POETRY STUFF – Page 10 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

Opening the Windows

Remember the joke about windows?

It’s the one with four experts in a car that breaks down in the middle of the desert, and they all try different methods to get it started – a physicist and a geologist, I seem to remember. and even a priest (no prizes for guessing his solution). All of their fixes fail. But the last one is a Microsoft engineer who suggests they close all the windows, turn the engine off, wait a couple of minutes, and then start it again. Which obviously works.

But that’s a kind of Windows I’m not thinking about. I’m thinking about submissions windows. I have no idea who invented this term. Still I picked it up and have used it ever since. It seemed to make sense at the time, though it was the idea of closing the windows that attracted me. Accepting submissions all year doesn’t mix with actually producing publications – not when there’s only one of you – so if you open a window and let everything in, you have to close it again before it gets out of hand. So I do.

Sending poems between July 4 and July 26 is best.

Sending them on July 30^th is not good, and you know what happened to Peter Pan when the window was shut.

For me, the reading months are also a matter of upstairs and downstairs. Upstairs, the literal and metaphorical window is usually closed (though the door is open). I sit at this desk and batter away at a keyboard and pore over a screen that increasingly drives me demented because there is so MUCH to do up here and so many emails flying hither and thither in the middle of everything else, and so many CAUSES and BLOGs and private messages and THUNDERCLAPs and things to buy and see and do and read and change on the website, and write and amend and proofread and typeset and complain about and fix and PAY for. And I have to get people to BUY the CURRENT set of books, let alone produce more. I am prone to headaches. The upstairs world is not good for headaches.

It’s better downstairs if I can just get there. That’s where the pile of books and pamphlets on the sofa is getting higher and higher (like the clothes in the ironing basket). I read some of them, or bits of them, in the late evening, and intend, next day, to write some OPOI upstairs, though latterly this hasn’t happened because of the maelstrom. (But please note there are two new Alan Buckley OPOIs, written by other people, which may be of interest to those of you who have read The Long Haul, or are thinking about it.)

It makes me happy to get downstairs during the reading windows. That’s one of the very good things about those times of year. I start the day on the sofa, or at the dining table, or sometimes even in the garden, and I read all morning, and usually some of the afternoon as well. I have to do it this way, because the noise of messages flying in at me off of the internet upstairs is not good for reading poems. It’s another reason why I prefer poetry on paper to poetry on a screen. Paper is quieter. I get fewer headaches with paper.

Anyway, I’m getting ready to go downstairs. The reading window opens at the start of July, though I shan’t actually start doing anything until July 5th, because I am away for a couple of days before that. This is not a call for pamphlet submissions, though if you’re burning to suggest one, you can. Remember (you will know this if you’ve read my book) that publishers have too many publications waiting to be tackled all the time. They are really looking for reasons to say NO to getting any more. Until something so tempting arrives that – sometimes against their better judgement – they commit.

So is how it will work at HappenStance from next Friday for approximately four weeks.

If you want to send an idea for a pamphlet publication (like you might with other publishers), then send up to four poems by snail with SAE, an outline of the idea for the whole publication and a bit of information about yourself and your background. A pitch. I’ll let you know if I want to see more poems. Mainly I deal in first pamphlets.

Alternatively, you may not be thinking about a whole publication. You might want to send four poems just to get some feedback. This is mainly what my reading windows are for. I like to read and respond to individual poems and individual poets. I get interested in many of them. Over time, if those poets keep sending stuff, I get to know them better. Sometimes I end up publishing a set of poems by one of those poets. Mainly I don’t.

If you’re a HappenStance subscriber, you get a slightly better deal. You can send up to six poems by snail or three by electronic means. I prefer snail, but I understand completely that for those subscribers outside the UK, email is the logical medium (I will come upstairs to read those poems) and nell at happenstancepress.com, formatted in the usual way, will find me. Remind me that you are a subscriber, please.

Before sending anything, please check out the guidelines for formatting and so on. If you generally fit in with my preferences, it will mean I read your work in a much calmer and nicer window-frame of mind. You know it makes sense. There are fuller details about everything on the submissions page.

Right. I have one hand on the latch and I’m looking at the stairs. Five . . . days . . . to . . . go.

The armies of perfection . . .

So do you need to know about the poet’s life?

Well – sometimes – where the poem hinges on autobiographical detail – you might want to.

Alison Prince, whose first full collection of poems, Waking At Five Happens Again, has just appeared in book form, for example, has had a long and extraordinary life. And her poems draw on it openly. This is especially noticeable in the ones that refer to her experience as a child during the Second World War, to her own current health condition, or to her parents, in particular her father, an intensely musical man and son of a Jewish immigrant from Russia or the Ukraine – the grandfather Alison never met.

