The Portmanteau

daily poem: Wet Evening in April / Patrick Kavanagh

2010-04-01T23:00:00.000+01:00

Trust National Poetry Month to happen at the same time as ScriptFrenzy (30 days, 100 pages, yiiikes), it's going to be a busy (and fun) few weeks! You'll be able to follow my ScriptFrenzy progress over at my film blog The Usherette, from April 2nd onwards, when I'll be living deadline free for a wee while at least! So, here's a little gem from Patrick Kavanagh to start off our poetical April, and very appropriate it is - as I type blustery wind and April showers are rattling the windowpanes, time to get under the duvet with a mug of something piping hot and chocolatey...

Wet Evening in April
Patrick Kavanagh

The birds sang in the wet trees
And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him
The melancholy.

Photo by Bator Horvath

poetry month

2010-04-01T10:54:00.000+01:00

Gosh! It's April already! The "cruellest month" if you believe Eliot. I'm rather more positive than ol' T.S. and am hoping that Spring is springing beautifully wherever you are, I noticed some lovely snowdrops yesterday and felt very light and bright and full of seasonal joys :)

Did you know that this April is National Poetry Month? Well, in the US and Canada at least, and I'm thinking it should definitely extend to the blogosphere, I'm all for poetry-sans-frontiers. So, in honour of National Poetry Month I'm planning a month-long poetry party at The Portmanteau with posts including:

a poem a day: an eclectic bunch of handpicked classic and contemporary favourites, available here and on my Tumblr blog
audio goodness: downloadble mp3 audio recordings of poets reading their poetry
poet profiles & interviews: sampling 30 contemporary poets from across the globe

Phew! I'm nothing if not ambitious. I want to get into the routine of blogging regularly and thought this would be a great way to kick-start The Portmanteau - we'll see how it goes... I hope you'll join me for a month of poetical adventures!

daily poem: The Howling of Wolves / Ted Hughes

2010-03-31T00:54:00.000+01:00

Apologies for lack of blogage this week, have been away from home for the last few days gorging on easter eggs and gin-&-tonics at the boyfriend's place in darkest Argyll. Am up late translating Old English poetry for a freelance research gig, deadline tomorrow - why am I still totally unable to do academic work unless I'm looking down the barrell of a deadline?

The Portmanteau is due a couple of big juicy posts this week, in the meantime here's something for a dark and stormy night from Ted Hughes...

The Howling of Wolves
Ted Hughes

Is without world.

What are they dragging up and out on their long leashes of sound

That dissolve in the mid-air silence?

Then crying of a baby, in this forest of starving silences,
Brings the wolves running.
Tuning of a violin, in this forest delicate as an owl’s ear,
Brings the wolves running—brings the steel traps clashing and slavering,
The steel furred to keep it from cracking in the cold,
The eyes that never learn how it has come about
That they must live like this,

That they must live

Innocence crept into minerals.

The wind sweeps through and the hunched wolf shivers.
It howls you cannot say whether out of agony or joy.

The earth is under its tongue,
A dead weight of darkness, trying to see through its eyes.
The wolf is living for the earth.
But the wolf is small, it comprehends little.

It goes to and fro, trailing its haunches and whimpering horribly.

It must feed its fur.

The night snows stars and the earth creaks.

Photo by Me.

daily poem: Always, Sweetness / Pablo Neruda

2010-03-24T17:57:00.000Z

I'm finding writing in the kitchen quite inspiring today, consequently The Portmanteau has been serving poems for the ravenous, sensory poems that play on the way language tastes on your tongue, food for thought, words that slake thirst and satisfy hunger. "Poetry," says Lucille Clifton, "speaks to something in us that so wants to be filled. It speaks to the great hunger of the soul."

Here's a wonderful poem from Pablo Neruda, good enough to eat.

Always, Sweetness
Pablo Neruda

Why such harsh machinery?
Why, to write down the stuff and people of everyday,
must poems be dressed up in gold,
or in old and fearful stone?

I want verses of felt or feather
which scarcely weigh, mild verses
with the intimacy of beds
where people have loved and dreamed.
I want poems stained
by hands and everydayness.

