ALL DAY EVENTS

Poetry Bookstall and coffee from 10.30am

Poetry magazines and other publications from the invited poets/publisher plus hopefully a second-hand poetry bookstall.

Poetry Tree

An invitation to adorn the poetry tree with your favourite poems. Choose one of the greats or write one of your own.

INDIVIDUAL EVENTS THROUGHOUT THE DAY

MORNING

Poetry Is Nice To Eat – Fun With Words – Family Workshop 11.00am

A workshop for individuals or the whole family with Phil Barrett (MR B). Poems will be used to adorn the poetry tree – he’s a poet and he knows it.

Poetry Lunch 1.00pm

Buffet lunch and light refreshments on sale, or bring your own picnic.

AFTER LUNCH

Closely Shared – A Poet’s Choice/Masterclass 2.00pm

A Close Reading where the invited poets share work that has influenced and excited

them, including a close reading of a chosen poem(s).

Strictly Spoken 3.30pm

An Open Event providing an opportunity to perform ‘Bob’s Lane’, also known as ‘Women He Liked’ by Edward Thomas (chosen by Peter Sansom) and get feedback on your performance from a panel of judges, including one or more of the invited poets. The winning recitation will receive a prize of £20.00. Sign up at the beginning of the day for one of the 10–15 reading slots. Copies of the poem will be available.

Poetry, Cake and a Cuppa – ‘Open Mic Event’ 5.00pm

Whilst consuming cake and a cuppa, people are invited to bring and read a poem by

an existing writer, or to read one of their own, on the theme of ‘Summer’ or ‘A Summers Evening’ chosen by Peter Sansom.

Poetry and Pimm’s – Poetry on a summer’s evening 6.30pm

A great opportunity to mingle and enjoy refreshments before and during the reading by our invited poets.

‘Reading’ 7.00pm – 9.00pm

Peter Sansom reads a selection of his own work, supported by readings from Sally

Baker and David Tait. The reading will be in two halves with Pimm’s and finger-nibbles available before the event and during the interval.

Peter Sansom

Together with Ann Sansom, Peter is a director of The Poetry Business in Sheffield, and co-editor of The North magazine and Smith/Doorstop Books. Carcanet publish his five poetry collections, including Selected Poems (2010), and his classic textbook Writing Poems is published by Bloodaxe. Peter has been Fellow in Poetry at the Universities of Leeds and Manchester and company poet for both M&S and the Prudential.

Sally Baker

Sally Baker was born in Suffolk and now lives in West Yorkshire. She teaches poetry for the WEA and works as a gardener for the NHS. She was selected for the Jerwood Aldeburgh Seminar in 2007 and recently received an Arts Council award. Her pamphlet, The Sea and the Forest, is ‘an enticing mix of documentary and fairytale. Understated yet rich … it captures the magic and longing behind everyday acts.’ — Polly Clark

David Tait

David Tait was born in Lancaster in 1985 and has spent time in Leeds, Thailand, Suffolk and The Lake District, where he was a warden at Helvellyn Youth Hostel. His pamphlet, Love’s Loose Ends, was a winner in the 2010/11 Poetry Business  Competition, judged by Simon Armitage. David is currently House Poet for Carol Ann Duffy & Friends at Manchester Royal Exchange.

TICKETS: £5 afternoon; £7 Evening; or £10 both

VENUES: Salthouse Church and British Columbia Hall (next to Salthouse Church)

For more information, contact Helen Birtwell at lilibirtie@yahoo.co.uk

or Rose Morton at rosemoreton@btinternet.com

And here’s something that will help tune you in. It’s a pamphlet from Candlestick Press in a lavender (French lavender) coloured card cover with an image by Beth Krommes, Ten Poems About Sheep (ISBN 9781907598111, £5.95). This niche series is pushing towards twenty titles: the pamphlets come with a classy plain envelope and a bookmark with plenty of space for ‘your message’ – clever gift packaging.. As well as the topics you’d expect – Cats, Dogs, Gardens, Love – there are the unexpected, Ten Poems About Bicycles, Ten Poems About Puddings, and this one. There’s several very classy editors, Carol Ann Duffy (working on Christmas), Jenni Murray, Monty Don. The sheep poems are chosen by Neil Astley, exceptional editor of large anthologies, who manages this miniature example with typical panache.

