Paris!

Last time I was in Paris I was alone, so I spent my spare time mooching around the bookshops of the Latin Quarter. This time, with my wife and teenage daughter, it was a bit different. I found myself mooching instead around the textile and dressmaking shops of the Place St. Pierre in Montmartre, and having lunch in the cafe featured in "Amelie". This last attraction is a typically and admirably
French phenomenon; tourists flock from far and wide, as we did, because of the movie connection, but cafe is run with complete indifference to it all. Sure, there are pictures of the movie and Amelie table covers, but it's still a rough-and-ready bistro serving very good, cheap meals, and catering for the locals.

During our visit to Paris we were also lucky enough to be able to take in the Stein exhibition at the swanky Grand Palais museum. They've gathered together the paintings originally collected by Gertrude Stein, her brother Leo and sister sister-in-law Sara, so you get to see some of the greatest paintings of the first half of the twentieth century. But if you're interested in Gertrude Stein the writer, as I am, then it's a bonus, as there are home movie clips of Gertrude at her sister's Le Corbusier home, and of her reading from "Tender Buttons". I hadn't realised how many artist's had painted her portrait; in addition to the famous Picasso portrait. I also hadn't quite realised how, in her "Autobiography of Alice B Toklas" Stein had bigged up her own role in the formation of the famous salons at the Rue de Fleurus, to the chagrin of her brother Leo, and others. Such is the benefit of being a writer; there's always the possibility of creating your own myth, which then becomes almost impossible for anyone to undo.

Carrie Etter: The Son

pub. Oystercatcher Press

There are times when a poet who is skilled in modernist techniques and the use of abstraction in poetry feels the need, due to the circumstances of his or her life, to tackle a personal subject, or at least one that deals with emotion and with the basic humanity that is common to us all. When this happens the results can be powerful. Carrie Etter's pamphlet "The Son" represents such a moment. The poems centre around a child who appears to have been given up for adoption; a sensitive subject, and one that could, in the wrong hands, result in sentimentality. But there's no fear of that with an accomplished practitioner like Etter. The collection consists of a series of prose poems, entitled "Imagined Sons", numbered 1-12. Interspersed with the prose poems are four poems called "A Birthmother's Catechism" with a question and response format:

How did you let him go?

With black ink and legalese.

How did you let him go?

It'd be another year before I could vote.

These short responses are in a laconic American tradition; their deadpan understatement conveying much more than any overblown cry of emotion could:

How did you let him go?

Who hangs a birdhouse from a sapling?

What a great line that is: expressing self-doubt and fragility in practical, workmanlike terms. The "Imagined Sons" poems are short dream-like stories, which hit exactly the right note, as suppressed emotion resurfaces in our dreams. There's a surrealist element to these stories, with a motif of a young man, familiar, but out-of-reach, the repetition of which builds up a powerful sense of longing.

The first and last poems - both in the catechism form - link the personal loss to the public loss of the 9/11 attacks. It's a risk, but it works, due in part to the understated nature of the poems; in fact, it succeeds in universalising an experience that might otherwise be intensely personal.

The Shindig in Leicester this week has been reported on by other bloggers, and everyone's commented on the strength of the open-mic slot. I must have listened to around thirty poets read that evening, and every one was worth listening to. It's interesting that, according to Kathleen Bell, one of the De Montfort Creative Writing team who have done so much to engender these type of events in Leicester, that the open-mic standard has improved as time has gone on, as less experienced poets have learned from the more experienced ones. To me, the whole phenomenon says a great deal about the contemporary poetry scene. Poetry is a participation sport; most readers are also writers of poetry, and the whole scene is democratic and unhierarchical. But this is not to say that standards have to be driven down to the lowest common denominator; there's no reason why that should happen, and the evidence of the Leicester readings is quite the opposite, with people generally trying to raise their game to keep up with others. Despite attempts by initiatives like The Forward Prize and now the Salt Best British Poetry (more on that one later), to establish canons and hierarchies, it seems that, at the cutting edge, the poetry scene is open, participatory and supportive. Long may it stay that way!

Simon Perril's Nitrate: the video

Simon Perril's 'Nitrate' (Salt Publishing) is a "meditation upon the birth of the moving picture". Here's the video to go with it:

New Work on Litter

Poetry

Martin Stannard
A Poem in tribute to the late Paul Violi

Geraldine Monk
A Poem from her new book 'Lobe Scarps & Finials'

Mark Goodwin
Two tributes to Geraldine Monk

Reviews

of books by Julie Lumsden, Eileen Tabios and Aidan Semmens

Click here to read

Review - 'A Stone Dog' by Aidan Semmens

published by Shearsman books, 90pp, £8.95 / $15, ISBN 9781848611658

If I were a tutor on creative writing course (an unlikely scenario) I'd advise young poets to stop writng for twenty years or so, then, after having some experience of life and wide reading, to take up the craft again. It seems to have beneficial effects. George Oppen famously gave up poetry for political activism for twenty-six years, and a number of poets I'm in touch with have taken life-sized sabbaticals: Ed Baker, for one, and the excellent Alisdair Paterson for another. And now we have Aidan Semmens, who has been working as a journalist and leading a normal life for a few decades, but who has now returned to writing and publishing poetry. Semmens was at Cambridge in the 70s - he won the 1978 Chancellor's Medal for an English Poem at Cambridge - and for a while edited Perfect Bound, the magazine associated with the Cambridge school and the British Poetry Revival. He then lived in the north-east, where he was involved with with the Morden Tower readings and was a friend of Barry MacSweeney and Richard Cadell.

