Jim,

there are fish, but not as we know them. There are many things, but not as we know them too. There is order and yet chaos as well. But there is his knowing, and we have to boldly go with it because that is why we are here, isn’t it?

It is.

We could discuss accessibility and such but this would miss an important point that I trust emerges more as I progress. I think these poems can seem challenging to read, but not for that bugbear of ‘complexity’ where complexity is for its own sake rather than as a reflection of something significant, and intentionally so, as with these poems.

If I was to say at the start these are ‘found’ poems that would set a context by which any perceived challenge in their reading would be explained and ‘accepted’. And they are found poems, but not as random – not that found writing has to be random – as this can suggest. Indeed, these poems are meticulously structured on the page: there are 39 poems, each with 8 stanzas and each stanza has 3 lines.

But to cut to the chase, the apparent randomness of the writing is reflective of a found technique [indeed, the back cover blurb tells us the poems are ‘produced through a mixing of word association, montage techniques and strange juxtapositions’] and accepting/acknowledging this is to read them without certain usual expectations, expectations like following an obvious narrative line. It is also to not see them as a challenging read. When I quickly stopped looking for obvious connectivity I was freed to simply enjoy the ride.

The first poem An even break will serve as a perfect illustration. The opening stanza is

‘Using big data to diagnose problems and predict
success is one thing. Yet there is no other path
and a key responsibility includes cooking with gas.’

This represents a familiar, though not exclusive, pattern throughout the poems: one line that has no connection to another, in this case the following line. The word ‘Yet’ actually suggests a link – this grammatical caveat – but the ‘cooking with gas’ is a complete surprise, and all the more fun to read for that.

The next stanza is

‘What’s your water source? Hopefully, people will
always subvert things yet we also found that parental
consent forms were inadequately completed.’

It might seem that ‘water source’ could be connected to ‘gas’ [in the context of utilities…] but it isn’t, and it is simply a matter of our expectations as readers. This becomes an early example of the ‘strange juxtapositions’ of that blurb but also a signal to relax as readers! It is quite likely also an indication of what it means to ‘subvert’ – though in a world of fake news and evasive truth, these poems mirror the disconnections we face each day in understanding, and as found items of that daily reality they perhaps are pieced together with more clarity of the real than the comfortable illusion we would expect/hope for.

Apparent snatches of conversation, signalled by italics in the poems, suggest other ‘meanings’, as in the third stanza

‘I’m not texting nobody. I can’t concentrate
on the bus. There’s too much noise. Just wait
‘til we get to town and we’ll sort it all out.’

and here is a narrative thread of sorts, but it is not necessarily a part of anything else in the poem. It is a part of the montage that makes up this opening poem.

The closing stanza is quite simply humorous as a construct,

‘It was a close-run thing and we remain unsure of
the implications. Peas can be frozen and will taste
delicious when defrosted. This swim is fizzing with fish.’

Why peas?

Why ask?

Jim,

there’s the fish ‘fizzing’, but why aren’t they red?

The point is not to inquire. Are these Birds Eye peas or a store-brand version? It doesn’t matter but they seem to use the same advertising.

Where there are connections, these might be said to be comic/absurd. In the second poem A closed door, the opening stanza presents

‘With her front legs resting on the surface and
her back on the reeds she waits. Like many
others we listened again to Lou Reed’s music.’

and this is the ‘word association’ of that blurb, though I think it is more indicative of, on the one hand, an overall playfulness, and on the other, the nature of our everyday reality where we are bombarded by sensory experience and encounter that sometimes merges and sometimes obfuscates and sometimes makes sense.

I could happily continue to illustrate from many poems but I simply want to recommend this collection for its innovation and positive, enjoyable challenges – ‘challenges’ I hope I have expressed as ways of reading and expecting, though most if not all familiar with Spence’s poetry as well as collections from Knives Forks and Spoons Press won’t need me to exemplify ways of reading contemporary, ‘alternative’ poetry.

