tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34078997032178845132024-03-21T21:26:04.397+00:00The Poet's SoapboxThe opinion blog of prize-winning poet Andy Humphrey, as first showcased in the National Association of Writers' Groups "LINK" magazine.The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.comBlogger77125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-76840220322567909222022-06-12T19:04:00.018+01:002022-06-12T19:11:00.332+01:00Of Barguests and Breadcrumbs - a tribute to Helen Sant<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4F7tIMT4Ljj8UUJ-CanBeFwnv7zT3_enOAqV5m0xUvpGPECVNW62AqO3ZUQjqWBX2Gs9VoQMIVT_czQZCZN6K60sjv0lapR_kEDOUWztO-1VUYT5Nsxi8tYOqk3X5KjHAYe96YXJ-vYDuW5YmolYPUJFLqu7M-RxBkm2697_dZC207ADG82-dQEQh/s453/Andy%20Helen%20publicity%20shot%20colour.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="453" data-original-width="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4F7tIMT4Ljj8UUJ-CanBeFwnv7zT3_enOAqV5m0xUvpGPECVNW62AqO3ZUQjqWBX2Gs9VoQMIVT_czQZCZN6K60sjv0lapR_kEDOUWztO-1VUYT5Nsxi8tYOqk3X5KjHAYe96YXJ-vYDuW5YmolYPUJFLqu7M-RxBkm2697_dZC207ADG82-dQEQh/s320/Andy%20Helen%20publicity%20shot%20colour.jpg"/></a></div>It’s a sad occasion which brings me back to the <i>Soapbox</i> after an overly long hiatus. The death of a co-worker inevitably brings forth a morass of emotions, and of course the writer in me chooses to process that in the only way I really can – by writing about it. At the same time, setting fingers to keyboard has a feeling of the futile about it – almost, of self-indulgence. Who am I, after all, to write this tribute? There are dozens of people, in York and elsewhere, who knew Helen better than I did. Family, close friends, other co-workers on her many projects in the literary, musical and heritage circles in which Helen moved. My words might as well be breadcrumbs, compared with the pearls that they have to offer.<br />
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But write I must, and I shall. And I hope these meagre words do justice to a fabulous creative spirit and a deeply valued co-worker, and that for those of my readers who knew Helen (which I suspect is most of you), something in here will strike a chime of recognition at a sad time.<br />
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Since I’ve mentioned breadcrumbs, let’s start with these – or rather with the trail of reflective glass balls set into the pavements of central York. They were put there in 2005, a year before I arrived in the city, as part of a storytelling trail designed to guide children through the history and folklore of the medieval city. Accompanying the trail was a rather beautiful book that I well remember being sold in cafés and indie outlets around the city, including my favourite restaurant of the time. <i>York Breadcrumbs</i> (“Tales of adventure that trace a path around York”) was co-written and illustrated by a group of local writers. The book itself is out of print, but <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/York-Breadcrumbs-read-follow-trail/dp/095432479X" target="_blank">you can still pick up second-hand copies from Amazon</a>, and follow the trail through the streets of York for yourself.<br />
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Helen Sant was one of the contributing authors. I met her very soon after my absorption into York’s literary scene. I knew her first as the small, striking, slightly Gothic-looking lass who worked on storytelling projects alongside another of the city’s legends, the late great Adrian Spendlow. Before long I had been spellbound by her translations of medieval legend into the language of today. She led ghost walks, under the pseudonyms Gothic Molly and <a href="https://helenmsantstoryteller.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">The Yorkshire Storyteller</a>. Even better, hers were no mere trap for the tourist pound – her ghost tours were bespoke affairs, the venues and the material tailored to the interests and enthusiasms of the audience. I still get shivers when I remember her telling the tale of the Barguest – the malevolent phantom hound – underneath the arches of Lendal Bridge, to a tour party made up of many of my oldest friends. I also vividly remember her taking my writing group around York, telling us all about the benign spirit who haunts the wings of the Theatre Royal, amongst other, seemingly endless tales.<br />
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Helen became a regular at <a href="https://yorkspeakerscorner.webs.com/" target="_blank">The Speakers’ Corner</a>, the spoken word open mic that I hosted until 2018. She would use the open mic to try out snippets of new stories, gleaned from near and far, and re-told with an idiosyncratic Yorkshire spin. Eventually she joined me as a host. I think we shared hosting duties for about five years, though in my head, it seems much longer. Helen was very much part of the furniture – as inextricably linked with York as the outline of the Minster against the skyline, or the scent of sugared chocolate that fills the air when the wind is in the right direction.<br />
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One of the curses of the coronavirus pandemic was the way it separated people from one another. We got into the habit of Not Seeing People. After Speakers’ Corner closed its doors for the last time in 2018, the places where Helen and I would coincide became fewer, but they still happened regularly. It didn’t seem as if successive lockdowns had removed her from my life; even if in-person events had ceased to take place, Helen would still post regularly on social media – vignettes about the day-to-day dramas of her neighbours, or news of her ventures into playwriting, performing (when restrictions allowed) and, more recently, <a href="https://yorkshirebitsandbobs.com/" target="_blank">her excursions into stand-up comedy</a>. There was a sense of continuity there – that “when all this is over” there would be plenty of opportunities to enjoy each other’s creativity once again. So when the news came, that this wasn’t going to happen, it truly felt as if it wasn’t just a friend and a collaborator who had gone, it was a part of the spirit of the city too.<br />
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Church of England funerals can be uncomfortable affairs when the person being remembered was not part of the worshipping community, a stranger to the minister officiating at the ceremony. I have no idea whether this particular funeral was anything like what Helen would have chosen for herself, had she been in a position to choose. Somehow, though, it felt appropriate. The vicar had clearly done her homework, spending time with family and friends and “tuning in” to the memories of what made Helen special. The service itself had a minimum of formality to it – a shared recitation of the 23rd psalm and the Our Father was as religious as it got – and instead of hymns, we had the pleasure and privilege of being able to listen to a recording of Helen herself, singing to a jazz-piano arrangement of <i>The Stray Cat Strut</i>. She was buried next to her father, on a picture-postcard early summer’s day, in the grounds of St John the Baptist church, Adel – a lovingly maintained old Norman church – amongst nose-high grasses and cow-parsley, with a choir of wrens in the trees singing their little hearts out in tribute. As a memorial to someone with such a sense of her connectedness to the earth and to the turn of the centuries, it all felt fitting.<br />
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Old Norman churches were very much Helen’s aesthetic. Probably my favourite memories of Helen are those of the times we worked together on our combined poetry performance and storytelling show, <i>Telling the Fairytale</i>. Its first outing was at Bar Lane Studios (as was) in 2011, followed by a bigger show during the York Literature Festival of March 2013 in the decidedly atmospheric surroundings of <a href="https://www.visitchurches.org.uk/visit/church-listing/holy-trinity-york.html" target="_blank">Holy Trinity Church, Goodramgate</a> – a gem of a place that you’d think had materialised right out of a medieval ghost story. My first poetry collection, <i>A Long Way to Fall</i>, was launched that year, and the folklore and fairytales that inspired many of the poems in that collection worked beautifully alongside Helen’s marvellous storytelling. I remember the box pews, our breath forming condensation-clouds around us in the chill of the air inside the church, our set lists and performance notes scattered about the pulpit. This was Helen in her element, treading in the footsteps of generations gone before – imagining their ghosts, perhaps, stirring themselves awake to listen spellbound to her tales.<br />
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I had completely forgotten, until the funeral day prompted me to look back at the <i>Telling the Fairytale</i> set list, that one of the stories Helen included in her performance was one of her own devising, about an enchanted shop somewhere off the Shambles in the heart of York, and a customer who falls in love with the magical lass behind the counter. He leaves without declaring himself, but when he goes back to find the shop again and offer his heart to the fair maiden, he cannot find the place. It has disappeared, gone in a breath of magic, leaving him wondering if it was all a dream, or if he’ll ever see it – and her – again. Of course, I can barely do justice to the story here. It really needs Helen to tell the tale, to weave the magic. But it occurs to me that having Helen vanish from our lives is not altogether dissimilar to what the hapless protagonist of that story must have felt, when he realised what he had allowed to slip through his fingers. Helen brought a little spark of magic to York; and now that the magic has worked its spell, the whole city feels diminished by her absence.<br />
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Thank you, Helen, for the joy of your words and the quiet delight of your presence. We’ll miss you.<br />
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<br />
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(The accompanying photo shows Helen and me and was taken as part of the publicity material for <i>Telling the Fairytale</i>)<br />
<br />
(If you want to know more about the <i>York Breadcrumbs</i> trail there is <a href="https://treasurehuntyork.com/blog/2022-01-24-breadcrumbs-trails-treasure-hunt-from-yorks-past/" target="_blank">a great recent article here</a>).
The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-87022932698821159472018-01-31T23:09:00.000+00:002018-02-01T20:15:09.432+00:00Is poetry a feminist issue? Part 3: "men's poetry"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnhsFapeVUIJ6dfCziZxJvDZ0Npgc9YQTPNPixCoBxE5OUW4bGqtagWmZnouquv_oKRJHDqaS4ysDRxgfSt2IaVaUHxOd3EKdsNsQTAbnlON40Sj4GSrI79LEcPAR12Kys1R7CG7V1IW0/s1600/Men.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnhsFapeVUIJ6dfCziZxJvDZ0Npgc9YQTPNPixCoBxE5OUW4bGqtagWmZnouquv_oKRJHDqaS4ysDRxgfSt2IaVaUHxOd3EKdsNsQTAbnlON40Sj4GSrI79LEcPAR12Kys1R7CG7V1IW0/s320/Men.jpg" width="208" height="320" data-original-width="306" data-original-height="470" /></a></div>Following on from my occasional series of posts about poetry and feminism (see my blog posts <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/is-poetry-feminist-issue-part-1.html">"Is poetry a feminist issue?"</a> and <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/is-poetry-feminist-issue-part-2-why.html">"Part 2: "women's poetry""</a>) I’ve decided to turn the discussion on its head and examine a rather provocative question that one of my regular correspondents posted on Facebook recently. My correspondent wanted to know:<br />
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“If one was to set up a poetry anthology that only men could be in:<br />
a) as a woman, or a man, would you be ok with that?<br />
b) what would you suggest as a theme?” <br />
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This was always going to be a controversial topic in the week that saw the President's Club scandal hit the headlines. Sure enough, the responses made interesting reading. A small number of female poets made clear their disbelief that anybody would even ask the question. After all, there were 250 years of male-only poetry anthologies, as one contributor pointed out – why on earth would we need another one? Several said they couldn’t think of anything in such an anthology that could possibly interest them. One went so far as to say something to the effect of “for goodness’ sake, I’ve had it up to here with bloody men.” And there was one male contributor who hit back aggressively at any response with a hint of feminism to it; his thesis, such as it was, seemed to be that feminism was so loud and influential that men are now an oppressed minority, and how dare anybody think differently...<br />
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I must be honest. I spend a lot of time apologising for my gender. And I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling ashamed to be male. It happens most weeks, in my day job, when I meet female victims of domestic abuse. It happened much closer to home, once, when a male guest at a party I was hosting committed a sexual assault on a female friend. It tends to happen most weekends when I have to fight my way through lairy crowds of stag-party-goers on the streets of York, or almost any city in the UK. I had another one of those moments when I read the unhelpful comments of that male contributor. But my heart sank even lower to see the kind of vitriol with which this small cross-section of the female readership greeted the suggestion. Now I wasn’t just apologising for the crassness of contemporary masculinity; I was atoning for centuries of patriarchy too.<br />
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Thankfully (for my sanity, if nothing else) the majority of contributors (of all genders) took a more progressive view. Many considered male gender identity in a wider social context. Male poets, it was suggested, have something important to offer by way of a reappraisal of what it means to be male, and an alternative to offer to the kind of ‘toxic masculinity’ that dominates the headlines in the era of Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein. Other contributors referred to specific issues such as male suicide and experiences of abuse; several felt that, now that the #metoo campaign has given increased visibility to the particular sufferings of female abuse victims, it is important to create a space where the experiences of <i>male</i> abuse victims can also be acknowledged. Others mentioned the experiences of gay men and non-gender-binary individuals, which are not well understood in <i>cis</i>-hetero-male society. Could a male-orientated poetry anthology make a contribution towards greater understanding and acceptance?<br />
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Personally, I think it probably could. But the discussion didn’t end there.<br />
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Because, as another contributor pointed out, who would read it? Probably a fair number of male poets. Some female poets too – though, as was clear from the discussion, there appear to be plenty who wouldn’t. With all anthologies, it’s something of a challenge to sell the book to people outside the immediate circle of the poets who contributed to it. My sceptical contributor suggested that a book with such an emphasis on the sensitive, emotional aspects of maleness was unlikely to appeal to the broad mass of the male populace. And if it was only read by the sort of male poets who already <i>get</i> these kinds of issues, then it won’t have achieved anything at all.<br />
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At least one contributor suggested that a more populist approach was necessary. An anthology that’s not afraid to immerse itself in the clichéd territories of stereotypical maleness – football, cars, the army, for example. Football poetry, after all, is one of a small number of areas where the world of the poet often <i>does</i> cross into the mainstream. But that kind of anthology wouldn’t appeal to <i>me</i>; and I suspect it would quickly lose the support of most of those female poets who could see the value in the original idea of “men’s poetry” (<i>and</i> quite a few of my fellow males). If anybody <i>is</i> brave (or foolish) enough to take a punt on a “men’s poetry” anthology, I want it to be one that confounds the stereotypes, instead of reinforcing them.<br />
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There is, I feel, an alternative. And that would be an anthology with a purpose. An anthology celebrating maleness in all its diversity – from the cult of men’s football to the female impersonator, from the parade-ground sergeant-major to the veteran with PTSD. An anthology that isn’t afraid to question the biological and societal implications of being male, or of being uncertain about maleness. An anthology specifically to raise money for an expressly male cause – such as research into testicular cancer, or (my favoured option) support targeted towards men and boys experiencing mental health difficulties. If the anthology is raising money for a good cause, it already has a natural marketing tool that takes it outside the narrow enclaves of the poetry-writing community. If what is <i>in</i> the anthology can offer some support and solidarity to other men at a point of crisis, then it really would be worth it.<br />
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The poet who posed the original question happened to be male, and a director of a small press poetry publisher. He made it clear that his press wasn’t interested in a “male-only” anthology, even for the worthiest of reasons; after all, even in a book themed around male issues, there’s no good reason to exclude the voice of the wives, lovers, sisters, mothers, or the voices of women who were assigned the male gender at birth. Making it “men-only” would be a gimmick, and it could be a gimmick too far. Nevertheless, I was surprised (and, in the end, delighted) by the sheer creative energy his question seemed to generate. I’d like to think that there is a poetry publisher out there somewhere who will have the nerve to pick up this idea, or something derived from this idea, and put it to work for the good of (literal, as well as literary) mankind.<br />
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And I hope that if they do, our amazing community of female poets will be prepared not to write off the project as another exercise in male ego-massage, and get behind it the way the vast majority of male poets I know have supported (and continue to support) our female contemporaries’ ongoing campaign for the respect they deserve.<br />
The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-41045449518734098862017-12-31T20:21:00.000+00:002017-12-31T20:21:00.517+00:00Some poets just need to get over themselves<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1_apfFOBeYTNRHMxolAwXCibB84t1KTEnA4qzdLkujzTaIMsxSLAcWv_d6IPtAQftQvSP3vpLZfTcjc5AeQHJkh0HZZIxKMbkEf5P1O-1VyPOUjemShHicj2d3hmZirBtLUWl55eHUk8/s1600/DSC03095.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1_apfFOBeYTNRHMxolAwXCibB84t1KTEnA4qzdLkujzTaIMsxSLAcWv_d6IPtAQftQvSP3vpLZfTcjc5AeQHJkh0HZZIxKMbkEf5P1O-1VyPOUjemShHicj2d3hmZirBtLUWl55eHUk8/s320/DSC03095.JPG" width="240" height="320" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="1600" /></a></div>A little rant to end the year.<br />
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Back in September 2016, I wrote a silly little poem in protest at the way the CEO of a certain nationally famous pub chain used his influence, and his company’s money, to generate pro-Brexit propaganda which was circulated amongst patrons of his pubs in the run-up to the referendum on leaving the EU. I subsequently posted the poem on my blog page on <a href="http://www.writeoutloud.net">Write Out Loud</a>, to receive the unexpected accolade of being voted Poem of the Week.<br />
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There was nothing solemn or pretentious in the aforementioned Silly Little Poem (<a href="https://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=60150">which you can read, in all its glory, here</a>). It was a skit – a pastiche – deliberately written in the metre most famously used by Dr Seuss in his comic rhymes for young readers. It was written to let off steam, and maybe raise a laugh. I wouldn’t ever have entered it for the Bridport Prize, or submitted it to a highbrow poetry journal. It’s not that sort of a poem.<br />
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I’ve re-posted links to the poem a few times since September 2016, when the pub chain which inspired it has cropped up in Facebook discussions. Most of the time it is received with the sort of droll amusement I hoped it would evoke. But not recently. The last time I mentioned it, a certain poet and Editor of a Respected Online Poetry Journal pounced upon the link and publicly denounced me for choosing to express my ire in the form of a Silly Little Poem. The poem itself came in for some Serious Critique for its “trite rhymes” and childish metre, and I was made to feel somehow kind of <i>sordid</i> for besmirching the good name of poetry by making a political point in such a light-hearted way.<br />
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And you know what? This made me angry.<br />
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OK, I should have guessed that my post would be read by some Serious Poets. The correspondent to whom I sent the link was a Facebook friend who is himself a Serious Poet of some distinction. He is however someone who has similar political sensibilities to me, and someone whom I know to be not averse to a bit of satire (and to be able to take it in the spirit with which it was intended). I suspected my contribution would raise a smile. I <i>didn’t</i> suspect that the Poetry Police would be scrutinising every word of his Facebook feed for signs of anything that could be seen to suggest that poetry is ever anything other than a Serious Artform. I certainly didn’t expect the sneering, the self-righteousness or the arrogance of the response with which my light-hearted little contribution was met.<br />
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In fairness to my friend, I should point out that he was not the source of the response. It came from somebody who followed his page – someone whose name is well known online in the poetry world, and who in my humble opinion really needs to get over himself.<br />
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First of all, who gets to dictate what does, and doesn’t, constitute suitable material for poetry? Political points don’t have to be made exclusively through serious poems – in fact, <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/political-poetry-is-it-any-good.html">as I’ve argued before on this blog</a>, sometimes the silly poem is more effective by virtue of being memorable for its daft rhymes, or for a refrain that gets lodged in the mind. After all, the satirist’s job is to make the self-important look ridiculous. The poems in Lewis Carroll’s <i>Alice</i> books were social and political satires; often they were pastiches of poems and songs of the day, or of well-known poetic styles; they were all very silly. And today they are fondly remembered, they are proudly recited by young and old alike, and some of them even feature in <i>The Nation’s Favourite Poems</i>. Now I’m not saying that my Silly Little Poem has anything to commend it to the extent that <i>Jabberwocky</i> does, but that’s not the point. The point is that you simply can’t say, with any justification, that serious political points can’t be made through light verse. A whole tradition of British poetic writing that encompasses Carroll, Lear, Betjeman, Auden, Roger McGough, John Cooper Clarke, Attila the Stockbroker and Les Barker will prove you wrong.<br />
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Secondly, there’s that sniffy assumption often made by Serious Poets, that writers of light verse somehow don’t take their craft seriously. I beg to differ with m’learned friend when he says that the rhymes in my Silly Little Poem are “trite”. I worked bloody hard at those rhymes – and though I say so myself, I think they are effective. The “Dr Seuss” metre requires them to be deployed with the subtlety of a rhinoceros driving a Sherman tank, but that doesn’t mean they are bad rhymes. One of the reasons I love writing Silly Little Poems is that they really make me work at rhyme, scansion and the musicality of a poem; they are great training for the moments when I get the urge and the inspiration to write Serious Poetry. As I’ve blogged before, <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/in-praise-of-les.html">it takes a great deal of skill to make light verse actually <i>sound</i> light</a> – more than most Serious Free Verse Poets realise.<br />
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(Again, <a href="https://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=60150">read the poem</a> and judge for yourselves. I don’t make any claims as to its literary greatness; I just happen to think I came up with half-decent rhymes that work moderately well).<br />
