DEATH BY POETRY

It happens all the time.

Death by poetry? It happens all the time.

A circular email arrives. It is addressed to several publishers, so I am one of a list – often quite an interesting list. Occasionally the list of other names is suppressed, so the email appears to be copied to its author, but I know I am one of many because the email will begin, “Dear Sir/Madam” or “Dear Publisher” or, as in one last week, “Dear Small Publishers”.

Then there is an appeal to read some poems. These will either be attached as separate documents or pasted in a long string underneath the message.

There may be elaborate claims for the brilliance of the work. There may be detailed descriptions of the author’s long-reaching literary arm.

However, the small publisher doesn’t read that far. She has already deleted the message or, as in my case, saved it in the Mad Poets file.

Sometimes, especially if I think the poet may be young, I reply with some advice, which may be a stupid thing to do. Once it involved me in a lengthy interaction, where the male poet (for some reason they are always men) bombarded me with poems. A barrage of verse. I had to block his messages in the end.

I do not read the poems. Okay—that’s not totally true. Very occasionally I read a few lines, with a sort of horrid fascination. I have never, in this situation, come across anything I liked. But even if I did, I wouldn’t like the way it had been thrown at me, and so I wouldn’t consider working with that poet, not for one moment.

Besides, the phrase ‘coals to Newcastle’ springs to mind. I am sitting in a room where two walls are lined floor to ceiling with books. Almost all these books are either collections of poetry, or books about poetry or poets. The third wall has a table, with piles of poetry books, and another bookcase full of . . . er . . . poetry books. I am sitting at the fourth wall, which has a window and so no room for a bookcase. However, on the desk in front of me, beside the Imac screen there is a pile of . . . you guessed already. Some of the work in this room is wonderful, and if I had time, I would be reading it now. I probably should be reading it now. Why would I want more? Especially of dubious provenance.

My job (because I am a humble publisher) is to sell poetry to other people, not have them hurl it at me.

Perhaps the real reason the mad poets’ emails are so frustrating is the way they caricature what I myself am doing as a purveyor of poetry. Here are some poems. You’ll love them! Best you’ve ever seen. Really—latest pamphlet, book, sampler. Unmissable.

But poetry is patently missable. We can live without it, despite the fact that some of us continue to search for the texts that feel indispensable. It is an odd search, and an odd dedication.

A little of the right sort of poetry—that’s what we want. It is never a matter of the more, the better. Too much poetry is a killer. I like pamphlets for that reason. Not too much in them, not too overwhelming, no overweening aspirations. Don’t ask me what ‘the right sort’ is. I only know for me, not you.

But I like a publication that results from an interaction, a process. I like a poet with humility and reserve. I like understatement, and I like irony, and I like playfulness.

There is a ‘right’ way to approach publishers with poems. It requires the poet to notice the publisher as a human being with personal preference and practice. These are not secret things: they’re easy to find out about. Websites are full of information. The world is littered with interviews and articles and year-books and listings. And you can write to a person—you can establish some interaction—without sending poems.

The poetry publisher is never short of Po. Although the mental (and sometimes physical) space is knee-deep in Po-matter, more and more of it arrives. He or she does not wake up one morning to say ‘Hurray! Five hundred more poems have arrived. Just what I wanted!”

However, he or she may—just possibly—say: ‘Hurray! A letter from J M B: I hope she’s included some new poems.’ It’s a relationship. It’s a context. We are human beings, not poem counters.

However, for those who continue to believe fame, fortune and the fabulous future are just around the corner if the victim publisher will just dip into the amazing poem in their email, I recommend British Writers Awards. This organization will take lots of money in return for feeding the belief that a life of influence and affluence is just about to commence. . . .


CLIFF ASHBY—RUNNING OUT OF WORDS

Cliff Ashby, who died last week, loved the natural world.

Cliff Ashby, who died last week, loved the natural world.

Towards the end of his long life he spent much time watching birds on the feeder outside his window. He had a wry turn of phrase, a way of mixing sly wit with a sudden absolute—for want of a better word—sincerity. Here he is on the season we call ‘spring’, for example. He was living at Loudwater Farm when he wrote this, and so the river in the poem is real enough:

Thank God for
The dispassionate Sun,
Birds that mate
In magnificent trees,
Water fowl
That splash down
On a cheerful river.

