what survived of you — Andrew McMillan

after hearing Larkin's Sunday Sessions

partly the voice of chipped vowels

decanted over decades, pauses frail

as grass, inflections casting hope out

like a lighthouse, but mostly what

survived of you was love, your million-petalled

flower of being here full-blossomed even now;

pulled from oblivion dark as a garage, I hear you

sitting, somewhere, put back together, stern,

sending poems, as though young men, over

stanza'd, distant hills to ears built like towns

(‘what survived of you’ from Every Salt Advance by Andrew McMillan, published by Sand Chapbooks, 2011.)

*

Don't remember which poem it is of Heaney's but in it you're walking across an American campus—Berkley, most likely—and there are these speakers set up in the trees, hanging down from them, weirdly bulbous, weirdly organic. So—if I remember it rightly—as the protagonist wanders under them, you’ve myth and gods hanging on the other end. The poem digging into that eerie experience, that occasional shock of the surreal at voice detached from source.

It’s not a subject you come across that often, so when I did come across Andrew McMillan’s ‘what survived of you’ I was immediately drawn to it. Having—like many—been enthralled by Larkin at A-level and later, clear of that, listened to and laughed at The Sunday Sessions it feels to me like wish fulfilment; I’d wanted it written before I’d read it.

Spooky how Andrew conjures up that Larkin sound, the poem more like the work of DJ Yoda (please somebody remix Larkin)—with its expert sampling, and scratch work—than an ‘original' writer. So, we’re in the Larkin echo-chamber with ‘pauses / frail as grass’ and ‘vowels / decanted over decades,’ which, down to the deft line break in the first, and the alliterative twist in the second, is like Larkin with the reverb turned up. 

In conversation with ROY Andrew said that he “look[s] on [Every Salt Advance] rather like people look on old photos of themselves" and that chimes nicely with the theme of this particular poem. What hasn't faded, what doesn't fade as fast as you'd think; what’s weirdly alive when you look or listen close enough.

The Black Hole

A ring of down-feathers surrounds the corpse
of the blackbird, thickly leaved like pages
of a burnt book. The cat steels himself at
their stirring perimeter. I've seen him
biff a robin's carcass to make it look
lively, crunching into the ginger-nut
of its breast, but he seems to teeter on
the brink of the blackbird — the breezy shiv—
er of charred down-feathers — the eyes,
a scuffed sequin of blood. If the fallout
stirs, he smacks his lips, as he does when he
perceives a threat. His flanks palpitate, star-
ing down into the black hole by mistake.

(‘The Black Hole’ from Byssus by Jen Hadfield, published by Picador, 2014.)

*

To get at an appreciation of Jen’s poem I’d like to start by referring to the recent article posted by Robert Pinsky in the edX course ‘The Art of Poetry.’ He starts there by unapologetically answering the question “why poetry?” Why poetry when YouTube, when Spotify, when games like Skyrim? At a time when we have unprecedented access to such vast quantities of sophisticated and immersive media “why this ancient practice of artful words, on the scale of the human voice?”

Pleasure is not often argued for in defence of poetry, yet the world also had an advocate in the British poet Philip Larkin. Ready to bite the bullet as always, Larkin conceded that if writing a poem isn’t entertaining, why write? Going on to say that sometimes he “deliberately let it compete in the open market… with other spare-time activities.” What these ‘other spare-time’ activities were in England in the 1960s I don’t know. Listening to the odd record perhaps? Going for a stroll in the park, participating — or not, as the case may be — in the sexual revolution? Maybe this is why the ‘pleasure’ argument for poetry doesn’t crop up much now-a-days. After all, how can it compete on the open market, against the rabid demands that now exist on our spare-time?



Pinsky has an answer. It is in that phrase of his “on the scale of the human voice.” And that appeals to me. Out of the blur of days when the competition is soundly trounced by computer games or the endless busy work of TV series, poetry rises like a modest diversion, a pleasurable concentration. And Jen’s poem, which I first read back in July, in the attractive 19.6 x 15.2 Byssus, has given me the kind of conviction Pinsky talks about, that feeling of “a kind of physical as well as intellectual sensation.”

