Herod

 

 

Herod

 

 

With Wikileaks in the headlines

you could say

the timing was perfect.

 

Three Iraqi profs in clown-suits

claimed they had intel

on a need-to-know-basis.

 

No one used the word coup

but it was clear what they meant.

 

Said they’d scoured satellites

to find me. Someone’s head

will roll for that, I laughed.

Not even a flicker.

 

I cut them a deal:

new Jeeps, immunity,

a map of the minefields

in return for his name.

 

We shook, nothing in writing,

everything clean.

 

How they twigged I honestly

can’t say. They didn’t look

like hackers, then who does?

 

Special forces, probably.

They were good, not a trace.

 

If they ever do go public

I will be waiting.

 

One thing I’ve learned,

if you can’t give the order

it’s time to get out.

 

 

Recent Research on Poetry in Education

Below is a summary of some recent research on progress in pupils' poetry writing and teachers' metaphors of poetry writing instruction.

Recent_Poetry_Research.ppt Download this file

 

Lifesaving Poems: John Logan's 'The Picnic'

 

 

If it is possible to identify one poem which acted as a kind of gateway for me into the world of poetry, that poem would probably be John Logan’s ‘The Picnic’. I encoountered it first in an English lesson at school.

 

Our third-form English teacher Mr Borton entered without speaking and with his back to us wrote at the top of the blackboard ‘DO NOT REMOVE BOOKS FROM THIS ROOM’, before turning round, smiling and beginning the lesson.

 

All we had to do was read the poem and then talk about it, but it changed me completely.

 

The poem is a narrative of two adolescent children walking across fields one school lunchtime to eat their packed lunches ‘away from the rest‘. The poem evokes perfectly the ‘soft caving in [the] stomach/as at the top the highest slide’ of giving and receiving a first kiss; and of the physical reactions to unexpected and barely articulated intimacy:

There was a word in my throat

with the feeling and I knew the first time

what it meant and I said, it's beautiful.

Yes, she said, and I felt the sound and word

in my hand join the sound and word in hers

as in one name said, or in one cupped hand.

While the poem did not describe experiences I had actually had, it conjured palpably a world with which I was entirely familiar: that of school, lunch hours, fields, streams, games and a vague but undeniably real sense of longing for ‘something else’, of not wanting to conform, perhaps. 

 

You could say I connected with it.

 

Other important questions about this poem arose during the course of the lesson.  One was to do with the poem’s form, or what I would have then called the way it looked on the page.  Oddly, the poem was laid out in one continuous stanza.  Also, it did not rhyme, nor appear to have any regular rhythm.  Indeed, if anything, it sounded more like someone talking.  These were puzzling for several reasons.  While the ‘poetry’ I had experienced as a young child had largely been oral, I had not been made aware that printed poetry in books could attempt to replicate the rhythms of speech and appear to sound natural.  On one level, therefore, the poem did not conform to my early expectations of what a poem could look or sound like at all: I felt it was more of a story than a poem. 

 

On another level, however, I was more than intrigued because the poem was about experience I knew little about but was keen to discover.  Furthermore, while I felt that the poem was ‘like someone talking to me’ I also knew that lines like those quoted above were not the way that people spoke.  There was a sense that this was language which was both real and artificial at the same time.

 

I now identify these feelings as being to do with the interplay of concepts such as ‘form’ with ‘content’, or, ‘voice and feeling’ with ‘structure’. But at the time I felt a combination of intrigue and puzzlement.  To borrow another phrase from the poem, I now see that the poem enacted ‘talk in another way I wanted to know’.

 

Whenever I read or hear a poem I like for the first time I still feel that same caving as at the top of the highest slide. It is a kind of joyous nervousness. I want the poem to talk to me in a way I know and yet have no knowledge of. I am in the business of wanting to be surprised. I am already falling in love with the words taking shape in my throat and under my breath.  

 

 

 

 

The Picnic

 

 

It is the picnic with Ruth in the spring.

Ruth was third on my list of seven girls

But the first two were gone (Betty) or else

Had someone (Ellen has accepted Doug).

Indian Gully the last day of school;

Girls make the lunches for the boys too.

I wrote a note to Ruth in algebra class

Day before the test. She smiled, and nodded.

We left the cars and walked through the young corn

The shoots green as paint and the leaves like tongues

Trembling. Beyond the fence where we stood

Some wild strawberry flowered by an elm tree

And Jack in the pulpit was olive ripe.

A blackbird fled as I crossed, and showed

A spot of gold or red under its quick wing.

I held the wire for Ruth and watched the whip

Of her long, striped skirt as she followed.

Three freckles blossomed on her thin, white back

Underneath the loop where the blouse buttoned.

We went for our lunch away from the rest,

Stretched in the new grass, our heads close

Over unknown things wrapped up in wax papers.

Ruth tried for the same, I forgot what it was,

And our hands were together. She laughed,

And a breeze caught the edge of her little

Collar and the edge of her brown close hair 

That touched my cheek. I turned my face in-

to the gentle fall. I saw how sweet it smelled.

She didn't move her head or take her hand.

