- ones I either like or have been influenced by:

Louise Glück
Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg
Karen Annesen
Anne Berkeley
Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill - admittedly for a single poem, that we know of, but what a poem...
Sappho - cliché choice but what would you; the woman's good.
Christine de Pizan
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz
U A Fanthorpe - much missed.
Rosie Shepperd

- so here's a poem by my friend Paul Yandle which does something I like in poems: lulls and then jolts slightly. His website, with more poems, is here

Shell


'The average garden snail has a top speed of 0.03 mph.'

It took him a good ten minutes
to cross the first patio slab
and so he was obviously not in any rush
to reach the small patch of lawn
that lies outside the kitchen window.

You know –
I thought as I watched him heading
towards the tall grass –
if you were going your top speed
you could have been there by now,

and I would not be watching from this chair
your steady, soothing progress,
but making that phone call to my father,
whose own father died exactly ten years ago today.

I would just be dialling his number
as you settled in your shell.

Paul Yandle

I used to have a random poem generator. Actually it still exists, over here at Geocities but it won't for much longer, because Geocities goes down the tubes on 26th October. I moved my site ages ago, in fact it's been in two incarnations since then, but few hosts can cope with javascript as Geocities, for all its faults, did.

I made it because I wanted to see if I could, really. I don't write javascript, but an intelligent man adapts; I had a sample generator and it struck me that with a basic knowledge of html it should be possible to work out which was the javascript and which the actual bits of fixed and random text, and insert one's own in place of this text, which worked fine. It was a very long job actually thinking up all the bits of text, putting them in and then changing ones that didn't work well in practice.

After that, however, one had only to hit reload to bring up half a dozen or so new lines of more-or-less sense. I'd say six out of ten were duds, another three had lines worth thinking about and the tenth would be really interesting. Sometimes images would accidentally work together, sometimes I'd get a contradiction, like the sun shining at night, that could actually be more interesting and that I'd maybe not have thought of by other means. What I liked about it was that it'd sometimes kick-start poems for me when ordinary methods didn't, yet because I'd created all the text in the generator, any poem that came out of it was still All My Own Work.

Anyone who fancies doing this as an aid to composition, and has somewhere to host it online, can right-click on the generator page, hit View Source and copy the script when it comes up, so they can then alter the relevant text. I've kept the script too, and also some of the results that came up lately. The words in bold in the first example are the only fixed text, all else was random. As you can see, you don't get masterpieces out of it; you get some odd juxtapositions of words and images that just might set something off.
( examples behind cut )

I’ve blogged before about analysis of poems and how they work, and how some love it while others avoid it. Here’s another dip into the same pool, occasioned by a Facebook discussion of the way a poem featured on Woman’s Hour had given rise to wide discussion, all, apparently, centred on the issues it raised, rather than on the way the poet used language. Someone defended the right of readers not to care about the way a writer uses language, but instead to value a poem solely for what it does to their emotions, and of course they do have that right. Indeed you could argue that the better a poem, or any writing, is, the less its craft should be noticed by the reader, just as you don’t expect to see the scaffolding once the roof’s up.
( But... )

Am doing some readings while down in Cardiff. (Actually threee, but the middle one isn't, as far as I know, open to anyone but the members of the Pontypridd WI, so if you join by next Wednesday...)

The one I've just done was in Chepstow for Poetry on the Border, with Wendy Cope, and, aside from being enjoyable, was notable for there being an unnerving number of poets in the audience, and good poets too - I counted Rosie Bailey, Anne Cluysenaar, Gwyneth Lewis and Ann Drysdale that I actually got to speak to, and I think there were others. That sort of audience really makes you feel you need to raise your game! But all must have gone well, because we sold books. I'm not sure the good citizens of Chepstow could quite give the erudite and noble inhabitants of Haverfordwest a run for their money, but they certainly compared favourably with most venues. (Haverfordwest is special; if you're a writer and ever get invited to read at Haverfordwest Library, go at all costs and take a shedload of books along to sell.)

Next (public) stop is Wednesday 16th September, 6.30pm: reading at Waterstones, The Hayes, Cardiff, to launch my Later Selected Poems (a title that seems to imply I'm a little more dead than when the last one came out). If anyone's localish, do come!

Arriving is always the same sweet mix of promises.
Leaving, well, you never know a person or a place
until you leave.
("Carl's Bar and Grill")
( more )

Salt's website is here

- and this is how the cover finally came out; I haven't scanned it in yet but the thumbnail version from Seren's website shows what I think is the one change, a sort of fade-effect on the words which I quite like.




