6 Degrees of Connection

At the end of 2013 I was commissioned by Tyneside Cinema to write and perform a poem as part of a conference about young people and engagement in specialised cinema. You can read about the event here.

It was a pleasing mixture of fun and terror writing a poem based on the conference as the conference happened. Since then we have developed a publication which combines a revised version of the poem, alongside prose which summarises some of the learning from Tyneside Cinema's Young Tyneside programme and the evaluation of it by Morris Hargreaves McIntyre, which can also be downloaded from the Tyneside's website here. This was published in 2014 but for some reason I did;t put this blog up then. Better late than never.

The publication, Six Degrees of Connection: Towards the Absolute Alrightness of the Kids, can be downloaded from the Tyneside's website or in the Publications section of the Thinking Practice site.
The poem got shorter after the actual event because it takes longer to write something short than something long, as anyone who's tried to write something good knows.

Video evidence of the reading of the original version exists, but I'm not telling you where. It probably goes without saying, but I am very up for being asked by others to do this sort of thing in interesting places and interesting situations.

The Infinite Town

Above is a photograph of a poem I was commissioned to write by Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council. It is inscribed in a large plinth on the High Street, part of a huge redevelopment of the town centre. From the summer, an automata in the shape of a train will arise from the point (once a day, in Trumpton-style).

The poem was one of a number I wrote in response to the commission, and was chosen by the panel overseeing the redevelopment. The poem had to do a number of things (some for the commission, some for me):

• Be memorable but not too simplistic - some people will see this a lot and I wanted it to strike them differently over time
• Have local relevance and reference, but not be backwards looking
• Not be trite
• Have a slightly 'civic' tone
• Have a kind of density to it.

So if you know Stockton you may pick up references to the Infinity bridge, which you can just about see from the plinth, the Tees, and the town's firework tradition. (Starting with the invention of the safety match.) It was also, of course, part of the birth of railways.

I actually did't know this was in place when I first saw it, on a shopping trip just before Xmas. I think it looks rather handsome, if I may say so myself. It's also a rather odd feeling to see your name in such a permanent-looking site.

It was very kind of the Council to put a big bow on it too. I think this was just for Xmas:

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