2013-05-19T06:45:00-04:00 Phil Brown http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=phil-brown Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Phil Brown Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1176422 2011-12-30T11:30:45-05:00 2012-02-29T05:12:01-05:00

Phil Brown http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phil-brown/ "How can my mind not be frightened not only of the world, but also of itself, this child's mind which inflicts the imperfect world on itself." - C.K. Williams

This Winter's edition of The Poetry Review contains a transcript of a lecture called 'On Being Old' by the American poet, C.K. Williams. The lecture meanders around mortality and the worth of a life spent on poetry before arriving on something that has always fascinated me about writing - its childishness.

Williams writes of himself that 'the older I am, the more I've become aware of how trapped I am in a mind that in its perceptions, its impulses, its emotions, is very much still a child's.'

When we compare the traits of a child-mind and the nature of poetry, there are many parallels. As Ken Robinson is eager to tell us at every opportunity, almost all children are born with the power of lateral thinking and a capacity for creativity.

Then, as Robinson's argument seems to follow, education crushes all that beautiful imagination out of us leaving society with droves of robotic office-drones with a few autistic/artistic types on the periphery to release the occasional book and squabble about Arts Council funding.

So why is a child's mind so inherently poetic? A good portion of it comes from the fact that children are at a linguistic disadvantage to their elders and will often brilliantly bridge the gap in a creative fashion.

It is not unusual for me to mark pieces of creative writing by my younger students with phrases such as 'the sky made waterness on the floor'. It is what linguists refer to as a 'virtuous error' - a piece of non-standard language with a clear chain of logic behind it.

Whilst the arbitrary rules of our language make such phrases technically 'wrong', they are a clear example of the sort of inventive perseverance and lexical lego-building that lead Shakespeare to coin words like 'admirable' and 'quarrelsome'. It is the same processes that lead Ted Hughes to the line 'that silver is snail-saliva silveriness' and Frances Leviston to the word 'unputbackable'.

With this predilection for pushing the rules of grammar and conjugation to their limits, poets and children also share certain semantic behaviours in their descriptions.

If I were to place a cat in front of you now and ask you to describe it, you would tell me any distinguishing features that set it aside from the hundreds and thousands of other cats that you have seen in your life. This is no fault in your part - simply a sign that we have trained ourselves to give little attention to 'everyday' things to keep our minds prepared for those things that we cannot predict.

But if I were to place a cat in front of a child who had never seen one before and asked them to describe it - then what would we hear? A comparison with other animals or objects that share a similar colour or shape? 'A goldfish-coloured dog with a tennis-ball head' perhaps? Or some description of the cat's movement? Or simply an awe-struck emotional reaction at this alien creature that now confronts the child?

The word 'alien' is important here, as it is exactly this which Craig Raine achieved with his most popular poem, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home and the whole Martianism movement that goes along with it. The child's necessary viewing of the world without the semantic conventions that culture brings is a state of mind that many poets strive for and is visible in images such as Lachlan MacKinnon's:

'The moon is a wild wind the staunch trees
cannot withstand.
They curl in, defeated, like waves.
They are the moon's slaves.
They shine back at her all night with dumb love.'
(from Youth)

and Jacob Polley's description of a jar of honey:

'it's the sun, all flesh and no bones
but for the floating knuckle
of honeycomb'.

At the heart of this is the poet's childish need for playfulness, even in the most serious of situations. Just as nursery rhymes, limericks and alliterative nicknames gave us pleasure as children, it is the poets' desire to play games that leads to so much sonneteering, haikuery and, for those who are feeling more inventive, the OuLiPo's build-your-own-word-game approach to writing.

A fine blend of poetic rigour and childish playfulness can be seen in Jon Stone's Treasure Arcade, an excellent experiment in form and meditation on computer games, and Ross Sutherland's excellent documentary about the process of writing poems using online translators.

Clearly there is more to creative writing than regressing into childhood - the oeuvre of C.K. Williams would be incredibly boring if that was the case. But the challenge of a poet will always be to unlearn the laziness and self-consciousness that brings us bland thoughts. Just as a child can only see the topography of an open space as a series of climbing frames and running tracks whilst us civilised souls keep our shoes clean on the footpath, it is up to the poet to capture something of both worlds.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1160624 2011-12-20T12:05:56-05:00 2012-02-19T05:12:01-05:00

Phil Brown http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phil-brown/ "... that's what we do, we make lines. Charles Olson, the poet, said no line must sleep, every line in a poem should be wakeful to the lines around it. And when you put a poem on a Kindle, the lines are broken in order to fit on the screen. And so instead of being the poet's decision, it becomes the device's decision." - Billy Collins

Why doesn't the Kindle Store have a Poetry section?

This Christmas, if you haven't done already, go and stand in a big bookshop. Obviously, Foyles in London is perfect for this, but anything with more than two floors is fine. Within 15 minutes you will hear somebody say, in that sagely middle-class way that us bookshop customers have about us, 'it's odd to think that all this will be gone soon and it's all gonna be Kindle.'

The thought process behind this fallacy is forgivable. Train stations and billboards are plastered with advertisements for Amazon's latest money-spinner. Kindle enthusiasts are legion and vociferous in their disdain for those lesser Luddites still clinging to a paper past. I have had more than a few friends and colleagues tell me that they will not purchase my collection until it's an ePub.

And, on the surface, Amazon is doing exactly what Apple did for the music industry with the iPod, aren't they? Providing a platform for entire libraries of content in an easily transportable device with enough greyspace to breach copyright boundaries is what this generation is all about.

When it comes to reading novels, magazines and blogposts, I agree - the Kindle is a perfect next step for those who want to flit between the complete works of Stephen King but do not enjoy lugging it around in 1000-page blocks for the sake of 45 minutes travel-time before and after work.

