hydrohotel.net - a Richard Price webspace

Letter to Sao Paulo, Spring 2007

Dear Virna

The month of March and Spring is in the air! I don’t think! Hail storms and a biting wind! It’s not properly cold, of course – we’ve had our “winter” - for one day in February. That was when there was just enough snow for my younger daughter to beat me convincingly at a snowball fight. But it was a 24-hour season and since then it’s been back to the same old peculiar mild weather (just as well, or I’d be the frozen core of a pelted snowman by now). It somehow feels wrong to call it Spring – after all, we’ve been having Spring for six months.

That doesn’t stop some things happening with their proper annual frequency, though: in poetry, the first three months of the year is the season of prizes. So perhaps this odd season between Winter and Spring should have a name to itself: “Gong”?

There used to be a dog and cat programme on TV here called “Pets Win Prizes” and, for me, that phrase rings out at this time of year. As a student I won one or two poetry prizes myself and I can’t help recalling the competitive high of triumph mixed with the queasy discomfort of being marked out, so I thought, as a “teacher’s pet”. With winning a prize there’s the vital public acknowledgement that you are, after all, a “poet”, but that is really a praise word, a categorical word, even a rather old-fashioned word, which a natural inclination towards hesitancy and explorative aesthetics can’t quite trust. And if you don’t win, and most of us don’t most of the time, then the response is probably somewhere on the emotional spectrum that starts in attempted obliviousness and ends in angry denunciation. I try to find a station where the radio dial is marked “Philosophical” though when I turn the radio on I find it has often been tuned to “Shrug”.

But the season of Gong is probably the closest that contemporary British poetry gets to a media celebration of poetry as such: it is one of the few times poetry publishers are invited to share column inches and TV minutes with their richer cousins in the leisure and arts industries. And the poetry world had to write their own invitations in the first place. In fact, that was what these prizes were set up for: specifically to place poetry into national and popular discussion, to champion poetry and sell more poetry by raising enthusiasm for it. Despite, I would have thought, what is its immense formal attractiveness to newspaper and broadcast media, poetry is little used and little discussed there on a day-to-day basis, so poetry publishers have provided something which connects quickly to the media’s more immediate demands – prizes help to create stories about contest controversies, the productions of best-of lists, timelines, poetry ‘family trees’ and ‘hierarchies’; the sort of summarising apparatus that also contains supposed reader interest.

As for poems themselves in newspapers and on the tv? I guess advertisements are essentially the poems that are chosen instead; short, clever, funny, and/or sensuous adverts fill the optimum territory for many poems. Advertisers pay, of course, but I think that their presentation and texts often win on aesthetic grounds, too: they can be as good as or better than much contemporary poetry. Poetry is a big grouping – but perhaps while some poetry needs to get very good at being completely different from anything the media can offer, other poetry needs to take on the excellence of advertising and compete in wit and depth of attraction. The web offers both test-bed and full-scale publication for this: a theme to which I hope to return in another letter. The secondary dimension needs to be taken on as well: to my knowledge, only The Guardian newspaper consistently reviews poetry – usually one or two books once a week in the Saturday review (this is a print newspaper, but the reviews are duplicated on the Guardian online site). It is extremely rare for a poetry book to be reviewed on television in the UK even though one of the most famous on-TV reviewers is a poet himself, Tom Paulin: perhaps only one or two books in a whole year are reviewed on the BBC’s weekly Newsnight Review.

So who did get the poetry gongs? Well, the veteran Irish poet Seamus Heaney won the T. S. Eliot Prize with his new collection District and Circle, the title poem a reflection on his father, on the London underground (the title refers to the names of two of the underground lines), and on mortality: “And so by night and day to be transported / through galleried earth”. I like his work, but probably with a puzzled affection that limits my own response. I am not sure the constant re-use of Greek and Roman myth in modern Northern Irish poetry has the gravitas it seems to be trying to purchase, for instance, nor that the small formal range in writers such as Heaney, Longley, and Mahon, can sustain re-reading as a deepening of understanding, rather than re-reading as a comforting and sensual pleasure (all of which, I nevertheless, like too). In the same breath, I should say command of renewed traditional forms, iambic pentameter and terza rima, is no small feat and I admire that. But I recognise my own thirst as a reader for a formal and subject novelty that their work has no intention of quenching (heaven knows what accusations this opens my own work to as a poet!); on the contrary, their work has the integrity of meditated slowness and the straightforwardly but usually generously didactic, both of which should be a warning to me that this reader and these poets are at cross-purposes. But in Heaney there are still the simple pleasures of crafted objects beautifully described, accounts of folksy compromises when folksy compromises are not to be sneered at – they can be life and death – and even, in the much earlier Station Island, there is more complex conceptual work.