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Lastly, I think I’m just sore at the fellow’s implication that somehow, by writing this stuff, I’m Not a Proper Poet. OK, so it would appear I’m never going to be published in his journal – I think we can be quite Clear about that, can’t we? – but I’ve published a whole collection of (mostly) serious poems and I’ve won 10 First Prizes in UK-wide and international poetry competitions – mostly with serious poems. I shouldn’t have to justify myself. I’ll be a poet in whatever medium I choose, thank you very much. If I choose to write Silly Little Poems, by all means judge the poems, but not the poet. If my output really isn’t for you, then fine – there are plenty of Serious Poets (and some silly ones) whose work I can’t stomach either. But the point is that those words speak to <i>someone</i>. Who are you to silence those words, just because that <i>someone</i> doesn’t happen to be you?The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-55051217823852683112017-07-03T22:57:00.001+01:002017-07-03T22:57:26.271+01:00Helen Cadbury - a tribute<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAJKtidy5TtoUtLo6vXX4FSma8m0iBVF0Xuk9mLS-JZr_zlFTkoaBJVxSfhTJhUDXXLZp374vGmW-DWbEUWs1eN1ccsneoAYVRVEZRgEWILs1_vjkOcXie320MGyn7PAs6H2JVigMJ2UI/s1600/Helen+Cadbury+at+SC.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAJKtidy5TtoUtLo6vXX4FSma8m0iBVF0Xuk9mLS-JZr_zlFTkoaBJVxSfhTJhUDXXLZp374vGmW-DWbEUWs1eN1ccsneoAYVRVEZRgEWILs1_vjkOcXie320MGyn7PAs6H2JVigMJ2UI/s320/Helen+Cadbury+at+SC.JPG" width="240" height="320" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="1600" /></a></div>The Poet's Soapbox was deeply saddened to learn of the death last Friday of one of the true stars of York’s literary scene. <a href="http://www.helencadbury.com">Helen Cadbury</a> was a successful novelist, a very fine poet, a playwright and a motivator of all things artistic. Her passing will inevitably leave a large empty space in the lives of her partner, sons and her sister, and it will be keenly felt too amongst all of us in the local arts scene who have had the privilege of knowing Helen and working alongside her.<br />
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My first encounter with Helen and her beautiful poetry was at Speakers’ Corner. On a night that was (as sometimes happens) almost entirely dominated by men, Helen’s was one of only two female voices to rise to the challenge of redressing the gender imbalance. I think it’s fair to say I was a little intimidated at first; there was a strength and a self-assurance about her which made me feel she was destined for more prestigious places than our little grassroots open mic. But as I got to know her it quickly became apparent that Helen’s self-assurance came from a strong, still centre. There was never anything about her that was in the least bit pushy or arrogant. She was quick to offer praise and support to others; she listened sensitively, and when she spoke, she spoke wisely. In a field where many of us often feel that we have to push ourselves forward to be noticed, Helen was one of the most humble writers I knew.<br />
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It’s also fair to say that I didn’t quite appreciate just how good Helen’s writing was until I landed upon an anonymous short story entitled <i>Hello</i>, which I found in the creative writing competition postbag for the 2011 Malton Literature Festival (the forerunner of what is now <a href="https://ryedalebookfestival.com/">Ryedale Book Festival</a>). The story was a chilling little psychodrama written with a breathtaking economy of language and a light touch of the pen which elevated it from its dark origins to something truly special. “I was as unsettled as I was fascinated,” I wrote in the judge’s report. “It is clear from the outset that something terrible has happened, but the writer paces the story cleverly, never revealing any detail until it’s exactly the right time to do so.” It was a story that easily deserved its prize, and it was clearly the output of a writer of extraordinary talent.<br />
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That First Prize winner was Helen. The story had its origins, she told me later, in some of the tales she had absorbed and the characters she had met whilst working in a women’s prison. As it turned out, that background was also the perfect starting-point for Helen’s subsequent career as a crime novelist. <i>To Catch a Rabbit</i>, the first book in the PCSO Sean Denton series, was a joint winner of the inaugural Northern Crime Award in 2012 and was first published under the Moth imprint in 2013. Subsequently republished by Allison & Busby, it was followed by a sequel, <i>Bones in the Nest</i>. The third book in the series, <i>Race to the Kill</i>, is scheduled for publication this autumn.<br />
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As a keen, but very selective, reader of contemporary crime fiction, I was drawn to the Sean Denton books, not just because I knew how good the prose would be, but because there’s something very “everyman” in the central character. Sean is not a detective, not even a police officer, when the series begins; he’s a lowly PCSO unexpectedly plunged into a world of organised crime and police corruption. His very ordinariness makes Sean such an empathetic central character: he’s a council estate boy, an under-achiever at school, with no great ambitions or pretentions. What he does have – and where I think her greatest fictional character mirrors his creator in many ways – is a quiet, instinctive understanding of what is The Right Thing to do, to feel, to believe, to stand up for. That knowledge, that strength of character, guides Sean Denton through his fictional troubles. And similar qualities guided Helen, as anyone familiar with her work in our community and with her unshowy but wise and insightful Facebook posts will realise. She made no secret of her politics (her sister is Labour MP and until-recently front bencher Ruth Cadbury) but the moral and social convictions which underpinned them were always more important than any party political points scoring.<br />
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It is, of course, as a poet that I knew Helen best: whether sharing a stage with her, or sitting around a workshop table at the York Stanza sessions hosted by the amazing Carole Bromley (whom Helen credits as being the person who started her on the path to writing professionally). Helen wrote, quite simply, beautiful poetry. Like their author, her poems were never flamboyant; but they were deeply felt, beautifully crafted, alive with imagery and inner fire. So many of Helen’s poems are stories which uncover the epic, the mythic and sometimes the tragic in the narratives of ordinary lives, poems which grant a special dignity to the otherwise uncelebrated. She was considerate in her critique of others’ work, and humble enough to be grateful for critique of her own. She was also an indefatigable supporter of the writing efforts of her contemporaries. She visited <a href="http://yorkwriters.webs.com">York Writers</a> a number of times to talk (with great charm and self-deprecation) about her journey into professional writing, and the pitfalls she encountered on her way. And she was a founder member of the <a href="https://yorkauthors.co.uk">York Authors</a> co-operative, set up to help published local writers across genres promote and develop their books. Through that group she helped give a platform to many of us who wouldn’t otherwise have the knowledge, the network or the oomph to embark on the thankless round of sales and promotions unaided.<br />
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There is perhaps an awareness of mortality in the title of Helen’s debut poetry collection, <a href="http://www.valleypressuk.com/book/88/forever_now">due to be published by Valley Press in November</a>. <i>Forever, Now</i> is a title lifted from Emily Dickinson’s aphorism that “forever is composed of nows”. It wouldn’t do for me to speculate on how Helen’s long illness may have affected her perspective on now, or on eternity. What is clear is that she remained to the end, not only fiercely creative, but full of possibilities, still excitedly discussing plans for her book launches just the day before she finally left us.<br />
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Thank you, Helen. For your wonderful writing, and the inspiration, strength and encouragement so many of us have drawn from you. We will miss you.<br />
The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-13898703755879913852016-12-31T12:28:00.000+00:002016-12-31T13:32:01.757+00:00Is Bob Dylan a poet?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvAJQ7xbAG22vkipjab-1te5J3RDeOL7HU97Ar3obJT6AwC8yTDjijG1laiKurOafRW0OAFc-NpU9-9xnXTM-MBuitzms7pwbDm_u3MAwODI2oeG7aC4_vQstkpGxhUJYiscSdo2dVQWk/s1600/dylan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvAJQ7xbAG22vkipjab-1te5J3RDeOL7HU97Ar3obJT6AwC8yTDjijG1laiKurOafRW0OAFc-NpU9-9xnXTM-MBuitzms7pwbDm_u3MAwODI2oeG7aC4_vQstkpGxhUJYiscSdo2dVQWk/s320/dylan.jpg" width="320" height="213" /></a></div>The decision <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/dylan-facts.html">to award Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize for Literature</a> is one that has ruffled a few feathers in the poetry world. Judging by my Facebook feed, at least, it also seems to have reignited the ages-old row about just what constitutes poetry anyway. After all, Dylan wrote songs, not literary works. Is there anything in his lyrics which justifies them being read in the way one might read a collection of poetry?<br />
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Some of Dylan’s detractors are comfortable with the concept of ‘Dylan as poet’, but can’t help asking was he really so much greater a poet than his contemporaries that he deserved a Nobel Prize when, for example, Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen didn’t? Cohen, after all, was a poet; he only became a songwriter by accident when he realised he could make far more money selling his poems by putting them to music than he could by publishing them as purely written collections. Others take a much more purist approach. Song lyrics, they argue, are <i>not</i> poetry, but a separate artform altogether. They are written for an entirely different purpose. They get away with things that would be unforgiveable in true ‘page’ poetry: trite rhymes, faltering scansion, cliché, wilful obscurity under the guise of psychedelic whimsy. And Dylan, in the course of his vast repertoire, has probably been guilty of all of the above, somewhere along the line. So is it really fair to true poets to put Dylan on the same pedestal as, for example, WB Yeats or Seamus Heaney by giving him a Nobel Prize for his writing?<br />
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Those in the pro-Dylan camp are more generous in their assessment of whether or not his song lyrics qualify as poetry. Some go so far as to assert that they are more accessible poetic works than most of the stuff that has been published under the auspices of poetry in his lifetime. They note the impact of his early protest songs on the global peace movement, the powerful social commentary and satire in many of his later writings. They point to the heartbreak of <i>Blood on the Tracks</i> and ask: well, isn’t such a paean to Love Gone Wrong <i>precisely</i> the stuff that poetry is made of? Where the pro-Dylan camp often falters is that they state this in such effusive terms as to suggest that Dylan never wrote a duff rhyme or a wilfully obscure metaphor in his life – a suggestion that, even as a fan, I have to admit is ridiculous.<br />
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So: was Bob writing poetry or not? And just what <i>is</i> poetry anyway? One of my correspondents noted, somewhat gleefully, that poets themselves (and free verse poets especially) are often painfully inconsistent on this very subject. “There are no rules – anything goes!” they triumphantly declare one moment – the next, they’ll be adamant that (for example) one of Bob Dylan’s song lyrics <i>isn’t</i> poetry because it has an inconsistent rhyme scheme/irregular scansion/doesn’t look like a poem on the page. My correspondent tells me that he has had great fun recently posting up pieces of prose on his <a href="http://www.writeoutloud.net">Write Out Loud</a> blog and waiting for the avalanche of criticisms that “that’s not a poem!”<br />
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I tend to take a liberal approach to what is and isn’t a poem. Basically, if the person who wrote it <i>says</i> it’s a poem, then who am I to argue? That doesn’t necessarily mean that the piece of writing <i>exhibits poetic qualities</i>. Many poems (or pieces of writing that are presented as poems) <i>aren’t</i> especially poetic. I suspect that my correspondent’s mischievous prose offerings may well fall into this category. But if the writer asserts that they want their work to be approached in the way that one would approach a poem, then as far as I’m concerned it doesn’t matter whether it is presented as a sonnet, a song lyric, a rambling piece of free verse, or as prose. If there are poetic qualities in the writing, these should sing out. If there aren’t – or if there are features of the writing which clash with any poetic qualities – these will probably stand out too.<br />
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A piece of writing needn’t be presented as poetry to have poetic qualities. The prose of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mackay_Brown">George Mackay Brown</a>, for example, contains some of the most intensely poetic writing I have ever had the privilege to read. The flash fiction of writers like <a href="http://www.stevetoase.co.uk/">Steve Toase</a> and <a href="https://amalelmohtar.com/">Amal el-Mohtar</a> is often so richly poetic that it can be a surprise to see it laid out on the page in paragraphs instead of stanzas. Some of my favourite songwriters – a gamut that ranges from <a href="http://www.paulsimon.com/">Paul Simon</a> to <a href="http://www.jarviscocker.net/">Jarvis Cocker</a>, with Dylan somewhere in the mix – have a brilliantly poetic ear for a good lyric. Others don’t, but are no less great songwriters for all that. <a href="http://www.katebush.com/home">Kate Bush</a>, for example, only rarely produces lyrics with a true poetic flair – but she’s a musician’s musician, far more interested in the sonic qualities of the music as a whole (words, accompaniment, rhythm and effects) than in the fine craft of rhyme and meter. It all depends on the writer’s intention for their composition.<br />
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So the question isn’t really “is it poetry?” The question that interests me far more is “does it have poetic qualities?” If the answer is <i>yes</i>, then the writing deserves recognition – be that a Nobel Prize or a round of applause at the local open mic.<br />
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And what constitute “poetic qualities”? I’ll happily throw some ideas out here. Poetic writing, for me, is a <i>distillation</i> – an attempt to convey intense experiences and sensations in as few words as possible. It does this by employing literary devices such as <i>imagery</i> and <i>subtext</i> to point at meanings beyond the literal text of the words themselves. And perhaps above all, it does this using a <i>musicality of language</i> which reinforces the mood and creates emotional resonances of its own.<br />
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I plan to look at these ideas in a bit more depth in future blog posts.<br />
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As for whether Dylan himself is a poet: I have no intention of answering that. You'll just have to weigh up the evidence and decide for yourselves.The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-21212555590657234922016-11-27T20:57:00.000+00:002016-11-27T20:59:32.747+00:00Five Words that Poets Hate<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDf325no5fik1fn4ywvLJVLf-rbxPYEmuuXWUpDkNUgmrV7qIOwaN1dV3SEmJ_Dfi4c63rBRnQeXlehCT2E3K6XxUdf6kEGRKOp-z0XhX3pgWmmTeePYr9dg9DmDUP5TPsn0M_W__U7Rs/s1600/Poets%2527+corner.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDf325no5fik1fn4ywvLJVLf-rbxPYEmuuXWUpDkNUgmrV7qIOwaN1dV3SEmJ_Dfi4c63rBRnQeXlehCT2E3K6XxUdf6kEGRKOp-z0XhX3pgWmmTeePYr9dg9DmDUP5TPsn0M_W__U7Rs/s320/Poets%2527+corner.jpg" width="320" height="253" /></a></div>As people who work with words, it’s only natural that poets can end up in paroxysms of rage at the sight of certain words or phrases. A couple of weeks ago I polled my fellow poets on Facebook for the words that make them most agitated.<br />
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<i><b>1. Corner</b></i><br />
Nobody puts Baby in the corner, as fans of <i>Dirty Dancing</i> know only too well. But poets get put in corners All The Time. And this really, REALLY gets my goat.<br />
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I suppose it’s a side-effect of that nice little mausoleum in the corner of Westminster Abbey, where some of the great names from poetry’s past are commemorated. But somehow the concept of a ‘Poet’s Corner’ has taken on a metaphorical life far bigger than the actual physical space that bears that name. Poets, admit it. How many times have you been to events where the poets have been relegated to a ‘corner’ because a non-poet organiser has got it into their head that poets and corners are supposed to go together?<br />
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I’ll admit to being partially guilty here. The open mic that I’ve been running since 2007 goes by the name of <a href="http://yorkspeakerscorner.webs.com">The Speakers’ Corner</a>. But there’s a difference between a Speakers’ Corner (named after the very public corner of London where anyone with anything to say can be heard) and a Poets’ Corner. You see, Speakers’ Corner excepted, a corner is where you put something to ensure it is out of the way. It is the shadowy space where you put that embarrassing ornament that was a gift from your rich aunt (the one you daren’t offend in case you lose the inheritance) but that you secretly hope nobody will notice. It is the outcasts’ space at parties, into which the uncomfortable, the awkward and the conversationally challenged are elbowed by their more socially gifted contemporaries. The corner, in short, is The Place That Doesn’t Fit.<br />
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And I rather suspect that that is the real reason why poets are so often relegated to corners. Poetry makes people uncomfortable – and so do poets. And if we’re doing our jobs right, we <i>should</i> be making people uncomfortable. Not by waxing lyrical about daffodils (see below), but by following Goldsmith’s admonition to “let thy voice, prevailing over time, redress the rigours of th’ inclement clime”. There’s a sort of collective moral responsibility on poets to call out the fakes, the falsehoods, the failures of our society and our politics – and I think that deep inside, most people with any cultural awareness have some sense that this is a good thing. The trouble is, most people don’t want us doing that in their backyard, or in their cosy artsy gathering. Much safer to relegate us to the corner, in the hope that people won’t notice we’re there, or will treat us as the oddities to be avoided. Meanwhile the organisers can tick the right box on their Arts Council feedback sheet and get on with their lives without being unsettled by what we do.<br />
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<i><b>2. Scribble</b></i><br />
It’s a faux-truism in popular culture that poets don’t <i>write</i>, we <i>scribble</i>. ‘Writing’ is an activity with a semblance of nobility about it. It’s the activity that produced <i>King Lear</i>, or <i>Paradise Lost</i>, or <i>Moby Dick</i>. A weighty activity for weighty men (and yes, the gender bias is significant).<br />
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‘Scribble’, by contrast, is what very small children do with coloured pencils before they learn to write proper words. It’s something that predates the idea of actual <i>communication</i>. When applied to adults, the picture it conjures up is one of eccentricity, of haphazard scrawl into dog-eared notebooks or on napkins in cafés. The implication is that the words being ‘scribbled’ are trivial, ephemeral. Or even self-indulgent; the whole essence of ‘scribble’ is that it’s indecipherable to everyone except the person doing the scribbling. So referring to a poet’s writings in this way fosters the stereotype that what poets write is essentially meaningless to anyone but the poet.<br />
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I have to admit, though, this is a word that divided my Facebook poets. One or two of them pointed out that they often <i>do</i> scribble stuff when they go about their day – and most poets are familiar with the syndrome of being far away from notebook or laptop and having a sudden urge to capture a fleeting line or an image that <i>must</i> be written down before it escapes. Even if that means scrawling it on a napkin, or on the back of your hand.<br />
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But as my regular correspondent (and fine poet) <a href="https://angelatopping.wordpress.com/">Angela Topping</a> points out, it’s one thing for us poets to refer to these contextless scrawls as scribble, and another thing altogether for a non-poet to describe the whole of our creative process that way.<br />
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<i><b>3. Wordsmith</b></i><br />
This one divided opinion even more than ‘scribble’. Some were entirely comfortable with it – others hated it with a visceral passion.<br />
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One or two of my correspondents added a whole pile of synonyms, with which they were equally uncomfortable. ‘Scribe’ and ‘wordweaver’ were particularly unpopular.<br />
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Why do these phrases attract such bile? There’s a slightly archaic, artisanal feel to them, which makes me think they are the kind of words that rich people who like to pretend that they’re cultured would use out of condescension, rather than genuine admiration for the craft. In these words the poet is cast in the role of skilled manual labourer – the verbal equivalent of a potter, or a rug-maker. It suits those who like to <i>appear</i> cultured to have the pot or the rug in their mansion (or the book in their library), but they would never want to get their hands dirty trying out the artisan’s craft for themselves. So they dignify the craft with a fancy title and it makes them feel that the world is ordered just the way they like it: the rich man in his castle, the poet at his gate.<br />
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It’s worth mentioning, at this point, some of the other detested phrases that often get bundled together with ‘poet’. ‘Impoverished’ was one. ‘Arty’, ‘intellectual’ and ‘dreamer’ were also in the mix. Again, all these are words which set up the stereotype of the poet as one of the noble, hard-working poor – much as if to say, well it’s all very nice to have them, but you wouldn’t actually want to <i>be</i> one, would you?<br />
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<i><b>4. Award-winning</b></i><br />
This is another one that I’m guilty of myself. Let’s face it, 90% of poets’ CVs contain the phrase. And therein lies the problem. When almost any poet you meet can describe themselves as ‘award-winning’, it’s obvious that being award-winning doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. As the great <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Len_Goodman">Len Goodman</a> once said, awards are like piles – every arse gets them eventually.<br />
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Why do so many of us persist in describing ourselves as ‘award-winning’? I think the answer to that is that we are constantly having to justify ourselves, and our art. Very few poets have a queue of people at their door, wanting to hear their words. Most of us, if we want to be taken seriously, have to get out there and sell ourselves to a largely indifferent world. And in my experience, that’s not something which many poets are good at. There are one or two honourable exceptions (my York contemporary <a href="http://www.miles-salter.co.uk/">Miles Salter</a>, for example, has a talent for self-promotion that I really envy). But most of us find that we need to stake our claim to being a Serious Poet by constantly referencing those pesky awards, whether they’re the Bridport Prize or our local writers’ group’s annual limerick competition. They are one of the few objective measurements we can cling to, to show that we are Any Good.<br />
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But even being award-winning is no guarantee of recognition. The extraordinary <a href="https://patborthwick.wordpress.com/">Pat Borthwick</a>, for example, has won almost every major poetry award out there, and tells me that she still struggles to get bookings. Which sometimes makes me wonder, if Pat has difficulty, what hope is there for the rest of us?<br />
