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Poet of the Week – 2: James Peake

TWO RIVERS PRESS POET OF THE WEEK – 2: JAMES PEAKE

James Peake lives in London with his wife and son. He has worked in trade publishing for several years, predominantly for the large conglomerates, but also for leading independents and literary agencies. He’s been a reader and editor for small literary magazines in the UK and US, and his own poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. His first collection, Reaction Time of Glass, was published in 2019. Several poems, including work from his next collection, can be read on Wild Court.

James Peake writes:

“Like many people who live in cities, I have a love-hate relationship with the one I know best, London. The things you condemn one day – the scale, noise, anonymity – can be the same things you relish the next.

London is a presiding presence in my first collection, Reaction Time of Glass. I’ve been asked a few times about the title and what it means. Easier perhaps to say a little of how it suggested itself. I’d been writing poems for many years before Peter Robinson, the poetry editor at Two Rivers Press, did me the kindness of suggesting that it was probably high time to put a collection together. He’d rightly understood, I think, that if someone didn’t put a flame under me I’d fall victim to the cult of endless revision (remember the description of a busy day attributed to Oscar Wilde: the morning spent putting a comma in, the afternoon spent taking it out).

One of the advantages of leaving first publication as long as I did is that you have a lot of material to choose from. I saw that certain poems in that heap had a natural kinship that, for example, poems written in quick succession might not. They shared an atmosphere and now they make up the core of the book. Additional poems were then written to reprise certain images and ideas so that the collection is, in several places, in a kind of dialogue with itself. But again and again it was images of glass that predominated: an open sash letting in rain overnight, a stranger being watched far below in an otherwise empty street, narrow realities as they unfurled across a computer screen or windscreen, fish in the luminescent darkness of an aquarium. Glass permits – and mediates – all these moments of attention, and given how invaluable it has been for scientific progress (it’s inert, plentiful, entirely clear) ours has even been described informally as ‘The Glass Age’. It can be tinted or painted, sculpted or even sounded, but more often it’s used in such a way that we’re supposed to forget it’s there.

One of the last poems in the collection, ‘The Club’, features a mirrored wall, the sort put up in dingy clubs to fend off claustrophobia in drunken patrons, and into which someone probably walks nightly. In this poem a reflection moves more slowly than the dancer who engenders it. This sort of perceptual lag is of course hallucinatory, typical of the effect it may be of certain recreational drugs or familiar to us as a horror movie trope, itself an imaginative reminder that our senses are being expertly tricked whenever we watch film or TV, or even when we use our phone to record something and ask it to do our remembering for us.

There are many aesthetic influences on the book – Fellini gets a look in, Cy Twombly also – and inevitably I have countless poetic debts. But I can’t miss the opportunity to recommend the shorter poems of a writer whose work I actually don’t know as well as I should even now, but whose clarity and confidence in the little I do influenced the style of the book at the earliest stage, the lifelong New Yorker and so-called ‘Objectivist’, Charles Reznikoff: ‘Along the flat roofs beneath our window in the morning sunshine, / I read the signature of last night’s rain’.

When I first read this many years ago (it’s from his book, Jerusalem the Golden) I immediately tried to write a poem like it. My subject was the deep rainwater and discarded shoes on top of a bus stop, conspicuous to those on the upper deck of the 27 but unknowable to those clustered there on the pavement. The poem was dreadful – nothing of Reznikoff’s judicious eye or lightness – but it helped me begin to get my own eye in, and eventually to arrive at what I hope is the clarity and perspectival play which characterize the poems in Reaction Time of Glass.”

BURIN FOR AN OPEN HAND

Stretch of adland emptiness
and westward from the flyover

buildings begin to shrink, wet
as the teeth in any jawbone.

I overtake my own sideways glimpse,
a lag of the senses

so that yards from where a terrace ends
I see the unchanged mural there darken,

its atmosphere of negative,
of cancellation, spreading like a film

across glass, metal or acetate,
as if to hide colour from a burin

till it scratches down, digs or nicks
the randomised palette beneath

and let stream the glow and afterglow
of a high street, the red, blue, green and yellow

of airless retail, Trade Marks and brands,
a jumble presenting as designed whole,

the last basis for things appearing as they do
on the change-down descent to street level,

level of the human, a sudden pedestrian
within arm’s reach of the passenger seat

and who glides as though drawn by thread,
one I recognise, have held myself

inside a labyrinth with no secret,
heightened friends at every exit,

eyes-within-eyes
or an ideogram for a face,

if only I could draw or paint!
As I vanish back up into third,

cross an out-of-hours bus lane,
I remember or have somewhere just seen

a man in a branded cap (Just Do It!),
the dry plastic hand in his lap

holding to the shape of likelihood.

