Buzzwords Poetry & Cheltenham Poetry Festival.

Buzzwords happens every month, usually on the first Sunday, at the Exmouth Arms in Cheltenham. The website is here: http://buzzwordspoetry.blogspot.com/  The meetings consist of a workshop led by a guest poet, readings by the guest poet and an open mic session. The guest poets have all been excellent. The group have been really welcoming and full of lovely people. I go to all the meetings I can. I always read as part of the open mic.


This weekend saw the opening of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival, which will go on until the 4th May. I have plans to go to at least five events and would like to go to more, but my care responsibilities make going to day-time and early evening events impossible.

Last night I went to a reading by students on the University of Gloucestershire Creative Writing Course. The course director is Angela France, who is also responsible for Buzzwords. Angela introduced her students to a sparse but appreciative audience. There were some good and accomplished poets in the group, as well as those who are just learning their craft.

Poem - My Grandfather and Uncle

This poem was first published in Pennine Platform magazine. It remains one of my favourites.

MY GRANDFATHER AND UNCLE

My grandfather and uncle

both returned to the earth

with untimely haste.

Although they worked it,

broke its back

for snow to bite into,

dragged sedge from ditches,

clawed back

lambs from snowheaps,

they did not inherit it,

unless it was

in the length and width

of a man's form.

And it claimed them

early,

reaching up through the chest,

pain filling the arms,

which had gathered harvests.

And still they loved it

and still they cursed

on cold wet mornings,

as it worked

like ringworm into their hands.

In death

they shall inherit the earth.

Until this time

they have been living

on borrowed land.

Muscovy by Matthew Francis

Here's another review that appeared on my magic realism blog.

Like his acclaimed Mandeville (2008), Matthew Francis's fourth Faber collection explores a world of marvels, real and fantastic. A man takes off for the moon in an engine drawn by geese, a poltergeist moves into a remote Welsh village, and a party of seventeenth-century Englishmen encounter the wonders of Russia - sledges, vodka, skating and Easter eggs. The scientist Robert Boyle basks in the newly discovered radiance of phosphorus (the noctiluca of the title) and the theme of light in darkness is taken up by the more personal poems in the book: phoneboxes, streetlamps, moonlight. 

Goodreads description

Another lovely poetry book for you. Not all the poems are magic realism, but most have that magic-realist sensibility that I have written about in the past. 

The collection opens with The Man in the Moon, an account of a trip to the moon powered by geese. It made me think of Calvino, although it is a based on a 17th century fantasy by Francis Godwin. Many of the poems in the collection are influenced by the past or by historical accounts. Some are realistic such as the title poem, which is based on an account by Andrew Marvell of an embassy to Russia. Others have a more supernatural  element e.g Corpse Candle and Familiar Spirit.  I have written before that historical novels (and poetry) that include the supernatural are presenting the world of the past realistically.

My favourite poem in the book is The Walker. It is a beautiful and subtle poem. It of course has a magic-realist angle, but also evokes its mountain setting accurately and in wonderful language:

And the sheep carried on, canted to one side,

    trotting on their adjustable legs

and the narrator's response to it:

I was an inkwash of myself, wet on wet, 

  among the limp vertebrae of ferns

  and the fuzz of bilberry. 

One stroke would smear me into a blur.

The natural eeriness sets the scene for the twist at the ending of the poem.

Wonderful stuff.

"The Worst Enemy to Creativity is Self Doubt"

Well I have done it, at last. I have started sending my poems to magazines again.

When I was younger I was regularly published in  magazines, including South West Review, The Rialto, Aquarius, Pennine Platform, and others. I was probably on the point of getting my first collection, but something happened.

I lost confidence. I have since discovered, this is not uncommon among women poets. Jo Bell and Jane Commane write about it in their excellent book How to be a Poet .  And I had a similar conversation about the issue with Briony Bax (editor of Ambit) at the Poetry Book Fair.  My loss of confidence was ridiculous really. I had two great poets saying I was good (Michael Horovitz, Philip Larkin) and still I gave up submitting.

There were some mitigating circumstances I suppose. Looking back I was struggling with depression, something neither I nor my husband really confronted. My way of dealing it was to stop being a full-time mum and taking on a demanding job, which meant I was balancing motherhood, career and poetry. Poetry was what suffered. My poetry was increasingly taking the form of long sequences or indeed long poems and so not exactly suited to magazine submission, and I used that as an excuse for doing nothing. Then of course the longer I left submitting poems, the harder it was to get back into doing so.

But that is behind me now. I have restarted submitting poems and already in just a month I have had three poems shortlisted for publication, so that is good for my confidence. Fingers crossed the poems make it to publication.

In case you are wondering about the quote in the title of this post - it is from Sylvia Plath.