Our first walk

Over here in Spain, we've been in lockdown, or confinamiento, as we term it, since 15th March. The rules have been that nobody is allowed to leave their house unless it's to work, shop for essentials or go to the doctor. In other words, no exercise has been permitted outside the home.

These rules have been widely accepted, especially as cases have dropped significantly since their implementation. The good news is that as a consequence today we were able to go out to exercise for the first time. Of course, the rules are still far stricter than in the U.K., as we're not allowed, for instance, to drive anywhere to have a walk. Moreover, we're also limited to a certain time slot by age group (ours was 6-10 a.m. or 8-11 p.m.).

We decided to have our first walk in the vineyards that begin about two hundred yards beyond our house. It was exciting to see how much the vines have grown over the past six weeks. As you can see in the first photo below, bunches of grapes are now starting to form, new life and fresh hopes taking shape in spite of everything. As for the views over the rolling hills, deep blue skies set against clay soil, they're as gorgeous as ever. The proof is in the second photo...

How Spain improved my English

The title for this post is a direct allusion to Tim Parks' recent article for The New York Review of Books, titled How Italy improved my English. In his article, Parks asks the following question:

"..what about those writers who move to another country and do not change language, who continue to write in their mother tongue many years after it has ceased to be the language of daily conversation?"

For me, this was what drove me into poetry's arms. I dabbled in verse at college and university, but wrote more drama than any other genre, as my first love was the spoken word. Of course, once I left the U.K. and moved to a non-English-speaking environment, my feel for dialogue soon became weaker. Moreover, there was no one to whom I could voice my thoughts in my native tongue. Poems became my outlet.

As the above-mentioned feature develops, Parks discusses the advantages and drawbacks of such a life of linguistic, social and cultural immersion in another country, mentioning the examples of others and recounting his own experiences. Having lived through a decade of only speaking proper English once a week in an expensive telephone call home, I understand how he feels, while I also learnt an awful lot about English by comparing its mechanics to those of Spanish.

Furthermore, I''ve also found my life turned upside down, and for the better, by the technological changes that he describes in the extract below

"All in all, I feel immensely lucky to have gone to Italy when I did and experienced for a decade or so the relative linguistic isolation that made me focus so intensely on language, writing, and translation. But equally lucky to be able to send this piece to New York by email, and to be part of that now global community that shares its thoughts, on literature and other matters, online, regardless of where we live."

E-mail, Skype and the internet transformed my poetic life and ended my isolation just at the right time for me to reconnect, save my native language from any deterioration and feel part of an English-speaking community once more. I too am incredibly fortunate to have lived through a unique period that has enabled me to experience both old-fashioned and new-style expatriation and immersion. It's fashioned me as a poet.

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.

What's in a name?

Spanish is an extremely vivid language in its use of names for places and families. For example, one of my recent opponents in the local tennis league here in Almendralejo is called Antonio Matamoros (Antonio the moorkiller). Somehow, I don't think he''ll feel too comfortable if he ever has to book in to an hotel in Marrakesh.

As for places, the drive from here down to Seville first crosses a river/steam called El Arroyo Matasanos (the healthy-person killer). Its water must once have been poisonous. Meanwhile, a few miles further on is La Cuesta de la Media Fanega, a huge hill that I featured in a poem (first published in The Frogmore Papers) a few years ago as follows:

After the Airport


Driving home, this winter morning
tracks my route with a searchlight sun.
Past holm oaks I reach La Cuesta
de la Media Fanega
- otherwise Half-A-Bushel Hill -
change down, memorise number plates,
breathe in lorry fumes. Locals chose
the name because of what a mule
devoured while getting over it.
I make the top at last, still lost
for what might get me over you.

These days, it's just a decent drop of scenery from the new motorway, but my battered, ancient Peugeot 309 really struggled up that old road!

Spain in a mess

This blog rarely enters the dodgy realm of politics, but I just can't ignore the current situation in Spain. The national picture is perhaps best summed up by a recent BBC article on how corruption is rife at all levels of society. It's very much worth a read and you can find it here.

The story in Extremadura, however, is even bleaker. Down here in Spain's poorest region, all the national problems do exist, but they are also compounded. On a nationwide basis, the housing boom has come to an abrupt halt, waiting for an economic revival. Nevertheless, in Extremadura, that revival is inconceivable to us on the ground. The boom was fuelled by E.U. subsidies that have inevitably run out and are being diverted to other member states. We're now left with the ruins of a house of cards and few resources to rebuild the local economy on a stable basis.

There's a whole lost generation in the area, men in their thirties and forties without education who worked on building sites and made a lot of money a few years ago. Those few years seem a long way off! People have been surviving on their savings and their parents' pensions, but the endgame is now stepping up a gear. Row after row of boarded-up shops line the town centre of Almendralejo and units are for sale throughout the industrial estate, yet this is just the start. The problem's now gone beyond bickering politics, as the very fabric of Extremaduran society is starting to come asunder. I shudder to think what the next few months may bring.

Much more than a wine blog

A few years ago, Un vino más seemed to start off as just another wine blog where tasting notes were posted by the author. These days, it's much so more than that. I stongly recommend that the Spanish speakers among you take a few minutes to trawl through its treasure trove of posts, a series of ruminations on the way wine, food and love intermingle and play against each other in the writer's life. Generosity of spirit shines through. It's terrific stuff!

