Year: 2011

STORY OF THE WORD

I’ve been thinking about spelling.

Some can spell well. Some can’t. Nothing to do with being clever. All to do with brains and the way they process visual information.

I’m a good speller. But then, sets of letters form patterns to me, patterns I like and feel at home with. And part of that is connected with the way I love the story of the word — where it came from, how it’s made up — which bits are prefix, which suffix, where the stem derives. And so on.

At school, when I started doing Latin at about the age of 14 (and I was never particularly good at it), it was a revelation to me. I suddenly realised where lots of words came from, how they came to mean what they mean. I’ve never got over it.

I think knowing the story of a word, or even part of its story, makes the whole business of writing it down different.

Think about spelling, and spell (magic) and a spell of time. How did one sound get to be so many things?

From one source or another, I get ‘spell’ from Old French espeller, of Germanic origin; related to Old Norse spialla to talk, Middle High German spellen. I like ‘spialla’, to talk. But also Old English ‘spell’ is speech. And Old Norse spjall is ‘a tale’, and all these words, though they have echoes in sound and form, came by different circuitous routes into this paragraph. It is a complicated and spell-binding story — probably several stories.

Somehow, we make sounds — and then visual patterns — correspond with something we want to communicate, and that is language. It’s amazing. A maze of amazement. In and out with no end to it .  . . .

IN IT TO WIN IT: THE POETRY COMPETITION BUSINESS

It’s so much easier to describe how NOT to than the reverse.

There are more of them all the time. How do you win them? How do you CHOOSE the winner?

I don’t really know, but I (like Frank Sinatra but less melodiously) do it my way. It goes something like this. . . .

Ten days ago, I read the 664 entries to the Nottingham Open Poetry Competition, which closed on 6th September. That’s a lot of poems. I say this with feeling because I was attempting to read the poems on journeys hither and thither and I couldn’t carry them all.

It’s the biggest number of poems I’ve ever read at once, I think, and when I got to the end I felt peculiar, as though I had eaten a vast amount of porridge and was struggling to walk. Or perhaps gravel, not porridge.

I thought I’d note some of my impressions during the process, since reading 664 poems isn’t something I do often. The first thing that interested me was whether there were obvious barriers to reading. By this I mean off-putting presentation, including:

  • multiple folds in the sheet of paper
  • splashes of tipp-x
  • italic fonts
  • tiny fonts
  • huge fonts
  • bold fonts
  • spelling errors
  • wrongly used apostrophes
  • print that was excessively faint
  • centred formats
  • coloured print
  • uneven margins
  • dirty marks on the paper
  • lines too close together
  • lines too far apart
  • margins too narrow
  • pages that looked crumpled, as though they had been in and out of the washing machine and never quite recovered
  • blood stains on the paper

(Okay I made up the last one). Out of the 664 poems, I recorded 165 with a format that was alienating. I hasten to say, I didn’t rule any of these poems out simply because I didn’t like the look of them, but I had to force myself to be nice to them.

I also noted the poems with formal constructions. Out of 664, I counted 82 that were definitely not free verse – about 12%. I may have missed a couple.

Then I re-read them all, this time putting little ticks in the corners of the poems I wanted to come back to. This was the first trawl and it left me 180 poems. I can carry 180 on a train, so that cheered me up. I still had no idea which would win, and I was aware some people had sent in a good set, though they could only win one prize.

I repeated the process the following day. The second swathe left me 98 poems.

The third swathe, the day after that, brought the complement down to 55.

By this stage, I’d dropped a number of poems I liked but which seemed to me to have flaws. I still didn’t know what was going to win, and I was a little worried that two or three seemed to  follow similar structures or approaches, though their ‘voices’ were dissimilar.

The fourth swathe was hard. I had been happy with that group of 55. I liked them all, in different ways and for different reasons. However, hardening my heart (tough love, or what?), I reduced it to 43.

At each of these stages, some of the poems with off-putting formats had made it through. I still had three that looked (to me) pretty grim in presentation terms, as well as two formally constructed poems.

On Friday night, I steeled myself. By this stage I was aware there were some poems I wanted to win, though I wasn’t sure whether they would. There were also some poems I liked (and if they had come to me as part of a submission, I would have liked the poet behind them, I think) but which I didn’t think were competition winners. Why? I don’t know. It’s incredibly hard to put it into words. My preferences wouldn’t be the same as someone else’s.

