BurnedThumb

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.

Apart from the monumental reading by Seamus Heaney which I wrote about last time,the most interesting thing was a lecture by Grevel Lindop entitled Myth Magic and the Future of Poetry.. Grevel has since posted the full text, on his web-site
here
so I won’t even try to summarise it, but it was excellent, well-written, well delivered, and a subject of passionate concern to most of his audience, which I liked, considering how much of a myth geek I am.

I am not sure, however, that we should, as he recommends, be using myths as a way of reconnecting with the earth. Tolkien also says that ‘recovery’ is one of the most basic functions of fantasy – if life has become dull and stodgy ‘dipping it into story’ is one way of making you appreciate the common things. And it is certainly true of The Lord of the Rings
. All those elves and monsters and magical rings, and what you really remember is the sound of a house door shutting in the early morning when the hobbits leave, or the taste of mushrooms at Farmer Maggot’s, and the runner beans in Bombadil’s wet and misty garden.

However, I am not sure that the process isn’t better the other way round. We learn by moving from the known to the unknown. If we use myth to sacralise nature (and what a bloody awful word that is) will it not lead to a romantic and sentimental – and beyond that, a self-serving view of nature? If we don’t value a salmon as a fish in a river, but as a repository for hidden wisdom, what will we understand about either fish or wisdom? Whereas if we learn about the salmon, observe it, and care for its habitat, we might learn something interesting and valuable about the world we live in, but we will be more fitted to understand the nature of all that wisdom it represents. And maybe a bit less uppity about the poet’s role as shaman and go-between. Ain’t nothing more spiritual about poetry than dishwashing if you ask me. Or less, for that matter.

I had only one day at StAnza this year – but even that’s an improvement. In the past, although I knew it was coming up, it always took me by surprise until it was too late. This year, however, I had the Thursday, because it was Seamus Heaney day.

I did go to other things – I heard Jacob Polley and Anna Crowe read and I went to an excellent lecture by Grevel Lindop about myth, magic and the future of poetry, which will need another post to deal with it, but there is no doubt that it was definitely Seamus Heaney day.

The event was completely sold out, and so were the overflow events where the reading was broadcast to other rooms in the building. It was typical of Seamus Heaney’s generosity that during the interval he went up to the other rooms to greet the people there too.

I saw him read once before at the Edinburgh Book Festival (I’d sat on the internet waiting for bookings to open that time too), just before his stroke. That was some performance – completely at home with his work and the audience and the questions, full of humour and generosity. The stroke has taken some of the strength and the confidence, but it hasn’t otherwise diminished him in any way. He read a mixture of new poems, (there will be a new book out in September), personal favourites and requests. My daughters would have been pleased that he didn’t do either The Death of a Naturalist or Digging both of which they still resent doing at school; in fact I think he must feel a certain reserve about Digging himself, because he read instead a poem where “a pen is a pen”. (I know how he feels about that one. I do still read Walking on Water sometimes, but you know, life moves on–).

There seemed to be a lot about death in the set – his father’s, his brother’s, his mother’s, and perhaps looking forward to his own, but there was also a sense of new inspiration, poems about wind and kites and healing that would lead you to think that perhaps post stroke, Seamus Heaney might be slightly less exuberant as a writer and reader, but more quietly and deeply reflective. I can’t wait for the new book.

Poetry seems to have taken a back seat lately while I have been building the Lúcháir web-site and dealing with some complicated family shenanigans. But I have been reading more – Eavan Boland, Gillian Clarke, Kathleen Jamie, Christine de Luca, and getting into Macdiarmid. A bit of a theme going on here – land, language, memory. Beyond that, I have a new respect for theory and criticism, not only because I have come across some interesting and intelligent critics – Alan Riach, Meghan McAvoy, Michael Gardiner- but because I have found a sort of criticism that is not just dissection and analysis, but which links the writing and reading of poetry to the experience of living, and, instead of slowing you up, making you cynically aware of tricks and techniques to practice or inhibits creativity, sparks off new ideas, new connections, new poems.

All of this is very exciting, and usually the effect of being excited is that I buy lots of books, read lots of first chapters and finish up in an exhausted heap of poetry fragments that result in three poems five years later. Not so much this time – the theory is like a good conversation which keeps me focussed and grounded, and I now have two different but related projects taking shape.

