Hidden Door

If you're anywhere near Edinburgh, don't miss Hidden Door at the Roxy Art House this weekend (full programme, details, cost etc. at the link). It's a huge event of genuine cultural significance. I'll be reading a few sets of poems, but I am only a tiny dot among 9 other poets, 10 film-makers, 30 bands, and 40 artists. Should be a fantastic event.

The Voice of Geddy Lee

I was following an online conversation about book jacket photos when the subject of Rush singer Geddy Lee somehow came up. I was never a Rush fan. I lived through punk and you either liked Rush, Yes and Genesis or Buzzcocks, Clash and Wire - but no one at the time could admit to liking both sides of that 'or'. I am grateful to Rush neverthless. For one thing, my own band did a cover of 'Spirit of Radio', a parody of course (if truth be told, we weren't remotely good enough on our instruments to have played the real Rush version), which gave us no end of hysterical fun. For another, Rush inspired one of my all-time favourite lyrics, from Pavement's 'Stereo':

'What about the voice of Geddy Lee.
How did it get so high?
I wonder if he speaks like an ordinary guy.'
'I know him, and he does.'

I never saw the video at the time but I was glad to discover it this afternoon. Classic stuff.

Angus Calder, Chapman Issue 110

Well, this is the first day in the past week in which I’ve actually felt positive about a new day. I haven’t been well and this will be my third day on anti-biotics, which do seem to have kicked in this morning. Not out the woods yet, but much better. I am now behind with everything – work, emails (sorry, everyone), blogging, reviewing, poetry (I had plans to write poems for one or two specific projects and haven’t written a word) and everything else.

Firstly, I was delighted to get my copy of the new Chapman, issue 110 (the website is still well out of date). Chapman has been over several decades one of Scotland’s central, important literary magazines. This is the first issue for about three (?) years, due to various reasons explained in the magazine’s editorial. The hope is that Chapman will be published again every six months - I hope so too. It contains the usual mix of poetry, fiction and reviews, some of which I liked and some of which I didn’t – the same would go for any issue of any magazine. There’s a very moving set of “memories and reflections not ‘tributes’!” of writer and poet, Angus Calder, which are fascinating in that they seem to talk about a real human being, not a sanitized version. I liked the anecdote on the value of the arts, from Alan Riach. Riach asked Calder whether the one person without whom the 20th century would be unimaginable was Hitler. Calder became passionately angry:

“No,” he said. “Because I care about Stravinsky, I care about Picasso, MacDiarmid, Joyce, Shostakovich. These are the people who make the 20th century possible to live in.”

Some people, probably the majority of people, will disagree with that. You know how it is when public money is allocated to fund a poet-in-residence rather than something useful? The tabloid newspapers go crazy and you’ll find no end of outraged people to complain about it. But the gap between expediency and value grows over time and if we neglect what’s truly valuable, the next century may become increasingly impossible to live through. It’s hard to measure the contribution that, say, Picasso, has made to our lives, and even to the lives of people who have no interest in his artworks. But without him and others of his great creative vision and skill in fields of art, poetry, film, literature and so on, somehow we would all be diminished, life wouldn’t be the same.

I have more to say about the Chapman issue, but this will do for now.

TS Eliot Prize 2009 Winner

Space Bar tagged me on Facebook, asking for my views on this year’s TS Eliot Prize, which was decided yesterday. The winner was Philip Gross for his book, The Water Table. Well, I can’t really say anything about the award itself, as I’ve only read two of the ten shortlisted books – The Burning of the Books and Other Poems by George Szirtes and Over by Jane Draycott – both strong collections. All I can really offer is congratulations to Philip Gross.

Apologies for the lack of posts on this blog recently – a combination of things – but I have a few lined up.

Hofmann on Reviewing

Some readers don’t trust reviewers. And who can blame them? Plenty of reviews are only settling old scores, or helping to cement a status quo. Some may tell you plenty about a reviewer’s opinions and enthusiasms, but they miss out the book under consideration. Some are badly written or send you to sleep. So I ask myself once again what the point of reviewing is.

