Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 39
May 8, 2012
Russian Arctic Convoys Museum
This is the website of a campaign trying to get a dedicated Russian Arctic Convoys Museum set up near Loch Ewe in the North West Highlands of Scotland, where many of them sailed from. They're currently running a week of fund-raising events. There's also a link to the e-petition for a medal to be issued to the few veterans of the convoys left alive. Yes, you'd think there would already have been one, for one of the most arduous and dangerous theatres of WW2, and there is, but President Gorbachev, bless him, issued it; the UK government has always been averse.
My father was in the convoys; he was on HMS Scorpion during the battle of North Cape when the Scharnhorst was sunk,and after he died I wrote a sequence of poems about his war medals (which was published in Poetry Wales). This is the one about the convoys:
Russian Convoys Medal (North Cape)
Mid-afternoon
             no daylight left,
the Arctic Ocean
             a monotone
far below
             the edge of Europe.
Warm rooms cut
             deep in the rock,
café, souvenir shop
             and a plaque burnished
for all the young men
             sick as dogs
who could not come in
             out of the storm.
"Hell of a place
             to spend Christmas"
- though, he'd always add,
             worse for the prey,
the shapely Scharnhorst,
             her radar blinded,
pack closing in
             and no way home.
My father was in the convoys; he was on HMS Scorpion during the battle of North Cape when the Scharnhorst was sunk,and after he died I wrote a sequence of poems about his war medals (which was published in Poetry Wales). This is the one about the convoys:
Russian Convoys Medal (North Cape)
Mid-afternoon
             no daylight left,
the Arctic Ocean
             a monotone
far below
             the edge of Europe.
Warm rooms cut
             deep in the rock,
café, souvenir shop
             and a plaque burnished
for all the young men
             sick as dogs
who could not come in
             out of the storm.
"Hell of a place
             to spend Christmas"
- though, he'd always add,
             worse for the prey,
the shapely Scharnhorst,
             her radar blinded,
pack closing in
             and no way home.
April 10, 2012
Tokens for the Foundlings
Tokens for the Foundlings is an anthology of poetry about childhood published by Seren for the benefit of the Foundlings Museum in London, with all royalties paid to it. The museum, established by Thomas Coram in 1739 with the support of Hogarth and Handel to rescue foundlings whose mothers had not means to support them, was both the first orphanage in Britain and the first public art gallery.
The poems, all on the subject of orphans or aspects of childhood, come from many poets including Gillian Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy, Helen Dunmore, Stephen Knight, Don Paterson, Elaine Feinstein, Dannie Abse, Seamus Heaney, David Harsent, Carol Rumens, Kate Bingham, Michael Longley and George Szirtes among others. But possibly the most moving is one written in 1759 by an anonymous mother who left her child at the Foundling Hospital. Some women left tokens with their children, as proof of identity in hopes (usually unfulfilled) that they might one day be able to reclaim them. This one left a poem. The punctuation's hers:
Hard is my Lot in deep Distress
To have no help where Most should find
Sure Nature meant her sacred Laws
Should Men as strong as Women bind
Regardless He, Unable I
To keep this Image of my Heart
'Tis vile to Murder! Hard to Starve
And death almost to me to part
If Fortune should her favours give
That I in better plight may Live
I'd try to have my boy again
And train him up the best of Men.
The poems, all on the subject of orphans or aspects of childhood, come from many poets including Gillian Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy, Helen Dunmore, Stephen Knight, Don Paterson, Elaine Feinstein, Dannie Abse, Seamus Heaney, David Harsent, Carol Rumens, Kate Bingham, Michael Longley and George Szirtes among others. But possibly the most moving is one written in 1759 by an anonymous mother who left her child at the Foundling Hospital. Some women left tokens with their children, as proof of identity in hopes (usually unfulfilled) that they might one day be able to reclaim them. This one left a poem. The punctuation's hers:
Hard is my Lot in deep Distress
To have no help where Most should find
Sure Nature meant her sacred Laws
Should Men as strong as Women bind
Regardless He, Unable I
To keep this Image of my Heart
'Tis vile to Murder! Hard to Starve
And death almost to me to part
If Fortune should her favours give
That I in better plight may Live
I'd try to have my boy again
And train him up the best of Men.
