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…
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