Night of 'The North' in Leicester and a Poem by Ann Sansom

A couple of months ago, a Londoner told me they were planning to head to Leicester. According to her, Leicester wasn't just north of London, it was (emphasis on the definite article) the North. I wasn't sure how to break it to her that Leicester is in the Midlands. Being a Londoner once myself, however, I was aware that everywhere north of Watford is usually the north to most Londoners. At the beginning of April, however, Ann and Peter Sansom, two poets utterly linked with the north on the poetry map, came south to join us for a reading in Leicester, the Midlands. This was for WORD! at the Y Theatre, a regular spoken word event which includes Open Mic readings, which I often write about here. There were Open Mic readings from Richard Byrt, Jayne Stanton and Michael Brewer and others.

I was lucky enough to be the support act, along with Roy Marshall, and read a few poems that had appeared or about to appear in the next issue of The North, the magazine edited by Ann and Peter. Earlier, the pair had held a workshop at De Montfort Uni, which was great for me as I literally finished work for the day and nipped over. Readers of this blog will know that I often pop up to Sheffield for workshops with Ann and Peter, run as part of their organisation The Poetry Business.

The evening was compered and organised by Pam Thompson, who also read some fine poems too. Both Peter and Ann read really well and Peter’s reading was warm and entertaining. I had heard him read once before in Leicester at States of Independence.  I’d never heard Ann, although I’d read quite a bit of her work, including the Bloodaxe collection In Praise of Men and Other People. Here's a pic of the cover:

I’m sharing Ann’s poem ‘Confirmation’ here; Ann very kindly gave me permission. This poem has previously appeared in The Rialto. Ann read it at WORD! and I thought there were so many interesting things going on in this poem. The tone is conversational perhaps and actually quite funny: ‘what miracle’s he going to perform on this, godforgiveus?’ but there’s a great deal of menace here.  I also learnt a new word, apparently ‘slaumed’ is a dialect word for smear.  What struck me in this poem is the way the school girls are made to literally work on their ‘knees’ for their visitor and then in their own social lives behave in a servile way. That final couplet, where the roadie is ‘here / and cocky and think yourself lucky.’ is compelling and you feel a bit sickened for the girl. I thought this poem was pin-sharp and here it is:  

Confirmation

In honour of His Grace, you had us on our knees for weeks,

‘a blessing on this visit and please god no silliness.’

Run ragged with dusters, shouted at for holey plimsolls,

threatened with expulsion, some broke down, distraught

in the branches of the forsynthia arranging, or, bright black with Brasso,

muttered in the trophy cupboard, ‘he’d better be worth it the bastard.’

We slaumed silver paint on the refectory radiator, lugged planks

to make an altar in the gym, ‘what’s up with the table we always have?

What miracle’s he going to perform on this, godforgiveus?’

But we were whispering by then, disappointed by the almighty

but holding our breath when He drew up. We queued and bobbed

to kiss his glove, got te absolvoed, took the slap to strengthen us.

Amen. Friday night: Roy Orbison invited Kath McMahon

to his dressing room at the Odeon, Bo Diddley’s drummer

got Jacintha Malley’s phone number, Gerry Marsden’s roadie

Instructed, I forget who it was, on the needs of the elderly

balding purple silky not so godly nor entirely manly, but here

and cocky and think yourself lucky. Obedience. We knew our place.

Thank you, Sister Mary Frances. 

The Great Lost Blog Entry

It's November. Haven't updated the blog since September and we've gone from summer to autumn without so much as a squeak. Right now I'm really busy so I thought this was a perfect time to ignore my tasks and displace my energies into the blog. Back in September I wrote the following post and for whatever reason forgot to post it. Well here it is:

Does A Poem Have to Know Where It’s Going?

One of the phrases I hear a lot at readings is ‘I don’t know what this poem is about’ or ‘I’m not sure why I wrote it.’ There is probably no point ever writing a poem maybe, but perhaps what the speaker intends to say is that the poem came out of nowhere. Whenever I wonder where poems come from, I imagine a big black forest somewhere, with poems climbing trees and digging holes like animals. I would argue that many contemporary poems try and imitate the dream, whereas older, traditional ones, many of which were and still are studied at school are the ones which are more immediate on the whole. They explain themselves, there’s more rhetoric, they make statements. I suppose in terms of new poems we’re talking Imagiste onwards, which can be dated around 1912, (Bob Richardson taught me everything about the Imagistes at the last Leicester Shindig, there were even visual aids involved). Virginia Woolf would say the First World War changed everything, poems stopped making sense because for many people the world did. It became gradually harder for poets to use such emotive, abstract sentiments after the Somme and Paschendale. Woolf famously uses this example in 'A Room of One’s Own' to illustrate the kind of poetry which she says would never be written after 1918:

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;

My heart is like an apple-tree

Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;

However, I would say that for most people who don’t write poetry this would be their idea of a poem: lyric, beauty, sentiment. It’s these new-fangled poets who don’t write like this. ‘All those similies; all that juicy fruit and halcyon sea, eeesh’ says contemporary poet. This poem knows where it’s going, people on the whole (let’s argue this one if you like) don’t write like this anymore.