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<i><b>5. Poetry</b></i><br />
I’ve saved the most controversial word for last. But the person who proposed it was quite adamant about this one. It’s a “pigeonholing misrepresentation”, I was told. And I have to admit, that somewhat flummoxed me.<br />
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So is it true? Are poets <i>really</i> ashamed, embarrassed or angered to be associated with poetry?<br />
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I’ve pondered this at great length since. And I don’t think that it’s the whole corpus of poetry that’s being slagged off here, but rather what my correspondent eloquently described as a “pompous white-ruffled airy arty farty stereotype”. The point was made that there is a way of presenting poetry which is intrinsically ‘uncool’ and which does sometimes irreparable damage to people’s appreciation of poetry, often at a very young age. Poetry was something, says my correspondent, that people just “didn’t do” when he was at school.<br />
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I can’t really argue with that. I’ve blogged before about <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/time-to-ditch-daffodils.html">the dreadful negative impact of Wordsworth’s <i>Daffodils</i> on generations of schoolchildren</a> – and the even worse impact that over-sentimental rehashings of <i>Daffodils</i> have on the credibility of poetry as an art form (it’s probably worth mentioning that the word ‘daffodils’ had its own nomination in this survey!). However, I’m far from comfortable with the notion that this means the very word ‘poetry’ is intrinsically devalued amongst those of us who write and perform the stuff. If anything, perhaps the opposite is true.<br />
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Poetry is not something which ever had aspirations to be ‘cool’ (except for possibly a year or two in the Beat era). In the UK at least, it certainly hasn’t ever been ‘trendy’ in my lifetime. But what <i>good</i> poetry has going for it is a certain counter-cultural quality. That’s why Goldsmith described poetry as “my shame in crowds, my solitary pride”. That’s part of the reason why it continues to attract such a high proportion of geeks, goths and misfits of all kinds (and long may it continue to do so). Pretty much all the performing poets I know are <i>proud</i> to call themselves poets; that word represents an artistic, cultural and political standpoint very different to the societal norms of capitalism, tribalism and conformity.<br />
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But I have met other poets who are still embarrassed to think of themselves as poets. They bring out their notebooks almost shyly at open mics. They share their words hesitantly. And it’s not because the words are bad – they never are. It’s because when they have admitted to friends, family members, sometimes even partners, that they have been writing poetry, they have had their art ridiculed, or dismissed as unimportant.<br />
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If you’re one of these people, then this post is for you. The word ‘poetry’ is on this list because poetry matters. <i>Don’t</i> hate that word. Be proud of it. Immerse yourself in it. It is a truly soul-crushing thing, when those closest to you just don’t understand why it matters to you. But there are hundreds and thousands of us who <i>do</i> get it. Seek us out. Be poets with us. We will do what we can to make your life better. To help you be proud of who you are.<br />
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And not a single daffodil will be harmed in the process.The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-90944602934966206912016-09-25T22:25:00.000+01:002016-09-25T22:28:40.589+01:00On Not Writing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6OZohM1ADqZh593keQUv7FaXG5dusT2PX8-dSQn80ssW0CwwedaSkpNtXbZfsjwMTcva7vR_CIFErTWRHDw_FsYwbEg6jN2xYrvASXgkdjYGuw3OdrX32qDARoXgwckGaZtokrYdUybo/s1600/Snoopy+at+typewriter.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6OZohM1ADqZh593keQUv7FaXG5dusT2PX8-dSQn80ssW0CwwedaSkpNtXbZfsjwMTcva7vR_CIFErTWRHDw_FsYwbEg6jN2xYrvASXgkdjYGuw3OdrX32qDARoXgwckGaZtokrYdUybo/s320/Snoopy+at+typewriter.gif" width="320" height="246" /></a></div>Regular <i>Soapbox</i> followers will have noticed that I haven’t posted anything for some time. The quietness of the <i>Soapbox</i> is symptomatic of my writing life in general this year. I’ve been doing very little creative writing of any kind. A meagre handful of new poems. Some blog articles. A couple of pieces for the community magazine that I contribute to. And occasional forays into the epic fairy-tales that I write for my own pleasure, as a break from the serious business of life.<br />
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I know many novelists – published and aspiring – who agonise over the phenomenon of ‘writer’s block’. But ‘writer’s block’ presupposes that you actually have the time and space and the desire to write – it’s just that when you sit down to do it, nothing comes. There are whole books of advice about it. But I don’t think I’m in the same situation.<br />
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My issue is more that the time to write hasn’t been there. The safe space in which to get the writing done hasn’t been there. Above all, the emotional energy which I believe is a prerequisite for <i>any</i> writing – perhaps poetry most of all – simply hasn’t been there.<br />
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I suspect a lot of people who write get periods like this in their lives. And I suspect most don’t like to admit it. The received wisdom – from the tutors, the guidebooks, and the writing magazines – is that we <i>have</i> to be writing. All the time. That somehow we’re not ‘serious’ writers if there are periods when this can’t happen.<br />
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All of which is, frankly, bollocks.<br />
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I’ve blogged before that <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/heres-to-part-timers.html">you do not have to be a <i>full-time</i> writer to be a writer</a>. JRR Tolkien wasn’t a full-time writer. Philip Larkin wasn’t a full-time writer. They had day jobs which paid the bills, and in Tolkien’s case inspired and preoccupied him every bit as much as the actual writing did. And the thing with day jobs is that they sometimes take over.<br />
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My day job, for the last year, has involved giving advice and legal representation to vulnerable households who are homeless or facing homelessness. It’s an amazing privilege to do this kind of work. The people I meet are extraordinary, fascinating, complex individuals. Some have serious health difficulties. Some have escaped abuse or violence. Almost all have been scarred to some extent by the present government’s persecution of the poor, the disabled and those at the margins of society. Every day I am honoured and amazed to be trusted with the stories of the hardships my clients have faced. Every day I am struck by their resilience in the teeth of terrible, sometimes tragic circumstances.<br />
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The trouble with a job like this is it’s very difficult to switch off from. I sometimes wake in the mornings realising that I have been dreaming about my clients’ cases, or trying to memorise tracts of law in my sleep. The hours are long, the work is demanding, the intellectual challenge enormous. This is all part of the reason why I love my job. But it’s also the reason that when I get ‘down-time’ from my work, I really do need to relax. To open up some emotional space for me to recover, otherwise I’ll burn out.<br />
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Now, to produce poetry requires a certain emotional space in which to be creative. To produce <i>good</i> poetry requires time and intellectual discipline, to work on refining those first drafts and turning them into material worthy of publication. Often, too, it requires time to get to workshops, critique sessions, open mics, to try out the material. All of this can be in short supply in a job like mine.<br />
<br />
So that’s the reason I haven’t been writing much poetry.<br />
<br />
I’m not beating myself up about this. After all, the work that I do is <i>important</i>. Let’s be honest, it probably makes more of a difference to more people than my poetry ever will. It’s an honour to be able to serve my community in this way. And it is, in many senses, a vocation. Right now, I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.<br />
<br />
Nonetheless, I find myself feeling I have to apologise to other writers for Not Writing. Every now and then I’m given the distinct impression that “I’m not taking things seriously” or “I’m not a proper writer.” But I don’t think either of these accusations are valid.<br />
<br />
For one thing, writers need source material. And the clients I’m working with now are providing me with inspiration in bucketloads. Right now, I <i>can’t</i> write about them – partly because of client confidentiality, but more because I’m simply too close to the people and the events to be able to write about them with any kind of perspective. I have no doubt that in the fullness of time, these experiences of mine are going to generate vast volumes of words. It doesn’t matter that they’re not doing so <i>now</i>.<br />
<br />
Many people discover (or rediscover) poetry, and other forms of writing, when they retire. With new-found space in their lives, and some distance from what was their day-to-day work, those nebulous strands of inspiration start to coalesce. Formative past experiences acquire a certain perspective.<br />
<br />
I hope I won’t have to wait until retirement to be writing prolifically again. In the meantime, even if the creative spark is dimmed, I doubt it is snuffed out altogether. I still have a small back catalogue of unpublished work that needs to see the light of day at some point. I have fragments of new poems (often cathartic silly stuff, which at least keeps up the poetic discipline, and provides light relief at the local open mics). And I have a huge store of new experiences to tap into, when the time and the space is right.<br />
<br />
If you find yourself in a similar situation, don’t despair. And don’t, for goodness’ sake, let <i>anybody</i> tell you you are failing as a writer, just because you can’t do exactly what the textbooks say, all the time.<br />
The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-49803458631157039442016-05-17T22:25:00.000+01:002016-05-17T22:25:50.550+01:00The Power of Birmingham, or: is there poetry in the city?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWj2s6m1Vzw_XnafnkhvedX56SYF10pqKkJL8evxhPTFqOACCe8QmMjQHJs_E9JI6jjOrJbFzMuNVdQAAAZEDxBsYmEJG3y27utrct9BmIrSARMsj7Cla5hiAsuU4f_AYQjzpZlvHYwlg/s1600/Birmingham.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWj2s6m1Vzw_XnafnkhvedX56SYF10pqKkJL8evxhPTFqOACCe8QmMjQHJs_E9JI6jjOrJbFzMuNVdQAAAZEDxBsYmEJG3y27utrct9BmIrSARMsj7Cla5hiAsuU4f_AYQjzpZlvHYwlg/s320/Birmingham.jpg" /></a></div>My literary hero, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mackay_Brown">George Mackay Brown</a>, was once unforgiveably rude about Birmingham. “A poet could not choose a better place to be born than a group of islands, like Orkney,” he wrote in his 1993 essay <i>Enchantment of Islands: A Poet’s Sources</i>. “...If I had been born in Birmingham, for example, I would know that any creativity in me would be impoverished from the start, perhaps fatally.”<br />
<br />
Closeness to the natural world, to ancient history and mythology, is a tremendous blessing for a poet, I agree. Most of my own poetry uses nature, myth and fairy tale as its starting point. But surely, surely he’s being unjustifiably harsh?<br />
<br />
I have to admit that when I think of ‘city poetry’, the first examples that come to mind are largely negative ones. William Blake’s hymn to London could hardly paint a darker portrait of an urban landscape:<br />
<br />
“I wander thro’ each charter’d street,<br />
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.<br />
And mark in every face I meet<br />
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.<br />
<br />
“In every cry of every Man,<br />
In every infant’s cry of fear,<br />
In every voice: in every ban<br />
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.<br />
<br />
“How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry<br />
Every blackening Church appals<br />
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh<br />
Runs in blood down Palace walls.”<br />
<br />
Eliot’s <i>The Waste Land</i> is hardly much kinder with its haunting portrayal of urban desolation. And we all know what John Betjeman thought of Slough.<br />
<br />
But hang on a minute. These strong gut reactions <i>are</i> poetry. You don’t have to be in love with a place to be deeply moved by its emotional undercurrents. What Blake and Eliot are trying to capture is the complexity of the urban setting and the effects of human habitation in close, crowded quarters. Both poets are reaching out to make a human connection within the ruins – and isn’t that what poetry is <i>always</i> trying to do?<br />
<br />
Mackay Brown points out in his essay that ‘city poets’ such as Keats and Shakespeare were reliant on being able to retreat to the countryside in order to reinvigorate their muse. I’m in the same boat myself: I need open space, coast and sea, landscape and legend, to refresh me and to rekindle the poetic fire. But actually, not all that much of my own poetry is set in open countryside or the distant past. Most of it is in the city because that’s where people are – and it’s <i>people</i>, for me, that make the most fascinating poetry of all. “This is not the countryside, this is the cityside,” declares Fisher Stevens in <i>Short Circuit 2</i>. “The city is full of people, and people are very complicated.” It may be a throwaway quote from a daft film, but there’s more truth in this line than the script writers realised.<br />
<br />
So: does living in Birmingham (or any city for that matter) really kill the creative impulse? I’m not convinced that it does.<br />
<br />
<i>Psychogeography</i> – the fundamental connection between place and emotion – is a bit of a buzzword in poetic circles. And I believe the interest in psychogeography is a trend that makes poetry less introspective. It prompts poets to look outward, to understand how their past lives and their current psychological make-up have been informed by the landscapes of their past, as well as the places where they are located now. It prompts them to think about the politics of their environment, and its effects on the people who live there. And because most poets, like most people, have been born and raised in more or less urban environments, this could mean we are on the cusp of a golden age of urban poetry.<br />
<br />
As I’ve got older, I have become more interested in tapping into the personal mythology of my childhood to find source material for my poetry. Seen through a child’s eyes, an urban landscape can be a place of wonder, terror and magic, every bit as much as a far-flung island can. My childhood in Merseyside was full of the strange and the mystical: the haunted railway tunnels of Green Lane station, the convent behind the high sandstone wall where we never saw a living soul, the aquarium with every colour of fish imaginable (and. incongruously, an impressive line in Space Invaders machines), the stained-glass hush of Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, the treasure trove of Skeleton Records. I’ve lived in many different cities since then, each of which has got under my skin in a different way. Some I’ve loved, such as the 1990s Edinburgh that I commemorated in my first ever prize-winning poem, <i>Joni Melts Wax in a Saucepan</i>. Others have elicited more ambivalent reactions, as attested by the set of poems from my three years’ exile in Milton Keynes which became the heart of my <i>Satires</i> collection. And my ten years in York have mythologised my current home to a certain degree, too. This is a city where the Green Man catches the Number 10 bus home from work, but it’s also a city where couples at the sharp end of Cameron’s Britain are trying to find a new language of love in the teeth of austerity:<br />
<br />
“Leaves confetti round,<br />
a dark scarlet tumble. You laugh;<br />
<br />
clasp my cold hand, warm it<br />
between yours; pick a thread<br />
that’s trailing down my sleeve. Kiss, and whisper<br />
<i>this is our show – our red carpet –<br />
all these lights, just for us</i>.”<br />
<br />
(from <i>Red Carpet</i>)<br />
<br />
I’ve lived in Birmingham, too. In fact, in my writing, the very word ‘Birmingham’ has taken on a whole new meaning:<br />
<br />
“We banned the ‘L’ word from conversation<br />
the third time <i>Tainted Love</i> came round on the jukebox.<br />
Decided it was much less bitter, somehow,<br />
slipping in something innocuous. Like ‘Birmingham’.<br />
<br />
“We played the game<br />
seven nights in a row.<br />
<i>You give Birmingham a bad name</i>.<br />
<i>I’d do anything for Birmingham (but I won’t do that)</i>.<br />
<i>Too much Birmingham will kill you</i>.<br />
<i>Birmingham will tear us apart...</i>”<br />
<br />
When I wrote this poem, I was aiming at something more than a frivolous bit of word-play. <i>The Power of Birmingham</i> is an urban love poem, full of the tensions and uncertainties that are the heartbeat of a city: <br />
<br />
“I walked you to the station<br />
Sunday night at twilight,<br />
the sky exploding violet.<br />
You giggled, kissed my cheek<br />
and said <i>Birmingham is a wonderful colour.</i><br />
<br />
“I waved you goodbye<br />
and promised I’d text<br />
and I shuffled my feet<br />
on the concrete grey platform<br />
and wondered when I’d see you again...”<br />
<br />
Its sequel (which ended up being called <i>Ever Fallen in Birmingham with Someone you Shouldn’t have Fallen in Birmingham With?</i>) inhabits that disconnected space that I’m often aware of in a city environment, where the rapid changes that take place in the physical space mirror a shift in the emotional landscape too:<br />
<br />
“I stop at the railway station corner<br />
by the boarded-up letterbox.<br />
Remember envelopes<br />
sneaked through the slot,<br />
jokes scrawled across the flap.<br />
<i>Birmingham really hurts without you.<br />
Might as well face it, you’re addicted to Birmingham.<br />
I don’t know who you are but you’re a real dead ringer for...</i><br />
I wonder<br />
about the ones that never got delivered,<br />
the kisses and wishes<br />
shut behind peeling flakes of fly-posters<br />
for bands long since broken up. Silenced.”<br />
<br />
Is there poetry in the city? Of course there is. It might not be the poetry of dramatic landscape and timeless mythology. But it’s there alright – in the cafes, the alleyways, the roar of traffic and trains; in the pulses of the people that are a city’s lifeblood, a poet’s stock in trade. You may have to dig a little to find the poetry, but I promise it’s worth the effort.<br />
<br />
And you may really Birmingham the results!<br />
<br />
<br />
(<i>The Power of Birmingham</i> appears in my collection <i>A Long Way to Fall</i> (<a href="http://www.freewebs.com/lapwingpoetry">Lapwing</a>, 2013). <i>Red Carpet</i>, <i>Joni Melts Wax in a Saucepan</i> and <i>Ever Fallen in Birmingham...?</i> appear in my collection <i>Satires</i> (<a href="http://www.stairwellbooks.co.uk">Stairwell Books</a>, 2015)).The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-38979756889369199582016-04-18T21:20:00.000+01:002016-04-18T21:25:40.895+01:00Testing times, hard choices<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNs_yQbSt_gmKpf7N68pcoInxARGFiHAMKJpFBPDtIWzL0ebuUlGGgYqDMcMAqpj6K6bVzkuqQSn2XqCIzIYKgYINmg-t9z1wFTPNR9ZetlT7YP5XCQhLuIaQzDTvT6_I7PIeSTxPY4Mg/s1600/austerity.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNs_yQbSt_gmKpf7N68pcoInxARGFiHAMKJpFBPDtIWzL0ebuUlGGgYqDMcMAqpj6K6bVzkuqQSn2XqCIzIYKgYINmg-t9z1wFTPNR9ZetlT7YP5XCQhLuIaQzDTvT6_I7PIeSTxPY4Mg/s320/austerity.png" /></a></div>I don’t often write on the <i>Soapbox</i> about my day job. I spend so much time and energy talking about it offline that my readers who know me in the non-cyberspace context are probably fed up of hearing me bang on about it.<br />
<br />
But every now and then, the day job overlaps with the concerns of the <i>Soapbox</i>, and sometimes I have stuff to say that is very uncomfortable indeed.<br />
<br />
This is a story about <a href="http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/14291804.Library_closures_and_adult_and_children_s_services_cuts_top_public_s_fears_ahead_of_Bradford_Council_s_crunch_budget_meetings/">Bradford Metropolitan District Council, who have just approved a programme to slash A MILLION POUNDS from the budget they provide for advice services</a> across their district. That’s 27% of their advice budget axed in one fell swoop.<br />
<br />
It may not be a very ‘poety’ subject to blog about, but I REALLY believe in advice services. I have a legal qualification, and during the day I work as an adviser with some of the most complex, most vulnerable households in Yorkshire. These are the people who are going to suffer the most from a cut like this. People who don’t have the resources to hire solicitors to represent them when trouble comes in their lives. People who very often don’t have the level of education necessary to represent themselves in court, or pick their way through the maze of the benefits system. People who lack the confidence (or the bloody-mindedness) to stand up to mistreatment at work. People with disabilities. With learning difficulties. People at the end of their tether. People, in short, who would get Royally Shafted By The System if it wasn’t for the fact that there are advice agencies that they can go to, for free, to access help with getting their lives on track, and legal representation to help them fight for their rights.<br />
<br />
Advice agencies have had a hard time of it in recent years, thanks to the Tory-driven austerity agenda. The Legal Aid cuts which took effect in 2013 have decimated the services which used to provide advice to the vulnerable. Many agencies (including big national agencies like Citizens’ Advice Bureaux) have relied on local authority funding to keep afloat in the face of government cuts. Others have had to make large-scale redundancies, or even close altogether.<br />
<br />
The massive cuts to the advice service budget in Bradford are inevitably going to be a hammer blow to a region which is one of the most deprived in the UK, with a high proportion of residents who do not have English as their first language and so face even bigger difficulties accessing help when they need it. Organisations will close. Committed and experienced advisers will be made redundant. The chances are that because of it, there will be families who lose their homes. Employers who will get away with discrimination and bullying. Victims of crime who will never get redress for what they have suffered.<br />
<br />
What has this got to do with poetry, I hear you ask?<br />
<br />
Well – leaving aside the obvious answer that poetry is born out of the stuff of human misfortune – I bet quite a few of my readers are followers of the <a href="http://www.ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk">Ilkley Literature Festival</a>. A number of you will have been to events there. Some of you may even have performed there. A year ago you will have got the same string of emails as I did, warning the Festival’s supporters that Bradford Metropolitan District Council were proposing to end their regular block grant to the Festival, and urging all its supporters to sign their petition asking the Council to protect the Festival’s funding.<br />
<br />
The petition succeeded. <a href="http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/ilkley-literature-festival-funding-saved-1-7130687">Ilkley Literature Festival kept its Council grant</a>. But when that is set alongside a 27% cut to the advice service budget, am I alone in feeling that there may be a case of distorted priorities here?<br />
<br />
Yes, the arts are important. I stand by <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/york-literature-festival-is-dead-long.html">what I said in an earlier <i>Soapbox</i> article about how in a time of recession, the value of communal participation in the arts goes way beyond mere pounds and pence</a>. I’m also all too well aware that certain vested interests are not all that keen on the voices of grassroots arts practitioners, particularly when they use those voices as a vehicle to question, challenge and protest what is being done. And I don’t envy the choices that had to be made by Council officials looking at ever diminishing budgets, and knowing that the axe had to fall <i>somewhere</i>. When we're talking £11,000 versus a million, it’s unlikely this was an “either/or” decision.<br />
