Category: Inspiration

Back from Ireland

River Lee, Cork

The rest of my week at the Cork Poetry Festival was brilliant – I want to say that right away as a few people were worried about me after my last blog post – thank you so much for the messages of support/understanding!

I think it took me a day or two to tune into what I’ll call the shape or thread of the place I found myself in. It’s a funny thing to try to make sense of. Finding myself walking a route between venues and remembering it from the day before, thinking ‘oh yes, I noticed that shop yesterday’ and ‘ah, that’s an interesting detail I’m discovering today’. Going down to breakfast and knowing what food there is but trying something different. Getting the feel of each venue and whether to arrive 15 minutes before the start or 5. Realising I do find it hard to concentrate after 10pm and not beating myself up for missing an event if I was too tired. Starting not only to understand the cadences of Cork, and the vernacular of the event in general, but enjoying it too. It was wonderful to meet up with Grainne Tobin, down from Northern Ireland, quick to take me under her wing and a mine of knowledge, ideas and energy. And speaking of energy, I was also lucky to spend time in the company of Abigail Parry: frighteningly talented, generous, modest, funny and one of the hardcore crowd still going strong at 3am on Saturday morning.

And the poetry of course! I heard poets reading in Irish (Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Ailbhe Ni Ghearbhuigh), and in Chinese (Jidi Majia) – nothing I’ve experienced before and it felt such a privilege to be there. Both Friday and Saturday nights were corkers: Jonathan Edwards read alongside Abigail Parry, followed by Sasha Dugdale with Theo Dorgan, who stood in for Karen McCarthy Woolf. The third session that night featured Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and David Harsent who read a series of poems with no titles, and he asked people not to look at him ‘so you don’t know when the next poem is going to begin.’ It created a kind of meditative atmosphere. Saturday night was a sell-out, with Kim Addonizio (btw I think this is the coolest poet webpage photo I’ve ever seen) and Kathryn Maris proving to be an inspired pairing, followed by Leanne O’Sullivan introducing Billy Collins, former US poet laureate and such a pro – his timing and deadpan delivery were perfect, here’s an example.

I’m sorry I seem to have reduced so many fine readings to more or less a list of names. I deliberately didn’t take notes, and now almost a week later it feels like a decade ago. It was an inspirational week for me; I did some good writing while I was there, had some eye-opening conversations and felt I’d glimpsed something of the country/culture in a way that rarely happens when you’re simply a tourist.

I also want to say a huge thank you to the Munster Literature Centre, organisers of the festival, particularly Director Patrick Cotter and Administrator James O’Leary, who appeared to work non-stop and always with an air of calm. Despite a number of readers dropping out through illness, everything was so well organised and on a human-friendly scale. Recommended!

Billy Collins reading at Cork Poetry Festival
Billy Collins

 

A furtive photo taken from the Farmgate Cafe in the English Market…

 

Abigail Parry & Robin Houghton
With Abigail Parry

 

Day 3 in Cork – turning a corner

Book haul 1 Cork

It’s day 3 and I’m settling into my Cork Poetry Festival experience. Yesterday and today I’ve spent the morning writing and reading. Afternoons I go to hear readings at the library, evenings are in the fine Cork Arts Theatre – a lovely intimate size perfect for poetry.

Highlights for me so far:

Launch event for The Well Review issue 3 on Tuesday at the Music School: a wonderfully thought-out programme that followed the ‘music’ theme of the issue. In between readings by contributors (Sasha Dugdale read Anna Akhmatova both in English and in Russian – I marvelled at the way her voice changes in accommodation) we heard music for cello and piano, by Shostakovich, Britten and Mahler. Editor Sarah Byrne made the introductions and has a manner I want to describe as ‘sweet’ but I don’t mean that in a patronising or sugary way at all. Gentle, thoughtful, informed.

US/Irish poet Thomas Dillon Redshaw reading yesterday at the library, from his collection Mortal (Brighthorse Books) and some new material too – goodness, what moving poems from the experience of losing his mother ‘in her hundredth year’. One of them, ‘Theft’, was published by the Irish Times last Saturday.

