Cutting Food Waste

Poetry prizes? Plagiarism? Verses off-by-heart in schools? I have missed out on all the contemporary hot literary topics, but I do have something to say about this rather shocking article from the BBC on food waste. Up to half of food bought in Europe and the USA is thrown away, apparently and, even if that figure is inflated, it still indicates a staggering amount of waste. The cost to consumers (or 'non-consumers', it seems) and to all of us who contribute to the costs of waste disposal through taxes, is incredible to think about, especially during a time when finances of average families are being squeezed.

Vanessa Barford, who wrote the article for the BBC, quotes seven ways to reduce food waste, from food writer and broadcaster Stefan Gates. However, I found his some of his advice problematic and I’ll deal with each point in turn:

Ignore best-before dates, they indicate when the manufacturer thinks the product is best, not safe. Use-by dates are important particularly with meat.

I’ve no problem with this advice. It’s entirely sound.

Shop in small amounts and more frequently

That’s all very well if you have an unlimited amount of time, but I find doing a ‘weekly shop’ is by far the best use of time. Also, if I shop on a day-by-day basis, I somehow end up spending more. The issue is partly one of self-control, of course. Shopping with a weekly menu plan and accompanying list can save a great deal of potential wastage. It does make sense, particularly with regard to certain vegetables (e.g. mushrooms), fruit and bread, to buy these around the time you need them and to check use-by dates on meat, eggs etc (see above) to make sure they will last until you intend to use them.

Avoid ‘Buy One Get One Free’ products or only buy them if you can freeze the extra product

Well yes, I agree. However, the supermarkets rip off everyone who tries to beat the system. To give an example: a three-pack of peppers (usually one green, one red and one yellow, like traffic lights) costs around £1.20. Inevitably, you go into the supermarket one day and find the price has increased to £1.95. However, if you buy one, you’ll get one free. Alternatively, you might find that buying two will cost you £2.50. Either way it’s hard to resist taking the extra packet because you know you are paying well over the odds if you buy only one. It’s enraging, and the supermarkets are entirely to blame for the waste that results. People could say no, but I think it’s unfair to expect them always to do so, given the pricing policies.

Plan meals

This always feels like an effort. But, when I do it, I definitely waste very little food. It also takes a certain commitment to stick to the plan, especially if it involves more than sticking something in a microwave. Fresh ingredients always tastes better and costs less in the long run. Last week, I tried making chicken soup from scratch by boiling the remains of a roast chicken (which had covered two family meals in itself) for four hours along with a few garlic cloves, carrots and four celery sticks. I then strained it into an airtight container, chilled it in the fridge and boiled it up again the next day with vegetables and a little remaining chicken. The best soup I’ve ever tasted.

Use your freezer more

Again, this needs organisation. I often forget to take things out the freezer to defrost in time, which messes up the menu plan, but it should be possible to get this right with a little more commitment on my part.

Never buy salad in bags, it isn't good value and once opened it goes off quickly

I agree on principle. But if you buy all the ingredients separately, you will have a lot of stuff and it will cost quite a bit. You’ll do well actually to use it all unless you’re eating salad with every meal for days. The reason people buy bagged ready-made salads is because they come in manageable quantities. Buying separate ingredients to make salads could result in more, not less, waste. Perhaps supermarkets could sell individual salad ingredients for a good price in smaller quantities?

Poetic Taste and Musical Taste

I’ve been thinking about possible correlations of poetic and musical taste. I’m talking mainly pop music here, but I’m sure classical alternatives would be easy to come up with.  

If you are a fan of music produced from, say, an Icelandic collective who record sounds from beaches and fields and run it through a variety of distortion pedals, are you destined to be a fan of avant-garde poetry?

If you are interested in that kind of stuff but spend more time listening to The Velvet Underground, be-bop jazz (and its descendants) or Yo La Tengo – are the chances of you enjoying poems on the mainstream’s left field correspondingly strong i.e. poems that employ experimental techniques but haven’t abandoned traditional forms and melodies?

Let’s say you enjoy what I might call ‘quality commercial pop’ – anything popular produced by talented people capable of writing a half-decent lyric and tune, but not manufactured by producers or TV talent shows. Does that make it more likely you will be into poets who regularly feature in the UK prize shortlists?

How many poetry collections will fans of over-produced power ballads, girl and boy bands, X Factor contestants, and singers who use autotune as a matter of course, read this year? Would it be true to suggest the answer will be close to zero, except perhaps in times of crisis or for special occasions like weddings etc.

