BurnedThumb

Englyn for Sally

In her cave of books, she guards the words,
Sorts trinkets from treasure.
There is fire in her belly,
And strength in her outspread wings.

I wrote this ages ago, when I first got to know Sally Evans, editor of Poetry Scotland and the Die-Hard Press, (which she runs with her husband, Ian King), and thought that, because of her name, she must be Welsh. She is, but not quite as much as I thought. Although of Welsh heritage, she was actually brought up in Northumbria.But this year she has been learning Welsh, and here she is, reading poems inspired by it.

Never was this englyn more appropriate than this weekend, when, as she does every year, she organises her Callander Poetry Weekend. Originally meant as an extended party for her Edinburgh friends who didn’t drop in quite so much when she and Ian moved to callander, it retains the friendliness, the hospitality and the illusion that it’s all easy and comes without effort. But it’s also an open house for poets of all kinds and types and classifications of poets, to read and meet up and find out what’s going on in poetry in Scotland – and further afield.

There are young poets, just getting started. There are older poets with years of successful publication behind them. There are mystical poets, political poets, love poets, green poets, lyrical poets, satirical and historical poets – some fabulous performance poets – and some really good musicians too. There are poets who write in Gaelic, in Doric or in the many dialects of Britain (and if you think dialect = comic you would be only half wrong as we had some excellent comic poetry written in dialect).

There were really good food, workshops (can’t comment, mine was one of them!) two book launches, (Charlie Gracie’s Good Morning, which I featured back in May and Sheena Blackhall’s Wittins, which I’ll write about later this month), and a tribute to Edwin Morgan, which everyone who was there found moving and appropriate for Scotland’s well loved makar.

Now, as well as organising and programming the many events packed into the weekend, Sally also cooks the food for everyone (and doesn’t charge), puts people up in her flat or in her garden, helps people find lifts home or places to stay, provides stalls for poets and other publishers to sell their books, and shares her lovely home and shop and garden with everyone who comes. It’s a mammoth job. What’s more, this year she did it, as she says, “with one hand tied behind my back”, because of a broken wrist which was in plaster until last Monday.

Sally, we couldn’t possibly tell you how much we loved this year’s festival, or how grateful and appreciative we are for all you do for Scottish poetry. Thank you so much!

The programme for the hospitable and poetically diverse festival of them all, Sally Evans’ Poetry in the Garden weekend,(3rd-5th September, Callander Bookshop, Main Street) is up on her website desktopsallye.com. In spite of having broken a wrist, Sally has put together something very special; if you can get to it at all, I really recommend it.

Of course it doesn’t hurt that I’m reading on the Friday night, and leading a workshop on the Scottish/Irish (and Welsh) poetry connection. But there are too many other excellent poets reading all through the weekend for me to single any out. Go look!

Sometimes you read good poetry that is familiar, that reads like the sort of poem you would write yourself if you were good enough, the sort of poem you want to write when you grow up. And sometimes you come across good poetry of a sort you never even thought of, and that you wouldn’t ever be able to write unless you rewired your brain, that astonishes you with newness and strangeness – and occasionally makes you ask yourself if what you write is poetry at all.

After today’s lot, I began to see myself as a slightly manic four year old, jumping up and down with excitement shouting “Wow, look at that! It’s so pretty!”

Poets of the first sort are easy to find if you like poetry at all. They include, for me, Kathleen Jamie, Gillian Clarke, Seamus Heaney and John Burnside, Eavan Boland (might as well aim high while you’re at it!) Poets of the second sort are rarer, and more tricky. Recently I’ve been reading two such – Geoff Cooper whose Songs the Lightning Sang was brought out by Calderwood Press earlier this year and Tim Atkins, whose Folklore is published by Salt.

Geoff Cooper’s poetry is unashamedly Romantic, obviously influenced by Coleridge, Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Neruda, but achieving a voice of his own by tempering the lushness with accurate observation of the natural world and careful control of metre and structure. It is sensual poetry, inspired by landscapes, painting and music, passionate, as becomes a first collection, but also powerful and mature. It depicts a beautiful but fragile world where human behaviour is largely destructive or violent, God absent, nature indifferent. Yet the pervading sense of alienation and despair is not the final word.
I remembered
as a fool remember, that poetry must go beyond
the shining world —
—brave and deep
inside others, and beyond ourselves.
must puzzle out
what’s furthest, hardest,
yes poetry must seek out

All those other human worlds

Tim Atkins’ poetry is not much like that at all. For him the distinction of the individual human worlds much less that between the natural and human world doesn’t seem to exist. It’s even hard to make out what the subjects of his fractured sentences are. The whole landscape,(Atkins is inspired by the Malvern Hills, the setting for The Vision of Piers Plowman) stones, people, flowers, stars, bones, birds, comes together to make one living breathing fertile mortal organism. You know what you are up against when he starts with
Man walks into sky .