<br />
But I still can’t help being uncomfortable that Ilkley Literature Festival kept its funding, when advice agencies have lost theirs. When friends and colleagues of mine are being made redundant, and vulnerable households can no longer turn to them for support and advice.<br />
<br />
The thing is, Ilkley Literature Festival is massive. It takes place in “the rich bit” of Bradford MDC’s administrative area. It has private funding from trusts, corporate sponsorship, and donations from benefactors. If it had lost its Council funding, the Festival would have survived. Yes, it might have had to tighten its belt, to think about a slightly less ambitious programme for a year or two – but <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/to-pay-or-not-to-pay.html">as I’ve argued before, this is not necessarily a bad thing</a>. Ilkley Literature Festival should not believe itself entitled to anything. Other festivals don’t – I write relatively fresh from seeing what a great programme the <a href="http://www.yorkliteraturefestival.co.uk">York Literature Festival</a> managed this year without any local authority funding and with no Arts Council grant. It would not have been a disaster had Bradford MDC withdrawn Ilkley Literature Festival’s funding; it would have just meant that its fundraisers had to get a bit cleverer.<br />
<br />
But it <i>is</i> a disaster that Bradford’s advice agencies are going to be making people redundant, and withdrawing services that the most vulnerable in the community rely on. If we poets are going to get angry about anything, let’s get cross about that, for heaven’s sake.The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-4081920503837671092016-03-10T22:24:00.000+00:002016-03-10T22:24:53.414+00:00Don't Pay the Ferryman, or The Perils of the "Greatest Hit"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuekT7BeU5_Quw46wBtY45GH2m5fi7Oxm97sDdjvm-AfA-1eeoZPbkGy_BXTECeCeYvsH9pOkp9DAo8oJhNPPoGSGgrWmT_4bqsx6wtJpeMMPhY27YQUVwnPr4dNkOQxqgpR5fobEc6mk/s1600/national-poetry-competition-image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuekT7BeU5_Quw46wBtY45GH2m5fi7Oxm97sDdjvm-AfA-1eeoZPbkGy_BXTECeCeYvsH9pOkp9DAo8oJhNPPoGSGgrWmT_4bqsx6wtJpeMMPhY27YQUVwnPr4dNkOQxqgpR5fobEc6mk/s320/national-poetry-competition-image.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjad2UIzO9tPv8OerZ6Smc8Kn0vGzu00aJXBbsLHgaBW3Jdbsahb1I1ZEniKp55q-8wsxEGntJm-Qpe2JZkuXTJsIEKKkqKiWaCeKc9ktgnyCq-fxY2GryFYej5l87ugWPmGcaLm8CWA9c/s1600/De+Burgh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjad2UIzO9tPv8OerZ6Smc8Kn0vGzu00aJXBbsLHgaBW3Jdbsahb1I1ZEniKp55q-8wsxEGntJm-Qpe2JZkuXTJsIEKKkqKiWaCeKc9ktgnyCq-fxY2GryFYej5l87ugWPmGcaLm8CWA9c/s320/De+Burgh.jpg" /></a></div>As results day for the <a href="http://poetrysociety.org.uk/competitions/national-poetry-competition/">National Poetry Competition</a> approaches, and the deadline for this year’s <a href="https://www.bridportprize.org.uk/">Bridport Prize</a> looms, I have no doubt there are many up-and-coming poets dreaming of how one of these prizes could change their lives. If you’re one of them, I don’t blame you. The poetry world is such a thankless one for so much of the time that frankly <i>any</i> kind of recognition from the establishment is cause for celebration. A win in the Bridport or the National could even be career-changing, as the likes of <a href="http://www.carolannduffy.co.uk/">Carol Ann Duffy</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colette_Bryce">Colette Bryce</a> can testify.<br />
<br />
But a big win like this could be something of a poisoned chalice, in its own way.<br />
<br />
I do enter these competitions, from time to time. Well, OK, not Bridport – <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/roll-up-for-lottery-its-bridport-prize.html">I’ve blogged before about why not</a> – but I try and use my <a href="http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk">Poetry Society</a> member’s free entry to the National every year. Yet when I do, there’s still a lurking fear that any dreams of success could mutate all too easily into nightmares. That, in short, a big win could turn me into the poetic equivalent of <a href="http://cdeb.com">Chris de Burgh</a>.<br />
<br />
For the benefit of my younger readers, allow me to explain. Back when I were a lad, before middle age and cynicism set in, there was a badly dressed troubadour whose songwriting I followed avidly. He lived in a castle. He had eyebrows like two large Tiger Moth caterpillars. And he was the nearest modern equivalent to the travelling minstrels of medieval times, wandering the countryside with his repertoire of fairy tales and murder ballads. They were quirky, subversive, rude and occasionally iconoclastic – and I loved them. I still remember, as an impressionable schoolboy, the shiver that went through me the first time I listened to <i>Spanish Train</i>. A song about God and the Devil playing poker for souls – not the sort of theology I was usually exposed to by the Christian Brothers! I remember singing duets with my brother, staggering half-drunk through the streets of Birkenhead, on the way home from some party or other: <i>oh the leaves are falling and the wind is calling and I must get on the road</i>. I was never all that rebellious in my youth; but somehow blasting out <i>Patricia the Stripper</i> on the sixth-form ghetto blaster when the head of year walked past seemed to make up quite nicely for all the absinthe, marijuana and fornication that I never had the nerve to attempt. To this day, if you catch me at the wrong moment after a beer or two too many, I can treat you to a full rendition.<br />
<br />
You see, back in the day, Chris de Burgh was actually rather good. He was like me: a compulsive storyteller. He was fascinated by fairy stories. He sang some of the best peace songs ever written. Occasionally he was really rude, in a naive, Benny Hill, chasing-scantily-clad-women-in-circles-round-the-nearest-tree kind of way. My brother, the metal-head, used to play the Apocalypse Cycle from <i>Into the Light</i> at full volume in his hall of residence, and fellow students really thought it was the next big thing in heavy metal. Chris de Burgh could be all things to all people.<br />
<br />
But then it happened. This bard with the razor wit and the rainbow voice went and had a hit. A <i>huge</i> hit.<br />
<br />
Yes, with a twitch of one megalithic eyebrow, de Burgh secured his fortune for the rest of his life. And buried his career with it.<br />
<br />
Now this is the problem. Ardent follower though I am, I have to confess that nine times out of ten, the reaction I get at the mention of Chris de Burgh (apart from “Who?”), is “Wasn’t <i>The Lady in Red</i> a pile of shite?” It doesn’t matter how much I talk about the radical back catalogue: the songs about strippers, or murderers, or celestial poker games. “Wasn’t <i>The Lady in Red</i> a pile of shite?” is all I hear. Unless I’m talking to a blue-rinsed <i>Daily Mail</i> reader, at which point I get really hot under the collar, because CHRIS DE BURGH WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE ENJOYED BY BLUE-RINSED <i>DAILY MAIL</i> READERS!<br />
<br />
There we have it: the curse of the “greatest hit”. One big success, and you can be pigeon-holed for life. You may spend the remainder of your creative career trying to replicate the magic formula – and kill off your creativity in the process. Think of all the great novelists who produced one successful novel in their lifetimes, and never published anything thereafter because they simply couldn’t come close to recapturing the magic of that first triumph. Or the ones who had a big success and followed it up with dozens of sub-standard re-runs. Or the ones forced into doing something so radically different that their original fans are left baffled and alienated, and who never quite win new ones.<br />
<br />
There’s also the risk that even if you <i>do</i> follow up the “greatest hit” with something wonderful, the public just won’t want to know. Another of my favourite hippie troubadours, <a href="http://www.ralphmctell.co.uk">Ralph McTell</a>, suffers from this more than most. He may have a good 45 years’ worth of wonderful songwriting under his belt but he's still expected to wheel out <i>Streets of London</i> at every opportunity. “<i>Streets of London</i> Syndrome” was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1YNEtaHbzA">brilliantly lampooned by the <i>Big Train</i> team back in the 1990s</a>, but there’s a truth behind the joke. I know one award-winning poet who loathes his “greatest hit” with a passion, but has to perform it at every single gig because this is what the audience demand.<br />
<br />
I’ve got to be honest. I can’t really defend <i>The Lady in Red</i>. The best I can do is point out the injustice that plenty of far more “credible” musicians have recorded far worse songs, and somehow kept their reputations intact while de Burgh’s has been ground into the mire. On a sliding scale of awfulness, <i>The Lady in Red</i> might score a full 9 out of 10, but <i>Wonderful Tonight</i> – quite possibly the most nauseating song ever written? – merits at least 30,000: and yet there are still people who claim that Eric Clapton is God! And what about Stevie Wonder? A songwriting genius, it’s true; but why is he allowed to get away with the sentimental bilge that is <i>I Just Called to Say I Love You</i>, while de Burgh gets pilloried for an inconsequential little ditty about his ex-wife’s red dress? It doesn’t matter how much I protest that <i>The Lady in Red</i> was an aberration, that he shouldn’t be judged on the strength of one embarrassing song. Judged he is, and probably always will be.<br />
<br />
This is why I dread becoming Chris de Burgh. It’s the lurking fear that, were I to have a big hit sometime in my poetic career, it will be the start of a slippery slope. That I’ll cash in. I’ll sell out. Or else I’ll yearn to do something different, but won’t be able to get gigs unless I keep performing the same old “classic”. I dread that one day I’ll make one concession too many, and everything worthwhile that I’ve ever done and stood for will be lost in a single act of all-consuming mediocrity.<br />
<br />
I’m going to go on protesting the greatness of Chris de Burgh. Every few years he’ll create a peace song of epic proportions, and remind me exactly why I used to revere him. The trouble is that for every <i>Up Here in Heaven</i> or <i>The Last Time I Cried</i> there are a dozen unnecessary re-runs of <i>The Lady in Red</i>. And they don’t exactly help my case.<br />
<br />
I try not to get too despondent. I still want to believe that in years to come, the reputation of Chris de Burgh will be redeemed – that our children’s children will be able to sing his songs the way I used to sing them, with sparkling eyes. But in the meantime I feel the tug of an expanding waistline. I catch a whiff of that expensive malt whisky I never used to be able to afford. And I know that if <i>I</i> ever wrote the literary equivalent of <i>The Lady in Red</i>, I would probably go the way of Chris de Burgh.<br />
<br />
So <i>don’t</i> pay the ferryman, ladies and gentlemen. Don’t even fix a price.The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-15313596908869820502016-02-23T22:45:00.000+00:002016-02-23T22:45:53.141+00:00Clap clinic...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL98knXHEy6HB2D9C5OL7OCO4U0-zGgEFZV-xKu-VFG1VWuH6cJBlX0aKq694ZwKhv78igrV4UVhGFc3_iBoTiq36FTc-jV1afHKfC8wE_AUexqtMZKX2-LQaoqgha_Sm0S23jVP-tkVI/s1600/Clapping.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL98knXHEy6HB2D9C5OL7OCO4U0-zGgEFZV-xKu-VFG1VWuH6cJBlX0aKq694ZwKhv78igrV4UVhGFc3_iBoTiq36FTc-jV1afHKfC8wE_AUexqtMZKX2-LQaoqgha_Sm0S23jVP-tkVI/s320/Clapping.jpg" /></a></div>Yonks ago, I remember a poet at a performance explaining that you can classify a poem by the kind of onomatopoeia it elicits. There are “ooh” poems. There are “aah” poems. There are “oh!” poems. There are “hmmm...” poems. There are “fffff” poems. There are “ouch” poems. And occasionally there are “ha!” poems too.<br />
<br />
Every one of these responses, in its own way, is a sign that a poem has succeeded. In some poetry readings you can gauge the impact of a poem by the volume of the wordless response from around the audience. It’s most obvious with the ‘instant impact’ poems, which tend to be in the “ooh”, “ha!” or “ouch” categories. But sometimes a particularly good poem needs an appreciative silence, to allow the impact of the words to sink in. A “hmmm” poem can become an “oh!” poem as understanding dawns on the listener. A love poem (usually an “aah”) may have a sting in the subtext, turning it into an “oh!” or even a “fffff”. Two of the First Prize poems I’ve chosen from competitions I’ve judged (<a href="http://katerhodes.org/Kate_Rhodes/home.html">Kate Rhodes</a>’ <i>The Movement of Bees</i> and <a href="http://www.poetrypf.co.uk/joannaezekielbiog.shtml">Joanna Ezekiel</a>’s <i>Homecoming</i>, if you’re interested) fall very much into this category – I’ve heard Joanna perform the latter, and heard the audience making exactly those responses. And it’s one of the joys of a good poetry reading, to allow the poems space to take root in the consciousness of the audience, to allow the responses to unfurl in exactly this way.<br />
<br />
There are many ways to show appreciation for a good poem. The evocative onomatopoeia may well be the highest compliment a poem can elicit. An appreciative (or even a shocked) silence can be another. And so can a round of applause.<br />
<br />
But here’s the thing. A round of applause may be entirely appropriate for a “ha!" poem, or an “ouch” poem. And let’s face it, performing poets love the adulation. But what may be entirely appropriate for a “ha!” poem may be exactly the wrong response to the more subtle piece of poetry – the “hmmm” poem that needs space, and perhaps needs silence too, to sink in. There may even be a risk that a premature round of applause can shatter a carefully woven atmosphere, detract from the substance of the poem, and rob the audience of the chance to really <i>feel</i> what the poet is getting at.<br />
<br />
One of my regular correspondents, poet <a href="https://angelatopping.wordpress.com/">Angela Topping</a>, puts this bluntly. “I ask for a silence so the poem can do its work,” <a href="https://angelatopping.wordpress.com/2015/08/12/applauding-between-poems/">she blogged in August 2015</a>. “To clap at the end of a one or two minute poem is like drinking tea from a delicate china cup, and then shattering it against the wall.”<br />
<br />
I’m not sure I would go that far, to be honest. As the MC of a long-running open mic night, I’m well aware of the value of a good round of applause as a sign of affirmation. It’s particularly important for those who are new to writing poetry, or to performing it in public. It also matters a lot to those visiting a performance night for the first time, who may be seasoned performers but could well be strangers to the rest of the audience. The enthusiasm of an audience response can be the difference between that person coming back, and maybe becoming a regular, and them never darkening your door again.<br />
<br />
So I was rather disconcerted when, after a visitation from the good people at <a href="http://www.writeoutloud.net">Write Out Loud</a> last year, <a href="http://yorkspeakerscorner.webs.com">The Speakers’ Corner</a> came in for criticism precisely because <a href="http://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=48097">not all audience members clapped every single poem that was performed</a>. The majority got applause, or at least that was my impression. But for other poems, the response was more along the lines of the considered “hmmm” or the admiring “oh!”, and the poets for the most part took this as a sign of affirmation of their work just as they would have done had they been met with a round of applause. There was certainly nobody who performed that night who wasn’t roundly applauded at the end of their set, whether or not there were claps between poems.<br />
<br />
I didn’t think this was an especially big deal. The audience at Speakers’ Corner is always supportive. We don’t boo. We don’t heckle (unless we know the performer very well, and know they won’t mind). We listen <i>really</i> attentively, especially when newcomers are performing. Saboteur Award winner <a href="http://www.writeoutloud.net/profiles/stevenash">Steve Nash</a> gave his first public performances of poetry at Speakers’ Corner, and even gave us <a href="http://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=42717">a word of thanks in an interview to Write Out Loud</a> because of the quality of the welcome and the support he always found from the Speakers’ Corner audience. There have been plenty of others, through the years, who have first performed for us as nervous newcomers, and gone on to write prize winning poetry and perform at slams and spoken word shows.<br />
<br />
Our visitors from Write Out Loud saw it differently, however. In fact, in one-to-one feedback after the event, I was told that one or two of the group had been planning to perform for us that night, but had been put off doing so precisely because they didn’t think they would be applauded. They therefore didn’t feel that their poetry would be welcome.<br />
<br />
That stung and saddened me. I’d hate to think of <i>anybody</i> coming to Speakers’ Corner and feeling that their poetic offerings are not going to be appreciated (unless they are using their verse to extol the virtues of Nigel Farage, possibly). I’ve been soul-searching for the better part of a year to work out if we were doing anything wrong, and if so, how we can improve. And to be honest, I haven’t come up with any answers.<br />
<br />
I don’t <i>want</i> to insist that the audience clap every poem. I’d rather have the appreciative murmur for the “hmmm” poem, the shocked silence when someone performs an especially hard-hitting piece. Should we applaud a poem about a rape? Or about the drowning of a Syrian refugee? My gut tells me that applause for the poem is not the right response (though applause for the <i>poet</i>, in due course, certainly would be). I want the audience to have the freedom to exercise the right not to applaud if that poem about the virtues of Nigel Farage gets an airing. But I don’t want anyone to feel that the possibility of <i>not</i> being applauded means a risk of them not being appreciated for sharing their creativity with us.<br />
<br />
<br />
(Photo (c) Cartoonstock.com)<br />
The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-82531212386475685722016-01-24T21:47:00.001+00:002016-01-24T21:47:16.685+00:00To pay, or not to pay...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7EaOLz09zD_6Myd2qtCsjtflS18dIyAOo4yBBFJQqoceuD_Wr-fPqvJn205Bn7UVCMFuFKDB1G4cSkzEiImcFz2afOcZP6SQZoX1spJN18MNij-Aj3Q52laPWKbJgwleB94Q6i3tGzWU/s1600/Speakers+Corner+reverse+image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7EaOLz09zD_6Myd2qtCsjtflS18dIyAOo4yBBFJQqoceuD_Wr-fPqvJn205Bn7UVCMFuFKDB1G4cSkzEiImcFz2afOcZP6SQZoX1spJN18MNij-Aj3Q52laPWKbJgwleB94Q6i3tGzWU/s320/Speakers+Corner+reverse+image.jpg" /></a></div>January 2016 is the tenth anniversary of <a href="http://yorkspeakerscorner.webs.com">The Speakers’ Corner</a>, the poetry and spoken word open mic which I have MCed for seven of those years. Over that time we have committed ourselves to providing a platform for up-and-coming local writers, giving them a chance to perform their work on an equal status with the often award winning poets who appear monthly as our guest features. We pride ourselves on being an accessible, non elitist event – both in the types of spoken word that get shared in the open mic (ranging from the unashamedly populist to the at times breathtakingly complex) and in our policy of keeping entry fees as low as possible so that nobody is priced out of coming along.<br />
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It was with rather a heavy heart that I began 2016 with an announcement that I was doubling the entry fee for our monthly event.<br />
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Yes, that’s right. The price of admission to Speakers’ Corner has shot up to a staggering £2 per person.<br />
<br />
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. Speakers’ Corner has always been, and will always be (under my tenure, anyway) a grassroots arts event. Since time immemorial the door money has been fixed at a mere £1. There were good reasons for asking for that £1. Even when an event runs on goodwill, there are expenses that have to be met – the cost of publicity flyers, for instance. We have also been committed to making a payment towards our guests’ travel expenses (and to covering them in full, wherever we can).<br />
<br />
This is really important: because Speakers’ Corner has never been able to pay its guest features a fee for coming to perform for us. So the least I can do is ensure that if guests want to share their creative work with us, they are guaranteed not to be out of pocket for doing so.<br />
<br />
It is the increasing burden of travel expenses which has forced the 2016 price rise. That, and the habit of a small minority of participants to not pay their statutory £1. Most years, the event breaks even. In 2015, it ran at a loss – it was only the generous decision of a couple of our guests to waive their travel expenses which stopped me from having to shell out my own money to keep the event viable.<br />
<br />
I had to take the view that this couldn’t continue. A £2 entry fee will mean we can be a little more generous in our travel expense allowances, and possibly build up reserves to invite guests from slightly further afield. Any surplus will be donated to the charities supported by York’s <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ArtsAgainstHomelessness">Arts Against Homelessness</a> initiative – so we remain firmly not for profit, and now have a chance to give something modest back to the community too.<br />
<br />
Nonetheless, I am distinctly uncomfortable that we are in this position in the first place. I don’t <i>like</i> being an event that can’t afford to pay its guest features. But such is the reality of trying to support grassroots art. We have never had Arts Council funding, or the backing of an established arts outlet – and we certainly don’t have wealthy patrons! In such circumstances we can only pay out what we take in. Long-time <i>Soapbox</i> followers will know <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/state-of-british-poetry-today.html">how vehemently opposed I am to the idea that access to the arts should be controlled by people’s ability to pay</a>. My principle has always been to keep Speakers’ Corner running at the lowest possible cost to its loyal punters.<br />
<br />
There was a certain irony in reading that a literary event much bigger than mine has just got itself into hot water over the selfsame issue. <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/philip-pullman-quits-as-oxford-literary-festival-refuses-to-pay-its-guest-authors-a6813066.html">Philip Pullman’s resignation as patron of Oxford Literary Festival</a> has set tongues wagging, and rightly so. The worker deserves his wages, and creative people deserve a fair wage for the results of their creativity. But I have a certain sympathy for the Festival, which suffered a barrage of negative publicity over its failure to pay its guest authors. Like us, Oxford Literary Festival has no grant funding and no wealthy patron. It has to be self-sustaining, or it won’t function. And somewhere along the line, the Festival organisers made the decision that it was better to keep a literary event alive by presuming on the goodwill of its headliners, rather than bankrupt itself by undertaking to pay out more in fees than it was going to recoup in takings at the door.<br />
<br />
There is, of course, a huge difference between Speakers’ Corner on the one hand, and Oxford Literary Festival on the other. We are a regional event in the back room of a pub, twelve times a year. They have been going 20 years and have over 500 events on their programme.<br />
<br />
All of which suggests to me that Oxford Literary Festival’s fatal mistake is one of failing to cut its cloth appropriately. You simply <i>can’t</i> grow to a 500-plus-event festival without a stable financial base. It seems ludicrous to me that they have done so. If the only way they can afford 500-plus events is by not paying the people who are the reason for the Festival even existing, then why aren’t they doing 100 events instead, or 50? <i>All</i> festivals go through lean times. Even the most successful can miss out on Arts Council funding, or lose key sponsors. The correct thing to do is to retrench and plan for something bigger and better when resources allow.<br />
<br />
There’s a certain arrogance in Oxford Literary Festival’s assumption that it can carry on as usual simply by presuming on the goodwill (or the vanity) of its authors. I hope this is a mistake we won’t make at Speakers’ Corner. I am thrilled that there are fantastic writers in the region who <i>want</i> to come to York to share their creative work with us, and don’t mind doing it for nothing more than a beer and the chance to sell a few books. But I know that what we do at Speakers’ Corner is only one part of what goes to make a vibrant and varied arts scene. We need the big events, the Arts Council funded ventures, the festivals that <i>do</i> commit themselves to paying a fair rate to those who make things happen. And they need us, too – to generate audience, enthusiasm, to showcase the stars of next year, and to keep the spoken word where it truly belongs. Among the people, <i>from</i> the people, and <i>for</i> the people.<br />
