectives. If people on the board, after receiving the grant, want to spend money on something different to what they’ve just received it for, they simply can’t do it. Unless they are “reinterpreting” what the application means, when it will still have to be generally in line with what ACE understood it to mean. This all smacks of politicking behind the scenes, people with opposing visions seeking dominance. The Telegraph suggests that ACE is becoming uneasy. If so (it is a big “if”), that’s not exactly great for staff morale, given that their jobs depend on this money, but I doubt ACE would want to pull out. I imagine the silence must be due to current sensitive negotiations between ACE and the Poetry Society and between different schools of thought within the society. Apparently there is a July deadline for a report on precisely how some of the funding will be used. That document should make interesting reading!

Lemn Sissay stepped in with a blog article a few days ago. I'm sure it's written with integrity and the best of intentions, but I also think it’s fair to say that he doesn’t really present a coherent argument. The main thrust of the article is to defend Fiona Sampson, editor of Poetry Review, the magazine of the Poetry Society. He feels that FS is being stitched up by people with a vested interest in her being removed. I guess there are a number of people who would like to see her booted out. I have no view on this, as I'm not a subcriber and haven't submitted anything for years. I think Fiona Sampson has offered the magazine strengths (translated work) and weaknesses (lack of range). But the extent of Fiona Sampson’s involvement in the current disputes is impossible to determine. Lemn Sissay says she has nothing to do with it. Other people say she is central to the arguments. People argue about these things on Facebook, on blogs, on newspaper comment sections, on the basis of facts which may not be facts. An entire discourse develops around happenings which may not have happened, figures which may not tell any story let alone a whole story, personalities which may be phantoms.

Charles Boyle summed it up well when he wrote:

I have no inside info; I don’t even have gossip. But what to me is a little bit interesting is that in the absence of hard fact, the speculation that fills the vacuum can become what a thing is about and start to influence what happens next.

Very true. But speculation requires a vacuum and the Poetry Society, in my opinion, is largely to blame for creating one. Its public statements have been evasive and cagey and the resulting speculation has led to a vast number of people joining the society simply to sign a petition calling for an EGM to get full answers. Some of the questions I have seen mooted for a potential EGM don’t seem quite adequate in that they can be answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and a few monosyllabic answers won’t tell us any more than the Poetry Society’s press releases. I reckon questions need to be open enough to require a thorough explanation.

I know Kate Clanchy initiated a call for names to call an EGM (around 340 are required, I believe), but I’m unsure whether that has now been derailed or not. (Actually, it's still on track. Katy EB writes in the comments, "Kate C is definitely still collecting names; anyone who wants to be on the list should email her at kateclanchy at gmail dot com. She has a barrister advising as to process and content of a possible EGM; email her for more information"). If anyone else is leading the call with an agenda set up and specific questions on the table (as required), I don’t know who it is. But I'm sure we'll find out sooner or later...

(incidentally, I don't mind comments on this, but please keep them from being abusive to individuals. I will delete comments which contain either abuse or libellous material)

Tennyson; In Memoriam - 10

2011-06-27T08:25:00.000+01:00

Poem number 10 from In Memoriam continues the theme of the previous poem that the ship carrying Arthur Hallam’s body will make it back safely to England. Tennyson knows he would feel better if his friend were buried than if he should be lost at sea.

X

I hear the noise about thy keel;
I hear the bell struck in the night:
I see the cabin-window bright;
I see the sailor at the wheel.

Thou bring'st the sailor to his wife,
And travell'd men from foreign lands;
And letters unto trembling hands;
And, thy dark freight, a vanish'd life.

So bring him; we have idle dreams:
This look of quiet flatters thus
Our home-bred fancies. O to us,
The fools of habit, sweeter seems

To rest beneath the clover sod,
That takes the sunshine and the rains,
Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God;

Than if with thee the roaring wells
Should gulf him fathom-deep in brine;
And hands so often clasp'd in mine,
Should toss with tangle and with shells.

I don’t find this one of the stronger portions of In Memoriam, but it has its moments. The opening stanza with its repeated “I hear” and “I see” and end-stopped lines has rhetorical power and brings the scene right before the reader’s eyes and ears. The positive list in the second stanza closes with the idea that the ship is also carrying a “vanish’d life”, which is a great phrase – very moving.

I really like the third stanza. It’s not quite what I was expecting – idle dreams, home-bred fancies – a detour into the hearts and minds of those waiting for the ship, which continues in the ideas expressed in the closing stanzas. He wants Hallam to have a proper burial: the earth is fed with sunshine and rain, and the prayerful people are depicted as the hamlet where the chalice of God’s grapes is drained. There is nurture and peace compared to the “roaring wells” and “toss with tangle” of the final stanza’s sea. It may be possible to read this as a depiction of Tennyson's own emotional state. At the beginning, he's beset by anxiety, noise and turbulence, and his hope for a resting place for Hallam's body may reflect his own hope that a burial might bring about some comparable inner peace.

Tennyson; In Memoriam - 9

2011-06-26T08:39:00.001+01:00

Tennyson imagines Arthur Hallam’s remains being carried home by ship from Italy. Poem 9 of In Memoriam is a ‘prayer’ (invoking the ship) that the remains will be carried safely. The poem shifts along fairly well itself, without mishap, until the final two stanzas in which it really takes off.

IX

Fair ship, that from the Italian shore
Sailest the placid ocean-plains
With my lost Arthur's loved remains,
Spread thy full wings, and waft him o'er.

So draw him home to those that mourn
In vain; a favourable speed
Ruffle thy mirror'd mast, and lead
Thro' prosperous floods his holy urn.

All night no ruder air perplex
Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright
As our pure love, thro' early light
Shall glimmer on the dewy decks.

Sphere all your lights around, above;
Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow;
Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now,
My friend, the brother of my love;

My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widow'd race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me.

The penultimate stanza pleads the weather to be calm and still and then Tennyson uses some extraordinary language to describe loss in the context of two men whose friendship was platonic:

My friend, the brother of my love;

My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widow'd race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me.

“The brother of my love”, “My Arthur”, “my widow’d race”, and then those final comparisons to his mother and brothers: Tennyson views himself as a wife who has lost her husband, the repetition of “my” from line to line building the intensity. It still seems extraordinary 200 years later and I guess it must have seemed extraordinary at the time. I wonder, when he first wrote “till all my widow’d race be run” or "more than my brothers are to me", if he ever thought, ‘I can’t write that!’ because that’s often the moment that lifts a poem out of the ordinary and soon-to-be-forgotten. As long as the poet doesn’t score it out which I suspect often happens.

Tennyson; In Memoriam - 8

2011-06-23T22:04:00.004+01:00

Tennyson really took me by surprise in poem 8 of In Memoriam. I suspect most poets would have stopped after the third stanza feeling they’d done a decent job, but Tennyson wants more than just decent.

VIII

A happy lover who has come
To look on her that loves him well,
Who 'lights and rings the gateway bell,
And learns her gone and far from home;

He saddens, all the magic light
Dies off at once from bower and hall,
And all the place is dark, and all
The chambers emptied of delight:

So find I every pleasant spot
In which we two were wont to meet,
The field, the chamber, and the street,
For all is dark where thou art not.

Yet as that other, wandering there
In those deserted walks, may find
A flower beat with rain and wind,
Which once she foster'd up with care;

So seems it in my deep regret,
O my forsaken heart, with thee
And this poor flower of poesy
Which little cared for fades not yet.

But since it pleased a vanish'd eye,
I go to plant it on his tomb,
That if it can it there may bloom,
Or, dying, there at least may die.

The poem starts with him imagining a man visiting his lover and finding her absent. He’s very sad about this, as if all his expectations have been dashed. Her entire house, it seems, has been “emptied of delight”. Then comes the first terrific line at S3 L1:

So find I every pleasant spot

What’s good about that? Well, there’s the dramatic contrast between the lover’s temporary loss and Tennyson’s all-encompassing one, enacted in a single, simple line. And look at the rhythm! You could scan it as purely iambic, but each of the first four syllables has a heaviness about them, even the technically unstressed first and third syllables – “SO FIND/ I EVery... “ That’s the sound and rhythm of anguish.

That could have been the end of the poem at the end of that stanza: a strong expression of personal sorrow – “all is dark where thou art not.” But Tennyson isn’t content with a decent poem and he goes for broke. The action switches back to the absent woman from the first two stanzas. She is out walking and finds a flower “beat with rain and wind” she’d once taken care of. Tennyson finds in this a metaphor for how he feels about Arthur Hallam, his late friend, particularly in poetry. And the great lines mount up poem by poem:

...this poor flower of poesy
Which little cared for fades not yet.

We could stick that on our fridges or Facebook statuses and wear it as a badge of hope. But Tennyson still isn’t finished, but has saved the best lines for last. He will plant his poem-flower at Hallam’s tomb:

That if it can it there may bloom,
Or, dying, there at least may die.

Morrissey may have said that he was more Wilde than Keats or Yeats (in 'Cemetery Gates'), but he may not have been accurate in saying that and his famous lyrics from ‘There is a Light that Never Goes Out’ have at least one prototype here in Tennyson’s poem. The flower may die at his friend’s grave, which would at least be something. But, carefully placed only on the penultimate line, it also may bloom.

Tennyson; In Memoriam - 7

2011-06-22T08:18:00.001+01:00

In poem 7 from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, I’m struck as much by the skilful manipulation of rhythm and metre as of anything else. The poem has Tennyson visit his late friend Arthur’s house by night, but of course he comes away feeling only his absence, made all the more acute by the busy, unaffected universe trundling along as usual.

VII

Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasp'd no more—
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

In the first stanza, Tennyson doesn’t reveal the precise nature of his syntax, which only becomes clear by line 2 of stanza 2. Each line in S1 begins with a heavy stress – a trochaic or spondaic foot – a rhetorical device we often use unconsciously when making an address. The first line of S2 then echoes the final words of S1, “a hand”, emphasising acutely that it can no longer be clasped. Then in S2 L2, we realise for certain that he is addressing the house, asking it to “behold me”.

Just imagine if Tennyson had been writing bad free verse (hard, I know)! He might have begun:

I stand by the dark house
in the long unlovely street
at doors where my heart used to beat
quickly, waiting for a hand

that can be clasped no more.
I cannot sleep...

Many contemporary poems, even some which are published in magazines, aren’t far away from that – dull prose, and that’s only with a few changes. Am I exaggerating? I don’t think so. The basic sense and narrative is all still there, but Tennyson’s rhetorical and emotional intensity has been ripped clean away. I write mainly free verse myself, of course, and it’s not free verse that’s the problem. I’m no formalist dinosaur. It’s all about recognising how poetry works and how important style, rhythm, music, manipulation of syntax, and...well... imagination are in making a memorable poem.

Tennyson imagines he is under the house’s gaze, a poor wretch creeping to the door of absence. The first line of S3 is terrific – “He is not here; but far away”, which sounds roughly what we might expect, but the following line removes even that far-off consolation:

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again

The noise of life is far away, not Arthur Hallam. Tennyson did of course believe in an afterlife, but “far away” wasn’t far enough for that idea.

I’d probably feel the same about the ending as I did with the previous poem. How do modern readers feel about those adjectives being used to create emotional mood – “ghastly”, “bald”, “blank”? Put it this way, contemporary poetic sensibility would ask anyone producing a poem like this not to rely on them – show, don’t tell; avoid possible sentimentality. And yet, the final line is beautifully crafted. The rhythm is broken up by the two unstressed syllables at the beginning, then three stressed, one unstressed and then two stressed to finish. But yes, it can all scan as iambic tetrameter. The interrupted rhythm, the strong –b alliteration, combined with the different vowel sounds slows the pace of the line right down. It’s as heavy as the day is about to become. Form mirrors sense.

Tennyson; In Memoriam - 6

2011-06-20T10:06:00.001+01:00

In poem number 6 from In Memoriam, Tennyson’s target is the clichéd words of comfort offered by friends –“other friends remain” and “Loss is common to the race”. His rebuttal is that death being commonplace makes his loss harder, not easier. He illustrates this by various people waiting for a loved one to arrive home, who dies even as they wait. The weight of loss keeps increasing and gives the poet no sense of ease at all. In fact, the point is that his specific loss is not common – it is specific. His friend, Arthur Hallam, has died and that particular person is irreplaceable.

VI

One writes, that `Other friends remain,'
That `Loss is common to the race'—
And common is the commonplace,
And vacant chaff well meant for grain.

That loss is common would not make
My own less bitter, rather more:
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break.

O father, wheresoe'er thou be,
Who pledgest now thy gallant son;
A shot, ere half thy draught be done,
Hath still'd the life that beat from thee.

O mother, praying God will save
Thy sailor,—while thy head is bow'd,
His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud
Drops in his vast and wandering grave.

Ye know no more than I who wrought
At that last hour to please him well;
Who mused on all I had to tell,
And something written, something thought;

Expecting still his advent home;
And ever met him on his way
With wishes, thinking, `here to-day,'
Or `here to-morrow will he come.'

O somewhere, meek, unconscious dove,
That sittest ranging golden hair;
And glad to find thyself so fair,
Poor child, that waitest for thy love!

For now her father's chimney glows
In expectation of a guest;
And thinking `this will please him best,'
She takes a riband or a rose;

For he will see them on to-night;
And with the thought her colour burns;
And, having left the glass, she turns
Once more to set a ringlet right;

And, even when she turn'd, the curse
Had fallen, and her future Lord
Was drown'd in passing thro' the ford,
Or kill'd in falling from his horse.

O what to her shall be the end?
And what to me remains of good?
To her, perpetual maidenhood,
And unto me no second friend.

The biggest success of this poem is to situate death right in the middle of life. It overshadows everything in Tennyson’s world. A young woman at the mirror turns “to set a ringlet right,” to look at her best for the man she loves, a small gesture that seems insignificant, but this is the very moment in which her lover dies. This cycle is repeated constantly – the lover may have died by drowning or falling from his horse, or whatever, Tennyson satirises the idea that the specifics are irrelevant – it’s all very common, the same kind of thing happening all the time. Except that to the woman, it is anything but common.

The ending is intriguing. Tennyson asks what remains for the young woman and for the poet in his loss:

To her, perpetual maidenhood,
And unto me no second friend.

This refers back to the first line in the poem. Tennyson denies the cliché. I find it interesting to consider that it would be impossible to finish a poem in that way today. Most contemporary readers would view this as melodramatic, over-the-top, an example of exaggerated emotion – why should the maidenhood be “perpetual”? And, of course, he will make new friends! But perhaps this attitude denies the very real fears and feelings people have, feelings we’d rather dress up in more sophisticated garb. Apparently Tennyson could hardly bear to read this poem to others, as it made him too upset. I wonder if 19th century readers would have found the poem melodramatic or if they would have regarded it as nailing the emotion with complete accuracy?

Tennyson; In Memoriam - 5

2011-06-18T08:46:00.002+01:00

Well, if I was slightly underwhelmed with section 4 of In Memoriam yesterday, it’s all made up for today in section 5. In twelve lines, Tennyson gets more into a single poem than some manage in an entire collection. For anyone who thinks that 20th century theorists invented a distrust in words and their ability to convey information, this 19th century poem is for you:

V

I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

In the first stanza, the rhyme between “reveal” and “conceal” on either side of a line-break emphasises the limitations of words and, in this case, poems. At the same time, the poem virtually disproves its own thesis! Which is, perhaps, what Tennyson most hoped for.

