 |
|
|
||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||
|
|
|
Poetry Landscapes |
|
|
|
Archive 20 March, 2008. Intolerance, Eurostar, Arts Council culture, Crossley-Holland at Wivenhoe, Poetry School exercise 3 March 2008. Interview Christine Webb 28 February, 2008. Normal weeks 14 February 2008. First fair of the year, Acumen 5 February 2008. Arts Council form filling, National Fairground Archives, Hecuba’s Lament 24 January 2008. Thinking about Books, Suffolk Book League, Image – Object – Text, Gertrude Hermes, The Poetry School 11 January 2008. Digging in, Stour Community First, Still ushering in the New Year, Thank-you letters 4 January 2008. Reflections on Christmas - Books, Round Letters, Poems, Back on track 23 December, 2007. Heaven & Hell, Kathleen Jamie, E-A’s Fairground Showmen, Snatches of South London, Ringing the changes 13 December, 2007. Travellers, settled and unsettled, George Baselitz, The Poetry School with Eva Salzman, Bedside Books 2 December, 2007. BOS in wind and rain, Ambit reading in North House Gallery, Tesco update, Submitting poems to magazines 19 November, 2007. Literary swings, Two Roberts at Wivenhoe Poetry, ulius Ceasar at The Mercury Theatre, Manningtree’s food markets, Sea change at Overy Staithe 4th November, 2007. Aldeburgh, Weekend with the Vasanthakumars, Old Girls, Coriolanus and Playing with gender at Colchester’s Mercury Theatre 26 October 2007. Matthew Sweeney at Poetry Wivenhoe, Seduced at the Barbican, Half-term in Highgate, Poetry Books 11 October, 2007. Poetry School Party, Stanza 3, National Poetry Day, ‘galaxies of flowers’ 30 September, 2007. A Disappearing Number, Into Autumn, More on competitions 18 September, 2007. Competitions, Manningtree festival 6 September, 2007. The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts 24 August, 2007. Snape Maltings, Charles Simic and Wallace Stevens, Poems from art 13 August, 2007. More on Gormley, Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, Strange summer 27 July, 2007. Wells-next-the-Sea’s settled travellers, Manningtree’s Riverside Studios, Horace 17 July, 2007. Themed night at The Troubadour, Gormley on the rooftops, Grandsons in Norfolk, Pest control 30 June, 2007. Fear no more the heat of the sun, Otiorrhynchus sulcatus 23 June, 2007. So poetry counts, Art for the solstice, More Poetry Wivenhoe 9 June, 2007. A Norfolk week 23 May, 2007. Starting to tick, A talk by Michael Schmidt, Wivenhoe Poetry 13 May, 2007. Feather pillows, Manningtree Poetry Society Stanza 6 May, 2007. Poetry-next-the-Sea, Manningtree Stanza 19 April, 2007. Cherry Flowers, Desert Island Discs at Leicester Poetry Society, Tammar Yoseloff at Kettles' Yard 8 April, 2007. New Stanza Page 2 April, 2007. Possessions, The Recycling Centre, A new Poetry Society Stanza, Round Trip 20 March, 2007. Moving on 12 March, 2007. Displacement activity, Soundswrite’s day of poetry, A poetry Stanza, Packing the library 6 March, 2007. Juggling houses, David Morley's poetry workshop, Cultural EXchanges 21 February, 2007. WG Sebald, Half term, Hallaton's horses, What undoes a writer? 10 February, 2007. Arrowhead Press Poets in Leicester, Poetry Publication, Creative Writing: a tutors view 3 February, 2007. Kiefer at the White Cube, Chola Sculpture, Garden History 27 January, 2007. Houses & Garden. Tom Duddy & The Small Hours 20 January, 2007. Lepcha music, TS Eliot Prize & Zadie Smith 13 January, 2007. More on the New York school, Feedback on Himalayan tour, Poetry prizes & Jane Hirchfield 5 January, 2007. The New York Poets, Chapbooks & Happenstance 28 December, 2006. Christmas in the Himalayan foothills 11 December, 2006. World changes colour, From home to home 4 December, 2006. Design Museum, The art of looking sideways, Anne Stevenson 28 November, 2006. Book club with Ronald Blythe, Agenda no 42 vol 2 20 November, 2006. Women’s anger, Rejections, Compensations 13 November, 2006. Riches on radio, making poems sell, Soundswrite 6 November, 2006. Houses & selling them, my website, Leicester Poetry Society 30 October, 2006. Midland Mainline, Tom & Viv, Sculptor David Smith, Dignity in Dying 23 October, 2006. Daughter says, Meg Peacocke interview, Half-term, Poetry Competitions 16 October, 2006. Village life, Leicester Poetry Society, Meg Peacocke reading, Amos Oz
Wild daffies are woodland plants, happy in half-shade, foiled by long grass: try telling that to Colchester City Garden Department. Such an egg scrambling on the roundabouts and exits, it almost sickens. Pink houses with yellow daffs are another Essex favourite. And the pink of our cherry is only just ok because of its sober back-cloth.
Four days with H in Paris are sailing away on a bubble of multi-culturalism, galleries, copious tea - brewed from a plastic kettle in the hotel bedroom, Expresso and croissants – any time, anywhere, some sleep deprivation, some dampness, and trans city tramps, one grey, one sunny and two through veils of wind-blown rain. Rue des Petites Ecuries was a good choice; every 500 yards, the nationality changes, from North to West African and back again. A hop, skip and jump from the hotel we ate couscous in an Algerian Bar, there were West African hair salons, crammed on a Saturday with colour and talk and laughter. My Manningtree hair dresser wrinkled her nose when I mentioned the woman stylist with a baby in papoose on her back. Boy, they know how to enjoy themselves! There were rows of the hire bicycles, three drink bars beneath the wrought iron balcony and Sunday night with a drunk who shouted on and on, until the police turned up to cart him away in a big pale van. Hardly was the cacophony over when energetic street cleaning began. Four galleries included the incomparable Pompidou Centre where we took a nap in a room of recumbent pictorial figures – flat on our backs along central benches, and had our photographs taken. Introducing Harriet to a Baselitz upside down (of course) pair of bikers in yellow and green. The strange hodgepodge emerging includes a delectable pair of gallopers between the Eiffel Tower and Palais de Chaillon on the north bank of the Seine.
The Arts Council liked the idea of interviewing Fair People and had the decency to say so. But the very mention of oral history makes them shiver. We didn’t argue; just found each other heavy going because my idea of what art is, isn’t theirs. As far as I’m concerned, listening can be an art. So can oral history, so can lots of things; it’s how it’s done. Quite wrong, I was patiently informed; only if I want to write poems, would they consider a grant. In the end, I quoted Gombrich’s ‘There really is no such thing as art, there are only artists’. It fell flat: A/C representative wasn’t sure he agreed and hadn’t heard of EH Gombrich anyway. Ah, the younger generation. There must be easier ways of getting a few thousand pounds. The Esme Fairbairn Foundation sound perfect for my project, but I need to be attached to an organization. Am thinking it over while I await the annual Easter Fair on Hampstead Heath. The weather man predicts rain.
Kevin is masterly at projecting his image, in fact he’s made reputation-building a perfect art. Has the literary scene at his finger-tips. Naturally, he works hard at it. ‘I want earth words, tough words’ he began his reading with a translation of nine lines from Old English. Then it was North Norfolk and its paradox for a writer searching for anchorage, to fix himself in a place of constant flux. Poems from Waterslain, poems from Moored Man - light, water, dykes, drownings, mud and marsh. ‘His feet are caked with mud…. His arms are tied with marram roots’. Briefly, we were whisked to Minnesota, where the girl who writes in The Guardian - not as casually inserted as it might seem; the elder daughter, then aged 7, grew up among the coloured maples of each Fall. ‘the best red golds, so you became the leaves you caught’ To Bremen, and back, appropriately, to East Anglia, with its ‘silt salt yap of rigging to a spur that’s lagged’…. Wonderfully tight, tight, words. He sold a lot of books.
For midday break at the Poetry School, we’re handed a copy of Frank O’ Hara’s lunch hour poem, A Step Away From Them. Which I’ve read before, and reread and wondered how he does it. Because the New York Poets wear their nonchalance a special way. Not easy to imitate. Go and walk, look, find, hear, eat, meet someone, suggested Maurice R. Mine came out full of dactyls and trochees I’m not really fetishistic, and it’s my lunch break, so I squeeze behind the bike stand and under a couple of ladders into Fitzalan Street with its high clopping black-shod women, dancing to their mobile phones. The roundabouts of sky TV on almost identical homes. The sky is grey and the bobbles on the plane tree swing like decoration. All that is solid melts into air. Here’s a long-haired man [M.R.] with a plastic bag which is pink and full of words that someone maybe has time to read and care about. Mystery. Doubt: we make our distinction. I’m listening for noise when I see a train and sit on a wall by a cream-coloured Broom and the smell is awful. Awful. And it’s starting to rain so I need a ‘find’. Fish and chip paper blows in the wind. A mess of salad cream that makes me think of Baselitz upside down. Two men in yellow and green. Last week in the Bauberg, we lay on benches in a room full of paintings of people lying. And the room went quiet and someone took a photo, you said when I opened my eyes.
