daily poem: Wet Evening in April / Patrick Kavanagh

Trust National Poetry Month to happen at the same time as ScriptFrenzy (30 days, 100 pages, yiiikes), it's going to be a busy (and fun) few weeks! You'll be able to follow my ScriptFrenzy progress over at my film blog The Usherette, from April 2nd onwards, when I'll be living deadline free for a wee while at least! So, here's a little gem from Patrick Kavanagh to start off our poetical April, and very appropriate it is - as I type blustery wind and April showers are rattling the windowpanes, time to get under the duvet with a mug of something piping hot and chocolatey...


Wet Evening in April
Patrick Kavanagh

The birds sang in the wet trees
And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him
The melancholy.



Photo by Bator Horvath

poetry month

Gosh! It's April already! The "cruellest month" if you believe Eliot. I'm rather more positive than ol' T.S. and am hoping that Spring is springing beautifully wherever you are, I noticed some lovely snowdrops yesterday and felt very light and bright and full of seasonal joys :)

Did you know that this April is National Poetry Month? Well, in the US and Canada at least, and I'm thinking it should definitely extend to the blogosphere, I'm all for poetry-sans-frontiers. So, in honour of National Poetry Month I'm planning a month-long poetry party at The Portmanteau with posts including:

• a poem a day: an eclectic bunch of handpicked classic and contemporary favourites, available here and on my Tumblr blog
• audio goodness: downloadble mp3 audio recordings of poets reading their poetry
• poet profiles & interviews: sampling 30 contemporary poets from across the globe

Phew! I'm nothing if not ambitious. I want to get into the routine of blogging regularly and thought this would be a great way to kick-start The Portmanteau - we'll see how it goes... I hope you'll join me for a month of poetical adventures!

daily poem: The Howling of Wolves / Ted Hughes

Apologies for lack of blogage this week, have been away from home for the last few days gorging on easter eggs and gin-&-tonics at the boyfriend's place in darkest Argyll. Am up late translating Old English poetry for a freelance research gig, deadline tomorrow - why am I still totally unable to do academic work unless I'm looking down the barrell of a deadline?

The Portmanteau is due a couple of big juicy posts this week, in the meantime here's something for a dark and stormy night from Ted Hughes...


The Howling of Wolves
Ted Hughes

Is without world.

What are they dragging up and out on their long leashes of sound

That dissolve in the mid-air silence?

Then crying of a baby, in this forest of starving silences,
Brings the wolves running.
Tuning of a violin, in this forest delicate as an owl’s ear,
Brings the wolves running—brings the steel traps clashing and slavering,
The steel furred to keep it from cracking in the cold,
The eyes that never learn how it has come about
That they must live like this,

That they must live

Innocence crept into minerals.

The wind sweeps through and the hunched wolf shivers.
It howls you cannot say whether out of agony or joy.

The earth is under its tongue,
A dead weight of darkness, trying to see through its eyes.
The wolf is living for the earth.
But the wolf is small, it comprehends little.

It goes to and fro, trailing its haunches and whimpering horribly.

It must feed its fur.

The night snows stars and the earth creaks.


Photo by Me.

daily poem: Always, Sweetness / Pablo Neruda

I'm finding writing in the kitchen quite inspiring today, consequently The Portmanteau has been serving poems for the ravenous, sensory poems that play on the way language tastes on your tongue, food for thought, words that slake thirst and satisfy hunger. "Poetry," says Lucille Clifton, "speaks to something in us that so wants to be filled. It speaks to the great hunger of the soul."

Here's a wonderful poem from Pablo Neruda, good enough to eat.

Always, Sweetness
Pablo Neruda

Why such harsh machinery?
Why, to write down the stuff and people of everyday,
must poems be dressed up in gold,
or in old and fearful stone?

I want verses of felt or feather
which scarcely weigh, mild verses
with the intimacy of beds
where people have loved and dreamed.
I want poems stained
by hands and everydayness.

