April 2017 - 'Believe me. Stories are real.' - John Foggin and NaPoWriMo

All of the above...

I am not procrastinating. I am living. I am trying to survive! Nearly five months since my last blog entry and here I am. I am doing NaPoWriMo, where you're meant to write a poem everyday in April, and apart from a few blips have managed most days. Some are bad, some have legs and may run somewhere. Hopefully not into a wall. The photo above depicts one of my doodling daydreaming moments in which I cover all four of my feelings on writing poetry at the moment.

I'm going to break my blogging silence with a poem by John Foggin. John is a friend. He is very dapper. He smokes roll-ups and makes his own books. He seems to be in a constant state of exploration; travelling across challenging terrain, going on residentials, writing poems, standing back and contemplating the view. I know him from my jaunts to Writing Days in Sheffield. He won last year’s Smith/Doorstop pamphlet collection and, they thought, no let’s have a book not a pamphlet! That's how great he is. Here's a poem from that collection, Much Possessed, which I loved. It's painful. It’s about a parent hearing the news of an adult child’s suicide.

It was a morning like this

a Sunday morning. The sun shone.

It was July. It was a morning like this,

your ex-wife at the back door,

and why would she tell you

your son was dead, or had died,

or had been in an accident

on a morning like this still

not fully woken, a morning of sun

to drive into Chapeltown to drive

to a police station that’s called

The Old Police Station now, that’s

a bijou gastropub but then was just

a police station full of Sunday morning

sadness, and a morning something

like this and two young coppers

who thought we’d need somewhere

quiet at the back which turned out

to smell of smoke, that had a pool table

and coffee rings, and no-one knew

how to start or what to ask but

it was a morning much like this

they asked if we knew a tower block

behind the Merrion Centre or if

we had a connection to a tower block

and a ring with a skull and a brown

leather case and did we know if

our son had friends in a tower block

behind the Merrion Centre and

we might as well have been asked

about tree rings or chaos theory

or fractals on a July morning and

one young copper saying that

he didn’t think it made sense

for cannabis to be illegal and

what harm did it do really and

how it wasted everybody’s time

and I don’t know why I’d remember

that except it was a morning like this

I learned what waste might mean.

A month or so ago, I asked John Foggin for this poem to share on my blog. I keep going back to it. Maybe because I actually experience the sensations within the poem; it seems to capture a terrible, dizzying moment when life is turned over. The ending is perhaps the only firm sensation to be experienced, you 'come-to' as a reader here. It's a painful realisation though. Elsewhere, I feel a sense of disorientation whenever I read the poem. Skillfull as well as a 'spontaneous overflow' of feeling. This poem deals with the exact moment when something terrible is conveyed. It’s not a poem of reflection, it’s about being plunged straight into the moment. This is ironic as the poet is reflecting. The words create a sense of being in a maelstrom.

To me this poem captures  a physical sensation of suddenly losing your balance and needing to hold onto something, whatever you’ve got. I find the mention of those concrete places, like the repeated Merrion Centre, like driftwood. But they’re not permanent or indeed supportive, places change:

The Old Police Station now, that’s

a bijou gastropub but then was just

a police station full of Sunday morning

sadness,

Notice how the building is wiped out as soon as it’s mentioned, ‘The Old Police Station now’ that ‘now’ is the ‘now’ of the past. We’re time-travelling in two directions at once.You can do that in a poem. What's real is no longer tangible. The tenses also convey that sense of disorientation, ‘your son was dead, or had died,’ things are always shifting.

It’s been said John is a landscape poet. He doesn’t often ‘do’ urban places. To me this is a terrific landscape poem, not just for the urban references, but for the sense of personal landscape, the inner map if you like, being challenged and altered forever. Thank you John, for allowing me to share this fabulous poem.

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In other news...I am behind in coming up-to-date with my own poetic dealings. I appreciate this is mainly of some importance to me and not the world. My aim is to use the blog as a cross between scrapbook and poetic journal. Poetry is a place I go to in my head right now, as I haven’t been to as many readings as I could have done. That does not mean I won’t be back. I have quite a few readings of my own coming up soon! I am going to aim to write in little bites rather than cover the lot.

Stay tuned.

Spots of Time: Marty McFly and the Time-Travelling Poet

Today’s Back to the Future day. Marty McFly will be joining us all the way from 1985. How could I let this anniversary slip? The first time I saw Back to the Future was at the end of the 80s with a hall full of pupils as our end of term treat. It was on a box shaped TV and if you were sitting near the back it was pretty much postage stamp size, but it was still considerably better than maths.