And the other major prize? The little-known John Haynes won the Costa Poetry Prize with his Letter to Patience, a kind of novel in Dante’s terza rima, concerned with Nigerian politics, longing, and friendship. It’s published by the relatively small press Seren, based in Wales, and caused as near a sensation as can be caused in the media-interfaced poetry world. The critic Jeremy Noel-Tod, who was also one of the judges, puts it better than me and relates it to another Northern Irish poet, the technically gifted Paul Muldoon: “The material is openly personal, yet the iambic terza rima is unobtrusively handled, with only occasional speech-abbreviations ("then's") and enjambment ("back- / bone") for the sake of rhyme. It is admittedly not a radical refreshment of rhyming form, such as that effected by Paul Muldoon in the cross-cutting longer poems that Letter to Patience sometimes recalls. Yet as a poet of autobiographical realism on a grand scale, Haynes is the equal of Muldoon, Heaney or Hill, while his philosophical self-effacement is all his own. Full of wit, learning and humanity, this is wide writing that ought to be widely known.”

“Wit, learning and humanity” – those descriptors would be quite appropriate for the work of another poet, Penelope Shuttle, who I read with a few weeks ago at a relatively new annual festival organised by one of the London universities, Royal Holloway: the Runnymede Festival. Runnymede, geographically speaking, is a broad bend in the River Thames about twenty miles west of central London. When we lived nearby I used to take my children up along the bankside path to the playpark there. It’s a lovely place to watch the local rowing club take their long skinny boats out on to the water and families have picnics in the parkland up there, too – Turkish families, I think, especially like it. Runnymede has a special resonance in English history (though not Scottish history – they were two separate countries at the time), because it’s there that the medieval monarch King John negotiated with ‘the barons’, the rich landowning nobles who seemed to have felt John was becoming more than a little power-crazy. Together, in 1215, they negotiated the Magna Carta, a charter regarded as one of the foundations of the English ‘democratic’ system because it limits the powers of the monarch. It used to be thought that the nobles compelled John but it is now suggested that it may have been a way that John managed unruly elements across the kingdom. Machiavelli – what a latecomer!

Sometimes I think Penelope Shuttle’s poems go back much earlier than the signing of Magna Carta at Runnymede (which, by coincidence, is just a couple of miles from where Shuttle grew up). The spell, inventory, and semi-catechism components in her work are a kind of modern paganism, a magic that manages to invoke imaginative energies while knowing that they are poetically made: which perhaps sees myth, ritual and the fantastic as ways into the expression of the most deeply felt emotions. Shuttle is the widow of the poet Peter Redgrove and in the last year of his life she didn’t write at all; this silence continued for another year following Redgrove’s death. But her most recent book, laconically entitled Redgrove’s Wife (Bloodaxe 2006) has seen a return to poetry with elegies that have the tender humour and enchantment of her best work. This is from "Wife, widow":

Like any married woman
I dream of great houses
disabled by fire,

of maps that grow of themselves,
like old experiments
in organic chemistry

Like any widow
I have a garden
where twelve Apostles and a Christ

dine on mist and rain

I’ve heard Shuttle read before, and this time I was struck again by how an almost baroque world of detail is delivered in a direct, common-sensical tone that helps the ‘household gods’ theme. As for myself, I read some poems that I wrote which are named after the adjoining area to Runnymede, Spelthorne. The name is Anglo-Saxon and means Speech Thorntree. It’s thought to refer to a tree where locals would meet to talk things over and decide how to organise activities they needed to do together; I like the “spell” syllable, too, and the constructive anarcho-syndacilist focus that contrasts between Runnymede’s aristocratic ‘national’ concerns, and so I’ll finish with a sample, entitled "Sparrows":

You don't see many hedges these days, and the hedges you do see they're not that thorny, it's a shame, and when I say a hedge I'm not talking about a row of twigs between two lines of rusty barbed wire, or more likely just a big prairie where there were whole cities of hedges not fifty years ago, a big desert more like, and I mean thick hedges, with trees nearby for a bit of shade and a field not a road not too far off so you can nip out for an insect or two when you or the youngsters feel like a snack, a whole hedgerow system, as it says in the book, and seven out of ten sparrows say the same, and that's an underestimate, we want a place you can feel safe in again, we're social animals, we want our social life back, and the sooner the better, because in a good hedge you can always talk things over, make decisions, have a laugh if you want to, sing, even with a voice like mine!

(from “A Spelthorne Bird List”, Lucky Day, Carcanet, 2005)

Till the next time -

Richard

Richard Price’s Lucky Day (Carcanet, 2005) was shortlisted for several prizes. He is Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library and is the co-author, with David Miller, of British Poetry Magazines 1914-2000: a history and bibliography of ‘little magazines’ (2006). He writes here in a personal capacity.










   
 
news & events
vennel press
         
         

 

Homepage
News & Events | Poetry | Fiction
Recordings | Literary Criticism| Art Projects | Translations
Renfrewshwhere
Magazines | Vennel Press
Chronology | Born Digital | Links