Simon Turner - Attenuated Mansard

Responses to 'Appendix 2: A Test for Poets' in Martin Stannard's poems for the young at heart (Leafe Press, 2016), £10.00*

1) Aaaarrgh!

2) Define ‘popstar’: if we’re talking a critically successful alt-rock musician with a moderately sized but loyal fanbase – a Bob Mould, say, or a J. Mascis – then I would say ‘popstar’ without a second’s thought.  But the real appeal of poetry is in the fact that no one – and I mean no one – is watching; no one cares what we do, which might sound pessimistic, but I see it as a great opportunity.  If you have the dreams and ambitions of an entire generation of teenagers resting upon your every move and utterance and thought, coupled to the financial needs of a megacorporation who are just as dependent (if not more so) on your continued success, you have no real artistic freedom.  I'll admit that poets exist in the gloomy crevices between cultural productions that actually have some kind of impact in the real world, but they are, unequivocally, our crevices to do with as we please.  Errrr…

3) Any time you have a few minutes or an hour spare, I’d say.

4) The ego?  No role at all: to my mind, the role of poetry is to allow language free play do as it will.  The moment your ego steps in, it brings a shedload of inhibitors along with it: cultural, psychological, sociohistorical.  They just get in the way.

5) No, but it not mattering doesn’t matter.  See answer to 2.

6) Yes and no: there are poets who seem to get a lot of attention at the expense of lesser known lights how are far more talented, sure, but to call it an Establishment, as though there were a secret club that a poet could become a member of if only s/he climbed the greasy pole with enough alacrity, doesn’t feel all that helpful.  It’s useful when you’re a young buck, as anger’s quite energising when you’re just starting out, but it becomes exhausting after a while.  Besides anything else, I think that the current technological dispensation’s been really good for unknown poets, letting them disseminate work through channels running parallel with the more accepted, established publication structures.  Having said all this, the notion of a Poetry Establishment is useful for one thing, and one thing only, which is this: whenever I read a review by Sean O’Brien of a new poet he doesn’t like, that’s a pretty surefire way of tipping me off about fresh-faced writers that I’m bound to enjoy. 

7) Yes.  No doubt.  Not always well, but it can be learned, like any skill.

8) Subjects are for absolutist monarchs; poetry should have its eye on other matters.

9) I do remember, as a matter of fact, though couldn’t recite it verbatim.  It was rather a bawdy piece in rhymed quatrains with a jaunty iambic pulse about a bee that stings a buxom dinner-lady on her ample bosom.  Edward Lear by way of Donald McGill, in short.

10) (d)

11) Reasonable?  Probably not, but it’s not something I lose sleep over.  The best thing to do it so make up the shortfall by writing the best poems you can hope for yourself.

12) The poetry on the internet is a kind of poetry; the internet itself is a kind of 12^th century Gothic cathedral erected in code.       

13) (a)

14) What’s it to you, hmmm?

15) To an extent: speech always wants to be heard, whatever form it’s in.  The act of writing poetry, though, is radically anti-social, which is one of the reasons I’m drawn to it as an art-form.

16) I tend not to have language / poetry dreams, though I do dream impossible books rather regularly.  One time, though, I did dream up a revolutionary system of transcribing dolphin speech, but failed to make note of it upon waking.  Silly man: that could have been my fortune.

17) (d)

18) Originality’s for the birds. 

19) Sometimes, but it’s not a given.

20) Probably, I guess.

21) I dunno.

22) No: the whole move of poetry has surely been to incorporate wider and wider subjects, and every era will have its own leanings and bugbears.  This is what’s so fantastic about poetry, right, that there’s an almost unbridgeable gulf between the architecturally-minded religious epics of Dante and the clerihew, between Pope’s brittle classicism and Whitman’s freeform cowboy strut through the American century?  An unbridgeable gulf, that is, in any world other than poetry.  That demented variety is not a glitch in the system; it is the system.

23) (a)

24) Plymouth.

25) It probably depends on how many references to early Hitchcock happen to be in them. 

26) (d)

27) It depends on the poem, but I’m not ruling it out in the future.  Beware of hard and fast rules, particularly hard and fast rules that have the faux whiff of liberation about them.

28) Ah, the whole ‘perfection in the life, perfection in the work’ conundrum.  I think it is possible, yes, but you’re liable to get less work done, as  by default you’ll have to take other people’s needs into account.

