This blog is now closed, since I have finally worked out how to set up and maintain my own website and have transferred everything there. All the posts will stay here untouched, but they have been transferred to my new site as well.
To be honest, I worked it all out a while ago, but was a too busy and disorganised to write this. Shockingly lax, I know. But there we are. I hope I’ll be forgiven in the long run…
My new website and blog can be accessed simply by clicking here.
Filed under blog
Today, I was walking back up to my studio after lunch, back to the routines of daily work and of thinking for others. Today was not a good day to be doing this. Today, twenty-six years ago, when I was twelve, my mother, Frances Horovitz, died.
I thought I was past the point of being overwhelmed by this; the old lie you tell yourself to keep on keeping on. But today I called in at Dennis Gould’s stall at the Shambles market in Stroud and he said: “Adam, I’ve got something for you.” Dennis is a poet and printer; he creates fine, anarchic letterpress prints of beat poems and gnomic sayings, football haiku and hymns to garlic and cycling. I assumed he had one of his latest prints for me. I was wrong.
Dennis opened up his rucksack and drew out a pamphlet. “I saw this in Oxfam and thought of you,” he said, passing me the pamphlet. I took it and looked at it. It was Snow Light, Water Light, the last pamphlet of poems by my mother that she saw, I had first seen this pamphlet twenty-six years and two days ago, when I went to the Royal Marsden hospital with my stepfather. It had arrived that day, and my mother, straitened by morphine and pain, had looked at it with us with weary pleasure.
It is the only book of hers I do not have a copy of dedicated to me in her hand. There were other things to think and talk about that day and she was too weak to write, having saved all her strength just to see me and to be coherent when she did so. It would have been stupid and shallow to ask; I was saying goodbye without admitting that I was saying goodbye.
Still, as a teenager, I felt a curious angst about the unsigned book – one of my mothers’ closest friends, the poet Gillian Clarke, who had turned up out of the blue to see my mother the next day, driven by a suspicion that she had to do so now or not at all, had a signed copy. I felt pangs of foolish envy of this for several years, always acknowledging the foolishness but unable to suppress the emotion entirely.
Today, I wept as I opened the book and Dennis apologised. But he could not see, and it was too much for me to explain to him then, that this was the most perfect present I could have asked for, with the most serendipitous timing.
If you live long enough, there often comes a point when you think that you can live past the blistering hurt of absence and hunker down to the abstract wonders of routine and money-earning, growing up, growing out, becoming something new and independent. You can’t, it’s impossible. I tried for years and buried too much beneath drink and food and more besides.
Deep at the heart of everyone who has lost someone lies the gaping wound of the grave. If you fence the grave off, or fill it in, you lose sight of the past, the truth, the urge to live well and be happy and be yourself.
Today, thanks to Dennis and his gift, given without knowledge of the day’s significance to me, still less of the significance of the book he gave, I believe am finally beginning to be prepared to live with the open grave, the memories that linger in it, like approximations of hope. Today, I am stronger for the memories, because I can recognise them for what they are; a part of me, of the continuum of living.
Somewhere, I will always be twelve and mourning. Somewhere I will always be twenty-five and ill with grief-stricken, unhealthy living. Today I recognise and welcome all of this unblinkingly. Today, I may be able to begin to grow up, un-shuttered, unfettered. Today will live with me for the rest of my life.
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I was delighted to see that the book of poems commemorating Adrian Mitchell, Adrian — Scotland Celebrates Adrian Mitchell, edited by Chrys Salt and John Hudson, which is being published and launched in late October, has made the news. The article in the Times makes play of the book’s claiming Adrian as Scottish – his father was – but also acknowledges Adrian’s view of himself as a blend of many influences – he described himself as “a socialist-anarchist-pacifist-Blakeist-revolutionary”.
I don’t remember Adrian as being anything but Mitchellish – the United States of Mitchell being a utopian headspace anyone who was gentle, angry, joyous and kind-as-often-as-possible could join if they had a mind to.
