Young British Poets: Brigley, Potts and Ttoouli by Todd Swift

I had a wonderful May Day party at my flat in Maida Vale today, to celebrate, among other things, a housewarming, and a recovery from ill health; many friends gathered, and, as the weather turned, and rain bucketed down, we came inside, until midnight (GMT) for tea and wine.  Many poets attended, including Alan Brownjohn, Tim Dooley, Denise Riley, Barbara Marsh, Kathryn Maris, Nancy Mattson, Mike Bartholomew-Biggs, Emily Berry, Katrina Naomi, Leah Fritz, Giles Goodland, Mr Social Control, Liane Strauss, Ashok Bery and Kavita Joshi.  However, as I began to contemplate this, my last guest blog, I became a little wary.  Surely, there is something ill-timed about shipping poems from Britain to America at a time when British Petroleum is destroying a way of life for many Americans.  As I am no supporter of the oil industry, and neither are the final three poets I wish to share with you tonight, I can only say that we are very sorry to see such a human disaster visited upon you, and wish you a very speedy recovery from this terrible spill.

Over the last week, I've wanted to share varieties of new (and emerging) British poetry with readers of this important blog.  At the beginning of the week, I suggested a tentative list of 25 poets worth following as their work develops.  I might have let that list drift to 40, and added poets like Jay Bernard, Ben Wilkinson, Camelia Stafford, Jon Stone, Ahren Warner, Katrina Naomi, Sam Jackson, Declan Ryan, Christopher Horton, and several others.  The point being - there isn't yet a definitive shorter list of who "the next next generation" will be in the UK - partly because the current period is remarkably fecund, volatile, and under-studied.  One of the paradoxes of Digital Age poetry is that, as we know, there are more poets than readers, but, even more to the point, more good poets than "bad ones".  This democracy and wide spread of ability and quality leads to "a good thing" - lots of good poems - but also can tempt critics, and readers alike, into avoiding the harder work of winnowing.  Not to exclude, but to allow extra attention to be applied to certain poets and texts, if only so that some poems get studied, read again, and memorised.

On reading the recent anthology Identity Parade, I remarked that while it contained work by several major poets (Alice Oswald, for one), and several very important newer poets (Jacob Polley, Daljit Nagra, and Patience Agbabi, for instance), it had few poems that marked this period as instantly "great" - that is it had many very good poems, but only a handful that were (or seemed to be immediately) extraordinary, in canonical terms.  In Britain, the emphasis on the brief lyric poem concentrates the idea of such a focus, because New Criticism celebrated these lyric poems most of all, as well.  It may be impossible to compare one age with another, one period and another, but have the 00s produced a dozen British poems as impressive as those of the 70s - one thinks of poems by Ian Hamilton, Ted Hughes, Larkin, and Heaney?  They have, it must be assumed.  What is required, and it may take time, is for a critical argument to be made, to support such a position, and to offer the evidence, the poems that truly move and inspire.

These final three poets should not have such pressure placed upon their work - nor should such expectations be placed upon the other 7 featured so far (Kennard, Berry, Berry, Katchinska, Hamilton, Riviere, and Underwood).  That these ten poets are among the "top 40" younger poets from Britain writing today seems certain to me - but what such a listing ultimately means is less assured.  It may be, as critics like Carmine Starnino have begun to argue, that we are in an age of poems, not poets.  Les Murray said much the same to me a few years back, when he stayed with my wife and I in London after a reading he did for my Oxfam series.  He had edited his selection of the best new Australian poets (no doubt inspired by the great series which lends its name to this blog) with an eye not on the author, but the text.  Anyway, to the poets, and poems - each fuses experiment and form, and allows content, as well as sheer linguistic play, their due.  I hope you have found this an enjoyable and informative way of meeting new good poems and poets.

George Ttoouli is an Honorary Teaching Fellow for the Warwick Writing Programme and a freelance editor. His articles, reviews, poems and short fiction have been published widely. He co-edits Gists and Pithswith Simon Turner, an experiment in poetry e-zining. He is Reviews Editor of Horizon Review.

His debut collection of poetry is Static Exile (Penned in the Margins, 2009) and he has a pamphlet, UN-Affiliated, forthcoming in summer 2010 from Nine Arches Press.  He also appeared on the Asking A Shadow To Dance DVD.  He's one of  the more impressive of the younger avant-garde poets now writing in the UK.

AN ABSENCE OF OMENS, INTERPRETED AS DAMNING

The skies are copied, east across to west

and the horizon is an empty slit

spread open around the island’s flesh.

The yeros in the cafés think the country’s blessed;

they’re reading coffee dregs and taking bets

where skies are copied, east across to west.

And the fishermen think they know best,

they’ll soon find swordfish in the empty nets

they spread around the island’s flesh.

