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Poetry Reading — 21st February 2015

Next Saturday I’ll be reading some poetry from the First World War (therefore not my own!) at the Buckinghamshire County Museum in Aylesbury along with some of my fellow members of Metroland Poets.

I’m due to be reading at 1,30pm and 2.30pm (there’s another, later, reading at 3.30pm).

The poems I’m due to read are:

  • Recruiting by E A Mackintosh;
  • An Irish Airman Foresees His Death by W. B. Yeats;
  • and The General and Base Details, both by Siegfried Sassoon.

It’s all free and it marks with the end of an exhibition about the First World War, which tells the story of the war viewed from a local perspective and by local figures, including the war artist, John Nash (whose First World War painting, The Cornfield, I have on my wall and a figure whom Kim reveres in my novel).

Please come along and listen to us if you’re in the area. More details about Metroland Poets can be found on the Poetry Society website at: http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/membership/stanzas/bucks/#Amersham

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Poetry Parnassus

Poetry Takeaway
MIne's a Doner With Extra Alliteration And Hot Metaphors Please

Here’s a very quick and timely post — showing that I’m still updating the blog despite only having posted once in June. (I’m furiously — and that’s probably a very apt word — trying to edit the novel into a state where I can send it to agents. But it’s a slow process and difficult to fit in with The Day Job and, more happily, the many diversions I end up spending time on through being in London during the week. (Of which perhaps more in other posts.)

Here’s something I visited one lunchtime this week — Poetry Parnassus. It’s part of the cultural Olympiad and is billed as the ‘UK’s largest gathering of world poets’ — in fact it’s said to be the biggest poetry festival ever in this country. It’s all organised by the South Bank Centre — and there’s plenty of information on their website.

There talks and readings by many famous poets, which is all of great interest to someone like myself, who’s dabbled in poetry writing enough to have had some published and be a member of a poetry group (Metroland Poets).

I particularly liked the quirky events held outside the Royal Festival Hall which try to inject a bit of humour into the precious and worthy image that often is unfairly associated with poetry.

Above is a photo of the Poetry Takeaway — a trailer designed to equate poetry with the sort of greasy kebabs that are sold to hungry, drunk customers from vans late at night in badly-lit car parks. The ‘customer’ queues to place an ‘order’ with one of the three poets ‘serving’ in the van (who can just about be made out in the photo). The poet (and they are relatively well-known poets) takes a bit of information about the person and what subject they’d ordered and the customer turns up an hour or so later to be served with a reading of their personalised poem. All great fun and completely free.

Sadly I had to get back to the office before I could order my takeaway.

There’s also a Poems on the Underground themed tent (see photo below) cleverly designed like a tube train (not quite convincing enough to believe it’s the real thing — unlike those at Village Underground, which are genuine). I didn’t go in the tent but apparently it holds workshops and events.

I went for a run past the Royal Festival Hall a day later and the Poetry Ambulance had arrived on the scene — no photos of this unfortunately — but it’s 60s vintage ambulance of the type you see on TV programmes like Heartbeat. It’s manned by poetic paramedics who will perform life-saving emergency treatment to sick poems — so any blocked bards should get along to the South Bank.

Poetry Parnassus finishes tomorrow on the 1st July — I’d recommend anyone with an interest to go along and join in. If the rest of the cultural Olympiad events are as innovative and humorous as the Poetry Takeaway then we should be in for a good summer (culturally at least, if not meteorologically).

Poems on the Underground
New Temporary Tube Train Drafted in for the Olympics? Or Poems on the Underground?
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Yellow

I’ve been writing a part of the novel where Kim is painting and she uses the concept of colour association to both tell James what she’s thinking and also to send him a coded message and ultimatum, should he be perceptive enough to pick it up.

It’s something of a Rothko-inspired meditation on colour and I’ve tried to come up with a rough approximation of what it might be like. Click on the picture to find how the character’s thoughts might be represented in another way. I won’t say what she titles the painting.

