Andy Brown POETRY

Radio Podcast

2012-02-24T02:37:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was invited to do a radio talk and reading for Devon's WordQuest project.

I had an hour's interview / talk / reading, with Richard Povall at the Aune Head Arts studio in Dartington. Here's the link to the podcast:

http://www.auneheadarts.org.uk/site/projects/wordquest/downloads_podcasts.html

I read a poem by Auden, and talked about painting-poems which, of course, led on to reading a few poems from my new book and discussing Bosch's paintings.

We also talked about ecology and poetry, and the book John Burnside and I collaborated on together, Goose Music. I read one of John's poems from his collection Feast Days and several of my own from Goose Music.

The show finishes with a favourite lyric poem by Thomas Lynch, and a final poem from my new book 'Clown in Space'.

New Translations of Borges

2012-02-22T07:13:00.000-08:00

Jorge Luis Borges

Many years ago I learned to speak Spanish by reading the poems of Jorge Luis Borges, and Frederico Garcia Lorca, with a girlfriend who was fluent in the language. It was all very romantic and I still have some of the poems by heart. But languages, like love, fall into a jumbled state of affairs if they are not attended to on a regular basis. In an attempt to rekindle my fires, I've therefore been working on some translated versions of Borges' poems - my first ever attempt to work at some serious translations.

The poems I'm most interested in are, what I call, Borges' "suburban poems", and I'm hoping that ten or so of these will form a central section in a new manuscript of mine, which I'm provisionally calling Exurbia - the exurbs are the outermost suburbs of a city. My own poems begin in the suburbs (where I grew up) and move out towards the coast (where I now live) from where, with a ricorso symbolised by a flock of homing geese, the poems come full circle. Borges wrote a number of poems in which the suburbs of his own city feature very strongly, more often than not troubled by sunsets and strange dawns. I've been trying to stay true to the suburban gardens, courtyards and sunsets of these poems, but have been re-versioning them in a simpler, less baroque language than many of the existing translations.

I'm keeping the suburban translations under wraps for the moment, but here are three other Borges sonnets I've also been versioning, much more in the metaphysical and symbolic vein for which his work is so well known:

The Enigmas

I who am now singing these lines

will soon be among the mysterious number

who inhabit that magical desert

with no ‘before’, no ‘after’ and no ‘when’.

So say the mystics. I trust

I am unworthy of hell or glory

and predict nothing – our history

changes form like Proteus.

What meandering maze, what

flash of blinding glory will be my fate

when this adventure presents me with

the curious experience of death?

I want to drink its crystalline oblivion,

to be forever, but never to have been.

The White Doe

From what rough ballad of green England,
or what Persian etching; from which obscure region
of nights and days that encircle our pasts
did the white doe spring, as I dreamed her this morning?

It lasted a second. I saw her cross the meadow
and vanish in an illusory evening gold,
mild creature made of shreds of memory
and a little forgetfulness, doe with just one side.

The things which govern this curious world
let me dream of you, but not be your owner.
Perhaps in a nook of the deep future

I will find you again, white doe of my dream.
I too am a fugitive dream lasting only a few days more

than the dream of the meadow, the whiteness.

To A Saxon Poet

The snowfalls of Northumbria have known

and forgotten the prints of your feet;

and the sunsets that have fallen between

your time and mine are myriad, ghostly brother.

Slowly, in the creeping shadows, you made

metaphors of swords on the great oceans,

of the horrors that dwell in the pines,

and of your solitary days.

How can I unearth your features, your name?

They are held in secret by oblivion.

I shall never know how this same

earth was for you my fellow man.

You wandered the lonely roads of exile

leaving only these, your songs of iron.

of Books, Butterflies, Beer and Bosch

2012-01-31T03:31:00.000-08:00

I’ve had a fabulous poetry week of it...

Last Tuesday I took my new book for its first outing. We went to Cambridge, where Jane Monson had organised another reading for her excellent prose poem anthology This Line is Not For Turning (Cinnamon, 2011). The anthology is doing exceptionally well, having cleared its first print run - no mean feat for a book of prose poems - and has one of my Clown poems in it.

http://www.cinnamonpress.com/this-line-is-not-for-turning/

Before the event I went for a pint with Richard Berengarten (aka. Burns), author of the astonishing book of poems The Blue Butterfly (Shearsman Books). This is the real thing: serious poetry documenting the events and aftermath of the Nazi massacre at Kragujevac, a town in central Serbia. It was wonderful to meet Richard for the first time, wandering through topics as various as cosmology, Emergence theory, our shared friendship with John Burnside, the I Ching, and how to sequence large poetry sequences and structures. Esoteric stuff.

