Et in arcadia ego – Luke Wright’s What I Learned from Johnny Bevan

 

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Castle Howard, Yorkshire (photo credit: Wikipedia)

Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, published immediately post-war in 1945, elegises landscape and lifestyle. The outsider Charles Ryder is drawn towards the bohemian Sebastian Flyte and his house and family. Using flashback, post-war austerity throws the vanished colour of Brideshead into relief. Revisiting Brideshead on active service, Flyte sees that its farm ‘had been marked for destruction before the army came to it. Had there been another year of peace, there would have been no farmhouse, no wall, no apple trees. Already half a mile of concrete lay between bare clay banks, and on either side a chequer of open ditches showed where the municipal contractors had designed a system of drainage. Another year of peace would have made the place part of the neighbouring suburb’.

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Mersey Court, Wallasey (photo credit: Mark Harrison)

In What I Learned from Johnny Bevan, Luke Wright offers an inversion of Waugh’s novel. The poem centres upon The Grooms, four high-rise tower blocks, revisited by Nick, a music journalist. Waugh’s sombre novel mourns suburbia’s scarring of the landscape but Wright has his sights trained on gentrification, as The Grooms, according to the spiel of the Urbania music festival he is covering for the media, offers ”yurts / and bell tents on The Rec between the blocks.’ / Tilly flicks a switch, the flats light up. / ‘It’s all mod cons, of course: 4K TV, / Nespresso and Egyptian cotton bedding’. As a student, like Waugh’s Ryder, Nick had been tempted to romanticise The Grooms: ‘The sheer scale took my breath: the length of pipes / that scored each tower’s face; the symmetry / of staircase upon staircase upon staircase; / the tiny dot of someone on a landing / far, far above our heads, ten storeys high’ but Johnny Bevan, born and bred there, harbours no illusions: ‘It’s fucking skuzz. / The lifts don’t work. The whole place stinks of piss. / There’s needles in stairwells. Murders happen’.

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Photo credit: Wikipedia

 

The poem’s utopia is not a place but an idea – New Labour: ‘And so at last to 1997. / Well-shot of law, I lost whole afternoons / immersed in Modernism: Mansfield, Joyce and Woolf. / All soundtracked by the shaggy krautrock drone / of ‘Beetlebum’, the death of jaunty Britpop’. The souring of the youthful energy and idealism of this election becomes the bedrock of Johnny’s protest politics: ‘But will I vote for UKIP?? Probably not. // But they, at least, address the working class / and challenge Brussels. Why do we accept Brussels? / A fucking super-state that business loves? / Romanians all sleeping ten-a-bed / and working shitty eighteen hour shifts / in Skeggy or some other skuzzy shithole, / sending wages home. Some Worker’s Dream! / But when you call it out they  call you a racist! Bleeding-heart, hand-wringing liberal cunts / shaking your cyber-fists from market towns…’

This poem, published in February, is up-to-the minute stuff. Brexit looms large (there, I’ve said it now – multiple drafts of this review have been keeping the B word at bay, but it’s back) and What I Learned from Johnny Bevan is an eloquent articulation of the sentiments which have lead us to this fork in our path. Furthermore, Wright’s riffing with Brideshead Revisited, together with his Classical epic form, endows the poem with a uniquely mournful gravitas. Understanding what ordinary British people have lost – space, a political voice… hope – points towards the political and social challenges of a generation.

Buy What I Learned from Johnny Bevan from Penned in the Margins.

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Rachael Boast’s Void Studies

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I am honoured to have been asked to review the titles shortlisted for the 2016 TS Eliot Prize by the TS Eliot Foundation.

A few weeks ago, I started reviewing a title a week, and these reviews have been appearing in the foundation’s newsletters. Click here if you wish to subscribe to these.

The Foundation’s website currently carries a review of Rachael Boast’s Void Studies.

Buy Void Studies from Picador

I’m a Bitch – David Kinloch’s Some Women

This morning, I’m thrilled to fill the guest blogger slot on Anthony Wilson’s poetry blog, where I write about the Renaissance poet, Aemilia Lanyer. Her indignant refusal to roll over and take it like a woman changed me, and changed my reading habits.

