A poem by Rory Waterman

I first met Rory Waterman in 2011 when we both read at a Days of Roses event in London (organised by Declan Ryan). If his reading that evening is anything to go by, then we're in for a treat at the Rogue Strands event on 28th November (see Facebook for more details), where he'll be one of our featured poets. Suffice to say, I was delighted when he accepted our invite!

Waterman stands out among the poets of his generation in the U.K. not only for his awareness of form and his technical control but for how lightly he wears them. His use of language is so natural that the reader is carried along by the cadences of his lines without any need for extraneous resource or recourse. 

His poem today, first published in the Times Literary Supplement, provides us with a terrific example of Rory Waterman's art:

Where to Build

I never thought I’d have a home

but then I’d built one up from the bay,

a shrub-scrubbed cleft half-hiding it,

a plunging stream behind the grate

and locals pointed up, or down,

to where I lived beside myself

for years, with all I’d wanted most,

building a greenhouse, annexe, shelves,

and made it all I knew to want

and drowned the voice that said I don’t

with all I’d always done for this

and grew tomatoes, seed to light

and ate them, happily, every night,

and fixed the leak that drew the rain

and fixed it when it sprung again.

Well, I knew of rock across the bay –

a skerry? – green-topped, curving round

to out of sight behind near rock.

But rain set in, the endless rain,

and through the sheet of endless cloud

a jet of sudden light cracked down

across that further hunk of land,

which glimmered ginger. And it stayed

for seconds, minutes, hours, days,

the whole life of my house away.

A poem by Ramona Herdman

I've been a fan of Ramona Herdman's excellent poetry for several years, but I wasn't aware of just how good she is at reading it until I attended the HappenStance event at StAnza last March, where she was exceptional. As a consequence, she went straight on our hit list when Mat Riches and myself started discussing the line-up for the forthcoming Rogue Strands reading in London on 28th November (see Facebook page here, plug, plug, plug...!), and we were delighted when she agreed to feature.

Moreover, the poem she's sent as a taster of her work is also top-notch. It represents so much of what makes her work special. Her control of line-endings and stanzas is delicate, working in perfect tandem with the build-up of semantic tension. And then there's her treatment of the contents themselves: this is highly personal poetry but never confessional in tone, and its emotional impact is consequently greater...

‘Wake up: time to die’

(Blade Runner)

It’s supposed to be digitally remastered

but it’s pixellated to shit still, luscious

city smog, rain, light blare like morning mist.

The year my father knew he was dying,

every film turned out to be about death.

Blade Runner the worst: built-in

obsolescence and a four year life-span

in the near-distant future of 2019.

I must have watched it yearly since

and every time Harrison Ford gets younger.

I don’t remember whether dad liked it

but every time Rutger Hauer dies for our sins,

too perfect to imagine, I think of watching it

with him: the oxygen tank, the tipping

chair the NHS lent him and how that year

he was too ill for his lifetime trip to India

so watched TV all day. I don’t care

if Deckard is a replicant or not.

I just hope he makes it to the mountains.

This evening, I am grateful to watch

yet another Director’s Cut, to wonder

at Pris (your standard pleasure model),

Daryl Hannah‘s tender immortal quarter-

century inner thighs – self-sustaining miracles.

I am grateful that you are here

again to snicker with me when Deckard fails again

to persuade anyone that he’s still quit,

to toast life as it is and still being part of it.

(First published in Under the Radar)

Antidotes

If social and traditional media promise to bombard and eventually dull your senses over the next few tumultuous weeks, Rogue Strands can offer perfect antidotes. During the first half of November, I'll be posting a top-notch, forget-all-the-crap-and-immerse-yourself, original poem by each and every featured poet (except myself!) from our forthcoming Rogue Strands reading in London on 28th November (see the event details on its Facebook page here). Of course, these tasters will also inevitably entice you to come along to what is destined to be a terrific evening of poetry, even if I say so myself...

Audiences at poetry readings

At one of my recent readings in the U.K., a Spanish woman approached me at the interval to say hello. She explained that she’d seen my event advertised in the local paper and had come along, just as she might attend a concert, exhibition or lecture. She was amazed to find that she was the only non-poet in the building apart from the barman and two long-suffering spouses.

