Tuesday Poem: Rae Armantrout - Making Poetry out of Crisis

Poets are expected to be contemporary and some even expect poetry to be subversive and offer solutions to (or at least analysis of) social turmoil.  Most of us remember, or carry around, scraps of poetry that have offered comfort or support in uncertain times, and some of us were maimed for life by having to learn the Charge of the Light Brigade at primary school!  But writing overtly 'political' poetry is very difficult and the results can be dire.   I found this fascinating video (link below) on the Poetry Foundation site.  Rae Armantrout, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, talks about how and why she writes about contemporary situations and reads some of the poems from her new collection 'Money Shot'.

The title has references only regular viewers of pornography might recognise - in these poems the financial 'exploitation and greed' that has ruined us all is identified as a different kind of pornography.  One reviewer writes that Rae Armantrout's poems  'work off the sleazy undercurrent of contempt and lazy petulance which one sees, or reads and hears expressed everywhere these days. The underlying quest of Armantrout's critique of our language is to identify and tag those elements which threaten to compromise our potential for goodness, or fulfillment, or ease.'  The poems themselves are deceptively spare.

Money Talks

1

Money is talking

to itself again

in this season's

bondage

and safari look,

its closeout camouflage.

Hit the refresh button

and this is what you get,

money pretending

that its hands are tied.

2

On a billboard by the 880,

money admonishes,

"shut up and play."

Interview and Readings here: - 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/video/313

For more wonderful Tuesday Poetry, please check out the Tuesday Poem website by clicking here.

Tuesday Poem: Martin Figura's 'Whistle'

 This poem comes from the compelling narrative sequence of poems 'Whistle' by Martin Figura, published by Arrowhead Poetry.  For a full review of the collection and the context of the poem please click here.

Strange Boy

We believe there is a one in ten chance
the boy will inherit it from his father
The boy is top in maths
He is near the bottom of the class in everything else
He writes wild imaginative essays with little regard
for spelling or grammar
He cries easily
The boy’s house is Belmont 47 (a prime number)
We know he steals, but are letting it go for now
We also know he smokes
He pulls a face when he concentrates
The other boys have noticed this
The boy is left here during half-term breaks
He occupies himself with dice games of cricket and football
that can take days to complete
They are too complex for anyone else to participate in
The boy maintains a number of statistical graphs
He is a good goalkeeper
He has made some friends through football
He has invented an elaborate past
He carries a 1966-67 News of the World Football Year Book at all times
Father William lets him complete his pools coupon
He has had some small successes

Copyright Martin Figura
reproduced with permission.
www.martinfigura.co.uk

Martin Figura was born in Liverpool in 1956 and works part-time at the Writers’ Centre, Norwich and as a photographer. He is a member of the poetry ensemble The Joy of 6. A spoken word version of his new collection Whistle (Arrowhead Press, 2010) is being toured by Apples and Snakes. He is Chair of the Café Writers Live Literature organisation in Norwich.

For a review of the whole collection please visit http://www.kathleenjonesdiary.blogspot.com

For  more stunning Tuesday Poems please visit the website at  http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Tuesday Poem: Norman Nicholson

Well, the rabbit is out of the hat and in full view of the audience.  I’d been keeping quiet about the subject of the new biography until everything was signed and sealed, but Melvyn Bragg mentioned it in his BBC Radio 4 programme and newsletter - so now everyone knows that I’m writing about Norman Nicholson!


So, who was Norman Nicholson? An obscure northern poet, from the small town of Millom in Cumbria, born in 1914, a protegee of T.S. Eliot and the Lake District’s second most famous poet after Wordsworth.  'Poem' is NN’s working manifesto.

Poem

I would make a poem
Precise as a pair of scissors, keen,
Cold and asymmetrical, the blades
Meeting like steel lovers to define
The clean shape of the image.

