Author: Robin Houghton

Close readings/

Kim Lasky pamphlet launch

… or rather ‘pamphlets’ launch – not only did Kim Lasky win the Iota Shots competition last year, she did a double whammy with the Poetry Business comp – now that’s just greedy!! Although, to be fair, I don’t know Kim personally but I’m told by several good friends that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person and more deserving poet.

Anyway, imagine my surprise to get a Templar email alert last Monday to say a pamphlet was about to be launched not only here in my home town of Lewes, but three doors along from my house. How convenient!

kim lasky pamphlets

Kim’s two pamphlets are Petrol, Cyan, Electric (Smith Doorstop) and Eclipse (Templar), available on the night for just £8 for the two – too cheap! And as always from these presses, lovely production values. Kim read from them both, Eclipse accompanied by a beautiful film. (If I’d had my reading glasses and with a teensy bit more light I’d have read along from the copy while listening. I often have that feeling when listening to poetry being read – I want to see it on the page at the same time. Is that something to do with how our brains process information – maybe there’s a word for being more able to absorb the written rather than the spoken word ?)

I haven’t yet read Eclipse properly, but I’m very much enjoying Petrol, Cyan, Electric. I wasn’t quite sure I connected with the subject matter at first (pioneers and early experiments in electricity) yet in fact I’m finding so much that I like in the poems, such as ‘Cut’ in which the silence of a power cut throws what light there is into sharp relief: ‘The moon lays a white sheet / on the bed’ and later ‘the odd spotlight / of an upturned torch / like a ringed planet.’

Elsewhere, in ‘In the Mood’ we’re offered a glimpse of ‘the father I have in photographs’ who ‘took five sugars in tea’ imagined in an empty aircraft hangar, leading the narrator in a 1940s dance –  ‘In your arms I smell the man I never knew / Brylcreem, the chemistry of petrol.’

The collection features many more delicately described incidents, imagined happenings. There is a sense of wonder about it.  I love the way Kim brings real (his)stories to the fore without it feeling like a backwards take, preserving the magic and the mystery of things which, like electricity, are still never fully explainable.

Petrol, Cyan, Electric is on the shortlist for this year’s Michael Marks Pamphlet Award, with results being announced tomorrow.

Events/

Poetry bombing

Came across this – Poetry Bombing – sewing poems into charity shop clothes – how much fun is that??

Except I think I’d be spotted in a jiffy in our small, local St Peter & St James Hospice charity shop, plus you’d need super-quick sewing skills. Knowing my luck I’d be fumbling about looking for my reading glasses then drop the needle as someone elbowed past me to the paperbacks.

But it got me thinking – you don’t need to sew a poem (as in, with a needle) when you can sow one (geddit?) on other ‘stony’ ground – for example, little pieces of paper can be slipped into books in bookshops or libraries, or magazines, and no doubt you can think of lots of other targets, retail or otherwise. (Although it reminds of the plot of a rather rude book by Nicolson Baker, where the main character slips erotic messages into unlikely books and then lurks to watch how some unsuspecting victim is affected by them.)

OK perhaps it’s not a new idea, but I’ve never come across a ‘guerilla’ poem, and I’d love to! Have you?

Mags & Blogs/

Submissions update

Good news and bad news!

Quick update first of all to my October ‘working on, waiting on’ post: Poetry London – standard rejection slip. Shearsman – standard rejection email. The North – a very nice personal reply, but no. Envoi – yes (yay!).

I’ve also just heard that The Interpreter’s House (now edited by Martin Malone and with a shiny new website amongst other things) is taking one of the poems I wrote at Ty Newydd, which I’m very pleased about. It’s a bit of an homage to Ian Duhig. Martin also leaps right to the top of the ‘speed of response’ chart, having replied within a few days. Douze points!

After a sending spree I’ve currently got 6 poems out to Ambit, 3 to Antiphon, 3 to Lighthouse and 3 to Poetry Review. Plus a number of pamphlet submissions. Will post updates to all this as and when.

Courses/

A poem by David Borrott

I think there were only three men on the course at Ty Newydd, so I don’t know how that felt for them. David Borrott consistently came up with fresh, original work, and had a deadpan delivery I particularly enjoyed. Faced with the challenge of writing a poem in which ‘lethargy’ is personified by a sea anemone he managed to mix poignancy and humour brilliantly (‘… I have so many arms to do nothing with’)

I did ask David for a biog but he’s been a bit coy, nevertheless I do know he is widely published and is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at Manchester Metropolitan University. There is footage of him reading at Poets & Players here on YouTube.