April 9, 2012
Second opinion?
From a Guardian article on Eastercon: "I think we've sorted out the gender thing," says John Medany. "Look around. Half of the attendees are female."
Now for all I know, he may be right; I haven't been to the con. But that isn't the way to judge it. If half of the speakers are female, then yes. Anyone know if that's so?
Now for all I know, he may be right; I haven't been to the con. But that isn't the way to judge it. If half of the speakers are female, then yes. Anyone know if that's so?
April 7, 2012
Review of "The Book of Idiots" by Christopher Meredith
Stupid deaths, stupid deaths,
Hope next time it's not you.
The above is of course the jingle of Death, in his slot in Horrible Histories exploring gruesome and unlikely ends. I don't suppose this was in Meredith's mind when he chose his title, but it occurs to me whenever Wil Daniel is exercising his pub quiz talent for citing examples of the same. Nor are the only examples historical, like Aeschylus (brained by a falling tortoise) and Henry 1 (surfeit of lampreys). In the course of the novel, a man falls unaccountably from a bridge; another drowns because his friends don't know the one thing about him that would tell them he was in trouble, while a third troubles the coroner as a result of a bizarre shooting. Not to mention Wil himself, constantly rolling cigarettes while dying of lung cancer, as stupid a death as one could well imagine.
This novel is full of trajectories (balls, arrows, stones), which may be launched by humans but are then often unpredictable and out of their control, and journeys which frequently don't go where they meant to either. There is more than a hint, indeed, that the only sure end of all these journeys is death, and that, this being so, it is the time spent in motion, rather than the end of it, that matters.
The repeated image of trajectories reflects in the novel's structure, which consists of separate though interwoven reminiscences by the narrator, Dean Lloyd. Some of these stones skim further than others, but the dominant thread is a long, rambling tale told to him at a pub by his friend Wil who, on his trips to outpatients, has met a woman, there for the same reason, whom he once knew intimately but had long lost touch with. The affair he starts with her may be partly fuelled by his own approaching death, but also seems to owe something to the "Friends Reunited effect" whereby the middle-aged, uneasy that they have not made as much of life as they might, begin to wonder where other choices would have led them and can't resist trying to find out. (At least three married people in the novel are playing away in this manner, and Dean may be another, depending on the identity of the unnnamed "you" he sometimes addresses.) One of the book's most poignant moments is when Wil and Annette, so long apart, update each other on their lives:
"Not that we said much. Basically we had nothing interesting to report to each other about the last twenty-five years."
The sense of shared mortality between Wil and Annette creates a sombre, powerful charge to equal that between the lovers of Chekhov's "Lady with a Lapdog", though expressed in Wil's wry, ruefully flippant vernacular:
"She was worried these two old bags would overhear us. I was worried that if we touched hands we'd earth a lightning bolt and burn the tearoom and the trinket shop and the prints of qaint streets to carbonised sticks and we'd be sitting there with just the whites of our eyes showing like a bit from a Roadrunner cartoon."
For all this power, it is never entirely clear how far Wil is embroidering the experience; there is a moment late on when he and Annette's husband meet, and we suddenly see how Wil looks to a stranger (more than slightly obsessive and unhinged). Nor is he the only unaware/unreliable narrator. Dean, having described in some detail a day of job interviews at his workplace, later realises he had misread much of what he saw. There is much, particularly about his friends, that he does not know, in which he resembles the eponymous poet-narrator of Meredith's earlier novel Griffri, trudging through the murky byways of mediaeval Welsh power-politics without ever realising what is really going on.
