The Poet's Soapbox

Why Not Capitalise?

2011-12-31T17:15:00.002Z

Poetry is ART. Poets have every right to do whatever we like with the poems you write. Adhere to the rules of grammar or discard them; it's our choice. What makes a great poem is the inspiration that goes into it, the originality of imagery and the beauty of the language used. Punctuation is really the icing on the cake.

But it's better to have beautifully presented icing if you can.

In Never Mind the Full Stops I looked at what happens at the end of a sentence. Here I want to consider the full stop's natural partner – the capital letter.

When I give critiques of poems I'm often asked about capital letters. Should there be one at the start of each new line of verse, or not?

The convention of capitalising each line of poetry is one that goes back hundreds of years. In the 18th and 19th centuries, when formal poetry ruled, it was pretty much obligatory. The contemporary convention is exactly the opposite. Even Carol Ann Duffy's Rapture, which contains traditional Shakespearian sonnets as well as free verse, avoids capital letters everywhere except straight after a full stop.

The change is a surprisingly recent one. Most 20th-century poetry appears to follow the 19th-century convention. You even find capitalisation in some of the most ground-breaking pieces of free verse, like T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land!

It was only as experimental verse took hold, under the influence of the Beat poets, that the capitals seemed to disappear. Penguin Modern Poets 10: The Mersey Sound, which showcased the ground-breaking 1960s verse of Adrian Henri, Brian Patten, and Roger McGough, illustrates the convention in transition. A lot of the more regular-looking poems in the anthology follow the conventional pattern, with a capital letter for each new line of verse. The more irregular or experimental poems abandon the convention.

Even after the 1960s, plenty of poets continued to capitalise. John Betjeman is a good example. But Betjeman's poems rely very heavily on rhyme and regularity of rhythm. Poets who gravitated towards more experimental free verse dropped the convention.

Clearly there is no right or wrong answer to the question of whether each line of poetry needs to start with a capital letter. It's a matter of the poet's preference. But as with everything in poetry, it's important that poets don't do things purely out of habit.

A capital letter does a special job. Its function is to suggest a new sentence or a new idea beginning, or to draw attention to a name or title. We give capital letters an unconscious emphasis.

In metrical verse forms it's normal for there to be a tiny pause at the end of a line (even when the line is enjambed). The first word of the line that follows has a special weight. In these circumstances it isn't surprising to find a capital letter at the start of the line. It's doing the job it was designed to do.

In free verse, line breaks often have a very different role. Enjambement is much more frequent. Here, I would argue that it is a distraction to place a capital letter at the start of the line. It implies a breaking up of the sentence into discrete phrases when this might be contrary to the sense of the sentence. It also gives undue prominence to the first word of the line. In free verse the emphasis is nearly always on the last word of the previous line instead.

My advice is that it's best not to capitalise the first letters of lines in free verse poems. When I write rhyming verse, I generally dispense with capitals too, but that's just me. Whether or not you do is your choice. But choose thoughtfully.

If in doubt, look at a copy of the poetry journal where you'd most like to see your poem in print. See what the editor prefers. It's a pretty mercenary reason for a stylistic decision. But getting published is hard enough at the best of times. Don't make it harder for yourself by ignoring what the editor likes!

(A version of this article was first published in the December 2011 issue of NAWG LINK)

Purple Patch's Best Small Press Poets of 2011 - some thoughts

2011-11-13T13:33:00.004Z

I like to think I'm reasonably good at spotting genuine talent when it comes to poetry. By "talent" I don’t mean "a combination of wilful obscurity and intellectual pretension", unlike the people who run certain poetry presses I might care to mention. I mean a genuine understanding that words, properly handled, are like music. An ability to make unusual and improbable connections between the world of the physical senses and the inner world of emotions, thoughts and dreams. And a certain fearlessness – a willingness to take the risk of speaking out against the prevailing opinions and fashions of the time, confronting the abusers of power and taking a stand for what they believe to be right.

Every now and then I get a little vindication. Back in 2005, when I judged my first poetry competition, I awarded the First Prize to a new poet on the scene named Kate Rhodes. Ms Rhodes has since appeared in the Forward Prize annual anthology more than once – a sign that she has written (and continues to write) some of The Best Poems of the Year.

This year's Purple Patch list of the Top 20 small press poetry collections was a particular source of delight. Purple Patch, for those who don't know it, is a fiercely independent poetry journal that has been going since 1976. It has a well-earned reputation for not following trends and fashions and for championing what it likes; and it is respected for sticking to its principles. Every year Purple Patch produces a "Best Of" list to recognise poets who pass under the radar of the literary "establishment" – usually poets published by small presses that wouldn't merit a mention in the Grauniad or the TLS. And this year there were not one, nor two, not even three, but four of "my" poets in the Top 20 Best Individual Collections list.

In that respect, I have something in common with Purple Patch. I spend a lot of my time trying to support and promote poets and writers who haven't had a chance in the world of corporate literature. I don't publish journals or anthologies; I don't run festivals or big, Arts Council-funded events programmes. But in my own small way, through open mics, performance nights, poetry slams, and hopefully in the near future the odd masterclass or two, I do what I can to help good local poets get their work across to a wider audience. They deserve it. Their work is every bit as good as what I can browse on the poetry shelves in Waterstone's (and a million times better than most of what's on the internet).

The fact that four – that's a whole 20% – of this year's Purple Patch Top 20 collections have come out of the York-and-the-north-east poetry scene which means so much to me, is confirmation of the fact that I'm not crazy. These people are actually bloody good.

I've worked with the No. 9 poet, Rose Drew, many times over the last five years. We've critiqued each other's efforts at getting a first collection into print (she got there way before me). There's a passion and gutsiness and a carefully controlled anger about her work that makes her a formidable live performer and a creator of startling imagery.

Tim Ellis, at No. 20, was one of the first poets I booked as a guest feature at Speakers' Corner. He's another first-rate performer; he might shock an audience by leaping around the stage pounding a bongo drum, or quietly captivate with poems of unexpected poignancy. His work is full of humour and colour, filled with an unashamed political and environmental consciousness, and he's one of the best contemporary rhymesmiths I've heard.

Miles Cain has only been writing poetry a few years. He became extraordinarily good, extraordinarily quickly. I had the unexpected honour of being acknowledged in his debut collection, The Border, which appears at No. 8. There are poems in this collection which I recognise from their infancy, as experiments with words and thoughts. The fact that they have crystallised so memorably – and this is a collection that's bursting with memorable images – is testimony to the dedication and hard graft Miles has given his art.

My fourth “Top 20” poet, Katie Metcalfe (at No. 15) is the youngest of the set, and perhaps the most visionary. Katie is an indefatigable poet, blogger and literary editor (she's the founder of Beautiful Scruffiness magazine, about which I've blogged before). It'd sound terribly patronising to call Katie a young writer – perhaps "pre-middle-aged" will distinguish her more accurately from my own generation! – but it's surely a sign of hope in a depressed age that a writer who clearly has so many more good writing years in her is finding the poetic soul in the recession-hit north-east of England, and making something almost mythic out of it.

All four of these debut collections are near the top of my review pile, and the Soapbox will be reporting on them in detail in due course. For now, I'll offer my official congratulations to Miles, Rose, Katie and Tim. You've made a cynical poet very proud – and convinced me all the more that this sometimes thankless passion that we share is still worth shouting about.

Never Mind the Full Stops...

2011-10-18T14:40:00.003+01:00

Not long ago my writers’ group had a hearty debate about the place of punctuation in poetry. To punctuate or not to punctuate – that was the question! The group was divided into two camps. One lot were saying "Forget punctuation – do what you want." Poetry is a free medium, and poets are artists. We are free to put words anywhere we choose, so we can do the same with punctuation marks. Sprinkle them liberally or leave them out altogether, it doesn't really matter to the sense of the poem. They are the shackles of a formalism that poetry has long since left behind.

If you're going to break the rules of grammar, then poetry is the place to do it. Poets have a long history in the creative use of punctuation – as e.e. cummings, Edwin Morgan or (more recently) Patrick Jones have proven. To write good poetry, you don’t have to have every full stop or comma in exactly the place that the rules demand. Many poets I know are dyslexic, and have difficulty putting their punctuation in the conventionally correct places. It doesn't stop them writing excellent poetry. In fact, for most of them, their lifelong struggle with words is what makes them such powerful poets.

But I have to admit that I side with the other camp, by and large. This group contended that a free-for-all approach to punctuation can be harmful to the meaning of a poem. If you're going to use punctuation, you have to think about the job it is doing – and how to make it do its job most effectively.

A full stop doesn't appear just anywhere. It brings a sentence to an end – and by doing so, it creates a weightiness that wouldn't be there otherwise. That weightiness guides a reader. It shows where the emphasis is intended, how the rhythm is meant to fall, and where to place the key dramatic pauses that enliven the poem. Poetry gets its power from what isn't said, as much as what is. Punctuation is a guide to understanding that subtext.

Poets are told to take the greatest possible care over where we place our words. It seems silly, therefore, to give no care to the unspoken clues which show a reader how to read our poems. So treasure those full stops (and commas, semicolons and dashes). Place them as carefully as you place the words in your poems. By all means break the grammatical rules – but only if it's your choice to break them, to give the poem dramatic impact. Don't just do it because you can't be bothered to try and get it right.

(A version of this article was first published in the August 2011 issue of NAWG Link)

Writers' groups: are they worth the money?

2011-09-16T10:03:00.004+01:00

Regular Soapbox readers will know that I'm involved with a couple of writers' groups in the York area. Now and then I'm asked to chair meetings at these groups. And just once in a blue moon, somebody comes in who seems to be dead set on causing trouble.

The contentious issue a couple of weeks ago was whether or not a writers' group ought to charge people to attend? The troublesome lady in question left us with the very sniffy comment that she'd "never in her life" been asked to pay to attend a writers' group. I can only assume that the writers' groups she has attended in the past have been informal groups of amateurs meeting to discuss each other's work. Because every single other writers' group I have ever come across has needed an income from somewhere in order to operate.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking the "informal groups of amateurs". I used to attend just such a group, back in the Milton Keynes days. And it was one of the things which made life in Milton Keynes bearable. The welcome and support I got from those four or five people is still something I treasure. The inspiration I got from the (sometimes fiendishly challenging) writing "homework" we were set every month was enough to produce numerous brand-new poems and short stories - some of them prize winners.

Any writer would be lucky to find just such a group. And it's just possible that if you CAN find a group like this, you need never pay to attend a writers' group again.

So why pay?

There are a whole heap of reasons. At the most basic level, it might be that the group can't exist unless it can hire a venue. So those who meet might have to put their hands in their pockets just to meet the costs of room hire. Although this didn't apply to the group which our sniffy lady attended earlier this month, who are lucky enough to get their venue for free, it has applied to several other groups I've known. Bottom line: you don't want to pay, you can't have a public venue. And bear in mind that a lot of public venues aren't exactly what you'd call altruistically minded. York Library now charges a minimum £25 an hour for hiring one of their meeting rooms. No wonder literary groups are deserting the libraries and taking refuge in the pubs instead.

The second thing a writers' group with a bit of finance can do, is get professional speakers in. People who are part of the industry - published authors or poets, agents, publishers - who know how the business of writing works and can offer the benefit of their experience to those who are just starting out. Are we seriously expecting these people to donate their time and energy for free? Writers (and especially poets) are forever banging on about how difficult it is to make a living as a writer. The last thing we should do is begrudge them a little remuneration for the professional services they're able to offer.

A writers' group with money can also run competitions. York Writers, for example, do this two or three times a year. They invite their members to submit poems, short stories and articles, anonymously to a professional external judge. The judge not only chooses a winner but provides a critique for each individual piece submitted, and then comes to a meeting of the group and talks in depth about what they are looking for in a prize-winning piece. Members of the group don't have to pay to enter the competitions; the prize fund and the judge's fee are paid for out of what the group collects from members' subscriptions and money taken on the door at meetings.

