The Best American Poetry

Young British Poets: Hamilton, Riviere and Underwood - A Norwich School - by Todd Swift

As May Day looms in Britain, so does May 6 - the national election, and, judging from last night's final leaders debate, the UK is facing either a hung parliament, or a weak Tory government.  Sadly, the hapless PM, Gordon Brown, with his awkward grin and huge sense of purpose, has blundered once too often, and perhaps put Labour out of office for a decade (which might prove a godsend, as the austerity measures that are coming, to save Britain from a Greece-style collapse, will make any elected parties more Sheriff of Nottingham than Robin Hood).  May in Britain is not yet summer - though, judging by the monsoon outside, it is the rainy season; this Bank Holiday is yet another very British let-down weather-wise - the last week was Clegg-sunny, and now, suddenly, it's cold, damp and grey again - no BBQ getaway just yet, then.  The sense of inevitable boom and bust, shine and rain, and poetic class struggle - the dialectics of the place - seems confirmed by the latest news that arch-provocateur and original Brit Beat poet, Michael Horovitz will challenge elitist genius Geoffrey Hill for the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford; suddenly, Britain has a contest between two older men who represent utterly different sides of the poetics spectrum, yet are both well-educated and impressive readers of their own work.  Is there such a thing as a Hung Poetry Parliament?

There is surely such a thing as a poetic horn of plenty.  In preparing this week of blogs featuring younger British poets (which ends tomorrow with a Welsh poet) I was conscious of the great challenge to be representative - Britain is Wales, and Scotland, as well as England - and beyond London are regions with many accomplished writers and poets, and key cultural hubs.  One such place is Norwich - home to the University of East Anglia, the Norwich School of Art and Design, and important arts festivals, museums, cathedrals, schools and galleries.  I sub-titled this post "The Norwich School" because each of the three young men I wish to bring to readers today has a link to this city, and it is in Norwich where they met, and, in one way or another, influenced each other, formed affiliations, and developed editorial projects together.  Each is also very individually a poet in their own right, with their own trajectories and interests, but the sense of a connecting thread is strong enough to justify an omnibus feature today.  I was glad to include all three of them on the Oxfam DVD, Asking A Shadow To Dance.

Overheard 8th Street & 5th Avenue

He (walking):  Fuck.  I"d take a triplex penthouse.  I would. I'm tellin' you. I would. I would.

He:  No shit, I'd take a duplex on the fourth floor. Damn.

He:  I just sayin'. Fuck that.  I'd take a one bedroom on the first floor.  Ya know what I'm sayin'? I would. Damn I'd take a fuckin' studio.

She:  Pull up your pants.  Give me light, would ya?

He:  Fuck.

-- sdh

April 29, 1962, at the White House

April 29, 1962. White House dinner and reception in honor of Nobel Prize winners. Front row: President Kennedy chats with Pearl Buck, while Jackie lends an ear to Robert Frost. Buck's back is turned to Lady Bird Johnson, wife of the Vice President, looking "lovely," smiling crookedly. Pretty sure that is Ethel Kennedy, wife of the attorney general, seated behind the president.

Quiz: Which of the front row authors won the Nobel Prize?
Analyze the body language of President and Mrs. Kennedy.

Pearl S. Buck :)
Posted by: Laura Orem | August 11, 2008 at 05:34 PM

Analysis of body language --
JFK - "Sorenson told me there'd be chorus girls."
JBK - "How long is this damn poem, anyway?"
Posted by: Laura Orem | August 11, 2008 at 05:41 PM

laura is absolutely right about body language analysis! i believe nixon was actually much more literary than kennedy. kennedy was really into ian fleming. such a bright guy but debilitated by physical pain (which led to non-stop horniness), the horrible influence of his father, and laziness. at some point i will post a really great phone conversation he had with eisenhower during the cuban missile crisis. that was the one time that there was such a mess that kennedy actually had to do some work!
Posted by: Mitch| August 11, 2008 at 06:47 PM

Young British Poets: Annie Katchinska by Todd Swift

I was speaking this morning with the fine older British poet, Alan Brownjohn, about the deaths this last weekend of Peter Porter and Alan Sillitoe.  We agreed it was a terrible loss.  Brownjohn has been doing his part these last few days to publically discuss and properly mourn Porter - a major figure in Britain - by writing in The Guardian, and recording a talk on his work for the BBC.  Porter's Selected (Picador, 2010) is just now out, shaped with the editorial eyes of Don Paterson and Sean O'Brien, and is an impressive 400 or so pages. One person's Collected is another Selected - it reveals the sheer scope of his achievement over the past 50 yars.  If American readers were tempted to buy one book by an "older British poet" this year, Porter's Selected might be a wise place to start.

