POF welcomes Alison Brackenbury:, from Monday 2nd November

A big POF welcome to Alison Brackenbury, who is a prolific poet. Alison has published no fewer than seven poetry collections. Her most recent collection is ‘Singing in the Dark’, Carcanet, 2008. “A quiet lyricism and delight”, (The Guardian). You can find it online at Amazon.

She has recently produced a chapbook of new animal poems, ‘Shadow’, available from Happenstance. New poems can be read at her website: www.alisonbrackenbury.com.



Alison will be popping in after work on Monday 2nd November to start answering your questions. This thread will be open from 10am that day, for two weeks.

To start the ball rolling, hi Alison!

I was wondering how you feel doing a full-time job entirely unrelated to poetry has affected your writing over the years. Do you find yourself begrudging the time not spent writing, or does it make you all the more focused when you do write?

And I often get the impression, Alison, that you write quite a lot in the middle of the night? Am I wrong?

Nell

I am very glad that you raised the subject of work. I intended to start my first post with a craven apology for the lack of sense and syntax in my replies, due to a day spent wrapping up pieces of aerospace tooling!

I should perhaps explain that my first two books ('Dreams of Power' and 'Breaking Ground') were written when I worked full-time in the library of a large technical college. My third book, 'Christmas Roses', was produced when I was at home with my daughter for a year, then did part-time clerical work. In 1990, tired of the Thatcherite public sector, I went to work with my husband in his family's metal finishing business, mainly doing manual work, cleaning and packing the components we rust-proof. This began as part time, plus paperwork (coinciding with my fourth book, '1829'). For the last decade it has been full-time, plus paperwork, plus another three books ('After Beethoven', 'Bricks and Ballads', and, last year, 'Singing in the Dark').

I think there are advantages in having a non-literary job. Unglamorous VAT led to what I think is one of my best poems, 'Bookkeeping', which I'll put at the end to plead its own case. I have always liked Hopkins' reference to things smudged by toil. Readers have told me from time to time that my poems do catch something of their daily lives. I think the inexorable rhythms of work may have found their way into the poems - together with the odd smudge of oil.

Do I have much time to write? No. I almost never write in the week. I'm most awake in the morning, and that time is lost to work. When my daughter was growing up, I wrote in one 'slot' of about two hours on a Sunday. I now have a Saturday 'slot' too, but either can become eroded, by domestic distraction or some social duty (though I'm very ruthless about time and others).

For decades, I went along quite happily doing this. A couple of years ago, I suddenly felt very unhappy and frustrated that I could not write in the week. During Gloucestershire's floods, I was at home briefly one morning waiting for - of all things - our plumber, and I wrote a poem I liked very much about the outbreak of the floods a couple of days before. I had the feeling this would have been a weaker poem as the memory of the great rains dimmed. I did wonder gloomily how many good poems I had failed to write.

For the first time in four decades of writing, I would have liked some kind of grant to stay at home with my poems; but the business couldn't manage without me. However, this feeling has passed. The plan is to shut the business in about three years, so in 2013, though I may not have some money, I may have more time. The challenge will be not to squander it! I ought to use it, among other things, to look hard at technique.

I must admit that reading is very hard to fit into my present schedule (during the recession, we do read at work, but that's normally impossible, except in our very short breaks). I would do more reading if I didn't crowd so many animals into my life, especially the amiable and tyrannical pony up on the hills. But they are my subjects too, and the pony is a gateway to the country, where I grew up, and its birds (and barbed wire, and chemicals).

One disadvantage, which I would stress to other writers, of certain kinds of self-employment, is that it's almost impossible to take odd days off. This leads to endless refusals of invitations to read etc, which may be rather unfair to the poetry. It also makes it very difficult to get to events and meet other poets, which may be bad for the poet.

I think the poet who works full time may 'lose' certain poems. But it is probably true that lack of time does force you to write about what is most urgent. I think some of my best poems have been written under most pressure. I am always fascinated by the relationship of T.S.Eliot to his non-literary work. I once met a much older poet who asserted, 'It didn't do Tom Eliot any harm at all to work in that bank!' It seems clear from Eliot's recently published letters that he saw that job as one of the forces driving him to breaking point. But did he, ever again, write so well? Or with such sympathy?


Bookkeeping


These are not (you understand) the figures
which send cold judgement into the backbone
which leave us, workless, shrunk at home
staring in a sky grown black with leaves.

