2013 – Page 4 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

ARE THEMED POETRY COLLECTIONS BEST?

Maybe. It worked for Sharon Olds, for example, with Stag’s Leap, winner of this year’s T S Eliot prize.

Anyway, Olds thinks themed. “When I see that I have a lot of poems clustering around a subject, I start to put a book together,” she says in the Huffington Post.

But other poets also do well this way, and the theme doesn’t have to be personal. Joanna Boulter’s Twenty Four Preludes & Fugues on Dmitri Shostakovich was shortlisted for the Forward First Collection prize in 2007. Sam Riviere’s 81 Austerities (a kind of theme) was the 2002 winner. Nancy Gaffield’s Tokaido Road ( a sequence of poems responding to Hiroshige’s woodcut prints of landscapes and travellers of the Tokaido Road) took the Aldeburgh First Collection prize, and was shortlisted for Forward as well. Of all Ruth Padel’s books, Rembrandt Would Have Loved You is the one I remember best, and that’s because it tells a story. Hannah Lowe’s Chick, released this year (and described as “a journey round her father”) tells another one (I predict thematic focus will assist its success). Anthony Wilson’s Riddance, which I wrote about here not long ago, pinned me to my seat not least because it deals with the progress of his treatment for cancer “from initial diagnosis to the uncertain territory of remission.”

Plenty of contemporary collections work in this way (although more are not themed). Whether it works or not depends on the synergy. For a true humdinger, the whole has to be more than the sum of the individual poems.

Reading a poetry book is an odd thing to do. Unlike chapters in a novel, which propel the reader forward, each poem demands its own island of time and concentration. The reader moves slowly from one intensity of experience to another (or skims from one text to the next deciding where to immerse). Some kind of connection does make it easier. Oh dear. Even in using the word ‘easier’, I felt a momentary sense of guilt. Is wanting it to be easy allowed?

I think sometimes a set of poems is easy, pleasurable reading. And yes, I think that’s okay. If they’re any good, there will be levels of meaning and intensity that creep up quietly and summon the reader back. And occasionally, if there’s a theme, they’ll accumulate to do something as a set that they might not accomplish individually.

Which brings me to a new HappenStance pamphlet. Officially launched next Saturday (her wedding day), Diana Gittins’ Bork! is a sequence of poems connected by . . . chickens. It isn’t a light verse collection, though there’s lightness in it. Diana keeps hens and, as every poulterer knows, their lives have preoccupations, triumphs and tragedies parallel to our own. Diana didn’t set out to write about the hens, but her writing space (a ‘shack’ in the garden) is in their territory. So this sequence represents – not a poet deliberately writing to a theme, so much as a theme that encroached while she was trying to write something else (in one poem, for example, the hens interrupt her reading of Prynne).

In Diana’s first submission to me, well over a year ago, the chicken poems were mingled with others, many of them interesting and worthy, but it was in the Bork! pieces I sensed synergy. So I asked for more.

I love these chicken poems. I wonder whether you’ll agree. Bork! is in the shop now. For the modest outlay of just over a fiver (including postage) you can sample the synergy.

POETS – EMERGING, EMERGED OR EMERGENCY?

I think of them as dragon-flies, some of the fastest flying insects in the world.

Let’s not even mention the egg stage. When writing early poems they’re more like nymphs. In fact, most of a poet’s life may well be spent in nymph form, beneath the water’s surface (submerged), using extendable jaws for nefarious purposes. The larval stage is short for some, lengthy for others. Some remain nymphs for decades. Some tend to merge, rather than emerging. But most achieve metamorphosis. The nymph climbs up some kind of stalk and is exposed to AIR. It starts to breathe, its skin splits, and out staggers . . . a flully-fledged poet, ready to feast on midges and propel itself in at least six directions.

Or perhaps it’s not quite like that. Tim Love sent me a link to a discussion paper from Devolved Voices, a 3-year research project based at Aberystwyth University. It commenced in September 2012 and they’re mapping stuff. I like ‘mapping’. It sounds like it will help you find your way (as indeed is the intention). You may recall another well-publicised document of this kind: Mapping Contemporary Poetry, released by the Arts Council England in 2010.

Poetry world is desperately confusing to anyone starting out as a writer. So how useful is this discussion document from Aberystwyth?

I liked it a lot. You could argue that it is a little retro – not enough about spoken word routes, or social networking, or new forms of publication, but it is easier to describe what has, until recently, been true than to write about a kind of emerging that is . . . still emerging. If you’re not sure whether you’ve emerged or not, a common concern, I recommend this document.

Aberystwyth propose stages of emergency. Stage 1 you get a poem, and then a couple more, published in a magazine, possibly a local publication. The nymph is just out of the egg.

