Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

I’ve written another Sphinx review, of Katie Griffiths’s excellent Live Canon prize-winning pamphlet My Shrink is Pregnant.

The other day I wrote an OPOI – ‘one point of interest’ – review for Sphinx, mostly focusing on the theme of ‘contemporary obsolescence’ in a stand-out poem in Emma Simon’s brilliant, prize-winning Smith|Doorstop pamphlet, The Odds. The review was published yesterday. You can read more about what an OPOI consists of here.

I first read this pamphlet in 2017, not long after it came out, and I’ve returned to it several times since, much because it seems to me a model of how a pamphlet can be an intensely pleasurable reading experience without having to be wholly or mainly dominated by one thematic concern. It contains 25 compact poems (only one of which spills, and even then only just, onto a second page), and gives a really good flavour of Julie Mellor’s range and ability. Let’s face it, the average full collection from some big publishers often barely gets past 30 poems these days, so this pamphlet provides true value for money as well as excellent poetic fare.

It starts with a poem – ‘The Scar on my Wrist’ – that tells the presumably autobiographical story of dicing with death as a late-teen or early-20-something in a car crash, and how at that age one has minimal sense of mortality and can laugh such incidents off:

and weren’t we the lucky ones, in love
with ourselves, the resilience of our bodies

taken for granted, and didn’t we drink ourselves
stupid the following night, quoting Talking Heads,
this ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco,

this ain’t no fooling around, me with my arm in plaster,
flirting with the fireball from a box of matches,
a pub trick that set my face alight.

The naively arrogant spirit of youth, of feeling indestructible and taking on the world (‘Life During Wartime’ indeed) comes across so vividly here, enhanced by the collectivism of that repeated “ourselves”. The pacing of the writing is urgent and exciting. It’s not easy to tell a story in a poem, especially one so personal, and knowing what information to include and what to omit can be almost as difficult as choosing the right words; clearly, though, Mellor has the gift to do so beautifully.

‘Penitential’ also touches on the spirit of youth, but is also typical of Mellor’s ability to describe with lyrical precision, in this case a pedestrian journey through Sheffield city centre, where the ordinary becomes extraordinary for being captured in words:

Walking barefoot to Paradise Square,
I pass the gym where Japanese students
work their bodies to perfection.

There is no weather, just heat.

I like that neat internal rhyme-of-sorts between “Paradise” and “Japanese” and I like the matter-of-factness of the depiction. The poem goes on towards a curious ending in Paradise Square, to which the narrator of the poem is compelled to go, in order

to look up at those Regency windows

where solicitors in white silk shirts
are working late and receive
the blessing of their immaculate advice.

It’s a strange and somehow unsettling scene; rendered stranger still, perhaps, by the unfortunate absence of a comma after “late”, without which the syntax could read as though it is the solicitors who are receiving the advice rather than the narrator. The economy of the wording – as throughout Mellor’s poetry – is exact and sounds pitch-perfect on the ear.

In fact, there are surprise endings in a number of Mellor’s poems, no more so than ‘Wasps’, which has an appropriately nasty sting in its tail. If writing about bees became de rigeur five to 10 years ago, then this is a waspy antidote that deserves to be anthologised as among the best poems about these much-maligned insects you could ever hope to read, with acute observation running all the way through it:

The air’s turning damp;
one hard frost might claim them.
But they blaze against death,

bodies brittle as sweet wrappers,
the inked nibs of their stings
constantly primed.

This is impressively taut writing; the simile and metaphor both spot-on. As ever, Mellor’s line-breaks too are just right, emphasising the words at the end and beginning of lines. I won’t reveal the ending of the poem, but suffice it to say that it takes the poem to a wholly unexpected, horrific place which is, nevertheless, in keeping with the rest of the poem. Cleverly, that sting is delivered in an off-rhymed couplet at odds with the tercets that have preceded it.

There are many very satisfying poems in the book: ‘To Say We Exist’ turns nicely from imagining the coming-up-for-air experiences of miners and divers to a comparison with memories of childhood when the narrator “stayed in a strange bed/ troubled by the ornaments of other people’s lives, the shape of the dressing gown// hung behind the door”. Mellor successfully captures here, I think the disorientation of being in any unfamiliar bed and how, as a child’s experience, it could induce considerable anxiety. The poem doesn’t explain why the child was not in their own bed and the question hangs over the ending. The neat form of the poem, in four quatrains, is reinforced by its circularity, in that its final image is of the child counting “coal trucks”. Mellor isn’t a formal formalist, as it were, but seems instinctively to have the knack of letting her poems find a form which suits them.

