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  1. <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?><?xml-stylesheet href="http://www.blogger.com/styles/atom.css" type="text/css"?><feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' xmlns:openSearch='http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/' xmlns:blogger='http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008' xmlns:georss='http://www.georss.org/georss' xmlns:gd="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005" xmlns:thr='http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0'><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096358914599952404</id><updated>2024-11-08T07:34:15.248-08:00</updated><category term="2017"/><category term="Angela France"/><category term="Currently and Emotion"/><category term="Hera Lindsay Bird"/><category term="Jacqui Rowe"/><category term="Jonathan Edwards"/><category term="Michael Symmons Roberts"/><category term="Paul Stephenson"/><category term="Rebecca Watts"/><category term="Robert McCrum"/><category term="Rory Waterman"/><category term="Stairs and Whispers"/><category term="Stephen Daniels"/><category term="The Guardian"/><category term="amateur"/><category term="fiction"/><category term="highlights"/><category term="hobby"/><category term="non-fiction"/><category term="poetry"/><title type='text'>Sweet Poetry </title><subtitle type='html'></subtitle><link rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#feed' type='application/atom+xml' href='https://sovietpoetriy.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='https://www.blogger.com/feeds/8096358914599952404/posts/default'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://sovietpoetriy.blogspot.com/'/><link rel='hub' href='http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/'/><author><name>Ashique</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/01776900758529804135</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='16' height='16' src='https://img1.blogblog.com/img/b16-rounded.gif'/></author><generator version='7.00' uri='http://www.blogger.com'>Blogger</generator><openSearch:totalResults>3</openSearch:totalResults><openSearch:startIndex>1</openSearch:startIndex><openSearch:itemsPerPage>25</openSearch:itemsPerPage><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096358914599952404.post-6041147067110212473</id><published>2018-03-04T01:39:00.000-08:00</published><updated>2022-03-26T04:31:26.011-07:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="amateur"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="hobby"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="poetry"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Rebecca Watts"/><title type='text'>Hobbyism and the poet</title><content type='html'>The recent brouhaha over Rebecca Watts&#39; essay for PN Review, &#39;The Cult of the Noble Amateur&#39;&amp;nbsp;, re-drew the battle-lines between the worlds of &#39;page&#39; and &#39;performance&#39; poetry in ways that were not always helpful. What interested me about Watts&#39; essay, however, was the author&#39;s perception of the need to defend poetry from the idea that it is something done by amateurs rather than artists. While I sympathise with much of what Watts says about the elevation of artlessness to a measure of sincerity, this struck a chord with many of the conversations I have had with other poets.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I have heard writers describe themselves as &#39;professional poets&#39;, but most who write seriously, without actually making their living from it, bridle when anyone tries to tell them that what they are doing is &#39;a hobby&#39;. Instinctively, most poets would feel that this reduces what they do the level of a trifling pastime, like building model railways or putting miniature ships into bottles.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Arguably, this resistance to the idea of hobbyism or amateurism seems snobbish. It seems to imply that all of those people growing prize-winning roses or carrying out conservation work in their spare time are doing something somehow less noble, less creative, than people who write poetry instead. It elevates poets to some higher plane, even above practitioners of other art forms that are carried out on a non-professional basis, like making music or painting.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Then again, the term &#39;hobby&#39; itself is inherently demeaning. Its origin is found in the Late Middle English word &#39;hobyn&#39;, referring to a robin, but then later applied to a small horse that could only be ridden for pleasure, as opposed to being economically productive as a beast of burden or a means of transport. By the 16th century, it was used to describe a child&#39;s toy horse. Is that what poets are doing? Footling around with childish things? Surely there is a strong implication here that doing grown-up things is about earning some money.