[Originally posted June 2013]

Pretty Is As Pretty Was

I’m working my way through the fascinating Eagles documentary History of the Eagles, The Story of an American Band shown recently on the BBC. I’ve just watched the section where it features the recording of their second album Desperado, and this is the album that introduced me to the band, having pretty much missed their first. It did then and does now appeal to everything I love about this country-harmony sound, a style Glen Frey in the documentary refers to disparagingly as ‘Beatles-Country’ as dictated [to a shared degree I think if the band is totally honest] by then producer Glyn Jones. The criticism is made because both Frey and Henley wanted a heavier sound, which they did move on to with their next On The Border where production duties were soon transferred to Bill Szymczyk [and the stylistic dichotomy between Bill and Glyn is an intriguing as well as mildly comic revelation in the programme].

Whilst interesting, these relatively minor schisms in style are meaningless in as much as I am a continuing fan of their oeuvre, but this second album is in my Top Fifty as both introduction to and exemplification of their beautiful harmonising and songwriting. The fact that JD Souther and Jackson Browne also still contribute to that songwriting on this album [well, on Doolin-Dalton] is significant, being a fan of their work too, as platitudinous as that statement and proclivity is. The point is I am with Glyn Jones on thinking this is the sound that defines the Eagles.

The ‘outlaw’ concept with album cover and other photos added an attractive if ultimately tenuous connection with notions of being alternative at the time, but I do recall playing the album over and over, as with their next two, for those glorious vocals. Pretty yes, but pretty damn fine then and now.

I am a hoarder of much, including work related to my 30 years as an English teacher [from teaching resources to student work, especially their creative writing], and when I have the occasional rummage and clear-out, though the latter is an intention rather than a fact, I generally come across some precious memorabilia that reinforces the good times, especially in the early years/first half of my teaching.

So coming across this today brought back one of my fondest recollections, and at 1997 it occurred into that second half I generally regard as the beginning of the decline [pre-1997 had seen beginnings of Tory SATs and targets, and 1997 itself saw Labour come in to power – and continue it all, with enthusiasm].

These two clips from a newspaper written by the students who were involved in the West to West visit/‘exchange’ set the context. I put exchange in inverted commas because our American friends did not come back to the UK, but our British students did stay with and in the homes of their American partners.

This only scratches the surface of what went on and how dynamic and rewarding the whole week was there in Ashland, Oregon, but on a personal note I was reminded today – with the re-discovery of this ‘hoard’ – of the writing workshops I took there and how brilliant that was as a teaching experience for me. Though humuments gets misspelled by the student writer in the following article, that is all a part of the honest reality of the experience and the two humument examples [USA on the left; UK on the right – I edited out the names as I don’t have permission]. I must stress that these two examples are just the text – humuments also have their crucial visual element and we couldn’t at the time reproduce this, but I might be able to find in another hoard and will perhaps post at a later date.

I am very pleased to have this poem up at the fine Stride magazine here. I should like to acknowledge the influence of David Grubb’s Ways of Looking chapbook I reviewed recently, his poetry itself prompted by Wallace Stevens.

Ian Seed’s latest New York Hotel arrived today. I have been anticipating this with genuine enthusiasm, knowing how much I would enjoy the expectation of the unexpected, and I’m sure I’ve used that line before in writing about his distinctive poetic vignettes.

I want to be clear before writing this review: I haven’t read all of the prose poems collected here. I don’t want to. They could be read in one delightful sitting – I have just written to a friend where I referred to them as ‘easy but playful and enigmatic reading’ – and they are and this is an absolute compliment [that easy tag] but they also puzzle more and play rough and tough on re-readings. However, and entirely pragmatically, I want some for tomorrow, and maybe, if I am disciplined, for one more day after that.

Seed’s narratives can seem difficult to hook, so to speak, and thank goodness. Are the hotels that often feature the New York of the title or generic places of transience and chance encounters? Is the Italy of occasional placing the same as that in Seed’s preceding work Italian Lessons? As the early poems in this collection demonstrate, answers to these essentially unimportant questions are elusive.

These opening poems appear to refer to the Italy we as readers have come across before, the country of his youth, and here for example in Early Promise where he is out of work and ‘reduced to wandering the streets and dossing in doorways’, Seed [as persona we’ll assume, more on this later] is helped out by an old friend, yet this is as fleeting as it is suspect, and when left wandering again he comes across an Italian café he fondly recalls. We hear a little of this happy past and just as he ‘knocks on their door’ to perhaps rekindle that experience from the past, this vignette finishes, Carver-esque in its anticipation and our unknowing.

