2013 – Page 2 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

POETRY WARS

My natural preference is for lyric.

I like poems that fit inside a page and have enough depth and beauty for me to read them over several times, and then go back to them. Sometimes I even learn them by heart. I’m not keen on battles or epics or religion.

So I was sorely tested last week. I went to the launch reading of Henry Marsh’s A Voyage to Babylon, which contains a long sequence of pieces about the Scottish Covenanters. It is prefaced by a detailed introduction about the historical period (1637-1685) that preceded the events and characters in the poems. The texts themselves are like fragments of a historical novel, mingling fiction and fact, but in verse form.

Here’s a bit from the introduction that I paused over, read and read again:

It is easy to skip through names of battles but the estimated numbers of Scottish casualties resulting from the Wars of the Three Kingdoms give pause for thought. [ . . . ] To get some perspective on these figures, perhaps 9% of the population of Scotland died directly or indirectly as a consequence of these wars, 3.7% of the population of England and a staggering 41% of the population of Ireland.

It seems almost inconceivable that people survived at all in a period of such turbulence.

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But it’s the personal stories that affect us most. On the way back from Henry’s reading, I read the whole Covenanter sequence. The narrative had me completely gripped from Edinburgh bus station to Bankhead Roundabout in Glenrothes. And so I was brought back to that other way of reading poetry, which is illumined by the story, and the personalities – the captive Lady Athunie and her diary, John Fraser, William Hanna, John Forsyth, Jean Moffat – and the little plangent details of their suffering and perplexity. Now and again, I stopped to savour lovely and haunting lines (“Some passed, in these summer days, / into their minds’ winter.”)

But Henry’s Marsh was not my only dose of verse narrative. I also went to the launch of J O Morgan’s At Maldon in the splendid Looking Glass Books in Edinburgh, which I’ve not visited before but certainly will again.

So there I was, bracing myself for another battle poem and this one not even a sequence: a book-length narrative about The Battle of Maldon in 991 AD, when an invasion of Vikings demolished the Anglo-Saxon defences.

Oh hell. I don’t enjoy battle poems, even though I love J R R Tolkien, himself also fascinated by the original Anglo-Saxon poem commemorating this battle (the beginning and end is lost). I’m not keen on book-length poems either (why not write a novel?) I might not even have gone along, had the volume not been published by Charles Boyle’s C B Editions, which never prints a dud.

And this was no exception.

J O Morgan (whom I had somehow assumed was old – I think I had him mixed up with Fergus Allen) was just a young man, with a most beautiful voice. He told us how he had worked not only from the original fragmented poem but from other contemporary accounts to recreate something of his own, “a poet picking morsels from the aftermath”.

Then he read lengthy, seamless extracts together with Ishbel McFarlane, an actress. Their style was restrained, their voices hardly raised – and yet the drama of the thing was palpable. They were telling a great story, and creating that hush of expectation only true storytellers can evoke.

Battles? It didn’t matter what the topic was, I would have listened. And on the way home (train, this time) I read the whole book. And later I read it again. And then I read it again, and looked up what there is to know about the original Anglo-Saxon poem.

This is a glorious piece of writing. To tell the truth, it took me a while to sort out quite who was doing what and where, but it was like a film: I could see the landscape and hear all the little sounds. And there was the Anglo-Saxon army “a single solid block of muscle-men, / from which lord Byrthnoth / steps out, one pace forward, / leaving an earl-shaped gap in the leading edge.” It’s vivid. It’s witty. It’s delicate. It’s masterfully paced. It sings.

In the original poem, there are two characters called Godric. One runs away, and survives. The other fights to the death. Morgan’s poem features both men, and concludes with the Godric who stands and fights: “And another man / named Godric fights / for everything he has / or has not loved”.

As I say, it took me a while to work out how all this fitted together, not least why there were two Godrics. But it seemed to me that the Godrics were the key. The great battle happens: the terrible, sad losses, young men and old men, their bodies sinking into the wet earth. They don’t just die – they surrender their whole lives, bit by bit. Morgan creates them as people carrying mental existences with them – their thoughts, whims, memories, impressions. They are real.

But it all happened a long, long time ago. Some say Godric fled. Some say he fought to the death. Maybe there are always two Godrics. There was fighting, there was valour and stupidity and pragmatism and grace and blood. There was, and is, a terrific story here, fabulously well told. It “becomes the history it tries to tell.”

Unmissable.

IN PRAISE OF LOGS

From the middle English ‘logge’, a variant of lugge, meaning pole or limb of tree.

We spent two hours yesterday lugging and stacking logs, and last night I slept like one. In fact, going to sleep was as easy as falling off one. A lot to be said for logs.

They make me think of the poet Richard Church, because our logs – though hardwood – are never from apple or pear. But I’ve always wanted pear because of one of his poems (I’ll get to it shortly).

Whatever our logs are made of – which tree, I mean – they smell comforting. Perhaps that’s because I grew up with an open fire, and this log burning stove of ours is not so far from that. My memory must be selective though, because the fire I grew up with smelled of coal, not logs, and my mother would burn everything a human being could burn on it. I remember her kneeling on the rug, first thing on a frosty December morning, crushing newspaper into little balls and stacking the small coals to get the fire ablaze. Then later, when it was roaring, she would emerge from the kitchen to tip a colander of potato peelings onto the flames. In winter that cut the heat dramatically and we shivered resentfully.