It seems in fact that we are all fated to go on journeys that end only where we don't want to go, and with a faulty satnav. As Wil says, "either there is no god, or if he is there he's a very rum bugger indeed." If this sounds a bleak message, it is not delivered without considerable humour. Both Dean and Wil have a nice line in wit, Dean more sardonic and observational, as with the job candidate: "I sensed her mechanically choosing moments to spray us with eye contact"; Wil more inventive and freewheeling, witness his views on Aristotle:
"He also thought that when bears were born they were just formless blobs of goo […] and then their mother licked 'em into shape. Literally. Licked 'em into shape. Fucking nutter. He also had a theory of tragedy. He was on firmer ground there. All he had to do was go to the theatre. […] They must have said to him in the stalls, Hey Ari, shoudn' you be in the woods with the bears? No boys, I'm working on a new book. I'm a theatre critic now".
Both are interesting company, which in a slow-burning book matters. It is daring of Meredith to have his heroes, in effect, stuck in a pub reminiscing for so long, but it works. This is a book with a sombre theme, suffused with melancholy, but also shot through with wit, linguistic inventiveness and sharp observation.
Hope next time it's not you.
The above is of course the jingle of Death, in his slot in Horrible Histories exploring gruesome and unlikely ends. I don't suppose this was in Meredith's mind when he chose his title, but it occurs to me whenever Wil Daniel is exercising his pub quiz talent for citing examples of the same. Nor are the only examples historical, like Aeschylus (brained by a falling tortoise) and Henry 1 (surfeit of lampreys). In the course of the novel, a man falls unaccountably from a bridge; another drowns because his friends don't know the one thing about him that would tell them he was in trouble, while a third troubles the coroner as a result of a bizarre shooting. Not to mention Wil himself, constantly rolling cigarettes while dying of lung cancer, as stupid a death as one could well imagine.
This novel is full of trajectories (balls, arrows, stones), which may be launched by humans but are then often unpredictable and out of their control, and journeys which frequently don't go where they meant to either. There is more than a hint, indeed, that the only sure end of all these journeys is death, and that, this being so, it is the time spent in motion, rather than the end of it, that matters.
The repeated image of trajectories reflects in the novel's structure, which consists of separate though interwoven reminiscences by the narrator, Dean Lloyd. Some of these stones skim further than others, but the dominant thread is a long, rambling tale told to him at a pub by his friend Wil who, on his trips to outpatients, has met a woman, there for the same reason, whom he once knew intimately but had long lost touch with. The affair he starts with her may be partly fuelled by his own approaching death, but also seems to owe something to the "Friends Reunited effect" whereby the middle-aged, uneasy that they have not made as much of life as they might, begin to wonder where other choices would have led them and can't resist trying to find out. (At least three married people in the novel are playing away in this manner, and Dean may be another, depending on the identity of the unnnamed "you" he sometimes addresses.) One of the book's most poignant moments is when Wil and Annette, so long apart, update each other on their lives:
"Not that we said much. Basically we had nothing interesting to report to each other about the last twenty-five years."
The sense of shared mortality between Wil and Annette creates a sombre, powerful charge to equal that between the lovers of Chekhov's "Lady with a Lapdog", though expressed in Wil's wry, ruefully flippant vernacular:
"She was worried these two old bags would overhear us. I was worried that if we touched hands we'd earth a lightning bolt and burn the tearoom and the trinket shop and the prints of qaint streets to carbonised sticks and we'd be sitting there with just the whites of our eyes showing like a bit from a Roadrunner cartoon."
For all this power, it is never entirely clear how far Wil is embroidering the experience; there is a moment late on when he and Annette's husband meet, and we suddenly see how Wil looks to a stranger (more than slightly obsessive and unhinged). Nor is he the only unaware/unreliable narrator. Dean, having described in some detail a day of job interviews at his workplace, later realises he had misread much of what he saw. There is much, particularly about his friends, that he does not know, in which he resembles the eponymous poet-narrator of Meredith's earlier novel Griffri, trudging through the murky byways of mediaeval Welsh power-politics without ever realising what is really going on.
