Where have all the war poets gone? Part 1

My friend and poetic sparring partner Tim Ellis sparked off yet another cracking Facebook debate a couple of weeks ago. In a discussion of his e-book On the Verge – an elaborate satire on the Western world's disregard for the consequences of environmental degradation – he asked the question: why were there so few poets writing about climate change? Are we afraid to tackle the subject? Or are we more comfortable disregarding the issue altogether, and writing about ‘safe’ subjects like love, daffodils and cats – thus proving the truism that most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people?

Tim has a point. Very few of the poets I know in Yorkshire are writing about climate change – or Syria, homelessness or benefit cuts. Those few that are overtly engaging with these issues seem to be writing rants, rather than poems – shouty tirades that fail to have any real impact. The bona fide poems are conspicuous by their absence.

I felt duty bound to play devil's advocate. It wasn't, I protested, that we didn't want to write about such things. The difficulty is that for most of us, war and homelessness and climate change are subjects too big to write about. Is it even worth the poet's effort trying to write about such things, when any given 30-second run of newsreel images makes our months of laboured word-craft pale into insignificance? Isn't it better to write about love, and daffodils, and cats, because these things at least give us a moment's escape from the ugly realities of the world?

I don't really believe this theory. Poetry is the stuff of human life. Poets, as a class, have a sort of responsibility to humanity, to reflect and recount all of human life. We need poets who write about climate change, and war, just as much as we need poets who write about love (or cats). Poets, collectively, are failing the world if we decide that any subject is not fitting subject matter to write poetry about.

So why do so many of us find it so hard to write poems about ‘big issues’ – or make such a bad job of it when we do try?

War and climate change are pretty unsubtle things. So there is a tendency, when addressing them head-on, to think that ‘subtle’ isn’t good enough. Why write a sonnet, when you can have a rant instead? But rants on their own are an artform more akin to Party Political Broadcasts than to poems. I'm not saying they don't have their place. Someone needs to get up on the barricades and say what the rest of us are feeling. But it doesn't require poetry to do that. Rhetoric, yes. Oratory, probably. But poetry? The subtlety of poetry is just going to be lost on an angry mob.

So what can poetry do to illuminate, inform and educate about the big issues?

In my opinion, poetry has two qualities that newsreel footage and mob rants don't have. Firstly, poetry is a way of looking slant-wise at the world – of finding meanings and connections that we never realised were there. By looking at something slant-wise, we end up looking at it more deeply – understanding its inner workings, its relationship to the wider environment. We find the new angle that the news reporters and the propagandists miss.

Pete Seeger's Where have All the Flowers Gone? is a prime example. One of the greatest anti-war songs ever written; but it never goes near a battlefield. Its starting-point is the cycle of life and love, as young girls pick flowers to be reminded of their sweethearts. It ends up in the graveyard where all their sweethearts are buried, without us quite noticing how we got there – and then the whole futile cycle starts again.

The second thing that poetry does is to use the microcosm to tell us about the macrocosm. A war poem doesn't tell us about ‘war’ – ‘war’ is too big, too abstract and too grotesque a concept to be pinned down in a 14-line sonnet. But a Wilfred Owen poem can tell us about a single, heart-stopping moment of terror in the life of a single soldier. And it's when we grasp the notion that this awful moment was replicated tens of thousands of times over, in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, that we begin to feel the true horror of the war. When we see its discarded left-overs picked over by the ragmen in Patricia McCarthy’s Clothes that Escaped the Great War – the 2012 winner of the National Poetry Competition – those of us who have been fortunate never to have experienced such desolation can at least begin to grasp the awful emptiness, the futility of what was left behind.

There is an even subtler way that poets can be war poets, or climate change poets. A good poem has many layers. The subtext of a poem often carries a meaning that goes far beyond the subject matter in the written words. Love poets (and love-gone-wrong poets) use subtext all the time, to turn a physical description into an emotional map of the human heart. A whole generation of literature students are currently writing theses on the existential significance of William Carlos Williams' wheelbarrow. So what's to stop a poem about a love affair, a cat, or even a daffodil, also being an unwritten commentary on the folly of war, or the depredations of global warming? All it takes is for poets to be made aware of the possibilities.

Are we all plagiarists now?