It’s often said that family life is disintegrating in the UK because folk don’t eat together any more. I don’t think it’s the food. I think central heating is to blame. When the only source of warmth in your house is the main fireplace, in the winter you sit with your family. When we were kids, hiding behind the sofa was always attractive but it was also cold. Soon we would be back at the feet of the grown-ups in front of the fire.

Upstairs, in my grandmother’s sitting room (she lived with us), there was an electric fire, and that was . . . acceptable. You could melt the chocolate on your digestive biscuit by holding it near to the bars, and then lick the deliciously melted surface off while watching TV. My grandmother presided over the family television and over the tin of sweets she kept in the cupboard. This was her lure to get us up there. But the comfort of the coal fire downstairs far outweighed three bars on an electric fire, especially when you weren’t supposed to have more than two of them lit.

At this time of the year, early October, we would have been scouring roads and hedgerows for fallen trees for the November bonfire. We didn’t call it Guy Fawkes. We called it Bonfire Night – because the bonfire was the thing – that huge pile of wood in the back field. I always thought of a bonfire as a good thing, a thing of joy, and in my mind the ‘bon’ was like bonbons – sweet and good. But I was wrong.

The bon in bonfire is from bane, and that’s what a bonfire did: it burned banes (bones) in circumstances not always favourable to their owners. Poor old Guy Fawkes, a terrorist before his time, was not burned, of course. But when we burned him in effigy (which we certainly did) ‘bonfire’ was the right word. Standing out at night beside the flames, hunkering on the grass beside the glowing embers – now that was something.

Back to the log stove. It is an enormous comfort. Fitted by Maddox and Potter from Abernethy, this thing works. The downside is the log lugging. You can’t get a car to the door of our house, and that means you can’t get a log truck there either. The logs have to be dumped about 50 yards away and we then wheelbarrow them along. It’s hard work. But in October sunshine, it’s a lovely kind of work.

Richard Church (back to the poet) wrote a whole essay on this topic. It’s called ‘Laying in Logs’. I found it recently – a beautiful piece of writing, lamenting the loss of the old ways when one bargained with a local farmer for the wood and he brought some when he felt like it. These days, says Church (writing in, or before, 1962) “I ring up an agency in the country town, and a week later get a ‘delivery note’ warning me (yes, warning me) that five tons of eighteen-inch logs will be delivered on such and such a date. And that’s the end of the human side of the matter. I might as well install an electric stove.”

But here it’s still quite human, frankly. I phone David Smith who lives just up the road and whose website is, reassuringly, still ‘in progress’. He phones me back and drives round with the logs within a couple of days. I count out the cash and stick it in an envelope. My other half puts on his boiler suit and gloves. We prepare to lug logs.

So here, finally, is Richard Church’s log poem. I can’t remember the title because I’ve drawn this from his essay which doesn’t mention it. Though dead for over four decades, he would forgive me, I think:

Now I come to the farmer about some logs.
He says in a casual way, ‘You can have pear.’
I stare at him for a moment. Shall I dare
Tell him I know that on the smithied dogs
In the brick hearth, black oakwood soaked in bogs,
Rose-roots, apple, ash with its swift, short flare,
And sparks thrown chimney-length to the open air,
Or elm that looks the part but easily clogs,
No firewood smells like pear? My conscience jogs
Me, saying, ‘Tell him that it isn’t fair.’

And so I do. But he just laughs and looks,
Thinking I’m crazy. ‘I don’t charge for smells,’
He says, ‘only for labour and the wood.
I’ll bet you got that notion out of books.’
But he is wrong: such perfume with its spells
Has never been described nor understood.

I ALWAYS THOUGHT . . .

I always thought Arvon courses were things other people did.

I’ve changed my mind. Some let me make you of the oaken voices.

First, the house at Totleigh Barton. If you visit the website (just click on ‘website’) there are wonderful photographs and some high praise. It is all true. The kitchen is like the one in Alison Uttley’s Recipes from an Old Farmhouse. It is the oldest house I’ve ever spent time in: it was there before the Domesday Book. The stone-flagged floors are eternal. The beams in the ceilings are ancient as forests. Little creaky stairs wind up from unexpected corners. Light pools through the windows. Even the toilets – one in particular, with a window opening into it through three feet of stone – are fabulous.

I don’t know what I thought they did on Arvon courses but I had a notion participants were quietly tortured, using writing implements. Or at least that would be what happened to me. There was no torture.

Oh but I need to go back. First there was the lengthy train journey to Tiverton Parkway, where Sarah, of Zipfish, who created and maintains the HappenStance website, picked me up. It was Sarah who drove me through the deep winding lanes of Devon to lovely little Sheepwash, and then through Sheepwash to the house itself.

Apart from the fact that we were in a car, and there was a SatNav man talking to us, it was like going back in time. The deeper in those lanes we got – the more brambled and hedged and leafed – the older.

