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)

 

Poetry and 9/11

 

I am a little late in writing these reflections prompted by the tenth anniversary of 9/11. What I want to say concerns not so much the events of that day, which have been endlessly analysed and described elsewehere, rather than a personal memory of what I was thinking and writing about at the time and how these have changed in the intervening decade.

Like everyone else I can remember the day very clearly. It was a beautiful day here in Exeter as well, with a crisp blue sky and warm sunshine. I had begun writing up my doctoral research study of teaching poetry writing to primary-age children for only a few weeks, and had reached something of an impasse in my literature review.

I was trying to argue that poetry was an important human need, not a frippery, as important as narrative perhaps, and that its place in the reading, writing and speaking and listening curriculum of children should be a reflection of that.

But I had come up against Geroge Steiner's argument which proposed that an intellectual life saturated with poetry is in fact no guarantee of civilised behaviour. He based this argument on an analysis of the compartmentalised lives of Nazi guards and officers who would exterminate Jews in the daytime and return home in the evening to listen to Wagner and read Goethe. 

The famous line of W.H. Auden that 'poetry makes nothing happen' also appeared to weigh in favour of condemning poetry to the margins. This troubled me greatly. 

Then, coming home from a buying a loaf of bread, I watched the planes go in to the Twin Towers. Seamus Heaney's words from his essay 'The Government of the Tongue' seemed freighted with a kind of negative capability as to poetry's 'use' in the face of such horror: 'Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil - no lyric has ever stopped a tank.' 

Sitting thousands of miles from the appalling events in New York my little study of children slowly learning to respond to and make poetry somehow more central in their lives suddenly seemed like a very lame exercise indeed. And here was Seamus Heaney, who had seen enough troubles of his own, appearing to confirm my suspicion.

I was relieved to read on, however. In a reference to the story in John's Gospel of a woman caught in adultery being brought before Jesus by the Pharisees, Heaney says this: 'In another sense, [the efficacy of poetry] is unlimited. It is like the writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed...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.'

Heaney is right. Poems do not prevent planes being flown deliberately into buildings. Paradoxically this helped me greatly. I knew rationally that my research was not going to change the world or bring about peace. But I also felt emboldened as I sat down to write my study in those days after the towers fell.

New York was the home of Kenneth Koch, member of the eponymous school of poets of that city and pioneer of teaching poetry to pupils and teachers in landmark projects recorded in Wishes, Lies and Dreams and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Whether they realise it or not, he influenced everyone who has encouraged a child to write imaginatively. I suddenly felt that I owed the liberal and liberating ideas that Koch stood for the respect and honour of finishing my work to the best of my ability. 

Like everything I have cared about writing, it was not easy. The project lurched around seemingly out of control at times, followed by periods of great flow and purpose. Sustaining me through it all, even when I was asked to rewrite it, was the knowledge that not having the answer to the question of poetry's 'usefulness' did not matter. It was too big a problem, and one I had not set out to appease. What did matter was paying due attention to the words of the children I had worked with, both spoken and written. In the end I went where the energy was. That is all I could do and all I have tried to do since.

Lifesaving Poems: Tony Hoagland's 'Jet'

Thanks to the recommendation of Naomi Jaffa (again) I had the smug pleasure of already knowing the work of Tony Hoagland at a dinner given by a friend recently. (I should say that the friend was Damian Furniss, and that he cooked perhaps the best curry I have ever tasted. I hear he is just back from India, which sounds like very good news indeed.) With Damian there was some serious poetic talent in the room: among others Ann Gray, Alasdair Paterson and Fiona Benson were all in attendance. It was far from a solemn evening. Its purpose was to meet and talk and eat and share the work of poets we had discovered and were excited about. Ann shared the amazing work of Matthew Dickman, who was new to me, and Damian read Tony Hoagland's.

Before reading his Bloodaxe Selected Poems: What Narcissism Means To Me (2005), the book of Hoagland's I bought and still adore is Donkey Gospel (Graywolf Press, 1998). 'Jet', below, is the first poem in the book. Usually on opening a new book of poems I jump in around page 23, but with this one I began reading on page 1 and did not stop until the end. I do this with very few books of poetry.

Any poem which begins in lines arresting as: 'Sometimes I wish I were still out/on the back porch, drinking jet fuel/with the boys, getting louder and louder' has my vote pretty much instantly. These and the lines which follow it contain an intoxicating mix of bravado, underage drinking and wistfulness which I feel unable to resist for one second. The poem casts a spell over me in clear words which portray 'empty cans', men celebrating 'their hairiness' (this makes me giggle every time I read it) and 'untrue tales of sex'.

But it is also about something other and more mysterious: 'the big sky river rushes overhead,/bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish/and old space suits with skeletons inside'. It is no accident the poem is about summer, that time of endless possibility and 'effervescence', brought brilliantly to life in the description of the 'crickets plug[ging] in their appliances in unison' and the fireflies flashing 'dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation/for the labyrinthine'.

The collection's final poem, 'Totally', also uses the word 'unison', speaking cosmologically of 'the whole world'. However, this poem also speaks of 'dividedness', and I think there is something of that going on in 'Jet''s final stanza, where the tone turns elegiac:'We gaze into the night/as if remembering the bright unbroken planet/we once came from,/to which we will never/be permitted to return.' What's crucial here is not the wonderful lyricism, but those two tiny words 'as if'. The speaker seems to be saying that, in fact, no real remembering is taking place at all, and not only that, but the beautiful planet the boys come from and do not remember is destined to remain unvisited.

