The Write Team Conference: Creativity, Confidence and Challenge

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Before I was silent now I think loud: The Write Team Conference

 

Emma Metcalfe
Project Manager

Bath Festivals
Third Floor
Abbey Chambers
Kingston Buildings
Bath
BA1 1NT

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E: emma.metcalfe@bathfestivals.org.uk" />emma.metcalfe@louise.betts@bathfestivals.org.uk mailto:bethany.alexander@bathfestivals.org.uk">louise.betts@bathfestivals.org.uk">bathfestivals.org.uk

 

 

Lifesaving Poems: Tomas Tranströmer's 'Alone'

 

It was a real treat to read Paul Batchelor's concise and enthusiastic review of Tomas Tranströmer's New Collected Poems in last Saturday's Guardian Review.

It reminded me of what I value about Tranströmer's poetry: the very odd sensation of witnessing experience as though from an altogether new perspective.

The poem I have included in my Lifesaving Poems series is one I have written about elsewhere on this site, the famous poem 'Alone', about a car accident and its aftermath in the writer's life.

I was drawn to this poem long before the opening line 'One evening in February I came near to dying here' took on a special resonance when I was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma on Valentine's Day, 2006. On first reading it reminded me of the time that our family car similarly skidded sideways on ice in the Jura mountains after we had spent Christmas with my mother's family.

I especially liked the description of slow-motion panic and frustration: the 'transparent terror that floated like egg white./The seconds grew - there was space in them -/they grew as big as hospital buildings'. I like the risk in these images, the connecting of the familiar and everyday to an abstract and real state of terror. But describing time as big is not especially new, maybe even cliched; and the poet risks overstating his case by linking this idea with what is perhaps obvious in this case of a car accident: hospital buildings. The effect is both immediate and otherworldly, apprehended as though pre-verbally in these highly cinematic images.

As Paul Batchelor rightly points out in his Guardian review, the second part of this poem describes the effect of this incident in the life of the poem's speaker: 'I must be alone/ten minutes in the morning/and ten minutes in the evening./- Without a programme.' It is as though the events described in Part 1 of the poem take the speaker into a space in which only silence can provide succour and reassurance in a world where 'Everyone is queuing at everyone's door'.

There is a quiet determination in these lines, yet they do not attempt to offer an overt reassurance of their own. Tranströmer presents, he does not preach. In their take-it-or-leave-it finality the closing lines of this poem similarly guide the reader into a new contemplation of space and silence, advocating them neither as threatening nor essential.

 

Alone

 

I

 

One evening in February I came near to dying here.

The car skidded sideways on the ice, out

on the wrong side of the road. The approaching cars -

their lights - closed in.

 

My name, my girls, my job

broke free and were left silently behind

further and further away. I was anonymous

like a boy in a playground surrounded by enemies.

 

The approaching traffic had huge lights.

They shone on me while I pulled at the wheel

in a transparent terror that floated like egg white.

The seconds grew - there was space in them -

they grew as big as hospital buildings.

 

You could almost pause

and breathe out for a while

before being crushed.

 

Then something caught: a helping grain of sand

or a wonderful gust of wind. The car broke free

and scuttled smartly right over the road.

A post shot up and cracked - a sharp clang - it

flew away in the darkness.

 

Then - stillness. I sat back in my seat-belt

and saw someone coming through the whirling snow

to see what had become of me.

 

II

 

I have been walking for a long time

on the frozen Östergötland fields.

I have not seen a single person.

 

In other parts of the world

there are people who are born, live and die

in a perpetual crowd.

 

To be always visible - to live

in a swarm of eyes -

a special expression must develop.

Face coated with clay.

 

The murmuring rises and falls

while they divide up among themselves

the sky, the shadows, the sand grains.

 

I must be alone

ten minutes in the morning

and ten minutes in the evening.

- Without a programme.

 

Everyone is queuing at everyone's door.

 

Many.

 

One.

