February – June 2016

I knew that Kamikaze was being used in the ‘Power and Conflict’ section of the GCSE English Literature exam’s ‘past and present’ anthology.  It was great to be printed alongside Shelley, Blake, Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, Wilfred Owen – and for me in particular, Seamus Heaney – as well as many distinguished modern poets. I’ve now been invited to one or two London schools to talk about Kamikaze to the class. It is quite a challenge:  30 or so keen-eyed 14 and 15-year olds full of their own ideas, challenges, complaints and questions.   I ended one session by asking the class to have a go at their own poems, and was later emailed several.   I suppose it’s inevitable, but my overriding impression was how dominated the young writers felt by grand themes, and by old-fashioned ‘poetic’ language.   In response, I encouraged something more personal and direct, more based on their own real and actual experience, and I had the feeling that this was a relief, akin to being sprung from a kind of poetic prison cell.

Here’s one of the poems that Hugo, Jonathan, Harry and Zac from Emily Kaplan’s class at a large North London school wrote in an imaginative response to their study of the poem.   Other poems written were from differing points of view – the Emperor of Japan, or the mother or father of the young pilot…   All inventive and lively, though one or two hamstrung by the effort to find rhymes.  Forget rhyming for the moment!  Just write with energy!

May 2016

What’s more, even though I was neither asked nor told this was to happen, a few months later I was even more pleased to learn that Lady and Fox was the ‘unseen’ poem used in AQA’s paper for this year’s GCSE exams.   On the evening of the day of the exam I had over 50 unexpected emails from all round the country, both teachers and pupils.   It’s so rare that a poem you’ve written gets that depth of attention and is taken so seriously:  it felt terrific.

The emails were very varied:  some serious, intelligent, extremely thoughtful and perceptive, some funny, including one of a photo of the young writer grinning like a fox, asking ‘what does the fox say??’   Here’s one I really liked:

“Soz luv,

What on earth was you on wen righting that poem. It was in are exam. All i want 2 no is wat inspired u. Rlly. 

i was getting a* now im getting nuffink.

lots of bants

G M, future McDonalds employee”

She’ll go far, and it won’t be in McDonalds either.

February 2017

After I’ve talked to a Year 10 or 11 group about the poem Kamikaze, I ask them to try their hands at writing Haiku. Partly to emphasise that Japan, in spite of dispatching so many young Kamikaze pilots to their deaths, has a rich and ancient culture in both art and literature. The three-line structure, amounting to 17 syllables in all (5/7/5 syllables per line) is quite demanding: but here are a bunch of lively Haiku from four schools. (Yes, I know the one about the Asda sausages didn’t get the counting quite right, but I like it all the same. Sorry I don’t have the poet’s name!)

HAIKU from Years 10 and 11

To GCSE students and teachers: A POLITE REQUEST!

I often get emails from you, and I really enjoy this, and am quite willing to respond to serious questions.  However, and this is becoming increasingly  important to me, when I’ve written back to you – and sometimes it takes quite a lot of thought and time, not always easy at the end of a working day – it is very disconcerting to hear absolutely nothing in reply.  I think it should be basic, just to send a quick email saying ‘thanks!’ in response.  It encourages me to answer the next email, instead of feeling vaguely ‘used’ by the student or teacher, maybe to get good marks in an exam, or to prepare a class.

Just a word or two back will do.  (A few of you do this anyway, but most don’t!)

‘The Invention of Fireworks’ has been short-listed among the Forward Prizes for the Felix Dennis Prize awarded to the best first collection.  Wonderful news at the beginning of June, entirely unexpected and therefore all the more exciting;  and pleasing too for Templar Poetry, my publisher, since Templar is the only truly independent publisher of those represented.   Six good collections from six good poets means that each of us can feel pleased and proud to be on the list, whichever one of us eventually is chosen on 30 September as the prizewinner.

One of the questions put by the Forward Committee to the six short-listed poets concerned how we began writing poetry in the first place.  I suddenly recalled that one of the many schools I went to used as a punishment the learning by  heart of quite long pieces of poetry.  I learned reams, acres of poetry – often Shakespeare – so the sounds and rhythms of the English language were in me from an early age, even though I may not at that point have understood the meaning fully.  Far from punishing me, it rewarded my difficult behaviour, and provided me with a source of pleasure and solace.   Whole lines and particular individual words themselves became, like sweets, something that could saved up and enjoyed, relished in secret.

The announcement of the short-lists for the Forward Prizes made the front page of the Guardian, mainly because of Jeremy Paxman’s accompanying complaint that too many poets write only for each other, rather than for ‘ordinary people.’   He’s the Chairman of the Judging Panel, and I imagine would not consider himself to be an ordinary person.   But then where are they to be found?   Two paramedics I encountered recently in a sudden ambulance trip to hospital, must have looked up my website having taken my details for the medical records; and then went on to listen to a recording of ‘Kamikaze’.   They suddenly appeared in the cubicle in A & E where I was lying and, beaming, said how much they liked it.   Clearly extraordinary people!    And a great boost to recovery from concussion…

Templar is an independent publishing house I have always admired for its poetry, but as well for the high quality of its graphics and design.   If you were lucky enough to be published by them you knew you’d have a very good-looking production. In February 2013, and not for the first time, I submitted a manuscript for their annual Straid award – and was extremely pleased, overjoyed in fact, to hear that I had won.   And extremely pleased too by the speed with which they produced a marvellous-looking and fireworky small volume in time for a launch at the Derwent Poetry Festival in Matlock in early November of the same year.