Is it just me, or do the poetry plagiarism scandals seem to be getting too close for comfort?

I was shocked when I read the allegations by Carcanet poet Matthew Welton that his work had been plagiarised by his fellow Nottingham poet CJ Allen. All of the plagiarism revelations to date have been scandalous, but this one seemed to hit home in a more – well, personal way. After all, I've entered competitions where CJ Allen has been a prize winner.

I must be clear: at the time of writing there is no suggestion that ANY of CJ Allen's prize winning work is anything other than his own original creation. But sadly, now that he's been tarnished with the plagiarist’s brush I can't avoid a nagging little “What if...?” that creeps into my mind when I hear his name mentioned. And it's depressing that I should think about any poet that way, particularly not one with such a strong track record and hitherto good reputation. If I start doubting one poet, how long before I start doubting them all?

What makes it worse is I have a sneaking suspicion that very few poets are entirely blameless when it comes to appropriating other people's work.

We all absorb ideas and images from the world around us. Writers pilfer constantly from overheard conversations, bits of pop culture, lyrics, advertising jingles, politicians' soundbites, and the like. “Intertextuality”, where a piece of writing knowingly references an existing source from the print or broadcast media, is one of the buzz-words in contemporary poetry. If, like me, you go to a lot of poetry readings and open mics, you'll be exposed to a whole barrage of poetic phrases, unusual metaphors and similes, and the like. And the chances are you may be picking them up subconsciously, reworking and reusing them in your own creative work.

I realised – and realised in a very public arena – that this was happening to me too, not so long ago. I'd been working on a new poem, a childhood reminiscence infused with my beloved fairytale imagery. I had a line in my head, which provided a perfect ending for the poem. And I knew it wasn't entirely ‘my’ line. I'd picked it up from somewhere – but where, I had absolutely no idea. Was it something I'd read in one of my books of fairy-stories? After all, I often find ideas for poems lurking within their covers. Had I heard it on TV, or the radio? Or – and this is the tricky bit – was it another poet's line, that I'd heard at a reading or an open mic, and picked up without realising that I'd done so?

It turned out to be the latter. This perfect final line for my new poem was somebody else's work. I used it in the poem. And the moment I realised where I'd heard the line before was the moment I read it out loud to an audience – at the self-same open mic that I'd first heard it, several months earlier.

Urgh.

If the poet who had created that line had been present, I could easily have ended up tarred with the same brush as CJ Allen. They weren't, as it turned out. But I had no idea who had written that line; all I knew was it was someone who might well be in the room, who almost certainly had friends who were in the room. The only honourable thing to do was to make a public confession of what had happened, and ask the original poet’s forbearance on the grounds that imitation, in this case, really was the sincerest form of flattery.

The audience at that open mic are a lovely lot. They were very understanding. They actually applauded the poem (and the confession) – and they didn't come after me with pitchforks afterwards, or ‘out’ me on the Carcanet blog. But I know fine well that I now have no right to use that ‘borrowed’ line in my poem. I could never be comfortable, submitting it for publication in the knowledge that the poem owed its power to someone else's words.

That last line has now been binned. It took me a couple of weeks to come up with the replacement (which is not nearly as good as its ‘borrowed’ predecessor). But such is life. All poets tend to find that, just when we want to say something really profound, someone else has got there before us. We shrug our shoulders, revise our poems, and move on.

The whole experience has made me realise just how close all poets come, at times, to being plagiarists. After all, we'd have precious little source material if we had to rely only on the original stuff that comes out of our heads. But the stuff we pick up from our environment – the lyrics, the headlines, the discarded soundbites – these are someone's creative work too. And the fine line between unconsciously using these as the starting-point for our creative process, and rehashing them wholesale as if they belonged to us in the first place, is finer than most of us realise.

Seamus Heaney: RIP

I don't think my meagre words can add very much to the many tributes that people far more erudite than I have paid to Ireland's most prominent poet since Yeats. I was lucky enough to hear the great man reading at York University just a couple of months ago; and it was an extraordinary experience.

Some poets are performers. They accompany their words with dramatic and flamboyant gestures, music, rhythm, sound effects, or multi-media installations. I have huge respect for those that can do this well. But there is something uniquely awe-inspiring about the quiet simplicity of a single poet reading their words, without embellishment, to a still, rapt audience.