It is physical, but not exclusively visual poetry, tactile, auditory, richly textured. Weird and beautiful.

I haven’t had time for a proper look at this book, which I got at the Stirling Writers’ Big Event last week, but you will be able to see one of Charlie’s poems (my favourite, actually)Clyde valley Walkway, late April, with my Father here in July.
This month features Chris Powici, who was tutor of the Stirling Writers Group until recently, when he became editor of Northwords Now.

The point of the post, though, is to show you the first of the new Die-hard hard cover books. Sally and Ian King reckon that the only way to keep ahead of the e-book phenomenon is to make books gorgeous, and they have. The books have board covers, lovely cream paper, and will lie flat when you open them for ease of reading. Brilliant, no?

Two helpful comments from poets on the process of poem:
At a recent meeting of SCoP (the Stirling Centre of Poetry)Kathleen Jamie said, “The hardest thing to teach students is that you have to let the shit fall onto the page”.
true, all too true. We have a tendency to censor what we are writing as we write it so a poem can be mummified before it is even born.

And I’ve just read this from W N Herbert’s book “Writing Poetry”;
“Most people — don’t read it (their draft) closely. What they see tends to be as much what they intended to write as much as what is actually on the page–Simply reading what you have actually written is by no means easy.”

That is probably the most helpful thing I have ever read.

I’ve spent a lot of time lately looking at blogs of quilters, embroiderers, dyers, weavers and all sorts of other people who craft with fabric and thread. I used to embroider myself at one time (and knit, and make clothes, too for that matter) and at times I get the delusion that I still could, if I set my mind to it, if I wasn’t so busy etc, etc.
In fact, last weekend, I succumbed to the temptation and made some cushions for the story chair in my study. (Why story chair? because they used to sit beside the children’s beds so I could read them stories. There are two of them which were passed on from my great-grandmother). Here they are.

But it was enough to convince me I should stick to the poetry.
But here’s the point. Looking at the crafters’ blogs is more than an exercise in nostalgia and fantasy. It is inspiring on many different levels.
First of all, they are often very beautiful. Mousenotebook and Nature’s Whispers come to mind here. Mousenotebook goes in for a very disciplined simplicity, neatness accuracy and restraint, whereas Natures’ Whispers is all about the colour – rich, riotous and intense.
As well as inspiring me in the ordinary way – there’s a poem about dyeing brewing in my notebook just now – thinking about the values they express in their different media helps me to think about the values I want for my poetry.
Some blogs do more than this. Spirit Cloth shows and discusses work in progress, and this is enormously interesting. Images and materials are assembled, laid out, put together, unravelled. Experiments are made with colour and form and stitching and texture. Ideas develop; understanding deepens. To me it feels a bit like watching a flower unfurl on film.

Poetry isn’t often like that for me. I tend to come up with an idea like an untidy tangle of thread. If I pull at the right bit, a good image, an interesting line or two it unfolds into a poem and I look at it with a certain degree of astonishment, almost as if it didn’t have anything to do with me. Then it’s a matter of straightening it out a little, if it’s disorderly, shining up the dull or tarnished bits, occasionally separating out the two poems that somehow got mixed up together. I quite like most of the results so far.

As I go on, however, and write more, I realise that this is not how the best poems come about. Good poetry is much more like good craftsmanship than good ideas. Taking time with your materials, engaging with the process, is as much part of the inspiration as the flash of insight.

And I have also found some poets who feel the same. I’ll talk about them next time.

You can read Colin Will’s take on the launch of his The Floorshow at the Mad Yak Café and Eleanor Livingstone’s Even the Sea at Colin’s blog.
I set one of my Orpheus poems at the Callander poetry festival, and it begins:
Poetry–starts
when Colin strikes the small Tibetan bowl.
The warmed and singing bronze awakes
a humming clarity
And so poetry started, with Colin’s singing bowl.

It was indeed a great night, not only because the poetry books were good, but also because the readings were excellent – which doesn’t always coincide. It was very well-attended – and yes, you two are indeed ‘national treasures’, justifiably well-known and well-loved, not only for your poetry, but for the help and encouragement you give to poetry in Scotland at large. You guys, and Sally Evans and Joy Hendry. Am I right?

