Free Verse Poetry Book Fair

Very quickly, just to demonstrate that this blog is at the beating heart of poetry, at least sometimes, here is a photo of my haul from last weekend’s poetry book fair.  Having an August birthday is an advantage. 

The two cut-off-corners magazines are from New York based Ugly Duckling Presse, whose table at the fair attracted a lot of interest.  Their formula is 6x6.  The honeycomb book is also from them and contains Jen Bervin’s Nets, in which she trawls Shakespeare’s sonnets.  I first came across some of the results in the Reality Street anthology of sonnets. 

How did I manage to get Kirsten Irving’s book, when Salt didn’t have a table, even though they haven’t stopped producing single-author collections quite yet?  From the author, who was at Sidekick Books with Jon Stone, another Salt poet... just two of the excellent list we are about to lose.  


Six [contemporary] Polish Poets are in a bilingual edition from Arc, one of a series: part of Arc’s excellent work on poetry translation. 

Things seemed to go very well, the hall was crowded, everyone was greeting everyone else, there are reports of publishers selling well, and CBe poetry fair super-hero Charles Boyle (blog link on right) says there were more people there this time.  My publisher HappenStance went home with a nearly empty suitcase.  Standing behind a stall while someone leafs through your own pamphlet (without knowing it’s you) is a strange experience.    

Magherafelt

Two Lorries                  (6th & 7th verses) 

Of motes and engine-revs, but which lorry

Was it now? Young Agnew’s or that other,

Heavier, deadlier one, set to explode

In a time beyond her time in Magherafelt…

So tally bags and sweet-talk darkness, coalman.

Listen to the rain spit in new ashes

As you heft a load of dust that was Magherafelt,

Then reappear from your lorry as my mother’s
Dreamboat coalman filmed in silk-white ashes.         

What to say?  I’ve typed out ‘Two Lorries’ and will change the verse above each day for a week (not tomorrow, it’s late now) – because I feel like holding a wake, and the poem’s got seven verses.  I’ve written myself a reminder, MAGHERAFELT, but doubt I’ll forget because the world has changed with Seamus Heaney’s death.   

There is no choice about the seven.  The course is set and the poem has to fulfil it.  Sestinas are good for thoughts, and coal deliveries, that go round and round; here, Heaney makes the form good for inevitability too.  The past turns into the future, because it must, and then the two get confused and synthesised into something universal.   

Why this poem?  It could have been many others.  There’s the coalman and the mother; there’s the lorry, the coal, the ashes, the dust, the folded coal-bags, the bus and its route, the black-leaded stove... and then the turn, the second lorry emerging from the first and enacting the way routine life is suddenly slammed aside when something terrible happens, even though in this case the two scenes are decades apart... and then that synthesis.  The way film underlies the poem, the glamour of wishes or the film-like nature of unbelievably terrible events.  The way the Troubles underlie it.  Black and white, underworld lorryman and angel, death and dream. 

There’s the lively and varied syntax, the delight in language, its crunchiness (hardly any Latinate words), the way Heaney throws himself straight at this often dire form and plays around, one of the six end-words coming out in several different ways as a sort of descant, a couple of others changing only under the pressure of the horror; the impossible-for-non-natives-to-pronounce place name anchoring the whole thing; such humour with the dexterity.

Seamus Heaney reads the whole poem at the Poetry Archive, and the text's there too.  Oh, such a voice.

He may not have been highly innovative or experimental, but his work contains that deep fusion of the age-old with the new that is so rare.  This from Michael Schmidt in PN Review 212 (not about SH) fits perfectly: “Inherence, the poet occupying the poem rather than vacating it by means of irony or fragmentation”.  

There’s a great passage from Heaney himself, from his Nobel lectures quoted on Robert Peake’s blog: ”.. in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself”. 

Wandering along fuchsia-studded lanes in Kerry or West Cork, I’ve recalled another favourite poem, ‘The Peninsula’, and fantasised about meeting Heaney round the next bend – not because I’d want to ask him about his poetry or tap the depth and width of his learning, but just to exchange remarks on the day, the weather, the view.  I think I’ll still imagine that, next time I’m there.    