Nothing extraordinary about that is there? Maybe the word “dispassionate” is just a little surprising but all the rest is straightforward enough. The next stanza is almost a logical continuation—perhaps not quite:

Say a prayer
For the squirrel
And the cock pheasant
Disappearing into the orchard.

God is in the offing. Praise His creation, though the cock pheasant is off somewhere and perhaps just slightly up to no good.

Then the next stanza—and the voice of praise is on its third round of rallying calls. It sounds just a little weary perhaps. And then human beings arrive on the scene, and the poet is one of them, though you don’t know that yet:

Let’s hear it for
The humble lark
And linnet,
The flamboyant magpie,
Children on swings,
Old men warming chilled bones
And the simple who
Make no complaint.

He is the old man warming chilled bones in the sun, but he doesn’t tell you that. He is not “the simple who / make no complaint”. Cliff never pretended to make no complaint, and he did not like being old and frail much. Who does?

And finally there’s the last stanza, which opens with a full-throated “Hurrah”, and ends completely unexpectedly:

Hurrah for
The tiny flowers
For which I have no name,
Discovered in odd corners,
The cuckoo, still to come,
Whitethroat, swift and swallow,
And yours truly
Sitting in the sun,
Wondering where the hell
The next poem’s coming from.

And there you go—from Heaven to Hell in one Spring poem. Man is at the heart of creation, despairing of his own role in it, his own inability to create. But Cliff Ashby is not—he is never—self-pitying. He chuckles at his own inadequacy.

Cliff Ashby Cliff was born in 1919 to a strongly religious family. His father was a Methodist Minister, so there was much moving around from place to place, as his father took up new office in one church after another. He left school early—at only 13—and never acquired educational qualifications.

However, his choice to register as a conscientious objector during the Second World War led him into contact with artists and poets at the Peace Pledge Union’s community farm ‘The Oaks’ in Essex. Here he met, among others, John Middleton Murry, who had bought the farm and given it over to the Adelphi Centre, a socialist peace community, co-founded by Max Plowman.

Ashby worked as a dairyman for the next 17 years, but something had sparked off—a new world of ideas and culture—and he had started writing poetry. He never looked back. Later he was published in David Wright’s legendary ‘X’ and the two men became firm friends. In this way he also forged a lasting friendship with Charles Sisson, and came to know Martin Seymour-Smith.

Cliff Ashby’s Collected Poems, PlainSong, was published by Carcanet in 1985. It is out of print now, but second hand copies can be had easily and cheaply. I have a handful of his HappenStance pamphlets left—A Few Late Flowers—and some of the Samplers too, his very last publication.

Here are concluding lines from the last poem in Flowers, ‘A Report for Ann’ (Ann was the much-loved wife who died two decades before him):

Now,
As night reaches
Its dark conclusions
And dawn brings problems
That I must resolve,
I finally run out of words.

But we were never much
For conversation,
Understanding with a lover’s art,
Silent as the river
That slides its way
Past my bedroom window,
Making its foretold journey
To the sea
While I,
Not much time left,
Totter towards the
Final resolution.

Cliff Ashby has finally run out of words. But his words have not run out. He has left some of them with us: the best of words, and in the very best order.

It was a privilege to have known him.

 


HOW POETS GET FORGOTTEN

Poor Fredegond Shove.  It doesn’t sound an auspicious name, though ‘shove’ rhymes, at the very least, with ‘love’.

Poor Fredegond Shove.  It doesn’t sound an auspicious name, though ‘shove’ rhymes, at the very least, with ‘love’.

She was a poet though. Why might you have heard of her?

Her main claim to fame is that she was one of only two female poets to make it into Edward Marsh’s best-selling anthology of Georgian Poetry, which ran to five volumes, all of which were issued from Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop.

Monro had taste. His books were well-made and a joy to handle, whatever you thought of the contents. He is also the man who started The Poetry Review: “Time is ripe for the forging of a weapon of criticism, and for an emphatic enunciation of literary standards”, he observed in January 1912, just over a century ago. Indeed.

