Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

The rowans outside my study window are greening in front of my eyes. One day there’s no blossom in the town; the next there are trees drenched in pink. The tulips in the front garden are standing proud with little red lines crinkling where they plan to open this week if the sun persists (it’s gone cloudy again this morning). This is the best time of year. Everything full of promise and eagerness. Nothing yet lost . . .

The Brilliant Poetry event in Montrose on Friday was lovely. I have never been to Montrose before — what a confession! I have never seen that great extraordinary sandy basin of the South Esk estuary. I drove up right after a Higher English class on Friday afternoon. It always strikes me as odd to move from teaching people to pass exams in English to doing the thing — doing the ‘live poetry’ when so much of it in the classroom seems so dead. Reassuring though. It reminds you — when you need to remember it — that poetry is a magical thing and can be magical for anybody in the right circumstances.

Rachel Fox organises these events in the Links Hotel — an intensely friendly venue, set up cafe style with little tables and a bar and microphones at the front and a Dave-Allen-type stool for performers to use or not use. I sat on it. For a little person a high stool is a wonderful thing. There were Rachel-friends doing the raffle, Rachel-friends on the door, Rachel-friends in the audience — a sense of fun and loyalty to her. She is a performer and poet herself, of course, and between each of the three guys on the menu, she read a poem of her own with verve and charm. The last of these would have done brilliantly at a slam event, though I know she doesn’t think of herself as a slam poet. What is a ‘slam poet’ for goodness sake? I should know better than to use these silly categories. It was a great audience poem.

I was looking forward to hearing the singer-songwriter Andy Shanks and he was every bit as good as I expected. Terrific. Sheer pleasure. Only thing missing was a wooden floor so you could tap along to some of the rhythms. They have folk events at the Links too and it’s a great place for that — if I lived in Montrose, or near, I’d be there. Lots of Andy’s songs have Fife references in them too; something lovely about that.

For me, it was a slightly breath-catching honour to read alongside Don Paterson. (Superb website, by the way, with all sorts of STUFF in it. Must read for those interested in metaphor). Never read with him before but of course I’ve been to many of his readings and he is also one of the few contemporary poets whose work I’ve followed closely, practically from the start — at least from his first book publication. I don’t like the word ‘great’ for poets but for me he is one of the few really special writers; as remarkable as his former friend Michael Donaghy, whose name was mentioned. There was a feeling of dead friends around, with Peter Porter having died that same day. I heard this on the news on the way in, didn’t know he was also a friend of Don’s. But all of poetry is a friend to the dead: it is permeated with those who have gone before. We are links in a chain: the chain goes on.

Just lately I keep writing funeral poems — that is to say, poems to be read at my funeral. I must be on about the 8th. It’s because people I care about keep dying. It’s part of the natural process of life, I know, but I’m getting older. It’s going to be me at one of these events sooner or later and I really want a good funeral. Years ago at a very sad funeral (early death, car accident) the grieving partner read aloud Auden’s Stop all the clocks and I wasn’t going to cry, but as he got to the end of that poem, of course I started. The thought going through my head was Auden, you bastard. Poets can and do exploit the emotive response, and the older you get, the more you cry, even at your own poems. I was going to read my 8th funeral poem at Montrose but decided, in the end, perhaps not.

It was good to hear DP reading in a friendly place. Heard him at the Byre recently — but that is so much bigger — a place the performer can’t see the audience because of the stage lights. Here there was chat, slower pace, strong sense of a local person doing their thing, rather than Great Poet before Floodlights. How wonderful to be able not only to do poems but music too. Don’s jazz version of Ae fond kiss (on guitar borrowed from Andy Shanks) was superb. I wanted to take it home with me, which (in a sense) I did. Here’s Rachel’s blog post of the same event.

I stayed in a B & B in Redfield Road. It was very good — I recommend it. The landlady, Ishbel, does a perfect poached egg and is incredibly welcoming. Drove back on Saturday morning in rain and a haary sky, through more rain, through Dundee in rain, North Fife in drizzle, then clearing towards the middle and then hot sunshine. It was a lovely day here, made more lovely by seeing my son over from Geneva to celebrate his brother-in-law’s thirtieth birthday. So planes are working again, for some people at least, and he’s to jump back on one this evening, so I’ll be back to pick him up and drive airport-wards.

I’m also tying up the ends of Jeremy Page’s In and Out of the Dark Wood. Just about to phone him for the final chat. Looking good. David Ford’s is still waiting but that’s next — both should be out by mid-May if not before, by which time we’re getting awfully close to the HappenStance Birthday Party in June at the Scottish Poetry Library (June 12th, 3.00 pm). All sorts of excellent people are coming. You could be one of them!

Reviews are on the website now for Mark Halliday, Alison Brackenbury, Harriet Torr, Judy Prince, Alice Beer, Anna Woodford, Andrew MacMillan, Kevin Cadwallender and Lyn Moir. The ones for Peter Sansom, Nalini Paul and Michael Davenport will follow shortly.

