The Far-Near

Poetry and Origins

2012-02-25T00:07:00.002-08:00

Chesterton, in his way, nails my theory of poetry in the quote below. Make it new, yes, but as Graves and many others said before him, you don't make new the themes. It seems to me that trying to make the very themes (as opposed to the forms) of poetry innovative, is how a lot of contemporary poetry dies.

"Poetry deals with the primal and conventional things-- the hunger for bread, the love of a woman, the love of children, the desire for immortal life. If men really had new sentiments, poetry could not deal with them. If, let us say, a man did not feel a bitter craving to eat bread; but did, by way of subsitute, feel a fresh, original craving to eat brass fenders or mahogany tables, poetry could not express him. If a man, instead of falling in love with a woman, fell in love with a fossil or a sea anemone, poetry could not express him. Poetry can only express what is original in one sense-- the sense in which we speak of original sin. It is original, not in the paltry sense of being new, but in the deeper sense of being odd; it is original in the sense it deals with origins."
GK Chesterton

Taken from Wisdom and Innocence by Joseph Pearce, (Hodder and Stoughton Kent 1996)

Patron Poet of the Twentieth Century

2012-02-10T13:03:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow is the 49th anniversary of Sylvia Plath's suicide, a poet whose death was, as Woody Allen said in Annie Hall, "romanticized by the college girl mentality." Her output was brief and phenomenal. It ended in poems of genius, and tragic death. She spawned a million wannabees, and the true extent of her literary influence is still, I suspect, very much under-estimated. For now, it seems, she's almost eclipsed by her own burning legend. But, I would argue, she is the patron poet of the twentieth century.

Plath is a modern icon for many reasons. One of them is that she laid herself bare in ways we are still understanding the limits of. Part of her appeal to young writers is that her development, her desperation to succeed, is on painful show in her diaries and letters. But Plath must also be the poet whose development is most visible, most easy to decipher, in the work itself. The early poems, blossoming and perspiring with promise, give way to poems, like The Colossus, with bulging carotids and finely wrought muscle. It's still easy, at this point, to imagine her poring over a thesaurus, searching for the knock 'em dead synonym. It's only in the last three years of her life that her voice erupts. Listening to the earliest recordings of Plath reading The Colussus, and then, shortly before her death, a poem like Ariel, is shocking. The voice is deeper, tremulously powerful-- but it has nothing to do with age or physicality.

Despite Plath being known as a confessional poet, and writing about her life in poems like Daddy and Lady Lazarus, Plath was so much more than a personal poet. She was a writer so intent on vivifying language that her famous 'I' disappeared into the Objective Correlative. "I foam to wheat, a glitter of seas" she writes in Ariel. In Lady Lazarus her skin is "bright as a Nazi lampshade". In Mary's Song her sunday roast recalls the Holocaust. She is the gigolo, the acetelyne virgin, the woman in purdah revolv(ing) in her "sheath of impossibles". Here's why she is the patron poet of the 20th century: she is a latter day Ovid metamorphising the woman into her own myths-- which just happened to be the great narratives of the last century: the question of suffering, and a new Fatherless-ness.

No self-agrandizing ego in the world, Plath was the disappearing woman intent on oblating the first person to the god of poetry. Her own father, of course, had died when she was a child, and this theme threads the entire body of work. Heaven is 'fatherless'. All that is left to her are words, "dry and riderless", "fixed stars govern(ing) a life."

For Plath, language was redemptive. She offered herself up to language over again and left us poems that are far from personal-- they are epic. We forget how shocking her lexicon and images were to the world they first appeared in. We've grown too accustomed to their echoes sounding in swathes of published poems, by male and female poets, ever since.

An old lecturer once told me that when you go to the Lilly Library where many of Plath's original manuscripts are held and ask for access to them, you'll be offered the chance to see, too, a lock of her hair. Plath has become a secular saint. She martyred herself for molten poems that tell us how inextricably we are bound up with the times in which we live.

Catholic Out of the Bag

2012-02-04T10:04:00.000-08:00

Sleeping Under Statues, by Remedios Varo

My Apologia came out in the Tablet a few weeks ago-- an account of my nine month passage from hardline atheist to Catholic. An interview on Australia's The Spirit of Things should also be available online for a few months.

Thanks to everyone who's responded, through whatever channel. Anything I write that's overtly spiritual will likely go on to the Hermitage website, where I'm poet in residence. But links will be here.

The Day Hospital

2011-12-31T07:39:00.000-08:00

October of this new year sees the publication of my third book of poetry with Bloodaxe Books. Of all three books, it's the one I'm most happy to see in the light of day. It's the one I hoped most to write, but found most hard. It took a decade of sweat, and a screening of Mamma Mia, for me to give birth to it.

It all started more than ten years ago when I was working as a psychiatric nurse in a day hospital for the elderly in North London. North London elderly psychiatric care turns up some gems as patients: writers, actors, politicians, ageing ballerinas. It wasn't uncommon to stumble across things like a note from Samuel Beckett on yellowing paper, or a George Cross, as you steered a frail body to the bathroom on a home visit. Another striking demographic was that all the patients had lived through World War Two, and most were immigrants-- meaning a huge number had fled Nazi persecution, often as small children. Those few years I worked in the day hospital I began to feel I was living the war, albeit vicariously. Hitler was often spoken of; the horror of the gas-chambers would often encroach on afternoon tea.

One day I was presented with a new patient: an 85 year old woman, Anna, who could barely walk with two sticks, and who spoke so infrequently she was labelled mute. Her mother, a Jew, had died in Nazi occupied Germany while Anna was working in an office in London. The guilt and horror she felt at her mother's death had driven Anna out of her mind-- to auditory hallucinations and frequent suicide attempts. She never married, and had no friends. Her clothes were in tatters-- new tweed skirts were ripped; shiny brogues were torn up from their soles. The best I could do for her, I was told, was to weigh her, and check she wasn't dehydrating. It's fair to say that at this point in my brief career in psychiatry, I'd torn up the rule book and followed my (sometimes crazy) instincts. She wouldn't speak, but I insisted we sat together for certain periods to conduct a one-sided chat, and listen to the London traffic outside. After a while, the rips in her clothes bothered me, and I smuggled a needle and thread into the counselling room, and began to sew up her skirt. She allowed me--in fact made much silent play of appreciating my trouble, patting me on the arm. But as soon as I'd finished, she gravely unravelled my toothy stitches.

It was on an Arvon course, I stumbled across the meaning of these ripped clothes: Kriah, the Jewish ritual of rending clothes in grief. It is, of course, a limited rite, taking place during the funeral. But for this woman, in her guilt, with all her terrible imaginings and unanswered questions about her mother, it could never end.

From there it was easier to broach such subjects, I suppose. I'm sure I planted my naive feet right in her wounds, but it loosened her tongue. She began, slowly and falteringly, to tell me her fears. There were even tiny gestures of affection between us.

When she died, as a young poet, I felt a responsibility to write her story in a poem. I couldn't do it. I tried it at university in South Dakota and produced ten pages of reasonable creative writing, but it wasn't right. I was writing as the nurse, as I often have, but I couldn't give breath and voice to what had happened.

I tried off and on for ten years to write the poem about 'Anna'. It was after 'Broken Sleep' was sent off to Bloodaxe I went to the cinema to see Mamma Mia. I hadn't wanted to see it, but my hair was torn out from checking and double checking the final version of the book, and my family pushed me out the door, claiming it would be a tonic. I did enjoy it. I did laugh. And I couldn't get over Meryl Streep who, even in that film, displayed the emotional authenticity she did in films I grew up on--Kramer Vs Kramer, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Plenty. The book put to bed, I decided to have a Streep-fest, and I started with Sophie's Choice. You couldn't pay me to watch it again. Streep is utterly convincing as the concentration camp survivor. She got inside the mouth, the brain, the gut, and the heart of the woman. Almost without thinking about it, I sat down next day and wrote Anna's monolgue. Yes, of course, a dramatic monolgue. I had to get into her skin.

Next night I watched The Bridges of Madison County, and another voice came to me-- Agnes from Poland who had dementia and believed the Nazis were coming for her. Almost superstitiously, I garnered as many Streep films as I could--The Deer Hunter, The Hours. It didn't matter what the subject or character was. The way she knew the workings of their very tongues and found, in every soul, the deepest pain--that hollow place in the heart--helped me hear voices, and more voices: Bridget who never left the flat, Pat who'd had a lobotomy, Maurice who felt so rootless, Daniele who threw himself off a roof. They came as if dictating to me.

I finally ran out of good Meryl films, and, eventually, the voices stopped. But here were twelve men and women, talking over the course of one day in London. Twelves lives, and a voice given back, I hoped, to Anna.