29) Every day, every minute: each poem’s an attempt to start again, and that’s how it should be.  I remember reading Roy Fisher’s account of writing The Cut Pages, of how at the start it was merely a means of getting his writing off the ground again after a period of block.  Most people would see that as maybe a cautionary warning, but I read it as a manifesto of sorts.  What if everything you wrote was a means of getting up off the ground again?  What if you wrote every poem as though it were your first, and your last?  What then?  Aye, what then?

30) I wold say ‘see answer to 29’, but that would be a lie, not to mention inveterately lazy.  I believe that it’s possible to fall out of love with the habit of writing, certainly, but I don’t believe in any real sense in writer’s block.  You can’t get deserted by the Muse, in part because the Muse simply don’t exist, but chiefly because there are millions of ways of getting back on the horse, writing-wise.  That’s the tough bit, naturally, but once you’re high in the saddle, well, it’s a different story.

31) (d)

32) Myself, and a small circle of friends.  If anyone else happens to be listening in, that’s lovely, but it's by no means necessary.

33) Obviously not, but there’s a two way street whereby each bleeds into the other. 

34) Absolutely, but the trick is to stay young whatever decade you happen to be stuck in the middle of.

35) No, sadly I don't but the young poets in Swaziland are producing some pretty astounding work.

36) Naah.

37) I refer you to:

38) (c)

39) It's a better policy to treat your whole career as though it were a plateau, I’d say.

40) Since when have poets of any age done anything gracefully?  Gah…

41) One of them dresses like Wednesday Addams on a particularly gloomy Sunday, and spends their working life adding cosmetic touches to lifeless, inanimate objects in order to give the impression of vivification for the benefit of emotionally fragile onlookers; the other is an undertaker. 

42) Soylent Greenleaf Whittier?  Yeah, why not?

43) ”Influence is bliss.”

44) Not one iota. 

45) Too many, I would wager: they are an impediment, for all their virtues. 

46) Yes; last Tuesday.

47) I should freaking well hope so: my legacy will be written across the stars, goddammit!

48) Aaaarrgh!

49) Zzzzzzzz……..

50) A veal scaloppini, a good fettuccini alfredo, a bottle of fettucine, a 1981.

 

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*No, I'm printing the questions, partly because it will be fun for you millions of readers out there in Digital Poetry Land to guess what I'm responding to, but also because you really ought to buy the book, as it's a hoot, and Leafe are a small poetry press very much deserving of your moolah.  Off you go.

Simon Turner - Brief News on a Non-Standard Midlander

I've just learnt, via Alan Baker's Litterbug blog, that Roy Fisher (one of the most important poets of the post-war period, as any fool know) will be giving a reading on October 28th, as part of the Beeston International Poetry Festival (when I was still living in Nottingham, that phrase alone would have been enough to send me into paroxsysms of joy for an uninterrupted month).  The festival, running for two weeks and organised by John Lucas, the head honcho of Shoestring Press (like Alan Baker's own Leafe, a Nottingham cultural institution to be ranked alongside Alan Sillitoe and Shane Meadows), looks set to be of great interest.  More details are available at Shoestring's website.  I'm hoping to attend the reading, but if I fail to make it - public transport being something of a bum wrap between Warwickshire and Notts County - G&P will be sending at least one of its spies to make notes on proceedings.  That is all.     

Alan Baker - The Book of Random Access (59)

The January sky was pale blue, with watery clouds. My perception of the world is limited by my five senses, and my perception of image is limited by my sensual perception of light. Image, time, mind and memory... to try to capture them seems absurd and futile. When my grandfather was out of work, he'd scrub the kitchen floor; he was a good man, my mother tells me. He fell out of an army truck and escaped the Great War. My perception of him is limited by my five senses. He is here in the present, along with my entire past, this desk and computer, along also with the future. The history and energy of presence. Good night, see you in the morning - that's the kids sorted out, let's have a glass of wine. The present, singular or plural, pale as January's sky with all its clouds. The past is present like a shifting sky of pale blue and thin cloud. The future, all our futures, are a presence like a shifting blue in a cloudy sky. All futures are invented. The origin of futures was in trade in agricultural commodities, and the term is used to define the underlying asset even though the contract is frequently completely divorced from the product. As you age, your future contracts. I see the future without me in it - with my children in it maybe. Nothing ever stands still - keep moving ahead with us. The future is orange. The future doesn’t exist. Let’s pour the wine.