‘Here’ – its title instantly reminiscent of Larkin’s bare Holderness-landscape, quasi-mystical poem of the same name, which opens The Whitsun Weddings – similarly conjures up a Northern English landscape “at the rim of the world”, a place where memories of the past are ingrained: “the road/ where my father won the slow bike race/ in 1953, where our uncles had biblical names,// Nicodemus, Diadorous, and our aunt was unrelated/ an evacuee who never went home”. This to me is writing which presents life with an attractive, unalloyed clear-sightedness. The title-poem, with its prayer “for those/ who dash with trolleys across Tesco’s/ miraculous car park, shimmering, soaked” is in the same vein; as is ‘Clog Field’, which describes a hinterland view towards the city centre from across south-west Sheffield, including “allotments with their umpteen front doors” and a “small acre/ where the city’s horses used to graze”. The drawing-on of memory within these poems is chocker with marvellous detail, but never verges into the sentimental, as though Mellor is too much of a realist to hark back with any excessive fondness, and in any case provides in such recollections an innate sense of timelessness.

There are so many poems which I would love to quote in full, among them ‘Divining’, which tells of a water-diviner

somewhere out in the stubble,
trousers tucked into the tops of his boots,
arms bent as if to steady a horse or fire a gun,
pointing instead the length of brass he communes with.

‘Grace Notes’ is another ‘edgelands’ poem, this time set at Morecambe Bay, and hints implicitly, through just one word (“Tides”), at the fate of the 21 Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned there in 2004, and moves to an epiphany of “black swans [. . .] overhead, grace notes/ drifting from the hinges of their wings”. The brilliance of this image is perhaps slightly diluted by using “grace notes” as the title of the poem, but is nonetheless beautiful and makes me want  to read more such excellent observation from nature by Mellor.

Since the publication of this pamphlet, Mellor has headed in a more experimental direction, through the use of redaction of found textual matter to create powerful, committed poetry which works as much through what it redacts as what it leaves for the reader, as a good look at her tremendous blog shows. Her voice deserves to be heralded as distinctive and fine.

I could go on to detail lots of other treasures to be found within Out of the Weather, but I’ll leave it there with a recommendation that buying it would be a very shrewd and rewarding move indeed.

Julie Mellor, Out of the Weather, Smith|Doorstop, £5

I was sad to hear today that David Walker, haiku poet and artist, died in September, shortly after his 80th birthday. David one of a trio of Davids, with David Cobb and David Platt, who gave so much to the British Haiku Society (BHS) in its first 15 years or so. He was a fine haiku poet, terrific sculptor and a raconteur, who was fond of telling how, in his RAF National Service days, he witnessed a nuclear warhead being loaded onto a plane at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis and then thankfully being taken off. David left the BHS around the same time as Martin Lucas, John Barlow and me, and for the same reason. The last time I saw David was in 2008, at the Bath launch of Wing Beats, in which John and I included David’s excellent haiku below:

mountain ridge
folded in slate
the raven’s wings

Being a professional artist, it’s unsurprising that David’s haiku often had that strong pictorial sense, as in these five haiku published in Haiku Spirit 20 years ago. David’s haiku were also anthologised in The Iron Book of British Haiku (1998) and The New Haiku (2002). Here’s a lovely haiku by David included in the latter volume, which I especially like for its sense of time having passed very quickly yet simultaneously being very still:

                                                summer again –
                                                poppy seeds pepper
                                                your empty room

that raspy voice
at the year-end market
dried persimmons

Some haiku are more subtle, and require a bit more work on the part of the reader, than others; this is a good example of that. Once again, and for the last time on this blog, it’s drawn from Snapshot Press’s estimable Haiku Calendar for 2019. (I’m sure the 2020 calendar, a perfect stoking-filler, will be just as fine and thought-provoking as this year’s has been.)

As Beverly Acuff Momoi lives in California, I presume the poem is set there, though the Momoi part of her name derives from her Japanese forebears so perhaps the scene is in Japan, where ‘persimmon/s’ is a stock kigo (haiku seasonal reference) for autumn.

The reader’s attention is drawn by the first word – instead of using the indefinite article, the poet uses ‘that’, which has far more clout than ‘the’ would have had. The word can be read as implying that the sound of the voice causes discomfort on the part of those within earshot, though that reading isn’t, I think, an essential component of the haiku’s quality and success.

The use of an exact adjective – ‘raspy’ – is key here, partly because it sounds similar to ‘raspberry’, giving a fruit- and near-colour-related link to ‘persimmons’; but more because it prompts the question in the reader’s mind of why the ‘voice’ is raspy; and, moreover, it isn’t spelt out as to whom the voice belongs. One presumes that it is the voice of a stallholder shouting, or rather trying to shout, about her/his wares. That reading is given weight by the time-stamp in the middle line: this is the end of the year, a very busy time in either the USA or Japan, when presumably the stallholder has shouted so much that her/his voice has become hoarse. And not only does it sound hoarse, but it also sounds as dried-out as the persimmons which s/he is selling.

It might’ve been tempting to have started this haiku with ‘year-end market’ as the opening line, followed by the cut at that point; however, that would’ve made for a much less enticing haiku, and the poet has worked harder than most haiku poets in English do in order to ensure that the overall poem coheres as a work of art. 

I’ve written many times about how the 4–6–4 syllabic haiku form in English sounds mellifluous on the ear, and particularly when the cut is at the end of the second line, and that is the case here. The reason for that is no doubt because it encourages a rhythmic syllabic structure. Here, the first line consists of two iambs, as, arguably, the third line does too. In the middle line, ‘year-end market’ is either two trochees, two spondees of a combination of both depending on how you say or hear it.