The pastoral tradition in poetry is a vast topic ( Is John Clare a genius master of the Matter of England, or a country bumpkin who can’t spell?)( Thomson or Vergil: who was more important in moulding Wordsworth’s sensibility ?) etc. Neil Astley cuts past all this and goes for poems that are about sheep (not shepherds, or man in nature, or whatever) by poets who have worked with sheep – have had their fists tangled in their greasy hair, held them and sprayed their magotty arses. Ted Hughes, Josephine Dickinson, Gillian Clarke etc., poets who see sheep as sheep, animal first, metaphor second.

The bright shock for me was when the pamphlet fell open on page 10 and I found that I was reading Hughes’ poem ‘February 17th’: forty five lines (too long for your average poetry competition) that I’d pushed into the ‘things to be avoided’ corner of my mind. Bang: here in the first sentence was the memory of Hughes’ voice ‘A lamb could not get born’. Clean syllables, a flat statement, the resonant accent of the man bouncing from vowel to vowel. It’s a grim poem, no flinching, about Hughes, who kept sheep, working to save the life of a sheep whose lamb had died in the birth canal.

It reminds me of a passage I found in one of those books, possibly that odd treatise Aristotle’s Works, that I turned to in my teens (no internet then) trying to discover the nature of conception and birth, where I found the gruesome tools and methods the physician needs to deal with obstetric misadventures. I suppose it did at least help with that question frequently asked in old time melodramatic fiction, ‘Shall I save the mother or the child?’

I notice that I’ve slid away from sheep, in a way that these chosen poems mostly manage not to. Astley says in his brief introduction; ’sheep behaviour assists survival, whereas human herd behaviour is unthinking, undermining and courts disaster. It is surely time we celebrated sheep for being sheep and for behaving like sheep, even when held captive by carnivorous humans’.

Jo Shapcott’s ‘Lies’ opens, ‘In reality sheep are brave, enlightened/ and sassy.’ It’s a very sophisticated poem, a joy to read. Humans tell lies about sheep – ’sheepish’, ‘like lambs to the slaughter’ etc., possibly to stay comforted in their predatory role. Jo Shapcott tells lies in her poem, ‘they are walking clouds’, but the lies delight, and we learn to look and to feel.

Gillian Clarke provides an antidote to Hughes with her ‘A Difficult Birth, Easter 1998′ –

‘This is when the whitecoats come to the women,

well-meaning, knowing best, with their needles and forceps.’

though she does roll rather more than plain sheep into her poem. And the other poets present are Christina Rossetti, David Scott, Josephine Dickinson, Ruth Bidgood.

My own sheep story is from childhood. We lived in an isolated oval of pebble dash houses on the edge of suburbia, mostly semis, rushed up by a builder in 1939. This oval of houses was set around a patch of grass – the Green. We lived at the far end of the oval, away from where the road came into the Green. I was alone in the house one day when a man and a dog and a flock of sheep came into the Green and straight towards our house. The dog kept the sheep in a tight bunch and they trotted along steadily. I don’t quite know what I was doing in my parent’s bedroom, but I watched from their upstairs window. The house next door was empty and the sheep went straight through the front gate, down the side of the house, through the garden (the back fence had been used for kindling during the war) and out into the fields beyond, where they continued on and were lost to sight. Nobody believed me when I told about the sheep. It was daytime and the men were away at work, the women in the kitchens, downstairs at the back of the houses. The next time I saw these sheep was several years later in a picture by Samuel Palmer, ‘The Flock and the Star’.

Ten Poems About Sheep is a must have must read little wonder. Available from Candlestick Press, Diversity House, 72 Nottingham Road, Arnold, Nottingham NG5 6LF www.candlestickpress.co.uk

Michael Mackmin

P.S. The Rialto published Josephine Dickinson’s sheepful first collection Scarberry Hill. There are still a few copies left.

