StAnza 3 - Non-Poetry-Reading Highlights (Part 1)

Roy Fisher and Jill Turnbull on Gael Turnbull – GT’s wife, Jill, and long-term friend, RF, demonstrated poems driven by motors on spinning ceiling-high metal cylinders, random poems based on shuffled packs of cards, beautifully carved wooden books in which fragments could be wheeled around to create poems. GT’s creations often had whimsical results but there could be no denying the skill and love that went into creating them. The stories behind them were fascinating.

George Szirtes’s StAnza Lecture – this is now online and is bound to attract a lot of discussion over the next while. I am still trying to digest it.

The Bar – there were few tables at the StAnza section of the bar/restaurant and the area was a constant milling about of poets, festival staff, editors, friends and families. I guess this could get tiresome if you were ‘doing festivals’ all the time. You’d probably end up wanting peace and quiet more than anything. But I really enjoyed the social side of things. I expect it’s one reason why participants in shows like the X Factor and American Idol want to stay in the competition – they become part of a group with similar interests, many of the people they meet are fascinating, they are treated very well, people speak to them with the assumption they have real talent. Of course the X Factor and American Idol offer a six-figure prize, but I doubt that’s the main sense of loss when it all ends and people go home empty handed. It’s the buzz that goes missing.

Open Mic Session at the Bunker Bar, Golf Hotel – a group of us got lost, including stand-up comedian/poet, Owen O’Neill. There were lots of bunker bars in St Andrews and everything in the area seemed to be called Golf-something. Eventually we found the right place and wandered in late. O’Neill had the ability to tell this not-particularly-funny story at the mic and have everyone laughing their heads off. He needed only to open his mouth and people would laugh. A great ability.

I was asked later whether we had looked at the map, as the venue was clearly marked. Map? Poets don’t use maps. Poets get lost.

StAnza 2 - What I Bought

What one buys at a poetry festival must say something about what stood out from the crowd. But for me it isn’t that simple. I was under strict constraints, partly because my bank balance this month is pretty hopeless, and partly because I’m trying not to buy anything unnecessary during Lent.

However, I felt it would be wrong not to buy books from fellow poets, especially when I was hoping people would buy my book. But what I bought doesn’t tell the whole story, as there were books I really wanted to buy but couldn’t, because I’d already fulfilled my quota for the day.

Sometimes I wanted to buy a book after seeing a poet in performance, such as Mario Petrucci, whose reading was terrific - particularly his poems on Chernobyl - and Mimi Khalvati, whose performance was reflective and engaging. Other times it was because I thoroughly regretted missing a performance after glancing through a poet’s book, or because (as well as the poems) I liked the poet as a person – Imtiaz Dharker, for example, on both counts, and Ron Butlin (whose reading I did see) on the second count.

I wouldn’t buy a book from a poet I liked personally but whose work was poor (well, not usually), but the reverse scenario doesn't follow i.e. when a poet is obnoxious and his/her poems are great. I did buy Mark Strand’s book, even though he came over to me as very grumpy. His poems were great though.

Two poets I did like personally: Jen Hadfield’s reading was a delight and her book looks excellent. Michael Laskey did a fine reading, which combined depth and wit.

The chapbooks all appealed to me because the opening poems were good. I bought each on the strength of that and I now hope the remaining poems will match up.

So here’s what I bought:

Books

Selected Poems – Mark Strand
Almanacs – Jen Hadfield
Permission to Breathe – Michael Laskey

Chapbooks

Smoke – Jenni Daiches
When Now Is Not Now – Alastair Reid
Three Little Ninjas – Chloe Morrish
Mackerel Wrappers – Martin Cook

And here are poets whose books I really wanted to buy, and will do in the course of the year:

Ron Butlin
Mario Petrucci
Imtiaz Dharker
Mimi Khalvati

StAnza 1

Yesterday evening at the end-of-StAnza party, a certain unidentifiable person with a vast knowledge of cows, who had organised a large gathering of over 100 poets that afternoon at an unidentifiable Scottish poetry festival, asked me if I would be writing about StAnza on my blog. I told him I would.