I would make a poem
Organic as an orchid, red
Flowers condensed from dew, with every lobe
Fitted like a female to receive
The bee’s fathering head.

I would make a poem
Solid as a stone, a thing
You can take up, turn, examine and put down;
Bred of the accident of rain and river,
Yet in its build as certain as a circle,
An axiom of itself.


I was approached recently by the Trustees of the Nicholson Estate to write a Life and Work for the Norman Nicholson centenary in 2014. This isn’t a commercial project, more a labour of love - I’ve always loved NN’s poetry - he wrote about the landscape I grew up in - a working landscape, not the pretty picture postcard views sold to the tourists.  His best poems are probably Wall, Sea to the West and On the Dismantling of Millom Ironworks, which is about the brutal de-industrialisation of the north of England in the second half of the twentieth century.  This is an extract:

            ‘They shovelled my childhood
On to a rubbish heap.   Here my father’s father,
Foreman of the back furnace, unsluiced the metal lava
To slop in fiery gutters across the foundry floor
And boil round the workmen’s boots; here five generations
Toasted the bread they earned at a thousand degrees Fahrenheit
And the town thrived on its iron diet.  On the same ground now
Split foundations moulder in the sea air; blizzards
Of slag-grey dust are blown through broken Main Gate uprights;
 Resevoir tanks gape dry beside cracked, empty pig-beds:
And one last core of clinker, like the stump of a dead volcano,
Juts up jagged and unblastable.....
                   
He lived all his life in the house he was born in - stubbornly defending his northernness - always a fierce enemy of Metrocentrism.  When anyone referred to him as a recluse he would say drily ‘They mean I haven’t been seen lately in London.’  People like Philip Larkin denigrated him as a 'Provincial'.  He was emphatic about the truth of Robert Frost’s statement ‘In order to be universal, you must first be provincial’.

I’ve only just embarked on the initial research and will keep you posted.  This will be the first time I’ve ever talked publicly about writing a biography, so it will be a new experience!




For more Poetry please check out the Tuesday Poets at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Tuesday Poem: Kim Moore, The Drowned Fields

Although being without him now
would be like standing on one leg
still everything seems paper thin.

If my foot slips and breaks the surface,
I’ll fall to a land of drowned fields,
where the only language is the language

of the sky and the birds make endless
patterns in the air and the pools of water
are words the rain has left behind.

The birds are like shadows in the corner
of my eye, or silver, as if the sky
is throwing money to the ground.

Next to the path the grass moves beneath
my feet. Hummocks store black water
while his thoughts, impossible to ignore

push their way across the land like large
enthusiastic dogs. The lives I could
have led are silver threads across

the drowning land and birds come
together , then spread apart, as if the sky
opened its hand and let them loose.

Kim Moore


Kim Moore (who just happens to live in Cumbria) is a young British poet who is regarded as one of the bright stars of the future. Kim has won two of the UK’s most prestigious prizes for young poets - an Eric Gregory Award and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2011. She is 29 and works as a peripatetic music teacher, and is also in the final year of a part-time MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has been published in the TLS, Poetry Review, The North, The Rialto and Ambit - all excellent places - and has read alongside Carol Ann Duffy at the Royal Exchange in Manchester.

The title ‘The Drowned Fields’ resonates with the weather up here in the northern hemisphere at the moment. I like the way the poem starts in mid-conversation, with images of a fragile relationship - the thin crust we all walk on with the ones we love before our lives become inextricably meshed together. The repetition of the words ‘drowned’, ‘drowning,’ emphasises the feeling of being overwhelmed and adds to the sense of danger - committing yourself to a relationship is one of the most risky things we do.

I particularly like this image:

‘ his thoughts, impossible to ignore
push their way across the land like large
enthusiastic dogs.'

And the way she describes the birds flocking and re-forming in the air,
‘.........as if the sky
opened its hand and let them loose.’

But somehow the birds, coming together and spreading apart, are another metaphor for the fragility of the relationship.
Kim Moore is one to watch.