The Poetry Bookshop was a very interesting place and Monro was its equally fascinating poet-proprietor. Anyone who was anybody in PoetryWorld arrived there sooner or later. It has come back into discussion of late, with the publication of Matthew Hollis’s book about Edward Thomas: Now All Roads Lead to France.

In this lovely book, there is no reference to Fredegond Shove. This is not a criticism of Hollis’s biography. There are so many people alive at any period of time: one can only mention the key players in any story. On the night when Thomas and Frost both attended a reading at the Poetry Bookshop, was Fredegond Shove there too? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps poetry was a minor part of her life.

Her other claim to fame as a poet is that Ralph Vaughan Williams set four of her poems to music, and they are still sung. However, this was not necessarily because V-W was deeply moved by the work. It could have been something to do with the fact that the great composer’s wife was Fredegond’s auntie.

Did they call her ‘Fred’? Did she have a sense of humour? She certainly had connections with the so-called ‘Bloomsbury Group’ (Virginia Woolf was her mother’s cousin) but she mainly lived in Cambridge and that’s where she probably grew up, as the daughter of Frederic William Maitland, whose rather handsome portrait hangs in the National Gallery, and who, according to Wikipedia, was not only Fredegond’s father but “the modern father of English legal history.” But he didn’t keep well. He died in 1906, when Fredegond would have been about 17.

I like the look of her. Click HERE to see her sitting smoking a cigarette and sitting against a hay stook (seems a slightly dangerous activity to me). Here she must be about twenty-eight. She looks a strong woman, a bit risqué, and husband Gerald, who became known for his work as an academic economist (he was a King’s College graduate and worked all his life in that self-same college) seems so much  . . . meeker. By this time, Fred’s mother is married to Charles Darwin’s son, thus becoming Lady Florence Henrietta Darwin. Everything connects!

Fred’s husband, Gerald, when at Cambridge, was one of the Apostles, and so he must have known Leonard Woolf and Lytton Strachey well. This was during the Great War, in which Gerald was plainly not engaged – he was a conscientious objector (lots of the Bloomsbury Group were) and he worked, according to Wikipedia, as a poultry keeper at the home of Lady Ottoline Morrell. That’s where the photograph will have been taken, Lady O being not only a patron of the arts but also a bit of a photographer.

Fred’s mother, Florence Henrietta, wrote plays, with what success I do not know, but six of them can be found in Project Gutenberg. She named her daughters Fredegond (but you knew that already) and Ermengard. They sound like two of the Valkyrie, don’t they? I have no idea what Ermengard did, exposed as she was to such an intensity of literary and cultural influences. It’s hard enough to pursue Fred through the English letters in which she has got lost.

The name ‘Fredegond’, so far as I can see, comes from Fredeguna, the fearsome Queen consort of Chilperic 1, the Morvingian Frankish King of Soissons. What? You can read all about her if you follow the link. If names do, as they say, influence our destinies, things were looking interesting for our Fred, the Poet.

But it didn’t work out that way. The history of literature barely mentions poet Fredegond Shove. She had no children. She died at sixy, outliving Gerald by only two years (he also died at sixty). I wonder what she was like? HERE is a bit of her family tree.

Another anthologist who selected a couple of her poems was W H Davies. I have considerable respect for his Shorter Lyrics of the Twentieth Century, although it didn’t live up to Davies’ hopes that it would sell in similar numbers to the Georgian series. Davies had an ear for true lyric, and he wasn’t anything like as masculist as Marsh. In fact, Davies liked women (in every sense).

Here is ‘Song’, one of the poems Davies chose, a good little poem for a wet spring morning:

Spring lights her candles everywhere,
But death still hangs upon the air;
The celandine through dusk is lit,
The redbreasts from the holly flit,
At night the violets spring to birth
Out of the mute, encrusted earth.

The wind has cast his winding sheet
(Which is the sky) and he goes fleet
Over the country in the rain,
Singing how all the world is vain
And how, of all things vainest, he
Journeys above both land and sea.

It’s not an ambitious lyric, but it does its work neatly and well. She handles the verse form beautifully. Although the first stanza is pretty ordinary, the second lifts: it’s all one sentence and she carries it right through with a lovely cadence. The “death” that hangs on the air isn’t just a fancy metaphor for winter. “All the world is vain”. She was writing in the aftermath of the Great War: this is her minor Wasteland, her lost lyric.

