Month: October 2015

The Reading List week 9: Malone, Maitreyabandhu, Man

This week, three books by men, all with names starting with M, all with (pretty much) monochrome cover art and three of the shortest titles ever. Spooky! This is the latest post in my Reading List project begun in July 2015.

Cur, Martin Malone (Shoestring 2015)

To read Cur in one sitting is a rollicking ride. The big themes of love, death, growing up, relationships and the like are all here, filtered through a range of references from pop culture to ancient Greece. This is a book that namechecks (among others) Jackie Pallo, Tuthmosis, Versace and The Smiths.

The first (and title) poem threw me into a Hughes-esque world of animal intensity and raw emotion. It’s the first of a sequence of twelve or so which explore a relationship, sometimes in narrative terms, sometimes reflective. In ‘Life Drawing’ the poet considers his sleeping lover and how he might paint her, the backdrop ‘Some capture of hinterland, an inkling shade of unknown.’ We meet the ‘Inkling’ again at the end of the book, the unborn baby as seen on an ultrasound image.

The changes of register are surprising, and music is everywhere – ‘Then you’re beside me, in a wind-tumbled / fluster of rooks and their cracked peppercorn / of song.’ (Alice) ‘The backbeat is all / – triplet, sinew, farts and porn – / born to it, solid.’ (‘Meet the Band’). Something I quite liked (but I can imagine not everyone would) is a certain knowingness that pervades some of the poems – almost as if to make up for the wonder and openness of others. It feels like a breaking of the fourth wall, as in: ‘Impossible to withhold comment, then, on the ironies of choice made / when a crippled Tawny took to roosting / in the garage of the Gadd’s semi.’ (Gadd’s Owl), or ’What he really handed me was some final flourish / of golden-summer cliche’ (‘Egging’), or ‘Yes, let’s play this game and go there, / leaf through your back pages, trace the stages/ and versions that led you to now and this man.’ (‘Life Drawing’).

I didn’t feel I had the key to all the poems, but that’s inevitable – I still got a jolt of pleasure to see a reference to ‘Alias Smith & Jones’ to which I was addicted – ADDICTED – when I was about 12, the opening script of which I still know by heart. And you can’t help but be joshed along by the satire of ‘Ver: A Modest Proposal’, enjoy the humour of ‘Lords of the Ring’. That’s not to say Malone doesn’t have a subtlety of touch, far from it – evidence, for example, ‘Eclogue’ and the heartbreaking ‘Like I was your girlfriend.’ There’s an underlying seriousness throughout which brings to mind the ‘craughing’ (simultaneously laughing and crying) described in ‘Doing Words’. A rich, full-fat collection. Favourite poem: ‘On an afternoon like this she takes a new lover.’

The Bond, Maitreyabandhu  (Smith | Doorstop 2011)

Just before reading this pamphlet I’d been tackling the first of Eliot’s Four Quartets. (I’m reading the heavy duty stuff in stages. Betcha can’t wait for my thimble-full of thoughts on The Waste Land…) As a consequence I started seeing little parallel themes and images which I’m sure are co-incidences, but I wonder if that’s what happens when reading collections back-to-back. Or even reading individual poems back-to-back, as when judging a competition or considering submissions for a magazine. Anyway, I digress.

Maitreyabandhu is a poet I noticed a lot when I was starting to submit to magazines. His name was everywhere, and accompanied by what seemed to me the most perfect and succinct of biogs which I wanted to emulate. Since The Bond he has gone on to have two collections with Bloodaxe, The Crumb Road and Yarn, and he hosts the Poetry East series which I’ve never managed to get to, but all the readings/interviews are on YouTube.

