Issue 2 – Autumn/Winter 2014
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ISSN 2050-4020 n g l e A Journal of Poetry in English Volume 3 – Issue 2 – Autumn/Winter 2014 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 _______________________________________________________________________________________ Cover photo, ‘Sunset through hag stone on Cromer beach’, by Amy Wiseman © 2014, reproduced with her kind permission. Endpapers, ‘Autumn’ and ‘Passionflower’, by Philip Quinlan. Angle is edited by Ann Drysdale (UK), Peter Bloxsom (AUS), and Philip Quinlan (UK), and published in the UK by Philip Quinlan. [email protected] www.anglepoetry.co.uk ISSN 2050-4020 Copyright © 2014 Ann Drysdale, Peter Bloxsom, Philip Quinlan, and authors as indicated. All rights reserved. This electronic journal may be freely circulated only in its entirety. No part of this journal may be copied, stored, retrieved or republished by any means. 4 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 _______________________________________________________________________________________ Contents Editorials 8 Poetry - Part One Lesley Quayle Brigitte Is Dancing 12 Ernest Slyman Reading in a Used Bookstore 12 Annette Volfing Beached 13 Jason Barry Driftwood 14 David Hathwell Shipwreck 15 J. B. Mulligan Notes to Everybody 16 Lazarus at the Wall 16 C. B. Anderson Escrow 17 Elise Hempel I Know Now Heaven 17 Before the Ablation 18 Robert Griffith Green Heaven 18 The Snowstorm 19 To Do 19 Jerome Betts Passing the Churchyard, 31st October 20 Karen Kelsay A Walk through Blenheim 20 Crossing the Divide 21 Janet Kenny Go Gently 21 C. P. Nield An Elegy for Rose 22 The Promise 22 The Jester and Jerusalem 23 Alan Wickes Sacra Converzione 23 Ray Miller Bad Faith 24 Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas Sonnet of Unrest 24 Matt Quinn First They Came for the Sonnets 25 Andrea DeAngelis Daddy Longlegs 27 Sandy Hiortdahl Wizardry 27 CSX 27 Ailsa Holland The Lake 28 Rosemary Badcoe On the Movements of Bodies 29 Rosanna Riches Meteorology 29 Rick Mullin Vale of Telephones 30 Gare Montparnasse 30 Tim Love Musée des Beaux Arts 31 The Poetry Channel 31 David Callin The Amorous Musician 32 The Norwich Beggar 32 Catherine Chandler Song of Praise 33 5 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 _______________________________________________________________________________________ Reviews David Davis Norman Ball, Serpentrope 34 Ann Drysdale Anna M. Evans, Sisters and Courtesans 38 Philip Quinlan Marybeth Rua-Larsen, Nothing In-Between 40 Arsy-Versy: Ekphrastic Supplement (separate contents page within) 44½ Poetry - Part Two Will Kemp Pheasant 45 Planting 45 Heaven 46 Stephen Giles Tutor 46 Jo Bell Almagest Disorder 47 Miracles 48 Jane Røken Doocot Paradise Blues 48 Ode to a Tapeworm 49 All Things Change, Nothing Perishes 50 Sean Elliott Re-watching Films 50 Ed Shacklee The Inkling 51 The Camel 51 The Jackalope 51 Richard Meyer The Mongrel 52 Kevin Casey The Office Scarecrow 52 The Snapping Turtle 53 Richard Meyer Night Lights 53 Annie Fisher A Tin of Tautology 54 Emily Dickinson’s Garage Rant 54 Kim Bridgford Well, Pinch My Toes and Call Me a Jelly Doughnut 54 David Hathwell Sure Thing 55 Will Cordeiro Doll 55 Garrett Biggs Playtime 56 Pluralism 56 Lou King The Flood of the Nile 57 Caleb Tankersley Left Eye 57 Alexandra VanDehey Motherland 58 Peleg Held Interval 58 In the Circle of the Golden Tortoise Beetle 59 Richard Epstein Algernon Swinburne Dreams of Going Out 59 The Poet Protection Program 60 Megan Grumbling Residence 61 Terese Coe Geomagnetics 62 Configuration 63 Peter Richards Logistics 63 Silenzio Onomatopeico 64 6 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 _______________________________________________________________________________________ Jason Barry Intuition 64 Michael Hallock Garden Life 65 Richard Meyer The Go-Around 65 Michael Hallock ‘Ron and His Father Planting Trees and Shrubs’ 66 Richard Meyer Disputation 66 David W. Landrum Washing the Pot 67 Wrestling with an Angel 67 Tan Yunxian (1461-1554) 68 Heidi Czerwiec Rachel 69 Contributor Biographies and Previous Publications 74 7 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 _______________________________________________________________________________________ Editorial Not Kevin’s Fault Nothing bonds like language. The cant of thieves, the backslang of schoolboys, the newspeak of managerial teams, the ever-changing adaptations of old words by young people eager to exclude the unhip. It’s all cool, demonstrably sick but hardly amazeballs. One of the best ways of holding a coterie together (other than a group hug, the idea of which chills me to the bone) is to develop a jargon that thrives like Leylandii, keeping us in and them out. When I was working with undergraduates I enjoyed cherishing them through the first few weeks. I asked them to share their hopes and misgivings. Many of them were genuinely afraid of what this ‘creative’ element of their course