Paxman and poetry

I've been rather tardy at updating here recently, but I'm determined to get back to it. Hopefully, the next few weeks on here will be largely celebratory (new Lee Harwood book, Mark Burnhope interview, Prole, Conor Jameson's new book), but let's get started with a good old-fashioned poetry dust-up.

Jeremy Paxman, one of the judges of the Forward Prize this year, has ventured the opinion that poets should start engaging with 'ordinary people'. On Facebook and Twitter, this has provoked a good deal of talk, some of which, as Jo Bell and Katy Evans-Bush have pointed out, does seem to rather back up his point. Why should it really be such a problem to have a 'non-poet' talking about poetry?

My main argument with it, I think, is not with the problem that Paxman identifies, but the reasons he suggests for that. I don't think it has a huge amount to do with the accessibility of the actual poems, with the often false separation of poetry into 'easy' and 'difficult' camps. I think it's more to do with another kind of accessibility, with the fact that it's hard to encounter poetry casually, these days. The odd newspaper or magazine publishes the odd occasional poem, and there are projects such as Poems On The Underground that attempt to get poetry in front of the public as they go about their everyday business, but frankly, there's not enough of it. When it does appear on TV or radio, it's generally in a niche of its own, rather than alongside other artforms.

I do have a slight problem with the whole idea of 'ordinary people', 'non-poets' and so on - aren't poets ordinary people, then? But that might be down to the way the papers have presented this. Paxman has obviously been asked to stir up interest in the Prize shortlist, and he's done it. In that respect, kudos to him. At least poetry's getting talked about on the news.

The one shame is that it's overshadowed the actual shortlist - scroll down to the bottom of that Guardian article to see it.

New Networks for Nature

I spent Friday and half of Saturday in Stamford, at the fourth annual New Networks for Nature symposium. The organisation has the long-term aim of establishing a festival celebrating the cultural significance of nature in Britain - on the evidence of this year, it's well on its way to doing just that.

It's really a bit unfair of me to pick out highlights, given that there were so many, and I'd be hard-pushed to find a poart of the programme that I didn't enjoy.

It all opened with Hanna Tuulikki singing entirely unaccompanied, but then she has such an extraordinary voice that no accompaniment could do it any justice. She somehow manages to make links between folk song and birdsong that really need to be heard to be believed - at the time I tweeted that she sounded like a cross between Bjork, Sandy Denny and a curlew, which I suppose at least ought to give some idea of what a unique voice she is. I have the feeling that I'm going to be looking for and downloading a lot of her work.

Conor Jameson's talk on Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and the debt we owe to it, was really excellent. I've read his own Silent Spring Revisited (highly recommended), but there was plenty more to take away from this, not least the conviction that change can be achieved relatively quickly. The following talk, by Jim Perrin, was equally inspiring, arguing for the value of 'rapture' in our relationship with the natural world.

The panel debate, preceded by Ruth Padel reading three poems (one of her own, plus others from Clare and Larkin), considered the question "Do the British care about nature?" You wouldn't expect to come up with hard and fast answers, but there were some intriguing leads.

In the afternoon session, the hard science provided my early highlights, with Chris Hewson's look at the satellite-tracking of Cuckoos, and Nick Davies' analysis of exactly how Cuckoos trick host birds into raising their young in the first place. Bruce Pearson's talk on albatrosses was excellent too, with his artwork adding an extra dimension.

On Saturday morning, David Tipling's all too brief opening slot was superb. Most birders are familiar with David's photos (we certainly use them whenever possible at Bird Watching), but everyone in the theatre gave a little gasp at a couple of his recent photos of Hares. Katrina van Grouw is someone else I know through her work for the magazine, and her current book, The Unfeathered Bird, is terrific, but her talk about its making was something else again - the phrase "labour of love" doesn't really cover it.

I read three birdsong-related poems myself, before Charles Bennett read from his poem/song sequence The Angry Planet, as well as talking about its composition. He touched on a theme that kept re-emerging throughout the two days - how to avoid giving in to hopeless pessimism about the state of the natural world, without offering easy answers.

Finally, Hanna Tuulikki retuened, along with Nerea Bello and Lucy Duncombe, to sing Air falbh leis na h-eoin (Away With The Birds), a large-scale vocal composition inspired by the Western Isles. Suddenly my rather glib tweet of the previous day looked a bit closer to the truth - this was music that both imitated and completely transformed wader calls and songs.

There was, as I said, much more that's worthy of mention, and as always it was good to catch up with friends and colleagues (and frustrating to miss one or two others). But there was always a feeling of momentum really starting to build, and next year's event has the opportunity to develop that in a big way.

J A Baker revisited

Leicester poet Roy Marshall, whose excellent chapbook Gopagilla is out now from Crystal Clear Creators, has very kindly chosen my poem Variations On A Theme By J A Baker for his Favourite Poem of the Week column.

He's also provided a link to an article about Baker, who's something of a hero of mine. I've actually just been reading Conor Jameson's excellent Silent Spring Revisited, which starts with his discussion of whether Baker was in fact seeing escaped falconry birds as well as wild Peregrines (we published a version of this in Bird Watching last year). Far from diminishing Baker's achievement, Conor puts Baker's extraordinary work into the context of an era in which modern conservation movements were just emerging, after the massive numbers of bird fatalities caused by unrestricted use of pesticides.

So, read Roy's blog, read Roy's book, read Conor's book, and read Baker.