From the start, The Rialto has received invaluable support from Arts Council England.
Our funding confirmed
Funding confirmed for The Rialto Poetry magazine
Norfolk-based poetry magazine The Rialto has received confirmation that it had been successful in its application to Arts Council England for funding through the National Lottery programme, ‘Grants for the Arts’. The Rialto has been offered £90,000 over three years, enabling it to undertake a number of new initiatives designed to strengthen the organization and secure its future sustainability.
The Rialto magazine is one of the UK’s longest established and most respected contemporary poetry magazines, with Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, Sir Andrew Motion and Jo Shapcott all advocates.
Michael Mackmin is widely recognized as one of the English-speaking world’s leading poetry editors. The grant will support a unique “Editor Development Programme” in which four aspiring editors will work alongside him to learn this vital role. Michael Mackmin said;
“It’s brilliant to get this endorsement of what we do from Arts Council England. Every year poetry magazines go out of business and over the years, ACE’s support has been vital in helping The Rialto to survive and continue its work, finding and bringing to readers the best poetry being written today.”
Helen Mitchell, The Rialto’s Development and Special Projects Director said;
“Michael Mackmin reads some 12,000 poems a year to find 180 to publish in The Rialto. With the explosion in self and online publishing, it’s more important than ever for there to be good editors sifting through, finding and promoting the best poetry. To our knowledge this is the only programme looking to invest in the editors of the future. ”
The Rialto will also be establishing an advisory board to support its work, exploring e-publishing and developing a groundbreaking partnership working with Writers’ Centre Norwich. Chief Executive, Chris Gribble said;
“There isn’t a lot of money in poetry so organisations and magazines often struggle to survive. We’re confident that both Writers’ Centre Norwich and The Rialto will benefit from the new form of collaboration we are planning. ”
Helen Lax, Regional Director, Arts Council England said:
‘Since its inception in 1984, The Rialto has upheld its reputation for artistic excellence producing a well-respected national poetry magazine with a loyal and wide-ranging readership.
‘This Grants for the Arts award will help to move the magazine into a new era, enabling both organisational and artistic development. It will support the team to pioneer new digital approaches to increasing engagement with poets and readers, helping more people to experience high-quality writing.’
The Rialto costs £7.50 for a single issue or £19 for a year’s subscription and is available from www.therialto.co.uk or from The Bookhive on London Street in Norwich.
Some Thoughts About Poetry and Comics
My partner writes (but does not draw) comics. This means I have been learning more about comics that I might otherwise have deemed necessary. The more I learn, the more interesting I find them, and the more I find which can be applied to poetry.
Here are some thoughts which have been paraphrased, adapted or stolen from a variety of sources. The sources are given below.
economy of line is paramount
Comics are at their most successful when the maximum effect is produced by every line and unnecessary lines are eliminated. This is an artistic choice distinct to the employment of a naive or simplistic style.
(see Scott McCloud for more)
each panel and page must be carefully constructed
The artist constructs each page as a separate structure, made up of one or more panels. The structure of the individual page is as important as that page’s contribution to the whole work. Similarly, the structure of each individual panel is as important as that panel’s contribution to the whole page and, by extension, the whole work. No panel should be dispensable.
(see Kurt Busiek for more)
consider how much will fit on the page
A page, or panel, will be unsuccessful if it tries to communicate more than there is room for. It will also be unsuccessful it squanders its potential with needless repetition or an absence of meaningful content. There is only so much room on a page. It must be used wisely.
(see Kurt Busiek for more)
artists choose whether to prioritise ideas or form
It has been argued that all artists fall into two groups. Those in the first group place more emphasis on ideas and purpose. They are often great storytellers who devote their energy to controlling their medium and conveying meaning. Those in the second group place more emphasis on form. They are often great innovators and pioneers.
(see Scott McCloud and David Galenson for more)
put everything in its right place
Comics are generally at their best when the words do not repeat the effects of the images and vice versa. Juxtaposition is an important tool. Images need to be read as well as the text. There is more than one layer.
(read comics for more)
the reading process is one of interpretation rather than perception
Comics panels offer the reader a series of static images to be read in sequence. Meaning is partly constructed through what is understood to have happened between the panels. The reader sees the individual parts but interprets them into an understanding of the whole.
(see Jacques Derrida for more)
what happens off the page is as important as what happens on it
Some artists have spoken of their great joy when a fan describes to them a panel which they had not in fact drawn, but which contains elements left intentionally for the reader to infer from the page. The space left undrawn can have as powerful an effect on the imagination as any mark made upon the page. It is the marks made on a page which create the possibility for this space to exist.
(see Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá for more)
all the right notes, not necessarily in the right order
Although comics art is sequential, this is not to say that meaning must be communicated in a linear fashion. The reader’s involvement in decoding a comic and the choices they make when approaching the page mean that, in some ways, all comics are non-linear in the hands of the reader.
