By Richard Price

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When I first became a father it was thirty years ago. I had been living in London for about six years after an upbringing in various dormitory towns south-west of Glasgow. I began writing the Hand Held poems collected  in Lucky Day (2005) all ‘about’ my first daughter Katie.

Katie has Angelman’s Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder. People who have the syndrome have a very limited ability to speak (Katie is mute) and they tend to have various other challenges, including mobility and educational needs. Katie, very roughly speaking, has the mental abilities of a one-year old.

Is a poem ‘about’ its subject, though? If it is, it seems to me it is bound to do a poor job of it. There are much better ways to give information than through a poem, much better ways to tell you about Katie than to offer you lyric poems dedicated to her.

Yet poems, like paintings and novels are traditionally aligned to wisdom, even knowledge – from the ‘thisness’ of, say, Les Murray’s Translations from the Natural World, all the way through the conventions to a different sort of information, the problematising patterns of Jeremy Prynne’s meta poems.

Photographs have fallen into the same category of mismatch. We say more can be said with one photo than with a thousand words, but when we go and look at a ‘historic photo’ it’s usually surrounded by lots of words to give it context (in fact, it almost always had words with it, explaining what it was).

As time goes on, images seem more and more insufficient, and words do too, falling into disrepair without their context – we need more information to fill the lack. I think asking poems to be wise or even information-giving is not necessarily a productive approach. To problematise and even bypass conventional information might be a better way of looking at poetry.

Whilst poems start, perhaps, from a specific external reality (though I am not sure this is true, either – poems may come from layered and learned sonic patterns  hard to pin down to particularities or may begin from unplumbed depths in our neurology or from quite deliberately alienated procedures) – they go on and make their own materialisation, offer their reality, always through stylisation and artificial constraints.

Then there it is, that small thing – the poem. The new world a poem creates is far less complex than the subject (any subject) it is ostensibly ‘about’. In my poems ‘about’ Katie there is that extra dimension of me trying to offer ‘witness’ to and for a person who is literally unable to say anything.

I do see myself as an advocate-in-poetry for the disabled as far as I can be, but the poems can’t possibly get to the heart of who she is, or her relationship with her mother, or her relationship with me, or to the world. And surely it wouldn’t be right to? That would be such an invasion of privacy.

Yet, look at me, I can’t help myself, I still assert a high level of knowledge for lyric poetry that does not belong in lyric poetry: I’ve just used that informational word “witness”.  It’s a word I’ve apparently borrowed from a forum that requires at times a forensic level of knowledge – the law courts.

Then I think about it a bit more, try to be truthful to the language in my air. No, it’s not from the courts, or at least not directly, though it has a court drama exhilaration. Maybe where it’s primarily from will help clarify things about the poetry.

I reflect on that word and now I think the testimonial urgency of ‘witness’ is more likely lifted from gospel-inflected soul music, from the radio of my childhood, and from the radio of now.

When Marvin Gaye sings “Can I get a witness?” he’s asking his audience to affirm he’s been wronged – in his case by the girlfriend in the song who he says has been doing him damage. You agree with me, right? he seems to be singing, or, in an anticipation of a later record, You see what’s being going on, don’t you?

In my ‘personal’ poems I think there’s something similar happening, and it’s to do with writing against isolation and towards community. In “Can I get a witness?” Marvin Gaye, in persona, is feeling downtrodden by his girlfriend’s behaviour; he feels lost, alone, but the jaunty roll and almost euphoric tone of the song is surely down to what he does with that – he appeals to his audience for support, he has made the leap from private pain to indignant sharing.

In Hand Held – which is a joyful as well as bittersweet sequence, so not straightforwardly an appeal in the same way – I’m still asking. “You get a sense of this situation, now, don’t you?”

I think this will have helped the wider understanding of some kinds of disability, and that is usually how I start to explain the book, but really, it’s the ‘tune’, the sound patterns, the play with and distortion of social language, that I believe is at the heart of the sequence.

I’m not, truly, “showing”, not truly “telling”, revealing, Katie’s world – the sequence finds an independence from its apparent subject in the way any portrait painting does. In this way the traditional ‘don’t tell, show’ advice of creative writing courses is out of its depth, insisting on a choice between two  informational framings (one direct, one graphic), while a better, non-informational framing (or super-informational framing) acknowledges poetry’s nets of sound.

