Haunts of the Poets

I never quite made it to London. A Canada-born northern girl, with a Scottish adolescence thrown in, I lived abroad before I seriously tackled the south of England. I barely even saw London before my early twenties, when an ill-advised foray into writing for men’s magazines took me to the top floor of Paul Raymond’s offices above his most famous Soho club, Madame JoJo. I wrote my first ‘proper’ poem as I like to think of it in a tiny room in a small Hungarian town long ago, but all my development as a writer happened afterwards in the bit of the south I finally came to and called home: Oxford.

Place means everything to me as writer, and nothing. An equally nomadic friend once told me that places are like people: you have a relationship with them and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Oxford was an accident, a chance encounter. It could have been a one-night stand, but turned out to be a fifteen year marriage, and we are still friends. My stay coincided with that of many other exciting poets who are still my friends today, and crucially, there was funding available which I won, and which gave me the money upon which all decent writing depends to survive. The place of Oxford was, for me, a confluence of several things essential to my survival and development as an artist. I had no other tie there, but I became myself there.

Now I live on the West Coast of Scotland, so different that it may as well be another universe. The only thing we have in common is that both populations breathe oxygen. I have mountains instead of meadows, seas instead of rivers and I am far from my familiar ‘cultural base’. But it is my home, and has, in a different way, profoundly affected my writing. My new relationship (to take the metaphor further) has been stormy and difficult. My landscape has demanded attention and forced me to change. My child has been born here and knows nothing else, and that too has a profound effect on what I consider home.

Where shall I haunt when my poet days are over? It’s an atomised world now and so many of us do not stay in one place all our lives. I shall have a busy afterlife haunting lots of places, or perhaps, if I’m lucky enough I’ll finally get my opportunity alluded to elsewhere and go to New York where I’ll start a whole new movement of Dead Poets. Or maybe I’ll just be frightening cats.

Download the details of the Poetry Society’s exhibition, Haunts of the Poets, here:  Haunts of Poets at Poetry Cafe

On Hilary Mantel and my new life in New York

Did anyone else see the incredible interview with Hilary Mantel at the weekend? That woman is a seer… and an inspiration. Something she said resonated particularly with me. She said that if circumstances had not thwarted her she would have been something in politics. Circumstances did thwart her completely, endometriosis and its misdiagnosis damaged her body and took away many of her options, in effect forcing her to her desk and to her writing. But how interesting that inside the writer is the politician frustrated in changing the world, driven instead to change it through imagination.

Perhaps fiction writers are frustrated politicians. I often wonder if poets are frustrated lawyers. In many ways I am. One of the most beautiful elements of poetry is the elegance of its ‘argument’, not the finger-wagging sort, but the presentation of truth, the persuasion of the reader to see one’s world. What draws me to the world of the law is that same elegance of presenting a case, of persuasion, and most of all the principle of not choosing one’s case, of finding the truth in what you have been presented, regardless of your own conviction. It’s taking ‘truth’ out of the self, and yet investing all of one’s self in it. And it’s about finding principle in a world of human compromise. In my next life, not only am I going to New York and missing out my Britain phase (I’ve so done that in this life), but I’m going to law school. I know I’ll drop out and go and write poetry somewhere in that life as well, but it’s going to be great fun before I do.

Mantel said a great many fascinating things in that film, but a final thought to share with you. She said a childhood filled with secrets had made her great desire to be to know what was being said on the other side of the door, that ‘everyone’ wants to know if it is evil on the other side of the door. In fact she believes self-preservation depends on knowing if there is evil behind the door. The interviewer pointed out gently, ‘But not everyone thinks like that.’ With her magnificent blue eyes unblinking, Mantel said ‘Fools!’ That is what makes the great writer, or indeed the great politician, or indeed the great lawyer… that ruthless mix of curiosity allied with principle, that makes an uneasy person but a real artist.

Poetry Society Trustee Election

Thank you to everyone who voted for me. It’s an honour to be elected to the Board, and I’ll be working hard for you. It’s not an easy job, by any stretch of the imagination, and there is very little time to get things right. Anyone who was at the Poetry Society AGM last night will have felt the anger that exists among the membership, justifiably. We shiny new Trustees can’t change the past, but we can work our hardest to secure the future. We have to get a move on: anyone at the AGM also understands the peril the Society is in.