This isn’t a theoretical question. I have several books and chapbooks to review in front of me. I’ve heard the argument, from several people, that the best review for a book is simply to print one of the poems. The reader can then judge whether to investigate further on that basis. Who needs a reviewer’s opinion, which is, after all, just an opinion?

However, I’m not convinced that ‘opinion’ ought to be the central focus of a good review in any case. Reviewers may offer opinions, of course, but if all they do is add to the dry mass of public opinion, not much is being achieved.

I think reviews are an art form in themselves, as much as poetry or any other form of literature. I can read a poem from a book and appreciate it, but a good review may challenge my reading, get me thinking again about a book’s virtue and vices, and enrich my knowledge. Even if I don’t know a thing about a book under review, I’d still expect a good review to get me thinking about poetry, and deepen my understanding of it in some way.

I’ve been reading, off and on, Behind the Lines – a collection of Michael Hofmann’s essays on poetry, fiction, art and film, which certainly does all the positive things in the previous paragraph. He is fearless too and doesn’t seem in awe of anyone’s reputation, but his enthusiasm and thoroughness is obvious. In his chapter on Robert Lowell’s prose, Hofmann has this to say:

“In an illuminating piece on Yvor Winters, he speaks of him not being ‘adequately praised’, and it seems to me it this ‘adequate praise’ (a dubious, stiff, almost paradoxical notion) that he is most often giving. Lowell is not a proselytizer, not an unraveller; he seems to keep a constant distance between himself and his subjects: his reviews are not discoveries.”

It’s the enthusiasms (positive or negative), the unravellings, and the unexpected discoveries that bring reviews alive and help me read poems with fresh eyes, those moments when another person sheds real insight on a poem or on a few lines, and reveals something I would have overlooked.

Neil Diamond Week - 5. Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show

Dolly Parton this time and she certainly puts her own stamp on Neil Diamond’s Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show. Pretty well done, I think.



For comparison, here’s a Neil Diamond version.

Neil Diamond Week - 4. Song Sung Blue

I’ll be honest, Altered Images’ version of Song Sung Blue hasn’t aged too well. It’s fun, mind you, and I did like it at the time. I met Clare Grogan once. For some reason she was signing albums in the foyer of an Aberdeen bank one lunchtime. I went along with my friend, Ritchie, expecting to queue for ages but maybe the publicity hadn’t been good, as we were almost the only people there. Clare was very chatty, good fun, despite being trapped with two adoring teenagers for an hour (thinking about it, we were only a couple of years younger than she was!). I suppose we passed the time for her and we were doing our level best to be as witty and interesting as possible. She even invited us to a Hogmanay party but ‘somehow’ forgot to give us the address.



So, OK, ND’s version is better, but I enjoyed hearing the Altered Images cover again after all those years.

Neil Diamond Week - 3. Red Red Wine

I bought UB40s first album on vinyl (still have it, in fact) with the great Unemployment Benefit Card cover, which included a free 12" 45rpm record with a few extra tracks. It was their best moment, I think, but they did quite a bit to popularise reggae in the UK, including a number one hit with this Neil Diamond cover.

White Noise

I couldn't have got a better soundtrack for this film than the snow falling on the camera. I fluff a word ('or') about halfway through, but Jamie (the cameraman) and myself were too cold by this time to consider filming again. The full text of the poem is at the YouTube link. It's also the fourth poem in The Opposite of Cabbage.

Neil Diamond Week - 2. Sweet Caroline

Another classic. I suppose you know you've really made it when you can say that Elvis Presley covered one of your songs...

Neil Diamond Week - 1. I'm a Believer

It's Neil Diamond week at Surroundings. He wrote some classic songs. I feel he blanded out for a while after his success in the seventies, but I heard a few tracks from an album he released last year and they sounded pretty good. I'm going to post a song each day this week, not always ND's version. To begin with, here's one of his most famous pieces. He could probably live happily from the proceeds of this alone:

Happy New Year!

The last poem I read in the previous decade was Comus by John Milton. Wouldn't it be great to actually perform this Masque live? Let's say June this year - at the GRV. I have one reader booked, but the rest of the programme could be a performance of Comus! Anybody up for doing this - I'd need a group of people involved, who wouldn't necessarily have to be poets - just good readers. Not sure whether it's best done off by heart; probably an impossible task for most of us...

