Tate Modern
This is a test because until now I’ve been unable to print poems in single spacing, but now a lovely lady from WordPress has told me how to do it.
Tate Modern
I’m not one for surrealism.
I want stories and common sense,
not these melting men in glass cages
(though at times I know how they feel)
nor shapes of paint that want
to be body bits. In theory,
I understand how putting disparate
objects together makes a synthesis
both startling and insightful.
But – to be truthful –
a bird that wants to be a machine,
or a machine that claims
(on its too small label)
to be a couple making love
do not say much to my pedestrian soul.
So imagine my surprise
when a lobster takes my order for tea
in the café and asks with insouciance
if I want WD40 with my scone and jam.
And when it comes it’s served
on a crisp bed of shredded German newspaper,
and the cream’s melting like a Dali clock.
July workshop at Cherington
It occurs to me that people on the List might be interested in the workshops that our group here in the Cotswolds take part in once a month. Some of us have recently done workshops with quite famous poets at Ledbury and have come back with the news that the ones we do for ourselves are much better.
This month, our friend Marianne, who is a painter as well as a fine poet, led us off with small squares of colour that she had prepared, I got one that was orange and acid yellow and kind of mauve, and another that was sludgy green/yellow/umber. We had to make lists of anything that these colours made us think of. This was my orange/yellow/mauve list:
miniskirts
geranium maderense
sunset
lonely hearts ads
music festival
Mozart
and then some adjectives:
clashing
mauve
aniline
fiery
fruity
This led to short “paragraphs”, Marianne asked for but I think most of us went straight into poem mode:
He scans the evening paper
for the ad he wrote.
“WLTM fun-loving, 20-30, GSOH.”
Mozart dances from the speakers
in the corner of his bed-sit.
Aniline strings of sound
run off across the sunset
over the park. He dreams of miniskirts
and thighs in multi-coloured tights.
He finds the words, cuts them from the page,
and carefully sets light to them.
We then read a load of poems which depended or focused on colour. By general consent, the star of the collection was ‘Almost Alabaster’ by Philip Gross. The we split off for an hour of quiet writing.
I produced two pieces, both of them influenced by the exam papers I had just finished marking.
The first one. (Google Robin Lakoff if the reference means nothing to you).:
Lakoff grins from the back of the room,
as I test her claim on my class.
Daisy wears a tee-shirt that’s moulded
to her post-adolescent breasts,
in shades of cherries coming into ripeness,
apples rounding off summer under Keatsian skies,
dark nectarines in a Spanish market.
“Write down,” I tell them, “the colour you see.”
The girls read out first. “Cerise.” “Plum.”
“Crimson.” Then the boys.
“Red.” “Red.” “Red.” “Red.”
You see, smirks Lakoff.
Not really going anywhere, but a bit of fun. Then a slightly more serious one.
Working for Dulux
Today we must set about the greens.
Green, naturally, is out. We must ransack
nature for her richness. Grass is possible –
but only with additions: sea, meadow, mown.
Think foliage – pine will work. Spruce?
Maybe. Sycamore? Probably not. Monkey puzzle?
Stop pissing about. But how to distinguish
each particular variation and add value…
Leaf and petiole stand ready to do duty
across the chart. Forest and grove and copse.
A hazel hedge welcomes spring with tenderness
and softest notes of surge and sap.
Water’s more for blue, but consider mountain pools,
with sedge and peaty darkness. Green lingers,
pulls the eye down into rain-fed depths.
But would you put it on your walls?
Think outside the can. Take us somewhere else.
Is contemplation green? Or afternoon?
Claim April for the greens. And Manet.
String quartets and parallelograms.
Parisian cafes in the Bois de Boulogne,
summer nights in Arizona, Massachusetts,
the thought of never seeing Portugal again,
the taste of Chablis… Thank you, gentlemen.
Ledbury
Just back from two days at the Ledbury Poetry Festival, so some thoughts about things I’ve seen and heard.
First, the place itself is really rather special. A market town that the mainstream commercial part of Britain seems to have overlooked. Apart from a Greggs, there were no national chain shops in the High Street at all. An independent bookshop (which of course was making the most of having a poetry festival in town), several good cafes/restaurants, market stalls on the pavements and so on. The kind of place which you find in France but which I thought was long extinct in Britain.
The architecture is special too. Lots of seventeenth century half-timbering – several on large hotels and such like. An enormous Victorian building with a tower called the Elizabeth Barrett Browning Institute, now housing the library.
