Delighted to be at #StAnza15

Having a pause after visiting the pamphlet sale or poetry market - curated by Alan Gay - in the town hall here in St Andrews and I can report that StAnza is every bit as good as people say - maybe the streets aren't paved with poets (not even after kicking out time at the pubs as Ian Duhig naughtily suggested on Twitter) - but the population density is certainly high.

This is heightened by the fact that the festival venues are close together in the three streets - with the result that you can mix fantastic and imaginative events with the constant joy of running into old friends.

I went straight into a great reading on arrival last night- the place is packed out - and I was lucky to pick up a returned ticket for Helen Mort and J L Williams (replacing Liz Berry) and then on into a (not so quiet) open mic (Colin Will reading in the picture) at Zest - where, yes, I read my first poems at StAnza. Fab.

Tonight it is Ian Duhig, Kei Miller, Ilya Kaminsky, the slam and Simon Armitage.

Simon Armitage walking home

New book out today from the big Armitage and it may interest you to know that poetandgeek organised the first gig on the troubadour Pennine walk he describes. It was at Abbotsford, the home of Walter Scott, in the Scottish Borders. He collected money in a sock and then left without signing books. Shame.

We hadn't offered him a lift from Berwick station suggesting he might like to take the bus to get into the spirit of the thing. And things seemed to go downhill from there a little. Oh well. And so another celebrity encounter failed to quite live up to expectations.

He did read Shout which is the one I hoped he would; one of my favourite poems apart from the one about hairspray spores. Probably shouldn't quote anything here because... But they are both in his 1989 Bloodaxe book Zoom. I think.

And in fact you can listen to The Shout here http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=88

Machine poets: the movement of big things

Man and machine, a combination that has existed in poetry since classical times; early English examples include John Donne's The Compass

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the' other do.

and Spenser's dissertation in the Faerie Queene on the uses of wood

    The Eugh obedient to the benders will,

    The Birch for shaftes, the Sallow for the mill,

But at the moment I am interested when machines stand for a certain kind of grit and honesty; less renaissance man who has an interest in science and more alpha male who "likes the movement of big things".

W.H.Auden's factories stand for social truth, Work has been stopped on the powerhouse; the wind whistles under/The half-built culverts while The square munition works out on the old allotments/Needs stricter watching (The Orators 1931); a society of which he is an observer and excluded (Stop all the clocks). But what often appeals to me is the more fifties brand of machine poet. Ted Hughes' Tractor is a badge of manhood endowed with all the pain of a rite of passage:

The tractor stands frozen - and agony

to think of...[]

It defies flesh and won't start

hands are like wounds already

Inside armour gloves...

In the end its superhuman power is mastered and it starts like a Blakean engine or mill. Simon Armitage's poem Very simply topping up the brake fluid (Yes, love, that's why the warning light comes on...) takes the process one step further. The chance of failure that in Hughes's poem is contained within the poet himself is split into a male expert and subservient female persona, the love in question. But Armitage's poem is a cry against the feminisation all men feel when they get out of their depth with machines; it is perhaps a logical step to men (and women) bathing in pies to assert themselves (The practical way to heaven) in Armitage's latest collection Seeing stars (something not so far away from D.H. Lawrence's nudity and wrestling).

This has to end for the moment in a call for machine poems and poets; the series is to be continued...