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Alan Buckley is the Poet in Residence
at The Poet's Letter Magazine for March 2006
It has been a pleasure having Alan Buckley as The Poet
in Residence for March 2006 at The Magazine. Reading his submissions for post
was a great enjoyment because not only he has sharp and to the point attitude
and intelligent argument and outlook but also he manages not to loose the focus
of what or why he is writing. This is one of the best quality of a poet who
always keeps focus as to why and what they are writing. We wish Alan all the
best with his poetry and his performances. We highly appreciate all his
contributions, efforts and support to this project. Well done Alan! A successful
Residency.
Alan Buckley
is a poet, writer and musician living in Oxford. He has had poems published in a
number of national and local magazines, and performs poetry regularly, both
alongside other poets, and in collaboration with artists using other media. He
is a member of the Fluid Group – a collective of poets linked to Hammer and
Tongue, which runs a wide range of poetry events and workshops in Oxford and
Brighton. He won the first Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival Slam
in April 2005, and is currently preparing a joint performance with another
poet for the Live Literature Arena (part of this year’s Oxford Literary
Festival) on April 1st & 2nd – see
www.hammerandtongue.org for details. He
is also working with a group of artists (including the Oxford
Improvisers) on an improvised performance of music, movement and words, due to
take place in July this year.
Contact:
alanjbuckley@hotmail.com
Poet in Residence – 29th March 2006 post
Slam in the slammer
So there’s these poets, and they go into a prison –
it’s Category B, so there’s serious offenders and lifers in there – and they
start running these workshops where the inmates not only start writing poems,
but learn about reading and performing them to an audience. And then in
addition, another poet who works at a university brings some of his students
from his performing arts course into the prison, so they can write poems and
perform them alongside the inmates; and hey, even though the students are all
women in their late teens / early twenties, and the inmates are all men in their
late twenties / thirties and forties, they discover that maybe they’ve got more
in common – in terms of needing to discover something about expressing
themselves creatively – than they first thought…
So it sounds a bit like an outline for a Hollywood film; you can imagine Robin
Williams being pencilled in to do a mawkish turn as one of the poets straight
off. However, it is straight from the real world. The poets are myself, Steve
Larkin (co-founder of Hammer and Tongue), and Phil Whitehead from Oxford Brookes
University. The prison is HMP Grendon, in Buckinghamshire, one of only two
therapeutic prisons in the country – prisoners choose to go there, and equally,
can be moved to another prison if they fail to engage with the programme. Each
wing is run as a separate therapeutic community, with daily groups facilitated
by therapists where inmates both challenge and support each other in the process
of deepening each individual’s understanding of their habitual ways of relating
to the world. A group called the Friends of Grendon support activities such as
the poetry workshops, which were run for the first time last year by Steve and
Phil. They made such an impact that the wing therapists asked that Grendon
advertises specifically for a poet in residence when the post of writer in
residence falls vacant later this year.
An obvious question is: are the poems people write any good? Or is writing them
just good therapy for the inmates? The answer is that the standard of writing
and performing is incredibly high for a group of people (both inmates and
students) who – on the whole – have never done anything like this before.
Although the inmates in particular often write about traumatic past experiences,
the reality for them is that they are in therapy groups every day, so they tend
to be very clear about seeing the poetic task as different. Also, the series of
seven workshops ends with a slam (“The Slam in the Slammer” – could it be called
anything else?), open to visitors from outside as well as inmates, so there is a
healthy pressure to write and work up pieces that are able to engage an
audience, whether this is through humour, exploring the common ground of human
existence, or challenging people’s assumptions.
As a trained psychotherapist myself, with fifteen years’ experience of working
in mental health and drug and alcohol settings, a prison TC is a familiar
environment. What is incredibly refreshing for me is to have the chance to
engage with people in a a way that is so clearly focussed on creative expression
and moving forward, rather than exploring historical hurt. My thanks to Steve
Larkin for asking me to co-facilitate the groups with him, and to the inmates
and students who have been so willing to engage in the tasks they were set.
New poems: 29th March 2006 post
One of the suggestions Munayem made for this space
was that any poems written during the “in residence” month could be posted here.
I’ve not written a great deal in March, as a lot of time has been taken up
preparing for the Live Literature Arena (see previous post); also, my poems tend
to go through a long process of drafting and redrafting before I think they’re
ready to be let loose into the world. However, perhaps because at some level
they’re straightforward political pieces, the two poems below feel as ready as
they’ll ever be.
How it works
(A 27-line treatise on the dynamics of international capitalism)
According to someone
on the radio
this is how they catch monkeys
in India.
Big glass jar, narrow top.
Put a banana in it.
Monkey sees banana.
Monkey puts hand in jar.
Monkey grabs banana.
Monkey can’t remove hand
without letting go of banana,
and is so attached –
to the idea of having that banana –
that it doesn’t run away,
but keeps struggling
to get the banana out,
even as the man emerges
with the big sack.
