Rebecca Perry, Beauty/Beauty

Bloodaxe, 2015
£9.95

tl;dr: If at times endearingly antiquated in its sentiments, Beauty/Beauty is also doggedly the work of a millennial. Perry’s insistence on facing down and subverting familiar poetic subjects suggests a sensibility unlikely to rest on its laurels.

Like the artist John Stezaker, whose ‘Mask XXXV’ features on Beauty/Beauty’s cover, Rebecca Perry’s first collection is in close proximity to Surrealism. Akin to Stezaker’s “preoccupation with … the revelatory potential of the obsolete object and image” Perry’s sensibility seems consciously Victorian in its choice of subject matter. ‘A Little Dog Angel,’ ‘Love Apart,’ and ‘Forever Friends’ are not titles that occur in this book. Yet that species of sincerity—the kind of poetry enshrined on the servers of familyfriendpoems.com, most written, most read, and for the most part completely ignored by ‘proper’ poets—is the kind Perry can’t resist playing chicken with.

That Elizabeth Bishop was dismissed as cute, her choice of subject matter, and her miniaturist technique thought of as unworthy of the generation that spawned a gerrymandering giant like Lowell, seems pertinent to recall.

Poems like the tongue-in-cheek ‘The Pet Cemetery’ succeed in-so-far as they are brave enough to face down and subvert the familiar. Rather than mawkish, ‘The Pet Cemetery,’ in approaching the long list of Perry’s deceased fauna (she should have opted for the Siberian hamsters) with the same collage technique used elsewhere in the book, manages to short-circuit conventional assumptions of the poetic. 

Fattie, my joy.

Ponto. See you on the other side.

We had twelve years together, Chips,

I will never forget.

My adorable Scum.

I.M.U., my relentless Casper.

My most magnificent Baron,

where have you gone?

(‘The Pet Cemetery,’ pg. 43)

The major criticism I can see being levelled at such plucky endeavours is that they can be seen as slight. Certainly, when the tour de force ‘Dear Stegosaurus’—Perry calls it “a love letter”—ends with the line “your mouth holds more wonder than a sky full of stars,” (even if the preceding line is exceedingly beautiful) you wonder if it hasn’t simply been an exercise in frivolity.

In what is perhaps an unintentional tribute to Stezaker “the dark spaces of subjectivity [in these poems] seem somehow blasted through, exposed and emptied out.”

That Elizabeth Bishop was dismissed as cute, her choice of subject matter, and her miniaturist technique thought of as unworthy of the generation that spawned a gerrymandering giant like Lowell, seems pertinent to recall. That Bishop herself fretted she had “wasted half [her] talent through timidity” and feared that her poems were “precious,” is hopefully not something Perry has to worry about. 

The poems that play with space on the page (surely a fulfilment of the Glynn Maxwell prophecy) possess an assurance rarely found in the British tradition. (The spaced out among American poets, in the mainstream at least, include Gillian Conoley, Juan Delgado, and Helen Vitoria.) ‘On serendipity,’  ‘Over/wintering,’ and especially ‘Ergonomics’ hold the same quotidian-become-beautiful charm as Cummings and are equally difficult to resist.

I have a soft bread roll on my desk               which two or three times

I’ve squeezed              very gently                   when no one is looking

butter           sprinkle of salt                            pea soup               dream

the price of gold is falling        I can’t see a window but the reflection

on the floor suggests          intermittent sun

(‘Ergonomics,’ pg. 34)

In what is perhaps an unintentional tribute to Stezaker “the dark spaces of subjectivity [in these poems] seem somehow blasted through, exposed and emptied out.” The artist’s reflection on his use of sea cave postcards seems remarkably relevant. 

If at times endearingly antiquated in its sentiments, Beauty/Beauty is also doggedly the work of a millennial. It isn’t just the online IQ tests, Tetris blocks, and flashing trainers either, but that poems like ‘Wasp’ and ‘Poor Sasquatch,’ attest to an affection for the inanimate to the tune of Gary Snyder’s Mac: “Because plastic is a sad, strong material that is charming to rodents.” 

The book contains five collage-like poems. They’re tumblr poems, Pinterest poems, poems that know the cut and paste, the drag and drop of this century. Some of the sources for them are familiar, such as Pitman’s Short-hand Instructor, The Year You Were Born, 1986, or the unmistakable copy of junk mail. (The poems ‘Junk Mail’ and ‘The Year I Was Born’ are not linked to any specific text in the notes.)

Perry’s sensibility seems consciously Victorian in its choice of subject matter. 

Others are more rarified, parts of a long poem by the avant-garde poet Anne Carson—for instance—are drafted in to make ‘A Most Satisfactory Dreamlife,’ and the literary detritus of Tennessee Williams shores up the familiarly titled ‘A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.’ (The quote is the subtitle of the little-know play ‘Stairs to the Roof,’ where it appears as ‘A Prayer for the Wild at Heart that are Kept in Cages.’)

Though I admit to being wary of the make-weight guff that comes out of workshops, the Williams mash-up contains beautiful lines, as does its Carson inspired relation. 