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There’s a separate debate raging off the back of the Philip Pullman issue: and it’s the one that mistakenly equates <i>professional</i> (in the sense of <i>those who can command payment</i>) with <i>good</i>, and <i>amateur</i> (in the sense of <i>those who will work for beer</i>) by some sort of spurious logic as <i>rubbish</i>. I’ve had <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/how-not-to-put-price-on-poetry.html">words to say about this in previous <i>Soapbox</i> posts</a>. I’m sure I will have more before the dust settles.<br />
The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-60390633596650411502015-10-27T21:47:00.000+00:002015-10-27T21:49:23.758+00:00Bridport Blether, part 2: The perils of the sifting committee<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib3sy4NIr1RE4h1yDCYW-EzW8BGTyuV3HuJY1-pevlcw0zwrlzUEF3ucxLy2V5FEcVumsyGkDaycgsDHTGuB85lsikVNthnVDMARMkw16UVnlsRYmxJm88WMvU7C-mPYr-hv1TS5rDs8g/s1600/Roger+McGough.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib3sy4NIr1RE4h1yDCYW-EzW8BGTyuV3HuJY1-pevlcw0zwrlzUEF3ucxLy2V5FEcVumsyGkDaycgsDHTGuB85lsikVNthnVDMARMkw16UVnlsRYmxJm88WMvU7C-mPYr-hv1TS5rDs8g/s320/Roger+McGough.jpg" /></a></div>The annual announcement of the <a href="https://www.bridportprize.org.uk/">Bridport Prize</a> winners always generates a bit of controversy. This year’s judge, <a href="www.rogermcgough.org.uk/">Roger McGough</a>, certainly didn’t mince words in his judge’s report. He talked about “feelings of déjà-vu” as he read the 200 poems culled from 7,000-odd entrants to make up the 2015 longlist, and of “emotional overload”. Reading many of the poems, he said, “seemed like an intrusion into a very private grief”. And what was missing, according to McGough? Rhyme, for one, was so scarce that McGough confessed to be “gasping for a villanelle or the whiff of a sestina.” Moreover, the few rhyming poems that <i>did</i> make it into his postbag “offered more in style than content.”<br />
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Many poets will also be intrigued by McGough’s lament at how little anger there was in this year’s longlist. “Where was the rage?” he demanded, adding more sarcastically: “our politicians can sleep soundly in their beds, the poets are not assembling in the street outside.”<br />
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So what on earth went wrong?<br />
<br />
Well as far as the winning and commended poems were concerned, nothing at all. McGough was generous in his praise for these poems and their writers (and I echo his praise, I’ve been a fan of third-prize winner <a href="www.juliadeakin.co.uk/">Julia Deakin</a> for some years). But something seems to have gone badly awry somewhere between the submission process and the choosing of the longlist. McGough blamed himself, to a certain extent, noting that his early encouragement to produce “poems that I wish I had written” may have resulted in a glut of poets trying to write in the style of McGough, rather than in their own unique voices and styles. But surely this can only be part of the story?<br />
<br />
I don’t believe for a minute that poets are not writing angry poems. <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/political-poetry-is-it-any-good.html">My recent blog on political poetry</a> remarked on just how enraged arts practitioners up and down the country are at some of the things done in our name (or not done) by governments and vested interests purporting to act for the benefit of the nation. Nor am I persuaded that poets aren’t working in rhyming verse forms; at open mics, and occasionally at writing workshops, I’m always coming across examples of original, often brilliantly witty rhyme. So I’m sceptical that there were no examples at all in the Bridport postbag.<br />
<br />
More likely, the poems arrived, but <i>someone</i> stopped them from ending up in the longlist that was passed to the guest judge.<br />
<br />
Roger McGough <i>wasn’t</i> the only person judging the Bridport Prize. Between the arrival of the 7,000-odd entries and the finalising of the 200-strong longlist, a whole committee of ‘sifters’ were at work deciding which poems would get through to McGough, and which wouldn’t. If certain types of poems were conspicuous by their absence from the longlist, it seems to me that the logical explanation for this is that the sifting committee decided they didn’t <i>want</i> those poems in the longlist.<br />
<br />
Of course, I have no proof that this is what happened. But my suspicions seem to be borne out by McGough’s own account of what he was told by the head of the sifting committee, one Candy Neubert, who reportedly felt that the standard of submissions this year was “disappointingly low”.<br />
<br />
This doesn’t necessarily mean the excluded poems weren’t any good. Poetry, after all, is notoriously subjective, and what works for one reader may be a turn-off for another. Was the competition strengthened or weakened by their exclusion? Probably we’ll never know.<br />
<br />
Sifting committees are common practice in the bigger competitions. And it’s easy to see why. 7,000-plus entries take time and emotional energy to read. And big-name judges are unlikely to do the work for minimum wage. Even a competition with the resources of Bridport would soon bankrupt itself if it expected the guest judge to consider every entry. And there’s the logistical issue that 90% of those entries will arrive in the last two weeks before the closing date. With a finite window of time until the planned announcement of the winners, reliance on a sole judge can mean some <i>very</i> late nights for the judge – and serious uncertainty for the competition organisers if the judge has to deal with unforeseen problems. A bout of ’flu at the wrong time could mean a missed deadline, a delayed announcement, and considerable expense and embarrassment for the organisers.<br />
<br />
The competitions I’ve judged in the past have never had postbags bigger than a couple of hundred poems (and a similar number of short stories, in one case). Even so, the first time I was a judge I quickly discovered that it took considerable forward planning to create the time and space to give each entry the attention it really deserved. The decision as to <i>which</i> of the shortlisted pieces actually got the prizes sometimes had to go down to the wire. And that’s when there are just a couple of hundred pieces of writing. <a href="www.carolebromleypoetry.co.uk/">Carole Bromley</a>, who has been sole judge of the YorkMix/York Literature Festival Poetry Competition since its inception (and was on the Bridport shortlist herself this year), had the herculean task of judging 1,736 poems in the space of about 4 weeks earlier in the year. She tells me that this was no easy task.<br />
<br />
So perhaps sifting committees <i>are</i> a necessary evil. But in the larger competitions, they surely only add to the nagging sensation that <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/roll-up-for-lottery-its-bridport-prize.html">there’s an element of the lottery about whether or not your poem gets picked</a>. I mean no disrespect to the winners. It takes huge skill to craft a Bridport Prize-winning poem – I would never dispute that for an instant. But one wonders how many potentially Bridport Prize-winning poems never make it as far as the guest judge because someone in a sifting committee has already decided that they’re not quite the right thing this year?The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-68407216626789596662015-08-30T11:20:00.001+01:002015-08-30T11:20:52.329+01:00Review: "Lapstrake" by Wendy Pratt (Flarestack, 2015, ISBN 978-1-906480-41-7)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD1FfCY2IWGb-Fk3HMp_uUxHyH7g7PLNMTySXn5X7XejeXoXAZ16gd6FoOkdOPsyRqmSM8m_MxN4w9UMyI0noD557mSJzh2XhuMKD6E8oK6gubcXBpe44DKgMmPZPkOwdi4V1QDjf2Rrs/s1600/Lapstrake+cover.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD1FfCY2IWGb-Fk3HMp_uUxHyH7g7PLNMTySXn5X7XejeXoXAZ16gd6FoOkdOPsyRqmSM8m_MxN4w9UMyI0noD557mSJzh2XhuMKD6E8oK6gubcXBpe44DKgMmPZPkOwdi4V1QDjf2Rrs/s320/Lapstrake+cover.JPG" /></a></div>As 2015 winner of the <a href="http://prolebooks.co.uk/poetry%20competition.html">Prole Laureate award</a> and the <a href="https://poetrysociety.org.uk/news/wendy-pratt-wins-yorkmix-poetry-competition/">YorkMix/York Literature Festival Poetry Competition</a>, <a href="http://www.writeoutloud.net/profiles/wendypratt">Wendy Pratt</a> is a poet whose star is in the ascendant. In her pamphlet <i>Lapstrake</i>, the music of the sea provides a backdrop to poems exploring both personal tragedies and the shared memories of past inhabitants of the Yorkshire coast on which the poems are set. <i>Lapstrake</i> itself refers to a method of boat building practised by the Viking fisherfolk who once attempted to tame these wild tides.<br />
<br />
The poems alternate between the contemporary and the mythic. 21st century resort towns, with their “cuddly toys / and waffles, the get-rich-quick sound / of money falling through the slots”, contrast with Viking settlements which once stood on the same ground, their “sun-keeper wheat, washed / in warm shadows. Barrows / topped with dense spelt.” I was reminded of George Mackay Brown in the way that Pratt’s narrator often inhabits multiple temporal spaces at once. The descriptive writing, too, was sometimes reminiscent of Mackay Brown’s, with a sparseness of language and a clarity of imagery ideally suited to the vast spaces of sea and sky which these poems inhabit.<br />
<br />
Pratt’s sea is personified in the Norse gods Rán and Ǽgir. In <i>Rán and her Net</i>, the goddess who snares drowned and drowning sailors sings a tender love song to her victims:<br />
<br />
“And I will search for coins in their clothes,<br />
I’ll take payment in gold for safe keeping<br />
and feel for their souls and kiss their skin...<br />
...and I cradle their heads<br />
and I tether the net, and I let them go<br />
and keep them close and let them go<br />
and keep them close.”<br />
<br />
This sea which can swallow men, ships, even whole buildings, is yet capable of unexpected gentleness:<br />
<br />
“Just now, with the sand faltering on the edge<br />
of land, the sea a smoothing hand<br />
that pats you down, your words are muffled...<br />
...We have teetered on the edge,<br />
but turn, now, away...”<br />
(<i>Cayton Bay</i>)<br />
<br />
The “tiny, dried-out effigy” of the mother in <i>Mermaid</i> yearns for the sea as escape from the depression brought on by her claustrophobic, land-locked life:<br />
<br />
“...And she swam<br />
back and away over the harbour wall<br />
back to her swimming dream-time, back<br />
to weightlessness like a water-birth.”<br />
<br />
It is in the central poem of the pamphlet – the eight-part sequence <i>And Her Great Gift of Sleep</i> – that we feel the pull of the sea most strongly. The poem is a heartbreaking tribute to a baby girl lost in infancy. From the first signs that all is not well, the sea presses inexorably in on a narrator who is powerless to hold it back:<br />
<br />
“...The sea is sick,<br />
with a sound like breaking glass,<br />
it beats itself to sleep in the bay.”<br />
<br />
“She is drowning.<br />
My little sprat, my gill-less fish, slippery-slim<br />
and flexible, my squid, my jewel<br />
in her mermaid’s purse with her tiny feet...<br />
...has stopped nudging me,<br />
has stopped.”<br />
<br />
“I dream the sea<br />
goes out<br />
and the tide line<br />
is scattered with her clothes.”<br />
<br />
Years ebb away, leaving the narrator “salted and wizened; a dead starfish or a shell.” The sense of grief throughout the poem is palpable; it murmurs and hisses like a tide which “moves on and on and offers / only sea glass and fossils.” Yet, at the end, there is a sense of acceptance, of letting her child go into the endless sea of time:<br />
<br />
“I think of her atoms climbing<br />
out of her body, out through the earth<br />
into the water, into the rain,<br />
into the sea. She is moving freely,<br />
now, and I cannot stay static,<br />
rocking her memory.”<br />
<br />
In the sounds and motions of the sea and the tugging of the moon on the tides, Pratt has found a music and a wellspring of imagery that perfectly expresses a sorrow that would otherwise be beyond describing.<br />
<br />
The other striking feature of this pamphlet is the intimacy of the poet’s voice. In <i>Places I No Longer Believe In</i>, Pratt reminisces gently but with beguiling honesty about the scenes of past misadventures; she has “inhabited these shells; / like a hermit-crab, discarded them, / left in a hurry, walked away.” Instead of losing herself in nostalgia, the poet reminds herself that she can look forward to “a life you can believe in, / a house with foundations you can touch.”<br />
<br />
Weaknesses in these poems are few. I felt that perhaps the formal poems (this poet has a particular fondness for pantoums) lacked the verbal clarity of the free verse pieces. I occasionally detected what may be signs of insufficient editing, with some unnecessary repetitions (“the dulled sound of inside / sounds”) and half a dozen deeply obscure phrases (“a satisfying sanguine indifference”, “the sun... poached disparately”, “the wind... a seagull’s bitter creel”, “the murmur of voices, falling like gulls from our conscience”, “a spouse-found / family”) which muddied the otherwise crystal clear waters of Pratt’s imagery. But these are minor niggles, and never detracted from the musicality of the poems or their authenticity of emotion.<br />
<br />
The concluding poem in this pamphlet is also the most surprising. <i>Dead Whale Dreams of God</i> is that rare poetic beast, a sestina which actually succeeds as <i>poetry</i>, not just as a writing exercise. The poem intersperses extracts from an autopsy report on a dead cetacean with philosophical reflections from the whale itself on its final journey. “The light, the dapples, the spotted deep... [the] great eye opening”, which seemingly herald the gateway to heaven, actually represent the sea breaking onto land at Holbeck Bay (and the beached whale’s inevitable death), providing a quietly unsettling end to the collection. This poem confirms Pratt as an ambitious poet, unafraid to take risks with her writing, and capable of tackling the cosmic with the same poignancy of image and musicality of voice with which she addresses the deeply personal. I suspect there may be great things to come from this talented and mesmerising writer.The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-79750520905409384862015-06-28T17:15:00.000+01:002015-06-28T17:15:16.100+01:00Political poetry: is it any good?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6j8XTOhH-YKsd47lpB3PtS9BvYczNoFuse2sPk5_V1zSIPw9kyWJuOwYLY4ThVPomYkCJzJmJamDLg0ph8vxi89AN9xodHlVfkZzf8jgeGefhgqOcYbxwf5e5A0KT08EDKlOYGBf6q-M/s1600/Anti+austerity+demo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6j8XTOhH-YKsd47lpB3PtS9BvYczNoFuse2sPk5_V1zSIPw9kyWJuOwYLY4ThVPomYkCJzJmJamDLg0ph8vxi89AN9xodHlVfkZzf8jgeGefhgqOcYbxwf5e5A0KT08EDKlOYGBf6q-M/s320/Anti+austerity+demo.jpg" /></a></div>I have my fabulous poetic ally and <a href="http://yorkspeakerscorner.webs.com">Speakers’ Corner</a> co-host, <a href="http://demeterspassenger.blogspot.co.uk/">Laura Munteanu</a>, to thank not only for the photo that accompanies this month’s blog post, but for the subject matter too. It was a Facebook discussion on, of all things, the death of Christopher Lee (a splendid man but a well-known Tory) which started a debate about whether or not ‘political’ poetry is any good. As a poet who has taken a step firmly inside the political arena myself with <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/poetry-politics-and-that-difficult.html">my second collection <i>Satires</i></a>, I suspect this is a subject I ought to have strong feelings on.<br />
<br />
And I do – sort of.<br />
<br />
Those who expressed their dislike of ‘political’ poetry made the valid point that often the political poem gets cheered more for its political than its poetic qualities. You stand up at a poetry slam and perform an anti-racist poem, or something about female empowerment or (to go back a blog post or two) <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/how-free-is-free-speech.html">the demerits of UKIP</a>, and you’re going to get cheered. This is stuff that poetry audiences want to hear – hell, it’s stuff that <i>I</i> want to hear! But I’ve got to be honest, most of it is ephemeral. It’s <i>intended</i> to be ephemeral. The sincere hope of the audiences (and, I suspect, of the performers) is that one day soon society will have changed for the better and the protest poems won’t be necessary.<br />
<br />
So it doesn’t really matter if the poetics aren’t up to the standards of Shakespeare, or the Forward Prize. If the poem makes the audience think, creates solidarity, encourages activism, and gives us all a glimpse (however brief) of a better world, the poem has done its job.<br />
<br />
I have plenty of poems like that. Most of them are unpublished, and likely to stay that way. A few made it into <i>Satires</i> – but to be honest I wish I’d been able to retire these poems with the 2015 general election. Unfortunately for the poetic community (as well as our wider civic society), the election result almost certainly means these poems have at least another 5 years’ life in them.<br />
<br />
But as a poet I’m concerned about craft, and aesthetics, and reaching a wider audience – perhaps one not directly affected by the situations I’m writing about. So can ‘political’ poems be poetically, as well as politically, pleasing? Can they – and <i>should</i> they – outlast the events they purport to chronicle?<br />
<br />
I suppose it all depends what you mean by a political poem. I tend towards the opinion that <i>everything</i> has a political dimension. The conditions in which we grew up, the jobs we do, how we spend our leisure time (if we’re lucky enough to <i>have</i> leisure time), what we do with our money (if we’re lucky enough to <i>have</i> money), how we bring up our families, and the circumstances of our last days on earth – these are all subjects with a political as well as a personal dimension. The simple facts of whom we love, and how we express that love – surely the oldest poetic subjects of all? – have never been more politicised than they are today, with recent landmark decisions about marriage equality across the world, and an inevitable phobic backlash. About the only way you can <i>avoid</i> being political is by opting out of society altogether and going and sitting on a rock – and even that could be seen as a political gesture, a rejection of modernity and all that comes with it.<br />
<br />
I certainly approached the poems in <i>Satires</i> with an awareness that everything is political. The love poems in the collection are set firmly in austerity Britain. I spend my working week with households at the sharp end of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’, and yet who find ways of living and loving and being family, even in the teeth of benefit sanctions, the bedroom tax and the food bank. It was their lives, which seem to matter so little to the people in power, that I wanted to celebrate – just as, two and a half centuries earlier, Oliver Goldsmith celebrated the ordinary lives of the rural poor displaced by the landowners in <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173557"><i>The Deserted Village</i></a>, for me the finest political poem ever written.<br />
<br />
The love poems in <i>Satires</i> WEREN’T originally created as political or social comment. They were created as love poems. But that’s the great thing about poetry. What we write is so infused with our environment and life experiences that subtexts creep in unbidden. All the most well worn subjects for poets – love, childhood, the seasons – can give birth to political poems, even if the politics isn’t the original inspiration for the poem (there are probably a few political cat poems out there, though I must confess I struggle to think of any!).<br />
<br />
So what now for the political poets? Well, we’ve no shortage of stuff to write about. In the UK another Tory axe is looming over the welfare state, the NHS, education and the justice system. Meanwhile, billions are pumped into an obsolete nuclear deterrent that’s a bigger threat to the citizens of our own country than to their supposed enemies. Worldwide, society has never been so unequal. War, exploitation of women and environmental degradation are at the forefront of every news bulletin. Poets <i>should</i> be commenting on such things – but how to comment in a way that means the poet’s voice is taken seriously?<br />
<br />
There’s certainly a place for rabble rousing poetry. But as noted above, it mainly tends to get cheered by those who agree with the political sentiments. An alternative – and arguably more effective – tool for the poet is satire. Satirical poetry can even be appreciated by the intended target, if it has the right amount of wit and is sufficiently well constructed. Think of Pope, Wilde, Goldsmith (again) – or the late great Ronnie Barker.<br />
<br />
But perhaps the poet’s most powerful weapon is the eye for the unexpected detail. Poetry which is (on the surface at least) primarily observational can often stand long after the events it is observing have passed into history. The war poetry of Wilfred Owen is a supreme example. Owen certainly rails against the establishment that sent his comrades to slaughter, but it’s not his rants that make his work so powerful. It’s the observational stuff: the gas attack likened to a drowning in the sea, the “white eyes writhing” in the corpses piled on the wagon afterwards. The message of these stark images has endured far longer than the trenches, the poppy fields, and the establishment that Owen and his contemporaries went to their deaths to defend.The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-36276355047797083012015-05-31T16:10:00.000+01:002015-08-30T11:38:40.078+01:00Review: Sampo: Heading Further North, by Bob Beagrie & Andy Willoughby (Red Squirrel Press, ISBN 978-1-910437-04-9)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX2Os9KSXjpYNoX-tbFmY2XXjFz1qSvt021JTsOwHHiRpcW2vBva8uXoK5mTSLfo9iq5T0ec_70zk2aEtGDEWgo_vHBDSFSzL6PtAE_6CeCyClPIN49j8mi8cB4u3rv8ZVbe9EDcnEqh0/s1600/Sampo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX2Os9KSXjpYNoX-tbFmY2XXjFz1qSvt021JTsOwHHiRpcW2vBva8uXoK5mTSLfo9iq5T0ec_70zk2aEtGDEWgo_vHBDSFSzL6PtAE_6CeCyClPIN49j8mi8cB4u3rv8ZVbe9EDcnEqh0/s320/Sampo.jpg" /></a></div>I have to confess a certain proprietorial interest in this book review. Back in 2009, when the original northern tour of the show which inspired this collection was taking place, it was <a href="http://www.ozhardwick.co.uk">Oz Hardwick</a> and I, as MCs at <a href="http://yorkspeakerscorner.webs.com">Speakers’ Corner</a>, who brought the performance to York. Authors Bob Beagrie and Andy Willoughby had big plans for <i>Sampo</i>. A national tour was envisaged; spin-off events planned; but these sadly foundered on the rocks of Arts Council funding cuts, and the show never quite had the impact it deserved. The poets immersed themselves in other projects and <i>Sampo</i> lay dormant awhile. But times change. Beagrie and Willoughby are back with new funding. The promised UK tour is a reality. And to tie in with the resurrection of an extraordinary piece of poetic theatre, the poems from the original <i>Sampo</i> show have been published here alongside brand new material to form a truly mesmerising book.<br />
<br />
I’ve been captivated by the weird mythology of the <i>Kalevala</i> ever since I first heard the music of Jean Sibelius as a teenager. The core inspiration for <i>Sampo</i> comes from the stories of the shaman-bard Vainamoinen as narrated in the early chapters of the Finnish national epic. But <i>Sampo</i> is more than a simple rehash of mythology. The collection begins squarely in 21st century post-industrial Teesside, where “the glare of closed circuit cameras” and “the flicker of the burn-off flares” imbue the landscape with a mythic quality. The Iron Age hill fort which overlooks the city becomes a gateway into the world of the <i>Kalevala</i>, and from here, time slip is the order of the day Are we in modern times, or the Finland of folklore? It really doesn’t matter.<br />
<br />
Readers unfamiliar with Finnish mythology need not worry that they are being taken into alien territory. The authors provide a helpful guide to the main characters and their stories in a set of well-crafted endnotes to the collection. The re-imaginings of the <i>Kalevala</i> tales are punctuated by fragments of emphatically 21st century verse (<i>Flotsam and Jetsam</i>) which provide an anchor point in the modern world, whilst constantly hinting at something magical, just out of reach.<br />
<br />