For other Tuesday Poems please take a look at the Tuesday Poets' blog over at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com
There's some great stuff!

Tuesday Poem: Wordsworth's 'Minstrels'

The minstrels played their Christmas tune
To-night beneath my cottage-eaves;
While, smitten by a lofty moon,
The encircling laurels, thick with leaves,
Gave back a rich and dazzling sheen,
That overpowered their natural green.

Through hill and valley every breeze
Had sunk to rest with folded wings:
Keen was the air, but could not freeze,
Nor check, the music of the strings;
So stout and hardy were the band
That scraped the chords with strenuous hand.

And who but listened? - till was paid
Respect to every inmate's claim,
The greeting given, the music played
In honour of each household name,
Duly pronounced with lusty call,
And "Merry Christmas" wished to all.

William Wordsworth


And a very merry Christmas to everyone!!!


I'm the editor of the Tuesday Poem hub this week and have posted 'A Child's Christmas in Wales' by Dylan Thomas. To listen to this and look at other Tuesday poet's contributions please visit www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Tuesday Poem: One Raven

That day by the lake
when you wouldn’t stop and
I made you and you stalked
off into the bracken and I sat
on the rock looking up
at the crag  wondering why
do I always take it why
am I still here and then
saw a bird circling
as a crow circles its carrion -
but more slowly, wings spread wide
and the feathers fanned out against the sun
and it seemed larger and darker
with more history than a common scavenger
and then I knew I was watching an omen,
riding the thermal, effortless,
croaking a harsh truth.

Kathleen Jones


I've now got almost a complete collection of poems on the raven theme, inspired by the culture of the Haida Gwaii indians of North America.   This one is about a quarrel (quite a long time ago now) and the moment of realisation when you know a relationship is going nowhere!    I'm also guest-blogging about the book that started it all 'A Story as Sharp as a Knife' over on Norman Geras' Blog today. 

For more poetry please go to the Tuesday Poem website and check out to wonderful selection on offer at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Tuesday Poem: Tim Jones

And Not to Yield

Leave home, and your ego
blooms as the square of distance. Return
is a necessary corrective,

a diminuendo of corridors,
anxious crowds, missed messages.
Fretting at the baggage claim:

did they even put your cases on the plane?
And the knowledge that, not far away,
an angry wife is pacing.

Pity Odysseus. Penelope
(the suitors done and dusted)
is on the surface calm

but furious beneath: all that crap
he put her through! She lets it out
in flechettes of resentment.

Odysseus learns to dodge or hide.
All he wants is a quiet life,
a place to write his memoirs,

but she keeps inventing tasks for him.
"I'm not bloody Hercules," he says, and,
"Didn't I tell you there could be delays?"

Tim Jones, from 'Men Briefly Explained'.



This newly released collection from Tim is excellent. There are some very impressive poems in it, but I also liked the way the collection framed them - the flow of the narrative through it. I was very happy to review the book and Tim quotes a paragraph on the back cover.

"Tim Jones writes about how it feels to be a man, of male relationships – father, son, brother, friend, lover, husband – exploring territory that men traditionally don’t talk about, saying what is often unsaid, confronting stereotypes, and genetic imperatives. He writes with a blend of economy, humour and compassion that is rare in poetry, often finding the unexpected phrase - ‘a diminuendo of corridors’ - or an unusual, but exact, image - ‘mountains piled like thunderheads’ - to surprise and illuminate. This poetry is how New Women want their New Men to be – strong, sensitive and empathetic."  Penelope would probably have preferred Odysseus to be like that too.  Living with (or more often without) a hero is hard work!   Odysseus also features in the Derek Walcott poem posted by Mary McCallum this week.