[from Reaction Time of Glass]

TEMPLE MEADS

Intending to rise as prince of the lonely dabblers
in lipstick and electronics, I plucked a musty kerchief
to become famous with, would bring down into music
those indignities I endured daily until they shrank,
a sea-change my acclaimed late albums would confirm.
I almost began … waterfront never meant to be lived in,
Bristol’s welcoming curvature, promise of departure,
that fulcrum in particular, where you can toe the feeling
of being deserving, having earned uncontaminated time,
the inside of which is dream without waste, turning up
selfhood against westerly, become the owner of knowledge
never looked for, achieving neutrality, a commute most
acutely felt after core hours on a Friday, push through,
tilt like the eye of an attendant gull, then bundling down
from derelict sorting office to high-numbered platform.

[Uncollected]

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Poet of the Week – 1: Kate Behrens

TWO RIVERS PRESS POET OF THE WEEK 1: KATE BEHRENS

Kate Behrens is the daughter of two painters, and a single twin. She saw herself as a painter initially, in part because poetry was her twin’s territory. Her father had several well-known poet friends, and visitors to the house included Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, Hugo Williams and Dom Moraes. A long time after Kate’s twin took her own life, in 1985, she began writing poetry and, under the persuasion of a poet-friend, sent a new poem off to that year’s Mslexia competition, where it was a runner-up. This was in 2010, and it marked the beginning of her life as a published poet.

Kate is a regular reader in open-mic events at Poets’ Café in Reading, where she came to the attention of John Froy, then the poetry editor for Two Rivers Press. Her most recent collection is Penumbra, published by Two Rivers Press in January 2019. It follows on from her first collection, The Beholder (2012), and Man with Bombe Alaska (2016). Other poems have appeared in Mslexia, Blackbox Manifold, Stand, The High Window, Reading Universityʼs Creative Arts Anthologies, Poetry Salzburg Review, Wild Court, Noon, The Arts of Peace (Two Rivers Press) and as Oxford Brookesʼ Poem of the Week. More poems are forthcoming in Stand and Axon: Creative Explorations.

Kate Behrens writes:

“An artist friend recently asked, ʽIʼm interested in why you risk being obscure in your poems.ʼ My first thought was thanks for your interest! Then: I am not either deliberately obscure or taking unusual risk. Itʼs a daring question − one I wouldnʼt mind asking certain lyric poets myself, if only because it might reveal some intimate details about their practice.

Attempting an answer to someone who wasn’t a poet was useful. I have edited that written response, but it went something like this: I can only really answer the question by describing how the poem guides me, rather than vice-versa. Words and/or images have usually arisen from a kind of small electrical charge, produced by a collision between inner and outer worlds, and meaning, ʽpay attention here, there is something happening that requires the maximum sensual receptivityʼ (poets become alert to false stimuli which can be quite barren and lead them astray).

That ʽchargeʼ might reveal the raw material, then elicit specific poetic devices that accumulate until first words and images have a sound-environment they can breathe in and a readable context from which to communicate. The first mysterious alert (rarer than I would like) often triggers a precise metaphor for some barely conscious but potent preoccupation or idea that needs expression, not unlike dream communications which can happen in simultaneous sensory ways. But at first the practice can feel like fitting bits into a complex design without being 100% sure of the purpose until the end-goal is suddenly illuminated: when in this mode, it is as if the poem knows the poet better than the other way round. Usually a last refining expands the final meaning(s) (ʽmeaningʼ in its broadest sense). Sometimes the inspiration is simpler, a surge of feeling aroused by some event.

My poems feel best to me when some elements can flicker between interpretations, which seems most true to life, although writing them is not an arbitrary search (when they work, everything is contained in that first stimulus). Finally I ask myself, is this poem one that others could relate to, even if they don’t altogether ʽunderstandʼ it? As well as experience, that can involve a degree of trust, both in the poem and in it finding the right reader. It must be just intelligible enough: to rob it of a certain kind of complexity can rob it of potential reach, but it must not be impenetrable to every kind of intelligence either. The degree of obscurity or transparency is intrinsic to each poem, not an objective. Much of the time I am honing it down.

Despite the subjectivity described here, the poem must not be solipsistic; that judgment can be a subtle one and is unavoidably subjective. Semantic ambiguity helps for this reason, but it needs to be an accurate ambiguity. And the poem must create an unequivocal realm: the reader can enter it or stay outside it, but I must be sure of it. That is an almost physical sensation, a feeling of rightness.”

THE SPONSORED RIDE

Where our footpath kinks,
this logjam. Hijacked breaths
articulate steam ghosts…
clattering anxiety.

Strings are pulled.
They canʼt fall apart, must shorten.

Grey lips flinch, furl
up messages. Theyʼre safest
silencing stabs of discomfort.

We lean back, into brambles.
Threaded flesh sparks as it passes,
naked as newly peeled chestnut.

Then theyʼre distanced, cut-outs.
Uccello colours crown the escarpment ‒
reds, white, brown,
the black trees over disquieted fields.