As I have mentioned, many of the poems in the collection narrate encounters and situations in quite probably the New York Hotel, a building in a ‘grand style’ and with a ‘wooden lift still in its steel cage’. Here Seed meets up, eventually, with his father, or as in Soundproof a woman with whom he is unexpectedly sharing a room. You’d think the surprise doubling-up would be the main focus, but it isn’t. It is the small bathroom with its sloped roof and the woman who ‘was no more than a doll’. But even this isn’t it. When a plane taking off from the nearby airport is seen through the bathroom window, the attention is for the ‘complete silence because the window was sealed tight’.

There are times when the encounters are delightfully surreal, or disturbingly bathetic. In Interview with a Priest, the inevitability of being captured by another’s faith – possibly sermon – is animalistic; in Resistance, a wife’s cruelty to her father is usurped as emphasis by the slowness of a moped.

There are chance encounters, chance seductions, chance getting lost and found, chance potential defenses [though thwarted by a headache] of Oscar Wilde. There are many visits to places once lived where people once known are no longer knowable and Seed will move on only to get lost again. He often wants to make amends for the past, or make an impression because of the past. At times he will chance upon a cure, though it is too late. The storytelling leads and often eludes but never loses us, though loss does so often prevail.

The poems are usually told in the first person so, as I suggested earlier, we see Seed as the persona, however close or distant that is to him as writer, but not always, as in American in Rome where as a sometime Quaker he [the poem’s speaker] entertains the Pope with an Elvis impersonation. And in this poem I particularly like the idea of the Pope who

…listened patiently, but couldn’t help smiling at the word ‘Quaker’

There are other voices. As Putin’s English tutor, he embraces Russia’s love with such emotion we could almost forget the deep irony. In other again surreal expositions, the observer in a poem is at Hiroshima, or in another is observing Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell as born-again hippies recapturing the promise of their collective ambition, before a different ambition triumphed.

He is Elvis again near the book’s end and I know for a fact Seed is genuinely fond of Presley and his music. I certainly don’t need certainty when I read these wonderful prose poems, but I couldn’t help but read a little extra poignancy in these closing lines from Loved,

I found Priscilla weeping on a bench. She waved me away without even looking up. It was people like me who through our adoration had killed her loved one, she shouted after me.

For further details and to purchase go here. You really should.

I have been reading and enjoying very much David Grubb’s recent poetry, posted mainly on Stride here and at International Times. They are as poems both lyrical and oblique, beautiful flows and cadences of language with sudden shifts in direction and narrative lines/focus.

In searching for information about Grubb as poet and his work, I read about this smith/doorstop collection and 2012/2013 winner in the Poetry Business Competition. I ordered immediately and it has arrived today. The chapbook is based in poetic approach on Wallace Stephen’s poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, and the six poems, each with their thirteen phases, further represent what seems to be a signature feature of Grubb’s work that I have seen so far – the lyricism of tone and flow with the suddenness of move in emphasis.

The narrative surprises are a delight to be handheld into, and I do think every thirteen part poem has a narrative line, as disrupted as it might be. And it is the gentleness of the surprise that warms each reading – these are not shocks and/or moments of apocalypse. They are shifts in glimpse, their extra surprise in the cleverness of idea/description. These being ‘surprises’ it is problematic for reviewing, as mentioning diminishes their essence. As compromise, I do want to illustrate but I will only do so for the first poem Ways of Looking at a Lost Farm.

Rather than plot the actual lead into the shifts [as I’ll continue to call them] I will simply quote the lines which even out of context reveal the core of their appeal and interest. From 1.

mother coughing in her grave again

From 3.

in August we took down the B&B sign
and skinned ten pigs

From 4.

…The estate agent knows
the price of an acre of autumn

From 10.

hugging side by side, as if we owned the snow and wind,
as though the radio was a friend

That will do, and all of this is from an increasingly moving account of a family forced from their farm to take up residence on an estate, and it is a poem of change and regret and external intrusion/interest and ultimately misconceptions of what was special about their life.