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Texts quoted:

The Encyclopaedia Brittanica on 'futures'.
Eric Gamalinda, 'Language, Light and the Language of Light' (Pinoy Poetics, Meritage Press).

Alan Baker - The Book of Random Access (58)

The process of filling in the bay had been going on for one hundred years. The reduced market for egg-hatching machines and spittle-cups made the change necessary. Whatever its appeal, Malmo is full of funkiness. People don't usually hang out in restaurants till late in the evening and it can be hard, thus, to track down a decent meal after dark should you get famished in the wee hours. The taxi took me down a dark road, far away from where I wanted to go, finally leaving me at a deserted hotel with no obvious way back. I had no choice but to climb the steps to the poorly lit lobby. Death is no longer enshrined in taboos. What was this hotel? My reflection in the doorway revealed to me my true self: a bipedal primate mammal, anatomically related to the great apes but distinguished by a more highly developed brain, with a resultant capacity for articulate speech and abstract reasoning, and by a marked erectness of body carriage that frees the hands for use as manipulative members. Famished in the wee hours. Burnt out on the trail. Not using my modem (I get no dial tone). A haunted man. Then she uprose, the only rose for me. She didn't understand me, nor I her, but that made things more interesting. She knew that the moon influenced the cycle of the tides. She circumnavigated the globe, she shook my pockets loose and took me home to meet my life. My hands were freed as manipulative members.

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Texts quoted:

The Encyclopaedia Brittanica on 'Death', 'Human Being'.
Tourist brochure for Malmo, Sweden.

Alan Baker - The Book of Random Access (54)

[He] remembered not only every leaf of every tree of every wood, but also every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. Forgetfulness might seem bliss, like falling asleep in a comfortable bed after physical work in the fresh air. If you find that difficult, it's something that can be learned. Simple breathing exercises can help, or meditation. Some people find that lavender oil, valerian or other herbs help them. In a prose piece, he envisages a School of Forgetting, where the pupils are taught in specialist fields, such as Forgetting History and Forgetting Language. In the lit room, the window pane is a black square, the streaks of rain are like little lines of glass beads. The modem is flickering, the printer is warming up. There is the case of “AJ,” a 40-year-old woman with incredibly strong memories of her personal past. Given a date, AJ can recall with astonishing accuracy what she was doing on that date and what day of the week it fell on. Because her case is the first one of its kind, the researchers have proposed a name for her syndrome – “hyperthymestic syndrome.” She had been called “the human calendar” for years by her friends and acquaintances. AJ is both a warden and a prisoner of her memories, said Parker, a clinical professor of psychiatry and neurology. They can at times be a burden because they cannot be controlled, but she told us that if she had a choice, she would not want to give them up.

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Texts quoted:

Jorge Luis Borges, 'Funes the Memorious', from Labyrinths.
BrainMind.com - Source: University of California - Irvine, Hyper-Memory: The Inability To Forget, March 7, 2006.
Dennis Tomlinson, review of 'Five Poets from Saxony' (Shearsman), Tears in the Fence 46.

Alan Baker - The Book of Random Access (52)

If the kingdom of the stars seems vast, the realm of the galaxies is larger still. From the North Devon coast we could see the Welsh Hills across the sea, and when night fell, the Milky Way was a pale crystal band across the sky. Our home galaxy is a large spiral system consisting of several billion stars, one of which is the Sun. Many such assemblages are so enormous that they contain hundreds of billions of stars. And yet there are so many galaxies that they pervade space, even into the depths of the farthest reaches penetrated by powerful modern telescopes. Look, I said, if you lie on the grass out here you can see the Milky Way. They rolled their eyes and smiled at each other, but came anyway. The stars were like jewels in a black roof. Below the cliff, we heard sea-surf sounding. At dawn the tides withdraw, currents pull round the headland to the grey Atlantic, past Lundy Island, where seals stare like the souls of the drowned. To have a soul would mean that consciousness was separate from the physical body. Every visible star is a sun in its own right. Ever since this realization first dawned in the collective mind of humanity, it has been speculated that many stars other than the Sun also have planetary systems encircling them, and that some will have life, even advanced civilizations. For the early Egyptians, the Milky Way was the heavenly Nile, flowing through the land of the dead ruled by Osiris.
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Texts quoted:

The Encyclopaedia Brittanica on 'Galaxy', 'Cosmos'.

