The Two-Way Poetry Podcast

Mark Pullinger on Shinkichi Takahashi's poem 'Sparrow in Winter' and his own work 'Magus' and 'Untitled'

In this episode, poet Mark Pullinger discusses Shinkichi Takahashi’s poem ‘Sparrow in Winter’ (translated by Lucien Stryk) and two of Mark’s poems: ‘Magus' and ‘Untitled’.
 
In the interview, we talk about Mark’s introduction to Zen poetry - and Zen haiku in particular - through his discovery of Shinkichi Takahashi’s work. We examine the multifaceted qualities of Takahashi’s poem ‘Sparrow in Winter’, which adopts simple language to create nuanced and complex associations around consciousness, the void, how the narrator and sparrow ‘mesh' with each other.   We then go on to explore Mark’s approaches to writing through focusing on ‘Magus’ and ‘Untitled’.  Mark talks in some depth - drawing on the specifics of these two pieces - about how his poetry has evolved over the past decade since the publication of his thesis.

You can find Takahashi’s poem ‘Sparrow in Winter’ in his collection Triumph of the Sparrow: Zen Poems by Shinkichi Takahashi - translated by Lucien Stryk (Grove Press, 1986). I picked up a digital copy of the book.

 

Mark Pullinger lives in the Dearne Valley, walking distance to RSPB Old Moor and its satellite sites, where he walks with his wife daily. The philosophy outlined in this interview was conceived for his PhD thesis, The Speaking World, available on Loughborough University’s Institutional Repository. He has recently completed a poetry collection on Kafka and the natural world, making a style shift from his thesis, but still expressing the same worldview.
 
The Speaking World is available at https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/thesis/The_speaking_world

 

You can also follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

 

Sparrow in Winter
by Shinkichi Takahashi
translated by Lucien Stryk
 
Breastdown fluttering in the breeze,
The sparrow’s full of air holes.
Let the winds of winter blow,
Let them crack a wing, two,
The sparrow doesn’t care.
 
The air streams through him, free, easy,
Scattering feathers, bending legs.
He hops calmly, from branch to empty branch
In an absolutely spaceless world.
 
I’d catch, skewer, broil you,
But my every shot misses: you’re impossible.
All at once there’s the sound
Of breaking glass, and houses begin
To crumple. Rising quickly,
An atomic submarine nudges past your belly.
 

Untitled
by Mark Pullinger
 
Polar bear
smells life
kills
spreading
through her
her cubs
extending skies
earth’s breath
expanding
sun’s reign

 

Magus
by Mark Pullinger
 
In a distant desert
a lone speck crosses
the horizon
mumbling,
“the desert
has dignity
moving through it”.
Sand drifts
across humps,
clinging,
rolling on.

Heat, like breath,
rises, waves
reaching skies.
Camel’s eyes
large distant
suns.
 

 

Fay Musselwhite on David Jones's book-length poem In Parenthesis and her own sequence Memoir of a Working River

In this episode, poet Fay Musselwhite discusses David Jones’s book-length poem In Parenthesis and her own sequence ‘Memoir of a Working River’ from her collection Contraflow.

In the interview, we talk about how Fay came to Jones’s poem - a book that follows soldiers' long trajectory toward the Somme battlefield, but has so much more within it than the subject of war itself. For Fay, it’s ‘the fact that one’s part of the earth,’ and that Jones focuses on ‘class, land and nature’ that makes this such an inspiring and important work for her. We discuss the abundant details, images, hauntings contained in the work - and how war plays out like some violent codified ‘sport’ inflicted on these young men.  Fay then goes on to explore the difficulties she encountered trying to write her ‘big river poem’ and how she found ways to embody the Rivelin as it runs through the western Sheffield by giving the river itself a voice and, for a while, the body of a young man. Fay explains why she wanted to make the river a human because she wanted to explore the world of those youthful Rivelin mill-workers. We reflect on the music of her poetry and how important it is to Fay’s project as a poet.

The extract that Fay read’s from In Parenthesis covers pp. 165 - 168 from her copy of the book (Faber, 1978).  