The main festival venue is up a narrow cobbled lane where sofas have been put out for weary poets to recline on, complete with cushions embroidered POETRY FESTIVAL.
But what a white, middle-class, middle-aged affair it all was! We all seemed to be clones of each other as we sat there and listened to people just like ourselves reading poetry that we could relate to because it was just like the poetry that we write ourselves.
Which sounds as if I hated it. I didn’t at all, but I did end up longing for something a bit challenging.
So, what did I go to? I had booked two readings and a workshop. One reading was by Penelope Shuttle and three ladies she had brought up from Cornwall. The other was by Philip Gross and Gillian Clarke. The workshop was to be led by an American poet of whom I knew nothing called Dan Chiasson. I still know nothing about him because he was summoned urgently back to the US and his workshop was cancelled. This meant that I had £15 credit at the box office. I spent that on a reading by 3 “New Voices”, a presentation of Gregory Award winners with Roddy Lumsden and (oh how I regretted this) a reading by Jenny Joseph and Elizabeth Good.
The highlights: Sian Hughes and Sarah Holland-Batt in the New Voices reading. Sarah impressed me so much I went out and bought her book. She’s Australian but living in Europe and I thought she genuinely brought a fresh eye to bear.
Sarah Howe – one of the Gregory award winners. Part Chinese, she also had a fresh voice and outlook and I shall look out for work by her when it gets published, as it undoubtedly will.
Phil Brown – another award winner. Engagingly, he confided that he was skiving off school for the day, having just qualified as a teacher. His reading was more of a performance than the others and the audeicne much enjoyed it.
The real highlight was Philip Gross and Gillian Clarke’s reading. He read from his book The Water Table that won the TS Eliot prize. Several people in the Cherignton group are good friends of Philip’s so I kind of knew what to expect. He has a most engaging way of reading: quite quiet but holding the attention seemingly without effort.
Gillian Clarke, after a fair few pseudo-poets, is the genuine article. A penetrating eye and clear diction. No obscurity for the sake of it. Important things to say and said clearly. And she reads like a professional. Well, I suppose that’s what she is.
Both she and Philip read poems of theirs which had been published in that morning’s Guardian.
The low-light. Jenny Joseph and Elizabeth Good. They both read from long, rambling mythologically based work that I thought was simply dreadful. Erotic without being arousing – over articulated in the reading – local writing group on a wet Wednesday…
Derek Walcott – White Egrets
I’ve just finished reading this book and thought I would try to get down some thoughts about it.
Firstly, it’s organised in an unusual way. All the poems are approximately sonnet length, though not really sonnets, and there are some which link together into short-ish sequences. Except that each poem/sequence in the book is numbered – 1 -54. So are we meant to read them as a single entity?
It doesn’t really work like that as the subject matter jumps around geographically, from the Caribbean to various parts of Europe and America; there are elegies, an epithalamion, letters to fellow poets. But still the reader tries to find links between these disparate elements.
The most obvious one is the image of the white egrets, which transmute in some poems, especially towards the end, into the white sails of boats on a blue ocean. Partly this is familiar Walcott territory, and partly something new.
The other unifying ‘drift’ rather than theme is his frank enjoyment of women, with whom he seems to have fallen in love an inordinate number of times. Given the controversy about the Oxford professorship last year, this isn’t much of a surprise, and he is never less than joyfully appreciative of women and their various charms.
All in all, I’m not sure how I feel about the collection – any more than I thought the Guardian reviewer was back before Christmas. Individual poems are very, very beautiful and his sense of place and person is wonderful.
Severn Bore
DIY now mostly finished and Sunday’s Cherington workshop produced some reasonable ideas, so I may be back on track.
Yesterday went to Epney to see the Severn Bore, expected to be the biggest for many years. Expectation was dampened slightly by the fact that there is already a lot of water in the river – and there was no wind to drive it up the estuary.
However, it was pretty spectacular, though I’ve seen comments from people who were disappointed. The group of us met up in good time and had a reasonable spot to view it from. Once it was past, we adjourned to The Anchor for bacon rolls and coffee. Sat talking for rather too long and when we emerged we discovered that the tide was now within a few feet of the top of the bank. Higher than I’ve ever seen it.
Walked along the bank for a couple of miles enjoying the sunshine and the spectacular river, which must in places have been all but a mile wide. The rubbish floating in it showed when the tide stopped flowing, stood still and then started to ebb.