In subject-matter, phrasing and meaning, this haiku is as satisfying as it sounds.

My boys-only grammar school was a microcosm of overwhelmingly white, Establishment England. In a Geography lesson, the deputy headteacher justified Thatcher’s sending of the Task Force to the Falklands with a rant about how his best friend at school had been beaten and starved to death in a Japanese POW camp, without any consciousness that both events were colonialism in action. The irony was compounded by the fact that the only teacher of colour at the school was Japanese. The headteacher refused to allow me to put the University of Ulster as one of my UCCA choices because it wasn’t the school’s type of destination; by hook or by crook I went there anyway. In History, there was next to no teaching of the evils inflicted around the world by British imperialism, let alone its legacy. For History A-level, one of the three modules was ‘the Scramble of Africa’, with the book of that title by Thomas Pakenham, now Lord Longford, as the main text, which at least, but only minimally, shone a little light on some of the atrocities, but the real  focus of the syllabus, and of what was subsequently tested by examination, was how the actions in Africa of Britain, Belgium, France, Germany and other European nations were a precursor to the First World War, and not that they devastated the lives of millions of Africans – and  likewise the First World War had been taught, for O-Level, only in terms of the fighting in France, with no assessment of its impact elsewhere.

My mother’s maternal grandfather had fought in two colonial wars, as a regular Private in the Chin Hills campaign in India, in the 1880s, and as a reservist Colour Sergeant in the Boer War. I’ve written a poem about the latter; in doing so, I kept my revulsion at his participation in that ‘White Man’s War’ simmering below the surface. Harsh though it may be to judge the actions of one’s forebears, in hindsight I regret not bringing it to the fore. As background reading, the only book on the Boer War I could find in the shops was Pakenham’s history of the conflict, published in 1979, drawing on interviews he’d conducted in the 1960s with the last surviving participant soldiers. Glaringly absent were the voices of any of the black Africans, or their relatives, whose lives had been so expendable as to be, apparently, of less value than those of the horses which pulled the Maxim one-pounder guns. When I was young, my father’s father often spoke as if he was the Alf Garnett of Sussex, openly racist in his language and attitudes, which, in my memory at least, my parents didn’t have the nerve to challenge. Yet, when I was 11, my father insisted that I watch the adaptation of Roots and bought me a copy of the Autobiography of Malcolm X, a book which I found inspirational because of Malcolm’s refusal to be cowed by oppression and, ultimately, his rejection of intolerance of any kind.

The outcome of Thursday’s election has brought all this into sharp focus in my head. Others more qualified to analyse the reasons why 13 million voters voted ‘to get Brexit done’ have stated their belief that, in doing so, many of those voters deliberately or implicitly rejected the values of inclusion and diversity, espoused by Corbyn, Abbott, McDonnell and other progressive politicians, and instead harked back to a time when the white British viewpoint was the only one which was heard; when the only successful people of colour were predominantly entertainers or sportsmen. (Labour, as we know, have only themselves to blame in not having supported electoral reform to a system which would allow every vote to count.) The Politics Live confrontation between Mark Francois and Will Self included Self’s point that whilst not everyone who voted for Brexit was racist or an anti-Semite, every British racist and anti-Semite voted for Brexit. (It then culminated with a famous staring match. It was notable, incidentally, that the first Conservative politician wheeled out on BBC1 on Thursday night to crow about the exit poll was that same Francois, who’d been kept in a cupboard with Rees-Mogg for the duration of the campaign.)

In her Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), Claudia Rankine, citing the execution by the Met of Mark Duggan, threw down a gauntlet to privileged white liberal poets like me to write about the oppression of, and everyday racism, towards people of colour in Britain. That’s a challenge which comes with a degree of difficulty: no white person has the right to appropriate the experience of a person of colour of course, but to me it seemed legitimate to write about it objectively, if not passionately. My poem ‘The Triumph of Sylvester Clarke’, in The Evening Entertainment, was based on a real experience which my father and I witnessed at The Oval in 1980: the monkey-noise chanting of thousands of Yorkshire cricket fans at the great Surrey and West Indies fast bowler, who responded by bowling the most skilfully ferocious spell I’ve ever seen.  The poem also draws on the irony that in order to make ends meet, Clarke felt he had no option but to take part in the West Indian rebel tours of Apartheid South Africa. My feelings about that choice are innately bound up in the fact that my great-grandfather fought in the war which directly engendered Apartheid.

In some recent poems, which I hope will be collected in my next book, I’ve tried to explore further the endemic racism fuelled by the British colonial legacy, most notably the shamefully inadequate facing-up to the impacts, historical and contemporary, of slavery.

Before anyone labels me as one more white liberal being ‘right on’, I just want to add that that surely ought to be the default position of every person in this country: kindness, tolerance and a rejection of hatred are the values we’re born with, and which are taught in primary schools but then get gradually diluted for some by the ‘pluralistic’ discourse of secondary school and the reality of adulthood. Much has changed for the better in this country in terms of a shift towards tolerance; positive discrimination has helped in that, but where are the leaders of colour? In my own workplace, whilst our workforce overall is proportionate, our senior leadership team is almost exclusively white. Several colleagues of colour have shortened their first names to make them sound less ‘foreign’ and easier for white folk to pronounce. Again, I have no wish to appropriate others’ experience, but it is essential to point it out.