Poetry of this kind is a much more lateral, even parataxic, way of ‘communicating’. I’m told Proust thought music ceased to be music when it could be understood and though that is going too far for an obviously linguistic medium like poetry, that aspect should not disappear entirely.

Don’t get me wrong, to make a voice, especially a truly voice-less ‘voice’, heard  – that is surely one of the things going on in Hand Held and Lucky Day, but because poetry is doing that it is both singing towards Katie and singing away from her.

These are not equal vectors – Hand Held is mainly taking off from its apparent subject, not offering information whose source can be traced in detail, but creating new patterns of sound and socialised -but-stylised language that ripple way beyond whatever originated them.

In Gaye’s song the direct question, “Can I get a witness?”, involves us as his listeners on one level in the same way. Right at the beginning, the singer even directs his song to us all, though pointedly “especially you girls”: “Ah listen everybody, especially you girls / Is it right to be left alone / While the one you love is never home?”

On another level, though, it’s a rhetorical question containing a residual concentrate, a fair bit stronger than homeopathic, of its religious history. It’s a commercialisation of a religious turn of phrase. Gaye and his songwriters have borrowed “Can I get a witness” from a black preaching tradition.

A pastor might well ask this question of their congregation, not in regard to a love affair, of course, but to seek affirmation of various Christian verities, all examples that God’s truth is indeed the Truth. “Did Christ die for us?, did He? I’m looking, I’m looking to you! Can I get a witness? Can I get a witness?” The only possible response from the congregation is a positive one, of whole-hearted support. “You know it! Amen!”.  

This, too, has a bearing on modern lyric poetry or if it doesn’t I find it useful by analogy. (I also believe that the songs of the 1960s were the cream of 1960s poetry, but that is for another day.) That the call and response convention is shared by both public-speaking and song is significant to me, as a lyric poet, as is the appeal to a law that’s bigger and better than the official legal system, so obviously inadequate.

After all, under the law so many black people have been injured, wrongly incarcerated, and killed (in the US and in the UK). The appeal is to find a ‘witness’ whose testimony will be heard beyond conventional law, since the ordinary courts will always disappoint, to put it mildly. That witness is an engaged, righteous audience who the speaker trusts on this question of faith, who will testify where it matters, firstly within the community on Earth and then beyond.

So now, as I write this, Hand Held has a different context, to my own surprise. And I can see that the new book Late Gifts shares that context:  the witness-bearing aspect of the political poems in Late Gifts pick up one strand of the spoken word tradition, which is heavily influenced by gospel history: the need to testify in front of and, as importantly, with an audience.

There is another context and this shouldn’t surprise anyone. Appearing to talk about private, personal things, in the way that Robert Lowell and Syliva Plath and Ted Berrigan do in their respective, breath-taking ways, has long had a name and that term, too, borrows from a Christian tradition: confessional.

Here, the meaning is about privacy, secret thoughts, secret sins – an opposite direction, at first sight anyway, to that which the gospel tradition asserts. However, because confessional poetry is by its nature placed before the public (James, the early Christian leader, did say, Confess your sins to each other (James 5:16) not to men in white collars), the difference is not straightforward: confession to a priest in private is really an organisational narrowing of the much more open instruction of the early Church.

In the context of poetry, “confessional” has a pejorative tone to it. Perhaps it’s that public element of ‘confessional poetry’ that so irks its critics, the apparent openness and even the prospect of popularity. I think the objection is both sniffy and resentful, as if the poet is simply using the good luck of their bad luck to make poetry.  Easy!

Perhaps the critics who in the past deployed the ‘confessional’ tag in a fairly condescending way (as “misery lit” has been used for heart-rending autobiography) were appalled at the thought of  strong emotions being expressed strongly.

If that is the case, it was a misunderstanding of the material nature of the poetry in the first place, downplaying its skilled technical qualities, as the virtuosity of poets like Lowell and Plath demonstrates.

The pejorative use of the term falls into the trap its users think they’ve set, misunderstanding the different music confessional poets have composed: from fear of intense feeling comes an inability to understand the expertise of different traditions expressing it and going beyond it into an exquisitely stylised world.