Stage 2, you start to use the extendable jaws and penetrate other magazines, “probably moving beyong the confines of an immediate locale”.

Stage 3, you get poems in much better magazines: the most widely read publications. You may even get a pamphlet published (most first-collection HappenStance poets are somewhere around stage 3). You’re climbing the stalk and you have abandoned your gills.

By Stage 4, you’re doing readings here and there, you’ve got a book collection out, you might be doing a residency or teaching creative writing. You are dining on more than just midges.

At Stage 5, you’ve got a “well-established profile over a wide national/geographic area”. You might be an “established reviewer or essayist”. You could be an important predator, consuming flies, bees, ants, wasps and very occasionally (and remorsefully) butterflies. You may be fulfilling “significant cultural roles”.

(Fulfilling roles is a phrase I’ve always had difficulty with. It’s the aural pun that causes me a problem: I have an image of people filling bread rolls. Significant ones. But I digress.)

Stage 6 is the final stage. At stage 6 you have emerged. You have self-actualised. You are probably on the literature syllabus in schools and most ‘well-read’ people, even people who aren’t into poetry, have heard of you. However, you are still subject to predation by birds, lizards, frogs, spiders, fish, waterbugs, and even other large dragonflies disguised as mentors.

The writers of the Aberystwyth paper point out that “poetic emergence is distinct from poetic development: it is entirely to do with becoming prominent as a poet, rather than becoming a poet of better quality or worth.” They also observe that “poets sometimes jump stages, and sometimes go into reverse, but most reach what is called her a ‘plateau’ and remain thereafter at more or less the same point”. (I am writing this blog from a pleasant plateau partway through stage 5.)

Stages 1-3 are “emerging”. Stages 4-6 are “emerged”.

There are bands too (not the musical kind: bands as in categories). Band A: pre-collection. Band B: first collection. Band C: multi-collection. Publishers like these kind of bands.

Devolved voices also touches on factors that can affect the emergency (I know I am wilfully mis-using this term: it keeps me sane). These include prizes, fellowships, creative writing degrees, courses, mentorships etc. They talk about “tipping the publication see-saw” (another neat image if tipped up) and “premature anointing” (to be avoided at all costs).

This is a ‘discussion’ document – so do join the discussion, whether you are submerged, emerging or emerged. Facetiousness aside, it is interesting, well-written and easy to digest.

But I said it was a somewhat retro. What about the new ways? Regrettably, I think I am part of the old: most of what I do is nurture an editorial relationship with a few nymphs to help them move from stage 3 to stage 4 (the sort of thing Rialto Bridge pamphlets also mention and that the Mapping Contemporary Poetry authors approve – but then, they would.)

Things are changing. Poetry used to be literary, intellectual and dusty (though it was discussed in pubs, by men, with beer or whisky). Now the slams, the performance, the spoken word, the fun – these things are bubbling, and not only with the young. Some of the nymphs read the notices on publishers’ websites about ‘no unsolicited submissions’; they get fed up because what they write is nothing like what wins competitions; they set up their own presses; they do the business. Some of these enterprises will prove their mettle and will draw in participants of talent, ingenuity and new types of jaws and wings. They will be impatient (and why not?). They will be unreasonable.

As George Bernard Shaw said (the world consisted entirely of men in his day): “The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him. The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

I am never very sure about the word ‘progress’. It suggests things get better. I suspect they simply get different. Human beings develop hierarchies, and people find ways to ascend. When daunted by the survival of the fittest and fastest, it’s useful to remember all this is “entirely to do with becoming prominent as a poet, rather than becoming a poet of better quality or worth.”

Given the devious dragon-fly trafficking, I’m strongly reminded of a poem by James Reeves who, despite mentoring from Robert Graves, spent most of his life at stage 5 and worked very hard to stay there. I may well have quoted this before, in some other context (blog entries proliferate on this plateau) but I don’t care. Here it is.

Important Insects

Important insects clamber to the top
Of stalks; look round with uninquiring eyes
And find the world incomprehensible;
Then totter back to earth and circumscribe
Irregular territories pointlessly.
Some insects narcissistically assume
Patterns of spots or stripes or burnished sheen
For purposes of sex or camouflage,
Some tweet or rasp, though most are without speech
Except a low, subliminal, mindless chatter.
Take heart: those scientists are wrong who find
Elements of the human in their systems,
Despite their busy, devious trafficking
Important insects simply do not matter.

TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG?

And is there a blogjam? Probably, yes.

And here’s another entry floating downstream and contributing to the probblog. Do I care? Not particularly. Bloggers don’t. They scribble away merrily, part of the hubbub. Nobody has to read them. It costs nothing but time.

