THE READING WINDOW OPENS

So this is what I do during the reading window in July.

The envelopes arrive (about 35 so far). I open them, number them and log them. I take note of whether the person has sent me poems before and whether they’re HappenStance subscribers. I read the covering letters. I put them in my yellow box, which is in the conservatory downstairs, well away from this computer screen and its interruptions.

It’s nice in the conservatory at the back of the house because you see the thick green of the trees and the Russian vine over the fence, and the main interruption is birdsong.

Each day I read at least a couple of the submissions, if I can, and return them. I read with a pencil in my hand, and write on the pages. I write some notes in my green book on what I thought of them.

On some people’s poems I write a lot. I feel a little guilty about this because it makes a hell of a mess of the poem. But at least it shows I’ve read it carefully and had a response. Because that’s all I do really – respond to the poems as best I can. Often I find the techniques of a poem interesting, even when I don’t much like it. On the other hand, sometimes I like it but it seems to me the technique isn’t working.

There are poems where my response fails. I don’t write all over everything! But poems are enormously interesting. There’s so much one could say. There’s so much one could wreck. How on earth to get the balance right between a constructively critical response and encouragement?

In the end, I just do what I do.

I thought I’d illustrate this week by sharing a poem with my scribblings. But I can’t share one from my submissions box. I’d have to ask the author first. And in any case, it might be a poem they’d later publish somewhere. So I picked one at random, by a poet totally unfamiliar to me, in a somewhat uninspiring anthology titled Poetry of the Thirties – in which only three poems are by a female author, all three by Anne Ridler). The poem I chose is not by Anne Ridler.

Here’s it is with my mark-up. At least it will be if I can get the scanner to behave. Not sure how legible it is…

And now for the after-thoughts.

When you read a person’s poem – a person you don’t know at all – you have no idea what underpins it. You know nothing about the life out of which it’s grown. And this was true for me with the poem above.

The author was Philip O’Connor. That name may mean something to some of you. It it dropped into an empty white space for me. But now I’ve read something about him. What an astonishing person! As mad as birds, as his drinking companion Dylan Thomas might have put it. But what an extraordinary life! And other poems by him in the book are more interesting – each completely different from the next. I don’t know that I like them exactly, but I am fascinated by them. More, please.

In ‘Blue Bugs in Liquid Silk’ (yes, he is a surrealist, or started that way) he writes “and a purple sound purrs in basket-house / putting rubies on with red arms”. And ‘Useful Letter’ (great title) begins:

You mustn’t take in more idealism than you can usefully
digest.

And ends:

All in all, my fiend to whom I send this letter,
I think there is room for everything and that everything has a place,
BUT
You must not take on (be impregnated with)
more ideals than you can profitably digest. Nosir.

And ‘fiend’ is not a typing error. Blimey – and people these days think they’re being zany and innovative! He has a whole series called just ‘Poems’ (see my useless comment in the scanned page). They start at number 5. Here’s just one of them, number 6 (the right-hand margin should be justified but I can’t make that happen here:

Captain Busted Busby frowned hard at a passing ceiling and
     fixed his eye upon a pair of stationary taxis. Suddenly
     he went up to one of them and addressed himself
     to the driver. He discharged his socks and continued
     whistling. The taxi saluted but he put up with it, and
     puckered a resigned mouth and knitted a pair of
     thoughtful eyebrows.

Dear Philip,

You have a way of your own. I don’t always understand your poems but I find them more than ordinarily interesting. Do send more in the next reading window (no promises – see notes to poets enclosed). I thoroughly enjoyed reading you.

Yours sincerely

Helena Nelson

How MUCH is poetry worth?

There’s value and there’s cost.

For practising poets, for example, there’s the cost of sending work out to magazines. There’s the cost of paper, and stamps and envelopes and printers and toner. The cost of travelling to readings and festivals and open mikes and workshop groups, and paying to get in. The cost (maybe) of entering competitions. The cost of enrolling for courses and even qualifications. And the emotional cost: investing years of your life making things out of words that will probably never achieve . . . whatever it is you want them to achieve. Readers? Wings? Publication? Money?

But what about the cost of reading it? For poetry readers (as opposed to writers), this is about pleasure. You buy just as much (or as little) as you want, or can afford. If you don’t like the look of it, you don’t buy it at all. Why would you? Desert Island Risks: which eight poems would you take with you? You don’t need a lot.

