My Blog

The M.A.W. Syndrome in Poetry

Thu, 2 Sep 2010 15:51:01 +0100

Okay, I can no longer keep my head below the parapet; I’m cross. I am a Middle Aged Woman and I write poetry. I’ve had many comments addressed to me in person on the subject over the years, eg: ‘Unfortunately there are too many Middle Aged Women on the poetry scene’, or ‘This poem will go down well given all the Middle Aged Women who read poetry’, ‘That reading was full of Middle Aged Women’, or ‘Workshops are mostly made up of Middle Aged Women’ (why shouldn’t they be?). The term always sounds so loaded and is bandied about with a certain scorn. From the way some people talk, and from various postings on the internet with regard to demographics, I’m starting to feel as if there is some sort of active discrimination against me by virtue of my age and gender. Why? I’m only trying to do the best job I can, using my hard-earned skills and life experience and working at what I do.

I’m not part of some imagined horde of frustrated ex-housewives whose kids have left home and who take up poetry as a hobby or distraction in the way that others might take up flower arranging or origami, tolerated as make-weights in poetry workshops and as buyers of poetry books. (Although where would the poetry world be without its older audience? Maybe they stick at it because they have more patience than a younger one?) It all makes me see some some nightmare vision of herds of stampeding menopausal women in aprons and curlers storming the bastions of verse, demanding that their amateurish offerings about cookery, periods and ballroom dancing become part of the cannon (and incidentally all those are perfectly valid subjects for poems if written well).

In every age group there are going to be people who take up writing poetry for all sorts of reasons other than that they love it, and who don’t want to get to grips with what hard work it is. Some will think of it as a hobby, or therapy, or a chance to experience something different - and why shouldn’t they? - but it needn’t be assumed that every woman over forty is in that category.

Writing for me is not and has never been a function of my age or a desperate attempt to fill the void that is my frustrated Middle-Aged existence, but a vocation and something I truthfully couldn’t live without. But you only have to look at me – and certain of my poems - to see I am recognisably an MAW although I’ve been a writer all my life. I’ve been a Young Writer too, with all the support and accolades that come with that title; and I had plenty in of those in my twenties – probably before I deserved them.

Now, after decades of making things out of the written word, I’m much humbler knowing how much I don’t know, but a lot better at what I do (I’ve lived more, yes, and practised more) and I am, surprise surprise, OLDER. Middle Aged, even, and yes, a Woman. And there are apparently TOO MANY of us. Oh God. Let me go and burn all my manuscripts then, and leave the world of poetry to the Young Writers and the Middle Aged Men. Yes, I know, the latter come in for a bit of stick too, but not for being bad poets all writing about the same tiresome things because they’re in need of something to do with their shallow, empty lives now that the kids have left home and the dog’s died.

I would just love us to get away from this obsession with who the poet is, and particularly their age and gender, and focus down on whether the poetry is any good or not. As a reader and purchaser of poetry, I don’t care at all what age a poet is. In fact I’d rather not know. All I care about is that they provide me with a transformative vision of the world that reframes some aspect of it, that gives me some sort of frisson – intellectual or emotional, and that they know how to use words to make a poem.

Labels for people have never been helpful, we all know that, but the MAW is getting quite a reputation for herself as a desperate dilettante (excuse near oxymoron) in the poetry community, and it’s time to knock that one on the head.

Now I must go and play bridge, or is rummy, at a poetry coffee morning, take my happy pills and write a few lines of sad doggerel about my menstrual cycle.

Angry? Moi?

Where have I been?

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:04:43 +0000

I wish I knew. It’s been a long, tough January. When did winter become such a hardship? Keeping warm seems to take a lot of effort.

But it’s not all bad. Highlights have included a trip to The TS Eliot readings, ten poets at the top of their game, all doing the read of their lives. A joy to see the Queen Elizabeth Hall packed out with poetry lovers, and all the gossip and shenanigans that go with any event of that magnitude.

