Poetry Express
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Poetry Express QUARTERLY FROM SURVIVORS’ POETRY NUMBER 19 SPRING 2004 Simon Jenner on Geoffrey Hill Elvis via Jeremy Reed David Miller on Prose Poetry Alan Morrison on Nicholas Lafitte Adam Horovitz’s Jerusalem Emlitt’s everywhere else W.S. Graham’s New Collected Poems Broadsheet Contents From the Interim Manager – Simon Jenner 3 I’ll Give Them Lyric Cry: Geoffrey Hill’s The Orchards of Syon – Simon Jenner 4 No Macro Lover: Nicholas Lafitte’s Collected Poems – Alan Morrison 6 The EMLITT Project – David Hart & Barry Tebb 7 Letter to the Editor – Joseph Roscian Ephraim 8 The Prose Poem – David Miller 9 W.S. Graham’s New Collected Poems – James Ferguson 10 THE POETRY EXPRESS BROADSHEET Rainbows Touting Freedom: Adam Horovitz’s Next Year in Jerusalem – Dave Russell & Simon Jenner 11 Errata 12 Uh Huh Him: Jeremy Reed: Heartbreak Hotel: A Tribute to the King in Verse – James Ferguson 13 Uh Huh Him: Elvis : Heartbreak Hotel: A Tribute to the King in Verse – James Ferguson 14 Reviews 15 Write on the Edge: The London Workshops – Razz 18 SURVIVORS’ POETRY POETRY EXPRESS Staff: Poetry Express is a quarterly publication produced by Survivors’ Poetry. It is mailed free to members: James Ferguson (Editorial), Roy Holland (Information and contact us to join our mailing list. We welcome Editorial), Simon Jenner (Interim Manager), Xochitl Tuck submissions – poetry, articles, news items, and (Events Coordinator) other matter which may be of interest to our field. We cannot guarantee publication and reserve Freelance Staff: the right to edit any contributions. The views expressed in this publication are not necessarily Razz (Camden Workshop Coordinator) the views of Survivors’ Poetry. Volunteers: Editor: James Ferguson Lloyd Lindsay (Office Volunteer), Dave Russell Reviews Editor: Roy Holland (Dioramanite Flyers), John Weedon (Office Volunteer) Design and Layout: James Ferguson Printed by: Chandlers, Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex Trustees: Survivors’ Poetry Peter Greig, John O’Donoghue (Chair), Celia Potterton, Neil Diorama Arts Centre Swire 34 Osnaburgh Street London NW1 3ND Advisory Group: Tel: 020 7916 5317 Registered charity No. 1040177 Paul Beasley, Christina Dunhill, Miriam Hastings, John Hirst, Danielle Hope [email protected] [Please note our new email address] Survivors’ Poetry is financially supported by Arts Council England 2 From the Interim Manager Simon Jenner Welcome to our new everything. The Dells and bells have munching absently for the rest of the afternoon. It was all arrived in our office, still sparkling with the curious dust wonderfully rounded off by a performance from Leah Thorn, you find on new equipment. This is the second of our newly who came down especially from London, and at pretty short designed magazine, courtesy of James and his Mac, and notice, to perform for us after a poetry workshop I'd been you’ve been kind about the first. Next time we’ll be larger, too. asked to lead. Several of us were then encouraged by Leah And a few pictures will peep out when the software arrives to perform ourselves. Thanks to all who took part in the and everything is finally installed. conference, and those who wanted to. It was a great privilege to chair this event (organised, as ever, by Roy) and re-connect Alison has resigned through illness, and we're in the throes of with a whole country. appointing a new director; I’m one of the candidates. Please send your best wishes to Alison through us, and we'll re-direct There was a strong move to found a Survivors group in as necessary. We’re enormously grateful to what she achieved Swansea, and indeed a Survivors' Cymru. A favourite proposal here in her first year, including the lassoing of Regular Funded came from Roy: a poets’ bus, not invoking visions of a pea- Organisation status from Arts Council England. In this she green Morris Minor estate and megaphone, but a vehicle with regularised the payments we’d hitherto won from ACE and predestined ends. Essentially, since we have a plotted graph the Lottery, A4E scheme, J Paul Getty and others. She also of our membership, we could sequence a route to embrace as succeeded in a bid to secure Lloyds TSB outreach funding, and many of you there as possible. Beyond this, is (as Ern Malley, much else. We wish her a speedy recovery and a fruitful career. the Australian poet who never was, says) anything. Outlying And happiness. areas need in particular the kind of contact that can't be provided by a city conference centre a hundred miles away. Two outreach posts are also in the process of being filled in This all takes considerable organising, and some felt it