‘Personally,
what is a poem to you?’
‘A poem is something that
moves me, something that sings, something
that has a lyric line in it, something that asks a question and
tries to pose an answer. That’s about all I’ve got’
– Ken Smith, interviewed by Brad Evans,
2000
The cover of Ken Smith’s Shed: Poems 1980-2001 features a painting by a Hungarian artist –
Tivadar Kosztka Csontvary. It’s called ‘Old
Woman Peeling an Apple’ and is of an old woman, her grey-hair drawn
plainly and tightly back. She is dressed in a long brown skirt and
black overshirt of some kind, under which can be glimpsed the collar
of a white shirt or blouse, and over which is a long pale blue apron.
She is also wearing a brown scarf, which appears to be quite thick
and warm. Her shoes are some kind of plain black slipper or pump.
On her lap is a flat brown dish, with five items of fruit on it.
I’m not sure they are all apples, but two or three of them would
appear to be. The woman is holding a knife in her right hand, and
her left is poised, about to pick up one of the fruits from the
dish. Contrary to the title of the painting, she’s not actually
peeling an apple. She is about to. The expression on the woman’s
face is difficult to interpret confidently. Face and eyes are downturned
in the direction of the fruit on her lap, and she could be calm,
with the merest hint of a smile on lips barely discernible. Or she
could simply be resigned to a task, such as it is, that she has
performed countless times before. She is set against a black and
dark background, on a plain brown floor. The overall impression,
I would suggest, is of a fairly austere life. One might be stretching
things a little to go on to say that the picture is an image of
someone who has known hardship, or that this is a painting of a
woman who has seen life’s struggles at very first hand, but it might
be justified.
I mention all this because
I feel reasonably safe in assuming that the poet chose this image
himself. If he didn’t, I feel very safe assuming that he is happy
with it on the cover of this big book of poems, which runs to over
300 pages, and has in it ‘all the poems [he] wishes to keep in print’
from his Bloodaxe collections starting
with 1981’s Burned Books.
If any cover of a book has a relationship with what’s inside it,
it’s this one, jammed full of people with whom this old lady might
well have something in common.
I’ve always thought Ken
Smith an interesting, readable poet – though it’s a while since
I read him – and the first poem from Burned
Books is a good starting point in explaining why. It also signals
most of the poet’s preoccupations throughout the rest of the book
Recitation at the burned books:
taking a handful
of rainy ashes
crimped halfburned
paper into his fist
what was some tale
of fair women or
tinker song how
Queen Miracle was
with the stable lads
he’s caught sight
of hawthorn hedge
drizzle & honeysuckle
asking what chance
of nirvana for this
wet rubbishy fistful
and longs to be
merely a grassblade
the singular stare
of the speedwell
maybe a reed flecked
by the reeds
his brothers
Images of desolation or
abandonment or hardship or grievance or suchlike – each of which
is apparent either in the person or persons of the poems, or in
their social and physical environment – are common. It’s pretty
much what the poems are about. There is a sense of resignation to
the fact of remaining unfulfilled. Literature and lyric are continuing
points of reference, through the written or spoken or sung word.
Nature, as evidenced here by hawthorn hedge and honeysuckle, speedwell
and reeds, is another permanent presence – if not in all the poems,
given their urban settings, then always in the poet’s continuing
larger world. Here, the drizzle casts across the poem what will
become a familiar air as the book progresses.
The conventional lyric skill
of a genuine lyric poet is partly concealed in this unpunctuated
poem: the a sounds that fill the first two lines,
the alliteration of ‘hawthorn hedge’ and ‘honeysuckle’, the assonance
of the speedwell and the reeds. A signature Ken Smith poem will
employ a longer line than this example, and will also use punctuation
when it seems fit, rather than in obedience to the so-called rules
of grammar. There is always a preparedness to stretch the sentence
and phrasing to accommodate what needs to be accommodated at any
particular time, and rules of written grammar are bent and come
secondary to the practice and vitality of the spoken word and the
human breath. Smith isn’t an experimental poet, particularly, but
his preference for the spoken language over the written to be at
the heart of this poetry is always to the fore, so those who prefer
things the other way around may frown a little. But what Smith actually
demonstrates is the energy and capacity of both:
We find the river again, the ferry
south over the great water, on the shore
you read Take Courage
and you’re not joking.
