The Short Story Challenge

edit biographydelete Biography Short stories - they're my latest challenge. I've written them in the past, with reasonable success (Radio 4, Bridport, Stand magazine and so on) but now I'm trying to go deeper, or shall I say, take more risks. It's a form of problem solving. Each time I sit with a writing pad it's scary. It's like when I used to dip the oil tank (this was before I got a remote senser) . . . up the steps, unscrew the lid, stick in a cane. Is there anything left in there? Does it come out wet? If it does, what a relief. That's what it's like. And then getting someone to read them is scary too. My wife Rosemarie is my best critic. I usually end up taking on most of her comments. But sitting there while she reads is hell. What if she thinks it's rubbish? (She doesn't usually.) It's different from me commenting on her pots. You can react to a pot in a few seconds. It takes longer to explain what I like (or much less often, dislike) about it, but there isn't that wait. A pot extends in space, a story in time.

Poem in hendecasyllabics

Danse Macabre

The hens were quickstepping this way and that

behind the steel mesh, today like every day,

crying, ‘Let us out, for God’s sake let us out!’

I sighed. ‘But I saw, yesterday
down the drive where you love to roam and forage
Brother Fox pass, grinning in his russet coat.’

‘We long to be free pour faire nos jeux,’ they raged,
‘and should the ball of existence bounce to the red
and should the one round in the chamber engage

and should our danse macabre prove a foxtrot
so be it.’ But I left them caged.

There are too many of us among the dead.

[Comments please!]

But I wanted to be that

I am sorry to have to report that Mr P. Oram has beaten me to the achievement of an ambition I have cherished for many years. Reviewing our book Orchards in PN Review Volume 38 Number 4, Mr +Andrew Shanks makes the matter clear:

'To translate poetry is necessarily to accord the poems in question a degree of slowed-down close attention that is hard to replicate with poems written in one's own language. The seductively persuasive essay with which +Peter Oram accompanies his and Alex Barr's joint translations of +Rilke's French-language collection Vergers is a prime case of what one might call resultant 'translator's obsession'. Indeed, Oram writes here almost as if he were a character in one of +Jorge Luis Borges' fantastical short stories . . .'

Well! As if being a character in a Borges story wasn't something I deserve much more! (As long as it isn't +Dahlman.)

Mr Shanks goes on to say 'the effect of the essay is uncannily beautiful.'  Easy for a Borges character I suppose. 'And, what is more important, the translations themselves are also fine.' (Oh good.) 'There is a lot of rhyme in the French; always, surely, the biggest problem in poetry translation. Yet the English versions reproduce a good deal of it in remarkably natural-seeming fashion.'

Oh well. Maybe I'm a character in some other author's story. Maybe even, Mr Oram is created from my imagination, as in 'Las Ruinas Circulares'. But I don't think so - my imagination has its limits. 

Ash Tree Revisited

I felt a need to revisit my poem 'Ash Tree' in my collection Letting In The Carnival. Reading The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck, and the introduction to The Poem Itself  (ed. Stanley Burnshaw) made it seem like (a) a responsibility and (b) a possibility. Here it is:

Ash Tree Revisited

Limbs hewn for light, hung with weights,
or espaliered. More air, less grace.

The canopy a disfigured surface.

Too late.

The dryad gone, he mourns no longer broad
and balanced branches more than her sad flight,

and what he said was love, bright

and flawed.

And here are two more . . .

Here's a preview of one of the Triangle Ted books I've been working on in collaboration with Peter Oram of Starborn Books and Dave Parkin. More to come so keep tuned in!

A new poem

In a vain attempt to emulate the hospital sonnets of Mr Peter Oram, I wrote the following while recovering from having my hernia fiixed.

Ward 3

Who knows where the time
goes? Into the dark
den of Side Room 3?

Up that half-awake
patient’s nostrils? Does
it infiltrate the grille
of that steel ceiling vent?

I watch. Perhaps it fills

(tangled among levers)
the space beneath my bed
until it overflows
down to where the dead
lie in that basement room
one enters with muted tread.

Haiku (?) in English

The form clearly has great appeal for writers in English. This despite the obvious problems. The main one of course is stress. Japanese, according to G.S.Fraser[1], is unstressed. English can’t avoid being stressed. So simply counting syllables is not enough. It seems we have to take as much account of stress patterns in writing haiku as in writing any other kind of poem, even though the condensed form makes this more of a challenge.

         By the way, I recently had the experience of digging out the notes for a poem called ‘The Allegri String Quartet at Fishguard Festival’[2], to do a display showing the writing process. To my surprise I found that I had used a syllable count (nine per line) to organize the poem.  (This, to my embarrassment, after telling one or two fellow poets that I thought such an exercise was a waste of time!) The poem nevertheless has five definite beats to the line, though I think the rhythm is different from the usual iambic pentameter, no doubt because of the constraint of syllabics.

         Fraser notes that in writing haiku the Japanese poets ‘makes no overt comment’, and also that they’re seasonal poems . So maybe a lot of the 5-7-5 three-liners I’ve written aren’t really haiku. This doesn’t bother me at all: the form is such a satisfying way to deal with stuff. The only problem is what to call the little beasts. At one time I thought of using the word ‘traplets’—a heavy-handed pun on ‘triplets’ and the idea of a trapping an elusive thought. But I’ve gone back to calling them haiku . . . with misgivings. Here are some of them, with the aforesaid misgivings.

