Issue 8 by Rebecca Sheppard

Issue 8, November 2009

the

www.durham.ac.uk/grove

GROVE

POEMS OF THE MONTH

Teasing Tu Fu Here on the summit of Fan-k’o Mountain, it’s Tu Fu under a midday sun sporting his huge farmer’s hat. How is it you’ve gotten so thin since we parted? Must be all those poems you’ve been suffering over.

Li Po

The Poetry / after Li Po I found him wandering on the hill one hot blue afternoon. He looked as skinny as a nail, as pale-skinned as the moon; below the broad shade of his hat his face was cut with rain. Dear God, poor Du Fu, I thought: It’s the poetry again.

Don Paterson

EDITOR’S COMMENT Do these poems go to say that December in Durham was always going to be crazy? Inside is what we would like to think of as a both a balm for your sufferings and an encouragement for your endeavours. Maybe I’ve overstated that, but if things really are looking seriously serious you may want to pop by our launch party, where storyreading will alternate with acoustic sets; details inside.

THE TEAM’S PAGE Dear Readers, Welcome, on behalf of The Grove team, to our 8th issue. It’s a somewhat special one this time as we’ve combined the English Writing and Events sections to bring you the best of this term’s Durham Book Festival. The two weeks were a great success and we’re proud to bring you a whole range of interviews, all accompanied with relevant extracts, from a host of the writers and poets that made an appearance. A special thanks to those who spared the time to be featured. And a special thanks to everyone who attended our first ever launch party! The night, which took place at the Durham Institute of Arts (DiA), was an outstanding success and included poetry readings, live music and a DJ set. In fact, it was so good we’ve decided to do it all again. Stories will be read and guitar music will be... guitared. The entry is as free as a copy of The Grove. So please join us again on 7th December, 8pm at The DiA on Neville Street (just off North Road) for what promises to be another fantastic night! Our decision to include all types of creative writing in The Grove is proving to be very popular and we’ve had a great response in terms of submissions for this issue. All we can say is keep them coming! We have two issues coming up next term, so whether it’s prose, poetry, drama, translations, don’t hesitate to send it in to grove@dur.ac.uk As mentioned, this issue sees a slight alteration to the usual format. But fear not, all the favourites are there, translations and student writing as normal and the English writing and Events section are to be found together with those exclusive festival interviews. So get stuck in and we’ll see you at the launch party. -The Grove Team.

To join our mailing list or get in touch, write to grove@dur.ac.uk Back issues and more information at www.dur.ac.uk/grove THE GROVE IS FUNDED BY

STUDENT WRITING The Grove just keeps on growing! Having lots of you lovely people submit your writing for us to read is wonderful; having to turn down a lot of it because we have space issues is not, however, so wonderful. Rilke said that writing for a true poet is not a choice, it is a necessity. So keep writing, and enjoy this small selection of student talent! EMILY CHESTER

Autumn It is autumn and this year you are not Here, and this year I am spitting on sentiment As the numbness seeps from blue fingers into Every artery’s blood pulse, pulse That song that I sung As your big lie masquerading as Preciousness Stripped. AUDREY ADAMS

Pink Plastic Chair Sat on the high burgundy leather sofa tears and adult words, well out. A mother’s rhetorical questions of why to fight over, money, ownership, families A widow, without citizenship, struggling to understand where she has been left Without a husband, in another country, strangers now to be trusted, her life organised differently. Words well out And a munchkin sits in a pink plastic chair eating her dinner in front of the television. Eyes wide to cartoons. With a big spoon in her hand, she turns her head occasionally, saying playful, simple things to the adults on the high sofa, between the tears. Her vision to the days, the care receives from her mother and words of love keep her a bright child, toddling on. 3

Audrey Adams

STUDENT WRITING

Happy in her munching, the angry, wet, saline words are not absorbed. The cartoons continue. But when will the tears stick? When does the pain permeate from mother to daughter? When will her vision lengthen, heaviness fall? The plastic chair is getting too small. ‘Don’t sit so close to the television’ ‘Sorry mama’ BEA MOYES

STUDENT WRITING Outside, felt-tip scribbles blur together Fields of green and violet nettles. Golden echoes promise pretty lies That hang in baskets outside the window. Gusts lead me through tangled lines To home. My kaleidoscope eyes See one world glisten, another fade. The beige door is locked by ruby key And I am safe. The seconds sing Into hours and days and afraid I clap and plead “encore!” – This mustn’t end. So next my dreams will play pretend.

Winter Crumble Crusty leaves beneath us crumble on frosty steps – we sit and grumble, Air like glass marks the heated breath Evaporating, when we have just left, All is quiet, wintry white bereft.

MATT LO

The Greatest Elixir

Every year the cold months come Shutting out that glittering sun, It leaves us in a dusky world And makes us wait – The fern to unfurl, A spring, to wipe away our moldy grey And bring about the warm soft day. AMANDA THOMAS

Porcelain My dollhouse sparkles; Sequin birds, crystal hearts, silver cans Blind out reality – an astonishing white – To the realm behind the curtains. Turquoise ribbons seam the walls together, Glitter forms the stars at night, Floral tights with their protective petals Bloom late November as if July. 4

To plunge never to emerge To breathe in a deeper elixir than air. To fall and never reach the earth To ground a greater grace onto The undulating meadows of a soul. To drift Dust in the dawn, Appearing unnoticed in a milky paradise, A warm glow on our shoulders, No imprint to be left unwashed Flooding at once off the edge of a lofty waterfall. Behind the towering trees, The bulging droops of new growth of last, The waves, colossal mountains of rock and ice, A more magnificent shadow will be cast. Bright flashes of colour in the night, Bubbling explosions of yellow and purple and white, Like sharp moments in time, 5

Matt Lo

STUDENT WRITING Cut in a straight line To the waterfall, The mountain, And the endless field of ice. Fizzing sparkles and cracks Cluster and burst, Singeing our peripheries, But not torching a barn in an inky void; A spot, A sparkle, A moment of clarity lost in the dense vacuum.

NADIA KHOMAMI

Wake Up Oh man What are you but flowing rivers And record players Slowly gathering dust In the corner of my quiet room?