In my fear the city, the blue misty planet
vanishes, a curtain ripped away
and nothing in back but fire, the river
and the busy roadway rolled aside
in our bad dreams from nights we don’t sleep.
And no one to remember. No messages
passed late at night across borders, by hand,
by word of mouth, we who are lost together
telling tales the prisoner spins the jailer.
This is from ‘The London
Poems’ in Terra, 1986. Phrases are strung together, as they are when someone
speaks rather than writes. And most of those phrases are, in this
instance and in most others, pretty ordinary. But they’re not pretty.
I haven’t come away from reading this big book thinking that Ken
Smith spins a wonderful line of poetry. I never once read a line
or a poem that, to coin a phrase, did my head in with its wonder
and marvellousness. They’re not about
that. Lots of Smith’s poems have their genesis within actual speech,
but actual speech can contain as much of the mad and marvellous
as anything you could ever make up. But Smith is justifiably and
understandably selective. In the same interview with Brad Evans
quoted from at the beginning of this essay, Smith describes the
beginnings of the process:
‘I like hanging around places
like railway stations, where you get the drama of departure and
arrival, and all that sort of thing. I sometimes consciously go
out looking for images and language, like the city’s a great, big
supermarket and you can pick & mix as you like……… Places like
that kick me off with some idea, or phrases
that cling together………. Usually when I go on a trip somewhere I,
again, collect ideas, images, language, and it usually leads to
something.’
The traveller and note-taker
decides where to go. One of the places he used to go was the magistrate’s
court. He was, almost famously, writer-in-residence at Wormwood
Scrubs Prison. More lately, Smith has travelled widely in Eastern Europe.
Guess what kind of lives and language you find in places like those.
I’ve read a couple of reviews
of Shed, and one of them refers to Smith’s
‘personae’ in these poems. This is where I come unstuck, because
I don’t think these so-called personae work the way they are supposed
to. In individual poems perhaps they do, but after a couple of hundred
pages…..
I think the last time I
actually read Smith was on the publication of Wormwood, which is the book associated
with his residency at the Prison. I can remember thinking then that
it wasn’t really my cup of tea. I could see how good it was, by
which I mean how accomplished. I knew I didn’t like the poems, though.
I can’t remember what else I thought, because it was a long time
ago. I seem to remember a friend of mine rated him because of his
politics. This time around, I can remember, because it’s only been
a few weeks. I read
nor am I awake nor am I asleep now
in the walled city, the boy in me still
bawling for love, and in me the animal
prowling, and the shadow of my shadow,
and the man I am sometimes a glimpse of
almost half human again, so where am I?
and I was a third of the way through this
big book and I realised that not only was this relentless ploughing
through poem after poem not the way to read poetry (I already knew
this, so it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. Nobody in their
right mind sits down with 300 pages of poetry and sets about reading
it.) but I was getting bored. I took the
book on holiday with me, and figured 20 pages a day would see me
through. I didn’t count on the Cyprus
sun, local beer, and a Mediterranean warm as a lukewarm bath. Talk
about two worlds….. I tried
not to become depressed. I knew the world was filled with people
who were not on holiday in Cyprus,
and with people who were up against it a bit. More
than a bit. I had no idea if this piece from ‘it happens’ in Wormwood
was Smith or a persona, but as time went by I began to understand
that it makes no difference.
If on page 30 a poem’s speaker (or speakers, perhaps) says
we repeat ourselves
we repeat ourselves
suffering is good for
one
try the lemon sole darling
off he goes in his porsche
and on page 130
Bricks made of clay. Clay
dug
in the river leas in the
Thames flood plain
brick cut fired tapped
to the trowel
coursed brick on brick
making prison.
Prisoners brickies
once labourers
thieves from the bridewell
hard men
from the Millwall
to dig in the mud
their own quarters the
cells
of all who came after
and a hundred pages later ‘Archive Footage’ is about war:
And there’ll be bluebirds.
Jess. Jeff.
5th
East Yorks wet and seasick off La Rivière.
Shot
or drowned, face down in the sea,
his white enamel mug drifting
after him.
and yet another hundred pages on there’s
A ragged country, the
roads under fog,
small towns and their
flags of allegiance:
Prod. Taig. No Bigot Parade. No Pope. No RUC.
