The Best American Poetry

Shakespeare was a Woman [by Leopold Bloom]

William Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him. Who did? While it is fruitless to speculate or seek an individual who is but a name on a weathered gravestone, I doubt she was Emilia Bassano. Consider the envy of Iago, the female spite that takes over his characater. Or contrarily think of the male initiaive animating  Lady Macbeth:  “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.”

Moreover, we know that the difference between the sexes is obscured by the very fact that all the players, including the women, are men in the plays that were played when they played them back then.

The play itself was the thing that, in an age devoid of photocopy machines, had only one copy and no one handling it thought to treat it as an archival treasure. Who knew what when, or who among the players wrote in the margin, are open questions, and if the women are often seen reading in the plays or showing off their intelligence as cross-dressing lawyers in stilleto heels, who get to punish the unfortunate but eloquent merchant and exonerate the poor improvident  Venetian loser, that would be dismissed in court as cirumstantial evidence, for justice is blond and the real killer is unmasked only in the fifth act.

Nevertheless, the apotheosis is Cleopatra, top cat of an empire, or failing that, with her name changed to Gertrude, marrying  the king or the brother who succeeds him on the throne, becuase love equals death or the sublime, and murder is just a name for overcoming rthe influence of anxiety.

Shakespeare was a woman. For surely the sublime. And the absence that precedes it, the belatedness of all action, the play having been composed before the chief actor could have come up with a prologue. Well, just imagine Marlon Brando as Hamlet in a production with songs written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

Shakespeare is God, I have long maintained, in the face of resistance from multiculturalists, nudists, feminists, poltically correct imbeciles, undersexed leftwing lunatics, bullshit artists, theorists, Dead-heads, pinball wizards, Marxists, neoconservatives and other non-traditionalists who resent the rich and sublimate their guilt into an identification with people who do what they cannot, such as kitchen patrol in boot camp, and working as a plumber.

You see, we only see what we see as Blake would say not with but through the eyes that reveal the arras behind which the pompous Prufrock is vanquished by the young hero. And the ayes have it. The phenomenon of what I have elsewhere called kenosis, an emptying of the vessel like that of a candidate for higher office. But only a woman could have done it -- inviisibly, of  course, because it had to be a secret. Only a woman could have channeled the fire and air of masculinity into the earth and water of pre-Socratic femininity.

Who was she? We may wonder. For the sublime, which can kill us but disdains to do so, exists as a thrill, which you can feel in Milton and Goethe. But Shakespeare, who hits you with it hard in King Lear, also gave birth to the human, as only a woman can.

More words that marked me, by John Foy

Earlier this year I was put to thinking about lines of poetry that meant a lot to me. This began when the poet Gerry Cambridge, who edits a fine, international literary journal in Scotland called The Dark Horse, asked me and several other poets to write brief essays on particular lines that had shaped us. So I wrote a short piece, published now in the current issue of The Dark Horse, about this line from Thomas Wyatt:

    Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind

The line had an effect upon me during my adolescence when I was just starting to see how language could light you up and open the doors of the heart and mind. Of course, all poetry seeks to hold the wind, a thought that imparts beauty to this line. So I wrote my appreciation for The Dark Horse. But in doing so I realized it was impossible to zero in on just one line of poetry. I decided, therefore, to go back and select more lines from other poems that have, in one way or another, put me on the path.

 

… Mark here below
How tame these ashes are, how free from lust,
That thou mayst fit thy self against thy fall.
(George Herbert)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.
(T.S. Eliot)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
(Robert Frost)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
(W. B. Yeats)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nights come bringing the snow, and the dead howl
Under headlands in their windy dwelling
Because the Adversary put too easy questions
On lonely roads.
(W.H. Auden)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.
(Elizabeth Bishop)

 

 

 

 

 

 

It pleases me to stand in silence here.
(Philip Larkin)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.
(Seamus Heaney)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are more, but that's for another time.

Best,
John

The Ollave, by John Foy

Many thanks to David Lehman and Stacey Harwood for inviting me back as a guest-blogger this week.

I recall reading somewhere – maybe someone can help me with this – that ancient druidic rites, or perhaps they were Welsh bardic initiation rituals, included the following. You had to lie in a trough of water on a cold night, wholly submerged and breathing only through a straw, and compose in your head a long poem in a complicated meter. The next morning, you had to emerge from the water and recite your poem.

How many could graduate from that school?

I earned my MFA in the early 1990s from a reputable institution. I am, therefore, a Master of Fine Arts. Anyone who has earned the degree should take careful note of this particular passage from The White Goddess, by Robert Graves. In my tattered edition, the passage appears on page 457:

“Who can make any claim to be a chief poet and wear the embroidered mantle of office, which the ancients called the tugen? Who can even claim to be an ollave? The ollave in ancient Ireland had to be master of one hundred and fifty Oghams, or verbal ciphers, which allowed him to converse with his fellow-poets over the heads of the unlearned bystanders; to be able to repeat at a moment’s notice any one of three hundred and fifty long traditional histories and romances, together with the incidental poems they contained, with appropriate harp accompaniment; to have memorized an immense number of other poems of different sorts; to be learned in philosophy; to be a doctor of civil law; to understand the history of modern, middle and ancient Irish with the derivations and changes of meaning of every word; to be skilled in music, augury, divination, medicine, mathematics, geography, universal history, astronomy, rhetoric and foreign languages; and to be able to extemporize poetry in fifty or more complicated meters. That anyone at all should have been able to qualify as an ollave is surprising…”

Best of all is that “appropriate harp accompaniment”! He made no mention of poetry workshops or lying in troughs of water all night.

Cheers,
John

History: The Great American Lullaby [by Natalie Diaz]

Words become words because we need them. I don’t know what they are before that—impulses, energy, trilobites, Hydrogen—who knows. But once they become words, I believe in them, the power and the glory of them. Even the ugly ones—those terrible angels of our mouths—beating like dark wings from our throats—savage, nigger, half-breed, chink, faggot, indian, redskin. We built them—like bombs—with our need to break each other.  

I am drawn to the words that hurt me most—No.—I mean to say: I am not afraid to put into my mouth the words that hurt me again and again. The people who first gave them to me didn’t always tell the truth, so I take them in and spit them back out—the bones of them, the parts nobody wants to talk about now—and I tell them my way because I got tired of choking on them.

History is the name of the greatest American lullaby. When we know the words to it, we feel like better people, church-going people. We feel like we have learned something. Worst of all, we feel like it is over. This is what history really means to most white people: It is over.

It might as well be the title of all the history books in high schools across the nation— 

Teacher: Class open up your It Is Over text to “Chapter 2: We Fucked The Indians Again But Jim Thorpe, So It Is Over.”

Tommy: Didn’t we read that last week.

Teacher: No, Tommy, last week we read “Chapter 1: We Fucked The Indians But That Was A Long Time Ago Which Means It Is Over.” This new chapter has blankets in it, and Hotchkiss.

No, the worst part is that when we memorize the words to History, we get sleepy. Our eyes are lulled close. Just like at the end of “Rock-a-bye-baby” nobody asks what happened to the baby because they’re already asleep.

What is my point? Words carry within them the dark things we have done and the dark things those dark things continue to do. It is important that we know our words better than anybody else.

This is what I tell my students: Every word. And not just that word, also the word it was before. And the word that word was before it became the word you are using. Know those words the way they were when they first meant themselves. The beginning of language must have been something else—each sound like an entire song—a want we wanted so badly that it began like a lightning spark in our minds and rushed downhill to the lamp wicks of our tongues where it lit into a word. Fire, someone said for the first time in the universe, and for the first time in the existence of the ear, someone heard, Fire—how it must have burned.

So if every word is Promethean, why shouldn’t I rivet them all to the rock and tear them open?

What a gift: to know every word a word has ever meant.

What a wound: to know every word a word has ever meant—

Our word for policeman translates to the people who rope you, and our word for jail is the place you are roped. It’s the same word we use to describe roping cattle.

The US government used to rope Mojave children, sat on horseback and lassoed them like animals. They put them in the back of wagons or made them walk behind their horse all the way to the boarding school, leaving their mothers wringing the hems of their dresses in grief. My Elder teacher told me this: Grandma used to say that after they rounded up Momma and the other kids and took them away, all the dogs ran in circles in front of the houses and ran up and down the river banks crying and crying because they wanted their kids back. Those poor dogs cried and cried and cried. They went mad with crying. Today, when we talk about the law, the police, the justice system, we are talking about those men on horses who roped our children and took them away. We hear the crying. It is not over. It is happening again and again in those words.

School, or huchqol hapoove, means the place they put and keep children. And they did—they took Mojave children, their best shot at crushing us. And once there—nyayuu hapoove is our word for closet—my great grandmother was given a switching and locked in a closet for the day when she was caught speaking Mojave.

Language is nothing if not violent—No.—Language is silent when it is not violent.

Our word for metal is ‘anya kwa’oor, which means it has a golden light. Metal came to us first in a prophecy, which translated roughly goes something like this: It will come across the ocean and land here. It has no head, no arms, no legs. It is oval-shaped. It will move through us up our shorelines. The metal that was prophesied was not the metal of pots or pans or rakes—it was a bullet. Anytime we speak of metal, we are speaking of the way it first came to us—sometimes by going through us the way bullets have always done.

So when I say know your words, I mean the ones that have shaped your mouth and your page. Look at them, listen to the things they have endured, the things they have done. Even if they are one part memory, they are also another part living. Maybe what I have been trying to say is that when you walk into the room of your poem and hear History playing in the background, you find that poem, you look that poem in the eye and say, Wake your ass up.

Among the Post-Holes and Potsherds and Grave Goods: An Interview with John Glenday (Lea Graham)

I first met John Glenday in person while walking a portion of the Great Glen Way from Invermoriston to Drumnadrochit, Scotland in 2012.  We had only a single mutual friend and poetry in common as way of introduction.   After walking the fourteen miles along the gorse-studded trail, above the Loch Ness, I arrived to the Glenday household where John and his wife, Erika, had already prepared a sign that captured their lovely and playful hospitality: Quiet--American Poet Sleeping.  What followed were several days of lively and thoughtful conversation about poetry, place and our political landscapes. One of the many things that intrigued me in our conversation was the different sense of inhabiting land.  I have long thought about the way in which particular geography and language intersect.  John Glenday, as you will see, thinks seriously about this intersection without allowing it to limit his poetic range.

John Glenday was born in Dundee, Scotland in 1952.  He is the author of three books of poems, the most recent, Grain (Picador, 2009) which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for both the Ted Hughes Award and Griffin International Poetry Prize.  His second collection, Undark, was also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His first book, The Apple Ghost, won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award in 1989.  He was appointed Scottish/Canadian Exchange Fellow for 1990-91, based at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.  He lives with his lovely wife, Erika, and their children in Drumnadrochit in the Scottish Highlands.

***

LG:  To begin with a rather wide-ranging question: What kind of connection do you see between place and poetry?  Could you talk a bit about the link between your home geography and language?  Has the knowledge of your family residing in the same area for over 800 years had any impact on your writing?

JG: Poetry holds on to a place in the same way a plant does – it takes nourishment from the land it was rooted in – what else can keep a poem alive? But when I talk about place, it is irrespective of time. So for me the poem is also an archaeological examination – it digs down among the post-holes and potsherds and grave goods for evidence of how life was once lived. What else is poetry about? The fact that my name has been associated with the Scottish county of Angus for generations and generations accentuates this for me. It tells me that whatever I write casts a long shadow. But I am not territorial in my writing, so I’ve happily adopted Scottish Islands, mythology, non-existent places. They’re all grist to the mill. One of my earliest poems ‘The Apple Ghost’ is a simple description of a house in Nairn, Scotland, as I saw it at the time. The narrative of the poem was inherent in that house. All I needed to do was write it down.

***

The Apple Ghost

A musty smell of dampness filled the room

Where wrinkled green and yellow apples lay

On folded pages from an August newspaper.

She said:

‘My husband brought them in, you understand,

Only a week or two before he died.

He never had much truck with waste, and

I can’t bring myself to throw them out.

He passed away so soon…’

 

I understood then how the wonky kitchen door,

And the old Austin, settling upon its

Softened tyres in the wooden shed,

Were paying homage to the absence of his quiet hands.

 

In the late afternoon, I opened

Shallow cupboards where the sunlight leaned on

Shelf over shelf of apples, weightless with decay.

Beneath them, sheets of faded wallpaper

Showed ponies, prancing through a summer field.

This must have been the only daughter’s room

Before she left for good.

 

I did not sleep well.

 

The old woman told me over breakfast

How the boards were sprung in that upper hall;

But I knew I had heard his footsteps in the night,

As he dragged his wasted body to the attic room

Where the angles of the roof slide through the walls,

And the fruit lay blighted by his helpless gaze.

I knew besides, that, had I crossed to the window

On the rug of moonlight,

I would have seen him down in the frosted garden,

Trying to hang the fruit back on the tree.

                                    From The Apple Ghost (Peterloo Poets, 1989)

 

***

LG: You’ve talked to me about place as being connected to person and certainly, many of your poems seem to address a person or sentient being even as the poems are rooted largely in some kind of place.  Give us a sense of your own—and maybe the European—nexus of place and person.  Perhaps, you could also talk about names?  Given that Scotland is a country associated with clan names and places like Loch Ness (which you live near), do you think there is a special sheen in names and naming in your own work or that of other Scottish poets?

JG: I’m not sure, Lea. Names are such slippery things – remember what Paul Valery said: ‘to see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.’ Names can come between us and the world, they can delude us into categorizing instead of appreciating. But they also change me, I believe, from an innocent bystander into a material witness. They do this by forcing me to look in an analytical way rather than simply to see.  It is essential, as an artist of any kind, to look in a penetrating manner at the world; to question it by observing it. Most names cast long shadows too – Mine comes from a small glen in Angus which in Gaelic means ‘the Glen of the fast flowing water’. So I can trek up into the hills and look down on my surname. I do this in the poem ‘Glendye’ of course. There’s not much there now – sheep fanks, heather and gorse, a thread of water. I like to imagine they are in me too. I also have the same name as my father, which I viewed as a blessing, and then a curse, and then a blessing.

