Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

This weekend it’s all stations go preparing for StAnza, the poetry festival in St Andrews which runs from March 4-8^th and to which poetry lovers from far and wide will flock. They’re packing their bags right now.

An extraordinary variety and range of performers will feature. These include some I know rather well. 

For example, there’s Gerry Cambridge,who will read from his new book The Light Acknowledgers on next Thursday afternoon. 

And there’s Nancy Campbell whose HappenStance pamphlet, Navigations, is officially published on the date of her afternoon reading next Saturday (but you can get it right now, if you want a copy before that). She is featuring at a poetry breakfast too, which is live-streamed earlier that same day, so can be watched at home. So even if you can’t make it to StAnza, StAnza can make it to you.

If you entered the WrapperRhyme challenge, you too (or your work, at least) will also be on display all week in J G Innes’s bookshop (upstairs gallery). If you can’t come, I will take photos once Jenny Elliott and I get the whole thing on display. It’s looking marvellous even in its disassembled form. 

And if you think poets are not all in the same boat, you may change your mind when you see the boat in the WrapperRhyme exhibition. If you are at the festival, please come to the talk on the Friday afternoon if you can, especially if you have a WrapperRhyme on display. This event will be participative!

There will be a HappenStance flashmob again too. Not Edward Lear this year, but Hilaire Belloc’s Matilda, and although all flashmobs are absolutely secret, I can reveal that early on Saturday evening in the Byre café something might happen.

Poets are often a bit intense. But they’re also allowed to have fun. 

​During the last ever reading window, there were many sonnets. This form (unlike the villanelle) is close to my heart, so sending some to me ought theoretically to be a good thing. But I’ve been thinking about sonnets for more than half a century (because I am OLD) and of course I’ve written them (or attempted to) at intervals. So I may be harder on them than anybody else.

A few centuries ago, when sonnets first became popular in courtly circles, the formal rules were clear enough, though even then not fixed. In the sonnets I most love, which include Shakespeare (of course) and Wyatt and Sydney, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edna St Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie and Eleanor Farjeon, it’s the tension between constraint and experiment that gives me pleasure. I love this particular way of tying up human consciousness in an electric box.

So I thought I might explain — as much for myself as anybody else — how I read a poem that looks like it might be a sonnet. Is it a sonnet or isn’t it? And what difference does it make what you call it?

If the poem looks sonnet-ish (size and shape) my mental checklist pops up. If more than one box is ticked, I figure the poem could be thinking of itself as a sonnet. Before anybody gets aerated, I’m not suggesting any of these characteristics are essential. Only that they are to me the most obvious indicators, based on the English sonnet tradition.

Sonnet indicators

1. Calls itself ‘sonnet’
2. 14 lines
3. Metrical pattern: most likely iambic pentameter
4. Lines of 10-11 syllables
5. Shape — an oblong box, perhaps with a gap just below the middle.
6. Lines of irregular metre but five strongly stressed syllables in each line
7. Lines of regular length, syllabically or metrically
8. A structured rhyme scheme
9. An argument: opens with proposition, shifts to resolution
10. A ‘volta’ (or turn in the argument/thought) at or about the ninth line
11. An 8-line + 6-line structure (octet and sestet) (marked by stanzas or rhyme scheme or ‘turn’)
12. A rhyming couplet at the end
13. A structural pattern created by line-end words (hard to define: may not be rhyme so much as deliberate similarity)
14. High level of compression/intensity focussed round a single idea

If the poem doesn’t have 14 lines but does have a clear ‘turn’ about two thirds of the way through, it may well be thinking of itself in sonnet terms. George Meredith’s sonnets in Modern Love (which was modern in 1862) had 16 lines each.

And if the poem has 14 lines and one (at least) of the first four is in regular iambic pentameter, it certainly suggests something. (Contemporary sonnets with no regular metre will often have at least one such line.)

But if it’s in seven two-line stanzas with no ‘turn’, no rhyme, uneven line lengths, and no metrical pattern, I will wonder whether the term ‘sonnet’ is relevant.

On the other hand, if it’s in seven two-line stanzas rhyming abba abba cdcdcd, I will think SONNET.

If it’s in seven unrhymed, two-line stanzas of loose iambic pentameter, I will feel it’s going sonnet-wards.

None of this is about being right or definitive or exclusive. It’s personal. I am just trying to explain, as a practising poet and poetry reader, my thinking.

Suppose the poem calls itself: ‘Sonnet for Eliza’. Eliza’s sonnet has fourteen lines of irregular length, no metrical pattern, no rhyme or sound structure that I can detect, and apparently no ‘volta’ or any of the other features on my list. I might, therefore, assume the poet is offering it as a ‘free verse sonnet’. But I find that term a bit of an oxymoron and, to be honest, I’m not convinced a free verse sonnet is something to aspire to. This is not a criticism of the poem as a poem.

However, everything that calls itself ‘poem’ stands in some relationship to whatever else is called ‘poem’, just as all visual art asserts itself in relation to a culture and tradition of visual practice. So any poem that calls itself ‘sonnet’ has a relationship to the sonnet tradition. Being aware of that tradition can give added aesthetic pleasure (in the same way that sampling a good malt whisky is enhanced by intimate and informed acquaintance with other quality malts).

