On losing a poet and a friend

Heather Trickey, author of Sorry About the Mess, died on 21 July, 2021, aged 50. It feels like yesterday.

It’s customary for publishers to put out a notice of regret, some words of praise, when one of their poets dies. It is so hard to do, in this case. Heather had become a friend, and obituaries make death real.

Heather loved being alive. She lived with fierce intensity, whether she was crying, raging, howling with laughter, or splashing in the freezing waves off the Welsh coast. She had a gift for friendship, and for making people smile in dark times. As she slipped further and further into illness, her friends, new and old, drew closer. She gently placed her ‘lovely shattered friends’ into poems. ‘Tell me about your heart,’ she said to them as she danced down ‘the long red carpet of the hall’.

Those phrases are her own, of course. They are drawn from Sorry About the Mess, just a little book, but it’s alive, and it will last.

When a poem works, that’s one of the magic things it does: it creates a tiny flicker of life. A bit of the poet is alive inside it for as long as the text is read, like the filament inside an old-fashioned light bulb.

One of Heather’s favourites was the ancient song ‘Westron Wynde‘, a poem that’s alive if ever one was. She loved ‘the smalle rayne downe can rayne’. She loved the yearning in that poem, the aching loss.

And now Heather Trickey herself is lost. Heather who adored her family with every fibre of her being; who cherished her friends dearly; who loved language, and the traditions of poetry, with every last scrap of her keen intelligence. It was vital to her to articulate the truth with precision and care, whatever it cost.

And here she is still, illuminating her own lines.

Pobble

After I leaked hot tears onto the radiotherapy bed
and the nurse said she would have liked to give me a hug
but couldn’t, I swung by our local patch of water.

This is the Channel. And I am the Pobble,
recklessly dabbling my toes
having already removed my paper mask.

A friend once sat hereabouts and sang a song to the Severn.
Brown/blue, two things can be true. Right now it looks
like sparkling shit. This poem is not about Pobbles
and it will not win prizes.

What to buy for Sebastian? And Robin? And Uncle Jock?

There are four new HappenStance poetry pamphlets. Would your friends and relatives enjoy one of them as a seasonal gift? Which one? I don’t know. I love them all.

But ever helpful, I thought I’d offer some buying tips. (All are the same price – £5.00, or £3.75 to subscribers.)

Bookmarks, D.A. Prince

A set of poems inspired by the markers we leave in books. It would appeal to the sort of person who loves reading, and leaves piles of books lying around (it comes with its own bookmark so that’s a special touch). Poets should be inspired by it too: there’s food for thought here about poem-stimuli. All D.A. Prince’s poems have layers: you can read them for their surface meaning and immediate interest, and then go back many times over.

Honeycomb, M.R. Peacocke

This is a slender set, only 24 pages long. The poems inside are delicate, careful and emotive. The connecting theme may be age and ageing but the touch is light. It does make a good gift for the older reader, but I think those who love lyrical work would also take to it instantly, at any age. And for anyone who already knows M.R. Peacocke’s work, it’s a must.

The Lesser Mortal, Geoff Lander

This is a great gift for scientists —perhaps in particular scientists who don’t think of themselves as poetry readers (also a good gift for artists who don’t think of themselves as scientists) — or young folk planning on science degrees. The contents are beautifully formal (rhymed and metrical) and fun to read, though far from trivial in their preoccupations. Geoff Lander is meticulous in his footnotes too, added value and pleasure here.

Briar Mouth, Helen Nicholson

An unusual first collection by someone who hails from the west coast of Scotland —some of her more eccentric Scottish relatives feature here, as does her experience of growing up with a stammer. Helen Nicholson, (a founder member of Magma) writes with wit, subtlety and charm. An especially good gift for those with Scottish connections, or interested in communication (Helen is now afundraiser for a Dundee-based charity for children and young people with speech, language and communication difficulties).

And what about Now the Robin by Hamish Whyte, published earlier this year? There’s a seasonal bird on the front cover, and two festive robins on the last page too (see illustration below). One of the finest feats for a poet is to write simply: Hamish Whyte does it with bells on. Now the Robin will appeal to anyone who loves sitting in a garden. And of course people called Robin.