It is remarkable how something as simple as a neatly printed black square on a page, can transfix you time and time again. Can pull you away from the sprawling mass of dutiful ‘entertainment’, render the sorting of brightly coloured sweets, as Julia Bird put it, irrelevant.

What I love about this poem, can’t stop looking at and listening to, is that it sounds like a normal person speaking. It sounds like someone I know and says things I can imagine myself and them saying. The cat “steels himself”, “biffs” the bird and crunches “into the ginger-nut / of its breast.” The idiomatic verve of the poem makes it familiar, easy to get to grips with, and appealing.

Yet, like Pinsky’s analysis of Hayden’s ‘Those Winter Sundays’, it’s the fracture of the slightly too formal that I think is what draws me back. Without the elegiac chill of the initial “a ring of down-feathers surrounds the corpse” and ritualistic language like the description of the bird’s eye as “a scuffed sequin of blood.” Without these elements what would it be? A poem about a poet’s cat, which is a poem we’ve all read and forgotten. But this is about much more and is much darker.

I can’t stop staring at the penultimate line-break. How the switch, the shift off of ‘staring’, breaks the word on ‘star’, that quiet gesture suggesting life on a whole other scale. For the poem to end on ‘mistake’, as well.

What I first complacently read as a ‘cat lady poem’ ends up terrifying the shit out of me. Moreover, because it ties you down into it. You’re the one ‘star- / ing’ down into ‘the black hole’ of the poem. You’re the one trapped, transfixed by your own — what? Fascination? Pinsky describes the effect of Hayden’s poem as a “web of feelings” where he feels “that kind of conflict and ambivalence, fear and love, muteness and expressiveness”

I’m like that with this poem. Fly in a web. Fly feeling the vibrations of the web, and we all know what that means. I wouldn’t normal have thought the fly’d get much pleasure from feeling like that but there we are. Flying about must be exhausting. Good to be suspended for a change.

*

My thanks to the author Jen Hadfield and her publisher Sarah Blake from Picador, for permission to reproduce this poem here on ROY.

True Grit

This morning ‘Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’
jangles out the radio and you remember holidays at Tintagel —
on edge, on the edge in caravan with mam and dad and nan,
come down from up North to grin and bear another grim hols.



Read the full poem on Ink, Sweat & Tears.

Washington Filifera

Out of the winda ’s straight-forward wonder

                         or my father’s & my friend’s 

                        exclamations of astonishment 

                                    at Washington filifera. 

But Californian fan palms are 

everywhere in California

                                                          and you live here. 

                                 Besides, the days are far too short 

                                             to make it into fifth gear—

                               so, settle for a much-of-a-muchness,

                                  the ordinary embedded in the odd,

like the acorns, you notice 

are cached in the trunk. 

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.

*

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.)

Mine - Becky Cherriman

“Mine,” says my two-year-old niece, plucking the green beanie off my head. “Mine,” she repeats as she slips it over hers, proving it to be hugely - hilariously - too big. “Mine,” she says again, informing me as to the true ownership of her giant inflatable rabbit. “Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine!” We adults smile knowingly at each other, “bless!” But if only we knew how many times we’d chanted the same thing. Hundreds of thousands? A million? And that’s only one generation. How many more back to the mi of Old Saxon, the mik of Old Norse or even the mam of Sanskrit?* And at what point do we convince others that the packet of Cadbury’s Chocolate Fingers really are mine, that the border of a country or a county is?

“Mine,” starts up the audience in a mesmeric hum. “Mine,” chants this huddled semi-circle in Nottingham who’ve come only to listen. But Becky Cherriman’s poem wants more from us than silent acknowledgement. It’s choral and quarrelsome, a poem unfashionably out of form (almost all the others we will hear will be written in one traditional form or another), a poem that insists we hear our own internal contradictions: that belonging to a place, coming from a place can never be a simple story, is always instead an inured ambivalence; I want to get away but stay put too. 