(see Scott McCloud and Eric Morecambe for more)
the reader is inextricable from the art
Comics are meant to be read, not read aloud or looked at. Just as a musical score remains locked on the page in a system of lines and symbols until it is read, a comic needs to be read if it is to come alive.
(see Chris Ware for more)
making the impossible possible
Nothing is undrawable for the artist who is skilled at communication. It is the job of the artist to give shape to thought. As long as the reader is willing, the possibilities for communication are infinite.
(see comics, poetry, literature, art for more)
Chrissy Williams works on the Saison Poetry Library’s magazines site www.poetrymagazines.org.uk. She will have a poem in the forthcoming issue of the Rialto and has been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Best British Poetry 2011 (Salt).
The darkest evening of the year
The nights draw in again and the winter equinox gets buried beneath the white noise of Argos adverts, flashing santa’s (in both senses), and the warblings of X-Factor winners dribbling out the radio like turkey-gravy down the chin of an elderly relative. The equinox for me is important as it means the nights stop advancing and start to recede, that cycling season is on its way, as are picnics, short trousers and wasps. I have always felt that the shortest day of the year is a hinge on which the new year rests, waiting to slowly open until it hits the June buffer and slowly closes once again. Winter has been mercifully late this year, a year which (to continue the wheezing Christmas metaphor) is a stocking stuffed with historical events that will take years of unwrapping by pundits, experts, dilettantes and David Starkey.
The equinox is special as it allows a perfect opportunity to re-read Robert Frost’s stab at memorability with his poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’:
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1923, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc., renewed 1951, by Robert Frost..
Each year I teach poetry to Access to HE learners, and I like to use this poem in class. There are always arguments over the meaning; of course there is, it wouldn’t be poetry without a few competing arguments. This year was no exception: someone felt that the poem was about someone contemplating suicide, and this shocked people who simply saw a person momentarily mesmerised by the falling snow. Another saw a man staring into America’s future at the start of the 20th Century and saw a complex network of trees and branches competing for space beneath silence. Of course they are all right and all wrong, and one of the greatest gifts poetry gives us, is that the meaning shifts as we shift through time, we relate to a different rider year after year. The poem for me this year, takes me back to the door and again, here is the hinge, a door closed with the tiniest crack of light at the edge, enough to produce a longing, a desire to move forward, away from those lovely, dark and deep trees.
Rumour has it that Frost wrote the poem on the longest day of the year after staying up all night to watch the sunrise. As a writer I see some truth in this rumour, that when you are at the furthest point away from the subject you want to write about, then it starts to happen. How can you write that ditty about the love of your life when they are right beside you? Much easier to capture them on paper when they are away, and you’re padding around the house in just your pants feeling sorry for your-self.
I grew up in the West-Kent area of the North Downs, with their deep woods made up of Ash, Beech and Oak. Thinking about the Frost poem takes me back to around 1986, a year we had heavy snow, and walking with my Father along the thin line between the edge of the woods and the fields on Christmas Eve. We saw a fox emerge from the wood and take the same path as us and we stopped without saying a word to watch this bright orange smudge move against the snow and even though it was cold and night was falling we stayed there for what seemed like an age, until it vanished back into the forest. It fills me with a longing for something long gone, the simple nostalgia for walking with my Father – my breath even drops when I consider this, and I think at some point the fox will emerge on the page, but not yet, even twenty five years later it needs to sit at the edge of memory and continue to distil. But Frost’s poem brings it momentarily back and I am thankful once again to the joy of poetry, and for another equinox.
Then there are the eight syllables per line.
But that’s for another year.
Andrew McDonnell (b.1977) performs his poems with the multi-instrumental group My Dark Aunt. His work has appeared in various magazines, most recently the Spring edition of Poetry London and he is currently studying towards a PhD at the University of East Anglia. Andrew recently fulfilled a lifelong ambition: the ownership of a Bianchi racing bike. His life has now improved by 93%.
MOVING ON FROM THE SEASON OF MISTS AND MELLOW FRUITFULNESS
I have managed to give myself a very sharp attack of bloggers’ block. I came back to a grey Stansted on a comfortable and efficient Ryanair flight at the end of August firmly of the opinion that I’d quickly jot down a ‘what I did on my summer holiday’ blog. And now we have moved beyond November. True there’s a shiny new issue of the magazine out, so I’ve not been entirely idle, but I’ve still not sorted out my as-it-seemed-then important thoughts.
