Hearing poems in the head. Hannah Silva’s Forms of Protest

I’m going to start with stating something that I haven't fully worked out for myself before, and may be obvious to everyone else.  I feel slightly embarrassed about doing this.  How people hear poems while reading them on the page must be a subject of enquiry, from academic research to blog posts. 

When I begin to read a poem silently, an inner voice starts up in my head.  Usually the voice is a disembodied version of my own.  The music of the poem runs alongside the voice; not exactly an accompaniment, rather something deeper, less conscious.  If the poem is by someone whose voice I know from readings or recordings, or by a friend/contemporary, then I hear it in the poet’s voice: Seamus Heaney or Sharon Olds; Patience Agbabi, Hannah Lowe, Stephen Watts.  The more distinctive the voice, the stronger this phenomenon is.  Going back: Dylan Thomas (Fern Hill!), Elizabeth Bishop.  My own inner voice still runs alongside, but subdued.  

Paul Celan

At least, I think this is what happens.  It’s difficult to analyse.  Maybe a different analysis would change my mind.  I would love to be able to read Keats with his voice, or Shakespeare.  Or Catullus, or Sappho.  Or Paul Celan… writing that, it suddenly occurred to me that this might be possible.  Here he is reading ‘Psalm’, and here ‘Todesfuge’.  Now I am going to try to go on writing this despite feeling moved and disturbed by those readings. 

The fact that I hadn’t looked for recordings of Celan before, despite occasional intensive phases of reading his work, shows how much of a page reader I am.  But poetry readings are a means of acquiring poets’ voices, to take back home into their books.  I’m looking forward to this happening at Niall Campbell’s London launch of ‘Moontide’ this week. 

Researching contemporary political poems for a workshop recently, I discovered Hannah Silva.  That too is embarrassing – to be so far behind.  I’d liked her sestina very much in the anthology Adventures in Form, but hadn’t listened to her performing.  Here she is reading/performing ‘Gaddafi Gaddafi Gaddafi’, a poem that comes in waves of sound, a child’s word-game in a prison-like, soundproof location, that also sounds like the chanting of a crowd:

Gaddafi a room with strong walls

Gaddafi strong floors and strong ceiling

Gaddafi and choose a word Gaddafi not any word

One of the ways the poem works is that the syntax of the text, concealed by the repetitions of “gaddafi”, is tightly controlled and very clear – all the more so when it overhauls itself by repeating phrases and other words.  In Silva’s reading, the poem comes across as very cogent.  Finally the meaning of the dictator’s name is lost and the name itself gallops away:

gaddafi gaddafi gaddafi we chant our way through this

loss of meaning until we become a gaddafi of horses

galloping: gaddafi gaddafi gaddafi.

The ending reminds me of a nursery rhyme which my ear still hears as if it doesn’t yet understand the words… ending, gallopa gallopa gallopa.

After listening to ‘Gaddafi Gaddafi Gaddafi’ I bought Silva’s book, Forms of Protest.  That sestina, ‘Hello My Friend’, is there.  The sestina may be today’s most despised poem-form, but it offers great potential for playing around with text.  Silva makes full use of that, her starting-point being disjointed phrases from email scams: 

I am contacting you with something urgent,

you have always been a good friend

The poem reaches far beyond this into the realms of social media and instant news culture.  Silva captures well the slightly off-true syntax of spam.  The repetitiveness of the form adds to the insistent tone and the confusion around the interconnectivity of things: 

Sometimes I wonder if we really need to be connected

to an idea, a chink in history that only now is urgent.

I wonder why I feel the need for a friend

when friendship has become a meaningless subject.

One of the two things I like best about Silva’s poems is that they address political subjects, often head-on, usually by using experimental techniques as a way to get beyond familiar types of political discourse.  Secondly, they combine such techniques (eg collage, homophonic translation, concrete poetry, texting) with lyric poetry, in varying proportions. 

‘Opposition’ rubbishes politician-speak by breaking it down into its components, from the insincerity of stock phrases:

It’s great to be here in Liverpool

we’re happy about that.

I’ve been in Downing Street

it’s great to be here in Liverpool

We’re happy about Downing Street

it’s great to be here in Liverpool

To a crazed obsession with cuts:

And yes cutting the

And yes cutting the nat

And yes cutting the national

And yes cutting the cutting the cutting cutting…

cuttingcuttingcuttingcuttingcuttingcuttingcuttingcctctctctctct…

The word ‘cutting’ is itself cut up, leaving only its onomatopoeic consonants.  This is a good example of a poem that must be great when performed, but also works very well on the page.  Nearly everything does work.  One exception is ‘Insults’, which might be effective in performance but its 23 lines come across as a lucky dip on the page, despite the lively language:

You are a surreal pandemic

You are an uber wacky

You are a poor man’s metaphor

You are an immortal waste of space

There is a suitably surreal, both funny and sinister “adaptation” of Kafka’s The Trial, one of several poems sustained over several pages and (like ‘Opposition’) in several parts with widely varying form and rhythm. 

