On 29th November 1935, Erwin Schrödinger published his famous thought experiment about the cat. That famous cat in the in the steel box, the cat which is at the same time dead and alive until the box is opened and the cat is observed. I can't say I fully understand it at a scientific level, but at a poetic level, it's just my thing!
I started thinking about how surely, unless the cat were asleep, it would be able to observe itself. And if it did, what would happen? Would the 'psi-function' collapse and, in effect, the cat kill itself via its own consciousness? Let's hope it's asleep, I thought, so there's no danger of that happening...
So, to celebrate its 80th birthday, here's my ode to Schrödinger's Cat, complete with suitably unscientific 'footnotes'. Imagine it with a bit of a rap feel...
Apparently, in later life Schrödinger wished he'd never mentioned the darn cat. I bet the cat wished so too.
As Christmas is approaching, I was reminded of this piece I wrote in 2010. It was only the third post on this blog, and has had the most page views over the years, so I decided that, with a few minor edits and updates, it was worth sharing again.
John Cage, Edwin Morgan and the finding of meaning
Christmas is coming. I can read the signs. There are sparkly decorations in the shops and department stores have started displaying bizarre ‘gifts’ such as electronic talking monkeys that you can clip to your shoulder. (Thank goodness there weren't 'gifts' like that 2000 years ago, or the Three Wise Men might have arrived bearing Gold, Frankincense and Talking Shoulder Monkey...) What else? Oh yes, X Factor fans are thinking about the Christmas Number One. And on Facebook, a campaign against anodyne manufactured pop is once more underway. There’s a group which wants to try and get John Cage’s 4’33’’ onto the Christmas Number One spot. I have to confess, I’ve clicked the Like button.
Born in 1912, John Cage was an American composer, philosopher and artist who became famous for stretching the bounds of music. His 4’33’’ is probably his most famous work. It was composed in 1952, and is for any combination of instruments. The score basically instructs the musicians to not play during the piece’s three movements – it is four minutes and thirty three seconds of absence of instrumental playing. However, it is not four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, but of environmental noise, of expectation, of aural space.
Cage had been considering the idea of silent music for a while, but was pushed into writing the piece by the example of the artist Robert Rauschenberg, who had produced a series of paintings which were basically large white squares. The point of this was that even if they just looked like blank canvases, they would change according to the conditions in which they are viewed: the quality of the light, or what other colours there might be in the room in which they were displayed. In a similar way, Cage’s 4’33’’ uses the silence as a background canvas for the ambient sound and atmosphere: the sounds to which we are usually too distracted to pay attention. Both Rauschenberg’s pictures and Cage’s music required the audience to pay hyper-close attention in order to experience them. Viewers and listeners had to make an effort: it wasn’t all laid out there in front of them. In fact, this requirement of effort meant that they had to become part of the creative process themselves.
John Cage said ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry’. Edwin Morgan, the Scottish poet who died this year, and whose tribute event, organised by the Poetry Society is taking place at the Southbank Centre, London, on Nov 3rd, took those fourteen words and made his own poem of them. The poem, 'Opening the Cage', is a fourteen line variation of those fourteen words, each line creating new meanings through new combinations.
It takes effort to tease meanings out of these lines, and I’m sure different people will find different things. To me, the first line seems to state the poet’s need to write, his uncertainty about whether that writing has any worth, and the fact that this dilemma is what he is considering:
I have to say poetry and that is nothing and I am saying it
By line 7 the words seem to have assembled themselves into an invitation to strip away all the fripperies of life and perhaps also of language to get to the bare bones:
To have nothing is poetry and I am saying that and I say it
And after a sonnet’s worth of variations, the poem concludes (if a conclusion it is) with the decisiveness of a manifesto:
Saying poetry is nothing and to that I say I am and have it
John Cage was very interested in aleatoric music, the music of chance. Morgan’s poem is very much in that spirit – the randomness of word-shuffling produces chance combinations from which meaning can be derived. Morgan chose the fourteen he felt made the meaning he wanted. It’s an interesting paradox, however, that while the poem is punningly entitled ‘Opening the Cage’, implying the freeing of language and meaning, Edwin Morgan might be considered to have imposed a cage of his own by using the sonnet form. (If it is a sonnet – certainly Don Paterson includes it in his 1999 Faber Anthology 101 Sonnets.) However, a more controlling poet might have added punctuation to clarify the meanings he wished his reader to derive. Morgan does not do this. He lets the meaning of each line stay fluid and free. (Have a look at the similarly constructed 'The Uncertainty of the Poet' by Wendy Cope, a poem also derived from another artist's work, to see how punctuation pins down meaning.) It seems to me, also, that implicit in the poem are all the other possibilities which Morgan did not use. For these reasons the sonnet-shaped cage is only an illusion. It’s a poetic Tardis: the inside is bigger than the outside.