Usually I take the chance of holiday to scratch down a poem or three, or a few bits of poems – dragonflies that have managed to crawl up a stem since the last holiday and can now burst into winged glory. Nothing this time. I blame my own stubbornness. I was determined to finish a version of Apollinaire’s ‘La Jolie Rousse’ that I’d been tussling with for weeks. (Pretentious? Moi?). I’d found a copy of the 1959 Penguin Book of French Verse, one of that lovely series with the knocked back pastel covers, with abstract patterns on them, that I used to own in the days when I was a melancholic student. Think I re-bought it in Mr Ellis’ excellent bookshop on the corner of St Giles Street and Willow Lane in Norwich. Anyway this copy fell open, as second-hand books often do, at a previous owner’s favourite page. The poem is a war poem – Apollinaire was wounded in combat in 1916 and died in the ‘flu epidemic at the end of WW1. It hinges, for me, on the word ‘bonté’, which Penguin, in the essential (for me anyway) literal translation at the bottom of the page, render as ‘kindness’. ‘Kindness’ somewhat obsesses me at the moment. Anyway I’ve done a version of it that I’ll be sending shyly out to poetry magazines in the next few weeks.
A side-effect of reading the volume (more properly ‘flicking through’) was a little ‘ah-ha’ moment about the connection between modernist French poetry and the poetry from America that I read these days in that famous magazine Poetry, and which I suspect is an important influence on the younger poets that send work to The Rialto – particularly those selected by Nathan for issues 69, 70, and 71. In the ‘Introduction’ Anthony Hartley says ‘ A good deal of the obscurity of modern French poetry lies in the ceaseless succession of images often only connected by an arbitrary act of the poet’s will.’ Given the American writers’ love affair with France, pre (and post) ‘cheese eating surrender monkeys’, it suddenly made sense to me that, for example, Lowell’s ‘The Quaker Graveyard In Nantucket’, though possibly nudged into life by TS Eliot’s ‘drowned Phoenician sailor’, has got to owe a lot to Paul Valéry’s ‘Le Cimitiere Marin’, even if only in tone and rhythm.
And the block? The last time I did an after the summer holiday task, that I remember, was when I shifted to secondary school, and the first Art lesson of the autumn term. We hadn’t exactly done Art at Coombe Hill House. The oddly named Mr Spackman had come in once a week on a Thursday afternoon and given alternating lessons. One week he’d mark up a ‘pattern’ on the blackboard, a geometric affair which we copied using rulers etc., and then coloured in with our Lakeland pencils. The next week there’d be an arrangement of small cubes, or cylinders, that we had to draw freehand. That was it. But now a part of the kit for school was a set of pots of poster paints, Burnt Sienna, Chrome Yellow, Ultramarine Blue, Black, White, together with several long handled hog hair brushes. The teacher, immediately scary because he tried to overcome a wicked stammer by shouting, wrote titles on the board, gave out large sheets of sugar paper and bid us get on. I painted Dungeness Lighthouse. Romney Marsh was a place I exulted in and I loved the Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway – a narrow gauge track that still runs the 13 miles between Hythe and Dungeness with a series of very beautiful one third size steam locomotives, built in the 1920s and 30s. That summer we went on the train from St Mary’s Bay, where we stayed most years in a rented chalet with Deco sunburst stained glass windows, all the way to Dungeness AND we went up the lighthouse – an expensive day out. It was hard to fit the lighthouse on the paper; it’s a tall column, set on a mound, with a bulbous top where the light lives.
As I was what was called in the 1950s a ‘late developer’ I hadn’t a clue why what I was sketching out, preparatory to colouring it in with my new paints, was causing giggles and glances from those near me. Some boys even found excuses to move around the room to take a look. Eventually I had the teacher standing beside me asking ‘W – W –W– W– WHAT’S THIS THEN?
He accepted what I said – even put the picture on the wall when it was finished, with a bright ultramarine sky and a black and white striped lighthouse. But the experience has led me to reflect on just how much the physical paralysis of shame has got to do with the development of depression.
I came to love this teacher. He encouraged me (though I couldn’t see why) to paint. He wangled me a ’special prize’ for my oil painting in the competition to celebrate the return of H.M. The Queen on the Royal Yacht Britannia, after her post-coronation tour. The whole Junior School had been bussed out to some far North Kent Thames embankment to see this cool boat come motoring home. David B and I, embryo birders at that point, managed to find a whitethroat’s nest by falling over in a bed of nettles.
I became one of the very few children to ‘do’ O Level Art. I’m not sure about this, but I think that at the end of the last paper – the task was Still Life Drawing and he’d put a punnet of strawberries next to a bottle of wine – he shared out the fruit and poured the 3 or 4 of us a glass each. Not at all like the school I’d come to loathe. It seems an unlikely memory. But I did drink wine at least once in the Art Room: maybe, more likely, after I’d announced that I was giving up the idea of a career as an architect. Three of us had had this neat conspiracy going, we got Monday afternoons off school and went up by train and tube to the V & A where we’d draw furniture and stonework, and then, under the censorious hands of the ‘part-time’ Mr Dawson, transform our sketches with pen and brush (S– S–S–Sable) and lovely sepia ink into the beginnings of a portfolio. The other thing about the Art Room was that it had, behind a screen, a working Letterpress.