Buon Natale

2011-12-19T03:00:00.000-08:00

Giotto

In the wider world, 2011 has been a year of spats in Poetry Land: the fracas of the Poetry Society and Poetry Review in London; the Vendler/Dove set-to in the USA; the Oswald/Kinsella pull-out of the Eliot shortlist. I usually have no patience with people who won't get involved with these things, or who don't have an opinion. But this year, with my new residency at The Hermitage of the Three Holy Hierarchs, my horizons both exploded and felt more snug around me.

Baron Wormser's was the best response, to my mind, re the Vendler/Dove debate. His definition of poetry, appropos of that, is, as always, pithy and true:

Let’s say that poetry in a mass democracy (or mass not-so-covert oligarchy) revolves around the

dialogue between the self and the soul. The self is the life in time; the soul is the life outside of
time. Poetry is the place where they meet. Sparks occur. Those are poems.

What working at the Hermitage has enabled me to do is focus far less on the self in time, and to give, finally, more space to the soul outside of it. Next year sees the publication of my third collection with Bloodaxe, The Day Hospital. The book is a collection of monolgues in the voices of elderly psychiatric patients. The voices are inspired by patients I cared for during my time as a psychiatric nurse in London. Next year I want to write more about the writing of it, but for now it's remarkable to me that the first poem of the book took a decade to write. The woman who inspired it was deeply damaged by the death of her mother in Auschwitz. She was mute, and so damaged by grief that I felt an extraordinary compulsion to somehow give her voice. But I wasn't able to for many years. Then the poem came, and, swiftly, the other monolgues. It was a lesson to me in how little control we, as poets, have over these things. And how divorced from the secularised/production-crazy/self-obsessed capitalist culture poetry really is.

I take my hat off to poets that fight the good fight-- and I don't forget the people who get a wage from the poetry industry. I feel very blessed though, to have had the space to back off, and it's something I would wish for many other people this coming year.

Have a very merry Christmas!

Translating God

2011-10-17T11:58:00.000-07:00

St Anne teaching the Virgin Mary to read, East Anglian 14th century altar frontal

Recently I spent the weekend in Florence in the company of my two translators, Andrea Sirotti and Loredana Magazzeni. It was fun. It was also an intellectual workout that left me zonked. It's probably something all poets should do however, even on their own: to go over poems you've authored, asking "What EXACTLY do you mean?" "Tell us in other words." "Why that word, not another?" "Why that sound?" "What is the nearest approximation in Italian?"

It was, in other words, a distillation of the process of writing: effortfully or inspirationally squeezing shut that gap between notion/feeling/image--and word. The translator tries to close the gap between new language and original language. The writer tries to close the gap between word and thing, and as such is also a translator-- she translates reality into language. Choosing a word is like choosing a house-- you need a structure the reader can walk into and inhabit; an atmosphere (smell, temperature, accoustics, colour) to persuade the reader they are experiencing something firsthand. Or perhaps it's more like wandering into a belt of weather. Or slipping into a silk dress. The language should only be 'beautiful' or noticeable in that it clings like staticky silk to the naked body of feeling. It should only clothe formally to enhance feeling's figure.

Translation is a big issue in all areas of life (military, diplomatic, legal etc etc). God has the biggest translation job of all time. His thoughts are not our thoughts. His ways are not our ways. And you can be sure his language is not our language. Which is why the creationists and the literalists are pointlessly barking up the wrong tree of knowledge.

As a new Catholic I'm constantly amazed by the beauty of prayer and liturgy. I love that the bones of the Catholic mass were formed at the Last Supper in the sharing of bread and wine. That Christians in the 1st Century confessed and sang the sanctus, and were exhorted to "Lift up their hearts", just as we are today. Greek was the main language of the gospels, and the first language of the church. Greek was the original staticky silk robe attempting to cling to the naked body of Christ. Yet even Greek wasn’t the language used by Jesus at the Last Supper.

It was after taking communion this sunday I was struck, again, by the impossibility (as yet) of giving voice to the experience of receiving the living Christ in the communion wafer. I'm in the process of writing an 'apologia', an explanation of my recent conversion from vociferous atheist to Catholic, and I was struck, again, by the un-sayables; the un-knowables; the breadth, depth and shape of feeling that I experience when taking communion. It's a sensation that seems to defy even a poet's dextrous tongue. And I don't want to try to describe it here. What I want to enshrine is the human difficulty of describing an encounter with God in language.

Love: how do writers describe that truth and not resort to cliché?

Misery: how do we make a reader feel that without recourse to sentimentality and bathos?

Poets face these questions every day, and good poets overcome them.

The Liturgy has the greatest poetic challenge of all—to clothe and convey the presence of God. It has been said, of course, in lilies and burning bushes, and dark nights; it is said every day in doxologies and hosannas. Is it possible to use a modern metaphor? Does cliché exist in spiritual writing, or is it a question of genre?

The hermitage where I am poet in residence is Byzantine. The Byzantines haven't substantially changed their Divine Liturgys since they were first penned 1500-1900 years ago. For what it's worth, the experience of receiving communion in the cathedral of that language (even in its English translation) comes as close to the skin of God as you are likely to get. It contains the truth of the Eucharist: time eternal, saints and angels present with Christ:

...there stand beside thee thousands of Archangels and ten thousands of Angels, the Cherubim and the Seraphim, six-winged, many eyed, soaring aloft, borne on their pinions...

In its dazzling poetic engagement it comes closest to Truth: the Truth we can only shadow with language. Language used badly distances us from experience; but language used well allows us to re-enter experience, or know something better than before. I’m left with the greatest challenge I’ll probably ever face as a poet: how to describe my knowledge of the presence of God. As poets we can only be translators of deep and wordless truths. Or seek to be.

Quotation from THE DIVINE LITURGY OF OUR FATHER AMONG SAINTS JOHN CHRYSOSTOM

2011-10-13T00:45:00.000-07:00

Defamiliarisation

2011-09-30T00:26:00.000-07:00

Photo: Robert Hupka

There can't be many people in the world unfamiliar with the image of Michelangelo's sculpture La Pietà. It's usually separated from us by the whispered chattering of tourists and hands held aloft with iphones. Just once I encountered La Pietà as it should be encountered. I was part of a small baptism party, ushered into the basilica at 8.30am before the masses were admitted. Then I could stand before it and hear its silence, its message, as it was meant to be heard and seen. Robert Hupka goes much further in his series of dislocating photos-- behind, above, profile, close up. He makes us gasp. This, surely, is one of the purest embodiments of Defamiliarisation.

The art, of course, is in the sculpture. But art of this magnitude is truth, and becomes a fact of life: like Hamlet's soliloquy or Beethoven's 9th. Like a fact of life, it can become a cliché. Which is why every actor's interpretation of Hamlet is so vital. I had never seen Hamlet till I saw Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet. Many people won't see La Pietà until they see Hupka's photos-- even if they've cued and stood tiptoe, peering through the gaps between people's heads.

One of the eternal conundrums of modern art, of course, is how to 'make it new'-- and there are those who would even ask, why bother? Poetry is, mostly, the art of the ordinary-- of looking at the ordinary in such an astute, precise and fresh way that the reader understands afresh and deeper. Otherwise, we lapse into dangerously inconsoling cliché that fails to converse with what it represents and ultimately betrays it. All art gets harder as generations go by because the new--if powerful enough--becomes cliché and offers us nothing genuine. For writers, the virgin snow gets less and less. Sometimes we behave as though we just want to get the whole thing over with and plough up the field entirely. But those patient enough wait for new snow-- not new subject matter, but new ways of seeing. And then, paradoxically, readers feel the shock of recognition.

As a poet I'm not sure I'd be entirely happy if I was known for reading someone else's poetry, just as I wouldn't be happy translating but not writing. But what Hupka's work teaches me is what every poet needs: a ladder, a powerful lens, space, a spine that can twist in odd angles, a reverence that isn't afraid to question.

And her right hand invisible but

for the elongated fingers
propping him like twigs.

As though he'd tumbled
from the sky, like Icarus, that other boy,

but instead of smashing
at the impact of water (that gives,

but not briskly
enough), was caught

in the snagging
perfect arms of a tree.

from 'The Baptism' in 'Broken Sleep' by Sally Read, Bloodaxe Books, 2009

Photo by Robert Hupka

Dead Saints and Pre-School

2011-09-15T12:56:00.000-07:00

JohnXXIII, Basilica, San Pietro, Rome

My five year old goes to a nun-run school near Rome, and this summer spent a month at La Colonnia, a summer school on the beach where the golden days began crossed legged in swim-suits on the sand, praying the Our Father and Hail Mary, and galloped through swimming, sack races, egg-and-spoon races, sand castles, wheelbarrow races and dancing-- all with white habited sisters holding onto their veils and shrieking with laughter. This week we bought the obligatory souvenir dvd and I was struck by two things:

First, consider for a second how very unlikely it would be to buy a film of twenty kids in swimwear from a school in England or North America (some of my north American friends won't even let their under fives go 'topless' on the beach). What joy it was to have none of that paranoia abounding.