But reading for the jobbing poet is another matter. It’s part of the business. First there’s the reading over the centuries, to research all the tricks and literary stratagems that have ever been tried. These are part of your armoury, your craft and your initial investment. Then there’s the keeping up: reading contemporary magazines (which means subscriptions to several) and new books. Poets complain there aren’t enough publishers. And maybe there aren’t. But still there are dozens and dozens and dozens of new collections. They spring up like meerkats: ‘Read me! No – read me!’

Some practising poets these days send only to ezines. Cheaper but not the same. Nothing like an ephemeral paper publication to quicken the blood. And for me, I like to read poems on paper. I can (and do) read them on a screen, but two thirds of the aesthetic pleasure is lost.

I keep a tally of what I spend and set it against tax. Buying poetry is part of my business. It supports the others (we are a network, after all) and I need to keep up with the reading. But I buy more poetry than I read. Behind me, in front of the poetry books and not yet shelved, are about 80 books acquired in the last year. There are more at the side of the bed. I have read most of them but with varying degrees of dedication. Poetry has to be read more than once, doesn’t it? – probably at least three times to get a handle. I don’t read all the books I buy three times, but I do read all the poems inside them that I like at least three times.

Oh but what about the guilt list? I carry this round in my head, ever-lengthening. I feel permanent remorse for all the poetry books I haven’t yet bought and read. Some of them are written by my friends! They stack up reproachfully in my memory bank. Despite the purchase of several volumes each month, there are always more I haven’t yet got. And always more newsletters from publishers telling me the latest wonderful thing I know I want to get. But how to get them all? How to read them all?

I relate to poetry readers with careful purses. Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves. But my buying of poetry easily adds up to between £500 and £600 per year. Magazine subs will add another £100 at least. I could spend much more but I can’t read much more.

And now – to add insult to injury – I’m a poetry peddler. I sell the stuff. So I want the ordinary Desert Island Risks readers, and I want the jobbing poets. I want them to buy stuff from me. Often I think how much easier it would be to sell paper clips. Or yoghourt. Or tea-towels. Or bait for fisherfolk. Or tin whistles.

But let me tell you about the new HappenStance pamphlet you’re going to want to buy. Have you ever come across someone who liked bluebottles? Calliphora vomitoria – blimey, what a name! Meet Helen Clare, poet and entomologist, an mind in which literature and science meet. Entomology is full of insects and behind the insects, as in most poems, are human concerns. It’s a love story. Love and loss: the two great themes.

If insects really creep you out (but don’t you just love the cover?), try fruit. Rosemary Hector whips up a mean syllabub from a quince or a cranberry, a pineapple or banana, in Knowing Grapes. And as for plums – well!

I know poetry costs too much. I know you need to spend money on the garden, and the bathroom and servicing the car. But this is different. Food for thought, a pamphlet. And not too long: just enough for reflection without pain, rehearsal without curses. Just £4.00. Only £3.00 if you’re a subscriber.

And after that, you’ll need to buy some stamps if you’re sending me poems with SAEs enclosed (please read the guidelines first). The July window opens on Tuesday, though several packets have already arrived, and at least one is sitting waiting in the sorting office (understamped).

Dear poets – what a business all this is! But isn’t it fun? It’s it marvellous to be part of this society of scribblers? Isn’t it great to make them and read them and hobnob about what’s missable and unmissable? Can you imagine a life without poems? Can you imagine not having an ill-fitting line to worry away at like a loose tooth?

Doesn’t the value infinitely outweigh the cost?

Gerris lacustris
Pond Skater

It turns out that the knack my mother had
of seeking out and bouncing smoothed flat stones
off the surface of Lake Bala depends
on water meshing, like a trampoline
returning the fallen to the sky,
or the atmosphere pushing off spacecraft.
Water clings to itself like mercury,
avoiding air, forming drops as it’s sloughed
from drenched dogs. Insect legs stretch the water’s shell:
they paddle without piercing or wetness.
It’s true too that a mosquito’s footfall
does not break dreams, as the skin—oblivious
to air—shrugs off the countless touches
of the day. Talk to me now of ripples.

– Helen Clare (from Entomology)

THE FASCINATION OF ASSASSINATION

I have learned some gruesome things from poems.

This week, after sending Helen Clare’s pamphlet Entomology to the printer, I looked up the word ‘assassin’. According to Merriam Webster the word comes to us via the medieval Latin assassinus, from Arabic ḥashshāshīn, plural of ḥashshāsh (worthless person – literally, hashish user). The poem that led me to ‘assassin’ also took me, via Helen’s blog, to a gruesome little film clip of Stenolemus bituberus in action, the Assassin Bug from whom a poem takes its title.