Which is, of course, the most precious thing we have.

Should poets blog? Does it help them to be successful, to get their poems read? It depends. It can do the opposite. If you launch a blog, it’s hard to undo it.

When I was at school, our English teacher said we should keep a diary. She said it would improve our style. So I kept a diary for about twenty years – maybe more. I don’t think it did anything for my style, but then I wrote it for myself, not for anybody else. It occurs to me that prose style is improved through writing for readers. I expect there are exceptions, but still the desire to be readable, to be engaging, to communicate – that’s worth fostering, isn’t it?

Who reads all the blogs? Lord knows. They become part of the Twittersphere, the FaceBookspeak, the vast network of communicators on the internet passing on links and connections. Something that interests one person, even slightly, is passed to another, and so on.

I can’t read all the good books that are being generated right now: no-one ever could. I can’t even read a fraction of the poetry. But I do read poetry bloggers: they make connections for me, and guide my reading. Some of these bloggers are also poets I’ve published; some are not. I’m always finding new ones. It’s like being at a huge party where you go back to the drinks and snacks and meet another person on your way. Or one person introduces you to another. Better than a party, really because you can go home whenever you want.

Recently I’ve had a great time reading Anthony Wilson’s ‘Lifesaving Poems’. It’s not just the style (open, personal and unfussy), it’s the introductions to actual poems I might never have read – and you get them in full. The recent blog on Sian Hughes led me to a poem and then into the poem, and now I shan’t forget the blog (or the dog either).

John Field’s Poor Rude Lines is splendid too, and he includes pictures – beautiful photos and graphics, which light up the lines. The blogs I like best are unashamedly personal. This week John shared his personal response to Fiona Moore’s The Only Reason for Time – and this is not a devious way of getting a friend to help sell the publication. No, he loved it and wrote about it, and I have never met him.

Meanwhile, Fiona Moore herself blogs too. She’s a terrific writer about poetry (being a poet doesn’t necessarily mean that you write about poetry well). This time last week she wrote about the experience of having that selfsame pamphlet published. Fascinating. Well, I would say that, wouldn’t I? Yes. But it is.

When you read a blogger you like, they lead you to others. That’s another of the lovely things about the blogjam. You get drawn in and before you know where you are, you’re back to Margaret Thatcher and Katy Evans-Bush writing brilliantly about her. Then off to check up on Tim Love, whose literary references were an education to me long before I published a word of poetry (my own or anyone else’s), and now he has a sub-blog (bloglet?) about the experience of his HappenStance pamphlet, Moving Parts. Check out the poster on his local library door!

Then there’s Sonofabook, Charles Boyle’s CB Editions publisher blog. He’s funny and he has a kind of addictive raspy edge. He’s also expensive because I want to buy the books. All of them. He’s a role model to roll with.

So many great blogs. How does anyone ever get bored?

As for whether poets should or shouldn’t (blog), far more of the poets I have published don’t blog than do. One blog isn’t like another blog, nor used for the same reasons. Chrissy Williams’ is mainly promotional. Matt Merritt often reviews books or pamphlets on his, but also writes about birds: that’s Polyolbion. Rob A Mackenzie blogs at Surroundings: he writes about a huge range, ineffably. Matthew Stewart blogs at Rogue Strands – a blend of comment on poetry, reviews of his own work, and experiences in the wine trade. Jim C Wilson, a newer blogger, is personal, anecdotal and amusing – a kind of update for friends. Andrew Philip (Tonguefire blog) is a diarist: life events and publications.

I know poets who have started to blog and stopped again. In fact, now I think about it, I started several before this one. You live and learn. I write this every Sunday morning, unless a life crisis stops me, and that’s been true for several years. Why? Officially, it’s a publisher’s blog: it’s here to promote HappenStance and its poets.

The real reason? I am a writer. I like the discipline, I like the practice. I’m dead strict with writers I’m editing. This is where I get strict with me. Brief is better. No pictures this week. I’ll stop now.

A DEMAND AND A PROMISE . . .

What IS a poem?

There are probably as many definitions as well-known poets. I’ve put a download in the HappenStance shop that shares some thoughts on this topic. It’s a lure, needless to say, to get more people into the new shop which has all sorts of advantages over the old one. But if you’ve bought from HappenStance before, and want to do so again, it does mean you have to re-register. It’s quite easy.

And it’s worth it because at the same time you can take a look at the sample poems for the two new pamphlets, Fiona Moore’s The Only Reason For Time and Chrissy Williams’ Flying into the Bear.

