Poetry Society resignations, and call for an EGM: update

There are rumblous thunderings over central London.  That’s not an attempt at pathetic fallacy but a description of the weather, which is heading this way.  I live on the side of a hill, so can see it coming.  

Kate Clanchy’s list of Poetry Society members calling for an Extraordinary General Meeting – see my last post – has reached 222 names, almost two-thirds of the way to the 340 names needed.  Do email her at kateclanchy at gmail dot com if you want to join the list.

The Poetry Society trustees issued a statement yesterday.  This uses Judith Palmer’s resignation as an excuse not to comment on what’s going on.  At least it says something about what the trustees are doing, though I think it’s much too late for that to be enough.  A bit like one of those political situations where there’s a lot of pressure for change, but too little is offered too late, and what might have been accepted at an earlier stage is no longer enough, so pressure builds for more change…  Which reminds me of the current situation in Syria – just to put things in perspective. 

Some people abbreviate the Poetry Society to PoSoc, which adds a nice Orwellian touch.  There have been two doubleplusgood blog posts on PoSoc by Rob Mackenzie (today) and Katy Evans-Bush.  

While I was writing this, the weather arrived in Greenwich.  Lightning and thunder cracked and crashed right overhead.  I’ll put any more updates in the comments below, because I don’t want this to turn into a blog about the Poetry Society. 

The Poetry Society and organisational behaviour. How to support the call for an Extraordinary General Meeting

I was going to write about Edith Södergran this week, if I was in the mood for her.  She’s a poet one really does need to be in the right frame of mind to read.  Basil Bunting is another.  There must be more; another time I’ll think about who they are and why.



Romantic ruin no.1

Instead, this is going to be about the trouble at the Poetry Society – from the perspective of organisational behaviour.  I don’t know any of the personalities involved, and will stay off the gossip.  But I do have an MBA, specialising in organisational behaviour. 

You may wonder why I’m bothering with this.  Nearly half this blog’s readers are now in North America; it also gets read round the world from India, Brazil, South Africa, Europe and Australasia to Trinidad & Tobago, Brunei and Nepal…  So I apologise for writing about a storm in a teacup and I promise I won’t make a habit of it!

Anyway, the reason I’m doing it is that I don’t like to see an organisation which I belong to, and which does plenty of good work, in a mess.  Part of this mess the Poetry Society could resolve easily, just by communicating what’s going on.  



Romantic ruin no.2



Briefly, for anyone who doesn’t yet know but is interested, I think these are the facts.  The Poetry Society’s director, Judith Palmer, resigned suddenly in late May.  The part-time finance officer left around the same time, as did a third member of staff; and the Society’s president, Jo Shapcott, resigned in early June.  There has been a lot of fevered speculation about why, fuelled by leaks.    

Every organisation has its own culture and way of behaving.  If I were an organisation doctor, then my diagnosis of the Poetry Society’s symptoms, admittedly from a distance, would not be positive. 

The main symptom is that they aren’t telling us what’s going on.  (I don’t count the feeble statement on their website, saying that things are carrying on as usual.)  

This suggests that the Poetry Society does not want to be open about its governance, and lacks a sense of accountability to its members; and that those in charge are feeling defensive.  Secrecy has its place in the world, defence of the realm for example, but is often abused… I didn’t realise I was a member of the Secret Poetry Society.

The lack of openness also suggests that the trustees and staff don’t understand public relations.  Didn’t they know that failing to give out information would allow gossip and speculation to fill the void?   Or that when an organisation’s director and finance officer both leave suddenly, people will wonder whether financial problems have been discovered?  Apparently that’s not the case at all… but members have learnt this from the gossip, not the Poetry Society.  



Romantic ruin no.3

I do understand that there may be a sensitive personnel angle to this, which the PS wouldn’t want to publicise – indeed, they probably shouldn’t.  But why can’t they be open about the policy issues?  If resignations have taken place because of a difference over the Poetry Society’s direction, then the members should be told.  In 2009/10, membership and publications brought in £165,000 which was 21% of Poetry Society income, so they owe us.  (Presumably the publications bit is Poetry Review; unfortunately there is no note in the accounts giving a further break-down.)

