Tag: eavan boland

A quickfire ‘personal canon’

The other evening I was in Lewes listening to Jackie Wills and Grace Nichols being interviewed by Mark Hewitt. One of the topics they discussed was the idea of having a ‘personal canon’, in other words those poets or poetry collections that have either been formative influences, or that you dip into regularly for inspiration. The talk was of how important it was to remember that poetry is very much a matter of personal taste, and that it’s pretty difficult for everyone to agree on ‘the poetry canon’, except perhaps for Shakespeare and a handful of other ‘greats’.

It made me think of the huge variety of ‘exemplar’ poems you come across in poetry workshops. On Grace’s list were Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Jennings and Sylvia Plath. She very cannily declined to mention the names of any living poets, for fear (she said) of upsetting anyone, since many of her contemporaries are her friends.

I started wondering who would be on my list. Of course, like any of those ‘desert island discs’ questions, it becomes impossible to choose between X, Y and Z. So I did it as a kind of ‘quickfire’ exercise – not taking too long to think about, just put down some names and stop when you get to 10. I too have deliberately avoided my contemporaries some of whom I think produce brilliant work.  But what will stand the test of time? That feels to me like a key ‘canon’ criterion. Having said that, there are some people on the list who are actually not dead.

So here’s my quick list, at this moment in time, but in no particular order…(*those still alive have an asterisk!)

Ted Hughes – we studied his poetry at school and I fell in love with his work, in particular his poem ‘Hawk Roosting’, waxing lyrical about it in my English exam. Oddly enough I assumed he was dead – when in fact if I’d asked our English teacher she might have been able to secure a visit, since that was a period when Hughes was reading at schools across the country.

Eavan Boland – I came late to the party on this, only discovering the late, great writer after she’d died. Boland broke away from the Irish literary status quo, writing on topics considered ‘unpoetical’ by her male contemporaries. Stunning poetry and inspirational essays.

Geoffrey Chaucer – Although the general prologue to The Canterbury Tales was on the reading list for aforementioned English A level, I wasn’t that engaged to be honest. But encountering House of Fame late in life gave me a new-found enthusiasm for Chaucer. He was educated and cosmopolitan, and yet very English, unafraid to cock a snook at the likes of Dante yet capable of the most glorious poetry. And many of his themes are very much relevant today.

*Mary Ruefle – An absolute one-off. Ruefle is famous for her erasure poetry (of which she’s written a ton) and books of essays. Poet Tania Hershman gave me a copy of The Most of It a few years back – it’s a collection of short prose pieces, although where is the boundary between prose poems and short poetic prose? Either way, her work is so crazy-creative I can’t think of a decent adjective to describe it.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha – I came Cha’s Dictee via my podcast partner Peter Kenny. It’s a postmodern hybrid collection like no other, and years before its time. A few pages of this and for several hours I’m physically unable to write anything in neat quatrains.

*Kim Addonizio – I devoured her selected poems Wild Nights – vital, sexy, funny, moving, just extraordinary. I always, always get an injection of energy and creativity when I dip into her work.

Walt Whitman – I admit I only really got into Leaves of Grass after singing in a performance of Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony, featuring extracts of Whitman’s wonderful, exuberant poetry. I found the whole thing as a PDF on the web, then realised it was 674 pages. So no, I haven’t read it all.

Tomas Transtromer – spare, beautiful, always surprising. A workshopping favourite I know, but for good reason.

*Roger McGough – as a teenager I loved the Liverpool Poets and I still read McGough for his wit and humour. A nice reminder of how a light touch can pack a huge punch in political poetry.

Alfred Lord Tennyson – I never thought I’d be including a Victorian poet in this list, but In Memoriam AHH had a big impact on me, and still serves as a model of how to write about grief.

Others I seem to have left off – oh no! Dante, Heaney, Auden etc etc. Yikes.

