Shearsman 91 & 92

I'm pleased to say I have three poems in Shearsman 91 & 92: two from the Divining for Starters series and "Orphan/age," one of my first finished poems about my mother's unexpected death last summer. I look forward to reading the poems by Catherine Hales, Gary Hotham, Rob A. Mackenzie, Sam Sampson and Steven Waling, as well as many other poets both new and familiar to me, including translations of Baudelaire. 

The Pleasures of Difficult Poetry, Tonight on BBC Radio 3's The Verb

Tonight I talk with host Ian McMillan and fellow guests Inua Ellams and Ira Lightman about American poet Hart Crane and the pleasures of difficult poetry on The Verb at 10 p.m. on BBC Radio 3 (that's 4 p.m. Central Time, my American friends), which of course you can listen to online. If that time's not good for you, though, you'll be able to listen to the program on BBC iPlayer for the week following. 

NaPoWriMo blown (sort of)

A few days ago I no longer could manage a poem a day, as the sinus infection I thought I'd conquered at the start of the month had returned. However, the intense projects I've been working on--a montage of pieces on Peter Coker's painting, "Sunflowers," for Sylph Editions and a series of poems using Esther Summerson's narration from Bleak House--mean that I have 28 pieces on day 26. I think that means I'll make 30 poems in 30 days, if not a poem a day, and I'm thrilled with that. How are others getting on?

NaPoWriMo with one week to go

Now that I'm back to work, I'm starting to struggle.... How are others doing?

"Wooding" by David Hale

David Hale was a student of mine for five years in a Poetry School seminar I held at my home in Bradford on Avon, and I'm pleased to say his pamphlet, The Last Walking Stick Factory, has been published by Happenstance. Here's one poem as a sample. 

Wooding

A thumb split by a felling axe, gouged knuckles,

gashed palms, a shin unstitched by tangled fieldwire.

What is it about these past few days, after weeks

without one finger diced for the pot, the saw singing

sweetly through close-grained ash, this sudden surfeit

of blood, its palette rich on skin turned winter pale?

These things come in clusters, you say and shrug

clutching bloodied fingers. Our work calls for edges,

the sharper the better. Even though I can see

what you say is true, we’re running out of lint and pins

and words for pain, and surely this is beyond probability,

this tendency of restless steel drawn as if by moon

or some other magnetic force through skin and nail.

No mere carelessness could spill so much blood.

David Hale

The Last Walking Stick Factory (Happenstance, 2011)

Aira Force, Ullswater, England, 19 April 2012

Click on any image to enlarge it.

Far more beautiful in person--

NaPoWriMo--the halfway point!

I've written poetry every day for fifteen days now, and I love the feelings it brings--giddiness, satisfaction, pleasure. How are others doing?

Stourhead Gardens, 1 April 2011

My Adoption Birthday

This is a picture of me with my parents, Henry and Bernadine Etter, the day I was adopted, exactly two weeks after I was born. We always referred to today as my adoption birthday.

This adoption birthday is my first without them, without their unconditional, boundless love, and I miss them desperately.

NaPoWriMo, day 9

Nine days, nine poems or sections of a longer poem completed. Whew. When I began, I thought I'd be writing individual poems, but a few days in, I accepted a commission to write for a Sylph Editions' booklet on Peter Coker's painting "Sunflowers." It looks to be a series of poetic prose meditations, that will hopefully also operate as independent prose poems. As my deadline is the 17th, the timing of NaPoWriMo and Bath Spa's spring break really help.

My second project is one I've long thought of, using fragments from Esther Summerson's chapters in Bleak House to create individual poems. Some critics have found her voice cloying, but I, as a fellow illegitimate, have felt her behaviour and voice motivated by the senses of not belonging and abandonment. I have been able to draft and revise the sections, but so soon after completion, and with writing so much, I find it hard to judge their quality at the moment. As others have said, that can be done once the month's over, poetic material to rework over the summer.

How are we doing now? Who's still on course at day 9?

Roy Fisher's Standard Midland (Bloodaxe, 2010)

The afterlife back then

was fairly long:

nothing demented like for ever,

nothing military.

from "The Afterlife"

Pass by the threat and it goes back nearer Nature: the three old horses that always amble in the boggy roadside fields have criss-crossed the bluff, growing bigger all the while. They've arranged themselves on the naked steps of the summit and stand there asleep as a single conjoined thing against the sky waiting for the enormous moon to land and take them up.

