Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

 Once it would be a letter that failed to get an answer, or a Christmas card that didn’t arrive. These days, it’s an email that isn’t answered. And a follow-up email that goes nowhere.

If the person’s on FaceBook, you check to see if there’s anything there about an illness, a problem, a death. If they’re not, you wait a little. Maybe you google the name, just in case there’s a headline somewhere. You ransack your brain to think who else you know who also knows your non-answering friend.

It was the Scottish (but living in Ireland) poet and novelist David Cameron who was able to confirm for me that Warren Hope had left the building. By which I mean, of course, he was gone forever (I’m resisting that nasty adjective ‘dead’). Warren was a poet, and he was the biographer of Norman Cameron (not related to David). He was also a close friend of the late Robert Nye, who first introduced me to him.

I knew Warren Hope as a friend for well over two decades. I knew his health was at risk. I knew the heart of this good-hearted man was a problem. I had emailed to ask him something. The question will never be answered, could never have been answered. I wrote some days after he had taken his last breath. My message disappeared into the ether, a perpetual question mark.

For a good while, I had—without realising it—come to rely on Warren’s wisdom, his kindness, his insights into (and knowledge of) English poetry. Although American, and living near Philadelphia, he was published both as a poet and a critic/biographer by Jim Hodgson of Greenwich Exchange. He and Hodgson were long-term friends—part of a network of connections stretching back through Martin Seymour-Smith, Robert Nye, C. H. Sisson, James Reeves, Norman Cameron, Robert Graves—stretching back, stretching back….

Warren’s own poetic work is not extensive, a handful of slim publications. His mode is characteristically quiet. If you read him aloud, you note the careful pacing, the gentle melodic variation. The poems seem to be about not much, and yet…

Druthers

When you ask me about my travel plans
I tell you that, if I could have my druthers,
I’d fly by British Air to London’s Heathrow,
Then take the special train to Paddington
And go by rail from there to Penzance, Cornwall.

After a single night spent at the Abbey
for luck, perhaps, or else for old times’ sake,
I’d fly by chopper to the Scilly Isles,
There to admire for, say, eternity,
The way rock in old age resists the sea.

When a writer friend dies, I collect all the books and papers I have of theirs and pile them up, flick through them, touch them. They’re magical relics. They call the person into the room. Warren’s here right now in his Student Guide to Seamus Heaney. He’s busily considering the ‘conflict between the Heaney of uncertainty and the Heaney with authority’. Warren liked poems ‘that grew from an inner necessity’. He found them in Heaney’s sonnet sequence Clearances: ‘Heaney has never again written anything to compare with these rapidly composed sonnets.’ He wasn’t afraid to speak straight, even about the good and (popularly regarded as) great. (He wouldn’t have used the word ‘great’.)

He wrote confidently about poetry—fearlessly—and he wrote well. I find myself smiling at his Student Guide to Philip Larkin when he remarks, ‘There is a good deal of talk among critics about a poet’s need to ‘find his own voice’ as if it were something that existed but had temporarily been mislaid.’ And I recall that comment about the poet’s ‘inner necessity’ when he says of Larkin: ‘The dignified, useful, but painful silence of his last years is the real evidence of his integrity as a poet.’

Earlier this year, my friend had completed a revised edition of his biography of Norman Cameron. As a biographer, Hope fully deserves the term ‘definitive’: it is a fine volume, an essential reference book, and a pleasure to read. His subject, Norman Cameron, also believed poems should only be written when driven by inner necessity. Warren was the perfect biographer for him. So much so, that the biographer’s comment on Cameron’s oeuvre could apply to his own: ‘His work will perhaps become better known when we realise the question to be asked of a poem is not how big it is, but whether it is alive.’ Hope follows this by quoting Cameron’s wonderful poem The Compassionate Fool.

But Warren’s poems are also very different from Cameron’s. Often, they’re like a man musing softly. A conversation overheard, easy to miss. He loves an iambic pentameter line, and it loves him. I’ll close with a poem from Adam’s Thoughts in Winter (Greenwich Exchange, 2002).

