The argument was that, if you have a full-time job, it’s bound to sap your creative energy – in addition to sapping 40 hours a week of time you could have spent writing. A full-time poet is bound to become a better writer than he/she would become if burdened with a job. The counter-argument was that working offers experience that informs poems, and that many famous poets (Wallace Stevens, WC Williams, TS Eliot, Philip Larkin etc) held down demanding jobs and still managed to write plenty of good poems. As someone who holds down a demanding job, I sided with the counter-argument.

However, I’ve been thinking more about it since. It is indeed true that I often have to break off writing a poem and do a whole load of other things. It’s also true that I get tired and sometimes have little energy for writing poems; even if the will is there, the flesh is weak. There is definitely a downside to combining poetry with a busy job. On the other hand, most ‘full-time’ poets make a living through doing tutorials and workshops, giving readings, writing articles/novels, teaching creative writing, and a host of other work activities that don’t consist of actually writing poems. The few who only write poetry must have a working spouse or other generous relative/benefactor, in addition to Arts Council grants. Almost no one can live off writing poetry alone. It’s easy to romanticise poverty (only a –v away from poetry) but, if you can’t pay the bills, your mind may not be fully on the blank sheet of paper in front of you.

What do you think? Is having a full-time job helpful or destructive for a poet?

Having chosen to give Magma 45 the theme of ‘Telling Tales’, I knew Julia’s poem was remarkable as soon as I read it – a master-class in narrative poetry, it seems to compress an entire coming-of-age novel into a few dazzling lines. As a teenage girl in her bikini tries to break into her family house through a window, we pan out to see the whole world around her: her friend, her mother, suburban frustration, empty lives, ‘the long, grey eye of the street’, the bravery and resourcefulness needed to survive small-town adolescence. The poem’s devastating question is: ‘What can she know / of the way the world admits us less and less/ the more we grow?’

The shortlist for the Forward Poetry Prizes is available to download from the Forward website. We will be cheering for Julia on the night!

“Our techniques became fairly guerrilla,” grins Nina Ellis, tucking her hair behind her ears, “It turned out that you’re not really supposed to hand out leaflets of any kind inside Tube stations, so we sped from one station to the next with calls of “Free poem?” before the Tube staff noticed us. We got some fairly inane responses too, like ‘Do I have to pay?’ and ‘Wow, a free phone?’”

Nina and her poetry ‘guerrillas’ have been handing out new works on the underground since March this year, after frequent travelling coupled with an interest (or dare I suggest, a poet’s nosiness) about her fellow travellers gave her the idea.

“I’ve lived in London since I was thirteen, and Paris before that, so I’ve spent hours of my life on the Tube and the Metro. I’ve always found my co-travellers on the Underground fascinating… I look at them and wonder about them and try to work them out until they catch me staring. I love how, like airports and other transportation hubs, the Tube throws together the most unlikely combinations of people.

“Nowhere else, in my experience, are people from such different walks of life placed in such close proximity – a closeness which feels quite normal to us in that setting but which might seem inappropriate or surprising in any other context. Travel puts us all on the same page, I think. We all become kind of alike because of our shared desire to get somewhere.

“So I guess the Underground Poetry idea was sparked by thinking about people on the Tube – who rarely speak or find out each other’s stories – but betting that most of them are as interested in each other as I am. What if we could experience their world view for a minute or two – and that’s what poetry lets you do.

“I had that sequence of thoughts on the Tube one day and decided that Londoners giving each other insights into each other’s lives by exchanging poetry and distributing it for free was a good idea.”

I am inclined to agree with Nina, having sent her two of my own poems in early April to be given out. The day they were distributed I found myself thinking about them frequently: would people think they were some sort of advertising flyer? Would they read them? And more importantly, how would they respond? With the poetry world often seeming incredibly small, the idea of not only strangers, but strangers with little to no interest in poetry reading a piece of my work intrigued me.

Lizzy Dening's poem was distributed to commuters in London

Although unable to afford the ‘premium’ website account to let her track the site’s traffic, Nina knows from the body of submissions that the movement is growing in popularity, “I get the impression that about half of the submissions are from people who found them on trains, or from people they’ve passed them on to. It’s really nice, actually: often travellers will ask for several copies to give out to their families or whoever they are going to meet. One woman asked for fourteen for her cancer support group. That made me really happy.”

