Tagged: Peter Carpenter

April 6, 2013

Lifesaving Poems: Tom Raworth’s ’8.06 p.m. June 10th 1970′

As I say in my previous blog post, I owe my knowledge of ’8.06 p.m. June 10th 1970′ to the great Cliff Yates, specifically his marvellous book of teaching poetry and poetry writing Jumpstart (Poetry Society, 1999). Which means I took it seriously. He quotes the poem in full on page 6, in a section titled ‘What is Poetry?’

Cliff follows it up in the book with Ian McMillan’s ‘Sonny Boy Williamson is Trying to Cook a Rabbit in a Kettle’ and Wendy Cope’s ‘The Uncertainty of the Poet’ both of which, like Raworth’s, are playful with language, syntax and meaning. Not least among their pleasures is their explicit questioning of what a poem should do and be. (Jumpstart contains a great short piece by Raworth on his poem and the sequence it comes from which is well worth reading.)

Fool that I was and stung by Foal Failure I took in these poems to the class of nine and ten-year olds I was working with at the time. I had considered ‘Birth of the Foal’ to be a banker of a poem in the classroom. There was no way it could fail. It failed dismally. I had nothing left to lose.

The riot I expected never happened. I am not saying the lessons we did on ’8.06 p.m. June 10th 1970′, Sonny Boy Williamson and ‘The Uncertainty of the Poet’ were comfortable or easy, but I will go to my grave knowing those children engaged with them in a way that surprised and delighted me, taking us all into a place of deep discussion and debate I would not have thought possible.

The poems they wrote arising from these discussions were some of the most challenging I have read anywhere, by anybody. Overnight they transformed themselves into the most avant-garde group of writers I have worked with.

I spend a lot of my time reflecting on what we mean by ‘signs of progress’ in the creative work of young writers. I spend just as much time reflecting on what this looks like in the work of beginner teachers. One of my very tentative conclusions goes something like this: it is about risk. Now we can debate for the next ten years what we mean by this, so I am going to use a very narrow definition here to explain what I mean by risk in this instance. I take it to mean the capacity to proceed along a line of action (teaching, writing) knowing at any moment the whole thing could collapse around you but proceeding anyway in good faith with resilience and joy and tenacity. The poets I am drawn to (Jean Sprackland, Peter Carpenter, Andy Brown, Siân Hughes, Ann Gray, Deryn Rees-Jones, Christopher Southgate, Michael Laskey) do this time and again in their poems. Like the geese in Raymond Carver’s ‘Prosser’, I have the feeling they will die for it, to get to the place where they do not wholly know what they are doing.

In simple terms ’8.06 p.m. June 10th 1970′ saved my life one spring afternoon in a classroom in Exeter because it gave to me much more than I had dared hope possible. But it was more than that of course. Everything was suddenly on the line. I had nothing left to lose.

8.06 p.m. June 10th 1970

poem

Tom Raworth (from Jumpstart, ed. Cliff Yates, Poetry Society, 1999)

Lifesaving Poems

February 5, 2013

Lifesaving Poems: Galway Kinnell’s ‘Saint Francis and the Sow’

I have written before that there are a wide range of reasons for including the poems I have in my Lifesaving Poems series.

Some of the poems I came across at school, and acted as a kind of gateway to the world of poetry and what it could do. Some I came across on recommendation of others, in reviews, or by word of mouth. Some of the poems remind me of friends to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for immeasurably improving my life, through their friendship and writing.

Some of the poems I came across entirely on my own.

My hunch is that the social contract we forge with each other when sharing poems, whether in person, or on email, or on blogs, is vastly underrated as a mechanism for cultural transformation, in this country at least (as a working academic I should really back up this kind of thinking with at least one reference to a recent research survey giving chapter and verse). There’s a lovely description of the kind of thing I am talking about in Seamus Heaney’s essay ‘The Impact of Translation’. In it he describes being shown a translation of a Czeslaw Milosz poem for the first time by Robert Pinsky.

There is a kind of religious, ‘conspiratorial’ hush about it, at once private and communal, and it seems to reach into spaces we all carry that are non-verbal, or pretty much that way for most of the time.

