I saw Micheal Schmidt reading at Poets & Players the other day - and was really pleasantly surprised by how good his new poems are. He only read seven, but most of them were quite long and narrative-ish, including one about Jesus healing a woman which was quite startling. It's good to see he's writing again - and doing it so well.

I've been a little slack on reading recently, but I finally managed to finish John Ashbery's Where Shall I Wander; for some reason, I hadn't quite got round to the last few poems. There are some great poems in the book, like Wolf Ridge which seems to reference the New York School period when everybody was friendly with one another. He's very funny in places, and nostalgic, thinking of death and suchlike (he's about eighty now I think) but remains faithful to his lack of subject matter technique. Or rather, it's not that he doesn't have a subject; he has lots of them at the same time. You can't say about an Ashbery poem, this is about "Jesus healing a woman" or "a visit to the gay bar," though in any one poem he may make reference to them both at some point. I have a little article by Meghan O'Rouke which says that his poems are basically about feelings not subjects; though of course, feelings are subjects, and you really can't say of any of his poems, this one's about feeling nostalgic, or this one's about feeling grouchy, though again, both those feelings might be in the same poem.

Anyway, one thing that bugged me recently was a remark someone made on the Ron Silliman blog comments book. Why would anyone want to write a sonnet anymore? someone asked. Well, the simple answer is because they think they can do something with it. I've written nine sonnets over the last two years, and it looks like I'll be writing a few more over the next few months. Not much rhyme, lots of cut and paste and chance technique, so it's more Ted Berrigan than George Szirtes, but hey, that's me. I like the limitation of space, and the feeling that a sonnet can be a kind of controlled explosion of thought and feeling. I like to think that some of them have the virtues of a traditional sonnet, like a volta or a closing couplet that opens the poem out, but I guess some of them are just not going to keep many of the rules at all.

Freedom and constraint is, I guess, what it's about. What can you do in a small space? How free can you be in a box? Poets have always had barriers to push against; it's what makes poetry interesting. Total freedom is boring.

Surprise

Well, it's cricket season again. And England still seem to be winning...

Anyway, interesting discussion that gets a little heated over at www.thepoem.co.uk: is there sexism in poetry publishing. Well, I guess for me the answer is, "yes and no". I don't think there's anybody out there actively discriminating against women poets, any more than I believe that there's anyone actively discriminating against black poets.

But what do we expect when we read a poem? I was reading something that Sheila Murphy was saying in an interview in Binary Myths (published by Stride a few years ago) the other day, and one of the things she looks for is "surprise." How many editors are looking for "surprise", rather than for something which is familiar to them, which will fit into preconcieved notions of what a poem should look like or sound like?

That's where the discrimination comes in: somewhere at the level of expectation. If you expect a poem to sound like, say, a regular anecdotal half-pager, rather than, say, one of those very tight but incredibly full poems of Lorinne Neidecker, or if you expect a poem to be full of clever show-offy metaphors, then that's what your choices will look like. I suspect that the editors of most of the mainstream poetry publishers are not looking far out of their chosen boxes for work.

But personally, I'd rather have a poem that surprises me than one that confirms what I already know.

Events

I'll be doing a workshop for the Chorlton Festival on 22nd May between 10pm and 3pm at Chorlton Library. The event is free and is described in the brochure as "Write & Refine with Steve Waling: Bring along a favourite piece of your writing, prose or script and be guided through an enjoyable process of editing, revising and re-imagining using a variety of often surprising methods." Chorlton library is on the main Barlow Moor Road in Chorlton Manchester, fairly easy to get to.

I'll also hopefully be reading at What the Papers Said, at the Lloyds pub upstairs room at 8pm on Wednesday 24 May in an evening of satirical comedy, poetry and music including Steve O'Donoghue, Dave Pullar, Claire Mooney & others. I think it's also open-mike, so unless you hear from me otherwise, bring yourself and your poems along.

Further details, as well as details of other events, can be obtained from www.chorltonartsfestival.com.