For the event Jane had organised at Cambridge’s CB1 poetry venue, there was a great mix of poets – Robert Vas Dias, Linda Black, Lucy Hamilton, David Gilbert and myself – and a big audience. Jane rounded the evening off with a single powerful prose poem. We’ve known each other’s work since I was external examiner to her PhD thesis on the French poet Francis Ponge. Jane’s first collection of prose poems, Speaking Without Tongues, is a must read from Cinnamon Press.

http://www.cinnamonpress.com/speaking-without-tongues/

For me, the stand-out prose poem of the evening was Robert Vas Dias’s ‘Do Angels Eat?’, based on Albrecht Durer’s engraving, Melancholia (1514).

The narrator comes downstairs in the morning only to find an angel “sitting on the little plinth I was going to put a potted plant on”, and this tips them into a series of searching descriptions and questions about what to do... I mean, “Do angels eat?” In fact, if you Google search those three words, you come up with a plethora of fascinating theological points from scripture: according to the Bible, their food is of course a granular substance called Manna, tasting like wafers and honey. Not unlike my breakfast then. “Why has she disturbed my life?” the narrator asks; “how do I accept her perched upon the little plinth as though she’s perched upon my soul?” Indeed. This great poem is in Robert's collection Still. Life (Shearsman).

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2010/vasdias.html

I read from The Fool and the Physician, and others read from their various collections: a great celebration of the healthy state of the contemporary British prose poem. Two days later I read from the new book to Carrie Etter’s (http://carrieetter.blogspot.com/) students at Bath Spa University, and the new poems seemed to go down exceptionally well. I’m doing these readings with a slideshow of the Bosch paintings which inspired many of the poems, so you get a touch of poetry, some art history, and a discussion of the processes of writing – an attempt to do something slightly different with the idea of ‘the poetry reading’. Next week I’m doing this for Sarah Law at London Metropolitan University, an event simply called Human Folly:

This link will take you to the Facebook invitations page for the event.

Perhaps see you there.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/events/348953278456154/

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/berenTBB.html

2012-01-14T02:58:00.000-08:00

My new book, The Fool and the Physician, beautifully designed by Chris and Jen at Salt Publishing, has just arrived from the printers.

The title is an adaptation of a quote from Tiberius: "At forty, every man is a fool or his own physician" and, being around that age myself, I had begun writing various poems about clowns and fools. These rapidly grew into a body of work - Part One of the book accordingly sees clowns careering into space, up to heaven, knocking on our front doors, and expounding on the end of the world.

The beautiful book cover is Hieronymus Bosch's painting "The Cure of Folly", and shows a quack-doctor removing "the stone of folly" from the head of a dupe called Lubbert Das, a gullible fool. It tied in perfectly with the Tiberius quote, so I decided to indulge my lifelong love of Bosch, and wrote poems responding to his remarkable paintings of human folly. There are clowns and fools everywhere in Bosch, and so Part Two of the book shows direct poetic responses to his paintings, formal experiments, and more tangential responses like the densely erotic anagrammatic poem 'The Garden of Earthly Delights'.

Do please visit the publishers webpage at http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844713462.htm

I hope you'll be inspired to get a copy, and enjoy reading.

Here's are two poems from the book. The first poem is about the first clown in space, and the second is based on Bosch's famous painting 'The Ship of Fools'.

Clown in Space

In September 2009, Canadian clown Guy Laliberté, founder of the Cirque du Soleil, was launched into space from the Kazakhstan steppes.

Above the steppes I career into space

and wonder myself into darkness.

It is daytime down there, ‘broad daylight’

up here, but utterly dark. Below on earth

the atmosphere spins the sunlight into gold,

whilst up here there’s no atmosphere at all

to strike a glow between the stars –

there is nothing like darkness to remind you

you are extraordinarily alive, and alone.

The blue planet turns like a plate on a stick

underneath the Heavens’ billowing Top,

slung with a billion fairy lights and spots.

The stars perform their hypnotism act,

pulsing like the cities down below.

Although I’m the first of my kind into space,

my friends are all around in constellation:

Leo jumping through his ring of fire;

the Gemini twins in bareback balance,

riding round the ring on Pegasus;

the giant Betelgeuse and his team of red dwarfs;

the Sisters of the Pleiades, holding on

like the Severinis in their human pyramid.

Here is Orion, throwing knives at Venus,

and Hercules decked with his barbells and furs.

Impossible to juggle here – the balls simply float

from your hands, although tumbling is easy:

you set yourself in motion, spinning round

and round and round.

But this show is soon done

when Earth obscures the blue-eyed moon;

when my dreams slide down the thrilling slopes

of the Big Dipper; when the lit-up world floats by

and this audience of one returns to gravity

and stumbling jokes, as the ring-master Sun

calls closing time on the cirque du soleil.

Ship of Fools

Despite the talk of storms we went out sailing

and three drinks down were all soon in our cups.

When something cracked, you asked if we were ailing

and whether something serious was up.

Were we now underway, or run aground...

but we were three drinks down and in our cups.

We picked up mermaids on our ultrasound.

Was that more storms ahead, or was it sunny;

were we now underway, or run aground?

When lightning hit our mast it wasn’t funny,

the mermaids disappeared beneath the waves.
Was that more storms ahead, or was it sunny,

would we all end up in a watery grave,

or would our simple vessel stay afloat?

