Writing poetry: Coming at it slant

I've got off to rather a slow start this year. After ending 2012 full of enthusiasm and ideas for working on my poetry in 2013, during the Christmas break I became ill and exhausted and I've been recovering by centimetres, a little at a time. I think I am almost back to normal - I can at least see blue sky now.

My plan for the first half of this year was to do Roselle Angwin's Poetry Correspondence Course which I thought would suit me very well. Roselle says about it: "While it’s an approach that favours the holistic, I’d like to think however that authenticity of voice, knowledge of the requirements of poetry & of the poetry world, & mastery of technique are given equal attention. I’m keen that literary quality is not sacrificed to the demand that poetry be also a means of connection, & a vibrant & essential aspect of inner work."

However, Roselle has decided not to run the course until July and since I'm always busier in the second half of the year and need something now to give shape to my work, I looked at other courses. The Open College of the Arts, the Poetry School... Nothing seemed quite right and so I decided to fashion my own Gelli Fach Poetry Course for myself. I'm structuring it loosely around two books: Jay Ramsay's The Poet in You and Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled. They cover what for me are the twin aspects of poetry - inspiration and craft. I had started to work with Stephen Fry's book last year (which is an absolute delight to read, erudite, quirky and surprisingly soothing and encouraging). I have to say that, although I did the exercises and felt I was learning an enormous amount, when I tried to apply it to my poetry it was a dismal failure; trying to channel my inspiration into a strict form had the effect of making it dry up. Nevertheless, I'm going to persevere - to a point anyway.

Jay's book is working with imagination and inspiration and gives a series of 9 exercises to be done ideally over 9 months. I wasn't sure how it was going to be but I have done the first one and although I wasn't expecting to get very much out of it, it was very rich, interesting, inspiring and rewarding. So, a good start. I may write about it at some point but for the moment I am concerned that some of the potency will be lost if I share it here.

As well as giving time to these two aspects of poetry, I am also reading some books about poetry which have been stacked in a pile by my bed for... well, too long. I've dipped into them but have decided I need to take one at a time and make notes as I go along. I'm starting with Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature by John Elder.

And of course I shall continue to attend the Poetry Reading Group once a month and the Poetry Workshop once a month - so that I am reading published poets, ancient and modern, and gaining from that, and offering my own poetry for feedback and constructive criticism from my peers, as well as offering feedback on theirs. Both of these groups I find invaluable as well as enjoyable.

I also have some readings and performances coming up. At the end of the month I'm launching my booklet, The Sea Road, at the Arts Centre Bookshop, alongside Ken Jones, a Buddhist and writer of haiku and haibun whose book, Bog Cotton, has recently been published. At the beginning of March I'm going to be reading at the Pen'rallt Bookshop in Machynlleth for International Women's Day and I'll also be giving a talk on self-publishing poetry. In May, the Word Distillery, the performance group I work with, will be presenting an evening dedicated to Coleridge at the Arts Centre - we'll be reading the whole of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, accompanied by slides of the Gustave Dore prints illustrating the poem, as well as some of Coleridge's other work. I'm very much looking forward to that.

Making up my own 'Poetry Course' means that I shall miss out on the discipline and the feedback which I wanted, but given the lack of energy so far this year perhaps it's no bad thing. I've discovered before that trying to impose a rigid structure on myself is a sure way to a collapse. I seem to be at my most creative or productive when I come at writing casually-  when I'm just having a look at a draft while the potatoes are boiling or jotting down notes which later I realise are nearly poems - or when I'm washing up and thinking about some image or potent experience that has occurred that day. I find I have to come at it slant.  "It's as if you have to sneak up on yourself", Eluned in the  poetry group said. But that doesn't mean that a more organised approach isn't useful for providing material and word music and improving skills. And practice, of course, makes perfect. I plan to write about this more here another time.

Wishing you- belatedly - a creative and fulfilling 2013!

PS - the submission deadline for Valleys has been changed to March 24th 2013. 

Honno Poem of the Month: Rapunzel

I'm pleased to announce that my poem Rapunzel is Poem of the Month on the Honno website.

Honno was established twenty-five years ago to increase opportunities for Welsh women writers and to bring Welsh women writers to a wider public. It is currently the only independent women's press in the UK. Rosanne Reeves, one of the founders, interviewed in The Cambrian News, gave an account of the situation in Wales which led to the setting up of the press:

"None of the publishing houses in Wales were particularly interested in promoting women's literature or writers, especially not in English... the thought of going out to look for new female talent and female voices was not a priority. It was in the 1980s that Greenham Common started, when women from Cardiff marched to the base; Welsh Women's Aid extended to rural Wales; the Miners' Strike brought women of the valleys out of their kitchens, to return to their kitchens empowered;... and a political branch of the Women's Section of Plaid Cymru was developed.