Verses of pastry which melt
into milk and sugar in the mouth,
air and water to drink,
the bites and kisses of love.
I long for eatable sonnets,
poems of honey and flour.

Vanity keeps prodding us
to lift ourselves skyward
or to make deep and useless
tunnels underground.
So we forget the joyous
love-needs of our bodies.
We forget about pastries.
We are not feeding the world.

In Madras a long time since,
I saw a sugary pyramid,
a tower of confectionery -
one level after another,
and in the construction, rubies,
and other blushing delights,
medieval and yellow.

Someone dirtied his hands
to cook up so much sweetness.

Brother poets from here
and there, from earth and sky,
from Medellin, from Veracruz,
Abyssinia, Antofagasta,
do you know the recipe for honeycombs?

Let’s forget about all that stone.

Let your poetry fill up
the equinoctial pastry shop
our mouths long to devour -
all the children’s mouths
and the poor adults’ also.
Don’t go on without seeing,
relishing, understanding
all these hearts of sugar.

Don’t be afraid of sweetness.

With or without us,
sweetness will go on living
and is infinitely alive,
forever being revived,
for it’s in a man’s mouth,
whether he’s eating or singing,
that sweetness has its place.

Translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reid

Read more Pablo Neruda here. // Buy The Essential Neruda here.

Photo by Veronika Lake

food for thought: of baking, Proust and square sausage

2010-03-14T14:32:00.001Z

“Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are,” Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 1825.

I think that weekends on The Portmanteau should include a few diversions from the strictly literary, lately my Saturdays off usually consist of moodling around from one meal to the next, meals cooked slowly and leisurely, meals that draw out to fill most of the day, eaten in front of the fire with a film and a bottle of something cold and dry. So here's a mouth-watering, stomach-rumbling, lip-smacking post of gastronomical delights, both edible and poetical...bon appetit!

The height of my love affair with cooking, fickle and intermittent as it has been, would probably be my first year at university, my salad days - others might have joined the CND, experimented with some half-hearted lesbianism or turned into mooncup evangelists. I became Mrs Beeton with an overdraft.

A bright-eyed fresher, faced with the sudden freedom and opportunity afforded by the dreaming spires and public houses of a university town, will generally spend too much time marinating in watered-down beer to desire initiation into the dark arts of the kitchen. In time, a bout of scurvy and/or rickets will rouse the more practically minded to action. Saucepans and cheese graters will be bought from Ikea, discarded copies of Creative Ways with Micropizza or Boiling Water for Dummies – previously pressed into the hands of the feckless greenhorns by tearful mothers – will be grudgingly opened. Local fire stations will experience a sudden upsurge in call-outs.

But for this domestic innocent, suddenly provided with a shelf in a communal fridge and an ancient, rusting oven, it was a different story. I shall win friends and influence people with my dazzling array of baked goods, I told myself. Let them eat cake, my home-made, lovingly prepared cake, washed down with creamy pints of the milk of human kindness.

I began to bake bread on an almost daily basis: small quick-rise rolls served still hot and doughy with lavender honey and golden butter. I combated the cold with huge vats of soup made from chicken legs, root vegetables and handfuls of barley. I made buttered rum with cloves, spices and lemons to alleviate freshers flu. I baked buttermilk scones and jam tarts, gingerbread men and petticoat tails.

Look at me! I thought, I’m making things, I’m self-sufficient, a domestic goddess! I’m Juliette Binoche in Chocolat, bringing charm and sensory delights to the humdrum lives of my Biochemistry and Engineering housemates. It didn’t last of course. Discovering that studying was not entirely optional nor my student loan entirely infinite curtailed my culinary odyssey. I accepted my inevitable decline into the typical undergraduate vending-machine connoisseur, burning the midnight oil by the barrelful, grazing from snack to snack.

Cooking creatively, for pleasure, is a luxury of course, most of the meals I make now are hastily thrown together, or consist of infinite variations on toast. But I can still look back in hunger. Nostalgia is such a huge part of enjoying food. As the late, great food columnist Laurie Colwin wrote: “When people enter the kitchen, they often drag their childhood in with them.” Think of Laurie Lee’s ‘first bite of the apple’ in Cider with Rosie, or Proust with his tea-soaked madeleine, observing that “the smell and taste of things remain poised for a long time, like souls, ready to remind us.”