*

Odours

of shellfish and salmon rising from marble

counters in the pomp of the market

defer to the palms ranged above. Masque

in the Aquarium tank breasting the view

floor up to roof where the skirts

swish through the murk and sharks

ride up and pass

'Sunday 6.30 Rev. Handel Broadbent

IF I BE LIFTED UP'

Indeed. If so he be. The phut and fall

of a late firework.

from "On the Wellingtonias at Pilleth"

[Here you will have to long for the exquisite 6-line elegy, "On Hearing I'd Outlived My Son the Linguist," or buy the book.]

My mood,

my garden: outline and ooze.

from "Shocking Pink"

Quite possibly I love the old cat

more than I love my thoughts. A private matter.

from "Of the Qualities"

It's plain. The rule

and the example.

In from the world and all its directions

the rule must fall and there lie

shining alone.

*

But there's a force that starts to curve as it gathers and says

MOVE

War and energy. Peace with revolutions

under the floorboards. Go looking.

from "Hole, Horse and Hellbox:

the Tabernacle Poems"

[More whole short poems would go here if I was going to fly in the face of copyright: "Plot," "A Damp Night," "The Skyline in the Wall Mirror"....]

It's as if some sunny splendour has not long since passed through this room and the passage beyond with the power to life the air and move, while the cartons and packing cases maintain an oppressive inertia bordering on menace.

from "Stops and Stations"

Peeling the present off the past

the better to show the wiring

*

rattling a cart of knocked-up planks

its bottom littered with research papers

on land use in the Fertile Crescent,

pamphlets, a Herodotus:

news of the stolen world.

from "Rattle a Cart"

Standard Midland is, as of this posting, available from Foyle's Books for 30% off.

Mary Leader's Beyond the Fire (Shearsman, 2011), second selection

I've finally finished reading Mary Leader's Beyond the Fire and can't recommend it enough--it's excellent, and its array of forms, mostly invented, is magisterial. Note that in the selections below, the spacing on the page is generally not the spacing in the original--I've had so much trouble trying to figure out how to do intricate spacing in Blogger.

I would have been your most

Precise friend, if not your enchantment, the winding of

Your air.

from "Ending with a Spell Incised on a Rib of Scrimshaw"

But certainly angels

feel solitude through and through

As perfectionism heading directly for rage.

*

In times of

human war,

You'll hear angels railing at statues of saints, screaming, "Do something!

Do something!"

*

Later, soon, once Hunger and

the other

Angels in attendance this summer, along with all their swan cousins,

lie down to sleep, distributed there

On the water's bank, then Tearbringer, and all the other resident saints, come

and steal in among them,

To lie down too, interspersing, so that through

the night, their somber

robes and the glossy white wings

Make a chessboard, of gray and gray, camouflage,

to tax the eye, to baffle

the hand, of God

from "On Boston Common"

That is how ignorant I am, thinking those folk are somehow avatars of pertinence, whereas she knows, it is not from the hall that the fetch will come but from that corner

*

And of self-forgiveness, that part of the Janus figure stays inchoate

from "Folio"

(key-

Board slippage left of f, or keyboard slippage

Right--wind, or wing--"father" coming out "gather")

from "Patronymic"

Not one of us had but heard

the wind at night,

The perception for I am alive inside

the countable lives.

*

We'd heard the wounded birds

coming down from the sun;

We'd heard the psalms

centrifuging into eternity;

*

The most outspoken among us

now says only

that the most outspoken

among us then

was heard to say:

"It is begun."

from "Pentecost"

You can learn more about the book and find links for purchasing here on Shearsman's website.

Some NaPoWriMo prompts

My friend Kristina Close is struggling to stay with NaPoWriMo, so I've recommended one site of prompts to her and thought I'd offer some myself.

1. Write a poem about something you collect or used to collect. Focus on the rich details that distinguish the items in the collection from one another.

2. Write a 16-20-line pantoum whose opening line (and hence ending line) contains a concrete image.

3. Write a poem that begins with seeing a person who resembles someone who's dead.

4. Write a poem composed of fragments, with the odd lines focusing on a concrete scene and the even lines focusing on a metaphysical issue. (Such a poem might work best double-spaced.)

5. Write a prose poem that begins and ends with the same image.

6. Write an angry, bitter poem to someone who has wronged you, but instead of relating the events or the wrong autobiographically, think of what could metaphorically represent that same event and write about that instead. For example, if someone stole your boyfriend, perhaps she moved into your castle.

7. Write a poem using five of the following six words: errand; body; world; dusk; snow; light.

That's good for now. I'd be glad to know people's experiences of these prompts if they try them.

NapoWriMo, day 4

I've written three poems in three days, and any other month, I'd be delighted, but it's April, and this has become usual. I'm trying not to evaluate whether the three very different poems--one a nature poem in fragments, one more linear, one a prose poem--have any value, so as to stay focused on the momentum. I'd be glad to hear others' experiences....

