Nimue Brown's Blog, page 318

Poetry and poetical things

After my recent rant about bad poetry, here are three poetic titles I’ve read in the last week or so that I can heartily recommend. All are accessible, and offer rich, rewarding reading experiences that draw you in rather than leaving you confused and/or alienated.

See With Heart – Janey Colbourne. This is a small collection of poems and photographs reflecting a deep love affair with the natural world. Clarity, simplicity and soul – this is a lovesong to life, joyful and reflective in tone.

More about the book here – https://heartseer.wordpress.com/publications/

And do potter around Janey’s blog and read some of her writing – there’s a great deal of poetry there freely available.

 

 

Grief is the Thing with Feathers, by Max Porter

A bit mainstream by my usual book hipster standards, but at the same time, this book gives me hope for the publishing industry because it is so good, and so surprising. It is a novella, by length and narrative shape. Most of its ‘chapters’ sit on the page like poems and deploy language in poetic rather than prose ways. I expect if you’ve studied Ted Hughes, there are lots of literary eggs to enjoy, but if you barely know anything (me) it’s still perfectly readable. It is a deeply emotional book about loss and grief that directly challenges all contemporary notions of how fast we should get over it. Alongside this, is the thing with feathers, the shamanic presence of Crow, helping, hindering, participating… It’s an incredibly powerful piece and it does not swing round to reassuring us that all is well. Death hurts. Death continues to hurt. We learn to live, again. And again.

(Thanks to my father, who gave me this as a birthday present.)

More about the book here http://www.faber.co.uk/shop/fiction/9780571323760-grief-is-the-thing-with-feathers.html

The Immanent Moment, Kevan Manwaring

I probably do get book hipster points for this, because not only is it a poetry collection, but it may not be in print right now – I can only find second hand copies online. It is however an excellent poetry collection – doing all the things I want poetry to do. It’s passionate, intense, and emotionally engaging. the wordcraft is beautiful, but you don’t spend your time thinking ‘gosh that’s terribly clever’ – this is wordsmithing that does not draw attention to itself. Some of the content is deeply personal, but Kevan shares it in a way that creates feelings of empathy, shared humanity and intimacy, rather than casting the reader in an awkwardly voyeuristic role. Alongside this, there’s a love affair with the natural world, with poetry and the work of other poets, and with landscape. Specifically my landscape of Severn and Cotswold, which of course I find especially persuasive!

More on the author’s website – http://www.kevanmanwaring.co.uk/the-immanent-moment.html

In troubled times

This is what we have to do. We have to be kind to each other and try to take care of each other, whatever happens.

We must not fall into blaming and hating each other. There have been lies written and lies spoken and emotions played on. If we keep feeding the hate we are supporting the lie-mongers. We have to be better than that.

We must not ignore what is happening. We must not be overwhelmed by what is happening. We must not be paralysed by fear.

Keep doing the good things. Play. Give. Love. Make good things and share them. Make tea. Make cake. Make hope in every way you can think of. Make a future that is not impoverished by hate and fear. Make a future that is better than the politicians, better than the media, better than the people who can only see how to exploit other people.

Today a thing happened that may have dire consequences. This is true most days, we just don’t always know about it. The only answers are to do the best you can with what you have. These are the only answers there ever are. Be brave, be good, be open hearted, be shamelessly naive about the idea that things could be a whole lot better than this. Forgive the people who let you down. Move on.

Hope.

Being Pleased With Ourselves

We are mighty

Because our team scored more points than the other lot

And we cheered (but cannot play to save our lives)

And yet, we are mighty.

 

We are important

We bought the thing important people are buying this year

And used it ineptly, wore it awkwardly

See ourselves getting ahead.

 

We are heard

Along with thousands of other people we phoned in

To choose the celebrity who will shortly be forgotten

We were heard, we mattered.

 

We are powerful

Because our country has expensive weapons no sane person would ever use

And is good at exploiting workers in distant lands

Behold our national identity.

 

We will vote

For the person we are told can actually win this

Because the key thing is to be seen backing a winning horse

Not what comes out of the horse’s mouth.

 

We are pleased with ourselves

Because we dare not think otherwise.

It’s all fine if you ignore the consequences

And we’re terribly good at doing that.

Little Glass Men

One of the things I love about the internet is the scope for bringing people together to work on projects. This is a story that, for Tom and I, began over at www.copperage.deviantart.com with an approach from a young writer looking for book cover art. As Tom is usually busy, he tends to say yes to projects that he finds inherently interesting and worthwhile, and having looked at some of the text from the book, he took on Little Glass Men.

Author Connor Walsh had clearly done his research, (this is going to be a recurring theme!) because he wanted a gloomy, mournful sort of cover. This is something Tom Brown is especially good at.

