BurnedThumb

Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

Poetry

And So Today

And so today, you ask me
What is your life about?
Why are you? What do you mean?
What is your function, what are you for?
And I will have to tell you
about the woodpecker drumming
and the carpet of celandines
below the old railway bridge,
the wrens defending their gardens
in a mad trill of music,
the sourdough bubbling in the kitchen
and the warm smell of soup,
the logbooks stacked beside my chair,
the firelight, a growing poem.

A springtime poem, but this is the mood for today. The world seems to be going to hell in a handcart, and there isn’t anything I can do about it, apart from this. I’m not making any great claim for it, but it isn’t exactly frivolous either. Love grounded in reality is where we need to start from. I’m sending love.

October 6, 2020
Tongues of Fire by Seán Hewitt

Front cover

This book is the one I waited for most anxiously, having read Seán Hewitt’s debut pamphlet Lantern last year. It didn’t disappoint. Right from the opening poem, the quiet, but not at all understated Leaf, you have some idea what you are in for:

For woods are the form of grief
grown from the earth. For they creak.
——
For even in the nighttime of life
it is worth living, just to hold it
Tongues of Fire p. 1

This collection is all about grief, chiefly for the slow death of the poet’s father from cancer, but also the deaths of friends and contemporaries by suicide, and the loss of love. The book is heavy and heartfull with grief, but it is not a sad book. It studies darkness and night, but also light, air and water.

It is essentially a ‘moniage‘ book, a going out into nature to discover wisdom and meaning, and it is full of trees, birds and plants. The poems about wild garlic and St John’s Wort are among my favourites, and I wish I had come across the latter when I did the St John’s wort newsletter! But Oak Glossary

In oak,
essential nouns include soil,
water and time – these are produced
from their elements. Water is a high
and gentle noise of clearest quality
which results from branches dripping
Tongues of Fire p16

and I Sit and Eavesdrop the Trees show the poet entering deeply into the life of other living things, rather than discussing how they figure in our lives. As a gay man in a very Catholic environment, the poet must consciously go ‘outside’ to think about his relationships and sexual identity, and he discovers a place full of secrets, danger and death, but also strength, wisdom and love.

The crux of the book is Hewitt’s ‘versions’ (as opposed to direct translations) of Buile Suibhne, the twelfth century Irish epic about a king who is cursed with madness by a monk, and has to live in the woods among the birds (I can’t find any justification for the assertion that he becomes a bird himself in the translations available to me). Seamus Heaney produced a translation in 1985, and I’ve found it useful to compare the two. Heaney’s Sweeney is a very physical, forceful disruptive man, reacting with violence whenever he is crossed, and rampaging about Ireland

poking his way into hard rocky clefts,
shouldering through ivy bushes
unsettling falls of pebbles in narrow defiles
wading estuaries
breasting summits
trekking through glens.
Sweeney Astray p.10

He winds up in Glen Bolcain, a valley of madmen, where he has to fight for the best of the wild watercress, and he is ‘flailed’ by the thorn bushes where he has to sleep, and battered by falling from branches which don’t bear his weight. He is always on the defensive, getting into fights with people who comment on his plight, and the weight of the poem falls on the loss of the social world he used to inhabit.

Hewitt’s Sweeney is quieter, and more introspective, lonelier and more vulnerable

no matter where I go
my sins follow. First,
the starry frost will fall
at night onto every pool
and me left out in it, straying.

Hewitt focusses on the friendships Sweeney forms first with the madman Fer Caille whom he meets in Britain, and with whom he agrees to protect each other until Fer Caille’s death, and then with the monk Moling, through whom he is healed, and who mourns his death. People have often seen this poem as a clash between an oppressive Christianity, and a more pagan pantheism, but in this version, Hewitt seems to create an reconciliation between the two worldviews, without necessarily giving ascendancy to either.

I find this elsewhere in the book, particularly in the final section – Tree of Jesse and the title poem Tongues of Fire, which is a reflection on the fungus clavariiforme (you can see it on the cover), which he finds in the woods, and also on the Pentecostal tongues of flame. In spite of the close attention to Biblical motifs, it is not exactly clear who or what he asks

for correlation – that when all is done,
and we are laid down in the earth, we might
listen, and hear love spoken back to us.
Tongues of Fire p.69

My own reflections on our relationship to the earth and the question of moniage in particular, will be a long time brewing, but start here. This is a stunning book.