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;table cellpadding=&quot;0&quot; cellspacing=&quot;0&quot; class=&quot;tr-caption-container&quot; style=&quot;float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;&quot;&gt;&lt;tbody&gt;&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: center;&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhihSt8wTE9JyilM6o5Gq0fzbiRdY38-14s8KQtDZvdMnIM_FP7-tQecAwCq-9pcRe6iHozInJ_NdYLE_Cp0L2cZMR-HIYmWkZULkBjfS-YbwGDU5vEzUwXaQu_zCjxR4J1dHkCVJSFb3c/s1600/Jean+Monnet+Hobby+Horse.jpg&quot; style=&quot;clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;&quot;&gt;&lt;img border=&quot;0&quot; data-original-height=&quot;488&quot; data-original-width=&quot;599&quot; height=&quot;260&quot; src=&quot;https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhihSt8wTE9JyilM6o5Gq0fzbiRdY38-14s8KQtDZvdMnIM_FP7-tQecAwCq-9pcRe6iHozInJ_NdYLE_Cp0L2cZMR-HIYmWkZULkBjfS-YbwGDU5vEzUwXaQu_zCjxR4J1dHkCVJSFb3c/s320/Jean+Monnet+Hobby+Horse.jpg&quot; width=&quot;320&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td class=&quot;tr-caption&quot; style=&quot;text-align: center;&quot;&gt;Jean Renoir on His Hobby Horse by Pierre-August Renoir&lt;br /&gt;Metropolitan Museum&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;/tbody&gt;&lt;/table&gt;&lt;br /&gt;For me, the only way out of a defensive stance, which rejects the notion of poetry as &#39;hobby&#39; while seeming to denigrate the (often very creative) things that other people do with their time, is to embrace the idea that poetry is, at least to some extent, an activity which, for most of its practitioners, exists outside an economic rationale.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;We have to ask very serious questions about a culture that has come to see the grown-up stuff as being about earning a living and anything else as childish mucking about. As the number of paid jobs in the Western world is likely to decline in the coming decades, the creation of identities in terms of what we get paid to do will increasingly come under threat. Poetry shows those of us who write it and don&#39;t earn our living from it that there are some things that human beings do that are valuable on their own terms, which have a &#39;use value&#39; even if they don&#39;t necessarily have an &#39;exchange value&#39;, as Marx would have said. If that makes them &#39;just a hobby&#39;, then maybe it&#39;s time we embraced our amateur status. After all, an amateur is someone who does something for the love of it.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='https://sovietpoetriy.blogspot.com/feeds/6041147067110212473/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='https://sovietpoetriy.blogspot.com/2018/03/hobbyism-and-poet.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='https://www.blogger.com/feeds/8096358914599952404/posts/default/6041147067110212473'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='https://www.blogger.com/feeds/8096358914599952404/posts/default/6041147067110212473'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://sovietpoetriy.blogspot.com/2018/03/hobbyism-and-poet.html' title='Hobbyism and the poet'/><author><name>Ashique</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/01776900758529804135</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='16' height='16' src='https://img1.blogblog.com/img/b16-rounded.gif'/></author><media:thumbnail xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" url="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhihSt8wTE9JyilM6o5Gq0fzbiRdY38-14s8KQtDZvdMnIM_FP7-tQecAwCq-9pcRe6iHozInJ_NdYLE_Cp0L2cZMR-HIYmWkZULkBjfS-YbwGDU5vEzUwXaQu_zCjxR4J1dHkCVJSFb3c/s72-c/Jean+Monnet+Hobby+Horse.jpg" height="72" width="72"/><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096358914599952404.post-2055196910292384703</id><published>2018-01-02T06:04:00.000-08:00</published><updated>2022-04-14T01:54:31.879-07:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="fiction"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Jonathan Edwards"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="non-fiction"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Robert McCrum"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="The Guardian"/><title type='text'>Fact or fiction?