I know this is all absurdly reductive. There will be many exceptions, but is the number of exceptions sufficient only to prove the rule?

Books, Books and More Books

It’s the 9^th January already and here comes my first post of 2013. Slowly getting into the way of things again. I had a mild cold a week or so before Christmas, a cold which never really took off, but I blame its after-effect for leaving me knackered over the whole festive period, not just the late nights, food, drink and sole party. I found myself watching TV when I could have been reading, including programmes I’d never normally watch, and this began to depress me (and that feeling is energy-sapping in itself).

Anyway, I am feeling much more like myself now and have been juggling being a co-judge for the Magma short poems competition with other reading matter in book form: Denis Johnson’s Great American Novella Train Dreams, Eva Hoffman’s fascinating, scholarly and fluently written meditation on Time, Luke Kennard’s new poetry collection, A Lost Expression, and Don Paterson’s Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

I never used to read more than one book at a time, but these days I almost always have several on the go. I’d recommend all of these books. ‘Train Dreams’ (which I’ve finished) packs a lot into its 124 pages and is a gripping narrative, both highly imaginative and emotionally charged.  ‘Time’ introduced facts I’d been unaware of, ideas I’d never really thought of before and some I’d thought of but had never quite found words for – it acts the way poetry sometimes does. Luke Kennard’s new collection is razor-sharp, possibly even better than The Harbour Beyond the Movie, which is a big favourite of mine. And Don Paterson’s thoughts on the sonnets are always interesting. I’d read some reviews that really slagged it off, but I’ve enjoyed it. I’m far from an expert on Shakespeare and his commentary has certainly given added pleasure to my experience of reading the poems, and surely that’s the point of a book like this.

On my mythical To Read table are two novels: Tim Parks’s The Server, and Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn and Child. And three poetry books by American poets I have wanted to read for ages:  Don Share’s Wishbone, Patricia Lockwood's amazingly titled Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and DA Powell’s Useless Landscape, or a Guide For Boys. Then, there are new collections out or imminent from Jon Stone, Kirsten Irving, Kaddy Benyon, James Brookes, Luke Heeley, Julia Bird, WN Herbert, George Szirtes, Kona Macphee, Hannah Lowe, John Ashbery,  Richard Price, Frederick Seidel, Nick Laird, Fani Papageorgiou, and the CB Editions critical study of the work of Michael Hofmann. Add to that two theological books: David Fergusson’s Faith and its Critics and Peter Rollins’s The Idolatry of God. And some kind of Lenten reflection thing – I don’t know what’s going to be published yet but am on the look-out for good stuff.

Will I manage to read all of these? There is not even the slightest chance! I will somehow have to pick and choose. Especially as I am about to move house and start a new post in mid-February. Everything is going to be new, interesting and will inevitably mean less time for reading for a while. In addition, I’ll no doubt have proofs of my own second collection to keep me occupied, launches to arrange (April probably) and other readings (please, anyone, I am er... available for readings). And hot new collections from Salt are also due in the same quarter from Andrew Philip and Angela Cleland. It’s going to be a busy time... 

My Favourite Books of 2012

Les Murray – Fredy Neptune (Carcanet 1998): if the very idea of a novel-in-verse puts you off reading it, don’t let that put you off getting hold of this one. Fredy, minus a sense of touch, travels through some of the darkest moments in 20th century history: it’s both a great, pacey narrative and an intensely emotional journey. Look out for continual killer one-liners.

James McGonigal – Beyond the Last Dragon: A Life of Edwin Morgan (Sandstone Press, 2012): a fascinating prose biography of one of the last century’s greatest poets, which also manages to convey its subject’s infectious enthusiasm and sheer energy for poetry, experiment and translation. I also appreciated it because JM picked out Morgan’s brilliant and underrated poem, The New Divan, as one of his favourites.

Nuar Alsadir – More Shadow than Bird (Salt, 2012): a step into the numinous and mysterious where nothing quite comes the way you expect. Sparse but beautiful language and an acute sense of line. I reviewed this book on Surroundings in May of this year and would still recommend it.

Ghassan Zaqtan – Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems (Yale University Press, 2012): a complete new collection and selections from two others from this celebrated Palestinian poet. The poems seem to speak to one another even across collections, not just as echoing phrases but with ever-deepening resonance. I reviewed this in this winter’s Poetry Review (vol. 102:4).