If one accepts this notion, ‘Opening the Cage’ is a poem that could continue, inside the reader’s head, for a lifetime. With 14 words there are 14! (that is, 14 factorial: 14 x 13 x 12 x 11 x 10 and so on down to x 1) possible combinations – in other words, 87,178,291,200 different ways of arranging those words. Well, you might say, some of those combinations will just be gobbledygook. Okay, let’s go for a gobbledygook one: the purely alphabetical
am and and have I I is it nothing poetry say saying that to
Is there any meaning to be found in that? Of course there is, of you look hard enough. The ‘am’ separated from its implied ‘I’ has a plaintive, questioning tone, while the repeated ‘and’s and ‘I’s reinforce this feeling of uncertainty. Then we have the question around which this line revolves, the shaky, inverted ‘is it nothing, poetry?’, followed by an imploring ‘say’ – tell me the answer. Next comes a phrase that implies no confidence in the received answer, ‘saying that to…’. This seems to me to question the motives of the unheard speaker: You’re just saying that for some other motive. Whatever it is, it means I can’t rely on your answer to help me in my search for whatever I’m searching for.
And I’ve derived that ‘meaning’ from listing those fourteen words alphabetically. You, dear reader, might derive a completely different meaning – it’s up to you. All it takes to derive meaning is a reader with the willingness to do so.
This kind of poetry, poetry that demands so much of the reader’s participation in the act of creativity, reminds me of the writing of someone I once met in a critique group. She was severely dyslexic, and had come to poetry, and literacy in general, quite late in life. For her, her poetry was mostly therapeutic, but for her readers, it became something quite exciting by virtue of her dyslexia. I can’t give any actual quotes, because I’m not in touch with her now, but, for example, in a poem about domestic violence, she might write things like ‘meating’ instead of ‘meeting’, and ‘burned’ instead of ‘born’ – changes which often added a startling and completely unintended complexity to her poems. When she was alerted to this, she was often delighted with the effect that she had created, and would let it stand. Her meanings were created in an aleatoric way, and the initially chance significances found by her readers were then fed back into her later revisions of the poems.
I’m not sure that Cage’s 4’33’’ will make the number one spot*. Nearly sixty years after it premiered it still provokes angry responses, as can be seen by some of the comments on the Daily Mail's coverage of the Facebook campaign. One person even rants about how the people who support the campaign should be locked up. What amuses me, though, and would probably have pleased both John Cage and Edwin Morgan, is the fact that the Cage piece must have suggested itself for this year’s campaign simply because of its chance sonic relationship with last year’s successful campaign band. Rage Against the Machine – Cage Against the Machine. A chance rhyme from which such appropriate significance and meaning has been derived. How could it have been anything else?
The making of Cage Against the Machine, 2010.
*In fact, Cage Against the Machine made it to number 21 in the UK Chart Singles. X Factor's Matt Cardle took the Number 1 spot with When We Collide. Hey ho, never mind.
‘Opening the Cage’ can be found in101 Sonnets, ed Don Paterson, Faber 1999.
As December is bounding towards us with tinsel between its teeth I thought I might get into the festive spirit and recommend a few books for Christmas presents. Today's selection is for children, but any sensible adult would also enjoy any of these!
The Day I Fell Down the Toiletwas my oldest daughter's favourite poetry book when she was at primary school. Funny, thoughtful, great illustrations - and nearly twenty years after publication, still in print! Published by Lion Books, who have also published two more collections by Steve Turner, Dad You're Not Funny, and The Moon Has Got His Pants On - both equally appealing.
Ted Hughes' poetry for children is just as good as his 'grown-up' stuff. In his Collected Poems for Children there are people and animals (Crow makes an appearance), and a series of Moon Poems which are absolutely stunning. The illustrations by Raymond Briggs seem completely organic to the text - it's like he's just sat down with each copy and drawn them on specially for each individual reader. This is a beautiful book, which I have just discovered is currently out of print. But I'm still going to feature it. Faber, what are you doing? Get it back in print asap! In the meantime keep a look out for it in charity shops... or find the individual collections by Hughes such as Meet My Folks and Nessie the Mannerless Monster.