Whilst studying from her degree in Social Anthropology, Nina makes her hand-outs once a month, and is currently producing a leaflet of free poetry to be handed out at Firefly music festival at the end of July, in the hope that music fans will be even more receptive of poems than her average receiver. I ask her whether she believes it’s important for poetry to become a part of people’s day-to-day lives.

Frowning slightly, she replies:

“Well, it’s important for me to have poetry as part of my day-to-day life, because it’s instinctively what I do, I write all the time. But I wouldn’t presume to say that it’s crucial for everyone to have it be part of their day-to-day lives, because we all express ourselves in different mediums. The right medium for me is not necessarily the right medium for the person sitting next to me on the District Line.

“However, I do think that it’s important to make interacting with other human beings part of our day-to-day lives – interacting with them, understanding them, learning to see the world from their varying perspectives. Being open-minded and accepting of other people’s cultural backgrounds is so important in this globalising world – especially in a culturally diverse place like London. And I think reading poetry by the people who surround us is an extremely effective way of opening our minds to their widely varying points of view – the most effective way I can think of, though of course most art forms are capable of doing that to a greater or lesser degree.

“Besides, it’s fun to read! Handing it out like that – something genuinely free that is being given out with the totally innocent aim of making Tube travellers happy, is just a nice thing to do. So little is free… And the Tube can be so gloomy. Why not brighten it up with some poetry?”

Both Nina and I agree that poetry can seem quite alien to many young people, something associated with GCSE revision and dry teachers, something which they believe requires a special knowledge to access. I ask how she believes poetry can be made more accessible,

“I think the best way of incorporating it into common life would be to make it more fun. People our age go to music gigs all the time, and music is a crucial part of most of our lives – why isn’t poetry? I think, sadly, that the answer to that is that poetry does not tend to be seen as very “cool,” so it doesn’t even occur to many people to get into it. It’s not massively alluring. The poetry festivals I have been to and worked at have been great – but most of them are about 70% over-40-year-olds.

“So of course poetry is unlikely to hold that much glamour or appeal for people our age. But they’re all mistaken – it is cool! To bring poetry into common life we just need to open people’s eyes to that. Start small-scale, have lots of poetry evenings, encourage friends to write, email our poetry round to each other, create forums, hand it out on the street and on Tubes, collaborate with musicians and artists, start poetry and music collectives, show that it can be fun.”

As for the future, Nina is fired up and full of enthusiasm. She is currently applying for funding from the Arts Council, and that being successful is ready to take Underground Poetry into the sunlight and further afield, on buses and to airport terminals.
“I think it’s important to not hoard our poetry but to share it just for the sake of sharing it. I think being generous with it and enthusiastic about it in the same way we are about music would be a good first step. And that’s my rather ambitious aim,” she laughs, “To make poetry cool again.”

Nina Ellis instigated the movement and hopes it will continue to flourish.

If you are interested in having work handed out on the underground, Nina is looking for poems, short prose or lyrics (a maximum of 31 lines, as she distributes on sheets of A4) with or without illustrations, which can be sent to poetryonthemove@googlemail.com See the website www.undergroundpoetry.webs.com for more information.

Lizzy Dening

Lizzy Dening is a freelance journalist and poet. She has had articles published in a variety of magazines, including The Word, Writer’s Forum and Writing Magazine. Her poems have appeared in The Times, the Rialto, Orbis, Rising, Pomegranate and Popshot.

I want to read poems about construction and / or destruction, noisy with the cement mixer and the wrecking ball or quiet as the clicking of knitting needles. Send me your poems about bringing something new into the world – or taking it out again. Actual or metaphorical – show me what you make or what you destroy, and how and why.

Please send any queries about the theme to contributions@magmapoetry.com

The deadline is 31 October 2010. Please see the Contributions page for details of how to submit your poems.

Julia Bird
Editor, Magma 49

The Magma Sales Table, being looked after by Jacqueline Saphra

Magma Poetry sponsored the reading by Philip Gross and Gillian Clarke that took place during the Ledbury Poetry Festival during the first half of July. Jacqueline Saphra and I, on behalf of Magma Poetry, went to Ledbury for the weekend to support the event and sell copies of the magazine there, and also to meet up with poets and poetry readers from across the country.

