Wednesday 24 October 2012

BACC for the future




http://www.baccforthefuture.com/the-facts.html

Did I say something positive about Gove in an earlier post?

It now seems he wants to cut the creative arts out of the core of our education system.

Have a look at the link and maybe sign the petition. Leave your comments here if you feel so inclined

Monday 22 October 2012

Simon Armitage and the Journey Home

Ledbury town centre







Gabrielle and I drove for three hours to listen and see Simon Armitage take us with him on his journey home down the Penine Way, at The Ledbury Poetry Festival.






Simon Armitage Walking Home
12.45pm – 1.45pm Community Hall £8 In this often hilarious account of travelling as a modern troubadour’ without a penny in his pocket, Simon Armitage walks the infamous and gruelling Pennine Way from Kirk Yetholm to the Yorkshire village where he was born, paying his way with poetry.

Hilarious! Well, there were a few laughs.

Simon Armitage shares a photograph


Gabrielle and I met each other out walking, and now we love to walk together; by the coast, along the Cotswold Scarp, or round our local secluded Evenlode Valley. So I hoped this talk would please us both, combining poetry with a walking journey and photographs of the landscape.

see: http://nickowensnatureblog.blogspot.co.uk/

The largish hall in Ledbury was absolutely packed. I had no idea how influential this Professor of poetry must be.

He read one amazing poem, and one good one, neither of which was written during this journey. These alone did not make our journey across Oxfordshire and Worcestershire into Herefordshire worthwhile. However, it was good to revisit the land of my schooldays and the place where one starts the great Ledbury run, back over the hills into Malvern College, made famous by C.S. Lewis in "Surprised by Joy."

I had another reason to go, however. I myself had started out on this Pennine Way walk, but going north from Edale on to Kinder Scout and over Soldiers Knob to the high Pennines.

It was right after my final exams and I was mentally exhausted. I lasted two days before catching pneumonia.
He had to have done better than me.

The other thing that drew my attention was his playing the troubador, reciting for his supper and board in every place he stopped on the way. That I found an inspiring idea. It was the most entertaining and enjoyable aspect of his talk too. I take my hat off to that.

BUT

I was hoping for poems, poems about the walking, poems about the landscape, poems about the emotional journey towards the childhood home.

There weren't any!

As a poem-picture artist I was also hoping for poem-pictures; and there were photographs.

However, a twelve year old could have made better images with a box brownie, and there were no poems to go with them. Why did he think we would want to see them?

What we were given was a story of a very ordinary man, with very ordinary concerns about his frail back, his socks, his boots, his backpack, and yes, at least something prosaic to say about the travelling and the landscape.

He was more self indulgent than entertaining, more navel gazing than meditative.

Gabrielle said she could have told as good a tale about her walks through several continents, and I don't doubt her.

I have discovered myself how hard it is to think properly when you are on a long distance walk. Your mind is always being dragged down to the stones under your feet. It was not surprising that the same happened to Simon Armitage. What was odd was that he thought he could pack a hall to hear him talk about.

What was even odder was that he could fill a hall to tell us about it.

If you like poetry and pictures, if you want poetry set in a landscape, if you want wise thoughts, buy "On the other side" by Tina Negus. She does it beautifully.

But if you want to hear a prosaic tale of a very ordinary traveller, go to this talk by Simon Armitage.

At least here was an upside to our journey. I bought the book of Bird Poetry, which Armitage has co-edited. That is a treasure to bring back home.



Notes on the first presentation of poetry at the museum.

The past is a storehouse of precious things:
 curious fragments and confusing questions,
 stories and objects, strangeness and sameness.
 Museums remind us of the mysteries of time:
 everything changes, everyone dies.
 Our age will vanish, as Alfred's has done.

 Those days are gone; these too will pass


 This stanza is probably the most resonant for me of everything we did on Saturday October 6th. There was a moment as John read “those days are gone; these too will pass,” when I slipped out of time and into some other sphere, which I might be tempted to call “the eternal”.

 I have spent too little time in museums. I am only just connecting with them fully.

Giles sometimes looks as if he belongs in a museum with wild hair and his PhD in medaieval studies. Mark Maker was read in one of the the place’s darkest spots, which made it very hard to see or video. Someone asked him if his work was all about making marks in the landscape. That could be right. People should look at his stuff on youtube and flickr. John was impressed with Mark Maker. He said there are two kinds of poems, the ones you wish you had written yourself and the others. This came into the first category.

