2019 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

NO COMPLAINTS ABOUT CONSTRAINTS!

I don’t mean manacles or chains. Or dungeons.

But other kinds of constraints apply a kind of pressure that may make the poet surprise her or himself. Think what Shakespeare did inside iambic pentameter, and Thom Gunn inside syllabic forms.

The WrapperRhyme challenge offered some old constraints and some new ones, and it’s been fascinating to see how writers responded to these.

Rhyming, for example, is one of the oldest constraints. Generally, I’d say poets are less good at it than they used to be (with notable exceptions) because it’s not one of the main tools of contemporary poetry. But still some lovely examples of super-rhyme have arrived here, and I’ve been tweeting or instagramming some of them.

But simply writing on a wrapper is in itself a constraint. Much of the wrapping material used for confectionery, for example, is that silvery slippery stuff that welcomes no pen. There are pens that will write on it, but you have to go to some lengths to find them. My implement of choice is Staedtler Lumocolor Marker Pen Permanent Special from Cult Pens. (I am on my fourth pen.)

Crisps and savoury snacks are usually bagged in the same silvery stuff but with an added element of grease at which even the Lumocolor Marker Pens jib. You have to wash the wrapping in soapy water (or at least you could, depending on how you respond to constraint).

But how fascinating, when you think of ancient humans painting on the walls of caves, that we can find ways of applying our mark to almost anything! And food for thought too about how easily we pick up another piece of paper, and another, and another. Or a screen. Or a phone. No shortage of welcoming surfaces for us.

Some entrants, defeated by the difficulty of writing on wrappers, ‘cheated’ by writing (or typing) onto labels and sticking these to the wrapper. Others stuck the whole wrapper to another backing material and wrote on that.

I love all the rebels. That’s another thing about constraint: it feeds rebellion. Without something to rebel against, where would any art movement be?

But I haven’t mentioned the obvious constraint of handwriting. Is handwriting getting less legible? Possibly. Certainly some excellent WrapperRhyme examples were extremely hard to read, and without the transcript one would have been seriously lost. No spell-check either, so some spelling was … creative.

There were constraints of length in the rules too (but many people forgot about them, either accidentally or on purpose) and constraints of the size of the wrapper in the rules (some huge envelopes dropping through the letter box showed what many poets thought about THAT).

And there was the constraint of having to mention the product (or some aspect of it) somewhere or somehow in the content of the poem.

For some writers this was a key advantage because it gave them something to play with. Others wrote whatever they wanted to write anyway and the product just got a mention in a free-floating title (and wrapper-rhymes don’t have to have titles at all, though of course they may).

I had expected the rhymers to write on the back of the wrapper, simply because it hadn’t occurred to me to do anything else (the Ted Hughes prototype was definitely on the back). But some of them incorporated their rhyme into the actual design on the front of the wrapper. Sometimes this worked rather elegantly. At other times, well ….

Right now we’re logging the entries carefully (I’m up to number 88 so far but there is a huge box of them waiting) and beginning to work on making all of them into something else, namely an exhibition/installation. It’s going to be really interesting working out how to display a two-sided product in multiple sizes and materials.

But Jenny Elliott and I have a million ideas for handling this constraint. Constraints are great.

WrapperRhyme Challenge DEADLINE approaches

23 days, 11 hours, 18 minutes and 29 seconds until Christmas Day which means 24 days, 12 hours, 31 minutes and 29 seconds for WrapperRhymes to arrive at my door.

If you haven’t heard about the international call-out for WrapperRhymes, where have you been? Entries have been being shared on Twitter, Instagram and FaceBook ever since 8 June 2019 when the whole idea was launched. (To find them search under the hashtag #HapWrap.)

Since then many envelopes have tumbled through the door here containing wrapper-rhymes of all shapes and sizes, many of them flagrantly and deliciously breaking all the rules. We have even had wrapper-rhymes that didn’t rhyme.

But there’s still time left for you to join the fray, if you’re reading this before Christmas 2019.

Please do one, or more, and share the idea with as many friends as possible. They don’t have to be poets. Just people who like rhyming.

Plans are afoot to display them in all sorts of different ways, suspended in strings, on shelves, tables, floors, walls. It will be a memorable event reaching its highpoint at StAnza in St Andrews with a marvelous display of the entries. At 15.45 on Friday 6 March, if you’re there for the festival (and why would you not be?) you can come along and hear me talking about them and sharing some aloud.

