Poetry Transvestism, Part 2: are you Sounding Lyrical?

Recently I had the privilege of taking part in the inaugural concert of the Sounds Lyrical Project – a collaborative venture between a group of poets and a small team of classically trained composers who have set our poems to music. I've always loved classical recitals, and for the Project, a full-length evening concert of original work was a "yes we can" moment: it was proof that the concept of Sounds Lyrical has something going for it.

But all of us, composers and poets alike, are aware that the Project won't get very far if we stick to this format.

A number of things struck me about the audience. One, there weren't all that many of them. Okay, fair enough – I've performed poetry to smaller crowds. What matters isn't so much the number of people turning up, but the quality of the experience they have when they do.

More striking than the numbers attending, though, was the proportion wearing what I would describe as "smart dress". Jackets and college scarves were the order of the day. Heck, I wore a jacket and college scarf. There was a practical reason for this (we were performing in a freezing cold chapel – why does this seem to be a recurring theme of my poetry gigs?!). But I was acutely aware that this isn't how I normally dress when I'm performing poetry. Jeans and T-shirt are more my style.

I don't think the audience were any posher than the crowd that used to turn out to hear me MC at Speakers' Corner. But there's clearly a feeling that a classical concert is a "special occasion" and requires a slightly higher standard of decorum than the average open mic. The need to dress smartly, to sit perfectly still for two hours in a cold chapel, not to shuffle feet or to cough, was clearly in evidence. Maybe this is the reason that concerts of this type (not to mention poetry readings of this type) tend not to attract large audiences?

The conversation at the pub afterwards explored this issue. One of the reasons the project was set up in the first place was to tackle an image problem within contemporary classical music. The intellectual elitism of Schoenberg and the European avant-garde, according to my composer friends, have done for modern composition what the pretentious poets of my recent blog post have done for contemporary poetry.

But, in composition at least, intellectualism is now on the wane. Composers these days, by and large, want to collaborate – to fuse genres and styles, to pick and mix from a melting pot that includes rock, jazz and world music as well as the European classical tradition. The opportunity to work with artists across a range of media also presents the chance to bring new music to audiences who wouldn't ever do the wear-a-jacket, sit-in-a-cold-chapel thing.

The ideal venue for our concert might well have been the pub we adjourned to afterwards. Not that we'd have wanted to ambush unsuspecting punters with a resonant baritone and the nifty fingerwork of a skilled professional pianist; but there was actually a piano in that pub, and no particular reason why the Project couldn't make use of it at some unspecified future date.

The advantage of "doing art" in an unconventional venue – a pub, cafe, railway station, or wherever – is that it opens up the art to people who wouldn't otherwise take a chance on it. Effort is needed to put on a jacket and sit in a cold chapel; but if you’re anything like me, you won't need all that much persuading to come along to your regular pub and stump up the price of an extra pint or two to try out something just a bit different. Especially not if beer, conversation and good company can all still be enjoyed into the bargain.

So where now for Sounds Lyrical? Our lead composers have been adventurous with their material, and in choosing to collaborate with an unruly group of poets. We need to be equally adventurous as to how and where we present that material. There are plenty of possibilities. When we lived in Birmingham, my wife and I sang in a choir who did more gigs in pubs than in concert halls. Their repertoire ranged from Britten and Barber to Abba and Queen (not to mention some extraordinary original compositions from members of the choir themselves). Their concerts were fun, accessible, and very different to any recitals I've ever attended.

This is the sort of model I would like Sounds Lyrical to aim at. I love to see poetry invading the public consciousness by showing up in unexpected places. And I'd love to hear modern classical music do the same.

Poetry transvestism?

It's not all that long ago that I was blogging about the possible demise of the York Literature Festival - one more victim of an austerity regime that seems to place little value on the power of the creative arts. Thankfully, the Festival has survived. This year it recorded its most triumphant season yet, with over 2000 tickets sold for a variety of shows ranging from big-name gigs to smaller community arts ventures. There was a veritable buzz about the Festival this year - ample proof that all that energy, enthusiasm and creativity has not been in vain.