Last but not least, there’s a HappenStance poetry party next Saturday at the Scottish Poetry Library where you can see these publications and decide for yourself. Do come if you live near enough — but reserve a place because space is limited. There’ll be cakes from Alison Brackenbury’s Aunt Margaret’s Pudding, something festive to drink, and of course some poets and poems.

Remembering Jack

Since my early twenties, I’ve owned a little brooch, a gold ‘true love knot’ dotted with tiny pearls. My mother gave it me, but it belonged to my father’s mother, and was given to her by her first boyfriend Jack. Jack went off to the war and didn’t come back.

So that was the end of Lizzie Wray’s boyfriend Jack’s story. I never knew his second name.

Meanwhile, Annie Wray, her younger sister (my great-aunt) also had a boyfriend who went off to fight. He was called Hamlyn Radford, and he went to France and did come back. He came back because he was shot through the chest in 1916. He survived that, and mustard gas, which he told me had made his hair fall out. He was indeed entirely bald.

Lizzie married someone else: Joseph Curry. And when her son to that someone (my dad) was ten, that husband died too, though of natural causes. And she married for a second time: Harold Essex (I have a silver lapel button with a tiny photo of Harold inside it).

But she kept Jack’s brooch, because I have it now. I’ve just cleaned and polished that little eternity symbol for the first time in nearly half a century. It seemed appropriate on Remembrance Sunday.

But recently something else happened. I was going through photographs of my mother’s (she died at 91 in 2015) and I came across a yellowing card: a sort of postcard with an embroidered panel, and the lacy panel has a flap, beneath which something presumably once went.

The card is marked and dirty. You couldn’t wash the embroidered section because it’s firmly fixed to the paper frame. Should I keep it or ditch it? I was in the mood for throwing things out. Then I turned it over and saw the handwriting (I have never noticed it before). It says, in faded letters, Yours Jack.

Do you ever feel as though you’ve had a little nudge? As though someone, not here, is sending a tiny hint that you should pay more attention?

Of course it could be any Jack. Any Jack could have written this on the card. But he’s also dated it, and the date is 26/7/17.

Does that mean he was killed at Ypres not long after? Maybe.

In tiny print, I can see the card announces its provenance as Paris, though the red, white and blue of the embroidery makes me think it was made for the British. I always assumed Jack had bought the brooch in England and gave it to her before he left. But perhaps he bought it in France and posted it to her. Either way, I think the brooch may once have been pinned to the card, and may have sat beneath the flap that says BEST LOVE.

Who were you Jack? How old were you when you died? What was your second name? You might have been my grandfather – or at least somebody’s grandfather – had you only survived.

All the people who might have known about my grandmother’s first boyfriend are long dead, and Jack even longer. I would have shared this with my sister, but since last year she’s gone too. So here’s to the memory of Jack. To Jack, and all the other Jacks.

If I were to wish anything for my own grandchildren, and for all the other children in the world, it would be for human beings to find a way to stop making war, to put all that behind us. Isn’t war the single most stupid thing an intelligent species could ever make?

POETRY AND BEES

The town of Callander, not far from the city of Stirling, is one of those places often referred to as ‘gateway to the Highlands’. It’s a busy little place, and scenic, with great big wooded crags behind it, from which the rain (when it’s raining) comes rolling down. It has a wonderful second-hand bookshop (more of that later).

It has significant history too. In 1645 about 80 Campbells (of Argyll), while retreating fast from a siege, were polished off by the Atholl men while fording the river. It was a fierce time.

And then there’s Helen Duncan – also known as ‘Hellish Nell’ and hence a bit of a connection for me. But although Helen Duncan was born in Callander, that town cannot be blamed for her adult pursuits as a spirit medium, with ectoplasm allegedly involving the regurgitation of cheese-cloth (there is an ‘official’ website that sues, quite rightly for her pardon, since whatever she was, she was not a witch). According to Wikipedia, the poor woman was the last person to be imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 – in 1944.