Like the spoken tone and arrangement of the lines, this is devastatingly casual and final, offhand almost. Suddenly and dramatically the boys are twice distanced from the moment they inhabit so deeply, their memories dropped like beer cans, dimly aware as the poem 'Hearings' has it that 'the truth is not the worst thing that could happen.'

 

Jet

 

Sometimes I wish I were still out

on the back porch, drinking jet fuel

with the boys, getting louder and louder

as the empty cans drop out of our paws

like booster rockets falling back to Earth

 

and we soar up into the summer stars.

Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,

bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish

and old space suits with skeletons inside.

On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,

 

and it is good, a way of letting life

out of the box, uncapping the bottle

to let the effervescence gush

through the narrow, unusually constricted neck.

 

And now the crickets plug in their appliances

in unison, and then the fireflies flash

dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation

for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex

someone is telling in the dark, though

 

no one really hears. We gaze into the night

as if remembering the bright unbroken planet

we once came from,

to which we will never

be permitted to return.

We are amazed how hurt we are.

We would give anything for what we have.

 

from Donkey Gospel (Graywolf Press)

Lifesaving Poems: Mark Halliday's 'The Missing Poem'

A very special thing happened this week: a large delivery of poetry pamphlets from Happenstance Press arrived. It included the wonderful No Panic Here by US poet Mark Halliday, which you can buy from the press for the ridiculous price of £4.00 (£3.50 if you take out a subscription). If you have not read his work before I seriously suggest you start now, and here. You might also like to check out his other books Tasker Street, Selfwolf, Jab and Keep This Forever, all easily avilable on Amazon. Of these Jab is my favourite, though this probably has more to do with the fact it was the first of his books that I read. For recommending his work to me I remain in the debt of Naomi Jaffa.

The blurb on the back of No Panic Here says this: 'Halliday isn't easy to categorize. Though described by poet David Graham as one of the "ablest practitioners" of the "ultra-talk poem" (a term coined by Halliday himself), ultra-talk is only one of the things he does. Intensely conscious of the presumption of the poet, he wriggles under his own critical microscope, wryly examining our 21st century poetic stance. He is witty, wayward, sardonic and serious.'

This is a great summary of what Halliday is up to (and if you want to find out about the concept of the 'ultra-talk' poem you can find David Graham's article on it here). 

The poem below comes in the final section of Jab, which contains just two poems, this one, the collection's closing poem, and 'Why Must We Write?' In a collection which is jammed to the gills with tour de force poems and tragicomic setpieces these two poems seem to drop down to an even deeper level of seriousness and plaintive enquiry. It was a close-run thing which one I would choose for my Lifesaving Poems, and even now I find it hard to choose between them.

For one thing I love the amazing phrase-making that is on display here. Billy Collins has a line somewhere about good reading making him want to stand up and applaud from the bleachers -this is what Halliday does for me. I savour lines like 'their cleats caked', 'the field's far end', 'a sense of beauty apparently very possible' and 'listening to the silence between them'; I take them into my day and look for how they might become more real in my world; I weigh them; I hold them up to the light. I do not find them wanting.

On another level I do think that Halliday's point, in common with all good artists, can never be said too often: look at, love and 'cherish life; the world will not do it for us.' For me the turn in this poem occurs at the lines:

Remember when you got the news of the accident-

or the illness- in the life of someone

more laced into your life than you might have thought;

the cool flash of what serious is.

I remember reading that just after receiving the news of exactly that -a heart attack in the life of a friend of a friend, as you do. 'The cool flash of what serious is' is another great phrase which is equal to the suffering of the world and yet outstrips it at the same time. What Halliday does in this poem, it seems to me, is create an alternative universe in the shape of a mythical 'missing poem'. In reality, what is missing is not the poem, nor the world it portrays, but concentrated quality of attention to what stays right under our noses, day after day.

The Missing Poem

 

It would have been dark but not lugubrious. It would have been 

fairly short but not slight. It would have contained a child

saying something inadvertently funny that was not said by my daughter,

something strangely like what your daughter or sister said once

if you could remember. The child's voice flies across 

a small parking lot where, in one of the cars,

a man and a woman sit listening to the silence between them.

The child's voice probably hurts them momentarily

with a sense of beauty apprently very possible

yet somehow out of reach. In the missing poem this is

implied, conveyed, transmitted without being flatly said.

And it does a dissolve into the look of a soccer field

after a game -the last three or four players walk

slowly away, their shin-guards muddy, their cleats caked,

one player dragging a net bag full of soccer balls-

the players seem to have known what it was all for

yet now they look somehow depleted and aimless there

at the field's far end; and a block away on a wood-grainy porch

the eyes of a thin woman sixty-three years old search the shadows

in each passing car, as the poem recalls what she wants to recall.

Hours later the field is dark

 

and the hills are dark and later even Firehouse Pizza has closed.

In the missing poem all this pools into a sense of how much

we must cherish life; the world will not do it for us.

This idea, though, in the missing poem is not smarmy.

Remember when you got the news of the accident-

or the illness- in the life of someone

more laced into your life than you might have thought;

the cool flash of what serious is. Well, 

the missing poem brings that. Meanwhile not seeming like 

an imitation of Mark Strand or Mark Doty or Mark Jarman!

Yet not like just another Halliday thing either.

Instead it would feel like a new dimension of the world,

the real world we imagine. With lightness!

With weight and lightness and, on the hypothetical radio,

that certain song you almost forgot to love.