I love this piece for its tragi-comic and slightly surreal treatment of everyday culture, all wrapped up in a lovely ironic swipe at both art criticism and that creative writing staple, the ekphrastic poem.

‘felicitous blending of figure and landscape’
by David Borrott

Two youths are fighting on the high street.
One wears a daub of blood on his white shirt,
the other’s fists are tight as apples;
a clench of excitement runs through the watching people,
their faces like a row of broken plates.
Dummies in the glass expand the crowd –
‘Next’ says the shop sign.

On the stone plinth of the town centre monument,
a woman with XXXL breasts is smoking.
She rests earthmotherly on the steps.
Smoke rises from her hand and her nostrils,
stroking the air with its grey curls.
Its filaments reach to the lowest green of a sycamore.
Her overblown curves temper the harsh lines of the war memorial.

A man is pissing down an alley.
It is night and a soft untroublesome rain persists.
Street lights reflect in the rancid puddles,
touches of orange amongst the grey and brown.
His fawn jacket is darker at the shoulders,
his half-cocked trousers are shadowy, vague.
It is almost as if he hovered there on the jet of his stream.

Published on Magma’s website as a longlisted poem in their competition.

Books/

A poem by Jenny Lewis

At Ty Newydd recently I was fortunate enough to be working alongside some wonderful poets, and with their permission I’ll be featuring some of them here.

The first is Jenny Lewis. I think Jenny was the most experienced of all of us, with many, many strings to her bow, and yet she wore her expertise with generosity and humility. Her comments were insightful and supportive and she produced some lovely work. It was very fitting that she won the competition set for us at the end of the week, with a very clever sestina. Jenny explained that it had been rejected by a certain poetry magazine, and so she’d rather lost faith in it (the poem that is), but Carol Ann Duffy wasn’t having any of that. “Who was the editor?” she barked.

Taking Mesopotamia

Anyway, I’m delighted that Jenny agreed to have a poem featured here. This is from her latest collection, Taking Mesopotamia (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet 2014). Of it, Bernard O’Donoghue writes: “Jenny Lewis’s quietly angry book is an account of the Iraq wars – mostly imposed from outside – of the past hundred years. Taking Mesopotamia – a brilliantly ironic title for our times – controls its anger through an accomplished and flexible technique in verse and prose. It is compulsory reading, even for those who don’t normally read poetry: an eloquent rejoinder to those who say poetry can’t, or shouldn’t, concern itself with public matters.”

Do visit Jenny’s website to get a feel for everything she’s up to, and for more details of her publications.

MOTHER

Childbirth was like being excavated:
my belly rose on whalebone wings,
pain soared about me like a bloodied angel:

then you were born

I saw you with my own eyes
I held you day and night:
you lay in my arms, a glowing pupa.

At Kut-al-Amara you were back-lit,
the moon pointed you out against the ridge –
when Turkish gunners stopped your spade

you fell slowly, shedding iridescence

each night in dreams I fail to catch you –
your bones the fragile quills of rescued fledglings
you placed by the stove for warmth

From Taking Mesopotamia (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet 2014) First published by The Oxonian Review, 2012.

Jenny LewisJenny Lewis
Jenny Lewis’s published works include When I Became an Amazon (Iron Press, 1996/ Bilingua, Russia 2002), Fathom (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet 2007) and After Gilgamesh (Mulfran Press, 2011) a verse drama for Pegasus Theatre, Oxford. Her forthcoming collection Taking Mesopotamia (March 2014, Oxford Poets/ Carcanet) expresses the revulsion and despair that ordinary people, especially women, feel towards war. She teaches poetry at Oxford University.

Writing/

Is it better to write with a pen?

The Poetry Socety recently reposted this Guardian article on Facebook – Why creative writing is better with a pen  – and I was reminded of how vehement Gillian Clarke was on the subject when she was tutoring us at Ty Newydd. She urged us to work in longhand before opening the computer.

