The theme for this episode was 'canonical'. I was hoping for a range of poems which would either celebrate the traditional canon of poetry in English, or go beyond it, or challenge it. Perhaps predictably, most of the challenges came from a feminine perspective countering what was seen as a male gaze or male point of view. I would have been interested in poems which took issue with the canon from a post-colonial or non-white or even just 'young'position. I think of a poem by Malaika Kegode, 'Music', in her collection, Requite, (Burning Eye Books, 2017):
Because I believe in Kanye West the way some do in Keats
believe in Marshall Mathers the way some do in Milton -
or, further back, of Daljit Nagra's very funny but devastating critique of the GCSE English poetry anthology in 'Kabba questions the Ontology of Representation, the Catch 22 for 'Black' writers' in his first collection, Look We Have Coming to Dover (Faber, 2007). Very pertinent as I write is Ben Okri's article in The Guardian:https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/oct/23/black-writers-new-stories-ben-okri-empire
However, the episode is jam-packed as it is, partly with solicited contributions, partly with new poems which were sent in.
The interview with Helen Eastman describes how she founded Live Canon and how, in part through its cross-overs with the world of theatre, it has become such an important force for promoting and publishing poetry.
We have a thoughtful extended reading from John Greening, where he reads poems which have been influenced not only by the English poetic tradition but the European heritage, as far back as Ancient Egypt.
Laura Varnam takes the part of Grendel's mother against the Beowulf poet, while Beck Reynolds criticises Keats through the voice of La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
Other poems come from Matt Bryden, Nick Grundy, Margot Myers, Rosie Jackson and Inge Milfull.
Dr Helen Eastman is a writer and director of theatre, opera and film. She trained as a theatre director at L.A.M.D.A., after graduating from Oxford University in Classics and English and has a doctorate in Classics from King’s College London. She founded the Live Canon ensemble and the Live Canon Poetry Press and has created over one hundred poetry shows, pop-ups and interventions with the company at venues from Abbey Road to Broadway. As director of the press, she has overseen the publishing of over fifty poetry books, including debut collections, pamphlets and anthologies. She created the 154 project, where 154 poets responded to the 154 sonnets of Shakespeare. She is currently the CEO and artistic director for Creation Theatre Company. Helen’s credits are too numerous to list here but these are some useful websites: https://www.heleneastman.co.uk/ https://creationtheatre.co.uk/ and here is an arbitrary selection of Live Canon publications: |
John Greening is a Bridport, Arvon and Cholmondeley winner with over twenty collections, most recently From the East. He has edited Grigson, Blunden, Crichton Smith and a new U.A.Fanthorpe Selected, plus several anthologies, notably Contraflow (with Kevin Gardner). His Goethe translations are published by Arc and there is a forthcoming Rilke. The Interpretation of Owls: Selected Poems 1977-2022 (Baylor University, USA, ed. Gardner) came out in 2023. |
Matt Bryden
Theophany
Your father appreciative
that you are of marriageable age
readies you a wagon to carry
your fine clothes to the river
scarcely needs tell you
the luminescence
that precedes the appearance
of a God
how from your party
you might be singled out
your playmates’ eyes
still on the ball
And you waiting
for a sailor to stumble from the bushes
bearded and unwashed, with a tale to furnish
of his desolated men… and while you
scan the shrubs and brush you will barely notice
the supportive grip under your shoulder
that holds you firm, nor the straight-back razor
tucked beneath your neck;
the confounding, the understanding
that comes with it
Matt Bryden is a teacher living in Devon. He has published a pamphlet Night Porter (Templar, 2010), a first collection Boxing the Compass (Templar, 2013), a book of translations The Desire to Sing after Sunset (Showwe, 2017) and a pamphlet The Glassblower’s House (Live Canon 2023). His work has appeared in various journals including Poetry Ireland, Magma and Modern Poetry in Translation. In recent years, he has won the Charroux Memoir Prize, The William Soutar Prize and a Literature Matters award from the Royal Society of Literature. He is a Royal Literary Fellow at the University of Exeter. www.mattbrydenpoetry.co.uk |
Beck Reynolds
La Belle Dame Speaks
Fledgling word weaver, dilettante maladroit,
you are not the first to entomb me in your verse,
I'd wager you won't be the last,
but if it's all the same I'd rather ditch the facade
erected by poets of the past.