***

Glen Dye

by that flinch in the Water of Dye

where its wersh soul swithers

through the Bog of Luchray

and on towards the Dee,

there runs a certain gentleness

of ragged stonework in an old sheep fank,

where a flush of broom pushes out;

and if you happened to lie in its doubtful lee,

come early spring, you might just hear

the wind clambering through, fluting

a note or two from a threadbare melody,

for nothing but its own sake.

                                     --From Grain (Picador, 2009)

)

***

LG:  In your book, Undark, you have a series of poems about the U.S. Civil War.  Could you talk about the genesis of these poems.  I believe they come out of photographs?  Talk about the process of writing about place and subjects that aren’t “your own” and yet, are so much your own.  “Artillery Horses Under Fire” seems a poem that you are intimately connected with or at least, you’ve rendered it as such. 

JG: All the Civil War poems are shamelessly appropriated from Shelby Foote’s brilliant book, or form Whitman’s ‘Specimen Days’. I’m not worried by this. After all, you can usually tell from the title what a poem is not about.  All the detail of the world – the terrible events, the pointless waste of lives, the bravery and self-sacrifice are all just ways in which the world is telling us how we work. The world is always doing that. The poet’s duty is to appropriate fact and fiction for the benefit of poetry. So in the poem you mention, it was the way the artillery horses would stand firm in harness while they were being shot that troubled me; and then I remembered how Union soldiers, advancing into gunfire over open ground, would turn up their collars and hunch their shoulders, as if they were advancing through rain, rather than lead. It is this tiny detail of the world that tells us a little of the big workings of things. If we can focus on detail and describe that, we can say more about the horror than any mere accumulation of statistics can do. So, in summary, these are not poems that try to be ‘American’, they are poems trying to talk about people, and how they live. The world will carry on giving us the clues – remember what happened to the glass negatives taken by Brady and others during the Civil War? Remember this, along with the Crimea, was the first war documented in photography. Those glass plates were sold to nurserymen after the war – the people were sick of images of the killing, they had no stomach for them. Can you imagine greenhouses glazed with the inverted images of the dead? What is that saying to us about us?

***

4. Artillery Horses Under Fire

That slap the minie balls make when they strike

sickens the heart.  Sounds just like pebbles

smacking into mud.

 

Mostly they fall straight off, then struggle

up again, shivering and stiff, but strangely

quiet till the next round comes.

 

Some simply twitch their flanks or slash

their tails across the wound , staring ahead.

You’d think it was a blowfly at them,

 

nothing more.  I remember at Cold Harbor we watched

as the last from a team of six stood firm

in harness with five bullets in her side.

 

She toppled only when the sixth ball sheared

through bone.  Not one was spooked, nor ran;

but then, the living were left limbered

 

to the dead.  We could hear the rebels cheer

as horse after horse dropped through its traces,

kicking the caisson sides.

 

They hardly make no sound—that’s what I hate.

Die as they must, God damn them.

I don’t know.  Some beasts act more like men.

                                --From “Whitman's War" in Undark (Peterloo Poets, 1995)

IV. To China: Possession Point [by Sarah Howe]

 

                                            ...The sour

 

 tear-like orange was there like a clove

of garlic melting in my mouth. It wasn’t

 

a time for complaints and nobody

murmured a word of discomfort. It was

 

the silence of refugees longing for an identity

foreign to this tiny, floating, motherless city.

                                      –Kit Fan, ‘BN(O)’

 

A fortnight ago, a story about rumour’s power to fuel a whirlwind of nationalistic indignation, stoked online and then as quickly averted, played across the news channels in China. The trigger was a photo circulating on the Chinese-language internet, which seemed to show an act of recent vandalism. In a piece of iconoclastic violence uncannily reminiscent of the faceless Buddhas in the Mogao Caves, the heads had been knocked from several of the mustard-coloured Buddhas sitting in teal niches on the glazed exterior of the Hall of the Sea of Wisdom, one of the most treasured buildings in Beijing’s Summer Palace. Was this the work of mindless vandals?

A couple of months earlier, another furore had broken out among Chinese netizens when a photo emerged of a carved stone relief inside the famous Luxor temple in Egypt: one of the 3,500 year old statues had been defaced across its torso by a Chinese tourist’s incised graffiti, sparking a hunt to shame the person responsible for so tarnishing China’s global reputation. The perpetrator had made the rookie mistake of scratching out his full name, and before long the crowd-sourced force of one of China’s increasingly notorious Human Flesh Search Engines had tracked him, a fifteen-year-old boy, to his home in Nanjing.

It looked like it was all happening again, this time on Chinese soil, until the Summer Palace’s curators came forward to explain that no modern vandals were involved. The restorer’s glue responsible for re-affixing the reconstructed heads onto the Buddhas’ necks, expanding and contracting with the seasonal temperatures, had caused them to fall off again. In fact, the ceramic heads had been smashed over a century earlier, in 1900, when an army of allied foreign forces marched into Beijing to respond to the Boxer rebellion.

The story was not, it turned out, about modern morals at all, but rather was part of a historical narrative about China’s ‘century of humiliation’ familiar to all Chinese school children from their history textbooks. The ruins of Beijing’s Old Summer Palace, ransacked by British and French soldiers during the Second Opium War, are a symbol of foreign imperialist aggression which the Communist government are keen to keep fresh in people’s minds. As Julia Lovell explains in the opening pages of her recent history of The Opium War, tales of China’s past sufferings under feudalism on the one hand and foreign imperialism on the other are a crucial part of the current regime’s narrative of its own rise to power, and thus its legitimacy. What English school children learn about Beijing’s looted Old Summer Palace, reduced to marble rubble by British troops? For the Chinese authorities, those Beijing ruins are an important spur to patriotic feeling – a reminder of the nineteenth-century wrongs against the Chinese nation that were only symbolically put right when Hong Kong finally returned from British control in 1997.

I only partly understood it then, but I spent the first eight years of my life, in Hong Kong, living in the shadow of a countdown. The Joint Declaration of 1984 – the agreement between Beijing and London that started the clock on Hong Kong’s eventual return to China – was signed when I was a year old. That number, 1997, loomed everywhere – was the subject of so many of the adult conversations I listened to half-comprehendingly from below. Many Hong Kong Chinese started looking for an exit strategy, especially the middle-class, which my father had watched grow so numerous in the decades since he first arrived in the colony in the ’60s. In the years leading up to the ‘Handover’ of 1997, three quarters of a million people emigrated from Hong Kong (some unofficial reports suggested even higher numbers), out of a population of six million. These people’s fears tell us something about colonialism’s paradoxical legacy in Hong Kong. Would the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ approach to the island’s gradual reintegration into China end up eroding the freedoms put in place by the British?

In his poem, ‘BN(O)’, from his first collection, Paper Scissors Stone, the Hong Kong-raised poet Kit Fan who now lives in the UK, looks back on a curious phenomenon of the pre-handover years: the British National (Overseas). The class of BN(O) was created in response to the question of what would happen to the people of Hong Kong after the return to China, but actually spoke more to British anxieties about immigration from their former colonies. Not the same thing as citizenship, BN(O) status didn’t grant right of abode in the UK, and needed specifically to be applied for. In the poem, Fan recalls standing, in 1987, in the long queue to register in front of the British Consulate, ‘at the junction of Supreme Court Road / and Justice Drive’. His grandmother peels and segments an orange, handing him the pieces one by one as they creep forward in line. The fruit’s sourness in the mouth is a taste the speaker indelibly associates, in later years, with the feeling of being ‘abandoned / by two countries, between two continents.’

My family left Hong Kong in 1991, with six years to spare, but a Chinese friend whose family stayed on a few years more, before leaving for Australia, recalled the empty desks that would appear each week in his primary school classroom, every empty chair marking another emigrated family. When Chris Pattern, Robin Cook, Tony Blair and a mournful looking Prince Charles lined up on the red podium at the exhibition centre in Wan Chai on the night of 30^th June 1997, my parents watched the ceremony not in real time but on the VCR in the lounge. The video player is long gone, but I think the tape is still in a box in the garage.

I watched that footage again for the first time this April, on a writing trip to Hong Kong. In the Hong Kong Museum of History, although there are one or two displays covering post-1997 events, the last room before the exit is a twilit cinema where you sit to watch the film of the Handover ceremony on a loop. I was there at the tail end of the day, just before closing, and I so was alone when I sat down to watch it. Stray details struck me: Prince Charles’ lugubrious ears; the strangeness of the fact that the Prime Minister we sent was Tony Blair, who somehow feels like a figure from too recent memory to have been involved. I found myself unexpectedly moved by the experience, less by the video than by the news clippings from all over the world covering the event, which had been pasted onto the cinema’s walls. In the screen’s half light, I got up and padded around to glance through articles and editorials from The Times, The New York Times, The South China Morning Post, and many others I don’t recall. I suddenly had a feeling of how momentous that night in 1997 had been – as, among other things, a symbolic end to the British Empire. That was my history, my origin, my explanation. I blinked to stave off silly tears.

Wandering round the history museum’s exhibits, I spotted a white sign next to a wooden crate which had been used to store black balls of raw opium as they sailed from the fields of British India towards China’s southern ports. It described the morning when British troops first planted their flag at a place on the island’s coast which came to be called Possession Point. On 26^th January 1841, Sir Commodore James Bremer, rear-admiral of the Royal Navy during the First Opium War, took over Hong Kong island, though The Treaty of Nanking did not formally incorporate the territory into the British Empire until the year after. As the Union Jack was hoisted at 8.15am, a gun salute from the harboured war ships rang around the otherwise empty bay. Away from the lines of royal marines and a few visitors from the mainland, the ceremony was observed by a handful of hawkers: the island was almost uninhabited at the time.

I was staying in Sheung Wan, an area on the northwest of the island. It was not on my mental map of the Hong Kong of my childhood, and perhaps I never went there then. I had chosen it because it was quite central, and because there were some good deals to be found on short-term sublets. The roads in Sheung Wan wound in parallel along the hillside, which climbed eventually up towards the Peak, meaning that if you wanted to cross from one hill-hugging road to another you had to walk down a ‘ladder street’ made up of a multitude of narrow steps. Some days before my trip to the museum, on one of my late afternoon walks, I had noticed a sign that read ‘Possession Street’, and mentally filed it as something to look into. It turned out that the front door of the block of flats I’d been staying in on Hollywood Road was about twenty feet from Possession Point – or at least where historians now suspect it lies. A small area of greenery crossed by pebbled paths called Hollywood Road Park now marks the site. Because of the land reclamation which has crept the coastline further and further into the harbour, Possession Point is now marooned, lying several hundred metres away from the current seafront. When I asked my mum what she knew about Possession Point, she said she had read about it in a history before I was born, but it seemed to her nobody was ever really interested. She made an effort to find the place – in those days there was no salmon pink signboard marking its location – and when she eventually tracked it down, further inland than she’d first thought, it was the site of a public lavatory.

During my Easter on Hollywood Road, I would go and sit on a bench in the park overlooking the fishpond, which reflected a red-columned pagoda capped by a tapering green roof that looked like the stem cut off an aubergine. The orange carp seemed happy enough, but the pond’s population of terrapins was struggling, as the park’s designers hadn’t incorporated any little islands or rocky outcrops for them to sit on. When they wanted to emerge into the dry, they had to arduously clamber up twenty centimetres of green plastic mesh protruding vertically from the water, designed to hold in the water lilies. When they made it to the top, the terrapins had to balance, without falling off, so that their ventral shells seesawed on the top edge. I watched one terrapin the size of a makeup compact heave himself up a few inches and then plop back several times over the course of ten minutes. When he finally made it to the summit, a heavier, soup-bowl sized companion bounced onto the plastic net nearby, flinging the little one back into the water. This was the place where it had all started, the hundred and fifty year history of British Hong Kong.

Reading about the Opium Wars that Easter, I would come across details that seemed to reach forward into my life. The two Scottish magnates of the nineteenth-century opium trade, William Jardine and James Matheson, secured a prominent role in the histories with their canny trading. I had heard their names as a child under the guise of Jardine Matheson & Co., a powerful Far Eastern trading house, or ‘Hong’, which grew up around the two Scots’ opium profits. Having expanded out of opium into a variety of trading areas, including insurance, Jardine was the company my father came to work for when he first moved to Hong Kong in the ’60s.

Or there was Yin Je, who would come to our Midlevels flat to cook during the day, and from whom I learnt whatever smatterings of Cantonese I had as a child (Fi di sic la! Hurry up and eat your dinner!). She would turn up each morning in an amah’s sam fu, or pressed uniform of starched white tunic and black trousers. It was only years later I discovered she had sewn those clothes herself: when she was first sent to Hong Kong, aged eleven, to live with an aunt, she had earned money by doing piece work with a sewing machine. At that time they lived in one of the many tin hut shantytowns that pressed the Hong Kong hillsides. It was only later, after she had started work as a cook for an ex-pat family, that they were moved to one of the new resettlement estates – blocks of flats built by the government after a series of devastating fires spread through the ramshackle hillside shelters, killing many of the recent immigrants who squatted there.