Chief among my own stomach-rumbling memories would be that first begged-for slab of millionaire’s shortbread, devoured in the long-gone Underground Café in Glasgow, a windowless cavern full of the gentle clinking of china and the murmur of gossiping mothers. And I can trace my ardent carnivorousness from a square Lorne sausage tucked inside a floury bap, eaten bleary-eyed and slightly green on the early morning ferry from Stornoway.

No writer traded off the natural greed of children better than Enid Blyton. I used to read and re-read her gluttonous descriptions of tuck boxes, midnight feasts and great farmhouse kitchen tables creaking under the weight of new-laid eggs, cold ham and tongue, potted meat, well-buttered toast and, naturally, lashings of ginger beer. Of course, during Blyton’s most prolific period of writing, rationing still dominated the nation’s larders. But the Famous Five still went happily munching on.

These days I’m mostly an armchair cook, reading cookbooks like novels, moveable feasts, fantasies of the kind of ambrosial idyll of uninhibited sybaritism my life would be were it not for lack of time, money and my congenital laziness. But the writer who never fails to awaken my inner epicure has to be Nigel Slater – the dog-eared pages of my copy of his Real Fast Food are stained with pan juices and sticky fingerprints, crumbs wedged between the most pored-over sections. Recipes for fish finger sandwiches and banana milkshakes nestle between instructions on how to make Hot Buttered Plums, Wholewheat Pasta with Sausages, Mustard and Caramelised Onions (my favourite), or Purple Figs with Warm Honey (“A snack to share with someone special, in bed, on a cold winter’s night…Eat with your fingers, sucking the purple-red flesh from the skins.”)

That flush of pleasure when you cook something that people enjoy isn’t dissimilar to the experience of the writer when their work connects with someone. Both are acts of creation that are meant to be consumed, to be chewed over. I write like I cook, mixing words and sentences experimentally, adding a bit here and there, trimming the edges, attempting to cover up the mistakes with some fancy icing, never quite sure of the end result.

A recognition of the potential of cookery as art, as transformation; its aesthetic qualities, and its cultural importance, is central to the abiding literary fascination with the edible. The best writing about food revels in the sheer taste of words, the delectable roll of syllables on your tongue. Less modish gastropub marketing speak and chef ego-massaging: to write about food should be to meditate on hunger, its ultimate insatiability, the transience of its fulfilment - food for thought.

Some poems abut food for your delectation...
The Simple Truth / Philip Levine // Peaches / Peter Davison // The First Green of Spring / David Budbill // Wild strawberries / Helen Dunmore // Blackberry Eating / Galway Kinnell (plus audio) // Apples / Laurie Lee (plus audio) //

Linkage...
Guardian Poster Poems about food // A book you might enjoy // More Nigel Slater yummyness

Millionaire's shortbread pic by Lisa.

Elizabeth Bishop and experiencing poetry

2010-03-11T02:33:00.000Z

When Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) taught at Harvard in the 1970s, she insisted that poems should never be interpreted, rejecting the close reading techniques of New Criticism, prevalent at the time (and still going strong!). Dana Gioia has described how her students would have to memorise a poem before talking about its meaning:

To her, the images and the music of the lines were primary. If we comprehended the sound, eventually we would understand the sense…She wanted us to see poems, not ideas. Poetry was the particular way the world could be talked about only in verse…the medium was the message. One did not interpret poetry, one experienced it. Showing us how to experience it clearly, intensely, and, above all, directly was the substance of her teaching. One did not need a sophisticated theory. One needed only intelligence, intuition, and a good dictionary.

Well, I hope that one out of three will do. I completely agree with this idea of ‘experiencing’ poetry, the immediacy of it, the images it conjures up, the way it feels on your tongue.

