Poetry Library Acquisition

The Saison Poetry Library (incorporating the Arts Council’s Poetry Collection) has just acquired my complete backlist. The library has a strong collection of text-based book art, and an exhibition programme of new work by artists.

The Library has been one of my favourite places to work since it reopened last year. It’s particularly pleasant during a heatwave, as it is located in the Southbank Centre, in easy reach of the river and the endlessly diverting fountain installation, 'Appearing Rooms' by Jeppe Hein. Unlike the British Library, it offers the serendipitous pleasures of browsing the shelves: last week I went in looking for David Constantine’s Casper Hauser, which explores man's inhumanity to man, and came out with Distance & Proximity by Thomas A. Clark, which is a delightful meditation on the pleasures of walking in the countryside.

Printing Bookmarks

Many of the bookmarks I’ve seen during my research on the topic for the University of the West of England's Bookmarks VII project date from the beginning of the twentieth century – they were produced using letterpress and type-high blocks. I decided to return to letterpress for my own design, and visited the Old Stile Press, where I printed the bookmarks on the Albion hand press from polymer plates. Nicolas McDowall snapped the following photos during one of my dawn stints on the press.

Laundry Haiku

It's nice to have a poet as a landlord. This morning I found a note outside my room after I had been waiting to use the washing machine.

Sun stunned bees and birds
Garden festooned with our sheets
Machine now empty

Yu No Hu, 21st century

‘I wanted to show the world that art is everywhere’

There is no other colour that will give you the feeling of totality. … Of peace … Of excitement … I have seen things that were transformed into black that just took on greatness.

So said Louise Nevelson, arch-haunter of East Side skips. Nevelson transformed herself into a black-clad Manhattan artist and took on greatness, becoming one of the most brilliant Abstract Expressionist sculptors. Nevelson’s post-Cubist ‘paintings in space’ were inspired by Picasso's early guitar sculpture, using oddments to create imposing monoliths. Not all her work is black, but she had a notable taste for monochrome.

A retrospective of Nevelson’s work is being shown at the Louise Blouin Foundation. I was particularly impressed by the huge work End of Day Nightscape (1973) in which 27 typecases laid end to end are filled with an assortment of bobbins, brushes and junk.

I've planned a series of children’s art workshops based around the show, and last weekend I was presumptious enough to suggest that we could make our own Nevelson sculpture.


Like Nevelson, the children used materials which had been discarded, but they worked on a slightly smaller scale. They made frames from old showboxes and filled them with cylinders (loo rolls), squares (plant pots) and accordion structures made from folded cereal boxes. The results were dynamic (and messy), but no one expected the transformation that occurred when I got out my spray can. PVA splashes and colourful commercial graphics were obliterated in mysterious black and gold. Later, Mairead O’Rourke, the education officer, organised a show of work in the gallery.


‘The work that I do is not the matter and it isn’t the colour,’ Nevelson said. ‘It adds up to the in-between place, between the material I use and the manifestation afterwards; the dawns and the dusks, the places between the land and the sea. The place of in-between means that all of this that I use – and you can put a label on it like ‘black’ – is something I’m using to say something else.’

Ellipsis 1

Ellipsis has gone to the printer! The first volume of the series will be launched at the end of July, with readings by the three authors: Frances Gapper, Bethan Stevens and Ruth Valentine.

Mirabeau Performance

Mirabeau went down a storm at our first London performance. One audience member was heard to compare the concoction of words and chords to chamber music, though our final number, Richard Price's 'Last Train', owed more to the Rolling Stones than Schubert. The compositions of the talented Caroline Trettine (above) added depth to the simplest verses and Ian Kearey's light-fingered guembe accompaniment to my poem 'Astrolatry' (a translation of a ballad by Sorley MacLean) evoked the magic of space travel.

The Crowning Privilege: Carol Ann Duffy

Those who are beginning to find the media reportage of the appointment of Carol Ann Duffy as poet laureate a little disingenuous may be revived by the words of Robert Graves. Graves gave the Clark Lectures at Cambridge in 1954-5, and chose to speak about poetic patronage.

The history of literature shows that it is possible to sell poems without selling your soul: Graves' opening lecture, published in The Crowning Privilege, makes an important distinction between poets who worked independently within a system of court patronage, retaining their style and dignity, and poets (often 'scops' or 'snobs') who produced mere flattery. Graves reminds us that poetry has been inextricably linked to royal patronage since the Anglo-Saxon period. He notes, wryly, that in the medieval period, ‘Slavish commendations of royalty had not become fashionable.' Poems addressed to a patron were more likely to incite debate, and even Chaucer used his envoys to 'lecture Richard II on what kingly conduct should be.' Graves, who had no love for the establishment himself, notes that the dedications to patrons, common in poetry up to the period of Pope, were not only obsequious fawnings. The noble dedicatee often served the same purpose as the well-known reviewer on the modern blurb: the reader assumed that this would be quality verse. Duffy's predecessors may have been more unconventional and anarchic than is widely believed.

In the same lecture Graves continued the theme of his work The White Goddess, pointing out that the poetic deity is perceived as female, whether the Irish Triple-goddess and patroness of poetry, Birgit, the Welsh Cerridwen, or Calliope, the most distinguished of the Muses. John Skelton, among others, paid homage to Calliope: ‘Regent is she/of poetes al’. Few will expect Duffy to bring supernatural powers to the laureateship. Perhaps she will find a better role-model in the druid-poet of pre-Christian Britain, who sat at the right-hand side of the powerful female monarch. According to Graves, this poet's duties included responsibility for the matriarch's insignificant male consort, ‘to stand continually by the king’s side and ensure that no accidental breach of royal taboo on his part – by eating beans, touching a dog, wearing a knot in his clothes, and so on – could endanger the safety or fertility of the realm.’ One wonders if Duffy might be able to take a similar custodial role with regard to the Duke of Edinburgh.


Robert Graves: Photograph copyright Rab Shiell