Wednesday 31 August 2011

Lifesaving Poems: Peter Sansom's K563

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In my last blog post I wrote about the importance of following one's nose in terms of developing a taste in poetry. This is how I first came across the work of Peter Sansom. As I remember it was a piece by Ian MacMillan in Poetry Review, in which he compared Peter's work with that of Alan Jenkins, which sparked my interest in his work. In amongst talk of the TLS, The Northern School and The North, MacMillan spoke with both delicacy and power of the sensibility at work in Everything You've Heard is True, Peter's debut collection for Carcanet. His point was that however slight the poems appeared, there was a much more subtle and restless spirit at work than the easy-going surfaces of the poems gave lie to.

A week or two later I found myself with a half-hour to spare in a bookshop, fell in love with the book's cover, and snapped it up on spec having read the poem below. At the time I did not understand the references to the music and life of Mozart (the title of the book is the tag-line used on the posters for the film Amadeus), but this did not put me off feeling compelled by the delicious feeling of witnessing scenes from my own life flash in front of my eyes.

The poem is about the end of an affair, but as I have returned to it over the years I increasingly think it both fits with and prefigures many of the themes in Peter's subsequent work: the place and 'use' of art in everyday life, and the cost of making such artefacts (music, books, poems) in the lives of individuals and their families and loved ones. His third book, Point of Sale, is particularly interested in descriptions of 'the money coming in/[not] covering the bills', for example.

The poem's speaker appears not to have a choices: he can neither prevent himself from nodding off, nor the arrival of 'someone new'. The poem's energy is derived, it seems to me, from the tension set up by these descriptions which are in contrast with the choices the speaker is very explicitly active in presenting to us: 'the cat,/who will be staying, stalks a daytime moth'; the churchbells tolling exactly 'eleven'; the poppies' 'splash of colour'. The finish of the poem is indeed 'very civilized'. But what it seems to be doing, however, is questionning the work of the artist in noticing and articulating these details, as it were celebrating while cautioning its own artistry.

 

K563

 

As on most fine summer Sundays

we are breakfasting outside with our books.

This morning it is one of the Divertimenti

keeps the neighbours to themselves.

Now I can remember that man's name -Puchberg-

who funded Mozart when his wife was ill

              and the money coming in 

wasn't covering the bills.

This is Vienna in 1788 in sunlight.

 

What are we supposed to do?

I open a connversation about Mozart

and you look up from the Penguin biography.

               The sky is a Prussian blue

and our back-yard garden is lit with music.

 

We are not yet thirty, and our lives

                are just about to start.

There is someone new, but that

is not why you are leaving. The cat,

who will be staying, stalks a daytime moth;

two stray poppies add a splash of colour.

 

It is very civilised. We are parting like friends.

On the breeze the churchbell tolls eleven.

Coming so far he won't arrive till three,

but your cases are already packed in case.

I've not slept properly for days

and now I need to be awake I find I'm dozing.

                When the record finishes

it is the hairfine crack in a teacup, ticking,

or a clock, perhaps, loud and very exact.

 

Peter Sansom, from Everything You've Heard is True

Sunday 28 August 2011

Lifesaving Poems: Jaan Kaplinski's 'This morning was cold'

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In my last blog post I wrote about the influence of social contexts upon one's reading, specifically that of my friend Duncan Kramer's copy of The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, and my discovery in it of a host of poets including Hugo Williams and Douglas Dunn. I have made many countless discoveries this way through friends like Naomi Jaffa, Michael Laskey, Jean Sprackland, Andy Brown and Peter Carpenter. Each one of their recommendations has gone off in my life like a tiny time bomb, the effects of which are still resonating on all kinds of levels, not least pleasure. I am going to come back to these in future posts.

But there are also some discoveries you make on your own, by following your nose, and these are just as precious to me. One of these is the work of the Estonian scholar, politician and poet Jaan Kaplinski. I try to read something by him on most days; increasingly I am thinking of him as my desert island poet, the one I would keep above all others. I can't really explain this any more rationally than to say I just like being in his presence. That's it. Reading his poems I feel as though he is sitting across the room/table/chair from me, silently nodding or smiling. As Philip Gross said in his seminal early review of his work 'Very conscious of the places words cannot reach, his poems create a space around them that is intensely good to be in.' That pretty much sums it up for me. It reminds me of an Ethan Canin quote somewhere in Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird which says that the most important thing a storyteller needs is a narrative voice the reader will find likeable. Kaplinski possesses this.

The poem below is from my favourite of his books, The Wandering Border (Harvill, 1992), translated into beautiful plain English by the author with Sam Hamill and Riina Tamm. I should say at this point that it does not belong in his recent and triumphant Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2011) -which you should buy anyway.

What I love about the poem is the way it presents an ordinary sequence of events as though they are at the same time full of mystery and even a little menace, but without any accompanying commentary or moralising. The speaker is explicit: 'I had no counsel to offer...' and this applies equally to the presence of 'night vandals', the 'freezing' June weather and 'militiamen', as well as the 'troubles' of his friend. The poem pulls back from seeking to be, in the phrase of Seamus Heaney, 'instrumental or effective'. It is prepared to let things coexist, if not happily, then at least with clarity, allowing the speaker and world he is part of to 'see his course', implicitly inviting us to do the same.

 

This morning was cold, but it warmed about mid-day.

Blue clouds piled up in the north.

I came from a meeting -a discussion of

the teaching of classical languages-

and I was sitting by the river with a friend

who wanted to tell me his troubles.