Deryn Rees-Jones –Burying the Wren (Seren, 2012): yes, believe it or not, a collection that was nominated for a major poetry prize (The TS Eliot) this year, and deservedly so. It’s beautifully written, ingenious, ambitious and moving. And, unlike some books that contain line-breaks and white space, this one really feels like poetry, in the true sense (whatever I mean by that. Don’t ask me to explain! I know it when I experience it).

Ben Lerner – Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press, 2011): A novel in prose about a poet, which spends some time reflecting on the place of artistic endeavour in society. That, to some, might sound unpromising. But it is somehow hard to put the book down after the first few pages. The main character tells the story in a haze of drugs and tranquilizers so that you’re always on the alert, suspecting things probably aren’t the way they seem to be. It’s funny and serious, comic and tragic simultaneously, and always feels on a knife-edge, even before the explosions.

Jules Supervielle – Homesick for the Earth (Bloodaxe, 2011): I hadn’t known much of Supervielle’s poetry before reading these ‘versions’ by Moniza Alvi . My French isn’t good enough to vouch for them on issues of accuracy etc, but they read really well as poems in English (although the French is on facing pages). He is especially good at finishing poems with great final lines - surprising and yet bewilderingly inevitable.

Jane Yeh – The Ninjas (Carcanet, 2012): This collection is vastly entertaining. How about that? About how many poetry books could I honestly use ‘vastly’ in this context? The poetry is humorous, a touch surreal, imaginative and shows powers of oblique observation. There's also a little bit of chill mixed in. There are robots, androids, witches, ghosts, jellyfish, great paintings and, of course, ninjas. Shades of early Selima Hill too, and I mean that as a compliment.

ed. Geoffrey Brock – The FSG Book of Twentieth Century Italian Poetry (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012): I should confess that I am in this book, although only with a ten-line translation of a poem by Salvatore Quasimodo on pp. 232-33. It is simply a treasure trove of amazing poems. It might seem expensive but, given that an average 70-page collection can set you back around a tenner, this anthology’s 736 pages isn’t such bad value at £29.95 or so, and it is a beautiful, sturdy hardback that will last you all the years it will take you to read it and read it again and again.

I’ve only included books I have actually finished, which means some very promising books on my 'still to finish' and 'still to begin' piles will have to wait until next year. Included in this is Adonis's astonishing close-on-400-pages 'Selected Poems' (Yale University Press), which I have been reading slowly and carefully and am now more than halfway through. Amazing stuff, unlike anything I've ever read.

Romney for Scotland

Fix News have sensationally named failed U.S. presidential candidate, Mitt Romney as hot favourite to take over as manager of Scotland’s international football team, following the departure of Craig Levein. Romney is said to be excited at the prospect of moving to Scotland. “Donald [Trump] says the golf is good there and the land is anyone’s for a price. Sounds like my kind of place.”

Romney confessed that Obama’s election was the best thing that could have happened. “Now I’m freed up for the Scotland job, and I have plans. First of all, I want to make sure the players wear sacred underwear so as to hide their nipples. I don’t want those huge crowds of scarf-wearing men to be tempted into becoming homosexuals due to nipples showing through shirts. Secondly, I’ve noticed that the team are good at kicking high into the crowd. That’s good, but they need to learn to pick the ball up and run with it more. I haven’t seen them touchdown yet.”

Concerns have been raised over Romney’s promise to scrap the women’s team (“these women, as a minority group, ought to practice minority pursuits more suitable for their status – like preparing modest refreshments and not giving opportunities for abortion”) and by his insistence on bringing Sarah Palin over as his “running mate” (“She gives good tea parties”).

The Scottish Football Association were unavailable for comment, but a spokesman for something or other said that Romney’s interest was welcome, although he would face stiff competition from Barbie, from ex-Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, and from pop star PSY, who promises a new brand of “gangnam style” tactics.

Best Living British Poets #95

#95 Malcolm McRammie

Malcolm McRammie is, in his own words, “a plook in the face of everyone everywhere”. Born in 1952, in a disused rabbit warren next to a rubbish dump where his family of twelve lived for years before emigrating to a cave, McRammie learned to read from a battered recipe book he found on the dump.

At the famous Edinburgh Poetry Convocation of 1973, he made his famous declaration that “Poems are spaghetti, prose is sauce,” to which the chairperson replied, “And yours are inedible.” A conviction and jail term for aggravated assault followed, but this only encouraged McRammie’s literary productivity. His Collected Poems vol.1 (1997) came to an astonishing 2,368 pages, and he has since written 3,457 pages of poems inspired by discarded ingredients found in Scotland’s wheelie-bins.

