sharon olds – Robin Houghton

Blog/ 29/03/2020

As the world moves online

Wow, things are changing so quickly it’s hard to believe – for example, how people are getting themselves online – to teach, to meet, to try new things, but mostly I think to keep relationships going with family, friends, customers… when the going gets tough, the tough get tooled-up on tech. This coming week our esteemed Hastings Stanza rep Antony Mair has arranged for us to hold our monthly workshop via Zoom, which is clearly the conferencing app du jour. And last week my dear husband actually started a blog, to keep in touch with all his choirs, and had 92 followers within hours. Whaaaa?! He’ll be writing poetry next.

And so to the lockdown. I’ve begun reading Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light which is highly absorbing, and another book which I was tempted into buying, called Timeless Simplicity – Creative living in a consumer society by John Lane, a book which I thought would suit current circumstances. But unfortunately it’s nearly twenty years old and as such rather dated in its information about mass leisure, work and consumption. There’s some food for thought though. I’ve started recalling books about plagues and sieges. I remember being much moved by Helen Dunmore’s The Siege. Years ago in school I read Albert Camus’s La Peste (aka The Plague – although we had to read it in French for A level – pah!). It’s clearly enjoying a renaissance at the moment – The Guardian reports that Penguin Classics are struggling to keep up with orders. And then there’s Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. I had a feeling I still had a copy, and lo – there it was on the bookshelf…

Daniel Defoe a Journal of the Plague Year

I can’t wait to get stuck into this, in fact I may to read it in parallel with the Mantel, something I never do with novels.

On the poetry front I am loving Sharon Olds’ Arias. It’s firing up my writing too. I’ve no idea what the effect is of the pandemic on poetry magazines, whether editors have too much on their plates dealing with the exigencies of life under lockdown to be thinking about the publishing schedule, or reading submissions or what have you. No doubt they’ll be inundated with poems now that we all have more time to write. And plenty on the subject of you-know-what. I wonder how much ‘pestilence poetry’ we can all take for the next few years as the theme filters through to publication?

I can report there was a mad rash of cleaning in our house last week. The kitchen was scrubbed so well I had a sore shoulder for days. I’ve also been cleaning old garden pots and potting on seedlings. We’re taking our exercise in the form of walks or runs, and last week had a lovely walk up to Beachy Head where sat well away from the path and ate a picnic. Very few people about. We’re so fortunate to have this sort of countryside on our doorstep and I do hope we won’t be prevented in the future from walking though it. Fresh air, access to nature and the ability to be outside are certainly crucial to my own mental health and I’m sure I’m not alone. Wherever we walk about here it’s very quiet. I was more worried on my one visit to Sainsbury’s, even though they are limiting the numbers in the shop. (I’d like to say how good the staff were at our local store in Hamden Park, Eastbourne – friendly, upbeat, entertaining the queue – shop staff are doing difficult jobs and I’ve no doubt they take a lot of flak.) And Katya in our local shop is doing a marvellous job of keeping open, with fresh produce available every day.

Eastbourne from beachy head — Looking back to Eastbourne from the Beachy Head peninsula

I’ve loved reading other people’s blogs and seeing photos of Spring. Last week I was thrilled to discover Jean Tubridy was back blogging. Jean’s blog Social Bridge was one of the first I used to follow. Warmly recommended. Another lovely post that caught my eye last week was Ann Perrin’s tribute to her mother – what an extraordinary life she had, and Ann tells her story with such generosity and ease. Do take a look.

PS I’m 6-4 ahead in the Scrabble Challenge…

Blog/ 03/01/2016

Some inspirational writing & poetry sites to enjoy in 2016

Happy New Year, and welcome to the rest of your life. May it be a long, healthy and happy one.

Had a nice Christmas? Glad it’s over now? It’s OK to answer ‘yes’ to both, by the way.

I’m in a contemplative mood. It’s great to look out of the window and see just one car parked on the street where most days of the year they are nose-to-tail. It’s great to feel a great relaxing downpull like one of those huge blow-up Santas deflating.

Let’s look forward, not back. I thought I’d share a few of the blogs & online resources I’ve been enjoying, some of them old favourites and others relatively recent finds.

These are all sites I go back to regularly for insights, inspiration, learning and entertainment.

If you enjoy this post, please share it with your social media contacts and writer friends. These are excellent sites and many run on nothing much more than love and a prayer. Many thanks.

