Opting for an anthology.

I’d been thinking about prose poetry for some time before I bought The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry, back in March. What I mean is, this wasn’t one of those whim-purchases that I generally specialize in. It was a gap in my library that had niggled at my consciousness for some time.

The choices I’d found by trawling the internet were not extensive, but all looked interesting. I whittled my list down by deciding I wasn’t looking for a historical perspective. I’d discovered plenty of well-written articles and essays about that on-line, and then there was a call for submissions for an anthology by The Valley Press. It had a 2018 deadline, but I followed the links and found that the anthology had been published in 2019.

The blurb for it said, ‘Prose poetry is at the cutting edge of contemporary writing, freeing words from the bounds of traditional poetic grammar and bringing the magic of verse to flash fiction.’ That sounded like the writing I was looking for.

Of course, it’s easy to make promises, and I wasn’t so sure about the claim that this volume was ‘ambitious‘ and ‘ground-breaking‘. It felt like a heavy sales pitch, for an anthology promoting brevity.

Maybe prose-poetry needs a harder sell. It is, after all, a hybrid form.

When I mention prose-poetry in classes, many readers haven’t heard of it. Often, those who have aren’t sure what it is. Few have bought any.

If asked, my advice to readers who are looking for adventure, is to try an anthology. That way, we meet lots of different authors, and there are likely to be at least one or two pieces of writing that we will be glad to have read. Single author collections are fine if you’re already familiar with their form, and style, but risky if you’re new to them. Most of my risks are cheap, found in the second hand market.

I thought about that, back in March, when I was dithering over buying this anthology. Do I support writers, as consistently as I do charity shops?

No.

Lately, my buying habit has been so focused on catching up with reading I’ve missed, that I’ve not thought about what’s new. Most of my books are ten years old, or more, and that age-gap is likely to increase as my shelves continue to overflow.

I don’t want my reading to keep up with my book buying. I like slipping across decades and centuries, styles, forms and genres. My bookshelves are also an anthology. They hold enough of a variety that I can dip in at random, choose by purpose, or turn to another title if a first choice doesn’t supply what I’m looking for.

Why else would I want to keep so many books?

Thoughts on how I connect with Ali Smith’s story about stories.

The Universal Story, by Ali Smith was published in her 1996 collection, The Whole Story, but I didn’t retrieve it from my TBR shelf until a couple of weeks ago. That’s me, late again.

But in a way I might claim to be mirroring the opening of this story. Because, here’s another book that I’ve subjected to a series of false starts. Having bought it, I shelved it; forgot it; passed it by on several previous searches for something to read.

Somewhere, in the past month, some mention of it triggered a memory of owning this collection, so I tracked down my copy. Thank you, whoever reminded me. I’m sorry I can’t recall in what context we discussed this. But again, that chain of events seems appropriate to my reading. Here are the opening lines:

There was a man dwelt by a churchyard.

Well, no, okay, it wasn’t always a man; in this particular case it was a woman. There was a woman dwelt by a churchyard.

Though, to be honest, nobody really uses that word nowadays. Everybody says cemetery. And nobody says dwelt any more. In other words:

There was once a woman who lived by a cemetery. Every morning when she woke up she looked out of her back window and saw –

Actually, no. There was once a woman who lived by – no, in – a second-hand bookshop.

Is this a story for writers, more than readers? I wonder, remembering conversations I’ve had with readers who stress the importance of being drawn into a recognisable world. This opening could seem designed to irritate.

Or, it might suggest such confidence on the part of the writer that she can afford to let us see how her mind worries at the details: how much thought goes into getting them right. Or do I mean correct? Actually, the word I’m looking for is, ‘true’.

As you can probably tell, I’m hooked. But I’m guessing this is one of those marmite stories. The way the narrator keeps pausing to work things out will unsettle readers looking for a fixed character to engage with, or a scene to immerse themselves in.