Somehow, I got that 43 down to 20.  A whole set of good poems were lost at this stage, poems I’d have been happy to read in any magazine.

What was left? Well, still some poems that were interestingly different. One of the group was faint and tippexed, and for some reason didn’t end in a full stop – I think that must have been an error, since the rest of it behaved in a punctuated way. It also had a sub-title, which I thought it needed to lose. One had two spelling mistakes. Two were rather like each other in construction and design (though not written by the same person), and I began to conjecture about workshop writing exercises, though if they were products of an exercise, it was a good one. There was one poem that could have been excellent, I thought, had the writer formatted the direct speech more effectively. There was one I loved, really loved, but thought the last line needed to go. I had grown unreasonably fond of one rather odd poem but thought other people might not be. Then I decided it wasn’t my job to worry about Other People. One wasn’t as good, when I typed it out, as I’d thought it on first reading. By now I’d read them all about ten times.

I typed the final twenty out and printed them, correcting any obvious errors. That way, I knew I wouldn’t be influenced by how they looked on the piece of paper because each would have the self-same type-face and presentation. I was beginning to be fairly sure of two of the prize winners, though mildly surprised (but pleased) that these two had risen, like dumplings, to the top.

At Haymarket Station yesterday evening, I became totally ruthless. There’s nothing like having a train cancelled to harden the nicest of adjudicators. I chose number one: a poem I will not forget. Very different. I had six others I wanted to give second and third prizes to.

Okay. I’ve just this minute decided which the second and third prizes shall be. And there are ten merits, people who get honorary subscriptions to Assent, a very nice magazine. Several out of these ten could have won prizes. (At least eight poems that didn’t even get to the final twenty were undeniably good. I miss them still.)

For those who entered but did not win, at least you were supporting a worthy poetry organisation. For the actual results, keep an eye on the Nottingham Poetry Society website. Happily, I’ll be at the presentation in Nottingham on Saturday November 26th at The Nottingham Mechanics, 3 North Sherwood Street, Nottingham NG1 4EZ. So if I’ve written really annoying things about the process of adjudication here, come along and take me to task.

Later that same evening (26.11.2011), there’ll be a HappenStance event at Lee Rosy’s at seven-thirty. So perhaps I’ll meet some of you there . . . .

THE TOWN MOUSE AND THE COUNTRY MOUSE

Usually I don’t go, but this time I went.

Usually I don’t go, but this time I went.

Things happen in Scotland, and it’s possible to get there and back in a day. Things happen in London, and it means asking friends for a bed for at least one night. It means effectively three days away from the business. Then there’s planes or trains, and Oystercardless tubes or busses that stop and ditch their passengers. It’s a trip to a foreign city where I’m just the little iron on the Monopoly board, with no houses and no prospect of a hotel.

Nonetheless, Charles Boyle’s invitation to take part in his CB Editions Bookfair was so warmly extended, I thought I’d do it. Just for once.

Three times now I’ve missed Book Fairs I very much wanted to get to. There have been, for example, two Leicester BookFairs organized by Ross Bradshaw of Five Leaves Press, (Ross is also author of one of my PoemCards) in the States of Independence series, and now there’s States of Independence (West), next Saturday in Birmingham. At these events, Robin Vaughan-Williams has been a noble HappenStance author in independent residence, and he’ll be flying the flag, as they say, on the 8th (Gregory Leadbetter is going along too).

I have, however, managed to take part in a number of the colourful poetry pamphlet fairs organized by Scottish Pamphlet Poetry, but there’s a special attraction about being part of a book fair. And while on that subject, HappenStance will be at the splendid By Leaves We Live annual Poetry Publishing Fair at the Scottish Poetry Library at the end of this month, and I’ll be doing on of the short talks (in our case a bit of a conversation) with Gerry Cambridge.

But back to Charles Boyle’s CB Editions event last week (which has been blogged about a lot. Already I feel I should have prefaced all of this with a hyperlink alert). It was held on a beautiful day – not quite as hot as it’s been in London this weekend, but still sunny and warm, so people could sit and chat outside at the various venues along the little street that calls itself Exmouth Market.  You don’t do that in Scotland in September!