One thing that struck me very forcefully about this year's Festival was the capacity for poetry to manifest itself in all kinds of guises that one wouldn't automatically think of as poetry. It crept up on this year's audiences in other guises - wearing the clothes of other artforms, if you will, a sort of literary transvestism.

It manifested itself most clearly in this year's headline act - a double-header, featuring on the one hand a fairly conventional poetry reading by the Poet Laureate herself, Carol Ann Duffy, and on the other a sublime fusion of classic verse with rock 'n' roll in the guise of poetic troubadours Little Machine. Little Machine are a couple of 90s stadium-rock survivors who have teamed up with a performance poet to present several thousand years' worth of poetry - from Sappho through Shakespeare to Philip Larkin's infamous "This Be the Verse" - in a variety of infectious musical arrangements. Some were sublime, some ridiculous, but all were calculated to get right under the skin and leave you humming along. When they handled classic texts, they had the gift of breathing new freshness into words which were otherwise over-familiar, giving them a whole new lease of life. When they set contemporary verse, they created a whole new way of approaching an art form that is all too easily dismissed out of hand as too serious, too difficult, or too intellectual. The great joy of Little Machine is that they showed just how wrong this stereotyping of poetry can be.

Little Machine aren't the first musicians to do this, of course. Last year I had the great pleasure of seeing my personal folk-rock heroes, The Waterboys, electrify the stage with a concert performance of An Appointment with Mr Yeats, an entire album's worth of musical settings of the poetry of WB Yeats. And if Little Machine surprised and delighted, the sheer power of the Waterboys' rendition of The Hosting of the Shee was enough to blow you backwards off your chair.

Poetry and music, of course, go hand in hand as art forms. An even more intelligent form of poetic transvestism took place in the form of Bob Beagrie and Andy Willoughby's show Kids: a poetry cycle ostensibly inspired by the film reel of Charlie Chaplin's silent classic, The Kid, but underpinned fundamentally by the writers' experiences of working with deprived and troubled teenagers in the most recession-hit areas of north-east England. The power of Kids came not just from the words, the mimes that accompanied them, and the excerpts from Chaplin's original movie that played out as the backdrop to the show (to the accompaniment of a brand-new piano score). It came, most of all, from the quiet anger of the social commentary that infused each poem. This was poetry in the form of an art that wasn't afraid to challenge the status quo, and ask the big questions of how and why society has ended up in such a mess, and what are we going to do about it?

I'll even admit to having a go at a bit of poetic transvestism myself. Telling the Fairytale, my first ever show for the Festival, wasn't really my show at all, if I'm honest: it was a collaborative effort between me and my good friend, storyteller Helen M Sant, to recreate some classic pieces of folklore and re-tell them in a 21st century context. In some ways, Telling the Fairytale was the exact opposite of Kids. Instead of contemporary social comment, here we had timeless fairy stories. Instead of a Powerpoint projector and a piano, our backdrop was an icy cold, medieval gothic church. But the reason I love fairy tales lies in the layers of imagery and metaphor behind them. The archetypes of fairy story may hark back to a bygone age, but they represent real concerns. Love, abandonment, social disconnection, mental illness - and the ultimate need we all have, for that happily-ever-after. Being able to wrap these concerns in the cloak of familiar childhood stories provides a way in for an audience, where a direct approach to the subject in a poem might be hollow or trite. Being able to perform these poems, set against some wonderful contemporary storytelling and a haunting flute accompaniment, made an hour of sheer enchantment.

It seems that rumours of the death of literature in York have been very much exaggerated. It's well and truly thriving, and often in the most unexpected guises. All art is richer when it collaborates, when it draws from experience beyond itself. And poetry, perhaps, most of all.