We arrived in sunshine — the kind of deep gold sunshine you only get in late September or early October. That marvellous house was bathed in the extraordinary light, and there were apple trees, with harvest gleaming on their boughs and on the ground. Beside the outbuilding in which I slept, there was a little crab apple tree laden with red fruits luminous as Christmas lights. Blimey.

There’s a bit of me, faced with such beauty, that says, ‘You don’t deserve this. You’re an imposter. When they realize, they’ll pack you off home.’ But they didn’t send me home, and this is what happened next, or some of it.

People arrived in ones and twos and threes over the next few hours, in cars and taxis. The stone drive outside the house, gradually filled up with vehicles quietly parked. The people disappeared into rooms, or sat in the sun, or wandered round the garden and the vegetable garden and the orchard and up the lane. They must have been talking to each other but it was quiet, like a film with the sound turned low.

Michael Laskey (my friend and fellow tutor) arrived. He’s the only person I’m going to mention by name. Totleigh Barton is a private, secret place. It’s where you go in safety, taking your life, and a pencil. It’s the wood between the worlds. When you leave, you wonder if you’ll ever find your way back again, though just knowing it’s there may be enough.

Some of them had been before though, so it must be possible to get back. One who was there for the third time said each time she had come a different way, through different lanes, and each time been surprised to find herself in the right place.

Oh, and not just the wood between the worlds. It was also Elrond’s house in Rivendell, the last homely house before the wild. I do not mean Elrond’s house in the computer game or the film – I mean in the book, that house with a place for everything: for thinking, and writing, for talking, and singing, and sleeping, and waking, for company and for being alone.

In the mornings it was misty. A deep mist hung over the trees and meadows. Then the mist lifted and the apples lit up.

There was no television. There was no wi-fi or access to the internet. No radio. No mobile phone reception (except in one particular spot in the field, allegedly, or at the very top of the hill). There were no houses next door – only a gaggle of pheasants congregating outside the drive each morning.

What did we do? The pattern was like this. Each morning at 9.30 for an hour and a half, we looked at poems with Michael. All sorts of poems. Most of them I had never seen before. In between the poems we scribbled in short snatches: five minutes on this, four minutes on that. We wrote down whatever the poems had popped into our heads. At the very end of the session, people shared – if they wanted to – a scrap of writing.

After that, we had coffee. The kitchen became ours. People knew where to find cutlery and mugs and coffee (all different kinds) and tea (all different kinds) and everything else except cocoa. Then it was back to the great wooden dining table for a second session – with me. This time different poems (some of them older) and more talking, less writing, though there were some odd things to take away and do. People went away after my Wednesday session to have a suitable dream, for example, and some of them did. Totleigh Barton’s a good place for dreaming.

Then there was lunch. Help yourself from a feast of cheeses and salads and cold meat, and maybe soup or baked potatoes, all waiting in the kitchen. There were elves. While we were scribbling, they were moving about softly in the kitchen doing things with food. There was a cake lady. She brought whole trays of it, freshly baked, then crept away again. Her beetroot cake was the stuff of legends.

In the afternoons, people went for walks or sat in the marvelous ancient barn, or took a nap, or found things in the library to pore over, or talked. Michael and I did things called tutorials. Michael’s were at one end of the great dining table. Mine were in the little lounge with a window over a piece of the garden.

Tutorials sound (to me) as though somebody teaches you something, with the teacher in perilously close proximity. The word ‘tutorial’ sits in my head next to ‘torture’ (like ‘tomato’ being next to ‘martyr’).

In fact, the week was all about learning but not, I think, about teaching and I felt no pain. No, that’s not quite true. There was pain – I had a migraine one day, and several other headaches. Other people plainly lived with pain of one kind or another. One was stung by a wasp and her hand swelled alarmingly. But the pain didn’t intrude – not even slightly – on the pleasure and delight. I could feel people learning, and I was one of them. Learning creates excitement: it simmers and bubbles. They were stumbling over things they didn’t know they knew, doing things they hadn’t expected – that I hadn’t expected. Expressions of surprise and delight lit up their faces.

They didn’t have to bring poems to the tutorials but they could. Some people brought old poems, or bits of writing generated during the writing sessions. Or they brought concerns: where their writing had come from, or where it might be going. It was humbling. It is always humbling when people write from the heart and share it.

Each day a small group cooked dinner. Food (and wine) was brought in by the elves, and also recipes. The meals were sumptuous. I was hungry. I ate far more than usual, including desserts, which we don’t have at home. The bread and butter pudding was astonishing. And there was clotted cream, double cream, ice cream, yoghourt and crème fraiche. Oh, oh.

On Wednesday evening, there was a visiting poet: David Constantine. He came from the outside world, the periphery. We sat late with him into the evening, listening to his poems and wrestling over poetry and what it was doing – its vexed place in human experience. We argued and we concurred, we laughed and our brains rattled. In the morning, David had disappeared before the mist dissolved.

On the fourth day, the people started to sing. I was doing one of the tutorials in the lounge and somewhere outside there were two voices singing softly, in harmony. Later, when I popped out to look for my next victim, I heard someone singing alone upstairs.