In this way, one echo of a Christian tradition – confession – has been used to punish another – witness, the public affirmation of gospel. In my mind, by corollary, that punishment is of spoken word and the testifying turn in printed contemporary poetry, too. And vice versa.

Both traditions, though as it happens having quite different positions in church history, are bound by technical rules of process and rhetoric, including a relationship to song-like qualities. Confession is a voice of any parishioner speaking in private to a ‘higher’, trained, listener (the Priest); Witness is a voice of a Pastor calling out, singing out, really,  in public to a laity who, importantly, are also the community and who are encouraged to respond and affirm.

Both strands emerge from profound human need. Tellingly, both kinds of poetry, the confessional and what I’ll call (for want of a better term) the witnessing, are seen, by the ‘discerning’, as artless and fake, focussed either on egomaniac individualism or folksy group identity, crude in construction.

They are framed as either a threat or irrelevant to ‘real poetry’ (or, in the same way that the Left is demonised in mainstream discourse, both a threat and irrelevant); in any case, certainly not wrought with the complexity of cooler ‘independent’ thought and the virtuosity of artifice that ‘real poetry’ has.

When Katie was little, I couldn’t help thinking of my mother who had died a few years before. As it happens my mother had grown up in England and abroad (her father was a soldier). Just occasionally when in my teens I’d detected a note of home sickness in some of her comments, and I think she especially missed the countryside she had known in Kent.

After moving north of the Border in the 1960s, my parents thought Scotland a better place to bring up children, and indeed to be an adult, so they stayed. In the late 1980s, when her children were grown up and almost all away from home, I wonder if she was beginning to think of an alternative life. Perhaps that would have been away from Scotland – in any case, away from devoting so much of her time and emotional labour to the care of her four sons.

Amid the euphoria of Katie’s birth there was a sadness in knowing that my mother would not see her granddaughter and that alternative life wouldn’t now unfold. I wrote four poems right at the beginning of Hand Held which are tributes to my mother. If they are confessional, they are bitter-sweet, singing the loss; if they are witnessing, they are testifying to gratitude, singing praise.

Many years later, it was a familiar yet uncanny experience in a new relationship to be a ‘new’ father again. Rory already has one book dedicated to him – his mother Hannah Lowe’s The Kids – and at the risk of being especially icky, my new book Late Gifts is also for him.

Again, poems for my mother seemed to arrive in the new baby’s early years. I remade the sonnet form to make it start tentatively and to build to full-throated by the end of the poem:  the first line just one syllable and the last line fourteen.  I made a different rhyme scheme for it, to suit.

With that new form, which I call the “stepper”,  I seemed to be able to braid the thankfulness I will always feel towards my mother with the increasing distance that a person has to those they continue to grieve; the melancholy, sometimes the anguish, as Denise Riley has said, that there will be no reply when you ask, please, “say something back”. In speaking to the dead, there is no Priest in the Box –  the Pastor has no reciprocating community.

Losing the word ‘love’

I   
need so 
much better 
for you Mum. No,
I will say “Mother” 

to respect the laughter 
and Star Trek transfers which glow
green/yellow long seconds after
the light switch clicks and the dark you know

is held by gifts for this small child off school –
a broken eardrum, was it, or ‘daymare flu’?
I can’t say love – that word’s too many kinds of true –
catch-all for like, for lust, breaker of its own proud rule:

that love’s select. Love’s too full. I’ll love you until I die.                     

(from Late Gifts)

I am not at all a religious person, though wish well all those who are. I am surprised I am so drawn to these histories and rituals and, importantly, their material and social contexts, as ways of thinking and, perhaps especially, beneficial not-thinking. Forgive the inept use of Christian traditions for these framing thoughts.

Still, I find the confessional/witnessing framework useful in trying to understand some kinds of poetry, including certain sub-strata within my own. I acknowledge the cultural limits of that – this is not a ‘General Theory of All Poetry’. Also, these terms have the big drawback in that they sound as if they are emphasising interior and external kinds of human activity when I am as interested in the almost de-personalised patterning and relationships across language which the models offer: the music, and the intensification of feeling that would be unbearable if it was constant.

I suppose the elegies to my mother are on the ‘confessional’ side of the schema I’ve tentatively sketched here, with the tone accordingly more intimate. I of course never forgot the musical frame that the poetry places words into, taking them away from ‘original experience’ into something new and non-realistic as much as reflecting on the apparent genesis.