To read the rest of the review, click here.

Review: Lumsden and Tabios

True Crime by Julie Lumsden (Shoestring Press), £5.00, ISBN: 978 1 907356 38 4

Silk Egg by Eileen Tabios (Shearsman Books), £9.95 / $17 ISBN 9781848611436

These two books are, on the surface, dissimilar; Tabios writing out of a post-modern, post-colonial milieu, Lumsden writing in what seems a more conservative mode. But the apparent differences are deceptive. Both books are ironic, economic with language, and concerned to present a subversive account of an accepted discourse.

Julie Lumsden is a writer I've admired for a long time, and was in fact, one of the first writers to be published by Leafe. This short pamphlet is exemplary in its concision and economy, delivering a series of monologues and brief, acerbic observations. Much mainstream poetry, combines monologue and lyric, but achieves neither mode successfully. Lumsden's monologues are dramatic in the way that Browning's were; Lumsden is a playwright for stage and theatre, and it shows. The opening sequence of ten poems tells the story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. and it does so from the viewpoint of the characters involved - The Best Friend, the Witness, the Hangman etc. The Hangman, speaking of the woman he's hanged before Ruth Ellis:

No one wept through the night for
Mrs Christofi, or broke through a police cordon...

...Let's put it this way, she
wasn't the sort of woman

men apologise to with roses.
She was older, not much of a looker.

Typically, this implies so much more than it says. The rest of the pamphlet has a similar cutting edge:

I'll stop when I'm ready, stop
driving to poetry events in suburban libraries
wondering if Frank is dead,
and if there's a poem in it.

What this pamphlet does is create a convincing world, peopled by believable characters, then draws the reader into it. A skillful thing to do.

Eileen Tabios is a renowned Filipino-American poet, publisher, editor and intellectual, and this is her first, long-overdue, UK publication, from the ever-reliable Shearsman Books. If all novels were like the ones in this book, I'd read a lot more of them.There are seven 'novels' here, each chapter of which consists of a short prose-poem, often just a couple of sentences, and each novel is a distiliation of the essential elements which could make up a real novel. I was won over on encountering these lines:

He moved into her gift, woke each morning to soft warm
lucidity, and agreed as regards the irrelevance of ribbons.

The understated sensuouness of that last line is superb. Each novel is an unfinished narrative, a set of fragments, for which the reader can supply completion, or, alternatively, they could just enjoy the phrasing, imagery and the sense of mystery each piece invokes. At one level, this book is a satire on contemporary novels, with each of the ten novels being a precis of a certain type. Thus, "Opium-Centred Lace", is - parody is too strong, and not the right word - is the ghost or shadow of a novel that might be a travelogue with some sort of love interest. But the language has a light touch and is too lyrical to be a straightforward satire:

The cafe was owned by the grandaughter of Romanian
gypsies...

Living a good life, someone once whispered in a
childhood schoolyard, is one conclusion to a grave secret.

In "Silk Egg" there is the most-modern notion of appropriating the contemporary realist novel, and the element of parody; but what ultimately appeals about this book is the delicate lyricism.

Men at Risk from Modern Poetry

Researchers have found that men who read difficult modern poetry - from Wallace Stevens to JH Prynne - struggle with relationships. It seems that such men become disillusioned with everyday conversations. Findings suggest that the poetry gives men unrealistic expectations about the complexity of daily language. According to one expert: "Men in particular, can find that the language their wives and families use is lacking in the exciting conundrums, non-sequiturs and thrilling blind-alleys of poetic diction. This can lead to them drifting out of relationships to join groups of like-minded individuals who can comprehend such verbal intricacies". Doctors recommend a gradual transfer of reading to simpler poetry - such as that published by Faber and Faber - with the ultimate aim of being able to survive on a diet of light romantic novels. "We believe such a course will help men to return to normal linguistic usage."

(source: McUniversity, Donaldstown, USA)

Carlo Gébler complains (see my post below) of the "the atrophy of community (writers have never been more marginal and their enterprise more quixotic and ridiculous)". He can't be talking about the poetry world, in which post-modern conditions have rendered traditional hierarchies meaningless, and in which writing and publishing is a shared, communal activity. As for his parenthetical aside; I think the aim of every writer should be to become quixotic and ridiculous.

Ian Seed reviews 'Variations on Painting a Room' on Stride.