Verses of pastry which melt
into milk and sugar in the mouth,
air and water to drink,
the bites and kisses of love.
I long for eatable sonnets,
poems of honey and flour.

Vanity keeps prodding us
to lift ourselves skyward
or to make deep and useless
tunnels underground.
So we forget the joyous
love-needs of our bodies.
We forget about pastries.
We are not feeding the world.

In Madras a long time since,
I saw a sugary pyramid,
a tower of confectionery -
one level after another,
and in the construction, rubies,
and other blushing delights,
medieval and yellow.

Someone dirtied his hands
to cook up so much sweetness.

Brother poets from here
and there, from earth and sky,
from Medellin, from Veracruz,
Abyssinia, Antofagasta,
do you know the recipe for honeycombs?

Let’s forget about all that stone.

Let your poetry fill up
the equinoctial pastry shop
our mouths long to devour -
all the children’s mouths
and the poor adults’ also.
Don’t go on without seeing,
relishing, understanding
all these hearts of sugar.

Don’t be afraid of sweetness.

With or without us,
sweetness will go on living
and is infinitely alive,
forever being revived,
for it’s in a man’s mouth,
whether he’s eating or singing,
that sweetness has its place.

Translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reid


Read more Pablo Neruda here. // Buy The Essential Neruda here.

Photo by Veronika Lake

food for thought: of baking, Proust and square sausage

“Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are,” Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 1825.

I think that weekends on The Portmanteau should include a few diversions from the strictly literary, lately my Saturdays off usually consist of moodling around from one meal to the next, meals cooked slowly and leisurely, meals that draw out to fill most of the day, eaten in front of the fire with a film and a bottle of something cold and dry. So here's a mouth-watering, stomach-rumbling, lip-smacking post of gastronomical delights, both edible and poetical...bon appetit!

The height of my love affair with cooking, fickle and intermittent as it has been, would probably be my first year at university, my salad days - others might have joined the CND, experimented with some half-hearted lesbianism or turned into mooncup evangelists. I became Mrs Beeton with an overdraft.

A bright-eyed fresher, faced with the sudden freedom and opportunity afforded by the dreaming spires and public houses of a university town, will generally spend too much time marinating in watered-down beer to desire initiation into the dark arts of the kitchen. In time, a bout of scurvy and/or rickets will rouse the more practically minded to action. Saucepans and cheese graters will be bought from Ikea, discarded copies of Creative Ways with Micropizza or Boiling Water for Dummies – previously pressed into the hands of the feckless greenhorns by tearful mothers – will be grudgingly opened. Local fire stations will experience a sudden upsurge in call-outs.

But for this domestic innocent, suddenly provided with a shelf in a communal fridge and an ancient, rusting oven, it was a different story. I shall win friends and influence people with my dazzling array of baked goods, I told myself. Let them eat cake, my home-made, lovingly prepared cake, washed down with creamy pints of the milk of human kindness.

I began to bake bread on an almost daily basis: small quick-rise rolls served still hot and doughy with lavender honey and golden butter. I combated the cold with huge vats of soup made from chicken legs, root vegetables and handfuls of barley. I made buttered rum with cloves, spices and lemons to alleviate freshers flu. I baked buttermilk scones and jam tarts, gingerbread men and petticoat tails.

Look at me! I thought, I’m making things, I’m self-sufficient, a domestic goddess! I’m Juliette Binoche in Chocolat, bringing charm and sensory delights to the humdrum lives of my Biochemistry and Engineering housemates. It didn’t last of course. Discovering that studying was not entirely optional nor my student loan entirely infinite curtailed my culinary odyssey. I accepted my inevitable decline into the typical undergraduate vending-machine connoisseur, burning the midnight oil by the barrelful, grazing from snack to snack.

Cooking creatively, for pleasure, is a luxury of course, most of the meals I make now are hastily thrown together, or consist of infinite variations on toast. But I can still look back in hunger. Nostalgia is such a huge part of enjoying food. As the late, great food columnist Laurie Colwin wrote: “When people enter the kitchen, they often drag their childhood in with them.” Think of Laurie Lee’s ‘first bite of the apple’ in Cider with Rosie, or Proust with his tea-soaked madeleine, observing that “the smell and taste of things remain poised for a long time, like souls, ready to remind us.”



