Martin Stannard's Home From Home

I've moved......

2007-08-31T16:43:00.000Z

Please go here to get to my newer and more up-to-date Home.

Thank You.

Welcome to here...

2006-08-20T01:09:00.000Z

(I just today updated this site by adding a link to Litter magazine. So much for updating. There is some new stuff at Stride too. I've been in China for a year teaching, and I'm going back there in a couple of days, and I can't access this from there, so while I'm here I've ..... are you still awake?)

What follows is what was here before I started fiddling......

***

I hate to write about myself. But here goes: I hope there is enough room.

I think my poems are sometimes acts of explicit design and at other times products of chance and a subconscious activity I rarely understand. More usually they come from somewhere between these polarities. When asked to explain my poems I usually resort to taking on a puzzled or pained expression, and say I can’t speak at the moment because I have to wash my hair. When I have to explain my poems because there is a gun at my head I admit they perhaps sum up my life, in part or in whole, which is either as it should be or very sad. And I have no idea if it’s true, to be honest. I don’t think about things like themes. Themes are for others to find, but if the poems are my life then that’s the theme, I suppose. Or one of them. If I understood it all I’d be very afraid, and I wouldn’t write poems.

Please click here to read my Autobiography.

Some Poems

2004-11-23T18:15:00.000Z

BE GRACEFUL AND EXPERIMENTAL

Be graceful and experimental,
the exact opposite of those who fail
of those who stay in the shadows.
The day awakens and thinks
what shape it’s going to be today,
then it’s that shape. Sometimes it’s difficult
to work out what the shape is going to
be when you look at the day before breakfast.

I looked out of the day this afternoon
and the sun was hidden by clouds
but I knew it would reappear
if not today then tomorrow or the next day.
I knew it was there, and only hidden.
The world is graceful and strange and
ugly and familiar sometimes and sometimes
it surprises you but there are things
that can be relied on. The sun is one of them.

And now it’s the night and the day
is going to graceful sleep. I am awake
thinking about several different days
and what shape they were. The days were
long ago, and although I couldn’t see
them clearly then I can now make out
what shapes they were. I am beginning
to understand what those days were about.

UNDERSTAND

It’s all very well,
the disappointments penetratingly understood,
and the long chill evenings
with their sweaty fitful sleepings on the sofa
are singularly understood,
and how the water is always warming
but never brought to the boil,
that’s enlargingly understood,
as the placing of a cover or lid
on the simmering pan is thoroughly understood,
and the caged bird in its frustrating riot of colour
is analysed then glaringly understood,
and the witch in the wardrobe of the apartment
empathised with and maddeningly understood,
the day’s long drawing out so physically,
substantially, and debilitatingly understood,
and the singing of muted swans
is swellingly understood,
and the slow and gradual appearing of ice,
that’s piercingly understood,
and it’s all very well.

FALLING TO THE FLOOR

Some days are blighted, some are blessed. And now, now cast upon
the waters, how can you ever know why to be, and how in the world?
Everything is precisely cut and dried and they (they who fell trees,
who cull sweet pups, who slip cordons, who are married so cheerily,
who everything condones) will ever seem as starry constellations
in the big heaven. Today the electric tram almost took out my life,
and the mob didn’t fall into a swoon as I exclaimed about a swan upon
a pond of calm I imagined as twilight fell. How can all this not be
connected in some way to the fact I was disguised as someone who
three times fell into the sea and each time was rescued by coastguards?
The pinnacle of my life was a recent season. Sun shone and ocean sang.
A decorative plate a moment ago smashed on the floor. I don’t know
which boot sale I got it at but it doesn’t matter as I stoop to clear it up.

LINES FOR AN ACQUAINTANCE ABOUT
TO LEAVE HER JOB TO HAVE A BABY

This is a time of joy and adoration and adulation,
physical pain, agonies even, and sleeplessness.
It is also a time for good advice, the giving
and the taking of. Here is some:

when the baby is born, keep it around
for a couple of days so friends and relatives
can prod and poke it a little, then
send it away to a boarding school.
The best are many, many miles away.
You will then be able to resume your career
as telephone operator / actress / model / super-
market check-out girl (delete as appropriate).
Arrange for the child to be returned
when it reaches its majority. Arrange also
to have, by that time, changed your name
and escaped into the backwoods where
nobody knows you and where you can disappear
like a girl, a wish, a hope, a dream.

COFFEE

And so they searched for the umbrella
but couldn’t find it. What was Mr. Weather
planning in his mysterious cave? Everybody
had lots of information but didn’t seem to
know anything worth knowing. Never mind:
as soon as they’d adjusted their clothing
they went for coffee, a beautiful couple
in the eyes of The Lord. It was only
a modest café but it suited them to a tee.
Someone had tied a horse up outside
and left it; perhaps they’d gone shopping.
This was, after all, a city renowned for
its superior retail outlets and not only for
a lot of gang-related violence. A waitress
was pretending to be a moment
of extravagance in a tawdry day but
like all other failed attempts she failed.
Great legs aren’t enough. While they sipped
their coffee, a window cleaner cleaned
the window, a traffic warden wasted
a couple of words on the horse, a crocodile
of schoolchildren trooped past the window
headed for Valhalla, a postman collected
mail from the box on the corner,
and it started to rain. The drops of rain
were big ones: it was that big drop
sort of rain. Low sky got lower.
Members of The Umbrella Club, had
there been such a club, would have been
so fucking smug. It seemed like
a good idea to order more coffee.
He used to think it upset his stomach
but now he wasn’t so sure and he liked
to drink it. It helped him stay awake all day.

