Poetry Express the Survivors’ Poetry Quarterly Winter 2005/06 Issue 23

John O’Donoghue on Robert Lowell A Postcard from Pitsea from John Weedon Lucía Moral Baena on Juan Ramón Jiménez Dave Russell on the literary journalism of Lorna Sage Alan Morrison on the Sixties Press mental health series Peter H Donnelly – A Brief Personal History of Hearing Voices Buzzed Off With Meher Baba – an interview with John Horder plus Broadsheet, Reviews and Letters Pages

The Survivors’ Poetry February Bash! Write to Survive! Campaign Update promoting poetry, prose, plays, art and music by survivors of mental distress DINODINO CAMPANACAMPANA

One of SELECTED the SELECTED greatest WORKS poets of “the WORKS century in any language

Martin Seymour- Smith, MacMillan TRANSLATEDTRANSLATED BY BY CRISTINA VITI Guide CRISTINA VITI to World Literature

Survivors’Survivors’ Press Press TranslationTranslation Series Series

To celebrate the re-launch of Survivors’ Press, Survivors’ Poetry are proud to announce the forthcoming publication of The Selected Works Of Dino Campana, translated by Cristina Viti. This beautiful collection is the first full” volume ever published in the UK of this highly gi�ed Italian survivor poet – keep an eye on www.survivorspoetry.com for launch date and venue announcement. To order a copy in advance of the launch please send a cheque for ₤9 including ₤1.50 p&p to the address on the opposite page. POETRY EXPRESS Contents Carry On Campaigning Editor: Alan Morrison Assistant Editor: Roy Holland Simon Jenner, Director Sub-editing, design and layout: Alan Morrison Proofing: Roy Holland 1 Cover Image: Structure a Poem in Three Projections by John Weedon © 2005 Winter Warmers Back cover image: The Cruellest Month by Stephen Jackson © 2005 Outreach with Roy Birch Printed by: Chandlers, Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex 4 The Twenty-Fifth Hour Poetry Express is mailed free to all members: contact us to join our mailing Bristol Survivors’ theatre list. We welcome submissions: poetry, articles, new items, and other matter 5 which may be of interest to our readers. We cannot guarantee publication Nine Types of Acuity – the and reserve the right to edit any contributions. The views expressed in this Mentoring Scheme publication are those of the individual authors, and do not necessarily represent 6 the views of Survivors’ Poetry. All poems printed herein are the copyright of the A Postcard from Pitsea authors credited. John Weedon 7 Survivors’ Poetry Studio 11, Bickerton House Poetry Broadsheet 25-27 Bickerton Road 9 Archway Survivors’ Prose – David London N19 5JT Krisman and Paul Murphy Tel: 0207 281 4654 ? 13 Fax: 0207 272 9278 [email protected] A Brief History of Hearing www.survivorspoetry.com 16 Voices – Peter H Donnelly

Charity No. 1040177 Company No. 2955445 Registered in England Good As Gold – Dave Russell on Lorna Sage SURVIVORS’ POETRY 20 Hard-Won Light – John Survivors’ Poetry is a unique national charity which promotes the writing of O’Donoghue on The survivors of mental distress. Please visit www.survivorspoetry.com for 23 Letters of Robert Lowell more information. A Survivor may be a person with a current or past experience of psychiatric hospitals, ECT, tranquillisers or other medication, a user of counselling Outpatient Polemic – services, a survivor of sexual abuse, child abuse and any other person who has 25 Sixties Press mental empathy with the experiences of survivors. health series Staff: The Universal Andalucian – Roy Birch (National and London Outreach), Blanche Donnery (Administrator). Roy 27 Lucía Moral Baena on Juan Holland (Information and Editorial), Simon Jenner (Director), Alan Morrison (Editorial Ramón Jiménez and National Mentoring), Xochitl Tuck (Events Co-ordinator) Buzzed Off with Meher Baba Freelance staff: the John Horder interview Janett Plummer (Diversity Co-ordinator), Razz (Camden Workshop Co-ordinator). 30 Co Wright (Website Design and Maintenance) Poetry Broadsheet cont’d Volunteers: 37 Alistair Brinkley, Dan Nelson (Fundraising), Matthew Hackett (Fundraising), Dave Russell (London Events Flyers), John Weedon, EzraWilliams 39 Reviews Trustees: Pauline Bradley, Marius Jankowski, (Acting Chair), Charles Lind, Piers Marter Workshops (Accountant), John O’Donoghue, Celia Potterton, Neil Swire, Barry Tebb, 43 Djamal Ticembal Events Advisory Group: 45 Paul Beasley, Christina Dunhill, Miriam Hastings, John Hirst, Danielle Hope, Helena Twist 46 P.S. S.P. – Letters Patrons: Moniza Alvi, Debjani Chatterjee 47 Some Contributors Carry on Campaigning Dr Simon Jenner, Director

...it seems that Survivors’ Poetry – which And ‘they are coming’ – the landlord some real on-hand guidance too, has worked nationally, for over a dozen cometh. I had to deal with him too, perhaps through a consultancy and/ years, with poets and poetry linked to by turning on the light. Then the or a fundraisers’ ten-day stint, to help distress and disadvantage – may face final Balrog-like confrontation: ACE themselves. They’d need to show the loss of its core funding: with all that and its compliances. All our fault. willing and frame a proposal (like would entail of uncertainty, provisionality the Transition to Disinvestment and the footslog of the fundraising his is what ACE’s 2003 Document they have to produce in round. We live in anxious times. Appraisal found, which any case). This would show they had Fiona Sampson, Poetry Review anachronistically formed the structure and personnel in place the basis of their 2005 capable of benefiting from such a ver felt like leaving Tdisinvestment. It’s also how they final investment. history to the defeated? sashay out of their rejection of Or politics to losers? our Stage 2 Complaint, to which Consultancies, then, offer a There’s so much going Peter Hewitt, CEO ACE, has negotiation, perhaps even to a re- Ewell with SP, I’m tempted to leave responded. Of course Hewitt is at structuring; certainly a clean bill of history alone. But it won’t always two removes, and has to protect health for other funders. The leave us; it meddles, tinkers curses his own. The mutual tone was what subsequent report can be excerpted with us. It wants to be found, like the Sir Christopher Meyer and his and quoted to advantage. This is Ring. We need to thrust its curse kind might call frank and decked. quite apart from the actual purpose: from us into some annealing flame. Perhaps being Christopher would to address the often painful process So I’m breaking off from another have helped, though his being less of re-structuring itself. Core fund- round of fund-raising and mentoring than kind recently inspires me to raising skills are something ACE a superbly gifted poet to look back mimic home office truths with gently could help enormously with. At an through an elvish (amber?) spyglass demonic laughter. I’m not frank, not average of £4,500-5,000 per ten days at the curse itself. No, it isn’t ACE. frankly. What I’d like to address is all (this sounds very little time, but can It’s ancient chemistry that neither the positive ways ACE have actually be strategically extremely helpfully I, nor our current Lead Officer for contributed to SP’s life, and many paced), it’s not a great deal to confer instance, have anything to do with. other RFOs. I think they themselves on an old RFO, with an accredited, Yet we discover these odd whitish feel extremely uncomfortable with pre-vetted firm. deposits on our jackets. Alum, their shuddery methodology, or at Gollum, Dust? So a dust-up. Then least their tactical withdrawal. Based And perhaps it should be generally I’m moving on to 2006 where I’ll on experience, I’d like to suggest a available, since all RFOs bar the meet most of the books we’re just few solutions, given an irreversible Royal Opera House are threatened publishing, and probably you. More decision on any RFO (see below). in any case. Not by ACE ultimately, later. but by what the Government Realistically, axing RFOs could involve choose to visit on ACE. ACE then When I arrived at SP, I found tapering off a grant, rather than slice have to choose the next batch for something akin to the dwarves’ it dead. There simply isn’t time in a the one-way carriages, though as Mines of Moria. Literally; it was dark, few months to secure alternative I’ve written before (so won’t again) had to be entered tunnelling through funding. It often takes nine months they could choose a freeze-dry. You another organisation’s room where from a successful initial submission can reconstitute those. ACE could dragonish stand-offs weren’t to grant. The 18 months initially instead show solidarity with say unknown. We entered on tip-toe. earmarked for Talawa at least 80% of those otherwise to be axed Then we got on famously. Still, what recognized this. But smaller RFOs (the £3m sum is trifling). This would confronted me was a pyred heap. with full-time staff should be given a mark a greater resistance to the Lists of missing scrolls jumbled with far longer lead-in. It hits them just Government’s starving ACE to death the dead. Was this the Director’s as hard, whether you employ four bar a few tokenisms (like the ROH, tomb, like Balin’s? I’d never had a job, or forty. Any RFO over £50,000 p.a. as ‘we go there, minister’), and having but oddly felt this lifestyle, with its should be given a like warning; the blame heaped on them. ACE as Mordor-like (though false) legend for certainly any over £100,000. scapegoat, always at one remove leaving Directors in the land where from blaming the Government, might shadows lie, wouldn’t leave me there. Expiring RFOs should be offered be the single reason for its survival. 1 No, there are a lot of miserable to shave. In case we might feel this is world. A third sector world not fit people at ACE. I don’t envy them zeitgeist, Arts Professional’s headline for cattle to live in. Let’s not be put their decisions. The Ring is heavy; reads: ‘Thatcherism Italian style’. We into cattle trucks. Or be branded for it’s time it was hurled into a smelting in the UK created it. We can resist it, trash. oblivion. So here goes. as the Italians and Germans certainly do. The French Government knows o how is SP in itself? Well, footnote to my it would lose, and hasn’t tried it on well. There’s the Campaign ruminations last time with figures like Pierre Boulez about, to get ACE to overturn or remains. The black even if he did repeat after twenty at least re-schedule their theatre organisation years that blowing up opera houses Sdisinvestment; to make them find ATalawa, whose fight with ACE I was still an elegant solution to a that magical reverse gear. We’d love reported last time, did have their bourgeois art form. Ministers would everybody to get involved in the disinvestment overturned; though find themselves suspended from campaign. The best way is to write at the cost of board and director. the outside piping of the Pompidou to ACE, tell them all that SP has Horse-trading takes place often Centre. Gently tapping in the breeze; done for you (like the viaducts); enough for all these sudden ‘never the echoes recorded for IRCAM’s otherwise click on our website www. never’ reversals to be commonplace. electronic music samplers. survivorspoetry.com, to find the ACE never admit driver error, but campaign ‘click’ and then press. It suddenly find a hidden reverse gear. A wider frame emerges, too, when goes to all the right people. And you consider what other Directors brightens their day. You can write They themselves at the Arts Council are telling me: first they’ll hit to the Guardian, keep up the steady of Northern Ireland are extremely disabilities, then ethnic minorities. It’s trickle of letters received since our upset at having their funding actually what Ken Livingstone has been raging article and letters went to press in cut from 2006-08. From £14 million about recently. The Commission for Society Guardian in August. Attend to £13.2 by the end of this period (Arts Racial Equality is being abolished, our great Bash at RADA, on 22 Professional, Issue 110, 21 November downgraded into a monitoring and February, from 7.30pm; the first of 2005). This is important. Northern advice board, a kind of un-glorified what we hope to be an annual event, Ireland, since it’s further out of view CAB with glossy logos. Some see and not a ‘Save SP’ farewell gig. We’ve to most on the mainland, is often the whole DDA compliance as a even thought of one outside Pear a testing ground for disinvestment, kind of privatisation of disabilities: Tree Court in Farringdon, opposite like the BBC Northern Ireland everyone but the Government pays the Guardian. You’ll hear about that. Orchestra being axed in 1981, and for it. Time to get Equalisers? So will our friends inside. surviving heroically as the Ulster Orchestra. The BBC’s decisions It’s time for the Arts to speak out. If you’re in and around London, listen are analogous to ACE’s. Someone If we don’t, who’ll be there when in to Resonance fm, where once a with a long memory in government they come to axe us? And which soft month from January we hope to remembered this happy experiment. target’s next? Each reduction showcase half an hour. Do listen out Yes, minister? diminishes us, reduces the grounds for details, or phone up. They’ll be for arguing the absolute, not posted on our website for those of And it’s Europe-wide: Italy is to have comparative social, need for the you waiting to tune in, turn on, drop a proposed 35% of its performing arts; its efficacy, its generation of out of official language. Sometimes arts and film budget cut (Arts wealth, the quality of life it brings. Resonance broadcasts windscreen Professional, Issue 110, 21 November This isn’t quantifiable in outcomes, wipers. Don’t be put off. It’s wipe-art. 2005). Opera and film, two of their in measuring it as a kind of band-aid We can send all this to you in a CD, three living national institutions substitute for a disastrous under- £2.99 for our two CD set, or £1.50 (the last, of course, is football)! investment in the social services per CD for our shorter shows… Furore is ensuing, however well- and education. Or as a soft-spread supported these mediums were, option for squashing against hospital ow I can announce even under Berlusconi’s Italy. Angela beds. But when the arts reduce, the our real achievements Merkel’s Germany has inherited a society it comes from does too. And this autumn. First is cut Kultur where the opera houses eventually a dust-bowl of scratchy the publication of the and museums were already being living emerges, where there’ll not NSelected Works of the great Italian pared back from their handsome even be room for politicians. There survivor poet Dino Campana (1885- subsidies. Crisis emerged in 2003, won’t even be a closing time for 1932). He’s one of the two or three and is lurching into freefall as File on the ‘Gardens of the West’, as Cyril greatest Italian poets of the last 4 reported two years ago. Merkel’s Connolly put it, closing his great century, alongside Montale, Ungaretti, already embattled cost-cutting might Horizon magazine in 1949. It’ll be Quasimodo, Saba, Betocchi and later, start with the zones Schroeder dared the dead mid-West of the Western slightly lesser poets like Pasolini and

2 Sereni. He is, as my late friend Martin proteges. Several poets seem fit at the coal-face of fund-raising, Seymour-Smith put it authoritatively, for volumes, let alone pamphlets. coming away quite cheerfully with ‘one of the greatest poets of the There’ll be far more on these poets unnaturally bright VDU faces. If century in any language’. He simply next issue. Samples of their work, they’re there at 7pm they might get matters, and yet this extraordinary how to obtain them, and perhaps hauled off for drinks; occupational vagabondish scholar, of chemistry comments from the poets – and hazard. EzraWilliams you’ll encounter and literature, who logged in South mentors – themselves. I must hugely as reviewer. Bet you didn’t know America and was discharged from thank Alan Morrison above all, he wields a mean drill, and has the army and finally his own whose co-ordinating has extended partly transformed the actual office. dangerous logic, has no volume in well beyond the call of duty; and Drilling, musically, on Sundays. Rock the UK. This is hardly through lack of the quiet counsel (as always) of Roy Drill? He once had a piece conducted regard: The old Penguin Book of Italian Birch with some of the initial stages by Peter Maxwell Davies, but this Verse accords him almost equal billing of the programme. Suffice it to say wasn’t it. Then there’s everyone with Montale. Yet the old Penguin through Alan’s efforts we’ve secured outside the office, which is where Translation series, which became our second year’s funding early, each group comes in, contributing entrenched, focused on Montale which is also a way to thank Hilary its section to this magazine. himself, Ungaretti because of his Hodgson of Esmée Fairbairn, whose modernism, and Quasimodo through support has remained unstinting, and Here the list remains, and must his almost accidental (but deserved) generous in the terms of its provision. remain, an endless fade-out. But I Nobel of 1959. He got it as a sop As well as pretty trusting! must record the death of the fine to communists, incidentally, being poet Margaret Walsh (Godmother one himself, after the previous year’s Next year, please start applying! of Damien Hirst), whose death was prize going to the quasi-dissident You might come across us through a scandal others will address. I hope Pasternak. And not quite for a the untiring networking of Xochitl to publish a proper obituary. volume of his poetry being spotted Tuck, in her Events at the Rustique in an Italian footballer’s haversack off Tufnell Park, or the Poetry Café’s I must also record my indebtedness during a match in Sweden. Thursdays. Or through Razz and his to Arts Professional who tactfully team’s gently-led but inspiring pointed out their article on Sports Campana was a one-off visionary, workshops, which, again if you’re in and the Arts (which I attributed and is pretty difficult to translate. London, should entice you. We’re to Arts Industry who also carried It’s to our eternal debt that working on what we can do, once it) was originally theirs. I’m a great Cristina Viti has undertaken and stabilised, for the rest of the UK. reader, admirer and stealer of both, so consummately completed the as you’ll have gathered. We need task. Her identification with the But we’re always here, particularly such compatriots on such a journey. poet is total, her own commentary Roy Holland who enjoys responding Like, of course, Fiona Sampson for frequently astonishing. She begins: to people even over much of the obvious reasons quoted above. Christmas period, volunteering Ever since crashing into the Italian poetry outside his hours: Phone, write, email inally I must, at last, scene like a suicide bomber giving his life for the right to worship No God, Dino Campana or log on to our web. Not just for introduce the person who’s has been at the centre of endless diatribes. campaigns, but through Co Wright’s done much to transform SP superb work as Webmaster, an over the past six months by Not for comfortable pundits of ever-spiralling menu of works Fthe time you read this. ACE were culture, then. Campana’s heightened including film, means we’re getting quite right to suggest we needed an nocturnal world is also precise, 5-7,000 visits per month, depending Administrator. We were able to offer tender, exalted, despairing. It asks, on what section people are the position to Blanche Donnery. like a few great survivor poets, the attracted to. There’s a moderated She’s qualified as a ceramicist (with dangerous question of what poetry Poetry Forum, where poetry chat design prizes), product manager, is, and what it does to us and for us. can be had. You can download all carer, social services administrator; Poetry Expresses; the University of and has taken on our finance – even The other great roll-call is for nine of Buffalo in New York State does this to becoming an intern with our our mentored poets. This has been on acid-free paper. And like many accountants. She’s mainly to be heard by turns a humbling, inspiring, organisations, is cheerfully paying pointing out that the f-ing cups could ultimately uplifting experience for us for doing so, offering unstinting do with washing, and that she’s had mentors like myself, and I hope a support for our current plight. For to do it yet again; will get on with beneficial one for mentees, with the addressing that, too, I must thank desktop publishing, and cheerfully often irritating niggles that mentors our incredibly dedicated fundraising reminds us of office protocol – as if provide by means of meaning research volunteers: Dan Nelson we’d ever forget it. Happy Christmas well, even the best, for their gifted and Matthew Hackett. They work and New Year!

3 Winter Warmers Roy Birch with the latest from National and London Outreach

uring the last quarter Frank Bangay’s Topsy-Turvey Band was ith regard to I seem to have been well worth the aggravation, and Razz National Outreach, mostly occupied with not only performed superbly (in spite there is considerably the London side of of a bad cold) but also connected less to report. DOutreach. with Creative Routes, a union which W will hopefully be of mutual benefit. In September, I visited Paula Brown In September I visited the Newham I also managed to reconnect with publisher, and co-ordinator of Centre for Mental Health to advise the One Tribe Quandary; so, all in all, a Portsmouth Survivors, to discuss a an Occupational Therapist as to worthwhile participation. possible collaboration between SP the best way to change a single- and music students at Bath university, ward writing group to a cross-ward n November 10th I with a view to creating a poetry/ group. This gave me a great deal of attended the Islington music CD. This initiative has yet to satisfaction, as I had not expected Mental Health Forum bear fruit. the NHS to ask for my help. AGM as part of a Opanel of three (the other panellists In October, I represented SP at In October I created links with were Claire Ward-Thornton, the Gael Force festival in Lockerbie, Exposure, a training scheme for Development Manager of the an evocative location for anything disadvantaged youth, based in the Islington Music Forum and Karin connected with survival. Gael Force Muswell Hill Centre, and with the Charlesworth, Project Co-Ordinator is not yet a large festival, being still in Harington Scheme, in Cholmely of the Other Side Gallery, a charity its infancy, but it’s fun, and hopefully Park, Highgate, a charity using which promotes art by homeless an increased SP prescence will be Horticultural Therapy to help young artists). found at a larger Gael Force, beginning people with learning difficulties and with next year. mental health problems. The event was highly enjoyable, with a lively discussion and good Earlier this month (the third to be Also in October, I liaised with Jo interaction between the panel exact) I gave a talk to the University Silver and SP Events Organiser and the floor. I made a number of of the Third Age in Stevenage, as Xochitl Tuck, to provide SP poets useful connections and hopefully part of Stevenage Survivors’ annual for Normaliz In Notebooks, a female laid the groundwork for a workshop U3A performance – a most enjoyable -centred event being run by Jo in collaboration between SP and the event, I have to say, and one which Kingston, Surrey. Sadly, none of the Islington Mental Health Forum. the Stevenage group looks forward SP poets turned up on the day. to eagerly each year. uring this period I I also arranged for SP to perform at have also been working I have also taken the first steps the Mental Health Today exhibition with Lynne Clayton of toward setting up SP International. at the Business Design Centre in Southwark MIND, to There has long been an overseas Upper Street, Islington, on Dset up a Creative Writing group at interest in SP, there being nothing of November 2nd, as part of the the Castle Day Centre at Elephant the like outside the UK. Creative Routes event. In the event, and Castle and to set up a Creative the SP contingent consisted of Writing group in the Children’s Sadly, ACE has decided to persist Razz and myself, performing in Ward of the Mental Health unit at with its ill-conceived disinvestment a difficult and somewhat fraught Guy’s hospital. of a totally unique and valuable atmosphere, as the management of organisation (SP) but I sincerely hope the Design Centre had browbeaten Further initiatives are developing, there will be many more outreach Creative Routes into lowering their but are at too embryonic a stage to reports. Have a great Christmas and volume (they are essentially a loud be viably reported at this juncture. hopefully talk to you next year. organization) to the point at which they were virtually inaudible at a distance of more than a few feet from the stage. Bizarre but still beautiful. 4 The Twenty-FifthH our Bristol Survivors’ Stepping Out Theatre Company’s staging of Per Olov Enquist’s Hour of the Lynx