Yin Je had been sent to Hong Kong, my mother told me, because her family had fallen on hard times. Her father had been the son of the head of the village, and so their family was the richest in the area. But one year, when times got hard, the villagers resorted to growing poppy. In Yin Je’s village, men and women all laboured in the fields. But Yin Je’s father, knowing how to read and write, was deemed unsuitable for physical labour, and so his appointed part in the venture was to do the numbers. It also fell to him, as an educated man, to test the village’s product. He got hooked (my mother’s word) and finally sold his fields and house to feed his habit. When I came back to Hong Kong for the first time, for a fortnight, aged 17, my mother and I met Yin Je at a food hall deep in a part of Kowloon I didn’t know, where the hills outside were covered in lush green ferns. She had forgotten whatever small English she used to know, and I had done the same with my scraps of Cantonese, so the two of us couldn’t really communicate any more. Her black curls had silvered in the intervening years, and she suddenly looked very small. I felt bad when, smiling, she handed us a round blue tin of those sugared Danish biscuits you used to get in the ’90s. We hadn’t brought anything.

 

 'Low Price Shop, Hollywood Road, circa 1999'

Hong Kong’s Hollywood Road has nothing to do with California, and in fact predates the settlement of the American Hollywood. The first road ever to be constructed in the nascent colony, in 1844, it seems it was named by the Governor after his family estate back in England. The many antique and curio shops that still line it had their origins when Hollywood Road was still on the coast. Foreign sailors would try to hawk the artefacts they’d picked up in China before sailing back to Europe. Until I asked her about Possession Point, I never knew that my mother had lived near this area of the island when she was small, and would walk along Hollywood Road on her way to school when she was five or so, playing hop skip jump on the many concrete flights of stairs that wind off the main drag. She remembered the antique shops, some of whose windows now display prancing terracotta horses and rare carved jades excavated from mainland tombs, with a price tag only for tycoons. My mum also remembered the various coffinmakers who still have workshops there today. I had never seen a Chinese coffin before I peered in under the garage-like metal shutters, where the light-wood coffins, clover-shaped at each end, would park while the craftsmen were still carving or lacquering them.

My stay on Hollywood Road happened to coincide with the Qingming Festival (Chingming in Cantonese). Also known as the Tomb Sweeping Festival, or the Day of Clear Brightness, it is the day when Chinese families go to their ancestors’ tombs to care for the grave, pulling its weeds and adding fresh flowers and offerings. On the pavement outside the buildings, people had set up blackened metal tins or little braziers, orange flames licking up from inside. They would stand by, feeding offerings into the fire, including Hell money in vast denominations (‘Bank of Hell, $100,000,000’) for their ancestors to spend in the afterlife. (The currency of the Underworld usually strikes foreigners as resembling the notes from a monopoly set.) In the narrow backstreets of Sheung Wan, I came across several shops selling paper votives. Their wares ranged from basic necessities (socks, polo shirts, baskets of dim sum) to modern luxuries (iphones, speed boats, Ferraris), and even a four-storey mansion resembling a paper Barbie house. All were constructed in three dimensions from printed and folded card or tissue. I couldn’t help chuckling to myself when I spotted a lifesized gold watch that read ‘RLOEX’ across the dial. Perhaps the afterlife has its copyright enforcers too.

 

Dim sum paper votives hanging in a shop in Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

That day on Hollywood Road you could see the whole history of Chinese funeral offerings – from an emperor’s tomb-stowed terracotta horse in the antique shop window, to the 3D paper roast suckling pig a waitress or taxi driver might burn for a hungering relative. Walking through the streets on Qingming, passing the smoking braziers converting a descendant’s proffered love to ash, I felt very much an observer to these rites. I have never fed a wad of banknotes into a can of fire, or left a saucer of apples in front of a joss-sticked shrine.

 

...foreign to this tiny, floating, motherless city.

 

My mother’s abandonment as a baby means that, other than her, I have no Chinese family, no ancestors to whom I might give sacrifice. She told me once how, when she was very small, her adoptive mother had sublet for them a room in a flat rented out by another family. Her mother slept in the tiny room, while she was put out in the corridor, to curl up in the opened trunk that held the other family’s winter clothes. She fell asleep each night seeing, in the darkness, the smoldering orange tips of the joss-sticks bedded in the sand of the other family’s ancestral shrine. In a world where your ancestors deserve worship like gods, what happens to people who have none?

 

–Sarah Howe

III. To China: The Library Cave [by Sarah Howe]

[My apologies – after a gruelling flight from London to Beijing yesterday (a journey I’d made in the opposite direction a few days before, coming home for a dear friend’s wedding), I found myself feeling somewhat discombobulated by my ping ponging of time zones. And so I’m running a day behind (or ahead?) with these posts which, appropriately enough, have just acted out the very West-East transit they describe.]

 

            At the turn of the twentieth century,

the monk appointed by himself caretaker

            of the sacred rubbish was persuaded

by Aurel Stein that the explorer should be able

            to load up his ponies and

‘Don’t miss me too much today’

 

            two years later the cave was empty.

                   –Caleb Klaces, ‘The cave is woken up’

 

At the close of my second post, I left you with Li Bai’s famous poem, ‘The Moon at the Fortified Pass’, which imagines how the wind which beats at the battlements of the Yumen Pass in Gansu has already scoured a thousand miles of desert before it reaches that point. The elements have eroded the four-feet deep ochre brick walls of today’s Yumen Pass to a dilapidated softness – as though destined to collapse back into the surrounding sands – which it can’t have possessed in Li Bai’s day, when it bristled with soldiers guarding China from westward hordes. Stretching away on either side of the pass are distant, marooned fragments of the Han Dynasty (206-220 BC) Great Wall, now just a few feet high. Built from tamped earth and reeds in the absence of a resilient local stone, they are a thousand years older than the crenellated bulwarks of the Ming Dynasty wall tourists saunter along near Beijing. On the afternoon, two weeks ago now, we filed through the squat doorway that broaches the Yumen Gate, jostled by a stream of eager Chinese tourists, the air hung unbearably still – the desert’s oven-like expanse relieved by no wind. But when the wind does blow in that corridor of the Gobi, it blows from the West. In other words, the winds noted by Li Bai follow the same route across Central Asia from the Middle East as the eastbound caravans of 2000 years ago, which would have had to pass through that very juncture, where we were stood, on their way to Xi’an and other Chinese cities to trade in silk and precious goods.

 

The Yumen Pass, near Dunhuang

 

A stretch of the Han Dynasty Great Wall, near the Yumen Pass

We had originally planned to track further back along this stretch of the Silk Road, from Gansu on to Xinjiang province. Xinjiang, whose name means ‘new border’, is the furthest west of China’s provinces and also the largest – its vast reaches of desert account for almost 20 percent of the country’s total area. Despite a recent and growing influx of Han Chinese, its inhabitants are mostly members of the Uighur ethnic minority, whose Turkic descent and Islamic faith mean they have more in common with the peoples of Central Asia than the Chinese heartland. We were interested in the city of Turpan because of its importance as a stopover on the Silk Road, but modernity intruded (as it does) by way of a reminder that the troubles facing China’s western border regions in Li Bai’s poem are still very much a present concern. In July this year violence once again broke out in Turpan’s streets, partly in remembrance of the Xinjiang riots of July 2009, in which hundreds were killed. In an effort to quell the ethnic unrest, the central government cut off communications and the internet in an effort to stay the flow of information in and out. As July wore on, we scoured the internet back in England, noting the trickle of photos showing tanks and troop-bearing vehicles lining the roads, which had made it out via twitter and a few news outlets, pondering whether it might still be possible to go to Xinjiang. That is, until our domestic flight into Turpan was cancelled a few days before we were due to travel, barred along with all other routes in to the region. That decided that.

On the long drive from Dunhuang out to the Yumen Pass, we whisked by an ‘Ethnic Minority Cultural Park’. From the photo-heavy signage, it seemed to offer Han tourists, there for the Silk Road sites, the chance to stop by and watch specimens of the westernmost few of China’s famous ‘55 recognized minority peoples’ engage in traditional cultural activities, from dancing and sporting colourful costumes to playing typical instruments and carving folk handicrafts. We had already encountered something of this that morning, when we found the route out of our Dunhuang hotel’s front entrance flanked on both sides by twenty pretty local girls wearing elaborate jingling headdresses and skimpy turquoise bikini-and-harem-pant-type outfits. They all adopted wafty poses and smiled (no teeth) while a besuited tourist-trade delegation padded past them into the carpark. By the time we passed between their ranks a few minutes later, they had already gone slack, looking rather bored. Our driver said that you could see Mongols and Kazakh immigrants, among others, in the Dunhuang ‘Ethnic Minority Cultural Park’, but when I asked if there were any Uighurs inside, he was distracted by an overturned motorbike that had clearly skidded to the roadside some minutes earlier. After that, I didn’t have the heart to ask him again.

The main reason for making the trek to Dunhuang (which really is in the middle of nowhere) is to see the Mogao Caves. The Mogao area’s several hundred individual temple-grottoes, which are decorated from floor to ceiling with painted murals, have also earned it the name ‘Caves of a Thousand Buddhas.’ Along with the material goods transported along the Silk Road, another foreign import to China that arrived along those continent-spanning routes was, of course, Buddhism. The Mogao Grottoes are not the only such painted caves in the region: various sites survive where monks and merchants, adopting the practice from Indian Buddhism, sponsored as an act of piety a cave to be cut out of the cliff face and painted with scenes brought to life from the written sutras.

What makes the Mogao site unique, however, is the sensational rediscovery in 1900 of its so-called ‘Library Cave’. A smallish cave (you can only peer in through a grille, as the guide’s torch wavers through the gloom), it had remained sealed for centuries, filled to the roof with thousands of manuscripts on paper, silk, hemp and bamboo, all hidden behind a carefully repainted wall. The manuscripts’ ‘discovery’ is usually credited to the British explorer Aurel Stein, who hearing rumours of their existence, rushed there to purchase thousands of the scrolls, shipping them back to the British Museum in London. But in fact it was a Taoist priest named Wang Yuanlu – he had arrived at the caves while wandering through a famine and appointed himself their caretaker, sweeping out the in-blown sand each night – who helped pull down the patch of wall another monk had noticed rung hollowly under his tapping pipe. Amongst the batch of manuscripts wending their slow way to London was a volume called The Diamond Sutra, which would later be identified as the oldest printed book ever found. It was the unfortunate Wang who presided over their sale to Stein and the succession of foreign collectors who arrived in his wake – a fact which continues to grate upon Chinese patriotic sensibilities, as was clear from the wire of emotion in our guide’s voice as she pointed her frail torch into the Library Cave’s hollow dark. Stein conducted the negotiations in broken Chinese and could not, in fact, read the scrolls he was acquiring.

...two years later the cave was empty.

The story of the Library Cave makes up one strand in a sequence called ‘16 Airs’ from the first collection, Bottled Air, of British poet Caleb Klaces. (Klaces might be known to American readers because of his role as curator of Like Starlings, an online space for collaboration between US and British poets, whose conversations often have a transatlantic flavour.) Bottled Air is a book of poems whose brilliance and variousness makes me regret the need to pick out here just one small tile from their mosaic. Describing the origins of these poems in an interview, Klaces stressed that he has never been to China. His imaginations of Mogao were mediated entirely through Aurel Stein’s journals and the other books on the subject he could find in the Texas university library where he went to work at the time. I find this so interesting – the question of what it means to summon a place in the mind solely from one’s read experience of it. The same thought occurred to me as I processed along the Mogao cliff-face, filing behind the other tourists to pass in and out of one cave after another, eyes dazzling in the desert sun after the accustomed gloom – Bottled Air in my rucksack all the way.  

Klaces’ poem, ‘The cave is woken up’, opens by comparing ‘Waking cut into managable pieces / by the snooze button’ – its troughs and hikes of consciousness – to the lookout towers spaced along the Great Wall. Intercut with the narrative of Mogao’s rediscovery, the poem’s other overt subject is a long distance relationship – a Skype call (‘Don’t miss me too much today’) across the Atlantic between the speaker and a girlfriend who is ‘always finding secret caves / in metaphors’. Klaces’ oxymoron, ‘sacred rubbish’, in the passage from my epigraph, at once reveres and dismisses the Library Cave’s contents. It is entirely characteristic of the book, whose tone is at once laconic, flat, and intriguingly multilayered. Whose words are these? Is the colour we’re getting here (‘sacred rubbish’) an ironic insight of the speaker’s – voiced with a century’s distance from the colonial unconcern of the European collectors? Or does ‘sacred rubbish’ subtly focalise the thoughts of one of the historical figures in the poem? Aurel Stein, who purchases the trove for a mere four horseshoes of silver? Wang Yuanlu, who allows the treasures to leave China for a song? Or could it be the monks who sealed the cave a millennium before? Their motives are still not understood, but it is thought they closed off the cave either to protect its precious cargo from Muslim invaders riding from the West, or alternatively because the Library Cave’s contents were fragments, useless scraps of sutras, which were only stowed away because they couldn’t bring themselves to burn them.

So preciously vulnerable are the Mogao Caves that tourists cannot be trusted to wander them alone. You must join a tour, so that your guide can unlock the climate-controlling metal shutter doors (donated in the seventies, our guide said, by a rich Hong Kong businessman) and check the carbon dioxide detector dial just inside the lintel to see if excessive touristic breathing is today at risk of mouldering the frescoes to oblivion. Only then will she gesture for you to shuffle through the threshold. When Aurel Stein saw them, the caves’ cliff-face exterior had partially collapsed, leaving their precious statue-sentried vestibules exposed to the elements, with ladders the only means of communication between each hole. My husband Marc and I were part of the only English-language tour group that day, and found ourselves tagging along behind a modest busload of twenty or so middle-aged Israelis. (Even though his Hebrew no longer stretches much further than his Bar mitzvah portion, Marc takes a certain professional pleasure in identifying Israeli tourists when we happen upon them abroad.)