He sees a therapeutic use for poetry (“the sad mechanic exercise”). It numbs the pain of grief. Perhaps Tennyson wrote far more than he published at this time – I’m not sure – because this poem is as far from a “mechanic exercise” as it’s possible to get. The third stanza is surprising and astonishing. He carries on the exercise, so wrapping himself in words, which are like clothes (“weeds”, not of the garden variety!) keeping cold out. And then the fantastic close:

But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

The “large” grief is himself, the one wrapped around with words. His entire being is depicted as grief-shaped (what an amazing image), although it is “given in outline and no more.” But the emotional impact of these lines is so great that we do indeed get more than an outline, more than could be humanly expressed if we could indeed see the real Tennyson going about his life before our eyes. His own doubts over the efficacy of poems to convey accurately an emotional state has become a catalyst for doing so.

True, his “measured words” conceal that real, physical sense of his being and consciousness that only he can know. But they reveal, across the centuries, something more than we could have known otherwise. Such is (great) poetry.

Tennyson; In Memoriam - 4

2011-06-17T09:33:00.002+01:00

Poem 4 of In Memoriam. Well, it’s OK, but I’m not quite as impressed with it as with the first three and, consequently, I have less to say about it. Tomorrow’s poem, however, is a cracker, so don’t give up just yet.

IV

To Sleep I give my powers away;
My will is bondsman to the dark;
I sit within a helmless bark,
And with my heart I muse and say:

O heart, how fares it with thee now,
That thou should'st fail from thy desire,
Who scarcely darest to inquire,
'What is it makes me beat so low?'

Something it is which thou hast lost,
Some pleasure from thine early years.
Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,
That grief hath shaken into frost!

Such clouds of nameless trouble cross
All night below the darken'd eyes;
With morning wakes the will, and cries,
'Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.'

Tennyson’s theme is sleep. The first two stanzas seem to connect with poem 2 about the yew tree which ends, “I seem to fail from out my blood/ And grow incorporate into thee.” In poem 4, he is sitting “within a helmless bark” and asks his heart how it feels that it “should'st fail from thy desire”. But while in poem 2 there was almost a longing for a constant raw grief, as opposed to real life’s uncertain moods, here, sleep mutes his sorrow. He can’t even quite be certain of what’s making him feel so sad. I suppose the counterpoint is that sleep offers no escape. The grief finds him even there, albeit in muted form, and he has no control over it. Morning brings full-blown sorrow, but at least it “wakes the will”. The poem suggests that sheer force of will could be what gets him through all this.

I love the line, “My will is bondsman to the dark.” And the idea that clouds are continually passing all night, somewhere between his eyes and brain, is a fantastic conception. But I found the poem less interesting than the others so far, both at the level of meaning and ideas and at the level of diction and great lines. I’m also puzzled by lines 3 and 4 of the third stanza – the grief that shakes “chilling tears” into frost (?), although I can see why breaking the vase might relieve the tension.

Tennyson; In Memoriam - 3

2011-06-16T10:30:00.001+01:00

Tennyson has just said it might be preferable to live with constant sorrow than life’s more typical unpredictability. In the third poem from In Memoriam, he more or less says the opposite which, in itself, shows how unpredictable living with grief can be.

Sorrow is personified in this poem, each line in the opening stanza is an invocation from the poet to ‘her’, and begins with a heavy rhetorical spondee:

III

O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,
O Priestess in the vaults of Death,
O sweet and bitter in a breath,
What whispers from thy lying lip?

'The stars,' she whispers, `blindly run;
A web is wov'n across the sky;
From out waste places comes a cry,
And murmurs from the dying sun:

'And all the phantom, Nature, stands—
With all the music in her tone,
A hollow echo of my own,—
A hollow form with empty hands.'

And shall I take a thing so blind,
Embrace her as my natural good;
Or crush her, like a vice of blood,
Upon the threshold of the mind?

Sorrow is ambiguous to the core – “cruel fellowship”, “Priestess...Death”, “sweet and bitter”. He has already said in the first poem that, without feeling this sorrow, his love could not have been real and passionate. But its ambiguity makes it difficult to trust and Tennyson’s mood swings against it.

Sorrow herself invokes a purposeless, blind, decaying universe, a mere “phantom” whose music is a hollow echo of Sorrow’s own and, just to rub the point home, she repeats the word “hollow” in S3 L4. The world is infused with sadness, but even it is just a ghost evidencing Sorrow’s substantive reality. I really like the third stanza here: the parallelism of the repeated “all the...” in the first two lines – encompassing everything in the universe – with “hollow” in the next two, the real state of things whatever their appearance, according to Sorrow.

Tennyson can’t embrace sorrow as a good thing in the grief process. Rather he feels he ought to crush her. Grief counsellors would screw up their faces in dismay at this poem, as those who bottle up their grief in this way are only storing up further problems for themselves, but Tennyson isn’t afraid to say the incorrect thing. Nor is he the least bit worried about contradicting himself. He describes a feeling. 'In Memoriam' isn’t a step-by-step therapy session but a poem which opens its doors even to thoughts even the poet may have preferred not to have.

The phrase “vice of blood” from the fourth stanza is striking, as if he regards sorrow as a kind of poison or infection. He won’t allow it entry but kills it off at the mind’s threshold. It does seem a curious, but interesting, way to describe his attitude. People who lament that modern poems don’t always say things straightforwardly ought to read Tennyson to see that good poetry has never stuck to the straightforward path.

Tennyson; In Memoriam - 2

2011-06-15T08:47:00.002+01:00

Poem 2 from Tennyson’s In Memoriam symbolises the yew tree as the power of death. No life-giving symbols are sufficient to block it out. Tennyson even envies its “hardihood”.

II

Old Yew, which graspest at the stones
That name the under-lying dead,
Thy fibres net the dreamless head,
Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.

The seasons bring the flower again,
And bring the firstling to the flock;
And in the dusk of thee, the clock
Beats out the little lives of men.

O, not for thee the glow, the bloom,
Who changest not in any gale,
Nor branding summer suns avail
To touch thy thousand years of gloom:

And gazing on thee, sullen tree,
Sick for thy stubborn hardihood,
I seem to fail from out my blood
And grow incorporate into thee.

The first stanza shows the stranglehold death exerts on human beings, even if this is unseen. The tree “graspest” at the stones which commit people to memory, its fibres “net”, its roots “are wrapt about” the dead below the ground. Whatever Nature does to give the appearance of hope is answered in the third line of the second stanza, “And in the dusk of thee, the clock” – the internal half-rhyme of “dusk” and “clock”, the two heaviest stresses in the line, connects them intimately, and the sole spondaic syllable in the entire stanza, “Beats out”, enacts as much as describes the process of time going past.

Nothing can alter the tree, whatever changes happen elsewhere in the world. Tennyson envies the tree this hardiness, but the final lines, if I understand them correctly, are highly double edged. The fluctuating moods of grief affect him deeply, so deeply that he longs for the tree’s resilience against everything that tries to change it. However, that existence is also unremitting gloom. Tennyson feels himself becoming like the tree, hardened and resilient, but this also condemns him to to eternal dusk.

However, yews do actually bear fruit, and some critics have asked what Tennyson can mean by “O, not for thee the glow, the bloom...” in S3 L1. The presence of fruit does seem to blow a hole in the whole idea that the yew is unchanging. On the other hand, both its leaves and fruit are highly poisonous, but that’s a slightly different point. Maybe we just need to grant Tennyson a little poetic license here...

Tennyson; In Memoriam - 1

2011-06-14T09:54:00.001+01:00

Continuing the In Memoriam series with Poem 1, which begins the first cycle – Grief (there are four ‘cycles in work: grief, hope, peace, and joy).

I held it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.

But who shall so forecast the years
And find in loss a gain to match?
Or reach a hand thro' time to catch
The far-off interest of tears?

Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown'd,
Let darkness keep her raven gloss:
Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss,
To dance with death, to beat the ground,

Than that the victor Hours should scorn
The long result of love, and boast,
‘Behold the man that loved and lost,
But all he was is overworn.'

Tennyson considers his theoretical belief that grief and hardship are character-building, that time is the great healer and we’ll see we’ve gained a great deal from our times of sorrow when we look back. In stanzas 3 and 4 he rejects that simplicity. This summary, of course, does nothing to describe the imaginative shifts and unexpected ways with which Tennyson carries out his argument.

The poem is a model of economy and image-making. Lines 3 and 4 have a graphic, painful image. Tennyson held it true (before the death of his friend):

That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.

“Stepping-stones/ of their dead selves”. What an astonishing way to put it! And I love the end of the next stanza too, the hand reaching through time to grasp the ‘benefit’ that present tears have granted. Tennyson cuts through the ‘wisdom’ of the day, and time hasn’t moved on much. Today people still console the bereaved by saying “Time is a great healer.” I have never heard anyone respond by quoting Stanza 2 of this poem, but it is worth committing to memory, just in case you ever need to use it (although probably easier in such circumstances just to nod grimly).

The third stanza begins with an entirely unexpected thought, “Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown'd”. Without such intensity of grief, love would mean nothing. They both belong together or else neither can be authentic. Again, Tennyson’s economy of phrase is striking – so much in one line. It’s simply enough expressed, but it doesn’t deal with simplicities. Rather it leads into the idea that it’s better to be “drunk with loss” than merely “overworn” through time, better to “beat the ground” than submit to love being “scorned” by the hours. Dylan Thomas must have been listening when he came to write his villanelle...

Great use of imagery, a shifting and surprising argument, economy of phrase, and a sense of emotional rawness conveyed with exquisite control: all those combine to make this poem a stand-out.

Tennyson; In Memoriam - Prelude

2011-06-13T09:20:00.001+01:00

In Memoriam recounts the effect on Tennyson of the death of Arthur Hallam, his closest friend. It’s no simple recounting of times spent together, but a splintering of the mind and heart, revealing the poet’s experience of loss and how he deals with it. The work contains 131 poems, with a prelude and epilogue, all in the same form – iambic tetrameter quatrains with a rhyme scheme of ABBA. Here’s the prelude:

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;

Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
Thou madest man, he knows not why,
He thinks he was not made to die;
And thou hast made him: thou art just.

Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood, thou.
Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine.

Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see
And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.

Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,

But vaster. We are fools and slight;
We mock thee when we do not fear:
But help thy foolish ones to bear;
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light.

Forgive what seem'd my sin in me;
What seem'd my worth since I began;
For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee.

Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved.

Forgive these wild and wandering cries,
Confusions of a wasted youth;
Forgive them where they fail in truth,
And in thy wisdom make me wise.

I’m just going to pick out a few things that strike me.

In the second and third stanzas, there’s constant repetition of the word “made” and its variants, emphasising how human beings stand before God. But repetition carries through the poem: “our wills are ours” in S4, “have their day” in S5, the word “know” throughout the poem, “help...to bear” in S8, and various other word and phrases. It’s a rhetorical device used for purposes of argument, but also purposes of lyricism. It brings both passion and order to the poem and neither one cancels out the other, which is quite an achievement. I like the way he parallels faith and knowledge, knowledge and reverence in stanzas 6 and 7. Together, he hears them as making “one music”.

Memorable lines, for me, include, “Our wills are ours, we know not how;/ Our wills are ours, to make them thine” from S4 - wonderful, aphoristic parallelism, and such an economic way of saying it. The most heartbreaking lines are from the penultimate stanza, “I trust he lives in thee, and there/ I find him worthier to be loved.” Yet, he is so overwhelmingly absent, but Tennyson isn’t glossing over that absence in sentiment. He’s just asked God to forgive his grief “for one removed”, so the lines reveal the intense pain of loss and separation.

The emotional centre of the poem comes in stanzas 7 and 8. It’s the one occasion of enjambment (a line running on) from one stanza to another. In fact, there is very little enjambment even from line to line in this poem – most lines are self-contained, so the heavy enjambment of, “May make one music as before,// But vaster”, stands out all the more. You can’t read “But vaster” without a long pause, and indeed the long sound of the syllable “-vast” draws the phrase out even more. The phrase looks longingly towards a new reality, in which grief, loss, faith and knowledge become reconciled. Until then, with struggling but determined faith, Tennyson is left with his “wild and wandering cries,/ Confusions of a wasted youth.”

Anyone for Tennyson?

2011-06-10T09:45:00.000+01:00

Every so often I feel the need to do something completely uncommercial on this blog and write about poetry I feel unaccountably interested in, the more unhip the better. This is fuelled by comments I sometimes read from other poets and performance artists who imagine they are being ‘dangerous’ or ‘cutting edge’ by saying things like, “Forget all that Milton/Wordsworth/Shelley crap with all their rhymes and metre and rules. X [Insert name of contemporary poet] is where it’s at!” Anyone who has read a literary biography of Milton etc will know what ‘danger’ and ‘cutting edge’ means and they usually put our contemporaries well in the shade. And as for rules, these guys twisted them out of shape and reinvented them. They aren’t rules anyway, but form, and the only poets who don’t employ form, including those who write free verse, are those who don’t know what they’re doing and ought to find out.

Anyway, I’m going to write some posts over the next while on Tennyson’s In Memoriam. I’m not an academic and, for anyone wanting an academic analysis of the poem for exams etc, you won’t find much to help you. I’ll be responding to the poem as a reader and as a writer. I won’t cover the whole poem and will stop when I feel like doing so. I hope some readers of this blog will join me.

Chaos at the Poetry Society

2011-06-07T22:12:00.004+01:00

I’ve been following the news from the Poetry Society, the little that has emerged in the past couple of weeks, with a degree of confusion. I’m not a member and I don’t suppose what happens makes any difference to me personally, but it nevertheless is becoming a genuine concern.

A week or two ago, the director of the Poetry Society, Judith Palmer, resigned. The story I heard was that she and some members of the board were pulling in different directions as regards administrative structure. This didn’t quite ring true. Directors don’t resign just because of disagreements over structure. But the board and staff were asked to observe confidentiality and so little accurate news emerged.

I do see the point in this, unlike some others who want everything aired in public. People on a board have to feel secure in speaking their mind on difficult issues while knowing what they say in private isn't going to be broadcast all over Facebook ten minutes later. But secrecy only works if nothing gets out. The minute people begin to leak hints and whisper slanted stories and Facebook threads become viral and rumours of rumours spread by word of mouth, email and on social networking sites, it becomes important to make some kind of statement. Not a bland statement which says nothing, but a statement which accurately and as fairly as possible tells the story, without attributing private opinions.

If that doesn’t happen, you get stories like this one from the Evening Standard appearing. It sounds bad. It makes accusations that the board (and one person in particular) wanted to change the Poetry Society’s focus. If this is true, I imagine it will go down extremely badly with the rank and file members of the society. The article also carries a call from an unnamed source for an EGM to ask for the board’s resignation.

The only problem is that this story comes from the Evening Standard. It may be true, it may not be true. It may be sensationalising gossip, it may be bitterness. It may have hit the nail on the head or it may be someone throwing a few darts and missing the board (apologies for the pun) by miles. Who knows? I’m only amazed that so many intelligent people on Facebook seem ready and willing to trust a British rag without question!

On the other hand, this does once again reveal clearly the urgent need for an accurate and fair statement on the situation from the Poetry Society, with input from the factions on both sides. If a statement doesn’t come, then members and interested onlookers can form their opinions only by what they read in the tabloids and on Facebook. They have nothing else to go on, and it makes the Poetry Society look as if they are being secretive, doing something improper, and adds fuel to the fire this newspaper article is obviously delighted to fan.