He was one of a few of my father’s friends whose presence was always welcome in my life. A sometimes stern but always genial avuncular figure, whose approach to poetry most influenced me at an early age, his words were the ones that followed me to and from school and at nearly all points in between.
In my teens I used to go to parties at his house in Hampstead with my father – parties which could have been overwhelming events for a teenager, given that they were stuffed with actors, poets, musicians and any number of other interesting people, but for the fact that Adrian’s generosity, presence and good nature swiftly evaporated all feelings of over-stimulated nausea. I remember one, aged 15 or so, at which I bumped into Jonathan Pryce on the stairs. I’d not long before seen Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and stood there looking like a fish struggling with the angler’s hook, until I was coaxed away by Adrian.
In the early 1990s, just as I was beginning to find my feet as a poet, Adrian became poetry editor at the New Statesman. I nervously sent a few poems to him – so nervously that I neglected to include a stamped addressed envelope. He wrote back, gently telling me that the poems showed promise but weren’t going to be published and that, in future, it would always be looked upon kindly by harassed poetry editors if the submission came accompanied by an SAE. I don’t think I’ve been told off so sweetly and caringly before or since – I wish I could find the letter.
I saw Adrian infrequently in the last ten years or so, but it was always a joy, be it at Glastonbury Festival’s Poetry and Words tent (he was the one calm man in a sea of frenetic bacchanalia that year) or in Stroud, where he came regularly to read and see the poets Dennis Gould and Jeff Cloves. I miss his ebullient fire, though his books and recordings are a fine reminder of it.
I should add at this point that Adrian — Scotland Celebrates Adrian Mitchell – doesn’t just contain Scottish poets. There’s a few of his old non-Scottish friends, including my father, Pete Brown and Paul McCartney. And there’s a poem by me, inspired by the memory of his parties. I can’t claim any Scottish blood or connection (other than I like the country and have red hair – although that comes from the Jewish side of my family). I would, anyway, rather be Mitchellish than English, Scottish, Jewish or whatever. It’s an honour, though, to be in fine company, in a fine book, commemorating such a very fine man.
To read more about the book, and to order it online, click here.
Filed under poetry
A week on Wednesday, I will be pitching my tent in a field in Somerset, pen, paper and funky web-capable phone (on loan from Orange) in hand, preparing myself for a weekend of mayhem and poetry writing at the Glastonbury Festival as the Official Glastonbury Website’s poet in residence.
It’s a great gig – four days of trekking around the many-legged glory that is the Pilton Pop Festival and transmuting the most arresting things I see, feel and hear into celebratory verse. This is the third year of the residency – I am following in the muddy but enthusiastic footsteps of AF Harrold and Elvis McGonagall - and it’s going to be splendid, whatever the weather. I’ll also be reading some of the poems at the Poetry & Words tent on the Sunday of the Festival – I’ll post the exact time as soon as I know in case anyone reading this wants to come along. Some of the poems will be very short and posted as haiku on the Glastonbury Twitter feed.
In the meantime, here are a few poems about Glastonbury, which I wrote for Cyril Laffort’s excellent exhibition of Glastonbury photos at The Space Gallery in Stroud a couple of months ago…
–
A tumble of clouds leaping
over gate posts,
leaving bright pennants
barbed on flagpoles.
In tented margins
hats leap like salmon
along a river of flesh.
The air
is a shiver of music
unbinding dervishes
of dust.
–
In the Tiny Tea Tent, Alice is holding forth
to an ever madder series of hatters,
doped up dormice and March hares
still in the boxing mood come June.
–
PJ Harvey found me
in the healing fields
in 1992,
riding the updrafts
like a gull in pursuit of the plough.
Sheela Na Gig
gaped and grinned in my ears
brought me,
skidding and sliding in dust,
down to her bowl of music.
I have never left.