A first reading in Spain

In spite of having spent seventeen years in Spain, I'd never given a poetry reading in Iberia. That was until last week, when my local high school invited me to give an English-language reading from Inventing Truth to their sixth-form students as part of their annual Book Fair.

The pupils had worked on several of my poems beforehand, and I was intrigued to see which pieces had been chosen (they were especially drawn with the ones that focus on identity and the sense of being a foreigner). Following a brief reading, I moved on to explain a bit about the metrics of English poetry and thus lyrics. We finished off by stomping out the iambs and trochées that can be found in The Beatles' Yesterday.

You can read more (in Spanish, of course) at the I.E.S. Santiago Apostol's blog here, with lots of photos of me in action with the students!

Poetry funding in Spain

Living in a foreign country has provided me with an extra perspective, the chance to compare and contrast. Some aspects of U.K. life now seem tattier, others seem better. Take poetry funding, for instance.

In the U.K. we tend to complain about the distribution of funding among publishers, mags, events and festivals,and those complaints are often justified. However, the grass is sometimes actually weedier elsewhere, as in Iberia.

There are many excellent poetic ventures in Spain, but a vast amount of funding gets pushed into prizes that are run by local councils. Instead of backing local groups, events and magazines, mayors tend to crave the publicity of handing out a prize that's worth a lot of cash. Doing so also involves far less work than getting their hands dirty with bits and pieces that might make a difference.

The best prizes offer publication, often with an offically-run regional publishing board who don't exactly push sales. Others are worse. A few years ago I was a member of the judging panel for one such local poetry prize over here. At the final meeting I was asked to cast my vote, at which point I tried and failed to explain to the incredulous mayor that I couldn't bring myself to do so: the winner would get 1000€ and no publication. As a prize-winner, his manuscript would be ineligible for any other prize or magazine publication. In other words, by choosing a winning piece I would be condemning the text to oblivion. Cash in exchange for destroying art. The saddest aspect is that umpteen poets submitted their work in the full knowledge of how the system functioned.

In summary, maybe we aren't quite so badly off after all back in the U.K....?!

Sheenagh Pugh on writers and displacement

Sheenagh Pugh has posted a thought-provoking article about writers and displacement on her blog. I very much recommend you read the full version here, but I was especially drawn to the following remark:

"...the writers who fascinate me do not have a sense of place so much as a sense of displacement..."

And on certain former students:

"...they observed the place where they now lived differently; they noticed and highlighted things that for a native-born poet might not have stood out, and over and over, their sense of the place where they were was informed by their equally keen sense of that other place where they had once been, but now were not..."

This ties in with my own feelings. The experience of living in a foreign country, immersed in the local language, culture and society, forms the core of my work. Not only does my background as a Brit inform my view of Spain, but my perspective of Britain is also conditioned by Iberia's counterpoint. I've learned how foreigners see my own place of birth, what surprises them, what they value and disdain both of the U.K. and their own homeland. I consciously and unconsciously sift through these angles, contrasting and comparing them, and I'm convinced they enrich my writing.

What's more, if we're talking about an enriching process, the learning of a second language to bilingual standard very much enlightens the use of a native language. My understanding of English has deepened thanks to having been surrounded by Spanish for the last sixteen years. My greater knowledge of the effect of words has played a key role in the development of my poetry.

Many thanks to Sheenagh for posting her article - it certainly got me thinking!

One language or two?

Just back from my latest trip to West Sussex, I've been catching up on reading and have encountered a thought-provoking piece by Michael Hofmann in the Guardian in which he discusses the value for a poet of speaking a second language. The following quote is central to his argument:

"We think and are and have our being in, and in and out of languages – and where's the joy and the richness, if you don't even have two to rub together? If you don't have another language, you are condemned to occupy the same positions, the same phrases, all your life. It's harder to outwit yourself, harder to doubt yourself, in just one language. It's harder to play."

Reading this article, I immediately recalled Larkin's Paris Review interview and his statement "A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him."

In my early years in deepest Spain I was the only foreigner in town. Before internet access and cheap telephone calls, I would often go for two or three months without talking to a native speaker of English.

That period of my life was key to my development as a poet. It firstly forced me to get writing if I wanted to find an English-language outlet, but it also then provided a counterpoint for my previous experiences back in Blighty. My views of U.K. society and the English language were challenged and enriched by my immersion in Spain and Spanish. Thanks, Michael Hofmann, for reflecting that idea so well!

Poetry with an anchor

The poetry I love tends to have an anchor - a physical set of surroundings and a social environment.

An obvious example might be Peter Sansom, whose work is mainly set in Yorkshire. Such a setting lends a specific sense to his work that opens outwards.

However, my interpetation of an anchor goes much further; Tobias Hill comes to mind at this point. Hill may set a poem in an exotic location, but London is always lurking in the background. Its social strands and physical layout provide an implicit counterpoint for all Hill's poetic wanderings. The reader is aware of London acting as an anchor throughout Hill's work - we know where he's from and we watch him exploring the developments in his relationship with his origins via his encounters with elsewheres.

Everyone has just such origins to affect how they view new experiences. All writers reflect this fact in their work, but Hill seems to do so more consciously than others, using it as part of the inner drive to his poetry. I aspire to something similar in my work, reflecting on an anchor that's inherently part of me. It permeates my poetry, not necessarily having to be openly invoked in every piece. Even when writing about Spain, I do so in the light of where I'm from, who I've been and what social anchors I've dropped.