What do you think of this? I’m interested to know, because although I do have a notebook by the bed (to capture ideas I have at night) I never actually write poems longhand. If I’m in a workshop I do use a pen and notepad, but I get a potential poem onto the screen to work on it as soon as I can. Some reasons I can think of are:

  • I type much more quickly than I write – I find I can lose an idea in the time it takes to write it by hand
  • I find writing harder –  my hand doesn’t seem to write what I intend, letters get missed out or the writing is illegible afterwards, plus my wrist aches
  • On the screen I can make changes very quickly to word choice, line length, layout to see how it looks, and can change back easily without lots of scratchings out
  • Because the typewritten word is clearer, I can ‘hear’ what I’ve written better
  • I like the intimacy of working on a laptop computer, and (unlike the writer of the Guardian article, for example) I don’t find the noise of the keyboard intrusive, quite the opposite actually – but then again Mac keyboards are very quiet
  • I can swiftly check something on the internet or in my archive without leaving my seat or breaking my train of thought
  • I can keep old iterations of poems and can go always back to see how something started, perhaps retrieve an old idea or go down another route for revision

Do you have any preferences or habits when it comes to writing by hand or on screen? What do you find works for you?

Places/

What we know by heart

Lewes Bonfire night

Today’s the biggest day of the year here in Lewes – Bonfire. Not much I can say about it that will do it justice, but search for ‘Lewes Bonfire’ on YouTube and you’ll get the picture. For the first time in about eight years we’re having a ‘quiet Bonfire’. In other words, I’m not dressing up & processing, Nick’s not playing host to a houseful, we won’t be standing in the muddy field at 11pm and I won’t be down said field at 7am tomorrow filling a hundred black bags with discarded bottles, chip papers, cans, broken umbrellas and all the other detritus dropped by thousands of spectators.

Nope – we’re just going to pop outside to watch a procession or two, enjoy the odd beer and bangers & mash and then see the fireworks from our top room. Ah!

Having woken up at 5.30am to the first bangs I started saying ‘Remember, remember the fifth of November’ in my head and trying to recall all the verses which get recited by the ‘Bonfire Boys’ around town tonight under the banner of ‘Bonfire Prayers.’ But if it makes you think of wiggling a few sparklers in the back garden as a kid then think again. These Bonfire Prayers are recited with all the ritual awe and seriousness of the Anglican Creed. People really do remember, and may of them feel the events of the past as if they happened yesterday.

What rhymes or songs learned in childhood can you still recite? We no longer have an oral tradition in this country, unless you count football chants (‘We’re all agreed, Liverpool are magic’). I was reading recently about how in Russia you won’t struggle to find people who can recite poetry, from all walks of life and backgrounds.

I started dredging my memory. Nursery rhymes – OK, I can probably do a couple of verses of ‘Sing a song of sixpence’ or ‘Oranges and Lemons’. After that, hymns – daily assembly from age 7 to 18 left an indelible mark. Even my ex-chorister husband (who has an encyclopaedic memory for hymn tunes and numbers) is surprised at how many verses of how many hymns I can still sing from memory. Pop ballads, sure. But there are no new lyrics, although I used to love memorising Al Stewart songs (“In a morning from a Bogart movie / In a country where they turn back time / You go strolling though the crowd like Peter Lorre contemplating a crime…”)

Then of course TV. ‘Hugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grump.’ And something I’m most ashamed of, advertising jingles:

Richard Shops are filled with lots of pretty things / lots of lovely pretty things to wear / hey there, pretty thing! Make the world a prettier place! / Come pretty up, come buy your clothes at Richard Shops! (Aaahh!)

Hmm… some nice (if unsubtle) internal rhyme there, but more repetition than a search-engine-optimised ‘buy now’ page. Believe it or not, that actually worked on me when I was about 15. I was desperate to shop at Richard Shops. And I won’t even start on the Flake advert.

Miss Cave who taught us RE at school (“Cave! That means ‘beware’!”) made us learn the books of the Bible to a catchy tune. Yes indeed – the entire Old and New Testaments. I wouldn’t trust myself to be word-perfect now, as I’m a little out of practice. But I can do enough for it to be a party piece. Of course it was just a mnemonic device, although many of the names have their own music – Habukkuk, Ezekiel, Collossians.

