August 2015 – Robin Houghton

Blog/ 30/08/2015

The Reading List, week 5: McVety, Konig, James

Right now my reading material consists mainly of kitchen brochures, legal house-moving gumph and internet research on macerator toilets and whether you need planning permission to change a window on the rear of a building.

So the antidote is of course a splash of poetry. ‘Splash’ being the right word, I think, consider the amount of water present in this week’s reading list. Nothing to do with all the rain we’ve been having. Or the toilet stuff.

Lighthouses -Allison McVety (Smith Doorstop, 2014)

I heard Allison read at the Swindon Poetry Festival last year which was when I bought this book. I enjoyed re-encountering some of the poems from that reading, including ‘Lido’, in which the narrator is swimming lengths as the rain comes down and she’s caught in ‘the liquid rhythm of cup and crawl’. We meet the lighthouse/sea/water theme in various guises, via beacons of light, starlight, LED light, watery deaths and ‘To the Lighthouse’, the three stanza homage to Virginia Woolf that won the National Poetry Competition in 2011. There’s a beautiful set of poems on separation from a loved one – ‘we sway though ups /and downs, soft footing it, you towing my heel, / me towing your lead’ (‘Tightropes’) yet McVety is just as at home with a conversational voice (eg ‘Levenshulme Semi’). This is the sort of collection I would love to have written. Moving, entertaining, varied and very skilled indeed. Favourite poem: ‘Treasure’.

Advice for an Only Child – Anja Konig (Flipped Eye, 2014)

There are some quite brief poems in this pamphlet. For some poets this may be a problem in that there’s nowhere to hide. But here, for ‘brief’ read ‘intense’: not a syllable is wasted – Konig writes in a pared-down style which somehow embraces both tragedy and humour, and it comes thick and fast. We witness two friends meeting for coffee, one disclosing that ‘…it had spread – / brain, liver, bones,/ a butcher’s plate. / You looked afraid. We talked / of other things, /that we should get out more …’ (Triple Negative). In ‘Six Nineteen’, both the aftermath of a breakup and the whole crux of the relationship itself is expressed in just six lines. I was fortunate enough to meet Anja at the Duffy/Clarke masterclass I went to at Ty Newydd a couple of years ago and she made a big impression on me. Great to see her producing such an excellent pamphlet. Favourite poem: ‘Dump’.

Be[yond] – Sarah James (Knives Forks & Spoons, 2013)

Crazily inventive! Of the book’s three sections my favourite is probably the first, ‘Against Air and Water’, eleven mostly prose poems through which I felt I was tumbling with very few handholds. A relationship is under scrutiny as is the narrator’s sense of self. ‘Some days are all elbows and thumbs. Then air makes me nervous. But also water. All the things that refuse to mix – or rest in stillness.’ (‘Hydrophobic’) The middle section of the book sees the most wordplay and typographical experimentation: part-words picked out from other words in bold or enlarged type, shaped poems, intricate spatial games – I got the impression James was having a bit of fun at the expense of more ‘serious’ wordplay forms such as acrostics or Fibonacci. And yet amidst all the fireworks there are many gentle moments where the language sings quietly, ‘As blue bruises, / he shoulders the horizon, / wears her skin in his branches.’ (‘Childbirth’). Favourite poem: ‘Visiting the Zoo’.

Wild words: a typical double page spread from Sarah James's [Be]yond — Wild words: a typical double page spread from Sarah James’s [Be]yond

Angst/ 23/08/2015

The Road Not Taken & FOMO

Just the other day Don Share posted on Twitter a link to a recording of Robert Frost reading ‘The Road Not Taken’. How wonderful to hear it in the poet’s voice. Here it is on YouTube:

Matthew Hollis, in his 2011 biography of Edward Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France, tells of Thomas’s distress at this poem, taking it so personally, in fact, that it was the final push that sent him off to war (and his death). This, despite Frost trying to reassure him the poem wasn’t meant as an admonishment for Thomas’s (self-perceived) cowardice or indecision, but rather a very mixed message indeed, full of ironies and what the poet called ‘the fun of the thing’.

Then this morning I open up the latest email from Maria Popova’s excellent Brain Pickings, to read another beautiful essay, this week on the topic of all our roads not taken – In Praise of Missing Out: Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on the Paradoxical Value of Our Unlived Lives.

In this early internet age of ‘fear of missing out’ – one of the truly troubling aspects of social media – the idea of being haunted by the road not taken, or the lives we might have lived or perhaps we feel we ought to be living, seems extraordinarily relevant.

As Philips puts it, “We have an abiding sense, however obscure and obscured, that the lives we do lead are informed by the lives that escape us,” going on to argue that our ‘wished for’ or fantasy lives, the ones we could have/might have lived, are as much a part of us as our real lives, and as Popova says, “the most ideal of these missed-out-on experiences reveal a great deal about the realest aspects of our lives.”

This is a fascinating read which got me thinking about so many aspects of online behaviour, not just FOMO or how the medium seems to fan the flames of envy, but also the holding power of online communities, fantasy worlds and games. I wrote an academic paper on the subject fifteen years ago entitled ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave’ – props to the first person to tell us in the comments what song that line comes from!