Very shortly, there’ll be a third. Diana Gittins’ Bork! is probably the only poetry pamphlet full of poems about chickens, and certainly the only poetry pamphlet about chickens also to feature Lacan, Foucauld, Prynne, Ginsberg (by implication) and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Watch this space. More will be revealed soon.

‘THE ONLY REASON FOR TIME ’

‘. . . is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.’ (Einstein)

From that Einstein quotation Fiona Moore’s The Only Reason for Time takes its title. It’s one of two pamphlets about to go into the online shop. The other is Chrissy Williams’ Flying into the Bear. They start a year of publications in which there should, for once, be as many female as male poets. Let me tell you something about these two – or at least try.

The trouble is, I don’t know how to describe Chrissy Williams’ Flying into the Bear. One page bubbles with mischief; the next topples into awe. The pamphlet features stage directions for a play that never was; there are bears in several senses; a retelling of The Terminator with a flock of sheep as protagonist; and a love poem for a computer game – I had to go to http://bit.ly/Vq3Lid to get it. I got it. I love it when poems make you read in new ways. These do that.

The Only Reason for Time, Fiona Moore’s first collection, has been a long time in the making. To me, these are stunning poems: chiselled, poised and balanced achingly between this world and extinction. Some are responses to the death of Fiona’s partner some years ago. All probe the nature of that mysterious and haunting thing we call life. I’ve lived with these poems, and they have changed me.

Now that I’ve dangled these poets enticingly under your nose, I have to say you can’t order either of them online for a couple of days because we are reinforcing the battlements. It’s busy here.

Attacks of hackers (successfully resisted) have necessitated a make-over of the online shop. It will go live in the next few days with the new publications in it. As soon as it does, there’ll be an announcement through the email newsletter and via FaceBook and Twitter.

If you’re not signed up for the email newsletter, it’s easy. Go to the main page for www.happenstancepress.com and run your eye down under the text. There’s a box at the bottom, in the middle. Put your email address in it and hit the orange ‘go’ button. It will send you an automatic email to confirm. That’s it. You’re on the list.

More soon. About everything.

SPAMMERS, HACKERS AND CYBER-ATTACKERS

Dear Santos38pe, Correia9g, Castro22cl and Oliveira30jw

and Cavalcanti5, Goncalves8m, Victorj0b, Lavinia0h7g, Almeidarc21, Larissa37pe and Vitoria65ql, and your many hundreds of relatives with curiously South American sounding names, greetings!

And in particular, I would like to mention Vsaegwe Upyours (user name Bvasdva) using a disposable email address, (a DEA), who ordered a single copy of The Pied Piper of Hamelin (I don’t think you would have enjoyed it much, Vasaewe) to be sent to 53 Vasdvddsv, in the UK city of Lalal, using a phone number with a Kelso code. Alas, there was a wee problem with the payment of £2.75, which didn’t go through. Such a shame.

Dear zombies, you electronic identities with no souls who register on the HappenStance website in flocks, with the intention (such a shame to mention it) to break into the site security, to ransack whatever is of pecuniary benefit to you there (email addresses? phone numbers?), you have educated me.

I now know, for example, about tempinbox.com which provides “free, receive only, temporary, throwaway email accounts”. It is all above board. They even provide alternative domains, also above board, though they sound somewhat below board to me, namely [anything]@DingBone.com, [anything]@FudgeRub.com, [anything]@LookUgly.com, [anything]@SmellFear.com. Easy to see, perhaps, that people registering on certain kinds of website for certain kinds of information, would not want their emails tracked. It is perfectly legal (or legally perfect, depending which way you want to look at it.) “Tempinbox.com is a free, anonymous, temporary email service . . . not necessarily a fake email address.”

Such sites are helping fight spam, they are the “anti-spam weapon of choice”. There is guerillamail.com. And spamgourmet (2000) and Trashmail (2002), And perhaps the most interesting, mailinator.com, which dates back to 2003 and was clearly created by a somewhat brilliant person, Paul Tyma, for engaging reasons.

Besides, Paul Tyma can write. In a blog based in 2006 he recalls the origins of Mailinator and its mission, that mission being mainly to survive, especially to survive the daily onslaught of spammers. Yes, the facilities that help people resist spam are themselves attacked by “zombie networks” of spammers (i.e. machines, not real people).

His Mailinator FAQs are very funny, witness:

What is Mailinator’s official privacy policy? Privacy is a serious issue, and we want to be clear. We think Mailinator can provide pretty decent privacy, but we can’t and don’t promise it. A promise like that would require lawyers, money, and probably guns – and we don’t have any of those.

