Saturday 28 January 2017

Poetry film

We had the privilege of hosting the Poetry Film iteration of the North West Poetry and Poetics Network at Salford university yesterday, jointly organized with two other poets, Antony Rowland (Manchester Metropolitan) and Ursula Hurley (Salford). I was reminded once again of the potential for generosity, openness, enquiring exploration, humour, inventiveness and eagerness/readiness to connect in surprising ways of poets, here accompanied by the wideness of scope and attention to both overall structure and details of perspective that a filmmaker can bring.

Sharing their work were Dalia Neis, CJ Hamand, Sarah Tremlett (and Meriel Lland and others), Helen Mort, Michael Symmons Roberts (interviewed by Martin Kratz) and Tom Jenks.

A really successful day in which I was able to make contact/be reunited with a fellow climbing poet Helen Mort - her poetry film set on (or up) Stanage Edge and another underway in Greenland; and also experience the excitement of boredom while listening to Tom Jenks' fantastic performance of many 'Dull days', which often seemed to initiate or presage exciting events (does excitement require the blank scratchiness of boredom?), to a backtrack of 9 1/2 minutes of train spotting filmage. Sarah Tremlett gave a generous introduction to a range of poetry film from the cartoonic, to the collage, to cave art (Meriel Lland); and Martin Kratz teased out of Michael Symmons Roberts a very interesting assessment of docu-drama and the difficulties of combining the two, both in the case of poetry and not. Also wonderful were the discussions between and after sessions, in which again and again the emphasis lay on the textured and spatial complexity a conjunction of film and poetry can bring. I was conscious there were other poets there (Ursula Hurley and Antony Rowland for starters) who could have contributed and that we were also lucky to have performance specialist Jo Scott whose comment in the morning debate on the use of screenplay techniques in poetry from the perspective of the stage play script set me thinking all day.

However I was particularly proud of the representatives of Salford's postgraduate community, both for the quality of comments and questions they offered in the general discussions, and also for their presentations in the morning's postgraduate panel - Dalia Neis' expansive discussion of the filming of wind extended to a filmmaker's view of Ann Carson's work, providing for it an extraordinarily liberating perspective ... exhilarating; and CJ Hamand's 'Depthlessness' https://curtisjadepoetry.wordpress.com/2016/09/06/depthlessness/ could be described on a first view as performance poetry delivered over black and white shots of urban Manchester, but there are such complex undercurrents, both in the half-captured words of the background chatter (and preaching) in the sound track, and even more in the words fleetingly present on screen, seen as reflection in water, advertising slogan, broken sign, graffiti scribble we can read, and elements that could be scribbles but that we cannot read. I find my eye adjusting by the end of the film to search for writing / letters in all the visual images, an exciting and very curious experience. She's on to something here!

Friday 13 January 2017

Poem reaches A level syllabus

A weird discovery last night - that at least one set of sixth formers in a school in Croydon are studying one of my poems. Not sure if this is good or not but certainly intriguing. How it happened: a teacher friend of mine told me that the Forward Poems of the Decade anthology which includes my poem 'Wa/Harmony' (from Joy Change the Japanese collection) has been adopted as a set text for the Edexccel Alevel and AS syllabus! https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/16/poems-of-the-decade-anthology-forward-prizes Quite soon, or possibly as I write, students may be writing essays comparing and contrasting it to another poem in that anthology.

This is the second time a poem of mine has reached syllabus level ('The Character of Rain' from the same volume was and perhaps still is on an Open University module). In this case not only is it strange to be re-reminded of the trajectories a little poem can follow outside my ken or even my awareness - how true they are now something other - an arrow sent forth to find its own way; it is also interesting to observe how work can be altered and reinvented in the process of anthologising and reprinting. The Forward Anthology has extended my poem by three lines! 

How this happened: I was not involved in the proof-reading of that anthology. Indeed I did not even know my poem was in it until it was published, and it took quite some time for me to be sent a copy of the book. When I did receive one, I saw that they had actually combined two of my poems into one. In Joy Change, 'Wa' on page 8 is followed by a little separate haiku on page 9. Haikus are traditionally titleless so this one was set slightly further down the page to indicate a new poem (other indications also being its separate listing on the contents page and indeed the fact that 'Wa' is in six regular stanzas of four lines each, while the haiku is much shorter in line length and in entirety - only three lines). Yet in the Forward anthology the two poems are presented as one.

I quite like the transformation this effects in an odd way although I wouldn't have (and didn't) choose it myself. It fits with one of the collection's potential themes - the expat lost and trying to find her way/make new connections in Japan. It also comprises a good lesson in layout - exaggerate the difference in layout if you mix titleless haiku with titled poems. And it illustrates so well the unfinished nature of a poem or any text. How often we assume we hold the definitive text in our hands, forgetting to check if what we see has been reprinted, republished, revised, or indeed translated from another language - perhaps several times, each of these actions having an effect on the text whether it be through differing layout, page design and size, alteration of wording or indeed changes in the actual language used. Those essays we write, those ponderings we indulge in are in this text now that we hold in our hands or behold on our screen, but not necessarily or not at all in the text the writer originally wrote (and what after all does that 'originally' mean - I had many drafts of 'Wa' I am sure and there is certainly one alteration I would make now if I was me back then (if that is ever possible) and rather wonder if I intended to make then but forgot: adjusting stanza one so the  'pack' is not used twice - although there may well be a student now commenting on exactly why that double pack is so important. (Sorry for the triple brackets by the way)).

But instead I think I want simply to celebrate the different groupings and interpretations that editors and readers and happenstance can come up with. A poem is never finished, is flexible and open and so Forward and Edexcel have done me a favour I think, in that way.



Sunday 8 January 2017

2017: into the new - a love song to Tod

very much still a rainy northern place but after some days of meditation what stays is not the chill and the wetness but the sharp clean brilliance provided by that rain, and also thankfulness at how individual and very much itself this little town I live in continues to be. every year seems to mark the beginnings of yet another new festival, which go on to win awards (Pulling Up Daisies), draw in relatives to visit (Lamplighter Festival), set a high standard for consciousness-raising through poetry evening and cartoon graffiti (The one-off how I wish it wasn't Climate Change Festival). The singing groups, the musicians, the folk festival, the one-off gigs... Yes, placed on the periphery, between two anciently warring counties, Tod has a history of going its own way that still sets a standard for the town, centre of Incredible Edibleness and yet without clinging on to it as IE threads its radial connections throughout the world, stuffed full of poets, potters, printers perhaps who knows, preachers(?), and other crafts or crafty men and women, builders, plumbers, wood-turners, small business runners, both an indoor market and an outdoor market, a traditional tourist information slap-bang up against a thriving willow weaving centre, a simple greasy or not so greasy spoon next to a state of the art truly ART hairdressers where I might get a lecture on how to take my glasses off and on so as not to spoil the cut, and in among the sheds and warehouses of one of its smaller industrial sites a totally unexpected climbing centre gleams its own promises and aspirations. and deep at its centre, opposite the lavish town hall is a huge gold bicycle - the tour de tod - as the Your de Torkshire /Tour de Yorkshire was fondly remembered - that it never even came through the town making not one wit of difference

                                                                                       love it