Unsuitable blog and HappenStance news

 I've always thought poems and recipes have much in common. The list of ingredients in short lines. Lots of space on the page. The method of making, sometimes in numbered steps with energetic and commanding verbs.

Weigh, mix, stir, simmer, bake, cool, eat.

So when Alison Brackenbury suggested a collection of poems based on hand-written recipes (her grandmother's) the idea appealed immediately—but the recipes themselves, or some of them, had to go in too.

Then it got more complicated. If the book was recipes, as well as puddings, we would have to test them—otherwise some of them might work for Dorothy Eliza Barnes (Dot), but not for us, or future readers.

Alison had vivid memories of Dot's delicious cooking, which was a grand incentive. She set about trying and testing a method for some of her favourites, including 'Aunt Margaret's Pudding', an old-fashioned steamed affair. Who eats steamed pudding these days?

Page one: Aunt Margaret's Pudding.
Take half a pound of flour,
three ounces lard (or butter), egg,
milk, sugar, baking powder.
Spread jam in basin, summer gleam.
Poke fire! For ninety minutes, steam.

    [ From 'Start' ]

This was a whole new approach to publishing. Not just proof-reading poems but proving the puddings, cakes and scones. My favourites turned out to be Raspberry Buns and Quaker Oat Scones, which disappeared in hours—the ultimate test of a good recipe.

This was a book with wonderful ingredients: poems, recipes (Dot's version and Alison's version), photographs, memories. Knowing Alison to be also a first-rate prose writer (not all poets are), I suggested she do a brief memoir too. She came up with a fascinating narrative—a story of rare determination and creativity in tough times. 

So the book—Aunt Margaret's Pudding—is fully cooked. I gave a copy to my old friend Tony (he is not far off 90). Tony has never understood why I should want to publish poetry, and regards the genre as plainly unnecessary. But I knew for a fact that his mother made steamed puddings: he used to talk about them hungrily. Once a pudding lover, always a pudding lover.

All the same, I didn't particularly expect Tony to read the book, so was rather pleased when he phoned to say at last I had published something he had really enjoyed. 'And the bit at the end,' he said, 'the prose pages about her grandmother—well, that's more poetry than the poems.'

Hurray! The book can, as I hoped, appeal to a wider audience than the usual poetry people, though I feel sure they will like it too. It's the ingredients that really make it different—recipe, then poems, recipe, poems, recipe, poems, memoir. And it's a most moving tribute to Dot, who might otherwise be as lost as 'The Lost Farm'.

Which is not entirely lost. It's in the book.

 We are onto our fifth day of snow. The mail was picked up yesterday from the local post office for the first time since last Tuesday. You know what this means?                                                                       

There will be snow poems. The somewhat slushy ones will arrive right away. Editors will be greeting them as soon as next week. About six months later, the good ones will have matured like cheese. They'll arrive in good time for next winter.

Snow still makes us stop still and marvel. It musters awe. It stops the traffic. In the UK, where snow these days is a rarity, it manages to stop everything. Just as long as you live in a warm building with plenty to eat, and can look at it through the window, it is a rare treat.

Poets swap their favourite bits of snow-po.The one by Michael Laskey, for example, 'Nobody' ('a whole / day of snow nobody's trodden'). Or Wallace Stevens ('One must have a mind of winter') or Edna St Vincent Millay ('... close to earth like mice we go / Under the horizontal snow'), or even Mary Oliver ('...once again the storm has passed us by').

But I'm going for Elinor Wylie, because she was once well known, seems to have got a little lost, and her snow poem, 'Velvet Shoes', made it into Walter de la Mare's anthology, Come Hither which is where it found me. It is not her very best poem, but it must have something because crunching softly to the post office yesterday, I thought 'velvet shoes'.

        Velvet Shoes

Let us walk in the white snow
   In a soundless space;
With footsteps quiet and slow,
   At a tranquil pace,
   Under veils of white lace.

I shall go shod in silk,
   And you in wool,
White as white cow's milk,
   More beautiful
   Than the breast of a gull.

We shall walk through the still town
   In a windless peace;
We shall step upon white down,
   Upon silver fleece,
   Upon softer than these.

We shall walk in velvet shoes:
   Wherever we go
Silence will fall like dews
   On white silence below.
   We shall walk in the snow. 

They WILL get lost if you let them. Some of them may have gone into my paper bin yesterday. Why?

I've been tidying. The debris and clutter of papers that builds up round here is astonishing! Every three or four years something has to be done or you wouldn't get in the door.