I’ve crawled into our attic tunnel to retrieve one maroon-coloured wheely suitcase. It’s a trusty horse. On top I’ve piled a small plastic kettle, a check dish cloth from a Paris street market, nightie, set of camping cutlery, two plastic plates and Maurice Riordan’s Word from the Loki. I like his humour. His utter lack of pretension. A lack of poeticism that’s yet far from prosy. My suitcase is nearly ready to go. It fancies another Paris. For three days at Overy I walked up the ladder of the wind, thinking about sperm whales who sleep as they spin through the waves for 15 minutes at a time. Drift on their dives. Earlier, Christine stayed. Harriet stayed, and we had what Christine calls ‘ready meals’ (poetry). Four of us heard my old friend, Katrina Porteous read her haunting fishermen songs. Back to Charlie Douglas from Beadnell, back to the knackerman, with its rich floral chorus. There’s poetry for the ear if ever there was. I continue to hear Katrina’s plangent Northumberland dialect in my head. How about fixing the rhythm of the fair people’s days: Roundabout, Octopus, Wiggle-waggle, Waltzer! They sometimes refer to outsiders as 'normal' though they also describe their own life as 'just normal', as if 'normality' were of itself an important consideration. In Manningtree our Norfolk daffies sing their yellow- a bunch on Michael’s maple table, and the first bud has burst its not quite shocking pink on the flowering cherry.
It might have been grey and almost spitting though nothing to touch yesterday, when a dense mist rolled in early and stayed on the East Anglian coast. St. Valentines’ Day was cold, and very cold for the Fairpeople on King’s Lynn’s Tuesday Market Square. A little kid hiding behind vast Eyeores and teddys, I stuck around noting the good-natured crowd gathering on the prime pitch outside Lloyds TSB. Suddenly they all moved on to the Dogems. Enter Mace-bearers, three clergymen, the Lady Mayoress and all her fine entourage for the official opening of the Eastern Showman’s season. Happily coinciding, with half term. There were prayers, Oh Yea’s, and the ancient charter was read out, the Dogems so full of Norfolk Councilors you’d think it would collapse. ‘I think there’s a free meal somewhere’. Someone was right. After the gold chain participators had sportingly whirled round their stage in a mini car, the town was hosting lunch for 140. Turn on the radio and someone is talking about multiculturalism and values that should or won’t expand to embrace difference. Loud speakers are a problem with fairs. I doubt those living near get a good night’s sleep, and health and safety - all these things are important. But the Showman suffers from too many dotted lines. Fair people are by nature orderly, (they have to be) and King’s Lynn has always been hospitable to them. My disappointment is that the fashion for baggy animals seems excessive; there’s even uniformity with rides and stalls. I’d like more variety in prize material and less concentration on mechanics. More of the old imagination you associate with the fair. More theatre. A boxing booth? Cleverness. Initiative. Spiel.
Acumen haven’t taken a poem before so it’s good to break in with Birthday Letters. Nell pointed to a couple of shortcomings when it had already been accepted. I thought she was right, and quickly sent out new copy, but too late. This is the old version and Alison Brackenbury wrote to say she liked the final line. So does Nell but not ‘Your voice is a hole in a stocking’ followed by ‘Can we unknot the past’. Holes don’t have knots, so metaphors get mixed. The Manningtree Stanza group was interested by her quick-spotting, as they were by her comments on sestinas. Here’s her reply when I offered to show her Christine’s prizewinner I can't change my mind about the sestina form for reasons I can't go into here. I might see individual examples I think are really good (I do know a couple) but the way it is necessary to write one is not my way. It all depends what you think poetry is at root, and my deepest belief is that it isn't that. That doesn't mean I would never ever publish a sestina but it does mean I would never ever write one. Actually I HAVE written them, but only to prove to myself what I always thought was true, if you see what I mean.. I love formal constraint, but not that one. I dislike villanelles too, mainly because they are over-used these days by people who couldn't write a decent sonnet to save their life. And the sonnet is a necessary form. I am unrepentantly and deeply prejudiced. Alison has made the Guardian review again, a perfect plug for her new collection, Singing in the Dark, which I shall buy forthwith. Her poems have a shining quality. Nell also came to Maggie Butt’s support over a slighting review. She’s right again, Respect respect. All this in Acumen, where William Oxley’s interview with Penny Shuttle throws up a lot of good things. Penny comes over as easy with herself, as if the words spill out. In a way they do, but there’s been prodigious drafting. The exchange she had with her husband, Peter Redgrove, until he died, was a precious thing.
It’s warm again with the sun making a brave effort to show through, though wind off the estuary flings itself round corners of Kiln Lane. The wind sucks and shudders our Maltings’ ventilation top-knot so we sound ‘at sea’. It’s worse since decorators replaced polythene with wire mesh to keep pigeons out. I biked to the Co-op to post an Arts Council grant, and wish it well. For several days I’ve pondered impossible questions: How many people will benefit from your activity ?Followed by an age-ranged chart. All a little academic. Instead of trying to suss out what they want to hear, I’ve opted for complete honesty. Done my best to help the other end assess whether I’m a good bet for a book I’d like to write. It would be about the dedicated, broad-chested men and pretty families who feature on the walls of the National Fairground Archives at Sheffield University, along with a fetching young nudi couple, someone on stilts, a traditional clown, three women in white boots and diabolic headgear with an inquisitive nanny-goat and a 40s or 50s snap of Billy Smart’s circus wagons.
North I sped to the City of steel that now has a good share of creative artists and is, like the metropolis, pleasantly multi-cultural: a young, thriving and bustly air to it. Two nights at the Peace Guest House were anything but peaceful, even at night. It wasn’t through tranquility it earned its name but because Picasso stayed there to attend a Peace Conference, the owner explained as we tried to negotiate a road at the bottom end of Botanic Gardens or was it Endcliffe Park – the city is full of river and park. If only I could manage the ring road coiling into its very midst. The collection is divided into History, Shows, Freak shows, Buffalo Bill, International Expositions/Worlds Fair, Circus, Seaside, Magic, Music Hall, and Family history though I didn’t get much further than works by Vanessa Toulmin, master-minder of the archives and one of the first women of Showland extraction to get her PhD and return to her roots, concentrating on the people rather than the materials of the trade. Leaving the city for three and a half hours of Radio 4 and a Louis Armstrong tape, I was full of admiration for stout work one person has accomplished.
The day before Sheffield, Issy treated me to Don Taylor’s rendering of Euripides’ Women of Troy at the National: a moving perspective on the hurt of violence. I won’t easily forget Helen’s mad parades at the upstairs windows of what looked like the basement floor of a multi-storey car park slunk with raging women, Hecuba at the helm. Alternately hunched into their shoulders and whipped into feverish desperation, their torn resilience, their helplessness as the city burnt around them made the casualties of war as real for us in 2008 as ever it has been. Only the dead shed no tears. They are beyond weeping SuperTuesday rolls to its end with the possibility of Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton’s making history.
The tide is out. A loop of sun lies over industrial chimneys at Cattawade on the far side of the estuary and little boats lying on their side in the mud. Cooper’s Gallery at Mistley Quay has a copy of Fishermen for sale, and Wivenhoe Bookshop are taking both Fishermen and my Gertrude Jekyll biography: time to move on to Travelling Showmen. Is the number declining as British youth turn to Facebook? Are fairs fated? Wells Public Library hadn’t a single item about the families in its midst who went there year after year with the fairs before they bought up properties along the harbour. I’m making for Sheffield University’s National Fairground Archive collection, where all roads lead, assures Vanessa Toulmin, Director, author and energetic supporter of Fair people. Their settled ones are called ‘Sanddancers’, I don’t know why, what a lovely word. People who live in houses are flatties because they lives on the flat rather than wheels, and children are chavs or chivvies. Other travellers’ words are Romany in origin. But why haven’t I heard them before? Do Norfolk’s travelling showmen use these words when they speak to each another? In the course of radio interviews, posted to me from the at NFA collection, travellers said that one of the reasons they use their own terms is to converse privately. The downside of the radio portrayals is that they concentrate on the elderly who tend to sound like ‘characters’ instead of being a legitimate part of society. More material for archives with 4000 books on aspects of fairground history. Maybe our inability to gauge difference in another is made easier when the difference is marked. We don’t know what to make of people we can’t pigeonhole.
holds its talks in a narrow Georgian building that became a Mechanics Institute in the 19th century and is now the Ipswich Institute. A literate man’s club with library and coffee room squeezed between shop windows in the centre of Ipswich. Here, the Book League opened its programme with Marina Warner plugging what she described as the most difficult work she had tried to write, Phantasmagoria - from Phantasma – dream in the mind, Goria – an open marketplace or street. What is a phantom? A spook? A zombie? Ever interested in words, the open minded Author owned she is also attracted by areas she doesn’t necessarily believe in. A point elucidated by her story about opening a box of ‘Ectoplasm’ in Cambridge University Library, to find faded taffeta spilt with a Medium’s regurgitations. Generations have been hoodwinked for their pennies and pounds. This has to be a lesson to us about what we believe in our own time. Marina dealt diplomatically with a question from a couple in her audience who claimed lively avatars. A form of consciousness of which I confess I was unaware.
