The Sparks on Arthur's Day

I’m very pleased to welcome Ben Wilkinson to my humble blog today, on what turns out to be Arthur’s Day. We’ve just missed the 17:59 time slot, but still, raise yourself a nice, slowly-poured creamy-headed pint of porter with me, pull up a stool and we’ll get down to some poetry appreciation.

Ben Wilkinson was born in Stafford in 1985 and studied English and Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. He is currently completing an MA in Writing at Sheffield Hallam University.

His poems have appeared in a wide variety of publications including Poetry Review, Poetry London, Magma, and the TLS. He has also reviewed poetry for Poetry Review, Stand and the TLS, and writes critical perspectives of contemporary poets for the British Council’s Contemporary Writers website.

His first pamphlet of poems, The Sparks, was published in 2008 as part of Tall-Lighthouse’s Pilot scheme, showcasing the best British poets under 30.

Wilkinson: to an outlier, it’s a name that whispers steel and Sheffield, and makes you think of a certain set of double crossed swords. But, before you wince, Ben Wilkinson crosses pens, not swords (perhaps there’s a new coat of arms) and makes Sparks with his pen. Hmm, does that remind you of anyone else in the poetry world? Digging..?

I really liked a great deal about The Sparks when it arrived in the post, so much so that I felt a little discontented that there wasn’t more to read, to contextualise the poems as part of a larger body of work. That is sometimes the shortfall of the pamphlet; a delicious taste that leaves you wanting (a little like fine-dining).

Still, there’s more than enough to show Wilkinson’s dexterity with words. My favourite is ‘Byroads’, a poem I can actually see in my head. I see it as a filmic slow-run film, intriguing in the way that Derry based artist Willie Doherty's work is. Doherty's art explores the complexities of living in a divided society, and I think this poem gets under that skin in a similar way.

In ‘Byroads', there are moments capturing a state of mind, or just a state. Or is it? I see the colours, borders and 'unapproved roads' (yeah, yer man is definitely to the forefront of my mind now) in the poem, and my mind fills in the rest: the north of Ireland and that not-so-simple-situation once you’ve looked.

Hanging baskets frosted white
in the orange blur of a maple wood dusk,
ice stalactite rigid towards the pavements.

The firing of some gun from the wood's
clearing. A bus rumbles on, coughing,
and a local makes his turn at the pub's carpark.

Living goes on despite the divides, but surface stillness betrays its depths. Like Doherty, there is a juxtaposition of image and language, through which a careful reader can extract a deeper meaning. This is but one example of Ben’s restraint, all the more remarkable given that sometimes our younger selves can tend towards a brashness that some might construe as vivid talent, and others showiness.

Anyway, intrigued by Ben’s pamphlet, I sent him some questions by email, to give us all a wee insight into what makes him tick poetry-wise.

When did you realise that poetry was going to be such a major part of your life? Was it in school or university?

Hi Barbara – thanks for featuring The Sparks on your blog. I suppose I first ‘found’ poetry in school, around my late teens. Something clicked while reading the stuff I was studying back then (Larkin, Hughes, Duffy, Armitage – the usual poetry taught in English comprehensives). And I guess at first, that ‘something’ was nothing more than a feeling that “this is doing things which, in my experience, prose isn’t capable of”. But over time, my interest in poetry grew into a sort of secret obsession, and I started privately reading as much poetry as I could, particularly twentieth century and contemporary stuff. I was also tentatively writing stuff at the same time – mainly while I was studying for my A-levels.

Things changed when I went to university. I joined the poetry society there and found likeminded people to share my interests with. A bunch of us would meet once a week for a couple of hours – sharing work by poets we’d recently discovered, playing writing games, reading our poems to each other and occasionally swapping drafts. I carried on attending these meetings until the end of my time at uni. How useful the group was to my actual writing, I don’t know, but it was good fun and I met some interesting people, and it introduced me to some great poetry. By my second year, I was pretty much convinced that poetry wasn’t going to leave me alone, even if I wanted it to.

What’s the best buzz you ever got from a poem - one you’ve written and one you’ve read.

Though I compulsively edit poems and am rarely satisfied with them (beyond the initial, distorted euphoria experienced after naively thinking I’ve just finished one), I have written a few things which buck this trend. ‘Filter’, a poem in The Sparks and my first to appear in Poetry Review (so something of a confidence-boosting milestone), was written in the summer after my second year at university. It emerged over the course of about an hour, almost fully formed – so much so that, unlike most other poems in the pamphlet, it is still pretty much identical to when I first saved it onto the computer, aside a few alterations. That was a really satisfying poem to write – the lines almost just seemed to appear, as if I’d been subconsciously preparing to write the thing for ages. If you’ve ever written a poem in that way – and I reckon most poets have at some time – you’ll know what I mean. For me at least, it doesn’t happen very often.