If you want to watch the film, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEa2W_Agmn0

The filmed sequence is creepy, though not totally unhinging (like the film I watched earlier this week of a heron, that great poetic symbol of wisdom and priestliness, devouring a duckling). Also the assassin bug in the YouTube clip is in Australia, which makes it (from the point of view of a viewer in Scotland), less threatening. I mind less about Australian spiders being viciously attacked. This doesn’t show I am a good human being, if you extrapolate the reasoning, but let that be. It’s only spiders we’re talking about.

Except in Helen’s poems it’s really people, needless to say. We humans see the whole of the natural world in terms of ourselves: perhaps there’s no other way. Even the name ‘Assassin Bug’ lifts the insect out of Latin and plonks it firmly into a human context. The fascination of knowing how some living creatures kill other living creatures underpins many a natural-world documentary. The more gruesome the method, the greater the fascination.

The poems in Entomology work in, round and about the sonnet form. The great classic sonnet sequences (Petrarch, Sydney, Spenser, Shakespeare) take love as their central theme. Helen takes insects. But love (both dark and delightful) is the key player.

To coincide with the publication of Entomology, the scientist/poet is blogging about some of its dramatis personae. She’s already written about the Emperor Dragonfly and the Assassin Bug here: http://haclare.blogspot.co.uk/ There will be more.

Meanwhile, here’s the bug between the lines.

Stenolemus bituberus
Assassin Bug

I love them all. CSI. NCIS.
Law and Order. Criminal Minds. I’ve read

there’s a comfort in these haunted heroes
who’re on our side when the worst has happened.

My favourites are those killers who look
a victim in the eye, tell them what they’ll do,

or leave a trail of clues someone might unpick
but only just in time. And no-one knows

why an assassin bug, after creeping
across a web, stretching, snipping, bouncing up

a screen of vibrations, then mimicking
a trapped fly, gives its prey a gentle tap.

Or why when, before our marriage, he said
he was selfish, I thought he exaggerated.

Comp 23 results: Feeling Blank

HappenStance Competition 23: Feeling Blank

Judge’s Comments: Helena Nelson (HappenStance editor)

Some hugely enjoyable poems came in for this competition. Some, however, had to be ruled out because they rhymed (which the rules excluded) or because although their authors may have thought they were in iambic pentameter, I didn’t. It’s a tricky business writing in a regular form and at the same time accommodating variation. So it’s not that every single line has to go te-dum, te-dum, te-dum, te-dum, te-DUM– but that pattern does underpin everything, and the ear needs to hear each line working either in that pattern or around or against it (as in the last two lines of the winning poem).

There were also entries in lovely iambic pentameter which I didn’t select because I liked them in part but not totally. As usual, I wanted several to end just before they did. Some last lines fell flat and to me sounded like they were trying not to rhyme while really wanting to (had the rules not excluded rhyme this might not have mattered).

All in all, judging is always partly subjective. I’d like to praise Janis Clark (lovely use of place-names), Sandra Horn (end on line 11 and it’s a winner), Peter Gallagher (beware: three lines rhyme), Eunice Lorrimer-Roberts (good garden piece, and topical), Stephanie Blythe’s lovely Christmas list, Les Berry (neatly retro), Eleanor Vale (chilling), Tracy Davidson (shades of Robert Browning), Douglas Hall (re-think last line perhaps?).

Tim Kiely nearly won with ‘Preparing Eggs for Easter’, which uses iambic pentameter beautifully and was a strong contender. My favourite bit of this poem is

[ … ] We sit
and watch. The kettle breathes. I take your hand.
It doesn’t go quite as we hoped. Our shades
don’t take. Even the royal blue that folds
luxurious from cabbage leaves laps up
against the shell and leaves it pale.

The ‘luxurious’ there is no less than delicious. For me, the end of the poem was not as good as the middle, albeit formally pleasing.

And Annie Fisher also nearly won with ‘Falling’. First-rate use of form, and what a cracking opening two lines!

I can’t forget a boy I barely knew
who rode into the sky one afternoon.

But I would suggest cutting the third stanza and ensuring that only one line ends with the word ‘fall’ the last one).

The poem I’ve chosen as winner looks modest but the more I read it, the more I like it, even though I might prefer ‘he’ rather than ‘it’ throughout. I’m also rather fond of toads, so that might be a factor, as was the utterly satisfying inclusion of the iambically tripping word ‘unmetaphorical’ . Well done, Mark Totterdell, for ‘Bufo’.

Bufo

Can it be glad I picked it off the path?
It’s dull as mud, gnarled as a crumpled leaf.
It fills my hand, unmetaphorical.
Is this walled scrap of garden all its world?
Its warts will not be charmed or doctored off.
There is no gem, but is the poison real?
And is it true what I knew as a child?
Does my skin burn its cool skin like a flame?