Kim's Rothko Yellow
Kim's Rothko Yellow
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Churning Through the Mud

Autumn seems to have crept upon us — it’s grey, drizzly and windy outside — and I’m facing the realisation  that I’ve not written half as much as I hoped over the summer. I made some amends last week by bashing out about 15,000 words. I deliberately just sat down and wrote and didn’t go back and revise anything methodically — and I know some of it is very bad.

I’ve developed a pattern of writing a first draft, printing it out and making corrections on the paper (they seem easier to spot), then printing it again and reading the whole piece out loud (not just the dialogue). After that process I’m usually reasonably happy with it but if I give it someone else to read I then tend to identify a whole slew of other mistakes. I guess this is the basis of the ‘put it in a drawer for a couple of weeks (or months) before looking at it again’ school of advice. This is all very time consuming — but necessary.

I found some sections quite easy and enjoyable to write and I’m still struggling on others. In fact, I may try writing some poetry to describe some of the natural features of the Chiltern landscape I’ve been trying to portray and then cannibalise it.

One good thing about grinding out the words is that I can suddenly take off in unexpected directions and I’ve come up with more ideas for plot and character later in the novel than if I’d just considered them in my head. But that also has the disadvantage of bringing in diversions and new directions in the material I’d originally intended to write.

So while it’s gratifying to have 15,000 more words (probably a sixth of a novel) more than I had ten days ago, I’m also a little exasperated that it’s going to need maybe twice or three times as much time again to revise and that, as with my opening chapters, not a lot seems to have happened in a large number of words. However, my intention was in this section to deliberately slow the pace almost to the point where the reader becomes impatient for fireworks to start exploding and I’ve tried to weave a lot of plot background and backstory into these sections.

Overall I think what I’ve written is good and that I definitely believe in it — and I often surprise myself at how much the novel reflects me personally — which shows that at a deep psychological level I’m probably impelled on an irreversible course to write this. However, I’m probably both a bit of a ‘needy’ writer and one who tends to write for an audience rather than just please myself so that’s why it’s a good thing that in less than four weeks I’ll be workshopping some of this material with the majority of the City novel-writing group. We’re meeting monthly on an extra-curricular basis.

Penny Rudge, when she visited the course, said that virtually every chapter of ‘Foolish Lessons in Life and Love’ had been through a post-course workshopping process with her peers. I tend to want to make use of peer feedback to a similar extent – while I could plough on independently  it will be fascinating to meet up with everyone to see how people are getting on.

As mentioned in a previous post we have at least one person whose work on the course has led to being signed by an agent and I know that a few people sent work out to agents after the reading, although I know of only the person who’s actually finished the novel — and he’s now redrafting. In my case it would probably instill some discipline by having an agent’s validation, encouragement and deadline setting. Yet agents can only make active progress when they have a full novel manuscript to work with and I don’t have anything yet in a shape I’d be happy to send out. The way I write means it’s not going to be a quick process for me to get the material into the shape that most advice tends to emphasise before one’s work goes near an agent or publisher – for it to be ‘the best it can possibly be’.  My tendency, mentioned above, to branch off tangentially in a random or arbitrary direction as I’ve been writing is sometimes good and serendipitous but means everything will need to be looked at again i.e. once I get to the end of the novel then I’ll want to make some significant changes to the start.

As an example, I had some very useful feedback from Guy and Charlotte on the course to chapters six and seven and, even though I’d spent a lot of time writing the chapters, Guy pointed out lots of ‘noise words’ like ‘just’, ‘perhaps’, ‘maybe’, ‘a little’ and so on that seem to become invisible on the page if you’ve stared at it too long in one session.

I also posted a reference to a recently written part of the novel a fellow student’s wall on Facebook and the brief exchange of comments that followed opened up a new aspect to Kim and James’ long, drawn-out first day that I’d failed to explore. That accounted for the rather meagre 300 words I managed on holiday.