We left for Ledbury at 9.30 on the Friday morning so we would arrive in good time to see some events before the Magma sponsored reading the next day. We had with us snacks, a SatNav plus a Roadmap (no substitute for an actual book) and the boot was full of Magma paraphernalia for a Roadshow event – copies of the current issue, back issues, leaflets, and an as yet not-fully-functioning banner. We talked poetry and plays and the quality of coffee on the M40, and by the time we arrived at our guest house just outside Ledbury some four hours later, we had barely started our discussion about how long it takes to finish a poem.

We stayed at a rural, newly ‘done up’ guest house just outside town and, our self-imposed rule, as the driver, Jacqui had best room. They were both lovely. But mine had no door. Really – I’m over it now.

On the Friday we had tickets for “Penelope Shuttle and Poets from Cornwall ” in the afternoon, and an Elizabeth Cook / Jenny Joseph double-bill in the evening – both at the Burgage Hall. A wonderfully eclectic mix of female voices ranging from Arcadian bliss to the deeply disturbing. Between we had a chance to catch up with poetry colleagues normally only seen on-line, and to say hello to Chloe Garner, the Festival Director who allowed us to be part of the wonderful activities. Then the group of six of us who went to dinner grew until we didn’t really all fit round the table, and the waitress in the restaurant had slightly lost the plot. Who can blame her? We kept playing musical chairs and I think my neighbour ate the tuna ordered by Alice from Cornwall.

The next morning Jacqui and I set to fixing the banner. The hook had vanished meaning it would not stay open and pinged back with alarming force and noise. We made a new hook using a wire coat-hanger, pliers, a glue-gun and it was attached by the long arms of the guest-house owner’s son. Watching Blue Peter is clearly never a wasted pastime and the banner stayed up. In the middle of all this we were introduced to 2-day-old chicks bred by the aforementioned long-armed lad. And here is the photo to prove it.

We were honoured to sponsor the reading by T S Eliot Award winner Philip Gross, and National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke. It was a truly packed house with the front-of-house team bringing in extra chairs at the back, and a few unfortunates having to suffer the heat of sitting in the mezzanine. But we hope they agree it was worth it. Philip Gross’s reading style allows every poem to breathe. It was like being in a contemporary art exhibition where each work was perfectly framed to allow the piece to take centre stage. And Gillian’s extraordinary lyrical work and Welsh lilt brought a lump to the throat. Jacqui has given me the OK to share that she had trouble not blubbing.

After the reading, as Philip Gross and Gillian Clarke signed copies of their collections, we sold copies of the magazine and chatted to poets and poetry lovers at our sales table.

A quick bite to eat, and a glass of red wine was followed by Martin Figura’s intimate narrative performance poem Whistle and then an early night.

We left Ledbury the next morning as the town was preparing for all-day street festivities. It was a party Ledbury. Thank you for having us.

Tim Wells

Carole Bromley

Michael Foley

Maureen Duffy

Dorothea Smartt

Matthew Sweeney

Denrele Ogunwa

Roisin Tierney

Barbara Marsh

Jo Shapcott

Photographs by Rebecca Root.

We’re proud to have published work from both poets in Magma Poetry; Gillian Clarke’s delicate sonnet, ‘Old Libraries’ appeared in a recent issue, and Philip Gross was our Presiding Spirits featured poet a few issues ago, where he wrote a specially commissioned poem and an article about his connection to Basho.

I’ll be at Burgage Hall, Ledbury, with Roberta James on Saturday 10th July at 2.30 to hear these two poets at the top of their game. We’ll have a sales table right there, so do stop by to say hello. We’d love to see you.

Annie Freud will be introducing the evening and co-hosting. A goodly number of poets have each agreed to read a poem, and we are delighted that the Magma showcase poet Dorothea Smartt will be sharing some of her work, plus we are thrilled to confirm that the guest readers are Jo Shapcott and Matthew Sweeney.

Here are directions to the venue.

We look forward to seeing you on Monday.

“As one who once considered himself in the vanguard of writing as writing, it is difficult for me to describe my feelings when confronted by a new generation of writers who are dedicated not to an exploration of any particular literary dimension I can identify beyond a snotty tone of voice. I know this isn’t something I ever had in mind.

