Andrew Oldham

Ian Parks Love Poems 1979 – 2009, Review by David Cooke

Where I can, I like to share reviews that I think capture a collection, this is one from David Cooke on Love Poems 1979 – 2009   Ian Parks, Flux Gallery Press, Leeds, 2009.  ISBN: 978-0-9560688-2-8.  £7.95

Ian Parks’ Love Poems is a substantial gathering of more than seventy pieces, many of which have appeared in earlier collections. It also contains previously uncollected poems and more recent work which appears here for the first time. The volume brings together all the love poems that the poet wishes to keep in print so that in some ways it has the feel of a ‘collected’ edition.  However, it is actually a ‘selected poems’ because it omits much fine work on unrelated themes. In fact, in his interesting Preface to the new book Parks explains how he never really set out to be a ‘love poet’ at all and that over the years these poems simply accumulated, seeming ‘almost an afterthought’, whilst he was working on things which at the time seemed ‘more important.’  They are poems, then, that were written because they needed to be and this sense of being taken by surprise is not dissimilar to the way in which they work upon the reader.

Typically, the poems consist of brief narratives where the reader’s attention is first attracted by the understated evocation of some landscape: ‘Think back: remember the lighthouse / poised on the windswept head’; or an interior as here in ‘The Gallery’:

        A wedge-shaped room with windows to the street   

        and branches agitating the cold pane.

        That’s where I met you, where I let you go…  

The reader is then drawn in by details which build up in a way that is cinematic: ‘Each object / bore your imprint and your name…introspective photographs / that lined the whitewashed walls; / dead leaves in the doorway…candles, pillows, sheets askew…’ until in this poem we reach the  marvellous closing lines: ‘Last night I entered cautiously…Someone had thrown a stone and smashed the glass, / let in the winter and the world.’ In another poem ‘The Mirrored Room’ two lovers are haunted by the ghosts of WW2 fighter pilots who ‘etched their names / and the names of their new lovers / with penknives in the bright / reflective glass.’ Many of these pilots of course had simply passed through the room before dying ‘above the Channel / France or Germany…’  The two worlds evoked are then brought together in a breathtaking final stanza that is deeply felt and eloquent:

         I don’t know what it meant to you

         but what it meant for me

         was sudden recognition:

         of how love looks

         when circumstance

         has stripped it cold and bare

         and how those random pairings

         made tenable by war

         were overlaid across your searching eyes,

         rewritten in your raised, enquiring face.

Not long ago the Irish poet, Michael Longley, took to task poets who have little respect for basic technique and no ear for cadence, whilst recently in Poetry Review Don Paterson lamented the too-pervasive influence of the ‘show me, don’t tell me’ orthodoxy. Both men would, I suspect, find much to admire in the work of Ian Parks who, whilst he understands the importance of imagery in a poem, knows also that plain speech and statement have their part to play when they are heightened by cadence and that innate feeling for the musicality of language that is part and parcel of it.  In a brief review it is difficult to do justice to work of such substance and quality.  However, mention must be made of ‘A Last Love Poem’, the superb lyric which brings the collection to a close:

I was thinking how the daylight disappears,

how one thing blends into another thing

as over river, rooftops, silent park

time slips away without our noticing:

the wave collapses and a cold wind veers

through all the public places where we loved.

That’s what it feels like these years on:

you were quite unexpected, and it seems

I’ve used up all the images I know –

midnight stations, coastal roads,

red wine, high windows, lace and sudden snow.

Don’t be surprised if language fails me now.

I turn to the sunlight. Let it go.

This is a poetry which is universal, profound, and as natural as breathing. Love Poems is one of the best collections of poetry I have read in a long time. It is to be hoped that it will gain for Parks the wider audience that his work deserves.

Tags: David Cooke, Flux Gallery Press, Ian Parks, Love Poems, Poetry, Review

ARCHIVE: Formal Values – an interview with Ian Parks

Andrew interviewed Ian in 2004. ‘I have been friends with Ian for many years,’ says Andrew, ‘I do find it hard to interview friends and when I do I always go off script. What I remember of this interview is not the questions or the answers but the location. I interviewed Ian in a pub in Mexborough and a man was playing a fruit machine in the background, which can be heard on the original tape. The man in question halfway through a bet asked the barman for a spoon, which he started to jab into the fruit machine in a vain bid to get his money back. No one batted an eyelid. I have always wondered why he chose a spoon to attack a machine’.