Anyway, I am using the film as an excuse to talk about poetry. Or I’m using poetry as an excuse to talk about Back to the Future. Not sure. The title (not the Marty McFly bit obviously) refers to Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’ passage in The Prelude, which is about how poems bring into present consciousness certain memories or moments in time. Recently, I’ve been thinking about how many poems crystallise moments in time, while clarifying something about the present and we owe a debt to the Romantics for this approach. Certainly a lot of workshop exercises ask students to think of a particular happening or thing.  Then there’s James Schulyer’s method of writing about a moment in time, or more specifically, writing about the present tense. Schulyer isn’t remembering or reminiscing he’s writing about now, or his now, as something like ‘Dec. 28, 1974’ shows. His now isn’t ours, so to me those poems feel like a form of time travel and, oddly, also an exploration of the present.Can you draft such a poem, or do you write it all in one go?

This is a long way away from discussing DeLoreans and Flux Capacitors. There were always bits of Back to the Future that got my imagination going, like the photo of the disappearing McFly children; If mom and dad don’t kiss at the dance, then no family and no Marty. In a photo he's taken along with him for the journey, all of them are fading fast. So Marty has to work fast to bring romance into his parents’ lives.

Of course if you haven’t seen the film, you won’t know what I’m talking about. Sorry. But it did occur to me that the key years in the film, 1955, 1985 and 2015 are relevant dates for me right now. Quite a coincidence. Firstly, some years ago I wrote a poem with 1955 in the title, which is currently on John Foggin’s blog and can be found here and is halfway through the piece. I’m very grateful to him for writing about my poems. Secondly, 1985 was the year I went to Cyprus to visit my family over there for the first time as a girl. I wrote a poem about that experience which features on Warwick University’s 50^th anniversary poetry page. I’m sharing that page with some fantastic poets, so have a look here.  It also features a recording of the poem. I was asked to take part by David Morley as I was a student there. Finally, I’m also including a 2015 poem, which is very different to the other two, and is a tongue in cheek look at my now, on the Poems in Which site you can find here.

And still no hoverboards...

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To finish off, you may remember that at the end of Back to the Future, when the lovers kiss and everything’s funkydory at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, Marty plays something a little far out for 1955 on his guitar. He utters the line, "I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet... but your kids are gonna love it."If you click on the link below and listen, it’s possible Marty underestimated some of his mid-50s audience.

Absence Notes, Editing and a Little Dancing...

Commonplace has been washing its hair for the last two months, but here I am again. It's time to catch up. It's easier to make a list on what's been going on and then deal with the finer details:

1. Getting published: I've had poems in Magma, Stand, Ambit, and The Emma Press Anthology of Dance.
2. Editing and Publishing: I've just edited Crystal Voices: Ten Years of Crystal Clear Creators.
3. (Related to no. 1 &2) going to launches. (Poets have got a thing for launches, haven't they?) These were for Ambit, the Dance Anthology, and Crystal Voices).
4. Working, mothering, birthdays. organising parties that included Frozen Karaoke, bugs, viruses, hacking things in gardens, being alive etc.
5. Editing reviews.
6. Reading.
7. Writing poetry, I have the coffee rings and the waste basket to prove this.
8. Spending hours applying for something and then being 'declined.' 'Declined' is more elegant don't you think?
9. Staring.

The publications...

I've not had as much faffing-around-with-computer time, so I've missed a few things and am trying to catch up with other people's blogs as there are so many good ones out there.

It was fun to get to the launches. I don't often have a chance to get down to London, but somehow I managed to make it down twice. The Ambit launch was terrific and I had a little dinner by myself in Soho and read some of the excellent Scarsdale by Dan O'Brien. Among the readers for Ambit was Emily Hasler and it was great to catch up with her. It was in a gorgeous venue and I met some people who ordinarily only exist on my laptop. I was really struck by Briony Bax's incredible dedication to the magazine. My next London trip was for the Emma Press Anthology of Dance - I brought my cousin Joanna along and although she isn't a poetry person she enjoyed the readings so much I gave her my contributor's copy. It was a real treat to meet Catherine Smith, one of my favourite poets. It's also a small world as Leicester local Pam Thompson was also there reading. The event was organised brilliantly by the Emma Press with treats and drinks. It rained a lot the second time I went down, so I hid in Liberty and marvelled at the £375 designer vintage hats which apparently some people can afford. Both events ended in a furious dash back to St. Pancras, but they were worth the physical effort.

