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Spring Meetings 2008
to be the usual 7.15 on April 9 and 24, May 7 and 21 November, Jun 11 or 12 (to be decided) in Manningtree.
As a workshop group, we have a similar format each time. Sit round with scripts, to a fortifying cup of tea or glass of wine, discuss modern poems, articles on poems and especially -our own poems. Of seven on the loop, two have been published in a number of magazines. With three poems about to appear in Ambit I've made 90, and have a second chapbook coming in 2008. One group member is a creative writing teacher and several have taken OU or Essex Uni courses in Poetry. Someone else came up with a maiden poem last week, others are writing in traditional forms for the first time and feel they've benefitted from it. Strong on teachers & ex-teachers, we know how to learn from one another.
Newcomers are always welcome. Contact sallyfes@aol.com for further details.
See below for details of our earlier meetings.
27 September, 2007.
Last night we met, and being a workshop, the format each time is similar. Poems by Peter Abbs (Morning at the Oakwoods & Owl of Minerva) were applauded for strong imagery, mystery and immediacy; the effortlessness with which the poet brings his own past and then, the distant past, into the present (Morning). His simultaneous awareness of ‘all time..eternally present’ and ‘unredeemable’) Are we worried by a poem’s starting with the Roman ‘Minerva’ and ending with ‘Athene’s bird’ (Owl)?
At last meeting’s request, someone has written a pantoum, titled ‘Speech after long silence.’ Inspired not only Yeats but by shades of the Paterson article we read last session, it is eminently successful. There is however one line both we and the poet reckon needs attention. Often the poet discover her hesitancy is confirmed.
How much of an established poem can be legitimately used in a new one, provided it’s acknowledged? One of us has written a poem based on the form and even some of the words from a much anthologised Wallace Stevens (called Tea at the Palaz of Hoon, though we don’t know why.) ‘Borrowing’, also raised in our first session, is reconsidered.
With reference to the Open Sonnet Competition (see my blog 18 ix.07) we discuss how writing in established forms can aid the poet’s facility. We discuss traditional sonnet forms and successful modern adaptations such as Heaney’s rhythmic freedoms (The Forge), Auden’s cropping the sestet, Alice Oswald’s idiosyncratic punctuation (Leaf) and her sonnet in rhymed couplets. (Wood Not Yet Out). Gavin Ewart ‘s sonnets don’t necessarily rhyme at all.
Two hours flow fast and a lot of ground is covered quite intensively. Both for first-timers and old-timers, writing a sonnet is suggested for October 10.
13 September, 2007.
An Indian summer finding most of the group on holiday, a knot of us launched the Autumn run with a protracted look at Don Paterson’s article on sound in PR’s summer issue. This was chosen because one member had mentioned it dwelt on points we’d already prodded during sessions.
Briefly, Paterson suggests that sound/sense relations aren’t accidental but are built into language during its evolution. Poetry accesses the pre-verbal and refines lingistic tendency. His vocabulary is extensive as anyone who reads his poems knows: it’s a text sprinkled with words like morpheme and iconicity. But all enjoyed the part about plucking words from ‘connecting silence’, and several phrases caught our attention.
‘the ear can be trusted to think’
‘the big church of the poem’s end’ ie the emptiness of the page
’the little time-trap of the poem’
Poems for discussion included Mary Oliver’s The Journey, the second from a poet who might well have particular appeal to women. The subject is suicide, and in this case, courage.
‘the wind pried / with its stiff fingers / at the very foundations …. Determined to save / the only life you could save.’
There’s no self conscious poeticism. It’s the form that moves the reader relentlessly on, with a river of short lines simulating water or perhaps the railway tracks that make the journey’s end.
Joanna Boulter’s Lament from her newly published Twenty Four Preludes & Fugues on Dmitri Shostakovich was a recent Saturday Poem in The Guardian. A four-stanza pantoum makes a fitting form for the grief of a husband – the voice of Shostakovitch himself at the funeral of his wife,a d mother of his children.
A two-week ‘homework’ is to come up with four strong lines and extend them into a pantoum for 26 September.
26 July, 2007.
Nine turned up and thanks especially to Christine Webbs’ joining us from Slough, Manningtree’s sixth Stanza workshop consolidated all the effort and support that members of this group have put in over the first five meetings.
