But I think I have been mistakenly silent myself on one matter, because I thought that mentioning it would be done by someone else, and because – well I want a quiet life. In December last year I resigned from the Board of the Poetry Society (as did Edward Mackay). We both resigned (for slightly different reasons) because we could not agree with the way the governance was going. I was particularly uncomfortable that I was not able to deliver whilst on the Board the kinds of things that those who elected me rightly expected. Last summer was a terrible time for those involved in British poetry, showing the British poetry scene at its very worst. I believed that as a Board we were recognising neither the depth of the problems faced by the Poetry Society, nor the depth of feeling in the membership who had put us there. I had so many messages of support when I was elected, and it troubled me greatly to think people were trusting me and I would not be able to deliver.

Edward and I both resigned at Christmas in part because we didn’t want to create needless fuss, or turn the story into something about either one of us. We thought the news would dissipate and everyone could get on with the celebrations untroubled by further controversy. I did assume, however, that at some point the Poetry Society would acknowledge that two of its Board had resigned. Yesterday I discovered that my name (and Edward’s) is still on the website as being on the Board and no mention has ever been made that we have gone. My friends, the membership, all are blissfully unaware that two Board members could not see a way to continue.

Aside from the insult that is to the contribution I and Edward made, it disturbs me because my friends and those who voted for me will think that I have endorsed various decisions which I have not been part of.  I wish the Society well, but my own reputation matters a little too.

Ladies and gentlemen who voted for me, I want you to know: I was thrilled to be elected; I did work hard as I promised, I did try extremely hard. My invisible resignation pains me not because I want some kind of limelight, but because it makes it look to you like I didn’t care, or worse – that there was something shameful about my resignation. I did care, and am not ashamed that I cared so much.

Nearly three months have passed since I resigned, and I’ve been working very hard at the things I love, enjoying my silence as described above. I’ve got to get the fact of my resignation out, but I don’t want to go on about it. I hope you will forgive me if I say that I am glad to be free to concentrate on other things. Warmest thanks to everyone to voted for me, and my warm admiration to everyone who worked so hard last summer at the EGM and beyond.

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

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.

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

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.

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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.

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.

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.