So what about Keats then? Mr Etherington read us Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and I discovered that I had hairs on the back of my neck. There was a second-hand bookshop in South Croydon. As both my parent’s were at work and not home until after 6 in the evenings (partly to pay for the expensive education that they thought I needed), I quite often didn’t hurry home – particularly once practice for the school rugby and hockey teams had given up on me, sometime during the crisis of puberty. I bought myself Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. I later discovered that this was a mistake, full of what was uncool kitsch poetry, but I loved it and read it under the bed-clothes late at night. I’m sure ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’(Reader, I married her) was in it. It was poetry in the realm of such lines as ‘Peace ho! the moon sleeps with Endymion and would not be waked’, the sheer emotional blast of which can still fill me with tears.
Later on, swimming against the stream, I found Keats’ ‘Odes’. I can recall reading both the Ascent of F6 and The Dog Beneath The Skin (the Auden/Isherwood collaborations) aloud in class. I think we were supposed to be more interested in politics than in sex. I can’t remember being encouraged to read Keats – Coleridge, a notorious drug addict, was considered thoroughly OK but he and Wordsworth had been political utopians, at least in their youth. However, I discovered that there were nightingales in the woods near Farleigh: I didn’t quite go as far as to read the ode at them (though I might now) but the song does fit amazingly to the poem. You can make the experiment by reading the poem and listening to the various YouTube recordings at the same time.
I was reading Keats partly because I’d gathered that he was a poet that girls liked, and partly because I thought he’d help me to find out about sex. I plunged into ‘The Eve Of St Agnes’ with growing arousal because I thought it might actually describe IT happening – the copy of The Decameron that I’d got from the second-hand bookshop did, but reverted to the Italian at the key point. All Keats told me was that sex involved a lot of fruit and junket and ’sirop’ and general baked meats, but the poet turned out to be virginal because all that happens after a lot of (well sustained) narrative stanzas is that he and the girl run away into the stormy night. Some lovely bits – like the way the wind lifts the carpets off the castle floors.
At the time (Late 1950s) it was believed that poets were the last people that should be allowed to read their work aloud. This was the age of Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, and John Gielgud – you can Google Gielgud’s Hamlet soliloquys if you want to get a flavour of ‘poetry’ as it then sounded. Avid enthusiast for The Third Programme that I was (how often do you get Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy broadcast these days?), I was all in favour of this magniloquent voice style. I did, by the bye, in the sixth form, play Polonius to Martin Jarvis’ Hamlet…. Anyway Keats is perfect for actorly reading. First there’s the general air of melancholy – ‘I have been half in love with easeful death,’ understandable when you consider that if you had TB in the C19 you knew death intimately, second there’s the general longing for, and terror of, consummation, the key text here is the ‘Ode On a Grecian Urn,’ and thirdly there is the verse itself. In ‘To Autumn,’ for example, there’s lots of alliteration, internal rhyming, long vowels and double consonants –
‘And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd and plump the hazel shells’.
Look at all the ‘l’s, consider the impossibility of reading it quickly, the words continually slow you, ‘ripeness’, ‘core’, ‘gourd’ just have to be lingered over: and ‘plump’ is lovely. Or consider the last lines of the first two stanzas
‘For summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells.’ And
‘Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.’
The double ‘m’s in the first, the long vowels in the second, slow time down (never mind the loaded sensuousness of what the words actually say).
I’ve enjoyed reading the poems again. The bloggers block? Hope I’ve moved on from it.
Michael Mackmin
Aldeburgh 2011
A weekend full of poems, poems on shop windows, in the free Poetry Paper, poems read and discussed by voices from all over the world. Voices presided over this year, it seemed, by Philip Larkin, probably polishing his glasses and adjusting his bicycle clips in disbelief at being cited as a particular favourite by the indomitable Kay Ryan. Her discussion of his poetry with Maurice Riordan was made all the more involving by the very un-English nature of Ryan and Riordan, both of whom read their chosen poems rather badly and talked about them rather well. Larkin’s own ‘posher-than-expected’ voice starting and ending the session and resonating through it.
Larkin’s Afternoons was chosen by Leontia Flynn for her close reading and in fifteen minutes she managed to explain why it remains a good poem, why it continues to speak to her, why we might have misgivings about his grumpy position and why that doesn’t matter. Her reading of her own poems earlier in the day beautifully edgy and intimate – the poems full of just the right details: political and personal. And you could see why Larkin might still be there, in the mix that helps to make her a wonderful poet.
For Kay Ryan it is Emily Dickinson and Stevie Smith. Of course Stevie Smith, we all said, as we squeezed ourselves into the Peter Pears Gallery for Kay Ryan’s close reading of The Jungle Husband – charmingly, Freudian slippingly, renamed ‘The Jungle Wife’ by Michael Laskey in his introduction.
Ryan was as witty, informal and hugely engaging talking about Stevie Smith as she had been reading her own poems the night before.
