We’ve been building a new web hub home for The Understory Conversation project, going forward.
I’m really glad poet and pal Sarah Barnsley has joined in this fledgling endeavour.
And grateful to my sons: Will built the website, and Joe designed the logo (which appears here).
Nothing better than having allies around you! Which is what The Understory Conversation is all about.
Really glad and grateful to have been invited to do an interview on poet, novelist and blogger Paul Tobin’s Magpie Bridge.
I enjoyed responding to his excellent questions, such as What makes you angry? and How far does real life creep into your work?
I seem to be collecting ‘house’-poems.
So, a while ago, on this blog, I wrote about Tom Duddy’s wonderful poem ‘Doorways’. I also referred in that piece to a poem of my own, from The Girl Who Cried.
‘The house with no door’ is here:
Then, last week, a poet-ally pointed me to a Raymond Carver poem: ‘Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying to Get Back In’.
What a brilliantly rich metaphor it offers, at the same time as a beautiful, natural description of a real experience.
Continue reading “ROOM IN MY HOUSE”
Recently I was chatting with two poet friends, and we remarked on how we did enjoy rain in a poem.
Well, I feel the same way – actually, more so – about telephones.
Continue reading “MEANWHILE TELEPHONES CROUCH”
‘The Understory is the group I so badly needed and didn’t know how to find. How could you possibly look this up on the internet? And now here it is: the beginnings of an innovative, experiential, inclusive conversation about what it means to be human, as a poet, in a flailing but wondrous world. I can bring a poem to a meeting. I can bring a problem or a thought, about writing or about my understory. I can bring all of these things – or none of them. This is utterly liberating. How many poet-group-spaces do that?’
An Understory group member
Last week I noticed a poem shared by Blue Diode Press on Twitter. ‘Meditation’, by Eunice De Souza, appeared in the collection A Necklace of Skulls: Collected Poems (Penguin).
The poem’s first two lines leapt out at me:
The lonely ask too much and then
too little
I love how the form reflects its content: how these two lines mirror what they’re describing.
All those words (relatively) crammed into that first line, in haste and at too great length; only to fall away into the sad stump of the second.
How differently it would read if the line break fell in the obvious place – after ‘too much’. I really FEEL it this way.
I see a baby who cries and cries, then gives up crying.
I also think about ideas I’ve explored before – people thinking they know what they want (read ‘lack’) but that familiar yearning masking an ambivalence, or terror.
I explore similar concerns myself – to all of these – in The Girl Who Cried.
Because I can feel I’ve spent my life rushing towards people, then retreating. Asking ‘too much and then / too little’.
So there it is: the magic.
A whole lifetime’s dilemma distilled – understood, reflected back – in two short lines of poetry.
I really enjoyed talking with Peter Kenny, for the Planet Poetry podcast recently. He asked great questions, including are readers to be trusted, and is poetry a place I feel I can enter safely? Together we took a spin around ‘Gannland’, a term Peter coined originally when reviewing Noir in 2016.
Do please listen to the Anxiety / Comfort episode which features our conversation here.
In The Girl Who Cried I have a poem about a ‘house with no door’. Tom Duddy’s wonderful poem ‘Doorways’ is very different – but, for me, it touches on related themes.
Continue reading “The front world, and the back”
Both my poetry collections – all three, if I include my pamphlet, The Long Woman – tell what I’m increasingly thinking of as my ‘understory’. There’s the public account we generally give of ourselves – the ‘how are you?’ ‘Coping, thanks’, ‘how’re the kids?’ version. The job. The family. The background. The how we look – ‘The smile I wore – my kind of clothes’ – as I put it in one poem in The Girl Who Cried. So, there’s this public face – our LinkedIn Profile. And then, well, for me certainly, there’s been a totally other story.
Continue reading “PARALLEL LINES”
It’s funny isn’t it, how individual photos can really move us? A photo that’s in no way spectacular: an old blurred print, only 3½ by 4½ inches, taken at a no-particular moment. One we’d have discarded as uninteresting when the holiday snaps came back from the chemist.
Here’s one such, for me. Taken, I know, in summer 1981, when I’d just done my O Levels. We’re in Denmark: I’m standing; my sister Sarah (who was then in her mid-twenties and living in Amsterdam) is seated, in a white T shirt; her Australian flatmate Anne, in yellow beside her.
I’ve no idea why this photo so stirred me when I found it yesterday, but it did and does. Something about it looking like a film still? I really like the brown and yellow, almost sepia, colour scheme. I find it touching to catch this glimpse of us so much younger. (What am I even doing? Maybe putting a cassette into a tape recorder? Or opening a bottle of wine? Gawd knows…)
A photo we just stumble on, in an old bag, stuffed between pages of a book, one of a bunch in a torn brown envelope, out of focus – not even taken in a place that means much to us.
And no one smiling into the camera, not posed; just caught in some random moment. Three people. Being alive. Thirty nine summers ago.
Charlotte Gann 