It seems in fact that we are all fated to go on journeys that end only where we don't want to go, and with a faulty satnav. As Wil says, "either there is no god, or if he is there he's a very rum bugger indeed." If this sounds a bleak message, it is not delivered without considerable humour. Both Dean and Wil have a nice line in wit, Dean more sardonic and observational, as with the job candidate: "I sensed her mechanically choosing moments to spray us with eye contact"; Wil more inventive and freewheeling, witness his views on Aristotle:
"He also thought that when bears were born they were just formless blobs of goo […] and then their mother licked 'em into shape. Literally. Licked 'em into shape. Fucking nutter. He also had a theory of tragedy. He was on firmer ground there. All he had to do was go to the theatre. […] They must have said to him in the stalls, Hey Ari, shoudn' you be in the woods with the bears? No boys, I'm working on a new book. I'm a theatre critic now".
Both are interesting company, which in a slow-burning book matters. It is daring of Meredith to have his heroes, in effect, stuck in a pub reminiscing for so long, but it works. This is a book with a sombre theme, suffused with melancholy, but also shot through with wit, linguistic inventiveness and sharp observation.
April 4, 2012
Vote early and often...
... for the Cultural Exchanges festival in the European Competition for Best Innovations in University Outreach and Public Engagement - terrible mouthful, but many folk in fandom have enjoyed participating in this festival, especially via Ian Hunter's three Slash Study Days. I'll never forget Gemma Bristow's talk on Aldington and Dorothea Schuller's on HD, at the third festival. It's always been very well run by the young students, too. I hope they win!
April 2, 2012
What's a writer worth?
The writer Paul Magrs, (Dr Who books, YA books and many prose works for adults) has posted a brilliant all-purpose email on his blog for the use of authors who get asked to do unpaid work at literary festivals. Having agreed to appear for free at a festival, doing 4 events over 2 days, he then found they wouldn't even pay his train fare, at which point, unsurprisingly, he pulled out. This was not some sort of free festival, by the way. Though he doesn't name it in the blog post, he subsequently did on Facebook, because they were still advertising his presence and he wanted to explain to anyone who expected to see him why he wouldn't be there. The festival in question, an SF/fantasy affair, is charging attenders £45 for a ticket to all events. I wonder if said attenders realise that the authors they came to hear won't see a penny of it?
The excuse often made by such festivals is that authors will find their appearance "profile-raising" and will sell more as a result. As a commenter on the blog points out, try that one on your plumber and see how far you get. The caterers, electricians and other backroom people who enable these festivals to happen will all expect, quite rightly, to get paid and would not consider working otherwise. Yet authors, the raison d'etre of a literary festival, are with increasing frequency expected to donate their services. Quite often, too, and certainly in the case of this festival, there will be "guests of honour" who do get paid, presumably at the expense of those who don't (the year Bill Clinton appeared at Hay, he was rumoured to have been paid £10,000, while most of the writers present went home with a white rose.)
At least, though, Hay does, or then did, pay expenses. Actually expecting an author to be out of pocket by attending is a new one on me, but I suspect it may increase. Paul Magrs did the right thing by pulling out, but I really wish more writers would refuse to be treated in this way. I don't think writers should even agree to appear without a fee, unless for charity or at a festival to which entrance is not charged. It's demeaning and it's unprofessional.
It's also a dangerous precedent to set. Organisers may tell you: these are hard times, they can't afford to pay writers "at the moment" (the implication being that if your charity enables them to survive, things might get better in future). Well, if they can't afford to pay those who constitute the most important part of their festival, they had better by all means go out of business. And as for the future, let us not forget that once upon a time, young people who entered professions, especially in the media, got paid. These days, they are expected to work for nothing as "interns" and somehow keep themselves or be kept by wealthy London-based parents in the meantime. This disgraceful modern version of sweated labour has become the norm and it will be very hard to change it back. If authors let unpaid work become their norm, they may well find the same. Many non-authors have real difficulty understanding why writers want and deserve payment; I have heard people seriously suggest they should do it for love and that it somehow undermines their commitment to their art if they want to put food on the table as well. But such folk are romantic fools; festival organisers are not, or shouldn't be.
Some few lucky authors may be able to afford to appear for no fee (though I suspect they won't be the ones asked to do so). But they should refuse anyway, on principle and out of solidarity with their fellow-writers.