Chief among my own stomach-rumbling memories would be that first begged-for slab of millionaire’s shortbread, devoured in the long-gone Underground Café in Glasgow, a windowless cavern full of the gentle clinking of china and the murmur of gossiping mothers. And I can trace my ardent carnivorousness from a square Lorne sausage tucked inside a floury bap, eaten bleary-eyed and slightly green on the early morning ferry from Stornoway.

No writer traded off the natural greed of children better than Enid Blyton. I used to read and re-read her gluttonous descriptions of tuck boxes, midnight feasts and great farmhouse kitchen tables creaking under the weight of new-laid eggs, cold ham and tongue, potted meat, well-buttered toast and, naturally, lashings of ginger beer. Of course, during Blyton’s most prolific period of writing, rationing still dominated the nation’s larders. But the Famous Five still went happily munching on.

These days I’m mostly an armchair cook, reading cookbooks like novels, moveable feasts, fantasies of the kind of ambrosial idyll of uninhibited sybaritism my life would be were it not for lack of time, money and my congenital laziness. But the writer who never fails to awaken my inner epicure has to be Nigel Slater – the dog-eared pages of my copy of his Real Fast Food are stained with pan juices and sticky fingerprints, crumbs wedged between the most pored-over sections. Recipes for fish finger sandwiches and banana milkshakes nestle between instructions on how to make Hot Buttered Plums, Wholewheat Pasta with Sausages, Mustard and Caramelised Onions (my favourite), or Purple Figs with Warm Honey (“A snack to share with someone special, in bed, on a cold winter’s night…Eat with your fingers, sucking the purple-red flesh from the skins.”)

That flush of pleasure when you cook something that people enjoy isn’t dissimilar to the experience of the writer when their work connects with someone. Both are acts of creation that are meant to be consumed, to be chewed over. I write like I cook, mixing words and sentences experimentally, adding a bit here and there, trimming the edges, attempting to cover up the mistakes with some fancy icing, never quite sure of the end result.

A recognition of the potential of cookery as art, as transformation; its aesthetic qualities, and its cultural importance, is central to the abiding literary fascination with the edible. The best writing about food revels in the sheer taste of words, the delectable roll of syllables on your tongue. Less modish gastropub marketing speak and chef ego-massaging: to write about food should be to meditate on hunger, its ultimate insatiability, the transience of its fulfilment - food for thought.


Some poems abut food for your delectation...
The Simple Truth / Philip Levine // Peaches / Peter Davison // The First Green of Spring / David Budbill // Wild strawberries / Helen Dunmore // Blackberry Eating / Galway Kinnell (plus audio) // Apples / Laurie Lee (plus audio) //

Linkage...
Guardian Poster Poems about food // A book you might enjoy // More Nigel Slater yummyness

Millionaire's shortbread pic by Lisa.

Elizabeth Bishop and experiencing poetry

When Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) taught at Harvard in the 1970s, she insisted that poems should never be interpreted, rejecting the close reading techniques of New Criticism, prevalent at the time (and still going strong!). Dana Gioia has described how her students would have to memorise a poem before talking about its meaning:

To her, the images and the music of the lines were primary. If we comprehended the sound, eventually we would understand the sense…She wanted us to see poems, not ideas. Poetry was the particular way the world could be talked about only in verse…the medium was the message. One did not interpret poetry, one experienced it. Showing us how to experience it clearly, intensely, and, above all, directly was the substance of her teaching. One did not need a sophisticated theory. One needed only intelligence, intuition, and a good dictionary.

Well, I hope that one out of three will do. I completely agree with this idea of ‘experiencing’ poetry, the immediacy of it, the images it conjures up, the way it feels on your tongue.

