21st Century Messengers

A lot of the time when I’m writing ‘A Pint for the Ghost’, I have my head in the clouds, looking for supernatural anecdotes, or idly searching out chilling and bizarre tales like this one.

Of course, you could say this airy-fairy tendency comes with the poet’s job description (along with our famous love of pubs, a myth which this blog works tirelessly to dispel) – poetry often seems like the realm of the liminal. In a soon-to-be-published issue of the fine Lancashire magazine CAKE, I can be found arguing (mostly with myself, it’s true) that, when I sit down to write a poem I’m intimidated by “…a desire to make sense of a world that’s just too big to fit into the poem… I think that’s why it’s sometimes easier to talk about the negative world, to things that didn’t happen, that we didn’t say or do, to the grand ‘nothing’ behind it all…”

Hanging up my other-worldly hat for the evening, I thought I’d mention a few hot-off-the-press publications that manage to do what I never can: tackle the world headfirst and make us look at things a bit differently. (NB. This isn’t intended to be a review of any kind – I only inflict those on the poor, unsuspecting readers of Poetry London – but a round up of what I’ve been reading lately that’s given me pause for thought.)

‘For The Messengers’ (Donut Press) attempts something bold and exciting – turning the news into art. Of course, there’s a well-established, strong tradition of poets commenting on global events – something that the current Poet Laureate takes in her stride – but Jude Cowan’s book does this in a way that’s entirely distinctive.

Working for Reuters news agency, Jude began writing poems in early 2008 in response to the varied daily news footage she was archiving, and continued throughout what turned out to be a turbulent year. As the project gathered momentum, Jude says she “became more aware of the recurring journalistic tropes – preparation, aftermath, conference, presser, interview, protest, funeral – and more conscious of the role played by selection and editing…”

The resulting poems are varied and often startling, whether considering economic crises, key global elections or natural disasters, sometimes from a more abstract standpoint, sometimes contextualised within the day to day work of archiving. Whether she’s writing about Japanese fertility rituals or death in Iraq, Jude Cowan manages to uncover both the humanity and horror behind the footage, and does so with gentle wit.

You can read some samples from the book here (including one of my favourites, ‘Germany: Zoo Christmas’. Highly recommended.

While I’m about it, a browse through the rest of the Donut Press catalogue reveals a wealth of other fine collections from the likes of Tim Turnbull, Tim Wells, Wayne Holloway Smith, Annie Freud, A.B. Jackson and others which all have their own distinctive worldliness… Go on, grab a Donut. You know you want to.

Alongside ‘For the Messengers’ I’ve been reading two debut collections from Mike Watts and Joe Hakim (who also perform together and host Hull’s ‘Write to Speak’). Mike’s book ‘Coming to a Street Near You’ (CreateSpace) is refreshingly in yer face; often hard-hitting, often funny, always frank. ‘The Decline of the Fishing Industry’ is a particularly beautiful poem: moving without being overly-sentimental. In it, the narrator brings his son to a place he used to fish, only to find that now he’s ‘fully-mortgaged / and hygienic’ , everything has changed here too: ‘he sank his net / Amongst bergs of polystyrene.’ Mike’s got a great eye for detail, whether describing dogs with ‘ice-pick teeth’ or eyelids ‘mussel-shut’. According to one reviewer, it’s a collection that’s ‘like the dodgem cars at Hull fair’ (having taken that out of context, I have to clarify that means it’s fast-paced and exciting, not something that makes you throw up!)

Just as Jude Cowan’s book offers a sideways look at the process of commentary, ‘Coming to a Street Near You’ has something to say about what it is to be a writer – in ‘The Slot’, Mike talks about ‘spilling your guts at the feet of strangers’ and elsewhere, mentions the guilt of wanting to turn everything into a poem.

Joe Hakim’s ‘No Light / Might Escape’ (Night Publishing) also engages subtly with what it means to be an author, whether of fiction, or your own life and how the two often overlap in surreal and surprising ways. Truth is always stranger than poetry.

From parodies of social networking sites (‘What’s On Your Mind?’) to encounters in a bar at the end of the world (‘Last Orders at the Apocalypse’), these are slant reflections on how bizarre our existence is – none of them heavy-handed. The theme of writers’ guilt is back again in poems like ‘Assignment’. Our obsession with the virtual world (what the writer Douglas Coupland would call ‘deselfing’) is sent up too: in ‘EPIC FAIL’, the narrator remarks of facebook:

‘Although I maintained some semblance of social interaction by posting increasingly obscure nonsensical status updates on my wall – example: REALITY IS NOTHING MORE THAN THE SPIN CYCLE ON A WASHING MACHINE – I had more or less alienated all my virtual friends along with my actual ones…I was the perfect consumer. I could share my burdens and burn-out with an audience of disinterested minor acquaintances.’