might expect of them. They were unsure of their ability to write spontaneously, worried that they might not ‘get it right’. This was because they had arrived in my class by clambering up a ladder of examinations that required them to put set texts into a killing-bottle and dissect them according to the received wisdom. They were expert in the production of academic essays in which they demonstrated their grasp of literature without ever descending to the first person singular. They put me in mind of battery hens. They were superb at producing results but were uneasy with the freedom of doing so on their own terms. It delighted me let them out and encourage their experimental foraging, from the first tentative scratches to the eventual uninhibited rolling in the dust, feet quivering aloft in al fresco ecstasy. The special language formed along the way. One of the things we had to establish afresh each time was how we were going to handle group criticism. Some groups liked the idea of declaring the writer dead so they could talk about the work as they had done with Dostoevsky. I was uneasy with this. Then it was proposed that the writer should live (and so have a voice in the discussion) but that the work be credited to another, whose name was decided by means of a hilarious brainstorm that left everyone grinning like conspiratorial pranksters. All work discussed in seminars was thenceforth deemed to have been submitted by Kevin. One situation arose often. Kevin would use words that, in his opinion, conveyed his meaning but others would interpret differently or address a subject in a way that others found objectionable, bringing their own baggage into the equation when discussing the piece and its effect on them. We agreed that, although it would have not been admissible in a ‘A’ level essay, it was a legitimate ingredient in forming a personal relationship with the work under discussion. It was valid and real, but, as one of the students pointed out, ‘not Kevin’s fault’. 8 Angle – Autumn/Winter 2014 _______________________________________________________________________________________ It stuck. The NKF became an element in the discussions. Unlike an infelicity of grammar or awkwardness of expression, it had to be worked through separately or set aside. It was not always a negative; sometimes an individual Gräfenberg spot would be gently touched by a combination of words that made a special relationship between Kevin and his reader. Most often it was a word or phrase that was perfectly legitimate in Kevin’s context but was unfamiliar to his reader and produced a frisson of resentment—‘who’d get that?’ or ‘why couldn’t he write it so I would understand?’ Should we always, immediately, understand? Is it incumbent upon Kevin to make sure not to write something we don’t understand? I think not. Since there is no way Kevin can see into my mind (heavens forfend!) the poor sod is on a hiding to nothing if I so insist. Poetry should make us want to explore. If the poem is interesting enough, we will seek enlightenment as to what Kevin may have ‘meant’ and the quest will feed our heads and add to our baggage. I stubbornly refuse to be drawn into the wrangles over individual poets, let alone individual poems, as to whether they are ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The concept is meaningless to me. I do not have the academic portmanteau from which to draw out the critical language, like the flags of all nations from a prestidigitator’s pocket. I have great respect for those who do, but to me their prose is often as impenetrable as anything Kevin can produce, even on acid. Once upon a time I suffered at the hands of a reviewer who took issue with me, gently at first, over metaphors and abstractions and then homed in on one word—paradiddle— which he said had turned him against the whole collection, forever. He repeated it several times even though he had killed it stone-dead with his first shot, just to make sure, kicking at it like a drowned rat in a gutter. After the browbeating came the breast-beating. At first I wanted to howl—could he not see how it worked in the context, could he not hear how only a perfect proceleusmatic would answer the need of the established scansion? Then I began to wonder if it were truly a grievous fault. I shushed my residual whimpers by deciding that it was, after all, only an NKF. That poor John had clearly been savaged by a paradiddle in childhood, or even by a taradiddle with which he was probably confusing it, like a Snark with a Boojum. This soothed like Mrs.Winslow’s syrup, although I have kept the review on a forgettery stick and now and then I show it to people like a battle-scar or a failed tattoo. Kevin must be true, first and foremost, to himself. So, when I write, I will see my own paradiddle and raise me a ratamacue and when I read, I will be happy to accept that the pleasing buzz I pick up from another’s erotic poem may be coming from the triggered dildo in my own handbag.