C J (Jonty) Driver – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

PUBLISHING DEAD POETS

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o’ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

O! how shall summer’s honey breath hold out,
Against the wrackful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O! none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Shakespeare Sonnet 65

One of the reasons poets want their poems published is so they’ll live on, after their death —the poems, I mean — though there’s a sense in which we want to believe a bit of the author is preserved along with them. If a UK book or pamphlet has an ISB number, copies will nestle in the copyright libraries forever. Or not. There are six mandatory receiving libraries in the UK. (In Poland there are 19).

There is a cost to this for publishers, of course, and also for the libraries. Cambridge University Library has been a legal deposit library since 1710. It currently houses its print contents over 100 miles of shelving, expanding at the rate of two miles per year.

Still it’s a comfort to know that once a book is positioned securely somewhere in those 100 miles, it’s safe. The words between the covers are protected from ‘the wrackful siege of battering days’ for a good while.

But publishing dead poets is problematic – unless the authors have already achieved school textbook status and outlasted copyright restrictions. Poets like Keats and Shakespeare sell well (in the context of a genre whose sales stats sink the heart). Other poets sell poorly at the best of times, and if they’re no longer around to help promote . . .

Because increasingly living poets have a dynamic role as marketers and promoters of their own books. They announce publication in social networks; some of them blog online; they work hard to get online reviews and offline readings. They ask all their friends to write to Poetry Please and request them. Publishers mainly don’t do this any more, if they ever did.

Living poets are placed between two stools. On the one hand, many of them are modest, bookish people. On the other, they are producing their own promotional text, with varying degrees of unease. Some of them turn out to be amazingly good at it. Others are frankly terrible.

Dead poets are spared this. With luck, some of their friends will continue to promote their book(s). But with the best will in the world, enthusiasm vacillates and wavers over time.

And other factors come into play. The work of dead poets is hard to get reviewed, even if the publisher is sending out myriad copies. Many publications don’t review the work of dead poets as standard policy. There are too many books every year from living poets clamouring for attention.

Dead poets can’t apply for grants or residencies. Dead poets can’t take on commissions. Dead poets can’t answer letters. Dead poets can’t network or blog. Dead poets can’t appear at festivals. Dead poets can’t write new topical poems. Dead poets can’t upload recordings on YouTube or SoundCloud.

And books of dead poets are usually ineligible for prizes and awards. The Forward Prize, for example, stipulates that ‘work submitted on behalf of an author who is deceased at the date of publication of the work is not eligible.’ What does a dead poet need with a cash prize? But it’s not the cash. It’s the attention that both the dead and the living most need. That’s what brings readers to poems.

If the poet is not there demanding attention, who is doing it for them?

The original idea was that the poems would continue doing the job. ‘Time’s best jewel’ would ‘still shine bright’ in ‘black ink’. People would read the printed poems and share them. That phenomenon known as ‘word of mouth’ would do the business.

Theoretically ‘word of mouth’ is more powerful than ever before. Publishers are keen to exploit the possibility that any text could go viral. It worked for J K Rowling. So far as I know, it has never (yet) worked for poetry.

Where am I going with this? HappenStance has just published a book of poetry by a dead poet. The Years, by Tom Duddy, will not be promoted or circulated by Tom Duddy, though his friends and family will do their best. It will not be entered for any prizes. It will gradually find its way to a number of very good readers: at least I hope it will. It is a beautiful book with the highest production quality we could get. There are times when an absolute belief in the work must override all other considerations. This is one of those times.

Meanwhile, a living HappenStance poet, C J Driver, will be taking part in a memorial service for Nelson Mandela in Westminster Abbey at noon on March 3^rd. Among other words, Jonty will be upholding the faith by sharing a bit of Shakespeare, undying proof that some poetry really does endure.

TONY BLAIR AND POETRY

Is there such a genre as ‘political poetry’?

I don’t know. Tony Harrison, maybe. Sometimes Adrian Mitchell. Although there is a sense, I think, in which politics strikes to the roots of everything. We’re all governed, in some sense or other. And sometimes the words of government and the words of poetry meet. Especially when a poem reaches to the troubling heart of government gone wrong.