</title><content type='html'>&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;Literary &lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://panfinance.net&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;journalism &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;loves lists, and lists are (usefully for literary journalism) always controversial. Robert McCrum&#39;s 100 best non-fiction books in The Guardian will be no exception, I&#39;m sure, but what immediately puzzles me about the enterprise is the inclusion of a handful of poetry titles.&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;Anyone who, like me, spends a good deal of their time browsing second-hand bookshops will know that the classification of poetry can sometimes pose problems. Really, the best solution is to have a section marked &#39;Poetry&#39; and leave it at that. However, poetry titles do sometimes get lumped in with the &#39;Non-Fiction&#39; section and even (oh, horror!) with the other books on a shelf marked &#39;Literature&#39; (I think &#39;literature&#39; is being used here in the sense of &#39;to be read out of a sense of duty, not for pleasure&#39;).&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;I can just about understand McCrum&#39;s inclusion of Hughes&#39;s &lt;i&gt;Birthday Letters&lt;/i&gt; or Plath&#39;s &lt;i&gt;Ariel&lt;/i&gt;, given that they are on some level autobiographical works. I was recently re-reading Plath&#39;s poems in the &lt;i&gt;Collected&lt;/i&gt;volume edited by Hughes and was struck by the way that Plath re-cycles experience almost immediately into poetry; she goes into hospital and writes hospital poems, then she starts bee-keeping and writes about a visit to a meeting of the local bee-keepers&#39; association, etc. So far, it could be argued, so &#39;non-fiction&#39;.&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;table cellpadding=&quot;0&quot; cellspacing=&quot;0&quot; class=&quot;tr-caption-container&quot; style=&quot;float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;&quot;&gt;&lt;tbody&gt;&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: center;&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg7FxJ8SZ8_dVp4ylYwmJwvoMFFKBKYoNYDUibb7Z3UB88s-1rUXG1wj5ufh0zonJCzy2yjGnXEf0Nvrlr-G3mXAJjtmme8Upzf1ss9kprKO1BaH68dRFJccQolaV1CqrEYrAVnpw6ZSI/s1600/reading+whistler.jpg&quot; style=&quot;clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;&quot;&gt;&lt;img border=&quot;0&quot; data-original-height=&quot;625&quot; data-original-width=&quot;480&quot; height=&quot;320&quot; src=&quot;https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg7FxJ8SZ8_dVp4ylYwmJwvoMFFKBKYoNYDUibb7Z3UB88s-1rUXG1wj5ufh0zonJCzy2yjGnXEf0Nvrlr-G3mXAJjtmme8Upzf1ss9kprKO1BaH68dRFJccQolaV1CqrEYrAVnpw6ZSI/s320/reading+whistler.jpg&quot; width=&quot;245&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td class=&quot;tr-caption&quot; style=&quot;text-align: center;&quot;&gt;&#39;Reading&#39; by James McNeill Whistler&lt;br /&gt;(Metropolitan Museum)&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;/tbody&gt;&lt;/table&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;The case seems less clear for Eliot&#39;s &lt;i&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/i&gt;or Edward Lear&#39;s nonsense verse, however, which also make it onto the list. McCrum offers the justification that, whereas the novel is easily defined, non-fiction includes just about everything else. I&#39;m not really convinced by this, but there is a more important point here about the perception of poetry and the limitations that critics and readers impose upon it if they understand poetry as belonging to that over-arching category of &#39;non-fiction&#39;.&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;This perception is common with many people who are starting to write and share their own poetry. When I work with writers new to the form, suggestions for changes are often resisted with the insistence that &#39;it really happened like that!&#39; My (perhaps rather heartless) response is normally &#39;I don&#39;t care!&#39; What matters is what works for the poem, not what really happened. This practical aspect of writing poetry tells us something about what poetry is trying to be.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;In the 1970s, the critic Phillipe Lejeune proposed the notion of the &#39;autobiographical pact&#39; as a way of distinguishing autobiographical writing from other kinds. Lejeune argued that autobiography was characterised by a conventional understanding between author and reader, namely that what the reader was being presented with was an account of a real life, which had been lived by the person whose name was on the cover of the book.