This unidentifiable person then asked me if I planned to mask people’s identities when writing about them to avoid any impression of literary gossip – for example, “the artistic director of a large Scottish Poetry festival was telling me…” or “a man with a white beard who wasn’t Douglas Dunn and who recently helped to bring a whole load of dead poets to life happened to remark that…” or “a former American poet laureate with the initials MS happened to say…”

This was of course good humoured Scottish sarcasm. I do plan to write a short series of blog posts on the StAnza festival, but it goes without saying that Surroundings does not (often) indulge in gossip and innuendo, not even that of a literary nature. Who lunched together, what they were overheard saying, the romances, the jealousies, the bitter arguments – these I will keep to myself. But the poetry, the performances, and all the angles one could think of employing when reflecting on a poetry festival will receive full coverage.

You read it here first.

Trident

It looks as though there is significant opposition to Tony Blair’s attempt to rush through a vote on renewing the UK’s Trident nuclear missile system.

But not enough opposition to stop the motion being carried with (ironically) the help of the Conservative party. I disagree with the UK having any nuclear weapons, but I have the sense that the Government increasingly pays no attention to what anyone thinks other than its own policy-makers. It’s hard to know what to do and the civil disobedience-style protests (cutting wire-fences, holding sit-down demos etc) are now so “expected” that they have no impact. But there must be something that can be done, beyond feeling apathetic and depressed.

I wrote a poem on the subject (both on nuclear weapons and on the apparent ineffectiveness of protest) a while back that was published in Chapman, issue 104:

Nuclear Yolk

The day after three middle-aged women
turned over Trident, lacing its insides
with syrup, bundling its computers
into the Gareloch, I read the morning news.

Magnifying glass in hand, I spied
a column somewhere to the left of page
nine, detailing anonymous arrests.
For some reason this made me hungry.

Passing over my usual cereal breakfast,
I boiled an egg so hard it mimicked
the texture of stone, smouldering like sulphur
in the salty depths, armoured against the stab

of ploughing cutlery, those who wanted
to split the whole shell open. I could do
nothing with it. Walls turned to rubber,
the rockery trembled like aspic jelly.

I bent a spoon over its head, its ashen
face staring like Medusa. One touch
and objects previously concrete became
flaccid and impotent reflections

of themselves, bouncing the egg back
like a bagatelle. I wondered whether
it could be used to soften up Trident.
The local activists’ committee warned me

to say nothing. Such tomfoolery, they said,
was bad for morale. As peace campaigns
were executed with military precision,
a stiff upper lip was required at all times.

Eggs then being no match for the nuclear
threat, we placed our trust in jumpered vicars
who strained their flimsy dog collars to the limit,
bulging adam’s apples with fruity hymns

set for guitars and fiddles. Even the navy
staff tapped their feet in rhythm, that old-time
religion and its half-remembered ritual
on the point of re-enacting itself, the snip

of wire, the snatch of arrests, and home
in time for Sunday roast; not before I pitched
my egg into the loch, and just as it struck
water, I’m sure it cracked a wicked grin.

Packing...

I’m off to StAnza around lunchtime today. I might miss the Italian poets. For some reason I thought they were on at 3pm, but the brochure says 2.15pm, and I don’t see myself arriving on time. Damn!

I’ll try to blog from StAnza if I find the time and energy. Today I plan to see Jen Hadfield and Polly Clark at 5pm, and then Sean O’Brien (reading from his translation of Dante’s Inferno) and Mimi Khalvati at 8pm. I might go to the open mic later on.

StAnza Readings

What to read at StAnza?

Each of the three poets have 18 minutes to read. I have a lot of poems but it seems important that more than half of them are from The Clown of Natural Sorrow, as the event is a Pamphlet Poets spot. I’d also like to read a translation. I’d like to get a balance of light (or as light as I get!) and heavy, a range of subject-matter, and yet for there to be a thread holding it all together.

