Sunday 24 July 2011

Don Paterson - The Lie

So the third and final of my Lyric festival blog posts is about Don Paterson. He has a sort of melancholic/haunted look in his eyes like he knows the world is going to dump seething piles of excrement upon him and he can't do anything about it but is otherwise a very charismatic man. It was also quite interesting in that in any blurb about him they always make a passing reference to his desire to be a jazz musician which I hadn't given much thought to until he kept taking breaks in his performance to play an acoustic guitar along with a humerous aside about vasaline...

His poems were as high quality as I was hoping, the unexpected gem was when he explained that he had challenged himself to write a series of sonnets this year and read one that he had written about the TV show House! It had a rather epic feel, referring to him as the 'crippled god' although I may be biased by my love of the show..

The best he read that I can actually find the words to however is this...

Don Paterson - The Lie

As was my custom, I’d risen a full hour
before the house had woken to make sure
that everything was in order with The Lie,
his drip changed and his shackles all secure.

I was by then so practiced in this chore
I’d counted maybe thirteen years or more
since last I’d felt the urge to meet his eye.
Such, I liked to think, was our rapport.

I was at full stretch to test some ligature
when I must have caught a ragged thread, and tore
his gag away; though as he made no cry,
I kept on with my checking as before.

Why do you call me The Lie? he said. I swore:
it was a child’s voice. I looked up from the floor.
The dark had turned his eyes to milk and sky
and his arms and legs were all one scarlet sore.

He was a boy of maybe three or four.
His straps and chains were all the things he wore.
Knowing I could make him no reply
I took the gag before he could say more

and put it back as tight as it would tie
and locked the door and locked the door and locked the door


The ritual is a great way of opening as it frames the way we approach a lie - as something that requires maintenance. It makes me think of Don Draper in Mad Men constantly working to hide the fact that he isn't who he says he is and removing all traces of evidence(As an aside Don Paterson said that he had been watching Mad Men and one of his conclusions was that Don was the one person everyone wished they were - I completely disagree but that is another rant).

I particularly like the fact that the lie is a child, because it shows a sense of innocence. In all honesty it is we that confer importance, whether white or dread, upon a lie and is meaningless and unknowing in itself which makes it seem all the more fitting.

The fact that it questions him, perhaps a metaphor for the why our lies question our identity. Why do we feel a need to support the lie? What does it tell us about ourselves? What we need to hide or more importantly protect? But then again the point we often don't attempt to confront the lie we hide from it and lock the door and lock the door and lock the door.

The final line that is ace with its furious repetition, like scouring skin with soap until it is raw to get some unseen dirt out. It also manages to maintain the rhyme scheme which I am pretending isn't there...

Thursday 14 July 2011

Carol Ann Duffy - Cold

The second of my three part Sheffield Lyric Festival update is about Carol Ann Duffy and I have to say I was rather disappointed.

The first reason is that the main part of a poetry performance is the Poet's ability to bring you in. When I saw Paul Muldoon, none of the poems he read particularly spoke to me but he had such a warm and welcoming body language with a soothing voice that he made me feel like I was part of an experience. Carol Ann Duffy on the other hand is very difficult to connect with as although the words she used were warm and friendly her voice was very terse and her body language very cloed and negative. She looked as if she should be standing on a cliff while storms rage around her and pounding rain attempts to make even the slightest impression on her stony face.

The second reason is that there appears to be two types of Carol Ann Duffy poems. They are either, dark visceral things pregnant with meaning or quite naff lists. She read a lot of these lists and although I'm sure there are a lot of people who appreciate them, otherwise she would not be a successful poet, but hearing her do things such as reel off a list of pub names made me yawn.

The best poem she read that day was one of the former and was called Cold.

Carol Ann Duffy - Cold

It felt so cold, the snowball which wept in my hands,
and when I rolled it along in the snow, it grew
till I could sit on it, looking back at the house,
where it was cold when I woke in my room, the windows
blind with ice, my breath undressing itself on the air.
Cold, too, embracing the torso of snow which I lifted up
in my arms to build a snowman, my toes, burning, cold
in my winter boots; my mother’s voice calling me in
from the cold. And her hands were cold from peeling
then dipping potatoes into a bowl, stopping to cup
her daughter’s face, a kiss for both cold cheeks, my cold nose.
But nothing so cold as the February night I opened the door
in the Chapel of Rest where my mother lay, neither young, nor old,
where my lips, returning her kiss to her brow, knew the meaning of cold.


The power to this hangs in the last three lines. As through all the constant mention of 'Cold' in a full range of senses, the sight of it, the feel of it and the simple matter of being told you are it reinforces the assumption that you would know what it is. But the revelation of its true meaning only becoming apparent at her Mother's deathbed, like the earth opening up below her feet to allow a sensation to rush it and consume her to the core, that's power.

Perhaps the list poems are required in a performance to make notes like this stand out?

Sunday 10 July 2011

Simon Armitage - The Christening

As always I find time quite a scary thing in that I have been meaning to write a trio of posts about Sheffield's Lyric Festival which took place in May and it is now already July. *shiver* but I am going to set myself a challenge dear readers to give you an update once a week! Bets are now on to see if I actually manage it...

So the Sheffield Lyric Festival, snuck up on me because it was a series of really brilliant, free events organised by Sheffield University and the advertising for it was appalling. If it hadn't been mentioned in passing by someone at a writing day I wouldn't have realised it happened!

Complaint aside, the first event I went to was the inaugural lecture of Simon Armitage. It was called the slim volume and the idiot lantern and was billed as a discussion about the relationship between poetry and TV but was essentially Simon talking about his career history and the half poetry half documentaries he'd done.

Now I never used to like Simon Armitage, his stuff I had seen on the written page had never worked for me and I had seen some of his poetry documentaries - namely porn the musical - and I though they were rubbish. Still do in fact and they had me thinking for a long time that all of his work was an 'I am a (insert long word that has nothing to do with anything)'.

However all this changed when I actually saw him perform live at Sheffield's Off The Shelf festival 2010. So I'm not going to get you to read his work, I won't you to click on the following link for the The Christening being read at another festival.

http://vimeo.com/2054023

When I read this poem I thought it was crap and just couldn't get on with the juxtaposition of Whale facts and slices of pop culture. it jarred and forced me out of the piece but listening to him read it, the work flows naturally. I can appreciate that it is a single voice and so his thought about the Green Party and the fact his song his available on compact disc suddenly becomes not just humorous but an obvious thing for a whale to comment on. There is a certain magic in his voice the page can't capture.

So my advice if you're wanting to encounter Armitage and really appreciate - don't read him, go listen to him. Be warned you may end up being converted...