Tag: andrew mcmillan

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Notes from a workshop with Andrew McMillan

andrew mcmillan photographed by Innes Morrison

As promised in my last post, here are my notes from the workshop I did on Saturday at the South Downs Poetry Festival, with Andrew McMillan. I’m including links at the end to other workshop notes, in case you find these posts useful.

I was really impressed with Andrew’s workshop. It’s tricky to teach a one-off session like this when you’ve no way of knowing who is coming to the session nor what they hope to get from it. As well as asking us to each say (briefly) what we hoped to take away, he also offered participants the chance to feed back after every exercise, and the chance to read aloud the example poems. Andrew had planned the session well and we motored through a lot of great material, but his calm and relaxed style meant it never felt hurried or forced. That’s exactly what I want as a participant – to feel challenged by the material, confident in the teacher and unaware of time passing.

So here’s a summary, in which I hope I’ve captured the essential points.

‘All poems fail – which is why you have to write the next one.’

‘Be prepared to throw your life off a cliff.’

Go to the place that makes you feel uncomfortable. Write the thing you wouldn’t want your mother to read.

How do you get at the plain truth of something and still make it sound fresh? Think about the notions of ‘truth’ and ‘honesty’. Getting to the ‘poetic’ truth might not mean presenting the actual truth of what happened.

The thing you want to tackle may be too big or overwhelming to get to grips with. So drill down to a small detail and let that be a metaphor for the big thing.

Example poem: ‘Your Blue Shirt’ by Selima Hill (from Gloria: Selected Poems. Bloodaxe. 2008)

‘How plain can it be and still be poetry?’

‘All poetic metaphor exists because you can’t find the one word or phrase which encompasses what you really want to say.’

AM loves it when plain language is used to express a simple truth, eg W H Auden: “Thousands have lived without love but none without water.”

Readers need time to pause and think.

It’s important to achieve balance – moments of ‘high poetry’ can contrast with those of mundane or ‘plain’ language – the contrast and balance can make each moment effective. Compare for example to music with its highs and lows.

Example poem: ‘Filling Station’ by Elizabeth Bishop (from The Complete Poems, 1927-1979)

If something’s not working, try stripping out everything that’s not essential – adjectives, fancy verbs, ‘wow’ words etc. Find the ‘survival mechanism’ of the poem. In this way you’re left with something sparse but dense. THEN you can think about building it up.

Example: ‘His Stillness’ by Sharon Olds (fantastically moving!) – from Selected Poems, 2005 (Cape)

Uncertainty can come across as more honest

The idea of not being sure about something can somehow be more honest and can allow a way in for the reader.

In a way, all memory is false because another person present will recall the same thing differently.

Example poem: ‘A Spruce New Colour’ by Tom Paulin (Love’s Bonfire, Faber 2012)

Consider balance and contrast in language choice and tone

Try to avoid writing about a serious subject matter in too high a register – it can seem a bit ‘poetic’, not really honest. Explore ways around this by varying the language.

Example poem: ‘I will love the twenty first century’ by Mark Strand (from the Ambit Magazine Retrospective) – where he gives the more ‘serious’ ideas voice via a third person, which the voice of the poet then undercuts.

One way of framing a serious topic and to foreground it without losing credibility and staying grounded/true is by bookending it with more down to earth details.

Example poem: ‘Dave and the Curried Soup’ by John Sewell (Bursting the Clouds, Cape 1998) – a mid section of energy and sexual excitement bookended by the banal details of a soup (‘The trouble with Jerusalem artichokes…’)

Last thoughts: ‘What people will think when reading your work … is not important’ (ie don’t let that fear inhibit you … you have the freedom to write whatever it is you need to write) – AM says when he wrote the poems in Physical he wasn’t thinking about them being published let alone read!

‘Poems need to vibrate on the page with energy.’

‘Something has to be on the line when you write a poem.’

If you’ve enjoyed this you may be interested in previous blog posts where I’ve passed on words of wisdom from poets:

Notes from a Don Share masterclass

Mimi Khalvati on editing and what to bin

More words of advice from Mimi Khalvati

Tips from Don Paterson

Mimi Khalvati on form, and a few ‘banned’ words

 

 

 

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At the South Downs Poetry Festival

Robin & Jess at South Downs Poetry Festival

When Tim Dawes came to Lewes just a few months ago to talk about his plans for a South Downs Poetry Festival, I admit I was sceptical about whether it could be done in such a short timeframe. But hats off to him, the event happened and from what I can tell, it was a super success.

After a poetry bike ride taking in the length of the South Downs, plus numerous readings and workshops throughout the area, things culminated in a day-long event in Petersfield on Saturday, which I was very pleased to be a part of.

