The sound of my own voice

The amount of times you read poems in the course of getting a book ready for publication is underestimated in the public imagination. You think you have finished writing them, having worked on them for anything between, oh, 20 minutes and 15 years, and edited, revised, sorted, revised a multitude of times, and then you have to proof read the book.

Now, I am a self-confessed terrible prof-roader. When I published the last issue of Scratch, the magazine I edited between 1989 and 1997, I put the name as SCARTCH on the cover as a deliberate homage/penance to all the fine writers that had suffered at my hands/eyes. (Matthew Sweeney told me he thought it was probably a better name, and he was probably right.) I put it down to being a Grauniad reader for too long.

Of course, even proof-reading throws up further corrections and amendments. We also had to decide how to handle the poems with longer lines - indents, shortening the lines even, bigger pages. (Smokestack's format is relatively small, which I rather like as it makes the pocket-sized, in comparision with my last publisher Flambard, who went for larger than normal which meant line-length wasn't an issue.) In the end we went for a combination of indents, 'stepping' one poem a la WC Williams, and one or two tight margins. That seemed to draw less attention than an unusually shaped book, as I don;t consider myself a 'long-lined poet', like CK Williams for instance.

After all that proof-reading I needed a break from these poems, but have just spent some time recording some for some 'podcast'-style 15-20 minute readings you can listen to or download here. This means listening to me reading them a lot, in the edit. So I am a little tired of the sound of my own voice right now. But hopefully you won't be.

You can find the first podcast - poems from the title sequence of How I Learned To Sing here. or just go to the new podcast page of the site. More to come.

By the way, you can now order the book direct from Smokestack - they pay all their taxes so far a I know, and if they offshore anything it'll probably be in Greece or Albania or somewhere that needs the help. (That was a joke if HMRC are reading.) It'll be ready any day now - which is very exciting.

How the hell could an onion smell of a political doctrine?

Unsure about adding to the flow of words about Mrs Thatcher, I thought I'd share two unpublished poems from the upcoming book that connect to her and her ideas. The first is from a sequence called The Dunno Elegies that considers (if that's something poems can do, I hope it is) various sites around the North East and their transformations, regenerations and degradations, using the recurrent image of angels for the spirits that once walked and worked in those places. It is partly an extended pun on Rilke's Duino Elegies. 

This poem references the place where Thatcher did her famous 'walk in the wilderness', perhaps the closest she came, briefly, to thinking desolation might not be a viable way of carrying on. It also draws on memories of visiting the offices of Tees Valley Regeneration, on that very land, surrounded by call centres and colleges. Is it a place or a community, beyond being a site? That we even need to ask the question is part of Thatcher's damaging legacy. 

The 2nd poem takes a more tangential and playful approach.

Dunno Elegy 2

Teesdale, Thornaby

To walk this wilderness you must commit

to the past, to taking of evidence

from the future. You must stand prepared

to stare down demons that draw strength from dirt,

the difficult to leave behind dirt.

Head Wrightson spilt blood here, ran it off

into the river and called it rust, or money.

These call centres exist. But they are blank

as acetates laid over a map in a museum,

blank as minds of reluctant students.

Bombs could fall and no adrenalin would flow.

George Stephenson’s ghost stalks the corridors,

pulled in all directions by fear of kidnap.

Stockton chains him in, Darlington too and

the wrong side of the tracks by the Tyne.

He watches over business studies degrees

and daydreams of Timothy Hackworth

bashing metal up country, near enough forgotten.

They made things here. The she-devil walked here

clutching her handbag and nearly said sorry.

Suicides the Durham bank of the river

brought more than those souls washed up in Yorkshire.

Becoming angels left their heads bloated.

The streets are dotted with students hunting a pub.

The revolution will not be televised.

There is no song to this place, no rhythm,

it is all straight lines and ambient backwash.

Every call has an answer, an even tone

blanketing all the noise that once was here.

Recycled air turns solid after twelve hours

with hardly a calorie burnt away.

The beaters and welders and handtool-burners

gather by the river to fish and to watch.

They talk of bait and boredom, of long years

watching, of the buildings and the quiet

drawn like curtains over the banging they hear.

Sparks flew but a spark now would stand out,

bright on the soft stone and white wash.