The genre (as you can read in the original blog) was first thought up by Ted Hughes, with a nonsense rhyme in the vein of Ogden Nash. But since we launch the WrapperRhyme challenge other sub-genres have emerged. There may be some singing….

Why? Well because of the genres that have emerged. For example, there’s the song-lyric WrapperRhyme, also known as The Cornetto (launched by Walls in 1982, though alas not written on a Cornetto wrapper). Song-lyric WrapperRhymes have appeared on the wrappers of tins of tomatoes (Why, why, why, tomato) and on wine labels (The Wichita Wine Man). The most recent was on Cadbury’s Darkmilk (King of the choc).

Then there is the noble-poem-parody WrapperRhyme, to which Emily Dickinson, W H Auden, Robert Frost, John Keats and William Wordsworth have all fallen victim. It is not their fault.

There is the Deliberately Bad Wrapper-Rhyme of which McGonagall would have been proud, and the Comment-on-health-benefits Wrapper-Rhyme (we have had rhymes on food which had almost nothing harmful in it, as well as the polar opposite).

Some of the very best WrapperRhymes received so far have been short, sweet and extremely pithy. The WrapperRhyme couplet should never be underrated, nor the WrapperRhyme epigram.

In fact, the WrapperRhyme is a unique celebration of the fact that poetry is allowed to play and absolutely everyone can join the game.

(Entry form and rules here.)

Touchstones: Alison Prince

On Saturday 12 October, the poet Alison Prince breathed her last. Born in 1931, she’d had a long life, as these things go, though her last few years were complicated by illness, including major heart surgery. She is survived by four children, six grandchildren, three great-great grandchildren, and two cats.

To everyone who knew Alison in her last decades, she was a starburst of creativity. She could turn her hand to almost anything: she could paint, she could draw, she could write, she played clarinet (jazz in a local group), she sang, she sustained friendships, helped and encouraged other writers, especially poets. She lived on the Scottish west coast island of Arran, which she loved. The vigour of her cheerfulness and determination was second to none.

Alison had always loved and written poetry (Mariscat Press brought out The Whifflet Train, a delightful pamphlet collection in 2003) but it wasn’t what she was best known for. She was a prolific children’s author, a life-long professional writer. The Sherwood Hero (1995) was joint winner (with Philip Pullman) of the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. Oranges and Murder was the Scottish Arts Council Children’s Book of the Year in 2002. She wrote for adults too: biographies of Kenneth Grahame and Hans Christian Andersen. And cult lovers of the Trumpton series will already know who wrote the scripts.

But I knew her as a poet. In 2016 I joined with Hamish Whyte of Mariscat Press to publish a full collection of Alison’s poems.

Waking at Five Happens Again was stylishly printed by Glasgow Print and Design Centre, beautifully typeset by Gerry Cambridge.

This lovely book gathered together a rich harvest of late poems. Been 2014 and 2016 Alison had been writing poetry profusely. She was acutely aware of her own mortality: it was as if it had sharpened her appetite for language. In the year before Waking At Five, I would open letters and emails from her and out the poems would tumble, so fast I could hardly keep up with responses. Many featured death in one sense or another, sometimes as the ‘seductive musician’, sometimes as a croupier, or ‘the vast unknown’. Every scrap was characterised by wit, resourcefulness, lightness of touch, and a precise lyric ear.

Certain poems are touchstones. Here is one of them. It is the last piece in Waking At Five Happens Again, by the poet, Alison Prince.

Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae

It’s very old, this singing
with no conductor and no instrument,
sometimes monastic, sometimes a madrigal
for joy or lament. Weep, O Mine Eyes,
the rising thirds a creeping grief.

If not running well, do it again.
It’s the trying hard, the coming right,
that brings us to this table with its water jug,
to listen and to sing.

Two of Alison’s paintings

Smiles, Forests, Damsels, Knitting and Water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are Your Modifiers Dangling?

My reading window last month brought more poems than ever before. So 159 poets sent work. I can’t read and respond to more than 1000 poems a month and stay sane, so I was at my limit.

But the challenge remains interesting, not least in the way trends change noticeably from one window to the next. So here are some trends I observed during the window. I’ve mentioned many of them before, but not all.

