I am moving this blog to Wordpress

If you are an email subscriber to this site (or any other kind of follower of it) I am writing this to let you know that I am slowly moving it to www.anthonywilsonpoetry.wordpress.com

This is not because I no longer like Posterous. Far from it. It is because of the recent decision by Twitter to buy Posterous, or, in effect, their top level staff. (You can read about this on any number of Posterous blog forums). For the time being Posterous will go on being Posterous as we have known and loved it. But sooner or later, it will get run down. Everybody is saying so.

So while the going is still good I have moved the bulk of my posts from www.anthonywilsonpoetry.com and www.lovefornow.posterous.com to the new wordpress site.

Please do visit it, watch it grow, make comments, and above all subscribe to it. Wordpress make all of these actions incredibly easy, which is the point, after all.

 

Thank you and goodbye (for now)

Anthony

 

The Write Team: Creativity, Confidence and Challenge

 

Yesterday I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the University of Exeter's CREATEseminar with Emma Metcalfe of Bath Festivals' Write Team on the impact of creative writers working in schools.

In particular we drew attention to the difference the project made to pupils' confidence and to changes in practice in participating schools. 

You can read the outline of our talk below.

The_Write_Team_Creativity_Confidence_and_Challenge_March_12_2012_Blog.ppt Download this file

Click on the following links for more details of the Write Team, including free downloadable resources and anthologies of students' work.

Click here to view a video about the work of Bath Festivals' education projects, including the Write Team.

Click here to download the full research report on the Write Team project.

Lifesaving Poems: Kenneth Koch's 'To My Heart at the Close of Day'

I saw the sign above on a wall during a visit I recently made to a school to talk to their sixth form about poetry. During the visit I was asked which poets I liked reading the best and my mind went blank, as it always does. The specific purpose of the morning was to discuss poems of 'love through the ages'. Floundering a little I spoke a bit of the poets I had chosen for us to talk about, and the ones they reminded me of, and the ones that got me interested in poetry in the first place.

But somehow I managed not to say that I love the work of Kenneth Koch. I know this because I was irritated with myself on the drive back from the school: how could I have forgotten him, especially when I managed to remember to mention his colleagues James Schuyler, John Ashbery and Frank O' Hara?

I first came across this poem in the review of New Addresses, from which it comes, by Mark Halliday in Poetry Review (posted at the bottom of this piece). If you will forgive the pun, I felt it was the game-changer. There is something more than autumnal about the piece, the voice dropping to a conversational murmur which is intimate and troubled. In a poem about a summer pastime which is played out on a grand scale in front of crowds, this is refreshingly ironic.

I think the poem is playful on other levels (please forgive that pun also). I think Koch is playing with his public persona of 'wackiness'. Read the first four and a half lines out loud: there is more than a hint of Edward Lear about them. I think those famous 'contemporaries' of his also ghost this poem, with the inevitable comparisons that were and are and probably always will be made between that famous school of New Yorkers, who were after all friends who supported and encouraged each other.

I delight in this poem, even though I know next to nothing about baseball. Underneath all of these plays for attention, the poem unleashes the twin terrors of a ball coming 'smashing toward you' in the 'sudden' darkness. The 'great step' we take toward it may indeed be a 'thrill', but the poem is careful not to prescribe anything so definite as an outcome. 

Finally I think Koch is playing with the idea of poems being words that can knock you for six (forgive the pun). That is what this one does to me.

 

 

 

To My Heart at the Close of Day

 

 

At dusk light you come to bat

As George Trakl might put it. How are you doing

Aside from that, aside from the fact

That you are at bat? What balls are you going to hit

Into the outfield, what runs will you score,

And do you think you ever will, eventually,

Bat one out of the park? That would be a thrill

To you and your contemporaries! Your mighty posture

Takes its stand in my chest and swing swing swing

You warm up, then you take a great step

Forward as the ball comes smashing toward you, home

Plate. And suddenly it is evening.

 

 

Kenneth Koch, from New Addresses (Knopf, 2001)

 

Lifesaving Poems

Mark_Halliday_on_New_Addresses.doc Download this file

Lifesaving Poems: Sharon Olds's 'Looking at Them Asleep'

I found this poem in a collection of poems called The Matter of This World in a second hand bookshop next to Berwick on Tweed station. It was pretty much falling apart at the seams then, and has completley disintegrated now. I still have it. It may be one of my favourite books of all time.

The first British publication of poems by Sharon Olds, it reminds me of a very particular time in my life, that of looking after and administering to the needs of my two young children. Parallel to this era, but not separated from it, was another kind of enterprise altogether, that of reading and writing as much poetry as possible.

I am not really sure if you can ever replicate the sheer hunger, obsession, desire and compulsion of your first serial encounters with poetry, at the point when you know you need it to breathe and make sense of who you are as much as you do food and a roof over your head.

The closest thing I can compare it to is the love -animal, pre-verbal- that consumes you if and when you first have children. You tiptoe into their rooms at night, just to check that they are still breathing. Sometimes you wake them up, just in case. It is just like tinkering with a poem, getting up early or staying up late to delete just one more adjective, or comma, in case you get hit by a bus on your way to work the following morning only for the world to laugh at your incomplete and amateur work.

Nothing prepares you for it and nothing comes close to taking over your life in the same way again, not even illness or death. It is not a choice, finally, like falling in love. It is beyond that, existing somewhere in and outside of ourselves 'deep in unconsciousness' and 'anxious and crystally in all this darkness'.