The Master’s Routine

You know the story anyway. Can see
It all. The long and empty platform where
The stationmaster in a peaked red cap
Rehearses how he would rush out to greet
The august persons he might someday welcome.
He paces briskly down the platform’s length,
Comes to attention, clicks his heels and bows.
A village girl, hiding and watching, laughs.
Arrival of the Emperor himself
Could never please him half so much as does
The sound of laughter that girl daily makes.

Both poems quoted here can be found in Selected and New Poems, Warren Hope, Greenwich Exchange, 2020 

Q: When does a Wordle not make a Wheedle?

A: When you fail to solve the Wordle. This happens to some of the best people. I know because I’ve been one.

This blog entry is a spin off from the Wheedle challenge, which in turn is a spin off from Wordle, the online word game. Click on the link above and you’ll see how to play it.

In Wordle much depends on the first and second guess. These early words rule out key letters, or rule them in. Sometimes, by a stroke of luck the first word puts two letters in the correct places.

It’s more difficult if the winning word uses a letter more than once. Also if it starts with a vowel.

But now a new issue has developed for some. If thinking of writing a Wheedle, it may affect the words you choose for Wordle. Aaaaargh! 

Today, for example, I longed to enter ‘TRYST’ for my Wordle first guess, but this would have used up two Ts at the start without eliminating any vowels. Much more sensible to go for TEACH or TEARS. (Mind you, TEARS is not bad for the first line of a Wheedle.)

Thus the writing of Wheedles affects Wordle choices.

Thus the writing of poems affects your attitude to words in other places throughout your whole life.

Thus a person can develop an obsession.

Should you, by any chance, have no idea what I’m talking about, it’s the Wheedle challenge, set up by Eddie Gibbons and myself, with over twenty-five participating poets. Eddie came up with the idea first. I admit I egged him on.

The results (see Wheedle pages) have been fascinating. The final word is the same for every person, and yet the ways of getting there are so many and various! I really hadn’t anticipated that ‘epoxy’ could be rhymed so variously. Constraints breed ingenuity.

No more commmunications about Wheedles, I promise. It’s not for everybody.

But for those who like to play at tricks with poetic forms, the game continues on FaceBook and Twitter where you can post your daily results using the hashtag #wheedlexxx (where xxx is the number of the Wordle solved). Best not to post until the day after the relevant Wordle (avoid putting spoilers out there).

And for inveterate addicts, Eddie has suggested sharing your Super Wheedle at the end of each Wordle week…. 

I often confuse ‘epigraph’ and ‘epigram’. These two Greek words seem uncomfortably similar to me.          

There’s good reason for this: Merriam Webster reveals that ‘epigramma’ actually derives from the Greek ‘epigraphein’, meaning ‘to write on’. The Roman poet Martial was famed for his ‘epigrammata’ (epigrams, not epigraphs): witty, terse little poems.

But forget epigrams. I intend to write about the epigraph, by which I mean the little bit of text, often in italics, that sits snugly between the title of a poem and its first line. This is described by MW as ‘a quotation set at the beginning of a literary work […] to suggest its theme’, which is at best only a partial description of the thing I have in mind.

Has anyone ever been publicly praised for their epigraphs, I wonder? Because currently poets do seem to like them. They’re especially fond of prefacing their creations with that troubling wee beast, the ‘after’ statement. I’m not sure when this started: I’ve just flicked through The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse and I can’t see any ‘after’ poems. They all seem to be befores.

Nonetheless, it’s not unusual these days to find you’re reading something ‘After Wendy Cope’ or ‘After W H Auden’. If there’s no mention of a specific poem, we nervously take the ‘afters’ to be a general allusion to style. Nervously because maybe there’s a resemblance between the poem we’re about to read and another we ought to know. A resemblance self-evident to everybody except us.