Beyond that, there are a number of other identifiable trends, which I would characterize briefly as: 1) Poems that prove how smart I am; 2) Poems that prove what a master of rhetoric I am; 3) Poems that prove I am a dope addict; and 4) Poems that just generally prove how hard I am to understand in any way…”

You might assume this was written by a critic as an indictment on today’s crop of poets. However, it was written way back in 1974 by Aram Saryoyan, commenting on the New York School (Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and others who followed them), and I found it on Don Share’s Squandermania blog.

I guess all poets fall into some of these the identifiable trends at times, even without trying to. At least, those who never fall into them must have no ambition whatsoever. There is a fine line between writing something brilliant and something merely to ‘prove how smart I am’, between something uncommon and original and something that only proves ‘how hard I am to understand in any way.’ It’s easy to fall onto the wrong side of that line. The only way to avoid doing so is to play it safe and not even try to be brilliant.

On the other hand, the idea that writers have given up on genuine feelings and ideas of substance in favour of tone, snotty or otherwise, might be a damning indictment. Or does tone – especially the stylish, ironic tone that largely gives up on sincerity, insight and truth, and that does characterise much 21st century writing – have a more important role to play in poems than Saryoyan admits? Can the tone of a poem arrest a reader and make a poem memorable every bit as much as an exploration of emotion or ideas? Or has Saroyan hit the nail on the head and identified why so many poems will never stick in a reader’s mind?

I have been working as Assistant Editor to Guest Editor Annie Freud who painstakingly read every contribution sent, before making her choices. This gave me the chance to read everything sent in, which was a joyous, humbling and – yes at times – slow process. Most poems submitted are in free form and gloriously cover the whole range of subjects and ideas. And a few are in traditional, familiar forms such as the sonnet and villanelle. But I was surprised how little poetry used adventurously unfamiliar or newer forms – such as the pantoum (an old form but seldom used), concrete or found poetry, the specular or sevenling – when such forms are ripe for exploration. Some did and were extraordinary; and a few were brave enough to try different forms but more as an exercise than as a communication tool. Writing any formal poetry can be challenging, and I know how very hard it is to create a strong poem when experimenting with unknown forms. But is “it’s difficult to do” an excuse for poets not to explore the relationship between different forms and content?

As someone who lives in London, I have seen three recent examples in the arena of site-specific or immersive theatre which serve to illustrate the point. Mincemeat at Cordy House in 2009 was a play presented by the homeless theatre group Cardboard Citizens: the play was set in a series of derelict rooms and was in part about lost identity, at the denouement the audience was invited to sit on remnant mattresses in a reconstruction of a shelter from where the play’s principal character had been plucked. The Old Vic Tunnels is an extraordinary space under Waterloo Station: its two productions so far have seen the tunnels represent the underground caverns of the film Metropolis in Punchdrunk’s Tunnel 228; and the underground refuge or prison of 12 people put there by a government to keep them safe, and whom the audience follow and associate with as they try and resolve their situation in Delirium’s Your Nation Loves You. And thirdly the Maria space at the Young Vic is a studio theatre that was constructed for the run of Kursk as the inside of a submarine in which the audience are promenaders who by their presence become complicit in events that unfold. The relationship between audience and actor or theatrical work is a complex and fascinating one, and these site specific and immersive works look that complexity in the eye and ask questions of it. And they use the opportunities of the space to explore ideas thrown up by the text and vice versa.

However poets seem shy of using adventurous poetic forms in the same way – to explore meaning in text. Any discussion of the relationship between form and content in poetry is revisiting very old territory I know. I continue to be enthralled by the endless beauty of a villanelle such as Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ which uses repetition and refrain to explore the pain of imminent lose and its related frustrated anger; and one of the joys of the ever-lovely sonnet form which can be described – as Phillis Levin does – as “a poem that turned and spoke to itself” because it sets up an emotional question in the octet requiring a rational response in the sextet, is that a dialogue of perceptions creates endless challenges for poets. Reading poems in familiar forms is deeply joyful when they are good, as it is wonderful to see an exciting new production of a play by Shakespeare, Miller or new writers through a proscenium arch. But there is a whole other opportunity and challenge for poets who use newer or unfamiliar form to explore ideas and meaning. I can only re-state that I know how difficult it is to marry unfamiliar form and substance and make it relevant for the reader. But if theatre can step into the abyss and make it work, poetry should at least try.

What Do You Think?

Do you agree that poets should use form more adventurously?

Is it possible for adventurous forms to add meaning to poetic text?