Dispatches from the Poetry Field

Behind all ideas is a field.
Meet me there.
Rumi

Our last session of the season in the Poetry Room was extremely summery, festive and friendly – almost as if it were the group’s birthday and everyone very happy to celebrate the past 18 months and the news that we can carry on for the next 2 years. We ate and drank and laughed and cried as everyone shared with the group one of their favourite poems (an almost impossible task, as we all agreed) – from 6th century BC China to a spanking new poet from Salt, covering the gamut of stirring political pieces, steamy love poems and inspiring reminders of what is important.

We gathered feedback at the end to pass on to New Writing North. If you weren’t able to attend last night but have something to say about the sessions – what you like/things that don’t work for you – do post something here or contact Olivia at NWN directly. We mooted the possibility of looking at the TS Eliot Prize shortlist in the autumn and folk seemed excited at the prospect. Looking forward to it already.

Meanwhile here’s a list of the work that was read last night – all cracking good poems and worth looking at again. Many many thanks to all of you who have made the Poetry Room such a vibrant success. We’ll keep you posted about our starting date in September/October. Till then, have a wonderful summer. xxx

Geography Lesson – Carol Rumens
Poem for the Rooftops of Iran – via YouTube
Lupins – Seamus Heaney
Shema – Primo Levi, Faber edition
Tao Te Ching, No. 58, translated by Stephen Mitchell
Podding Peas - Valeria Melchioretto, published by Salt
To My Mother – George Barker
Wild Geese – Mary Oliver
Skeins of Geese – Kathleen Jamie
Old Crofter – Norman MacCaig
Sonnet 17 – Pablo Neruda, from 100 Love Sonnets, trans. Stephen Tapscott
‘Lovers think they are looking for each other’ - Rumi
The Bait – John Donne
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning – John Donne
The Moth – Miroslav Holub
Tuesday June 4, 1991 – Billy Collins

(Apologies for any errors that might have surfaced in the transcription.)

John Donne appeared twice over the course of the evening but Rumi was quoted three times… so it seems only right to give him the last word:

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.

Party! Party! at the Poetry Room

  • You are warmly invited to a Poetry Party

    where:  Blackwell’s bookshop, Newcastle

    when:    Tuesday 30 June from 6.30-8pm

    Bring along a poem you love (and some photocopies if possible) and any nibbles! Most importantly bring yourself (even if you’ve never been before) and come and share a late June evening of poetry and pleasure!

    Looking forward to seeing you there…

    Anna & Linda

Tuesday Thébaïde at the Poetry Room

At last night’s Poetry Room or ‘Thébaïde’ (place of contemplation as those of us who have read Douglas Dunn’s poem ‘Tursac’ now know) we discussed the ground-breaking collection Elegies.  Published in 1985, the book followed the death of the poet’s wife from cancer and can be seen as one long, and perfectly executed, poem of love, loss and consolation.

 Opinion was fairly divided among those who loved the book (one person described it as ‘love at first sight’, while others felt it gave them an insight into their own experiences of grief). However, others – while admiring the book’s craft and confidence didn’t feel it touched them on a ‘heart’ level.  One person thought this might be because we all have a personal relationship to the subject-matter – for some Elegies chimed with this, others felt it was contrary to their experience and not ‘how it was’.

 We began by looking at ‘Thirteen Steps and the Thirteenth of March’.  The poem in thirteen stanzas looks at ‘the grief before grief’ with the husband catering for his dying wife’s friends who have come to visit.  It was felt that the friends’ presence was resented but also welcomed as ritual and distraction, helping define the exclusive moments the husband enjoyed with his wife as they remembered their lives by candlelight.  The pathos of the line ‘Her fingers dwindled and her rings slipped off’ was admired as was the poet’s characteristic restraint and lack of sentimentality in his handling of emotive material.  The poem ‘Arrangements’ describes the husband registering his wife’s death.  The reader is plunged into the husband’s confusion as he enters the wrong door of the registry office (where marriages are taking place).  It was noted how deftly the husband’s shock and the relentlessness of the legal ritual was underpinned through the use of short lines, the present tense and the forward drive of alliteration. 