There are lots of other reasons why a writers' group might need money. They might want to produce an anthology. Or put an advert in the writing press, seeking new members. They might want to run a public event - a talk from a famous author, or a poetry slam (York Writers actually ran a "short story slam" earlier this year, with a cash prize!). Or they might simply want to show solidarity for an organisation like the National Association of Writers' Groups, which exists to provide resources to connect writers across the UK and support their development as writers.

I don't suppose we will be seeing our sniffy lady again. Which saddens me, in some ways: she had a couple of other criticisms which I think were probably justified, and it would be good to at least let her know that her points were taken on board. But is the fact that the group were asking for money really justification for her rudeness? I don't think so. I think it's more likely that she expected everything to be handed to her on a plate, with no commitment on her part. If that's the case, I hope she is able to find the support that she needs for her writing, somewhere else. But I strongly suspect that if she's serious about writing, she may have to put her hand in her pocket every now and again.

Ayat Al-Gormezi freed

2011-07-19T10:19:00.002+01:00

Just a very short post today, following on from my last one: according to Write Out Loud, imprisoned Bahrainian poet and dissident Ayat al-Gormezi has been freed. Read more about her and her experiences here. Your can read a translation of the poem which got her imprisoned in the first place, kindly translated by Fatima al-Matar, here.

Thanks to all who have supported the campaign for her release.

When what you write (and what you stand for) is a matter of life and death

2011-06-07T18:23:00.006+01:00

Ayat al-Gormezi is a poet. If, like most of my readers, you live in the UK, the chances are you will never have heard of her. I have to admit I'd never heard of her until a day or two ago.

Ayat is currently in prison in Bahrain. She was tried before a "security court", where her lawyer was not allowed to speak, and there are indications that she has been tortured whilst in prison. Her crime? Reading out a poem at a pro-democracy rally.

Poets in the UK are a well insulated lot, by and large. Our world is comfortable, indulgent, and – let's be honest – pretty self-satisfied. The sort of poetry we write doesn't change the world. Our journals prize the esoteric, the obscure and the intellectual – or else make a virtue out of being "experimental", without it being at all clear what the experimentation is for. We take for granted the freedom that we have to paint our little odes about a daffodil or a glass raindrop on a leaf. It's all too easy to forget that there are poets around the world risking their lives for their words – so that their compatriots can enjoy the freedom that we have.

I want to talk about another extraordinary international poet before I sign off. His name is Javier Sicilia. That's him in the photograph that accompanies this blog entry. On March 28th, Javier's son and six friends were murdered in an outbreak of violence between warring drugs traders. Such violence is nothing unusual in Javier's native Mexico; but this poet refuses to be crushed by his loss, or the enormity of the challenge of setting things right in the face of government inaction. Instead he's leading a caravan of hundreds of poets and peace activists across the country – a focal point for non-violent demonstrations calling for an end to the bloodshed.

Javier is taking a risk. No doubt the vested interests controlling the drugs trade will take a dim view of his campaign. But he has something to believe in. "May the light be the road", says the placard that he carries. May it be the road to freedom for him, for Ayat, and for all who suffer for their words. May it be our road too, so that we can stand in solidarity with our fellow poets across the world – and make it clear that what they are suffering should not have to be tolerated.

Sign the petition to free Ayat al-Gormezi here.

The Water of Life?

2011-05-05T11:49:00.004+01:00

I can't be the only poet who's sometimes a bit intimidated by those rare and gifted writers who can rattle off new work every day without seeming to break into a sweat. One of the most prolific (and talented) poets I know recently complained to me that she'd only managed to write four poems in the preceding month. I couldn't help replying that that was about as many as I’d managed to write all year.

The truth is, producing poetry at that kind of rate is not something that's likely to happen throughout a poet's life. Pressures of work, the demands of family life, and the cares of the world can all conspire to squeeze out the emotional space that's crucial to the creative process. We needn't feel we are failures when that happens.

The bottom of a whisky bottle isn't perhaps the safest or most reliable place to look for comfort at such times! But there's a certain similarity between what it takes to make a good poem, and what it takes to make a good single malt. Poetry, after all, is also a distillation – an attempt to refine the raw material of human emotion into its most concentrated essence. This process is not something you can hurry. The result may occupy minimal space on the page (or in the bottle) but it's loaded with flavour and impact.

The analogy doesn't end there. As every whisky connoisseur knows, it's usually what happens after the distillation that makes the unique flavour of each single malt. It can't even be called whisky unless it's given a minimum 3 years in the barrel to absorb the flavours of oak and atmosphere. In practice, it usually takes much longer to mature the perfect single malt.

That's the way it is with poetry too. After the initial creative act, it can take a long time for a poem to reach perfection. What follows is a slow process of maturation – of gradual refinement. Replacing one word with a more expressive one; fine tuning the metre; inserting assonances and internal rhymes; adding the brilliant metaphor that usually turns up when we least expect it. This is not a process that should be hurried. Some of my poems are still maturing, years after they were first created. They're not quite right, yet. I won't release them on the unsuspecting public until they are.

There's everything to be said for the daily discipline of writing (even when it feels like the last thing you're ready to do). Poetically fertile periods do come, with poems appearing in a rush. Make the most of these periods, because they won't last forever. And if you're far from those ultra-creative highs, do not despair. Give those poems-in-progress the time and space they need to reach maturity. Let them absorb the rich flavours of your life experience. And trust your poet's palate. You'll know when they are ready.

(This article first appeared in the April 2011 issue of NAWG LINK magazine)

Review: The Illuminated Dreamer by Oz Hardwick (Oversteps Books, 2010; ISBN 978-1-906856-14-4)

2011-04-27T08:49:00.003+01:00

Oz Hardwick's third collection of original poetry is a more extrovert work than its two predecessors. The Kind Ghosts and Carrying Fire (Bluechrome, 2004 and 2006) were books that looked back into the past, rich in imagery from folklore and medieval literature; The Illuminated Dreamer documents the poet's journeys across more familiar, or at least more easily pictured, territory. The poems in this collection are beautifully crafted and there is a sophistication to them which belies the accessibility of the subject matter.

After a slightly trance-like beginning, the opening poems of the collection are mainly an exploration of the poet's uneasy fascination with the United States of America. Halsted Street Market in particular captures the complexities and contradictions that present themselves to a visitor's eyes:

"Her clumsy ring, its stone too big, clings
to dreams of dust and slide guitars, handsome
strangers, dangerous to cross...
Beneath the counter, a loaded forty-five,
hair-triggered and warm. She smiles again..."

Many of the poems in this section of the book derive their inspiration from music and film. Bob Dylan features in a number of guises, principally as the symbol of a youth left behind and of dreams not quite fulfilled:

"So when I heard his slow train coming
I watched from the side of the track, nodded,
ordered one more cup of coffee as he passed
and once again left me behind."
(from When Dylan Found God)

There's a nostalgic colour to these pieces, but they are never self-indulgent. A wry awareness that nothing stays the same is the dominant mood. It's present in both the social commentary of Desolation Row Revisited ("now poetry's handled by offshore concerns, / its rhythms stuttered from call centres / in countries with unpronounceable names") and the romanticism of Monochrome ("for you I'll extinguish / Times Square's gaudy neon glare, / mute it to monochrome with a rising Gershwin score, / meet you in secret when the last train has left.") My favourite of this set was The Cats of Greenwich Village, who may have "put on weight since Fred Neil / crossed MacDougal" but "carry it well, proud and hip". Today they "run wholefood stores and guitar shops, / reminisce about sitting on Dylan's shoulder, / relax and let the rats run free."

There's a sense of travelogue in the rest of the collection, but the destinations are predominantly European. As with the American poems, many of these pieces portray a reality that doesn't match up to the clichés of artwork and film; the scenery "seems painted, clouds / unconvincing, grass too green" (Notre Dame de Maigrauge). In Drowning in Paris, the familiar romantic backdrop (the tower "out of focus, its searchlight beams / refracted, showing nothing") evokes a very different story:

"I bent down to look at a postcard stand
and could not surface. Your cold hand slipped
away. I float with flotsam and suicides, abandoned."

In other places, however, the ordinariness of the setting is what allows unexpected magic to happen: the creature "waiting / with flowers at the station door, remembering / all I wished to forget" in Cow Parade: Milan; the enchanted solitude of the Italian riverside "where the bright lights shine, / rain-born and flowing to a foreign sea" in Welcome Stranger; the "Orpheus of the accordion, drunk and swaying" in Orphée.

The remaining pieces are journeys in dreams, strongly reminiscent of those in Carrying Fire. In these pieces, Hardwick’s credentials as a romantic poet are unashamedly laid bare:

"And here I will talk in warm, hushed voices
with those who you have forgotten but who remember you still,
and those whose rooms you keep fresh and ready,
though they will probably never return. All these people
I will know and call my friends."
(from Sleep Now)

The hazy, filmic quality of the imagery in this collection is one of the most distinctive aspects of Oz Hardwick's voice. Reading these poems is rather like being immersed in the very finest scenes from classic European cinema. One is never quite sure where description ends and dreams begin:

"When I see white horses stamping in the car park,
a boy cradling a goldfish that fell from the sky
and wild creatures sniffing at my door, I ask,
but they say nothing, leaving me lost and wide awake."
(from City)

The sheer musicality of his words is also striking. For a predominantly free verse poet, Hardwick's gift for rhyme is first-rate; he manages to sneak rhymes unselfconsciously into pieces that still feel like free verse:

"We have all day to dance. First, feel
this chill air. A bird flutters. A cat
stalks long shadows. A wooden wheel
cracks against cobbles – a tumbrel of clowns, fat
unsmiling masks yawning..."
(from Masks)

And most importantly, he never overdoes it. The same is true of the alliterations and consonances which give many of these poems almost the feel of songs:

"Rain slicks cobbles, shining
like tongues licking lamplight. Listen –"
(from Borderland)

"The mist-kissed cobbles glisten like a tear"
(from Autumn)

"Lips lapping kisses from cloudless sky"
(from Innamorati)

It is this music which gives even the most complex poems an instant accessibility.

The few pieces in more formal metre were, in my opinion, less successful. Here, the weaknesses lay not so much in the choice of words as in an occasional stutter of rhythm or the need to resort to poetic inversion. But these are minor blemishes in an otherwise delightful collection of poetry.

The Illuminated Dreamer is a feast of lush images and intoxicating music. Hardwick's social commentary is intelligent and unforced, and the sheer richness of his language adds special languor to the dream sequences and the love poems in particular. It continues to be a crying shame that Oz Hardwick's work isn’t given the same critical acclaim that many of his less interesting contemporaries receive. That recognition is now long overdue.

For more on Oz Hardwick, visit http://writeoutloud.net/p/poets/ozhardwick.

For more information about Oversteps Books, or to order The Illuminated Dreamer, visit http://www.overstepsbooks.com.

Hey Jack Kerouac

2011-03-31T09:17:00.004+01:00

I have a glaring gap in my knowledge of modern poetry. To some, it will seem like a sacrilegious one. I've never read the Beat Poets. And, I have to be honest, I've never quite understood why I should read the Beat Poets.

I'm 40 years old. I know a huge stack of poets in the "around 50" age bracket. And most of those people hero-worship the Beat writers. I've lost count of the number of people of that age who've told me it was Kerouac, Ginsberg et al. who first got them turned on to literature. I think that's fantastic. Anything that gets anyone reading and writing has to be commended. But I think I must have been just slightly too young to catch onto why the Beat writers were significant. I grew up on the Mersey Sound; most of my favourite modern poets were either inspired and mentored by McGough and Henri, or reacted against them.

This is the thing. For me, what the Mersey Sound poets did was real. I could look out my bedroom window as I was growing up, see the shipyards and the river, the two cathedrals, the Liver birds, the Tower Restaurant - the Liverpool icons that I shared with Roger and his contemporaries. They wrote about stuff that I could relate to: the first day at school, the fear of the end of the world (1981 was a paranoid year), and all that slightly bonkers romanticism as I got old enough to understand what romanticism was. What people have told me about the Beat poets doesn't even touch that world. Was there any relevance in Jack road-trippin' and substance-abusin' his way across the highways of America? It was a million miles away from my experience, my hopes and dreams, and what I saw out of my window every day.

