Susannah Herbert's Reading List

"Yes, and she’s a big celebrity in Belfast because of it, which is deeply encouraging. What I like about Morrissey is that she moves forward. She is aware of the need to interrogate where you are at any given time. And she draws on the past. Her winning collection On Balance is largely about giving the past a voice and also drawing attention to the impossibility of knowing whether or not that voice is correct. It’s provisional. I like the precariousness of the book’s subject matter, like the aeroplane built by the early twentieth-century aviator Lilian Bland, which was called the Mayfly, and which, of course, may fly or may not fly. You constantly feel she is happy to be tentative. She’s not the kind of poet who makes definitive statements in the voice of God, ‘This is an announcement. This is the world. I give it to you.’ I think that’s generosity in her writing and I notice this particularly because part of the Forward Prize is to do with reaching new audiences. We give school children the chance to write about these poems and we make a little ebook of shortlisted poems that we distribute for free. A lot of these teenagers took flight from Morrissey’s poems, using her writing to inspire their own. There is a popular illusion about contemporary poetry that it’s very hard, unapproachable and deliberately obscure, but it’s clear from seeing how the children responded to Morrissey’s work, that they didn’t feel that at all. Ocean Vuong was the other poet that these students responded to with such enormous readiness. And they were writing not just critical essays but their own poetry. Yes, it’s part of the communication. Communication is not one way with a poem, it is two-way and that’s what I love most about it and why I would offer poetry as a model for literature at the moment. Well, I think there’s Louis MacNeice there, which I suppose is inevitable because of the Northern Irish connection. But there is one funny poem called “Perfume” which has all these teenage girls wetting themselves at a Beatles concert, and that made me think she had read a lot of Larkin. She’s also influenced by Les Murray. But out of all these voices, she makes her own voice and she is a bewitching speaker. I’ve seen her perform four times including at Buckingham Palace. She owns the space in which she speaks."

"I really love this book. It hums with energy. Tara’s worked a lot on translation and you see in this book a real playful joy in exploring what it means to move from one tongue to another, what it means to rephrase something, what it means to take a life and relive it or take words and re-say them. The cover is very beautiful and it’s got something on it that I couldn’t understand, a sort of red heart-shaped thing with a hole in it. I realised, eventually, that it’s the Ouija board she mentions at the very end of the book, a Ouija board, which the Marx daughters play with. Precisely, and it struck me that there’s a great act of listening going on throughout the book, listening to that which is not said and also listening to the way in which it is not said. Bergin is, like Morrissey, a superb performer with humour and wit and self deprecation. Yes the book is about Eleanor Marx in some way but I didn’t feel for a second that I needed to research every detail of Eleanor Marx’s life. Bergin uses this figure – she was Flaubert’s first translator – to unpick the whole idea of translation as it can be applied to life. And that’s brilliant to watch. That’s part of what poetry is: a serious game, a serious play. I was interested to read in an interview , that she had been changed by the experience of performing her poems, by the pleasure and the sound of words. So again and again, even though she might be talking about, let’s say, language, she’s not doing it in a way that pushes you back to Wittgenstein; she’s doing it in a way that references the language of, say, flowers. Or she will take lines from different translations of Flaubert offered by six different people, including Eleanor Marx. They’re all translating the same sentence of Madame Bovary, and just by juxtaposing them Bergin makes you aware that the way in which you say something radically changes its meaning. And yet, they are all recognisably saying ‘the same thing’. And from this she makes a kind of song."

