Although the two poets at the Trust’s latest reading came from very different places, they had much to unify them. Pickard is from Newcastle whereas Kleinzahler originates in New Jersey, but they both came with recommendations from Allen Ginsberg (the influence of the Beats was evident in both of their readings), studied under Basil Bunting, and are personal friends. Beyond these superficial ties, their poetry has a similar basis in vernacular language and a wide body of references.
Pickard began with a definition of ‘Hoy Oot’, the title of his collection (meaning to throw out or discard, sometimes to throw money to guttersnipes), saying that this was a good summing up of himself, and self-definition was a vein that ran throughout his reading. In his poems he wove together description and multiple voices to create a world and a period of time, as in the narrative ‘Cowboy’, set in the Newcastle of his youth, a cowboy being the man who collects empties in a pub to earn himself a pint. Littered with swear words, his poetry seemed intent on forcing people to sit up and take note. Similarly, he often used the pastoral, but with a grim and unforgiving coating: blackberries were ‘black as opium’; the wind howled incessantly; the heather bled. The blasted hawthorn was a frequent image, clinging to the landscape, with ‘a history of wind in it’.
Linking to this importance of landscape, Pickard also drew heavily on the folk traditions of his native North-East. He referred to Tommy Armstrong, the ‘Pitman Poet’ from County Durham whose ‘proper’ folk songs speak of the hardships of mining life. Also crucial was the influence and memorialisation of Jamie Allan, the eighteenth century Northumbrian piper, horse thief and deserter, amongst many other less than respectable professions. Pickard has written a folk opera based on Allan’s life, often using official documents which he then turned into lyrics, through this discovering Allan’s inner voice, which mingled with his own. The reading of ballads from the folk opera proved to be some of the most beautiful and obviously lyrical of Pickard’s reading: ‘make of air a song / Your breath be steady and your tune be long’.
The songs and the poems were given equal weight; another song, entitled ‘Valery in the Gallery’, revelled in rhymes and references to poets and artists, which reminded this reviewer of certain Bob Dylan songs. The names he riffed on perhaps represented a loose litany of his influences: the Symbolist poets, Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso – a focus on poetry as an abstract art and concerned with the effect of the sounds of words rather than the meaning, which was true of both Pickard and Kleinzahler. In their hands, poetry was a dramatic act.
Kleinzahler’s performance was particularly virtuosic. Ranging between different registers with hypnotic ease, he shouted and mumbled and adopted accents; in ‘The Dog Stoltz’, he read in the voice of the dog; in ‘Anniversary’ he screeched like the hawk he was describing with such precision: ‘that retinal flick, the plunge and shriek – / cruelly perfect at what he is’; ‘behold a pure white heartless thing’. He gave the impression of spontaneity, although the poems were linguistically rich and acutely observed, full of humane observations. He asked as an aside in ‘The Dog Stoltz’, ‘who among us does not care to be undressed?’
Kleinzahler ended his reading with a long poem, ‘The Rapture of Vachel Lindsay’, also drawing on the life of an American folk hero for his inspiration (although ‘hero’ here might be taken with more than a pinch of salt). Lindsay was the best known poet in America between the two World Wars, but today largely neglected. He walked all over the country, often 40 miles a day, trading his ‘exultant verse’ for board and food, ‘salt-pork more salt than pork’. Crucially he was a performer, often singing or chanting his poetry, so he was an apt subject for Kleinzahler, whose own performance was so impressive and brought the evening to a satisfying close.
Join us for our next reading from two former poets in residence, Paul Farley and Owen Sheers, due to take place on Tuesday 12 August 2014.
By Jessie Petheram, July 2014.
Grasmere Poetry 