Top Ten Autumn Poems

If the sign of spring is the first cuckoo, for me the sign of autumn is hearing someone - usually someone just stepping outside into a foggy day with golden leaves swirling across the pavement - quote Keats' 'season of mists and mellow fruitfulness'. Like 'now is the winter of our discontent' or 'shall I compare thee to a summer's day', these lines are no so much part of the English language that they survive quite happily without the poem they introduce. Autumn provides a ready-made metaphor for the end of youth, the process of ageing and intimations of wintery death on the horizon. And yet, as in Keats' lines, autumn is also a time of plenty and harvest. So, my selection of favourite autumn poems (in no particular order) may be downbeat, but there is always some comfort to be found.

I'd love to discover some of your favourites - feel free to leave a comment!

Image: Wikipedia

1. 'October' by Edward Thomas

Thomas is the 20th century poet of the English countryside, but the landscapes he loved were never only beautiful, shadowed as they were by existential and political concerns (for instance, in 'The Team's Head Brass'). Here, the observer is struck by the beauty around him, but also experiences a melancholy born of his own awareness of his difference from the rest of nature, that difference which is a product of human consciousness. The irony is, of  course, that the beauty of nature could not be experienced without that human point of view.

2. 'Autumn Song' by W.H. Auden

A wonderfully musical poem which manages to make the mountain of winter (and, metaphorically, death) sound like a relief from the stiffness and decay of the autumnal world. It certainly seems more of a comfort than the narrator's fellow human beings, growing cold as the nature around them.

3. 'A Cranefly in September' by Ted Hughes

The cranefly of the summer becomes an ungainly, unlikely creature in Hughes' description, like a species about to be made extinct by an environment which has changed without leaving time for it to adapt. The 'vast empire' of nature is indifferent to her fate.

4. 'Song at the Beginning of Autumn' by Elizabeth Jennings

Elizabeth Jennings says that 'every season is a kind / Of rich nostalgia' - as in most things, she is right.

5. 'Sestina' by Elizabeth Bishop

Skilfully using the sestina form to suggest a moment of stasis, Bishop captures autumn as a time of waiting - the cold felt by the grandmother is an intimation of mortality, while the child waits for the flower bed she has drawn to bloom in an anticipated spring.

6. 'When Autumn Came' by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Autumn as a desolation that only May can redeem.

7. 'After Apple-Picking' by Robert Frost

Frost beautifully juxtaposes autumn's twin themes of decay and plenty - here the narrator is weary from harvesting so much richness, and that weariness suggests that he may not be able to enjoy the fruits of his labour for too much longer. The pane of ice from the water trough, which he holds up to observe the autumn world, is a lovely metaphor for his melancholy point of view.

8. 'Preliminaries' by Peter Redgrove

A much more vital and life-affirming take on autumn here, as we might well expect from Redgrove, who is never a glum poet - the poetic imagination gives the changing season an energy which charges the whole of the natural world with erotic expectation.

9. 'Autumn Evening at Home' by Penelope Shuttle (you have to scroll down slightly!)

A lovely poem by Shuttle for her late husband, Peter Redgrove. Here autumn is a moment of loss and loneliness. It's remarkable how much Shuttle is able to achieve with such economy - a real contrast to Redgrove's effervescent style.

10. 'Autumn Refrain' by Wallace Stevens

If there's one thing I personally try to refrain from, it's commenting on or attempting to interpret Stevens' poetry. I just read it. A kind of desolate music in this exquisite poem.

Autumn Dates

After a pleasant summer lull in poetry goings-on, I have a few appearances coming up in September and October.

On Sunday 22 September, I'll be in Bromsgrove for the prize-giving ceremony for the Ralph Ockendon Poetry Prize (http://ralphockendonpoetrycompetition.com/). My poem 'Lenin at the Music Hall' is nominated for the prize. The event takes place at 3.00 p.m. at the Artrix Theatre. The prize has been judged by Sean O'Brien.

On 26 September, I'll be in Cirencester with my good friend Jennie Farley, performing our 'Counterpoint' programme at the Brewery Arts Centre, from 7.00 p.m. Further details here. Jennie and I have put together a wide-ranging performance of about 40 minutes, with reflections on love and relationships, taking in myths, cross-dressing and superheroes along the way. There's an open mic sessions before our reading, so the audience can share their poems, too.