Still, the ‘after’ statement may be there as a point of honour. Perhaps the poet was inspired by somebody else’s poem and wants to acknowledge that fact, whether or not the new poem resembles its ‘before’ source. (It occurs to me that poets grew keener to acknowledge such influences after poetry plagiarism became a hot topic.)

There are certain risks, though. An ‘after’ epigraph can make the poet look pompous. I would suggest ‘After Seamus Heaney’ and ‘After William Shakespeare’ are best avoided. The same applies to ‘For Seamus Heaney’ or ‘For Philip Larkin’. Besides, writing a poem ‘for’ a dead poet (as opposed to a living friend) tends to work against the hope that it might have been written for the common reader.

If there is an art involved in the epigraph, shouldn’t it be to give the reader a skilful tip-off, something that will make the poem better understood, or more accessible? There might be a painting, for example, that the reader needs to see in order to make sense of the imagery. In today’s digital world, the epigraph can be helpfully hyperlinked to a relevant image, recording or film. Or there might be an essential place setting, a location, that the reader needs to know. In such cases, the epigraph is perfectly justified.

When it comes to an ‘I. M.’ statement, the decision is also straightforward. If a poem’s written with a particular person in mind, someone who has perhaps died recently, it can be most helpful, and in some cases essential, to know the piece is ‘in memoriam’.

There are even epigraphs consisting simply of a date. An obvious example is 9/11/2001: a historic allusion easily recognised by most adults. Such detail could be vital to making sense of what follows.

And that’s the key. If unsure whether to include an epigraph or not, ask yourself whether it offers information the reader can’t do without. Are you sure it isn’t already in the title? Or the poem itself? You are sure. OK. Then let it stay.

But if the detail is enriching rather than essential, a useful alternative to consider may be a note. For the reader, notes are nicely optional, and can be placed in an obvious position at the foot of the poem-page, or more subtly at the back of the book.

Of course, in certain circumstances you could have an epigram as your epigraph. An epigram might have inspired the whole poem: ‘I can resist everything except temptation’ (Oscar Wilde). But that would be really confusing. 

 One thing about the festive season is that there is sometimes a little more time for sitting and reading, reading and sitting.

For me, the reading included Stephen King’s Billy Summers, and this quotation leapt out at me. How did he know about the unfinished thing that lurks on my i-Cloud drive. I know it’s there. Will I ever finish it? And how many of us are the same?

The central character has started to write a book, for the first time. He is really a paid assassin, and living as a writer is his ‘cover’, but it quickly draws him in.

“He looks at the first line – The man my ma lived with came home with a broke arm – and feels a kind of despair. This is good work, he feels sure of it, but what felt light when he started now feels heavy, because he has a responsibility to make the rest just as good and he’s not sure he can do it.

He goes to the periscope window and looks out at more nothing, wondering if he’s just discovered why so many would-be writers are unable to finish what they have started. The thinks of The Things They Carried, surely one of the best books about war ever written, maybe thebest. He thinks writing is also a kind of war, one you fight with yourself. The story is what you carry and every time you add to it, it gets heavier.

All over the world there are half-finished books – memoirs, poetry, novels, surefire plans for getting thin or rich – in desk drawers, because the work got too heavy for the people trying to carry it and they put it down.

Some other time, they think. Maybe when the kids are a little older. Or when I retire.”

Stephen King, Billy Summers
Hodder & Stoughton, 2021

It’s very small. Unassuming, you might say. And can be found inside the word ‘unassuming’ and also inside ‘assuming’.         

What a complicated way to reach the word itself! Namely: ‘as’.

What has ‘as’ done to deserve my hostility?

Nothing much. It’s not rational. Each of us develops different bees in different bonnets — as it were.

And I don’t say I never use it (I just did). But I can’t choose it without caution.

For me, the first issue is that although ‘as’ is so small, it has at least three or four meanings. (Merriam Webster has nine entries!) 

Each possible meaning has a different effect on the line. It can be hard sometimes to see which of them is intended.

The worst of the possible meanings of ‘as’ (in my book) is ‘because’. When it means ‘because’, it sounds like a phrase book for someone learning to speak English.

