Three Good Questions

Kate Clanchy, one of the UK's best contemporary poets, is also a superb reader of her own work - she read for my Oxfam series a while back, and the audience was entranced and delighted in equal measure by her poems.

I hope she won't mind my replying, then, with all due respect, to her comments, written in today's Guardian Review section, in her review of De-iced, a book by Susan Wicks (Bloodaxe): "There are questions that creative writing teachers are careful never to ask of their students, questions which are out of their remit and destructive to their jobs. 'Is this poem original?' is one, 'Is it urgent?' another, and 'Could it find an audience outside our subsidised community?' an unmentionable third".

I'm a creative writing teacher - and have been since 1998. I also have an MA from the University of East Anglia's creative writing department, where I am currently pursuing a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing. I currently am a Core Tutor for The Poetry School, and lecture on the MA in Creative Writing at Kingston University. I enjoy teaching, and see it as an inspiring, meaningful and practical activity - one that complements my other roles as a poet, literary editor and poetry advocate.

Firstly, creative writing teachers succeed when their students succeed - foremost by creating work they're proud of, and that stretches the student writer's abilities, their craft, their imaginations, their sense of language - so no questions about writing are ever beyond a creative writing teacher's remit or destructive of their jobs - any teacher who churns out only mediocre writers just isn't doing their job properly.

Clanchy's statement to the contrary seems to me to be incorrect. In fact, these questions, often framed or phrased somewhat differently, but amounting much to the same, such as Is it a cliche?, Is it fresh?, Are you saying something new? are central to provoking students into reaching beyond their comfort zones, often by reading more, and revising more.

Thirdly, as for "reaching beyond our audience" - what is the audience for poetry, and what's beyond it? Poetry reaches who it does, and always has.

Inland Vampire

Eyewear is sad to hear of the recent death of Canadian-born icon of silver and small screen alike, Yvonne De Carlo (pictured).

She was best known for her vampiress role in The Munsters (1964-1966), which was cancelled the year I was born. Like many who came to love her, and the show, I saw it in re-runs.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1988638,00.html

Poem by John Haynes

Eyewear is honoured to be able to feature poetry, this Friday, from John Haynes (pictured),this year's winner of the Costa Poetry Prize (formerly known as the Whitbread Prize) for his collection, Letter to Patience, published by the excellent Seren, based in Wales. While I have yet to read the whole book, what I have seen of it, including this section, excerpted below, is worth getting to know.

Haynes was born of parents who were professional entertainers. After dropping out of school at 16, he joined the RAF, before going on to university, where the great poet F.T. Prince ("Soldiers Bathing") was his tutor. Haynes spent 1970 to 1988 as a lecturer in English at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria where he founded the literary journal Saiwa. Now back in the UK, he has continued teaching, writing and publishing and is the author of a number of books: on teaching, style and language theory, as well as African poetry, stories for African children, and two other volumes of verse. Sections of Letter to Patience have appeared, over the years, in London Magazine, Stand, Poetry Review, Ambit, Critical Quarterly and Poetry Wales. He has won prizes in the Arvon and National Poetry competitions. He has a PhD in applied linguistics.


VI

"The bar is what you're going to miss," you said,
"not me," but that's wrong isn't it, to draw
lines around people (even if they're dead),

as if I'd miss the place you live in more
than you, when there's no line between at all
and that's something that you kept saying, your

philosophy, the sense of floor, mud wall,
dust road as who we are, the kites' long cry
at harmattan, the beggar's rhythmic call

outside Alhaji Kowa's store, this I
that floats and enters you from just as far
as ever, dear one, shapeless as the sigh

that lifts out of your mouth, out of the bar,
out of the rusted corrugated zinc
and mixes with some wailing armoured car

out on the road, and then the first tink-tink
of birds, the cockerel's call, none of it you,
except that when I think of it I think

it is and not the old femme noire, femme nue
"Afrique", no, something shared in spite of skin
colour, and Lugard's maxim gun, or through

just those, is it? I think so, what we're in,
as what we are. And so I'm writing this
Magana Jari Ce, am I, to spin

you into words? A spell, a selfishness
to try and keep you there, or rather here,
closing my eyes with lust to see, miss

you, sharper - no, the bar, musci, the beer?
Or it's an elegy for someone dead
for all I know, for all I fear to fear.