The book fair itself was held in exactly the sort of church hall you would find anywhere in the UK. Slightly dilapidated but spacious, with a kitchen at the back where worthy ladies must have made teas for generations.

Book Fair (early)

There were Christmas lights (unlit, alas) trailing from the roof beams, and tables assembled all round the edges of the hall. On the stage at the front, Michael Horowitz did a weird and wonderful introduction to events, accompanied by kazoo and his own personal sound effects. Later, a singer from the street outside came in and did a few songs. Upstairs, there was a little room in which readings went on throughout the day, non-stop – and although I only made it to a couple of these, I can confirm it was a friendly little room and I should like to have heard a whole lot more of them. Not a bad place to read either, despite interesting noises from the street outside – crashes of a million bottles landing somewhere, the street singer resonating up through the window, the chiming of a clock at regular intervals.

Fiona Moore (who is to be a HappenStance poet in 2013) has described it all beautifully in her Displacement blog. I hadn’t met her before, and one of the lovely things about this day was having the opportunity to hobnob with poets, who obligingly stepped off the paper into human form. Jon Stone and Kirsty Irving, for example, were sitting beside me for most of the day being Sidekick Books, but they also read in the HappenStance relay-race slot. Kirsty has her own account of events here.

Tim Love took over the stall while our reading was going on upstairs – Tim was around for most of the day. Marion Tracy arrived (she is a forthcoming HappenStancer) and Christina Dunhill (ditto). And Peter Daniels and D A Prince and Lorna Dowell and Clare Best and Mike Loveday. Oh, and Matt Merritt was there too — here is his blog on the subject: he now, of course, represents Nine Arches (opportunity to meet Jane Commane for the first time). And Chrissy Williams, who will also metamorphose into a HappenStance pamphlet in 2012, organized  the programme of readings and was around to greet us. There was even Geoff Lander, my old friend from university, living proof that all roads meet in the end. He was a chemistry student once – now he’s turned to verse! Oh and Nancy Campbell, whom I’ve wanted to meet for years, and who brought me some beautiful postcards celebrating her newly launched How to say ‘I love you’ in Icelandic. A joy.

HappenStance poets reading

So there was something of a party spirit in the air. In fact, several parties were going on in various parts of the hall. Here is Tom Chivers’ account, for example. Katy Evans-Bush calls it a Renaissance. Ken Edwards on Reality Street gives it a mention. Honestly everybody who was anybody was there. (Well, you could be forgiven for thinking so. Some of them were actually at The London Art Book Fair, as mentioned in the Sphinx feature about Sylph Editions posted recently. In fact, as I travelled back to Vauxhall on the tube, the man sitting opposite me had a huge transparent carrier bag full of publications from that very event).

Other blogger accounts included Sue Guiney (who also read — and I actually HEARD her read, with particular pleasure), and Hilaireinlondon. Rack Press, who was there, has a paragraph about it too. And there’s Andrew Bailey, whom I didn’t quite meet. There were people matching faces with FaceBook friends, one of today’s most amusing party games. Why are people never the same height they seem to be on FaceBook?

The previous night, Chris H-E had launched the new Salt Best British Poetry 2011, and many of the poets in that volume were around, as well as Roddy Lumsden, the noble editor. It was pretty busy, especially between about 11.30 and 2.30.  Chris blogged about the event afterwards – a lovely commentary. He calls Charles Boyle “deliciously grumpy and adversarial”, a great compliment. I wish somebody would call me that. It’s so much better than “the Delia Smith of poetry”.Charles Boyle

I feel I should say Charles has been very charming to me and not at all grumpy.  His own CB Editions books were modestly displayed on a stylish little bookrack to my right, and although this corner was not always manned, people kept coming and buying his attractive books. We slid notes into the money pouch of our rival without demur. He is running a fascinating book enterprise. His books are worth buying.

Chris  Hamilton-Emery talks in his blog about the dark side of such events, how they “can be downright depressing experiences when a (seriously) amateur world collides with different levels of professional delusion and, well, trajectories of intention: from the technically proficient to the anarchically crappy.” How true this is!  I was worried it might even be true of this event, but happily it was not. There was an air of cheery professionalism about it all. Fellow publishers were, as I have found ever since I commenced on this crazy venture, undeniably friendly.