Lachlan Mackinnon on Geoffrey Hill's Clavics

2011-06-05T21:11:00.004+01:00

There’s been a fair bit of talk concerning Lachlan Mackinnon’s review of Geoffrey Hill’s Clavics in The Independent. Obviously, people disagree over whether his dismissal of the work is justified or not but discussions have focused more on the nature of reviewing itself.

It is true that most broadsheet critical reviews over the past year or two have seemed, well, rather uncritical. Uncritical to the extent that I have wondered what has been going on. This review is the complete opposite of that anodyne tendency, but I disagree with those who suggest it represents a much-needed kick against one of the big establishment names. Hill is absolutely not establishment. He belongs to no school except his own and has pretty much nothing in common with most of the big names in British poetry at the moment.

Nor do I really accept the idea that, just because someone is a big name, they deserve to be taken down a peg or two and given a good trashing every so often. That’s only true if they write a bad book but, sometimes, I get the impression that disgruntled reviewers make a decision to write a negative review before they’ve read a word of the book at hand – either due to peer rivalry/enmity or because they want to draw attention to themselves.

I’m not suggesting that’s true in the case of Mackinnon on Clavics, incidentally. I think it’s a fair review in that he makes his points and backs them up with evidence from the text, and I doubt there’s any underlying personal agenda. There is of course an agenda in the battle for Hill’s reputation. Hill has a massive Collected Poems coming out in the next year or two. It’s what he will be judged on – the early stuff nearly everyone (however grudgingly) agrees is significant and perhaps great, and the later stuff which has so divided critics and readers. Many believe Hill to be the greatest living poet. Others, even those who loved his earlier work, have been driven to distraction by the obscurity (note, I don’t use the words ‘difficulty’ or ‘density’ which could also apply to his earlier work) of the later material. There’s little middle ground in this debate. Hill’s later work is either “the sheerest twaddle” (Mackinnon) or further evidence that he is the “greatest living English poet” (Michael Dirda). In this connection, I’m intrigued by Liam Guilar’s question:

...Can a poet reach a point of eminence where what they write is no longer important because there are enough people ready to find value in whatever they write?

I think the second half of that sentence rings true in many cases, but I haven’t yet read Clavics to know whether the whole question ought to be asked of Hill’s admirers.

I doubt the review marks any real change in the way the broadsheets deal with poetry. They tend to review well known names from the major trade presses and use other well known names from the same major trade presses (often good friends of the writers under review, which is ridiculous!) to write the reviews. The way reviews are conducted in those venues certainly helps with the marketing of books more than the advance of genuine and rigorous critical discourse in this country, and it disappoints me (at times, it enrages me) that reviews have become an arm of the big publishing houses' publicity machines rather than independent evaluations.

Tweet Your Questions to Magma Poetry

2011-06-03T07:05:00.000+01:00

For those of you who use Twitter, the editor of Magma 49, Julia Bird, will be answering your questions for the magazine’s first Online Meet-the-Editors Q&A session. You can tweet questions anytime, but most will be answered today (Friday) from 1pm British Summer Time (12 noon GMT) for one hour. Full details can be found at the Magma blog.

Scottish Poetry Library Book Sale

2011-05-28T08:56:00.002+01:00

Earlier this week, I managed to make a quick trip to the Scottish Poetry Library. I had a couple of books I needed to return. On my arrival, I discovered they were having a book sale, boxes packed with books, many of them costing only 50p. I could have gone away with scores more volumes, had my own finances been in a healthier state, but I exercised a degree of self-control. Here’s what I did buy:

The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays – W.H. Auden (1st edition hardback, Random House 1962)
The Triumph of Love – Geoffrey Hill (Penguin 1998)
Collected Poems – Les Murray (Carcanet 1998)
Lord Weary’s Castle & The Mills of the Kavanaughs – Robert Lowell (Meridian 1961)
The Dolphin – Robert Lowell (Faber hardback, 1973)
Last Poems – James Schuyler (Slow Dancer 1999), with afterword by Lee Harwood
The Good Neighbour – John Burnside (Cape 2005)

All that cost £11 (and the Auden itself was £5 of it). I see the SPL are going to be clearing away the sale ‘next week’. When next week, I’m not sure, but I’d advise poetry readers anywhere near Edinburgh to get down there as soon as possible (the library is closed on Monday, mind you). I even spotted a hardback copy of The Opposite of Cabbage in the sale – for £5!

Ryan Giggs, Imogen Thomas, and Press Freedom

2011-05-24T09:52:00.002+01:00

I’ve been following the Ryan Giggs/Imogen Thomas story without much interest in either of them, but with a real interest in the issue of superinjunctions and press freedom. Some people have positioned themselves as defenders of free speech, complaining bitterly about the gagging orders and demanding that the press should be able to print what they like about whomever they like. I take the opposite view, but with a twist.

I was disappointed that the superinjunction taken out by Giggs didn’t work, but I feel that Thomas should have been allowed one as well. They should be cheap, in fact they should be free. If they had been, the story wouldn’t have come to anyone’s attention and we would have been spared reading about it. I support free superinjunctions, but with one condition – that the media are not allowed to feature anything ever again about those who ask for one, except for stories with material connection to their profession.

Just think, we’d never have to read any story ever again about Imogen Thomas, although magazines would be able to print pics from her modelling work – a girl’s got to make a living after all. The same with Giggs – no stories about affairs, only those about football. Just think – if Katie Price, Paris Hilton, Kerry Katona or any Big Brother/X Factor-loser ‘celebrity’ had to resort to a injunction, under my proposals, we’d never hear anything from them ever again! Max Clifford, (inevitably) Thomas's publicist, is arguing that superinjunctions should be removed so that newspapers can print more of these stories. No, let's have less. In fact, let's have none. Let's put Clifford and his like out of business for good!

If my proposals are accepted, think how little celebrity gossip there would be. People would be taking out injunctions all over the place to protect themselves from damaging revelations about their private lives but, afterwards, the papers couldn’t print stories on their inane opinions, their nights out at society parties, the people they’re seen with etc. All those horrible celebrity gossip rags would go out of business overnight, the newspapers would have to print er... news, and the TV companies wouldn’t be allowed to follow people around with a camera 24 hours a day.

Some people might miss this for a few weeks. There might be withdrawal symptoms, but we’d all end up far happier as a result – of that, I’m confident.

As for press freedom? Well, the press has enormous power and they often use their freedom to curtail the freedoms of others, to destroy lives - often unnecessarily – to publish highly slanted political opinion masquerading as news, and to print stuff simply to make a great deal of money for themselves, at the cost of not printing stuff that actually matters.

We need to preserve a lack of interference/censorship from politicians etc. That’s what matters as far as freedom of the press goes. The media have enormous freedom to publish what they want in the UK and they choose to serve up a constant diet of inane celebrity gossip. That choice has enormous impact on our society – its awareness, intelligence, and ability to make coherent choices. Other people do their jobs according to rules and regulations and I don't see why journalists should expect themselves to be some kind of hallowed exception. A celebrity news black-out might lose them some sales, at least for a while, but they’d be able to use their massive freedom to print other stuff, stuff that really counts.

Parkway by Mirabeau

2011-05-23T12:28:00.001+01:00

Fantastic stuff, this. Featuring poet, Richard Price, on spoken vocals. The lyrics are from a poem of the same name from his last collection, Rays. Great guitar playing too and the woman singer's voice is gorgeous. It's on the band's current album, Golden Key.

My Reading at Keele University

2011-05-22T08:39:00.000+01:00

I said I’d blog about my reading at Keele University, and it’s taken me ages to get round to it, due to external factors rather than anything about the reading itself. Keele takes a bit of getting to. Train from Edinburgh to Manchester, train from Manchester to Stoke-on-Trent (there was an 8 minute changeover but, luckily, the trains all ran on time), and then taxi from Stoke to Keele University.

I had wondered about the taxi. Surely there were buses to Keele? Well, there may have been, but I would never have known where to get off or how to find anything. From the taxi window, Keele seems to consist of an industrial estate and a massive, modern university campus, including accommodation. It’s unlike anywhere I’ve ever been before. Office and seminar buildings appear from all sides, at all angles. There are plenty of signposts, and just as well.

I met up with James Sheard and two other guys from the Creative Writing and English departments and we went to a bar. The weather was pleasant so we sat on tables outside with our pints – all very nice. Then it was time for the reading, which took place in a seminar room – small and intimate. The audience provided the atmosphere, and they really did seem like a good, friendly bunch of people. Most were Creative Writing and English students and staff. The reading was in two halves. In the first half, I read from The Opposite of Cabbage and read all new material in the second half. It seemed to go down well, and I even sold a decent number of books. Afterwards, it was back to the bar again for more conversation before grabbing something to eat at Jim’s house at around 11pm.

I wish I had some entertaining travel stories for you. Normally, I end up in a carriage where a fight breaks out, or people have loud, astonishing dialogues that are stranger than fiction. But these trains ran on time and without incident. I am thankful for that really.

Harold Camping and the Non-Rapture

2011-05-21T08:40:00.000+01:00

Apparently, a few people in California have been saying that the world is going to end today. Why this should be a source of endless chatter on Facebook and other social networking sites is beyond me. After all, if I said that the world was going to end next week and produced a bizarre calculation based on various biblical texts to prove it (easy enough to do, believe me), my friends might have their concerns for me and my employers might perform some kind of sanity assessment, but no one else would pay a blind bit of notice. So why all the attention for Harold Camping, a man who has already got the rapture date wrong once (he last predicted it would come in 1994)?

Apparently he runs a radio station, which reaches millions of people. He has also spent more than $100 million on an advertising campaign, warning people that the end is nigh. When you put that much money where your mouth is, I suppose people do take notice, if only to throw stones. Money gets attention.

One item of false information I’d like to correct is that Camping has predicted that Christians will all rise to be with God on this date, about 200 million throughout the world. In fact, Camping has condemned all mainline Christian churches and all who attend them as apostate. He doesn’t accept that the vast majority of Christians are true believers at all and the number of people he expects to rise is very small indeed. He has nothing to do with mainstream Christianity. In fact, he is hostile towards it.

He has achieved massive publicity for his campaign. I wonder what the fall-out will be: those mixed-up people who have fallen under his influence who now find themselves alive and well after his latest staged “rapture”. The reaction of some has been to laugh at them. I'm not laughing...

Review of Claire Askew's 'The Mermaid & the Sailors'

2011-05-18T07:32:00.001+01:00

I’ve read through Claire Askew’s first pamphlet, ‘The Mermaid & the Sailors’ and enjoyed it. I know Claire and (disclaimer time) wouldn't have written anything had I not liked the pamphlet. But, seeing as I did, I will try to bring some kind of critical discpline to the table. Claire has a good ear for sound and rhythm and her writing is noticeably tighter than when I first came across her poems a few years ago. There are certain points where it really soars, such as in ‘Moloch’, a poem in which a father has taught his offspring how to make a fire:

...It was what this town worked for –
the men up at dawn, crawling
into the lit-up earth like colourful bugs.

It’s a mining town and the depiction of the men as insects, however colourful, is painfully apt given what was to befall British mining communities later on. Good writing, but it’s in the second and final stanza that the poem lifts full off the ground. The son/daughter remembers the father’s instructions and begins making the fire with newspaper, kindling etc, and then:

Finally, the few ancient apples of coal –
its cold choke the thing
that would cripple this town, given time.
And the first thought of heat would occur
to the grate, as the first flame
ghosted up out of the pile.

The title poem is very strong, with its drunken men (‘sailors’, metaphorically) spinning their tales to the narrator at the bar, “hooked by my red hair,/ swarming like fish/ to a bright fly”, which put me in mind (in a good way) of Sylvia Plath’s “Out of the ash/ I rise with my red hair/ And I eat men like air” (from ‘Lady Lazarus’).

There are also intriguing connections between poems – images of fire and fish keep surfacing. In fact, steam, smoke and fire all rise both literally and metaphorically in several poems and men who’ve “dived right in” eventually “come up sparkling,/ wheezing, waiting to be saved.” (‘The Mermaid and the Sailors’).

Negatives? A villanelle-type-thing tries hard to take on a big subject and doesn’t get anywhere with it. ‘Visiting Nannie Gray’ is strong (and indeed won a prize), but starts off with the dull, “We go on Sundays to make her tea”, when it could have begun with what immediately follows, “I’ve known her years, but every week...”, a far more interesting lead-in! A few poems are well written but don’t get under the skin in the manner of ‘Moloch’ and others (but at least there are others, which isn’t always the case with poetry collections). These blips are more than made up for by a highly imaginative three-part poem on ‘UFOlogists’, a list of place names which, for whatever reason, I liked a lot (‘Fell’), and an unexpectedly fine sestina, ‘Dream Lover’:

He’d know how to hot-wire a Ferrari in the dark,
eyes closed. He’d smell like kerosene and a quiet road at night,
and touch my face as if I’d made him blind.

Well, OK, I’m not certain that the eyes need to be closed in the dark, but I love the way he can smell both like kerosene and like a quiet road at night, and the third line is a great image, combining tenderness and wild passion in one vivid, economic sweep.

(The Mermaid & the Sailors is available from Red Squirrel Press for £4)

Eurovision 2011

2011-05-14T22:40:00.000+01:00

I usually blog about Eurovision (last year, I was on a 6-month blog break), as you can see from a search of this blog, but tonight my daughter was appearing in a theatrical production of The Little Mermaid and I was out watching her dance around the stage. So I’ve missed Eurovision and the blog-as-it-happens thing will have to wait until next year. They must be onto the voting by now.

I’ve glanced at Facebook and everyone seems to be backing different countries. No one has mentioned the UK entry which I believe was by the band Blue, who I seem to remember being a boy band about 15 years ago or so. So now a dad band? What a bizarre idea... But not as bad as Ireland who are represented by the truly awful Jedward. The Moldovans apparently had cones on their heads and, for that, they probably deserve to win.

No, Poetry Is Not The New Rock'n'Roll

2011-05-14T09:35:00.002+01:00

It is about time I got my blogging in order and started to write something at least semi-regularly again. I haven’t felt much inspiring me to write prose recently (although I have been writing poetry), but I always feel that actually doing something germinates further creativity.

Also, it’s about time I wrote something about my mini-tour with Andrew Philip through Cambridge, Norwich and London, and my near-secret gig at Keele University. While I’m tempted to suggest there was something rock’n’roll about it (it was a tour, after all), I’m more thinking of my own experience of the rock’n’roll lifestyle than the universally accepted one of drugs, sex and other hedonisms. My own musical career took in the sights of tiny bars, mainly around Glasgow and Edinburgh but occasionally further afield (one memorable night of delightful hostility in Cumbernauld, for example), where we’d play before a mostly bemused ‘crowd’ for a while and then have to lug our own equipment – amps PAs, drum-kit and all – home to our tiny rooms.

Poetry is a little better than that. There are no drum-kits involved and people are only there because they’ve chosen to come, not because they wanted to get quietly plastered in their favourite bar and have instead been interrupted by a bunch of guys howling over a hail of distorted indie guitars. But the very fact that people have come willingly, and have often paid for the privilege, increases the pressure to appeal. With a band, you can always drown out negative energy by sheer force of volume. A poet doesn’t stand a chance.