I'm tired of being shackled to fleeting iambs,
forced to be a man's cautionary tale -
typecast in the role of femme fatale
before I could claim to be more than a child,
contorting to fill a woman's guise.
I didn't know better than to let myself be molded
into an object to be acquired,
pandering to men who think it's flattery
to say ‘it was an ill day’ when they first saw
your face - an ill day indeed.
The truth is no one shows little girls how to shed
a shadow who claims his life will end without you;
how was I to put up a fight when he insisted
on taking my cries as a lover's lies -
to be trampled by persistence?
It was only when he pulled me down
onto dewy meadow blades that I realized
I never stood a chance, I was cast
as the partner in this cursed dance
from the moment his pen first produced me.
So do not procure pity for a man that weeps
when the birds do not sing -
their blood is on his hands,
their feathers decorate the land he journeys over,
grinding bones into dust under his heel.
For once I want my story to feel like it belongs to me,
not some cliche riding in on a white steed they christen lover;
we have suffered him enough to suffer loudly,
if he seeks to inflict wounds on himself, let him be.
Men like him have taken up enough space in poetry.
Beck Reynolds is a poet from Oxfordshire, who is currently working on her first pamphlet. She writes about identity, belonging and things that are left unsaid. When she's not writing poetry, she can be found fumbling her way through her twenties, armed with a stack of books. |
Margot Myers
The Pretty Baa Lambs (Ford Madox Brown, 1851)
after Emma Madox Brown
There’s no hidden meaning, you said
it’s just a lady, a baby, some lambs
and some grass — it’s about capturing
sunlight and shadows with pigments
of green, blue, red, flake white
and Roberson’s high-gloss resin.
But I’m no oil painting, I said
nor a vision — it’s about my nose
hot blistering red, and poor Katty
starched stiff as a rocket, her warm
wet bottom such a weight in the crook
of my arm, the sheep eating the geraniums
and how, even after all that, you said
my mouth was never quite right.
Margot Myers lives in Oxford. She has been placed or shortlisted in several competitions, and has been widely published including The Emma Press Anthologies, Mslexia, The Interpreter’s House, Under the Radar, Cinnamon Press online, Poetry News, The Crank online, The Alchemy Spoon, Snakeskin online. Lighten Up Online, Poetry Worth Hearing. I Meant to Say (2020) is her debut pamphlet. https://www.poetshousepamphlets.co.uk
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Nick Grundy was born in central Manchester in the 1950s but grew up mainly on the edge of the Peak District, where he quickly developed a passion for the local wildlife and landscapes. After graduating in English Literature from Sheffield University he worked for several years at Sheffield Town Hall before becoming a teacher of English in Northampton and south-east London. He was a teacher and guide in Greek Macedonia and on the island of Crete prior to settling in Nantes (western France) with his French wife, Virginie. Nick and Virginie have been in Nantes for over 20 years, and they have a 23 year old daughter, Elina. This set of poems is republished with thanks from Acumen, Summer 2024. |
Rosie Jackson
Virgil, Dante, Flamingo
My love, when I die, I’ll turn flamingo…
Kathryn Bevis d. 14 May 2024
That morning they were everywhere, lipstick pink,
heads nodding on long necks as they twisted
to watch the train, water up to their skinny shins,
then in shop doorways, peering through glass.
And when I opened my phone, I understood why:
6 a.m. that day you turned flamingo, the colour of the dawn
in summer. I was on my way to a talk about the influence
of the classics on modern poets, the series named
after Jackson Knight, who translated Virgil’s Aeneid.
