[Before I start: an apology is due. The poems in the post are stanzaic, but despite 3 re-edits, WordPress keeps removing the stanza breaks. For the sake of sanity, then.

Before the flood is in 6-lined stanzas, except for the one beginning ‘the fifth year’ which has 8 lines

School Caretaker is in 4-line stanzas

Baba Yaga’s Daughters is more complicated. The seuence of lines is 4/2/4/5/6/7/3/6/2]

Thank you for coming. You look especially smart, today…shirts neatly tucked in, no trainers, nice hair, all sitting up straight and eager. And so you should be. I’ve been looking forward to this cobweb strand for a long, long time. Let me declare a vested interest. I owe a huge debt to Steph Bowgett, and to the Albert Poets, which she’s jointly run for years and years. Steph will tell you more about the Albert Poets anon, but my gratitude stems from an invitation to read at The Albert a few years ago, when I had published nothing, nor had any poems in any journals. Sally Goldsmith and Cliff Yates and Gaia Holmes were the other three readers. Ann and Peter Sansom were in the audience. I’ll not forget what that did for my self-esteem. Since then I’ve been a regular in the audience, and in her Monday night workshops, with John Duffy (a recent guest on the cobweb) in  which they both keep me on my toes, and my feet firmly on the ground.

Steph Bowgett is one of those people who champions other people’s poetry, and is absurdly modest about her own. Self-effacing and self-deprecatory, she strengthens my firm belief that the best poets I know are the most modest, and often unsure of and unconfident about their own work. Almost invariably it’s because they know a lot about poetry and its craft and its best practioners, and are over-inclined to compare themselves with the best and find themselves wanting. I should also say that I firmly believe that all too frequently the opposite is true, too…the confident and cocksure are rarely as good as they think they are, though they are pretty hot at self-publicity. I think I’d better not pursue that any further.

The title of her brand-new first collection is a gift. A poor kind of memory. I’m totally committed to the thesis that imagination is essentially the practical use of memory. I wrote about this at some length in the early days of the cobweb, so I’ll not trouble you with it now, but you can always check it out in a spare moment. You can find it in the archive : June 16, 2014. It’ll explain what lies behind the endorsement I wrote for A poor kind of memory:

“Accurately sensuous, beautifully crafted poems that range through the dark undertow of folk tale, myth and fairy tale, contemporary multicultured landscapes, a childhood in post-war Germany and the curious double moral standards of the English 19^th Century; a collection packed full as a beehive with crackling energy and riches. Wonderful.”

When I re-read this, I think I should say that I wanted ‘sensuous’ to include ‘sensory’, because it’s this sensory, as well as empathic, memory that makes Steph’s poems memorable and moving. And it’s all informed by wide reading, a vibrant sense of the realities of the historic past, a keen moral sense, a hatred of injustice, and above all, by love. You could at this point go back to the archive, and luxuriate in the poem that gives her collection its title. It’s a poor kind of memory that only works backwards. You can find it in the posts for June this year. Go and have a read and I’ll see you in a short while.

Ah, here you all are again. Good, isn’t it? Told you so. Right, I’m going to hand over to Steph, now, but I’ll interrupt every now and then to share a poem or three. Our guest: Stephanie Bowgett.

” I only started writing poetry in my forties though I’ve always loved reading it, and chose the 20C poetry unit as part of my Open University degree. This gave me a magical week’s summer school at York University where Seamus Heaney read on the first night, got chatting with my tutor group about eight of us, and then stayed the week attending our tutorials. I always enjoyed teaching poetry as well and got good results and did some training sessions for the LA but I still didn’t write.