In 2010 he boasted proudly that, despite his status as Scotland’s best-selling author, he had failed even to be shortlisted for a poetry award, only to find himself in the running for all the major prizes that year. “They must think I’m about to die,” was his response. “This is the first year ever that I haven’t actually published a collection.” No one seemed bothered by this and McRammie won more or less everything. He ritually burned all the plaques and trophies at a hastily arranged news conference on the peak of Ben Lomond, but kept all the money.

[photo from sheeldz's photostream, used under a CReative Commons License]

New Reviews of 'Fleck and the Bank'

A few reviews have appeared on my pamphlet, Fleck and the Bank, to add to Harry Giles’s review at Ink, Sweat and Tears. Harry’s review was as close to a dream review as I’ve ever received, not just because it was mainly positive but because he seemed to 'get' more or less everything I was trying to do. For example:

‘The poems are a series of signs pointing not to Fleck but to other signs, because Fleck himself is not there, is someone of whom even an imagined newscaster’s imagined dress is “more solid than himself”.’

and:

‘... the themes themselves are unusual, or at least have unusual clarity: to write more about a specific absence than any real moment or presence seems new to me, especially when achieved with such grace. And there will, as I’ve suggested, be many more ways to read this book than mine, it is far bigger than its size suggests... Fleck couldn’t hope for a better offering, wherever he is.’

Three new reviews have gone up now at Sphinx and these reflect the huge variety of thought and opinion that constitutes Contemporary Poetry PLC these days. Jake Campbell doesn’t care much for the pamphlet, describing it as having ‘crystalline moments of greatness, but also elements of drudgery’. He goes on to say:

‘I want to be angered; I want to feel Fleck is angry, or at least alive. Instead, he feels like a wet lettuce.’ :-)

Rosie Miles, on the other hand, finds the poems and themes interesting. Rather self-effacingly, she says:

‘I am not this collection’s ideal reader. I don’t entirely “get” it. But I assent to the world it creates and Mackenzie’s use of language is inventive and full of a kind of demotic energy.’

Actually, her readings of the poems seem perfectly fair to me.

Matt Bryden finds it “satisfying” and “generously dense and experimental.” And he makes the interesting point that

‘While some of the fun in reading is to make out Fleck a little more clearly, in one sense he is the MacGuffin that keeps you reading to figure out his world.’

And, finally – on Andrew Shields’s blog – you'll find not a review as such, but more a reflection on how juxtaposition and disorientation are used in some of the poems to create new meanings.

Thanks to all the reviewers for taking the time to set down their thoughts, whether positive or negative. It’s all much appreciated and I certainly hope Salt and I sell a few pamphlets as a result...

Best Living British Poets #96

#96 Smurf K.

Smurf K’s work has divided critics ever since his unforgettable debut, titled simply ‘Smurf’, which contained only the word ‘smurf’ employed in an almost infinite variety of forms, shapes, sizes and fonts over 117 pages. The collection was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the fury of the avant-garde was unleashed like never before, one prominent member from Cambridge calling it “typical mainstream nonsense: self-referential, unimaginative balderdash which might have appeal only for readers with the emotional structure and restricted vocabulary of a two-year-old kangaroo.” However, poet laureate at the time, Andrew Motion, wrote in The Times that it was “possibly the most intriguing debut this decade...”, although he did add, “...apart from [a 28-page list of other notable debut collections of the decade]”. A second collection, ‘One-Word Poems that Never Use the Word, Smurf’, was published the following year to similar consternation, but Smurf K argued strongly that the radical switch in direction was vital to his development and range.

He is currently running workshops in the Seychelles for dropout students from the Faber Academy and is working on a third collection, ‘I Am Not a Hobbit, but Would Like a Part in the Movie, Peter Jackson.’ Last year, he won the inaugural €250,000 'Award for the Deployment & Advancement of Poetic Theories in Small European Towns' for a sequence painted on paving stones, based entirely on words and lines used by celebrated twentieth-century European bureaucrats.

[photo from jonasholmstrom's photostream, used under a Creative Commons License]

UK Poetry Awards and Gender

Just a few harmless statistics on UK poetry awards and gender:

Forward Poetry Prizes from 1992-2012:
Main Prize winner - women 4, men 17.
First Collection prize - woman 9, men 12
Best Poem – women 11, men 10

T.S. Eliot Prize from 1993-2011:
winners - women 4, men 15

Costa Award, poetry category, from 2000-2011:
winners - women 4, men 8

Scottish Poetry Book of the Year (2007-11):
winners - women 0, men 5

There are various conclusions we might draw from these statistics.