When it comes to poetry I know very few poems in their entirety (and they’re all short!) and some snatches/lines from other poems. There’s always been a movement in support of learning songs and poems from memory. I wish I’d made more of an effort to do so when I was younger and it was easier to stimulate the long-term memory. One of my mother’s great pleasures at the end of her life, when it was hard for her to focus on the here and now and even photographs had lost their relevance, was to be read the poetry she learned in her youth. Even the little rhymes in her school autograph book made her laugh every time I read them out, and it was a joy to hear her join in the phrases she still knew by heart.

If you’re around fireworks this evening, stay safe (and dry, if you can.)

Events/

Riordan & Share on ‘100 years of the don’ts’

Don Share & Maurice Riordan

Yesterday evening I was at Keats House in Hampstead listening to a Poetry Society debate on the subject of Ezra Pound’s enormously influential article ‘A Few Don’ts’, first published a hundred years ago.

As the respective editors of Poetry Review (UK) and Poetry (US), Maurice Riordan and Don Share could be said to represent the behemoth of the poetry establishment from both sides of the Atlantic. And both magazines published ‘A Few Don’ts’ when it first came out. Fascinating though the evening was, I guess this was never going to be a platform for a radical re-working of the ‘don’ts’.

Riordan in particular expressed fondness for many of the ‘rules’, and also argued that they were more discretionary than they are usually given credit for. “Go in fear of abstractions” isn’t the same thing as “don’t use abstractions”, for example. He also pointed out that Pound did say the ‘don’ts’ were not to be considered as dogma, rather that they offered guidance – “cautions gained by experience” and were up for debate.

There were some questions and observations from the floor and the talk was less about whether we need a new list of don’ts, but the bigger question of whether in this century we will see a new poetic movement to take us away from modernism, whether we need (or have) another Pound in our midst to reinvent poetry in the way that he did, “from the doughy mess of Romanticism”. Someone said that in order for a new movement to take off, enough people need to hate what currently holds as fine poetry.

Another important point made by Don Share was that there is far greater access now to poetry from around the world, and new ideas spread quickly via the internet. It’s hard to imagine anyone having the influence and power of Pound over today’s poetry scene, with its myriad different artistic movements, sub cultures and niche followings.

I first came across ‘A Few Don’ts’ in a brilliant book called Strong Words, an anthology of essays by poets on poetry, edited by W N Herbert and Matthew Hollis. I think it’s one of those books that’s on the reading list of any Creative Writing MA, but if like me you’ve never done one, it’s a revelation. Highly recommended.

Angst/

At Ty Newydd, part 2

sea-grass-pylon

Here’s the longer post I promised about my week at Ty Newydd. First of all, some of the advice and sayings I captured from the tutors during workshops. It’s not a long list, but we were mostly doing exercises, so I just wrote down phrases that resonated with me:

  • Train yourself to remember details
  • Sometimes by going through an exercise of trying to remember something that happened in the past, you can surprise yourself with what comes out
  • When you’re in a poem, all else disappears – “touch the miracle by allowing this to happen”
  • “At the moment it’s falling apart like a glass of water that’s spilled”
  • There has to be a very good reason for a line to only contain two words
  • Think of verbs as the battery of the poem – they give it life and energy
  • Form forces you to “make choices and to be hard on yourself”
  • You need to love the ‘clay’ between the bricks (ie all the bits of a poem you make have overlooked)
  • There are some words like ‘flotsam’ that “only appear in poems”
  • You can say something more movingly if you don’t over-egg it
  • Have a rationale for your line lengths and stanza lengths – the architecture of the poem
  • Be careful about saying ‘not xyz’ in a poem because then you are saying it!

How we spent the time

There were 16 of us on the course and I was very pleased to find myself thrown together in workshops with so many accomplished and talented poets. We were put into ‘mini groups’ of 3 or 4 and encouraged to work together in our spare time. I warmed very much to my mini-group and I think we did some good work together – we certainly had a lot of laughs (or was it hysteria?) and shared a good amount of wine, all important elements of the bonding, of course.

The idea of spare time was an interesting one! I was in awe of those students who made time to go for runs or a long walk. Two of the days were rainy but I was persuaded to get a bit of fresh air on the last day, which I needed as I had a massive headache from around Thursday lunchtime.