Our guide spoke rapid English straight into our earpieces, which startled because of its frequent invocation of a highly specialised theological and art historical vocabulary (Asparas, Bodhisattvas, lapis lazuli, oxidization), which sat strangely with her lack of basic fluency elsewhere. She would preface all of these choice terms by giving the word in Chinese, then would say, several times over, ‘Do you know...Bodhisattvas?’, or ‘Do you know...oxidization?’ The effect of her repeated ‘Do you know...’, ‘Do you know...’, was to make my idling mind begin to imagine that Oxidization, like the various members of the Buddhist pantheon, was a personified entity whose acquaintance one might hope to make. As it turned out, her strategy was an effective one, and no doubt learned from hard experience, because many of the Israelis hadn't met Oxidization. So there would follow a period of susurration in which the more fluent English speakers would try to translate for their companions what was going on. This pleasant Babel lingered especially long after the guide explained why so many of the seated Buddhas and other painted figures appear to have black skin: the lead white pigment, ground by the original craftsmen so many centuries ago, had oxidised on prolonged exposure to the air and gradually darkened to black.

I thought I knew what was coming when one lady finally asked the guide whether part of the Buddhist community of Mogao had come from Africa. Perhaps she had in the back of her mind the Ethiopian Jews famously evacuated to Israel in the ’70s and ’80s. In many ways it was a fair question, given the trans-continentally cosmopolitan variety of peoples who passed through Dunhuang on the Silk Road. Among the manuscripts in the Library Cave were discovered not only Buddhist scriptures, but writings in many different languages and from several different religions – Daoism, Manichaeism, even Nestorian Christianity. Several leaves of prayers written in Hebrew found in the Library Cave have allowed scholars to conclude that Jews were among the many groups who traded along the much-trodden road via Dunhuang. In fact, Marc and I had gone to seek out the still-surviving descendants of these Silk Road Jewish traders the summer before, when we took a detour from following the route through China of the seventeenth-century Jesuit Missionary, Matteo Ricci, to stop at the city of Kaifeng. Kaifeng lies right across the other side of the country from Dunhuang, at the Eastern end of the Silk Road – and was even the capital of China for a time. Ricci never visited Kaifeng himself, but in 1605 received an emissary from the head Rabbi of their small community – previously unknown to Europeans – who wanted to negotiate with him towards their conversion to Christianity. Otherwise, he feared the dying out of their non-Chinese traditions.

After many generations of intermarriage, the Kaifeng Jews looked Chinese in appearance, but still practised many customs (sometimes without quite remembering why), such as the avoidance of pork, which marked them out from the rest of the Chinese population. Searching the dusty alleys behind one of Kaifeng’s many mosques, we eventually stumbled upon ‘Teaching Torah Lane’. A lady about my age and who self-identified as Jewish, Guo Yan, welcomed us into a side room in the house she inherited from her grandparents, which happens to sit on the site of the synagogue built there in 1163 (the synagogue’s footprint is now largely covered by Kaifeng’s city Hospital no. 1). The room serves as makeshift shrine to the place’s Jewish past, its back wall bearing a painted scroll mapping the lost synagogue’s various courtyards – to my eye, its architecture of red wood columns surmounted by colourfully tiled roofs looked like a Chinese Buddhist temple. Guo Yan’s dream was to raise enough money to have the synagogue reconstructed, not as an active place of worship – she didn’t believe the government would allow that – but as a kind of garden-cum-museum with live demonstrations (‘Ethnic Minority Cultural Park’?) of the city’s Jewish past. We bought a leaflet from her for a few pounds. In 1851, European missionaries in Kaifeng purchased a Hebrew Torah scroll, one of the fifteen thought to have originated in the city – the remaining Jewish descendents were happy to sell it to the foreigners as no one could read it anymore. It now resides in London, in the British Library.

One of the most extraordinary things about the Mogao frescoes, oxidization aside, is the continuing brightness of their pigments – the intactness that came from being so long forgotten by the outside world. And so the examples of their deliberate defacement, when you come upon them, are all the more striking. In 1921 the Dunhuang local authorities were confronted with a flood of incoming Russian soldiers, fleeing the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution. They decided to house them temporarily in the Mogao Caves:

 

The emigrants wrote their names all over the statue,

        carved genitals into its mouth

and cut out its eyes. “The kind of shit people do

        to find out where they are”

                        (Caleb Klaces, ‘Emigrants deface the caves’; you can read an earlier version of the poem, which differs only by a few words, online here) 

 

In one of the caves we entered, decorated with thousands and thousands of two-inch high Buddhas, crosslegged in their painted niches (the pattern reminded me of English wallpaper), the Russian refugees had used their nails, or perhaps knives, to scratch out the faces of all of the tiny figures they could reach. Our guide explained that they were after the gold leaf that once shimmered over those thumbprint-sized visages. I wasn’t sure about this explanation; I wasn’t sure one could so confidently infer the motives of such iconoclasts. In my academic work as a scholar of Renaissance English literature, I’ve been interested for some time in the history of Reformation iconoclasm – the waves of destruction of Church art, in the 1530s and after, that followed on from England’s conversion to Protestantism. A host of little churches in Norfolk contain painted rood screens of Christian saints sporting exactly the same type of damage as the Buddhas in Dunhuang: whole faces, or sometimes just eyes, scratched out with a neatness of outline (like a kind of reverse colouring-in) that seems to belie the passion involved in such a destructive act. The paradox is, of course, that the iconoclasts seem to believe that the pattern of pigment on the panel before them holds forth an eye, a face, which could suffer hurt, even as they seek to demonstrate the image has no hold over them. Sacred rubbish.

The final stanza of Klaces’ last Mogao poem, ‘Emigrants deface the caves’, switches scene entirely, leaving behind the desert of Dunhuang for what I think must be the South American waterfall that starred in Werner Herzog’s 2004 film, The White Diamond:

 

Nobody had ever seen the cave behind the water.

        “Please don’t show it in your film”,

requested the elder tribesman. “We would rather not pry

        where the swifts go. It is their place,

not ours”.

 

The cave behind the water. Herzog’s water-veiled cave is that of Guyana’s Kaieteur Falls. But the segue here reminded me of the Water Curtain Cave (Shuǐlián Dòng) from the Chinese novel Journey to the West, the thought of whose secret space used to enthrall me as my mum read to my six-year-old self about the Monkey King’s early days, happy in the cave behind the waterfall. Journey to the West ultimately tells, of course, the legend of how the Buddhist Scriptures were brought eastward from India into China. In The White Diamond, Herzog puts his camera behind the sacred falls and watches the footage himself, but does not show it to the viewer:

 

But how could he not take a camera

        through the falls, just once, to turn

on himself, to star in what wasn’t really there?

 

When the Jesuits arrived in China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they considered paintings of the Virgin and child to be among their most powerful tools in the quest for converts. (The Crucifixion – the execution of a lowly slave – seemed to go down less well with the Chinese audience.) But it wasn’t so much the content of the paintings as their style – endowed with all the ‘realism’ Western linear perspective and chiaroscuro could afford – in which they placed their faith. The technical devices of European painting demonstrated its clear superiority to the unshaded flatness and misshapenly proportioned figures the Jesuits saw in Chinese painting – and thus couldn’t help but capture the minds of Chinese converts with its awesome verisimilitude. And yet this idea of depth – of penetrating through the painted surface into the receding world of the work of art behind – is enshrined in the famous legend of the artist Wu Daozi. On finishing a spectacular mural for the emperor’s palace, the Tang dynasty painter clapped his hands and disappeared into a cave within his picture, whose mouth sealed itself behind him before the emperor could follow. Scratching away at the murals’ gilded surface, perhaps Mogao’s Russian guests were trying to emulate Wu Daozi – to open up a hole in the painted surface and follow him through.

 

–Sarah Howe

II. To China: Du Fu’s Cottage [by Sarah Howe]

 

If I could get a mansion with a thousand, ten thousand rooms,

A great shelter for all the world’s scholars, together in joy,

Solid as a mountain, the elements could not move it.

Oh! If I could see this house before me,

I’d happily freeze to death in my broken hut!

            –Du Fu, ‘My Thatched Cottage was Torn Apart By Autumn Winds’,

trans. Mark Alexander

 

Just over a week ago I found myself in the Sichuanese capital, Chengdu, standing in front of the thatched cottage of Du Fu. Du Fu 杜甫 (712-770), along with Li Bai 李白 (701-762), is of course the most celebrated of Tang dynasty poets. Looking over the vaguely Disneyish contours of his Chengdu cottage, with its low eaves and hummocked thatch, it’s hard not to think of the famous poem of his that begins with an Autumn gale stripping the straw from its roof, to leave his children rained on in their beds. Written when Du Fu was 50 years old, that poem builds up to a final vision picturing a mansion of ten thousand rooms in which (depending on how the translator deals with 士 shì) all the world’s scholars, or all the world’s poor, might shelter together. So impoverished was Du Fu around this period of his life that one of those children died of starvation. His official position had, scholars suspect, fallen foul of one outspokenly critical poem too many. After the Tang dynasty found itself riven by rebellion, Du Fu had fled the then capital of Xi’an, wandering across a devastated country until, weak and sickening, he reached the southwestern city of Chengdu in autumn 759, then spent the next year working to build his simple thatched hut by a stream.

According to the signs, what you now see tucked among the delightful gardens of Flower Rinsing Creek is actually a Qing Dynasty reconstruction of Du Fu’s cottage. (But given that the Qing ruled from 1644 to 1912, I wasn’t clear whether the current bui
lding’s vintage is closer to Milton’s Paradise Lost or Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’.) The poem about the autumn gale and ruined thatch only underlines the basic fact that all traditional Chinese wooden structures are, in some sense, ephemeral, even as they endure. This Ship of Theseus-like paradox struck me on my first visit to mainland China in 2004. One section of the Forbidden City had been sequestered behind blue metal hoardings. On the other side, conservationists weren’t swabbing surfaces with cotton wool; rather, workmen were sawing and hefting out wholesale the more cracked and flaking of the red-painted wooden pillars. (The sign read: ‘The ancient building is renovating. Excuse me for bringing trouble to you.’) If every single pillar, beam, and tile in the Forbidden City has been replaced at least once, is it still the Forbidden City? That question probably only occurs to us because our way of thinking has been shaped by Athenians (who might or might not have a ship belonging to Theseus).

Since I joined my current Cambridge college, Caius, as a Research Fellow a couple of years ago, I’ve had to get used to calling the figure known to the wider poetry world as J.H. Prynne, ‘Jeremy’, and to sitting near him at lunch. Despite the cavernously high ceilings in college hall, dinners there can get uncomfortably hot, and you will often see Jeremy at high table, wafting a silk fan painted with a Chinese poem, whose author and title have sadly escaped me since I last asked. This was not many months after I arrived at Caius, and Jeremy replied that many of the fan poem’s more obscure characters had once been printed in his memory, but had since faded. (Having in recent times been trying to grapple with a hundred or more new hanzi a week, I now know how this feels.) He then went on to tell the most wonderful anecdote about his College Tutor at Jesus, the man who had first begun teaching him Chinese, Laurence Picken. As Jeremy told it, Picken had been a biologist and had published a tome on the structure of the cell. But when Watson and Crick published the DNA paper in 1953, he saw the writing on the wall for his particular niche. He decided to turn fulltime to what had previously been a hobby – oriental musicology.

The most important discovery of Picken’s musicology career was his ‘rediscovery’ of Tang court music, which had once been thought lost because it survived only in scraps of documentation. In his search for the lost Tang music, Picken’s instincts led him to Japan – whose highly conservative culture has preserved so many aspects of ancient China – and then to Japan’s remaining ancient temples. One day, he had a flash of inspiration: what if he took the recordings he had been making of the monks’ chants and sped them up? What he found was that the monks’ austere drones transformed, when played back at double speed, into a lively rhythm that might furnish the dancing of an evening at the Tang court. When he compared this living musical relic to the scraps of Tang notation, they appeared to match. And so the Tang music once thought extinct, Picken managed to reconstruct to the point where it could be performed again.

This delightful fable of accidental preservation and unexpected recovery stayed with me. So when I came to read Prynne’s 2012 introduction to the Chinese translation of his Selected Poems – a talk reprinted in Cambridge Quarterly’s issue on China and the Cambridge English Faculty – I recognised it immediately. Within the prefatory talk, Picken’s is not only a story about history’s losses and gains; it’s a parable to take into the difficult process of translating a poem from one language into another, which involves its own tallying of gains and losses.

A few weeks ago I went home to visit my parents, so that I would get to see them before my next long stretch of travelling. Later that night, the house quiet except for the hum of the fridge, my mum brought down two books from upstairs – one was her secondary school Chinese poetry textbook, the other was a Hong Kong-printed copy of the 300 Tang Poems, which she had bought a few years later. I needed to trace the eye-scrunchingly small characters down the page with my index finger, working across from right to left in the old way. She would pause to help me with the characters I didn’t yet know, or where I couldn’t recognise the traditional equivalent of a simplified one. And so we read together – her reading the words in their Cantonese pronunciation, me sounding them out in my English-stilted Mandarin. My Chinese studies have not yet stretched to Cantonese, whose eight or so tones make it a more musical language than Mandarin, but also an even more fiendishly difficult one to learn. I read somewhere that Cantonese is likely closer than modern Mandarin is to the ancient pronunciation of Du Fu and Li Bai. The sonic effect of that midnight reading was lovely in its own right, as the sounds in the two different dialects crossed paths, sometimes almost overlapping, only to diverge again, as if harmonising with one another. 

I’ve seen those two books on the shelf as long as I remember, so it moved me to be able to pick them up and read from them, albeit haltingly and with much help. Because of their place in my mother’s early life, the books themselves already feel like precious survivors. But during that reading session, two further relics emerged from the tanned pages of the 300 Tang Poems. When the book was new, my mum had fashioned it an impromptu dustjacket from a cheap inkwash print bought off a stall, by now an interesting piece of ephemera in its own right. I had looked at its design of grey ducklings on a reed-edged pond many times, pulling it off the shelf as a child – it was the only thing in the whole volume I could understand. But that night, for the first time, I noticed a folded, much-yellowed rectangle of paper tucked into the dustjacket’s inside edge. When I pulled it out an opened it, it turned out to be a form, neatly filled in blue ink, which my mother had needed to submit, aged 11, to apply for her Hong Kong ID card. The over-neat, childlike English script wasn’t my mother’s handwriting, but apparently that of a ‘cousin’ – not a real cousin, but a granddaughter of the old woman she’d been left to lodge with at that time while her adoptive mother went out to work.