The Bond takes us on a journey through a young boy’s formative years and the tentative beginnings of a first relationship. Some of the poems are in the first person and written with the straightforwardness and voice of a child, ‘I’d follow my mother round the house and watch her/ … She’d tuck the sheets / and blankets in so tight, you had to wriggle / when you got in to make a proper space!’ (‘The Chest of Drawers’). Others are written as the adult looking back, sometimes with a certain wary retrospection, or in the distancing third person ‘He had a landscape in his head… the place the dog jumped in and barked and bit the water; / the lawn of someone’s house.’ (‘A few fields’). Interspersed with these are a number of enigmatic, allegorical poems open to interpretation, such as an apparent moment of enlightenment (‘The Small Boy and the Mouse’).

Throughout the collection is a sense of place, location, and the recurrence of certain details – a set of keys, the dogs, the father’s tools, dust – highlights their significance. From the initial ‘stand-alone place, big enough for one’ (‘The Coat Cupboard’) to the ‘den’ or ‘hidey hole’ we return to in several of the poems, where the boy meets secretly with his friend, to the amount of effort expended in the raising of a signpost that ‘points at something too far away to see’, (‘Signpost’), it feels like the narrator (and we) are on a mission to decode the events of the past and the details that linger in childhood memory. There’s a central sestina upon which the collection seems to turn, expressing the crux of it all ‘The den we found was presence and a gap. / You said nothing. I said nothing back. I had my way / of thinking, touching your ill-remembered face.’ (‘Sestina’). Favourite poem: ‘The Cutting.’

Lift, Harry Man (Tall-Lighthouse, 2012)

A pamphlet that set challenges for the typesetter! Rather like Sarah James, whose book Be[yond] I reviewed a few weeks ago, here’s a poet who likes to play with layout, word order and the convention of line. This collection bristles with electricity and experimentation. Its broad themes are space travel, time travel, human flight, technology and a good deal of ‘what if’. I’d read ‘Lift’ when it first came out and Harry kindly allowed me to reproduce one of my favourite poems from the book, ‘telesue’, which you can read here. 

As if mirroring the other-worldliness of their subject matter, the poems delight in technical and sometimes strange vocabulary (‘circumzenithal’, ‘plitter’, ‘flensed’, ‘zoopraxiascopic’), but Man also has a fresh way with phraseology – sheep ‘chewing with the expression of someone who thinks / they can hear the telephone’ (‘Sheep Get Inquisitive after a Meteor Strike, Stanbury Moor’), ‘A Saturn V sheds her heavy feathers / in the smoke, a rising asterisk of light’ (‘The Discovery’). Several of the poems have titles that read like newspaper headlines, and there are plenty of jokes – ‘I have a question for you guys, / how rare are villages?’ (‘Lines Derived from Minecraft Player Queries’). It’s all quite geeky and sometimes a bit confusing, but then I guess that’s the idea – like the ‘Re-entry of the First American in Space’, you don’t always have a clue what’s going on, but hey!

Interesting to note a connection with ‘Cur’ – both collections have poems about ultrasound scans. From Malone we get ‘fishbone, heartbeat, / the opening sequence from Doctor Who’, the unborn child with ‘an extraterrestrial hand’ (‘Inkling’). From Man: ‘The white artery of your spine / hovers beneath a butterfly’s ghost; / wings budding into flight / twice a second, heartbeat by heartbeat.’ (‘Ultrasound’).  Favourite poem: ‘Troubleshooting’.

Readings, launches & seeds of a new project or two

We’ve been in Eastbourne a month. It probably sounds daft but I’ve been struck at how mild it seems to be here compared to Lewes or Brighton. The latter in particular. And yet they’re only a few miles away. Maybe we don’t get those biting Brighton winds here?

But today I’ve spent all day at the computer.  I have a pretty good 180 degree view of the weather from where I’m sitting and let me tell you there was no reason to go out today.