Rebecca Perry — Beauty/Beauty (Interview)

So, Rebecca — is everything ready? Are you excited?

Everything is ready! For a while I just had a couple of boxes of books in my front room and I felt a little detached from the whole thing, then – are you ready for a terrible, half-baked simile – it was like that moment in Sonic where he smashes open the capsule to free the woodland creatures, and there’s a very brief screen-freeze, then the capsule blows up and they all leap out and gambol around.  It was like that. The screen freeze was basically me walking past the boxes in my front room for a couple of weeks, looking at them a little distrustingly, then people started tweeting pictures of it and someone told me they saw it in a bookshop, and suddenly it felt like it was out there.

(Sonic Simile)

Could you say a little about how you came to be publishing with Bloodaxe?

I was incredibly lucky. For years I’d hoped that when I was ready for a book it would be with Bloodaxe – I’ve always admired the list and, more specifically, their legacy of publishing women and writers of colour where other poetry publishers were (and still are) failing to – so I sent my manuscript to Neil and, after suggesting I work on it a little and add some more poems, he accepted it. I’m very aware that I had a really easy run at the whole thing!

Before talking about what's inside the book, it seems like the design — judging from the beautiful cover at least — is really important to you. Could you say a little about the process, about how much input you had in the design of the book? 

The cover was very important to me, actually, and I was very grateful that I was allowed to have a say in it. I think someone else choosing it would have been tricky for me. I’ve thought a bit about why it was so important and I think it comes down to two things: the first is that art is very important to me, something I have a great love for, so I figured the cover may as well be a work of art. Also, because the collection doesn’t have a unifying theme, sense of place, or central image as such, I wanted an image that would sit beside it abstractly, something a little stranger.

The cover of Beauty/Beauty featuring 'Mask XXXV' by John Stezaker.

Lots of specific things – dogs, fruit, hearts, ice, flowers – recur throughout the book, so I spent an inordinate amount of time googling bizarre images featuring those things and then, as the search became less hopeful and more crazed, dogs eating fruit, which inevitably descended into me just watching videos of dogs on YouTube. Then (mercifully) my friend Alex, who had been helping me search, suggested I look at John Stezaker’s work. I saw Mask XXXV and immediately knew that was the cover for the book. Luckily Neil agreed it would be perfect, Bloodaxe approached John for permission, and a few months later were granted it. Once I’d seen that image (though we’d yet to be granted permission for use) it presented itself in various ways in the few poems I had left to write, so it was like an unexpected one-sided collaboration for me.

I also enjoy that the cover is quite divisive – most people love it but a few people have found it a little disconcerting, like ‘Oh! That’s… unusual? Did you choose that?’

Now, in terms of the contents of the book, ROY made some predictions about poems that might have made it and there's a taster on the Bloodaxe website, but what can you tell us more about the poems in the new book? Where do they come from? 

In the end very few poems from the pamphlet made it into the book and it felt a sort of relief to leave them behind. Not necessarily because of any great feelings of shame about the older poems but just because I wanted the book to be a new thing. Most of the poems didn’t make it because there was no way I’d have written them now, however many years on and that felt akin to being dishonest, somehow.

I find talking about my writing/articulating where it comes from very difficult. I suppose when I first started out writing I was certainly mostly reading male writers (Lorca, O’Hara and E E Cummings, who I still love) and lyric poetry, but for the last few years my interest has shifted and I’m interested in very different writing, mostly by women. So my poems come from the experience of being female, certainly, and the experience of love, and the terror of one day ceasing to be alive. A friend who helped edit the manuscript had written and circled the note  ‘DEATH’ on quite a lot of pages, which is… notable.

What was the writing phase like from pamphlet to collection?

They were very separate things – it wasn’t a case of the book developing from the pamphlet as such – and the book felt much more of a process. When I was working on the earlier poems with the vague notion that they might become a book, I was having my writing workshopped regularly and spending a lot of time worrying about editing them, being sure they were ‘clear’, hoping people didn’t hate them. Once the book was taking shape and I needed another 10 or 15 poems to make up the numbers, I wrote in a much more solitary, and less inhibited, way. I showed the poems to almost no one and a handful of them had only been read by one other person by the time the book published. I much preferred that way of working.

What did you enjoy the most about preparing your manuscript?

Once I’d made the decision to divide the book into sections it appealed more to my proclivity for micro-focusing. It was a much less daunting process to approach each section as a mini book within a book. Prior to that it had felt a bit unwieldy and overwhelming.

I was also finishing the writing during summer so I had lots of weekends sitting in my local park or on my balcony in the sun, with a pile of books and a jar of gherkins, which was lovely. I also had a couple of people who really helped me work on the manuscript, so there were brilliant evenings in the pub looking through the poems, deciding what to cut and what to keep. The process was really made by some of my friends actually, being relentlessly supportive and enthusiastic when I ceased to be.

Could you pick a poem to whet appetites?