The exhibition at Essex University, curated and opened, once again, by hot-footed Marina Warner, were inspired by a folder of somewhat abstract poems written by Nikos Stangos. Stangos was an inspirational publisher of the Penguin Modern Poets who died four years ago. Add the concept of concrete set by the 60s architecture of the University buildings, and you open up forty years of interrelationship between image, object and text. Ian Hamilton Finlay and Richard Wentworth are here, as are a number of works from Sam Winston’s London gallery - others are simultaneously on show in South Bank’s Poetry Library. An origami-like sculpture crosses the gallery bearing every word in the Complete Oxford Dictionary on the fanned curves of its folded pages. Punctuation marks, blown up to look like giant fingerprints, hang on the walls. And having pulled on cloth gloves, the visitor can sift through large pieces of cartridge paper in which a few lines of made-up story, or a short encyclopedia extract give ‘birth’ to a fantasy of verbal associations, grouped to form designs. In the final page, each word has been cut out, only its’ shape remain. The result is entirely visual; words have become graphics. They must have taken Winston hours and hours of cryptic concentration to achieve.
No double meanings, from Gertrude Hermes’; not, at least, in the wonderful horned goat and some terrifying mat-tailed cats among her sensitive animal linocuts and wood engravings at North House Gallery. The more womb like ones are reminiscent of her onetime husband Blair Hughes Stanton’s work, and during the late 60s, when brother John, then at Chelsea Art College, was her lodger, Gert, as she was known, was busy with the textured hunks of Stonehenge.
A second Saturday at the Poetry School had me striding from Victoria; Circle, District and Jubilee lines all being out of action. Riordan does the tutoring to perfection, not chipping in until all have had a say, when he quietly reinstalls some of the lines and phrases we’ve wished away and takes out others. ‘Too general: be specific.’ ’Be sparing with the slack or vague.’ ‘You need a concentration of language.’ ‘I like excess’, and of my Himalayan poem, ’It’s like pearls without a string.’
Days I get rejections, I’m glad of something to dig into. Earth doesn’t stop revolving; it’s like any disappointment, you need to adjust. Patient Maurice Riordan at Poetry London writes, ‘These are certainly very beautifully worked .. even though I am again (frustratingly I guess), returning them’ while Peter Sansom at The North consoles ‘you were in our “look again” box’. Slowly the message gets through; however good they seemed to me when I sent them, there’s a great deal of competition and the poems weren’t good enough. Listening to my Showmen tapes was reasonably satisfying, at least hearing the Norfolk voices was; listing the bodies from whom I await replies gave an unrealistic sense of control. (The Whitechaple Gallery for info. on their Fairground exhibition in 1977, Centre for EA Studies & Norwich City College to investigate any mutual interest; Art’s Council, & Runneymede on possible grants, World’s Fair on books for reference and those might cover the same ground; The Poetry School for a tutorial.) Cutting up Sevilles was the best fillip. A 3-day marmalade recipe we’ve followed for years. Ist day, slice and swim the orange in water; 2nd, boil till the fruit is soft; 3rd, slide in a pound of sugar per pint of liquid. The whole thing in practical steps, though hardly tip-toe as in Gillian Allnutt’s poem (The Makings of Marmalade): Unripe oranges in silk-lined sacks Her qualified nouns, make the transformation otherworldly, almost magic; the finesse speaks of generations turning oranges in something to spread, on ‘small pieces of toast’.
While Michael’s been teaching in Manchester, visiting old haunts en route, fed and watered by John & Mary T, I’ve joined small groups in Manningtree. Manningtree Library are putting to HQ in Colchester, the suggestion that our Stanza group might lead some readings this year, on Poetry Day. We thought with suitable choral and interactive speaking, and movement such as I first saw performed by Mario Petrucci’s group, Shadowlands. A dozen of us, mostly men in caps and clean walking boots took a pleasant talking pace from The Boot Inn at Freston, though alternately closed and open country, tall once-coppiced chestnuts, a sticky field of black beans below the long arch of the Orwell Bridge, and back through stubby meadowland again to wood.
After dutifully switching off the Christmas lights on the 6th, we got out the step ladder in a steady drizzle to strip the cherry tree of green wires and glass tube bulbs for another year, noting how pliant are its pinkish grey branches. I’m reading what must be one of the set books for the literate Englishman, Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, which I’ve often seen referred to and mistakenly assumed was a novel. Instead, it’s this dense and amazingly intelligent but not impenetrable survey of anti-establishment philosophical literature. ‘..freedom is not simply being allowed to do what you like; it is intensity of will, and it appears under any circumstances that limit man and arouse his will to more life.’ The author is explaining Sartre. From Molly: “The book you gave me was very bloody at the end but very funny to read how horses think about us humans. There was a lot of history behind it and it was so dense that you could only read small amounts at a time. That was good because it meant that I didn’t rush the book to much. There were a lot of brilliant horse names like Electra and Harpinna. I have just moved up a group in riding and I have also started training for my British Horse Society Stage 1. Because the times are so spread out it means that I can spend the whole day at the yard!!!!” And Daisy: “The book you gave me swapped from Mathew's life to Moju's life throughout the chapters. This made it a bit confusing to remember which boy did what. I have to still get down to reading the last few chapters, but I will soon. “I have found a website were you can make your family tree. I have so far 165 people on it including dad's side. I thought it would be intresting to find out all the meanings of the peoples names. Michael is from Hebrew origin and it means 'Who resembles God'. We have just been on my paper round in the rain. Mum went with us to be a umbrella holder. It is very windy outside and I am about to go to school with my bag mum gave me for Christmas. We are going to watch the end of a film called 'Whale Rider' in class. The begining was sad but great. It is about a living Maori tribe in New Zealand.”
Reflections on Christmas - Books Simon just rang, ‘It sounds noisy.’ ‘It is noisy.’ He was in a Pizza Café near his workplace in Shaftesbury Avenue. Issy had brought the boys along for a shared lunch to celebrate Julian’s birthday. ‘Julian wants to tell you something.’ A small voice raised above the din. ‘Thank you for the book. It’s about a mission, if you’re a wizard, you go to different pages.’ The book in question is The Sorcerer by Steve Jackson, billed as a ‘fighting fantasy game’. Julian, ten two days ago, has found reading a struggle, so I feel amply rewarded. I chose it when I saw a boy reading aloud to his companions at an underground station. On the Circle line train, they dashed to a seat and he continued reading. All were either nine or ten. I noted the book. I find choosing gifts devilish unless they’re books, in which case I take pride in ‘getting it right’. The Guardian Review came up with reviews for Daisy and Molly’s, Burn My Heart, by Beverley Naidoo, a riveting tale of two young boys that sets in perspective the Mau-Mau episode in Kenya, (Daisy’s best friend was born in Kenya) and Katherine Roberts’ I am the Great Horse, History, literally, from the horse’s mouth – in this case Alexander the Great’s Belepheron, for a hopelessly horse-besotted twelve-year old. Both scored hits. To Molly’s request for ‘something as good’ as a birthday present, I’ve ordered Ann Kelley’s Da Costa winning The Bower Bird.
‘Forgive the circularity’, writes Marthe, enclosing the 2007 newsletter from the Centre deco/Ethco Reserche et Education at La Combe. Bezudun sur Bine, in the Drome, is in snow, and coal tits have taken up residence ‘in a big way’ in cracks ‘of which there are plenty’. Once scornful of round-letters, I admit I find some of them uplifting. Marthe began her year with a trip to Berkeley to study ’animal consciousness and subjectivity’ whatever the latter might mean. We hear of the hectares under cultivation, potager, parterre edges, a bull calf who vanished for three days after his entry into the world. Named appropriately, Vanish. And hear about each equine and canine member of the establisement, still, individually remembered by Molly. Another fine tale from Wye College friend Joy Larcombe and Don – who writes so bracingly that even bodily infirmity has you alternately laughing and crying for what’s to follow. Like Marthe, Joy and Don moved into foreign territory at a time of life when most of us opt for a more sedate lifestyle. Both wander the world and reap its harvests, both couples are solidly bound to the earth.
Seasonal poems are celotaped round the edge of glass door to the Manningtree third storey – kept permanently open, so the poems ask to be read. More than one friend is taking a creative writing MA in his or her retirement and more than one winning prizes. All verses are treasured though it’s Norman MacCaig’s subversive 12-liner, Real Life Christmas Card, (the Guardian’s Saturday choice) I’d most like to have written. Robin, I watch you. You are a perfect robin – Robin, you watch me. Am I a perfect man – except,
after days of whisking round. The cat on antiB for a recurring respiratory virus, is tripping round with a pyjama top lodged on his back like a tortoise or one of the tangerines we had in our Chrissy stockings years ago. They came to market stalls wrapped in a square of tissue paper, which we’d twist at each corner before rolling the tangerine on the floor to watch it’s animalistic ‘run’. At last the tits and finches have discovered the hanging nuts in our bit of town garden. It’s not just pigeons and doves.