I felt a soft caving in my stomach

As at the top of the highest slide,

When I had been a child, but was not afraid,

And did not know why my eyes moved with wet

As I brushed her cheek with my lips and brushed

Her lips with my own lips. She said to me

Jack, Jack, different than I had ever heard,

Because she wasn't calling me, I think,

Or telling me. She used my name to

Talk in another way I wanted to know.

She laughed again and then she took he hand;

I gave her what we both had touched; can't

Remember what it was, and we ate the lunch.

Afterward we walked in the small, cool creek

Our shoes off, her skirt hitched, and she smiling,

My pants rolled, and then we climbed up the high

Side of Indian Gully and looked

Where we had been, our hands together again.

It was then some bright thing came in my eyes,

Starting at the back of them and flowing

Suddenly through my head and down my arms

And stomach and my bare legs that seemed not

To stop in feet, not to feel the red earth

Of the Gully, as though we hung in a

Touch of birds. There was a word in my throat

With the feeling and I said, It's beautiful.

Yes, she said, and I felt the sound and word

In my hand join the sound and word in hers

As in one name said, or in one cupped hand.

We put back on our shoes and socks and we

Sat in the grass awhile, crosslegged, under

A blowing tree, not saying anything.

And Ruth played with shells she found in the creek,

As I watched. Her small wrist which was so sweet

To me turned by her breast and the shells dropped

Green, white, blue, easily into her lap,

Passing light through themselves. She gave the pale

Shells to me, and got up and touched her hips

With her light hands, and we walked down slowly

To play the school games with the others.

 

 

John Logan from Touchstones 5

 

Lifesaving Poems

 

In search of the ‘Tyger’: power relationships and poetry in the classroom

 

When I began teaching the Year 5 class of children whose work would form the basis of my doctoral study of teaching poetry writing I did not really know what I was doing. (This was in an ‘ordinary’ community primary school in a not particularly salubrious area, and with no strong tradition of poetry teaching). I had a strong hunch, nothing more, that engaging the children in reading, writing and performing poems would somehow be of benefit to them. I think I had the grand idea that I would somehow find a link between ‘improved literacy’ and writing poems. But I was confident that if I read them poems and asked them to talk about them we might have the basis of a conversation which could be transformational. This was not a research finding, it was a hunch; and I was so serious in my belief in it that I spent the next three years investigating it.

 

I was influenced in my first sessions with the class by something Wendy Cope once told me about her teaching. After reading a poem to a class she would deliberately restrict herself to one question about the poem, and then let discussion about the poem emerge from there. She also tried never to use the same question twice.

 

On my second visit to the class I decided to read them, among other poems, William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’. I imagined that they would not understand all of it, that they might even find it a bit strange or difficult, but I was convinced they would respond to it. What happened that afternoon changed my whole view of teaching, and teaching literature in particular.

 

After reading ‘The Tyger’ to the class I chose to ask what pictures went through their minds as I was reading the poem. After a few slightly predictable answers about forests and tigers one boy put up his hand and said this: ‘I think it is about a big forest and a little forest. The little forest is trapped inside the big forest and is struggling to escape from it. It is a real struggle. Eventually the little forest breaks free and makes its way to edge of the big forest. It looks out.  What it can see on the other side is the First World War.’ There was a silence. Nobody knew what to say next. I thanked the boy for his comment and said that I found it interesting. Then I did something I had not done consciously in my teaching before. Instead of saying what I wanted to say, which was to debate with the boy’s interpretation of the poem, or read another poem perhaps, I asked the class if the boy’s answer had made anyone else think about the poem differently. All of their hands went up. Then I did something else I had not done before: I allowed the children to take control of the discussion. Instead of their comments going through me ‘in the chair’ they began talking and responding to each other, not always in agreement, but with a new energy and purpose.

 

I thought about this story again at the third Poetry Matters Seminar Series in Leicester in September. During a discussion of a paper by Gary Snapper Michael Rosen encouraged us to reflect on the power relationships at work in the English teaching classroom. It was impossible, he said, to ignore them. Drawing on the work of Foucault, he invited us to consider the connection between the questions we ask in classrooms and the imperative of exams and ‘standards’ and thus policy. Placing poetry in this equation is by definition a disruptive act, he reminded us, because poetry is a democratic and subjective art-form. Sue Dymoke added that taking this kind of risk requires confidence, both in terms of subject and pedagogical knowledge.

 

Together we considered the paradox of ‘losing’ power in order to gain new kinds of knowledge and confidence by asking questions about poems we do not know the answers to. As Sue Horner remarked later at the Seminar, it is possible to move too speedily from curriculum specifications to decisions about classroom practices without taking the time to engender the trust and the fun and the risk which we know teaching poetry can bring. We can catch glimpses of the Tyger, but these will not be memorable or long-lasting if we go hunting for it using only pre-planned routes.

Lifesaving Poems: Ann Gray's 'mercifully ordain that we may become aged together'

Ann Gray and I were chatting the other day. We were trying to decide how long we had known each other. Ann thought we met at the launch of The New Exeter Book of Riddles. I thought it was at Exeter Phoenix, at Uncut Poets, the open mic night Ann founded in the late Nineties.