As this year nears to a close, any reader could do no better than to read Candice Carty-Williams’s magnificent novel Queenie, a hugely entertaining but also deeply serious portrayal of a young black woman’s experiences in urban England today. It’s a brilliant reminder that in these difficult times, respect for others and valuing and celebrating difference should be foremost among our concerns. That must be the case for poets and other creatives as much as it is for anyone in their everyday lives.

Football Poets is a treasure trove of poetic musings about the beautiful game. I have a poem on the site today – ‘Magic Boots’.

midnight garden
only the snowberries
take on the starlight

What a lovely, atmospheric haiku this is! Phillip Murrell has been writing haiku for many years and this is among his best. Like others which I have written about of late, it features in this year’s Haiku Calendar, from Snapshot Press.

The conflated time and place setting of the first line plunges the reader straight into the scene: a chilly, shivery, cloudless night somewhere in rural England, probably in Kent. For British readers of a certain age, the words ‘midnight garden’ have a resounding echo of Tom’s Midnight Garden, Philippa Pearce’s strange and beautiful 1958 children’s novel, in which the title character travels back to Victorian times when the grandfather clock in his aunt and uncle’s house where he is staying strikes thirteen (itself an echo of the unsettling opening of Orwell’s 1984).

The middle line has a fine sonic balance to it, with the ‘o’s working as well as those in Roy Orbison’s ‘Only the Lonely’. Snowberries – the white fruit of Symphoricarpos albus – are an American import, supposedly first introduced into Britain 202 years ago, although it’s only in recent years that I’ve noticed their proliferation. In his seminal Flora Britannica (1996), Richard Mabey says that one colloquial name for them, in Shropshire, is ‘lardy balls’, which sounds like an affectionate insult. Their fruiting season used to be May to September, but with climate change, that has extended into November and beyond, in southern England at least.

But it’s the ambiguity of the verb use in the third line which makes this haiku a winner: ‘take on’ could mean ‘absorb’, as if the starlight is burnishing the whiteness of the berries; but also, perhaps more likely, mean that the berries are challenging/rivalling the brightness of the stars. Either way, the sensation conjured up is one of the macrocosm of the firmament and the microcosm of the bush in a garden mirroring one another and illuminating an otherwise dark, late-autumn night.

A few thoughts on the sounds of and within the poem: I suspect that most English (or Scottish or Welsh) readers would pronounce ‘snowberries’ not as the three-syllable ‘snow-be-reez’ but as the two-syllable ‘snow-breez’, which improves the sound of the haiku on the ear, because ‘starlight’ is, of course, a two-syllable noun also. The ‘ar’ sounds in both ‘garden’ and ‘starlight’ help the overall composition too.

My day started well this morning by finding out that eminent poet, critic and prolific reviewer Billy Mills had posted a review of The Evening Entertainment among other reviews on his always-interesting Elliptical Movements blog.

Whilst I hitherto wouldn’t have agreed that my poems are quite as formulaic as Billy implies, it’s useful to hear a viewpoint which challenges my own perception of my poems and which will therefore make me look again at how I construct them. It’s true that many of them are born from anecdotes, or eye-witness accounts if you prefer, but for poets like me who hold the philosophical position that poems should “come from an Ever”, as Stevens put it and Lucie Brock-Broido quoted from in her poem, ‘Still Life with Aspirin’, I would argue that’s inevitable. I like to think I’ve developed a more varied range of poetic constructs in the two years since my collection was published – I’ll see!

I’m grateful to Billy for his close readings, his encouraging words and his constructive and helpful criticism. It is very kind of anyone to take the trouble to review a book, and to do so objectively and intelligently as Billy does takes skill, generosity and a keen poetic sensibility.

*

On Sunday, I attended the readings of the Live Canon ensemble of three actors who performed the 20 poems shortlisted by Zaffar Kunial for the 2019 Live Canon Poetry Competition. Jim Scott performed my poem ‘Locarno’ with gusto. It was a lovely experience, and even though my poem didn’t win the grand prize, the afternoon, at Greenwich Theatre (replete with a bar named after Max Wall), was a real delight and honour.

the old man’s hands
make the shape of a pot . . .
October sun

I have previously remarked upon the sharp-eyed freshness of Jane McBeth’s haiku, but as Martin Lucas wrote (and I never tire of quoting), “Haiku isn’t as easy as just looking, and it isn’t as easy as it looks”.

Knowing how much information to impart to the reader is a good starting-point for writing excellent haiku, because giving the reader too much information can both overload the haiku and prevent the reader from ‘completing’ the haiku with their interpretation of it; conversely, giving too little can, of course, prevent the reader from coming to any sensible conclusion as to what the writer is getting at.