to be July. One, centred on London, partly encompasses the mentor/ impractical, whilst many others were more excited about it mentee programme I outlined at length last time. The other, than any other topic. Whatever the outcome, we need such nationally based, does the same but with a huge remit to initiatives. Thoughts, everyone? contact and visit all Survivors’ Groups. Much else is planned, notably poetry publication, and various groups writing their Finally – since I've gone on quite enough elsewhere too about own broadsheet-length contributions for Poetry Express itself. Geoffrey Hill, may I just add how wonderful it's been working We hope to feature the first in our next. Warwick and Swansea with you: humbling and inspiring by turns. But I hope to be have just started up Survivors' groups and have volunteered: back, with a voracious appetite for my own words. Oh – and hello! So do please send your group activities and poetry to us. yours. Something else we've inaugurated, is our Letters to the Editor, since we get several, as you'll see, of exceptional interest and pretty singular expression. Several might come from our outreach activities recently. In March as promised, we visited Literature Training under Philippa Johnston in Edinburgh, where SP and other affiliated groups such as Lapidus, NAWE, Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, Writernet, eight in all, gathered to swap and suggest mutual support and targets. One of these is plain enough. Gary McKeone, the friendly Literature Officer of Arts Cocooned Council England, addressed us with long-term strategies all regularly funded organisations such as ours must heed. In I dreamed that you lay for years, inert, beneath my March 2006, all RFOs, as they are known, will be submitted table. after long assessment to the criteria of relevance and I wanted to reveal you, I peeled you away, performance. Some will have their funding withdrawn. We’re bit by scabrous bit, until there was only pink skin. all wonderfully concentrated by this. It does provide a window I left your eyes, for they were open, of challenge and focus over the next two years, to celebrate ugly and milky, staring at the lid of your strange our organisation and you, whom it serves. That’s enough of coffin. the missionspeak, but you know what I mean. If I’m around, I Suddenly you awoke, and you were your old self, rather welcome it, since there’s so much to do. Much of that I though sober for having slept so long. outlined last time, so I won't bang on a can again. Still I felt the same mixture of sickness and pleasure and wished that I had left you as you were, Another outreach venue we hit on our wonderful trail was cocooned, inert, beneath my table. Swansea on 29th April. We met in the Dylan Thomas Centre, warmly hosted by David Wooley, Jo Furber and their staff. I LOUISE GLASSCOE was last there in the same room, droning on aimiably about 1940s poetry, six years ago. The food was exquisite and I was so busy chairing that it was wheeled off without my taking a bite. Whereupon I deserted the chair, hotly pursued it to a lift and snaffled back as much as I could. Then chaired again, 3 I’ll Give Them Lyric Cry! Simon Jenner on Geoffrey Hill’s The Orchards of Syon There's a fragility in self-quotation that renders it touching, time The Wood of the Suicides?' Quite feasibly, with the but sometimes too flinchingly so. We hate things that have Terrible Sonnets. It's contrasted with Silvertown, the Essex a palpable design upon us, and yet this is part of artfulness; area that sustained a devastating munitions explosion in it can be achingly real. You need to be famous first to quote January 1917, worse than the Delft one of 1655 that killed the yourself of course. Otherwise, it perhaps depends on your age, painter Fabricius and many others. Stephen James is right to or intensity of experience. No one would blame an 85 year old counterpoint this, one of the few clear counterpoints. And composer for self-quotation, or a young tubercular writer if Goldengrove does duty as antipode for Infernos, too: soon they'd written enough in between. So when Richard Strauss after, in XXI, ‘Can you stand –/cleft-but in the spirit, as a tree/by quotes his youthful Death and Transfiguration of 60 years lightning, close to the shored heart?/ I believe this has been earlier in his Four Last Songs it's intensely poignant. When he done. Dante/describes it somewhere – I may be mistaken.’ did so only a few years after first writing it, touches of bombast weren't wholly excluded in Ein Heldenleben, if only because That 24 is a third of 72 makes for some tripartite gesture of he quotes from most of his other heroic works to date as well.