I ought to choose the poems the audience are likely to enjoy most, but it’s impossible to guess which ones these are. Poems that have gone down well with other audiences could bomb with this one.

I need to just not think about it too hard.

In case anyone wants to take a trip to St Andrews on Sunday 18th, I'll be reading with Lyn Moir and Diana Hendry at 11.30am in the St John's Undercroft.

At least I know what I’m reading at the 100 Poets Gathering. We were told to choose our “best known poem”. Well, I have no best known poem! So I chose In the Last Few Seconds. It isn't in my pamphlet, but possibly got read by a lot of people over the weeks following the National Poetry Competition. Not that I have any way of knowing whether that's the case or not.

Must Be a Bit Frustrating...

Someone came to this blog earlier this evening after googling for “Andrew Philip naked”. I’m fairly sure there are no nude photos of Andy at this site, and although I haven’t noticed any at Tonguefire, it might be worth making a thorough search.

Someone also arrived here today after googling for "prostitutes at Voronezh", and would no doubt have been delighted to find a poem concerning Voronezh by Osip Mandelstam.

Five Hallelujahs

It’s Leonard Cohen’s song and the lyrics are terrific. But who does the best version?

Leonard Cohen
John Cale
Jeff Buckley
Allison Crowe
Rufus Wainwright

My order of preference would be:

1. Jeff Buckley
2. Leonard Cohen
3. John Cale
4. Rufus Wainwright
5. Allison Crowe

Withholding Information in Poetry

George Szirtes has posted a draft translation of a poem, Lullaby, by Hungarian poet András Imreh.

It’s a really good poem, full of lyrical lines and with an atmosphere of mystery perfect for its subject of sleeplessness and the thin film that separates dream-states from reality. I liked the ambiguous attitude towards the coming morning – its predictability, which still manages to sound fearsome, coming as it does “dead on our doorstep/ grey as a pigeon… with a dull thud as if wrapped/ in silver paper.” As long as dreaming continues, the dull morning is warded off (and yet, paradoxically, mornings seem to arrive faster if the night passes by in dreams than if we spend time tossing and turning, awake on a bed).

What got me thinking was the withholding of information. It’s only in the last stanza when it becomes clear that a fever is the reason for the difficulties in sleeping.

I wrote a poem a while back where I withheld information that the poem’s subject was a child. When the revelation came halfway through the poem, it was clear the child was in danger in a way an adult wouldn’t have been. People who saw the poem didn’t like this aspect. They wanted the child’s identity to be clear from the beginning.

At first I justified the strategy to myself. But I soon came to believe my critics were correct. If the main tension came from the subject being a child, why wait? Why not crank up the tension from the beginning, give the poem an immediate sense of threat and danger. So I made changes.

In Lullaby, the revelation of the fever comes in the final stanza. Why wait? Why does Imreh withhold the information until the final stanza? Maybe it’s just the natural rhythm of this poem, a gradual build-up of repetitive words, sounds and phrases, balanced out by a controlled progression of new information?

Clearly, it’s impossible to legislate on a question like this. If you withhold information until near the end of a poem, it’s because it feels right to do so, and the poem works. But I wonder why I sometimes feel cheated, even annoyed, when a poet hits me with previously withheld information in a final stanza? And why I feel neither cheated nor annoyed when I read Imreh’s poem?

Any thoughts on this more than welcome.

New Poem (now deleted)

Probably this won't be up for very long:

and it's now gone.

Ambit's Review of The Clown of Natural Sorrow

If you’re not yet sick of hearing mention of The Clown of Natural Sorrow on this blog, you can now read an excerpt from the Ambit review.

New Sphinx

Sphinx Issue 6 is out in print. On the website there are also reviews of chapbooks not included in the paper version. I have two reviews there:

first, of The Self in a Photograph by Lisa Dart. Despite my humming and hawing, I thought this was good in places and well worth a read;

and second, of Simple Words by Stephen Warrillow. Probably a case of publishing poetry a few years too soon.