STUDENT WRITING

Jamie Baxter

You howl I howl For the solitude and prayers, Ten tributes of orchestral glory Go to the fortuitous fool Who stuck out his hand And felt the damp Within his palm. The angels wait for me, They say Wake up Wake up You’re dead, I play my numbers two a piece And rest my decaying soul, I stand and watch the Thames a- flowing And I wait For your epitaph. KATE HUTCHINGS

Christmas

What are you but moans, Visions of a life Not yet lived But foredoomed?

Tonight I’m eating all the kisses Off the mistletoe Because you’re not here.

And man, When will the angelic chorus’ play? I shall moan tonight Like no other, With suitcase in hand, Heavy with the burdens Of yesteryear’s Indifference.

JOE CRONIN

Winter Pastoral The man was walking through woodland on a bright winter’s morning, with a collie dog at his heel. He wore a waxed Barbour jacket and a flat cap. The dog kept wandering off into the undergrowth, looking for rabbit holes. He never got far before the man called him back. At this time of the year, the woodland was a tapestry of bare branches. White

Oh man, You stand in rain, 6

Jamie Baxter

STUDENT WRITING

birches and alder saplings clustered beneath lofty evergreens. The dirt path was surrounded by thickets of heath, covered in emerald mosses and gorse bushes with little yellow flowers. Everything glistened with the frost. It was silent except for the odd bird call and the crunch of leaves underfoot. The man hadn’t seen another person all morning. He didn’t mind that. He liked the solitude. The path descended into a clearing, where an oak tree stood. It was a stout old oak, standing proud even in its winter nakedness. There were a few trinkets dangling from its branches: wind chimes, a dreamcatcher, and a ceramic angel. A bunch of rotten flowers lay at the base of the tree. The man stopped. “Sit,” he said to the dog. The dog sat down and gazed up at his master. The man stood there for a long time and took it all in. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but no words came out. After a while, he turned his head towards the dog, and they continued walking.

The Tower

STUDENT WRITING

George Mason

CHARLOTTE JONES

To Lose Lost in myself, in you, I’m lost. To lose is to be left missing something You once had Like a party dress that sparkled and danced in the rain Or a scribble-free conscience You can lose your mind, your sight A life And a memory You tucked away in a box, wrapped up In blue, red, orange tissue paper But time, like a thief, stole it. You lose someone too, you lose someone To Cancer, war, your own stupidity, Like a light bulb, off, on, off Gone.

The porch light comes on a man in a suit leaves, hidden behind the door is a woman barely in her underwear. He thinks half about his journey home, half of an ill-conceived poem: comparing her nipples to the beads of rain on the windscreen; comparing her hair to the snow which his fingers remember. All the while he is turning through roads, like a bird in a tower

Lost is the past as if it won’t Come back. Maybe it will casually drop by one day Throw its arms around your neck And you’ll taste its smell, breathe its skin and feel, feel, feel. GEORGE MASON

The Bag

dreaming at night of full wings: the flutter, swoop and dive. She fills his mind with their time together. He lies awake, his mind sounding in the dark.

Do you ever feel, as you make your way through life, that you are gathering up, slowly and surely, no matter how you try, a greater and greater assortment of mistakes? I feel that way sometimes, especially so, as now, when I have just made a new one. As you pick it up and feel the weight of it, its cold heft in your palm, and place it in that bag you use to carry them, over your shoulder, you hear it clink against the

This is our tower: the skin sheath, the single breath, the hands which want to fill with flesh. 8

George Mason

STUDENT WRITING

others, nestling in its place, and you remember them all, and feel their weight anew. Perhaps this new stone is not such a large one. It will soon work its way to the bottom of the bag, to the others there, the small ones, the old ones, the I-was-onlyfifteen-at-the-times. Those ones which as you walk, with each new stride, jostle and clink and wear and grind, until you barely remember their original shapes, until you can’t pick them out, individually, from the sands at the bottom of the bag, the old mistakes, forgiven, forgotten, excused; but still there, a residual weight, a palimpsest of the bad old days. The bigger ones, the important ones, never make it down there, never lose their distinction. You remember them, you make sure you do, because you only want to carry the weight of one, of one of each sort. But they lose their edge, the sharp protrusion that once dug into your back, let you never forget for a moment, kept you awake at nights. They soften and round, like a smooth rock from the beach, so that they are heavy, still with you, important, but not painful, except for that dull ache of the weight, pulling down on you at times like these, times when a new stone clinks and jostles them on its way down. Sometimes one from last year that had softened a little gets turned around, protrudes again, pains you again, for a while. It’s still got a point, enough to feel at this new angle, though it’s not sharp anymore. And as your bag of misdeeds is brought back to your attention by this new addition, you may notice how it is filling. Perhaps you’re twenty-three, like me, and it’s filled just past a third of the way. Are you struck by another thought too? How long now until I need a new bag? AUDREY ROGERS

The Artist Flaky Croissants, butter yellow tea mugs, Scratchy canvases piled precariously high, Blizzards of peeling paint, rainbow speckles Against whitewashed walls, coughed up, Spluttered in sporadic fits of creativity. A collage of black, a collage of white, Pale photography wilting inside bold frames, Smiling faces, evasive eyes like fresh pencils, That sharpen, elucidate and then…erase. 10

STUDENT WRITING

Reetta Humalajoki

Beneath teak beams, wafts of turpentine Twirl into smells of bubble bath and Rest upon the girl, the solemn artistDirty blonde strands tied up in a paisley Scarf, clothes hanging off a fragile frame. A cigarette burns in the tray, coffee cools, As her virtue, tears, rips open and splits Into fragments that fall upon blank white, And her paint brush dips in and out of paint, Stroking the canvas, filling out fragments That blink through the pewter duvet of dawn. ANITA SIAN JONES

Moon The fat candle of the moon showed her face, throwing a silver, shimmering vale across the land. I walked home casting a night shadow across the dew dropped ground. REETTA HUMALAJOKI