All of this came back to me last weekend as I prepared for my Poetry School course by typing out Galway Kinnell’s marvellous poem ‘St Francis and the Sow’. I was first shown it in much the way Heaney describes, by Jean Sprackland, at the Arvon Foundation’s writing centre at Totleigh Barton.

That week we had given our group a pre-course task, of bringing to the course one book of poems they felt passionate about, to share and discuss with others. Jean brought Kinnell’s Bloodaxe Selected. I had not seen it or the poem before.

My initial reaction to it was one of surprise and great fondness. I loved that it dared to hymn unlovely subject matter. I loved its complete self-absorption in the living moment of description. I loved that it did not seem to care a hoot what I thought about it.

Reading it again now, I think daring is not far from the mark. It seems to take two very distinct strains of American poetry, beginning in didacticism and ending with tender praise, and blends them without one overshadowing the other. That is both risky and skillful. Poems that do that usually fall flat on their backsides, while this one achieves liftoff and in plain sight.

But it is in more than admiration that I come to this poem. It is ‘about’ a sow, and the sowiness of sows, returning us the earthy facts of the matter with both precision and exultation. I happen to think it is just as much about teaching and suffering, and the counter-cultural energy that is released when we choose to utter praise. As one of my Poetry School group remarked last night when I shared it with them, the poem enacts its own meaning, flowering into ‘self-blessing’ like the ‘bud’ it describes, in spite of its ‘broken heart’ and ‘creased forehead’.

If that is not a miracle, I don’t know what is.

Saint Francis and the Sow

The bud

stands for all things,

even for those things that don’t flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

as Saint Francis

put his hand on the creased forehead

of the sow, and told her in words and in touch

blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow

began remembering all down her thick length,

from the earthen snout all the way

through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,

from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine

down through the great broken heart

to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering

from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and

blowing beneath them:

the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Galway Kinnell, from Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2001)

Lifesaving Poems

Top 10 Lifesaving Poems

January 4, 2013

When poetry stopped me breathing in 2012

I have just been asked by Abegail Morley to send her a list of my poetry books of 2012 for her blog. You can read them here.

Abegail’s request got me thinking. While it is nice to make lists, and sometimes even be in them, it made me realise what I really value about poetry, about reading it and writing it and talking about it and sharing it is the social aspect of it.

I don’t necessarily mean going to tons of readings and meeting lots of people, though that has its place, I’m really talking about slow meandering conversations that are intimate and full of surprises and notes made on the backs of envelopes about who to read next. (If a good pinch of gossip is thrown in, so much the better, but this is not essential).

What do you mean, you don’t do this too?

My essential poetry experiences of 2012 all centred around long unhurried conversations with friends, sitting and talking across tables, with wine, coffee and in some cases food. One was in a cafe at the end of my road and was supposed to be about a research paper. One was in a pub at the launch of a book, with the biggest glass of white wine I have ever seen (and no peanuts). One was in a Portuguese city square over fish. And one was in a supermarket, with shopping bags nestling at my feet.

I also saw Jackie Kay give a reading in a university classroom which I swear made everyone in the audience stop breathing; I took a lesson in writing my first slam poem (thanks, Joelle!); I swapped books with poets who are dear to my heart; I gave a book away when I shouldn’t have; I said goodbye to my favourite ever poetry magazine; and the most perfectly extraordinary thing of all: I read some new poems which also removed breath and brilliance from the day while illuminating those things even more splendidly.

The last of these occurrences (and therefore the one that is freshest in my mind) was coming across, at random, a poem of John Ashbery‘s, from his massive Collected Poems 1956-1987, which I had not seen before.

I’m talking about the poem ‘A Train Rising Out of the Sea’ (from As We Know). I was Christmas shopping and had taken a detour through Waterstone’s on my way to somewhere else, but could not resist a peek at the poetry shelves. (What do you mean, you don’t do this too?)