Formal Values: an interview with Ian Parks. Interview by Andrew Oldham

Ian Parks is a unique poet with the skill and craft of Auden and the heart of Shelley. Parks has been published worldwide in such magazines as Agenda, The Observer, Oxford Poetry, New Welsh Review, Poetry (Chicago) and Cascando. His collections include, Gargoyles in Winter (Littlewood, 1985), A Climb Through Altered Landscapes (Blackwater 1998), The Angel of the North (Tarantula CD 2000). Parks has been described as “the finest love poet of his generation” (Chiron Review, USA) and is part of the collective of poets known as inc. I caught up with him on the eve of his new publication Shell Island (Waywiser Press) in a quiet pub in South Yorkshire where a young tattooed man was jamming a fork in a slot machine and old men were putting the world to right.

“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a poet. My first exposure to poetry came from hearing my father recite it. He’d learned reams of it by heart at school and would repeat it when he was getting ready to go out. At school I discovered poems I liked and copied them into an exercise book, making a personal anthology”.

The thought arises of how much these early books would be worth now.

“My first poems were mainly imitations of the Victorian poets I was reading at the time. Then I came to Ted Hughes…,” Parks attended the same school as Hughes, “…and Thom Gunn via the First World War poets and realised that poetry could be written in what Wordsworth referred to as ‘a language really used by men’. That was a liberating experience. One of the first poems I had published was in the Poetry Review”.

In 2002, the poetry world was hit hard when Waterstones decided to stop stocking literary magazines, cutting the voices of a generation of poets dead. Many magazines are now fighting for survival as are poets trying to reach out to audiences that don’t know they’re there.

“I don’t think any poet can work in isolation. I was running a workshop once and this bloke came in and I asked him which poets he read and he replied by saying he wasn’t interested in reading poetry, only in writing it. It’s a view you come across quite often and it never fails to surprise me with its arrogance and stupidity”.

Now shelves are stocked with poets long dead or modern poets who have been writing for forty years and have only just been discovered but who will replace them in another forty years with no outlets.

“From a purely common sense point of view it seems counter productive to ignore what’s been done so well in the past, or to refuse to learn from it”

Ian Parks voice drips with South Yorkshire vowels, drawn out across the backwater of disused colliery fields.

“As far as my voice is concerned, I’m not sure where the idiosyncrasies of a poet’s voice come from. I guess they lie very close to the rhythms of the poet’s own speaking voice and that, in turn, interacts with a subject. What we call a poet’s voice arises from the tensions implicit in this situation. I think you have to be true to that voice. I think there’s a danger, with the proliferation of free verse, for poetry to end up as nothing more then chopped up prose”.

Who are the next generation of living poets?

“The poets I admire who are writing today: Thom Gunn, David Constantine, T.F. Griffin, Pauline Stainer, all have recognisable voices. They all seem to have an ear for the difference between poetry and prose”.

Parks’ poetry is born of the twentieth century and the upheaval of social changes of the 70s and 80s. The fleeting nature of the changing relationships in the home and workplace transferred to the page as he redefined love poetry for a new generation while learning from the past.

“I think Auden occupies a central place in the poetry of the last century. You can’t get around him. He is the first poet to feel at home in the twentieth century. The main thing I learned from Auden was that you can write love poetry that also has other dimensions. Auden understood that every love relationship has a social context of some kind and was therefore able to extend considerations usually confined to the private realm into the public realm of politics. In “Lay Your Sleeping Head”, for instance, he uses the very intimate form of address to say something about the ‘fashionable madmen’ who were at large in Europe during the 1930′s”.

Ian Parks is born from this tradition, marrying political and social image to a modern world.

“We’re living at a time when freedom and democracy are at threat – but this time from within. Except that this time around the very language of freedom is being appropriated by the powers that be in order to persuade us that what they’re doing is right. One of the main functions of poetry today, as I see it, is to defend the language of the heart from such blatant misappropriation”.

Ian Parks’ work breaks the stereotype of what most of think love poetry is.

