An interview

There's an interview with me on the website of You Caxton.

Lost in Translation

I have made some comments for World Poetry Day on poetry in translation which you can read on the website of English PEN.

Is There Really No Political Poetry?

Why are there no political poets?  In a long article by Alan Morrison, "Reoccupying Auden Country" in International Times he offers a long (I wish it had been written more concisely) answer which interrogates the question in a useful way.

Morrison points out that whenever this question is put, either by canonised saints of the Left like Eagleton or Pilger or, far less satisfactorily, by poetry magazines like Poetry Review in a singularly ineffective recent issue flagging up the topic, there is an assumption that the question really is: "Why don't the established poets of The Guardian, the big imprints, and the prize shortlists write any decent political poetry in a time like ours of profound political upheaval?" In other words political poetry is being written.  It's just that we don't always get to hear about it and when it does appear these outlets and public poetry voices ignore it because they aren't writing it themselves and they haven't stamped its visa.

When there's a call for more political poetry the answer that invariably comes back is the traditional one that, in Auden's famous words 'poetry makes nothing happen'.  It's a thought that chimes in with the dominant view that political poetry is a form of bad taste, that it will almost certainly be tonally "strident" or formally "doggerel" or morally "posturing".  Proper poetry, this argument runs, "survives in the valley of its making", it is itself and obeys only the laws of poetry, cherishing its aesthetic freedom, untainted by the partisan and tendentious.  Tell that to Milton, Marvell, Blake, Tony Harrison, Liu Xiaobo, Yannis Ritsos, etc etc.

Obviously no one wants to read crudely buttonholing, head-banging doggerel, especially if it lacks any stylistic or poetic interest, but it seems to me that there are two kinds of political poetry: the upfront and the indirect.  The upfront is clear and I have written just such a poem myself, Get Real!, a polemic against the Coalition Government published a year ago and, apart from a favourable mention in the TLS diary column, it has been almost completely ignored by the handwringers of poetic opinion mentioned earlier.  It was sent to every progressive (and unprogressive) publication that seemed relevant but they preferred not to acknowledge it.  It did, however, sell out.  It can be downloaded free until 23rd April when it is republished in my new book Acapulco: New and Selected Poems (Melos Press).  [The new book, by the way, contains several other political poems, including one about Peter Tatchell's courageous defiance of the anti-gay thugs in Moscow, that has one fan so far in Peter himself, who accepted the dedication by calling it "a fab poem".  There's also one called "City of Culture" which will put my Freedom of the City of Liverpool on permanent hold.]  Get Real! is written in a regular Burns-style stanza and it is unambiguously and plainly an excoriation of our current government.

But there are other ways of writing political poetry, more subtle engagements than the direct polemic (vital as that is).  And here I agree with Eagleton, quoted by Alan Morrison, when he says "for almost the first time in two centuries there is no eminent British poet...prepared to question the foundations of the Western way of life".  [I think Geoffrey Hill thinks he is but we can't understand him.] We are still allowed to smile approval at Shelley's assertion that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.  We could argue about what that phrase signifies but let's say it means that they have something to say that is valuable and that may change society in the longer term.  In advocating less in-your-face, direct polemical engagement with immediate political realities, the Poetry Review and poetry prize ceremony crowds will breathe a sigh of relief and feel able to relax again.  They will be much happier with a kind of writing that is not "politically partisan" (ie challenging the political framework they themselves are quite happy to work inside).  But this broader work of engaging with the deepest springs of contemporary society and culture and attempting to criticise it, change it, rebuild it, is a task every bit as important as the lively topical broadside.  It may do more long term good.  We need it, but it does not seem to be forthcoming, unless I am falling into the same trap as the Guardian/New Statesman seers who don't see enough of what is already here.

If I am wrong I would be delighted to hear of my omissions.

Spring is Coming...

The tiny blue forget-me-not flowers that tentatively poked their heads above ground in my garden in Wales in late January were quickly obliterated by the recent weather and we wait for the genuine spring. Meanwhile I have been reading John Barnie's most recent collection of poems A Year of Flowers (Gomer Press) a beautiful volume that presents 44 wild flowers observed within walking distance of his home in Aberystwyth each with an accompanying poem.  The photographs were taken by John Barnie in 2010 and the poems provoked by each flower are, like the images, small beautiful and delicately defined.  It's a delectable little book and finely produced by Gomer.  I live in Powys, the neighbouring county to John in Mid Wales, and I was pleased to see (not ever having considered myself a botanist) that I could identify most of these flowers from my garden and the surrounding hedgerows and fields.  There were some I had never heard of such as Enchanter's Nightshade and some seaside flowers like Sea Holly and Sea Sandwort that I wouldn't expect to see in the Radnor Hills, but otherwise there they were in their glory: harebell and toadflax, stitchwort and violet...roll on Spring!

I won't quote any of the poems; instead you must buy a copy now!

(Something About Me)

I am very pleased to have been elected as a Fellow of the Welsh Academy.  I am not sure I deserve to be in such distinguished company!

Edgelands: The Wilderness in the Back Yard

Having been brought up in the "edgelands" of north Liverpool, where post-war housing petered out in a raddled landscape of stagnant pools, black canals, and the tatty margin of Lancashire agricultural land, I could hardly fail to be interested in this absorbing book by poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, Edgelands: Journeys into England's True Wilderness (Vintage, £8.99).  Their title refers to these nondescript areas that are neither town nor country (the latter managed and curated and signposted).