Cities feature as prominently as frozen wastes in this collection. In part, this is because the city acts as a metaphor for the “ever float”, the limbo state which immersed the ocean-bound Vainamoinen before the start of his questing, and which constantly threatens to pull him back.<br />
<br />
“The city with its shifting name / of London, Helsinki, / Moscow, Kyoto / Amsterdam and Carthage” inevitably draws comparisons with TS Eliot’s London. The cityscapes of <i>Sampo</i>, like those of <i>The Waste Land</i>, are bleak surreal territories somewhere between dreams and reality. There is a similar visceral empathy with the urban wilderness, and with the people adrift there. But whereas Eliot’s masterwork may present difficulties to a modern reader lacking an immersion in the classics, the <i>Sampo</i> poems are instantly accessible. This is <i>The Waste Land</i> for the <i>Game of Thrones</i> generation. Mythology goes hand in hand with pop culture references and subtle social satire, all with a rich insistent musicality that demands these poems be read aloud – or better still, sung:<br />
<br />
“The iron in the blood points North.<br />
The iron in the rocks stains ’em red.<br />
The blood in the hills drew iron.<br />
The iron from the hills cries blood.<br />
The North in the blood seeks iron.<br />
The North knows the origins of iron.”<br />
(<i>Walking in Circles</i>)<br />
<br />
“I drove a rag and bone cart piled high<br />
with mistakes and some mistook my cargo<br />
as wisdom: a broken bike, smashed TVs,<br />
stepladders without the rungs, snapped<br />
fishing rods, clapped-out rusted engines;<br />
the things that most throw out as junk<br />
I’d take away as basic truths.”<br />
(<i>The Ever Float</i>)<br />
<br />
As the story unfolds, the narrators slip not only through time, but in and out of the skins of the heroes of the <i>Kalevala</i>. The tragi-comic figure of Vainamoinen is surely a poster boy for poets the world over. There’s more than a whiff of Byron, or Dylan Thomas, about the ageless bard with his hopeless quests, his self-inflicted wound and his permanently broken heart:<br />
<br />
“Seven years I spent<br />
in the drink,<br />
the seedy underworld,<br />
inventing a self<br />
from submerged archives<br />
of sponges, sea snails<br />
creatures with pincers<br />
and all those scaly fish.<br />
I thought I was a fish myself,<br />
a fish afloat, alive or dead.”<br />
(<i>The Birth of the Shaman</i>)<br />
<br />
“I cannot say <i>forgive me</i> or explain my distance<br />
when you are already gone back to the waves...<br />
...I can’t say, <i>sometimes I am this other floating man</i>...<br />
...who cannot treasure the instance of yourself,<br />
as all is merged and rocked into the eternal.<br />
By the time the clock comes back our time is over.”<br />
(<i>The Floating Man</i>)<br />
<br />
Joukahainen, the upstart who challenges him for the bardic crown in an <i>X Factor</i> style poetry face-off, is contrastingly brash, a figure too modern for his time:<br />
<br />
“There was once a singer (<i>me</i>)<br />
who proudly sang all the truths<br />
of the land and of the life<br />
he had learned...<br />
...I reel out a litany of facts, figures and lore<br />
but this old bloke with a silver beard<br />
and a broken sledge remains unperturbed...<br />
...and simply waits for my voice to falter.”<br />
(<i>Up to the Neck in It</i>)<br />
<br />
It is Joukahainen’s sister Aino – given to Vainamoinen as ransom when her brother loses his duel – who inspires the most beautiful, and heartbreaking, poetry in the collection. In the <i>Kalevala</i>, the grief-stricken Aino flings herself into the sea and is transformed into a fish. In <i>Sampo</i>, her story becomes a tragic extended metaphor:<br />
<br />
“What remained were bogs and stubble, stunted trees...<br />
...and a lost girl with hands running red,<br />
her voice the caw of a hungry crow.”<br />
(<i>The Wizard’s Wooing</i>)<br />
<br />
“I wrap up in fur<br />
to slip past the sleeping faces of my kin,<br />
unlatch the door and leave the familiar lair<br />
for good...<br />
...I cry icicles for a world ruled by snowmen.”<br />
(<i>In the Land of Lumiukko</i>)<br />
<br />
Vainamoinen, it seems, truly loves Aino, but in his relentless quest for intangible mystical wisdom he drives her away:<br />
<br />
“Be quiet! Can’t you see I’m unthinking the ocean?<br />
Why do you distract me with your biscuits and your kisses?”<br />
(<i>Unthinking the Ocean</i>)<br />
<br />
But there is always another love. Despite the pull of the ever float, despite his grief over his beloved’s apparent suicide, Vainamoinen finds another – equally unattainable. It is his wooing of the Maid of Pohjola which sends him on his ultimate quest: to forge the Sampo, the indefinable treasure rumoured to bring peace and harmony back to a shattered world:<br />
<br />
“‘<i>Make me something brand new</i>,’ he says, ‘<i>Something<br />
never seen before and never to be seen agai</i>n’...<br />
...As if that’s not enough the daft old bard<br />
wants the witch ‘<i>to play the drums on it</i>’...<br />
...And to top it all ‘<i>it has to shine</i>’,<br />
enough to warm the heart of a Northern ice queen<br />
who has just traded in her daughter to a bloke<br />
who spends most of his days weeping<br />
for the lost poems of the world atop a Baltic rock...<br />
...So muggins here says just show me to the anvil.”<br />
(<i>The Trouble with Wizards</i>)<br />
<br />
It is the quest for the Sampo which brings the collection full circle: back to the modern-day hills where Vainamoinen and his ally, Ilmarinen the smith, seek out the origins of iron. In these closing poems the smith’s raw material takes on a personality of its own, and a chillingly contemporary prophetic voice:<br />
<br />
“I am the ubiquitous reinforcer of the heavy Rule of Law...<br />
...As the sun glinted me I pricked out a dying wail<br />
from punctured guts of men in the mud at Passchendaele...<br />
...All around I abide, a bridled slave in shackles, to scrape chins,<br />
smooth legs, stab peas, spoon, scoop, drill, lever, lay still and spin.<br />
I evolved into razor wire to protect you from your brother...<br />
...For you I span river banks, touch cloud, turn soil in furrows...<br />
...You hammered out my shape but you can’t control my dance.”<br />
(<i>Ferrous</i>)<br />
<br />
The Sampo itself remains forever out of reach. Like all classic quest objects, it is impossible to recreate or imitate. The final poem, <i>Sampo Unbound</i>, is a celebration of the paradox that there <i>is</i> no holy grail, no perfect poem – and yet there’s something missing from human existence if we don’t keep trying to remake the unmakeable.<br />
<br />
Like the Sampo, there is a sense that this whole collection is unbound by the constraints of the page. The poems’ rich musicality demands that they be read aloud, or sung, or performed ‘beat poetry’ style with an instrumental accompaniment. The two poets’ voices blend seamlessly together, at times duetting (as in <i>Sampo Unbound</i>, where bard and smith spark off one another) – <br />
<br />
“But what if she sings you a Siren Song, a song<br />
to set you weeping through your beard for home,<br />
so a sharp rock resembles your yearning pillow?<br />
<br />
“C’mon Smithy, toss in a Gideon’s Bible pilfered from a motel<br />
with a Playboy Bunny pasted in the Book of Revelation.<br />
Throw in a dinosaur bone pissed on by weary poets...”<br />
<br />
– at times fusing so harmoniously together that it is impossible to see the join:<br />
<br />
“I can sing light with the knowledge of bird heart and feather<br />
So wings sprout for a moment from the backs of my listeners...<br />
<br />
“...I can sing a village into a town and a town into a city<br />
And with a chosen word or trumpet sound bring them all down...<br />
<br />
“...I swear on a good day I can turn a hill into a mountain<br />
And cover its steep slopes with lush green forest.<br />
<br />
“All these things were given me in the floating dreamtime.<br />
But sing as I will, I cannot bring you back from the deeps.”<br />
(<i>Shaman Song</i>)<br />
<br />
What fascinates about this collection is the fierce identification which two socially conscious Middlesbrough poets find with the legends of ancient Finland. Vainamoinen’s quest, in the hands of Beagrie and Willoughby, mirrors the universal striving of the poet to find an identity and to make sense of the world, in whatever condition we find it – to come to terms with love and loss, war and betrayal, material distraction and spiritual longing.<br />
<br />
Having seen the show, I’m aware of the difficulties that must have faced Beagrie and Willoughby in pinning these poems to the black and white of the page. That they have succeeded in creating such a beautiful written collection is testimony to their extraordinary talents as poets. But my hope is that <i>Sampo</i> won’t just be read. The show, the CD, and the brilliant imagery of this collection makes it thoroughly deserving of a Saboteur award – perhaps even a Ted Hughes Prize.<br />
<br />
(Copies of the book can be ordered from <a href="http://www.redsquirrelpress.com">Red Squirrel Press</a>)<br />
The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-30474439576092545822015-04-12T22:43:00.000+01:002015-04-12T22:43:59.608+01:00How free is free speech?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMcS11SUtzjCjZlxIYeGtu1y3Nn2tZTvjRAYVbiAAZU8_bmbQ_DArTPD8paAn_Lm6DkLKtgnaM8nFo490I2fMMmx3Vp5CqX8mhLsnejS66fhYQIomXVrrhuDxahyDkvcvBiXh6-ab6IXQ/s1600/Free+speech.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMcS11SUtzjCjZlxIYeGtu1y3Nn2tZTvjRAYVbiAAZU8_bmbQ_DArTPD8paAn_Lm6DkLKtgnaM8nFo490I2fMMmx3Vp5CqX8mhLsnejS66fhYQIomXVrrhuDxahyDkvcvBiXh6-ab6IXQ/s320/Free+speech.jpg" /></a></div>As a poet, I’m all in favour of free speech. But I much prefer to be paid for it.<br />
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It’s an old joke, but one that has become worryingly topical. In all seriousness, I can’t remember a time in my career as a poet when the issue of free speech has generated such fierce argument.<br />
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The impact of the Charlie Hebdo murders has been felt worldwide. A great many of my fellow poets feel that the attacks were attacks on the very idea of free speech – an assault on <i>everyone</i>’s freedom to express their political, social and religious views, in verse or at the ballot box. It’s not just the political activists that have felt this way. Some of the most mild-mannered writers I know have been the most vehement in their expressions of solidarity with the Charlie Hebdo victims, and with persecuted poets and satirists the world over.<br />
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There are others who feel equally strongly that the cartoons which incited the massacre were hardly dispassionate political critiques. They point to a deeply embedded racist tendency within certain sectors of French culture – to a society which regularly gives a quarter of its votes to a neo-Nazi political party – and ask whether the cartoons were not simply pandering to this tendency, rather than engaging in genuine cultural discourse. They question whether it might have suited the establishment to use the facade of free speech to excuse collusion in the dissemination of material which another society might view as propaganda.<br />
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All of this has got me wondering: how free <i>is</i> our speech? Do we, as poets, have an inviolable right to express what we believe? Or are there times when that right could – or even <i>should</i> – be curtailed?<br />
<br />
The question raises its head in absurd ways, as well as horrific ones. A couple of months back, I was at a poetry slam where the opening contestant had the temerity to make a derogatory reference to UKIP leader Nigel Farage. All poets have their hate figures, and as they go, Farage is a sitting target – the ridiculous, readily caricaturable but ultimately rather unsettling face of a political movement that’s not a million miles from those French neo-Nazis I mentioned earlier.<br />
<br />
I cheered along with everyone else. Or <i>nearly</i> everyone. A certain writing acquaintance, who was sitting not far from me, took what I can only describe as extreme umbrage at the reference. Not only did he get up and ostentatiously walk out – but straight afterwards he buttonholed the poet and harangued him at length about the “offensive” nature of his poem.<br />
<br />
Personally, I regard UKIP’s political views as far more offensive than the poem that ridiculed them. I asked myself what my response would have been if it had been a poem from <i><a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/poetry-politics-and-that-difficult.html">Satires</a></i> which had provoked the audience member’s ire. I would probably have said, “I’m glad you were offended – because at least I’ve made you think.” I once had a football kicked in my face whilst performing a poem in praise of immigration. I count that among my proudest poetic moments. Where such matters are concerned, I’d rather be booed than met with indifference.<br />
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But what would happen if the boot was on the other foot? If a poet came to one of <i>my</i> events, and performed a poem that was blatantly racist, or homophobic, or misogynistic?<br />
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At <a href="http://yorkspeakerscorner.webs.com">The Speakers’ Corner</a> we have a liberal, open door policy when it comes to our open mic. The principle is that we don’t censor; people can bring 5 minutes’ worth of any material they like, and anyone can sign up to perform. So far, during my tenure as MC, no one has abused the privilege. Some of our more “humorous” poets sail a bit close to the wind at times in their comments on the opposite sex, but generally we know these performers well enough to be sure that no malice is intended, and that the sheer cheek of what they are saying is all part of the act. Occasionally, people have performed work that has been sufficiently heavy with expletives or sexual references to offend some of our more mildly spoken regulars. None of this has ever given me grounds to censor a performer.<br />
<br />
But the thing is, I know there is a limit. I don’t <i>want</i> racists, or homophobes, or rape apologists to take advantage of the free speech that’s offered at Speakers’ Corner to publicise themselves, or their views. Actually, I suspect that if we ever get this type of thing at Speakers’ Corner, the audience will do my job for me and shut the idiot up before they say something we will all regret.<br />
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I’m constantly thankful that I live in a society where I am free to use my art to express my political and social opinions. I don’t face assassination by drug cartels, as <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/when-what-you-write-and-what-you-stand.html">Javier Silicia</a> did. I don’t (yet) face imprisonment without trial and torture, as <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/ayat-al-gormezi-freed.html">Ayat al-Gormezi</a> did. If the price I have to pay for freedom of speech is a football in the face now and again, it’s a small price in the grand scheme of things.<br />
<br />
But ultimately, as an MC, I still have to make decisions about how far to allow my performers the freedom of speech that I profess to uphold. I’ve never (so far) had to censor a performer, but there will come a day when I have to seriously consider it. And that’s not a responsibility I ever wish to take lightly.The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-17479702061506781272015-03-29T22:37:00.000+01:002015-03-29T22:39:21.277+01:00Poetry, politics and That Difficult Second Book<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIVsNmgixQ5nXpa6cnoXsWW1SMZe6oSUR6aN09aUFX_IAMIv8RHoEaKtIPoyW1JU9M4qzNa6bsUYEQtGTxqE5sSU8QQ9_vaTwC7rdxkz7GPamnFbP1LQ1Gwpx_mPu37rEABgKxinq3UFE/s1600/Satires+Cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIVsNmgixQ5nXpa6cnoXsWW1SMZe6oSUR6aN09aUFX_IAMIv8RHoEaKtIPoyW1JU9M4qzNa6bsUYEQtGTxqE5sSU8QQ9_vaTwC7rdxkz7GPamnFbP1LQ1Gwpx_mPu37rEABgKxinq3UFE/s320/Satires+Cover.jpg" /></a></div>After a frenetic week (and a more than usually busy couple of months), I’m pleased to report to <i>Soapbox</i> readers that my second book is now well and truly launched. Now that I have a minute to catch my breath, this seems like a good time to set down some thoughts on the journey into print for the second time.<br />
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<i>Satires</i> is quite a different book to my debut collection. <i><a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/a-long-way-to-fall.html">A Long Way to Fall</a></i>, although praised by one respected poet for its witty qualities, was in essence a serious collection. It was a culmination of seventeen years’ labours at becoming a Serious Poet. <i>Satires</i> is nothing of the sort. The title gives it away; most of the poems in the new book have a heavy element of satire, or at least of social comment. The majority of the pieces are rhyming poems, where <i>A Long Way to Fall</i> was almost entirely free verse. And most of the poems are really rather silly.<br />
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So do I see any problems, or contradictions, in going from one to the other?<br />
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Well, no – not really. I’ve blogged before about <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/time-to-ditch-daffodils.html">how difficult it is to write <i>good</i> silly poetry, especially in rhyming verse</a>. There’s as much craft in the art of Pam Ayres as there is in that of Carol Ann Duffy. John Betjeman, one of our wittiest British poets, was meticulous in his attention to the musicality of his rhyming verse; there’s scarcely a skip or a stutter in his metre. I’d like to think that I have put as much effort into crafting the whimsical rhyming poems of <i>Satires</i> as I have into the free verse of <i>A Long Way to Fall</i>.<br />
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One of the reasons I admire the masters of rhyming verse so much is because it’s often easier to sneak a serious message into an ostensibly silly poem than it is to bludgeon a reader into emotional submission with a poem which tells the tale straight. “A serious message in silly poems” could even be a tagline for <i>Satires</i>. Much more so than in <i>A Long Way to Fall</i>, I was conscious of the social and political landscape in which the poems in the new book are set. The UK has endured five years of what I can only describe as misrule from a Coalition of bankers, economic theorists, consultants, ideologues and millionaires who don’t seem to have the faintest idea what is happening to real people every day. Slashed welfare spending, the near abolition of Legal Aid, the creeping privatisation of the NHS – it all hurts those in our society who are most vulnerable, whilst leaving the men at the top (and they mostly <i>are</i> men) pretty much unruffled. A right-wing media agenda has created a climate where immigrants, benefit claimants and people with disabilities are automatically assumed to be cheats and scroungers, while mega-corporations get away without paying tax and siphon vast (often taxpayer-subsidised) bonuses into the pockets of a new ruling class of fat cats. Meanwhile our schools and universities are being hijacked in a way which allows narrow interest groups to dictate what can be taught, what the next generation is allowed to think. Whether it’s the imposition of fundamentalist religious narratives in so-called “free schools”, or Michael Gove’s attempts to re-package the horrors of World War I as some sort of glorious patriotic misadventure, the end result is a stifling of creativity, a discouragement of critical thinking, and an erosion of the right to question what is being done in our name.<br />
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I’ve always believed that poets (and practitioners of all the creative arts) have a responsibility to reflect and comment on the times in which we live – to reinterpret the received wisdom of the day, to question and challenge the propaganda machine. I don’t want to claim some grand socio-political agenda for <i>Satires</i>. The silly poems in the book are there to entertain, primarily. But they are also there as a challenge to the <i>Keep Calm and Carry On</i> generation. I’d far rather produce a book of light entertainment that makes people think a little, than a weighty political diatribe that ultimately preaches only to the converted.<br />
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Actually <i>producing</i> <i>Satires</i> was the easy part. When I put together <i>A Long Way to Fall</i>, there were a number of poems in my repertoire which didn’t fit in the collection. The rhyming satirical pieces that remained included a couple of prize winners, so I knew that they weren’t “bad poems”. But they sounded a discordant note in a collection of free verse that was so steeped in nature, folklore and fairy tale. I knew that there could be another use for these poems, and my original plan was to self-publish them as a pamphlet and use the proceeds as a fundraiser for charities working at the sharp edge of Cameron’s so-called Big Society. I was delighted when Rose Drew of <a href="http://www.stairwellbooks.co.uk">Stairwell Books</a> told me that her imprint would be happy to publish the pamphlet for me. That meant I had the clout of a small but well respected publishing house behind <i>Satires</i>: an assurance of the physical quality of the finished product, and of committed editorial input as the collection was finalised.<br />
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<i>Satires</i>, in the end, became something midway between a pamphlet and a full collection. Poems kept going in: a few free verse pieces to counterbalance the rhyme, new political satires alongside the older pieces, some socially conscious love poems to provide a variation of tone. Only two poems were dropped. Once production costs have been paid for, all profits from sales are going to homelessness prevention charity <a href="http://www.keyhouse.co.uk">Keyhouse</a>, so (sales permitting) <i>Satires</i> will eventually achieve its dual purpose as fundraiser and awareness-raiser. I really couldn’t be happier about the “difficult” second book.<br />
<br />
It’s the <i>third</i> one that will require the real hard work...<br />
<br />
<i>(Note: </i>Satires <i>is available now from Stairwell Books and can be ordered online <a href="http://www.stairwellbooks.co.uk/html/bookshop.html#Satires">by clicking here</a>)</i>The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-48899031021485447472015-01-25T16:39:00.001+00:002015-04-12T23:01:58.374+01:00How (Not) to Put a Price on PoetryWhile the poetry world has been debating Big Questions like the alleged nepotism of the TS Eliot prize, the literary credibility of Kate Tempest’s rap album, and the effect on free speech of the terrorist attacks in Paris, a different argument has attracted my attention. I have to thank <a href="http://www.paulavarjack.com">Paula Varjack</a> for pointing me in the direction of the <a href="http://www.theeternalgraffiti.com/">Eternal Graffiti blog</a>, whose co-founder Mike Simms recently posted <a href="http://www.theeternalgraffiti.com/on-being-a-professional-poet-and-the-damage-we-are-doing-to-the-brand/">a challenging article about the prospects of make a living as a performing poet</a>.<br />
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Simms, a poet based in Atlanta, Georgia, argued (quite rightly) that it should be perfectly possible to do so. With the rise and rise of the spoken word scene, more young poets are now aspiring to make a living from their craft – and why not? If performers can have ambitions of careers on the West End or touring the world making music, why should poetry be the poor relation?<br />
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The problem, according to Simms, is that poets themselves are their own worst enemies. Too many are content to perform for free, sofa surfing their way around the country and relying on book and CD sales to cover their expenses. Or else they accept pitiful token payments from event promoters – payments that make a minimum wage job stacking supermarket shelves seem a more attractive way of putting food on the table. Simms reports a conversation with a professional US poet who turned down a $200 performance fee because it “wasn’t worth her time.” It was more cost-effective for her to spend that time at home developing new material.<br />
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“Poets need to stop undervaluing their art,” Simms declares. And I can’t argue with that. In poetry, as in all the performing arts, most of us do what we do for little more than goodwill. We all know the busking musician who spends rainy Saturdays in town centres and comes back with nothing more to show for his labours than a chill and a handful of loose change. Or the actor working as a waitress to make ends meet, honing her craft by night in draughty village-hall am-dram in the hope of a decent review. As a nation, the British (like the Americans, it would appear) are chronically bad at valuing their artists.<br />