How long was it, we wondered, ten years, longer? Neither of us knew. 

In any case, it does not really matter, as it doesn't when you are in the company of someone you trust. This is important because when I come across Ann's poems, in the Guardian, say, or the Rialto, it takes less time for me to find the wavelength of the poem in question. If you do not know her work I urge you to check out her last two books in particular, both published by Headland Books.

I first came across 'mercifully ordain that we may become aged together' in the Rialto. It is taken from Ann's most recent collection, At the Gate, and shares what I think of as that book's central preoccupation: how can we live with attention to those we love the most.

The poem is spoken in an easy-going demotic which belies its cleverness. It flirts with becoming a well-behaved sonnet, then veers off at the fifth line, as if it has more important business in mind. 

All that happens is a man helping his wife into her coat in a coffee shop. There is no extra commentary. There is nothing complicated about the diction or the scene it describes. Yet I find it completely harrowing.

The more I read the poem the more convinced I am that the poem achieves its power in the gap between the unfulfilled promise of its title and the expression of everyday love which is described. The key to this is the 'c'/'ck' sounds in the middle of the poem, contained in the words 'jink', 'hoick', 'neck' and 'tucked'. These are like breath catching in the throat, as at the start of tears. Everything either side of them is smooth, in phrasing which chimes in pairs of words: 'shoulders'/'shopping', 'feet'/'freed', 'helping'/'held'. This is re-emphasised in the repeated 'He must have/done this for years, this exact same thing for years.'

The entrance and exit of the poem's speaker are also paired in the details they contain (the latte and the white chocolate chip muffin). But the speaker leaves the poem (and the Canadian Muffin Company) as she enters it, alone.  

 

mercifully ordain that we may become aged together

Tobit 8.7

 

I was in the Canadian Muffin Company in Armada Way,

 waiting for an extra large latte, cinnamon and chocolate

and a white chocolate chip muffin, to take away,

when I saw them. He was helping her get into her coat.

He held it out for her as if the sleeves were winged

while she gracefully turned her back to shrug it on.

At this point he did a little jink, more of an imperceptible

hoick, on the balls of his feet, so the coat lifted

neatly over her shoulders and tucked under her neck,

then he freed her hair from the collar. He must have

done this for years, this exact same thing for years.

I watched him pick up the shopping, she picked up

her bag, and I collected my latte and my white

chocolate chip muffin and walked out into the rain.

 

Ann Gray, from At The Gate (Headland Books, 2008)

 

 

 

 

 

Lifesaving Poems: WN Herbert's 'The Black Wet'

In 2002 I heard WN Herbert read 'The Black Wet' at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. This is not remarkable in itself, you might say, and perhaps you would be right. The truly remarkable thing about Bill's reading is that I can still see and hear him delivering it, nine years later. For someone with the attention span of a gnat, this is unusual.

It was a beautifully paced reading, with proper peaks and troughs, moments of slapstick comedy followed by lyrical grace; towering rage follwed by barehanded grief.

For me the stand-out moment was Bill's reading of the poem below, 'The Black Wet'. It came to mind again this week as I watched and listened to the Devon skies doing what they love best.

With Bill's performance still fresh in my mind's eye, I am reminded that on hearing it I spent most of the time laughing. 'How does he do that?' I remember thinking, as the poem swirled around us and gathered unstoppable momentum, seemingly bringing everything in the world into its unique force-field of upside down logic.

I see this poem as a kind of chant or spell, the better with which to curse and/or bless the generosity of the heavens. It is always a good day when you can mutter under your breath 'It's raining Bala, Baikal, and balalaikas,/it's raining soggysidewinders and sadder adders'. I love the love of wordplay at the heart of this poem's enterprise. The energy it generates reminds me of those music hall entertainers spinning plates.

Nine years later everything is still in the air. Nothing has come crashing to earth yet.

The Black Wet

It's raining stair-rods and chairlegs, 
it's raining candelabra and microwaves, 
it's raining eyesockets. 
When the sun shines through the shower 
it's raining the hair of Sif, 
each strand of which is real gold 
(carat unknown).

It's raining jellyfish, 
it's raining nuts, bolts and pineal glands, 
it's raining a legion of fly noyades, 
it's raining marsupials and echnidae, 
it's raining anoraks in profusion. 
It's siling, it's spittering, it's stotting, it's teeming, 
it's pouring, it's snoring, it's plaining, it's Spaining.

People look up, open their mouths momentarily, 
and drown. 
People look out of windows and say, 
"Send it down, David." 
Australians remark, "Huey's missing the bowl." 
Americans reply, "Huey, Dewie and Louie 
are missing the bowl."

It is not merely raining, 
it's Windering and Thirling, it's Buttering down. 
It's raining lakes, it's raining grass-snakes, 
it's raining Bala, Baikal, and balalaikas, 
it's raining soggy sidewinders and sadder adders. 
It's raining flu bugs, Toby jugs and hearth-rugs, 
it's raining vanity.