Giles is hosting Christopher Reid at the Wantage Festival on Wednesday 31. Worth a ticket I think.

 Vahni bravely turned up feeling fluish, but still drew us into the magic of how a museum can turn into a place of worship or sanctuary. She looked a little like a saint with a very bright halo above her head, made by the light of her object.

 David gave us the most amusing moment of the tour. I had to ask him how he had resisted the “irresistible” pull of the object in his “Do not touch.” He said he had been well brought up. A poet well brought up! I still remember reshaping a piece of sculpture in the Haywood, which someone seemed to have sat on. That was the seventies. No one objected. Today I would go to jail. I would not dare. David was fortunate in having a well lit place to recite. I never gave a thought to the fact that it is not allowed to make videos in there. Modern art is much to be protected.

Jude, our very helpful hostess said it was allowed, this time. I could not help but feel angry that a sculpture is “for our eyes only”. There is something about sculpture that is essentially haptic. It should be touched. Nothing is everlasting, nor should a museum have the delusion that it can make it so.

 These days shall pass Everything changes

 I look forward to David’s poem about the Stradivarius that no one must ever play. It is in there somewhere. Jenifer entertained us with different ways of reading nonsense. She emphasised how much we bring to the object and the poem in our listening and perceiving. I would have focused more on the meanings that lie hidden in nonsense that are sneaking through to us. I had hoped to lecture on sense and nonsense in psychology and art this term, but it was not to be. Both points of view are worthwhile.

 Then it was my turn. I felt happier doing the performance than in looking at it on video afterwards. I am slowly making them into something just about watchable on Youtube, linked to the blog.

Do tell me if you don’t want to be seen. Someone made off with one of my poem-pictures from it, so I suppose it wasn’t too bad. The audience in the Lear Gallery was a good one. I was able to lower my voice to a whisper for the relevant part, and I heard no other voices.

Sunday 21 October 2012

Review; Tina Negus. The Other Side.

To one end only
On the other side

A book of poetry and Pictures by Tina Negus

              This is a remarkable book by a very special woman. Tina is not just a poet, but a painter, photographer, potter, naturalist and historian. She is also the best person anyone could turn to for support in a personal crisis. Her poem-picture art is not just words and marks on the surface of paper, it runs deep, deep into history, deep into human experience, deep into the meaning of life.

            She has chosen the title of one of her poems for the title of the book. In it she looks through a key hole into the life of a church, where the life of the place has turned into history.  Perhaps she is telling us that she has stepped outside of time to observe the passing of time. Perhaps she is telling us that she is on the side of the ghosts, or in an eternal space. Yet again, perhaps the mystery is about a faith that is lost.

            In “Gospel writer”, she says,”

                       Living words pour from my pen
                       As life ebbs from me

            Who is the gospel writer? Is it the lark rising, singing his song to the sun? Is this a pagan Goddess? Is this the author, bringing us good tidings, or is it someone who can no longer see him, concentrating only on her pen, her words?

            The poems take us back to the remotest of times, when the landscape was made by nature and then remade by man. In so many of them we go off into the long dead past, only to find it still with us, accompanying our steps as we wander with the author through the ruins of now.

            When Tina and I started the on-line gallery, Poetry and Pictures England, on Flickr, I had dreamed of large coffee table books with fine colour pictures opposite each image. Indigo Dreams publishing have offered us a slim volume, A5, with tiny black and white pictures tucked away below the poems. It is a poetry publishing house, after all. Maybe coffee table books will return if the economy ever recovers. My own book, “A journey though Grief” is given a similar treatment in its paper back form, but at least there is a colour version in the e-book (Chipmunka publishing.). Some of her pictures come out surprisingly well in black and white. Langstrothdale works particularly well.

            Love of history, love of the English landscape, love of mythic reality and naturalistic spirituality, these are the themes which are woven in threads though the great majority of the works. Occasionally she makes a foray into the grime of modern life and modern politics, but here she is not as convincing, not as connected. The modern ugliness of life impinges on her work occasionally, when she shows and tells of the violation of the temple at Avebury by unknown modern vandals.

            Three more poems to mention; “Dunstanburgh” tells the story of a castle on the coast where Kings and Lords are imagined coming and going, only to replaced by the poet coast path walker, calling out to the birds and the winds, where once there were armies. The tiny black and white image looks pixelated, a sad comment on the grandeur of the grand place the poem conjures. “Zipped” has a powerful resonance with me. I have heard that zip run over the bodies of my wife and father.