And yes, people did spend money, though not, at my table, as much as Chris suggests (“. . . people came in droves. Really. Not only did they come, they spent money; lots of money.”) A great many of the people in the hall, so far as I could tell, were poets, or aspiring poets. It would have been nice to know how many could have been classed as common readers, the species that poetry so very much needs to win back. And poets are not, in my experience, particularly wealthy. In fact, I worry periodically that poets from my own list are impoverishing themselves trying to support my enterprise: about £120.00 worth of HappenStance publications disappeared on the day, which is not half bad for these events. But I think a number of my own poets bought stuff (they are such nice people)!

So from the money side of things, going to the event did not – could not –  be rational. There was the fee for the taking of a table, there was the (in my case) plane and train fares, the car parking in Edinburgh, the tubes and so on. And most of all, the time investment.

But the meeting of the poets, the taking part in the hubbub, the learning experience –  these factors made it worth it. I wish I had spent more time talking to publishers: I didn’t really manage that, though it was great to meet Andy Ching of Donut Press, whose table was near mine. I wanted to talk to others, didn’t really have time – not even to talk to my own publisher, John Lucas, who was sitting at a Shoestring Press table himself.

Back to country mouse existence now. . . .

ALL GO FOR PO!

A hive of activity, that’s what it’s been here in the last two weeks. A veritable hive.

A hive of activity, that’s what it’s been here in the last two weeks. A veritable hive.

Poetry activity, needless to say.  I’ve been working with Gerry Cambridge on the book which will come out in November. Yes – a whole book, not a pamphlet. It is to be called Notes for Lighting a Fire and it is terrific. I know I am biased, but even when I take my bias and hold it at arms’ length for appraisal, I still think it is a terrific book. But in the meantime, I’m nervous about getting it right. I have my own sweet little time-honoured method for pamphlets now and this is a different kettle of verse. Having said this, Gerry is so good at what he is doing – and so expert at making publications – he is a joy to work with.

Pamphlets are short and they ought to be easy by comparison. But they aren’t easy. Each one is so remarkably different from the last it wakes me up with a little shiver of anticipation.  On Thursday I posted a first draft to Peter Gilmour, a Glasgow-based writer. His poems are exceptionally intense, several of them triggered by his wife’s suicide. It’s a cliché to compare them to black holes, but they do have that effect of appearing to suck in everything around them, so it’s difficult just to slip from one poem to the next. In the end, I divided the pamphlet into sections to give the sets more breathing space. We’ll see what Peter thinks.

Peter’s is a first publication and so is David Hale’s, which will probably be titled The Last Walking Stick Factory. There are woods in it, and many trees, a coffin and some machines. I particularly like poems about machines for some reason. I’ve been communicating with David for years now – at least three years I think, and some of these poems have been coming and going between us until they’ve become old friends. I’m dying to see them printed. Both this and Peter’s pamphlet create a challenge for cover image – Peter’s poems are more abstract than visual, and David’s image could be the walking sticks, but that might look jokey and silly, and few of the poems are light. Perhaps the weave of the wood. . . ..

And finally, Sue Butler’s pamphlet – not sure of the title yet. Sue’s not a new poet. She has, over the years, had pamphlets from different publishers, and her first book, from Smith Doorstop in 2004, was Vanishing Trick, which is one of those books where certain poems stay with you.  For me, it was ‘The Song of My Weakness’ and ‘A Miniature Fairytale’ and ‘When I Grow Up I Want To Be’, and actually, now I think about it, several others too. I’ve been writing to her for years now, on and off. You have to feel strongly about a person’s poems to write to them. I also identify with her situation – a person who, like Alison Brackenbury – has worked away in ordinary jobs, while squirreling away poems.

I would like to use the last line of one of her Vanishing Trick pieces to describe her own poems, but that’s complicated. I’ll need to quote the poem first. Here it is. It’s called ‘Proposal’, and it’s typical of her work to embed a whole narrative in a few bleak words. Having said which, ‘Proposal’ is not bleak at all, and it reminds me I also have a weakness for poems which cook up a meal. Matthew Stewart can do that, and so can Sue Butler:

……Down back streets with women
……double his age, he queues for pears.