Thank you to everyone who voted at all, whether for me or not. I am delighted to be part of this Board. Democracy, wonderful though it is, can deliver unpredictable results, and I was not a little concerned that things might end up… a bit random to say the least. The result was very close in some cases – three re-counts had to take place, and a number of us were starting to wonder if the Hanging Chad might make its appearance. But the end result, to me as a member as well as a Trustee, is a strong first step towards building new confidence. Such thought was put into the voting; I am sure people had been researching beyond the 200 word statements to deliver a group of people with a range of skills and experience, ages and backgrounds, and who, just as important, are going to be able to work together. I am as pleased by the process (long and moderately tormenting though it might have been for the candidates) as by the result.

There are some excellent candidates who weren’t elected. I hope we’ll be able to call on their expertise anyway. And my thanks go again to Kate Clanchy, whose tireless work, imagination and optimism have made this new start possible. And I expect she’ll be keeping a close eye on us!

Today I think we can say the members of the Poetry Society have got a Board they deserve. A good one.

The Trustees are: Shanta Acharya, Martin Alexander, Polly Clark, Robert Hutchison, Sir Stephen Irwin, Edward Mackay, Kona Macphee, Heather Neill, Paul Ranford, Michael Schmidt, Laurie Smith, Stephen Wilson

Can you help my poetry investigation?

I am never happier than when I get to be an unfettered Poetry Detective, combing the internet and prodding every contact I have for leads and evidence of writing I don’t know about yet. My latest assignment is to find poets and writers from the African members of the Commonwealth to bring to Cove Park as part of a group of residencies that will link to the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

There are 20 African countries in the Commonwealth, from the rich to the poor, from the massive and populous to the small. My focus is the smaller nations and newer additions: Namibia, Zambia and Rwanda. Searching for writers from these countries leads tangentially via excited mouse clicking to the wealth of writing coming out of South Africa and Nigeria, the Swahili poetry from Tanzania; poetry in Portuguese from Mozambique.  I get a bit giddy at this point, I begin to catch the faintest scent of the range, diversity and excitement of contemporary writing in this vast continent. Until now Africa has been largely neglected in literature projects and exchanges with the UK in favour of China, the Middle East and latterly India.

I come across a book mentioned widely when enquiring about Zambia on the internet: Under African Skies: Poetry From Zambia. It sounds like just what I am after but it is out of print everywhere in the world by the looks of it (anyone got a copy they could lend me?). I stumble upon writers featured in it who have gone on to great things including Mandla Langa who features in the Bush Theatre’s 66 Books this year and who describes himself as a poet who has evolved into a novelist. Elsewhere I come across a poet and academic who has challenged his very language itself by his use of Swahili in a new context (Euphrase Kezilabi) and another Hagi Gora Hagi, described as a ‘a word artist in the true Swahili tradition’.

This last puts me in mind of another major residency I am thinking about: a residency for a poet writing in Scots around which we can build events and gatherings to explore further the rich heritage of the Scots ballad and Scottish storytelling, and the powerful music that Scots poetry has when it wrests itself from the page. Because what I am always seeking with my projects is synchronicity: the unintended echo that sometimes occurs between one artist and another, that can go on to broaden artistic understanding. Especially mine, little, striving thing that it is.

Namibia, Zambia, Rwanda. I can see my search has barely started. But what a thrilling search it is.

What I stand for – in a word(le)

A visitor to the Poetry Society Members site has created Wordle Maps out of the statement by each of the candidates. What fun… though how useful it is I leave to you!  I’m not as distressingly autumnal as it might suggest.

Click on the picture to view full size.

On Anne Carson, generosity and performance

Anne Carson came to Cove Park as the Creative Scotland Muriel Spark Fellow (how I wanted her to! how I agitated for her to!) and stayed for two weeks. This was hugely significant for me: Anne Carson is one of very few massive, lasting talents in contemporary world poetry. From the day I first read The Beauty of the Husband, shortly after it had rather grudgingly been awarded the TS Eliot prize (in a flurry of grumpy journalism saying  This Is Not Poetry) and found myself devouring a poetry book, twice, three times, getting something new each time I was in the lucky position finally of having a figure in poetry  to whom I could look for inspiration, who was reinventing the form with each book and taking delight in showing what is possible.

With her new book Nox, she explodes the form again. In amongst the hail of chatter about the death of the book, Kindles, digitisation, Anne Carson has produced an object (not exactly a book as it’s in a box) that is beautiful visually, quite expensive, designed for display not sticking on a shelf and simply ignores the direction we’re all supposed to be going in. It’s personal and powerful and most inspiring of all, Anne Carson has simply done what she pleased. This is what makes it a true gift to the reader.