 

Looking at Them Asleep

 

When I come home late at night and go in to kiss the children,

I see my girl with her arm curled around her head,

her face deep in unconsciousness – so

deeply centred she is in her dark self,

her mouth slightly puffed like one sated

but slightly pouted like one who hasn’t had enough,

her eyes so closed you would think they have rolled the

iris around to face the back of her head,

they eyeball marble-naked under that

thick satisfied desiring lid,

she lies on her back in abandon and sealed completion

and the son in his room, oh the son he is sideways in his bed,

one knee up as if he is climbing

sharp stairs up into the night,

and under his thin quivering eyelids you

know his eyes are wide open and

staring and glazed, the blue in them so

anxious and crystally in all this darkness, and his

mouth is open, he is breathing hard from the climb

and panting a bit, his brow is crumpled

and pale, his long fingers curved,

his hand open, and in the center of each hand

the dry dirty boyish palm

resting like a cookie. I look at him in his

quest, the thin muscles of his arms

passionate and tense, I look at her with her

face like the face of a snake who has swallowed a deer,

content, content – and I know if I wake her she’ll

smile and turn her face toward me though

half asleep and open her eyes and I

know if I wake him he’ll jerk and say Don’t and sit

up and stare about him in the blue

unrecognition, oh my Lord how I

know these two. When love comes to me and says

What do you know, I say, This girl, this boy.

 

 

Sharon Olds from The Matter of This World

Lifesaving Poems

 

Lifesaving Poems: Julia Darling's 'Chemotherapy' vs 'Psalm 102'

I was astonished to find in an old diary today that by 8 March 2006, less than one month after I was diagnosed with cancer, I had already been given two infusions of chemotherapy. The speed of the cycles of my particular treatment was due to my successful volunteering to take part in a randomised control trial testing the efficacy of a cycle of 14 days against 21 days, or, in the jargon, 'CHOP-R 14 vs 21'.

It is odd what you remember. The twenty tiny cherry-red pills I had to swallow with milk during for five days after each infusion. (These were steroids. They were deeply un-fun, let me tell you). The Piriton chaser injection just ahead of the main infusion, 'to send you away with the fairies, my lover', as one nurse put it. She wasn't wrong. 

Most of all I remember the swathes of bright blue clothing every nurse had to wrap themselves in each time they began the course of injections. When I asked why this was necessary I was told it was because the chemicals were so poisonous they would burn through ordinary clothing if spilt. 'And to clean it up we would have to shut the whole ward down. For a day.'

Mostly I looked forward to being away with the fairies.

I had come across Julia Darling's marvellous poem 'Chemotherapy' nearly a year before I fully understood what she was talking about. There is not much I need to add to it, except to say I think 'the smallest things are gifts' sums up for me the entire universe of pain, gratitude, suffering, relief, anxiety and humour which the word 'cancer' registers in me.

Chemotherapy

 

I did not imagine being bald

at forty four. I didn’t have a plan.

Perhaps a scar or two from growing old,

hot flushes. I’d sit fluttering a fan.

 

But I am bald, and hardly ever walk

by day, I’m the invalid of these rooms.

stirring soups, awake in the half dark,

not answering the phone when it rings.

 

I never thought that life could get this small,

that I would care so much about a cup,

the taste of tea, the texture of a shawl,

and whether or not I should get up.

 

I’m not unhappy. I have learnt to drift

and sip. The smallest things are gifts.

 

from Sudden Collapses in Public Places  (Arc, 2003)

 

 

I did not come across Psalm 102 ('A prayer of an afflicted man. When he is faint and pours out his lament before the Lord') until some after my treatment had ended. Again, I do not think it needs much explication. My first reaction to it was -how did the psalmist know how to describe the bodily reaction to chemotherapy thousands of years before it was invented? 

 

Psalm 102

 

Hear my prayer, O Lord;

            let my cry for help come to you.

Do not hide your face from me

            when I am in distress.

Turn your ear to me;

            when I call, answer me quickly.

 

For my days vanish like smoke;

            my bones burn like glowing embers.

My heart is blighted and withered like grass;

            I forget to eat my food.

Because of my loud groaning

            I am reduced to skin and bones.

I am like a desert owl,

like an owl among the ruins.

I lie awake; I have become

            like a bird alone on a housetop.

 

(1-7)

 

Lifesaving Poems

Thomas Lux's 'The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently'

To celebrate World Book Day last week I read the poem below, by Thomas Lux, to my students. I was put in mind of it by a recent and ongoing discussion thread on this blog, under a post I wrote in November 2010 called The Politics of Reading.

It reminds me of the complexity and layeredness of reading as a skill and as a composite of attitudes and learned behaviours and history.

As Seamus Heaney says in his essay The Government of the Tongue '[the poem] 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 distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves' (The Governement of the Tongue, p.108).

 

The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently

 

is not silent, it is a speaking-

out-loud voice in your head: it is spoken,

a voice is saying it

as you read. It's the writer's words, 

of course, in a literary sense

his or her voice, but the sound

of that voice is the sound of your voice.

Not the sound your friends know

or the sound of a tape played back

but your voice

caught in the dark cathedral

of your skull, your voice heard 

by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts

and what you know by feeling,

having felt. It is your voice

saying, for example, the word barn

that the writer wrote

but the barn you say

is a barn you know or knew. The voice

in your head, speaking as you read,

never says anything neutrally - some people 

hated the barn they knew,

some people love the barn they know

so you hear the word loaded

and a sensory constellation

is lit: horse-gnawed stalls,

hayloft, black heat tape wrapping

a water pipe, a slippery

spilled chirr of oats from a split sack,

the bony, filthy haunches of cows...

And barn is only a noun -no verb 

or subject has entered the sentence yet!

The voice you hear when you read to yourself 

is the clearest voice: you speak it

speaking to you.

 

Thomas Lux from New and Selected Poems: 1975-1995 (Mariner Books)