I read the two books on the train going home (I know, but it was a long journey and a long wait before). Eleanor’s poems are shorter, warm and witty, and deal with growing up, growing older, and the small intimate moments of relationships, but also have some beautiful clear snap-shots of nature and landscape. The poem that made most impact at the reading was It’s my Party– but the one I come back to, which I hope she won’t mind me quoting is the introduction to part 2:

a Sunday in June
no bees in sight but listen
to the tree humming

Colin’s poems are longer, less personal but deeply reflective. There are a lot about landscapes, Suilven and China, but the tone was set by some serious reflections about mortality and faith – or perhaps lack of it. It seems hard to strike the right tone in a society where we are pretty much in denial about death and a common belief or response is not a thing to take for granted, but these poems were calm, thoughtful and honest, deeply engaged, but not emotional. The only quarrel I have with this book is that it is too short!

You can get both of these books from Red Squirrel press.

Here is the picture (copied from the Red Squirrel web-site) of the winners of the James Kirkup Memorial Competition last Friday. Sheila Wakefield, the publisher of Red Squirrel Press (who were organising the competition) is on my right, and you can just see the top of the head of Richie McCaffery, from Stirling Writers, behind me. I hope there are other photos which show him to better advantage!
The library where the event was held is a modern building beside a shopping centre – reminds me a bit of Dundee where the library is in the Wellgate Centre – in the Library Theatre. This was a lovely space, small enough to feel intimate, but with enough space for generous seating and good acoustics. It was a much less well-attended event than we might have expected, as eight of the runners up had been prevented from getting there by the ash cloud.
It meant, however, that as well as my own poem Rushlight, I got to read on behalf of one of the absentees Jellyfish by Julie Mellor – a stunning poem; I felt very lucky.
As well as catching up with Richie, I got to meet his parents, and to talk to the judges of the competition about how they had set about their job. This was a really nice experience, as you often find yourself sending poems to competitions and hearing nothing back, and sometimes you wonder if they hadn’t just disappeared into a black hole somewhere, or got spiked and forgotten. But every poem in the competition had been read several times before the short-list was drawn up, and all the judges cross-marked their choices. They said they felt they had a ‘duty of care’ towards those who had sent them work. Far be it from me to suggest that all judges don’t act the same way; I bet they do, and sometimes it’s a lot of hard work for very little return, but all the same it’s nice to hear that your work has been so carefully treated.
The anthology of winning poems is already available from Red Squirrel Press (£4)The winner was Lesley Mountain (she’s at the front of the photo) with a poem called Timewasters, which you can read on the web-site,and Sheila, who must be the most hard-working and efficient publisher in the business, says that her pamphlet will be gong to press by Wednesday. Lesley read more of her poems in the second half, along with judges Terry Kelly and Alistair Robinson. A really good night.

South Shields is a very friendly place – I was struck by the courtesy of the drivers who stopped for pedestrians in a way I thought went out of style with pan stick and love beads, but also by the willingness to party which starts the weekend at four o’clock Friday (“So late?” asked the landlord of the B&B I was staying in.) St George’s day celebrations seem to be a big thing, so by nine o’clock when the James Kirkup evening ended things were already lively, and I was frankly very grateful to Richie’s parents for giving me a lift through the revellers!

I have had this book almost a month now, and though I read it the very same day I got it, here I am only just posting about it.

I am very fond of Burnside’s poetry, ever since I read The Myth of the Twin. I was gob-smacked when I heard him read from Four Quartets which is the third section of Gift Songs and has all the complexities and layers and entrelacements of music, as well as the obvious influences of TS Eliot. So when I found myself in St Andrews for StAnza in a very crowded coffee-bar, and it looked as if the only place left was beside JB I decided I couldn’t be that bold, and sneaked off into an obscure corner till I could stop myself doing the ‘we’re not worthy’ bit.

This volume has even more echoes and influences of T S Eliot, but it’s a lot easier to get your head round. It has a similar hypnotic evocative loveliness; the poems are full of rain and flowers, the sea, bats, snow, light and shadow. Burnside’s world is inherently permeable, dust, pollen, feathers, snow, memories, shadows, ghosts, alternative possibilities slip through it, changing, hinting, fading. Haunting is the word for it.

And haunting it is, because this book is haunted by death. Deaths of friends and family; our own death, imagined, feared, longed for, or evaded; village deaths that become a matter of rumour and folk-lore; the death of animals and the guilt (or lack of it) that goes with it. Death hunts us in the forest of our lives, our dreams, and sometimes we hunt it, and sometimes we hunt each other.

It is an extraordinarily beautiful book, but it is also astonishingly creepy. On the other hand, there are three poems called Amor Vincit Omnia – rays of light in what would otherwise be a very dark place indeed.

I have just finished refreshing the main web-site, so please take a look if you have time. Later this week I will be writing a bit more about St Andrews, and including a review of John Burnside’s new book, which was so very hot off the press it was practically smoking.