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.

Hex — Ben Wilkinson

These days, the way my mind works, 

when she and I are side-by-side the morning after 

in a bedroom-cum-DIY-disaster 

it takes no more than a number or word 

or her surreptitious hand brushing close to mine 

to set the rhymes racing off 

like inmates that’ve tripped 

the central security system 

and are running like fuck-knows into the distance

the way thoughts might link

hex to text to the lesser-striped Baryonyx of the Early Cretaceous

who, with twice as many teeth

as its nearest relatives and a sharp angle 

near the snout, could hold onto its prey

with twenty times the efficiency of the modern crocodile or shrike.

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“They say it’s like speaking to snakes,” says Kasia, the Polish language Larkin scholar who I’m meeting in Warsaw. “Really?” So Harry Potter is speaking Polish when he goes all Parselmouth on us? More like the peaks and troughs of radio static, I think; its tonal fluency crashing into the burrs and clicks of consonant clusters so thick you’d need a palate as sharp as a machete to cut your way out of it. And though an Anglikiem playing Polish Scrabble has to grasp the law that every ZED isn’t worth a ten, (there being three of them) and that the hissing ‘sz’ and ‘c’ occur often, it’s slippery only in-so-far as mastering its cases goes, not its noise. That, at least, is my opinion. 

My opinion. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? I suspect I hear Polish as I do because of the interference of the alliterative bent in my first language. And like Richard Carter, quoted in a recent article in the Yorkshire Post, “I’ve learned quite a lot by not being in Yorkshire,” that’s why I think I hear this poem like I do too.

After all, don't Yorkshirefolk, like the Ulstermen in the W. R. Rogers poem Heaney quotes in Feeling into Words (pg. 4) also have a fetish for the hard edges of their speech? We too are 'an abrupt people.' But there's a conflict. Because our regional linguistic habitat has also provided us with the set of famous and well-loved broad vowels and diphthongs. 

And I believe it's precisely this tension between restraint and freedom, singing and stuttering, between being eloquent or tongue-tied, that this poem explores so well. And not just in its thematic preoccupation but in its language as an achieved and condensed expression. Because language, in this poem, is allowed to become mimetic self-knowledge; not merely a way of knowing the world but a more vital intimation of it. 

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'Hex' is certainly a shapely poem, its four tercet stanzas spilling out onto the page in a pleasingly organic way. The last line insistently separating itself off, and several others stretching out like branches; casually patterned.

How the poem then gathers itself from the first monosyllabic line and riffs off into the rough schwas of 'after'/'disaster' ending l.2 and l.3 into the contrastive 'surreptitious,' it being Latinate and polysyllabic (posh, in other words). Enough stuff unpacked, the poem then loses no time (or words) before going for a tricky crane-shot, the simile of l.6 racing off ahead of us to l.9.

We're already doing pretty well. But then it gets better. We suspected we were going to get bored right about now, but instead something very special happens. Something we couldn't have seen coming and which, we might safely assume, the poem didn't either.

And look, it's visible; it has been preserved. The aural cue for the one big movement of thought in the poem, as l.11 pulls away from the body of it into metaphor, and renders the stretch of the imagination that has been reached for, visible.

As the poem riffs off the bravado consonants of 'fuck-knows', into 'link', 'hex', 'text' and finally onto the brilliant, the unretractable, 'Baryonyx.' And, despite its alliterative density the poem opens up again; the slow panning shot from the long vowel of 'who' moving over a little more unpacking before cutting to that awkward, insistent last line, and that word: /ʃraɪk/ ‘Shrike,’ the dark hush of its initial /ʃr/ into the long fluid vowel of /aɪ/ cut brutally down the middle by the almost ejective final stop consonant, /k/, which makes for a very satisfying finish. 

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Ben Wilkinson will be publishing his second pamphlet For Real with smith|doorstop next month, after being an overall winner of The Poetry Business's 2013-14 Book & Pamphlet Competition, with the launch on the 31st of May at the Wordsworth Trust's Jerwood Centre.

If the poems in that volume demonstrate a matured fine-tuning, as it's safe to assume they will (The Sparks is six years old, after all, published when the author was 24), of the deft circuit making and conservation of language found in 'Hex' then that's a huge reason to be very excited about the development of this poetic talent.

Make sure you check out Ben's blog for a generous helping of reviews and poems, as well as his author's profile on The Guardian for more articles. You might also want to keep your eyes and ears peeled for events like Spire Writes, where you might be in or a chance of hearing 'Hex' live.

'Hex' also featured way back in the day on the blog 'Surroundings.'

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. 