In ‘The Map’ (click to read) - the first poem in her Complete Poems - Bishop likens the poet to the cartographer, the map-maker creating an image of the real world with his ‘delicate colors.’ Although Adrienne Rich found this poem “intellectualized to the point of obliquity”, I think Bishop is really talking about reading, and the relationship between writer, reader and text. As the poet looks at the map she tries to read it, to interpret it, imagining the excitement of the printer, wondering if the land is “tugging at the sea from under,” and if the countries can choose their own colours. “Topography displays no favourites,” she declares. For Bishop the map-maker, like the poet, must simply describe what is there, and yet must make reality comprehensible, shaping it through words and form.

In the last lines of the gorgeous ‘At the Fishhouses’ (the first poem of Bishop’s I read, and one that I still think is her best) Bishop describes “cold dark deep” water as a “transmutation of fire” and says

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world

Here, knowledge is both “flowing, and flown”. The world is too vast and mysterious to be reflected in what Bishop would later call ‘the geographical mirror’, and knowledge cannot be captured or shaped into words. The poet’s – and the reader’s – purpose is simply to experience.

For Bishop what is important is – to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens – not ideas about the thing but the thing itself. Seeing, for Bishop, is the poet’s work, her leading purpose, it is enough just to notice and record, and in this way 'the thing' is illuminated, is really seen. Writing to Robert Lowell at one point about his poems, she could have been speaking about her own:

They…have that sure feeling, as if you’d been in a stretch…when everything and anything suddenly seemed material for poetry—or not material, seemed to be poetry, and all the past was illuminated in long shafts here and there, like a long-waited-for sunrise. If only one could see everything that way all the time! It seems to me it’s the whole purpose of art…that rare feeling of control, illumination—life is all right, for the time being.

Audio goodness...

The Fish / read by Elizabeth Bishop

Read it here. Download mp3. Buy Complete Poems here.

Here's George Szirtes on 'At the Fishhouses' // Read more by Elizabeth Bishop here.

Photo by edlyytam

daily poem: The Promise / Sharon Olds

Having a rather bad day today, trying to focus on the positive in the spirit of TiLT, but feeling a little overwhelmed by a recent spate of personal disappointments and bad news. However it's only Day Two of The Portmanteau's Poetry Month and I don't want to fall behind already...so here's a poem from Sharon Olds for the moment. I was hoping to focus on Olds in today's poet profile too, but I think I'll keep that for next week when I have more time to do her justice. In the meantime I'm planning to get a profile post on Elizabeth Bishop (who I can write about more easily, having studied her in some depth as an undergrad) and some audio up tonight. Here's 'The Promise', which I adore, in fact I'm completely head-over-heels for Sharon Olds, no one writes about love and sex with such tenderness and richness and lyricism as she does...


The Promise
Sharon Olds

With the second drink, at the restaurant,
holding hands on the bare table,
we are at it again, renewing our promise
to kill each other. You are drinking gin,
night-blue juniper berry
dissolving in your body, I am drinking Fumé,
chewing its fragrant dirt and smoke, we are
taking on earth, we are part soil already,
and wherever we are, we are also in our
bed, fitted, naked, closely
along each other, half passed out,
after love, drifting back
and forth across the border of consciousness,
our bodies buoyant, clasped. Your hand
tightens on the table. You’re a little afraid
I’ll chicken out. What you do not want
is to lie in a hospital bed for a year
after a stroke, without being able
to think or die, you do not want
to be tied to a chair like your prim grandmother,
cursing. The room is dim around us,
ivory globes, pink curtains
bound at the waist—and outside,
a weightless, luminous, lifted-up
summer twilight. I tell you you do not
know me if you think I will not
kill you. Think how we have floated together
eye to eye, nipple to nipple,
sex to sex, the halves of a creature
drifting up to the lip of matter
and over it—you know me from the bright, blood-
flecked delivery room, if a lion
had you in its jaws I would attack it, if the ropes
binding your soul are your own wrists, I will cut them.


From Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002. Buy it here.

Photo by koinis.