That is my defining memory of Seamus. That, and his self-deprecating answer to the questioner who told him "By brother says that your work can be summed up in the words 'death and potatoes' - how would you describe it?" He simply smiled, and told the questioner that he couldn't describe his work any better.

My final comment on the loss of Seamus Heaney is a wry tribute from the Yahoo! news page which reported his death. A commentator with the alias "Taylor Swift Rules" had made a disparaging remark about how this was typical of Yahoo!, advertising the death of "someone nobody has ever heard of." There's a thesis that could be written about what a sad state of affairs it is that there are English-speaking people who haven't heard of Seamus Heaney. But the best riposte was the one from the wag who replied, "Who's Taylor Swift?"

(photo taken from Wexford Festival Opera)

Would you just look at what the Arts Council is doing with our money now...

Two identical envelopes dropped through my door yesterday. One addressed to “Andy Humphrey – Freelance Writer”; one to “The Chairman”. Both of them contained the same thing. A single piece of red card, mocked up with the imprint of a button that said “Push”. On the other side, a cursory blurb announcing “New Work from the Writing Squad – supported by Arts Council England.” And that was it.

Excuse me, but am I missing something here? I don’t completely oppose the idea of unsolicited mail (I have to send it myself, from time to time, when promoting competitions or touting for new business). But when I get unsolicited mail I appreciate it if, at the very least, it makes some effort to tell me WHAT THE HELL IT IS ABOUT. This prime candidate for the recycling bin told me nothing about who the Writing Squad are, or why I should care. It said nothing about what kind of new writing it was promoting – it just gave me a cursory web address as if it was implicit that the answer to all my longings would be there. Nor, and this is the bit that REALLY gets my goat, did it say why on earth this had merited Arts Council funding, when other truly worthy projects that I know of are repeatedly getting turned down.

OK, maybe the sender was presuming a bit of prior knowledge on my part. It’s not inconceivable that maybe I ought to know who the Writing Squad are, or why it matters that they are producing new writing. But if they are trying to tout for new business, oughtn’t they to do me the courtesy of doing a little bit of the work for me? Like sending me a press release, an excerpt of some of this great new writing – or even (and wouldn’t this be marvellous?) an invitation to get involved? But no. There was none of that. Just a bit of gimmicky red card.

No doubt this was the product of some head-in-the-clouds marketing guru’s blue-skies, high-concept, outside-the-box publicity machine. But to me it really just seemed as if the Writing Squad, whoever they are, couldn’t be bothered. They didn’t want to tell me who they are, how great they are, or what they have to offer me. After all, why go to all the hard work of scripting a press release when the Arts Council will give you money to print crappy bits of red card instead?

And so to the question: did the Arts Council know that this is what their money was going to be spent on? And if they did, who on earth had the idea that this was a sensible way to spend taxpayers’ money? Arts Council money, after all, is public money, paid in by British taxpayers – people like me.

I’d like to know how many people across the country this has been sent to. I’ve been sent two, after all – which means two envelopes, two lots of postage costs. Even if they confined their mailing to all the freelance writers and writers’ groups in Yorkshire, at the very least that’s a few hundred quid of their grant spent already. If the damn things have gone nationwide, we’re talking a cost of thousands. Just think what that money could have been spent on. Community arts initiatives – I know of projects in the north-east, designed as outreach to socially excluded groups, which haven’t been able to get any funding in the last few years. Brilliant multi-media shows combining spoken word with music, visual art and storytelling, that can’t go on tour to wider audiences because the Arts Council won’t fund the costs of a tour. Journals forced to close because the grants on which they depend have not been renewed. And what are they giving money to instead? THIS rubbish.

I suppose I should congratulate the Writing Squad. If they’ve done nothing else, they’ve made me talk about them, and apparently there’s no such thing as bad publicity. But it’s the Arts Council who should be shamed by this flagrant waste of public money. To deny grants to grassroots arts initiatives in deprived communities is bad enough. But to allow our money to be used for this experiment in third-rate, yuppie ad-agency tosh is, frankly, unforgiveable.

Plagiarism - what can we do about it?