The book itself is about veterans from the First World War, in a hospital in Louisiana, circa 1921. The setting immediately got my attention – having researched and written my own WW1 novel some years ago (not currently available) one of the things I noticed is that we only really talk about the war years, and not what happened afterwards to the many injured survivors. The aftermath of war is something we need to talk about, and Connor wades into the physical and psychological horrors faced by the survivors. He does this adeptly, not bogging the reader down in unbearable suffering, but certainly getting across the long term costs of this conflict.

You get quite a long way through this book before it starts to become apparent that it is not just a tale about the characters’ pasts. As we delve into the histories of the inmates, a shadowy plot has been forming, and this gradually develops as the narrative unfolds.

I found this to be both a strange and a captivating read. Some of the characters are quite unhinged, and when we look at reality over their shoulders, it’s never entirely certain how things really are. Perhaps the idea of how things ‘really are’ isn’t even relevant when dealing with the kind of breakdown of civilization and humanity this war represented.

This is an author who knows his stuff, and who has given a great deal of thought to the period, and its many issues and how those issues might interconnect within a single story. At the same time it does not read like a history lesson. If you are happy to read darker tales then do check it out.

More about the book here – https://www.amazon.com/Little-Glass-Men-Conor-Walsh/dp/0692456279

What’s the point?

It’s easy to fall into habits, to do what is expected or wanted by others. As a consequence it pays to stop every now and then and ask why you’re doing something. What is this for? Where am I going with it? What is it costing me (and I don’t just mean money)? What am I achieving? Is this even a good idea?

We’re taught to think about ambition in terms of worldly success, money and status. However, our hearts and minds respond to all kinds of things. Being ambitious is really, really good, but only if you’re doing it on your own terms. So, what are my terms?

I’ve spent weeks with these questions recently, needing to make some significant life decisions. I learned a lot. I will start by asking whether something is of practical or economic benefit to my household, because I have to factor that in. I will consider the environmental impact, or benefits, and think about wider social implications and who is benefiting, or paying for the idea. Beyond that, my absolute preference is to pick the jobs no one else can do, because I can take real pride in that.

Sometimes, the jobs no one else can do are all about my unique skills set and experiences. Last month I had the honour of getting to proof read the third Matlock the Hare book. Who else could edit who knows Dalespeak? Who else can make the time for some 200,000 words of fiction having read the other two books so as to be alert to continuity? It was a joy to do.

Sometimes it comes down to my unusual capacity to stay focused on long, fiddly, tedious jobs. At the community allotment, I’ve spent mornings picking stone out of the ground to make way for plants. I once spent a month painting all the exterior woodwork at my son’s school because it needed doing, and there was no money to do it, and this is not the kind of job you can usually get volunteers for. It doesn’t have to be glamorous. There are a lot of really important things that need doing, which do not confer status or wealth on the person doing it. Picking up litter, being an obvious one. I will be there for those jobs, not because I am uniquely capable, but because I am willing.

If there are lots of people who can and will do something as well, or better than I could, I’ll probably step back. Those jobs rapidly lose interest for me. I don’t want to be interchangeable. Plus there’s every chance someone else has a unique skill set that would transform the work, elevate it, bring in some new dimension. I don’t want to get in the way of that.

It’s possible to do anything well, with style, creativity and in a way that makes the task more valuable than it first seemed. For some people, the kitchen can only ever be a place of drudgery. For others, it’s the place of witchcraft, magic and delight. We are all likely to be happiest in the spaces where we find our own personal magic, where we can make contributions uniquely our own. When we put down the material-wealth-based ideas about worth and start looking at what we find intrinsically valuable, life changes.

And so I have laundry to handwash, a cake to make, and books to review. I have rubbish to upcycle and pages to colour. In knowing what I do best, and where I fit I am able to work happily, and not to feel irrelevant, or interchangeable, or insignificant. There is significance in moving the stones to make way for plants, which supposedly more glamorous jobs for which I am unsuited, would not give me.

Poetry for Peace

The following poem, by Adam Horovitz, is highly pertinent to the strained and uneasy times in which we are living. It speaks directly to the ludicrousness of hate, but it also points to a way forward. One of the things apparent in the last week, has been how hard it is to challenge hate-speech without just shouting angrily back across the divides. The first half of this poem expresses the rage, but the second half opens the door to something else entirely, which is exactly what we have to do.

In The Name Of… (it’s a sweary poem, you may want to check the words before you listen if you’re concerned about who else may be going to hear it…)

And you can read a text version here

Imposter Syndrome

Imposter syndrome is frequently an issue for creative people. The fear of finding out from the reactions of others, that you’re a fake, or not equal to what you said you were doing. It’s not just a creative person issue however.