 ‘A Rediscovery of Juvenilia’ was for one person the poem of the collection.  She noted how every stanza was in itself a poem and enjoyed the sense of growing acceptance that the piece provided.  More consolation was found in ‘Tursac’ which describes a tender erotic memory between husband and wife.  Finally we looked at the last poem in Elegies ‘Leaving Dundee’.  The use of rhyme was again noted, which gave the poem a sense of motion and brought both the narrator and reader to a place of acceptance and potential.  Thank-you to everyone who came along and who contributed so generously.

 We’re partying next month at The Poetry Room!  Everyone is extremely welcome (even if you’ve never been before).  Please bring along a poem that you love.  It can be contemporary or ancient, silly or serious, rhyming or non-rhyming - whatever.  If you can bring along about 10 photocopies even better.  Nibbles would be great too.  Nothing big (packet of twiglets, carton of fruit juice  etc.. and don’t worry if you don’t get round to this, your presence is the most important thing!)   We’ll be meeting at Blackwell’s, Newcastle on Tuesday 30 June at 6.30pm.  Spread the word.  See you there – and have a great month. 

 

Exploring Elegies

 On Tuesday 26 May at The Poetry Room, we will be looking at Douglas Dunn’s sublime collection Elegies, which explores love - and its loss - in the wake of a wife’s death from cancer.

 The collection won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and brought Dunn widespread literary fame.

Elegies is intended to be read as a sequence but we will be focusing on the following poems in particular:

 Thirteen Steps and the Thirteenth of March

 Arrangements

Tursac

Empty Wardrobes

Reading Pascal in the Lowlands

A Rediscovery of Juvenilia

Home Again

Leaving Dundee

Looking forward to seeing you at 6.30pm on Tuesday 26 May at Blackwell’s, Newcastle.  New faces (or new to us!) as well as old friends are, as ever, very welcome. 

 

 

 

 

 

Shantih Shantih Shantih

Thirteen of us met to read and discuss TS Eliot’s The Waste Land & Other Poems. It was a stirring night – most people there had strong feelings about Eliot, and The Waste Land in particular. Even though no one was willing to admit they ‘understood’ the poem, we were all happy to appreciate its power, its sonority and the impact of its stark disjunctions. Testament to the fact that a good poem can’t be paraphrasable into prose and that, however depressing the subject matter, the art of it is transformed into something inspiring and beautiful.

We began with hearing everyone’s initial responses to the book – mostly all positive, even if slightly confounded. A recording of Eliot himself reading Journey of the Magi quickly got us in the mood – his voice so cultivated and precise, failing to declare his American origins. We admired the poem’s striking details, almost journalistic in their matter of factness, and then the stunning ending - ‘this Birth was/Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.’

In an attempt to avoid becoming lost in the labyrinth of notes and allusions in The Waste Land, we read the poem in ensemble choral fashion to hear the richness of the sounds, the closely woven texture of the multiple voices. Eliot made a special appearance for A Game of Chess, playing with the voices in the pub, funny and horrific at the same time, catching us between laughter and tears. Everyone appreciated the chance to directly inhabit the words themselves rather than staying on the outside, struggling to make sense of a poem that defies reason and analysis; at Eliot’s own admission he’d sent readers on ‘a wild goose chase’ with the notes, added to fill out the first edition. Later he also declared the poem was less ‘an important bit of social criticism’ than ‘the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling’ and much of his later work was more thoroughly aligned towards tradition in both content and subject matter.

Nevertheless, in 1922 The Waste Land caught the mood of a world shocked by what WWI had unleashed, ready for the cultural changes expressed in Modernism. As change seems to keep on happening, it continues to be relevant in our current uncertain times. The critic IA Richards said it is ‘a perfect emotive description of a state of mind which is probably inevitable for a while to all meditative people’.