“Ziiiiiiiiiiiippppppppp
Echoing quiet, softly
My mother’s life being zipped up”

It is an unforgettable noise, an unforgettable moment. The poem tells it so well.

Finally there is the last poem, the one after “The other side.” “To one end only” tells of the end of life, the end to which we are all coming. It feels to me a very biographical story of the author’s own movement into old age and dying. Perhaps there is no other side after all. Perhaps there is no stepping out of time.

You will need to read the book to make up your own mind.

Nick Owen                                              2012-10-21





“So tell me the truth about love”; some observations about trends in modern poetry.

Two hundred years ago, Shelley wrote that poetry is a means of “perfectionizing” mankind. His object was “simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination….with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence, aware that until mankind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, the reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust.” 

He also called poets, “The unacknowledged legislators of mankind.” He thought the job of a poet was to tell the truth about love.

Ah, you say, with sangfroid or even satisfaction, thank heavens we have escaped from all that absurd romantic idealization.

In the twentieth century we see an altogether humbler and less self assured approach to writing about love. Yet a poet like Auden conceals a fair amount of philosophy and profound rumination inside the persona of an ingĂ©nue asking questions. He keeps it simple, folksy, and even uses rhyme. Not the iconoclastic style of the post Auschwitz poets perhaps, but still very different from the old romantic poets, very “modern”. 

Auden invites the reader to provide the answers to his silly-seeming questions. It is in considering these answers that you find yourself reflecting on love more profoundly, challenging the popular culture of the time’s banalities, going beyond the senses, and yet being drawn into the sights, sounds, smells and feel of love. Not so metaphysical as the old romantics, and yet it ends

Will it alter my life altogether?
Oh tell me the truth about love.

Somewhere behind the surface of things, that is what it does. Doesn’t it?

The poem is a model of metre, form, rhythm, even rhyme. It has profundity while pretending to be trite. It has earned its place in the canon. You can find it here.


At the dawn of a new century we really do have a brave new and dystopic world. 

The vogue is for clever words, unusual words, and for direct personal experience, no matter how lacking in meaning, truth and profundity that may be. 

Editors like novelty in metaphor. But it seems they are as disconnected from the profoundest truth of human loving as are the poets they encourage. 

Much as I have enjoyed the Blood Axe Books series on being alive and human, I am concerned that the poems about birth and early mothering lack psychological depth. To greet a new born child is as profound a moment of love as we are likely to have. Poetry of any quality should reflect that. 

I shall use as an example the poem “Love” by Kate Clanchy. 

It was included in Best Scottish Poems 2004. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2004 was Hamish Whyte


I quote:

“Editor's comment: 
Lovely poem about the mother's puzzling encounter with her baby, this alien. I like the repetition of 'gave out' to mirror its breathing.
Author's note: 
'Love' comes from my book-length sequence of poems Newborn, which is about motherhood. The poems were written at different times during my son's first three years, and this is one of the last, written when I was remembering the chaotic first days with a baby rather than actually experiencing them.
New mothers are expected to 'bond' with their babies instantly: I found the process slower and stranger, and this is the record. 'Misericord' is the only odd word here, I think, – they're those grotesque little figures with caricatured faces carved under the seats of choir-stalls. The title may seem rather bold and bald, but this isn't a conventional romantic poem. And after all, love is what it's all about.”
If this is what love is all about we don’t need to wait for global warming to destroy the planet. 

The new born baby’s face is seen as a misericord. Such things rub against bottoms like babies being born, or when we stand in church. They sit underneath bottoms when we are seated there. Most male faces on misericord’s are of devils, or of the wonderful mythic being, the Green Man, who represents the life force bursting through the human dimension, nature within man. He is as primal as birth itself. A mother’s view of this might be blurred on the end of the exhaustion of child birth. One might claim that this was both meaningful and true of a new born. But if we unpack the word misericord, we find misery and a broken cord. There is no sign of love in this poem, no sign of loving connection with the baby. It is all about the suffering and anxiety of a mother who has made no connection with her child before birth and has no clue how to connect with it after the birth. We meet a description of his hands as “curled dry leaves”. Clever, one might say. It makes one think. But after a moment’s pondering, any loving person who ever had a child would be revolted. It is the antithesis of what a child’s hand is. A baby’s hand is the soft subtle opening leaf stretching from the core of the plant, not the one whose life has gone, and which is decaying, ready to drop.