The woman sat in the empty shop. It was late afternoon. It would be dark soon. She watched a fly in the window. It was early in the year for flies. It flew in veering triangles then settled on The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald to bask in what late winter sun there was.

Or – no. Wait:

There was once a fly resting briefly on an old paperback book in a second-hand bookshop window.

These changes in tack, shifting of perspectives, seem to me to mirror the way I browse a second-hand bookshop, drifting from one title to another in a random, rather than linear, fashion. Those connections are not predictable, they depend on the shape of words on a spine, or colours, or a promising illustration. Then again, they depend on where the seller has gathered their stock from, and what they’ve chosen, and how they’ve decided to arrange their shelves…

Let’s get back to Ali Smith, I’ve one last thought to add, about character. Wait, though, shouldn’t that have been at the start of my discussion? Don’t I repeatedly claim that character is at the heart of a good story?

How does that work when a story bounces around between several, and not all of them are even human? Brilliantly.

You can either trust me on that (but why would you? We don’t necessarily have the same tastes), or read it for yourself.

Patterns

Our neighbours gardens are bursting with bright flowers, sometimes forming unlikely harmonies: the purple smoke bush fronted by bright yellow evening primroses, or delicate crimson sweet peas next to blowsy orange dahlias. These glorious pallets of colour are a credit to the time and care that have gone into them.

In contrast, we’re still favouring the wild look. Thanks to a few strategic rainstorms between heatwaves, green is still our predominant colour. We are a garden of textures and tones, with only a few dots of colour from the hardiest types of independent blooms. The yellow-hot pokers have been stars, and so are those rampant volunteers, the orange marigolds.

Luckily, the results of this abandonment are not so obvious from a distance, so we’ve not had to deal with comments about harbouring an invasion force. This week though, my conscience was triggered when returning from a trip to collect our clicked groceries.

I didn’t notice them on the way out, because I was concentrating on reversing. We have a tricky gateway.

Driving in, I couldn’t avoid noticing the very tall and vigorous hog weed plant leaning, triffid-like, over the bonnet of the car, heavy with ripening seeds.

Tall as it is, luckily it’s not Giant Hogweed, which is a notifiable weed. Still, I was certain my neighbours wouldn’t be pleased to see it. Something would have to be done.

I’ve a fascination with the patterns of seed-heads. So, once I’d seen one seeding plant, my eye was in for spotting the others.

What is it I like? The symmetry.

Anyone who knows me well would be able to explain how paradoxical that answer is. I am hopeless at mathematics. Show me a number and my brain stalls. At school I failed to understand anything beyond the basic, practical levels.

I can still name a few geometric shapes: isosceles triangle, equilateral triangle, the parallelogram… Could I describe them? Please don’t test me.

Perhaps, if they’d been presented as nature notes I might have made an Archemedian exclamation. Give me maths with a story attached, and things like measuring volume make sense. Eurika!

Stories are patterns. The ones I love best are a puzzle to be unraveled. They can be seen quickly, and enjoyed in passing. Some can be studied, over and over again. Look closely and each time they will reveal a fresh pattern of meaning, of symbols, words or images. Perhaps this is the same principle as someone colouring mandalas in one of those mindfulness books.

To look at a dandelion seed-head before I use it to count time, is to lose time. So imagine my fascination with the salsify seed heads, three times the size of a dandelion. They’ve been popping up in this garden for years. These are the grandfather clocks of nature’s timekeepers. The stems can be up to five foot tall.

Then there are teasels, another of my unconventional garden residents. These have their seeding shape before the flowers are showing. They’re pretty spectacular from a distance, but look down at them and another pattern shows.

Patterns like these lead me to think I might manage to understand the equations behind polyhedrons, or maybe, even, The Golden Ratio. First, though, I’d better find my loppers, and cut down that hogweed, before it scatters its way into the gardens of all my neighbours.