This is for my friend, Laura, and was recently published in an anthology of poems about female friendship, Best Friends Forever, edited by Amy Key and published by The Emma Press [the poem 'Soup Sister' will also appear in Beauty/Beauty, which is published on the 25th]:

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Soup Sister


And, of course,

it bothers me greatly that I can’t know

the quality of the light where you are.

How your each day pans out,

how the breeze lifts the dry leaves from the street

or how the street pulls away from the rain.

Last week I passed a tree

that was exactly you in tree form,

with a kind look and tiny sub-branches

like your delicate wrists.

Six years ago we were lying

in a dark front room on perpendicular sofas,

so hungover that our skin hurt to touch.

How did we always manage

to be heartbroken at the same time?

I could chop, de-seed and roast

a butternut squash for dinner

in the time it took you to shower.

Steam curtained the windows, whiting out

the rain, which hit the house sideways.

One of us, though I forget who, said

do you think women are treated like bowls

waiting to be filled with soup?

And the other one said, of course.

Now the world is too big,

and it’s sinking and rising

and stretching out its back bones.

The rivers are too wild,

the mountains are so so old

and it’s all laid out arrogantly between us.

My friend, how long do you stand

staring at the socks in your drawer

lined up neat as buns in a bakery,

losing track of time and your place in the world,

in the (custardy light of a) morning?

*

Thanks from ROY and the little lizard to Rebecca Perry for responding to the suggestion of an interview at such a busy period. If you'd like t'see your work, or can think of someone else's, you'd like to see up on ROY then y'know what t'do. 

Also this: 

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.

McNeill and Solanki — Contemporary Couplets

In lieu of forthcoming reviews of Mahendra Solanki's The Lies We Tell and Christine McNeill's First and Last Music, both from Shoestring Press, here is a second post in the series Contemporary Couplets (thanks again to Mahendra for suggesting the name).

Gaps

I walk into your room

after they took you away

looking for anything that’s

still a part of you, imagining

a clip of nail, a wisp

of hair to be yours — trapped

in the gaps in the floor;

nothing to grasp,

nothing to hold on.

(pg. 8, Mahendra Solanki, The Lies We Tell, 

Shoestring Press, 2014)

*

Swan

You love to see me sew.

Is it the neck bending to the task,

like a swan contemplating the concentric motion

of its patch of water?

The needle tests the cloth,

plunges in. I hum a tune;

each stitch

brings up something from the deep.

I knot and cut the thread;

what you see

empties itself

as the quilt comes to rest in my lap. 

(pg. 18, Christine McNeill, First and Last Music, 

Shoestring Press, 2014)

_________________________________________________________________________________

Dimensions of Mahendra's ‘Gaps' are typical of the compressed lyrics in The Lies We Tell, both in the straightforward sense of how much space it takes up on the page and its syntactical scale, its reliance on a muted, subtle style. Love how the ghost of a final particle ‘to,’ as in ‘nothing to hold on to,’ hovers over the close of this elegantly simple autobiographical poem. Its clipped potential, the absence of the possible internal rhyme of ‘to’ and ‘you,’ feeling suitably brutal. 

On a similar scale, in both senses, Christine McNeill’s ‘Swan’ is also similarly autobiographical. Its combinatory contrast of a direct literal address, “you love to see me sew,” with a rising tone that tracks meaningful abstraction, “the concentric motion / of its patch of water … each stitch / brings up something from the deep,” is something that plays out well in the rest of the book. That contrasting colouring of tones, is something that, in the closing of the poem, is something that has drawn me back repeatedly to this poem and to First and Last Music as a whole. 

Both ‘Gaps’ and ‘Swan’ are understated and disciplined poems. Both represent fine intersections between expression and language, between saying what you want or are compelled to, and coming away with what language has to give. 

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.

Three Americans on Four Englands

Following on from Ben Wilkinson's response to Todd Swift’s ‘Four Englands: Four Debut British Poets Being Variously English,’ which was published in the October issue of Poetry Magazine and on their website, I thought it’d be interesting to pull in a few American voices on the article. Please feel free to add your own to the chorus. 

Views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of ROY, and shall not be used for advertising or product endorsement purposes, alwite?

Lawrence Eby

Well, the article is pretty thorough. It gave me a good sense of some of the drama surrounding the scene and a bit of its history, as well as its contemporary triumphs. It made me curious of these four poets, so it does its job well as an article. 

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Kevin Riel

Well, my first thought is I would really like to get my hands on James Brooke's book. My second is that the review overall seemed fairly banal and hapless, seemed to make its case as if no one had written poetry in the UK since WWII except Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney. Overall, it seemed to oversimplify these poets' influences—literary, cultural, historical, and otherwise. Exhibit A: 

“It all comes down to a certain kind of English xenophobic suspicion on the parts of some critics, readers, and writers, that English poetry was only ruined when it came into contact with European and American modernism in the twentieth century … a puritanism that wants poems simple, plain, and as undemanding as take-it-or-leave-it Church of England fetes.”