The first alternative is that that women do not often write good books. They very rarely write the best poetry book of any year, and never do in Scotland. Their first collections are usually stronger than anything they do afterwards. But they do write good individual poems, even slightly better individual poems than men.

The second alternative is that something is slightly askew with the awards systems.

The third alternative is...oh, I don’t know...

Rhian Gallagher on the National Poetry Competition

Surroundings is pleased to be hosting an article from New Zealand poet, Rhian Gallagher, in support of the National Poetry Competition, which you can still enter here before the end of the month.

Rhian Gallagher lived in London for eighteen years and returned to NZ in 2005. Her first collection Salt Water Creek (Enitharmon Press, 2003) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for First Collection. Gallagher received the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award in 2008. Her second collection, Shift, was published by Auckland University Press, NZ, in 2011 and by Enitharmon Press, UK, in 2012. Shift won the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry.

Her fine poem, Embrace (scroll down), took third prize in the National Poetry Competition in 2001, and her article reflects both on writing poems for competitions ('Big Day Out') and the effect this can have on a writer's life ('Where It Took Me'). It's part of a National Poetry Competition blog tour, the full details of which can be found here.

Big Day Out

• Be serious about the writing and light-hearted about entering the competition. The freedom of being anonymous can be very energizing — an opportunity to be playful and exploratory; generally it’s more daunting to submit work with your name on it to the editor of magazine you respect.

• Poets are a suspicious lot. You may be a dab hand at hexameters but if the poem has nothing interesting to say then no matter how technically correct it is I suspect it won’t grab a judge’s attention.

• Read competition winners from the last couple of years. Purists will say ignore anything that’s gone before but if you’ve never entered the NPC previously how else will you get a sense of the quality of the work that the competition yields.

• It’s not a body of work that’s being judged but a single poem – it’s a bit like an audition in this regard. You might want to ask is your poem memorable: read it aloud – if you get bored half way through you’re in trouble. A fresh take on a subject, precision in word choice, musicality, a sense of energy being sustained through the whole poem (even the saddest poem needs energy); the x factor I suspect is a degree of originality – not something that can be defined.

• Road test your poems before submitting them: have a friend read them. At the very least this will help avoid sending work with obvious glitches.

Where it took me …

‘Embrace’ gained third prize in the National Poetry Competition in 2001 – I’m not sure where this took me, aside from to some swanky law offices in the city of London where the prize reading was held! Ian Duhig and the late Michael Donahy were on the panel of judges – I hold both poets in high regard and their acknowledgement of the poem did make a difference. I was working towards a first collection — ‘Embrace’ is a love poem and, for better or worse, through the competition I gained confidence to write more love poems.

In a strange kind of way the competition also helped in my negotiations to cut back to a four-day week in my day job. Although my poetry had been published in magazines, the competition gave a different kind of visibility and this registered with my boss in a favourable way. One free day in the week made a huge difference and enabled me to finish my first collection.

Best Living British Poets #97

#97 Philomena Béserk

Philomena Béserk is an acclaimed poet-critic – acclaimed, at least, by poets she has herself acclaimed, which comes to very many indeed. Her major critical works, My Canon: Everyone's Canon and Nepotism for Beginners were marked by trashing poets who had offended her (whether the offence had been deliberate or not), even omitting famous poets from subsequent editions if they had inadvertently won prizes she knew she ought to have won. Generally, she favours writers who approximate her own style and several times has accidentally quoted lines from her own poems to illustrate their strengths. Each of her sixteen collections has won prizes, coincidentally always the year after she herself judged them.

(photo from Cea's photostream)

From Blank Screen to Hamlet

I’d had a few thoughts on this blog over the past few months: how to revive it or how to give it a decent burial. I contemplated erasing it entirely, which may actually happen at some point. But, instead, here I am with a new post, mainly because I have been trying to write a poem and have come up with a blank screen, a highly attractive shade of luminous white.

The poem is a new opener for my next collection, as I feel there is no real opener among the poems already written. What makes an opening poem? Well, there’s no formula, although it has to be really good and has to act as a doorway into the rest of the book. Perhaps those twin demands have simply made its writing impossible up till now. Also, it’s the last poem I will write for the collection (I may delete poems, but not add any more) and, somehow, the final step towards completion of anything is often the most difficult of all.

