Bees | Poetry | Wintering

It is difficult not to use ‘bees’ and ‘poetry’ in the same sentence without thinking of Sylvia Plath. Under interview she suggested that it was Ted Hughes that forced her to embrace her fixation upon the image of her father’s beekeeping.



Fear not, I do not intend to give you a cod-Freudian interrogation of ‘Ariel’… there is enough of that swarming around out there to satisfy any apiculturist readers of poetry.



I would simply like to share with you my favorite Plath poem, Wintering.



All poets have their individual strengths, and for me, Plath’s is her ability as a generator of images. Images that hold you and appall you and unsettle you and fill us with familiarity and disgust. Delving into Plath’s later poetry often feels like throwing an Easter egg against a wall to see it explode with maggots.



Of all the knock-you-off-your-feet imagery Plath has melded into her poems, there is an image, an idea, in ‘Wintering’ that has stuck with me with hypnotic clarity since the first time I read it, around 4 years ago.



This is the time of hanging on for the bees - - the bees

So slow I hardly know them,

Filing like soldiers

To the syrup tin



To make up for the honey I’ve taken.

Tate and Lyle keeps them going,

The refined snow.

Part of the reason this image stuck with me so clearly is Plath’s use of ‘Tate and Lyle’… an exceptionally rare use of an ephemeral brand name in a body of work which otherwise strives for an otherworldly, timeless quality. It feels like an interjection from the modern-world amidst an ancient ritual – a police siren wailing over Claire de Lune perhaps.



But it’s the idea behind the image that bares so much fruit in this poem. When I first read this poem I was sat in a library full of underslept academics gazing into the gaudy glow of their laptops. They were flicking frantically through all manner of text-books and literary theory, trying desperately to manufacture that artifice of originality in the over-farmed soils of literary theory.



Whilst doing this, they were doubtless keeping a weather-eye on an instant-messaging window, sifting through electronic versions of literary journals, hunting down publication dates with which to cite that sting-in-the-tail quotation they have been saving for their essay conclusions.



I was doing the same.



And I got to thinking about the most important ideas of all humankind coming from sitting under a tree, or getting into a bath, or Paul McCartney writing ‘Yesterday’ whilst making himself some scrambled eggs.



The human as bee, then. When was the last time we experienced honey? For how long has the Tate and Lyle kept us going? What do I have to do to experience the real thing?



Plath knew more than most of her time, how we medicate ourselves to maintain the equilibriums we aspire to, be it with aspirin or cigarettes, antibiotics or cocaine. In Wintering we have that horrifying idea of the human ability to spread this dependence indefinitely – by turning a swarm of bees into her basement into syrup junkies.



I hope that you enjoy her poem as much as I do.

Wintering by Sylvia Plath



This is the easy time, there is nothing doing.

I have whirled the midwife's extractor,

I have my honey,

Six jars of it,

Six cat's eyes in the wine cellar,



Wintering in a dark without window

At the heart of the house

Next to the last tenant's rancid jam

and the bottles of empty glitters ----

Sir So-and-so's gin.



This is the room I have never been in

This is the room I could never breathe in.

The black bunched in there like a bat,

No light

But the torch and its faint



Chinese yellow on appalling objects ----

Black asininity. Decay.

Possession.

It is they who own me.

Neither cruel nor indifferent,



Only ignorant.

This is the time of hanging on for the bees--the bees

So slow I hardly know them,

Filing like soldiers

To the syrup tin



To make up for the honey I've taken.

Tate and Lyle keeps them going,

The refined snow.

It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.

They take it. The cold sets in.



Now they ball in a mass,

Black

Mind against all that white.

The smile of the snow is white.

It spreads itself out, a mile-long body of Meissen,



Into which, on warm days,

They can only carry their dead.

The bees are all women,

Maids and the long royal lady.

They have got rid of the men,



The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.

Winter is for women ----

The woman, still at her knitting,

At the cradle of Spanis walnut,

Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.



Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas

Succeed in banking their fires

To enter another year?

What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?

The bees are flying. They taste the spring.