And the other one that Davies chose – that’s the one I’d like to think she was writing, or thinking about, sitting against that hay stook in 1917. I think the ending may be a little dark and brooding – I wonder why the joys are “disembodied”: is it just an allusion to reading the stars, or did she already know there would not be children, not for Fred and Gerald? The sun, ‘as golden as a pound’ reminds us that there was a time – there really was – when a gold sovereign was worth the name. At first you think the comparison of a daisy’s face to ‘glass’ is odd – perhaps just there for the rhyme. But I don’t think so. I think it deliberately anticipates the other kind of glass, the mirror in the second stanza. Just a little poem, with a whole life behind it, written before Dutch Elm Disease decimated the “white stars”.

In memory of Fredegond Shove, then, minor poet of minor poets, here is ‘In a Field’.

IN A FIELD

The sun and moon I see
…Beside me in the grass:
The moon, a daisy’s face
…As pure and fine as glass;
The sun, a dandelion
…As golden as a pound—
Oh what a firmament
…Is this which I have found!

White stars the elm tree shakes
…To twinkle where they lie
As bright upon the earth
…As any in the sky.
This field is heaven’s glass
…And gazing in I see
What disembodied joys
…The future holds for me.

 


GET YOUR STRIPES HERE

The three high stripers for 2011 have been REVEALED!

In 2011, no fewer than 65 poetry pamphlets were reviewed on Sphinx.

That was 195 reviews, three for each publication.

As you probably know, Sphinx reviewers not only write a review in the ordinary way, they make a rating, using four categories:

  • production values
  • quality of the poetry
  • coherence of the collection
  • strength of recommendation.

Generally, any publication getting six stripes or above is worthy of note, and it’s likely at least one of the reviewers has liked it  a lot. The rating process, though, is a tricky one. Without doubt it does happen that two reviewers rate high, while the third does the reverse. The way we evaluate poetry (and much else) is . . . subjective.

To get a very high stripe rating, a publication must impress all three reviewers.

In 2011, 17 of the 65 publications achieved eight stripes. This is a significant accolade. It suggests just over a quarter of pamphlets sent in for review are indubitably of a high standard –not just the poetry, the production values and so on. But poetry pamphlets have upped their game, have they not? Some fabulous things are springing from the presses these days.

Three publications achieved even higher ratings. At 8.5 stripes. They were:

And finally (roll of drums please and ta-da!), the nine-stripers and therefore leaders in the field for 2011 were:

Congratulations to Luke, Kirsten and Tony! May your stripes never grow shorter.

Meanwhile, you can find the latest reviews for 2012 on www.sphinxreview.co.uk.  None of these so far have attained nine stripes but some are pretty close . . .

PAIN DE CAMPAGNE (TIRED OF LIVING IN THE COUNTRY)

I think poems and recipes have a lot in common. Sometimes they can even be combined.

I think poems and recipes have a lot in common. Sometimes they can even be combined.

Pain de Campagne[1]

Day 1:

Mix these things in a roomy bowl:

  • 8 ounces of strong white bread flour
  • A scant dessertspoon of table salt
  • 8 fluid ounces of tepid water
  • A little dried yeast (a scant half teaspoon)

Cover with a plate and leave till next day.

At night dream richly. Record your dreams.

 

Day 2:

Return to the bowl.

Add 4 fluid ounces of luke-warm water

and then 4 ounces of whole-wheat flour.

As you stir the mixture, remember your dreams.

They will rise to the surface in tiny bubbles.

Cover and leave. Sleep well that night.

Record your dreams.


Day 3:

Beat in more water—4 fluid ounces

and then add 12 ounces of strong white flour—

enough to make a workable dough.

Knead at length, remembering your dreams.

Add flour if needed. Continue to work

until the dough is beautifully smooth.

Leave to rise till doubled in size.

Take a nap, if you like, while the bread rises.


Two hours later:

Punch back the dough.

Knead briefly and form a long oval.

Place on a baking tray covered in flour.

Shake more flour on top of the loaf.

Lightly cover and let it rise.

This loaf will grow.


When the size impresses you

slash the top with diagonal cuts

and bake very hot[2] for a quarter of an hour,

then somewhat cooler for twenty minutes[3].