“Even though people talk about me as a love poet I’d say the main theme running through everything is time. The apparent interest in history is really an interest in time and how it affects us at both a personal and collective level. At their deepest level, all the poems are about this. I think a very fine membrane exists between the present and what we call the past. Hardy understood this; he knew that a thin tissue separates us from what’s gone before. To be on the verge of being overwhelmed by the pressure exerted by the past on the present moment is there in my poem ‘Towton’; about a particularly bloody battle during the Wars of the Roses. It’s really an attempt to articulate the obsession with time and the fact that it has no linear properties as such. I was over in the USA on a Travelling Fellowship and came to the conclusion that the American Civil War is very much a living issue for the descendants of those who fought in it. You can visit any one of those battle sights and feel the tangible presence of the past. I wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity to mention Robert Graves. A little out of fashion now, Graves was probably the greatest love poet of the last century. I admire his unswerving dedication to poetry – and to his belief – encapsulated in ‘The White Goddess’ – that poetry is essentially a miraculous activity, the processes of which we can neither understand nor quantify”.

Poets are often seen as private people with public love lives. The work often reflects this but the argument still rages: when should the private become part of the public realm?

“There comes a time when the poem ceases to be the exclusive property of the poet and takes on a life of its own. I get people coming up to me at poetry readings describing a certain poem of mine, which I don’t recognise. When they tell me the title I know the poem they’re referring to, but their experience of it has been so unique, they’ve brought so much of themselves to it, that I have difficulty relating their description to the poem I wrote. There is, after all, no ‘correct’ reading of a poem. We’re not talking about maths where two and two will always make four. We’re in a highly subjective area where the poet’s intentions – such as they are – become secondary to the experience of the reader”.

Modern Literature has now spiralled away in packaging, making money and the cult of celebrity with poetry being wheeled out for Valentine’s Day, Christmas and the ubiquitous National Poetry Day. Are we seeing the death throes of poetry? Is Seamus Heaney right in his assumption that the likes of Eminem are the new face of verse and where does that leave love?

“The difference now is that we have a different set of ethics to the ones that existed when, say, Tennyson wrote his love poems. Then people were expected to marry for life and love poems tended to limit themselves to either praising the attributes of the loved one or dealing with the painful process of loss. People now expect to have several relationships in a lifetime and this effects how they think and feel about love. The love poet has to be in tune with this change. If the cultural atmosphere presents a less naive, more analytic approach to love then the love poet ought to reflect that. I guess I’m interested in transitory states; how one thing becomes another thing. Poetry seems to me to have the flexibility I require to explore all this. Love poetry provides us with a powerful continuum. It connects us by a very strong thread to the poetry of the past while, at the same time, acting as a sort of spirit level for our deepest feelings”.

Editors often have nightmares about working with poets, as they are often seen as temperamental. The poetry market in the UK is an incredibly small one and many of the big publishing houses no longer touch poetry for financial reasons. What are the processes you went through to select work for your new collected love poems?

“My first love poem was published in 1983 when I was twenty-four and the most recent earlier this year. Twenty years seemed like a nice round number. In a way, the selection process was complete before the collection was put together, in that I only sent out poems that I felt happy with at the time. So, in a sense, I’d made my mind up about them already. The problem wasn’t so much in selection as in deciding what, strictly speaking, constituted what should be in Shell Island – and how the collection should be organised. A couple of poems didn’t make it because they weren’t good enough; a couple more because they seemed to repeat what was done better in other pieces. You don’t want to keep writing the same poem forever. The temptation to do that is quite strong. Shell Island breaks from this”.

As we’ve talked about history, what one poem do you give up to it, which one do you think will stand the test of time?

“I’d have to opt for ‘The Mirrored Room’. It’s about the experience of visiting a tea-room in York and finding a wall of mirrors etched with the names of airmen from World War Two, and the names of their girlfriends, and knowing that they probably went off to die. Seeing those names imposed over your own features somehow provides an objective correlative for what I was saying earlier about the pressure of the past on the present”.

And with that the evening turns cold, the rain rattles against the glass panes, the young man jams a spoon in with the fork lodged in the slot machine, the old men order another round, and Ian Parks watches this, marking the moment he selected the one poem to stand up and take on history.

Tags: Andrew Oldham, Ian Parks, Mexborough, Poetry, Shell Island, Waywiser Press

Paston Letters

Just a gentle reminder for 2010 that Ian Parks new pamphlet collection is coming out from Rack Press. A Paston Letter is a great return for Ian Parks longer sequence poetry. The pamphlet collection deals with Margery Paston’s thwarted love for Richard Calle. Hopefully, I will get around to reviewing it this year.