This is because in Spain (in my own personal experience) on average maybe only two or three people at any given poetry reading are poets. The rest have an interest in the arts. They’re often teachers, academics, visual artists, etc, who enjoy poetry just as they enjoy other genres. This cross-fertilisation means that poetry reaches far more readers than in the U.K., while also overcoming the simple fact that a large chunk of people at most poetry event in the U.K. would actually love to be giving the reading themselves.

So, having identified a problem and an uncomfortable comparison, I’m pondering the causes and potential solutions. Firstly, I’d argue that we could all do more to reach out to the millions who think poetry’s not for them except when attending weddings or funerals. Secondly, I do feel a concerted, coordinated, long-term effort is required to ensure that poetry acquires new readers who don’t necessarily aspire to being poets themselves.

Here’s one example of how things are done in parts of Spain: instead of getting a poet into a specific school to do a workshop, certain councils bring in a poet every month of the academic year to give a reading in the morning at the main theatre in the city for kids from all the schools (the poet’s work is previously read in class, of course), followed by a reading at the same venue in the evening for the general public. Everyone who attends either event is given a tiny booklet of the poet’s work for free to take home with them. Hundreds of people progressively learn how to listen to and read poetry without seeing it as something that’s written by poets for other poets. 

Would this work in the U.K.?

A clarity of vision, M.R. Peacocke's Honeycomb

Back in January, when M.R. Peacocke generously granted me permission to post one of my favourite poems (see here) from Honeycomb, her recent HappenStance pamphlet, I promised a review of the chapbook in question, and here it is.

Honeycomb is an unusual pamphlet in many ways, not least because it represents something of a New & Very, Very Selected Poems, combining more recent uncollected pieces with complementary poems from M.R. Peacocke’s previously published full collections. As such, it represents an ideal introduction to her work.

Moving on to this collection itself, if I had to choose one single term to encapsulate M.R. Peacocke’s poetry it would be “clear-eyed”. There’s a clarity of vision to her poems that stretches from the construction of her sentences and the cadences of her lines to the layering of her narratives and the thrust of her thematic core.

This afore-mentioned thematic core pivots on a teasing-out of the tension between life and death, youth and ageing, nature and humanity, all illustrated by minor details that take on huge magnitude when brought together as one. An excellent example can be found in the final stanza of ’Taking Leave’:

…And it’s like that, people leave,

sooner than they thought,

sooner than they knew, and things

don’t wait, and a lifetime

isn’t enough to recover the words,

uncover, discover the words.

A lesser poet would have thought a stronger effect could be gained in the closing lines by bunching the three …cover verbs together artificially one after another. Instead, Peacocke repeats ’the words’ at the end of both the last two lines, splitting up the verbs in such a natural way that these lines manage to take the reader aback, cast fresh meaning on existing language but also seem inevitable, all at the same time. She suddenly reminds us of the subtle differences in meaning between recover, uncover and discover, juxtaposing the urgency of the search for meaning with the impossibility of achieving such a feat.

Quiet voices tend to be lost amid our contemporary tumult, and M.R. Peacocke’s runs just such a risk. However, as remarked earlier, her clarity of vision is crucial to her poetry’s longevity. It provides her work with a edge that can cut through digital cocoons and remind us how to feel. As a consequence, I strongly recommend you get hold of Honeycomb, but with one warning from my own experience: you could then be tempted into acquiring the rest of M.R. Peacocke’s excellent books as well.

Poetry Bites in Birmingham

Prior to the Rogue Strands event in London on 28th November and Poetry at Pembroke in Oxford on 27th November, I'm really looking forward to appearing as the guest poet at Poetry Bites in Birmingham on 26th November. That's three reading on consecutive days, so I'll have to get in training!

On this occasion, the details are as follows: Poetry Bites will take place at the Kitchen Garden Café, 17 York Road, Kings Heath, Birmingham, B14 7SA. Entry is five pounds, while food will be available from 6.30 p.m. onwards and the event itself will begin at 7.30 p.m..

Poetry at Pembroke

The last week in November promises to be a busy time for me. Not only will I be reading at our second Rogue Strands event in London on 28th November, but I also have two additional readings in other cities on the 27th and the 26th!

Here are the details for Oxford, where I'm delighted to report that I'll be the guest poet for Poetry at Pembroke. The event will take place in the Mary Hyde Eccles Room at Pembroke College, Univeristy of Oxford, at 6 p.m. on 27th November, with free entry and an open mic (see link here). It would be lovely to see any of you who might be in the vicinity...