There's a recording of an extract of the poem on the Poetry Archive website. It includes an introduction by David Jones himself, and actors playing the many voices in the work. It gives you a good sense of the polyphony in the poem. You can listen to the audio here.

You can read more about, and buy a copy of Fay’s very fine collection Contraflow (Longbarrow Press, 2016) here.

 

You can also follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

 

From 'Memoir of a Working River’

6

Woken by some beast’s nudge then stunned
at the incredible stillness of sky, slips in
to bathe where the mill-dam overflow cascades
slithers out freshened, rises and shivers
watches the mud where new droplets nuzzle.

Donkeys trudge by, pressing on, faces low
as if the cinder track hears their moan.
Follows their swagger-loads
sees motion onward driven
by the momentum of raw and wrought iron.

Wavers as they near the spark-shed
shy of its screaming grind and gritty guffaws
but the torture rack, humped on its back
in full watery swing, pricks his learning’s gap.
Keen to find why the wheel must turn
braves the factory door

steps in and into a gusting blur
tastes its metal, feels particulates snag in sweat
takes a moment to see where he is.

In geometry against nature’s grace
humans are caught in a web
each slumped over oak, held by spindle and belt
to a stone that spits hot grit.

His feet itch.

He swerves a man dragging iron rods
and trying to make his free hand speak.

On the river-run some images stick:
flashes of crimson through blackened fur shreds
on that donkey’s neck, the clench of combat
riddled through men’s backs.

Lying on a weir
to rinse metal squeals from his hair
on the air a tang
enthrals the inner juices —

he paces it downstream, tracks the prey
to a tufted cove, a pail propped in rocks
a man doubled over racked in rasp-spasms.
When coughing releases its grip
he sits near the man, asks how life is.

Sunk in the chest, not quite
sitting up, the man shares his snap
and between pneumatic seizure
tells how he offers blunt steel to grit
till it’s flayed by resistance to its leanest edge
how each day he enters the valley
more of it enters him.

The man says he’s seen eighteen summers
a grinder for three, and nails in a voice hollow-loud
what binds the wheel’s turn to that cheese and bread.

Twice the man says — The mus’ave a name.

Only once — Come wi’ me, if tha needs a crust.  

 

Lydia Allison on Tom Phillips' A Humument and on her own Metro Erasure Poems

In this episode, Lydia Allison reflects on Tom Phillips' 'treated' book A Humument and how it influenced her own Metro erasure poems.

 

In the interview, Lydia talks about going to an event where Tom Phillips talked about his practice as an artist - and about A Humument in particular. She relates how the book came about and describes its various iterations - the different ‘river’ poems that Phillips came to write using the original text - an obscure Victorian novel entitled A Human Document by W.H. Mallock. Lydia discusses the overall ‘narrative’ of the book, and then focuses on two pages in particular: page 40 and page 305 (which you find and can click on below). 

Lydia then goes on to explain where, why and how she developed her own Metro Horoscope-page found poems.  She talks about the rules that she follows in the making of these works, how she distributes them on social media, and what sort of reactions she has got from printing these versions. We then go on to explore a series of poems, looking in particular at how she uses punctuation and word choices to create her original pieces. 

 

Lydia Allison is a poet, writing facilitator, creative mentor, and tutor. She has been involved in a number of projects and collaborations, including Stevie Ronnie’s ‘A Diary of Windows and Small Things’, Doncaster Arts’ activity books for lockdown, and ‘Dancing with Words’, a project that paired poets and dancers. Her writing is often inspired by her working life, which spans from bridal consultancy to teaching overseas. 

She is interested in approaching writing in an experimental and playful way. This largely takes the form of blackout poems where she tries to unearth poems hidden in other interesting texts.