The second thing that struck came about 40 mins into a very long dvd, and made me sit bolt upright in the chair. After reams and reams of beach, sea, paddling pool etc, suddenly there were the kids sitting by a glass coffin with a dead nun inside. And there was my kid sitting in front of her, smiling in a "Ho hum, what next?" kind of way.

My child has been having a few nightmares of late, but I instinctively felt this dead lady was not responsible. She hadn't after all, been mentioned ("What did you do at Colonnia today?" "Nuffin'")
Much circuitous, Anglo-Saxon interrogation led me to the conviction that, as my kid said, the experience had been 'normal'. The nun is connected to the school and has been beatified. Her face and hands are waxily perfect. Her feet, in sturdy black lace-ups, are the most oddly life-like though. As if she is about to sit up and march off to mass.

The Catholic Church loves it relics and its dead, which is why cremation is 'uncatholic'. Doctrinally, we need our bodies at the second coming-- we are to be restored in soul and body. In daily life, the importance and love of the body come across in a thousand tiny ways in Italian life: how parents stroke, cuddle, and, yes, smack their kids. How strangers manhandled my bump when I was pregnant. How my child's teachers kiss me if I haven't seen them for a few days. How cemetries are cities of marble or granite tombs decked with burning candles, armfuls of fresh flowers, and portraits of the dead.

As a student nurse, 25 years ago in London, I shared a flat for a while with a couple of Emergency Ward nurses. One night I walked in on them in the sluice, howling with laughter. They'd been in on a 'prank' which involved taking the body of a newly dead man and jamming it, somehow, into an x-ray machine. The notion made me nauseous. I couldn't even pretend to laugh. I was green, they said. I needed to toughen up. The regard I held for the dead seemed odd, even to myself back then, in a culture that routinely divorces body from soul, or denies the existence of soul at all.

I've always been a fan of the body-- waterproof vessel of leaky soul, translator of love and desire, mobile hiding place. My poetry has always been, unintentionally, physical. I can't separate the body from emotion or philosophy. My gut feeling is that stopping in to greet this old dead nun on the way to splashing and sand-castles is a good thing. It demystifies death, teaches respect for the body, and for the position those long dead have in our lives and history.

Perhaps Rome is, after all, the best place to write the body.

Cell Lines

2011-07-29T05:41:00.000-07:00

from The Fetus Project by Jorges Lopes dos Santos

Back in the 1970s a mother was carrying a baby boy, but the baby had some condition or disability and was not expected to reach term. So, the parents aborted him in Switzerland and donated his body to mecial science. The doctors took a tissue sample from the fetus and then grew more cells from that tissue. Those new cells provided material for revolutionary treatments for burns and wounds.

The cells, like a microscopic forest carried on growing, and so did opportunities to use their proteins. Soon the Swiss company, Neocutis, was using proteins from cultured cells not only in medical treatments, but in skin creams. And Senomyx a company who researches how to make artificial flavours taste good without using extra sugar and salt, were alledgedly using HEK 293, a protein derived from the fetus's kidneys, to test the flavours. Cambell Soup stopped working with Senomyx after the link betwen fetal matter and tomato soup became explicit (though they did not make the connection between their standing back and HEK293 explicit and Senomyx have never publicly admitted using the HEK293 to my knowledge). Many other large companies incuding PepsiCo are working with Senomyx.

The images are irrestibly pagan: women smearing their faces with a product derived from a dead baby; food tested on a boy who never saw the light of day, let alone tasted his mother's milk (how fascinating to imagine receptors grown from him light up with 'pleasure' at contrived tastes. Rolled up within these cells is a whole lifetime of response and emotion.)

These techniques involve the production and utilisation of 'cell lines'. The chronological and physical connection to the dead child is slight, one could argue. The ontological and philosophical ramifications are for us to decide. Distance is what powers the modern world and salves our consciences: predator drones, pornography, even abusive comments on Facebook. Can we deal with closeness anymore? Or, is there nothing we won't deal with at enough distance? A poet's job, it seems to me, is to join the dots down a cell-line, pilot the predator drone, get intimate with the porn star, clothe and name the baby, and look people in the face.

Here's a marvellous poem, written by Gwendolyn Brooks, long before the cell-line.

The Mother

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed
children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?--
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.

Gwendolyn Brooks, 1945

Defamiliarisation

2011-06-21T04:34:00.000-07:00

The British poet Roddy Lumsden once told of how, walking through a gelid North American winter landscape, he came across a dead deer frozen in ice. "There's a poem," he thought. But try as he might, he couldn't make a poem of it. The truth of it was that the poem already existed: the natural produced something-- a still life, if you like-- that made the observer stop dead, surprised at this beautiful, upsetting turnabout of the expected. Like a good poem.

I had a similar non-writing experience while working on my latest manuscript, "The Day Hospital". The book comprises dramatic monolgues in the voices of elderly psychiatric patients, many of them immigrants. Although the pieces are well fictionalised, they all spring, one way or another, from people I met and nursed. There was one patient with advanced vascular dementia who'd fought in World War II and been highly decorated. He had almost no long or short term memory. He didn't know if he was married. Or, if he remembered he had been married, he couldn't remember that his wife had died 20 years before, or even her name. He never knew where he was. It was a quiet afternoon at the Day-Hospital. The patients were milling about, or drinking tea; I was preparing afternoon medication. Suddenly, this man, grabbed my arm and asked where Anne, his wife, was. "Is she dead?" It wasn't just the lucidity of what he said struck me, as the clear, unclouded look in his eyes. All his lines seemed to come sharp. We'd known each other a year, but it was the first true exchange we'd had. "Where are we? Some kind of hospital?" I locked up the drugs, and ushered him into the 'Reminiscence Room'.

We sat in 1940s style armchairs by a fake fire, a wireless on the mantlepiece, and a portrait of King George above us. Yes, we were in a kind of hospital, I told him. "What's wrong with me? What happened?" He was able to understand, absolutely, the nature and cause of his condition. And then we got down to brass tacks. When had his wife died? What of? Where was she buried? He sat opposite me, put his head in his hands and cried, brokenly, as if it were the first time he'd heard the news. But he pulled himself up, blew his nose. Like me, he seemed to sense that time was running out. "Is the war over?" "Who won?" I found myself telling this man who'd flown Spitfires over Germany my schoolgirl grasp of history: Hitler's suicide, the Italian switch, the late American entry. "And then," I gabbled, Russia became the Soviet Union, and we're in a Cold War, with nuclear weapons. Do you remember Ronald Reagan, that mediocre film actor? He was the last president of the USA! And you, you have medals. You're still talked about."

He squinted at each word, nodded, slapped his leg in disbelief. "It was the noise you won't believe in those bloody planes. Like a tin-can. Nearly went deaf. We were lucky. Every mission back home safely. Flying down the Elba on the watch out for Nazis. Nasties we called them."

Then we slowed down. "Who takes care of me now? What a bloody awful mess to be in."

I kept talking, but I could see his eyes becoming clouded again. Whichever capillaries and veins had briefly flooded with oxygen were becoming occluded, dammed up. It was as though, after years of stuggling through overgrown paths, brambles in the face, and catching legs, he'd pitched up, bewildered, in a clearing-- day-light, space, a map. But after ten minutes, he'd been hurled back into more undergrowth. As it turned out, there'd be no more lucid minutes in this man's life.

The day before he died he was lying in bed at home, listening to Mozart and conducting an imaginary orchestra. "Hello darling!" he called as I walked in. "I don't want to go anywhere today. Tell them I'm not well." So I squeezed his hand and left him blissfully knowing every note.

I tried to write about this incident when it happened, when I was 25. It was an amateurish short story. Later I tried to make it into a poem. And finally, when the voices of The Day-Hospital seemed to come as though through a séance, I thought I could capture him. But I couldn't. The moment was already defamiliarised. He was my deer in ice.

Shelley wrote in his "Defence of Poetry" that poetry should strip "the veil of familiarity" from the world. Poets do better with a walk down a street, or nothing happening in the middle of the night. Then they can peel away the familiar and show the extraordinary tensions and contrasts underneath. Even, at times, the transcendent. But deers in ice flip the cellar door up and dislocate our understanding. There are times, perhaps, when language is superfluous.