War, for children, is mysterious and frightening, but also exciting. If you grew up in the Second World War, the stories of the Great War were vividly present. Alison’s father was one of only two men from his battalion to come back physically unharmed from Ypres and the Somme. in her poem ‘Centenary’, she recalls his memory of a trench in Flanders:

A dead man’s hand, he said,
projected from the muddy wall,
useful to lean your rifle on.

This soldier-survivor met the love of his life, Alison’s mother, when she came back from nursing in France. Both of them had seen terrible injury and pain. But they got on with ordinary lives, except that they were far from ordinary, and never ever ‘soft’. Her father did well in his banking career. His aspiration to be a concert pianist was shelved, but he played every night in the front room, wearing an overcoat and hat if the fire wasn’t lit. When he forgot to draw the curtains, people passing by gathered at the garden fence to listen.

There were two children: first Alison and then, five years later, her brother Roderick. But another war loomed. Just before it started, Alison was taken to the island of Arran by her grandmother, and knew for certain that it was where she belonged (she lives there now), but then she was carted back to London and a war began. And the children played in bomb craters and survived. When Alison’s mother asked ‘Where have you been?’, the answer (in her poem ‘Kids’) was:

Hurling a Spitfire through the sky, mother.
Manning an ack-ack gun.

During wars, children get on, as best they can, with the serious business of play:

People in uniform banished our dream.
They had no time for us.
We were just kids,
though not what you could call children.

Alison miraculously escaped death when a bomb lodged in the rafters over her bed and failed to explode. But some of the neighbouring chldren were less lucky. ‘Wartime’ tells the story of two who ‘would have been old ladies now / except the Luftwaffe arrived’. They ran across the road to the public shelter:

A bomb killed one of them
but the other stumbled on.
Only inside the curtain
did the dim light show her hands
holding the spilled wreckage
of her abdomen.

During a war, death is no stranger. There it is at your right hand, sharpening the angle of the light. And this poet, now in her eighties, faces an assault again – not from outside, but from within. Problems with heart and lungs bring back that knife-edge, both literally and metaphorically. Past and present merge, a wild and beautiful blend, as the ‘heart beats in double time’ and ‘rests are not restful’. Here’s the second stanza of ‘Fast’:

The armies of perfection are most beautiful,
helmet feathers waving in the sun,
lances slanting like blown corn,
so good, so generous, so warm,
so oath-bound to serve life
even when life is off somewhere,
flirting outrageously with the dark-cloaked
seductive musician
who will play ‘The Last Post’.

Alison Prince is an artist (she can paint and draw beautifully) and a musician (she plays clarinet in a jazz band) and a story-teller (author of countless children’s tales) and a biographer (lives of Hans Christian Andersen and Kenneth Grahame) and a gardener (it’s in the poems) and a teacher and a mother and a grandmother and a poet. In her later years, poetry is the form in which she brings all the threads and threats of her life together, and the fusion is like no other. Waking At Five Happens Again, published jointly by Mariscat and HappenStance, is the book of a lifetime in which a whole life nestles, offering its stories and reflections, making its own sense out of the great puzzle of existence.

‘Centenary’, which begins with Alison’s father’s story about the dead man’s hand, ‘useful to lean your rifle on’, ends like this:

I knew him in another war,
crouched in another bolthole underground.
The hurricane lamp would flicker when
shock pulsed through the earth from a close bomb.
His hands, clamped round an empty beer glass,
trembled. We pretended not to see,
because there is nothing so dangerous
as being afraid.

***

How personal should poems get?

It’s a sort of spectrum. At one end – the safe end – there’s persona (Robert Browning – ‘My Last Duchess’).

To get to the other end (hot and dangerous territory) you move through ‘Lyric I’ to potentially real experience, personal anecdote, unambiguously personal experience, personal outburst or rant, and – at the far edge of the spectrum – first-person confession and writing from the jugular.

In poetry, the word ‘confessional’ has generally had bad press. It’s like ‘Georgian’. Its dynamic strengths have been subsumed by the whole idea of spillage and blurt. So generally it’s used by critics with a tone of disdain.

Latterly the word ‘personal’ seems to be acquiring the same disparaging resonance. In more than one place I’ve read comments suggesting mainstream poetry in English is sadly dominated by memoir and personal anecdote. Too much boringly true experience. Not enough innovation and excitement.

Personally (I use the word advisedly), I’m suspicious of innovation and excitement. I’m with Robert Frost in saying ‘I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.’ Or to put it another way, there’s nothing especially good (or new) about innovation per se. Yes, I know I am sixty-two years old and I don’t remember what I thought when I was twenty.