Future Welcome

It's a funny thing being in an anthology; you look at the company you keep and wonder if it's good enough for you. Why isn't so-and-so in it/isn't it great that so-and-s0 is next to me? Well, I don't have any problem with this anthology because on the whole I don't know a lot of the writers. That's because a lot of them are Canadian, as this anthology is produced by DC Books (it's their Moosehead anthology X) and so I don't know many of their names. I don't have to feel miffed or superior; I can just enjoy some great writing and hope that my own poem comes up to scratch.

The theme of the anthology - that of the future - is sufficiently broad enough to take in lots of approaches, from science fiction to Tim Cumming's "relentless enthusiasm of American newscasters". It's one anthology I'm proud to be in because there's so much good writing in it. David Prater's Inna for instance, with its unpunctuated lines leading you down the page:

you may never have even lived in
this world on these planets your
orbs dig a furrow for my desires
i zoom in using alien technology
take soil samples & then am gone

It somehow reminds me of all those science fiction novels I read as a kid, full of terms like "server farms". It's good to see a mixture of prose and poetry, though as usual I'm way behind on the prose. There's mixture of styles from Language influenced to straight forward lyric, which I think is down to its editor, Todd Swift, who likes to mix things up.

I'm not going to quote a lot of it, but I will quote one that I really like. I've a fondness for really short poems, and Hal Sirowitz's Hiaku tickled me pink:

The future
is the past
gentrified

Other highlights include Sina Queyras, Jason Camlot, Hilary Menos, Todd Colby and so many others. It's also got my poem Every Planet Has a North.

I'd recommend you get hold of it now, from www.dcbooks.ca.

I did a workshop at the Poetry Business on Saturday, and used a couple of Robert Adamson poems as stimulus for writing. He's an Australian poet who's always lived in the same part of the Hawkesbury River, influenced by American poets like Zukovsky and Williams but there's a real sense of lived experience in his work. I sometimes feel with John Kinsella that there's always a theory behind everything he writes, however good and well-written he is. I don't get that with Robert Adamson.

I've never really been very good with theories and ideologies etc. I've always been political - pacifist, left-of-centre, liberal-minded etc... and I've never thought that such things don't matter. But as for actually using my poetry to get my ideas across, I can't do it. All that evangelical religion early on, with its guilt-inducing pressure to evangelise, did for that. So I can write from my experience, but I find it difficult if not impossible to write from my ideas. Those ideas could be religious; I want to write about those times when I was very religious and very fundamentalist even, but I find it difficult to get past criticising the ideas to the actual experience.

Religious poetry is difficult anyway; how do you express religious ideas in poetry that doesn't sound like it was lifted from Hymns Ancient & Modern? Or that doesn't sound like a catalouge of New Age vagaries? I still haven't worked that one out, even though a few of my poems have been religious. I didn't plan them that way though; I just wrote them and found out what they were about.

Which is probably my best way of working: not having an idea of what I'm going to say before I write it. I might be writing about a specific experience, but I don't know what I'll say about it. Will I even end up agreeing with myself?

Dusty in Memphis

I've been thinking about what it is that made me gravitate towards American models for poetry rather than English ones. I saw a programme about Dusty Springfield on Sunday (South Bank Show - haven't seen one for ages) and thought it was an appropriate metaphor. English provincial girl who feels out of place in her own town and has a great singing voice; English provincial boy who feels cramped in his small town but has a way with words (or at least a desire to have a way with words.) English girl hears American soul singers and reaches out to something that is so different from everything she's known, it has to be better, falls in love with Motown/Stax. English boy escapes home town, discovers American poetry, realises it's freer and more open that anything he's so far read in English poetry and falls in love with New York City.

Well, it has the virtues of neatness, even if it was all a lot more complicated than that. My first readings of Ashbery, for instance, were exercises in incomprehension. But it has some truth in it. On the www.thepoem.co.uk discussion board, Eva Salzmann says that she became fascinated with British poetry, maybe for similar reasons? Because, perhaps, it was different to what was familiar?

It's at least part of the picutre, I feel. There are lots of other reasons too, but the desire to escape from the stifling bonds of one's own upbringing is surely one of the reasons we become artists in the first place. We want to be "different", like the boys from Liverpool who grew up to be the Beatles by imitating their heroes in America.