OK, poetry doesn't have to be directly relevant to daily life to be meaningful. Some of the best poetry transcends it altogether. I've already written on here about how much The Waste Land inspired me, and I don't think it has a shred of connection with the day-to-day life I live! Poetry works if it inspires dreams. It's just that, for me, there have always been poets other than the Beat poets who have seemed more real, more accessible, better able to inspire those dreams for me.

So this is a plea, to those of you who love the Beat poets. Please tell me exactly what I'm missing. Let me know how and why they inspired you - something that's going to make me want to immerse myself in their world too. I want to understand what it is you feel when you read those works. I want to understand what makes them classics. But before I can do that, I need a way in. And don't feel you can't contribute if you weren't old enough to read the Beat poets when they were contemporary. If you've newly discovered them, that might be even more exciting.

York Poetry was slammin' on 18th!

2011-03-21T11:11:00.004Z

They said it couldn't happen, but it did... After the demise of the York Literature Festival, you could be forgiven for thinking that no one in York WANTED to show up to literary events. York's first ever Poetry Slam, on 18th March, proved the detractors wrong by packing out The Basement at City Screen Picturehouse and attracting 31 contestants from the local area and as far afield as Newcastle, Manchester and Coventry. After a high-energy Grand Final, Harrogate's Tim Ellis was named York Poetry Slam Champion 2011 and took away a prize pot of £44.62 kindly donated by his fellow performers.

It seems appropriate to set down my thoughts on the Slam while they are still fresh in my mind. So here goes!

I have to begin by thanking the people who made it possible - Helen, my co-host at Speakers' Corner; Jem and Nicola at Harrogate's Poems, Prose and Pints for designing a fabulous poster and plugging the event with all their might; Rose and Alan of Stairwell Books for providing much of the motivation for getting the slam going in the first place; and performance poet Ash Dickinson, our guest judge, for invaluable advice and also for providing a guest slot which was one of the best poetry performances I've seen in ages. Without you guys, there really would have been no slam - we owe it all to your dedication, enthusiasm and energy.

I have to thank the performers too - all 31 of them. Several (including one of our finalists) had never read their poetry in front of an audience before, and deserve massive respect for having the courage to stand up and make themselves vulnerable that way. A great many travelled for miles just to take part. The feedback I've had from the performers was universally positive. All of them seemed to think it was well worth the effort, even if they didn't make it to the final.

The mix of material was gloriously diverse. Our three prize winners truly earned their accolade, but there were some stand-out performances along the way which have left an enduring memory. Some of them were pretty off-the-wall, like the guy who performed his poem lying down on the stage with a sleep mask over his eyes. Some were moments of unintended comedy, like the lady's handbag which inadvertently became the most entertaining stage prop of the evening. Others were quieter, simpler. A poetry slam can be a noisy affair. Everyone expects to have a good jeer at bankers, warmongers and upper-class members of the Cabinet. But sometimes a quietly alliterative poem of lost love, or the image of a young woman in a hijab describing her face, can have a more lingering effect.

Mistakes were made along the way, of course. I thought our publicity was crystal-clear, but there were still inquiries coming in right up to the last minute about who needed to buy tickets, where to buy them from, and what time we were due to start. We had an unforeseen partial clash with another poetry event elsewhere in town - though if anything, we may actually have ended up boosting attendance at each other's events, by providing enough incentive to drag poets from far and wide into York on a Friday night. Not being aware of "how other people do it" led to a couple of complaints, from people who had been to other slams and expected, not unreasonably, that ours would run the same way. But these were very minor niggles, and soon forgotten in the general enthusiasm of the night.

For me, perhaps the best endorsement of the night came from the anecdotal evidence of people scribbling down words and ideas throughout the evening, of conversations overheard in the toilets that people were inspired to get writing. This is what it's all about. If we've given people ideas, encouragement, inspiration - if we've sown seeds that will germinate into new pieces of writing - if we've prompted people to get writing, perhaps for the first time - then I don't think we could want anything more.

It's great to bask in the applause (as Tim will, I'm sure, testify!). It's great to have the reassurance that we sold enough tickets to cover our costs, plough a bit of money into our respective organisations, AND have enough left over to donate £50 to Comic Relief. But we don't do it just for the applause, the self promotion, or the money. We do it to spread the germ of writing - that subversive disease that undermines, inspires, and offers alternatives to a grey, mediocre, recession-ridden world. If we've done our bit to spread that disease, then I'm happy.

Why I'm uneasy about World Book Night

2011-03-04T12:20:00.004Z

This Saturday evening, people across the UK will be giving out free books as part of the World Book Night initiative. A brilliant idea – at least on the surface.

After all, everyone who writes has a vested interest in Getting People Reading. Books transform lives – they transformed mine. Access to the printed word can educate, inspire, set people in directions they'd never have dreamt were possible. With World Book Night, that access is being made available to everyone – and somebody else is paying for it.

Like most writers, I was really enthusiastic about this scheme when I first heard about it. It's only as time has gone on that I've started to have my doubts.

World Book Night was sold on the basis that, if your life has been transformed by a book, this is your chance to give copies of that book to others. But that's not really what is happening. There are only 25 books to choose from. OK, some of these are worthy enough to justify inclusion on the list. Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time genuinely did transform a largely ignorant populace's understanding of how being on the autistic spectrum influences a person’s relationships with other people and the outside world. Love in a Time of Cholera, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and even Northern Lights are proper classics in their own right. And Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife is a rarity amongst poetry books, being both impeccably crafted and instantly accessible.

What troubles me is that the list stops here. You see, if I were giving out copies of the books that had transformed and influenced me, I'd be giving out different things altogether. The Armada Book of Young Verse, for instance. It's out of print now, which is a crying shame, because this was the book that first showed me the magic of language and the wonder of what you can do with it. I wish other people had the same chance to enjoy it as I did. The novels that'd be on my “giveaway” list would be stuff like Tolkien's Tree and Leaf, or the complete works of Robert Louis Stevenson. Or, to bring it more up-to-date, perhaps Iain Banks's The Crow Road, Joanne Harris's Gentlemen and Players, George Mackay Brown's Beside the Ocean of Time. There'd be short story collections too. The spell that Jeanette Winterson wove on me in The World and Other Places has been unsurpassed in 10 years.

And what about poetry? It's represented twice on the list – by Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy. Probably the only two poets in the world who don’t actually need more publicity. There are many brilliant poets writing life-transforming work, constrained only by the fact that people don't know about their work, and publishers can't afford to give them the sort of publicity that your blockbuster novelist – or even your Poet Laureate – can command. If I were a World Book Night ambassador, I'd want to be giving out copies of Diana Syder's Hubble. It's a book I'm utterly in love with. It transformed my vision of the power of poetry. And I wish with all my heart that more people had read it.

There are several books on the World Book Night list that I like. Even one or two that I admire. Some that I really ought to get round to reading one day (and wouldn't be averse to getting my hands on if a World Book Night ambassador happens to be passing). But none that I'm actually in love with. And that's where the whole concept makes me uncomfortable. The books on this list are loss leaders by major publishing houses. And it's the major publishing houses who are using this scheme to dictate the books that people are supposed to be in love with. Granted, they have endorsements from famous names who actually like and understand books; but it was the publishing houses who dictated what they could choose from.

The gamble, for the publishers, is that people will read the free books, enjoy them, and go out and seek other works by the same author. It's crafty; I can't help but admire it, albeit grudgingly. The handful of authors on the list can be justifiably proud of inclusion, and none of them will object to the ensuing boost in their sales figures. It's all the others that I can't help feeling sorry for. The real test of World Book Night's success is going to be whether or not it's a springboard for people to seek out other authors – the ones who aren’t lucky enough to enjoy the free publicity.

Review: Admiral FitzRoy's Barometer by Pat Borthwick (Templar Poetry, 2008; ISBN 978-1-906285-20-3)

2011-02-13T09:20:00.003Z

Yorkshire-based poet Pat Borthwick has won just about every poetry competition known to humankind. Admiral FitzRoy’s Barometer is her third full collection. It’s a slim, beautifully presented hardback volume that feels like it could have packed many more poems within.

As you might expect from a multiple prize-winning poet, this is a sophisticated collection. Many poems home in on minute details in the area where philosophy, nature and science intersect. Concepts such as the nature of light (At This Moment), the origins of matter (Stone), the meaning of empty space (At Least 51 Ways of Contemplating a Hole) and the origin of madness (The Tale) are explored in imagery that is ingenious, but filled with childlike wonder. A number of these poems reminded me strongly of Diana Syder’s brilliant Hubble collection. What is notable about these poems is that the poet’s choice of words remains uncomplicated and accessible, even when immersed in lofty ideas. The poems are clever, but never intellectual for their own sake.

Stone was my favourite of these. In it, the contemplation of a pebble becomes a dialogue in which both the poet and the stone seem to be suffering from the same existential angst:

“I hum a lullaby and one by one
its eyes begin to close.
Has my life been wasted? it dreams.
Was my voice too soft?”

The poet wrings an enormous amount of pathos from a set of interlinked verses about a family. Whether this is the poet’s actual family, or a fictitious one, she is careful not to let on. Dark shadows of repression (Apple Pie), lies (One of My Fathers) and sexual abuse (Snake) are seldom far from the surface. The tender mother of Becoming Woman, comforting her newly pubescent daughter after a vivid nightmare, and the domineering matriarch of Apple Pie seem so far removed from one another that they could be (and perhaps are) two different characters entirely; but the similarity in the narrative voice left me a little confused as to which version of events I was supposed to believe. This confusion is one that the narrator apparently shares:

“Truth. Lie. Truth. Lie.
Our words balance against each other’s
then roll away, sticky as dough balls.”
(from Apple Pie)

Snake is the most gut-wrenching of these pieces, an allegory of sexual abuse and its consequences. The storytime monster under this child’s bed is all too real, and the effect in her later life is chilling:

“I’ve gained their confidence. Come up,
I’ll say, and then, in their jewelled tuxedos,
watch them stretch across my pillows...
...I’ve spent years
learning to unhook my jaw, perfect
the toxicity of digestive juices
so not a single drop’s superfluous.”

The dreadful dilemma of the pregnant rape victim of Katya, not knowing whether she will “kick it and its afterbirth / down the mountainside” or “say, Give me my baby, and... call it Katya”, echoes this theme. It disturbs and revolts the reader quietly, without any sense of preaching.

A more poignant note is sounded by another linked set of domestic poems, these ones exploring the memory of departed loved ones through the relics they leave behind: the broken chair leaning against the allotment shed in Chair, the memory of fading light and the radio in Forecast, the crumpled handkerchief containing “a shower of moths and butterflies / enough to fan the whole Earth” in The Wash. The images that these leave in the reader’s mind are of astonishing clarity, resonant with sadness as well as celebration of lives lived to the full. The Widower’s Button provides a sensitive variant on this theme, as the lover of an older man finds herself intruding unbidden in the world of his departed first wife:

“She must have used this same needle,
this same white thread,
easing them along cotton hems,
newly laundered shirts,
the smell of sheets fresh from the line.”

I felt, at times, that there was a risk of the images and metaphors becoming a bit too off-the-wall, too airy. Sometimes a Camel is full of images redolent of Noah’s Ark and those early-20th-century black and white animations, but left me baffled as to where it was going and what it was trying to say. Past Twelve O’Clock takes a memorial silence as its starting-point but finishes with the planet as a bell ringing in space, without any real sense of how we got there. I’m not sure if this was just me, failing to spot a vital connection that’ll be obvious to a more intelligent reader, or if these genuinely were poems designed to go spinning into the ether, never quite earthing themselves again.