The first song I listened to in this decade, other than the boring stuff on the TV Hogmanay show, which has already (thankfully) slipped my memory, was Neil Diamond's 'Holly Holy'. Despite Diamond not being exactly hip these days, I love this song and several others he wrote. This morning, I found this performance of the song, from 1970. I prefer the studio version in a musical sense, but I wish people still danced like this in the 21st century:



Here's an excellent live version of the song from a year later, in 1971.

Morning Star: Best Poetry of 2009

I had a surprise today on seeing the Morning Star’s Poetry Books of the Year. Thanks to Kevin Cadwallender for nominating me, and good to see his own book being mentioned later on. Also great to see Ian McMillan nominating John Ashbery’s latest collection – McMillan is always a man of surprises and seems to have a very wide taste in poetry. The whole list is one of the more interesting ‘end-of-the-year Best Ofs’ – not the usual suspects, in the main.

Two Books and My 2009

I finished off two poetry collections in the last few days. First of all, The Burning of the Books and Other Poems, the latest collection by George Szirtes. I wish I had time to say more about it (but don’t). It’s a great read – complex, multi-layered, and unafraid to tackle big subjects. Many poets would come unstuck and produce turgid, earnest poems, but Szirtes is relentlessly inventive and shows (if this needs to be shown) how tight form can liberate poems from doing only the easy, expected thing. The book also has one of the great covers of 2009 - click on the image to see it better. Some people like to divide poets into oppositional categories such as ‘mainstream’ and ‘innovative’, ‘traditionalist’ and ‘modernist’, but Szirtes’s poetry resists such categorisation, which can only be a good thing.

I’d say the same about the second book I read, which was Equal to the Earth by Jee Leong Koh, born in Singapore and now living in New York City. The poems tackle immigrant experience, homosexuality, love, loss, and relationships. They often make use of traditional form but stand (I feel) at a distance from much American ‘formalist’ writing – I get the feeling many ’formalists’ spend most of their time counting syllables on their fingers to make sure they’ve got everything right! Koh’s formalism serves the poems rather than the other way round. They are extremely well written, moving, pointed, and refreshingly unfashionable (less surreal and elliptical, more complex reality and linguistic precision). His material is often deeply personal and clearly means a great deal to him but he avoids both melodrama and dry distance. At the Equal to the Earth link, you can read a terrific sample poem, ‘Brother’, a coming of age poem I suppose, the mythical brother-in-the-womb evocative of all ‘shimmering absences’ and unknowable desire. Anyway, I recommend this book highly.

People are blogging ‘what I did/achieved in 2009’ posts to end off the year. I didn’t really do enough to fill a blog article – I had a poetry collection published, a book I am still very proud to have written – I guess that’s an achievement in itself. I did plenty of readings and had poems and reviews published in various magazines. Other than that, there’s nothing of real note to say.

Have a Great Christmas...

...when it comes. Here's Mary Margaret O'Hara - a great gift, if there ever was one. Great words, great singer, great band, great song. This is the kind of thing that should have been number one this Christmas (if only a recording for download existed!) rather than all that 'Fuck you...' crap, or Joe singing Miley Cyrus:



Just in case MMO’H is a new name to some readers here, her only full album, Miss America (1988) is one of the best albums ever recorded.

Poetry And The Future

I was reading Don Share’s new blog article, The Future of American Poetry on how the relationship between poet and audience has changed and is still in the process of changing, mainly due to technological advance. Of course, it’s not only American poetry at stake. The “chapbook publisher with a Blogspot page and PayPal account can sell directly to readers worldwide,” as Ron Silliman mentions, from just about anywhere.

Any poet can develop an international readership, which would have been unthinkable only 15 years ago for all except for the most lauded writers with international reputations, who were very few. That’s the theory and, for some, it works. However, it’s more complicated than that.