*



Phil Brown
Poetry Editor

Destruction | Poetry | One Art

“For a chap with a face like a butternut squash, the voice of a clinically depressed I-Speak-Your-Weight machine, the joie de vivre of a Southend clam and the swashbuckling sex appeal of Lord Irvine of Lairg, the late Philip Larkin still manages to generate excitement.”

            -John Walsh

“the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.”

            -Elizabeth Bishop

Those final two lines from Bishop’s ‘One Art’ stick in my mind with greater adhesive force than perhaps any other couplet in existence. This is partly of course, because it rhymes and is therefore fast-tracked to the memory banks. More importantly however, I have always seen ‘One Art’ as a fascinating and cynical insight to the creative process.

The poem can indeed be interpreted as being about ‘dealing with loss’ and getting over the upset of bereavement (the first draft appears around 8 years after the suicide of her partner of 15 years, Lota de Macedo Soares). However, I have always read the poem as being a more sardonic piece of advice for how to be a Writer™ – Bishop is not telling us how to deal with loss, but rather how to cultivate ‘loss’ as a key ingredient of our lives so that our biographers have something to write about; ‘Lose something every day. Accept the fluster / of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.’

This clearly wasn’t Bishop’s actual take on how to be a good writer, which can probably better be summed up in her letter to Miss Pierson (written the same year as the first draft of ‘One Art’):

“Read a lot of poetry – all the time – and not 20^th-century poetry. Read Campion, Herbert, Pope, Tennyson, Coleridge – anything at all almost that’s any good, from the past – until you find out what you really like, by yourself.”

What I think Bishop does hit upon in ‘One Art’ however, is a mantra which will lead you to the lifestyle that we want from our poets and artists in posterity. We want our poets to be ‘nowhere man, living in his nowhere land’, ‘losing farther, losing faster; places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel.’ We want our poets destructive, promiscuous, libertine and obnoxious as they burn out young and hit an untimely death, leaving behind a world that never really understood them.

Consider some of the films that have been made about poets and the slant which they put on their lives:

The Libertine (2004 – dir. Laurence Dunmore)

Johnny Depp is the 2^nd Earl of Rochester, John Wilmot. He uses his mixture of charisma and poetic ability to go round having it right off with every woman who will stand still long enough to hear a few of his couplets. He is obnoxious, treats his friends awfully, has copious amounts of sex with everyone but his wife and keeps getting banished and given second chances by King Charles. He uses his potent artistic acumen to rear the actress/prostitute Lizzy Barry as a star of the stage whilst having a goodly amount of sex with her. It is also suggested that at some point, he has had sexual dealings with his mother. He dies of syphilis.

Shakespeare in Love (1998 – John Madden)

A young Shakespeare moves to London and has corporeal relationships with more prostitutes than you can shake a quill at. As the film opens however, Shakespeare is wracked with impotence, which should in no way be attributed to feelings of guilt over his wife back in Stratford. Luckily, a sort of Elizabethan psychotherapist helps him get his erection back and as a happy coincidence he ends up writing the greatest love story of all time.

The Edge of Love (2008 – dir. John Maybury)

Dylan Thomas is an obnoxious drunk who goes round poncing money off his mates and having it off with everyone. WWI veteran, William Killick finally has enough of Thomas trying to get his wife Under his Milky Wood and takes a gun to the guy’s house for a good old fashioned game of ‘shooting up the house of the guy that keeps trying to have sex with my missus.’ Rather than leave it there, Thomas tries to get the guy done for attempted murder, unsuccessfully. The film ends with a petulant, defeated Thomas sat in his car, presumably thinking about how to fit in a quick pint and an extra-marital fumble before dinner without his wife noticing.

Sylvia (2003 – dir. Christine Jeffs)

Young American poet, Sylvia Plath becomes increasingly frumpy and nobody really takes her seriously as a poet. Her husband on the other hand – well there’s another story. Everyone loves Ted Hughes and, being a poet, he goes around having it off with everyone. Plath has a bash at living la vida poetica and tries to initiate a bit of sex with Alvarez. Big Al is having none of this however, kicks Plath to the curb and proceeds directly to tell Hughes about what just went down.