……Inspects the eyes and gills before buying
……herrings from a trawler.

……Bakes their flesh with dill,
……stews a sauce from their severed heads.

……He covers the gate-leg table with a cloth.
……Arranges lilac in a milk bottle.

……At ten to eight he melts fresh butter,
……flash fries the pears.

……Stirs in sugar, cream, crushed cloves
……until every mouthful is deafening.

“To whom I was like to give offence. . .”

We ‘did’ Frost for O level.

We ‘did’ Frost for O level.

Ten Twentieth Century Poets, edited with notes by Maurice Wollman, M.A. – I still have a copy, though it’s not the one I used because my name’s not in it. Instead, it’s Susan Heald 5B, Rosemary Green, 4x, Lindsay Brown 4E, Sheila Foster 6”. Where are you now, Susan, Rosemary, Lindsay and Sheila? What do you remember of Robert Frost?

Our teacher was in her early sixties I think, close to retirement. She was plump and very sweet – not a confident woman, but she liked poetry and we must have liked her because we learned not only French vocabulary but also poems on the school bus from Knutsford to Wilmslow, and we passed our exams. I still have ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by heart.

Yesterday, it was ‘Mending Wall’ that came to mind. The fence at the front of the house was being . . . half mended, half rebuilt by two stout members of the family. It fell to me to make scones and bacon rolls to keep them going. Their fingers were literally green by the time they downed tools.

‘Mending Wall’ was the first of the set of Frost poems and therefore the first Frost we read. In my head, Frost got mixed up with Andrew Young, who was in the same book – “Frost called to water ‘Halt! / And crusted the moist snow with sparkling salt”.

And then there was the odd inversion at the start – “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”, instead of “There is something . . .” And that reminded me of Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Family, which had been a craze for me and my two friends Kate and Keri the year before. They talked like that in How Green Was My Valley, inverting everything in a Welsh way. In fact, we re-named the novel There is Green My Valley Was, and Kate became Ceinwen, Keri Keridwen and I think I was Olwen. It wasn’t fair to Kate: nobody, after reading the book, wanted to be Ceinwen.

But back to Frost. We used to adapt bits of poems for our own ends. Something would go missing and one of us would say, “it’s not elves exactly”. Or we would be dragged out against our will to play netball in drizzle, moaning “Oh, just another kind of outdoor game”. Even now, when someone fondly produces a well-worn phrase, the words come to me: “he (or she) likes having thought of it so well”.

I didn’t notice how playful the poem was. I didn’t notice “And on a day we meet to walk the line / And set the wall between us once again. / We keep the wall between us as we go.” How regular it is – how the lines of the poem turn into the obedient lines of the wall! And although there are notes at the back of the book, this poem has none.

In the Highlands, there are dry stane dykes all over the place, mossed over and tumbling. Something has often “spilled the upper boulders in the sun” but mostly the lower boulders stay exactly where they are, and the lines of the ancient walls run through wood, valley and field with stoic determination.

But that’s by the by. Our Hatton Green fence is stoutly erected to keep out neighbours’ dogs and make cats think twice.  It’s taller than I might have liked, because my other half wants privacy (“He moves in darkness as it seems to me, /Not of woods only and the shade of trees”). But there’s a little gap underneath. The hedgehog can probably still get in. . . .

SALLY’S CALLANDER

Poetry history is taking place in Perthshire. It’s doing this in glorious sunshine, with leaves brandishing all the shades of Autumn and rowan berries gleaming like jewels.

Poetry history is taking place in Perthshire. It’s doing this in glorious sunshine, with leaves brandishing all the shades of Autumn and rowan berries gleaming like jewels.

Of course I am referring to the Callandar Poetry Weekend. I was privileged to be at a little bit of this on Friday evening, reading a few poems from the most recent Grey Hen anthology, Get Me Out Of Here! Poems for trying circumstances. Such a pleasure to hear Margaret Christie, Eleanor Livingstone, Anne Clarke and Margaret Wood as fellow Grey Henners – in what a context!