The second relic I recognised immediately as of my doing. It fell out when I flicked through the poems: a serrated-edged leaf of about two inches, pressed to an unnatural flatness, and desiccated to a purplish brown. I’d gone though a phase in Hong Kong of picking samples of the local flora when taken for walks, to stow in selected books around the flat. I think I had got the idea that this was the sort of thing little girls in England did. My parents eventually put a stop to it when it was discovered I had ruined an encyclopedia of the animal kingdom – whose colour prints of tapirs and whale sharks had filled my rainy afternoons – by crushing inside it a particularly large and succulent tropical bloom picked up outside our block. The deep pink nectar had seeped through several pages on either side, cementing them together. When I started at my primary school in England, they liked to have us learn classic poems off by heart. I’m not sure if the teacher thought she was being a wit when she assigned me – a recent arrival from the tropics – Browning’s ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’. As it was, the poem’s warnings about the ‘gaudy melon-flower’, and its inferiority to restrained English blossoms, had come too late for this particular colonial child.

Where the purplish serrated leaf had sat undisturbed, for what could have been twenty years, between the pages in my mother’s copy of 300 Tang Poems, it had left a mottled ghost of itself. Before closing the book that night, I slotted the folded yellow form into its dustjacket niche, then placed the leaf carefully back on top of its printed shadow.

That day in Chengdu, when we had finished looking round Du Fu’s cottage, and I had photographed his supposedly replica desk, we strolled onward to another of the city’s famous parks. At that hour of the afternoon it was full of Chengdu’s elderly, seated with thermoses of green tea at the outdoor tables within the sprawling precincts of the park’s teahouse. Most were playing Mahjong, their quiet chat periodically punctuated by a fevered clacking as a table ‘washed the tiles’ (xi pai), all hands digging in to shuffle the plastic pieces around the centre of the table. As we followed the park’s bamboo-arched avenues, we came across an old man who was using one section of flagged path as a giant piece of paper for ‘ground calligraphy’, or dishu. Dipping his outsized brush – it was somewhere between brush and mop – into an old can filled with water, he used that ‘ink’ to trace out characters onto the path. Their scale turned the act of writing into a movement involving not only the hand, but the whole body, like a kind of dance.

I had heard about this ephemeral art of ‘ground calligraphy’, but had never seen it. It apparently had its origins in the public parks of Beijing in the early ’90s. One might read too much into that putative date and place of origin, but it made me think of the theme of transience and disappearance that runs through Chinese contemporary art of that decade. The work of one artist, Song Dong, sprang to mind particularly. He had begun as a painter at an early age, but after the trauma of events in Tiananmen in 1989, he ceased work for some years, before returning as a purely conceptual artist. In 1995 (perhaps inspired by the old men in the Beijing parks?) Song began to keep a daily journal, which he would write out in water on a large flat stone. Their putative record vanished faster than the days themselves. The following year, on a freezing New Year’s Eve night, Song performed a piece called ‘Breathing’. He lay down in a totally deserted Tiananmen square, face to the ground, so that his lips almost touched the pavement. Over the next 40 minutes his clouded breath played over the concrete flag, its vapour cumulatively freezing into a thin sheen of ice, which lasted for a few hours but was gone by morning.

Almost at the same time as we discovered the elderly Chengdu calligrapher, a posse of student physiotherapists out on a team-building exercise had already engaged him respectfully in conversation. He teased them about their difficulty understanding the traditional script, or fantizi, of his artwork.  Their generation, unlike his, had grown up only ever knowing the Mainland’s simplified Chinese script, first introduced by Mao in 1956. Eventually he handed over his brush-mop to one of the girls, who giggled and tried to refuse. The whole group laughed as she tried, jaggedly, to write out her name’s three characters with the unfamiliar instrument, which suddenly seemed as clunky in her hands as it had been deft in his.

In the midst of this intergenerational exchange, I asked the old man whether the lines he had written were those of a poem. He replied that it was a very famous poem by Li Bai – but in the old man’s thick Sichuan accent (which for me was verging on incomprehensible) it sounded more like Li Bei. When I got back that night, I identified the poem as Li Bai’s 關山月 (guan shan yue), ‘The Moon at the Fortified Pass’. The old man had only managed to get to the fifth line before being distracted:

 

The bright moon lifts from the Mountain of Heaven

In an infinite haze of cloud and sea,

And the wind, that has come a thousand miles,

Beats at the Jade Pass battlements….

China marches its men down Baideng Road

While Tartar troops peer across blue waters of the bay….

And since not one battle famous in history

Sent all its fighters back again,

The soldiers turn round, looking toward the border,

And think of home, with wistful eyes,

And of those tonight in the upper chambers

Who toss and sigh and cannot rest.

 

(Li Bai, ‘The Moon at the Fortified Pass’)

 

Written at a time when the Tang dynasty was at war with Tibet, this poem’s terrain is the Chinese empire’s vulnerable Western borders. Many of the place names it invokes are not, relatively speaking, that far from Chengdu, in neighbouring provinces at the country’s western edge. By utter coincidence, the ‘Jade Pass’ Li Bai describes as beaten by the thousand-mile wind is in fact the Yumen Pass in Gansu province, which we had visited just days before. A fortress guarding a gap in the Great Wall outside the city of Dunhuang, it served as a vital conduit for trade on the Silk Road. And so, a few days before we met the calligrapher in the Chengdu park, we had stood sweltering inside the shell of Li Bai’s ‘Jade Pass’, trying to imagine what it must have been like for the ancient soldiers to be stationed inside that hellhole of heat and dust.

In a further little twist, googling this Li Bai poem on the English language internet mainly brings up results associated with Chow Yun-fat’s role as a suspiciously Orientalist pirate captain in Pirates of the Caribbean 3, who recites (in Cantonese) its last four lines during the film. But the reason English language newspapers were so interested was because the poem was cut from the version of the film screened in China itself, along with almost half of Chow Yun-fat’s 20-minutes of screen time. Hollywood films are regularly censored in China for sex and violence, but it seems likely that the Chinese government takes special exception to what they perceive as retrograde Hollywood representations of Chineseness.  I was tickled to read that the scene, towards the start of Men in Black 3, where Will Smith ‘neuralizes’ the gathered crowd of Chinese onlookers to the chaos in New York Chinatown was also cut in China, possibly because it was taken as an allegory of Chinese government censorship as an attempt to induce mass amnesia. If the scriptwriters had really been that on top of their covert political allegorizing, it might have been a better film!

I didn’t get the chance to quiz the old calligrapher any further about the poem, because we had a date later that afternoon with a two-week-old baby panda called Hesheng, in whose company I shall leave you now...

 

 

–Sarah Howe 

I. To China: That Blue Flower on the Map [by Sarah Howe]

 

The Savage is flying back home from the New Country

in native-style dress with a baggage of sensibility

to gaze on the ancestral plains with the myths thought up

and dreamed in her kitchens as guides.

        –Denise Riley, ‘A Note on Sex and “The Reclaiming of Language”’ 

 

This Easter I spent five weeks or so living and writing in Hong Kong. It was only the third time I had been back since my family left for England in 1991, when I was almost eight. That childhood migration didn’t surprise me or, I think, my Chinese mother (though my little brother was tearful for days after it was announced, believing he would have to leave all his toys behind). My father had swapped East London for the Far East thirty years earlier, but had always encouraged us to think of England – a country we had scarcely visited – as ‘home’. I had it marked with a toothpick Union Jack on the world map in my childhood bedroom. But two decades later, it was Hong Kong that had come to feel for me like a place in the imagination.

People often ask me how much I can remember of it – and the answer is, surprisingly, a lot. But of course they’re a small child’s memories. The yellow-crested cranes in the enclosure at the park. The banyans hung with fishing-line hairs that sentried my walk down the hill to the school bus. The neon-silver vista of the skyscrapered harbour, peered at through the kumquat trees that lined our living room window. But I had no residual sense of the island’s geography, of how those memories would relate to each other plotted on a map. So this year, in what turned out to be an unusually wet and sultry April even by Hong Kong standards, I went on long walks, trying to knit together the places I could remember, or at least could remember being told about – sometimes a bit of both.

My hope was that all this would seed new poems, but what I didn’t expect was the unintended fact checking of older poems I fell into. Unintended, because it hadn’t really occurred to me I might have got things wrong – or that it would matter if I had – in the handful of poems about Hong Kong I’d already written over the past few years. One long poem, ‘A loop of jade’, which interleaves my early memories with my mother’s childhood in ’50s Hong Kong, proved especially problematic. Some errors were simply factual – retelling a Chinese fable, and embroidering one particular scene, I’d placed the draped bride at the ‘head’ of her wedding procession rather than in its midst. If I hadn’t stumbled on a traditional bridal sedan (plus explanatory plaque) in the history museum, I would still be oblivious of that modest howler. With its smoothed dark wood carry-poles, it looked much too small to fit a person inside.

Other errors were more to do with visualisation – details that were slightly off. I’d written how worshippers casting their fortunes at the temple would ‘shake out a fan / of red-tipped / sticks’ from the cylindrical box, then pick one to entreat their fate. Yet when I stood in the courtyard at Wong Tai Sin, watching the rows and rows of people before the altar alternately bowing and rattling out their quivers of bamboo staves, I found I’d remembered the exact sound the sticks made when shaken (like clackier maracas), but that my mental picture, though vivid, was completely wrong. The sticks didn’t ‘fan’ out at all – I must have conflated them with the way playing cards spread – but rather sheared forward until, after several low bows on the supplicant’s part, one scarlet-painted tip would come to the fore. After some pondering of alternatives (bundle? box?) I finally deleted ‘fan’ and typed in ‘sheaf’, resolving that that was the best I was going to get out of one syllable.

Conflated memory was certainly the issue a few stanzas away, where I’d described the temple’s ‘fluttering, tree-tied pleas’. Many times in temple precincts on the Chinese mainland I’d seen these extraordinary wish-festooned trees – their every reachable branch tied round with torn strips of red cloth, like Rambo’s headband, onto which thousands of supplicants had permanent-markered their hopes. The idea of these trees made such an impression, I guess, that I edited them in to my mental summoning of Hong Kong’s temples. During Easter, in all the temples I walked around, I never saw any sign of this particular practice – the closest thing was the way people at Wong Tai Sin had clipped shiny-beaded lucky knots onto a patch of chainlink perimeter fence. 

Yet all these fact checking endeavours were complicated by the fact that the temple scene described in the poem was set 30 years ago: it was not something I or even my mother had witnessed directly, but part of her own adoptive mother’s experience. This old woman, who I never really knew, had taken in, somewhere in Guangdong province, the abandoned girl baby that would become my mother. Within a year of the adoption, by 1949, the Communists came to power and they fled, together with so many others, across the water to Hong Kong. When I was a newborn, my mother’s mother had gone to the temple to have blessed for me a jade bracelet sized for a baby’s wrist, and to have my future told. I asked my mum, but she didn’t think she’d ever seen any red-ribbon ‘fluttering, tree-tied pleas’ around and about such scenes. ‘There aren’t many trees left in Hong Kong,’ she ventured. ‘I don’t think people would want to risk hurting them.’ My adoptive grandmother seemingly never told what exactly the fortune-teller said that day. I wonder if he got it right.

These details might seem trifling, but cumulatively they made me think hard about what it means to tell the truth in a poem. Although descriptive precision has always been important to me, this more ‘documentary’ sense of truth is not a quality I’ve ever particularly sought out as a reader of poems. So it seemed strange to suddenly be getting het up about it. With a bit of thought, I became aware of all the small untruths I’d glossed over in previous poems, which had gone into making them feel right, artistically shaped. One example was the way I’d omitted the presence of my then boyfriend (now husband) from one or two poems based on our past travels in China. It just seemed more right – more true – to be wandering lonely as a cloud, especially when there was some kind of lyric quest at stake. I don’t think Marc minds being airbrushed...

The literary critic part of me suspects this is a naive set of questions to be asking – except that the literary expectations revolving around autobiography and ‘authenticity’ (I’m thinking now via Graham Huggan’s important book, The Postcolonial Exotic) seem particularly charged when (female) minority writers are concerned. What I had written in my latter years away from Hong Kong, was it – like the ancestral plains imagined by Denise Riley’s homebound Savage – so many ‘myths thought up / and dreamed’? My flurry of Hong Kong fact checking had, in fact, exposed the clash between a place in the imagination – the backdrop for one’s self-mythologizing – and a place where you might sublet a studio flat for five weeks.

That tension between reality and projection is one I’ve been thinking about a lot in recent months. I’m coming towards the end of my year’s tenure in the Harper-Wood Studentship from St John’s College, Cambridge. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s not far off heaven – a year’s grace in which to travel and write poems. I’ve used my time to learn Mandarin and to spend a substantial time in China and Hong Kong, writing poems on the way. I’ve been trying to work out how you might use poems to explore the historical encounter, broadly conceived, between China and the West (not least because I’m one product of that cultural encounter, albeit pretty far down the line). I’d like to spend the rest of my posts this week musing on a few highlights from my travels, which have stretched from Hong Kong in the East to the Silk Road in the far West. Perhaps the most enjoyable path I followed was in tracking, late last summer, the northward progress from Macau up to Beijing of the first and most famous of early modern Jesuit missionaries to China, Matteo Ricci (1552-1610). I managed in four weeks of buses, high-speed trains and internal flights a journey that took Ricci twenty-eight years.