Paris, London, Rome

2011-06-03T11:45:00.000-07:00

Sally Read, Roddy Lumsden, with Heather Hartley and Jemma Birrel of Shakespeare & Co. behind.
Photo c. Lauren Goldenberg

What is a poetry reading, and why do poets do them?

Ted Hughes advised reading aloud poems as if one was reading the ‘phone directory. Actors, often, don’t read poetry well, not understanding that language needs to speak for itself without the contralto of emotion. This spring I happened to read in Paris, London and Rome. The phone directory just doesn’t sound the same in Italian.

But let's start with London. Aside from the bigger venues like RFH, readings usually happen in a nice or not so nice room in a pub. Sometimes it’s at a bookshop, like Oxfam in Marylebone High Street, where Todd Swift holds his excellent events. (Swift is a compère par excellence.) Pub readings involve a regular crowd, made up of--let’s face it--mostly other poets or would-be poets. There’s nothing wrong in this: the Bloomsbury set were pretty incestuous, as were the Pre-Raphaelites. Families create. These poetry evenings, however stellar and mainstream the poets, are low-rent. Chips, beer, jeans and a reader slouched at a mike. Having said that, women poets are much more glamorous than their predecessors of 20 years ago. We’ve ditched that “I just got out of clink/I only wear dungarees” look. The likes of Kathryn Gray, Zoe Brigley, and Isobel Dixon have mixed posh frocks with high quality writing. No one’s discommoded by the feminine in poetry anymore. (Though when will we have the first female editor of a large publisher?) British poets read with a tad more diction and expression than if they were reading the phone book (and, c’mon, so did Ted Hughes, owner of the sexiest voice in literature). But they’re understated. It’s poetry, after all. When I was in the States in 2000 poets were ending every line on an ascending note...? A bit like the vast majority of British under-thirty-somethings in ordinary conversation? But Brits don't like artifice in their art. The words are rich enough, and wrought like a maze. Let the listener enter in, and don’t distract. Money in the hat. Books for sale at the door.

All the readers were a wow that night—really (see Reading post, below). But it seemed to me that Baron Wormser was the wowser among wowsers. He pushed away the microphone and declaimed, inhabiting every inch of the space, and his own body. You could feel that lizard-stillness come into the audience—watchful, passive, a kind of hypnosis.
<><> <><> <><>

Ahren Warner reading at Shakespeare and Co. Photo c. Lauren Goldenberg

Paris. This was held in Shakespeare and Company, and, in essence, was much like a London reading: we were imported lock, stock, and Roddy Lumsden. I seized the chance of going over to promote Bloodaxe's 'Identity Parade', because, when I first learned about Shakespeare and Co. one scorching summer school in Vermillion on the Great Plains, I yearned to go. Landlocked and terminally un-cosmopolitan, the USD students, including me, dreamed of Hemingway’s gruff romanticism, the louche, miserable brilliance of Djuna Barnes, the droll invention of Gertrude Stein. We wept over Sylvia Beach, and her heroic sacrifices to get 'Ulysses' published; how she went slowly blind as Joyce altered proof after proof. In the wide empty streets of South Dakota I wanted Parisian pavement cafés, and stacked bookshelves.

Eleven years later, I rolled up to the ‘new’ Shakespeare and Co. The original, it turned out, was destroyed in the war. But it was exactly as I imagined: a smallish, vivid, living store.

“Are you one of the poets?” a shop assistant asked. “Sylvia is coming down to take you all for a drink.”

When a young blonde woman came out onto the street she told me, yes, she was named after Sylvia Beach. And it did feel she knew what had been entrusted to her: the spirit of welcoming writers (there are still beds between shelves upstairs); the sense of literature as something always being written.

After our drink, we read much as we would have done in London—but the store was packed. A microphone had to be relayed to the upper floor, from where we couldn’t even be seen. Who were the audience? Many Parisian English speakers, ex-pats, writers, students, mostly under the age of fifty. Intent, passionate, soaking it up. Maybe it’s because I’d been told that the French value their writers and give their best scribblers state funerals, but it felt special, protected-- even reverential. After the reading we were taken out for dinner. Reflect on that. I don’t know if even Seamus H gets bought his supper in England. The owner of Shakespeare and Co is, of course, British, but the philosophy of the shop has remained defiantly ex-pat/Parisian. The original Sylvia wanted to open a place that knew how to support writers, gave them somewhere to be. That vibe has certainly remained. There are events every week, and the shop’s open daily 10am til 11pm.

<><> <><> <><>

Mia Lecomte, Francisca Paz Rojas and Brenda Porster in "Madrigne" by La Compagnia delle Poete
Photo c. Dino Ignani

Rome was another story. This time, three months later, I was to be part of a company, La Compagnia delle Poete, and this was performance, not reading, with three days of rehearsals before the show. We were all foreign, though I was the only one still not writing in Italian. Poems, translations, had to be memorized. We were to wear black, shoes with ‘a bit of heel’, no jewelry. On my first day a fellow poet introduced herself and added, “Sei bellissima, meno male.” (“You’re good-looking, thank God.”) In London that line would never be uttered. Or if it was, it would be mangled in feminist/post-feminist/lesbian misinterpretation.

I worried, I worried. About the event, about the very Italian preoccupation with appearance (in a more general, theatrical way), the script, the significance (or lack of) of juxtaposing poems with other poems, of being directed, blocked, asked to dance. But as we rehearsed I began to realize that the organizer, Mia Lecomte, had edited the poems together exactly as an anthology editor puts poems together—so pieces on similar subjects were threaded; adjacent poems ‘conversed’, contrasted etc… Poets addressed each other, just as poems address each other in a book. The musicians—a double bassist, clarinetist, and flautist—were genius at riffing and improvising until they’d created a catchy, funky, wistful score for before, for between, for after. We stamped our feet, clicked our fingers, shimmied. The poems, I realized, demanded to be performed in this context. The translations are someone else’s words (thank you Andrea Sirotti and Loredana Magazzeni), and in a sense this freed me up to re-find the emotional locus of each piece: the dread of leaving a child in Saint Gianna from Broken Sleep, the anger in Breaking Fish Necks, the gentle detachment of Seduction both from The Point of Splitting . At the same time, the intensity of rehearsal exhausted me. Never again, I thought. Really. Give me a phone book. Never again.

<><> <><> <><>

During the dress rehearsal of "Madrigne" by La Compagnia delle Poete in Rome.
left to right: Andrea Colella, Sally Read, Helene Paraskeva, Francisca Paz Rojas, Sarah Zuhra Lukaric, Vera Lucia de Oliveira. Photo c. Dino Ignani

But the piece was beautiful. Lit, blocked, sculpted, this was ‘performance poetry’ at its most artful. And the audience (full) included writers, yes, but also photographers, musicians, teachers, children. And the foreign women I performed with, were, I realized, my comrades: displaced, and negotiating perpetually with another tongue; perpetually in love with their mother tongue. What this group gave me was another way of being a poet, another way of presenting my work.

I’m very English. That is, I’m a believer in the primacy of language above all. Anything above a microphone feels too much like artifice. I would hazard a generalization that the French feel the same. The weight of words is different in Italian, but that’s the subject of a future post. La Compagnia delle Poete is, I would guess, a unique enterprise in Italy, and yet it is very Italian: it couldn’t exist in London where we buck at the merest whiff of arrangement (fearing contrivance) or emotion (fearing sentimentality). We too often anesthetize the reader without cutting open the flesh. Though, in recent years, we have begun to change all that, profoundly. Still, integrity of body and delivery and word was easy for many of my South American, Croatian and Romanian co-poets and strikingly un-British. It’s hard for an English poet to remember she has a body, a face on the stage. We’re all desperately trying to shrug off ‘self’ ‘gender’ and ‘ego’. But maybe we shrug off other things too. Perhaps Baron Wormser—who’s reading and writing has reached a crucial intensity—instinctively got there at The Compass, N1, Islington. His mouth reckoned every word, his body was alive with it.

In ancient Greece poets were given large houses in the central piazza because they were thought to speak for the people. Since then we 've scuttled to the margins, been exiled, been reviled for being elitist, for not using rhyme, for dumbing down or being high-brow. The British poetry reading is the place we poets sell most of our books. In this sense we're travelling salesman. But it doesn't account for why Shakespeare and Co was packed, or why there were no books for sale at the Rome performance. Ultimately, people, it seems, want to hear writers. And writers, lovers of solitude, sneakers, and bath-robes are firked out of their shells to bear witness to their own humanity. Poetry is fallen music, says the philosopher Peter Kreeft, and prose fallen poetry. I like the idea, but I disagree. What we aspire to has the rightness of music, but words are no consolation prize. We strive for something so right it's almost unutterable, and people come to readings, it seems to me, on the off-chance they'll hear that something spoken by a mere mortal.