About Me

2004-11-23T17:57:00.000Z

I am a poet, and my poetry and criticism has been published all over the place for more than 20 years. You can find information on some of my books over on the right hand side of the screen. (Click and travel.)

In those more than 20 years I have read at places including the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, The Morden Tower, and St. Mark’s in New York City. I’ve also run so many writing workshops and classes my head spins when I think about it.

What’s more, for a long time I edited the poetry magazine joe soap’s canoe. There are people out there in poetry world who think this was a great magazine, and I’m not going to be the one to contradict them.

These days one of the things I do is run a website, Exultations and Difficulties, which you may have been to en route to here. If not, please pay it a call. It’s a blog which is something of a magazine, in that I publish poems, reviews and other kinds of things by people I like, as well as posting more traditional blog-type things. It’s as close to running a magazine as I want to get at the moment, and it’s good, I think.

2004-11-23T17:43:00.000Z

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Anne Shelton was my mum from 1952 until 1957. Alma Cogan took over until1966, then she disappeared into the television and we never saw her again. Lita Roza did the job for a little while but couldn‘t stick it. I think my smart-arse brother pissed her off. Marion Ryan was my mum’s sister and used to carry me home from the park in a big wicker shopping bag. She was my mum from late 1966 until the remains of The Vernons Girls turned up, but more of them later. Ruby Murray was a friend of my mum’s best friend: they used to take in ironing. The Beverley Sisters lived in the house on the corner of Liverpool Road and Manchester Road opposite the Post Office and next door to the old woman who had loads of cats. Shirley Bassey used to work in our butcher’s. Jackie Trent would come to coffee mornings at our house and insist on helping with the washing up after everyone else had gone. Petula Clark was a friend of my dad, and was always first to suggest a sing-song around the piano on a Sunday teatime. It was Winifred Atwell’s piano. Julie Rogers was also a friend of my dad, but she didn’t get on very well with Petula Clark and I don’t remember ever seeing them together or even in the same room at the same time. My nan knew Marianne Faithfull’s mum. Some of what you read is true. Helen Shapiro was a girl I knew at school but she was a few years older than me and she thought she was a goddess. We used to glare at each other from a distance. We had a fight once because of Anita Harris. I wanted it to be because of Billie Davis but it wasn’t. When I got a Saturday job in the greengrocer’s on School Road Clodagh Rodgers was working part-time at the petrol station opposite. We used to smile at each other across the traffic. We did that for about three months then I asked her out and she said she was engaged to a bloke who went to Oxford. The only time I’d ever been to Oxford was on a charity walk. She reminded me of Twinkle, who used to let me call her Lynn when we played together on our bikes in Coventry Road. When what was left of The Vernons Girls took over being my mum in 1969 I figured it was time for me to leave home in search of The Tiller Girls. I thought I’d dreamed them, but I was determined to find out the truth.

If this wasn't the Autobiography you were expecting, I'm sorry. I wrote this poem (which is in prose, sort of) earlier this year. You don't want to read my real autobiography, I hope, because I really have no desire to write it. But there's a couple of things you might want to know, and they might appear if you click on this word: WORD

Coral

2004-11-22T15:55:00.000Z

Coral, a set of 18 poems that (not unlike “Poems on Various Subjects” but not much like them at all) were written as a determined “set”, was published by Leafe Press in November 2004. There is a kind of symmetry about that, because the book was started, written, and finished during November 2003. Not October or December, but only November.

Because it’s so new there has been little chance for the reviewers of the world to ignore it, but two places are ahead of the game: Rupert Loydell, the editor at Stride, has a blog, and you can read what he has to say about “Coral” there, and The Ragged Edge is cutting edge.

Please contact Leafe Press for more information.

* 30th December. A new review of Coral is online here. I don't fully understand it, and don't know if it's what you'd call "a good review" or not. I guess you would have to ask Doreen.

Poems on Various Subjects

2004-11-22T15:54:00.000Z

Shoestring Press published Poems on Various Subjects in 2000, which was a very good year (apparently).

It's a set of poems written as a set of poems, and published as (wait for it....) a set of poems. The title of the collection is from Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects, published in 1796.

I think it's sold out now, but you can still visit the Shoestring Press website if only to prove I'm not making all this up.

Reviews online include Herbert Lomas in Ambit and one of my favourite reviews ever in the world by Steven Waling at Stride Magazine.

Writing Down the Days

2004-11-22T15:53:00.000Z

New & Selected Poems

Stride published Writing Down the Days: New & Selected Poems in 2001. It includes work from some of my earliest pamphlets, and up to and including poems from "A Hundred of Happiness". It concludes with a new sequence, "Arising". It's by far the heaviest book I've ever done - in terms of weight, that is.

Among the reviews online, Steve Spence writes at Terrible Work, and Jim Burns is at Ambit.

For more information, please go to Stride Books.

Conversations With Myself

2004-11-22T15:52:00.000Z

Selected Reviews and Notes 1984 - 1998

Stride published this in 1999. The subtitle describes it pretty well: it's a selection of book reviews and various prose pieces from those years. I've done a lot of reviewing, and this is some of it. Plus every now and then you find yourself writing something about what you do, and it's kind of interesting.

There only seem to be a couple of online mentions of this book, because it was 1999, and people still used paper. One is at New Hope International. The other is at Amazon, but why the hell not? It's informative, if nothing else.

A few of my more recent reviews are get-at-able via the sidebar, over on the right.....

Difficulties and Exultations

2004-11-22T15:38:00.000Z

Difficulties and Exultations was published by Smith/Doorstop in 2001. You will no doubt notice that the title is where the name of the website Exultations and Difficulties comes from. It's the same words but the other way around. I was feeling very clever that day.