If there is a structural weakness in the collection, it is the seemingly random disposition of the poems. Pieces which are closely related are scattered all over the collection, without any apparent sense of order. Perhaps this is to ensure that parts of the collection don’t become too bogged down in darker subject matter. But for me, a little more ebb and flow in the themes and moods would have strengthened the collection as a whole. The problem is at its most acute in Passing on the Tickle, where the implied reference to panpipes in the description of the reedbed is mystifying without first reading Interlude, which appears much later in the collection.

These minor reservations aside, Admiral FitzRoy’s Barometer is a strong collection of poems. Its distinguishing features are the original, often startling imagery and a deep sense of the poet’s intimate connection with the natural world and the loved ones who are honoured in the poems. Humour is often present just under the surface too – sometimes playful (My Neighbour’s Myna), sometimes wry (In Praise of Grey). The result is a sophisticated yet accessible collection that will leave memorable images in the mind long after after the book has been shut.

For more information and to order, see the Templar Poetry website.

Review: Tasting the Fruit by Steve Allen (Indigo Dreams Press, 2010; ISBN 978-1-907401-08-4)

2011-01-31T10:05:00.003Z

Performance poet Steve Allen has been flying the flag for poetry in the cultural wilderness of Milton Keynes for years. In the flesh, he is a compelling performer, using his whole body to bring his words to vivid life. Steve’s sense of dramatic or comic timing is about the best I’ve witnessed on the performance circuit. He can spot an innuendo at 1000 paces, and revels in being able to spice up otherwise serious poems with a choice double entendre or two. It’s the more risqué side of his repertoire that’s best known from his performances, and there are some good representative examples in this long overdue debut collection. But it’s easy to forget that his publication record has been largely built up on serious poetry. The bulk of the collection consists of travelogues, love poems and love-gone-wrong poems (and sometimes all three in the same piece of writing).

It is in the love poems that Steve’s touch is most delicate, his poet’s eye at its most insightful. What I loved about these pieces was their simple domestic intimacy. There is an understated poignancy in the first-time chef’s act of kindness to a sick partner in Can’t Cook, Don’t Cook, the glances and touches of the separated former lovers walking in the woods in Midsummer, the butterfly fluttering past the boarding aeroplane in Incarnation.

As for love poems, so with love-gone-wrong poems. There are a whole clutch of these, that fuse raw emotion with rather cynical humour. Second Adulthood, the exact mid-point of the collection, is the angriest poem in the book. On one level it can be read as a divorcee’s bitter rant against the failure of a marriage; but the overpowering mood is one of triumph:

“Separation?
I’m not fragmenting
I’m intact.”

Other poems chart the search for a human connection to replace the one so brutally disconnected in Second Adulthood. The tone of these is more wistful, the poet’s disappointment quite palpable through the subtext:

“We drank your wine
Not mine
But that’s OK”
(from OK);

“I accept the euphemistic coffee,
mentally noting that, at this time of night,
decaffeinated is safest.”
(from Come, Come).

A similar unsettledness enlivens the travelogue poems, which range through scenes as foreign to Home Counties eyes as Kuala Lumpur street corners, the home of a Brazilian charcoal burner and, erm, Camden market. The scene pictures are deftly painted; the “old boat, now on stilts, that houses her garden” (Zafira’s Garden), the “bandaged, bloodied stumps / of the shuffler / struggling along / the pavement-less road” (Knees), the “village bullock and cart (that) plod the fast lane” (Caste and Contrast) and the signposts filled with unintended doubles entendres (Kum Kum) were particularly vivid for me. But I felt a curious sense of detachment when reading these poems. The narrative voice was that of a self-styled “Englishman Abroad”, wryly noting the alien and incongruous scenes around him, but rarely getting involved. When the poet is dragged into the scenes, it is usually against his will.

A review of Steve Allen’s work could never be complete without mentioning the slightly smutty, innuendo-laden poems which are his hallmark as a performer. Several such poems are clustered together in the central section of the collection. They range from the ingenious Park and Ride and Pay and Display to the splendidly titled Vibrator Racing. At their best, these pieces display a precision of craft that equals any of his serious poetry. But some (You Done Then?, (C)Rude Poem, the laddish punchline of Mind and Behind) leave too little to the imagination. I know that they are effective on stage; but devoid of the performance element, I didn’t honestly think these pieces brought any real poetic quality to the collection.

For me, the greatest poetic depth was to be found at the end of the collection, in a small set of autobiographical poems. East End, Southend was a particularly intriguing piece, centring on the rescue of a vandalised photograph of the narrator’s parents in their courting days. There’s an unstated sense of sadness for lost times in this poem and many of its companions. Here, for the first time, it feels as if the poet is writing honestly about himself without hiding behind a bluster of drama and innuendo: as a child in Early Days, a teacher of disaffected colliery children in Supply, a would-be hippie transported unexpectedly back to 1969 in After the Rain-Gush. The poet’s memories of his mother, sharing the drama of thunderstorms in Bravery Comes in Many Forms, and her simultaneous vulnerability and stoicism in When Mother Fell, are particularly moving.

For me, this collection was a bit of a paradox. Steve Allen’s talent as a performer, his timing and intonation and sheer energy, are so much a part of his poetry that some of the poems in this collection seem weak when stripped of these elements. What comes across as wry wit in a live performance can be mistaken on the page for smugness or a route to a cheap gag. With few exceptions (Park and Ride being one), the poems here which are most effective as written poems are the more personal pieces, which show a delicacy of touch and a mastery of subtext which is sometimes absent from the performance pieces. So for me, this was a mixed collection. But if its existence provides a means for one of today’s best performers of poetry to get his work performed live in front of new audiences, it will have amply fulfilled its purpose.

More about this book, and some sample poems from Steve Allen, can be found on the Indigo Dreams Press website.

Review: The Honey Month by Amal El-Mohtar (Papaveria Press, 2010; no ISBN)

2011-01-26T08:57:00.006Z

Amal El-Mohtar’s The Honey Month is really the literary equivalent of a concept album. Having received a gift of samples of 28 different types of honey from a friend, the writer resolved to taste one a day, and produce a piece of writing each day which reflected the experience of each different honey. The result is a delightful debut collection whose poems and short stories are more than just an aesthetic pleasure; they are a rich sensual indulgence. There’s an ethereal, rather fairytale quality to the writing; but that doesn’t mean there is nothing here for those who like their poetry to be more intellectual.

The first thing that strikes the reader is what a gorgeous book this is. It’s not just the fonts used, the quality of the paper, and the overall feel of the book in one’s hand; the beautiful illustrations by Oliver Hunter, ranging from line drawings to full-page colour artworks, make this a visual feast. It’s fitting that a collection dedicated to a sensory exploration as well as an imaginative one should delight by sight and touch as well as by the music of the writing itself. One reviewer described this as “literary synaesthesia”, and I’m inclined to agree.

The writing in this collection ranges through free verse and formal poetry, prose poems, and short stories. The favoured poetic style is free verse or prose poem, but the poet also has a fascination for villanelles. These are not strictly formal in metre, but where the poet bends the form she does so knowingly, and never pushes things too far. The overall effect is to enhance the poems, rather than weaken them. Day 6 – Lemon Creamed Honey, with its “yellow laughter from a yellow-sounding throng” was my favourite of these.

There’s a light sentimentalism inherent in some of the writing. But like the honeys themselves, the poet keeps any sugar-sweetness well balanced – sometimes with a piece of tart allegory, often with an understated bitter note which makes it clear that this is a poet who has lived, loved, and lost, and dreams of doing it all again. The prayer to the rose in Day 4 – Raspberry Rose Honey struck me as particularly knowing:

“Oh Rose, aren’t you sick
of metaphors, of perfection,
of being Queen to a grasping multitude
who’ve never brushed a thorn?”

Some pieces are a wistful revisiting of the poet’s Canadian childhood. Day 12 – Red Gum Honey is characteristic:

“She wakes to quiet loneliness,
dresses, walks to her windowsill,
and sip by sip, lick by lick,
draws night back home again.”

Others have us rambling across the Cornish countryside which is her current home, in search of magical beings. Day 7 – Thistle Honey introduces us to Scraggle, the thistle pixie who “looks like summer”, while Day 22 – Malaysian Rainforest Honey brings a troll by a trash can, an air-sucking spirit in a water spout, and a romantic beggar girl with “eyes like penny candy.”

Not everything in the honey world is sweetness and light. This is particularly true of the short stories in the second half of the book, where more serious subtexts lurk just beneath the fairytale words. Metaphors for addiction (the eerie ravens of Day 18 – Manuka Honey), depression (the Rapunzel-like girl in Day 24 – Apricot Creamed Honey), and suicide (the mermaid of Day 25 – Raw Manuka Honey) are particularly potent here.

Day 11 – Blackberry Honey tugs us out of fairytale land with a jolt. This is a protest poem with an edge of steel to it:

“They pulled me from the rubble
like a fabled sword; never
was Excalibur so tarnished.”

To create a war poem with a weight of truth in a cynical age is no mean feat. Perhaps more strongly here than in any other poem in the collection, there is a suggestion that this poet’s words are going to become more powerful and even more compelling in her future work.

It is the yearning romanticism which colours almost every poem, the sense of heartbreak in the subtext, which leaves the strongest impression after the book is closed. The motif of the bees’ nectar-dance occurs throughout as an extended metaphor for the emotional journey of love. Usually the dance is doomed. In Day 16 – Blueberry Honey the poet is left contemplating the wiles of the destructive ex-lover (“the twist of your lips in a secret fit to kiss”), while in Day 26 – Blackberry Creamed Honey the poet seems to put herself in the persona of seducer, musing on the lover she leaves behind (“quiet and crunching on cardamom, licking honey from his lips”). “Why are you so sad, girl, you who love us so much?” ask the bees in Day 28 – French Chestnut Honey. The poet’s answer? “I am only a girl, a small plain girl, a girl who must smear her lips in honey to be found sweet.”

In just one poem, Day 2 – Peach Creamed Honey, the dance of love seems innocent and new:

“They say
she likes to suck peaches. Not eat them, suck them,
tilt her head back down and let the juice drip
sticky down her chin, before licking, sucking,
swallowing the sunshine of it down.”

This was my favourite poem in the collection, a sensual overdose that metamorphoses from free verse to pulsating rhyme in a beautifully crafted climax. The impression is of a poem about loss of virginity, but with no mention of sex anywhere. It’s joyous, it’s full of summer, and it made me feel young again.

I don’t think I can recommend this collection highly enough. I’m a sucker for fairytales, so that aspect of the collection won me over instantly. But there is plenty here that those who like their poetry more firmly rooted in real earth can feast on too. It is a triumphant debut for a poet with a mesmerising voice. I look forward to hearing more from Amal El-Mohtar very soon.

Arts funding cuts - where next for the York Literature Festival?

2011-01-24T10:20:00.003Z

In a recession, arts funding is always seen as a soft option when cutbacks are on the table. It’s not that arts types don’t protest – far from it. It’s more that there’s no easy way for the bean counters to put any quantifiable price tag to the benefit that supporting the arts can bring. Anything that can’t prove its worth to the profit making machine automatically counts as frivolous, not worth spending money on.

It’s a narrow-minded way to conduct cultural policy. The arts have a value that goes far beyond the purely economic. Engagement with culture increases quality of life, boosts health and well-being, improves education, provides disaffected youth with alternatives to anti-social behaviour, and creates and nurtures transferable skills that are essential in the workplace. When you take away provision for such things, you take away a lifeline for many people – and you have to pay the price, indirectly, afterwards.

It is always a pity when a grassroots literary movement bites the dust. That’s exactly what has happened to the York Literature Festival, which will not be going ahead in 2011 despite four successful years as a showcase of the best local and regional literature. York Literature Festival has always been planned and run from within the local community, by a volunteer committee and team of promoters. Despite the inherent challenges of running a Festival staffed by volunteers, it attracted writers of the calibre of Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Atkinson, Jim Crace and Tracy Chevalier over the years.