This statement seemed ridiculous to me. It's the old line that British critics and intellectuals are a lot of crotchety pedants besotted with pride and nostalgia for the country's Victorian, Romantic, and Elizabethan heydays. From my experience as a student at the University of Sussex for a year, the academic establishment in the UK is lively, radical, internationalist, and completely engaged with contemporary currents across all disciplines. A good deal more than anything I’ve encountered in the US. 

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Shondra Rogers

First off, this ... has minimized Mort into a singsongy poet with nice rhyme and simple narrative. Clearly he’s incorrect in the notion that she falls into the trope of duality as a one-trick pony as well. He obsesses over her drinking aspect, but my assumption would be that this is mainly due to his clearly masculine reading of the text. Further, he takes the Plath approach [and] that’s all too overdone: that she was nothing more than a confessional poet. He suggests that Berry has channeled her simply because her poems are emotional in tone, [which] again seems like a masculine paradigm that he's dug himself into. As an American reader I take into the text with me preconceived and often false notions of English life, which happen to include things such as an obsession with tea, and he does quite well to harp on this in British poets to the point that it’s more detrimental to the portrayal of British poets than beneficial. Also, for someone who knows English lit so poignantly, I find it disappointing that he only mentions Keats in the context of being a poet, being English, and being a Romantic. Superficial read[ings] if you ask me.

*

Despite criticism similar to that expressed above Swift said he saw no reason to respond stating, in similar words to Lawrence Eby, that “[the article] is meant to be an open door, inviting American readers (and beyond) to begin to read younger British poets. It has done that, and so succeeds." 

When asked for a response Helen Mort replied with the common-sense view “I think it's a good thing if an American readership is made aware of British poets through a review and hopefully some readers might seek the books out for themselves and form their own opinions." Judging from the three American voices reported here that would already seem to be the case. 

Four Ferocious Fulmars

First link's to the music game Hooked on Music created by Citizen Science and discovered through Radio 4's Inside Science. It's meant to be a large scale study of what makes songs catchy (or not) and it's bloody fun as well. The song starts, and if you recognise it you get to sing the bits that are missing. Bit like karaoke being used for the good of science.

Wonder if something similar would work for poetry?

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Read Jose Varghese's post on Paxman, nice to get his perspective on it.

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George Szirtes blogs like crazy and they're always very readable. This week it's speaking Hungarian and reading to old ladies. Wish he'd write some fiction.

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Came across Jon Stone for the first time via Ben Wilkinson on Facebook and through Jon the excellent Sidekick Books blog, etc. It's stimulating stuff as well, and aside from the video game/poetry posts Jon has put up that I'll think about later, there's an entertaining dressing down of Don Paterson's contribution to 'Letters to a Young Poet,' which was broadcast on BBC3. So Don and Jon, they argue like it's true love.

Here's a few excerpts from the article:

Don: The truly original idea must be part familiar, so that it can take the reader on a journey from the known to the unknown.

Jon: But anyone who has ever found themselves baffled and dismayed by other readers' enthusiasm or glowing testimonials will know that there is no formula for emotional impact. 

ROY: Ye-ah, but. But there are some givens, surely? I mean, we're an endurance predator that's evolved in a specific environment; emotion in-so-far as it's an evolved part of our physiology is at least systematic, if not formulaic. Isn't that why Hollyoaks works, not to mention ALL OF THOSE KOREAN DRAMAS?

*

Don: Readers read poetry to take them closer to something powerful and dangerous that they will not usually be prepared to let themselves feel.

Jon: Don's correspondent risks ending up lacking individual character in his poetry as a result of seeking guidance as to how to impress Don the reader, how to write poetry in the style of Don Paterson.

ROY: Jon is bang on I reckon. But then, isn't that just how it works? The anxiety of influence and all that? And the ones who overcome the influence mix stuff up into something interesting?

*

Don: The brain will entertain anything that is sung to it first, even things it vowed not to let pass.

Jon: Pertinent - this whole essay is an exercise in singing sweetly in order that the listener's brain entertain (and perhaps accept) what are often very wild assertions. So point proven, I guess. 

ROY: Duh, persuasion is built into language, to the extent that they're pretty much synonymous. That's why your post's so bloody iconoclastically brilliant too.  

Tony Walsh — A Girl, Like, Y'Know

Talked to my sister Katie the other day and, after chatting about Mario Kart 8, after reminiscing about how I used to thrash her on the N64 (please accept that unquestioningly), she asked me about the fruit over here. Well, we ended up touching on the palm trees, and I just happened to suggest she have a look at my last blog post. 

She went quiet. Very quiet. Now this could mean one of two things. Either she’s not looked at it and feels guilty or she has looked at it and thought it was crap. I went with the latter, saying, “don’t worry, it’s not another one of them boring poem posts,” and she laughed a give-away laugh. I know my sister, but I sometimes forget that the kind of geeky-indulgence poet fanboys like to wallow in is definitely a big turn-off for most. 