This is true of some of the poems in Jonty Driver’s Citizen of Elsewhere. Born and educated in South Africa, Jonty’s opposition to apartheid and suspected membership of the African Resistance Movement led to exile from his homeland for many years. He wrote a biography of Patrick Duncan, the political thinker and activist. Duncan is in these poems, and so is the principle of facing up to death and worse than death:

Blood eats blood, but how
We do not know.
Justice too is slow.
There are such things done by men to men
We can hardly bear to hear them again.

High above London he lies,
Never doubtful now. His eyes
Do not pretend
Disease will end—
Where sun has flaked and knived colonial hills,
Death is a drought of blood that only kills.

And yet, every single last
Loss must burst from its past—
Like dying. So,
He died; and so
Remember Patrick Duncan, who to the end
Faced the faceless dark as a friend.

Jonty Driver is a lyrical writer. His phrases and cadences sing; and the effect is uplifting as well as scary. In the face of human history, fearfulness is right. One of the poems, ‘Much-Afraid’s Song’, delicately touches on this. ‘Much-Afraid’ is Mr Dispondency’s daughter in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Remember her—“tongue a little bit tied, hesitant maid”? But by the end of the poem, the first person voice speaks for the poet too:

Since I’m still for much of the time afraid,
I shall sing some words no one can hear;
The river will swallow them up—and me:
It’s the only way I can free me from fear.

It struck me as curious that I should be publishing both Jonty Driver and Tom Vaughan (not his real name) at the same time, because Tom, too, is ‘political’. Recently retired from a senior post in what we used to call the Foreign Office (now the FCO), he has been writing for a long time. There was a novel once, and there have been poems throughout—mainly formal, and wry and often witty—sometimes published in HQ Quarterly. He has intelligent fun in verse. But there’s more to it than that.

In 2010, there was a Sampler of Tom’s work (sold out now) which included ‘The Mower’, a poem I put on a card because I liked (and continue to like) it so much:

The Mower

I cut the grass again today.
It took three hours, but now I know
that man was made his lawn to mow.

It’s smooth enough to play croquet.
The shorn blades smell of long ago.
I cut the grass again today.

I’m basking in the afterglow.
I sit and sip a beer, although
under my feet it starts to grow.

You can easily see the playfulness in that poem but there’s an edge too. And that edge is honed and sharpened in Envoy. There is political comment here, yes. There’s lightness, and there’s pain. I have never before worked with a poet who worked in person with Tony Blair and put him in a poem!

For most people in the UK, military entanglements happen on the other side of the world. We know there are diplomats involved but not who they are. Easy to forget they have hearts and minds and feelings, when all is buried by officialdom and negotiation and intelligence and other abstract nouns.

But they do.

Appropriate

Appropriate’s a lovely word—
it doesn’t mean a thing.
So useful when we need a text
appropriately thin.

Appropriate measures may be used . . .
appropriate forces sent.
Appropriately you’ll never know
exactly what we meant

when unforeseen—of course—events
raise the question why
inappropriately innocent people
die.

ELSEWHERE

It’s the month of new publications!

Jonty Driver’s Citizen of Elsewhere has now followed Hamish Whyte’s Hannah, Are You Listening? into the webshop. Tom Vaughan’s Envoy will follow next week.

I love the word ‘elsewhere’. Something magical about it. Robert Nye has a poem ‘Lines to The Queen of Elsewhere’, in An Almost Dancer, his 2012 collection (“Remembering places where I’ve never been . . .).

‘Elsewhere’ feels dramatically different from ‘somewhere else’.

Also Tom Duddy, in The Years, (imminent second collection) has a poem titled ‘Elsewhere’, in which children’s “minds [go] wild with the thought of elsewhere”. Elsewhere is beautiful, unattainable, and eventually tinged with sadness.

In the Merriam Webster, I find also ‘elsewhither’ and ‘elsewhence’, neither of which I remember encountering before. Perhaps I can incorporate them into something.

The Christmas launch at the Scottish Poetry library (Saturday, December 14) is now in the planning. Hamish Whyte, poet and editor of Mariscat Press, will be reading poems from Hannah (Hamish lives in Edinburgh). Jonty Driver will be travelling there all the way from Sussex – a rare chance to hear him read in Scotland. Gerry Cambridge will be sharing a couple of the new poems from Notes From Lighting a Fire, the PAPERBACK! It’s possible that I may have some Fife Place Name Limericks to rattle along with by then too. Most importantly of all there will be a lovely atmosphere and a warm welcome for poets and readers and friends.

Now I must get back to the packaging and sending out of books, elsewhence I came.