Tag: faber new poets

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Seven Questions for Poets #8 – Anna Kisby

I first met Anna Kisby at the Brighton Poetry Stanza and was struck by her writing. Sadly for us, she then relocated to the west country. But it’s always a joy to come across her work, and we met again recently at the South Downs Poetry Festival, where she was awarded first prize in the Havant Poetry Competition. Last year she was commended by Faber, and she recently won the BBC Proms Poetry Competition. Here are Anna’s answers to the seven questions…

1 – What was the last poetry book you read, that you would recommend?

The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe, recent Poet Laureate of New York State. I’m interested in how she writes about the actuality of life – using plain language and metaphor only very sparingly – but the poems lift off the page.

2 – Philip Larkin and Dannie Abse are both alleged to have said they only wrote one or two decent poems a year. How is it for you? 

Sometimes there are poems that, as a friend describes it, ‘Come out whole, like laying an egg’. I always feel affection for poems I write like that as opposed to the ones I labour over, which start to get on my nerves.

3 – What would be your ideal place for a writing retreat?

That hotel in the Alps where Hemingway and his wife Hadley stay in the 1920s (as described in A Moveable Feast.)

4 – Do you enter poetry competitions?

In phases – at the moment, yes! A mixture of the biggies (worth a try?) and smaller ones tied to local festivals.

5 – If someone has never read any poetry, where would you suggest they start?

A predictable answer but: Staying Alive (Bloodaxe, ed Neil Astley). It set me going again.

6 – You’re asked to give a reading at the Royal Festival Hall, to thousands of people. What goes through your mind?

New shoes.

7 – Can you remember the first poem you wrote? What was it about?

Living in America, aged 8, a long rhyming poem about sisters Primrose and Camomile Brown – it was flowery and quite self-consciously English. The important thing was that when I showed it to our neighbour, a craftswoman, she made me feel it was the best poem she’d ever read, bought me a special Poetry Notebook and took me very seriously as a writer. I rather let her down by not focusing on poetry again for another 30 years…

 

QUICK PLUG:

Anna Kisby’s most recently-published poem is included in the Live Canon anthology 154: contemporary poets in response to Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. On 4th Nov 2016 the Live Canon ensemble will perform a selection of poems from the anthology at Oxford Playhouse – details available here.

Previous ‘Seven Questions for Poets’:
#1 – Clare Best
#2 – Jill Abram
#3 – Antony Mair
#4 – Hilda Sheehan
#5 – Ian Humphreys
#6 – Claire Dyer
#7 – Louise Ordish

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Coffee House Poetry at the Troubadour

Had a great evening yesterday at the Troubadour as Coffee House Poetry, Anne-Marie Fyfe’s fortnightly poetry readings, got underway for its summer season.

It’s a crazy scene –  the vibrancy, the quirkiness, the sheer number of people, Cahal Dallat’s virtuosic keyboard skills (yesterday the background medleys included opera classics and a rumbunctious dose of Mozart, all from memory). Moving amongst the crowd, Anne-Marie greets everyone and the whole place feels like a party. And who’s that sitting at the back? Oh, it’s Van Morrison and Jimmy Page, dropped by for a spot of poetry action. You can’t help but feel you’re on a film set. Love it!

Last night’s first half readers were Mark Huband, Scarlett Sabet, Will Burns & Miranda Peake, after which we had a brief musical interlude when Henry Fajemirokun played and sang a very nice Simon & Garfunkel number. Mark Huband’s background in journalism and travel writing informs his poetry – he read from his book ‘American Road’ and some extracts from a new long work. I loved the start of Scarlett Sabet’s set, a strong first poem full of promise. Towards the end she read some more performance-style poems which I find a bit harder to digest – I suppose I mean the repetition and relentless hard rhymes, which I find distract from the meaning and weaken the power of the words.  Miranda Peake admitted she was very nervous, which was a shame, because it dried out her voice – I suspect I would enjoy her poems on the page, they seemed accomplished.

I didn’t take notes, although I noticed a few people around me doing so. I wonder what they write? Maybe the names, for future reference, or perhaps an idea or two that needed capturing. I do sometimes find my mind wandering in a reading, but not in a bad way – it’s usually something I hear that takes seed or gives me a sudden angle on an old issue. As I’m writing now I’m remembering a couple of things I should have written down at the time. Oh well!  And the other thing I’m famously pants at is taking photos of well-lit readers in dark spaces. Which is why I only managed one, but the reader is so blanched out it could be anyone – although it is in fact Will Burns:

Will Burns Faber poet

The second half felt like the big-hitters, with Nigerian poet Inua Ellams (check out his beautiful and stylish website) full of warmth and humour getting things off to a cracking start, Tim Richardson – a big character with an even bigger following in the room, Roisin Tierney – authoritative presence & many Spanish food references and R.A. Villanueva, a vibrant American reader who I wish I could have paid more attention to, but I was a bit tired and thinking about my train at this point.

My favourite reading of the night was by Will Burns and I couldn’t wait to snap up a copy of his pamphlet. Something about his poetry made me sit up. There was nothing exotic about it, but it was extraordinary. The problem with writing about the extraordinary, whether it’s people, experiences, places, is that the writing has a lot to live up to. (See point 7 of Don Paterson’ tips). Plus there’s not always space for the reader. Whereas writing about the ordinary, in an extraordinary way, feels to me like the real work of poetry. It doesn’t just let me in, it reminds me there’s a reason to write and how much there is still to discover both in myself and in others.

On the home page of the website, a quote from Billy Collins declares that the Troubadour has “evolved over its 60 year history from a hidden-away beatnik coffee house to a world famous center for the performance of music and poetry.” Well, it still feels pretty beatnik to me, and nothing wrong with that.