Il Postino (1994 – dir. Michael Radford)

Postman, Mario, wants desperately to sweep a beautiful lady from his Italian village off her feet but he just doesn’t have the moves. Luckily for him however, Pablo Neruda shows up and teaches him the ancient art of conning women into finding funny-looking men attractive – poetry. As if to prove this point, we see a few shots of Neruda (who is depicted as a bit like a Hispanic Hitchcock) dancing with his super-hot wife. A few poems later and Mario is well and truly in there with the ladies and manages to land the girl of his dreams.

Gothic (1986 – dir. Ken Russell)

What happens when you get a handful of the most important poets of the Romantic Era together in Lord Byron’s castle? They all take drugs and have sex with each other, obviously.

***

The problem I have about the weird sub-genre of film – ‘Poet Biopics’ is that cinema and poetry are fiercely at odds with one another in many fundamental ways (although, as Cecil Day Lewis once wrote, cinema and the art of editing has trained generations of readers how to become more skilled at making the leap from one image to the next).

Films are money-spinners; there is no money in poetry. Cinema requires some form of spectacle; reading and writing poetry is just about the quietest, most introspective meditational act imaginable. Films require an audience; poetry’s audience is, relatively speaking, a specialist interest niche. Films require characters; poets often take great pains to remove all traces of their own personality from their work.

With these tensions in mind, no wonder that biography and cinema seems to propagate this image of the male poet as a strange anarchic creature comprised of nothing but an erection and a middle finger, barking abusive comments at everyone he comes across whilst spilling his tortured autistic genius onto the page. I’m thinking here of that bastion of historical accuracy, The Tudors (late noughties BBC costume-porn about Henry VIII and his roving ways). Did anyone else see the bit where Henry and Anne Boleyn are celebrating their much-postponed marriage at court when we are briefly shown a cutaway to Thomas Wyatt sat looking moody at the banquet and muttering to his friend “for the record – I did fuck her!”

With this in mind, I have prepared a brief synopsis of the biopic for the life of Philip Larkin which will hopefully gain more attention to the (impossible to get hold of) BBC piece, Love Again (2003) which made the schoolboy error of going down the ‘honest, understated’ route. Here is where I would go with the project:

Larkin ‘til the Break of Dawn (2012, dir. Phil Brown)

Young, obnoxious and promiscuous poet, Phil Larkin, meets an enchanting exotic dancer in a gentleman’s club called ‘Skunk Hour’. As it transpires, this woman is a lesbian (her name is Lizzy Bishop) but Larkin is able to scribe metaphors so potent and seductive that Lizzy gives up her job as a lesbian stripper and becomes an award-winning poet (under Larkin’s tutelage). Disaster strikes when Larkin is enlisted to fight in the Vietnam war and Bishop’s affections turn to the draft-dodging Robert Lowell. Whilst fighting overseas however, Larkin forms a close friendship with Private Berryman. The two spend their evenings getting stoned and writing poems and learning more about each-other and themselves. Larkin soon falls in love with the Vietnamese prostitute, Emily Dickinson and is distraught when he realises that he is responsible for the destruction of her village in a napalm strike. Returning to New Hull at the end of the conflict, wracked with guilt, Larkin wins critical acclaim by writing The Wasteland.

***

To avoid the efforts taken in having to do such a dramatic recasting of a life story, could I ask any poets reading this to please do the honourable thing and make sure that your life has involved at least one love-triangle, a traumatic experience and a high-profile world-event at some point. I promise you it isn’t hard to master, even though it may look like disaster.


Phil Brown
Poetry Editor

Second Person | Music | On you-turns: twin exercises in a mature ‘you’

‘You’ is a shortcut-highway to accusations of immaturity – in both word- and music-writing. Just as a fundamental rule of beginner poetry classes will always be avoid ‘I’ and ‘you’ or you’ll end up writing a diary-entry, not a poem, so anybody with even a smattering of music literacy will immediately call to mind bands such as Radiohead whose dodgy early efforts (that's right, Pablo Honey) were defined, in many ways, by their dodgy uses of the accusational second person pronoun (on ‘You’, the blisteringly dreadful ‘How Do You?’, and ‘Thinking About You’, a song about wanking). And whose proper maturity, located to the minds of most fans on Pitchfork’s Album Of The Noughties Kid A (or from it onwards, anyway) made use of a much more abstract voice, with even its occasional flirtings with ‘you’ taking the form of a much more musical, non-representational component, as opposed to sole focus – “You can try the best you can, you can try the best you can: the best you can is good enough” on the wonderfully-titled ‘Optimistic,’ for example.