On 2 October, I'll be reading my poem 'Leda' at the launch of The Echoing Gallery, an anthology of ekphrastic poems by writers based in Bristol. The reading will feature 22 poets and live music. It starts at 7.30pm at The Orangery, Goldney Hall, Lower Clifton Hill, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1BH. Further details on the anthology can be found here.

On 5 October, I'll be reading my poem 'To the Harvesters of Ambergris', which was commended in this year's Battered Moons poetry competition, judged by Alice Oswald and Cristina Newton. You can read all of the winning and commended poems here. Further details of the event can be found here. The chief attraction of the evening will be to hear Alice Oswald read. I'm very much looking forward to it. Tickets seem to be selling quickly, but can be booked here.

On 13 October, I'll be reading my poem 'Song of His Suterkin Brother' at an event for the poets nominated for this year's Wells Festival of Literature poetry prize. The even begins at 2.30 p.m., but details are not yet on the web. I'll update in due course.

Constraint

As noted below, I haven't been blogging much recently, faced with an increasingly tricky work-life-writing balance. Writers who don't do it for a living often complain that they lack the freedom (i.e. the time) to write, but I wonder if I would get any more written if I had more time to do it. After all, what I have written has happened in amongst everything else that I do. What would really happen if that was taken away?

I've been thinking a lot about constraint recently, having read a new book of two essays on the Oulipo movement: The End of Oulipo by Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito. It's quite a curious book, polemic at times, and less about the movement and its poetics than about particular individuals, but still worth reading as a reminder of the fascination which this group of writers, founded in Paris is 1960, can still exert. In the English-speaking world, the prose works of Oulipo writers are perhaps better known, including those of Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, but their approach to literature is equally applicable to poetry. The Ouvroir de littérature potentielle or Workshop of Potential Literature (Oulipo for short) proposes an approach to writing which emphasises the imposition of artificial and often complex constraints on the text to be produced. The resulting work represents a possible outcome of the experiment conducted by the author, but only one of the many potential outcomes. And, indeed, the experiment can be repeated again and again within the same text to demonstrate the many possible versions that might be produced. So, for example, Queneau's Exercises in Style retells the same banal anecdote over and over again in a variety of literary styles. A recent practitioner of Oulipian techniques in poetry, although not a member of the group, is Christian Bok, whose collection of prose poems Eunoia contains five sections, each written using only words containing only one of the vowels. (There's an excellent essay on Bok's work here, by the way)

Photo: D. Clarke

While these extreme forms of constraint produce fascinating - and often very witty - results, I wonder to what extent Oulipo, at least in poetry, is in fact at one end of a spectrum along which all poetry operates. Really, there is no such thing as 'free verse' - poems tend to invent their own conventions, and every poet is constrained to some extent, even if only by the practice of line breaks and stanzas which we all recognise as making the text on the page seem like a poem.

When I look around at contemporary poetry, I see a lot of poets setting themselves formal challenges. Michael Symmons Roberts recent Drysalter, for example, consists of 150 15-line poems. As far as I'm aware, there is no special reason for adopting these parameters, but - once accepted - they allow Symmons Roberts to explore a range of formal possibilities within the space of those 15 lines. Only by limiting himself is he able to discover something new. Matthew Caley's Apparently (2010) is a very different collection, but takes as its starting point the premiss that each poem will either begin or end with the word 'apparently'. This gives the whole collection a speculative, playful atmosphere, as if everything were in the subjunctive - which, in poetry at least, I suppose it always is. There's more game-playing of various kinds to be found in Jon Stone's excellent School of Forgery (2012), much of it with distinctly Oulipan tendencies.

But even poetry which does not foreground its formal constraint so openly cannot escape the fact that its artifice is central to its own production. I have often heard the view expressed that poetic form should somehow melt into the background or become natural-seeming. Of course, we have all heard and read bad poetry which is written only to make the rhyme or meet the requirements of the chosen metre, but these poor examples should not distract us from the potential of formal constraint, of whatever kind, to challenge the poet to explore new terrain - form is not just something the poem is poured into, but a factor in its production, opening up new potential for expression.

Coming soon...

I've been feeling terribly neglectful of my blog of late. (Paid) work has been all-consuming, and any poetry energy available has been channelled into actually writing some poems. Hopefully the summer months will bring a little breathing space.

For now, readers will hopefully be content with another bit of self-publicity, this time for three gigs where they can here me reading some of the poems from Gaud and more recent work.

