Blog tour: you are here

Welcome to p&g - if you are on the blog tour, take a walk round and see what the weather is like...if not, just do what you normally do!

Thanks to Jules Horne for giving directions to here. She has asked some questions which I will attempt to answer. (Don't normally do this stuff - click on a few topics on your right to get a feel for our everyday p&g.)

1) What am I working on?
Well, too many different things probably - my own collection, the Fragments project (http://fragmentsinwords.tumblr.com/), a longer poem on commuting, Bimblebox 153 birds (http://bimbleboxartproject.wordpress.com/2014/01/07/bimblebox-153-birds/), constantly distracted by vintage petrol pumps, disused buildings, Elizabeth Bishop, old roads, shepherds, Victorian engineering, taxidermy, lichen, John Leyden, renaissance gardens, elegant code etc.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?
Good question - in fact like all poets I respect what went before and try to learn from it. I have been working on a verse form based on William Shakespeare's satiric use of a courtly style of speech in Much ado about nothing (based on John Lyly's Euphues the anatomy of wit, a speech style hailed at court as the new English). This involves for me balancing opposites like black and white, harmony by mentioning each seasons, or times of day, and adding whatever else I feel like to a poem structurally - preferably so the reader is unconscious of it - unless they look closely - in which case they can share the joke. Above all, I value a human response to poetry. Nothing is set in stone.

3) Why do I write what I do?
I used to write and put on plays at school (crocodiles, nightclub singers...) and always thought I would be a novelist. But poems scare me. They are the most ancient form of all. And also the most up-to-date. Generations use poems to remember history, laws and family history from ancient manuscripts to birthday cards. They have no boundaries.

4) How does your writing process work?
Walking round in circles helps. Outside. Usually. Or driving the car places. Then sit somewhere and write stuff down. Edit it later. And again. But sometimes it all happens quickly. And that's cool too.

Next stops on the tour (and more on these 3 shortly) Elizabeth Rimmer here http://burnedthumbblog.blogspot.co.uk/, Andrew McCallum here http://andramccallum2013.wordpress.com/, Dorothy Bruce here http://jingsandthings.wordpress.com/ and back to Jules Horne here http://juleshorne.wordpress.com/

And if that isn't enough for you try Jane Aldous' Jane's Writing Shed http://kitchenpoetry.blogspot.co.uk/

Postscript on John Leyden

I know a lot of Leyden of late...leydenmania.

But it is just about played out now.

Only remains to say that his grave - he died after rushing into a pestilential library basement of oriental manuscripts unable to resist them and wait for the room to be aired - is in Java and  "remains home to a colony of fireflies".

Book of wonders

Monk Lewis the eighteenth century English gothic novelist also put together this book of fantastical ballads with help from his friends including Walter Scott, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (translated by Scott and Lewis), Robert Southey and yes, John Leyden in 1801.

Leyden's own contribution is The elfin king - an atmospheric more robust predecessor of Keat's La belle dame sans merci (1819).

lines from The elfin king


How swift they flew! no eye could view
Their track on heath or hill;
Yet swift across both moor and moss
St. Clair did follow still.

And soon was seen a circle green,  
Where a shadowy wassel crew
Amid the ring did dance and sing,
In weeds of watchet blue.

And the windlestrae, so limber and gray,
Did shiver beneath the tread  
Of the coursers’ feet, as they rushed to meet
The morrice of the dead.

Come here, come here, with thy green feere,
Before the bread be stale;
To roundel dance with speed advance,  
And taste our wassel ale.


You can find the full text of the poem here http://literaryballadarchive.com/PDF/Leyden_2_Elfin-King_f.pdf

Ballads and politics

Political ballads or just ballads?

Last Tuesday I attended a talk on John Leyden (1775 - 1811) the Scottish Borders poet and had to prepare the vote of thanks. Apart from training as a minister, Leyden was an expert in oriental languages providing early translations of Sikh and Panjabi texts, a surgeon, a judge, a naturalist, an environmentalist and lover of traditional ballads.

But I never knew him as a nationalist until I discovered that he had also translated the Complaynt of Scotland a 16th century text outlining Scotland's difference from England. A new side to the many-faceted forgotten Scot? Well yes, but worth noting that this book is made of collected anecdotes, stories and poems and is the first place to record the ballads Tam Lin, Froggy would a-wooing go and The Ballad of Chevy Chase.

You may also be interested that it contains the earliest recorded instance of words including axis, barbarian, buffoon, cabinet, crackling, decadence, excrement, heroic, humid, imbecile, moo, parallel, robust, suffocation, superb, timid and water-lily.

More on the Complaynt here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complaynt_of_Scotland and Leyden's Panjabi translations here http://www.drleyden.co.uk/