If you read my post last week you’ll know I was out and about last week though – lots of lovely readings, poetry gatherings and a very low-key talk to the ladies of the SWWJ about blogging, twitter and the like. It’s always a pleasure to read alongside wonderful poets and last week was no exception – on Friday it was an intimate affair at the Albion Beatnik in Oxford, where Martin Malone was celebrating the launch of his new collection Cur (more on that in a post very soon). My fellow readers in the warm-up act were Telltale stable-mate Siegfried Baber, Roy Marshall, Josephine Corcoran and Hilda Sheehan. I really enjoyed the evening and was sad to rush off, but after a 5 hour drive to get there I wanted to get to my bed by a reasonable hour. In fact the journey back was a mere 2 hours 40 mins which I was pleased about, although I think I may have been papped by a speed camera on the A22 – ugh. I was personally pleased with my reading as it was all from memory (three poems, all relatively short.) I’m determined to read more and more from memory, it’s such a different experience (and rescues the reading-glasses scenario.)

Last night I was at a different kind of reading, to celebrate the launch of True Tales from the Old Hill, a new anthology of life-writing essays by people living in and around Lewes, published by The Frogmore Press and the Centre for Life History and Writing Research at the University Sussex. It’s a fascinating project, not one I thought I could contribute to, but I’m glad I did. I suppose if you call it ‘creative non-fiction’ it sounds different from ‘memoir’. We heard some brilliant readings, and I especially loved the family ‘vignettes’ from poet friend Charlotte Gann, so much so that I had to read them out to my husband as soon as I got home. Classy stuff.

On Monday it was the second session of the poetry course I’m on at New Writing South, led by John McCullough. I’ve got a lot of time for John. He’s a fine poet and an enthusiastic and sensitive tutor. The group is a bit large for my liking but no doubt it will settle down. There are some talented poets in the group and I’m looking forward to what’s to come. I’ve already started 3 new poems in the last fortnight so that’s got to be a good sign.

 

memorial bench, eastbourne

Meanwhile I have ideas for two Eastbourne writing projects, at least one of which I’m hoping to get off the ground very soon. The photo is a clue. Both projects need a lot of research, but that in itself will be fun. I’ll keep you posted.

 

Lewes & Oxford readings this week, plus poet friends’ success

Ah, National Poetry Day seems to be the unofficial kickstarter of the poetry season (is that ‘open season’)? Last week saw a flurry of competition results and exciting announcements: Facebook was groaning under the weight of congratulations and almost couldn’t keep up.

First of all the Stanza Poetry Competition, won by Graham Burchell to whom I hand over my tiara (although I think it looks better on me, to be honest) and Runners Up none other than my old Brighton Stanza mates Marion Tracy and Tess Jolly. Yay!

Then lovely poet friend Abegail Morley scooped up the Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year award (not exactly from under my nose – I only made the longlist, but I would have put up a fight if I’d been there!) Hurrah!

For my own part, I’ve nothing amazing to announce but I did make the longlist for the Poetry School/Nine Arches ‘Primers’ competition. Longlisting is an interesting idea – I have to remind myself that its purpose is actually to encourage the entrants. Longlistings don’t make it onto CVs (except possibly for the National). But at least you know you came close-ish.

This week sees a lovely bumper crop of readings – on Wednesday 14th October I’ll be back on my old manor in Lewes for the launch of South Magazine 52. I was one of the selectors together with Jeremy Page of The Frogmore Papers so will be be reading a couple of poems alongside a number of the contributors including poet friends Lucy Cotterill and Miriam Patrick. The selection process for South is done anonymously, so I had no idea we’d chosen poems by Miriam and Lucy, but it was a nice surprise.

On Thursday 15th, I’m in … Lewes. Yep – like I never left! It’s the quarterly Needlewriters readings, this time featuring Matthew Stewart, Ros Barber and Caroline Clark. I’m not reading but as I’m on the committee I’m naturally there helping (?) out where possible. It’ll be nice to remind my Lewes poet friends that I haven’t actually stepped off the edge of the planet even though Eastbourne is a foreign country; they do things differently (t)here.