But even as I trekked across China, I found myself still fascinated by Western accounts and imaginings of the country I was seeing – partly because I know I can’t escape the European cast to own my vision. The kind of willow pattern fantasizing you get in Chinoiserie is a mode that fascinates me, not least when it turns up in English language poetry. I recently stumbled across a moving example in a poem by the American poet Cathy Song:

 

He thinks when we die we’ll go to China.

Think of it—a Chinese heaven   

where, except for his blond hair,   

the part that belongs to his father,   

everyone will look like him.

China, that blue flower on the map,   

bluer than the sea

his hand must span like a bridge   

to reach it.

An octave away.

                         (Cathy Song, ‘Heaven’)

 

Rather as I spent my first seven years staring at a tiny Union Jack blutacked to the pink triangle of England on my bedroom wall, the speaker’s son imagines China’s ‘blue flower on the map’ (like the blue flower gracing a porcelain bowl?) as the place where he will perfectly belong. I’ve experienced that same elated sentimental fiction of belonging all three times I’ve walked off the plane into Hong Kong airport – it even smells like home! That is, until I get a bit further down the arrivals corridor and realise that, though I might, from behind, for a second, mistake one of the older women for my mum because of the way her hair falls along her chin, they would never make the same mistake with me. On a flight from Lanzhou to Chengdu last week, the very nice stewardess asked me where I was from (‘Oh, Engelan!’), and then told me I looked like Lady Mary from Downton Abbey – a programme I’ve never watched, but know enough about to know I don’t look very much like Lady Mary. Maybe Downton Abbey stands to England as blue-white painted willows stand to China.

I have to say, I’m more comfortable with these lines of Cathy Song’s than I’ve ever quite been with a poem like Derek Mahon’s ‘The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush’:

 

While I sit with my paper and prawn chow mein

Under a framed photograph of Hong Kong

The proprietor of the Chinese restaurant

Stands at the door as if the world were young,

Watching the first yacht hoist a sail

– An ideogram on sea-cloud – and the light

Of heaven upon the mountains of Donegal;

And whistles a little tune, dreaming of home.

            (Derek Mahon, ‘The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush’)

 

The proprietor of the Northern Irish seaside town’s (one?) Chinese restaurant ‘whistles a little tune, dreaming of home’ – a home we’re meant to imagine corresponds to the ‘framed photograph of Hong Kong’ hanging above the speaker’s chow mein laded table. I know that Mahon is quite conscious of the way what looks at first like empathy here is actually, on closer inspection, a kind of overwriting – but then that kind of representational imposition is hardly alien to Ireland’s own colonial history. Of course the idea is that both men are equally outsiders, and usually I find Mahon compelling on place and home and exile and homelessness. (‘What's the difference between an exile and an expatriate?’ he jokes in one interview. ‘It seems to me that an Englishman in France is an expat, but an Irishman is an exile.’) Maybe it’s just ‘little tune’ that grates with me. Perhaps unfairly, I can’t help hearing that diminutive slip from qualifying the tune to qualifying its whistler. 

 

Plate with a view of Burghley House. Qianlong period (c.1745-1760). Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

I’d like to leave you with one other, to my mind, charming example of the problems involved in conceiving (let alone representing) otherness. This eighteenth-century Chinese plate is in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and was produced to order for a British market hungry for Chinoiserie. The ceramic dish is decorated traditionally in blue and white, yet looks at first glance rather odd – it features a linear rendering of the Elizabethan facade of Burghley House, perhaps copied from an English print. But what makes the object so fascinating is the way its two artistic vocabularies, Western and Eastern – one might even say ‘realistic’ and ‘fanciful’, while noting the terms’ Orientalizing charge – sit in it side by side. That is to say, the backdrop the Chinese artist has imagined for this Lincolnshire pile is, to our eyes, the realm of fantasy. The house is set among a stand of twisting Chinese mountain pines, as a phoenix flies past in the glaze of sky.

 

–Sarah Howe

 

Mistakes, by John Foy

We all make mistakes. This can include killing baby rabbits. For those attuned to this sad sort of thing, there is a macabre sub-genre of contemporary poetry about mistakenly killing small creatures with power mowers. 

Philip Larkin famously killed a hedgehog while cutting the grass (“The Mower”), and Richard Wilbur clipped off the leg of an unlucky toad (“The Death of a Toad”). In Robert Frost’s poem “The Exposed Nest,” a father and daughter contemplate a cluster of baby birds who narrowly escaped—who knows how—the cutting blade of a mower that was pulled over their hidden nest in a field. In a less-well-known poem by James Wright called “Small Frogs Killed on the Highway,” the speaker observes how speeding cars obliterate the frogs as they try to reach “the green stalk of the field / On the other side of the road.”

Some poems are variations on this theme. Richard Eberhardt, for instance, in “The Groundhog,” considers the decaying body of a groundhog in a field. Granted he didn't kill it himself, but he ruminates existentially over the bloated corpse. Then we have William Stafford’s anthology piece, “Travelling Through the Dark.” A driver comes upon the body of a deer hit by a car. It’s by the side of the road at a tricky turn above a canyon. The speaker of the poem stops his own car, gets out, and sees it was a pregnant doe. Realizing the danger to other drivers, he roles the warm, gravid body down a ravine into the river below.

We mustn’t forget “Snake,” by D. H. Lawrence. The violence here is no accident, though the speaker in this case doesn’t kill the snake. He hurls a log at it, sending it panic-stricken into its dark hole. To his credit, the speaker immediately regrets what he did and realizes that he missed his “chance with one of the lords of life.”

 

Why do we write these poems? It’s a symptom, I think, of modernity and our guilt over pulling ever further away in our mechanized lives from the natural world. I’m riveted by these poems, particularly Larkin’s and Wilbur’s, because I had the misfortune in my early twenties of mistakenly going over a baby rabbit with a massive power mower in a horse pasture. I still think about it, and it fills me with dread. The worst thing was, when I found the rabbit, it wasn’t dead yet. I’ve written a poem about this called “Killing Things.” It’s due to come out later this year in American Arts Quarterly, thanks to the poetry editor there, the sculptor and poet Meredith Bergmann. (To respect editorial policy, I won’t include the poem here.)

I’d like to end with a supposition. It seems clear to me that Larkin and Wilbur, with their power mowers, are reaching back to a very ancient image from the Latin poets: the wild flower at the edge of a meadow inadvertently "touched" by the plow. The image comes from Catullus XI (To Furius and Aurelius). I'm grateful to the translator and poet Chris Childers for helping me re-find this passage. In Catullus, the destroyed flower and the plow are not at the center of the poem. They are invoked at the end by a disabused lover to show how he has been hurt by Lesbia, a carless paramour with industrial-grade appetites. Here is Chris Childers’ excellent take:

Don’t let her call me a lover or a friend;
it's her fault that my love is fallen now
like a shy flower touched at the meadow’s end
by a passing plow.

If we disregard the context and rhetoric of this poem (Chris warned me to be careful here) and look only at the image in the last two lines, it’s not too different from Larkin and Wilbur. As Chris rightly pointed out to me, Catullus XI is a love poem, whereas those by Larkin and Wilbur are mortality poems, and Larkin’s mower is more Horatian. Still, in each case, a fragile, living thing, be it a wildflower (Catullus), a hedgehog (Larkin), or a toad (Wilbur), is killed with a tool by mistake and rather thoughtlessly. My claim is that Larkin and Wilbur, with their power mowers, are pointing back to the ancient plow. Of course, the image of things getting cut down by a gardener with a scythe is a commonplace emblem of Death at work, but in that case, there is intent to destroy. Not so, here. These three deaths are caused unintentionally, which makes the perishing more poignant. Did Larkin and Wilbur have Catullus in mind? I would like to think so, but it requires a better scholar than I to answer this.

 

No Job at All: Francis Thompson, Destitution, and the prose of Philip Larkin, by John Foy

Yesterday, I wrote about the question of poetry and employment. Today’s posting is closely related. If you’re a poet, what do you do with yourself? Consider poor Francis Thompson, an English poet from the late 1800s who was not wealthy but who nevertheless, to his own grave disadvantage, sought no means of work at all. Wikipedia refers to him charitably as an ascetic. The voice below is neither Thompson’s, nor mine, but Philip Larkin's. The quoted text is from Larkin’s essay on Thompson, called “Hounded” (from Required Writing, with a foreword by David Lehman!). Because my sense of humor is rather dark, these passages always have me doubled-over. Here’s Larkin (the book he’s referring to is J. C. Reid’s Francis Thompson: Man and Poet, London: Routledge, 1959):

“This book is fascinating because Thompson is fascinating, with all the fascination of character produced to excess. Born in Ashton-under-Lyne in 1859, the son of a Catholic-convert doctor, he had a happy childhood—indeed, too happy: after the nursery fantasies of dolls and his toy theatre, adult life was an anticlimax. An attempt to enter the priesthood was foiled by the percipient Fathers at St. Cuthbert’s, Ushaw, and he was sent instead to study medicine at Owens College. Daily he went by train to Manchester, to please his father, but once there he spent his time wandering about, reading and sleeping in Manchester Public Library, and watching cricket, in this way pleasing, or at least not displeasing, himself. Every so often he failed an examination. Incredibly, he kept this up for six years, and would no doubt have been content to spend the rest of his life travelling backwards and forwards on this misunderstanding if his father had not lost patience, and demanded at last that his son go to work. It was too late. Thompson had already found the answer to growing up: laudanum.

“Sooner than work, he quitted Ashton for London. Whether this sole decisive action of his life was simply an evasion, or whether it was in its pitiful, maimed way a gesture of independence, its consequences were terrible. Between 1885 and 1888 Thompson lived as miserably as any English poet before or after. Begging, selling papers or matches, running errands for a kind of bookmaker, spending what money he had on laudanum while he ate vegetable refuse in Covent Garden and slept on the Embankment, it is unbelievable that any many of sensibility could have voluntarily endured it—voluntarily, because his father sent him an allowance of seven shillings a week to a reading room in the Strand. But to collect it would have required conscious exercise of the will, a recognition of reality, a degree of self-discipline. Thompson preferred to starve.

“[He] just wanted to escape crushing responsibilities like getting up in the morning. Though there had been some talk of a literary career at home, he wrote nothing—certainly no poetry—and it was not until a tentative and long-disregarded contribution to Merry England had aroused the curiosity and compassion of the editor, Wilfrid Meynell, not until Thompson had been persuaded into a private hospital and broken of his addiction, that ‘from this man of thirty who had had only two rather mediocre poems printed, poetry now poured in a turbid torrent.’ In 1893 Elkin Mathews and John Lane published his first book, Poems. From then on he lived the rest of his life—another fourteen years only—in the Meynell’s kindly ambience. He was no more efficient, and not much happier, but at least he was never without food and lodging. Laudanum reasserted its hold, perhaps to dull consumption, and he died in 1907, murmuring ‘My withered dreams, my withered dreams’.”

This is Larkin at his bitter best, and it’s a good argument for poets to seek refuge in the Church, the Corporation, the Academy, or perhaps the Military. The message: get a job.

Monsieur Hulot, Mademoiselle Heather, Au Revoir [by Simon Barraclough]

A couple of years ago, after reading some Eliot and watching some Jacques Tati, I thought it would be a smashing idea to write a parodic blend of the two and it started thus:

The Hulot Men

Mistah Hulot—lui mort.

We are the Hulot men

We are the French men

Smoking together

Pipe bowls filled with straw. 

but it didn't get much further, thankfully. But another entanglement of poetry and Tati has come together in this image of Monsieur Hulot's brother-in-law's swanky new car in Mon Oncle:

for the cover of Heather Phillipson's new book is inspired by this vehicle. Regardez-vous:

and this cover has already had an article devoted to it in Art Review (one of the perks of being a practising artist as well as a poet).

The reason I mention all this is that last night was the London launch of Instant-flex 718 (Bloodaxe) at the Art Review Bar just off Old Street ('Silicone Roundabout' as almost nobody calls it) and the great and the good (although I prefer the term 'the out and the about') gathered to start up this gorgeously hued vehicle and drive it away.

The first words I heard out of Heather Phillipson's mouth, back in 2007, were:

The only men it's safe for me to love are dead –

O'Hara, Stevens, Berryman.

when I read with her at The Poetry Café in Covent Garden and I became a fan at that moment. These are the opening two lines from 'Devoted, Hopelessly', which appears in the book. By the way, the title refers to the type of glue used to bind the book. I could talk about how the title and some of the poems inside speak of the materiality of language as used by the poet. But I won't. 

What I will say is that this debut collection contains many hilarious, touching, surprising, and intriguing poems with wonderful titles like 'German Phenomenology Makes Me Want to Strip and Run through North London', 'Red Slugs in Every Irrelevant Direction', You're an Architect and I Want to Make Dinner for You' and 'Actually I'm Simply Trying to Find My Dressing Gown Sash'. 

I like a launch to be more of a party than a reading and Heather chose to read a single poem, pushing the needle of the 'launchometer' almost as far away from the 'reading' end of the 'party – reading' scale as it is possible to do. But she left us wanting more, which is always a good thing. 

Another good thing is that four of us peeled off to eat fish and chips at Kennedy's on Whitecross Street, which is worth a visit if you're ever out East.

So. As Monsieur Hulot departs at the end of Mon Oncle to allow his nephew to bond with his formerly stuffy father, Monsieur Arpel, so must I depart at the end of my week as guest blogger. It's been a pleasure and there were many other things I wanted to write about, like how can we get people to stop saying "x won the Internet"? but perhaps I will continue with these over at Mo' Worse Blues.

Au revoir. I leave you with an apposite poem from Heather Phillipson.

The Distance between England and America

Much could begin like this: a large man,

tie slackened, voice buoyed up by altitude.

My mind's elsewhere –

the air-conditioning. It's cold.