So if the government issued a subpoena to Mailinator to divulge emails or logs, you’d rat me out? Holy crap, yes. I’m not going to jail for you, I have a boyish face and very (very) supple skin.

So websites like Mailinator give you temporary email addresses that help you resist spam – except they themselves are targeted by numerous spammers, most of them zombies, trying to put Mailinator out of business.

Why?

Ultimately, it’s about money. Spammers spam for money. Some of them are (allegedly) college students raising money to help them with fees. Hackers and spammers overlap, because hackers want to get into websites in order to spam registered users for the aforesaid reasons.

Because of all this, we are currently working on, and changing, the HappenStance website shop which is currently Vmart but about to be HikaShop. Frankly, I don’t understand any of this but fortunately Sarah at Zipfish, does. She is the one who monitors the changes, the weaknesses, the security and the spammers.

This is going to mean that loyal online customers will need to re-register – but not yet. Wait till it’s all up and running. There will be special offers and attractions! At the moment the current shop is fine and no security is compromised. It’s just being bombarded with ever increasing numbers of false registrations. Those people (except they are not actually people) won’t be able to register with the new setup.

So next time you get annoyed by the various ‘captcha’ systems (copy this to prove you’re not a robot), remember why. It’s all in order to keep your information safe, especially if you’ve given a real email address, as I myself do when ordering online purchases.

AND there are about to be two new pamphlets to order, and two new cards. Watch out for Paul Lee (card), Fiona Moore (pamphlet) and Chrissy Williams (pamphlet). More news about those next week.

IS A POETRY REVIEW EKPHRASTIC ART?

The answer is no. But then the answer could be yes.

It depends whether a review can be considered an art form. It depends what’s meant by ‘ekphrastic’.

I’ve never warmed to the term ‘ekphrastic’, but then I suspect all complex literary terms. Too quickly, they become the privileged jargon of Those In The Know (TITKs). Poems termed ‘ekphrastic’ start to sound special.

There is no univeral agreement about the meaning of the term. Ekphrastic is plastic: it can be moulded to suit the purpose of the user. It can simply mean “a literary description or, or commentary on, a visual work of art” (Merriam Webster). According to this definition a review might even be ekphrastic, provided the poem under scrutiny were conceived of as visual works of art, and reviews as verbal.

The freedictionary.com draws on another popular definition of ekphrasis as “the graphic, often dramatic, description of a visual work of art”. The Ancient Greeks have a lot to answer for. For them, ekphrasis was part of the literary training known as ‘rhetoric’, an art in itself, and a dramatic one. The derivation (though it doesn’t help us much) is from the Greek ‘ek’ and ‘phrasis’, meaning ‘out’ and speak’. The verb ekphrazein is to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name. (It cheers me to know ekphrasis can be spelled with a c. Ecphrasis looks less intimidating, though also – to me – wrong.)

Wikipedia (like a number of other sites) lists the famous instances of ekphrastic writing, from ancient to modern. These include Homer’s extensive description of the shield of Achilles, Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, and a Shakespearean description of paintings in Cymbeline. I don’t know Cymbeline well enough to remember where the reference to paintings comes. But the other two . . . Keats may have been thinking about one particular urn, but it’s more likely he invented an urn image to suit his poem. Homer is unlikely to have seen Achilles’ shield, other than in his imagination. These are responses to imaginary works of art, not actual ones.

But Marjorie Munsterberg (2008-2009) says “For most readers of famous Greek and Latin texts, it did not matter whether the subject was actual or imagined. The texts were studied to form habits of thinking and writing, not as art historical evidence.”

It seems to matter to us these days that the subjects should be actual. The Nillumbik Ekphrasis Poetry Award (Victoria, Australia) 2013 posts the artworks that are to be responded to, and later posts the images beside the winning poems. Some of these are amazing: well worth a look. A number of art galleries (The Scottish National Portrait Gallery does this annually) run competitions for poets to write in response to paintings. During the Titian exhibition in 2012, the National Gallery in London launched the ‘Tweet Titian’ challenge: to write a poem inspired by Titian’s ‘Diana and Actaeon’, ‘The Death of Actaeon’ and ‘Diana and Callisto’ in 140 characters or less (Jacqueline Saphra won). Ekphrasis joins Twitter.

Andrew Carruthers, writing in the Cordite Poetry Review in May 2012, comes up with a form of poetry that has escaped me up to now: “poetic art” – that is to say, not the art of poetry but “poetry which is not simply poetry but also art, and not even just art; a practice which attempts a ‘generalised ekphrasis’ across the boundaries between mediums while considering its main business to be that of poetry.”

It is very difficult. What is poetry?