The mermaids disappeared beneath the waves

singing ‘Fools set out to sea in unsound boats’.

Despite the talk of storms we went out sailing.

Would our simple vessel stay afloat?

When something cracked, you asked if we were ailing.

2012-01-12T01:44:00.000-08:00

Two New Poems and a Commentary by George Messo

The first poems I read by George Messo were in a meticulously produced chapbook from Oasis Books, In a Station House. This refined booklet struck me for its meditative, musical and formal qualities, as well as its wonderfully disquieting images. This was not traditionally formal poetry, rather a different kind of sensibility and musicality that had me going along with, what the poet himself describes as, a ‘liquid skip: / a sizzling saltarello.’ I have since gone on to read, delight in (and review) George Messo’s subsequent books: From the Pine Observatory (Near East Books), Entrances and Hearing Still (both Shearsman Books), as well as translations of the Turkish master Ilhan Berk, and the younger Turkish poet Gonca Özmen. I included some of his work in my anthology The Allotment (Stride), admiring his lyrical maturity and the almost 'still life' quality of his poems: controlled syntax and form, an individual ear, and a unique way with exquisite images and pace, that leave time and space for the poem to resonate, shaping both writer and reader. An interview follows, but here are two new poems by George Messo.

Winter. Fox And Hawk

for Tina Peace

Frequently near, the summer months pass

and even here we speak so often of you

now, coming like a spirit these years

as the short-winged hawk, too light

to lift his kill, rests by the frozen river.

I have carried you, and brought you to this

far cold north, through moveable snow,

bewildered. You were my poowogan,

dream walker, soft-footed, while I,

mute and dumbed-down by frost,

whitened beyond my age by rime,

stalked you through aspen, willow and pine.

And here, where forest entrails spill

into winter light, you find me, straying

out from the forest’s dark memory:

your racing heart, heat to my tongue.

Morning At Midnight

A moment ago is a marvellous way to make a memory,

of a past so recently here like a lingering scent

or a body-shape left on a bed, she said. Our history

says once and means in a time not now; reticent

but faithful to our fragile need for mystery.

When the time is right we find what’s absent

— or does it find us? — tucked surreptitiously

where it’s least sought: the past in the present.

Enduring but reducible. That, she said, is the poverty

of life in a present where the future’s already spent.

A few years ago I began a conversation with George, intending to publish a collection of interviews, but the project was overtaken by other things and never completed. What follows is George’s initial response: I find his descriptions of his own processes, his sense of sound and form, and his reflections on the influences of the languages that surround him, quite fascinating:

George Messo: “I was never able to separate form and sound. Form was just a way of orchestrating sound in the poem for me. A lot of what I heard in poems were sounds and patterns of pauses and silences that I didn’t very much recognize as those I had in my head. I suppose like many other poets my sense of my own music – or at least a desire to make it – was strong, and so I wasn’t interested in mimicking other peoples’ music.

I did this, of course, for a while, playing with traditional metres: sonnets, sestinas, ottava rima. I think, though, I became a bit obsessed with sound, with music, and that whole enterprise of manipulating and controlling the breath. I tried, as far as I thought it might be possible, to formalize or pattern or score what I took to be pre-eminent: the music. I even had ideas at the time that I could imagine the sound of the poem before I’d written it and I would sometimes write a kind of diagram, a skeleton of how the stray lines, phrases and words would come together in the final poem. If you can picture a few random words and sentences surrounded by blanks, and the blanks overwritten with marks for stress and syllable count. That now seems absolutely crazy to me, but I understood it at the time as a way of stretching the formal possibilities of the poem as much – I thought – as the music of my own language required.

And then when the language around me changed, when I moved to Trabzon, my whole notion of what sounds meant changed a great deal. My first reaction was silence, the cultural and linguistic isolation, and the adjustment that followed, the learning of a new language. I didn’t write for two years. Being away from English books also had a silencing effect.

I knew I was going to be here (in Turkey) for a while, so I set myself some goals. Things really began to change for me by the third year when I was able to read poetry in Turkish for the first time. Oktay Rifat was a revelation, as profound as my first readings of Christopher Middleton, Derek Mahon, W.S. Graham and Tranströmer. There was an almost unsupportable simplicity in his poems, as if he were balancing everything on a phrase, a nuance, a kind of verbal tick. But with it an imaginative power that opened the poem to a large and abundant landscape, to ways of speaking I’d never heard before. And it all sounded so beautiful, so simple. There were many other poets I read after that: Hikmet of course, Asaf and Anday (both of whom I translated at length), Ilhan Berk, Cansever, Süraya, Uyar – too many to mention.