A wonderful day and great to be with old friends. Lynn was glad to get out of the house as D. is very ill indeed and, I suspect, a difficult patient. Kidded Pete that next month we were going to walk the traverse from Black Mountains to Black Mountain. He went white at the thought!
My pictures of the bore are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/33118075@N05/sets/72157623542223372/
Block
“Life like a dome of many-coloured glass stains the white radiance of eternity” wrote Shelley.
Well, there ain’t been much white radiance round here this last month or more. And rather a lot of stained glass life going on.
L’s operation and recovery have been taking up a great deal of time and emotional energy. The first day she was home I was really snappy and and she got really really irritated and it was pretty hellish all round. Since then things have been heaps better, but she still needs quite a lot of attention. The whole situation of a partner in hospital and then recovering at home is just made for poetry. Last time I wrote a few pieces – but this time nothing.
Maybe because we had the builders in at the same time. We were having to make decisions about the extenstion and furnishing and so on and it’s just astonishing how much of you that kind of thing takes up. Now Dave and Martin have gone and I’m left with the decorating and getting it generally habitable. Maybe there are poems to be written about this situation, but if there are they escape me at the moment.
I did go to the workshop at the end of January, and I had intended to write it up here, for anyone who was interested, but it was based on listening to music and I really only wrote the poem that had been at the back of mind before I went anyway, so it wasn’t terribly productive. Maybe I should stop whining and just scribble something down. Maybe writing this is a necessary first step.
SK contacted me back-channel from the List to ask about metre, of all things. I enjoyed putting an answer to his question together and it made me realise that I can do this. I just have to get down and do it.
This afternoon Val Williams funeral. The church was crammed to bursting. I think there must be a kind of regional variation in funerals. At home (meaning in Devon) very few funeral would be that big. But here in S Glos it seems to be the norm. There were young men there who remembered me from school and who can only have been there because they were friends with her sons. Which wouldn’t qualify me for going to anyone’s funeral. It was nice that they asked after K and R. How useful the word ‘partner’ is when talking about K’s life. They can assume what they like about ‘partner’s’ gender!
The latest
I meant to write more frequently than this, but life gets in the way.
Our builders are back after three days missed because of the snow. That’s all gone now, so Dave and Martin are back and hoping to press on to the finish now. We spent yesterday measuring and working out how to decorate and make use of our extra space. Everyone on this estate feels like they own a piece of Dave. He’s a terrific bricklayer and because everyone drives past our house he picks up no end of work just by being here. Just so long as he doesn’t get distracted from our extension.
No word from Robert about a job. Getting worried for him.
L’s birthday on Wednesday so I’m off to Bath this a.m. to buy a token for the spa. I hope she will like that.
Following a hint from Bob Cooper on the List I’ve found babelfish and got it to translate one of my poems into Spanish and then into French and then back into English. One of the Listers said it was like Beckett. Strangely, I’d been contemplating attempting a Becket-type piece.
Walking
Yesterday was our monthly walk.
We assembled in Avebury and walked up on to the Ridgeway. There was just a dusting of snow, the sun shone and the wind was very slight. Altogether a perfect day for walking in winter and the light across Wiltshire when we reached the top was just perfect.
One person suggested that it would be better if it was clearer, but actually the very slight haze across the hills gave a kind of magical glow to the whole scene.
The Ridgeway itself is more suggestive of the lure of travel than any motorway. The track disappears off in both directions and it’s easy to imagine ancient drovers with their beasts slowly heading for London.
Back in Avebury, the stones were covered in fresh snow which had fallen as we came down the hill.
Altogether a terrific day’s walk. Today it would be impossible to get to Avebury.
Torcross
I’ve been mulling over in my mind, while painting the downstairs cloakroom, the first poem in my projected Beaches series.
I want to bring together my afternoon with Maggie Campbell at Strete Gate with the D-Day landing rehearsal and the deaths of those American soldiers. The only link is the word ‘practice’, but I’m fairly certain that the conjunction of ideas will work. It could be that what is needed is a form to give some discipline to the ideas, which are still fairly incoherent.
I could also bring in Sunday afternoons when the bomb squad comes to blow up shells that have been found. Or the dredged up tank in the car park. Or the fact that relatives had to leave their farms so that the Yanks could practice D-Day landings.
But this is making the poem probably way too long. I can hear comments about trying to include too much stuff.
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