Biography | Poetry | Bio-Gravy

In a way that reflects our current political culture, people don’t buy poetry anymore, they buy poets. I think this is best exemplified in the recent generational anthology, Identity Parade. People love bitching about this book for various reasons but I think it is fair to say that it does a very competent and necessary job of giving poetry outsiders, outer-insiders and newcomers an accessible introduction to contemporary British poetry.

What instantly sets it apart from its predecessor, The New Poetry, is the way that the good people at Bloodaxe have put biographies to the fore; every poet’s contribution is preceded by a photograph and some biographical (and in some cases critical) notes.  Compare this to its  1993 predecessor, which had all biographical notes squeezed into nine pages at the end as an appendix rather than a visual show-stealer.

I personally do not enjoy the latest format, as it makes the reading experience seem fragmented and encourages the reader to thumb through to the poet with the most interesting face and bio-notes.  It all seems indicative of a reading public who places too much importance on a poet’s spiel rather than letting the words speak for themselves, but then in an anthology composed largely of poets with only one collection to their name, sometimes spiel can be the difference between healthy sales and obscurity.

I am also well aware that lots of people much prefer this style of presenting the poems, and my lack of interest in the poets’ biographies and photographs is simply a matter of taste.

I do find the modern poets’ biographies fascinating though. Let’s have a quick peek at Siân Hughes’ bio from her excellent debut collection, The Missing (read it if you haven’t already, it is one of the finest collections of 2009):

“Siân Hughes is a lone parent who lives in the middle of nowhere with her two young children and works part time as a teacher and in a book shop/ café. In 2006 she won the Arvon International Poetry Competition with The Send Off, an elegy for her third child.”

So, conventionally enough, we have a mention of an award. This is undeniably important when convincing the customer that a debut collection is worth reading. We also have a mention of the tragic loss that has influenced some of Hughes’ poetry. Again, this is essential in establishing some indication as to a poet’s subject matter.

What really sticks out to me though, is that phrase ‘lone parent’. It makes me wonder if this was a phrase suggested by Hughes herself, or the marketing team at Salt. When we read that a woman is a ‘lone parent’, there is automatically that semantic tentacle that flails towards the more conventional phrase ‘single mother’.

So why ‘lone parent’ and not ‘single mother’? Is it because of class associations? Or because ‘single’ has associations of looking for a partner? Or because ‘parent’ is not anchored to gender and therefore implies somebody playing both roles? Or is it because ‘lone parent’ has that sense of someone standing tall against adversity, working two jobs to make end’s meet whilst somehow managing to write some award winning poetry, where as ‘single mother’ has been semantically glued by the Daily Mail to a bunch of benefit leaches?

Either way, this is a prime example of the biography as a fleeting opportunity for a poet to win you over with their ‘story’, especially early on in their career. There is also a small trend within debut collection bio's to offer seemingly innocuous pieces of information in the final sentence:

“She currently lives in Norwich.”

from Metrophobia by Stephanie Leal

“She has travelled and worked in Central America, particularly Mexico.”

from The Secret by Zoe Brigley

“At the chess board, as in life, he defends – even when not besieged.”

from Dream of the Condom by Nicholas Swingler

Actually, I quite like that last one. The point is though, that biographies on debut collections are such a strange art. You have to make it either deliberately sparse, consciously quirky, unashamedly braggy or somehow imbued with an attractive enough sense of mystery for the reader to bite and want to find out more.

In an age where most collections are festooned with a press-shot, we must accept that whatever blurb to our lives we offer in biographies will be read in tandem with what our face looks like… like a social networking site on a bookshelf. In this sense, I feel that biographies now must all be written with the photograph in mind, like some capitalist strand of ekphrasis, drafted and redrafted until we have a perfect combination of words and image to give us the appearance of being someone that you want to read.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Phil Brown was born in Redhill in 1987. From ages 7-11 he performed to captivated audiences at the school ‘Book Character Event’ where he performed as, in order, Just William, Hogarth (from The Iron Man), The Riddler and Nick from Brandon Robshaw’s ‘The Amazing Adventures of Raincoat Man’. He quit this tradition whilst at the top of his game, and has since become an English teacher.

Fresh Starts | Poetry | Robert Lowell, Confessional Chameleon

Forgive me father, it has been many years since my last poem. 

How much of ourselves are we supposed to put in our writing? It is an equation which the greatest writers have always strived to balance. It is a notion which Robert Lowell spent a great deal of his career tinkering with, and is best exemplified in his acceptance speech of the 1960 Poetry Book Award:

“Two poetries are now competing, a cooked and a raw. The cooked, marvellously expert, often seems laboriously concocted to be tasted and digested by a graduate seminar. The raw, huge blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience are dished up for midnight listeners. There is a poetry that can only be studied, and a poetry that can only be declaimed, a poetry of pedantry, and a poetry of scandal.”