Please don’t answer that, not even in a comments box. People are always defining poetry and it doesn’t help. The significant factor is that one considers oneself to be about the business of making whatever one considers poetry to be. And our simplest understanding of poetry is something significant made of words. Hold that thought.

Carruthers talks about what he describes as xerographesis, a form of art work more simply termed ‘the photocopy poem’. But his discussion is enormously complex and simplification from me won’t help here. The visual works themselves look (follow the Cordite Poetry Review link above to see them) surprisingly easy to respond to, given the complexity of describing what they might be doing in words.

Carruthers goes on to rehearse the way other art forms have poached the concept of ekphrasis: musicians who respond to paintings or sculpture, painters who respond to music etc. He quotes James Heffernan’s definition of ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of visual representation” (1993), a delightfully simple but somewhat problematic statement (it doesn’t mention art at all). He (Carruthers) then applies a mathematical metaphor:

reduce it to its common denominators, and then factor in the hybridity of interartistic exchange in ekphrastic practices, you get ‘the representation of representation.’ Before each representation you might substitute any of the multiple types of art: ‘sculptural representation of musical representation,’ ‘painterly representation of verbal representation,’ and so on.

I have a bit of a problem with syllables. Once words with large numbers of syllables multiply, I find it difficult to follow the meaning. Put “interartistic” in the same phrase as “ekphrastic practice” and one of my eyebrows starts to misbehave. Still, I am quite attracted to “the representation of representation”.

Although this blog is already too long, I can’t conclude without mentioning Ryan Welsh’s essay on ekphrasis (2007) in the University of Chicago Theories of Media glossary. Thinking about just one word can be enormously educational.

Welsh says (reassuringly): “Few pieces of media jargon have as long a history or as considerable an evolution as ekphrasis”. While bearing in mind Humpty Dumpty’s celebrated assertion (“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less”), it is worth reading on: Welsh says a number of illuminating and entertaining things.

For example, he quotes art critic Peter Wagner (1996) – “We should drop, once and for all, the tacit assumption that the verbal representation of an image must be “literary” to qualify as ekphrasis – in our age of the arbitrary sign it has become extremely difficult to distinguish between ‘literary’ and ‘critical’ text.”

Ha! Indeed it has. Certain kinds of review may be more literary than critical. They may be one form responding to another: they may even be the representation of representation. On the other hand, “Wagner is mindful of the need to broaden and restrict the usage of the word ekphrasis.” Quite. The TITK fraternity need boundaries to stay defined, though type designers see word as image, which really throws a spanner in the works.

I like that W.J.T. Mitchell (1994) proposes a three-part understanding of ekphrasis:

1. ekphrastic indifference
2. ekphrastic hope
3. ekphrastic fear

I shan’t attempt to explain these steps in the evolution of the understanding of the word ‘ekphrastic’ because I am pretty sure your (and my) use of the word has now regressed to an earlier state where our indifference is more than merely ekphrastic. Besides, “If ekphrasis were to become a complete and perfect intermediary between the two sides of the word/image dialectic”, as Mitchell points out, “the entire paradigm would crumble.”

I will make a couple of unsupported assertions anyway and sod the paradigm. I think a poetry review could be one art form responding to another. It need not necessarily comment on perceived strengths or weaknesses, because reviews can do all sorts of things, not least when they think of themselves as art forms (though this has risks of its own).

Most poetry reviews are written by poets. A review might be written with the same precision and attention that a poet pays to her poem in construction. It could be a piece of ekphrastic art: a creation in its own right, a unique response to something worth responding to.

THE SPACE BETWEEN THE STANZAS

This is cheating. I am really thinking about StAnza.

And this morning it’s snowing and around me all the trees are white and I’m not even there. I’m working. But this is a space between yesterday (when I was there) and today when I’m working.

When I went to bed last night my head was full of the space between the stanzas, which for me was the space between the events at StAnza. The events are many, marvelous and magical, of course, and you can read about them elsewhere.

The spaces between the events are just as remarkable, and somewhat more mysterious because completely unpredictable, and not on the programme. When you run an arts festival, you create spaces for unexpected concatenations, correspondences and coalescences. I know that’s just alliteration, but how do you describe it?

On your way to hear a poet read, someone you may never have heard of, perhaps even in a language you don’t know, you stop for a coffee and fall into conversation with Michel (?) from Belgium, there to present a film poem event, and whose job it is to co-ordinate and run literary events in Antwerp – such a charming and interesting young (to me) man. And then we are joined by poet Paula Jennings and Jenny Elliott. Jenny is an old friend (we were once StAnza trustees together) and also a poet and originator of the Shed Press (in her garden shed). Together we sorted out European politics and then moved on to discuss our mothers, over soup and sandwiches (it’s not just poetry). As the table filled up with friends, I moved the flowers onto the floor. Out of the corner of my eye I could see people I knew and wanted to speak to, and others I dimly recognized from their dusty photos on book jackets.