All of this reading caused me to think very hard about my own practices, and in particular about the dialogue I’d been having with myself about form and sound. There really are no parallels in English for much of what happens in a poem by Rifat, for instance. And I began to ask myself, well, why not? I guess the new poems in Entrances were my way of responding to that question. The openness, the verbal simplicity, the emphasis on syllable over formal metres, the use of internal rhyme away from end rhyme, all of these things I put down to the Turkish influence – and I mean that in the broadest sense. I really can’t exaggerate what it’s like for someone who learns the language and suddenly finds himself in a vast library of hitherto unknown – and to his culture still unknown – voices.

What encounters in poetry always occasion for me are forms of engagement with the self and others that I’m unable to imagine myself. A poem that I could have written isn’t interesting to me. I know the kind of thing I would write if someone asked me to write a poem called ‘The Contours of a Tree’s Grief’ or ‘The Interior Life of Mold’. And that’s one reason why I don’t write often. I have to somehow take all the “me-ness” out of the draft and start again, and it’s the re-start, the revision, the de-centering which forces me to see the poem creating me, rather than me writing the poem. That kind of de-familiarizing of the self gives me what I so much admire in others: engagement, renewal, awakening. If my poems are moving differently now it’s because I think I know more about myself, I know more about my own poetry. And a lot of that I put down to being here and having a foot in two cultures."

George’s blog is available at www.georgemesso.wordpress.com

2012-01-11T03:32:00.001-08:00

Today I’ve been reading EXCISIONS by Clare Best (Waterloo Press, 2011). I’d already read Clare’s chapbook Treasure Ground some time ago, and admired its careful attention to observed detail; its attentiveness to landscape and stewardship (it came out of a writer’s residency on an organic farm), and its equally careful attention to phrasing, poetic devices and a great way with imagery. But EXCISIONS is an altogether more extraordinary book of poems, wholeheartedly recommended.

A first group of poems, Matryoshka (those Russian Dolls that serve for such varied metaphors), presents a group of poignant elegies in a family’s lineage, and blends carefully wrought lyric verses, with more evanescent moments of memory, kinship, grief and recovery captured in some exact prose poems - I was particularly pleased to see these as they lend a formal range to what is an already confident lyricism.

The second group, Self-Portrait Without Breasts, is truly remarkable. As a teenager in the 1970s, Clare had nursed her mother through the trauma of two radical mastectomies. Her aunt and first cousin both developed breast cancer in subsequent decades. Following all of this, she was told that she also had a high risk of breast cancer herself and so chose preventative bilateral mastectomy. This radical reformulating of her mature body has not only reshaped her life, but resulted in a body of poems that equally shows radical poetic reformulations that are more than equal to handling this mind-boggling subject matter. As she writes ‘I have an ear for truth’ and that is unquestionably so. I don’t want to ‘excise’ bits of it myself, so will just say “read it”. This is precise, inventive, often witty and sometimes erotic, and at all times powerfully truthful writing – I don’t think any other group of poems has made me feel so aware of my body. There’s not a shred of sentiment or maudlin self-indulgence here: this is the real thing. Formally it is varied and rich, assured in its handling of music and image, and conclusively powerful in tone, range and subject matter.

The last section of poems, Airborne, returns us to the lyric mode at which Clare Best is adept, exploring desire in its many forms: personal, quotidian, and often domestic confessionals. These are quietly assured pieces.

You can read more about Clare Best at her website http://clarebest.co.uk/

And you can see/buy the book from the publisher’s website

http://waterloopresshove.co.uk/#/clare-best/4555468964

2012-01-11T03:31:00.000-08:00

New on the Stride Magazine website, here's my review of John Kinsella's excellent latest book ARMOUR.

http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20mag2011/nov%202011/WHITE%20PUNKS%20IN%20ARMOUR.htm

2012-01-11T03:29:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased to now be supervising the PhD of poet Eleanor Rees, who has recently started a funded PhD in Writing Poetry with me here at Exeter University.

Eleanor has recently been collaborating with film-maker Glenn-Emlyn Richards to create a film version of her poem 'Saltwater'. Have a look at their work by following the link: http://vimeo.com/32033601

The poem was originally commissioned by Almanac for a performance at the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool in April 2011, 'Radical Liverpool: a Happening on Hope Street'.

Eleanor's website is at http://www.eleanorrees.info/

of Vegetables and Villanelles

2011-12-22T04:54:00.000-08:00

In his landmark book The Country and the City, critic Raymond Williams notes that people living in villages have always cultivated “a rented patch or strip, an extended garden, a few hives or fruit trees… not only for their produce, but for their direct and immediate satisfactions and for the felt reality of an area of control of one’s own immediate labour” (101). Williams is clearly talking about the allotments that have since proliferated in our towns and cities; those communal plots where we can still get our hands and our minds muddy and feel not only nourished by our produce, but also by the satisfaction of knowing that it was we who did it; an “area of control or our own immediate labour” as Williams would have it.