The evening was particularly invigorating – our oldest poet so far seemed to elicit a different response than some of the newer contemporary poets. Here there was familiarity, the sense of spending time with an old friend, the pleasure of revisiting our own and literature’s past, aware how closely they’re woven together.

Next time in the Poetry Room, Anna will be taking us through another classic collection, Douglas Dunn’s Elegies. Tuesday 26th May at 6.30pm – look forward to seeing you there. Meanwhile, do add any comments, remarks or suggestions here. There are lots of (very quiet) people registered with this site – we’d love to hear from some of you.

The Cruellest Month

‘Not only is life sterile and futile, but men have tasted its sterility and futility a thousand times before. TS Eliot, walking the desert of London, feels profoundly that the desert has always been there. Like Tiresias, he has sat below the wall of Thebes; like Buddha, he has seen the world as an arid conflagration; like the Sibyl, he has known everything and known everything in vain.’

So wrote Edmund Wilson of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land when it was first published in 1922. HP Lovecraft called it ‘a practically meaningless collection of phrases, learned allusions, quotations, slang, and scraps in general’ and wrote a scathing parody called ‘Waste Paper: A Poem Of Profound Insignificance’. Come along to the next Poetry Room and tell us what you think. You might even find yourself changing your mind…

We’ll be looking at The Waste Land, and, if there’s time, some of the shorter poems in the Faber collection, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Preludes, Journey of the Magi and Landscapes.

Looking forward to seeing you at Blackwell’s on Tuesday 28th April at 6.30pm. No cruelty allowed.

Zoology

Everyone admired Pascale Petit’s courage in writing the poems in The Zoo Father.  We needed to summon some courage of our own reading them.  Once more, folk appreciated the support of the group in tackling ‘difficult’ poems: stirring themes of abuse, betrayal and loss were transformed here into work of shocking beauty and tenderness.

The poems enact rituals of transference and empowerment, using symbols drawn from the author’s travels in the Venezuelan Amazon.  They sing with birds and violins, shimmer with octopuses and sunlight, rattle with stones and shrunken heads.  The selection we read in the session took us through the ‘story’ of a dying father, a sick mother, a lost childhood and the reclaiming of personal power and the coming to terms with a legacy of half a hectare of French vineyard.  The poems are compact and unornamented, inhabiting a non-linear, non-rational reality, not unlike a shamanic dreaming.  Pascale Petit’s training as a sculptor also contributes to the sense of how these intensely physical poems were shaped.

It was tempting to ask questions about the autobiographical background but, as we usually do in the Poetry Room, we tried to keep returning to the body of the text, trusting what the poet wished to illuminate and make public, remembering the appreciation is always enhanced by focussing on the craft.

The two men present admitted some discomfiture at the father’s treatment of his daughter, offering a valuable perspective on this work, which makes no simplistic, generalised judgements but, again bravely, says what is hard to say and at the end of the evening left us all uplifted and deeply impressed.  We parted with the cry of kingfishers calling us home – Tchi chee kwee kwee.

We’ll be exploring very different territory in next month’s Poetry Room when we’ll be looking at TS Eliot’s classic collection The Waste Land and Other Poems – Tuesday 28th April at 6.30 pm in Blackwell’s.

Visiting The Zoo Father

Pascale Petit’s stunning collection The Zoo Father (Seren 2001) dramatises and transforms the painful process of her father’s dying. Their troubled relationship is brought to life in a shamanistic world where fire ants and hummingbirds, dolphins and jaguars can do what human beings can’t. The power of the natural world suffuses these raw but perfectly sculpted poems - miraculous and magical.