Lanyer’s subversive, ironic, yet reverent engagement with her Biblical sources reminds me of David Kinloch’s HappenStance pamphlet, Some Women. It’s two series of monologues: Old Testament and New Testament voices. ‘I’m a bitch, I’m a lover / I’m a child, I’m a mother / I’m a sinner, I’m a saint / I do not feel ashamed’ sang Meredith Brooks in 1997 – casting all women as nameless functionaries of an overwhelming and often contradictory list of duties. In Kinloch’s hands, the unnamed Cain’s Wife had it no different: ‘I was a tiller, a sower, a hoer, a sewer, / a server, a scyther, a shearer, a reaper, / a planter, a mower, a herder, a milker, / a minder, a plougher, a thresher, a gleaner, / with no time for a name of my own’. It’s not just the overwhelming range of physical labour here. It’s the fact that it’s all agricultural labour – work that ties people to the land yet, with her husband’s murder of his brother, Abel, she will, presumably, wander the Earth alongside her other half, blameless yet equally defined by the mark of Cain. Needless to say, her fate doesn’t merit a mention in the good book. It’s also worth mentioning that Kinloch’s Scots wordplay is a hoot: ‘a hoer’ – a whore? Later, we’ll encounter Mosaic tablets but will think of the sugary Scottish confection instead.

By the end of the pamphlet, in First Letter of the Hebrew Women to St Paul, Kinloch’s sentiments sound a lot like Lanyer’s: ‘Hebrew Women, apostles of Christ Jesus to Paul, / alleged saint, notorious scribbler: grace to you / and peace from God our Father. Now look here: // Adam could have said ‘no thanks’ or ‘apples / disagree with me’. He didn’t. He had a bite / as well. So he was deceived. Just like Eve. // We’re equal and get used to it’. The internal rhyme of ‘deceived’ and ‘Eve’ invites the reader to see Eve as so culpable that her crime has entered the language. It’s a playful false etymology, as ‘deceived’ has a Latin root. The OED says that ‘the literal sense of Latin dēcipĕre was apparently to catch in a trap, to entrap, ensnare; hence, to catch by guile; to get the better of by fraud; to cheat, mislead’ but I like Kinloch’s new vista on this word better.

Buy David Kinloch’s Some Women from HappenStance

 

Blue Dress: Ryan Van Winkle’s The Good Dark

Simultaneously existing at the poles of  purity and perversity, there’s a delicious, unresolvable tension in the music of Depeche Mode. Take Blue Dress from 1990’s Violator – ‘Put it on’, the speaker commands. ‘Can you believe / Something so simple / Something so trivial / Makes me a happy man?’ Is this a request, or something debased, fetishistic, demanding? Martin Gore’s fragile vocals counterpoint the band’s electronic sound and are also at odds with that demand to ‘Put it on’.

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Arabian lamp (photo credit: Pixabay)

Ryan Van Winkle’s second collection, The Good Dark, opens in style with The Duke in Pines. Listen to Ryan reading the poem on the Scottish Poetry Library podcast – it’s good – but, on the page, additional vistas of uncertainty and unease open before you: ‘I always put you in a dress / you never wore but I used to touch /           every day, getting my shirt or tie’. Perhaps ‘I always put you in a dress’ is an idiomatic version of ‘I prefer to remember you wearing a dress’ but there’s a 50 Shades undercurrent here too (for me anyway). There’s something literal, domineering and more comfortable with old school gender roles. Then there’s the next line – ‘you never wore but I used to touch’. Why was this dress never worn? Was it a party dress in a relationship devoid of parties, or was it just unflattering and forgotten? Forgotten by her, but not by him. Why touch it? There’s something obsessive and fetishistic here – or perhaps it’s a talisman – a secret, hidden source of strength, a symbolic point of connection between the couple. And then, over the next glorious line break, we read that the dress is touched ‘every day’ – magnifying those obsessive, ritual associations before Van Winkle qualifies and transforms the phrase with the workaday ‘getting my shirt or tie’. Meaning plays and bounces across the surface of the poem like the iridescence of silk. It’s a tense, dark, obsessive scrap of memory, still rubbing away – at an object now stored in the mind like an Arabian lamp, hoping that, in time, the genie can be released.