Tags: A Paston Letter, Ian Parks, Rack Press

Milner Place on PoetCasting

In a previous post, I spoke of how I, Milner Place, Ian Parks and Gaia Holmes recorded some poems for PoetCasting. Gaia was first up on the site, followed by me and now Milner is up there with some great poems. If you’re a fan of listening to poetry, then don’t miss out on one the truly great voices of English poetry. You can listen to Milner’s poems here. These are great recordings and show the diverse nature of Milner’s voice and writing. The whole experience of recording with these three poets was one of the high points of 2009 for me - Andrew Oldham 09/11/2009

Tags: Andrew Oldham, Gaia Holmes, Huddersfield Recordings, Ian Parks, Milner Place, PoetCasting

Novels ‘written’ by celebrities

Last week Andrew was asked by the London Evening Standard (via Incwriters) to respond to an article on Authors who have launched an attack on novels by celebrities. His response appears below, courtesy of the London Evening Standard:

‘The trend for celebrity novelists is nothing new. Publishers need to sell books. The problem arises out of the money spent to publicise books across multi-platforms; the web, the media, the Literature festival and the retailer. It is this question of cost which means a publisher will inevitably turn to an easier or cheaper route of making money. You can’t blame them for that. It is an industry and publishers have to survive. However, it is prudent for such publishers to use those celebrity profits to give equal promotion to the new novelist, poet or short story writer. It is this lack of commitment that is hard to swallow by many and it gives the reader an unbalanced view that the publishing market is driven by celebrity. It seems to create a monopoly of books by talented celebrities but not necessarily talented writers. These celebrities draw in crowds but not readers. The proof of this can be found on any Sunday car boot, street market or second hand bookshop. Here you will not see a glut of Charles Dickens, PD James, Chris Beckett, Ian Parks, Gaia Holmes, Andy Remic or Will Self. Critically, that speaks.’ – Andrew Oldham 26th October 2009

What are your views on celebrities writing fiction?

Tags: Andy Remic or Will Self., Chris Beckett, Dickens, Gaia Holmes, Ian Parks, Incwriters, London Evening Standard, Novels ‘written’ by celebrities, PD James

Andrew Oldham on PoetCasting

Earlier in 2009, on a wild and woolly day I was invited to record some of my poetry along with the poets, Ian Parks, Gaia Holmes and Milner Place. The recording took place in Milner’s Cottage in the countryside. The recordings were engineered and produced by the wonderful and dedicated Alex Pryce of PoetCasting. For those of you who do not know PoetCasting they are an Arts Council funded organisation who records British and Irish poets and publishes their audio recordings online. PoetCasting aims to bring together poets from all backgrounds to share the medium of the internet. Here poets can be read and heard in one place.

I am proud to be one of the poets now associated with this excellent website and they have included podcasts of my poems Geometry, Ways of Autumn, Calling of Young Tony (originally commissioned by the Carolione Wiseman Gallery and The London Magazine) and even the very new, and long poem, The Anchor (which I recorded in one take with no apparent fluffs). You can hear them all at: http://www.poetcasting.co.uk/?p=162

Do leave your comments here and at PoetCasting.

Andrew Oldham 03/10/2009

Tags: Andrew Oldham, Calling of Young Tony, Caroline Wiseman, Gaia Holmes, Geometry, Ian Parks, Milner Place, PoetCasting, The Anchor, The London Magazine, Ways of Autumn

Born Into An Unquiet: T.F. Griffin at 60

‘Born Into An Unquiet’ (Flux Gallery Press 2009) is a unique celebration of the work and life of T.F. Griffin to mark his 60th birthday; edited by the poet, Ian Parks. This collection comprises of a seminal interview between the two discussing the core of his work, together with critical book reviews and appraisals from a variety of academic resources.

Also included, together with facsimile pages from his notebooks, are a number of essays and poems from fellow poets and friends, such as, Jules Smith, Andrew Oldham, Ed Reiss, Gaia Holmes, Tony Flynn, Milner Place, Genny Rhatz, Linda Marshall, Ian Pople, Peter Didsbury and William Park. All of whom have encountered T.F. Griffin’s poetry over the years. Due from Flux Gallery Press in October 2009, for further enquiries visit: http://www.fluxgallerypress.co.uk/

Tags: Andrew Oldham, Born Into An Unquiet, Ed Reiss, Flux Gallery Press, Gaia Holmes, Genny Rhatz, Ian Parks, Ian Pople, Jules Smith, Linda Marshall, Milner Place, Peter Didsbury, T.F. Griffin, Tony Flynn, William Park