This haiku by Jane McBeth, another featured in Snapshot Press’s marvellous Haiku Calendar for 2019, is a fine example of achieving the right balance between those extremes: we are presented with the picture of an old man gesticulating with his hands in a way that resembles ‘the shape of a pot’ whilst there is what we may intuit as bright autumnal, specifically October, sunshine. that wonderful light might be casting its glow on yellow and orangey red colours of leaves starting to turn, for we may, I think, safely presume that the scene is outdoors, though that may not be especially relevant. What is relevant is that the haiku contains a simile: there is an implicit resemblance between the round-ish shape of the pot and the shape of the sun. Is that it though, or is there more depth to this haiku?

There is another less obvious – but still implicit – simile between the autumn of the man and the actual autumn of the year, like the poet’s near namesake character in the Scottish play: ‘. . . my way of life / Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf’ (Macbeth, Act V, scene 3).

Beyond that, are we to take literally the shape which the man’s hands are making, or are we to presume that this is another simile, i.e. that the shape is like the shape of a pot. Either way, one might discern that the writer is hinting at the man’s life/career of creativity and/or admiration of aesthetic beauty. These undercurrents are what gives this haiku added layers and resonance, but McBeth achieves that not by any showiness but by using simple language: all the words used are everyday and of Anglo-Saxon/Old English origin, though paradoxically the haiku is richer for those choices; indeed, they lend an added element, of assonance and alliteration, i.e. ‘make’/’shape’; ‘man’/make’, ‘old’/‘October’, which serves to bind the poem together.

To my ear and eye, the form of the haiku is just right, because it has four syllables, then six then four again; a ‘4–6–4’, which in English so often sounds beautifully poised, as it is invariably (almost) iambic, suits haiku such as this, which are quietly reflective and layered.

Two of the poets whom Cahal Dallat focused on in the week in Carnlough in August were Ciaran Carson and Lucie Brock-Broido, and so I’ve been reading both lately.

I was already familiar with some of Carson’s poetry, though, as noted here before, I’ve read more of his prose than his poetry, but when I was at the Poetry Business HQ two weeks ago I borrowed a book by Carson which I’d not seen before: From Elsewhere (Gallery, 2014) . It’s an unusual book, with an unusual premise: it consists of Carson’s translations of the short, rather dream-like yet precise, gnomic poems of the French poet Jean Follain (1903–1971) with each translation faced with a poem by Carson which responds, sometimes obliquely, in some way to the content or tone of the Follain poem. In his own poems, Carson matches the chiselled detail of the translation; for example, in the way the studied, pent-up masculinity in his ‘Closed Circuit’ responds to that within Follain’s ‘Contours’:

He is the regular whose eyes you avoid
because the only time you did not
yours were met with a blank
still you think he knows
who you might be
[. . .]
who takes his gun apart
and reassembles it
three times a day
every day that passes
loads it
aims it.
(Carson)

From time to time the harness maker
would turn his hand
to barbering armed with razor
everything stayed coiled
within him and about him
his great forked beard [. . .]

(Follain)

No doubt, Carson’s references, as here (presumably), to the ‘Troubles’ and the British Army occupation of Belfast are intended as a mirror of sorts to Follain’s responses, however tangential, to living through the Nazi occupation in his native Normandy and then the Allied pulverising of Caen and Saint-Lô. Both poets’ poems have an attractive freshness born of what seems like spontaneous, associative composition which appears to go with the flow with little cerebral overlay. The appearances in Carson’s poems of the stock images and paraphernalia of the North of Ireland conflict are memorably vivid – ‘the painted kerbstones/ bordering a waste ground/ where the skeleton/ of a child’s perambulator smoulders/ at the heart of a dead bonfire’ (‘The Geography Lesson’). Sometimes, though, they have a degree of repetitiveness which is either a little wearing or a deliberate stroke of genius depending on your viewpoint, e.g. ‘upon a mantelpiece/ a Dresden vase crowded/ with open-mouthed flowers/ trembles about/ to topple/ over’ (‘Reverberation’) is resoundingly echoed by ‘the whole house shuddering/ under the onslaught/ the Dresden milkmaid figurine/ falls from the mantelpiece/ and shatters on the hearth’ (‘Covert’). Occasionally, a line-break appears obtuse to the point of cussedness: surely the break should be after ‘was’ rather than ‘boy’ in ‘As he told it/ when the boy/ he was stumbled’. But these are minor quibbles, as Carson’s translations and his own poems are limpid and often beautiful.

*

Brock-Broido, who died last year aged just 61, produced four collections of poetry in her lifetime, from the first three of which Carcanet selected the poems published for a British readership in Soul Keeping Company (2010). They have a formality reminiscent of great American poets like Tate, Lowell, Bishop and Plath, and a worldview full of curiosity about history, fact and language. In a fascinating 1995 interview with Bomb magazine, she described her writing process:

Yes. I listen to the poem. First I hear the provocation and the name, and the trouble, the trouble in mind. But then what I listen to is not what provoked the poem, not what named the poem, not what I originally insisted that the poem was going to be about. The poem has to have its own circulatory system, and I begin again. When I’m “composing” it, I can say anything, no one’s looking. I can be overwrought, underfed, I can be anything. It’s in the editing of it that I allow the poem to tell me what its particular truth will be. Even if that truth is Autobiographically Incorrect.