I’ll close on one other poem from well into the collection, A lingering message. I don’t think there is anything like a gradation of meaning and/or internal connectivity as we read though the poems, but this one resonates with all the elements I have briefly alluded to. The opening stanza, in italics but not as obviously a snatch of conversation as I earlier suggested [!], sets a question, of sorts, that seems to get ‘answered’ in the following one where actual quotation marks indicate speech/conversation [this description essentially given to illustrate the silliness of trying to explain]

‘Are we marching towards a sunlit fungal future?
Here’s a tip for pole-fishing fans. For the rest of us
the drama and the violence of the sky is enough.’

‘“Isolation breeds hostility,” he said. Yet the
consciousness of rivalry was always there and
these conflicts are about different values.’

and I’m going to contradict myself – but I would like to think I am now at one with the poetry – by stating that this seems to have more significance than peas.

Later we read

‘“It’s unethical, it’s not illegal,” she said. A slew of
fungal technologies is creeping out of the woodwork
while the madhouse remains firmly rooted in the past.’

and I am thinking it just happens that what is found and montaged here reads more intensely as subject-matter than elsewhere. The unethical that is not illegal may indeed be the madhouse of justification for all that is rotten today in behaviour and excuse and disguise from those in power. That it is ultimately disguised in the madness of all the other competing snippets merged in these poems may be their very essence of revelation.

And in the penultimate stanza we find humour again

‘He rose from the table and was surprised to see
his own image in a great number of mirrors at the
same time. Ah! – we have a distinguished visitor.’

Reading is of course an accumulative effect. These poems as individual findings and joinings in eight stanzas can seem disconnected, but the repetitions across the pages are echoes that build and suggest. Just read Reef madness and Like no other and you are immersed in the richness of what they say as a part of the whole drive to them. You learn too – not that these are lessons – that there is more fungi than fish.

Jim,

why isn’t the collection called ‘Many Red Fungi’?

I think it is because fungi does not have fins. But stop calling me Jim.

For details where to order, go here.

Pleased to have this poem here today, with thanks to Claire Palmer for the great illustration.

From The Sopranos, Series 3, Episode 2. Anthony Jr [AJ] and Meadow [M] – brother and sister – are talking. Anthony is in his bedroom studying and throws a pen at the wall in anger just as Meadow is passing on the landing outside his door. She enters his room:

M – What’s your beef?

AJ – Asshole Robert Frost. How am I supposed to know what this means? Like I even care. ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’.

M – Oh, my god, I’m so glad I’m not in high school anymore.

AJ – You read this?

M – Sure.

AJ – What does it mean? I have to turn in a close-read by tomorrow.

M – What does it mean?

AJ – ‘The woods are lovely dark and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.’

M – Okay, look. Where is he?

AJ – He’s in a field on a horse.

M – He’s not on the horse. The horse has bells.

AJ – So?

M – What kind of horse has bells?

AJ – I don’t know! Just give me the fucking answer so I can write this?

M – A horse that’s pulling a sleigh.

AJ – Oh, so this is a Thanksgiving poem like, ‘over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go’.

M – No, it’s not a Thanksgiving poem. What’s covering the field?

AJ – Snow.

M – Yay! And what does snow symbolize?

AJ – Christmas?

M – Hello? Cold endless white, endless nothing.

AJ – I don’t know!

M – Death.

AJ – I thought black was death.

M – He has ‘miles to go’ before he sleeps.

AJ – So, he must be far away from his house.

M – The sleep of death. The big sleep. He’s talking about his own death, which is yet to come, but will come.

AJ – That’s fucked up.

M – Gotta go.

AJ – I thought black was death.

M – White too.

See here

It doesn’t take a whole lot to make me nostalgic or to make me nostalgic about a whole lot.

Use this opening line to write a poem…

Just joking. My opening line is a proper line about my reacting to an article in today’s Guardian here – ‘Pretty ain’t it…Mrs Yonge said so’: the changing face of teaching poetry by Alison Flood. This refers to an exhibition at Cambridge University about GCSE poetry teaching texts over the years, collected and explored by Julie Blake, a PhD student in the Faculty of Education and detailed further here.