Perhaps a deferment would suit you better?

Would you like me to explain what deferment is about?

Leave the carpet alone and listen to what the lawyer is saying!

Silva addresses gender politics, in very different environments.  Sometimes all you can do is laugh in the face of despair... ‘Tory Party Sonnet’ starts:

There are no women left, can’t win

carpeted halls, a place that smelt, women left

exhausted sandwiches spoke only to themselves.

It reads like, and is, a collage.  The last two lines are brilliant.. get the book!  ‘River Bank’ is also disjointed but graphically frightening instead of comic:

What do you do with a slut?

Reach for the ketchup bottle.

I could easily quote from another dozen or so poems, to cover more of the variety of form and subject matter.  There’s a good review on John Field’s blog, which covers both similar and different ground.  Reading the book, my inner voice goes all over the place, turning into Silva's for 'Gaddafi Gaddafi Gaddafi' and a couple of others I've listened to, and extrapolating from her voice to varying degrees for the rest.  

To end, here is the last verse from the lyrically weird last poem, ‘Sharing Faces’:

 

 it is a lonely place

     the body stretched out across the river

                      walk on it  I dare you

 

Forms of Protest is published by Penned in the Margins.  

First Poem

People keep mentioning ‘Tarantella’ – it seems to be having a Moment.  My mental map for childhood memories can locate where I was when I first heard it, aged 7: in a classroom with walls the colour of the less lurid kind of mushy peas.  On one wall was a grid with our names down the side and x2, x3, x4 etc along the top.  Whenever one of us mastered a new times table, the relevant square in the grid was filled with a coloured star.  Or were the stars all gold?  The room faced south and I’m seeing the sun lighting up our stars, which made an interesting pattern, though one very unlike real stars. 

It didn’t matter who this man with a strange name was.  I don’t think I associated him with the Cautionary Tales.  The poem’s rhythms, rhyme, speed and descriptive power took root.  The pattern of the sounds went in and out like the dance.  I could see most of the poem though had trouble with “the wine that tasted of the tar”; how could this adult drink taste of the sticky stuff that melted on roads in the summer?  I can still see what I saw – the courtyard of an old, white-painted inn with several floors of wooden-railinged galleries, red flowers/leaves and everyone looking Spanish.  There wasn’t a picture, I’d never been abroad and we didn’t have a television at home.

Attachment to the romantic sublime in landscapes must start early… re-reading the poem brings back my visualisation of the second verse too.  I relished the abrupt change of mood to doom and gloom – all those long vowels, “more.. hoar.. falls”, etc, and the feet tramping in the dead sound of the words ending in d, “sound.. tread.. ground.. sound”.  Not knowing what had happened only drew me deeper in.  Probably not understanding all the words (muleteer, tedding, hoar) did too.  So, I think, did the idea of remembering something that couldn’t be retrieved from the past but  could be recreated on the page.      

Of course some of the above may be false memories, as dubious as the goldness of the stick-on stars.  But at least some of it’s valid; and above all I can remember the feeling of the experience – my first ever grown-up poem, and the first time I got what poetry could do.  Anyway, here’s ‘Tarantella’.  You can listen to Hilaire Belloc himself half-reading, half-singing it on the Poetry Archive.  There’s an interesting piece about him on the same page.    

Tarantella       by Hilaire Belloc

Do you remember an Inn,

Miranda?

Do you remember an Inn?

And the tedding and the spreading

Of the straw for a bedding,

And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,

And the wine that tasted of the tar?

And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers

(Under the vine of the dark verandah)?

Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,

Do you remember an Inn?

And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers

Who hadn't got a penny,

And who weren't paying any,

And the hammer at the doors and the din?

And the hip! hop! hap!

Of the clap

Of the hands to the twirl and the swirl

Of the girl gone chancing,

Glancing,

Dancing,

Backing and advancing,

Snapping of a clapper to the spin

Out and in –

And the ting, tong, tang, of the guitar.

Do you remember an Inn,

Miranda?

Do you remember an Inn?

Never more;

Miranda,

Never more.

Only the high peaks hoar:

And Aragon a torrent at the door.

No sound

In the walls of the halls where falls

The tread

Of the feet of the dead to the ground

No sound:

But the boom

Of the far waterfall like doom.

Charlton Lido, swimming poems, Waterlog

Londoners, especially south-east Londoners, where are you?  Why not here?  Forget all London’s other best-kept secrets, this is The One.  5pm on Good Friday: me and 3 other swimmers in this heated, 50 metre, open air pool. 