I last went up to my own allotment about a week ago. It was extremely cold and wet – that drifting mist of a rain we call “mizzle”, a delightful portmanteau word that exists somewhere between “mist” and “drizzle”. Needless to say I was the only person up there; at this time of year there’s not a lot left growing. I picked some sorry Brussels Sprouts for the Christmas table this coming weekend; a purple cabbage and a white for some Boxing Day coleslaw; the last of the green onions and a handful of kale. It’s really time to wait the Winter out now and, in the coming months, to start to get the garden ready for the growth of Spring. In the meantime, we’re steadily getting through the pickles, chutneys, jams and sauces that we made from the fruit and veg this Summer and Autumn.

Whilst I’m thinking about allotments and portmanteau words, it inevitably sets me to thinking about poetry: how poems and allotments share all sorts of metaphor, vocabulary and culture; how poems and preserves conserve the yield, “the great harvest”as Robert Frost put it in his poem ‘After Apple Picking’. Unlike Frost, however, I’m not tired of it; I want more.

Some time ago I edited an anthology of new poets, which I called The Allotment. The book itself didn’t do so well I admit although, notably, many of the poets I included have gone on to very good things, publishing award-winning collections of poetry, translations, and works of criticism: Abi Curtis, Rose Flint, Iain Galbraith, Luke Kennard, Sarah Law, Aoife Mannix, Sophie Mayer, George Messo, Jane Routh and Scott Thurston amongst them, to name but some of the contributors. I still very much stand by them. Part of my idea in the book was to draw the parallel between the allotment as “a small piece of land rented for cultivation” in the sense that Williams describes it, and the poem itself as a metaphoric “patch, tract, plot” as the dictionary also defines “allotment”. And where the poem is concerned, the other meaning of “allotment” is also apposite: “a ration, quota, or measure”. Poems embody many forms of measure, in the technical sense, but they also certainly measure out our lives just as they measure out Raymond Williams’s “immediate satisfactions”.

Which brings me to another landmark book, Jonathan Bate’s Song of the Earth, in which Bate makes a similar point but, for him, in relation to New York’s Central Park. Bate refers to the Park as “a representation of the state of nature: a representation which we may experience, a re-creational space in which we can walk and bathe and play” (64). Bate argues that “other works of art, mostly poems, may create for the mind the same kind of re-creational space that a park creates for the body” (64). I guess I’m musing about the same thing, only my metaphor is the vegetable garden. As with the hands-on allotment, where generations of us have momentarily escaped the realities of modern urban living by getting our hands and feet muddy, the “patches, tracts, plots” of poems are spaces within which cultivation and growth, by necessity, figure strongly. And as I tuck into my Brussels Sprouts and Marrow Chutney this Christmas, I can hear Robert Frost somewhere in the back of my mind, or W.B. Yeats tending his ‘nine bean rows’ at the Lake Isle of Innisfree. So whether its Sonnets or Sweetcorn, Vegetables or Villanelles, now we’ve passed the Winter Solstice, I’m hungering for the growth – the satisfying reality – of the garden plot of the new year.

2011-12-11T12:22:00.001-08:00

Thisness and Thusness: Thing Theory

In the writing classroom I regularly find myself discussing the central aim of poetry to make something that is absent become present. It seems to me one of the most basic concepts to understand in writing a poem. How do we make what is not there, appear as though it were?

T.S. Eliot of course came up with the idea of the Objective Correlative – a way of using concrete objects to stand in for abstract emotions. It has become an orthodoxy in creative writing, underpinning the endlessly-touted imperative “Show Don’t Tell”. And it is in his stead that the Canadian poet Anne Carson, for example, writes about her father’s blue cardigan (the present object) to stand in for the abstract idea of loss (the absent). Don’t name the loss, we teach, which is abstract and absent by nature; simply write about the empty cardigan. It’s a simple enough idea, an extremely effective one and, I think, can be traced back to that most simple of forms: the riddle.

Yet even the riddle itself may find its roots, perhaps, in something much simpler: the Old Norse compounds known as Kennings. “Sea-steed” says the Old Norse poet, and the absent “ship” is suddenly made present. “Bane of Wood” he says again, and this time the absent “fire” springs into presence. It is perhaps the simplest form of conjuring with language; a piece of magic. Going beyond two- or three-word kennings, the riddle aims to do the same thing: to conjure the absent into presence: “My first is in Howl but not in Owl,” and there we have the first letter in the name of our mystery object that will, by the end of the poem, magically appear.

So why might I be thinking about riddles? Living and writing in Exeter places me in immediate relation to The Exeter Book of Riddles, one of the few surviving miscellanies of Anglo Saxon poetry. It comprises ninety-six riddles from an original one hundred, describing animals, weapons and household objects, music and writing, and Christian symbols. I’ve also just read one this morning in Paul Muldoon’s magnificent book of poems Horse Latitudes - a riddle about a griddle. And I’ve written riddles myself in the past; most notably as a commission in 2002 to commemorate the lifting of restrictions to animal movements during the Foot and Mouth crisis in the area of North Devon where I was living at the time.