Blog/ 19/08/2015

The Reading List, week 4: Heaney, O’Brien, Williams

As promised, The Reading List continues …

District & Circle, Seamus Heaney (Faber, 2006)

Everything you’d expect from a Heaney collection: poignant but unsentimental recollections of the past, images you can’t get out of your head days later, a familiar strangeness, the ghosts of various characters from Edward Thomas and Dorothy Wordsworth to Harry Boyle the barber in his ‘one room, one chimney house’ (‘A Clip’). Wondrous use of language, so many poems I want to read again and again. Favourite: ‘Höfn’:

Höfn

The three-tongued glacier has begun to melt.
What will we do, they ask, when boulder-milt
Comes wallowing across the delta flats

And the miles-deep shag-ice makes its move?
I saw it, ridged and rock-set, from above,
Undead grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon scruff,

And feared its coldness that still seemed enough
To iceblock the plane window dimmed with breath,
deepfreeze the seep of adamantine tilth

And every warm, mouthwatering word of mouth.

Downriver, Sean O’Brien (Picador, 2001)

Interesting choice of opening poem in this collection, in which a poet at a reading is requested to ‘..bore the arse off your nearest and dearest instead / Supposing they haven’t divorced you already / Or selfishly put themselves under a train’ (‘Welcome, Major Poet!’) I’m not sure what I was expecting after that, but it wasn’t a series of gritty landscapes, laments, commentary and songs. We’re tossed between classical myth, popular culture and what feel like a series of in-jokes. There’s a rollicking sequence called ‘The Sports Pages’ in which the Olympics, armchair footie experts and the commercialisation of sport is all rounded on – and packaged up in a comedic rhyme scheme that reminds us it is, after all, a game. Then there are train journeys, river journeys, mythical journeys. I wouldn’t say that O’Brien does wistfulness, but in Downriver the sense of place and belonging, and beauty in even the most unlikely places, is tangible – ‘All our excursions run / Not to our love but where we lived and died.’ (‘Ravilious’). Favourite poem: ‘Postcards to the Rain God.’

Flying into the Bear, Chrissy Williams (Happenstance, 2013)

I seem to remember from Media Studies that ‘postmodern’ had the qualities of pastiche, parody and cultural scepticism – which is possibly where this pamphlet sits – many of the poems in ‘Flying into the Bear’ are puzzling and I wondered occasionally if I was trying to read more into them than the poet intended. That said, there’s a thrilling energy and ‘so much to like’ (if that’s not too abused a phrase) in the experimental feel. Ezra Pound appears as a puppet ‘bearded, elderly lunatic’ in a poem that’s written as stage directions (‘The Puppet’). Tommy Cooper’s death on live TV features in ‘Bears of the Light Brigade’. There are many notes at the back, which I probably should have read but didn’t. The special textual effects were fun but I wasn’t convinced I needed them. The poems that worked best for me were probably the less surreal numbers, written with a sort of deadpan lyricism, a moving simplicity. – ‘This is London. It is on fire. / I go to bed while it is burning. I wake up / and parts of it are still burning.’ (‘The Burning of the Houses’). Favourite poem: ‘The Invisible Bear’.

This post is the latest update to my ‘Reading List’ project begun in July 2015.

Blog/ 16/08/2015

Post-holiday news, blues and beginnings

Back from holiday less than a week and plenty has happened. While I was away I received three rejections (boo!) and one ‘long listing’ (hurray!), so now I’m faced with a big hole in my sending out schedule. I haven’t written anything new for a while and am about to go into another busy period with moving house, developments with Telltale Press and a Lewes Singers concert in 6 weeks’ time to organise and promote. So who knows when I’ll get down to any quality poetry-writing time.

If you’ve been following the house move saga, just to say that contracts were finally exchanged on house (double hurrah!), so by the end of September we will be homeless unless we can find a flat to rent before then. We’re already seen several places in the last few days but it’s clear that in the rentals market the good stuff goes within 24 hours, a week at the latest. Plus there are dirty tricks galore. So we are sharpening our elbows.

I did no writing at all on holiday, and not a great deal of reading – but a lot of sleeping, swimming in the sea (without requiring a wetsuit – bliss) sightseeing and eating/drinking. So I’m a bit behind in my ‘read a poetry book a day’ project – although I’m back on track, have been reading some stunning poetry and the next instalment of postage-stamp-size reviews is coming soon.

There are plenty of exciting things to look forward to in the next couple of months – I’m giving a talk at New Eastbourne Writers the week after next, on blogging/social media & writing, then I’m lucky enough to have been invited to a lovely reading/writing afternoon with local poet friends, there’s my first visit to the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival to plan, Telltale Press’s debut at the Poetry Book Fair and forthcoming readings in Lewes and Bradford-on-Avon. Plus a house move. And a concert. Oh! And enjoying watching my first grandchild, Hazel, finding out about the world around her.

Hazel with Nana — Two-week-old Baby Hazel with her Nana

Blog/ 06/08/2015

Different ways of promoting your blog posts on social media (reblogged from Social Media for Writers)

This is the last of my re-blogs from ‘Social Media for Writers’ while I’m on my hols.

Please do still leave comments, which I love reading, although I won’t be able to reply immediately.

Social media can be a big time-suck, if you let it. So it’s worth knowing about automation – what tools are available to help you out, how to use them wisely and so forth.

Here are a few tips and ideas – How to promote your blog posts on social media – manual vs automation methods. Hope it’s useful and thanks for reading.

Blog/ 03/08/2015

Making the most of Twitter lists (from Social Media for Writers blog)

This is the second of my re-blogs while I’m on my hols and trying to take a break from the internet! My ‘Social Media for Writers’ blog has many useful articles on it but I’ve never gotten around to promoting it much, which is a bit of a waste, and I’m not proud of the admission!