(I am aware I have a number of bees in my bonnet. It’s inescapable. You get over-sensitized to things.)

There were an unprecedented number of poems formatted in double spacing (often because Microsoft Word may double-space each time you hit the ‘return’ or ‘enter’ key). I strongly suspect some people think this is what ‘poem’ text is suppose to look like.
I have seen the most ever poems with zero punctuation, though the poet may make an exception in the case of a dash, a question mark or an ellipsis. So actually there is punctuation but no commas or full stops.
Punctuation-less poems in stanza form but with a capital letter at the start of the first word of each stanza. Gaps may be used to suggest pauses.
‘So’ or ‘such’ used as intensifiers.
Poems that switch verb tense somewhere in the middle. Most poems these days are in the present tense. We have forgotten that this is a fashion. Once they were mostly in the past tense.
Insertion of the phrase ‘I think of’, sneaking in even more often than ‘I remember’.
Prose poems formatted in very wide blocks, long LONG lines.
Line breaks allowed to substitute for commas.
Punny titles.
‘As’ used too often (my most unfavourite word, because of its grisly sound and the fact it can mean three things)
Lists of nouns, but no ‘and’ before the last one.
Metaphors that create an unfortunate mental image if you take them literally.
Some poets have favourite shapes, so each poem looks rather like the one before (even though it may be about something completely different) eg long and thin, or short and fat.
Enjambing every stanza.
Whilst, amidst (but not amongst).
Not heft this time, and only one shards, but quite a bit of musk and citalopram.
Pantoums (loads): it’s the new villanelle.
‘After’ poems (I need to blog about this separately because there is no consistency in what people mean by ‘after’ and it really does get confusing).
The single sentence poem that gets its syntactical knickers in a twist in the middle.
Long sentences with difficult syntax, often with the key verb and subject delayed and maybe three or four line breaks to negotiate before things start to make sense.
That thing called a ‘dangling modifier’ is an arch culprit in poems. If your modifiers are dangling, I’d say you have a problem.
Anaphora poems, by which I mean poems that start each stanza or each line with the same word or phrase (the ‘Because’ poem is a familiar example). This can be powerful. This can be powerful, of course. This can be powerful in the right poem. But you can have too much of a powerful thing.
Sentences starting with a verb but subject implied: I am seeing this more and more. She goes to the cupboard. Takes out a cup. Thinks of a bad sonnet. (Is this actually a variation on ‘leaning verbs’?)
The ampersand is back, judicious use in some poems, rather than a consistent stylistic feature.
Poems that can only work inside the space of an A4 page.
The single most common problem: unintended obscurity. The poem is behaving as though it’s obvious what’s going on but the reader is mystified. This is quite different from deliberate obscurity, which can be compelling.

If any of the points above are obscure, it was unintentional. Sometimes you just can’t see how difficult you’re being.

THE WINDOW IS CLOSING

This has been a hugely busy window month: I have received the most poems ever.

I think I’ve been useful to some poets, annoying to others. I really hope I haven’t upset anybody. I have seen some excellent writing, some I was baffled by, and a great many pantoums. Pantoums are the new villanelle. (Josephine Corcoran, is this your fault?)

And where has all the punctuation gone? (Andrew McMillan, is this your fault?)

But the window is closing.

If you were sending poems by post, they needed to be on their way by today (Friday 26^th) because Sunday is the last day, so they need to arrive Saturday.

If you are sending poems electronically (see new option on submissions page), you’ve got till Sunday night. But bear in mind that the recipient (me) is knackered.

WrapperRhymes have also been arriving, which is great. But the poets are not very good at reading the rules. Do take a look at the original Tumblr site to get the idea.

Poetry is often strengthened by specific constraints. In this case the constraints are formal (it must rhyme) and physical (you have to write on the back of some wrapping, probably a biscuit or chocolate wrapper or similar, and this means you haven’t much space and you may need a special pen). We have had rebel entries on boxes of tissues, paracetamol, toothpaste etc. So rebelling is possible, but do it deliberately!

Enough already. I still have poems to read. But my hand is on the latch.

I will be at the pamphlet fair at the Scottish Poetry Library tomorrow afternoon, 12-4.00 pm, 27 July, with Pimms. So if you’re near enough, do come along.