So that's my challenge to poets for 2013. Try on someone else's clothes for size, and see how they feel. An artist's, a musician's, a social campaigner's. You could find a new freedom in your writing. And, perhaps most importantly, you might find new audiences too.

Pretentious poets

I'm not convinced that performance poet Tim Ellis will thank me for name-checking him at the start of a blog post headed "Pretentious Poets." But it's thanks to him that I'm writing this post. Tim and I have different poetic backgrounds and interests, which has made for some lively online debates in the past couple of years. While we often disagree about specifics, we mostly keep a healthy respect for the other's point of view.

But I cannot, ever, agree with Tim that the work of TS Eliot deserves to be consigned to the poetic dustbin.

I should add that Tim is one of the least pretentious poets I've ever met. As a writer he's a genius of rhyme and rhythm; as a performer, he was a worthy winner of the 2011 York Poetry Slam, for which I was part of the judging panel.

As I understand it, Tim's take on TS Eliot is this. TS Eliot is a pretentious poet. Much of his work is so thick with obscure allusions to ancient Greek and Roman civilisation that it's impossible to find a way into it unless you have a higher degree in classical literature. And, surely, any poetry that is this hard to understand just adds fuel to the argument that poetry is something that's disconnected from reality, and simply not worth bothering with.

I have a lot of sympathy with this argument – and it's one that has made me think about why I first started writing poetry. I came to poetry relatively late in life, following teenage years filling bookshelves full of ring binders with really bad novels of epic proportion. My poems started life as stories that I was trying to tell: some to fathom out the problems of the world or the complexities of the people around me; others, simply to capture the mood on one particular day or in one special place. "Art", for its own sake, was practically non-existent in my list of priorities.

Accessibility is always really important if you're trying to tell a story. And it's the same with my poetry. If people don't get what my poems are going on about, then on some level the poem hasn't worked.

The trouble is, other poets don't write for the same reasons that I do. There are many who write for no other reason than the joy of artistic expression. They don't necessarily need an audience; and when they get one, it may not matter if not everyone in the audience can understand what they're going on about.

Which brings me back to TS Eliot. His approach to poetry was in many ways the polar opposite of mine. Yet, when I blogged awhile back about "The Ten Poems that Changed my Life", The Waste Land was one of the poems I listed.

There is something magical for me about this poem. Eliot's ability to draw scenes and atmospheres, to get deep into the guts of his characters' (and his readers') dreams and fears, and the sheer musicality of his free verse – all these things weave a sort of spell about me. It doesn't matter that three-quarters of the classical allusions go straight over my head. Somehow The Waste Land bypasses my head and echoes inside my gut in a way that few poems have ever done.

Four Quartets, by contrast, leaves me cold. The layers of classical and artistic reference are so thick here that to me they're completely impenetrable. There's nothing I can latch on to or identify with. The atmospheric quality of The Waste Land is missing, the rhythm and musicality of the words seem to be lacking too. Its philosophising is abstract, self-indulgent. It makes no connection with me and sheds no light whatsoever on the world around me.

There seem to me to be a lot of poets who have been encouraged to write in a way reminiscent of what Eliot does in Four Quartets. The end result is to daze the reader with intellect. This can be done very cleverly; even though I don’t understand the end result of Four Quartets, I can at least tell that there's a master craftsman at work. Mostly, though, it just seems insufferably smug.

If there is a huge intellectual hurdle to be overcome before you can appreciate poetry, to me it is not good poetry, no matter how many awards it wins. Outside the rarefied atmosphere of literary circles, the misconception that 'serious' poetry is something too snobbish for the average man or woman in the street is still one that's all too common. And any poet dead set on propagating that misconception is going straight into my personal rejection bin. They're not telling a story. They're not even enchanting their readers with a glimpse of a dream. To put it bluntly, all they are doing is showing off how clever they are.