Imagine me sitting on the carpet surrounded by cards, photographs, sheets of paper, prints, drawings, poems, letters. It's lovely in a way but in another intensely panic-inducing.

What do you keep? What do you discard? How do you file them all?

I try to file HappenStance correspondence by year – for posterity or something. It goes in plastic wallets that eventually find their way into the roof in boxes. I'm not sure why, to be honest, but it seems a good idea to keep records, just in case. Fragments shored against something.

And yet, I end up throwing masses of it away. When the lovely card from MS arrived, I knew who MS was, of course. But that was a couple of years ago. Maybe even longer. Now I have no idea.

The sweet letter from Tony isn't dated, and I know (or have known) five Tonys. Which one, and when?

And, most importantly, what about the poems?

All sorts of people send me poems. Not just for feedback during the reading windows, but at other times for other reasons. When my sister was dying, numerous people sent me poems (written in not dissimilar circumstances) as a form of empathy or consolation. So of course, I kept them.

But I was in chaos at that time. I just piled stuff up. When things arrived signed by Sarah, (I know nine Sarahs) I wailed 'Which one?' and then stopped thinking about it because other things took over. I know several Susannas, lots of Stephens, Davids, Emmas and Johns, a number of Jameses, Michaels, Martins and Jennys. HappenStance alone has had, so far, nearly 900 subscribers, and that's without other friends and acquaintances.

When my mother had Alzheimers and she couldn't remember who her correspondents were, I learned how important it was to write on cards not only the first name, but the second (in brackets) and possibly 'your niece' as an explanation. But I don't have Alzheimers (yet) and it's just as bad!

On the HappenStance submissions page, it reminds people (twice, because I've just doubled the instruction) to put their name and address on every poem sheet. But many people either don't read this, or ignore it. In the 2017 December reading window I had more unnamed poems than ever before and found myself wearily scribbling in pencil, again and again and again, 'put your name and address on each poem sheet'.

There is only one of you. You know who you are. You write to me with an SAE (though many people forget this too) so you know I know to whom the poems should be returned. Why would you need to put your name and address on each individual sheet?

Because the individual sheets may not stay with your envelope. Because if I particularly like one, I might lift it out to show someone or to copy out. Or I might just drop the whole shebang while having a bad cracking-up day. Poems get separated from their poem-set. They get separated from their authors. If the author's name and address is on the poem, it's no big deal. But often it is not. Trust me, often it is not.

You may think it is poet novices who forget to identify themselves. Not so. Often it is the most experienced, widely published poets. Often it is my friends!

Yesterday I found poems in all shapes and sizes that I had kept over the years. Many, of course, had identifiers, or signatures in handwriting I know well. But some had no identifier whatsoever. Once I knew precisely who sent them. Now I have no idea. Some of them were even laminated!

If they're sent electronically, it's even worse. I file them in a digital folder – maybe under Submissions, or Poems of Friends, and at the time I know who they came from. But later, years later, opening up a Word or text document with no identifier – who wrote it? Where did it come from?

People worry about copyright theft – and yet they don't identify their work....On good days, when people send me poems electronically with no identifier, I add one – put a header or footer in for them. So some days I remember but haply may forget.

So – is a small habit to get into but a good one. Put your name – and an address if possible – somewhere on your sheets of poems. Create a footer and put details in there so it's neatly out of the way but easy to find when needed.

Your poems are important to you, or why would you write them? And having written them, why would you disown them? 

This week an old friend sent me a copy of a poem, cut out of a magazine. It ended, or appeared to end, on a stanza that was somewhat appropriate to him. (My friend lives alone and, like many who are lucky enough to live a long time, has found his former cronies have vanished one by one.):

But the years, that take the best away,
Give something in the end;
And a better friend than love have they,
For none to mar or mend,
That have themselves to friend.

It's from 'The Chilterns' by Rupert Brooke and if you follow the link, you'll find there are actually three more stanzas.

But that's by the by. This piece of Rupert Brooke set me to thinking about him. I've always loved some of his poems, even The Soldier, which has fared so badly compared to Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth.

'The Soldier' has come to be seen as a slightly embarrassing piece of patriotism in an age when patriotism is a dubious virtue. I'm sure the poem was used in its day (1914, when war was new, and people and poets didn't see what was coming) to stir up battle-hungry youth. But actually, the title is the only part of the poem that mentions war, and the last line celebrates peace. If you set it next to Robert Browning's Home Thoughts From Abroad, or some of the things Edward Thomas said about his reasons for going to France to fight, it is very much in a tradition.