No more competitions for a while. HappenStance is having a rethink about many aspects of its business, this being only one of them.

If competitions start up again, I’ll notify all who have signed up for notifications.

WHO WANTS TO BE A MINOR POET?

How have I missed Louis MacNeice on minor poets until now?

Thank you Michael Longley for including his ‘Elegy for Minor Poets’ in your Selected. There’s a lot to be said for selections, especially where a poet has been so prolific you can’t see the woods for the poems.

Also I relate – many of us do – to the idea of the Minor poet. It seems to me to be a worthy ambition to aspire to be a good Minor poet. (Not a bad Minor poet, please. Not a totally Forgotten poet, please.)

Hardly anybody gets to be Major. Still fewer get to be Great. Louis MacNeice is nearly always disadvantageously compared with W H Auden, who was Major. MacNeice was also a friend of Dylan Thomas who was once Minor but has now been moved up to Major.

Minor or not, there are poems by MacNeice that have wormed their way into the hearts of many of my contemporaries. ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’. ‘Snow’. ‘Bagpipe Music’. ‘House on a Cliff’. I have spent years thinking about ‘Snow’, and when it snows, I can’t not think about it. MacNeice isn’t all that Minor to me.

Here are the first two stanzas of his ‘Elegy for Minor Poets’:

Who often found their way to pleasant meadows
Or maybe once to a peak, who saw the Promised Land,
Who took the correct three strides but tripped their hurdles,
Who had some prompter they barely could understand,
Who were too happy or sad, too soon or late,
I would praise these in company with the Great;

For if not in the same way, they fingered the same language
According to their lights. For them as for us
Chance was a coryphaeus who could be either
An angel or an ignis fatuus.
Let us keep our mind open, our fingers crossed;
Some who go dancing through dark bogs are lost.

How beautifully he takes us into the world of the poem. The easy clichés of the pleasant meadows, the peak, the ‘Promised Land’. We know just where we are, we poets. We have seen that land. Then the three strides and the hurdle – back to school – remember missing that hurdle? Or failing in the long jump? And the prompter (in a play, maybe). And then the tripping change of rhythm in ‘too happy or sad, too soon, or late’ – so very simple. And the last line neatly echoing Kipling’s ‘Let us now praise famous men’.

With an elegant little skip, the second stanza is different. Its first sentence runs nimbly over the end of the line into that lovely phrase ‘According to their lights’. No stock imagery here. Fingering language is a complex image. You can pursue it in several directions, just as you can ‘the lights’. And now he’s got me thinking about that phrase ‘according to their lights’, which is what good poems do. I won’t be able to say that again ever, without remembering MacNeice, that good Minor poet. I had to look up ‘coryphaeus’ – it’s the leader of the chorus. MacNeice was a classicist. This stuff came easily to him. But the last two lines are a mantra for poets: ‘Let us keep our mind open, our fingers crossed; / Some who go dancing through dark bogs are lost.’

Then he expands on the ways of getting lost:

Who were lost in many ways, through comfort, lack of knowledge,
Or between women’s breasts, who thought too little, too much,
Who were the world’s best talkers, in tone and rhythm
Superb, yet as writers lacked a sense of touch,
So either gave up or just went on and on –
Let us salute them now their chance is gone;

And give the benefit of the doubtful summer
To those who worshipped the sky but stayed indoors
Bound to a desk by conscience or by the spirit’s
Hayfever. From those office and study floors
Let the sun clamber on to the notebook, shine,
And fill in what they groped for between each line.

Isn’t ‘the benefit of the doubtful summer’ wonderful? And the ‘spirit’s hayfever’? But his point is clear. It makes no difference: poets can get lost from working too little or too much. Such a terrific and generous couplet: ‘Let the sun clamber on to the notebook, shine, / And fill in what they groped for between each line.’ And yet I don’t think he’s being patronising. He’s in there with the gang. His ‘salute’ is born of true respect. Playfulness, too, but not satire.

You have to admire his clinching couplets, don’t you? Here’s the next stanza:

Who were too carefree or careful, who were too many
Though always few and alone, who went the pace
But ran in circles, who were lamed by fashion,
Who lived in the wrong time or the wrong place,
Who might have caught fire had only a spark occurred,
Who knew all the words but failed to achieve the Word –

And with what irony, that couplet is turned against MacNeice by John Fuller, in Poetry London, in 1951, who (reviewing his Faber collection, Solstices) thought “so few of his poems achieve real poetic inevitability that one is almost tempted to label him from his own ‘Elegy for Minor Poets’ as one who ‘knew all the words but failed to achieve the Word’.”