As well as the workshops each morning and two of the afternoons, we had plenty of homework to keep us busy. I was very pleased with my week’s output – two poems that are three-quarters there and the seeds of at least three more. Morning sessions started at ten, so I usually found myself working in my room for at least an hour or so before. At the other end of the day I struggled. On Wednesday I was on the cooking team, so when the afternoon workshop ended we had half an hour ‘free’ until reporting for kitchen duties which then tied us up for the rest of the night, returning to the kitchen after Imtiaz Dharker’s reading to empty the dishwasher and put stuff away. The ‘secret poem’ evening was great fun, but by 11pm when it was drawing to an end I was absolutely fried.

train sign

The thorny issue of tutorials

A few of us (not all – one person took me task for bringing it up) were disappointed to be told right away there would be no individual tutorials, since it was clearly stated on the course literature that there would be ‘plenty of time’ for this during the week. Someone asked the question on the first night and the issue came up several more times, and eventually the tutors defended the decision by saying that individual tutorials tended to just waste everyone else’s time, and were only a feature of beginner-type courses.

The whole thing was (as one student pointed out) simply to do with managing expectations. Some of us had been so excited by the prospect of a hobnob with CAD or GC that it had become a huge selling point of the course. When in fact, if we hadn’t expected it, no-one (me included) would have been disappointed, because we would have gone there simply prepared to take our chances as and when. Which is what happened eventually on the last day, when someone came running into the dining room saying ‘come quick! this is the stuff we’ve been wanting to hear all week!’ – the tutors were in the conservatory, answering questions about getting published, pamphlets, how they (and others) had done it, advice & insider tips … all the things we wanted to ask. Within minutes we were all sitting around them like disciples, agog and hanging on every word.

The people

Naturally what happens in Ty Newydd stays in Ty Newydd. So no identifying details of individuals or the work we covered. But from my own observation, both tutors were extraordinarily giving and worked hard to challenge us and help us develop our writing. It was a generous and supportive group producing some wonderful work. I’ve got exciting names on my radar now: David Borrott, Ben Rogers and Ruby Turok-Squire, for example. Jenny Lewis, who won the competition on the last day with a brilliant sestina (which I had no chance of beating even if I had overcome my flounces about entering) is an accomplished poet with more than one collection already with Carcanet. Her warmth, expertise and sheer humility about her own writing were admirable.

By the end of the week I felt the tutors and students had come to a pretty good rapport. I’ve no idea how Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke teach so many of these courses and remain sane, cheerful and motivated. I have huge respect for them. I’ve never taught on a residential course but I know how exhausted I get after even a half-day workshop with demanding students. It was lovely that both tutors brought along and introduced us to their family in the evenings. The staff at Ty Newydd were so accommodating, relaxed and friendly; I couldn’t fault the atmosphere in that sense.

Relaxing in the library at Ty Newydd

Final thoughts

Several of the students had been on residential courses before, in some cases quite a few. I think I’d be reluctant to do it again in this format. Although for me the ‘outcomes’ of the week (as it would be officially termed I guess) were excellent, I was surprised at how stressful I found being hothoused with so many people I didn’t know. A smaller group would have allowed more real connection with each others’ writing, and might have felt less hectic. I seem to need a lot of thinking time, and because of this I’m not sure my own contributions were that helpful – it takes me longer than five minutes to offer meaningful feedback on a previously unseen poem. But I know there are the economics of numbers to consider.

What I’m hoping is that the payback (if I dare call it that – I was made aware that not everyone likes to talk about the poetry business in such terms) of the week will extend far into the future. I hope I’ve made some friendships and that there may be opportunities for future collaboration, mutual invitations and who knows what other projects. I hope I’ve learned some valuable lessons, about writing and much more. I think I have.

Robin at Ty Newydd

audio/

Something completely different – sound poetry

I was just reading this post on Rebecca Gethin’s blog and from there followed a link to Hannah Silva’s blog, which led me to watch some videos of her performing. Hannah’s amazing ‘sound poetry’ made me think again about the Magma theme ‘the music of words’ – I hope the editors are planning to include something by her.

Here’s a video of Hannah Silva performing ‘Talking to Silence’ for example…


… and then the mesmeric ‘Threshold’ seems to push the boundaries of poetry to its limits. As someone in the comments suggested, it’s not dissimilar to what some composers have done with music, for example Berio’s Sequenza for Voice which I once heard/saw performed by the wonderful soprano Lesley Jane Rogers. It’s a stunning piece of music, and Mozart it ain’t.

Feels like a breath of fresh air to stumble on something like this and find myself challenged out of my poetic comfort zone.