–
Gathering
for Katie-Jo
Your head massage guides me back
through an acid-spiked labyrinth
dancing to the tune of a fiddle
rough as scrumpy.
I am flying through the lanes in your hands
my brain expanding and contracting, like a lung.
I feel the long breath of trees on my back,
hear the stream’s music,
the undertow where dark, melodic fish swell
before swimming out to haunt guitars.
A waterfall of bodies.
A tumble of music and mating calls.
The high colours of morning
singing from painted stones.
We are all gathering ourselves in our own ways,
crow-wise or carefree,
the tribal river-drums of our blood beating
in a multitude of ears.
I’m taking part in a poetry slam tonight for the first time in some years – Slam the Atom at the Cheltenham Festival of Science, hosted by Marcus Moore and Sara-Jane Arbury. Perversely, I’m actually quite nervous.
I say ‘perversely’ because I became bored and disillusioned with slam a few years ago, having been involved with it pretty much since its arrival in Britain in the early 1990s – I took part in the first slam at Glastonbury Festival. Back then, slam seemed like an egalitarian, preposterous and fun way of seeing a number of poets, be they good, bad or indifferent, and a good way of getting poetry noticed. There were many good poets involved – and still are. But on the whole, slam has become much more competitive and much less about poetry over the 15 or so years since it burst onto the British poetry scene.
Some remarkable poetry always gets through, but, more and more, slam poetry resembles stand up comedy or invective-fuelled ranting that plays to the gallery at the expense of wit and subtlety. There are too many poor clones of excellent poets like John Cooper Clarke (and less invigorating poets such as Pam Ayres) littering the slam scene, too many people who treat slam too seriously as a competition. There are many notable exceptions to this rule, from A.F. Harrold to Lucy English, and one can often find a giddying blur of poetic styles – from rap-inflected verse to bucolic lyricism - sharing the stage. For those exceptions, slam should be celebrated.
So why am I taking part tonight, if I have professed myself bored with slam? There are three reasons: one, it’s an invitation only slam and there will be a number of excellent poets taking part, some of whom I haven’t seen in a couple of years. Two, I sometimes miss the adrenal rush of slam, the hope that my poem will hit a nerve in a febrile atmosphere of easy-going competitiveness. The third reason is that the first poem has to be new and must be about science or heresy – the theme of this year’s Science Festival – and I like to be forced to think and write about things that might not otherwsie hit my brain’s register.
Actually, there’s a fourth reason – Marcus and Sara-Jane are splendid hosts who rarely, if ever, let the heavy competitive edge that can sometimes sour slams get out of hand thanks to a voting system that judges quality of writing, quality of performance and quality of audience response. It’s a far cry from clapometer-driven see-how-many-friends-you-can-bring-to-shout-you-through mayhem at one of their slams. They are both committed to excellent poetry and are keen advocates of slams in schools – and that’s where the future of slam lies, I think.
Slam is a wonderful way of engaging teenagers, who are too often put off the idea of poetry by the time they leave school because they have been bored into seeing it as a dull, dry, unengaging and unremarkable art. Get them in a slam, which harnesses the competitive streak of the majority of teenagers and points it in a surprising new direction, and many more eyes and ears come alive to the possibilities of poetry. That can only be a good thing…
Just a little advance notice of a rather good gig coming up at the Gallery in Barnstaple next week as part of the North Devon Festival – Brian Patten and special guests on Wednesday, June 10th at 8 pm.
I’m a little biased I’ll admit – I’m one of the special guests. If you’re in the area, come along!
“In hell, nothing you have done will not be watched.” From Household Gods by Anne Stevenson.
In hell, your every indiscretion
will be picked over endlessly
on freeze frame repeat
and your life will be condensed
into daily half hour slots of pain.
In hell you will live forever
and learn how to attract flies.
In hell, each blinkered and unworthy thought
each curse, each brief display of hate
will be broadcast at high volume
to anyone who cares to listen
with running commentary from smug demons
who’ll pull at their sharp suits
and smile inscrutably, while you scream
into your pillow of thorns,
as they edit out your achievements
to please the crowd.