 

On feeding The Lake

The spreadsheet of poetry magazines is forever growing, albeit slowly. Even though I’m adding perhaps eight to ten titles each quarter, there are those I have to delete. This is usually because they’ve stopped publishing; quite a few mags were set up hurriedly during the pandemic and never really got off the ground. Others have drifted away on a seemingly permanent hiatus, either for personal reasons of the editor or maybe loss of funding. Others I delete because they never update their website, never respond to my query emails or just generally offer an impoverished service to readers and would-be submitters. Sometimes a publication is resurrected from the dead, or at the eleventh hour, which is always good to see: the Fenland Poetry Journal, for example. Even Strix is planning a comeback after two or three years in the wilderness.

Sometimes I forget the original purpose of the spreadsheet, which was to help me manage my own poetry submissions. So recently I’ve been making an effort to submit to magazines that are less known to me, and online mags in particular. As a consequence I discovered The Lake, a serious-minded online mag that’s been quietly gliding along (sorry) since 2013. On its modest website, edited by poet and tutor John Murphy, The Lake publishes new work every month from around ten poets, together with book reviews and occasional tributes (for example this one on the death of Eavan Boland, written by Rose Atfield. The range of contributors is impressive, many from across the world, making for an interesting read. I find that print magazines tend to present more of a monoculture; much as I may enjoy (say) The Rialto or Rattle, they paint very different pictures of contemporary poetry. I guess it’s as much about editorial taste and cultural preoccupations as it is practical issues that may affect submissions from overseas (availability of the journal in question in the contributor’s own country, for example).

Anyway, The Lake: worth a dive in? (SORRY)

Advice to a poet, and a curious birthday thing

Q: Who are these poets and what do they (almost) have in common?

poets-born-on-29Oct

(Answers below…)

Advice lines

Recently I came across this delightful and very relevant piece on the Poetry Ireland website:

Advice to a Poet – words of wisdom from Maurice Harmon, critic, biographer, editor, literary historian and poet.

Even the title has an authoritative feel! But this is no harangue. When I read it I’m picturing a kind but firm teacher, one who challenges but encourages at the same time. So many good thinking points (‘All forms of laziness are fatal in poetry’ ….’You must, and will, find your own way of saying’ … ‘Poetry is above all a way of telling the truth’…’Does it make a difference?’)  I don’t know about you but I have to read essays like this on a regular basis, to remind myself what the hell I’m supposed to be doing, because it is so, so easy to stray down those lazy byways or lose sight of the reasons I’m trying to write poetry.

Advice comes in many forms of course and sometimes poets don’t even know they’re giving it. One of the things I like about Rattle magazine is the regular poet interview at the back, and I’m just at the section of the Eavan Boland Sourcebook where we get to read interviews with her. There are always gems to be found in these chats, I think; there’s something both voyeuristic and educational about hearing what a poet has to say about their working methods, inspirations and general thoughts about what gives.

On a somewhat drier note, in the spirit of starting my ‘literary education’ from the beginning, I’m also reading Aristotle’s Poetics, translated by Anthony Kenny (Oxford World’s Classics edition 2013), although I’ve learned quite quickly that it’s actually about tragedy and ‘the epic’ rather than lyric poetry, which doesn’t get a look in. Aristotle rather slyly suggests early on that he’s going to come to ‘comedy’ in due course. And then he doesn’t. What a tease.

Calling all poets with late-October birthdays

I’m fast approaching a ‘landmark’ birthday, and I’m reminded that I share it (the date, not the year) with fine poet Sarah Howe (above right). So just for fun I got researching poet birthdays to see who else is in this 29th October club. According to his family at the time, John Keats was born on October 29th, although official records list it as 31st. Killjoys! Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke only just missed out – she was born on 27th October, as was Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath. So, if you, or any poets you know of, were born on October 29th (or let’s say 2 days either side, although that’s not quite the ticket) do let me know and we’ll sort out a club logo or secret handshake or something. (When handshakes are allowed again, of course.)

Current reading and other news

Current reading … and a parrot

Camilla’s Bookshop is open again in Eastbourne after an arson attack, and I can report that the parrot is still alive and greeting you as you enter, and the stacks of books are as tightly packed as ever – in fact even more so! Here’s how the poetry section looked before (multiply this ten or even twenty times over and you get a good picture of the shop as a whole!