There are some reviews of the book kicking around on the InfoWeb.

Norman Jope writes about it at the Terrible Work magazine site, plus there's mention at New Hope International. Other reviews appeared in print rather than electronically, because this was in 2001 and that's almost the olden days.

Please visit the publisher, Smith/Doorstop, for further information.

On Tom Raworth

2004-11-20T18:28:00.000Z

Tom Raworth, COLLECTED POEMS (Carcanet)

1. YOU WERE WEARING BLUE

The first poem by Tom Raworth I ever read was “You Were Wearing Blue”. It’s in Michael Horovitz’s 'Children of Albion' anthology:

the explosions are nearer this evening
the last train leaves for the south
at six tomorrow
the announcements will be in a different language

At the time I’m not sure I knew why it appealed to me. Now, I’d say things like it’s really crisp, throws a light across what I carelessly call “life”, and it’s in a language that’s my language, which is not the language someone like Ted Hughes used, and the poem seems full of air and clarity and possibilities and

listen you said i
preferred to look
at the sea everything stops there at strange angles

I had no idea what those line breaks and spaces were doing (although I managed to work out that you could read some of it in two ways because of the layout) and it wasn’t until I’d been to university (Raworth wasn’t on any course, I read him while I was there, but university taught me, in its own way, how to read), and wandered around in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, saw some life, and stumbled through a whole other mish-mash of reading that I – no, not “understood” how this stuff worked exactly but, rather, understood how it’s okay to intuit something from a poem rather than “get it”. And though you might “get” how a poem works and how form “works”, it’s not what you think about when reading. When writing, it’s a different matter.

2. A(C)(W)E

I’m in awe because it looks like what he does is write down just about anything, and it becomes “a poem”. Don’t try and write like him: it’ll end in tears. I think if you tried to identify a structure and/or tried to explain how these poems are constructed (correct word) you could end up sounding as unnecessary as Marjorie Perloff (Times Literary Supplement, 30 May 2003). And you wouldn’t want to do that.

What a poem “Ace” is! And a lot of the time Tom Raworth’s poems are really funny. Or, they have funny things in them. Other times they knock you dead. Actually, they always knock me dead, but they’re not always funny. I’m writing down as I think this. Don’t try and write like him. You’re not him.

3. I’M WRITING DOWN AS I THINK THIS

If you try to explain how these poems are constructed you’d at least be advised to refer to the letter Raworth wrote to me as his contribution to joe soap’s canoe #14, and to a poem he refers to there: (“I thought I’d pretty clearly stated my method in…”) “El Barco del Abismo” (“…over twenty years ago, and I don’t think it’s changed much.”) which is on page 42 of the Collected. This extraordinary little poem is followed by more words about where each line came from:

Title from Sr. Martinez Ruiz’ Latin American History lecture on Thursday, May 9th, 1968 at noon. I was so impressed I stopped listening.

Four lines from a Spanish Vocabulary, Sunday, May 12th, about 4.p.m. Something else Roy pointed out in the same book: in a list of words to do with crime, police, the law, etc. was the Spanish for ‘tapered trousers’.

And, of course, these “notes” are part of the poem. Probably. They are, at least, on the same page and under the same title and go towards making up the experience of reading the poem. (I’ve just realised how boring this statement is. The poems deserve better.)

This stuff’s quick. It looks like what he does is write down just about anything, and it becomes “a poem”. But it’s also considered, and considered carefully. You’ve only got to try this method yourself and see what a mess you make. Re-reading and re-rea-reading reveals (slowly) how carefully these poems are made. Someone has probably already written a thesis about it.

I just spent this afternoon with “Ace”, and it strikes me how I feel very relaxed reading these poems: I’m not struggling to understand them, and I’m not trying to find a narrative line, or even a reason for any of it at all. What I’m doing is surrounding myself with the words. Enjoying being with them. Reading a few lines and getting one “meaning”, then reading them again and finding something else. And enjoying it. Okay, I might be missing loads, but there’s lots of time left to read it again. And again. I think Tom would rather we enjoy the process of reading poems than be able to explain it.

(This appreciation of Tom Raworth was first published in The North)

A Hundred of Happiness and Other Poems

2004-11-19T20:29:00.000Z

A Hundred of Happiness and Other Poems was published by Smith/Doorstop in 1995. It should have won prizes but it didn’t, although it was given a very pretty rosette by a girl from Mansfield.

This is what some people said about it:

“The domestic and the spiritual, the political and the fantastic cohabit in Stannard’s world, held together by the contradictions and ambivalences in his approach. It’s the tension between those contradictions that make his work so exciting, but his real triumph is in fashioning these struggles and contradictions into such serious entertainment.” – Mark Robinson, Scratch

“There is an urgency about the poems that won't let the reader drift away from the text, and it's compelling. It would be hard to be bored by a Stannard poem. You might be irritated, especially if you're the kind of poetry reader who looks for platitudes and certainties and confirmation of what you already know, but that would seem to me a sign that the poems are working as Stannard intended........ [they make for] reading which is always provocative, often exciting.” - Jim Burns, The Wide Skirt

“His language is plain but his meaning isn't; he is intelligently silly and there are dark undercurrents to his tomfoolery. He celebrates the spontaneous in a style that is in fact highly crafted and artful........ the most succinct way to describe Stannard's work is as serious play......” - Emma Neale, Scratch

“He manages to create poetry out of the mundanities of everyday life, elevating even the most commonplace experience to one of strange significance and occasionally beauty...... He is, after all, one of the few poets around who can combine blunt realism with fantasy and actually come out with something worth reading.” - Jane Holland, Blade