But all of this is equalled by something no less extraordinary that occurs usually the first weekend in September in and around King’s bookshop. This is, of course, the Callander Poetry Weekend. You can find the programme for this extraordinary grassroots festival, if you don’t already know about it, on Sally Evans’s website, DesktopSally.

Sally is half of King’s bookshop, and Ian (King) is the other half. From that shop they run Diehard Press which has been publishing from the early nineties, first from Edinburgh (Old Grindles Bookshop) and then, as the twenty-first century rolled into action, from Callander. Diehard, among its other publications, is the source of the broadsheet magazine, Poetry Scotland. And Ian is also a book-binder.

Yesterday, for just one enriching afternoon, I was in the Kirk Hall in Callander with the poetry community that assembles for this special weekend. It is a real community, not just one of those ‘community’ references that surround us these days. On the page for ‘diehard publishers’ on the Scottish Poetry Library website, you will see this statement under ‘Submission Guidelines’:

We are ceasing to publish submission guidelines as we get to know poets through the community and readings. We do not accept online submissions.

The Callendar weekend is a community. Anyone can come. No money is involved (unless you choose to buy books). It isn’t competitive. There are lots and lots and lots of readings, and some high quality listening.

The atmosphere is friendly and supportive. You can feel like you belong, just because you’re interested in writers and writing. It doesn’t matter what nationality you are, or what shape or size or gender or colour or age.

Some of the Callander weekend poets have well-established, and well-deserved reputations. Some are newbies. Some are somewhere in the middle. It doesn’t matter. It reminds you that we are all part of the same thing, the same scribbling and trying, the same footering and listening. The listening is especially important – and at Callander the poets (and sometimes musicians) really listen to each other. They don’t arrive just for their own five minute reading and then bugger off. This is a community, like the bees that Sally keeps behind the shop.

Rilke leaps to mind: Wir sind die Bienen des Unsichtbaren – ‘We are the bees of the invisible. We plunder the honey of the visible in order to gather it in the great golden hive of the invisible.’

Doing away, as we say here. Doing away.

You don’t have to be famous. You don’t have to be published. You can come along with bits of paper. You can come with the poems in your head. You will fit in. There will be time.

And there are provisions: Sally magically summons them (though her magic is of the practical kind, including a basket of real, not plastic, cutlery), and the poets and helpers and friends bring more. This is a poetry community in which you will not starve.

That’s if you can get there – a bit late for this year unless you set off right NOW, but there’s next – you should go, you really should. Add it to your bucket list.

I am absolutely certain there is nothing else like it anywhere in the world.

WHAT TO DO WHEN ALL YOUR FRIENDS ARE AT A POETRY FESTIVAL AND YOU ARE NOT

Easy. Here’s a festival I made earlier.

Last Saturday afternoon when I was not at Aldeburgh and was waiting for a grandbaby to arrive (he showed up on Sunday morning), I went to this mini festival. It’s a mixture of reading and listening. It takes about an hour. Too long for you, reading at speed on the interweb, I know. But no matter. I had a lovely time and I recommend the experience. I’m sorry some of the participants are posthumous. Please add your own guest events in the comments boxes.

Festival Appearances

nb sometimes these sites run slow, or don’t connect for a few seconds. Think of this as a slightly delayed appearance. They’ll show up eventually.

Opening gig: raise your spirits with ten minutes of Matt Harvey from TedxTotnes. A love poem to a tea-bag, ‘What are you?’ and ‘A hymn to hands’. (9.17 mins)

Now three visits to the Poetry Archive

First a brief extract from an interview with Ruth Pitter, who speaks about ‘the noble obscurity of poetry’, and then goes on to read one of my favourite poems of all time, ‘If You Came’ (Just over 3 minutes)

And next Hilaire Belloc reading, or really singing, Tarantella. How extraordinary! (1.5 mins)

And finally Dannie Abse reading ‘In the Theatre’. He talks about the background to this extraordinary poem first. (About 3 mins). The brain and soul. Once heard never forgotten.