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Annular eclipse, eastern New Mexico (photo credit: Kevin Baird)

Last week, I was reading Katy Evans-Bush’s collection of essays, Forgive the Language, where, considering Keats’ idea of negative capability, she invites her reader to consider absence, to consider writing the space around the subject. One thrust of Van Winkle’s collection is to offer untitled poems which exist in a relationship with their epigraphs and one of these poems opens with Nathaniel Hawthorne: ‘There is an hour to come when all of us shall cast aside our veils‘. We’re back with that dress hanging in the wardrobe, with added issues of sanctity and taboo: ‘To think I once called the curtain // a veil, and once I touched / the flesh beneath the cloth / when it was the cloth / I should have touched. // The veil was no window. / The pane and the clouds / beyond the pane will move / from where they are // and come back again / when the birds have changed / the scenery, the sky / and the clouds in the sky’. The view through a window is free and fluid, whereas the bride beneath the veil has fixed herself to her husband. There are big ideas and cosmic laws at work here, as the speaker banks upon the dependability of the  Earth’s rotation. However, ‘there is only a blink / when a cloth billows back / to reveal a magician’s dove. Pay attention / to the flap of the clouds // rushing out to reveal a hole / the shape of the sun’. Van Winkle offers us the inverse of every love poem, of Romeo’s teenage certainty: ‘But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? / It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!’ In Van Winkle’s troubling, surreal universe, we’re presented with catastrophic violence, with a solar system in jeopardy and, at its heart, a void where life-giving warmth should be. It’s a dramatic image and defines things through absence, loss and space along the lines that Evans-Bush discusses.

Van Winkle’s universe is a dark one, aching with loss. In his hands, language is tense, and unstable and thrilling.

Buy The Good Dark from Penned in the Margins

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Katy Evans-Bush’s Forgive the Language: Essays on Poets and Poetry

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You see Katy’s mugshot every time you visit this blog. Look at the masthead – top row, on the right, between Tom Paulin and Ted Hughes. Yep. That’s pretty much what I think of Katy Evans-Bush. Plenty of poets had a claim to that spot – Plath, Christina Rossetti and Aemelia Lanyer were all contenders. (I’ll be writing about Lanyer for Anthony Wilson’s blog later this month). However, Katy’s blog, Baroque in Hackney, was and still is a one-off. When Poor Rude Lines started, all I could find online was self-published poetry. Discovering Baroque in Hackney was a shot in the arm. Katy is disarmingly well read, humane and infectiously engaging.

It’s a thrill to read these essays from our foremost blogger. It’s testament to her talent and a validation of blogging in general. Flicking through these essays on Negative Capability, Dylan Thomas, plagiarism and poetic metre, Katy’s significant contribution to British and international poetry becomes clear. You could set your watch by those tedious little posts asking whether poetry is dead. Meanwhile, with characteristic chutzpah, Baroque in Hackney has just been getting on with the business of creating the sort of online space and conversation that poetry lacked but needed. Erudite – yes. Academic – no (well, not in that way). Baroque in Hackney is for us, for general readers, and surely continues to bring new audiences to contemporary poetry.

Katy’s essay, ‘The Poem is a Question: Keats, Negative Capability and Us’, serves as an illustration of some of this book’s qualities. It’s grounded in the here and now, in a real evening, in the writing of a real poem and, with characteristic, joyful bloodymindedness, interrogates and rejects creative writing’s tired old dogmas:

     Write what you know. That’s what we hear. Even schoolchildren are given this advice, whose whole job in the world is to be curious and find everything out. But how do you even know what you know? And really, what does anyone know?
The other adage, which crops up even more frequently is this one: Show, don’t tell. Generations of writers have been given this advice. Presumably it applies after the writer has figured out what they do and don’t know.

And then, in a thrilling leap, Keats enters the ring. An essay on Negative Capability at keatsian.co.uk explains the Latin root of ‘doubt’ as ‘being in two minds’ – a state of uncertainty. (Check out Gina Cooke’s excellent Ted-Ed video – posted above). Katy develops the idea:

So, Negative Capability is not about a capability as such, and it isn’t about being ‘negative’. The phrase can possibly be understood in the light of two other ways in which we use the word ‘negative’. One of them is the photographic negative – which contains all the information necessary for the picture, but does not yet present it – and the other is the concept of negative space. That is the space that surrounds the subject of the picture; it’s everything except the thing you think you’re looking at, and it defines the thing you’re looking at. If all you are doing is ‘telling about’ or ‘showing’ the thing you think you’re looking at, you are missing (as Keats seems to be telling us) most of the information.