The commission was to provide a riddle for a bell, made by the sculptor Marcus Vergette, to be cited in the community. During the Foot and Mouth crisis, the ringing of church bells was temporarily halted, to begin again on the day that restrictions to livestock movements were lifted. The ‘peal’ of the bell reaches to the ‘pale’ of the parish, these two words having an intrinsic etymological root: ‘peal’ has its origins in the Saxon word for the picket fence erected on the ‘pale’, or boundary, of hill forts. Traditionally bell towers were designed so that the peals of the bells could be heard throughout the parish, right the way to the ‘pale’. And as they reached there, and beyond, the peals paled. The riddle I wrote for the Highampton bell (pictured above) says:

My feet in Earth

My Mouth in clouds

on one side of the bell and, on the other,

My song is soft appeal

To bring home flock and herd.

The answer to both riddles being, of course, ‘Bell’.
Bells have complex sounds, not only in their pitch, but also in what we perceive the bell to be ‘saying’, a complexity compounded by the complexity of social and cultural lore surrounding bells, and the complexity of the musical patterns in campanology. At the end of the Foot and Mouth epidemic in 2001, the local church in Highampton rang a peal all day, for the first time in six months. My riddle, with its own gently swinging ding-dong rhythm, the ding-dong rhymes of ‘bring’ and ‘song’, and its obvious pun on ‘appeal’, suited the subject well. Along with its cultural reference to historic shepherding methods – the shepherd bringing in the sheep penned in by the ‘pale’, it also makes clear reference to the restocking of the contemporary landscape after the mass slaughter of animals in the Foot and Mouth crisis – ‘to bring home flock and herd’ is intended literally as well as historically. These matters also suited the situation of the bell, which stands on the boundary of the village school, where the local children can hopefully come to understand the complexities of land stewardship. And every schoolchild loves to unpick a riddle.
Kevin Crossley-Holland and Lawrence Sail argue in the Foreword to their New Exeter Book of Riddles, that riddles establish metaphoric relationships between things and other subjects in a peculiar way: ‘In this way, a riddle may not only be pleasurable but also have a healing power,’ they write. This was certainly a quality I wanted in the riddle for the Highampton Bell. And, although I’m clearly no longer a schoolchild, I still can’t resist the riddle as the simplest and most inherently thingy of poems. As Stephen Spender wrote:

‘in most poetry which has as subject a concrete or animal thing – Shelly’s Skylark, say – one begins with the object, the title, the thing, in mind, and then reads the poetry as referring back to this already-conceived idea. The Riddle is back to front. One gets the poetry emanating from the subject – thing – first – and arrives – if one does ever arrive at it – at the title last. The effect is something like pure poetry – a peculiar concentration on imagery – before one arrives at the actual image’ (in The New Exeter Book of Riddles).

The relationships between poem and thing, absence and presence are made quite overt here. From the ‘thusness’ of the poem the reader works towards the ‘thisness’ of the thing. And to go back to from where I began: where the lesson about ‘presence and absence’ is concerned, it’s this careful balancing and orchestration of thisness and thusness that lets us find our ideas in a poem. You got it right William Carlos Williams: ‘No ideas but in things’.

2011-12-05T07:37:00.001-08:00

“Autobiographical and yet entirely fictitious…” :

how poems emerge

I was teaching my 3^rd year writing class last Friday afternoon when questions of collaboration came up. Is all writing ‘a solitary act’ as John Burnside said to me years back when I interviewed him for Binary Myths my book of correspondences; or is it collaborative in the widest senses of that word? In class, my teaching assistant, the poet Ben Smith, pressed me on it: what about Goose Music, the collaborative book I published with John Burnside in 2008?

Goose Music as a whole was informed by ideas of Emergence theory – how we get very complex patterns in the world (and in poems) through very simple rules and local interactions. John suggested we use Emergence as a theme, and a technique, to which we both responded, letting the new poems listen to each other to build a unified whole out of our constituent parts. Emergence favours the collective over the individual, and it found its way into our poems about human and natural world relationships, poems about myth, fable, folklore, politics, ecology and much more besides. John had also suggested we originally write with Indian Raga structures in mind (a particular interest of his), but we never did this. However, it did lead to us organising our poems into long improvisatory sequences – even though the poems were often written individually.

We swapped our poems and sequences several times throughout the collaborative process, and looked at where the book was heading, identifying other poems that we might write in response to each other’s contributions. My poems have often explored these themes, and John has often dealt with ideas of kinship in its local and philosophical meanings. I remember setting myself the task of responding to John's poems by writing a kinship sequence that engaged with Emergence, poetry sequences and kinship all at once.