She has appeared a number of times in print and online, including The Result Is What You See Today, Introduction X, Surfing the Twilight, Poetry Salzburg Review, PN Review, Feral, and Ink, Sweat & Tears. You can read more at lydiaallison.com, or follow her on twitter/X @lydiarallison 

 

The Tom Phillips poems that we focus on can be found here:

Page 40 (slideshow):
A Humument Page 40 (slideshow)

Page 305 (Slideshow)
A Humument Page 305 (slideshow)

You can the book in its entirety here (Tom Phillips also reads one version of the book on the website):

https://www.tomphillips.co.uk/humument

 

I also mention Nicole Sealey in the podcast. You can find her poem "'Pages 1-4,' An Excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure'" here.

 

Lydia Allison's Metro Erasure Poems

grow
trees
start a
home.
begin now

/

It's time to
help
others,
reorganising
The
what
and when

The Sun
moved
to mingle
with your
life and soul

/

come in
for now,
get
your thoughts
sizzling
with
romance

 

be
logical but
very illogical
. Be
physical and
creative
and
perfect
, Gemini

/

Are other people
you?
the Moon
could be
.
,
time
time spent
beautiful

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elizabeth Holloway on Sharon Olds' poem 'The Blue Dress' and her own poem 'Blue Dress'

In this episode, I talk to the poet Elizabeth Holloway about how Sharon Olds’ poem 'The Blue Dress’ influenced the writing of her own poem ‘Blue Dress’.

Liz talks about the impact Sharon Olds had on her when her first British collection - The Sign of Saturn - was published (in 1991). She talks about the idea of confessional poetry, and how closely we can connect the author with the narrator of the poem.  She talks about Sharon Olds’ own version  of free verse and how technically skilful she is in terms how she uses uses run-on lines and punctuation to carry the narrative along. Liz also reflects on the different versions of Olds’ persona that are represented in the poem. She talks about the idea of ‘safety’ and disguise in this work, and goes on to discuss the figure of Electra in relation to Olds’ poem too.

Liz talks about how aware she was of Olds’ poem when she was writing her own piece ‘Blue Dress’.  She describes the free verse form she has taken on, then explores the similarities and differences between her poem and Olds’ piece.  Liz talks about the use of blue in other mother-daughter relationships she has written about, then considers the tone of the poem - how both doubt and anxiety play a big part in the making of this work. She goes on to examine the ‘prosy’ quality of her poetry and where she allows herself to tune into more heightened language. She talks about touch and feel, and getting back in touch with someone special who has been missing from the narrator’s own life in the context of Falling Mother.

Dr Elizabeth Holloway (formerly Elizabeth Barrett) is an award-winning poet whose work has been published extensively in journals and anthologies. She is the author of four full-length collections of poetry. Her first book Walking on Tiptoe (Staple, 1998) focuses, in part, on the diagnosis of her son as autistic. Elizabeth received an Arts Council of England New Writers’ award to support the completion of her follow-up collection, The Bat Detector (Wrecking Ball Press, 2005), which continues to explore the experience of parenting an autistic child. In the collection, Elizabeth uses the metaphor of detecting bats to understand the process of communicating with a non-verbal child. The collection led to a collaboration with the violist Robin Ireland who composed original music for a sequence of the poems. Subsequent collections include Walking on Tiptoe and Other Poems (Bluechrome Press, 2007) and A Dart of Green and Blue (Arc Publications, 2010). In 2018, Elizabeth received a Northern Writers award to support work on her future collection, Falling Mother.

Liz Holloway read Sharon Old’s poem ‘The Blue Dress’ from her collection The Sign of Saturn: Poems 1980 - 1987 (Secker and Warburg, 1991) . A version of the poem can be read here: https://www.wisdomportal.com/PoetryAnthology/SharonOlds-Anthology.html.

 

Blue Dress
 
The call comes out of the blue. 
How else? There is only the blue. 
It is what we have lived with. 
Afterwards, I am dazed by the day.
I replay the phone ringing twice —
the way I picked up the second time
remembering she used to do this. 
“It's alright Mum, it’s me calling”.
She names a date and place, 
the hours she could be there. 
She knows it might sound crazy. 
Too far away. Afterwards, I wonder 
if she heard the hesitation in my voice.
 