September 25, 2020
Living La Vida Lockdown -The Burnedthumb Ring

I expect a lot of us have made random purchases during the lockdown. I know one family who bought a tap floor for dance practice, and a lot of people who got seriously obsessed with Animal Crossing. Then there are customised facemasks and wish-listed box sets, plus all the things we bought to help out the small independent producers or because supermarkets couldn’t supply our usual stuff – I probably won’t go back to supermarket bread flour, or big brand soap and shampoo even when this is over. My purchase, which I would never have bought without the weirdness we are living in, is the Burnedthumb ring.

If you’ve been around since I started this blog, you’ll know how important the legend of the salmon of wisdom, and how Fionn mac Cumhaill burned his thumb cooking it, and accidentally became able to understand the languages of all living beings, is to my poetry. This poem is from The Territory of Rain, published in 2015

Land Speaks
Land speaks to the seed
of rock and sand and water
in the language of rush and heather,
deep-rooted trees and scavenging gorse.

Land speaks to the builders of nests
of wind and rain in the scour of river banks,
the burn’s swift rush of water in the creeks
the deep moss-cushions, the sway
of tall firs and the lie of wind blows.

Land speaks to the crawlers
of frost and sun, soft going and dry,
in the bleached grass, and cracked seed-case,
the rise of small flies to the swallow’s beak.

Land speaks to the trees
of growth and blossom and failing
in the depth of pine needles on the forest floor
the decay of last year’s leaves, and the green dust
of new seedlings on the wet mulch.

Land speaks to the buzzard
of running voles, and rabbits nibbling
the soft stems of clover and primrose flowers.

Land speaks to the bat
in lengthening days, warm nights
of insects swarming, circling over the grass.

Land speaks of summer and winter
in the language of warbler and waxwing,
in rose and ivy flower, mist and lightning,
tree-rings, lichens and weathering stone.

and the central image of The Wren in the Ash Tree is the ‘web of speaking beings’ that is the earth and everything in it. I have been revisting it as I write the big scary poems that I need to form the heart of the next collection, and when I browsed Instagram (at a particularly low point!) and found this ring, with its shape inspired by the tail fin of a salmon, I frankly couldn’t resist it. And then, in a moment of pure serendipity, I discovered the concept of Deep Mapping in a soon to be published pamphlet by Rebecca Sharp and Simon Whetham (watch this space), which has brought so much thinking into focus, and has set me back on the right track.

Thank goodness for random purchases!

May 27, 2020
Virtual Launch: There Will Be Dancing by Kemal Houghton

In the unusual circumstances posed by the corona virus, formal launches of Poetry have been cancelled – at least for now. So I would like to welcome you to the virtual launch of publications by Red Squirrel Press.

Electric Minstrel

Plugged-in and tunes selected,
the electric minstrel fills the air
with a beat they will know
and a voice that must coax.
Some may glance her way
in the lull of conversations,
but she is the salt of the diners;
the liquid of the glass.
Her mother was a jukebox,
her father played the fiddle.
Long ago there was someone
playing a lute while people, as always,
shouted over the racket.

Her job is to entertain,
distract and take away the silence.
She is in every town, every encampment,
wherever people have knotted together.
She drives through the rain, as she always has,
down mud-spattered lanes
with carts or whatever could be carried
on groaning backs. And this road is no place
for the squeamish. Many have fallen; Buddy Holly,
Johnny Kidd, Eddie Cochran are just a few.

Yet she will battle above the rows,
the women who teeter towards a fight
and the drunken laughter. She
will get their attention.
Now someone is singing in the corner,
bodies unwittingly move to the beat.
They have learned to accept her voice
and there will be dancing.

Every Drop

I am the drip that wears the stone,
darkly I fill the upland wastes,
then trickle the hillside where I
crash and fall. I am the roar
at the valley’s heart where I sing
my song as I dash to be free.

I am the green upon the lawn,
the juice that feeds the forest pine,
each little sip the sparrow takes,
each cup of tea, each cask of wine.

Trapped underground, I have distilled
the years where I’ve been the maker
of caverns and spires. Caught out by
the cold at the roof of the world
or at the Earth’s poles where I turn
so solid I can crush the rocks.

Your great ships may cruise me, careless
you’ve abused me as you clutter
the oceans with pain. But I am
the one drop inside your collar
who’ll shudder a chill down your spine.

