Sir Tom Finney

In How I Learned to Sing, there are a couple of sestinas for my dad. The 2nd tries to capture something of one of my favourite things in life: walking up to Deepdale, home of Preston North End, with my dad. I tried to make it a bit like a poem version of an animation in which we morph from me as a child to me leading him, now a slower and older man. I wanted to pull off that lee Hall trick of it being full of feeling and sentiment without it being sentimental. I didn't want anything 'clipped' though: it is a risky gesture, and not for me to say if it came off.

I share the poem below, as I dubbed it a 'Finnale: ancient Lancastrian verse form, a sestina mentioning Sir Tom Finney' and Sir Tom passed away last night aged 91. There's no need for me to say much about what a great man he was, and how sad that is. For North End supporters, I think he's always been a kind of grandfather figure. It's sad he never got to see PNE back in the top flight. I love the photograph above for all sorts of reasons, some of which are also wrapped up in the poem.

2nd sestina for my Dad, a Deepdale Finnale 

I march as if catching up, feet off the ground

across every gutter, from the bus station, my Dad

swerving me through ginnels he used to walk

with his gang from Lady Street, demolished now, toward a win,

but only for the police horses on the terraces as we lose,

then make our way back through fight-littered streets

that now glow in the dark, suddenly glamorous streets -

one set of expectations drowning another, grounds

for a Saturday night on the tiles as I lose

him in the crowd, squeeze back to the barrier and there’s Dad

leant where he can hardly see, dreaming of pools wins

and telling his friend the boss exactly where to walk,

how one day we’d drive there, stop short to walk

from Nan’s penultimate nursing home through streets

a shimmer of redbrick fresco into sunlit wind,

make our way across Moor Park’s muddy ground

hopeful and joking, sometimes with my Mum, Dad’s

being dragged there something we did together, lost

when her legs would not support her, when to simply lose

was harder than it had ever been to make that slow walk

through optimism and renewal, to find in my Dad

imagined grit of those proud sheepish workers’ streets

turned into short lets, passing through drugged ground

where the roar for late equalisers sounds like a win

to wretched early leavers too eagerly taking wing,

his shot knees cracking shut to slow him, mine loose

as ever, dragging my son now, hopeful that the ground

floodlit ahead might hold a game that would let us walk

away brightly, with only praise, only laughter, through streets

rivering with victors around us as we wait for Granddad,

eddies of history, generations of anticipation, all that Dad

disdained to climb so high to see, an echo of a Finney win

blowing these foggy memory-streaked streets,

full of everything all of us will one day lose,

someone who remembers the ancient trail we walk

towards who knows what, away from the very ground

that taught Dad how to teach me to lose

the desire to always win, to find a line to walk

through tight-woven streets, mapping memory’s home ground.

Finnale: ancient Lancastrian verse form, a sestina mentioning Sir Tom Finney

Stride review

Rupert Loydell, who published my first full-length collection, The Horse Burning Park, back in 1994, via his Stride Books, has reviewed How I Learned to Sing on the Stride Magazine website. It's a kind and generous review, describing how this book and Paul Hawkin's Claremont Road, which Rupert also writes about, had started to rekindle a jaded interest in poetry. In a strange coincidence, I once briefly lived on the next street to Claremont Road, in E11.

Here's what Rupert had to say about the book:

Mark Robinson has ended a decade of poetic silence whilst working as a senior arts manager with a New and Selected Poems. How I Learned to Sing is aptly titled, for one of the astonishing things Robinson continually does is make music out of political and social concerns and observation. His poems tell stories, but these are stories fuelled and informed by anger and outrage at the way he and all of us are treated.

In more recent poems this is filtered through stories about his family, his fears for his children, often via more playful and gently experimental forms - lists and variant patterns. Robinson is ‘a northern poet' still, he says so in his poems; and the plain-speaking, plain-language of his early work has (thankfully) never gone away. Robinson has no time for daft ideas or political shenanigans, wants to cut through the crap and make it right; ask questions and get direct answers.

This isn't, however, political poetry that rants and screams: there's little sloganeering and no platitudes here. Robinson's politics is personal: in his world art and writing count, politics is personal and affects the real families, communities and society he is part of. It is from this that he makes his poems and tells his stories, makes comments and asks questions.

Here are two poets who have learned to sing down-to-earth songs, who know that 'Ideas should not be mistaken for facts' (Robinson) but know ideas come out of facts, make facts and inform facts. Fact: this is hard-won, hard-working poetry, that's reminded me how good words on the page can be.

Reading Guide for How I Learned to Sing

One of the great things about the Read Regional promotion is that every book has a 'Reading Guide' produced - well, produced as a downloadable pdf anyway. You can see mine here and those of the other 10 writers here.

Each consists of an introduction, written by the writer, some questions for discussion by reading groups, or for deep reflection if reading alone, I guess. At least one of the question in my list is a bit sarcastic which gives you a clue that the writers were asked to think of questions. There are also suggestions for further reading - I took this as an opportunity to point people towards anthologies mainly, including some I'd either edited or been anthologised in that people might otherwise not come across.

I've added the introduction as a separate page here, as it seems to work pretty well on its own. If you come up with any particularly insightful, funny or insulting answers to the discussion questions, I'd be very happy to hear them!