Yesterday evening I loved hearing Pat Boran, another name I hadn’t heard of but I bought a copy of his ‘pocket selected’ A Man is Only as Good…(Orange Crate Books) and have already started reading & enjoying it. We also had Jessica Traynor reading from The Quick (Dedalus Press 2018). Great presentation and some wonderful poems. A poet I have heard read before of course is Kim Moore. I’d heard most of her set before and that was a big part of my enjoyment of it. She manages to make each reading (and the links) sound fresh, making me laugh at the funny bits as if hearing them for the first time.

Meanwhile I’ve actually already worked on four ‘archive’ poems (ie one of about 200 I’ve ‘put in the drawer’ over the years) and started a new one. The new one is partly a response to Thomas Dillon Redshaw’s poems about his mother. It’s been six years since my mother died, but just ten lines written this morning and I was crying my eyes out. I would blame it on hormones but I think that’s all done with now.

I won’t deny I’ve struggled a bit since arriving in Cork – people have been so kind on Twitter but by last night I was seriously wondering what sort of dreadful negativity I was giving off in real life! I’m so grateful to Sasha Dugdale for joining me at breakfast yesterday, but then later in the day she endured my moaning on about being a Jonny-no-mates – ugh!  How embarrassing – I owe her a bunch of flowers at least.

I’ve reminded myself of a few truths: that I can’t have it both ways – I like my solitary time, I knew it would be challenge to come here not knowing anyone, I came to hear the work of poets new to me, and to be inspired. I didn’t come here to socialise, or to feel obliged to fit in with others – I am an outsider here so wishing that wasn’t the case is really a bit silly. So I’m over myself. I’m in Ireland for $£@*’s sake! I’m hearing some fantastic poetry! I’m extremely lucky!

Anyway, today’s another day entirely and from my first encounter with the famous Cork friendliness at the health club reception desk this morning (Shane! Thank you! I realise that you probably spell your name Siaorghne or something so please forgive my ignorance) to the brilliantly empty swimming pool, to the wonderful person on reception who offered me a different room, (in which hopefully I won’t be woken three times a night by the bins lorry) I feel encased in a glow of positivity and ready to turn a corner. Off to the library.

Recent reading: Janet Sutherland, Poetry magazine

Alongside making updates to the look and feel of this site (and general online spring cleaning) I’ve been enjoying some stimulating reading lately. The January edition of Poetry has yielded up a lot of interesting material, including extracts from ‘A Frank O’Hara Notebook’ by Bill Berkson, which made for rich reading on a train journey yesterday…

a frank o'hara notebook

At the back of the mag Mark Ford reviews the Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons (over 2,000 pages!) – a poet I confess I’d never heard of, and clearly someone who went against the grain in more ways than one.

I’ve also listened to two of the podcasts for this issue, in which Don Share, Lindsay Garbutt and Christina Pugh focus on a single poem for reading and discussion. It’s like listening in to an editorial meeting, and always makes me appreciate a poem more. Each month they pick three or four poems to talk about. The two I heard were Khaled Mattawa’s ‘The Boat Merchant’s Wife’ and Jorie Graham’s ‘Overheard in the Herd’. Fascinating. You can catch all the Poetry magazine podcasts here.

A few weeks ago, Janet Sutherland and Matthew Stewart were two of the readers at Needlewriters, a quarterly event in Lewes, in which I’m involved. They each read from their latest collections. I’ll talk more about Matthew’s collection The Knives of Villalejo in a future post.

Home Farm by Janet Sutherland

Home Farm is Janet Sutherland‘s fourth collection from Shearsman. As an aside, when I was at the Swindon Poetry Festival last October, Tony Frazer of Shearsman was on an editors’ panel, and when they were all asked ‘is there a poet you are most proud of having discovered?’ Tony’s answer was ‘Janet Sutherland.’