I want to get something for her. 
Perhaps because I don't believe 
I am enough. Maybe to make up 
for birthdays I’ve missed. Or just 
to have something, whether true 
or a lie.  Something she can't deny 
is a gift from her mother. Something 
she can hide from her father if he asks. 
I would need to pick out something 
not too expensive she could say 
she bought for herself. Something 
un-extraordinary. A plain gift giving 
nothing away. Something to wear perhaps.
 
I choose Oasis, the airy boutique 
with a glass lobby and mirrory gallery 
at the top of a silver river of stairs. 
Thin men in hoodies and tall girls 
with eyeliner and ponytails 
peer over a chrome rail. 
I flatten myself against the side 
like a nun, try to be invisible. 
I braved this place for her. 
Beyond the lobby, random rails 
of fluid clothes. Denim. Sweats. 
Coats with fur-edged hoods.
I don't know who she’s become.
 
It’s foolish. Impossible. As I turn 
to go, a rack of spare clothes —
one-offs, small sizes, shop returns —
and suddenly a bolt of blue in my eye
like shot silk from Shandong.
I run it through my fingers.
The grain catches. I trace 
the scalloped neck to the waist, 
test the lay of its deep V over 
an inset panel, across the breasts.  
I push my hands inside, try to gauge 
the space for her ribs. In the LED light 
it turns purple indigo delphinium iris.
 

Angelina D'Roza on Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy (translated from Sophocles) and her own poem 'Correspondences: The Credence of Birds'

In this episode, I talk to the poet Angelina D’Roza about how an extract from Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, a verse translation of Sophocles' play Philoctetes, influenced the writing of her own poem ‘Correspondences: The Credence of Birds’.

Angelina talks about how Seamus Heaney’s stage directions from The Cure at Troy grabbed her attention, the ‘right thing at the right time.’ She goes on to discuss how she uses this text (and other corresponding texts) as a way in to explore a subject like colonialism, but it’s as much the delight in language at the beginning of the play, apparent in Heaney’s translation, that drew her in. She talks about how she negotiates appropriation of other writer's work in her poetry. Angelina then goes on to expand on all the different influences, alongside Heaney’s stage notes, including the inciting incident from Damon Albarn’s opera Dr Dee, and a poem by Jane Kenyon (on ‘the presence of an absence’) , that worked their way in to her own piece. Angelina develops at length her own processes as a writer, how she draws on exemplary texts from a wide range of sources, a patchwork approach, as a way of an introduction to her own poem ‘Correspondences: The Credence of Birds’. She talks about the play-like quality of this poem, and where it geographically references in the Peak District. She discusses how she doesn’t want to explain all the levels of ambiguity in the poem - to keep those spaces open for herself and the reader. Angelina reflects on bird-lore, and on notions of time before finishing the conversation by discussing how lyrics and songs have influenced her own approach to writing poems.

You hear Angelina read an extract from The Cure at Troy, Seamus Heaney’s translation of Sophocles Philoctetes (Faber, 2018).

Angelina D'Roza lives in Sheffield. She was a writing mentor with the Koestler Trust and writer in residence at Bank Street Arts, collaborating with artists, writers, photographers. Most recently her work appears in Blackbox Manifold and Shearsman Press. Her debut collection Envies the Birds was published by Longbarrow Press in 2016. The Blue Hour is Angelina's new collection and was released by Longbarrow at the end of 2023.

 

 

Correspondences: The Credence of Birds
 
A gritstone edge. Boulders higgledy-piggledy with sprouts of purple heather. No sun to speak of but light diffuse and silver, an evenness to it. Maybe rain, if there’s the wherewithal. Or a sort of shimmer to the flattened grass, as though rain has been. An absence left. A man in a red anorak, a bouldering mat folded on his back, walks quickly right to left. If Heaney’s chorus of boulder-still birds beginning to stretch from under their shawls can be made as lovely as he wrote it, do it. Pheasants, falcons. A spray of meadow pipits darting out from their hair and hands. Chip-chip- chip-chip. A woman climbs the rocks toward a platform stage-right, with the silhouette of an ancient fort just about suggested. The birdsong continues – ek-ek-ek-ek – but she is alone. Perhaps she addresses herself. Or perhaps, someone else. Someone absent. No questions, but the fractals in the bracken, their green mathematics transposed as music, the closing cadence that resolves the song.
 