Also, poor Brooke did die in another country. Not of a gunshot wound or a shell explosion, but nevertheless, in Greece on his way to Gallipoli, of an infected mosquito bite. Nothing heroic about that, but fearfully sad.

Anyway, I still haven't got to the point.
Which is that I started to think about Rupert Brooke, whose poems I learned to like from my mother, who had the Complete Poems with the lovely frontispiece photo of Brooke looking irretrievably handsome in 1913 protected tenderly by a sheet of tissue paper.

She had told me how she started to read Brooke at the start of another war, the Second World War, and it was because of a man she met while watching a military parade. He had given her a volume of Brooke. I knew there was a story to this, and I remembered there was a mysterious inscription at the front of the book, but for the life of me I couldn't remember what she had said about this chap.

This gave me one of those little stabs of grief that you get when you know the people who knew the answers are all gone. My mother died over two years ago. My sister, who might have remembered something of this, died last October.

So I picked up my mother's copy of Brooke (I have my own copy too, and it's in better shape, so I rarely look at mum's) to reflect on the inscription I remembered at the front.

How mysterious it is!

    A tribute to your
charming, vivacious personality
& recalling our very happy
companionship – though of
short duration.
    Sincere wishes for a very
Happy Future,    from   
    Just an ordinary
                   Englishman

I recalled her saying she thought he was probably married, that's all. What had happened? What happened to that ordinary Englishman? In 2016, I published a book of my mother's stories and anecdotes, her attempts to recover memories from the past before Alzheimer's removed them permanently. But this story wasn't in that book.

I turned idly to the back of the volume. There was a thin sheet of paper, folded and sellotaped inside with tape that had gone dark orange with years and dust. There were also two quotations in red biro, written in her own hand:

Love is like a hyacinth, it must strike root in the dark before it can produce a vigorous flower. Strindberg.

This is the measure of the love that warms me to you, that I forget one nothingness, and out of shadows make reality. [No attribution]

I unfolded the piece of paper. It was the story of the man she met who gave her the book. Typed in her own slightly wonky fashion, there it all was. I hadn't even known this existed, but then perhaps it was her secret. But she had written it down. Thankfully, she had written it down.

And so I learned that this man – the man who had given her the book – came from Sussex and that he knew H.G. Wells, who was his 'neighbour'. At that time, Wells would have been living not in Sussex, but in London. But his childhood years were certainly in West Sussex, at Uppark where his mother was in service, and later in Midhurst as a young apprentice. Midhurst, where my mother spent the last 16 years of her life. She always loved a coincidence.

The story of the man who gave her the Rupert Brooke is below. I am quite certain every word is true, and equally certain that had she not written it down, it would all have been lost forever. 

A sunny morning at the beginning of September. There was a war on, and a girl with a dog stood beneath a low copper beech tree, waiting for a parade to pass, on its way from church. She was in her Sunday best, happy and seventeen, and desperately wishing ot be older, to be part of the drama taking place in the world. Then the bands came nearer, and the Territorials, the Home Guard, the Nurses and the Civiil Defence marched bravely past, heads high, arms swinging, and the sun shone and the world sang.

There was a man watching the parade, too, under the beech tree. Something that he saw in the face of the girl moved him to speak to her – the weather  –  the parade  – the war – and in minutes they were carried into a conversation which swept them along, of books, of music, of life....

After that, they met often. They went for long walks in the crisp Autumn evenings, and she showed him the Cheshire countryside. he told her that he came from Sussex, where the soil was red instead of black ... that he was in the Army ... and that he knew H.G. Wells, who was his neighbour. But she never knew his name, or rank, or whether he was married, though she suspected that he was. Or his age, but then she never told hers, hoping that he would think her older than her seventeen years. Nor did he know her name or address. They met and parted in the same place always, and neither asked any questions of the other.

But he took her to her first opera, The Barber of Seville, and they sat in the very best seats, and she had a huge box of chocolates in spite of the war.

It was a fine Autumn, and the nights grew colder, and the leaves fell. 

One evening they were walking across the fields towards Rostherne, and a bright Hunter's Moon made a path for them to walk on. Suddenly, and for no reason that she could ever explain, a cold terror seized the girl, a primitive aweful dread which froze her. The man was gentle and courteous as always; they turned round and made their way out of the fearful fields, through the dark streets, and at last into a pub where he insisted that she had a whiskey.

But it was the beginning of the end  – after that she was afraid to go walking in the dark, and besides, in a small town her anonymity could not last much longer.

They had one last evening together at the ballet, and as a parting gift he gave her a book of poems, this book, with special reference to a poem called 'The Wayfarers'.  It was November 1941.