Still, it seems to me this poem has caught fire. It has certainly caught my attention. So much so that I’m sharing the next stanza too:

Their ghosts are gagged, their books are library flotsam,
Some of their names – not all – we learnt in school
But, life being short, we rarely read their poems,
Mere source-books now to point or except a rule,
While those opinions which rank them high are based
On a wish to be different or on lack of taste.

Isn’t it all still true? The Minor names. We may know them – Richard Church, Edmund Blunden, Alice Meynell, John Drinkwater, Fredegond Shove, William Soutar, Violet Jacob – but, life being short, we rarely read their poems.

And the final lines of ‘Elegy to Minor Poets’ (you have had the whole poem now):

In spite of and because of which, we later
Suitors to their mistress (who, unlike them, stays young)
Do right to hang on the grave of each a trophy
Such as, if solvent, he would himself have hung
Above himself; these debtors preclude our scorn –
Did we not underwrite them when we were born?

More difficult, but interesting. The Muse is the mistress and the poets are the living suitors. The tone and imagery reminds me of another Minor (?) poet, Robert Graves. I like the idea of hanging a trophy on the grave. It neatly reverses Keats’ idea of the poet’s soul as a trophy on Melancholy’s shrine. Besides, it’s what I’m doing now, in effect, by paying respect to a true poet who may be Minor but is Major to me. I like ‘if solvent’: I wonder if it’s a nod to Dylan Thomas, who never was (solvent), and for whose family MacNeice helped to raise money after his death.

The last metaphor lingers. We are the underwriters of the dead minor poets. We are their security, their future, their insurance. We are also writing under them, they are up there, their poems somewhere in the ether. We inherit the chance to keep them remembered by being born into the art, the making of poems, and the reading of poems, and the writing about poems….

So having split up ‘Elegy to Minor Poets’ mercilessly between my paragraphs, here’s a poem entire, from Holes in the Sky, a collection published in the late 1940s. He could do the little gob-smacking lyric too. What a poet!

What is truth? says Pilate,
Waits for no answer;
Double your stakes, says the clock
To the ageing dancer;
Double the guard, says Authority,
Treble the bars;
Holes in the sky, says the child
Scanning the stars.

WHY IT’S SO HARD TO SLEEP IN THESE DAYS . . .

The “first fine careless rapture” is startlingly loud just now. And it’s not the first.

It’s not just bird song that wakes me up. Several times recently one of the young birds has arrived on the bedroom window sill and is evidently trying to get in.

And so I lie awake trying to identify the different calls but I can’t — apart from wood pigeons, crows and gulls. I never have been able to. Even when I listen to them on the radio and feel sure I’ll remember, I don’t. Perhaps you have to be trained when you’re young.

So much I don’t know! I didn’t know till today, for example, that there was a difference between the song thrush and mistle thrush, or how to tell it. And now I do know, I’ll probably forget. What a confession! I didn’t know a blackbird was a thrush too (they’re all the same family) or that their Latin un-graceful family name is ‘turdus’. And I now know we have both songs and mistles in our garden, though not all the time. Last week a pair of mallard arrived just outside the garden fence. At least ducks go quack.

But who’s making all the noise this morning, on the first day of June? A lot of it’s the chaffinches (even better in Latin, fringilla coelebs) but some of it’s sparrows and bluetits (who sing their song many times more than twice over). And the coaltits – they’re my favourites to watch because they’re so very tiny. But their song (I now learn from YouTube) is much bigger than their size. Same with wrens. But I’ll still forget which of them is which. I remember standing underneath a robin singing in the spring, determined to memorise the sound because it was so beautiful. But in bed, listening, I’m not sure which one is robin.

I’m not even sure (when I’m half asleep) which sound belongs to the starlings (stukkies in Scotland) because they make such a range of noises when out and about. It may be young starlings that knock against the bedroom window. They do a lot of clowning about. In the tall trees in the road, when roosting together, their beautiful conversation is unmissable but on their own they don’t make that high looping, keening sound.

Thankfully I warm to the calming sound of the fat wood pigeons, who roll around the garden, eating everything in sight. I associate it with holidays in Wales. Probably the only bird sound I’m sure of.

Bird song brings me inevitably to Home Thoughts from Abroad, by that songster R Browning, one of the earliest poets ever to be recorded forgetting his own poem (though not this one). But I love him all the more for that. and at least I could recognise his voice anywhere. Obviously it is the Wrong Month now for this poem. But I woke with it in my head, along with the birdsong . . . so here it is.