n Thursday October Ros Lidiard is at her effortlessly she pulled off consummately. 22nd I attended a brilliant best as the Pastor, and as performance of the for Rebecca Adamson, who plays The plot, adumbrated eloquently by Stepping Out Theatre Lisbeth, the psychiatrist, it was only Roy Birch, winds around Liddiard’s Oproduction of Per Olov Enquist’s when I met her after the performance being skeined into a labyrinth by the The Hour of the Lynx, at the old Red and was able to contrast the real obsessions of the Swedish-born Seb Lion Theatre, Angel, Islington. person with the stage persona, that I Steiger. Killing the new owners of fully realized how good she was. his grandfather’s house and burning Set in a secure mental institution in it down form a painterly and very Sweden, the play tells the story of a “Do not fear the twenty-fifth hour”... funny backdrop to this intensely young man (a double murderer) who More importantly, do not fail to see realised heaven, full of Spitfires and is given a cat as part of a psychological this wonderful play! iconographies pulled in by Steiger experiment. What transpires is not Roy Birch from his boyhood’s anecdotage. It is at all what anyone expects. he who ultimately cat-cradles the Pastor in his arms, after relating Though The Hour of the Lynx is how he’s mercy killed the cat, undoubtedly a work of genius, who is God, before they can be it is not the easiest work to separated. God, the ginger cat, define. While addressing such flips over the ancient Egyptian major issues as love, hate, death, cult; though this implicit grammar, faith, redemption, and the eternal never mentioned or ritualised is search for understanding, it powerfully absorbed into Steiger’s actually goes much further. In personal mythos. Direction is fact, it is really only through the taut but evocative and breathing, cat, forever centre-stage by virtue spotlit and stripped but expansive of its referential absence (much through the actors’ very gestural like Beckett’s Godot and Behan’s use of space. Someone must hear Quare Fellow) that we truly touch the he Hour of the Lynx is the the praise for Stepping Out; they essence of this Nordic masterpiece. kind of play that though realise virtually all of this shuddering written in 1988 is the masterpiece. Blessed with a compelling script, a prototype of similar Simon Jenner minimal yet highly effective set, superb Tthemes and extremities seen from lighting, appropriately atmospheric around a decade later. Some of The Hour of the Lynx by Per Olov music (in this instance Arvo Pärt), the newish wave of Irish playwrights Enquist. Produced by the Stepping- and virtuoso performances, The (The Weir, The Deserted Bar School Out Theatre Company in association Hour of the Lynx is everything I have as I’ve called it), or Ariel Dorfmann’s with The Jigsaw Ensemble. Produced come to expect of a Steve Hennessy Death and the Maiden, furnish the and directed by Steve Hennessy production. This particular play has, tonality. The setting, a psychological as a bonus, Steve’s own directorial hell that morphs to a shell for three, Photos courtesy debut. For those who do not know, is masterly, layered, persuasive of Stepping Out Steve Hennessy is the Co-Ordinator and ultimately heartbreaking. Ros Theatre© 2005 of Bristol Survivors’ Poetry and the Liddiard excels as the Pastor called founder and lynch-pin of the Stepping- in by her niece, a stiff-necked Out Theatre Company, which, in turn, psychologist, to theologically stiffen a is the country’s leading mental- patient. The niece is superbly fielded health-based theatre group. by Rebecca Adamson; ironically, the only one named: Lisbeth. Adamson With regard to the performances. later commented that this was an out- Swedish-born Seb Steiger, who plays of-character role; sounding naturally The Boy, is quite electrifyingly superb. stilted is astonishingly difficult, a feat 5 Nine Types of Acuity Alan Morrison reports on a productive first year of the National Mentoring Scheme

t’s been a mammoth challenge expressive work that I feel it merits several occasions at his home on the overseeing the mentoring full volume publication – this will be Isle of Wight, and the results of this scheme in tandem with appear under the Survivors’ Press particularly interactive association taking on Poetry Express, and imprint early in the new year. will impress, I promise. Isince doing so, I’ve not had time to maintain the same level of input into At a tender eighteen, Tim Pearson Poet and publisher Paula Brown has the mentoring as I was able initially. is our youngest mentee and a performed wonders for the scheme: prodigious find: he’s already having started mentoring highly My first task as co-ordinator was to enrapturing audiences at The Poetry promising poet Margaret Carney select eight ‘mentees’ (a new entry Café with his blistering words, and half way through the year (the two for the OED perhaps?) with the help his pamphlet promises to be a real having replaced mentor Pete Morgan of Roy Birch. We sifted through eye-opener. It was felt only one and mentee Jane Esson – both of many submissions, all worthy in their person was poetically equipped to whom dropped out due to other ways, and narrowing them down mentor Tim, our own Simon Jenner, commitments), Paula astonishingly to a manageable nine or so was a highly accomplished poet of great completed Margaret’s collection well no mean feat. Roy and I selected intellectual prowess. Simon was before the November deadline. on an instinctive criterion: we delighted to be matched with a weren’t looking so much for protégé whose imagistic lyricism Prize-winning poet Debjani technical polish (polishing would reminds him of Rilke and Trakl. Chatterjee also merits a special come through the mentoring) as commendation: having initially emotional intensity, and, above all, Dave Russell has done stirling work mentored Amita Patel, and then poetic potential. Simultaneous with mentoring Kate Evans, even going taken on Gail Campbell on Amita this: the daunting task of finding the so far as to practically produce her becoming ill, she agreed to continue mentors, established poets who entire pamphlet himself – somewhat mentoring both mentees when would be willing to lend their beyond the call of duty but evidence Amita recovered. Amita’s pamphlet services voluntarily to help largely of his enthusiasm for her work. will appear next year. unpublished survivors work towards their first substantial publications. Peter Campbell’s mentoring of It just remains for me to say a huge I was amazed to find the majority satirical poet John Exell will reach thank you to Hilary Hodgson of of poets contacted agreed without fruition a little later than the rest, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation condition to take on the nine month with a pamphlet in early 2006. for providing the funds to make correspondence programme. Face- this extremely rewarding scheme to-face mentoring was the ideal It was Geoff Clarke’s request on possible. One which I hope will scenario, however, we matched being accepted for the scheme that prove a springboard into publishing mentees with mentors on the basis Roy Birch mentor him. Subsequently for its gifted beneficiaries. of stylistic rather than geographical Roy has worked very closely with compatibility; apart from anything Geoff and both are en route to The Survivors’ Poetry National else, in a national scheme the produce a very strong collection. Mentoring Scheme pamphlets 1 – 8 chances of a mentee and mentor will be launched at The Poetry Cafe living close enough to meet regularly London-based mentee Anne on 9 February and 9 March 2006 was unlikely. As it turned out some Cooper has said her pairing with (details tba on website). David matches shared (mainly London) Brighton-based poet and performer, Kessel’s volume will be appearing postcodes as well as poetics. Bernadette Cremin, has been a real in the new year, launch to be confidence-boost to her writing. announced. David Kessel requested I mentor him after we’d met and found we In spite of geographical barriers, the For entry into the 2006 leg of had a natural affinity in poetic styles partnership of mentor Robin Ford the National Mentoring Scheme, and tastes, not to mention a strong and mentee Bear Tyler has developed please email 15 poems to personal rapport. I’ve grown so into a strong friendship as well as [email protected] or impressed by David’s harrowingly collaboration. Bear visited Robin on post to the usual address. 6 A Postcard from Pitsea Survivor Artist John Weedon takes a return trip to Greece to talk about painting and sculpting projects

t last I’ve arrived on Now pin back your listening devices Rayleigh” is on my poetry notepad. vacation in Greece. The for a special surprise. A new friend, Spencer Nugent, is the weather’s perfect. So is opening artist. I`ve been invited to this island of Kefolanian. During August Danielle Hope (‘The show there too. AI wrote ‘One Day I Went Walking’ City Fox’) telephoned the news that here seven years ago. Now at last I she had written a script and had at I met Spencer at the Space to Work can begin to write a few thoughts last begun writing poetry again. The seminar. Spence has given me new for Poetry Express. Alan Morrison play, a satire, was to run at Waltham ideas broadening my vision and suggested I tell you some of the Abbey. Survivors` Poetry had come he has helped me to expand my things that have been happening to with a remit in drama and music to metaphysical skills. This has been a me in the Essex art scene this year help Essex artists! “WOW…” was very exciting experience and it is and I decided to feature some of my response. surprising since our philosophical the eople I’ve met. There are some backgrounds are so very different. surprises for you too. Here we go... On 17 September we met for drinks Standing in the countryside one before the last night performance day he demonstrated his African It all started at a Seminar at Writtle and I showed Dani a selection of ideologies of “giving back” using a College, Chelmsford, the County my newer paintings. After some fern leaf which he picked from below Town of Essex. Some 100 artists discussion with two friends from a hedgerow alongside the footpath. gathered together on 5 April Prague she decided firmly that Eclipse With, as he describes it, his studio all to ‘think tank` the ingredients – A Song from the Sun, my last painting, around us, he held the fern upright. necessary for a major strategy to was the best picture. This is very re- He broke off the bottom right hand provide studio spaces throughout assuring because I believe this new spur and said simply “Look! It is the County. To use art to attract series is very exciting. A Song from the the same…” Then he repeated this tourists into heart of Essex which Sun is quoted from my poem ‘And again and again until the leaf in his is truly underated in its wealth of There Came A Man’, which I have hand was minute. Then he said history and natural beauty. Comets decided will be the title of my one finally “This is my media…” The from all visual arts disciplines man show at Rayleigh Arts Centre symbolism of geometry within our collided and blended. A fantastic in Essex during March next year. (I own countryside is clear but Spence cocktail of combined intellect and am hoping that Survivors’ will be has lived and worked with native talent! well represented at the Private artists in the rainforests of Africa. View ‘bash’. The show will combine My first important meeting occurred pictures with poetry). For Wat Tyler Country Park, a during coffee before the start. huge sculpture project to bring fun Juliet Martin, the Regional Arts During the evening many friends of and involvement to teenagers from Development Officer, came out of Danielle`s gathered round a large nearby Pitsea where poverty has the crowded foyer to invite me to table. I lit the candle and we shared become a major problem, I have attend the first Masterclass tutored an enormous ploughman’s supper submitted three sculpture designs. by Francis Bowyer PPRWS. “He’s a before watching Weddings Of Mass One is entitled Rebirth of the Planet. friend of mine” I said to Juliet, “from Destruction, a satire written in the the Bankside Gallery in London.” form of a musical. It was extremely During July I visited our new offices The RWS were coming to Essex entertaining. At the last curtain at Archway and was delighted to with a remit to help by instructing there were bouquets for Dani and find that at last our Director has an “artists who are especially gifted photographs. office of his own (Congratulations and talented”. Forgive the blurb Simon). With Alan Morrison and but I was very proud that morning. At Rayleigh too I have become Simon Jenner, some very exciting The Masterclass was held on 17 very interested in a National Trust ideas were developed. One of them June, the subject Figure Drawing. It project to renovate a windmill, is on the front cover and I am very was a very intense day’s study and I providing museum and gallery space. proud of this. This picture is from worked very hard. It was built in 1796 by Dutch settlers a trilogy entitled Structure a Poem in and I am researching. “Tall Mill Of Three Projections, which was inspired

7 by the new architecture of London “The thing I like about this poem Then Town. is that it contains no punctuation,” breathing is easier Hannah said. I`ve never forgotten my moist eye can see fter the achievements that remark. where I am of that day, I decided to Here not there attend the very next I’d like to dedicate the poem to that Poetry Café event, to read new member and ALL my friends in Greetings Survivors from Greece! Asome of my new material and to help Survivors’ Poetry: Xochitl Tuck, our Events Co- ordinator, like I used to. Part .S. I have read with of coming back to Survivors. passionate concern A kind of homecoming Simon Jenner’s article to my real London ‘ACE Of Clubs’ in the town. That night I befriended Plast issue and would now voice a new member who told me that I strongly support Simon in he was homeless. A young his campaign. At Rayleigh Mill London street poet who lived a Draft Bid which I thought to on the pavements of London; be a flyer was suddenly rejected the pavements of London with 30 points to answer in which we all know are hard excess of the 25 point criterion and uncompromising if you requirement. “Desk top politics” are homeless. I call them “the was my first observation when pavements of Gold”, but in Spence rang me with this reality I know its only sodium astounding news. Rochford light reflected when its raining Council are seeking alternative and cold. He asked me if I sources for money but it has had ever been homeless. I said severely affected plans to open “To be honest with you, no I during October. Spencer, ably haven’t.” But then we began supported by Carol Coates to share some of my history. Rochford’s ADO, wrote his own The long, long journey bid for set up costs to open which also was hard and The Mill bedecked with Light uncompromising. At times Sculpture. In this area of visual there was real terror during arts Spence is astounding. I was madness. But now there is Structure, going to help him with his set up. there is Order and there is Purpose. Clawing Out Of The Catch Can Later, the same poet asked me for a Communications throughout this pound. “What’s it for?” I asked him Clawing out of the catch can project have frankly been appalling! and he told me “I need food for my There I stand in the wings but Spencer has cat”. He came back later with a tin Where the dark mind tunnels often been in my studio with tears of of cat food. cannot issue a bright stone frustration whilst the bid was under of any kind preparation. On my way home that night I sat in Theonly bright stones the train thinking about it. His cat to be found In the meantime, give me a was hungry. His first priority was to are outside this town desk and a telephone Simon. help a fellow helpless creature he Here not there I wouldn’t mind pushing my loved. I`ve experienced the same weight around on this one at all. feelings when things were bad for Clawing out of the catch can me when my son was in trouble to find something of mine with depression in Hastings. At the now found at last time I needed a third verse for a with glasses of beer poem. I was pleased with this poem Then but it wasn’t working. It needed giving bright words more building up to support the sharing bright eyes triumph in the final verse. And I Here not there am remembering now how Hannah Clawing out of the catch can McCallum complimented me for to climb into the sunlight it at a Feedback Workshop once. where the air is clean

8 Survivors’ Poetry Broadsheet

Feeling Peevish My Paintbrush

Feeling peevish, I went to a doctor. I keep my paintbrush with me wherever I may go, in case He said: ‘The soul seems fine I need to cover up so the real me doesn’t show. I’m afraid and your heart is in the right place; to show you me, afraid of what you’ll do – that you might even your ears are either side of your face laugh or say mean things, I’m afraid I might lose you. but you appear to be having problems with your spleen. If it continues you will become vile! I’d like to remove all my paint coats to show you the real, Bile is the product of bitterness,’ he said. true me, but I want you to understand. I need you to ‘Is it to do with something you have seen?’ accept what you see. So if you close your eyes, I’ll strip ‘I see too clearly,’ I replied. ‘We are lied to and misled. off all my coats real slow. Please understand how much it All around I see selfishness and greed.’ hurts to let the real me show. ‘Avoid electronic media and newspapers’ he advised. I said ‘Okay’ and obeyed the Doctor’s orders. Now still love me with all that you see, you are my From that day my sense of well-being revived. friend pure as gold. I need to save my paintbrush though and hold it in my hand. I want to keep it handy in case Jeremy Gadd someone doesn’t understand. So please protect me my dear friend and thanks for loving me true, but please keep my paintbrush, until I love me too.

Capital Liberty L. A. Sadler

Historically grouchy, gladly keeping its distance, forgetting the name of everyone who passes, I am Me the city is a language in details, a compact dictionary, a population I was I of words, less active than suppressed, and now – I’m me. testing raw nerves, never seeing, never the same. I was the cow, Thesky is like white ointment rubbed into air. I were meant to be. I walked into the city, with parks, gardens, water, But I’ve become appearing like hallucinations at lunar intervals. the object of my verb...

Thereis nowhere in the world I want to be. I am a rump steak now, I think where I grew up, where I live now, is nowhere. or so I’ve heard.

I sit weighed down by storms, on the corner of ashes, Yes, I am Me; where the centuries vibrate, where brown water flows. a murdered cow... A transitive verb? Thescaffolding erected to clean stone is coming down. Yes, I am, somehow. I follow the river, measuring the distance, the squalor, of tribal conversations, clamouring dialect, You can try and try insubstantial prints, the worldless silence of unhappy to re-conjugate: nations. Some doubt such a verb can have a fate: I claim this to be real, otherwise I would convert to I’m a verb to be stone. in an altered state: I squeeze out of the humid afternoon a place to stand. I tip over, not content with the motion of the universe. Thefirst person I shake hands with silence, rub shoulders with air. will consume me now. I growl my joy, a broken compass pointing in all directions. Carol Batton Austin McCarron 9 relative to the fact that we are always staring at some end ThomasLand for richer or poorer (that’s for fucking sure) Stained Glass a death did I part for us then ended thereafter Theleaves fall and as always never changes Watching the ‘life she once had’ i have begun again Seems inevitable Seasonal clockwork rigorously perpetuates Ewan Mearns Whilst inside Suspended animation Leaves wither, flowers fade Theirdestiny and hers inexorably bound Natural Philosophy Yet divorced from each other

Like clothes, we try ideas on She feels her life sap though fashions seldom linger long – Energy expelled you’ll notice if you stand and stare Giving way to weary frustration how few smart folk there are. Sees evidence of years passing With the “few extra greys”. Before he delved, or Eve had Another year another ‘expect’ spun, If anyone would think to ask a naked Adam took the sun She was the bloody expert! and who was then the Familiarity feeds knowledge gentleman? Forget to think and start a tan! And so the mindless struggle Thetedium of solitude Kevin Saving Mixed with her daily dose Of mundane routine Her pain her fatigue her loss her dependence A Photograph Her bed! Inevitably – spring comes A while now since we snapped But this glossy mirage of your hair Does it? which stills you – though escaped – Sally Richards both framed and cornered there.

Recollection leaves me lonely as the pigmentations fade and negative the only Burst reproduction that we made. History foams at the mouth, Kevin Saving sprays fantasies; fate’s aura, crushing reality.

Theblin dness of words, seeking a clear path.

There– Epitaph the tabernacle in the snow is lit; While there’s still time to sing and laugh the whole world gathers in forgiveness. I shall attempt this epitaph: He was a jester and a king, All language is untied; the trees in the forest stir. and at his best he was much more: a child, enjoying everything. Austin McCarron

10 Decisions On Their Way To Wherever

Sometimes...no. Quite often Borrowed, bought or sold, now turning cold I have trouble getting to sleep. their souls turned to iced membranes so salt. Lying in bed negotiating the problem He bolts the door, fearing assembling tears of medication. Which, if any, to choose. is it something buried deep within Weighing the options: attached to someone else’s learning? a guilt-free herbal slow drift down, or a pharmacological Theycome and they go as the tide flows, no-questions-asked-and-I’m-gone. pulled this way and that. He mimics, she mimes so beholden so unconscious. Amanda Geary Unknowingly. Patterns. Heart of clay. Waiting for the smelter, to unwind the wedge.

Jo Silver Man in Black

He used to sit her on his knee And tell her that she was Lennon from a Train pretty Thenas she grew Lennon looks out at me lyrically He “liked her smile” Aeon meaningfully Said “stay please, just for a while” Certain of solitude, Uncertain of the I blinked love force Her youthful eyes were The sky turned over Shot down at forty New York “Deep, so deep” A wave of starlight soliliquy Her teenage head thought “what Rolled Have you gone to heaven now? Were a creep” Through my hair you in heaven then? Re-incarnated? Too much feted when Where once she smiled with Sally Richards on earth. Re-birth adoration Over-stated someone hated you Her cooling heart enough....Xsmas song.. Saw aberration What have they done? She had no choice but ‘keep him sweet’ How in the world could she retreat? Jo Silver

She used to think he was supreme In innocence Of him she’d dream The Turning

Now in the chillness of her bed Thegrey gull of the northern land: forlorn in the gloom His septic words Swoops over me from time to time. Rang in her head As months stretch thinly into years Her youthful heart mature and strong Whispering their demise in a refrain of leaves blowing Felt bitter that his thoughts were wrong up the country lanes And the orb spins silently on its onward, meaningless How could he? in his position voyage Mislead her so A scratched and frosted blue marble spinning in a With no contrition vacuum.

He used to sit her on his knee Slowly, steadily And tell her that she was pretty Rotates the orbit of a human life. Its trajectory an imprecise orbit measured in wasted Sally Richards opportunities, It’s arc unresolved. Only the sense remains much desolation lurks across the empty plain, Where stands aging, a wizened, hapless tree,

11 Clawing vainly at the sky, a bent exclamation mark, Letter to Milan Kundera While the lithe young birds Peck, hop, swarm tauntingly Scent of Parisian Autumn blown in by the wind Towards moister, less barren soil. A doorstep mottled with white and Prioritaire Inscribed upon the lid; I imagined him I am in that musty tent, Opening my message in the country: Thatnebulous, undesired territory An escape from the horrors of the everyday world Between youth and middle age, And other people; in a garden in sunlight A borderland where the cry of impotence Sundials peppering the lawn, amber peacocks (At the disparity between soaring hope and tangible Strutting in a cornucopia of light and shadow achievement) And defecating on the roses, the roses which Forms fractured in my throat. Stretched in military lines through the garden And beyond, basking in sunshine, my few words, Thosenights when all endeavour, all action, even the Hypocrite, I reader, my brother. thought of movement Is futile. Paul Murphy And the sleeping millions are alternately blissful or troubled in their limbo And there is no one to hear Cats me, AfterTS Eliot

No warm body to embrace. A Still Life of Dead Flowers Theperfume-stained Only the crepuscular quality cushion For he travelled by bus, rail and tube Which comes with this A copy of the Iliad sitting To earn his pay for fifteen hours – darkened room: invaded by on it A pittance paid to blood-red nails precise shafts of moonlight Lamp in the window And a crumbling grave among dead flowers. Shining on the dust and must Betrayed of this garret Thenext day is rushing in Spencer James Jeffery Where the floor creaks and Cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, ghosts swirl invisible, Odour of puss – stains of hanging on the air, puss Snagging on threads of Thefetid smell of cat’s piss discord which one emits like breath. Cat’s faeces, cat’s claw.

Dreams coil and whisper, trailing from your brain, Nip Nip Nip Nip Thedreams of fulfillment, I fed the cat. Which must be coaxed to sleep Or else be smothered without sentiment or ideal. Paul Murphy If there is any peace to be had at this hour, Or any hour, It resides in realism’s last fatal sigh. Human Hope and Hackney And so I turn towards the slope Rearing from my back window, Roots stronger than hope in the shabby streets. On which the tree stands A seagull flies from mid Atlantic to the broken doors of Supplicating to that forlorn grey gull our dreams. In a time without frost Walking us to dole-poverty and aborted love. An atmosphere without wind And I speculate for the first of many times (ThisNovember rain against dirty windows. In this era of lengthening shadows Suffering the morning street with the freshness of its Where uncertainty ploughs its furrows pain On the brow of that hill A sweet cuppa’ and a long, slow, bitter drug). And the grooves above my eyes Become more visible with each passing day. David Kessel

Leon Brown

Broadsheet continues on page 37...