The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log,

That rock where breakers shredded into rags,

The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,

Islands riding themselves out into the fog.

 

Photo from Poetry Society

The Irish Writing Blog's put up a compilation of essays on Seamus Heaney.

Communion by Jacob Sam-La Rose

One of this summer’s poetry treats was CBe’s pop-up bookshop in the Portobello Road.  I browsed for a while and thought about one of my first poetry experiences a block further up the road, where a childhood friend had lived.  Occasionally I’d stay the night which we’d spend reading from a book of ballads she had – large enough to seem inexhaustible to us, from Sohrab and Rustum to Sir Patrick Spens – and scaring each other with our own stories.  She usually outscared me.   

Flipped Eye had a stand in the shop, and I got Jacob Sam-La Rose’s pamphlet, Communion.  I wanted it the moment I opened it and started reading… some poetry decisions are easy. 

                                         I don’t know

the smell of his sweat, or if our fingers

look alike. I didn’t learn to drink

by draining whatever wine he might have left

or sharing an ice cold can. He never

wrestled me down, so I never grew up

to return the favour. 

That’s from ‘Never’: one of the best poems (it ends beautifully), but they all share the same intense, personal tone, lyrical ease and seemingly effortless lineation.  Although I knew that Sam-La Rose has since had a first collection from Bloodaxe, Breaking Silence, I was taken aback to find that Communion was published in 2006.  It’s taken me this long to catch up with such a good poet, and then only with his first pamphlet.  This is from ‘My Mother’s Guitar’:

      I wish I’d learned to play, to hold

the chords she held, catch something of her

voice. The keys turn easily,

tightening the strings back into life

but my fingers don’t know how to make

her music. Instead, I write it all down.

Growing up in south-east London is the background to many poems.  The city is there as an atmosphere, a setting for the experiences of youth, rather than for itself.  There’s also an undercurrent, as in that last quote, of themes of origin and belonging; Sam-La Rose is of Guyanan ancestry.  

Some of the poems mix dream and reality, and several take place at night.  Most have relationships, close or fleeting, real or imagined, at their heart, and plunge the reader into their moment – on a crammed dance-floor, in church (making the light reflect from a watch onto the arched ceiling), right next to a massive speaker on a carnival float, or playing basketball.  Five basketball-themed poems take up the middle of the book; this is from the last one, ‘The Brothers of Ladywell Fields’:

                     My feet stutter

on the tarmac. Maybe the brothers

can read my steps, smell a fall

rising from my skin like sweat.

I know too well the raucous clang  

of a near miss on the rim, the way

a smooth arc can turn ugly at the end,

and all that air still remains.

There are several prose poems, including the church one; prose poems in a pamphlet tend (I think) not to be up to standard, but these are good.  I could go on… about the poem that starts “The girl on front desk in reception will probably keep the baby”, the one that contains a dream about an algebra lesson, or the one about a sleepwalking cousin who now “serves a time defined by walls”.  This is a book where each poem enhances every other.   

Of course I now want to read the full collection, which came out after a 5-year gap.  Judging from Sam-La Rose’s poems at the Poetry Archive and the ones he reads on Bloodaxe’s website, it won’t disappoint, and will fill out some of the themes of identity begun in Communion.  (It was also shortlisted for the Forward and Aldeburgh first collection prizes last year.)

‘Won’t disappoint’ may sound rather grudging, in the circumstances.  Here I confess to a fear that I sometimes have after much enjoying a pamphlet: that the full collection that follows might disappoint; might be less concentrated and more diffuse, harder to take in and digest.  Not that these things are bad in themselves, but they may make for a less intense and immediately satisfying experience.  And the full collection will certainly be two to three times the price, and harder to slip in a pocket. 

But this is one I must get my hands on.

