Robin Houghton

Workshopping/ 11/01/2013

How to tackle the “What does it mean?” question

“Poems need room for the imagination to engage” says Roselle Angwin in a interesting blog post on creating ambiguity in a poem, not telling the whole story.

So here’s a problem I have, and I can’t be the only one! When I take a poem to a workshopping group I really don’t like explaining. Anything. I just don’t think it’s relevant. So if I’m asked straight away “what does this mean?’ I want to say ‘what do you think it means?’ Letting people decide, or hearing people discuss amongst themselves can be very revealing about where the problems are. Not in the sense of ‘oh no, they’ve got it all wrong, I need to change that so that my meaning is clear.’ Because if I do that, there’s no ‘work’ left for the reader. And anyway, I love it when people put their own take on a piece. It means they’ve engaged with it.

But how to tackle the ‘what does it mean” question? Sometimes people get a bit tetchy if I refuse to provide answers. And if I say ‘I prefer not to explain’ it all sounds rather pompous. Or if I do find myself explaining, I get all defensive and then annoyed that I’m coming across as not wanting criticism, which of course I do, but I think this ‘need to find the meaning’ gets in the way of really looking closely at the thing.

There are plenty of poems I can’t make sense of, especially on a first reading. If there’s a specific word or phrase I don’t understand, I may comment that this tripped me up, or ask if it’s important that the reader understands it.. By asking “is this important?” you are prompting the poet to question it in her mind. Personally, that’s the kind of feedback I find helpful – comments that make me really interrogate what I’ve written. What do you think? Do you agree? I know it’s not easy to give feedback – I find it really hard myself – so am I being unreasonable? Should I be grateful for any kind of feedback?

Books/ 10/01/2013

T S Eliot shortlisted poetry collections – reviews

I confess haven’t read all the collections shortlisted for this year’s T S Eliot Prize. But I’ve trawled for informative reviews of each, in order to at least have an idea and also in anticipation of hearing all the poets read on Sunday evening at the Festival Hall. So here we go.

Sean Borodale Bee Journal (Jonathan Cape) (Bees seem to be a hot topic at the moment. Does their essential yet potentially doomed role in the ecosystem give them extra poetic power?) Giles Pitts’ review in Varsity makes me think I would enjoy this collection.

‘10th February: Dismantling the Comb’, for example, is a deeply moving account of bereavement, the poet shining light into the comb’s cells in a fruitless search for life: ‘It’s like the grain of a moon, a spoon-back of pale no one, / just the pail of an egg’s dry opal empty of hunger’.

Gillian Clarke Ice (Carcanet) – Stevie Davies in the Independent calls it ‘partly pastoral elegy, partly georgic’ and offers this assessment.

In 1947, news of the ice-girl’s end aroused in the prescient young Gillian a sense of “her china inkwell emptied of its words,/ the groove for her pen like a shallow grave”.

Julia Copus The World’s Two Smallest Humans (Faber & Faber) – reviewed in the Guardian by Kate Kellaway, who calls it a ‘remarkable collection’. She focuses in particular on the poem ‘Ghost’ which is printed in full at the end of the review, noting that the poet “avoids the first person and keeps a tight rein on emotion.”

SImon Armitage The Death of King Arthur (Faber & Faber) – a gallant Kate Kellaway tackles this tome despiteadmitting initial reluctance (“When I studied Anglo-Saxon at university, I remember complaining that whenever I wasn’t sure of a word, it turned out to mean “spear”.”) She concedes, however, that Armitage “has a miraculous ability to make the past fresh, moving and urgent, not allowing legend to create distance.” Personally I’m not sure how much I’d relish all those bloody battles, but perhaps I need to keep an open mind – if I’ve got the stomach for Julia Copus’s IVF poems then I can face anything. (For some reason, poems about pregnancy and childbirth make me queasy.)

Paul Farley The Dark Film (Picador) – despite Nicholas Pierpan’s excoriating review in Tower Poetry (is this the guy who critiqued my work both times I submitted stuff for the Poetry Society’s ‘Prescription’ service? I recognise the style!) I am interested to read this collection, if only to see if there’s more to it than Pierpan fancies. (For example, ‘Saturday Irons’ he dismisses with “Are the final two lines tongue-in-cheek, or just bathetic? I honestly can’t tell; they don’t work either way.”)

Jorie Graham P L A C E (Carcanet) – is this is the front-runner, having already won the Forward Prize? Here’s Sean O’Brien’s review in the Guardian. Funnily enough I only heard of Jorie Graham recently, when I asked poet friend Lynne about American poetry, in which she’s pretty much steeped. Must explore.

Kathleen Jamie – The Overhaul (Picador) – I was googling this to find a review and got sidetracked by a wonderful interview on the Scottish Review of Books. I like the sound of Kathleen Jamie, she comes across a bit like Don Paterson, all dry and matter-of-fact what’s-the-fuss-all-about. Must be a scottish thang. Anyway, here’s Maria Johnston’s review in the Guardian of what sounds like a fine collection.

Sharon Olds Stag’s Leap (Jonathan Cape) – my poet friend Charlotte lent me a copy of this to read a couple of months ago and there was something terrifyingly gripping about it – the story of a marriage break up in painful, masochistic detail. It gave me bad dreams – I suppose it played on my greatest nightmare, which would be to lose the love and fidelity of my husband. But here’s a wonderful video interview / profile on the PBS website where Sharon reads from the book and talks about her writing and her life. There’s a sympathy, acceptance and calmness about her that I nearly missed in the reading of Stag’s Leap.

Jacob Polley The Havocs (Picador) – so I click on the Guardian’s review of this collection and there’s a photo of a beekeeper – wtf! Anyway, Ben Wilkinson finds much to admire:

Tripping through assorted rhythms, sonnets, end-rhymed quatrains and the looping lines of its centrepiece, it is as formally vibrant as the luminous letters that adorn its cover….The Havocs may be an uneven collection that sometimes finds Polley treading water, but a handful of its poems are so moving and memorable you might just forgive him.

Deryn Rees-Jones Burying the Wren (Seren) – Carl Griffin in the Wales Arts Review suggests that this collection on ‘recollections and grief’ has its ‘fair share of poems that should have been buried with the wren’. Nevertheless he finds ‘ingenious images’ as well as ‘snatches of comedy and joy’ in her writing.

Mags & Blogs/ 04/01/2013

January’s off to a great start

Happy New Year!

I’m particularly upbeat about 2013 – already there are lots of positive things going on in both work and play (not sure where poetry sits on that spectrum but I’m doing my best to blue the edges, little by little.)

On New Year’s Eve I had an email from Helen Ivory to say she was accepting my poem ‘Left’ (which Mimi Khalvati had described as ‘bonkers’!) for Ink, Sweat & Tears so that should appear around March time.

And New Writing South have showed interest in a workshop proposal I sent them, which is very exciting, so more on that as it develops.

I’m looking forward to the TS Eliot prize readings at the Festival Hall on Sunday 13th. I first went to this event last year with several poet friends and really enjoyed it. Very buzzy and a brilliant opportunity to hear all ten shortlisted poets reading from their work.

Meanwhile, Brighton’s very own Ten Voice Stanza is only two weeks away – yikes! I hope we can pull in a good audience. It should be a lot of fun with a good range of poets reading, so I do hope so. You can read all about it (and RSVP) on Facebook or here for the Facebook refuseniks. If you’re anywhere near Brighton, please come (and tell all your friends!)

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!