Now we're trying to find an official launch date and a venue that costs sixpence-halfpenny - you'd think places would be reasonable, in these hard times, but it ain't necessarily so, apparently.

Haven't found any typos yet though I did find one factual error in the back cover blurb that someone, namely me, should have picked up on. Am hoping nobody will notice.

"Where do you get your ideas from" – the perennial question writers get asked at readings or workshops. I used to try to give an answer to the question asked (though it generally came down to "from the world around me"). But I think now that I should have been saying "it isn't about ideas at all; it's about what you do with them". And if I were still giving workshops, I might use the two Ozymandiases to illustrate.
( cut for length )

On Jo Preston's poetry blog, A Dark, Feathered Art recently, I had a difference of opinion with a poster who said she couldn't be doing with criticism that focused on the technical stuff about poetry, rather than its inspirational, emotional side. And now I think maybe I can demonstrate why I do want criticism to do just that – because, paradoxically, I am currently quite emotionally overwhelmed by a particular poem. It's one heavy with nostalgia and loss, freighted with unreachable back-story, that leaves you - well, me - with that weight-pressing-on-lungs feeling of utter sadness and emptiness, plus a strong desire to read it again immediately and get the fix repeated, that one only gets from a really good angst-fest. Like the end of HDM, though for my money the angst there isn't fully earned, or the end of Renault's The Persian Boy, where it is. Or many an angsty fic I can think of.

Many poems do it too; one that's been giving me the angst fix for years is a French poem by Francis Jammes called "Clara d'Ellébeuse", which I might write about later. And I don't need commentary to tell me what the poet is doing; I know. What I want to come at is how he does it. As a writer, obviously I want to know his techniques so that I can pinch them but I would think non-writing readers too would be interested in exactly how someone is managing to mess with the inside of their head.

So, behind the cut, my thoughts on a poem in the latest issue of the journal Agenda, "Penllain" by Paul Henry.
( cut for lengthy wittering )

I don't speak Catalan, which I regret, because during the short time I spent in Barcelona I noticed that it seemed to resemble Welsh in some ways, like the days of the week. But I've always been irrationally chuffed to know that there's a Catalan translation of a poem of mine online.

It's at the web site of the translator Sadurní Vergés and is a translation of a poem called "The Extra" - the original is underneath the translation.

It's always fascinating to see a poem in translation, even if you can only guess at the words from their resemblance to others; you still see different rhythms, emphases, rather like giving yourself a new hair colour.

- that would be Edwin Morgan, above, who is 89 today. It is considerably more than 6 years since some doc told him he had only 6 years to live, but that's Indomitable Genius for you. A lot of great writers are not very nice people; he is. Here's a link to A Home in Space, on his web site

- and to Strawberries, same place.

Strangely enough, he shares his birthday with Samuel Morse, which I'm sure he appreciates; he has always been interested in unconventional language. Here's The Loch Ness Monster's Song, a sad little narrative which makes perfect sense when you hear him read it. (I must check if it's on youttube; will edit if I find it)

- for the Wales Book of the Year prize. With another 9 (one of them the poetry collection Mandeville by Matthew Francis, who's not only a good friend of mine but has written a fine book, blast him). Three will get shortlisted at the Hay festival in May, then one will go on to win in June (provided they don't get an idiot politician to read out the winner and find he reads the wrong name, as happened last year...)

And there's also a People's Choice category; folk can go here and vote for their friends and relatives favourite books. Should be interesting to see if the two votes agree!

Here's a free sample:

The Opportune Moment

If you were waiting for the opportune moment, that was it" - Capt Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl

When you go ashore in that town,
take neither a camera nor a notebook.
However many photographs you upload
of that street, the smell of almond paste
will be missing; the harbour will not sound
of wind slapping on chains. You will read
notes like "Sami church", later, and know
you saw nothing, never put it where
you could find it again, were never
really there. When you go ashore
in the small port with the rusty trawlers,
there will be fur hawkers who all look
like Genghis Khan on a market stall,
crumbling pavements, roses frozen in bud,
an altar with wool hangings, vessels
like canal ware, a Madonna
with a Russian doll face. When you go
ashore, take nothing but the knowledge
that where you are, you never will be again

Andrew Motion in today's Guardian:

"News editors don't think a poem is a story in and of itself, so they then get on the phone to as many people as it takes to find someone who doesn't like the poem - then they have their story: poet laureate writes another no-good poem.