Of course, if you’ve been, you will know. But if you haven’t, this is not an official poetry festival. This is a gathering, a consummation of poets, an ongoing party with reading and singing, much of it in a bookshop, or in the garden behind the shop. The space is crammed with hob-nobbing poets. Plates of cake and strawberries and olives nestle on tables between bookshelves and people. During bookshop readings, the space is restricted, so knees cram together on chairs and faces peer over shoulders. Meanwhile, the resident cat slinks in and out between stanzas while the imitation deer’s head on the wall, with its enormous antlers, officiates. Poets of all shapes and sizes consign their words to the attentive air and the walls of books absorb them. Later it’s time for a break and supper and conversation. People sing. Even the deer on the wall sings.

This is King’s Bookshop, Callandar, and the Poetry Weekend is originated, invented, perpetuated and hosted by the remarkable Sally and Ian King. Sally edits Poetry Scotland, among other tasks, writes poetry, keeps bees and warmly welcomes fellow enthusiasts. Ian once wrote a fair bit of crackingly radical poetry himself. Now he is a book-binder par excellence, restoring and re-binding old tomes (just now poets are seeping in and out of his workspace) and a book-seller and a jovial host. And of course, Sally and Ian are publishers too: they are Diehard Books and they are part of Scotland’s literary history – nobody could ever doubt this for one moment.

There are readings in the Kirk Hall across the road from the shop too. And Callandar itself is a lovely little town, nestled in the hills, relaxed and welcoming. If you’re not there this year, put Callandar on your calendar for next. . . .

It’s also my father’s birthday, or would have been. He died a long time ago, must be over quarter of a century. But I think of him probably more now, not less. He said his children were his immortality. He’d also tell me to shut up about this and get on with my day, but he wouldn’t really mean it. There’s not a lot of him left – some books with his name in them, the novel he never wrote, the signet ring my mother still wears at 87.  There’s a poem about him in my last book, Plot and Counter-Plot, and since that’s a bit of him too, and since it’s his birthday, I’ll put it here as well. ‘Schoolmaster of Rostherne’, it says on the little stone where his ashes are buried.

Nobody could say ‘fatuous’ like my father. He called the Beatles ‘long-haired louts from Liverpool’. When I was a teenager and setting out to a party in my mini-skirt, he said, “You look ravishing, darling. I just hope you don’t get ravished.’ He made sure I didn’t get ravished by arriving to take me home long before it was time. I would beg to stay till eleven o’clock.

Because he was a head teacher, children called him ‘Sir’, a title he relished. When I was tiny I got confused and called him Sir Daddy.

So — Joe Curry, known during my life-time as ‘Howard’ and to my mother as ‘Howie’, here you are.

YOUR NOSE

The blowing of your nose was a trumpet
thrilling the house, rocking from cellar to attic,
shaking the stairs and banisters. It was a strict
aquiline beak that you called ‘Roman’ – at least
it would have been if you hadn’t broken it
and crooked it sideways in the mending. You ate
Club biscuits in majestic bites, then hooked
the wrapper over your royal snout and snorted
till we giggled. Quick to condemn, you sniffed
with curling lip at fads and fatuous fools.
Even in later years your granddad trunk
inhaled the world as fiercely, quivering over
a cut glass filled with amber. Presence flared
from your nostrils; little children warmed themselves
by dragon flames that lasted and lasted. Yes.

CAN POETRY BE TOO OBSCURE?

Sometimes, obscurity exercises its own spell. It’s the bit you don’t understand that does the trick.

Sometimes, obscurity exercises its own spell. It’s the bit you don’t understand that does the trick.

Maybe that’s only true if you more or less ‘get’ the main part of the poem, on one level at least. I woke thinking about Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci, which I’ve loved for as long as I can remember. I like it because it feels so fragmentary – a glimpse of something, a mood, a half a story, a mystery. And it’s a masterly exercise in exploiting traditional ballad form (with a twist – the way the last line of each stanza falls metrically short is exquisitely melancholy).

It’s enormously romantic, of course. Knights wandering around the edges of lakes looking lost, faery ladies seducing them and then disappearing. But at least it makes sense of that label ‘romantic poetry’. I love the way the whole ballad answers “O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms?”, though the narrator has to repeat the question twice. It’s not easy disclosing ailments.

So what does ail him? Love, of course, that old culprit. The loitering knight met a faery lady in the meads (meadows) and they had a dynamic erotic encounter. The word ‘wild’ recurs four times – first it’s her eyes, then it’s the honey. Then the adjective multiplies:

……And there I shut her wild wild eyes
…………With kisses four.

