Proletarian Poetry

I've long enjoyed Peter Raynard's blog Proletarian Poetry, 'a home for poets and poems that portray working class lives from many different angles', and am very honoured that my poem A Lack of Minarets has found a place amongst excellent company.

The poem was first published in Primers Volume One  by Nine Arches Press.

The Primers Tour Continues

Please Pass Me the Jackhammer

Yesterday at a local café, in walked a person I once compromised by email at our place of work.  My words created a problem and a chain of events from which she had difficulty extricating herself.

Though I did apologise some time later, sadly I was not big enough yesterday morning to ask her how she was, and used the fact of her involvement in deep conversation with someone else to keep my head down.  Perhaps she has forgotten all about it  I told myself.  But I know that I haven’t.

By writing that email and committing my take of events to paper I sidestepped a cardinal rule: to talk first, to hear both sides of a story before anything is set in cement.  Words will stand – even these ones – as a record, and perhaps even in someone else’s record.

A number of years ago I was called to jury service.  I buzzed with excitement and sat ready to memorise all the evidence as it was presented – maps with Xs, photos of secret phonecalls, (this was when people still used public phoneboxes), transcripts of recordings - in order best to argue my point with my fellow jurors when it came time for our verdict.

But I fancied I had an even grander mission.  I noticed how a barrister easily destroyed the evidence of one witness, merely by using the ammunition of armour-plated sentences.  His pronouncements were buttoned up, profiting from a dense and rich vocabulary that created an impermeable structure against which the witness’s clumsier and more threadbare answers made few dents.  And I (smugly) thought that my job amongst the group of jurors, many of whom had fallen under the barrister’s spell, was to break down the clusters of polished words.  His meticulously crafted observations could be persuasive and grandiose but their sheer dazzle, I felt, might be blinding us.   It was the first time I had truly seen the power of clever argument in action, and how persuasive, dangerous  and far-reaching it might be. 

To my great regret, the court case was dismissed early on a technicality, so I never did get the chance, in a locked room overnight with my fellow jurors,  to act as jackhammer and deconstruct the arguments to check the validity of their constituent parts.

But I had seen a living example of how words can on occasions form clumps, intertwine, and ultimately block out the light.  

Just as that email I once wrote at work had been strong, earthquake-proof, but ultimately wrong-headed.

I guess words                   sometimes need     space      in between     them

                   to loosen up         the black              and     white                      and  allow

colours                        

                               colours                         

                                                                              colours

Close-ups and Longshots

Loutro

I’m thinking about blank pages and scrawls, space and containment, yawning horizons and sharp focal points, and how they apply to poetry.  For if a poem ideally is a nugget of experience, how much padding do you include, how much wide angle?  

In Loutro, a former fishing hamlet on the south coast of Crete that can only be reached by boat, I spent a week this last June on a poetry course contemplating such issues.  It helped all thought processes that the sea, only yards away, could be swum in at 7.45 in the morning, that an intensity of blue was everywhere, and that bowlfuls of juicy cherries (and sunhats) could be bought from the shop just below my room.

Led by our tutor, the poet Henry Shukman, we delved into an array of work by Thomas Hardy, Sharon Olds, Robert Frost, Mary Oliver, Tomas Tranströmer.  We attempted to uncover the authorial genius behind decisions about precisely what to include and what to leave out.  There were poems diluted down to a few words yet carrying a full payload of history, such as Dan Pagis's Written In Pencil in the Sealed Boxcar, whose exquisite terseness needs no more than its six explosive lines.  There were more sweeping snapshots in the uncomfortable take on modern America, as  in Hard Rain by Tony Hoagland.  Or dizzying leaps between lines in extracts from Judith Taylor's Curios.