I
Oh, to be in England now that April’s there
And whoever wakes in England sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England – now!

II
And after April, when May follows
And the white-throat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossom’d pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray’s edge—
That’s the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over
Lest you should think he never could re-capture
The first fine careless rapture!
And, though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower,
Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

ALMOST A REAL PUBLISHER

Sometimes I feel almost like a real publisher.

Actually, I’ve never felt quite like a ‘real’ anything. In the olden days, when I was introduced as a teacher, I would often say, ‘Yes, but not a real one.’ Same with youth worker. And playleader. And pastrycook. Same with poet. Definitely not a real poet. I have been a real mum and now a real grandma, but that’s different.

(I might be a real writer. Possibly.)

Anyway, back to the point. I felt like a real publisher this week because I sent the electronic files of D A Prince’s second collection, Common Ground, to the printer. This will be HappenStance’s fifth book (most of the 120-ish publications so far have been pamphlets). But more importantly, it’s D A Prince’s second whole book from this imprint. The first, in 2008, was Nearly the Happy Hour.

Back then, I wasn’t sure whether I would do any more books. It felt hugely risky: books are expensive things to make – at least they can be. They can equally be surprisingly inexpensive to print, but Common Ground won’t be. It will be sewn in groups of 16 pages, printed on good quality paper, and held secure and safe in a hard backed binding, with a dust jacket.

Scary. Real publishers don’t get scared. They know what they’re doing. (I am still finding out.)

Common Ground has all sorts of poems in it, including (and this really is astonishing considering my declared bias) a villanelle and a sestina. Some of D A Prince’s poems are complex; some are formal; some are free as the wind. Many of them are apparently simple.

And here is one that looks almost inconsequential. But it fits perfectly with my blog of three weeks ago, What Kindle Can’t Do. When I get to the end, the sadness of mortality washes over me in swathes. The poet (a real one) has some background in librarianship, and loves books. Can you tell?

Heroes of Our Islands

Dust jacket: faded (sun)
and water stained; torn,
front and back, repairs
(amateur); cracked spine
and wear to corners.
Cover (linen) worn.
Dog-eared, furring on all sides.
Maps partly crayonned in
and marginalia (juvenile).
Some illus., black and white; defaced.

Inscribed: To dearest John,
to speed you in their footsteps,
love
from Auntie Joan,
and kisses, Christmas 1959.

Picture of old book by Jörg Busack

THE LOUD HILL OF WALES . . .

. . . is still singing in my head.

The world launch of two prose pamphlets took place on Friday night in the Grand Pavilion, Porthcawl. You can still avail yourself of a copy via the HappenStance website, though their numbers are diminishing, but you have lost the opportunity – forever – to be there. What fun we had!

How lovely it was to hear Robert Minhinnick himself gloriously challenging the myth!

How wonderful to hear the quiet chuckle of the audience in response to Ruthven Todd’s wit and mischief (with his picture in THE HAT on the screen behind me as I shared some of his words)!

Such a great audience, and with what enthusiasm they chipped in with their thoughts and insights about the great DT!

I don’t rememberl writing this many exclamation marks, ever!

And in between, Kristian Evans read his marvellous translation from Dafydd ap Gwilym, and another from Rimbaud, and another poem of his own. Oh, if you can’t have an Irish accent, have the soft music of Wales singing in your voice!

And I haven’t yet mentioned the music, the astonishing music from Peter Morgan (who also took the photographs included here). He began with a copy of the poster for the event (which included a photo of Dylan Thomas), and he had a computer programme that converted visual image into sound. Obviously this is magic. That magic was followed by conjuring electronically manipulated sound files of Dylan’s voice into the mix, and on top of all this Peter himself extemporised on a keyboard which looked like no keyboard I have ever seen in the world. Bright squares in a rectangle. Utterly amazing.

We had an official artist-in-residence at the event too: Kristian’s small son Gwion drew us on stage as we launched the world. A first.

I am returned to Scotland overwhelmed with Wales. The weather in Wales is glorious always. The sea shimmers in the morning light. The circus has permanently just arrived. There is jasmine in every garden and yucca trees shaking their heads ever so slightly. The machines and the rides and the windmills and the candy floss of the fair are new minted. Little children in white sun hats, clutching small spades, are pressing their first footprints into the sand ripples and shivering with delight. Windmills and shrimping nets are clustering outside shops, longing to be bought.

The Grand Pavilion is grand. The perfect place for the world launch of two tiny pamphlets. They are now tiny paper boats bobbing through the Celtic Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.