"Rather to my embarrassment, I didn’t know that much about Gwendolyn Brooks before this book. One of its editors, Peter Kahn, has been a real force of change in British poetry: he set up something called Spoken Word Educators in London schools. They got a bit of money together and put together a squad of poets to work in tough inner-city schools. An American, he brought this practise from Chicago, where Gwendolyn Brooks was also from, He works closely with people who are going to be big, some of whom are already pretty big in the small world of poetry, but when he told me about this volume I said, ‘I’m not sure anybody in Britain really knows very much about Gwendolyn Brooks’; he just replied, ‘Oh they will. They will.’ “This book invites readers to be writers and writers to be readers. It’s celebrating the fact that the two must go together” And when it was launched earlier this year at the British Library, it was stunning, among the most stunning events I’ve ever seen. They had Terrance Hayes who is now the poetry editor at the New York Times , and he is so charismatic, so extraordinary to hear, to read. Someone described him to me as the Elvis of poetry. There seemed to be a huge number of poets of colour present, all reading, and again and again I realised that they had been confined to the box marked ‘Performance.’ ‘Now, though,’ they were saying, ‘we are being published and for that we have to thank people like Gwendolyn Brooks, who took the idea of poetry and spread it and gave it to people in a much wider way.’ Of Brooks herself, I know what you can glean from the book. She was America’s first black Poet Laureate. Yes, and she was based in the community. She was not a mandarin, in any way. She wanted always to be of the public, with the people and for her, I think, communication and the desire to give other people agency in their own lives and writing was absolutely paramount. And that’s a very different model to UK laureates like John Masefield who did their stuff and everybody just bought the books (or didn’t). Gwendolyn Brooks was a participant and believed that other people were participants too. Absolutely not. And that acknowledgment is really important, because for a long time in this country the only places for a poet to really earn a living has been in academia. And I would like poets to be able to live outside the academy, because if you live inside the academy chances are you will end up, like it or not, writing the kind of poetry that pleases the academy rather than connecting to the broader public. Yes, it’s a really good idea. You take a striking line from a poem you enjoy, something that fastens itself to the mind. You take that line and run it down the right hand edge of your paper, one word on each row and then you write a poem in which each of your lines ends with a word from the borrowed line – so it gives you a structure, but it’s not an acrostic. It can be almost invisible, but it gives you a structure and since so many people have such difficulty even starting to write a poem – because they think ‘I better write something really deep and meaningful and it better be completely brilliant’ – here you can say, ‘write a poem and it will have a brilliant line in it already.’ It kicks things off, like the Oulipian idea of a freeing constraint. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter What I found so interesting about this was that the editors invited poets who are at the top of their game, alongside emerging poets. So anyone can do a golden shovel. It’s not something you just do in workshops or with kids. So here we have poems by British poets such as Kwame Dawes, Claire Pollard and Leontia Flynn, as well as masses of Americans. Sharon Olds is there, and Rita Dove, Richard Powers… the list of contributors is good. This book is something that you’ll return to, you’ll pick it up and get excited by each poem, wherever the pages fall open. But I suppose what I love most about this book is what it’s trying to do. It is inviting readers to be writers and writers to be readers. It’s celebrating the fact that the two must go together. Precisely."

"Inua Ellams is a phenomenal force of energy: I first came across him when I started organising National Poetry Day about five years ago. He was unofficially National Poetry Days’ Twitter poet, and what he did was a call-and-response via Twitter whereby he’d give whoever was following him little stimuli to their next lines of poetry, and then at the end of the day he’d pull them all together. So you’d find that, without really knowing that you’d written a poem, you had – Ellams had been midwifing it into existence. “Seamus Heaney wrote about finding a voice ‘adequate to our predicament’, and you have to do that again and again for every generation” He’s also famous in rather cooler circles than those I move in for organising something called the Midnight Run , which exists in lots of different cities now. “Participants” will basically stay up all night, going from place to place being insanely and enjoyably creative. It’s for people who drink a lot of coffee…. As you said, Ellams is also a playwright and he has a play on at the National Theatre, Barber Shop Chronicles – one of the National’s few hits this year. This poetry book, though, comes from a conversation with the Poetry Library on London’s SouthBank where he decided to find a poem in its stacks from every year of his life from zero to 18 and bounce off it, writing it again in his own words, including elements of his own life. The result is called #Afterhours: Anthology / Diary / Memoir / Poems and its from a small and brilliant publisher, Nine Arches . Poems are life enhancers to him and he recreates that feeling, inspiring other people through sheer enjoyment. So for a long time, as I’ve said, the poetry establishment were their own worst enemies because the image of ivory towers were very daunting. But Ellams makes it possible to walk up to any poem and have a conversation with it. Yes. I’ve been a magpie here, picking books that teach us new ways of making poetry connect. Ellam’s book could give birth to lots of other ways of reading, and, I hope, give way to more and more people coming to the Poetry Library. And indeed that’s already happened – the Poetry Librarian, Chris McCabe, says that since Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey became this runaway global bestseller, not just in terms of poetry books but among all books, he is seeing completely different kinds of people coming into the Poetry Library. So they organize shelves with Kaur’s books on them and signs saying ‘If you like that, you will like this…’ – so it’s all about creating that way in. An opening has been blown into the citadel of poetry, which can only be a good thing. Yes. Seamus Heaney wrote about finding a voice “adequate to our predicament”, and you have to do that again and again for every generation. It’s not something that can be done by, say, Sylvia Plath, and then: ‘okay, job done, everyone go home.’ We have to go on finding the voices adequate to our predicament day by day. And since our predicament is human and historical, they change."