‘Hell, you know, lies so close to Heaven, and Heaven so close to Hell’ said Matisse, near the end of his life. A sentiment endorsed by Christian Carion’s first World War drama about the 1914 Christmas Eve when German, French and British troops declared a temporary truce. Baby Christmas trees sprouted above the trenches, music was made and games were played in no man’s land. Sentimental maybe, but so movingly done that I had to stop watching when warfare recommenced.
Kathleen Jamie’s Wivenhoe evening was, I’m told, a treat. Her poetry compelling, her delivery warm and clear. The wine and pies were good too. I opted out at the last moment, and disappointed, sat on my bed reading old favourites from The Queen of Sheba (1994).
On two sparkly days, I met two Showmen families. Sweeping north from Norwich through arable prairie, interspaced with woodland either side of the A140. At Cromer I took the coast road to Sheringham, reminding me of a route well travelled some 40 years ago when I wrote Fishermen. Indeed, a strong sense of deja vue infuses the whole taping and transcribing procedure. This time, I bring sonorous Norfolk voices to my high-up home in a neat little black beetle Olympus tape recorder, far superior to the one I used in the early days. A night at Peafield Mill with John and Caroline is more than warmth and hospitality. Colour and light play, multiply and divide, round eight floors of solid walls with their stunningly hung art works. The next day found me at one of the showmen’s Norwich winter quarters - 64 immaculate chalets and trailers in Hooper's Lane yard. Here I’m alerted not only to continual annoying misrepresentation in the media but endless pettiness & red tape from Norwich Council. At a time when minority interest counts at least in theory, I wish Norwich could wake up and realise what they neglect.
Visiting John and Sarah found us in Brixton’s pleasantly multi-cultural ambience; walking Brockley Park, with its mixture of slender churches, Crystal Palace and the London Eye on the skyline, in fading light. Mallards and tufted duck stuck on the surface of a pond we suddenly realised, was frozen. By 159 bus to Oxford Circus where exit to and from the underground for a quickie at M&S (to exchange some slippers) was sample enough of the vast consumerism that seasonally takes over. The stress evident in men and women talking compulsively on mobiles in the Quiet carriage B of our more- often peaceful Manningtree train. This time last year we were trekking through semi-tropical forests of Northern India, to the knocking of bamboos. From ex-General, Jimmy Singh’s house with its line of prayer flags and hot water-bottles at bed time, we watched the lives that for all the hardships, are close enough to nature to bring their own reward. This is to some extent a romantic view, but we can’t help but compare the faces of the people who lived in Samtha with those of bag-laden shoppers.
What of our year? The extended Overy cottage has a garden ripe for redesign, while three stories up, we are installed on the Suffolk edge of Essex. This morning in frost and sun we biked past Brantham church and walked along the far shore of the Stour estuary. South west, stood the tower of Mistley church, thestrange dome roof of the old Mistley Maltings and the EDME Maltings chimney; between us the spread of water with its birds. A radio play and a poetry chapbook will be coming to a head in 2008. I’ve written my first sestina and appeared for the first time in Acumen and Stand. We have a Manningtree Stanza group off the ground, and I’ve begun another book.
When a middle-aged man is unable to speak for his emotion, when moisture squeezes down his cheek, you know you’ve tapped something significant. So it was with one of my late fair-travelling showmen, and I felt privileged to hear what he eventually had to say. That was ten days ago, since when I’ve been making contacts. The Showmen’s Guild; do they have a library? Can they send me a list of what’s been written about the lives of showmen. No reply from HQ. One or two contact names from the Secretary of the Eastern Region, who’s been at the job 28 years and feels it’s long enough. John Broadbent is much more fruitful. ‘You want sociologists’. It was he suggested UEA’s Centre of East Anglian Studies: busy Christmas partying, coming back to me tomorrow. At Norwich City College, a helpful librarian transferrs me to Andy Salmon, Head of Creative Arts. ‘Are you the same Sally Festing wrote a biography of Hepworth? It was a good start. Andy was not only helpful but immediately interested in the project. I sent him a paragraph or two about it and he, too, will return to me when he’s emailed appropriate people. John’s third suggestion was Essex Uni, who have I find, one of the biggest sociology departments in the country. I home in on a list of some dozen professors when aol chucks me out. Meanwhile the Arts Council reply with one of their typically arts-council texts. ‘We can support non-fiction when it is clearly very innovative or stylistically original, but we do not support .. books without a substantial element of creative writing.’ Time spent justifying my claim irks me. Michael says better try all the same.
I thought I knew Baselitz work, scratchy white lines, heavy brush strokes, clumpy wood sculpture. Maybe, but nothing like the full scope or the horror of his eschatological dramas in which war, sex, religion and German folk myth combine. By the time Julie from Garden history days in Surrey, and I, had looked at a room or two, we had learned not to question his fractures and inversions. After all, he could have painted his figures and landscape upright and simply hung the painting upside down. The poorly translated Gallery Guide is mean at £2.50 but I shan’t forget the RA exhibition. Baselitz has been experimenting since police removed paintings from his first one-man show in 1963.
I’m outside Number 81 Lambeth Walk. Surely this is the right number for the Poetry School? In the rush to leave the house I forgot to bring the address. It’s raining. I bang on the door but no answer. I ring four bells one on top of the other of the adjoining house and enquire for the Poetry School. A voice says indistinctly ‘Round the corner.’ I walk round the corner, but find no mention of the Poetry School. It’s 10:30, two and a half hours since I left home and time for my class to start. I try a hostel a few doors down on the other side. ‘What did you say? Some sort of school? Sorry, we’ve never heard of it.’ I ask people passing. No one, it seems has heard of the Poetry School. As usual I don’t have a mobile, its raining harder and I’m getting anxious. ‘Try the shops’ I scurry 500 yards down the road and try three shops. In the last one, a confectionary, the proprietor lets me use his phone. I first telephone Directory Enquiries, then the Poetry School. .. they’re there all right. It was the right door. They’ll leave it open. Julia Bird is calmly eating an apple. I’m grieved when I walk in. It’s my first class there, I tried to enrol for Maurice Riordan’s class but it was full. Jane Shelton is in Jane Draycott’s class next door. I have Eva Salzman, whose poem about her first piano teacher was in Poetry London. And she is very very good. The day passes so quickly. 4.30pm releases me to a wet and twinkly Westminster with a poem that needs a drastic rewrite. ‘Try a sestina.’ Eva said. I’ve been at it ever since.
What you are reading is a constituent of how you feel. Tucked beside the bed are the second volume of Hilary Spurling’s utterly absorbing biography of Matisse; Matisse, the Master and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are not the only Fruit. I spend delicious intervals sitting with the cat. I sit, he makes a black pool of fur. The Spurling, I read slowly, delighting in the feel of the pages of a beautifully produced book. The Winterson is a secondhand paperback breaking at the seams. Not only funny; it’s brilliant. Was she really 25 when she wrote it? Some show-offs have every right to be. She’s one of them.
BOS in wind and rain Through rain-tricking windows, I watch blackbirds and thrushes on the lawn the far side of Glebe Lane. One black Labrador dashes from a garage and a silver car from next door sloshes on to the coast road to collect the Sunday paper. I plan to see our neighbour about the windy gap in the joint hedge where he’s had dead privet very recently removed. It’s next-door’s hedge but chicken-wired their side to contain cats and rabbits, so the only access is on our side and this only by snipping away the original 1937 boundary-marking, wire fence. Hedges need delicate handling. I’m here for two more interviews with and about Norfolk’s travelling fair people. (see blog for 27 July, 2007)
Four of us from the Manningtree Stanza read poems from the floor in the North House Gallery, where Kate Boxer's airy and imaginative art made a perfect setting for Ambit in Essex. Editor, Martin Bax presided and Penny Hughes-Stanton supplied us with several helpings of wine. Ambit is an art- (not a poetry-) magazine, I was reminded; and to me, notable, for a fine sense of design. It tends to be male, and sex, dominated, but that hasn’t stopped me trying to get in for a second time. If you’re work isn’t taken, Martin said, try again. ‘Maybe you’ll be lucky the fifth time.’
Following a second meeting of Stour Community First, and prior to a Christmas Fayre on Saturday to encourage local participation in the anti-Tesco campaign, Michael and I become increasingly involved. Suddenly everyone, everywhere is talking ‘Tesco’. And a good thing: before it’s too late. Anyone in doubt about what a store near or even far from them might entail should read Andrew Simms Tescopoly. Cost £7.50 from Abe, including postage, it’s a read we won’t easily forget.