3rd July sees me in Bristol, at Charles Thompson's Bristol Poetry Review at the Square Club in Bristol. I'm very excited to be involved in this reading in particular, as it sees the first outing for the re-vamped Poetry Factory, a workshop group/performance collective, which will be delivering a programme with the enticing title 'Lucky Dip' to the good folk of Bristol. Full details are below on the excellent flyer created by Philip Rush. You can find out more about Poetry Factory at our blog, run by Sharon Larkin, or on our Twitter feed. We really are very 21st century, as you can see.

Only a few days later on 7th July, I will be reading at Buzzwords in Cheltenham (from 7 p.m. in The Exmouth Arms) along with the aforementioned Philip Rush. I'm especially pleased to be doing this, as Buzzwords - run by the amazing Angela France - was the first open mic I went to when I moved to Cheltenham and the first place I really started to get a sense of how my work came across in performance. The quality of the poetry you can hear at this venue really is excellent, and the support in the room is always magnificent. Can't wait!

Incidentally, Buzzwords has a top-notch competition running at the moment, judged by David Morley. Please do enter - the prizes are generous and the cause is a good one.

Last but not least, one half of the Flarestack Poets team, Jacqui Rowe, has invited me to read on 23rd July at Poetry Bites at Kitchen Garden Cafe in Kings Heath, Birmingham. The gig starts at 7.30 and will also feature Nichola Deane and open mic slots. I'm looking forward to seeing some new faces and hearing some new voices.

Another Review at Sabotage

I have another review of two very interesting pamphlets on the Sabotage website.

The review discusses Cara Brennan's Destroyed Dresses (2012) and Michael Stewart's Couples (2013). Both are from Valley Press and well worth a read.

Never Apologise.

A seminar room in a college or university somewhere in the UK. The students, aspiring journalists, have been set the task of writing a piece for the cultural pages. Just to make things more of a challenge, they've been asked to write about something they know all of their readers will hate - poetry.

'Don't forget', the tutor says, raising an admonishing finger, 'you have to start by reminding your audience how dreadful poetry is. Poetry is dull, alienating, intellectual, inaccessible, la-di-da. Or it's effete, over-the-top. Most of it doesn't even rhyme, that is to say, it isn't actually poetry at all.'

The students tap away frantically at their laptops, getting this all down.

'But the secret to writing about it,' the tutor continues, 'is to get all of that out of the way first, which will allow you to then do your big reveal - the reading, event or festival you are writing about is actually...'

He pauses for dramatic effect. Fingers hover over keyboards. Jaws slacken in anticipation.

'QUITE GOOD!'

Image: Concordia University Magazine

Now the students look less convinced.

'No, seriously - poetry in the UK at the moment is vibrant, exciting, moving, all of that stuff. In fact, I'm not sure it ever stopped being that way. But we can't say that in print, UNLESS we start by emphasising that, in general, it is pretty awful. You will only ever convince a reader that anything to do with poetry is worth paying attention to by making clear that whatever you are taking about is very much the exception to the rule.'

A murmur goes through the class. They are almost ready to be persuaded.

'Don't believe me? Well, just take a look at just about any article on poetry in the non-specialist press, listen to any mention of poetry in broadcast media. It's common practice and what the punters expect.'

A hand goes up.

'But what about opera, Dr Hackensack? That's just as turgid and elitist as poetry, surely?'

Another hand.

'Yeah, and ballet?'

The tutor smiles the smile he reserves for questions of such naivety.

'Oh no, no. Other minority arts' - he scratches some scare quotes in the air - 'are just not in the same category. I know we're supposed to encourage critical thinking, but this really is one of those eternal laws of journalism. No editor will be able to explain it, but that's just how we do things. I look forward to reading your articles.'

**

Well, that's how it must happen. Otherwise, this journalistic reflex seems hard to explain. Is there no better way journalists can find to talk about poetry than to begin their pieces by apologising for its existence. I've read this sort of thing far too often.

And it infects poets, too. I had to turn off my radio recently when the otherwise excellent Paul Farley began his Radio 4 series The Echo Chamber by reassuring his audience that contemporary poetry really wasn't as scary as they reckoned. This apologetic and negative stance does poetry no good and is actually patronising to the audience, who don't need to be told what they feel about anything. Poetry needs to present itself on its own terms and let the audience make up its own mind - and journalists are not helping that process by prefacing everything they say about poetry with negative stereotypes.

