Julian Turner – My Apprenticeship: Stormy Day by W.R.Rodgers

I am afraid I cannot remember much about how Michael taught us to understand and then to write poetry. I had written for years, without learning very much, before I attended Michael’s class at City University. After a prolific youth, and publication in some magazines, I gave up on poetry in the 1980s as seeming too male and white and narrow in perspective. Of course there were exceptions to this general rule (Bloodaxe had started to throw the net more widely by that time), but I found that many poets were not addressing subjects with which I identified. Nor were their styles sympathetic to my desire for studied informality in my work.

I was managing a young people’s counselling service in Hackney seeing young people not much younger than I was then who were highly distressed and had a lamentably long history of mistreatment and abuse. They often had experience of self harm, mental health problems and sexual abuse was frequently a causative contributor to their mental distress. When I came out as a poet there and started asking the young people for poems to place in our annual report, one young woman who I knew wrote poetry suggested I try Michael’s class. I read his work (Michael’s first book, Shibboleth was published at that time) and agreed with her. It took a suicidal young person to give me guidance in those days and so I signed up for his class at City University.

Michael was not at all the sort of person who I thought wrote poetry. He was young, (about my age), quick-witted, unstuffy, hard to pin down, curiously like quicksilver in his manner and jump-cuts of conversation. He also knew so much about poetry I did not know, but wanted to learn. One of the best things about him was his distance from academia. Recent developments in poetry have muddled this issue and I am greatly relieved (as someone who had the misfortune to study English Language and Literature at Oxford) not to have had the dead weight of the Academy fall on my poetry or halt my inspiration. I decided I would to undertake what I thought of as an apprenticeship with him and that is how I found myself in his City University class, repeating a single module 11 times.

The formula was simple and so elegant. We would show up just before 7.30 and sit on an extremely uncomfortable plastic chair for a couple of hours. I am an introvert, but even I was able to open up and express my views on what worked or didn’t work in a poem. At school and university we had been taught to appreciate poetry but Michael asked a different question: does this poem work and if so, can you tell me how? This opened up so many possibilities for me. After a short break Michael would ask us to write a poem which we then had to read out to the class. It was a much more practical and hands-on approach, and one I found I could live with and learn from.

The format was: the first half of the class involved a task, writing a poem or reading one. The poem I have chosen to write about is Tony Harrison’s Timer. The young poet writes about his mother’s cremation. His Dad says she has to wear her ring and there follows a moving metaphor of how the egg-timer she used to let him play with becomes a way of talking about the grief he feels.

He’d read the poem, always, give it a good hearing, make sure we could get the tensions, the nuances of speech, the hesitations, here which sound like grief, the break in the stanza structure so like a breaking voice, how the structure of the poem helps contain the emotion felt by the poet and makes those feeling accessible to the reader. He also showed us the extra bits: how this poem uses the nothing, the “O” of the ring, as a space for the ashes to fall through like in the timer. This made metaphor feel real.

One of the things about Michael, much appreciated by his students, was his ability to hear and appreciate the worth of different kinds of voice. It made the group of poets who came through his classes wonderfully varied and really not a unified group as such.

One day he brought in a poem by WR Rodgers, Stormy Day. The best thing about this poem, for me, was way he made the language reflect the stormy weather:

“knuckles of the lurching cherry tree/
Heap and hug, elbow and part, this wild day.”

The use of rhyme and alliteration enrich the sense of the sentences:

“And at jetty’s jut, ripe and roped for hire,
The yellow boats lie yielding and lolling
Jilted and jolted like jellies.”

Even the use of exclamation marks contributes to the staccato and broken-up syntax. The way the language mimics the ecstatic behaviour of the windy environment is part of the reason why the poem succeeds.

I took this poem as an opportunity to try out using language to add ornament and music to my work. In some ways, I already had developed a musical facility. I was aware of rhythm, the iambic and other patterns that poetry used as part of its repertoire in conveying the sense of what it needed to communicate. In truth there were countless ways in which Michael challenged and stretched us and I for one went on learning from him and benefiting from his generosity and kindness.

I doubt it was an accident how many of the students in his classes went on to become “successful” writers, by which I probably mean “published”. He was simply that good a teacher, who never told you what to do, but none of this really touches how much Michael gave or how deeply he impacted on us and our work. We loved him fiercely and I am sure that is something no one can measure. All those candid times in the pub after the class, from 9.30 until after closing time, all those intimate conversations in the car on the way home. What a picture of a person and a poet we were fortunate enough to receive. The imprint rubbed off on us, and there is still an affinity felt for each other by those of us who came through his class. 

After my 11 terms some of us went off and started meeting on our own, giving each other feedback on our work. Sometimes, not infrequently, he would come to those meetings too and sometimes he would read us drafts of his work like any other member of the group. What better way to bring us through and usher us into the world of poetry, adult poets who had served their full apprenticeship.

Stormy Day by WR Rodgers
 
O look how the loops and balloons of bloom
Bobbing on long strings from the finger-ends
And knuckles of the lurching cherry tree
Heap and hug, elbow and part, this wild day,
Like a careless carillion cavorting;
And the beaded whips of the beeches splay
And dip like an anchored weed around a drowned rock;
And hovering endlessly the rooks
Hang on the wind’s effrontery as if
On hooks, then loose their hold and slide away
Like sleet sidewards down the warm swimming sleep
Of wind. O its is a lovely time when
Out of the sunk and rigid sumps of thought
Our hearts rise and race with new sounds and sights
And signs, tingling delightedly at the sting
And crunch of springless carts on gritty roads,
The kite caught dangling in the skinny wires,
The swipe of the swallow across your eyes,
Striped awnings stretched on lawns. New things surprise
And stop us everywhere. In the parks
The fountains scoop and flower like rockets
Over the oval pond whose even skin
Is pocked and goose-fleshed by their niggling rain
That frocks a naked core of statuary.
And at jetty’s jut, ripe and roped for hire,
The yellow boats lie yielding and lolling,
Jilted and jolted like jellies. But look!
There! Do you see, crucified on palings
Motionless newsposters announcing
That now the frozen armies melt and meet
And smash! Go home now, for, try as you may,
You will not shake off that fact today.
Behind you limps that dog with tarry paw
As behind him, perfectly timed, follows
The dumb shadow that mimes him all the way.