The best buzz I ever got from a poem… that’s a difficult one. I enjoy many poems for the unique experience they offer, so it’s hard to narrow it down beyond a handful. But I have to pick Philip Larkin’s ‘Here’, simply because when I first read his collection The Whitsun Weddings, and particularly that poem, it made me realise that in the right hands, poetry could encompass, reconcile, and attempt to make sense out of anything and everything. It could switch seemingly effortlessly between the totally insignificant and trivial and the utterly profound and existential (and often pull apart the false boundaries between these). Of course, I now realise the limits to Larkin’s style, but as a young lad I found poems such as ‘Here’ made me see poetry in a completely new way, and helped to validate my own first attempts at writing.

But I might also be tempted to choose Mick Imlah’s ‘Tusking’, simply because, despite having had little influence on my own work that I’m aware of, it is such a haunting and beautiful and absorbing poem it refuses to leave me alone. Memorability is an important factor. I want the initial buzz of the first reading, but I also want that feeling to carry on and make me return to the poem later; for it to persist and stick in my thoughts, even if it’s just a stanza or a few lines. What I reckon all great poems have in common is that persuasive musicality and distinctiveness, but also an intoxicating emotional and intellectual potency. They also have a (perhaps deceptive) sense of necessity and purpose – as if they almost willed themselves to be written.

Do you play word games, like Scrabble, and if so, what's the highest score you've ever had with one word (can you remember it)?

I used to play Scrabble quite a lot – with my grandparents as a young kid, and occasionally with friends when I was in my teens – but I don’t so much anymore. I guess I like to think I was – and still am – pretty good at it, so I suppose my highest score for one word was halfway decent. I don’t remember it though. Besides, the thing with Scrabble, as I’m sure you know, is that an impressively complex or obscure word doesn’t always equal an impressive score. My highest score probably involved placing something really boring, but creating new words from existing words in the process, while landing on a triple word square or whatever. It wasn’t “quixotry” though, I’m afraid.

Who have been the most important poets you have come across?

It depends what we mean by ‘important’. If we’re talking about which poets I think have had the most noticeable influence and effect on my work, I’d say Eliot, Auden, Larkin and Gunn have all been very important. More contemporary poets would include Simon Armitage, Don Paterson, Michael Hofmann, Glyn Maxwell, Roddy Lumsden, Carol Ann Duffy and Paul Farley – essentially, those poets which I feel are most interestingly engaged with the British lyric tradition. In my own work, I’ve always been interested in attempting to combine a colloquial, everyday register with an inventive use of poetic diction, syntax, rhythm and form – particularly segueing from one to the other (and sometimes back again) in a single poem.

But I read much more widely than that list perhaps suggests, and poets whose work currently interests me include Christopher Middleton, James Lasdun, Frederick Seidel and Todd Boss. I’m not one for factions or ideas about ‘where poetry is headed’. Michael Donaghy – who is so eminently quotable that anyone even remotely interested in poetry should read his recently published collected prose – once pointed out that “art has no direction”. That makes sense to me. All poets are plodding along together, trying to write the best poetry they can, with only instinct to guide them. I think Donaghy also rightly said that you can always tell bad poetry because it’s always bad in the same ways, whereas a good poem surprises and delights in unexpected, inventive and often artful ways. For that reason, I’m always interested to read widely, and uncover new and different approaches to writing.

Poetic Justice - a new forum

Poetic Justice, a new poety forum, launched yesterday. In their own words, they hope to encourage the healthy discussion of "the ins and outs of gender issues within the creative arts, though especially poetry - hence the name."

Membership is not limited to women, so why not pop over and join, introduce yourself and get stuck into the discussion of the issues. I have, and already it's proving much more stretching than I'm used to, which is great!

A Rush of Pleasure!

Back from Kerry again - this time I didn't get to see very much of the scenic mountains or the sea - but hey, that's editing.

I've now got the framework for the collection set up, and there are a few surprises in it that I wasn't expecting. Noel got very excited by two long poems I had brought down, that I didn't include in the original MS that I sent. In fact, it was a very positive and affirming experience to have my work gone over in the minute detail that it was: pretty much like my own private workshop!

These poems are very different in timbre and style to the rest of the collection and are a creative interpretation of some mythological figures that I came across while researching. One of my favourite themes to play with is the figure of the Smithy - probably because of my surname - and I have always liked to link that to the idea of wordcraft, or wordsmithying.