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;To extend Lejeune&#39;s notion of such a pact between author and reader, I would argue that non-fiction operates with a different implied understanding. Non-fiction books are those which, however artfully, want to say something about the reality of the world, or to reveal some aspect of how that world is in fact. They are asking the reader to share in an interpretation of the social or natural world as it can be found outside of the text.&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;This is not, to my mind, what poetry does. To adopt and somewhat adapt a notion from Niklas Luhmann, I would argue that what poetry does is to announce to the reader that it is &lt;i&gt;not &lt;/i&gt;the world. The poem claims its own space, apart from the world, and leaves the question of its relationship to the reality of the poet&#39;s own experience, and that of the reader, open.&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;In other words, the poem is an aesthetic object that challenges the reader to make sense of the it in relation to their own experience. How they make that sense, and how the encounter with the poem might enrich their understanding of the world, is deeply personal. In this respect, reading a poem is an act of creative imagination.&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;To return to the example of Plath, the poet might easily have written a memoir detailing a spell in hospital, living with small children and a difficult husband, her experience of depression, and so on. Instead, she wrote poetry, which is not simply &#39;non-fiction&#39; because the material she worked with was her own experience. Her work may get pigeon-holed as &#39;confessional&#39;, but it is the transformation of life into poetry, not into reportage.&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;Why does this matter? It has been observed often enough that the &#39;I&#39; of lyric poetry tends to make us think of the poems as confessions, that is to say as accounts of personal experience, and therefore as somehow &#39;real&#39;.&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;I remember being at a reading by the brilliant Jonathan Edwards when an audience member expressed shock that many of the poems that Jonathan had written about things that had happened to his family were, in fact, completely invented. Jonathan&#39;s &lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blogili.com&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;straightforward &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;response was that he was writing poetry.&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;Without putting words into Jonathan&#39;s mouth, what I think he meant by that was that he wanted to write something that would move people and that would open up their own thinking about what the experience of family might mean to them. The poems were not there to tell them what family is, but for them to find out what it means for themselves.&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;MsoNormal&quot;&gt;When we reduce poetry to &#39;non-fiction&#39;, then, we miss something fundamental about what reading poetry could be as an experience for readers, leaving us with an impoverished understanding of this art form. Let&#39;s hope &lt;b&gt;&lt;i&gt;The Guardian&lt;/i&gt; now&lt;/b&gt; does the decent thing and creates a list of the best 100 poetry titles. I have plenty of suggestions.&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='https://sovietpoetriy.blogspot.com/feeds/2055196910292384703/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='https://sovietpoetriy.blogspot.com/2018/01/fact-or-fiction.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='https://www.blogger.com/feeds/8096358914599952404/posts/default/2055196910292384703'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='https://www.blogger.com/feeds/8096358914599952404/posts/default/2055196910292384703'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://sovietpoetriy.blogspot.com/2018/01/fact-or-fiction.html' title='Fact or fiction?'