Remembering Linda

I'm looking forward to a tribute to Linda Chase at the Manchester Literature Festival in October. Her poems old and new will be read by a selection of poets, and her final collection - Not Many Love Poems - will be launched.

I'm glad the Guardian are featuring her for this week's Saturday poem.

Finding Inspiration

The Saturday poem in the Guardian today is Monte Baldo by Annie Freud. (Women - 12, Men - 27).

I like Annie Freud's poetry, it is sensuous and mysterious. I feel both unsettled and comforted by her direct style and rich poems which also inspire me to go away and write. Thanks, Annie.

The Present

Here is Simon Armitage's Keats-Shelley prize-winning poem .

Swoony Simon Strikes Again

I've just read on the Guardian website that Simon Armitage has won the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize. Congratulations and well done! The prize is awarded for a poem which is romantically inspired and has modern relevance.  Simon's poem - The Present - will appear in the the Review section of the paper on Saturday. I'm looking forward to it!

Which brings me once again to my little research project - if this poem features as the Saturday Poem (likely), the running total for this year so far will be female poets 11, male poets 27. Which means that even if poems by women  feature every week from next week till the end of the year (unlikely), the final total will be women 21, men 26. Hmm I think I'll open a book and start taking bets...

Chauvinist Piggery

Guardian Saturday Poem.

Women 10, men 24.

Sorry, my patience has worn thin.

Poetry Saturday - Goes Round Comes Round

Saturday Poem today is Miniature Poodle by C. K. Williams. (Bringing the count so far this year to women 10, men 23). As I don't know this poet's work, I had a quick spin round the internet and found him on poets.org. I only had time to listen to one poem so I chose My Mother's Lips. His voice is lovely, I felt a connection and wanted to read more of his poems.

When out and about on my own, as I was this morning in Chester, I can't be trusted not to go into a bookshop. So predictably, I went into Waterstones, only for a look, you understand. 

Of course there was no harm in just popping upstairs for a peep at the poetry, to see what's what. And to see if there was anything by C. K. Williams, which there wasn't. 

Then my eye snagged on Don Paterson, who I have mixed feelings about. The first of his poems I ever met was Imperial in Ruth Padel's 52 Ways of Looking At A Poem. I really didn't like this poem, a bit clever-clever and macho, so I left DP alone for a while. Some time later I read Why Do You Stay Up So Late, which I found beautiful and very moving. I warmed to him when I read Rain, the collection that this poem comes from. 

So today I read the title poem from The Eyes - a collection of DP's versions (as opposed to translations) of  poems by Antonio Machado, and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. This made me think of Emily Dickinson's maxim that she knew what was poetry because of the sensation of the top of her head lifting off! 

Spurred on by this experience, I took a look at Landing Light, by now moving towards an inevitable purchase. What finally made me buy Landing Light was that I noticed in it DP's version of Rilke's poem which I featured here yesterday. I just took it as a sign. 

(Skimming through Ruth Padel's book when I started writing this post, I noticed that she analyses Harm by C. K. Williams. I look forward to reading her appreciation of this poet, which I must have overlooked, first time round...)

Archaic Torso of Apollo
after Rilke


You'll never know that terrific head,
or feel those eyeballs ripen on you -
yet something here keeps you in view,
as if his look had sunk inside


and still blazed on. Or the double axe
of the breast couldn't blind you, nor that grin
flash along the crease of the loins
down to the low centre of his sex.


Or else he'd sit, headless and halved,
his shoulders falling to thin air -
not shiver like the pelt of a wolf


or burst from his angles like a star:
for there is nowhere to hide, nothing here
that does not see you. Now change your life.
Don Paterson

Saturday Poem

Today's Saturday Poem in the Guardian is Bishop in Louisiana by Frances Leviston.

So far this year, this column has featured 20 male poets and 9 female poets.

Hundredth Post

I thought I'd written my hundredth post a while back, but when I totted up, the list included some drafts which never made it. So this is officially Numero 100! A century!

As I've mentioned previously, the Saturday Poem in the Guardian is a feature which both irks and delights me. Tearing open the plastic wrapping on Saturday's paper, I'm always excited to find out which poem has been selected for us in the Review section. I'm irritated that despite there being scores of brilliant and talented women poets, for some reason this column seems to have a tendency to favour male poets. Not that I don't like poems written by men, but so far this year, poems by men have featured 16 times, poems by women only 5. What's all that about then?

Anyhoo, today is one of those red letter days when another woman poet is being showcased - woohoo!  Pascale Petit is the fifth woman to have made it into the column this year. 

Her poem The Bus is from her latest book What The Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo. The collection is a series of poems inspired by the life and paintings of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. The poem is based on the above painting. 

I find the poem and the painting incredibly moving. As a young woman Frida Kahlo was in a bus crash and suffered horrendous injuries. Not surprisingly, this had a profound impact on the course her life took afterwards.

Like the painting, Petit's poem is a poignant portrait of Kahlo's world in the moments  before that life-changing experience.

Ted Hughes Award

The Saturday poem today featured another woman (only the third this year - remember I am keeping count). Alice Oswald has just become the first recipient of the Ted Hughes prize, a £5000 annual award established by Carol Ann Duffy when she became Poet Laureate. 

Written from a little girl's perspective, this poem is quite spooky, I'm looking forward to getting the book and reading the rest of this collection.

Daisy

I will not meet that quiet child

roughly my age but match-size

I will not kneel low enough to her lashes

to look her in her open eye

or feel her hairy wiry strength

or open my mouth among her choristers

I will not lie small enough under her halo

to smell its laundered frills

or let the slightest whisperiness

find out her friendliness

because she is more

summer-like more meek

than I am I will push my nail

into her neck and make

a lovely necklace out of her green bones


Alice Oswald

International Women's Day

I love my Mslexia diary and I love the Saturday poem in the Guardian. For 2010 I had a brainwave - I decided to cut out each poem and stick it in my diary, thereby compiling a lovely anthology which grows week by week, and which I can dip into if ever I find myself somewhere without a book to read. 

Six weeks into the year, I realised that not one poem by a woman had featured yet!! The following week - another male poet. By this stage I was fuming, preparing my letter of complaint to the Guardian. Luckily for them, in week eight a woman appeared, so I calmed down. For the moment. 

I am keeping my eye on them. Here's the year's anthology so far:

1)  2 Jan - Traffic - Andrew Motion

2)  9 Jan - Pigeon - Lachlan MacKinnon

3)  16 Jan - funhouse - Charles Bukowski

4)  23 Jan - In a Syrian Harbour - John Ash

5)  30 Jan - Turns - Christopher Reid

6) 6 Feb - About Time - Robin Robertson

7) 13 Feb - Strawberries - Edwin Morgan

8)  20 Feb - On Lacking the Killer Instinct - Eilean Ni Chuilleanain

9)  27 Feb - Cholera - Kona MacPhee

10)  6 Mar - 42 - Derek Walcott 

Statement from the front of Mslexia magazine:

'Mslexia means women's writing (ms = woman, lexia = words). Its association with dyslexia is intentional. Dyslexia is a difficulty, more prevalent in men, with reading and spelling; mslexia is the complex set of conditions and expectations that prevents women, who as girls so outshine boys in verbal skills, from becoming successful authors. 

Mslexia aims to define, explore and help overcome the condition of mslexia and provide a platform and playground for women writers. We are dedicated to encouraging, nurturing and empowering women writers to produce, publish and have their work read, with the parallel aim of improving the reach and quality of women's literature.'

Click on the image above of the diary to visit Mslexia's website.