The cover illustration of a cross-section of a cow sets the scene perfectly. Janet grew up on her parent’s dairy farm in Wiltshire, and much of the book is set there – the experience of day-to-day life and death, the precarious nature of land, weather, animals ‘If symptoms are severe / your animal can die in just an hour -‘ (‘Bloat’) This is no cosy pastoral memoir. The poems draw on actual incidents, stories and memories, extracts from books, letters and accounts. We learn the names of the fields (‘Stony ground, East Close, Home ground, Muddy Track, Paddock, Park, Chapel, Horatio…’ – ‘Fields and Copses’) and the cows, are given glimpses into the ways that love and care for the animals is balanced out by the hard realities. In ‘Mum’s Accounts’ of births and deaths, we’re told ‘The Middle Column is for notes of trouble, trial, losses (‘1987: Gorse, milk fever. Lotus, calved early, calf dead. Dolly, needed help, calf died next day.’) The writing is unsentimental, brutal at times and brilliantly so.


You’ve see calves born, shut them in pens,
and heard their mothers’ bellowing.

You set that grief aside. You taught
calves how to dip unwilling heads to drink,
to suck your milky fingers like a straw.  (‘You hold in your head a notion of the land’)

A seemingly simple poem about a doe making her way tentatively through a wood (‘She will enter’) is a moment of such intensity and understatement, very typical of Janet’s style. I hesitate to call it ‘nature writing’ as there’s something rather limp about the phrase.

The collection embraces experimental poems, fragments and illustrations, all of which I found absorbing, moving and mysterious, propelling me on.

A facsimile of a page from a letter is reproduced, phrases from which appear in a poem later in the book to heartbreaking effect:

I was just looking at your room this morning
and wishing you were home

this room is already empty
the face above the sheets
has gone to clay

now son take care of yourself

Even as I type this my eyes are welling up! Surely this is what poetry exists for.

What Mary Oliver said about distractions

Mary Oliver A Poetry Handbook

One of the first books I bought and consumed (once I started thinking it possible I could write the odd semi-decent poem) was Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook, along with Julia Cameron’s The Sound of Paper. Now Mary Oliver has died I suppose it was inevitable there would be a flurry of Oliver-appreciation, and I’ve enjoyed being reminded of her wisdom.

This week in Brain Pickings, Maria Popova has pulled up from the archive The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Time, Concentration, the Artist’s Task, and the Central Commitment of the Creative Life. It’s a wonderful read, and I love her description of how interruptions can destroy the creative mind at work. This was well before social media of course, but it’s not just outside forces that can do the damage:

…just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation.

Indeed. I hope this week brings you at least some moments of sustained solitude in which to write.

New Year, new intentions

I’m a big fan of yoga teacher Adriene Mischler, whose ‘home practice’ videos I’ve been following for about six months. I’ve just started her latest ’30 Days of Yoga’ series and she talks at the beginning about ‘setting an intention’. I really like that idea – rather than New Year’s resolutions, how about setting some intentions? It feels more intimate somehow, more inclusive, kinder on oneself.

I have a number of intentions in mind – encompassing writing, blogging, giving myself permission, looking after myself, all the usual things I suppose. A poet friend tells me the ‘Guide to getting published in magazines’ that took up so much of my time recently was yet another ‘displacement activity’ distracting me from writing poetry. He may have a point. I seem to have some deep down belief that writing poetry is the ultimate indulgence and I’m not sure I deserve to do too much of it, especially when other projects present themselves.*

So, with all this in mind, I’ve already signed up for a fortnightly workshopping group led by the excellent Katy Evans-Bush, which I’m hoping will boot me out of my comfort zone. I’m intending to start a poem a week, and am looking forward to reading Jo Bell’s wise words on the subject. I haven’t yet done my annual stock-take of submissions and rejections but I know I’ve had a lazy year on that front. (Details to come!) On the other hand I’ve enjoyed giving readings. I’ve two more coming up very soon – at Reading Poet’s Cafe this coming Friday 11th January, and next month at Buzzwords Cheltenham. All very exciting and fun, and incentive to really work on delivering a strong set.


*OK, I’ve literally just been over to Katy Evans-Bush’s blog and read the entire chronicle of her last nine months or so, being made homeless by criminally bad landlords and how she’s now putting her life back together, and I feel ashamed of all my hand-wringing ‘oh I don’t allow myself to write poems, I need to be kinder on myself’ etc etc. I live a comfortable, charmed life and one of my intentions is now to remind myself of that every single day. Happy New Year!