As for the issues: there seems to be a split between those who want the Society to concentrate on education in its broadest sense, and those who want to do more to promote high-profile poets.  The Poetry Society is a registered charity, and its 2005 constitution states that “THE OBJECTS OF THE SOCIETY ARE TO ADVANCE PUBLIC EDUCATION IN THE STUDY, ENJOYMENT AND USE OF POETRY”.  (Interestingly, the Society’s annual report & accounts for 2009/10, which you can read on the Charity Commission website, lists subtly different objectives: “The objects of the Society are to promote the study, use and enjoyment of poetry”.  Why?  One can’t just change charitable objects casually, it’s a complicated process.)

This has all been going on for a month, and we are none the wiser except for a welter of gossip.  In the absence of the director, the trustees could show leadership – that’s one of the things they are there for.   And show respect for the membership, by talking to us. 

Romantic ruin no.4

I wonder what the Arts Council thinks – already the largest single funder of the PS, it increased its grant significantly in the recent controversial funding round in which others such as the Poetry Trust, the PBS and various publishers lost out. 

If 10% of the Poetry Society’s members ask for an Extraordinary General Meeting, it has to be held.  Kate Clanchy is trying to get names together to ask for an EGM, simply to get the PS to make itself accountable to us and explain what’s going on.  She has just started and has over 40 names so far; needs to get to 340.  If you are a PS member and would like to add your name, please email her at kateclanchy@gmail.com. 

The wastefulness of writing poems; rain; the excellence of sand dams

Writing poetry is so wasteful.  So many poems worked and worked on and abandoned.  Or finished, but unable to fly.  All my drafts are listed on a spreadsheet, but a better representation might be a plane wreck in the desert, bits strewn everywhere.  I don’t know whether to be encouraged or still further depressed when famous writers complain.  Here is Peter Porter, quoted in The Guardian a few months ago: 

Queueing for water, for days, near Mtito,
SE Kenya.  No sand dams here.

“I'm not at all confident about the quality of what I do, and I suffer like all people do, I think, who are writers, an intense disappointment – not at the reception of what I've written, but at my own inability to bring off what I want to bring off. Auden in his introduction to his Collected Poems (well, the first one of his collected poems), said in a writer's work there are usually four categories – he loved categorising things.  First, sheer rubbish which he greatly regrets ever having done.  Second, poems he's got nothing against except they're not very important; they're not very good but, you know, he doesn't hate them.  Third, the saddest of all, the fair notion, fatally injured.  And then the last one, the handful of poems he's truly grateful for, which if he were to publish would make his work seem dangerously slim, and vitiated.”

Seed bank, Kevanda, SE Kenya

 ‘Vitiated’ seems a strange word to use here.  (I’m assuming it’s Auden’s word, not PP’s; I’ve only got A’s Selected.)  I’ve just looked it up. Meanings include: to make incomplete or faulty; to corrupt or deprave; to contaminate; or to invalidate, make ineffectual, make [an argument] inconclusive.  Presumably it’s the first and/or last of these he means.  But why the assumption that it’s dangerous to be slim?  Does the best work need a context; is it all the better when surrounded by middling stuff? 

Of course Auden is the man who in later life described some of his 30’s poems, such as ‘Spain’ and ‘September 1, 1939’ as “trash” which he was “ashamed to have written”.  Thank goodness he wasn’t able to throw them down a memory hole.

Tree nursery, Meka, SE Kenya

It’s raining outside…. a week ago that would have seemed astonishing, as it had rained once since mid-March.  A spring without rain is unnatural.  Anyway at the weekend it rained non-stop all afternoon and evening and night, and some of the next day, and there have been showers ever since.  The effect on birds is amazing – I hadn’t heard a thrush since March, but now they are singing again.  And the blackbirds have got much more vocal.  When I walk along the station platform, I can hear two wrens singing, one either side.  Also the birdsong sounds much more liquid – revived, just as coloured pebbles are by water. 