John Ash Profile

Extraordinary UK poet, John Ash, who has lived in Turkey for the past decade, has a new collection. At least it’s out in the USA, but isn’t published in the UK until April. The profile at the link is very interesting.

I liked especially:

Ash still loves to search for forgotten Byzantine towns in remote valleys of the Levant. In one new poem, he wonders if the many American males named Brad are aware that they share their name with a lost Byzantine city in northern Syria. "I have spent days amid stony hills/trying to find you but failed utterly, O Brad!" he writes. "I will not give up. You will be mine I tell you."

Death's Waterfall

Stevie Smith said:

I love death, I think it’s the most exciting thing. As one gets older one gets into this – well it’s like a race, before you get to the waterfall, when you feel the water slowly getting quicker and quicker, and you can’t get out, and all you want to do is get to the waterfall and over the edge. How exciting it is! Why do people grumble about old age so much?

I’ve never heard anyone express quite that attitude before, and I can think of a few reasons why people might grumble. But there’s no doubt she meant what she said. Perhaps her attitude to death mirrored her attitude to life?

In any case, Stevie Smith died of a brain tumour on this date, 7 March, 36 years ago, aged 68.

Coffee Revisited

A new scientific study has decided that a first morning coffee doesn’t give you a buzz or give you an extra alertness, unless you rarely drink any. It only restores you to normality after the withdrawal symptoms from an entire night’s sleep without coffee.

I suppose I should be worried about this, as before my morning coffee, I’m dead to the world. Even the first taste appears to make a huge difference.

Bur according to Professor Peter Rogers:

“That alertness you feel is you getting back to normal, rather than to an above normal level.”

Tony Blair-Should I Stay Or Should I Go

Coffee

I used to drink instant coffee, like most people in the UK. When I lived in Italy, I moved onto real cappuccino and espresso. Since I've come back (and it's been nearly two years), I've failed to make the move back to instant. It tastes bitter, chemical, awful. I can drink filter coffee at a push, but it's only the stuff made in a proper machine that does it for me.

Anyone else fussy with their coffee, or is it just me?

Robert Crawford

On a rare Wednesday evening off work, I went to see Robert Crawford reading at the Scottish Poetry Library – the Scottish Robert Crawford, that is, not the American one - at an event held by the Poetry Association of Scotland.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d read a few of his poems, but I’m not familiar with his work. At present he has six collections and a Selected Poems, so I’m way behind. I knew he was Professor of Modern English Literature at St Andrews University, so I thought he might have been dry and academic, but nothing could have been further from the truth.

He was an excellent reader, dramatic without being over-the-top. His poems fell (from my point of view) into two categories. There were the poems reflecting on science, technology, identity, and language itself, which were clever, funny, and perceptive. And there were a group of more personal poems reflecting on fatherhood, death, and faith, which managed to find new slants and perspectives on their timeless themes.

One pervasive aspect of his poetry was the strong presence of rhythmic and sonic effects. You could never confuse these poems with prose, even without knowledge of where the lines were breaking. There was a music about them that immediately defined them as poems. Not that prose can't be musical (good prose should be), only that these poems simply couldn't have been prose! I can't easily define the difference, but I could hear it clearly.

Defintely a poet I plan to read more of. His Selected Poems is probably the place to start.

New Umbrella

The second issue of Umbrella is now up.

The first thing I’d say is that even before reading any of it, the whole look of this zine is enough to convince me that there’s bound to be good stuff inside. Looks, of course, can be deceptive, but in this case I doubt it.

The second thing is that there is some good stuff! I’ve only managed to read a tiny amount, as it’s just up today and there’s a lot of material. But the four poems by Matt Merritt, who is a HappenStance author and is behind the Polyolbion blog, are all very good.

Finally, I am in the prose section with a review of Tomas Tranströmer’s The Deleted World.

New Poem - deleted

This won’t be on this blog for long – around 24 hours from now it will disappear – and I’ll no doubt tinker with it over the next while

***Pop!***