section excerpted, with permission of the publisher, from Letter to Patience
Seren Books, 2006
by John Haynes

http://www.seren-books.com/public/index.cfm

Language Acts

Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry 1976 to the 21st Century
eds. Jason Camlot and Todd Swift
Essays
March 2007

Vehicule Press
ISBN-10: 1-55065-225-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-55065-225-3
Can $22.95
paper / 276 pages / 4 appendices

Language Acts: Anglo-Quebec Poetry 1976 to the 21st Century brings together twenty provocative essays on the state of English-language poetry in Québec since 1976. Born and raised during this historically resonant period of Trudeauism, organized Québecois nationalism, sovereignty referenda, language legislation, and profound demographic and cultural change, Anglo-Québec poetry has come of age in the 21st century as a literature with its own distinct arguments about itself, and its own poetical acts in language.

Featuring essays on many important, even canonical figures such as Robert Allen, Anne Carson, Leonard Cohen, Louis Dudek, D.G. Jones, Irving Layton, Michael Harris, Erin Moure, David McGimpsey, Robyn Sarah, and Peter Van Toorn, and on a wide range of poetry activities including those of the Véhicule Poets and the Montreal Spoken Word scene, Language Acts is the first critical collection of its kind to appear in over forty years, and will set the terms used to discuss English language poetry in Québec for years to come. As such it is an indispensable guide to a body of 20th and early 21st century writing that is simultaneously American and post-colonial, Canadian and uniquely Québecois.

http://www.vehiculepress.com/files/Spring2007Catalogue.pdf

The TLS Wants More War Poets

I am reminded of Charles Foster Kane's immortal promise, "Dear Wheeler: you provide the prose poems, I'll provide the war."

The TLS (missing the poems, if not the prose) recently [January 5, 2007] asked, in its oft-brilliant NB column (edited and written by J.C.) -"Where are the poets of war?" - before suggesting that one oughtn't to look for them in the anti-war camp, despite what Francis Scarfe wrote in 1941: "a good war poem must also be a good peace poem."

As the TLS writes, "We exclude, for the moment, poems gathered together in collections such as 100 Poets against the War, edited by Todd Swift, and 101 Poets .... [the ellipsis is J.C.'s] edited by Paul Keegan and Matthew Hollis, the very titles of which amount to to a political agenda (the former contained new work; the latter poems from all ages). The kind of war poetry you want, as a reader, challenges your assumptions with doubt, pity, glory, even gore." There's a lot here to unpack. So much so, it's almost like that picnic basket from The Wind In The Willows.

Firstly, no sane reader wants any war poetry at all - surely, it's only a necessary evil of combative times. What they expect, if there is a war, is that the poetry written during wartime will, at the very least, "handle" the pressure of experience placed on language and the living (and dying) at that time;

Secondly, the requirement to "challenge your assumptions" rather begs the question of what those are, in the first place. Poetry is not a debating chamber, only. If one's assumptions are that Christ died for our sins, that one shouldn't kill, that war is a last resort - well, one hardly wants or needs Satanic verses espousing a holocaust simply for the sake of throwing off dusty old ways for shiny new ones. T.S. Eliot's sublime Quartets are blessed with very much establishing convictions, not simply shaking an apple tree to see if any Vicars fall;

Thirdly, the rather simplistic idea that only poetry anthologies with self-evident titles contain a "political agenda" is a little old-fashioned. Every poetry anthology constitutes a micro-canon, and therefore establishes and defends its own set of values, hierarchies and traditions;

Fourthly, Tom Paulin's superb anthology of Political Verse (Faber) should lay to rest the cliche that "politcal poetry" cannot, first and foremost, sing as well-crafted verse. "War" or "politics by other means" is no less a legitimate theme for poetry than love - and besides which, the best WWI poetry from the trenches expresses a strong anti-war bias without ruining the quality of the writing, or the pity;

Fifthly, there is a long-standing (and mistaken) belief, among critics who have not read my famous anthology, especially, that nth position (and later Salt's) 100 Poets against the War collection, contains "merely" propaganda, rather than excellent new writing. Look again. The anthology of mine that the TLS so airily dismisses contains poems written in the 21st century, in a variety of forms and styles, by some of the finest (often major) poets of our age, including: Charles Bernstein, Mahmoud Darwish, Michael Donaghy, Marilyn Hacker, David Harsent, Ranjit Hoskote, John Hartley Williams, Mimi Khalvati, John Kinsella, Robert Minhinnick, Sean O'Brien, Grace Schulman, and George Szirtes. Hardly a list of beatnik also-rans.