I seem to be remembering the women in particular, and Saturday afternoon was the triumph of the young women: Emily Berry, Helen Mort and Hannah Lowe. Confident, completely different from each other and fabulous. No orthodoxy in these 21st Century women poets, and a pleasing lack of wombs and moons too. As a feminist – a phrase heard too often in the Master Class on Sunday – it gladdens my heart to the point where I can almost feel sorry for the men. Especially after Luljeta Lleshanaku’s poem Men on Sunday afternoon, although they manage well enough with thoughtful young men like Christian Campbell and Luke Yates (he the cheerful recipient of Master Class criticism prefaced ‘As a feminist’ from several women who don’t understand irony) and, older and wiser men, like Fergus Allen, Robert Hass and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.
Writing this now I’m home is like looking back on a Kim’s tray (mentioned by some poet or other) with some things more sparkly than others but everything worth remembering. I shan’t forget Fleur Adcock’s wit about the vagaries of ageing, or Luljeta Lleshanako, answering Robert Hass’s question about the effect on our imaginations of a planet where there is nothing left that has not been touched by human nature, with the fact that in Albania it is hard to care about a cut tree when you are struggling to survive.
Another gloriously diverse Aldeburgh makes us understand a little more about many points of view. For all those who go on about it being too expensive, most tickets are less than the cost of two pints and there are ten free events. Where else can you hear, for nothing, the best poets in the world talking about poetry?
Alicia Stubbersfield
Issue 73
Issue 73 – OUT NOW
David Constantine: ‘A Local Habitation And A Name’, ‘A Romanesque Church in The Rouergue’, and other new poems.
Sophie Hannah on Therapy – ‘The Little Cushion And The Empty Chair’.
Penelope Shuttle on Penelope Shuttle and becoming a poet (plus two new poems).
Luke Yeats’ ‘Impeccable Risotto’.
At least two poems about horses, and a golf poem, ‘ Breakfast at Turnberry’ by Oliver Comins.
Poems by Clare Best, Joanna Clark, Carrie Etter, Sarah Hymas, Maria Jastrzebska, Molly Naylor, etc. Also some poems by men, including Roddy Gorman, John Mole, Jack Underwood, etc.
There’s also news on The Rialto and RSPB Nature Poetry, ‘From the Editor’ and Dean’s rumours, books, events.
Fabulous cover by Phil Cooper.
The Story of The Time-turner and The Lyrical Ostrich
Penzance literary festival is unlike any other’ reads the welcoming and informative website http://penzance-literary-festival.org.uk It’s a community festival, started last year, and organised again by a small number of volunteers who have somehow succeeded in expanding it on an extremely small budget. Contributors are mostly local or have Cornish links, and entrance to an event costs less than a cup of coffee.
However, people do cross the Tamar to get there. The first person I bump into is Tessa West, another Aldeburgh festival veteran. Tessa has travelled from East Anglia to exhibit and read from ‘The Other Vikings’, her handmade and illustrated book of poems, which she unwraps and unfolds before an attentive audience. She is also contributing another talk and reading, as well as sampling the sea bathing of West Cornwall – definitely warmer than Aldeburgh in November.
The theme of this year’s festival is ‘stories’. There are story-writing/telling/reading events for all tastes and ages, talks on writing and publishing, stories in photographs and on the paintings of the Newlyn School artists, travel stories, biographies, and a ‘Big read’ of The Secret Garden. And even stories in poems.
With an incredible 80 events in 13 venues over 5 days, even deciding what to choose requires concentration, and I’m full of admiration for the programming skills involved. But even after many years’ training at other poetry festivals my enthusiasm exceeds my stamina, particularly as there are often six or even seven events running concurrently. So, lacking a time-turner, I miss out on Philip Marsden (I loved ‘The Main Cages’ ), and various talks including ‘The Oblivion of Richard Trevithick’. And sadly I can’t make it to the improvised opera entitled ‘The Dangerously Rough Guide to Getting Published’. Sounds brilliant. I just hope there will be a repeat performance next year.
So I choreograph my own sequence of poetry events, including Nick Round’s translation workshop of Portuguese and Spanish poetry which is full of gems and turns out to be one of my festival highlights. Here, with permission, is his translation of Antonio Couto Viana’s The Lyrical Ostrich
Ostrich:
The bad joke of two stumpy wings
(A thwarted longing for space and light, which
yearns after fragile, lyrical, delicate things.)
Flat feet glued to the ground.
Will it fly? As far up as its neck goes.
A creature for which no label has been found.
One thing? Or the other? Nobody knows.
That’s me.(The irony causes a pain
– an unaccountable modesty.)
Hence the daft notion entered my brain
to bury my head in poetry
which nobody reads, it seems to me.
On Saturday morning we arrange the Penlee Coach House for those booked into my workshop, but then they just keep on coming so we put up more and more tables. It’s an international group (South African, German, Venezualan, North Devonian, Cornish…) with a range of ages and writing experience: the festival definitely lives up to its aim of ‘inclusiveness’. I follow the story theme and read them Dean Parkin’s poem ‘Waiting Room’ to use as an exercise. They are equally enthusiastic about poems by Andrew Waterhouse and Tess Gallagher, which also provoke some great draft poems. It’s a brilliantly supportive group, and we are all amazed by what everyone else has written. Definitely a case of flying ostrich. I go on a bit about the need to read contemporary poetry if seriously attempting to write it, and they take away magazines, and Rialto leaflets, and booklists, and everyone goes out grinning and blinking into the perfect bluesky sun.