Ian Parks & Gaia Holmes at Saltaire Festival, Sat 12 Sep 2:00 PM

Ian Parks & Gaia Holmes at Saltaire Festival

introduced by Andrew Oldham

Supported by Salt’s Mill

Date/Time(s): Sat 12 Sep 2:00 PM

Venue: Saltaire Bookshop

IAN PARKS’ first collection was published in 1986. He was made a Hawthornden Fellow in 1991 and received a Travelling Fellowship to the USA in 1994. He was one of the National Poetry Society New Poets in 1996. He has taught creative writing at the universities of Oxford, Hull, Sheffield and Leeds. A THROUGH ALTERED LANDSCAPES was published in 1998 and followed by SHELL ISLAND and THE CAGE. epoems appear in THE OBSERVER, THE LIBERAL, THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY, POETY REVIEW and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3. His collected love poems is due out this autum from Flux Gallery Press. 

 GAIA HOLMES was born in Halifax, West Yorkshire. Her debut poetry collection Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed was published by ‘Comma Press’ in 2006. 8 of her poems have been adapted to film by regional film makers. Her poem Desires (dir: Kate Jessop) was shortlisted for a ‘Virgin Media Shorts’ award and has since been screened in cinemas and city squares throughout the country. Gaia is a graduate of Huddersfield University’s English with Creative Writing BA, and has previously made a living as a busker, a cleaner, a gallery attendant,an oral historian, a lollypop lady , a poet in residence and a Creative writing lecturer. She is currently a freelance writer, a part-time lecturer and a DJ for Phoenix FM (her local community radio station) where she broadcasts a fortnightly show music and literature show called ‘Themes for dreamers’. She is slowly gathering her dreams, ideas and favorite words and weaving them into the shape of a new collection.

More information on the festival at: http://www.saltairefestival.co.uk/

Tags: Andrew Oldham, Gaia Holmes, Ian Parks, Sailtaire Festival

T.F. Griffin Audio Recording July 2009

Another poet, another recording and a million miles away from the opinions of Milner Place. T.F. Griffin is a poet who believes that every poetic line should be able to stand alone. These principals came across the recording in Leeds and Ian Parks, Ed Reiss and I were joined by Jules Smith (TLS Critic) and Pam Scobie. It was a busy afternoon, and we did cover vast sections of Griffin’s life from his correspondence with Ted Hughes to his work with Larkin. T.F. Griffin comes from the Hull Poets movement, a tempestuous time that saw the far left clash with the literary elite, and saw poetry at it’s political height. T.F. Griffin went against this grain to capture poetic images that owe more to Yeats and Hughes then campus sit ins, three day week and the growing crowd of bored, angry young men.

I hope in the next few weeks to put up some audio excerpts from this recording and Milner Place’s recording, probably under the Oldham Sessions banner – let me know if you want to hear them!

In the above image are left to right, at the back, Andrew Oldham and Ed Reiss, and at the front, Ian Parks and T.F. Griffin.

Tags: Ed Reiss, Ian Parks, Jules Smith, Oldham Recordings, Oldham Sessions, T.F. Griffin

Milner Place Audio Recording February and June 2009

I have been busy recently recording a number of Northern based poets. Rather than just recording their poems, I have, with the help of Ian Parks and Ed Reiss, been delving a little deeper. This has allowed us not only just to capture the poems, discuss form, influences etc but look at the stories behind the poetry. These recordings have often caught the funny and sad tales behind the poet’s life, and rather than romanticise the world of poets, show that poets are just normal people and have to cope with the same chaos we all have to cope with.

It was a delight to record Milner in February and June of 2009 and get an oversight of his life. He was frank, honest and shared many of his old and new poems with us.  I do agree with many of things Milner has said in these two recordings. One of these things I want to pass on is what Milner said in the first recording, ‘I am not a poet, I just write poetry’. I wish a lot of new and established poets would take this on board rather than believing they have to buy into a lifestyle, the life of a tortured poet, the garret and the tempetuous relationships that they believe dog the life of poets. This is just life. Good poets note this. Bad poets buy into it. Milner Place is a man who writes fantastic poetry and it was an honour to record him and bloody good fun.

Tags: Andrew Oldham, Ed Reiss, Ian Parks, Milner Place, Oldham Recordings