For one thing, at twenty I wouldn’t have ventured any opinion in public (and just as well), but now I have no compunction. I don’t agree that ‘mainstream poetry’, by which I mean the stuff that is in most of the print-based poetry magazines and read by most (but not all, not all) of the aspiring poets, is marred by being written out of unambiguous personal experience. If it is marred at all, it is by a failure to find sharpness and insight inside that material. This kind of failure characterises every era. The majority of printed poetry (I am not dealing with spoken word here) is worthy but forgettable. A little bit of it, for reasons hard to define, bites.

Where am I going with this? I like personal poems. I believe writing out of true experience is intensely valuable at some point to everyone, though of course not everyone chooses poetic form in which to do this.

As soon as you put true experience into any kind of words, you’ve made something of it. Describing is a kind of understanding, or at least moves towards it. One of the purposes (there are many) of poetry is to share an attempt to understand what’s going on. And to share what being human is like.

Tom Duddy writes about ‘a kind of vividness that poems at their best can and should have’ and at the same time his ‘craving for such vividness—a vividness without which I cannot be satisfied, no matter how admirable a poem or piece of writing may be in other respects’. He came to each poem, he said, not as a poet but as a reader with a need. A need for vividness.

Which means precisely what? The word ‘vivid’ has its origins in the Latin verb ‘vivere’ meaning ‘to live’ (it’s also in ‘revive’). Some poems are more alive than others. They revive us. It’s a little like a film moving suddenly out of black and white into colour. Or the sun coming out on a grey day. Or a human being whistling who suddenly turns into a master fiddler and the whole world dances.

So when I say I like personal poems, I like this kind of personal. The kind that wakes me up. That satisfies the craving for vividness, that reminds me what I read poetry for.

I’m working towards two new HappenStance pamphlets released this week. Kate Hendry’s The Lost Original is centred on personal experience. It begins when the poet is a child and her parents separate, and it ends in Costa, with the poet as a mother herself. But it’s not what poems are about that counts. It’s their vividness, which can sometimes be accomplished with such plainness that it’s humbling. Here is Kate’s opening poem. Each time I read it, my heart flips:

Baked Beans

He’d already gone, when Mum told me—
to a room in the Alveston House Hotel.
Still a chance he’d come back home.

It was baked beans on toast, in the garden;
the green baize card table (brought out
for good weather) unfolded just for me.

After I’d been told, I ate up my food
and I took my empty plate, knife and fork
back inside and washed them up myself.

Not one metaphor. Not one simile. Not one rhyme. The vividness all in the detail. The Alveston House Hotel. The green baize card table (how well I remember them). The empty plate. The knife and fork. The ‘just for me’. The ‘washed them up myself’. The vulnerability of the child eating in the garden (in ‘good weather’) on her own. Not one emotion: just that coldly ‘empty plate’.

This is what Kate Hendry can do with personal experience: share its vividness in a way that makes me be that child. To share this well is a sort of emotional intelligence. I re-learn through feeling it, what I already intuitively know, that the deepest emotions may not show. That the child who copes well is feeling things she can’t or won’t articulate, and may never communicate. Until she writes this poem.

The other new HappenStance pamphlet, Alan Buckley’s The Long Haul, is less obviously personal. On the spectrum, he’s nearer the may-be-personal-experience end. But hell – his vividness is personal. Take a look at ‘Flame’ – the sample poem in the webshop. It sends a shiver up and down my spine every time I read it. That’s vividness for you. It’s addressed to a ‘lover’. I have no doubt this human lover existed (or exists). But when you read it, this poem is addressed to you. And it is alive, and burning.

Both The Long Haul and The Lost Original deal with fathers, and these fathers are tricky people, difficult men. In Kate’s pamphlet her father features several times and, in a sense, he’s even on the book jacket, because he s the one who insists she master ‘Compositae, Rosacea, Gramineae’ from Keble Martin’s Concise British Flora. Alan’s dad makes one intensely memorable appearance ‘grappling under a bonnet, / as deft at the wrench as the fine adjustment’ while his son fumbles even ‘to lever off a bicycle tyre’.

How shall we ever understand our fathers? They are like us, and not like us. They never understood us. And we are still trying – those of us who can remember them vividly – to make sense of all that, whatever it was. This is poetry and it’s personal.

Dreams and Rejection

So I’m dreaming and in the dream, I’m thinking, this dream wouldn’t make a good poem because it’s stuck.

Dreams like stuckness. They take it and put it in a giant symbol.

In this dream I’m on a train. This train is luxurious and very fast and packed with passengers. Among them, there’s me and my sister Louise. Louise has pushed my heavy suitcase into a luggage space somewhere and we’ve moved up the busy train to find a seat. But actually we’re not sitting, we’re standing and chatting.