 
 
She:
 
I might believe that a kingfisher strung up on silk can predict the weather, or that placing the semen of a pigeon on someone’s shirt can make that person love you. You think it’s wild, but you believe time runs as the crow flies. Take the roses replanted to my new house, those roses that know a home before this, my young son, the woman I was, its stems grown long and winding through the pale fuchsia, the fuchsia with its pale pink memory of a previous owner. The latitude of these two recollections mapped in space, in gradients, and tangled into a grammar of now, or here, the woman I am. I would send you their late bloom like a temple tumbling into the sea to keep in your wallet with the present tense and the half built, a botanical representation of time, the ongoing of what’s gone inscribed in the ground underfoot.
 
 
 Chorus:
 
sip-sip-sip-sip
 
 
A cage in the side of a boulder opens. A Japanese tit flies out and across the water. A stone arch at the back of the stage, where the river runs down to the orchestra pit. Hanging from the stone, an iron hook and a small bell. The bird rings the bell and collects a folded piece of paper that could be your fortune from the hook, flies into the gods. Let it go.

 

She:
 
I would send you John Cale’s “Big White Cloud”. After all is said and done / everything is just like it began. But time flows one way, whatever leaves it gathers in its talons, and to predict is to look back, to believe that autumn will cause the trees to redden. Bergson says that what we express is the dead leaves floating on the surface of the water, the various and fugitive reduced to the same handful of words, as though love isn’t changed by having loved. I don’t know what this means for us. Perhaps, that’s the point. The reds and golds were always there, it’s only that we see them now. Everything’s clear, everything’s bright. To leave this unspoken way of being unspoken, and so unchanged by language that can only approximate how it feels, to dream in birdsong, the water trickling down from the moors.
 

The chorus boulders huddle against the cold – chee-chee-chee-chee – Light fades to black – ek-ek-ek-ek

Matt Clegg on ’Back Home Again Chant’ by T’ao Ch’ien (translated by David Hinton) and his own poem ’Tzu-Jan as Performance Outcome’

In this episode, I talk to the poet Matt Clegg about how ‘Back Home Again Chant’ by T'ao Ch'ien  influenced the writing of his own poem ‘'Tzu-Jan as Perfomance Outcome.’

Matt talks about how Chinese poetry has come to increasingly influence his approach to writing over the past ten years.  He talks about T’ao Ch’ien’s style - how it conceals depths beneath its apparently simple surface.  He talks about different notions of the idea of the body (and body politic), about the choices T’ao Ch’ien made in this regard - turning away from power and influence to live a more 'stripped-down' life - and how these decisions can speak to our own materialistic, consumer culture. Matt goes on to discuss tone in T’ao Ch'ien’s piece - and about coming to this work as a piece of translation.

Matt then goes on to talk about his own poem in the light of saying what Tzu-Jan means in relation to Taoism.  Matt talks about ‘walking out’ of the city - about different ideas around ‘productivity’, about drifting, moving between the inner world and outer world. He reflects on walking as an 'anonymous' person - and what this state of being allows him access to as an alert observer. He finishes by discussing his latest collaborative writing project.

 

Matt read and discussed 'Back Home Again Chant' by T'ao Ch'ien from The Selected Poems of T'ao Ch'ien Translated by David Hinton (Copper Canyon Press, 2000).

 

Matt Clegg teaches creative writing at the University of Derby. His books include Cazique, The Navigators, & West North East, all published by Longbarrow Press. His current project is Have You always Been Here, a haibun sequence inspired by Kobayashi Issa’s The Spring of My Life. Have You Always Been Here will combine haiku & prose poetry by Matt, and illustrations by P.R. Ruby. It explores the impact of Covid lockdowns on the contemplative life; on what we observe & how it affects us; how we care; & how we try [or fail] to take responsibility.