Then in 1992, the TES ran a competition for teachers to win an Arvon  writing week at Tottley Barton. They asked for examples of lessons using a particular poem. To be honest, I was just as excited about the prospect of staying in that lovely old building as I was in writing. I wrote about a series of lessons using “I know why the caged bird sings” with my Year 6 class. The school I taught in had a predominently Pakistani heritage intake, but we also had African Carribbean children, children of Indian heritage and European migrants. I always tried to reflect their histories and cultures in the curriculum and this poem was part of a project on migration. It caught the eye of the judges and that was my first experience of intense writing and then having that writing analysed and criticised. The tutors were Kit Wright and the lovely late Gerard Benson. It was Gerard who encouraged me to continue writing, especially when he discovered I lived in Huddersfield, then dubbed Poetry Capital of the UK

( I think it probably still is , but in any case, this is nice opportunity to share the first poem, which reflects that concern for her multicultured classroom she talks about…..and her absorption in biblical myth and narrative, which she roots in a recognisably contemporary consciousness. Whence comes the perspective, and the workings of love)

Before the Flood

The fields grew white with salt;

our cow licked and licked,

worked her blue tongue. Her belly swelled

but not with calf. She died.

The fig tree died. I taught the children

to lance a cactus leaf, to suck its sap.

Old man Noah lost his head, began

to collect rope and asphalt,

barrels and pitch; to corral wild beasts,

bear, hyena, leopard; to dismantle

his house and build a boat. His wife

would scuttle past without speaking.

A first, second, third year passed.

People grew thin. A fourth year

and they wandered the city, prayed hard

for rain. My little ones whimpered;

I gave them rags to suck. The cactus

shrivelled like an old hag’s dug.

And all the time, that mad man Noah

hammered day and night, chanting

cubit lengths like a mantra. We got no sleep

for the hammering. His poor wife wept

begging him to stop. And the clouds

penned like sheep. Not a drop of rain.

The fifth year, and no livestock left, but Noah

filled the fold: mountain goats

two land-locked crocodiles, a pair

of aardvarks, a peacock and a peahen.

The stench was unbearable. And the hammering.

One night, I tried to catch the peahen;

she screeched and flew onto the roof and Noah

came out, caulking brush in hand.

The sixth year has come and gone. The sky

rumbles over the cracked town. Noah,

his mouth full of nails, hammers on.  Dear God

how we need the rain. He’s penned his wife

on the deck with lions, scorpions and silverfish.

She screams and screams.

My little ones don’t cry, don’t squabble,

they sleep. I watch them sleeping. There is a saw:

The sleeping and the dead are like one another.

Seven years ago this would have been a comfort to me.

Seven years ago, I would have wagered my last shekel

that this leaden sky presaged rain.

(Like so many of the poems in the collection, I heard it first in a Monday night workshop. And like so many others, it caught me unawares, made my skin prickle. Steph continues:)

These were heady days and Kirklees then funded three workshops in Huddersfield Library, one in Dewsbury (which I later lead with Mandy Sutter), and one in Holmfirth all with paid leaders. I knew John Lancaster who went to a Monday workshop in the library; this was for advanced writers. He read some of my first attempts and said he thought I would be fine there, so I went. Jeanette Hattersley was leading the group at the time, but my first session had the three John’s:  Duffy, Bosley and Lancaster, as well as Milner Place, David Morley and Janet Fisher. The group was soon taken over by Simon Armitage for a while and Phil Foster started coming. It was a baptism of fire, very nerve-wracking and lots of people came once and never again. After the workshops, we would go over to the Albert.

The next year, I was lucky to get an early reading at the library for International Women’s Day with three other new women writers, and felt sorry for the male poets who were new to the workshops.. so we arranged a one-off reading for them in the backroom of The Albert which was very well-received. (There was a precedent;Milner Place had had a reading there to celebrate his 60th, before I was involved.) This got John Bosley, John Duffy, Phil Foster and I thinking that we would like there to be regular opportunities for poets from the workshops to read for a decent amount of time as a scheduled poet…. not just one of many at an open mic.. We wanted it to be open to anyone, so decided on the 15-20 minute reading followed by a 15 minute break which enabled audience members to come just for short bursts if they wanted to. I went up to the bar and asked if we could have a regular slot in the back room and they gave us the second Thursday of the month which we have had ever since.

(Time for another poem: this one I want to share because many of Steph’s poems draw on her childhood in Germany in a British army family. This one makes me shiver, but I love its wit, its layered-ness. It’s a rich seam to mine when your Dad is given a copy of Mein Kampf signed by Hitler, and the gift is without conscious irony)

School Caretaker – BFES Essen

She wore her grey plaits, coiled into earphones

still that blonde Mädel in a dirndl skirt in the snap

with Ernst that she kept in her pinafore pocket.