Before I expect it, I see the train’s approaching my station and I don’t know where the suitcase is. Louise goes off to find it. She doesn’t come back.

I don’t know where she is. I don’t know where my suitcase is. I have my handbag but NOT THE SUITCASE. I can’t get off the train without my suitcase.

The guard’s slamming the doors shut again – bang, bang, bang – and the train moves off with me still on it. Louise hasn’t come back.

The train’s carrying me in the wrong direction. It’s carrying me south and I want to be in the north.

Somehow I’ll have to get back. I go in search of my suitcase. There’s a small child following me who wants to play, so I have to hide in one of the toilets while the child disappears, and then creep out again.

Finally, I find my suitcase! It’s a dirty-white colour, and even heavier and larger than I thought. I can hardly drag it out of its space. How my little sister ever manage to stow it?

Louise reappears. We’re very glad to see each other though she doesn’t say where she’s been. My huge suitcase is blocking the aisle. We’re chatting and I realise the train has stopped. It’s sitting beside a platform and I should get off and wait there – wherever it is – for a train going the other way to take me back to my own station.

But the suitcase is too heavy. I can’t get it past the seats and into the corridor. The guard is already slamming the doors shut again – bang, bang, bang – and the train’s carrying me further and further away from where I need to be. The train is travelling south. I need to be travelling NORTH. Get me out. Get me out.

So that was last night’s dream, or part of it. The business of not being able to get off happened three or four times because I was trying to wake up and couldn’t manage it – and that’s why, in my sleep, I even began to think of dreams and poems, and what the symbols might mean, because I knew I needed to get up and WRITE THE BLOG.

In fact, I never did get off the train. I just, in the end, managed to wake up.

And what about the suitcase? You don’t need a psychoanalyst to work that one out. The symbol explains itself. It works at more than one level. I didn’t come up with it consciously. It sought me out.

Poems often do something not dissimilar, especially those poems that seem simultaneously obscure and easy to grasp. I like dream poems (though many editors don’t), and I’ve written a number. I’ve even blogged about them before, here.

But what makes a dream like a poem? I think it’s the combination of symbol and powerful feeling, so not just any dream will do. It has to be strongly felt.

Here’s the background to one of mine, written after a poem had been rejected by a worthy magazine. This poem popped up, of course, before ‘submittable’ was dreamed up.

I know I urge other people to send poems to magazines. I tell them not to be put off when they come back, it’s something you have to go through. But the truth is I hate it myself. I hate the brown envelopes coming through the letter-box. More than anything else, I hate the fact that I hate it! Grrrrrr. I hate picking up the envelopes and feeling how heavy they are. If pretty heavy, that means ALL the poems have come back. If a bit lighter, maybe the magazine has taken one. Or even two! And if very light – could it be, could it be. . . ? And why do I even care?

Anyway, in the past I have often managed it: the sending out of poems and the dealing with returns. But it used to take me 48 hours for the cold feeling associated with rejection to go away. I thought this feeling was completely ridiculous but I still felt it. And the feeling did go away. It would gradually fade over the first day and night, and disappear completely in 48 hours. (Only 24 these days for ‘submittable’.)

But once I had a more complicated rejection. One of the editors of a magazine had liked one of the poems in the brown envelope but suggested I change a line. So I changed the line and sent it back cheerfully. Alas, another of the editors opened the envelope and must also have seen the poem before. This person did not like it, and returned it immediately with a snippy comment about it being no use sending in the same poem twice, they did remember them.

I was not just rejected. I was enraged and wounded. I was so full of injured rejection that I wrote a letter explaining how truthful and honourable I was and sent it to the unjust editor. I dreamed about the whole thing that night, and also wrote down the dream as a poem. I’m going to include it here, because it’s in Unsuitable Poems, which has now been out of print for years. (I may have to do something about that, if I can just get time. But the suitcase is so heavy. . .)

And then I woke up. . . .

You were extremely red in the face
and when you opened your mouth to speak
you made no sense at all, you were obviously pissed
first thing in the morning and I told you so.
Did you care? No.
You said they’d slipped something into the soda water,
it wasn’t your fault
and in any case you were never drunk before nine,
I should know that, and then
I had to marry the man who picks up litter round here,
the one with the funny hat.
I didn’t particularly want to do this because
I didn’t think marriage was a great idea and in any case
he was already married and had six children
but he was still keen and it turned out he was
the editor of a poetry magazine called Trash
and he told me not to be so stupid because
I was only dreaming
and so I woke up except I was still dreaming and
in the dream I had woken up and was writing a poem
about the dream, another dream poem
for Kevin’s magazine Trash
and it was going to be wonderful, like no other
dream poem
had ever ever been, and then I woke up
and bugger me—is this a poem?