I can’t really describe the feeling the poem gave me since most of these precious fragments occur at something way below pre-verbal levels (in my case, at any rate). John Logan in his poem ‘The Picnic‘ talks about a feeling like a ‘soft caving in [the] stomach/as at the top of the highest slide’: that is what reading John Ashbery was like for me, suddenly surprised whilst surrounded by Saturday shoppers, re-calibrating everything.

When I got home I realised the poem had been there all along, in my Penguin Selected. And that was the poetry that stopped me breathing in 2012.

September 16, 2012

Lifesaving Poems: Peter Carpenter’s ‘Nightwatchman’

I met Peter Carpenter in the summer of 2001 at the Arvon Foundation’s Totleigh Barton writing centre. I was at a low ebb of writing at the time. I had published one book of poems, in 1996. In spite of that book’s relative success my publisher had no plans to do a follow-up second collection. I had been sending my second manuscript to publishers for several months, collecting many polite notes of rejection in the process.

I felt as if I was about to drop off the face of the earth.

One week after the Arvon course finished Peter emailed me to ask if I had got a manuscript of poems that I might be prepared to send to him at Worple Press. One week later he said that he liked it very much and would like to publish it the following year. Since that moment, and very often since, I have felt that I owe him my life. My utter and profound feeling of despondency was replaced in an instant by one of relief.

I think of Peter as an angel and Worple as home.

So, being honest, I am biased when I read his poems. I come to them knowing his voice and his poetics and the rhythm of his thinking. You could say I am on his side, before I even turn the page. This feeling is doubled when the poem in question is about cricket and is subtitled ‘an elegy’. (We all have our prejudices, consciously or not; W.H. Auden encourages us to admit them frankly).

Carpenter does silence brilliantly: the silence between people, the silence of crowds at football and at the racing, the silence of defeat:

The keeper whoops and hurls

the ball to the skies. You walk without waiting

for the dreaded finger.

Head-down trudge

to a sealed cube with the door marked

VISITORS. Dust motes patrol heated air.

In among the grim socks, grass-stained

whites and open coffins, you take in

the smell of embrocation, shake off

gloves, stoop to unbuckle your pads.

Like all good poems, ‘Nightwatchman’ is about much more than what it is about. The ‘dreaded finger’, the ‘marked’ door and open coffins (kitbags) of team-mates all point towards death. Carpenter’s chief tactic, however, is not to persuade the reader of this but to present these luminous details -which point towards loss- with control and tact. Poem after poem in After the Goldrush, from which this poem comes, accomplishes the feat of leaving the reader meditating on the strangeness of what has been described in measured syntax and precisely rendered detail.

If you do not know Peter’s work After The Goldrush (Nine Arches Press, 2009) is a great place to get acquainted with it. (Later this year we will have the joy of reading his forthcoming ‘Selected’ from Smith/Doorstop).

There is no such thing as a ‘typical’ Carpenter poem. To paraphrase the title of his first collection, the England he chooses to portray is one of exhausted cricketers, fluffed lines in restaurants and a tramp asleep in a bookshop impregnating ‘every last page of verse’ with her stink: ‘the entire Carcanet list, the brand new Armitage,/the Collected Muldoon, the Selected O’Hara, the new/Billy Childish, 101 Poems That Will Change Your Life‘ (‘Borders). The recoil of shoppers wrinkling their noses and paying by plastic is noted, but not commented upon. The poem closes with a neat twist: the tramp turns up ‘days later, unremitting, unbearable still, in page/after page of Paul Celan or Miklos Radnoti’. The poet eschews the option of separating himself from the emotion of ‘disgust’. In doing so, and in recalling previous witnesses of suffering, the poet becomes complicit in the complacency the poem implicitly attacks.

The silent recognition underlying this -hinted at, never mentioned- is what gives this book its force. It is a brilliant dissection of reserve and of the impact that it can make upon our lives.

Nightwatchman

an elegy

Mouth set. So far, nought

not out, having dabbed at

the spinner who’d been giving it

some air. Hands soft – taking the sting

out of each delivery.

Their demon quickie

is brought back into the attack.

He pounds in.

A virtuoso leave.

You judge the away