In Ways of Looking at Blessings, the narrative start seems more conventional – more linear and connected – but then the poetic beatitudes take on more distinct aphoristic gestures, and this becomes very much the feature in the next poem Ways of Looking at a Very Old Lady where the succession of aphorisms take on comic/ironic tones, that is until the suddenness of a plaintive stanza catches us out in our smiling

7.
The man who comes to stroke my hand says
he’s my grandson and that he remembers
closing all the shutters at night and that every
room had its own way of forgetting things.

The final poem is Ways of Looking at a Poet. Again, I won’t spoil by over-quoting, and I certainly won’t quote the wonderful stanzas 12. and 13., their two encapsulations of respectively ‘each poem’ and ‘each poet’ hauntingly [I think that is the right word] insightful, but I will close by referring to the humour of stanza 6.

It is easier to deal with
people from Porlock; it is
often like mending a chair
that you are sitting on.

You can buy this for £5 [including p&p in the UK] here.

There’s a breathless hush on the freeway tonight
Beyond the ledges of concrete
Restaurants fall into dreams
With candlelight couples
Lost Alexandria still burns
In a billion lightbulbs
Lives cross lives
Idling at stoplights
Beyond the clover leaf turnoffs
‘Souls eat souls in general emptiness’
A piano concerto comes out a kitchen window
A yogi speaks at Ojai
‘It’s all taking place in one mind’
On the lawn among the trees
Lovers are listening
For the master to tell them they are one
With the universe
Eyes smell flowers and become them
There’s a deathless hush
On the freeway tonight
As a Pacific tidal wave a mile high
Sweeps in
Los Angeles breathes its last gas
And sinks into the sea like the Titanic all lights lit
Nine minutes later Willa Cather’s Nebraska
Sinks with it
The sea comes in over Utah
Mormon tabernacles washed away like barnacles
Coyotes are confounded and swim nowhere
An orchestra onstage in Omaha
Keeps on playing Handel’s Water Music
Horns fill with water
And bass players float away on their instruments
Clutching them like lovers horizontal
Chicago’s loop becomes a rollercoaster
Skyscrapers filled like water glasses
Great Lakes mixed with Buddhist brine
Great books watered down in Evanston
Milwaukee beer topped with sea foam
Beau Fleuve of Buffalo suddenly becomes salt
Manhattan Island swept clean in sixteen seconds
Buried masts of Amsterdam arise
As the great wave sweeps on Eastward
To wash away over-age Camembert Europe
Mannhatta steaming in sea-vines
The washed land awakes again to wilderness
The only sound a vast thrumming of crickets
A cry of seabirds high over
In empty eternity
As the Hudson retakes its thickets
And Indians reclaim their canoes

© Lawrence Ferlinghetti

In this fine poem, Nebraska is a rural everyperson to contrast with the urbanite reality, but it too is swept away and ultimately the poem is about change everywhere and questions humanity’s survival/renewal.

I am very pleased to have three poems here in Issue Three of Adjacent Pineapple. I am delighted to be in such fine company and trust anyone visiting will read further poems there.

Rather than simply leave it in the reply section to my previous post Oracy is the New Black Pudding, I am happy to fully post comments from Director of Voice 21, Beccy Earnshaw, here.

It is reassuring to read the detailed aims and objectives of Voice 21 regarding oracy, and I of course fully endorse them.

As a regular blogger on education issues that still matter to me, I am pleased to at least have a response, and one that is informed – and persuasive – rather than dismissive or just flippant!

I will read the further details Beccy has highlighted from Voice 21, and I will continue to follow reporting on this issue and challenge misrepresentations, as I did in my article when referring to ‘education commentators’:

Hi Mike
I read your blog with interest and as Director of Voice 21, I wanted to reassure you that we do not define oracy as the ‘art of teaching children how to speak well’ – those are the words of the journalist not Voice 21. On our website you will find our oracy charter which outlines our beliefs re. oracy (https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/2c80ff_ccd5718b6ca84a74b0eaefcd8ee01f14.pdf

Voice 21 Oracy Charter
– Oracy is the capacity to use speech to express our thoughts and communicate with others
as outlined in the four strands of the Oracy Framework.(the Framework was devised with Neil Mercer and team at Cambridge University and can be found here https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/2c80ff_1c4bb315fb26438b9eaa2fc4899bafe6.pdf)
– Teaching improves oracy and oracy improves teaching and learning.
– Effective oracy teaching and learning is purposeful, scaffolded and structured to deepen understanding and develop critical thinking.
– Children and young people should become agile communicators who learn to navigate
the expectations for oracy in different contexts through the provision of a wide
and varied curriculum.
– Oracy is the responsibility of every teacher and the entitlement of every child