But this breed of generalities tells only half of the story. For there is much more to ‘you’ than lack of refinement, than youthful directness. Indeed, possibly because of those connotations rooted in perceptions of immaturity, a switch into the ‘you’ can form and has formed the basis of many a mature artist’s most breathtaking work – especially when it comes after a career spent exploring more abstract, descriptive, self-obscuring, traditionally-profound modes of address. ‘You’ represents, then, not just the central ingredient beloved by the doughy adolescent bard: it can also be kneaded into the shape of the YOU-TURN (I capitalise it because I’m fucking proud of the coinage, to be completely honest with you – more proud, indeed, than I am of the extended bread metaphor). The you-turn: the sound of the mature artist pulling the rug from under his or her audience by reminding them that he or she exists, breaths, eats, shits in a manner far more viscerally human, and therefore potentially far less superficial, than do his or her imaginative creations.

Two such you-turns: Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters and Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call. This being Music As Reading, let’s whack the latter on top of the former and see what happens. Two different species of you-turn…

Here is not the place for either a lengthy discussion of the biographical context behind either collection (try here, here and here for entry-points into that kind of thing). Nor does it represent an opportunity to crassly and simplistically compare, I don’t know, fragments of Cave’s lyrics with stanzas of Hughes’ verse in order to come to voyeuristic conclusions about supposed similarities in their respective feelings, approaches to aesthetic translation, sadnesses and regrets. Searching for particular significance in skin-deep resemblances between a passage such as this:

Your temples, where the hair crowded in,

Were the tender place. Once to check

I dropped a file across the electrodes

Of a twelve-volt battery – it exploded

Like a grenade. (Hughes, ‘The Tender Place’)

and Cave’s ‘Black Hair’ (“Smothered me, my lover with her beautiful black hair. The smell of it is heavy. It is charged with life. On my fingers the smell of her deep black hair full of all my whispered words, her black hair. And wet with tears and goodbyes, her hair of deepest black”) is, I think, dangerous for the way that it risks seeking ‘rules’ for the personal, ignoring the fact that Cave and Hughes are writing in different ways, for music and not for music. Similarly, thematic relations between, say, Hughes’ fascination with Plath’s American-ness and Cave’s with Polly Harvey’s West Country “accent which I’m told is ‘broad’” and English culture in general, whilst interesting, are far more coincidental than they are properly significant.

Rather, let us look at what the more genre-centric you-turn relationship between Birthday Letters and Boatman’s Call has to teach us about what this moment in established artist’s careers actually means, pragmatically- and philosophically-speaking…

Save-ups

Both are save-up collections – as in, assembled work composed, one can only assume, over a certain amount of time. In Birthday Letters there is a full-length biography of Hughes’ and Plath’s relationship, not to mention the aftermath; Cave reflects, meanwhile, on his relationship with the Brazilian journalist, Viviane Carneiro, the mother of his son Luke, as well as his time with Harvey and a lifetime spent thinking about God. Is this key, then – that you-pieces are held back before being thrust into daylight together, even organised chronologically (as in, events-wise, not composition-wise) as is the case with Hughes’ book? Is this phenomenon born out of a desire to avoid looking juvenile with one’s early writing – to wait until reputation is established? To earn one’s right to be properly confessional by not being so? Do artists only have one collection like this in them?