There will also be a need to maintain consistency, particularly in dialogue. As mentioned in previous postings, Kim will be fluent in English but will perhaps have some transatlantic turns of phrase plus perhaps a tendency to construct sentences grammatically as they would be in German.  I think I’ve largely achieved this as I’ve gone along and she speaks little phrases in her first language from time to time. I’ve been dropping these in with increasing frequency making use of my limited German.  Kim’s English is described by another character (I’m told that this is grammatically correct, which surprised me): ‘Dein Englisch ist sehr flüssig, aber Sie sprechen mit einem leichten deutschen Akzent – sehr Hochdeutsche.’

Any suggestions?

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‘Sweat Me Garlicky’

We had to take along a published poem (by someone else) to Metroland Poets last night on the theme of ‘Poems to Read Aloud’. There was a very varied and entertaining selection ranging from ballads by Walter Scott to Edwin Morgan’s famous ‘Loch Ness Monster’s Song’.

I made a choice in about five minutes flat but was quite pleased with the poem that came to mind. It’s ‘Cooking with Blood’ by Linda France, which is featured, along with an interview with the poet, in the Open University’s ‘Creative Writing’ course (A215). Click on this link for the poem and an opportunity to hear her read it out.

Again there’s a link with The Angel as it’s all about cooking (in the section I’m workshopping on Monday James tells Kim about his passion for food). It’s also dedicated to Delia Smith in a way. Delia is someone I’ve loved even more since her famously tired and emotional appearance on the pitch at half time at a Norwich City game.

I get the feeling she’s far less prim and proper than supposed ‘edgier’ cooks like Nigella and Jamie Oliver (who I think, to use Kim’s vocabulary, is a bit of a tw*t).

‘Cooking with Blood’ was inspired when Linda France was looking through the index of a cookery book, probably Delia’s, and found all kinds of exotic names for dishes and techniques. What people found quite remarkable when I read the poem was the amazing use of these names as verbs in the poem. ‘Wouldn’t we sausage lots of little quichelets’, ‘She played en papilotte/for just long enough to sweat me garlicky’, ‘I’ve stroganoffed with too many of them’, ‘[I] triped
myself into a carcass’.

Making imaginative use of verbs (and, in fact creating new verbs like this) is something that I don’t really do enough of in my own writing — probably because I do it too quickly. I’ve got the opportunity to experiment a little in this way in my next chapter when I get James and Kim completely plastered. I’d like to try and hint at their altered states of consciousness by attempting to play with language in the same sort of way.

The poem also appeals to me as it’s very sensual. There’s clearly a link between food and sex in the poem (even as far as talking about procreation) but it’s amusing and thought-provoking: ‘After I’d peppered her liver, stuffed her goose/
and dogfished her tender loins, she was paté/in my hands’ and ‘We danced the ossobuco;/her belly kedgeree, her breasts prosciutto.’ I think this poem must have tapped into my subconscious quite deeply as I tend to return to similar elements in my writing: people say it’s quite physical. I tend to write a lot about what people do with their hands and their body appearance.On Monday in the workshop I’m sure it will be noted that James is something of a compulsive breast watcher (well, he’s done it twice once with each of the women). I’ve played this up deliberately for mild amusement but I’m starting on the journey to finding my writing ‘voice’ and I think I’m always going to have a theme of the physical and sensuous. I’ve done the same in ‘Burying Bad News’ with Frances imagining herself and other people with physical attributes of grape varities. It’s interesting as I’m not a touchy-feely type person in normal life at all — I just seem to write about it.

One of the women poets was surprised that ‘Cooking with Blood’ was written by a woman as she thought its tone was quite male. Perhaps that’s down to the physicality of its approach as opposed to the more metaphysical, spiritual tone she might have expected in a poem with a similar message written from a more conventionally ‘female’ point of view. I’m not so sure there really is such a gender bias in reality between male and female writers. At least three of the male novelists on the course are writing from female points of view and Eileen writes in a very convincingly masculine voice in her novel extracts. However, there’s no doubt that many readers form expectations about reading a novel just by reading the gender of the author. That, famously, is why J.K.Rowling is known by her initials — the publishers didn’t think their initial market of teen boys would want to read a book written by someone called Joanne.