/><author><name>Ashique</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/01776900758529804135</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='16' height='16' src='https://img1.blogblog.com/img/b16-rounded.gif'/></author><media:thumbnail xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" url="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg7FxJ8SZ8_dVp4ylYwmJwvoMFFKBKYoNYDUibb7Z3UB88s-1rUXG1wj5ufh0zonJCzy2yjGnXEf0Nvrlr-G3mXAJjtmme8Upzf1ss9kprKO1BaH68dRFJccQolaV1CqrEYrAVnpw6ZSI/s72-c/reading+whistler.jpg" height="72" width="72"/><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8096358914599952404.post-5321745881965227043</id><published>2017-12-27T07:21:00.000-08:00</published><updated>2022-03-26T04:32:21.115-07:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="2017"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Angela France"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Currently and Emotion"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Hera Lindsay Bird"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="highlights"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Jacqui Rowe"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Michael Symmons Roberts"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Paul Stephenson"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Rory Waterman"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Stairs and Whispers"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Stephen Daniels"/><title type='text'>That was the (poetry) year that was</title><content type='html'>Somewhat contrary to expectations, the world seems to have survived 2017, and continues to produce plenty of new poetry for us to enjoy. It was hardly a &#39;thin&#39; year from where I was standing (or, rather, sitting and reading). However, there are already plenty of lists of &#39;the best&#39; of the year out there for you to take a look at (including this one from the Poetry School that kindly included &lt;i&gt;Scare Stories&lt;/i&gt;), so I&#39;m not going to add to that discussion. Nevertheless, as the year draws to a close, here are a few reminiscences of the poetry year 2017 as it comes to an end. My memory for dates is terrible, though, so the chances of this being in any kind of chronological order are slim.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;In that spirit, I&#39;ll start with Rory Waterman&#39;s excellent collection, Sarajevo Roses, which came out in November. I enjoyed Rory&#39;s first book very much, but this second set of poems feels even more convincing. Whereas the autobiographical element was strong in his debut, the poet manages here to incorporate that direct response to his own lived experience (there are quite a few poems of travel here, for instance), while remaining attuned to the political and social moment. The poems are formally very assured too,&amp;nbsp; harnessing a direct and apparently colloquial form of speech to a subtle musicality. Trump, Brexit, and so on are all there in the background, but it&#39;s Rory&#39;s ability to bring that sense of history into the everyday life of the rural Lincolnshire he knows so well that is most impressive. I know many of the places he talks about myself, which adds an extra poignancy for me, but there is a strong &#39;state of the nation&#39; thread running through these poems, which is all the more convincing for its lack of portentousness. Although he is sometimes angry, the poet is also generous and open-minded. If, in time, I&#39;m ever asked by anyone what England was like at this time of transition and perceived crisis, I&#39;ll put this book in their hand.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;Another book from late in&amp;nbsp; the year was New Zealand poet Hera Lindsay Bird&#39;s &lt;i&gt;Hera Lindsay Bird&lt;/i&gt;, the self-referentiality of which is announced in the title. Despite the apparent reference to autobiography or self-analysis, however, Bird is actually playing with the persona of the self-obsessed &#39;millenial&#39;. By turns hilarious and bleak, these are fluid and troubling poems. They are deceptively easy to consume, and (on the face of it) brutally honest, but the apparently confessional mode in which they operate is both revealing and concealing at the same time. Are we hearing the voice of Hera Lindsay Bird or a poetic avatar called &#39;Hera Lindsay Bird&#39;? The poems oscillate between cool insight and desperation. Unnerving but (even more unnervingly) highly entertaining stuff.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;table cellpadding=&quot;0&quot; cellspacing=&quot;0&quot; class=&quot;tr-caption-container&quot; style=&quot;float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;&quot;&gt;&lt;tbody&gt;&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: center;&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy1qhZuAkhu-0REeoZWADqG5iwVKobVJACsgLS79gJ-Gyu0pazreSJwA9oCrgdfP8QzF7dnA5ALpfWxaHAMBZkiag68R1JEuEdBU5k46TTJYU8XqDkhU2uRBarrSAN1w8pCv5Ao9RGGIg/s1600/Winter+Landscape.jpg&quot; style=&quot;clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;&quot;&gt;&lt;img