There’s an ungainliness in selecting a handful of poems from a collection fuelled by such a strong narrative, but the poems we’ll be looking at during our session will include:

Self-Portrait with Fire Ants
My Father’s Voice
My Father’s Lungs
Motherfather
Self-Portrait as a Warao Violin
The Ant Glove
A Wasps’ Nest
Trophy
The Horse Mask
My Octopus Mother
Self-Portrait as a Yanomani Daughter
A Parcel of Land
Landowners
The Snake Dress

The concluding sequence, The Vineyard, explores the implications of inheritance, geographical as well as physical and emotional. Pascale Petit was born in Paris, trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art and has travelled in the Venezuelan Amazon; threads from these experiences are woven throughout the poems, adding colour and texture to some of the most exciting work published in the past decade.

I’m very much looking forward to sharing our responses to The Zoo Father at the next Poetry Room on Tuesday 24 March at 6.30pm, at Blackwell’s bookshop.

P.S. In case you’ve missed the various layers of publicity, there’s also a chance to hear George Szirtes’s Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures all next week (Monday 16th, Tuesday 17th, Wednesday 18th March at 5.30pm in Culture Lab), rounded off with a reading on Thursday 19th at 7pm. All the details are at www.ncl.ac.uk/elll/creative/bloodaxe.htm. See you there.

Inside Ariel

 No surface in Waterstone’s was left unsat on last night!  Thank-you to everyone who came along to a crammed Poetry Room.

 We were looking at Sylvia Plath’s Ariel: a delightful and daunting task.  Many people commented on how they were looking forward to reading the poems as a group, and sharing feedback.  Some were new to her poems and felt a certain amount of trepidation.  Others were fans, one person disliked her work but was interested to hear other’s people’s comments. 

 We started by looking at ‘Morning Song’.  Opinion divided on whether it was a positive or negative depiction of motherhood and it was generally decided it could be both.  The chubbiness of the opening watch imagery was admired and it was noted how the line set an inevitable and momentous journey into motion.  The wit of the poem was also appreciated.

 Next we listened to a recording of Plath reading her poem ‘Lady Lazarus’.  The version differed from the printed poem and fascinatingly included lines which were later edited such as ‘I am Japanese’.  It was felt that Plath’s unflinching journeying into the recesses of her speaker’s mind places a reader in a vulnerable position, and we discussed how comfortable, or otherwise, the poem made us feel.  It was acknowledged that the speaker of the poem was separate from Plath, though the poet relentlessly used her own life in her work.  The use of the holocaust was discussed, both how it pertained to Plath’s life, and also a more public psyche. 

 Our penultimate poem was ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’.  Again the wit of this piece was enjoyed.  One person suggested that poem might be about being a poet, but we decided maybe (hopefully!) it was just about being Plath.  In a bid to send ourselves off on an upbeat note, there was a quick discussion of ‘You’re’.  The wonderful sounds of this poem were discussed as were the sublime metaphors for the unborn child throughout including ‘my little loaf’.

 Finally we discussed how important the group was in enabling people to read the poems. Many people felt that the communal nature of the activity helped with Ariel in particular, acting as both support and safety net.

 Many thanks again to everyone for an illuminating evening.  On Tuesday 24 March at 6.30pm Linda will be leading a discussion on Pascale Petit’s The Zoo Father – a collection which has parallels with Ariel.  See you there.  And happy reading! 

Plath Poems

Sylvia Plath’s Ariel is for some the greatest poetic achievement of the last century. The book, posthumously published, was an immediate and worldwide literary sensation. Her poetry is mesmerising - deft, intelligent, shocking and risky. The poet has become more famous than the poetry – partly due to Plath’s marriage to the poet Ted Hughes, and her early death by suicide. We will be focusing on the work rather than the life – but can you separate the two? Discuss!

The poems we will be concentrating on are:

Morning Song

Lady Lazarus

Cut

Daddy

You’re

The Arrival of the Bee Box

Edge (in some editions of Ariel and not others, it’s on the web at http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/edge/)

Mushrooms (not in Ariel but included because I have a recording of the poet reading it! See http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/mushrooms/)

Enjoy! And see you next Tuesday 24 February at Blackwell’s bookshop, Newcastle at 6.30pm. Old-hands and new-comers as ever are all very welcome.

Listen to Sylvia Plath reading Daddy