Three cheers for NOT embracing the internet!

There are still small magazines that don’t.

Don’t engage with the internet, that is. HQ Magazine (The Haiku Quarterly) has now lasted quarter of a century without so much as a website. Its editor, Kevin Bailey, has the most modest of Wikipedia pages.

Its most recent issue arrived this week, with its buttercup yellow card covers, its neat A5 saddle-stitched format, its modest editorial and ‘short review’ pages at the back, its 35 pages of poems unfussily presented, each still placing its author (in neat italics under the name) in a location: David Allen ( Palermo, Sicily); Alexis Lykiard (Exeter); W.D. Jackson (Germany); William Hart (San Francisco), and so on. The seasoned poetry reader will recognise a number of the names inside. But by no means all.

Kevin Bailey says that over the years he has ‘tried to entertain the readers and give an audience to poets of merit, regardless of the supposed place in some kind of poetic hierarchy’. He has made ‘creative exchanges with poets’ a priority.

The magazine has not flown off the press four times a year, despite the ‘quarterly’ in the title. This is issue 46 and we’re 25 years in. But how delicious and typical of poetry’s essential rebellion that it should be called a quarterly and defy its seasons.

Here’s an extract from the current editorial:

‘I admit that I have not kept up with the times. HQ has not embraced the internet, and I treat communication via e-mail the same as I would ordinary letter writing. The economics of the magazine are pure 20^th century – an old-fashioned ‘Bursars’ account and reliance on cheques and cash. – but it seems to work, and will do so until it doesn’t. . . So there you have it – by all laws that decide the fate of a small press magazine, HQ should have vanished years ago – but for one thing – the sustaining passion of HQ’s subscribers and poets . . . I have an abiding loyalty to the wonderful subscribers who have put their faith in my much-repeated promise to get each issue out ‘eventually’ – and the poets who have trusted my literary judgement. How could I ever betray any of them? As I have said before, I see HQ as the manifestation of a Fellowship of writers and readers – it’s a hackneyed thing to say, but HQ really is your magazine – I simply manage it for you as best I can – and each issue arrives, I hope, like an unexpected letter from an old friend.’

This is the traditional, old-style, little-magazine way of doing things, with an un-famous editor working for neither profit nor fame. A shoestring operation with inexpensive printing. A labour of love. Needless to say, HQ has no state funding, which no doubt helps to explain why it has been able to continue in its own sweet way, refining the art of creative idiosyncrasy.

But surely everything has to be ‘new’ these days. If your breakfast cereal stops selling well, before you know it, it will be ‘new and improved’. A failing restaurant is soon flagged as ‘under new management’, almost as though the words ‘new’ and ‘better’ were synonymous. This is clearly pulling new wool over old eyes. Increasingly, I find the notion of innovation exhausting. There’s much to be said for doing one un-innovative thing well. Or even just doing something for long enough to get it right.

HQ Poetry Magazine is a publication of character and charm, doing its thing. It’s not too long to read with pleasure. It has a wide range of styles and forms (not just haiku): most readers will find something in it to savour. And it even has old prices: subscription £12.00 for four issues (how can he do it for this price?). Single copies £3.50. Cheques (if you still have a cheque book) payable to The Haiku Quarterly.

The address to write to (do you have paper still? Do you have envelopes? And stamps?) is

HQ Poetry Magazine
39 Exmouth Street
Swindon
SN1 3PU

The Editor is reading poems for the next issue at this very moment

‘There is no limit to the number of poems that can be submitted to HQ, but the editor requests that authors submit within the bounds of reason.’

No limit? Why not submit within the bounds of reason? Don’t expect a speedy reply (this is submission, not ‘Submittable’). At the same time send a cheque for a subscription with your poems, or if you’re chequeless, try banknotes. Just one five-pound note will buy you the issue I am still enjoying.

Join the fellowshop of a little, unfunded magazine while you still can. Forget Instagram and bloggers (even this one). Kevin Bailey is an editor who relishes letters on old-fashioned paper. Such editors won’t exist forever. Besides, these days it’s innovative to be retro.

Join the fellowshop of a little, unfunded magazine while you still can. This is an editor who welcomes letters on old-fashioned paper. Such publications won’t exist forever. Besides, these days it’s innovative to be retro.

Blog Jest

That’s what my mother used to say, especially on a Sunday: today we have jests for lunch.

So this week I was a jest on Anthony Wilson’s blog, the first time I have ever jested on another person’s site. So that’s my blogging juice used up for this week and I refer you to that place to read about Andrew Waterhouse, a poet alive in my head though not on the planet.