These are like the ticking of a clock,
the daily sums, a van’s new brakes,
three drums of trichloroethylene on the back
of a thrumming lorry; yet they take
a day to make: thin bars of figures. While
I try to balance them, light scurries round
like a glad squirrel. Radio music stales –
until shut off.

What’s left when it is done,
the green book closed? There is no sea to swim
no mouth to kiss. Even the light is gone.
Bookkeepers drink over-sugared tea
lie in dark rooms; are always hunched and tired.

Where I stretch up the low bulb burns and whirls.
And in it, I see him. The dusky gold wing folds
across his face. The feathers’ sharp tips smudge
his margins.

Sunk, in his own shadows, deep
in scattered ledgers of our petty sins:
he, the tireless angel:
Unaccountably, he sleeps.

Alison Brackenbury
(Selected Poems, Carcanet)

Do I write nocturnally? No, not poetry. Prose seems to work differently. It can go quite well after midnight (aided by a certain brand of German chocolate biscuit..)

Hello Alison!

Good to see you here. What do you see as the future of poetry in the UK?

Wow, Chris. Talk about an 'open' question!

Welcome, Alison.

LOL, it is a bit of a shop stopper that!

Alison is one of the most generous people I know of in the British poetry scene, I'm genuinely interested in where she thinks it's going or ought to go.

I think we should ask the big questions, although, in my case, this will result in a scattering of small answers! First, most of my knowledge of poetry now springs from England, though I do hear a little about what is happening in Scotland. The Welsh, having - heroically - saved their language, have also kept a unique set of competitions and celebrations for poetry which I have not yet managed to attend. Although a magazine in Belfast has just taken a generous selection of my work, I have never travelled there. I suspect that many English people of my generation know the Irish Republic at first-hand, but not Northern Ireland. So I had better shrink 'UK' to 'England', though with the hope that the odd sentence might echo past Berwick or Chepstow.

I don't think English poetry has one future, because English poetry is not simply one thing, and never was. Shakespeare's sonnets (a publishing failure) lived beside the ballads hawked successfully in the streets. We have the ghosts of both in the language today. One of my strongest impressions of English poetry today is of bewildering variety, from J.H.Prynne to Pam Ayres. Yes, I do think Pam Ayres' work is poetry, and I go and listen to her regularly. She is a highly skilled performer.

To judge from the small town where I live, the performance of poetry- usually by the poets - is growing at a startling rate. Slams seem to present no barriers to women or black writers. Poetry groups are increasingly meeting in public places, pubs and cafes, where it is easier to drift in or take part than if you have to ring the door bell of someone else's house, and gatecrash an inner circle, as in some groups I encountered in the 1970s. The group I go to regularly, which has guest readers and 'open mic', draws in a good number of retired people - like the groups of the 1970s - but also a significant number of students enrolled on English, and creative writing course, at the local university. I have been thinking for some time that the expansion of higher education should encourage more reading and writing of poetry. It has taken a while, but it now seems to be happening.

I'm not involved in the formal teaching of creative writing, and I don't feel competent to prejudge what these new university courses will bring. I know that some writers who know the USA well have some reservations about the effect of creative writing courses there. But I think it is very useful for someone beginning to write poetry to work systematically through various poetic forms, which certainly the local courses here require students to do. I grew up with a lazy Sixties backwash whispering this might not be necessary. I think it is.

Though,if Ben Jonson's sneer was true, Shakespeare may not have been too fluent in Latin or Greek, for centuries the majority of English poetry was written by people with a thorough working knowledge of classical metrics expensively acquired at private schools. My generation of writers, born after the second world war and mainly educated at more basic state schools, generally lacked this knowledge. There was an intimidating gulf between us and the assured metric authority of - for example - Auden. Many of us, I suspect, taught ourselves about form and metre, from dissecting other poets and stumbling through manuals. I certainly did. It was not ideal. When I read the work of very young poets now, I am often amazed how strong - and inventive - they are technically. There was a lot of bluff in my generation. I hope that younger writers, technically, will have more substance.

There is one obvious worry about all this. It was put bluntly to me by someone I met recently at a packed poetry event. 'I looked round the room and I realised that everyone there was a writer.' Is English poetry in the future going to be read or heard by anyone except those writing it?

Of course it is. If you look at the exam tables which show that half England's children still do not get enough qualifications for a basic clerical job, you might doubt this. But poetry is an instinct. People who would not dream of going to a poetry reading, or ever buying a collection, search the Internet for a suitable poem to read at the funeral of someone they loved. Or at their wedding - I've just been asked to write a wedding poem. Hint to all parents: name your children in rhymable monosyllables. To the dismay of vicars, God often seems to have left the ceremonies of the English. But poetry has not.