Tougher than Belfast steel, I am
heavier than the air you breathe;
I am the force that can sweep you
away. I will rise and fill up
these fields, drown your crops and livestock;
this planet has always been mine.

From the stiffness in the plant’s stem,
the liquid in the blood, I float
all the things you do and I am
always
the better part of you.

Offa’s Dyke Path: In Mist

The pace of life slows to a step
along each rugged or muddied
path. We slide in the wetness, feel
the fall of the earth beneath us.

All sense of place is muddled here
in the fog of the hills. Valleys
are lost, even the route ahead
is consumed by the fallen cloud.

Company is sparse. Huddled shapes
mist past: walkers, wild ponies, but
mostly sheep. Few words are spoken,
just the duplicitous skylark
singing us away from her nest.

Through faith we follow the way down,
markers mostly point the right way,
though some need interpretation.
Guidebooks and GPS all help.

We enter each new town the way
people have done throughout the years;
strange pilgrims in search of shelter.

Kemal Houghton lives on the Wirral. He is Chair of the Chester Poets, a co-presenter at First Thursday in Heswall and of Poetry Roundup on the internet station Vintage Radio. He is on the planning group for the Wirral Poetry Festival and has run numerous workshops for both the festival and other community groups. He has a diverse body of work which has appeared in Chester Poets’ Anthologies since 1981, Poetry Scotland, Poetry Cornwall, The Jabberwocky Green Book, and on-line on Three Drops of the Cauldron. A retired social worker, Kemal now chairs the charity and not for profit organisation, Wirral Independent Living & Learning who provide support to people with learning disabilities. In his ‘spare time’ he enjoys hill walking and completed the 189 miles from Chepstow to Prestatyn along the Offa’s Dyke Path in 2018.

This is Kemal’s first pamphlet on Red Squirrel Press and sets out with A Sense of Purpose to explore, not just people and places, but attitudes to and our relationship with the world we live in. Amongst the many ideas collected over the years, be assured ─ There Will Be Dancing.

“There is a reassuring solidity in these poems, which encompass themes of time passing, evanescence and journeying on foot. Yet conversely there is also a disconcerting sense of the poet observing life from a very distant vantage point. A worthy first collection.” Gill McEvoy

You can buy copies of this book from the Red Squirrel Press website, or signed copies from Kemal’s site when it goes live. And later this year, we hope to have live launches, with the usual wine and (potentially) squirrel cookies!

March 20, 2020
Virtual Launch: Heft by David J Costello

In the unusual circumstances posed by the corona virus, formal launches of Poetry have been cancelled – at least for now. So I would like to welcome you to the virtual launch of publications by Red Squirrel Press. The first is Heft by David J Costello.

Heft

Altitude affects them.
Fixes contours in their flesh.
They learn the valleys from their mother’s milk,
assimilate the paths’ worn ink, the brutal rock,
the hoarse voice of the heather.
Every lamb is impregnated with its map.

Each day the shepherd and his dogs
corral them on the lower slopes
but their internal compass
tugs them back into their heritage of rock,
the heather’s cackle,
and the milky-white cartography of snow.

Visiting Time

He found her name
amongst the unused words
his mouth forgot it knew

and like a moth
discovering a flame
he caught the flicker
of her face inside it’s frame

and for the briefest time
became aware
of all the loss and loneliness
that kept him there

until his tears erased her to a blur
and cleansed his grief.
Her visits seemed so very brief.

Moth

Drawing the curtains dislodged it.
Now it bothers me at night.
The whirr of its wings.
Its little thermals bristling
the stubble on my face.
The way it nuzzles into dreams.

I see it with my eyes closed.
Its floury wings dibble
powdery clouds all over the place
and now it speaks to me as well.
I never catch its question
but I recognise the voice.

Your last words when you fell asleep
and I got up and drew the curtains back.

David J. Costello lives in Wallasey, England. He has been widely published and anthologised. David has won prizes in a number of competitions including both the Welsh International Poetry Competition and the Troubadour International Poetry Competition. His latest pamphlet, No Need For Candles, was published by Red Squirrel Press in 2018. David’s first full collection Heft is published by Red Squirrel Press in 2020.

You can buy copies of this book from the Red Squirrel Press website, or signed copies from David’s site at https://www.davidjcostellopoetry.com/ . And later this year, we hope to have live launches, with the usual wine and (potentially) squirrel cookies!