One is the ‘saracen’ outlaw woman who has haunted me for at least the past ten years – the Polly Oliver,the girl who dresses as a boy in order to become a soldier, the selkie shape-shifting between human and seal, Baba Yaga a cannibalistic ‘bad mother’ or wise woman, depending on who you are, the Black Madonna (why does it matter to Spanish or Austrian communities that she is black?), Hestia (who is she and why does she matter so very much?)and the Sheila n-a gig a thoroughly irreverent fertility goddess,apparently. One of the ‘saracen’ poems “The Bower” will appear in Poetry Scotland shortly.

The other is ‘hohokam’ – the name of a native American city that was abandoned just before Europeans showed up. Apparently the name its survivors gave it means ‘all used up’. I’m thinking a lot about erosion, fossils,decay, abandonment and survival/regeneration.

Remember back in November I said Nobody any good is allowed to bring out a book until the start of the next financial year!. Well, a lot of good that did me. Fortunately I’ve had a birthday, and people who know me know enough to give me book tokens, so in spite of Lynn Moir’s pamphlet coming out, and the imminent arrival of pamphlets by Geoff Cooper, Judy Taylor and Juliet Wilson, I was able to conduct a raid a couple of weeks ago on Waterstones in Glasgow. It is my impression that they seem to be trying harder with the poetry these days, and I was hard pushed to keep within my budget (failed, actually, but then I knew I would).

Among the bunch was a pamphlet in the Faber New poets series by Fiona Benson. I met Fiona at Lumb Bank last year, and though there were several interesting ’emerging’ poets there, Fiona struck me as being one who stood out for the concentrated power and physical texture of her work.

She has Scottish connections, as she completed the MLitt in Creative Writing and a PhD on Ophelia as a dramatic type at St Andrews university, where she edited The Red Wheelbarrow.

This is a small collection, only seventeen poems, but each one pulls its weight, giving the pamphlet more good poetry to the square inch than many larger works. Fiona Benson deals a lot with love, sex and death, memory and premonition, and the ‘times between’ times. Images of fertility, healing and decay are frequent – a bird skeleton, spawning fish, the Hungerford Bridge ‘the simple stitch/heals the breach of the river’, but also the outdoors, gardens, coasts and cliff-tops, references to light, sea and wind. I like the colours, the space and the ‘bodilyness’ of her work, but more than that, the ability to sidestep sentiment and self-indulgence by expressing powerful emotional experiences through her painterly creation of her settings.

Fiona Benson’s first full collection, which she is currently working on, should be something to look forward to.

Yesterday I went to Glasgow to hear Iain Anderson in conversation with Alan Riach and Norman Bissell about the poetry of Scotland.
This was a pretty good event even before it started because it gave me a chance to meet up with friends I met at the Atlantic Islands Festival on Luing last year, and there was some fantastic music by the Juniper trio, and poems by both speakers, but the conversation was also substantial, inspiring and thought-provoking.
It was nice to hear some very positive thoughts on the curriculum in Scottish schools – Scottish literature is alive and well and in safe hands if these educators are anything to go by, and there was a good deal of justified (in my opinion) optimism about the future generation of poets coming through. They drew attention to the riches of Scots and Gaelic available to writers in Scotland, and advocated that Gaelic should be in every primary school and nursery. Alan Riach made the sound suggestion that we should treat Gaelic as the New Zealanders treat Maori. Not everyone speaks it fluently, but everyone gets to experience the sounds and structures and concepts of the language as part of their personal and national identity.
Both speakers talked about the influence of place, landscape, communities, and language on poetry. They believe that the best art comes from the interaction between people and the world around them – “a heightened awareness of the things that are there that really matter, that you have to assent to” -such as landscape and weather, the facts of material life. This was given particular point by the fact that Alan Riach had recently broken an ankle falling on the ice, and he read a poem about it, referring to ‘the mercilessness we walk in’.They talked about Hugh Macdiarmid and Norman McCaig, Sorley Maclean and George Mackay Brown, but also musicians like Margaret Bennett, who was also taking part in Celtic Connections, and painters like William McTaggart Joan Eardley and William Gillies who shared this readiness to be regenerated and inspired by the geography.
It seems characteristic of Scottish culture that there should be this cross-fertilisation between disciplines. As they said at the end,”Closed compartments are only good for sinking ships. What we want is dialogue!”