Tag: Kei Miller

Back to school, current reading & looking forward

Back. After twelve days or so away I’m feeling positively autumnal and a bit ‘back to school’ (garden looking blousy, woollies coming out the wardrobe, wondering when Masterchef starts, etc).

I haven’t got back into any new writing but that will come. Sometimes I get the feeling I’m waiting  – for inspiration maybe – for a collection of poems, rather than a poem here, a poem there – and I’m a bit annoyed with myself. I really enjoyed hearing Kei Miller read at Hastings LitFest a few weeks ago, and he surprised some us by saying that he only wrote poems when he had a book in mind, and when there’s no book in mind, there are no poems. This was refreshing in a way – I’ve never been one of those people who are disciplined to write every day (not poetry, anyway). I’ve also never been very good at using exercises or ‘free writing’ as a means of churning out (or up?) ideas into proto-poems. Thinking in ‘book’ terms appeals to me and I do it a lot – trouble is, it seems to be in parallel to writing poems; I haven’t yet tied the two together. And I need to remember that Kei Miller also writes novels, so he’s quite possibly knocking out several books in those poetry dry-times. Ha!

Current reading

The September edition of Poetry, which seems to be breaking the boundaries this month with the inclusion of graphic prose poetry, a computer program, pictures of fans and a couple of essays… intriguing.

Madeleine Wurzburger‘s pamphlet Sleeve Catching Fire at Dawn (Smith/Doorstop), a gift from Marion Tracy. The poems are written in a kind of pseudo-historical style, in that they seem to be (on the face of it) well-researched historic portraits, commentary, testimonies. But they’re witty, funny in places, and certainly interesting.

Stephen Sexton‘s first collection If All the World and Love were Young (Penguin) – what a gem of a title for starters. You’ll be reading plenty of reviews of this, watch as it comes up for various awards. I was at the prize giving ceremony for the National Poetry Competition in 2017 when this poet won it, still in his early twenties. Oh my. This book was a slow burner for me, but I’ve read nothing like it. Very subtle and original and all the more moving for it. If you get a quarter of the way through and you’ve still no idea what’s going on, trust me and stick with it! Nice piece here by Stephen in the Irish Times, on the background to the book.

Coming up, in brief

Next week two lovely poet friends, Clare Best and Robert Hamberger, are launching their new collections in Brighton and I’m hoping to go, but if not then I’ll definitely hear them read at Needlewriters in Lewes next month, for which I’ll be MC-ing which is always fun. Also next month I’ll be running a workshop for some lovely High Weald Stanza writers. Some time in November I’ll have a new pamphlet ready to launch, alongside three fine Live Canon pamphleteers. And I’ll be reading in London in November at a special night being organised by Mat Riches and Matthew Stewart.

Meanwhile I’m still deciding whether to renew my membership of the Poetry Book Society. I tend to buy poetry books at readings, or second-hand. I’m not sure how useful I find the PBS Bulletin which basically includes brief review/blurbs, long poet blogs, huge poet photos and a sample poem for each of the ‘recommendations’. Pamphlets only get a very small amount of space. Buying through the PBS doesn’t save any money (once you factor in the postage cost and cost of membership). Or should I not be looking at it in those terms?  I’d be interested to know people’s thoughts on this.

 

What I’ve been reading… Kei Miller’s ‘Cartographer’

At the library I recently picked up Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (Carcanet 2014), and it proved to be one of those books you start reading and can’t put down till you get to the end.

I’ve folded back so many corners of pages, to mark the poems I loved. At the heart of the book is a dialogue between a foreign cartographer intent on making a precise map of Jamaica (‘what I do is science’), and a ‘rastaman’ who explains the impossibility of it and distrusts the reasons for it –

the mapmaker’s work is to make visible
all them things that shoulda never exist in the first place
like the conquests of pirates, like borders,
like the viral spread of governments

(‘ii. in which the rastaman disagrees’)

The voices of the protagonists reveal the clash not just of cultures but of ways of seeing and thinking about our existence. Interwoven throughout are the stories behind place-names, the characters and history that has shaped the island, answers to the map-maker’s questions. A white mistress who ordered the road to her property be ‘laid in its serpentine way’ so that she never had to look at her black neighbour’s property which was bigger than her husband’s. A house given a fancy French name ‘Chateau Vert’ becomes corrupted to Shotover, and how the story now goes that the owner’s job was to shoot at runaway slaves, which shows that ‘when victims live long enough they get their say in history’ (‘Place Name, Shotover’).