Breaking Fish Necks

2011-05-24T07:16:00.000-07:00

The Mermaid, JW Waterhouse

What do anal sex and fishing have in common? This was the question I was most asked after I read what was for a while my best known poem, Breaking Fish Necks (see below). In the poem the protagonist has anal sex for the first time. I stopped using it at readings; I didn’t include it on my Poetry Archive cd. I felt it would become a ‘signature poem’ and I disliked the knowing leers and questions from male members of the audience that it provoked. Then, Mia Lecomte, organizer and director of May 28^th’s “Madrigne” for La Compagnia Delle Poete, (see 'Readings' on side bar for details) included its Italian translation in the script. I called her up and told her I’d rather not perform it. But she pushed my writer-buttons: it’s a fine poem, it’s significant, it isn’t titillating. Plus the script is written. When my Italian husband went through it with me in Italian he freaked, “Santo Dio!”. The mother in law has been shipped over from Sardinia to babysit so he can drive me and my tough New Yorker friend Rosie (who’s been through everything from armed burglary to 9/11) to the venue and steal me out through a side-door afterwards, under a blanket. As Rosie drawled when she read the script

“Honey, are you sure you wanna do this? You don’t wanna be the poet who took it up the Hershey tunnel.”

Why do people assume poems are real, and what’s in a poem is what a poet has done? Well, mostly because it’s true. Most of my poems are, in some way, an account of what I’ve personally been through. Except the exceptions. Anal sex is a thing I’ll bet MOST women have been confronted with, even if, ultimately, like me, they opted for anal virginity.

“What is it with men and the ass these days?” Samantha in Sex and the City asked (in the days when it was a fairly intelligent examination of the modern mating game). Yeah, what is it? Most men seem to want it (not all). The man at the centre of the poem “Breaking Fish Necks” was always after it. And he gave me my favourite ever lines from a decade of dating in London:

Me: “You’re telling me you’re leaving first thing in the morning, that you don’t even want to spend the weekend together, and you want to have anal sex with me?”

Him: “We’d be having anal sex not building a shed.”

This same guy used to fish when he was a lad--out with his pa on the Great Lakes, bonding, drinking beer, and doing guy-things. But he stopped because he couldn’t stand breaking the fish’s neck. His dad thought it was more humane to snap the neck than let the fish flap about and suffocate on the bank. What a sweetie my guy was. And then I got to thinking (as Carrie Bradshaw might have said before she sold out to foreign location and greed), how this same guy was intent on us performing what, for me, would have been a painful, unhygienic, and ersatz act. I asked around friends: who had, who hadn’t. The nearest I got to consent was a friend who told me it was “The agony and the ecstasy”. Oh, and someone I worked with: “Well, if it keeps ‘em happy” (bless them).

The poem, it strikes me (at a distance of eleven years since the writing of it, it does seem penned by someone else) is about women not breaking. The man able to intimately dominate and undo a woman, and not have her fall apart. The desire to illicitly find the nub, the rub, the kernel that is nothing to do with her womanhood and the gift she has of creation. And not kill her. Not really. Unlike the fish “too easily become the dead weight of flesh…” She is easier to play with. To walk away from.

The poem almost became classified as an ‘erotic poem’—a label I strenuously resist for it and all the sex poems in my first book The Point of Splitting. Now I’m out of the London dating game, I see the willingness of a lot of women (not all) to feed desires that have nothing to do with love or procreation as sad. Many of us are help-mates in the perpetuation of our own loneliness, or ultimately, childlessness. About to turn forty, my peer-group is witnessing the impact on women of a legacy of contraception, abortion, and work-above-all-else. Women who, suddenly, want a baby. After two decades of assiduously trying not to fall pregnant, it’s now not so easy. The term Culture of Death springs simply and silently to mind.

The vagina has become a second class erogenous zone.
How, in hell, did we let that happen?

Breaking Fish Necks

The next afternoon we tried anal sex
and as you coaxed my neck with your thumbs

I thought of Wolf's Creek
and the fish you wouldn't catch,

plump trout necks you couldn't bear to break
and take home dead to your mother.

In the warmth I knew my arse
was soft, the downy peach.

But what was beyond drew you in:
a core, sensitive, harsh

like a peachstone--
its coarse ridges, fine strings

caught in grooves
where flesh is torn raggedly away.

Here, at the kernel
of spine, cat's-cradle of muscle,

you tried to undo me, cupping my hips
with your hands, breaking me patiently.

As we paused, I did loosen
but held together

around this hardness,
in the brace of your arms

till we rolled apart
and I healed slowly over.

You stopped fishing years ago.
You only used the stillness,

the bronze film of water
to will the fish deeper.

You couldn't watch them
choke on air or feel the snap

of delicate bones
between forefinger and thumb.

Or walk the mile home
swigging a beer

with a wet chill on your hands,
and flashes of silver skin

too easily become
the dead weight of flesh

slung at the bottom
of your pack.

from The Point of Splitting Bloodaxe Books 2005

Reading, this Thursday 19th May!

2011-05-13T10:32:00.000-07:00

Vigilance

2011-05-01T06:38:00.000-07:00

How often do you write? people ask. Some poets will reply, Only when the lightning flash strikes/Only when I feel the urge/Only when I have a deadline. I'm of the school of an artist friend: "I write every day because I'm only a genius once a month, and I'd hate to miss it."

I have known poets scoff and guffaw at the idea of a poet sitting at her desk at 9am ("like a novelist!"), but though motherhood and life in general may disrupt my work ethic, I realise it's less Protestant than Catholic; less enter-your-card-details-for-coaching-here, and more mystic. It's about vigilance, and training the self to go through the dark night of no idea, no commission, no applause, no sonnet-- to sit and listen. Anyone who thinks this approach is designed to lead to applause and publication should stop reading. As my poetry professor used to say, "There are two types of poetic ambition, and I'm not interested in the one concerned with getting placed in The Paris Review."

Virginia Woolf would get up in the morning and stumble to her desk to work. It was important not to speak with anyone, or to eat anything beforehand. The mind and the body were purified by sleep, and fasting. The day itself was a pollutant. In fact most writers report being able to write better in the morning's lucidity, before contrails of words colour the ears, before sugar rushes, and carbo-comforts distort the purity of thought.

Thought. Is that the right word?

Simone Weil described prayer as an act of "absolutely unmixed attention". Other mystics labour on this same theme, Teresa of Avila lamenting the (presumably gurgly, windy, achy) distractions of her own capricious body when she prayed. One only has to listen to writers down the ages to hear similar concerns ("Did you know," one novelist friend asked her neighbour, "that you clear your throat three times a minute? It's very distracting....").

What this edgy neighbour, philosopher, and flustered nun have in common is the desire to prepare the heart, the ear, the mind, in absolute calm, for the blown-in shapes of inspiration, or a connection to the transcendent. Some writers will speak of texts that 'write themselves'. I have written poems which, when I read them over, seem to have come from somewhere else entirely. There was a strong 19th Century literary movement which attempted to harness mysticim-- think of Yeats's Automatic Writing, and the supernatural hand that guides the human hand.

But it's important not to confuse true inspiration with direct authorship by God. We're not to believe that God personally channeled the Complete Works to Shakespeare. Or even certain shots to Fellini. Yet, there are artists and writers, of no belief and various beliefs, whose work surpasses the mundane, or even the human. I'm thinking of tracts of TS Eliot and Shakespeare, parts of Sharon Olds (yes), Ottavio Paz, whole symphonies by Beethoven, and concertos by Bach. The well-readied mind--ploughed, watered, attended-- can take on seeds that seem to grow so fast they defy the stumbling, mumbling, quotidian humanity of the author.

Simone Weil goes so far as to say "Extreme attention is what consitutes the creative faculty in man and the only extreme attention is religious." Yet, in a resolutely atheist author like Virginia Woolf, the reader is sharply aware of her connection to the nature of being, the transcendent, the metaphysical:

"Now tonight, my body rises tier upon tier like some cool temple whose floor is strewn with carpets... When I look down from this transcendency, how beautiful are even the crumbled relics of bread!"

The anxieties of production and success mitigate against vigilance. So does the notion, observable in some quarters, that you can buy the know-how to write like you can buy dental floss. There are, of course, wonderful teachers and places to go and write-- The Arvon Foundation (UK) and The Frost Place (US) to name but two. The right type of workshop can offer vigilant poets advice on becoming accomplished and more expert with language. Mostly what these teachers and places offer is well-honed, well-tutored quiet, space, and reflection. And the right kind of talk that feeds.