“What lifts Stannard above so many others..... is the unforced energy of his writing: it's not driven, exactly, but nor is it entirely contrived. He can pull off O'Hara's trick of allowing resonant detail to arise from near-random accumulations of thought and.... allows us access to the workings of his mind in all its hit-and-miss glory.” - Wayne Burrows, Sheffield Thursday

“There is a sense of space in his work, of light and air, as the lines go freewheeling. He calls to notice things that are relevant to all of us, though continually glancing away as well....Often what he has to say is in the way of a puzzle, often it borders on the profound -- but it always challenges you as to exactly how profound. It's baffling, in a good way. This is poetry with the head fully engaged.” - Keith Dersley, Tears in the Fence

For more information or to purchase A Hundred of Happiness, please go to Smith/Doorstop

On Michael Laskey

2004-11-18T18:33:00.000Z

Michael Laskey, PERMISSION TO BREATHE (Smith/Doorstop)

One thing I have always thought about reviewing is that it’s possible to be the right person or the wrong person to review a particular book. I’m sure it must be pertinent sometimes to say “No”; to say it would be best to give this book to someone else, because I don’t feel able to write usefully about it. Other times, one might feel this way, but then reconsider. I sat here with Michael Laskey’s new book, and I reconsidered. I reconsidered because it occurred to me I was both the wrong person and the right person to review this book, which made me perfect for the job. And my reasoning is simple. Nobody, not even a much-liked poet, and brilliant advocate of poets and poetry, and a highly respected poetry workshop leader, is owed anything they haven’t earned. I felt like this as soon as I’d read the book and the descriptive blurbs accompanying it. I’ve decided, in the wake of this experience, that some people might think me almost totally deficient when it comes to appreciating other people’s emotions, and caring about how they feel, and all that business. I could be seen as a cold robot with no heart. On the other hand, and rather more to the point, I am about to risk losing a friend because I don’t like his book of poems, and saying why.

The primary attributes of Michael Laskey’s poetry, according to the puffs of praise on the cover, are his writing about what Craig Raine describes as “wry grief”, and what the PBS Bulletin’s anonymity calls “intelligent, feeling writing.” Robert Potts, in The Guardian, apparently noted “originality of thought” as well as “quality of execution.”

I have no argument with the last of these remarks. I’ve known Michael personally, and been familiar with his work for many years, and there is no question that he writes well, in the way one is encouraged to write well at places like the Arvon Foundation and in writing workshops. This is not disputable. But this robot heartlessness of mine loses patience with the rest of this laudatory flannel.

Nearly half of this book is concerned with the loss of the poet’s elderly parents. By “loss” I mean of course “death” - I don’t mean losing them in the shopping precinct on a Saturday morning. Although this small retail mishap could actually be quite a good subject for a poem of about four lines, sadly the poems I’m concerned with here are dead parent poems, all of them much longer than four lines. About half of the remaining poems are tied up with the poet’s sense of his own advancing age, and with his domestic circumstances. A handful has its genesis in a trip to Australia. (Yes, I yawned too: Go abroad. Write poems. Oh God.) There are a few others, including a couple of somewhat out-of-character list poems, which remind me of better poems by someone else. Yet I have to say (and I mean this as much as I am able to mean anything) if one is keen on poems that are laden with “wry grief” then it is probably difficult to find anyone better to read than Michael Laskey. He writes well. Not everyone does.

But I don’t really like stacks of poems which, let’s be honest, have someone’s death to thank for being there. They have to be amazing poems to justify their presence, I think. And those poems do exist. Of course they do; but not in this book. The first half of “Permission to Breathe” is overwhelmed by parental loss, and you can have too much of a thing. Poems like ‘The New Car’ are typical and, I suspect, potentially prize winning. It begins:

Coming in with a bag of windfall Bramleys…..

By which time, frankly, I’ve lost interest. When the end arrives, and the poet is

Cutting the bruised bits
out of the apples, adding sugar; telling
myself I’m sure he’d approve.

I’ve already been out of the room to make a cup of tea, and flicked through the TV channels to see what’s on. Poetry like this mainly serves the poet’s desire to write poems and assuage something in their self which has not been dealt with elsewhere. I’m pretty sure of this, but I’m also certain Laskey would argue with me about it. And let’s face it lots of people love to read this stuff, because here they can find sentiments with which to identify. The poet has also managed to make half a book of poems out of the fact of particular deaths, and that link between death and a book of poems sometimes, sometimes, worries the hell out of me. It feels as if this sadness is all little more than so much poetry material. One poem yes, I can understand that. But twenty? Twenty? No, it’s too many. My parents are quite elderly, and I suspect that it won’t be very long before I have to deal with their passing. This is something like a fact, a sad but undeniable truth. But reading books and poems like this make me swear to God I won’t write poems about them when they go. I have trouble enough talking to them now; I’ll be damned if I’ll talk to them in public when they’re dead. If someone can tell me what purpose these twenty poems serve other than to pander to something not unconnected with the poet’s ego, then please do. Nothing in these poems is particularly new or original, either by way of thought or execution, no matter what it says in The Guardian. They are very good examples of their type. But what, I wonder, exactly is “their type”, apart from popular and, I’m sorry to say, easy? And is it good?