March 20, 2020
StAnza 2020

Eleanor Livingstone and Annie Rutherford, the power behind StAnza

Thank you StAnza, that’s a wrap. I am going to write the poetry version of this blog for InterlitQ later this month, full of thoughts about the complex multi-layered nature of identity and how poetry can open up the two-dimensional focus we can get from news, social media and television, assumptions about women’s poetry, diversity and neurodiversity, and a lot more wonderful stuff, but this blog is about the other thing – the experience of StAnza.

This year was a very good StAnza for me. I was in a very comfortable B&B on the other side of town, where I could see trees from my window and hear blackbirds and mallards on the river more than seagulls. It was quiet there, and I didn’t have to deal with the beer festival. There were fish suppers and fruit scones, and plenty of bookshops to browse in, and I went to more events than I think I’ve ever got to before.

I bought more books than I’ve ever bought before too, and even at that I didn’t get Jay Bernard’s or Caroline Forche’s – which I can see I will have to remedy as soon as I can. The poetry was as good as you would be led to believe by the brochure, and the Byre now sells ice cream in the intervals of the Centre Stage events, so boxes ticked there.

But the big thing that StAnza does is something I don’t think you get so much elsewhere. It doesn’t feel like a series of separate events, so much as one long poetry party. Poets don’t come, do their gig and disappear, they come to a lot of things, and hang about and chat in the Byre and the coffee shops. Because the Byre is not just the auditorium, it is genuinely a hub where you meet everyone (it’s a bit like Lisdoonvarna for that). And people come back every year, so you can look around the audience and see loads of people you know and find out what people are writing and who is being published this year, and projects are set up, connections made and faces you know from Facebook become actual people.

For a poet, if you don’t work in academia or publishing, there was also something else you don’t get everywhere. It was really important to spend several days with people for whom poetry is not a marginal activity, not private or sentimental or eccentric, but a subject of enormous range and importance, worthy of proper professional attention to technique and subject matter. It is important to see how poets take on the important issues of the world, and how practice in the arts relates to other aspects of life. And beyond that, it was very good to see women talking about their work, and claiming the right to take it seriously and to have it taken seriously, in the way men do, and women often seem to apologise for.

StAnza is a gift to poets, at every level, and we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Board, all the volunteers – most of whom come back every year too, and the team – especially Eleanor Livingstone and Annie Rutherford, who take care of every detail, who seem to know everyone and remember all the names, who keep calm in the face of every crisis that blows up, from cancelled gigs to venue switches, corona virus to pens for poets to sign their books. Thank you all, and see you next year!

March 9, 2020
The Very Peculiar (and Wonderful) Burns Supper

I was reading on Saturday night at this event. We had readings from Debbie Baker, Laura Fyfe, Anita Govan, Emma Mooney, Ailie Wallace and myself, (I’ve seen all of them before, and thought I knew what to expect, but all of them exceeded expectations, And I will happily sign Anita Govan’s ‘manifesto’, This is Poetry, any day of the week) and there was music from Amy-Lou from Dunfermline. There was also a ‘lingo bingo’ (I won a haggis) and a jumping frog competition, and it was fabulous. There will be photos on Facebook shortly, taken by SweetP Photography, and they will be amazing. Many of the profile pictures I’ve used over the years are from Sweet P.

I’d like to thank the organisers, The Write Angle, Gossip Collective who created the opportunity to access the venue, and The Macrobert Theatre who opened the Workspace for us. You all gave us a wonderful night!

I have been associated with The Write Angle for a few years. It is an arts hub which opens up opportunities for emerging poets, artists and musicians (and even the most tentative of beginners) to practise and showcase their craft, by organising events, which are always free to attend (often donations are welcome, but there is never any pressure) at which people are encouraged, and not merely invited, to show what they can do. And the results are always astonishing.

It’s not always that we hear from undiscovered geniuses who have been hiding their lights under bushels – though it does happen rather more often than you might expect – but that people who didn’t think they could write, or didn’t think they had anything to say, or who didn’t think that making art was for the likes of them, are allowed to try out their own voices. They can rely on an atmosphere which will help them to discover that whatever they have to say finds its resonance with other people, that they will be heard with friendly attention. Some will find that they are unexpectedly amongst friends, or with people who share their experiences. Some will find that telling stories isn’t just gossip, but a way into sharing memories and creating history. Some will find that they’ve said something interesting, but they’d like to find ways of doing it better, and that there are people who will help them without making them feel dumb. Some will find that the rules and restrictions which intimidated them from speaking or writing or drawing don’t always matter. Some will find that there are ways of doing what they’ve been doing for ages that they never expected.