I asked Facebook friends when was a good time to tell Anne that she was my Ultimate Poetry Idol. Straightaway, or a bit later? Many kind answers… in the event I didn’t say it at all, but she knew anyway. You can’t hide these things, even if you’ve mastered not-drooling. On the train home from a reception – a very long train journey – I asked if she would find it weird if I read The Beauty of the Husband again while I was sitting next to her, since I had it in my bag and wanted to read. So we sat in companionable silence while she read her Patricia Highsmith and I read my Anne Carson, and reader it was bloody obvious to her or indeed anyone with even one eye that I am her No. 1 fan… but hopefully not in a Kathy Bates sort of way.

From right to left: String, Anne Carson, Robert Currie, Polly Clark. Photo by Claire Quigley.

One of Anne Carson’s talents is her unending capacity to surprise. Each book is different from the others, taking leaps in imagination, in form, in subject. I was in for another surprise. Anne Carson also does what can only be described as Performance. She came to Cove Park with her husband, Robert Currie, who in her words, changes her two dimensions into three. He brings dancers, actors and props into her readings. Now, I’m British: prone to artistic constipation, prone instinctively to think ‘oh my god!’ rather than ‘what a great idea!’ and easily embarrassed. But when Carson asked me if I would like to take part in her performance, which would also include string, I leapt at it, because while I may be British and all those other things I’m a poet and know when to leap.

For those of you who couldn’t make it to the CCA to see Anne Carson’s reading, I’m really sorry! But here’s a photo. She began with a piece, where I read sections, and Robert Currie, gently and with perfect timing, unrolled a ball of string around the stage and audience, ending by rolling it back up again at the very last last word of the poem. An enduring memory for me will be Jo Shapcott holding up some of the string while listening intently. It was funny, diverting, but oddly undistracting. Carson went on to read in the expected way for much of the rest of the reading, although she did invite audience participation in quite a lot of it. And it was, frankly, the best reading I have ever gone to. Not because Carson ‘performs’: she actually reads very quietly and in a deadpan way. No, it is because at every turn she is open to the possibilities of the poem and the moment in which it is being read, and you feel there is nothing she won’t entertain in her mission to give the reader the poem to the best of her ability. Her collaborations with Robert Currie are a combination of seriousness, playfulness and generosity, and it got me thinking about ‘performance’ which is such a loaded idea in British poetry.

Since we had Kristin Linklater, the world renowned voice coach who has worked with actors like Donald Sutherland and Sigourney Weaver come to Cove Park to work with poets (more on this soon), I have been thinking about the notion of ‘voice’, the poem’s and the poet’s. Carson approaches performance in yet another way, bringing the very structure itself out of the page and into the space. This is exciting territory, for this British poet at least.

Poetry Society Trustee Elections

The Poetry Society has posted up a list of the names of candidates…. so it’s all really happening! I’ve set up a separate page on this site where you can see the statement and also download my CV if you’d like to know more. You can also read more in the ‘About’ section. And I hope you will email me if you have questions about me before the AGM on the 14th September. And see you then.

 

I am standing for election to the Board of Trustees – here is my statement

I am very grateful to Kate Clanchy, Robyn Marsack and George Szirtes for nominating me for election to the Board. I am wholeheartedly committed to poetry: the enjoyment of it, the writing and publishing of it, and its wider community. The Poetry Society is essential to the life of poetry in the UK and I have been involved from the beginning with the requisition for an EGM and the petition. I would like to contribute what I can to the Society’s future.

It seems to me vital that the Poetry Society includes voices from the regions and from Scotland. The range of poetries in Britain, the talent and innovation around poetry and literature, these are the strengths of poetry in the UK and the Poetry Society can only benefit from bringing in voices and skills from all over the country. I live far from London, on Scotland’s west coast, and whilst I am connected and involved with what’s going on, this also means that I am not part of any particular faction.

Alongside writing three books of poetry I worked for several years in publishing at Oxford University Press, and also over the last decade have worked extensively with the Arts Councils of England and Scotland on many literature projects. These are outlined in my CV which you can download here shortly (or see ‘About’), but broadly, this experience allows me to bring to the Society Board not just an understanding of Arts Council funding and a sense of how artists can work fruitfully with funding bodies, but also a clear grasp of how poetry can thrive in the real world, one that includes hard economics and powerful social media. Currently I produce the Literature Programme at Cove Park, Scotland’s International Artist Residency Centre. This is a small, publicly funded arts charity, with, like the Poetry Society, immense reach. I am not an HR, charity or law specialist: what I can bring to the Society is knowledge and solid experience of how such a body works, as well as a thorough understanding of the challenges and exciting possibilities ahead.