From a poet in his 80s, now, to a poet who is just in her 20s. Annie Katchinska is perhaps the youngest of British-based poets to have already achieved something of a genuine name for herself; her rise is meteoric, and has some of the precocity and excitement that surrounded the young Dylan Thomas.  I for one knew of her work a few years back, when I published her early poems online, and I am sure she was no more than 16 then.

Katchinska was born in Moscow in 1990, and currently divides her time between London and Cambridge. One of the other ways in which support for and interest in younger poets is generated in the UK is via the Foyle prizes.  She was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2006 and 2007.  She was included in the previously-mentioned Bloodaxe anthology Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century.

Intriguingly, the pamplet (chapbook) has come into its own in the last few years in Britain.  There is a major new award (the Marks) for best pamphlet of the year, and several small presses, such as Tall-lighthouse, Hearing Eye, Oystercatcher, and Pig Hog, have generated much excitment with their collections.  Faber and Faber, the UK's leading mainstream poetry publisher, with its venerable back catalogue of greats like Pound, Eliot and Stevens, and recent poets like Hughes, Larkin, Heaney and Oswald, is preeminent in its field.  Faber decided to enter the chapbook game for young peots, with Arts Council funding, last year or so, and selected 8 poets for the initial run (Fiona Benson, Toby Martinez De Las Rivas, Heather Phillipson, Jack Underwood, Joe Dunthorne, Sam Riviere, and Tom Warner).  Katchinska was selected to be "Number 6" in this series, and so her Faber New Poets pamphlet has just been published.

"Sandra Bullock Reveals Baby Boy!" [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

 

Sandra Bullock Reveals Baby Boy!

 

I don’t know much that I thought I knew.

I have been stupendously surprised.

Ever since balloon boy, I have been

scanning the skies,

but I did not see this coming.

There is, after an Oscar win,

a history of damaged joy,

not so tiger-sized, but not without an element

of a role reprised. Now this surprise!

Lucky for him, the kid looks wise.

My dearest bleaders,

I offer you this occasional on the fly as my grad students require my immediate attention. Stay alive and I shall return to encourage you further.

Love,

Jennifer

Young British Poets: Liz Berry by Todd Swift

I read last night in a basement bar in London's East End, as part of poet Declan Ryan's "Days of Roses" reading series.  It's become one of the main fixtures of the young London poets underground scene.  I was impressed with everything about the look and feel of the place - red walls, ska posters on the walls, a live DJ, a good mic - and an audience of attentive, stylish and alarmingly hip twentysomethings, the guys smart in skinny jeans, jackets and ties, the ladies in 40s/50s retro summer dresses with enough red lipstick to knock a B52 out of the sky.  Some of the poets reading are among those I have been mentioning this week - including Kate Potts, and Sam Riviere.  Other fine emerging poets, Jon Stone and Katrina Naomi read, too.  Also in attendance was poet Liz Berry, who I am pleased to introduce to you today.  Before I do, spare a thought for poor Gordon Brown, the embattled UK PM, who has just today made a major election gaffe by saying what he really thought of a sweet old lady on the campaign trail when a live lapel mic stayed on too long; this may hand the election to the Tories (or Lib-Dems).

Anyway, back from politics to The Blind Mice bar in Hoxton, and from there, rapidly, to this intro for Ms. Berry.  For, Emily Berry (yesterday's featured poet) is not the only Berry in town.  Liz Berry is another poet I was glad to include on the Oxfam DVD.  When the director Jennifer Oey and I sat down to edit the film, we knew right away that we needed to start the readings with Liz's performance.  She has one of those mesmerizing deliveries that captures an audience instantly.  Liz Berry, like many of the young British poets, won an Eric Gregory award, in her case, in 2009. She has has an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway. Her poems have appeared in magazines including Poetry Review, The North, Ambit, Poetry Wales and Mslexia.  Last year Berry was the winner of the Tall-lighthouse press pamphlet competition and her debut pamphlet, The Patron Saint of Schoolgirls, will be published in May 2010 (note, the British call chapbooks pamphlets). She works in London as a kindergarten (early-years) teacher.

As the previously unpublished, new poem of Liz Berry's below, shows, her work is an unnerving, and sometimes slyly charming, exploration of the erotic, and the romantic, as they intersect with darkness, innuendo, and the potentially taboo; like fairy-tales, or Lynch, the innocent surface or form of things is potentially always about to be ruffled by experience.  Of course, one needs to read British poetry with one ear tuned to its subtle almost dog-whistle effects, for much of its violence and surprise occurs - unlike North American poems which seem to employ a broader register of statement - in the slightest variations played on common, polite speech, and with the English poetic tradition in mind.  Decorum trembles like a bodice in Tom Jones.