12 Survivors’ Prose Life in Meadowlands by David Krisman s I enter the asylum everything is a blur. I’m don’t want to hurt them and besides they have heard it all surrounded by inmates who are staring at before and it’s a secret. They might inform the “spies”, the me, or else staring and climbing the walls. I grinning nurses. They now look as depressed as I feel as notice their newly bandaged wrists, glazed they leave. I try and think clearly; is this a hotel, a prison, an Aexpressions, blank looks, all with a story to tell; drugs, asylum, my new home? Where the hell am I? I want to go abuse, depression, voices etc. with a smile thrown in for home, but the door’s locked and I can’t even remember good measure. I hear and observe the constant clanging where home is anyway. I go to my dormitory, bed 6, and and clanking of the ubiquitous keys held by grinning the sleeping pills soon take effect as I fall asleep amid the nurses, as they open and close doors in sequence. Always manic sounds of my fellow inmates. Peace at last – without at hand and watching are young nurses, forever grinning, dreams. For my dreams have gone, like my mind, without wearing clinically clean white short sleeved uniforms, notice or warning. However, tomorrow’s another day, but looking down at us inmates. Conformity is the name of I realise it will be just like yesterday and the day before. the game, or else it’s a “section” and a quick sharp depot injection in the behind – or even worse, electric shock Up The Republic! treatment; not for the faint-hearted. I walk alone, along the dark archaic wooden by Paul Murphy corridors that leave you feeling isolated and bewildered as I head for the OT Department – I’m told it’s good he North Central Spanish plain is something therapy... I’m asked numerous times by Zoe, the paranoid like an endless car factory, a desert, and schizophrenic, for a fag, as she picks up yet another dog- various Visigothic, Christian and Moorish end from the newly polished floor, already littered with castles thrown into a pot. Inhabitable it is not, ash. And no, I haven’t got a light, or any bloody change, as Talthough it has its inhabitants. The administrative centre I stare blankly at the walls. Am I going mad? Oh, I forgot, I of Spain, Madrid, is supposed to bind the regions together. already am. Spain’s Parliament, El Cortes, is in Madrid, as are many art It’s lunch-time, so we queue up like cattle, before galleries and museums, most famously El Prado, flanked “Happy Time”, when the nurses, still grinning, administer as it is with statues of Goya (pronounced ‘Goja’) and to the inmates their mood stabilisers, anti-hypnotics, Velasquez (pronounced ‘Belafqueth’). tranquillisers, anti-depressant pills, or if you’re really lucky, “What do you think of King Juan Carlos?” a laxative for the meal you’ve just eaten. “I think he is an idiot!” Then I meet or rather confront the “Big Boss”, I leant back in my chair as the air conditioning the almighty, bespectacled Consultant, not grinning like whirred. Intense sunlight poured through the window. the nurses, but looking deadly serious, wearing a smart Later on I sat in the internet café. A song was being tweed jacket instead of the standard white uniform. played about how a young man from Donegal had come On entering his office, I am greeted by a number of to Spain to fight (and die) in the International Brigade. professionals, dotted around the room, smiling like As I walked back through the town centre that innocent children, as they introduce themselves. It’s still peculiar dry heat, typical of Spain, saturated my clothes, a blur. Only the “Big Boss” talks and writes, enquiring my hair. about my life history, asking some pertinent questions One day I walked to the edge of the town and about How? and Why? I’ve landed in this mess. It’s like found some old field artillery and heavy machine guns. an interrogation and my mind goes blank, and I have no The spot was dignified with a board which had the word answers, but he carries on writing regardless. Finally, he ‘Military Museum’ spelt out in black acrylic paint. All the informs me condescendingly of my medication and says guns seemed to be pointing towards the offices of the in “parrot fashion”, “We will meet in a week’s time!” It Guardia Civil. Perhaps with a little reactivation I might means nothing to me as I meekly thank him and leave, carry off the last battle cry of the Republic! observing all the smiling faces of the professionals. Have In those heady days (what else can one say about I just won the lottery? I vaguely remember my days in the La Guerra Civil – The Spanish Civil War – except ‘those city, as a wheeler-dealer in the stock exchange. Gone now heady days’!) General Yague’s Army of Africa, the core of forever! For Heaven’s sake, I can’t even concentrate and veterans that constituted Franco’s elite troops, and Andre watch television or read now! Malraux’s fighter squadron had operated in this area. At last, it’s the highlight of the day: “Visiting Time” Andre Malraux (1901–1976), a French novelist famous and I prepare to pour out my troubles and feelings to for his work Man’s Estate, an account of the Communist my nearest and dearest. But instead, I say nothing, as I Revolution in China in the 1920s, and Days of Hope, an

13 account of his actions in the Spanish Civil War. Later in common with the Spanish masses to countenance the he fought for the French Resistance in World War Two arms shipments that would have guaranteed a Republican and ended up in de Gaulle’s Post-war Cabinet as Minister victory. for Culture from 1959-1969. By this time his left-wing In the pub Alto Rey (High King) I had gone to look idealism must have worn off, for he compromised his for Dave the ESL teacher, but found nothing but a dope views rapidly and joined a quite far-right government. -sodden haze. Not unusually the barmaid offered me a I had assumed that Malraux was an adventurer in the free drink. Sizzling heat in mid-summer, the sour smell of Ernest Hemingway mould, but was surprised to find out marijuana was flowing plentifully among the compadres. that he’d been involved in various art scams, selling major At the College I discreetly asked some of my artworks bought in China at inflated prices in Europe. students about Guadalajara, for that was the town that Furthermore, some doubt has been cast on the actual I was teaching in (Mexico’s second city is also called efficacy of his leadership in both the Civil War and World Guadalajara). They told me that Guadalajara was one of War Two. One account I read mentioned that Malraux the only towns in Spain still to have a statue of the dictator was the kind of man that lost the war for the Republic, Franco and one of an even earlier Spanish dictator, Primo alongside a further account of his military incompetence. de Rivera. They indicated that there were some fascist Speaking of Ernest Hemingway. I realised that symbols left on government offices in the town. These the Republic was a fashion item for intellectuals of the men seemed to be surprised at this. Many of them were period, for no intellectual or artist dared to call him or workers from Madrid, and regarded the eccentricities of herself a fascist (in fact there had been quite a few that the townspeople as a sign of their dire lack of sophistication had done just that, G.B.Shaw, H.G.Wells, Ezra Pound, and political education, which was unsurprising, since W.B.Yeats, T.S.Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and many others the authorities in Guadalajara controlled the education had flirted with fascism for at least part of their lives; system and therefore the minds of the people. Most in Pound’s case this proved to be near-fatal as he found of the locals had quite recently come from the pueblos himself broadcasting radio programmes for Benito (villages) of the surrounding area and pronounced words Mussolini – after World War Two he ended up in a mental with a thick peasant dialect and alternative pronunciation. institution, narrowly avoiding execution as a traitor). For instance, ‘Madrith’, ‘Amistath’, ‘Bajadoleth’, instead of Ernest Hemingway was the Republic’s trumpcard, a Madrid, Amistad and Bayadoled (‘Valledolid’). famous American novelist and anti-fascist, who lent the But not all of the people of Guadalajara were Republic credence and respectability on the world stage controlled by the authorities, as I discovered in one and penned off a novel about the conflict, For Whom dimly-lit pub. A sign with an Anarchist symbol and the the Bell Tolls. Other intellectuals lent the Republic vocal slogan Reclama los Calles! (Reclaim the Streets!). Many support (when asked for his views on the matter, Samuel of the banks had Anarchy symbols and slogans daubed Beckett simply replied ‘Up the Republic!’), George Orwell on them, there were punky types with Mohican haircuts, fought for the Anarchist militia POUM (supposedly and the all-round regalia of the Punk. In many ways this Trotskyites or Anarchists; in reality the militia of the party town seemed to be a short step away from the 1970s, of Left-Communist Reconstruction whose secretary had which either meant the UK had silently evolved, or, more happened to have been Leon Trotsky’s) in the Barcelona likely, reverted back to those former Imperialist practices area, and the poet John Cornford who was killed in action before the ascendancy of the post-war Labour Party. with the International Brigade. Some 40,000 foreigners Back in the pub Dave the ESL teacher was ended up fighting for the Republic; on the Fascist side bantering me with his latest conspiracy theory and account there were only 1,000, and virtually none of these men of world history. In brief he argued that the rulers of the came for adventure, they fought for a cause. world (bound together as the New World Order – what In the great football match that is history, it a fascist titling that is! – and their latest ideology of Neo- was FC Fascists 2 FC Republic 0 until the two Western Liberalism) were all related to each other and could trace democracies, Britain and France, came to the painful their genes back through the Knights Templar to Jesus realisation that Fascism as a political movement was and beyond. After telling me that I would certainly not eventually going to overthrow them too, and moved to be welcome among Britain’s ruling classes (because, as he defend their buffer in the East i.e. Poland, against Soviet explained, I would not have the right genes…), he slipped Communism and German Nazism. But it was Britain in the fact that he was an ex-public schoolboy. Which is specifically that had opposed support for the Republic, what the novelist and political journalist George Orwell whereas France’s Socialist Popular Front government had been (a graduate of that great bastion of the English was naturally sympathetic, preferring to wait on the ruling classes, Eton College). sidelines, for the Republic was packed full of ‘dangerous Sobriety had replaced recklessness as I wandered Socialists and Bolsheviks’. Had Britain aided the Republic back to my piso (apartment) with a fair awareness of what the Second World War might have been pre-empted was going on around me: that the streets were virtually or curtailed. As ever it was a case of a house divided empty even though it was quite early on a Friday night. against itself and collapsing: Britain’s ruling classes had Things get busy late in Spain, with the early evening too much in common with the Fascists, and not enough period regarded as a mealtime. I passed the Plaza de

14 Toros (bullring) on my left (a great pleasure in Southern ‘him’ was the Russian Anarchist leader Prince Mikhail Spain, though less popular in Northern Spain; I never Alesandrovich Bakunin (1814-1876). Bakunin was Marx went to see a bullfight, apart from its obvious exotic and Engel’s main rival in the First International. Bakunin appeal it seemed to me to be very boring. I tried to espoused Anarchism, a political philosophy that dispenses read Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon but it left with any form of Vanguardism (the Marxist belief that me indifferent to the sport, though I empathised with his the proletariat need to be led by a core of professional fascination with this primordial ‘blood and sand’ event). revolutionaries organised in a party structure) in favour In the main Plaza (square – pronounced ‘platha’), of spontaneous action and wildcat strikes, and in Spain, Pablo Iglesias, I stood to make a phone call. Suddenly notably, anti-clericalism. someone grabbed my ankle. I looked down and a little Anarchism has its roots in France, its most famous gypsy girl crawled out from under the phone box. She exemplar there being Pierre Proudhon with his timeless came at me somewhat aggressively, and, surprised, I epigram ‘Property is theft’. France was an agrarian society backed off. The town had a small gypsy population. The for much longer than Britain, where social upheavals such gypsies were clearly not of Spanish origin but Romanies, as Chartism had normally been of a non-violent character originating from South-Central Europe. Other distinct (the Peterloo massacre is one notable exception). The ethnic minorities in Spain were, most notably, the Jews, two other countries enraptured with Anarchism were (known as Sefardic Jews, i.e. those Jews from North Africa Russia and Spain, each positioned at the opposite ends of and Spain as distinct from European, Russian or African Europe and both partly belonging to another Continent, Jews), the Basques in El Pais Vasco, and the ‘Moros’ (the Spain being the only Western European country to have term the Spanish gave to those North African Moroccans, been once occupied by a non-European power, and most of Berbers or Tuaregs, who today use Spain as a tourist Russia having been submerged in Asia. The non-European destination, often in winter). Until recently, scholarship or semi-European nature of both of these countries is had suggested the Arabs of Medieval Spain practised a one explanation for their fervour for Anarchism, and for good deal more tolerance than their Christian left-wing political movements in general. counterparts, though this view has now been Spain had also taken its eccentric route on the questioned. (In Medieval Christian Spain, Jews were Right, with various groups and factions, two competing made to wear a compulsory red and yellow badge groups of Monarchists, Carlists and Alphonsists, right- of identification – eerily echoing the coloured wing Catholic organisations such as Opus Dei, the Falange, triangles for the various groups imprisoned by the who were not recognisably Fascists. Franco was very Nazis in their concentration camps; depictions of much an orthodox right-winger in that his main enemy Jews wearing this badge can be found in the chapel of was the Left, he had none of the obnoxious racial theories Santa Lucia in Tarragona. The Jews were later expelled of Hitler in Germany. Franco kept Spain out of World from the peninsula in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella, King War Two, sending the Blue Legion to fight and die on the and Queen of Castile). Eastern Front. He stayed in power until 1975, abdicating The little girl ran away. With no social security in then in favour of Rey Juan Carlos. Juan Carlos then Spain anyone who is unemployed, or very young and from established, what he called, a constitutional Monarchy. A a poor family, has to construct a placard and put their Republican might have called it a bourgeois democracy. hand out. Afterwards I regretted that I hadn’t thrown her In the pub Dave’s lighting up his umpteenth spliff, 100 pesetas, or taken her into the café for a soft drink. while Bernhard is playing with a huge bottle full of beer. In the café Canas y Tapas I spoke to the Polish Soon everyone is covered with Spanish beer. waitress. She couldn’t speak English, so we communicated Spain is a landscape where ideals and realities through Spanish. I wondered why she was so far away meet, and are somehow entwined. Looking beyond the from home. She told me she’d had to come to Spain to red flags and the black flags there is a landscape with an seek work because after the fall of the former Communist inkblot seeping through every tree, every blade of grass, regime in Poland the economy hadn’t recovered, and the every Moorish turret, the red clay, the limpid eyes of each Poles had been made many promises that weren’t fulfilled. bird, donkey, horse and through the Andalucian peasant In Poland Solidarity had left power and the Communists, who sits for a day dreaming up every Picasso painting in re-modelled as a Social-Democratic Party, had slipped existence, and then forgets them at the end of his siesta. back into power. A sad realisation of the caprice of It is a world of casual genius, uncompromising ideologies, Capitalism had been gained, because this was a gain. of comedy, of abstract and round images, illogical routes I walked back to the Alto Rey. In Spain place to supremely simple goals and solutions, and of confusing names tell their own story. Plaza Pablo Iglesias named routes to inordinately insane and obtuse non-answers. It after Pablo Iglesias (literally ‘Paul Church’) a 19th is still best summed up in Miguel Cervantes’ novel Don Century Spanish Socialist and one of the founders of the Quixote, and in the abstract summation of the dichotomy orthodox Spanish Socialist movement. But the orthodox in man between the dreamer and the realist, between Spanish Socialist movement was not to be the dominating the madman Don Quixote and the cynical realist Sancho factor in Spanish politics. Karl Marx and Frederic Engels Panza. Everything else that Spain has offered the world had once remarked, ‘we must leave Spain to him!” This seems to be a further fugue on this original theme.

15 A Brief History of Hearing Voices John H Donnelly on the Hearing Voices Conference

Theyearly Hearing Voices of their brain or consciousness, hearing voices group. I was also so that they are not consciously disappointed that no draft copies of Conference – a critique of experiencing it, and this involves written information based upon all style and presentation distracting or imagining one is three talks was not available. absent from the reality of the abuse ome of us from my local and the situation. he first talk on Sexual Hearing Voices Group, Abuse, described how attended the Hearing As a way of describing how hard it abusers set up different- Voices Conference on the is to dissociate from abuse, the first versions-of-reality, how S7 December 2001 at Christchurch speaker asked the audience to think Tabusers groom and control their University, Canterbury. One voice of the word “elephant”, and then victims in order to sexually abuse hearer commented afterwards asked the audience not to think of them, and then convince them to that he felt the speakers mainly the word “elephant”, emphasising buy into different-versions-of-reality addressed a professional audience how hard it was not to think of the - that the abuse is their fault, or that in their choice of humour and word, once it had been suggested, they in some way wanted, needed, or presentation, chiefly because they set thought of, and experienced. deserved to be abused. This whole out to convert professionals over to area only concentrated on sexual an acceptable, entertaining, common The three d’s were mentioned by the abuse, and not on other types of image of a person diagnosed with speakers: dissociation, distraction, child abuse and domestic violence, mental health problems. and depersonalisation. It was also that are not overtly sexual, but may mentioned that an event or action have similar control patterns and Otherwise, the talks would have in adult life can trigger memories psychological consequences. been based upon a fairly sound user of abuse, and onset mental and or survivor recovery model, but I emotional distress which can lead to The first speaker described how agree with the other voice hearer hearing voices. some of the myths of different- that in humour and presentation, versions-of-reality can be social the speakers created a very similar The matter of dissociation wasn’t and cultural, and she described stereotypical image to the old one questioned, discussed, or debated, the dissociation strategies or of the psychiatric-diagnosed person, other than by one participant in mechanisms which are used for and which perhaps also showed their the audience at the very end of the coping with the intolerable mental, professional aspirations in terms of talks, who asked the speakers if they emotional, and physical pain of being who the talks were largely aimed at. were using some sort of cognitive- sexually abused. behavioural model to describe I was pleased with some of the actual sexual abuse, self-harm, and hearing The speaker described mental, content of the talks, but would have voices; to which it was replied that emotional, and volitional distraction preferred it if they were entirely the speakers take an approach which very well, and emphasised that user or survivor speakers. integrates the mental, emotional, distraction and dissociation take up a and physical aspects of analysis and lot of time and energy of the person The overall general theme of all recovery. who is trying to cope with being three main conference talks, was that sexually abused, and that physical dissociation is a coping-mechanism, There were three main talks: one on distraction as a coping-mechanism and a symptom of being sexually Sexual Abuse, one on Self Harm, and can be misinterpreted as so-called abused, and a cause of self-harm one on Hearing Voices, followed by a behavioural problems. and hearing voices; along with some choice of three workshops on each admission by the speakers that the subject matter. I was disappointed The first speaker more or less psychiatric mental health system that all three workshops were on concluded by saying that we need to participated in setting up different at the same time, because I was be in equal relationships in order for versions of reality. interested in all three workshops, us to have creative relationships and but I chose to attend the Hearing live and thrive creatively, and without Dissociation basically means that Voices Workshop because I thought someone else’s professional power the abused person makes the pain that, a more general theme, it and control over us, and that we of being abused go to another part might be more relevant to our local need to be strong together.