Most mothers are afraid of their baby dying. Babes are so small, so vulnerable, so defenceless. But Clanchy goes on to describe the heat of the child as “profligate”. The most charitable way of interpreting this word is “Excessive”. But why not use that word if that is what she means. “Profligate” is unusual, clever, different. It is the sort of word that modern critics might like. It means immoral and debauched. 

She says misericord is the only odd word, she thinks. 

But this word is very odd indeed. How “clever” to see the old school innocent “trailing Wordsworthian clouds of glory” as something debased and debauched, “a joke on his father”. Can we believe this woman loves the baby or the father?

Next, she thinks his “filaments will blow”. One might guess the baby has a fever. But if that were true, medical professionals would have stepped in and made sure the baby was kept cool. This mother says she does not know how to keep him wrapped. Well, she would destroy the baby by wrapping him, if he is overheated. It is hard not to think there is a death wish in the background.

She does not know how to “give him suck”. No first time mother does. True. Luckily the baby has an innate rooting reflex and will take charge, unless the mother resists and blocks. So many modern mothers do resist, sadly. With their breasts full of silicon, many will never be able to breast feed. At least this woman may wish to nurture her child. She says she has “no idea” about him. What this means is that she is completely cut off from her own instinctual mothering responses. In this she is merely typical of the twenty first century western woman, emotionally cut off from herself or her baby. You could say she is telling the truth for her kind. 

But this should not be poetry. A poet has to have more to offer.

The author says she is writing the poem from her memories rather than from immediate experience.
It is said that women have their memory of giving birth unconsciously blocked, or they would never have another child for the pain is too great to contemplate. To remember a baby’s head as “small as a cat’s” is utterly delusional, however. The most noticeable thing about every baby is that the head is huge in relation to the body. There would be no pain in child birth if human heads were as small as cats. The soft spot on the top of the head, “hot as smelted coin” is another piece of specious cleverness. It is not remotely true, unless that incredible vulnerability burned itself into her. It is a strange thing to feel your way, almost inside the skull of a newborn. It is wonderfully soft, yielding and warm.

Then there is a burst of imagination around the downy hair of the baby. But it is a not realistic comparison. She has not met or touched a “rare snow creature”. Yet that is what she “starts with”, she says. The baby is thus a rare snow creature that you cannot get close to. It is a rare “beast”. Either that or it is an “emperor dying on cushions”. What it is not is a human being, wonderfully adapted to meet and love its mother, waiting for tenderness, care and love.

How can the editor approvingly describe the baby as “this alien.” How many aliens do we greet with love?

Is this then the truth about modern love? Is this what the best modern poetry has to tell us about love?

Welcome to poetry all sorts


I have been reading and writing poetry since I was seven years old. 


My first school report said that I was best at recitation and art.

Recitation! 

You won't find that in the curriculum today. But maybe Minister Gove will bring it back in the near future. If students are going to have to learn poetry, let it be good poetry.

I can remember being frightened to go to school and read "The Charge of The Light Brigade", which I love today, in spite of its glory in warfare.

As a writer, I started with Limericks, inspired by Popeye on  TV. I composed them in strings to amuse my friends. This naturally led on to Edward Lear when I was sent off to boarding school.

I loved how he delighted in playing with words. But I did not like his limericks because he lazily repeated the first line with the last. 

It didn't work for me.

Today there is a lot of stuff that doesn't work for me as well. I will be trying to show what is not so good about modern poetry as well as sharing stuff I think is great.

This blog will have rants and criticism, guest commentary, poems and poem-pictures. It is a brother blog to my 

http://poetryandpicturesatthemuseum.blogspot.co.uk/2012_07_01_archive.html


which looks at poems written around inspiring objects from museums.

I am particularly interested in combining imagery with poetry. Sometimes an image cries out for a poem. Sometimes a poem does not work without the image or images which inspired it.

The book which inspired me to create my own poem-pictures was "The darkling thrush and other poems by Thomas Hardy, with illustrations from Gordon Beningfield."

For the most part the images evoke the world of the poems so beautifully. There are some odd exceptions. There is no thrush at all in the picture which goes with the title poem. Maybe it is only the voice of the thrush that makes all the difference for the poet here.

Thrushes are becoming rare. I am so happy that there are now two, which come to feed in our garden. One flew into the house and had to be carefully escorted to freedom. I was really worried about her survival. But she is doing well now.

So here is my first offering;




The Darkling Thrush

BY THOMAS HARDY
I leant upon a coppice gate
      When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
      The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
      Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
      Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
      The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
      The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
      Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
      Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
      The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
      Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
      In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
      Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
      Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
      Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
      His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
      And I was unaware.