So this one’s for you Kay, I won’t be squelching about in any high-falutin' textual analysisisis just trying to put down why I like this poem so much. Better mention though, if I mention the word ‘poem’ I mean the video, the performance and not pg. 37 in SEX & LOVE & ROCK&ROLL (Burning Eye Books, 2013), which is reproduced at the bottom of the post. 

If you’ve watched the poem already then you’ve heard Tony’s introduction. It’s “in the words of a young girl” who “finds herself with a baby” and, moreover, “she hasn’t got fancy words” to tell her story. He goes on to say that, “this poem tries to take its power … from her inarticulacy and her limited vocab.” We know where we stand then and are able to orientate ourselves early for this sadly all too familiar story.

After the intro we get a brief glance down, and then we’re straight in. (People who perform from memory get nowhere near enough credit for doing it and the delivery here is great, fluid and natural.) So we’re led through the first two or three stanzas with a smile, with gestures. And it really comes across, we’re nodding along with it, inadvertently smiling along with the “pissed,” and “kissed,” and “round the back.” We’re even still smiling when we get to the “fuckin’ hell,” but that soon starts to fade. The insistent and level-eyed delivery starts to feel more reproachful and our stupid grin sinks. 

As we follow into the complications of the “area’s crap” and “loads of stuff,” we start to sense something bad coming. The voice, that seemed so self-confident, starts to collapse in on itself. What follows, the almost impossible confession of violence, which starts with “felt a bit — shit,” and leads into “hits” and “kicked” is represented on the page (see below) by a couple of dashes and repeated letters. What else can you do? To get to the emotion represented in the performance on the page you’d have to wedge a good bit of blank space between the lines and stretch out the stuttered letters over the margin. 

Well-produced too, good sound quality (bit of a shame about the ambient being loud) and great choice of location. Can’t imagine a poem like this being read out to you on the street. Seems more intimate, too confessional to be done in front of people. 

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Me crummy Signet edition of Robert Frost’s poems has a quote on the back that enthuses, ‘His poems are people talking!’ I don’t know anyone who talks like a Frost, thank God, but I know people who talk like a Walsh. Well, here’s one person talking, in a voice that is utterly believable and inhabited. Moreover, it’s a voice, handled with sensitivity and sympathy for its perceived inadequacies. What the unforgivingly aspirational among us identify as vulgar stylistic traits, excessive use of repetition, too few fancy words to throw the plebs off, and ready use of—can you believe it—cliché? Yet, in the face of what they’d say, the very limits of expression are used as the means to propel this poem to the heights of something very much like eloquence. 

I’ve a crummy video-game metaphor for it. So there’s Mario in Super Mario Galaxy, right? And occasionally he comes up against an enclosed sheer wall that he just can’t jump. What the expert player (or any average six-year-old) knows to do here is use Mario’s limits to beat the challenge. You jump off the opposing wall onto the other and so on, using your momentum to ricochet to the top. The obstacle becomes the means of progress. 

And this is just what this poem does. Never once stepping outside the bounds of its proscribed realism it ricochets off its limits. The chorus, or refrain, is the perfect example of this, the "like" and the "y'know" that run all the way down the spine of the poem keep turning us around when our attention might otherwise try and escape. This, I reckon, is what makes this poem so absorbing and memorable.

It is also practically inspiring; if this much can be said with so little then it's not only Mr Walsh that can do it. It's not only the people who know more fancy words than you who can be persuasive, who can represent their own interests and arguments, you can do it too. 

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A Girl, Like, Y’Know 

When I met him, and that

I just liked him, and that

There was summat about him, you know

And we was all a bit pissed, like

And we just sort of kissed, like

And ended up round the back, like, you know

And then later, and that

When I found out and that

I was like, ‘Fuckin’ hell,’ like, you know

And me Mam’s like, ‘No way,’ like

But then she’s ok, like

She’s been dead good now, like, you know

I’m like, ‘Are you moving in, like?’

‘To help with this kid, like?’

And he’s like, ‘Whatever,’ you know

So we got our own flat, like

But the area’s crap, like

And we need loads of stuff, like, you know

And then - I had Kyle, like

And now - for a while, like

I’ve felt a bit - shit, like, you know

And he - hits me, and that

And he’s - kicked me, and that

But - I - I - I - love him, and that, like, you know?

And - sometimes - I feel, like

I’ve - ruined me life, like

But then I’m like - ‘What life?’ You know?

Three Triumphant Tangerines

Right so there's the Paxman furore to start with, isn't there? For anyone who isn't aware, Jeremy Paxman, Newsnight host who loves to stick his stick in nests of any sort and, until fairly recently, facial hair experimenter extraordinaire was chosen to be one of the Forward Prize judges. Well, now quite a lot of poetry people seem to thing he's a bit of a twat for saying uncultured things like, "[poetry] has connived at its own irrelevance," and that he wishes poetry in general would just, "raise its game a little bit."

A lot of his remarks seem extremely sensible to the President of R.O.Y. (i.e. me) and I was also pleased to read Ms Baroque's post 'Paxman, poets, and the 'pellety nest'', which is as balanced but biting as her best.