My Stalker It started out subtly, She would cast a shadow in the corner of my eye, and I would begin to notice little things. Books I read as a child, left on the table. The one with the silver dolphin cover top most. I’m sure I haven’t touched that in years. I might just be scatterbrained. It grew to little coincidences, unfortunate collisions. Your skinny nosed ex brushing past with a glazed over gaze as I walked home weighed down by shopping and sweat patches. Or stumbling on a picture of me and mine, that day you had no time. 11

Reetta Humalajoki

STUDENT WRITING

The little things all started piling up. At the bottom of my purse bad memories. Last term’s prescriptions and drinks receipts, from nights we probably fought. And you ran home without me. These little bits of paper appear haphazard, but they were placed. I know, because She’s found me again. Suddenly She was everywhere, everything. Not just my life. Old music videos and documentaries on TV, I remember that song from ’93. Headlines littered with collective memories, last year’s school shooting and other tragedies. It started spilling out from under my feet. Remodelling, dad found newspapers under the kitchen floor. We’d been walking on headshots of Stalin, words of Cold War. There’s no point now, trying to ignore Her. Again I am surrounded by History. MATTHEW GRIFFITHS

Elegy in Blues Minor The high-toned player lies in state with whiskey bottle and saxophone. The late arrivals lament the late man’s last record being his final one. Their boys in ties and shorts run round his empty house – they’re hunting for his dressing-up box of sound. They cannot know the final score composed in liverspots by age from the treble clef of one ear across his forehead’s screwed-up stave. Stars shimmer in a final tear. Those boys are in the old man’s loft – it had played back his final notes, and in the late light’s shafts of soft dust, new melodies rumble in their throats.

TRANSLATIONS I wish I was busy travelling to all the places I read of... well, most of them at least (see “A Fly in the Urinal”)! This time round, we have a little Nietzsche classic, joyous, aggressive and beautiful as always, rubbing shoulders with 8th-century Li Po, while Gospodinov and Wieringa are contemporary favourites of mine - the latter having featured at Durham Book Festival. And no, don’t be alarmed by the presence of Welsh, the translations made for The Grove feature alongside the original - a little encouragement to look at literature from elsewhere (linguistically) and maybe translate something for us? GEORGI GOSPODINOV (Translated by Levitin and Levy from Bulgarian)

Christine Waving from the Train That had been her decision - to wave at everyone. The train was crossing the middle of Europe, passing through the Tatras, through the whole Slavic spirit of the landscape, long rows of mowed alfalfa, dandelions, and daisies. Poppies all along the rails were going crazy. I had the feeling the all the Middle European railway companies were proving for themselves mainly through selling opium. The sun was already setting, and the sunset over those plaines promised never to end, and Christine, who was sticking her head out of the window, shone as if made of tinfoil. I suddenly recalled someone saying it takes just one wave of a butterfly’s wings to change the world. She turned around and declared that she was not a butterfly... especially not of tinfoil. Sometimes she really showed me her surprising abilities. Leaning out again, she waved aggressively at some old Middle European peasant. The man noticed her, hesitated, and, as it seemed to me, even looked around shyly then, waved back. “Well,” said Christine, turning around again, “I think I made him glad, all right.” You burst into his life, all right,” I answered. “Imagine now, this ma, comes home to his aging and pretty boring wife, tosses some hay to the donkey, gives the pig some slop, drives the sheep in, and sits down in front of his house on the warped sear taken from a truck. And imagine that he can’t get you out of his head, not even for an instant. On top of that, you remind him terribly of some woman ticked so deep in his memory that he hasn’t thought of her for thirty-eight years now. And the more he thinks and sips his mastika, because meanwhile he has taken out a bottle, the more clearly he sees how everything has rushed past him, just like that train. But trains never stop here, at his crumbled, small, pitiable life, dirty yellow like the station toilet wall wet with piss. And right then , his wife, dressed in a bleached gown patterned in small pink flowers, appears at the door shouting at him to stop boozing 13

Georgi Gospodinov

TRANSLATIONS

Friedrich Nietzsche

and to come inside for dinner, and he doesn’t even look at her, feeling so bad that even hurling the bottle at her wouldn’t help. It’s a if that same train from thirty-eight years ago had come back and were running over him very slowly. Terribly slowly...” I felt that my imagination was gaining a kind of sadistic momentum, so I shut up. Christine had huddled up in the seat by the window and was looking at me, almost frightened. “Are you serious?” “I’ve warned you. You can’t burst into people’s lives, even just by waving your hand. Sometimes you can unwittingly become their destiny.” “Bullshit. It’s awful, turning everything into a story.” And in order to show me how strongly she believed what she said, she turned abruptly to the window and waved in a forced way at a linesman who was standing to attention in his slightly oversized uniform beside the passing train. The linesman remained in the same position, his head turned left, for another few minutes. She looked really irresistible in the never-ending light of the evening sun. “Why didn’t he wave back, huh?” She sounded so hurt, her eyes so accusing, as if I were hiding away the answer away in a story that only I knew. I explained that right now he was at work, and the engineer could interpret his waving hand in a wrong way. “Still, he liked you,” I remarked, “and I definitely think that he barely refrained from waving back.” Now she made a face made to show her utter indifference to whether some linesman liked her or not. But shortly afterward she said, as if in passing, “Still, i e really liked me that much, he would have waved back, no matter what.” “I’m sure he already regrets that. But can you imagine what would have happened if he hadn’t restrained himself and had starting waving like a... ,” I was about to say ‘like a clown,’ but that could have insulted her, so I went on cautiously: “The engineer would have instantly interpreted his waving as some signal. He might have changed tracks, and now you and I would be rushing toward some train coming from the opposite direction. And so your linesman would never had the chance to see again. I guess all of that must have crossed his mind in an instant, preventing him from waving back.” She definitely liked this version, but she wanted to hear the rest of the story. “Just don’t try to come up with horrible things like the last time.” I assured her that this time it was a completely different story and that she has intervened happily in the young linesman’s life. I was forced to tell in grand detail about how from now on no single train would be just a train to him, but rather the bearer of the most beautiful thing he would ever see in his life. And how from now on all the passengers would see an infatuated linesman, his eyes scanning the windows of the passing trains...