The water was still high. Two boys

were throwing pebbles from the bank into the river.

I had no counsel to offer... There were

no benches on the bank -probably night vandals

had thrown them into the water once again.

The sun slipped behing a cloud. We were freezing.

We rose and went back to town.

Perhaps he could see his course.

I stopped at a shop for oatmeal and bread.

It was June. Going home, I saw

three young militiamen winding their Rubik's cube.

 

Jaan Kaplinksi, from The Wandering Border

Wednesday 17 August 2011

Lifesaving Poems: On Hugo Williams and Douglas Dunn

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I can remember exactly where I was when I first read these poems. It was on the balcony of the squat of my friend Duncan Kramer, in Bromley in the summer of 1984.

The house had been earmaked for demolition to make way for a ring road. It was shared by Duncan with five other art students, each of whom attended Ravensbourne College of Art on furniture/product and graphic design courses. It was perhaps the most chaotic house I had ever seen, with bikes and car repair tools littering the hallways and landing, no locks on the bathroom or lavatory doors (you had to claim occupancy with a post-it note), and a constant mix of music seeping through the pores of each floor and ceiling.

I used to escape my bedsit in Golders Green to visit Duncan on the other side of the universe, turning up at his door unnanounced with a bottle of wine in the hope of being fed and entertained for the weekend. If he was irritated by these raids of mine, he never showed it.

I do think they were some of the most formative experiences of my life.

It was through Duncan that I had first met the work of Seamus Heaney (one winter he walked around with a copy of Field Work in his donkey jacket pocket), and now I was meeting other poets who were not on the syllabus of the English Literature degree I was doing: Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin, Douglas Dunn, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Hugo Williams. They were all to be found between the pages of a tiny looking paperback, The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion and published only two years previously.

We were sitting on his balcony with coffee and the papers, having got up late one Saturday morning, when I began glancing through this little book of poems, intrigued by the artwork on the front cover and drawn in by the lure of reading more Heaney.

To the sound of weekend shopping and ordinary south London traffic I read these lines of quiet longing and utter clarity, feeling as though someone had taken a look inside my head and made a snapshot of it for all to see:

 

Tides


The eveing advances, then withdraws again

leaving our cups and books like islands on the floor.

We are drifting you and I,

as far from one another as the young heroes

of these two novels we have just laid down.

For that is happiness: to wander alone

surrounded by the same moon, whose tides remind us of ourselves,

our distances, and what we leave behind.

The lamp left on, the curtains letting in the light.

These things were promises. No doubt we will come back to them.

 

It seemed to describe perfectly the liminal world I was living in, with its descriptions of abandoned paperbacks, lamps left on and aimless wandering. I loved that I could see everything in the poem, while feeling that its main action as it were, remained mysterious, out of reach. Right at the poem's centre was a big abstract noun, 'happiness', a word I was deeply suspicious of, let alone seen described with such stark negatives, in terms of distances, departures and delayed fulfilment of promises.

Yet I was very happy to read it. My reading up to that point had been Geoffery Summerfield's Worlds and A Alvarez' The New Poetry, Hopkins and Plath for A level, Ted Hughes and McGough for O level, the early poems of TS Eliot, bits of Yevtushenko and some Thom Gunn. Having read Plath in particular, I was both surprised and delighted to see that the moon could appear just as itself.

Flicking through the book from front to back I next came across Douglas Dunn. The book seemed to fall open at 'On Roofs of Terry Street':

 

On Roofs of Terry Street

 

Television aerials, Chinese characters

in the lower sky, wave gently in the smoke.

 

Nest-building sparrows peck at moss,

urban flora and fauna, soft, unscrupulous.

 

Rain drying on the slates shines sometimes.

A builder is repairing someone's leaking roof.

 

He kneels upright to rest his back.

His trowel catches the light and becomes precious.

 

I did not know until I read these poems that if you wanted to say in a poem that rain drying on the slates shines sometimes you could actually say 'Rain drying on the slates shines sometimes'.  It seems so obvious, looking back at it now, but I cannot overestimate the shock and the joy of discovering the power of plain language, aged 20, one sunny South London Saturday.

 

I have felt indebted to Duncan Kramer ever since that moment, for the frenzy of reading, borrowing, buying and writing of poetry that has ensued in my life as a result. I am not sure anything has come close, before or since, to confirming my pleasure and awareness of the numinous, and awakening my desire to 'credit marvels' (Heaney again) in the everyday.

 

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Monday 15 August 2011

Not Cricket

I began writing this poem in 1996 in response to the election of a BNP councillor in Tower Hamlets, the first of its kind in England. I was not happy with the poem and shelved it, quietly. I picked it up again in 2001, when it was published by Third Way magazine, under a different title. Still not completely happy with the poem, I shelved it a second time.

I reproduce the poem in its final draft here for the first time, some fiteeen years since its inception.

 

 

Not Cricket

 

 

Oddly I am in love with your rain

and on Fridays my favourite food

is pizza. My father is charming

and my mother beautiful.

In spare time they are human.

 

I also state without lying

when Southgate missed against Germany

I wept.  (Weeping

can sometimes be laughing  

as leather cracks Smith on the helmet.)

 

When shit falls from the letterbox

cricket is not in it when I smell it.

Freedom has brought fair play

into the home so now it is war

in the pleasant land.

 

If you see me teaching blood

like a language in the street

do not worry.  Tomorrow  

we go to the ballot box

to cast our votes, our stones.