I was there with fellow Telltale Poet Jess Mookherjee, flying the Telltale flag, socialising with fellow publishers/poets and taking in readings and workshops where possible. Being a new festival, it was on a small scale – which made it actually all the more fun. With smallness comes intimacy – everyone was relaxed, poets and organisers accessible, and there was time and space to really talk to people. And we brought cookies – free edibles are always a magnet!

The sun was blazing outside, which made the short walk between venues all the better – although screams of delight from the next-door lido almost made me wish I’d brought my cossie. I even had an enjoyable drive there and back – 80 miles each way through some of Sussex’s loveliest towns, and the A272 was oddly free of horse boxes, cycle races and traction engines. Result! And let’s not forget a memorable warm-up breakfast at the Apothecary Cafe with Jess – we were ON FIRE with ideas by the time we were setting up our stand.

But I digress! The business of the day was of course poetry – Jess and I managed to catch the prize-winning readings of the Havant Poetry Competition, judged by Stephanie Norgate and won by former Brighton Stanza member Anna Kisby with a fine prose poem. Now based in Devon, Anna is a very talented poet who tends to quietly win a lot stuff and deserves a big audience.

During the day there were workshops going on, and readings and performances into the evening. I enjoyed meeting and/or catching up with lots of friendly faces and lovely poet friends including Lucy Cotterill, Hilda Sheehan (sorry we never got to chat properly, Hilda!), Frances White, Hugh Dunkerley, Wendy Klein and Andrew McMillan – whose workshop I managed to get along to and so glad I did – I’ll be posting a full report on this shortly. It was also nice to meet and chat with Alwyn Marriage, who is doing an amazing job running Oversteps Books single-handledly.

My one annoyance was coming out with a phone that I hadn’t charged up properly – a dead phone, DUH! So no photos of our stand (the one above is thanks to the good peeps of Winchester Poetry Festival, taken before we all moved into the much cosier foyer), no pics of the readers, no pics of our superior breakfast, no selfie with Andrew McMillan – tragic!

But despite the lack of pics, it was still a fantastic day. We’re already looking forward to next year’s festival.

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Andrew McMillan’s ‘Physical’

Physical by Andrew McMillan

Even though we have NO bookshelves at the moment and about 40 boxes of books we can’t unpack, I had a bit of a poetry book-buying splurge lately (this – AND even though I’ve just taken out two poetry books from the library, having discovered the poetry section at Eastbourne Library isn’t too shabby). And EVEN though I’ve two other collections on the ‘have read’ list, waiting to be written up, I’m letting this one jump the queue as it’s fresh on my mind.

Physical, Andrew McMillan (Cape, 2015)

This collection has of course won much acclaim– including the Guardian First Book Award, (the only poetry book to do so)–and there are plenty of great reviews to be read. But I can’t help wanting to put down my own thoughts on it. A layman’s review, if you like, along the lines of the ‘Reading List’ project I ran last year.

Straight into the guts of the collection, the first poem ‘Jacob with the Angel’ is a retelling of the Biblical encounter in which an exhausted Jacob is wrestled all night by a character who only reveals itself as an angel the following morning. Although without the title (or knowing the story straight away – I had a vague idea but had to look it up) it sets the scene for what’s to come – ‘grappling with the shifting question of each other’s bodies’ … ‘the tasting of the flesh and blood of someone/ is something out of time’. Trying to make sense of the intense intimacy that can exist between strangers – ‘not giving a name because names would add a history’. And at the end, the page-turner promise: ‘he says writing something down keeps it alive’.

There’s a wonderful frankness to so much in this book – celebratory, pained, questioning, and always rooted in the flesh– ‘sighing out the brittle disappointments of the bones’ (‘Yoga’). ‘Unflinching’ is an overused word and I hesitate to use it here, because it could sound like a euphemism for ‘explicit’ when so many of these poems are about love in a variety of forms, always surprising, sometimes messy, often very moving–

… when he learned the baby
wouldn’t wake           there might have been a tray of food
still in the room            or a balloon trying to climb the wall  (‘I.M.’)

or strung through with irony and humour –

here we are         a man holding a boy above him
horizontal       like an offering to the artex ceiling
not even a minor Greek would see as fit to sculpt (‘Strongman’)

Growing up, masculinity, sexuality, familial relationships are threads throughout the book – ‘go to the other room computer television/ … laugh harder than you should have or wanted to’ (‘How to be a man’).

I really loved the layout of these poems with their lack of traditional punctuation, the many ellipses and exploded lines which, for me, were utterly in the service of the writing and not for flimsy effect. The use of compound words – strengthofbody, deadheavydrunk, spinebroken, slowpunctured, lonelyhaircut and so forth – suggested to me a poet who takes delight in both exuberance and precision in language, borne out by so much beautiful lyric writing (‘the lighthouse throws its face and catches it / night slicks in over the water’ (‘When loud the storm and furious is the gale’). It worked for me.