After Friday dinner, our last evening together, we had a session in the barn. Everyone read at least one of the brilliant things they’d made during the week. Some were funny. Some made us cry. Some took our breath away. And after that there was more singing. We sang together, and as we sang, friends gradually left the song and went off to bed, one by one, until only a couple were left. Finally, there was the silence again – the sort of silence that opens out after a really satisfying poem. And in the night, it rained: it thundered on the roof.

We had a terrific time. Words fail me. By the time we hugged or waved or touched the ground under one another’s feet, the superlatives were exhausted. So were we, of course. We drove back to the noisy world in the rain, with windscreen wipers wiping metrically. (The sun is preparing itself for the next group on Monday.)

Arvon courses, how profoundly I underestimated you. Dear reader, if you haven’t had this experience and you can get it, even once, you should. My notebook is bursting with ideas and thoughts I didn’t know I had, and I was only the tutor. You don’t have to be rich (though I would sacrifice much for this): there are grants.

There is one other, particular thing I liked. Much of my time is spent interacting with poets who haven’t won. They haven’t won competitions (or not the right ones). They haven’t won the heart of the publisher they wanted. They haven’t won a place on Parnassus, wherever that stupid mountain is. It’s such an effort finding a place where poetry, our most important secret writing, can be shared.

At Totleigh Barton last week, every single person was a winner. They know who they are. We will not forget.

AN INSPIRATION IN EVERY MOUTHFUL

Report on the FreeVerse Bookfair? Better late than never.

The hall was busy from start to finish – a hubbub of busy, chatting, poetry buzzing people. It was enormously friendly. At first I thought it too full. But no, it added to the warmth of the occasion. Parties are always better when there’s hardly room to move.

And since this is the third fair of its kind, a pattern has emerged. The remarkable Charles Boyle (or another member of the team) stands on the platform and rings a large brass bell to announce readings. Talk is hushed. A rivulet of people exit the hall to hear the reading. Their place is immediately filled by others. Talk starts again, but louder.

You see people you haven’t seen in years. You meet people you have never met before, but will certainly meet again.

Sales from HappenStance were good. Much better than I expected. We despatched nearly all the Seamus Heaney jelly, made from blackberries picked with my own hand the day before I left. D A Prince, who was assisting on the HappenStance table was plugging it cheerfully as “an inspiration in every mouthful”. I agree – but then I would.

After the bookfair. I went to my mother’s in Sussex for a few days. I got back late Wednesday night.

When I left there was a depressing space where a conservatory (albeit crumbling) once stood. And the window to the sitting room was boarded up, making it permanently dark inside.

When I got back the edifice was up! The window was back. And there was a sparky in the house putting in new plug points, even though it was 8.30 pm. In fact, it was he who came and picked me up from the bus stop. It isn’t just poets who are versatile.

The furniture from the conservatory, and some of the stuff from the sitting room, was in the HappenStance room. (Still is.) The contents of the dresser in the sitting room, which had to be moved to allow the sparky to move the points, were on the dining table. The television was in the bedroom. The telephones were on the floor. The furniture in my study (aaargh!!) was in a pyramid in the centre of the room to allow the sparky to get in with his drill and implements.

There was dust. A lot of dust. And some rubble.

On Thursday and Friday the Men worked on the inside of the conservatory and laid the laminate flooring. Mugs of tea were supplied.

Tomorrow (Monday) a painter comes to tape things in the conservatory and make the back walls look like wall, as opposed to plaster board with nails in it. The harling man may come back this week with more scaffolding. It has not been possible to get him on the phone.

And while on the subject of phones. My Significant Other has observed, in his ongoing study of the Ubiquity of Mobile Phones and their Destructive Effects on Modern Society, how often the Men, whether builders, joiners, harlers or plumbers, take phone calls. You see them in the garden chatting away, or texting. And yet – when they are not at your house and you try to phone them. . . .

The worst point of the week was when the joiner appeared behind me while I was busily typing away and trying to clear the backlog of email and orders. He made me jump, and knocked my concentration for six. He had arrived to reseal the leaking double-glazed windows. I had forgotten about the leaking windows.

So I had to move all the furniture around the window in my study and in the HappenStance room. There isn’t really anywhere to move things to any more. The chair I am sitting on is falling to bits. The desk is propped up in a somewhat worrying way because it collapsed irretrievably when I moved it and fell on top of it. I still haven’t hoovered up the sawdust round the skirting boards.

There will not be a blog next week, not because of the building works, which still won’t be finished, but because I will be in Devon and about to participate in an Arvon course at Budleigh Salterton for the first time ever. I hope I can find all the bits I need to take with me. I hope I can get my head clear enough to prepare (I am a great preparer, though I’m not always convinced this is a virtue).

Why do I keep making bramble jelly in the middle of this mayhem? (More will be made this afternoon.) It’s a stay against confusion. I find it works better than poetry.

LOSING, WINNING, WINING AND BUILDING

But not whining. Or I hope not.

But it has been quite a week.