No Agreement. Dungevin
supports Garvaghey Road.
a certain mood sets in. It set in ages
ago, to be honest. I became awfully tired reading this stuff in
bulk. It doesn’t matter that there’s a constant undercurrent of
strength and optimism coursing through and between the lines, even
though sometimes it’s struggling to hold up its head:
What else I recall are
tiny white roses
growing in the Basques’
country of the tongue.
And wayside herbs: feverfew,
yarrow,
soldier’s wort,
all good for something.
No, it doesn’t matter, because after 300 pages I’m beaten. I’m feeling
a tad irritated too, because I almost feel guilty for not being
moved quite as I suspect I should be by all this hardship and grit.
Here’s Ken Smith again, talking about a poem (I pulled this off
a BBC website):
‘My interest in exiles is part of my interest in outsiders, people
who see us as we do not because they are in some way outside the
cultural consensus we operate. Prisoners, foreigners of all kinds,
Gypsies, immigrants, the homeless, all of them in some way outsiders…….
the things I’m interested in: alienation, impermanence, the capture
of the fleeting moment among the endless stretches of time, the
passing show, signified in images, in a long procession of associations.’
And as I say, I come unstuck with the notion of ‘personae’ because
half the time when there’s an ‘I’ in a poem I don’t know if it’s
a persona or the poet or a mixture of the two. But after a while
I came to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter because most of
the people who may well be the personae of these poems wouldn’t
be anywhere near as literate as Ken Smith, and poetry would not
be their chosen form of expression. Sometimes their chosen form
of expression lands them in prison, but more often they’re gagged
and rendered voiceless. But this is poetry, and really it’s always
Ken Smith you’re reading. And I don’t have a problem with that.
But I think it would be awfully easy to say something pleasantly
politically correct about these poems and shrink from saying that
these 300 pages demonstrate that Ken Smith does what he does very
well but it’s a bit samey after a while. And whilst I agree with
a comment from Sean O’Brien on the back cover, to the effect that
‘One of the signs of an important poet is that he or she leaves
with an expanded sense of imaginative possibility.’ (I think there
should be an ‘us’ in there between ‘leaves’ and ‘with’…) I can’t
say it applies to the poetry in this book. I mean by this that I
didn’t come away from reading these poems having learned anything
much about people like ‘prisoners, foreigners of all kinds, Gypsies,
immigrants, the homeless’. Mind you, that’s not what I read poetry
for. But I still know the stuff I knew beforehand about this area
of human existence, stuff gleaned from personal experience, reading,
watching television and listening to the radio, and generally keeping
my eyes and ears open. I’m not sure that particular stock of knowledge
has been added to. And none of this has anything to do with “imaginative
possibility”. It’s not that kind of poetry. Nor are my feelings
of irritation and guilt anything new: I don’t watch the 6
o’clock news, but turn over for The
Simpsons. Somehow I manage to live
with myself.
This is a poetry drenched
in language, though. Not all poetry is. Found and overheard colloquial
pickings merge seamlessly with a robust and robustly loved wider
vocabulary, and a love of words:
It is the war of the language
where the neighbours don’t
agree about history,
too much bloody water,
too much misery,
the Vlachs
become the Rumanians
kin with Trajan’s
soldiery
settled on the Dacian
frontier
where begins the East, serfs
tolerated by grace,
banished
from the proud fortified
towns, forbidden
chimneys, windows, public
office,
embroidery, furs, shoes,
boots.
This is from ‘The Other Shadow’, one of the new poems in the book.
Earlier, ‘Unaccompanied singing’ is a prose meditation on the phrase
‘À capella’, which traces linguistic relations through centuries
and nations and demonstrates beautifully the ties that bind. Which
I know is also one of the things Smith’s poetry might be said to
be doing, pulling all the outsiders together into itself, expressing
on their behalf. Is this an aspect of “imaginitive
possibility”? I have no idea, and find it quite difficult to get
my head around. Does poetry do such apparently big things? Or do
we just like to think it does? Discuss…… Personally, I suspect that
poetry might do those big things in cultures where thousands turn
out to poetry readings, where it has some kind of cultural clout
because it’s part of peoples’ lives in a way that the English have
lost. Here, this big book with 20 years’ worth of poems in it isn’t
in the local Waterstone’s, and nobody gives a damn. But the book has left
its mark on me: I feel almost guilty for not giving much of a damn
either.
© 2002 by Martin Stannard