But does this simply mean that congregations will sit through doggerel? The poems (often regarded as anonymous) which rise up through Google usually do have enough space in them for the listener to fill with their own emotion. They are sincere, but usually crumble from insight to cliche. They could be much better.

I think the connections that people will make with good poetry in the future depend a great deal on the attitude of grant-makers, powerful people within the poetry world, and of every poet. If there is good poetry available, then I am wildly populist about its scattering. I would like to see poetry more celebrated and publicised in the music world. Many of our best songwriters, not surprisingly, read poetry.

But there is a good deal which the poetry world could do for itself. 'Poems on the Underground' and the free pamphlets in surgeries from the charity 'Poems in the Waiting Room' are demonstrably appreciated. I'd like to see poems on buses and beer mats. I'd like to see piles of free anthology pamphlets of good, new, appealing poetry in public libraries, amongst the computers. On the computer screens, I 'd like to see the British version of America's Poetry Daily, which claims to be the most popular poetry website, and simply has... a poem a day. The Internet has not turned poetry into a grey international porridge. Some of the most successful poems I have read in its blue spaces celebrate the local, and spark to what is common in us all. Good poems, as varied as Britain. Surely we could manage that?

I'm late coming to this forum, because I've been trudging round Morrisons, where, since the credit crunch, many things seem to cost a pound. I think that if poetry is to travel further in this country in the future, it needs, at times, to cost less than that. It needs to be free. Cheltenham's Festival of Literature demonstrated that in a bold move a few years ago. Occasional poetry events with excellent readers (but quite expensive tickets) were often poorly attended. So the organisers scheduled a reading each weekday night of the festival, just after most people's work ended, called it enticingly The Poetry Cafe, and made it free. It is packed. Amongst the audience are students, and retired people carefully eking out low incomes (who often do buy books, after the reading, which they can barely afford). Forget 'average' wages; they are distorted by high wages at the top of the scale. England is not a high-income country; and Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are, I suspect, still worse.

I think English poetry has a future: on the page, in performance, on screen, on the passing bus. It needs to be bought by some and given to others. (The two groups may blur - a little.) It must not forget how to sing. For, in one way, my view of poetry has changed since I was an earnest and un-metrical student. I used to see poetry - and its reputation - as a kind of constant, in a civilisation which had great tensions and injustices, but would probably creak along for a very long time. Then, I compared translations of Homer. Now I stare at pictures of melting ice. Unless we change our lives, I believe the world will change horribly, within our days and those of our children. The future of English poetry may yet be as scraps, half-sung by a few people, huddled round a fire.

P.S. For 'dissected other poets', please read 'dissected other poets' work'. The poetry world wasn't quite that vicious in the 1970s.

Very interesting response to Chris's question, Alison, but one thing worries me slightly about the picture you paint, which certainly doesn't strike me as being much different from the situation in Scotland: if poetry needs to be free, where will poets get their money from? Should we all have full-time employment outside poetry (mine is currently four days a week)? Does it mean an even greater reliance on money from the big prizes, the arts councils and any other generous benefactors, especially if events organisers have no income from the door? Are we back at individual (or corporate) patronage for poets and, if so, is that healthy?

Hi, Alison.

Andrew raises what I think is the key objection to the idea of 'free poetry' - what's in it for the poet? How does giving away the poems put dinner on the garret table? Personally I believe that accessibility to poetry (not 'accessible poetry' vs 'difficult poetry' but rather getting people to read/listen to the whole range of current poetries being produced these days) is more important than poets' egos, though I accept I hold a minority view on this issue.

On a related point, you mention poetry and education. If I had my way the bulk of public funding for poetry would be channelled into education - particularly primary education: hook them young! Do you have any views on how public funding for poetry should change, if change is needed at all?

Hullo Alison,

Do you think that the rise in neo-formalism will regain the lost audience for poetry?

Jan

The question of how people do, or don't, earn money is one I've always found fascinating, and I would be very interested to know how forum members think poets of their acquaintance fund their lives.

It's been my impression over the last thirty years that very few poets have been able to keep going as freelance writers. Wendy Cope is always very frank about the economics of poetry. I think she wrote somewhere that during her years as a full-time writer she had just about managed to equal the wages she would have earned as a teacher. She must - deservedly - be one of the most popular poets of her time, and this income presumably included a fair number of readings, and other activities such as judging poetry competitions. So, strictly speaking, even Wendy's income would not all have been come straight from her poems.