No, I'm afraid if the TLS is looking for "war poets" they better start reading the Internet, particularly nth position, more closely - our e-books have, since 2003, continually supplied readers who want "gore" as well as "pity" excellent verse dealing with all sides of the issues relating to the wars against terror, in Afghanistan and in Iraq - most recently in Babylon Burning, a collection J.C. mocked, gently, in the same pages in 2006, for raising funds for the Red Cross. Is J.C. a little bloody-minded?

http://www.nthposition.com/babylonburning911.php

Over The Edge

Not a confession, but a fact.

I'm to be the guest reader for a very special event coming up end of the month, in Galway, Ireland.

As the link below says: "The first Over The Edge: Open Reading of 2007 takes place in Galway City Library, St. Augustine Street, Galway on Thursday, January 25th, 6.30-8pm.The Featured Readers are Elaine Feeney, Mary Mullen & Todd Swift. The reading is a special occasion for co-organisers, Susan Millar DuMars and Kevin Higgins, as it is the fourth anniversary of the series, which began in January 2003."

http://www.overtheedgeliteraryevents.blogspot.com/

Irony Will

If it so often seems in the "poetry world" (by which I mean the English one, primarily, but also the French somewhat) that what divides is the Atlantic, or versions of "linguistic innovation", or politics - my experience, with poets, critics, editors, publishers, and those rare, elusive everyday readers we hear so much about, instead suggests the fault line in early 21st century is Irony.

Simply put, there are two types of poets in the world - those fundamentalists who are roughly humourless and have the face of the farmer in American Gothic and think words are for sincere barter, about as subtle as a ton of pig - and those gay, Nivenesque souls who employ irony in their work, as not just a method, but an esprit. I am thinking, really, of the difference between a great many poets whose poems are about even more than an authentic disclosure of experience - and those who enjoy a little aesthetic distance, even artifice, in their writing. I am thinking of the wonderful New York School Poet, Kenward Elmslie, who wrote poems like "Girl Machine" and "History of France" - insouciant poetry that couldn't care less what you thought about it (dear reader) and yet always makes you feel part of the circus act (a circus where Shirley Temple might get eaten by lions).

Nor is this a "postmodern" versus "mainstream" shoving match, either. The great American avant-gardist (and Amazing Absorbing Man) Charles Bernstein is hilarious, ironic (in the sense the poem is never mistaken for being a bus ticket that can get you from A to B, whether that be Heaven or Hell) and eclectic in Benjaminian fashion; but some experimental poets can sound very sombre and pretentious, indeed, and would never ever think it right to include the name of a movie star in one of their poems. And yes, some mainsteam poets, like Simon Armitage, are ironic as hell, and often very funny, rarely acting in their poems like they are laying down a direct line to Stalin or the Pope or Wordsworth. Meanwhile, others act like every word not only counts, but plays the fiddle, dances, and transports you to the garden of Eden, for five cents, return.

I confess to being frustrated when some readers don't "get" my poetry. The reason they don't get it, is because they do get it, and they don't want what they're getting, just like some people don't want gay people in their churches or hotels. The truth is, sadly, many readers of poetry want ONLY some things from a poem and one of the things they ONLY want is that ahhhh feeling, like when you see a rainbow, or feel a lovely breeze on your face. I write poems about rainbows, because that is part of life, having an ahhhh every once in a while. But there's a lot of pleasure in being an Elmslie, or a Denby too - formal, serious, artful and clever, yes - but never less than witty, never not open to the full delights of the tongue, which cannot always be governed, and must sometimes be joyously diverted by cheek.

In short, the poetry world isn't ultimately divided along lingustic, class, national, ethnic, theoretical, or even philosophical lines, but whether we think poems always have to be po-faced or not.

(On the other hand, it sometimes is lovely to just be sincere, earnest and straightforward, and say something you believe in, eh?)