Clare Best – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

O ROSE, THOU ART SICK!

Last week I bought a climbing rose from Aldi for £1.99.

This was a mistake because the rose bush was almost certainly dead already. I was rooting in the bucket for the best looking specimen and my loved-one was humphing and saying, ‘Come on, come on!’ So I grabbed what I thought was the best-looking specimen.

Later I took the poor thing out of its plastic bag and let the roots unfurl in a pot of rain-barrel water. It looked even deader. I left it there for several days, unable to decide whether (and where) to plant it.

To let you understand, this bush had stalks only, held together with a rubber band. Not one leaf.

Finally I found a fertile, well-drained place and planted the rose. It felt like a funeral.

I mentioned this fact to Geoff Lander. ‘O Rose thou art sick!’ he quipped, and sent me to Benjamin Britten’s setting which is also pretty funereal.

William Blake’s poem is always an earworm for me (no pun intended). Once I think of it again, it goes round and round and round in my head like it always has. It seems to apply to so many things. And so last night in my sleep I found myself dreaming the poem and making a reluctant class write an essay about it. Three hundred words, like the current HappenStance competition. But there was a bit I could not remember: the verb in line five:

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm,

Has [???] thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

In my dream, or half-sleep, I went over and over and over it. ‘Has hidden in thy bed’? ‘Has discovered thy bed’? ‘Has opened thy bed’?

I woke up this morning and it was there on the tip of my tongue. ‘Has found out thy bed’. Of course.

Of course.

‘Found out’ is precisely it. ‘Found out’ because the bed was secret and private. And that’s why the love is ‘dark secret’, and some horrible secret thing is festering here that nobody but the invisible worm knows. A thing that is killing the rose.

It’s one of the most potent poems I know. It fulfills that Don Paterson definition (which doesn’t work for everything) that a poem is a little machine for remembering itself. Look at the adjectives, the way they build to a sort of crescendo: invisible, howling, crimson, dark, secret – and then at the end just ‘life’, no qualifiers. Life.

The poem, one of the Songs of Experience, is both beautiful and horrible. It takes us to that literal moment in the garden when we look closely at a rose, only to find it’s being eaten away in the middle. Or pick up a perfect apple, only to turn it and see one side half-eaten away by wasps and a wasp in the cavity still suckling.

This is nature and fact. In metaphor it’s the same. The most beautiful girl may be being eaten away inside by disease, or by knowledge of what has happened to her, which is in itself a kind of disease. And the invisible worm kills because although he has found her out, everything is secret and contained inside the rose. Until she dies, and the secret with her.

But not all roses die, nor do all secrets die with them. See Clare Best this week in Touching the Core. She quotes St Thomas’s Gospel at the start: ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’ Please also read the rest.

Now back to my rose bush. I’m pretty certain it is completely dead, though conditions at Aldi are to blame, not any form of infection. However, for £3.99 I also bought an apple tree, which will be cross-pollinated by the crab apple I bought for a similar price four years ago.

The crab apple is about to burst into blossom and the new apple sapling is looking fine and dandy. I plan to look after it, in rain and sun. I know the risks. No secrets in this garden.

POETRY THAT ISN’T

Over the last few years I’ve seen quite a lot of it.

I’m talking about poetry that isn’t prose but isn’t quite poetry either (whatever ‘poetry’ is). Something in between. I don’t say this as a criticism. I like it when text slithers in and out and won’t be pinned down.

Poets sometimes propose work that is like this. And several times people have suggested I might publish a pamphlet of poems with complementary art work. HappenStance doesn’t do illustrated work (Diana Gittins’ Bork! has been the only exception), so I say ‘No’ to that. Simples.

But I don’t by any means rule out a mixture of text forms, morphing in and out of whatever you might want to call them. Clare Best’s Treasure Ground had prose sections at start and finish, and there will be a pamphlet by Kris Evans next year that will mingle its forms magnificently.

And although I don’t personally publish art work with poetry, I like the idea. I like the way Ambit has always done this. I like the mixture in The London Magazine. So when people ask about it, I always want them to find a way to make it happen, even if it’s not through me.

So I was specially interested to read Estuary by Lydia Fulleylove, with artwork by Colin Riches. I published Lydia’s debut poetry pamphlet, Notes on Land and Sea in 2011, and knew something about the collaborative work that has underpinned this new book. It’s a paperback volume from Two Ravens Press (an imprint worth supporting) with eight laminated colour plates in the middle. The text itself, to quote the introduction, ‘has three elements: diary observations, poem meditations, and voices of those who work the land’.

The narratives in their various forms weave several threads into the whole. There’s the life of the farming world – human, plant and animal. There’s the poet’s father, who is ill. There’s the river estuary – the water, and the water creatures. There’s the weather, and the movement of the day from light to dark. There are the inmates in the prison, where the author is working part-time, and they too are writing and responding to the environment. There are people in the local community, which whom the author is also working: the High Tide poets and the Drawing Ahead artists. It sounds an impossible combination!

However, Lydia has cracked it. It works. This is a fascinating, moving, unusual piece of art. It is not expensively produced, nor without some minor flaws, but it is a marvellous demonstration of a project achieved. Matthew Stewart’s recent review on Rogue Strands gives more quotation and more of an insight into how it works.

Anyone who is interested in cross-art projects, or poems with pictures, or poems that aren’t necessarily ‘poems’, should take a look at this. It can be done. More people should think outside the poem-a-page book. More people should be determined to find a way to bring it into print. A pleasure to read, and to recommend.