*

I read again at the Trof last night. There was quite a lot of poetry; although I'm not sure I'd call Thick Richard poets. Pale imitators of John Cooper Clark who actually still use the word "punk" and think that taking dope is still cool. Then there was Angry Sam, a good performer from Brighton with a silly name. It sounds like a punk children's TV puppet: Postman Pat, Fireman Sam and Angry Sam. But he sounded like he cared about words.

I've been quite busy since I was last here. A quick and very short trip to Amsterdam, going by coach via York, a few hours there then back again. I visited the American Cafe and an Indonesian restaurant called Bojo's, walked around the canals, then caught the coach back; but a couple of nights on a ferry were very pleasant.

I've been reading a lot of novels: Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night, Martin Booth's penulitimate novel The Industry of Souls, and I've just started on John Murray's Murphy's Favourite Channels. The Martin Booth one left me feeling sad at the end - that I had to leave the company of the main character. He was Alexander Alanovich Bayliss, an Englishman who had been caught up in the Russion gulag for twenty years, but who stayed in Russia rather than come home. It was very well written - and there's some lovely incidents in it - of eating mammoth steak in the frozen tundra, for instance. I'm not sure it's even possible, but Martin Booth made it seem so while I was reading. It's published by the publishers Dewi Lewis in Stockport - another example of a small independent regional publisher picking up on a mid-list writer who really ought to be better known. The John Murray has already had me giggling on the Metro. Very funny.

I did a workshop on Wednesday in Bolton with the Bank Street Writers, where I talked about rhyme metre and free verse. Really nice people, and a good discussion. They asked what "prose poetry" was, which kind of stumped me because I don't know enough about it. I should probably look more into it.

Anyway, I sold some copies of Calling Myself On the Phone - all the ones I took in fact - and that's no bad thing.

Reading Matters

I finally got hold of David Challoner's Collected Poems on Monday - by ordering it from my local library. I think I'll do more of this kind of thing - ordering books throught the library. That way, more books will be available to more people, and instead of paying £18.99, it'll only cost me 50p. I have to take the book back or renew it; but when I've finished, others can read it.

I'm not sure what I think of him on the whole. But I'll reserve judgement for now.

*

I've been doing a lot of reading recently. Chris McCabe's The Hutton Enquiry is also on my list. He's a youngish poet, originally from London, who now lives in London. Very lively, with a political edge and a kind of spikiness that I don't often find in poetry. I don't mean by that that he's one of those Charles Bukowski wannabees always writing "from the street", though he does have a very urban feel to him. Again, I'll try and do something more in depth later.

*

I've been trying to write as well. Half my poems these days seem to turn into unrhyming "sonnets" of one kind or another.

*

Then there's Lynette Roberts, who's proving to be a rather lovely find. What was it about the '40's that the Movement found so objectionable? There are a few characteristics: the use of the "I" for instance in lines like "I, in my intricate image..." (Dylan Thomas) where the "I" almost becomes a floating signifier, a sailor lost in the sea of selves. Then there's the seeming over the top image of lines like "Shall I make my disasters clear?" (Nicholas Moore) where the Movement poets wanted to return after the war to a kind of reticence about feelings.

It's good to see them republished, though. It feels like a gap in English poetry (a whole decade's gap) is finally being filled.

More on Readings & '40's Poetry

I've read in two places this week, and the contrast is fascinating. First is Linda Chase's Village Hall, as part of a Poets & Players event. Quiet, full of nice people who were very nice, and with more of that nice folk music. I enjoyed it, and the standard was reasonably good. There was a good group poem that was pretty interesting. One chap recited a ballad and we had a song from a young woman playing a wind organ. I read one poem, In Hitler's Bath, which I guess was semi-abstract. Because it was about Lee Miller, someone asked questions about it, and generally it went down very well. We had tea in little China cups and biscuits.

The other was the Trof, a bar, between lots of singers and a couple of other spoken word artists, including an interesting black poet whose accent sounded African. There was much more noise, and the whole thing was much less polite. Everyone was younger (students mainly) and there was a DJ playing everything from Kraftwerk to Kate Bush, ending up with The Fall's Hip Priest, still out-rocking the opposition twenty-odd years on. I read some of my more "performable" poems, and got a heckler. Then someone said I was better than Ted Hughes! Nice...