16 he second talk, on Self can therefore be a euphemism speaking to many people in mental Harm, started off with for marginalisation and coercive health chat rooms over the Internet, the speaker talking about distancing. The whole area of I have found that many people who his experiences as a dissociation didn’t make a distinction are taking or have taken Risperdal, Tpsychiatric nurse, his experiences between dissociation as a cause have said that it gives or has given of being sexually abused as a child (violence, abuse, and coercion) and them nightmares. and being a self-harmer; and he dissociation as effect (as a coping- then presented a critique of medical mechanism and symptom). After receiving counselling, and then psychiatric diagnosis, talked about writing the content of my voices the dissociation strategies of self- Some of the coercive aspects of down as I was experiencing them, harmers, and described how he saw so-called dissociation can be best I was able to hear positive, friendly, recovery in terms of therapeutic described by referring to the film G. and supportive voices – two voices relationships, and the eventual I. Jane where upon entering the army, of which were the voices of some autonomy of the person from mental a woman finds that the people who of the counsellors I had received health services. are supposed to supporting her are therapy from. At the time, I heard corrupt, as they urge her to distance both negative and positive voices, The third speaker, on Hearing Voices, herself from the social and political but I found that by reading what I talked about his experience of being reality of things. had written down, and then by only sexually abused as a child, his writing down the positive voices experiences of being psychiatrically and afterwards reading them, I was diagnosed, how being sexually A Brief Personal History of able to experience only the positive abused was connected to his Hearing Voices voices. After concentrating more experiences of hearing voices, and on the positive voices in my writing how he used dissociation in order to first started hearing voices and with my mind, and ignoring and cope with the mental, emotional, and when I was in my early twenties. defocusing on the negative ones, I physical pain of being abused. The This was brought on by past only heard positive voices, developed Hearing Voices workshop looked abuse, trauma, and stress, and more positive voices, and then all of into an understanding of hearing Iby being insulted and undermined the voices stopped altogether for voices as to do with people’s life- when I became diagnosed as me for a few years. experiences and belief systems, and mentally ill. The voices started off the speaker took questions from the as negative and undermining in my I was after a while missing my audience, and described how he had early twenties, and I was initially not positive voices, but found that by worked with others in order to help believed by a social worker when I concentrating and focusing (by using them understand, recover, or come told the person that I heard them. my memory of how I experienced to terms with their experiences as I was also called a liar when I the positive voices with my mind) I voice hearers. disclosed information to the social was able to activate and create the worker about my childhood. When positive voices again. Whilst I hear I agree with the speakers that some I did convince the social worker that positive voices, and can activate this dissociation exists, but I also think I was abused as a child, the social freely with my mind, my voices can that it’s a bit of a myth and a mentalism, worker said that maybe the person also become beyond my control and I’m not convinced how effective was right to abuse me. When I did and negative. The positive voices it is as a coping-mechanism, because convince the social worker that I was can become beyond my conscious depersonalisation and derealisation hearing voices, I was then labelled as creation and control as well, but are can go along with dissociation, “psychotic” and told to take anti- not distressing like the negative ones, and can still involve much mental, psychotic medication. although the positive voices can emotional, and physical suffering. sometimes turn into negative voices The theory of dissociation, may I was prescribed a high dose (20 mg) and turn nasty. When the voices are therefore be used to deny the reality of Stelazine, and which caused me negative, they repeat and chant the of a person’s suffering, and in itself to have major side-effects, but same phrase over and over again, sets up a different-version-of-reality. was years later changed over to taunt and torment me, and insult and It also occurred to me that setting Olanzapine, and then onto Risperdal undermine me. up different-versions-of-reality might which I am currently taking. Whilst in itself be a form of so-called Risperdal quells the voices when When the voices become negative dissociation. they are quite audible and negative, and beyond my control, I become I have found that Risperdal also gives very unwell, and this often adds to Dissociation is not merely a me bad dreams, and I have wondered or causes my depression. I also psychological concept, but is also whether its sedating effect has sometimes become a bit unwell and a social and political one, and contributed to my depression. From depressed when I can’t hear any 17 voices at all, as my positive voices The questions the positive voices ask consciousness psychologically and are often a comfort to me, and offer me are unlike intellectual thinking, socially. me a type of support, friendship, not of an individual nature, but are and counselling. This, and the fact much more of a collective way of I find that I have to lower my that actual counsellng in-part helped thinking, and when I’m asked these intellectual consciousness and me to transform or transfer my questions by my positive voices, I’m awareness, in order to think in terms voices from negative to positive, and asked by a group of many positive of common sense, and to debate and to eventually be rid of the voices voices, and these questions are then discuss with my positive voices, and altogether for some years, makes me asked or represented individually by which are like the voices of ordinary think that good counselling is in-part one, two, or three voices at different people. As a result of this interaction conducive to some recovery. intervals. between my intellectual thinking and feeling and a common sense form of Overall, I am glad that I hear voices, As an intellectual, I am a lateral and debate, I am able to once again raise partly because of the positive not a common thinker, but I need my consciousness and awareness experience of it, and partly because I this inner public awareness in order and come up with more intellectual am trying to figure out all the factors to think more in terms of how the thinking, discovery, and ideas. that cause and cure hearing voices. actual public might or could respond I have cured myself in the past, to my ideas, discoveries, and writing, TheKey but because of my enquiring mind and to both bring knowledge to and wanting to experiment with the public, and to bring some of Knowledge drives me like a secret the experience for both support my thinking, consciousness, and mile and knowledge, I have sometimes awareness more down to earth. Carrying me through madness and become unwell with voices again and experimentation need help and support from my local My positive voices often ask me very Linking and then spraying us hearing voices group. common sense, relevant questions, through sunlight and which again, I would otherwise Clasping and releasing my mind as I not think of asking myself. Hearing Voices and Public smile. Awareness Ideally, I need this kind of public Diagnosed people hold the key debate in my actual social life in Although we do not always cast the ublic awareness is both a response to what I experience, think, spell political and a mental health and write, but I find the actual public For like shadows we laugh and weep phrase and concept. It is are usually not willing to debate Pecking through the tortoise shell. also a psychological one. intellectually at all, or not willing to PWhilst public awareness and social debate with intellectual people. We struggle to cure ourselves consciousness are usually described together as something external to the It’s sometimes assumed by medical Against the curse of ignorant bliss individual mind and objective, there’s psychiatry that hearing voices Rejecting the academic world of also an internal and subjective is due to low intelligence, or shallow text experience of public awareness, due to a lower form or level of Our emotions breed like hungry which is absorbed and exists in a consciousness. In my experience of insects dialectical relationship to the my own voices, and my experience Swarming towards liberation. intellect; to thought and to feeling. and understanding of other voice hearers, I think that hearing voices Hearing Voices and I sometimes have discussions and can be due to both a higher and debates with my positive voices, and lower form of consciousness and Creativity one main function of these voices, awareness – simultaneously, and at is that they ask me questions about different times. he voices I hear and things that are based upon common perceive are female voices, sense and public thinking, and which Whilst politically in mental health, and some of them are I would otherwise not think of we are often told about raising positive, educative, friendly, asking myself. The positive voices, public awareness and social Tand supportive. I’m glad that I hear critique and ask me to clarify some consciousness, and whilst I very these voices, because they are very of the things I have written in my much agree with doing this, I much a part of my true nature, they mental health articles, for the benefit think we also need to be realistic improve my knowledge, social skills, of both subjective and objective about it, and to realise the and communication, and keep me in public and intellectual understanding. higher process and dialectical touch with the creative and learning interaction of higher and lower spirit.

18 All voices are in a sense all – including myself – are single and realise the social interaction aspects of every human being, as very much need and would like strategies, actions, and behaviours, we all internalise our social and relationship partners in our lives, which are oppression, and which interpersonal experiences to some although obviously, some people in can be coerced and enforced upon extent, but they are also very real satisfactory social relationships hear peoples lives without our individual and definitive differences in society, voices too. and general choice, agreement, and which can become internalised consensus, or consent. by the individual voice hearer to A friend of mine who also hears meet his or her needs and voices, recently said to me that In my mental health articles, I try requirements. a person can still be alone in a to write concisely and with a flow, crowd, and that maybe when he much like a piece of music or a song, Some of my female voices can act as was surrounded by other people in and I write in a manner that reveals a muse, able to both inspire, respect the Nineties he was isolated after glimpses of light, reveals some of and appreciate the emotional and all. He added to this, agreeing with my ideas and findings, but which intellectual skill and ability of a this article after reading it, by saying also subtly encourages and inspires voice hearer. The very strange, that he doesn’t think that voices people to think for themselves. I but very beautiful, hypnotic and do develop through isolation at all. don’t by any means reveal all of trance-like receptivity of some of Whilst having a love relationship with my own social and interpersonal my female voices, filters, transforms, two people in the nineties, my friend knowledge and findings, as I don’t and reciprocates the social and said that he heard lots of voices, and want my knowledge and findings to interpersonal experiences of other when he was very mentally unwell become elitist and institutionalised. people into the mind, social at the start of the nineties, he was interaction, and creative imagination. living with friends with whom he One difference between used to party quite a lot, and he still psychiatrically diagnosed people and Whether the fact that I have heard voices then too. It was when other people in society, is that we intellectual discussions and debates he became more solitary in the last are often more emotionally assertive with my female voices, means that 6-7 years that his voices stopped. and receptive, and struggle to be I’m not being adequately stimulated more emotionally free or liberated. or represented intellectually in my think it is a mentalism, and a Because of emotionally repressive social life is an interesting point. In very common misconception English culture though, we often some ways this is very true. From amongst a lot of mental have to suppress our emotional my experience, interaction, and health workers and hearing expression and receptivity with observation, I think that a lot of Ivoices group facilitators, to believe psychiatric drugs, which reduces psychiatrists in particular, are jealous that voices develop solely through our imagination, creativity, emotions, of the knowledge and creativity of emotional, intellectual, and social desire, thinking, consciousness, and psychiatrically diagnosed people, isolation, because whilst there is awareness. and very envious of the fact that we obviously a lot of truth and accuracy have a spiritual and creative realm of in this, this rather reductionist our personal and social experiences, viewpoint, can also fail to understand which are not controlled by church the necessary interaction between and state, and which psychiatrists inner and outer experiences in STOP PRESS!!! cannot adequately experience, order to love and learn, and it can accept, or understand. also deny and invalidate a persons Following the retirement of inner and outer experiences of their John O’Donoghue and I was very interested and intrigued past and present life in general. Neil Swire as SP’s Chair and by what a hearing voices group Secretary, we are seeking facilitator said about a member of It can also deny and invalidate the applications for these two key her local hearing voices group, unique processes, experiences, who also had female, helpful voices, knowledge, wisdom, and culture of positions. Full details at: but that the voices eventually psychiatrically diagnosed people, www.survivorspoetry.com said goodbye to him when he and deny the healthy and creative was engaged to be married. This interaction between inner and outer Closing date: Fri 3rd Feb 06 raises the question of whether experience which are required to Interviews Fri 10th Feb 06 hearing voices is caused to a great earn, share, and exchange knowledge extent from love and relationship and love, and to function in society We are particularly interested to deprivation. On the one hand, I to our satisfactory or full potential. hear from applicants among the think this is true, as most members ethnic minorities. from my local hearing voices group It also fails to acknowledge and

19 Good As Gold Dave Russell on the literary journalism of Lorna Sage

Lorna Sage (1943–2001), critic and perspective.” For all her depth What she did vis-à-vis Gore Vidal author, left behind her a legacy of of scholarship, Lorna Sage never was developed to a far higher highly respected literary built any comfortable academic degree in her article Freedom journalism; she was the first critic shelters. Quite the contrary: she Fighter (Interview with the Italian to bring the gifts of Angela Carter revealed to the general reader all novelist Oriana Fallaci): this is a to the general public’s attention. the flaws and inconsistencies of the best-selling writer with pop-star She also edited the consummate academic world. The ‘ivory tower’ acclaim, adored by general readers, Cambridge Guide to Women’s is shown, in true Sagean fashion, to suspected and vilified by critics Writing in English (1999). In the be utterly crumbling and corroded. and other writers. An interesting year of her death, her autobiography No antiquarian exclusivity here, comparison with Umberto Eco, Bad Blood won the Whitbread no hiding of the weaknesses: “The whose L’Isola del Giorno Primo is Biography Award. Survivor poet language of theory gives its users reviewed in the penultimate article and songwriter Dave Russell pays the illusion that they are in charge, in this selection – supremely erudite tribute to her critical works... somehow, riding this authoritative and ultra-reader-friendly, selling discourse, when most of them like hot cakes on the news-stands: ad Blood is far more are closer to being its creatures. “Fiction . . . enables us to understand than an autobiography. It Talking about power becomes a something of the mechanisms by is a chronicle of English kind of vicarious trip, especially which we overinterpret the world” provincial life in the Fifties when the prestige of intellectual life (p357) . . . “with Eco you can have Band, as such, an essential complement is so low outside” (p188). Indeed, your postmodernist cake and eat to works written in that period. she is outspoken about the role of it” (p358). Fallaci hates her ‘role’ Lorna Sage is writing about that derivation and copying in all literary persona: “she prefers to think of time from the intimate standpoint creation (p137). Creative writing herself as someone in a sense of having grown up in it, not being courses at universities often result invisible, outside the frame, her own a fully-formed adult observing it. in “a triumph of rhetoric in the woman” (p347); she loathes the act Obviously, her time perspective did perfectly traditional sense” (p189). of writing as masochistic. Fallaci’s not give her any rose-tinted glasses. works are mainly centred round She faces writers like Gore Vidal who the theme of war and conflict. But It has the bonus vision of being have ‘on-going’ relationships with it is no ‘black-and-white’ clear-cut initially located in the village of the media, political trends since the conflict: “Her people are citizens of Hanmer, in Flintshire, a backwater Sixties, the sexual revolution, now, caught up in the contemporary within a backwater: “this little pornography and turn-of-the- kind of civil war where there are not rounded isthmus of North Wales millennium image-consciousness two sides but – as she nastily says – a sticking into England”. There, (“Greenham women acting as real- whole cathouse of factions” (p352). conditions in some ways dated back life understudies of the statuary as far as the 1880s. stars” [p155]). As stated in the As her life progressed, Lorna became preface, “She writes for what’s increasingly involved with journalism. Good as her Word – Selected left of the common reader in us.” To some extent she welcomed its Journalism, is a powerful sequel to The banal and the sordid are given strictures: “I have always preferred Bad Blood, Lorna’s greatly, and justly their fair, proportional due in the to be a hack, it seems less of a acclaimed autobiography. I did have spectrum of consciousness. She mystification.” So technically, most the pleasure of meeting Lorna and valued what she acknowledged in of the articles in this selection are Vic Sage during their undergraduate Elizabeth Barrett Browning, what is reviews of biographies and critical era, and throughout the subsequent “sublime and approachable, splendid works. But predominantly, they decades have always been stimulated and vulgar” (p136). No flinching represent Lorna’s views on the by her unfailingly hard-hitting from pornography either: Lorna has subjects of these works. I have journalism. Leaving no stones the courage to evaluate Keatsian concentrated on her observations unturned, flinching from no issues, aesthetics in comparison with Soho and opinions. This is because of Good as her Word is wholly incisive glamour photo parlours; they both working within the limits of my throughout, setting out, in Vic have the common root of voyeurism, review, not out of any desire to Sage’s words, “to delve underneath after all (p225). belittle the works of the authors and challenge that ready-made under review here.

20 orna’s journalism places organic wisdom!” [p148]). I have long Lorna bravely defends Anne a strong emphasis on the been repelled by idolatrous attitudes Stevenson’s attempt at a balanced biographical factor, which towards ‘great writers’ – the public appraisal of Sylvia Plath, at the she treats as inseparable being given, through classical cost of detracting from an Lfrom the text produced (she is portraiture and slanted biography, incredibly appealing romantic opposed to “male modernists a sanitized image as a facile basis legend: “Stevenson measured out separating work from life” (p29). for infatuation. Idols, of course, are her sympathy, counted the cost of “I can see that there’s at least one much easier to construct after their Plath’s apotheosis. She gave space to virtue in literary biography: a ‘life’ ‘life models’ are dead. hostile witnesses . . . This, combined can demythologise the work in the with sympathy for Hughes . . . earned best sense, preserving its fallibility, Lorna faces, fairly and squarely, the Stevenson her critical roasting. She which is also the condition for its influence of posthumous recognition threatened to spoil the biography brilliance.” She outspokenly portrays on the attitudes of the readership. game” (p107). trends, over four decades, within An outstanding example of this is academic literary circles, showing her exploration of the senility and Lorna is especially acute about the all the flaws of the deadening new decomposition of Jean-Paul Sartre. effects of feminism on her academic orthodoxies which arise in the name And when writing of Sterne, she field. She is circumspect about of ‘progress’: “It starts to look like could say “He was an intellectual, but “trendy Women’s Studies” (p147), a Nineties conspiracy, disseminating he refused to sweep out his mind or but then she can rightly value the ignorance” (p188). spring-clean his imagination” (p25). “conciliatory public languages of Lorna Sage is truly contemporary feminism” (p164). There is a struggle, In reviewing a study of Richardson’s in that she is aware of present-day against enormous odds, to get a Clarissa by Terry Eagleton, she sees writers’ relationships with the mass coherent picture, saying, quite rightly through the sanctimoniousness of media. This is especially marked in that “. . . no one has managed to Marxist critical dogma (a ‘pious duty’ her article on Gore Vidal. Reflecting combine partisanship with criticism for Eagleton), and can add the barb on the Sixties sexual revolution and at all consistently” (p135). And is that “. . . English Departments are very its aftermath, she expresses regret Margaret Drabble “a mere shuffle short on working-class students, but that “our fashionable thinking about across the carpet”? – Plenty of food full of middle-class women in danger liberation . . . has been gruesomely for thought there! of being seduced by Lovelacian impoverished by the stripping away theoreticians” (p286). At several of non-sexual politics.” (p179). But The article Sisters of Sisyphus deals points she seizes on the dynamics of she presents a fair balance sheet. with the wish of successful women contradiction as a key factor in any There is no spurious nostalgia about to change society rather than just writer’s (or other creative person’s) old exclusive bohemianism, whatever be assimilated to the existing fabric. metabolism: “a natural association of its concomitant ‘intensity’. The title of the article was inspired creativity with destruction” (p3). by Doris Lessing’s phrase ‘boulder- ood as her Word has pushing’ (the hill is Patriarchy; the There is an article on one crudely a global perspective, boulder is sisterhood. BUT “the glamorous character, Emma demonstrated by the boulder itself has to be constantly Hamilton: “she had no social identity features on Christa Wolf redefined” (p159). to speak of, and could impersonate G– a major (formerly East German) goddesses partly because she writer operating in the environment In discussing Romanticism, Lorna is was ‘nobody’ or worse” (p21). of a now-defunct communist critical of “sensibility snobs” (p175) Hamilton’s increasing weight and orthodoxy, and the translations of Her discussion of Andrea Dworkin’s predatory nature do not escape Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. Intercourse spells out “. . . an impasse Lorna’s binoculars. Lorna’s interest in the latter was in feminist thinking. The reformist perhaps prompted by her close strain is wearing itself out (this Good as Her Word is a supreme friendship with, and championship of, is almost a definition, in any case: statement of demystification. Angela Carter. Flesh and the Mirror: it’s about wearing oneself out) in Having been brought up in much Essays on the Art of Angela Carter was conflict with both consumerism of the archaic mandarinism which a major factor in Carter’s gaining (which makes use of ‘liberation’ for Lorna Sage so vitally exposed, I was general critical recognition. Carter its own purpose, and the various overwhelmed by the totality and (as well we know – largely through forms of fundamentalist backlash. At fearless strength of her opposition to Lorna) was forced to re-evaluate the same time, there is a retreat, a it (good point about D H Lawrence’s her self-image and self-perception green retreat into separatism, with “monotonously respectable by her migration to the ‘mirror’ the stress on feminine, nurturing presence on A-Level syllabuses” and environment of Japan. qualities” (p162). Naturally, she is “colleges-of-education pieties about opposed to the idea of “the powerless,

21 fey poetess” (p140). The problems “Women attack pornography and history, and of iconography. Literati of feminism are explored in relation write it, sometimes even the same are all prone to idolatry to some to linguistics: “Metaphors redraw women. Could there be a better degree, and this portrayal of a valid the map, and put the boundaries in demonstration that feminism has icon, fulfilling real needs and functions, different places; these metaphors, joined the ‘real’ world to serve the is an exciting supplementary in particular, make women into powers that be?” (p189). There is backcloth to this selection. As ever, territory that has a boundary drawn also some sharp analysis in Learning it is ‘warts and all’. The power of not round its edge, but on the inside, new titles: “Feminist academics first this figure is crumbling and fading: in the name of nature (NB: this in got jobs and tenure, in significant “Montenero is a ‘human document’ Lorna’s gloss, not Susan Dworkin’s numbers ‘at exactly the moment and like many things cushioned and text)” (p163). when the profession itself came sanitized by that label its fascination under pressure to downsize (Lorna’s is rather grubby. It’s not about the The survey of the Hite Report quote from Susan Gubar)’. The result dignity of suffering at all, but about shows Lorna Sage to be fully attuned was that competition, the pressure the craven and utterly natural desire to topical public opinion and social to publish and the need to distance to escape it” (p327). surveys, and the study of Sally yourself from your predecessors Bowles shows her to be fully up-to- in the name of originality, were “Perhaps when the Madonna of date as regards the area of cross- all savagely increased . . . the very Montenero became the patron of dressing and gender ambiguity. consciousness-raising that brought Tuscany in 1947, it was already a sign Interestingly, Shelley is ‘revalued’ so many women and previously that she was losing her power as a for his freedom from gender excluded minorities into higher local deity who could counteract categorisation, though not, of education itself led to the rationing. the malice of events. And perhaps course, without recognising the Women in women’s studies the visual world has changed too concomitant problems: “But in programmes came up against the much – everyone with a camera; actuality, surely, the breakdown of limits of official inclusiveness with newspaper and television close-ups gender boundaries (such as it is) particular force” (pp210-211). of worldwide random violence – for spawns . . . variegated monsters . . . local craftsmen to get calamities people not only divided from each Again, in Mother’s Back: “What’s down the street or round the corner other, but psychologically motley in been lost is the sense of connection into focus any more” (p328). themselves” (p242). with utopian politics. Part of the fiftyish feeling is to do with having The points I have made here are in Lorna makes a very full statement to recognise that the future – that no way exhaustive. This book is so about this issue in her article The future, the classless, melting-pot, invigorating; just pick it up, and you’ll Women’s Camp: “Feminist theory is unisex, embarrassing one – is now find yourself, insatiably, wanting in fin-de-siecle mode: self-fashioning in the past. Or, more painfully, that more... (‘constructivism’) is winning out it has been hijacked by obscurantism everywhere and anywhere, and and academic careerism, which drag, cross-dressing, travesty are often amount to the same thing . . . the metaphors. “So after twenty- Feminist theory took a wrong turn odd years of feminist theorising almost at the moment of its rebirth what’s the big Difference? In a way in the 1960” (p215). it’s a non-question, since that sense of returning you to the conviction hroughout her life, of the unreality (and finality) of Lorna Sage had a deep representations is what the project attachment to Italy, to is always about. The process seems which the last section of to work like a spiral or a gyre, though, TGood as her Word is devoted. Her so that each return is a turn of the attraction there is understandable; screw – yet more self-conscious, the upsurge of radicalism in a more knowingly perverse. “Feminist formerly traditional/repressive theory is lesbian feminist theory is society has incredible verve: “the Bad Blood, Lorna Sage (2000, ‘queer’ theory and so on – which time-honoured separation of sex- ISBN 1-84115-043-6) and Lorna is one reason why in terms of style roles makes it much easier for them Sage: Good as her Word (Selected and tone you can hear the accents of (women) to think in sexist terms on Journalism), Eds. Sharon Sage & camp on every side. Mimicry, parody, their own account” (p137). Victor Sage (2004, travesty, appropriation are almost ISBN 0-00-715779-7, H/B £16.99; inevitable” (pp175-176). The article on the Madonna of P/B £8.99), are available from Montenero shows her acute sense of Fourth Estate Books