And there’s Hamlet. Yesterday evening was a chilly, damp affair and I spent most of it curled up on the sofa reading Hamlet and thinking of how Shakespeare managed to knock off over a hundred pages of brilliant poetry, full of memorable lines and deep thoughts, whereas I have been struggling for days to write a poem that will fit inside a single page. Perhaps Shakespeare had those kind of days too. “Write something!” the creative writing tutors shout in near-unison, but “To be or not to be...” was not just “something” and may have needed days or weeks of silence before it all poured out. I have written something – this blog post – and I am thinking of Ophelia. Ophelia was a sap, wasn’t she? While Hamlet makes his “to be or not to be...” speech for himself, Ophelia ought to have listened in more carefully. She chose not to be in the end but, really, she chose that with every decision she didn’t make and farmed out for other people to make for her. Hamlet is quite nasty to her as time goes on. If it were a modern play, Ophelia's character would be condemned by many as an example of misogyny. She is certainly a tragic figure, all the more so because of how easy she is to identify with for more or less everyone, including me. But even poor, conflicted Hamlet finds making his life count for something almost impossible, even though he articulates his dilemmas with an emotional clarity most people can never approach. We don’t all have Shakespeare’s help. Only the clown, who also happens to be the gravedigger (a Shakespearian masterstroke), seems to find fulfilment in life, a fulfilment that comes from immersing himself in death. His work, at least, will outlive all the others.

Best Living British Poets #98

#98 Miss B. Field



Miss B. Field, sensationally stripped of the T.S. Eliot Award in 1977 on a technicality because, in the words of a letter published in The Lonesome Echo and signed by 83 leading poets, “she ain’t no human being,” nevertheless continued her meteoric rise to poetic superstardom by winning the Ted Hughes Award. Given her status as a field, she is unable to read or write. Nevertheless she has overcome such challenges as might have defeated those of lesser ambition. Field conjures poems as structures of grass and wind, cowpats, weeds and flowers, punctuated by lost sheep and broken fences. She has no collections. “My life is a poem in progress,” she told The Economist. “My new collaboration with Ruby Rabbit is my most politically charged work to date satirising the house-building industry. Who needs words when you have grass?”

[photo from StevenM_61's photostream, used under a Creative Commons License.]

Fleck, Magma 53 and Two Readings

The sun has sneaked out from the heavy cloud which has made June feel autumnal so far in Edinburgh, and already I feel positive about the day. I am definitely not suited for this country’s climate. Anyway, a few recent happenings...

First of all, my pamphlet, Fleck and the Bank has been out now for about a month and seems generally to be getting a good response from readers – thanks to all of you! It’s available from the Salt shop or from me. I have just installed a ‘Buy Now’ button (PayPal or card) below the image of the pamphlet’s cover near the top right of this blog, and also one for my The Opposite of Cabbage full collection. I hope someone will soon be the first to try it! Tell you what – for the first ever button order of the pamphlet, I will send a free copy of the collection. First come, first served...

Secondly, Magma 53, edited by Kona Macphee and I, has been published and is available from the Magma website. The launch at the Troubadour Cafe, London, on 4th June, was a fantastic occasion, and the first of two photo-enriched reports on it will be going up at the Magma blog very soon, hopefully later today. We are delighted with how the issue turned out – from the poems, reviews and articles to Hugh McEwen’s excellent cover and M J F Chance's illustrations.

Thirdly, and finally, I am doing two readings in the next week. I’m reading tonight, Wednesday 13th June from 8pm at ‘Verse Hearse’, Rio Cafe, Hyndland St, Glasgow (near Kelvin Hall underground station), along with the uniquely creative nic-e-melville (expect plenty of high-quality cut ‘n’ paste and Tippex), followed by an open mic. Then, I’m reading next week, Tuesday 19th June, at the Fruitmarket Gallery, 45 Market Street, Edinburgh (at the back entrance of Waverley Station) from 7pm, along with Chris Emery and Andrew Philip (£4). [Unfortunately, we've had to cancel this reading. Apologies for this. We hope to reschedule it for a later date] This will be the Scottish launch of Chris's new book, The Departure, which is well worth getting hold of.

