For Love of 2015

I've had an extraordinary year. The only diminishment to the pleasure has been the inability to share any of it with my parents, especially my mother, my best friend, who I often used to speak to in my thoughts.

The first spectacular was the shortlisting of Imagined Sons for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry by The Poetry Society--or, more specifically, the judges, Julia Copus, Kei Miller and Grayson Perry. For a manuscript first completed in 2006, honed nearly until publication in 2014, I was honoured and thrilled to receive national recognition.

Not long after the shortlisting, Susannah Herbert phoned to ask if I'd serve as a judge for the Forward Prizes in Poetry. The work proved exceptionally heavy--180 books, 225 poems (or thereabouts)--with a quick turnaround before the shortlist meeting. It was a treat to work with A.L. Kennedy, Emma Harding, Warsan Shire and Colette Bryce, and I learned so much about the way poetry collections operate, about the way they achieve integrity and excellence.

With the Forward prizegiving and celebration on 30 September and the new academic year commencing at the same time, I felt overwhelmed and delighted with my year in poetry. At the end of October I attended one of the most personally gratifying events of the year, with the launch of my late friend Linda Lamus's collection, A Crater the Size of Calcutta. Many publishers didn't want to touch a posthumous book by an unknown poet, but Mulfran Press took it on and produced a beautiful volume. The launch of the book in Bristol, with ten people who loved her reading a poem each, was perfect.


Yet there was more, relevant to my position teaching at Bath Spa University. To my delight, I received some teaching relief for the upcoming academic year, so while I'd be coordinating four modules, teaching PhD and undergraduate students doing independent studies, doing the usual load of moderation of marking for my own and other modules, and running the weekly first-year plenary series, I would not be teaching directly any individual modules and so not doing any large loads of marking. Instead of working five days a week for Bath Spa (I'm on a .7 contract, which means just under three-quarters' time), I would be working 2-3 days, so I'd have 4-5 days a week for my writing. Wa-hey! Further recognition came in December, with promotion to Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa.

I've had a splendid few months using the extra time the university's given me. I've been writing as much as possible, researching (this is the first book of poetry I've worked on that involved extensive research), and reading widely and voraciously. Thanks to my friends, colleagues, students and readers for your encouragement and support--I'm so grateful.

Here's to 2016!

Matthew Siegel's Blood Work (CB Editions, 2015)

Some favourite passages from Matthew Siegel's Blood Work:


...I take my benadryl with beer, thank you very much,
sleep like a cut under a band aid....

from "[Sometimes I don't know if I'm having a feeling]"

I wear this living skin--

wear it in the sunlight,

in the forest, in the city--

wear it like a suit

of metal, a suit of gauze--

my face of abalone, of straw

assembling, trembling

apart in the water.

from "The electric body"

I enter the field. The field contains me.

last line of "The edge of the field"

And my father pulls off into the gas station

to fill his empty tank. The flow of gas sounds

like the flow of blood. The same pressure.

The same insistence. The same rush and fill.

last stanza of "On the way to the airport I fail to tell my father

I left some meat in the refrigerator."

I was getting stoned in the kitchen with my mother

when my sister, wrapped in clouds, filled the room

with lightning.

*

Each vertebrae in my spine tingled like radio static.

from "Weather of the Body"

No, I am not hurting in this moment.

I am memory's lips sewn shut.

from "Overlooking the City"

I've got too many needs for a month like November. 

from "Living with You"

You can buy Blood Work directly from publisher CB Editions here.

Mona Arshi's Small Hands (Liverpool University Press, 2015)

Some favourite passages:



     He starts undressing me under the sweetening stars.

Please girl, he mews; this might be the last time
     I will see how the thin light enters you.

end of "The Lion"

I want to tell you about the elegant savagery of my spider.

from "Practising Your Skills"

She smells of . . . preening oil, salt, top notes of earth.

My mother is turning bird.

from "The Bird"

Brave things are happening

            in the garden when I'm not looking.

The junction of each branch

                            holds its sobriety.

opening of "April"

Wait fast ghost, you should see how the living room is

choked with living things and your mother is upstairs

sitting on your bed, nurturing scraps in the poor light.

last section of "Notes Towards an Elegy"

I traced a stitch raised by your absence.

     I concentrated on this panel of sky

and wound myself into a ribbon of silence.

opening stanza of "The Rain That Began Elsewhere"

Fat drops of rain

captured

in your tiny pink purses.

from "Ode to a Pomegranate"

                                      I contemplate window glass,

quietly fracturing on its own terms.

end of "Woman at Window"

Purchase Small Hands directly from the publisher here.

Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (Penguin, 2015), first selection

Some favourite passages from this brilliant book (some parts of which are easier to excerpt than others, including the excellent section II): 



from section III:

For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler's remarks, you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and, as insane as it is, saying please.


from section IV:

The sigh is the pathway to breath; it allows breathing. That's just self-preservation. No one fabricates that. You sit down,  you sigh. You stand up, you sigh. The sighing is a worrying exhale of an ache. You wouldn't call it an illness; still it is not the iteration of a free being. What else to liken yourslef to but an animal, the ruminant kind?


from section V:

Sometimes "I" is supposed to hold what is not there until it is. Then what is comes apart the closer you are to it. 

This makes the first person a symbol for something.

The pronoun barely holding the person together.

* 

Join me here in nowhere.

Don't lean against the wallpaper; sit down and pull together.

Yours is a strange dream, a strange reverie.




You can purchase Citizen: An American Lyric from Foyle's Books here. 

The Forward Prizes, with thoughts for those on and not on the shortlists

Today The Guardian covered the announcement of the Forward Prize shortlistings. I've been quoted by newspapers four times before--twice by the L.A. Times, twice by the (central Illinois) Pantagraph, yet never accurately until now. You can read the article here.

While I've been pleased to see congratulations go to the shortlisted poets on Facebook and Twitter, I've also thought of the sadness and disappointment some of those not shortlisted may feel, as I've felt before at similar announcements, and want to say there was much good work that didn't make the shortlists, and not making the list does not mean one's book or poem isn't good.

Judging the Forward Prizes, Reading Differently

As a university lecturer and further education tutor for the last twenty years, with a focus on teaching creative writing, I have developed my ability to read appreciatively. I've come to start my workshops with "What do we like?" because I want to use that immediate, almost unthought initial response as a starting point. 

Reading for the Forward Prizes requires a different approach, that of reading for excellence. In poetry it consists of many elements, including linguistic precision, musicality, and depth of thought. I think reading nearly 200 books like this will make me a better teacher and a better reviewer--or so I hope. I've certainly already perceived a development in my thought, in my sense of my own poetics as well as what I look for in others' poetry. The two poems I worked on on the flight to the States ten days ago differ markedly from my previous writing--they're a lot longer, and one combines lines and prose, something I've never really done before. Whatever is yet to come, judging the Forward Prizes has been one of the most challenging pleasures I've experienced in a long time. 

On not winning the Ted Hughes Award

My partner Trev and I were not long inside the Savile Club before its poshness had overpowered us--or we had someone with whom to share our views. For the first time in years I saw my former MA student Tom Weir, whose poem had placed in the top ten in the National Poetry Competition (yay, Tom!). Before long I'd met up with Peter Daniels, Rachel McCarthy, fellow shortlister Patience Agbabi, Tammy Yoseloff and many more I met that night for the first time. I became an avid poet-sighter, pointing out to my partner  John Agard, Carol Ann Duffy and Alice Oswald, among others.

Fortunately we didn't have to wait long into the night before the Ted Hughes was announced. Kei Miller and Julia Copus gave lavish descriptions of each work on the shortlist, then Carol Ann Duffy pronounced Andrew Motion the winner. I looked at Trev and shrugged my shoulders and spent much of the rest of the night receiving commiserations as well as, more happily, talking about the Forward Prizes, as I met Forward Arts Foundation employee extraordinaire Maisie Lawrence, with whom I'd had a fair bit of contact about meeting arrangements and book deliveries. 

Was I, am I disappointed? Of course, but only a little. I've greatly enjoyed being shortlisted and the new readers it seems to have brought to Imagined Sons; there have also been some new invitations for readings and workshops. It's time to get on with my reading for the Forward Prizes--and to my next collection, on which I'll say more before long. 

Thanks to everyone who sent kind messages over the past weeks about the book and the award. I don't think I've ever felt such strong support for my work, which is so heartening as I look to the future. Many, many thanks.

Judging the Forward Prize

The word's been out a week now, I think, that I will be one of the five judges for this year's Forward prizes in poetry. My fellow judges are A.L. Kennedy (chair), Colette Bryce, Emma Harding and Warsan Shire. I've just finished reading my first box of books, and the second came today, with more sure to follow. I'm enjoying becoming acquainted with poets and presses I hadn't known before and keeping a list of a wonderful array of potential poems for the anthology. What will happen to my own writing during such intense reading? I'll let you know!

The Aldeburgh Prize shortlist's "lack of experimentation"

In this review essay in today's Guardian on the shortlisted books for the Aldeburgh first collection prize, John O'Donoghue notes "the lack of experimentation" and warmly mentions, from the Forward first collection prize shortlist, Steve Spence's A Curious Shipwreck. There's already a flurry of responses on the webpage, but the discussion quickly, predictably became unwieldy. Your thoughts would be most welcome here.

The Tethers' first print review: The Times (!)

In today's Times, Paul Batchelor reviews "four poetry collections that the [Forward Prize] judges missed" in composing their shortlists: Pauline Stainer's Crossing the Snowline, Jane Draycott's Over, David Constantine's Nine Fathom Deep, and, yes, The Tethers.