The sky is one vast water-clock 
and it's raining seconds, it's raining years: 
already you have spent more of your life looking at the rain 
than you have sleeping, cooking, shopping and making love. 
It's raining fusilli and capeletti, 
it's raining mariners and albatrosses, 
it's raining iambic pentameters.

Let's take a rain-check: 
it's raining houndstooth and pinstripe, 
it's raining tweed. This is the tartan of McRain. 
This is the best test of the wettest west: 
it is not raining locusts - just. 
Why rain pests 
when you can rain driving tests?

It is raining through the holes in God's string vest. 
 

Note 
The black wet (Scots) - rain as opposed to snow

from New Blood (ed. Neil Astley), Bloodaxe Books (1999)

 

The Write Team: Creative Writers in School -from Bath Festivals

via youtube.com

I used to be the one sitting quiet in the corner and now I am not afraid to speak up.

My Hero: Michael Laskey

Photo: Derek Adams

Some writers influence you through the pull of their imagination on your work, opening up new worlds as you read them. As I wrote recently, Ted Hughes is an example of this for me. Other writers come in and out of your life through firendship and collaboration. Michael Laskey is my hero because on top of these influences he also rescued me.

Towards the end of 1998 Michael rang me to invite me to consider coming to Suffolk to work as the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Spring Poet in Residence. he described a two-week programme of visiting schools, colleges and community groups where I would encourage children, teachers and writers with their poetry writing. It was a fantastic opportunity. Like an idiot, I turned him down. I explained that the PhD I had embarked on was very time-consuming. For good measure I also threw in an excuse concerning my worries about childcare.

Michael listened to me patiently, and finally put the phone down accepting what I had told him.

I think the real reason I said no to Michael was my complete lack of confidence at the time. My first book, published in 1996, had done very well for a first volume of poems, selling out its print run within a year. My publisher, however, was reluctant to commit to another print run, and interest in the book stalled.

The gap between acceptance and publication of the manuscript for the book had been three years. In the intervening period I had begun writing new poems, but was not sure if they amounted to enough material for a new book let alone whether they were any good.

When it became clear, early in 1998, that no new print run would be forthcoming, I began to wonder if these new poems might ever see the light of day in book form.

I had met Michael once before, at a reading for Smiths Knoll at the Troubadour Coffee House. I liked him immediately, quickly learning to relish both his enthusiasm, and his disdain for what he called 'showy' behaviour. I knew I was letting him down by saying no to his kind offer, which I had not asked for, but genuinely felt I had no option to say anything else.

My wife came home later that evening and confirmed that I was indeed an idiot for turning him down. I rang him back and was relieved to find he had not offered the residency to anyone else. I would be delighted to come to Suffolk, I told him. By now thanking him profusely, he stopped me, saying, 'Of course with your book now out of, we'll have to put some new poems out. Do you have any new work I could see?'

I asked him what he meant. 'Well, you know, a pamphlet or something. We can't have our poet in residence giving readings with no book to sell.' Excited and still not catching up with him I asked him what he meant again. Ever gracious, he explained in words a child would understand. 'What you need to do, Anthony, is send me some new work, your best stuff mind you, and then we'll print a pamphlet for you with some of your older work that's now out of print so that people can see a range of what you've been up to. How does that sound?'

I told him this sounded brilliant, and began thanking him profusely all over again, at which point he told me to shut up and stop being so silly, it was his pleasure and they were really looking forward to working with me.

And that is what happened. I went to Suffolk, working in schools and with writers groups, and I gave readings from my brand new pamphlet which we decided to call The Difference. 

I can still see Michael now, pounding the steering wheel with pleasure on the way to some tiny village school in the middle of nowhere, then attacking it when some opera came on. Once, in a traffic jam somewhere outside Sudbury, he saw two children, a girl and her younger sister, shouting at each other. 'Look at that, Anthony, that's 'Kin' by CK Williams, do you know it?' I told him I did not. 'Oh, Anthony, you must, what do mean you don't, you should, you know, God, really? It's the one that goes 'Next the wretched history of the world'.'

Even now he is probably turning to a newly-arrived poet in his car, handing them a book of poems and saying 'You really should read this, you know, it's bloody brilliant, what on earth were England thinking of in the rugby?'

 

The Difference

for Jim

 

The lives we're living,

what difference do they make?

 

We wake up,

throw our children in the air

and catch them laughing

into our arms.

 

Friends come and go, seasons pass,

the leaves collect silently

in the garden.

 

Which reminds me,

there's pruning to be done

and bonfires to build.

 

What is it that we're doing

in this world to make it better,

a place more easy to wake in

for our children?

 

In the middle of all this

I am amazed

the sun still finds time

to rise beautifully over these roofs

and never asks anything in return.

 

My Hero: Michael Laskey

Photo: Derek Adams

My Hero: Michael Laskey

Photo: Derek Adams

The Day Ted Hughes Died

Ted Hughes died on 28 October, 1998, aged 68. He had been suffering with colon cancer.

Just about everyone I know who reads and writes poetry seriously owes a debt to him, directly or indirectly. Even though I never met him (the nearest I came was receipt of a hand-written note in the summer before he died) I still think of him as the single biggest influence on my poetry-writing (and therefore reading) life. As I think Peter Sansom said at the time, his death was the first of a public figure that moved me personally.