The trigger for it came in the form of a book review. I had read a review of one of my previous books that week. In it the reviewer had written something that could be applied to many poets’ work, but for some reason it stuck with me. They thought my poems were both ‘autobiographical and yet entirely fictitious at the same time’. That struck me as exactly right: poetry should be about us; emerge through us, but absolutely not be 'about me'. As Borges wrote: 'The poem gains if we look at it as the expression of a longing, not the account of an actual event.' ('The Other') I took that idea on and decided that I would write my sequence of kinship poems as an entirely fictitious biography. To do this, I needed a title. I was playing around with inconsequential phrases, and was reminded of a poem written by an old poet friend Miles Champion, called ‘Elves in the Shelves’. Silly stuff. John Ashbery has done similar things with titles. It made me choose my title on the spot – this new sequence would be called ‘The Other Brother’, and it would be an homage (another of John’s recurring themes) to the brother I do not have. I sat and wrote seven lyric poems in sequence, in a couple of days. I was very pleased with them. They came at me virtually from nowhere (although I’ve just revealed the truth of what that ‘nowhere’ really was – not ‘nowhere’ at all, but a complex mix of Emergent collaborations). I showed them to John, and he thought them suitable for the book.

So Ben… in answer to your question… the act of writing is solitary, yet everything about it is a collaboration.

Days are Kumquats - or The Enterprise of Poetry

2011-11-24T03:03:00.001-08:00

Since Corinna Wagner gave her recent public lecture on ‘John Keats in Teignmouth’ and, being ‘the new poet in town’ myself, I’ve found myself reimagining those eight weeks that Keats spent here some 200 years ago, nursing his dying brother. It’s a delightful seaside town but it was, without doubt, a melancholy time for Keats.

And as questions of ‘Melancholy and Delight’ are surely never far away from any poet’s mind, it was that I found myself reaching for a particular poem in a PhD tutorial I was holding yesterday. My PhD poet Jacky Tarleton had written a poem with a tangerine in it (she was thinking of Louis MacNeice peeling and portioning his own tangerine, in his poem ‘Snow’ and feeling ‘the drunkenness of things being various’.)

In a moment that we might identify as 'the enterprise of poetry', all of these things suddenly came together – Keats, melancholy, delight, citrus fruit, drunkenness, variety – and made me instantly reach for a book on the shelf. I wanted to show Jacky an old favourite poem, Tony Harrison’s ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’, which fuses all of these elements into a long, lyric poem; an extended metaphor on melancholy and delight, written by Harrison in Micanopy, Florida, home (amongst other things) of various citrus fruits. Harrison’s poem is a reply to John Keats’ famous poem ‘Ode on Melancholy’. In his final stanza, Keats writes of the grape as ‘Joy’s fruit’, but in his lines gives us the bittersweet metaphor that Melancholy and Delight are inextricably intertwined. These are Keats’ final lines:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil’d Melancholy has her Sovran shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

Harrison substitutes the Kumquat for Keats’ Grape, and writes back to him, beginning with the assertion that this bittersweet kumquat is ‘the right fruit for my prime’. The narrator – and here we surely have the poet himself speaking in direct confessional mode – was ‘full of bile and self-defeat’ last year, but now things look much better. Keats wrote his ‘Ode’ just a couple of years before he died and knew a fruit or two himself – ‘candied apple, quince and plum and gourd' – but Harrison suggests that surely Keats would have chosen the kumquat for his metaphor, instead of the grape, if only he had known about such a fruit. For the kumquat has, in Harrison’s mind, ‘all the qualities of fruit before the Fall’ and is the ‘best fruit, and metaphor, to fit the soul’. Crucially, it is the sourness with the sweetness that makes it so, for in eating the fruit whole (pith, zest, flesh, pips and all) we never know where the sweetness is and where the sourness. It’s such a beautifully simple metaphor:

that Micanopy kumquat that I ate
whole, straight off the tree, sweet pulp and sour skin –

or was it sweet outside, and sour within?
For however many kumquats that I eat
I'm not sure if it's flesh or rind that's sweet,
and being a man of doubt at life's mid-way
I'd offer Keats some kumquats and I'd say:
You'll find that one part's sweet and one part's tart:
say where the sweetness or the sourness start.

Harrison extends his metaphor to ask where night and day end and begin, exploring how, just as ‘days have darkness round them like a rind’, so ‘life has a skin of death that keeps its zest.’ In all this existentialism, what Harrison really wants is Keats' verdict on the kumquat and, though he can never have that, (‘dead men don't eat kumquats, or drink wine’ – one of my favourite all-time lines), what he does have is poetry.
Poetry to bring things together: grapes, wine, melancholy, delight; Keats’ allusions; his beloved Fanny Brawne and Harrison’s own wife; his daughter’s illness, his mother’s death; both poets’ meditations on life, death and the delight that should fill the space between those two markers... are all brought together in the simple act of picking a kumquat and popping it in the mouth; bursting its bittersweet joys against the palate; and turning to poetry.

The new day dawns. O days! My spirit greets
the kumquat with the spirit of John Keats.
O kumquat, comfort for not dying young,
both sweet and bitter, bless the poet's tongue!
I burst the whole fruit chilled by morning dew
against my palate. Fine, for 42!