Then an event and then the poetry book fair and then more chats with Tony Lawrence, who has redefined poetry according to laws of mathematics, and the man from Monifieth whose name I can’t remember but who has come to the festival every year for eleven years, and D A Prince, and Karin Koller, and Robyn Marsack and Sheila Wakefield and Stephanie Green and a long conversation – the longest we have ever had, (a GREAT conversation about the late David Tipton and his wife Ena Hollis, taking in John Lucas, Tony Ward and Alan Hill) – with Martin Bates; and another with the lady at the second hand book stall – shop in Newport – I forget her name but it will come back to me; and of course Gerry Cambridge and briefly Rob Mackenzie.

And Richie McCaffery and Stef, and Sally Evans and how lovely to see Ann Drysdale, who has written a whole book about Newport and thus a long conversation about W H Davies and other matters, and briefly (hug interval) Lyn Moir, and Lydia Harris (well met, for the first time) and Christine Webb, and Robert Minhinnick on Dylan Thomas, and Joy Howard and Alan Gay.

And many more. Many more, and some sought for but just missed. Deus ex machina (I’ve just realised that’s a double dactyl) Eleanor Livingstone slipping in and out carying strange objects and messages and inspirations. And others glimpsed in the distance or pausing to share treasure, or say ‘see you later’.

Extraordinary.

The sun has come out and lit up the snow.

And now back to work.

WHAT STICKS IN THE MIND

I couldn’t even remember at first which poem it came from — it was the image that stuck.

It’s hard to know how or why this happens, but happen it does. A fragment of a poem lodges in the mind, illogically and irreversibly. I woke thinking about one of these again: the small creature with “shining eyes between the leaves” in the grass or under the hedge, the life that goes on despite us and beside us.

It was W H Davies who planted this image. It haunts me, especially when stuck in traffic, intent on some human imperative or other – the vision of a small creature nearby in the grass leading a separate life altogether.

Last June, when visiting New York and waiting on the train to go into the city, I glimpsed a chipmunk (I had never ever seen one before) busily about its business at the side of the train track. He was so easily missed, and yet there, as alive and urgent as we were, only a few yards away. W H Davies put him there for me, I reckon.

And about eight years ago, I was with my friend Stewart Eglin, outside the Adam Smith Theatre in Kirkcaldy, on a bench in the sun, when I had a similar experience. We had spent an hour in the café inside but they had thrown us out. It was their closing time and we weren’t done chatting. So we sat outside in the sun, and as we talked, I noticed a mouse. (We were beside a public thoroughfare, a main road and traffic lights). The mouse popped up its head from a grating just opposite us and looked from side to side, slowly and carefully. Its ears were as fine and clear as a cartoon mouse, the sun highlighting their translucence. I could practically see its whiskers. Then it popped down again, into the dark. It was sheer chance that I noticed it at all. Chance and W H Davies.

All those lives going on just beside ours. All the things we don’t see.

W H Davies was probably best known during his life time for The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, though he wanted his reputation to rest, above all, on his poetry, and for me, it does. When he needed inspiration he went walking, tramping through the countryside and over the hills, like his friend Edward Thomas.

Davies had many casual relationships with women, paying for sex on a regular basis, before he finally married (late but irrevocably). As a child, he had been brought up by his grandmother, in a strict Baptist faith, with many “shalt nots”. The theatre was regarded as sinful and the famous actor, Henry Irving (later knighted for his theatrical achievements) was known as the man who brought disgrace on the family.

But Davies was a rebel. He could never have settled for an ordinary life and even the story of how he became a poet is an extraordinary one (too long to tell here).

I tracked down the Davies poem that planted an image in my mind. It wasn’t at all the one I was expecting.

It was ‘A Fleeting Passion’, first published nearly a century ago in The Bird of Paradise. Here Davies recalls one of his sexual assignations. Oddly I had remembered nothing of the sex, the passion (fleeting or otherwise), or even the contrast between the man and the woman (to the woman’s grave disadvantage). It was the small creature in the grass at the edge of the road that had remained vivid and haunting. It will stay with me for life.

‘A Fleeting Passion’ is a strange poem, I think, as many of Davies’ poems are – despite his reputation for being a predictable Georgian. I’ll leave you with it.