Twenty Two Words for Snow - Helen Mort

The lawn was freezing over

but the air stayed empty,

and I wondered how the Inuit 

would name this waiting - 

our radio playing to itself in the bathroom,

the sound from the street 

of ice-cream vans out of season

in this town where we don’t have 

twenty-two words for anything,

where I learned the name 

for artifical hills, the bridge

where a man was felled by bricks

in the strike. From the window,

I watch the sky as it starts to fill.

In the kitchen, dad sifts flour, 

still panning for something.

(Read the poem with its accompanying neuroscience on Helen's blog.) 

Chances are the reason you’re here at all is because the same thing has happened to you. And maybe you’re a bit sore about it. Maybe a bit bemused like; you’re trying to figure out how it happened. I mean, considering how good your defences were. You might even have tried the same thing: getting stern with it, putting on your best German and holding open the door for it. But all it did was get big-eyed and wouldn’t budge. And you melted. You melted. 

Like you I didn’t have a clue what I was letting myself in for, when on the 24^th of April, at Deddington Lane I first read Helen Mort’s ‘Twenty Two Words for Snow’. Skinny thing, I thought. Slight, I thought. Bit of a stray. What I hadn’t thought was that it might have been too late already. That the mangy thing had come in through the back door and was - as I pontificated - already making itself comfortable on the hearth-rug. Don’t be too hard on yourself. It happens to the best of us. Feeling. And now it’s here we might as well help it settle in. Somehow I think this might be a long-term thing. 

But your inspections of the new resident during long nights by the fire make you non-the-wiser. At 94 words and just 10 seconds short of a minute it could be a short, stripped Meredithian sonnet or a whippet. With no full-rhymes and its diction only lifting out of the familiar once with, ‘Inuit’ it’s quiet. How then, since this list seems - if anything - exceptionally dull and uninformative, has it bitten you? 

Well, you can’t help but remember a phrase from the American poet Timothy Donnelly’s recent interview, where he mentions how he likes the way Wallace Stevens’ ‘thoughts fall.’ Trouble is it sounds so beautiful that you don’t think about it much at all. Just do what it wants you to: ‘Thoughts fall. Thoughts fall. The way the thoughts fall. The way the thought falls.’ And now the word ‘fall’ is suspended and as it sinks into print, you savour it. And suddenly what seemed merely well written is now perfectly unparaphrasable

How you’re led by the nose by the past-simple continuous, ‘The lawn was freezing over …’ on by the inoffensive conjunctions ‘but,’ ‘and,’ to the quiet expansion of the clump of independent clauses that follow, ‘ … our radio playing,’ ‘… the sound from the street.’ 5 to 13 are a not uncommon vision, one of those landscapes you come on in the car; everything suddenly big and far, very far away and the best thing about it? That it came upon you silently. Which is a really imprecise way of saying: I like how the thought falls. How it’s bloody ingenious because I feel like I understand it but can’t say how without sounding like an idiot. It’s snow. It - sounds? - sounds like falling snow. How?! 

The first sentence closes on the word ‘strike,’ which is a word that threatens to go supermassive black hole on all of us; to swallow the poem up whole. It doesn’t though. Maybe because of the music. Take the lines that follow for instance, 13 and 14. ‘From the window, / I watch the sky as it starts to fill.’ Can you hear it? What is that? ‘From the window, / I watch the sky as it starts to fill.’ But look, it happened before, take lines 5 − 9, is it just me or do ‘bathroom,’ ‘season’ and ‘anything’ make the same pleasant sort of consonantal hum? ‘Our radio playing to itself in the bathroom, / the sound from the street / of ice-cream vans out of season / in this town where we don’t have // twenty-two words for anything.’ What is it about this that makes it sound so beautiful? 

And then - some how - it has you feeling sorry. Sorry for it. Sorry for yourself too. As if there were good reason to. And even though you’re a little shocked to discover that dad was in the kitchen sifting out his flour; that your family alone must be stuck in a weird time-loop, fallen completely off the WI’s radar. But you don’t feel like making half-hearted crap jokes at the end of this poem. Because it’s got to you. It got to you with that gap you didn’t mind between 8 and 9, ‘this town where we don’t have // twenty two words for anything.’ 

Oh yes. This poem wants to be kept. Remember Ian McMillan’s anecdote? That the difference between going into a barbers in South Yorkshire and the South is 40 or so words? We’re not what you’d call loqacious. But then - maybe - that’s why we want to try for fluency so often. Our accustomed extremes of expression being: I’m just saying like or I’m saying nowt. Well I’m just saying like. I for one hope this poem has pups.

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Helen Mort performed ‘Twenty Two Words for Snow’ on the 24^th of April at the Guitar Bar's open mic slot in based in Hotel Deux Nottingham. Where were you? Helen Mort's performing at Bridlington Poetry festival on the 15th of June, don't miss it!  

(Poem reproduced with permission of the poet.)