Any other pamphlets in for review haven’t gone out to reviewers yet. We are carrying out a standardisation exercise, which I’ll write more about soon.

Issue 12 will be posted out to those and such as those on or around April 12th.

Meanwhile, I’m going away for a few days to catch up on sleep. More soon from the Delia Smith of poetry (not).

The cost of stamps is about to go up again. No surprise there.  Yesterday, I bought even more than usual for the mass post-out of  Sphinx 12 which is imminent: it cost a great deal of money and my small consolation was knowing it would have cost even more in two weeks’ time.

Then I went to the bank to pay in the tax rebate (yeay!) from losing money on HappenStance last year and was served by a girl with a badge that said ‘Sharon Excellent’.

“Are you really called ‘Sharon Excellent'”? I asked her.

“No,’ she said. “It’s a scheme where they phone customers and ask them to rate you after they’ve been to the bank.”

Aha. Fore-warned is fore-armed. I, too, may receive a call asking me to rate Sharon. Haven’t had one yet, though I have had one from British Telecom. Since I am “one of our valued customers” (as opposed to one of the other kind) they wanted to make me a special offer regarding Broadband. Since I am one of their customers, they should know I am registered with the Telephone Preference Service and shouldn’t receive sales calls. However, they obviously count themselves as exceptional, though they are certainly not excellent.

In the Post Office, the service is not just excellent; it’s personal. That’s the local post office, where I do nearly all my purchases of stamps and so on. In the Town Post Office, it is more impersonal and less excellent. You feel sympathy for those poor, newly-trained staff who cannot let you leave the building without trying to persuade you to ‘top up’ your phone, when all you wanted was two books of stamps.

In my local post office, this week the Manageress told me she was supposed to try to sell me car and home insurance and she wasn’t doing it. Hooray for rebellion. “They pressurise us, you know,” she said. “They phone us up and tell us our jobs may be at risk if we don’t do it.” Their low-paid, highly pressurised jobs doing confidential transactions for pensioners, running down the road after people who left things behind, explaining how road tax works, weighing parcels for ebay and mail order, sending off parcels to Afghanistan, asking after people’s grannies and sick husbands and repossessed houses and dead dogs. The world is changing. There are those who will sell insurance to everyone they know (most of us) and those who will refuse.

The weeks between sending a publication to the printers and getting it back remind me of the no-time between death and a funeral,  locked in an apprehensive space where everything goes slower than usual. Except in this case everything goes faster because I had forgotten this was the weekend of losing an hour in the cause of more daylight and the hour I lost was the hour in which I write this blog.

Never mind, Eddie Gibbons’ new book What They Say About You (Leamington Books) is previewed at The Lot, Grassmarket, Edinburgh this Thursday April 1st, 2010 at 7pm.

Do come — entrance is free. I was one of Eddie’s lunchtime audience at StAnza and I can recommend this book warmly. I even wrote some of the blurb on the back cover and what I said there is true. He is funny and moving and quick on his poetical feet. A pleasure to read.

Meanwhile, I should flag another event in April, since we are nearly in April,at Brilliant Poetry Montrose where Helena Nelson (me) is reading, or something approximating to that process. If you go to the link, I am the one wearing the banana earrings underneath Don Paterson looking into your soul. Eeek. A bit nerve-racking to perform along the great and good. For those who (understandably) shift in their seats a little when poetry is mentioned, there’s Andy Shanks — a marvellous folk singer.

Now it’s back to the labels. Labels? Typing out the labels to go on the Sphinx envelopes and checking the list is correct and updated at the same time. It’s the last issue that will go out by post. After that the reviews will be more regularly updated because there will be a teeny weeny bit more time to do that. . . .

Not just one new post. A whole fenceful of new posts are fine and upstanding in the garden which yesterday was even graced by sunshine.

The fence – garden side

What a strange time of year this is — lovely but odd. The crocuses and spring bulbs are perking up like they’ve never been away and at the same time all the debris of autumn and last summer sprawls all over the place. And the earth is so compacted after the snow, so flattened! The men putting up the fence have flattened it even more. However, it is a fine fence. It is upstanding fence. It is a fence of magnificence.

Meanwhile, this is StAnza week, and I managed two things on Friday after work. I can report back on a fabulous reading from Tiffany Atkinson and Kei Miller. I had heard neither of them before and will forget neither of them again. A great combination: two excellent performers doing something very distinctive and often very beautiful too.