These are where old industrial workings, canals, business parks, pylons, power stations occupy land that, in some instances, is more bio-diverse than the official rural spaces where people go to observe Nature.  Overlooked, largely undiscussed, these neglected and supposedly unlovely places are, especially to children whose play-spaces they have become, imaginatively rich and haunting and this was an excellent idea for a book.  The two poets, as might be expected, draw on some interesting poetic illustrations of their theme but the main focus is on direct observation and an acute commentary that works its way through all the types of edgeland landscape and its uses.  These boys have done their homework and when they fetch up on some tract of wild land you know that you are going to encounter an exact and copious inventory of the flora and fauna.  It's true that Google has made us all instantly omniscient but I was impressed and learned a great deal.  Buddleia, for example, the typical wild shrub of the edgelands, was actually named after an 18th century botanist, Alan Buddle.  That's why it's such a devil to spell correctly.

Early on in the book the authors have a tilt at the fashionable 'psychogeographers' like Ian Sinclair and Will Self (not mentioned by name) who use the edgelands as "a short cut to misanthropy" with their over-written and over-milked accounts (forgive me) of their urban wanderings.  There's also a bash at those who indulge in flâneurisms (something of which I am guilty) instead of getting on with the walking though, paradoxically, there's not much walking in this book, its authors, one feels getting out to many of their locations by car.  On the other hand the edgelands are more like standing pools than racing rivers so the verb to loiter or mooch (or stare through the chain-link fence of the scrap yard) is probably more appropriate than stride in this context.  Another intriguing paradox is that they attack the advocates of wilderness (i.e. 'real' rural wilderness) for seeming to want to dispense with humanity.  A good point, but the actual encounters and dialogues with individual people in this book are surprisingly rare.  It has more of the detached, analytical feel of a work of high anthropology and so we don't learn a lot about the joint authors, no messy anecdotes or too many direct reminiscences, though clearly they are drawing on personal knowledge (when describing dens and sheds for example).  The popular cultural references and the vocab is always ultra-cool and up to the minute and fogeyisms very rare – all of which of course may seem like a rather knowing tone to some readers – but the book's great strength is in the way it makes us see and think about the edgelands in a new and comprehensive manner.

To close with a typical observation of the authors.  Describing the new 'community forests' which have been planted as part of a strategy of 'regeneration' in some of the edgelands they point out how some interesting new eco-systems that were starting to establish themselves in this marginal wild have actually been destroyed "to make way for the new 'high quality environments'. It feels like a green version of what happened in our inner cities after the war, when communities were cleared and moved on to outlying housing developments.  Regeneration is such a seductive and powerful metaphor."  They are thinking for themselves, in other words, which ultimately makes this a very valuable exploration of the contemporary English landscape.

Would You Treat Your Apostrophe Like That?

As someone who has had to teach writing skills to undergraduates (sometimes in "world class" institutions where one might have thought such a task unnecessary) I know that the basics of English grammar are not universally grasped even by the brightest of young minds.  This was the context of Lynne Truss's best-selling Eats, Shoots & Leaves which revealed a hidden passion amongst the British population for trying to get things right grammatically.  There were opponents, of course, in the shape of the academic professors of linguistics who (unlike the person in the street) didn't like the idea of prescriptive grammar and who argued instead that usage is the God and that permissive grammar is the only permissible version. No one, however, has taken much notice of them.

Now someone has come up with the bright idea of following the success of Eats Etc with a practical workbook, that helps you get on top of the good advice in the earlier book and try out its prescriptions for grammatical improvement for yourself.  It's a simple idea but an excellent one and saves you having to spend Tuesday nights in a drafty further education hall being taught how to do it. You can do these exercises at home with a G&T in one hand.  The author of Can You Eat, Shoot & Leave?, Clare Dignall, has put together a lively little workbook that is a lot more attractive to use than those big fat hortatory books about good usage (sorry Simon Heffer) that clog up the bookshops. There's a characteristically trenchant and funny introduction by Lynne Truss herself who makes the interesting point that never in human history have we done so much writing, as we scribble texts, emails, Facebook posts, tweets – you name it – all day long.  So it makes more sense than ever before for us to get it right.

Clare Dignall briskly takes us on a tour round the well-known troublespots of punctuation (beginning, of course, with the apostrophe) and not only does her book complement Lynne Truss's book, it has something of the same lively wit.  She points out, for example that the apostrophe is "obedient, enthusiastic, and capable of carrying out many important tasks" which makes it a bit like a much-loved spaniel: "However, that's where the analogy ends, because we are usually nice to spaniels."

If you have any difficulty with grammar and punctuation I would say this looks like a very good starting point.

P.S. When I was an English undergraduate at Liverpool University in the 1970s I proudly went to collect my first marked essay by the great Shakespearian scholar, Professor Kenneth Muir.  Would he congratulate me on the brilliance of my critical insights into The Tempest?  A very grave and professorial professor, Muir slid the essay across the table and announced in the tones of an Old Testament prophet: "You should never begin a sentence with 'however'."  I have not done so since. Actually, as Clare demonstrated in that sentence of hers I have just quoted, of course you flipping can.  Being exact in your punctuation doesn't mean being rigid and fogeyish.  It just means getting it right.

Can You Eat, Shoot & Leave? by Clare Dignall is published by Collins at £7.99