A short break from poetry but still in the weirdness that is poetryland. A short lecture on LIfshin by Daniel Nester (this is really an essay, I’m afraid, but it’s so beautifully conversational it is like a short talk: Rejection Slip? What Rejection Slip?’

Back to the stage. The ultimate in performance from Marina Abramovitch, (3.37 mins), with music. I’m giving you the music version because it tells you the backstory. I adore this woman. Makes me cry every time. And the lyrics are lovely.

Interval
Okay, we need to come down from that intensity, so a little bit of reading, in the quiet on your own. Think of this as a walk away from the hubbub. I’m taking a bag of chopped up bread with me. ‘From troubles of the world I turn to ducks’ by F.W. Harvey – such a lovely face, he had. ‘Yes, ducks are valiant things’. (2 mins?) And while we’re out by the pond, you might like to unscroll your copy of Trees by Joyce Kilmer. You can read it in half a minute or so, but you’ll want to read it twice of course.

Back to the theatre. The other thing about the web is that poets can be in two places at once. So not just in Aldeburgh but here online is Kei Miller with Unsung (1.38 mins). Uplifting, right?

So the ultimate uplift, from Maya Angelou, And still I rise. (2.52 mins)

Not just English: This festival is not just limited to one language. It can do more. I was enchanted by this bit of Baudelaire, read slowly enough for me to get it. (2.07 mins)

And a little Tom Duddy, who recorded very little during his lifetime, but this magical poem can be heard in his own voice: ‘The Touch’. (2.21.)

More performance: so many politicians talking at us. Hannah Silva says it all, without exactly saying it. (3.21)

Discussion, with music. Aldeburgh was on my mind and winter, and this brought me to a recording of Peter pears and Benjamin Britten peforming from and talking about Die Winterreise. You could listen to all of it, or just a bit. (12.44). A marvellous piece of film.

The Final Billing: headliners Edna St Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Stevie Smith and W H Auden.

‘Love is not all’, Edna St Vincent Millay (1.29 mins)
‘One Perfect Rose’, Dorothy Parker (c 1 min)
Stevie Smith, my hero, with Tenuous and Precarious (1 min)
And that bit of film produced by the post office and making this bit of Auden famous for all time: ‘Night Mail’. (3.53) Practically an elegy really, now that nobody writes letters any more. (Well, I do. Sometimes.)

ON GOOD FORM

Have we got it right? Does the poem work? Did the poem win?

Last week my multiple foibles and fixes were more in a spirit of play than anything else. Poets should get in more, and have more fun. And worry less about winning.

But I had a subtext that never made it into the blog, and it was to do with form. Form intrigues me, although of all the forms a poem could take, we’re often ruled by fashion and habit. (I’m using the word ‘form’ in the widest sense: it includes ‘free’ form.)

This isn’t always a bad thing. I’ve known poets who, for an extended time, wrote sonnets relentlessly. The result was a handful of wonderful poems (in the middle of others less remarkable). One can stick to a particular form for ages, in order to become so comfortable that the range of possibilities stretches and extends.

On the other hand, writers can stick to a familiar form because it’s the way they write, and the way most of their contemporaries write. It’s what most people do, at least at first. It’s normal.

Just now, there’s a lot of poetry in two-line stanzas. Fashion favours aeration in poems these days. And although there are a number of texts that leap about the page with gaps and jumps, far more poems follow a dutiful line down the left hand margin. If there are stanzas, they’re mainly chunked in regular numbers, and often this chunking works against the verse paragraph: you see that by the amount of cross-stanza enjambment. Prose poems are ‘in’: you see them in numerous first collections, though sometimes the shape is formed by the typesetter, not the poet because the poet, wrongly, thinks prose is just prose.

Sometimes readers mention a sense of boredom or ‘same-ishness’ when reading poetry journals or inside whole books of poems. They can’t quite put their finger on what causes it but it’s there.

I think it’s often caused by lack of variety in form. And yet – I don’t think that nails it either. Because sometimes I have the same sense of same-ishness in a journal where the poems are actually pretty varied on the page, insofar as layout is concerned.