This place is all curves and circles, not sparks.

When this circle reaches back to its beginning,

you can feel the bombs drop. The weights

were heavy they used to move things here.

In the offices of Tees Valley Regeneration

a model appeals to the unseen gods.

It is an idea of heaven gone mad. It is innocent

boxes and balls that nothing can balance.

The angelic welders walk around us.

They are not concerned at our planning,

give permission for nothing, just spit

on the polished floors, breathless

from their sweated effort regardless.

They make no announcements about scale,

or what shape it should be, no prototypes

or macquettes can be put under glass

to start conversations in reception.

They do not know any of the answers.

They are not waiting to be shown through.

We are left with the questions, smooth

and unrewarding to the touch as iron.

There is no give here, nothing but

resistance to be found even now.

Everything is a trap for these angels.

Documentary

I knew what would happen next.

I walked out backwards into the yard.

There was a huge onion on the step.

It smelt of acrid string and Thatcherism.

I burst into tears and sobbed uncontrollably.

If you’d have asked me why, I’d have said nothing.

I was incoherent and uncomplaining.

How the hell could an onion smell of a political doctrine?

On estates to the north of Stockton they would tell you.

They would open the shutters slightly.

They would put out a fist to meet your nose.

They would explain that there is little difference.

They were used to finding onions on their doorsteps.

I was not, I was downright puzzled into anger by it.

I’d have turned round and wormed my way back in again.

But words cannot be unspoken.

Besides, there was now a chicken on my doorstep.

Advance Information

It's a weird and unsettling thing seeing yourself described by others to others, in a way that hopefully makes them a little bit more interested in stocking your book. That's what an Advanced Information Sheet does. You can see mine here.

I am used to describing what I do and who I am in multiple ways to multiple people. That means using different kinds of language, which I'm fine with, and finding the truth in all of them. It would be possible to feel 'inauthentic' in describing my consultancy or coaching offer, just as it would in creating interest in booksellers, but I have so far avoided feeling that. The biographical notes I use for my Thinking Practice work, and how I describe myself as a poet, or simply to someone new I meet, are consistent, although not necessarily in the details they choose. Some feel more natural than others, none feel wrong.

Finding that unity, and exploring the plurality and instability within it,  is one of the themes that runs through How I Learned To Sing, particularly the title sequence, but it is also there in the older poems. So I was interested to read the Advanced Information Sheet for How I Learned to Sing, and see what it focussed on. I had helped Andy Croft, my publisher at Smokestack, with the blurb, but from then it was very much up to Andy and the people at Inpress to develop it - they after all know how to get things into shops. (Even when I used to published poetry through Scratch, that wasn't something we majored on.)

This was a little similar to the feeling I had when someone pointed out that LinkedIn endorsements - those weird, rather pointless-seeming traffic-generators introduced recently - gave a sense of how you are seen. I am, apparently, arts admin and fundraising guy, which is not really how I would describe myself at all. (I administer myself fine, but that's where the 'offer' stops, and I try and avoid fundraising and rightly so given my recent track-record.) 

So this AI sheet says - he used to be big in the Arts Council so might have some profile there, he's from the North East and good enough to get in the same anthology as people from there you've actually heard of (which we also supply), and some of the poems can be seen in the context of cultural transformation, that thing you read was under threat recently. (I've always wanted to be of 'current affairs interest', so that's a plus.)

Does this feel like anything to do with the poems, to me? Well, in the first instance, not really, although I recognise there are lots (relatively!) of people who know me through my arts work. It feels increasingly distant, but I know why it's a hook, and it does explain why I've not published a book for such a long time. The second bullet point is by the by, much as I admire those writers, but I guess is a kind of 'benchmarking'. If I'd ever won a prize I guess that would go there, but hey ho. And thirdly, yes, that is very much part of the book, in The Dunno Elegies particularly, but also in other poems. The poems from Bringing Down The Government, from Half A Mind, and Gaps Between Hills describe the same places in different ways too.

I'll be using this blog to unpack some of the themes of the book - and to promote it, to be honest - and the processes that have gone with it, and to share some of the poems. So consider this Advance Information.

How I Learned to Sing

Coming Summer 2013: New and Selected Poems

from Smokestack Books

Watch this space...