G. And what have you found in Iceland?

C. What have we found? More copy, more surface,
Vignettes as they call them, dead flowers in an album –
The harmoniums in the farms, the fine-bread and pancakes,
The pot of ivy trained across the window,
Children in gumboots, girls in black berets.

R. And dead craters and angled crags.

Louis MacNeice, ‘Eclogue From Iceland’

This sign greeted me when I arrived in Iceland just before Christmas. I heard no harmoniums, ate no pancakes and wore no beret, but the landscape and twenty-hour nights disarranged my vision and so my economy.

universal tinge of sober gold ... (Keats, Endymion)

Photo borrowed from my daughter, bauble paid for in full.

Like the growth of crystals: a formative will and the impossibility of adopting any other mode.

Last weekend, walking along this beach, I wondered about all the bad poems and paintings this landscape has inspired. It's the Suffolk coast between Walberswick and Dunwich (a dangerously "poetic" place because most of it fell into the sea)*.

I once sat on a judging panel for a poetry prize when, exhausted by how much was out there, we began to discuss giving a different kind of award. It would be for not writing (or at least publishing) any poems for a specified period. In European agricultural policy, where farmers have been paid to leave land uncultivated so that it can recover, this is called set aside.

Setting aside the who ... how about the what? Which words, phrases, devices, angles, subjects, etc., would you pay good money not to see in a poem again?

I’d start with decorative taxonomies - those lists, in particular of artist’s colours and birds. No more alizarin, no more godwits.

And any form of epiphany other than the manifestation of Christ to the Magi, also known as January 6th.

And anything liminal, lambent or ludic.

*That is not Dunwich on the horizon. It is a nuclear power station and will have inspired bad poems all of its own.

Something stops making sense, won’t stay still, can’t be grasped, and then you come across the plain shape of it - a simple version that says ‘This is what I mean.’

Once when I was broken-hearted, I went to stay in a place where it rained every day. Each morning when I opened my door and set out along the path, I found a heart-shaped puddle. If anyone had been anywhere near, I would have said ‘Look, a heart-shaped puddle,’ and they would have said ‘Yeah right,’ and seen the heart because I had told them it was there.

The heart-shaped puddle meant nothing but I had to stop myself acting upon it and that meant something.

'First tell me what it was you thought you heard.'

In Berlin this week, I wandered into a dark room next to this building site and found myself not in a silent disco but a silent singalong.

‘Tune thy music to thy heart,’ Thomas Campion proposed. These people sure did.

Now that there is renewed hope that action can bring about change, are we going to see a return to explicitly political art?

I went to see the dance company DV8’s latest production, To Be Straight With You, which is described on their website as ‘a poetic but unflinching exploration of tolerance, intolerance, religion and sexuality.’

If someone described a poem that way, I would expect the worst:

And the London Times today published a poem written by Derek Walcott for Barack Obama. The comments, largely positive, include the suggestion that the poet read the papers more often. Should he? Should we?

The changes in the weather here have become less gradual, more brutal. Hailstones fall out of a blue sky. There is snow in October and then there isn’t.

It is four years since the sudden death of Michael Donaghy, at the age of 50. Donaghy was an American of Irish descent, who went to Chicago University, where he edited The Chicago Review, before settling in London in the 1980s. His poetry was the subject of this year’s T.S. Eliot lecture, given by Sean O’Brien, which focuses on Donaghy's "Black Ice and Rain" in which a man at a party follows a woman into her bedroom and tells her how he met a woman at a party... O'Brien concludes:

from Self-misunderstood
by Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac ‘Gaariye’

I can't understand you, curious self,
nor grasp how you're both life and death,

grabbed land and peaceful settlement,

grudging milker that makes me full,

sun set at evening whilst casting

noon's shortest shadow: how can you be

two who can't marry

yet share the same house?



How can I set this riddle and

give away its answer if

I fail to understand your secret

or even what you mean by it?



Are you something separate,

a stand-alone that leans

upon no man’s shoulder,

or such a part of the people

that you can't be parted from them?



And are you that which is Gaarriye

or two opposing halves

he cannot fit together?

