Doug Sandle writes:
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| Kim Moore and George Szirtes |
I was delighted to introduce George, having been one of his
lecturers and tutors at the Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Metropolitan
University) when from 1969 to 1972 he was a fine art student. Both his life at
Leeds and continuing interest in visual art featured among several of the poems
he presented. A connection with his former student days was the poem Poet about Martin Bell, who was Gregory Fellow in Poetry
at Leeds University 1967 to 1969 but who thereafter taught at Leeds Polytechnic
for a time and who was very influential in nurturing creative writing among the students (and staff) of the art
and design department. Poet makes
reference to James Thompson's City of Dreadful Night which was parodied in the title of Martin’s powerful
response to and critique of the Leeds of the sixties, the City of
Dreadful Nothing. Bell’s poem refers to the
‘Merrion Centre with
its special subways for mugging’ and the Merrion Centre receives a mention in
another Leeds related poem read by George, Chuck Berry Live, which begins
Too
tired to dance with anyone right now
After
the gig, here in the Merrion Centre
Where
Chuck Berry has just taken his bow.
The poem goes on to describe a bleak experience of Leeds,
which has much of the tone of
Martin Bell’s City of Dreadful Nothing. Another
poem, Girl Flying recounts an
incident when George witnessed a girl student caught by a fierce wind on the
steps that led up to the Leeds Polytechnic’s H Block, to such an extent she was
blown into the air and which stirred his imagination to imagine her flying:
When
she stood at the top of the stairs by the door
of
the college, the wind caught her up and so
she
flew all the way down, as if no more
than
a micro-detail on a map that any breeze could blow,
and
if she could have flown of her own will
at
any time she chose, this was how she’d go,
These two poems are one of five grouped together under the
title Yorkshire Bitter and another read
was Night Out, about his
experience of a notorious Leeds Pub of the sixties, The Hayfield, a poem, which
as in several of his poems, contained references to popular culture of the time
with mentions of Jack Palance, Pat Phoenix and Leeds United footballers Sniffer
Clarke and Norman Hunter. The poem begins:
Everyone
wears drag around here. The barman
In
gold lamé and vast peroxide wig
serves
pints of Sam Smith to a local Carmen
wearing
the cruiser’s full authentic rig
of
white blouse, fish-nets, tiny leather skirt,
with
three day’s stubble, mouth like a ripe fig.
Visual art, the visual and the painterly is also still a
concern as exemplified by poems from A Howard Hodgkin Suite and also from
Minimenta –postcards to Anselm Kiefer. The sensual synaesthetic relationship between
colours and the sound of words was evident in a poem entitled Colours, which beings with fourteen lines of colour names –
some as in common use and others made up.
Burlywood,
Charteuse, Gainsboro, Ghostwhite, Greenberg,
Maroon,
Orchid, Moccasin, Peru, Demosthenes, Snow,
Papayawhip,
Popper, Peachpuff, Hotpink, Hothot,
Darkred,
Darkgrey, Dodgerblue, Drudgery, Derrida,
Some of the poems presented also related to photographs and
film or were structured around a
celebration and exploration of the interrelationships among the
forms, patterns and sounds of words. His final poem Say So was much enjoyed by the audience for its musical resonance.
However while the imagery and pictures in his poems are
powerful as such, they often rapidly develop and lead us on a journey into the
metaphysical and in the case of his reading Seeking North from a sequence entitled Northern Air: A
Hungarian Nova Zembla a journey is itself
the means for this. His poem Allotment from the Mimimenta –postcards to Anselm Keifer is another example, which begins
When
I glimpse from the train a clutch
of
allotments, a tight row of cabbages or spuds
or
garden peas, I think there are gods
beyond
gods who live in the bones
of
men and women, shivering at their touch;
that
when rain falls it weeps hailstones;
There was much variety in the reading and a personal and
moving Prayer for my Daughter will have
resonated with parents in the audience and such as Madhouse had political implications.
All together it was a very powerful and inspiring reading
and while it was George Szirtes’ first visit to Leeds for a long time, let us
hope that it will not be too long before the next one.
Click here to hear six early love poems.
Click here to hear six early love poems.
Richard Wilcocks writes:
Two things in
particular struck me as I was listening to Kim Moore read. The first was that
she, a mistress of the lyrical, should team up with another musician, or an ensemble, to create new
material for new performances: Teaching the Trumpet would be an obvious starting point. It provides good, professional advice:
Imagine you are
spitting tea leaves
From your
tongue to start each note
So each one
becomes the beginning of a word.
Sing the note
inside your head then match it.
It’s advice
which is brought into a new dimension by the closing lines about remembering…
the man who played so loud/ he burst a blood vessel in his eye… lines which
invite much surmise. Who? When?
The second was
the confident way in which she can speak from her own dark depths, like a
cave-based oracle or a priestess well in touch with the lupine side, which has
been noted by plenty of commentators, lifting off from the terrific title poem of
her 2011 pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves. Lupine could indicate sensual or fleshly, but
it’s a lot more than that: Today at Wetherspoons demonstrates how tellingly she observes the people
she encounters on the shore, in the street, on trains, in pubs:
…The women tilt
in their
chairs, laughter faked,
like mugs about
to fall, cheekbones
sharp as
sadness…
The poem goes
on to address matters lupine, or perhaps just seedy:
…My feet slide
towards a man
with one hand
between his thighs…
The key poem
for me on this particular evening was Hartley Street Spiritualist Church. The interest in the dark depths is in
there, of course, how could it not be when the church in question has a psychic
artist, shudder-inducing mediums (who were trainees, we were told afterwards)
and a voice whispering to her that a drawing of an elderly woman with a perm is
a depiction of her grandma? But the poem is not really in any gothic domain: there is
a hymn by Abba (I believe in angels) and a spirit dog wandering around. The dry humour
is delicious.
Her personal
narratives – for example one of her more recent poems which is centred on when
her husband had a nasty fall in the bathroom – often celebrate the unexpected,
or the odd, and then there is always the landscape of her part of Cumbria looming somewhere behind the characters,
a cloudy cyclorama.
Photos by Richard Wilcocks
Photos by Richard Wilcocks
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