Submitting poems to magazines Were I editor of a poetry- or an art magazine which included poetry, how would I cope with poets who have second thoughts about poems they’ve submitted? Ambit ‘s policy is not to replace if alterations are small. But in a poem, where a single comma can make an inordinate difference; who is to say whether an alteration is significant or not? What I know is that a word here and there feels hugely important to the poet. Ever- charming, but mystifying where acceptances and refusals are concerned - Agenda tend not to tell you anyway. Suddenly a poem appears in the magazine. Or doesn’t, as the case may be. Michael Mackmin from Rialto acknowledges, we all do it,’ all the time’. Only once, have I fallen foul of an editor for asking him to dismiss a submission when I discovered the poems weren’t good enough. I didn’t want him to waste his time but somehow got my letter wrong: he thought I was playing games. It pays to be careful, you can bet a poetry editor is overworked and under stress. The problem can be multiplied if you print poems on a Christmas card. View from our window, Stour estuary;
November commenced with a down. It was the most encouraging refusal Amy Wack could have written. If I’d lived in Wales, [if maybe I’d been younger]. But no, she was sorry, Seren won’t publish a full collection though she does like my work; she affirms, ticking the poems she likes. I scan the ticked 34 and the unticked 25 poems without clarification. They’re not the same ones that Helena likes, nor can I discover overall distinctions between the two categories. Almost all have been published and the three just out in Stand include an unticked followed by two tickeds. Close, yet far: it’s happened before. The same morning I press some unique combination on the keyboard and lose an entire web. Michael manages to recover most of it, but the picts have gone, and they will have to be reinstalled one at a time. The next day Sara rings from BBC Radio Bristol that she’s had renewed interest in our third collaboration – Widening the Sky. When things happen in radio, they happen fast. Emails hot-foot between Sara and Rukhsana who is writing the script. Discussion and rewriting follows before a developed offering with accompanying poems is made. To hear the outcome, we wait until January 2008.
Two Roberts’ reading at Wivenhoe made even more contrast than usual. Robert Charleston writes easy, unpretentious poems, about the country, the environment, and his family; his delivery is relaxed and the crowd in the British Legion Building include a lot of friends from the period when he lived in the town. Richard Cole’s more academic poems, mostly from a recent Chapbook, spin imaginatively from the lives of well known literary and artistic hero’s. Several in his audience would have enjoyed a little more introductory explanation.
Deaths, accomplished as a series of cinematic stills, bloody corpses hauled high in bags and dropped heavily on the stage at appropriate moments, and a set bare as a warehouse with it’s oil drums, are what I remember most about Dee Evans’ Ceasar. A percussion player who limbered up with the splits and moved like a dancer throughout the evening, a sturdy Brutus, reptilian Cassius and a Casca sprung with the idea of freedom. Costumes for the Brutus faction resembled cabbage white caterpillars while the pro-Ceasar gang looked like slim white and red crackers, mostly white, timeless, and placeless.
Not many of the 200 anti-Tesco faction (from a population of 700) turned up to the King’s Head on South Street to pool ideas. While Lawford inhabitants want cheap food, there is a traffic problem but above all, we worry about the change that will take place among small shops in the High Street, to us one of Manningtree’s greatest delights. A radio programme about supermarkets confirmed my fears. In pursuit of profit, Tesco are up to every trick. Donating to charity is a persuasive notion. Tesco staff as well as its customers like to think they are contributing to charity while buying cheaper food than elsewhere. Against this, academics and environmentalists inform us that supermarkets can make any claim they like without official verification. Besides, who is to say that 2% or any other percentage is the amount our wealthy Western country ‘should’ be donating to the poor. Moreover, statistics the company make to their building’s being more environmentally viable are nullified by Tesco’s expansion. In the end there is a dilemma. Consumers want to see supermarkets behave environmentally but they want cheap food more.
Some of the stillest days here are bright, almost breathless, and sweet with the song of small birds, while gees honk huge formations across the sky between Holkham, Overy and the sea. Beneath silver birches in their last coppery-gold leaves, we’ve chopped down a wonky-stemmed holly, and planted in its place a five foot Malus florentina to hide some offending dormer windows. Other garden trimmings leave a huge bonfire pile on the piece of garden reserved for next year’s vegetables. Soon as it’s burned, we can start lopping the outsize walnut and replace it with something more picturesque.
The Poetry Festival isn’t at Snape. Luckily, someone told me. Leave an hour to get there and the usual extra for getting lost. Try to imbibe plan of the town from the festival leaflet. Pack sandwich, blanket, & flapjack reinforced with sesame, poppy and sunflower seeds, glace cherries, mixed fruit, & chopped dried apricots. Survival kit. A new girl, I planned to sample one of everything, interview, workshop, craft talk, magazine talk, a close-, and a multiple reading. To say the day went as planned would be an understatement. Aldebrugh is fast, friendly and inspiring, deeply so, if you choose the right events. There will undoubtedly be opinions given with which you’d quarrel, there may even be performances you need to walk out of. The strength is breadth, depth, and the respect given to the varied offerings. It’s the morning after, and I’ve been scrounging all the poems by John F Deane I can find in magazines. Reading, blown by the richness he, on stage, prefaced by recalling the very simple language of George Herbert’s Love as a background to his own offering. Inspiring though the final, international, reading was, (John F Deane, Louis Jenkins & Taha Muhammad Ali), I might not be alone in choosing Arvon Foundations’ director Ariane Koek’s interview with Alice Oswald as the most memorable event. It was very dense, carefully prepared, and deeply thoughtful. AO. is, of course, a superb poet. Furthermore, she takes on an extra authority when she reads. In a Tidal Valley, the first poem, comes from a new series in which the moon is the poet’s ‘transformative subject’. ‘beautiful uncountry of an estuary’ / ‘house of the sea’ / ‘flooded and stranded weeds’ / ‘Slabs of light’ / ‘the muscular unhurried moon’. It was thick with Oswald imagery. Why the moon? The poet replied that her last book, Dart, was a ‘daylight’ poem with a day-lit landscape, and not one in which she had dwelt much on ’time’. In contrast, the moon can change dramatically during a night ramble of two or three hours. Night walking is something in which she regularly indulges. On roads and through fields, without light. And writing another long poem gives her ‘the luxury of being inside a thought process’. The new commissioned poem based on the River Severn with its “tidal wave”, is to be recited with mixed voices and fireworks in 2009. ‘Water is an ‘eye’ by day and very different at night. It’s like a mind. Because there’s no reflection, it’s so inward.’ Poetry is for AO, a way of finding what’s ‘out there’ rather than self solecism, and it’s not just what she says that is important, but playing with pulse, gap, beat and silence. ‘As a writer you have to keep doing things you can’t do.’ Oswald answered questions about the classical background that informed her first poetry (Ovid’s lack of fixity and Homer’s explosive energies) and the prose reading that opened her to’ freer, more open rhythms’. About her un-Wordworthian view of nature to something less ‘settled’ in pastoral scenes. Her first memories of encountering nature and the reasons for working in gardens after leaving university. Quite a lot of things she’s done, turned out to be reactions to ways of living allotted to her by family and fortune: to accepting what one might call the ‘normal’ course of events. It is through small rebellion, she is able to focus so entirely on what is necessary for her as both person and poet. This day full of old and new friends and the pretty town with its boat- spattered, shingled margin to the sea would have been worth coming for my first engagement alone.
Dogs and horses are major constituents of a weekend at Wye. If walking your dog is life-affirming, we did a lot of it last weekend with two mostly-collies, and an 11-year old lunging an unbiddable grey mare who’s scarcely been ridden for several years, won’t wear a bit and has a tummy globose from over feeding. Like our daughter and son-in-law, we went to Wye College, so old memories are constantly reinforced. Because Imperial College saw money rather than pursuit of knowledge in purchasing the institution, the place was for the first time permanently without students.
The important thing about making friends really young is that you can have one quite different ways since, and this doesn't matter. There's something running underneath: I think a sort of trust. In days of dislocated childhoods, holding on to such old friends is a blessing. Five of us who first met in one of Crichel’s dormitories in our twelfth year and three husbands between us, swapped news in Hammersmith.
My initiation to the Mercury Theatre in Colchester gives them full marks for engagement. Arriving for a performance of Coriolanus with ¾ hour to spare, I was invited to a talk on a forthcoming production of Julius Ceasar by Director, Dee Evans, and a handful of her cast. Seven men and three women had signed up for parts. The company knew they were running Coriolanus the same season, and it was to be performed as originally, by an all-male cast. From there sprung the idea. ‘It’s a ‘blokish’ play. Why not do Ceasar’s cast of 12, ten of them, men, entirely with women?’ ‘We’ve asked the women actors what it’s like to play boys and they say “It’s great”. In fact no one wanted to play Portia or Calpurnia. The play is about power.
The British Legion Building on Wivenhoe quay wasn’t quite as chilly as we’d feared. On this occasion, Matthew Sweeney’s pronounced Irish brogue announced, denounced and teased. ’Now I’ve got you all together, I can say what I want.’ The language might be simple, it’s jumping into his wave length that’s the test. ‘Readers of TLS must understand Samarkand, he quipped, because the editor chose it for them. Some readers might: I read it at our Stanza meeting, and no one did. Sweeney’s manner is casual, he reads well and the poems in Black Moon are largely contemporary moral investigations and considerations. More often than not the clue comes in the final two lines. There are bids for awareness rather than hiding your head beneath the sand. Is that the clue to Samarkand? ‘every item in the first issue / [of a quirky magazine] contained some reference to sand.’ About to send the poem to some literate friend for elucidation, I’ve suddenly, I think, twigged. Thanks to Poetry Wivenhoe, I took the stage for two 10-minute slots.