22 Hard-Won Light John O’Donoghue on The Letters of Robert Lowell

oets cannot be truly laid Lowell’s manic depression is as and taught Ann Sexton and Sylvia to rest until the proper much a part of his poetic persona Plath (1958 and 1959). Nor was ceremonies have been as Keats’ tuberculosis or Blake’s he unaware of this Noche Oscura: observed. This is a visions and perhaps it is now ‘This is the dark night… My night is Preference not so much to a place possible to discuss the inter-relation not gracious, but secular, puritan and in Poets’ Corner and the attendant between his condition and his art agnostical. An Existential night…’. requiems, but to what the Life was without the kind of sneers Larkin all about, what any poet’s life is about: was fond of making about ‘the boys Do the Letters help us to see the the Work. The publication of Robert from the asylum’, or allegations of way in which Lowell endured his Lowell’s Letters brings to a close a reducing Lowell to a pathology or a trials, how he made lasting poetry process begun five years after his case study. No one can be defined by out of transitory sufferings, however death with the publication of Ian a diagnosis, but manic depression is debilitating and prolonged? Do they Hamilton’s Robert Lowell: A Biography a fact of Lowell’s life and something give an indication of the processes (1982); continued with the Collected about which he wrote in new and which led to the composition of Prose (1990), edited by Robert powerful ways. The question of Life Studies? Are they in any way Giroux; and brought to a climax with how his illness affected his art, preliminary vignettes, a sketchbook the Collected Poems (2003), edited by and how he created art despite where one can discern outlines Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. his illness - or perhaps indeed at of the finished portraits? Can the times because of it - is, then, a valid reader catch a cadence, a line or an We now have what may constitute the critical enquiry. What contribution idea in the day to day correspondence Complete Works, although we can do the Letters make, therefore, to which finds its way, honed and be sure that Lowell’s bibliographers our understanding of Lowell and polished, into the poems? – the real Hamlets to his Yorick – his experience of manic depression? will not have had their final say just In a reply to Richard Tillinghast, a yet. Lowell’s body of work throws up Life Studies (1959) is Lowell’s doctoral student at Harvard, written problems which are sure to keep the most striking achievement, a in August 1969, Lowell writes: ‘Let professors busy, and the books cited book of portraits of his family me finally give the order of the form an interim report on Lowell’s and his experiences in the various autobiographical part of Life Studies.’ ouevre, rather than a final inventory. institutions he had been detained in He says that ‘Uncle Dev’ [‘My Last Taken together, however, they aid our up to the date of its publication. Of Afternoon with Uncle Devereux understanding of this complex and course, Lowell sometimes blurred Winslow’] was ‘First in 1954 (?) often embattled poet, and we owe the lines of his ‘Life Studies’, so that after a long depression in the Payne a debt of gratitude to his biographer the volume’s autobiographical tone Whitney Clinic and possible [sic] and editors. is not to be taken strictly at face the little poems after ‘Commander value. Lowell is not under oath in Lowell’ [‘Terminal Days at Beverly Lowell first became mentally ill this collection; nor are his poems Farms’, ‘Father’s Bedroom’, ‘For in 1949, at the age of 32, and was and the prose memoir ‘91 Revere Sale’]’. hospitalised for ‘acute manic Street’ acts of perjury. episodes’ and ‘depression’ on This sequence of three poems twenty-one occasions, at such Life Studies explores Lowell’s journey comprise portraits of Lowell’s various institutions as the Payne through the existential crisis which parents, which started off as ‘very Whitney Clinic, New York; the beset him in his middle years. From rude sketches, to be worked up into Military Hospitals of Salzburg and his first breakdown in 1949 to the what I don’t know’. Two further Munich; McLean Hospital, Boston; publication of the book a decade poems, ‘Sailing Home From Rapallo’ the Institute for Living, Hartford, later, Lowell lost his mother and and ‘During Fever’, written in 1957, Connecticut; Greenways Nursing father (1950 and 1954 respectively); complete this sequence of family Home, St John’s Wood, London; and published his third volume, The portraits. These poems are all in last, and perhaps most poignantly Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951); was the first section of Part Four of of all, St Andrew’s Hospital, hospitalised eight times; secured the book, which ends with ‘Waking Northampton, where John Clare employment as a university professor in the Blue’ and ‘Home After Three had been a patient over a century (Boston, 1956); bought a house Months Away’. earlier. (1956); became a parent (1957); 23 fter Lowell’s initial burst Is In Marriage’ – a franker poetic American fullback,/… still hoarding of work in 1954, he tells emerges and is perfected. It is as if the build of a boy in his twenties/as he Tillinghast that he wrote the intensity of his experiences, of his soaks, a ramrod/with the muscle of a ‘the long prose piece’ journey through the Dark Night, has seal/in his long tub/vaguely ruinous A(‘91 Revere Street’) in 1956. Then burnt away ornament and rhetoric from the Victorian plumbing’. The ‘…1957 the poems began’. ‘The first to leave a flatness of statement, as people whom he encountered in part’ of ‘Man and Wife’, ‘Skunk Hour’, though he had moved through the hospital and briefly noted but never ‘Commander Lowell’, ‘Words for dark glassily to arrive at a day bleak ‘worked up’ are perhaps the most Hart Crane’, ‘Terminal Days’, ‘Sailing with hard-won light. intriguing. In a letter to Elizabeth Home From Rapallo’, ‘Memories of Hardwick from Payne Whitney in West Street and Lepke’, and ‘To Speak Some of these ‘rude sketches’ are 1949 he mentions the ‘arrival of of Woe That Is In Marriage’ were all also evident in the Letters. Here’s a Catholic priest (a patient) full of completed at this time. ‘Man and an early sighting of that Lowellian facts about the Navy, Missions and Wife’ and ‘Words For Hart Crane’ trademark, the triplet, in a letter St. Paul’, which makes him sound were further revised towards the to Randall Jarrell from Baldpate like Lowell’s doppelganger, perhaps end of Lowell’s creative surge in ’57. Hospital, Mass., May 21, 1949: ‘I’m the reason he left only a thumbnail Lowell then had a ‘breakdown’ (he poor, helpless, conceited here’ sketch of this poor cleric rather than was admitted to McLean Hospital Compare this to: ‘Cured, I am a portrait in Life Studies. in February 1958). He says: ‘It took almost the rest of the year to write There are also stray lines of the remaining poems: ‘Waking in the poetry in his Letters, grace notes Blue’ – done most while sick, but not amongst the commonplace prose of the ending which makes it a poem.’ correspondence: ‘It’s tough sledding Three further poems followed: not seeing another poet’; ‘It looks ‘During Fever’, ‘Dunbarton’ and rough at first, but it was written ‘Grandparents’. with a world of pain’; ‘Little Harriet will never see the shadow that has This window into the composition darkened us and gone’. of Life Studies shows Lowell feeling his way towards not just a collection Lowell was prescribed Lithium in of poems, but a book with various 1967. This slowed down the rate thematic unities. His family history, at which he fell ill, but did not cure his personal history, and the history him. Is it a coincidence that the next of his times are all reflected in Life four books he wrote contain only Studies. In order to write of new 14-line unrhymed sonnets? Was subject matter – a frank portrayal he desperately trying to turn into of family, mental breakdown and poetry the quotidian reflections so incarceration in institutions – Lowell evident in his correspondence as developed new techniques and a the upswings and the downswings of new tone. Lowell broke with his frizzled, stale and small’ (‘Home manic depression flattened out into style and with the traditions he been After Three Months Away’). This a monotonous sublime? born into, both as a patrician son of dying fall usually rises and is Lowell’s Boston, and as a poet. gift to the language. His letter to Robert Lowell’s Letters are a triumph Elizabeth Bishop from McLean’s is of the editor’s art. They shed new Gone is the gorgeous bombast and full of the same kind of ‘rude sketches’ light on the poetry, on Lowell’s formality of ‘The Quaker Graveyard he draws on in ‘Waking in the Blue’: ‘world of pain’. Ultimately, they are in Nantucket’, ‘Between the Porch his triumph, work the life bequeaths and Altar’, and The Mills of the The man next to me is a Harvard us, hard-won, and wonderful. Kavanaughs ; Lowell uses a more law professor. One day, he is all happiness… But on another day, his casual tone in Life Studies, those ‘rude depression blankets him. Early in sketches’ behind many of his poems. the morning, I hear cooing pigeon TheLetters of Robert Lowell are As his technique develops – from sounds, and if I listen carefully, the words: published by Faber & Faber, £30 the early family portraits through ‘Oh terror, TERROR!’ Our other male assembles microscopically exact models ‘Waking in the Blue’, ‘91 Revere of clippers and three masted schooners. Street’, and the final compositions (March 15, 1958). Book cover reproduced with the kind which complete the book: ‘Skunk permission of Faber & Faber © 2005 Hour’, ‘Memories of West Street and Echoes here of: ‘… Stanley, now sunk Lepke’, and ‘To Speak of Woe That in his sixties/once a Harvard all-

24 Outpatient Polemic Alan Morrison on the Sixties Press mental health series arrowing is the word I wondered what strange thoughts declaring it to be wonderfully suited which comes to mind filled his mind as he toiled among the to his needs. ....He lived out of tins harvest of bones and rotting flesh regarding this extremely and heaped wreaths and footprints and drank too much and gradually insightful and important of mourners and the tyre marks changed days into nights’. series of mental health-related of innumerable hearses? What H metamorphosis did the blurred pamphlets from Barry Tebb’s But the crucial vicissitude in Isaiah’s indefatigable Sixties Press. That a contents of his mind undergo as he harrowing story comes with the sat night after night drinking himself read should disturb one is most into blind stupefaction, staggering forboding line: ‘On May 16 2001 he often a constructive thing, if done home to scream hallucinatory phoned me to say that he believed didactically, as it opens the mind hatred at his timid and terrified Irish hsi head was coming off his body’. more to itself and, more importantly, Catholic wife in the presence of four Swiftly following was a swift diagnosis bewildered children? to the minds of others; that essential of ‘gross psychotic delusions’ and the empathetic function of good writing. And; inevitable sectioning. But as soon as As C.S. Lewis once said, ‘something ...the night when the madness made Isaiah showed signs of recovery, he has to drag us out from the nursery fires burn in his eyes and he wrote was billeted to a halfway house run into the worlds of others’ (sic), and in huge letters over the sink MUR- by ‘Community Links’ (no doubt an these first three of the Sixties Press’ DER IN SEACROFT HOSPITAL and offshoot from Thatcher’s Care in he hurled everything he had through mental health pamphlets do just that, the open window in a crazed whirli- the Community cop-out policies), a uncompromisingly. gig and pounded his television on public-private-partnership chimera screen until there was nothing left of New Labour’s ever self-dismantling The first in the series is 2004’s but a fine grey powder... NHS. Here Tebb observes what he Kith and Kin – Experiences in Mental terms as a ‘Parent Blaming’ culture, Health Caring. It comprises three Disturbing indeed, as is the blank- which he feels leads to his son’s first person accounts of caring for faced, two-way-mirrored impunity accusation that he and Brenda loved ones with mental illness. In of GPs and psychologists, typified practise witchcraft: ‘...and in this ‘One Carer’s Story’ Barry Tebb lays in Tebb’s razor-sharp observations state [he] was discharged into bare the profoundly distressing sink of inanimate minutiae: ‘...countless the community’. What a surprise. into ‘insanity’ (presumably paranoid ballpoint pens with cryptic messages Isaiah then progressed, or rather schizophrenia) of his father-in-law on the barrels, “Flossex b.d. - the deteriorated onto delusions of Cyril Williams, and in turn of his and peace of heaven” and “Ditrol makes being ‘Christ’s middle-man’ and after and Brenda Williams’s son, Isaiah. for the mile-wide smile”’. a significant struggle to find him an acute bed in Leeds, is now finally Cyril’s story is made all the more Equally heart-wrenching is the back on an appropriate ward. vivid through Tebb’s powerful ensuing story of Cyril’s grandson’s prose with its painterly splashes of similar plunge into this arguably Barry frequently tells me of his description; he tells us that Cyril had inherited mental disorder. In ongoing, inexorable commuting enjoyed a briefly contented period Isaiah’s story there is again a similar rounds to visit Isaiah, and I can only ‘as a collector of broken typewriters pre-breakdown erraticism to his say I greatly admire his courage for city centre offices’. Tebb then grandfather in his impulsive swing in coping with schizophrenia’s speculates: ‘...perhaps the seeds from pursuing an M.Ed. in Classics at relentless grip on his son. Barry’s of his paranoia were growing and Balliol to using his £5,000 Newcastle deeply moving poem ‘Our Son’ festering and in the casual glances of Scholarship to study Bengali at follows this profoundly honest and typists and office boys he somehow the University of Shantinektan in affecting account, as does a series sensed that they might know his Calcutta. For the following four and of Brenda Williams’s inimitable secret frenzies so instead he took a half years Barry wrote to his son in and highly accomplished sonnets to digging graves at Lawnswood and India, receiving nothing in return all on the breakdown and suicide of Killingbeck Cemetery, in sight of the that time. On returning to England ex-senior social worker Christine wards where Kathleen [his wife] Isaiah left for Leeds where he lived Blake, who was scandalously barred worked nights’. This deft prosaic in a ‘...damp and depressing bed sit in from attending the Fordwych portraiture of a man on the brink of a back-to-back in Beeston. No other Road Day Hospital, under the ever mental breakdown is chillingly vivid: tenant lived there for more than a – apparently – unwatchful eye of night but Isaiah grimly remained, Camden and Islington Mental Health

25 and Social Care Trust Board (going This is Important. Ham and High during September this by the shenanigans of a certain year. Tebb praises this paper whilst Social Care & Health Trust in a Life and Death in Camden (2005) criticising the apparent political more southerly region of the UK, contains relentless rounds of complacency of the Camden New who organised their meetings of correspondence tennis between Journal in its reticence to publish any summer 2001 around the World Barry Tebb and sundry luminaries of directly contentious details on these Cup match schedule, this comes as responsibility-deference, including issues on its own pages, in spite little surprise to me). A preceding Rob Larkman, Chief Executive of the of its radical reputation. It seems section of text also tells of Brenda’s Camden Primary Care Trust, and The in this particular area, the CNJ has own seemingly unmitigated neglect Right Honourable Chris Smith, Chair not answered Tebb’s rallying call, from same authority, which she has of The Committee for Standards in and he goes on to laud the launch been famously petitioning against Public Life. This correspondence is of the Camden Gazette, a new paper for some time now, as chronicled in both eye-opening and sociologically produced by the Ham & High’s the Ham and High. Brenda deserves pertinent. The rest of the pamphlet owners. particular commendation for her is flowing with irresistably polemical courage in defiantly fighting this poetry from Tebb and fellow Sixties This is polemically gripping stuff, and institutional stoicism, as does she one can only admire Tebb’s courage for producing such powerful and in naming and blaming those he feels memorable sonnets through years of A survey showed responsible for Camden’s woeful largely un-alleviated depression – as that the diagnosis of mental healthcare record; one which Tebb notes: ‘A survey showed that schizophrenia in an can boast ‘“...the highest suicide rate the diagnosis of schizophrenia in an adult child impacts more in the country...”’ – ‘1 every 10 days’, adult child impacts more severely on severely on parental he states in a letter to the Lord parental health than would the same Chancellor. This shocking statistic “health than would the child’s death in a road accident’. is all the more disturbing when one same child’s death in a confronts proposals by the Social ‘A Journal by the Father of a Son road accident Services’ Press Office to close down with Schizophrenia by Mike’ is a vital day centres for the severely series of blisteringly honest emails mentally ill in Camden: charting the course of a son’s lapse Press stalwart, Brenda Williams. into schizophrenic breakdown. As always, a rewarding read. But ‘The rationale used as an excuse is a report of the Social Exclusion Unit The medium of emails making it Censored In Camden – The Closure but this simply says that the mentally all the more real and immediate. of Jamestown Day Centre is” polemic ill should not be excluded from An important sequence well with a capital P; a further, more the mainstream of society, e.g. they worth reading. The final inclusion, comprehensive tirade against the should not suffer stigma. The Council ‘Schizophrenia: A Mother’s Story inadequate and ineffective ‘services’ carelessly conflates this with the DWP’s intention to move 1 million of By Georgina Wakefield’ is a of Camden Council, Camden Mental the less ill on incapacity benefit into deeply moving account, again, of Health Liaison Group and Camden work over the next decade...’ a son’s schizophrenia, this time and Islington Mental Health and from a maternal viewpoint. This Social Care Trust regarding in It’s indeed a disgrace that under is compulsive reading, in no small particular its continued refusal to the eyes of a supposed Labour part due to Georgina’s incidental provide treatment for Brenda Government, emotive issues are awakening to the therapy of writing. Williams, arguing she should seek twisted in order to justify cost- She also pens a crucial legend care in Westminster. The suicide of cutting. Will there ever be a stigma which emphasizes how essential it Damien Hirst’s godmother, writer against political immorality? is for sufferers, sufferers’ families Margaret Walsh, is also cited as and therapists to engage on a another example of Camden and The Sixties Press mental health broader empathetic forum with one Islington Trust’s apparent inability series are must-reads. another: to provide a proper service to its service users. This chronicle of Kith and Kin (£2), Life and Death ‘I also hope that professional systematic neglect is illustrated in Camden (£6) and Censored in people read it and they may be through a series of correspondence helped by seeing things from an Camden (£4) are all available from entirely different angle. It’s so betweenTebb and these organisations’ Sixties Press – to order please email hard for all concerned because representatives, predictably closing [email protected]. the nurses know what’s best, but, ranks against the facts. Scattered inevitably, feelings get in the way among these cuttings are other Coming soon: Beyond Stigma and parents can’t always carry out what’s best’. Tebb-penned letters, and news – Experiences of Mental Health stories from various editions of the Survivors, Sixties Press.

26 TheUniversal Andalucian Lucía Moral Baena on the Generation of ‘27’s figurehead, Spanish Nobel poet Juan Ramón Jiménez

uan Ramon Jiménez, “the universal Andalucian”, was born in 1881 in Moguer, Huelva. He came from a middle- Jclass background in conservative and traditional Andalucía. His hometown was crucial not only in his poetry but in the way events took place in his life. Moguer, an idyllic place where time never seemed to change, is intrinsically linked to his childhood, parnasianism, which influence his 1907 his depression worsens as a or as he himself put it: ‘I live with my future work greatly. By this time he result of economic problems with best friend: solitude’. is composing Rimas (Rhymes), which his family. is later published in Madrid in 1902. Jiménez moves to Seville to study He also has various love affairs that In 1911 he returns to Madrid, law but his interest is in painting and inspire him to write much erotic inspired by Ramón Gómez de la writing. His family encourage him to poetry; but in 1913 he meets and Serna’s publishing of his poems in the follow his heart in poetry when he falls profoundly in love with Zenobia journal, Prometeo. Juan Ramón stays leaves his degree unfinished. Already Camprubí. It is during this time at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Seville, he discovers the romantic (some literary critics call it his where he becomes one of the most poet Bécquer, who is the first and ‘sensitive period’) that Juan Ramón important literary focuses for what strongest influence on his work. finds his real mission in life: “I am was later termed ‘the Generation of not a man of letters but a poet who ‘27’. In April 1900 he moves to Madrid on made his dream come true. For me the invitation of the modernist poet there is nothing else but beauty”. In 1916, he and Zenobia travel to the Francisco Villaespesa, and Ruben USA where they are married. Juan Darío who suggests the title Almas Ramón promises Zenobia that he de Violetas (Souls of Violets) for his I am not a man will write the most beautiful book of work-in-progress. Here he enjoys a of letters but a poet who love ever, and starts sketching Diario life of bohemianism with his fellow de un Poeta Recién Casado (Journal of poet friends. made his dream come a Man Just Married). true. For me there is However, after only two months in “nothing else but beauty On his return to Madrid Jiménez Madrid, Jiménez returns home as finds himself at the centre of all the he claims he feels very sick. It is in avant-garde movements in poetry, a Moguer that a catalystic event of his position earned by his seminal work, father’s death tests Juan Ramon’s By the end of 1901 he is transferred Eternidodes (Eternities) (1918). intrinsic sensitivity to the limits and voluntarily to another psychiatric plunges him into a state of deep sanatorium in Madrid until 1903. Juan Ramón’s generous nature depression and neurosis from which The publication of Arias Tridas (Sad is reported widely by his fellow he will never fully recover. His ensuing Arias) confirms his reputation in” the writers. However, his refusal to obsession with death triggers a lapse literary world. participate in the homage to the into mental illness and in 1901 he classic poet Góngora, and some has to be admitted to a psychiatric A new crisis in 1905 makes him misunderstandings with Unamuno sanatorium in Le Bouscat, France. return to his hometown where he about the order of his poems writes the classic novel Platero y Yo in a magazine, brings him a sour During his in-patient stay he first (Platero and I), while inspired by reaction from his “disciples”. This comes into contact with French symbolist poetry, and the famous estrangement from the Generation poetry, and the literary currents poem ‘El Viaje Definitivo’ (‘The of ‘27 is even more accentuated by at the time, symbolism and Definitive Journey’). From 1905 to a telegram sent by Buñuel and Dalí, 27 both cruelly unaware of the poet’s sensitivity. Furthermore, the Juan Ramón Jiménez argument between ‘pure poetry’ (the only possible poetry for Juan (1881-1958) Ramón) and the ‘impure poetry’ developed by political changes Poems in the country, concludes with Jimenez irreversibly severing his attachments from this group of poets. The Shepherd’s Star

It is in 1935, that Pablo Neruda Shut up, for God’s sake, because you inherits leadership of the Generation won’t be able to tell me; of ‘27 and publishes the manifesto let open all my of ‘impure poetry’ in his magazine dreams and all my lilies. Caballo Verda Para la Poesia (Green Horse for Poetry). My heart hears well the lyrics of your affection… When Juan Ramón publishes the water is telling it his Cuadernos (Notebooks), amongst the flowers of the river; his attitude becomes more suspicious and lonely. On the the fog is dreaming it, outbreak of the Civil War, he the pines are crying for it, embraces the Republican cause. and the pink moon and He puts orphans up in his own the heart of your windmill… house and leaves all his savings to them before leaving Spain Don’t turn the light off, for God’s sake, to settle in Washington, where that burns inside myself… he becomes Cultural Assistant Shut up, for God’s sake, because you at the Spanish Embassy. His won’t be able to tell me. plans of returning to Spain vanish due to the triumph of General Franco.

Juan Ramón’s life grows more isolated and he creates his own ideal world, ignoring the ugly reality of life and alll its social The Definitive Journey structures. He and Zenobia move (from Country Poems 1910-1911) to Puerto Rico where he writes his definitive books: Romances de Coral …And I will go away. And birds will stay Gables (Romances of Coral Gables) singing; (1948), Dios Deseado y Deseante (God and my back garden will stay with its green tree, Desired and Desiring) (1949), and his and its white well. long poem Espació (Space) (1954). Every afternoon, the sky will be blue and placid; In 1956 he receives the Nobel Prize and like this afternoon, bells will chime for Literature. However, in the same from the church tower. year Zenobia dies from breast cancer. Now completely alone, Juan Ramón’s Thosewho loved me will die; neurotic character intensifies and the village will be new every year; irreparably. Two years later he dies and in that corner of my florid and blanched back garden, in Puerto Rico in total desolation. my spirit will linger, nostalgic… Solitude follows him to the grave. And I will go away; and I will be alone, homeless, without green tree, without white well, without blue and placid sky… And birds will stay singing.

28 The Blue Rose

What sad joy this, doing all things as she used to! My hand turns sky blue, I become infected by other poetry And the scented roses, which I arrange as she did, intensify its colour; and the beautiful cushions, which I arrange as she did, flower its gardens; And if I put my hand – as she used to – on the black piano, it emerges as if on a faraway piano, but with its deep melody.