These are grand claims, but they are true. It was the poetry of Ted Hughes which first alerted me to the concept of poetry which was not a hymn or a nursery rhyme. It was the poetry of Ted Hughes which I first understood as belonging to and coming from 'a poet', a living one at that, and not just a name in an anthology. And finally it was in Ted Hughes's poems which I found for the first time, aged thirteen, a sense of excitement in the act of reading.

Specifically, this was the first time I remember experiencing that vertiginous yet intimate sensation of reading poems which were not about me whilst sensing that they knew aboslutely everything about me at the same time. In the English lessons of Tim Borton we looked at 'Retired Colonel', 'Thistles', 'Pike' and (of course) 'The Though-Fox'. Later I remember being given the poem 'Wind' to write about in an exam, and found that I could. I can still remember the weird and not altogether comforting sense of self-awareness that interpreting the poem gave me. I particularly enjoyed the 'black-/back gull bent like an iron bar slowly'.

In the week that Ted Hughes died I was staying at the house he had owned and lived in, Lumb Bank, now owned by the Arvon Foundation, near Heptonstall in Yorkshire. My colleague and friend Siân Hughes (no relation) and I were acting 'in loco parentis' for a group of young poets who were being tutored by poets Jo Shapcott and Roger McGough, as part of their prize in the first ever Foyle Young Poets Award (then called the Simon Elvin Young Poets Award).

In the way of the old joke, it only rained twice that week, once for three days, and once for four. In the brief hiatus between these downpours, the sun did shine with what the poem 'Wind' calls 'blade-light'. It filled the dining room where we sat writing, the only time we saw it that week. After setting us our morning exercise, I noticed Jo Shapcott leaving the room. Five minutes later she silently beckoned Siân and me to follow her into the kitchen, where she whispered to us the news. At that exact moment telephones began ringing in the house, which Jo wisely told us to ignore.

From then on we had two main concerns: to protect the young poets from the gaze of the outside world (there were sightings of film crews near the grave of Sylvia Plath in Heptonstall); and to honour the memory of this great man whose life had touched all of ours so deeply. The first we achieved quickly. Jo broke the news to the group around the table, and we held an impromptu minute's silence. We got them to agree to a self-imposed curfew, also immaculately observed. As Seamus Heaney says in one of his sonnets of grief for his mother 'we all knew one thing by being there'.

Later that night, around the hearth of the house, Jo read 'Wind' in his honour, and we toasted his memory. The windows did indeed tremble to come in and we all felt the roots of the house move below us. Every one of us understood that this was the very house Hughes wrote about in the poem we were hearing taking place inside our heads and in the elements outside.

Jo closed by saying that her lasting memory of Ted Hughes would be one of personal encouragement, particularly in letters and in personal conversations. 'It is the side of him the world will never see,' she said, 'because kindness does not sell papers. Let that be your legacy to each other.' 

Like reading one of Hughes's poems, it was not a comfy experience to live at the centre of the storm of interest in his life that week. But I was pleased to have been there because the experience reminded me what made me want to write poems in the first place.  Now I also felt I had the resources to keep going. 

 

Lifesaving Poems: James Schuyler's 'June 30, 1974'

 

James Schuyler is probably best known for being a central member of the New York School of poets comprising Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch. Having said that, it is probably fair to say that he is not as well known as his compatriots, a state of affairs which is neither just nor entirely explicable.

I was reminded of Schuyler's delicate, unnerving, gossipy and immediate poems this week as I read an essay of my friend Cliff Yates in which he describes the composition of poetry as an act about itself as much as the 'subect matter' at hand. 

Schuyler's project can be categorised in this way, it seems me. His long poems 'The Morning of the Poem', 'A Few Days' and 'Hymn to Life' range widely in their content but are all ultimately about themselves as constructed annotations of minute lived experience. They do not pretend to have been written at one sitting, often notating changes in weather, seasons and news of friends and in the wider world; in this way they are catalogues of experience, more akin to albums of snapshots than portraits in close-up. 

What makes Schuyler such a delight to read and re-read, is that he was no less accomplished at the short lyric 'poem of the moment'. 'June 30, 1974' is a good example of how these poems often proceed: there are mentions of specific friends and places, gossip, tabletalk, and a rapturous adoration of the natural world. It is also a good example of the poem as enactment of its own composition.

I like spending time with Schuyler's poems very much. In contrast to his perhaps more famous colleagues I feel the need to read him very slowly, one poem at a time, savouring the experiences that are being described. I do think he was a great love poet, by which I mean he was in love with every second he was alive and with the process of writing it down.

The poem below feels casual, almost throwaway. Can serious poetry be written at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning after a dinner party, while the rest of the house is asleep? Schuyler seems to imply not only that it can but that it is the true fountain spring of writing, among the dishes and the coffee cups, alone and in perfect quiet.