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But Simms’ solution to the problem is a worrying one. “We have to establish tiers in spoken word... There should be an inherent knowledge that if you want someone who is at the top of their game, you can’t even approach them with a $200 budget, the promoter should have known that they were in the market for a lesser (however you want to define that) caliber poet... If you want to pay a poet nothing to do a show, go get a rookie.” Yet perplexingly, Simms declares that this is “not elitist.”<br />
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I beg to disagree.<br />
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Simms presupposes that all gigs are professional gigs, well funded and capable of packing in large audiences, where the promoters are trousering the proceeds and leaving the guest feature with peanuts. The whole concept of grassroots art seems foreign to him. He’s also assuming that a ‘big name’ poet equals a ‘better’ poet, and it’s on this basis that the ‘professional’ deserves better remuneration than the ‘rookie’. As an event organiser I find much to criticise in both assumptions.<br />
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First of all: it would be wonderful if every poetry event had some kind of grant funding, or backing from an arts institution. But this just isn’t the case. In the UK, if you want to run grassroots literary arts events you either have to get very lucky with a grant application (the minority) or you have to self-fund. Our little open mic, <a href="http://yorkspeakerscorner.webs.com">The Speakers’ Corner</a>, has been running off and on in York since 2006 and is well respected in the region for the quality of its guest features, which alternate award winning poets with up-and-coming local talent. But I make no money from it. Our guest performers, as a rule, are <i>really good</i>; but my day jobs don’t pay enough to allow me to give them the kind of fees they deserve out of my own pocket. Furthermore, I’m determined that grassroots arts should be accessible to all. That means I’m not prepared to charge the audience more than £1 per head to come to the event. The money we collect buys guests a pint and covers their travel expenses; a few quid a year is spent on publicity; and there is basically nothing left over. I could <i>try</i> putting the admission fee up to a fiver or more so that I can pay my guest features, but I don’t think it would be looked on favourably by my audience, who always have the option of going elsewhere.<br />
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Then there are charity events, fundraisers, and the like. If you’re running these from the grassroots, you <i>have</i> to call in favours from your guests, or they simply won’t happen. For the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/artsagainsthomelessness">Arts Against Homelessness</a> benefit gig I’m organising in March I have no budget, so I <i>have</i> to ask my guests if they will be prepared to give their services for free (or for travel expenses only) to make sure that the money we take from the audience actually goes to the homelessness charities that we are supporting.<br />
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As for whether a ‘professional’ poet is a ‘better’ poet: all I can say is that I’ve seen some big names in the poetry world – people who have won major literary prizes and regularly get booked to appear at festivals – give the most limp, uninteresting performances you can imagine. Meanwhile Speakers’ Corner, a back-of-a-pub, £1-a-shot, grassroots outfit, has hosted numerous ‘unknown’ local poets who would blow these big names out of the water. Being a ‘name’ doesn’t mean that you’re <i>good</i> – nor does it mean you’re any more deserving of a realistic fee than the not-yet-published local performer. It just means that you’ve networked yourself into a position where someone with clout knows your name.<br />
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Like Simms, I sometimes wonder if I’m colluding in devaluing my art. I regularly do guest feature slots for nowt, or for travel expenses and book sales only. But I think the <i>real</i> devaluing of poetry happens when you start putting a price tag on it. Simms talks about poets “defining a value proposition” for their art. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a less poetic suggestion in my life.<br />
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Nonetheless, poets have to eat. We are entitled to respect for what we do. A large promoter with an Arts Council grant should never offer less than minimum wage plus reasonable travel expenses. In most cases, it should be offering more, to reflect the time and trouble we put into creating our poems and honing our performances. But poetry’s natural home is among the grassroots, and <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/york-literature-festival-is-dead-long.html">we should never underestimate the value of grassroots art</a>. As I’ve argued before, it’s not something you can ever put a price tag on.The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-26119322204215525842014-11-30T15:34:00.000+00:002014-11-30T15:34:39.822+00:00Is poetry a feminist issue? Part 2<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJgGI4ErAfZHIsQQryzbCG_nIMQdac5AALVwy_2b1nyQUfVgQhVnim8WAVUBAsLfs3XmrtCsjvvZZQNb6byMMgXNvuzq_PEM4eFNXMt19YTKI6mltJ3D8v1nJDQTvyzJNooVyW9SZH4tQ/s1600/60+women+poets.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJgGI4ErAfZHIsQQryzbCG_nIMQdac5AALVwy_2b1nyQUfVgQhVnim8WAVUBAsLfs3XmrtCsjvvZZQNb6byMMgXNvuzq_PEM4eFNXMt19YTKI6mltJ3D8v1nJDQTvyzJNooVyW9SZH4tQ/s320/60+women+poets.jpg" /></a></div>I don’t think anyone who takes a serious look at the evidence can really deny that female poets have a hard time of it. <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/is-poetry-feminist-issue-part-1.html">My recent blog post on this subject</a> highlighted clear evidence of audience misconceptions, critical disdain and stereotypical assumptions on the part of publishers and critics about what women ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ be writing about. It seems inarguable that all this has created a climate which has disproportionately disadvantaged good female writers from making headway in the poetry world.<br />
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Nonetheless, the flyer that dropped through my letterbox earlier this year advertising the <a href="http://literature.britishcouncil.org/the-dorothy-wordsworth-festival-of-womens-poetry">“Dorothy Wordsworth Festival of Women’s Poetry”</a> left me with a distinct feeling of unease.<br />
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I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be positive action to create a level playing field for female poets. As a union rep, and latterly as a law student, discrimination – and combating it – is a subject I care about passionately. But does the preponderance of this phrase – “women’s poetry” – do anything at all to level the playing field?<br />
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My fear is that it could be having the opposite effect. Instead of creating one shared art – “poetry” – to which men and women have an equal claim, it could end up ghettoising the female poetic voice. Festivals of Women’s Poetry – or journals, or anthologies – surely run the risk of propagating the notion that the women can be sidelined into a safe little niche where they won’t bother the male-dominated establishment. And sidelining can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. As soon as you put the label “<i>women’s</i> poetry” on a festival – or a journal, or an anthology – there’s more than a hint of subtext that whatever is contained within is not of interest to male readers and writers of poetry. Or worse – that even if the men <i>are</i> interested, they simply aren’t welcome.<br />
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This is not equality. It does nothing to further the case that women and men should be equal partners in the art we love.<br />
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It’s quite insidious. Even our local <a href="http://www.yorkliteraturefestival.co.uk">York Literature Festival</a> this year held an event called “Three Women Poets” featuring readings from award winning poets <a href="http://www.emilyberry.co.uk">Emily Berry</a>, <a href="http://www.helenmort.com">Helen Mort</a> and <a href="http://rebeccagoss.wordpress.com">Rebecca Goss</a>. But as one female attendee remarked to me afterwards, it was depressing that it was deemed necessary to bill them as “women poets”. Surely, these are just three really good poets, and their gender is immaterial?<br />
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This isn’t a new question. Twenty years ago, when <a href="http://www.bloodaxebooks.com">Bloodaxe</a> published their celebrated anthology <i><a href="http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852242523">Sixty Women Poets</a></i>, one female poet (Sheenagh Pugh) refused to be included on the grounds that “she refuses to have her poetry published in women’s anthologies.” Editor <a href="http://www.lindafrance.co.uk">Linda France</a>, writing in the Spring 2013 issue of <i><a href="http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/publications/review/">Poetry Review</a></i>, gleefully recalls that the sheer diversity of writing in that anthology was a more than adequate answer to anybody ascribing a “spurious sense of unity” to poetry written by women. The anthology was a signal to the establishment that “women poets, as well as being different from men poets, were different from each other” – a statement that may seem obvious with hindsight, but one that by all accounts needed to be made. <br />
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So is there any benefit to having the label? It goes without saying that many still believe it to be necessary. <i><a href="https://www.mslexia.co.uk">MsLexia</a></i> magazine, for one, has been proudly promoting women-only writing (and writing opportunities) for years as a means of redressing “the male bias in publishing”. I have to admit that when I began getting published, I was suspicious that this “male bias” might be a historic artefact – after all, the number of rejection slips I’ve received did nothing to suggest there was any bias in favour of <i>me</i>! – but the evidence that it <i>is</i> still a real problem seems incontrovertible, at the higher echelons at least.<br />
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That there seems to be a continuing appetite for “women’s poetry” seems incontrovertible, too. Throughout this year I’ve seen countless calls for submissions to women-only anthologies: some celebrating the strong female characters of myth and history, others celebrating female-only attributes (such as motherhood). There wouldn’t be this many anthologies if people didn’t want to read what was in them.<br />
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And I suspect that it’s not just women who are reading them. I can think of plenty of male arts lovers, in York and around the country, who are only too happy to stand up for the rights and the dignity of women, and who care passionately that there are arts outlets which positively celebrate all that the critics seem so sniffy about. It’s not as if female poets are short of strong role models, either. The poetry headlines this year have been dominated by women. Just think of <a href="http://www.jessgreenpoet.com/#!video/cwcy">Jess Green taking on Michael Gove</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjwnJU5hnMQ">Hollie McNish’s public fight in support of breastfeeding mothers</a>, <a href="http://www.katetempest.co.uk">Kate Tempest</a>’s nomination for the Mercury Music Prize, or the ubiquity of “52” poetry ambassador <a href="https://belljarblog.wordpress.com/about/">Jo Bell</a>.<br />
<br />
If I have a message for the critics, then, it’s that the tide is turning. Ghettoising female-centric poetry and attaching a label to it – such as “women’s poetry” – may be easy and convenient, but I see no evidence that female poets are content with being ghettoised. The fact is that my female colleagues are giving us men a run for their money. And the art of poetry can only be enriched as a result.<br />
The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-60613974704270118982014-10-30T16:22:00.000+00:002014-10-30T16:27:29.007+00:00The Meaning of Meaning<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_ixliFSTLTFu91_36RHUrzC2sAfZKtume0JEjWGa2r8d7w_PnPE3vQYww4_E_ZVpolkGuvRVn2u54hm5bJ9ZKE0jYCDrix5JsfVaicel7onJq8HMN5aUiwDX6rqIS_VJgcpYS6iqyZuQ/s1600/Yorkshire+Sculpture+Park.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_ixliFSTLTFu91_36RHUrzC2sAfZKtume0JEjWGa2r8d7w_PnPE3vQYww4_E_ZVpolkGuvRVn2u54hm5bJ9ZKE0jYCDrix5JsfVaicel7onJq8HMN5aUiwDX6rqIS_VJgcpYS6iqyZuQ/s320/Yorkshire+Sculpture+Park.JPG" /></a></div>A few years ago, the judge of one of the big poetry competitions was roundly lambasted in the literary press for a judge’s report that began “What I liked about the winning poem was its ambiguity.” <i>Noooo</i>, screamed the correspondents. A poem is an attempt to convey something profound to an audience. If the audience can’t grasp the meaning – if the poem is ambiguous, obscure, or open to diverse interpretation – then surely the poem has failed at the first hurdle?<br />
<br />
I was reminded of this discussion recently. In his recently published “<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-29538180">Top 10 Tips for Being a Successful Poet</a>” (which are really tips for how to prepare the mind and heart so that you are in a state which is receptive to the possibility of poetry happening – a subtle but important distinction), Andrew Motion states that “people will interpret your poetry in different ways, but provided the interpretation that is brought to the poem isn’t plainly bonkers, I actually enjoy that.”<br />
<br />
This statement elicited a strong response from my literary sparring partner <a href="http://www.birdbard.co.uk">Tim Ellis</a>, who retorted: “I never write a poem unless I have something I want to say, and if people interpret my words differently I consider the poem a failure.” And that really set me thinking.<br />
<br />
I wrestled with a similar problem earlier in my poetic career. At that time, a rather lovingly crafted descriptive poem of mine had just been Highly Commended in one of the bigger competitions. I was proud of the success. But when I read the judge’s report, I was perturbed to discover that the judge had inferred a subtext within the poem which I had never intended. The subtext he’d ‘found’ was about bereavement – not exactly a minor issue. In fact, owing to the subject matter of the poem, I was initially a little upset to realise that the judge had interpreted it this way.<br />
<br />
What followed was a bit of a crisis of confidence about my integrity as a poet. After all, aren’t poets supposed to tell the truth, at least as they perceive it to be? If people were reading my poem as a poem about bereavement – if, indeed, it had won its competition place on the strength of an assumption that it <i>was</i> about bereavement – then wasn’t there something intrinsically dishonest about the poem? And wouldn’t there be something even more dishonest about me putting the poem forward in future poetry readings, knowing that at least some of the audience were likely to interpret it that way?<br />
<br />
It took a very wise poetry tutor to explain to me that that <i>didn’t</i> mean the poem (or the poet) wasn’t truthful. The very fact that the poem was open to an interpretation other than the one I’d intended was a sign of the power of the poem to take on a life beyond the person who had written it. Those who subsequently read, or heard, the poem were free to draw out meanings from the poem which resonated with <i>them</i>. The poem was no longer constrained by the fairly narrow sphere of my own observations, thoughts and feelings; it could land in somebody else’s heart and have a whole new meaning for them, independently of me. And that, if I’m honest, was something a little bit awe-inspiring, and very humbling.<br />
<br />
This is exactly the same reason I love modern art, and folk music. In both of these art forms, there’s seldom an obvious contemporary meaning to the artwork. Modern art and traditional songs and stories are at their most powerful when their meaning isn’t tied to the person who created them. Other people can come and interact with and, to an extent, reinterpret the artwork. Thus, fairy tales take on new meanings which resonate with the concerns of the contemporary society. The tales of King Arthur have been constantly rewritten for the changing times, from the age of high chivalry in Malory, through the vehement anti-war satire of TH White, to <i>Monty Python</i>’s surrealist whimsy. We are far more aware of the undercurrent of, say, sexual violence in <i>Little Red Riding Hood</i> or domestic abuse in <i>Cinderella</i> than were the audience of fifty years ago, or a hundred. And one reason why I love the <a href="http://www.ysp.co.uk">Yorkshire Sculpture Park</a> so much is that the Henry Moores and Barbara Hepworths there can be touched, climbed over, peeked through and hidden behind; their meaning is constantly reinterpreted by children of all ages finding new ways to interact with these magnificent sculptures, new games to play with them.<br />
<br />
For me, a really good poem has a similar quality to those stories and sculptures. It can also be played with by the reader, or listener. They can see aspects of their own lives, or their landscape and history, in a new light by seeing them through the poem’s lens. So there doesn’t have to be one, absolute, inviolable meaning to a poem for it to be a success. Even an overtly contemporaneous political rant, if well written, can resonate long after the events which incited the poet to put pen to paper have become yesterday’s news. Goldsmith’s <i><a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173557">The Deserted Village</a></i> was written in response to the effect of the Enclosure Acts on rural populations, but the workers of mischief in the poem seem disturbingly familiar in an age of austerity, benefit cuts and food banks.<br />
<br />
There has to be <i>some</i> meaning though. There are poets who take ambiguity to an extreme, and produce poetry so obscure that <i>no one</i> can dig out <i>any</i> meaning from their words. Or, perhaps worse, only those with doctorates in literature can decipher them. Ambiguity as a poetic tool fails when its effect is to exclude the readers, instead of inviting them in.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, judging by the content of certain journals I could name, there are still one or two poetry editors who haven’t realised this...The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-88731911031634787282014-09-18T11:17:00.000+01:002014-09-18T11:18:44.148+01:00Too much of a good thing?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRYy9os9o7FJYfj_uLFhDjFgAZ-R8rkTPqGZTjxuTtmYMpCggJj-3sW64ShaSHWKe8OWxWg4Om1cXq4sIijyFPMIPXmbHOjBo8nCdlt8CrgAmoaKT-YI5bGBdm4fIp5Xe0QoPmx8cOYh0/s1600/Empty+theatre.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRYy9os9o7FJYfj_uLFhDjFgAZ-R8rkTPqGZTjxuTtmYMpCggJj-3sW64ShaSHWKe8OWxWg4Om1cXq4sIijyFPMIPXmbHOjBo8nCdlt8CrgAmoaKT-YI5bGBdm4fIp5Xe0QoPmx8cOYh0/s320/Empty+theatre.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<br />
2014 has been an unprecedentedly lively year in my neck of Yorkshire. The Tour de France and its spin-off celebrations, the <a href="http://www.yorkliteraturefestival.co.uk">York Literature Festival</a> and the success of local publishers such as <a href="http://www.stairwellbooks.co.uk/">Stairwell Books</a> and <a href="http://www.valleypressuk.com/">Valley Press</a> have really helped put this part of the UK on the literary map. My colleagues in the <a href="http://www.soundslyricalproject.org.uk/">Sounds Lyrical Project</a> have been celebrating their first Arts Council grant with the launch of a brand new concert series fusing spoken word with original music. My neighbours at Harrogate’s Poems, Prose and Pints have just celebrated their fifth anniversary with <a href="http://www.harrogateadvertiser.co.uk/what-s-on/poetry-prose-pints-celebrates-fifth-birthday-1-6838520">the launch of a cracking anthology</a> featuring work from regulars at their monthly open mic alongside nationally known writers. Performance poet <a href="http://www.henryraby.com/">Henry Raby</a> has triumphantly brought poetry to the Yorkshire masses at the <a href="http://www.galtresfestival.org.uk/">Galtres Festival</a> and is launching a programme of poetry slams bringing national superstars of the spoken word scene to York. And my own little contribution, <a href="http://yorkspeakerscorner.webs.com">The Speakers’ Corner</a>, has started up again in a lovely new venue, delighting regulars and visitors alike with the work of some excellent guest features.<br />
<br />
So why is it that I’m beginning to doubt the saying <i>You can never have too much of a good thing</i>?<br />
<br />
Here’s the problem. If all of this were going on in London, nobody would ever want for an audience. But York is not London. We have more than our fair share of great writers and performers – but sad to say, we still don’t have large audiences. And the problem with having a literary calendar where events are happening every night (as was true a couple of weeks ago) is that most people are simply physically unable to get to every event. Put too many events on, and you begin to split your audience.<br />
<br />
I’ve noticed this a lot, of late. There might be tons of events, but at many of these events you can count the audience on your fingers. It’s also noticeable that at a lot of these events, the audience consists entirely of other writers. And that bothers me. It suggests that literary York is beginning to turn into some sort of highbrow ghetto. Are we forgetting how important it is to engage with the wider community? Are we failing in our efforts – or are we just not bothering?<br />
<br />
Something else which is a cause for concern is that I’ve noticed the language of rivalry starting to creep in. It makes my heart sink to hear participants and audience members talk about such-and-such an event as “the best” literary event in York. It’s even more worrying when event <i>organisers</i> do it. It smacks of a suggestion that other events are somehow inferior. The message that goes out is “Don’t go there – come here instead.” But a literary scene should thrive on being “better together” (to use a well-known phrase of the moment). It <i>won’t</i> thrive on rivalry and one-upmanship.<br />
<br />
But there’s something even worse than one-upmanship – and that is wilful ignorance of what else is happening. This became obvious to me a few months back, on a night where not one, but TWO, poetry events were happening in York in two different venues simultaneously. In the first (let’s call it Event One), the most critically lauded poet in the UK at the moment was giving a reading of work from his multiple award winning collection. In the other (which I’ll call Event Two), an Arts Council-funded event organiser brought together ten of the region’s most well respected poets in a high-profile showcase of their work.<br />
<br />
The problem this created is obvious. Most of the audience who were at Event Two (<i>and</i> most of the performers) would really have liked to be at Event One. But a poet can’t be in two places at once. The audience was divided. And NEITHER event got as big an audience as the performers deserved.<br />
<br />
Double booking really gets my goat. I can understand it happening in London, or Glasgow. But there’s simply no reason for it to happen in a place the size of York. Our literary community is a small demographic in comparison with, say, the audience at the Theatre Royal or at York City football ground. It really isn’t difficult for information to be shared, diaries synchronised, and events timetabled in a way that doesn’t split the audience.<br />
<br />
Having multiple events take place on multiple nights in a row can be almost as bad as double booking. York’s literary community lead busy lives. Many of the most committed members are older, or have health difficulties which make it physically impossible to come to events on consecutive nights, no matter how much they might wish to do so. Others have family commitments which mean that even getting out of the house once a week is a luxury. Choices have to be made: do I go to Event X or Event Y? And audiences are divided as a result.<br />
<br />
So why does this keep happening?<br />
<br />
The problem doesn’t lie with the performers. It’s the people who promote the events, nine times out of ten, who don’t bother co-ordinating what they are doing. It’s the promoters who often don’t see a NEED to co-ordinate. Their event is the best and most important thing happening, and why <i>shouldn’t</i> everybody drop everything and come to their event, regardless of what else is going on?<br />
<br />