Not that either Andy or myself had to contend with stage invasions or anything like it. This, to an extent, is disappointing, but it shows how little poetry resembles real rock'n'roll, and maybe just as well. You can read Andy’s commentary on the tour here (1) and here(2) and here (3), and I’ll try not to repeat much from his version. We began at Cambridge with CB1, a well established event with a fine programme, organised by a flawlessly efficient committee (or it so it seemed to me), in The Punter, an aptly named venue. The audience was generously attentive, the open mic before our sets was good, and we both sold a fair number of books, which doesn’t always happen at readings. Andy read some of his poems off-by-heart, which worked well. If I could be bothered to learn my own poems, I'd do the same, but I doubt it will ever happen. I read some poems from the book and some new ones. It all went well.

We then did a lunchtime reading with Josh Jones at Norwich in the back room of a bar, The Birdcage, dominated by a large mirrorball. The women’s toilets were at the back of the room and anyone with needs from the main bar had to walk right between the audience and performers to get there, which I presume was a terrifying experience for anyone who had to go. Two old ladies were sitting in the bar and Josh asked them if they wanted to come to the reading. “No, we don’t like poetry,” they said, although one of them did visit the toilet and may have had to suffer a line or two. Of course, the readings again went well, and again we sold books – thank you, kind people.

In London, we found this little South American carry-out place near The Wheatsheaf (the reading venue), where I had the best tortilla I have ever tasted in my life – chicken, avocado and other veg, and a fantastic sauce. All for a fiver, too, with freshly squeezed orange juice. Wish I could remember the name of the place, so that I could recommend it. At the reading Simon Barraclough was such a fine MC! I should have taken notes on how to MC a poetry reading properly. Great to meet Liane Strauss and hear her read mainly from her recent Salt book, Leaving Eden, and also a fab, fun poem “We’re all fine” from a new anthology called The Art of Wiring, which I presume is available from Simon (?).

I’ll have to leave the Keele reading for a separate post, as I’ve run out of time, but I do reflect on how easy it would be to turn into an alcoholic if you were doing this all the time, rushing from gig to gig, festival to festival. You’d either have to subsist on a nightly diet of orange juice and cola (which, I suppose, could be as unhealthy as excess alcohol in the long run), make a decision to return home immediately after each reading without talking to anyone beyond the usual thank yous, or else make a decision not to live for very long. However, a three-date tour over two days was a great experience, and I look forward to repeating it. I’d love to do a short tour of Ireland in 2012.

Why the Liberal Democrats Got a Drubbing at the Elections 2011

2011-05-06T16:04:00.000+01:00

Nick Clegg, apparently, has said that the Lib Dems have been punished at the polls because they are bearing “the brunt of the blame” for the coalition spending cuts.

Nick, that’s bullshit. Let’s get this straight, OK. You are not being blamed directly for spending cuts. What voters have against you and your party is that you didn’t stand up for your principles. You broke promises and sold things you were supposed to hold dear down the river for a sniff at power.

Someone said to me that, at the British elections of 2010, the Lib Dems were stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they hadn’t gone into coalition with the Tories, people would have blamed them for the lack of a stable Government in a time of crisis. So they went in, hoping to get AV and maybe a few more concessions. They had lost seats, after all, and weren’t in a strong bargaining position.

Well, yes. But going into the coalition has lost them all respect, especially among members of their own party, most of whom are extremely hostile to Tory policies. That’s not easily recoverable either. If they had forced a new election by not offering stable coalition, they may have suffered a short-term backlash, inspired by the right-wing press. But people would have remembered their principled stand, and that goes a long way in politics these days. I guess they would have ended up stronger as a result. Not any more.

My feeling is that Clegg should resign from the Government along with all the other Lib Dem Cabinet members. It would be damage limitation, too little too late, but late is better than never. At least it would be better for them, as well as for the country...

The Scottish Election 2011: Edinburgh West

2011-05-03T10:29:00.004+01:00

Has it really been a month since I last blogged? It would appear so. I really ought to say something about my reading tour south (for two days) with Andrew Philip, but that will have to wait until tomorrow, at least.

On Thursday, there are elections for the Scottish parliament. My constituency, Edinburgh West, is normally a safe Lib Dem seat, one in which no one would seriously expect an upset. But these are not ordinary times. I was surprised to get a letter posted by hand through my letterbox this morning – a handwritten envelope with my name on it. Inside was a letter from my Lib Dem MSP, Margaret Smith, asking for my vote.

The letter suggests that the key challenge in Edinburgh West comes from Labour. The Conservatives can’t win, she says, and many people are backing the Lib Dems to stop Labour from winning the seat. So the idea of the letter, it appears to me, is to persuade Conservative voters to vote Lib Dem to keep Labour out.

But wait a minute! The results of the last election tell a different story. The Lib Dems won with a handsome majority. But in second place were the SNP, not Labour! It seems obvious to me that the SNP are the main challengers in Edinburgh West and that this letter shows how desperate the Lib Dems are. They do face annihilation in Scotland, and many previous Lib Dems have switched to the SNP since the Lib Dems’ betrayal of voters in Westminster, entering into a coalition with the Conservatives.

So the tactic of the letter is to presume people aren’t going to check the result of the last election and will assume that the SNP aren’t in the picture for Edinburgh West. Conservatives reading the letter might vote Lib Dem to keep Labour out, and tactical voters might vote Labour if they are too lazy to have done their research.

The letter is a clever tactic, but... it doesn’t seem quite right to me. It seems to me like the kind of thing Nick Clegg would do, the kind of thing that’s going to see the Lib Dems wiped out in this election. I hope voters in Edinburgh West come to a similar conclusion.

***Edit: and indeed they have! The SNP have taken the seat from the Lib Dems. I must admit, even I am just a little surprised, but it goes to show - if you treat the electorate like idiots, as people who are too stupid to check the implications you make to them in a letter, they will treat you as you deserve.

New Poetry Anthology

2011-04-01T10:24:00.006+01:00

Breaking News. The Government have announced that, as part of their ongoing commitment to literature and the arts, a new anthology called 'Undersize Sock Poems' has been produced for compulsory daily use in all schools and universities, featuring poetry written by current Cabinet ministers. Each poem is accompanied by a short paragraph of explanation. Kate Middleton writes in her specially commissioned introduction, “We want to get away from elitist poetry that only rich, privileged people – y’know, the corduroyed luvvies – can understand. We’ve included explanations so that no one, not even council house dwellers and other minority groups, will feel excluded.” According to a parliamentary spokesman, “Some of the poems are juvenilia, written as school assignments or, in Jeremy *unt’s case, when he was suffering from a curious bout of Reverse Tourette’s Syndrome, but others are far more recent and will shed light on how coalition brains work.”

Prime Minister David Cameron’s poem is called ‘Last Night I Dreamt that Somebody Loved Me’ and although all the words are the same as The Smiths’ song of the same name, the emphasis is different and ‘somebody’ is written (and sung on the accompanying DVD) in italics. “Basically, we all want poetry we can relate to and we can all replace that ‘somebody’ with our own name,” writes Cameron. “I want this anthology to be firmly democratic.”

Other ministers featured include Nick Clegg (‘Elegy for a Dead Duck’), Vince Cable (‘Would I Lie to You?’), Theresa May (‘God bless Theresa. She lived like a rat...’), Michael Gove (‘No Ideas About the Thing’), George Osborne (‘Send in the Clowns’) and Ian Duncan Smith (‘Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?’).

Proceedings from the anthology will be split between two charities. A proportion of the money will fund a new scheme, at a cost of £120,000, to allow poets to say they are published by Faber when they are in fact posting work to an unsearchable page on the Internet, and the rest will commission some random lottery winner to write a poem titled ‘Kate and Wills from My Perspective’, which will be read on royal wedding day from an exclusive soapbox erected for the occasion at the top of Ben Nevis.

Poetry, Criticism, and Moral Values

2011-03-29T11:55:00.001+01:00

On my Facebook wall (for those of you who can see it) at the moment, there’s a very interesting discussion on a set of reviews and, by extension, on the nature of reviewing generally and, extending further from that, on the state of UK poetry today.

One of the most interesting points is how reviewers tend not to question a poem’s moral values and, instead, examine its technique, narrative and subject matter. But the moral outlook on the world (or lack of it) exhibited by a poetry collection is obviously an important part of what it does. One commenter suggests that critics maybe lack the confidence –or ability – to look at such issues. Or perhaps it’s because the current values of our society say that all moral truths are relative, and there is heavy pressure on critics to reflect only on how poems say what they say, but not on what they are saying, the values they espouse behind their narrative and subject matter.

Critics and reviewers aren’t moral censors. Poets have to be free to express the unpalatable, the difficult and offensive, without being censored. But if they do, they ought to expect critical reaction, some of it hostile, rather than silence and a quiet sidestep into technical considerations. Reaction is surely welcome or they wouldn’t have published the poems in the first place.

Report from the StAnza Poetry Festival 2011 - Part 3

2011-03-28T11:07:00.002+01:00

I guess you’d need to pace yourself if you were the kind of person who gets invited to all the literary festivals to do readings, workshops, masterclasses and panels. Every day there are stimulating events, a constant melee of people to meet, and a mountain of food and alcohol to consume to all hours. It must become routine if you travel from one to another every week or two, and you’d need a strategy to survive. I know one reader at StAnza said that he got frustrated flying into festivals, reading and signing, and then flying out again only a few hours later. But the alternative would mean hardly seeing his family and friends and probably becoming massively overweight and alcoholic.

So, there is at least one advantage of not being a habitual invitee on the festival circuit, or that’s what I tell myself. When I make my annual Spring pilgrimage to StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival, I can have a good time knowing that normal life will resume a few days later with its customary vengeance. I made it to bed by 1am on the Friday evening, but I saw 2am on both the Saturday and Sunday. StAnza has a justified reputation as the ‘friendly festival’ and it is this buzz which makes it special, even if it seems rather less buzzy at 7.15am in a B&B with light streaming through the pale curtains.

My highlights were:

a) a panel event about the relationship between poetry and history, which might not sound immediately gripping, but the panel (Anna Woodford, Kevin Young, Hugh McMillan and Anna Robinson) got a great discussion going on the fluid relationship between truth and lies, imagination and history, witness and satire – all themes which are central to my own second collection-in-progress, so I was listening carefully.

b) Selima Hill and Philip Gross – Philip Gross read well. He has great ability to develop ideas and images throughout a poem and keep it interesting and surprising without resorting to absurdity or bizarre tangents (some poets do absurdity and tangents well, of course, but I guess it’s become no more than a technique for others). I felt his introductions were too long and covered matters best left to the poems themselves, but it was still a fine reading. Selima Hill polarised people. I am definitely a fan. Her poetry is entirely singular and so was her reading – from the four and a half minutes of awkward shuffling about preceding her first words, to the constant refrain of “I just want to go home” every few poems (my interpretation of this was that in a way she did and in another way she actually didn’t, but saying it was a help to her – all to do with Asperger Syndrome), to the idiot heckler who tried to derail her halfway through (and didn’t succeed), she crafted an experience as astonishingly weird as her poems. As someone remarked to me afterwards, “Whatever people thought of that reading, they’re all talking about it and will never forget it.” No doubt about that!

c) Helena Nelson & Durs Grunbein – Nell read very well, poems mainly from her new collection Plot and Counter-Plot. If people had only heard her read the light verse from her pamphlets before, some of these poems would have come as a surprise. Then came Grunbein, one of Germany’s top poets, with translations by Michael Hofmann (from Ashes for Breakfast) read by Don Paterson. It’s really good stuff and it was great to hear the sound of the poems in the original German, even though I don’t speak the language.

d) Antonella Anedda & Carrie Etter – I thought Italian poet, Antonella Anedda, was terrific and I traded one of her books (in Italian) for my own collection (she laughed when she saw my poem featuring Berlusconi). I might try to translate some of her poems, just for fun in the first instance to see how they turn out. I hadn’t met Carrie before despite ‘knowing’ her online for a while, but I wasn’t surprised that her reading was lively and diverse – she read from The Tethers and from Diving for Starters. What was interesting is that these poems, on the page, seem to come from different ends of the poetic spectrum, but they fused together for the reading so that it wasn’t always obvious which book she was reading from.

e) The Poets Market – I was on the Magma stall for four hours on the Saturday afternoon. I met loads of people and sold a decent number of copies of the magazine. I also managed to have a quick look at some of the other stalls. There were few quiet moments, which was all to the good and the time shot by.

f) Kevin Williamson – Kevin recited/performed poems which Robert Burns had written anonymously or had been lost from his official writings for one reason or another. They were often political and, with Kevin’s delivery, sounded highly contemporary. He may be doing a complete show of these at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year and I’d recommend going along.

StAnza Poetry Festival 2011, Part 2

2011-03-21T18:33:00.004Z

I’m back from StAnza and, of course, had a good time. I’ll say more soon, but I have a work meeting tonight and need to get ready for it. But here is a list of books/pamphlets I bought, swopped for, or was given:

Velazquez's Riddle - Lyn Moir (Calder Wood)
Cloud Pibroch – James McGonigal (Mariscat)
Notti di Pace Occidentale – Antonella Anedda (Donzelli Poesia)
Five Days – Hugh McMillan (Roncadora)
The Thing to Do when You Are Not in Love – Steve Ronnie (Red Squirrel)
The Mermaid & The Sailors – Claire Askew (Red Squirrel)
Ashes for Breakfast - Durs Grunbein (Faber)

The Sadness of Unambitious Poetry

2011-03-18T07:56:00.001Z

“How sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self defence to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things that are not.”

(Keats, 1818)

StAnza Poetry Festival 2011, Part 1

2011-03-18T07:44:00.000Z

I had a good time at StAnza yesterday. Great to meet up with people I hadn’t seen in a while, even if only briefly, and to run into new people too. The poetry? Well, it was a mixed bag. A couple of very enjoyable and interesting readings though. Didn’t get to hear Yang Lian, as I had to get home. As I left the Byre Theatre to catch the shuttle bus to Leuchars, I saw him through the Byre’s glass panelling, eating dinner with a bunch of people, but I didn’t want to disturb him by going back to say hello while he was enjoying a relaxed meal before his reading. I’ll be back in St Andrews tonight and will report after the weekend.

Off to StAnza 2011

2011-03-17T07:54:00.002Z

I’ll be making my annual pilgrimage to the StAnza International Poetry Festival for at least part of today. I hope to catch Matt Merritt reading later this morning, but that all depends on time – perfect bus and train connections after dropping my daughter off at school. I’ve a feeling I might be fractionally too late, but we’ll see.

There are a few interesting events this afternoon e.g. Jo Bell, Belgian sound poetry, the StAnza lecture from Robert Crawford. I can’t decide yet but will go with my whim at the time. I slept badly last night and feel tired this morning, which might mean I’d fall asleep in a poetry event if it isn’t extra-special. So pull out all those extra stops, folks...

At 5pm, Natasha Trethewey is reading with Brian Johnstone, and I’ll make a point of getting to that one. Brian is very good, of course, and I’d recommend anyone who doesn’t know his work to check it out (his Book of Belongings, published by Arc in 2010, is excellent). But, for me, this also is a one-off chance to see Natasha Trethewey, a very interesting U.S. writer whose poetry is difficult to classify - a good thing, probably. I don't know her work well, but I like what I've read.