Other poems chart unexciting poetic territory. A house tumbles over a cliff because of erosion and a well is discovered – “A well/ we hadn’t even known we’d owned.” (‘Freehold’). The poet falls out with the telephone – “And suddenly see it, feel/ the frown I’ve become, how I sigh/ whenever it rings, put off/ calling anyone, even Suki.” (‘On the Phone’) Also, one is asked to suffer the heavy-handed metaphor of ‘Past Talking’, where the poet and his wife (one has to assume it is the poet and his wife, otherwise the poem is even more tiresome than I thought) are loading their cycles on to the carrier on the car, and “They don’t naturally fit together……….Contradictory, they need a good shove/ sometimes to make them lie snug”. One can almost imagine a bunch of people sitting around in a workshop talking about how well-achieved this is.

I am also annoyed by how well-behaved these poems are. And now I have written that, I know I’m faced with the challenge of explaining what I mean by it. It has a little to do with the tone of poems that begin “Met him first I thought at Pete’s fortieth/ and we got on well….” (‘Old School Tie’), which is neither a true speaking voice nor quite a believable written voice (it is, in fact, a poetry voice: take a moment to consider the grammar and construction of it) but this is only part of the cause of my annoyance. It’s also to do with how the poems are neat and tidy, well-worked and resolved, with none of the loose ends and ragged edges and unsettling disjunctions real life entails. Upset is what nearly all these poems are about but it comes so neatly packaged my interest is no more than if the guy had told me Sainsbury’s were out of his favourite coffee. In one poem a chap (it may be the poet, it may not be: let’s guess) is alone for an evening and is set to treat himself to a meat pie he wouldn’t eat if his wife were home. Then she comes home unexpectedly. Big deal; I shrug my shoulders. I couldn’t care less. Here, in this poetic world, upset even of the most mundane kind, minor psychological discomforts and middle-aged disquiet are all material for a poem. I am somewhat uneasy with this notion. These are not poems that set out to stretch language to make it somehow tally with our lives, nor are they poems to particularly exercise the imagination. They are polite and decent and may well win, and may well already have won poetry prizes for being well-behaved and well-presented. And I know this is exactly why I am the right person to review these poems. I know these are the kind of poems that dominate the most read and popular parts of poetry world at the moment. They are easy to digest. They are well-written and educated. They are awfully polite. They never shock. They threaten to say the unspeakable, but don’t. They probably mirror the stifled and pent-up emotions and sentiments of lots of people. And they bore me so much I could lose the will to live, but I know better than to let them get the better of me.

(This review first appeared at Stride.)

On The New York Poets

2004-10-23T19:43:00.000Z

THE NEW YORK POETS: An Anthology. Edited by Mark Ford. (Carcanet.)

Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery changed my life. I need to say that at the outset because it’s an important fact that will colour everything else I may say here. At the moment, as I sit here writing this on the coldest and wettest of June days (I’ve just put the heating on for God’s sake) at this exact moment I don’t know what I’m going to write.

There was a time when I wrote poems and the only agenda I can recall having for writing those poems was some kind of hazy idea that poems could be good. But I also thought that most if not all the modern poets who were famous at the time were dull and boring. That me and my friends could upset the applecart and replace the cloudy and the dull with zip and zest. It was a naïve, somewhat ignorant, probably stupid notion, and it was also an unoriginal notion. But it’s also one I would now regard as healthy and almost necessary for a young poet to have, with passion and fire.

My introduction to the New York poets (as I’ll call them for convenience’s sake – the whole thing about labels is just done to death) was haphazard and somewhat bemused. I think I saw Kenneth Koch read at Cambridge in 1977 or 1978. But all I can remember is Alan Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky and Anne Waldman. So he must not have made a big impression on me, unless he wasn’t there and my memory and misinformation is so fogged that this is all nonsense. But around the same time Rupert Mallin suggested I read O’Hara’s “Easter”, and I did. I didn’t get it at all, but since it seemed to be somewhat surreal and nonsensical and I quite liked the idea of being what I thought was surreal and nonsensical I took it on board, sort of. But not entirely. It wasn’t until I picked up a copy of Marjorie Perloff’s “Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters” in London’s Compendium Bookshop in, I think, 1981 or 1982, that things became clearer. I sat in my friends Stuart and Angie’s flat in Crouch End reading Perloff’s book when I should have been talking to them. And I began to realise I had found something in poetry that wasn’t admiration or awe but some kind of understanding that went deeper than the academic or the analytical. I’ve since come to find Perloff a pretty irritating critic (especially when she writes about John Ashbery) but she is also able to make you feel like you just got out of a cab with her outside 441 East 9th Street and she say’s this is where we go and see Frank and Joe, and that’s what she did that afternoon for me. There were things she said about the poets and their general attitude to poetry and life that I felt very comfortable with. It made no difference that it was pretty obvious these guys were geniuses and I was some klutz from England. I knew there was somewhere a wavelength we were all on. Somewhere. But I couldn’t articulate it. I knew, though, that where I felt, say, I had been trained at school almost as though T.S. Eliot came from another planet and was a strange alien being, these guys inhabited a world I recognised and sort of knew. They went in bars and had messy lives! They used yellow cabs! And they also had what I knew to be a healthy disrespect for the dominant poetry of their time. This was crucial.

This was over twenty years ago. Lots has happened in the meantime. I know Eliot wasn’t an alien (give or take) and that most poets have messy lives. And I know I don’t want poetry to tell me information I already know. And I’ve read the poetry of Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery over and over again. Not all of it, but lots of it. And I discovered the poetry of James Schuyler, and am glad I did. And I’ve written about them and reviewed them. And I can now count a younger generation of New York poets, people like Paul Violi, Charles North and Tony Towle, as friends. We’ve sat at dinner tables together and laughed and talked. And I feel privileged because they are lovely people, and great poets, but this is not really my point. What I’m working toward is something vaguer and yet so crucial to me I know I’m not sure how to say it.