It didn’t make me nostalgic about teaching GCSE poetry texts, not that I can’t be, but in continuing to examine this each year for GCSE English Literature [now 35+], it is not as reflective as what I was prompted to reflect upon.

I was suddenly driven further back to my teaching poetry at secondary level and using a variety of school anthologies for this. I began teaching in 1980 and there was an abundance of these [see a selected list at the end of this piece – selected because after all these years memory is selective…]. But more than an abundance, there was a sense then that reading and talking about and writing poetry was so much more than studying it, and that wealth of anthologised materials made this not just ‘easier’, but ordinary, and I don’t mean expected, though this would be a part of it.

There were anthologies like the Michael and Peter Benton Touchstones series that presented poems thematically and with pictures and ideas for exploring [this latter I seem to remember]. Other popular texts were the Voices series by Penguin, again with a wide range of poems and pictures. Then there were the classroom textbooks of more than poetry, but including poetry [and I don’t mean The Art of English et al] like a great landscape book Sandals in One Hand with stories and poems and creative writing tasks and comprehension exercises – lively and colourful in presentation.

When I went on Amazon to research these – typing in ‘school poetry anthologies’ – I was disappointed that the first four or more pages at least and then throughout were all about GCSE poetry examination texts and the teaching of these [including the turgid CGB Book series] with many from the various Awarding Bodies as well as major English subject publishers.

As the author of Poems in your Pocket, a Longman text about teaching for GCSE poetry examination, it will seem a tad hypocritical to say the above, but I did include one of the widest ranges of poems to read and explore ever put out there as well as a Teacher Handbook that encouraged creative writing with a host of activities and exemplar [see other creative writing texts in About].

Defense over, and to the thrust of my nostalgia, I return to those anthologies which provided students with such a rich source of reading. And as a keen teacher/presenter of poetry, and poet, these would be supplemented by work from the likes of Roger McGough and Adrian Mitchell [yes, from my days as a student, but still so engaging and fun] as well as many more.

A fondest memory is of my personal Poetry Disco [sans flashing lights, and I will always regret not making that happen] which was a mobile bookcase – on wheels – jam-packed with poetry books – multiple copies, occasional hard-back and illustrated editions, small-press editions, genuinely wide-ranging individual texts – these funded by, as I recall, TVEI money the school had received which was used either directly or indirectly by releasing other money for departments to enhance their resources.

I choose poetry. And without question, just riding that bookcase into and around a classroom and opening it out to its two sides with burgeoning collections of poetry books and an exhortation to students of all ages to select and simply read was one of the happiest teaching experiences of my life and by and large a positive encounter for the students.

Even in my final days of teaching, that sense of freedom and space to just explore was diminished by the weight of targets and testing. The demands too of the sheer amount of GCSE poetry to cover intruded on the instinct and desire to simply read and write poetry for pleasure – and the urge then, as increasingly now, to make instead the lower school curriculum, and especially year 9, ‘rich’ with such is understandably and importantly a laudable rearguard action, but examining at GCSE should not be the dictator to this degree of curriculum development [*].

That is my whole lot of nostalgia, and the following is a list of some school poetry anthologies I remember using and sharing with students:

Touchstones
Life Doesn’t Frighten Me At All
The Fire People
Is That the New Moon?
The Bees Knees
The Bees Sneeze
Voices – An Anthology of Poetry and Pictures
Touched with Fire
Junior Voices
Watchers and Seekers
Against the Grain
Poems in My Earphone
Poetry With a Sharper Edge

[*] The removal of GCSE coursework also impacted heavily on my work with poetry in the classroom: for the Original Writing piece, I always introduced and provided models for writing poetry that encouraged experimentation and abstract uses of language, the work from mixed-ability students never ceasing to please/impress me [and them].