Two illustrations of the context where poetry can take place these days; it can either be treated with reverence as a kind of secular religious practice. The Village Hall is usually used for Tai Chi, so the metaphor is appropriate; we even had to take off our shoes. Or it can be thrown into the lion's den of noise that is a student bar. Somehow, through it all, the poetry comes through. Maybe I'm schizophrenic or something, but I enjoy both. I'm not so keen on slams, because of the competition element (capitalistic as it is) but I like the fact that both kinds of venue exist.

***

As well as reading in public, I've been rediscovering another neglectorino: the 40's poet Lynette Roberts. It seems that the 40's as a poetic era is being finally rediscovered, and I do wonder what it is that's prompting this. There's something in the air, perhaps. A lot of these poets seem to be writing out of an emergancy, a sense of not doom as such but certainly of big events that the individual couldn't control happening elsewhere, or even in front of their faces. There's a poem in the new Carcanet Collected Poems about a bombing raid on the East End of London, for instance.

Perhaps our own sense of emergancy: the Iraq War and its aftermath, 9/11, the London bombs last year etc, have made poets and readers look to the 2nd World War to see how poets then responded to the times. Whatever the reason, it's good to be able to read Burns Singer, Lynette Roberts and Nicholas Moore again; to see a full collection of WS Graham etc.

Wanting an Audience

I think a lot of us as writers exist in a kind of paradoxical relationship with readers. We want a large audience, we want to sell thousands of copies of our slim volumes. We want to be "famous writers", and we want to be loved by the public.

But we also don't want to "give the public what they want." We want to challenge their expectations, perhaps, alter their perceptions of the world etc... We want to be original, originality being the big idol of art since at least the Romantic movement. The more post-avant, modernist, post-modernist we are, the more we want to disrupt expectations, disorient readers, challenge them to, as it were, write their own meanings into our poems.

But then we don't want to disorient them so much that they don't come back, and so we're constantly torn with between the desire to be original, challenging etc. and the need to find an audience to read what we write. So we write for the kinds of people who will like the kinds of things that we like to write. If you write rhyming doggeral, you will find a willing audience who like that stuff; if you write viso-poetic works, you will find a willing audience for that too. We group ourselves into camps because we all like to be accepted by people, at the same time as we like to think of ourselves as challenging others. We create our own "us" and "thems".

I was listening to a Gang of Four compilation recently and reading about how they put together songs according to certain rules of democracy. They were trying to resist the consumer society's demands to please the audience; but they were also acutely aware of being part of it. They were purists aware of their own impurities, unlike those rock and roll heroes who think that a guitar solo is, by itself, an act of rebellion, rather that something that lots of perfectly unrebellious folk expect from rock and roll. As the phrase about turning "revolt" into "style" has it, it's not something any of us can escape. Even the most uncompromising follower of Prynne needs an audience, and will probably find one.

Gang of Four made paradoxically moving records by using what is on one level a very cold and calculated method, because through them, they expressed their own frustrations with the process, their own uncertainties. Too self-aware to be fooled by the rock and roll hero stances of other bands (like the Clash) but also wanting to rock out themselves. Wanting an audience and wanting to disorient the audience. Wanting to be original, and knowing that complete originality is a chimera. Wanting to defamiliarise, and wanting to bring the audience into your world.

I suspect that those of us who want to be "serious writers" all find ourselves in this dilemma, or maybe a series of dilemma. We'll find different solutions and positions along that spectrum; and that's why I find the whole avant-mainstream fascinating.

It's been a sad month. First, Barbara Guest died, now Ivor Cutler. I saw him years ago at the Lancaster Literature Festival, playing his harmonium, singing his strange songs and reciting his strange poems. His Life In a Scotch Sitting Room, vol. II is a classic; but I wonder now how he will be remembered. He was never part of an grouping, whether avant or mainstream, his poetry doesn't make the big anthologies, but anyone who can write a poem like this:

If your breasts are too big
you will fall over
unless you wear a rucksack

deserves to be remembered.