I was in the pub a week or so ago with a friend, and we were talking poetry, and he mentioned (for the zillionth time) a poem of Ashbery’s that I introduced him to a long time ago, which mentions “the pudding people”. It’s a poem from “Can You Hear, Bird” …..

I knew we should have stopped back there
by the pudding station
but the pudding people were so - well -
full of themselves.

And my friend always laughs and asks me who the pudding people are, and what it all means. And we got to talking about how someone recently said to me they don’t find Ashbery interesting. They don’t find what he has to say very interesting, and how what he has to say about life is just more or less one narrow thing, which precludes him from being “great”. Now, I have no idea if Ashbery will, in time, be considered “a great poet”. I don’t care much. Sometimes but not all the time Ashbery’s poetry absolutely touches some kind of node or button in me and awakens my sleepy dormant parts into realising and noticing that life, this “life”, is this and that and the other. And I don’t know what it all means but this is how it is -- difficult and confusing, swathed in ignorance and folly, and blessed by moments of sharp insight and wonder. And he awakens in me a way of knowing the world which is the way I want to know the world but often forget about in my waking walking life. Ashbery doesn’t tell us how to live, he tells us how we live. Or, rather, shows us. It’s not instruction or information. It’s not “meaning” in the conventional sense. It certainly isn’t meaning in the same way a poem has meaning when it tells you how sad it is someone died, or how mean it is that people are mean.

There is something subliminally revelatory about this poetry when it works, which is not all the time. But when it does it’s a remarkable thing. There is also the sense that these people wrote good things, honest and good things, with no regard for what the people who run poetry world thought about it all. My first real introduction to Kenneth Koch was through the famous poem “Fresh Air”, with its timeless and still pertinent

It is time to strangle several bad poets.

Then I found how remarkable and dazzling his world of poetry was. How his expectations of poetry and his sense of the world were so huge. I’m not sure I’ve ever quite recovered. I’ve told this story before, but in 1990-something I drove Kenneth Koch from the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival to catch a plane from Heathrow back to the U.S. It was a mad drive. Kenneth came off stage at three, and his plane was at something like 5:30. I broke every speed limit in the book until, as we finally hit the approach to Heathrow on the M4 and joined the airport traffic he turned to me and asked if it would be okay if we slowed down now. And he gave me some work that I would publish in “joe soap’s canoe”. As he handed it to me he said something to the effect of, OK Stannard, tell me what it is you like about my work. And my whole life flashed before me, and then I said, It makes me want to be alive. And he said, I guess that’ll do. Or something like that.

Koch could be a pain in the arse. In 1992 when I was working in Ipswich for the local council as their one and only community arts worker, I worked alongside Rebecca Weaver, who curated the prestigious Wolsey Art Gallery in Ipswich. We asked Paul Violi to curate an exhibition of Koch’s collaborations with artists. And then we managed to get Koch and Violi over to England for the show. After the opening of that (at which they both read) I took them off on a brief reading tour of the UK. And Kenneth could be a pain in the arse. He wanted to be the centre of attention. He wanted sometimes the moon when all he could have was Ipswich, or a reading in a room at the top of a very long and steep flight of stairs in Huddersfield. But he was also lovely, and genuine and true, and I feel honoured to have spent time with him. This afternoon I re-read the poem “Marina”. It’s a wonderful example of how Koch’s exuberance and vitality is wonderfully controlled and emotional. You should read it. You really should. The poem is ten pages or so of doomed but inspiring and exultant love. The way the language and the line is used, how the so personal reference opens up into the universal marvellousness (and its opposite) of being in love -- this is how words can be.

I read
Tolstoy. You said
I don’t like the way it turns out (Anna
Karenina) I had just liked the strength
Of the feeling you thought
About the end. I wanted
To I don’t know what never leave you
Five flights up the June
Street emptied of fans, cups, kites, cops, eats, nights, no
The night was there
And something like air I love you Marina
Eighty-five days
Four thousand three hundred and sixty-
Two minutes all poetry was changed
For me what did I do in exchange
I am selfish, afraid you are
Overwhelmingly parade, back, sunshine, dreams
Later thousands of dreams

Koch isn’t, of course, renowned for the emotional. Yet he is often emotional. He is more famous because so many of his poems are the poet at play. But the poet at play allows in so much, and expands the notion of the poem so much, that everything eventually comes in: happy and sad, silly and serious, everything. It makes me want to be alive.

James Schuyler wrote beautiful poems. And I am only now coming to realise how beautiful and wonderful they are. I’m not sure yet that he touches me the way his friends do. But one of the things one learns from reading poems is that wakefulness comes at odd times. One may perhaps only begin to fully appreciate a poet after an unusual long time of acquaintance. I have not, until lately, been altogether ready in my head for the still and monumental exactitude of Schuyler’s beauty. Then, reading these poems again for the first time in a while, I was stunned. “Hymn To Life” is amazing. Nine pages or so of amazing.

One gull coasts by, unexpected as a kiss on the nape of the neck.

If you would not give your life to be able to write like that then you do not want to write. I am sorry. That’s what I think. And I am not sorry at all.