For more Tuesday Poems please visit the website at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Tuesday Poem: Christina Rossetti

A Pause

They made the chamber sweet with flowers and leaves,
     And the bed sweet with flowers on which I lay;
     While my soul, love-bound, loitered on its way.
I did not hear the birds about the eaves,
Nor hear the reapers talk among the sheaves:
     Only my soul kept watch from day to day,
     My thirsty soul kept watch for one away:-
Perhaps he loves, I thought, remembers, grieves.
At length there came the step upon the stair,
     Upon the lock the old familiar hand:
Then first my spirit seemed to scent the air
     Of Paradise; then first the tardy sand
Of time ran golden; and I felt my hair
     Put on a glory, and my soul expand.

Christina Rossetti,  written circa 1853

Christina 1848 by her brother Dante Gabriel

 

Christina Rossetti's father was an Italian political refugee and poet.  Her mother was the daughter of another Italian writer, Gaetano Polidori.  Christina's uncle was John Polidori who accompanied Byron and Shelley to the continent and wrote The Vampyre.  Although she was born in London and spent most of her life there, Christina was very Italian in temperament - which didn't fit very well with English Victorian notions of womanhood.   She and her brother Dante Gabriel were known as the 'two storms' but while he was allowed to go his own bohemian way, Christina had to conform and she found it difficult to subdue her rebellious disposition.   Much of Christina's poetry is about loss, loneliness and renunciation - themes that mirror her own life.  She broke off two engagements to men she loved  passionately because of religious differences (one was a Catholic, one an aetheist).   She seems to have regretted both decisions in later life.   Her mother was deeply, inflexibly, religious, an older sister became a protestant nun, and Christina's life under their influence was very restricted.  She was always very shy and spent most of her life at home, avoiding social contact,  writing poetry - some of which was erotic and passionate.  Her most famous poems are 'A Birthday',  'In the Bleak Midwinter', which was set to music by Holst, and 'Goblin Market' - one of the most erotic poems in the English language.   The poem above, A Pause, was written at a time when she had just broken off her engagement to the Pre-Raphaelite painter James Collinson who had converted to Roman Catholicism.  

Christina Rossetti:   Learning not to be First, originally published by Oxford University Press,  is available as a Kindle book on Amazon for £2.86.

For more Tuesday Poems, please go to the hub on www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

For a review of  contemporary American poet Stanley Plumly's collection 'Now that my father lies down beside me' , go to my book review site .

Tuesday Poem - There's Nothing Like the Sun: Edward Thomas

There's Nothing Like the Sun

There's nothing like the sun as the year dies,
Kind as it can be, this world being made so,
To stones and men and beasts and birds and flies,
To all things that it touches except snow,
Whether on mountain side or street of town.
The south wall warms me: November has begun,
Yet never shone the sun as fair as now
While the sweet last-left damsons from the bough
With spangles of the morning's storm drop down
Because the starling shakes it, whistling what
Once swallows sang. But I have not forgot
That there is nothing, too, like March's sun,
Like April's, or July's, or June's, or May's,
Or January's, or February's, great days:
And August, September, October, and December
Have equal days, all different from November.
No day of any month but I have said -
Or, if I could live long enough, should say -
"There's nothing like the sun that shines today"
There's nothing like the sun till we are dead.


I've just been reading the new biography of Edward Thomas by Matthew Hollis, so I thought a less well-known poem by Thomas might be appropriate, particularly on a wild, wet autumnal day in England when the sun is in very short supply.  But my late, last damsons are still clinging to the branches of the tree.

Edward Thomas wrote this poem when he was in training to go to France, convinced that he would be killed there, but nevertheless, resolved to go.

I've reviewed the biography on my book blog - it comes well-recommended.

For more Tuesday Poems, visit the Tuesday Poem hub and read the main poem and those of the other poets on the sidebar.