Best Living British Poets #99

#99 - Vicci Kone

With her Gregory Award winning pamphlet, I'm Not Bitter!!!, and Forward Prize shortlisted British Poetry is Shit, Vicci Kone quickly established herself, in her own words, as “the enfant terrible of World Literature.” Her celebrity party gatecrashing-on-horseback exploits and trademark headgear earned her instant media notoriety and a weekly astrology column in the Daily Mail. Eminent critic E.R. Silverspoon described her sixty-eight page ‘insistent sonnet’ which, controversially, filled an entire issue of Poetry Review, as “Rambo let loose in a pig sty.” She is married to one-time Stockport County ballboy trialist, Philip Prance, with whom she has co-written an autobiography, All Nobodies Without ME. She is currently studying for a Creative Writing diploma at Shilbottle University.


(photo from ukslim’s photostream, published under a Creative Commons License)

Review: 'More Shadow than Bird' by Nuar Alsadir

The bio note on More Shadow than Bird tells us that Nuar Alsadir is training to become a psychoanalyst and this I can well believe after reading her poems. Her subject is the unknown self, fleeting glimpses into the hidden depths of motivation and personality. Her characters often have difficulty in understanding who they are and where they’re going. They are at the mercy of events, misunderstanding others and themselves, and yet a hazy kind of clarity emerges: “more shadow than bird”, it’s true, but the habitually invisible can hardly be held in easy focus.

The attempt to focus results in remarkably clear and striking images; the connections between them aren’t always immediately obvious but they aren’t arbitrary either. Some poets juxtapose outlandish images for reasons of humour or even stylish obfuscation, but Alsadir is trying to express things that aren’t ordinarily expressible. ‘The Ride Home from Mourning’ begins with the phrase, “My underwear is my backpack/ and I feel true” and later, with a desire for accuracy, “grey, with thin strings”. The mood evoked from such imagery is not self-pity, but a desire to express the impact of loss. The narrator asks the questions people ask at such times: “Where do we go when we go/ no more? The unmooredness puzzles”. There are no answers to such questions, but the narrator reflects on how we mourn:

the unintelligible inside us
and the accurate on our backs.

This final couplet clothing unintelligible unmooredness (which is nevertheless somehow moored deep within us) with the weight of accurate expression sends you back to read the poem again, and it’s true that these poems, like all good poems, need to be read more than once. Her images are perfectly clear but produce complexity in combination. The most similar UK poet I can think of would be Claire Crowther and, perhaps behind both, we might detect American poet, Lorine Niedecker.

‘Disquiet’ is a fairly riveting sequence of short independent prose paragraphs. They read like aphorisms but seem less certain of themselves than traditional aphorisms. It is about disquiet, but some lines could be read as describing Nuar Alsadir’s poetics:

What blooms does so in the space that breaks from knowing.

and:

Reason is like light, it comes in quanta. There are no lines connecting thoughts, only packets and leaps.

Making the leaps and connecting without drawing hard-and-fast lines certainly brings rewards here. Most of these poems can’t be explained or summarised but I was always convinced that something interesting was going on. ‘Breakfast’ would be one example. Phrases repeat and echo throughout the poem – images of eggs, roads, and three characters (one man, one woman, and the first person narrator) having an argument are all jumbled up. Some change has occurred. Anyone who can write lines like

.............He thinks she’s a trail
of cigarette butts to something human

and:

Morning. We crack eggs in the pan,
wait to see what creature will rise

has my full attention. The characters appear disorientated and curiously estranged both from their own selves and from those around them. The man’s perception of the woman as a trail is countered in the final line. He doesn’t notice, but “she’s not the path, but where it begins.” What exactly is being said here isn’t clear to me, but I find the poem intriguingly mysterious and strikingly well written, worth continuing to ponder on.

Other poems are more immediate, such as ‘Walking with Suzan’ and ‘Bats’, both of which you can read in full at Michelle McGrane’s Peony Moon site (along with several others). ‘Bats’ again may tell us something about Nuar Alsadir’s approach to poetry. The bats, “not like you/ or the other rodents” are unashamed and “share their darkness like a piece/ of delight”. The crawlers have to “rise for breath, belief”. In contrast:

The bats do not need applause.
If you clap, they will change direction.

Echoes of W.S. Graham there, of course, from the end of his famous poem, Johann Joachim Quantz's Five Lessons:

...keep your finger-stops as light
As feathers but definite. What can I say more?
Do not be sentimental or in your Art.
I will miss you. Do not expect applause.

The evasion of applause or indifference to it. An immediate change in direction at the first hint of populism. Art, not Commerce. So let’s not clap, at least not loudly enough to be heard. More Shadow than Bird is an extraordinary collection: beautiful, reflective and provocative in equal measure. It deserves readers and perhaps the turn of a page, that near-silent form of applause, is all that matters.