Saturday seminars and workshops in Swindon

At the encouragement and under the organization of the wonderfully industrious Hilda Sheehan, I'll be doing monthly Saturdays in Swindon from May to July, then September to November, at the Richard Jefferies House and Museum. In the morning (10 a.m.-12:30 p.m., with a short break midway), I'll run a seminar with a changing, practical topic: 26 May, A Short Introduction to Prose Poetry; 23 June, Titling Your Poems; 21 July, Ending Your Poems. These will involve guided discussion and a writing exercise. In the afternoon (1:30-4 p.m., again with a break midway), I'll be running an advanced poetry workshop (members must be pre-approved). As we need to keep the numbers low to have a chance to talk about everyone's poems, I'm afraid the workshop is already full for May through July, but Hilda's maintaining a wait list. Further details are on the website, along with pricing.

Saddle Tor, Dartmoor, 15 March 2012

It was a bleak day when we headed up to Saddle Tor.

Perfectly balanced:

A sense of the scale....

National Poetry Month begins!

Here's the list of those joining me in trying to write a poem a day for the month of April:

1. Joanne Limburg, Cambridge, UK

2. Jennifer Clarvoe, US

3. Aisling Tempany, Cardiff

4. Daniel Luff, Bath

5. Claire Lerpinière, near Bath

6. Natalia Spencer, Bristol

7. Jennifer K. Dick, Mulhouse, France

8. Reiss McGuinness, Bath and Sheffield

9. Kit Fryatt, Dublin

10. Cat Conway, London

11. Barbara Marsh, Hackney

12. Marthe Reed, Lafayette, Louisiana

13. James "J.P." Pavett, Bath, Somerset and Ferndown, Dorset

14. Katy Wilson, Bath

15. Alex Clere, Bath and Tamworth

16. Isobel Armstrong, Southampton

17. Jenny Martin, Great Bookham, Surrey

18. Kathryn Simmonds, London

19. John Wheway, Bath

20. Kristina Close, Cleeve Hill, Cheltenham

21. Tom Weir, Leeds

22. Kenny Campbell, St Andrews

23. Samantha Boarer, Bath and Newton Abbot

24. Matt Haw, Bath
25. Abigail Maskill, Halifax and Bath
26. Laura Hill, Borehamwood and Bath
27. Katherine Frost, Folkestone and Bath

28. Connie Voisine, Belfast, Ireland

29. Frank Dullaghan, Dubai, UAE

30. Dikra Ridha, Bath

31. Libby Walkup, Chicago

32. Jack Tinmouth, Whitchurch, Bristol

33. Simon McCormack, Bournemouth

34. Ginny Wiehardt, Brooklyn, NY

35. Éireann Lorsung, Nottinghamshire

36. Charlotte Owen, Bath

37. Emily Maycock, Newton St Loe

38. Laura Burns, Bristol

39. Mark Olival-Bartley, Munich, Germany

40. Simon Williams, South Devon, UK

41. Peter Daniels, London

42. Sarah Rudston, Bath

43. Zoe Howarth-Lowe, Bath

44. Rob A. Mackenzie, Edinburgh

45. Violet Echo Dahl, Bath and Oxford

46. Lindsey Holland

47. Graham Burchell, Dawlish

48. Sharon Larkin, Cheltenham

49. Bob Walton, Bristol

50. Diana Gittins, Exeter

51. Lucy Sixsmith, Bath

52. Lily Kerfoot, Dartmoor and Bath

53. Sarah Lariviere, Paris

54. Nathan Say, Las Vegas

55. Jason Mark Curley, London

56. Hazel Hammond, Bristol

57. Valeria Melchioretto, London

58. Susan Taylor, Dartmoor, Devon

59. Sarah Law, London

60. Melissa Studdard, Houston, Texas

61. Eileen Moeller, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

62. Kit Kennedy, San Francisco, California

63. Joan Mazza, Mineral, Virginia

64. Marie Dullaghan, Dubai, UAE and Essex, UK

65. Charlotte Owen, Bath and Bradford, Yorkshire

66. Michelle Boisseau, Virginia, Ohio, and Kansas City, Missouri

67. Ben Hall, Bath

68. Scott Lutz, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

69. Louise Stephens Alexander, Edinburgh

70. Kimberly Campanello, Dublin

71. Siobhán Campbell, Washington, D.C.

72. Linda Black, London

I'll post a message asking 4-5 days asking how people are progressing, how the process is affecting the creative process, etc., and I'd be grateful for your responses.