The relevant tubes weren’t working so I walked through shiny glass buildings in Rope Makers Street and didn’t arrive at the Barbican until Saturday midday. It was half-term and kids were chasing pigeons to the fountains windy hiss. There’s generally plenty of room at Barbican art exhibitions, but a highly favourable review on Front Row the previous night brought in so many we were queuing for tickets. The exhibition (Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now) however, is vast. I wandered slightly fog-eyed through Greek nymphs and Roman lotharios, dawdling to marvel at what seemed a superfluity of legs in the early Chinese prints. It wasn’t until I moved upstairs and found the little line drawings by Rodin, Schiele and Picasso that I truly woke. The last, aggressive, which is what you’d expect, and sometimes difficult to work out what’s happening in a plethora of beasts, cunts, legs and penises. From then on, I was fascinated, touched, and often amused. There was a copulating couple by Louise Bourgeois in her 80’s, headless because on her own admission, they made her so angry she chopped off their heads. I first saw Robert Maplethorpe’s stunning photographs in San Franciso in the late 80s: the first shock of his sado-masochistic images is now intrigue. There was Andy Warhol’s male couple kissing for three minutes to counter an old Hollywood stipulation that a kiss shouldn’t last longer than three seconds. I couldn’t wait a for a young man on the large screen [I think it too was by Andy Warhol] to emerge from cigarette smoke, to see what happened, and hadn’t so much as heard of Kr buxury (b 1967) whose upper body videod in ecstasies of orgasm was accompanied by Faure’s Requiem. There were Jeff Koons’ to me, unappetising, takes on girls in red leather boots stuck with young men’s penises, Duchamps’ witty rendering of Rodin’s famous Kiss in which the man’s hand, instead of resting coyly on the woman’s hips, has slipped between legs. If young Araki upset Japanese decorum by recording visits to night clubs and brothels, his celebration of nakedness made a deeply moving sequence of photographs of himself with his wife until close to the time she died. Presumably of lung cancer, as a cigarette was constantly at her lips. Often I found images that made me laugh aloud though to judge from facial expressions, the general consensus seemed to be that it was serious stuff.
Saturday ended in North London where grandsons were sharing their bath with flabby plastic sea creatures. Sunday morning to the Turkish International Supermarket on the Turnpike Road where I sample new foods and wonder at vegetables so fresh we might have grown them ourselves. Something we miss increasingly since we left Hallaton. Ampala, a few shops away, weren’t ready with their pakora nor onion and potato bhajis. A gap we filled playing pig-in-the middle with a flying fox (one you throw, not the trapeze type) in stripped sunlight, in Priory Park. Traveling back to Manningtree, I wonder what it is they put in train food that makes it smell unwholesomely strong.
’What are you writing now?’ ‘Are you doing another radio play?’ Faces take on a visibly disappointed air when I admit that one, or even two books might be on the way, but only poetry. No one, uninvolved in the poetry world has any idea of the work involved in writing and getting a collection published. How could they understand that having the editor of a magazine, let alone a publishing house write ‘I do like your poems’, is the most beautiful boost. It happened. I’ve sent a full collection to one of the six houses I approached earlier this month. Two said ‘no’ without so much as looking, which leaves four from whom I’ll be lucky to hear within another year, if at all. Not that all this boosting makes any easier a current poem that turned into a snowball I couldn’t unpack. Thanks to poet friends from Soundswrite, and one or two lines that still sound like something I want to say, it’s jogging forward, a word or two at a time.
The highlight of my literary week was Poetry London’s launch and competition prize-giving at Foyles. If the café hasn’t the space or the luxury of a Barns & Noble, it compensates with a fine repertoire of jazz recordings. By 6.40 pm about fifty red chairs were occupied in a clearing among the art books on level 2 - a number almost doubled by the end of the evening – and Maurice Riordan was experimenting with an unforgiving mic., reluctant either to amplify or to be pinned to his T-shirt. ‘I don’t have a moustache’ he apologised, trying his nose, and finally abandoning the gadget. ‘I’m pleased’, he said, coining his own fit word, ‘that Jo Shapcott is going to read: she judged the competition and is a great enthusifyer’. Two poets featured in the magazine set the tone. Jean Sprackland started with Matresses ‘a testament to the need to be close’, and, read later, a poem I remembered from PR about a natterjack toad’s ‘wet slack in the dunes’. I once crossed paths with a natterjack, otherwise known as a Birkdale nightingale, doggedly pacing the sea wall at Overy. Phillip Gross feels a special allegiance to poems which ‘come’, or ‘feel they need to exist’. Gratitude is what I feel – for the sweat they save. Not always easy to hear despite the resurgence of the mic. Phillip treated us to humour and a plenty of water with a stream that runs at the bottom of his Welsh garden threatening to swamp his habitation. The poem I liked best was a mysterious evocation of the moment when the child could be the father of his parent and somehow the realisation closes a generation gap. For him this moment occurred during a walk with his father on the Severn estuary. His lyrical poem is called Severn Song. Jo Shapcott had never before judged a competition of such high standard, she said before introducing the prize-winners. Poetry London is a magazine she feels is in good hands. A sestina is a fiendish form to write, and Christine Webb’s Seven Weeks fell out, as naturally - I excuse a overworked cliché - as leaves from a tree. Another of the prizewinners whose work I liked a lot is Caroline Bird. She's very young, I've seen her read before, must have been a Magma launch - and her voice is distinctive. Wild Flowers had a repeated line, like a vow ‘I will be sober on my wedding day’. Shortly before the reading ended, I squeezed my ungainly John Lewis stainless steel peddle bin between chair and pillar, and made my way to the tube. On the Manningtree train I read a read from a leaflet I’d picked up that there is an Essex Poetry Festival. Tomorrow afternoon Michael Laskey is reading in Colchester. By that time I shall be heading for Highate via the Barbican’s titivating art exhibition. The Essex Festival will be an event to which I shall surely make my way in 2oo8.
I’ve just seen Alison Brackenbury’s poem reply to Don Patterson’s “Song, though, is a uniquely human business.” printed under Letters to the Editor at the end of PR’s Autumn number. Pity I hadn’t spotted it before I met Alison at the Poetry School Party in hired quarters behind the new Tate. Poised over silver dishes of wine and delectables, the up-and-comings were looking over their shoulders at a Who’s Who of established poets. There was Archie Markham, hot from his wickedly inventive plea for inclusiveness to restore the straggly magic to our pared-to-skeleton verse (PR page 26). Jane Shelton, who has opted for one of Graham Fawcett’s seminars after several years of Tammy’s. Tammy Yoseloff, herself, of course, though no longer part of the Poetry School, with husband, Andrew. Marianne Burton who has graduated to one of Mimi’s sought-after classes, and Mimi in silver, top to toe. Julia Bird is to be published next year by Salt and Maggie Butt, sweet and pretty as I’d expect from her pic in Poetry News. To boot, she heads the Media Department at Middlesex and chairs the National Association of Writers in Education. Everyone, it can seem, is getting out a full collection! Home and envious, I sent off a flurry of submissions and jogged Chris at Salt. It’s not as if I don’t appreciate the load that poetry editors take on. If the answer is ‘no’ I will accept it gracefully. It was from Enitharmon and Shoestring, I heard within a week. There’s wasted energy in the hit and miss. Maybe I should opt for Maggie’s technique, ’Go to readings. Join a Stanza group ... Set up camp in the Poetry Library.. and .. Don’t give up.’ Having done her homework, Maggie targeted a small publisher (Greenwich Exchange) and was prepared to work for her poetry publication, Lipstick, by editing a collection of essays.
Three of us produced sonnets at our third Stanza meeting in Manningtree. It’s a question of being assisted rather than cramped by the form. We’d all taken liberties. Lowell wrote reams of unrhymed sonnets, Caroline reasoned. As DP says, rhyme is helpful when the search for matches dictates new directions. It can jump a poem from what we know to what you discover, from nostalgic reverie to the excitement of present. Even when the bones are laid, there remain decisions about whatever liberties you’ve taken. Do they enhance or weaken the poem? I keep in mind Elizabeth Bishop who dangled her poems, as Lowell said, ‘in air ten years /unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps / or empties for the unimaginable phrase – ‘
NPD brought me a new poem from Christine, who attended a first meeting of her London MA with only three fellow students. Andrew Motion is presiding spirit, Jo Shapcott her tutor this term. An urgent outpouring was prompted by reading a poem by Sharon Olds’ about running to catch a train when her father was dying. Think of all these poems locked inside us, awaiting the right trigger to emerge.
On the second of two days in Norfolk, we were out before porridge to dig a suitably generous hole where a recently felled trio of silver birch has left the ground dry and hard as bone. Pick-axe stuff. Was it to be for a plum or a pear: I cogitated, refilling the hole temporarily with rich Hallaton compost, to await arrival. Since reading Martin Harrison’s Plum Trees (PR page 9) I’ve opted for a half-standard Victoria on a slightly restricting rootstock to load its ‘galaxies of flowers / like night sky’s sprawling fire / in the middle of daylight’ in 2008.