But what about the literature that stays with us like the memorable line of a poem? What it is about these poems that endures in our memories? The title of this piece is one that stays with me, a line that I read and felt moved every time:

RETURNING TURTLE

By Robert Lowell

Weeks hitting the road, one fasting in the bathtub,
raw hamburger mossing in the watery stoppage,
the room drenched with musk like kerosene-
no one shaved, and only the turtle washed.
He was so beautiful when we flipped him over:
greens, reds, yellows, fringe of the faded savage,
the last Sioux, old and worn, saying with weariness,
“Why doesn’t the Great White Father put his red
children on wheels, and move us as he will?”
We drove to the Orland River, and watched the turtle
rush for water like rushing into marriage,
swimming in uncontaminated joy,
lovely the flies that fed that sleazy surface,
a turtle looking back at us, and blinking.

1973

The poem, from Lowell’s later period is a loose sonnet. The second line is the one that haunts me, but not in a straightforward way. It could be argued that it’s a quite disgusting image: uncooked mincemeat blocking a bath plughole, but it’s the unusual ‘mossing’ that lifts this image, that makes it somehow beautiful. There is tenderness to this poem, one of a family making concessions to each other over the care of a turtle and in the end deciding to return it to the water. ‘Mossing’ suggests a softness, a cushion against the waste pipe that carries the water away. Both ‘mossing’ and ‘stoppage’ are soft sounding words and have a lovely play of music when read aloud. It’s also startling to have these words work so beautifully together, I can’t think of another poem that features a hamburger for example, (maybe O’Hara is the go to man for American fast food) and makes it seem strange and new. But all this is not really nailing it for me – why does this line stick in my head?

I can probably think of a dozen more lines by other poets, such as Stevens ‘let be be finale of seem’ that rattle round my brain and make me want to go back to the poems. But more than that, it’s the feeling they produce, something in the music that makes me feel suddenly richer. It’s like someone has asked you to stop and listen in a park, until you hear the furthest away sound and you are aware of the world going about its business, that somewhere in 1973 a family are blocking up their plughole with a hamburger; that a train is pulling up to a station where no-one gets on or off; that there’s a game of Hide & Seek going on in downtown New York; that there’s half a hedgehog on a main road in the Czech republic; that there’s a single man eating a chow mein; that there’s a robot asking about the spines of snowmen; that there’s family having a day out in Belfast to see a new roundabout; that a South American general has a sackful of human ears on his terrace and so on. Those one liners rattle around my head like a marble and every so often one will drop through. But isn’t that the joy of poetry – the lines reminding us we’re alive like the knock of the blood at our wrists?

Music is perhaps the thing that helps words endure – in the same way a banal pop lyric can be lifted into mysticism by a great hook, (forgive me, but a guilty pleasure of mine is Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, but try reading Go Your Own Way like a poem…) a poet with a good sharp ear can craft words in an order that becomes memorable, and it’s not restricted to sonnets, sestina and other precise forms, it also happens in prose poetry and novels. When we read poems, we sleepwalk beyond our defences and something often slips through and remains. For me it the raw hamburger mossing in the watery stoppage, and for you?

Andrew McDonnell performs his work with the multi-instrumental My Dark Aunt.  He lives in Norwich and is involved with this years Voice Project ‘Singing the City’ on the 12^th May for the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, alongside George Szirtes.

New poems by Fleur Adcock and Les Murray.

Emily Berry typewrites her way into poetry.

Passion in the kitchen – poems from Catherine Benson and Jen Campbell.

Three new poems by Hannah Lowe.

Poetry in process – the revised Aldeburgh Masterclass poems.

Helena Nelson’s ‘Rant’, Poems from Josh Ekroy, Ric Hool, Helen Mort, Mike di Placido, David Tait, Victor Tapner, Lizzi Thistlethwayte, Chrissy Williams, Emily Wills and many others.

Cover by Amanda Colville.

Rialto Issue 74 Options

UK £7.50 GBP Europe £9.50 GBP Rest of World £11.00 GBP

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.

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 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 20^th 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%.

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

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 21^st 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

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.

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