Review of 'The Debris Field' at Sabotage Reviews

My review of 'The Debris Field' by Simon Barraclough, Isobel Dixon and Chris McCabe has just been published at Sabotage Reviews. I'm looking forward to writing some more for this excellent website in the near future.

Poetry = No Rules

National Poetry Competition season has been upon us. Nick Laird, one of the judges - and an admirable poet himself - has added to what must now, I think, be considered a sub-genre of poetry crit: the 'how not to do it' guide.

These sorts of interventions have something of a tradition, one of the most famous being Ezra Pound's 1913 essay 'A Few Don'ts by an Imagist'. There are even poems by disgruntled competition judges and editors dedicated to the things you should never do if you want to get your work published, for example by Todd Swift, Michael Mackmin of The Rialto, and Fleur Adcock. I also regularly come across blogposts with lists of 'what not to dos' by established authors.

When this advice relates to how to deal with editors and others who have a say over whether your work gets published, much of it seems to be sound. I'd certainly agree that making demands or even threats is a bad way to go. It's just plain rude, for a start.

But then there is the advice about how the poetry itself should be. Don't use commas at the end of lines. Don't use cliché. Never repeat a word in same poem. Never repeat a significant word within a collection or sequence of poems. Never write 'shards'. Never write 'gossamer'. Never use a rhyming dictionary. Write simply. Only use everyday language. Use footnotes if you are making obscure references. Never make obscure references. Never use adjectives. Never use more than one adjective in the same line. Never use semi-colons. Never use dashes. Never ask questions in poems...

All of these pieces of advice (and there are plenty more where those came from) are things I have read in guides to poetry writing or heard repeated by fellow poets, in the latter case quite often with the (frankly infuriating) rider that 'my poetry tutor said...'

Well, it's all guff. Total and utter guff. I have read excellent contemporary poems that do all of those forbidden things (although not usually all at the same time) and bravely fail to follow the accepted wisdom. No doubt such wisdom is helpful in some ways, if only to make us question what we are doing and pull us up when we are writing lazily, but there also comes a point where we have to have the courage of our convictions and say, 'I know that isn't supposed to work - but it does.'

Another problem with the don't-ers, is that they limit poetry. Pound was pushing an aesthetic agenda, and this is true of any maker of prohibitions in art. On some level, they want poetry in general to be like the kind of thing they like. But isn't that a strange thing to wish for? Would it make sense for someone to say, 'music should be like this, and only like this', when music as an art form is so immensely diverse? That 'a painting can be like this and only like this'? Then why do so for poetry?

I'm more than happy for there to be poetry I don't like, since nobody yet has forced me to keep reading it, and I can see when I am reading something I don't care for how I would do it differently. But to suggest that there is a way to 'get it right' turns poetry into something akin to a sport, like diving or synchronised swimming, where the reproduction of an ideal set of moves is what counts, not the testing of the boundaries.

So let's have an end to these supposed rules of poetry. They are snake oil. And the excellent winner of this year's National Poetry Competition is proof of that, since it marvellously contravenes one of my own personal (and vehemently espoused) don'ts - 'don't write poems about World War One'.

Who'd a thunk it?

Image: Thunk

A quick mention for Thunk, a South West-based magazine for fiction, journalism and poetry that is about to launch its first issue. I will be in Issue 2, scheduled for June, but in the meantime they have published one of my poems on their website. For those who know me, the central figure in this poem is an amalgam of various characters I've worked with over the years, not any particular individual - and the joke is really on the narrator of this tale, not its subject.

Poem at 'Antiphon'

I'm delighted to have a poem in Issue 6 of the excellent on-line poetry journal Antiphon.

Moving house last summer involved the disassembly and reassembly of a greenhouse - a process we had already been through once when we had bought it second hand and transported it in pieces from the outskirts of Birmingham. On both occasions, it was an extremely long-winded and fiddly process, but - as poets probably say too often - at least I got a poem out of it.

Photo: D. Clarke

In keeping with their name (antiphony is when a song features a call and response between the singer and the choir or audience), the editors are keen for readers to comment on the published poems and tell them about their favourites. Click here for more information. I know that Orbis have been doing this very successfully in print for a number of years, and it seems only logical that on-line magazines should provide a forum for this kind of discussion. So, why not get in touch if you have enjoyed the work?