This week I’ve noticed a number of invisibly bi folk (not just me) struggling in the wake of the ghastly Orlando shootings to know how to respond. Not feeling gay enough to speak as an LGBT person. Fearing that the appearance of straightness will make any empathy sound like straight people appropriating an LGBT issue – which has caused more than enough hurt and anger already. Bi people hear that it’s just a phase, that we are sluts, indecisive, want it all, are greedy, fickle – and worse. No doubt there are all kinds of things trans and genderqueer people hear to invalidate their experiences, too. We’ve a long, vile history of telling gay and lesbian people that they are ill and need curing.

I get it around health issues too, and I know that’s not just me. Being largely invisible, mental illness often isn’t afforded the same care and respect as physical illness. Long term physical illness and disability is not reliably taken seriously enough either. My physical issues vary. On a good day I can walk twenty miles. On a bad day, walking from the bed to the computer is about as much as I can take. I know some people will see the good days and disbelieve the bad ones. Most chronic conditions vary in severity from day to day. A person who sometimes needs a wheelchair may be treated as a fake because there are also better days when they don’t. This is grotesque.

I expect to be treated as an imposter, because I don’t conform to other people’s ideas of what I *should* look like. I’ve had a lot of disbelief to deal with around physical and mental health issues. I’ve spent my whole life being told I’m just making a fuss about matters of pain, and despair. I’ve been laughed at for expressing distress. Again, I know it’s not just me, and I know of more extreme cases where disbelief has lead to serious dangers. Larger people whose health problems are ascribed to size, with no other considerations explored, are being treated as impostors, putting their lives at risk, for example.

On the writing side, it’s about being part time. ‘Real’ authors – the famous ones – can write full time. Those of us who can’t make it work (most of us) and do other things as well as writing can experience a lot of feelings of being an impostor. It doesn’t help that this is often reinforced by people looking in from the outside, happy to say ‘well it’s just a hobby, isn’t it?’ How odd it is that whether something is perceived as a calling is determined by the cash flow it creates. Again, this happens to a lot of creative people, and it can seriously undermine confidence. It can be soul  and life destroying to be told you aren’t real. Van Gogh couldn’t make it pay, either, to name one of many.

I’ve had it happen around emotions – being told that what I feel is preposterous, overblown, unreasonable. A denial that my feelings and experiences have validity. Again I’ve seen it happen to others, too, seen how it silences and diminishes people, causing them to be less involved, less honest and less themselves.

Who has the right to judge? Fluffy bunny, fake guru… we do it all the time in Pagan circles too, denying the validity of other people’s paths and practices.

And what happens when we all shut up and conform to whatever the collective notion looks like of who we are supposed to be? If we all make ourselves smaller, and claim nothing… does that make the world any safer for the supposedly ‘proper’ and ‘real’ people? If everyone who had been slapped down as an impostor stayed down, who, and what would we have left?

If it wasn’t so commonplace to see other people being rubbished, perhaps impostor syndrome would be less of a thing. Perhaps if rubbishing other people wasn’t such a socially acceptable activity, we’d have a lot more people able to express their own truth. If we were quicker to question the knocking down, rather than assume there’s a problem with the one taking the knocks, rather a lot could change.

Imposter syndrome needs re-framing as a problem with the eye of the beholder.

Contemplating violence

No one starts by killing someone.

There is a process of escalation, increasing levels of violence, or a psyching up to the attack. When we are going to be violent, we feed it, deliberately. We dehumanise the enemy, we hold our rage close and tell ourselves why the rage is justified, and why we are entitled to act on it. We feed our own fear, of what ‘they’ will do to us if we don’t act first. We attribute to ‘them’ the reasons for all the hate and fear we’re experiencing. ‘They’ did this to us. We’re just protecting ourselves.

Whether we’re talking about someone who beats their spouse, verbally abuses others online, murders, or we’re talking about violent action between communities, or countries going to war, there is a process of feeding the hate and fear first. I know of people who have been physically assaulted by other people who were screaming ‘you are abusing me’ even as they did the damage. The attacker is often invested in their own victimhood.

Not so long ago, I was witness to a person psyching up, but not alert enough to see what was happening until afterwards. They spoke at length about how they had been a victim, how everyone thought the aggressor lovely, but really the aggressor was nasty. It went on for some time, at the end of which the ‘victim’ went off in a state of carefully crafted rage to challenge the ‘bully’ over a matter of coffee. Shouting ensued, as the ‘victim’ hurled abuse at the ‘bully’. At the end the ‘victim’ stomped off, still shouting about how badly they had been treated, while the ‘bully’ still silent, stood shaking and tearful, shocked by what had happened over a mistake involving coffee. The ‘victim’ then later told us it’s a well known fact that the victim leaves the fight first. This is rubbish.