You might also be interested in this research we commissioned last year which explores this in more depth https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/2c80ff_91a02276fdf645d2b70ad433049306a3.pdf or this blog (there are some short videos on this site too) https://www.edutopia.org/blog/oracy-literacy-of-spoken-word-oli-de-botton or this essay in the ESU’s Speaking Frankly publication https://www.esu.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0025/13795/ESU-Speaking-Frankly.pdf

I am sorry you could not find more details about our aims and work on the website – it is all there on links from the homepage but we will review the site to ensure people can find this info more easily. If you want to see the kind of approaches we promote you can have a look through our resources on http://www.voice21resources.org

Finally, I totally agree with your points on oracy not being something new (many of the approaches we use have their roots in Ancient Greece!), however as the polling we conducted with teachers and school leaders found, most schools are not giving oracy the focus (we believe) it deserves for a variety of reasons (these are explored in the research) and we want to support teacher and schools to put a greater emphasis on oracy and increase the quality and quantity of dialogue within classrooms.
Do get in touch if you would like to discuss any aspect of our work,
Many thanks
Beccy

Oracy would seem to be the new superfood, like black pudding: it’s always been there but people have only recently recognised its worthiness. Now we know you can talk your way out of a locked cold store room with a bit of oracy…

I recall it used to be virtually impossible to find a definition of it, definitely in hard-copy dictionaries, and especially in the early days of computer search engines when even the spelling wasn’t recognised – and as I type, Word right now red-underlines oracy as an error.

Typing the word in Google Search today, here are some first lines from suggested reads:

Talk supports thinking, and that means it supports learning

In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the need to help young people develop their abilities to use spoken language effectively

 Skills in oracy (the use of spoken language) will be more important for most people when they leave school

 For most of the British population, oracy has never really been a subject in the school curriculum

 If there was ever a generic skill that was most essential for success in life, it would have to be oracy: the power of effective oral communication

 It helps students formulate their ideas into clear thoughts

All of these are to a degree knowing and positive, but even here there are worrying slants [no pun intended, see soon…] and misconceptions and annoying contextualising. I know I can be easily irked, but these wrong-rub my understanding of oracy:

In recent years – I have been aware of and put into practice oracy as a principle of teaching and learning from the early 1980s and throughout my teaching career

(the use of spoken language) – oracy is this but equally and critically about listening [thus the latter term, especially at GCSE English, Speaking and Listening]

has never really been a school subject – it isn’t a subject, it is a pedagogical principle/approach that should be applied to all teaching and learning in all subjects

That nit-pick is simply to fine-tune. Indeed, the point is that quotes 1, 3, 5 and 6 above are pretty much spot-on as encapsulations, especially the first one.

There would appear to be a ‘resurgence’ in thinking about and promoting oracy, especially in teaching English, and I have picked this up largely through twitter posts, as I did this article today about oracy from Schools Week which has prompted this posting in the same way it did my tweet, which was:

As reported, this comment ‘a “family lunch” which “implicitly models oracy” through a daily discussion of a political or ethical topic’ is just fundamentally dumb in its complete misunderstanding of oracy as a principle of teaching and learning

Yes, irked. Sometimes school leaders and other representatives of the Return to Gradgrind brigade [see post here] say the stupidest things, firstly in candid defenses of their nonsense, then, as here, in little meaningless caveats of how their nonsenses are really not all that bad.

But enough on the philistines.

My introduction to oracy was through the DES 1982 Bullock Resisted: A Discussion Document by HMI which articulated and promoted the principles of oracy, so we are going back a few years before its more ‘recent’ resurgence. As a new English teacher – I started in 1980 – I was around that time working with my then English Advisor and my Head of Department in devising teaching materials incorporating the primacy of student talk in classroom methodology as well as disseminating this to other English teachers in the county. It was an exciting and positive time. Other influences were the Resources for Learning Development Unit, based in Bristol, whose teaching projects also placed student speaking and listening at the core of the work.

So I am both excited and dismayed to see oracy’s renaissance but then also the counter move to these absurd SLANT instructions which are in the Schools Week article further absurdly referred to as a process

in which pupils fold their arms and track the teacher with their eyes in silence, is used to “ensure pupils are actively listening”, another element of oracy.