In ‘The Map’ (click to read) - the first poem in her Complete Poems - Bishop likens the poet to the cartographer, the map-maker creating an image of the real world with his ‘delicate colors.’ Although Adrienne Rich found this poem “intellectualized to the point of obliquity”, I think Bishop is really talking about reading, and the relationship between writer, reader and text. As the poet looks at the map she tries to read it, to interpret it, imagining the excitement of the printer, wondering if the land is “tugging at the sea from under,” and if the countries can choose their own colours. “Topography displays no favourites,” she declares. For Bishop the map-maker, like the poet, must simply describe what is there, and yet must make reality comprehensible, shaping it through words and form.

In the last lines of the gorgeous ‘At the Fishhouses’ (the first poem of Bishop’s I read, and one that I still think is her best) Bishop describes “cold dark deep” water as a “transmutation of fire” and says

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world

Here, knowledge is both “flowing, and flown”. The world is too vast and mysterious to be reflected in what Bishop would later call ‘the geographical mirror’, and knowledge cannot be captured or shaped into words. The poet’s – and the reader’s – purpose is simply to experience.

For Bishop what is important is – to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens – not ideas about the thing but the thing itself. Seeing, for Bishop, is the poet’s work, her leading purpose, it is enough just to notice and record, and in this way 'the thing' is illuminated, is really seen. Writing to Robert Lowell at one point about his poems, she could have been speaking about her own:

They…have that sure feeling, as if you’d been in a stretch…when everything and anything suddenly seemed material for poetry—or not material, seemed to be poetry, and all the past was illuminated in long shafts here and there, like a long-waited-for sunrise. If only one could see everything that way all the time! It seems to me it’s the whole purpose of art…that rare feeling of control, illumination—life is all right, for the time being.

Audio goodness...

The Fish / read by Elizabeth Bishop

Read it here. Download mp3. Buy Complete Poems here.

Here's George Szirtes on 'At the Fishhouses' // Read more by Elizabeth Bishop here.

Photo by edlyytam

daily poem: The Promise / Sharon Olds

2010-03-06T16:00:00.000Z

Having a rather bad day today, trying to focus on the positive in the spirit of TiLT, but feeling a little overwhelmed by a recent spate of personal disappointments and bad news. However it's only Day Two of The Portmanteau's Poetry Month and I don't want to fall behind already...so here's a poem from Sharon Olds for the moment. I was hoping to focus on Olds in today's poet profile too, but I think I'll keep that for next week when I have more time to do her justice. In the meantime I'm planning to get a profile post on Elizabeth Bishop (who I can write about more easily, having studied her in some depth as an undergrad) and some audio up tonight. Here's 'The Promise', which I adore, in fact I'm completely head-over-heels for Sharon Olds, no one writes about love and sex with such tenderness and richness and lyricism as she does...

The Promise
Sharon Olds

With the second drink, at the restaurant,
holding hands on the bare table,
we are at it again, renewing our promise
to kill each other. You are drinking gin,
night-blue juniper berry
dissolving in your body, I am drinking Fumé,
chewing its fragrant dirt and smoke, we are
taking on earth, we are part soil already,
and wherever we are, we are also in our
bed, fitted, naked, closely
along each other, half passed out,
after love, drifting back
and forth across the border of consciousness,
our bodies buoyant, clasped. Your hand
tightens on the table. You’re a little afraid
I’ll chicken out. What you do not want
is to lie in a hospital bed for a year
after a stroke, without being able
to think or die, you do not want
to be tied to a chair like your prim grandmother,
cursing. The room is dim around us,
ivory globes, pink curtains
bound at the waist—and outside,
a weightless, luminous, lifted-up
summer twilight. I tell you you do not
know me if you think I will not
kill you. Think how we have floated together
eye to eye, nipple to nipple,
sex to sex, the halves of a creature
drifting up to the lip of matter
and over it—you know me from the bright, blood-
flecked delivery room, if a lion
had you in its jaws I would attack it, if the ropes
binding your soul are your own wrists, I will cut them.

From Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002. Buy it here.

Photo by koinis.

things i love thursday #1

2010-03-04T22:53:00.001Z

1. colour burst, 2. For Jonathan, 3. Ol' Blue Eyes, 4. Sunshine to Grow, 5. Spring Fireworks, 6. Blue Bells,
7. because i loved this colour, 8. Buzzing, buzzing...., 9. Untitled

♥ Spring! So over Winter, am enjoying Scotland's attempts at sunshine and warmth, longer days, some beautiful sunsets over lochs in beautiful Argyll, daffodils everywhere, the first blossoms on the trees in our street, not having to wear enormous coats and hats, tadpoles in the pond, blue tits in the garden, seedlings and catkins and bright colours popping up all over the place.