And then there’s Frank O’Hara. It’s Frank O’Hara people usually mean when they say that so-and-so writes poems influenced by New York School poetry, like if so-and-so writes poems that are kind of diary-like occasions, and have a lot of the everyday in them, and are thus unpoetic in a conventional unconventional way. O’Hara is perhaps the most misread and misconstrued New York poet. He is mainly known as the poet of the “I do this, I do that” poem, knocking off poems at parties, and giving them to friends, and forgetting about them. Then those poems are discovered in their several hundreds after his death and they make a huge Collected Poems, big enough to stun more than a single ox. And it has to be said that they are not all good poems. The word “slight” comes to mind. But the good poems are so good. The somewhat over-anthologised O’Hara poems (“Why I Am Not A Painter”, “The Day Lady Died” etc….) are not all of O’Hara. One has to read more widely, and even beyond the startling “In Memory Of My Feelings”, to get a true sense of this remarkable poet, the melancholy and sadness, and the beauty

and soon I am rising for the less than average day, I have coffee
I prepare calmly to face almost everything that will come up I am calm
but not as my bed was calm as it softly declined to become a ship
I borrow Joe’s seersucker jacket though he is still asleep I start out
when I last borrowed it I was leaving there it was on my Spanish plaza back
and hid my shoulders from San Marco’s pigeons was jostled on the Kurfűrstendamm
and sat opposite Ashes in an enormous leather chair in the Continental
it is all enormity and life it has protected me and kept me here on
many occasions as a symbol does when the heart is full and risks no speech
a precaution I loathe as the pheasant loathes the season and is preserved
it will not be need, it will just be what it is and just what happens
( from “Joe’s Jacket”)

The lesson that poets can learn from these guys is an immense one. This has to do with a permission to be yourself -- bubbling, melancholy, daft, whatever, and to use poetry and not let poetry use you. In other words, the New York School poets know and knew all about traditional forms and where it all comes from, but utilize the knowledge to move forward into a realm which is completely individual and self-contained. Let the world catch up, is what they say. But writing of this kind requires enormous self-belief and trust. It’s also a recipe for disaster, of course. Finally, I guess, you can’t wilfully write “New York School poetry”. For one thing, there is no such thing. The poets are too various for it to be only one thing. For another, it would be like writing to please your workshop tutor, which is a crock. New York School poets write out of themselves to please themselves, and for the one or two people who understand them. Any other people who get it are a marvellous bonus. And, of course, the joy is that when one writes like this, so freely and truly and purely, then lots of people get it. They are not bored by it, as they may be bored by the latest workshop fixated magazine page-sized competition aimed effusion.

When I read this poetry I am amazed by life. I think that’s a pretty cool thing for poetry to achieve. For me, the poetry touches something true about the world that I can only understand somewhat through the nervous system. Not through the academic, literary critical analytical system, or poetry as some kind of fine pastime of the chattering classes. It touches what I sometimes laughingly call my soul. The very processes by which it is made and conjured are so closely aligned with the only reason I can find that makes it worth being alive – how, notwithstanding the sadnesses and the heartbreaks and the catastrophes, life is, somehow, remarkable, and it’s the remarkable which makes it worth being alive and ploughing on, and finding those moments of, to use a word favoured by Frank O’Hara, grace. Which perhaps sounds like a load of hogwash, but it isn’t. There’s not a hell of a lot of poetry I’ve read written in the last 100 years that makes me happy to be here. This poetry does exactly that, though.

This anthology, published by Carcanet (who have published these guys over recent years and should be thanked for that) and edited by Mark Ford, who is a chum of John Ashbery’s and knows what he is talking about, is ideal for the reader new to these poets. It brings together many of the most familiar and anthologised poems, as well as some of the less well-known ones. Ford’s articulate and lucid but mercifully brief introductions to the book as a whole and to the individual poet’s selections are as good as one could ask for. He says what needs to be said, but by being brief lets the poems do the talking.

(This review was first published by Stride.)

On George Oppen

2004-10-23T19:35:00.000Z

George Oppen, NEW COLLECTED POEMS (Carcanet)

I don’t know the poetry of George Oppen well. I almost don’t know it at all. I’ve only had the more than 400 page Collected Poems for three or four weeks, and I’ve only read half of it, and since reading a book of poetry entails a bit more than just turning the pages to get to the end to see what happens, this almost amounts to not having read it at all.

While I waited around for the book to arrive (smoking, drinking, loafing) I prepared myself a little. I’m also not much of an expert on the Objectivists (of whom Oppen is/was nominally one) but I did a bit of brushing up, which served at least to remind me how in the past I’ve often found that stuff kind of dry, but my tastes are changing (albeit slowly) and perhaps it’s time to have another look. Which I haven’t yet. My somewhat limited refresher course also reminded me (in more detail than before) of Oppen’s personal history.

And I immediately took to him. This was initially and primarily on the level of an immense respect, because I figured that anyone who could be serious enough about poetry and about social and political concerns to give up the former because he wasn’t going to rope poetry in to the service of social causes, to fall into the trap of writing slogans and doggerel, was someone worth thinking about. And for this refusal to write poetry and commit oneself to social and political work to last 25 years….. Well, 25 years is a long time, and he obviously meant it. As for the poetry he did write, there’s also a nice line in the Preface by Eliot Weinberger to the Collected which is worth taking note of: “A product of the 1930s, Oppen had spent the first years of that decade attempting to rally a second generation of American modernism, relocated from Europe to the American city, that would continue and modify the poetic principles of its immediate predecessors while rejecting their political principles: a poetry that might not be for the masses, but one that did not loathe them.” (my italics)

This combination of what I perceived to be a decent human being (which is not always the case with poets) had me more than a little inclined to be sympathetic and receptive when I eventually got to the poems themselves. But before I get to them, there’s Ezra Pound, who wrote the Preface to Oppen’s first book, Discrete Series, (1934) and said, among other things, “I salute a serious craftsman, a sensibility which is not every man’s sensibility and which has not been got out of any other man’s books.” As ever, Pound manages to say something that we forget all too easily or, to put it around another way, something we should remember more than we do, almost all the time: poetry is (or should be, when it’s the genuine article) another person’s sensibility, not necessarily a comforting reflection of one’s own. And not got out of books but, by a process of elimination, out of life.