I'm not the first laureate to complain about this. John Betjeman (who got so fed up with it he considered resigning) and Hughes say exactly the same thing in their letters. But I am the first person to say it in public - call that a privilege of my 10-year span, if you like. My point is not simply that the response is tiresome for whoever happens to be laureate. The point is: it's bad for poetry in general - but journalists apparently have some difficulty (or, more likely, no interest) in grasping this."

This is absolutely true, though not just of poetry. It's true in a wider sense of literature - the Whitbread prize for biography was only news the year two authors who happened to be husband and wife were "rivals" for it, and I've been rung up a few times by BBC bods who were doing stories about fan fiction and hoped that, as a published author, I would tell them how terrible and intrusive it was. When I told them what harmless fun it was, they were gravely disappointed, though to their credit BBC Wales has latched on to this now and rings me up when some other author is getting stroppy about it. But the format is still "find two people to disagree on air, or find one to take a negative view", and it extends beyond the arts. "Government Initiative Succeeds" isn't news. "Exam Results Improve" isn't news unless you cast doubt on their accuracy. I happen to think this is bad for society in general - anyone would think our national newspapers were all edited by Eeyore - but I think Motion is right that it's particularly obvious in editors' treatment of poetry, perhaps because they see poets as an elitist bunch who need mocking. They do love being able to portray them as forever feuding and squabbling, though, bizarrely and inconsistently, they also see them as forming cliques to assist each other's careers in underhand ways, which you wouldn't think they'd do if they really hated each other so much.

One result is that if a literary author of any kind wants publicity for a book, he or she is well advised to find some totally non-literary angle - invent a feud or a case of censorship. Which demeans things, but is scarcely unexpected....

OK, "Porphyria's Lover" ends in a murder, but for my money, this is scarier:

J is for Jealousy
by W H Davies

I praised the daisies on my lawn,
And then my lady mowed them down.
My garden stones, improved by moss,
She moved – and that was beauty's loss.
When I adored the sunlight, she
Kept a bright fire indoors for me.
She saw I loved the birds, and that
Made her, one day, bring home a cat.
She plucks my flowers to deck each room
And makes me follow where they bloom.
Because my friends were kind and many,
She said – "What need has love of any?"
What is my gain, and what my loss?
Fire without sun, stones bare of moss,
Daisies beheaded, one by one,
The birds cat-hunted, friends all gone –
These are my losses: yet, I swear,
A love less jealous in its care
Would not be worth the changing skin
That she and I are living in.

Those last three lines! The automatic, matter-of-fact resentment of any attachment on the lover's part to anything else, even the sun itself. That "changing skin" suggests a chrysalis within which a body is broken down and remade into something new, scary enough in itself, but this is two bodies, two minds, reshaping each other. When Plato states airily that a true lover's greatest wish is to become one with his beloved, it sounds sweet. When Davies shows it happening in practice, it's terrifying, and the more so because of his glad compliance.

( Also because it's at least semi-autobiographical )

My latest collection Long-Haul Travellers has been shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize and yes, I'm quite pleased (at the very least you get a day out at the BBC's expense in Brecon, which is a nice town).

But the reason for the post is that it triggered a memory of Roland. He was a very eminent Welsh poet, prose writer and critic and towards the end of his life, I judged a poetry competition with him and Aeronwy Thomas, daughter of Dylan. We were quite a bit younger than him, and he had once been a headmaster and couldn't help still sounding like one, so the experience was educational but slightly intimidating for all his great courtesy; it felt like swapping opinions with some sage of the mountains. And he could do something I have never seen before or since. I've judged a lot of comps and people always ask "are they really anonymous - don't you recognise the writer's style even with the name missing?" And the answer is no, in most cases - I can't and nor can most judges I know. But this comp was specifically for Welsh writers in English (they called themselves Anglo-Welsh then but that's frowned on now) and Roland did, in fact, go through about 20 anonymous MSS and name each writer, from his own encyclopaedic knowledge of that writing scene ("this is X, he uses a campanalogical term here and his father was a bell-ringer, and this is Y, you can tell by her line breaks"). Never come across anyone else with that skill.

- is getting voted on here. I just put in a vote for "Floating Off To Timor". I suspect though that Strawberries or The Unspoken will win it, and God knows they're good enough too.