No robins, though.  A black cat with white paws from across the road killed one of the pair nesting in the ivy hedge, who were my constant garden companions.  I think they raised one brood.  I hope so. 

Rain brings out the poets too.  Which 1950s magazine editor said that whenever it rained, he got lots of rain poems in the next post?  I think Sylvia Plath comes into this story somehow. 

Building a sand dam

 In some places in the world, a year’s only rain can fall in a couple of days. Or not at all.  Have you heard of sand dams?  They provide rural communities in semi-arid areas with clean water, and raise the water table at the same time.  They are low-maintenance and last for decades.  The inspiration for them came from a local farmer. 

Irrigating tomatoes, Mansenviro

You can still listen to John Humphreys making last week's BBC Radio 4 appeal for Excellent, which helps communities build them, here.  The charity’s website is here.  I’ve been to Kenya and seen sand dams, and talked to communities about the huge difference it’s made to their lives – diet, health, earning an income, going to school.  It’s wonderful.  Travelling around, valleys with sand dams are terraced and green with fields and trees; valleys without are the colour of earth and sand.  

“Your heart is your forest”.  Kenyan saying

I try to post something on this blog every week.  I won’t be posting anything next week, as I’ll be away.   

 

Kevanda self-help group discussion

Why does nobody read J H Prynne?

Well, not nobody; I do, for a start.  But I have yet to hear anyone else express enthusiasm for his work. 

He doesn’t make it easy.  I’ve just weighed Poems on the kitchen scales: 2¼lb, or just over 1 kilo.  This slab of a book would be a useful accessory for yoga, or for building a wall.  And getting hold of a smaller helping of his poetry is difficult.  With one exception, on Amazon you pay between £95 and £322 for old pamphlets, but most of them are unavailable.  Prynne hardly ever does readings.  There’s a recording on YouTube of him reading at Chicago a couple of years ago, but the sound quality is very poor, and, having expressed doubt about the value of readings in his introduction, he doesn’t read particularly well. 

And then there are the poems.  Here is the opening of ‘The Ideal Star-Fighter’:

Now a slight meniscus floats on the moral

     pigment of these times, producing

displacement of the body image, the politic

     albino.  The faded bird droops in his

cage called fear and yet flight into

     his pectoral shed makes for comic

hysteria, visible hope converted to the

     switchboard of organic providence

at the tiny rate of say 0.25 per cent

     “for the earth as a whole”.  And why

go on reducing and failing like metal: the

     condition is man and the total crop yield

of fear, from the fixation of danger; in

     how we are gripped in the dark, the

flashes of where we are.

That poem is from Brass, 1971.  It’s one of the poems he read in Chicago, maybe chosen because it is relatively easy to follow.  It seems to me to be a violently pessimistic poem.  In the last section it includes the lines “We walk / in beauty down the street, we tread / the dust of our wasted fields…. we have already induced / moral mutation in the species”. 

Typically for Prynne, it plunders the vocabulary of various specialisms, politics and also literature to produce strange juxtapositions, connections and imagery.  I find this exciting – it makes my synapses spark, whether or not I understand what is going on.

I’m not sure that late modernist poets are meant to be lyrical.  A few years ago I went to a reading/lecture by John Kinsella, organised by The Wolf magazine, in which JK and others referred admiringly to Prynne’s non-lyricism.  I suspected them of macho posturing, reflecting a value system which at least has the merit of rarity.   I find some Prynne very lyrical, including the poem quoted above.  More obviously, Moon Poem (from The White Stones, 1969), which ends:

I know there is more than the mere wish to

wander at large, since the wish itself diffuses

beyond this and will never end: these are songs

in the night under no affliction, knowing that

            the wish is gift to the

            spirit, is where we may

            dwell as we would

go over and over within the life of the heart

and the grace which is open to both east and west.

These are psalms for the harp and the shining

stone: the negligence and still passion of night.   

And the first poem, untitled, in Pearls that Were (1999), which ends:

So Orpheus tamed the wild beasts

  for long night comes down

moving naked, over the wound,

  the gem from the crown.