The Hermitage, where I am poet in residence, is a pool of this kind of quiet and contemplation. The numerous repetitions of the prayer rope are partly recited to give the mind something to grasp while a deeper silence can be pursued. It's brought to me, abruptly, the similarities of prayerful and creative minds-- the longing to be watchful, listening and utterly still. And then, perhaps daily, perhaps once a month, to receive.

Quotations:
from "Gravity and Grace" Simone Weil, Routledge NY 2002
from "The Waves" Virginia Woolf, Penguin London 1992

19th May Reading: What a Line Up!

2011-04-24T12:09:00.000-07:00

At 8pm on Thursday 19th May at The Compass N1, 58 Penton Street, Islington, London Simon Barraclough, Isobel Dixon, Philip Fried, Chris McCabe, Sally Read, and Baron Wormser will read together.

SO EXCITING!

Why? Well, I've just glanced over their biogs and their credentials are, of course, impeccable. But biogs always make my eyes cross and my brain go yadayadyayda. What makes this American--South African--Anglo--Anglo-Italian line up exciting are the poems (of which six are featured below)-- these are poets at the forefront of UK-US contempoary poetry. And they all write live-wire verse.

Baron Wormser (see him on The Far-Near under Featured Poets) is not known in the UK, and that should change. In the US he's one of the tree-rings in the oak of poetry. His poems are rich, living, lasting and lyrical voices of the US. They are testimony, drama, and artifact in the best sense. Not only that, he writes about teaching, about what poetry is. He is part of what makes US poetry.
Philip Fried is another glittering tile in the mosaic of US poetic culture-- founder and editor of the famously wonderful Manhattan Review, and writer of incisive, intelligent, daring, innovative poems that we are very lucky indeed to have in these scrambled times.
On this side of the pond, I'm thrilled to be reading with Simon Barraclough. I honestly rank the title poem of his first collection Los Alamos Mon Amour, as one of the best love poems of the last sixty or so years. It's incredible. And his new collection, "Neptune Blue", out with Salt this July, is witty, layered, poignant, and zings with meaning about life itself.
Chris McCabe, another Brit, has great zeitgeist, and is devastatingly personal. He's in touch with every pulse from fatherhood to the stock exchange. Every poem is an urgent appeal to emotion and intellect.
Isobel Dixon lives and works in London, but is from S.Africa, and her poems glow with it. Whenever I read her I feel as though I've stepped out of a chilly, grey street into the odd, reddish light of Africa. She conveys the grandeur of her native country in all her themes-- and all with an exceptional lyric gift. She, too, has a book out with Salt this July: "The Tempest Prognosticator".
And there's me, Sally Read. I'll be reading from my new manuscript of monologues, "The Day-Hospital" which comprises voices of elderly psychiatric patients I used to nurse in London. (For my horn section, see bottom of the posts, under my book titles.) The poem, 'Tatiana', below, is in the voice of an elderly lady of Russian origin who suffers from vascular dementia.

It's going to be a fantsastic evening, fantastic mix.
Here are poems by each poet as an appetiser...

Earth by Simon Barraclough

God's gobstopper:
first mouthed to be last swallowed,
blue-green baubled gobsmacker.

Without the lunar counterweight,
the grave embrace's tidal tug,
we'd pop our dislocated poles
and shudder like a shook snow globe
and every shook snow globe on Earth
would synchronise and stormy flakes
would regulate themselves and lovely chaos
might abate. And then where would we be?

Somewhere someone's daughter asks,
"If the world is round, why is a frozen lake flat?"

This is the planet of daughters and sons,
the noisy neighbour, noise polluter,
party thrower, troublemaker,
incubator, hibernator, estivator, terminator.

Such sights. Where to start? Where will it all end?
Deep in the belly of the old star mother?
The blown red placenta, the giving one's all.

from 'Neptune Blue' Salt, July 2011

Mountain War Time by Isobel Dixon

‘Will Mount St Helens continue to build until it surpasses its former majesty, or will it blow itself apart in a new fury of destruction?’
National Geographic, Vol. 160 No. 6, December 1981

Renowned for its height and perfect cone,
the American Fuji-san
now rises with a broken crown

above the slopes made mud- and ashscape,
burying bobcat, spotted owl and elk.
Ghost vapours from a methane lake

unfurl, before the pearly everlasting
and the lilies of the avalanche
emerge. Trailing blackberry, lupine,

bracken fern, disguise the scars
of that May day in this volcanic arc.
The Cascades shaken, parted

from old certainties. Remember,
here, this is the Ring of Fire,
the lava flow not far from where,

made pure, Element 94,
plutonium, formed Fat Man’s core –
the Sumo Bomb, its promised rain of ruin:

molten kimono flowers singed to skin,
a city threshed and sewn with blossoms, fissioning.

from 'The Tempest Prognosticator' UK: Salt, July 2011; SA: Random Umuzi, August 2011

Celestial, Inc. by Philip Fried

I regret to inform you that, in the purview of immutable discretion, it has now become necessary to downsize the elect.

It may seem strange that of the great body of humankind some like yourself, predestined to salvation, should be laid off.

But please bear in mind that the Boss does not guarantee for all an eternal position, and even those initially receiving the wages of grace may be let go.

It must be plain how greatly ignorance of this principle detracts from his glory and impairs true humility.

In your pre-termination meeting, you will be briefed on re-salvation options. You may come as a grievant or a supplicant.

Now, quickly step away from your papers, even those with only stray marks and doodles,and a guard will escort you from the Office.

If you have any question about how your severance reveals the obscurity of the Boss’s say-so, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Thank you for the services you have rendered, and I wish you every success in your post-salvation existence.

from Early/Late: New and Selected Poems; originally published in Green Mountains Review

WHERE ARE THE STONES by Chris McCabe

Asleep on my arm as Olson reads
“love is form, and cannot be without
important substance” – and him, not yet three –

Outside two jackdaws shriek out the hemp-seeds
of each other’s eyes.

All morning we drew pictures of wild strawberries
then in the fishmongers a tail-fin
hooked a clamp from a mackerel’s mouth
– net-caught live-bait –
and he pulled the sprat from its gullet
like a spoor from a hologram.

That sprat like a silver butter-knife
so why were the lures I’d bought
in luminescent larvae, one black eye
to jig a Chinese puppet in high-camp,
and these spinners polka-dotted –
a jester’s warring cod-piece.

Where are more stones Dadda,
where are the stones?

A guppy I caught half-scale to the lure
a triple-hook through its skull,
its trident dorsal arched –
little fuckin punk
with a crown of thorns.

The langoustine is a liar in shades,
tails available in Newquay
all husks exported to Europe.

We made the Sunset Bar, the rest from there
was gingerbread men & sandcastles,
and that continental breakfast you promised
was it just a disorganised Full English?

The magpie lost the calm of its pawnbroker’s legalese
and threw its boiler’s rag at the hovering kestrel
– above its borrowed nest of never-nevers –
flung its kitchen-hooks from a sky of Mother Love.

Sonnet by Baron Wormser

When the troops don't find the trade union
Leader at home (some intelligence misconstrued),
They swear and look for someone else to ruin:
A shrieking girl of twelve will have to do.
They stuff her mouth with gloves; they tear her sex
Like cellophane; they force her anus, then beat
Her skull with the butt of a rifle until flecks
Of bone obtrude. Now they have not been cheated.

They light machine-rolled cigarettes and go.
When next evening, the priest arrives, he smells
The smoke of candles. His breath stalls but after slow
Steep seconds it returns, the knell
Of life. If then he fell, he might not rise.
He speaks--so that what is human might die.

from 'Scattered Chapters new and selected poems' Sarabande Books Kentucky 2008

Poem: Noli Me Tangere

2011-04-23T07:48:00.000-07:00

Noli Me Tangere, by Alexander Ivanov 1834-36

The last of Sally Read's Easter trilogy is up at the Hermitage: www.3hierarchs.blogspot.com

Happy Easter!

New poem: The Body in the Tomb

2011-04-22T09:27:00.000-07:00

Jesus in the Tomb, by Jean-Jacques Henner c.1879

See the poem by Hermitage Poet in Residence Sally Read at www.3hierarchs.blogspot.com

The time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is a void in secular culture. I had already written "The Raising of Lazarus" and "Noli Me Tangere" in the voice of Mary Magdalene for this Easter, when I came across this, from the Divine Liturgy, in the Hermitage archives where I'm poet in residence:

"While in the tomb according to the flesh, thou yet, being God, wast with thy soul in hell, in paradise with the thief, and with the Father and the Spirit on the throne, O Christ: thou fillest all things, being uncircumscribed."

The body didn't rot. The soul wandered. Until he came to collect: THE BODY IN THE TOMB.