It's worth reading Michael Symmons Roberts' response to Paxo's comments too. I thought his most sensible remark to be: "we have lost the sense that poetry sits halfway between prose and music - that you can't expect to read it like a novel. We are quite used to downloading an album and listening to certain tracks ... poetry needs to be consumed in that way." Must admit I'm not a fan of the nasal haughtiness detectable in Roberts ('we are quite used', 'you can't expect') but I agree completely with this. Still, don't think many poetry people think twice of simply how unnatural it is to be self-conscious about language. It would also be nice to see more practical experimentation with feasible/marketable audio productions.

How best to achieve this? Single poems being available for download is excellent, pricing them sensibly too?

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Mr Ben Wilkinson's new pamphlet 'For Real' has been launched and it looks spectacular in Liverpool red. Hopefully be reading my own copy before too long as sent a cheque sometime last week through the post. Don't want to think about how long it will take to traipse its way to my doorstep though.

There's a nice 'next big thing' Q&A on Ben's blog, which is worth a gander.

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Thirdly, one of my poems has been accepted by Helen Ivory for publication on IS&T so that's good. If you don't know the magazine then check it out. Lots and lots of poems, a huge archive and editors. Editors that I believe to be good, which is a statement I make completely without bias of any kind.

One Onerous Onion

Just one thing this week, the film Reaching for the Moon, the story of the tragic love affair between Elizabeth Bishop (Miranda Otto) and Lota de Macedo Soares (Gloria Pires) and two or three things to think about from that. 

Rather than go in for a review of the film or to attempt to use my insufficient but enthusiastic knowledge of Bishop’s life to pick at the holes that dramatisation leaves in the story, I want to concentrate on one aspect of the film, its conclusion and its comments on poetry. So, you have been warned, if you haven’t seen the film, or don’t know the story, don’t read on.

So, at the beginning, Bishop goes to meet (a frankly seedy) Lowell (Treat Williams) at the boating pond in Central Park, and reads him an embryonic version of ‘The Art of Losing.’ He says some not very kind things and then plants his hand on her knee, at which she giggles. Bloody hell. But it’s the composition of this singular poem that acts as a pair of bookends to the tragic action of the film. 

After Lota’s death (I did warn you!) Bishop again returns to the boating pond to meet Lowell and we are treated to a reading of the whole poem over shots of swishing trees and, yes, a fucking sinking toy boat. Come on! Mr Director, what were you thinking? And then this intelligent and above average film decends into a final 10 minutes of pure indulgent pap. 

How did this happen? Did Mr Baretto run out of ideas? Did they let the intern do the ending? Or can’t the medium handle the material? It’s at least possible that the end may have been intended as praise for poetry’s resiliance as an art form, for its capaciousness. Instead we’re left with the drab morbidity of an ending that seems to suggest that the poem is to blame. It was the poetry what done it. The poem that wanted to be finished, to be perfect at all costs, that possessed Bishop and killed Lota. 

Is that why I dislike it so much? Because there might be an element of truth to that? Donaghy’s remarks about his father’s funeral are in the same vein, the morbidty of the mind that creates, that wants to ‘get a poem out of this.’ Then the paraphrased Paterson: if you’re not a poet, consider yourself lucky. 

Different Principles of Enclosure — Mona Arshi

'Different Principles of Enclosure' — Toe Good Poetry

I admire Carrie Etter’s approach to posting poems on her blog. She puts up lines she likes from books or whole poems without comment. If I didn’t feel obliged to follow the format of my previous close-reading posts then I’d be happy to only repost this poem by Mona Arshi. What can I add to it, really? But, you’re under no obligation to read my thoughts on it and, in fact, I actively encourage you to ignore my waffling and re-read and listen to the poem a dozen times instead. But that said, I think it’s natural enough for poetry to be set in and around prose, as long as it’s acknowledged that any comments can’t be a substitute for the poem and shouldn’t attempt to displace it.

When Mona Arshi’s poem ‘Hummingbird’ won the Magma poetry competition in 2012, she later, in September that same year, wrote a short piece entitled ‘Hummingbirds, ghazals and pistachio nuts,’ which is as close to an Arshi ars poetica as anything you’re likely to find. Joyfully, she writes, without a trace of hubris, of “the fascination of suspending intentionality” and her love of “[using] language to allow creative accidents to take place.” 

Identifying herself as a “latecomer” to poetry, she seems to be an unjaded poet, in the way those who have ‘been trying to make it’ or who self-identify as a ‘poet’ but have had little or no public acknowledgement sometimes are. Perhaps her felt freedom for form (she says of her failure to write ‘Hummingbird’ in a strict ghazal that “the form needed to loosen and give way”) comes from and is rendered sustainable by this outsider identity. 

It’s certainly interesting that Arshi has lived a life, was trained as and practised as a Human Rights Lawyer, and was used to, “employing language in a fixed and rule-bound way.” Surely that’s something easy to undervalue in a poet, as if it might be cut away and made irrelevant. Instead, it must function as a point of contrast a locus standi in her public and private identity. 