Ring of Words features a fabulous selection, chosen by the inimitable Roger McGough. Poets range from Walter de la Mare to Stevie Smith, Wendy Cope to Donald Justice, George Szirtes to Grace Nichols. This is an inspired selection. If some totalitarian regime passed a law that a child should only have access to one poetry anthology, I would say let it be this! Give it to them while they're at primary school and they'll still be reading it when they moving up through secondary.
Update: I have just discovered that this is also no longer in print. Faber, what are you doing - again? However, there are lots available at the moment for mere pence at a certain online book retailer's 'marketplace'...
This one, thank goodness, is still in print. Edited by another Liverpool poet hero of mine, Brian Patten, The Puffin Book of Utterly Brilliant Poetry features a selection of poems from ten different poets, plus an interview with each of them. Poets featured are Spike Milligan, Kit Wright, Michael Rosen, Charles Causley, Roger McGough, Benjamin Zephaniah, Brian Patten, Jackie Kay, John Agard and Alan Ahlberg. Apart from the gender imbalance - which is made rather obvious because of the small number of poets featured - I think this is a great representation of a range of poetry for children. The illustrations are bright and stylish, with a different illustrator for each poet, and here the gender imbalance is the other way, since more than half are female. Great for primary school aged children.
Okay, slight failure on the recommending books that people can actually buy front. Sorry about that.
But there's some brilliant children's poetry out there. One I'm going to give to someone this Christmas (shhh! Don't tell!) is Carol Ann Duffy's 101 Poems for Children: A Laureate's Choice, (Macmillan, 2013)with poems ranging from Emily Dickinson to Alice Oswald and ee cummings. However, before I wrap it I'm going to have to read it myself. I have to test it out, don't I?
I've just had the pleasure of reviewing this lovely pamphlet, a linked sequence of original art and poetry responses, at Abegail Morley's Poetry Shed. You can read the review here, and purchase the book here. It's beautiful, and would make a lovely Christmas present for anyone who likes art or poetry!
The poets and artists featured in the pamphlet are:
no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark
I bought Warsan Shire's pamphlet teaching my mother how to give birth on the strength of some of her poems that had been widely shared and quoted on Twitter and Facebook.
I'm so glad I did.
It's not comfortable reading. And that's a good thing.
The poems are brilliant.
Buy it.
Warsan Shire has 53.5K followers on Twitter - when you read her poems you can understand why.
Here's 'Home' which is not in the pamphlet, but which I've quoted from above.
Warsan Shire: teaching my mother how to give birth, flipped eye, 2011
I bought my first Penguin Modern Poets when I was thirteen. I was staying with my uncle and aunt in Dumfries in Scotland, and spent much of my days wandering around the town, revelling in a new kind of freedom five hundred miles away from home. I visited the museum with its wonderful Camera Obscura several times, and I also spent a lot of time in bookshops, where I discovered these slim black volumes. At the cost of 20p or 4/- (both decimal and pre-decimal currencies were marked on the back) I could afford several, so I went home with numbers 2,4,6 and 7, and numbers 13 and 16 which were far more expensive at 25p! I think they must have been old stock, because by the time I bought The Mersey Sound (number 10) six months later, I had to fork out 75p.
I've been adding to the collection ever since, letting serendipity guide me: I don't seek them out, but wait for them to appear before me in charity shops and village fetes. It's like a very quiet mission: I'm playing a long, slow game. One day I might have them all - I'd particularly like number 24, which features Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Kenward Elmslie, and 26 which is Dannie Abse, DJ Enright and Michael Longley.
But I'm reminded of the old Arthur C Clarke story about the monks who wanted to discover all the names for God. They set a computer running to discover all the permutations possible, but when the program had finished and they had what they wanted, they suddenly noticed that one by one, the stars were all going out. The purpose of the Universe had been fulfilled. So perhaps I ought to make sure that there is always a space on the shelf - just in case.
As I've been posting a few prompts for ekphrastic poetry, I thought I'd share one of my own poems inspired by a painting. 'Eye' was written in response to Howard Hodgkin's 'Love Letter', which you can see here. I liked this image as a prompt because it is so open, so full of possibility, and a poem could move outwards from it without (I hope) undermining it. I wrote this a few years ago, and looking at it now, although I'd probably write a different poem today I still like it enough to share it.