Mary Magdalene

2011-04-15T07:50:00.000-07:00

Mary Magdalene by Caravaggio

There are new poems going up at the Hermitage of the Three Holy Hierarchs (where I am poet in residence) this Easter, two from the perspective of Mary Magdalene. The first is
The Raising of Lazarus at www.3hierarchs.blogspot.com

Since my studies in theology began, it was the figure of Mary Magdalene fascinated me most: she is, I argue, the best lover in history.

Magdalene is (it was convincingly argued by Pope Gregory the Great) also Mary of Bethany and the woman cleansed of seven demons. There's no documentary evidence to suggest she was a hooker. The seven demons Christ cast out may have been the seven cardinal sins, or she may have had some kind of disease. Either way, she was so taken with Christ that she repented, washed his feet with her tears, dried them with her hair, and oiled them. She packed up and formed a band of women who followed Jesus and his gang around, cooking and providing for them from their own means. She was one of the earliest roadies and activists.

She was also a pioneer feminist-- ignoring the housework and mounds of uncooked food in order to sit at Christ's feet and listen to the really interesting stuff. In those days, women were not allowed to sit at the teacher's feet and learn, but Christ encouraged her to be that 'unencumbered' and to have the 'better part'. Words that make me think of being a woman in my twenties, single, with a pile of books and a list of classes to attend.

Magdalene followed Christ to the end-- she was one of only three who waited out the crucifixion. Like millions of women every day, she stood vigil till death, laid out the body, and returned for the embalming. She was the one he showed himself to after the resurrection.

From a purely literary standpoint the love Jesus had for Mary Magdalene is understated but utterly palpable within the gospels. I'm not arguing a revisionist/Dan Brown love story (The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, discovered in 1896, is, even from a literary standpoint, clearly inauthentic). John tells us explicitly that Christ loved her, her sister and her brother Lazarus. But there are other glimpses within the text of his love for Magdalene-- and, primarily, appreciation of her love for him. As she oils his feet and is reproached by Judas for wasting expensive spikenard, Jesus responds: "Why do you trouble the woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me." (Mt: 26)

In theological terms, Christ is not a human person but he has a human nature, united with a divine one. Human nature requires love in the most fundamental terms-- studies have shown that orphans in state institutions who are not cuddled and loved, fail to grow, physically and psychologically. Our being recognizes love at every level. One cannot help but wonder whether the presence of loved ones beneath a cross, or beside a death-bed, ease in any way the pain or misery of death. Likely, yes. Mary Magdalene gave her assent to Christ, packed up, followed, supported, waited, wept, and returned. In the elliptical prose of the gospels this is a love story without sensation. So, like us, Christ needs to be loved. It explains the need for worship, adoration and devotion; the human in the divine.

The Catholic Church is surprisingly sexy. The incarnation is about having the Beloved inside us in the form of the Eucharist. Christ went about his mission making people, male and female, fall in love with him for his forgiveness, his healing, his pacifism, his rejection of the futility of the old laws. We'll never know for sure if Mary Magdalene was a hooker, but she was certainly a woman who knew how to love. The sight of her beloved out of the tomb and on his feet must have been shattering. These things, if we believe in them or not, should be considered in their human complexity as part of our heritage, our consciousness, a strand in the largest and most electrifying poem we possess; part of what makes us who we are.

What would it mean to find the dead one-- who we wanted to hold one last time-- gone, and then to see him right in front of us? It is Christ's final, masterful stroke that he shows himself to her, only to add, "Noli me tangere (Don't touch me.)" It bequeaths a legacy of promise and longing.

(New poem Holy Saturday will be posted at the Hermitage after Vespers on Good Friday.
Noli Me Tangere will go up on Easter Sunday.)

Banned Words and Why Poets Should Know Their Metaphysics

2011-04-14T10:57:00.000-07:00

The Banned Words List-- a list of words that should never be used in poems, or only used with caution--was put together some years back by a group of UK poets of different poetic backgrounds. It's surfaced again, in a good-humoured, thought-provoking thread on Facebook.

Here's the list:

shard/daffodil/ziggurat/epiphany/fester/blob/palimpsest/soul/plethora/gossamer/ammonite/hark/destiny/
rectal/candyfloss/sunset/frond/prayer/milt/sapient/tesserae/loo/snedder/poised/shriek/lambent/snot/Jesus/
humdinger/shimmer/golden/heartbreak/mango/harbinger/myriad

It's plain that they had some fun; it's also plain which words are too abstract or clichéd to be used without exceptional need. (It's also plain, to me, that my first book, "The Point of Splitting" hinged on the words 'loo', 'shriek', and 'snot'. And I have no regrets.)

But the words that grabbed me this time around were the words 'soul', 'destiny', and 'prayer'. Like you, I can bring to mind many contemporary poems where those words are used cheaply (they're often American--aren't they? A lot of British poets get embarassed about anything they can't lock up in their garage-- unless it's an explicit sexual act). The problem with the words I've picked out is that they're often used by writers with no theological or philosophical understanding-- they're used as a catch-all for something woolly about the meaning of life, or connecting with the cosmos. I'd like to quote a couple but I'm not that mean.

Don't get me wrong: I had no philosophical grounding or any clue about metaphysics, theology, or that mighty literary tome the Bible until about, um, ten months ago. But being poet in residence of a Byzantine Hermitage, it's my business to know these things.

Metaphysics, for example, dates back to the Greek philosophers and is about the nature of being. It is a science; its tools are logic and reason. Like poetry, it begins with what is palpable and proceeds to the immaterial. Poets whose poems strive for any kind of coherent philosophical meaning or transcendence are, whether they know it or not, playing in the garden of metaphysics. Certainly poets who're fumbling after the words, 'soul', 'prayer' and 'destiny'. And there's nothing woolly about metaphysics. Read John Donne. Or the theologian, Thomas Aquinas. He would have had Christopher Hitchens with a cherry on a cocktail stick.

Like all clichés the problem is not the word, but that it's become divorced from its, or any, meaning. And that people don't know the meaning anymore.

Featured Poet: Baron Wormser

2011-04-08T00:49:00.000-07:00

The US poet Baron Wormser is reading with Simon Barraclough, Isobel Dixon, Phil Fried, Chris McCabe and Sally Read at 7pm on 19th May at The Compass N1, 58 Penton Street, Islington, London. Baron isn't well known in the UK but he's a quiet phenomenon in his own country clocking up, over the last three decades, eight collections of award-winning poetry, two textbooks on poetry teaching, and a memoir--and, from 2000-2005, serving as Poet Laureate in Maine. Unlike the majority of contemporay US poets, he does not belong to a university. In fact, for many years, he worked as a librarian. In fact, for 25 years, he and his family lived in woods in Maine without electricity or running water-- growing their own produce and reading and writing by a kerosene lamp. Visitors, Wormser remarks wryly, tried to like the romanticism, but were repelled by the smell of kerosene and discouraged by its feeble light.

Wormser's poetry grows and feeds from the real-- real voices of real people: nuns, waiters, kids, pensioners, holocaust survivors; real concerns about war and the tyranny of certain democracies (see "Carthage", 2005); death, depression and happiness. Wormser is not a poet obsessed with self or personal anecdote yet his poems seethe with humanity and authenticity. I was fortunate enough to be taught by him for a semester at the University of South Dakota in 2000. What stuck with me apart from his immense propensity for humour was his respect for language-- the search for the right word, the right line, the right expression. He is a poet who dislikes finishing with a poem, who is always willing to revise, to perfect. And the resulting poems are turned with a craftsman's expertise and an inimitable flair.

A line from his memoir, "The Road Washes Out in Spring" (University Press of New England, 2006) about those 25 years in the woods, seems to evoke the counter-cultural nature of his work, the quiet triumph of his humanity:
"....we fear the treachery of feeling. It's safer to dwell in the domains of irony."

Locks

I click off the lamps,
Damp the wood stove,
Check the locks

As if the house were a fortress.
Husband and wife, all day
We have been unto ourselves

With one another--
Oblique love quilted with habit.
I search for a missing scissors;

You know were it dwells.
Why is the Protestant ethic
So intractable, you marvel.

Looking up from a plate of greens,
I semi-explicate.
No-one's come in today

Out of the cold or the heat
From a car or a star.
We've kept the same faces

While spading up grace,
Sowing calm kisses
Where they might prosper.

The locks are stoic.
The lights are out.
We lie in bed and touch.

Our voices murmur.
Devotion is the strangest longing.
The one that is satisfied.