That’s two kisses for each wild eye, following which she lulls him asleep. All this wildness must be sexual intensity. I don’t see how it can not have something to do with that, and the dream he goes on to have – all the pale kings, princes and warriors – these are all the strong men who, like our melancholy knight, have been destroyed by love (all-consuming passion, in particular).

I love the phrase “palely loitering”. How can you make ‘pale’ be an adverb? Keats can – and all those ‘L’ consonants make the tongue stick to the phrase, loiter round it, no less. I once worked in a college with a set of published rules for its students, one of which was: “No loitering in the corridors.” Loitering is not manly. Loitering means a person can be up to something . . .

In this case, the knight is up to something quite useful. In answering the narrator’s questions “O what can ail thee”, he passes on the “horrid warning”, and the message is quite simple. Should you meet a faery lady in the meads (or, if you live in Fife, the Meadies), don’t even think about it. If she gets her way with you, you’re going to be stuck for ever, a prisoner of inertia. All you’ll want is the faery lady, but hey, she’s off enthralling some other poor bastard.

In a Scottish Higher English examination recently, one of the questions invited people to write an essay about some text (could have been novels, or poetry, I can’t remember) which took as its theme ‘unrequited love’. Interestingly, nobody in my class this year had met the word ‘unrequited’, so it’s obviously become archaic, or relatively so. And when you think about it, can anything else be unrequited except love? Merriam Webster wholly links the word to this emotion and even, bizarrely, rhymes it with “self-excited”.

Anyway, I still haven’t got to the bit I was thinking about when I woke up this morning. It was “fragrant zone”. I never understood “fragrant zone” though I have always adored that bit of the poem simply because it was its own wee mystery. Here it is:

……I made a garland for her head,
…………And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
……She look’d at me as she did love,
…………And made sweet moan.

In my head, the garland and bracelets had to be made out of flowers, something like daisy chains, though perhaps something a bit more exotic. Meadow flowers, anyway. And I figured they were scented flowers, so the garland and bracelets together created a whole zone of fragrance. And ‘zone’ has a nice buzz to it, as though even the bees would be gently attracted to the faery lady’s adornments.

I’ve been reading this poem to groups of people, off and on, for approximately thirty years. Nobody has ever asked about “zone”. You’d think somebody would have said once: what does he mean by “fragrant zone”. But no. I have explained manna and elfin grot and why faery is not spelled fairy. But not a peep about fragrant zone.

I don’t know why I’ve never looked it up. However, I just did. The mystery of half a century has dissipated. “Zone” is an archaic word for girdle or belt. Why did I never think to look it up before? I don’t know. Maybe I just wanted it to stay obscure. But now the mystery’s solved, I still like it. What a strange word for a belt: a zone. But now I know ‘zone’ means something that encircles (even in its more usual uses), I like the word even better. And I like that the garland, the bracelets and the zone are all circles, magic circles. Though he could have made her a ring, couldn’t he? And he didn’t do that . . . .

So here’s another thing poetry does. It uses words magically: you get drawn to them and like them (some of them, anyway) before you know what they mean. And sometimes you eventually look up the ‘meaning’ and find there are no simple meanings, just layers of usage and association. And this is amazing. Far better to fall in love with the mystery of language than faery ladies with wild eyes in meads.

But if you want a jolly version, you can’t do better than the Ray Archer Trio. Recommended antidote to faery ladies, in fact.

TOO OLD TO START WRITING POETRY?

Keats was dead at 25, Shelley at 29, Dylan Thomas at  39, Sylvia Plath at 30. Chatterton didn’t even make it to 18.

Keats was dead at 25, Shelley at 29, Dylan Thomas at  39, Sylvia Plath at 30. Chatterton didn’t even make it to 18.

But Fergus Allen, who reads at this year’s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, didn’t start the poetry business seriously until after retirement. His first book-length collection was published when he was 72.  There have been three others since, and now, at ninety, he  will be conversation with Peter Blegvad about all of this in November.

People, including poets, are (with unforgettable exceptions) living longer. Many of them have time and opportunity in their sixties to do things they’ve never done before. For some it’s sky-diving or cycling across India. For others, it’s poetry.