 

June 30, 1974

for Jane and Joe Hazan

 

Let me tell you

that this weekend Sunday

morning in the country

fills my soul

with tranquil joy:

the dunes beyond

the pond beyond

the humps of bayberry -

my favorite shrub (today,

at least) - are

silent as a mountain

range: such a 

subtle profile

against a sky that 

goes from dawn

to blue. The roses

stir, the grapevine

at one end of the deck

shakes and turns

its youngest leaves

so they show pale 

and flower-like.

A redwing blackbird

pecks at the grass;

another perches on a bush.

Another way, a millionaire's

white chateau turns

its flank to catch 

the risen sun. No

other houses, except

this charming one,

alive with paintings, 

plants and quiet.

I haven't said

a word. I like 

to be alone

with friends. To get up

to this morning view

and eat poached eggs

and extra toast with 

Tiptree Goosberry Preserve

(green) -and coffee,

milk, no sugar. Jane

said she heard

the freeze-dried kind

is healthier when

we went shopping

yesterday and she

and John bought

crude blue Persian plates.

How can coffee be 

healthful? I mused

as sunny wind

streamed in the car

window driving home.

Home! How lucky to

have one, how arduous

to make this scene

of beauty for 

your family and

friends. Friends!

How we must have

sounded, gossiping at

the dinner table

last night. Why, that

dinner table is 

this breakfast table:

"The boy in trousers

is not the same boy

in no trousers," who

said? Discontinuity

in all we see and are:

the same, yet change,

change, change. "Inez,

it's good to see you."

Here comes the cat, sedate,

that killed and brought

a goldfinch yesterday.

I'd like to go out 

for a swim but

it's a little cool

for that. Enough to 

sit here drinking coffee,

writing, watching the clear

day ripen (such

a rainy June we had)

while Jane and Joe

sleep in their room

and John in his. I

think I'll make more toast.

 

James Schuyler, from Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993)

Lifesaving Poems: Cliff Yates' 'Boggle Hole'

This has already been a memorable year, for I have seen my old friend Cliff Yates twice, both at poetry-related events. This increases my average sightings of Cliff in any given year by about 2000% and is a cause for clebration.

Cliff popped into my head again this week. He had emailed me a piece he has written called 'Flying: A Poetics' and wanted to know what I thought. It is lovely, and very typically Cliff, by which I mean it is generous and thoughful and gently provoking. Its subject is how the writing of poems itself becomes the experience or the subject of the poem.

If you do not know his work, you could worse than start with Frank Freeman's Dancing School (Salt, 2009). Reading the poems in this book, from which the poem below is taken, is a bit like watching the best kind of slapstick comedy: each gag is inevitable, hilarious and sad all at once. In his poems you see the wooden plank on the shoulder of one man as it spins around, misses his friend as he ducks out of the way then catches him in the face on the return circuit.

What Cliff also shows us, and this is what give the poems a special kind of resonance, is the following shot where you can catch the same man scrabbling around on the floor, looking for a contact lens, perhaps, or perhaps just scrabbling around on the floor. Cliff does not moralise or attempt to persuade us what this might mean.

'Boggle Hole' is funny, and lyrical and a bit sad all at once. I do think it displays Cliff's unique way of looking at and experiencing the world. I think the established trope to describe an oblique take on experience is now 'surreal'. This is not quite true of Cliff, since his poems are not voyages into the unconscious, even though there are unusual juxtapositions to be found (horses chewing at bike tyres, a donkey drawn on the sand).

In his own way I think the view of England that Cliff protrays is as distinctive as those created by Hughes or Larkin:

There used to be 

smugglers here and someone wrote 'LULU'

four feet high in the slipway's wet concrete.

It is a vision of inbetween places, where nothing much happens or promises to: where the horses snack on bike chains, boats are called Freedom, dogs run sideways, and the seaside donkeys are virtual.

 

Boggle Hole

 

Two new mountain bikes chained to the fence,

three horses lean over, bite at the tyres,

get the chain between their teeth,

eat most of a saddle and a hadlebar grip.

 

Boggle Hole Youth Hostel and someone

has written 'welcome to BOGGLE HELL'

on the bottom of the bunk above this one

in red felt tip and shaky writing.

 

A gang of bikers comes in late - a bottle

smashes outside the door then it's quiet

but for the talking, distorted, muffled

through the wall, apart from that voice...

 

After breakfast a tractor tows a boat

named Freedom into the sea. There used to be

smugglers here and someone wrote 'LULU'

four feet high in the slipway's wet concrete.

 

Freedom is oil-grey, just below the horizon

when a dog tears along sideways, its tongue out,

tasting the salt on the wind, and, in the first

drops of rain, a boy draws a donkey in the sand.

 

from Frank Freeman's Dancing School  (Salt, 2009)

Lifesaving Poems: Robert Rehder's 'Corminboeuf 157'

 

I was very sad to read yesterday that the American poet Robert Rehder died in 2009. I had no idea.

He was from Iowa, educated at Princeton and lived in Corminboeuf, a tiny hamlet in French-speaking Switzerland, which no one, not even the Swiss, have heard of.

Robert Redher's poems are an absolute delight, if you do not know his work. He published two collections with Carcanet, The Compromises Will be Different (1995) and First Things When (2009). I urge you to read him.