Issy was late. Sitting outside the Barbican’s Waterside Café in brilliant light, I scanned the long flight of steps down which she would descend when Tammy Yoseloff found me. ‘You’re the third poet I’ve met here.’ We were all going to Complicite’s production. ‘Haven’t you heard from Salt? Try Arrowhead; they’re publishing Anne Ryland. Try several publishers. Pretend you don’t know they say they’re not taking submissions.’ ‘I’m waiting for my daughter-in-law’, I explained to the woman who sat down opposite me. Chic as ever, Issy duly appeared. Both Northern and Victoria lines being closed, she’d had to take a taxi and her wretched mother-in-law isn’t ‘into’ mobiles. From this minute I vowed I’d dig out ours and bring it to personal meetings. Running into the same woman on the way home I asked had she enjoyed the performance? She looked fretful. ‘I read you didn’t have to understand the maths. But you did. I’d no idea what was going on. Last time I saw one of their productions it was fairy tales.’ The house was packed, some stood to applause the final bow yet here was disappointment. What was A Disappearing Number all about? I had only two tube stops (Central line) in which to offer my version. As a start, it was visually stunning, the Indian drumming and dance were alluring and constant experimental techniques that defied linear time, kept the audience on its toes. Yes, it was about maths, more specifically, about infinity and the abstruse String Theory. It was about different realities, pattern (in maths or poetry), attitudes to race in the early 20th century and strong on symbol and metaphor which bind the personal and local to the universal, it made a glittering web of connections that hold the opposing forces of fertility and death in delicate equilibrium. Nothing was more central than the long tipping blackboard beneath which actors disappeared into chasms of time, travel and space. Scenes flitted back, forward and sideways from the story of GH Hardy, inscrutable Cambridge don complete with bike and umbrella, and a virtually self-taught Brahmin clerk from Madras, whose astounding largely-unconscious mathematic ability, Hardy ‘discovered’. That Ramanujan came across as shadowy, was, I felt, intentional. Something of a myth and an enigma to those around him, he was miserable in the cold where he lived on a diet of rice and lemons, but only until he was 33. Interlocking stories told of an affair between a largely but not entirely cerebral disciple of Ramanujan and an American businessman with an Asian background. As the latter spent most of the play locked in a lecture theatre, fittingly, since he was more or less blind to maths, there was also the story of his relationship with a larger than life telephone operator working for British telecom from ‘Headquarters’ in deepest Bangalore.
A finale to the summer’s alternations in Norfolk was an extended family weekend with half-sibs and partner. Up to Overy and back again in a loaded car went the ‘grabber’, loo seat, loo frame, crutches, and of course, the cat. A third trip to the vet looks like throwing up a deep-seated infection caused by the stress of moving home. Half a pill a day for 20 days and white powder on his breakfast, may do the trick, our Lawford vetinary surgeon assures. I’m reading Coriolanus in readiness for a performance at Colchester’s Mercury Theatre. We’re off for what will be Michael’s first post-operational spree in Stour Woods, the floor smothered with acorns and green spiny chestnut fruits.
(see log on 18.ix.07) Between 8000 and 10,000 entrees is, I gather, a more likely figure for entrants to a well-advertised competition.
In September, the school year begins, The Guardian Review doubles its pages and poetry magazines release a flutter of competition leaflets. Six and a half years of submission may have led to publication in a succession of magazines, one or two difficult to plumb but when it comes to boosting one’s profile, there’s nothing like winning an important competition. This is what prompts those who organize them and poet alike. For they’re not only about the art of poetry, they’re about raising funds. Some competitions make their rules of entry extremely broad in a bid to boost the number of submissions. The Open Sonnet Competition run by a commercial company in Barwell, Leics is a fair example. Provided the poem is 14 lines there is no formal stipulation about form. ‘We are looking for innovation more than imitation…if it has 14 lines (however long or short each line may be), we will call it a sonnet.’ As for the poem’s history, the only stipulation is that the poet has not received payment for the poem, ie book publication or a previous prizewinning is out. The entrant, lured by such terms, could still be competing with Carol Ann Duffy who turns out peerless sonnets at the flick of her wrist. If indeed, she bothered. The cost of entry is £7.00 a poem and they’ve roped in three highly qualified judges, say for £1,200 each. At a thousand entrees, they stand to break about even. On 2,000 entrees, a more likely, though still very conservative figure, they’d gross £8,000 after paying £2,400 in prize money. Of course, they supply a service which is in demand.
Stretched along a sofa in our kiln room, cat on his side between my legs, one paw reached out at right angles, I’m aware of the slim spire of Mistley church centering the softly sun-filled window in front of me. Slightly to the left rises the shorter chimney of Mistley’s operative EDME Maltings. Since the Twidells stayed, we’ve remembered Mary’s memory-prompter for the acronym; Everyone Deserves Malt Everyday. If I turn round and squinted past an architectural juggle of brown clapboard, brick and domestic chimneys, I’d find the estuary is in flood. Flags are flying along High Street to celebrate what is our first Manningtree Festival. On Friday a sculpted sand horse guarding entry to the front was floodlit. On Saturday the horse watched a scatter of small children competing in a sand castle competition, while the bottom of South Street was cordoned off for stalls and the Thames barge floating its tanned sails offered free trips along the estuary. In 2008, we may well be passengers. For anyone with unaccommodating leg joints, one of the surprising boons is the ‘grabber’ used to clear up fair grounds, horse-racing events and other public gathering. Michael’s grabber waves high over the bed a succession of socks, slippers, sweaters, envelopes, newspapers, even books. There is something a menacing about its black pincers, so like a crab’s. 6 September, 2007.
It’s unlikely that the Norfolk & Norwich University Hospital, a mega complex of industry and medical expertise, was purposefully sited near Norman Foster’s Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts on the west side of the city. The Centre is of small use to most of its patients. To the hospital visitor, among whom I’ve numbered over the past nine days, the happy proximity is a boon. I’m getting used to the dearth of written information in the gallery. It’s a very personal collection which Robert & Lisa Sainsbury wanted displayed as close as possible to the way it grew in their home; the difference being that as friends and patrons, the Sainburys knew the modern artists intimately, knew all their stories, which the visitor doesn’t. But in a climate where the media is bombarded with data, the SCVA wants you to look and look again. Let the gemmy pieces of art speak first. A half-way measure might be to quote the artist. This was done in the stunning Hitchens’ Exhibition we visited on the way to Overy, at Robert Sandleford’s re-landscaped Tudor Manor near Swaffham, Narborough Hall. The Sainsbury Centre has chosen to give its guides a six-month university training in art history. There are always guides floating round, and for those like me who prefer to suss out things for themselves, Yale has published three heavy volumes on the collection. Visitors are free to use display copies which hasn’t been a problem this summer with visitors thinly dispersed. There’s something strange and perhaps a little elitist about this cavernous space with its white noise you can’t hear but smothers other sounds like a woolly blanket. It’s a shame, for pieces in the permanent collection soon become old friends. A late 19th century Reliquary head from Gabon pouts engagingly, a Votive figure from Mesopotamia (c 2700) stares me full in the face, and because I’ve been looking at Cycladic dancers, I’m arrested by the folded arms. Resonances are a part of what the whole place is about, you need only look around you to appreciate them. I’ve only now realised that Hans Coper’s pots simulate Cycladic forms. ‘Of course’ says our Overy neighbour, another Sally. But she took an 18 month university course in pottery. Almost sexless figures (intended to be female) with pale white, back-tilted faces, arms folded across the chest and down-pointed toes return my mind to humans lying supine in their hospital beds. Michael has two ceramic hips containing an aluminium compound that’s the hardest mineral on earth after diamond. And a super-human sense of smell. Odd how the massive attack on the body of such an operation triggers the most primal sense, making him finely tuned as some predaceous four-legged animal. Even the cat claws and rumples our discarded clothes with delight at emanations he picks up from what is to us almost scentless. The pity is how unpleasant most of the scents discovered when trundled through the hospital on a trolly. Unsavoury smells also render food almost uneatable; a serious disadvantage for a might-otherwise be hungry man. To Manningtree via Norwich tomorrow to prepare the house with high raised chairs and extended loo seat. I’ve been scrumping plums and blackberries for the deep-freeze, there’s still the lawn to rake and mow while I contemplate how to get a six footer up the first fight of stairs.