I call you, crooked creation:

bear witness to your character.


Gaariye's poetry was translated by W.N. Herbert in collaboration with Martin Orwin, as part of the Poetry Translation Centre’s second World Poets Tour, which recently brought to the UK leading writers from Kurdistan, Cape Verde, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Somaliland and Sudan. Almost a year earlier, each was matched with a translator and a British poet, who worked together on producing English versions of their work.

W.N. Herbert had this to say about it all on the tour blog:

So did she or didn’t she and do we care? Travis Nichols is right to question the misguided investment made in how a poet goes about things and what they were wearing at the time, although there is sometimes something to be gained from putting the books down and going there.

I lived in Amherst for five months and failed (quite unconsciously) to visit the Dickinson home. I sat in an apartment belonging to the college founded by her grandfather, and read her poems and letters instead. It helped to be there under her sky (what could be seen of it through all those trees) and to get a sense of life in the kind of place you felt yourself entering or leaving, but I had no curiosity about her chairs and tables, let alone what action might have been seen by her sofa.

Some years later, I went back to make a radio programme about her and so had to get over myself and go inside.

Have we entered a version of silent disco in which the primary experience of the poem is as received signals rather than noise?

For a poem to operate as a poem must it now be concentrated on the idea of itself, must it appear to be either the square root of poem or hardly a poem at all?

What's a disco? asked my American penpal in 1974. She also sought clarification on ‘jumble sale’ and ‘youth club’.

Silent disco: I thought it was the most miserable thing I’d ever heard of (a room full of people with headphones on, dancing alone and in silence) until one night a year ago in Nova Scotia when there was well and truly nothing else to do. Someone described me as looking joyful. It’s not often I get called that.

1. COSMIC BLOOM

Someone told me recently that I was ‘one big metaphor’. They had a point.

One of my brothers has a PhD in astrophysics. I once asked him how his research was going and he replied, ‘It’s been a good month. I got a result.’ What was it? ‘Twenty-five million light years plus or minus twenty-five million light years.’ Fifteen years later, I am still thinking about what that might mean.

He was sent out to an observatory in the Australian desert to observe his particular corner of the cosmos. It rained for the first time in a hundred years and the skies were so cloudy that he could not see his stars. Meanwhile, flowers that hadn’t been seen for a century were emerging outside the observatory door. The desert was in bloom.

How was I going to resist this? Even though IT DIDN’T MEAN ANYTHING. And how could I properly understand what he was doing when I did not have the required maths?

Writing poems is as much about learning what is not enough, what is not the poem, as it is about retaining susceptibility (and you do need the courage of imagination to let yourself dis-integrate so that, like Frost, you arrive in the world of the poem as if you had ‘materialised from cloud or risen out of the ground’).

The more something speaks to you of poetry, the more you must search for, and find, whatever it is about the desert/cosmos/bloom fandango that speaks of you.

I grew up in a house full of books and made my way through the shelves.

There wasn’t much else to do.

I didn’t have a clue who anyone was, so I read poems not poets.

Those who formed me were from mythical places: Eastern Europe (lurking behind the Iron Curtain) and America (lurking behind the album cover and cinema screen).

They took me outside and so I got to see in.

Al night by the rosë, rosë,
Al night bi the rose I lay,
Dorst Ich nought the rosë stele,
And yet I bar the flour away.

Anon (14th century)

Those who understand what went on inside a tunnel in Switzerland last Wednesday have been struggling to explain it to the rest of us. The picture above is of what physicists believe the thing they are searching for might behave like if it does in fact exist.

While the world might think it doesn’t need poetry, it sure needs metaphor. The trouble is words get tiring and boring.

I like what Clive James has to say about Plath’s suave swing and what it is that activates a poem, or sustains one. On two recent occasions I have sat listening to people - first scientists, then academics - talk about the “poetic” when what they meant, in terms of content as well as style, was a kind of background music or easy listening. The scientists wanted something fuzzy from the word, the academics something sweet.

The second of these occasions was a conference on the great German melancholic W.G. Sebald, whose prose work Rings of Saturn is a metaphysical wander along the coast of East Anglia.