Is this why the poem I’ve chosen to read seems to embody the duality of ‘this was an accident, but no accident,’ in the contrary sense Bishop identifies? The best poems are “lucky accidents” but “aren’t at all — they are … the indication that you have worked hard” and have “managed to create the right atmosphere in your own brain for a good poem to emerge” (1995, 361). I believe there is a similar sympathy for the long-game of language, to the waiter crossing borders with writer, in Arshi. 

But if that’s true then so is the reverse. George Szirtes, in his lucid and unpretentious post-Paterson T.S. Eliot prize lecture ‘Thin Ice and The Midnight Skaters,’ talks about poetry as a dance across the ice, and though I can’t paraphrase the superb way in which he unpacks the metaphor here, we might think of it as antithetical to the other half of Bishop’s ‘work.’ It is a spontaneous trust, more reliant on instinct than intellect, and open to the potential freedom of accident, to embracing it as unintended intention. 

"The Writer", Hampstead Heath, August 2005. tinyurl.com/m3ew8h2

But that’s mostly piffle, isn’t it? Interesting enough to me, but piffle. Better to look at the poem, to look at it as an achieved accident. Well, initial scans tell us that it’s made up of seven loose knit stanzas, that it avoids full rhymes, and that, with only a single period (uh-oh, the Americanisms are creeping in!) it represents a single sentence. That bloody paperclip from Microsoft Word circa 2003 would be pretty displeased with a sentence of 96 words (he flags up anything over 60 as ‘wordy’), but, fortunately, we can torture him with a number of right clicks to the head until we find ‘ignore.’ But it is a remarkably challenging poem to read aloud, for me, at least. Arshi, on the other hand, seems delighted to skillfully percolate her voice through the “stops of breath, sparrow diction,” of this poem. 

And once you read and listen to it a dozen or so times the sense of its sound starts to coalesce in your ear. The way it delicately drops down the page and catches on the series of -ing endings, “something,” “thing,” and “climbing.” “Mounting,” “diminishing,” and “drilling" all the way down to the final two, “flying” and “flushing.” 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Because at first brush are also the images, “the bird” like “a whirring crocus” a “little thing / of spongy moss” or “like a pebble / being sucked down / or drilling.” And what can you say? That some of these accidents might not be so fortuitous? But the poem is all the better for its oddness, for the voice’s capacity to dilate about where language wants to go. Rowyda Amin, when she said the poems display, “the precision and eerie, alienating beauty of a familiar object viewed via an electron microscope,” put it far better than I ever could. 

Though there is indisputably something of the miniaturist in the voice of ‘Different Principles of Enclosure’ there is also an unembarrassed confidence. Evident, I think, in the willingness to let personal memory enter: “unwrap the image of the blue felt hat I / always wore on the heath.” And, in the rhymed lines that truncate from ‘hat’: “flying can be / like that / (like the thing that calls you back).” It feels like the voice has chosen an opportune moment to make an end, has played on an accident of memory, ‘the hat,’ to tie a knot. 

The whole effect, of the opportunistic play with language, is one of apparent uniqueness, of it being a true “lucky accident,” which, by its nature, is unrepeatable. And though we can be sure this poem won’t happen again, we can only hope that Mona’s experiments continue to produce similar results.

53° 09'33.17" N, 0° 25'33.18" W — Rory Waterman

A lodge-house to an estate, once: the front wall

still ends with one redundant brick gatepost,

its rustic latch clicking only to wind,

and the clean bulk of its limestone cap

shorn of clogs of English ivy, carious and precarious.

There used to be a long metal water-butt

out of bounds, snug to a wall, pungent

with moss and webs, its content a black

lilting mirror when I'd raise the lid

that was wooden and rotten and gave slightly.

And there was a low-slung roof on a breezeblock annexe

with a fat windowsill and convenient external piping

that occasionally broke and had to be mended;

and a cigar-box of old green pennies and shards of pot

from the garden, out of sight in a cracked soffit.

But the side gate remains, a wrought iron cross-hatch

mass-produced in a distant foundry, showing

bends for the feet that are no longer mine,

that kicked off and made it a shrill, dull swing;

and the fence is the matt-green my grandmother painted,

though tarnished now, and in places peeling.

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When I first came across ‘53°’ as the Guardian's Saturday Poem, I was ready to dismiss it. I thought my initial half-hearted scan told me all I needed to know about it, i.e. that it’s built up out of three solid-looking five-liners (if you know the technical term, please let me know) and one equally cairn-stone-like final six-liner. The second, slightly less lazy sweep, picked up compounds like ‘breezeblock,’ ‘water-butt,’ and ‘wrought iron.’ “Great,” I thought, “another Heaney knock-off. Another old fashioned poet getting a hard-on over the concrete.” I was ready, in other words, to dismiss it as a dull old dad poem. 