Moreover, the anti-glare screen of a Kindle is perfect for doing this - allowing for a whole Ritalin-riddled generation to have their novels in large-text-tiny-screen chunks and feel the moral gratification of finishing a page every eight seconds.

But this does not lend itself to the enjoyment of poetry.

For those of you who are not regular writers of poetry - I shall give you a quick insight into how many of us work. For most poets, the A4 page is their primary medium. It is their ambition to leave this blank 210 x 297 mm rectangle with an imprint of an idea or two and then hammer it into what lazy reviewers will then refer to as 'wrought'.

When this is done, it is the job of the publishers to typeset these, often oddly-shaped, things into rectangles of 152 x 223 mm without causing too much havoc (this is why collections of sonnets are a diplomatic, if often boring, godsend). Then come the arguments.

It begins when the poet looks at the proofs of a typeset manuscript and notices that an unintentional line-break has been put in and e-mails the publisher. The publisher makes every effort to accommodate, only to find that the poet has since emailed a further forty revisions concerning everything from the font-size of the titles to the width of the right-hand margins.

Both the publisher and poet exasperate each other during this process - both of whom are trying to do their job as best as possible whilst keeping the other side happy. This is by no means the most enjoyable part of poetry publishing, but it stems entirely from the fact that poets and their publishers care. They care emphatically about the details, and every individual page, line and word in a collection is weighed for its shape and structure to an extent that most fiction writers and readers could not sustain.

And so when I first read a collection of poetry on my new Kindle, I saw exactly where the problems were. The Kindle, as it currently exists, bypasses the back-and-forth process I have just described - it does not care about the poet's feelings about line-breaks or page-structure or the publisher's in-house typographical style. The Kindle cares about giving you the words you asked for in the order that the writer wrote them - if Coleridge could read Kubla Khan as an ePub he'd write a couple of footnotes to his famous adage.

Whilst the nature of novels certainly stand up incredibly well to this treatment, the arbitrariness of page and line-breaks on the Kindle make viewing Prufrock on an eReader akin to viewing an Edward Hopper painting snapped in two and placed in neighbouring rooms to save space.

I have no doubt that my Kindle and I will spend many happy hours together over the years - but until the greatest minds of my generation start scribbling verses in 91 x 122 mm, I'll stick with paper, ink and glue for poetry. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1150794 2011-12-15T09:51:08-05:00 2012-02-14T05:12:02-05:00

Phil Brown http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phil-brown/ "I think poetry is the opposite of money, but money is something we might end up talking about - and since this is England - we shall probably discuss it sideways in terms of grants and awards. If I hold up a ten pound note and a poem and I burn one then the other, how do we feel?" - David Morley

This month, Alice Oswald and John Kinsella withdrew themselves from the TS Eliot Prize shortlist. With £15,000 and arguably greater prestige than any other British poetry accolade, dropping out was clearly not a decision taken lightly. Their reasoning? The funding behind the TS Eliot prize now comes from Aurum, a hedge-fund investment company, rather than the recently withdrawn Arts Council Funding that used to keep the Poetry Book Society afloat. To quote Oswald, "I think poetry should be questioning not endorsing such institutions.'

As is always the case when poetry manages to scandal its way into the broadsheets, the poets of London took to their blogs and Facebook walls to discuss the issue at length. Katy Evans-Bush brilliantly wrote it up as the genesis of the Occupy Poetry movement. Todd Swift, in usual devil's advocate form, suggested that all anti-capitalist poets should move to North Korea (then he thought better of it and removed the post). Oswald herself wrote for the Guardian that 'I hope my fellow poets will have different opinions and not be afraid to express them.'

This is the second time in the last six months that the British poetry framework has had its dirty laundry aired in the dailies. Last Summer, the Poetry Society had a mass exodus of trustees over the matter of the misallocation of Arts Council funding and the alleged bullying of an employee. As a result, the Poetry Society's continued public funding is still unsure and, from what I gather, morale at their head office suffered immeasurably.

At the heart of both situations are a set of assumptions about public and private money and the contrasting characters of both. The largest criticism of the Poetry Society's trustees was that they were using the society's funds to pay for expensive legal advice from a private firm; clean money floating towards the supposedly mendacious, muddy private sector.

On the flipside, the Poetry Book Society is now coming under criticism for finding financial support from a hedge-fund investor; dirty, mendacious private money slouches towards the clean fortress of integrity and non-capitalist values that is poetry.

But, short of writing a short biography of every penny's journey from the Royal Mint to the poet's pocket, this attitude is a very difficult one to see through to its logical conclusion. As has been iterated again and again in light of this recent poetry-spat, no money is truly 'clean', and to live, work, win financial prizes of any nature and sell a product (even a collection of poetry) in this country is to engage with capitalism on a very tangible level.

If we are to call foul-play at the capitalism of an Aurum funded TS Eliot prize, then surely we must denounce all of poetry's other pet plaudits. The Eric Gregory and Cholmonedy Awards are presented in Picadilly's Cavalry and Guard Club, funded through private donations. Should I have asked where Gregory got his money before I cashed the cheque? The Costa Book Awards are funded by a big-chain café - aren't they the ultimate emblem of capitalist sensibilities? Shall I pick the phone up now and berate Hugo Williams for accepting his Queen's Gold Medal for poetry?

Of course Oswald is calling for none of this - her intentions are creative, not destructive. Her recent actions, on a fundamental level, have served the functions of a well written poem and should be read as such. She has produced critical responses, complex interpretations, and has forced us to reconsider a once-familiar landscape with new scrutiny. As any great poet should, she has not given us answers but lead us towards the discussions that we need to have.
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