I’m not going to say any more than that I’ve been enjoying her poems so much that I’ve had to limit myself to one a day. I’m late to this particular party but I’m determined to enjoy it.

I spent the last week in August in Carnlough, on the Antrim Coast, on Anne-Marie Fyfe and Cahal Dallat’s Coffee-house Poetry week, and what a week it was. Anne-Marie’s inspirational exercises had the twenty of us participants drafting poems infused with blueness and on all things cloud-related. Cahal’s workshops on the writing of Sinéad Morrissey, Ciaran Carson, Lucie Brock-Broido and Brigit Pegeen Kelly were enlightening, but with his vast erudition worn lightly and wittily. Our final-night readings were joyful and memorable as only the culmination of a fantastic week can be. Best of all, though, were the readings by Anne-Marie and Cahal of prose and poetry from their upcoming new books, which will be unmissable.

Here’s a bit of frippery I wrote on our trip to see the treasures of the Ulster Museum and its environs:

CINQUAIN FOR THE NURSERYMAN IN THE BELFAST BOTANIC GARDENS PALM HOUSE

Good old
health and safety
prevents him wearing shorts,
because his legs’d get scratched by
cacti.

*

This week I managed to get along to the Red Door Poets for the first time this year, which was belatedly marvellous, then went to John Greening and Roger Garfitt’s readings at the Barbican Library. They read beautifully, from their new collections, respectively The Action and The Silence, to a small but enthusiastic audience. Here they are, afterwards (John on the left).

Over on the Carcanet website there’s a blog post by the wonderful poet Roger Garfitt about the opening poem of The Action, which I’ve been enjoying very much. Last week, I re-read Roger’s superb memoir, The Horseman’s Word too. His writing – whether poetry or prose – is so precise and full of beautiful detail.

I’ll be going to see Roger read, alongside John Greening,  in a couple of weeks’ time – I can’t wait.

rustle of corn leaves—
fitting my son
for a new ball glove

This haiku features among the August selections on this year’s Haiku Calendar, and is one I like very much. Chad Lee Robinson is one of the very best of the younger generation of American haiku poets. His excellent 2015 collection The Deep End of the Sky (Turtle Light Press) and 2012 e-chapbook Rope Marks (Snapshot Press) both conjure the vast space of the prairie of South Dakota, in whose state capital, Pierre, Robinson was born, raised and still lives.

With its sense of timelessness, implying multi-generational tradition, this example fits perfectly with the genre of American and Japanese baseball poems that Cor Van Den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura collected in their seminal 2007 Baseball Haiku anthology, to which Robinson was the youngest contributor. I’ve never watched, let alone played, baseball, but my lifelong obsessions with cricket and football mean that I can easily relate to the scenes in the individual poems of that wonderful book – and, as any sports obsessive will tell you (think Bill Shankly), the sport in question is about more than just the game itself.

I wonder how much Robinson worked on that first line, because the reader (well, this one anyway) would naturally presume that the ‘action’ in the second part of the haiku is taking place indoors, within a sportswear shop of some kind, so the exterior scene of the first line initially seems at odds with that; though maybe baseball gloves are available in general stores and so here the door of the shop is open, allowing the sound of the wind ruffling the endless cornfields to be heard. Perhaps that’s exactly how it happened and the haiku fell into Robinson’s lap, as often they do to experienced haiku poets who are deeply in touch with their senses. (Robinson’s day job as a store-owner influences that reading.)

Whatever the truth of the matter, it’s irrelevant really, because what we have here is a haiku where the disjunction between the two parts is powerful and lovely, and, as I say, evokes the traditions and hugeness of the American Midwest in a beautifully worded way. It’s worth noting that Robinson’s eschewal of a definite article before ‘rustle’ endows the appearance of the word, and the start of the poem, with extra impact. It should also be noted that this haiku’s form is contrary to the orthodox pattern of a three-line haiku, in that it is long/short/long rather than the far more common short/long/short, but the rhymes in the poem, corn/son and leaves/glove, and the alliteration of ‘fitting’ and ‘for’, give the poem a balance which enables Robinson to transcend the limitations of this apparent heterodoxy.

Above all, it’s a touching moment, full of love and pride, between parent and son – between father and son if we assume, and there is no real cause to think otherwise, that the parent and the author are one and the same. It’s made additionally touching by the implicit sense that the father in the poem was in the son’s shoes a generation before, and so on back in time. The overall impression, then, is one of continuity, in a place where agriculture has dominated for several centuries. Robinson’s artistry magically transforms a small-town, Corn Belt ‘Nowheresville’ into a place with immediate resonance for the reader.