border=&quot;0&quot; data-original-height=&quot;472&quot; data-original-width=&quot;600&quot; height=&quot;313&quot; src=&quot;https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy1qhZuAkhu-0REeoZWADqG5iwVKobVJACsgLS79gJ-Gyu0pazreSJwA9oCrgdfP8QzF7dnA5ALpfWxaHAMBZkiag68R1JEuEdBU5k46TTJYU8XqDkhU2uRBarrSAN1w8pCv5Ao9RGGIg/s400/Winter+Landscape.jpg&quot; width=&quot;400&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td class=&quot;tr-caption&quot; style=&quot;text-align: center;&quot;&gt;Henry Farrer, Winter Scene in Moonlight (Metropolitan Museum)&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;/tbody&gt;&lt;/table&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;My own recent publisher V Press had a great roster of work out this year, and deservedly got themselves a Michael Marks Award nomination. I particularly enjoyed Stephen Daniels&#39; debut, &lt;i&gt;Tell My Mistakes I Love Them&lt;/i&gt;. Stephen&#39;s carefully conveyed sense of the surreal qualities of the everyday allows him to address the big themes from surprising angles, for instance in one poem where intimations of mortality lurk in the background as he describes getting a mole checked by his doctor. He&#39;s one of those poets who writes poems about things that other poets wouldn&#39;t write poems about, which is only ever a good thing.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;Another big favourite of mine from this year in the pamphlet form was Paul Stephenson&#39;s &lt;i&gt;Selfie with Water Lilies&lt;/i&gt;. As in Paul&#39;s previous pamphlets, Oulipo-like games, patterns and constraints structure many of these poems. Sometimes the effect is humorous, as in a poem about Alan Sugar that uses the word beetroot at the end of every line, but in others these surface effects provide a way into talking about more difficult topics, particularly the bereavement that dominates the collection. These poems don&#39;t emote, but find a way to pattern language so that the reader finds their way to emotion, which sidles up as if from just outside the field of vision. This writing feels like a kind of magic trick, but I never feel hoodwinked reading these poems. The poet wants to lead us to something true. I think Paul is one of the most interesting people writing at the moment and it really is time someone offered to publish a full collection by him.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;Sometimes that move from pamphlets to full collections can take a good while, so it was great to finally see a book from Jacqui Rowe, an energetic promoter of others&#39; work via the award-winning Flarestack Poets imprint.&amp;nbsp;&lt;i&gt;Blink&lt;/i&gt;&amp;nbsp;showcases Jacqui&#39;s range, both emotionally and culturally, from occasional poems and ekphrasis to responses to Apollinaire and Verlaine; all held together by a characteristic clear-sightedness. Drawing as it does from Jacqui&#39;s previous publications, her first &#39;proper&#39; collection is arguably a &#39;New and Selected&#39;, but it still feels remarkably cohesive.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;A project very close to my own adopted home was Angela France&#39;s &lt;i&gt;The Hill&lt;/i&gt;. I&#39;ve walked on the eponymous Leckhampton Hill in Cheltenham myself a few times (although not for the decades Angela can boast) and her sense of the place, and of the meaning of place in all of its social, historical and political associations, is unrivaled. She interweaves the natural history of the hill and her own autobiography with the history of riots that took place on there in the early 20th century after a local quarry owner attempted to fence off the land local people had walked for centuries. As Angela points out when performing the poems, this protest pre-dated the Kinder Scout trespass, but is now largely forgotten, perhaps due to the working-class origins of the protagonists. The collection manages to encompass and transcend local history, however, and asks important questions about what it means to belong to a place in ways that cannot be captured in the title deeds of property.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;Place plays a very different role in Michael &lt;b&gt;Symmons &lt;/b&gt;Roberts&#39; &lt;i&gt;Mancunia&lt;/i&gt;, another of my favourite reads this year. Roberts has a particular voice, like someone whispering directly into your ear, conjuring worlds that are written like a kind of ghostly palimpsest over own lived reality. Ostensibly about the city of Manchester, the poems in the book offer many Manchesters, that is to say many possible versions of the city, in order to think about the end of things, the coming of utopia and utopia&#39;s likely failure. Here as elsewhere, Roberts is constantly inventive and compelling.