At Write Angle events, I’ve heard story-tellers who would shame the professionals, reflective writers who can discuss current preoccupations in a more immediate way than most journalists, and singers and musicians who will be a force to be reckoned with in a year or two. I’ve seen people trying out new art forms, people wrestling with poetry who never thought that poetry was for them, or people simply realising that the way they speak is the way they are allowed to write. I’ve seen people progress from little sketches of family life to moving portrayals of historical events or searing portraits of abusive relationships. I’ve heard people try their first spoken word performances, who then went on to try a slam. I’ve heard people articulate the kind of experiences you can only share in safe spaces, and find that they are indeed safe and supportive.

A lot of this is down to the organiser (whose name never appears anywhere on the publicity, so I won’t reveal it here). He is passionate about the arts, familiar with almost every event that goes on in the Forth Valley, and brings people together in his own inimitable flamboyant way. His initiative is one that resonates very strongly with me. Art is more than self-expression – though goodness knows, we need more of that, as society becomes more homogenous and more restrictive – it is a way we can begin to think more deeply about the shape and progress of our lives, and a way we can hold conversations with each other and find common ground. And it creates a space for something we are losing more and more – a shared sense of wonder, meaning and purpose. I love this contact with organisations who put their time effort and money where their hearts are.

January 27, 2020
The Publishing Process

This is my wonderful publisher, Sheila Wakefield of the astonishingly productive Red Squirrel Press. Since I have started editing for Red Squirrel Press I have had a look at the publisher’s eye view of being published, and also developed and editor’s eye view and they are a little different —-

but let’s have a look at the poet’s eye view.

It is lovely when a publisher asks you to submit a manuscript (this does happen sometimes) and it’s lovely if you’ve sent some poems and you get a positive response. It’s fabulous to hold the finished book in your hands and put in the sticky tabs marking the poems you’re going to read from it at the launch. But it’s very hard to find a publisher, and I hear a lot of people asking why they bother. Self-publishing software is available, and if you’re willing to go to the trouble, you can get a professional looking product, do all the promotion yourself, and do so much better ——-

Well, can you? I have met people who say they do, and they are not poets. Fiction publishers seem to think along the grooves, and if you have something a little bit off the wall, but you know there’s a market for your work, it might be worth a punt. If you have been published and your publisher hasn’t treated you well, but you know all that’s involved, you might do a better job. If you are willing to pay the professionals for the things you can’t do, and spend half your working life (literally) doing the social media and the marketing emails and newsletters, you might make more money.

Poetry is different. For one thing, it is way more diverse and experimental than prose. People do it for love, not money (just as well) and poetry is short and portable and cheap to transmit. I see a lot of poets (mostly older, and more often than not male, don’t know why) complaining that poetry is all x these days (performance, or instagram or identity or issue based or —–) and I want to say, every time, “Where are you looking?” There is poetry of all sorts being published, lots of small magazines, online mostly, but a surprising number in print, thanks to print on demand. You are rarely going to be ‘too original’ or ‘not sufficiently commercial’ for publication.

Then, print runs are small. Unless you do it yourself, which is a much more skilled job than many people would like to admit, it is going to be expensive – editing, cover design, book design and typesetting, proof-reading, printing and binding cost so much that unless you sell a complete run, you won’t even cover the outlay. And then you have to factor in the library copies and review copies – and reviewers very rarely buy the books they review – not to mention the ones you swap with other poets for their books —-

No-one makes much money out of poetry.

If you are a spoken word poet, and all you want is a bit of merch for when you do a gig, you might be happy with a do-it-yourself product, but even then, I would encourage you to look around. There are some wonderful small presses who specialise in doing just this – Stewed Rhubarb, for one. But you will be trading on your reputation within the spoken word community, and page poetry doesn’t work the same way.

Page poetry does sell via readings and festivals and so on, but you have to be asked to those things, which means a lot of self-promotion. Being published by a traditional publisher gets you through some of those hoops, because they are part of a trade network. Your book joins an established conversation, instead of shouting into the void. Requests from publishers for their poets to appear in festivals carry more weight unless you already have an established profile. Reviews are easier to get that way too, but this is getting harder to achieve. Mostly, poetry books sell via the publisher’s website. I sell very few books myself, but Haggards has been reprinted twice, and has never been reviewed at all.

