Category: reflections

You have to throw the book against the wall

I’ve just finished reading Margaret Craven’s I Heard the Owl Call My Name. For a novel that’s 133 pages it took me a long time to read. It’s about an Anglican priest who is unaware that he has only three years to live. The bishop is told this by the priest’s doctor and sends the young ordinand to Kingcome, British Columbia to live with First Nations Indians.

The book is resonant and so poetic that it reminds me of Cornel West in the film Examined Life saying that reading Ruskin, Twain or Melville:

“You almost have to throw the book against the wall because you are so intensely alive that you need a break.”

The following passage is Jim, one of the major characters, describing the lifecycle of salmon.… Continue reading...

Crow, performed by Handspring

Until I saw Crow performed at The Borough Hall tonight, I don’t think I’d realised how well dance and poetry complement each other. They are physical in different ways. Poetry is a language we read with the body and the senses. Dance struggles between freedom and the corporeality of the body. Like poets, dancers can contort the language of the everyday and ‘make it new’. They are naturally symbolic arts and share a vicarious attraction.

Ted Hughes’ trickster was inventively staged thanks to Handspring’s beautifully incomplete puppetry. We saw Crow literally animated from a spitball of black lace, metal and ink to something eerily human and then something still more mysterious.

The expectation of surprise

I sent a batch of poems to Poetry London yesterday. Sending to magazines is a great excuse to catch up on any issues you haven’t read in a while. They give you a sense of what’s happening in poetry. It’s refreshing to see emerging themes and styles. How far this is because of the editorial vision or the movements of a collective muse is difficult to know. If it were obvious the magazine would probably feel laboured and didactic.

But even when you are familiar with a magazine, it’s not really possible to second guess what the editor wants to read because, in all likelihood, the editor wants to be surprised. All we can say is that the poem has to be one of the silver bullets:  self-contained enough to survive when separated from the body of your work.… Continue reading...