This distinction heightened and hounded Lowell’s career from the moment he uttered these words. The dichotomy between formalism and confessionals pulled his work between the desolate piquancy of Life Studies which gained him his early popularity and the ornate architecture of Land of Unlikeness from which his writing career began.

In the thirty-three years between Lowell’s first and last collections, he never stopped tinkering and refining, one might say reinventing, his approach to writing poetry. But then, is reinventing a misnomer, as it suggests that Lowell was fully complicit in his ever-changing style? In his superb synoptic essay, After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays on Me, he suggests that this is not the case:

“When I was working on Life Studies, I found that I had no language or meter that would allow me to approximate what I saw or remembered. Yet in prose I had already found what I wanted, the conventional style of autobiography of reminiscence. So I wrote my autobiographical poetry in a style I thought I had discovered in Flaubert, one that used images and ironic particulars.”

He then goes on to suggest that his later shifts in style were a direct result of the poems’ requirements, rather than any conscious effort to change his own style:

“Later on in For the Union Dead, free verse subjects seemed to melt away, and I found myself back in strict meter, yet tried to avoid the symbols and heroics of my first books.”

I always find these phrases like ‘I found myself’ and ‘tried to avoid’ fascinating when writers are discussing their own work. It all fits in with that trance-like state that is supposed to take hold of us when we are truly in sync with the muse and writing ‘real’ poetry. It is also entirely at odds with what we know of the drafting process – no writer should be able to look their reading audience in the eye if all they have done is knock a few moments of inspiration onto the page and post it off to their publisher. In his ‘raw’ and ‘uncooked’ analogy, surely Lowell is driving at the idea of the poetic sweet-spot being a figurative ‘medium-rare’ situation.

“I pray that my progress has been more than recoiling with satiation and disgust from one style to another, a series of rebuffs”, writes Lowell at the end of his essay. In retrospectively considering his career, he is clearly aware that his shifting style could be seen as caprice, or a superficial avenue for redecorating his common theme of autobiography.

It must surely have been in reaction to M.L. Rosenthal’s labelling of Lowell as “confessional” that the poet went about such shape-shifting in style, just as his close friend, Elizabeth Bishop, did all she could to avoid being pigeon-holed as a female or feminist poet.

Perhaps it is through my own semantic idiosyncrasies that I have always paired Lowell with a very different stylistic chameleon, David Bowie. At similar stages in both men’s careers they went about the task of ‘cover versions’, of sorts; Lowell with his series of poetic re-working, Imitations (1961) and Bowie with his album of cover-versions, Pin Ups (1973).

I make this connection, purely because it serves as a fine illustration of artists telling us a great deal about themselves through the convenient masking act of ‘translation’. When Bowie was between two elaborate concept albums, Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs, two wonderful pieces of musical fiction, he allowed himself an album of cover-versions with which to unashamedly share far more universal and cathartic themes than Ziggy Stardust would ever allow him to explore.

Similarly, we get the sense that Lowell shares far more of himself through the re-imagined monologues of his Imitations than in the more factually autobiographical yet emotionally measured pieces in Life Studies. It puts me in mind of poor Thomas Wyatt, finding the only acceptable public voice for his melancholy in translating the works of Petrarch from the Italian. As Paul Muldoon points out in his Oxford lectures, we often find out most of Lowell’s life when he is writing about and through historical figures.

But then, what are we then to learn from Lowell about fresh starts? Surely the man who happened to find himself writing in one form or another, depending on what the poems required would scoff at the artifice of a ‘fresh start’. In this sense, Lowell tells us that there is no such thing as a fresh start in poetry, merely a willingness and openness to go where our writing requires us to go.

I would argue that it is one of the only true signs of a genuine writer that their work varies from collection to collection, even at the expense of quality and commercial viability. The poet who churns out a second collection of similar length, content and style to their debut has not found that balance between the raw and the cooked; the worst and most repetitive of us can easily be located on either side of this spectrum.

Lowell did something that poets such as Anne Carson and David Morley are doing now (in both cases, look at their three most recent collections and trace the great stylistic eclecticism, held together by clearly tangible thematic threads that run through their respective works). Like many great writers, Lowell knew that his foremost challenge was to harness his writing toward something with purpose, secure that the style of his writing would come through patient exploration, just as the sea sounds from a shell.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

FINKPOINT | FINKBOOK | VOL FINKKK, LOST AND FOUND BY ROWENA KNIGHT (FINKPOINT)

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Vol XXXVI, Lost and Found

 by Rowena Knight.