***

Talking of being remembered, I thought I'd post my favourite poem by Nicholas Moore, 40's poet and neglectarino supreme:

ANECDOTE AT THE PURPLE MOCCASIN


'Ingenious as it may seem, the Emperor Caligula
Was in the habit of sharing his bath with a tiger.
Its huge muscles gleamed; and the black stripes on the orange
Fur brought him lascivious delights. Its vigour

Reminded him of his manliness and of
The manliness of all emperors.' I smiled.
Anecdotes flew from Mr. Tabbeney's mouth, but
Could they be true? His surmises were all wild;

The strangest creatures populated his fancies.
'And when his bath was over, the Emperor would laugh,
And his wife, who loved to hear him laughing, would come in,
Beautiful as a re-touched photograph,

Her bronze hair strung in waves upon her shoulders.
And she would kiss him, naked as he was.'
'And what about the tiger in the bath?'
I asked. 'He sat and watched them. In his paws

He trapped the soap, then chased it like a fish
Around the slippery walls. He would seem to grin
At Caligula and his mistress, happy
In the warm water, impervious to the din

Of her kisses and faithful sounds, gay as a child
In the water. He was tame. And his stripes were the blackest of black.'
I conjured up the scene, the emperor, his mistress
And the tame beast, and I gave this man a look,

Observing the spots on his coat and his unpressed trousers,
The dirty, small ends of his moustache, his cigarette-stained fingers.
Anecdote, I thought, anecdote. And is
Every anecdote a meeting ground for strangers?


Nicholas Moore, 1950

It's a beautifully unexpected piece; I love the anachronism of that "beautiful as a retouched photograph," and the details of the strange man telling the tale. It came from his second major collection, Recollections of the Gala, in 1950.

If this poem were included in some of the major anthologies of 20th Century poetry, I'd think a lot better of them.

Becoming the Poet I Am

Kelvin Corcoran's recent book did bring up some interesting questions for me. How does one become the poet one becomes?

Some of it is down to personality. TS Eliot could never have written something as "wild" as "Howl" because he just wasn't Allen Ginsberg. But if I'd stayed in Accrington, or if I'd done an English degree rather than a Theology degree, I would be a very different writer than the one I am now. If I hadn't discovered old copies of the Poetry Review full of terribly avant garde poetry I didn't understand, if I hadn't discovered the poetry of John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara...

...I might have stayed with Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, with the poets in my local library or available at the local bookshop. Of course, you might need an investigative spirit even to crack open the spine of a writer you're not familiar with, but they have to available to you in the first place. If you never go into a second hand bookshop, you're never going to find that copy of George Macbeth's The Cleaver Garden. But there has to be a second-hand bookshop for you to go in.

The problem with a lot of the non-mainstream poetries in this country is not its incomprehensibility; but its unavailability. If there's a large Waterstones, and it's got a good stock, you might nowadays find the odd Shearman or Salt book in there; but West House? Equipage? Barque? Highly unlikely. I guess the same could be said for presses like Enitharmon, Peterloo or Smith/Doorstop. It's harder and harder these days to discover the outre, the out of the way, the not very popular.

There is the Internet, of course, and there's a lot of it out there. But the Internet is largely unregulated, and again you only come across the good stuff by accident or recommendation. You can't get a recommendation unless you know someone, who knows someone who knows someone... If you live in the city, there are groups you can go to, you can make friends. But how do you do that if you live in the boondocks?

Becoming the poet I became has been a long and twisted path, involving a lot of discovery, a fair amount of incomprehensability and a fair amount of amazement. But at times, it's been frustrating, trying to track down writers and books. There's lots more out there, I'm sure. As Captain Picard might put it, "Let's see what's out there."

Kelvin Corcoran

One of the reasons that the perpetual divisions in British poetry don't make sense any more is that so many good poets languish in obscurity, unread and therefore unenjoyed by the readership they deserve.

One example of this has to be the poet Kelvin Corcoran. I first came across him by accident: a copy of one of his early books in Frontline Books, a radical bookshop co-operative that used to exist in Manchester. It was either TCL or Qiryat Sepher which I bought first, and later I found Melanie's Book in a second hand bookshop. Yesterday, I obtained the New and Selected Poems, published by Shearsman Books, and it's an absolute delight.