The thing I often miss is the sense of everything coming together: that the sound, the shape and the sense have fused. That the form (whatever it is) feels like the only one possible. That the poem has led the form, rather than the form guided the poem.

You know it when you see it – or rather, I think you feel it when you read it. It’s an intuitive matter to some extent, and there’s no recipe for getting it ‘right’. But there is a mindset in poets that can allow for good form. I think it’s a playful mindset. Playful, in the best sense.

Often writers believe they must be innovative. On back covers of books, the blurbs brandish ‘risk’, ‘experiment’, ‘fearlessness’ and any possible aspect that can be described as ‘new’. We have been persuaded to value innovation to a ridiculous extent, to the extent that the word ‘innovative’ is bland and mindless.

But for poets there’s no need to be stuck on what’s new, any more than being stuck in the rut of familiarity. Every single form that has ever been done — from Old English metre through rhyme royal through Spenserian stanzas (never liked them much) through ottava rima through dada through L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and the avant garde through iambic pentameter through ballads through salads through the chains of free verse through syllabics through Sound and out again through round through concrete and discrete and tall and short and fat and thin and out-loud poems and poems so hard to decipher you have to read them on an iceberg all by yourself — all of this stuff, and more, is available to you.

Using retro language might be inadvisable, but no form is ever redundant. All forms and shapes and approaches are options. It’s mind-boggling.

This doesn’t mean you have to run the gauntlet of clever-clever I-can-show-you-all-my tricks. It’s a mindset I’m talking about. A sort of informed instinct, even in the act of writing, for the shape/form the poetry might need, whether it’s two lines long or 5000. And sometimes an instinct for when the poem hasn’t found its true form, or is behaving sheepishly in order to fall in line.

I’ll end with a poem by W H Davies, who was often accused of repeating himself, though actually his range of form and method was pretty wide. He wrote a lot, and played with different forms a lot, and out of that play came a handful of lovely things, where everything fused. I think ‘The Villain’, first published in 1920, is one of these.

It opens in plodding ballad metre – such a heavy plod – and it summons ‘joy’ (Davies had a thing about joy) and then calls ‘where’er’ into service. Your heart sinks.

But Davies is mocking his own method. Read on. Look how he uses the indents to shape the poem, to emphasise change in tone and action, and how the rhythm of the last line isn’t like any of the rest.

The Villain

While joy gave clouds the light of stars,
    That beamed where’er they looked;
And calves and lambs had tottering knees,
    Excited, while they sucked;
While every bird enjoyed his song,
Without one thought of harm or wrong—
I turned my head and saw the wind,
    Not far from where I stood,
Dragging the corn by her golden hair
     Into a dark and lonely wood.

32 WAYS OF REVIVING A REJECTED POEM

Warning: 1. We can get too serious about our poems. 2. Sometimes poems die under the knife.

So – choose a poem you don’t love deeply. Choose a poem you know has something but you’re not sure what. Set aside eleven copies of the original to work with, and try ten of the methods below. Then take a look at your ten versions and decide whether you want to combine or vary or mix the results on the eleventh text.

Creativity involves fun, discovery and joy. None of the following methods are magic. But they may encourage your brain to function in ways it ordinarily doesn’t. Your poem might surprise you yet.

So, if you’re on board with this, start your selection and implement fearlessly. At the very least, this will keep you harmlessly engaged for a whole wet afternoon in winter. If you suffer from that mysterious malaise known as ‘writer’s block’, you’ll forget such an affliction ever existed.

I suggest your original poem should be no longer than 20 lines in length, and it should not be sestina, villanelle, triolet or pantoum. Ghazals and sonnets will be fine to mess with.

Please don’t try these methods on a poem you strongly feel is right already. Keep faith with that poem, no matter who has rejected it.

Work with a text you were never all that sure of in the first place. This could be more about process than product anyway. Most of the methods will be easiest to do if working electronically.

Choose another title, a long title, that seems not to belong to the poem. You might try the style one of those 18^th century chapter titles: “In which a gentleman of uncertain age meets three ladies and has to take a decision”. Or any other lengthy title you like.

