Poetry corner

This year will be the tenth anniversary of National Poetry Day in the UK. To mark the event the Poetry Society is asking for nominations for Poetry Landmarks of Britain.

Why? It may sound romantic, but many visitors from abroad think of Britain as having a rich tradition of poetry, and some even travel here because of it. Apart from the odd blue plaque, though, those of us living here may not be able to easily point to the nearest 'poetry landmark'. The Poetry Society decided that given the theme of "Britain" for this year's National Poetry Day, the most important contribution it could make would be to collate and publish a contemporary and historical map of Britain's Poetry Landmarks.

I thought it sounded very romantic and I was keen to send in a few nominations, until I realised the kind of places the Poetry Society people are thinking of:

A poetry landmark could include poetry publishers, venues which host poetry readings, poetry festivals, poetry-friendly organisations that promote poetry, poetry-active libraries and bookshops, schools, historical and contemporary poets of note, poetry as public art, and so on.

Offices and civic buildings; how romantic!

They’re just looking for places to put more blue plaques. This is not “poetry as public art”, it’s architectural history; poetry reduced to a guided tour of tired old buildings. Where’s the romance in that? And where’s the imagination?

Anyway, here are the nominations I was thinking of: “Lines written in Kensington Gardens” and “Dover Beach” from Matthew Arnold, and the churchyard at Stoke Poges where Gray composed his elegy.

In all three works the poet seeks refuge from “the madding crowd” either in a city park, on a beach at night or in a country churchyard. And in each poem, it's the impressions these special places make upon the poet that draw him on to contemplate life’s larger questions. Visiting these places, even today, you can still be touched by the same impulse that compelled the poets’ words. Why, you can almost hear the Muse!

Poetry corner

Keeping it real

Twenty odd years ago, when I was publishing and performing poetry, I used to hate the Poetry Society. Despise would probably be a better word.

To me, and to the people whose words I reproduced, the PS was BS. Its members represented the Establishment, and they seemed to us detached and irrelevant. We hated their poems and we hated their delivery: that too sincere, half-breathless, calm, small voice in which they lisped their “readings”. And the poems they wrote seemed dead to us: conceited ramblings of the self-obsessed, dreary and wantonly fey.

These people had forgotten the importance of not being earnest. In their hands poetry became a lifeless thing. To us, poetry was about performance: sound and meaning, the power of the spoken word. It meant talking directly to the audience, grabbing their attention and challenging them to listen. Sometimes it was absurd, occasionally ugly, but it was always live and direct.

For us, poetry was not a pastime for over-sensitive intellectuals, it was a duty, and the poet was required not just to write but to perform. We took as our manifesto the words of Brian Patten’s “Prosepoem Towards a Definition of Itself":

When in public poetry should take off its clothes and wave to the nearest person in sight; it should be seen in the company of thieves and lovers rather than that of journalists and publishers.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, it's just a long-winded way of introducing this video of Rong Radio from Benjamin Zephaniah's Black Cab Sessions.



[Edited down from a previous post. More from Poetry Corner]

Poetry corner

Anna Denise

A brief visit to A Small Victory reminds me that it's still National Poetry Month over there.

I'll maybe post links to some of my favorite poems later in the week. In the meantime, here's a poem I like from the Library of Congress's poetry for high schools project.

It's called How to Change a Frog into a Prince by Anna Denise.

Poetry corner

Punks and poets

The Academy of American Poets has recently overhauled its website Poetry.org, which is where I found an article by Chad Davidison called Got Punked: Rebellious Verse.

The title caught my eye, and I was looking forward to reading it. As it happens, it's way too cerebral for my liking.

Punk, though it celebrated its own death, is constantly reborn. Poetry, too, is continually redefining itself, continually resisting its own intelligence. Iggy Pop pops up in Jim Jarmusch films. Ziggy Stardust might be dead, but Bowie isn’t. And the artistic androgyny Bowie embodied? What better way to represent Keatsian "negative capability" or Eliotic "extinction of personality"? Punk lives long enough to annihilate itself, then repeats the feat like a god at the center of a harvest myth.

Mmm. I'm guessing Davidson's never seen a punk poet like John Cooper Clarke in action.