Then Katy gets all the tools out of the box, reading her ideas against Keats himself (Ode on Melancholy), Philip Gross’ Elderly Iceberg off the Esplanade and against Elizabeth Bishop’s Cirque d’Hiver. The close reading and the range of poets cited is thrilling and, when she feels it, she’s prepared to go out on a limb. Here she is on that Elizabeth Bishop poem describing a toy circus horse bearing a dancer on his back:

In the third stanza, a surprise: ‘He has a formal, melancholy soul’… More than this, ‘He feels her pink toes dangle toward his back / along the little pole / that pierces both her body and her soul’. It is quite possible to imagine that Bishop didn’t even see this coming, till it came.

With one notable exception, I’ve had to accept that my local pub and my life aren’t filled with hordes of people reading and discussing poetry. Blogs and blogging have gone a long way to filling this need and I owe Katy Evans-Bush my thanks. If you’re as yet unacquainted with Baroque in Hackney, head on over – and buy a copy of Forgive the Language while you’re at it.

Buy Forgive the Language from Penned in the Margins

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Helena Nelson’s How (Not) to Get your Poetry Published

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You’ve never seen a soul playing football. You never read about it. You are unaware of its rules, or even of the fact that it’s a team game. Yet, intent upon a professional career, you travel to Old Trafford, White Hart Lane, or some such, and wait at the front door ready to impress the manager with your skills…

Many of those who would see their poetry in print test the relatively saintly patience of their would-be publishers and it’s worth asking yourself for a moment why anyone would take the trouble to publish poetry: imagine the pestering, the pleading, the mad, and the downright rude emails; imagine the stress of the financial risks; the challenge of being distributed; of being reviewed. I often think of setting up as a publisher of poetry – Poor Rude Press – but it won’t be for money. What’s stopping me at the moment is the certain knowledge that it will steal the food from my children’s mouths. One day though…

If you write poetry and want to see it in print then, God’s sake, bag yourself a copy of Helena Nelson’s book, How (Not) to Get your Poetry Published. Helena’s the one woman whirlwind behind HappenStance and, as such, she’s seen it all. There’s a disarming, self-effacing quality to this book. Helena’s had two collections published and has ‘made all the painful mistakes a person can make […] Here’s a confession. Twenty-five years ago I put a series of poems together and sent them to Faber & Faber, whose address I had found in the Writers’ & Artists’ Year Book. I had no idea of the poetry editor’s name. I probably wrote ‘Dear Sir/Madam’. Oh dear’. So, Helena’s on your side. Hers is a voice of wisdom, experience and, yes, of opinion – but motivated purely by a desire to help poets and poetry.

It’s all here: the hows and the whys of submissions to publishers, to magazines, online, self-publishing, social networks, blogs and poetry readings. If you’re just starting out, I can think of few better guides than Helena Nelson. Check out the HappenStance blog to experience the welcoming qualities of her prose.

(Can someone get this woman an OBE for her services to UK poetry??)

Buy How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published here

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Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors: Tamar Yoseloff’s A Formula For Night: New and Selected Poems

For the Love of God

Damien Hirst, ‘For the Love of God’, 2007, platinum, diamonds and human teeth, 171, 127, 190 mm (photo credit: Ilona Gaynor)

The optical illusions at work in St Peter’s Basilica aim, unbelievably, to create a more intimate space. When a building’s the size of an aircraft hanger, the roof’s going to feel pretty high, so the three tiers of statues running around the walls trick the eye. The second row are a third larger than the bottom row and the top row are a third larger again. Viewed from the ground, everything’s in proportion, the roof appears to be brought down a little and the overwhelming architecture is tamed. Tricks like this are at work all over the building and the fact that they are necessary illustrates just how awesome this church is. Therefore, I’m left speechless by tourists’ reactions to the space. The crowd pressed against the plexiglass protecting the Pietà is a jab of the elbow away from war. Salvoes of flashlight bounce uselessly from the glass, ruining the photos… and the view. As the most solemn moment of Mass is celebrated, tourists shout over their own noise. Filling the frames of their retina screens with their own faces, Michelangelo is all but squeezed out. How humanity achieves such narcissism in a spaces like this beats me.

