The chance to go shagging down the woods — Steve Ely's WIP Incendium Amoris

What's the new book about?

The themes are quite diverse— love, sex, England and the English, the English language, the attempt to salvage meaning and value from tradition, religion and history, the need to restore and preserve nature, wildlife and  landscape, anti-Semitism, social-justice and social-banditry, violence, yeoman-anarchism and so on — but are unified by the life, writings and landscape of Rolle. Rolle anchors the poems, they’re not about him per se — although some of them are. As a whole, the piece embodies a kind of transcendental parochialism (in Kavanagh’s usage), the assertion of which might be the over-riding ethos of the book, or certainly its underlying raison d'être. What’s it about? Fire in the belly.  Robertus Swynherd against the French King. Heat, sweetness, song.  

How is it different from your previous work?

I’m drawn to certain themes (see above) that arise out my vision and critique of England and my related critique of the scorched-earth devastations of (post)modern (late)capitalist consumer-narcissism. I write about the same things again and again. My Werewolf poems (some of which have recently published in The Poetry Review and the London Review of Books, for example) are overtly about the potential for extremes of violence in humanity but they’re really about the dehumanisation, alienation and anomie that follows from reducing humans to political and civic powerlessness, stripping them of identity and reducing them to market cyphers in our devil-take-the hindmost society. Oswald’s Book of Hours was an exploration of English identity, but inchoately posited an alternative to the world Werewolf addressed, in much the same way as Englaland, my next book of poems (Smokestack, 2014), will. Incendium Amoris is more personal, quieter. All it wants is: the reflooding of the fens, the reversal of the reformation, the reintroduction of the wolf, ten acres and a cow and the chance to go shagging down the woods.

Photo credit: Steve Ely, early mock-up

Could you talk us through what stage the manuscript is at now and what further work you'll be doing?

Every one of the forty-eight poems of Incendium Amoris has already been through a very thorough drafting process — typically between fifteen and thirty drafts — so they’re reasonably polished. I’ve already clipped out poems I didn’t think were good enough to get in, so my expectation is that these forty-eight will survive, even the two or three that are still problematic — I’m confident I’ll sort them. By arranging them into the shape of a provisional ‘collection’ they’re now like a half erected tent. You can see the shape and most of the pegs and one or two of the guy ropes are in, but it looks a bit floppy. Over the next several weeks I’ll repeatedly re-read the typescript in dozens of short, often almost incidental bursts of between ten minutes and an hour; often several per day, making annotations, striking out articles, adding, deleting, nibbling and tweaking.  Every couple of weeks I’ll make the changes and print a new version.  The tent is now looking more solid and taut; a few more guy-ropes are in, the pegs have been stretched, etc. I repeat this process a couple of times until I’m ready to camp out in it. It usually takes two or three months.

Three Thankful Thrushes

Steve Ely — Poetry of Public and Social Engagement

Ely has anti-Lyric ranted before but the article disappeared. Well, now he's tapping into fashionable Lyric-bashing in support of a new course of his at The Poetry School. Still, it's amusing stuff. Painting them as glorified postcard writers is a stroke a genius. Wish he'd come out with some names too mind. 

“The concept is of poet-as-gadabout-tourist-of-his-own-experience and, extending the metaphor, his poems might be characterised as postcards home or even holiday snaps in verse — lovely sunset this evening, really missing you, gorgeous-paella-evoked-in-vivid-sensory-detail, horrific oppression of donkeys, wish you were here — and so on.”

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Kei Miller — The Anxieties of Being a Black Poet in Britain 

Kei Miller’s a bloody good poet and I didn’t know he wrote a blog so here’s his latest post, a meditation on being a black poet in Britain. Bit annoying that he’s so coy about who the ‘major poet’ is but still, discretion is the better part of valour, etc. Anyone care to guess which grandee got the monk on about the race card being played?

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David Orr — James Franco, Poet

“I’m obliged here to note that this actor is well acquainted with the educational system, having apparently attended graduate programs at Yale, Columbia, New York University, Brooklyn College, Warren Wilson College, the Rhode Island School of Design, Le Cordon Bleu, Quantico, Hogwarts (Ravenclaw), the Vaganova School of Russian Ballet and the Jedi Academy.” 

Five Green Botts.

Five things. First is Steve Ely talking to Maurice Riordan about poetry stuff, and lamping on Poetry Review's latest podcast. Found it shed good light on Ely’s work and thought he came across well, modest, aware of his position but respectful. Some great descriptions in there, Ely describing lamping for one, and a powerful reading of a new poem at the end. 

Next up is the ‘Fugue #3: Crossgates’ podcast by Matthew Clegg. Came across this through Helen Mort’s reweet (so thanks Helen). Grand. Even though calling it a ‘fugue’ seems extraordinarily pretentious, I thought the format worked really well. Poems embedded in a bit of narrative and all of it recorded on loc. Makes for good listening. ‘Blood and Icecream,’ especially powerfully read, I thought. 