The Rough Guide to Rock described Clarke's high-speed delivery as being "based on the rhythms of rock and amphetamine sulphate rather than any conventional poetic metre" - that about captures it. Stark and direct, it was "the verbal equivalent of the headlong musical thrill of punk."

John Cooper Clarke is better heard than read: if you get the chance to see him live, take it - it's an experience. In the meantime, try "Beasley Street".

In the cheap seats where murder breeds
somebody is out of breath
Sleep is a luxury they don't need
... a sneak preview of death
Belladonna is your flower
Manslaughter is your meat
Spend a year in a couple of hours
on the edge of Beasley street

Like they say, read the whole thing.

Poetry corner

Robert W Service

Someone once told me the only sure way to tell an American from a Canadian is to ask them if they’d ever heard of Robert W Service: Americans might answer yea or nay, Canadians will be affronted you asked.

Now, I don’t know whether that is, or was ever, true - but one thing is certain, the poetry of Robert W Service , "Bard of the Yukon", deserves a wider readership than Canada alone can muster.

The tightly rhymed ballad (Service’s speciality) is not a popular form these days; modern English poets tend to concern themselves with written verse and often ignore the rich oral tradition of which Service was a part. In England, his work seems little known and even less admired. Those who have heard of him often know only one of his poems: “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”. His other works are hardly ever remembered.

I grew up with a copy of Service's “Ballads of a Cheechako” and have always greatly admired his work. To me, his ballads have never seemed clunky or corny. Indeed, the ballad seems a fittingly heroic form for the task Service set himself – to tell tales of the “Men of the High North”.

My personal favorite from "Ballads of a Cheechako" is the "Ballad Of Blasphemous Bill" (it used to be my party piece), but the far darker "Ballad of the Brand" is also a notably powerful piece of work, and "Ballad of the Black Fox Skin", though overlong, shows Service at his best:-

There was Claw-fingered Kitty and Windy Ike living the life of shame,
When unto them in the Long, Long Night came the man-who-had-no-name;
Bearing his prize of a black fox pelt, out of the Wild he came.

His cheeks were blanched as the flume-head foam when the brown spring freshets flow;
Deep in their dark, sin-calcined pits were his sombre eyes aglow;
They knew him far for the fitful man who spat forth blood on the snow.

"Did ever you see such a skin?" quoth he; "there's nought in the world so fine--
Such fullness of fur as black as the night, such lustre, such size, such shine;
It's life to a one-lunged man like me; it's London, it's women, it's wine.

You can read the rest here.

And I can't resist pointing to one of Service's simple gems: this sketch of one of life's perennial losers from "The Ballad of Hard-Luck Henry":

Now wouldn't you expect to find a man an awful crank
That's staked out nigh three hundred claims, and every one a blank;
That's followed every fool stampede, and seen the rise and fall
Of camps where men got gold in chunks and he got none at all;
That's prospected a bit of ground and sold it for a song
To see it yield a fortune to some fool that came along;
That's sunk a dozen bed-rock holes, and not a speck in sight,
Yet sees them take a million from the claims to left and right?
Now aren't things like that enough to drive a man to booze?
But Hard-Luck Smith was hoodoo-proof--he knew the way to lose.

Heh.

Poetry corner

Benjamin Zephaniah

I’m not surprised to hear that poet Benjamin Zephaniah has turned down the offer of an OBE. I am, however, astounded that someone had the gall to ask him if he wanted one.

CNN reported his response.

Zephaniah said that when he received a letter from the UK prime minister's office saying Tony Blair intended to recommend his name to the queen in the New Year's honors list, he thought: "OBE, me? Up yours."

Good for him!

I don’t share his politics but I would have thought much less of him had he accepted the honor.

I’ve been a Zephaniah fan since the performance poetry days of the early eighties. The best of his work is both personal and political. Rich with the informalities of Jamaican English, it is rooted in a strong oral tradition and informed by harsh experience.

If you ever get a chance to see him live, don’t miss it.

Thanks to Biased BBC for the link to CNN.

Update
Saturday's Independent has a piece on Zephaniah that explains the background to his decision and describes some of the work he does for the British Council.

Poetry corner

I've only just come across this, so excuse me if it's old hat, but Taylor Mali has his own YouTube channel.

You'll find more than just Taylor Mali there, including: Sarah Kay, Rives and Marty McConnell.