Listening to the story, Christine missed the chance to burst into the life of a young family pushing a baby carriage, three gypsy kids waving enthusiastically by a crossing gate, an old lady, and two dogs.

A Fly in the Toilet In a German toilet - I mean, in the men’s room - the urinals look like this: polished to a radiance, which is understandable, but with a fly in the middle of each of them. At first, it makes you jerk back in disgust, then you see that the fly has been painted on. Complete realism. The fly in there has at least two functions. First, by its absolute inappropriateness, it is intended to emphasize the utterly antiseptic look of the German men’s room, especially of the urinal. The second function, as I found out upon inquiring, is purely pragmatic. A man standing in front of a urinal needs an object to take aim at. A fly is a good target, an irritant, bull’s eye that the man unconsciously seeks to hit. And by means of this simple system, “target - direct hit,” the chances of scattered fire can be significantly reduced. That way you get both: the fly is hit, the men’s room is clean. And the man is satisfied. All of that can happen only in a German toilet, where the fly is painted on. What if we are in a toilet somewhere in the Balkans?! (We call them shit holes around here - and for good reason.) First of all, there’s more than one fly. Second, they’re all real. And, third, they never stand still. At this point our story comes to an end, because the squeamish reader gets sick, the ladies feel neglected and the analogies turn into allegories. No story can be harmless anymore. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (Translated from Walter Kaufmann from German)

from Thus Spoke Zarathustra “Stop, dwarf!” I said. “It is I or you! But I am the stronger of us two: you do not know my abysmal thought. That you could not bear!” Then something happened that made me lighter, for the dwarf jumped from my shoulder, being curious; and he crouched on a stone before me. But there was a gateway just where we had stopped. “Behold this gateway, dwarf!” I continued. “It has two faces. Two paths meet here; no one has yet followed either to its end. This long lane stretches back for an eternity. And the long lane out there, that is another eternity. They contradict each other, these paths; they offend each other face to face; and it is here at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway is inscribed above: ‘Moment.’ But

Friedrich Nietzsche

TRANSLATIONS

Tommy Wieringa

whoever would follow one of them, on and on, farther and farther — do you believe, dwarf, that these paths contradict each other eternally?” “All that is straight lies,” the dwarf murmured contemptuously. “All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle.” “You spirit of gravity,” I said angrily, “do not make things too easy for yourself! Or I shall let you crouch where you are crouching, lamefoot; and it was I that carried you to this height. “Behold,” I continued, “this moment! From this gateway, Moment, a long, eternal lane leads backward: behind us lies an eternity. Must not whatever can walk have walked on this lane before? Must not whatever can happen have happened, have been done, have passed by before? And if everything has been there before — what do you think, dwarf, of this moment? Must not this gateway too have been there before? And are not all things knotted together so firmly that this moment draws after it all that is to come? Therefore — itself too? For whatever can walk — in this long lane out there too, it must walk once more. “And this slow spider, which crawls in the moonlight. and this moonlight itself, and I and you in the gateway, whispering together, whispering of eternal things — must not all of us have been there before? And return and walk in that other lane, out there, before us, in this long dreadful lane — must we not eternally return?” Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts. Then suddenly I heard a dog howl nearby. Had I ever heard a dog howl like this? My thoughts raced back. Yes, when I was a child, in the most distant childhood: then I heard a dog howl like this. And I saw him too, bristling, his head up, trembling, in the stillest midnight when even dogs believe in ghosts — and I took pity: for just then the full moon, silent as death, passed over the house; just then it stood still, a round glow — still on the flat roof, as if on another’s property — that was why the dog was terrified, for dogs believe in thieves and ghosts. And when I heard such howling again I took pity again. Where was the dwarf gone now? And the gateway? And the spider? And all the whispering? Was I dreaming, then? Was I waking up? Among wild cliffs I stood suddenly alone, bleak, in the bleakest moonlight. But there lay a man. And there — the dog, jumping, bristling, whining — now he saw me coming; then he howled again, he cried. Had I ever heard a dog cry like this for help? And verily, what I saw — I had never seen the like. A young shepherd I saw, writhing, gagging, in spasms, his face distorted, and a heavy black snake hung out of his mouth. Had I ever seen so much nausea and pale dread on one face? He seemed to have been asleep when the snake crawled into his throat, and there bit itself fast. My hand tore at the snake and tore in vain; it did not tear the snake out of his throat. Then it cried out of me; “Bite! Bite its head off! Bite!” Thus it cried out of me — my dread, my hatred, my nausea, my pity, all that is good and wicked in me cried out of me with a single cry.

You bold ones who surround me! You searchers, researchers, and whoever among you has embarked with cunning sails on unexplored seas. You who are glad of riddles! Guess me this riddle that I saw then, interpret me the vision of the loneliest. For it was a vision and a foreseeing. What did I see then in a parable? And who is it who must yet come one day? Who is the shepherd into whose throat the snake crawled thus? Who is the man into whose throat all that is heaviest and blackest will crawl thus? The shepherd, however, bit as my cry counseled him; he bit with a good bite. Far away he spewed the head of the snake — and he jumped up. No longer shepherd. no longer human — one changed, radiant, laughing! Never yet on earth has a human being laughed as he laughed! O my brothers, I heard a laughter that was no human laughter; and now a thirst gnaws at me, a longing that never grows still. My longing for this laughter gnaws at me; oh, how do I bear to go on living! And how could I bear to die now! Thus spoke Zarathustra.

RHODRI AP GWYNLLIW (Translated by Hickish and Jones from Welsh)

Y Cymro (The Welshman) Waeth heb a maeth arreuthau – mwy o son Am sennedd ahawliau; Nefoedd hwn yw ufuddhau, Anwylo’r hen hulalau No point to long speeches – with more Talk of senates and rights; Our heaven is to accept And comfort away old chains TOMMY WIERINGA

from Joe Speedboat ‘He wasn’t so much a special guy as a force that was freed. You tingled expectantly in his presence – there was an energy that took form in his hands, in no particular order he conjured up bombs, race-mopeds, and aeroplanes, juggling them like a lighthearted magician. I had never met anyone for whom ideas led so naturally to action, on whom fear and convention had so little influence.’