On Friday 16th, that somewhat rakish editor of The Interpreter’s House Martin Malone has kindly invited me to join him for the launch of his new collection Cur (Shoestring Press),  at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Oxford. He’s probably hoping to placate me after rejecting the poems I sent to TIH earlier in the year – ggrrr! The other guest readers are fellow Telltale Siegfried Baber, lovely Swindon poetry impresario Hilda Sheehan and the seemingly ubiquitous Roy Marshall, who pops up in every magazine I look at these days. I last met up with Roy in the summer at a reading in Camberwell organised by Richard Skinner.

I need a good night’s sleep after getting back from Oxford because on Saturday 17th I’ll be giving a talk to the Society of Women Writers and Journalists on the subject of … well, it’s a wide open brief, so hang onto your hats, I may be flying without a parachute. But there will definitely be some tech evangelism, some uplifting female empowerment messages and some major myth busting. Wish me luck!

The Reading List, Week 8 – McCabe, Hopkins, Skinner, Sawkins

All the National Poetry Day euphoria over with and I’m back into the swing of The Reading List this week, and some wonderful reading to report on. Included here are two pamphlets I picked up at the Poetry Book Fair, by Chris McCabe and Holly Hopkins ( who I also heard read). I’ve had Richard Skinner’s ‘Terrace’ for some time, and thought I’d lost it or lent it out, until I found it down the side of the bed when we moved house – almost as good a tenner – ha ha!

Chris McCabe, The Borrowed Notebook (Landfill 2009)

A sequence of numbered poems exploring a young man’s relationship with his father (I think) who has apparently died young. Rich in musical references and wordplay, steeped in Liverpool, popular culture and snatched details/memories ‘you threw me your most assured & scalding/ marshmallows in Russian vodka look’ (5) ‘your best most cynical / strawberries in gravy look’ (1). Many of the pieces are almost in note-form themselves, referencing the ‘notes’ – both those written by the father and discovered after his death ‘your fictionalised biography in a ringbound jotter’, and the mental notes taken by the son, revisited in the light of this discovery. At least, that’s how I read it – the whole piece has a fragmentary feel, and open to interpretation (like all good poetry, in my book)  – but what excited me most about this sequence was the energy of the language and the layer upon layer of repetition, rhyme, puns, jokes and other verbal richness.
‘I took your notes to fish out the best.
To flesh out the beast.
It was a bastard. Made fresh.’ (13)

Holly Hopkins, Soon Every House Will Have One (Smith Doorstop, 2014)

I enjoyed many of the poems in this pamphlet, although for me the strongest were towards the beginning. It opens with a walk through a semi-derelict rural landscape where a barn owl magically appears ‘because you were there and could charm a fish out of its pond’ (‘Offchurch’). It’s the first of a number of strange, sometimes beautiful landscapes throughout the pamphlet that become increasingly dreamlike, where space and place are paramount (‘We left the broken glass of the old city,/ that bowl of smog between chalk hills,/ to live inside high granite walls.’ (‘The City Cut from a Mountain’). A theme we return to many times is the body and body parts – natural, artificial, alive and dead – from mannequins given names and life histories in order to increase their value to collectors (‘Investing in Mannequins’), to a woman with ‘steel hips’ swimming across a lake (‘Margaret and her Cottage, Ontario’). ‘Bicycle Woman’ presents a Frankenstein-esque scenario that takes prosthetics to a poignant extreme. One or two poems didn’t quite work for me and there were times I wanted more, for example the five lines of ‘Country Churches’ seemed too brief.
Favourite poem: ‘Bicycle Woman.’

Richard Skinner, Terrace (Smokestack, 2015)

The cover art is beautiful and reflects the lushness of these poems. The reader enters a world of mysterious landscapes, exotic birds and re-imagined histories. The sky takes centre stage here, whether we’re being blinded by a ‘sunrise blow-torch’ (‘Three Landscapes’), up high looking down (‘Each of these cimitero is like a Chinese character / legible only from the sky’ (‘Isola di San Michele, Venice’) or on a high ridge (‘the sky like bits of blue material, / yet still immaterial.’ (‘Pillar’). There’s an smooth elegance about these poems, but this is no travelogue of gorgeous landscapes. Alongside the oleanders, curaçao and eucalyptus we meet challenging characters and situations. ‘You wait for the men to come, with rouged lips, / brace yourself for the arms and the turn of the lock.’ (‘Indoor Pallor’). A sinister organisation hints at dark activities in a totalitarian-regime-style press release (‘The Monarch Foundation’.) A rich and intriguing collection. Favourite poem: ‘Isola di San Michele, Venice’.