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I know it’s still only August, but all of this reminds me that I must pre-order the 2020 Haiku Calendar – I heartily recommend that you do likewise. In its 20 iterations over the years, the calendar has consistently been the best annual English-language haiku anthology bar none (albeit that the poems within it weren’t necessarily written or published in the previous year). For that reason, it’s very much worth buying past years’ calendars too.

the soft splash
of a lap swimmer’s strokes
morning coolness

One of the June selections for this year’s Haiku Calendar, this haiku, by a former Associate Editor of The Heron’s Nest, is exemplary in its mood of serenity. For me, the swimmer’s action has an implicitly metronomic, perhaps hypnotic, quality to it, which contrasts with, and cuts through, the chilliness of what has to be early morning, well before 8am. Due to the inclusion of the word ‘lap’, implying a degree of proficiency and/or dedication, I see the swimmer as one of a handful of regulars in what must be an outdoor pool. The balance of the haiku – with three syllables in the first line, six in the second and four in the third – is nice, and all those instances of the letter ‘s’ make the poem easy on the ear. There’s no flashiness at work here, it’s just a quiet rendering of an everyday scene in straight-talking language, as many of the best haiku are.

‘Michaelmas’ was chosen by Michael Schmidt as one of four poems to represent Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s sadly slim output in his Harvill Book of Twentieth Century Poetry in English, and, since reading Forrest-Thomson’s fantastic Collected Poems, I’ve been wondering why, as it’s a curiously difficult poem among an overall oeuvre renowned for being contrary, albeit not as contrary as I was led to believe it to be.

I confess to having a soft spot for the poem’s title, purely because my birthday falls on Michaelmas, the 29th September. However, it used to be celebrated on the 10th October, so that is the relevant date here, I presume. The poem is quirky, steeped in English history and I suppose one would say Post-Modernist or experimental through its inclusion of Old/Middle English fragments quoted from the OED. It reminds me a little of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns in its seamless movement from the present to the past and back again, and, among contemporary poets, of Steve Ely.

The poem is the opener of Forrest-Thomson’s 1971 collection, Language-Games, which, as the title suggest, is dominated by Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, as principally expounded in Philosophical Investigations. It’s a very playful and clever collection and I think the poem needs to be seen in that context.

The title and the first word of the poem are presumably meant to be read as a run-on. The second and fourth lines are syntactically similar, are comparatively crowded in reflective of the flowers they’re describing and have an internal rhyme – ‘aster’ / ‘masses’ – which works very nicely. It’s notable that the Michaelmas daisies are described as being ‘purplish’ rather than ‘purple’, which, in spite of the ‘-ish’, gives an exact picture.

I like how single words with colons introduce fuller definition, e.g. the first-glance blackbird is actually a ring ouzel, that lovely summer bird especially common in the Peak District; and that the crocus is in fact an autumn crocus, which isn’t actually a crocus at all though it resembles one. That is of itself a Wittgensteinian game of sorts, about how exact we can be with language and to what extent another person can grasp the exactness of what another person is trying to represent with their descriptive language. The three mentions of ‘the harvest moon’ in the poem and the other repetitions, notably of ‘masses of small purplish flowers’ serve to bind the whole together.

I’ve fruitlessly consulted my copy of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader and I don’t have a full OED, so I’m none the wiser as to the meaning of the first Old/Middle English fragment beyond that it seems to refer to a nobleman being wounded on Michaelmas in 1123!

The next six lines are laid out like a list, as though they’re summarising the picture which the poet is laying before us. They consist of the words or phrases ending lines above.

The word ‘tide’ is a little more problematic, since, if we take it to be a noun (which surely it is coming after ‘moon’), it conjures either a seashore or a stretch of tidal river, neither of which has previously been implied in the poem. Although it’s obvious that this is a poem of the imagination, perhaps purely an exercise triggered by the title word, ‘tide’ nevertheless takes the poem to a different place, and then free-associates (‘time and tide wait for no man’ and all that), seemingly, to the word ‘time’, possibly in recognition that the etymology of ‘tide’ is an Old English/German division of time. The word’ spring’ is equally difficult as it has multiple meanings; given that it leads to ‘Indian summer’ and that the poem has hitherto been autumnal, we can rule out the seasonal meaning, so maybe it’s meant as a verb collectively conjugated by ‘tide’ and ‘time’. Alternatively, perhaps Michaelmas could prefix each of ‘tide’ and ‘spring’ to make compound nouns, as it does with ‘term’. The definition of ‘Michaelmas term’ – minus its month parameters – is then stated and an example from the OED concerning Edward I is given. Again, there follows a sort of inventory of words or phrases ending lines above, which then shifts into another quotation from the OED, and then segues into a list of ‘cowrtes’ at Cambridge: Nevile’s at Trinity College, and Queens’ College. The poem then ends where it began, with the description of the Michaelmas daisies and ‘the harvest/ moon’.

