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

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?

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)

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

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!

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

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)

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.