 

 

Tomas Tranströmer, from New Collected Poems (Bloodaxe), trs. Robin Fulton

 

 

Poetry Exhaustion

 

Poetry Exhaustion

 

If you write poetry (and I assume that if you do, you are also actively engaged in reading it), sooner or later Poetry Exhaustion is going to happen to you. By Poetry Exhaustion I mean the complete lack of that shock of recognition you’ve always been able to count on from a favourite unputdownable book of poems. Or the sudden knowledge that the poems you have been working on for the last two months are certainly not your best work and actually not even worth keeping (though you do, in case).

​It is normal to run out of steam, for the language to dry up, and for formerly exciting poets to suddenly appear dull.  The good news is that there are ways, not of avoiding Poetry Exhaustion, but of dealing with it so as to lessen its impact.

​The first and most fundamental of these is to adopt an open attitude of mind: towards reading poets you have not read before; to writing in styles and/or voices which are new to you; to varying your writing routines. (Ann Sansom once said to me that running a bath was an ideal activity for the latter: see if you can get a first draft done before the bathwater overflows.) Another key attitude is what Ken Smith once called ‘absolute patience’: ‘mooch[ing] about…mucking about in a library…going on a journey; finding silence; entering places where English is not spoken; sleeping a lot and dreaming…until the poem begins to nudge’ (from How to Publish Your Poetry, Peter Finch, 1985).

​There is another kind of Poetry Exhaustion, different in circumstance and intensity to the everyday variety I have mentioned. This can occur when difficult events in our lives (death, separation, illness) conspire to close down all effort of concentration towards the fresh look and listen that poetry can reward us with. This is also natural enough. Speaking from personal experience of cancer, the very last thing I wanted to do after each of my chemotherapy treatments was to pick up a book of poetry. ‘Aren’t you writing about it?’ my friends asked. I was, in prose, but not until I had recovered did I feel poetry returning to me.

​There is a third kind of Poetry Exhaustion, even more serious perhaps. This is the bone-dry, lost-in-the-desert variety, which, unlike its cousins, is completely avoidable. The mistake I made after recovering from cancer was to exaggerate the importance of the praise I received for The Year of Drinking Water, a pamphlet I produced in support of the Exeter Leukaemia Fund, the charity which finances the haematology unit where I was treated. These poems seemed to affect those who came into contact with them very directly. To receive their heartfelt and immediate words of affirmation meant a great deal to me (and still does), especially in the context of having lived through such a traumatic experience. But, ridiculously, I found myself expecting the same kind of affirmation in the rest of my life in poetry. In other words, I began looking to poetry for rewards that are not within its gift. The writing has to be enough.

Experience should have taught me that praise in this field is rare. Anne Lamott describes looking for this as giving cocaine to your ego. It is fatal. Because when the emails ceased arriving (as they always do), I was left not with the surety of having done a difficult job to the best of my ability, but with a growing resentment and certainty that people’s earlier responses had been insincere. My second mistake was to get angry. Onto this spark of anger I poured fuel: that the merits of poetry were illusory and a waste of my time and talent. And that is how I was prepared to leave matters.

What snapped me out of my stupidity was again illness, not mine this time, but a friend’s. Lucy Mason was a designer and maker of textile wall-hangings. She was diagnosed with lung cancer a few weeks before my remission began. She endured her illness for over two years with grace, courage and humour, always in hope that she would get better, but always aware she might not. Eventually the news came through that it was a case of when, not if, she would die. This is what it took to rouse me from my self-imposed, childish refusal to believe in what Seamus Heaney calls ‘the power and scope of poetry’. I began writing a poem for Lucy, as a present for her, taking the title of one of her wall-hangings as my starting point. A race against time (more serious than running a bath), I wrote at traffic lights, in the dark, during meetings and at mealtimes. I’m pleased to say that she was able to read the finished poem in the days before even reading was lost to her. I am not proud to relate, however, that it took the early death of a friend to reconnect me to the art-form that I love so much.