Not every publisher edits. I have talked to poets who have submitted an manuscript and some time later a book lands on their doorstep, and that’s the first they know about it. Some poets like that – they’ve worked hard on their poems, and surely, if the publisher liked them well enough to accept them, they are good enough? However, some poets get very nervous about it, and I think they are right to do so. There is something reassuring about talking your work over with someone who is as invested as you are in getting your work into its best possible form. If you have a publisher who does editing, you should treasure them.

You can find a lot about my philosophy of editing here, but there are a few more points I want to make.

Editing is a delicate process, and understandably, some poets feel very defensive. Will they get you? What if you write the kind of ppoetry they don’t like – or if they write the kind of poetry you don’t like! It’s worth remembering that if a publisher has selected your book for publication, the editor already believes it must be good. You are starting from a winning position!

Of course it won’t feel like that when you are told (as most poets, unaccountably have to be told) that you have submitted too many poems and a lot of them will have to go. The usual limit for a pamphlet is twenty pages of poems, and for a collection it’s 60, because of the way printing costs are calculated, but what most people don’t realise is that the computer default is A4, whereas book pages are closer to A5. Unless you write very short poems, that’s going to make a big difference.

The simplest way to proceed is to cut out the duds. But by the time you get to publication, very few poems are actually duds. The selection process is governed by many more factors that might not occur to a poet. When you first write a poem, the dialogue is between you and the topic, you and the poem. But when you put them all together, the poems begin to talk to each other, and it makes a big difference.

I like to find out what a poet has in mind for this collection. Is it her best work? or a showcase of everything she can do? Or does it tell a story, or take you for a walk through something or somewhere? Many of the poets I’ve edited already have a sense of structure and progress through the book – nothing so explicit as a theme, necessarily, but a sense of which poems belong together, which is the opening poem, which the conclusion. And when an editor cuts poems out, it has to be with respect to that structure and progress. So you might find there’s a cracking poem which doesn’t make the cut because it doesn’t fit.

Then, you might find you have an awful lot of poems with the same atmosphere, using the same techniques, on the same themes, or using similar motifs and images. It doesn’t always show up on a poem by poem basis, but when the whole thing comes together, it becomes a bit obvious – I’ve put an indefinite ban on rain and clay in my poems, after Haggards!

My own personal beliefs and preferences don’t come into the selection process as much as you might think. I have edited many poems whose arguments I don’t accept, many poems on subjects I don’t myself find interesting. Of course racist, sexist and homophobic poems wouldn’t make the cut, but poets who get this far don’t usually make those mistakes. You can occasionally find you’ve written a poem that is open to misconstruction, and then it has to be reworked or dropped – a second opinion on this can save you a lot of future embarassment. There is only one subject I won’t accept, and that is the kind of gratuitous graphic presentation or contemptuous treatment of the subjects of self-harm and suicide. This is a live issue in my life, as in the lives of many people, and disprespectful treatment isn’t just upsetting – it can produce very damaging and dangerous results. Personally, I can’t even deal with such poems – I literally fainted the first time I came across one.

Occasionally poets, especially in their first collection, show a lot of influence from particular poets, and this can be a problem, not of plagiarism – that would be totally unacceptable – but of establishing the maturity and authenticity of a poet’s work. Mostly I try to cut such poems, to allow the poet’s individual voice to sound out more clearly. Sometimes I request edits to poems for the same reasons. There are exceptions, however – one poet actually became stronger and more confident with a model to work from, and another had such a wide range of influences that it gave the collection a versatility of voice and technique that you wouldn’t have expected.

By the time I get to suggesting any changes, I will have spent a long time getting the feel of a poet’s own style and technique, and I won’t be trying to change or soften it, but it is true that my ear for another poet’s style isn’t as good as hers. If a change is needed, your change will work better than mine, and I almost always accept it.

And finally – a small boast, not to big myself up, but to reassure any upcoming poets who don’t know me so well. Almost all the collections I have edited have been reprinted and sold well. Naturally, the credit for this goes to the poets first, and to Sheila Wakefield’s good judgement in spotting their talent. But I think you can safely believe that I won’t be doing your book any harm!