The first time I met Charles Causley's Timothy Winters, I was in my first year at secondary school, a large split-site comprehensive in Cornwall. The first two years were based in the old Victorian Grammar School building, but it had been overflowing long before it became comprehensive, so English lessons took place in ancient 'temporary huts', beside a patch of scrubby grass known as the paddock, and just about big enough for lunch-time football games .
It was in one of these classrooms, with the fug from thirty eleven-year-olds steaming up the windows, making slow waterfalls of condensation, that the teacher read:
Timothy Winters comes to school
With eyes as wide as a football pool,
Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters:
A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.
I thought I'd read a lot of poetry. My bookcase had several anthologies aimed at children, and I'd read some AA Milne, Kipling, Tennyson, Blake, Christine Rossetti, Longfellow, Belloc, Robert Louis Stevenson, even a bit of Keats and Shelley. But this was the first time that I'd come across a poem that was about something real. I had no idea what a football pool was, but in my head I was standing at the edge of that paddock, and now it was hollow, a deep crater full of dark, cold water.
I knew that boy. He'd been at primary school with me, in my class. In fact, he was at school with me now, but in another classroom. He wasn't called Timothy Winters, but I knew him, that dirty, pinched-face boy whose 'britches' had holes in them so you could see he had no underpants. And now I was understanding more:
Timothy Winters has bloody feet
And he lives in a house on Suez Street.
Suez: war, bombs and planes, conflict and crisis. I knew about Suez, because one of my father's favourite tales was of how, when he was in the army, he got appendicitis in the troopship on the way. And now I knew what Timothy Winters' home life was like. War, crisis, conflict. This was real, this poem was about someone I knew, and it was making his life even more real to me.
And there was no help, no one to 'take his cup away' from him:
The Welfare Worker lies awake
But the law's as tricky as a ten-foot snake,
So Timothy Winters drinks his cup
And slowly goes on growing up.
And so he did. Charles Causley never knew what happened to his Timothy Winters, but I know what happened to mine, and it wasn't good.
Causley once said 'If I didn't write poetry I think I'd explode', and I am so glad he wrote this one. If he hadn't, I would not have had that mind-exploding experience one grey day in the '70s, when I found out that poetry could make real things even more real.
"Emily Dickinson would not have had a Facebook page, although her cryptic lines make excellent status updates.'' (Sophie Mayer: Emily Dickinson, Vampire Slayer)
Essays by Luke Kennard, Adam Fieled, Sophie Mayer, Emily Critchley, Theodoros Chiotis, Ross Sutherland, David Caddy, Simon Turner,Tim Clare, David Barnes, Hanna Silva, James Wilkes, Alex Runchman and Katy Evans-Bush. Edited by Tom Chivers. Published by Penned in the Margins, 2010.
I've been doing a lot of writing from art recently, but I also have intermittent bouts of creating art. I get frantic with the paint and the ink and the camera, throwing myself into creating something without the intermediary of words. I make a lot of stuff in a rather intensive fashion, and then go back to writing again. I find I can't do both at the same time.
It's liberating, sometimes, not using words; and it's also great training. It gets me looking at things a different way, and this often feeds back into my writing. So I thought I'd share on this blog some of the pictures I've created over the last few years.
You'll find the link for my new page 'Visual Art by Sally Douglas' at the top right of this blog, or click here.
Here's a taster:
Landscape and Reflection. - Sally Douglas. Acrylic on paper.
This term I'm doing a teaching course at my local FE college. It's been very interesting so far, and because it's not subject-specific, I've met people who are teaching or training in widely differing subjects - Hairdressing, Health and Safety, Catering, Safeguarding, Personal Training and many others. In one of our assignments, we had to give examples of we would embed 'functional skills' into our own subject area.
Functional skills are English, Maths and ICT - and apparently we're pretty bad at them in the UK, so the Government wants teachers to take every opportunity they can to give learners the opportunity to use them. And - here's the rub - 'embedding' means the students don't notice you're doing it!