He’d been right, she insisted, to divorce her;

the Fatherland needed children;

a barren woman was no fit wife; her life

was to serve. This school had been

the Gauleiter’s house, was her pride and joy.

My father caught her in a cartoon on his poster

hands in the air, wire glasses awry, cups flying

as she collided with that wayward child.

Please do not run in the corridor

In truth, it was Frau Schütte who ran.

Everywhere. Staccato as a scrawny chicken,

she ran round after Dad, Herr Director,

wrongly anticipated his every need.

When he left, she gave him a gift; something

she treasured. He must take it to England,

she said, bobbed a curtsey, thrust it.

into his hand. He protested, she insisted.

A copy of Mein Kampf. signed by the Fuhrer.

Frau Schütte was the only card-carrying Nazi

Dad ever met in Germany. And, despite it all,

he wouldn’t have hurt her for the world.

(Right. Back to Steph)

“The first reading was Christmas 1993 when the four of us read. Our audience included Simon Armitage who has always been hugely supportive and the place was full; a triumph considering they had to contend with crowds ouside watching Mr Blobby turn on the Christmas lights. By our third reading, we had got caught up in a “Poetry is the new Rock and Roll” thing and the media showed an interest. The Telegraph sent a reporter to that reading and shortly after that we were filmed by ITV’s Calendar and recorded for BBC4’s Kaleidoscope. Now people were asking to read. Local well-known poets Simon, Ian MacMillan, Ian Duhig and Geoff Hattersley have always been very generous with time and support, and over the years we have hosted many excellent readers including Jacob Polley, Philip Gross, Linda France, Kim Moore, John Hegley David Morley, John Lyons, Ian Parks . …….(I will have missed out loads of important people in that list). We have never lost sight of the reason we started, though, and we include newer and less well-published poets from our workshops, often giving them their first public reading.

(as I said earlier. I was one of them. I even found a picture of it on Google…Cliff Yates is reading and I’m listening)

The funding for the workshops disappeared, so we carried on the Monday workshops, running them ourselves, currently meeting in The Sportsman .(also in Huddersfield). John Duffy and I also run a workshop in Huddersfield library on Tuesday afternoons and also sessions in the Lord Street Mission.

I won a prize in the Arvon competition and one in the Peterloo, and won the Ilkley and Nottingham competions. John Harvey of Slow Dancer asked me to submit poems for a pamphlet. This was “The Grape-eating Fox”  published in 1995 and launched in London at The Troubadaur and now out of print. In the meantime, The Albert poets have performed in fields, pubs, coffee bars and for several years at with Michael Massey, Adrian Ingram and assorted other musicians The Marsden Jazz Festival.

Parly because of personal circumstances,including a much more demanding job and partly a loss of confidence, I stopped sending stuff to magazines (I had been published in Wide Skirt, Rialto, London magazine, poetry London, Smith’s Knowl etc.) I still enjoyed writing and the workshops and readings.

It took Bob Horne to make an offer I couldn’t refuse. He is amazing; his vision and enthusiasm in setting up Calder Valley Poetry and the speed with which it has been established as a recognisable brand is inspirational. He made it very easy and by now, I’ve got a lot of poems! I have really enjoyed putting this pamphlet together with his guidance and help.

(God bless Bob Horne, I say. I’m just as indebted to him, and I’ll shortly be writing a post about the business of the small poetry press, in which he’ll tell you more about it. But right now I just want to say what a pleasure it’s been to have Steph Bowgett as our guest, and to share one last poem. This one isn’t in the collection, but I heard it a couple of weeks ago at a workshop and just had to have it, because it encapsulates, I think, all the those qualities I wote about in my endorsement of A poor kind of memory. And also because it has Baba Yaga in it. I’m a total sucker for Russian folk tale.)

Baba Yaga’s daughters

You never could tell us apart,

that one in the mirror and me.

Wolves in the forest howl, yellow as yolk

and Bublik, we know you are one of their ilk;

why else would we languish, pine for you here

in a house that struts on the legs of a hen?

And this is a riddle

I riddle for you:

Why have one girl

when you can have two?