Poetry Rules

That’s not Poetry Rules OK, though it does on this blog, but Rules for Poetry. These get tossed to and fro in workshops like paper aeroplanes, or lurk like U-boats below the surface of reviews.  One day, if the world continues as we have known it, someone will write a PhD on what effect poetry workshop culture had on poetry in the early 21st century.

The only good poetry rule is this one: THERE ARE NO POETRY RULES.  It’s tempting to call for a ban on all the others, but that would be accepting the terms of the rule-makers.  Here are the ones I find most irritating:

SHOW DON’T TELL

AVOID ABSTRACTIONS

DON’T CLOSE OFF POEMS AT THE END

Telling, abstractions and closing-off are difficult to do well, today – for example, it’s easier to end a poem by stepping off lightly or at an angle.  These three do cause problems in draft poems.  But advising people not to try them at all is like saying, don’t try anything difficult.  Or, don’t take risks… though ‘risk-taking’ is one of the most annoying adjectives used in reviews. 

Better to make apprentice writers aware of the pitfalls, not warn them off altogether.  Ezra Pound:

 

“A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.”

And yes, that’s the Pound of the Don’ts.  He does say that his list is “for those beginning to write verses” (at the beginning of ‘A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste’, first published in Poetry in 1913, though not necessarily in the issue pictured here).  Geniuses were presumably exempt.  

Interesting that the Don’ts have lasted for 100 years.  What does this tell us about poetry now?  That a set of precepts formulated at the dawn of free verse still applies in its maturity, or that we’ve got stuck, or a bit of both?  Maybe we’ve just got stuck on the idea of Rules.

One of the most quoted items from Pound is, of course, “Go in fear of abstractions”.  (“Fear” is an interesting word choice.)  I wonder if that’s an example of having got stuck.  But it’s immediately followed by this less quoted passage:

Don’t retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.  

That remains excellent advice (and it is advice, rather than a Rule).  Pound could open many poetry magazines today and find a poem that has deceived. 

Les Murray has the right idea.

I'm a dissident author; the deadliest inertia is to conform to your times.

Editors who have to read hundreds or thousands of poems may disagree about avoiding rules. They are well placed to identify today’s poetry trends and mannerisms.  Helena Nelson of HappenStance sometimes writes about these on her blog.  She reads like crazy for two months a year and must be the UK poetry publisher with the clearest, most transparent guidelines.  (She’s my publisher so I’m biased, but find me another like that.)

I’m revising drafts at the moment, and have gone back to a piece Nell wrote last year.  Near the end is a list of around 20 features of what she calls “Contemp Po”.  A list that I read both as writer and reader, checking off which habits I’ve got, and which I recognise around me.  None of the three Poetry Rules listed above is there – I wonder if that’s because everyone is either following them, or taking the risks successfully.  Here are four of (to me) her most interesting items:

– the word ‘yet’ flagging an epiphany;

– cross-stanza enjambment with no particular logic to it, except to fulfil the poet’s desire to divide stanzas into neat chunks of two, three, or four lines;

– numerous ‘as’ sentences;

– …sections relying heavily on two or more verb clauses, each appended to the same subject. Often this increases towards the end or high point of a poem… I walk into the room, pick up my gun, shoot the publisher.

This stuff – not rules, but advice to help us poets see ourselves as we are, subconscious absorbers of trends, of micro-memes – is gold dust for any emerging writer.  Nell’s also been blogging this month on the same theme, and giving (as usual) syntax the place in criticism that it deserves but rarely gets.  Here she is on engaging the jaded reader’s interest in the first few lines of a poem:

The syntax (by which I mean the grammatical structure of the opening statement or sentence) is usually crucial.

To end, here's a classic piece of poetry advice, my favourite ever, from Philip Sidney's muse.  And oh, what he does with syntax!

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,

That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,—

Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,

Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,—

I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;

Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain,

Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow

Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburn'd brain.

But words came halting forth, wanting invention's stay;

Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows;

And others' feet still seem'd but strangers in my way.

Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes,

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,

"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write."