Formless

Certainly, the simple almost-formlessness of many of Hughes’ poems (free verse, very few stanza-breaks) and Cave’s songs (only semi-rhyming, often chorus-sidestepping) that defines both collections seems to be a privilege purchased by a lifetime’s formal pyrotechnics, experimentalism, proof of ability, be it technical-literary or Birthday-Party-bastardry-to-Bad-Seeds-balladry musical breadth. The much-cited example of Picasso proving himself a gifted formal draughtsman before choosing to experiment with cubism seems, hackneyed as it is, somewhat relevant here. Yes, the sharpened crystal clarity of both Birthday Letters and Boatman’s Call, their slap-face directness, is the fulcrum of their respective extraordinary success – simplicity for simplicities sake this is not. However, I think it is a simplicity acutely conscious of the work the precedes it’s lack of simplicity. Would either collection have worked as either artist’s first collection – have been accepted in the way that they were? A chorus that runs “Into my arms, O Lord, into my arms, O Lord, into my arms, O Lord, into my arms,” or the remarkable monosyllabicism of ‘Red,’ Birthday Letters’ closing poem:

Red was your colour.

If not red, then white. But red

Was what you wrapped around you.

Blood-red. Was it blood?

Long and monotonous

But not in a remotely problematic way. Both Birthday Letters and Boatman’s Call are long, the former particularly so. And both don’t change very much, from song to song, poem to poem. Hughes’ book represents, in fact, a triumph of unwavering voice. Cave’s record, on the other hand, was regarded by many as proof that he didn’t need the adornment of insane character-creations, melodrama or Bad Seed instrumental fleck to write brilliantly – that lyric, voice and piano could be enough, if he put his mind to it. Both are, in short, masterpieces of authorial integrity – their monotony makes that unarguable. Without this, the you-turn surely crashes and burns…

Both represent, essentially, a barely-interrupted stream of barely-split long-poem. Cave's record draws out this facet to Hughes' book in all its different-form proof of the integrity of Hughes' stylistic choices. The mature ‘you’ will always represent such a barely-split longpoem I reckon, it's the only way the thing can work – for this is a single moment in an artist's journey, almost arbitrarily segmented for the audience palate. See also, I don’t know, Nick Drake’s Pink Moon. More related in date (and, I suppose, in some ways content) to the content of Birthday Letters – read the latter with the former on in the background.

And begin to see, in word, voice and music, the singularity of these moments of twilight sad.

(To access a Spotify essay-soundtrack-playlist to accompany the above, click here)

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor

Issue 1 | Poetry | C-Words

I’ve always been somewhat of a completist. As a comic-book aficionado I would never be satisfied with a series until I’d owned every copy dating right back to the first. If I hear a song I enjoy on the radio, I react by saving up enough money to buy that band’s entire back-catalogue. If I enjoy a film, then I make a point of watching every  featurette and every interview I can find on the DVD until I feel like an authority on that movie.

I wouldn’t have brought this up unless I’d known that you all do this too. We’re a society obsessed with being vs. seeming. We trawl through bonus-discs and acoustic versions and making-ofs and rare B-sides and interviews. We’re addicted to what’s on the other side of the curtain.

In many ways, this outlines our obsession with those two dirty ‘C’ words in poetry – ‘Collected’ and ‘Complete’. Those two flirtatious little words are dotted across the spines on my shelves making the same promise we’ve all fallen for; ‘To read me, is to have the whole picture. I will take you back to where it all started and you will know this poet.’

We all want to go back to the start, read the complete Robert Frost as if we were the first people to discover him and chart his progress. We all flick to that first collection thinking ‘now, I will be experiencing the real poet, before he learned to hide himself in all that poetry.’ The idea sits there in our heads, that if we can go back in time to where the poet is finding their feet, then we will find that, just as we suspected, they are just like us behind all that talent and fame.

The more I play the debut game though, the more I realize it’s a false economy. The debut collection often represents the poet at their most guarded. The esoteric allusions come thicker and faster in many cases as a résumé to ward off the anti-youth brigade. It’s also a cliché but entirely true that a debut collection has often taken a whole lifetime longer to write than any of its follow-ups… often a lifetime spent without much first-hand experience of the literary community and professional criticism. I do genuinely believe however, that the internet is slowly but surely shifting trends in self-awareness and the value that writers and people who write place on their work.