 

 

Tzu-Jan as Performance Outcome

 

Into every account mail is pinging: ‘we will secure

our long-term future by competing on more fronts.’

Let’s find a glade where a thought might grow.

On Penistone Road, fans have assembled a totem pole shrine

out of teddy-bears, Wednesday shirts, and ever-wilting

bouquets. They are taped to a long redundant road sign,

as if to re-construct a universal grammar. Dear

Performance Review, this is what I’d really aspire to.

From Beeley Wood Road, someone has flung a single

ballet shoe over the river. It curls, like a comma

for the mind. A captain of industry exhales

his strawberry vape and dreams of shedding half his

body fat in a fixable world without depression.

His factory remains a nut-free zone. Permit me

to fast-forward half a mile, as I climb the hard yards

towards Birley Edge. One acre of slope is bitumen black

and seeded with beer cans.  An emerald fly dances Morse

on the hot-pan of a broken slate, but heather

knits in from all sides, its purples blossoming bees.

Elsewhere, narcissists and lamplighters are blagging

their way into the goonlight, but here, just under

the Birley Stone, someone has evoked their late mother

in flowers of violet and mildest blue. I’d love to stop,

but have business in the leafways of Wharncliffe Woods.

I find a tree, violently uprooted in some long blown-out

gale. The crater where it once clutched earth is a pool

fermenting mud-water wine. Reflected light minnows

back and forth, close-reading each crevice in the exposed

roots. Elsewhere, there are directives to create

future-facing partnerships, but I want only to collaborate

with pipits that flirt in and out of bracken tips, all day.

Here I sit reading Ta’ Chien to the trees, knowing little more

of strategy than this. Fresh crops of data are being harvested,

and bright careerists kneel to the metrics, but here,

aphids have printed their green bodies between the lines

of ‘Back Home Again Chant’. A golden Labrador lags far

behind its master, and snuffle-blesses my open book.

 

 

Pete Green on Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal and on their own poem Sheffield Almanac

In this episode, Pete Green reads and discusses Chapter Eight from Louis MacNeice’s book-length poem Autumn Journal and how it played a part in the writing of their own long poem Sheffield Almanac.

 

In the programme, Pete talks about their own long relationship with MacNeice’s poem, how it ‘works’ as a poem, stitching together contemporary ‘pinch points’ of late 1930s history and the author's own autobiography.  In a wide-ranging (roaming) conversation Pete talks about how the form of MacNeice’s poem influenced their own approach to Sheffield Almanac. They also explore how MacNiece brings together high and low culture to discuss notions of privilege, politics, and the state of the nation. Pete goes on to reflect on the first and second editions of Sheffield Almanac, and how their own work as a song writer has informed their own poetry writing skills. Pete talks about conflating the personal and political in Sheffield Almanac, and 'the predicament of the city of Sheffield' that is interrogated in this extended lyrical narrative.

 

The edition that Pete reads from here is Autumn Journal (Faber, 2012).

 

Pete Green is a song writer, musician, and poet. They have published two pamphlets with Longbarrow Press - Sheffield Almanac (first edition, 2017 and second edition, 2022), and Hemisphere (2021).  Pete’s first full-length came out with Salt in 2022, entitled The Meanwhile Sites.

from Chapter One of Sheffield Almanac (second edition, Longbarrow 2022):

 

