Poetry update: eggs, Aldeburgh, August – and Pussy Riot latest

Okay, so see above. One is my book; one is the book of Nikola Madzirov, a Macedonian poet I met at Poetry Parnassus. One has a lying-down egg with a drawing of Mark Lawson on it; one has a lying-down egg with writing on it. One has a Salt logo, and one has a slightly imperial-looking emblem. One has two typefaces of the same kind for title and author, while the other has two typefaces of the same kind for title and author… oh, I see – and an introduction! Well, I have a blog.

And one is almost the exact green I once painted my living room, even to the extent of mixing it myself, whereas the other  - well, the other egg is in my living room.

One I already own, of course; and one is winging its way to me e’en now. Nikola told me last week it was coming, but only yesterday did I find out about the eggness.

So my question is this: could they by any chance be related?? 

In other news, the programme for this year’s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in November is now out – and it’s great to be able to announce that I’m going to be the festival’s first-ever official Blogger in Residence! I’m very excited about that and massively looking forward to it. Aside from anything else, I’ll be up there for four or five days, and that will be my first ‘holiday’ in over a year. But also, it’s brilliant to be doing it; there are ideas flying around about how best to use the platform to enhance people’s experience and also to make a blog that will continue to be a resource even after the festival. I’ll also be presenting an event on some of the poets who are reading. And it’s an exciting year anyway, with the festival’s move to Snape – and I’ve had a sneak guided tour of the whole place and it is gorgeous. Click the picture to go to the festival website. Really interesting readers and events, which of course the blog will attempt to convey to both festival-goers and a new constituency of ‘virtual festival-goers’…  So did I say it was exciting?

Also, Rotterdam’s Poetry International website has published three new profiles – of Jon Stone, Shazea Quraishi, and Helen Ivory - that I wrote for the Poetry Society. They come replete with poems, some new, so have a look.

While we’re on the subject of Jon Stone, the tireless one has devised a series of writing exercises, or prompts, and they’re being run on the Young Poets’ Network blog as the ‘August Writing Challenge‘ – one every other day in, er, August. The idea is for poets under 25 – whom the website is aimed at – to do  the whole challenge and to come out of this month with a mini-pamphlet of new work. But I think it’s a great idea and doesn’t have to be just for the kids! I say, let’s occupy that poetry challenge. Everyone’s away anyway, the rest of us might as well do some writing.

And finally, this Paris Review interview with Frederick Seidel - you’ve got to read it. Frederick Seidel is wonderful, for reasons this paragraph comes close to capturing. What it doesn’t capture is what his poems are like. But there’s a longish poem in the piece that’s a perfect example.

The poet’s work has won notoriety for a stance of épater-le-bourgeois knowingness that asserts with a cool rhetorical elegance that Seidel is on speaking terms with the haut monde (which is true enough), and that at the same time he essentially belongs to a society of one. It is the classic antisocial pose of the dandy, ennobled by Baudelaire but notably absent from most of American poetry. Some readers have failed to see beyond the stylistic carapace into the passionate heart—fearful, courageous, and tender—that it conceals and protects. As Benjamin Kunkel observed in Harper’s Magazine: “the excellent table manners combined with a savage display of appetite: this is what everyone notices in Seidel. Yet he wouldn’t be so special or powerful a poet of what’s cruel, corrupt, and horrifying had he not also lately shown himself to be a great poet of innocence.”

He is also – for someone who very sensibly won’t be drawn out on ‘what his poems mean’ – surprisingly direct and articulate about what’s important in a poem, and in the writing of one. The interview is littered with really good reflections on writing, and form. It might give you some more to go on while you do Jon Stone’s challenge.

INTERVIEWER

In other recent poems the formal elements have become more pronounced, more stylized. Take the poem “‘Sii Romantico, Seidel, Tanto Per Cambiare.’” You use one rhyme for the whole thing: “Women have a playground slide / That wraps you in monsoon and takes you for a ride. / The English girl Louise, his latest squeeze, was being snide.” Where did that come from?

SEIDEL

It’s called monorhyme when it applies to the Mu’allaqat, the great pre-Islamic odes in Arabic. I’ve tried for twenty years, and failed, to translate the two odes by Imru’ al-Qays and Labid, both in monorhyme. Someone had addressed the Italian words of the title to me, and I started the poem off as a mocking reply but was almost immediately aware that I was remembering the monorhyme of the odes.

INTERVIEWER

How does the use of monorhyme improve the poem? What does it contribute?

SEIDEL

By using monorhyme I’ve forced the formal elements to become a character. They are insisting that you pay attention to them. They are onstage with the other elements of the poem. In fact pulling off the monorhyme becomes a kind of acrobatic feat. But the truth is, despite the noise and obviousness of those rhymes, a certain number of readers will be more interested in the colorful vehemence of what the poem is talking about—“The toothless carnivore devoured Viagra and Finasteride” and “He filled the women with rodenticide”—and will hardly notice the monorhyme. But the rhymes say, The subject isn’t the subject. Don’t be fooled.

And finally, as keen-eyed observers will be aware, Vladimir Putin was in London this week. What joy for us. Apparently the pressure is working – there have been Pussy Riot protests outside the Russian Embassy, as well as Amnesty International and other campaigns. Well, blow me down if the ex-KGB man hasn’t just issued a surprise statement! (This isn’t poetry news exactly, but it is in a way because the lyrics of the Punk Prayer are actually interesting in themselves. And regular readers will know we’re taking a very keen interest in the Pussy Riot trial here in Baroque Mansions.) The statement, designed to make him look more reasonable in the eyes of the West – and get him off the hook if the girls should accidentally be put away for seven years – nevertheless carries with it an astonishing suggestion that it’s natural for the courts in Russia to be influenced by something the President says.

“Nonetheless, I don’t think they should be judged too severely for this,” Putin said. “But the final decision rests with the courts – I hope the court will deliver a correct, well-founded ruling.”