The opportunity to sell women's literature became a possibility - the influence of Virago, The Women's Press, Spare Rib, Onlywomen and the Attic Press in Ireland led the way. But of course Wales was different from England and there was a gap in the market in Wales for books which were relevant to the women of Wales, in both languages."

Honno's authors have included Sian James, Malorie Blackman, Tessa Hadley, Lindsay Ashford, Patricia Duncker, Kitty Sewell and many others. There have been several high-profile awards, including most recently Bethan Darwin's novel Back Home which won the Aur Pur Award 2010 and Cold Enough to Freeze Cows by Lorraine Jenkin which was shortlisted for the People's Book prize.
Jane MacNamee's anthology of women writing about nature, In Her Element, includes essays by Christine Evans; Sian Melangell Dafydd; Jane Matthews; Dee Rivaz; Jay Griffiths; Patricia Barrie and Sue Anderson. The book was serialised on Radio 4.

Sadly Honno no longer publish poetry books but they have established the Poem of the Month feature on their website to promote the work of women poets in Wales. And one of my favourite books of poetry, Vixen, by Glenda Beagan, is still available. In this, her first collection of poems, "she dips into the world of nature and myth to draw on themes, which though ancient, still have a powerful effect on the modern world. Through the central figure of the vixen she looks at the twin pulls of motherhood and independence, and explores how it feels to be a woman in Wales today".

There is also a collection of Welsh Women's Poetry 1460 - 2001 which includes brief biographies of each poet, and some daring new translations. The editors have produced "a superbly researched anthology that illustrates the breadth, power and skill of Welsh women's poetry". "This groundbreaking volume is the first bilingual anthology of Welsh women's poetry, demonstrating the rich, varied canon of poetry by Welsh women, in both the Welsh and English languages. It ranges from Gwerful Mechain, the Welsh women's Chaucer, to acclaimed contemporary poets such as Menna Elfyn and Gillian Clarke, and many works which previously existed only in handwritten manuscripts in the National Library of Wales.

The Welsh word honno is the feminine form of  'that one' (who is elsewhere).

Join the first Mindful Writing Day on 1st November

This Thursday the 1st of November is the first ever Mindful Writing Day, organised by Kaspa & Fiona at Writing Our Way Home.

I'm going to be travelling to London on the train in the morning  to perform in the evening at the Poetry Place, Covent Garden, with the Word Distillery. I shall have plenty of time to be mindful, gazing out of the train window. I wonder what I'll see?

To join in simply slow down, pay attention to one thing and write it down (making a small stone). Read all about it here. Small stones are easy to write, and they will help you connect to the world. Once you've started, you might not want to stop...

You can read more about small stones and find out about Lorrie with pea-green eyes in Fiona's free ebook, Write Your Way Home. If you visit Writing Our Way Home on Thursday you'll find out how to download your free kindle copy of the new anthology, 'A Blackbird Sings: a book of short poems' (which contains two of my small stones). You can also submit your small stone and see it published on the blog, and be entered into a competition to win one of five paperback copies of the book.

 There's a Facebook invite here if you'd like to invite your friends, and do feel free to copy this blog onto your own blog. You can tweet this: Connect with the world through mindful writing - join the first Mindful Writing Day on the 1st of November: bit.ly/VjzRKe #smallstone

The Sea Road: available soon

My poetry booklet The Sea Road is now in print. I'm very pleased with the way it's come out. There are twenty-five poems and artwork by local artist Jenny Fell. I took down my previous post about it as I had a hitch with the payment details and it seems to have disappeared! As I'm busy again preparing to go away for the poetry performances in London, I'm going to wait until I get back to launch it here. Meanwhile, you can see an image of it on the sidebar.

Book Launch: Ruth Bidgood and Matthew Jarvis

Ruth Bidgood

(I wrote this post back in July and forgot to post it!). 

I recently attended a book launch at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre bookshop for Ruth Bidgood’s latest volume of poetry Above the Forests and Matthew Jarvis’s study of her work for the Writers of Wales series, called simply Ruth Bidgood. It was also a celebration of the poet’s 90^th birthday a few days before.