Baron Wormser "Scattered Chapters" Sarabande Books Kentucky 2008

Where I'm coming from

2011-04-05T00:19:00.000-07:00

I first came to live in Italy eight years ago and, like everything else, it wasn't forever. I wasn't yet published. I spoke not a word of Italian. I was living in a tiny, rural town where they disliked foreigners, and slowly roasted stolen sheep by burying them deep underground and burning a bonfire for days on top. I stayed in my tiny damp flat and wrote poems I wondered if anyone would ever read. I walked to the local mercato, and made brown faces snarl up with incomprehension. For days I wouldn't have an English conversation. I wrote poems. I wondered if I would ever be published. I broke out in a sweat in the post office as I approached the desk and the clerk flung stamps at me, grimaced and tossed her head.

St John of the Cross (yes, I mention him a lot) writes of the soul's dark night--the painful purgation a soul must go through to attain divine communion. As a person comes nearer to God they will feel, paradoxically, more alone and in the dark-- they are stripped of their rituals, their icons, their lucky charms and bumper stickers. They are up against the fact that we don't know what God is. A poet writing without a readership is the religious approaching God; one hand clapping; the tree falling in a forest with no one to hear. I wrote a poem, 'Late Sonata', which was later included in my first book 'The Point of Splitting', about Beethoven composing after he went deaf. It was a clear, unconscious examination of my own, unheard, unseen creativity.

Those first months and years in Italy, I'd sit at the family dinner table and felt as though I had a huge fat lip and suffered partial brain damage as I tried to converse, josh and scintillate in another language. The brilliant pinks and greens of Sardinia in the summer were oddly muted-- everything was filtered through a grubby grey mist of partial comprehension.

One day I was approached by two wonderful translators, Andrea Sirotti and Loredana Magazzeni. They began translating my poems into Italian, and reading them was the beginning of that grey mist clearing. (I also thought, 'Yikes, now the in-laws will understand it.') Talented translators are such a wonderful thing! They make literature fly between cultures-- and we all know how hard it is to do well. Their translations are so sensitive, so precise, so accurate and so musical that reading them is like hearing my thoughts murmured in Italian between two women sitting in the piazza at sundown; or recognising my emotions-- FINALLY-- in the terracotta roofs, the whine of vespas, the dull clang of the church bells.

I moved to Santa Marinella shortly thereafter, a little seaside town near to Rome where foreigners are tolerated, or even, very occasionally, liked. I somehow picked up the language-- though I always feel awkward speaking Italian, like a cello player suddenly given a fiddle. I make the wrong jokes; I place the wrong emphasis; I am often disastrously informal. Could I write in Italian, people ask? Could Yo-Yo Ma play the horn?

I'm a long way from London. I go back a lot. I do readings and interviews. I email people. But I'm an outsider. I got through the dark night (though the dark night is not linear; it rewinds; it comes back, especially at 3am). I wrote when the silence was so intense I was distracted by the creak of my pen. I'm an outsider, but I wanted to come out and say "I'm here." (After all, that's what writers, in essence, do). And maybe to talk about the dark-- between other fun, and featured poets. I'm also glad, in retrospect, that I didn't have Facebook or a blog, back then, to buffer the loneliness. Is there, in fact, such a thing as too much audience? By that I don't mean 'readership' (a writer can never have too many readers); but could poets today suffer from writing for a peergroup, a scene? The most obvious example of this would be in-jokes, in-styles. But there are other consequences of being part of the ultra-connected culture that is a huge part of the production-consumption mentality of quick-paced capitalism. Just a thought.

The lizards are out in the garden; the plum blossom is falling; the 5.30 bells are ringing for mass.

Here's the poem from those damp Sardinia days:

Late Sonata

Beethoven, alone, stone-deaf, hunched at the dumb piano
pounding: the notes came soft as mould in his hands.
His deep tonics evaporating to a muffled tap of felt
on wire--like fingertips drumming a silent face--
and the unentered rooms of his head echoed wildly
to their own singing.

Till he took a saw, hacked off the piano legs;
his playing soaked directly to the floor. The floor's
fizzing message telling him what his own slack eardrum
couldn't-- the whistling in the wind came undammed
and found its bone to beat against,
knew its own existence.

from "The Point of Splitting" by Sally Read, Bloodaxe Books 2005

The Body in the Well

2011-03-30T11:47:00.000-07:00

I have to hand it to editors who sift through hundreds of submissions on a weekly basis. I only had one brief stint on an editorial team, and that was at the South Dakota Review. I quickly learned that I get word-blind very quickly-- and that word-blindness is like snow-blindness: everything looks the same, you have no idea where you are--and if you make out the vague shape of a neon bar in your peripheral you head for it. So I have no big ideas about publishing poems by the week or the month on this blog. However, if I come across a poet (alive or dead, and not necessarily anglophone) who thrills in an unexpected way I'd like to give them space here. Gregory Leadbetter is one such poet, and one such thinker.

A collection of Leadbetter's poems, 'The Body in the Well', was published by Happenstance Press in 2007. His work is profoundly evocative, both in terms of mood, and the more distant literary past. In fact his forthcoming non-fiction book, 'Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination', promises to explicate this poet's preoccupations with Coleridge's poetry and 'the transnatural'. There's a Romantic, almost Hughesian edge to Leadbetter's work-- a fascination with the natural, and its relationship with the 'transnatural'; a metaphysical involvement with image and language. See below for a taster, and for links to both of his marvellous published works.

The Body in the Well

Even here, where the aquifers are spoken of
with a reverence strangers save for cathedrals,
it's rare to find a house like this, three stories
of gleaming limestone raised like a lantern
out of the rock, lit like a match when struck
by the stone of the moon, a pale flame.

The locals say the house was a dream of his,
climbing like a pyramid month on month:
building it was a way to forget. "Make
this dream your own," the auction-catalogue
tells the buying-public. "The property
includes a well" follows in a quieter font.

He would listen at the mouth in the floor
of the cellar, patient for the voice of the dark
in the sound of the stalagmites rising.
When he fell into its echoing heart
the waters gathered him with their song
and here, he remembered everything.

Gregory Leadbetter
The Body in the Well Happenstance Press 2007
http://happenstancepress.co.uk/joomla/index.php?optim=com_content&view=article&id=327:gregory-leadbetter&catid=29:poetsItemid=63

Also by Gregory Leadbetter:
Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination Palgrave 2011
http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=407315

Far-Near

2011-03-10T01:27:00.000-08:00

This blog is about poetry and what matters. It won't blog through daily detail, but it will be a place to see what I'm writing and working on, and to find out about what what's out there already. It, in turn, will publish genuine poems by poets living or dead. And discuss thought by people like Marguerite Porete.

Porete was a 14th century mystic who called God her FarNear: the tightest paradox of transcendence and immanence. Porete's mysticism is, in many ways, reminiscent of St John of the Cross, but Marguerite, an itinerant holy woman, took the search for God to heretical heights--trashing Reason, Free Will and the Church in the process--and was burned at the stake for her trouble. She, like St John of the Cross, and Simone Weil, was concerned with annihilating the self and becoming one with God (she would probably never have posted a status update on Facebook: "10.15 I have almost no ego left").

What has this to do with poetry or blogs? We live in an age of being regarded: being filmed, being read, being applauded or denounced in front of an audience. The idea of not needing what pop-psycholgists call 'positive strokes' is becoming archane; the idea of living without posting is becoming Luddite. But mystics and real poets have something in common-- the necessity of annihilating the ego. When Sylvia Plath found her "I", she simultaneously executed the ego of her earlier work. "And now I/ foam to wheat, a glitter of seas" she writes in "Ariel". The self becomes one with the objective correlative-- or the objective correlative becomes one with the self-- and the poem transcends the ordinary and becomes truth. These days more than ever, our egos can trip us up: our botox, our followers, our profile, our thumbnail, our status. If we're not careful we can become consumed by our own ego, and then lost in its subsequent distortions. That makes for bad poetry and a paucity of mystics and saints. As a poet I know how rare a real poem is; how a large part of any real poem has more in common with mysticism than workshops. Or maybe I've lived so long near Rome that the Catholic world has seeped under my skin and out of my bones. I've come to see that religion and poetry have more in common than most would care to admit.

I take the name of this blog, and some of Marguerite's rollicking, sensual, arrogant ideas, out the smoking cinders of her bonfire, with respectful fingers.

She described, for eg, two kinds of souls: the lost and the sad (which puts me in mind of Woody Allen's line in Annie Hall that there are two kinds of lives, the horrible and miserable). The lost souls obey Nature and Reason and love God. The sad do the same-- but they understand that they lack understanding; they understand that they will never understand enough to attain total Divine Union in this life.

This blog is named for the need in poetry to stay sad, to understand that we cannot understand.

Status update, 10.25: "I'm listening."

Ref: "The Mirror of Simple Souls" by Marguerite Porete; translated from the French, and introduced by Ellen L. Babinsky. Paulist Press, New York Mahwah 1993