So I give it to my dull old dad to read (don’t worry, he openly admits/aspires to being the most boring person in the world) and he likes it. Quelle surprise! But I listen as he gives me specifics: “I like ‘English ivy,’” he says, “like ‘carious and precarious.’ Didn’t know, ‘carious’”—and he shuffles his eyes over at me, cautious, as always, of being caught out—“was a word? I like ‘convenient external piping’ too,” he muses, "‘and mass-produced.’ But they’re not coordinates. They’re longitude and latitude.” I watch him carefully articulate each part of the title over the rim of the Tetley’s he likes to provide me with. “Fifty-three degrees, nine minutes and thirty-three seconds …” 

“Seconds?” I interrupt, incredulous, because he must have got his wires crossed. Regardless of whether, technically speaking, they are ‘coordinates’ or not, we’re talking about place, about distance and location, and not time, right? So dad launches into a lengthy explanation of how the globe is divided up, some of which I know, some of which (even though it's KS2 stuff) is utterly mysterious to me. And mysterious in that brain-blocking utterly quotidian way, like flying from Keflavik, Iceland, at seven and arriving, 3600 miles away in Seattle a mere 45 minutes later at a quarter to eight. 

My interest is piqued and, thinking I might have been too hasty to judge, I go back to the poem. 

What the little orange man sees.

I think a good way to start appreciating it is to—in true internet style—skip to the money-shot and look closely at the last two lines. So what do they tell us? Well, there’s no couplet, for one thing, and even though the ‘showing,’ ‘swing,’ and ‘peeling,’ of l.17, 19, and 21 do set up an audible echo, I think it’s fair to say, in terms of an ending, it’s a bit of a non-event. But this, I would argue, is what makes the poem and is the only way it could go out.

In one of the later letters collected in One Art, Elizabeth Bishop complains about her students’ tendency to “try to tie everything up neatly in 2 or 3 beautiful lines” (One Art, 1995, 596). It’s to this poem’s credit then that the last 2 or 3 lines are nothing if not understated; closure, in a formal sense, is only provided by—what I figure—is the pararhyme of ‘painted’ and ‘peeling.’ 

Because, as far as tempo is concerned, this is a remarkably even poem all the way through. From the quietly assonantal first few lines of ‘lodge-house,’ ‘once,’ ‘one,’ and ‘gatepost,’ onto the ‘rustic latch’ onomatopoeically, but quietly ‘clicking’ in the wind. 

Further evidence of an even tempo is the tiny modulation of excess detectable in l.9-10; ‘I’d raise the lid / that was wooden and rotten and gave slightly.’ ‘And’ has to be the most powerful word know to man. And what if that line was, ‘was wooden, rotten, and gave slightly’? Would that make much of a difference? Yes. The series of ands in place of a series of commas, act like bumps in the road, allowing the reader to register an emotional resonance that, were the language more strident, would be lost. 

And I believe this emotional resonance is the main achievement of the language in the poem. The lyrical ‘I’ is almost totally absent (occurring once in ‘I’d,’ in the unreal past, occupying only 3 out of the poem's 1,000 odd chars); instead we get a subject subsumed by the object of mutual attention. Take l.18, for example, where ‘the feet that are no longer mine,’ kick off against a gate. The feet that are no longer mine? What a weird thought. They were my feet so, what? Do I have a new pair of feet? Attempting to think about that induces the same over-clocking I get when I think about flying into the future/past and calls up a remark of Peter Porter's on George Herbert's 'Virtue,' that "the daring of ... great poets is largely in their sudden blows of ordinariness" ('Poetry and Materialism,' 2001, 198).

Little orange man stands at
crossroads.

Similarly, in l.19 there’s a blow of the ordinary I was misreading for ages. The line, ‘kicked off and made it a shrill, dull swing,’ I was reading as, ‘kicked off and made a shrill dull swing.’ Again, it’s a small difference, 4 chars out of a 1,000 (it’s consoling that 0.04% of anything’s pretty easy to miss). Kicking off against it doesn’t just make a noise, it imaginatively transforms the object into something else; it turns the ‘gate’ into a ‘swing.’ So Porter again, in the same essay, says "[language] has to be made materialist by the alchemy of the poet" (2001, 190), which seems to chime well with the ample reverence for ordinary mystery this poem demonstrates.

Maybe it’s because I returned to the poem sufficiently confused to not not understand it, or maybe, now that I’ve put roughly 6,000 miles between the place and the people I’d known as home, the poem seems much more ego-apt. Whatever the reason, I’ve found it increasingly arresting. 

This poem is a remarkable act of linguistic monument-making, the load-bearing past simple and its solid syntax support the weight of a series of descriptions compacted so densely that tracing its lines reminds me more of tracing relief work in stone than something made mostly on the breath and the brain.

And that’s why I’ll be returning to ‘53°’ and the rest of Rory's poems in Tonight the Summer's Over, be keeping an eye on developments on his blog, and next time won't be so eager to dismiss dull old dad poems. 

Anyone interested in reading more should check out the write up on Rory's poetry on 'Between Sound and Sense,' and the grand little magazine 'New Walk,' on which Rory works as an editor. 

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Would like to hear what other people thought about ‘53°,’ did you like it from the get-go, or did it grow on you? Feel free to comment or social-mediarize me.