             And we were timeless

As the empty afternoons when we would settle
   In for desultory shifts at the Fellow & Firkin 
Unprepared to take one more step
   Toward the millennium’s unmapped plains 
Without a pint of cloudy ale and a doorstep
   Sandwich loaded with fat chips. 
Some seminar on Woolf and Joyce just finished,
   We might stay put, we might loose happenstance 
With suburban wanderlust undiminished —
   Let the current bus us to Cotteridge or West Bromwich, 
Let the bondage of deadlines unravel
   Free in time and space, at least within the bounds 
Of an off-peak pass from West Midlands Travel. 
   Suede supplanting Blur, Blair succeeding Smith: 
Tumbleweed days. None of us paused to cherish 
   Carefreedom since we never knew — or just 
Suppressed the knowledge — that it could perish 
   While the ink dried on our dissertations. 
Weeks were some abundant currency one borrows 
   At deceptive interest rates, pays back
At breakneck terms, in repossessed tomorrows 
   And when the time came to consolidate 
Sheffield was our redemption, our second 
   Bite at adulthood’s sour cherry; 
And when it’s done, when the tallies are reckoned 
   And we feel the slowing of the birthdays zipping 
Past like the exit signs for junction 
   33, will we have come this far 
Only for the settled life itself to seal our dysfunction 
   Rather than those years of frenzied chasing? 
We thought those threadbare rented rooms, curtained
   With frost and damp, would be the time the 
Low tide turned amid the hurt and

   Searching. What if they prove instead the 
High water mark? These kids have 4G, streaming media, wi-fi, 
   Colossal debt, jobs pre-empted by machines; 
We had payphones, typewriters, a dust-strewn, scratchy hi-fi,
   Student grants and jobs that worked us like machines 
And all of us austerity, austerity and ISIS,

   Seas that go on rising through each summit, 
Refugees, and leaders somehow baffled by a crisis 
   Every bugger else could spot a mile off
Just as, this time last year, we watched the occupation 
   Of Central Office while they pricetagged hope and knowledge,
Surprised by the moral pluck and spunk of a generation

   Dismissed as dismal materialist go-getters. Equally 
Wrong-footed, the coppers made a kettle,

   Flung kids from wheelchair seats, performed the miracle 
Of raising a new cohort to its feet and on its mettle 
   To pick up where we left the poll tax off. 
This time, beyond London’s hall of mirrors, every region 
    Saw insurgent youth again 
And round Coles Corner marched a stoked-up legion

   Of sophomores and schoolkids side by side. We know any 
Booming cogwheels will surely crunch and seize up 
   Should we live to see recovery, we know the rest: 
Clegg and the Tories put the fees up —

   But now we know the nature of autumn’s bonus hope: 
Despite the cost of learning going treble,

   The spirit that radiates as halls of residence revive 
Is the spirit not of the entrepreneur but the rebel. 
   Let’s go again: 
Psychology, Landscape Architecture, 
   Biotechnology, East Asian Studies: 
An occupied theatre hosts a free lecture — 
   From barricades to trending topics 
I followed the movement online while tending 
   The baby: one feed for the jaded, one 
Feed for the pure. While we’re expending 
   Reproductive energies, a revolution’s spent 
And look now: winter extends a brittle hand, calling
   Last orders on the year 
But I’ll be the obstinate last drinker, stalling

   For time while autumn’s tables are wiped down; 
I’ll be the flâneur in the park, passing

   Dead leaves and regrets from hand to hand 
While squirrels hunker below the slow massing

   Of polar air at the season’s borders. I’ll see you on the
Other side. Perhaps they’re right, perhaps the interweaving 
   Of our threads into our children will be our
Making after all, and soon we’ll be retrieving 
   Optimism from these lengthened nights as our 
Adopted city draws new breath this morning 
   Like this oblique first light along the streets of Crookes
With those unloaded bags of socks and books adorning 
   Freshman lawns. Let them be young 
And daft, let fortune attend their drunken 
   Stumbling into roads. Let the kids be alright. 
The shine will dull on this clutch of conkers, their shrunken
   Drying bulk brittle like ageing bone, as blown 
And brushed from grates go the last of the old year’s embers
   And the season’s first curls of chimney smoke 
Stroke the underside of the first chilly sky, while September’s 
   Evenings graduate from the grey of slate to the black of carbon. 
Let the nights not draw in quite yet nor the kids grow sober — 
   Autumn’s advance and the slants of the Earth 
Shade on these vestiges of warmth into October,

   Shade on, prolong, the welcome of this shifted city, 
Let its embrace still widen. Now’s no moment for this prudent 
   Stock-taking, bean-counting, the accountant’s wary eye. 
Let this place take in the refugee, the student,

   The one and all who reinvent, renew, regenerate. 
Underfoot the leaves accrue like debts for tuition, 
   Degenerate to mulch: this is the dying season 
Yet these guests now unpacking lives make scant imposition 
   But loan this city life, new blood, new reason. 
 