And talking of Eliot, another highlight was Fiona Shaw’s brilliant performance of The Waste Land at the Wilton’s Music Hall. I last saw it twelve years ago, when she did it the first time, but found it more engrossing still this time around. The music hall is an old genuinely distressed building. You feel as if you’re stepping onto the set of some Dickens recreation. Such a perfect atmosphere for a one-woman show where light and shade play such an important part. An absolute triumph.

Tonight I’m off to host The Shuffle where some fabulous poets will be reading as usual. This is the first Shuffle of 2010 and I’m hoping for a large, enthusiastic audience. There’s so much poetry around at the moment, live and written, so much to take in, it becomes easily overwhelming.

I’m also working with two incredibly energetic and dynamic artists from Accident and Emergence, who do amazing projects, on a project that brings together artists and poets. Our pairs are now busily working and we will have an exhibition in April.

And I’m working on a live event at the Tate Britain where half a dozen poets are responding to ‘Bigger trees near Warter’, three huge canvasses by David Hockney.

I spent part of my lovely, restful, sleep-filled xmas holidays sorting out my books. gave a lot to Oxfam and put my poetry collections into alphabetical order. I cannot tell you the joy this has given me. Now when I’m looking for a collection, I can actually find it!. Ditto with my study. I threw away eight bin bags full of poetry, and miscellaneous notes. I often wonder where my words might have ended up, and whether anyone might have picked them up and read them. Accidentally.

I’m also putting together my collection, which will be published by Flipped Eye sometime this year. That is a massive, but satisfying undertaking. And finally, Magma 46, which I have been editing since last July with my dear friend Norbert Hirschhorn, will be off to the printers in two days’ time. ‘Looking forward to getting your life back?’ asked Laurie Smith, who is one of the magazine’s founders and a stalwart.

Aha. Now I know where I’ve been. And so do you.

There’s no Business like Shoah Business

Sun, 6 Dec 2009 19:02:02 +0000

So the National Theatre are staging a play - ‘Our Class’ about Polish anti-semitism during and after the second world war. Finally, a Polish playwright gets to grips with a hidden part of his country’s history. Claude Lanzmann did that many years ago with his documentary ‘Shoah’, but this play is based on both fact and fiction.

What a massive disappointment. The subject matter is utterly gruelling as you might expect, but this is yet another familiar, horrible Holocaust hijack. The first half builds slowly to a climax where 1600 of a town’s Jews are put into a barn and burned to death, following a spate of hideous violence and an extended rape scene (where the female victim tells us that she’s never felt pleasure like that). The audience sits in hushed and sacred silence as these appalling events are recounted. How can they respond in any other way? How can they protest when these ghastly and inhumane acts are being laid before them like biblical texts?

This is not enough. We need context. Although the play hints at the anti-semitism of the Catholic church, it does seem to be suggesting that relationships between Polish Jews and Catholic Poles were pretty cosy until the Bolshevik invasion, when the Jews began to collaborate with the invaders. What about the roots of anti-semitism? The centuries of scapegoating, of institutionalised separation and prejudice in Poland and the rest of Europe?

Where is the intellectual rigour in the argument of the play? Brecht would surely have something to say about this mercenary use of suffering to silence an audience (and theatre critics) to the point where they cannot think and cannot see the simplistic and one-dimensional view the playwright is taking.

The information contained in this play may be news in Poland, although one would hope not. But there is nothing new about it to me. In the early eighties, I visited the town where my Grandparents lived before the second world war. I saw the house that had been appropriated by the townspeople, I saw the barn where they’d taken all the Jews during the war before they shot them. The largely and obviously Jewish audience at the National Theatre - whose guaranteed attendance must have played a part in the decision to stage this retrograde piece of theatre - must have been very well informed too.