That contradiction is in the poem. At 44 lines and roughly 02:15 in performance (not including applause!), occassionally, opportunistically rhymed (l.1-A, l.3-A/, l.7-A, l.9-A-int/; l.30-B, l.31-B; l.44-C-int) relying heavily on a small repertoire of rhetorical techniques, (repetition, paromoiosis, brachylogia) the  poem shuttles between expansive romantic sentiment and direct no-nonsense statement; between waxing lyrical and shutting your trap (very Leeds). 

Take l.17 - l.22, within these five lines we’re circumscribed within what is thoroughly stratified diction, ‘the aria of the tide,’ ‘the opening of the lotus,’ ‘the weave and the weft,’ lucid dreams and yawning caves, we're stifling a yawn too, we've heard it all before. And yet the forward impetus of the repetition (‘Mine is …’) coupled with the sound parallelism (l.18 and l.20) incredibly makes, what would otherwise be pretty dull-dead stuff, come to life. Part of this is its mindfulness of performance; the poem wants to be read aloud.

And why not? It was born for it. Mythic but unpatronizing; allusive but down-to-earth, the poem keeps faith with the primary visceral texture of language. More neat parallelism being built into l.30 − 33, l.43 − 45 comes out in performance as so much savoured language, an appeal which rarely fails to do just that. 

Mahmoud Darwish

Though the poem insists on the right to political statement (being written after controversial Palestine poet Mahmoud Darwish), that the geopolitical divisions that exist the world over necessarily exist here too, its negotiation with performance and its eye and ear for how it will be received demonstrate a sincere wish for, as l.45 has it ‘new beginnings.’ One could do much worse than to make this their mantra.


*If we put one generation at a very approximate 25 years and trust Wikipedia about when Sanskrit first came to India and Pakistan, (in the second millenium BCE), then the sum is fairly straightforward. 4013/25 = 160.52 generations. Ask how many 'mines' or mine-like-utterances were repeated during those generations, multiply and - well - no wonder the word appeals. 

∞

The event took place thanks to the Beeston Poets based in Beetson Library, Nottingham. Check out their up-coming events here. You can find Becky Cherriman at her website, and read her poems. You can listen to the live performance of 'Mine' at Beeston Poets too.

∞

Mine 

(after Mahmoud Darwish’s I Come From There)

1     I walked this land before

2     the moon was torn from the earth

3     in a gnashing of rock and magma.

4     I come from bones stripped bare

5     on an empty plain.

6     Born in a roar of lion cubs,

7     I had the mane of Sif and a legacy to fight for.

8     Mine is the forest and the herb

9     and the terra strata of vineyards.

10    Mine is the hills and the streams,

11    womb song and fire dance.

12    The golden apple is mine
13    and the bubbling stove.
14    Mine is the mangle and mine is the cradle.

15    Mine is the inheritance 

16    snatched by wolves.

17    The aria of the tide is mine.

18    and the opening of the lotus

19    Mine is the weave and the weft 

20    and the welcome interruption 

21    Mine is the lucid dream,

22    the history hidden in the yawning cave.

23    Mine is the holding place.

24    Mine is the inheritance 

25    snatched by wolves.

26    Mine is whalebone 

27    and plucked out toenails.

28    Mine is the stone and the razor, 

29    the red light and the wimple.

30    Mine is size zero and cellulite.

31    Mine is the soldiers in the night.

32    Mine is the girdle and the branding iron.

33    Mine is the language that clamps my tongue.

34    Mine is the inheritance 

35    snatched by wolves.

36    I have sent them away 

37    with torn ears and limping.

38    I learnt their stories only to rewrite them. 

39    I render the poison to the adder, 

40    the gold to Midas.

41    Mine is the ship on the horizon

42    where I net double rainbows like mussels. 

43    Make no mistake, 

44    I would raise the seas and drown the cities 

45    to forge a new beginning.



(Poem reproduced with permission of the author.)