Four contemporary-poet poems brought in included Europe from Sarah Maguire’s glowingly reviewed collection by Harry Potts (Guardian 21.vii.07), The Pomegranates of Kandahar (Chatto, 2007). What Potts said about Maguire’s scope of reference and quest for form are, we felt, amply justified by the poem. A brave title to encapsulate in sixteen lines, one with which the poet succeeds, not only through a physical grip of location that snatches you across the straights of Gibraltar, but from one culture to another while sustaining a poignant political sympathy for the plight of asylum seekers. How poignantly this distance between the haves and the have-nots is revealed.
Alice Oswald is another how-does-she-do-it poet. Immediately recognisable and endlessly ponderable. A sonnet from her republished first collection, The Thing in the Gap-stone Stile (Oxford, 1996), alerted us to the fascinating aside that Christine taught Oswald as an unusually responsive 13-year old schoolgirl.
Five poems from the floor had us by turn, laughing, puzzled, chopping out stanzas and editing down to what might have seemed bare bones. Suggestions for improvement can feel like criticism, and this can be hard to take. It may be harder still to imbibe the wisdom that what moves a poem foreward can only be reached by rebuilding, the way leaves sprout after pollarding. Some poems ‘come’; others need endlessly to be reworked. Sticking the course requires dedication, perseverance and a certain faith.
12 July, 2007.
Of three newcomers to our 5th meeting on 11 July, one has joined classes at London’s Poetry School, two have taken OU courses in poetry and one studied for two terms at Essex University before finding the course didn’t offer quite the organization and support she hoped for.
Before we looked at our own work, we close-read two inspired poems from PR 97:2, Burnside’s An Essay Concerning Solitude and Matthew Francis’ Was.
Both concern identity, both are subdivided into six sections and use form actively to reinforce their argument. After this, similarity is less obvious than difference.
I’ve sometimes felt Burnside’s poems are sprung inches above the page in some sort of architectural daring. Essentially a ‘woods’ and ‘trees’ poet, his frame of reference is large. Acknowledging the past with an epigraph from Thomas Merton, An Essay Concerning Solitude selects and dwells on various entirely modern ‘selves’ or presences - the marital self, self-love, a computer self and so on. Each section collects lyrical comment on its situation in a single winding sentence brilliantly reinforced by the words’ actual placing. For me, this poem is a marvel.
Francis’ novel and vivid trail of youthful memories is also, we noted, about the development of language. Was is divided into six equal, four terset stanzas in which each line of the first five stanzas is end stopped. This gives the abruptness of a child’s reader. Not until the final darker stanza with its increased awareness of change, does the poet relax into single sentence stanzas.
The Manningtree poet pool has now expanded to double figures. On 25 July, our last meeting before the summer break, it looks as we will have a full house.
30 June, 2007.
The Leicester-based Soundswrite (www.soundswrite-poetry.co.uk) that remains my model has a pool of 16 active members. This ensures a varied turn-out of between six and eleven at each meeting.
There are many programmes such as Bookclub on the radio and on TV, in which comments from readers are presented to an author for clarification and comment. While the Manningtree Stanza needs a core of writers, it’s my view that all comments from poetry-loving readers are equally valuable to the poet.
Poems for close-reading at the fourth Stanza meeting included McGough’s Let me die a youngman’s death, Duffy’s Recognition, Auden’s Stop all the clocks and new poems from the summer Poetry London – both about dentists. A sexy stanza from Tammy Yoseloff (Dentist) and Diana Pooley’s aptly titled Diachrony which means concerned with the historical development of a subject. This single-sentence 15 liner evoked huge horizons. It had to be set in the US or Australia, and turns out to be Queensland. Space is played off against time and change with some lovely personalised detail.
Two of us workshopped poems, supported by a contribution from a group member’s 7-year old granddaughter. Seven years catches kids before they’ve become self-conscious about right and wrong, spontaneously, they can string out word associations. Like this on the theme of cobras – ‘tricky, fanged, coiling, ambushing, shedding, cool, angry’. (Jessica Campbell, from Kenya, at present on holiday in the UK)
Michael Laskey has kindly agreed to send out flyers about us in October with Smiths Knoll Magazine 41.
On July 11, we plan that those who belong to the Poetry Society choose poems from the Summer P. Review. On July 25 we will be joined by Peterloo poet, Christine Webb. From September 12 we recommence at fortnightly intervals.
15 June, 2007.
To base a meeting on what group members bring along invites a certain spontaneity. A third meeting, on Wednesday, moved across the scope of poetry from Billy Collins’ low key Consolation to an American poet, Marlyn West’s Ballad of the Subcontractor from Best American Poets 2005. Collins is here as always, perceptive, amusing but without a memorable line.