Above the Atlantic he bellows long vowels to me,

and I'm cabined, window-seated, polite.

With my English tone, I'm inadvertantly provocative –

No more salted pretzels for me, thanks Jeff.

 

At the sound of Charles Darwin's bassoon,

earthworms, apparently, writhed.

Jeff booms: Pittsburgh, golf clubs, his search for a wife.

I twist in my seat – suggest something,

in my movement, of all evolution.

His blanket folds back like an invitation

to navy shadows and polyester.

Heat and anything could happen under there.

 

Oh, take your loafers off, Jeff –

throw them in the aisle.

Your gusto can conquer my boredom, our bed can be the sky.

It's warming up. We won't be sleeping.

For almost nine hours beneath United Airlines covers

we'll share everything but thought.

In the morning, white bread rolls and Columbus, Ohio.

Women distribute plastic cutlery in the night. 

 

For more information on Heather, click here.

 

 

 

And – Which is More – You'll Beowulf, My Son! [by Simon Barraclough]

"Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?" That is the question. Yes, Heidegger, that's a pretty good originary question. I might go further back and ask why is there matter at all? But an originary question one gets asked a lot is "What first got you into poetry?" and variations thereof.

I had two 'big bangs' or inflations, or 'mini-bangs'. One courtesy of Auden when I was about 13 but one much earlier, when I was about seven years old, courtesy of Miss Campbell and Beowulf.

Ah, Miss Campbell, exotic and intoxicating on so many levels: a substitute teacher (a fresh face), an energetically tousled redhead, a lover of poetry, and a Canadian. In Huddersfield, at the start of the 70s – man's footprints freshly planted on the Moon – Miss Campbell was a sign of futurity and opportunity for me.

When the time came for her to leave ahead of our seemingly endless six-week summer holidays, she chose to leave us with two things on that poignant Friday afternoon: proper fresh popcorn and Beowulf.

Having only eaten pre-packaged, sweet soggy cardboard like Butterkist, I'd never seen popcorn made like this. I didn't know you could make it. Actual, neutron star-dense kernels of real corn. Hot oil. A sealed pan. A hail storm within the pan, and then an overflow of bright white and yellow corn-novae. Miraculous. But more so after butter and salt were added. From that day on my tooth became a savoury tooth and has remained so.

And, as we munched, she turned herself into live cinema by reading a modern translation of Beowulf to us. Terrifying. Suspenseful. Gory. Electrifying. I've no idea which translation she read to us. Look at how many there are:

Annotated List of Beowulf Translations

but it made me realise how exciting, troubling, suspenseful and entertaining poetry could be. Not that it always is. And not that is should be or has to be. But it was a great start for a seven-year old.

Years later I relished Seamus Heaney's 1999 version, which translates "Hwæt!" as "So." which is exactly how my Irish aunties begin every new story: "So."

So, I'd like to mention that there is a brand new translation missing from the list above, by Meghan Purvis. It begins, as playfully and colloquially as Heaney, with:

Stop me

if you've heard this one before: the lands up north,

hoar-bent, frost-locked, need deeper plows

to dig them. Here is one.

I haven't ventured much further than this yet but I'm on my way, with my popcorn, and memories of Miss Campbell.

Beowulf by Meghan Purvis from Penned in the Margins, London

 

 

 

Maris, Pollitt, Rumens [by Simon Barraclough]

There's only one reason to go to Piccadilly Circus: to visit Waterstones' magnificent flagship store. Okay, the cocktails at The Criterion are good also. Plus the ICA is nearby. Oh, and it's not far from Cicchetti's either. But remember that this part of London recently replaced the Swiss Centre cinema with M&M's World. I don't really even know what that is. I know that the vicinity smells of sickly sweet chocolate and the edifice pummels the retina with primary colours but I tend to scurry on by.

Anyway, I went to Waterstones last night to see Kathryn Maris, Katha Pollitt and Carol Rumens read from their new and recent books published by Welsh publisher Seren (the editor in chief, Amy Wack, was in town to introduce the three).

It's an odd thing writing up a reading. You're tempted to switch to 'book review' mode but then you'd be kind of reviewing people, which, until Google Glass makes it the norm for us to give each other 'star-ratings' as we walk down the street, doesn't feel right to me.

Plus, compared to reading poems on the page, a live reading has so many additional variables. Like tone of voice, length of intros, particular words that are explained and over which the poet stumbles when they come around in the text; and perhaps one of the poets might knock over a glass of water just before reading a poem about a washer woman. I'm not saying these things happened last night, but they might have.

Anyway, the large and appreciative audience was treated to three readings of great style, wit, emotion and skill. I have all kinds of rules and pet peeves about poetry readings but two halves of ten minutes from each poet worked very well. Certain themes recurred, including ironic, not-entirely-ironic, and rather political takes on Bible stories and experiments with the linguistic style of the King James Bible. 

There were poignant reflections on age and youth and the changing relations and attitudes between both, often within the same body. There was also a palpable, creative, tension between American and UK tendencies, especially regarding form. The three poets almost described a smooth spectrum from Rumens's frequent use of form, to Maris's increasing use of form, to Pollitt's occasional use of form.

Some discussion followed about these technical matters in the Q&A but no firm conclusions were drawn. Needless to say, I wrote down many choice lines and phrases in my notebook but I'm not sure they will work that well out of context (a bit like the way lines from poems posted as tweets often don't work) but I can recommend the poets' respective books:

God Loves You by Kathryn Maris

The Mind-Body Problem by Katha Pollitt

De Chirico's Threads by Carol Rumens

I also learned that 'Seren' means 'star' in Welsh. I should have known that, but it was pleasant to learn. I will leave you with one complete poem, from God Loves You. A domani.

This is a Confessional Poem

I am guilty of so much destruction it hardly matters

anymore. There are so many thank-you notes I never wrote

that sometimes I’m relieved by the deaths of would-be 

recipients, so I can finally let go of the shame.

I was awful to someone who was attached to the phrase

‘social polish’, as though she’d acquire it through repetition.

I took an overdose at a child’s 6^th birthday party.

I was born in a country which some have called

The Big Satan. I abandoned the country for one

that is called The Little Satan. I wished ill on a woman

who has known me for years and yet never remembers

who I am – and now she’s involved in a public scandal.

I have been at parties where I was boring.

I have been at parties where I was deadly boring.

I have worn the wrong clothes to sacraments, not

for lack of outfits, but for a temporary failure of taste.

I’m a terrible, terrible liar, and everything I say is full of

misrepresentation. I once knew a very sweet girl

who stabbed herself in the abdomen 7 times.

She believed she was evil and thought 7 was a holy number.

Besides that she was sane, and told me her tale

out of kindness – because guilt recognises guilt,

the way a mother can identify her own child.

I met her in a class called ‘Poetry Therapy’

in which the assignment was to complete this statement:

When one door closes, another opens.

I wrote: At the end of my suffering there was a door,

making me guilty of both plagiarism and lack of imagination.

I was the vortex of suffering: present, future and retroactive

suffering.  The girl tried to absolve me.

‘Don’t be Jesus,’ she said. ‘There are enough around here.’

I know I should thank her if she’s alive,

but I also know it’s unlikely I’ll rise to the task.

 

—Kathryn Maris

 

Bank Holidays, Bunking Off, Pasolini [by Simon Barraclough]

Yesterday was a Bank Holiday in the UK. This is a day we occasionally grant to our banks so that they can take a breather from refusing to lend to businesses, insisting on unnecessary payment protection schemes, finding ways to turn public bailout money into private bonuses, and so on. They need to replenish their batteries.

And the rest of us need to go have lunch in cafés attached to museums and galleries. For a freelancer, depending on one's success or commitment, either every day is a Bank Holiday or Bank Holidays remain something that only other people enjoy. I must confess, I bunked off and practised my F major scale.

I also had time to reflect on a recent event I organised for the BFI (British Film Institute). The BFI has a generous and welcoming attitude to poets and it enjoys exploring the links between poetry and cinema. Over the last few years I've been involved in their poetry/film crossover event 'O Dreamland', which invited poets to write about their digital archive (The Mediatheque); I launched my collaborative Hitchcock homage Psycho Poetica at the BFI in 2010; and last year Isobel Dixon, Chris McCabe and I premiered The Debris Field there.

This year I was asked to organise something for their recent epic Pasolini retrospective and I considered various approaches. I thought of poetically 're-staging' Theorem using six poets playing each of the main characters, and I also toyed with comparing the 'swinging Sixties' of Pasolini, Antonioni and Bertolucci.

But in the end I took my lead from Pier Paolo himself and his love of the literary portmanteau movie, so I suggested A New Decameron: ten films, ten poets, ten film clips, one evening of poetic and filmic enthusiasm. 

I asked nine other poets and writers to join me: Jane Draycott, Charles Lambert, Glyn Maxwell, John McCullough, Valeria Melchioretto, Luca Paci, Cristina Viti, Stephen Watts and Chrissy Williams. We were also lucky enough to have Rosa Mucignat of King's College London reading some of Pasolini's poetry in the Friulian language, with translations by Cristina Viti.

The sold-out show was funny, moving and powerful by turns and I wanted to give you a little taster by posting Chrissy Williams's poem and a film clip here. Chrissy freely admits to being obsessed with Pasolini's clownish muse, the great Ninetto Davoli. I'm currently talking to the BFI and the poets about getting all the work online in the near future.

First a small sample of the irrepressible Davoli from Chrissy's chosen film The Canterbury Tales.

 

And now her poem.

Ninarieddo

for Davoli in The Canterbury Tales

"col tuo sorriso, fulmineo e buffo" — Pasolini

"My only enemy is time" — Chaplin

 

I step to the screen

with your face so big, a kiss

with my arms reached up

would wrap around me whole.

Slip tongue, slip lip to the camera.

I fell in love with a face once

until it swallowed me.

 

And all him loved that looked upon his face

That each him loved who looked upon his face

No length of time or death may this deface

 

Step, nod to the screen and wink the bride.

You, happy as a goldfish in a glade.

You, little tramp with laughter for a face.

The bride winks back, slips back into a stolen moment.

Slip tongue to the world and hope for many moments.

 

and your face    is a song, fool

your eyes         light a dance, fool

lip-tight             on the laugh of language

                        on the laughter

 

Step hip to dance with shadows till it's time

and it's always time to dance with shadows.

We dance against the day the music slips.

We dance the laugh of lips in bandages.

 

Thy face is turned in a new array

Your face is mottled in a new array

 

No step is left behind,

just kicked in a new way.

Stories shift, dreamed high,

kicked about in an angel's face

which changes, because

everything is always changing

although it stays the same.

No story is left behind,

just slipped on in a new way.

 

and I'll see you here       again and again.

I'll love you here             again       again.

I'll fall and catch my heart         in your constant face.

 

I fell in love with a clown once,

with a fool. Now I am the new clown

of no good, who falls with a cane

as time rearranges the stories of your face.

 

Is the face enough?

Is any one face ever enough?

 

In all his face there was no drop of blood

With his face pale and with a heavy cheer

Now list you down with face all pale of hue

 

I fell in love with your face once,

with the face I found, and I will follow it, 

love, through all our familiar stories.

 

More about Chrissy Williams here.

The View from the Cuckoo's Nest [by Simon Barraclough]

Huffy Henry blogged      the day (Berryman)

I used to write a blog, five years ago, called Fallout. After a year or so, we fell out.

Comes over one an absolute necessity to blog (D.H. Lawrence)

I have a new blog called Mo’ Worse Blues but so far has only one entry announcing that more entries will follow soon. That’s been up for about a month. I will attend to it soon, I will.

For a long time I used to blog early (Proust)

But it will have to wait till after my vacation here; my week away in a blog cabin.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own blog, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these entries must show. (Dickens)

Thinking of cabins and woods, while I neglect my own blog and set up here I feel a little like a cuckoo – albeit a (so far) welcome and cordially invited cuckoo – typing its way out of the shell.

Soul, wilt though blog again? (Dickinson)

I’m already perched quite high (here’s a photo of yesterday’s sunset, looking over The City)

but the view from the eyrie can seem dismal at times. Nations disintegrate; those who ‘do not wish to get embroiled in the conflict’ deliberately embroil themselves in the conflict; our party of power, which I detest, is compelled to ape a smaller, similarly detestable party in an effort to cling to its pseudo-mandate; buildings are collapsing around our desire for cheap produce; the British 1970s and 80s are under arrest for unspeakable acts; and poachers have picked Mozambique clean of its glorious rhinos.

But fretting in public like this makes me feel faintly absurd, like Proust’s Madame de Guermantes:

“I supposed that, since she was always dabbling in politics, she intended to show that she was afraid of war, as one day when she had appeared at the dinner table so pensive, barely replying in monosyllables, upon somebody's inquiring timidly what was the cause of her anxiety, she had answered with a grave air: ‘I am anxious about China.’” (The Fugitive)

So instead I will focus on cuckooness for now. First, a cuckoo that speaks with the voice of Ted Hughes (with perhaps a touch of Al Pacino doing Shakespeare):

Hooha! Hooha!

Dizzying Milkymaids with innuendo...

 

O Orphan of orphans! O moon-witted

Ill-bred dud-hawk!

Cavorting on pylons, you and your witch moll!

(From A Primer of Birds, 1981)

And one of Scottish poet Richard Price’s many wonderful birds, this one flying in a prose poem pattern: 

Cuckoo

It’s an uplifting call and when you hear it spring is coming, sure enough, resurrection, promise kept. But I’m not comfortable. That’s no life for her and it’s no life for anyone else mixed up in the whole business. The parents think the chick is just like them, and it’s a hero when it gets bigger. Then it’s all me me me, eating its brothers out of home and house, breaking its foster-mother’s heart as sure as. I can’t speak to her about it, and she won’t get help. She says: every one of my children is like a little Jesus, and that makes me…God.