Dump your title. Use the first line as title.

Find two words that rhyme. They may be very small words like ‘you’ and ‘two’. Introduce more words that rhyme with these, but not at end of lines. (BUT if this is a rhyming poem, take all the rhymes out and then decide what other changes you need to make for the poem still to work; these will probably include changing the line breaks.)

Change a key noun in the poem by replacing it with another word that rhymes with it. Don’t worry if the poem no longer makes sense

Change the font of the poem: if you use a seriphed font like Garamond or Times Roman, change to sans serif like Calibri or Arial Narrow. The aim is for you to see the poem differently. Now cast the whole poem into two-line stanzas.

Change your pargraph formatting. If you double-space your poems, single-space it (if you don’t know how to get it out of double spacing, you need a soft return at the end of each line: shift+enter instead of just enter). If you single-space, try widening the gaps between the lines to 1.2 (in Word, Select the text, then Font > Paragraph > Line Spacing and type 1.2 into the box).

Remove all adverbs and adjectives if there are any. Then put one adjective back in but it must be different, and more potent, than any you took out.

Change the shape of the poem. Consider indenting every second or third line. Consider making it concrete. Think hard about what the poem is about and whether there is any shape or stanza division that would connect with its central idea.

Take out all the line breaks and put them back in again every seventh word.

If there are stanza breaks, take them all out. If there are no stanza breaks, break the poem into either two-line or three-line stanzas.

Cut the first sentence. Not the first line, the first sentence, unless the first line ends with a full stop, in which case cut the first line.

Take out all the punctuation and remove capital letters at the start of sentences (you can retain capital I for the first person). Now decide what you need to do to allow the poem to make sense. You’re not allowed to put any punctuation back in again.

Run your eye down the left hand margin. Which line has most energy? Which line starts in the MOST interesting way? Make this your first line.

Reduce (or expand) the poem to fourteen lines. Whatever it takes. Remember you can have very long or very short lines. You can have anything: you are The Poet.

Go to another poem you have written (unpublished) and extract three lines you know you like, not necessarily a group. Inject them into the rejected poem somewhere near the middle.

If the poem has a clear theme, find a nice quotation that touches this theme obliquely. Insert it as epigraph.

Consider assonance. Where you find an ‘ah’ sound, vary your existing word choice so as to create another and another. Where there is an ‘oh’ sound, make more of them. And so on. Do this systematically through the whole poem, but not to the extent it gets silly.

Consider consonance. Reading aloud will allow you to discover naturally occurring sound repetitions: sounds like D and K and S and M. Strengthen the phenomenon in one particular section of the poem but try to avoid alliteration – sounds in the middle or end of words can be subtler.

Recast the poem as a series of questions and answers. (Optional: take out the questions. Or take out the answers.)

Alter your sentence lengths. Make sure not one of them is longer than eight Now ensure two of them are no more than three words long.

Sing the poem to a well-known tune. (Allegedly all of Emily Dickinson can be sung to The Yellow Rose of Texas.) You might like to try You’ll Never Walk Alone or, if you’re a church goer, ‘Praise my soul the King of Heaven’. Adjust the poem so it’s possible to sing it to this tune without too much difficulty.

Pantoumise the poem by creating a repeating pattern. It will end up divided into four line stanzas (quatrains). So start with your first four lines, then make a stanza break. Your second and fourth lines will now be repeated as the first and third line of the next four line stanza. And so on. It will double the length of your poem. Don’t worry: this is poetry.

Reverse the opening and closing lines of the poem.

Repeat the opening line or lines at the end of the poem.

Cut the last line(s) of the poem.

Introduce a new voice into the poem, a voice that argues with any of your assertions. eg. The morning was chilly and grey. / No, it was warm and sunny.

If your poem is about an event, something that happened once, change it completely so it’s about what didn’t happen that day. This is a complete redraft though you may save some of the poem anyway.

Think of your poem, whatever it is, as a sort of narrative or commentary on an event or person. Divide it into three chunks and number them 1. 2. 3. Change the title to something that contains the word ‘three’. Or if you get really excitable, do the same with the number 7.