October 9, 2019
Introducing Burnedthumb

When I first developed an online presence, this is what it looked like. I was providing authentic Latin for a computer game my daughter was developing – Latin, it turns out, was made for alien court cases – and I thought I might do a lot more of this, as well as translations. It never happened. People who wanted ancient languages for curses, spells, prophecies or plain ordinary geeky purposes were very soon able to learn , everything from Old Norse to Elvish and Klingon on the internet, and didn’t need me. And I found myself increasingly absorbed in my own poetry – and eventually, editing. But the idea I dimly felt when I started and later expressed in the Burnedthumb poem, was that it is a poet’s job to cross the boundaries between one language and another, and between one species and another, listening and learning wisdom.

This came out in the Eurydice sequence in Wherever We Live Now, in the Huldra poems in The Territory of Rain, and was behind the ways of knowing poems in Haggards, and more explicitly in The Wren in the Ash Tree. But since Haggards came out, there has been a slump in my poetry. I’ve written a bit, but I’ve been very ambivalent about it, wary of staying in my comfort zone and merely repeating myself. I’ve also been very busy editing, which turned out to be very helpful in ways I couldn’t possibly predict. And, if you’ve seen the events page you’ll see that lately I’ve done some readings, including newer poems, and a workshop. I’m not going to discuss those in detail, but all these combined factors have helped me develop the theme and structure of the next collection.

Occasional comments about my work have seemed to imply that my personal life was missing from my work, and that this poet wasn’t so much ‘scarred, accidental, listening’, as invisible, perhaps in hiding. This threw up a dilemma that was psychological as much as poetic. It wasn’t just that I believed my personal life was uninteresting or irrelevant to the poetry – the poet is always implied in a poem, no? But I appeared, when I thought about it, to be invisible and in hiding from myself.

There are people who take this to pathological extremes, lumped together under the heading of dissociative disorder. I haven’t experienced anything serious enough to classify as pathological, but I have had enough fleeting and partial experiences to realise that it is not the most creative or comfortable way to be. Recent events have forced me to reflect on what it means ‘to be a person’, and the kinds of knowledge someone has to possess to know that she is a person. Crucial to this is the work of Julia Kristeva whose concept of the human as a ‘speaking being’ inspired The Wren in the Ash Tree, the writings of a Scottish medieval philosopher, Richard of St Victor (who may even have lived in the Abbey of our village), as well as the writings about herbs which led me to think about the ‘ways of knowing’ valued by different cultures.

I’m going to be writing about self-understanding and perception, about belonging to a place or a community, and artistic expression and language. Some of it may well be quite personal, but mostly it’s about being human in an age where that concept seems increasingly up for debate. Since I’ve started reading the recent poems, the book has come alive in my head, and it will be called Burnedthumb.

Banner for the original Burnedthumb website

September 26, 2019
The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson

Although we love a good superhero film in this house (and frankly we’ll settle for a mediocre one, so long as it doesn’t take itself too seriously) I have been baffled and confused by the whole superhero thing, and I’ve become not a little uneasy about what it says about the current state of political thinking.
So I was particularly intrigued by Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. It got a lot of attention, thanks to Emily Wilson being the first woman to publish a translation – and some undue criticism from the ‘men in fedoras’ (the kind of trolls on the internet who seem to think that comics and video games belong to men, and women shouldn’t trespass there – it’s fairly disappointing that this extends to classics, but no longer a surprise. Ho hum.).

The text itself is very fresh and readable, so it is justifiably a best-seller. The bonus I really appreciated is that the introduction is really interesting about the problems of translating, keeping the poetry, and making sure that you represent an ancient culture comprehensibly, but with respect for its distance from our own. She spends a long time considering the ethics of ancient Greek society, with a fascinating discussion about whether we can consider Odysseus a ‘hero.’ Modern superhero stories are full of this. ‘Am I a good man?’ asks Peter Capaldi’s Dr Who. Arrow is full of questions about who a hero is, and Supergirl is always worrying whether or not the citizens of Metropolis ‘believe in her’.

Now, one thing you may not know about me is that I once wrote my MLitt. dissertation on The Concept of the Hero in Middle English Romance, so this is pretty much my thing. I studied the British heroes, King Horn (in versions dating from (1100 to 1300, to 1530), Athelstan (1370), Coeur de Lion, 1300) Bevis of Hampton (1350 up to Shakespeare) and Guy of Warwick, and watched the evolution of the protagonist from archetypal ballad hero to noble chivalrous knight. Some of them were what we might expect, and some of them were far from endearing – especially King Richard the Lionheart, who would be up there with Hannibal Lector today. I was delighted to find a very familiar hero in Emily Wilson’s Odysseus, baffling as she finds him.

