‘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.
Category: Poems
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.
First poetry reading group – Ní Chuilleanáin, Feaver, Wilkinson
There’s nothing quite like reading poetry to stimulate writing – something it took me many years to discover. So I was very pleased when Brighton Stanza member Miriam Patrick proposed a new monthly group devoted to reading poetry. Our first meeting was last night – we were a small but perfectly formed group!
The format is that we each bring multiple copies of a poem we’ve read and enjoyed, and we discuss. The focus is on contemporary work, although it’s fine to bring along something you really like even if was written a while ago.
For this session we looked at 3 poems – Miriam introduced us to ‘The Second Voyage’ by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, from her “Selected Poems’. Ní Chuilleanáin is a well-respected Irish poet who I confess I’d not come across. (For me, that’s the beauty of the these sessions – there’s so much poetry out there I’m completely ignorant of.) There followed much discussion of the Odyssey and whether or not, if you base a poem on myth, it’s reasonable to assume the reader knows the original story. But even for those of us not entirely au fait with Odysseus’s Second Voyage, we agreed there was some stunning language (‘…fountains / Spraying as wide as willows in empty squares, / The sugarstick of water clattering into the kettle,’)
Then we read Ben Wilkinson‘s ‘October (after Paul Verlaine)’ which was one of a pair I’d seen in the current Poetry Review and enjoyed. I’ve got a bit of a sonnet thing going at the moment and I liked the clash of registers in this poem, I know the ‘turn’ is supposed to bring a change, and although in this case it seemed a tad unsubtle, maybe that was the ironic intention, and ‘after Paul Verlaine’ was the clue:
Wouldn’t you wager it the truest season,
free of summer’s delusional passions?
and a few lines later, on the turn:
Of course those nutters and the pushovers
all go for spring and dawn
I admit I’d done a hasty search for Paul Verlaine and I wasn’t sure the info I had scraped from Wikipedia was reliable! We talked about what ‘after XYZ’ meant when we saw it as a subtitle to a poem – in the style of? As a reaction to? An ‘homage’? Anyway, homework on French Symbolist poets to be done I think.
Jo’s chosen poem was ‘Ironing’ by Vicki Feaver. Jo was impressed by the way the poet was able to convey so much about the course of a life within the ironing metaphor, going from a kind of bitterness and anger at a life the narrator clearly wasn’t happy with (‘my iron flying over sheets and towels … the flex twisting and crinking until the sheath frayed, exposing wires like nerves.’), through an intermediate period (of change? of loss? of resignation?) to happiness and love (‘an airy shape with room to push / my arms, breasts, lungs, heart into.’)
We’re going to have to spend less time on each poem if the numbers go up, but that’s OK. I think the group will evolve naturally in whatever way we want it to, and like the workshopping group it will have a different dynamic from month to month depending on who comes along.
(PS: I do feel I lack the analytical skills to take a poem apart with any real insight – possibly due to my lack of poetry training! But that’s sort of what I’m hoping to try harder at over the course of time, and learn from listening to others and indeed by reading others’ reviews.)
A feast of first lines
First lines. Ack! It’s worse than a job interview. You have 2 seconds to make an impression. Or something like that.
Do you find yourself going back to the first line and re-writing because it’s just not strong enough? And as a reader, do you ever read the first line and immediately your mind says ‘uh oh’ and you’ve already got a prediction in your head of where it’s going? I know I do both of these things, and more. After the title, the first line has to be pretty good, do you agree?
In a moment of stupor I thought I would try to finally CRACK the first line thing by doing some research. Ha ha! The appliance of science – always worth a try!
So I dutifully recorded all the first lines from every poem in The Rialto 74. Call me crazy if you like, but it was a fun exercise. And the resulting list of 55 first lines actually reads like a poem in itself, although I don’t think even the (theoretical) love child of Selima Hill and Sam Riviere could come up with this. (Love them both though! No offence intended! But they can be pretty left-field!)
So here we go. If this is a breach of copyright, I apologise – all credit to the poets, but if anyone would like their line pulled from this post, on the grounds of non-attribution, please say.
Hard to think about infinity
We’re the lucky ones
The postman listens to Roxy Music on her iPod nano
Down with poetry! It’s all over the place
We lean into the soft brake BLUES
Some people are bad for the soul. Avoid them.