I’m fond of Virgil, those haunting scenes where he falters
through the underworld, searching for his dad,
how the greyness does not deter him. No wonder
he was sent as a guide to Dante in the Inferno,
those circles as dark as the catacombs under Paris,
where the living and the dead feed together.
When Jackson Knight got stuck with his translation
he contacted Virgil through a medium, wanting
the long-dead poet’s guidance, line after line.
It’s the kind of thing I might be tempted to do,
but the audience tittered, as if death’s only certainty
is to drive us off a cliff into a tongue-tied sea.
So I turned down the volume to where you were,
Kathryn, tall and free, skimming through the darkness,
your webbed feet pausing briefly on stepping stones
of light. I could see your scalloped wings, smell the mud
of the afterlife, the briney water, hear the squelch.
I’ve always thought pink too girly, but now I remembered
the picture of Dante in front of Paradise, his long robe
that rich flamingo pink, and in that hour of seeing you,
I knew it for what it was: the colour of love, of benediction.
What a one-sided affair it is, this dialogue with the dead:
how we’re allowed to talk to you, yet if we claim to receive
answers from the other side, it’s seen as lifting the veil
too far, as deluded as thinking flamingos have some kind
of gravitas. But they do, Kathryn, thanks to you, they do.
When I see them now, find a gaudy feather drifted
onto my desk, or words that need no watering,
I know it’s a message from you, and the heaviness
lifts a little – the missing, the riddle.
Rosie Jackson is an award-winning poet and creative writing tutor living in Teignmouth, Devon. Born in Yorkshire, she grew up in the mining Midlands, has degrees from Warwick and York, and has taught at various universities including East Anglia, Nottingham Trent and West of England. Widely published, her latest collection is Love Leans over the Table (Two Rivers Press, 2023). Other works include Light Makes it Easy (2022), Aloneness is a Many-headed Bird (with Dawn Gorman, 2020), Two Girls and a Beehive: Poems about Stanley Spencer and Hilda Carline (with Graham Burchell, 2020), The Glass Mother: A Memoir (2016). Rosie has won many awards, including Commended in the National Poetry Competition 2022, 1st prize Teignmouth 2021, (joint) 1st prize Hedgehog Press 2020, 1st prize Poetry Space 2019, 1st prize Wells 2018, 1st prize Stanley Spencer Competition 2017. She was a Hawthornden fellow in 2017, nominated for the Pushcart prize in 2021, and is on the team of Poetry Teignmouth. |
Inge Milfull
Death is the Outside
(after a passage in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History)
Thus spoke one of the king’s counselors:
Life seems to me, to those who linger in it,
as if we huddled inside, in the winter season,
sheltering together against sharp showers
in the walls of the house in harsh weather,
and a bird blundered in, blackbird or sparrow,
driven through the doorway by the dreary onslaught,
flitted among rafters, randomly roaming,
hovered near the hearth where the heat rises,
then blundered out through the back door--
the soul's image, we have all seen such--
off again into the unknown.
Inge Milfull is half German, half Australian. She grew up in Germany and now works in Oxford as a lexicographer. She now writes mostly in English. She is a member of the Back Room Poets and runs one of their poetry workshops.
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You can find the recordings of these poems on the podcast at.https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kathleen-mcphilemy/episodes/Poetry-Worth-Hearing-Episode-27-e2q2vql or on Apple or Audible podcasts. Please listen to the poems rather than just checking out the contents here. This podcast values writers reading their own work in the belief that the aural dimension is an integral part of the experience of most poems.
The theme for the next episode is 'lost and/or found'. Please send recordings of up to 4 minutes of unpublished poems with their texts and a short author bio to poetryworthhearing@gmail.com. Please send texts as word docs rather than PDF. Deadline November 18th.
Comments and suggestions very welcome to the same address.
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