♥ Charlie Brooker - I'm rather obsessed with Mr Brooker, undisputed king of misanthropic TV criticism. In fact he's kind of become the third person in my relationship, my boyfriend and I spend an inordinate amount of time either watching old episodes of Screenwipe online, looking forward to the next episode of Newswipe, or reading his rather brilliant journalism collections (yes, we are all kinds of tragic). Trust me, Charlie Brooker is right about everything.

♥ Tumblr - Loving Tumblr right now, especially just browsing images that other people find inspirational, I could do that for hours (heck, I've been known to do that all day long!), my tumblelog is over here and is a bit of a mis-match of images, quotes and poems I love, a few of my own photos there too - more on my flickr - really want to get into photography more, will have to convince the boyfriend to lend me his DSLR.

♥ Honourable mentions - // Italo Calvino's dazzling Invisible Cities // Carmex lip balm in a tube // finding old letters // super-cheap g&t's with good friends in Glasgow pubs // Belgian fruit beers // this cocktail // these hats // crunchy organic peanut butter // dreaming about living in treehouses // bamboo knitting needles // DIY Moleskines //

...wondering what Things I Love Thursday (or TiLT) is? Well, it's a chance to remind yourself of all the good things that have been putting a spring in your step over the past seven days, and for someone prone to a certain degree of prematurely jaded curmudgeonliness, I thought I could do with a weekly dose of enforced positivity! Take a gander at blogger-extraordinaire Gala Darling's site (who initiated TiLT and is the definition of fabulous).

poets who don't read poetry

2010-03-01T21:47:00.000Z

Here's Portmanteau Poet of the Day Bill Manhire on poets who don’t read poetry:

I have met plenty who declare that they never read other poets: their own pure, original voice might somehow be contaminated. People who talk like that aren't writers. They simply like the idea of calling themselves writers. If you read a hundred poems by Seamus Heaney and write in his influence for a month or even a year or two, that's fine. It may be part of the process of finding out what to do. I don't imagine there are many aspiring screen writers who decide not to go to films on the grounds that the experience may destroy their art. The only person who will never become a writer is the one who doesn't read. Concert pianists listen to music. Great chefs like to eat.

This is from the intro to Mutes and Earthquakes, an anthology of works by writers from Manhire's greatly respected creative writing course at Victoria University, in Wellington, which I would so so love to enrol on!

Bill Manhire and a very long cat

2010-02-26T10:00:00.000Z

“You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.” – Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio.

I’m a huge fan of the work of Bill Manhire, New Zealand’s inaugural Poet Laureate and unquestionably the leading New Zealand poet of his generation. Manhire was Poet in Residence at StAnza 2009 here in Scotland and is published in the UK by Carcanet, his most recent collection Lifted came out in 2007. I am shamefully ignorant of all but the most visible of Kiwi writers, and I’m sure I’m not alone here; very little poetry of the antipodean variety makes it to our shores. Allen Curnow, Lauris Edmond, James Baxter and Auckland-born Fleur Adcock all achieved international acclaim, but there are few contemporary New Zealand poets that have enjoyed similar reach. Manhire’s poetry has made the leap, and deservedly so, it's playful and poignant with an immediacy and availability that draws you in and holds you tight. His writing has a transparency, a smoothness of expression and lightness of touch that is very accessible, he’s not a poet to rage and burn, but he smoulders quietly, even insidiously. I first came across him when I was at a lecture Marina Warner gave at the Edinburgh Book Festival a year or two ago, promoting her really wonderful book Phantasmagoria. She quoted Manhire’s poem ‘Kevin’, the final poem in Lifted, and it’s stayed in my mind indelibly. Have a read here.