More Shadow than Bird by Nuar Alsadir is published by Salt, 2012, in paperback, currently £7.99.

The Best Living British Poets #100

#100 – Gordon ‘The Onion’ Rummy

Born in a field in North Derbyshire, Rummy is one of a new breed of young poets (anyone under the age of 57) whose risky references to both pop culture and University Challenge make them perfect material for patronising comments from jealous and less talented middle-aged duffers. A key member of ‘The New Acerbity’ school, his seven collections revolve around only two themes: sex and vegetables, sometimes both simultaneously. He is not called the onion for nothing. His “fierce kiss will stay on your lips,” said Carol Ann Duffy. He is number 100 in the Surroundings list of 100 Best Living British Poets, which is a great honour indeed. I might consider revealing the identities of those at numbers 101, 102 and 103 at some point, because they really have done very well indeed and only just failed to make the grade.


(photo from kapongo's photostream, used under a Creative Commons License)

The Fleck Pizza

Look, here comes a flying saucer, FLECK
on top in chopped tricolour peppers!

He has arranged them this way:
the pizza a self-addressed valentine,
rehearsal for the real thing.

- from 'The Bank, part 2' in Fleck and the Bank

This pizza tasted pretty good!

Jessie J, Price Tag and Poetry

Here are a few statistics. Two years and four months ago, I made a video of myself reading a poem. It wasn’t a professional job, just my stepson holding a video camera and me standing in a blizzard reading ‘White Noise’. I guess there is a certain humour about it as the snow beats down on me and the book (which I had to cover in clingflim to save it from disintegration), but there is no other concession to the entertainment industry. I uploaded the video to YouTube where it has received 421 views. Not bad for poetry – that’s about one view every day and half.

Contrast this with a video uploaded one year and four months ago of Jessie J’s Price Tag, the official video of the international smash hit single. The video helpfully reminds us that the money doesn’t matter – just as well for me, although I suspect its budget would have been just slightly more than mine. Even a vertical strip torn from one of Jessie’s outfits would have cost more than my video camera. In case anyone thinks I’m being cynical about her, I’m not. She’s obviously a highly talented songwriter and singer (unlike some of her contemporaries) and Price Tag is an extremely catchy song. I’m not surprised it was a massive hit. And the viewing figures? Well, I measured them over the last four days:

Today - 208,692,483
Friday - 208,405,142
Thursday - 208,250,000
Wednesday - 208,133,000

Basically, the views are rising at a rate of anything between about 120,000 and 300,000 a day! By the time you read this, they will have risen significantly again (edit: 16,000 people have watched it in the 1 hour and 20 minutes since I posted this article). At the time of writing, nearly 209 million (209 million!!) people have watched this video and that’s only the official video. It doesn’t count the hundreds of live and acoustic versions of the song, some of them very high quality recordings.

So there you have it: 209,000,000 versus 421. In fact, if you add another year’s viewing to Price Tag to catch up with me, it would be more like 421,000,000 to my 421. A Jessie J song is officially one million times more popular than one of my poems!

Clearly, there are tie-ups between poetry and music – lyrics are obviously a close relation, and good poems are built on rhythm, sound, music etc, but none of that seems to have entered popular consciousness. Poetry suffers from complete lack of exposure. Most people wouldn’t know where to start. And most of them wouldn’t want to start. The latter is fine by me – I wouldn’t want to start doing all kinds of activities that other people find fascinating e.g. playing computer games, watching basketball, cricket etc. I am also resigned to the fact that poetry is a minority and non-commercial activity, and that brings its own creative freedom from commercial pressure, for which I’m grateful. There is also no point in competing for space with genuinely popular art forms like pop music – there is simply no competition, as the figures above demonstrate.

But somehow, I still believe that good poetry is important and that a society is diminished when it loses sight of it. Good poetry is not entirely invisible yet, even if it is about 99.9% of the time, but I do think that the 0.1% is vital to build on. I don’t think poets should pander to the commercial side of things – poetry is more akin to an obscure Scandinavian trio, with a cult following, playing weird music in 5/4 time with terse Norwegian lyrics, than to a new Lady Gaga single with accompanying superficial ‘shock’ banalities. But I’d bet the Scandinavians would still succeed in reaching a bigger audience than an average Faber poet (let alone everyone else). I also believe there is no reason for that to be the case.