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Masaccio, Crucifixion, C. 1462, panel, 83cm x 300cm, Museo di Capodimonte (photo credit: Wikipedia)

The hospital looms large in the final ‘New Poems’ section of Tamar Yoseloff’s A Formula For Night: New and Selected Poems – and there’s a rawness to them too. ‘Skull’ opens with ‘A middle-aged man, black jeans, spiky hair, / black tee: a skull emblazoned on his chest – / symbol of Black Sabbath, or Napalm Death, / one of those metal bands that wears the reaper // lightly – at odds with daffs and furry kittens / around intensive care, where he now sits / while the skull on his chest winks and grins; / and I think of Masaccio’s crucifixion.’ The black jeans, the black tee, the reference to black in the band name ‘Black Sabbath’ reduce death to a brand as well as to a band. It’s this laziness, the crassness that’s offensive.

In ‘Clear Water’, she articulates the strangeness of industrialised healthcare, operating with vertiginous economies of scale. ‘She must have been his daughter, the woman / visiting the man in the bed next to my mother, // our lives rubbing together in the glare of the HDU, / a thin curtain between us’. ‘Rubbing together’ implies both warmth and friction and, at the point of contact, the improvised intimacy of necessity.

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Michaelangelo, The Last Judgement, 1535 – 1541, Capella Sistina (photo credit: wha.hu)

In ‘Hospital Time’, ‘The body breaks and bruises and still it ticks, / a tarnished watch. Never the right time. / Never enough’. The present continuous ‘breaks’ and ‘bruises’ suggests that to live is to break. Often. All the time. Yoseloff gives us a full first line. The next is fractured by a caesura but, against that full stop in the middle of the line, the poem picks itself up and carries on but the next line doesn’t make it past the caesura. On the hospital campus, we see the inactivity of despair. Yoseloff’s tableau makes the hospital look like a scene from Dante, or Michelangelo’s ‘The Last Judgement’: ‘The one-legged smokers at the entrance / Stoke the furnace of their disappearance, // the woman in the crowded lift / cries into her hands’. Each image, each inpatient is hermetically sealed into its own stanza – a confinement – a premonition of the ultimate interment, perhaps. remind me of a However, the poem’s list like structure suggests death’s comprehensiveness. As Eliot writes, looking at another river: ‘so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many’. Everyone is waiting it out. Even the nurses ‘gaze into their phones’ with the lobotomised thousand yard stare which defines our era. We’re left with the image of the drip: ‘Her little bag of blood. Not red, / more rust, like the dirty river / through the window’ pouring away like the sands of time.

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Lace (Photo credit: MAKY_OREL)

Yoseloff’s New Poems are sombre. 2007’s ‘Silk’, from the collection Fetch, enjoys a tactile eroticism with its ‘black silk slick / under your fingers / as you undo those // fiddly little buttons / one by one and open me’ whereas the new poem, ‘Lace’, eschews its erotic possibilities as ‘I drape myself in lace, / pretty trappings of the widow, / that hide a tangled mess / of arteries and veins – a mess of pain.’

If you know this blog, then you’ll already know that I admire Yoseloff’s work. A Formula for Night is a great way to get your hands substantial selections from four major collections, some sonnets from the 2012 Ted Hughes Award shortlisted Formerly and, of course, the new poems. Some of Vici MacDonald’s photographs are, thankfully, published alongside the sonnets but, if you’ve never seen the handsome Hercules Editions of Formerly before then, for my money, you’d still do well to bag yourself a copy here.

Buy A Formula for Night from Seren here.

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Claudia Rankine’s Citizen

CitizenMy final review for the TS Eliot Prize is now live on the Poety Book Society’s Poetry Portal – and what a book to finish with.

As I left work one bright September evening, Front Row snapped into life, mid segment, as I turned the ignition.

With no prior knowledge of either book or author, I heard Claudia Rankine read from Citizen. Her delivery – the gentlest of deliveries – hit as hard as anything I have ever heard.

 

I decided to buy and share this book with my colleagues at school long before she had finished speaking.