INTERNATIONAL WRAPPER-RHYME CHALLENGE (#HapWrap)

Poets and rhymers of the world, welcome to the International WrapperRhyme Challenge!

Our aim is to extend the reach of this enjoyable artform, culminating in a major exhibition/installation at StAnza, Scotland’s Poetry Festival, in 2020.

(If you can’t be bothered to read the rationale and the tips on best pens for the job — currently Artline Garden Marker — just go straight to the entry form).

Red Squirrel Press has just published some of my own WrapperRhymes. (I’m offering a unique, hand-written WrapperRhyme inside Branded sold via this website and — for those of you in or near Glasgow — there’s a WrapperRhyme launch event at the CCA on the 18th of this month).

But the WrapperRhyme challenge is really not about me.

As a poetry editor/publisher, I want to encourage people to rhyme, and rhyme well. It saddens me that rhyming is generally ‘out’ these days, despite the persuasive words of ace-rhymer A. E. Stallings, and the bizarre popularity of the villanelle. You may even have read that English is ‘rhyme-poor’, compared to French and Italian. Bollocks! All you need is practice and determination.

So what is a WrapperRhyme? Nick Asbury, together with Glasgow’s independent design studio Effektive, coined the term in 2011, after seeing an example by Ted Hughes written on the paper wrapping of a Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer. This inspired a WrapperRhyme Tumblr site, to which poets were invited to contribute: https://wrapperrhymes-blog.tumblr.com

Alas, that wonderful WrapperRhyme site is no longer accepting contributions. But I am.

I want to attract WrapperRhymes (your very best, please) on food/beverage product wrappers from all over the world. These will be used to create an exhibition/installation at StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival, in March 2020.

Is this just silliness? Emphatically not. Like any other bit of lightness, it can be done badly, or well. My own attempts vary, but I’m smug about the best of them.

There’s an educative benefit too. WrapperRhyming makes you really look at packaging. Lists of ingredients provide fascination/horror/inspiration. You compare different brand designs. You pick up on rhythmic/alliterative marketing text.Before you know it, you find yourself researching the history of chocolate bar wrapping.

And you begin to notice what can be written on, and what can’t. Potato snack packets are almost impossible. The flimsy plastic surrounding most chocolate bars is daunting. In Ted Hughes’s day most food wrapping had a paper component. Now it’s not so simple.

Any committed WrapperRhymer requires a suitable writing implement. I turned to Cultpens, who meet and exceed the promise of their strapline —’the widest range of pens on the planet’. So far, the only pen I have found which will write on almost anything is an Artline Garden Marker (a snip at £2.03). But you could choose to write on the packaging of Toblerone, or Terry’s Chocolate Orange. Cardboard — easypeasy.

To date, I have WrapperRhymed on the paper sleeves of tins of tomatoes, baked beans, the labels of jars of beetroot and chutney, the cardboard wrapping of ‘readymeals’, butter paper, stock cube wrappers, frozen pea packets, and instant pastry. I have read the marketing text on each with minute interest and occasional horror.

Entries to the WrapperRhyme challenge are warmly welcomed from all ages, locations, and languages (but if not English, please provide a translation). They must be accompanied by an entry form (so that you give permission for your rhyme to be used in the exhibition) and of course they have to comply with the rules. The closing date is 25.12.2019.

If you need more information, send an email (but read the entry form and rules first). No limit to number of submissions.

Please share this opportunity and any of your WrapperRhyme creations as widely as you possibly can (#HapWrap).

For International WrapperRhyme Entry form, click here.

Twelve Reasons Why Poets Should Write Reviews

Okay: here goes.

Poetry is a communication — a message in a bottle. A review is a reply.
There is no shortage of poets. But good poetry readers are rare. Reviewing helps you read well.
Reviewing is educative. You look up the references, you look up the poet, you pay attention. You learn things you never knew you didn’t know.
Reviewing poetry gives craft insight: you see new tricks to try, and also some to avoid.
Most poets like to have work reviewed. If you give reviews, you get reviews (not always in equal proportion).
Poets need to write well in prose too. Reviewing (with an editor and some constraints) strengthens prose style and confidence.
Poetry books are costly, especially if you read widely. But review copies are usually complimentary.
Reviews are an art form. Writing them is creative.
Reviewing strengthens your profile as a writer and extends your network.
People sometimes think reviews are about criticism or praise. Not necessarily. They are (or can be) about expressing interest and encouragement.
Reviewing is a way of paying respect to the community you’re part of, putting your money where your mouth is.
A book and its reviews are a conversation anyone can join, provided they use words carefully. Join the conversation!