I chose West’s dialectic poem not only for its precise language and unusual subject – conception was prompted by the poet’s reading about skyscraper construction and the Manhattan skyline - but as a study in line endings. I once read that line endings define a poet, and seldom are they more unconventional than in this poem. Sometimes the effect is to enhance ambiguity,
‘We threw them in a lift, debated / Knocking them around / A bit. ‘
At other times, an ending is dictated by the force of the first words in the ensuing line.
‘Pneumatic / Drills advised them to do as they were told / In the old country.’
Workshopping each other’s poems, enthusiasm kept us until 9.30 pm.
Progress is slow: people are a little suspicious of joining a ‘poetry’ group and don’t always know what a ‘workshop’ entails. More notices have been pinned around Manningtree and in the creative writing department at Essex University where Marina Warner joined the staff last academic year.
Our next meeting, June 27, should expand the group with three English teachers from Colchester and a poet from Aldeburgh, all of whom heard about us through the Poetry Society. Rather than end the term more or less as we began, we're extending to a couple more sessions on July 11 & 25.
9 June, 2009.
A third meeting is arranged for Wednesday 13 June, 2007.
13 May, 2007
During what I called an exploratory meeting (3.v.07), three of us culled from the Poetry Society discussed our future, critiqued one another's work, and read poems from Poetry Review. Those we chose to share were Gwynneth Lewis' How to Knit A Poem ('Because she wrote a wonderful book about depression and anyone who can write a poem about knitting is worth hearing.'), Sarah Wardle's Healing ('Because I was left-handed and wrote in mirror-writing when I was young. My mother thought it was clever. She never tried to change the way I wrote.') Jean Sprackland's The Birkdale Nightingale, whose 'wet slack in the dunes' we all applauded for a description of a frog, and Adam Thorpe's Lifting the Harp (my choice). The poem looks good on the page, carries its parallel stories to profound effect, its two laid-back first stanzas preceding the shock of discovering that love and war take place simultaneously, as indeed they do in life. In the poem, each situation bounces off and enriches the other. It is moreover, a beautifully crafted, sound-conscious poem, with its repetition of vowel and consonant, and not a syllable too many. A poem that sent and continues to send shivers down my spine.
The Spring issue of Poetry News records forty-two UK Poetry Society Stanza Groups distributed largely in the south of England. A subsequent update mentions one mergence, one folding and one change of representative. The scene is in flux and 'Tips' for prospective Stanza leaders from the Bristol Representative, read, 'Don't think just DO! Pound your local streets .. gatecrash poetry events .. get talking and network .. !'
It’s a juncture that seems to demand a certain reflection. What do I want to achieve for members of a Manningtree group, including myself?
The most obvious way to stimulate is by listening, close-reading and evaluating modern poetry. All these actvities feed into our expertise as writers, and I’m interested as a poet, though it remains something I shirk from calling myself. Critiquing each other's work is a valuable source of insight, but given the diverse reception to poetry as a genre, offering helpful, reliable feedback is going to be tricky. There has to be faith in the cumulative input of a circle who read poetry, a supportive spirit and a certain flexibility. First reactions are not always sustained. To be receptive to what others say, opens us to a change of heart. Nor should we be afraid of doing so.
Paul Farley once told me that he always, in his writing, ‘aims high’. I know what he means. Writing poetry isn't easy, a fact that emerges out of a good workshop. Though poems occasionally 'arrive', more often they take months and years to ‘get right’, ie to say what we want them to, in the way unique to the poet. Critiquing is a responsibility and this needs to be shared. The more published poets I can gather, the more shared will this responsibility be.
3 May, 2007
Letter to Paul McGrane at the Poetry Society, 4.iv.07
Dear Paul,
Thanks for getting the Manningtree Stanza listed in the new PN, I've also received your useful flyer. Still full of packing cases but wd like to make a start after Easter.
I'll put up your flyer in the local library, the art gallery run by Penny Hughes-Stanton who works in London with Ambit two days a week, etc. and understand that you'd now be willing to contact PS members in this area (as discussed, CO and IP from Ipswich to Wivenhoe).
Since hearing from Fred, I'm reassured that overlap won't stop female members of the Poetry Society from joining both groups; EA, Coast & Brecks is based on delivering information and rounding up members for events, the Manningtree Stanza will be in essence a workshop for woman who enjoy poetry. I plan to concentrate on writing, reading poetry and supporting poets, leading, with luck, to performance.
Wednesday or Thursday evening, 7.15 pm suggest themselves as good times for me. When I've contacted a few people, we can decide what suits. Venue is no problem; we've moved into a converted Maltings with a 30 x 30 foot room on the third floor!
Best wishes
Sally
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