But Porthcawl is a whole hotbed of creation. On Thursday night, Robert Minhinnick hosted a poetry event in the Green Room above the Sustainable Wales shop. Everybody should go to an event in this green Green Room. Everybody should go to the Sustainable Wales shop, where I bought the green green dress that I wore to read Ruthven Todd the very next night in the Grand Pavilion. I have never been to a friendlier or more sustaining open mic event than the one on Thursday in the green Green Room above Sustainable Wales: such lovely, enthusiastic, talented people. We are all part of this writing thing – there are no winners and losers, only participants, celebrants and supporters – and these are rotating roles.

And Robert Minhinnick, Porthcawl writer and local international poet, is the warmest possible host to poets. And Margaret Minhinnick, from Yorkshire once removed, lighting an entire room with her smile and her welcome. There is writing, and there is creating the space in which writing and making can happen and be celebrated. Margaret and Robert are heroes. Go to Porthcawl. Sustainable Wales will sustain you. Fair, local, eco-chic. You can get there via the internet. The sun will be shining.

AGE, DEATH AND TULIPS

“The god of grump” someone called him on a FaceBook thread recently. Old Larkin, old love.

But how a grumpy god can haunt the reader! The last line of ‘Dockery and Son’ revisits me regularly: “And age, and then the only end of age.” Not to mention the bit in that nightmare of a poem ‘The Old Fools’:

At death, you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time you can’t pretend
There’ll be anything else.

Since he’s been dead, I’ve always wanted to ask him: ‘So, Philip, was it like that? Were you right?’

But the essence of grump lies in experiencing the worst before it happens and describing it so irrevocably that it feels like fact. Extending your grim apprehension long past your own demise, in fact. It is Claudio, in Measure for Measure (“Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; / To lie in cold obstruction and to rot”). It is the impossible idea that consciousness is aware of its own absence. It is the opposite of death as a metaphorical sleep. Rest in peace Philip Larkin. Your poems are here to ensure that I do not.

But in any case, it was not death but age I meant to write about. It is a great theme. Youth is tremendous, but without age it would be nothing special.

So down with Mr Larkin when it comes to age! Bring back E J Scovell, who is a great comfort and under-read. It was Peter Scupham in PN Review who first made me aware of her, and I have not stopped being grateful. ‘Child Waking’ is the poem most widely known, but Joy Scovell is also brilliant on age.

It is tulip time in my garden. I have a flower bed outside the fence, just beside the path. Little children run down there and (because this is what kids do) knock the heads off the flowers, even the tulips. And I (because this is what old people do) pick up the fallen blooms and bring them into the house. They live out their days in a cup on the table, and there is another kind of pleasure watching their intimate lives, as the petals open wide and wider, with that incredible play of light on their shiny surfaces.

This takes me to E J Scovell’s poem ‘Deaths of Flowers’, which you can find in the Carcanet Selected volume, or in the Collected, come to that, if your purse is well endowed. But you can also find it here:

I would if I could choose
Age and die outwards as a tulip does;
Not as this iris drawing in, in-coiling
Its complex strange taut inflorescence, willing
Itself a bud again – though all achieved is
No more than a clenched sadness,

The tears of gum not flowing.
I would choose the tulip’s reckless way of going;
Whose petals answer light, altering by fractions
From closed to wide, from one through many perfections,
Till wrecked, flamboyant, strayed beyond recall,
Like flakes of fire they piecemeal fall.

E J Scovell lived to the age of 92 (she died in 1999) and continued to write into her last years. This is one of her late poems. All the better for that. Two bits in particular stay with me: “Age and die outwards as a tulip does” and “I would choose the tulip’s reckless way of going”.

“The tears of gum not flowing” is her weakest line, I think. But after that, what a wonderful eye for detail she has. The petals of a tulip do “answer light”, just as they alter “by fractions” in the cup on the dining table. Day by day, it is a process of “many perfections”, each stage almost more beautiful than the last. I love the way the second stanza works up to a glorious highpoint. Instead of avoiding adjectives (as we poets are supposed to do these days) she lists them unashamedly: “wrecked, flamboyant, strayed beyond recall”.

The poem is incorrigible. And terrific, is it not? Now that’s the way to go.

WHAT KINDLE CAN’T DO

I was in Wigtown, Scotand’s National Book Town. And I have something to confess.

I went for the Writer’s Gathering – a great privilege and a perfectly splendid occasion. Lively, talented, spirited people, raring to go. Marvellous interaction. It could not have been more welcoming. But for an hour, I slipped away into the town.

