Carcanet New Poetry Showcase: The Audience Writes Back

Photo by Michelle Tan

On 30th April Carcanet hosted a New Poetry Showcase at King’s College, London, featuring John Gallas, Oli Hazzard, Sinéad Morrissey, James Womack  and Jane Yeh. Today Michelle Tan, a KCL student who attended the showcase, reports back.

Michelle Tan

I’ve spent a significant part of my teenage life memorising poets, authors and their publishers while working in BooksActually, an independent bookstore from back home. We took pride in being different from the larger stores and I can still hear my boss reminding us that having Carcanet in stock was special in Singapore.

This new partnership between my university and the press is, then, yet another fortuitous connection. I love that many of my favourite contemporary writers are published under its banner: Frank O’Hara, Marilyn Hacker and Roy Fuller among others. Receiving the email about the day’s reading compelled me to finish my university coursework a day early for the first time in my life. I am (not really) sorry for my effusiveness.

Frank O'Hara's Selected Poems
are published by Carcanet

Michael Schmidt’s editorial emphasis on fresh diction was evident through the works by all five poets of the evening. There is truly much delight to be found in an arresting image or a least expected turn of phrase, and also in shapeshifting from James Womack’s asparaguses to the deadpan of Jane Yeh’s ninjas. In a slightly inappropriate twist, Oli Hazzard had the room collectively imagining ‘the sensation of someone mentally undressing you’ to his voice – before we tripped across John Gallas’ translations of everyone from Akhmatova to Zhadovskaya. The final reading of the night was of Sinéad Morrissey’s poignant poems from Parallax; I was privileged to have attended her writing workshop with fourteen other participants prior to the reading.

Sinéad Morrissey
Photo by Eleanor Crawforth

“In the ancient days, was everything in black and white?” I remember her prettily enunciating her six-year-old son’s innocent question in her Irish accent, and this duochromatic thought is perhaps also relevant to the art of the poem in print. With Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’ always in the consciousness of a contemporary reader, it is wonderful to see how much a voice can colour work that usually lives on a page. The audience listened keenly, listening itself being their own act of creation. And so there was light and shade from just a little attention to sound, under spring's late sunshine still visible from the skylight of the KCL Anatomy Theatre. As a singing student I am more accustomed to hearing poems as song than poems as poems, but there is much music to be heard in this craft of consonants, vowels, and carefully married words. And as someone who writes, it was inspiring to hear the poets’ new works in recital – in person.

I think it was Hazzard who wrote that ‘if you remember nothing you’ve had a good time’. I clearly must have had a rather awful time by his standards, but the post-reading reception did pass in a pleasant haze of wine and good conversation.

Author portraits by Michelle Tan

Michelle Tan is a second-year Music undergraduate at King’s College London. She is currently working on her first manuscript of poems and curates a personal selection of poetry at pocketpoem.tumblr.com.

If you like Sinéad Morrissey's poetry, why not try her first collection, There was Fire in Vancouver? Get 25% off this and a range of other titles in our First Collection sale all this month!

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Flora Neville, another KCL student who was in the audience, reports from the workshop which Sinéad Morrissey gave in the afternoon.

Sinéad Morrissey talks to fellow Carcanet poet Elaine Feinstein

There was a gentle sort of atmosphere wafting around the room on Tuesday afternoon. Perhaps, it was the lyrical hint of an Irish accent in Sinéad Morrissey's voice. Perhaps, the promise of a long awaited summer whispering through the window. Perhaps the tentative poetry of nervous students or, most likely a

synthesis of all three.

We each read our own poem aloud, then someone else read the poem aloud, then
we had a discussion in which the poet was silent. Hearing someone else read your poem makes you feel like an established poet: visions of awards and book signings floating above you. Morrissey asks, 'What is this poem about? Or, What's its project? Or, What's going on?'

Flora Neville

Hearing your poem discussed without the ability to interject with, 'But you see I meant to do that because it shows the speaker's evident confusion', humbles you, allowing you to properly consider a reaction to their poetry.

Morrissey has a clear idea of what it is that makes a poem good or bad, but none of these ideas are communicated through maxims or principles. Instead she articulates her views through seemingly spontaneous analogies.

'The line is your fundamental unit', she proposes, dismantling an entire body of Poetry that

Severs

A

Line for absolutely no reason other than

Umm....

Linear Rebellion?

Morrissey's discussion of poetry, other people's poetry, puts images and pictures in the listener's mind. 'Scaffolding phrases' is such a picture. It illustrates the redundancy of those phrases that enable the construction of the poem, but that read like lingering steel after a building is complete.

Sinéad Morrissey's new collection,
Parallax, is forthcoming in September.

Morrissey is suspicious of the abstract noun, questioning its purpose within poetry

as, 'the opposite of imagery', a blank space in the reader's mind. As such, she advocates poetry as a power to paint pictures in the readers' mind, rendering the reading and the writing of poetry an accessible affair. We are, as poets, in debt to the reader for giving our words the time of their eyes and their minds, and therefore we should have a story, a message, a project to our poetry that creates something of a mental movie, rather than a mental mush, in the mind of the reader.

Poetry has a purpose to create a picture of the idea or image it is propounding, and transmit that picture to the reader. And though there is space within the gentle atmosphere for wispy ethereality, there must be something concrete to which the words can take hold.

Flora Neville is a second year student at King's College London, studying English Literature. She has written for university newspapers, including reviews, short stories and poems. She hopes to become more involved in the world of fiction and reviewing after university.