Listen! Our mother is pounding home

grinding stars in her mortar.

She wants you

for a lampshade

on a post by the door,

And we agree, me and the one

you mistake for me. Cornered,

your eyes are wide as a girl’s.

We giggle, kiss your loose lips,

pass you from tongue to tongue

dissolve you like sherbet,

me and my sister, the silver needle,

threaded behind my lapel,

She stitches you up in the hem of my skirt.

Swing there heavy, while I clap,

clap, clap to the balalaika;

arms akimbo, pirouette;

stamp my feet in little red boots

Hold tight, Bublik! One of us you’ll wed

but both of us you’ll bed, and Mother,

oh Mother will never know.

And this is a riddle

I riddle for you,

why have one girl

when you can have two?

In the dark they say,

all cats are grey

So too, my dear, are wolves

So too, my dear, are wolves

A poor kind of memory, indeed!  All that’s left for you to do now is break out in rapturous applause, say ‘Thank You, Sephanie Bowgett’ and then buy the book. Here’s your link.

Bookshop

Looking forward to seeing you all again next week. I just bought U.A.Fanthorpe’s Collected Works. I think I’m going to write about it with huge enthusiasm.

I was almost on the point of saying that I’m feeling my age. But that wouldn’t be accurate. Somewhere inside, I feel as young and confused as I did at thirteen. I was on the point of saying it last week on Skye when I was struggling to do much walking. What I was actually feeling was my crumbling bones, and I should be used to that by now. It’s been going on for 70+ years, after all.

However. It just happens that this morning I decided to try and make sense of my study; I’ve been steadily acquiring poetry, and books that I need to supply material for more poems, and once more running out of shelf-space. I’ve got a big collection of picture books and children’s fiction. That was fine when the grandchildren who visited were of an age for picture books and stories. But they’ve grown up through that. Now THAT makes me suddenly feel my age. Wow! What’s to be done? The answer’s simple. Keep the few you can’t bear to parted from and give the rest to a small school (our youngest lad’s best friend is headteacher of one such small primary school)…and another bag to eleven-year-old grandson who I reckon is ready for Alan Garner, and also for Earthsea, now he’s worked his way through Susan Cooper (and all my William books). And now I feel unencumbered and youthful, and the shelves breathe a sigh of relief. It’ll not last, but it’s nice for the moment. And, hey, it’s given me a nice hook for the cobweb strand.

But before I introduce today’s guest, a bit of ego-trippery feels unavoidable. And if not that, then certainly irresistible. With the magic of copy and paste, I can share this that I put on Facebook yesterday:

“Still dazed and starry-eyed  from last night in Sheffield. No experience quite like being handed a copy of your own book for the first time. It never palls. Lovely to read in a very handsome room in The Art House, surrounded by some very handsome artwork, and a very handsome audience. Steve Ely, Keith Hutson and Sally Goldsmith were among them. And I met and heard Stuart Pickford for the first time…which was great. Met Ann Pilling, one of the Yorkshire Prize winners, and also one of my heroes of the wonderful world of children’s fiction. And then there was Mike di Placido, who I could listen to all night, and the 1st Prize winner, Charlotte Wetton who can do no wrong. Thank you, Poetry Business, thankyou Peter Sansom and Suzannah Evans for setting it all up. I am very very very happy. And this is why.Every picture tells a story. (ps there’s a celebration of 30 years of the wonderful Poetry Business at the Loom Lounge in Dean Clough in Halifax on Wednesday November 9th. 7.30pm. There will be cake.Please come).”

I should add that if you want to buy a copy (and I sincerely hope you do) then you’ll shortly be able to do so via the My Books link and the magic Paypal button. It’s just waiting on my IT-savvy son, Mick.What I’d do without him I cannot imagine.

Ego-trip over. On with the young ones.

Actually, when I typed the title of the post, I wasn’t thinking of this lot, much as I loved them. I was actually thinking of a film I never saw, and a single , which I never loved at all, on the grounds that it swung like a ship on a sea of Mars Bars. He was never hip, was he, Cliff? About as edgy and dangerous as a bag of Skittles.