But while you’re here, if you haven’t already noticed, there’s a whole bit of HappenStance website now dedicated to How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published.You see it from the main page in a tab at the top highlighted with a little red star. Click here and you zip to another page which is effectively an advert (designed to restore HappenStance‘s fortunes while doing something useful). But it’s also more than an advert.

There’s another toolbar to the right of this new page, which takes you to various pages with useful links. There could be more.

I’m hoping for comments. And suggestions. I can add more information here. I can do ‘yes buts’. I can do ‘what ifs’. I can highlight relevant news.

New publishers, or publishers doing new things, please alert me to your activities. I can add a ‘new publishers’ tab.

In How (Not) to, there’s a chapter about thinking outside the book, or the box, or whatever you’re currently thinking inside.

Talking of which there was a lovely article in Ghana Web this week about the rise of poetry in Ghana and particular a new book of haiku by Celestine Nudanu. It was an delightful piece in a number of ways. I liked the bit about haiku being ‘laden with a lot of aesthetics, a challenge that discourages less passionate Haiku authors from writing’.

But best of all I liked the opportunity for performer poets. According to Deputy Minister of Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts, Dzifa Abla Gomashie, there is a steady rise of spoken word and poetry in Ghana and in recent times ‘many young people’ have been ‘invited to perform the art to break the monotony of speeches upon speeches when events are organised’. I take these to be political speeches. I do hope so. Because she even noted that ‘this is an avenue for the youth to earn some decent money while they also express themselves creatively’.

I can see a whole new opportunity at the next Labour Party Conference in September. It would certainly make a change.

Hearing Things Wrong: Ode Don’t

It can make it very difficult to take poetry seriously.

‘Ode’, for instance. Because I hear it as ‘owed’ and immediately I’m thinking debt, which is the wrong connotation entirely.

But I think I may wilfully misconstrue, and that it’s a learned habit. I think I got it from my mother, who may have got it from hers. The women of our family have a tendency towards silliness and raucous laughter. It drove my father daft.

If you can hear a word two ways, I will hear the wrong one. I hear it wrong with my listening eye. That is to say, even when I’m reading.

Last night I witnessed it in action and it wasn’t even me. My other half saw Richard Scott’s new pamphlet Wound sitting on the settee where I had been reading it. ‘Wound?’ he said(to rhyme with sound and pound). ‘Wound what?’ He was looking from a distance so couldn’t see the battle scene etched in red. He was hearing ‘wound’ like wind-up, like a clock.

Which immediately made me think of the difficulty I’ve always had with John Donne’s ‘And finde / What winde / Serves to advance an honest minde’. I always read ‘winde’ as wind (blow-the-wind-southerly) and then all the rhymes go askew.

I’ve just looked up Richard Burton’s reading of ‘Go and catch a falling starre’ and it’s not just me! If you look down the comment threads under the YouTube clip, you can see a lovely bit about the line ‘Till age snow white haires on thee’. One commenter had always had the wrong sort of hares in mind. Just imagine – a blizzard of mountain hares (they go white in winter, I’ve seen them) hurled at an old man’s head. This is really a sort of mondegreen, I think, which I’ve written about somewhere else, so I won’t start now.

The trouble is, once you’ve got the wrong image into your head, it’s impossible to undo the effect. Carol Ann Duffy’s Rapture – you may have read it. A whole set of poems about a love affair that went amiss. So it starts with rapture, like the title suggests, and then things go wrong. They start to go wrong with a poem titled ‘Row’, of which the first line is ‘But when we rowed’, and this line is repeated as the first of the subsequent three stanzas. I’m in a boat. I have two oars in my hand and I’m rowing merrily.

It’s a pun, isn’t it? But it’s an unintended pun, which is what undoes so much. And I am a punster. I can’t help it. If a word can mean two things, I must have them both, and preferably the wrong one.

But in the right circumstances, this tendency can be liberating. It can demystify the over-awing seriousness of Literature. I can still see the astonishment on the faces of students in my college class when we talked about Shakespeare sonnet 135, and the recurrence of the word ‘Will’.

Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

‘It’s a pun on his name, of course,’ I said. ‘Will Shakespeare. But what else? Come on. Someone tell me. It’s obvious.’ They didn’t get it. They hadn’t yet read the brutal translation on Gradesaver. They treated Shakespeare with respect. I had to say, ‘It’s his willy.’ Some were appalled. Others were delighted. It was a licence to be bad. And bad we went on to be.

(Hare pinned from Etsy.com)

TALKING TO POETS

Why would you want to talk to a poet? What are you supposed to SAY?

Plenty of people do it. There are interviews all over the place. But over the years the questions have changed. I remember when the regular openers were, ‘Where do you get your inspiration?’ and ‘What started you writing poetry?’

These days the questions are many and various, and the web is a great medium for an interview. I’m not thinking of YouTube or Vimeo, here, so much as text.