The decoration of the HappenStance bedroom/office was neatly finished in time for the work downstairs to commence with a vengeance. The conservatory, which was leaking in more places than we had bowls to put under, has been torn down (ready for rebuilding). So the furniture from the conservatory is in the newly painted bedroom. It is difficult to move there.

The new conservatory has not yet been built so the door which would go into it is boarded up and the sitting room is consequently very dark.

However, the log burning stove (cue previous saga) has been installed. We are still getting used to the shock of stove plus huge pipe. But it works. It certainly works. And the light from the flames slightly offsets the huge dark from the boarded up wall.

Half the exterior of the house has been rough cast and harled. Men come to do pipes, cladding and gutters tomorrow morning. And more of the building work round the soon-to-be-erected conservatory. They are all men. On the board in the kitchen, there’s a small list of names and what they take in their tea.

And on my upstairs list (it has been increasingly hard to get to this computer which is a gateway to the WORLD) there has been the pleasure of knowing Gerry Cambridge’s book, Notes for Lighting a Fire, has been short-listed for The Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards. Long live mortgages!

But meanwhile (a lot of my paragraphs are starting with ‘but’, but that’s the least of it), my friend and HappenStance poet Marcia Menter, arrived from New York, and together we set off for the Isle of Arran, leaving the building work behind, and my long-suffering partner Matt in charge of log stoves, tea for the workers and general survival.

Why Arran? Marcia was one of four winners of the Robert McLellan poetry prize and she flew over, like a true poetry executive, for the award ceremony. (This is not the sort of thing she usually does but hey, life is short).

The three other winners included another HappenStance poet, Jim Carruth (hurray!) And then there was Ron Scowcroft, Hubert Moore and highly commended Emma Strang. Hubert is the one with his hand in his pocket, Ron the one gripping the lectern. Jim, you will recognise. A lovely bunch of people.

But it wasn’t all winning. On our way to the event, Gerry Cambridge texted to say Seamus Heaney had died, a huge loss. I would not normally see this from a US perspective but because I was with Marcia, I knew that this death was featured next day on the front page of the New York Times above the fold. This is practically unheard of.

And so, as PoetryWorld shivered on its foundations, we celebrated poetry, which will outlive all of us.

Peter and Ann Sansom were the judges of the McLellan competition and awarded prizes. But they did much more than that. They are not ordinary judges (or poets). They talked about each winning poem. They read each poem, and then the poets read them again. We got to know those poems, and their authors.

All this in a little community hall on Arran, set out not in in rows, but with café-style tables and bring-your-own bottles of wine. There was a lovely atmosphere. Peter and Ann read a few of their own poems too – not many – with charm, humour and generosity. We laughed a great deal. Oh did you read Anthony Wilson on Ann Sansom? It is all true.

I think it’s true to say that on this lovely occasion on Arran, despite the loss of the great Seamus, we felt like we had all won. He was not forgotten, and as long as there is life and letters, he never will be.

We arrived in Arran in rain but with rainbows.

We left in a squall of rain that nearly soaked us through, followed by brilliant sunshine.

Now back to the building of the HappenStance emporium. This week the conservatory should go up, the roofwork should be done – oh and a few other things. One day it might be possible to read and write here again.

But not yet.

On Friday, I go to London, taking some HappenStance wares to the Free Verse Bookfair at the Conway Hall in London. I must work out where it is before then. If you’re based in or near the metropolis, do come along and have a chat. I may have dust and mortar in my hair, but who cares?

HAPPENSTANCE GETS FACELIFT

Actually not a facelift, an office lift.

Actually not an office lift, more of a mood elevator.

Actually not really an elevator but a coat of paint or two, and the removal of four layers of wallpaper.

Once it’s all back in place, thinking and writing may be easier. When the entire HappenStance ‘office’ (what was once the spare bedroom) is all in lumps and piles and packages and under dust sheets, it is truly awful.

I’m convinced the house in which one lives has a direct relationship with the brain with which one thinks. If one of the rooms — especially a room that’s central to functioning — is in upheaval, then the brain experiences fundamental disruption. It’s all to do with the Roman Room theory. If one of the rooms is out of action, how can memory work?

It may be easier next week.

ENSLAVED!

I’ve been away. Temporarily I was free.

I have seen other writers, on FaceBook, declare they are leaving for weeks/months/years/permanently (delete as appropriate) in order to work on a manuscript. I always wonder what on earth they’ve been doing on FaceBook to prevent them writing.

Not me. I am immune (except when it comes to Scrabble).

But I realised I was in fact enslaved when I came home from a week’s holiday. It must have been gradually getting worse. After unpacking, I spent six hours working through emails and messages on social networks (I haven’t finished yet). One hundred and twenty-five people said Happy Birthday to me on FaceBook. There was a party on my FaceBook page – in my absence.

And for the first time, although there was a bunch of mail behind the door (to use an American expression), it wasn’t a huge pile. The postal pile was much smaller than the equivalent personal part of the email. And I like letters.

I am not reading less than I did. I am reading more. But the more I am reading is an online more, and it’s in bits and pieces, updates and mini-blogs, quotes of the day and offers from websites, links and jokes, pictures and comments.