So, how on earth do I embed Maths in Creative Writing? After a lot of head scratching (and asking fellow poets for ideas) I came up with the following:
Discussing word and syllable counts - simple, but counting is a maths skill
Multiplying stanza length and number of stanzas to ascertain a desired line count
Using Dadaist and OULIPO techniques to generate poems and discussion on probability and mathematical generation of material
Discussion of the influence on poetry of Fibonnacci and the Golden Ratio
Talking about probabilities and percentages in relation to the chances of getting published!
I'm sure there are many more, but it took me quite a while to get even these. But after I'd handed in my assignment, I remembered that the title of this blog comes from relating poetry to maths - you can read about it in my very first post, here. It turns out I've been embedding maths in my own musings about poetry for quite a while...
I've just come across Maquette, a Devon-based publisher of chapbooks. Their list is small but, judging by the two pamphlets I've read so far, excellent. They have published four: Kelvin Corcoran's Radio Archilochus, Jos Smith's A Plume of Smoke, Sally Flint's The Hospital Punch and Marc Woodward's A Fright of Jays.
I like chapbooks and pamphlets. They create a different reading experience from that of a full collection: tighter and more focussed. The poet has the opportunity to explore a theme or subject in depth without it becoming overwhelming. Poems are able to 'talk' to each other more intimately. And they're not so heavy to carry around!
You can find my review of Marc Woodward's A Fright of Jays, here at Canto Poetry.
First of all, I have to come clean - I know the poet whose book I'm recommending here. But that's not why I'm writing about it - I'm writing about it because it's great!
Elly Nobbs' The Invisible Girl won the 2013 Doire Press Competition, and reading it, one can see why. Her poetry is rooted in rural Canada, with poems about family, and cattle, and collecting firewood; but it zooms its way through science and science fiction as well, in poems ranging from the microscopic (amoebae) and the infinite (space).
In Re-Write, she raises questions about reality and truth; and what a poem is, and what it's for. The poem recounts a family disaster when the cows died, but starts
We're supposed to lie in poems:
so here's one
Threading the poem through with repetitions of 'I suppose', and the dreadful concrete details of the cows' suffering -
...their stomachs
blew up like olive green balloons
and her father
stuck their bellies with Mom's carving knife,
let out the fermented gas, called the vet -
who couldn't help. Kaput. Like that.
- the speaker holds off till the very end to reveal which part of her story was the lie.
In The Cure, the small world of the speaker echoes the smallness of our everyday experience:
Days are like zoos. It's unnatural
and tiresome under the grey microscope
in this tiny room where I get paid
to tally invisible dead
insects in brine...
but in Space Ship Captain, the poem from which the collection's title is taken, when a girl is assigned the task to
...sort
invisible bits of
things into piles -
one room's for wings
with black holes;
nonsclerotized bits with no pronotums
must go some-
where else
she decides to do something else with the bits, and makes herself an 'Apollo Saturn V rocket'. By Act II the 'Invisible Girl' is breaking into NASA, and by the end, she's off on her travels, and, at least to herself, invisible no more.
This collection is sparkling with wit and weirdness, and at times as playful as a puppy, but its concerns are deep and universal. It's a magical collection, and well worth ordering all the way from Canada. As Bill Greenwell says, 'Elly Nobbs writes like Emily Dickinson on Mescalin'. Who could ask for more?
In Anthony Wilson's fantastic new anthology 'Lifesaving Poems' (Bloodaxe, 2015), there is a poem called 'The Picnic', by the American poet John Logan. Anthony recounts how this was the poem which was his gateway into the world of poetry, when an inspired English teacher read it aloud to his class of schoolboys. And when I heard Anthony read this poem at the Bodmin Moor poetry festival I had an instant flashback to my own school days.
I was thirteen - in what would now be called Year 8 - and the Lower School English Monitor. This role consisted of keeping the English stock room tidy, and had the work-related benefit of being able to spend every lunch time ensconced in a book paradise. It was a small room, in an old Victorian granite building with high church-like windows; every wall was covered with shelves upon which were stacked all the books that might be used in the first two years of the school.
To be honest, keeping the room tidy didn't take very long. So I spent most of each lunch-time reading. I often found the playground a difficult place - books were much more reliable companions. And the book to which I kept going back was a poetry anthology: Voices, the third book, edited by Geoffrey Summerfield. Before Voices, I had loved poetry, but the poetry I loved had been very limited. I'd been brought up on AA Milne and Lewis Carroll, with quite a bit of Kipling; I knew Allingham's Fairies in their rushy glen, and William Brighty Rands' 'The Pedlar's Caravan'. I had the 1973 Oxford Book of Children's Verse, (edited by the wonderful Opies) but that ended with Eliot's cats and a verse by Ogden Nash. I'd read and had read to me lots of poetry - but nothing like the poems contained between the covers of this book, with its picture of a candle-lit skull, and a moth perilously close to the flame.