The crust of this loaf will be domed and firm,

the crumb dreamy.

It will make great sandwiches, keep well

and prove that poetry can be useful.

[1] Tired of living in the country

[2] 230C

[3] Or perhaps a little longer, at 180°

INTIMIDATING POETRY

Poetry is out to get me.

Sometimes nice people say to me, by email, “I will send you some poems soon”. I know they mean well, but nevertheless I experience this promise as a warning. It is like the Godfather saying “I will send you a little present”.

But I have an antidote. It is a thin paperback volume with a green cover. It is 56 pages long and contains 33 poems written over seven years.

This is Robert Nye’s new book. I cannot link to it here, because the publisher, Greenwich Exchange, hasn’t yet made the publication available on their website.

The book is titled An Almost Dancer, Poems 2005-2011. Like the poet’s previous volume, The Rain and the Glass, it has a brief foreword about poetic practice. Here’s what the poet said back in 2004:

The craft, as has been noted, is long to learn. And the last lesson (like the first) may be that craft at best is only half the story, for poetry is not a product of the will. I have spent my life trying to write poems, but the poems gathered here came mostly when I was not.

“Poetry is not a product of the will.” Say that in a creative writing class and emerge unscathed.

In his new volume, Nye refers in his foreword to Norman Cameron, the twentieth century Scottish poet. In New Verse, Geoffrey Grigson asked Cameron “Do you intend your poetry to be useful to yourself or others?” Cameron’s reply (and it was typical of him) was: “Neither. I write a poem because I think it wants to be written.”

For Robert Nye, who shares Cameron’s view, “in each case certain lines came into my head unbidden which then required resolving before they’d let me rest.” Many of us could relate to that, though few would go on to say, “I must admit that . . . the process of poetic composition is still as much a mystery to me as it ever was, perhaps more so.”

But it is a mystery in more than one sense. It is a mystery that in the melée of tweeting and twittering, prizes and glorification, puffs and counter-puffs, rants and pomposities, a small poem can still arrive astonishing and complete. It doesn’t need to assert itself. It waits for you to notice it and pick it up, like a pebble amongst sea-washed pebbles.

Ruth Pitter, in her preface to Poems 1926-1966, says “I think a real poem, however simple its immediate content, begins and ends in mystery”.

I do not want to mystify – neither the process of writing, nor that of reading either—because essentially, despite the tracts and books about poetic theory and so on, certain poems do not need annotation or cleverness. Some of those are in Nye’s new book.

Sometimes Nye’s style is so plain that a modern reader could suspect the author of being disingenuous. But he is not. Here is one of my favourites, ‘The Lady With The Dog’. The title is not a subtle reference to Chekhov. The experience, I am sure, was real:

I saw a little old woman being led
Up a Cork alley by a mongrel dog.
The dog was wall-eyed and it had the mange
And slavered as it pulled her on a string,
Yet as they passed I heard the woman chant
In a low voice, as sweet as Juliet,
‘Who is my joy? Who is my darling boy?
Wolfie, my dear, aren’t you the dog of dogs!’
I hurried on, for I had things to do,
But when all’s done I hope I shan’t forget
That lady and her love for one fine dog.

In the crucible of the poem, “things to do” are life itself, the way its busyness preoccupies us and prevents us from seeing. And “when all’s done”—that is death, the moment of dissolution. And the lady herself, whose voice is as sweet as Juliet, is a vision.

In Nye’s poetry it is as if one line or phrase opens that vision, the glory that Wordsworth felt he had seen as a child and later lost. For a moment you peer through the poem and glimpse it too. Then you wonder whether you imagined it, and you have to go back, and read again.

Here is ‘Valentinus’, who was also Martin Seymour-Smith, the poet and literary critic, and a friend. What had he to say?

Yes, I knew Valentinus from my youth.
He taught me poets have to tell the truth
Or try to, though it make us seem uncouth.

You find this foolish? Lady, so did he,
Laughing at his own verses, teaching me
To laugh at mine or simply let them be.

Not that it’s ever simple to make sense
At least when living in the present tense,
Or to be more than your intelligence.