Away from all this, last week I was reading books.

I read, for example, The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth, which not only looks magnificent with its red (embossed with gold) cover, but is hugely entertaining. It’s the sort of book which is deeply annoying for everybody but the reader because of the amount of chuckles and ‘you must listen to this’ announcements.

It was Mark Forsyth who educated me in the origin of slaves. I now know about Basil the Bulgur Slayer, one of many who contributed to the low status of the Slavs: “When they weren’t being slain by Basil in the south they were being subjugated by the Holy Roman Empire in the north and forced into lives of servitude. So many Slavs were defeated and oppressed that the word Slav itself became interchangeable with forced labourer, and that’s where we got the word slave.”

But the deep satisfaction of Forsyth’s book is the never-ending connections. One word leads to the next. A medieval Italian courtesy greeting was ‘Sono vostro schiavo’ – I am your slave (a bit like ‘your humble and obedient servant’), and this became shortened to ‘schiavo’ and this corrupted itself into ‘ciao’. For some reason, it’s enormously satisfying knowing this. It reminds me of when I first studied Latin at school. It was a sort of revelation to me. I became a complete pest at home, constantly announcing which words derived from what.

Which reminds me of the time my friend Kate was sitting sunbathing outside our school. This was strictly against school policy but she was with other girls on the flagstones under the windows of the biology lab. They had escaped – after an exam, I think – to a place where they couldn’t be spotted. They could, however, hear the class teacher, whose name was Mr Trueblood (really) instructing the class inside. He was talking about menstruation.

I know it seems hard to believe that a Mr ‘Trueblood’ was talking about menstruation but I have not made this up. Worse still, he announced that ‘menstruation’ comes from the Lation word mensa, meaning month. Kate was studying Latin with me. It was all she could do to restrain herself from leaping up and shouting through the window ‘No, you idiot. Mensis means month. Mensa is a TABLE!’

Where was I? Yes, the derivations of things. Reading Forsyth’s book I was enthralled. But wait – ‘enthralled’ is connected with ‘thrall’, and a thrall is no more than a slave, from the Old Norse þræll meaning a person who is in bondage or serfdom. And who were the thralls? Yes – I’ve just checked on Wikipedia. They were Scandinavian. They made specially good thralls because they were pagan, and Christians around 1100 A.D. were allowed to enslave pagans, of course.

So all slaves were Eastern European, and slavery is no more than a state of enthrallment. Or thralldom maybe.

And the fact is, I am both enslaved and enthralled by my connection to the world wide web. I marvel at the fact that I just looked up ‘thrall’ for myself. I can check and double check. This is fun.

But now there’s another blog I have to keep up with. Mark Forsyth at Inky Fool. And there I see he’s just been at the Edinburgh Book Festival, though I missed him because I was on holiday. But there is a podcast of him, though it’s nowhere near as good as reading his book. Or the previous entries on his blog. Talking of which. . . .

Oh hell.

TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALONS

Yes, it’s TALENT. I know.

As in talent contest. On holiday in Llandudno over 50 years ago, my grandmother made my sister and me enter one. She herself had won a prize for consuming more marshmallows inside a minute than anybody else.

Our task, in the children’s section, was to sing. We were about to perform Brahms’ Lullaby, to which we knew the words. We queued up for our turn on the stage. I (aged five or six) was the older sister: Louise must have thought I knew what to do. But we forgot the words after the first couple of lines and in an agony of embarrassment our chance of fame dissolved.

And then talent turned up again in church, in that mystifying parable. Two faithful servants doubled their allocation of talents, so you got the general idea. The one who buried his in the ground got short shrift. His shrift was so short that the words stuck forever: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

No wonder John Milton in ‘On his blindness’ (available as a HappenStance BardCard) talked about his ability to write as “that one talent which is death to hide”.

And now there is Carol Ann Duffy. The word ‘talent’ pops up all over the place in her work, like a shining coin. She even has a whole poem called Talent.

But I was thinking about T S Eliot and his famous essay, which is now, O wondrous internet, available at the click of a mouse. I was thinking about it – I often do – when reflecting on how hard it is for poets to work out where they fit in. People like me tell them they are not original enough. Where and how does the individual talent fit in, and how do you double it?

So I re-read the essay, which seemed to me much harder work than I originally thought it. In fact, what I had preserved was an interest in the central idea, namely that there is a relationship between the individual writer and the writing tradition, and that this relationship may be a vexed one.

Eliot writes in a traditional essayist’s style and that’s another problem for me now, though it wasn’t when I first read him. In my teens, I thought all poets were men. Now, when I read about “the historical sense” that “compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones”, the “man” and the masculine pronoun make me read uncomfortably, like someone in bed with crumbs.

The “historical sense” is, to Thomas Stearns, crucial. It is vital to one’s place in tradition, which cannot “be inherited”. Indeed “if you want it you must obtain it by great labour”. Already his language is semi-biblical. And off he goes:

. . . the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

Blimey. I’d say it’s impossible to write poetry, well or badly, without the pastness of the past getting through. Sometimes aspiring poets say, without compunction, that they don’t read poetry. They worry about being influenced.