I'm really, really proud that there so many good poets on the Yorkshire scene who show that it is possible to be serious about your poetry without it becoming pretentious. The poetry world doesn't need another TS Eliot; one is quite enough, thank you very much. If a few regulars in the learned poetry journals could learn to be a bit less TS Eliot and a bit more Tim Ellis, they'd be doing all of us a favour.

The Poetry Society: do we really need it?

I want to tell you about one of my new year resolutions for 2013. I'm going to join the Poetry Society.

I have to admit to being rather cynical about the Poetry Society. Don't get me wrong – I like the idea of the Poetry Society. Goodness knows, poetry gets precious little promotion in the UK and it needs somebody fighting its corner. But does what the Society offers really justify a full membership fee, at current rates, of £42 a year?

Currently on offer in the membership package are: 4 issues of the society's broadsheet Poetry News (and the chance to submit your own poetry to be published in it); 4 issues of the premium poetry journal Poetry Review; discounts on critiques and appraisals from professional poets; 2-for-1 entry to the National Poetry Competition, which the Society administers; access to the Society website to promote your events and publications; and discounts on Poetry Society events, including products and masterclasses at the Poetry Café in London.

In many respects the Society does pretty good work. Their website (and especially the "Poetry Landmarks" section which lists places of interest to poets region-by-region, including regular performance venues) is a little treasure trove. The network of regional groups, or "Stanzas" (a name which is either poetically brilliant, or just plain pretentious, I can't quite decide which) provides a means for poets to meet, obtain constructive critique and develop and hone their work. The opportunity to promote yourself alongside the great and the good of the poetry world is one that no self-respecting self-publicist would want to pass up. And did I mention that the awesome Roger McGough is currently their president?

So what’s not to like?

Well, the poetry itself, for one thing. Some of the poetry that the Society promotes has what I can only describe as an image problem. To put it bluntly, a lot of people see it as unbearably pretentious. The poems that appear in Poetry Review and a lot of the pieces that win the National each year can be so sophisticated as to be pretty much inaccessible without a higher degree in literature. Many poets I know won't submit work to the Poetry Society for exactly that reason.

I have ambitions to be a serious poet, whose work is taken seriously. That's why I have finally decided to give the Society a try. But I'm still at the point where submitting my work to the National Poetry Competition feels like a waste of money. I simply don't write poetry of the intellectual intensity that seems to be required to make the shortlist. And even in my most serious, pretendy-strokey-beardy moments, I'm not altogether sure that that's the way I want my poetry to be.

As a dyed-in-the-wool Northerner, I have concerns about the London-centric nature of the Society. Sure, the Poetry Café is a brilliant thing. But it's in London. In fact, most of the Society's activities, and 90% of the stuff it promotes, is in London. The rest of the UK may well have the "Stanzas". But when I read the Society's literature, and look at its website, I still get the feeling that the provinces are just subsidising what goes on in London; and if I'm rarely in London, I'm unlikely to have the advantage of it.

I have a more fundamental reservation than these, though. My socialistic instincts don't sit easily with the fact that membership of the Society is solely by virtue of being able to pay for it. This is very different to, for instance, the Society of Authors where you're only admitted to membership once you have a bona fide publishing contract for your work.

I'm not advocating that the Poetry Society should have the same selection policy. Contracts to publish poetry are like gold dust (though not nearly so lucrative!), and any restriction of membership to poets who already have a published collection would raise a massive problem of elitism. But most learned societies require applicants to present some evidence of achievement in the field, and commitment to their continuing professional development. At the moment, all that Poetry Society membership signifies is that you're rich enough to pay the subscription. And as I'm forever arguing, the notion of poetry as a rich person's pursuit is probably the single biggest problem that our art has.

I've ummed and aahed for years about joining the Poetry Society. Now it's time to try it out. After all, the concept of a Poetry Society is one I have no problem with supporting. I don't oppose the Poetry Café, the National Poetry Competition or Poetry News either; I'm just not convinced that they are value for money for a struggling Northern poet who's still without a collection to his name.