The excuse often made by such festivals is that authors will find their appearance "profile-raising" and will sell more as a result. As a commenter on the blog points out, try that one on your plumber and see how far you get. The caterers, electricians and other backroom people who enable these festivals to happen will all expect, quite rightly, to get paid and would not consider working otherwise. Yet authors, the raison d'etre of a literary festival, are with increasing frequency expected to donate their services. Quite often, too, and certainly in the case of this festival, there will be "guests of honour" who do get paid, presumably at the expense of those who don't (the year Bill Clinton appeared at Hay, he was rumoured to have been paid £10,000, while most of the writers present went home with a white rose.)
At least, though, Hay does, or then did, pay expenses. Actually expecting an author to be out of pocket by attending is a new one on me, but I suspect it may increase. Paul Magrs did the right thing by pulling out, but I really wish more writers would refuse to be treated in this way. I don't think writers should even agree to appear without a fee, unless for charity or at a festival to which entrance is not charged. It's demeaning and it's unprofessional.
It's also a dangerous precedent to set. Organisers may tell you: these are hard times, they can't afford to pay writers "at the moment" (the implication being that if your charity enables them to survive, things might get better in future). Well, if they can't afford to pay those who constitute the most important part of their festival, they had better by all means go out of business. And as for the future, let us not forget that once upon a time, young people who entered professions, especially in the media, got paid. These days, they are expected to work for nothing as "interns" and somehow keep themselves or be kept by wealthy London-based parents in the meantime. This disgraceful modern version of sweated labour has become the norm and it will be very hard to change it back. If authors let unpaid work become their norm, they may well find the same. Many non-authors have real difficulty understanding why writers want and deserve payment; I have heard people seriously suggest they should do it for love and that it somehow undermines their commitment to their art if they want to put food on the table as well. But such folk are romantic fools; festival organisers are not, or shouldn't be.
Some few lucky authors may be able to afford to appear for no fee (though I suspect they won't be the ones asked to do so). But they should refuse anyway, on principle and out of solidarity with their fellow-writers.
March 11, 2012
What's the world's best advertising space?
Yup, the back of a toilet door. The brilliant Jen Hadfield worked that out some time ago and instituted Shetland's Bards in the Bog programme to bring poetry to the ultimate captive audience. It's a very popular programme and I'm delighted that I'm part of it this time round - the current 6 poems are the first in the list on the attached link. There are some great poems in there; I can recommend "Immigrant" by James Sinclair and "Come Ben Trow" by Mary Blance. They have to be no more than 12 lines; this is mine:
Winter: Hoswick
In the fields
                   more geese than sheep
in the bay
                   more seals than boats
in the sky
                   more night than day.
Winter: Hoswick
In the fields
                   more geese than sheep
in the bay
                   more seals than boats
in the sky
                   more night than day.
March 8, 2012
New poem online
- over at the Poetry Daily website. First published in Poetry Wales, it's called The Sailor Who Fell From The Rigging. Not massively upbeat, but then so few of them are...
March 6, 2012
My lord, I bring good news...
Greatly chuffed that Rosie Shepperd, who gave me an interview and some poems for the blog here, is a winner in the Poetry Business competition and has a pamphlet out with Salt next year. Rosie is a really exciting, different, individual poet. I said in the interview that if I had to choose one word to describe her poems, it would be the 19th-century slang coinage "slantendicular", meaning not just askew but somehow subversively askew. Massively looking forward to that pamphlet.
February 25, 2012
Review: Finns and Amazons, by Nancy Mattson
Nancy Mattson is a Canadian-born poet of Finnish extraction, who lives in London. She thus falls into the Displaced Writers category that a lot of my favourite poets come from; there's something about having a sense of displacement, rather than a sense of place, that gives a poet's language and observation an extra edge, almost as if they don't have a comfort zone.
Her collection Finns and Amazons (Arrowhead Press 2012) provides, in its organisation, a fascinating example of how, in writing, one chance stimulus tends to interact with others and lead in all sorts of unexpected directions. She sees an exhibtion of early 20th-century Russian women artists; at first no poems emerge but later an encounter with a portrait by Sonia Delaunay, another Russian woman artist of the same period throws up a connection with Finland, and leads the poet back in time to her antecedents, particularly the story of a Finnish great-aunt whose personality comes over strongly but whose fate is shadowy.
