Editor and publisher Neil Astley does things in his own inimitable style. First he published a poetry anthology which became a best-seller without offering back to the nation only poems which were already familiar favourites: Staying Alive gave readers hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world, many of them by little known authors, by women, by poets who write in other languages.
Now he has compiled a companion volume, Being Alive, and instead of launching it with one big party, he has taken his show on the road. Throughout National Poetry Week he has been presenting a selection of the poems with different readers at different venues nationwide. And this strategy appears to be working: Being Alive went to the top of the best sellers list immediately on publication (unlike its predecessor, which took two weeks to get there).
The northern launch took place within the framework of the Durham Literature Festival, with readers Helen Ivory and Charlie Hardwick.
Helen Ivory is a poet, artist and photographer, a former chicken farmer and bricklayer who now teaches creative writing at the University of East Anglia. She won a Gregory Award for a poetry in 1999, and her first collection The Double Life of Clocks was published by Bloodaxe in 2002. Her poems are included in both Staying Alive and Being Alive. Charlie Hardwick is an actor who has appeared regularly at Newcastle's Live Theatre. She was in the original stage production of Billy Elliot, and took her rôle in Julia Darling's Attachments from stage to television. Other television work includes Byker Grove and, most recently, Emmerdale Farm. Her films include The Scar and Purely Belter.
Begin by defining your terms: Helen Ivory read two poems about poetry, and Neil Astley followed on with Billy Collins (US Poet Laureate)'s Introduction to Poetry, which contrasts different ways of reading poetry:
"I want them to waterskibut "they" want to interrogate and torture the poem, "to find out what it really means." The Bloodaxe anthologies do not offer poetry for this sort of academic inquisition, but as something to live with, something alive in itself. They aimed to reach a new audience for poetry, and their success in this respect is reflected by the praise heaped upon Being Alive by people who are not primarily known as poetry critics:
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore."
"I love Staying Alive and keep going back to it. Being Alive is just as vivid ... But this new book feels even more alive - I think it has a heartbeat"
Meryl Streep
"Hopefully, books like this will put poetry back into the mainstream"
Van Morrison
Being Alive was designed to reach Staying Alive's audience, which was a new audience for poetry; it was also designed as a "bridge anthology", which would make its readers want to read more by the same poets, and would help them to do so. It was a riposte against the narrow, anglocentric nature of most poetry currently being published: its editor likened its impact to assuming that contemporary music meant Britpop, and then discovering world music. "This is world poetry." - and it gave Neil Astley a chance to show off his ability to pronounce Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska. But he also quoted the UK's neglect of Philip Levine, who had a single collection published here twenty years ago, and nothing since, although this was the period of his best work.
Neil Astley's reading of Philip Levine's The Simple Truth was the cue for Charlie Hardwick to torment her salivating audience with a group of food poems: Denise Levertov's Oh Taste and See, Peter Davison's luscious Peaches, with its succulent word games:
I beseech you, peach,and Li-Young Lee's From Blossoms. By the time she ceded the stage to Neil Astley's reading of Pablo Neruda's Sweetness, Always, she too was carried away by this poem of sweetness to the dish of liquorice allsorts on the refreshments table.
clench me into the sweetness
of your reaches.
Relenting, Helen Ivory shifted the subject away from food with Czeslaw Milosz's Gift and Jane Hirschfield's Not Yet and despite Neil Astley's attempt to wrest it back with Jack Gilbert's greedy exploration of an apple in Hunger, continued with Mary Oliver's The Summer Day, Kerry Hardy's Sheep Fair Day and two of her own poems: Sleeping with the Fishes and Note to the reader: this is not a poem.
The latter was one of the poems included in Staying Alive, and introduced a further passage of polemic in which Neil Astley defended his anthologies against those he called the "Poetry Police" (whose views were represented by the Poetry Review): Bloodaxe were still, two years after the publication of Staying Alive, receiving postcards and e-mails saying "thank you" and asking for more of the same. This had motivated the publication not only of a second anthology, but also of collected editions of two of the poets who had generated a particularly positive response. Jack Gilbert's Measuring the Tyger illustrated his thesis that many American poets are currently more willing that the British to take risks, push their poem to the edge and bring philosophy into their poetry.
Inevitably, in a reading which included so many poems in translation, Neil Astley was asked whether he thought poetry could survive translation. In reply, he quoted William Trask: translating poetry is "impossible, of course, that's why I do it". Fortunately, some poets met the translator half way: Miroslav Holub, for example, was deliberately anti-lyrical, writing in plain language. His poem The Fly survives the transition from Czech to English by the freshness of its perception.
This was provocative, which was in keeping with the flavour of the evening: it was a combative presentation of the anthology. It set aside the "sugar plums", the more familiar poems in the book to challenge the audience with the more contemporary selections. Answering questions from the audience, Neil Astley confirmed that the choice of poems had been his, and that he had allocated them to the different readers who had appeared at each event. There had been a degree of type-casting: on other occasions he had allocated the more sensual poems to Helen Ivory, but tonight he had given them to Charlie Hardwick, leaving Helen the more demure rôle - with the exception of Kim Addonizio's What do women want?, which she had refused to relinquish. As if to thwart this male simplification, the two women had dressed in styles opposite to these imposed characters, Helen Ivory in flame-coloured flamenco flounces, and Charlie Hardwick (in her own words) as "a 1950s office lady". Asked if there were any poems in the anthology they regretted not getting to read, Charlie said no, she never regretted anything: but admitted that she had been pleased to see Louis MacNeice's Prayer Before Birth in the book; Helen Ivory said simply that she had envied Charlie the opportunity to read Deborah Garvin's Fight Song and Kim Addonizio's For Desire which had on other occasions been hers to read.
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