The Q & A format allows for short snaps (huge swathes of text are not so great on a screen), graphics (in some cases) and that marvellous business of live links that can swoop you right out of what you’re reading into something else.

It also means, of course, that you sometimes forget where you started and find yourself in another meta-country completely. But there’s something lovely about that.

The interviews I like most are the ones that delve, the ones that show the interviewer knows the work and wants to ask some of the questions I would want to ask myself. So not the pattern of Six Poets, Six Questions at poetry.org, where the same standard set of questions is hurled at each poet as though they’re a single breed.

No, I like an individualised approach and an interviewer who prepares in advance (I’m old-fashioned that way). It doesn’t have to sound like a natural conversation (though some do). But it makes you think. Gives you a bit of context for the work, which you may or may not know already. Some of the ezines do this brilliantly – the Harlequin with Don Paterson, for example, or Cadaverine a good few years ago with Richie McCaffery.

And, of course, there’s Sabotage, whose Will Barrett interview with SJ Fowler was a 2015 most popular read. And that Fowler piece demonstrates the lovely thing an interview can do – leap off the screen into immediacy: ‘My answers are approximations, and contain necessary generalisations, and they are opinions, not a call to arms. They are constantly open to revision, and are being revised. And if anyone disagrees, just come and speak to me face to face, much better.’ And a medium like Sabotage can then swing right into a big interview: something complex and searching. Major statements from the interviewee. Major intellectual challenge to the reader.

In Jacket, there’s even an interview with an interviewer of poets, Andy Fitch, who made a book of sixty such exchanges (Sixty Morning Talks) as an antidote to the literary density of doctoral study.

And blogs: some bloggers do great interviews. Isabel Rogers has one with both John Glenday and Don Paterson about the process of editing poems (Glenday’s, in this case), a rare three-way exchange on such an interesting topic!

But who reads interviews with poets? My money’s on poets. Practising poets, wouldbe poets, mightbe poets, aspiring poets, expiring poets. Perhaps a sprinkling of general readers interested in writing? No, my money’s on poets reading about other poets.

What is this thing after all – this writing of poetry? Why are we investing so much time in it? What is it supposed to be, after all, this stuff that could look like a blob on a page or a 26 ottava rima stanzas and still be called ‘poem’. There are no authorised answers. Only comments on practice from specific people. You read them and you compare yourself with them, and either feel a degree of affinity or the opposite. Both are useful. We need allies. We need influences. We need challenges.

So the newest interview outlet (or inlet) I’m following is Poetry Spotlight. Its creator lives near me geographically, though we’ve never met in person. This shouldn’t necessarily make it more interesting but somehow, for me, it does. And Poetry Spotlight has a nice formula: just a few questions (five or six). Plenty of white space. The varied questions show the interviewer knows the work. The answers are peppered with live links, so you can follow up, get lost somewhere else, and come back. And there’s a poem at the end of each interview, chosen by the poet – with a few words about that poem.

Several of the poets spotlit by Poetry Spotlight so far have been HappenStance pamphlet poets, the most recent being Jon Stone. But there’s also Kirsten Irving, Niall Campbell, Peter Jarvis, Richie McCaffery (several years on from his Cadaverine interview) and, of course, Vishvãntarã.

Lots of other fascinating writers too, and the list is growing at an astonishing rate. Subcribe here: http://poetryspotlight.com/subscribe/

The Strangeness of the Present Tense

I pick up the book in my left hand. With my right I riffle through to page 31.

I start to read. ‘She’s drowsy and deep,’ I read. ‘She’s drowsy and nearly asleep. She sits on the high chair and nods, like a little old lady, though she’s only two. She makes one weary cheep, a baby sparrow. From nowhere, in a flurry of perfume and patterned frock, her mother blows in, smothers her with kisses, and sweeps her up and away.’

That paragraph was in the simple present tense. Most novels and stories are these days. You get used to it, though in the nineteenth century (Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës) they were all in the past, except for passages of direct speech:

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.
(First sentence of Jane Eyre).

Like stories and novels, poems used to describe experience in the past tense: ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills’. In those Wordsworthian days, some words (o’er) were squashed to fit the metrical pattern. We regard that as seriously retro now, and most mainstream poems these days are in the present simple. It almost seems natural.

She’s drowsy and deep.
She’s drowsy and nearly asleep.
She sits on the high chair and nods
like a little old lady
though she’s only two.

However, it’s not ‘natural’ at all. It’s a literary device. We do funny things with verbs for creative reasons. When we’re just talking and not creating a literary effect, the simple present tense is what we use for habitual actions: I go to the gym on Tuesdays. I catch the bus and get off in town. If we’re describing what we’re doing ‘right now’, it’s the present continuous tense: I’m sitting down on the bus and I’m looking out for my stop.

