Vernacular

Poems of Working Class Lives by the New and Next Generation Poets

As part of this project I seem to be developing, I will be giving a paper at the Institute of English Studies conference: “New to Next Generation 2014: Three Decades of British and Irish Poetry” on March 13th (come along). I am on a panel entitled Promoting an Inclusive Poetics (I should be careful what I wish for). So as part of developing the paper, I thought I better get to know who the ‘Generation’ poets are.

I have featured four of the Generation Poets on the site so far – from 2014: Hannah Lowe, Kei Miller and Helen Mort; and one from 2004, Patience Agbabi. None from 1994 as yet.

In line with my belief that all poets have written a poem of working class lives, I am going through the poems (at least the ones that are available online at this stage) of each Generation poet to find out if there is any truth to my belief. So this first instalment is a selection from the 1994 ‘New’ Generation – I have looked at eleven of them so far, there are others such as Don Paterson and Kathleen Jamie I know I will find poems from, but there are still a few that I haven’t found one for (e.g. Glyn Maxwell, Lavinia Greenlaw), though I haven’t lost hope.

1994

Moniza Alvi: The Country at My Shoulder is about Moniza’s country of origin, Pakistan, the poverty and gender divide there and how it weighs heavily on her identity.
‘the women stone-breakers chip away/at boulders, dirt on their bright hems./They await the men and the trucks….I try to shake the dust from the country,/smooth it with my hands.’

Simon Armitage: Clown Punk is very much a poem about identity, of how for some it changes, whereas others may believe it remains the same as exemplified in fading tattoos.
‘don’t laugh: every pixel of that man’s skin,/is shot through with indelible ink;/as he steps out at the traffic lights/think what he’ll look like in thirty years time.’ (more…)

Photograph, Art Student, Female, Working Class by Liz Lochhead

liz lochheadThere are not enough portrayals of working class females in literature. What there are, often tend to be of escape from a repressive class or one of discrimination when trying to be part of another. I was therefore struck by the title of Liz Lochhead’s poem, “Photograph, Art Student, Female, Working Class“. It is both intriguing and to the point, which I think always makes for a good title for a poem.

I don’t think the poem is wholly based upon the model, Twiggy (she was 17 in 1966, not 18, was dubbed the ‘face of 66’, but didn’t go to art school), but in some ways that doesn’t matter; the young woman in question represents many from her background at the dawn of women’s liberation in the 1960s. The poem was written for Carol Ann Duffy‘s Jubilee Lines anthology. where 60 poets wrote a poem for each year of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee; Liz’s year, whether chosen by her or not, was 1966. (more…)

A Cento from October’s Poems

photo (3)It has been a great pleasure to have featured eleven poems up to the end of October. In order, these were:

1.  Birmingham Roller by Liz Berry (with a video of Liz reading it so beautifully).

2.  Hoxton Stories by Karen McCarthy Woolf

3.  This Zinc Roof by Kei Miller.

4.  North by Paul Summers

5.  Shitneck. Playing the Name Game by Steve Ely (with a video of him reading his poem Arthur Scargill)

6.  Quality Street by Debris Stevenson (with a great performance from her at Wordsmiths & Co)

7.  Portraits of Women – East London 1888 by Anna Robinson

8.  Living Space by Imtiaz Dharker (with a video of her reading two poems for Bloodaxe)

9.  Last Orders for Chesterfield by Helen Mort

10. A Conversation with a Man in Wetherspoon’s by Raymond Antrobus (with a video of him acting it out)

11. I Beg to Apply for the Post by Catherine Graham

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Karen McCarthy Woolf’s Hoxton Stories

 

Karen McCarthy WoolfKaren McCarthy Woolf‘s Hoxton Stories are vernacular poems of her grandfather’s experience growing up in the area. Here is featured, Guy Fawkes Night, taken from Modern Poetry in Translation Dialect of the Tribe. I have written poems taken from my Father’s verbatim experience of living within the pages of Angela’s Ashes, (for him it was Glasgow) but never thought of it as translation. But thinking about it, that is what it is; maybe not in the literal sense of how we understand translation as a foreign language, but in the vernacular sense. Translation is more than understanding or comprehending, it is about empathizing with, not only people’s experience but their culture. This is summed up in the final beautiful and direct words of her grandfather, ‘So what d’ya reckon about that one then?’ Well, what d’ya reckon?

Karen has recently published “An Aviary of Small Birds.”

www.karenmccarthy.co.uk

Twitter: @KMcCarthyWoolf

 

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Liz Berry and the Music of the Vernacular

Black-Country-Final1The Black Country by Liz Berry is a wonderful contemporary example of vernacular poetry. It goes beyond mere dialect to use the words as a way of conveying meaning and music. Elsewhere, the novels of the likes of James Kelman or Roddy Doyle use dialect to great effect in conveying working class life in Glasgow and Dublin. And Liz Berry does this in her poems about the Black Country and surrounds. To help us along, she even features translated words at the end of each poem.

http://lizberrypoetry.co.uk/

Twitter: @MissLizBerry

Best of luck to Liz tonight at Forward Prize for first collection.

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