The mystery of how I’ve reached volume III of Ann Radcliffe

There has been a lot of weeping, so far. I assure you, though, dark as this journey has been, these tears were not from me. Our heroine, Emily, is the watering can, crying her way through most chapters, now that she has been orphaned.

Oops, sorry for that spoiler, folks. Perhaps I should have warned you that I’m going to be discussing several incidents from the first two volumes. So, if you’ve plans to read The Mysteries of Udolpho, you’d be advised to leave me here. Because, unlike Miss Radcliffe, I’m not going to be coy with my revelations.

Yes, Ann, I do accuse you of deliberately withholding key information, a story-offence of the first degree, in my opinion. Let’s take the example of the veiled picture, first discovered while Emily and her maid, Annette, are trying to find Emily’s new bedroom in the huge and inhospitably drafty castle, in the dark.

Annette is too frightened to stay and lift the veil, she runs off with the lamp. Why wouldn’t she? The other servants have warned her about a range of ghosts and horrors linked to the castle and it’s questionable owner.

Emily though, like me, is driven by an overriding curiosity. The next day she retraces her route to the picture…

…which appeared to be enclosed in a frame of uncommon size, that hung in a dark part of the room. She paused again, and then, with a timid hand, lifted the veil; but instantly let it fall – perceiving that what it had concealed was no picture, and, before she could leave the chamber, she dropped senseless on the floor.

When she recovered her recollection, the remembrance of what she had seen had nearly deprived her of it a second time.

Yes, but what was it? What did she see?

I’m a hundred pages further into the story and I still don’t know, despite several occasions when Emily becomes weak at the knees over the memory.

I’m not too happy about the treatment of Annette, either. She’s full of the kind of sensibilities that allow Emily to demonstrate her superior commonsense and bravery. How does Emily repay this? When she’s too frightened to stay in her room alone she has Annette stay with her. Emily gets the bed, Annette must make do with a chair by the dying fire.

But let me get back to Emily’s weeping. No, wait, it’s never gone away. She’s prone to getting ‘lost in this melancholy reverie, and shedding frequent tears…’

To be fair, this young woman is at the mercy of an unenviable bunch of relatives who are intent on using her to advance their own fortunes. But what else should a female of the 1580s expect? Her role, as she continually reminds us, is obedience to the wishes of her elders, even when she knows that they act wrongly.

Except, hold on a minute, who says that their ambitions are wrong? Why Emily (and Ann Radcliffe).

The case for the defense, surely, is that Emily’s aunts, uncles and neighbours are acting in her best interests, as well as their own, in aiming her towards the most advantageous marriage possible. After all, upper class marriage in the sixteenth century is not about love, it’s a business deal negotiated by family elders.

Her father knew this, but still he decided to bring his daughter up in such a way that she was never going to fit the social scene. What was he thinking? I have some ungenerous thoughts about his selfishness. It was all very well to create a perfect companion for himself, but did he think beyond the limits of the estate where they lived?

In fact, now I come to think of it, this book sets me in a particularly judgmental frame of mind. Hmm, does that mean I’ve entered into the story?

It might. Though if so, it’s not in a way I would usually expect.

I’ve spent a lot of time locked up in dark spaces with Em as she dithers, sobs, faints and waits for things to happen to her. I’ve had to remind myself that, for readers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Emily is daringly independent. She goes alone, at night, to visit her father’s grave. She wanders through Udolpho Castle, a place full of mysterious corridors, rooms and presences, in darkness and daylight, despite her fears of molestation and abduction.

However passive she might be in some instances, she is a young woman without access to transport or uninterested assistance. The constraints of her time mean that she must always be limited by the need to hold onto her respectability. If that is lost, so is she.

What I’m irritated by is the very thing that Radcliffe is drawing attention to, the dangers of having too much sensibility. This is interesting, because it seems that here I am, 226 years after this book was published, reacting in a way that the author probably intended, despite our cultural differences.

The Mysteries of Udolpho summer readalong is organised by Cleo, at Classical Carousel.