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;This year was a good year for anthologies, too. Nine Arches Press did the poetry world (and the world more generally) a great service in producing &lt;i&gt;Stairs and Whispers&lt;/i&gt;, an anthology of D/deaf and disabled poetry. As a non-disabled person, the value of the book for me was two-fold. Firstly, and perhaps rather obviously, it confronted me with the reality of other lives. In a world apparently short on empathy, that is a valuable contribution. Secondly, the editors&#39; choices go far beyond poetry that simply talks about disability to consider how differently inhabited subjectivities might make formal innovation necessary, not just in terms of composition, but also in terms of how poetry reaches its audience and makes itself accessible in all kinds of ways. If the poetry &#39;scene&#39; wasn&#39;t talking about these issues until this anthology was published, it must do now.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;I&#39;m also going to sneak in Sophie Collins&#39; anthology &lt;i&gt;Currently and Emotion&lt;/i&gt;, despite the 2016 publication date, as I only became aware of it later and it feels like one of my 2017 books of choice. If you think that you know what translation is and does, then those notions will be challenged by some of these occasionally weird and occasionally wonderful approaches to translation as a creative process. The book itself is a beautifully produced object, too, as I&#39;d expect from its publishers, Test Centre.&lt;/div&gt;&lt;table cellpadding=&quot;0&quot; cellspacing=&quot;0&quot; class=&quot;tr-caption-container&quot; style=&quot;float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;&quot;&gt;&lt;tbody&gt;&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td style=&quot;text-align: center;&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-2_0stIh5epXpR9BcN21-31mGYcSC_vZ0wFbT9NhESRv3_xSS0nPdn6phoj11vYYeCQ-vxSS_wbCKnFXVPsIRgsb3pIKgOvOyK6VFe4LxQm3bFFCDgU8doKvp7KUO7N3bKajYcM5w_Ns/s1600/newyear.jpg&quot; style=&quot;clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;&quot;&gt;&lt;img border=&quot;0&quot; data-original-height=&quot;409&quot; data-original-width=&quot;599&quot; height=&quot;218&quot; src=&quot;https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-2_0stIh5epXpR9BcN21-31mGYcSC_vZ0wFbT9NhESRv3_xSS0nPdn6phoj11vYYeCQ-vxSS_wbCKnFXVPsIRgsb3pIKgOvOyK6VFe4LxQm3bFFCDgU8doKvp7KUO7N3bKajYcM5w_Ns/s320/newyear.jpg&quot; width=&quot;320&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td class=&quot;tr-caption&quot; style=&quot;text-align: center;&quot;&gt;The New Year – 1869 – Drawn by Winslow Homer,&lt;br /&gt;Metropolitan Museum&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;/tbody&gt;&lt;/table&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div&gt;So, not a best of, then, but a list of &#39;poetry highlights&#39;, perhaps. These are the poetry books I&#39;d be most likely to mention if asked &#39;what did you read this year?&#39; Clearly, 2017 was indeed a good year, not least in terms of the richness and variety of what contemporary poetry has to offer. And that&#39;s without mentioning all of the great poetry events the year gave us (Jan Wagner giving the Poetry Society lecture, Verve Festival, Ledbury, Cheltenham Poetry Festival...). Here&#39;s to 2018!&lt;/div&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='https://sovietpoetriy.blogspot.com/feeds/5321745881965227043/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='https://sovietpoetriy.blogspot.com/2017/12/that-was-poetry-year-that-was.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='https://www.blogger.com/feeds/8096358914599952404/posts/default/5321745881965227043'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='https://www.blogger.com/feeds/8096358914599952404/posts/default/5321745881965227043'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://sovietpoetriy.blogspot.com/2017/12/that-was-poetry-year-that-was.html' title='That was the (poetry) year that was'/><author><name>Ashique</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/01776900758529804135</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='16' height='16' src='https://img1.blogblog.com/img/b16-rounded.gif'/></author><media:thumbnail xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" url="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy1qhZuAkhu-0REeoZWADqG5iwVKobVJACsgLS79gJ-Gyu0pazreSJwA9oCrgdfP8QzF7dnA5ALpfWxaHAMBZkiag68R1JEuEdBU5k46TTJYU8XqDkhU2uRBarrSAN1w8pCv5Ao9RGGIg/s72-c/Winter+Landscape.jpg" height="72" width="72"/><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry></feed>

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