 
 

James Caruth on Anne Stevenson’s ”North Sea off Carnoustie” and his own poem ”Coast Road, North Antrim”

In this episode, James Caruth discusses Anne Stevenson's ‘North Sea off Carnoustie’ and how reading this work influenced the writing of his own poem ‘Coast Road, North Antrim’.

In the interview, James discusses the importance of workshopping and writing days. He reflects on ideas of the north in both his and Anne Stevenson’s poetry. He also talks about the significance of landscape and the elements in terms of how it affects the world view of individuals in a community. James goes onto discuss ‘North Sea off Carnoustie’ as a touchstone poem.  He explores different ideas of viewpoint or 'stance' by reflecting on his own poem ‘Coast Road, North Antrim.' He reflects on why his early poems were about leaving, and now why he writes about returning to his homeland.

James Caruth was born in Belfast but has lived in Sheffield for the last 33 years.
 
His first collection A Stone’s Throw was published by Staple in 2007.
 
Dark Peak a long sequence appeared from Longbarrow in 2008 followed by Marking The Lambs in 2010 and The Death of Narrative 2014 both published by Smith Doorstop.
 
His poems have appeared in a number of anthologies including The Footing (Longbarrow Press 2013), The Sheffield Anthology (2012); Cast – The Poetry Business Book of New Contemporary Poets (2014) and One For The Road (2017).
 
His last pamphlet Narrow Water was published by Poetry Salzburg in 2017
 
A full-length collection Speechless at Inch (Smith Doorstop, 2021) was shortlisted for The Derek Walcott Poetry Prize.  

‘Coast Road, North Antrim’ comes from Speechless at Inch.

Coast Road, North Antrim

It holds a narrow course
between abrupt hills and the sea,
where a cold sheen off the water
tells us this is the north,

our Ocean Drive that skirts
the island’s rim, where a Zen Master
might sit to watch waves shatter,
counting each iridescent fragment
as an evening sun flares over Donegal.

Somewhere out there,
Rockall hides its face,
a storm gathering
before its luminous approach.

Strings of fairy-lights dance
along deserted promenades
in the small seaside towns,
streets glinting with rain.

This shore, the edge of all we know.
Beyond the horizon we are strangers
guarding our small square of earth,
faces to the wind, translating a language
of clouds, the taste of a breeze,

cautious when the shore birds up and leave
but trusting the ocean’s persistence,
safe in the consolation of a faith
that each year grows closer to extinction.

 

North Sea Off Carnoustie
 
You know it by the northern look of the shore,
by salt-worried faces,
an absence of trees, an abundance of lighthouses.
It’s a serious ocean.
 
Along marram-scarred, sandbitten margins
wired roofs straggle out to where
a cold little holiday fair
has floated in and pitched itself
safely near the prairie of a golf course.
Coloured lights have sunk deep into the solid wind,
but all they’ve caught is a pair of lovers
and three silly boys.
Everyone else has a dog.
Or a room to get to.
 
The smells are of fish and of sewage and cut grass.
Oystercatchers, doubtful of habitation,
clamour weep, weep, weep, as they fuss over
scummy black rocks the tide leaves for them.
 
The sea is as near as we come to another world.
 
But there in your stony and windswept garden
a blackbird is confirming the grip of the land.
You, you, he murmurs, dark purple in his voice.
 
And now in far quarters of the horizon
lighthouses are awake, sending messages –
invitations to the landlocked,
warnings to the experienced,
but to anyone returning from the planet ocean,
candles in the windows of a safe earth.

from The Collected Poems 1955 - 1995 by Anne Stevenson (Oxford University Press, 1996)