But poets, for ‘right now’ descriptions, choose the present simple. It creates a sense of immediacy (and there are fewer ‘ing’ words). Sometimes the event happened ages ago, but the present tense is still hauled in, in which case it’s a ‘historic present’. We cheerfully buy into this literary device and forget it’s a stratagem.

A radio journalist would do it differently. Their immediacy would be summoned by the present continuous: ‘I’m looking at a little boy. He’s probably about two years old. There are sores on his arms and legs and I can see a bruise on his forehead. I’m going to talk to his mother in a moment. She’s coming into the house now.’

Another verb trick for poets (but not journalists or podcasters) is to bring the reader in with a series of imperatives:

Look at her. She’s drowsy and deep.
Look how she sits on the high chair and keeps
nodding like a little old lady.
Watch her mother sweep in now. . .

This can work – if not done too often. Tricks work best when they sneak up on you.

We prize a conversational tone in poetry these days. It’s part of our extended reaction against what was regarded as ‘Georgian’ or ornate in early twentieth century writing. So we do different things and think they’re not stylised. We do like to feel contemporary.

But we’re just as stylised as any age has ever been. It isn’t conversational to say ‘She sits on the high chair and nods like a little old lady’. It’s a cross between surreal dream style and the Janet and John books, ‘John sits on the chair. Janet nods. See, mother, see!’

Oh yes, I use the simple present tense myself in poems (especially in dream poems, where it’s great for capturing a sense of the surreal). It’s something I’ve learned, one of the devices of my age. Most poets use simple present at least some of the time. I’m not knocking it on principle. I’m just doing my bit for raising awareness.

Because sometimes I pick up a set of poems, and every single text is constructed that way. The ubiquitous I + simple-present-tense can wear thin.

There are changes that can be rung. Time for some ringing.

photo credit: Of Tings and tongs via photopin (license)

Hot topic: Age and Aging

As a writing topic, age is in. Age has always been in.

Sarah Catherine’s ‘a classical blog’ quotes Sappho on the topic. And Mimnermus. And Alcman. And Anacreon. The Chinese ancients had it nailed too – all over the place.

Last night I was reading the 2015 Emma Press’s Anthology of Age, edited and illustrated by two relatively young (age is a matter of perpective) people. It’s a lovely set of poems about age and aging – and many of them are heartening.

Meanwhile, the Saltire Society brought out Second Wind last year, a pamphlet by older poets Diana Hendry, Vicki Feaver and Douglas Dunn tackling the aging process with the energy of youth.

And the Scottish Poetry Library, in conjunction with Polygon, is planning an anthology of ‘Scottish poems for growing older’, due later this year.

Even I myself am currently working on a new publication from Alan Hill, a sequence of short poems titled Gerontion. (You may be able to guess its central concern.)

We human beings brood about age a lot. It seems to trouble other animals less, but then other animals don’t look in mirrors.

On her later birthdays (88, 89, 90 and finally 91), I used to ask my mother how she felt about having achieved that particular age.

‘What age?’ she would say.

‘Well, 90 is pretty old, isn’t it? How does it feel to be so old?’

She would shake her head. ‘I feel just the same as I always have,’ she would always say, never one for a fuss. But latterly she looked in the mirror less – much less – which is perhaps why her cardigans were frequently done up wrong, or the patch of melted chocolate on her blouse failed to bother her.

Mum was ill with Alzheimer’s Disease, which confers both bother and blessing, and it was the reason why we were jointly compiling her memoirs. She felt extremely well most of the time. On one of the birthdays, I told her how old she was and she was astonished. ‘Am I really so old?’ she said.

‘You certainly are,’ said I.

‘Well, how old are you?’ she asked me.

‘How old do you think I am?’

‘About 25?’

I laughed, of course. ‘Mum, I am 60.’

She looked at me properly then, and with horror. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘That’s AWFUL! It was like being in a science fiction film, where the main characters are suddenly spirited into a future fifty years ahead, chatting happily, until catch a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, and a horrible reality dawns.

But my mother soon forgot this and went back to being her young self with me cast as a somewhat younger friend. In fact, I thought she was feeling younger and younger in the later years. Quite often she was a child whose parents were just about to arrive.

I think most of us continue to feel much the same inside, throughout our adult years, until some aspect of physical decay strikes us. So poems about age and aging are really about some form of loss, loss being (to my mind) the central and abiding theme of poetry.

Young poets are supposed to write about love. Unsurprisingly, we fall in love with youth which (apart from Jane Eyre) is associated with health and beauty. We do not fall in love with age (the stereotype stoops from street crossing signs).

But even love poetry is really about loss.