The cartographer moves from his position of objectivity to wondering about Zion that the rastaman speaks of, and the question ‘how does one map a place / that is not quite a place?/ How does one draw / towards the heart?’ (xxi.)

So many of the poems are beautifully self-contained and yet part of the whole. I had so many “DAMN! I WISH I’D WRITTEN THAT” moments. Wonderful lyricism and clever, clever use of language, rhythm and rhyme…

…a hymn then
not to birds but to words
which themselves feel
like feather and wing

and light, as if it were
on the delicacy of
such sweet syllables
that flocks take flight.

(‘Hymn to the Birds’)

I can see why this book won the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2014. If you’ve read it, tell me if you agree. If not, you should be able to get it in your local library (at the moment that is, until all the money is pulled entirely from public services, and libraries, museums, art galleries, parks, free healthcare and free anything all become things of the past.) I started writing this post as a way of taking my mind off how sad and angry I’m feeling today, and how ashamed I am of my country, and how sad I am to feel so ashamed. But I couldn’t stop it all welling up at the end. Sorry.

Aldeburgh Poetry Festival de-brief

And so the inevitable Aldeburgh Poetry Festival blog post. You’ve probably read a post or two on the subject already, or at least seen the Facebook/Twitter storm of “wasn’t it amazing?” sound bites, in-jokes about poets posing as penises  – (I know! Too much alliteration) – and jolly pictures of poets sipping pints. (SORRY, am doing it again.) This is quite long, but there are subheads for the skimmers!

Three lessons for newbies

It was the first time I’d been, and clearly had a lot to learn. Still, when speaking to other ‘virgins’ I found some common themes: firstly, it’s easy to book too many sessions. I’d underestimated how exhausting it would be to go from one session to another and not schedule time for eating, chatting, walking or just sitting quietly. As it was, I certainly missed a few things I had booked for, but I don’t regret it – I had a better time for it. Secondly, be prepared for no phone signal the entire weekend. I saw a few people managing to make calls and had phone network-envy. Some were able to text. But me? Nothing. I hadn’t realised how stressy it would make me when I couldn’t talk to my husband on Friday. But thankfully there was internet, so we spoke via Skype. Thirdly, it’s important to pace yourself – not just in the number and timing of sessions, but also in the ‘meet and greet’ aspect of what is an intensely social event.

On ‘networking’

OK, so not everyone was at Aldeburgh. Hilaire wrote a lovely post about what she was planning to do while the tweet-heads were trying to get #APF15 trending. But in the crucible of Snape Maltings it was heady stuff.  And for the ambitious and ballsy, there were plenty of people worth cosying-up to.

Poets and networking don’t always sit happily together. It was fascinating to see how a few people went about it. I think you need to be single-minded and thick-skinned to do it properly. But do I do it myself? I acknowledge there’s a bit of the ‘networker’ in me but although I tinker at it I’m not really confident enough to consistently pull it off.  There’s the added stress of course that, unlike in business, networking has a reputation for being loathsome. To get away with it, I think it really has to be done subtly, accompanied by lashings of charm and good humour. The only trouble is, you might start believing you’re not networking, just being charming and good humoured. And that’s when it becomes loathsome.

On the first day I was pleased I hadn’t come alone as it seemed a little overwhelming. But being there with poet friends Charlotte Gann and Clare Best was brilliant, as was seeing so many familiar faces: the Brighton and Lewes contingent was impressive. I couldn’t help looking out for people I knew, or thought I might know via social media, and wondering whether to introduce myself or not. There were poets I knew (of) but not to speak to, and plenty I didn’t know at all. One of the great things was that the poet-presenters mingled and came to other people’s sessions, so there wasn’t a huge gulf between us and them. By day three I got the impression that everyone was more relaxed, me included. It seemed much easier to say a quick ‘thanks – enjoyed your session’ or ‘hello, are you so-and-so… just wanted to say hello’.

The ‘Aldeburgh’ bit

Aldeburgh is a wild place, especially in November. It didn’t stop a few poets (almost) skinny-dipping on Saturday morning while I was just about hauling myself out of bed. The weather wasn’t nice and the land around Snape Maltings (where most of the activity took place) was boggy, but staying on Aldeburgh seafront was quite magical. And the rain did clear up. This was the view from our house this morning before we left.

View from our house at 8am

The town is centred on one long High Street parallel to the coastline, its houses are colourful and quirky but this is a strange, end-of-the-world sort of place which seems to teeter on the edge of the North Sea. It’s well-heeled: ‘Chelsea by the Sea’ was how a poet friend described it to me. The town is famously where Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears lived, worked, held court, founded a music festival and created a huge heartland of music for much of the mid-twentieth century.