Emily Wills
What is the point of making teenagers write poetry?
Have you read any of Tom Warner’s work? You should. He’s an excellent poet. Which is why I was pleased but also a bit nervous to be working with him on a pilot project called Well Versed (run by Writers Centre Norwich and carried out by poets and teachers in schools across Norfolk). I was nervous because Tom is a proper poet whereas I am a writer-performer and feel like a fraud most days. I have only published one book, which has more pictures than poetry and looks suspiciously like a comic.
Luckily, it transpired that Tom sometimes feels fraudulent too. And actually as I meet more writers I discover that we all have this capacity – or tendency – to worry that what we’re doing is not really a thing. The results or impact of our work are sometimes intangible, often imperceptible and rarely explosive.
So what happens when we are asked to go and inspire a bunch of teenagers to write poetry? Is this something we are capable of? And why are we even bothering (aside from our need to pay the rent)? Is this is a ridiculous thing to do? Tom and I didn’t know the answer to these questions a few weeks ago. And I’m not sure we do now. But we have drunk some beers and talked about it.
Well Versed is all about changing the way poetry is taught in schools. Making it more inspiring and interesting. Less about the analysis of a poem and the subsequent systematic box-checking process: metaphor – check. Simile – check. Symbolism – check. Less about this and more about… Well. I’m not sure anybody quite knows yet. We just suspect that it is important.
First, Tom and I did some workshops in primary schools and they went well – the kids were open, funny and expressive. They seemed to get a lot out of writing, performing, discussing meaning and articulating their ideas in a less formalized setting. So far so good. We then went into a secondary school to do the same thing.
After the first day we had noticed two things. Firstly, that it sort of stank. Of chips, Dettol, Lynx Africa and cigarettes. The second thing we noticed took a bit longer but was no less disappointing; that the processes one has to go through when writing a poem are completely at odds with what it is to be a teenager; crippled by hormones, insecurities and lack of knowledge (I’m obviously generalising; if you have a teenager I’m sure he/she is poised and charming). Self-conscious on a level I had completely forgotten about, and I can be as bumbling and socially awkward as the next poet. Regardless of this, we had the audacity to be asking them to express themselves truthfully in front of their peers. On discovering this troubling contradiction we almost smashed the staff toilet window and fled in Tom’s weird Japanese car.
But over the course of the project there were some surprises. We surprised them – I think – by being alive, and young-ish. We looked less like their notions of what a poet looks like and more like slightly off-kilter kids TV presenters, or a dubiously named indie band (hey, have you heard that new album by The Poets?) – embarrassing yes, but slightly less-so than the strange caricature of a writer (which always for some reason involves some sort of ridiculous hat).
They surprised us with their eventual willingness to share their work. I suppose they are used to being told what to do. When they did share, we were also surprised by the content. It was pretty good. Reflective, honest and considered. After they’d gotten over the difficulty of finding a way in (which is what we were there for, with our armoury of stealth-exercises disguised as games), they actually found it strangely easy to access a means of expression that was creative, anecdotal and lyrical. So they also surprised themselves.
Something that also surprised us was their ambition. Or their expectations, I should say. Despite living in a tiny town in rural Norfolk, they were massively tapped into the rest of the world. By ‘the world’ I mean the Internet. I mean the posturing, pouting versions of themselves, which they are encouraged to project, and the rancid fruit salad of celebrity culture. And perhaps because of what they are exposed to on a daily basis via the web, many of them have big ideas. They all want to be footballers, or pop stars. They all want to be rich. They want nice houses. For some of them, this seemed to be all they could imagine or aspire to in terms of the future. A massive house. A fast car. Drinking champagne in a limousine.
And although I found it a bit nauseating, maybe this is fine and not entirely the fault of the Internet. I never wanted to be a footballer or a supermodel, but I did want to be a famous actress. Learning that this probably won’t happen to you is part of growing up. So we didn’t tell them that they may never achieve these dreams, or that these dreams are a bit ridiculous, or that – despite what TV talent shows have them believe – wanting something a lot doesn’t equate to deserving it. We didn’t tell them that in their lives there might be bouts of waiting on tables, wiping arses or stacking shelves. We didn’t remind them that they are growing up in a country where it can be relatively hard to get a minimum wage job and incredibly difficult to buy a house, let alone a ‘sweet crib’. It wasn’t our job to do so. We just tried to put some poems in their heads.