 

Poetry & alcohol, contentious essays and more

Ah, December. The month when I may be found stressing over the kerning and leading of some choir’s concert programme, editing singers’ lengthy blogs and updating the Christmas card list. Yes! I am still a Christmas card aficionado, despite every year it becoming yet another soul-search about whether the negative impact on the environment of all that paper, print and roadmiles outweighs the social benefit of sending and receiving something with physical presence handwritten by a human being. I’m sure my parents must have faced similar moral dilemmas but I can’t imagine right now what they were.

Having just emerged from a ‘dry November’ – no, it wasn’t for charity, just for a challenge – I feel just a tad liberated. I mean, to return to alcohol. I wonder if the occasional injection of alcohol actually loosens up my brain in a way that allows me to think poetry – rather like allowing one’s gaze to soften and see those 3D ‘magic eye’ images that had their moment in the 1990s. It feels that way, anyway. I’m sure it’s not a scientific fact, otherwise there would be no teetotal poets. Which I’m sure isn’t the case.

Read this please

I came across this piece by the big-thinking Jon Stone, on how we could be re-thinking the traditional poetry book blurbs and steer clear of the dreaded ‘ceaselessly inventive and original, utilises precise, finely wrought language, deft musicality’ etc etc stuff that we read every day. This appealed to me greatly. I try to suppress the copywriter in me but It’s very hard when yet another claim about ‘clear-eyed poetry that demands to be written’ or whatever makes me want to be sick into a bucket. Although I admit I also fall into this particular bucket from time to time.

Jon’s essay is a fab read on its own, but don’t miss also part 1 in the series, on Prize Culture, sure to quicken a few pulses (“If the Forward or the Eliot mysteriously stopped producing spikes in sales for shortlisted books, a serious reform would be undertaken immediately, as a matter of emergency”). I can’t find parts 3 – 5 of the series, but I’m waiting for them with bated breath. These essays were written in 2014, so why have I only just discovered them? Conspiracy theories on a postcard, please.

Readings, launches

A couple of weeks ago I went over to Chichester to read at Barry Smith’s excellent Chichester Poetry Open Mic. Twas a fairly foul night, but the small audience had a big heart – not only was the open mic element one of the best I’ve experienced, but the lovely people bought a few of my pamphlets as well as my ‘Guide to Getting Published in UK Poetry Magazines’ (yes! another plug! But if I can’t plug it on my own blog then what kind of a marketer would that make me? No need to answer that one.)

A few nights ago I attended the launch of Antony Mair‘s wonderful new collection, Let the Wounded Speak. Antony had invited two other poets to read from his collection, and the whole event had been impeccably planned. Having others read his poems was a bit of a masterstroke. I love hearing Antony read, but giving the poems to another voice meant we got a different slant on the work. I admit I was surprised to find it so moving, although I’m not sure why I was surprised, because I’d been to the launch of his first collection performed partially by the actors of Live Canon, and enjoyed that immensely.

Antony has a theory that my poetry-related doo-dads such as the quarterly windows updates and the ‘how to’ book are displacement activities designed to stop me getting on with the first collection. There could be something in that. But there’s also the pleasure of dipping in and out of diverse projects.

One thing’s for certain, I need the relative quiet of January to get on with thinking about the collection. Music for now. I’m still enjoying laying out the programme and learning the music for our upcoming concert…

Small milestones

'The Other Foot' by Robin Houghton, from 'Foot Wear' (2017)At the end of October it was my birthday, and over a boozy supper my dear husband suggested we do a ‘dry November’. I couldn’t think of a reason why not – no social events planned, Christmas to look forward to, and I certainly couldn’t face giving up alcohol for January, the most depressing month of the year. So November seemed like a good time to try the Ultimate Detox. I wasn’t fantastically optimistic we’d manage it to be honest. But here we are, 16 days in and holding strong. Fingers crossed!

It may seem like a minor thing, and perhaps a bit sad, but if my willpower keeps going to the end of the month it will feel like a mighty achievement. Other things I’m celebrating other than half a month without a drink: two and a half years so far free of cancer (without having taken the drugs), and my ‘how to get published in UK poetry magazines’ booklet selling out in ten days. This was amazing to me – and I wish I’d had more copies printed in the first place because it would have been so much more cost-effective than having to do a second print run. On the plus side, I’ve tested the market and (so far) have had some wonderful feedback. If you’ve bought it, and if you’re one of the lovely people who’s shared it and endorsed it on social media, thank you so much!