I SEE IS NO NEED FOR OUR DEDICATED READERS TO GO WITHOUT, CHAPBOOK-WISE. SO HERE'S FINKPOINT'S PICK OF THE SUBMISSION PILE (I'VE GOT THAT TOO). BROUGHT TO YOU BY FINKPOINT.

Generation | Chapbook | Vol XXXI, Long and other short poems by Alistair Noon

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Vol XXXI, Long and other short poems

Alistair Noon (1.10.10)

 

Alistair Noon’s chapbooks of poetry include At the Emptying of Dustbins (Oystercatcher), In People’s Park (Penumbra), Animals and Places (Longbarrow), and Some Questions on the Cultural Revolution (Gratton Street Irregulars, forthcoming).

Generation | Poetry | TS3L10T

"Poems are machines for remembering themselves."

-Don Paterson

For the first time in years I went cycling today. It was exhausting. I kept thinking to myself 'machines are much better than people at the whole transport thing, aren't they?' I mean, having a nice bike ride or a run from time to time is pretty fun, but cars are essentially better built for the job, in terms of efficiency and all that, right?

Successful Machines = Efficiency + Autonomy + Saving of Money + Sexy Design (optional)

My point is... I have recently been reading an equally fascinating and mind-numbing thesis on machines being able to generate poetry. Aside from the idea itself being quite poetic, the paper makes for frustrating reading. I get the impression that the author, one Hisar Maruli Manurung, doesn't spend much time with poets, based on phrases like:

"We propose a model of poetry generation as a state space search problem, where a goal state is a text that satisfies the three properties of meaningfulness, grammaticality, and poeticness. We argue that almost all existing work on poetry generation only properly addresses a subset of these properties."

Part of me likes the idea of poetry being the litmus test for the existence of A.I., as it is supposedly "a task which, if done by a human, requires intelligence to perform." Is the hard-wiring of a soul provable only through poetry? Would The Terminator enjoy Ezra Pound? I can sort of imagine his data-scrolling infra-red vision scanning the Cantos for esoteric references. 

The problem with this line of research is that poems are fundamentally at odds with machinery in so many ways.

Firstly, poetry ain't efficient and it certainly isn't about saving money. To write, read and publish poetry is a financial dead-end, and is procrastination of the highest order. Poetry is what happens when you try to take your mind for a walk in the park and it stays rooted for hours, sniffing the trunk of a tree covered in another mind's piss.

The biggest problem with this research however, is that it is based on a false premise. Writing poetry is not "a task which, if done by a human, requires intelligence to perform". Sorry poets, but it's not. In fact, poetry is often a task which requires its writer to fight against their own intelligence, combating prolixity and deliberate encryption in the name of honesty. Sometimes.

What does require intelligence however, is reading poetry. This is the biggest problem with the premise of a machine generating poetry... poems are designed to make the readers do half the work themselves. The Red Wheelbarrow is the finest example of this - the poetic sentiment is there once we realign our perceptions and bring our own semantic contributions to the reading.

This is why, when we interrogate Manurung's thesis, he is not genuinely giving us the promise of a machine that writes poems but rather assuring us "that computer programs can indeed autonomously generate texts that are considered poetic". And right there, in that word 'considered' is the achilles heel of the argument. For all the ideology behind 'meaningfulness+grammaticality+poeticness=poetry', the only thing that makes something officially poetic is 'consideration'.

Well, I argue that we don't need machines to sit round naval gazing, poking away with quill and parchment. Humans and machines have always lived in a shifting artistic equilibrium. Look at what beautiful artistic movements came as a result of the camera doing a much more convincing job of portraiture.

Now consider thermal imaging, ultra-sound scanners, aeroplanes, iMax, triple-distilled vodka, roller-coasters, silent discos, Facebook...

These things are all doing the job of poetry. That is, they are showing us the same world we have always lived in, but in a way which we are not always ready for. And, as a result, our poetry is effected. We scribble our verses now, not at the pace of footfall, but at the speed of engines. Our references and influences and motifs are as varied as the internet allows us for inspiration. Our egos and ids are irreversibly hacked into by every aspect of the media.

So please, by all means train a computer to write poetry, but I implore you not to do so until you have programmed it to start running an application for jaded solipsism every time it gets a bad review.

See a LIVE Silkworm!

Phil Brown working the podium.

As you are all aware, 7th October is National Poetry Day. Silkworms Ink are chipping in by donating our poetry editor, Phil Brown, to do a live reading in the Poetry Library in Royal Festival Hall at 8PM. Also reading at the event will be 3 other 2010 Eric Gregory winners - a guaranteed treat for all. 