So why the demise of the Festival?

The first nails started going into the coffin in late 2009, when York City Council formally withdrew the funding that had previously made the Festival possible. The committee were left with no choice but to plan and run a Festival that was entirely self-funding. And they managed it. The 2010 York Literature Festival ran off modest sponsorships from local businesses and generous private donations from groups and individuals. The result was a packed 10-day programme that drew in literary enthusiasts from across the region. But there is only so long a Festival can go on without secure funding to produce programmes and publicity, and to attract big-name writers. The committee could only hold out so long in hope that the funding they needed for the long term would arrive. It never did.

So, for now, the York Literature Festival is no more. In mourning its passing I have to take my hat off to Miles, Fiona, Antonia, Jenny, Rob, Adrienne, Rose and Alan, and the many other local people who willingly gave up their time or donated money to make previous Festivals happen. I might not mind so much if they were just plucky underdogs, defeated by circumstance. But this story illustrates another side of something that’s happening nationally, which is really beginning to trouble me.

On the whole, the arts are resilient in times of recession. Straitened financial circumstances force people into finding new ways to entertain themselves. The Thatcherite recession of the 1980s created a wave of small-scale, local, “do-it-yourself” arts movements. Punk had encouraged the belief that ordinary people could make things happen; Thatcherism forced ordinary people to step up to the challenge. Grassroots art thrived in a way that the establishment couldn’t have predicted – and didn’t altogether like.

There are signs that the same is starting to happen again in the poetry world. Milton Keynes’ Monkey Kettle is leading the way with its triumphant brand of leftfield satire and surrealism. In the north-east, we now have Beautiful Scruffiness. I predict it’s going to be the first of many new, grassroots publications: run by poets, produced on a shoestring but not compromising in production quality, and designed to bring poetry back where it belongs – among the people.

The problem is that there are vested interests even within the liberal arts. And those interests sometimes end up opposing grassroots arts movements, rather than supporting them.

In the corporate mind-set, control is everything. The name, the branding, the “public image”, everything that happens has to be carefully micro-managed to ensure that only the corporate values are reflected. That’s why, to take a purely hypothetical example, you could envisage a situation where a civic authority might refuse a small grant to a grassroots festival and subsequently spend thousands subsidising glossy brochures for a public event (maybe also branded a “Festival”), which turns out to be just a thinly disguised publicity junket for a wealthy local industry. To take another hypothetical example, you might envisage other corporations (and remember, corporations come in all kinds of guises these days, in the public as well as the private sectors) being frustrated at not owning the name and brand identity for a grassroots festival. Instead of supporting, they might want such festivals to fail (or even be planning for it). Where control is not an option, the only alternative is to quash it altogether.

I’m comforted by the knowledge that the grassroots won’t stay silent for long. Where we’re squashed in one place, we will come back even stronger somewhere else. Literature and art will thrive in Britain, whatever the Con-Dems in central government or the stuffed shirts in the councils do.

The great thing about the grassroots is its self-reliance. Local people really can make things happen where they are, with negligible funding. Those corporate interests that sneered at the York Literature Festival because it never was corporate could be in for a shock when the recession axe starts to fall against their interests too. They may well find that they’ve lost the support and goodwill of the community that they need to carry them through the storm.

New Year Resolutions

2011-01-10T14:14:00.003Z

I've been neglecting the Poet's Soapbox of late. I have to blame that on pressures of the day job, a new course of study, and all the 101 little things that conspire to get between an artist and his favourite pleasures. But with some significant changes in my personal circumstances, I start 2011 determined to give the Soapbox the attention it deserves.

To that end, I’ve come up with a couple of new year's resolutions for my blogging.

One is that I need to do it more often. The core of this blog will remain the Soapbox articles I produce for the National Association of Writers' Groups' excellent LINK magazine. But in order to improve interactivity, I’m going to intersperse these with some personal reflections too.

I'm already drafting a linked series of articles on my experience running an open mic night for poets and spoken word performers (which I’ve given the provisional title of Open Mic Surgery). Regular readers will know that I believe performance to be the lifeblood of poetry. If I have one aspiration for the Soapbox, it would be that it encourages people not to be intimidated about standing up and reading poetry in front of an audience. For those who don't have the good fortune of an open mic on their doorstep, I also want to offer some encouragement that starting one up may not be as difficult as you think.

I'm keen to have other people's insights to offer, not just my own. So if you've been involved in setting up an open mic, or you're an MC or organiser of one now, please leave a comment here or email me (at the usual address) and let me know about your experiences. In particular, have a think about the following questions:

How and why did you get started?
How do you publicise your open mic?
Do you have guest features? How do you find people who are willing to feature?
Have you come across any problems or difficulties in running the open mic? How have you dealt with them?

I'll try and incorporate as many responses as possible into the Open Mic Surgery articles as they evolve.

The other new thing I intend to do with the Soapbox is to write reviews of poetry books.

I seem to pick up poetry books all over the place. Books by poets I hear at readings; books by guest features who've come to Speakers' Corner; books that just seem to get sent me randomly in the post (there have been a whole stack of these in the last few months!). Now that I have more opportunity to spend quality time with these, it seems only fair to do what I can to give the most deserving ones a bit of publicity.

Most of the titles I get are published by small presses, and never get the kind of exposure that the Seamus Heaneys and Carol Ann Duffys of this world seem to automatically deserve. But some of them are every bit as good as the latest Heaney or Duffy. Others – well, poetry is like any artform, a mix of the good, the bad and the ugly. I want to be able to praise and promote the writers who really deserve it. But I want to be honest, too. No poetry collection is flawless. If I offer criticism here I will intend it as constructive criticism, and hope that the poets concerned will accept that criticism in the spirit with which it's meant – kindly.

Once again, reader feedback will be welcome. If you've read one of the books I've reviewed, and want to offer your own thoughts, please do (especially if you disagree with me!). The one rule to remember, is be helpful, be constructive; comments that aren't will just be deleted. And if you've read a poetry book you would like me to review – or are a poet yourself, and want to send me a review copy – please leave a comment on the Soapbox or by email in the usual way.

It only remains for me to thank my existing readers for their loyalty, and to hope I get some new readers in 2011! Happy new year.

All About Soul - free expression or language fascism?

2010-09-03T13:28:00.002+01:00

(editor's note: this article first appeared in the August 2010 issue of NAWG LINK)

A few months ago, a dreadful example of literary fascism dropped through my letterbox. It wasn't an election leaflet from a right-wing political party; it was the judge's report from the latest competition in a respected poetry journal. The report was one long diatribe against poets who used a small subset of words to which the judge seemed to have taken an irrational dislike. "Shards", "crimson" and "seeps" were singled out for particular criticism.

I won't name the journal, or the offending (male) poet. In his defence, there's no doubt that poets can get over-fond of certain words ("shards" is probably one of them). It doesn't matter how beautiful a word might be, its poetic resonance will pale if you see it too often. Even the professionals are sometimes guilty of over-using their favourite expressions – just count the number of times the verb "to sieve" crops up in Carol Ann Duffy's writing!

But it got worse. According to this judge, the word "soul" has no place in contemporary poetry. It is "curious and archaic" and shouldn't be seen except in Victorian hymn books.

OK, so this poet might prefer a rational, non-mystical approach to poetry. Fair enough. A few of my favourite poets are secular atheists, some outspokenly so. But I can't think of any who would make a pronouncement so sweeping, or so culturally alienating. The word soul is still in common usage to refer to a dimension of life which people use to encompass poetry, nature and the arts as well as religious experience.

And what about "soul music"? Is that an anachronism too? Judging by the public response to the untimely death of Michael Jackson last year, it clearly isn't. His music still inspires and uplifts generations of people from a worldwide cross-section of cultures and traditions.

Making arrogant pronouncements about the words a poet can and can't use is a fascism of language. It is dictatorship, in the literal sense of the word: one self-appointed authority telling others what they should (and shouldn't) be thinking, believing, and trying to express; one poet controlling the style and manner of expression of an entire art form. This is completely contrary to the spirit of free expression that poetry should be about. It isn't just an intellectual pursuit; and we shouldn't be content to let language fascists turn it into one.

The Problem with Poetry Readings

2010-08-07T11:18:00.002+01:00

(editor's note: this article first appeared in the June 2010 issue of NAWG LINK)

The deeper I go into poetry, the more I am convinced that what makes poetry powerful isn’t the appearance of words on a page, but the effect of those words being transmitted from poet to audience. The democratic principle appears to be behind me on this. Open mic nights, slams, and "poems and pints" sessions are springing up all over the place. Poets who appear at these gigs range in age from students to retired people, and in style from shaven-headed rappers to foppish Victorian throwbacks.

Not everybody in the poetic world agrees that this is a good thing. There is a distinct snobbishness from certain quarters – a suggestion that poetry should be elitist rather than democratic, intellectual rather than accessible. A dangerous mind-set for poets to possess.

My first poetry readings, back in my student days, were tipsy, hedonistic, romantic affairs. These days, "poetry readings" mostly seem to involve a darkened room, a stack of books, and a guest poet sat behind them. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this format. But it's more like a sort of highbrow Jackanory than the poetry readings that were so formative for me.

I've lost count of poetry readings where the poets don't seem to understand how to connect with an audience. They have sat miles back, buried their noses in the books, and mumbled their poems – often without even a microphone to mumble them into. It's as if they are embarrassed by the whole affair.

Is this really the way for the poetry world to win new audiences? Is it heck.

What makes it worse is that I'm not talking about amateur poets. I have seen some of the most respected names in British poetry give readings like this.

The audiences are sometimes as much of a problem as the poets. The whole affair can degenerate into an excuse for people of a certain caste (usually white, patrician and elderly) to show their faces in the right company. I've walked into events like these and left with a definite impression that my face doesn't fit. Audiences have been downright rude: I've been cold-shouldered, talked across, even on one occasion verbally abused. Are they telling me I'm not part of the poetry "set" and have no place there?

Poetry exists to stir a response in others. There is no better way to stimulate that response than by performing poems in front of an audience. Not all poets have a natural aptitude for this. But all poets who have ambitions to succeed as poets need to learn how to do it. Poetry needs to live, to breathe. To be heard.

Its audience deserves nothing less.

Ten Poems that Changed my Life

2010-07-18T15:19:00.003+01:00

(Author's note: this article first appeared in issue 86 of NAWG LINK)

I'd like to pass on one of the best pieces of writing advice I've received. If you find the writing doesn't come, don't stress about writing – READ instead. Read your favourite things, the stuff that really inspires you. Immerse yourself in it, for weeks or months if necessary. Over time, those treasured writings will start to stir your subconscious, and get your imagination on the road to fruitfulness again.

I'll go a step further. Many people have a musical Top Ten, or a list of "songs that changed their life". So why not seek out the ten poems that changed your life, and use these as the starting-point for your literary therapy? Don't just list them – think about how and why they changed your life, why they're still meaningful today. Read them, again and again. Luxuriate in them.

I'll get you going by telling you a bit about ten poems that changed my life.

The first one goes back to my infant years, and Brian Cant (I think) on Play School (more than likely) reciting Wilma Horsbrugh's The Train to Glasgow. This has everything a perfect child's poem should have: it's full of rhythm and rhyme, delightful repetition, lovely unusual words, and it's really, really funny. I can still recite it today.

I have my Mum to thank for unleashing the storytelling power of poetry on me at an early age. Her eerie recitation of Edward Lear's fantastical ballad The Dong with a Luminous Nose is one of my earliest memories. She filled it with such weird musicality that it used to terrify me as a child; today, I consider it the finest gothic romantic poem ever written.

Roger McGough's First Day at School was another much-quoted childhood treasure. I didn't realise it at the time, but this was my first encounter with free verse. No less rhythmical or musical than The Train to Glasgow or The Dong, it's a joy to read aloud.