People are always asking me where they can find new poets, by which they generally mean where online, i.e. without finding somewhere to buy a book or magazine. Well, this poet hasn't got a book out yet so about the only place to find some of her work together in one place is online here (the site of a big competition she got shortlisted for). There are a few errors on it, which I hope'll be removed soon; site editors have real problems with getting poetry up right, specially anything with unconventional/individual layout.

And as you'll see from the first poem there, "I love you, Sheila Mackenzie!", Rosie is nothing if not individual. For one thing there's the joyous freedom with which she uses the entire page, not just the left-hand side of it, but almost more unconventional than that is the strong narrative element. A lot of poets fight shy of that in fear that it'll end up sounding too like prose. Mind you, with the sort of stories that happen in her head, there's not much chance of that. I'm very fond of Mr and Mrs Jarvis, in "Syzygy", flying past the second-floor window in that matter-of-fact way that is somehow so much more dislocatory than astonishment. Characters come strongly through these little narratives (the woman who voices the poem to Bernard, for example) and that's often not what people think Poems Are For either. I've got nothing against the poem as lyric moment (Rosie does those too, now and then) but reading some mags, and indeed collections, you could easily come away with the idea that the lyric moment is all poems can do. Rosie's are a good corrective to that. I love the humour too.

The mention in a previous post of Thomas Hood's "Song of the Shirt" started me thinking about poems that escape their normal audience for a life in the wider world. I'm not thinking here of what might loosely be called greeting-card verse like "Trees" but of poems that do have at least some genuine literary merit and yet achieve a wider audience. There's a famous story told of the great Chinese T'ang poet Po Chu'i, (772-846) a popularist by conviction: a young courtesan put up her price on the ground that she could recite Po's tear-jerking masterpiece "The Everlasting Wrong".

Can't see that ever happening in the west, but there are other measures, for instance:

1. being reproduced in other and more commercial contexts than books. "Song of the Shirt" was printed on handkerchiefs. I've seen Kipling's "If", copyright notwithstanding, in umpteen formats.

2. being set to music – eg Masefield's "Sea Fever", Idris Davies' "The Bells of Rhymney"

3. being used in mass media, like newspapers ("Song of the Shirt") and film (John Pudney's "For Johnny", Auden's "Stop all the clocks")

4. being widely able to be quoted in part (Wordsworth's "Daffodils", Shakespeare's "Shall I compare thee", Herrick's "To the Virgins, to make much of Time", Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade", Jenny Joseph's "Warning")

5. being widely parodied (Felicia Hemans' "Casabianca", "Sea Fever", "Daffodils", William Carlos Williams' "This is just to say")

6. becoming a "school" poem, widely known in an educational context. "Casabianca" was foisted on many a generation of bemused American schoolchildren who had no reason to attach any importance to an incident in the Battle of the Nile. "Daffodils" has put many a boy off poetry for life, including my husband, but he can still quote it.

It's already fairly plain from that list that escape isn't necessarily permanent. Nobody outside literature now knows "Song of the Shirt" or "For Johnny". "Sea Fever", "To the Virgins" and "Casabianca" are reduced to single lines in the public consciousness and it's like enough the same will befall the Auden and Joseph poems (she probably can't wait; she's quite tired of it).

As to what helped them escape in the first place, any common factors? Three of those above, the Hemans, Tennyson and Pudney, were elegies for people killed in wars, but I don't know how relevant that is. It's interesting that the two by living poets don't rhyme, but they do have a very definite and imitable structure (you only have to look at all the WC Williams parodies to see how imitable). That would seem to suggest that a degree of patterning helps. Also the thing needs to be fairly accessible, either easy to understand or easy to think you understand (both "Warning" and "If" can be read as rather darker than they appear on the surface, but most people don't).

What I don't know is how much any of the authors aided the escape. Joseph and Kipling almost certainly not; neither rated their escapees highly. But Tennyson and Hemans were quite savvy self-publicists and Hood was on a campaign.

As usual: all questions, no answers.

There's been a lot in the papers lately about what might loosely be called public poems – Elizabeth Alexander's inauguration effort and, on this side of the pond, the debate about who should be the next poet laureate, a debate complicated by the fact that every time a candidate is suggested, her reaction is to say the thing should be abolished in its present form (Wendy Cope and U A Fanthorpe, most recently).

Now of course that's partly because of the royal connection; remarkably few contemporary poets fancy penning odes on the occasion of the marriage of some pointless princeling, and Andrew Motion has admitted to living in dread lest William's engagement should predate his own escape from the post. But I think the problem goes deeper.
( cut for length )
My, that was a long witter, and inconclusive; I still want both....