Ruth Bidgood is an accomplished reader of her own poetry. As the medieval Welsh Bardic Grammars point out, it is rare that a reciter is able to read a poem exactly as the poet composed it and listening to Ruth reading her poems with ‘fluency of expression, elegant sense and full understanding’ was a privilege; especially perhaps, as her full understanding of the poems includes bringing out some of the humour in them which we might otherwise have missed.

The evening included John Barnie, poet and one-time editor of Planet, interviewing Matthew about his book with occasional questions passed to Ruth herself. The book is a fascinating study with some interesting and appropriate biographical details and a close examination of many of the poems. It also includes in an appendix an unpublished letter Ruth wrote to the editor of Poetry Wales about her long sequence, Hymn to Saint Ffraid, which throws light not only on the genesis and intent of the piece but also on the poetic process.

                                                                    Matthew Jarvis

However the poems themselves must take centre stage. They address memory, its importance, its effect on the past, its relationship with what is real. Often they engage with the unseen, the numinous, in a delicate and clear-headed way. The ground of their being though is the landscape and communities of the area surrounding Abergwesyn in mid-Wales, Ruth’s ‘home patch’ as she refers to it. Ruth Bidgoood observes in fine detail the life in the locality, past and present. Written over four decades, such an achievement must be almost unique and, as Matthew suggest, the work amounts to a mid-Wales epic. It is a record of the milltir sgwâr, the square mile, a Welsh phrase used to describe the patch of land that nourishes, sustains and calls to you. Matthew Jarvis describes it as ‘a bluntly defiant commitment to the region’s memory and its yet-surviving life’. Ruth says simply:

It seems important 

to remember right:
know exactly the angle
of house to hill, be able
to count the pines…

as though the intensity
of my recall
ensured the reality
of the place, its being…

as though the existence
of a loved place were something
to be built, sustained
each moment, held to, against
the cold and cancelling wind.  

( from Recall) 

Word Distillery Blog

                                     

Tina Warren reading at the Russkiy Mir bookshop, London

I've been facilitating a blog for The Word Distillery - the poetry group I perform with. There are pages for each poet with a short description and samples of his or her work as well as the latest news, pictures and forthcoming events.

If you'd like to have a look, click here: The Word Distillery

Amergin, Keats and Dōgen, Poets and Mystics

Pamela Budge:The Croft Studio 

I am Wind on Sea,
I am Ocean-wave,
I am Roar of Sea,
I am Bull of Seven Fights,
I am Vulture on Cliff,
I am Dewdrop,
I am Fairest of Flowers,
I am Boar for Boldness,
I am Salmon in Pool,
I am Lake on Plain,
I am a Mountain in a Man,
I am a Word of Skill,
I am the Point of a Weapon (that poureth forth combat),
I am God who fashioneth Fire for a Head.

R.A.S. MacAllister's translation from Lebor Gabala Erenn (Irish Texts Society, 1941)

So sang Amergin Glúingel, poet of the Milesians, when he first placed his right foot on the soil of Ireland. In Wales, the medieval bard Taliesin claimed to have been many things, animals, wild and domestic, the tools of farmers and smiths:

I was a blue salmon,
I was a dog, a stag,
I was a roebuck on a mountain,
I was a block, I was a spade,
I was an axe in the hand,
I was an auger [held] in tongs,
for a year and a half.
I was a speckled cockerel
covering the hens in Eidyn;
I was a stallion at stud,
I was a fiery bull. 

( Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin, edited and translated by Marged Haycock)

Some people see these proclamations as evidence of shamanic practices, shape-shifting or time-travelling, while scholars studying the Taliesin texts have sought to demonstrate that they are not the work of an early druidic bard but rather of a medieval professional poet promoting a mystique about the knowledge and talents of his profession, incorporating learning derived from such diverse sources as medieval science, folklore, biblical and continental texts.

But can we see these particular utterances of Amergin, (‘Born of Song’) and Taliesin (‘Radiant Brow’) in poetic terms as exemplifying the ability or skill of the poet to inhabit other bodies, other times and situations through his imagination or mystical experience?

Famously John Keats described the chameleon poet who has no colour of his own but takes on those of others, whether good or bad:

The poetical character... is not itself — it has no self — it is every thing and nothing — It has no character — it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it fair or foul, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. — It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philospher, delights the camelion poet.

It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity – he is continually in for – and filling some other Body – the Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; no identity – he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures. [1]

Keats is even able to imagine how an inanimate object might experience its existence, telling his friend Richard Woodhouse that he could conceive of a billiard ball taking a sense of delight in 'its own roundness, smoothness, volubility and the rapidity of its motion’.