But despite the naffness of the single (and someday, when the years have flown, darling we’ll have young ones of our own…….It’s not rock ‘n roll, is it?   Hope I die before I grow old. That’s more like it) I’m happy to pinch the title. The Young Ones. Ladies and gents, let me introduce this week’s guest poet, Laura Potts.

I met Laura first, and subsequently, at The Red Shed Poetry nights in Wakefield. She actually looks like a poet. I’ve never seen her without a small notebook, in which she writes neatly, minutely and concentratedly. And she wears a small stylish hat. I notice these things. She also looks younger than she is. This is, I was told by the headmaster who gave me my first teaching job, a Good Thing. I remember that at the age of 24, and with two small children to support, I was refused service in an off-license in Marske. On the other hand, she’s still at university and has already  has twice been named a London Foyle Young Poet of the Year and Young Writer.She’s in the same distinguished company as Holly Hopkins, Luke Samuel Yates (who was a Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition winner in2015), Charlotte Wetton (see above) and the illustrious Helen Mort.

And here’s the thing; I sort of feel my age. She’s not 21 yet, and she writes and performs with a rare poise and confidence. How do they do it, the young ones? Because I only have two or three poetry friends who are older than me, I tend to think of 50+ year olds as young ‘uns. I sort of think of the likes of Kim Moore, and Helen Mort, and Tom Weir and Andrew Macmillan and Yvonne Reddick as precocious talents. I mean. They’re in their 30’s and they’ve got at least 30 years start on me. And here’s Laura, with about 50 years’ start.

I’ve written before that I come late to writing poetry. Writing seriously that is. Working at it. My friend Hilary Elfick said it was like a dam bursting, that a weight of stuff had been building for decades. And, as a teacher and voracious reader, I’d absorbed a lot of intuitive understanding of words. I understand that. But what grabs my attention and admiration is not just the technique of these young writers, but the obvious confidence that they have things to say. I thinks it’s wonderful, if not actually miraculous. I have to pinch myself to remember that Keats was dead in his twenties. What did he know about life? What indeed. I guess I needed to write that, to get today’s guest in perspective. I worry it will come across as condesencion. Because it isn’t. It’s gobsmackedness.

Let’s crack on. Laura writes about herself: (3rd person first)

Laura Potts is a Yorkshire-based poet and is currently an English Literature student at The University of York. In 2014 she became a Lieder Poet at the University of Leeds. In her spare time Laura is co-editor of creativity at The Yorker and edits The Poets’ Nook, promoting spoken word and emerging writers around the UK. This summer she has returned from studying at The University of Cape Town, South Africa, and working at The Dylan Thomas Birthplace, Swansea.

She continues (1st person)

My earliest memory of writing is of a seven-year-old me in my grandmother’s old armchair back home. She would read Kipling’s ‘If’ to me over and over again, and to this day I can still recite it. She wasn’t well-known in the writing world, but she’d had a few poems published in her time and was a great lover of words. I used to sit on her knee and she’d read in her great gravelly voice verses of Tennyson and Chaucer for hours. Of course, I didn’t understand it back then, but something about her vocal lilt made the words alive to me even when I was young. I often think of those times. That’s how it started. I owe my own love of writing to her.

As I grew through high school, writing became a form of escapism for me. I found those last years very mentally draining, and poetry was exterior to all of that. I wrote quite vigorously in the evenings, had a few pieces published here and there, and my break came when I became a Foyle Young Poet twice over. Someone actually thought there were sparks in what I wrote.

I guess these were the kinds of sparks they thought they’d seen and heard..Laura’s sent me three poems to share. The first fizzes with sparks:

But then parts of you

are dead. I sent the world a postcard from a fusty

window that said

I am wearing my grief.

Sling clothes into the bin: your socks, your skirts,

the notebook in the pocket of the moth-eaten dress;

pearls, perfume,

that locket – yes – the one etched with that lover’s name

you would never speak, but traced with warmer words

in the tepid curls

of firelight. Death in his Sunday finery asleep in the hall.

I call. Mother. Hear you still singing while washing

the dishes.