I discovered his work through a review of his first book by Ian MacMillan. I seem to remember him saying there was something kind of Huddersfield and kind of New York in his work, mixed with kind of something else he could not put his finger on. Labels are always a bad place to start when discussing poetry, a topic Rehder wrote much about in his academic work (when people ask me what kind of poetry I write I say 'The good kind, of course!'), but as it happens MacMillan was onto something, particularly the thing he could not put his finger on.

Mark Halliday has a line in one of his essays about contemporary poetry making intense investigations into ever smaller units of experience (I paraphrase). This seems to me much of what Rehder was up to. In 'Hidden Agenda' he details the 'crisis' of losing his favourite diary (I always trust a poet with the statienery thing), only to find it down the back of a sofa a few days later, having made the trip into to town to buy a new one. The effect is self-deprecating and charming: 'An event of this magnitude//Overshadows the destruction of the Berlin Wall/And the troubles in the Caucasus.'

In 'The Pequod Meets the Virgin' he details receiving an indifferent review of his poems by 'A would-be poet whom I will call D/Because you have never heard of him//And I hadn't either -':

When the first blind unreasoning rage had passed,

My implulse was to smash his face in

 

And knock him down.

He's smaller than I am

 

Even if he is a pretentious cretin.

I have no problem with criticism

 

As long as it's constructive,

But kicking him very hard in the crotch

 

Might not hurt him enough

Since he's a eunuch,

 

Therefore, it might be better

Just to beat him to a pulp.

 

These lines had me laughing out loud when I first read them. It seems to me they are a very accurate description of the rewards of life as a poet. I dare you not to recognise this.

A Redher poem is often about nothing very much at all: 'I am so bored by Corminboeuf/That I can't stand it -//My boredom, that is./ I lke Corminboeuf.//Only about half a dozen times a day/I wish I was somewhere else' ('Corminboeuf XXXIX').

When nothing dries up there is always the subject of the poems' composition to write about. I am still not sure if Rehder chose to do this as an act of defiance or desperation. 'I have just composed the first/Corminboeuf poem.//If this doesn't put Corminboeuf on the map,/What will?' ('The Affidavit (Corminboeuf II')). 'Corminboeuf III', the next poem in the book, begins less certainly: 'The third Corminboeuf poem is going/To be more difficult'. 

Writing in a foreign country in the middle of nowhere seems to have energised Rehder hugely. The poems in First Things When are still about themselves, about nothing and about Corminboeuf, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes as if they each represent each other. But there is wonderful satire on the America of George W Bush and on mall-culture, too. It is darker, perhaps, and tinged with sadness.

Here is the poem of Rehder's I read first. It is quoted on the back cover of his first book and does give a good idea of what he was up to.

I am so sorry to have just typed that last sentence in the past tense.

 

Corminboeuf 157

 

I am writing these poems

As fast as I can

 

So that I don't miss out on my late style

Which will be extremely allusive,

 

Very simple,

Freer than anything I've ever done.

 

(The compromises will be different.)

When I get there, the work

 

Will be already changing,

Further from everything,

 

Although I don't want to say goodbye,

And yet closer,

 

As the saucer reminds us of the cup.

The things that are not mentioned

 

Will go on existing,

Exerting their unspeakable presence

 

Like childhood

Or the books beside the bed in the next room -

 

I have my Montagne Sainte-Victoire.

The poems will be the wonder of the future

 

And totally American

Like all of the poets

 

From Eastern Iowa

Who live in Corminboeuf.

 

Robert Rehder, from The Compromises Will be Different (Carcanet, 1995).

 

Lifesaving Poems: Mandy Coe's 'Let's Celebrate'

I will forever be grateful to Emma Metcalfe from the Bath Festivals' Write Team for recommending to me Mandy Coe's wonderful book Clay, from which the poem below is taken.

I am slightly ashamed that I needed to be recommended the book in the first place, as Mandy is an old friend and colleague whose work I have always loved and admired. My excuse for not knowing about Clay is that in my slow recovery from treatment of cancer in 2007-08 I did not much feel like reading very much. I am not proud to admit that when news did reach me of books of friends I was content to let the opportunity of reading them pass by.

I was exhausted, physically and mentally. And I could not understand why I kept wanting to cry in public places.

Without overstating it, I do think that with a small number of other books of poems Clay is what got me reading poetry again. If you have not seen it, please check it out, you will not be sorry.

For one thing, Mandy does great titles. 'Sunflower Sex', anyone? 'Creationist Homework'? 'Sometimes it Occurs to me That I am Dead?'

For another thing, Mandy Coe is an original. No one looks at and writes about the world like she does. 'Stair-space is mysterious;/altering time and matter' she says in one poem ('You Only Notice Stairs During Strange Times'). In another poem a gecko 'pauses, receiving'. I love the minute attention to detail in that line, an almost Blakean sense of the divine in living things.

Everything in Mandy's world seems light. This is not to say she is not serious. I think everything Mandy writes is deadly serious, but wearing a grin and a cackle. Her project I think is to notice absolutely everything; not to do so, she seems to be saying, is not to live properly.

