December 2012 – Robin Houghton

Books/ 30/12/2012

‘Wordsworth’s Skates’ by Seamus Heaney

A wonderful little poem by Seamus Heaney. Seemed right for the season.

‘Wordsworth’s Skates’ from District & Circle (Faber & Faber, 2006).

Happy Christmas.

Books/ 20/12/2012

Holiday reading part 1: Ted & Sylvia

Christmas. I wish I could play up to the seasonal stereotype of the busy ‘mum’ with a house full of over-excited children and the prospect of hoards of rellies to cook for and entertain. I don’t even have to search the internet for ’10 top things to do with left over turkey’ or whatever – our Christmas Day lunch à deux will be courtesy of Cook. (The shop, I mean. We don’t actually have staff.)

Yes, there’ll be various family meals, a Boxing Day lunch excursion with my mum, an untypically high number of drinks parties to go to (yay!)… but as my husband works on Christmas Day morning, I’ve got into the habit of insisting we keep the rest of the day just to ourselves.

Which brings me to holiday reading … although I’m still a member of a book group, where we read anything from Murakami to Chatwin, I’m wondering if I might give it up. Mainly because I’d rather be reading poetry, or poetry-related stuff. There are two new poetry reading & workshopping groups which I’m going to start attending regularly in 2013, and something’s got to give. We’ll see.

By the side of my bed are various piles of books I’m currently dipping and diving through. There’s also a bookshelf, but the shelf heights are fixed, so quite a lot of things have to be laid flat. And because they stick out they often fall when I squeeze past. So it’s all a bit messy. Here are a couple of items on top of the pile:

Inspired by a post on Josephine Corcoran’s blog, I reserved a copy of The Letters of Ted Hughes (edited by Christopher Reid) from the library, and couldn’t resist also borrowing Sylvia Plath Selected Poems at the same time. I’m reading the Letters from the beginning and am just at the point where he and Sylvia are married. Fascinating to read the advice they give each other. “Don’t be take back by those rejections, but don’t send them straight out. Do as you are doing, sending out your latest. If you keep up your writing you will see, after a few weeks, where you can improve the rejected ones, or whether they are better let lie.”

I’m tempted to skip forward to the juicy bits, but on the other hand I’m enjoying all the little details of these glorious, long letters which even as a teenager are full of fun and energy ( “we now possess a gramophone which you must hear at work, and I must have your opinion on the wreck of my hair”) as well as various schemes and ideas of how he might make money, or at least enough money to allow him to write.

As for the Plath – I wasn’t steeped in Plath as some women of my generation and younger appear to have been. At our school we read Ted. There was no mention of Sylvia. I can still recite ‘Hawk Roosting’ and large chunks of other Hughes poems, but hardly read anything by Plath until a few years ago. Maybe our English teachers were disapproving of the whole Plath-Hughes debacle. Perhaps they sided with Ted. Or maybe they didn’t believe in bringing a poet’s private life into the reading of their work. I don’t know, but I do find Plath’s writing challenging and I’m enjoying the ‘Selected’ (as selected by Ted Hughes) in conjunction with the letters.

More in a later post (still to come: Heaney, Olds, Armitage & A C Grayling – yes really.)

Angst/ 17/12/2012

My recent poetry unsuccesses

True to my pledge to blog the UNsuccesses as well as the successes, here’s the latest news.

Firstly Magma – I’ve submitted there a couple of times previously and on both occasions was rejected pretty quickly. This sets a precendent – you assume that if you don’t hear quickly, that your poem is likely to have been shortlisted. However, with different editors for each issue, I guess they all have their different methods. In this case, decisions were sent out relatively late, and several of us who had been on tenterhooks all learned more or less at the same time that it was a ‘thanks but no thanks.’

Anyway, I haven’t held it against them (how could I? when it’s their loss!!) and have now subscribed to Magma, as it does look like an interesting and wide-ranging magazine. This subscription will be at the expense of Aesthetica, which I subscribed to for a year but realised that although it was intriguing for its coverage of art, it doesn’t actually feature poetry any more.

Which brings me to my next unsuccess, which came in the form of a standard rejection from PN Review. This wasn’t so much of a surprise, as PN Review is a very high brow mag indeed, and its rejection of my work only increases both my admiration of it and my determination to one day produce something worthy of its pages.

I’m now trying to decide whether to subscribe to PN Review, both as part of my general poetry education and in an attempt to mold something they would like. If I do, it has to be a straight swap with my Mslexia subscription, but that doesn’t expire until next summer. I feel like I’ve kind of moved on from Mslexia. Although I still enjoy browsing the directory of courses & competitions and dreaming about going on a writing retreat in Italy, I get frustrated at how little serious coverage is given to poetry. Plus, recent articles about social media and blogging have annoyed me in their simplification of the issues and regurgitation of same old advice. Not exactly cutting edge.