Maggie Sawkins, Zones of Avoidance (Cinnamon, 2015)

This is a work perhaps better known as performance piece – it won the 2013 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and I wrote recently about seeing it performed live in Lewes. As a collection, it’s set out in two parts – in the first we meet the poet’s daughter, seen from her mother’s point of view, and witness her struggle to cope with drug addiction, up to the birth of her child and his subsequent adoption. There is a narrative flow which begins with the eponymous opening sequence, followed by various episodes typically recorded in a flat, factual way, which adds to the horror of it all. ‘Sunday morning. The doorbell rings. I put on my dressing gown and go down. Sitting on the doorstep, with her back to me, is Sunny Girl. She gets up and I let her in. She’s wearing three overcoats, she’s dyed her blonde hair black, she’s spent the whole night walking.’ (‘The Real Thing’)

Part two takes us into the worlds of other recovering addicts and the moving testimony of their stories. ‘…he’d always / considered himself a moral thief – / would only steal from mates, / the old girl’s purse’ (‘Papillon’).

Addiction – the symptoms, the consequences, the reality of it – is ostensibly the subject matter here. But it’s as much about a mother’s metaphysical struggle, her questioning, her need for answers, that accompanies the sheer exhaustion of day-to-day coping. There are some truly heartbreaking moments, but blackish humour also, as in ‘Sub-title: A Visual Exploration of Fetish’. There is lyricism throughout the collection and the language and range of forms are beautifully judged. Sad and fascinating, ultimately offering hope of a sort.
Favourite poem: ‘The Cord’.

The Reading List, week 7 – Jack Underwood ‘Happiness’

 

Only one book to report on in this episode of The Reading List  – there seem to be endless admin jobs involved in moving house, as well as getting out and about exploring my new town when the weather’s been so glorious. Plus I have a cold. Boo! Anyway, excuses be damned. The upshot is that I’m devoting a whole post to this one.

Happiness, Jack Underwood (Faber, 2015)

A few years ago I was in a Poetry School class about ‘putting a pamphlet together’, taught by Jack Underwood. I’m not sure I got as much out of it as I could have, partly because the classes always seemed to start late and I always had to leave promptly to get my train. Attendance was patchy, so I didn’t get much of a sense of the other attendees. I was probably also not really ready for a pamphlet.

There was lots to enjoy though. I have a fond memory of Harry Man‘s work and his sense of humour. And although Jack’s teaching style seemed chaotic he had a real presence and was generous, sparky and funny. I’ve always enjoyed his poems when I’ve come across them in magazines, so I was really looking forward to Happiness, his first full collection just out from Faber.

First, the title: you can read as much irony into it as you wish. Inside are poems of love, anxiety, death, depression and most of all (it felt to me) wonder. In the opening poem, an onion is cut in half, and despite the ‘hung cloud of acid’ it’s a thing of beauty.

as the knife bisected

like a maker of names passing
between twins, calling one half Perfect
and the other half also Perfect. (‘Certain’)

The idea of twins and speculation about ‘otherness’, the nature of the relationship of the narrator to the living world round him/her: people, nature, animals, things – there are eggs, toads, and questions without question marks. It’s a world of conundrums and riddles, where the traditional answers to the burning questions of life are found wanting (‘…suppose there was no panther.’ ‘Theology’).