Which brings me to the perfect and devastating poem 'Let's Celebrate'. As I say, when I first read it I was still feeling my way into recovery and 'normal' life, including that of work. If I am honest I found it hard to believe that my diagnosis and treatment had happened to me. I could not believe that the world seemed to have gone on perfectly well without me contributing to it in any significant way other than to shuffle with my son backwards and forwards to his primary school. 

When I reached the end of the poem I actually felt winded. Few poems have the power both to acknowledge life in extremis while offering a vision of how it might be otherwise. I think Yeats called this a possession of both 'reality and justice'.

All I want to say to Mandy, and to her wonderful poem and book of poems, is thank you for noticing, and in noticing, giving me time to notice what is around me, even when 'nothing' is happening.

 

Let's Celebrate

 

the moments

where nothing happens.

The moments

that fill our lives.

Not the field bright with poppies, but

the times you walked, seeing

no leaves, no sky, only one foot

after another.

 

We are sleeping

(it's not midnight and 

there is no dream).

We enter a room - no one is in it.

We run a tap,

queue to buy a stamp.

 

These are the straw moments

that give substance 

to our astonishments;

moments the homesick dream of;

the bereaved, the diagnosed.

 

Many Coe, from Clay  (Shoestring Press)

The Preliminaries

Several years ago, just as rugby turned professional, I realised what I loved most about the game was the build-up: the banter in the studio, the fancy-dress of the crowds, the bands playing in the pouring rain out on the pitch. Nobody knows what is going to happen, least of all the players and managers. I love this liminal space of uncertainty and danger and swagger.

I wanted to celebrate this and did so in the poem below, from Nowhere Better Than This (Worple Press, 2002). I thought of it again the other day as I watched Canada coming onto the pitch in a cloudburst to play France at the Rugby World Cup.

I think this poem started off wanting to be sonnet, but then kind of fell apart, which seems appropriate. I have no memory of writing it at all.

 

 

The Preliminaries

 

I love the preliminaries at internationals,

the camera panning down the ranks of players,

arms locked behind them, bringing every follicle,

every pore to us, their nervousness,

 

the flat unashamed cry of their singing

ahead of the band and the crowd,

Vaseline glowing on their foreheads,

gumshields flashing, their hard swallowing

 

faces shivering, thighs jerking

their knees forward, the glazed

handshakes with royalty sending

them trotting off like schoolboys

 

to face the opening whistle, crowd-bay,

wind-tears, the thunder.

 

from Nowhere Better Than This (Worple Press, 2002)

Lifesaving Poems: Moniza Alvi's 'I Would Like to be a Dot in a Painting by Miro'

 

I first read Moniza Alvi's wonderful 'I Would Like to be a Dot in a Painting by Miro' in the book she shared with Peter Daniels, Peacock Luggage (Smith/Doorstep,1992). The selection of poems she chose to publish in this book also appeared in The Country At My Shoulder, her debut full-length collection with Oxford University Press, not long afterwards.

The feeling I had on finishing reading the poem was something close to elation, I remember. I felt transported to a completely different world and way of looking at the same, by a voice that sounded completely self-assured. Here was someone, I thought, who had arrived.

On the surface the poem is not self-consciously 'about' the poet at all. Choosing to speak in an assumed voice about the overlooked 'dot', it nevertheless tackles huge subjects: of art, gender, race and sexuality at the margins. This is all done in a voice which sounds effortless, chatty even. It is also explicitly a poem of 'joy' and celebration.

I have read the poem countless times over the years and the more I do so, the more I think that its most important line is not the description of the 'tawny sky', the 'lemon stripe' or the 'beauty of the linescape', gorgeous though those phrases are. The more I read this poem the line that cuts me in two each time I do so is its unassuming centre: 'But it's fine where I am'.

At first reading I thought this comically throwaway, and not terribly poetic to boot. What I have come to appreciate about it over the years is the way it lends the whole piece a tone of lightness. Without it the poem struggles to achieve its concluding note of acceptance, of relish in imperfection. The poem holds in tension the reality of life at the 'edge', a space it denotes as 'fine'. This is the 'adventure' at the heart of the poem, it seems to me, which, for all its lightness of touch, is a deadly serious challenge.  

 

I Would Like to be a Dot in a Painting by Miro

 

I would like to be a dot in a painting by Miro.

 

Barely distinguishable from other dots,

it's true, but quite uniquely placed.

And from my dark centre

 

I'd survey the beauty of the linescape

and wonder-would it be worthwhile

to roll myself towards the lemon stripe,

 

centrally poised, and push my curves

against its edge, to get myself

a little extra attention?

 

But it's fine where I am.

I'll never make out what's going on

around me, and that's the joy of it.

 

The fact that I'm not a perfect circle

makes me more interesting in this world.

People will stare forever-

 

even the most unemotional get excited.

So here I am, on the edge of animation,

a dream, a dance, a fantastic construction,

 

a child's adventure.

And nothing in this tawny sky

can get too close, or move too far away.

 

Moniza Alvi

from The Country at my Shoulder (OUP, 1993)