One of the reasons for not blogging has been the fact I've been editing like a mad person. I started in January and since then I've been copying and pasting, reading, emailing, tweaking, head scratching and reading drafts on trains, waiting rooms and in bed. AND there is still the odd typo. It's done! The anthology is a real thing and copies are now available. I chose writers who had been actively involved with CCC from the very beginnings to around the Hearing Voices period and when the pamphlets were published. Some of the contributors had worked with us in terms of teaching and behind the scenes work as well. It's not easy deciding on such a list and there were some more people I wanted to ask, but we were already jam-packed. I also wanted a very varied range of different styles and voices. Also, I have to say I preferred editing a book to a magazine. During the Hearing Voices period I wasn't keen on sending 'declined' (that word again) emails and Jonathan did a lot of that instead. For the book I didn't have to 'decline' anyone and it was super to ask people for work. The line-up of writers is superb and the book features:

Alan Baker, Kathleen Bell, Rebecca Bird, Julie Boden, Alison Brackenbury, Will Buckingham, Jane Commane, Caroline Cook, Nichola Deane, Kate Delamere, Mellissa Flowerdew-Clarke, Mark Goodwin, Sarah James, Charles Lauder Jr, Emma Lee, Carol Leeming, Melissa Lee-Houghton, Angela France, Siobhan Logan, John Lucas, David McCormack, Sue Mackrell, Martin Malone, Roy Marshall, Jess Mayhew, Matt Merritt, Andrew ‘Mulletproof’ Graves, Simon Perril, Alexandros Plasatis,  D.A. Prince, Robert Richardson, Victoria Smith, Jayne Stanton, Hannah Stevens, Matthew Stewart, Aly Stoneman, Jonathan Taylor, Pam Thompson, Lydia Towsey, Deborah Tyler-Bennett, Claire Walker, Lindsey Waller-Wilkinson, Rory Waterman.

I am so grateful to all these people for contributing. We had a terrific launch at the Leicester Shindig with Nine Arches Press that also featured fantastic readings from Jo Bell and Jonathan Davidson.

I'd also like to mention (cough) that this book is only £5. That's as cheap as most pamphlets! Purchasing details are here.

Also there were some terrific write-ups of the evening from Roy Marshall and Matt Merritt , and also a lovely post by Matthew Stewart.

Talking of blogs, one of the ones I've been meaning to catch up with is John Foggin's. He writes keenly and with so much detail and passion. He's not been blogging all that long, but he's certainly making up for lost time. I will try and be more prolific myself.

Places and Commonplaces...

Looking back at the year's blog post it seems that most entries are about events and the inevitable travel to different places and locations across the country. One entry I regret not writing was about my experience and reading at the Wenlock poetry festival, life intervened! I had a great time, but the occasional travelling throughout the year did get me thinking about those poets who travel all the time. I'd say it's fairly inevitable that the more you're prepared to travel the more you can reach an audience, meet other poets and benefit form hearing their work, Not always easy. On the other hand I've seen people for whom travelling is a necessity. Read Matthew Stewart's blog here on this subject. It goes without saying, perhaps, that the web alters some of this.

I was thinking about the poet's 'place' in the world and remembered this quotation by E.M. Forster about the poet Cavafy "standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe." Fairly relevant to most poets. Back in the summer I wrote a hasty poem about a childhood home which also wasn't about it either. It was just a place in a poem I suppose, even if it started off true. I revised it a bit (it started life as one of Jo Bell's 52 poetry prompts) and sent it off in an envelope to the Nottingham Open Poetry Comp and it received a merit. There was a prize giving ceremony in October. There was even a competition buffet on the day, yummy. I digress. In her judge's report, Helen Mort wrote about the importance of place in her favourite poems:

'I’m obsessed with trying to write about different places and locations in my own work and I really loved the different worlds (whole worlds in some cases) these poems all introduced me to. Like all the best place poems, they captured not what you could read in a visitor’s guide, but what it feels like to be there...'

What you see on exiting Nottingham Station... 

Many of the poems she chose were about the idea of place. The second prize winner, Liz Venn, wrote a poem called 'The Spin' as in a spinning globe which contained these lines:

As you get older and more birdlike,

keep a grip on the quick land,

stay close to the outreached hand

It seems to be about the speaker's need to root themselves somewhere. The first prize poem was called 'Day Trip' by Julie Lumsden and ended with this verse: 

or forget the serious sea

out in the bay where the tide comes in

faster than a man can run.

This place feels real and concrete but also has an emotive force. To me it's about feeling overwhelmed. Universal. In Mark Done's poem 'Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station, 9 hole, par 60 (3624 yards)' the night-shift workers are playing golf at work, leaving odd traces behind, such as 'an upturned saucer of the 9th green' and 'future archaeologists will speculate about its use.' My dad worked at Ratcliffe Power Station once, I should ask about the golf. In John Foggin's poem 'The Fox on the Window Sill' that place is the location for the fox's skeleton. The remains are always in a state of decay, but still visible. The bones have something to say about her life and where she lived. The skeleton: 'grows articulate, what’s left – / skull and grinning jaw', Death is a (sort of) place too

If you'd like to spend some time going through the winning poems, and my poem 'Resident' is there too, click here to read. 

