Magma Poetry

Rupert Loydell is not one of those poets who will publish a mere 100 or so gems of perfect poetry over a whole lifetime. He’s not Larkin, or Bishop, or Bunting. He’s more like Emily Dickinson, or John Ashbery: he writes a lot of poems and sends them out into the world, and isn’t afraid of over-production. I find this refreshing myself: but inevitably, it means that among the books, pamphlets and collaborations he’s sent forth over the years, there will be some poems that work for me and others that don’t.

Like Ashbery, his poems are basically about his life and times; unlike Ashbery, though they sometimes use cut-n-paste techniques and are sometimes humorous, there’s none of the odd angles and non-sequiturs of the New York poet. These poems are often in plain, simple language, often conversational and personal, with a kind of resigned grace to them that is very appealing to me:

      I don’t know what to do with my arms.
      They fall off the sides or end up numb
      under the pillow. Spiders build nests
      in my arm pits and my muscles won’t
      work in the morning. I don’t know what
      to do with my head.
           (‘When I Sleep’)

Wildlife is in many ways not very different from his previous Shearsman collections. There are the Animals Are Not Your Friends poems, interspersed throughout the collection, which meditate on various subjects but seem increasingly aware of mortality, and there are poems about family and art, poems which may or may not be collages. Rupert Loydell’s world is strangely beautiful, or beautifully strange, but it’s also strangely familiar. He writes about middle-class family life, holidays and children growing up, in ways that make them seem like the freshest of subjects, because there is always the sense of the intangible behind his words:

      Symbols and cymbals glitter
      in the mirrored distance,
      These moments do not reflect,
      do not compute; it’s a good job
      we have email or I’d never be able
      to write to myself.
           (‘Not Made to Last’)

I suspect he’s not as well-known in poetry circles as he perhaps should be because he’s never gone the poetry career route, and his Stride website can contain some very trenchant and sometimes unfair reviews (usually not written by him, though). He’s non-mainstream without being massively experimental, though he is prepared to experiment when he thinks it necessary.

What I like about Loydell’s work is his commitment to a kind of truth, not to experience so much as to language. He doesn’t fuss over his language, he’s never showing off his clever images, or making you gasp as he steps over rhetorical tall buildings with his wit. He can be witty, he shows his intelligence all the time, but he never shows off about it. To me, that’s a great virtue, and long may he produce more of it.

Steven Waling

[Steven Waling's last two collections are Captured Yes (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, 2009) and Travelator (Salt, 2007). He lives in Manchester. ]

Wildlife by Rupert Loydell is published by Shearsman Press, £8.95)

[for blog review 2, see Cath Nichols on Gregory Wood’s ‘An Ordinary Dog’.]
[for blog review 1, see Mark Burnhope on Katy Evans-Bush’s ‘Egg Printing Explained’.]

Magma’s launch readings have been hosted by Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour for many years.

Knowing many Magma readers are also Coffee-House regulars, we would like to bring to your attention the Fifth Annual Troubadour International Poetry Prize.

I’ve been around Magma since before it was Magma, a name chosen “to suggest the molten core within the world, hidden as deep feelings are and showing itself in unpredictable movements, tremors, lava flows, eruptions”.  Magma began not so much as an eruption but as a slow burn.

It must have been in the summer of 1992 when Laurie Smith and several of his City Lit poetry class decided we wanted to carry on reading and discussing our poems after the end of a shorter-than-usual summer term. So, we spent the summer bringing bottles and poems to a different flat or house each week. I remember helping wash up in the small kitchen of a flat in a Vauxhall and feeling enormously excited about the idea of starting a poetry magazine called Urban Fox.

I’m a sucker for dogs. Dogs are not taboo in poetry as cats are. I cite Suzanne Batty’s ‘The Barking Dog’ and Chase Twitchell’s ‘The Language of Dogs’. Mark Doty, too, writes dogs into poems and his memoir Dog Days. However, the dogs of the aforementioned poets appear as energetic Buddhas; cheerful, deep, embracing the ‘now’ that contemporary writer-owners find elusive: “This shining bark// a Zen master’s gong, calls you here,/ entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow” (‘Golden Retrievals’ in Doty’s Sweet Machine). Gregory Woods does not present dogs in this way.

The title poem is, after all, ‘after Kakfa’. This dog chases an ambulance and then turns off: “the bystanders reconcile themselves/ to knowing / it was just an ordinary dog.” This disappoints: don’t we want the dog to follow its injured owner all the way to hospital? We already know that life is bleak, don’t we want the poet to transfigure the ordinary dog? But Woods might be right to deliver such a poem and he avoids (even comments upon?) the sentimentality of other poets who rely on emotionally manipulative story-telling. Yet Woods does not restrict himself to a purely plain-speaking or realistic stance.

For years we debated it, balked, retreated, re-visited, shelved and returned to it, until eventually we decided the time had come to launch our first competition. It’s been a long road: Magma is run democratically and each of us on the board has strong opinions and part of the work was the inevitable round the table discussion about what we planned to do and how we planned to do it. We’re never ones to shy away from a debate (it’s half the fun), and much argument was had as we discussed how to go about running the competition and how best we might reflect Magma’s personality and aspirations. Many of us have been on the other side of the fence, entering competitions rather than running them, and we tried to use our own experiences to help us design a competition that we ourselves would want to enter.