The sea is making
love to each dark mound of rock,

coming with white foam.

Too clunky a metaphor, betraying the poet’s presence?

One thing about death:

you don’t have to clean your teeth
or the kitchen floor.

Hmm. Definitely not seasonal, and the comment much too overt.

 ‘Love thine enemy.’

‘Why’d ya kill Bin Laden, bub?’

‘We call that tough love.’

Even worse . . . but I was very happy to nail a thought.

Driving through Carlisle
we saw posters Shop at Binn’s.

Dad said, ‘Cats do that.’

Is this close, even though not seasonal? Anyway, it’s one of my favourites.

The sheep have been shorn
and the wind is everywhere.

‘Bare,’ they chorus, ‘Bare!’

Even closer?

Now the blade of dawn
laid along the eastern hills
peels away the dark.

No, no, more self-conscious imagery . . . And finally

At Mum’s funeral
Reverend read her CV
for a job in heaven.

This goes down well at readings. But is it a haiku? And do the stresses in all the above fall musically? (I haven’t marked them.) What do you think?

---

[1] Fraser, G.S., Metre, Rhyme, and Free Verse, Methuen 1970

[2] Published in Stand magazine (new series), March 1999. 

Harold Massingham: a tribute

Harold Massingham, who died last year, had a big influence on my poetry at a crucial stage. This is a tribute to him.

I’d enrolled in his extra-mural class at Manchester University. I got in the lift to the second floor with a big bearded Anglo-Saxon of noble bearing. Was this the poet himself? I was too shy to ask. But it proved to be he.

The way he read aloud was a revelation. Rhythm, cadence, passion were all there. South Yorkshire too. He was generous in his comments on our work, but if you read between the lines you could tell what needed to be worked on. Another revelation was the amount of labour that could go into a poem. He showed us the worksheets for ‘Agnes Cassilda Adams’ (in whose kitchen the wallpaper ‘blebbed like wens’—marvellous phrase). The wodge of paper was a good half-inch thick. I still keep my worksheets, few of the packages as thick as Harold’s, but some not far off.

After the class, those who lived in South Manchester and beyond would join him in the Albert in Didsbury. In my second year he would invite me back to his home with a few pints inside us, to listen to Wagner. ‘A giant has the Ring!’ he told me excitedly. He was repainting the house meticulously, scraping clean every groove in every architrave and skirting. Several times I nearly missed the last bus to Bramhall.

I got to know his work through his collection Frost Gods. Even on the printed page his voice resonated, and still does, in my head. ‘Blood and cream bullion’ to describe a cow, for instance. ‘Humiliating thews’ for Beethoven’s stature. He also read to the class his unpublished poems, many of which were not collected until years later in Sonatas and Dreams. My pleasure in seeing it launched was short-lived—it was the day John Major was re-elected.

I once saw a school performance of Britten’s Noyes Fludde in which he played the Voice of God. I told him afterwards that I thought he was type-cast.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, my poem ‘English Rain’, which I read on Radio 3, owes almost everything to Harold Massingham. So thanks again, Harold, and if you’re up there, please look down, kindly as always, and bless my work. 

My debts to other poets

A lot of the poems I’ve written owe a debt to the work of others. We all write as part of a tradition, as Eliot pointed out. It seeps into us by osmosis . . . but I’m talking about specific debts to specific poets, and even specific poems of theirs. And this seems to me a perfectly healthy way to work.

            In my first collection Letting in the Carnival, ‘The Professor of Physics’ was a subject that was agonizing until I found what to cast it in: the ballad form favoured by Charles Causley, deceptively light treatment for serious subjects. The choice of words in ‘English Rain’ is directly influenced by the Anglo-Saxon euphonies in the work of Harold Massingham, of whom I’ll have more to say in a later blog. ‘Manchester’ demanded to be written after reading sonnets by Michael Longley.

In Henry’s Bridge, my second collection, the debts pile up. ‘Another Fronrhydd November’ is simply a version of ‘L’Hiver’ by Jules Laforgue. ’ ‘Horizon’ is a direct response to ‘Hamatreya’ by Emerson. ‘Great Uncle Charlie’s Golden Treasury’ steals a chunk from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Sudden Light’ and carries on in the same verse-form. In ‘Ynys Meicel’ I had to wrestle with a painful subject and dealt with it (to my satisfaction if no-one else’s) by taking a structure from W.S.Graham.

The title poem was another struggle. I got nowhere with it until I read ‘Questions of the Woman Who Fell’ by Robert Minhinnick and imitated the voice, in the first few lines at least, enough to get me started. ‘Harmonious’ sounds to me like a distant echo of Stevie Smith. And finally, anyone familiar with Wallace Stevens will recognize the tone and content of ‘The Allegri String Quartet at Fishguard Festival’ (though once again, only a distant echo.) Wishing to combine the abstract with the specific, I even stole the form of the title from ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.’

So how about that? Does anyone else work the same way? If anyone stole a form from me, let me tell you, I’d be delighted.