There are as many as a dozen second hand bookshops there. As I wrote that sentence, a shiver went through me from my scalp to my toes.

I only had time for one – the biggest second-hand bookshop in Scotland, on the main street. It is called The Bookshop. It is divine.

As is my wont (though I love all books), I went straight to the poetry section. I ascended a white ladder to the high shelves and knelt beside the low shelves. I extracted a little bundle of desirable volumes. Then I sat in a deep comfy chair beside the stove and read.

Needless to say, I made purchases. The walls here are groaning with books, most of them filled with poetry and poets. My Significant Other, who would never read poetry by choice, tells me one day – not too far away – the ceilings will collapse.

Nevertheless, I bought several books, one of which was a hardback copy of the Daniel Jones edition of Dylan Thomas’s poems. I already have it in paperback. (I had it with me in paperback.) But I could not leave this book behind.

It was not expensive, probably because it is full of pencil scribblings. Some of the scribblings are not pencil. They are in red pen, or red crayon. Inside the front cover, there are eight yellow/orange newspaper cuttings about the bard, and a bookmaker’s note from the Mecca Bookmakers. But it doesn’t record a bet.

On the bookmaker’s note the owner of the book, David W F Brown, has copied a poem stolen by Dylan Thomas as a boy for his school magazine (plagiarism is not a modern art). Such an irony in the poem he stole! Its sentiments are true to much of DT’s later writing.

The plagiarised poem was by Thomas S Jones and DT found it in 1000 Poems of all Times and Countries: Children’s Encyclopaedia, ed Arthur Mee. I know this because David Brown has carefully copied the detail onto the bookmaker’s slip, as well as the whole poem. Thomas S Jones sounds like another Welshman but he was in fact American (‘Sometimes’ can be found in Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry in 1919). Here is the stolen poem:

Sometimes

Across the fields of yesterday
He sometimes comes to me
A little boy just back from play
The boy I used to be.

And yet he smiles so wistfully
Once he has crept within
I wonder if he hopes to see
The man I might have been.

In the blank front sheet of the book, Mr Brown has written It’s like eating caviare, only. Above the crossed-out ‘only’ he has substituted ‘alone’. Underneath that is another inscription in pencil, with crossings out and substitutions.

Can you read the inscription clearly? Why did Nico stop being ‘dear’? What hastened the ‘disillusion’? Was David Brown himself a poet? I think he might have been. He was certainly an analytical, obsessive reader. He had a mark-up system with a capital E for Erotic, M for Metaphysical and R for ‘Regeneration theory’.

Like me, Brown began meticulously in his study but the pencil markings dry up as the poems get later (and mainly stronger). Above ‘The Neophyte, Baptized in Smiles’ he has written Drunk at the time. He has crossed through some poems as completely worthless. Above ‘High on a Hill’ he has written Tumescence and detumescence which, yes, sums it up.

Under ‘Being But Men’, he has written – a plea to the poet himself regarding his determination to subvert ordinary word order – Couldn’t you, just for once have changed it? But BEING MEN . . . .

But what got me – the reason I had to have the book – was the markup on ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’. This is an early poem, you know. Most of the best of Dylan Thomas arrives later. It is dated April 1933. (The poet wasn’t even twenty when he wrote it.)

I have wrestled with ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’ for as long as I can remember. Where other readers find reassurance (it is both apocalypse and resurrection), I find nightmare. But David Brown’s comment took me into a reading of two lines so absolutely compelling that I sat and stared. I was astonished. Turned (temporarily) to stone. Heads of the characters hammer through daisies? They certainly do.

This is what David Brown wrote, among other things (and perhaps I should mention he has scribbled A v. great poem under the title). His longest remark, in pencil at the end of the poem, is attached by an arrow to this couplet in the poem’s final stanza:

Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain

Note (writes David Brown) This ‘may’ is not an imperative. One of most evocative couplets in Eng. Lang. I can’t speak it without tears. Such a sad impression of buffeted beauty bravely striving.

Of course I had to have this book. What is more – as I travelled back to Fife with it, carefully scrutinising the annotations, I was absolved of a terrible and secret sin. If you only knew the guilt I have accumulated for writing in books! I have been doing it since I was three. Some of the volumes I have scribbled in are rare and old. I love them but I have desecrated them. What would a librarian say?

But it’s a conversation. David Brown is the real reader. This is his response to the poems, which are, after all, a communication, and here is that response: alive in the very moment it was written. And now I am the reader of David Brown reading Dylan Thomas, and so are you. We are reading David Brown, who possessed Dylan Thomas: The Poems in more than one sense.

You don’t get this on Kindle.