There was a London launch too, which I shared with a clever and talented young poet, Matt Bryden, who had already had a pamphlet published by Templar (Night Porter – brilliant, wry and witty) and now had his first full collection:  Boxing the Compass.   We held the launch at Keats House in Hampstead, in the Nightingale Room which holds just over 100 people –  and it was just about full, of families, friends, colleagues and poets.   We were introduced by Alex McMillen, who is the Editor-in-Chief at Templar, and both of us read from our work.

Here is a link to my volume (have a look at Templar’s web-page for the book), and don’t forget it’s postage free.

Buy The Invention of Fireworks here

And here is a link to Matt’s volume:

Buy Boxing the Compass here
Buy Night Porter here
mattbryden.co.uk

It’s really worth having a close look at the Templar website, because there are so many publishing opportunities there:  books, pamphlets, the magazine Iota;  and, just announced, the Templar Portfolio Award 2014.  This quarterly award offers poets the chance to submit a Portfolio of between ten and twelve pages of their work for consideration.

The best event I attended at the festival was a talk by Tim Dee on ‘The Poetry of Birds’.   He talked of a lifelong passion for noticing, watching and identifying birds, and read several poems from the book of the same name that he and Simon Armitage have edited.   Many of the poems in the book were  new to me – I was amazed to find what a rich source of  work bird life has been for poets over several centuries.   Tim Dee confessed to not being particularly fond of certain species – basically birds that can’t fly, such as ostriches;  and ducks don’t stir him the way better flyers can do.  But he allowed that the non-airborne species were good to eat….  Both that book and his bird-watching autobiography, The Running Sky, are terrific, and highly recommended by me.  He writes better prose than many poets write poetry.  

The prize-winning children were extraordinary:  serious poems that made the older poets whistle and exchange glances of admiration.   Some serious competition for the older generation within the next few years.   I read ‘The Academy of New Words’, which won second prize –  I will put it up on the website when I get enough time to work out how to edit this whole business properly.

Everything Don Paterson said about the reasons for setting up this new prize (Guardian, 22/1/11) sounded absolutely right.   I don’t know how many hopeful unpublished poets actually got as far as jumping through the initial hoops demanded by the competition – many of which were to do with presentation – but in the end there were 10 short-listed poets.   Including me.   The surge of happiness that shot through me and out at the ends of my fingers on reading the email that began ‘Congratulations on being….’ was tremendous.   But it brought turbulence in its wake:  having told myself I didn’t stand a chance, and that brushing up enough poems to enter was the real point, to learn that now I had at least one chance in 10 made sleeping almost impossible (see ‘The delivery’).

There began to exist an odd split in my head:  85% of me knew quite well (not least because Don Paterson had already turned down a collection from me) that winning was impossible but the other 15% began to daydream deeply, almost at moments sure the prize was mine.   I remember that same state of mind from the week the Lottery was set up.   I had bought one ticket and then spent the rest of the week planning how to spend the money.   Madness.  A friend of mine had exactly the same day-dream:  we agreed to split the money in case just in case one of our tickets was lost.  But I suppose if there isn’t that 15% capacity to daydream there’d be no room for hope in a life.  And where there’s hope there’s life, not the other way round.

20^th January 2011 was the day of the announcement.   Ten poets plus a few guests each joined a large noisy party in the basement of Pan Macmillan.   My day-job has meant I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of public lectures and seminars here and all over the world, but I have never in my life been more anxious or incapable than I was during the hour before the reading began.  Being about to read meant it was impossible either to have a drink (fatal) or to talk normally to anyone at all, including family.   It took over an hour before the readings began – apparently because One Poet Still Wasn’t There.  Don Paterson introduced us in alphabetical order and said something generous about each of us – but it was clear to me and a few others as well when he introduced Richard Meier that this was his favourite among the ten good poets there on the day.  And so it turned out to be.   That 15% of me dissolved back into the other 85% and right then my main feeling was immense, but immense, relief it was over.   Richard’s wife immediately burst into tears of joy, which was very touching.  He is a good and original poet and it was a strong choice.  (Richard used to go to Colin Falck’s Worskshop, so I already knew his work.)

I felt sad over the next few days, having lost the dream, but perhaps that’s better than feeling nothing at all.  I don’t believe in ‘not minding’.  And actually it feels OK to lose to someone truly good.  What would have been painful as well as sad would have been to lose to someone I didn’t rate that highly.  So.  On to the next poem.  And then the next.