Please take a look at sphinxreview.co.uk with its ongoing resource of OPOI reviews, and, if you can bear a few more emails in your inbox, subscribe to the list.

This will mean you get notifications about new material on the site, mainly new OPOI reviews. Such emails tend to come in little flurries when groups of reviews are posted. If it drives you nuts, you can unsubscribe at any time.

OPOIs are short reviews of poetry pamphlets which focus on only one point of interest (OPOI) in not more than 350 words.

Far more poets would like their pamphlets to be OPOI-ed than would like to write the OPOIs. Forty-three poetry pamphlets have been received for review this year so far, and only three new reviewers have offered their services. More are needed. Over 60 pamphlets are waiting hopefully.

Some poets don’t have the confidence to write reviews. They are nervous of this role, which they see as authoritative and judgmental. OPOI reviews are neither. They are edited before they go public. They are a good thing to do, and if you are reviewing for the first time, the ideal place to start.

What do Poetry Editors do?

What DO they do? I’m not always sure of the answer, but I know what I do. It’s a place to start. Oh but — health warning: this blog entry is quite boring.

It’s easier by far to talk about other kinds of editing. When you edit prose, you check for consistency of house style, regularise spelling and punctuation, remove stray spaces, sort out grammatical glitsches. It all makes complete sense.

But you can’t do that in a poem, or not necessarily. Many poets don’t have systematic punctuation. Some use punctuation in one poem but not the text. Or minimal punctuation in one, and then masses of dashes in another.

Quite often poets even withhold the full stop at the end of a poem, on purpose. They stick gaps between words. They throw ellipses all over the place ….

Frankly, poets are an editing nightmare!

So (when occupying the editor’s role) you do your best. You work out what seems to be the system in any one poem or set of poems and you make suggestions for change, if appropriate.

You work out whether anomalies are deliberate or accidental.

You work out whether ambiguities are intended or not.

I did a workshop recently which included ‘editing’ as its topic, so I drew up two lists for the participants.

List one is the ordinary things editors (and typesetters) check mostly without even thinking.

List two is the point where the editor (or it could be a critical and respectful friend) gets more challenging.

All these editors, when it comes to your own work, are you.

List A (simple):

Make all the dashes the same size (m dashes): many people are confused about this.

Reduce two spaces after full stops (or colons) to a single space.

Make sure ellipses have the correct number of dots.

Consider direct speech, how it is presented (speech marks or italics), whether it’s consistent, and whether it works.

Identify punctuation system (if there is one) and make it consistent if possible.

If poet uses gaps inside the lines work out what system/consistency is (if any) i.e. how many space-bar spaces makes up a gap.

Consider whether line length can be accommodated without doglegs or, if a dog has to break a leg, where it should do it.

Consider whether poem will fit inside an A5 page, or any page, advantageously.

Check for errors in capitalisation e.g. seasons.

Check spelling (US or English, practice or practise).

Check apostrophes.

Check for ‘dumb’ quote-marks and make them all curly.

Check references for accuracy – dates, places, people etc.

Simplify punctuation if it is over-complicated (eg unnecessary number of semi-colons and colons).

Italicise Latin/foreign words or botanical references.

Make heading styles consistent.

List B

Check for repetitions – if intended, do they work? If unintended, need to think again e.g. too many uses of ‘then’ or ‘as’.

If references are difficult, consider whether poem might need note or epigraph.

Consider effectiveness of line breaks. Do any of them seem to throw up barriers, or are any too obviously ‘clever’ e.g. fall over / a cliff; go round / the bend.

If the poem is ‘after’ somebody, decide what ‘after’ means in this case. May need to track down the source and see what is owed.

Consider title. What does it contribute? Does it replay a key phrase from later in the poem and thus steal some thunder? If so, suggest change.

Consider the form: does it work for the content? Would change of stanza groups or lineation be worth considering?

Consider shapes: is the poet doing much the same thing in several poems: e.g. generally long and thin, generally couplets, generally even-sized chunks. And if so, does this have a cumulatively dull effect?