Stood outside of the situation, I saw one person invest enormously in becoming angry and feeling hard done by in order to feel justified in launching an intimidating verbal assault on someone who, at worst, might have been guilty of a trivial error of judgement.

When we act on anger, it’s because we feel justified. Verbal aggression online is common, and watching it, I notice that very few people are just having fun. Many are afraid, and see the ‘other’ as a threat and a menace. You will bring down society. You will destroy this country. You will make everything worse. You will let some even more fearful third party do even more terrible things. Go on the offensive in response to their terrible accusations, and all their fear and rage seems justified, to the person who will then consider themselves your victim.

Of course our anger is reasonable, well placed and appropriate. We’re acting for the best possible reasons, and on the other side there are narrow-minded idiots who cannot see how dangerous their ideas are, and what kind of trouble they are causing. They cannot see how wrong they are and it is our job to shout some sense into them. Scream it into their faces. Knock it into them. Beat them into submission.

And of course the easiest answer to this problematic, toxic expression of anger, is to rage at other people for expressing it. If we can’t get at them, we can lash out at those who were to hand, but made a bad call about the coffee, or other such infringements. Other people should not be angry. It’s all their fault. How can this change if we don’t face our own anger?

There is a relationship between verbal violence and physical violence. Mostly we start with words, with accusations and justifications, and we ramp it up from there. Perhaps if we want genuine solutions to matters of fear, hatred and violence, we’re going to need to start with non-violent language.

Songs for Druids

My transition from Pagan to Druid began when someone asked me to sing ‘one of your Druid songs’. It lead me to ask what it is that Druids sing, which in turn led me to Damh the Bard, and since then, Paul Mitchell, and Talis Kimberly. ‘What do Druids sing?’ is a question that brought me straight back to the folk tradition and seasonal songs as well.

What I want to share today, is a recent discovery – an absolute wealth of original songs and chants on Soundcloud – https://soundcloud.com/bartstationbard

Here’s a sample.

One drum, one voice, one creative soul… I think these are fantastic, so please do hop over to Soundcloud and have a proper listen – there are 21 tracks at time of posting.

The Emperor’s new poetry book

Of all the things I try to review, poetry is the most problematic. For context, let me mention that I have a degree in English Literature. I’ve studied literary criticism, I’ve written degree level essays on poetry from the last couple of centuries. I’ve read a lot of poetry, historical and more modern. Compared to an academic working in the field of poetry, I’m a lightweight. Compared to the average reader, I’ve read and studied a lot of poetry. And yet, when I look at how other reviewers respond to some books, I can often be stumped.

I’ve just fallen out of a collection. I don’t think I can face reading it to the end. It felt like hitting and sliding down glass walls, with occasionally a sense of meaning implied, but always unavailable to me. Individual lines seemed well wrought, charming even, but added together to make… nothing I can figure out how to respond to. My only emotional response has been frustration.

And yet, other reviewers have heaped praise on it. “A gorgeous, brilliant book,” says one. “Complex sensuousness and deep intelligence.” “Unintrusive precision” – what does that mean, even? “Her almost painterly imagery implodes gracefully.” Ah, so that was what I was missing.

When other critics respond in this way, it’s hard not to feel that as the reader, I must be the problem. I’m too ignorant, no doubt. I couldn’t spot the graceful implosion of a poem if it splattered itself all over my face, I expect.

As an ordinary reader of poems, I’m basically looking for something I can connect with – images, moods, ideas… Some point of meaningful engagement between me and the text. I want something to happen, other than me feeling confused and dense. I can handle ee cummings and Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson and the metaphysical poets. I can cope with complexity, I think. I can cope with metaphor and surprising juxtapositions. In the realms of story and non-fiction, I feel confident saying when something doesn’t add up. The nature of such writing makes it easy to point at problems. We have some collective ideas about what stories and essays are. But what is a poem? What does a poem do? At what point can we safely say ‘this poem is not doing the things’?

A continuity error in a story is easily flagged up. A failure to resolve a plot in a satisfying way is easy to talk about. An argument that isn’t logical, or well founded can be taken apart. ‘I do not get this poem’ can be answered with ‘you didn’t read well enough’. I’m wary about picking holes in poems for this reason. Am I an insufficiently sensitive reader? Am I too old fashioned, too low-brow, insufficiently read and educated. I look at my qualifications, and my reading experience.

Back when I was writing Fast Food at the Centre of the World, I had a poet character. He’s a charlatan. Let me write you the kind of thing John Silver would write…

“In the withheld breathe, a moment of iniquity,

Longing becomes a windmill, exacerbated

By time, for the wind is change and I am the eye

Of a storm that caresses immortality.”

I can do this all day. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s designed to sound like poetry and that is the sum and total of what it is for. Sometimes, in matters of poetry, I am deeply suspicious that the Emperor has no clothes on.