Ivory tower: not Cambridge Gothic
but Khiva minaret (pinkish bricks
the colour of Prynne's book cover)

What I don’t like at all is what is evident throughout his long oeuvre but becomes more pronounced in some later poems: a sort of senior common-room cleverness, an arid playing with language.  So I can see why people say, when asked about Prynne, that they find him dry and cerebral, as well as obscure and difficult.  But I think they miss the lyricism – and the emotion. 

I wonder if people also find the obscurity and difficulty threatening because they may not get individual references in a poem, let alone the whole picture.  Though in this google age, the former can be less of a problem – I just googled a quotation in ‘A New Tax on the Counter-Earth’ (from Brass) and found it came from Trollope’s The Prime Minister.  The poem, which is highly ironic and in parts comic, includes these lines:

                        

          … the stupid slow down & become

wise with inertia, and instantly the prospect of

money is solemnised to the great landscape.

It actually glows like a stream of evening sun,

value become coinage fixed in the grass crown.

The moral drive isn’t

            quick enough, the greasy rope-trick

has made payment an edge of rhetoric;

                           the conviction of merely being

                 right, that has

marched into the patter of balance.   

That could have come from a 2011 collection, not 1971.  Prynne’s  poems often use words from  finance and economics; they address the environment, disintegration, the edges of things, the end, muddle, disaster.  It is a shame his fractured language should be perceived as a barrier to such contemporary stuff.  I can’t think of anyone else who writes about it half as compellingly.  ‘On the Matter of Thermal Packing’ starts

In the days of time now what I have

is the meltwater constantly round my feet

and ankles.  There the ice is glory to the

past and the eloquence, the gentility of

the world’s being… 

That’s from the end of the 60’s.  I am probably reading it too literally, but the poem does contain a powerful metaphor for transience and instability (and/or other things I’ve missed); and becomes all the more powerful when read today. 

Relevance is only part of it, though.  One way to enjoy the poems is to… well, enjoy them – read them in a state of negative capability, and see what happens.  Maybe have fun reaching after references later, but only once the poem has entered in, as a poem, with all its richness and energy and colours, and anger, confusion and sometimes despair. 

There is a bit of help available with reading Prynne, though some of it is written in language which may well put off anyone who’s put off by Prynne anyway.  Thus keeping the smooth walls of the ivory tower in good repair.  An exception is a piece by Ruth Padel on his early poem ‘The Holy City’, in her book The Poem and the Journey.  She says, of modernism generally and JHP in particular:

‘It is as if, ninety years after [Modernism started, it] has become a form of elegy: a lament for the fact that words can never exactly match things…  Or else it has become an intense form of yearning driven by two incompatible desires: to get everything in and say you can’t.  A poem may want to be all of life but has to use form and language.  Form and language limit it, so the poem can never fulfil what it longs for… words can never completely represent the world. 

‘Formal traditions make a virtue of this; they revel in it.  Avant-garde work, like space travel, always wants to go for broke, go farther, strip away frontiers and boundaries.’  

Another exception is an interesting piece by Robert Potts in the Guardian, here, from which comes this statement by Prynne himself about his poetic practice:

‘It has mostly been my own aspiration, for example, to establish relations not personally with the reader, but with the world and its layers of shifted but recognisable usage; and thereby with the reader's own position within this world.’

A more recent piece by Potts is here.  And there’s a whole Prynne poem in Jacket, here, analysed by John Kinsella.

Two years after writing this I went to a lecture by Prynne at Sussex University.  It was rather entertaining – see here for an account.  

Prynne’s Poems are published by Bloodaxe. 

Valzhyna Mort (again), Jorie Graham, the dangers of speaking to poets at readings

This is a postscript to my last piece on Valzhyna Mort and Factory of Tears.  A London audience heard her a couple of years ago at Poetry International on the South Bank.  She read very well and intensely, including some poems in Belarusian, but seemed quite shy.  Maybe she was shy in the company of Jorie Graham, Mark Doty and Mourid Barghouti.  She’s been described as a ‘fireball’ and ‘electrifying’, and the internet audios of her reading in Belarusian sound great. 