I am volunteering my time and all my skills including my poetic ones and don’t expect any payment for work undertaken on behalf of the Poetry Society.

An English country garden on the West Coast of Scotland

For the last four years I’ve been engaged in a project almost as overwhelming and consuming as the other two going on concurrently with it. The other two are raising a small child and writing (and earning a living)… this third which worked its way in slyly, masquerading as necessity for a long time, is creating an English country garden here on the west coast.

It began with simply clearing the enormous site that is this garden. Bordering the sea, completely colonised by rhododendrons and every pernicious weed in the book, it was dark, marshy and windswept. I had come from a little courtyard garden in Oxford, whose size was completely in tune with my utter indifference to gardening. It took over a year for me to realise first that it was possible to change the environment, and following hard on this thought came the understanding that it was essential. Stuff grows three feet a year here. It’s like the tropics, but without the sun.
Over the last four years I’ve built by hand a carport, patio, paths, drystone walls. I’ve cut down trees and planted hedging. I’ve built drains (making it up, and then realising I had inadvertently created ‘French’ drains). I’ve killed loads of stuff, mostly through ignorance, and saved a whole lot more.
And in the midst of this, almost secretly to myself I began to grow flowers from an English country garden. Cornflowers, daisies… even hollyhocks which look so wonderfully huge and daft shortly before they get blown over that it’s worth it. I didn’t know how much I love these flowers, how they remind me of ‘home’ whatever that is. I’ve created a wildflower bank in my garden, currently stocked with cornflowers and daisies, grown by my own instruction-blind ‘triffid method’: sow in compost indoors, treat like your most expensive houseplant, and plant out once it’s sunny. And behold – giant gorgeous versions of the plants I remember, nodding in amusement at where they’ve fetched up.

Will Augmented Reality mean I need a new bra?

Last night at Cove Park, one of our Jerwood Catalyst residents, Hannah Rudman, gave a talk about the unstoppable rise of technology and what it means for artists and arts organisations. We may all think we’re pretty with it since we’re wasting time with such ease on Facebook, but actually Facebook is pretty much for oldies anyway: 65% of its users are over 25. What’s coming – what in fact is already here if you are under 25 – is a whole change in mindset. Convenience, newness, and a term I want to use as often as possible: ‘Augmented Reality’ are the priorities of the younger generation, so much so that smart phones – the best purveyors of augmentation – are about to overtake sales of laptops.

What is Augmented Reality? Pretty soon – probably in about 20 minutes or so – you’ll be able to point your smart phone at say Oxford Street, or in my case the zig-zags in front of the corner shop, and your phone will superimpose on the image extra stuff that’s of interest. In the case of Oxford Street you might get an image from history, the Suffragettes say, demonstrating outside what is now TopShop. Or an arrow telling you where the nearest pub is, or something to tell you there’s a lunch deal at the restaurant round the corner. In my case… well the augmentation might be an arrow pointing to the ferry with the ferry times and probably a targeted public information message: ARE YOU STILL HERE CLARK? WE DON’T LIKE YOU AND THERE’S A FERRY LEAVING IN 5!

The National Theatre of Scotland recently decided to experiment with the immediacy of new technology: over a 24 hour period anyone in Scotland could perform a 5-minute play live, and these were captured and beamed out live. Selections were made on the basis of a submitted idea, and then quite simply your play was broadcast wherever you were: your sitting room, a mountain, a church hall. Some of these pieces have on gone on to viral fame on the internet: what it showed was that if you combined good production values and attention to the process of theatre with the sheer, raw immediacy of live broadcast you could engineer something truly inclusive and exciting. You can see some of the pieces by clicking here.

It seems to me it’s writers, and perhaps most of all poets, who stand to lose or gain the most from our new reality. On the one hand with words considered simply packets of information, what value can be held by words arranged in a particular order by a writer? On the other hand, in a world where immediacy, focused truth and emotional or intellectual ‘extras’ are the objects of desire, poets may find a special place. One thing I find very exciting is the irrepressible drive to democracy that technology and social media are bringing. Organisations and governments can’t keep secrets anymore, people can group and protest without cluttering up the streets; and ideas and oratory, the mainstays of poetry seem to have a revitalised role.

So to conclude… when our reality gets augmented, will our friends notice? Or will they just say we seem to be looking very well? Maybe I should get cracking on my new business idea: the reality-bra shop. It’ll go down well there next to the butchers.