Check it out! And while you're there, you might help Taylor Mali in his quest for a thousand teachers.

Poetry corner

John Cooper Clarke

I'm sure I wasn't the only person surprised to hear John Cooper Clarke's "Evidently Chickentown" feature at the end of one of The Sopranos episodes. I did wonder what the folks back home would make of it. As E.J. at Loudersoft notes:

Clarke never quite made a name for himself stateside. The reasons are undoubtedly two-fold: firstly, his works are steeped in British cultural references and nomenclature. Secondly, Clarke spent the better part of the 1980’s struggling with his addiction to heroin. Further, according to Wikipedia, Clarke was living and involved with, either romantically or addictively, one-time member of the Velvet Underground Nico.

Clarke’s works (which occasion to remind one of Ian Dury & The Blockheads, Robyn Hitchcock or even Art Brut) while quite brilliant musically and poetically, are not entirely accessible works; the songs come out frequently so avant-garde as to initiate stand-up comedy potential. Having apparently recovered from his addictions sufficiently, Clarke has embraced his humor with dignity and humility as he continues to perform live around England.

There's a link to the audio of "Evidently Chickentown" in E.J.'s post. Those interested in hearing more can check out Clarke's homepage, but it's such a mess of a site that it's difficult to find the gems.

The audios of live performances of "You never see a nipple in the Daily Express" and "I married a monster from outer space" (to be found on this page) are worth a listen. Sadly, I couldn't find an audio link to "Beasley Street" which many people, myself included, regard as Clarke's best work. (Tripe Soup has the words - you'll just have to imagine the delivery).

Poetry corner

Called to mind

For some (strange and possibly unknowable) reason, reading the tributes to Kurt Vonnegut Jr put me in mind of one of the poems of Edwin Brock.

Five Ways To Kill A Man

There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this
properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.

Or you can take a length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince, and a
castle to hold your banquet in.

Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
a mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
and some round hats made of steel.

In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you, two
systems of government, a nation's scientists,
several factories, a psychopath and
land that no-one needs for several years.

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways
to kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat
is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.

So it goes.

Poetry corner

Live and direct

I don't think Saul Williams needs much introduction, so all I'm going to say is, after watching "When the Clock Strikes Me", you might also want to check out the sheer verbal audacity of "Coded Language" and the rushing anger of "Amethyst Rock".

Poetry corner

A sickness

I think I must be coming down with something. After a few fitful hours of sleep I can already see the signs. Most people know their body is battling a virus when they start to get a runny nose, a ticklish cough, slightly high temperature - these are all acknowledged signs.

With me, it's different. I know I'm coming down with something when I find myself listening to Bukowski. Yep, I've got creeping misanthropy - along with a raised temperature, runny nose and a ticklish cough. But the Bukowski thing came first. Maybe there's some kind of causal relationship - like his words not only eat away at the soul but also, in some way, depress the immune system. Who knows?

Anyway, I'm going back to bed - I'll leave you to deal with Bukowski.

Poetry corner

Franklin P. Adams

Us Poets

Wordsworth wrote some tawdry stuff;
Much of Moore I have forgotten;
Parts of Tennyson are guff;
Bits of Byron, too, are rotten.

All of Browning isn't great;
There are slipshod lines in Shelley;
Every one knows Homer's fate;
Some of Keats is vermicelli.

Sometimes Shakespeare hit the slide,
Not to mention Pope or Milton;
Some of Southey's stuff is snide.
Some of Spenser's simply Stilton.

When one has to boil the pot,
One can't always watch the kittle.
You may credit it or not--
Now and then _I_ slump a little!

From "Tobogganing on Parnassus" by Franklin P. Adams

Nowadays, Franklin Adams is little remembered. But, between the wars, he was a prominent New York columnist and a leading member of the Algonquin Round Table - he once said of Dorothy Parker that he had "raised her from a couplet".

In his humorous column, "The Conning Tower", Adams frequently published readers' contributions and assiduously promoted new writers, including James Thurber and Eugene O'Neil.

These days, his aphorisms are sometimes quoted but his light verse is all but forgotten. Which is a shame, because some of it is delightful (To a Thesaurus being a fine example).

Poetry corner

Poetry corner

(From Robert Frost's "West Running Brook", Holt 1928)

Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.