For example, ‘I ate every scrap of my dinner as I was ravenous’. 

Or ‘As the bus was full, I caught the train.’ 

‘As’ used in this way deadens a sentence. Nobody would ever say, ‘I ate my dinner as I was hungry.’ It’s better to split the sentence into two, or use a dash: ‘I wolfed my sandwich — I was ravenous.’

(I don’t like the sound of ‘as’ either. The ‘s’ sounds as ‘z’. It reminds me of the word ‘gristle’, and gristle reminds me of cheap sausages.)

When ‘as’ means ‘because’, it functions as a connective, or conjunction. But even when ‘as’ connects two clauses, it can have more than one meaning, the other most likely possibility being ‘while’.

‘As I combed my hair, I thought of my mother’, for example. Or: ‘The surf glistened as the moon rose high above the waves.’

The third meaning is the one I least dislike. As fast as lightning. As white as milk. When used in a simile,’as’ often pops up twice (once on each side of the adverb) and I don’t mind this in the least. However, it means the number of usages quickly multiplies:

As the moon rose into the sky,
the boat slipped over the horizon
as fast as night. It was a slow boat,
a cold boat. As it had no sails,
so no sailors and no oars.
As it vanished, it left no sign.
As if it had never ever been.

‘As’ is so small — so unassuming — its repetitions slip past the most eagle-ish of eyes.

But it can damage sharpness of phrase. It can smudge clarity and precision.

I hate ‘as’.

As I said earlier, it’s not rational.

Frank Wood died recently at the age of 95. HappenStance published a pamphlet of his work in 2012.    

So that’s the ‘Wood’ in my title.   

We won’t be seeing Frank again, though his voice — unapologetically plain-spoken — can still be heard in his poems. And always will be, for as long as such poems are heard.

But the ‘trees’ are also the poetries. Today, with dozens of poem-texts whirling round the globe every second, there are great forests of poetries, in which one could get lost for all time. Yes, I know that’s a horribly mixed metaphor. Forests don’t whirl round the globe, unless you think of Wordsworth’s Lucy ‘Whirled round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks and stones and trees’ (I always felt for Lucy).

My point is that the writing trajectory of a poet like Frank might be seen as ‘unimportant’. Poetry was a lifelong interest for him, but he didn’t start writing it until he was well into his forties. He didn’t win the National Poetry Competition. He didn’t publish to popular acclaim. He had a modest circle of appreciative readers (and fellow writers).

Frank did succeed in placing poems here and there in the small press over several decades. He co-edited a small magazine for a while, played an active role in Suffolk Poetry Society, had modest wins in competitions, and there was a pamphlet: Racing the Stable Clock. He was a practising poet who kept practising.

His poetry ‘career’ might look like not much, as these things go. It was more than it seems.

He always sent me poems during the HappenStance reading windows, and latterly I encouraged him to send them whenever he wanted to — which was still about twice a year. It was rare to get a batch in which there wasn’t at least one I thought outstanding in some way. He was a wit, with strong opinions. Often, he made me smile. But sometimes his poems opened out into sadness, and I would stare out of the window and think, and think some more.

I believe the writing of poems brought him joy. It wasn’t about getting famous, or building a reputation as a ‘player’. He found poems joyous things to make, worthwhile creations, like well-made chairs. They made him happy.

I won’t forget him. Right to the end of his long life, he was writing self-critically and with acuity.

I’m appending one of the poems from Stable Clock below. It’s short. And yet (to me) there’s a whole world below the surface. The father who wrote the sermons was the same father who was gassed in the First World War, the same father who once ‘killed a German face to face’ and who, when it came to questions about that war, ‘would never talk about it’. But his son wrote about him, a lifetime later.

Writing the Sermon

My father was known for his sermons.
He used to grade them according
to the number of pipes he smoked.

Three pipes spelt hell
for next day’s congregation —
and that was only the notes.

As his neighbor, who kept hens, said,
When you go out to feed them,you don’t
have to give them the whole bucketful.