Tommy Wieringa

TRANSLATIONS

‘My thoughts went back to the years before I’d met Joe, before I’d left the world behind for 220 days. So many questions back then. So many it made me dizzy. There had to be more to it than this, I was sure of it: people couldn’t really be content to live and die the way they did. Some secret was being kept from me, something they knew but weren’t telling, something a thousand times more real than this. Wondering why, they say, is the start of all philosophy. For me it was the start of a kind of hell…Looking back on it, I think I wasn’t even searching for the truth or anything, just for something that shed a little light. My first year of high school was one huge disaster. It made me sick. Everywhere I looked I saw mediocrity and submissiveness. And an innocence that ruined everything, because it meant no one could really help it. If we were, in fact, the measure of all things, what hope was there of redemption? By the end of my second year I was furious. A long vacation followed, and I watched July go by. Then August came, and I waited for nothing. I lay on my back in the tall grass that was already turning yellow. The dryness rustled, little bugs crawled over my arms and legs. I let them. Somewhere I heard the pounding of a galloping horse, the corn was still half high and the rust-brown sorrel stuck out above it. I looked up at the blank sky. A lovely blue and all, but otherwise nothing. Growling monotonously, a little plane crossed the void. At the edges of my vision the woolly thistles were bursting their buds, butterflies fluttering aimlessly and I had the feeling I was sinking. I sank to a dark and quiet place. It was a day for cyclomowers. I must have heard it, the tractor pulling the snapping blades cutting through grass and flowers. Whack whack whack. No sleep so deep but that you would hear that. Who could fail to hear the roar of a 190-horsepower John Deere? Who would lie down and sleep in the grass at mowing time? Who would do something like that? Then you’ve got only yourself to blame. You’re right, all of you. Who would lie down in the grass at mowing time?’ LI PO (Translated by David Hinton from Classical Chinese)

Ching-t’ing Mountain, sitting alone The birds have all vanished into deep skies. The last cloud drifts away, aimless. Inexhaustible, Ching-t’ing Mountain and I gaze at each other, it alone remaining. 18

DURHAM BOOK FESTIVAL Earlier this term Durham played host to a national book festival, which ran from the October 23rd to November 1st, and to celebrate the festival’s great success, this issue sees The Grove combine the Events and English writing sections in order to bring you a hamper of post-festival exclusives! Several of the writers and poets were kind enough to spare some time for a few questions and each interview is accompanied by a matching extract. It’s all there for you to enjoy and once again a big thanks to all those featured. DON PATERSON

Rain I love all films that start with rain: rain, braiding a windowpane or darkening a hung-out dress or streaming down her upturned face; one long thundering downpour right through the empty script and score before the act, before the blame, before the lens pulls through the frame to where the woman sits alone beside a silent telephone or the dress lies ruined on the grass or the girl walks off the overpass, and all things flow out from that source along their fatal watercourse. However bad or overlong such a film can do no wrong, so when his native twang shows through or when the boom dips into view or when her speech starts to betray its adaptation from the play, I think to when we opened cold 19

Don Paterson

DURHAM BOOK FESTIVAL

on a rain-dark gutter, running gold with the neon of a drugstore sign, and I’d read into its blazing line:

DURHAM BOOK FESTIVAL

Mario Petrucci

So what’s next for you?

forget the ink, the milk, the blood— all was washed clean with the flood we rose up from the falling waters the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters and none of this, none of this matters JAMIE BAXTER INTERVIEWS DON PATERSON How do you prepare for a reading? There’s nothing to prepare for really, I write the poems and then just have to gauge what people want to hear. I mean, people come out to see you, you want to give them a good time. You’ve just won the Forward Prize for Rain, and many others, how do these prizes affect you? You feel happy for the poems, given that the poems have been through such torment over the past six years. But you’d be a fool to take it as a compliment in yourself, you might start to think you were on to something, which you’re not, the page is as white as it was yesterday. Your new Collection ‘Rain’ seems a lot bleaker than your previous collection ‘Landing Light;, was that just the effect the past six years had on you?

I’m more trying to write sonnets, so see how it goes. I’ve always thought, in a kind of pre-Socratic way that poetry is a good means of exploring what you think about stuff because the pre-Socratics combined the two, style was content and if you find a good way of saying it and a really short way of saying it, it’s probably true. I thought I’d just try and find out what was going on and I’m not any further forward and I won’t be any further forward at the end but hopefully I’ll have a whole bunch of sonnets. But I’m doing a bit with Shakespeare at the minute, looking at his sonnets . Is that why you’ve chosen the sonnet as the form to use? No, I’ve always written sonnets, but obviously that’s the big thing in English, the Shakespeare sequence. As a relatively new literary journal do you have any advice for The Grove? Just open all the mail away from your face because you never know what’s in it and who wants to kill you, it’s a dangerous business! Trust your instincts. You can’t go on anything you’re not feeling so what you wanna do is find out a way of making your gut feeling more reliable. At the end of the day if you don’t love it, don’t print it. Seriously, that’s all it comes down to. So all you do then is legislate against stupidity, then you’re clear. MARIO PETRUCCI

If you Were to Come Back

The last poem in the book is quite a long poem, an elegy to Michael Donaghy, did you write it over a long period of time?

I’d stand at the door like one bereaved: Aghast and breathless, With silence stretched between us For a second Before it snapped And my heart burst its banks In belief.

Yeah, it took me a long time to gear up to. I wrote it relatively quickly over a period of a year or so. I didn’t want to be the last one to deliver an elegy for Michael Donaghy, but we were very close and it was always gonna be a hard one.

Then I’d draw you in by both hands I’d kiss you on the mouth, on the face Wear out your name

Yeah, I mean you don’t know what’s gonna come up and sometimes your subject matter is something you’ve got to go and find and sometimes it comes and finds you. Unfortunately, a lot of it came and found me, you know, stuff happens, people die, it was rough.