I came across Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village when I was 16, studying English Literature O-level. I have Irish heritage and this poem took me right back to where my ancestors might have started out. It was a blast of fierce political rhetoric, lambasting the establishment of the day for ruining a land and its inhabitants in the name of what we'd now call capitalism. At a time when my social and political conscience was still being formed, it stood strong alongside the repertoire of protest songs I was discovering.

O-level English Lit. also introduced me to Tennyson's The Lotos Eaters. Tennyson was well and truly part of the establishment that Goldsmith loathed. But he was a lyrical genius. Not only was this a slice of epic storytelling in a tradition that I loved, but it was one of the most musical things I'd ever heard (it demands to be read aloud).

After Tennyson, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land was a shock to the system! I blame a theatrical production by a university friend, not long after I moved away from home, for introducing me to this incredible piece of writing. I hardly understood any of it; at the same time I was mesmerised. The words, the chants, the half-glimpses of meaning wove a spell around me like nothing I'd experienced before. Suddenly I knew it didn't matter if I didn't always understand poetry, I loved it just the same.

J.R.R. Tolkien isn't best known for his poetry. A cursory glance at the form and structure of his Mythopoeia shows a number of stylistic weaknesses. But these didn't matter to me when I discovered that behind the shaky iambic pentameters lay the best excuse for imagination, ever! The poem was Tolkien's response to an argument with C.S. Lewis when Lewis was still an atheistic rationalist who sneered at storytelling and myth as "lies". Tolkien's defence of the storyteller's art was satirical, inspirational, and even a little prophetic when you consider the struggle that writers and dreamers still face against the dumbing-down of the world. The central stanza is a call to arms for poets and all creative writers to keep their eyes open, keep dreaming and marvelling at the wonder of the universe: "He sees no stars who does not see them first / of living silver made that sudden burst / to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song / whose very echo after-music long / has since pursued. There is no firmament, / only a void, unless a jewelled tent / myth-woven and elf-patterned; and no earth, / unless the mother's womb whence all have birth."

I’ve loved and lingered over almost all of Carol Ann Duffy's collections over the years, and have been lucky enough to hear her read a number of times. Our new Poet Laureate deserves to be represented in this list, though I struggle to settle on a favourite from her vast repertoire. The famous Valentine, a brilliant subversion of the classical love poem, is an obvious choice. But if pushed I think I might have to go for Star and Moon from the Meeting Midnight collection. A poem written for a close friend of the poet and for her unborn child, it has a breathtaking intimacy that I long to be able to emulate in my own poetry.

I was just beginning (unsuccessfully) to send my poems out to competitions when I discovered Diana Syder's Hubble. In my day job I'm a research scientist, and I'm acutely aware of how infrequently the scientific world and the poetic world overlap. It's not that they have no connection – more, perhaps, that many poets don't know how to make the connection. Syder, an astrophysicist, astonished me with her hymn of praise to the Hubble Space Telescope – and put a healthy dose of childlike wonder back into both poetry and science.

Just one more to choose: and for my last one I'll select something that brings me full circle, in Roger McGough's Poem for the Opening of Christ the King Cathedral, Liverpool, 1967. I grew up in Birkenhead, and the unique shape of "Paddy's Wigwam" sat on the skyline throughout my childhood. It symbolises family, community, my roots, and my faith. McGough, fellow Merseysider, catches the spirit of it perfectly.

There you have it. My poetry jukebox, or Ten Poems that Changed My Life. Which ten poems would you choose?

Time to ditch the daffodils?

2010-06-25T09:26:00.003+01:00

(Author's note: this article first appeared in issue 85 of NAWG LINK)

Having had a few choice words to say about pseudo-intellectual free verse in a previous Poet's Soapbox, I think it's time to direct my ire elsewhere. Critics of the poetic "establishment" often raise the accusation that the more prestigious poetry journals seem to have no time for verse which the general public would actually recognise as poetry. The mystical, the avant-garde and the just-plain-pretentious is fine; but try sending these journals anything which has a regular metre or which actually rhymes, and your chances of publication are about as remote as my beloved Tranmere Rovers' hopes of winning the Champions League.

Many poets feel hard done by on this score. Rhyming verse, after all, is central to the British literary heritage. Shakespeare's sonnets, Blake's Jerusalem and Lear's nonsense rhymes are as much a part of the English psyche as cricket, roast beef and rain-swept seaside holidays. Burns' ballads and satires are at the heart of Scottish lore and its modern national identity. Rhymesmiths like Roger McGough, Pam Ayres and the two great Barkers (Les and the late lamented Ronnie) are almost national treasures. More importantly, their verse is actually recognisable as verse – a relief in a world where poetry can be so mystifying it seems to require a doctorate to appreciate it.

So why do the premier journals and the competition judges seem to despise rhyming poetry? I have a few theories about this. And the most persuasive, for me, is that such a lot of today's rhyming verse is awful.

Is that controversial? Good. To support my thesis I'd like to cite poet Norman Johnson, who a couple of years ago set up a journal specifically dedicated to rhyming verse. You'd think that Star Poetry, as it was known, would be inundated. After all, isn't this what the grumblers had been crying out for – an editor who knew and loved good rhyming verse and was willing to go the extra mile to champion it? The sad fact was that Star Poetry closed after just two issues. The reason Norman gave for closing it down was that he didn't get anything like enough submissions that were of a standard worthy of publication.

When I judged the Speakeasy poetry competition a few years back, roughly 1 in 3 of the poems I received was a rhyming poem. Only three made it to the shortlist. The year before it was even worse, with just one rhyming poem shortlisted from a postbag of over 160. The reasons that all the others were eliminated? Many were binned on technical grounds. The rhythms were inconsistent, so the poems didn't hold the music which is essential to rhyming poetry. The words were often jumbled up in ways that meant they rhymed, but lost all coherence in the process. They read as if Yoda had written them. A few were better crafted, but were so full of "thee"s, "twixt"s and "'neath"s that they read like pastiches of Victorian verse instead of modern poems with something to say in their own merit. And an even larger category went into the recycling bin on the grounds of toe-curling sentimentality.

Why is there such a dearth of good rhyming verse? When those who complain about the poetic status quo insist that the people want rhyme, why do the people seem to be so incapable of producing it to an acceptable standard?

I think I know the answer to that. It's because generations of English-speaking people have been brought up with the idea that William Wordsworth's Daffodils is the pinnacle of poetic accomplishment.

The popularity of this poem (listed at No. 5 in The Nation's Favourite Poems) mystifies me. For the standards of its time, Daffodils is mediocre. Its formal structure is flawed; the iambic tetrameter stutters in ways that no poetry tutor would allow nowadays. And that opening line contains one of the most ridiculous similes ever penned. I wandered lonely as a cloud, for goodness' sake? Never mind whether or not clouds can feel loneliness – even the most anthropomorphic cloud "floating on high" o'er the Lake District would be anything but lonely. It’s the one part of England where you can guarantee there will be plenty of other clouds for company!

Daffodils presents a whimsical, sentimentalised view of the natural world, or Wordsworth's corner of it. For me, the great thing about nature poetry is the way it provides a window into the human soul. Robert Burns' "sleekit, cow'rin', timorous beastie", for instance, is a metaphor for the frustration of human (as well as animal) endeavour. Oliver Goldsmith's memories of The Deserted Village form the backdrop to a ferocious social and political commentary, making this ostensibly rustic poem one of the first truly modern protest songs. Even Matthew Arnold's Scholar Gipsy, which contains some of the most overblown pastoral wittering in English verse, has a serious point to make about the threat of Progress to traditional wisdom. But Daffodils offers no such insight. Nothing new or surprising, or especially deep.

Herein lies the problem. All the time Daffodils has been held up as the quintessential English poem, generations of English people have been brought up believing that this is how poems should be written. Schoolchildren, at least until recently, were taught to emulate Wordsworth's Daffodils when writing their own poems. Thankfully, these days poetry in schools tends to be more contemporary; but the damage has already been done. Countless thousands have grown up thinking that poetry means trite nature studies in forced rhyme schemes, interspersed with sentimental metaphors.

No wonder so many fail to get beyond this, and lose interest in poetry altogether. No wonder, too, that many who return to writing poetry later in life start flooding the literary presses with over-sentimentalised nature poems filled with twee poetic inversions and awful rhymes. They were first taught poetry as children re-hashing Daffodils – and are writing it now, like children re-hashing Daffodils, because they don't know any better.

There is great rhyming poetry in the English-language poetic canon. But Daffodils is not it. Those who want to know how to write good rhyming verse with a modern feel should be looking at Auden, Larkin or Betjeman – or even at Roger McGough, who combines the music of rhyming verse with an exhilarating freedom of form. They should appreciate the intensity of craftsmanship that goes into sounding as effortlessly silly as Pam Ayres or Les Barker. And they really should ditch the Daffodils.

Poetry and free speech: the Patrick Jones controversy

2010-06-07T22:15:00.003+01:00

(Author's note: this article first appeared in issue 83 of NAWG LINK and appears here with a couple of minor modifications)

It's not often that poetry makes headline news. But that is exactly what happened in November 2008 when the Cardiff branch of Waterstone's took it upon themselves to close down a book launch by Welsh poet Patrick Jones. They were responding to complaints and threats of direct action by a pressure group on the extreme fringe of Christianity, who had read Jones’s poetry and condemned it as "obscene and blasphemous". Fearing violent – or at the very least, objectionable – altercations if the launch were to go ahead, senior management at Waterstone's cancelled the event at the last minute, leaving supporters of the poet and staff from his publishers Cinnamon Press locked out.

My immediate reaction was What on earth is going on? This is supposed to be a democracy, after all, which upholds an individual's right to freedom of expression even (or especially) in the face of violence or intimidation. Waterstone's never took this action against Salman Rushdie when his controversial writing made him the subject of violent threats, so why pick on a poet whose sales are likely to be pitiful by comparison? When The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins – surely a far more influential and (to religious extremists anyway) dangerous thinker – was published, many branches promoted it as a staff recommendation. There were no crowds of picketing believers outside.

Was this pressure group attacking a poet because he was a soft target, with nobody influential to fight his corner? And were Waterstone's caving in because they thought the launch of Darkness is Where the Stars Are was a small event, and nobody would notice if it didn't go ahead?

It seems both Waterstone's and the protesters miscalculated. The unforeseen publicity has prompted all sorts of people, who might never have opened a poetry book otherwise, to read Patrick Jones. The first thing I did when I heard about the furore was log on to the Cinnamon Press website and order a copy.

Personally I find Jones's poetry to be a mixed bag. There is so much atheistic polemic in Darkness is Where the Stars Are that other good writing in the collection (and some of it is very good writing) is rather eclipsed. I can't criticise his sincerity. His anti-war poetry is ferocious, invoking the spirit of Wilfred Owen in Keys to your Kingdom when he writes "pro patria mori, the old lie, / you warned us yet no one heard / and your words drifted like ash". But his determination to pin the blame on organised religion is so relentless that at times it loses the personal focus, resorting instead to abstracts. It's a pity, because when he is talking in the first person, Jones's poetry is raw and immediate – and correspondingly powerful. Moment of Light, which for me is his most persuasive "political" poem, is effective not because of doctrinal conviction but because it comes straight from the heart: "today / I have become a born again / atheist / bow to a river bank not the parting of the sea / sing to a star not an invisible man."

It has been argued that Jones is the architect of his own controversy. He has a habit of sending samples of his writing to people who are bound to object to it, in an effort to encourage debate. Is this commendable idealism, or self-publicity? I'm not entirely sure. His publishers state that "Patrick Jones has corresponded with many organisations with whom he strongly disagrees and on every other occasion the result has been mature, if passionate, discussion, not threats. Patrick has never threatened anyone nor tried to curtail anyone else's freedom of speech."

And to be fair to Waterstone's, they have never refused to stock Darkness is Where the Stars Are. My local branch had plenty of copies on the shelves last time I looked. I can’t help thinking they're a little embarrassed by the whole sorry episode.