So there we are – I still have a few things out for consideration here and there, and I’ll let you know what happens. But for now I try to do what Kipling urged – to ‘meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same” – he he.

Readings/ 16/12/2012

Poetry reading on January 17th

The workshopping group that I go to in Brighton is holding an event, Ten Voice Stanza, on Thursday 17th January. If you are anywhere in the vicinity, please come – and tell your friends! There are ten of us reading and we each have a maximum of 8 minutes, to allow some time for open mic.

There are Stanza groups all over the country – they are affiliated to the Poetry Society, and although group members are encouraged to become PS members, it’s not obligatory. The Brighton Stanza was re-born about 3 years ago when Jo Grigg took it over, and in that time many members have established a pretty good track record of publication and success in competitions. So there will be a good variety and high standard of poetry at Ten Voice Stanza. BUT we’re all relative unknowns, so we need members, friends and friends of friends to help spread the word. Please help – thanks!

Hope to see you there…

Poems/ 11/12/2012

New poem by Harry Man

Earlier this year I was on a Poetry School course in Lambeth and met Harry Man. I really liked his work and I think he and I were two of only four participants who completed the course (out of about 15).

I came across Harry’s name again recently and had a snoop around the internet, discovering all sorts of things that he’s far too modest to shout about, for example he won 3rd prize in this year’s Cardiff International Poetry Competition. Wowza!

Harry’s agreed to be an open mic buddy when I take my first tentative steps onto the London poetry scene next year. Can’t wait! Plus, I asked him for a poem and he very kindly sent me this…enjoy!

Hiromi Miyake
Japanese 56kg International Women’s Weightlifting Silver Medalist

The audience at the front; dark white bread in an oven,
each of them had expressions uncompressed as lakes.
Snatch, and nostrils of Mingjuan, trembled, flaring
pleased and quiet like a mirror, a muscle, a whistle string.
Arrow root lifting-powder poltergeisting about the place.
Wang Mingjuan was a slow motion cat leap into red towels –
happy to be here, happy to compete, happening,
Hiromi Miyake, Hiromi Miyake – not City, Red Army,
The just so so beautiful tonight ArcelorMittal Orbit,
“but works in a bank part time to fund her appetite
for lifting weights…”
the bar is seven reds, retinas, clean, high over heads
of state.

Poet's Tips/ 09/12/2012

Brendan Cleary workshop – drafting poems

Yesterday I was in Brighton at the Pub with No Name (which is incidentally in an area with a pub on each street corner as well as halfway down each street, so not having a name is pretty cocky) for an all-day workshop with legendary Irish poet Brendan Cleary. (Brendan is editor of the recently relaunched magazine The Echo Room by the way – worth checking out.)

We were in the upstairs room with the bay window in the photo, with sun streaming through and views almost to the sea. It was an enjoyable, intense, not to mention beer-fuelled, day which ended in me falling asleep in my dinner, but more of that later perhaps!

The day’s focus was on the process of drafting poems. We all shared how we went about bringing a poem into being, how we beat it into shape, what triggered a new poem, that kind of thing. We each workshopped a poem before lunch, and (very briefly, although we ran out of time) another at the end of the day. In between we started a new poem and Brendan guided us through a couple of drafts of it. With just five of us in the group it was pretty full on.

In time-honoured tradition (I love being able to use all kinds of terrible cliches on this blog – sorry!) here are a few of the tips, ideas and other gems given to us by Brendan during the day.