A decade or two ago, most poets writing now would have had no audience at all other than friends and family (if that). Some others may have become known in a local scene, but not beyond. Only a handful would have entered the public consciousness (or, at least, the poetry-reading public consciousness). These days, millions of poets compete for readerships through the Internet and there is no quality-control. Poetry boards abound where people ‘share’ their poetry, and many of those people will never read poetry books. They read only their ‘sharing’ peers online, partly because they expect their community to reciprocate. I suspect they don't really constitute a significant potential base of readers (perhaps I'm wrong about that?). Some poets who would never have got a publishing contract from a traditional page publisher are getting read on the Net and are selling a decent amount of their pamphlets and books. These include poets who write 'traditional' verse and those who lean towards experimental work. Because there are so many, however, those with a gift for marketing themselves with an online presence are most likely to succeed in gaining an Internet audience. The rest will fail.

I’ve noticed that most of the bigger UK independent presses like Bloodaxe, Carcanet, Salt, Seren etc are all developing a significant Web presence and are embracing new media such as e-books, video, audio etc. The same isn’t true of the trade presses like Faber, Picador and Cape. They perhaps feel that their books will set the agenda for future anthologies, that posterity will belong to them, and that the deafening racket from today’s Internet won’t cement any reputations. They may be right. I know their books sell well (for poetry books), but they must be losing out on a vast potential audience by not engaging with Net readers. At the moment, they are fine and get plenty of publicity on the Web through newspapers (the traditional outlets online), prize shortlists, and the sense among UK readers (it still exists, I think) that a new Faber book is an important event. They are trading off their reputations, which is a fair enough strategy. But is it adequate to ensure a readership for poetry in the future? It’s hard to believe it is. As Ron Silliman says, “everything is up for grabs.”

TLS Review and New Scottish Fashion

Great to see Carrie Etter’s review of The Opposite of Cabbage in the Christmas double-issue of the Times Literary Supplement. It’s only on paper, not online (unless you’re a TLS subscriber), but it’s a very positive review and focuses both on the collection’s recurring themes and on the detail of individual poems. A few snippets:

Rob A Mackenzie’s first full collection inhabits present-day Scotland in all its liveliness, banality and bad weather… Mackenzie’s vigorous urban language, often employed in declarative sentences, vivifies it all.

One of Mackenzie’s stylistic hallmarks is paradox tinged with irony, as when a man ‘loses with a symbolic victory secured’… These apparently oxymoronic statements that pepper the volume suggest that people negotiate such contradictions as part of the difficulty of living, at the same time as they contribute to the book’s conception of the zeitgeist.

The Opposite of Cabbage impresses with its distinctive style and energetic exploration of ‘the way we live now’.

Anyway, a nice Christmas present for me.

Another Salt book, Mark Waldron’s The Brand New Dark is also reviewed, on the same page, by Ben Wilkinson. I haven’t read this book yet but it does sound like a collection I‘m liable to like. Ben says that:

The success of the book, however, stems from the way in which Waldron handles the sinister, noirish aspects of contemporary life… Waldron’s gift is to approach these subjects from oblique angles, often with a tone that is more implicating than accusatory.

I like the image Ben quotes straight afterwards, from a poem called ‘The Sausage Factory’, in which the meat is figured as “wee circus elephants, /gripping the tail of the one that goes before, /marching uncertainly away from death” (and for once, of course, I've been glad to set out poetry in sausage-quotes).

I’ve read three collections recently - Don Paterson’s Rain (Faber), Brian McCabe’s Zero (Polygon) and John Glenday’s Grain (Picador). Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Three recent Scottish poetry collections all with single-word titles. Is it a new fashion? I suppose you could add Richard Price’s Rays too. Probably just coincidence although, as George MacLeod (late leader of the Iona Community) said, “If you believe in coincidence, I wish you a very dull life.” They are all good books in very different ways.

Give Thanks and Go West

Henry Smith wrote ‘Give thanks with a Grateful Heart’ and published it in 1978, although it didn’t become a staple in Christian worship until after 1986 when it was recorded by Don Moen. Here it is, a fairly soporific version by the Maranatha singers (couldn't find a decent version of it on YouTube), but the similarity to another song is obvious:



In 1979, the Village People released ‘Go West’, more than a year after Smith’s worship song. I wonder if Smith was paid anything for it, as the similarities in the choruses are immediately striking:



The irony is that most people probably think the worship song was filched from the Village People. On some Internet sites, ‘Give Thanks’ is dated as 1986, but that was the Don Moen album release date. It was definitely first published and recorded in 1978 and I have the music in front of me to prove it. Not that I’d want a legal action against the Village People or whoever wrote ‘Go West’ because the VP appear to me to be having a great time in this video.