Tuesday Poem: Allen Ginsberg, Howl

I've just seen this film, which came out last year, and really enjoyed it. The script is taken from Ginsberg's collection 'Howl and Other Poems', from transcripts of interviews he gave, as well as the obscenity trial in New York, all linked together with some amazing passages of animation. It's a long time since I read Howl, and it made me want to pick it up all over again. It also seemed to fit with a book I've just been reading - Joyce Johnson's Beat Memoir 'Minor Characters'.

For more poetry please go to the Tuesday Poem hub, at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Tuesday Poem: What the River Told Me & This is What the Sky Says

What the river told me .....

Nothing escapes
the memory
of water.

This
is what you are made of.

This is what you are afraid of.

This is what the Sky says .....


Don’t wait up.

I have all the time in the universe.




I'm currently in transit between England and Italy.  These are two small fragments from the series I'm working on based on the Haida Gwaii Indian beliefs and poetry.   Their shamanic rituals were mostly in the form of poems and incantations and they all have wonderful titles which are irresistible as prompts for poems.   I'm having great fun exploring it all!

The photographs are from an autumnal, cloudy, but rather beautiful northern England.

For more Tuesday Poems, please visit the Tuesday Poets' Hub at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

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Tuesday Poem: Barbara Crooker, In the Late Summer Garden

In the Late Summer Garden


Green beans lose their adolescent slenderness,
broaden in plump pods.  One pumpkin swells,
fills a corner with its orange lamp.
At night skunks slink in to dig for grubs;
in the morning we see their small excavations.
My friend's cancer has grown, spread to her femur
and liver.  Everything that can be pruned has now been taken.
Tomatoes spark starry yellow blossoms, hope against hope.
Some will turn into hard green marbles, but the sun
has moved past equinox, days shorten and cool.
My son is learning his multiplication tables;
he flips flash cards at the maple table.
Numbers multiply like random cells.  I am learning
the simpler but harder facts of subtraction. .......

For the rest of the poem click on the link.


I'm travelling at the moment so have put this up in advance -  A wonderful poem by Barbara Crooker which appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review.  Just click the link.  It's rather sad in the beginning, but a great sense of seasonal rhythm and the natural cycle of life.   Feeling a bit autumnal myself - first of the autumn storms yesterday leaving us without internet for a while - and sad at leaving Italy which I'm growing to love more and more.

Of Books and Mussels

Wellington from Thornden

It’s been a very busy couple of days. First there was an interview with Lynn Freeman for a Radio New Zealand arts programme 'Arts on Sunday'. I love radio - mainly because of the anonymity. No-one can see you, there's only the voice. And it was a delight to be interviewed by someone who really knew the subject and wasn’t just reading from a list of questions prepared by a researcher.

This weekend there was a second hand book fair in Wellington and it was book-browser’s heaven. If only I wasn’t travelling with a luggage allowance! There were books I’ve always wanted to read as well as a good selection of New Zealand literature we don’t get in England.  I've never seen so many books under one roof.

At 2 nz$ per book every one was a bargain and I bought quite a lot. I will try to read them all before leaving NZ and then release them into the wild! New books are so expensive here (a very sobering reality check for a writer) I’m sure I will have no shortage of takers when I leave.

After the book fair I met up with Mary McCallum for coffee. She runs the Tuesday Poets’ blog and is herself a very fine novelist and poet (see her novel The Blue, published by penguin). She is absolutely fizzing with energy and, like most people I’ve met here, incredibly welcoming and friendly.

Then to the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace, where KM was born and which is now a beautiful museum.

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace

On my first visit to New Zealand ten years ago I met its founder Oroya Day and over the intervening years have become friends with the curators, Laurel Harris and Mary Morris. Today, they had a film unit there making a documentary about Katherine Mansfield and toys, centred about the Dolls House - a treasured childhood toy that became one of her most famous short stories. So, unexpectedly, I found myself sitting in a chair in front of a camera (my least favourite position!) talking about KM for the tv.

Now, it’s off for dinner. The seafood here is miraculous - the green-lipped mussels are the size of mobile phones!