Henry used aspects of meditation to kickstart - or perhaps infuse - the day, drawing on his experience as a teacher at the Mountain Cloud  Zen Centre in Santa Fe.  But then came business, ten-minute exercises with the rules: write, don’t stop, don’t edit, use concrete images, and if you find yourself heading into uncomfortable territory, advance fearlessly and go for the jugular.  Spurred by his encouragement, we sat scribbling around a table outside the Scirocco Café, drinking tea and coffee (Henry swearing by Nescafe Frappé) and into my notebook sprang unexpected items about crossroads, fishing nets, wartime collaborators, and parrots.  

We were only four in the group - Hugh, already published, with his keen observation and perceptive critiquing, Mary Ann with her sensual poems about Greece, Juliana with a natural flair for rhyme, who also was the only one to attempt a piece based on the Fibonacci sequence (which she called Fiberace, conjuring up visions of the mathematician’s and Liberace’s lovechild).  One morning we welcomed an infiltration by the course’s enthusiastic prose tutor David Swann and his two students - Leandra (Juliana’s sister) bringing tales of life below the surface in the Bahamas and Dave with his raw stories of Liverpool and Toxteth.  As the sun crept higher through the awnings, we swapped ideas and considered whether examples of flash fiction, with syntax tweaks and different line breaks, might claim kinship with narrative poems.  

But back at my desk in the afternoons the ponderings continued.  The holy grail of all students on such courses is, quite simply, how to write brilliant poems.  What exactly are the tricks?  And how can I use them?  What can I learn from the greats, what can I absorb of their originality while at the same time unlocking my own?  Answers do not come easily, yet from the work we had seen it seemed to boil down to this - success apparently lay in the power of the emotional or philosophical charge, which could be conveyed in all manner of styles - concise, conversational, strictly adhering to form or more relaxed.  In essence, it appeared that the authenticity of the poet's voice mattered above all, and if, behind it, further layers could be discerned, so much the better. 

Well, duh, I've always kind of known this but now, with my own work and drafts more under the microscope, I began to notice that my, at times, over-zealous editing can beat the air out of an idea.  Efforts to slash and burn the 'extraneous' can run the risk not so much of creating hiccups in understanding as severing a reader's possibility of empathy or connection.  

Or so I think, for the moment.  

Between times we took canoes out in the bay, worried about the goat marooned on the rocky outcrop, and (the hardier) walked down the Samaria Gorge and spotted griffon vultures on the wing.  

On the last night, in an even tinier hamlet named Phoenix, we dined on a terrace and read selections of work as the sun set.  The close-up?  The bloom of bonhomie and wine on faces as we boarded a boat back to Loutro.  The longshot?  A night sky above us, punctured by stars.

I booked the course through Espirita, a not-for-profit organisation with intriguing trips on offer.  Check it out!

An Abiding Passion

Mr Darcy wrapping paper from Jane Austen house

In addition to the I Love Mr Darcy wrapping paper pictured above, there were three important things I brought back from Jane Austen's house in Chawton, Hampshire, when we visited a couple of weeks ago on a drizzly grey unpromising day - much like the one outside right now - to find welcome respite in the solid and genteel red brick house, which was the author's home for the eight years before she died.

The first was that sense of excitement tempered with frustration when attempting to infer, imbibe and inhale a life whose artefacts and props are situated all around.  Everything was tantalisingly close - there was the very table she wrote at, there were the letters penned with quill in her assured script, there was the quilt sewn with her mother and sister from scraps of fabric salvaged from their dresses.  And I waited and hoped, merely by dint of walking the same floorboards, that the spasm, the jolt, the judder of inspiration and genius would manifest itself in my own cells.

The second was a reminder about discipline.  Jane's day habitually went something like this: piano before breakfast, writing throughout the morning, a two-hour walk in the afternoon through the gently undulating countryside, then sewing and conversation - if not the occasional writing - in the evening.  Of course, any artist worth their salt understands the need for discipline and the necessity of 'showing up at the page' (as Julia Cameron of The Artist's Way would have it.)  Indeed, Jane's own prescription for dogged perserverance is clear.   'I am not at all in a humour for writing; I must write on till I am', she said in a letter to her sister, Cassandra.  But as I placed a hand around my own throat to drag myself away this morning from a discussion about the benefits of kiwis and cucumbers on Spanish internet television, (ostensibly both educational and linguistically stretching) I envied her life without saturation levels of distraction. 