Anyway, these figures belong to that sort of artisan background, and I have come to regard them, well, not quite as Muses, but as guardians of writing, in a way.

If that all sounds very mystical, I apologise. I am quite grounded, but with strong leanings towards a curious and stretching mind. Perhaps we should wait and see what readers think of Kairos, when it makes its debut.

Oh, and I finished reading that Harry Potter book too - a good read.

Poetry and Politics - Szirtes View

Last night I attended one of the talks in a series that has been running in Trinity College Dublin. The series investigates with the help of a number of poets, how different poets deal with and relate to politics in their work. George Szirtes was the speaker last night and gave the audience a good insight into how his work is informed by politics.

Beforehand, I had scrutinized his last publication, Reel, for signs of his 'politics.' Some references and exploration of his personal background as an emigre from Hungary, but little of the rabble rousing calls that some poets may make. There was a very good reason for this as we learned during the course of the talk.

George Szirtes began by giving an overview of the upheavals of Hungary. Hungary is a land-locked country, and it's size has swollen and shrunk with each passing revolution. He began by telling us about the poet Sandor Petofi, whose statue has been used as a rallying point both in 1956 and again in 1989. A quote from a poem that Petofi wrote, NEMZETI DAL, asks

Shall we live as slaves or free men?
That's the question

This became a rallying call for Hungarians in the year of revolutions in 1848. Szirtes focused on this quote, looking at the binary connections: either/or, for/against and described how his poetical outlook questions that simplicity. For him it is much more complex than that, because human beings are more complex and the nature of our political struggles is always more complex too. Szirtes believes that for most 20th century poets, it is not enough to think in those on/off connections either.

Szirtes went on to talk about his personal family history, and the discoveries made about his family, in the mid 70s about a Jewish connection, and the history of how names changed in Hungary with the changes in country borders. Germanic names became Hungaricised - people tried to fit into their new territories, and by extension, the Szirtes family became Anglicised when they moved to England in 1956. This was by way of showing how complicated the idea of identity can become. And by extension, when you are an emigre, it is more difficult to go with that binary idea of black/white, yes/no.

So in effect what Szirtes explored in his writing was that type of politics - the exploration of discovery within the family unit could inform a wider point of view. As he prefers to think of it, poetry may not just be a statement of affiliation, but more a commentary on the discovery. There is a telling quote at the beginning of Reel, from Martin Bell's 'Ode to Himself':

To watch is possible: therefore you must watch.

From here then it was an easy jump to one of Szirtes' favourite muses, Clio, or history. He explained how Clio watches from afar, not concerned with the meaning of the individual story, but where it fits into the greater scheme of History itself. Clio is interpreted by Szirtes as someone involved in movies, recording things but remaining aloof: editing the film, or on the judging panel at the film festival, maybe. By way of background to the first poem he read, he described how he discovered that his mother had been detained in a concentration camp during WWII, at Ravensbruck - never mentioned until after his mother's death.

Szirtes' research showed that Ravensbruck had been liberated by the Russians. But it turns out that by this stage his mother had been moved to another camp, Penig which was liberated by the Americans, and which liberation was also captured on film! The poem itself used the flickering grey images and used the idea of Clio, the watcher, the recorder, to keep a distance from this emotive subject, as does the actual form, which I think was terza rima. Still very moving.

His next piece came from a poem commissioned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. This poem used the idea of North, cold and truth and borrowed from John Mandeville's travels, the idea of sounds being frozen. Szirtes has incorporated this into the poem as a strong look at how we can't view History the way it happened at the time, at a later date - how we revise the past, as though it were frozen and then reassembled later on. He read two sequences from this long piece, Nova Zemble.

Afterwards, there was a Q&A session which allowed the audience to learn more about Szirtes' method and poetics. We learned that Szirtes fascination with form came after 1975, and that he considered it took it him about six or seven years to get into this craft (!). He became a more formal poet, using form to contain the meaning of the formlessness of existence (my words, not his!). Szirtes also views the relationship between poet and language rather like that of two dancers: language usually does the leading. Language when used in form always offers resistance, that resistance leads to new discoveries. On 'truth' he believes that a fidelity to the apprehension of things, will allow truth to speak - a very delicate concept. By his own admission, his use of, and view of politics in poetry is oblique, but that is because his method is more to discover through the exploration of watching and recording.

Postscript: of course, you could simply just visit George Szirtes' Blog and see how he frames the evening - much better than I did- he knew what he was trying to say: I am but one interpreter.