The high-profile plagiarism scandals of recent months can't have gone unnoticed by the editors of top literary journals or the organisers of poetry competitions. With two serial plagiarists unmasked recently, many editors must be asking themselves if this is just the tip of the iceberg. What if those brilliant, original, prize-winning poems aren't original after all? What if someone just happens to have nicked them from somebody else's website, or from a forgotten poetry collection published 30 or 40 years ago?

There must be more than a suspicion that the plagiarism scandal calls into question the whole existence of poetry competitions. When a brilliant, unknown poet appears from nowhere to walk off with several hundred pounds' worth of prize money, some are bound to look askance on the winner and wonder just how original they really are. Are they just passing off the work of forgotten writers from a generation earlier? There are certainly rumblings that some competition organisers are going to start looking with new suspicion on ‘unrecognised’ names who achieve competition success.

To me, this is a dangerous mindset. After all, the whole point of poetry competitions is to give the brilliant unknowns a chance to make their mark, on a level playing field when up against established names. That's why poetry competitions are judged anonymously – so there's no chance of a judge being influenced by an entrant's reputation, or lack of one.

There are already competitions which churn out the same ‘type’ of winner, year after year with tedious predictability – often a winner who turns out to be a well established name on the poetry scene, frequently someone with several collections to their name. It's almost as if the judges only want work from a particular school of thought or writing. It would be depressing indeed if those competitions which still champion the independent voice are put in a position where they can no longer do so. Small competitions don't have the funds to defend lawsuits, and can't afford the reputational damage that might ensue if their champion work turns out to have been a plagiarised product. Will these competitions close altogether, rather than run the risk?

I'm a competition judge myself. I certainly don't want to be in the embarrassing position of mistaking a plagiarised poem for a brand new piece of original writing. But it could happen, even to the best of us. The sad fact is that many poets of the last hundred years have published their collections and then vanished without trace – and there's nothing to stop an opportunist taking advantage of the words they left behind them. Not even the best read judge is going to be able to recognise every plagiarised work for what it really is.

However, there's just the possibility that the recent scandals are signs that the situation is getting better, not worse. Serial plagiarisers are being found out. And we have the internet to thank for that.

Many poets are nervous about their work appearing on the internet. We're almost preconditioned to believe that someone is out there waiting to steal what we put out to public view. But in fact, the internet makes it harder for plagiarists, not easier. A poem placed in public view can always be matched with its real owner. A simple Google check (other search engines are available) is a standard tool in the competition judge's repertoire. It will pick up, not just plagiarised work, but also any other work that runs the risk of creating a copyright lawsuit by having been previously published somewhere else. Every competition I've judged has seen at least one entry disqualified from the shortlist as a result.

The Google check isn't perfect. There are any number of poems from the pre-internet generation which are not online, and which won't show up on a Google search. But a winner's name may well show up, once announced. Their past publication history may show up. And thanks to the dedication of poetry detectives like Ira Lightman (pictured), who brought the recent scandals to light, the plagiarists will soon run out of places to hide.

Iain Banks: RIP

It's perhaps a tad unusual for a poetry blogger to be writing a memorial to the life of one of the UK's most unusual prose writers. But the sad loss of Iain Banks, who died on 9th June aged 59, has got me thinking about why the poetry I write sounds the way it does. The man's influence got into my writing, I think, more deeply than I ever realised.

I've been obsessed with stories and storytelling all my life, from long before I ever started writing poetry. There was a rather fantastical element to my favourite reading matter – fairy tales, Victorian novels, and Tolkien – and I have to confess that when I was younger I pretty much avoided contemporary fiction altogether. I was writing, all this time: fairy stories of my own, some of them of epic proportion. I used them as allegories – spaces where I could get to grips with the darker aspects of the world around me, to try to make sense of the struggles of the people I loved. I've always believed, as Tolkien did, that mythic storytelling is anything but escapism. It is full of symbolism, allusion and metaphor, a way of looking slant-wise at the world and of setting its tragedies and pains in a wider, more universal context.

It was rather a shock to the system to discover a contemporary writer who set his tales in the modern world, but had a way of telling them that was utterly faithful to the tradition of mythic storytelling with which I'd fallen in love. The BBC dramatisation of The Crow Road in the 1990s was my first encounter with Banks's quirky storytelling (I still maintain that “It was the day my grandmother exploded” is the greatest opening line in English literature), and I was captivated from the outset. There was an epic quality, not just about the sweeping Scottish landscapes of the story, but about the young hero's classic quest (in this case, to uncover the truth about the mysterious disappearance of his uncle some years before, opening up all kinds of dark family secrets on the way). The mixture of folklore and pop-culture which seasoned the story was an intoxicating combination for me. And for the first time, it made me realise that it was possible to tell a timeless tale in entirely modern language.