Read the poem aloud. Change any line you stumble over unless you never stumble once. If you never stumble once, make one line much more difficult to read aloud, preferably a line that connects with some idea of difficulty in the poem.

Take out all the line breaks. Think about your poem as a prose poem. Does it work in prose? If not, make it work in prose. If it’s a prose poem, it had better be really good prose. Remember Mark Twain on adjectives: If in doubt, strike it out. And on adverbs, If you see an adverb, kill it. You also need to decide how you want to justify (in typesetting terms) your prose poem: left justified or fully justified. There is a choice and it’s just as significant as your choice of line breaks in a conventional poetry format. If your prose poem is fully justified, how wide should your block of text be?

Put the word ‘dinosaur’ into your poem somewhere. Or make ‘Dinosaur’ the title.

Decide which lines in the poem you like best. Remove them. a) Do whatever it takes to make the poem work without them. b) Make the lines you’ve removed work on their own (changing the title could be a key move). Now you have two poems: it’s like a ginger beer plant. Remember ginger beer plants? All you need is a starter.

Finally: assemble your versions in a row. Pick out any that attract you. Work with one or several of them to arrive at a revived poem you like. Don’t angst over this too long. Send it to a worthy magazine and see what happens.

HOMEWORK: WRITE A POEM ABOUT A LEG

Why would you write a poem about a leg? A leg!

Even if the leg had been detached from its owner. Even if the leg were detached during, or immediately after, the Battle of Waterloo. Even if the poem about the leg was written just before the bicentenary of the battle in which the phrase ‘met his Waterloo’ was born. Even if the battle was fought on a Sunday (when some people are peacefully writing their blogs).

There’s no logic behind what poems are written about.

But if the Earl of Uxbridge, who lost the particular leg as a result of a cannonball injury at the age of 47, happened to be your distant relative, then maybe. And if there was a story: not just the fact that the leg was lost but what happened to the limb later, well . . .

And if the resulting poem (or sequence of poems) had such wayward character and wit that a publisher could not resist it, so she squeezed it into her impossibly crammed publication schedule six months before the bicentenary, then maybe you might want to read it, or buy it and send it to a friend. Because poems are sometimes fun, and easy to understand and delight in. There should be more of that kind of poem.

The one I’m referring to is in the HappenStance shop, waiting for you to find it. It’s by Jo Field, and she’s good. (She’s in Blame Montezuma! too).

There’s no time like the present and I’m not pulling your . . . No, I must resist silly jokes. This is not a silly poem. Wit and charm. Those are the key attributes: wit and charm. (But it won’t cost you an arm and a.)

CHOC-LIT MELTS INTO ACTION

I now know the cure for eating too much chocolate.

It’s easy. You consume a small amount of very good chocolate.

I did this on Thursday, while talking to Julie Collier. Julie is the Commercial Director for Iain Burnett, The Highland Chocolatier, who opened a shop in St Andrews (only 22 miles from here) last year.

As I walked into the shop for the first time, my eyes were drawn to the tiny chocolate cubes on the counter: free tastes for potential customers. Four different chocolate confections, one being the signature ‘Velvet Truffle’.

Pick it up.

Smell it. Aha!

Taste slowly.

Mmmm.

MmmmmMMMM.

Honestly, this will put you off chocolate gorging for life. It is fabulous. It is so fabulous that you don’t want too much. You want just the right amount. Maybe one truffle cut into those adorable little cubes. And then another tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.

However, I didn’t go to the shop to eat Velvet Truffles, though that would have been reason enough. It was to discuss collaboration in a chocolate/choc-lit event in November. A free event with free chocolate. How could you possibly not go if within travelling distance?

Oh but you don’t know when it is. Or where.

The reading/tasting will be held in Zest Juicing and Coffee Bar, which is on South Street in St Andrews in Scotland. Those of you who have already been in St Andrews for StAnza, the poetry festival, will know this coffee sanctuary well. It is not a chain. It is expertly run by a real, dynamic, independent person: Lisa Cathro. It is a poetry-friendly café.

