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)

 

 

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.

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.

 

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)

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: Peter Sansom's K563

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

On Saying Goodbye to Primary PGCE Students

Art: Children from Abbas & Templecombe C of E Primary School (Saturn House)

For the last nine years at the end of the first week in July I have been saying goodbye to Primary PGCE trainee teachers as they complete their initial teacher education.

It is a celebratory occasion, yet also poignant. We acknowledge and take delight in the resilience of these bright, energetic and creative people in achieving the status of Newly Qualified Teacher. But we are also sad to see them go. As we have endeavoured to shape them, they have shaped us.

 Many of them come to us having made decisions to change career and set up home in a new part of the country, in strange accommodation. Many come to us not really knowing what to expect other than that they are passionate about passing on their love of learning and teaching because someone passed it on to them first. They all want to be brilliant.

I am in awe of them and their positivity, their iron-clad faith in themselves as agents of change. They persuade me that I have the best job in the world. Watching and talking to them in school and at the university I am further persuaded that everything is going to be all right.

 

Reasons for Life 

after Mark Halliday 

 

Because of the desks.  And the luck.

And because there are too many eighteen year olds

running round with guns because Miss Eve said

‘Not now, Darren, let’s get back to the Pharaohs.’

Because: ‘Not one day went day went by

when reading was easy.’

 

And because Miss Brown ignored

the sunlight, filled with dust motes,

and had you sketching shells

from her Greek holiday instead.

And in spite Miss Janners in Geography and everyone in Physics,

there was Mr Lee in Chemistry and Mrs Crump in Spelling.  Especially

Mrs Crump. 

 

Because once, the classroom emptying,

the blackboard groaning with homework,

someone approached your crouching form

and said how pleased they were

you had attended their lesson

and had you considered reading Lawrence.

 

Because if they don’t get it from you,

who will they get it from?

Because of the desks of forgetting,

the sunlight filled with dust

of wanting to be outside

and the luck of finding someone who found you interesting

enough to believe in.

 

Because your dad was, or mum was

and the sight of a kitchen table piled high with blue books

appeals to you in the way computers and cars

sing to those you grew up with,

who now live in suburbs you avoid

because they are full of roundabouts.

 

Because you burn with it,

basically,

 

which brings you here

to this room, just one more filled with desks and sunlight and dust motes,

and because time means nothing to Isha, and Ashraf

is making plans to look nobody in the eye.

 

 first published in The North.

 

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)