I intend to find out if the Poetry Society is really worth the money. A year's membership should be long enough for me to form a reasoned opinion on the matter.

You can be sure I'll blog about it all the way.

A Fringe too far...?

Indigo Rising UK editor Jem Henderson's recent rant about the Harrogate Festival Fringe touched a chord of recognition with me. Back in 2011 I blogged about the clash between grassroots art and corporate self-interest, and I'm sad to see yet another grassroots movement fall victim.

I've been lucky enough to guest feature at the Harrogate Fringe. I've also attended a number of the writing workshops that have been run under the auspices of the Fringe over the last few years. And I have to say that they were pretty much unbeatable value for money. The organisers were doing it for love, not cash. They put their heart and soul into those events. And they managed to coax some half-way decent writing out of their participants!

Most importantly, I think, everyone had a really good time.

So it's sad to see a joyless bunch of money-makers taking over, squeezing out anyone who can't stump up the premium fees and won't mould themselves to the required brand identity.

I'm encouraged from the fact that the original subject of my 2011 blog post - the York Literature Festival - is not only back but is bigger, stronger and attracting higher-profile names than ever. As I've said before, grassroots art is surprisingly resilient. It may get beaten down, but it has a habit of growing back again.

So here's my plea to Jem: don't see this as a defeat. It's a setback, but ONLY a setback. The good work that you guys have done over the last few years is appreciated, even celebrated. You'll find a way to move on from this and come back bigger, brighter and better than before. Perhaps a Harrogate Fringe Fringe is in order?

Here's to the part-timers!

It was a sad decision to have to take – to close down a successful monthly open mic that had been giving the poets of York a voice for more than seven years. Last month The Speakers' Corner closed its doors for the last time, for the immediate future at least. And I know I won't be the only one who misses it.

I've been MC at Speakers' Corner since 2007. The monthly spoken word night has become such an integral part of my time in York that it's strange to face life without it. The welcome I received when I first turned up there, as a newcomer to the city and the literary scene, was what first made me feel I belonged in York. And I know that others have felt the same. I'm really proud of the fact that we have given some brilliant up-and-coming writers their first platform, either in the open mic or as a guest feature. And I'm very, very proud of those superb poets and performers I have had the pleasure and privilege to work with as co-hosts.

But all good things come to an end. Sooner or later, circumstances dictate that things have to change. And not everyone is keen on that idea.

The closure of Speakers' Corner has made me acutely aware of something that has troubled me for awhile about the literary scene. Because of those who have demanded "Why have you closed Speakers' Corner?", a significant but vocal minority have expressed what I can only describe as surprise and disbelief that the three of us who have been running the event actually have other commitments in our lives. The tone has been almost accusatory at times. How dare you put family, friends, career, study or your own health above attending literary gatherings! Where’s your dedication to your art?

There is an expectation that if you write, and are serious about making a success of your writing, that this has to be your all-consuming preoccupation. Everything else – housework, family life, social life, the need to pay the bills – is to be treated as something which gets in the way. Literary magazines are full of this attitude. Countless interviews with authors and poets describe in lurid terms how it was necessary to jettison the day job, the husband or wife, and all previous interests in order to get the debut novel or poetry collection published. Aspiring writers are told in no uncertain terms that there is no place for the part-timer in the literary world.

Well I disagree.

Literature is full of first-rate, part-time authors and poets. Two of my literary heroes, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, made their living as lecturers, not writers. Tolkien's writing was a spin-off from his academic interests in mythology and language, and from his need to entertain his children with bedtime stories. It WASN'T the be-all and end-all of his life. William Blake spent so much time and energy on social and political campaigning that it's a wonder he ever found time to do any writing. Philip Larkin was quite possibly the most famous librarian of the 20th century – after all, nobody can expect to pay the bills with poetry alone!