However, the ‘witness’ side is stronger in Late Gifts, in poems which testify to the environmental disgrace we are experiencing at the hands of the super-rich, and which my son and I and us all have inherited. I have used many different forms to express that, mutating the “stepper”, adopting ballad forms, and revisiting the prose poem whose genre had significant presence elsewhere in Lucky Day in the Spelthorne Bird List.

In fact, the stepper form and the idea of modern witness took me to quite different places – a whole sequence, Tinderness, about dating apps and the relationships that arise from them, was written in poems which are various versions of the stepper.

In the end, arguing with myself about how it did and did not belong to the themes of Late Gifts, I decided it was better as a single short collection and published it as an artist’s book with eerie (and sometimes funny) images by Simon Lewandowski. I still see it as a companion piece to Late Gifts, however so much it complicates the narrative.

This led the way for a leaner story line in Late Gifts¸but it still feels overflowing! Key poems in the new book speak of the degradation of the most basic of natural resources, including water, and the violent effects visited on anybody’s son or daughter by our economic systems.

These have been caused not by ‘humanity’ or ‘humankind’, nothing as unspecific as that. I am sure the multinationals would love us all to feel as guilty as each other (that would be very helpful to them for accountability-shifting) but this set of catastrophes has been caused by very particular economic thuggery – the work of super-bosses, their proxies, and their institutions of past years and in the present. Most of humanity has been powerless before them, or they have imagined themselves powerless (with the help of immensely persuasive tools deployed against them from birth).

The air that he breathes

I have a little boy,
late gift in last days.
He laughs so freely, and that’s how he plays.
He doesn’t see nothing’s free –
least, not the air that he breathes.

I walk with him.
I take his sticky hand.
We risk the road,
he skips to a scrap of land.
Beneath old trees refugees twitch in their sleep.
We’re all ‘sharing the peace’ – and the air that he breathes.

There’s a five-a-side field,
it’s all marked down for shops and flats –
‘affordable’ homes, and zero rate of tax
for land-bank owner-absentees.
It’s a Government decree.
There’s a short-term lease on the air that he breathes.

I never thought I’d leave this world
with the children fighting for air.
I never thought I’d see this greed
and leave them choking there –
outside, at the ‘gated community’ wall.
I didn’t think at all –
I believe the things we need should be free,
including the air that he breathes.

I have a little boy,
late gift in last days.
He laughs so freely, and that’s how he plays.

                                                                                     (from Late Gifts)

Times will change. There are already models of resistance and of far better ways of living operating in the world which we can learn from and make the norm. In the UK the activism of, say, Don’t Pay UK, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, of a renewal of the trade union movement, the revival of Tribune for history and theory (and the renewal of Glasgow Review of Books), new media platforms, and the positive work of community wealth programs (for example in Preston), to name only parts of the solution, have shown us that the real tough choices will not be made by those in the current political settlement.

Instead, we must stop the planet-killers in their tracks, create a new and enforced framework of sharing (it’s as fundamental as that – spoilt big boys need to be made to share) and so lead towards the re-making of the bonds of community. This must sweep the existing institutions clean – or away.

I hope this book will, albeit in the smallest portion, contribute to the new reckoning and the new way of living on the planet that must come. There is a lot of joy in the Late Gifts book. The world of loving human relationships and human invention, and the guarantee of life’s essentials so that relationships and creativity can thrive, is a world worth fighting for. I will always testify to that.

Total concentration

when he is almost on his own
playing on the rocks
and he’s singing-humming
(I’m not sure how you’d classify it)
total concentration
and his body is moving too
(fluently)         he’s dancing

when it’s him and me
we’re watching an anime
and we both feel the shockwave
the parents have been turned into pigs
serves them right     but even so
and the last train moves through shallow water
incremental inundation     the end of the world by seepage
“I’d love to be on that train, Dad”
“Me too”         “Can we?”

when it’s all the family
what’s left of it
a wedding      or a Sunday front room
and there he is dancing again
everyone knows he has that gift
celebrate him celebrate us     all life
because everyone had something of that   that gift once
no still does

or so what       keep dancing

            (from Late Gifts)

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