Alan Baker - The Book of Random Access (51)

As if this place were a dream of this place, that comes from no where other than here. If this were true, then ducks rising from a pond in a flurry and splash are taking off into a season of late promise, into which, while the power station spreads its clouds (which, incidentally, are mainly water vapour), late developers come to skinny-dip and young women dream of men who make them laugh. For the young, all things are possible. Would you like to reconsider? The tapestries tell of meadow flowers and men with lutes that strolled through the young land like news of peace, mixed with the uncomfortable freedom that peace brings. The word troubadour is a French form derived ultimately from the Occitanian trobar, “to find” or “to invent.” A troubadour was thus one who invented new poems, finding new verse for his elaborate love lyrics. The young girl in love invents her lover anew, perhaps while lighting a cigarette or texting her friend. The mind thus invents a place that is no where else than the place it's in; the ducks are in full flight now, the estuary extends, painterly and complete, under an extravagant sky. Meanwhile, Super Mario clears the way to a lower (indestructible) floor and heads to the first pipe spawning Bobombs. If you’ve forgotten your password, we can send it to you by email. A home without books is like a room without windows. The casement swung open and she leaned into the May morning, hoping this wasn’t a dream.

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Texts quoted:

The Encyclopaedia Brittanica on 'Troubadour'.
Slogan from Jacqueline Wilson's website (www.jacquelinewilson.co.uk).
"New Super Mario Brothers Cheats", (www.cheatscodesguides.com).

Alan Baker - The Book of Random Access (50)

Through effort we develop our character. In this hexagram, wood, standing for our character, nourishes fire; through the good example of our character, we light the way for others. This gives meaning to our lives. At fifty, a man should be rich. But how many are? Money isn't the answer - it's transient and unworthy of our attention. The life span of a five-pound note is one year on average. Between 2004 and 2005, the Bank of England reported that 153,531,778 five-pound notes were shredded. Lakshmi Mittal, aged 55, is the richest man in Britain, with an estimated fortune of 14.9 billion pounds derived from his steel empire. But is he happy? My daughter, born Nottingham 1996, passes me a note: Dad please come up in 15 minutes with water and a Nerofen. I know this is a wrong spelling SOS. The phone is ringing. Hello? It's my mother, born Newcastle-upon-Tyne 1923. She's had a slight fall and spent the afternoon in casualty, but sounds OK now. Now it's time to settle my daughter down in bed. A glass of water and some Nurofen. And I've caught a cold. If I were rich, these things would still happen. We light the way for others. This gives meaning to our lives. My father, born Newcastle-upon-Tyne 1921, died, Newcastle-upon-Tyne 1973, has nothing to say; yet his influence at this time is propitious, and worth more, I may say, than all the banknotes shredded by the Bank of England. And he wasn’t rich, or anything like it, at fifty.

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Texts quoted:

A Guide to the I Ching, Carole K. Antony (Antony, 1980).
Schott's Almanac, 2007.

Alan Baker - The Book of Random Access (46)

There is no one reality. Each of us inhabits a separate universe. That's not speaking metaphorically. This is the hypothesis of reality suggested by recent developments in quantum physics. Reality in a dynamic universe is non-objective. Consciousness is the only reality. So reality means the memories of each person? That dog that I'm watching scampering across the park in the chill autumn fog, running until he's out of sight in the gloom. Is he in a separate universe? We can confirm that your order was sent from our Fulfilment Centre. Tomorrow is the shortest day, St. Lucy's day, the winter solstice. Four more shopping days till Christmas, and the Sony Wii is out of stock everywhere. The Wii handset is a piece of advanced technology; it uses an accelerometer and a gyrometer to measure motion and tilt, and likewise utilizes both infrared and Bluetooth technology to interact with a sensor bar and to send information to the Wii console. The universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. M-Theory is defined in eleven dimensional space-time with ten dimensions of space and one dimension of time. F-Theory may contain two dimensions of time and ten dimensions of space. We believe that a multiverse of universes exist like bubbles floating in Nothing. Like a star at dawn, lightning in a summer cloud, a phantom and a dream. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder … we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.