And that, really, is what I've been trying to do in my writing ever since.

Iain Banks was more than a cracking good storyteller, though. His descriptive writing was some of the most beautiful I’ve ever read, in prose or poetry. There was something of the nature poet in Banks’s writing, a knack of capturing a place in a way that engages every sense. The opening paragraphs of Espedair Street, his roller-coaster faux-biography of an ageing, forgotten rock star, have haunted me for years:

“Two days ago I decided to kill myself. I would walk and hitch and sail away from this dark city to the bright spaces of the wet west coast, and there throw myself into the tall, glittering seas beyond Iona (with its cargo of mouldering kings) to let the gulls and seals and tides have their way with my remains... or be borne north, to where the white sands sing and coral hides, pink-fingered and hard-soft, beneath the ocean swell, and the rampart cliffs climb thousand-foot above the seething acres of milky foam, rainbow-buttressed.

“Last night I changed my mind and decided to stay alive. Everything that follows is... just to try and explain.”

My own nature writing harks back to similar scenes – the shore, the deep ocean, even the Corryvreckan whirlpool (which also makes an appearance in that first paragraph) – and I've always tried, like Banks, to convey a sense that my reader is right there in that place, in the snapshot moment, smelling and tasting the tang of wind and sea-spray. I'm surprised now, when I revisit his prose, just how many echoes of him I find in my most recent poetry.

Tastes and tangs and the crazy soundscapes of life infuse Banks's descriptive writing. It's hardly a surprise. Banks was a malt whisky enthusiast of the highest order. He knew the spirit's capacity to surprise and astonish with its spectrum of flavours and fragrances. He also knew the futility of trying to pin down the character of a malt whisky. His non-fiction bestseller Raw Spirit wasn't really a "search for the perfect dram", despite the advertising slogan: it was an autobiographical road trip, a journey of self-discovery. That heightened capacity for sensory detail, honed through a finely trained whisky palate, was a gift that any poet would envy.

There's a Gothic aspect to Banks's novels which made it very easy for me to fall in love with them after an upbringing on fairy tales and Victoriana. The macabre murders in Complicity (the first Banks novel I read cover-to-cover) almost have something of the Brothers Grimm about them; the islands and open spaces and creaking ancient buildings where his stories are set could easily belong in the work of the Brontës or Bram Stoker. Banks's characters have secrets, personal tragedies, enormous unspoken sadness, which make them grotesque and compelling at the same time. They are the sort of characters I have been trying to fathom out in all my writing, from my first teenage epics to my most recent prize winning poems. But it's his eye for the small details which make their awful dramas resonate. In The Steep Approach to Garbadale, a dream-like fixation with the description of an old coat becomes a chilling foreshadowing of the wearer's suicide:

“The coat is too big for her, drowning her; she has to double back the cuffs of the sleeves twice, and the shoulders droop and the hem reaches to within millimetres of the flagstones. She rubs her hands over the waxy rectangles of the flapped external pockets... The door slams shut behind her, leaving him where he's been for some time now, screaming unheard at her, silently and hopelessly, begging her not to leave.”

What I love most of all about Banks, though, is that his writing bursts with an unstoppable compulsion to tell stories; and it's that compulsion that makes the tales so vibrant, so addictive. The plots may be fantastical, the settings might read like something from Robert Louis Stevenson or Daphne du Maurier, but they're infused with satire and social comment which brings a realness to them despite the preposterous excesses of their characters. If Banks ever guest-featured in one of his own novels, for my money it was in the guise of Kenneth McHoan, the storytelling father of The Crow Road – the curmudgeon with a romantic streak, blasted off the face of the earth by a lightning bolt on a church roof, leaving the memory of endless tall tales behind:

“ 'The rich merchant was very powerful, and he came to control things in the city, and he made everybody do as he thought they ought to do; snowball-throwing was made illegal, and children had to eat up all their food. Leaves were forbidden to fall from the trees because they made a mess, and when the trees took no notice of this they had the leaves glued onto their branches... but that didn't work, so they were fined; every time they dropped leaves, they had twigs and then branches sawn off. And so eventually, of course, they had no twigs left, then no branches left, and in the end the trees were cut right down... Some people kept little trees in secret courtyards, and flowers in their houses, but they weren't supposed to, and if their neighbours reported them to the police the people would have their trees chopped down and the flowers taken away and they would be fined or put in prison, where they had to work very hard, rubbing out writing on bits of paper so they could be used again.'