The third was a lesson about passion and commitment.  No, I am not necessarily referring to Mr Darcy, or the need to marry for love - although those themes may be appropriate for Valentine's Day.  This very day, a ring once owned by the author has been returned to the Jane Austen house in Chawton.  Bought at auction last year by the American singer Kelly Clarkson, its export from this country was prevented, allowing time for sufficient funds to be raised to buy it back.  As far as we know, it was not a ring given to Jane Austen from a suitor, but the determination shown by admirers of the author to keep the piece of jewellery here - not to mention a sizeable donation by an unknown benefactor - are testament to the esteem in which she is still held.  It is appropriate that, as far as possible, her objets should be kept at the very spot where Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion were birthed, and Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey were revised.  This is the work of the Jane Austen House Museum, which receives no regular government funding, but relies on donations, public admissions, and sales from its shop.  Their passion for and abiding sense of  Jane Austen as a pioneering writer, as a keen observer of mores, as a woman breaking new ground, linked with the absolute necessity of keeping her actual bricks and mortar home open and available to the public, can only be celebrated.

Mildly Indisposed

I’ve not been around much lately.

That’s because I’m writing my second novel.  It feels like a dose of the flu.  You know when you need to take yourself off to bed and allow things to run their course, getting up only when you need to go to the loo or trudge bleary-eyed and sore-headed down to the kitchen for a crust and a cup of tomato soup?

It’s just like that.  I swear this novel is the heaviest cold ever.  I want to treat it and only it, snuggle down into it, let it sweat itself out, let the aches and pains remain behind closed doors, confining it, nursing it, ignoring all phone calls asking if I have recovered yet.   

Maybe this is exactly as it is meant to be.   Never surfacing until the indisposition has passed.  Refusing all temptation to rise from the sickbed and flee the house.  ‘I don’t go out for lunch,’ said A. S. Byatt simply, sternly last year when talking about the discipline of her writing life to students of Creative Writing at Roehampton University in west London.   I happened to be in that audience, cheering on one of my former star pupils, Haley Jenkins (watch this space →                                                                               

← Haley, that’s for you).  As Haley’s guest, I accidentally found myself ushered into the ‘Green Room’ beforehand.  Suddenly, A.S. Byatt, that giant of modern English literature, was standing at my side.  Fortunately, no one had mistaken me for her agent, her sibling, or her distant North American cousin – unlike the time I was for ten minutes the wife of the late, and much missed, poet Michael Donaghy. 

On that previous occasion, I had arrived extremely – and uncharacteristically – punctually at the school where he was due to give a reading.  As he went off to prepare for what turned out to be a scintillating and inspirational evening of poems recited from memory and flute playing, I hung around in the foyer - all too matrimonially, apparently.  I found myself being introduced to all manner of people by the Head of English.  Thinking this was extraordinarily attentive of the school’s staff to a person who had just blown in off the street, I lapped it up until the moment the head girl herself was summoned before me, and I heard the unmistakeable words: ‘and this is Mrs Donaghy’.

‘No, no,’ I said, flattered, but hugely embarrassed, ‘I’m just…’

I was just… what?

And I am just….what?

Just holed up, to be honest, the novel brewing like fever, and still tetchy, grumpy, indisposed…

A Surprising Robin Hood

Robin Hood

A little more freckled, I’m back from my sojourn at Mslexia.  And it’s time to see who or what has inhabited this space in my absence. 

I’ve flung open the curtains and windows of my blog and allowed an unseasonably cool June draught to surge through.  It all looks unfamiliar here.  After the comfortably sociable Mslexia spot – where the neighbours were chatty and a friendly jingle on the comments door would signal the arrival of a newcomer – this a lonelier place.

