Tom Duddy's The Café

Most of my favourite poetry is dangerous. It breaks the rules and takes risks. By that, I don't mean that it necessarily undermines metrics or flouts grammar. Instead, I'm referring to a great poet's ability to pull off something that shouldn't work at all.

One such example is Tom Duddy's poem "The Café". It comes from his indispensable first full collection, The Hiding Place (Arlen House, 2011), which inhabits my desk alongside his posthumous book, The Years (HappenStance Press, 2014). Duddy achieves delicious simplicity in "The Café", convincing the reader that his words couldn't have been written in any other way. Here's an extract:

"...Though I always ask for one
coffee - regular, black - she
never presumes to guess.
And so each day is a new day.
Which is as it should be.
There is an understanding
that there is no understanding..."

Count those four uses of "is" in eight lines, alongside the seemingly mundane repetition of "day" and "understanding".Yet the poem undoubtedly works. How? Forget logical analysis or explanation, this is verse that's been lifted from the ordinary by Duddy's magisterial touch.

I want you to go

A number of poets work as Teachers of English as a Foreign Language. Doing so for a prolonged period has major drawbacks, especially if your only contact with English is through your pupils, as your own linguistic use easily becomes stilted. However, there are also considerable benefits. Above all, you find yourself in the position of explaining points that you never had to learn consciously yourself, thus bringing about a major reassessment of your relationship with your native tongue.

When first in Spain, I did a lot of TEFL work. I found that the Spanish tended to speak English in something of a monotone, not feeling its bounces. Of course, Spanish metrics count syllables instead of stresses, and that is a reflection of how stress and intonation differ between both languages.

Over time, I realised that English-language poetry was a useful tool in the classroom: I would ask my pupils to recite lines of pentameter to work on that afore-mentioned intonation. Meanwhile, another favourite activity was to take a sentence and analyse how its meaning would be altered by a slight shift in intonation. I often used the following example, the brackets providing an unspoken illustration in each case :

I want you to go (but your mother doesn't)
I want you to go (I really do)
I want you to go (not your brother)
I want you to go (not to come)

I recall rows of flabbergasted Spaniards trying to get to grips with an implicit semantic use of intonation and stress that just didn't exist in Iberia. The nuances might sound so obvious to a native speaker, but I had to go through a considerable process of working out how my own language functioned before I was able to explain them to my pupils.

In other words, coming to English afresh from a foreigner's perspective is a terrific experience for any writer. For a poet it's even more enriching.

The accumulation of detail, D.A. Prince's Common Ground

There’s no impatience in the poetry of D.A. Prince throughout Common Ground, her second full collection (HappenStance Press, 2014), no sudden foreshortening or abrupt change of gear, no shocking thrust toward the core of inspiration. And nor is it a poetry of the peeling of layers as focus is gradually revealed.

All very well, you might say. It’s easy to pinpoint how her verse doesn’t operate, but just how does it work? Well, D.A. Prince is a specialist in the almost-unnoticed accumulation of emotional impact. Her work builds imperceptibly, detail on detail, gathering momentum line after line. One such instance can be found in the final two stanzas of “P.O.W.”:

“…She waited

while he stripped the chicken carcass,

every sliver, not a scrap wasted,

leaving the bones polished,

scoured of meat, a gleam on the plate.

It was only over

with the last shred eliminated

and the silence reshaped around him.”

This poem homes in on a series of minor points so as to generate major impact.

Now I’ve read elsewhere that D.A. Prince’s poetry is lacking in humour. I’m afraid I couldn’t disagree more. It’s absolutely packed with the stuff. Not laugh-out-loud ribald jokes, not the funny-bone fireworks of early Armitage, but the slow-burning wry grin of keen observation. A personal favourite is the role reversal that’s portrayed in “Responsibilities”, as the offspring worry about their parents:

“…They confide in friends

over school lunches: where did they go wrong?

and will we ever learn? They whisper how

they have to check our bags, can’t trust us

with the car. What if we’re taken into care?

That they’re too young for this.”

Just as double-acts (i.e. the straight and funny man) work by creating uncertainty, so humour plays a crucial role throughout Common Ground by playing off D.A. Prince’s precise control of those afore-mentioned accumulated details. This is a poetry of unsuspected ramifications. Readers underestimate it at their peril!

Clarissa Aykroyd's The Stone and the Star blog

Another year, another excellent poetry blog comes to my attention...

... this time it's Clarissa Aykroyd's The Stone and the Star. Her blog is especially interesting because it often draws on out-of-copyright poems that can thus be republished and discussed in situ. Moreover, Aykroyd doesn't just slap verse up there and deal with it superficially. Instead, she gets her hands dirty and homes in on how the verse functions.

Perhaps my favourite out of all the recent posts on The Stone and th Star is Aykroyd's detailed analysis of Keith Douglas' "Words". Okay, so I'm a committed Douglas fan, but she really does the poem justice. Furthermore, her piece encourages me to reread his verse in the light of her remarks.What greater recommendation can I give...?!

Striking a balance

My four years at Oxford sharpened my critical capacity. Those one-on-one tutorials taught me how to dismember or defend a stance on a text. However, they also blunted my creativity and enjoyment of reading.

At the time, I was surprised to find so few tutors were also writers, but I later realised that their constant deep analysis of the relative virtues of existing texts inhibited their capacity to create: when committing words to paper they were only too aware of their own deficiencies. One Spanish lecturer even struggled to bring himself to publish his critical articles, such were his demanding standards.

As a reader, meanwhile, my time at Oxford changed the way I approached a text. In my teenage years I’d fallen in love with books for the way they captivated me. Oxford took that away. I was no longer captivated. Instead, I was coached to assess a text’s value from the first word.  

I do worry that many critics (and poet-critics) have fallen out of love with literature, and that’s why I left academia as soon as I’d finished my undergraduate degree. Almost twenty years later, I’m finally capable of letting a text wash over me once more, before stepping back and taking it apart.

However, there’s also the opposite end of the spectrum. Writers who haven’t developed a critical eye are at a severe disadvantage when looking to improve their work. All poets should write reviews, not necessarily for publication but as a way of getting to grips with their own views on verse. It’s all very well for us to state that we like or loathe a book, but the key is in coherently putting our arguments down on paper. Learning to do so will make us better poets. It’s a question of striking a balance.

Poems from the Road now on SoundCloud

Following its weekly slot throughout December on Hive Radio, Poems from the Road is now available on demand via SoundCloud. It's well worth a listen. I was also delighted to see the excellent feature on it here, which even mentions my poem from the podcast.

Rogue Strands on Twitter

And so Rogue Strands are finally on Twitter, looking forward to sharing more great poetry in 2015!