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Texts quoted:

Interview with Dr Michio Kaku, BBC.
The Universe and Multiple Reality, by Professor M. R. Franks.
The Ghost in the Atom, by C. W. Davies and J. R. Brown, ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (New Revised ed.), (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932; Cambridge: The University Press, 1932)

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Alan Baker is the editor of Leafe Press. Other sections of The Book of Random Access can be found in Great Works, The Hamilton Stone Review, and on his own blog, Litterbug. The Book of Random Access has 64 sections, and each section has 256 words. 64 is the number of hexagrams in the I-Ching, and both 64 and 256 are significant numbers in computing. This is the first of seven sections from the sequence which Gists and Piths will be serialising over the coming week.

Trajectories by Alan Baker

Arriving by bus in a strange city

Waking in a room
with open curtains
on an indeterminate day

Rooftops gleam in morning light
like difficult decisions

A zone of newly-constructed space
through which adjacent lives might glimpse
a primary school class in 1966
round the piano, singing
'Drink to me only with thine eyes'

Jove's nectar must have been
what my father drank
in brown bottles by the fire and telly,
a tiny silhouette of the Tyne Bridge
on its label

*

The strange city
becomes accustomed to my eyes,
its trajectory of optimism
takes me to political theory
and the price of coffee in Derby,
where the railways lurk
like Banquo's ghost
at the feast
of business parks
link roads, junctions
airport runways

And I heard it, on TV
after the Hatfield train crash:
The head of the rail network
emerging from a meeting with fellow directors to tell the press:
'we've been thinking unthinkable thoughts'

*

Fox droppings, fleece on fenceposts,
beyond the field, in mist,
a road hums
with unanswerable knowledge
and bids us be on our way
while it attends to
encroaching cigarette butts
and men with tape measures

The attitudes of harm
are omnipresent,
life as a series of events, some connected,
and the world a theory, waiting to be proved.

 But let's get on with it, you say:
   your life
   or lives
from 'collateral damage: the movie'
to lists of Jews
to the evening news
and Bethlehem under siege
   a front-door shuts
a car passes,
a kettle is filled,
conversation downstairs
and outside the window
tree-lined boulevards lead into spring
advancing sunlight reflects
a rise in the Dow Jones
0% finance
and everything Made In China 

*

Speak to me only with thine eyes
thy lips, thy tongue, thy body
and that voice

I need that voice
like the world needs love

faced with CO2 emissions
and rising seas
I need
a kiss
a cup
and some kind of nectar

*

Forgotten hopes sidle up
like homeless people
we spare some change for

How long will it be like this?
the ratios of empowerment
bending the odds
spring sunlight jamming the frequencies
air everywhere fair, or might be
And I was therewhen the leather struck the netting
like a speculator opening an account
a blow-by-blow account
of how the world was won
to roars of 'Howay the lads'
as the crowd pours out of the ground
(so many, I had not thought Sunderland had undone so many)
scarves against the cold, beery breath,
winter lights on the ferry
where latecomers watch replays of missed penalties
ghosts of keelboats haul their coal,
and the Captains of Industry think unthinkable thoughts

*

Along the line of the valley
between Castle Rock and the Trent:
the railway, canal, factories,
once lacework, female labour,
depots and offices designed,
in the seventies
blues clubs and reggae,
and from this vantage
hindsight underestimates

*

Early evening
cannabis smoke drifts above the festival
stagestruck songbirds singing in the dimness
and the world is full of children,
some of them grey-haired and stooping

A big drag, and then it happened,
the road shining, trees bowing as we passed:

   the new Mazda 20v 1.8ltr 4WD with sunroof 

   because you care about your car 

*

I like the way you walk

 I like the way you walk
into my life
each day
like someone else's taste in music
   their radio playing
   'My Baby Wrote Me a Letter'
despatched by night mail
to a dawn platform,
where passenger trains arrive
at a world full of children
   each contingent
   upon each other
or so the language can say
in its brighter moments
among the jingles and slogans
realised as what words are for 

 If you drink to me only with those eyes
   I'll take the pledge with mine
O quench that thirst
   it's from soul, the heart and soul 

Get me a ticket for an aeroplane
   an intercity bus, a fast train 

*

Out across the midlands, low hills
motorways and lines of pylons, the airport
and its destinations, hitchikers at the junction
collateral and contingent,
their questions worn like new clothes
doled out to Jarrow marchers

Egg and sausage at the truckers cafe,
strong tea, and we're ready to set out


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Alan Baker is the editor of Leafe Press, a publisher of innovative and left-field poetry based in Nottingham. Some of his other poems can be read online at Shearsman and Great Works.