I’ve been up inspecting the blog’s attic and down in its basement to see what has withered or pushed up through cracks, what is salvageable and what needs to be flung.  There’s a suspicious stain close to the margin, some random words in a sorry heap and a half-eaten idea about horses and precipices. 

And nowhere certain, yet, to park the phrase the need to move tables that I’ve transported back as a souvenir of three months away.  It will function as a wheedling instruction to get on with writing a song about furniture removal.

As a curio collected on my travels, this scrap of paper with its five words may appear slight, but my feeling is that it’s probably going to be as potent as the Robin Hood you can see pictured at the top of this post.  Yes, correct, he’s not the Robin of Sherwood Forest.  Nor England.  Nor even Europe, for that matter.

But let me explain. 

One day three years ago, in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, my partner and I were on the trail that leads from Imlil to Mount Toubkal.  It had never been our intent to slog all the way to the summit, but we’d been impelled by the breath-taking scenery to walk further along the path than planned and were now taking a break in a crumpled heap under the shade of an overhanging rock, contemplating heading back down.

An English couple approached us on the path from the opposite direction.  ‘Don’t give up just yet,’ they advised.  ‘There’s a little village twenty minutes ahead where you can get a drink.’

We trudged on.  Sure enough, gradually, improbably, a tiny camouflaged settlement appeared, clinging to the rocks, complete with mosque, café, and colourful rugs and shawls for sale, all fluttering in the breeze.

A hidden village!

A twenty-something Moroccan man with excellent English immediately took us under his wing, ushering us with the smooth assurance of an event planner to the small café where he snapped fingers for the service of refreshing mint tea, then to the stalls of his cousin selling carpets and Berber carvings.  I was captivated by the figurines – and one in particular who stood with pointed head and ring-hole ears like a tough pint-sized warrior.  The bartering began, but only half-heartedly as I lacked the energy to drive a hard bargain.

Soon the figurine was in my hands.  I was pleased.  The seller was pleased.  Our young guide was pleased.

‘What’s your name?’  I asked him.

‘Robin Hood,’ he replied.

And so, the feisty little Berber carving that I brought home and then stood on a chest of drawers was named in honour of the Moroccan who was disarmingly honest and upfront about precisely what he was up to. 

Perhaps, then, the best location for my new cut-up souvenir phrase, the need to move tables, is exactly as I've  now decided to place it -  captured and preserved in the photo below, at the feet of the beguiling north-African Robin Hood who, with his wide-eyed stare and defiant stance, will forever ward off mischief-makers.

While I get on with the work at hand.  After all, there’s still a pile of unpacking and a load washing to do.

A Hatching

You can read this blog on the Mslexia website.

A Reason to Rhyme

You can read this blog on the Mslexia website.

Phone a Friend

You can read this blog on the Mslexia website.

David Bowie and the Art of Furniture Removal

You can read this blog on the Mslexia website.

A Fine Song

You can read this blog on the Mslexia website.  Hope you enjoy it!

Mslexia Blog

I've great pleasure in announcing that I've been asked to guest blog for Mslexia magazine from March until May.  During that time, I'll be looking at the ups and downs of attempting to write song lyrics.  You can find my post here.

Typing Up a Storm

Typewriter in the house of Robert Graves, Deia, Mallorca

Writing in longhand.  The impulse from your wrist to form letters.  Ink flowing like blood, like dark milk, like grape juice.  Sufficient delay to dredge your depths.  Notebooks covered with splotches and underlinings.

Versus typing on a keyboard.  Torrential clicking when ideas flow and you must keep pace.  Reams of churned paper that already have the look of something organised and official.

Both approaches are useful, depending on context and type of work. 

When I decided, back in the mists, that I wanted to be a purveyor of words, it was essential to learn to type - using all ten fingers as swiftly as possible.  Although the advent of word processors and PCs was just around the corner, my first writer’s tools were a Remington typewriter and a gallon of correcting fluid.