Warner was connecting Manhire’s poem to ideas about the emergence of radio – of wireless technology – and the early twentieth century precoccupation with spiritualism, something I’m really interested in. The disembodied voices from the wireless seemed to come from a mysterious “ether”, linking us to a larger, supernatural realm and tapping into the late Victorian longing for a contact with the spiritual world, with something transcendent. Here’s Susan J. Douglas in Listening In:

Wireless fanned long-standing fantasies and, from its earliest introduction, evoked psychic metaphors. It worked, wrote the New York Herald simply, “like magic.” Being able to speak to others through the air in an electromagnetic voice “would be almost like dreamland and ghostland,” concluded one writer in 1902. It seemed the technical equivalent of telepathy. Popular Science Monthly observed that, through wireless, “the nerves of the whole world [were], so to speak, being bound together.”

It might seem strange now, accustomed as we are to technologies that operate invisibly, but if you really stop and think about the way we are connected to each other – by the internet, by mobile phones, making distance irrelevant – there is much to wonder at. “Any sufficiently advanced technology” said Arthur C. Clarke, "is indistinguishable from magic.”

In ‘Kevin’ Manhire wonders where the dead go, and sees the faraway dark spaces within the “heavy radio” as a good a place as any. There’s an eeriness, an uneasiness to that “dark, celestial glow” of the dial, even as it connects us to those distant voices clamouring in space, giving a primal sense of a bond to “the cave, the hive”. It’s a poem about mortality, and uncertainty, both consolatory and disquieting. The idea of being suddenly ‘lifted’, by death, or as a child by parents “we barely know”, is unsettling, but there’s also a comforting side to that image, the child trusting the hands that lift them. There’s a sense in the poem of that longing to be connected to others, part of “the cave, the hive”, but there’s also something more than a little terrifying in that uncertainty and mystery of the far away places beyond us, and the promise that one day “we all shall go / into the dark furniture of the radio.”

The idea of the radio as a connection to a spiritual realm isn’t a new one, it preoccupied the Modernists and shook up their writing (see the fragmentary, cacophonous style of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Virginia's Woolf's The Waves, Ezra Pound's Cantos and have a read of Kipling’s short story 'Wireless'). I like the idea of poems as voices in the dark, ways of connecting with kindred spirits. A last word from Manhire, interviewed in theage.com.au: “I certainly believe there's a big universe out there and everything that's ever broadcast on the radio is travelling through space – and books and poems are part of that. There are ways in which we survive our own endings.”

And a bonus, here's Bill Manhire reading 'Love Poem', the first poem from his first collection:

Download mp3. Buy Collected Poems here.

//Explore some more radio poems here. // The Scottish Poetry Library website has a great selection of NZ poets introduced by their Scottish contemporaries over here. //

Photo: Bricolage.108.

daily poem: Introduction to Poetry / Billy Collins

2010-02-19T13:34:00.000Z

I love Billy Collins, one of those rare genuinely popular poets who has a real evangelistic approach to poetry, and who manages to be funny and lyrical and very accessible. His brilliant Poetry 180 project is all about getting poetry-for-pleasure into the classroom, with a hand-picked collection of 180 poems - one for every day of the school year - selected on the basis of “their willingness to deliver immediate injections of pleasure.” It's also a great introduction to contemporary poets, including many not especially famous. You can read the poems over here and there's a handy teacher's guide here.

Introduction to Poetry
Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a colour slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
And feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Buy Poetry 180 here. // Buy 180 More here.

Photo by marrian.

welcome!

2010-02-18T18:15:00.000Z

So…here it is. The first bite of the apple. Welcome to The Portmanteau! This is my blog, it’s going to mostly be about poetry – writing it, reading it, being excited and baffled and unsettled and bowled-over and grabbed by the throat and shaken by it. I’m Laura, your friendly companion and tour guide as we journey through the challenging, wonderful and occasionally treacherous hinterlands of all things poetical.

Let’s go!

I like the idea of a poem as a journey – the way it opens up in front of you, building in impact, becoming aware of its cadences, the rhythm of it; and the way meaning emerges, which can sometimes feels like an uphill climb – but then you stand at the top and look back and say yes, I see it now! I’m currently reading Ruth Padel’s so-far excellent The Poem and the Journey, which packs in sixty discussions of contemporary poems and seems like an excellent primer for anyone looking for a way into the world of contemporary poetry, a world that can often seem a daunting, exclusive and difficult place to be.