And “life” -- in inverted commas here, but out there it doesn’t have inverted commas, it simply has factories and conveyor belts and long hours and not enough money and all those life things – is hanging all around George Oppen’s poems. As the first poem posits, by way of Henry James (and I quote it here in full, because it says it all, and is, anyway, quite beautiful):

The knowledge not of sorrow, you were
saying, but of boredom
Is ---- aside from reading speaking
smoking ----
Of what, Maude Blessingbourne it was,
wished to know when, having risen,
“approached the window as if to see
what really was going on”;
And saw rain falling, in the distance
more slowly,
The road clear from her past the window-
glass ----
Of the world, weather-swept, with which
one shares the century.

What goes on goes on outside the window. It’s weather, but a weather that stands for every kind of ray of sun and blast of wind that rocks or soothes a life. And it’s the century, our time. We share it. And it matters. And this underpins Oppen’s poetry, but it’s not an easy poetry to read, for me, and it almost certainly won’t be easy for anyone wholeheartedly unused to reading a poetry that denies our expectations of conventional poetics and gives us, instead, fragments, disassociated phrases, sometimes part-utterances ….. but which also, in spite of that, often (very often) gives moments of pure beauty, elegance, recognition, wisdom. It’s sometimes hard to relinquish the quest for total comprehension in favour of a few seized moments of great pleasure or revelation, but I swear it’s worth it. When I think of how often reading and “getting” a whole poem can be a very much less than pleasant reading experience, I’m thankful for a few lines that give pleasure and add something to my world.

One can read one of these poems and it might feel like a cold and unforgiving gemstone: it looks great, feels great, but it’s not exactly yielding anything up to you. You’re very much outside it and separate from it. But it’s okay to read a poem more than once, and largely these poems have that about them that suggests you do that. Attempt One wasn’t altogether bad, even if perhaps you didn’t get much from it in the way of meaning but there was some reading pleasure; Attempt Two may yield something else. And as readers, we can work a little, can’t we? A poem with only a couple of dozen words in it, and the first time it resisted you, but you liked it enough to read it again -- And again -- And again several days later -- For example:

This land:
The hills, round under straw;
A house

With rigid trees

And flaunts
A family laundry,
And the glass of windows

I admit I still can’t make anything very interesting out of that “round under straw” bit. I may be being blind and dense. But for the rest, each time I read this poem, I see a picture in my mind’s eye but, more importantly, I sense a celebration (if that’s the right word, which it perhaps isn’t) of the very ordinary washing flapping on the washing line, and those windows, which one can look in to, and out of. And think and imagine. “Rigid” is an interesting word in the middle of the poem, don’t you think? And it doesn’t matter if I’m right or if I’m wrong, because it really doesn’t. I’m not being marked on this.

Occasionally, a poem will be much simpler:

Civil war photo:
Grass near the lens;
Man in the field
In silk hat. Daylight.
The cannon of that day
In our parks.

Which is, I think, and to be frank, damn fine.

Having read “around” Oppen in my preparation for reading the poems, I came across some pretty finely tuned intellectual ideas, not all of which made complete sense to me. I can just about live with his concern with the little words, what the Objectivists termed “the lyric valuables” that make up the world, what a note in the notes to the Poems refers to as his “lifelong concern with the primary elements of experience, those ‘little nouns that he [liked] the most’”. And I’ve read a couple of analyses of a couple of poems that concentrate, for example, on how the word “thus” is used twice in a poem, and how its use and placing, and the space around it resonates….

…. which is all very well, and I’m not underestimating any of that in any way, but there’s a few reasons why quite a lot of what I read in my reading so far of The Collected Poems of George Oppen left me a little uneasy, for example the major sequence that opens Of Being Numerous, which contains some absolute gems, pearls, but its being a sequence of 40 short pieces stretching over 25 pages rather suggests you should be able to see the connections at once (and the notes, and Oppen’s own comments, don’t always help towards this) and you can feel a little inadequate, and so much “modern poetry” does this to you –

but there’s some cracking stuff here, so let me tell you now: don’t be put off. Get this:

It is the air of atrocity,
An event as ordinary
As a President.

A plume of smoke, visible at a distance
In which people burn.

“An event as ordinary as a President.” Wow!

But after all this, I’ve forgotten to mention the warmth. And I don’t get it from every poem but I get it lots, and the only way I can describe what I mean is to quote another poem entire, which to me sums up the humanity that is in Oppen’s best poems, and probably in all of them, but I’m still getting to know him. This is “The Men of Sheepshead”. One could go on about the knowledge and empathy in this poem, the calm assurance of it, or how the world is these things, the mauls, the piers, the tenons, the rules of thumb and cams and levers. Or you could take another angle and try and find some way of accounting for how “Speaking of things” works, and why it is placed the way it is; or you could write an essay about “self-contained”. Or then again, how the joining, the dovetailing, apparently about wood, could and probably is about people, too. Or you could let the poem speak for itself:

Eric -- we used to call him Eric --
And Charlie Weber: I knew them well,
Men of another century. And still at Sheepshead
If a man carries pliers
Or maul down these rambling piers he is a man who fetches
Power into the afternoon
Speaking of things

End-for-end, butted to each other,
Dove-tailed, tenoned, doweled – Who is not at home
Among these men? who make a home
Of half truth, rules of thumb
Of cam and lever and whose docks and piers
Extend into the sea so self-contained.

This review was previously published in The North.