Having had my head down working on ‘the book’ my poetry writing has been a bit inconsistent lately. I received a rejection from Rattle – not entirely unexpected as it would be amazing to have a poem accepted there. Poems I sent to a couple of comps crashed and burned. Meanwhile the Poetry News theme of ‘the abstract space’ had left all of us in the Hastings Stanza a bit bemused. Having said that I did send a couple of poems in the end. I was quite pleased with one of them, so even if doesn’t work for P News I have hopes for it. I also sent three poems to Magma on the theme of ‘work’ – would be ridiculous if I did not, having banged on about my work-themed poems for so many years. An interesting thing: as I bundled these three together I realised there was another unifying theme, and something I’ve spotted elsewhere in my own poems. It’s starting to look hopeful for the much-talked-about first collection. Now that WOULD be a milestone. I almost daren’t say it!

An aside from Swindon

Clare Shaw reading at Swindon Poetry Festival

Although I’m currently officially blogging the Poetry Swindon Festival over at Festival Chronicle, this is my own blog so I thought I’d put any personal asides on here. You know me, don’t you?

On Friday morning some us were lucky enough to be in workshops with either Clare Shaw or Kim Moore. I was with the former. We did a fair bit of free writing, which I’m not sure I’m doing right as my ‘stream of consciousness’ writing is invariably as prosaic as it comes.  When asked to describe a fish, my piece went a bit like this “The fish lives a small pond and often tries to hide under a lily pad although I can still see its tail waving.” Whereas my fellow poets will typically produce “the fish’s silvery backbone strokes the water’s surface like a reflexion of the moon skittering across my lonely eye” which is sightly intimidating. Is it just me?

Now I want to say a few words about Clare Shaw, who I’d not met before, but was curious about after Sarah Dixon the day before had announced herself to be a Clare Shaw Fangirl. When Ms Shaw entered the room there was an undoubted frisson. I immediately thought of James Bond, but then no, more Doctor Who. Forget Jodie Whittaker, Clare Shaw for Doctor. She probably is a doctor for all I know. Anyway: rangy, no-nonsense and a great voice. Clare reminded me a bit of Jeanette Winterson, but taller. The kind of woman who makes me almost forget I’m straight. In Clare’s workshop, Clare’s in control – “Feel free to ignore me (if you dare…)” but she’s playful too. Selima Hill urges us to ‘go naked into the shower of truth’ – “which I’d like to do,” says Clare, “but I’m not inviting you to picture that – I just did! Stop it! Really intrusive!”

At the evening readings even Hilda seemed unable to say Clare’s name without dropping her voice an octave, at one point announcing there was only one copy of Clare’s book Flood left to buy – then proceeded to rub the said book briskly over her chest in a way that only the hilarious Hilda can get away with, before telling the audience the price had gone up twenty quid. Stop it! Inappropriate!!

Notice I’m not saying anything about Clare’s poetry or her reading here, but I’m putting all that in the official report. Speaking of which, l’d better get back to business.

Here’s the link to my report of Friday night’s readings from Clare Shaw, Kim Moore and Wayne Holloway Smith, including audio recording of Clare and Kim reading a couple of poems.

A few thoughts on ‘truth’

One of the things I like very much about the US poetry magazine Rattle is the ‘Conversation’ at the back. It’s basically editor Timothy Green interviewing a poet, presented as a verbatim conversation, and it feels so immediate, like you’re listening in to a phone call or something, or an unedited podcast. The fact that it’s date-stamped, so you know when the chat took place, adds to its appeal. I can read it and think ‘Oh yeah, on February 18th 2018 I was doing XYZ, and these guys were having this conversation…’

I can’t really explain why I like that. It just seems to ground it in the real world. The interviews are never stilted, you can’t ‘hear’ the interviewer shuffling papers or thinking about the next question he’s going to ask. The conversation feels like a free flow. When there’s a lull or a sticky moment you sense that. But it’s never cosy or time-wasting. It’s juicy stuff. And it seems really real. Would it spoil my enjoyment if I found out it was scripted, or edited, or that it’s an amalgam of several conversations, or other interviews? Or if the interview (or even the interviewee) was fictional?