I’ve been a literary promoter myself, ever since I joined the organising team for Speakers’ Corner back in 2007. And one of the first decisions I made was that Speakers’ Corner <i>shouldn’t</i> be an event which only promoted itself. We proudly support up-and-coming local talent. Through newsletters, social media and word of mouth we do more than our fair share of promotion for other people’s events. I like to think that this has helped boost audience numbers, and foster the lively literary spirit which is so much in evidence in York today.<br />
<br />
But there really are limits. And when our efforts get thrown back in our face out of rivalry, or thoughtlessness, or sheer bloody arrogance, then you can’t really blame us for stopping every now and again and asking “What’s the point?”<br />
<br />
Perhaps the answer is for some of us to stop running events altogether. Let the law of the jungle govern the literary calendar, so that the strong survive while the smaller, and those who make less noise, disappear. Speakers’ Corner did have a sabbatical in 2013, while I worked on my poetry collection and my co-organisers concentrated on their own projects. There was an immediate clamour of “It’s not fair”, “Why did you shut down?”, and “When are you coming back?” So clearly we met a need that wasn’t catered for by the upsurge of newer events.<br />
<br />
But there is only so long you can keep working at a thankless task. If audiences are doomed to dwindle, then perhaps some of us really need to stop organising grassroots literary events. Give the bigger boys what they already seem to feel they deserve. See if they sink, or swim.<br />
<br />
But I don’t really <i>want</i> to be part of a literary scene like that. It flies in the face of the very experience of community and mutual support that drew me in in the first place.The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-8775921034596297372014-07-16T16:23:00.000+01:002014-07-16T16:23:32.375+01:00Review: "The Psychiatrist" by Mariela Griffor (Eyewear Publishing, 2013, ISBN 978-1-908998-11-8)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC7RwKEKeYD7-hxPXRL_PQ2zU46BSzsWc52v09o9R-ov-1ARZLrF3hTQAUbs5ve3YQo8X2vw7dY16Sg6VvLVIUhoK3QwYwzhow1PrjMQ13FnxrA4yoM2SQr5NULE4xaW5_4RAysDZMldQ/s1600/Mariela+Griffor+-+The+Psychiatrist.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC7RwKEKeYD7-hxPXRL_PQ2zU46BSzsWc52v09o9R-ov-1ARZLrF3hTQAUbs5ve3YQo8X2vw7dY16Sg6VvLVIUhoK3QwYwzhow1PrjMQ13FnxrA4yoM2SQr5NULE4xaW5_4RAysDZMldQ/s320/Mariela+Griffor+-+The+Psychiatrist.jpg" /></a></div>The latest in my irregular series of <i>Poet’s Soapbox</i> reviews is a solicited article, in that the editor of <a href="http://www.eyewearpublishing.com">Eyewear Publishing</a> approached me directly to provide a review of <a href="http://www.eyewearpublishing.com/products-page/books/the-psychiatrist/">Mariela Griffor</a>’s first UK collection of poetry. I agreed, without quite realising how long it would be before <i>The Psychiatrist</i> made it to the top of the ‘To Do’ pile. I haven’t seen the final print form of the book; this review is based on a proof manuscript so is guided solely by the substance of the poems, not the look and feel of the book itself.<br />
<br />
I have to confess at the outset that my knowledge of Latin American poetry extends not much further than a few Neruda quotes. I’m aware of the dangerous political environment in which many of the great names were writing, and of the long shadow that the 20th-century dictatorships cast over every writer within this tradition; but I’m still largely unfamiliar with the works themselves. As a newcomer, therefore, I’m grateful that <i>The Psychiatrist</i> is a collection which presupposes no prior knowledge of South American literature and only modest familiarity with the politics of the region. This is a highly accessible collection; its clarity is never impeded by unfamiliar references. It even provides a miniature glossary at the end, where a small number of phrases are briefly explained.<br />
<br />
The collection spans poems written between 1986 and 2011, charting the poet’s path from Chilean revolutionary to exile in Sweden and, later, the US. The work is heavily autobiographical, or at least biographical – it isn’t clear how much poetic licence has been taken with the more startling stories, but what <i>is</i> clear is that this writer has lived through turbulent times. It’s hard for cosy British poets, with their cloistered poetry readings and expensive writing courses, to honestly understand the ‘other’-ness of a world where being a writer can make you a political threat, a military target. It is to Griffor’s credit that she gives us a glimpse into that world without sensationalising her past, and without any exaggerated claims as to her own role in the struggle.<br />
<br />
Despite the autobiographical tone, this collection doesn’t follow a linear narrative arc. Glimpses of the poet’s past are given in snapshot form, without chronology, allowing the reader gradually to piece together a rustic childhood, a great love, a violent bereavement, then exile and motherhood and a coming to terms with the past. The dead lover looms like a ghost over these poems; but what is most intriguing is that we never really get to see more than a shadow of the man. We infer an outwardly conventional marriage (at least, in the sense that elderly relatives are happy to embroider blankets for the couple), an academic career, a circle of intellectual friends – and then the revolutionary stuff, the death. But these are no more than glimpses. Only the penultimate poem, <i>Chiloe Island</i>, offers any kind of linear narrative, eventually stringing these threads together in a coherent whole:<br />
<br />
“...When he came back to the hotel, after his<br />
lens in photography class saw everything,<br />
we ran up the street...<br />
...He made me promise if we ever had<br />
a child, and if he was not there, I would leave the country.”<br />
<br />
The poems themselves are un-fussy free verse, with plenty of white space to let the words sink in. The language is unpretentious and there is a striking lack of imagery. Those physical images which <i>do</i> carry emotional resonance (flowers, rainbows, blood, long corridors, guns and ammunition, the aforementioned blanket) do so by way of unsurprising metaphors, and I did wonder at first if this was a weakness of the collection. But actually Griffor is a very fine descriptive poet. Like the dead husband, she has a photographer’s eye for the telling snapshot image:<br />
<br />
“In Detroit it is easy to see pheasants walking the alleys,<br />
or children running like a flock hunting a dog,<br />
murals of Jesus, Martin Luther King, Bob Marley<br />
or BB King on dirty walls,<br />
pink, velvet sofas covered by bags full of garbage...”<br />
(from <i>Selective Exposure</i>)<br />
<br />
“The night before your call, I dreamt of the ocean:<br />
cold, dangerous, deep, dark, blue at dusk and dawn...”<br />
(from <i>Thirty: just in time</i>)<br />
<br />
“...They had gardens where the sun rose<br />
face to face with the sand.<br />
They had rainbows, like us,<br />
thirsty and wild.<br />
They had emptiness like us...”<br />
(from <i>In Manistee</i>)<br />
<br />
The poet is content to let the visual pictures tell their own story, without imbuing them with more than their fair share of significance.<br />
<br />
The emotional heart of this collection lies in the poet’s personal struggles: with exile, bereavement, motherhood. “What do we do with the love if you die?” demands the first line of the second poem, <i>Love for a subversive</i> – a question that rings like gunshots through all the poems that follow. Accusations are levelled against the poet’s mother –<br />
<br />
“Here I see her,<br />
her face in a duel with the sun...<br />
I see my pink communion dress in her hands.<br />
I do not know her smell”<br />
(from <i>Parade</i>)<br />
<br />
– and grandmother:<br />
“She hid her smile to use against us.<br />
So powerful, so invisible...<br />
Even war is not so cruel”<br />
(from <i>Cyanide Smile</i>)<br />
<br />
– though when the narrator herself becomes a mother, a reconciliation of sorts is reached:<br />
<br />
“...The last paragraph<br />
of the letter said ‘I hope now when you are a mother yourself<br />
you can understand your own mother a little bit better.’<br />
I couldn’t answer her. Not because I didn’t have anything<br />
to say but it was so hard to say it.”<br />
(from <i>A Mother Thing</i>)<br />
<br />
It is in these poems that I begin to suspect a hint of unreliability in Griffor’s narrator. In other poems in the collection, her childhood memories verge on the rose-tinted, and it’s not until she arrives as an adult in Santiago that the conflicts really begin:<br />
<br />
“I assassinate the old days with nostalgia.<br />
I don’t see but invent a city and its people, its fury, its sky...”<br />
(from <i>Prologue I</i>)<br />
<br />
The title poem of the collection brings these conflicts and contradictions graphically to the fore. Manuel Fernandez, the psychiatrist who guides the poet through her traumas, becomes a hate figure for the narrator precisely <i>because</i> of his reasonableness:<br />
<br />
“You are suffering a post<br />
partum depression, he told me, before I shot him,<br />
like the many other voices in my head.”<br />
<br />
At its best, <i>The Psychiatrist</i> is a vivid, engaging collection. It’s full of colour and fine description, peopled with outlandish characters – from the pipe-smoking mathematician Robin Gandy, who laughs “the way / a beggar laughs in children’s tales: / smoky and loud”, to the stern taskmaster Andres the Barbarian, “the man who hit me in the head / every time I forgot the letter ‘H’”, by way of a colourful string of revolutionaries with code-names like Wolf and Daphne. Griffor’s sadness for the country she abandoned and for the friends left scattered across the world is palpable:<br />
<br />
“...You and I will order<br />
two Napoleons and two coffees.<br />
<br />
We will sit at the table, you will look around<br />
to check if everything is the same...<br />
<br />
This time you give me your list, full of incomprehensible requests:<br />
<br />
go to Mass on Sundays, talk to the girls.<br />
I will bring my chair closer.”<br />
(from <i>The middle of this goodbye</i>)<br />
<br />
Where I had difficulties with the poems, these largely seemed to arise not from the storytelling but from the translation. My proof copy contained no translator’s details, so I’m unclear how many of the poems were originally written in English, or whether Griffor made her own translations of any that were not. In the earlier poems there are a number of weaknesses in the choice of words and in the phrasing and layout of stanzas, which I suspect would not have been there had the poems been presented in the poet’s first language. Line breaks happen haphazardly, often on unimportant words (“a”, “the” or “of”). Poems full of dramatic portent fizzle out and end with seemingly inconsequential domestic detail (<i>Death in Argentina</i>). Abstracts abound: “innocence”, “truth”, “disappointment” (<i>Child’s Eyes</i>); “certainty”, “regret”, “indifference” (<i>Heartland</i>). A few poems (<i>Heartland</i>; <i>Boys</i>) seem to be nothing more than lists of rhetorical questions.<br />
<br />
These blemishes gradually disappear on progressing through the collection – presumably a reflection of Griffor’s increasing ease with the English language in the later poems. The political narrative, too, evolves, becoming a backdrop for the personal. Stories of tyranny really matter, and it’s important that they are shared; but for me, those stories became so much more moving when the poems progressed beyond reportage, and Griffor allowed me to glimpse how they shaped her narrator, with all her contradictions, years after the tragedy and the exile.<br />
<br />
The strengths of this collection lie in the accessibility of its language, the breathtaking clarity of the descriptive writing, and the gradual empathy that Griffor elicits for a complex, not overly reliable, but always compelling narrator. <i>The Psychiatrist</i> is a thought-provoking introduction to an important genre within western poetry, and a salutary reminder to English poets that we should never take our freedom of expression for granted.The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-20808870309926832672014-07-02T10:20:00.000+01:002014-07-02T10:21:03.639+01:00Poetry and music: the Sounds Lyrical Project, part 2<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguNqjuUUR3xeNFy5a4uvNvyRwaikOt4rJ84DmnSn4nkpN6zltSl3vbnZm-LHIZoIRRfccaX3Ov4yNvYJhPJbBaqYJpk43Epa0pE-8n21C_ATt4wQCJAnVtlDt8II3LWeIwl_-Xcu0XnPA/s1600/Pete+Byrom-Smith+and+performers+(web+size).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguNqjuUUR3xeNFy5a4uvNvyRwaikOt4rJ84DmnSn4nkpN6zltSl3vbnZm-LHIZoIRRfccaX3Ov4yNvYJhPJbBaqYJpk43Epa0pE-8n21C_ATt4wQCJAnVtlDt8II3LWeIwl_-Xcu0XnPA/s320/Pete+Byrom-Smith+and+performers+(web+size).jpg" /></a></div><br />
Regular <i>Soapbox</i> readers will know that for a year or two now I’ve been part of a collaboration involving four York poets and a group of classically trained composers. The <a href="http://www.soundslyricalproject.org.uk/">Sounds Lyrical Project</a> was set up to create opportunities for both poetry <i>and</i> contemporary composition to break into new venues and find new audiences. Our respective arts both have something of an image problem with the general public. Poetry is often perceived as <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/time-to-ditch-daffodils.html">twee and childish</a>, or (at the other extreme) <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/pretentious-poets.html">remote and unconnected to reality</a>; whilst modern classical music, with its conventions of smart dress and a silent, serious audience, can have a whiff of intellectual snobbery about it. An avowed aim of Sounds Lyrical is to do its bit to combat this image problem by changing people’s perceptions of where poetry and modern composition belong, and who can access and enjoy it.<br />
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Our <a href="http://poets-soapbox.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/poetry-transvestism-part-2-are-you.html">first concert, in March 2013</a>, was very much in the classical mould; but recently, after a long period of repertoire development, we tried something new. Our appearance at <a href="http://www.bridlington-poetry-festival.com/">Bridlington Poetry Festival</a> a couple of weeks ago made use of the classical set-up of vocalist and piano, but also brought in state-of-the-art electronics. The poets in the Project weren’t just listening to musical settings of our poems; we were also performing our own material, to the backdrop of musical samples and complete pre-recorded instrumental pieces by the Project’s composers. The poems we performed were carefully selected and choreographed so that poetry and music formed a seamless whole.<br />
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Rehearsing for this show was one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve had as a performer of poetry. There was a ‘light-bulb moment’ for me when, sitting over a cup of herbal tea in <a href="http://www.soundslyricalproject.org.uk/html/lizzie_linklater.html">Lizzi Linklater</a>’s living-room, I realised that the soundscape effects being played through <a href="http://www.timbrooks.org.uk">Tim Brooks</a>’ laptop were the perfect backdrop to an as yet unpublished descriptive poem of mine, and that properly handled, they could really enhance the performance of the poem. This was followed by a play-through of a recording of one of Peter Byrom-Smith’s instrumental works – a piece which had exactly the right rise and fall, the perfect complement of rhythm and cadence, to fit another one of my poems. My performance repertoire was suddenly taking off in a direction that would never have been possible had I been working on it alone.<br />
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The audience response at Bridlington was highly encouraging. One person commented that the choreography of my words to one of the pre-recorded instrumental pieces was so perfect as to make the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Others said it was much the most interesting poetry they had heard in a long time.<br />
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Of course, those who spend any time around the live poetry circuit (particularly in big centres like London, Manchester and Newcastle) will know that what we were doing was hardly revolutionary. Medieval bards were performing poems to musical accompaniment centuries ago. Beat poets revived the genre in the 1950s and 60s. Modern rappers have samples and backing tracks to provide the beat to their words, while the big names in contemporary performance poetry frequently collaborate with musicians to provide a soundtrack for their spoken word shows. Nonetheless, I think the Bridlington concert still provided us with a horizon-expanding moment. What we achieved was to take contemporary techniques into the setting of a very ‘old-school’ poetry reading, carrying those who were more comfortable with the traditional English poetry recital along with us for the ride.<br />
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So much for the audience reaction. I’ve found it even <i>more</i> interesting, during rehearsals and after the concert, to talk to my fellow performers about their own responses.<br />
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I grew up with music all around me. Although I never became a musical performer in the same way that I have done with spoken word, I’ve always felt that poetry as an art-form is even closer kin to music than it is to, say, prose or playwriting. For me, fusing music with my poetry has felt like a very natural thing to do, now that I have the opportunity to do it. There’s hard work involved, of course – you have to choreograph your performance of the spoken word so that its rhythm fits the musical backdrop, so that its rise and fall follows the rise and fall in the music. But rehearsing with the music, for me at least, is pleasure not pain.<br />
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I’m not sure it was that way for all the poets in the Project. One commented to me repeatedly at first that this way of working with her words seemed quite strange and alien. On the day of the performance, however, she choreographed her words to the music probably better than any of us.<br />
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Another of the poets in the group is a composer in his own right, with an extensive grounding in the classical vocal and choral tradition. For him, the fusion of his own poetic performance with pre-written music was far <i>less</i> interesting than the creation of new music to fit his words, to be performed by professional musicians. He rightly observed that there are loads of performance poets whose work has a musical backdrop, and they do it probably much better than us. But there are very few poets having their work transformed into modern classical song, or choral work, or opera. An audience who come mainly to hear <i>poetry</i> might be less engaged by the classical song settings than by the performance poems. But an audience who come mainly to hear <i>music</i> are likely to have the opposite response. What the Project’s composers have done so far, in setting our words in arrangements for single vocalist and piano, barely scratches the surface. We have scope to bring in multiple voices, additional instruments – to have our poetic words transformed into whole lush soundscapes.<br />
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He’s right, of course. But one of the joys of this project is that we’re <i>all</i> right. One way of working doesn’t exclude the other. The only real limits are those of our own creativity.<br />
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Two big pieces of news, post Bridlington, may well give us a pointer as to what’s next. The first is that the Project has been successful in getting an Arts Council grant to develop repertoire and put on our own concert series, which will begin in York in September. The second is that we’ve managed to win a booking for the Project to put on a fringe show at the <a href="http://www.ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk/">Ilkley Literature Festival</a>, bringing our music and poetry to one of the most prestigious literary events of the year. With just a couple of months to go before the first of these shows, we have a lot of rehearsing to do. But I think we’re starting to get a flavour now, of just how wide the possibilities are.The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407899703217884513.post-90144687826399746302014-06-19T22:46:00.000+01:002014-06-19T22:46:58.355+01:00Le Grand Débacle<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja9X-1n0l7jJmnby1Yyn8cCi-TK7Iu8C-wYAdRiq0881qz6cgRuU_uawStIlE3ajAoZwCGiBSHGYjQ_Akmtar0RKgsB7IcBLdVBiDhGDmO6olMh0LxyHMDVYR6OiKVpHaXrHfiZIl5dI0/s1600/Rusty+bike.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja9X-1n0l7jJmnby1Yyn8cCi-TK7Iu8C-wYAdRiq0881qz6cgRuU_uawStIlE3ajAoZwCGiBSHGYjQ_Akmtar0RKgsB7IcBLdVBiDhGDmO6olMh0LxyHMDVYR6OiKVpHaXrHfiZIl5dI0/s320/Rusty+bike.jpg" /></a></div>It’s only a couple of weeks until the opening stage of this year’s Tour de France hits the streets of Yorkshire. And you could be forgiven for thinking the poetry world has gone just a little bit, well, bicycle crazy.<br />
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The wretched things seem to be everywhere. Bike-themed anthologies, bike-themed poetry nights – no doubt someone has had the bright idea of being Poet-in-Residence-on-a-Bike and will be chasing the peloton up hill and down dale, declaiming verse from their latest collection as they go.<br />
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Now, I know a lot of poets. And I can probably count the number of them who are genuine cycling enthusiasts on the fingers of one hand. For those fortunate few, the Tour de France is a dream come true: one of those rare occasions when a genuine personal interest meets a genuine public interest. Any poetic cyclist who can write authentically about their two-wheeled passion deserves to be able to seize the moment, and milk it for all it’s worth.<br />
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But excuse me for being a bit cynical here. This deluge of bike-related poetry anthologies is more than the work of just a small number of genuine enthusiasts. In fact, the whole thing has a distinct whiff of band-wagonry about it. And there is nothing – <i>nothing</i> – that creates Bad Poetry like trying to force verse out of a subject you don’t really care about, just because it happens to be the theme of the day.<br />
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I can understand the temptation. Because the coming of the Tour de France to Yorkshire has also meant the coming of the 100-day Festival of Yorkshire – and with it, perhaps more importantly, a lot of money. Poets and arts organisations who have spent the last few years searching the backs of their sofas for any scrap of loose change that would help finance their work, have suddenly found that if they can somehow manage to shoe-horn <i>bikes</i> into what they’re doing, local authorities and the Arts Council will positively throw money their way. Who wouldn’t want a slice of that?<br />
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The money may be all very well. But I have major reservations about the quality of the work that’s the result of it.<br />
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I have even more serious concerns about the <i>longevity</i> of the work. Because that’s the trouble with the theme of the day – tomorrow’s theme will be something else. Once the dust has cleared, the cyclists have left the hills of Yorkshire far behind them, and the money has run out, who is actually going to <i>want</i> to read a pile of sub-standard poems from writers who don’t really give a <i>cuisse de grenouille</i> about bicycles, or the Tour de France? They’ll be consigned to charity shops, bargain bins, the 2-for-1 giveaway.<br />
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Poetry deserves better than this. Frankly, the Tour de Yorkshire, or whatever it’s called, deserves better than this.<br />
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If you’re a poet with a passion for cycling, be glad. This is your moment – so make the most of it. When you write from the heart, it will show. You will write fantastic poetry.<br />
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And the rest of us should keep our mouths shut and let them have the moment of glory they deserve. Our time will come, eventually. But let’s not sell out our art just because someone has a bit of money to throw around, or a new raft of opportunities to get published. Let us write what <i>we</i> believe in, what <i>we</i> can speak about from the heart. Otherwise our verse will be as rusty and as wobbly as an out of control penny-farthing on a cobbled Yorkshire snickleway.<br />
The Poets Soapboxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17843387930043596992noreply@blogger.com0