On tense: it’s OK to put something that happened in the past into the present tense – the immediacy can make it fresh. But be careful not to mix tenses by accident.
It’s also OK to change details of something that actually happened, if the poem calls for it. It doesn’t mean you’re being unfaithful to the spirit of the poem.
If you use brackets, or dashes, or lower-case ‘I’ or whatever, have a rationale. Every decision like that, every punctuation mark counts and you should be able to defend your decisions if asked. They shouldn’t be arbitrary. Every tiny detail of the poem contributes to the whole.
Whether you start a poem with a page of notes, a random outpouring or a particular shape or form, the first step of redrafting is to go through and mark the bits you consider to be ‘grade A’ then cut everything else. With what’s left, a shape may start to emerge. Be prepared to experiment with different line lengths, different stanza lengths, different forms. What you have cut out may not necessarily be bad, and the bits you are really reluctant to cut may be the material that’s stopping the true poem from emerging – be aware of that.
Keep a notebook on you at all times and don’t be afraid of ruining it!
If you draft in longhand, the quicker you get it onto the computer the better as it helps the process of de-personalisation. Look at the poem on the page (when typewritten) and consider the logic behind the shape of it, and the white space. “The white space behind the words is the rest of the universe.”
Don’t get bogged down with making sure people will understand your poem. Removing some of your authorial intention is crucial – allow people to make their own interpretations and decisions as to what it’s about.
Engagement – you have to engage with your poem, and think about how it will engage readers.
A poem can go in its own direction. That’s when you might get that ‘did I really write that?’ moment.
When drafting/re-drafting ask yourself questions like “What do I not need to say?” “Is this really 2 poems?” “Have I given the trick away too quickly?” “Do I need to re-order lines, or even start at the end?”
You don’t often add to a poem after the first draft, but you often cut.
Poems can be made from other poems, and they feed off each other. Go back to a successful poem, one you are pleased with, or perhaps where the form suggested itself naturally. Maybe you could write another poem in that form, or the poem may prompt another. (Useful idea when putting together a collection. Poem that work in isolation don’t necessary form a coherent whole, and conversely some poems only work in conjunction with those around them.)

Brendan also quoted John Berger when he said “Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.” Reassembling what has been scattered – what a nice idea.

After a few more drinks in the pub after the workshop ended, I made my way home to find my husband had cooked a sausage casserole, and he and stepson regaled me with everything they’d been up to. But I confess I was completely burned out and halfway through dinner suddenly I couldn’t listen to (or utter) another word. Call myself a poet? I have no stamina!

Books/ 04/12/2012

First poetry reading group – Ní Chuilleanáin, Feaver, Wilkinson

There’s nothing quite like reading poetry to stimulate writing – something it took me many years to discover. So I was very pleased when Brighton Stanza member Miriam Patrick proposed a new monthly group devoted to reading poetry. Our first meeting was last night – we were a small but perfectly formed group!

The format is that we each bring multiple copies of a poem we’ve read and enjoyed, and we discuss. The focus is on contemporary work, although it’s fine to bring along something you really like even if was written a while ago.

For this session we looked at 3 poems – Miriam introduced us to ‘The Second Voyage’ by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, from her “Selected Poems’. Ní Chuilleanáin is a well-respected Irish poet who I confess I’d not come across. (For me, that’s the beauty of the these sessions – there’s so much poetry out there I’m completely ignorant of.) There followed much discussion of the Odyssey and whether or not, if you base a poem on myth, it’s reasonable to assume the reader knows the original story. But even for those of us not entirely au fait with Odysseus’s Second Voyage, we agreed there was some stunning language (‘…fountains / Spraying as wide as willows in empty squares, / The sugarstick of water clattering into the kettle,’)

Then we read Ben Wilkinson‘s ‘October (after Paul Verlaine)’ which was one of a pair I’d seen in the current Poetry Review and enjoyed. I’ve got a bit of a sonnet thing going at the moment and I liked the clash of registers in this poem, I know the ‘turn’ is supposed to bring a change, and although in this case it seemed a tad unsubtle, maybe that was the ironic intention, and ‘after Paul Verlaine’ was the clue:

Wouldn’t you wager it the truest season,
free of summer’s delusional passions?

and a few lines later, on the turn:

Of course those nutters and the pushovers
all go for spring and dawn

I admit I’d done a hasty search for Paul Verlaine and I wasn’t sure the info I had scraped from Wikipedia was reliable! We talked about what ‘after XYZ’ meant when we saw it as a subtitle to a poem – in the style of? As a reaction to? An ‘homage’? Anyway, homework on French Symbolist poets to be done I think.

Jo’s chosen poem was ‘Ironing’ by Vicki Feaver. Jo was impressed by the way the poet was able to convey so much about the course of a life within the ironing metaphor, going from a kind of bitterness and anger at a life the narrator clearly wasn’t happy with (‘my iron flying over sheets and towels … the flex twisting and crinking until the sheath frayed, exposing wires like nerves.’), through an intermediate period (of change? of loss? of resignation?) to happiness and love (‘an airy shape with room to push / my arms, breasts, lungs, heart into.’)

We’re going to have to spend less time on each poem if the numbers go up, but that’s OK. I think the group will evolve naturally in whatever way we want it to, and like the workshopping group it will have a different dynamic from month to month depending on who comes along.

(PS: I do feel I lack the analytical skills to take a poem apart with any real insight – possibly due to my lack of poetry training! But that’s sort of what I’m hoping to try harder at over the course of time, and learn from listening to others and indeed by reading others’ reviews.)

Robin Houghton

Poetry

Month: December 2012

More holiday reading