“ 'Is this story pretend, dad?'

“ 'Yes. It's not real. I made it up.'

“ 'Who makes up real things, dad?'

“ 'Nobody and everybody; they make themselves up. The thing is that because the real stories just happen, they don't always tell you very much. Sometimes they do, but usually they're too... messy.' ”

I have to leave this tribute on that thought – and with the awareness that the world has lost one of its most original and idiosyncratic storytellers, a poet in his own outlandish way. The great man is away the Crow Road; and may the journey ahead be a bright one.

A long way to fall?

It's finally happened. After years of submissions to magazines and competitions, many rejection letters, occasional acceptances, and the odd envious glance at my younger, better looking, more successful friends in the poetry business, I finally have a book of poetry to my name.

It's been a rapid journey from acceptance to print – 3 months to correct the manuscript of A Long Way to Fall, gather in endorsements, and get the finalised version printed and bound. But that's not to say that the process of producing the book has been a rapid one. My initial query to the publishers was submitted a year ago. That was after half a dozen years putting together prototype versions of the collection, trialling different combinations of poems to try to find a harmonious whole. Then there's the time it took to produce the poems themselves – seventeen years since I first started writing poetry. It has taken about as long to create my debut collection as it takes to mature the most famous expression of my favourite Ardbeg single malt. As one who believes that poetry and whisky have a lot in common, I'm not altogether displeased by the comparison.

As it happens, there aren't any poems in A Long Way to Fall which date back quite that far. The oldest poem in the collection was written in 1999, though it has undergone a few changes since then. The newest pieces? Mere months old – babies by comparison.

The collection might never have seen the light of day were it not for the support of a select group of fellow poets. Two of them – Ann Heath and Tanya Nightingale – are still without a debut collection to their name: a serious deficiency that I hope the poetry world will remedy soon, because the best of their writing is amongst the best poetry I've read anywhere, ever. Ann and Tanya were in on the story right from the start. Not only did they offer some invaluable critique of individual poems, but they helped enormously in the selection and ordering of material. It is thanks to their insight that I was able to figure out the eventual shape of the collection, the sequence and flow of the poems, and – crucially – which poems to put in, and which to leave out.

Just over half of my 50-odd previously published poems made it into the collection. So what about the poems that weren't included? Some of them were immature pieces. They got picked up by editors in my early days, when I submitted a great mass of work all over the place. It was a great encouragement to get these accepted for publication, and I'm proud to have them on my CV. But if I'm honest, I probably wouldn't write these poems the same way if I were writing them now.

Other poems were left out, not because I was unhappy with them, but because they didn't gel with the overall feel of the collection. I decided with some sadness that I wasn't able to include my first ever competition-winning poem, Joni Melts Wax in a Saucepan. It isn't rubbish – the cheque it earned me back in 2004 testifies to that – but its style and voice are very different from the rest of the material in the collection. Joni is light-hearted, satirical, and really a much 'fluffier' poem than anything else in the collection. It may well belong in a future compilation, though, one with a slightly different mood to it.

The remainder of the poems in the collection are hitherto unpublished. They include a whole set of more recent poems which really created the distinctive 'voice' of the collection. They dictated the ebb and flow of material, the pace and style of poems which went together, the vital balance between lighter and more serious material. Once these were included, the other poems fell into place.

The process of getting A Long Way to Fall into print has been a voyage of discovery. At times I've felt like the seafaring character who appears in several of the poems: adrift on uncharted seas, never quite sure where I'll end up. But the book is here now. Finally, I am a Proper Published Poet. And here, I'm beginning to discover, is where the journey really begins.


A Long Way to Fall is available now from Lapwing Publications (email lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com), price £10. ISBN 978-1-909252-40-0.