Moss Rich, now billed as ‘Britain’s oldest poet’ launched his first pamphlet publication with PigHog at the age of 95. HappenStance’s oldest poet is Cliff Ashby. Cliff didn’t start writing until he was 40, but once he started, he kept going.

During my reading window in July, the ages of the poets sending work varied widely. The young ones were older than Chatterton and the oldest ones were younger than Fergus Allen but there was an incredible range. The one thing writers significantly over 60 have in common, as it seems to me, is an increased sense of urgency.

But it’s all very well being welcomed into a writers’ group and then placing a few poems in magazines after a lifetime of reading and loving the stuff. It’s another thing to find a publishing outlet, especially if one prefers paper to keyboard, bookshop to online emporium.

On the other hand, older poets sometimes have a bit of an income and they have that commodity so hard to find in the world of work — time. They can often get about to festivals and readings and meet people. They are shrewd and worldy-wise. They make it their business to secure a future for their poems.

W H Davies self-published his first brief collection, The Soul’s Destroyer, when he was  33. He felt he had started late, so he worked like a demon to win himself a place among the poets of his day.  He was intensely prolific to start with, though as the decades went on, he began gradually to reduce his output. And here’s what he had to say about it.  He is addressing one of the garden birds he loved in this poem: I have a dim memory it was a robin, though this may be my own invention.

…….Late Singers

…….The Spring was late in coming, so,
…….…….Sweet bird, your songs are late:
…….Have you a certain number, then,
…….…….Of verses to create?
…….If late to start means late to end,
…….You comfort me, sweet friend.

…….It was the summer of my life
…….…….Ere I began to sing:
…….Will winter be my summer, then,
…….…….As summer was my spring?
…….No matter how things change their hue,
…….We’ll sing our number through.

 

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SHOULD POETRY BE MORE COMPETITIVE?

Well, now. Until Saturday I would have said (nay, shouted) NO!

Well, now. Until Saturday I would have said (nay, shouted) NO!

However, the Inky Fingers A Knife Fight in a Telephone Box changed all that. This was an Edinburgh Festival Fringe event at the Forest Café. This is a hot little dive at the best of times, but it has great atmosphere.

On Saturday all sorts of things were going on there. Kevin Cadwallender, for example, was in process of masterminding a record-breaking 48-hour continuous poetry reading event, for example – a new poet every fifteen minutes – and carrying on most of Friday night. Now THAT takes dedication. It was easy being one of the readers. Turn up. Have a nice cup of tea. Listen to a couple of poets. Read for fifteen minutes and go off to have dinner, attend an event … whatever. Meanwhile, Kevin sat there nobly welcoming, liaising, introducing. Of such stuff are poetry heroes made.

Then at 7.00 the seriously competitive bit started. That catchy title – ‘A Knife Fight in a Telephone Box’ – was used by one of our major poets to describe recent events at the Poetry Society. I didn’t know it was actually the title of a song. My informant was poet and HappenStance subscriber Jim Brown, who knew immediately this was a reference to an album by the American band Bleed the Sky.

The original album was Murder the Dance (2008), and the track in question was in fact A Knife Fight in a Telephone Booth. I hope the original music’s better than the lyrics, but fortunately at the Forest Café event no blood was spilled, though the competition was intense.

The two competing teams were Andrew Phillip, Sandy Hutchison and Rob A Mackenzie representing Salt Publishing. The opposing side comprised Martin Figura, Helen Ivory and myself. Order was established and maintained by the redoubtable Tim Turnbull  — a marvellous master of ceremonies. (Martin has a particularly good Fringe show of his own each afternoon, so he was on overtime).

There was some ordinary stuff – yeah. We read poems like poets do. But in between, things happened that were more unusual. For example, one member of each team read a poem while two others interpreted the poem in terms of contemporary dance. It’s a long time since I’ve laughed so much.

And there were unforgettable moments when Rob Mackenzie and Helen Ivory read a well-known poem aloud, while competing to see how many ice cubes they could put in their mouths during the performance.

Really, poetry should be much more competitive. You can see the light of ambition in their eyes as they prepare to take on the Enemy. It takes determination to be a poet, you know.

Sandy, Rob and Andy. The Dance.Helen prepares to read on ice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rob A Mackenzie reading on ice