I had never read anything like it before. This was real, grown-up stuff, stuff that hit me in places I didn't know I had. The poems seemed to encapsulate all I needed to know. Philip Larkin’s ‘Days’: such simple language, and the first time I had come across a poem which didn't tell me everything but made me realise it myself. Wole Soyinka’s ‘Telephone Conversation’: just that, a conversation, shockingly introducing me, a child from the exclusively white society of rural Cornwall, to the reality of racism. Thom Gunn’s ‘Jesus and his Mother’ which extended, and made me question, all I had taken for granted about religion. Suddenly I was reading Auden, Heaney, Robert Frost, Emily
Dickinson, Denise Levertov, Wilfred Owen, Ted Hughes and many, many others. Charles
Causley, Miroslav Holub, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Carl Sandburg: they all spoke to me, to me
directly, through those black and white pages. A lot of them didn't rhyme, a lot used very plain language, some were instantly accessible, others took a bit more work. But they all set my head on fire.
Wole Soyinka (photo of Soyinka by Roger Mayne)
And there was 'The Picnic' by John Logan. This was a poem about teenagers. People not much older than me. Here, in this book. Not patronising, or didactic, or diminishing the experience of youth through the filter of the adult gaze. Just the words, freighting the experience of a life that a thirteen year old could imagine as their own.
Radio 4 once had a series called 'The Tingle Factor', in which musical, artistic, and literary personalities shared the things which made the hairs on the back of their neck stand on end. Hearing Anthony read 'The Picnic', I now know that this poem, along with Tchaikowsky's 5th Symphony, Beautiful South's 'Good as Gold' and several other pieces of music, has the Tingle Factor for me.
Voices is still one of my favourite anthologies. I bought my own copy during my teens and I still dip into it regularly. Now I am able to appreciate the skill of the editor, and the choice of challenging but incredibly apposite illustrations. 'The Picnic' is flanked by Edwin Morgan's 'Strawberries' and an anonymous C4/5th Chinese poem about a boy and a girl sent out to gather rushes and returning with none - a triptych of adolescent summers which to me as a teenage reader functioned almost like one of those triple mirrors one sees on dressing tables. Wilfred Owen's poems are preceded by Hardy, Hughes and Rosenberg on war, and then a six-page series of photographs of World War I: a pictorial narrative which concludes with pictures of a dead soldier and his horse, and a devastated town. Poems are also juxtaposed with art by Peter Blake, Elisabeth Frink, Hokusai, Hogarth and many others. Absolutely brilliant. Tingle-inducing indeed.
Last year I bought a second-hand copy for my thirteen year old niece. A quick peep into the Amazon Marketplace tells me that there are 47 copies on offer, mostly for a penny each plus postage.
Might I suggest buying two - one for yourself, and one for a Year 8 person you might know?
There's been a lot of discussion about plagiarism recently, following some high profile unmaskings, the latest of which you can read about here. And it seems to have got people feeling very nervous.
I'm sure there's no debate over the fact that if you pass someone else's poem off as your own, only changing a few words, or use thinly disguised tranches of another person's work, it's unacceptable: it's plagiarism. But what about the odd line or phrase that may have crept into a poem through the subconscious? Or something factual that you have jotted down in your notebook and subsequently used in a poem - should you provide footnotes for these sources of information? What about intertextuality - are you going to credit Ovid if you mention Daphne or Narcissus? Do you have to credit the BBC News if a poem came via one of their stories? What about art - if a painting or a sculpture inspired your work, but the poem has moved on from its connection, should you credit the artist, even if by doing so you compromise what the poem is now 'about'? Where is the 'line of necessary accreditation'?
And what about coincidence? It does happen that the same metaphor occurs independently to two different people who've never met, and never read each other's work. Worrying about that is enough to completely paralyse the pen!