Sometimes the relationship between a poem and its traditions is defined simply by doing none of what might be expected. So there’s some mileage (though it is hardly novel) in calling something ‘sonnet’ when it conforms to nobody’s expectations of that form. The most extreme example of this may be Don Paterson’s ‘The Version’, a prose piece with a volta (a kind of joke about a sonnet that vanished) extending over three pages in a book titled 40 Sonnets.

When it comes to learning sonnets by heart (I recommend this to anyone trying to write them), a structured sonnet is the most pleasurable kind. Getting it by heart allows you inside the mind of the poem and therefore the poet. If the sonnet isn’t beautifully constructed, you’re unlikely to get far. If the manufacture is high-quality and durable, each and every phrase will seem inevitable and, at the same time, surprising.

You might start with some of the HappenStance sonnet cards. Each contains a sonnet I recommend, and we produce new ones regularly. I apologise if one of them turns out to be by me. You’ll find these in the HappenStance web-shop. 

If you learn any one of them by heart, they’ll last a lifetime — which is more than you can say for Glenfiddich.

We launch two new pamphlets this coming Saturday (October 5^th) at the Betsey Trotwood in Clerkenwell. They are Katharine Towers’ The Violin Forest, and Smile Variations by Martha Kapos.

So that’s five pamphlets in all this year from HappenStance, fewer than usual — yes this is true. But each is packed with rarities.

When I think of any one of them, visual images flood my mind. In The Violin Forest, there’s that lovely violin on the jacket, shaded with leafy branches. And inside the poems, there’s an abandoned harmonium in a Sussex wood, and a dead fox, ‘laid out on the road like a fox diagram’. Some bluebells have ‘finished talking’ and lain down ‘under the tall beeches’, and an old man (a luthier, no less) ‘comes / to the forest walking and tapping in winter’. To read the poems is to enter a thinking space, green and leafy. You read, and re-read. When you come out, you have that Rip-Van-Winkle feeling. How long have you been gone?

And Smile Variations — here the jacket image evokes music too. There’s a stave, and odd note-like symbols, and a treble clef, all moving in a circle, dynamic and strange. Inside the poems, there’s fluidity and strangeness too, even where the situation is (almost) familiar. For example, a child listening to parents talking hears their voices as ‘the muffled stuff of breath, a broken river’. Soon a smile ‘has escaped over high walls’. Later that smile has ‘snapped shut’. Perspectives are ‘perilous’, ‘dwindling between hills’. I’m reminded of Alice in Wonderland where the reader identifies with a child’s perspective, learning to make sense — a new sense, but never a non-sense: ‘Sentences open in the morning / with nothing to hold them up.’

And Rachel Piercey‘s pamphlet, Disappointing Alice, has Alice stuck in the desert, begging her friends to come and save her. But they won’t — ‘the topsoil of their affection was thinning’. What’s going on? There’s a medieval damsel on the jacket, with a magnificent pointy headdress, but the narrator of ‘Love’ has ‘one hand upon the latch’ and ‘one hand upon the axe’. There are heroines here, certainly, but being Eve, or Cinderella or Amelia Earhart — what does it mean? Who can damsels trust to save them when the damsels may be scamming? A teenager plays Miranda in a school production of The Tempest but she alters the end of the play completely. Forget Naples. Here Miranda stands in the sand waving off ‘the boat of lordly men’ before going back to the island with Ariel and Caliban to ‘start again’.

Then Claire Crowther’s Knithoard — this is different from all the others. Of course, it comes out of knitting, that traditional women’s craft, that safe woolly pursuit. But this sequence of poems calls risk, fear and fragility into its meditative frame. Loosely based on the French medieval fatras form, it comprises a series of eleven-line poems, each with an introductory couplet. You could read the entire work as being about art. Or life. Or love. Into this, the lovely language of knitting is bound. A ‘notion’, for example, means (there is a helpful Glossary) ‘any item of knitting equipment’. In ‘Tension’ the speaker says ‘I am instructed over and over: / Change your yarn, / use bigger notions’. ‘The readiness is all’, as Hamlet said, and here that preparedness is in the final section: ‘I will finish abandoned garments, cast off all / those vests sleeping in bags and drawers, / all the unfinished [ … ]’.

The last shall be first and the first shall be last. The first pamphlet to appear this year was Lydia Kennaway’s A History of Walking, which has now walked its way into many homes. There are two footprints on the cover, each with lines from poems written into them. And the poems are all about walking, and much more. There’s Buzz Aldrin bouncing across the surface of the moon; there’s Little Red Riding Hood, and Goldilocks; there’s a baby taking her first steps; there’s an old woman who has walked, and fallen, and will never get up. There’s rage and mischief, and politics and desperation, and energy and fun. And there’s ‘Walking for Water’, the image of which stays with me perhaps most clearly of all, because of what it is not:

Walking for water is not
to see an unmissable sight.
It is not on anybody’s bucket list.

It is the flight of a migrating bird,
a cruel calculation of distance, fuel
and energy burned.

[Go here to hear Lydia reading this poem precisely as it should be heard.]