welcome!

So…here it is. The first bite of the apple. Welcome to The Portmanteau! This is my blog, it’s going to mostly be about poetry – writing it, reading it, being excited and baffled and unsettled and bowled-over and grabbed by the throat and shaken by it. I’m Laura, your friendly companion and tour guide as we journey through the challenging, wonderful and occasionally treacherous hinterlands of all things poetical.

Let’s go!

I like the idea of a poem as a journey – the way it opens up in front of you, building in impact, becoming aware of its cadences, the rhythm of it; and the way meaning emerges, which can sometimes feels like an uphill climb – but then you stand at the top and look back and say yes, I see it now! I’m currently reading Ruth Padel’s so-far excellent The Poem and the Journey, which packs in sixty discussions of contemporary poems and seems like an excellent primer for anyone looking for a way into the world of contemporary poetry, a world that can often seem a daunting, exclusive and difficult place to be.

I want to redress this, not because I feel particularly qualified to do so – (I’m a recent(ish) grad with a Masters in English Literature, have had a few poems published, won a prize or two, organised a small creative writing group and worked in publishing) – but because it’s something I really feel a need for. The contemporary poetry world is very much alive and thriving – there’s heaps of poetry readings in every city, hugely successful book and poetry festivals, oversubscribed creative writing courses, excellent journals, zines and online communities, and many, many brilliant poems published every year. But so much of that exists in what can seem a quite exclusive and intimidating world that can be difficult to access, especially for those who may have little experience of reading contemporary poets or who have preconceived notions as to what contemporary poetry is like (obscure, difficult, self-indulgent, irrelevant, inferior to ‘classic’ poetry, etc.).

Studying English Literature at university, I was really surprised how many of my fellow students were dismissive and resistant to any kind of poetry. They probably wrote their own plaintive post-adolescent poems about being pseudo-bohemian, socially awkward, prematurely embittered, misunderstood geniuses of undetermined sexuality (I know I did), but many, maybe the majority of those I studied with, just didn’t ‘do’ poetry - didn’t get it, or like it, or see it as being as worthy of consideration as the novels and plays we studied.

So, if even Eng Lit students don’t want to read poetry, then there can’t be much hope for everyone else, right? Well, I think a lot of the problem is the way poetry is taught in schools, you remember – all that critical analysis and interpretation, (What is the effect of Keats’ use of alliteration in the final couplet? Discuss Larkin’s attitude towards religion. Compare and contrast Heaney’s use of metaphor in any two poems…and so on and so on) picking apart every word of a poem until it lies lifeless in front of you, murdering to dissect. In Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled the inimitable Mr Fry laments this tendency and quotes a well known joke:

The way poetry was taught at school reminded W.H. Auden of a Punch cartoon composed, legend has it, by the poet A.E. Housman. Two English teachers are walking in the woods in springtime. The first, on hearing birdsong, is moved to quote William Wordsworth:

TEACHER 1: Oh cuckoo, shall I call thee bird
Or but a wandering voice?

TEACHER 2: State the alternative preferred
With reasons for your choice.

Funny, but all too familiar. I hate this. I hate that the same poems are trotted out year by year in schools all over the country, I hate this emphasis on interpreting everything, as if all poets are just trying to be clever – or showing off – by speaking in endless metaphors and similes, all wrapped around the ‘meaning’ that must be rooted out and analysed. Here’s Neil Astley in his foreword to the brilliant Bloodaxe anthology Staying Alive:

One of the greatest disservices to poetry has been the modern tendency to read poems in terms of their paraphrasable meaning…These kinds of misreadings of poetry are the inevitable result of botched teaching: first the killing of poems by careless dissection at school, then their intellectual “decoding” as so-called “texts” in universities by literary theoreticians.

Poems should live and breathe, they should seep under your skin or grasp you by both hands, they should simmer and burn and boil over, they should knock your socks off. So this is a blog about poetry (although I reserve the right to squeeze in a few things non-poetical along the way). Because I love it and because I want more people to get the chance to enjoy it, I don’t pretend that this blog will achieve that but I want it to be a place where I can explore and discover and share all kinds of writing, new and old, famous and not-famous-yet, published and unpublished.

So…are we ready? I’m packing a thermos of tea, some peanut butter sandwiches, my moleskine, and the aforementioned Staying Alive, which, along with its sister anthology Being Alive, is the one book, above all others, that I’d recommend you invest in for the journey. It’s published by the terrific Bloodaxe Books, purveyors of poetry of the highest and coolest order, and it’s the book that really turned me on to the awesomeness of contemporary poetry.

Here’s the two quotes borrowed from its epigraph, and I can’t think of better ones to welcome you to the poetical adventures of The Portmanteau:

One should only read books which bite and sting one. If the book we are reading does not wake us up with a blow to the head, what’s the point in reading? A book must be the axe which smashes the frozen sea within us. – Franz Kafka

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. – Emily Dickinson