American Poetry Recommendations

Looking over the poetry I’ve been reading this year, I’ve read quite a number of recent UK collections. This is highly unusual for me. Normally, I read poetry from Scotland, Europe (in translation) and the USA - not much else – and these can come from a variety of time-periods.

This year, I read only one U.S. collection published in 2009 - D.A. Powell’s ‘Chronic’ (unless I include Mark Halliday’s ‘No Panic Here’ chapbook, published by HappenStance in the UK). The American poetry world is so vast, it’s hard to know where to start, except with writers I already know about. I found this list by Brian Foley (thanks to Howard Miller for the tip), which contains some books I think I might like from the last decade of American poetry. I have wide taste, although I have a blind spot both for LANGUAGE poetry and for bland poems full of incidents concerning people’s relatives etc. I like the New York School, WS Graham, Wallace Stevens, Zbigniew Herbert, and I also like quite formal writers like George Szirtes and Don Paterson. I’m not so interested in writers like Sharon Olds and Mary Oliver (not slagging them off – they have a big audience who love them – it’s just not for me). I like poets who can write well and whose minds work in interesting ways

Anyway, what individual U.S. collections from the past decade would people recommend to me? And is there anything coming up in 2010 I should look out for?

My Favourite Poetry Collections of 2009

I’m going to make an attempt to pick out my favourites of 2009, although I’m bound to miss some. I really need to re-read a couple of books that might have made this list, but deciding on the basis on a single read-through isn’t my practice e.g. Carrie Etter’s The Tethers (Seren) and D.A. Powell’s Chronic (Graywolf). I also need to finish a few collections that seemed to demand a gradual approach – so gradual that I’ve still not made it to the end e.g. Brian Johnstone’s The Book of Belongings (Arc), Liz Gallagher’s The Wrong Miracle (Salt), and Merle Lyn Bachman’s Diorama with Fleeing Figures (Shearsman).

Of books I have finished this year and read thoroughly, here are my favourites. First of all, those published in 2009: I read Andrew Philip’s The Ambulance Box (Salt) as it emerged in manuscript form and the final book version is really excellent; Claire Crowther’s The Clockwork Gift (Shearsman) displays a refreshingly original approach to language, even stronger than her fine debut collection; Roddy Lumsden’s Third Wish Wasted (Bloodaxe) contains several outstanding poems and has strength in depth – I can’t even begin to fathom why it hasn’t appeared on this year’s prize shortlists; C.L. Dallat’s The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff) also has some great poems, written with real skill; Richard Price’s Rays (Carcanet) is just amazing in its range, formal dexterity and invention – his best collection yet; much the same could be said of Tony Williams’s debut, The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street (Salt).

I’ll also mention a couple of pamphlets/chapbooks published this year – James Robertson’s Hem and Heid (Kettillonia) was entertaining and very well written; Mark Halliday’s No Panic Here (HappenStance) breathes new life into irony as a poetic technique, and was a highly enjoyable read.

Now for a few books I read this year but weren’t published in 2009: I read through all four of Michael Hofmann’s collections (all Faber) – brilliant stuff, of course; Mark Ford’s Soft Sift (Faber, 2001) was really good, influenced by Ashbery but only good Ashbery; I was blown away by Robert Archambeau’s Home and Variations (Salt 2005) – a really terrific book and another which displays astonishing range; Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts, was re-published by Bloodaxe this year (the poem was originally published in 1966, so it really belongs in this section) together with a CD of Bunting reading the poem and a DVD of a Channel 4 documentary about Bunting – everyone should read it and take plenty of time doing so. The book/CD/DVD package is great.

Finally, for anyone interested in publishing poems, I’d thoroughly recommend Helena Nelson’s How [Not] To Get Your Poetry Published (HappenStance 2009, £5), which contains all the advice you’ll ever need on the subject, besides being an entertaining, funny and painfully honest take on the subject.