I’m in a rebound from yesterday’s poetry. Snape Maltings is a beautiful building to be in. All that shiny wood, familiar ceiling drawn high into a ventilator roof, marshy views and something unexpected - the crowds. Eight hundred and thirty of us, a full house in the auditorium and all listening to poetry. They probably included a lot of Woodbridge, my neighbour in the bar informed, of whom a fair proportion are regular concert goers to Britten’s music, and people like me who’d come further, drawn by Snape’s reputation and the exertions of the Poetry Trust. Last night they played safe, with Adrian Mitchell, relatively less known Helena Nelson, (See blog January 5, 2007 under Happenstance) and Michael Rosen. All it seems were enjoyed, all were accessible, witty and crafted. It was the freshness, the glint in her eye that brought Helena Nelson resounding applause at the end of a perfectly pitched and poised delivery. Like an off-duty footballer in his striped shirt, Mitchell tramped on to a stage full of boxes labeled WORDS and gathered his listeners. ‘You’re human. They are human. Let’s try to be human.’ There was bandinage about the worst reading he ever did at a Welsh School in the backwoods. More about schools. Quite a lot about schools. Pally stuff with family themes, an Anti-war poem, a global warming one - Mitchell has always been good at anarchy - one about death, and some time-honoured favourites. His forte is to say serious things in an unserious way. Eating My Words was the poem Nelson chose to start and finish with. After all, as she said, love poems say the same things over and it doesn’t seem to matter. In a way, all poems are in love with their readers and listeners. Is one of her Gender-ralisations true? That women write poetry straight from the heart, where men write from the head. Another playful piece was spun from the radio’s mispronunciation of ‘ludicrous’ as lucridou. Taught, punchy and rhythmical, she kept us on our toes, sometimes sad, never bitter, sharp and above all warm without being sentimental. I’d have loved to heard Rosen. Worried about a) being unable to find my car b) getting out of the car park among some 400 vehicles, and c) being unable to find my way home, I left at half time.
were an unlikely companions for a wet Norfolk spell. The first all bare bones - invariably cryptic and often grim, the latter more variable, often written entirely round word combinations. Both have defined vocabularies and a penchant for words no longer listed in the Concise Ox Dic. With the knowledge that US doctoral theses on Stevens outnumber those on any other modernist poet, I worked through his self-selected Faber collection in a landscape imaginatively transformed by ‘windy booms / Hoo-Hooed’ and the frenetic ‘slopping of the sea’. An impression worked up one evening by Sibelius’ The Tempest on Radio 3.
A visit to the Sainsbury Centre at Norwich’s UEA offers two possible rewards, that of looking, and with luck, also stirring a poem. Roughly a third of my poems are inspired by painting, drawing and sculpture. I can only think this is because I’ve been conscious of the visual arts for a long time. Some don’t like this kind of poem and I accept that there’s a danger. The poet must get beyond her or his visual catalyst. A particular problem is that Helena Nelson doesn’t like them and we are working together on a Chap Book. One way round is to find another publisher for a book restricted to art poems. Best of all I’d like to convince my editor that if the poem succeeds, whether she or he knows the art piece is irrelevant. For me, it’s been a crutch. Not quite dispensable, because I want to mention my source for the odd reader who does recognise the art. How about John Davies’ Bucket Man who gazes down over Norman Foster’s gallery from the front of the mezzanine? Why is he so haunting? Why do I want to suss out the creepy feel he gives me about integration, or lack of it, between mind and body? I want to confront him. That’s one thing writing a poem is about.
After commenting how the Gormley exhibition attracted school parties, (17.7.07) we heard of one batch who got the upper hand. If I got the story right, the Hayward Gallery had to be closed before the culprits would emerge from one of his exhibits. I’m not sure if this suggests appreciation of sculpture as an art or a bit of a lark.
Art means union comes the Director’s message (via Tolstoy), ‘We must keep the lines of communication open .. for two and a half days this small seaside town is open to the world’. Aldeburgh is something I promised myself in 2007, I’ve not been before. A 36 six page programme has arrived, offering ‘Thirty outstanding poets .. in a record fifty events’, suggesting, I suppose, extra choice. Appropriately, poems fill six pages. But among so many often simultaneous readings, crits, talks and workshops, and knowing how difficult it is to absorb densely packed material, I can’t decide what to plump for. Who are the thirty lucky poets? - Personal blurbs tend to stress less academic qualifications ‘barmaid’ before more conventional ones. The admirable Michael Laskey is everywhere on or behind the lines, which isn’t surprising as he started the festival 19 years ago, and unsurprisingly there are names I associate with Smiths Knoll – Connie Benson, Philip Hancock and Roger Motion. Three more who help to keep the poetry world turning, Michael Mackmin, Peter Sansom and Fiona Sampson, are editors as we tend to know, of Rialto the North and Poetry Review. Esteemed women writers include the inimitable Alice Oswald and Anne Stevenson, another poetry-world turner who manages to have had a prolific round since her hefalump Poems 1955-2005 came out with Enitharmon last year. Add what the Poetry Trust refers to as ‘Highlights’, five poets from abroad. Joining the Trust for £15, gives a week’s priority booking. Non-members have until the 28th August to chew over the programme. Maybe what matters most lies where I began, in meeting one another. I shall take the programme with me to Overy tomorrow.
Prompted by an email from a school friend that she keeps in touch ‘in a way’ through my blog, I’m persevering with it through some strange summer weeks. A week in our more urban surroundings (Manningtree) has been long enough for the washing machine to need a new motor. As we’ve had six people staying in the week, this flashed me back to swishing sheets and towels in the bath. Could have done with a mangle. The electric kettle fused a whole circuit before it despaired of life and a large bathroom mirror clattered in pieces, breaking the limestone tiles below it. Wouldn’t have been so bad if they hadn’t all happened the same day. Since we moved, the cat has developed what seems like an feline version of emphysema, except that the vet can’t detect fluid on it’s lungs. She says cats don’t normally cough. Must be something wrong. Blood tests are under way. Failing that, an X-ray? Steroids? Something I vowed I’d never do with an animal. But after fourteen years there’s a certain loyalty to a mog who might, after all, have a fish bone stuck in his throat. A personal highlight was a note from Christine Webb, our last Stanza workshop visitor, that hot on a second prize for the Mslexia competition, she’s won the Poetry London competition with a sestina, ’Seven Weeks’. Having been sent the poem for comment, I’m proud to own a few small alterations. ‘Art means union’. We’ve been exchanging poems since meeting at a Smiths Knoll poetry workshop about five years ago. Phil Hancock did too for a year or so. It’s wonderfully affirming when poems you know by friends you know, are fully acknowledged.
Christine and Sally in Stour Wood, Essex
I shall always remember the impact of the small annual fair when I was a youngster in Overy Staithe. We’re talking about the fifties. How year after year the music crooned the darkening nights with strains of O my pretty little black-eyed Susie, railway carriage, cottage and garden tent, long after we’d done the rounds of candy floss, dodgem cars and goldfish bowl. An excitement difficult to imagine in a television society. Alternative pleasures have sealed the fate of many a travelling enterprise. Gray and Underwood are two of Norfolk’s fair families whose roots go back a long way. Both have contingents who have settled and prospered in Wells, where they own and run a variety of Amusement Arcade and Ice-cream Parlour along the sea front. ‘Fine, shy people.’ I was told by an open-minded Wells dweller. ‘In subtle ways quite separate and different.’ A fierce sense of identity, strong work ethic, big funerals and habits rooted in the caravan lifestyle are qualities that alerted my interest irrespective of the fact that the owners of a couple of properties on the Front are waging battle with Wells Council. The problem began with fire damage, since when the premises have been boarded up. As such they are an unsightly blot on the town. The heart of the problem is a personal battle that lies outside my wetted interest. Why are the settled travellers so successful in the town? How much is the old life influenced by the new. Are traditions being lost? All sorts of questions occur to me. A history of oppression has made ‘Travellers’ self-protective and like the fishermen they are cagey. Outsiders tend to lump together all types of traveller, fair, circus, and Roma, referring to them with the now-derisive word ‘Gypsy’. Before I started taping, I did some homework.
Our Lutynesque garden gate has been restored by the young man who made it along with the others in Central Maltings five or six years ago. Its central arch where the rot had entered, now being hard wood. Craft has long been a feature of Wivenhoe and Manningtree – where old warehouses at the edge of the Mistley quay have been transformed into a café, a local artist and potters shop, and series of tiny workshops. One for making musical instruments, another for stained glass. Here I’ve bought some real goldilocks pottery bowls for porridge. Whitish with uneven blue rings inside and out, ridiculously cheap for the quality by local potter Rob Wickens. At the same time I came by an old tourist information leaflet superior to the updated English Heritage version we acquired when we moved in. It tells me what I’ve been negligent in discovering; that the origin of the name, Manningtree is obscure though by Tudor times, a thriving port was known as Manytre. Much of the wealth in Elizabethan times came from the cloth trade, and weavers cottages still stand in South Street which leads steeply up to the Georgian section of town centred in its green. Notorious 17th century Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, began and ended his career in the vicinity. Twenty shillings a witch would have bought quite a lot of blue and white breakfast bowls. Presumably his victims wer |
was handing them one by one for his Dad to hang on strings. ‘He’s camera shy.’ Then my camera read ‘change the batteries’, so I didn’t get the Booster with its two 130 foot welded metal arms clutching a handful of skywise seats or three youngsters from Bristol minding one of the rock and fudge stalls. 
Stour Community First at the Red Lion, a Stanza meeting and an organized tramp with the Bradfield Walkers. 
‘We’re seriously low-key’, says Harriet, which is a jolly way of saying we can look forward in the next few days to plenty of muddy dog walks. The V’s have Andre from Madagascar sharing Christmas day. There will be many hands, and things will get done in their own sweet time. On Boxing Day we re-congregate with Simon and Issy in North London, then to Overy.
Something we need to think about early, as a dual purpose communication about our change of address. Michael patiently printed scores of cards before I had a change of heart. One stanza didn’t flow. So… I had to make pages of single verses to paste over three offending lines. If the cards don’t look as professional as they might, for me, the poem’s improvement compensates.