That’s the location, then.

And when? Thursday November 27^th, 6.30-8.00 pm.

I know (because, apart from anything else, I have read the Highland Chocolatier’s blog for October 8th) that early evening is not really the right time for tasting chocolate. The whole event should be scheduled before breakfast, before even your first sniff of tea, let alone coffee. However, it is a very good time for poetry (again, in small quantities).

The plan is to introduce Blame Montezuma!, the HappenStance choc-lit anthology, with a couple of the contributing poets to help me. We will read a few poems, carefully spaced between chocolate facts and chocolate tastes from Julie. It will be hugely educative and very tasty. There’ll be something to suit every palate. All in all, an unmitigated pleasure.

And if you want any choc-lit books for Christmas gifts, they will be on special offer. And there’ll be postcards and badges. Merchandise to die for.

Am I over-enthusing? Sorry. It’s the chocolate.

It really was divine.

I have to go back.

And soon.

ps It’s National Chocolate Week from 13th October. Poetry gets a day. Chocolate gets a whole week.

Comp 23 results: Feeling Blank

HappenStance Competition 23: Feeling Blank

Judge’s Comments: Helena Nelson (HappenStance editor)

Some hugely enjoyable poems came in for this competition. Some, however, had to be ruled out because they rhymed (which the rules excluded) or because although their authors may have thought they were in iambic pentameter, I didn’t. It’s a tricky business writing in a regular form and at the same time accommodating variation. So it’s not that every single line has to go te-dum, te-dum, te-dum, te-dum, te-DUM– but that pattern does underpin everything, and the ear needs to hear each line working either in that pattern or around or against it (as in the last two lines of the winning poem).

There were also entries in lovely iambic pentameter which I didn’t select because I liked them in part but not totally. As usual, I wanted several to end just before they did. Some last lines fell flat and to me sounded like they were trying not to rhyme while really wanting to (had the rules not excluded rhyme this might not have mattered).

All in all, judging is always partly subjective. I’d like to praise Janis Clark (lovely use of place-names), Sandra Horn (end on line 11 and it’s a winner), Peter Gallagher (beware: three lines rhyme), Eunice Lorrimer-Roberts (good garden piece, and topical), Stephanie Blythe’s lovely Christmas list, Les Berry (neatly retro), Eleanor Vale (chilling), Tracy Davidson (shades of Robert Browning), Douglas Hall (re-think last line perhaps?).

Tim Kiely nearly won with ‘Preparing Eggs for Easter’, which uses iambic pentameter beautifully and was a strong contender. My favourite bit of this poem is

[ … ] We sit
and watch. The kettle breathes. I take your hand.
It doesn’t go quite as we hoped. Our shades
don’t take. Even the royal blue that folds
luxurious from cabbage leaves laps up
against the shell and leaves it pale.

The ‘luxurious’ there is no less than delicious. For me, the end of the poem was not as good as the middle, albeit formally pleasing.

And Annie Fisher also nearly won with ‘Falling’. First-rate use of form, and what a cracking opening two lines!

I can’t forget a boy I barely knew
who rode into the sky one afternoon.

But I would suggest cutting the third stanza and ensuring that only one line ends with the word ‘fall’ the last one).

The poem I’ve chosen as winner looks modest but the more I read it, the more I like it, even though I might prefer ‘he’ rather than ‘it’ throughout. I’m also rather fond of toads, so that might be a factor, as was the utterly satisfying inclusion of the iambically tripping word ‘unmetaphorical’ . Well done, Mark Totterdell, for ‘Bufo’.

Bufo

Can it be glad I picked it off the path?
It’s dull as mud, gnarled as a crumpled leaf.
It fills my hand, unmetaphorical.
Is this walled scrap of garden all its world?
Its warts will not be charmed or doctored off.
There is no gem, but is the poison real?
And is it true what I knew as a child?
Does my skin burn its cool skin like a flame?

No more competitions for a while. HappenStance is having a rethink about many aspects of its business, this being only one of them.

If competitions start up again, I’ll notify all who have signed up for notifications.