Read Regional article in the Bookseller

I was asked to write an op-ed piece for The Bookseller about the Read Regional scheme How I Learned to Sing was selected for. You can read it online here : http://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/reading-regionally.html.

In it I talk about the positive use of public funds, New Writing North's track record of great ideas, and the virtues of libraries as democratic spaces and signs of community health. Hopefully any librarians reading it will feel obliged/encouraged to make sure I have audiences when I turn up at their venues over the next few months. (Tour dates here.)

Review of Read Regional reading

It's not often you get a review for a reading, but there was a very nice one done of the Read Regional event as part of Durham Book Festival, by Alex Opie in The Bubble. This discussed all the readings in what was, as s/he points out, a quick 30 minutes, by myself, Tara Bergin and Cara Brennan. Here's the part about my reading:

The final poet of the afternoon, Mark Robinson, read from his collection How I Learned to Sing. It is a collection about the “cultural and industrial transformation of the North of England” and this therefore makes Robinson the most obviously “regional” of all three poets. Never one to avoid a good pun, Robinson created his own version of the Bohemian Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies,but instead colloquially entitled them The Dunno Elegies. The poem that would naturally lend itself best to a Durham Book Festival reading is a musing on the historic city itself, and Robinson successfully fused Durham’s rich history with his own poetic style. He presented a vivid picture of the “earth-bound angels” that “throng the bridges” and the all-too-familiar notion of being given “a lecture in rhetoric.”

As well as these topographical works, what makes Robinson’s writing so unexpectedly brilliant is his ability to turn from what one would consider conventional aestheticism but to still create something ultimately beautiful. In How I Learned to Sing, the audience are presented with the striking image of “the snag of mishaps” that has “shaped mum’s face into a taut parody of itself.” Yet, as Robinson read aloud, you could understand how his writing is not intended for the academics; instead he is writing for, not, as his poem exclaims, the “real birds” with “real blood”, but the “real people” with “real heritage.”

Reviews, Readings and Reading Regional

REVIEWS:
I've added a Reviews page to this site, and will add to it as the reviews roll in, as they no doubt will. (He said confidently.) There was a nice long, interesting and interested review by Greg Freeman on Write Out Loud which you can read in full here. I couldn't help but laugh at the way not being in Poetry Review is a good thing, although I'm not sure my poems are as plain as they may appear. They aren't very elusive, I agree, but there are a lot of allusions in them, some deeper down than others. There are two in the football poems Greg quotes, for instance. Anyway, I'm glad he seemed to have enjoyed the book, and knows his football!

I also remembered another short review in July's edition of Culture magazine, and found some really nice comments on Anthony Wilson's 'Poems That Saved My Life' blog. I'm not sure quoting something which calls me 'hugely underrated' falls under bragging or complaining, though, to use a phrase I used in 'If I said I was reading' which was discussed recently on Twitter by Oliver Mantell in his @IrregularMargin guise. (Captured in the picture above.)

READINGS:
I will be performing with Bob Beagrie and Andy Willoughby (feeling like the Des O'Connor to their Morecambe and Wise?) at the exciting sounding Jabberwocky Market festival in Darlington on Sunday 6 October. If you're around Darlington - only 2 and a bit hours from London Village - it'd be good to see you. There are 3 short performance during the afternoon, with theatre scratch schows in between.

I will also be performing on the last day of the Durham Book Festival, at 12.30 at Clayport Library in the centre of Durham, with Cara Brennan and Tara Bergin. There are other writers there during the day, including the fantastic Andrew Crumey after we three poets.

READ REGIONAL:
Cara, Tara and I are the three poets on the list of selected writers/books for the 2013/14 Read Regional campaign, working with libraries and readers across the North East and Yorkshire. The Durham event is a sneak preview for events which will mainly take place next year. All the writers recently did short readings for a roomful of librarians and reader development specialists, some of whom had been up since Daft O'Clock. Fine for me to go last out of 11 then...

Actually, we all enjoyed doing that, and meeting each other, it was the 'having our photos took' bit we all pretended to really not enjoy. Anyway, next year I'm looking forward to getting out and about as part of the project, which is produced by New Writing North with Arts Council support. There's even going to be a 'Readers Group Guide' style thing for the book, which is exciting. More on this soon!

A review!

First proper review of How I Learned to Sing was spotted yesterday, in The Crack magazine, North East England's longest-running listings and culture magazine. You can read it in full here on their rather nifty website. Here's some (most) of it...

'And what a fabulous collection it is, an unpretentious examination of art and life in general with his role at the Arts Council naturally informing his worldview (“I could be sticking words to beats somewhere near Boyana / Instead of playing jargon bingo eating a banana”). Clear-eyed and rooted in reality (he’s not afraid to reference Sky Sports, The Lion King and Kafka) and with a finely honed sense of social justice and sparky wit this is a collection that is rich with biographical detail. And he gives just as much weight to the little moments in life, which speak just as loudly as the big stuff.'

I'm pleased with that, though a bit puzzled by the Lion King thing, as I don't recall deliberately making one. I did watch the video a lot when the kids were little though so maybe it snook in somehow. Anyway, hakuna matata. 

And I'm pleased it doesn't say 'autobiographical detail' too.