Silly monkey! You almost piss yourself
laughing, as you sit in your shiny car –
one of several hundred lined up two by two
in the stationary queue
outside the retail park.
You won’t believe our offers on plasma screen TVs!
We’re practically giving them away!
Hell, you barely hear the rustle of cloth
as it slips past your ears.
The oldest news of the world
TV soap star (former Page 3 girl) exposed
as prostitute. I do the orgies
anyway: I might as well get paid.
Astute. Something for the weekend?
Seven grand – includes lesbian floorshow,
all the trimmings. That old game:
it’s rarely ever planned. And then the gasps
of shock, in Middle England stripped
pine kitchens. Simulated outrage,
red-tops blazing on: the paper’s rustle
distracts, from other things that stir.
A comfortable life: it clings to the veins
like smack, making a slew of hypocrites.
Who hasn’t kept some contract nice,
always unspoken; kept kissing on the lips?
Alan Buckley 29/03/06
Big ends and little ends: posted on 13th of March
At some stage, anyone making a serious commitment to being
an artist (in any medium) has to say something about what they do. Manifesto,
rationale, statement of beliefs – whatever you call it, there comes a point when
you have not only to do whatever you do, but say something about why you do what
you do. The filling in of grant application forms in particular usually requires
a movement into a more adult world, with explicit thinking through around the
nature of artistic creation.
This, of course, is risky (as being an adult always is); you’re left wide open
to appearing foolish, pretentious, or – perhaps worst of all – incongruent. I
can think of several poets I know who have written passionately and eloquently
about the value of poetry, its redemptive and empowering potential, its ability
to talk straight to the heart of the reader / listener. But when I’ve turned to
the individual writer’s own work, I’ve often been disappointed to find it overly
detached, unhelpfully cerebral and generally unengaging. I’m sure that whatever
I say won’t – for some readers anyway – be backed up by the actuality of the
poems of mine that appear here.
However, as I said before, it’s a necessary adult risk to take. So I’d say that
in good poetry the personal experience of the poet acts as a channel for some
much broader, universal truth to be channelled through – I’m very fond of
Charles Simic’s comment that all poetry is “a translation from the silence”, as
though the poems are all already there, hovering in the ether, and our job as
writers is to embody them, to shape an appropriate vehicle by which they can be
communicated to a wider audience. The personal experience of the writer is
(literally) vital; the poem can’t be given an embodied life without a visceral
response in the writer. When I read or hear a poem, I want some sense that –
however fleetingly – this was a poem that had to be written, that there was a
physical urge in the writer to get the words out.
The truth conveyed doesn’t have to be furrowed-brow serious, in that the speck
of universality that the reader / listener receives may leave them roaring with
laughter, smiling wryly, or jumping up and down with joy, just as much as it
might leave them angered, moved to tears, or simply connected in a quiet way to
the nature of being alive. But there has to be connection – the receiver
connecting with themselves and the world around them more strongly as a result
of engaging with the poem – and I believe that this only occurs when there’s a
genuine sense of the poem having had to be written. Without that, we get poems
that may be clever and highly crafted, or appear stuffed with important meaning,
yet ultimately feel empty, without soul.
Equally, the poem that is too much about the poet’s personal response leaves any
universal resonance obscured; there’s no space (or encouragement) for the
audience to come in and find meaning for themselves. Scylla one side, Charybdis
the other, and if I had a quid for every poem that fell prey to one of them I
could stop worrying about how to pay for my car’s MOT. All I can say is that I
set out with good intention, and the ambition to write the best poetry that I
can at any time. I only ever write when I feel I’ve got something that needs to
be said – even if, in retrospect, it turns out it was something that only I
needed to hear.
The world of poetry is, like the world it tries to reflect and engage with, made
up of countless sets of polarities other than the personal versus universal one
outlined above: and like that particular set, what appear to be things in
opposition are ultimately utterly interdependent. I think that the split between
“performance poetry” and “page poetry” is another example of false
dichotomising, where polarities that actually help define and inform each other
(and the spectrum between them) are instead set up as crudely oppositional. The
title of this post came from my reflections on what should go in the programme
for a show that myself and another Oxford poet (George Roberts) are putting
together. During his stay in Lilliput, Gulliver is called on to help the
Lilliputians in their long-running conflict with neighbouring Blefescu. The
source of the conflict is a disagreement over which end of a boiled egg should
be broken when eating it. Blefescans maintain the tradition that the large end
is the correct one, whereas Lilliputians – by decree of their king – break them
from the small end.