Mario Petrucci

DURHAM BOOK FESTIVAL

with soft saying I’d kiss you more than you would want Until you’d have to draw back, breathless As one wounded To try to speak, to tell me Why it was you came. MATTHEW GRIFFITHS INTERVIEWS MARIO PETRUCCI

DURHAM BOOK FESTIVAL

David Nicholls

Cartesian way of seeing it? That would be the Cartesian way. An anti-Cartesian mode of poetry is able to carry all of these possibilities with it as it proceeds, things happen by chance, there’s things that you don’t actually agree with, there’s things that you might not precisely want to say, but the insistences that are expressing themselves are ones that you’re feeling through and thinking through and expressing through a different relationship to the conventional “This is what I need to say, what’s the best possible way of expressing it?”

I thought what was interesting listening to your reading tonight was that you had contrasting halves; in the second half, you’re using other people’s voices [in Heavy Water], so there’s almost a plain style, but the imagery is very rich ...

And this has informed your ecological angle, if you like, because things are connecting themselves like an ecosystem?

I agree. It’s the vernacular.

In a sense, that’s what’s gone wrong with ecology. We see ourselves as separate from it, and merely responding to changes in it and how are we going to fix it.

Yes. But then did you feel that you were consciously striving to find an idiom of your own in the other stuff [ie Flowers of Suplhur]? I mean I presume you were kind of writing these [poems] at the same time?

So it’s an instrumental thing?

It’s quite banal, but I try less and less “striving”, and more and more listening to what the language is doing. As you were saying about Charles Olson... Yes, and there’s Zukofsky, Robert Duncan, others. It’s more a case of language writing you, and that’s an old idea. There was lots of theory in the 80s about the language – structuralism and so on – being merely links, and then you have Chomsky’s generative grammar and so on. It’s just the infinity of ways of language expressing itself through us. Then you’ve got the selfish gene. I’m not talking about any of that. I’m talking about listening to the way language works in the line and being receptive.

Yes. Yes. We’re all Benthamites. And what it needs is to get back into a right relationship with it, and live it as it is. And that means perhaps living it in a degraded mode over the next hundred years, but being fully involved and immersed in, let’s not even call it “environment”. And do see poetry as a way, do you think it’s the best way of using language to express that kind of relationship? I don’t know if it’s the best. It has the – the resources? – the resources of, and especially post, and I don’t mean postmodernism, I mean, post-gap-modernism, after modernism, we’ve got very considerable resources, templates and exemplars of how to work more fluidly with language, to reach the deeper truths of how it functions and expresses our relationship with ourselves, our relationship with creation and perception.

To where it’s taking you. To the possibilities it expresses, even if you’re not entirely sure yourself where they’re going or what they mean in the moment that you’re experiencing them. So it’s not post-hoc writing, it’s not writing where you’ve had the experience and thought about it – So you’ve got the language over here and the experience over there, that would be the

DAVID NICHOLLS

from One Day And so Emma Morley walked home in the evening light, trailing her disappointment behind her. The day was cooling off now, and she shivered as she felt something in the air, an unexpected shudder of anxiety that ran the length of 23

David Nicholls

DURHAM BOOK FESTIVAL

her spine, and was so intense as to make her stop walking for a moment. Fear of the future, she thought. She found herself at the imposing junction of George Street and Hanover Street as all around her people hurried home from work or out to meet friends or lovers, all with a sense of purpose and direction. And here she was, twentytwo and clueless and sloping back to a dingy flat, defeated once again. ‘What are you going to do with your life?’ In one way or another it seemed that people had been asking her this forever; teachers, her parents, friends at three in the morning, but the question had never seemed this pressing and still she was no nearer the answer. The future rose up ahead of her, a succession of empty days, each more daunting and unknowable than the one before her. How would she ever fill them all? She began walking again, south towards The Mound. ‘Live each day as if it’s your last’, that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn’t practical. Better by far to simply try and be good and courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Go out there with your passion and your electric typewriter and work hard at... something. Change lives through art maybe. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance. That was her general theory, even if she hadn’t made a very good start to it. With a little more than a shrug she had said goodbye to someone she really liked, the first boy she had ever really cared for, and now she would have to accept the fact that she would probably never see him again. She had no phone number, no address, and even if she did, what was the point? He hadn’t asked for her number either, and she was too proud to be just another moony girl leaving unwanted messages. Have a nice life had been her last line. Was the really the best she could come up with? She walked on. The castle was just coming into view when she heard the footsteps, the soles of smart shoes slapping hard onto the pavement behind, and even before she heard her name and turned she was smiling, because she knew it would be him. ‘I thought I’d lost you!’ he said, slowing to a walk, red-faced and breathless, attempting to regain some nonchalance. ‘No, I’m here.’

a T.S. Eliot poem or a Samuel Beckett play and it obviously didn’t work! I focused mostly on acting at that stage but I studied English too so I was reading at the same time.

CHRIS HOGG INTERVIEWS DAVID NICHOLLS Thank you for giving this interview David. We may as well jump straight into the deep end and start by asking how you got into writing. Well the funny thing is I didn’t always want to be a writer. I think if I wrote anything when I was younger it was always trying to be something else. I would try to write

David Nicholls Interview

Do you have any favourite writers at all? And in what ways have they influenced your writing? I have a lot of favourite writers but it’s strange because I think in many cases I write nothing like them! I’m a big fan of Dickens, Orwell, Fitzgerald but I wouldn’t say there’s much of them in my writing. When I’m stuck I may pick up The Great Gatsby for example and obviously it’s such great prose that it naturally inspires on some level but I think for me there’s a definite sense of perhaps really enjoying something but perhaps not always channelling that directly into my writing. You said that you didn’t always want to be a writer. What was it that made you change your mind? I started by going into acting but I did a lot of understudy work. For a while I hung in, hoping for a break, but I remember it got to a point where I realised that it was all a bit absurd really. As an understudy you’re often in the odd position where your chance of a break may rest on another actor falling of his bike and breaking a leg, which isn’t exactly ideal! So I decided to knock acting on the head. After that I began to work as freelance script editor, using my acting background to aid me, and after a while I found myself being persuaded to have a go at writing myself. It was then that I did scripts for “Cold Feet”, “I Saw You”, and another series called “Rescue Me”. What, then, inspired you to make the switch to writing novels? And your novels often have quite a visual quality to them. Do you think that results from the experience you gained when writing for television? Well I certainly think that it did have its effect on my writing style and I suppose some of the techniques I use, such a cutting a lot between scenes like in “One Day”, owe a lot to what you may call television writing. But my decision to write Starter For Ten as novel owes a lot to television too. There was a wide sense at the time, though I think it’s changed slightly in recent years, that you couldn’t make a film about British University and British students. In America there’s a big tradition of ‘college films’ but in Britain many producers felt that the University experience just wouldn’t work or sell. So I started to write it as a novel. I was a bit nervous, especially as it was the first time I’d tried to write properly, other than for the screen, but the more I got writing the more I realised that it worked best in the 25