There are poems of sheer joy – ‘She loves you like your hair smells proteinous; she loves you like pausing to move a snail somewhere safer in the rain; she loves you like milk is not like water…’ (‘She Loves You Like’). ‘… the goofy ten gallon/ hats of happiness that children plant on us everytime/ they impersonate knowledge.’ (‘Happiness’)

In ‘Inventory of Friends’, with more than a nod to Shakespeare’s sonnet 130, we get a list of ‘grass-topped lives’ (what a wonderful phrase – suggesting not only the icing on a cake, the pretty surface, but also ‘pushing up daisies’, ie dead below) in which the narrator compares himself to them…

… But with a predictability
that would be cuteness if it weren’t honest first,
my thoughts turn to you…

what it might be like to be you, coming home
in four hours’ time with no inkling of the way
my insides grown and click like a tired, old
galleon when you take off your coat like that.

More often than not we’re on a knife edge between happiness and sadness – ‘like an anvil dropped from heaven’ (‘Sometimes your sadness is a yacht’). There’s something terrible and poignant about ‘Your horse’, ‘bending himself into the room… we are crunching on polo mints together / and remembering the way your body used to move.’

In ‘Second’, the narrator offers advice –

…I would tell you to let yourself
be sad, if being sad is what happens when a person,
awkward in a universe as a plum on a plate,
drops their day to the inaccessibility of other days,
and loosens their tie on the sofa to let some life out.

It’s beautiful, unexpected, vibrant stuff and I felt I’d been kicked up the backside. This is a book I see myself back to again and again. Do read it.

‘Zones of Avoidance’ – a live literature performance

What would your understanding be of a ‘live literature performance’? Is it the same, or related to ‘performance poetry’? Could any poetry, when read or recited in front of an audience, be performance poetry?

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity of seeing a live performance of Maggie Sawkins’ Zones of Avoidance which won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry last year. It’s billed as ‘multimedia live literature production’, and with Mark C. Hewitt as director I had an inkling of what that meant. I knew it would be staged in some way. I suspected that the performance aspect would have little to do with the use of ‘trained actors’, or slam poetry, or a poet dominating the audience with sheer force of personality.

Mark is a writer, theatre maker, producer, director and all-round talented person who I know from Lewes Live Lit, the umbrella for all kinds of poetry activities in Lewes over the years. It’s he who organises the regular workshopping groups with Mimi Khalvati, and whose one-man show ‘Expiry tbc’ I really enjoyed a year or so back.

The performance I saw was actually a dry-run before its London debut, at The Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone, with the last performance taking place this evening. Certainly more than a rehearsed reading, as the piece had been performed quite a few times, it was nevertheless a ‘be prepared for anything’ kind of show. It was a small, invited audience and we’d been warned that not all aspects of the production would be happening (such as some lighting effects), also that we shouldn’t be alarmed if there were unscheduled moments or re-takes. In fact, there were no interruptions. Much of the material was read confidently from memory, all the technical aspects seemed to work (or work well enough for the impromptu venue). I loved the intimacy of what felt like a private view.

I knew the subject matter was based on the poet’s experience of her daughter’s drug addiction and her own professional work with recovering addicts. So I knew it wasn’t going to be ‘light’ entertainment. But I have to say I found the whole experience mesmerising. The trouble with trying to describe the dramatic elements of something like this (to someone who wasn’t there) – the props, the lighting, the use of projection/audio tracks, how the poet/performer changes position – is that you end up with a list of features which can, out of context, sound a bit periferal or mannered. But it wasn’t like that – the staging was absolutely integral to the piece.

The poet’s delivery was matter-of-fact, deadpan even. There was humour. And pathos. And most of all the frustration, anger and desperation of a mother having to stand by as her daughter self-destructs. It was moving, but not maudlin. Occasionally, between poems we heard recordings of addicts in recovery, speaking about their experiences. Some poems appeared on film. The whole production was carefully paced, giving us the audience time to take in what we were hearing and seeing: a muted, ordered presentation of a sad story of utter disorder.

Do go see Zones of Avoidance if you’re able to. I came away with the book which contains the whole sequence (not all the poems are in the performed version). I’ve added it the The Reading List, so in due course I’ll be talking more about the poems.