Literary Hub

I subscribe to the LitHub Daily, a brief email with one-line links to thought-provoking articles on sundry (brilliant) websites. So I guess you’d call Literary Hub an aggregator site of curated material. Like the other sites I mention here it’s much more than just a load of links – the true value of this type of site lies in the quality of the curation and presentation of content, the design and ordering of material to give the reader a seamless and exciting way in and through.

Their description: Literary Hub is an organizing principle in the service of literary culture, a single, trusted, daily source for all the news, ideas and richness of contemporary literary life.

Sample post: The Unheralded Monk who Turned his Small Town into a Center of Publishing – Martin Luther, Revolutionary Disruptor and Start-up Success Story

Transatlantic Poetry

Once a month, live poetry reading podcasts which you can then access afterwards at any time. Usually one US poet and one UK, reading from the intimacy of their sitting room. There are a number of different hosts doing the introductions, including Anglo-American poet Robert Peake and Timothy Green, editor of Rattle (my current US magazine du choix). A simple idea, well executed.

Their description: Transatlantic Poetry is a global poetry movement bringing some of the most exciting poets from the US, UK, Europe and beyond together for live online readings and conversations.

Sample podcast: Danez Smith and Liz Berry, September 2015

Divedapper

I came across this site quite recently – transcriptions of interviews with poets by Kaveh Akbar, the brains behind Divedapper (yes, it’s actually a bird – you have to visit the site to find out more.) Kaveh has a nice way of bringing out the candour in his subjects. I suppose the poets are all or mostly US-based, as I wasn’t familiar with most of the names, so that’s interesting too as an interview often makes me want to read more of a poet’s work.

Official site description: a new project devoted exclusively to featuring interviews with major voices in contemporary poetry. It has no affiliation with any institution, academic or literary or otherwise.

Sample post: Interview with Sharon Olds– ‘I write as much crap as anyone.’

Poetry Foundation

I know, I know – a longstanding (nay, towering) figure on the poetry scene, but impossible to leave out. There’s so much on this site that’s good, it’s easy to forget and think of it as ‘just’ the website for Poetry magazine. Listen to iconic poets reading their work, browse poems by title, poet, even season…read articles, find teaching resources (if that’s what you’re looking for) and explore the Foundation’s many initiatives.

Their description: The Poetry Foundation is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience.

Sample: Winter poems

Jacket2

I’ve hardly scratched the surface of this rich site, but I’ve enjoyed listening to some of their podcasts in which poets gather for close readings of featured work, or interview poets and ‘poetry people’. There are reviews, features and in-depth essays … it looks like an awesome resource.

Their description: Jacket2 offers commentary on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics. We publish articles, reviews, interviews, discussions and collaborative responses, archival documents, podcasts, and descriptions of poetry symposia and projects.

Sample podcast: Roundtable analysis of James Schuyler’s poem ‘February’, featuring the poet reading his work.

Entropy

It’s tough to describe this site adequately, plus it’s new to me to I’m only finding out as I go along. Its range is wide – from poetry to games. All I can say is DO take a look.

Their description: CCM-Entropy is the result of newly merged Civil Coping Mechanisms and Entropy, an independent literature community and portal that includes CCM: publisher & promoter of kick-ass independent literature, Entropy: a magazine and community of contributors that publishes diverse literary and non-literary content, and Enclave: a community blog that exists as an open and central space for contributors representing different literary communities, corners, and aesthetics to express themselves openly, urgently.

Sample post: Dear Blank Space: A Literacy Narrative by Jennifer S Cheng

Brain Pickings

Oh I know I’ve talked about this site before, but it continues to deliver wonderful content so I’ll say it again – it’s an amazing compendium of fine writing, insights, stories and inspiration, masterminded by Maria Popova. Subscribe to the ‘free weekly interestingness digest’ and you won’t be disappointed.

Site description by Maria: Brain Pickings is my one-woman labor of love — a subjective lens on what matters in the world and why. Mostly, it’s a record of my own becoming as a person — intellectually, creatively, spiritually — and an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email that went out to seven friends and eventually brought online, the site was included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive in 2012.

Sample post: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Sacredness of Public Libraries

Books/ 10/01/2013

T S Eliot shortlisted poetry collections – reviews

I confess haven’t read all the collections shortlisted for this year’s T S Eliot Prize. But I’ve trawled for informative reviews of each, in order to at least have an idea and also in anticipation of hearing all the poets read on Sunday evening at the Festival Hall. So here we go.