Other recent poems of Berry's consider a human-dog love affair (elegantly and lyrically described) and a fishwife's salty honeymoon oysters.  They're really love poems, but with a hint of lemon. or twist in the tail.  Her work is among the most compelling being written by this younger generation, and, in its sense of extending the tradition of the erotic witty monologue developed by Duffy, and combining that with the intelligent moodiness of Paterson, is quietly ambitious, and exciting.

STONE

When you bought me a milk pan for Christmas

a woman at work said you were as romantic

as a stone. Watching you that evening,

I wondered what stone she had meant:

a chip of carpark gravel or something fancier

like the peridot in my mother’s engagement ring?

My interest in you became geological.

Pulling on your wellingtons to walk the dog in the rain,

you were granite, durable, funereal almost.

Under the water of the bath, you were the agate

I found on Brighton beach as a child, sleek

and mottled as the skin of a seal.

At other times you seemed a rarer gem,

not emerald or topaz, nothing any other woman

would wear at her throat; but plainer, more lovely,

like the limestone walling the caverns back home

that purified the iron in blast furnaces

where keepers dripped jet from their beading brows.

And a man like that would never choose a rose

or a diamond ring, he’d stand for hours in a shop

on the coldest day, testing the unfamiliar weight

of a pan in his hand, assessing its metal,

imagining how the milk would taste on my tongue

as it poured, steaming, from that perfect lip.

poem by Liz Berry

 

 

 

Persistence of Memory (by Mitch Sisskind)

Ha, ha! 'We were rough and ready guys
But oh how we could harmonize!’ Those
Words from the song ‘Heart of my Heart’
Well describe the friends of my youth
When, during the Kennedy administration,
Careless and carefree, we used to race
Our hot rods through the cemetery!

And lo, there came a frigid January day
With snow piled high along the roadways
Of the slab orchard when -- laughing,
Burning rubber and fishtailing with
Blasphemous intent -- we crashed
Our cars into a snowbank! Now what?
There were no cellular phones in 1962!

But no matter -- for what was not mirthful
In those days? ‘And look here,’ said we
To one another. ‘Why, here is a newly dug
‘Grave, unoccupied as yet, but a remarkable
‘Engineering achievement in this hard ground.’
Then each in turn we lay down in the grave
And I recall it quite clearly across the years.

But this is the strange part. That same night
My father died, and on Milwaukee Avenue
By the Como Inn the Lloyd J. Harriss pie factory
Burned down as, lazily, the red circling rays
Of the firefighters’ lights penetrated the snow,
Which was falling again, with the orange flames
Beyond, and that was also unforgettable.

Young British Poets: Emily Berry by Todd Swift

In the UK, poets seem, like fish, to first appear in schools - darting about and flashing their stuff in unison, thus often establishing a period style, or styles, that define a moment.  One thinks, especially, of the Fifties, synonymous for many with The Movement - or the 30s, and the Auden generation.  Tensions arise because, of course, there are other poets, and other modes and manners, that don't get to swim with the big fish.  So for every Movement there must be the Mavericks.  One of the ways that schools, or generations, used to emerge, in the UK, was through education (the poets would have attended the same university) - another, through being discovered by a critic or editor, as DH Lawrence was (and, indeed, though I have implied there are no important British poetry critics anymore, I did not mean to exclude the impact of established older figures like a Mark Ford, or Ricks, or poet-critics like Tim Dooley and Sean O'Brien and Fiona Sampson.  What I have been driving at is the absence of anyone like a Randall Jarrell, more precisely - a poet of the age wading into becoming a symptomatic arbiter of taste for that moment with full authority)

Then, more recently, - and controversially in some quarters, promotions were established, with Arts Council funding, to generate interest in emerging poets - most famously, "The New Generation" in the 90s, which arrived around the same time as Britpop and New Labour - and which was followed by The Next Generation.  Also, for decades, there have been other markers for young poets of talent - placing in major national poetry competitions; appearances in key journals, like Poetry Review or Poetry London; being included in anthologies - and winning an Eric Gregory Award.  Each year, the admirable Gregory process introduces Britain to five or six younger poets under the age of 30, without a full collection.  Competition is fierce - and most who win go on to soon after get an offer of publication.  All this by way of introducing today's Young British Poet, Emily Berry.

Berry, is, to my mind, another of the top five or ten younger poets now working in the UK - of the group without a debut collection out, one of the most anticipated, among many of her peers (along with, say, Helen Mort and a clutch of others).  Her work is very much in the school of Kennard - often employing a flat, deadpan prosaic line; sinister or bizarre monologues or poetic speakers; morbid and blackly comic situations.  What distinguishes Berry is her willingness to combine the very weird and even taboo, with more traditional poetic pleasures, especially emotionality, and sometimes oblique romantic confession.  A fan of The Smiths, she has learned from Morrissey to explore sentimentality and the strange hand in hand.

A teaching of Rav Zuscha --->>>

Sad on many levels: the downside of paying attention

--sdh