The life of a poetry mogul

No news from me this weekend because I am leaping into an aeroplane and flying to Geneva instead, pretending to be a powerful potentate, except that potentates probably don’t fly EasyJet.

However, a set of Sphinx reviews have just gone live on the website, including reviews of publications by David Morley, Jane Mary Wilde, Fiona Sinclair, Colin Donati, Clare Best and Carole Bromley.

No news from me this weekend because I am leaping into an aeroplane and flying to Geneva instead, pretending to be a powerful potentate, except that potentates probably don’t fly EasyJet.

However, a set of Sphinx reviews have just gone live on the website, including reviews of publications by David Morley, Jane Mary Wilde, Fiona Sinclair, Colin Donati, Clare Best and Carole Bromley.

An interview with Leona Carpenter of Mulfran Press will be published once I’ve worked out quite how to do this and where to put it. Interviews with Veer Press and Pighog editors are in progress.

Back soon, after eating Swiss cheese and dreaming of St Bernards.

Right as rain

All the ‘spare’ time in the last ten days has been spent looking for used cars with Gillian (artist daughter). She passed her test (first time, unlike her mother) about two weeks ago and needs to have a vehicle to drive. ‘Bean cans on wheels’ my mechanic partner calls them. He hates cars . . . However, we finally found one yesterday: a pale blue Getz. Let’s getz a Getz. Here it is, or similar.

: Gillian’s car

It reminded me of the first car I and my then husband bought together, which was a little red Fiat (we didn’t know about Fiats then) with a sunshine roof. The salesman had huge ears which practically flapped while he was talking.

We took the car out to the Derbyshire hills the first weekend after the purchase, excited to get away on our own for a country walk. The brakes failed on the top of a hill. Completely. We got home on handbrake and gears — jist and nae mair, as they say in Scotland. I remember confronting the flapping-eared salesman in a state of fury, shouting We could have been killed! In which case the world would have been saved from this blog entry. But we weren’t, and I hope Gillian and Jamie won’t be either, even though I’ve lain awake all week visualising them in endless car crashes.

So the poetry, to stay in metaphor, has taken a bit of a back seat, though a lot of things are about to happen. The Ruth Pitter Selected has been to Mark Pitter, Ruth’s nephew and copyright holder, for approval and he likes what I’ve done — so that’s a relief. I need to send a copy with the cover to (artist and poet) Alan Dixon, who has done the woodcut on the cover for his approval now (see image on left).

: The Traveller

Alan did Persephone in Hades as well. I love his woodcuts. In fact, I have many more of them which don’t fit onto pamphlet covers but which strike me as gorgeous. We used one on the Conversation with Ruth Pitter as well — not the one originally intended but a splendid cat walking along a wall. Alan loves cats.

I should be talking to David Ford later this morning and hopefully finalising most of the details of his pamphlet, Punch. Jeremy Page’s In and Out of the Dark Wood may be back from the printer by the end of this week. We’ll see.

The Po-Rating Standardisation Exercise is nearly complete. I sent the same pamphlet to 34 reviewers to rate, using the four criteria we’ve had in place since the tripartite review system went online. The results are very interesting. It doesn’t surprise me that the judgement on the poetry varies dramatically (a 4 being the lowest and a 10 the highest). However, it does surprise me that the variation on production quality is almost as wide (lowest 5, highest 10). I’m still thinking about how to put the feedback on this together.

Meanwhile, the latest issue of The Bow-Wow Shop is out. I particularly liked the bit on How Editors Choose. The return from Peter and Ann Sansom is cheering. The lack of return from some editors provokes many an evil chuckle. The B-W Shop has a great logo. I find the fully-justified white on black text extremely hard going though (I cut and paste into Word, change the justification and THEN read it) but at least the web makes that possible. (And the reviews are a long, long column, entailing endless scrolling and encouraging the supposition that nobody reads reviews anyway). And the left-hand toolbar lists the contents of issue 5 immediately on top of issue 4, which is confusing at best. Ezines are still thinking about themselves. Ease of reading on screen is paramount and rarely achieved. So much easier to work out how to accomplish this on paper, because of the centuries of forerunners.

Allegedly, an affiliation has been agreed between B-W Shop and P N Review, two very different publications but with some of the same writers. I think of P N Review, which I have had cause to admire in many ways over the years (not least for surviving and retaining its own character), as a solidly male magazine. Lots of lengthy male reflections in a solidly male prose style. Thankfully, there are bits in this Bow-Wow by interesting women like Nancy Campbell, reporting on her experience as writer in residence in Upernavik Museum, Greenland. I don’t mean to go ON about the male/female balance. It’s just a reminder that there are some women writing excellent prose. Haul more of them in!

Peter Daniels in the Bow-Wow also reviews some HappenStance publications appreciatively, which is nice and the appreciation is appreciated. He says HappenStance has style and a sense of purpose. Health warning: you have to scroll a long way down a fully-justified reviews column to find his comments on Paula Jennings (Out of the Body of the Green Girl), Clare Best (Treasure Ground) and Jon Stone (Scarecrows): look for the bit titled The Pamphleteers March On. And yes, there does seem to be a lot of fuss about pamphlets lately. It is still hard to sell 150 copies of anything — believe me.

Now, I must go make another pamphlet. And maybe some breakfast with purpose and style.

: Alan Dixon. Isn’t this marvellous?