Sean Borodale Bee Journal (Jonathan Cape) (Bees seem to be a hot topic at the moment. Does their essential yet potentially doomed role in the ecosystem give them extra poetic power?) Giles Pitts’ review in Varsity makes me think I would enjoy this collection.

‘10th February: Dismantling the Comb’, for example, is a deeply moving account of bereavement, the poet shining light into the comb’s cells in a fruitless search for life: ‘It’s like the grain of a moon, a spoon-back of pale no one, / just the pail of an egg’s dry opal empty of hunger’.

Gillian Clarke Ice (Carcanet) – Stevie Davies in the Independent calls it ‘partly pastoral elegy, partly georgic’ and offers this assessment.

In 1947, news of the ice-girl’s end aroused in the prescient young Gillian a sense of “her china inkwell emptied of its words,/ the groove for her pen like a shallow grave”.

Julia Copus The World’s Two Smallest Humans (Faber & Faber) – reviewed in the Guardian by Kate Kellaway, who calls it a ‘remarkable collection’. She focuses in particular on the poem ‘Ghost’ which is printed in full at the end of the review, noting that the poet “avoids the first person and keeps a tight rein on emotion.”

SImon Armitage The Death of King Arthur (Faber & Faber) – a gallant Kate Kellaway tackles this tome despiteadmitting initial reluctance (“When I studied Anglo-Saxon at university, I remember complaining that whenever I wasn’t sure of a word, it turned out to mean “spear”.”) She concedes, however, that Armitage “has a miraculous ability to make the past fresh, moving and urgent, not allowing legend to create distance.” Personally I’m not sure how much I’d relish all those bloody battles, but perhaps I need to keep an open mind – if I’ve got the stomach for Julia Copus’s IVF poems then I can face anything. (For some reason, poems about pregnancy and childbirth make me queasy.)

Paul Farley The Dark Film (Picador) – despite Nicholas Pierpan’s excoriating review in Tower Poetry (is this the guy who critiqued my work both times I submitted stuff for the Poetry Society’s ‘Prescription’ service? I recognise the style!) I am interested to read this collection, if only to see if there’s more to it than Pierpan fancies. (For example, ‘Saturday Irons’ he dismisses with “Are the final two lines tongue-in-cheek, or just bathetic? I honestly can’t tell; they don’t work either way.”)

Jorie Graham P L A C E (Carcanet) – is this is the front-runner, having already won the Forward Prize? Here’s Sean O’Brien’s review in the Guardian. Funnily enough I only heard of Jorie Graham recently, when I asked poet friend Lynne about American poetry, in which she’s pretty much steeped. Must explore.

Kathleen Jamie – The Overhaul (Picador) – I was googling this to find a review and got sidetracked by a wonderful interview on the Scottish Review of Books. I like the sound of Kathleen Jamie, she comes across a bit like Don Paterson, all dry and matter-of-fact what’s-the-fuss-all-about. Must be a scottish thang. Anyway, here’s Maria Johnston’s review in the Guardian of what sounds like a fine collection.

Sharon Olds Stag’s Leap (Jonathan Cape) – my poet friend Charlotte lent me a copy of this to read a couple of months ago and there was something terrifyingly gripping about it – the story of a marriage break up in painful, masochistic detail. It gave me bad dreams – I suppose it played on my greatest nightmare, which would be to lose the love and fidelity of my husband. But here’s a wonderful video interview / profile on the PBS website where Sharon reads from the book and talks about her writing and her life. There’s a sympathy, acceptance and calmness about her that I nearly missed in the reading of Stag’s Leap.

Jacob Polley The Havocs (Picador) – so I click on the Guardian’s review of this collection and there’s a photo of a beekeeper – wtf! Anyway, Ben Wilkinson finds much to admire:

Tripping through assorted rhythms, sonnets, end-rhymed quatrains and the looping lines of its centrepiece, it is as formally vibrant as the luminous letters that adorn its cover….The Havocs may be an uneven collection that sometimes finds Polley treading water, but a handful of its poems are so moving and memorable you might just forgive him.

Deryn Rees-Jones Burying the Wren (Seren) – Carl Griffin in the Wales Arts Review suggests that this collection on ‘recollections and grief’ has its ‘fair share of poems that should have been buried with the wren’. Nevertheless he finds ‘ingenious images’ as well as ‘snatches of comedy and joy’ in her writing.

Books/ 30/12/2012