The event has been organised by one Simon Armitage, who we have discussed on numerous occasions on this website.

Tickets are free but you need to reserve a place by following this link here.

See you there!

Post | Introduction/Poetry | Suffix To Say

Week 18 | Post | Contents

Tuesday | Poetry | Suffix To Say

Wednesday | Fiction | Where Have All The Postmodernists Gone? 

Friday | Chapbook | Afterwards, by Jamie Baxter

Post 9/11,

is it possible to post

anything resembling

a postulate without

posturing?

In this world of postal strikes

and lamp-post hangings

is there any point posting bail?

To be allowed to re-enter

…what?

Years after the last post,

when this poor planet’s

post-nuclear detonation

and some inquisitive alien

species floats over

to do the post-mortem

on the rubble, what

will they make of us?

In the postlapsarian age,

what will they make of this

post-Modern post?

Be gentle,

fickle posterity.

I am no imposter

(and have no repost).

I’ve no posterior motives

and have posed no threat.

I’ve no wish to postpone

the inevitable postcoital coyness.

I’m the post-op poster child

for the poseurs, post-dated

for posthumous obscurity.

What was I supposed to say?

My post-graduate was a posterized ploy

dreamt up by postilions and priests

– poorly signposted pratfalls.

Please, fresh postpartum parents

poised to provide,

practice your postprandial prayers

for the postmen,

who

won’t

knock

after

four.

Who was the last notch on your bed post?

Answers on a postcard.

-Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Gonzo | Poetry | Two Thumbs Up

I got to the Hunter S. Thompson party too late. By the time I discovered who he was, I was about nineteen and the narcotic-dabblers, goths and pseuds had already claimed him for their own. Hands off, Phil.

It’s a shame though, I really think I would have got on with him. In fact there were times when I thought it was going to work out. His writing on the Hell’s Angels is some of the finest journalism I have ever read. His political savvy and unfaltering outsider-ness were (and are) astounding. The 2008 documentary of his life paints one of the finest portraits of a writer I could imagine.

It is too late though. Sorry Hunter… I’ve had too many of the most heinous human beings on the planet tell me that “ya know, I’m only doing this while I’m putting my book together, I’m working on some kinda Hunter S. Thompson shit, ya know?” Sadly, yes I do know.

(ed. I am not saying that all Thompsonites are horrible people… I know at least three Hunter fans who are out and out thoroughly good sorts.)

The main thing that stayed with me when finding out about HST however, is the bizarre arrangements he made for his own funeral. The affair was apparently bankrolled by one Johnny Depp and involved some very particular preparations, but the salient facts are that his ashes were shot out of a cannon and there was a giant two-thumbed fist erected in honour of the event. I don’t know which hymns he chose.

So, with all this thinking about a suicidal, drug-abusing genius (the main demographic we seem to write about on this site) and his intricate funeral plans, I got to thinking about what sort of public send off I’d have if I was being bankrolled by a quirky A-List actor. Uplifting stuff, right?

Go on then, have a poem. You’ve earned it.

Last Orders

Let my grave be three-feet square and twelve deep

and rest my cadaver on its head so that in the months

following my fleeting my brain can finally absorb

everything I was at my end.

Let those I have offended worst in life be first

to toss gloating soil at my upturned feet

and let my past pupils pour gallons of red ink

over the hands that marked their juvenilia.

Advertise my send-off as a facebook event

and send malicious messages

laced with expletives

to those aloof hundreds who RSVP as ‘Maybe’.

Sit my ex-girlfriends together in a row

and let them all (even that one!) get on famously

before eventually arguing over which of them

is being snidely swiped at in this poem.

Set up a ‘lost-property’ stall by my tombstone

filled with the myriad items I’ve borrowed,

let Lewis take back his snooker cue and give

Emily the magazines I’ve no right to cling to

Hold the service on a 213 bus

for this has been my place of prayer

and silent introspection for over half

my sleepless life.

Arrange for no music, but provide a stereo

and invite my hipster friends to make mix-CD’s

watch them fight over which obscure B-Side

will best provide the funeral frisson.

Finally, mould my grip around my wife,

twist my hard arms around her waist

and let the suitors queue up to try

prising her from my cold, dead hands.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Jazz | Chapbook | Vol XXVIII, Variants of Dialogical Voices by Felino A. Soriano

 

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Vol XXVIII, Variants of Dialogical Voices

Felino A. Soriano (10.9.10)

Variants of Dialogical Voices by Felino A. Soriano is a series of ispriations plucked out of the grand jazz canon, featuring Jackie McLean, Matthias Bergmann, Julius Hemphill & Albert Ayler.