In the evening, Yang Lian (with translator Brian Holton) is reading with Poetry Review editor and Carcanet author, Fiona Sampson. I’d love to get to this as Andrew Philip, Katy Evans-Bush and I read with Yang Lian and Brian in London last year, a fantastic experience with two great people. Yang Lian writes poetry like no one else – I have two of his books, Riding Pisces (Shearsman), and Lee Valley Poems (Bloodaxe). Unfortunately, I need to get home and will have to pass up the chance to go to this one but, if you’re anywhere near St Andrews, don’t miss it!

I will be back in St Andrews over the weekend and, on the Saturday afternoon, you’ll find me on the Magma stall at the Stanza Book Fair.

Explaining Poems

2011-03-15T11:31:00.004Z

You can find this quote all over the Internet:

It’s art if can’t be explained.
It’s fashion if no one asks for an explanation.
It’s design if it doesn’t need explanation

— Wouter Stokkel

Nicely done. I suppose it means that poems which can be explained or paraphrased, which lose nothing from being recast as prose, aren’t really art at all.

The Troggs - With A Girl Like You (1967)

2011-03-10T11:50:00.001Z

The Art of Recklessness

2011-03-10T10:24:00.001Z

I’ve just ordered Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness, which sounds really good to me. I like the way he attempts to prove the need for recklessness by using the example of Shakespeare, Wordsworth etc, not just the modern writers we might typically expect to hear from. The blurb says:

How can recklessness guide the poet, the artist, and the reader into art, and how can it excite in us a sort of wild receptivity, beyond craft? “Poetry is not a discipline,” Young writes. “It is a hunger, a revolt, a drive, a mash note, a fright, a tantrum, a grief, a hoax, a debacle, an application, an affect . . .”

Here's an interesting review of it. The author of the review admits his own bias in its favour, but still goes on to say interesting things about it.

Of course, craft is important, as millions of badly written poems on the Internet will ineloquently testify, but it’s just as important to ignore every guideline you’ve ever learned if the poem demands it, to go with the poem and not with your internal censor. The fine tuning can then cut out the misplaced word, dodgy rhythms and sonic blandness etc, as long as the reckless energy remains.

Magma, Issue 49, and the E-Newsletter, Issue 12

2011-03-07T12:15:00.003Z

The new Magma, issue 49, is all ready and you can read a few poems and articles from it online, including my review of Katherine Gallagher's Carnival Edge: New & Selected Poems (Arc £11.99), Alan Wall’s Doctor Placebo (Shearsman £8.95) and TEN: New Poets Spread the Word ed. Bernardine Evaristo and Daljit Nagra (Bloodaxe/Spread the Word £8.95).

In addition, if you sign up to receive the free bi-monthly e-newsletter (halfway down the page at the link to sign up), you’ll find me doing the ‘subscribers workshop’ in which I comment on a poem someone has asked for help with (perhaps 'set loose to run riot over someone else's poem' might be just as good a way to put it, but I hope it's a constructive riot), along with articles on ‘poetry and catharsis’ by Jacqueline Saphra (which includes a nice mention of Andrew Philip's collection, The Ambulance Box) and a review of Matthew Sweeney’s The Night Post (Salt 2010) by Laurie Smith. Definitely worth signing up for.

Three Snippets

2011-03-07T11:59:00.001Z

I have two reviews in the latest issue of Sphinx online, issue 16, both of pamphlets from the ‘innovative’ or ‘radical’ or ‘experimental’ (or whatever word is being used these days to pin down what can’t be pinned down) end of the poetic spectrum: here’s my review of Ralph Hawkins’s ‘The Size of a Human Dawn’ and also this one on Nathan Thompson’s ‘A Haunting’. Both are published by Gratton Street Irregulars.

*

I’m spinning out the theological implications of a very different WS Merwin poem to ‘Home for Thanksgiving’, which I wrote about on this blog on Saturday. In the same book, he has a one-liner called ‘Savonarola’, which goes, “Unable to endure my world and calling the failure God, I will destroy yours.”

*

Yesterday, it appears my daughter left a message, in a very posh voice, on her friend's parents’ answerphone:

"Hello. I'm the prime minister, David Cameron. Can I help you? If I can, press 9. If you don’t want my help, press 0.”

If only it were that simple.

On WS Merwin's 'Home for Thanksgiving'

2011-03-05T16:52:00.004Z

I’ve badly misjudged WS Merwin. I’d read only a few poems by him, mainly written in the last decade or so, and these hadn’t done anything for me, so I paid him no attention, not until a week ago when I wandered into a charity shop in Edinburgh’s Gorgie Road and found Merwin’s 1963 collection, The Moving Target, a 1966 hardback reprint to be exact, from Atheneum Books, New York. What route it took from New York in the 1960s to Edinburgh in 2011 is anyone’s guess, but I’m glad to be its latest recipient.

It contains plenty of good poems, but I was immediately struck by the opener, Home for Thanksgiving (full text at this link), which is well worth printing out and reading carefully. My first thought was that it would have been a more conventional poem, the kind of poem commonly written by many, many decent poets, if he had begun at the third stanza, the memories of women and the regrets at how things had panned out. I wonder if that’s how the poem began life, if the dramatic opening stanzas arrived later and then went on to affect those following. Impossible to know, of course.

In any case, the first two stanzas employ astonishing imagery – the streets opening like “long/ silent laughs”, the “knowing wires and the aimed windows”, the “crusty/ unbarbered vessel”, and this brilliant combination on the limitations of freedom:

...the months of plying
Between can and can, vacant as a pint in the morning,
While my sex grew into the only tree, a joyless evergreen,
And the winds played hell with it at night, coming as they did
Over at least one thousand miles of emptiness.

He’s come back from all that, from all that promised happiness, which never really was open to him. Or, at least, the promise might have been real enough, but the reality was that possibilities proved vacant, the evergreen proved joyless, and (from the third stanza) Vera had a “small fat dog named Joy” and Gladys had “watery arms”. The refrain, “well this is nice,” suggests ironically that coming back from it all isn’t nice either, even if the billboard informs him that things have “now improved”. The regions of pure hope had proved an illusion and nothing can alter the natural imperfect human state. The best he can do is half-hearted dishonesty, to say things are “nice”. Happiness couldn’t have come from these particular women – he knows they would have drunk his bottle (the same one that launched his hopeful boat in the first stanza) dry or smashed it to pieces. Instead he’s left with misery (repeated three times!), which fits him perfectly, and he even makes it painfully plain that he’s thankful (it is thanksgiving after all) for this discovery, that he’s done “the right thing after all.”

The structure of the poem elevates it above the typical memories and regrets poem and instead sets it within an existential struggle – one human being (who is all of us) against all the forces which conspire to snuff out hope, a man resigning to the perfect fit of misery. But the resignation is also the site of discovery. “I bring myself back...” he keeps saying – back home, back to his senses, the one place where he can begin from truth, reality as it actually is. This is, of course, his own perception of himself, reality through the narrator's lenses.

Another way to read it might be that he saw only the bad points of imperfection and ended up wrapped in his misery like a comfort blanket as a result, whereas he could have done better to settle for an imperfect happiness. The final "I did the right thing after all" then reads as unconscious irony. It's his own attitude that keeps him locked up in misery rather than reality itself, the fear of letting go of his comfort blanket. I guess we all know people whose misery gets them attention, and they prefer the devil they've become over-familiar with. To his credit, Merwin doesn't judge the issue and I think either reading could at least be partly correct.

The vocabulary is straightforward, nothing you’d need a dictionary for, but there’s no way you could confuse this poem with prose. The syntax plays a part in that. Merwin spins out sentences like little webs – the word “from” in the first line keeps finding new nouns to govern throughout the stanza. The same goes for the same word, “from”, in the second stanza where it makes its first appearance in line five. It means the reader needs to stay awake but rewards are well and truly there for doing so. He also keeps sentences going by using commas when full stops would have been technically ‘correct’, as if to keep things flowing with the required intensity. The rhythms also aim to capture the reader with their intensity, right from the first line and a half:

I bring myself back from the streets that open like long
Silent laughs

The strong stresses are woven between weak stresses, almost anapaestic, until “long/ Silent laughs”, the line-break adding emphasis to the heavy enjambed spondee, and suggesting immediately that these laughs aren’t the kind to chuckle merrily along with, silently or otherwise. And so it proves, although black humour survives the misery; some of the descriptions are priceless, although my favourite is probably the aforementioned billboard, “Which says NOW IMPROVED and I know what they mean.”

A terrific poem, I think, and not the only really good one in the collection, which I am currently halfway through.

Nick Clegg and Gary McKinnon: Before and After

2011-03-03T21:32:00.006Z

Ah yes, here is an article in the Daily Mail, (not a paper I habitually read but now and again it comes in useful for something, as here) written by none other than Nick Clegg on 4th August 2009. Clegg is writing about the planned extradition of Gary McKinnon by the then New Labour administration. McKinnon was due to be deported to the USA to face trial for computer hacking, despite the fact that he has Asperger Syndrome.

Here are a few choice quotes from Clegg’s article:

“It appals me that, so far at least, no one in government seems prepared to lift a finger to help him. You can be sure that if the situation was reversed, American politicians would be moving hell and high water to protect one of their citizens from such a gross injustice. It is an affront to British justice that no one in the Labour Party has the courage to do the same.”

“...this case is about more than legal technicalities and political treaties. It is about compassion, knowing the difference between right and wrong - and the sorry truth is that the Labour Party lost its moral compass long ago.”

“It would be fair and it would be right to try Mr McKinnon in Britain. But the clock is ticking. The Prime Minister just needs to pick up the phone to make this prosecution happen. I urge him to do so, before it is too late.”

Well, OK, that was Mr Clegg back in 2009. He obviously felt very strongly about the case. In fact, here he is with Janis Sharp, Gary McKinnon’s mother, at a demonstration calling for McKinnon to be tried in the UK (photo from the Free Gary McKinnon campaign site).

So, you’d assume that Nick Clegg would now be using his influence as deputy prime minister to influence the coalition on Gary McKinnon’s behalf. After all, he had called the previous administration’s attitude “an affront to British justice,” and talked about “compassion, knowing the difference between right and wrong” – strong words from a politician.

Unfortunately, and this may not exactly be a surprise, Nick won’t now meet with McKinnon’s mother even to discuss the case. Photos with her were fine before the election, but now he won’t even talk to her. But don’t worry, his parliamentary spokesman is on hand to clear things up:

"As these are live legal proceedings the Deputy Prime Minister has been advised that it would not be appropriate to meet Gary's mother and discuss the details of the case."

So it’s not allowed for you, Nick, to meet in private with the mother of someone you're on record as supporting to discuss a case that someone else, the Home Secretary, is dealing with? Yeah, right... Looks to me as though Clegg has abandoned both the "courage" and the "moral compass" he demanded of the previous government. Pathetic.

Janis Sharp says it for us all:

"I trusted Nick Clegg to the core - I really believed in him. The Lib Dems used my son's case pre-election and as far as I am concerned it was 100% commitment to him. How can we have any trust in politicians when they behave like this?”

David Orr on Reviewing and Criticism

2011-03-02T16:40:00.002Z

An interesting interview at Lemon Hound's blog, from which here are a couple of short extracts:

"If you’re a poetry critic writing for a general audience, it’s essential to realize that the overwhelming majority of your potential readers think of your art form the way most people think of Renaissance faires. That perception is wrong, of course, but it’s one you ignore at the risk of having your audience read your opening sentence and promptly assign you to a pigeonhole adjacent to the jousting fanatics..."

"I’ve always thought that criticism is its own art form. It’s true that only by reading poetry can we have the experience “reading poetry,” but it isn’t clear to me that that experience is richer or better than the experience of reading criticism, if the criticism is good enough. So I guess by “writing about writing” I hope to achieve something at least as interesting to the reader as a decent poem or pop song."

Dispatch from the Ghost of William Shatner

2011-02-24T10:03:00.000Z

Last night, I took part in a unique event, The Ghost of William Shatner, in which people performed the lyrics to pop tunes without singing and without music. Did the lyrics work without musical backing? Well yes, they did, because they were being performed. Few, probably none, would work well as poems on a page, but that wasn’t the object of the exercise. The variety was impressive – everything from straight performances of Radiohead, The Smiths and Bob Dylan to mock-heroic renditions of Barbie Girl, Rocket Man, and We Are the Champions. The result was thoroughly entertaining.

Through every performance, the spirit of William Shatner brooded over the stage in the form of a cardboard statue (as you can see from some of these photos by Chris Scott), later won in a raffle by the Scottish Poetry Library’s Peggy Hughes, who also contributed a memorable version of Barry Manilow’s 'Copacabana'. I imagine carrying the thing at that time of night through the Cowgate would have won her considerable attention. As MC Gavin Inglis said, “the person most likely to get mugged on the way home” (she has posted on Facebook this morning, so I’m glad to know she got back safely). The stand-out performance on the night was Stephen Barnaby’s hilarious ‘Rasputin’ (the Boney M song) in the style of a university lecture by Professor Bobby Farrell, complete with academic commentary on the lyrics – one of the funniest things I’ve seen in ages.

My contribution to the evening was Jacques Brel’s ‘Jackie’ – the version in English, as sung by Scott Walker

The 'Real Critic' and the 'Good Ordinary Critic'

2011-02-21T14:38:00.001Z

I posted this quote to a Facebook thread yesterday. It’s from an essay in which Randall Jarrell argues that critics had become too central to literary discourse. He satirises the tendency, citing academics who had read thousands of articles about a poem, but had not actually read a contemporary poem in years. He talks of a PhD student who had read everything there was to read about Tennyson’s Ulysses, but had never actually bothered to read Homer’s Odyssey. Jarrell sees the role of the critic to help readers, to open up poems for them; not to maintain discourse with critics and academics, but to create interest among general readers of literary works.

He goes on to differentiate between the ‘real critic’ (who may not actually exist in a pure form) and the ‘good, ordinary critic’:

“...the real critic must speak ill of friends and well of enemies, ill of agreeable bad works and well of less agreeable good ones; must admire writers whom his readers will snicker at him for admiring, and dislike writers whom it will place him among barbarians to dislike. For it is the opinion he offers with trepidation, thinking, ‘Nobody will believe it, and I hardly see how it can be so; but it seems so to me’ – it is this opinion that may be all the next age will value him for; though in all probability it will value him for nothing...

“But I am talking about a ‘real critic’ who would have a very short half-life, one who may never have been on sea or land; let me talk instead about good ordinary ones...What is a critic anyway? So far as I can see, he is an extremely good reader...He is always many other things too, but these belong to his accident, not his essence.” (Randall Jarrell, 1955, ‘The Age of Criticism’ from Poetry and the Age).

I’m with Jarrell all the way here. I think we are very short of the kind of criticism and reviewing he’s looking for in our own age. Many reviews in newspapers speak well of “agreeable bad works” and pretty much ignore “less agreeable good ones.” There is a degree of dishonesty too: that need to watch one’s back, not to speak ill of the influential, to talk up those who've talked nicely about us and bat down those with whom we’ve previously disagreed. It’s all wrong.

Jarrell’s age was different from ours in other ways too. There was plenty of space for reviews and criticism. In fact, many of the top journals had little space for poetry and short stories and were dominated by criticism, and some critics obviously felt their art superior to the poets they criticised. Jarrell counters this and feels criticism is there only to serve the art of poetry.