Let me save you some time. Behind all that talent and (often posthumous) fame, poets are just like you. They watch trashy television shows and eat fast food. They have the exact same relationship problems that you have. They all worry sometimes that their life has been pointless. They lay awake at night wondering whether or not to send an email to their ex. They get pissed off when other poets beat them for a promotion. At one point or another, they have all broken wind. If you take all these things as read, then you will not need to go trawling through ‘Complete’ collections waiting for the poets to tell you this for themselves.

What you will find in debut collections, however, is the poet’s opening gambit. Their entrance music if you will. I have taken the liberty of composing 30 Haiku-Reviews of debut collections from people I respect. You will see that, in a few cases, it is not their abilities as a poet that I respect in these people, but there is nobody on this list that I do not look up to for one reason or another.

Ted Hughes – Hawk in the Rain

Devastatingly
powerful in its address
and orality.

T.S. Eliot – Prufrock and Other Observations

How very awkward
and solipsistic it is
to be middle-classed.

Robert Lowell – Land of Unlikeness

So very prolix
and esoteric. Who knew
he’d write Life Studies?

Robert Frost – North of Boston

If you are after
long, rural and lyrical
poems, you’re in luck!

Geoffrey Hill – For the Unfallen

Don’t worry mate, I
didn’t really get what he
was saying either.

Charles Bukowski – Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail

some goddamn asshole
in the flat next door won’t stop
screwing his damn wife.

Sylvia Plath – The Colossus and Other Poems

Some fine craftsmanship
but Plath will drag you into
a morbid hell-world.

Rudyard Kipling – Barrack-Room Ballads

A little racist
on occasion, but the man
sure had good rhythm.

Elizabeth Bishop – North and South

Knowing how angry
the ‘female’ prefix made her
… just ‘a good poet’.

Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass

Depending on which
edition you own, you could
be here for a while.

Dylan Thomas – 18 Poems

So much beautiful
nonsense – so shallow that it
appears to be deep.

DH Lawrence – Amores

Get lost in the cold
music of melancholy,
wise lyricism.

William Blake – Songs of Innocence

Something tells me that
this series is due to take
a rather dark turn.

Billy Corgan – Blinking With Fists

Seriously bad.
And I’m not just saying that.
Really bad writing.

Tim Burton – The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy

Not for young children
but ideal for those dark souls
who enjoyed Corpse Bride.

Matthew Welton – The Book of Matthew

Once you get your head
into his weird semantic
mind-fuck, you’ll love it

Luke Kennard – The Solex Brothers

Trippy prose poems
to leave you scratching your head
whilst laughing out loud.

Wallace Stevens – Harmonium

If nothing else, you
will learn a lot of new words
(keep Google open).

Hugo Williams – Symptoms of Loss

Probably his worst
collection but worth a read
for exposition.

John Berryman – The Dispossessed

It’s all there, the wit,
incantational syntax,
a drunk genius.

Tennessee Williams – In the Winter of Cities

Whilst it’s his drama
we remember, his poems
gave him his vision.

Nicholas Swingler – Dream of the Condom and other poems

It’s a tragedy
that more people don’t know this
book. Go buy it now!

Ray Diamond – The Runner of Little Races

One of the few books
I own set in sans-serif.
It’s very good though.

Jacob Polley – The Brink

One of few writers
able to write metaphors
that serve their purpose.

Stephanie Leal – Metrophobia

American gem
I like the one she wrote on
her vile ex-boyfriend.

Ross Sutherland – Things to do Before You Leave Town

I laughed my ass of
at the titular poem
and ‘Two Moons For Mongs’.

Les Murray – The Ilex Tree

Strewth! Bleedin’ bonza
bushwackin’ boetian boy
breaks onto the scene!

Seamus Heaney – Death of a Naturalist

These are the poems
on which a legacy’s built –
that one about spades.

Daljit Nagra – Look We Have Coming to Dover!

A moving collage
of the voices that have been
soundtrack to his life.

William Shakespeare – Venus and Adonis

The moral being
that clingy chicks get in the
way of a good hunt.













Phil Brown
Poetry Editor