I defy any of you not to nod in recognition…

Like ‘Coming to a Street Near You’, the book’s rooted in Hull, but ‘No Light / Might Escape’ casts a line out to a parallel universe - as befits the title, a reference to the essence of a black hole. The collection mixes poems with short stories and the effect is arresting, a ‘genuine jig on the end of life’s rope’ as one review puts it. You can fit an overall narrative to the book if you’ve a mind to but, like all the truest stories, it isn’t a linear one. Incidentally, in the interests of preserving ‘A Pint for the Ghost’s’ beer credentials, I’m compelled to say that one of the prose pieces in the book contains the best description of hair of the dog I’ve come across…

Finally, I wanted to mention the intriguing prose book ‘Edgelands’ by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts (Cape), but Robert Macfarlane goes over it at length in The Guardian here, so suffice to say I was hooked.

I’ll leave you with a far more elegant reflection on the relationship between the ‘real’ world and the poet’s world than I’m capable of. It’s from Charles Simic, writing for the New York Review of Books blog:

“As any poet can tell you, one often sees better with eyes closed than with eyes wide open. Am I claiming, you are probably asking yourself, that most things that happen in poems are not true at all? Far from it. Of course they are true. It’s just that poets have to do a lot of time-wasting to get to the truth… I strain my ears and stare at the blank page until a word or an image comes to me. Nothing genuine in a poem, or so I have learned the hard way, can be willed. That makes writing poetry an uncertain and often exasperating undertaking. In the meantime, there’s nothing to do but wait.”

Well then. I’m off. This window won’t stare out of itself…

The Hungry Ghost

As the stalwarts amongst you may recall, ‘A Pint for the Ghost’ was first inspired by old legends that describe leaving milk on the hearthstone for ancestors or spirits. The question of how ghosts sustain themselves seems to be a vexing one: some maintain that they can’t eat solid food at all.

Eastern traditions, meanwhile, often celebrate the notion of the ‘hungry ghost’. In Buddhism, these are a metaphor for unfulfilled desires or emptiness – beings driven by intense emotional needs. In Tibetan Buddhism, they are described as having "mouths the size of a needle's eye and a stomach the size of a mountain". This is a metaphor for people trying (and failing) to fulfill their illusory physical needs.

On May 18th, I’m going down to London to taunt any hungry ghosts out there at an event that promises to be a feast for all the senses: ‘We Eat Poets!’ isn’t a morbid sacrificial ritual (I hope) but “an eclectic mix of poetry, excellent food and related performance and participation, surrounded by extraordinary antiques and architectural relics from London’s past.”

The venue is bonkers and beautiful LASSCo in Vauxhall, a den of curiosities which I visited in March. The room that will host the event is full of strange bits and pieces, all for sale. Walking into LASSCo is an experience in itself – you’re constantly assailed by strange and lovely things, hanging from the ceiling, inviting you to sit on them (er) or decorating the walls. It’ll be a great stage for a night of theatrics.

I’ve written some new material loosely based around the theme of ‘hunger’ to perform and will even be taking part in a quickfire poetic challenge on the night itself… If the poetry isn’t enough to tempt the Londoners / dedicated travellers amongst you, perhaps the prospect of food from Cannon & Cannon is. Either way, you can buy tickets here, before they’re all devoured (sorry, I’ll get my coat).

I’ll leave you with a short story from ‘A Pint from the Ghost’ that’s sure to put you off your dinner. It takes place on Gibbet Moor, in Derbyshire, close to Brampton and concerns a hungry visitor…

“Long, long ago – and no-one’s quite sure when – there was a tramp who wandered up from Brampton to the only cottage on the moor. A widow lived there, and he sneaked in through the door to beg for food, for he’d had none in weeks. He had a grisly face: a thin, black beard, a hat that he’d pull down so that you barely saw his bright blue eyes.

He found the widow frying bacon in her kitchen and he pleaded for a scrap. She said she had no food to give him, bid him go, she said there’d be no supper for the likes of him. That set him in a fearful rage, and the smell of the food was maddening to one who’d starved so long. He knocked the widow to the ground, then seized the frying pan and poured the scalding fat into her mouth.

They found him living in her house, the widow’s body in its twisted posture on the kitchen floor. The policemen set a gibbet up beside the cottage door. But rather than kick the stool away, and spare him with a quick death, the townsfolk strung him up to starve, or else to die at the hands of winter cold, or wind and rain. It took three dreadful weeks, and all day long the tramp would howl and scream. The sound was so piercing that it carried over the hill to Chatsworth House, disturbed the Duke himself from sleep. If you go walking over Gibbet Moor, you’ll hear his howl, and blame it on the fearful gale. Or else you’ll see that dark shape moving on the skyline, tell yourself it’s nothing but a swaying tree, tell yourself it isn’t drawing closer, following you home.”