I wonder if we have reacted too strongly to that generation and now devalue good reviewing and criticism too much. “It’s someone’s opinion, no more important than mine or anyone else’s,” people claim. And of course, that’s true. It is just someone’s opinion. But surely some opinions have to carry more weight than others. If not, then we may as well unpack our brains from our skulls and throw them to the pigs. We don’t have to agree with everything our favourite critics say (nor did we ever have to), but we can at least allow them to make us think, to challenge our received ideas. It’s a basic act of humility, to acknowledge that we have something to learn and that specialists in an art might have something to teach. To deny that strikes me as a form of arrogance peculiar to late-20th century and early 21st century western humanity, an attitude I doubt we will be commended for by posterity.

February 31st

2011-02-18T08:26:00.002Z

Intriguing, this. Why would someone write a non-existent date on a gravestone? Unless the entire existence of Christiana, wife of John Haag, is fake, but the gravestone is in a genuine graveyard (the Old Mission Church Cemetery in Upper Sandusky, Ohio) and I wouldn’t have thought the authorities would have allowed a stone for a fictional person. Perhaps no one noticed? Or is it just trick photography?

(Image reproduced under a Free Documentation License)

Mike Scott Meets WB Yeats

2011-02-17T08:33:00.003Z

I first saw Mike Scott way around 1980 when he played for a band called Another Pretty Face, supporting Stiff Little Fingers at the legendary but long departed Apollo Theatre, Glasgow. I can’t remember much about APF’s set, but I do know they were eclipsed by SLF at the top of their game (although 'All the Boys Love Carrie', at the link, still sounds good to me).

I was listening to the radio one evening a few years later and heard a track called December by a band called The Waterboys. I liked it so much I bought the single on 12 inch vinyl that weekend and the albums that followed. I went to see The Waterboys at the inauspicious Heathery Bar, Wishaw. Intimate, yes, but it wasn’t a great gig. At one point, Scott broke a string on his already way-out-of-tune guitar but kept hammering away at it regardless. Hard going...

But the albums were good – from the big music of the first three to the classic Fisherman’s Blues and the much maligned Room to Roam, which was critically mauled at the time. I don’t know why, as it contains some fantastic songs, such as How Long Will I Love You? It was just different from Fisherman’s Blues and the critics couldn’t cope. There’s good stuff on all the albums which followed.

And now Yeats. Scott toured briefly this winter, including a date in Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall, to showcase songs he’s written using the poems of WB Yeats, and they are terrific, among the best material of his career. The live performance was great too, theatrical at times with its use of light and staging. His voice is strong, his diction clear, no doubt helped by the RCH’s fine acoustics. Unlike most gigs, it was possible to hear virtually every word. He talks to Ryan Van Winkle about it at this SPL podcast (about 25 minutes), which is well worth listening to. I hope we have a Yeats album soon but, until then, the memory of a fantastic gig will have to be enough.

Haiku Comes to Edinburgh

2011-02-16T09:02:00.001Z

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been to a few live poetry events, none of which I’ve written about through lack of time, so here goes with the first one, an unusual event at the house of Japan’s consul-general in Edinburgh. It featured a lecture by Madoka Mayuzumi, a woman who has become one of Japan’s most celebrated exponents of the contemporary haiku.

She spoke for just over an hour on the haiku, with translation, and was really quite engaging. Her most memorable comment, for me, was when she compared haiku to Japanese flower-arranging. The combination of flowers isn’t what’s most important. Some flowers are given short stems and some have long stems, and the success of the arrangement is found in the distance created between the flower-heads. Haiku is like that, said Ms Mayuzumi – it’s the space created for the reader’s imagination, not the images in themselves, which really matters.

The other thing I found memorable is that she didn't read any of her own work, not until the question and answer time when she was coaxed by the audience into reading a single haiku. I guess this was out of modesty. I wonder how many poets could similarly resist...

Afterwards, there was wine and a magnificent buffet of Japanese food – simply outstanding hospitality. And time for a quick pint afterwards in the hotel bar down the hill before slinking off home

Farewell, Ronaldo

2011-02-14T21:52:00.005Z

Ronaldo, one of Brazil's and the world's greatest ever football players, has announced his retirement at the age of 34. Hard to believe he is so young, as he seems to have been around forever, but he began his professional career at the age of just 16 and was knocking in goals for PSV Eindhoven as a 17-year-old. Just in case anyone has forgotten the level of his achievement, here are a few figures, courtesy of the BBC:

Cruzeiro 1993-94 - 45 games, 41 goals
PSV Eindhoven 1994-96 - 58 games, 54 goals
Barcelona 1996-97 - 49 games, 47 goals
Inter Milan 1997-2002 - 99 games, 59 goals
Real Madrid 2002-07 - 164 games, 98 goals
AC Milan 2007-08 - 20 games, 9 goals
Corinthians 2009-11 - 31 games, 18 goals
Total - 466 games, 326 goals

Add to that his international career with Brazil, where he scored 62 goals in 97 appearances, and shares the record with Gerd Muller for scoring the greatest number of World Cup goals (15).

And here are a few of his goals:

From John Tranter to Jennifer Aniston

2011-02-08T08:08:00.002Z

February always makes me feel tired. It doesn’t matter whether the weather is stormy or simply chill, whether the sky is low and grey or high and blue. There’s just something about the month. It’s so relentless, a winter that lasts and lasts and lasts and has been lasting since last November and may well last until well into April if we’re unlucky.

Last night, I was reading John Tranter’s Selected, Urban Myths: 210 Poems, and was enjoying it, but there came a point when my brain wasn’t taking anything in and I did something I wouldn't have done at all if it had been summer – I switched on the TV, and there was Jennifer Aniston. As usual, she was playing Rachel from Friends, but in a movie about how some bride-to-be (Aniston) suspects that The Graduate had been based on her parents and goes around trying to find out whether the rumour is true or not. Somehow, I watched this for about half an hour. Complete nonsense. It’s hard to believe that so many millions can get poured into rubbish like this while virtually nothing is given to marketing and distributing poetry.

But this is the world and “we’re all in this together,” as Disney and David Cameron tell us, an alliance almost as unholy as the current coalition. Except we’re not in it together. There is plenty of room for opposition, for not playing. I switched off and went to sleep, wondering why it had taken me so long. There are worlds it’s best to have nothing to do with whatsoever.

The First Poetry Collection

2011-02-01T09:42:00.000Z

Here’s a really brilliant reflection on first collections, part of a review written by W. N. Herbert, originally published in the autumn 2010 issue of Poetry London.

“There are two ways for a poet to be professional which first collections tend to throw into relief. The first is the orthodox career, in which, having acquired the necessary awards (and, increasingly, degree), then having wooed the correct mentor, residency and publisher, a debut volume appears — its voice already assured, its technique established, its unique subject matter clearly delineated. None of these are easily come by, especially at an appropriate level to make it worth acquiring them in the first place.

But the second involves a still-harder apprenticeship, following the obstinate, labyrinthine path that learning craft takes through such markers of esteem and our individual experience. Along this route concepts like ‘voice’ or ‘muse’ fall under perpetual critique and suffer challenging reform. Here the poem itself often has to be sufficient reward, one glimpse of theme must function as sustenance for years, and publication may be no more than an interim report, rather than a career-defining goal.

Our society encourages new writers towards the first challenge, while their instincts tend them toward the second. On the one hand the triumphant first steps of Eliot or Auden; on the other the initial sketches of Pound or Morgan. Publishers, in the business of second-guessing posterity, prefer the former; the media, too, is always drawn to the simpler narratives. “ (W.N. Herbert)

That sentence, “Our society encourages new writers towards the first challenge, while their instincts tend them toward the second,” is spot on, isn’t it? Or is ‘encourages’ too mild a word?

America - Horse With No Name

2011-01-29T15:00:00.002Z

Like Todd Swift, I'd have the Fleet Foxes eponymous album from 2009 as one of my albums of the decade. I'd think of the Beach Boys as their main inspiration but, on listening to America's 'Horse with No Name' live, I get a sense that Fleet Foxes have been listening carefully to the tone of those harmonies (and getting tips for their beards too):

Pure Television

2011-01-28T15:19:00.002Z

I recently acquired the technology to convert humble audio cassette recordings into MP3 format and I’ve managed to dig out a few recordings of my band, Pure Television, from the 1990s. You can listen to them at this page – at the moment there are six songs, but I will upload more as I track them down. I'll also try to post more lyrics (only lyrics to 'Bicycle Balladry' are currently up there), which I confess are all mine.

The songs were recorded on an 8-track portostudio in the bedroom of my house. We recorded them live, rather than by individual instrument, to preserve the energy of the moment. I think we just about succeeded in that, but we also didn’t bother to eradicate mistakes, of which there are many. So, it’s about as un-slick as is possible to imagine.

Our first gig was at a party. We had been playing our instruments for exactly four days. We played three songs, all of them total chaos – including a cover of Joy Division’s ’24 Hours’. In fact, I don’t think we even bothered to tune up beforehand. Audience members amused themselves by trying to pull the leads out of our amps, while we raced around putting them back in again.

We did get better, although how much better is a matter of debate. The band never achieved much success, but we did play a number of gigs around Glasgow and Edinburgh with some people who did go on to achieve considerable fame and fortune. At one gig, most members of Belle & Sebastian were in the audience, although they’ve probably erased this from their collective memory by now.

If you like lo-fi, warped jangly pop, you might find something to enjoy. I am unaccountably glad I’m now able to preserve those digitally in any case.

Salt Books Winter Sale

2011-01-27T14:45:00.005Z

Until the end of January, you can buy books direct from Salt and get 33% off the price – the real price, that is, not the inflated Amazon one (see below). The Opposite of Cabbage is listed at only £7.19 in the Salt online store. With 33% off, that should be less than a fiver. Use the code HGW45R13 for any purchases at Salt.

From a review in The TLS, by Carrie Etter:

Rob A Mackenzie's first full collection inhabits present-day Scotland in all its livliness, banality and bad weather... Mackenzie's vigorous urban language, often employed in declarative sentences, vivifies it all... The Opposite of Cabbage impresses with its distinctive style and energetic exploration of 'the way we live now.'

Now, something very odd. Amazon UK appear to have doubled the price of books published by Salt. The paperbacks are on sale for anything from £15 to £18. It must be a mistake, but Amazon are rather taking their time to sort it out. In connection with this, I had a weird dream two nights ago. I won a competition. The bizarre prize was that the winner had to buy both The Opposite of Cabbage and a rail ticket to Newcastle, by debit card. It cost me £26 for the book from Amazon, and the rail ricket was for the next day, when I was working and couldn't travel.

Happy Burns Day 2011

2011-01-25T08:03:00.004Z

It is Burns Day, and I’ll be tucking into haggis, neeps and tatties tonight. Always a good thing when a duty is so pleasurable. My haggis will be of the normal variety. I have tasted vegetarian haggis and it wasn’t so bad but, nevertheless, Alexander Hutchison’s poem, Surprise Surprise!, written in 1984, always makes me laugh every time I read it. It’s from his outstanding New & Selected Poems, Scales Dog, which would have been a massive bestseller in a better world.

I have a vague hope of making it to the Burns flashmob at 1pm today outside St Giles Cathedral, where anyone can join in an improvised rendition of A Man’s a Man for A’ That, but time may be against me. Peggy, from the Scottish Poetry Library, shows you how it’s done below.

Reading at the City Arts Centre, Edinburgh

2011-01-23T14:06:00.003Z

I spent a highly enjoyable evening yesterday at a reading organised by Colin Herd on the fifth floor of the City Arts Centre, Edinburgh. The venue is a little like being in a university seminar room, without atmosphere, but it has great acoustics (no need for microphones) and is so high and away from everything that no background noise, which can sometimes plague bar events, was able to interfere. There is no perfect venue anywhere in Edinburgh! At least not an affordable one.

The readers were Andrea Brady, JL Williams, Richie McCaffery and Sandy Christie, and A W Singerman contributed a few songs. To say there was a contrast in styles – both in terms of poetry and reading style – would be a huge understatement. Eclectic is the word.

I’m not going to review the readings – suffice it to say that I enjoyed the evening and had a good time in the Waverley Bar afterwards. However, I will draw your attention to the fact that JL Williams has a collection coming out in February with Shearsman Press called Condition of Fire. She only read one poem from it last night, but it whetted the appetite for more (let that be a lesson for the over-loquacious!). Also, Andrea Brady’s latest book is Wildfire. I didn’t have enough money in my pocket to buy the book last night, but I plan to order it. It’s far from straightforward material, but I kept hearing snatches of lines and phrases I really liked at the reading and would like to slow the pace down and read them in a book.

Finding New Poets

2011-01-21T21:28:00.000Z

Interesting article by Don Paterson in the Guardian on ‘Finding the Best New Poets’. I’ve read enough hopeful Facebook updates from people “seeking publisher for my new manuscript” to know that seeking publishers isn’t the way it works for poets. A good few years ago, someone said to me, “Don’t look for a publisher. Let the publishers look for you,” which seemed more than slightly optimistic, but the title of the Guardian article bears that out.

The background here is the Picador poetry prize, won in its inaugural year by Richard Meier. It’s partly a matter of what style of poems you like, of course, but Meier looks like a worthy winner. A prize is only one way for publishers to find their poets. While Don P exaggerates just a bit in suggesting that a new talent will find themselves linked into poetry networks from only “one casual appearance at the most obscure local workshop,” he’s right that “you really have to work at being a recluse of a rare and dedicated variety to avoid being on the radar.”

Probably, poets fret too much about publicising themselves. There are thousands of poets all competing for the tiny poetry market, and the tendency is to feel you have to shout pretty loud to be heard. Increasingly, I’m not so sure about that. Strong work, activity in support of a book (readings, interviews etc), a little word of mouth from other people, and a growing sense that there’s something distinctive about you is mostly sufficient. Some books sell far more than others – not always the best books (Wallace Stevens’s first collection, Harmonium, sold terribly when first published, for example) – but the hope is that, in time, at least some of the best books will keep selling while the others fade away.

Interesting that Don P picks out blogs and Facebook as ways of “helping enormously” in maintaining good networks. I was at a reading he gave not so long ago when he said (tongue-in-cheek, of course), “What is Facebook anyway?” Nice that he picks out Baroque in Hackney as an example of good poetry blogging (it certainly is). As for “many anonymous others which resemble farty wee boys' gang-huts, and where membership is conditional on hating the right people,” I suppose the advantage of blogging is that the only farts you can actually smell are your own. The others are all scentless cyber farts. I would like to see the list of the right people to hate too, so that I can send them all a special Surroundings Valentine card. Anyone on that list is a friend here.

Horizon Review, Issue 5

2011-01-20T07:59:00.000Z

Issue 5 of Horizon Review, edited by Katy Evans-Bush, has just gone live. Poems, reviews, articles, short stories and much more. I have a poem in the issue called Eggy.

The TS Eliot Prize 2010 Broadcasts

2011-01-19T10:51:00.000Z

Here’s a competition – no prizes, but it might be interesting. The BBC has been broadcasting poems from the shortlisted poets for this year’s TS Eliot Prize. The result is due next Monday. I’d like to know:

1. Who reads their poems best (based only on those broadcasts at the link)?
2. Which of these poems is your favourite? Was it by the poet you expected to like best?

Only six of the ten shortlisted poets have contributed at the time of writing this blog article, but you can change your votes if those who come afterwards change your minds.