(From Lucky Day, Carcanet 2005)

For the rest of the week I’ll be flitting in and out of the nest and will bring back some juicy scraps from the London poetry scene, among other things. But now it’s time to roost.

So Much Depends... on Brodsky's Thumb

 

We've really enjoyed our week on Best American Poetry. The UK Poetry Society blog tour will be moving on to the Scottish poet Rob Mackenzie's blog, Surroundings, on Tuesday; please come with us! Here to conclude the week is the Welsh poet Stephen Knight.

Stephen Knight has published one pamphlet, four books of poems – two of which were shortlisted for the T S Eliot prize – and a novel, Mr Schnitzel, which was the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year in 2001. His collection The Prince of Wails is just out with CB Editions.

Stephen Knight won the 1992 National Poetry Competition with his poem, 'The Mermaid Tank':

Beneath my weight, the duckboards bow.
Two buckets, slopping water, weigh me down.
A cold wind howls around the cages now,
    While rain sweeps in -across the town-
Again; and while our rheumy-eyed,
    Arthritic monsters fall asleep
        Or vegetate
             I kneel beside
The Songstress of The Deep
      And wait. ...

Read the rest

I first entered the National Poetry Competition when I was at university – in 1981, the fourth time it ran, so I must have been 20 or 21. I say entered, though in fact I failed miserably at the first hurdle, sending my batch of poems to the Poetry Society without an entry form. My cheque was returned with polite instructions on how to proceed. Embarrassed but undeterred, I tried every year after that, picking up a couple of £100 prizes in 1984 and 1987, then winning in 1992. It was only when the Guardian article which reported on the competition described “ten years of trying” that I was conscious of my persistence. I had simply considered it something to do every year, long before the National Lottery’s cajoling You’ve got to be in it to win it slogan. (But I’ve never bought a lottery ticket – the odds are ridiculous!)

I hadn’t tried out the poem on any magazine editors before entering it – in a batch of three, if I remember correctly – but it had had an airing at that year’s Hay Festival, when I was one of seven youngish writers fortunate to attend Joseph Brodsky’s masterclass. By the time he read “The Mermaid Tank”, he had already dismissed one or more of our poems. No one was immune. Through the week, he spent more time talking about works by Auden, Frost, Rilke and Milosz than he spent looking at his students’ poems – something none of us properly appreciated at the time. We would meet in various rooms above bookshops: small windows; generously upholstered armchairs with faded flower-patterns; doilies. While everyone was heads down in the shadows reading “The Mermaid Tank”, I caught Brodsky’s eye, and he gave me a wordless thumbs-up. I was elated.

A few months later, when it was time to select a few poems for that year’s competition, Brodsky’s thumb gave me some confidence in one of my choices. I should have thanked him.

Check the Poetry Society website to read the rest of this blog tour.

The Poetry Society also hosts the winning poems, and many of the commended poems from 24 years of National Poetry Competition.

As well as cash prizes, winners of the competition also see their poems published in Poetry Review, the leading poetry magazine published by the Poetry Society. A subscription is included in Poetry Society membership.

The National Poetry Competition - really an international competition - is open to anyone, anywhere, writing in English. The deadline is October 31. Enter here.

 

Carried Away: a Reflection on Winning the UK's National Poetry Competition

Julia Copus is a poet and radio playwright. She won First Prize in the National Poetry Competition in 2002 with her poem 'Breaking the Rule', and has since been awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Last year she was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for her radio sequence, Ghost.

Her three collections are all Poetry Book Society Recommendations; her third, The World's Two Smallest Humans, was published this summer by Faber & Faber.

Julia writes:

Here’s how it started. I began by entering a whole group of poems – four or five, maybe (this still strikes me as a sensible tactic, by the way) – and, as it happened, the poem that ended up winning was one I’d put in almost as an afterthought. Folding the pages into an envelope, I remember thinking, safety in numbers…

In fact, I’d written the winning poem a year or so before, in the public library at Lion Yard in Cambridge, where I’d recently declined a place on a PGCE course at the university. It felt like a rash decision at the time, turning aside from a lifetime of probable security as a schoolteacher, but I knew my heart wasn’t in it.

So the poem was finished and filed away, and by the time it occurred to me to enter the National Poetry Competition I’d moved up to Blackburn and was working part time as a TEFL teacher at the local college. I lived then in a soot-blackened weaver’s cottage at the top of a steep hill, and it was in the kitchen of this cottage that the phone rang one ordinary afternoon with the improbable news: I had won first prize.

What does elation do to you? The word comes from the Latin efferre meaning “to carry out or away”, and even in Roman times it acquired the sense of “uplifted, exalted” – carried, if you like, out of oneself.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that winning the NPC is responsible for all the good things that have happened to me since, but it certainly gave me the boost I needed at the time and, though I was unaware of it then, it may also have done something to raise my profile. Once won, such honours cannot be unwon.

But to continue with the etymology, by the time I received that implausible phone call, another kind of dissevering had already begun. In the eyes of the British poetry public “The National” is undoubtedly a major prize. Whatever my personal response to the win (and I’ll admit that after the elation, I quickly reverted to a more familiar mode of unease), there was a sense in which another self had been “carried away” into the outside world; a sense in which it was inhabiting an independent (albeit modest) life of its own.

To this day, I am surprised when students on poetry courses or audience members at readings question me about “the poem that won the National”. On occasion it has been the only thing they know about me. If it is enough to bring them out on an evening when they could be curled up in front of the fire or the television then that’s more than all right by me.

This post is part of a blog tour the UK Poetry Society is running, hosting guest posts by poets on a number of leading poetry blogs. You can find the whole tour linked on the Poetry Society website, incuding those that are here on Best American Poetry.

You can also read all the winning poems, and many of the commended poems, going back to the beginning of the competition. Winners, and 2nd and 3rd prizes, are also published in Poetry Review, the UK's leading poetry magazine, which the poetry Society publishes.

The National Poetry Competition - really an international competition - is open to anyone, anywhere, writing in English. The deadline is October 31. Enter here or by clicking the pretty picture in the sidebar! EVery journey starts with a single step...

Journey of a Poem: Paul Adrian on 'Robin in Flight'

Paul Adrian won the UK's National Poetry Competition in 2010 with his poem 'Robin in Flight' - the first poem he had ever sent out for publication.

Since then, his poems have appeared in magazines including The Moth, And Other Poems, the poetry blog Eyewear, and an anthology of young poets, Lung Jazz. He received a commission from the British Craft Council to accompany their Twenty at Twenty exhibition.

Born in 1984 in Yorkshire, he still lives there. He is a support worker for autistic adults.

Here Paul talks about the journey his poem has taken him on.

...

A poem is often a journey in itself. You start off reading or writing without knowing where it might take you, or what it might become.

Simply put, I was reluctant to expend too much energy on my poem, because I didn’t think I had a chance. No mythologizing – I wrote it recumbent on the sofa in my flat, on a pad of A4 with a HB pencil. I started with a vague idea in my head about the malleability of matter, and slowly the page became that idea. The decision to enter it into the National Poetry Competition came late on, a second thought to another poem I (mistakenly) thought better. The two went off together, after a day of the kind of circular editing where you spend hours rearranging the words only to end up with a version identical to the one you started with. They were submitted about an hour before the competition deadline, with something of a frustrated, “that’ll have to do” resignation.

I didn’t look at it again until a day or two after I found out I’d won and began to practice reading it aloud. I’d never read a poem in front of anyone before, and the first time I did was (terrified) in front of a video camera for the Poetry Society. The second time was in front of an audience of poetic notables at the award ceremony. Carol Ann Duffy was stood a few feet to my left.

Since then, the poem has come and gone. I’ve been asked to sign copies of it, and responded with bewilderment. A copy which I hand-wrote and illustrated made £100 in a charity auction (doubly a surprise, considering my handwriting is barely legible).  I’ve been in and out and around those two stanzas more times than I can remember, know it’s strengths, it’s weaknesses, every vowel and verb by heart. We are no longer intimate, but familiar. It no longer feels like something I created. Superior interpretations by other readers have taken away any ownership I may have once claimed.  Mostly, poetry readers have no idea of me until I mention Robin and then they say “Oh, that was you”. The poem is the thing. That’s what people remember. This one became something I had no idea it knew how to be.

Read the other blogs in this tour on the Poetry Society website.

See all the posts in this series on BAP.

Enter the National Poetry Competition.

It Starts With the Echo of Hooves...

Photo: Keith Morris

Day Two of the BAP/National Poetry Competition UK Blog Tour. Here's yesterday's Introduction, if you missed it.

Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, our blogger for today, has published three collections, Rockclimbing in Silk (Seren, 2001), Not in These Shoes (Picador, 2008) and most recently Banjo (Picador, 2012). Her poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies. 'Ponting' won second prize in the 2011 competition just before its publication in Banjo, which selected by the Telegraph as one of the UK's best new poetry books of summer 2012.

...

....

Ponting

In the end we turned him into a verb:

to pont meaning to pose in ice and snow

 

until frozen. On the voyage south he’d be

tilting plates in the darkroom, in one hand

 

the developing dish, in the other a basin

of vomit. One minute he’d arrange us

 

in groups for the cinematograph, then rush

to the ship’s side... (read the rest)

....

Samantha writes about a flurry of activity, and the reality of the writer's shed:

....

Sometimes at a canter, sometimes at a gallop, I hear a strong poem coming (or what turns out to be a strong poem) months beforehand, until the sound of hooves is so loud that the poem is at my doorstep, demanding to be written. This is what happened with Ponting. I had never received a poetry prize before...

  ...so the telephone call from the Poetry Society in January this year was a lovely surprise. And it was even nicer to be published in Poetry Review for the first time. The fact that Ponting resonated with the three judges gave me the much-needed confidence to embark on my next group of poems.

Ponting took about two weeks to write (including research time) and twenty drafts. Then I left it in the drawer for six months. I always think it’s a good idea to leave your poem in the drawer for as long as you can. If I get twitchy about opening the drawer I start work on a new poem to distract myself from the temptation to coo over a piece of work which is so riddled with faults that I cannot even see there is no central image around which the poem can cohere, that I have not paid attention to making the most of my line breaks and that my narrative thread is so weak as to be non-existent.

In the wake of the prizegiving good things happened. I found myself racing from one poetry festival to the next to give readings. At Ledbury Festival I read three times over the course of a weekend, mainly from my new collection, Banjo, which came out a couple of months after the National Poetry Competition results and included Ponting. At readings many people have said how much the poems have meant to them. I enjoy giving readings. I find that speaking the poems out loud can bring something new to them, even to me.

Now I am back in the shed, scratching out words in the cold, disturbed only by the tapping of a loose tile on the shabby roof, reminding me that the reason I’m sitting in a clapboard lean-to is because of an echo of hooves I heard months ago.

You can follow the whole blog tour on the Poetry Society UK's website, and selected posts will also appear in the Huffington Post.

Hands Across the Water: Britain's National Poetry Competition comes to Best American Poetry

Here Here - and also on the sidebar to the right - is a little orange picture, with people excitedly scrambing over an enormous open book. This is your portal to entering the UK's National Poetry Competition - in reality, an international poetry competition - possibly the most important competition for an unpublished poem in the UK.

A competition has a life beyond the words first, second, third. This year, to celebrate the life and afterlife of the poems that win, or are commended - and the journeys poets find themselves on, sometimes merely as a result of deciding to enter - we're taking some of the most interesting poets in the UK on a 'blog tour' to talk about their own poems and experiences.

'Best American Poetry' is kindly hosting us for this week; we'll be posting up at least one post a day. So read what the poets have to say, find your best poem, click the picture, enter the competition - you never know where you're going.

To begin, here's a piece that appears in the current issue of Poetry News, our members' newsletter:

The kids are back at school and the nights are drawing in – it’s that time of year again. That’s right: the “season of mist and mellow fruitfulness”, when poems from up and down the country, and around the world, make their way to the Poetry Society for the UK’s most important poem competition. The holiday season is over and it’s time to get the pick of your poems ready for their big day out.

For 34 years, the National Poetry Competition has been making a difference: both to well-known poets and to the new names the competition has brought to the fore, whether as winners, as ‘commendeds’ or ‘placed’. Every year the judges, and the staff in the office, feel a palpable excitement; last year saw over 11,000 poems submitted and the winners and commendations reflected the thrill of new discoveries.

New discoveries included last year’s third prizewinner, Zaffar Kunial for ‘Hill Speak’, who had never sent a poem anywhere before (though he had been writing for years). In 2010, Paul Adrian’s first-prize-winning poem ‘Robin in Flight’ was also his first published poem.

How do you help your poem put its best foot forward in such company? Even after he won, Paul Adrian said, “the calibre of the past winners is truly intimidating”. But your poem is not up against past winners: it’s up against the other poems sent in for this competition, and they are all judged anonymously. Paul added, “The NPC is wonderful in its democracy:  open to all, professionals and amateurs alike, and judged anonymously, it focuses solely on the strength of the poetry.”

Ian Duhig has sat on both sides of the fence, as both a competition winner and (in 2001) a competition judge (with Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Michele Roberts, and Michael Donaghy). Here’s what he says about that process:

“All the good poems somehow created space around them as you read through the pile. I think it was Eliot who said that poets aren’t really in competition because they are doing such different things, and there are so many varieties of poetry around to be enjoyed at present that his remark is even more true now. However, within their styles some have more intensity than others: they command their space and ‘stand well’, so you want to keep looking at them. When I found a poem I liked I read it aloud several times as well as rereading it mentally many more times. I suspect most judges do this, so entrants may well want to bear this in mind and do the same with their poems before sending them off.”

So read your poem aloud – to yourself, to someone else. Show it to a friend. Give it a week, check it again, look out for spelling  and punctuation errors (everyone is susceptible). Once you’ve scrubbed it up nicely, you have until 31 October to give it a kiss, tuck in its scarf, and send it off for its big day out.