It makes no odds. Poetry is in them. It creeps in from the playground. It’s in Sticks and stones can break my bones / but words will never hurt me. It’s in It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man’s snoring and A stitch in time saves nine and Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper, as well as She sells sea-shells on the sea shore.

And more modern sources too: A finger of fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat and Her ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

The tradition is in the language, the language is in the tradition, the tradition is the history, we are pickled in it from birth. And it gets, willy nilly, nolens volens, into poetry. It’s jiggery pokery and hocus pocus. It’s the Catholic mass and the Cadbury’s fudge advert.

What the poet does with it is quite another matter. She has to find her place in the whirling world of words and still say something or other. Eliot insisted “that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.” I guess that’s the same as saying poets should read.

But then we get to an even harder demand: “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” This appeals to me. I absorbed Calvinism with the parable of the talents. But wait – continual extinction? From him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. Damn.

It may be argued (with some justification) that I am deliberately muddling Eliot’s noble thesis. Keats’ “negative capability” and Eliot’s extinction of the personality are not a million miles apart. But Eliot goes on to compare the poet to a shred of platinum. I had forgotten this, and I do see why. As memorable metaphors go, it doesn’t rate highly. But then there’s the celebrated bit: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality”. This dictum seems to apply remarkably well to Eliot’s own work (invariably true of poets’ definitions of poetry). And it sounds rather good.

Except that he ruins his entire effect by adding petulantly: “But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

So yes, the essay is interesting, but not as interesting as I thought, or as useful. It is difficult – coming out of a tradition and at the same time finding a way to be oneself. Perhaps it doesn’t do to dwell on it too much. Perhaps the thing to do is just to keep working away. Keep writing. Stuff talent.

WHAT GOES RIGHT WITH POEMS (AND PIGS)

The same things make them go right as make them go wrong.

Maybe the poem is in couplets and it has to be couplets. Maybe the prose rhythms are essential. Maybe the plod of iambic pentameter is just right. Maybe the leaning verbs lean like no others. Maybe the line breaks are all broken and that’s the point. Maybe it’s like Keats and still not like Keats. Maybe the poem jumps all over the page and I don’t even notice because I’m too involved. Maybe the poet is simply having fun.

I don’t know what makes them go right. I only know how it feels. Which is as follows:

I am inside the poem and I don’t know how I got there.

The poet vanishes.

The form (which I haven’t noticed anyway) fuses with mood, matter and meaning.

Whether or not I understand the poem, the poem understands me.

I am unreasonably excited.

I want to read it again. Now.

I want to copy it out and carry it round with me.

I want to share it.

I’m nearly at the end of the HappenStance July ‘window’. I’ve read 75 sets of poems, 47 by women and 28 by men, and I have come across a handful of wholly magical texts in that time.

There are never many poems that create the experience I describe above, though there are some that could, I think, and others that do it in little patches. And there may be a few I miss. I know from experience that some quiet (but vital) poems can slip past when you’re tired.

Much of the time, I am thinking ‘oh, another villanelle’, or ‘oh what a pity she spoiled her effect there’. Or ‘duh?’

But thankfully (or I would have to stop ), I like doing all this. It appeals to my analytical self. I’ve been trying to write poetry all my life. I keep thinking that if I can fathom what other people are doing, especially when it works, I’ll learn something I can use.

There is a mystery at the heart of it though and all the analysis in the world will not solve it. Poetry, whatever it is, rises from the roots of language itself, and language is a mind-boggling phenomenon.

Anyway, there’s nothing unusual about me as a reader of poetry (except possibly in my relentless analysis). My experience of reading poetry is the same as yours. When you read a book (or a magazine or anthology) full of poems, it’s rare to find one that does the full-on, magical thing, isn’t it? In fact, often there aren’t any.

But there are some.

This week, thanks to Andy Philip’s guest blogging feature about poems to take on holiday, and in particular John Glenday’s introduction to Heidy Steidlmayer, I read Fowling Piece – a whole book of poems on top of the others.

But it is a fabulous book, with all sorts of intrigue, fun, design, contraption and inspiration. And several times I found all the things on my list happening. She even has a poem in one of my favourite genres – the ironing poem – a beaut. Here it is:

Circles

Because it is late
and a man’s white shirts
gleam as if frozen,
the woman ironing
dreams of skating in circles,
on edge, leaning in.
Always there are more shirts
before her skating away.
If she is not careful, she will
scorch them as she glides the quiet
length of an untouched lake.

See? It even has an as in its final sentence and it didn’t impede me in any way. In fact, I didn’t notice it till this very moment.

And then there is Hilary Menos’s new book Red Devon. I first met a Menos poem at an Aldeburgh Poetry Festival (2003, I think) where an unpretentious little sonnet got the full treatment in a master class. I think the Master was Paul Muldoon. It was a bloody good poem. When it appeared later in a Smiths/Doorstop pamphlet, I was delighted to see she hadn’t made any changes. She doesn’t finish a poem easily, or lightly.

In fact, my money is on Hilary Menos. Sometimes I forget how good she is, and then I start to read one of her poems, like I did earlier today – when I wasn’t supposed to be reading poems at all – with a shock of recognition, and a little shiver of delight. The magical thing can still be done, and there are people doing it.

