Humphrey 'Huck' Astley absorbs the work of four imaginative poets
- Poetry Reading
- Mimi Khalvati, Alison Brackenbury, Claire Crowther, and Jing-Jing Lee
- The Albion Beatnik Bookstore, Oxford,
- Saturday 31 October 2015
It's not often you go to a poetry reading and hear the words 'fugly' and 'anus' and the line 'semen is flowing like golden rain', but this is no ordinary poetry reading - indeed this Halloween special, with Mimi Khalvati, Alison Brackenbury, Claire Crowther and Jing-Jing Lee, has to be one of the best to have taken place at the Albion Beatnik Bookstore.
The aforementioned taboo-breaking phrases are uttered by headliner Khalvati, whose Tehran-born/Isle of Wight-raised background most likely contributes to her unstuffy, wide-ranging style - her poems touch on everything from the animal kingdom to the human soul, from Christopher North to Gustav Klimt.
Most of what she reads tonight is from her 2014 Carcanet collection The Weather Wheel, whose poems wear their lyricism on their sleeves without ever being obvious.
Set-opener 'Knifefish' shows us a familiar world that is 'Lit, lit, lit, lit' by the human ingenuity of 'landing lights' and 'flare paths', a world where 'Three jets like electric fish streak the sky with rose'. As soon as this simile is allowed to take shape, however, the subject seems to become its symbol, as if the metaphor is so strong that it takes the poem hostage, plunging it into the depths of the fish-world itself, where 'driftwood / casts distortion shadows'.
A few electrifying stanzas later, the poem turns again and the fish becomes 'Old Aba Aba, grandpa // with your one room lit at a time, feeling for walls, / navigating as surely as in the brightest, highest dawn!' - unexpectedly returning us to both the human world and the sky of the opening.
Some readers may baulk at the sight of the effusive exclamation mark, but Khalvati is a classicist, not an ironist, and she presents her poems on the page in the same way she presents them in the flesh - forthright, unabashed, direct.
Indeed 'Fog', whose imagery and syntax seem to recall the great Louis MacNeice, begins matter-of-factly by telling us that 'World is headless, cut off at the waist, and we, bundled, / seeing snowflakes only as they pass across a face'.
Sadly Khalvati has to leave early, so we get half as much material from her as we do from the others, but the impression she makes is no less powerful and when she disappears into the October night, she leaves us with lasting images of warmer climes - 'It was June and every barnacled brick of the sea wall / was drying out as we were.'
Alison Brackenbury, another Carcanet poet, introduces a more intimate and tense atmosphere to the reading with talk of 'unhappiness, who stood / In a high Oxford room, beside my bed.'
But it's by no means a maudlin performance, and by the time the speaker of 'The North Room' admits to being 'half-choked by despair', there can be no doubt that we are in the presence of a master performer - reciting from memory, her incantatory tone and gestures give her the air of a kind of white witch of poetry. (That she's getting into the spirit of things by wearing a cape probably adds to the effect.)
And there's magic in her poetry, for sure, when it tells us of 'a day when children played and did not fall, / when traffic slowed to world’s edge, a gold crawl, / which I heard, sun-lapped, sleeping through it all', eliciting a delighted gasp from the audience - the kind of gasp that attends so many of her poems' closing lines, which turn and open like exotic flowers.
The subject matter is often mundane but it's the alchemy of each poem's reveal that elevates it, as in 'January', which invites us to 'Peel the potatoes. Stir the spoon. / I hope, before lit days, and many, / you meet a January moon. / How will you spend your silver penny?'
This particular piece will appear in her forthcoming collection Skies, though it originally appeared on Radio 4's Front Row - Brackenbury is one of the most enterprising cross-genre poets around, moonlighting as broadcaster and critic, among other things.
Her background in the metal finishing business, meanwhile, seems to show in 'Bookkeeping', with lines like: 'These are like the ticking of a clock, / the daily sums, a van’s new brakes, / three drums of trichloroethylene on the back / of a thrumming lorry.'
It's a suitably autumnal piece with its 'sky grown black with leaves', and leaves us wondering 'What’s left when it is done, / the green book closed? There is no sea to swim / no mouth to kiss. Even the light is gone.'
A poet who seems at home in the darkness is Claire Crowther, whom I'm delighted to have encountered tonight. Her poetry, which reminds me of Paul Celan's, is an unnerving meeting of the bodily and the otherworldly, as in 'Separation', whose speaker is 'woken by pain with its orange beak.'
She begins with some short pieces from her chapbook Silents, a unique work that combines poetic responses to silent films with stills from the films themselves. Of course, it's hard to do these semi-visual pieces justice by writing about them, but in Crowther's words, 'There is something locked down in a face in a silent film.
It is the physical human voice. This forces the viewer to speak for what she is watching. The silent film viewer becomes a witness.
It makes a lot of sense when you think about it - poetry, with its rich ekphrastic history and inclination towards fabular storytelling, is perfectly equipped to re-introduce and re-imagine these films (many of which are now a good century old, if you can believe it).
And, as Glyn Maxwell has enigmatically suggested, the poetry of the future could take its cues from screenwriting... Some of Crowther's poems are more elaborate and recall Elizabeth Bishop with what seems like densely allegorical language: 'Mosquitoes charged me with their sour sugar outside the vinegar house. Six years, ten years, sixty, it ferments from oak to juniper to chestnut to cherry and back to oak wood barrels, balsamic vinegar separating itself from a hundred-year-old mother sediment.'
Meanwhile, the subject of 'Jehanne d'Arc and the Angels of Battle' is perhaps the perfect vehicle for Crowther's bodily-otherworldly concerns - Joan, the girl who sacrificed flesh for soul.
The sacrifice is complicated in Crowther's poem, of course, or it wouldn't be interesting, and there's something neurotic and pent-up in the poem's jagged couplets, which rhyme only by repeating themselves, as if trapped:
'They were carrying elaborate armour, when they broke in, to lock me in.
'This metal face, these sleeves can't be undone. I think I'll suffocate. This hard face is so heavy that, in itself, it could kill. I pitied them when I saw them [...]'
Finally, it's Jing-Jing Lee's turn to read.
She is perhaps the least experienced speaker - she's the youngest, after all, and even admits to 'rumours that I don't project' - but the language itself has the strength and sheen of steel.
Formally ascetic, her poetry has the texture of memoir - indeed her debut collection And Other Rivers, which she reads from tonight, seems largely autobiographical.
It's clear from the outset, however, that imagination and interpretation play a part - the ghosts that haunt her 'Interview' could be representations of everything the interviewee is unwilling or unable to disclose, though the spectres themselves are less than shy - they 'swarm around me, / trying to undo / the grandmother's knot / at the nape of my neck.'
The poem ends with 'my chest / opening up, / touching air'.
Though the culmination exists only in metaphor - as with many of Lee's poems, there's a sense of a promise not quite kept, of fulfilment deferred, as in 'The Find':
'I would have brought you home if my hands hadn’t decided to make a game of you, tossed you back into the water [...] I picture you made whole from scavenged parts.
'Rubber boots from the market. Brown, pitted skin and big, waving-away hands that men have. Only a man can lose himself like that [...]'
Here and elsewhere, there are echoes of H.D., a founding Modernist, and Lee is likely to have a similarly storied career if she can keep coming up with lines like 'No one sees her / climbing the far bank, her scales / bone-dry, a ballad veiling her hair.'
Four excellent poets, then, and four more reasons to attend a poetry reading when you next get the chance - sometimes they truly deliver.
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