What sad joy this, doing all things as she used to! I lean towards the glass of the balcony, with one of her gestures and it seems my poor heart is not alone. I look at the afternoon garden, as she did, and both sigh and stars fuse in a romantic harmony.

What sad joy this, doing all things as she used to! In pain and with flowers, I go, like a hero of my own poetry. Throughdeserted corridors she awoke with her white pace, I Am Not Me and my feet are made of satin – oh! Cold and hollow absence! – and my footprints leave sparkles. I am this one who goes by my side without me seeing him; who, sometimes, I come to visit, and who, sometimes, I forget. Thisone who keeps quiet, serene, when I talk, When I Was the God-Child this one who forgives, sweet, when I hate, this one who will stand on his feet when I die. When I was the god-child, as in Moguer, this village, a white wonder; the light with time inside. Introducing... Each house was a palace and each temple a cathedral; everything in its place, the earth and the sky; Janett Plummer and through those green vineyards I jumped with my dog, our new Diversity Coordinator cheerful as the clouds, like the light winds, believing the horizon was the line of the end. have extensive experience as a I workshop facilitator and poetry I remember a day in which I returned to my performer (aka Melted Demerara). I village, have over ten years experience of policy afterthe first absence, it seemed to me a cemetery. development and diversity work: I set up Inspired Word, Thehouses were not palaces, nor the temples cathedrals, a Women’s Survivors writing group that also explore and everywhere loneliness and silence reigned. issues of violence and sexual abuse in a safe space. I’ve I felt very small, little ant of the desert, also worked in community development and health. I was with Concha the shopping woman, all in black with black, a founder member of JAWA Theatre collective and am who, under the torrid sun and through Inbetween Street, an active member of the London branch of Malikas’s was stooping and pulling from the god-child and his dog: Poetry Kitchen. the child all deeply absorbed, the dog considering him with approval and care. y first aim as Diversity Coordinator will be to Mdevelop Black and Minority Ethnic groups within What time the time! Did it go with the god-child the Survivors’ Poetry community. Initially I’ll be working running away? with the already established One Tribe Quandary. And who could always be what he was In Spring 2006 I’ll be launching a Black and Minority in the first place? Ethnic Women’s Writers Group (name to be announced) Who could not fall, no, no, not drop old; – keep your eyes peeled on www.survivorspoetry.com to be again the pure dawn, to live with the whole time, for a date and venue to be announced soon. For more to die being the god-child in my Moguer, this village! information on the group and how to join, please contact me at [email protected] or call 0781861 6489. All translations by Lucía Moral Baena © 2005

29 Buzzed Off With Meher Baba: An Interview with John Horder From Meher Baba and hugging to Stevie Smith and music therapy, Alan Morrison finds out what makes John Horder tick

When I first bumped replete with a tall, floppy hat reminiscent of the into John outside the Sugarloaf style (c. 1470) and an orange and brown Survivors’ Poetry striped sweater, which made him rather resemble a offices at the Diorama giant bumble bee. I felt it was high time I enticed John over a year ago, I was to buzz down with a bump and tell us all what exactly struck by a larger-than- makes him tick... life apparition: stood before me was a figure hich came first John, the journalism of almost Dickensian or the poetry? proportions, an impressive-faced word -veteran beset with W giant pale eyes, I had to perform to survive and I’m only just wearing a ‘little boy finding out how hard I worked. Often putting on a lost’ expression on false performance because that was the only way I his face and – as I’ve found I could get the attention or approval of Molly now come to learn – a and Pearson, my two dysfunctional parents. characteristic wide- Poetry didn’t come at a critical time…at the brimmed green hat on usual time…The first poem I wrote, which I’ve his white-haired head. since lost, was called Mocio Among the Litmus Trees. I instantly warmed It was written on a train. to this likeable and amenable veteran of I had a hideously unhappy time as a schoolboy at St. poetry and journalism. Paul’s School in Hammersmith. A really unbeliev- I also felt a tingle of ably unhappy time. And I had an unbelievably un- “ almost juvenile awe at happy childhood; isolated. Even my father knew, my meeting someone who alcoholic father who was slow on the uptake, that had been a lifelong I went actually from the frying-pan, after my moth- friend of the now er’s death, tragically at the age of 40 Molly had died, legendarily inimitable I was thirteen/fourteen, and I sort of compensated Stevie Smith (well, I by becoming the star of a children’s television pro- didn’t come from a gramme on the BBC called Junior Wranglers and it literati background). went to my head, of course it did. It was May 1951 and I was called ‘the second Dr Joad’ - because I used Over the past year I’ve to wave my fingers at the camera and say ‘it all de- come to know John pends what you mean by that word’ -, which was a more intimately, both very mixed compliment because Dr Joad had been John Horder in Ford Maddox hat stepping out of us often sharing our imprisoned several times – he was a philosopher – for of I3 Carlingford Road, experiences of OCD not paying his railway tickets. Hampstead NW6, Nov. and the highs and I968 (© Bruce Milburn) lows of being ‘word- Putting it bluntly, I’ve always been a kind of media obsessed’, one of prostitute and that’s not surprising given my father’s John’s trademark phrases. John’s sartorial uniqueness ambitions for me which were completely out of pro- has never ceased to amaze me: on one occasion he portion to what I could deliver. There was a writer slumped himself in a chair in the Survivors’ office called Arthur Calder-Marshall who in the Thirties

30 and Forties was a pretty famous novelist, published was a bit of a disconcerting thing. I was all right in the by Jonathan Cape, and my father knew him as a friend end because I actually started my career as a literary and Calder-Marshall had been to St. Paul’s, so I was journalist writing a piece about Gabriel Fielding the sent to St. Paul’s. novelist – who wrote a wonderful book called The Birthday King about the Germans and the Nazis and Was his daughter the actress Anna Calder- the Roman Catholics – he was a Roman Catholic; he Marshall? was a Roman Catholic in the hysteric sense and always very in awe of other Catholic writers like Muriel Spark, I think they were definitely related yes. You can’t have Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene – and my article in a long name like that and not be related. The Guardian resulted in… one of my first articles, an- other was with Bridget Brophy, a forgotten figure but a When was your first journalist job? very excellent writer…

Well the first thing that really kind of made any impres- How did you get the commission to do the BBC sion and made so much impression I actually couldn’t Radio interview at Broadcasting House? cope, was…I’d been an Ordinand in the Church of England to be, you know, ordained. I worked from I think it was just sheer…I’ve always been lucky. I mean 1961–62 as Assistant Press Officer to two Archbish- I had this track record, I’d done a lot of broadcast- ops of Canterbury in Church House in Westminster ing while I was at St. Paul’s School; I was on Children’s and had a pretty nasty crack up at the end of it. I was Hour quite often and I’d done interviews when I was very very much chaste of mind. I had a very bad rela- 18 or 19 with Jane Gaskill who was a novelist, Michael tionship with my physical body. So surprise, surprise, I Hastings the playwright; I’d done all these interviews had to spend six months in a mental hospital called St. for a part of the BBC called Network 3, which shared Luke’s Woodside, which is still in Muswell Hill. I was the same wavelength with Radio 3. It actually very lucky because in my second month there I actually started from the fact that I…I’d been on a television arranged to interview Stevie Smith and they were very programme at the age of 12 from Alexandra Palace. So keen and even though I was twenty minutes late to ar- I’d been a real media junkie…from a very early age, and rive at Broadcasting House – this is all documented in it’s no coincidence that I became – because I couldn’t Frances Spalding’s biography of Stevie, Stevie Smith – A cry or show my emotions since Molly died, she was Biography, just reissued by Sutton Publishing – it was a 40 and I was 13 – a star of Junior Wranglers; I tried to tremendous success simply because we’d never been compensate for her and not being able to cry. mirrored by a mother’s unconditional love, which was the phrase that comes from – very emotional territory Of all the poets and writers you interviewed, which for me – it’s mentioned at the end of the Stevie pamphlet stood out for you and why? (Greville Press) – I got this phrase from Alice Miller’s exquisite book, The Drama of Being a Child, in which she Oh I think Stevie by a long way. describes the gifted child’s grandiosity and depression being two sides of the same coin. The nurses put me You became good friends with Stevie didn’t you? on a 134 bus; I was only in my second month and on quite a lot of medication – Librium and sleeping pills Well we met at Broadcasting House in Portland Place and sodium – so the fact that I did that in my second and we landed up in the foyer again and she said to month of my six month stay in that hospital is quite me, ‘Ah, our club John’, and it was the nearest both of enlightening… us came to a Gentleman’s Club. But I didn’t realize at the time that this was the event of a lifetime. She was St. Luke’s was in Muswell Hill and the interview was an extraordinary performer – that was I think what taking place at BBC Broadcasting House. At that time I really got me. There’s always been a frustrated actor/ – I’ve always – had a very difficult relationship with the performer in me and certainly at that time – 1963/4/5 world and for me to get on a 134 bus… They put me – when I was not yet thirty, certainly that performer on the bus, I got to Broadcasting House to interview hadn’t had much of a chance even with all the broad- her about her Selected Poems, and I was twenty min- casting I’d done; I mean I haven’t even told you that utes late – this is all in Frances Spalding’s biography. I chucked up the chance to take up a six-month contract to do interviews for a ghastly programme But that wasn’t the only bit of luck actually: there was called Calendar, which was in the God Slot – a religious a nurse at St. Luke’s Hospital and she had a partner programme, 7pm Sundays 1964, ATV – I had the same who had a really good job on The Guardian and she agent as David Frost and I blew it by being a raving volunteered to introduce me, and she did, and the first perfectionist…so great was my self-sabotage that I did person she introduced me to promptly died. So that one programme for them and tore up the contract.

31 That I wouldn’t do again. Of course arguably poets like Stevie Smith have stayed more in the public consciousness than poets Did you stay in contact with Stevie till her death? who are more critically acclaimed…

Oh yes, until her death. She paid me the highest compli- People just don’t have the honesty or the courage to ment: there’s a poem of mine in A Sense of Being called say look, if it’s a choice between The Wasteland or Not ‘Little Willie’ – which was published in The Observer Waving, But Drowning, I’d go for Not Waving, But Drowning – and she said ‘Oh, I could have written that’. any day. The human condition is there in Not Waving, But Drowning, but The Wasteland… That’s a very big compliment… Not Waving, But Drowning is universal isn’t it, Yes. I didn’t realise this at the time. I was very slow whereas The Wasteland is fairly esoteric and you with that penny dropping. None of the poems in need to be appropriately educated to fully under- Meher Baba and the Nothingness, which was ‘After stand all of it… the party the poor poet laments/ Ah woe is me/ Ah woe is me/ Said the poor poet/ Throughout eterni- Yes. There’s a whole drama of all sorts of facts about ty/ Why is that I am forever/ Searching for my soul/ – why does there have to be this mystique about men Outside of me?’ – now that’s a refrain that goes all poets? We know by no means all the facts about T.S. the way through – they’re more Stevie than Stevie. Eliot’s first wife and there’s an incredible lot we don’t know about Ted Hughes (’wives?) Compared with all the men that won’t come out. I do feel poets, Stevie was so much strongly about this thing of the more easy for me to fall in love Stevie had her poet’s false persona. The thing as a performer, as a poet, as a flings. There’s about Stevie that really tickles woman – I mean my God quite a story me pink is that she was actually a she was an awkward woman dab hand on the Stock Exchange. because she was even more un- about her and You would never have thought it. hugged than me. George Orwell I suppose she had to get some “ being caught One of my favourite films is money to keep herself in Stevie starring Glenda Jack- on the kitchen secretarial work…? son. From the point of view of someone who knew Stevie, table. But she was very good at it; she was that a good portrayal? was very good at stocks and shares. That’s not something that is Well the trouble with Glenda Jackson is that no- commonly known.” She had this incredible close relation- body could get the wounded three-year-old omnipo- ship with the Lion of Hull (her aunt). I was very spoilt in a tent little girl, it was impossible, and Glenda Jackson way. Having met Stevie for the first time in 1961, was much more confident. My fantasy with Glenda then I go on to interview Marianne Moore for The Jackson is she had a few hugs to set her on her way. Sunday Times in 1964. She was equally intriguing.

I didn’t really realise but the emotional illiteracy of What is so heartbreaking is the lack of insight into the the men poets, like Ted Hughes and Larkin and Peter unconscious self-brutalising habit patterns of so many Porter, Alan Brownjohn, I mean they were all so well poets. Marianne Moore paid an incredibly high price thought of but you know what are they compared with and left this wonderful poem called ‘What Are Years?’ Stevie Smith? And Ursula Fanthorpe, the best poet lau- and she was a most fascinating person, had a closer reate we’ve never had, and incredibly well-grounded, than close relationship with her mother. There’s a real both of them, in the Classics, Grimm’s fairy stories, in fascination with Marianne Moore with her relationship the Bible…the women poets know their stuff. Stephen with Elizabeth Bishop, who was a lesbian, and of course Spender, you can see in his translations of Rilke, who Marianne wasn’t; she wasn’t sexually operational. wrote those Duino Elegies - ‘the beauty and the terror of what we’re still not able to bear’ – he’s just not done Do you think that was the case with Stevie as his homework. He’s like a naughty schoolboy waiting well? for his bottom to be smacked. To be honest with you, Spender was another media slut. The assumption was Stevie had her flings. There’s quite a story about Stevie Spender could translate Rilke, but I’m not sure he having a relationship with George Orwell and both of could. them being caught on the kitchen table. I believe that

32 is a true story. Many writers are torn by shyness on the one hand and the wish to be notorious. They both had a very wounded part of them, Orwell and Stevie you know. There’s another scoop.

Other notable interviewees?

I was working pretty regularly by 1965 for The Guard- ian and I went up to Hull to interview Philip Larkin. It was an odd moment – it was his breakthrough time in 1965 and I interviewed him on a cricket field in Hull. Emotionally he gave absolutely nothing away. The piece was run. It was a prize-winning piece called ‘Poet on the 8.15’ and it got a lot of admiration. I think in a certain way that was as much to do with Larkin as it was to do with me. Often at that time I happened to be in the right place at the right time but unlike with Stevie Smith, it was opposite as with Stevie Smith – as soon as I met her for the first time in February 1962 or ’63, we were friends for the rest of her life; noth- ing such happened with Larkin. He was another very John Horder replete with Sugarloaf hat and bee-stripe touch-deprived, un-hugged poet I think. jumper, 2005 (© Co Wright)

What’s your opinion on the relationship between Born: 20th November 1936, Brighton creativity, particularly poetry, and mental illness, Educated: Downside Preparatory School, Purley; from your own life experiences? St. Paul’s School, Hammersmith; Selwyn College, Cambridge When I have my birthday I usually insist on them Acting: Children’s Hour, 1950; Junior Wranglers, putting ‘To John Horder, Poet and Storyteller’. I have 1951 a great love of the oral tradition of storytelling; there Journalism: interviews with Gabriel Fielding, is this task, if we’re poets, this acknowledged or un- Stevie Smith, BBC Radio 4, 1963; Philip Larkin, Ted acknowledged task of us loving, honouring, cherishing Hughes, The Guardian, 1965; William Empson, The and respecting our own stories, we help other people Guardian, 1969 to love, honour, cherish and respect their stories, and I Poetry publications: poem in The Cambridge still feel it is the dark ages. It’s not really acknowledged. Review, 1960; The Child Walks Around His Own Grave, I find it unbelievably frustrating that there is a book Giles Gordon, 1966 (two Arts Council of England by Julia Cameron called The Artist’s Way, which is a Awards); A Sense of Being, ed. C Day Lewis, Chatto bestseller by word-of-mouth, and that has a most & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1968; A Sense of marvellous technique to help novelists, poets, play- Being (second edition), The Menard Press, 1981; wrights, artists of any age from 9-90, just by writing Meher Baba and the Nothingness, The Menard two or three pages of A4 stream-of-consciousness Press, 1981 (three poems made into a film, Baba fashion, and I think doing that for over seven years Is, by Pete Townshend); Stevie – A Motley Collection now has helped me – I mean I don’t think I would of her poems by John Horder and Chris Saunders, have got into Music Therapy if I hadn’t been writing Greville Press Pamphlets, 2002 these Morning Pages beforehand because it’s actually Plays:Cakes and Carrots, King’s Head Fringe Theatre, been the only way round but I’m by no means there. Islington 1976; The African Who Loved Hugging I was brought up to be such a brutal perfectionist, to Everybody, Anna Scher’s Children’s Theatre, 1976 have impossibly high standards by my parents Pearson and Molly, if it hadn’t been for the Pages, and I think What are the Morning Pages? Diorama... – and I was there for ten years and that was a long time – and I had to learn some pretty dif- I have a friend, a Buddhist, called Sara Bowman, and ficult lessons, I must have partly wanted to be taken her sister Anna, they both write these Morning Pages. advantage of financially, I’m talking of Alison Coombes; The idea is you write them quite fast, and as early in St. James’s Picadilly was my baby to celebrate Stevie’s the morning as possible – sometimes I write them birth, in 2002, and I wasn’t rewarded in any way, and ridiculously early, like three or five or six in the morn- that was a blow… ing and you write about anything and you don’t show

33 it to anyone…I carry this to rather extremes because – why do I have such a deep friendship with Brenda I hardly ever re-read what I write, so I’ve got masses Williams? Because Brenda is the opposite to Molly in of stuff… It’s the most powerful therapeutic tool I’ve some ways, she’s a great protestor, a fantastic protest found in my life. If you have a girlfriend or a boyfriend poet, my mother in many ways would only row with you never show them. It’s frustrating for me because the shopkeepers in Brighton and Hove – or Hove and it’s another un-mined field of gold… Brighton really – when she was smoking herself to death with Craven A cigarettes. We moved to a re- You’ve often used the phrase ‘word-obsessed’, ally horrible suburb called Goldston in Surrey in 1944, what exactly do you mean by that? when I think my sister Caroline was born – she’s eight years younger than me. The Music Therapy has I had an incredibly important dream. I know when a been the most shocking experience for me. I’ve been real plum of a dream comes along. It was about two involved with more therapists than most people have months ago. It was about a boxer, aged 25, called Jack had hot dinners and I’ve tried to follow these teach- Austen. It’s very rare that names should stick in your ings of Meher Baba for thirty-seven years and I’m mind…and he’s actually related to Jane Austen in the still in a group with a Sufi Meher Baba teacher, Don dream. In the dream his teeth have been absolutely Stevens, who’s 87 now, who knew Meher Baba and mashed to a pulp and the fighting part of him at the who is the leading Meher Baba authority in the world age of 25 is destroyed, which is why they had this and has written many books on him. And I’m with the obituary of him in The Independent. Now my Music same group of hugging women and men for nearly Therapist – who I’d say is in his thirties, maybe forties thirty-seven years, and like a marriage it has its ups – we haven’t discussed this in words and for a word- and downs and I’m afraid I’m a bad boy for most of obsessed person like me that has actually sent me the time. I get very resentful and very pissed off and bananas in the past two months or so… very angry with Meher Baba for some time – and you can put that in…and depressed with him. I know Music Therapy has had a profound effect on you… A possible title for this interview?

It’s been a shock just to realize just how…I’m 69 Yes. Angry, depressed and [buzzed] off with Meher next month on 20 November and obviously as one Baba. gets older I’m having to confront my mortality which has been a lifetime’s obsession – I didn’t need Peter Of all the poems you’ve ever read, which Porter to remind me that the literary man’s biggest one would you say has stuck in your mind as guns are to do with death – nothing has prepared particularly poignant for you? me for the – in the Sixties I was very lucky, I went to see a Jungian psychotherapist, a White Russian, a The poem by Anonymous which is Christ’s Lovesong, very self-effacing man who was a brilliant midwife, Dr which is the perfect fusion for my passions for Sacha Alexander Dunnington, who died about four poetry and music – it has this line ‘I have thee one in years ago, and he put me on first to the oral tradition fight’, it’s about the lover and beloved buried in all of storytelling, and if it hadn’t been for him I wouldn’t our hearts. Because Meher Baba says – it’s something have written either The Child Walks Around Its Own the Churches can’t get their heads around – that if Grave or A Sense of Being. He was an absolutely ideal God exists anywhere it’s in our own hearts. midwife to get those books out of me. My Music Therapist, Donald Wetherick is very much in that I like that sentiment – one of my favourite poems tradition, he’s a very intelligent and intuitive man, but of Stevie Smith is The Christian Doctrine of Eter- he is not obsessed with words in the way I am, so nal Hell and I identify with her wish to believe in from time to time there is a complete breakdown in a Christian God but finding it difficult because she our understanding. He’s much younger than me and sees Him as too judgemental and condemnatory – we’re as different as chalk and cheese. I know that the so I can understand that quote from Meher Baba. key part of my whole life, I know now, was because Molly didn’t allow me to socialize or mix or have As I call them, the Meher Babarians – I call them that any social contact with any other little girls and boys to their faces. There is a very dark side to ‘God’, between the ages of two/three and seven. It’s a which Jung knew all about, and Sacha Dunnington, my wonder that I’ve survived. first psychotherapist who I think I was very lucky to have – I think I was with him until about 1972, so I Because she (Molly) was a woman of her time, was with him for a long haul – I’ve been two years she could fight for herself, she could assert herself with Music Therapy and I’m in deeper shit than I’ve

34 ever been in in my whole life. It goes up and down all were able to see that video of me singing ‘Before the the time. I’d love you to see the session of me singing World Began’, and if that was able to be on BBC 2 ‘Before the World Began’. or Channel 4, or somewhere…It’s not just poetry I’m passionate about, but storytelling and music too… The biggest struggle in my life was not only being with so many theoretical, emotionally illiterate men at an Any comment on the possible disinvestment in all-male public school and then going to an even worse Survivors’ Poetry? institution where there were no women unfortunately, I went to Selwyn College, Cambridge where the likes I don’t want Survivors’ Poetry to shut down. My hopes of John Selwyn-Gummer and Richard Harries, Bishop for SP are that there will be more people who will of Oxford were, it was very easy for me to be conned work on self-esteem. My self-esteem gets very easily by these people who became famous because they wounded or crushed. I would like to do more perform- were really all theory and not so much experience; ances with musicians and with young actors. I think we Cambridge at that time from ’57-’60 was and I think it are only at a beginning. Even in a year or two we’ll still is, the terrible thing about Oxbridge, is it breeds look back, in 2006/7 – I’ve had to tell Tony Rudolph theoreticians, because aren’t we trying to build a bridge, (of Menard Press) that if he wants to publish my all of us, certainly most of us who have anything to do Collected Poems in 2009 that may be pushing his luck. with Survivors’ Poetry, we’re trying to build a bridge But he’s so dotty about Paula Rego, and who can blame between the theory of how we would like our lives to him, she’s the greatest painter. The one good thing be and the experience of how it actually turned out. Alison Coombes did was get her to illustrate one of Stevie’s poems in the leaflets for the SP celebration. Which poem would you choose for your epitaph - and that can include one of your own? If you had a chance to write your own obituary, is there anything in particular you’d like to say in it? Yes, it’s a poem called ‘The Time Before Death’ and it’s about one of Meher Baba’s favourites – his favour- ‘He tried hard to be compassionate and self-forgiving, ites were Hafiz, Kabir and Rumi – and Kabir just says, but found it mostly uphill all the way’. don’t fantasise, don’t be under any illusions, death doesn’t solve anything, enjoy the moment while you’re Could you explain a bit about your experiences here, forget about the past, forget about the future, of OCD? and enjoy the present moment as much as you can. I burst into tears when I read this at a Meher Baba sem- Meher Baba has a word for habit patterns which he inar about two or three years ago…but my own poem calls sanskaras, which is the same as cravings or lusts. which I think comes nearest to what I would want as My OCD cravings are just so almost unbearably vola- an epitaph and it goes hand in glove with ‘The tile. One week I have an OCD structure to my life, then Time Before Death’ – so in other words, ‘The Time along comes the Music Therapy at quarter past four Before Death’ is saying to people of all religions, don’t on a Tuesday, and I sometimes take 24 or 36 hours to bank on anything – and I think this is why people who recover because my structure for the next day or so commit suicide have a fantasy, the suicidal part of all has been completely catapulted. of us, that death will solve something, that it will be better, but according to Kabir, Rumi and Hafiz, How do you try and cope with that? pretty unlikely, you know, it’s merely I think we go – if one believes in reincarnation, which I do – one Usually by collapsing into bed. I have habit patterns dies and then you come back with the same three of either being over-gregarious or over-active one big problems which most people have to try and sort moment, or by collapsing… I was kept in bed by my out in any given lifetime. The other poem which is an over-protective mother Molly virtually for the first epitaph for me, ‘After the Party the Poor Poet five or six years of my life. Laments and Unshed Tears’, and I think ‘Why do they If life got difficult at all, even Never Cry, Why do they Never Weep?’ (in Meher after 5/6/7 or 8, Molly just Baba and the Nothingness). I’m giving you rather too packed me away into bed all many poems for an epitaph. the time.