I want to redress this, not because I feel particularly qualified to do so – (I’m a recent(ish) grad with a Masters in English Literature, have had a few poems published, won a prize or two, organised a small creative writing group and worked in publishing) – but because it’s something I really feel a need for. The contemporary poetry world is very much alive and thriving – there’s heaps of poetry readings in every city, hugely successful book and poetry festivals, oversubscribed creative writing courses, excellent journals, zines and online communities, and many, many brilliant poems published every year. But so much of that exists in what can seem a quite exclusive and intimidating world that can be difficult to access, especially for those who may have little experience of reading contemporary poets or who have preconceived notions as to what contemporary poetry is like (obscure, difficult, self-indulgent, irrelevant, inferior to ‘classic’ poetry, etc.).

Studying English Literature at university, I was really surprised how many of my fellow students were dismissive and resistant to any kind of poetry. They probably wrote their own plaintive post-adolescent poems about being pseudo-bohemian, socially awkward, prematurely embittered, misunderstood geniuses of undetermined sexuality (I know I did), but many, maybe the majority of those I studied with, just didn’t ‘do’ poetry - didn’t get it, or like it, or see it as being as worthy of consideration as the novels and plays we studied.

So, if even Eng Lit students don’t want to read poetry, then there can’t be much hope for everyone else, right? Well, I think a lot of the problem is the way poetry is taught in schools, you remember – all that critical analysis and interpretation, (What is the effect of Keats’ use of alliteration in the final couplet? Discuss Larkin’s attitude towards religion. Compare and contrast Heaney’s use of metaphor in any two poems…and so on and so on) picking apart every word of a poem until it lies lifeless in front of you, murdering to dissect. In Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled the inimitable Mr Fry laments this tendency and quotes a well known joke:

The way poetry was taught at school reminded W.H. Auden of a Punch cartoon composed, legend has it, by the poet A.E. Housman. Two English teachers are walking in the woods in springtime. The first, on hearing birdsong, is moved to quote William Wordsworth:

TEACHER 1: Oh cuckoo, shall I call thee bird
Or but a wandering voice?

TEACHER 2: State the alternative preferred
With reasons for your choice.

Funny, but all too familiar. I hate this. I hate that the same poems are trotted out year by year in schools all over the country, I hate this emphasis on interpreting everything, as if all poets are just trying to be clever – or showing off – by speaking in endless metaphors and similes, all wrapped around the ‘meaning’ that must be rooted out and analysed. Here’s Neil Astley in his foreword to the brilliant Bloodaxe anthology Staying Alive:

One of the greatest disservices to poetry has been the modern tendency to read poems in terms of their paraphrasable meaning…These kinds of misreadings of poetry are the inevitable result of botched teaching: first the killing of poems by careless dissection at school, then their intellectual “decoding” as so-called “texts” in universities by literary theoreticians.

Poems should live and breathe, they should seep under your skin or grasp you by both hands, they should simmer and burn and boil over, they should knock your socks off. So this is a blog about poetry (although I reserve the right to squeeze in a few things non-poetical along the way). Because I love it and because I want more people to get the chance to enjoy it, I don’t pretend that this blog will achieve that but I want it to be a place where I can explore and discover and share all kinds of writing, new and old, famous and not-famous-yet, published and unpublished.

So…are we ready? I’m packing a thermos of tea, some peanut butter sandwiches, my moleskine, and the aforementioned Staying Alive, which, along with its sister anthology Being Alive, is the one book, above all others, that I’d recommend you invest in for the journey. It’s published by the terrific Bloodaxe Books, purveyors of poetry of the highest and coolest order, and it’s the book that really turned me on to the awesomeness of contemporary poetry.

Here’s the two quotes borrowed from its epigraph, and I can’t think of better ones to welcome you to the poetical adventures of The Portmanteau:

One should only read books which bite and sting one. If the book we are reading does not wake us up with a blow to the head, what’s the point in reading? A book must be the axe which smashes the frozen sea within us. – Franz Kafka

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. – Emily Dickinson