The target of Swift’s satire is the conflict between Roman Catholic France and
Protestant England. The debates in poetry world have much the same quality;
while there is a serious area of argument to be explored (and I may put in my
two penn’orth on the page / performance question some other time) it has to be
remembered that to the outsider, it all looks very small and trivial. All I’ll
say for now is that George and I are both committed to writing poetry that lives
as well – albeit maybe differently – on both page and stage. And now the
shameless plug…
The Live Literature Arena is an event taking place in Oxford on Saturday 1st and
Sunday 2nd April, as a kind of official fringe to the Sunday Times Oxford
Literary Festival which runs from Saturday 25th March to Wednesday 29th. The LLA
will feature over twenty poets from around the country, performing hour-long
shows that combine poetry, prose, cabaret and theatre. The event will take place
at Grove House (44, Iffley Turn, East Oxford), an eighteenth century building
previously owned by Graham Greene. The shows will be performed in the Rotunda,
built in the 1960s to house Vivien Greene’s collection of dolls houses. It’s a
marvellously intimate setting for hearing poetry, with excellent acoustics; and
given that the present owners are going to convert the Rotunda into living space
fairly shortly, this is a last opportunity for members of the public to see
inside it. George and I are performing our show (entitled “Rhyme and Reason”) on
Sunday at 1.10 pm – for more information about the weekend, visit the Hammer and
Tongue website at
www.hammerandtongue.org , e-mail
events@hammerandtongue.org , or phone 01865 200550.
Plug over. If you have any comments or queries, then my own e-mail address is
alanjbuckley@hotmail.com My
thanks to Munayem for offering me the first Poet in Residence slot on the Poet’s
Letter Magazine.
Alan Buckley 12/03/06
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Where Eagles Dare
Men, so often they’re birds of prey:
wheeling around each other, beaks
and talons pointedly visible,
looking like they’re looking
for a mouse to pounce on,
rip it up, be bloody-minded;
when what they yearn for
is the soft ruffling of the other’s
feathers, sharing warmth against
the world’s wind, which is unrelenting,
and truly merciless.
A scientific enquiry
It seems to play with the laws of physics.
To start, we take an experience – say, two people
travelling in a car. However trivial the event,
we may identify a certain weight (felt
in the remembering), which adds to the amassing
of occurrences that makes up a relationship.
We notice this later, after a door has shut
behind someone. When they return, their eyes
are flecked with sorrow, unclosable distance.
If then (as an experiment) we put them
both back – same car, location, time of year and
day – an absence would be felt: something
clearly missing. So, we find the later event
causes the first to gain and lose weight, simultaneously;
and furthermore, the end result is not homeostasis,
but arrival in a different dimension. Despite
the infinite nature of the universe, our bodily sense
is that a total inversion of same has taken place.
Yes. That drive, heading south out of the city.
Late afternoon sun dappled her car through the trees.
They were laughing at something inconsequential,
sharing a certain space.
Missing the point
The cream-flecked greening beauty of the sea,
incessant, ebbed and flowed across the sand,
rippling your toes, steadily rising. Bloody cold,
but you had a point to make, held your arm out
boldly. Now they’d see the limits of our human
agency; even a crown’s powers are only
finite, never absolute. But can you teach
a lesson that no body wants to hear?
I guess you must be well pissed off, your name
become a byword for arrogant folly,
and you a figure of fun. The roaring tide
of our avoidance is relentless, and no single hand
can halt the waters, swirling blind,
drowning the laughing land.
First published in Magma 32
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Mind your head on the light
Queer place. In the days when this town
was grim, unreconstructed,
it stood proud in the wasteland
between the big streets,
Conway and Cleveland,
where terraces had collapsed under
a fifties blitzkrieg of smart planners,
and towers were thrown up
(Oak and Eldon Gardens, those
concrete sequoias perverting nature);
which, two decades on and the dream
grown shabby, fell out of fashion –
fell through dynamite’s passion –
leaving this place standing
defiant in the empty grid,
a slap-up Victorian boozer.
Angel Inn Free House big letters
brown on cream on the sheer wall
facing the walk from the precinct.
No locals, so both dispossessed
and daring (flirting with the rough edge)
called it theirs: greasers one end,
casuals the other, Marston’s Pedigree
pumped while the jukebox
thumped out faded hits – Sultans
of Swing, More Than a Feeling,
Since You’ve Been Gone, Hotel
California. Hey Paulo: you remember
that night you danced on the table?
Mind your head on the light
was all the barman said, it was
that kind of place.
Seven years later: briefly, our lives
overlapped again. We gunned your beamer
up the six and fifty-three
through a thunderstorm, pathetically
fallacious, tripping on nostalgia
brought up sharp: it’s shut
we were told, we walked up
from the precinct, our feet not believing
the ground. All boarded up.
We broke in through the barrel drop,
smoked Bensons in the wreckage;
found photographs of people we half-
remembered, tried to put ourselves
in the pictures. Like kids in silent grief
over a dead pet (slim preparation
for what comes next)
we sat there, surrounded by
mouldering wood and broken glass,
recreating the scratchy vinyl
through force of memory.
First published in The Nail 5
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