Now. Minds do many things. Canteen food garden gate

passing-bells rings. A wind slips beneath the door and

I hear you humming,

a voice swollen with the years of rolled-up sleeves

and tired eyes. The cries of a child at its mother’s knee.

See,

I remember Wordsworth, Tennyson, Keats, dripping

from your tongue in a terminal bed. Mother, I said,

forty years from

the child in your arms. There are parts of you dead.

Bottle and Bible. Now this is pleasurable. Somewhere

on the other side of the night I am hearing you say

The fields are alive

when the moon is bowed. Your name is stirring

in the trees and is gone. No. Look what you’re doing.

Look at me now.

It’s a curiously disturbing poem, I think…partly because I can’t quite nail the owner of the voice of the one who’s telling me all this. But there are memorable and memorisable things.  Death in his Sunday finery asleep in the hall. It’s such a precisely located and unexpected image. It sticks and bothers. Whereas the tepid curls / of firelight simply sticks. As does Bottle and Bible. I think I’m missing out on some common knowledge. And I love the confidence, the easy assurance of Now, this is pleasurable. Yes. It is.

Laura continues: Since coming to university I’ve tried to drive my craft more than ever. A few magazines have picked me up and of course the rejections outweigh the acceptances, but that’s how every writer begins. It’s dispiriting, but having just one poem out there every now and then is enough to keep writing.

I’m glad that she does. And I do like that conviction, too, about driving your craft. Because that’s what pays off in the end, as it does in the next poem

Yesterday Calling

Somewhen,

a gull snaps its wings

and laughs

as I stretch out the past

to the city with its dark heart

and us,

splitting our skins for a kiss.

On the rim of a memory,

spinning,

we fizz

like silver pins

on that street

or this.

My lover’s words I remember

trembled

like globed pearls on tepid stars

the hot dark of torchlight

kicking

from the pavement

sparks

as he went.

Bone-bent,

with eighty-six years in my face,

I read books

and play cards

and years have dried up,

slow prunes

in a vase.

But last,

in my crabbed hands his skin,

doused with river lights,

no foul breath of wartime but

a whole lost world of long-kissed nights,

thin films of eyes candled bright

in the lobes of my palms,

the four-medal arms deliberate,

passionate,

strong.

Afterwards, the distant salute of a bomb.

I’m still not quite sure about that last line, but there a the moments that matter, that memorise themselves as you read them. The gull that ‘snaps’ its wings, ‘splitting our skins for a kiss’ as we ‘fizz like siver pins’. I like the way the poem recognises the vitalities of memory, and the way the distant past may be more vibrantly alive and particular than the presentness of age. It’s quite something, that. Just one more poem, then, after this last thought from Laura:

The process is really quite cathartic to me. And it’s even more rewarding when that one person approaches me at the end of a spoken word night to say I touched them in some way. For all those hours of quiet, contemplative study, writing becomes, really, a connective medium. And it’s something to hold on to, something higher, something separate from my everyman world.

This is our night,

so we dampen down

stars onto pavements

which sleep on the other side

of the city’s eyes.

The long slow slope of the hills

stretches away

into the dark

and home.

In a park, the mouth

of a streetlamp gutters

and laughs. We are grinning

through a candle hour,

kicking back history

in the arch of our backs, the distant

chant of childhood a train wrecked

far off its tracks, a shadow lost

in some long-corridored past.

Cross the dark hills and

you hear them calling –

the other us –

the children down the hallway,

scrawling a sentence

which one day will speak

in the thawing smudge

of a kiss in this street,

where here and now

we are fizzing

and laughing

and dancing

when it is our night.

They are still letting off fireworks along the Calder valley, tonight, the night after Bonfire Night. Which seems right, where we are fizzing / and laughing /and dancing.

So, thank you for being our guest and for sharing your poems, Laura Potts. We’ll be seeing you again and again. And I know some of your more recent poems are full of crafted and complicated rhymes. That’s something to look forward to.

Next week we’re having a Poetic Gem Revisited, and the week after that I’ll be celebrating a memorable first pamphlet. See you all next Sunday. If you’ve nothing on on Wednesday, you’ll be more than welcome at The Loom Lounge at Dean Clough in Halifax. 30 years of the Poetry Business will be celebrated. How could anyone resist.