If you haven’t read this one yet, bag a copy now – it’s timely and necessary.

I’ll be tweeting from the awards ceremony on Sunday evening.

Buy Citizen from Penguin Books

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Listen to Claudia Rankine read from and discuss Citizen on Front Row
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Watch Claudia Rankine’s superb Lannan Foundation interview with Saskia Hamilton

Rebecca Perry’s Beauty / Beauty

Rebecca PerryThe Poetry Book Society have posted another of my reviews on their Poetry Portal, this time on Rebecca Perry’s Beauty / Beauty.

Beauty / Beauty meditates upon some of life’s binary oppositions with deft clarity and simplicity – all of which is achieved with sympathetic technique and memorable language.

Check out the collection on the Bloodaxe website.

 

 

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The Poetry Trust

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Photo credit: Barry Marsh (Flickr)

Have you visited the Poetry Trust’s website recently? In my opinion, it showcases the democratic internationalism of the Trust’s vision and I only hope that something is being done to save and relocate some of these exceptional resources for future generations of readers and writers.

If you’re involved in education – whether of the young, or of adults keen to read and write a few more poems for themselves – then I recommend that you spend some time reviewing the Trust’s online legacy…

Sooner or later, the Trust’s online hosting service will demand cash to keep them online for another year and, at that point, my guess is that the website will be closed.

The Poetry Channel

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There are some incredible readings and valuable interviews on the Poetry Channel. For me, Alice Oswald’s interview with Ariane Koek, ‘Poetry and Landscape’, is an important teaching tool and was especially useful when sharing the poetry of Thomas Hardy with A level students. Other readings and interviews have offered great personal pleasure; if you missed them, check out Seamus Heaney’s 2010 reading and interview, and Thomas Lux’s Aldeburgh Backchat.

These interviews and readings allowed the Poetry Trust to democratise their flagship festival, to share the best with the wider world. My hope is that these precious recordings will find a home elsewhere – they could offer a lasting legacy, bringing new audiences to poetry.

The Poetry Toolkit

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Schools are cash cows and an industry, dedicated to the creation of classroom resources (regardless of quality), seeks to monetise our professional fears and insecurities. In English departments across the land, you’ll see posh ring binders chock full of untouched photocopiable resources to assist with the teaching of poetry. Needless to say, they all cost top dollar.

The Poetry Trust created The Poetry Toolkit: foolproof recipes for teaching poetry in the classroom. There’s an acute need for this sort of stuff. As I’ve mentioned before, Andrew Motion’s research indicates that UK English teachers lack confidence in this area and the Poetry Toolkit is a great resource, one I hope someone can adopt and find a new shop window for.

Request that the British Library archives the website

We can ask the British Library to archive the Poetry Trust website. Thanks to Josephine Corcoran for this sensible suggestion.

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***

I would like to thank the Trust for its support of this blog.

When Poor Rude Lines started, I was looking for readers – for a validation of the project. A number of people were encouraging, despite the fact that the blog was months old and contained a handful of posts. Mat Merritt’s Polyolbion, The Poetry Archive and the Poetry Foundation gave me welcome publicity. Nell Nelson at HappenStance and the poets Matthew Stewart and Olivia Byard have been stalwart supporters from the first and Naomi Jaffa, then the Trust’s Director, made it clear that she was considering me as a possibility to fill Katy Evans-Bush’s fabulous shoes and blog for the Aldeburgh Festival. From that point on, I was reading and reviewing regularly, with a clear sense of audience and purpose.

Naomi’s endorsement was typical of the Trust: it would have been so easy to run it like a personal FIFAdom. However, the Trust developed talent wherever it could find it (the Aldeburgh Eight) and its policy of refusing to invite a poet to return to the Aldeburgh Festival to read a second time within ten years kept it fresh – as did its internationalism.

I am a johnny-come-lately – my association with the Poetry Trust was, sadly, all too short. But I am gutted. Gutted, gutted, gutted. Measured by any standard, the Poetry Trust was an exceptional arts organisation and it will be sorely missed.

Michael, Naomi and Dean, your graft, sweat and tears achieved something spectacular. I told Naomi that I would vent my spleen but, having taken some time to think about it, I would just like to say ‘thank you’.