Wendy's remark suggests to me that it would be extremely difficult in Britain today to earn a living wage purely from publishing poetry (and doing nothing else!) It also suggests that only the most successful poets can 'get by' on their earnings from publishing plus the whole galaxy of other freelance activities available to poets in demand: reading, perhaps schools work, judging competitions, doing workshops etc. And the elephant at the back of the poetry reading is the pension (or lack of it). Wendy's poetry, unlike her teaching, would not be linked to a final salary scheme. I wonder if many freelance writers do have enough spare cash to contribute to a personal pension scheme. I've had one of those for twenty years through being self-employed in industry. A friend of mine who was a teacher couldn't believe how small a pension I am set to receive from it.

I don't know many poets well, so my impression of their earning strategies is often based on those brief biographies at the back of the many magazines I see. Until the 1990s, poets who were trying to live as full-time writers often seemed to be moving from one writing residency to another (which must be very difficult to combine with partners, children etc).

From roughly the 1990s onwards, I began to notice a shift. Perhaps the pension elephant had coughed! An increasing number of poets now listed academic jobs in their biographies, often part-time and usually linked to creative writing. But these were regular jobs, presumably with a fair amount of marking, admin, class attendance etc. So these poets are no longer full-time writers (albeit backed by residencies) but must be relying heavily on salaried work, linked to poetry, but distinct from royalties, readings etc.

So - and I'd be interested in your comment on this - I think that more people are publishing poetry, but that more of them have concluded that they can only do so by being, to some extent 'wage slaves'. Whether the job is full or part-time, linked to poetry or not, depends on the writer's own circumstances and preferences.

A job eats a poet's time; but, I've always felt that in a curious way it gives freedom. My poetry has always been dependent on the State in the sense that my publisher receives an Arts Council grant. With a class and education system which leaves about half our children with fewer than 5 essential GCSEs, I don't think we can expect a mass market for poetry. The subsidised poetry presses do seem good at nurturing poets who then achieve a - relatively - wide audience, often moving on to non-subsidised publishers. Carol Ann Duffy published several collections with Anvil. U.A.Fanthorpe was always published by Peterloo. So I don't feel guilty about my links to subsidised poetry publishing, which I think is a necessity if poets are to get a toehold in Britain today.

The question of patronage, which Andrew raises, is very important. I think people's reactions to this vary. I have always liked having my main income independent of poetry. To put it bluntly, I can write what I like when I like. I do not have to worry that I have taken money to write or finish poems, but they're not working out. I do not have to take on commissions for poetry. Each writer has to work out what suits them. Some poets seem very good at writing to commission. Others are clearly very glad to have grants to finish books. But the one compensation for wage slavery for a poet may be, strangely, some measure of artistic freedom.

We all approach theoretical questions with a certain ballast of assumptions. One of mine, for poetry, is fairly gritty. As you'll have gathered from the detailed account above, I don't think that it has been possible, for at least the last thirty years, for a poet to make much money purely by publishing poetry, whether with the subsidised or non-subsidised press. I don't state this as an ideal or manifesto. It is simply my impression of what has happened, and I can't think of any new reason why poems might make their authors any richer in the immediate future.

I do,however, think that it is possible to bring poems to a much wider readership than they usually find in England. I don't suppose 'Poems on the Underground' made large amounts of money for the poets involved. I don't know if they were paid - or how much - for having their poems on the Tube posters. I assume they would only have received a flat fee for having their work included in the 'Poems on the Underground' anthologies (poetry bestsllers). But they would have gained a much wider audience for their poem. I'd be happy with that.

I have a poem about to come out in the 'Poetry in the Waiting Room' scheme's next pamphlet. It's very humbling to have emails from complete strangers saying they've come across one of my poems and like it. It does revive my enthusiasm for getting up on a Saturday morning and fishing out the pile of scribbled-over poems. A cheque would be most welcome; but it wouldn't have the same effect. I'm getting old; life at times has an appalling simplicity. I aim to stay alive, to get up in the morning and to want to write.

I entirely agree with you that what happens in schools is crucial. When I worked in a technical college in the 1970s, people who would have been at school in the 1930s or 1940s routinely said to me 'Oh, I don't know anything about poetry, but there was a poem I learnt at school which I really liked' - and promptly recited the entire poem. Now no one could say that their education had prompted them to go on reading or buying poetry - but they did have a poem in their heads, which is no small achievement.