That is not the end of the poem, but those stanzas encapsulate a paradox—that the poet can somehow, sometimes, be more than his or her own intelligence, can be a vehicle for something that wants to be written. Nye is serious about this. He does not make the claim grandly.

Like many contemporary volumes, the book has endorsements on the back cover from Carol Ann Duffy, John Burnside, Peter Porter and even Ian Crichton Smith. But the poems do not need endorsement.

All they require is a little private room for solitary reading. They are not in the least intimidating.

A CREEL SPINNING OF THE CLOSE FLEET

‘You ask, Will this take long?‘

That’s the first line of Richie McCaffery’s first poem from Spinning Plates.

Niall Campbell observes, ‘How difficult it is returning’ and Theresa remarks, ‘We agree to reconvene in a few hours’.

Even from those first lines of the first poems you pick up their very different voices, the immediacy with which they dive straight in, without preamble or fuss.

These three were launched at StAnza last week, with splendid readings from the poets (we sold all the pamphlets on the bookstall). They are a unique set for HappenStance because all three are aged under thirty.

They therefore bring down the average age of the HappenStance poet significantly overnight, though two of them would be dead already if they were Keats. As it were . . .

Happily there are lots more copies in the spare bedroom, and they can be ordered now. Just click on the links below.

They are:

 

 

THE IRONING POEM GENRE

Last Sunday my iron gave up the ghost.

Last Sunday my iron gave up the ghost.

I almost invariably do the ironing at some point on a Sunday evening. I put it off, like I used to put off homework when I was at school, but as Monday approaches, so does the prospect of the ironing basket full of clothes and the clothes full of wrinkles.

Besides, my mother used to iron on a Sunday night. It was one of the few times she stopped rushing around and stood still for long enough to have a conversation. I could sit and learn my French verbs while she stood at the ironing board, pressing and folding.

I must be able to remember – I think – a time before steam irons became ubiquitous, because I’m sure she had a little jug of water, from which she flicked drops across the garments. Thinking about this has led me to a fascinating website I didn’t know existed – ‘Old and Interesting’. (Our iron did not, thankfully, plug into the light fitting.)

And I recall being taught to iron – imagine longing to be allowed to iron! – and practising on my father’s handkerchiefs, because they were easy. The only hard bit was folding them so the monogram appeared on the corner.

And then there were steam irons and the comforting hiss of the steam, and the button you could press to send a fine spray over the garment if you wanted to. And it was warm in the room where the ironing went on, because my mother plugged in the iron beside the coal fire, and I curled on the settee with my work, and we chatted.

My memories of Mrs Tiggywinkle and my mother are very close together, and this perhaps, is the source, the ‘urquell’ of the ironing poem genre:

Lily-white and clean, oh!
With little frills between, oh!
Smooth and hot – red rusty spot
Never here be seen, oh!

Now that preceded the steam iron: you had to be good and careful in the days when carelessness could lead to rust and burns. Mrs Tiggywinkle was an expert and a heroine of domestic achievement.

No wonder I don’t mind ironing. It remains a comfort activity for me, and a harbinger of doom when the iron finally dies, as they do now and again. Ironing and irony are indissolubly and irrationally linked in my mind.

But there is an ironing poem genre. I have been watching them pop up over the decades. I have written at least three myself – not intentionally, but by accident. And lots of people will know the remarkable Pauline Prior-Pitt’s ‘Ironing with Sue Lawley’.

You would think ironing poems might always be authored by women. I have a feeling there was no Mr Tiggy-Winkle, though it is impossible to be sure. However, these days domestic tasks are less gender-connected. Women carry in the coal (except the coal, too, is running out and soon there will be none for them to carry) and men iron their own shirts. This is one of the reasons why I particularly liked finding an ironing poem in Matthew Stewart’s HappenStance pamphlet, Inventing Truth. It is called ‘La Despedida’ and it is rather sad. Before I go out and buy a new iron, I will share it:

There’s a regular slopping of water

up and down the iron. He juggles it

with all the collars, cuffs, pockets and sleeves,

shrugs blouses onto hangers, places them

in wardrobes, his hands precise and routine

as if he weren’t about to leave at last.

Her clothes will wait their turn till none remain,

just the hangers drooping like empty yokes.

Clothes hangers desin