Odysseus is a hero from a society where the issues aren’t rules or values, but relationships – gift-giving and hospitality to strangers are the bonds that keep society together and create diplomatic links for trade and peaceful co-existence – as opposed to the threat from ‘pirates’ who arrive from outside and simply take what they want because they can. Love of the gods is a matter of loyal allegiance based on their ability to protect, rather than faith, and truth or goodness doesn’t come into the picture at all. Rules in societies like this are codes of behaviour, wisdom traditions like the Hebrew Proverbs, Confucius’ Analects or the Viking Havamal – pragmatic, creating protocols for handling tricky situations – feuds, broken agreements, criminal acts, rather than establishing moral values.

Socrates is the first western philosopher to see ‘good’ as a value in itself, and raised the question about whether ‘good’ is good because the gods love it, or whether the gods love ‘good’ things because they are good. A very disruptive question, suggesting that mortals might judge gods or kings, rather than simply obeying. Christianity resolved this by declaring that God himself is ‘the good’, so that ‘loving God’ means not merely keeping the rules, but becoming like God. Thus, the rules are the relationship, which were pursued by holding a balance between wisdom and love. It’s fair to say that medieval romance heroes were a bit wobbly on this in practice, but you can see the perspective there, at least up to the time of Chaucer.

What happened after that gets interesting. The humano-centric culture of the Renaissance was a lot less theological, and questions of virtue became much more ‘show don’t tell’. A hero had ethical values, certainly, but his behaviour became more polite – ‘courtly’ and ‘noble’, and questions of good taste in clothes and manners were as important as virtue and high principles. In the latest version of the Horn story, the hero is renamed Ponthus (because classical is now classy) and he doesn’t weep or throw things when he is upset, he keeps a gentlemanly stiff upper lip.

Translations of the Classics bought into this big style, and your Greek and Roman heroes were suddenly the standard role models for the European prince or courtier, and eventually of the English gentleman.

What Emily Wilson does is to remove the ‘gentlemanly’ carapace from our assumptions about classical society, and reveal its inner superhero. Odysseus becomes a recognisable as the first cousin of the Irish heroes like Finn and Cuchulainn or the Eddic Thor and Loki. More importantly, he is very like Oliver Queen or the darker versions of Batman. His reactions are personal, his emotions tempestuous and often lead to violence. His values are invested in relationships not abstractions, so his allegiances and assumptions about what he should do vary from scene to scene. And he is the hero because he doesn’t back down. He is the confused, well-meaning everyman, believing he has to be superhuman, striving to achieve impossible aims and compromised by misfortune and by his own turbulent emotions.

We know him. He is on television every day, and I fear, he has invaded our political and personal lives. How close a parallel to our own post-modern society he is can be seen in this perceptive thread Emily Wilson posted on Twitter after a recent mass shooting:

https://twitter.com/EmilyRCWilson/status/1158695617859850242

Why and how might a man slaughter large numbers of his fellow human beings? It’s a terrible topic. I don’t think there are any exact parallels in other cultures to the situation in the US right now. The shocking recent shootings have culturally & politically specific causes.
But FWIW, the Homeric poems are also deeply interested in a version of this question. Odysseus and Achilles both go on killing sprees, and slaughter not only those who have hurt them, but also bystanders: Lycaon pleading for his life, Amphinomos the suitor who tried to run away.
There are at least 3 common factors in these massacres. 1. Killer has great weapons, readily acquired (the special bow; the divine weapons made by Hephaestus, given by Thetis). “Weapons themselves can tempt a man to fight”.
Killer has been through years of war, loss of his friends & home, has already killed many people, has a huge sense of grievance & entitlement & righteous rage, & lives in a culture where men are praised and rewarded for aggression and killing.
Killer is helped, inspired and authorized by a vastly more powerful figure (a goddess, in the Homeric cases; you can apply it as you will), who has own desire for glory & attention and doesn’t care much about human life in general.
But there were no video games in archaic Greece.

After this insight, I can’t wait to see how The Iliad turns out. I can’t recommend The Odyssey too highly. Read the book, but also, if you have any interest in the Classics, or in translation as an art, I can wholeheartedly recommend you follow @EmilyRCWilson on Twitter.

August 27, 2019

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