Helena Nelson: The Teller

2011-01-17T11:03:00.000Z

Like Rachel Fox, I’m won’t review Helena Nelson’s new collection, Plot and Counter-Plot. I know Helena and she published my first chapbook with HappenStance Press. However, this is my blog and I can do things here which I couldn’t do anywhere else: I am going to look at three poems – one today, the others will come later in the week.

When I first started to read Plot and Counter-Plot, I rattled through it at an alarming speed. The poems seem to invite this approach, as they employ plain language, ordinary syntax, and punctuation in all the right places. I thought the poems were ‘OK’ but there was a voice in my head shouting, “Slow down! That’s no way to read poetry!” And when I slowed down and started again, I realised how much I had missed first time through.

Take ‘Teller’, as example, an eight-line poem in couplets, set in a tight iambic tetrameter and full rhyme scheme – AB CD AD CB. On my initial quick read-through, I wasn’t much impressed by this poem. The narrator tells her story to the rain, the rain tells it to the trees, the trees recount it, and the narrator is left with an empty breeze and has to begin all over again. “Hmmmm, so what?” I thought.

So, quite a lot... Reading it again, I wondered how it was possible for me to have missed so much, but that’s what happens when you blast through a poem without giving it due consideration. The first line should have alerted me that something odd was happening – “Umbrella-ed here in Autumn light”. I am thinking Mary Poppins, an uncanny entrance – not literally Poppins, but certainly magic-realism of some kind. It could be the narrator simply is carrying an ordinary umbrella, but the oddity of “umbrella” being used as a verb and acting on the narrator, who appears to have no choice in the matter, speaks against that.

So we’re whisked out of normality into an eerie half-lit world (“Autumn light” isn’t accidental), and the narrator tells her life-story to the rain – as you do... The rain passes it on to the leaves and moss on a tree-bark. The third couplet lifts the poem way beyond standard poetic fare:

The bark recounts, but not quite right,
the plot and counter-plot of loss.

It’s like Chinese Whispers. The bark isn’t accurate and the story comes out slightly wrong. The poem might be about communication, about what gets lost in telling, and the life story is itself both a ‘plot and counter-plot of loss’. Who thinks of their own life like that? The poem invites us to do so. A life has a story and also an anti-story: what gets missed out, forgotten, misinterpreted, told all wrong. It strikes me that the bark’s mistake mirrors our own attempts to tell stories, as getting it ‘quite right’ is virtually impossible.

The result is an ‘empty breeze’. The story is nowhere. The narrator’s attempts to tell it and have it soak perfectly into the world seem to have failed. Perhaps we could read this as a parable on writing (not the only way to read it, of course) – every poem is born to fall short. It tells us something and then someone like me comes along and recounts it, but not quite right, as the poem itself – the minute it is retold in someone’s head – ceases to be exactly itself.

Does the poet then give up? The narrator here starts “to tell my tale again.” That’s why we write poems, because the billions written before by ourselves and others weren’t enough to tell what needs to be told. There is value in doing so, necessity even, whatever is lost in the telling. The rain is waiting patiently.

Facebook and Networked Blogs

2011-01-14T07:45:00.001Z

You could be forgiven for thinking that this blog is pretty dead, due to the lack of comments on most recent posts. Does anyone read it anymore? Well, yes, people do read it, but tend to comment on Facebook, a trend I’m becoming unhappy with.

I signed up for Networked Blogs some time ago, a Facebook application which posts a link on Facebook to every new blog article I produce. It sounded like a great idea, a convenient way for interested people to read the blog. In practice, it does bring readers, but not comments. The discussions take place on Facebook. After a few days they disappear into that huge, uninhabited desert of old Facebook status updates, links, videos and notes that no one will ever read again. The living record of a blog discussion is gone. Anyone looking at this blog in a month or two’s time would never know any discussion had taken place.

This seems to me to defeat the whole purpose of blogging. I could post articles to a non-interactive website, no problem. But a blog’s nature is interactive and, in its archive, the comments are often more interesting than the original posts.

So I’ve made the decision to leave Networked Blogs. However, I looked and couldn’t find any way to leave. There didn’t seem to be any ‘delete application’ button. But I’m going to do some research, as there must be a way. It’s possible I might lose a few readers by doing this, but I’d rather remain true to the spirit of blogging. For anyone who wants to keep up with things here – please add me to your blog feed, as I do want to keep as many readers as possible.

Reviewing (and Reading) 'Difficult' Poetry

2011-01-13T11:56:00.002Z

Apologies for the gap between posts. I’ve been busy generally and, on top of everything else, I’ve been making a determined effort to and allocate reviewers to books for the 50th issue of Magma. Almost there, but not quite.

I’ve also had a couple of chapbooks to review myself for another magazine. At the moment, I’m not sure about them. They are firmly ‘innovative’, or ‘experimental’, and half the battle is working out what they are trying to do. It’s obvious that they have ‘something’, as there are many fine lines and phrases. I’m not totally in the dark, but haven’t quite got a handle on them yet.

What the best approach for a reviewer? Is it best to be tentative and say you’re not certain about various things? Or is it best to stick to points you are fairly sure of? The first way is honest, but might make some people think you are incompetent. The second isn’t quite honest and may not get to grips with a book as a whole, but it does at least avoid making idiotic mistakes. I suspect many more reviewers go this way than would admit to it.

At the moment, I have time to hope things start to sink in. That’s often the way it is with poems, even those I do ‘get’ immediately. I never like to rush down a reaction because my brain seems to work subconsciously over a period of time and I find more in good poems than I at first thought existed.

How To Lose Weight

2011-01-07T16:13:00.002Z

If you're trying to fight the post-Christmas flab, you can't really beat this regime, created by Boo Hewerdine. I have been lying on a big ball for the last few days and, I have to say, my shape is definitely changing, although not necessarily for the better. If anyone can supply four poodles and a few leotards, I'd be grateful.

You could do the exercises while listening to Boo H's Graceland, one of my favourite songs ever. I'm sure that would help. And here he is with Eddi Reader singing Footsteps Fall.

Review: 'Alex y Robert' by Wena Poon

2011-01-06T08:35:00.004Z

I met Wena when she was in Scotland last summer for the Salt Scotland launch and then at various times during her residential fellowship at Hawthornden Castle. It’s possible that this novel might have sneaked under my radar if that hadn’t been the case, but I’m glad it didn’t because Alex y Robert is an absorbing read from start to finish.

The story is of Alejandra Herrera (aka ‘Alex’), a young American woman who wants to be a bullfighter in Spain. She has some pedigree in that her grandfather was a famous matador, she speaks fluent Spanish, and she has done some training in the USA, despite the misgivings of her parents-by-adoption (her mother and father were killed in a car crash when she was a child). She goes to Spain and makes contact with Roberto de la Torre, a rising star in the bullfighting arena, whose grandfather was a matador contemporary of Alex’s granddad.

It isn’t exactly plain sailing. Public opposition to bullfighting, at home and abroad, is growing. The majority of people in the bullfighting scene are opposed to women-matadors and will have nothing to do with them. There are close-shaves and crises of confidence. The recession is threatening many venues and promoters. The press is often contemptuous. Roberto has his own personal and public crises to deal with. Will Alex ever realise her dream of fighting bulls in the great arena in Madrid?

The narrative speeds along with real fizz and energy, but not at the expense of character development. Wena Poon artfully structures the novel so that it switches between present and past without the flashbacks seeming in any way obtrusive. They build up a sense of who Alex and Robert are and the issues that face them, including the issue of their own relationship, which is the subject of much gossip. You’ll end up caring about the fate of the two main characters (and some of the supporting roles), whatever your feelings towards bullfighting. The competing, passionate attitudes towards the art (not a ‘sport’, we are reminded) are dealt with in a fair and subtle way. Wena Poon obviously researched deeply, not just the bare facts, but the inner psychology of matadors, managers, fans, and those vehemently opposed to the whole thing, and weaves it seamlessly into the narrative. She questions too-easy assumptions of cultural superiority (from all sides) and revels in their inherent contradictions, perhaps well illustrated by the scene in which Roberto meets up with his friends, Paco and Ana. Ana has been reading VirtualPeña, a website for women bullfighting fans:

Paco asked her when she became interested in bullfighting. She retorted that she was not, but VirtualPeña was addictive. She added that she supported women in any kind of activity that men didn’t allow them in, even though she taught yoga, was vegetarian, and opposed the corrida, and yes she was a bundle of contradictions, and did the men at the table have a problem with it?

This is a literary novel which is also a page-turner, an exciting story which is intelligently organised and very well written. It also asks questions on identity, on how opinions are shaped and cemented, on tradition and modernity, on danger, beauty, cruelty and violence, and shirks nothing. My advice: get some olives, pour a large glass of fine Rioja, and imagine that it’s sunny outside. Pick up this book and start reading.

(Alex y Robert, by Wena Poon, was published by Salt in 2010, and is currently priced at £6.07 (free postage worldwide) at the Book Depository. The book’s Salt Page is here, and contains useful information, and the button to buy it there now works!

Review of 'Mollicle' by Claire Crowther

2011-01-05T16:09:00.001Z

My review of Claire Crowther’s pamphlet, Mollicle, published by Nine Arches Press, is now up at Sphinx magazine. It’s the third review of three on the page. And there are reviews of many other pamphlets too by a host of reviewers.

Supermarket Trolley: A Cautionary Tale

2011-01-04T21:48:00.001Z

I’m in Sainsbury’s trying to choose between various packages on a shelf. A shallow trolley, in which I have placed a small grey backpack and a pair of trousers, is slightly to my left. There are too many packages and it’s hard to choose between them. What do I want for dinner tonight? What about my wife and daughter? I make a few choices, turn round to the trolley and... it’s gone!

I feel a sense of minor panic. Luckily there’s nothing financially valuable in the backpack – a pair of reading glasses, a copy of Arun Kolatkar’s ‘Collected Poems’ recently published by Bloodaxe (which has consistently been astonishing me) and my poetry notebook. Only the latter is irreplaceable but it’s quite new and doesn’t have much written in it. My bank cards are in a wallet in my pocket, so the thief is going to be very disappointed. I speed up and down aisles in the vain hope of catching sight of someone racing off with my stuff.

Instead, I bump into a young woman pushing my trolley. My backpack and trousers are still in it, but she is loading on cartons of juice and has already stacked it with milk, yoghurt and several vegetables. I point out that it is my trolley. She looks surprised. I point out my backpack and the trousers. She now looks absolutely shocked and blurts out apologies. If she is a thief, she is an astonishing actress. But she can’t be a thief. This woman was continuing her shopping, in no obvious hurry, only a couple of aisles down from where the trolley disappeared. I take her back to the disappearing point, where her own trolley, containing a single bag of potatoes, idles at the discount food section.

She must have been in a dream not to notice my backpack in particular, which was standing up clearly as she placed food around it. I wonder when she would have noticed and whether she would have bought the trousers at a till without noticing. Next time I must follow her rather than confront her too soon. Good to get my stuff back but disconcerting to discover how easily I could have been robbed, if it had been a real thief, in a supermarket.

Review - Gulliver's Travels (2010 Movie)

2011-01-03T10:43:00.004Z

I took my daughter to see Gulliver’s Travels mainly because I checked the schedule too late to see Animals United, but mistakes of that kind can sometimes be fortuitous. Not this time.

Gulliver, as you can hardly be unaware due to the massive marketing campaign from TV adverts and bus hoardings, is played by Jack Black, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that Jack Black plays Jack Black. People call him Gulliver for whatever reason. He plays the generic character from all his movies – a wisecracking loser with a whiff of unpredictability, except that nothing unpredictable ever happens. With a hefty injection of menace, he might angle vaguely towards Jack Nicholson, but ends up more like a Build-a Bear with dodgy battery – ‘cuddly’, ‘limited range’, and ‘annoying’ are phrases which spring to mind.

The Build-a-Bear identity is the only way to explain the attraction between himself and the beautiful, sophisticated Darcy (Emily Blunt) - at least, from her point of view. Darcy works, like Black, for a newspaper but she is a successful travel editor while Black works in the mailroom and has done for the past 10 years. A trainee on his first day at work is promoted above Black. You get the picture. Perhaps Darcy likes the idea of buying Black a new wardrobe and dressing him up each morning. You can buy beds, jewellery and shoes for these teddies, and they are very willing to spend time in the shops, unlike most men. Even Black’s plagiarism of a travel article isn’t enough to put her off. The message of the movie seems to be – ‘Plagiarise from Hollywood! Don’t worry! We’ll forgive you and you will win that gorgeous woman of your dreams you lied to. Women appreciate good liars as long as they can demolish an entire fleet of micro-people with one sneeze.’ Good, wholesome stuff.

Black wisecracks his way through various battles on behalf of Lilliput, despite betrayal from an embittered Lilliputian general. Nothing can hold him back for long. His escape from a giant doll’s house in Brobdingnag is all too easy. He has to wear a doll’s dress, which is of course Jack Black at his hilarious 'best'. As for Swiftian satire, you may as well forget it. There is no hint of a political agenda in this movie. It is a threadbare love story with a few special effects and a pompous baddie with a posh south of England accent, who is, in fact, the only one to see through Black’s lies that he was President back in the far-off land of USA. The baddie gets scant reward for this intelligence and for his genius in building a giant fighting robot that does at least give Black a run for his money.

Does Black ever get out of the mailroom? Well, that would be a spoiler if I told you, but you can probably guess. After fighting villains for much of the movie, he manages to deliver a message on the evils of war, for which we can all be profoundly grateful. ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’ ‘Tell lies to get what you want.’ ‘Plagiarise and you will be well rewarded.’ What would Jonathan Swift make of it all?

A Book Which Doesn't Exist

2011-01-02T09:52:00.000Z

OK, it’s New Year, a good enough time as any to get serious about my second full collection, the one which doesn’t yet exist. Poems begin life in a ‘Poems 2010’ folder (now 2011, of course) and move into the hallow of hallows – the ‘second collection ms’ folder – when/if I feel they’re ready. However, I have 55 poems there (most forming parts of sequences) and I am already itching to rewrite some of them and get rid of others, and there are some which, while good enough, don’t really fit in with this book and will either need to be left for a future occasion (by which time I will no doubt be thoroughly bored of them) or booted out.

I have a group of poems I call ‘nocturnes’ – my idea is to have 12 of these and, so far (in an entire year), I have written only 3. They are strange, hard to write, and it’s often easier not to think about them than work a difficult shift in which I may spend an hour and come up only with two or three usable lines. But that hour and other similar hours represent the difference between something being written or not written. This year, I am determined to write the final 9.

Happy New Year!

2011-01-01T10:01:00.000Z

As paper trumpets blare and toot,
as sirens wail and foghorns hoot,
and as churchbells toll all around me

– I wish a happy new year to you all

Breathing fire, coughing smoke,
spitting ash,
as firecrackers burst inside my pants

– I wish a happy new year to you all

As all my buttons pop,
my chest opens and lungs collapse,
as a feather of flame starts eating my hat

– I wish a happy new year to you all

As the Rajabai Tower cranes its neck
to see me reduced to a smudge on the road
and bursts into a joyous song

– I wish a happy new year t

[short excerpt from ‘Man of the Year’ by Arun Kolatkar, from his remarkable Collected Poems in English (Bloodaxe, November 2010).]

New Year's Prayer

2010-12-31T11:07:00.001Z

Happy Hogmanay and all the best for 2011 to readers of Surroundings! Here's some Jeff Buckley - his brilliant 'New Year's Prayer'.