The division is often ridiculous because it is assumed that all non-mainstream poets must be terribly difficult and extreme. But there's as much - and in many ways, very much more - variety in the non-mainstream as the mainstream. Kelvin Corcoran is - supremely and unashamedaly - lyrical in his concerns. Take this example from Melanie's Book:

Hilversum

Saxon mouth, telling us how to live,
over the scabby allotments back there
but for the warmth in the name
even my sister, what do you expect?

It leaps up from the long table into your face:
at 1.20 dread wind slips into town,
at 1.20 total loss holds me.
There's no stepping back from here.

Standing outside the house I
thought we were dark bodies
walking, through the light of facing windows;
another family lives there now.

It means don't believe that broadcast,
the time of your life or.

Roll the sylables around your head for awhile. It's even a sonnet; not one that gives out its meaning too easily, it needs some working out; but it's as good as anything I've read this year. It's lyrical and it has a mystery about it that you want to explore. His use of the unrhymed sonnet throughout this collection is noticeable; I think he has a deep awareness of form, of that Poundian sense of condensare, of every word counting to the whole.

There's a political edge to his poetry which doesn't impinge or preach but which is a quietly insistent pulse of care throughout the book; or at least, the poems I've so far read. The latest poems have a Greek setting, and often invoke or write about the gods. This might seem old-fashioned, but it perhaps reveals something of his roots in modernism and his interest in Greek poets such as Cavafy. There are poems that refer directly to the refugees who regularly wash up on the shores of Europe, drowned through unscrupulous traffickers or upturned boats.

His earlier poetry is perhaps slightly too concerned to establish his non-mainstream credentials. No-one but a non-mainstream poet would talk of "the hot symbolism of dawn", for instance: a line too proud of its own awareness. But he soon grows out of that. The politics are perhaps a little too earnest early on; but they're a young man's poems so we can forgive him.

I haven't finished reading this book yet, so these are only interim statements. There are some terrific poems in this book: poems like The Empire Stores and A Shelley Poet. He makes me think; but he also makes your head sing with sound. And to think, if I hadn't found him in a small radical bookshop that no longer (alas!) exists, I would have missed him. That's why it's important to step out of the mainstream: just think of what jewels you're missing by sticking to the tried and the tested!

Readings

I've had a busy weekend. I went to two readings, and finally saw the film, The Constant Gardener, which was a good thriller with a pretty decent message, though at times I wondered if it overdid the preachiness. Ralph Fiennes was very good as the diffident English diplomat, and Rachel Weisz as his wife, the campaining woman whose meaning for life seemed to depend on making the world a better place.

But it's the readings I really want to talk about. Firstly, there was Anjum Malik, who is really a performance poet, who also happens to write for the radio. She may well be very good at that; she's got a serial on Woman's Hour and one on the Asian Network. Her poetry - well, lots of coy sexual references in poems about fish and chips, and the occassional serious poem with a message. A good performance, technically; but I didn't appreciate being jollied along and told to say "wa wa" if I liked something. It may be popular in Asian poetry circles; but the material wasn't really strong enough or challenging enough for me. It was OK as far as it goes; but that's not very far.

Then a reading in the Whitworth, with Grevel Lindop as the star guest. Now, he is a good poet; I liked the one about the six lemons, for instance. They were very well-constructed, basically School of Quietude but done with craft and a certain amount of depth of thought. I liked his reading. There were three other poets, who I won't embarass by naming. The first was the kind of woman one imagines drinking tea in a tea-shop in Buckhamshire while solving a murder in the vicarage. Very Home Counties, and she used the word "beau" in a poem. Now there is a word that really ought to have been taken out and shot in 1914, along with the perpetrators of that dreadful war. Poems about art, the kind of art that people in Cheshire like that doesn't frighten the horses.

Then there was a young woman on the MA course at MMU, who was very shy and not very loud but from what I could gather, very interesting and promising. She needs to practice using a microphone, and maybe be given some training in standing before an audience, but otherwise she might go far. Her poems had long, interesting sounding titles and actually seemed to go somewhere.