The poetry festival used to take place here – but the story goes that some of the venues lost their health & safety credentials and the festival needed to expand in order to get the funding it needed. So everyone decamped to Snape Maltings 5 miles inland. There’s no doubt the various auditoria and the facilities there are fabulous. Some poetry festival events still happen in Aldeburgh but travelling to and fro during the day isn’t ideal, and if you don’t have a car you’re dependent on bus times.

The ‘poetry’ bit

Aldeburgh Poetry Festival handouts

The weekend consisted of readings, craft talks, lectures, discussions, close readings and critique sessions/masterclasses. There was plenty of variety and a few free sessions (although I never made it to those, they were mostly 15 mins of a poet talking on a topic or on a poem he/she liked.) For me, the craft talks were where I learnt the most: Zaffar Kunial on line endings, Kei Miller on ‘the image that doesn’t quite close’, Kim Addonizio on turns.

The main readings were on the long side – three poets each reading for half an hour with an interval between the second and third. On Friday evening I loved Helen Mort and Kei Miller. But after the break I was already tired (up at 7, five hours driving, three hours of poetry sessions). Like much of the audience, I was perplexed by the third poet who read, seemingly from a 1970s timewarp and determinedly ignoring the audience for his entire set. I struggled to stay awake. Still, it proved a talking point until 1am and for the rest of the weekend. Maybe the programming was designed to challenge us!

I went to a lovely short reading on Saturday by Michael McCarthy and Christine Webb, two poets with fine pedigrees who I’d never encountered before. Fifteen minutes each was the perfect format, and in an intimate venue. Similarly, a ‘New Voices’ reading gave us the opportunity of hearing four relatively new poets over the course of an hour.

There was something for everyone. At Tony Hoagland’s talk on Sharon Olds, one poet turned to me, indicated the empty seats and said ‘I thought EVERYONE would be here for this!’ To be fair, it did fill up more. Then afterwards as I made my way to the cafe I encountered another lovely poet who informed me of her great joy in NOT attending a talk on Sharon Olds. Tee hee.

Over the whole weekend I discovered all kinds of poets, poems and collections I didn’t know and hadn’t read, international in scope, and that was one of the standout features for me.

The boxes issue

I struggle a bit with the Poetry Trust stage sets – piles of cardboard boxes with ‘Words’ printed on them. First of all, in the Britten Studio, the courses of bricks weren’t aligned properly. Everyone knows “the universal rule allowing for brickwork to be stable under even modest loads is that perpends should not vertically align in any two successive courses.” (Wikipedia) This wall was about to topple. Secondly, the boxes were clearly empty. So the overall message was ’empty words, ungrounded and easy to knock down.’ Is that a good image for poetry? Remember now – I had hours and hours to stare at those boxes.

But seriously

I’m a complete newbie to the festival but it was clear talking to people who have attended many times or been involved in one way or another that it is under threat, in terms of lack of funding, and it’s by no means certain the festival will be able continue. This, plus the fact that Creative Director of sixteen years Dean Parkin is stepping down, is very sad. 2015 was the first year of Ellen McAteer‘s Directorship and it was also very sad that she was unable to be there, for personal reasons. The Poetry Trust does a fine job on a shoestring. There were one or two aspects of the festival that got me a bit grumpy but I came away as impressed and as satisfied as all the fans on Twitter. So I hope finance can be found. I would go again – probably not next year though. Unless I win some money. It gets expensive.

Winners, honourable mentions etc 

Zaffar Kunial – I can’t wait to get his pamphlet. A fabulous craft talk and a star reading. This guy’s the real deal.

Kei Miller – everyone fell in love with him. The question is, does his twinkly smile remind me more of John Travolta or David Essex?

Kim Addonizio –  never mind the 1980s Madonna thing, I want her as my mentor. Besides, I love Madge.

The seating in the Britten Studio – proof that good ergonomic design simply works.

Tony Hoagland – another breath-of-fresh-air American whose reading was sharp, funny, poignant and moving.

A spontaneous Saturday pub lunch – I hope we weren’t too loud …  Five Women Poets Get Lairy as Locals Flee

Poet friends Clare and Charlotte, my sorority house pals and the perfect travel companions. Here’s to wine, peanut butter sandwiches, chocolate and ibuprofen!

Charlotte, Clare, Robin at Aldeburgh