In the museum-without-proprietor
The bound book lay open on the desk
At least you can sleep, folding us and the hours
You’ll have had me, the view of me, down on the sand
At the high pass, forward scouts report,
You are welcome, you arrive to embraces and chatter
There’s a red spot in the centre of today
Laura shows up in time to have to wait
I reflect on their defects. They give me
spine faded, pages yellowed, corners turned down
What would you do if I died right now, here, you asked,
Until recently we were very pleased with Roger.
We were litte upstarts; our causes imperceptible, inflamed
The bathtub, the Frigidaire, the gilded tap,
We learn why things happen
The inn on the Tokaido Road has
Standing at the sink
The others are glad not to be the corpse
are discussing provocation: holding law up to the light.
Across the road the decorators have finished;
In the last August of the war, my
Dear little damp foot
Really I want to keep this to myself
You tell that story again
A girl is two eggs waiting to be a cake, or a sun; Our Father going round and round in her song.
How the heart wire snapped and on the loose my heart
Wriggling, it pulls. The tip of the tail
Robert makes two cups of tea
Each of my poems is
And this too will pass into spring
You tie my scarf so it drapes like Madonna’s,
It is not the rusting of summer into inevitable
A man coughs like a box
I am an old book troglodyte
For years nobody had been to the library
Make do with my father, speeding
Love was the boy you broke up with years ago
Grief was the flash bloke with the bleached teeth
The smell of bonfires. Autumn in the garden.
I’m sat on a bench on the promenade
And how many men are stood like this in their socks
I ride the famous tourist bus for hours,
He’d forgotten he had his father’s pistol.
He’d never seen such a horse before:
I’m not malicious though have scarred a woman
The stone in me speaks directly into the eyes of a toad
We drive until there are no more mirrors.
We finish and you sigh and gaze up into my eyes
After breakfast I clipped the peonies
(image credit: British Library)
Robert Hamberger’s ‘Being the Sea’ (video post)
You can read this poem in Agenda Vol 46 number 3, ‘Retrospectives’.
At the Plastic Bag Museum
these are the things
that carried the stuff
that people bought
see those loops
for hands – handles
they’re called
carried boxes
the corners would
poke through
split sides
you can see why empties got crumpled
thrust into drawers
small thin ones used
to pick up dogs’ turds
the sturdier ones
for kitchen bins some got buried
with their cousins or
stuck up trees years
later plucked free or
flushed out to sea
to bob in packs some (not this one)
swallowed whole or
chomped through
by blue whales
wrapped round claws
or tails perhaps you’ve seen one
you can’t get them
any more but feel
how smooth and thin
logo intact how
perfectly preserved
(published in Mslexia issue 53, March 2012)
When my sister is old
I will wait at the door with flowers
if she greets me at all it will be brief
and cold as the Guildford house
where the stairs stayed uncarpeted
and the kitchen unmodernised,
names and numbers taped on walls,
coats and boots crammed under stairs.
Her back will be bent like our mother’s,
she will start in the middle of a sentence
half scolding, half pleased, tired of TV
and itching to get out walking with sticks
she will bring up that time on the Isle of Wight
when my legs gave way and she carried on,
fitter than me and needing to travel.
We will have tea and talk about church
or someone’s baby, there will never be
enough hours for all she must do or has done.
I will tease out family secrets and remind her
of twenty years she thought she’d never have,
if she comments at all it will be brief,
like the moment before sleep.
(from Agenda – web supplement to ‘Retrospectives’ issue April 2012)
Invasion
It took three rows of barbed wire coiled round stakes,
hammered at angles into sand and shingle. The beach
packed and leaking like keddle nets of cockles in green
buckets, for six summers.
held occasional wakes, observed by boys belly-down
in the dunes with binoculars, swapping quiet jokes
and stale crackers. Over on the mud flats lugworms blew their coiled casts
as shellfish slept peacefully, and tides took time to warp
the weed-wrapped posts, as crippled as the knees
of sentries denied their leave. After the war, low-slung homes stood watch: black-eyed,
slammed cold up against marram grass and buckthorn,
demanding their sea defences. Then came Pontins
and the caravans.
published in Interpreter’s House, February 2012
River Ouse, Rodmell, 1941
The first she prises out, clenched in bindweed:
reluctance adds to its appeal.
several flints conspire their surfaces glass-perfect, all the better
to slip in without fuss. From mud, she frees a stump of the fat chalk Down
walked each day, as worn as the worsted that parcels up her reedy body
ready for anchoring. Pebbles lean into her, take us they say, take us,
the floods are coming but like Noah she must leave some behind,
the unbelievers.
(first published in Agenda Vol 46 No. 2, Sept 2011)