If poetry is a great love in your life – how could it not be, you are reading Smiths Knoll –and you feel that love ebbing away: take courage, for it will return. Try running a bath, or reading John Ash.

I am still in the foothills of my recovery.  For the last eighteen months I have mostly been reading poems in translation: Rutger Kopland’s Memories of the Unknown, Piotr Sommer’s Continued, Marin Sorescu’s The Bridge; and a poet who is new to me, the wonderful George Messo’s Entrances. I’ve also read some old favourites (Kaplinski, Tranströmer). As a friend recently said to me – when you have been angry with the Bible begin again at the last place God spoke to you:

In the empty block

across the lake from here

you notice first a light

go on go off go on again.

 

You wonder who

at this late hour

stirs in rooms

darkness uninhabits.

 

And then yourself, alone,

gazing from a room

towards the light

across the lake from here.

 

George Messo (‘The Beautiful Apartments’)

 

Anthony Wilson, August 2009

via s3.amazonaws.com

First published in Smiths Knoll in 2009.

Lifesaving Poems: Janet Fisher's 'Women Who Dye Their Hair'

 

I first had the pleasure of reading this remarkable and delightful poem by Janet Fisher in 2001 in the company of a room full of chuckling people with Ann Sansom at the Arvon Foundation Writing Centre at Totleigh Barton.

It is from her wonderful collection of the same name, which you can find on the Smith Doorstop website.

What I felt about the poem then, and still feel now, is that it appears artless, almost 'careless', as the poem has it. It is anything but. Comprising just two sentences, it is a bravado display of control which moves between defiance and despair, so neatly encapsulated in the final line.

It is a brilliant example of how a poem can appear to be 'about' one thing (dying your hair, secret trips to Boots), but is just as much 'about' other things (age, sex and death). The tension between the 'artificial' products described and the inevitability of being told you look old by teenagers is what gives the poem its energy and 'finish'.

If you haven't read Janet Fisher's work before, this is a great place to start -but you should also check out her wonderful book Brittle Bones (Salt, 2008). I do think she is one of the sanest poets who has ever lived.

 

Women Who Dye Their Hair 

 

Some of us have done it since our twenties

when our hair turned white on the death of a loved one

or it ran in the family like baldness, and some of us

spray red or purple on shaved stubble,

and others have let it creep up on us,

countnig the odd hair, then the fifth, the fiftieth,

till our teenagers point out how old we're getting

but our lovers who hate anything artificial

like make-up and sequins, though they accept

icecream and the Pill, say we shouldn't bother,

so we steal home from Boots with the ColorGlo

and lock ourselves in the bathroom in rubber gloves,

emerge an hour later ten years younger

with a smart grey streak over one temple

and mahogany smudges round the jaw line.

And when the roots start to show we carelessly

pop into the hairdresser and book a colour

which means a cut and finish and takes all morning

so we can catch up on our reading, extending

our knowledge of the stars and multiple orgasm,

but we have to go every six weeks or it starts to fade

and by now the local firm is turning our hair to hay

so we find a better one at fifty quid a splash,

a rollercoaster we can't get off of,

and we decide to let it all grow out and be our age

which isn't a hundred and five but might as well be.

 

Janet Fisher, from Women Who Dye Their Hair (Smith Doorstop, 2001)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lifesaving Poems: William Blake's 'The Divine Image' (via Lies Damned Lies)

 

I was reminded of 'The Divine Image' the other night at about three in the morning when my daughter came in to talk about her plans for revising William Blake for her A level English. The exam is next week.

So I exaggerate. It was more like half past ten.

My experience of this poem is as a song, not a poem, thanks to the beautiful setting of it by Lies Damned Lies (who are Steve Butler, Charlie Irvine and Dot Reid) on their live album The Human Dress. 

They have claimed in an interview that the poem/song is about incarnation: the presence of God in everyone -as Charlie Irvine puts it: 'Something to stake your life on.'