‘Another element of oracy’? You cannot coerce students into positive and productive speaking and listening. It has to be through a culture and ethos within a continuing classroom experience. It also concerns me that, as reported, some apparently promoting oracy do so by references to ‘rhetoric and debate’ and ‘academic terms’ and this leads to my final concern that Voice 21, again as reported in the article cited, and promoted [in good faith I am sure] by Emma Hardy, Labour MP for Hull West and Hessle, is presenting oracy as

…the art of teaching children to speak well

This may be a gross simplification of the aims, but nonetheless, having started with definitions of oracy as a key place to begin making clear what it should and shouldn’t be, this definition is completely wrong.

Indeed, I have just visited the Voice 21 online site, and whilst its aims and objectives aren’t presented in any detail – sadly – there is this stated objective which, as a definition, does seem much more expansive than the one about speaking well:

All children & young people, regardless of their background, should have access to high quality oracy education enabling them to develop the communication skills and confidence necessary to thrive in the 21st Century

Educators and education commentators need to be aware of the dangers in misrepresenting what oracy is. I don’t care if teachers today think it is a new approach – though I have, I accept, been elsewhere a little defensive about its actual history – but I do have real concerns about flaunting it as a means of ‘improving’ speaking.

Worse is suggesting the occasional ‘serious discussion/debate’ makes up for other co-existing practices where student voices are made entirely passive. Worse still is missing entirely the fundamental purpose of oracy which is, as our first definition succinctly stated, appreciating how student talk supports thinking, and that means it supports learning.

[Originally posted February 2014]

Purple

I’m listening today to a superb live recording of Donovan, the 1967 The Complete Anaheim Show, and when he sings songs from the 1968 UK release A Gift From A Flower To A Garden I am reminded of how much I loved this album at its time, and more recently – for me that means in the last 10 years – when I bought it on cd. It is both beautiful and twee [e.g. a song sung to a pebble, everybody is a part of everything anyway], encapsulating all that is classic Donovan as well as late 60s, right down to the purple and mauve and pink psychedelia of the cover and all similar posters/pictures of this album and the time. Prettily purple, psychedelically purple, poetically purple. For me, Donovan’s purple patch too, though many may prefer the folk of his earliest recordings, and these are fine as well. The live recording has some excellent light blues and jazzy performance, the latter demonstrated on the track I am listening to as I write, Preachin’ Love, Harold McNair terrific on sax solo.

It isn’t that my Top Fifty or albums for that category have now become an afterthought – well, I guess that’s precisely what they have become. The defence I want to make is that favourites still resonate and for some reason I have simply left this blog focus behind a little. Perhaps that is what makes today’s ‘discovery’ so pleasing and surprising, surprising that I hadn’t written about the album before.

Songs that meant the most to me at the time from the album are Isle of Islay, The Lullaby of Spring [oh the consonants and enunciation], Widow With a Shawl [A Portrait], Epistle to Derroll, Wear Your Love Like Heaven [a single too] and The Tinker And The Crab [*]. And others, but those just mentioned are songs I played on the guitar [I have the songbook somewhere] and sang, and played with a good friend who had a flat in Putney, and as a teenager I used to go there from Ipswich to visit and grew up in all kinds of interesting ways for my age and at that time and in London. We even had a very occasional band called Proleptic Kinecy – oh yes, as pretentious as that – and played one gig as a band at a residential centre for disabled teenagers where we helped out [my friend then a social worker]. It was earnest and correct and worthy and all those things that you can’t knock and yet seems formulaic.

But those songs are so, as I’ve said, pretty. I don’t know if Donovan is an acquired taste: he wasn’t the British Dylan because he was so different, but it is easy to understand that tag. The ‘poetry’ of the lyrics was quintessentially British [I think ‘English’ but Donovan is Scottish so I am being embracive] yet it is that enunciation, again already mentioned, and the precision of the language sung in the sweetest tones that may not have appealed to all. Not the case for me, then or now.

[*] Have just returned from car trip when I played the cd: was reminded quite sharply that apart from Wear Your Love... I don’t really like what was the first of the two lps, and it is only the second one that truly appeals, so on the cd it’s track 11 onwards. Also reminded of the campfire cowboy harmonica on The Mandolin Man and his Secret as well as the dancing flute breaks, especially on The Tinker and the Crab. What a sucker I am for this sunshine pop ‘For Little Ones’].