Individual words: do any of them feel too ‘easy’ or even risk cliché?

Are there too many adjectives?

Point of view: ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘one’, ‘we’, ‘she’: is it mixed? Is it right?

Metaphor: does it work? If mixed, does the mix work?

If the first four lines are a little flat, decide at what point reader attention is captured. If parts seem to be unduly hard to follow (or a complete mystery), try to work out whether this is intentional and necessary, or whether simplification would be a good idea.

Sometimes there’s an obvious point where the energy kicks in, and that’s not always the first line. What happens if we start with stanza 2?

And that’s about it. I promise to be more entertaining next time and not so up my own ellipsis.

EILEEN ÒG

In the olden days, before there were radios in cars, folk travelling on long journeys used to sing. As a child, I always liked story songs best. Our family of four used to rattle out Clementine and Walzing Matilda with gusto. Walzing Matilda has a ghost in it and ghosts are always good. I think of Clementine as our mother’s song, Walzing Matilda as our dad’s — I never learned all the words to Walzing M. because they were so mysterious — jumbuck and tucker bag and swagman. But it was great hearing dad sing it and joining in the chorus..

At bedtime, sometimes an adult would sing to my sister and me to get us off to sleep, especially our grandmother on dad’s side (we called her ‘Nanny’). As I get older, her songs draw me back, and I wonder about the world they came out of — music hall, perhaps, or old 78 records. Where did she first hear them? Inside what kind of life? How did she know all the words — because she did know all the words, and once I did too, and so did my sister, who had a fabulous memory. As we grew up and were assailed by contemporary tunes, the words started to disappear.

It’s a very strange thing about being a granny-age yourself, though. You find yourself losing some bits of memory while other bits come back, like an onion unpeeling and rediscovering itself. Snatches of those old songs keep coming back to me in bits and pieces, phrases and flashbacks. Thanks to the wonder of the web, if I can remember even some of the words, I can find recordings, I can even find (what a joy!) all the words.

Here, for example, is one of Nanny’s favourites — ‘I wouldn’t leave my little wooden hut for you‘. And she often sang a lullaby — ‘Sweet and Low’, the words of which are by Tennyson (we were injected with poetry without knowing). I can hear her quavery voice now, and since I’m the age she would have been then, mine quavers too.

She liked strongly sentimental songs. Her repertoire included ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles’ and ‘Sonny Boy’. And she particularly liked (and we did too) ‘If those lips could only speak’, which I’m betting she knew in the Peter Dawson version I’ve linked to. It’s a music hall song and she told us this song was based on a true story — that the woman in the beautiful picture in a beautiful golden frame was shot by her husband in a hunting accident. Did she invent this?

But the song I loved best was one I could never find, and mum sang it. I thought it was called ‘Eileen Orr’, and I always remembered, and loved, the tune, and some of the words — but with gaps. A few years ago I looked for it on the web and failed to find it.

But this week I looked harder and there it was, in several recordings on YouTube. Where did our young mother first learn this song? Lord knows. Her version, as I remember it, was not wholly true to the Percy French lyrics. I think she did sing ‘Eileen Orr’, not the proper name in the Irish song, which is Eileen Òg.

Eileen was the Pride of Petrovore, not (as I’m sure my mother sang and we sang with her) the Pride of Pethragar.

The villain of the story should be ‘the hardest featured man in Petravore’ — not, as we sang, ‘the ugliest looking man in Pethragar’ — but we would never have understood ‘hardest featured’ — maybe she changed it. I’m sure we sang: ‘Eileen Orr, sure that was what her name was, / Through the Blarney she was also famous’.

In fact, the official version goes:

Well Eileen Òg, that was what her name was
Through the Barony her features made her famous

In whatever mode you sing it, it’s a beautiful song, a cracking tune, and some of the lyrics are terrific. Boys oh boys, it’s where I first learned how cannily words can fit to a rhythm and how utterly satisfying it is when they do.

And ‘Eileen Òg’ is a story, sad and funny. To think that some of its words have been ringing in my head all my life and now — by some miracle — I find people still belting it out, making new recordings, passing it on. Cathy Jordan’s version is a delight. I’m singing along at this minute. Eileen Òg — sure that was what her name was!