Poetry, art and science: complementary or contradictory?

I've never had a problem with the idea of science and art being compatible. Before my current role as writer-cum-law-student-cum-charity-worker I worked for a number of years as a research scientist, exploring the chemistry/biology interface and working on projects such as cancer drug discovery and global food security. A lot of my leisure time involves enjoying music, modern art, theatre and comedy as well as the literary arts, and I've never really seen a dividing line between these and what people tend to think of as "hard science". But a surprising number of people seem to be taken aback at my having interests on both sides of the arts/sciences "divide". People seem even more surprised at the idea of my having had a career, of sorts, in both.

In 2011 The Speakers' Corner (the spoken word night I co-run in York alongside Helen Sant and Joanna Ezekiel) featured for the first time in the programme for the York Science Festival. Our special guest was one of my modern literary heroes: the wonderful Diana Syder. Regular Soapbox readers will know just how in awe I am of this superb poet. As well as having four poetry collections under her belt, Diana holds a Public Awareness of Science award from the Institute of Physics and has been poet in residence in the Engineering department at Sheffield University. Her poetry is filled with wonder at the mysteries of the natural world and the achievements of science. When I first read her work, it seemed to encapsulate an excitement and joy which I could all too easily lose in the day-to-day grind of the research lab. She helped me see science through new eyes.

I was able to have a lengthy chat with Diana about the difficulties that people have in crossing the arts/science divide. One anecdote that came up concerned a cross-disciplinary festival at Cambridge University a few years ago. The idea of the festival was supposed to be that university staff could go and attend lectures and demonstrations given by experts from disciplines other than their own. The intention was to deepen the participants' knowledge and stimulate new ideas for interaction across the traditional dividing lines of academia. Apparently quite a number of scientists went to talks on fine art, literature, music and the humanities. Almost nobody from arts disciplines came to events organised by the scientists.

Did that mean scientists were more willing to step outside the boundaries of their disciplines than artists were? I'm not really sure. If anything, the result of our being in the Science Festival programme was the opposite: not a single new person came along to Speakers' Corner because of it. There was an excellent turn-out from our regulars, many of whom made a special effort to be there to hear Diana read her poetry. But there was precious little evidence of anyone from the scientific community "crossing the divide" and trying something new.

I have to admit that if my scientific training ever strays into my poetry, it does so unconsciously. A lot of what I write is inspired by imagery from the natural world - birds, wild plants, rock formations and sunsets - and although I don't exactly labour the point, I'm sure that my appreciation of the science as well as the aesthetics enhances the imagery in my poems. But I've almost never consciously chosen to write a piece inspired by my science. The nearest I ever got was a back-of-an-envelope love poem that went

"My love's like butyllithium.
I handle her with care.
I keep her under nitrogen
'cause she inflames in air"

which isn't likely to win me the Bridport Prize any time soon... I've had ideas for "sciencey" poems, to be sure, but they've rarely ventured any further than the idea stage. So to find a writer like Diana, for whom the link between the science and the art is so instinctive, is an absolute joy for me.

Is it really so difficult for artists and scientists to find inspiration in each other’s work? Or could we all benefit from a little exploration outside our usual field of expertise?

(A version of this article originally appeared in the Vitae Research Careers blog in March 2011)
(Special thanks to Diana Syder for the thumbnail image on this blog post - more can be found at http://www.dianasyder.com)

Poetry and war imagery: why what we call stuff matters

The Soapbox has been quiet for a little while, but there have been a good number of poetry-related debates raging on the Facebookosphere, and I think it's about time I went on record and made my views known about some of them. I'm going to start with one that has turned my blood cold just lately.

Back in the glory days of beat poetry and Greenwich Village, poetry was a politically conscious, socially aware movement. In the Vietnam War era it tended to champion the cause of pacifism. More recently we've seen the likes of Ayat al-Gormezi standing up for the rights of poets to non-violent freedom of speech. Poetry, like every social activity (and I *DO* believe poetry to be a social activity) has a political dimension to it.

So I have to confess that the recent proliferation of performance poetry events using overly warlike imagery has left a rather sour taste in my mouth.

The very worst one I've come across used to take place in Leeds until a couple of years ago. I'll grant you that there's a certain linguistic cleverness in the use of the word "Letterbomb" as the name of a poetry night. Poems are made up of letters, and all poets like to think that their words might have the potency to demolish strongholds. But just think about the implications of the word for a minute. A letterbomb is a terrorist device, right? - usually the province of the sort of right-wing extremists whose ideologies are making uncomfortable headlines in the news right now. Do poets really want to have their words associated with this kind of an image?

There's an even more dangerous subtlety about "Bang! said the gun". Billing itself as "Stand-up poetry for those who don't like poetry", this regular London performance night attracts some of the UK's top names in performance poetry. Ian McMillan, the good old Bard of Barnsley, describes it as "One of the best poetry nights in the country" and says that "the combination of excitement, enthusiasm and deep, deep concentration on the poems is a wonder to behold." Its impending launch in Manchester was the reason I ended up embroiled in a Facebook row over the event's choice of name, and found myself roundly derided for daring to suggest that it was at best a tasteless choice, at worst a potentially dangerous one.

I can't fault the aims of the event - particularly when it sets itself up as the antidote to all that stuff about thwarted love and daffodils that I regularly take issue with in this blog. The world needs more urban (and suburban, and rural) live poetry events to take our art away from those who would turn it into mere intellectualism. The programme for the London events is one to make a small provincial literary promoter like me green with envy; and I can only assume that those who have guest-featured there in the past have no qualms about what the event calls itself. So why does it make me so uneasy?

Maybe it's the feeling that the name is a sensationalist one. That, in trying to draw a "non-poety" crowd, it's going for the language of gangsta rap, as if to suggest that it has more in common with the streets of downtown Compton than the South Bank Poetry Library. If this is the case, then I think it's on dangerous territory. An event that's trying to INclude can unconsciously EXclude through the language it uses, the imagery it portrays. And you'd have thought that poets, of all people, would be the first to realise this.

Maybe, as one commentator suggested, I'm taking all this way too seriously. But I can't shake the feeling that there's a matter of principle at stake here. I'd prefer to stand alongside the pacifist poets, the ones who believe that the language we use should be an antidote to the violent culture all around us, not pandering to it. What we call stuff, matters. It says something about what we stand for, the values we hold dear, the culture and mindset we want to pass on to the next generation.

And I guess that's why I won't be guest-featuring at "Bang! said the gun" anytime soon.

Why Not Capitalise?

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

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...

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?

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

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.