But I lacked speed and technique, and so enrolled for three months at a secretarial college in west London.  The classes crammed with non-native speakers, the shabby premises, and the whiff of unregulation were reflected in very reasonable fees.  Students came and went, and there was always room for more in that quirky establishment - where it appeared the tea lady ruled the roost by the quantity of tea or biscuits she awarded, and where the typing teacher was clipped and meticulously English.  “What is your Christian name?” she would habitually ask new Arab arrivals, much to their bewilderment.

One day I came to college forty-five minutes early, seeking warmth and the possibility of getting ahead with my work.   Within ten minutes, the assistant principal marched in.  An octogenarian, she wore a wig which had fitted her head thirty years before, but which had long since shed bits of itself down to the webbing.  It was now a patchy-haired beret skewed at a worrying angle.

She was stiff with anger.  “What on earth are you doing?  Classes don’t begin until 9.0 a.m.,” she shouted.  “You foreigners are all the same.  No concept of correct behaviour.” 

I stood away from my desk, stretched up to my full five-foot-four-inches, and responded through clenched teeth:  “I’ll have you know that I was born in England, so I’m not exactly a foreigner.   And how dare you suggest that they or I don’t know how to behave.  For your information, I happen to have been brought up correctly.  In any case, the college was open.  I wanted to do some more practice.  This is actually important for my career.” 

Or words to that effect.

News of the altercation soon spread.  The tea lady sidled up to me with a fresh brew in her huge aluminium teapot and an unprecedented three Rich Tea biscuits.  She asked what I was hoping to do in life.  I told her I wanted to be a journalist. 

“I think I can help you,” she said. 

“Oh?”  My ears pricked up. 

“My nephew works at the Daily Express.” 

It wasn’t the paper I had in mind, but a start is a start.   

“What does he do?”  I asked.  Even a junior reporter might be able to put in a good word, or smuggle me in as pencil-case holder on a celebrity assignment.

“He’s the car park attendant,” she said.

That afternoon, I was summoned to the principal’s office.  Preparing myself for a dressing-down, I sat…(demurely I was going to write, but it was more nail-chewingly)…in my chair.

“The assistant principal…” she began.

Gulp.

“The assistant principal is retiring in two months.  Would you like her job?”

Gentle reader, I’m pleased to tell you that etiquette held good and I managed to turn down the job without resorting to words like stick and sun and don’t and shine, before packing up my 63 wpm typing skills and heading off into the west London streets.

But thanks to that school, ever after there’s been that delicious choice:

Slow contemplative doodle?  Or energetic word tumble?

In Which Coffee is Drunk, A Mug Finds a New Home, and Muffins Beg for Attention

Cafe Central, Vienna

Does a cup of strong coffee turn you frothy?  Ebullient?  Stunningly witty?  Or, do you think it does?  Then you’re in good company.  A survey of workers done by Dunkin Donuts has apparently found that the biggest coffee drinkers are, in order: scientists, marketers, PR people, education administrators, and editors and writers.

In other words, people trading on ideas.  Not so foolish, then, to turn to the brown elixir in order to pump up your creative thoughts.  In a famed quotation, the French writer Honoré Balzac eulogised on the state of mind that coffee produced: "Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink – for the nightly labour begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.”  (From the essay The Pleasure and Pains of Coffee translated by Robert Onopa.)

In truth, this “cavalry of metaphor” surged very successfully through La Comedie Humaine, all ninety-odd tomes of it.  So what if gallons of the beverage per day sent him to an early grave, his output was of a prodigious quantity that any other free-thinker might think it worth buying a percolator for.  No wonder in Canada and Germany chains of cafés have been set up bearing his name – the author whose oeuvre plus coffee fixation represent a colossus of achievement. 

Me?  I’m usually on decaf, which could explain the dribble of product  compared to Balzac.  But coffee is an essential part of my working day –  to clutch at for warmth and security, to punctuate yawning moments of inaction, and to provide the excuse to get up and go somewhere else altogether. 