The third woman poet was a middle-aged woman who read something from memory that was in the voice of a woman who was possibly in love with someone, and there was one good line: "so what if there's no moon, let's make one." She hummed between each section, which made her seem even more soporific, and the whole seem rather sentimental.

So: two out of four ain't bad really. None of them, though, really challenged any boundaries. It was a very polite do with some mildly diverting folk at the beginning and the end, just the kind of thing you'd expect in a very respectable gallery setting. It would have been fun to see what a Geraldine Monk or a Bob Cobbing would have made of the place.

I seem to be having a month of publication. First, I receive my copy of the Moosehead Anthology X: Future Welcome, with my poem Every Planet Has a North in it. Then Poetry Nottingham 59/4 arrives with two of my poems in it. Then I get a poem accepted by a new anthology from a new press, University of Central Lancashire Press, for an anthology of food poems called Taste. That's interesting because the poem is an old one, that was in my collection Mee-Mawing in an earlier version. Now I've just had 4 poems accepted by a new internet mag edited by Ian Seed, Shadow Train. Things are looking up.

I still get a buzz from seeing my name in print.

Meanwhile, I'm still looking for more suggestions of English neglectorinos.

English Neglectorino's

Over in America, there's now a website dedicated to neglected poets run by the poet CA Conrad (http://neglectorino.blogspot.com/) and it occured to me to wonder who the English poets would be who are most deserving of reviving. I have a few candidates myself, in particular George MacBeth, Nicholas Moore, Veronica Forrest Thomson, Geoffery Holloway and many of the poets of the '40's such as Lynette Roberts, Paul Dehn, and others.

Some of these poets seem to have disappeared recently: George MacBeth died of motor neurone disease, then seems to have been forgotten until Enitharmon's Selected Poems. This was edited by Anthony Thwaite, and while useful, only showcases his more sensible formalist side; there's nothing of the hit-and-miss playfulness and games-playing side of him as seen in his Unwin Collected Poems, and nothing of his longer poems or experimental autobiography such as My Scotland.

Lynette Roberts has recently been published in a handsome edition by Carcanet, of course, and the forties poets might just be about to re-enter the canon a little. Their voice - anxious, committed and often more interesting than the Movement poets that pushed them out of the way - has been missing from contemporary poetry for too long.

Geoffery Holloway seemed to be stalwart of the small-press scene, and apart from two early Anvil volumes, never made it beyond that. But there was always something about his poetry that wasn't well-behaved, and he was always readable and often funny and wise at the same time.

Sometimes these neglected poets died, or became ill, or stopped writing too early to establish a reputation. Such was the fate of Nicholas Moore - though he later took up writing again, but by then the poetry world had moved on, and he never found a major publisher again. Lynette Roberts stopped writing when she got religion, then became ill as well. Rosemary Tonks is another poet who is neglected - two books, a couple of novels then she got born again. Why does being born again stop you from writing?

There are plenty of others I could name. Stanley Cook, Frank Redpath among the School of Quietude, early Denise Levertov perhaps, and of course Mina Loy. Derryn Rees Jones I think has recently been seeking to reassess Edith Sitwell. The surrealists, in particular Philip O'Connor. I'd be interested in any names of British poets (they have to be dead, by the way, and twentieth century) that my readers think are unjustly neglected.

George Oppen's Psalm

A poem I wish I'd written by George Oppen:

Psalm

Veritas sequitur . . .

In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down —That they are there!


Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass


The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.


Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun


The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.

The concision, the beauty of the images, that wonderful opening out into a kind of secular faith at the end, is truely mindblowing. Not a very critical statement that. George Oppen was one of the leading members of the so-called Objectivist movement in America, and I guess this would be an example of that type of poetry. Except in another sense, it's just a beautiful nature poem. It's also - in that last verse - about celebrating the ordinary words, the everyday language, about finding spiritual value in the world around us, rather than the high-falutin'. In that sense, it's an incarnational poem: it doesn't find meaning by looking up at the skies, it finds meaning by looking at the dirt.