In the book's first section, which concerns the women artists, the most striking, for me, are the first three, centring on the displaced Sonia in Paris, looking at tapestries in the Musée de Cluny and letting her memories remake them:
       I thread myself into the panels,
       unpick the unicorn, stitch in the elk
       I saw in Karelia
             ("Sonia Visits Le Musée De Cluny)
The first poem, "Simultaneity 1", does something I wouldn't have thought would work, repeatedly using single-word lines and white space to slow down the tempo and point up a crucial moment. It does work, especially when read aloud, though I'd have to quote much of the poem to prove it.
In the other three sections of the poem, we are on the track of elusive family ghosts: a great-aunt who vanished in Soviet Karelia, a grandmother whose pseudonymous newspaper articles are tantalisingly present but unfindable in an unindexed archive, a language yielding only grudgingly to translation (Finnish doesn't even belong to the Indo-European language group and has precious little in common with most European languages). Fittingly, the section on "loss" begins with "What Can Be Translated":
       A door is not a tree though both are wood
The lost great-aunt is present through letters, some of which are both reproduced in the book and transmuted into poems. Letters are a means of communication, but these, while on the one hand showing much of her sturdy, slightly awkward personality, are also tantalisingly self-censored (it not being politic, in Stalinist Russia, to write just what one was thinking) and incomplete in that the other half of the correspondence is missing. Again the message is unknowability, the impossibility of translation which in no way diminishes the urge to try.
The great-aunt of course is also a displaced person, who had left Finland first for America and later for Russia. In her last letter (1939), disillusioned by events, she is coming to the conclusion that "people who spend their whole lives in one place are the happiest". Maybe, but it's the displaced who often observe the most clearly and write the most memorably.
Her collection Finns and Amazons (Arrowhead Press 2012) provides, in its organisation, a fascinating example of how, in writing, one chance stimulus tends to interact with others and lead in all sorts of unexpected directions. She sees an exhibtion of early 20th-century Russian women artists; at first no poems emerge but later an encounter with a portrait by Sonia Delaunay, another Russian woman artist of the same period throws up a connection with Finland, and leads the poet back in time to her antecedents, particularly the story of a Finnish great-aunt whose personality comes over strongly but whose fate is shadowy.
In the book's first section, which concerns the women artists, the most striking, for me, are the first three, centring on the displaced Sonia in Paris, looking at tapestries in the Musée de Cluny and letting her memories remake them:
       I thread myself into the panels,
       unpick the unicorn, stitch in the elk
       I saw in Karelia
             ("Sonia Visits Le Musée De Cluny)
The first poem, "Simultaneity 1", does something I wouldn't have thought would work, repeatedly using single-word lines and white space to slow down the tempo and point up a crucial moment. It does work, especially when read aloud, though I'd have to quote much of the poem to prove it.
In the other three sections of the poem, we are on the track of elusive family ghosts: a great-aunt who vanished in Soviet Karelia, a grandmother whose pseudonymous newspaper articles are tantalisingly present but unfindable in an unindexed archive, a language yielding only grudgingly to translation (Finnish doesn't even belong to the Indo-European language group and has precious little in common with most European languages). Fittingly, the section on "loss" begins with "What Can Be Translated":
       A door is not a tree though both are wood
The lost great-aunt is present through letters, some of which are both reproduced in the book and transmuted into poems. Letters are a means of communication, but these, while on the one hand showing much of her sturdy, slightly awkward personality, are also tantalisingly self-censored (it not being politic, in Stalinist Russia, to write just what one was thinking) and incomplete in that the other half of the correspondence is missing. Again the message is unknowability, the impossibility of translation which in no way diminishes the urge to try.
The great-aunt of course is also a displaced person, who had left Finland first for America and later for Russia. In her last letter (1939), disillusioned by events, she is coming to the conclusion that "people who spend their whole lives in one place are the happiest". Maybe, but it's the displaced who often observe the most clearly and write the most memorably.