In hell you will dress to kill or be killed
and in the evenings go out to the hot spots
with a host of others,
all of you hoping to be saved.
You will be cut to pieces
by paper knives each morning
and will have to stitch yourself together
in time for interviews,
in which your gut-wrenching past
will be dragged out and given
new, unpleasant meaning.
In hell you will be a celebrity
amongst thousands of celebrities
all of you famous for nothing more
than an unending scream.
You will long for the still,
silent heaven
whose gate you missed
on the way down,
lost in an unending conversation
about yourself.
I wrote this poem a while back for a topical, satirical blog on Mark Borkowski’s blog site, but thought it worth posting again in the wake of Susan Boyle’s discovery of the harsh price of modern fame…
Filed under Poem, topical poem
TaurusVoice Theatre Company
The Space, Lansdown, Stroud
Friday, May 1st
TaurusVoice’s production of A Sleepwalk on the Severn, Alice Oswald’s theatrical poem commissioned by Gloucestershire County Council for the 2009 Severn Project Festival, which premiered at The Space on May 1st, is a riveting, extraordinary show, which will be touring the county over the next two months.
Oswald’s poem celebrates the Severn and all that it has sucked in over the centuries, all the noises, people, creatures and ghosts that surround it. She has listened carefully to the water, the wind, to the people that populate the river at night, now and in the past and charts the way the moon affects them. Director Jo Bousfield and composer Pete Rosser have listened equally attentively to the poem and created a visual and aural feast to augment her verse.
The actors, working in tight, tidal rhythms, wash around each other wonderfully, their faces and voices in perfect, lunar (and sometime looney) harmony. They recreate the un-silence of the river with chattering, sucking, squeaking and wailing noises that drive the words forward, and, when speaking in choral harmony, raise hairs on the back of the neck.
It is a very active dreamscape they create out of the tides of Oswald’s words, taking in the mythic symbolism of Lorca’s Blood Wedding, the raucous imaginings of Under Milk Wood and an earthy sense of Gloucestershire’s people and river. If there is one problem on the opening night, it is that the words of the songs are sometimes drowned out by the music – a shame when the words are so vital.
But one could smell the River Severn in the theatre – on the rain-swept hair of the audience and in the imaginations of the cast.
Review first published in the Stroud News & Journal
Filed under review
I’ve finally caught up with the first episode of Owen Sheers’ series for the BBC poetry season, A Poet’s Guide to Britain, and was enjoying his brief but informative trawl through the thinking and history behind Wordsworth’s sonnet Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, right up until the point that Sheers began to wonder about the detail of what Wordsworth might have been thinking during the month he spent in France arranging to disentangle himself from the mother of his illegitimate child.
Sheers bemoans the lack of detail in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal: “she’s frustratingly quiet on the things we really want to know about,” he said. “What was it like for William and Annette to see one another again? Was there still any spark? How was it for William to meet his nine year old daughter for the first time?”
I was disappointed – Sheers had seemed sensible and subtle until this point. Why is this “what we really want to know about”? Why can we not be trusted to get a clear idea of the state of Wordsworth’s mind from the sonnets written in and around that month-long beach holiday? Why must everything be reduced to tittle-tattle?
Sheers mentions the sonnet that refers to Wordsworth’s daughter, which begins “It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free”, and suggests that there is a sense of detachment in the closing lines:
‘Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear’st untouch’d by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year;
And worshipp’st at the Temple’s inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.’
There is, but Sheers doesn’t connect this back to his earlier, tediously populist question – he is yearning for dirt on the holiday in Dorothy’s journals, as if she were some sort of paparazzi diarist, when he should have been looking to the poems for answers. However oblique they may be, the answers are in there, in the fond detachment of Wordsworth’s connection with his daughter, in the fact that the second set of sonnets is dedicated to liberty and look often longingly back at England and in this extract from To A Friend, Composed Near Calais: “Yet despair/I feel not: happy am I as a Bird:/Fair seasons yet will come, and hopes as fair.”