For writing has always been a lonely activity.  Peace and quiet are over-rated.  Which is why taking up your scribblings and marching to a suitable café to seek hubbub and gossip has such appeal.  The further afield the café from your own patch the better, so that right under your nose something preposterous is taking place for which you need to messily fill in the blanks.  That the establishment should also have angles and corners you can get your back into, with no passers-by sniggering over your efforts, is a prerequisite.  You’ll need to monitor the number of other writers tapping more adeptly on their laptops or eavesdropping more intently on the same conversations as you.  Which means definitely no J. K. Rowling over by the newspaper rack, already on her third latte and fourteenth manuscript, and much too palsy-walsy with the proprietor. 

Cafe Hawelka, Vienna

Nor do you want the aroma of freshly-baked cakes and pastries to be so tempting that all creativity goes into the girth of your thighs rather than the thickness of your novel.  Here you’ll need to steel yourself against the ice cream confections at the Café Lepanto in Malaga and the Schokozauber at the Café Central in Vienna, but there again in a place such as The Nest in Ripley, Surrey, a new favourite of mine, your conscience could be salved by the beetroot part of the delicious chocolate and beetroot cake.

And so, clutching shitty first drafts  (as the writer Anne Lamott calls them) and hoping to salvage anything from the wreckage, I’m ever on the hunt for the ideal café, a place  to sit smack-bang up against other lives that spill noisily and imperfectly. 

And I was thinking how wonderful it would be to share coffee with you, good reader, in such a place.  As second best and in an act of coffee solidarity, I’ve decided to put the names of the loyal followers of this blog into a hat and pull one out.  He or she is going to receive the very first, inaugural A Woman in Goggles mug. 

And so, the lucky recipient is……..here goes…….wait for it………just juggling the names now…….oops, butterfingers……. the recipient would seem to be…………Diary of an Unfinished Woman.  

Unfinished Woman, I wonder if you might also be interested in the following recipe that I’ve been road testing, worryingly frequently, in my household over the last couple of months.  It’s for healthy muffins – an excellent way to soak up the coffee contents of your new mug.

(I tend to measure in cups – a hangover from my Canadian days.  But don’t get into a flap about exact amounts.  These muffins are robust, and can cope with a shaky hand on the measuring device.  I’ve measured out the amounts in cups, weighed them – and yes, the oatmeal is light so 1 cup did weigh the same as ½ cup of maize flour.)

Oh So Fab Guilt-Free Oatmeal Muffins

¾ cup Greek yoghurt (6 fl oz/ 200 ml/ 340 grams)

1 cup oatmeal   (4 oz/ 100 grams)

½ cup maize flour* (4 oz/ 100 grams)

½ cup polenta or cornmeal* (4 oz/ 100 grams)

1 ½ teaspoons baking soda

1 ½ teaspoons baking powder

1/3 cup olive oil (3 fl oz/ 90 ml)

2 large eggs

2 medium-sized mashed bananas

½ cup raisins or sultanas (4 oz/ 100 grams)

1. Set oven to 350◦F or 180 ◦C.  (This will be 160 ◦C if you have a fan oven.)
2. Line a muffin tin with 12 muffin cases.
3. Mix the oatmeal into the yoghurt and allow to sit while you prepare the other ingredients.
4. In a separate small bowl beat the eggs into the oil then add the mashed banana.
5. Combine the maize flour, polenta, baking soda and baking powder in a third bowl.
6. Add the egg/ oil/ banana mixture to the oatmeal mixture.
7. Then add the dry ingredients also to the oatmeal mixture and mix only just enough so that the batter is moist.
8. Stir in the raisins.
9. Spoon into the muffin cases.  They will be quite full.
10. Bake for 20 minutes.

Best eaten warm, with a modicum of butter.  (Or lashings of butter.)  If you have left them to go cold, they are delicious if heated up individually in a microwave for 20 seconds.

Enjoy!

*Instead of maize flour and polenta, I’ve also used a combination of rice flour and wholemeal flour with excellent results.