There are recipes for certain kinds of poem. Villanelles, for example.

Ingredients: one rhyming couplet, each line sufficiently persuasive to bear four repetitions and bake on its own with strong flour. If you have any iambic pentameter, so much the better. Select a third line that's easy to rhyme with, since this pudding (I mean poem) only has two rhymes throughout. Pre-heat your oven to approximately 180°C.

But you don't want to make a villanelle, surely. I know they're fun to concoct, but so rarely sustaining. They remind me of Dr Johnson's unfortunate but memorable observation on women's preaching: 'like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all'.

But I digress. I am thinking really about poems with recipes rather than recipes for poems. I am working on Alison Brackenbury's forthcoming HappenStance publication, which was to have been a pamphlet and has grown into a delightful book. It is called Aunt Margaret's Pudding and contains a mixture of poems and recipes, as well as a brief account of the life of the woman who inspired them – Alison's grandmother, Dot – who worked, at one time, as a professional cook.

As a recipe lover myself, I have often been struck by the similarity, on the page, of poems and recipes. They both often resemble lists, but they're a little unpredictable. They can sprawl unexpectedly, and contain little asides that have nothing to do with the food. You can make of them what you will.

Either way, it strikes me as an excellent combination. Alison's poems are particularly good if read in combination with a cup of tea and, say, a raspberry bun. (I especially like Dot's raspberry buns and my other half, Matt, who almost never eats cake, has developed an interesting partiality for them.) So this is a little advance puff for her book, though there will be much more about it later.

I once tried to combine a recipe and a poem. That is to say I converted a recipe into what seemed to me at the time to be poetic form. I am not sure the results would have pleased the T S Eliot judges, but at least it has saved the recipe from getting lost – another use of poetry, if you like. Before it became a poem, I once lost it, and my friend Barbara, to whom I had passed it on, copied it out and gave it back to me. It is called 'Pain de Campagne' and when Barbara returned it to me, she had subtitled it 'Tired of Living in the Country'.

So whether or not it's good poem, I know it's a good recipe. It is tried and tested by more than one of us and will not let you down. Here it is:

Pain de Campagne

Day 1:
Mix these things in a roomy bowl:

8 ounces of strong white bread flour
A scant dessertspoon of table salt
8 fluid ounces of tepid water
A little dried yeast (a scant half teaspoon)

Cover with a plate and leave till next day.
At night dream richly. Record your dreams.

Day 2:
Return to the bowl.

Add 4 fluid ounces of luke-warm water
and then 4 ounces of whole-wheat flour.
As you stir the mixture, remember your dreams.
They will rise to the surface in tiny bubbles.

Cover and leave. Sleep well that night.
Record your dreams.

Day 3:

Back to the bowl.

Beat in more water—4 fluid ounces
and then add 12 ounces of strong white flour—
enough to make a workable dough.
Knead at length, remembering your dreams.
Add flour if needed. Continue to work
until the dough is beautifully smooth.

Leave to rise till doubled in size.
Sleep, if you wish, while the bread rises.

Later the same day

Punch back the dough.
Knead briefly and form a long oval.
Place on a baking tray covered in flour.
Shake more flour on top of the loaf.
Lightly cover and let it rise.

This loaf will grow.

When the size impresses you
slash the top with diagonal cuts
and bake very hot[1] for a quarter of an hour,
then somewhat cooler for twenty minutes[2].

The crust of this loaf will be domed and firm,
the crumb dreamy.
It will make great sandwiches, keep well
and prove that poetry can be useful.

[1] 230C

[2] Or perhaps a little longer, at 180° 

How much lovelier an old poem may seem if the original spelling, or something approximating to it, is retained. It takes me back to my early years of reading, when the children in books by E. Nesbit (or Enid Blyton) find an ancient manuscript or a treasure map. They know it's old because all the 's's are 'f's.

What mystery is in that idea — what glory in deciphering the words and phrases and finding they are not so far — not so far at all — from what we might say even now.

When you're young, you tend not to think an awful lot about the meanings of the words. You can like them, thankfully, without analysing them. You can welcome things that are different and odd. So each December, I remember the time we did Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols in the school choir. Both my sister and I sang in it, and we loved it all our lives.

That Britten stuff – it was weird, right? We'd never sung anything like that before. What we usually did was the descant to O Come All Ye Faithful. But the more we sang the Ceremony, the more we got to like it, and its strange words. I don't recall anybody explaining what they meant – only how we had to sing them.

So in 'I synge of a mayden', 'Goddes moder' was three syllables, with mother as mudder. (We were not to sing God's mother, even though we all knew that was what it meant.)