Mort’s publishers hadn’t managed to get her book to London in time, and at the end of the interval when the poets had been signing books I went along to say I loved her poems and would get the book when it arrived.  She wasn’t there, and instead two of the contemporary poets I most admire, Graham and Doty, were sitting side by side at empty desks.  As Jorie Graham signed a book for me, I asked her if she knew where Valzhyna Mort was.  ‘WHO??’ she said.  I repeated the name, loudly and too clearly.  She didn’t seem to be fully aware of her co-reader. 



Moose thinking about Sarah Palin. 
 Alaska Moose Foundation



Just shows one should never approach famous poets at readings, especially those one admires.  I was then too put out to say to Mark Doty I was only not asking him to sign Theories and Apparitions as I’d got it at home… but that would probably have gone wrong too.

Anyway I remember it as a really good reading, all four of them – though Jorie Graham nearly spoilt it by starting her spot with a rant several minutes long against Sarah Palin hunting moose from a helicopter.   

This didn’t go down at all well with the audience, who had come to hear her read her poems and didn’t need to be told what Sarah Palin was like. Did she think we didn’t know?  Was this all to do with not everyone thinking Graham’s recent books are as good as the earlier ones? 

I’m still not sure what I think about that.  The earlier books are more accessible, but I am fascinated by Sea Change and Never, the way she seems to write at the edge of both geography and consciousness.  Here is an extract from near the end of ‘The Time Being’, from Never:

… The breaking waves tossing

spume the whole length of the beach.  The glassy

tidal-retreat zone where the reduced

incline allows for a full measure of sky

every eight seconds or so to be strewn over the

otherwise dark-wet sand – a sun, a blueness,

clouds clearly moving, the skin of water

giving us “where-the-earth-opens” [it must open],

sun in there one cannot look at any

more than one can look at the one above – then the retreat –

sun, clouds, blue, all being taken back

into the shorebreak, tossed-up, in-ruffled

airily into huge plumes and upcast mists, the looking-down

leaving tiny holes where clam and crab and tubeworm

suck back under and the water goes down as well as out

and the earth is filling and the earth is

shut.  The time presses.

The sense of one’s person

numbs as in having been too long in too

strong a wind.  The idea won’t

hold as I push it out.  Then it will.  Then it

is held [not by me].  Then it is all gone. 

Factory of Tears

That is the title of a collection by Valzhyna Mort.  What a wonderful title.  A poet’s work, poems’ work, life, one’s homeland…  The last poem in the book has the same title, and starts –

And once again according to the annual report

the highest productivity results were achieved

by the Factory of Tears. 

It ends –

I’m a recipient of workers’ comp[ensation] from the heroic

                                        Factory of Tears.

I have calluses on my eyes. 

I have compound fractures on my cheeks.

I receive my wages with the product I manufacture.

And I’m happy with what I have.

The whole poem can be read here.  Great to see the language of Soviet era central planning put to such absurd use.  And to be made to wonder about the Factory of Tears that is poetry. 

The last line takes us back to the smiling workers of socialist realism.  If the poem had been written by someone from any other former Iron Curtain country, we might suspect ironic Ostalgie.  But Valzhyna Mort is from Belarus which is a dictatorship, very repressive; see the BBC, today.  See also the Belarusian Telegraph Agency, if you want to enter the strange land the Factory came from – note that in the menu of news topics, President comes first, before Politics, Economy etc.  It’s hard to imagine that Mort is popular with the Belarusian authorities, though her first poems were published there.

Valzhyna Mort now lives in the US.  Factory of Tears has Belarusian and English in parallel text, the translation done by the author and Elizabeth and Franz Wright.  An excellent idea – if only there were more such poetry books.  Someone who has a Slav language and Cyrillic script can follow the original, which makes a huge difference to the reading experience.  (I was reading it yesterday sitting on the train, and became aware that a young man with a check shirt was standing there, staring intently at my book.. he then turned abruptly and walked off.  Had he thought it was Russian and then realised it wasn’t?)