Teaching avant poetry

Last week I did a class on Free Verse for an Adult Education Class in Bury and introduced them to a poem by Lee Harwood and a poem by Barry MacSweeney. I didn't say at first that these two are regarded in some circles as "avant garde" - neither poem was them at their most difficult, though MacSweeney's was typically mordant. I looked at their use of images, sound and even the visual appearance on the page. Line-ending too -

why does the poet end
the line here

not
there for instance?

They took to them both without much persuasion. Some prefered Harwood's lightness, others MacSweeney's heaviness but that I suspect had more to do with their respective tastes for light and dark anyway. Nobody had any difficulty with them.

Interesting that. There is this strange idea that the avant garde is "difficult" but when you introduce people to the avant garde without telling them it is, they don't seem to mindat all.
Of course, I didn't show them any JH Prynne or Drew Milne. I didn't show them any Bob Cobbing (though the recent exhibition of his work in Bury went down well, I believe) or face them down with US Language poetry. It was perhaps the more comprehensible end of the avant garde, nevertheless...

I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to widen peoples' perspective, especially if there are parts of the poetry world that most people don't usually have access to. Lee Harwood's Collected is a delight: both experimental and airy, open and free-wheeling. I'm less of a fan of MacSweeney's, though I don't know it well apart from A Book of Demons and Pearl
The avant garde poetry world does tend to be harder to access than the mainstream, I guess - like free jazz improv, it goes on on the sidelines. Some of the protagonists probably like it like that - it gives them a sense of superiority, and feedstheir persecution complex - but getting more readers/listeners to find out about you is no bad thing, in my opinion.

Stephen Poliakoff

I watched the latest film by Stephen Poliakoff on BBC1 yesterday, and it was a marvel. There's something about his work that is utterly refreshing and new each time I see it.

It was called Friends & Crocodiles and was about the working relationship between a man with a vision and a very hemmed-in, prim kind of woman. They didn't fancy each other, so there was no posibility of them ending up in bed together, or walking into the sunset hand in hand. This in itself is enough to recommend it; not that there was no sex in it (Paul, the visionary entrepreneur with the chaotic lifestyle, was partial to threesomes) but that the relationship between the two characters wasn't about sexual tension.

They were characters who rubbed each other up the wrong way all the time, who couldn't work together but should have done, because they each needed the challenge the other brought them. I know what that kind of relationship is like; I have that relationship with a friend. We sometimes argue, but she always challenges me with my poetry and my life. I don't know if I do the same for her, but I hope so.

Anyway, back to the TV film. What I like about Poliakoff is that there's often a kind of epic quality to his work that never seems overblown or dependent on trickery. He's what I feel like calling a "slow" worker: his films take time to tell their stories, to reveal their characters. He doesn't feel the need to blast you with noise either; people speak quietly in his films. The music is often string-heavy but contemporary, neither too lush nor harsh. This gives them an air of strangeness that it's difficult to describe in print.

I'm reminded a little of the films of Powell/Pressburger. Though Poliakoff is a lot less lush and neo-romantic, there is nevertheless an air that is very different from most British films these days. They're not trying to be working-class nostalgia, period pieces or in-yer-face gangster. They are not cute like Richard Curtis films (not a ditzy Yank actress in sight; and no Rowan Atkinson gurning.) Films like this, The Little Prince and Shooting The Past get you involved by good story telling and dialogue, and the script is almost scored like a piece of music. BBC4 are doing a special on him; I wish I had digital now.

Zimbabwe

Seems to me that's there's interesting things going on in the world of Zimbabwean poetry at the moment. The poetry they are producing seems to be very lively and direct and full of reality in a way that I very rarely see. So I've linked to the webpage for www.poetryinternational.org so that people can go and investigate it. Dambudzo Marechera seems to have inspired a whole new generation of young poets, including some of the ones I've worked with on the Crossing Borders project for the British Council. Irene Staunton seems to be doing a great job in encoraging them and bringing them some recognition.

What I like about the poems is their directness of address. In reading Marechera and Philip Zuwhao, I feel like I'm reading the New American Poetry again, except with a greater urgency because this is not some American with a relatively privilaged upbringing. Life's hard in Zimbabwe at the moment, very hard, as seen by the short life of Philip Zuwhao. They deserve our support and encoragement, so go and read them.

And if they have books to sell, buy them.