"Marianne Moore was at the birth of modernism, as an editor as well as a poet. She edited the Dial from 1925 to 1929 when it was the leading showcase for modernism, and she was highly rated by her peers including T S Eliot, who published and edited her work, too. I thought I knew Marianne Moore because I studied her work at university and thought, “Good, there are not very many poems so I can study this in a week and be an expert,” but it turns out that the volume I was looking at, Complete Poems (1968) was nothing of the sort. So this really is a new collected poems: a work of love and of scholarship by Heather Cass White, its editor. White shows you to what extent the later Moore rewrote, re-edited, eclipsed her earlier work and changed it from the poetry which earned her so much of her reputation. And it’s a real shocker – excitingly shocking – to find out that I can get the newly minted poems of the 1920s and 30s before the Moore of the 40s 50s and 60s decided to ‘improve them’ by taking out most of the detail and playing up the moral dimension. It’s an incredibly wonderful book. Moore was given to making pronouncements through her poetry: her most celebrated poem is probably the one called simply “Poetry,” and here we get both the long version and the short versions. Yes! “I, too, dislike it. There are things that are important beyond all / this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one / discovers in / it after all, a place for the genuine.” And that’s something that can’t be said often enough – she made a place for the genuine and she found the genuine above all in precise observation, in celebration of the singular, of things that cannot be generalised or summed up or reduced. And the catholicity of her imagination, how she takes and honours detailed observation is an inspiration now. In fact, Tara Bergin quotes a line from Marianne Moore as the epigraph for her book. “What is more precise than precision? Illusion.” Her main aim was that the poetry should re-present experience, in the sense of making it present again, as well as simply representing it. She makes vivid the world or aspects of the world which we take for granted. The overlapping scales of a spruce cone in her Pangolin poem. You can never look at a pangolin in the same way, after that. Admittedly, the chances of looking at a pangolin these days have slipped… but she renews things. The act of observation is a very active one and she enables her readers to feel that they too can observe: what matters is the quality of the attention, demonstrated in precise language. Yes, and sometimes you do wonder. There’s a lot of excitement in poetry world when plagiarism is discovered. I’m not always convinced that we’re doing anybody any favours by shrieking out about plagiarism all the time because – was it Eliot who said it? – “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” “Marianne Moore’s aim was to re-present experience, in the sense of making it present again” You are part of a conversation and communion with the dead when you are engaged in literature. You are receiving from people who may not be around anymore, but you still have them with you because you are reading them. And that conversation will continue around the globe and down the ages. It’s one of those things that reduces the isolation and the atomization that you’re doomed to if you don’t read or listen. In fact, you’re far more cordoned off and secluded when you’re reading a novel. A novel demands a huge amount of time to take in, whereas a poem doesn’t. You can get it in the time a train travels between Marble Arch and Liverpool Street. You’re in the company of the poem on the poster opposite you. That’s enough. It may well stay with you for life depending on you and depending on it."