Since working on our Telltale anthology ‘Truths’ I suppose it’s heightened my awareness of what ‘truth’ in poetry means to me personally. And it’s fascinating to eavesdrop on others’ conversations on the topic.  There’s a section in the most recent Rattle Conversation with poet Stephen Dunn, in which the subject of his degenerative illness comes up. Green suggests that Dunn may not be writing about it because it’s perhaps too personal, and because his poems ‘have a genuine, authentic feel, because it’s a fictional you-but-not-you’:

Dunn:  Partly. I don’t think my life is interesting unless I make it interesting. There’s no reason anyone should care about me. the burden is on me entirely to make whatever I’m doing interesting. To me, first of all, and then to others.

Green:  So how much of a poem is you and how much is fiction?

Dunn:  More and more it’s fiction and more and more it’s about me. I think of [Wallace] Stevens again, who rarely used the personal pronoun. […] I’m always known as an honest poet, but being honest is an achievement, a matter of high technique. I let the reader know only the truths that serve the poem.

Green:  Yet there’s this strange thing where readers want to think everything is true …

Dunn:  And I want them to believe everything I write. That’s the art.

I loved this whole exchange. So many things jumped out at me with a big ‘yeeessss!’ – ‘the burden is on me to make [what I’m doing] interesting’, ‘let the reader know only the truths that serve the poem‘.

Personally I like to think the starting point for writing any poem is the thought ‘this is interesting.’ If I find it interesting, there’s a chance others might too – but not necessarily. There are subjects I find fascinating but am not yet convinced I can make interesting enough via a poem. They remain challenges to which I hope one day to rise.

There are poems I’ve written that may start off as ‘the truth’ as in ‘this really happened’. I’m sure that’s a starting point for many people’s poems. And yet what we’re really saying is ‘this is how I remember it happening’ which is often a different thing altogether.  For someone else who experienced the same thing, my memory may be a fiction. Even in the process of writing, I find myself editing the truth for reasons that ‘serve the poem’, and as a consequence I sometimes start believing my fiction to be the truth. More than once I’ve been asked something like ‘did that really happen?’ and I answer ‘yes’ instinctively. If I then think about it, I realise that’s not the truth. But I didn’t feel I was lying when I said ‘yes’. Is this normal? The re-writing of truth into fiction and the fiction becoming, in some way, the truth? In the realms of poetry it’s all pretty inconsequential. But superimposed onto the bigger world it’s a slightly worrying thought.

 

*There’s a Rattle anthology of fourteen selected ‘Conversations’ for sale here, and a sample of a conversation between Alan Fox and Jane Hirschfield from 2006.

“Patience is the master key to every situation”

Another wonderful article from Brain Pickings, this time Rilke on ‘the lonely patience of creative work.’

Solitude and patience are essential to creative work, he says: “Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything. Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.”

Since having a garden, and making my first steps towards growing things, I’m understanding this a lot better.

Just look at this – it’s a broccoli seed

A seed of a broccoli plant

I planted some of these last summer. Here are the seedlings, just planted out, in around July:

Broccoli seedlings

Little was I to know there are FAR too many here, because they get big…I had to pull up 5 plants in the end, and the bed still looked like this a month or two later, with plants nearly as tall as me:

The leaves were ravaged by caterpillars as we didn’t know to protect the plants from butterflies. Over the winter I really wondered if any of the plants would produce actual broccoli, or whether we might as well pull them up. They went through snow and cold and looked pretty sad, but by January there was broccoli appearing, much to my excitement:

The fruits of nature’s labour, and my own patience :

As metaphors go, it’s a good one I think. Those yellowing, rotting leaves on the ground in the penultimate photo pretty much represent the poems that died, but they didn’t prevent the good stuff from bearing fruit. And quite a lot of the ‘good stuff’ didn’t look at all good most of the time, so much so that I nearly gave up on the lot, which would have been a shame.

This year’s broccoli seedlings are growing, but I won’t say ‘I can’t wait’ for them to produce, because this time I know I can wait!