It's made even more tricky by the working methods many poets adopt. If you look at any creative writing handbook, or attend poetry writing courses, you will come across a plethora of writing prompts in which you are encouraged to springboard off other people's poems. There is a whole sector of poetry which works with the adaptation and appropriation of existing texts, and many writers will from time to time use related methods. My father died recently, and both before and after his death I found it very difficult to write. My need to write, however, was enormous, and one of the routes I found very helpful was to write down random phrases from various ephemeral texts such as newspapers, jumble them up, and filter my experience through them. These odd phrases may now be peppering my poems - in fact, 'salting' them might be a more appropriate metaphor, since they add flavour but are not visible, are dissolved into rather than sprinkled on the resulting text. Do I need to credit The Guardian et al? The ideas they now express are a million miles from what they were saying in the original context, and to be honest, most of the words were pretty mundane anyway when chopped out of context.
So how careful, and how fearful do we need to be? I don't really have an answer. I think if people get paranoid they're not going to write good poetry. All the words have been used before, and all the ideas come from what everyone has in common - being a human being. Nothing is new under the sun (that's from Ecclesiastes!) but there are new ways of seeing. If we use someone else's way of seeing, and we know we have done so, we need to credit it. So if one writes a draft of a poem that springboards off another work, it is good practice (and might save a lot of grief later) to make a note on the poem so one doesn't forget its method of genesis.
Regarding the odd phrase creeping in via the subconscious, though - I'm not sure there's much one can do, except stop writing altogether.
Which, I have to say, seems a tad drastic, given what my cat, after much internet research, is telling me...
I heard Matthew Francis read at the Bodmin Moor Poetry Festival at the end of May, and was unable to resist buying his two most recent poetry collections, Mandeville and Muscovy (both from Faber).
Mandeville is a retelling of the travel tales of the purportedly real, more probably fictional, C14th explorer Sir John Mandeville. In this collection of interlinked poems, Matthew Francis takes us to situations that many travellers would recognise alongside many that they would not. In a foreign inn, the traveller tests his phrasebook:
Give me soup. This wine is bad. What have you put in it? I am a pilgrim. A merchant. I am lost. Help me. I am sick. Tired. I am wounded. I have hurt my foot.
And on the road, the familiar is made strange by being in unrecognisable language:
...underneath the sound and look the meaning of things has changed: road rain tree bird cow man
broken into pieces and floating before your eyes, as if it was only the words that held them in place.
As he travels, Mandeville sees things that are more and more amazing: The Land of Darkness, the Amazons, the place where 'the ants are as big as dogs' and dig for gold, and the Gravelly Sea where waves are made of stones
...drawn and redrawn on the stillness as if a field could plough itself, or the desert frown
This book is a fantastical journey, filled with wonderful images, but it is as much about the nature of travel and what it does to us, and the nature of language and how the unfamiliar can set it loose from its own moorings. Definitely worth a read.
Oh, I loved this slim pamphlet. Loved the cover design which seems to hold both the stillness of amber and the movement of water, and loved the typeface which seemed quite ordinary until it went into curly, almost mythological, italics. In fact, these physical characteristics of the book might be seen to symbolise the world Nell Farrell depicts within these pages.
Nell Farrell's Mermaids come to stay like a gaggle of teenage foster-daughters from somewhere very other. They try out human life with a zest that has them talking like buses and emptying the contents of the freezer, visiting Cornwall, going for speech therapy; and experiencing Christmas, when films featuring pirates
...lure them
to sit enraptured in the greenish light,
arms around each others' waists,
soothed to a slightly puzzled bliss
Ordinary things are transformed through the mermaids' gaze, while the speaker's ordinary life is transformed by their presence. These poems are funny and poignant and sparkling with language. I loved them.
The second part of the pamphlet widens its scope to other characters: nuns and goblins, circus acts. I particularly liked the two short sequences. In 'Ascension' an artist's model finds that his experience leaves him strangely changed, and in 'Assessing the Librarian', real facts become surreal facts, and artefacts become talismans:
That's an angels' vertebra. I found it on a beach in Greece.
I've always loved it there; they gave so many words
to my profession: heuristic, hermeneutics.
This is a fabulous collection, in every sense of the word: an exuberant place where there is no distinction between story and everyday life.
Mermaids and Other Devices is published by Moormaid Press, and can be ordered very easily from the publisher here.
An incredible variety of poems and subject matter, all held together by their relationship to the title of the collection. A compelling central sequence, 'How I Abandoned My Body To His Keeping', is flanked by poems rooted in the quotidien North but threaded through with humour and the strangeness of the dark.