But for all of the weight of its doctrinal imperative, the poem does not act on us because of the 'truth' it espouses. It acts upon us precisely because it is a poem, beginning in delight and ending in wisdom as Frost would have it.

As Seamus Heaney has said in The Government of the Tongue: 'It does not say to the accusing crowd or to the helpless accused 'Now a solution will take place', it does not propose to be instrumental or effective. Instead, in the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as a distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.'

You do not have to believe in God (or god) or the incarnation to be persuaded of those things while living in the world of the poem as you read it.  But it is hard not to. 

This is one of the paradoxes of poetry.

 

 

The Divine Image

 

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love

All pray in their distress;

And to these virtues of delight

Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love

Is God our Father dear,

And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love

Is man, His child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart,

Pity, a human face,

And Love, the human form divine,

And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man, of every clime,

That prays in his distress,

Prays to the human form divine,

Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

And all must love the human form,

In heathen, Turk, or Jew;

Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell

There God is dwelling too.

 

William Blake (via Lies Damned Lies: The Human Dress, Sticky Music)

To read about The Human Dress click here

To listen to more Lies Damned Lies music click here 

 

 

Lifesaving Poems: Mark Robinson's 'Domestic Bliss'

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of getting back in touch with Mark Robinson, poet, author and former editor of the late and wonderful Scratch magazine.

Mark had written to say that he had noticed he was in my Lifesaving Poems list and that he was chuffed to be next to Keats. Here is why I love Mark's poetry and 'Domestic Bliss' in particular.

I chose 'Domestic Bliss' because it saved my life at a time that was incredibly exciting for me, around 1991. I had just rearranged my working life around reading and writing poetry, part of which process meant I had begun subscribing to a range of small press poetry magazines which were new to me. Scratch was one of these.

Also around this time I began running a writers and artists group called Bull, with my friend Luke Bretherton, in my kitchen in Brixton. For the price of a bottle of (usually very cheap red) wine friends of friends of friends could descend on our house and read/show/play their latest piece of work. As I say, all of this was new and exciting to me.

Up to this point I had written alone, in the dark and in secret. It had taken me a very long time to notice that no one knew my work because I was not showing it to anyone. Subscribing to magazines like Scratch and taking part in Bull were among the most the most formative experiences of my writing life, therefore. Suddenly I was in contact with people who cared about words and poems and metaphors in the same way I did. I realised I was not alone.

So I would send Mark my wry little poems about changing nappies and I would see his in Scratch and in other places like The North and The Wide Skirt. I liked them immediately because, as Kenneth Koch said about Frank O'Hara, there was nothing in them I did not like. There were references to the music of Mowtown and making curry, all shot through with a gentle cynicism which never overwhelmed the poems or threatened to become less than generous. 

I love 'Domestic Bliss' because it reminds me of that time and because it is a lovely domestic poem that achieves much more than it appears to do, all in the space of 16 lines (or a glass of blackcurrant wine). I do think you would have to be from Mars not to be able to relate to what it describes. On a personal note I want to say that 'The world is hard but worth it' is one of the great last lines of any poem, and I wish I had written it.

'Your smile leaps out from behind your teeth' is not far behind.

 

Domestic Bliss

 

The mess gets worse as the beautiful world

tries harder, expands on its original mistake -

something crass blurted out in a fluster -

making a mountain out of moleshit.

 

You and I aren't bothered. Too busy to 

beat the wolves back from the doorstep, too tired

to be pissed off at anything, tonight

the blackcurrant wine is dying our tongues

 

the colour of our hearts. We're saying what we mean,

for once, and it feels good, making plans

for the future as if there were no tomorrow.

Your smile leaps out from behind your teeth.

 

We can do whatever we want.

What we want to do right now is 

get sordid in front of the fire.

The world is hard but worth it.