Later there was Moniza Alvi and Dennis O’Driscoll. These are two people whose work I’ve read here and and there for a terribly long time. They were nothing like I expected. Better — much better. The Alvi poems about souls, for instance, have always irked me somehow, like a mannerism you feel you ought to not mind but do mind. However, she had great charm in introducing these poems and especially her comment at the start — that she had noticed the word ‘soul’ had become taboo in modern verse so she decided to use it as much as she could — that somehow made it all right. Her links were extremely interesting: many of her poems were pretty short and often when it’s like this, you tune into the links more (poets please note). I’ve just looked her up, and there’s an instant proof (I think) of the unreliability of Wikipedia, which has her down as born in 1968. Other sources (including York University, of which she is an alumnus) have it as 1954. She is looking pretty good for 56 but remarkably good for 42. . . .

Meanwhile, Dennis O’Driscoll, born (how interesting) the same year – 1954 – probably looked a bit older than he must be. He did remark that he had been looking as though he was nearly dead for most of his life, but actually that wasn’t true. You can see the twinkle in his eye from 100 yards away. He is a very slight man though: slight-man-in-suit, and he stood at the lectern with one leg crossed in a slightly apologetic way, though his manner of speech was not apologetic. His manner of speech was extremely funny and of course he is Irish — what a birthright for the voice! He is an arch entertainer, had his audience rapt, knew it, relished it and communicated the full range of emotions — from frivolity and delight to that tragic fall, when the silence opens around the words. You couldn’t not like Dennis O’D. Yet how often have I read him in Poetry Nation Review and thought he was yet another of their dry, utterly-male essayists? I must not have read him properly. Perhaps his paper words were overwhelmed by their context in that so literary journal (free copies of which were given away in the Grevel Lindop StAnza lecture, which was on myth.

Lindop spoke about “a recovery of a sacred vision of the world through a poetry that draws on the language of myth” and much of what he said was very interesting: some of the old stories he replayed for us, the anecdote about Oliver Sacks and his ‘dead’ leg. . . He got a lot of questions at the end, too. I wasn’t sure whether I was convinced about the big spiritual role for poetry: the recovery of a ‘sacred vision’. I’m not always sure what poetry is in this regard, even though I admire several poets (Ruth Pitter is one) who espouse what can only be described as “a sacred vision”. All the same I get ‘antsy’ about the whole terminology, start to shift in my seat.

Yep.  Just lately the word ‘spiritual’ has started to be a problem for me. At a poetry festival, you remember (how did you forget?) that there’s no shared understanding of the meaning of the word ‘poetry’ (let alone ‘spiritual’). This in itself is reassuring: it means the centuries of definitions, the multiple attempts to pin it down, haven’t worked. But when you sense a far-reaching manifesto for the power of the Po, I don’t know.. . Some prickle of resistance stirs the hairs on the back of my neck and not for the reasons that interrupted A E Housman shaving.

At lunchtime yesterday I went to a reading at Perth Writers Day (Scotland is somewhat overfull of literary festery this weekend – not just StAnza — unmissable for poets — but Perth Writers and even the interestingly named Clackswrite Writers’ festival in Alloa.) Back to Perth.

The Perth event was a launch reading for three ‘new’ poets: Andy Jackson (not to be confused with A B Jackson, who is also a Scotland-based poet), Morgan Downie and Deborah Trayhurn. All three read well: very different poets, very different personalities but a nice event, organised by the remarkable novelist and Soutar Writer in Residence Ajay Close. Andy was funny. I already had a copy of his book, and I had flicked through with interest, but his reading deepened the interest: he has some magnificent endings. He has the art of building towards a climax that satisfies, carries off a poem with aural panache. Morgan Downie was very visual: he created intensely real pictures of the Western Isles, painted word pictures — at times it was like opening a window and looking right through.

Deborah Trayhurn, of course, was the one I was keenest to hear because I published her pamphlet, Embracing Water, before Christmas, but had never met her in person. It’s riveting to hear a person read poems you have yourself typed out word by word, moved from page to page, savoured letter by letter. Not quite like anything else. At the point of assembling the publication, you disappear inside the poems — like going for a long walk in a rainstorm — after a while you are so immersed in them, you can’t even see them any more. Then the book is published and you come out, you come right out and you almost lose touch again with what is in it. Other readers comment on the work: some like it a lot, some less. You leave the publication to make its own way in the world. You start on the next one.

And then you hear the artist, like yesterday, make it come alive. She is a delicate and elegant person: she looked precise and beautiful and at the same time slightly period. She could have read at Harold Munro’s Poetry Bookshop evening readings and not been out of place. Deborah is a visual artist as well as a word-worker and you sense that in her reading. The poems in this set all have first line titles which means, effectively, they have no titles — and that is how she read them: brief introduction and then straight in. Full immersion. I particularly liked her introduction and reading of Whether I write, words like birds, its modesty and joy in writing, its impish bouncing from phrase to phrase, its tender reassurance to new writers. It countered the idea of the huge mission for Poetry,  brought it back to the small joy, the personal pride, the delight.

Matt says I photographed the fence from ‘the wrong side’. He says fences are meant to be looked at from the outside.