It’s a long epitaph... What would you like the Well John, thanks for future to hold? getting out of bed to do this interview. I’d be more thrilled than you would ever know if you 35 ” poems by John Horder The Curates How impeccably well-dressed they are Theseunhugged curates! Thisone’s whole body A Sense of Being Is spruced up in a sort of corset. Theexpression on his face, contorted. Thereis nothing in me to assure me of my being. Thatis why I so often think At what cost to himself and to others About my heart beating. Does he spend his whole life suppressing his vital Nothing to do with the fear of it stopping, energies. It’s just it’s so hard to imagine it – beating – At what a terrible cost! Just as it’s hard to imagine that I derive from something Thatactually works. Something that lives and [Anthologised by William Cole in America] breathes. Something that has a sense of its own being. Oh, it’s so very hard to imagine these things, And I’ve always been told that I was imaginative by Planting A Body nature. “Shall we fill up the hole with gravel? Imagine: a tree has roots: it knows where it springs “Thehole, I mean, that is inside your mind.” from. “Which one? you ask petulantly. We have parents. But the orphan and the murderer “Thelarge one”, I reply, impatient, “the void, where have one thing in common. “Theconscious is always trying to meet up Something vital in each of them has been wiped out. “With the unconscious. It’s difficult”, I agree, It’s hard to explain exactly what. It’s something “Bloody difficult. Most people spend most of their A word or a glance from a parent may have set into lives motion “Trying to fill up the space with a body, anybody, Or not. It’s not that this gives a child a sense of itself “Just so that someone’s there. Just like that. Nothing as simple as that. “Planting a body, they call this.” But it can be the basis. Something to start from, something that grows “You don’t get it? Well, a good father or mother And will eventually determine who and what he’s to Can help you fill up the hole that’s inside you. be “Otherwise this whole business of planting a body Or not to be, as the case may be. Whether he is, or “Anybody, becomes a necessity. Doesn’t much matter is not. who, “For most people, just so long as they make some [Performed on BBC2 by Julian Glover] attempt “To fill it up. Damned important to pretend it’s not there. “You still don’t understand. Well, if someone’s to he ugging hild hand T H C “Theycan help you from falling down it. Or pull In hugging memory of Stevie Smith “You up out, or help make you more aware that it’s there. “Don’t worry. Fill it up with gravel. It’s far less Where is the hugging child trouble.” In most adults I should like to know. [broadcast on a late evening programme in German and in Extinct. English from Cologne in November I968] Murdered. All poems copyright John Horder © 2005 Or merely waiting to awaken?

36 Poetry Broadsheet Continued

TheBeach Master Even though the substance and the words are gone – Thepage that flung you –new bathed, fresh, pyjama-clad, A perfect crescent of blazing golden shingle, – that no-man-unfathomed Vortex... Backdrop of pine trees, scented, But later, in quiet classroom, what relief Baking hot, dry sand and dust in the car park, To find this sonnet – savage, ordered, true Lazy sand-flies woozy in the heat, To what I, also, knew. Transparent clear sea water, moulded, sterilizing and invigorating, Juliet Gowan It is as I remembered it.

Thepebbles crunch and grind against one another under my shoes. Unconditional Love Thesweet salty smell of seaweed blows in on a soft onshore wind Unconditional, parental love does not see the nose out and my spirits soar once more. of joint, or the sagging chin Thebeautiful white horses riding the crests of the waves, Or the ever-increasing foibles of the maturing process shining in the brilliant sunlight. Thechanges in micro-intensity go unnoticed Ah, the suck and pebble rush of the rip-tide surf, Its love sees the aura in the life it gave. Thepounding, pounding of the waves on the shore, HEAL MY SHATTERED BRAIN YOU BEAUTIFUL SEA, Thenthere is performance-based affection. YOU BLOODY BEAUTIFUL SEA, Thesensitivity of the spouse, unforgiving, I mean it now, dammit, I have worshipped you, Remembering every detail AND I WILL WORSHIP YOU AGAIN. Thebattle over what is and what is not required. And the good? R A Lavers Thechance to leave our animal past behind Thislove is not the realm of the natural world It learns to be unconditional Thiswe give to our true love. At School Jethro Dykes Once, in a room for six, I sat alone, Reading, legs swinging on the rim of the hard bed. Thiswas the book: Der Ring des Nibelungen Lovely you might think – inspiring, glorious? Thebook was big, the page white, lines written before a “one-to-one” art therapy session Thetext a torrent of black, telling of goblins, Weird, unmanageable beings, inexplicable motives, like an untidy bundle of unironed clothes impenetrable forests, towering mountains, stacked in a corner upon a kitchen chair fathomless depths, waiting to be ironed of their creases fathomless depths... the future lies unready to wear Sudden, searing, blank terror whirled and clung, unready to use Thepage became hollow; vision tunnelled down, down through the page but what to iron first: Down past the splintered, bare, defining should it be this one – or that? floorboards or do i leave them unironed for another day? hollow, appalling, panic – horror – the Void. Stephen J B Francis Thebook dropped; I groped, choking, clinging for sanity.

“O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man – fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne’er hung there...” You hate, you dread the book you read that night – 37 Dawn desirous without hope, insignificant and indecisive, Light breaks the blackness neither good nor evil, Of another dark night. tagged for dead-heading. It beckons us to another day. Thesunshine slowly creeps Nigel Humphreys Across ploughed fields Like some sort of imaginary film. God, the director, and each scene Is lit perfectly. Paranoid Connections Blue skies gradually lighten To the cold realities of the day. Thinkof anything to do with rejection and the electric In our own dark security, meaning trail is started again. Topped up by drink and cigarettes, We are zooming towards panic. And T.V., Fate finds slight and subtle ways to remind me of the It infiltrates the room. obsession. Overpowering the light bulb, At the tiniest little clue to a paper trail of culpability I Making a mockery of our own shudder with fear. Dark little world. I have become expert in connecting meanings which Slowly it creeps into our room, have dark implications. Another day dawns and the The dark implication – that I birds am guilty of something foul Are calling for food. Loneliness The implication... connected They’reup and about. words and ideas that my brain Cawing, singing and Theempty room, the television chattering, digs out and highlights in red chattering, Four walls lit by a dim light. For your special attention, we Another day dawns. Looking around at objects from the past, are here to persecute. All silent and still, even me writing this exposes Derek Harris They cannot speak to me, me to risk of incriminations Or tell me their stories. is this what it means to be I have stories to tell, paranoid? But no-one to tell them to. Aware of dark secrets and the TheGarden Nursery Café fear of their exposure “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi Derek Harris policeman’s gun ... BANG ch’intrate” - Dante or is it the presence of evil? An abstract disembodied I see myself a virtuous pagan force alive in my mind – the stirring tea in the hem of my life devil ! by way of slowing the clocks. White hot burning terror fizzes in a suffering brain, pins and needles and an indrawn breath. A bright vestibule, the aura of beige you have been busted (by the rejection police!) percolates through trellis divides. Help me avoid this torture of blame, disclosure of secrets, meltdown. Unsleeved in aran, surrounded by Angel Wings Luke Dunn I recount my change – something to do, indulge the nervous tension in my legs.

A young waitress goes round me, Self Harm Haiku greasy head, gripped; my smiles are grappling hooks. She cuts herself so Her spirit will be released When the gates open the air shifts. Pink petals let go. I am not ready for that. Grace McKie So I wait in this wickerworld irritated by half-emptied confiture jars and unwiped trays,

38 Reviews Reviews Reviews... Commissioned by Roy Holland

Barry Tebb – The Fiddler and to ‘place’ those mundane but often becoming a writer. Post-war British his Bow – The Autobiography of a numinous moments that trigger education ushered in a decade of Poet, Sixties Press (2005) an artist’s imaginative growth and grammar school/ secondary modern Reviewed by Mark Floyer become the subject of his lifelong dichotomy, designed to prescribe quest for an unique self identity. an apartheid of professional and arry Tebb’s latest auto- vocational educations on the basis biographical publication is Tebb’s early childhood would appear of a single 11 Plus exam. These subtitled The Autobiography to have been as ‘paradisal’ as could grammar schools were often run on of a Poet, which gives be expected, living in a working-class unimaginative, militaristic ‘Gradgrind’ Bthe reader a firm steer as to the neighbourhood that was materially principles by second-rate teachers distinctive quarry he is pursuing in spartan but blessed with proximity of middle-class extraction who had this particular volume of memoirs. to family and community (a far cry probably pickled themselves in envy This is not just a colourful and exact from today’s sealed off and fractured at failing to secure a post at Eton on reminiscence of growing up during ‘virtual’ reality lifestyle, marooned de-mob from the Services. the austere and closely communal on the Information Highway, working-class living conditions of simultaneously glutted with data and Apart from exposure to a gifted post-war Leeds but a search for starved of connection) and lit up by and necessarily subversive History the defining twists and turns (with his first muse Margaret. teacher, J.M. McNeil, who gave Tebb analogy to Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’) much needed time and support, life in the growth of a poet’s mind and The fractures to this ‘Eden’ occured at school seems to have been an psychological make-up. As he phrases both internally and externally. Re- extended tramp through a cultural it on page 46: “Does knowing derive call of being terrified at watching desert. Nevertheless, Education from being or is it the other way a film called No Room at the Inn became an obvious way forward round?” – a philosophical chestnut about a “gin-drinking” woman who and Tebb’s time spent training to be which Tebb explores through an incarcerates young orphans in a a primary school teacher at City of obsessive re-working of his past with “rat-infested cellar” indicated the Leeds Training College co-incided all the attendant problems of sifting possession of a highly sensitive mind with the arrival of more liberal real memory from screen memory, that would need more sustenance pedagogical practices in the 60’s fact from myth, subjectivity from than could be provided by a life as well as his first sustained spell objectivity. of ordinary routine. Meanwhile of poetry making, culminating in setbacks to the family such as his inclusion in Michael Horovitz’s The success of the book is rooted redundancy and illness, the de- ground-breaking Children of Albion in the early chapters where Tebb stabilising effects of moving location anthology. Ironically, this era in disciplines the ‘adult’ voice to the laced with the corrosively depressive British education (perhaps only margin and focuses on connecting awareness of a shift up (in status? experienced by those, as the adage up to the fresh and uncluttered down in well-being?) from upper goes, “who weren’t there” though sensibility of the young child. This is working-class to lower-middle class, Tebb seems to have been very frame-worked within a very palpable, revealed a world out there which much there) was only a temporary factually correct and (presumably was competitive and utilitarian, idyll and since the seventies British researched) re-call of the geography waiting to pounce on and extinguish education has clawed its way back to and impedimenta of the Leeds of any predilections for individuality a polarisation between examination his childhood. Details such as these that a youngster might possess. results obsessed private schools and are highlighted when describing inner-city ‘sink’ schools deprived the annual holiday train journey to Education, Education, Education! of all vestiges of civic pride and Yarmouth: “Over the seats were pre- This is the other main theme discipline. Much of the latter parts war photographs of Yorkshire coastal running through this volume. Like of the book dwell on Tebb’s ideas resorts in sepia tones, rather like the his hero, Stephen Daedalus from formed on Education forged partially illustrations of H.V. Morton’s timeless Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a through his own experiences travelogues” make for a realism that Young Man”, Tebb needed to widen with schools as a pupil, teacher helps to verify the writer’s search his experiential parameters in and parent, and partially from his order to begin the long process of wide and eclectic reading of ‘key’ 39 contemporary psychoanalysts who 1361-2336 £3.00 UK $7.00 US Riley, which suggests that the work have radically influenced his ideas Reviewed By Roy Birch of Dino Campana is over-burdened on the links between education with fevered imagery. To say such a and psycho/ spiritual health. As he ulsar is a quite beautifully thing about such a brilliant poet is ruefully mentions, the first need for produced quarterly daring indeed. Campana’s work is most schools today is to install a magazine. Sadly, I found indeed filled with fevered imagery, psychotherapy unit - too true! the poetry something of but it is certainly not overburdened. Pa muchness. In fact, without the The latter stages of the book are authors’ names, it would have been The Spoken Word Poets, British concerned more with recent events easy to believe the bulk of the work Library Board (2003), ISBN in his life. Whilst Tebb has been on display had emanated from the 0-7123-0516-5 writing, editing and publishing his same pen. That is not, however, to Reviewed by Kevin Saving Sixties Press imprint at a furious say that I didn’t like it. In fact, there rate, he has also been shuttling was much that I did like. For instance, hen people speak of between Leeds and North London, a wonderful passage in Elizabeth a particular poet’s caring for his brilliant but mentally ill Birchall’s ‘Role Reversal‘: ‘I fancy/ An ‘voice’, they appear son Isaiah and ex-wife poet Brenda aeon or two in black underwear, to have in mind Williams, fighting battles against an orgy/ with a hundred swarthy Wsome charateristic combination of NHS bureaucracy to get the right Heathcliffs’. This from ‘The Course’ syntax, form, vocabulary, subject service and support on their behalf. by Duncan Fraser: ‘He sought out matter and revealed philosophy – a There is a very moving section of the soft discourse of the wind/ in the kind of idiosyncratic literary modus the book which recounts the sudden tree-tops. This gave him a feeling/ operandi. But, of course, there is decline into mania of Brenda’s father of peace, he said./ He saw that that another ‘voice’ which speaks more Cyril and one is made very aware word unsettled me’. The climax to directly to the ear, which affords of the fragility of most of our lives, ‘Suicidal Attention Seeker’ by Chris some acquaintance with its owner’s teetering precariously on the edge Kornacki: ‘hanging up/ the phone/ physicality, cultural exposure, even behind seemingly safe front doors. to call/ another ambulance/ felt no psyche. different/ from ordering/ a pizza’. Overall, this latest contribution to This recent release, a compilation Tebb’s autobiographical oeuvre is a My favourites in this particular of early recordings by many of the brave and wide-ranging achievement. collection are ‘The Great Love’ great figures of English Literature (all Apart from the pedantic check by Kate Edwards – ‘They met at a born during the nineteenth century for typo errors and minor lapses gallery. Again, in a garden open to and all reading from their own work) in sentencing sequence that a the public,/ eventually at a party makes available to the interested commercial publishing house would given by an accountant….they made layperson archival material which run the script through, I don’t see love on top of a goosedown duvet…. previously might have been obscurely what holds it off from squaring He bought her oils and perfumes inaccessible or entirely unsuspected. up in the same company as other and silken bras….They shopped at recent mini-masterpieces in the Sainsbury’s….They argued about The collection opens with an 1890 genre such as Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood. the washing up….He took up golf recording of Alfred, Lord Tennyson Furthermore, one senses that Tebb again….they lay apart beneath the declaiming sonorously (if sometimes hasn’t finished with this material - goosedown duvet..One morning she unintelligibly due to poor sound more poems, prose and meditations packed her bags and left,/ leaving quality) his ‘Charge of the Light are surely in the pipeline from a a note which said nothing about Brigade’, and showing as well that writer still engaged in the creative their great love’; and Ivan Wallace’s there are few ‘ps’ or ‘bs’ in the text. processes of establishing his authentic Homage to the ‘Older Woman’. One commentator, Montague Eliot, voice. And just in case we take him ‘“You look very young for your age,” later spoke of being put off poetry too seriously, the book ends on a I said….. “Can I ask, how do you for life when, as a child and seated note of ‘nudge nudge, wink wink’ explain it?”….”embalming fluid,” she in the front row of a Tennysonian double entendre in which another said’. recital, he and the other children ‘muse’ accuses Tebb of having less “were regaled with a shower of than honourable intentions: “Well, Middle-of-the-road, uniform, safe. spittle”. it’s not all but it’s enough to be going Obviously, Pulsar was not produced on with, or off with...” with me in mind. But possessed This is followed by Robert Browning, of sufficient charm to make it caught in the year of his death from Pulsar, Poems from Ligden Poetry worthwhile. I enjoyed reading it but bronchitis (1889), by now well into Society, September 2005, Edition I wish it were a little more daring. his mid-seventies but sounding 3/05 (43), Editor: David Pike, ISSN Except for the review by Ingrid remarkably chipper. He seems the

40 more likeable too, for first fluffing be found here, if you’ve a taste for professional backgrounds. But be his lines and then apologising with such things, akin to finding a virtual- it Dickie Dorset the depressive an “I’m sorry but I can’t remember reality Scheherazade in your living body builder, or head psychiatrist Dr me own verses!” Sir Henry Newbolt room, telling her tales. For all that, Ramsbottom, all seven characters recites ‘Vital Lampada’ like the these are not, for the most part, are as mad as one another. All have archetypal product of a plummy polished performances – certainly an equal amount of hang-ups. parsonage, inciting us to ‘play up, not by actors with extensive training play up and play the gime’. In later in intonation, pitch and the strategic Another story, Parrot, is a look at life he’d come to dislike this, his best use of pause. human life through the eyes of a known poem. parrot in a cage. What the parrot What this collection does bring us sees is quite disturbing. Days By We can catch William Butler Yeats is the immediacy of some of the The Sea is a humorous look at discussing and then reading his ‘Lake world’s greatest writers speaking sheltered accommodation and some Isle of Innesfree’, accent not in the some of the world’s greatest lines, of the people who live in it. Some least Oirish, which is unsurprising using whatever wit and nature of the other stories have a darker when we know that between the lent them. Not necessarily the edge to them, relating to Kevin’s ages of two and 16 he was brought finest interpretations available, but struggle with ill health. For example, up largely in Hammersmith. We can assuredly, the definitive ones. in Alive the main character dies eavesdrop on a strangely anonymous and is thrown into a disorientating Rudyard Kipling, perhaps in 1921 still Kevin Coyne – That Old afterlife that he struggles to get used guiltily grieving his son, John, whom Suburban Angst, Kevin Coyne to. Some of the characters in the he’d encouraged into enlisting, Books (2005), £9.99 + £1.20 book have disabilities that make under-age and fatally, during the First p&p, tonydonaghey@kevincoyn them feel like outsiders. In some World War. We catch Laurence ebooks.co/ www.Kevincoyne.de stories such as Rabbit Teeth and Alan’s (‘age shall not weary them nor the Reviewed by Frank Bangay Search For True Love, there’s a sense years condemn’) Binyon sounding of tragedy. However, you get the half-asleep. Eventually, with Walter evin Coyne is probably feeling that these people can laugh de la Mare, we hear the first fully best known in England for at themselves. competent recitation: rich, cultivated a series of fine records voice, well-modulated tones. Much that he made on the That Old Suburban Angst also contains how we feel a poet should sound. KVirgin label in the 1970s. However, some of Kevin’s poems. ‘To A Sibling’ right up until his sad death from lung is dedicated to his brother Arthur. We hear Robert Frost with miles to fibrosis last December, he carried ‘On The Riverbank’ finds Kevin in go before he sleeps, workmanlike and on making interesting records. He a reflective mood: ‘In the dusk in with a pleasant, New England twang; also pursued separate careers as a pyjamas,/ Feeling spiritual./ Watching Alfred Noyes, putting his heart into painter and as a writer. His later the waters for mallard,/ Yearning to ‘The Highwayman’; John Masefield in career started with the publication wash the past away’. 1941, by now every inch the lettered of The Party Dress in 1990. That Old poet laureate, no longer the waif Suburban Angst is Kevin’s first book I won’t spoil things by telling you who’d run away to sea. We hear Ezra to be published in English since more about this book. Discover it for Pound - a quite dotty performance, Showbusiness in 1993. Subsequent yourself. You won’t be disappointed. this, featuring a cod-Scottish brogue, books were translated into German. booming balderdash and comic self- Kevin made Germany his home in [Visit www.lifeandliving.net for accompaniment on the timpani. We 1985. Sadly, Kevin passed away before Frank Bangay’s interview with hear Siegfried Sassoon, very much the book was published. Kevin Coyne] the gentleman-player, at ease with his material, if not yet his memories. And Like the title That Old Suburban Angst Marianne Hieb – Inner Journeying we hear the old mandarin himself, suggests, a number of the stories are Through Art Journaling, Jessica Thomas Stearns Eliot, the merest set in a troubled but often surreal Kingsley Publishers, £14-99. ISBN inflection of the trans-Atlantic about version of suburbia. The narrator 1-84310-794-5 his delivery – dry, but engagingly in the title story drops his trousers Reviewed by Roy Holland disinclined to treat ‘The Love-Song in public. After a two week spell in of J. Prufrock’ too portentously. an open prison near Biggleswade, he his book gives practical finds himself ostracised by all around. instruction in recording These are some of the highlights on He is left trying to understand your feelings from day to an impressively compiled CD, which the reason for his behaviour. Life day in a visual diary with can be resourced via your local Story features seven different Twords as a supplement and aide- library. There is a certain magic to characters, four of whom are from memoir. This process is regarded