I am very out of touch with what is happening in schools, as my daughter is now in her twenties, and I don't work in schools myself. There are worrying mutters in the press that Literacy Hours etc are not leading children to enjoy reading or poetry. I have heard teachers from both primary and secondary schools express great enthusiasm for the work done with pupils by good poets who have come into their schools. Teachers, in my experience, aren't easily impressed, so these sessions seem to me very well worth funding.

In general, my first reaction to state funding for poetry is that it should mainly be spent helping the publishing, distribution and reception of poetry - which would certainly include a good chunk for education. I will admit though, that I have not had direct experience of funding for poets e.g. grants to finish books, and I've never studied the percentages of money given to the different aspects of poetry, so I don't have a detailed blueprint in my head of an ideal arts budget. I do have a gloomy feeling that the cost of the Olympics is going to knock hell out of a lot of worthwhile projects for some time to come.

I'm fascinated by this question and feel curiously ill-equipped to comment on it. I write; I read (belatedly) a wide range of magazines; my desk is heaped with books, and reviewing brings more to my notice. But I'm not sure I'm good at trend-spotting, except perhaps to notice certain vocabulary floating in and out of fashion on the tide.

Is formal poetry being more widely written or read than it was, say, ten years ago? I think younger poets are more proficient in traditional forms (if they choose to use them) than many writers seemed to be in the 1970s when I began to have poems published. This may be because of creative writing courses, full or part-time. It seems to me a thoroughly good thing. I think a knowledge of certain basic metres and stanzas is going to strengthen a poet's work, whatever star in the stylistic galaxy they eventually find themselves on.

I have heard the odd recent comment that some magazine editors may be resistant to rhymed poetry. I am undecided on this point - your general impressions would be of great interest.

I do think that people generally expect skill from artists (and I share some of the tabloid scepticism about some feted visual artists' abilities). I'd risk saying that poetry doesn't truly live unless it is memorable, and a strong sense of a poem's form, including possibly rhyme, helps lodge a poem securely in mind. Music seems to me one of the overwhelming passions of our time. I had to travel by train a lot a few years ago, and was very struck by how many of the conversations round me (participants aged 10 to 16) were about concerts and music. One group of boys burst into song as we drew into Lincoln! I spend a good deal of my spare time glued to the BBC digital station, 6 Music. I think poetry can only gain when its own links to song are felt strongly, at least at times.

But I don't think fixed form is the only way to write. Writers often use it as a springboard to write very differently. Ideally, as Rik said, I think writers would like readers who are alive to the variety of poetry. But well-written formal poetry, catching some life - and possibly some good rhymes - should never be a stranger at the feast. Did it ever really go away? Perhaps we all got a bit lazy in the Sixties. But the musicians still wrote rhyming ballads!

Hi Alison, sorry to be so scarce! And right now I'm in a rush to get somewhere but just wanted to say hello.

Fascinating discussion, I'll look forward to catching up and joining in either later today or tomorrow... And those things that are a pound in Morrisons - I'm sure some of them till recently were 89p.

Yes. I have my doubts about my recently acquired packet of flapjacks-

Hullo again Alison,

Absolutely, I agree.

It is probably more fair to say that only a few are receptive to formal verse. From time to time they get a guernsey in General Discussion threads at Eratosphere. Many of the online forums are also dismissive of formal verse as are many leading poets. I was told by an extremely well credentialed poet once that when judging she does a cull of all rhyming verse first.

I think that free verse is not the only way to write *grin* I swing every way but loose (I hope *smile*) on writing.

I think that it became quite hard for a while to get anything formal published that was a little more ambitious than a pop ballad.

As a matter of interest only. I do not think in all fairness it can be comfortably extrapolated, I am in a couple of book clubs and in both there was a strong nay said when I proposed poetry collections. When I asked why, the general consensus was that it had stopped rhyming and was no longer memorable nor was it pleasurable to read.

It is interesting to note that in Australia at present there has been quite a growth in bush balladry, Pam Ayres would feel at home.

Edited back in:

Perhaps readers would like ... *smile*

Regards,

Jan Iwaszkiewicz[QUOTE]

Hi Alison

I don't know about Australia, but I think this is much more true of the US than the UK - there are very firm divisions in the US between formal and free verse (which forums like Eratosphere both emphasis and perpetuate).

In the UK though, many of the leading poets use form comfortably and regularly: Don Paterson, George Szirtes, Carol Ann Duffy, Alison, all have rhymed and unrhymed, formal and free work in their books. The majority of online workshops are US-led so give a skewed impression of the formal/free divisions.

As an editor for 'Iota', I can tell you that we certainly don't automatically discard any rhymed and/or metered poems.