So why this modern tendency to insist that if you want to write seriously, you have to write 24/7, and anything less is going to harm your prospects as a writer?

I suspect it's not really about the writing. The real issue is the self-promotion that is now expected to go hand in hand with the writing. We all know that the market is overcrowded and it's hard for new voices to get noticed. So it's all too easy for the assumption to creep in that if you're not flogging your wares at every open mic or literary event in town, or travelling great distances to perform to new, potential book-buying audiences, then you're not doing the job properly.

Eventually, if the publishing deal doesn't turn up, something's got to give. The literary equivalent of "executive burn-out" is bound to set in. Exhaustion, disillusionment or the demands of the real world will take their toll. And I think more writers (and agents, and publishers) should be upfront and honest about that.

The test of whether or not you're a writer is not to do with how many open mics you perform at, how many tweets you send out, or how much of your life you spend schmoozing other writers at literary events. The test is simply that you write something, sometime; anything else is a bonus. If that means taking a step back from the self-promotion to give yourself the emotional space to be creative again, for goodness' sake do it and don't be embarrassed about it! It doesn't mean that you're letting the side down or that you'll never be a success.

So here's to the part-timers: the latter-day Tolkiens, Larkins and Lewises. Be proud of what you're doing. And don't let ANYBODY tell you it isn’t enough.

Debut collections - how soon is too soon?

I've been writing poetry for nearly 20 years. I've notched up a few prizes in that time, and had nearly 50 poems published. But one goal has consistently eluded me: finding a publisher for my first collection.

The vogue right now seems to be to encourage poets to get their debut collections out Really Early. Universities might be partly to blame for this. It's very common for students on those ubiquitous creative writing courses to be set the assignment of "putting together a poetry collection". And in many ways, creative writing courses are a great environment for hot-housing a debut collection. All that concentrated work in a short space of time, with professional feedback from the tutors, can give rise to really focused collections of poetry. And I suspect that the opportunities for networking with publishers and industry insiders play as big a part as the intensive tuition in hurrying these new writers into print.

But part of me can't help wondering if this trend means that some poets are being rushed into print too early – before they've really had a chance to develop their voice? Along with that comes another question: if publishers' lists are full up with early poets hawking their Creative Writing Degree assignments, how on earth can poets get a look in who have never done the obligatory writing degree, don't have the contacts, and have taken the long slow route towards maturing their poetry?

Regular followers of the Soapbox will know my theory that good poetry is like good malt whisky. You can't hurry it. Very few poems emerge from the creative process fully formed. Most need time for maturation. I still find myself tinkering with "old" poems months or even years after the first draft emerges onto the page. Publish too early, and the poem gets "set in stone." There's no opportunity to improve it, even if with the benefit of hindsight the piece is an immature work.

When I first started getting published, I bunged out a lot of work into the public domain in a short space of time. I had quite a few acceptances – and a couple of poems ended up being published, that didn't really deserve it. They may add to my CV, but I don't want them in a debut collection. If I'm honest, I'm probably a bit embarrassed by one or two of them.

I can't help wondering if the graduates of the Creative Writing Degrees and Arvon courses, proudly displaying their debut collections, will still feel as proud of their work in a few years' time?

I have to admit that part of me feels a bit, well, dirty for asking such a question. These people have accomplished what I've never managed to do; and all credit to them. Far be it from me to cast aspersions on their achievements. It sounds a bit too much like sour grapes.

On the other hand, I know at least one poet (whose work I really admire) who confesses that parts of her debut collection now make her cringe.

So how soon is too soon? Maybe there's no easy way of knowing. There are certainly poets who go to the opposite extreme and are never satisfied that what they've written is printworthy, or keep on re-working their poems until all the freshness has gone out of them. Maybe I'm one of those. And if that's the case, I could learn a lesson or two from the eager upstarts of the poetry world. Sometimes, I think, you've just got to take the risk.