Coleridge wrote in a letter of 1819 that he too experienced "a sort of transfusion and transmission of my consciousness to identify myself with the object" and nearer our own time T. S. Eliot has described how the poet continually surrenders himself to something more valuable (in this case an awareness not only of the time in which he lives but also the presence of the past, an experience of the timeless and the temporal) and asserts that  ‘The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’ (Tradition and the Individual Talent)

There are some similarities between this ‘progress of the artist’ and the Buddhist way. The 13^th century Chinese Buddhist Dōgen said:

To study the Way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.
To be enlightened by all things
is to remove the barriers between one’s self and others.

But, although Dōgen himself was a poet, he taught that the Way led beyond language to a state of being fully present and enlightened. The way of the poet and the way of the mystic share steps on the journey but lead to a different place. When I was 16, sitting by a tree-lined lake with my cat, I had the classic mystical experience that we are all One. This was no conscious musing or reaching after meaning; there were no pictures, no words at the time, it was a sudden, unexpected and involuntary shift of perception - one which hasn’t recurred  to date, although I suspect that my sense of the world and my being-in-the-world has been informed by it. But it's an experience that is impossible to put into words beyond 'We are all One'; impossible to describe of what that consists, how it feels, how it looks - because it is outside the usual bounds of perception and therefore of our usual modes of description which rely upon the senses. We may try to use words to describe it further, but in my experience they taint and dilute it.

In her essay Two Secrets: On Poetry’s Inward and Outward Looking [2], Jane Hirshfield considers poetry’s relationship with the outer world. She suggests that poems which carry reflective and indirect meanings take one of three stances: the subjective in which a ‘human-centered consciousness [is] dominating’; the reflective in which ‘the poet and the outer world stand face to face in mutual regard’ and the objective in which ‘the poet becomes an intermediary, a medium through whom the world of objects and nature beyond human consciousness may speak’.

But is it possible for the world of objects and nature beyond human consciousness to speak to the poet and for the poet to communicate it to others? As Hirshfield herself says, ‘The earth does not speak our language’ (and Wittgenstein thought “if a lion could talk, we could not understand him”). Miriam Gamble points out in her review of Ruth Padel’s recent poetry collection Mara Crossing, that ‘Padel tussles…with the paradoxical truth that we can gain access to other perspectives only by filtering them through the networks of our own’. We cannot ‘conjure the experience of animals without sinning through usurpation’.

I think there are two ways in which we endeavour to engage with the consciousness of other beings and objects. One is through a mystical communion with nature, with aspects of reality that are normally beyond human perception – an experience which is beyond words and is often corrupted if an attempt is made to communicate it in language. The other is through the imagination.

What is the imagination? It is the faculty which gives “the power to visualize and build mental images; dream about things that have never happened; feel intuitively; and reach beyond sensual or real boundaries” (Elementary Art - Glossary of Art Terms) Colderidge defined the Primary Imagination as “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”. James Volant Baker thought that for Coleridge, "the creative act… is a godlike-act-of-power and causing-to-be, imagination being the divine potency in man”. (James Volant Baker, Sacred River: Coleridge’s Theory of the Imagination) The Primary Imagination says Coleridge, is the necessary imagination as it "automatically balances and fuses the innate capacities and powers of the mind with the external presence of the objective world that the mind receives through the senses".

“I am God who fashioneth Fire for a Head” said Amergin, the pronouncement often taken to mean that he is the god who kindles the fire of creative imagination. But is that what he said? The original says “Am dé delbas do chind codnu" and codnu is obscure. It may be a plural form of the noun conn / cond which could mean a 'protruberance, bulge'; so 'horns, antlers', or it could mean 'intelligence, sense', or even 'chief, leader, sensible person'. The meaning ‘fire’ (tene) only comes from a later gloss on the text. Dennis King has questioned, could the line read "I am a god who shapes/creates horns/antlers for the head" - which might link it, perhaps, with Cernunnos, the antlered god. John Carey (The Celtic Heroic Age), meanwhile, translates the line as “I am a god who forms subjects for a ruler”. Problems of translation are not only between nature and ourselves…

But if Amergin is saying that he is a god that shapes intelligence or sense (meaning), then that is perhaps not a bad way of describing the consummate poet who uses his imagination to engage with the external world and filter his vision through language and form to his or her audience, enabling us to expand our perception of the world, its diversity and its wonders.

^[1]   Selected Poems and Letters of John Keats, edited with commentary by Robert Gittings, Heinemann, 1966, p 87

  ^[2] Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, by Jane Hirshfield, Harper Perennial, 1998, pp 127-152