One can draw plenty of conclusions from Wordsworth’s sonnets and his sister’s journals without ever submitting to the peculiarly modern need for a prosaic ‘he said, she said’ dialogue. But we are living in an age that demands such minute detail of private lives, gossip and scandal at the expense of subtlety, as everything from the hoo-ha surrounding the Oxford Poetry Professorship to the latest issue of Heat prove; an age of celebrity and personality at the expense of art and artfulness. It is depressing to find that Sheers is as eager as a gossip columnist for clinical details of the arrangements.
I’m not suggesting that we should divorce poet from poems entirely – it is instructive to know that Wordsworth was arranging the freedom to marry Mary Hutchinson whilst he was writing these sonnets in 1802. What I would really like to know, however, is what conclusion readers of Wordsworth’s 1802 sonnets, given the barest biographical detail surrounding the writing of them, would come to as to his state of mind.
WRITTEN IN LONDON,
September, 1802.
O Friend! I know not which way I must look
For comfort, being, as I am, opprest,
To think that now our Life is only drest
For shew; mean handywork of craftsman, cook,
Or groom! We must run glittering like a Brook
In the open sunshine, or we are unblest:
The wealthiest man among us is the best:
No grandeur now in nature or in book
Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expence,
This is idolatry; and these we adore:
Plain living and high thinking are no more:
The homely beauty of the good old cause
Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence,
And pure religion breathing household laws.
Wrote this review of Leonard Cohen at last year’s Glastonbury Festival for the official website. I’ve just been listening to the live album and felt the need to repost it…
Leonard at Glastonbury
Welcome to Glastonbury, Leonard Cohen; welcome to this gloriously gaudy feast of holy fools and neon-clad fakirs, of prophets and loss, of ecstasy and revelation. Welcome to a tower of song erected in a farm, where closing time is Monday and the world, for the most part, is a little bit more real, purely because of its unreality. Welcome to a world where flame haired girls shiver out tears from their lovers’ shoulders, a saline cascade of joy that chimes as it falls to the tune of ‘Bird on a Wire’.
“It’s a great honour to play for these angels born of the mud,” says Cohen, his sonorous growl encompassing a lop-sided smile as he surveys the oasis of bliss rising from the heads and hearts of the crowd. He has moved them to stillness with ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’, which stalks up the spine like a lover’s finger, chilled them with his vision of ‘The Future’, and he is about to launch into ‘Tower of Song’.
I had forgotten this song until now, forgotten the line “I was born like this, I had no choice / I was born with the gift of a golden voice.” The crowd laughed appreciatively at the perceived irony, but it occurs to me that golden is exactly what Cohen’s voice is. It is heavy and coruscating, and, through the cracks, it shines down on the transfixed crowd, who worship it and join in with it in impassioned choruses, first with ‘So Long Marianne’ and then more and more throughout his set.
Cohen’s is a voice that Moses could have carved the Ten Commandments on with his fingernails; heavy yet tender, soft almost, mordant, but laced with a lyrical, playful wit and wisdom that beggars most of his contemporaries’; it is a savage and glorious tool that serves the words, which anatomise the vagaries of love and politics, lust and despair. He is “leaning out for love” and “will lean that way forever”.
‘Suzanne’ melts over the crowd like dew; ‘Hallelujah’ erupts like a volcano in thousands of lungs; the sensual, subtle bravado of ‘I’m Your Man’ sings like a pheromone in the encroaching dusk. Cohen, all the while, is simply smiling like Gabriel, occasionally doffing his trilby to bursts of applause. He is the epitome of refined cool, a dapper, studied man who carries peace in his wake and parts the sea of gaudy thrills that is Glastonbury to open ways to a myriad of promised lands.
Filed under blog