And maybe that is a not such a ridiculous thing to do. Maybe that’s the point of projects like Well Versed, aside from helping them do well at poetry questions in exams. Because that’s what saved me: the fact that it’s easier to scrub, and clean, and wipe and serve if you have poems in your head. If you have developed the capacity for creative thought and been given the tools to reflect on the world and view it in a framework outside of ingrained capitalist ideals. If you have discovered some ways of thinking that recalibrate notions of aspiration and its relationship to the acquisition of possessions and status.
Simply put, it’s about instilling basic artistic sensibilities. Which link to being able to question they way we live our lives and how we relate to the other people we encounter in the world.
I’m not saying that Tom Warner and I succeeded in doing any of this in two weeks. Ha, imagine that. No. But at least we sort of figured out why we were there, and got to discuss this with like-minded teachers and educators. And the staff toilet window remained intact.
Molly Naylor is a writer and performer. Her first solo show, Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You debuted at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2010 to critical acclaim and is touring nationally throughout 2011. She has adapted the show for radio and it will air on BBC Radio 4 this year. Molly has written for the Independent and her poems have been featured on BBC Radio and in publications including The Rialto, the Londonist and Pen Pusher. She has performed at a variety of festivals and events worldwide. Her first book – an illustrated text of her live show – is available from Nasty Little Press.
www.mollynaylor.com
A day at the poetry
The Cley Little Festival of Poetry, in my experience, circles around the village of Cley but doesn’t settle there, ranging between Sheringham and Wiveton along the coast road. They very generously invite me to suggest themes, poets etc., from time to time and this year asked me to read and to bring two other poets who I thought well of. I suggest Hannah Lowe and Jack Underwood and we are all booked in for two events and as many of the others as we want to join in.
Saturday morning finds me driving down the hill from Salthouse Heath towards the marshes and the sea. Plenty of sky in view, clouds rolling about, but all quite mild enough. The catastrophe would be one of those May sea frets, an innocuous looking little mist full of ice that hangs about all day and eats human bones. The signs just before the duckpond point off to the right, showing the way to the Festival. I’m at the Columbia Hall before either of my poets, and I unload the box of books and magazines I’ve carried with me into the care of the woman from the amazing Brazen Head bookshop in Burnham Market, whose stall is set up with marvellous and rare early editions of various twentieth century poets – First Edition Heaneys etc., and a little pamphlet of Denise Levertov that I deeply covet but am too mean to spend £20 on.
At the back of the hall are tables piled with home baking, sausage rolls, pizza slices, a hundred and three different types of cakes, including a very bright plate of Battenburg slices. No audience yet, but hey, it’s poetry.
The Cley Little Festival is probably the nation’s senior poetry event. Everybody has read at it. This very hall was packed and bursting a dozen years ago when professor Germaine Greer spoke: Sir Andrew, when he was Poet Laureate, found himself facing the largest book signing queue outside of Hay-on-Wye when he read to a full house in the Beeston School Sports Hall. I remember reading with Peter Scupham in the Wiveton Village Hall one year, the coal fire glowing at our backs, the portrait of HM QE2 as a much younger monarch smiling down from high over the mantlepiece. A very distinguished older lady in the front row nodded off as we began to read, pronounced the evening ‘wholly delightful’ at half time and wandered off into the gathering night.
Hannah arrives by taxi from Norwich. She had to redirect the driver who proposed to take her to Salhouse and she has her wrist in a brace after a Yoga accident. Then along comes Jack with his family. And suddenly the hall is respectably full.
The first event, at 10.30., is Closely Shared. After an introduction from Helen Birtwell, the indefatigable presence behind the festival in recent years, Hannah, Jack and I launch into discussions and readings of three poets who have meant much to us. We are surprised to find that we have all chosen American poets – mine is Robert Lowell, Hannah’s is Philip Levine, and Jack reads Elizabeth Bishop. Jack and Hannah both teach for a living, or as a part of their living, and I’m very cheered by how good they are (lucky students) very bright, confident and knowledgeable. I’m hoping we are impressing the audience. I’m hoping they like us. We read and speak and answer very informed questions for close to an hour and a half, when I begin to notice that there are more people pressing into the hall – it’s time for the next event.
This turns out to be bright genius. I don’t know who had the idea – Helen B perhaps, or maybe Phil Barrett who has been helping with the festival this year. The event is called Strictly Reading. Phil asked me weeks ago to suggest a poem and I came up with ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’. The idea is that members of the audience can take it in turn to read the poem aloud. There’s a table at the front of the hall with three judges, Hannah, Phil and I. We have in front of us a pile of papers with the numbers one to ten printed large on them. It’s a little bit like the famous BBC Strictly Come Dancing, but far more intimate. The readers come up onto the stage and read, the judges take turns to comment and then we hold up our scores. We all have a wonderful time. Lots of people want to read, including the couple who were camping along the cliffs at Cromer and thought ‘that’s for us’, the family from Derbyshire whose two young children read, first announcing that their house is called Innisfree, various stalwarts of the Cley Poetry Group, etc. What was wonderful was that the poem responded to them: it proved capable of carrying all sorts of voices and differing interpretations. Phrases that I had only half heard, it seemed, in my own readings, were suddenly fresh and new. I had proposed to myself that I’d try for a Craig Revel Horwood role as judge, but I couldn’t do it. I was charmed and excited by the performances.