John's poem reminds me that the other day I read the most lovely poem by Peter Sansom, called 'Mini Van' which was commended in the Troubadour Poetry Prize, A boy in the mini van is stuck 'In the back / with no seats or windows / just more grey metal' en route to 'a houseful of the dead / still living none of them more than ten minutes / from where they were born.

Poetry, Events and Being on Trains a Lot: York Mix Competition and Two Poems from Rory Waterman

On Sunday March 23rd I travelled up to York as I'd been commended in the York Mix Poetry Comp, which is part of the York Literature Festival. I normally have mixed feeling about entering poetry comps, but this one was different. For starters it was judged by Carole Bromley and I really admire her poetry so I thought I'd support her and the festival. Also, it was only a fiver for three poems! Normally I wouldn't travel so far, but in the spirit of the poem I'd written I thought 'why not?' and off I went.

I made it to York, left the station and had a rather buoyant feeling of being somewhere I didn't know but was happy to visit. It seemed like a city with many visitors, lots of people were rushing past with wheeled suitcases and even on a Sunday you could feel a buzz. I wondered around the city peering into all the attractive shop fronts and was delighted by the sight of the river. The twins had asked me to take photos, so I did:

The prize event was very friendly and many of the prize-winners and commended poets were there to read their poems, including a poet called Clifford Hughes who'd travelled all the way from Hayward's Heath. It was also good to see my mate John Foggin who is going through a golden patch at the moment poetry-wise, winning all sorts of things, including the Lumen/Camden Poetry Prize. It's not easy getting first place in comps (understatement), so well done, and well done to Kay Buckley who won first Prize at York Mix with her poem 'Huskars' which is about a tragic incident where young children working down a pit were trapped and drowned. Many thanks to Carole for all her hard work judging the comp, no mean feat as there were nearly a thousand entries. I liked her approach of dealing with the poems as they came through on email. If you'd like to read about the judging process, read the winning and commended poems and look at photos of the event then do click here.

So I was on the train for 4 hours or so and the next weekend went up to The Poetry Business for one of their writing days, so another two hours and of course inevitable work journeys into Leicester. So I needed some reading material. Poetry and trains are quite well-suited. I think there must be a whole sub-genre of poems about writing poems on a train. The journey gave me an opportunity to re-read one of my favourite collections from last year, Rory Waterman's 'Tonight the Summer's Over' (Carcanet).



Rory's poetry is full of emotion, experience and observation. A significant part of the collection for me deals with the feeling of being torn and not quite belonging anywhere, 'I'd brag about that 'other home' / and other me - not here, like them - / the Irish me that never was.' Rory's mother left his father and their family home in County Derry and moved with Rory to rural Lincolnshire. The child's home is Lincolnshire, but 'home' is also Ireland too. Rather than being comfortable in two places, the poet feels estranged from both:

And Lincoln was a blessing and a curse,
where Daddy lived each month, and lived with me.

Oddly enough being on a train means you're nowhere; powering through anonymous fields and the backs of towns and cities for most of the journey. Perhaps this enhanced my enjoyment? Matthew Stewart has written an incisive review of this book on his blog Rogue Strands, which is here. If your tempted by the book I'd recommend a read, and to further whet your appetite here are two poems which Rory has kindly allowed me to use. The first has a terrific energy and a really sharp pair of end lines. 'Two' really moves me and is distinctly memorable.

Navigating

A heron burst from the bank where we hadn't seen it
to out of sight beneath the tree-bitten sky
            the way we were heading.
Let's follow! So, a dawdle became the pursuit
of something we couldn't realise.

We paddled and ruddered, slick through spilling rapids,
round snags and boulders, churned small dark-skinned deeps
          as otters and crayfish hid;
sparrows and what-not cheeped; cows chewed at the lip
of a sudden meander, and watched us ignoring them;

and inverted willows shivered with river-weeds,
where toppled half-drowned boughs cut withering chevrons
           along each shadowed straight.
We were happy - weren't we? - because each bend was blind.

We must pursue and not expect to find.


Two

The toddler with fat red cheeks in a blue Babygro,
legs skew-wiff, blond hair in a motherly clump,
face trapped in cute consternation, lets me know
through widened eyes that what happens to him matters.

The floppy-eared teddy he clutches in that studio
is a prop, not a gift. He doesn't realise
yet, but soon he'll have to let it go.
He hugs it because he's told to, looking up at the camera,

at the trap of a violent flash-bulb exploding. So
thirty-year-younger eyes stare blind at their future.