There were other problems with the play. The design was terrible. A metal frame hanging from the ceiling came down a few feet at the end of the first half - why? In the second half, the action took place on a floor covered in ashes - to remind us of those who were burnt to death? An old-fashioned style of a combination of narration and ‘physical theatre’ reminded me of many a student production in the 1980s. The characterisation was thin. The music (clarinet and of course violins) was predictable. And then a long and rambling second half would have put me to sleep had I not been so enraged. Each character had to tell us their story, finishing with their death, when they retired to a pre-designated chair. Some of these people lived until the twenty-first century; that’s a lot of years to recount. You could see how many empty chairs were left. You knew how many long, tedious stories were still to come.

The fact that I need to write a whole blog about this shows you how strongly I feel. Michael Billington reverentially quotes a line in the play ‘You can’t bury the truth’ at the end of his review. Well actually I think the playwright in this case did a pretty fine job of doing just that.

The Poetry and the Poverty

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:08:28 +0000

So here I am merrily editing next Spring’s issue Magma Poetry and working my way through the 2014th poem submitted for publication and I find an accompanying letter from a potential contributor saying something like this (and I paraphrase) “I can’t imagine a more wonderful job than evaluating people’s poems all day’. Firstly, is it wonderful evaluating poems all day? Well not exactly. It’s a learning curve, yes, it’s fascinating, but it’s certainly not easy. Perhaps more to the point though, I begin to wonder, is editing Magma a job? It certainly FEELS like a job - by turns tedious, infuriating, exhilarating and exhausting, but it is of course UNPAID. As are almost all our contributors. As are all the members of the editorial board.

When I tell non-poets there’s really no money in it they generally look very surprised. Unless, I add, you’re Seamus Heaney or a university lecturer or perhaps Patience Strong. It is truly a Cinderella of the arts. No good being here for either money or fame. You will never be rich and you are highly unlikely to become a household name.

Most serious poets I know have day jobs to support their habit. Or they have a wife/husband who earns the money. Those who don’t, struggle along on practically no income at all with a little help from the Arts Council, bless their darling cotton socks. Recently at an open day for undergraduates at Warwick University, David Morley declared ‘Poetry is the opposite of money’. Well, it was ever thus I suppose, but must it always be so? Poetry is a minority interest, so it will never pay its way perhaps? But opera is also a minority interest, as is contemporary art, but both of those seem to get plenty of support and a reasonable amount of government funding. Think of the Tate Modern and the Royal Opera House: huge temples to the visual and live arts respectively. Then think of The Poetry Cafe in Betterton Street. Small tatty basement with a dodgy microphone and impossible air conditioning. Or am I missing something here?

Recently, yes, there’s been an increase in coverage for poetry. CAD, our venerable Poet Laureate has managed to get swathes of it into The Guardian and has a Daily Mail column. The South Bank has hosted festivals. ‘Spoken Word’ (sometimes great and sometimes terrible) is starting to create new audiences.

But still, poetry is poor and poets are poor, and it is incredible what people will do for no money where poetry is concerned. As Apples and Snakes education officer put it to me recently in an interview - you don’t need money to make poetry. You can do it on a street corner, you can do it on a bus, you don’t even need a pen and paper because you can write it in your head. Maybe the very democratic nature of poetry is a kind of poisoned chalice. Because we all own the universal currency of language, we all think we can use it to write poetry. The truly dreadful mixes with the transcendently wonderful and you can often get the transcendently wonderful absolutely free. Is that fair on the poet though? Writing good poetry is immensely time-consuming and it’s the labour of a lifetime. And editing a poetry magazine is hard work. It’s not a job, I suppose, it’s a vocation. We do it for love because we love it. We do it for nothing because there is nothing in the world that can do what poetry does, both for the writer and the reader.

So those of you who are poets, get back to your garrets and your gruel and finish filling in your Arts Council applications. And those of you who aren’t, do pop round to your local bookshop and buy a few collections of poetry. Feed a poet today.