I'm a couple of years older than Harrison was when he wrote this and, although days are undoubtedly kumquats sometimes, we DO have poetry. I find myself turning to a writer who can say it better than I can - Thomas Lynch. In his engaging short essay about the processes of one of his own poems "Notes on 'A Note on the Rapture to His True Love'", Lynch writes:

"Now endeavor to relate these seemingly unrelated apparitions in verse - for isn't this the enterprise of poetry? To apprehend the kinship in the distant cousins of happenstance and image and utterance? Or vice versa?"

What Lynch and I are getting at in all of this is the way that Poetry brings things together – Keats, Harrison, melancholy, delight, citrus fruit, drunkenness, Teignmouth, Florida – and makes a shape for it. Poetry is the making of all this – Poesis Greek from poiein to make; Makar, Middle English, a maker, a poet. It’s what Wallace Stevens means in his own great Florida poem (my all time favourite in fact) ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’: ‘For she was the maker’.

New Prose Poems and Critical Realism

2011-11-17T02:01:00.001-08:00

I've been writing a lot of new prose poems recently and, as a result, I can now foresee a complete body of them somewhere up there in the future. I'm going to focus on this new body of work when I have some study leave from teaching in the New Year.

http://www.cinnamonpress.com/this-line-is-not-for-turning/

Some older prose poems of mine, and a couple of newer ones, were recently published in the anthology This Line is Not For Turning (Cinnamon Press, 2011), edited by Jane Monson, herself a fine prose poet. There have been several launches for the anthology around the UK, including a recent launch in Exeter at the October Exeter Poetry Festival, with readings from Luke Kennard, Jane Monson, Anthony Caleshu and myself. I'm told the anthology has pretty much sold out its first print run, which is a remarkable achievement for the first ever anthology of British prose poets. It's a very interesting book with lots of fine examples of what poets are doing with prose poetry in Britain today.

A few of my newer prose poems are published on the Shadowtrain Magazine website. Shadowtrain is, according to its editor Ian Seed, "a bi-monthly gathering of poems, translations, articles and other writings, from the lyrical to the innovative, whatever makes the editor spill his coffee." You can read my new coffee-soaked prose poems at http://www.shadowtrain.com/

There are 4 prose poems here. 'The Bone Folder' came from a course I taught at Arvon with the wonderful book binder Rachel Hazell. The poem plays with the mathematical idea that you cannot fold a piece of paper more than seven times, imagining that, when someone does, the eighth fold slips them through the gates of this logical world of geometry into a new dimension in which the language and tools of paper folding define everything. Check out Rachel's richly imaginative world at http://www.hazelldesignsbooks.co.uk/

'Mushrooms' was an idea borrowed from Milan Kundera, about a man who talks about mushrooms instead of love. With the prose poem's ability to mop up surreal scenarios, the poem simply explores the transposition of the word 'mushrooms' to where love should be. It's a fitting poem for me, being as I am both 'into' mushrooms (I picked a bag of Horse Mushrooms with my kids at the weekend from a siding on the River Exe), and being 'in mushrooms' myself.

The prose poem 'On Beauty' extends my fascination for wordplay, mixing it with nature again. Borrowing a phrase from J.A Baker's extraordinary book The Peregrine (this is a 'must read' for everyone), I subject the lyrical impulse of his beautiful line "The greater the beauty, the more terrible the death", to OuLiPo style word replacements, simply counting on in the dictionary to find new nouns and adjectives for 'beauty' and 'death'. Again the prose poem's ability to capture the apparently absurd and transpose it into a new kind of logic, provides a series of happy accidents and new ideas here.

'The Rock' is me being a realist. A Critical Realist actually. In everything I write I'm interested in how our mind-dependent descriptions of the world, relate to the mind-independent world itself, without simply slipping into the endlessly self-reflexive world of the postmodern linguistic turn. The American philosopher John Searle perhaps best embodies this Critical Realist approach for me in his 1995 book The Construction of Social Reality, examining how we move from the 'brute facts' of the real world (like rocks and mountains), to the 'institutional facts' of the social world (like money and language). The British philosopher Roy Bhaskar combines a similar philosophy of science (my academic background) with a philosophy of social reality (for me, poetry), looking at the interface between the natural and social worlds. However we may describe it, and fight over our hotly contested, differing descriptions of the world, what we are describing is the world. The real world. So this poem works through those ideas, by writing about one of my favourite places - the Logan Rock, at Treen in Cornwall.

2011-11-16T08:33:00.000-08:00

The new ebook from Argotist Ebooks is Woody Alliances Laundered by Andy Brown and William Wordsworth.

In Woody Alliances Laundered Andy Brown and William Wordsworth collaborate on 16 reinterpretations and variations of the most popular of English Romantic poems "I wandered lonely as a cloud". Among other questions, these witty and insightful new poems ask what if Dorothy Wordsworth were the original source of the poem; what if William vanished from the picture altogether; what does commerce and recession have to do with daffodils; and why is the Reverend Spooner out walking in Grasmere, conversing with rhyming Cockneys, Zen poet-monks, and archaeologists who have just uncovered the Rosetta Stone for Wordsworth’s original poem?

You can download it for free at:
http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/woody-alliances-laundered/18349864