As a poem mixing up Wittgensteinian theory, the Imagist depiction of natural elements, with ‘found poetry’ from the OED, it is very much of its time. It’s hard to respond to on any kind of emotional level, as it is such a cerebral exercise – Peter Riley has written, “Veronica Forrest-Thomson was very much an academic poet with a programme for poetry which was worked out in her study” , and she appears to have been staunchly opposed to poetry whose ‘meaning’ is crystal clear – yet this poem is an attractive one, and sounds mellifluous on the ear: the repetition of words, phrases and syllables – notably ‘-mas’ / ‘mass’ / ‘maesse’ / ‘-masse’ – has an incantatory, mantra-like impact. The unstated contrast between the simplicity of natural elements and the implicit great financial wealth of historical Establishment England is an interesting one though it’s hard to know whether there is an intentional political agenda on the part of the poet. In fact, there is no overt judgement in the poem, and adjectives are used sparingly and with the kind of exactness used by the Imagists or by lexicographers but queried so brilliantly in Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy.

It’s a minor point, but it’s surprising to me that Forrest-Thomson bothered with a full stop at the end of the poem, but then she had a habit of subverting her own experimentation: her witty poem ‘Ducks & Rabbits’ – concerning Wittgenstein’s consideration, in part two of Philosophical Investigations, of a picture which could be viewed either as a duck’s head or a rabbit’s depending on one’s position and perception – was in full end-rhyme throughout. How sad that Forrest-Thomson didn’t live and write longer than she did. As she wrote in ‘Alka-Seltzer Poem’, ‘[. . .] experience/ is an active verb and the end/ of poetry is activity.’

My mum passed away in the early hours of Sunday morning. Here she is in, I think, the late ’Fifties.

 

I was sad to hear today of the passing of Les Murray. In September 2015, Hamish Ironside (pictured with Les below) and I went for dinner and a few pints with Les at the Anglers in Teddington when he was over for a reading tour and was staying, curiously, in the same hotel as the All-Blacks who were over for the Rugby World Cup.

We talked of poetry of course, but also of haiku, in which he was very interested, not least because of his friendship with the American minimalist Gary Hotham. Les spoke, too, of his early days in London in the late ’50s and early ’60s, when he hung out with Peter Porter, Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries and Clive James, and also of his more recent friendships with Pascale Petit and other British poets.

The next day at work I kept having to pinch myself that I’d been down the pub with one of the greatest poets of our time.

Of late, my reading seems to have been stuck in an early-Twentieth Century time-warp: Ivor Gurney’s Collected Poems – his post-war war poems are undisputedly great, as well as others concerning his native Gloucestershire, especially during the two years 1920–22 immediately before his confinement in asylums, for the rest of his life; Helen Thomas’s beautiful and desperately sad memoirs of friendship, courtship and marriage to Edward, As it Was and World Without End; Edward’s poetry, a perennial favourite, so full of plein air existentialism before the word had even been coined; and HG Wells’s novels, The History of Mr Polly and Kipps. To an extent, I’ve been led back to such reading-matter by Glyn Maxwell’s incredibly good On Poetry, and his maxim, “You master form, you master time”, and his repeated insistence that line-breaks and stanza-breaks are forms of punctuation as vital as commas, full stops and the rest.

Consequently, my writing has been enriched, I think, by reading more carefully and more slowly; by not galloping through poems but taking more time to look properly at how black type imposes itself upon white space. I find it difficult to write about life today and worry that I’m simply a poet of memoir. Working my socks off in local government at a time of having to do far more with less funding and fewer resources means I get enough of contemporary life for most of my waking hours. Outside work, the impact of political callousness and uncertainty and the hideousness of Brexit inevitably drive me back into memory. But I’m not harking back to any golden age, because it’s obvious to everyone – except to the racists who are increasingly infecting our society again – that one never existed. It begs the question, though, of how one can write about the past without seeming that one is harking back somehow. The answer surely lies in doing so with affection where it is warranted and without any rosy-eyed sentiment when it evidently isn’t.

I’ve also volunteered myself as family archivist: I have boxes of documents, of family tree research undertaken by my paternal grandparents in the Fifties and Sixties, and amazing photo albums going back to late Victorian times. They are a trove of material. Of course, such materials trigger loads of questions which, to my constant sadness, it’s too late to ask.

This time last week, 10 of my fellow Poetry Business Writing School 2017–2019 poets – David Hale, Keith Hutson, Hannah Lowe, Marie Naughton, Stephen Payne, Kathy Pimlott, Emma Simon, David Underdown, Tom Weir and Rod Whitworth – and I were preparing for our end-of-programme celebratory reading in the Jerwood Centre next to Dove Cottage in Grasmere, as the culmination of our residential weekend at Rydal. Unfortunately, our twelfth member Ramona Herdman was unable to take part. in the reading.

Despite all weathers, including snow and hail, we had a sizeable audience, including Wordsworth Trust poet-in-residence and New Networks for Nature steering group member Matt Howard. It was a special occasion and the happiest reading I’ve ever been part of. I can’t speak highly enough of Ann and Peter Sansom, whose guidance, knowledge and wisdom have been a constant source of inspiration for the last two years.

On her website, Kathy Pimlott – whose new Emma Press pamphlet Elastic Glue is a must-read – gives an eloquent account of how and why being a member of the group has been so inspiring. For my part, I couldn’t have wished to have had nicer, more encouraging colleagues. We hope to have some reunion readings in due course.

I’ve enjoyed the programme so much that I’m doing it all over again, in the 2019–2021 cohort, for which I am very grateful and excited!