The two starriest stars of the event were one of the senior members of the audience who read in a hauntingly quiet voice that reached to the back of the hall; his reading pulled out all the loneliness in the poem. The other star reading was from a twelve year old in a cowboy hat, with that astonishing confidence that her generation have (you’ll have noticed it if you’ve been following Britain’s Got Talent): she announced that she loved literacy and proceeded to proclaim the truth of that statement with a reading that gave us a poem full of energy and passion.
These two were the highest scorers. There was a tense Read Off which the twelve year old won by a narrow margin of two points, carrying off in triumph the £20 prize.
This event was a joy to be a part off. If the Arts Council wants to see poetry alive and well this is the kind of event to support.
Hannah and I went to the pub for lunch. We chose the Fish Pie, which turned out, rather like Winnicott’s mothers, to be ‘good enough’, but we rather wished, when we saw others eating it, that we’d gone for the Gammon and Chips. I then zoomed off to greet the family who were driving down from London for the half term weekend: they were much delayed by traffic particularly through the notorious Elveden area, so I didn’t get back to the Festival until just before the Evensong Service in Salthouse church – however Jack and his family joined in the Consequences Cake and a Cuppa event with poetry games, and pronounced them ‘great fun’.
A church service has been a traditional part of the Festival – at one point in its history they would take place in the so called ‘redundant churches’ i.e., churches without congregations, buildings that the late Lady Harrod put years of effort into saving and restoring. Salthouse church, says Pevsner, is mostly late fifteenth century and is sited ‘on an eminence broadside to the sea…. somewhat gaunt in its loneliness’. He also remarks on the ‘bare impressive tiled interior’ but he doesn’t seem to have spotted the sailing ships that have been scratch carved into some of the woodwork in the choir.
The service was centred around celebration of the King James’ Bible – 400 years old this year. We had several readings from the book by members of the congregation and Cley poetry members, and we sang hymns and psalms in the untutored way that C of E persons do, half following, half racing the organist, and never letting our voices get too loud. And we had a sermon from a Dean. My knowledge of Dean’s is mostly derived from Trollope’s Barchester novels, though I did once meet a very delightful one in South Norfolk. This one reminded me of those schoolteachers of my youth who would try to unbend but could never really overcome the vast distances between themselves and us. He did talk about the history of the King James’ Bible and reminded us of how much it has entered our language, but he was there to give a sermon and he fairly quickly got onto Paul’s Letter to the Romans, that celebrated cornerstone of the Christian religion. Have a read of it – essential if you want to understand those Christian fundamentalists.
By this time the poetry audience were trundling in to the back of the church, come for the final event of the festival, billed as Poetry and Pimm’s. There was some hesitation about setting up the bar while the Dean was preaching. Soon got over. I was a bit miffed to see the clergy vanishing: I’d come to their gig, but it was pretty obvious they were off out of it before any poets could raise a glass, let alone a voice.
The other thing that Pevsner doesn’t mention about Salthouse church is that it can be rather chilly on a late May evening. I’d begun to notice this half way through the service and my anxiety was confirmed when I saw two experienced members of the poetry audience arrive carrying blankets and shawls. However we fortified ourselves with Pimms (free to the poets) both before starting and during the interval, and we read courageously (though Jack was slightly wary of reading in a church, expecting thunderbolts). We’re very different poets, but we’re all three very convincing, passionate about writing, and rather good. Damn fine show I thought. Meanwhile the rest of the world, including my son-in-law at last arrived in Aylsham, was crammed into pubs watching Barcelona trounce Manchester United.
Michael Mackmin
Hannah Lowe’s pamphlet The Hitcher is published by The Rialto
Michael Mackmin’s latest pamphlet From There to Here is published by Happenstance
Jack Underwood’s pamphlet Faber New Poets 4 is published by Faber and Faber
You can buy all three online.
Issue 72 OUT NOW
Issue 72 – OUT NOW
Farmers in Curly Pink Wigs? – See Simon Armitage’s new poem
The Crocodile God, an important long poem by Christina Dunhill
Terror Of, Desire For, a new canzone from George Szirtes + his Fish Music and two other poems
Les Murray, two new poems, one about a Little Haiku, and the other about Little Terns
Memoirs of a Basque Ice Skater – Harkaitz Cano translated by Amaia Gabantxo
Hannah Lowe on Hannah Lowe
And poems by Sean Borodale, Jen Campbell, Dorothy Fryd, Harry Guest, Fiona Moore, Graham Mort, Jeremy Over, Julia Reckless, Chris Sparkes, Heidi Williamson, Anna Woodford, etc., etc.
Wonderful cover by Eric Ravilious.