What the uproar does illustrate is something fundamental about the nature of poetry. You see, poetry is a powerful beast. Whether or not the modern, short-attention-span world claims to understand it, there remains a sort of visceral awareness that poetry packs an emotional punch. That distillation of words, emotions, ideals, into a few short rhythmic phrases seems to have the capacity to disturb, inspire and challenge humankind in a way that few of our arts and none of our technology can achieve. Perhaps that is the real reason why the enemies of free speech are so afraid of it.

Patrick Jones's poetry tackles subjects which many of today's poets don't have the guts to approach. We have become used to the poem on the page as a sanitised thing. We can agonise for hours about the metaphor hiding in a raindrop on a branch. Or, when we dare to tread in sensitive areas, we prefer to whisper and hint, using the gossamer of our imagery to ensure we don't have to touch the bloody, smelly, repulsive things of our world.

There is no such fear in Patrick Jones. He speaks unflinchingly about the (male) victim of domestic violence (in the title poem and numerous others), or the friend carted off to the psychiatric hospital (Spring Asylum). He likens the ruined woodlands where he played as a child (Flowers for the Trees on Mother's Day) to terrorist victims, "a field of fresh corpses". He gives a voice to the persecuted asylum seeker, the victim of female genital mutilation. He may not be Wilfred Owen, but his words reduce war to the ugly, irredeemable mess it is. He may not be Richard Dawkins, but his critique of religious hypocrisy is just as scathing. As a Christian myself, I can’t agree with his condemnation of all religious belief, and can understand why some find it offensive; but I applaud him when he likens the distorted fundamentalism of the group which scuppered his book launch to that of the Taliban. As a poet, I can only admire his determination to keep using poetry to "redress the rigours of th' inclement clime", to borrow a phrase from that other great protest poet, Oliver Goldsmith.

It could be that Patrick Jones is exactly the kick up the backside we poets need. The bards and poetic agitators of yesteryear made their words and their principles work together. Let's see if today’s poets can do the same.

In Praise of Les

2010-05-14T12:46:00.002+01:00

(Author's note: this article first appeared in issue 82 of NAWG LINK and has had a couple of minor modifications to make it up-to-date)

The search for a new Poet Laureate last year threw up some predictable names. As well as Carol Ann Duffy, who eventually accepted the post, a string of well-known poets including Simon Armitage and Wendy Cope were tipped as possible successors to Andrew Motion. But one surprising name was added to the list of contenders through the unusual mechanism of a Parliamentary petition: that of a certain Les Barker.

This isn't a name you are likely to find on the poetry shelves in Waterstone's. Les Barker doesn't judge poetry competitions, keeps out of the literary journals, and for many in the narrow world of English poetry, his name is unknown. Yet Les is one of Britain’s most successful poets. He regularly packs out concert halls and collaborates with some veritable legends in the music and entertainment worlds.

Les is a true English eccentric. He spent the early part of his working life as an accountant before giving it all up to become, in his own words, "a professional idiot". He is also the power behind Mrs. Ackroyd Enterprises, his own very small press and independent record label. On stage, grey and cardiganed, he shuffles through his poetry collections as if bewildered by the poems. The deception lasts about thirty seconds.

I want to talk about Les Barker because he’s a wonderful example of an alternative road to success as a poet. The established career path for most professional poets (and many good amateurs) involves literary journals, competitions, poetry readings, festivals, an Arvon course or two. But this isn’t a road that suits everybody. For those who thrive on the adrenaline buzz of live performance, the rarefied world of "traditional" poetry may well be a disappointment.

Les created his niche by a different means: through the subculture of Britain's folk music clubs. He is a natural songwriter; his poems lend themselves well to musical arrangements. His repertoire of "filk-songs" – comedic or satirical re-workings of well-known folk or popular songs – has almost cult status. Many have now become part of the folk tradition in their own right (The Hard Cheese of Old England, recorded by Martin Carthy, is a fine example).

Britain’s folk clubs share a sort of "bush telegraph" where news of great performances travels faster than the performers themselves. One small but successful gig can spawn dozens of recommendations. For Les, this has meant an ever diversifying audience; writers' circles, literature festivals and the Eisteddfod now regularly succumb to his unique brand of insanity. He is a headline act at most of the UK's folk festivals, drawing audiences of hundreds. Few of today's professional poets can boast of such crowds.

What of the poetry itself? It's true that some purists would probably sneer at the notion that Les's many filk-songs and rags deserve to be called "poetry". This work does however showcase two distinctive aspects of the Barker craft: a surreal sense of humour which compares favourably with another enormously popular poet, Spike Milligan; and a faultless ear for puns and word-play. A poet can have no better preparation for their craft than to be in love with words, with the absurd sounds they make and the intriguing similarities which ring out when they are placed together. Les Barker is a master here.

His repertoire isn't restricted to filk-songs. Les's gift for rhyme has spawned a vast body of original, absurdist poetry in the grand tradition of Milligan, Stanley Holloway and Hilaire Belloc. His comedic characters – such as Cosmo the Fairly Accurate Knife-Thrower, Spot of the Antarctic, and Jason and the Arguments – have become legendary. Famous names such as Terry Wogan, Roy Hudd, Mark & Lard, and even Ian McMillan have recorded their tales on CD. Barker fans wait breathlessly for new instalments in the lives of these characters ("Cosmo, Prince of Denmark" made a recent appearance…). One of his most celebrated works – Have you Got Any News of the Iceberg?, the tender story of a polar bear looking for his family, missing on the iceberg that sank the Titanic – was turned into a graphic novel by cartoonist Bill Tidy.

A poet has to have a fine eye for small, incongruous details, and Barker's is magnificent. Undeterred by the niceties of convention, he tackles such subjects as the eating habits of mangetout peas, the temporal irregularities of occasional tables, and the question of how to experience déjà vu for the first time. The results are some of the finest performance poems I've ever heard, and a masterclass in how to hold an audience spellbound.

Although a Les Barker gig is generally a laugh a minute, the poet has a serious side. Now and then, a piece of barbed satire will slip through between the jokes. War, human rights and global warming often feature on the agenda. His poetic critiques of George W. Bush and the so-called "war on terror" are compelling in a literary sense, as well as a political one. His many musical collaborations include the libretto for the folk opera The Stones of Callanish. More recently he has won several prizes as a writer of poetry in Welsh.

So why won't we ever see a Les Barker collection in Waterstone's? Well, mainly because his many collections of poetry are self-published (through the ubiquitous Mrs. Ackroyd imprint). They lack the luxury of smart covers, and are higgledy-piggledy in their selection of material. However, these collections sell in their droves at gigs and through his website (www.mrsackroyd.com). A newcomer to Barker will find an excellent introduction to the essential works through the Guide Cats for the Blind audio CD series, too.

Les Barker, in short, is a beacon of hope for those poets who really do move to the beat of a different drum. His success is self-made, and all the more impressive for it.

There is still a chance that one day, one of the "serious" poetry publishers may give his repertoire the credit it deserves and take a chance on publishing a Selected Works. But even if that never happens, I don't think Les will be disappointed. That strange combination of eccentricity and business acumen ensures that the Mrs. Ackroyd brand stays more than merely viable. His diary is generally booked up a couple of years in advance; even heart bypass surgery seems not to have weakened his appetite for performance. And he's one of the only poets I can think of who is pretty much guaranteed to sell out every venue he performs.

An unlikely candidate for Poet Laureate, perhaps – but a candidate whom the Poet's Soapbox was proud to support.

The State of British Poetry Today

2010-04-30T18:21:00.002+01:00

(Author's note: this article first appeared in issue 81 of NAWG LINK)

Readers of literary websites and Writing Magazine’s letters page may have noticed that the poetry “establishment” in Britain has come in for a fair bit of criticism over the last couple of years. The gist of the argument is that critics, poetry competitions and writers’ workshops all promote one style of poem as a sort of cultural acme. The favoured style, according to complainants, is a type of free verse that’s rich in intellectual allusions but short on points of connection with the average reader. More traditionally popular, or at least populist, verse forms get turned away by the top literary magazines and generally sneered at by the self-appointed arbiters of taste.

This state of affairs, so the correspondents claim, has been directly responsible for the marginalisation of poetry as an art form. It has been driven into a ghetto inhabited mainly by upper-class intellectuals, and no longer has anything to say to the public at large. What’s more, this ghettoisation has become a self-propagating cycle. Those who run the workshops, edit the journals and judge the poetry competitions come from within the clique, and only encourage writers who produce the sort of material they like.

I too have been “named and shamed” on one website which alleges a conspiracy of the artistic elite. The website seemed to be claiming that it was inappropriate for people who have won poetry competitions (as I have, occasionally) to judge other poetry competitions. But I’m not unduly worried at having been “outed” in this way. After all, it’s the first time I have been mentioned in the same breath as Andrew Motion and Carol Ann Duffy!

What worries me more than the conspiracy theories is that I can’t quite shake the nagging feeling that the original complainants have a point, of sorts. Neil Astley of Bloodaxe – arguably the UK’s most important independent publishers of poetry – appears to agree with me. In the 2008 Poetry Writers’ Yearbook he wrote of a “huge gulf” existing between many of the poetry publishers and those who actually read the stuff. “Too often”, wrote Neil, “poetry editors think of themselves and their poet friends as the sole arbiters of taste, only publishing writers whom they think people ought to read and depriving readers of other kinds of poetry that many people would find more rewarding.” The result, as he sees it, is a bias towards “male-dominated, white, Anglo-centric” viewpoints – despite the fact that over two-thirds of poetry buyers are female.

My own experience of poetry in England sometimes seems to tally quite worryingly with Neil Astley’s. There are times when I look through poetry journals and can’t seem to find a single poem that has any connection with my own life. Sometimes I suspect the contributors of being more interested in proving their intellectual credentials than in connecting with an audience. I’ve been to poetry readings where there hasn’t been a single non-white face, or non-Oxbridge accent, in the room. And I’ve come away really quite worried for the future of my art.

But – and it’s a really important but – I’m equally certain that this phenomenon isn’t universal. There are so many poetry journals now that even if a few read like the collected works of gobbledigook, it doesn’t take too much effort to find several that publish the sort of poetry which really speaks to me. Dee Rimbaud’s excellent AA Independent Press Guide (available online at www.rimbaud.org.uk/aaipg.html) lists some 200 UK-based periodicals, to say nothing of e-zines, catering for a broad spectrum of tastes as well as the many niche markets that exist. The very small presses have a devoted, even cult-like, following. My own favourite, Monkey Kettle (http://www.monkeykettle.co.uk/), publishes left-field poetry from writers with day jobs as cleaners, care workers, students, and so on – worlds far removed from the supposed poetic elite.

Then there’s the resurgence in live performance poetry. By this I don’t mean the cloistered world of the poetry “reading” (I have more to say about this in a future article), but the much more democratic arena of the open mic, the “Poems and Pints” night, and the poetry slam. Events of this sort are taking off in towns all over the UK, and you’re more likely to find them in a pub than an arts centre. They are attracting new audiences – not necessarily the poetry journal-reading classes.

Cross-over art is thriving, with many poets collaborating with musicians, film-makers and visual artists. The result can be a wonderful fusion of the traditional and the avant-garde – just listen to Benjamin Zephaniah’s extraordinary re-working of the Ballad of Tam Lin which features on The Imagined Village album, and you’ll know exactly what I mean.

An interesting point to note is that many of the best performance poets around today are non-white. Many are from distinctly non-academic backgrounds. A lot of these performers are making an admirable effort to take poetry to new places, particularly into Britain’s schools – which can only encourage future generations to take up the poet’s mantle too.

So there are signs of hope for poetry. A minority art it may be, but it is a resurgent one. The challenge for today’s poetic “establishment”, so-called, is to nurture these seeds of hope, not crush them.