Thought the Dave (if he is an actual Dave) of Davepoems, when I first came across the site, might be one of those anonymous knob-bloggers. Bit too vitriolic if occasionally irreverently brilliant. But Dave seems to have shelved his more extreme iconoclastic tendencies for the time being, and has started writing very readable and informative reviews. Nice. A review of Niall Campbell's Moontide is up there now, go read it!

“Is this idea of treating every poem as a passage from havoc to identity some kind of liberation theory of poetry? Yes.” David Biespiel on The Rumpus does it again. And getting Roethke and Rich in on it clinches his argument. Used to have ‘Diving into the wreck,’ on a CD I listened to daily on the way to work in Poland. Reading it again’s like having a circuit come live. Very inspiring third instalment. 

One last bott — I’m hoping to write a post about Mona Arshi’s poem ‘Different Principles of Enclosure’ for Friday and the website I found it on is Toe Good Poetry. I love to listen and read me poems so I think it’s brilliant.

Arthur Scargill — Steve Ely

As posts go you’ll have to squint to see that last one, way back in the mud of May ’13, which is getting on for a year now. Which is probably why it’s a strain to remember much of what went on and why and where, why there has been such a long hiatus. Work, yes. And London. But that time seems, above all else, a good whole to leave behind; a skin to shed, back before I had my VISA and my flights, when moving on was less final. 

Somewhere in there though I happened to say a brief hello to Steve Ely again, after an initial meeting back when I posted about his fellow Yorkshire Arts Circus’s Writer Development Programme graduate Becky Cherriman. 

That second meeting was at the Forward Prize ceremony in London, in October, where I had the pleasure of meeting the lovely Mona Arshi and where Oswald’s Book of Hours was up for the Felix Dennis Best First Collection and ‘Compline: Coronation of the Virgin’ got read by an actor (a feature of the evening Katy Evans-Bush covers expertly). 

It must be gratifying for Steve that Oswald was recently nominated for a prize in the name of the poet he very much admires, Ted Hughes. A fact that’s fairly indisputable, “bet I'm the only nominee who's actually written a book about Hughes,” Steve gleefully wagers on his website. I wish him best of luck at the award ceremony taking place in London this Friday.

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‘Arthur Scargill’ is the first sonnet of a sequence entitled ‘Memorials of the Saints,’ which concludes Oswald’s Book of Hours, published by Smokestack Books in 2013.  

Arthur Scargill

The lowest of the low and low-paid,

the primary men; farmhands, quarrymen, colliers.

Crude men, of appetite and violence, mumblers,

white-knucklers, averters of eyes. Beasts of burden,

their lives lived out in the rhythm

of the Coal Board’s seasons: days and afters,

Henry Halls, neets reg. Larks orbiting the wheel

and the cold cage falling. Crushed torsoes under splintered 

chocks, amputations on the maingate rip,

blood-streaked phlegm hocked-up. Surface to the land

of cockaigne: egg and chips, beer and the bookies.

You brought them health and Palma de Mallorca,

Cortinas on the drive and kids in college,

reading Marx and Mao and The Wealth of Nations.

‘Here, here,’ rings out the gruff and immediate response to this sonnet in the recording, the politics and the sentiment meeting with approval. But don’t let that make you think this is a poem that shirks the responsibilities of poemhood. Chances are the audience knew they agreed with the politics of the voice before they heard the poem, but this is a poem of a rare muscular affirmation. 

I’ve heard complaints from older poets about my generation for their a-political existence. But even among the elders, politics in poems—at least overtly—isn’t practised widely. Yet this poem isn’t ashamed of its opinion; it sticks its heels in and grinds out its music. Not that it’s just a grim old thing, though parts of it are. It is harsh historical realism married to something sweeter, the Henry Halls, the lark, gloriously, “orbiting the wheel.” It reminds me, if anything, of a folksong in the line of Harry ‘Haywire Mac,’ one that manages to be sternly knowing and affectionate. 

Though the guts of it are grim, the blood in the phlegm, the crush, and the rip, you get the notion that this is because it's got guts. It's got “muscles and enjambments and eight and six,” “a waist and a middle—it is a form.” So as Heaney has it, as opposed to those sonnets “going the rounds in the United States,” this one packs an audible punch and holds true to poetry as “a muscular response,” (Schmidt, Lives of the Poets, 843, 1998) something Hughes would surely have approved of. 

And what impressed me the most initially, that echo, that response from the audience. The guttural grunt of affirmation, the agreement that this is a position to hold on to. I hope Steve soon receives further national and international recognition for hitting the nail on the head for the community he writes in.