And to demonstrate that truth, here’s Hilary Menos’s ‘Long Pig’, particularly good poem for a Sunday:

We eat the flesh only in wartime, when enraged,
and in a few legal instances. Theft. Treason.

Adultery. When the elders deem fit, revenge.
When a captured prisoner cannot pay ransom

in coin or woman or pig. And we find nothing
animates missionaries like being eaten.

When we introduce you to the village elders,
you men, with your degrees from Oxford or Eton,

must squat at the far end of the hut from our king
due to your woeful lack of pigs. Still, be at ease.

But when our women gather salt, and limes, and rice,
hanging coconuts like sucked skulls from the palm trees,

it might be prudent to invoke the Lord’s Prayer twice,
or whatever prayer, to whatever God you please.

WHAT GOES WRONG WITH POEMS (III)

July is a long month. There are ten days still to go. I’ve read 56 sets of poems now, and I’m getting tired.

Also I may have become completely neurotic. This leaning verb thing, for example. I keep falling over them. And the ‘as’ construction keeps popping up (you know I hate that word) at the end of what is otherwise a nice poem.

Last night I was constructing verse in my sleep, stanzas that would exemplify the recurring patterns.

The long day is longer, hotter than ever before
and the leaning verb thing leans in-
to my consciousness as I read. It’s
familiar as conscience, seductive
as silk. It feels like poetry, aches
like an old grudge. As I move out of the sun
it leans over to me, reaches my ankles,
whispers reassurance, and burns.

One day a poet will take revenge on me. It will be easy. The person will trawl through my two full collections to find examples of Helena Nelson doing exactly the same thing. I know, I know. The semi-colon in my own eye is what makes me see it in others.

Here are two more things that go wrong though. First, there’s the poem that makes complete sense to the poet but less sense to the reader.

Here’s what Ruth Pitter has to say about obscurity:

[ . . . ] I think a real poem, however simple its immediate content, begins and ends in mystery. It begins in that secret movement of the poet’s being in response to the secret dynamism of life. It continues as a structure made of and evolved from and clothed in the legal tender and common currency of language; perhaps the simpler the better, so that the crowning wonder, if it comes, may emerge clear of hocus-pocus. (I think it is important to make the plain meaning of the words as clear as possible, but it cannot always be made entirely clear. Our only obscurities, I feel, should be those we are driven into; then a sort of blessing may descend, making such obscurity magical.)

I agree. There’s a kind of necessary obscurity. It arises when you write about something you don’t fully understand. The poem may be an attempt to grasp an idea bigger than itself. But it is “important to make the plain meaning of the words as clear as possible” and that’s where things can go amiss. It can start when the poet chooses an obscure title, and then goes on to other layers of obscurity.

Imagine, for example, that the title is ‘Miasma’ and the poem is about the day the poet learned she was at risk of losing her sight. The verb ‘to see’ is a wonderful one to play with, because it means see with the eyes and understand with the brain. “I could not see what he meant” in the context of this imagined poem, therefore, is pregnant with irony.

However, the unknown reader may not see what the poet is talking about, or only with difficulty. Perhaps the poet has introduced her poem to a group of friends – a workshop group perhaps – and the group already knows (or she tells them) about the experience underpinning the text. Nothing is obscure to them.

But often it’s more difficult for a general reader. I often get to the end of a poem and feel unsure what it was about. I assume the deficiency is in me. I read the text again. I think it might be about a) or it might be about b). It could even be about c). I feel wary of making a comment in case I reveal my own idiocy.

Should all poems be immediately comprehensible? Obviously not. The delight may reside in the mystery. I can think of poems I love that I’ve never fully understood. But I think this is the obscurity Ruth Pitter calls “magical”. It’s a mysteriousness the poet is driven into unavoidably.

I once shared a little poem in a workshop group – a poem by me, I mean. It was about an innocent childhood memory and yes, it was a bit obscure. To my horror, my friends were convinced it was an experience of sexual abuse. I couldn’t see any way to save it. The poem went to the bottom of the ragbag.

One last thing. I like narrative poems, by which I mean poems with a story at their heart. But I notice the heaviness when they involve a backstory with past perfect or habitual tenses.

The same difficulty often afflicts short stories:

“I had often seen Mr Parr on a Tuesday morning. He’d be shouldering his purple and green backpack. He would wave to me as he marched past my garden. He’d almost certainly be wearing his mauve hat with a white pompom. But today was different.”

If you can avoid the past perfects, with their heavy ‘d’ sounds, I would do it. In a poem you can almost always swing straight into the simple past, without having to explain (through your verb tenses) which action came before which. For example:

On Tuesdays Mr Parr waved as he marched past
with his purple and green backpack, and
his mauve hat with a white pompom. But today
was different.

The reason for avoiding the he’ds and you’ds and we’ds is two fold. First, the mechanism is unimaginative – such an obvious way of filling in background. Second, if you fill your poem full of ‘d’ sounds, it’s like a bag of stones. It sinks straight to the bottom of the river.