‘Ok’, says the poet, ‘poems have to make sense in terms of dream logic, off to my notebook I go.’ My own view is that all poetry from different time periods and cultures must be enjoyed. For this experiment, however, the poet wants to be contemporary. To test this I have opened a copy of the latest Rialto – the closest thing next to me at the desk – randomly. Below are the opening lines to a poem, ‘The Last’ by Robin Houghton:

They’ve been coming since posters were invented:
sometimes in dreams, to the tipping of cowboy hats

Ok, so who are they, they sound a bit ominous, not friendly, there are cowboy hats involved, what if they have guns? Later on the poet describes: ‘And still they would come, insistent. / They left my body as they found it…’ To me that’s chilling, but I’m still none the wiser as to who they are but they are interesting. On closer reading maybe they’re not so bad, I’m thinking about them as heroic figures perhaps. The poem mentions ‘they’ are dressed in Liverpool shirts and the person in the poem wrote about them in ‘diaries’. Maybe they’re people he/she wanted to be or dreamt of being when young? If he/she had known when the ‘last’ of them had arrived they would have ‘thrown a party.’ Sounds sad, or a tribute to something lost.

Having thought about the poem I’m reading it again and enjoying it and unpeeling it with interest. I plucked that poem from the air of course. One poem isn’t enough perhaps, but this is a blog post not the Royal Institute Christmas Lectures. You never know where you are going, you just go with the poet. You have to trust.

Age before Ink?

Fig 1. Silly boy...

In  the last few issues of The Rialto, there has been a great deal of discussion about poetry written by the young. In this case under 35, well you can imagine my relief being 32 at time of printing. Now I'm 33, with not so long to go before my 36th birthday grabs me by the ankles and pulls me into a pit of decrepitude. According to Nathan Hamilton, lovely man, us 30-35s are still young because our 'frontal cortex' has 'not finished developing.' Therefore, 'good news: at 35, you are still a young poet.' Well that made me feel like cracking open a bottle of cider and hanging out at the shopping precinct in a Nirvana T-Shirt. But then, oh misery, someone wrote a letter saying that 30-35 was 'too old,' apparently many of us have a 'des res, double garage and two children by then.' Well I have twins and I'm fond of where I live so that's more sand grains through the hourglass then. Blimey. Then I read a letter by D.A. Prince, a local poet, a very gifted local poet who I've read and have listened to at various readings, saying the debate is 'irrelevant.' You know I think it's partly Chatterton's fault. There's this obsession with youth and writing, when perhaps there needn't be. I suppose it's all those smouldering portraits of young romantics that support this myth. But if Nathan Hamilton still thinks I'm young, then great. I'm off for a joy ride in my hoody, thanks Nathan, on behalf of many confused early 30 somethings.
                 Perhaps the most positive reason for getting excited about young writers is one of promise. Obviously if someone is a gifted young writer, than surely it means that they can only continue to progress and write wonderfully as they age, (you know, even at 38, 39 for instance*). At worst, I hate it when publishers think they can capitalise on a sexy photo of some young thing. Perhaps this happens a little more in prose? I'd like to think writing is writing and not the X factor. There are many gifted older writers about who are in their 70s, 80s and beyond. Les Murray, Roy Fisher, Ruth Stone, Gerard Benson, Diana Athill and others I could mention. Thomas Chatterton was a silly boy.

(* this is called IRONY.)

Pingggk! with Roy Marshall

How many years must a mountain exist, before it is washed to sea? How many Gs are in Pingggk, the name of Leicester's newest spoken word night, not sure, but hoping it's three. On May 31st, next Tuesday, Roy Marshall is the main act at Pingggk! and it should kick off at around 7:30 with slots for open mic, whoops, nearly spelt that 'open mice.' Roy is something of a local phenomenon in Leicester, he's been published in lots of top notch magazines including The Rialto and Smiths Knoll. He's also won a comp to have a pamphlet published with Crystal Clear. So then, 7:30, 15 Wellington Street, Leicester next Tuesday it is.

Oh, by the way checked my stats page, never knew it existed before. I would just like to thank the people who actually read this blog! Especially those from the Ukraine, Brazil and the Netherlands - you are all splendiferous.