A Fleeting Passion
(first published in The Bird of Paradise and Other Poems, 1914)

Thou shalt not laugh, thou shalt not romp,
…Let’s grimly kiss with bated breath;
As quietly and solemnly
…As Life when it is kissing Death.
Now in the silence of the grave,
…My hand is squeezing that soft breast;
While thou dost in such passion lie,
…It mocks me with its look of rest.

But when the morning comes at last,
…And we must part, our passions cold,
You’ll think of some new feather, scarf
…To buy with my small piece of gold;
And I’ll be dreaming of green lanes,
…Where little things with beating hearts
Hold shining eyes between the leaves,
…Till men with horses pass, and carts.

‘A BEAUTIFUL OIL PAINTING THE FIRST TIME YOU TRY’

Do you remember the smell? The redolence of the little tubes of ‘oil paint’?

Not to mention the exquisite risk (because oil paint would not wash off). The necessity to soak the brush in that strange stuff—‘turpentine’. The ambition, the aspiration to achieve the picture of a horse in a field, the flowers in a jar, the replication of the Mona Lisa: so perfect and so beautifully available—if you could just fill in each numbered portion faithfully, with its own faithful colour.

And the painting to be achieved would arrive on a birthday or at Christmas, the perfect thing to fill several hours of patient application. But oh, the disappointment when half way through, your patience ran out or you discovered you’d painted a bit with the wrong colour. Your edges weren’t clear, like they should have been. The horse was not as horse-like as it had been on the cover. It should have fitted together as magically as a jig-saw but (in my case, at least) it never quite did. And so the painting lay about, and the little tubes looked squeezed and limp, and the brush was not soaked in turpentine as it should have been, but hardened in the unforgiving paint, which had also somehow found its way onto bits of the dining room table. There was retribution, and there was guilt.

Wikipedia tells me it all started in the early 1950s, just in time for me (born 1953) to undergo aspiration and anguish. Max S Klein (owner of the Palmer Paint Company of Detroit, Michigan) and Dan Robbins (a commercial artist with an eye for the main chance) were the perpetrators, and the marvellous idea led to ‘colour by numbers’ (with crayons, so much less dangerous to household furniture), as well as the same principle applied to tapestry.

Stamped cross-stitch and embroidery kits must, however, have long pre-dated painting by numbers. From the tablecloths we grew up with, I have reason to believe my mother tackled pre-printed designs long before I was born. In this case, no numbers are required, just the faint indication of the design on the cloth, sometimes in colour, more often in monochrome shadow, with the colours left to the craftswoman’s judgement. I have a memory of half-finished embroidered cloths in the little sewing table (the lid lifted up and the threads and bobbins were underneath). Presumably the vision grew thin halfway through, or my mother got too busy to finish the job.

There’s no real connection between this and writing by numbers. There isn’t really an equivalent, and when Pope talks about it in his ‘Epistle to Arbuthnot’, he means something different:

Why did I write? what sin to me unknown
Dipp’d me in ink, my parents’, or my own?
As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,
I lisp’d in numbers, for the numbers came.
I left no calling for this idle trade,
No duty broke, no father disobey’d.
The Muse but serv’d to ease some friend, not wife,
To help me through this long disease, my life

‘Numbers’ were the Renaissance term for poetry, because poetry was defined in terms of measured form, counted out metrically or syllabically, or via some patterned system. Certainly it makes sense in terms of Pope’s work, his ear for the perfect turn of phrase to complement a neatly iambic line.

And now? What about the repeating French forms: the villanelles, the sestinas, the triolets, and even the paradelle (the last invented by Billy Collins as a joke, but now popping up in various places with disturbing solemnity). The pattern is supplied. You study it carefully. You choose the words that are to recur in the recurring places, and – voilà! a poem appears. I am among the many who have served their time with these forms, who have industriously studied to repeat the repetitions, in the hope that something would emerge.

For me, however, they do not have the charm of the oil paint, the risk and the promise. I can’t say these forms are unworthy. Sometimes, when penned by other people, I read them with pleasure and surprise. I know the feat has been achieved when I discover I have liked the poem without noticing the elaborate practice in numbers. This is rare. (It doesn’t help when the work is titled ‘Sestina’.)

As for the villanelle: if you are going to repeat two lines four times inside one poem of only 19 lines in total, those two lines had better be good. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ is one of the few that does it for me. By and large, I think the villanelle is a villain. But let Pope have the last word:

Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand,
They rave, recite, and madden round the land.

What walls can guard me, or what shades can hide?
They pierce my thickets, through my grot they glide;
By land, by water, they renew the charge;
They stop the chariot, and they board the barge.
No place is sacred, not the church is free;
Ev’n Sunday shines no Sabbath-day to me:
Then from the Mint walks forth the Man of Ryme,
Happy! to catch me just at Dinner-time.