We could make a start by ditching the snobbery which still lingers around white, upper-class poetry. Cressida Connolly, writing for the Telegraph magazine (and online at http://tinyurl.com/3blk2k), noted a distinct snootiness in some literary circles. One poet she interviewed dismissed the entire arena of performance poetry as “anything that doesn’t work as a poem on the page”. Such snobs have clearly forgotten that poetry, classical and British, wasn’t originally intended for the page at all. Today’s performance poets and storytellers are the heirs of a bardic tradition which carried poetry, like news and scandal, from place to place by word of mouth. Keeping this tradition alive should be celebrated, not sniffed at!

A tendency for poetry to cater only for the rich doesn’t help the cause, either. Competitions with spiralling entry fees (and increasingly ludicrous prize pots) do nothing for the democratisation of poetry. Nor do “writers’ holidays” in the Himalayas or the Greek islands. We need to see these activities available in the inner cities instead – why not in youth clubs, churches and mosques, workers’ education establishments, in shopping malls for goodness’ sake?

Wherever the people are, there is where poetry will be. The challenge for us poets is to get out there and show this to be true.

Competitions - How to make your money work

2010-03-25T13:33:00.003Z

(Author's note: this article first appeared in issue 79 of NAWG LINK).

In my previous post I made the case in favour of entering writing competitions. Now I want to look at the downside to the competitions arena: the entry fees.

A few writers can happily write cheques to cover entry fees for every competition that comes along. For the majority of us who live in the real world, this isn’t an option. We need to make sure those pesky entry fees provide some sort of return on our investment, even if we’re not fortunate enough to be prize winners every time.

Here are some suggestions to help make those entry fees work for you.

My first tip is research your market before you submit anything. There are a lot of writing competitions, and it’s easy for a competition novice to enter too many – or to enter the wrong ones.

Big competitions like the Bridport Prizes and the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition have a sizeable publicity budget and always command a fair bit of press coverage. Unless you are one of those annoying people who can produce works of genius without breaking a sweat, these are not the best competitions for you to enter at the start of your writing career. Those who win tend to be writers with a CV of previous competition success. They may even have already had collections of poems or short stories published. If you submit to the Bridport Prize, you will be competing against a lot of writers who are this good, or nearly this good!

Competitions run by local writers’ circles or small presses have a lower profile than the major literary prizes. Not only does it cost you less to enter, but you stand a more realistic chance of being placed. By doing a few of these, you’ll be preparing yourself for bigger things as your experience and confidence increases.

Don’t enter every competition that comes along. There are a few scams out there, and it takes a little practice to spot them (a lack of past history and an exorbitant prize pot are usually dead giveaways). The NAWG website (www.nawg.co.uk) has listings of established, bona fide competitions, and is peer-reviewed so any dodgy ones are eliminated. For poets, the listings on The Poetry Kit (www.poetrykit.org) and the Poetry Library website (www.poetrylibrary.org.uk) are invaluable. I also recommend Prizemagic (www.prizemagic.co.uk), run by published author and competition addict Michael Shenton. He provides an entertaining (and at times splendidly sarcastic) commentary with each competition listing.

It is worth pointing out that not all the reputable competitions offer value for money either. The most useful competitions to enter are the ones which tell you as much as possible about the poems (or short stories) you’re up against. Competition statistics (total numbers of poems or stories submitted, numbers long-or shortlisted, etc.) can help you size up your chances of success. Seek these out. Look for competitions where you can buy a winners’ anthology, or read the winning pieces on the competition website. These will give you a clue as to why the winning poems or stories were winners, and what happened to those that weren’t. Competitions which publish not just the prize winners’ names, but the shortlists as well, are really helpful – otherwise you have no way of knowing if you reached that far.

Not all competitions will give you this information. Competitions which don’t are doing the entrants no favours. I suggest you spend your money elsewhere.

The judge’s report from a competition can also be a goldmine of information. Sometimes the difference between a First Prize-winning piece and a Highly Commended work isn’t apparent from simply reading the works on their own. Judge’s reports provide an insight into what special qualities stood out for him or her in the winners. They also reveal which deficiencies a judge may be willing to overlook, and which are a guaranteed route to rejection! But beware of relying too much on judge’s reports. The factors which decide who gets which prizes often lie in the judge’s own likes and dislikes as much as in the originality of the material and the skill with which it was created.

So much for the preparation. Now we come to the manuscript itself. The golden rule is never send in shoddy work. During my judging stint for the Speakeasy competitions I was amazed at how many manuscripts arrived with crumpled paper, glaring spelling mistakes and awful grammar. Some of these were obviously works which had been produced in a rush of creativity – but the writers had never bothered to tidy up their original draft. Material that is scrappy or that the judge will struggle to read is sure to end up in the recycling bin. So is anything which fails the “Alison Chisholm test”. I won’t repeat the excellent advice which she and Ian Pattison offered in their recent article (LINK 74) but I would urge all competition entrants to follow it.

Never, ever, submit the same piece of work at the same time to two or more competitions. This practice is known as simultaneous submission. It will make you unpopular because all sorts of copyright problems can ensue if you happen to win both competitions and both organisers choose to publish your work. Small presses and writers’ groups cannot afford litigation. Nor do they want to be made to look silly. If you’re producing shortlist-quality work but you get a reputation for simultaneous submission, you could find yourself blacklisted.

Finally, before you seal up the envelope, go back and re-read the competition rules. Double-check your entries to make sure they fit all the criteria. Don’t risk being disqualified because you’ve failed to double space your story, or exceeded the line limit with your poem. No matter how good your manuscript may be, if it doesn’t fit the competition requirements it will not win – and you won’t get your money back.

If this is a lot to remember, take heart. After you’ve done a couple of competitions, the process will be second nature. And don’t give up. Just because one of your best pieces might sink without trace in one competition, it could still do well in another. The most prestigious of my First Prizes to date was won with a poem which went to five previous competitions and had never been shortlisted. It can be worth persevering with a piece you know to be good, even if you seem to have no success at the first few attempts.

Competitions: Are they really worth it?

2010-03-25T13:24:00.003Z

(Author's note: this article was the first of my Poet's Soapbox pieces to appear in NAWG LINK (issue 77). I've given it a teensy bit of editing to make it blog-friendly, but otherwise it appears as originally published).

It doesn’t take very long, hanging around a writers’ circle, to realise that one issue divides the writing world straight down the middle. Writing competitions. Half the writers I know treat the annual competition calendar with deadly seriousness. They spend laborious hours over their poems and short stories, earnestly believing that a win will be the Next Big Thing on the rocky road to literary success. The other half treat competitions with disdain. They see writing competitions as close cousins to the vanity publishers. Competitions swallow your money, promising wealth and recognition but delivering little or nothing in return.

I’ve been on both sides of the divide myself. In my very early days as a poet, I picked up a few flyers for competitions, sent off my cheque and the best of my material, and predictably heard nothing back. I felt I’d been conned. An unexpected First Prize in my local writers’ group’s annual poetry competition a few years back encouraged me to try again. Since then, I’ve made the competition circuit into part of my writing discipline. Modest successes, in the form of four more First Prizes in national/international competitions, and several placings and commendations, have followed. I’ve also had the competition experience from the other side, having judged the Speakeasy creative writing competitions for two years running (judging poetry and short stories) as well as a couple of local and regional competitions.

In the next few articles I intend to take a look at the competition experience. Much of what I have to say will be applicable to those interested in both short story and poetry competitions. For writers new to the competition circuit, I will be suggesting ways you can avoid a few of the mistakes I’ve made over the years.

To begin with, I want to address the fundamental question: are competitions worth it? Is it possible to see all that time and effort, the entry fees and the stamped addressed envelopes as an investment, rather than an indulgence or a waste?

My answer is yes.

Writing competitions matter because in many ways they are the lifeblood of the literary scene in the UK. The writers’ circles and small presses who run the competitions are (with very rare exceptions) not profit-making concerns. They exist for love, not money. Competition entry fees don’t provide the chairmen and editors with exotic holidays and champagne. Once the prize money has been paid out, the judge’s honorarium paid, and (usually) the magazine or anthology published, any surplus funds are ploughed back into the organisation. This money gives writers’ circles the chance to run workshops, invite guest speakers or produce their own publications. It keeps the small presses alive – for many, it can mean the difference between financial viability or closure. It keeps many of the literary festivals on a secure financial footing.

So supporting a reputable creative writing competition is one way of supporting the literary arts, locally and nationally.

Writing competitions matter to the winners, and those shortlisted, because they look good on the CV. There are very few competitions that will guarantee a new writer a publishing contract, representation or fame (the Bridport Prize is probably an exception). But every win or shortlisting mentioned on the aspiring writer’s CV can be another bit of ammunition for that all-important future pitch to an agent or editor. It is a demonstration that you are serious about your writing, and that it is good enough to command at least a small degree of critical respect.

A third reason to make the effort of entering writing competitions is that the effort instils discipline. Competitions demand inspiring, original work, it’s true – but they also demand work that is neatly laid-out, legible, well constructed, free of typographical errors, and suited to the requirements of the competition. If you are a new writer, who has never submitted material to an editor or agent before, I heartily recommend entering a small competition. This will give you practice in laying out a manuscript, gathering together the accompanying paperwork, and reading and assimilating the submission requirements. If you can get used to doing this, year on year, for the East Smethwick Short Story Competition (to take an entirely fictitious example), by the time you’re ready to send a manuscript to a publishing house or an agent, the process of manuscript preparation will be second nature.

Competitions also demand forward planning. The deadlines are usually publicised several months in advance. The well prepared writer will use this time to ensure that their work is thoroughly revised, so that the manuscript which eventually goes in the post (or email) is the best you can get it. Hastily plotted stories or first drafts of poems rarely win competitions. Spending the time fine-tuning your competition entries is another part of the writer’s discipline.

Now to the downside of the competition arena. Most writing competitions (NAWG’s own being an honourable exception) require you to part with money to enter them.

Entry fees are inescapable. In an era when state or philanthropic support for the creative arts is meagre, struggling small presses and writers’ groups have no other option to finance the winners’ prizes, or the competition anthology. This may be all very well for the idle rich, but for the impoverished bohemian, scribbling away in a garret and living on baked potatoes and soup, it’s a problem.

It does worry me that entry fees deter many good, but financially restricted, writers from having their work recognised. There are, of course, ways to make a name for oneself without recourse to the competition circuit. But competitions remain one of the surest ways for a hitherto unknown, talented writer to make an impact. Those of you who are beginning to have some confidence in yourselves as writers should not be put off by entry fees alone. Nor should you sit back and let lesser writers get their foot in the door of the literary world ahead of you on the basis of their ability to pay their way in.

In my next article I will be looking at ways for writers on a budget to maximise their investment in the competition arena. For now, though, I’d simply like to issue a plea that if you believe in your writing, and it receives supportive constructive feedback from other writers, do consider putting it into the competition arena. As writers, all of us have to make some investment in our art: printer paper, ink cartridges, notebooks, stamps and envelopes, and the sheer time and effort we put into our creations. Within reason, it is possible to see a modest expenditure on competition fees as part of this investment. Hard work and talent do pay off – and sometimes they even pay out, too.

Andy Humphrey

Welcome to the Poet's Soapbox!

2010-03-25T12:50:00.001Z

For the last few years, I have been contributing a semi-regular column to the National Association of Writers' Groups' LINK magazine under the heading "The Poet's Soapbox". The Soapbox has given me the opportunity for a good old rant about the things that irk me in the world of poetry in the UK - and for an occasional rave about the things I think are worth celebrating.

It seemed to make sense, in the fulness of time, to move the Soapbox to an online format, and give its readers a chance to have their say. Thus the Poet's Soapbox blog. I will continue to use it to post copies of the articles that appear (and have appeared) in LINK, as well as responses to topical poetry-related issues and some of my own musings on life as a poet, scribe, performer, open mic MC and occasional competition judge. Feedback is welcome though I reserve the right to edit readers' posts as needed.

In the next few posts I'll put up copies of some of the early articles from the Soapbox series in LINK. Comments on these are still welcome!

I hope you enjoy your visit.

Andy Humphrey