I am telling you the truth in poetry...

2010-12-30T07:31:00.000Z

I
am
telling you
the truth
in poetry

I am
telling
you
the truth in
poetry

I am
telling
you the truth
in poetry

I am telling you
the
truth
in poetry

I am telling
you
the truth in poetry

I am
telling you the truth in poetry

I am telling you the
truth in poetry

I am telling you the truth in poetry

I am telling you the truth
............................in poetry

My Favourite Books of 2010

2010-12-28T11:37:00.001Z

Hope you all had a good Christmas. I was very busy through December, but still managed to have a good time. Here’s a short ‘best of’ list for 2010. I did read quite a number of very good books which may, in other years, have made the list. First of all, some 2010 poetry (in no particular order):

In the Wake of the Day – John Ash (Carcanet)
Dammtor – James Sheard (Cape)
Lighthead – Terrance Hayes (Penguin USA)
A Curious Shipwreck – Steve Spence (Shearsman)
On the Governing of Empires – Alasdair Paterson (Shearsman)
Hurt - Martyn Crucefix (Enitharmon)

And some prose fiction:

Dreams of Rivers and Seas – Tim Parks (Vintage)
Da Happie Laund – Robert Alan Jamieson (Luath)

And some non-fiction:

Cutty, One Rock – August Kleinzahler (Farrar Straus Giroux)
21st Century Modernism – Marjorie Perloff (Blackwell)

I also read Louis MacNeice’s Collected Poems (Faber), but it hardly seems right to include a lifetime’s work in a Best of the Year list. In any case, the work varies from brilliant to just OK, although the brilliant work is brilliant in a real sense (as opposed to the ‘book blurb’ sense).

Books I’m looking forward to reading, or am currently in the middle of and very much enjoying, include collections from David Morley (Enchantment), Ryan Van Winkle (Tomorrow We Will Live Here), Matt Merritt (Hydrodaktulop...), Matthew Sweeney (The Night Post) and Dean Young (Primitive Mentor). And Wena Poon’s novel (Alex y Robert). And six extra hours in every day would be great, thanks.

Don Van Vliet 1941-2010

2010-12-17T22:37:00.002Z

Great Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band live performance. RIP.

The Race for the UK Christmas Number One Single 2010

2010-12-17T16:05:00.002Z

I don’t suppose being the Christmas No 1 single is as important as all that, but this year the fight has been more vigorous than usual.

Until last year, the X Factor winner was guaranteed number one spot, but the Rage Against the Machine campaign successfully knocked Joe McElderry into number 2. This year, the campaign to get John Cage’s 4’33 to number 1 has gradually built momentum, cleverly (or confusingly, according to some) called Cage Against the Machine. You can download the single from here and it will count as a UK chart sale. All the money raised will go to the charities detailed at the link, very worthwhile charities too. However, there have been problems in recreating last year’s success.

Some people don’t like the idea of downloading 4.33 minutes of silence (well, it’s not quite silence, which is the point, as this Guardian article makes clear). And so an alternative song has been mooted, Bird is the Word, recently revived by a famous episode of Family Guy, as Peter Griffin’s favourite record. I’ve heard supporters say that this stands more of a chance because it’s more commercially viable to a wide public. Um...but why not just buy Matt Cardle’s X Factor single then, if we’re taking commercial viability into account? The money raised by the Bird single will go to the record company and the Trashmen, the band who recorded it. Nothing will go to charity.

I’ve also heard supporters of the Bird campaign claim that ‘Christmas is all about fun. The Bird record is fun. The John Cage definitely isn’t fun.” It’s news to me that Christmas is all about ‘fun’. I thought it was supposed to be about giving, sharing, caring, a time for reflection, and (for those so inclined) a time to celebrate the birth of Christ. The John Cage record, whatever else it does, offers a break from running about, from noise, from bustle, from ‘fun’. Fun is over-rated as a way of life, as anyone finds out at any point when circumstances make fun difficult or impossible. I always liked the Housemartins single, ‘Five Get over Excited’, not because it had great poetry or musical arrangements, but because it exposes the ridiculous idea of fun-as-moral-system ('live for the moment!') as a total sham inside three minutes. The John Cage record might create a space where we and other fun-loving people remember people for whom Christmas isn’t much fun at all. What could we do to help them this Christmas?

Another bizarre campaign is for the original Biffy Clyro single, which Matt Cardle is covering. This reached number 20 in the charts at the beginning of this year, which I think accurately demonstrates its average quality as a song. Buying this is just more money to the record company and, of course, Biffy Clyro will also be getting all the songwriting royalties from the X Factor single.

And there have been a few other songs recently mooted as potential Christmas number ones. Divide and rule, anyone? We’re going to let Matt and Simon Cowell take the Christmas number one spot by default with all this arguing. That's what's happening at the moment. Apparently, Matt is way ahead on sales and Rihanna, who - not coincidentally - appeared on the X Factor Final as a guest artist last week, is at number 2.

I’m definitely all for the Cage single. It makes a point, it’s uncommercial, the money is going to good charities, the campaign is well organised, and it actually has some resonance of meaning that people of many different beliefs can unite around. We have until Saturday midnight to get John Cage shooting up to the top spot. Let’s go for it!

SPL Podcast

2010-12-15T12:01:00.000Z

I’m featured in the Scottish Poetry Library podcast this week, chatting with Ryan Van Winkle about my mysterious middle name, what I’m writing at the moment, form and structure, Magma, revenge and ego, criticism, and various other matters. I also read two new poems. That’s in between saying ‘you know’ and ‘um...’ and ‘kind of’ a few hundred times too often.

If you'd like a good poetry collection recommendation, you need look no farther than Ryan's Tomorrow We Will Live Here, published last month by Salt. On sale at the Book Depository for only £6.98 at the moment.

Musical Treasure

2010-12-14T11:18:00.009Z

I have been searching through a treasure trove over the last couple of days, otherwise known as a cardboard box. I had wondered fleetingly over the last few years what had happened to some of my old records and tapes, the ones I knew I had somewhere but could never find. I’d assumed I’d given them to someone and hadn’t got them back. Then my sister mentioned that she’d been clearing out her attic and had found a cardboard box full of cassette tapes and a bag full of records. She asked whether I wanted them or should she just throw them out. Throw them out??? What!

They were delivered to my house over the weekend, and it’s been amazing hearing them again. Not only the ones I knew I had ‘lost’ (e.g. the Factory Records ‘Fact 10c box’ containing Joy Division’s first album, Unknown Pleasures, along with the album cover postcard, old Woodentops, Quando Quango and Rip Rig & Panic albums, The Wild Swans’ incredible ‘Revolutionary Spirit’ single), but also many blank tapes I had recorded stuff onto from the radio up to 25 years ago, a recording of Radio Scotland’s ‘Beat Patrol’ show from the mid-nineties featuring my band, early Aztec Camera live in Glasgow, and much more I haven’t had a chance to listen to yet. Tantalizingly, many of the tapes have no information on them at all, so I have to play them to find out what’s on them. A few tapes haven't survived the decades and won't play properly, but most sound fine, so far. I have to restrict myself to playing them while cooking dinner or I’d spend every hour with them, but I have found recipes that take a reasonable amount of time.

Here's the Wild Swans:

The X Factor Final 2010 - Part 2

2010-12-12T19:59:00.010Z

Part 2 of the final, minus Cher. Matt, One Direction and Rebecca fight it out. It’s a struggle between consistent and boring, cheeky and scream-inducing, cool and classy. Well, who would you choose? My entirely unbiased live blog will carry you through the evening. Can Rebecca do it? She is the best, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I'll update as the evening goes on.

Matt is singing first. He’s been plugging away at his music for 17 years and has got nowhere. There just could be a reason for that - that way audiences have of falling asleep during performances might be one of them. He’s singing Katy Perry’s ‘Firework’ and deserves to lose just for that reason. Horrible song, currently new and popular – going for the teenage girl vote. He’s wearing neon yellow trousers – who that’s supposed to appeal to, I don’t know. I’ll give him 6, as he sang the horrible song consistently as ever. Daughter says 7.

One Direction are doing their boy band thing and they did it just the way you’d expect. Plenty of energy, a few harmonies. It’s a Take That song, isn’t it? I get confused, as those kind of songs all sound very similar to one another. Really new, original and cutting-edge. Not. Simon says they are something we’ve never heard before. Ha ha ha ha... How can he say that with a straight face? He isn’t even being ironic! The boys sang it OK though. I’ll give them 7. Daughter says 7.

It’s Rebecca. She’ll have to do brilliantly to win as she deserves because I fear the British public will go for one of the other two. She’s singing ‘Sweet Dreams Are Made of This’. They’ve tied her hair up and slapped loads of make-up on her face. Harsh lipstick. Not the best look for Rebecca, I think. But her version of the song is quite different from the original. A good thing too, as the song is pretty boring. She breathed a degree of life into it. I’ll give her 9. Faultless performance. I took one off because the song is dull. Daughter says 8.

Ok, after the break, one act is going home. Three will become two. Matt is the weakest, I think, but I'm not at all sure the great British public will see things my way.

Oh no, Matt is through. Looks like Rebecca is out! But NO!!! One Direction are out! Wow, that was a surprise. And a little unjustified, as I think they’ve been much better than Matt in the final. So it's Matt v Rebecca head-to-head. Nail-biting stuff.

Matt and Rebecca will both sing their own winner’s single, not the same song as in previous years. Probably fair enough.

Will Matt choose another crowd-pleaser? It’s an incredibly bland song. What the hell is it? “When we collide we come together, if we join we’ll always be apart...” He’s singing it OK, but he could sleepwalk that kind of song (and everyone else will sleepwalk with him!) Zzzzzzz. So boring. The neon blue lights, lasers, and smoke can’t disguise how weak a song that was. ‘A brilliant contemporary pop song’ says Louie. ‘Incredible song’ says Simon. What are they on! He sang it well, mind you, to be fair, and he put a lot of feeling into it. I won’t bother with marks out of ten at this stage.

Rebecca is now on. She’s singing cool and classy as ever. Perfect song for her. It’s really good. A few tremors halfway through the second verse – nerves and emotions. But she recovers. She recovers big-time. The emotion she conveys by doing something really simply is amazing. It’s all in the voice. She has surely sang Matt off the stage with this. Brilliant. Simon says he can’t call this competition. He must have listened to a different show tonight! Although it’s true it’s impossible to know who is going to get the votes. Rebecca is easily the best though and has been from the first live show.

"One last surprise after the break," Dermott tells us. OK. What will that be? A duet between Robbie Williams and some member of Westlife? Simon and Louie miming to 'I Love Rock'n'Roll'? Who knows... In any case, we'll soon find out who has won. Must be Rebecca, surely.

No, the surprise is just Take That! I don’t understand the excitement around the re-formed Take That. It’s tedious stuff. And this new single they’re performing is awful. I bet Matt loves it though...

After the break it’s the final result. The voting has closed. Fab Marks and Spencers advert. Great dance routine complete with circling Santas. Here we go though – back with the result, which is in...

On come the judges with Matt and Rebecca. They look tense. The winner of the X Factor 2010 is... Matt??? You're kidding! That’s a crazy result. Matt is going to sing that boring song again, which will be a single. Who in their right mind would buy this?

Anyway, the alternative is to make John Cage’s 4’33 number one for Christmas and I’m certainly going to download it. There is a Facebook campaign. A little ambient silence is just what’s needed. Matt is still singing. It’s almost as soporific as silence, but more annoying. Oh boy...

And here endeth the X Factor 2010 live commentary.

The X Factor Final 2010: Live Commentary

2010-12-11T19:51:00.007Z

It’s the final of X Factor. Can you feel it? But don’t worry, you have this live blog for company, updated as the show progresses.

Missed Rebecca, who was first up. Apparently, she was terrific. Hmmmm, sounds as if I also missed Matt who was really first up. The clip shows Matt being Matt, technically perfect and mind-numbingly boring.

Now it’s One Direction. I hope they don’t win, although I suspect we’ll be seeing their cheeky faces around for a long time, win or lose. Will they sing in 4-part harmony tonight? They’re singing Elton and, would you believe, they do try a harmony and almost get it right – a wee bit out, but not all that much! An OK start, I suppose. I’ll give them 7, one of their better attempts. Daughter says 7.

Now it’s Cher. She starts standing on the judges’ table, showing ‘attitude’, or should that simply be ‘altitude’. It’s a good performance by Cher. It’s not really my kind of stuff, but it’s not dull. She could even make an interesting record, given decent songwriters. Simon says she is his favourite brat with a heart. I’ll give her 8. Daughter says 8.

Now it’s round 2, and Matt is thrilled to sing along with his star. Who is it? Let’s find out. He’s doing his best John Bon Jovi impression tonight. Well done, Matt. Zzzzzzzz. Here comes Rihanna, who is mentioned in one of my poems, 'The Look' from my 'The Opposite of Cabbage' collection. It stands to reason that Matt would like Rihanna. Tedious MOR stuff. She is tall, so tall. Matt says he looks up to her – he didn’t have much choice! Their harmonies are a bit off. I’ll give Matt 5 for that. Daughter says 6.

Here comes Rebecca. Can she wipe the smiles off No Direction’s faces? I mean One Direction, of course. Good to see her hair down – much less severe than the tightly pulled back look. She’s singing ‘Beautiful’, Christina Aguilera’s best song. I think Rebecca sings it better than Christina, to be honest – more controlled, less histrionics. I’ll say 8. Daughter says 9.

Who will duet with One Direction? Important to get right for the boys. Och, it’s Robbie Williams. It would be. How predictable can you get? I can’t stand him. OD says he’s a ‘hero to all of us.’ Well, I guess you get the heroes you deserve. I can hear the sound of harmonies, but this time, was that them or was it part of the backing tape?! It sounded suspiciously high and harmony-perfect. I’ll say 6. Daughter says 7.

Here comes Cher. She’s rapping. It’s the Black Eyes Peas guy. Not much I can say about that. 'Tonight’s Gonna Be A good Night'. Maybe. I think Cher will go tonight, although that’s a shame, because she did well there. I’ll say 7. Daughter says 7.

Rihanna’s doing a special guest performance. I’ll take this opportunity to watch wallpaper dry in the next room out-of-earshot...

Christina Aguilera now. Burlesque. Zzzzzzz. Skimpy costumes can’t make an interesting song all by themselves. CA can sing, of course, but what a boring song.

One of the four remaining hopefuls is about to be eliminated. Who will it be? I’d like to think Matt or One Direction, but I reckon it will be Cher. Why? Well, Matt's voice gets votes from people who think that's what the show is about. But think of his debut album! Could you do anything but sleep through it? One Direction simply appeal to, let's say, a different planet from the one I live in, but their fans appear to vote in force. Keep Rebecca in though, please.

Who’s going through? The announcement is coming from Dermott. The four acts and judges are coming onto stage. On now. In no particular order, the first act through is.... REBECCA! Yeah!! Second through is One Direction. Now, Matt or Cher? Come on, Cher, even though it’s obviously going to be Matt. Aw, what a shame. Cher is going home...Bye, Cher. We’ll hear from you again, I suspect, and I don’t think that about many X Factor losers.

The final continues tomorrow. Only three left, only one with that little bit extra. However, Rebecca could easily end up going out first tomorrow with Matt vs OD in the sing-off. What a joke that would be. We'll see...