We did not reinvent the words. We just sang them. With relish.

We sang most carols with relish, whatever the words were, which was just as well. Hymns to us were all a kind of mystery with a good tune, and fair game for creative interference. So the repeating phrase from The Angel Gabriel from Heaven Came  – 'most highly favoured lady'  – was invariably rendered as 'most highly flavoured gravy'. I still can't hear that carol without thinking of good quality turkey stock thickened with just a little cornflour.

The year after A Ceremony of Carols, I started a degree in English Literature in the University of York. I didn't go to all the lectures, but I went to all the lectures by one R.T. Jones (Bob Jones) because they were a revelation to me.

He would take just one poem and talk about it for a whole hour very quietly and very carefully. Actually, he didn't talk. He read slowly from whatever he had written down on the papers in front of him. Little, if any, eye contact with his students. He had an intensely bookish, closed-in manner, as though everything he was sharing was a secret. So you tended to lean forward and listen more carefully.

One of the poems in his series was a medieval lyric from Britten's Ceremony, and it was 'I syng of a mayden'. I hadn't thought of a carol as a poem till this point, or considered the relationship between song lyrics and 'lyric' poetry.

This was over 40 years ago, so my memory of what he said is partial. The main thing I took away with me was an understanding of the power of repetition when each repetition is connected to a tiny change. That, and the idea of an experience getting close, and closer, and closest.

I think I had thought (because we sang it at Christmas) that the song was about the birth of Jesus. But it's not. It's the annunciation – the point at which Mary – without having sex with mortal man – meets the angel Gabriel, accepts the invitation to be the mother of God, and. becomes quietly and mysteriously with child. Most highly flavoured gravy, in fact.

But I believe this carol is as much about a spiritual change as anything else. Here are the old words, from the Sloane Manuscript in the British Library, thought to date from about 1400.

I syng of a mayden þat is makeles,
kyng of all kynges to here sone che ches.

He cam also stylle þer his moder was
as dew in aprylle, þat fallyt on þe gras.

He cam also stylle to his moderes bowr
as dew in aprille, þat fallyt on þe flour.

He cam also stylle þer his moder lay
as dew in Aprille, þat fallyt on þe spray.

Moder & mayden was neuer non but che –
wel may swych a lady Godes moder be.

So the maiden that is 'makeless' is matchless – beyond compare – and a 'mayden' means a virgin. If you lost your maidenhead, that meant you had had sex with a man. Here, Mary is a woman with a choice, not meekly bowing her head.

Bob Jones took us through the structure of the piece, the way it's bookended with couplets about the holy maiden – mudder and mayden, Godes moder – all those 'm' sounds and 'd' hammering away. Bob was the first person ever that made me aware of the small sounds and their connection with sense.

And then the direction: the way new life approaches and then gets closer, and closer and closer. He comes 'also stylle' – very very quietly – first where his mother was, then to his mother's bower, and finally where his mother lay. Something delicate and beautiful about it all, and increasingly intimate. 

The dew in April (lovely idea in itself) is there three times, but first the dew falls on the grass, then the flower (with all its fertility associations), and finally the spray. It is an insemination, of sorts – but as quiet and innocent as morning dew.

And then suddenly there's the last couplet which is a triumphant assertion. In the Britten version, it was enormously satisfying. You get to sing 'was never none but she' – such a wonderful phrase, with each of its syllables belting out the message, and the music suddenly scored to zoom from very quiet to as maximum forte. There is a YouTube recording of a girls' choir that sounds very much as we did.

Bob would have pointed out the three monosyllables at the end of the line 'none but she'. I can remember his mouth making the word 'syllable'. I can remember realising the syllables had something to do with the intense heart of a poem, whatever that might be.

I have only just noted that Carol Rumens had this lyric as her Guardian poem of the week in 2010. She's a similar age to me. A Ceremony of Carols must have been doing its round of the English schools when we were both busily being educated. She read the words then and now, she says, as an 'erotic myth'.

Odd how strong a word 'erotic' can seem in the context of this lyric with all its subtlety and sweetness. But that's newspapers for you. They have allowed someone (I am sure not Carol) to introduce the ghastly subhead: Set to unforgettable music by Benjamin Britten, this strangely erotic Nativity is even better on the page. Heavens above! It's not a nativity. It's the arrival of the first thought of a baby.

I found it both pure and intimate, and still do. There seems to me something odd about a baby coming to his mother in an erotic way. Obviously people could argue about this till, as they say, the cows come home.

The cows are on their way right now. The stable is just around the corner. One more ƒleep