Camilla's Bookshop

Now, the stacks on the floor are about 4 foot tall and it’s impossible to bend down and get one’s head into a position to see what’s actually in the stack…however I managed to find two books of interest on the upper shelves. One is John Donne, The Complete English Poems (Penguin Classics) and the other is  The Eavan Boland Sourcebook (Carcanet) which I’ve started and already it’s fascinating. Eavan Boland is a poet I’d only heard of but not read, but when she died earlier this year there was such an outpouring of grief from the poetry community that I decided I needed to seek her out.

In addition to this I’m near the end of a lovely book by Jean Sprackland, a memoir in which she retraces her steps through the graveyards and cemeteries she’s known over the years.

current reading 27-7-20

Other recent reading:

current reading-27-7-20

Vicki Feaver‘s I want I want (Cape) is one of the Forward Prize shortlisted books that I ordered, and Sestet is an anthology that I’ll be reviewing for The Frogmore Papers. I must say I’m looking forward to reading Rachel Long‘s My Darling from the Lions, which is up for Best First Collection in the Forwards. I really liked her recent work in The Poetry Review.

Also waiting in the wings to be read is Little Kings by Peter Kahn (Nine Arches), kindly given to me by Peter Raynard. Peter Kahn is a new poet to me, and the book jacket blurbs make it sound very promising.

My contributor copy of Stand arrived recently. I’m delighted to have a poem in Stand; I’ve subscribed this last year and have enjoyed much of its content. Particularly interesting are the editorials. I think it’s a shame that not all mags have them.

I’ve resubscribed to Poetry just at a turbulent time it seems. A poem in the July/August issue by Michael Dickman has caused a massive furore, and editor Don Share resigned. Here’s his extraordinary final editorial. 

Feature on the Frogmore blog

And speaking of The Frogmore Papers, here’s a lovely post on their blog about the sad demise of listings mag Viva Lewes. The April issue was due to feature four of the members of the Needlewriters Collective (Jeremy Page, Charlotte Gann, Janet Sutherland and myself) but it never went to print. But the feature is reproduced here, like a sort of echo of what almost happened.

‘Ellipsis’ on Radio Reverb

Another lovely thing: fine poet and Brighton Reverb Radio presenter Jackie Wills featured one of my poems on the Reverb Literature Hour the other week. It was such a treat to hear her read the poem; I don’t think I’ve heard anyone read a poem of mine before. And her analysis of it was wonderful. I was very touched. With Jackie’s permission I’m posting it here:

Unexpected bonus

Poetry Magazine (US)

In the post today came a copy of Poetry magazine, volume 202 number 1 – yes, it’s been going for over a hundred years – gawds! The reason it was an unexpected bonus is because I cannot remember where or when I ordered it. But here it is, and with such a heritage the first adjective that comes to mind is ‘august’, although that already seems way too stuffy.

I have to say it’s a thing of beauty – first of all, for a magazine to be even called something as simple as ‘Poetry’ is pretty impressive. Then there’s the lovely size – presumably an American shape – narrower than A5 but bigger than the average paperback, perfect-bound with a proper spine. Then the cool, clean fonts and layout – reminiscent of The Rialto, but the paper stock is creamier, slightly more retro. Am I sounding a bit fetishistic?? I haven’t even mentioned the contents yet.

To be fair, it’s only just arrived so I’ve only skimmed it lightly so far – but I can see there’s a section entitled ‘A few more don’ts’ with the subtitle Ezra Pound set forth his now-famous “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” in the March 1913 issue of Poetry. In commemoration we’ve asked a few writers to update Pound’s essay for our time.

Hello?? “In the 1913 issue of Poetry ….” Just how cool is that??? Anyway, can’t wait to read it. And I’ve already spotted and enjoyed poems by Eavan Boland and Jamaal May, so I have the feeling the whole magazine is going to be a bedtime treat for some while.