David Nicholls Interview

DURHAM BOOK FESTIVAL

novel format. What makes Brian Jackson [the novel’s protagonist] funny is the difference between what he thinks is the reality, in his own mind, and the actual reality of the situations he finds himself in. With the first person narrative of a novel it is much easier to represent this than it is on screen, unless you having a horrendous amount of voiceovers. It’s one of the reasons why I think some of the jokes are lost on the film adaptation.

DURHAM BOOK FESTIVAL

Andrew Motion Interview

Andrew Motion is an interesting character for a Poet Laureate; he seems to have a real love-hate relationship with the post he left earlier this year when we sit down in the Town Hall’s ad hoc green room following his Book Festival appearance. On enquiry, he explicitly says he doesn’t regret taking on the high-profile role for the

past decade; but he also says he is ‘very glad I did it, and very glad I am not doing it any more’. He seems to regard the role as almost a necessary evil, something he did as a public service rather than for any personal benefit: he talks about how the role has become ‘higher profile than ever before’, and states that there is a ‘price to pay’ for this for the person in the job, but that it must be good for poetry. His main problem is with commissioned poems, a large part of the Poet Laureate’s role. He dislikes writing poems about ‘something that strikes no bells’ with him. This inevitably leads to a question about the poem he has just read, commissioned for the Durham Book Festival, about Holy Island, which he admits he has never been to but would like to visit. He says the poem is ‘about not going to Holy Island’, a more interesting choice perhaps than writing about it through second-hand sources, whose ready availability thanks to the internet he discusses but does not believe limit experience. He also is unaware of what will actually happen to the poem now; free of being Laureate, he seems content to leave things to work themselves out. He speaks of how he has recently been writing poetry with a ‘greater sense of freedom than ever before’, the results of which will no doubt be very interesting to see when he next releases a collection. Which he will do shortly, one would think- what comes across from the interview is that however much he may have issues with the role of Laureate, he is passionately dedicated to poetry. He describes it as the language of the soul, a fairly standard description, but goes further, saying, ‘What is the first poem any child hears? Goo goo’, and going on to talk of playground chants as evidence of poetry’s importance to us all. ‘Poetry puts people in touch with their deep selves, it is primitive’, he states, clearly believing every word of it with great conviction. Summing up, he says, ‘fundamentally, it [poetry] is fundamental’. For him individually this is true too - he says he wants ‘poet’ on his gravestone rather than ‘writer’, as Larkin had. Asked what he is most proud of, he says the online Poetry Archive, still being added to- and, again bringing up his love-hate relationship with the Laureateship, says he would never have been able to do it had he not been Poet Laureate. He says we ‘live in a literary culture that is precisely as diverse as the social culture that we live in’, and wishes fervently that ‘people would talk to each other - so join it up’. His desire for literature’s separateness from society to be reduced is forceful. When asked about the future of the Laureateship, he says it is important that the Laureate ‘go about [the job] in quite a busy way’. He seems to believe his successor, Carol Ann Duffy- who briefly enters during the interview after a long drive up to Durham and is evidently a good friend of Motion’s- will do precisely this, describing her as a ‘good person, a well-liked person’. Finally, asked about Durham’s Festival, he says it is a ‘very, very good festival’, going from strength to strength, and ‘slightly more diverse’ this year. Presumably, given his enthusiasm for bringing poetry to a wider audience and recognising its fundamentality to us all, he will celebrate this development. Motion is, despite his

And finally David, what advice would you give to young writers? Are you a fan of creative writing courses for example? I’m certainly not anti-creative writing courses. Obviously it wasn’t the route I took but then there are so many routes into writing really. I’m not one of those writers who would say that natural talent is natural talent and you’ve either got it or you haven’t. I know that I had to work hard at my writing and whether you go for the whole creative writing course thing or not the best advice I can really give is simply to have patience and work hard at developing your writing into a style that you feel comfortable with. ANDREW MOTION

To whom it may concern This poem about ice cream has nothing to do with government with riot, with any political scheme It is a poem about ice cream. You see? About how you might stroll into a shop and ask; One Strawberry Split. One Mivvi. What did I tell you ? No one will die. No licking tongues will melt like candle wax. This is a poem about ice cream. Do not cry. THOM ADDINALL-BIDDULPH’S ACCOUNT OF AN INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW MOTION

Andrew Motion Interview

DURHAM BOOK FESTIVAL

problems with the role, clearly someone who made a good Laureate, not because of his poetry, but because of his carefully explained and stated dedication to poetry, something all readers of The Grove will no doubt appreciate.

Yeah, I said, noddin me head, serious-like. You wanna see a cow-fuck? Yeah. Really badly? I watched Arthur’s mouth twitchin at the corners. Not really badly, I said slowly. But fairly badly? Arthur said, but he couldn’t hod it together and fell back laffin in his placky chair. Yer a hoot, you are, now give us that back, he said.