[From Penumbra]

ON ISOLATION

Creativity feeds in shadow,
inattention.

Below the plumbline
of a thinking mind.

So you feel down for it.
Loneliness is all you find.

It climbs into your lap,
breathes out anomalies:

a chimera with humid bumpy skin.
This creature weighs a ton.

Creativityʼs weightless.
Its cradle is sure feeling

rocked by currents through negative spaces.

[Uncollected]

Read more about the Two Rivers Press Poet of the Week feature

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Steven Matthews in conversation with Naomi Wolf

This is a fascinating and wide ranging conversation between Steven Matthews and Naomi Wolf, about the importance of poetry in these times of climate crisis.

The meeting with Naomi Wolf came about in the wake of a previous recorded talk Steven had with her a few years ago, which had received interest in the US. The opportunity this time derived from recent poems that he has been working on, subsequent to the work that went into the On Magnetism book published by Two Rivers Press in 2017. These new poems arise partly from a residency in 2016 at Oxford Natural History Museum, but also from more recent commissions.

The theme, therefore, was the Environmental Emergency, but more particularly the role that poetry might play in raising awareness of the situation, the loss of species, and the climatic alterations we are all suffering. The interview involves readings from recent work about that loss, its consequences – but also a discussion of the traditional roles that poetry has taken from Classical times in response to natural disaster. In the course of talk about a new translation of passages from Ovid by Steven Matthews, for instance, there is consideration of the ways that human transgression resulted in environmental cataclysm in the Metamorphoses. Poetry is both reporting on events, and forewarning about their consequences. Towards the end of the discussion in the interview, there is broader consideration of the origins of Steven’s poetry, of technique (in fact a running theme throughout), and of the urgency for poetry to be heard amidst the cacophonies of modern life.

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Two poems by Susan Utting

Two poems by Susan Utting, both inspired by workshops at Reading Museum, led by Adrian Blamires and Lesley Saunders, the first at the “Oscar Wilde As Critic” exhibition, and the second a workshop looking at medieval artworks in the Museum, in this case the Bayeux Tapestry.

—

The Value of Nothing

“Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer”

Oscar Wilde: The Critic as Artist

 

The girl who stares into space is on detention, again,

for insubordination.

For insubordination read

daydreaming, that other world reached quietly by

means of dust-mote moving staircases, by way of

silences.

For silences read dumb ignorance, read

indolence, read downright insolence; by means of helter-

skelter slides through city-dirt-encrusted windows, across

playground tarmac, over regulation iron railings, over

pavements, along gutters,

(for gutters read star-gazers’ resting places)

down alleyways and entries, down muddy lanes to tree places,

up tree trunks, through the scratch of branches, slap of rain-

bedraggled leaves, up-up-away and through to where they know

the value of the nothing in her head:

that painted place that zigzags,

coils and skitters her to other lands, to anywhere she fancies,

where they know the priceless,

fiery possibilities of indolence.

 

—

 

The Ladies of the Leek Embroidery Society Copy the Bayeux Tapestry

 

Miss Edith Wardle, Miss Frost of Derby, Mrs C Gwynne, Miss Gater

 

Our fingertips bear witness to our labour, our thimble

fingers wither, pale beneath their metal caps. Poor, dear

Elizabeth has grown quite thin, round-backed from stooping

for The Ride to Bosham, and Phoebe’s wrists grew stiff when

Harold Sailed the Sea – the tedium of all those waves,

stem-stitchery in scalloped flourish after flourish!

 

Miss Gillett of Garfield, Miss F Pattinson, Mrs Watson, Miss Parker

 

We envied Mary Edith, though it was a stretch, as she

worked her magic on the comet, that miracle in the sky

for which her long back pained her for weeks beyond

the final knot and bitten yarn. Emily’s huddled witnesses

stared up amazed at what she’d made. Day after long day

we embroidered on, couch stitch, stem stitch, myth and men,

 

Miss Turnock, Miss Bentley, Mrs Worthington, Mrs Charles Smith

 

horse and great ship, cock and raven, hawk and bow and arrow,

broidered canopy, broad shield, legend, history. We have sewn

ourselves into the woof and warp of cloth, thread by thread

picked up precisely till, spellbound by our own crafting,

our needlepoints have made a chain, a sisterhood that holds us

here: read our names, these are our stories. Read us here.

 

Miss Clowes, Miss Lunn, Miss Garside, Miss A Allen, Mrs Iliffe …

—

SUSAN UTTING was born in South London, moved twenty times in forty years, then settled, after a fashion, in Berkshire. Her collections of poetry include Half the Human Race, Striptease, Houses Without Walls and Fair’s Fair.

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Poetry in Aldeburgh

This Saturday 9th November, at 4pm, Claire Dyer, Lesley Saunders and Susan Utting will be performing in the Peter Pears Gallery: a conversation on gender, its complexity, perplexity, its poetry. You can book here.

 

PIA flyer 2019 (final) (1)