The women sit and prophesy a mesh

of broider, on which their hands will try to fit

the copied skies, east across to west

and I sit here blind to suckle kittens at my breast,

imagining the crow cries that

will spread across the island’s flesh

and though I thought to find a palimpsest,

iodine has only cleaned these cuts:

the skies are copied, east across to west,

spread open around the island’s flesh.

poem by George Ttoouli

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Kate Potts lives in London and has taught in Further and Adult Education for several years. Her poems have appeared in various magazines including Ambit, Magma, Poetry Wales and The Wolf. Her work also features in Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century. Her first pamphlet Whichever Musicwas a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the inaugural Michael Marks Awards for pamphlets. In 2009 she received an Arts Council England grant to assist with her first full-length collection, which has recently been accepted by Bloodaxe.  She was also selected to appear on the Oxfam DVD.  I heard her read this poem on Tuesday night at the Days of Roses event.

 

MAPMAKER

Begin with a blank sheet – like plash, night-drizzle, the white-wraith splinter of breakers on shingle. They sail in close to the land. Stowed in the darkwood bows, he starts at the grating of the boom’s swing, the deck crew’s stamping lunge. The salt-bite of his smallness is cupped in that nutshell, that bobbing tin-toy ship. Water tips and distends its horizons. He has no characters – no ink-swipe or gauged mark – to chart this.

A week of trek away, inland, a child wakes, sees it’s early and drifts off, again, into the shallowed heat of their breathings – his siblings – their language: hickory, deer pelt, moss and wold. Outside, the embers glower and cluck.

The empty map, in its beginning, is junked canvas, scraps, hanks of linen, hemp and flax hacked and pulped, each cellulose fibre forced – old bonds re-aligned in bleached, pressed skin. He’s dreamed the land they near as anthracite and bones, and a new sphere sleeps, total and unfaulted. He’ll trace it onto the white. The day baulks still, cat-thin, demurring. Soon, it’ll shoal in, nipping his hard heels. The paper leaf – the topsheet – is lined up, a regular cut, smelling of nothing.

 

poem by Kate Potts

 

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Zoë Brigley is a Celtic writer who grew up in Wales, but now lives in Pennsylvania. She mainly writes poetry, and is the winner of an Eric Gregory Award from The Society of Authors in London. She also won an Academi bursary to fund travel in Central America as well as the English Association's Poetry Fellows' Award. Her first collection The Secret was published in the UK by Bloodaxe (2007) and it was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; it was also long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize. She writes a blog called The Midnight Heart.  She edited an anthology of women's poetry, Bluebeard's Wives,with the poet Julie Boden, and a collection of academic essays with Sorcha Gunne titled Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives. She is a visiting lecturer at the University of Northampton. I am pleased to end this selection of poems with a Welsh poet, and such a fine poem, as Dylan Thomas was the first poet I ever loved, and all young poets owe hi some debt, however much "the fever" later abates, as Larkin claimed it did with him.  Brigley's poetry, with its vital themes and formal quality, mark her out as a resonant way of ending this post, with a sense of much more to follow.

 

ATLAS-EATING

The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with tomorrow’s scream.

    -Dylan Thomas, ‘Altarwise by Owl-Light’

In atlas charts and longitudes, in plots

and plans and latitudes, the new found land

gives up its lard for the fattening

of Spanish cathedrals, its gridded gold

wired into archives of cartography.

At home, tomes of maps are mercantile bondsmen

and the only sound that matters on earth

is the rat-a-tat-tat of a coin on teeth.

Blueprints are filed in marbled office cells

by clerks that regard Columbus; script

but never tremble. The maps of harbours,

with their sea snakes and turtles, are nothing

compared to creatures gathered onshore:

the squat, warted toad of the colony.

 

Grudges grow deep in new-coming colonists

like mandragora buried in a graveyard plot,

watered with semen and honey to shore up

the slime and decay of their outpost land.

They slow-bake their greed until it is nothing

but ashes in their fires; they feel it fatten

under shirts and doublets, still harbouring

sweet grudges like the mandrake’s syrupy gold,

and the lust on their faces is an age-old script:

starving on the shore of a new geography.

Out of the alchemy of colony cells,

white and tubercular grow the New World men;

parasitic, they swell from soil to burst,

and shriek like mandrakes torn out of the earth.

 

poem by Zoe Brigley

 

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Comments

[Terence Winch]

Thanks so much for your series of posts this last week. I found all of them illuminating, as I'm sure many other readers did as well. To say nothing of all the terrific poems you presented.

[DL]

Let me add my appreciative thanks to Terence's. It may be that we are living in an age of poems, rather than of poets, and the annual anthologies have certainly advanced that trend. The question pressed itself on me in a concrete way when I edited "The Oxford Book of American Poetry." The book is as big as an old-fashioned one-volume encyclopedia. And even so, there were limits: you can't include everything or everyone. But the previous edition, that of Richard Ellmann, had represented 78 poets and I chose 210, and only thirty years separate the two volumes. My assumption was that a wonderful poem merits inclusion regardless of authorship -- that the book was not to be restricted to major poets, however one defines that term. In the introduction I think I use that very phrase, that I wanted "an anthology of poems, not poets." The distinction between major and minor may have become harder to observe. Or maybe we have a profound new respect for the many contenders.

[personalized poetry]

I agree that we are living in an age of poetry but I also believe that poetry has always been here since the days of old. It never went away. Now more individuals are realizing life to be so - poetic.