However, this may also be a disadvantage.  Mort said in an interview:  “For me this is something that I would like to escape, this label of being a Belarusian poet because I truly don’t know what is Belarusian about my poetry and when I come to a reading, I feel people have some kind of expectation that I will not be able to fulfil unless I wear a national costume!”



Socialist realism (across the
border in long-ago Poland)



I confess I find it hard to get away from the Belarusianness: the  Belarusian text, the book’s title; even the novelty value, the costume.  In the poem quoted above, the Factory of Tears has ‘adopted a new economically advantageous / technology of recycling the wastes of the past - / memories mostly’, and the theme of memory, some of it very Belarusian, runs through the book.  It is a first full collection, published in 2008; her next book will be written in English.  Maybe the interview comment, from 2010, is more about her recent work.   

Anyway, one of the book’s strengths is the poet’s ability to draw on the unusual material provided by her country of birth.  The opening poem, ‘Belarusian I’, begins

Even our mothers have no idea how we were born

how we parted their legs and crawled out into the world

the way you crawl from the ruins after a bombing…

and later

completely free only in public toilets

where for a little change nobody cared what we were doing

we fought the summer heat the winter snow

when we discovered we ourselves were the language

and our tongues were removed we started talking with our eyes

…..

                        …and when they ate our heads alive

we crawled back into the bellies of our sleeping mothers

as if into bomb shelters

to be born again

and there on the horizon the gymnast of our future

was leaping through the fiery hoop

of the sun

That’s the end of the poem (read it here, plus a video interview), which she says is a response to criticism she and her contemporaries received for writing in Belarusian rather than their first language, Russian.  It shows another of the book’s strengths, the vigorous imagery which drives so many of the poems.  She often starts with something simple – a tiger, a train, snow – but the way she uses the images is very striking.  The short poem ‘Fall in Tampa’ ends

..summer is standing stock-still

like a white heron in green water

    

‘for Rafal Wojaczek’ has death as a fly:

getting into your eyes

mouth

ear

like a filthy fly

death is circling

interfering

with seeing

eating…

A grandmother, to whom the book is dedicated and whom I understand as symbolic / folkloric as well as very real and loved, appears in the poems; this one’s called ‘Grandmother’.

she swallows the sun-speckles of pills

and calls the internet the telephone to america

her heart has turned into a rose the only thing you can do

is smell it

pressing yourself to her chest

By now it will be clear that she writes in free verse, without much punctuation, and that the line breaks mostly go with the sense.  The translators have done a good job of being faithful to this without losing the energy. 

The poems that don’t work so well lack the thematic force that otherwise welds different metaphors together within one poem.  A long prose poem, ‘White Trash’, in the middle of the book has some great bits which could be more effective on their own, each as a short prose poem. 

Minsk: socialist realist sculpture

I suppose it’s a cliché that the first post-war generation of East European poets wrote politically, and the post-Fall of Berlin Wall generation turned towards individual experience.  Though Mort belongs to the younger end of the latter group (and writes poems about sex and growing up) it seems to me her poems contain elements of both, and her surreal metaphors certainly recall some of the former, such as Różewicz and Holub.  Her perspective can be both very personal and broad at once, as in ‘for A.B.’:

it’s so hard to believe

that once we were even younger

than now

that our skin was so thin

that veins blued through it

like lines in school notebooks

that the world was a homeless dog

that played with us after class

and we were thinking of taking it home

but somebody else took it first

gave it a name

and trained it stranger

against us

Mort has said she is old-fashioned in that she believes in ‘inspiration’.  Audios of her reading in Belarusian sound great – she’s been described as a ‘fireball’ and ‘electrifying’.  The best poems come across on the page with the force and originality of something inspired.  Wherever she’s going, I hope she doesn’t abandon the national costume completely, to be lost in the great American crowd. 

Factory of Tears is published by Copper Canyon Press (love its cover, the laminated flower tablecloth and low enamel kettle – that’s Ostalgie).  Collected Body, same publisher, comes out in September 2011.