Poetry Salzburg Review review

Michael Blackburn has written a very interesting, and generous, review of How I Learned to Sing in Poetry Salzburg #25. It's part of a long essay so I've not copied it all out. There are a few choice paragraphs below, use technology to read the images if you want to see the full thing. 

I like the idea of being part of 'the airbrushed Great Poetry Surge' but should point out I presume Michael means airbrushed out… I don't think we used Photoshop to look thinner. (Might be a good idea now, though…) 

"With his influential magazine, Scratch, as well as his own poems, Mark Robinson was one of the original participants of the airbrushed Great Poetry Surge of the 1980s and 1990s (forget about the ‘New Generation’ stuff – that was the metropolitan establishment waking up to what they’d failed to see and which they’d played no part in producing). When he progressed from vegetarian chef to arts administrator, turning from metaphorical poacher to gamekeeper, he took a decade-long self-imposed sabbatical from publishing his work. For the poetry world this was a loss, but with this excellent collection from Smokestack Books we can catch up with what we missed.

‘The world is a place that has changed and I need your help’ the poet says in one of his earliest pieces, and it could be taken a primary motif of all of his work. Robinson has become a chronicler not just of his personal life – marriage, children, getting older – but also of the society in which he lives.

….

For me, the great strength of his work is the straight-forward human warmth it demonstrates… If you ant to get the best of Robinson, I do not think you can do better than ‘My Love’, which is one of the finest contemporary love poems I have read, and exactly as Milton said poetry should be, simple, sensuous and passionate – and economically short, deploying clear images and a sure sense of rhythm and pace: ‘Such a long time ago now, and nothing to be done,/ which is why I bring you fruit and drink and hope.’

As Pound wrote in Canto 81, ‘What thou lovest well remains, / the rest is dross’; and with this poet’s talent and our luck what remains is a poem like that.’ "

Poetry cushions anyone?

When a poem is published, it's no longer yours. The downside is you often feel it has expired somewhere just round the corner. The upside is that sometimes poems take on a life of their own. Or more precisely, readers give them life beyond their published form or the rites of performance. They pass them on. They anthologise them. They do surprising things with them. They take them into their own lives.

This has happened to me a couple of times. Once, my poem ‘Buttocks’ was used in a Longman school book, in a compare and contrast exercise with a poem by Louis Macneice and ‘The Road Not Taken.’ That was a surprise when I read it. (One question asked ‘Do you think this poem is any less serious than the other two?’) Happily, it does allow me to say teenagers have been compelled to compare my ‘Buttocks’ to Robert Frost…

I was thinking of this because I recently had an email from someone about my poem ‘Domestic Bliss’. They explained why they were getting touch:

More than 10 years ago now I read and loved 'Domestic Bliss'. I studiously copied it and ever since it's been displayed in many, many forms, from framed italics to embroidered cushions in every house (and country) I've lived in. I never took note of the writer so till now it's been anonymous and, each time it is reborn I have a quick Google in the hope of finding out who wrote it and what else they might have done (if I love this so much, what if the writer has more?)

The person had found the poem on Anthony Wilson’s Live-Saving Poems blog – where its inclusion and Anthony’s kind words had been a lovely thing in itself. You can read Anthony’s blog here.

Now, if I’d been Wendy Cope, who has written about how reciting poems should earn a royalty for the writer, I might have sent an invoice and a stroppy note.  (Goodness knows how much she’d want for something almost permanent like an embroidered cushion.) But I was delighted the poem that started life in my head 20-odd years ago had meant so much to someone without my knowledge. Becoming Anonymous but part of someone’s life seems a better aspiration for me as a poet than holding on so tightly. Maybe this just goes to show I'm not a proper poet. Maybe if it happened more often I’d feel differently, but I doubt it. (I believe in home taping too, by the way…) 

I don’t write poems to commission for nothing,  unless its for family and friends and I’d be unhappy if you photocopied the whole of How I Learned to Sing to give to someone.  (It would cost you more than the book, mind.) But if you photocopied your favourite poems to paper your loo, I’d be rather chuffed, though a little surprised. I may look into ‘Domestic Bliss’ tea towels though…

Anyway, here is the poem. As Tammy Wynette sang, there’s No Charge….

Domestic Bliss

The mess gets worse as the beautiful world

tries harder, expands on its original mistake –

something crass blurted out in a fluster –

making a mountain out of moleshit.

You and I aren’t bothered. Too busy to

beat the wolves from the doorstep, too tired

to be pissed off about anything, tonight

the blackcurrant wine is dying our tongues

the colour of our hearts. We’re saying what we mean,

for once, and it feels good, making plans

for the future as if there were no tomorrow.

Your smile leaps out from behind your teeth.

We can do whatever we want.

What we want to do now is

get sordid in front of the fire.

The world is hard but worth it.

PS: None of this should be interpreted as not supporting the right of artists to get paid properly for their work. a-n and air are doing sterling work on this at the moment, which you should read about here. 

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.)