Magma Poetry

I was having another read through Magma 52 the other day and came to Glyn Maxwell’s fascinating article on poetry and theatre. He finishes off with a plea to young poets to create verse theatre. Here’s the quote (I’ve left out the exhortation to ‘young poets’ in particular, as I see no reason why this couldn’t apply to anyone of any age):

“…go and find a space and some actors. Test your verse on the lungs and throats and tongues and lips of creatures trained to know utterance from nonsense, trained in the best English written, trained a hundred times harder than you. You’re not afraid of poverty or critics or you wouldn’t be a writer. Make some poets’ theatre, someone, before I go cheerfully mad alone in this field.” (Glyn Maxwell, from ‘Character and Verse Theatre’, Magma 52)

That’s the kind of challenge I feel I’d like to respond to, partly because I enjoy both poetry and theatre, partly because it feels like such an uncommercial move and I am unaccountably attracted to uncommercial moves (I do occasionally wish that wasn’t the case, especially in a recession). Whether I have the time and a half-decent idea is another matter. There’s only one way to discover whether I have the talent… I guess the best way would be to start small, to write something short and easily/cheaply staged, and take it from there.

But how about readers of this blog? Would you go to see a contemporary verse play? Would you like to see more being written and performed? If you’re also a writer, would you consider writing one and trying it out with a group of actors?

Natalya Gorbanevskaya will be best known to some as the activist to whom Joan Baez dedicated her song ‘Natalia’. Part of the Soviet dissident movement, Gorbanevskaya was arrested in 1969 and interred in a Soviet psychiatric prison for several years. Though the work by no means relies on it, some knowledge of Gorbanevskaya’s life helps inform her spare, powerful poems and this volume of translations by Daniel Weissbort provides an accessible introduction to both her work and life – useful historical notes are offered unobtrusively throughout.

In these Selected Poems, the beautiful and the brutal are dangerous bedfellows. Political landscapes are often described through tender evocations of weather: coming rain or “the indomitable wind / over this absurd, wide world”, the place where “an icy wind / chills the bright surface of a well.” In an extract from ‘Seaboard’ (1956-1966), the poet describes facing death with equanimity:

I was interested in reviewing The Model Shop because Williams hails from my own part of the world and is just a few years older than me. I hoped to find the cultural icons I grew up surrounded by, rooted in a familiar environment. Williams’s style is one of clarity and precision, with a quiet wit in his sidelong glances at things. Like William Carlos Williams, F.J. sees ‘poetry only in things’. The title poem acts as an intriguing opening to the collection, as he compares model making to world creation, the maker to God:

God repeats himself in the flat-pack doll’s house, The rubber furniture and plastic piano Hushed of all arpeggios

Come and join us for the launch reading of the new issue of Magma on Monday 5th March at The Troubadour, Earl’s Court, London, as part of the Coffee House Series.

The event will be full of contributors who’ll be coming to read, and we’re also thrilled to have as our guest readers Greta Stoddart and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch who have both contributed poems to this issue.

We would be delighted if you would join us for this event at Waterloo East Theatre, Brad Street, London SE1 8TN (5 minutes walk from Waterloo Station)

Doors (and bar) open 6.30.

There was a moment during my reading when these two books merged. It occurred shortly after I set down my copy of The Tempest Prognosticator and picked up Neptune Blue. At one moment I was visiting the Motel in Fairvale through the eyes of Isobel Dixon, as she took on the viewpoint of Lila finding Bates’ mother sitting in her chair in the cellar with

the woven shawl, the grey hair Gathered in a careful bun …

The title poem, ‘House of Tongues’, is after Paul Bowles’ 1947 short story A Distant Episode which recounts the capture and physical mutilation of a linguistics professor travelling through an unnamed country that is probably Morocco. The professor suffers an emblematic violence when his tongue is cut out by a band of Reguibat tribesmen. It’s a strange and compelling narrative that stays with you long after reading and House of Tongues has a similar effect: these are subtle yet invasive poems that creep into your psyche and occupy space.

In the poem, Wicks skilfully interweaves the original narrative with a more intimate domestic tableau, where

Noel Duffy’s choice of title for his debut collection is a good early omen. It neatly and precisely draws together the book’s deepest concerns. In the Library of Lost Objects is primarily concerned with preservation and restoration: the poems that play with this theme are uniformly more satisfying than the ones that don’t. To be more specific, when Duffy employs his knowledge and intimate familiarity with the natural and geological world, the poems flow with quiet assurance.

This refreshing curiosity about the inner workings of the stellar bodies, magnetic fields, beehives and fossils is the fuel for his poems; richness, even in such mundane things, comes from being in a world in which life is precious and survival always possible. A few key poems lend the book a sense of cohesion and, with ideas so thoroughly connected, even a few lesser pieces gain in vitality.

What an evening it was. A cold night, a packed house, and the utterly complementary talents of Pascale Petit and Selima Hill as our guest readers.

We were also fortunate to host a large number of contributors, many of whom had travelled some distance – from Sweden, Switzerland, Brussels and even California.

The richest events occur in us long before the soul perceives them. And, when we begin to open our eyes to the visible, we have long since committed ourselves to the invisible. Gabriele D’Annunzio Poets are often advised to  ‘find a voice.’ This voice can only come,  I think, from the unique past and terroir of the poet.  In his essay, ‘Something to Write Home About’, Seamus Heaney describes growing up in Ireland between the Catholic and the Protestant communities, between a railway and a road, between the sound of a trotting horse and that of a shunting engine, between a variety of accents and dialects. One of the dialect words which lodged in his memory from that past was ‘hoke’.

‘The word means to root about and delve into and forage for and dig around, and that is precisely the kind of thing a poem does so well. A poem gets its nose to the ground and follows a trail and hokes its way by instinct to the real centre of what concerns it.’