JACOB POLLEY

from Talk of the Town Fer detention yer shut in a classroom and med ter write lines, lines like ‘I must learn to obey when those around me depend on my obedience’, or essays with titles like ‘What I have learnt during my time in detention’ while everyone else is outside. It’d be alright if yer were let out when yer’d written a thousand lines, but yer just given another thousand till the time’s up, so yer may as well dawdle through the first thousand yer given. People knock on the winders while yer in, their blurry hands loomin up the other side of the cobbly glass, and yer can hear the voices, which is the worse, the shouts and the fizzy chatter. The Mencae popped in ovver the two weeks Arthur and me weere cooped up, ter see we were keepin pace. What we and Arthur were doin was gettin acquainted ovver Hangman and Battleships, which Arthur showed us how ter draw out and we played, him on one side of the room and me at a desk on the other side. We were in nee hurry ter shade in our aircraft carriers and gunboats. Arthur told us how the cows swung past under his winder, so his days started and ended with the sound of splatterin shit, and how outta town, where he lived, there was anyspot to gan if he just took it into his head ter climb a gate and walk. He let us hod the bullet he’d dug outta the old rifle range ovver the fields from his house. The metal targets’re still there all stacked up, rusty and shot fulla holes, he said, and yer never see nee one down there. Yer stand on the toppa the range and yer can see straight ovver the Solway ter Scotland. Yer can swim there in all but nee one does anymore. Why not? Cus of radiation, yer dipshit. Yer gan in ter cool off and come out glowin. I thought about the empty country, imaginin myself stadin out lookout on the rifle range. Have yer ever caught a rabbit? Nah, I said, cus I hadn’t. Ever buried a sheep’s head, then dug it up when the skin’s rotted off it? Nah. Ever sin a cow-fuck? Nah. D’yer wanna? 28

Jacob Polley Interview

MAXIME DARGAUD-FONS INTERVIEWS JACOB POLLEY How long did it take you to write the book? Did you feel at one point, you’d go on writing it forever? I started to write it in 2004, I really, really liked writing it, but I never thought it would be a massive, 500 pages book covering plenty of characters. Despite the large number of characters, the first person narrative in the novel is very effective. Was it a deliberate decision to write from this perspective? There seemed no other way of doing it, it had to be first person, it had to be just a boy who knows certain things and sees the world in a special specific way, and yet there are a vast number of things that he is unaware of; he is very naïve. I could only show that through first person narration. In the same way, the book is written in the vernacular. Would you say that, in a way, the book is about language itself, something which the title suggests? Yes. The novel is about special ways of speaking, of talking and about gossip somebody being the talk of the town. As a reader of your poetry, I was able to see echoes of your work as a poet as the novel developed. Being a student, I was wondering if there is an attraction in writing about teenagers - or ‘young adults’? The book is about kingdoms, as well as about childhood. I think that is something that we’re left out of as adults and once we realise that we’re no longer children, we can’t ever go back. The one thing I think about children is that they think that they understand, but really, they don’t. That’s why I wanted to write about an area 29

Jacob Polley Interview

DURHAM BOOK FESTIVAL

where authority is not the authority one might expect. I wanted to write about a character whose language was unique to him... he was coining new words as one does in childhood, and so the novel is to do with being in school and related ideas. As a child, you’re busy re-making language - I think it’s quite an attractive thing to write about. Do you think that writing in the vernacular has its limitations? For example, would somebody who is not from Carlisle struggle to read your novel? I didn’t think that there would be any problem with the language, but that might have been my own naivety. I just thought that you pick up a book and read. As Sean O’Brien has said, poetry is hard and people find poetry hard, and yet it’s only 14 lines! However, we’ll persevere for how many pages with a novel? At least 10, 20, or 30. It is an odd thing that readers are prepared to do. I was more than prepared to take the risk of writing a novel even if it was naïve. I write poems, you know, and you expect people to read a poem again and again but when you write a novel, you can only expect the novel to be read once, so you want the reader to be drawn all the way through. I was faced with the challenge of having to adapt my writing style.

EVENTS CALENDAR THE GROVE LAUNCH PARTY Story time! Come along to Grove the 8th’s laid-back launch night! Stories will be read to you, and songs will be sung to the sweet music of guitars. A nice way to end the day at the end of a very hard term.

WEEKLY EVENTS Colpitts Poetry Reading: Sean O’Brien and Michael O’Neill, Alington House (North Bailey), Thursday 4th December at 8 pm, £4/£2.50 Mondays, 7.30-9pm at the Big Jug: Literature Discussion Group. This year, tutor David Crane will be discussing the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Tuesdays, 7.30pm: Creative Writing Society. Whether it’s overcoming writer’s block or getting feedback on yout work, CW can help. Contact creative.writing@dur.ac.uk to find out more. ER157.

STUDENT WRITING Intellectual copyright of all material in the Student Writing section is held by the authors

DURHAM BOOK FESTIVAL Don Paterson, “The Poetry / After Li Po;” “The Rain.” From The Rain (Faber & Faber, 2009)

TRANSLATIONS Li Po, “Teasing Tu Fu;” “Ching-t’ing Mountain, Sitting Alone.” Trans. David Hinton. From The Selected Poems of Li Po (Anvil Press, 1998)

Mario Petrucci, “If You Were To Come Back.” From Shrapnel and Sheets (Headland Publications, 1996) David Nicholls, One Day. (Hodder & Stoughton, 2009)

Georgi Gospodinov, “Christine Waving From The Train;” “A Fly In The Urinal.” Trans. Alexis Levitin and Magdalena Levy. From And Other Stories (Northwestern University Press, 2007)

Andrew Motion, “To Whom It May Concern.” From Selected Poems, 19761997 (Faber & Faber, 1999)

Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Vision And The Riddle, Section 2.” Trans. Walter Kaufmann. From Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Viking, 1954)

Jacob Polley, Talk of the Town.(Picador, 2009)

Rhodri ap Gwynlliw, “Kalzaki.” Trans. Frederick Hickish and Anita Jones. Intellectual copyright is held by the authors and translators.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to express our thanks to: Thom Addinall-Biddulph, Jamie Baxter, John Clegg, Matthew Griffiths and Alice Mullen for the interviews. Also, Durham Poetry Society and Taahir Patel at DiA for the launch party, Chris Wright for dictaphones, Sarah Elliott at the DSU and Rebecca Gent. Last but not least, a huge thanks to Olivia Mantle and New Writing North for making the interviews possible.

Talog Davies, “Gwen.” Trans. Frederick Hickish and Anita Jones. From Talwrn Y Beirdd (Gwasg Gwynedd, 1984) Gwynlliw Jones, “Y Cymro.” Trans. Frederick Hickish and Anita Jones. From Talwrn Y Beirdd (Gwasg Gwynedd, 1984) 31

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