 

Mark Robinson

from The Horse Burning Park (Stride)

On Martin Stannard and Paul Scholes: The Ingredient (Lifesaving Poems)

Photo: Merenna Wilson

 

'If he had been Spanish then maybe he would bave been valued more.'

-Xavi Hernandez (Spain and Barcelona) on Paul Scholes (England and Manchester United)

 

Writing on Tuesday about Alasdair Paterson's wonderful 'Fishermen' put me in mind of a wonderful favourite poem of mine by Martin Stannard. The Ingredient, below, is part of my Lifesaving Poems series, and here's why.

I was thinking in my post about Alasdair that I love the sense of mystery at the heart of 'Fishermen'; we never really know what is going on at the poem's heart. I also love the sense that it does not seem to matter a great deal to the poet whether he has worked out what is going on either. What was it Keats said about living in ambiguities? 'Fishermen' is a good example of that.

Martin Stannard's 'The Ingredient' also has that quality, though of course it is a completely different poem and works in a different way from Alasdair's. I first came across it in the library at the Arvon Centre at Totleigh Barton in Devon. The then centre director was having a bit of a spring clean, and I picked up The Gracing of Days (Slow Dancer), where this comes from, and Denying England (Wide Skirt), for virtually nothing.

I couldn't belive my luck. I had driven out there especially for a house warming for the new centre directors. Though I live in Devon I was new to the area and had got lost and was a bit frazzled on arriving. My children, who were young at the time, had accompanied me, and they were frazzled as well.

While they set about eating all the crisps I picked up Martin's book at random, having enjoyed his work in magazines. I found 'The Ingredient'. I have set about finding his work, by foul means or fair, ever since. I do happen to think he is a genius. Which is why I began this piece with a quote by a Spanish footballer.

Martin is a bit like Paul Scholes in that he has been plying his trade in plain view for ages now (at least the duration of Scholes' 17-year career), but mostly unfeted and unloved, in contrast to Manchester's finest. Had he come from New York, or Zagreb, we would all be calling him a genius by now. But he isn't, and we don't. I know virtually nothing about him, except that he lived in Beeston for a bit, and may well now be teaching and living in China.

I can't define my experience of 'The Ingredient' (and countless of Martin's other poems), except to say that I love being and living while I am reading and experiencing it. The pleasure pulses through my veins, you might say. It makes me smile, even though I will go to my grave knowing no more of why teacups have it and mugs do not.

 

The Ingredient 

 

Teacups have it.

I don’t know why teacups have it,

but teacups do.

Horses turned out into a cold field have it,

as do the smouldering remains of a bonfire.

Mugs do not have it.  That’s a certainty.

Sacks of coal at the back gate have it,

and jig-saw puzzles have it,

and a river meandering through life has it.

A canal seems to have it, but it hasn’t.

A bike has it, if it is a very very old bike.

Coloured pencils have it.

Leg irons are said to have it, but that’s a joke,

and a very cruel joke at that.

This hasn’t got it, but neither has a bottle of turps.

A Del Shannon 45 on the London label has it,

although a compilation LP of his Greatest Hits

doesn’t have it even though it’s tried really hard.

Ham salad has it.

Or rather, ham salad can have it but it doesn’t always.

Leather gauntlets have it, if they are brown leather gauntlets.

Discarded silk at the foot of the bed doesn’t have it,

although sometimes it’s worth pretending that it does.

Night has it, if it has been snowing.

The sea has it, even though it is saddened by oil,

and I am happy to live by the sea.

Aircraft do not have it.

Parks used to have it, but most have lost it

and are unlikely to regain that which has been squandered.

But ducks and swans have it.  Especially swans.

And certain dreams have it.

Not all dreams, but certain dreams.

Some photographs have it.

Some photographs do not.

You do not have it, but not having it is not everything.

I rarely have it, and even when I do

it seems as if I am not quite myself.

Perhaps this explains how come teacups have it

and mugs do not.

 

Martin Stannard

from The Gracing of Days (Slow Dancer, 1989)