Swim on your back and align yourself by the clouds – not many of them recently, instead blue sky which goes up, and up, and up.  Swim on your front and, if the sun’s out, watch the net of light-ripples on the pool floor.  In calm conditions, there are extra bright points of light where ripple lines intersect, reproducing the knot pattern of a fishing-net.  You, shadowy swimmer, are the fish, or, as you spread your arms/legs, Leonardo’s (wo)man in a circle.     

The pool floor and sides are a perfect pale, coolish blue.  Black lines down the centre of each lane have the fat certainty of masking tape.  At lane end they make a T-junction and break into dots (why is this satisfying?)  The water is heated to 25oC, which makes it a lot warmer than the air on a cold day like today, yet refreshing in hot weather.

Plodding up and down the quaint but dirty and run-down 25-yard local indoor pool can be a slog, though the aftermath involves mild euphoria.  Lido swimming is something else entirely – exhilarating while it lasts, and 4 hours later I’m still on a high.  

Photo: News Shopper

The peripherals are unfussy – changing cubicles round the side, (hot) poolside showers, lockers if you need them, all surrounded by plain art deco brick.  There’s a café plus terrace upstairs, newly opened, which looks good.  There’s a gym and stuff too.  And new loos; when the lido first re-opened briefly a couple of summers ago, the loos were ruin porn, a reminder of the pool’s precarious survival through the last three decades. 

Next to the lido is a beautifully kept small park – more a garden, really – full of blossom trees, birds, lavender hedges for the summer, and formal flower beds.  Today there was a single yellow rose, fully out. 

Anyway the lido is back now and is going, they say, to be open all year round… but each time I’ve been there in the last month since it re-opened, usually at lunchtime on a sunny weekday, there’s only been a handful of swimmers.  Last summer it opened for a few weeks and was so packed in the hot weather that you could scarcely spread a towel.  I’m afraid that if people don’t visit out of season, it’ll go back to the summer-only opening of former days.  The lido website is here, with a map, directions etc. 

People, go, it is heaven!  It’s also part of the much-vaunted and much-criticised Olympic legacy. 

***

Walking and poetry go together; swimming and poetry not so much.  There’s something about the swing of the walking legs, beat of the feet, beat of the heart that invites thoughts into a pattern.  But I love the rhythms of swimming, the sweep and frog-kick of breast stroke or the different water-wheels of front and back crawl.  Being in the semi-alien element of water does inspire poems. 

This is an extract from ‘Going Swimmingly’, from Katherine Pierpoint’s collection Truffle Beds (1995) which has several swimming-pool poems. The whole poem is here. 

Sheer weight and size of water!

Remembering some geography and its clean, cross-section diagrams–

The sea is an upside-down mountain of water,

An upturned yogi

Alive with pulling, fluid muscles;

A pressing city of water; a universe;

The town pool is an inverted block of flats, something

Gathered and gently milling. Container for a small revolution.

Hannah Lowe’s Chick also has a few.  This is from ‘What I Think About When I’m Swimming’:

           It is boring to watch me swim.

What is beautiful are the tiles

           with their century of rust,

                       the pool spread like a sunken ballroom,

marbled with the winter sun and here,

           the deep end’s edge

where I hang breathless,

           wet and warm and sad…

Then there’s Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, not poems but prose, a sort of diary of a swim through Britain.  He lived in north Suffolk in an old house with a moat (not that uncommon around there – you can drive around with an ordnance survey map, finding all the houses with boomerang-shapes or squares of water – moats must have been bang on trend there for a while).  The book opens with him swimming in the moat, with a “frog’s-eye view” of a rainstorm.  Mostly his swim-journey was about getting away from lengths but he did visit some pools, and expressed hope (in the late 90’s) that the re-opening of some famous lidos might signal a move back towards public provision.  Here he is in Parliament Hills Lido, almost alone on a sunny, cold November day:

..you can breathe and move in perfect rhythm, so the music takes over.  Mind and body go off somewhere together in unselfconscious bliss, and the lengths seem to swim themselves.  The blood sings, the water yields; you are in a state of grace, and every breath gets deeper and more satisfying.  You hunker down and bury yourself in the water as though you have lived in it all your life, as though you were born to it, and thoughts come lightly and easily as you swing up and down in the blue.  The sublime word ‘swimmingly’ is born of such moments; so is the Greek word ekstasis, root of ‘ecstasy’, which means simply to be outside your own body – exactly the state you achieve in a cold-water swim.  If you tread on air on your way from the pool, it is because you are floating somewhere above your corporeal self. 

   The beauty of a swimming pool is in its graphic simplicity, framing the contrasting, exquisite complexity of the snaking, opalescent mosaic of wave-forms projected on the bottom.  What you are seeing is changing so fast your eye can never quite catch up with it.  In every way you are dazzled.  It is not water you perceive so much as light, and how water can play with it.

Charlton Lido is open throughout the Easter weekend.