41 as a spiritual practice, almost a form theatre creatively builds on their Next issue a major review of of prayer, and is geared to people famous heritage of mime, humour the Poetry Olympics POT! ‘who are encountering loss, grief, and emotion immortalised in anthology, edited by Michael resistance, or discernment issues’ silent movies in the 20s, bringing a Horovitz... as a therapeutic tool. Marianne contemporary twist to the tradition Hieb also deals with the difficulty of of burlesque. In the programme avoiding intellectual constraints to notes David Gothard places the spontaneous creativity. performance in a direct line from Fellini’s Clowns and Franca Rame and She does give a welcome intellectual Dario Fo. framework in terms of design theory, and her definitions of marks, The mixture of surrealism and line, shape, texture, form and colour calmness gives just the right use a simple language and are therapeutic mix for an enjoyable beautifully clear. The chapter on spectacle. In the very first scene Introducing... ‘The Principles of Design and the Aurelia’s legs and arms emerge Blanche Donnery Creative Process’ contains sections from within a chest of drawers. on balance, movement, rhythm, The audience is at once perplexed our new Administrator contrast, emphasis, pattern and unity and amused by her dexterity, for ay I take this opportunity to as an introduction to forgetting example lighting a cigarette with introduce myself to Poetry and remembering, compassion, her feet coming out of the bottom ExpresM s readers and contributors befriending the creative process drawer! Later in the performance and the Survivors community as a and faceted prayer, which she calls her face peeks out from the red whole. Survivors’ Poetry needed ‘a blank openness into which you curtain at various heights as she an Administrator and lucky me got invite the voice of the Holy’. balances on the trapeze behind. She the post. creates moods with an absolute Hieb suggests using the drawing minimum of props. ’ve joined the organisation or modelling, gazing and writing of at a dramatic juncture with art-journaling for ongoing devotion Victoria Thierree Chaplin’s routine disinvestmentI looming and a and organic growth. The only grew out of Le Cirque Imaginaire and fight in hand. All the staff at SP drawback of the book is the limited took off in Paris at the end of the have made me very welcome and number of practical examples with seventies. Her children were brought regularly express appreciation for interpretation. As I understand it, up in the circus environment and her my contribution, which is lovely and the art-journaling could be practised husband, Jean-Baptists Thierree, was I thank them all greatly. with a therapist or on one’s own the model for their clowning. In this for personal satisfaction. It is good production Aurelia is supported by s this is a campaign issue it to find a therapy which is not too the dancer Timothy Harling. takes the heat off me from prescriptive and which uses both writingA witty and lyrical riposte artwork and writing. The book, When I go to dance or circus which is a relief as Administrators unlike many of this publisher’s art performances, I often feel it is best to are not known for their devastating therapy studies, is a genuine teach- get in touch with my own body first stand up. Therefore, I sincerely yourself guide. by doing yoga or exercises shortly hope that for all the survivors out beforehand. Then I can experience there who feel strongly about ACE’s Aurelia’s Oratorio created by the show as an extension of my own decision to disinvest, that they write Victoria Thierree Chaplin with space and enter into the stretching not only to Sarah Weir at ACE, but Aurelia Thieree, at the Gardner of my feelings. The performance has also to their local MP and make as Arts Centre, University of Sussex, a healing function. But for Aurelia’s many people as possible aware of Brighton, as part of the Brighton Oratorio I had no such preparation, the vital work Survivors does and Festival in May 2005 and I felt the wit, the empathy and the its need in the community. Reviewed by Roy Holland bravado took me right out of myself. Do look out for Aurelia Thierree’s t is a rare privilege to work for such a unique organisation that urelia’s Oratorio is future productions and if you get I devised and directed the chance to see Aurelia’s Oratorio touches marginalised individuals by Charlie Chaplin’s then I would highly recommend in a such a personal and inspiring daughter, Victoria, and it. The Brighton Festival is to be way. May it long continue. congratulated on its choice. Aenacted by his granddaughter Blanche Aurelia. This visually stunning and musically seductive piece of

42 Workshops Razz

nd so we come to the For our final workshop of the After we had done Razz’s exercise end of yet another year we are planning a visit to the and read back our poems in the hostile year. War in Iraq, Museum of London. In the New garden, I gave out 12 hand-outs bombs in London, the year, we have plans for more for the second part. The writing Athreat of disinvestment hanging over surprise visits alongside regular exercise was about finding our muse, Survivors’ Poetry’s head. Famine, sessions at the Bickerton Rd office using three Pre-Raphaelite paintings flood and Geri Halliwell, as I said and Swiss Cottage library. If you as inspiration: Ophelia, The Lady of once in a poem. But the workshops are interested in joining us, you will Shallot and Lament for Icarus. It was have chugged along in a creative and be very welcome. Meanwhile, have good to focus on one of three, as stimulating fashion. We’ve moved a great Christmas, Survive into the the paintings were full of colour and around quite a bit this year. There New Year and pay us a visit! detail, crammed into the gallery as was the physical move of the whole they were. There was a slight danger office from the Diorama to the Upcoming Workshops of sensory overload. I asked them new offices in Archway. We’ve held January - March 2006 to consider in their own experience quite a few workshops there since someone who had died young, or the move, mostly feedback and Bickerton Rd been taken from them too soon, and performance ones. Tuesday 10 January, 7.30pm perhaps someone who still remained Feedback at the back of their mind as a kind of A quick refresher for anyone unfamil- Museum art gallery (venue tba) inspiration. iar with the terminology. Feedback Saturday 21 January, 2pm workshops are a space for people to Writing I was concerned that perhaps bring their unfinished pieces, so that Bickerton Rd I hadn’t been clear enough, but more than one pair of eyes can take Tuesday 7 February, 2006, 7.30pm wandering through the gallery, I a look and “feedback” to the partici- Performance found the writers all busy. After pant, in a friendly and constructive Swiss Cottage about 25 minutes we went outside way, ideas to strengthen and tighten Saturday 11 February, 2pm to read back, sitting under a strange the poem and make it more effec- Writing sculpture of a gong with a face. It was tive. Of course, all feedback is op- Swiss Cottage a wonderful turn-out, but because tional. Performance workshops give Saturday 25 February, 2006 2pm not everyone there attends regularly, people the opportunity to hone the Writing we had a bit of trouble tracking them delivery of their poems, to learn Bickerton Rd down for their poems. So, here are breathing techniques and recently Tuesday 7 March, 7.30pm four poems from the workshop, only we have combined this with turn- Feedback a sample of the good work we did ing up for the monthly open mike Swiss Cottage that day. I recall Kate and Sue both sessions, run by Xochitl at the Saturday 11 March, 2pm saying they’d been unwilling to write Poetry Café in Betterton St. Writing about something so personal, but in (second Thursday of each month). Museum art gallery (venue tba) the end were glad they had done it. Saturday 25 March, 2pm On top of this we’ve managed Writing writing workshops at Swiss Cottage library; poetry picnics on Hampstead Untitled Heath; a visit to the Science Gail Campbell Museum, the Natural History Thecandlelight hovers Museum and Tate Britain; we took SP Tate Britain workshop On your skin wing in the Wetland Centre in Barnes; Paper thin ne fine Saturday and visited Keats’ House and wrote Covering the bones afternoon a few weeks about the experience. For myself, I back, the Survivors’ think a lot of trust and camaraderie Seated on the bus Poetry workshop was has built up in the nucleus of the Suddenly immersed held at the Tate Britain. It was to group. As the bond has grow O In a ceaseless cauldron be the first workshop where I was stronger, the numbers of participants Of tears facilitating, so I was very nervous. has built up. 43 To a shapeless present TheLady of Shallot Amorphous time-zones Her river of flowing life stopped barren. I feel It rushed on the desert of death, turned red Diminshed by And seeped through sand. Your loss Tho’your Her river of flowing life crashed. Passing was a release Thevessel that carried her, abruptly ruptured by Rocks. Vera Kryshek Her heart bled, her head fell back. She cried through crimson lips. Her grail cup cracked and the elixir seeped!

Stephen Her river of flowing life mashed She was so young in the spring of life, No golden boat or dawn But something ate beneath the beauty mask. To ferry you across the river Styx. Her life became a nasty task! No myth to make your death significant Wine soaked pills washed down her throat – Just chemo, hair loss and the faith of Jehovah witnesses I loved the way you spat your truth Her boat lost course and it crashed Into their faces As your world collapsed Her hair swept back she reached aghast and was Caved in around you. Swept up by swallow’s wings to heaven’s light! I loved the way you tore up the oncologist’s office When he told you you had relapsed; And I wonder what made her crave the night? Thatthe chemotherapy wouldn’t help you anymore. Nigel J A McHugh You were eight and a half

When you died the undertaker Pumped you full of embalming fluid After The Lady of Shallot Leftyou in a room that had no refrigeration BIG MISTAKE! She’s dressed like a hippy YOUR BODY REACTED TO THE CHEMICALS! Floating in a boat On a lake But you were no Icarus having struggled for the sun In the early morning haze. You’d faced no Medusa who could turn you into stone Her boyfriend is out cold at the camp Unless it was your mum! Theirnighttime party ran on for days.

On the phone I was told She’s all alone in the cold morning light It was best I didn’t see you Hung-over and stoned You weren’t a pretty sight Wanting to move away

You had to be buried in a man-sized coffin Thebig estate has this large lake I never really got to say goodbye And she tries to paddle With an old stick she found. Your grave had a stone, a genie and a colourful Spinning wheel on it She’s leaving the Sixties behind Vandals came and smashed the graves to pieces Sailing into day and reality A baby leaps in her womb But they weren’t Giants dreaming of Valhalla And she heads into the seventies But Portsmouth yobs dreaming Into the new dawn. Of cans of stella Paulsgrove toughs. Gail Campbell

Razz

44 Events Xochitl Tuck

Survivors’ Poetry & Music Open Mics! The Salisbury Pub 1 Grand Parade, Green Lanes, London N4 (Between Manor House/Turnpike Lane) 4th Thursday of every month, 9pm Admission Free Floorspots: 10 minutes each Buses: 29, 141, 341 Tube: Manor House/Turnpike Lane

No Margins – Survivors’ Poetry at the Café Rustique 142 Fortess Road, NW5 Last Saturday of every month (bar Dec), 8pm Admission: £1.50 Floorspots welcome Tube: Tufnell Park Buses: 4 & 134

Saturday 31 January 2006

Survivors’ Poetry Open Mic at The PoetryCafé The Poetry Café 22 Betterton Street, London WC2 (between Drury Lane and Endell Street) Second Thursday of every month, 8pm – 11pm Latte Laureates: Cristina Viti, David Kessel and friend taking pre- Admission: £2.00 reading refreshments (top), David Floorspots: £1.00 Kessel (above left), Cristina Viti (above Tube: Covent Garden right), John O’Donoghue (left), Norrin Radd brandishing guitar (below), and the return of Mr Kessel (below right), The Poetry Cafe, Oct/Nov 2005

45 P.S. S.P. Letters, Emails, Vox Pops, Soap Box...... thankyou to you last issue was a daunting task, Self Harm Haiku is on page 38. and everyone at and I think he rose to the occasion Congratulations. I’ve only just Survivors’ Poetry. I received the brilliantly, in his inimitable style. noticed Sally’s poem On The Edge latest issue with my story plus Nevertheless, I’m sure you’ll find was entered twice in the last issue. poem included and was absolutely his introduction to this issue lays Oops! I’m sure she’ll accept my thrilled and I must also say what a more emphasis on what Survivors’ apologies for repeating her poem! A great job you have done on putting members can do by way of practical genuine error – despite the poem’s “the magazine together keep up the opposition to the disinvestment: quality. Oh, she must have burning great work... sign up to our Write to Survive ears, here comes Sally now... Vicki Hartman, Bognor Regis Campaign via our website at www. survivorspoetry.com which will be What can I say? I’ve been Your attractively-produced directly forwarded to ACE. on cloud nine since receiving my Poetry Express (Autumn 2OO5) has copies of PE 22 and finding two indefatigable “cutting edge” to it. Many thanks for Poetry of my poems – ‘Invisible’ and John Horder Express received this month ‘On the Edge’ inside. I blinked, – wonderful! I’m enjoying reading it then gasped, then cried! – with Brilliant edition received very much. happiness I must add. Thank you today, Alan!! So much good stuff in Anne-Margaret Moy, Hove so much. It really was fantastic it and so professionally produced. to be in print in a journal with I’m proud to be included. Many, ...the review was wonderful which I feel so much empathy. I many thanks. Nice to be able – really thoughtful and generous am thrilled to be sitting alongside to appear in such a prestigious – thank you! I thought Simon’s such fantastic poets and poetry! publication. editorial too was brilliant – I hope All the poems are wonderful, and Nigel Humphreys, Aberyswtyth the right people read it. some have particularly moved me Victoria Field, Cornwall (far too many to mention) to name I saw yesterday at my final but a few: ‘A Mirror in Pieces’ by session at the Big Issue (the funding I really appreciated the Zachariah Rush; ‘Autumn Haiku’ has been cut for the writing group review of my pamphlet Going Back by Hannah Inglis’; ‘Untitled’ (‘I am - very sad after it has been going 8 (Firewater Press) in PE 21, however, a portrait...’) by Roy Birch; ‘New years) a copy of Poetry Express with the typesetting computer spelt Arrival’ by Paula Brown; ‘Untitled’ my article in it. Martin and Barry my name Grossman, it is actually (‘my mother told me’) by Roy certainly enjoyed seeing their pieces Crossman. Holland; ‘After the Silent Running’ in print... Clare Crossman, Herts by Maureen Oliver; ‘The Water Dominique De-Light, Brighton Shallows’ and ‘The Blackboard’ Thecomputer sincerely apologises by Alan Morrison. I seem to have Our sympathies Dominique – it for the error Clare. exceeded ‘a few’; sorry! There are seems this Arts holocaust is blitzing just so many I love... the whole nation presently. Is no one What an excellent edition, a ...On a completely different safe from disinvestment? tour de force of human experience, note – I am horrified! How can sometimes disturbing! At last I ACE even contemplate disinvesting Very sorry to hear about got my name printed between Survivors’ Poetry? I see it as a the Arts Council’s looming your pages in Issue 22 of PE, even life-line, a voice, a friend. Too often disinvestment. Dr Jenner’s editorial if it was only on your feedback people with mental health issues was – rightly – long on indignation, comments page. One day I will are marginalized, isolated and but short on what needs to be progress to the Poetry Broadsheet. forgotten...Keep taking the pills... done in the way of practical We survivors need ambition to Get some therapy....Keep away opposition. ...Liked ‘The Water keep going. How come Sally until you are ‘better’... This thread Shallows’ (the issue’s second best Richards gets her poem ‘On The of discriminationm, ignorance and poem, I thought, after my own ‘Dis- Edge’ published twice? Just one basic lack of respect runs through Illusionment’!!!). By the way, many once would be nice (only joking). most of society. Yet so many people thanks as Broadsheet curtain-raiser. Grace McKie, Stafford who have these difficulties are the Kevin Saving, Buckinghamshire most brilliant, creative, talented, Well Grace, you’ll be pleased to decent, hard working (when able) Thanksfor your support Kevin. see that you have finally made the people you could find. Oops a The intro Simon had to undertake Poetry Broadsheet – your powerful touch of ‘soap box’ there. Now 46 once again we are to possibly lose something so valuable for so many. As I write I am planning Some Contributors to find out about the Petition and will be adding my name to the list Frank Bangay is one of the founder not reside in Hackney as I said last with gusto!!! Thank you again for members of SP. He is a poet and issue, but sunny Whitechapel - Ed.] all your work at Poetry Express. I’m songwriter who has regularly keeping everything crossed. broadcast on Resonance fm. Vera Kryshek lives in Queens Park Sally Richards, Shropshire in London and regularly attends SP Leon Brown was born in 1973. He workshops. Well Sally, so are we, and thank you works as a TEFL Teacher in Portugal. for such an enthusiastic letter. See He used to be part of the Highgate Lucía Moral Baena was born in my reply to Kevin Saving for what Poets group. He is currently working 1978 in Granada, Andalucia, Spain. you can do support us. on a novel. A trained translator, she lives in Brighton and is currently working ...am just so thrilled you Gail Campbell is one of the SP on a collection of Spanish poet Juan included two of my poems ‘Ipso National Mentoring Scheme Ramón Jiménez for Survivors’ Press. Facto’ and ‘Postcard’ in PE 22, ‘mentees’ and her pamphlet will be For freelance commissions please thank you it means so much – also appearing early next year. contact [email protected]. very thrilled to see two of Sally Richards’ poems in same issue and Peter H Donnelly is 38 and from Paul Murphy was born in Belfast, very moved by so many of the Kent. He is a survivor of domestic 1965. A stint as writer-in-residence poems – especially Sally Richards’ and psychiatric abuse. at the Albert-Ludwig Universitat, ‘On the Edge’, Hannah Inglis’ ‘How Germany. Poetry, criticism and travel poems start’, Martin Edwards’ Luke Dunn studied Physics briefly writings published internationally. ‘Dragon,Flower’, Hermann Hesse’s at university but enjoys using the Publications include, criticism: TS ‘Psychology’, Roy Birch’s ‘Untitled’, English Language. When he is ill he Eliot’s Post-Modernist Complaint Alan Morrison’s ‘The Blackboard’, thinks all sorts of strange things. He (Postpressed, Australia); and poetry: Sarah C. Smith’s ‘Half-Way Down lives in Ramsgate and goes shrimping The New Life (Lapwing Press), In the the Glass’, and Alan Collins’ two sometimes. Luxembourg Gardens (University of vignettes – ACE are SO WRONG!!! Salzburg Press, Austria). – will sign petition. Derek Harris is a survivor of severe Steve Mann, via email depression. He lives in Weston- John O’Donoghue has contributed Super-Mare. poems, essays, articles and reviews Many thanks for PE 22 and to The Observer, The TES, PN Review, for the generous cover you gave John Horder has been publishing Acumen and Ambit. Letter to Lord to Hippopotamus Press books; it poetry and journalism since the Rochester was published by Waterloo is much appreciated, I would ask early Sixties. A lifelong friend of Press in November 2004. you to convey my thanks to the Stevie Smith, he edited Greville reviewers concerned. I am sorry Press’s pamphlet Stevie for the 2002 Dave Russell is a songwriter and to learn of your funding crisis. I SP Stevie Smith event. His Collected poet who has broadcast his music have never understood how Poems will be coming out from The frequently on Resonance fm and is a these things work, as for most of Menard Press in 2007. veteran SP performer at The Poetry Hippopotamus’ history, it failed to Cafe. He is mentor to Kate Evans. secure any grants. How it survived Spencer Jeffery is from New from sales alone is still a bit of a Zealand. He spent three years living Kevin Saving is a regular contributor mystery. I wish you well in your in Brighton. Previously appeared in to PE. He lives and writes in Winslow, confrontation with ACE. There’s an Anchor Books anthology in 1998. Buckinghamshire. nothing much I can do from down His illustrated children’s book, Little here in Somerset. Ben’s Big Time, is published by Trafford, Jo Silver is a regular performer at SP’s Roland John, Hippopotamus Press available from [email protected] Poetry Cafe events. She is currently co-ordinating poetry, music and play Thanks sincerely for your support David Kessel is a member of workshops at Clusters drop-in in Roland. But you can add your voice Outsider Poets, who perform every Wallington. to our Write to Survive petition last Wednesday of the month at the by logging on to our website down George Tavern. His poetry volume, John Weedon is a long-standing SP there in Somerset. Hungering, is forthcoming from painter and poet, currently working Survivors’ Press. [Note: David does on a series of SP postcards. ” 47 Survivors’ Classifieds

Centrewww.funnybone.co.uk Stage SLAMMERS 2nd Tuday 8pm Doors 7.30pm CENTRE STAGE CLUB Paul Murphy 14 QUEENS RD, WESTBOURNE BH2 6BE Artist THE FRESHEST, MOST INTOXICATING POETRY PERFORMANCE IN TOWN! original paintings TWO POUNDS TO PERFORM OR ENJOY! BAR AVAILABLE affordable prices PAULA BROWN 07833 912927 for full catalogue email DAVE BROWN 07913 029527 www.thepeoplespoet.com [email protected] [email protected] Don’t let 2006 be doomsyear for Survivors’ Poetry Add your voice to Roland John David Kessel Edna O’Brien Write to Survive Andrew Motion Moniza Alvi Peter Finch Paul Murphy Alan Bennett Barbara Follett MP Jeremy Reed Paula Brown Robin Ford John Rety Ralph Brown John Hegley Anne Rouse Peter Campbell Brian Hinton Penelope Shuttle Debjani Chatterjee Danielle Hope Iain Sinclair Kevin Crossley-Holland Michael Horovitz Barry Tebb Victoria Field John Horder Cristina Viti send your message straight to ACE via...

And don’t forget!!! the Survivors’ Poetry New Year Bash featuring John Hegley Ralph Brown (Danny in Withnail and I) Debjani Chatterjee and many more... Wednesday 22 February 7.30pm George Bernard Shaw theatre RADA