When she was a young girl, Sharon Olds told an audience at Ledbury poetry festival, she knew God could read her thoughts. But for some reason she believed He could not look over her shoulder, and see what she was writing. Even now, she said, perhaps as a way of keeping God in the dark, “I don’t know what I’m thinking, unless I’m writing.” Last year Olds won the TS Eliot prize with Stag’s Leap, a collection of poems that catalogued the break-up of her marriage 15 years earlier. She told interviewer Julie Boden at Ledbury on Saturday that “for a long time I would not say whether my work was autobiographical or not … and then a young woman, a poet, she was writing for the Guardian, she asked me that question, she looked sad, and she was young, and I thought, Why am I saying, this, what is the danger?”  Then Olds added, laughing: “And then when Stag’s Leap came out, I tried to take it back! I said, I’m renewing my vow!”

Olds has said before that she delayed publication of the poems about the marriage break-up for so long because she had promised her children that she would not go public until they had had a chance “to live their own lives … I think no one puts in a request to be born into the family of a family-autobiographical poet”.  

She added that she did not want “to be always talking about the subject matter of my poems. I want to be talking about the line, metaphor, simile, all those things. I love talking about craft.” The form she used in her poems “developed in my writing, to make something, and sing, and break the silence, and try to be truthful, whatever that means …”

Speaking softly and gently, but clearly, Olds said that she did not understand the prose-poem: “For me, it’s the line and the sentence. I don’t have eyes for anything else. That’s the dance for me.” Olds said: “I think my writing comes out of a personal need … I don’t know what I’m thinking unless I’m writing … I’m thinking when I’m writing, but I don’t know what I’m going to say.”

Referring to a question about the natural world in her poetry, she professed to be “less of an intellectual, I’m less educated, I’m less aware of all this [nature and politics]”.  Earlier she had claimed: “I don’t have much imagination.” She said her subject matter was “family and human, rather than that bigger vision … earlier I wished so much that I might write like Jorie [Graham], Louise Glück, Anne Carson … I compared myself to them for a long time”.

She talked about the process of writing a poem. “The way I express it, is that a poem comes to me. There’s always a germ of some kind. Or I’m describing what’s around me, and then it will remind me of something, then I start writing …” She writes in longhand, “I like the feeling”, in spiral, white, ruled notebooks, “with a grocery store pen”, rather than immediately on the computer: “I don’t like the percussive instrument so much.”

She was due to give a reading at Ledbury the following evening, so she read just a few of her poems at the ‘In Conversation’ session -  ‘Miscarriage’, which contains graphic, visceral  images of the experience; returning to it in Stag’s Leap, ‘To Our Miscarried One, Age Thirty Now’ -  “That he left me is not much compared / to your leaving the earth”; and another poem in Stag’s Leap about breaking the news of the break-up to her mother: “So the men are gone, / and I’m back with Mom. I always feared this would happen. / I thought it would be a pure horror, / but it’s just home.”  

And when she finished reading that poem, Olds said quietly but firmly: “I think we’ll stop there.”  

 

THE DEATH of Seamus Heaney brought a worldwide reaction normally reserved for the loss of political figures, a leading Irish poet argued at Ledbury poetry festival. Bernard O’Donoghue told a packed audience at Burgage Hall that the loss of the Nobel laureate on 30 August last year brought a sense of cultural loss and shock, a “collective trauma”. Why was this? As O’Donoghue pointed out, Heaney was 74, and had suffered a stroke eight years earlier. But he likened the reaction and coverage to “a state funeral”, and compared the significance of and mourning at the death to those of WB Yeats, Pushkin in Russia, Tennyson in England – and even Nelson Mandela. What Heaney represented for Northern Ireland, as Mandela had for South Africa, was “a new era of self-respect”. O’Donoghue, who was one of a number of leading poets who read at a tribute night to Seamus Heaney at the Royal Festival Hall last november, said Heaney had “a strong sense of vocation”, and added that his collection North was his “most controversial – and, I think, his greatest volume.” He quoted Auden – “poetry makes nothing happen” – and asked: “Why was that not true in Heaney’s case?” He paid tribute to the poet’s ability to “to say something extraordinary” through the enactment of “ordinary things”, adding that Heaney was “not a moraliser, he was much too understanding of the frailty of human nature for that”.  But although the power of his poetry was often in its oblique references to the Troubles, he could also represent the horrific truth of violence more directly at times, too. To emphasise his universality, his poem, 'Anything Can Happen', after September 11, was translated into dozens of languages, O’Donoghue pointed out.  

 

FROM THE SUBLIME … to the festival slam. Some of those who took part in the 13th poetry festival slam in Ledbury’s Market theatre on Saturday night, and included some fairly earthy, Anglo-Saxon language in their offerings, might have been surprised by the family nature of the audience. Groups out for the evening and looking for a good night’s entertainment included some young children who may have been hearing their first live poetry. It’s true that many of the more down-to-earth poems were met with guffaws and sometimes gales of laughter, but their exponents did not make it to the final. Funny that. I sound so po-faced; but you could argue that whenever the F-word is included, it is potentially squeezing out another word that might be far wittier. Needless to say, it was nevertheless a stylish lineup, ably marshalled by experienced comperes Sarah-Jane Arbury and Marcus Moore. Sarah-Jane’s rapidly written, half-time summaries of those who had made it into the second round were a tour de force. And two wordsmiths of wit fought themselves to almost a standstill in the final, Steve Harrison just pipping Catherine Crosswell after several recounts.

 

POEMS that have “a spark of something”. That’s what Ledbury poetry competition judge Esther Morgan was looking for when she first started sorting through the boxes of entries for last year’s competition, she said at the festival on Sunday.  It’s always interesting to hear poetry competition judges explain their selection process.  Morgan went on: “The boxes have arrived, and they’re sat in my study. First, I set aside those poems that had a spark of something, a chance of a second read-through. At the end of that process I had about 70 poems that I wanted to revisit. That’s when the hard work begins. You have to probe at the poems a bit more, be more critical. There were poems that I really liked, but they suffered from a flat ending, lacked an urgency, felt that they didn’t actually need to be written.” She added: “I am not a fan of the too highly polished, the too ostentatiously clever, the too neat. There were some poems that felt overworked. There is a frisson of strangeness when you read a really successful poem. I’d rather be puzzled and unnerved by a poem, than be too admiring of it. All these [winning and shortlisted] poems had a gleam of fresh perception about them.”

The 2013 Ledbury poetry competition winner was Peter Freeman, with his poem ‘Snapper’. Second was Pippa Little, and third was Peter Marshall. 

 

PHOTOGRAPH: GREG FREEMAN / WRITE OUT LOUD 

 

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