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In the last issue of Rialto Michael Mackmin mentioned that he would be interested to see a piece comparing the original poems I wrote during my Smiths Knoll 2006 mentorship with the mentored results. Bearing in mind that a good mentorship is about more than just feedback, I’ve pulled out from my disorganised folders the first submitted draft of a poem, ‘Viewing At The National’, some of the SK comments, and the final version which SK published in the magazine and in The Devil’s Cut, the pamphlet they produced for me at the end of the mentorship.

Joanna Cutts’ and Michael Laskey’s approach to feedback changed during the mentorship year. In the first six months they were anxious to find enough poems for a pamphlet, so they made more suggestions for actual amendments, trying to work up poems which were perhaps a little – cough – weak. By the second six months, when it was clear that there would be more than enough poems, their comments were along the lines of ‘yes, this one looks good, keep working on it’ or ‘we’re not so keen.’

‘Viewing At The National’ was a first six-monther, so I was being breathed on fairly hard at this stage. It was included in my first submission of poems in November 2005, in reaction to Michael’s request for ‘a dozen or so of your most alive, maybe troubling or troubled, unpublished poems’. ‘Viewing’ was a response to the London zeitgeist following the July 2005 bombings; a time when walking round London with a friend who looked Muslim could produce strange results. It was the time of the infamous ‘Don’t freak, I’m a Sikh’ T-shirts.

‘TAKING A VIEW’ – INITIAL SUBMISSION

We have stood a full ten minutes gazing at St. Lucy,
her eyes heavy-lidded on a plate like two sad oysters,

then walk into the next room where the warden stares,
wanting you under some restraint, on a ribbon maybe

like Uccello’s dragon. A tourist group glances up,
stiffens, parades to a distance. Their lecturer glares,

as if expecting you to run amok, as if whatever
foreign field or training camp I found you in

had set you ticking. You are too dark for comfort,
too much the Believer, your scimitar nose, olive

black oil-slicked hair, your box-shouldered zealot
gait a swing of suppressed violence under an East

End coat, a human-headed bull like the fivelegged
guardians flanking the gates of Nimrud.

So we pass between massacres, tearing by beasts,
crucifixions, beheadings, flayings, past the alarm

of visitors, under the restless wary eyes of guards,
looking at pictures, picking up looks, until outside we

breathe out under the portico. ‘Not my cup of tea
really,’ you say, and lay a finger lightly on my arm.

This is the initial SK response from Joanna:

We liked this poem for its willingness to take on this uncomfortable subject and the surprising tenderness in the last couplet. But overall, we felt it was too heavy and some of the changes we’re suggesting might lighten it. For instance ‘stares’ and ‘glares’ in couplets two and three felt unconvincing and we liked the more subtle shifty reaction of the tourist group, thought it was more realistic. Next, we wondered about cutting down or cutting out completely the description of the ‘you’ in the poem in couplets 5, 6 and 7. We already have a picture of the ‘you’ from ‘foreign field...training camp...set you ticking’ and perhaps it’s best to leave the reader to fill in the details of that picture themselves, to make it their own? The poem would then go straight from ‘set you ticking’ to the brutality depicted in the paintings. We felt the bit from ‘past the alarm’ to ‘picking up looks’ was repetitious and thought it could be cut or shortened. The ‘we’ from the ninth couplet might be better moved to the beginning of the tenth. Do those two outs - ‘outside’ and ‘breathe out’ – bother you? And back to the beginning, would the second line read more easily as ‘her eyes heavy lidded like two sad oysters on a plate’? And are they wardens or/and guards in art galleries? Neither felt right to us. Attendants maybe? We couldn’t remember. And finally, the title. Is it a word play on taking a stand? We didn’t think it quite worked and wondered about simplifying it to ‘Viewing’ instead.

And this is the published version:

‘VIEWING AT THE NATIONAL’

We have stood a full ten minutes gazing at St. Lucy,
her eyes heavy-lidded on a plate like two sad oysters,

then walk into the next room where the attendant
looks you up and down, then strolls behind us,

wanting you under some restraint, on a ribbon
maybe, like Uccello’s dragon. Whatever happens

it won’t be on his patch. A lecturer glances, stiffens,
parades his tourists to a distance, as if you might

ignite or run amok, as if whatever foreign field
or training camp I found you in had set you ticking.

You are too dark for comfort, too broad, too much
the long-pelted bull, your shoulders boxed to hide

your neck, your walk a swing of supposed
violence under your East End coat, as we pass

between massacres, torture, beheadings,
flayings, tearing by beasts, until in the cold air

we breathe out under the portico. ‘Not my cup of tea
really,’ you say, and lay a finger lightly on my arm.

Roddy Lumsden and I recently re-visited this poem. Roddy couldn’t understand why visiting an art gallery with an Asian friend would cause any problems whatsoever. It was a poem of its time and people forget; which is just as well.

Another poem from the pamphlet, called ‘Darkness At Antananarivo’, was originally part of a five poem sequence on plane travel in Madagascar. This was my original draft of the last three stanzas:-

Torches switch on from dozens of passengers used to trekking,
but the weighing machines have failed as well. We just have to wait.
Outside the moon is cutting a wry tight-lipped smile; she lies on

her back at the equator, not tipped en pointe, ready for
Endymion. Dawn comes fast. The stars are fresh, the Milky Way
runs its washed-out smudge across an unpolluted sky, while

beside me a woman speaks in Malagasy, then in French,
when I reached the last sheet it was the size of a baby,
this one at least I knew was not my husband.

And this was SK’s feedback:-

We liked this very much, loved the trekkers and their torches. Wondered about Endymion, the literariness, the cultural distancing here, the mythologising of desire, which is odd in the sequence where the rawness is important. But maybe it increases the shock of the end? The moon’s feeling a bit overworked though - the wry smile being the narrator’s while the lying on her back in the context of III [the poem ‘Air Hotel: Day Room’, the preceding poem in the pamphlet] feels sexual or maybe lazy, inert, inefficient in the context of the power cut? And ‘washed out smudge’ seems to contradict ‘fresh’ which is a pity perhaps when the narrator‘s and our spirits are being lifted before the darkness of the last verse.

I amended it to two stanzas as follows:-

The trekkers offer their nocturnal lemur torches. We brighten up,
but the weighing machines have failed as well. We just have to wait.
Outside the moon cuts a thin smile. The stars are fresh. From the night

beside me a woman speaks in Malagasy, then in French,
when I reached the last sheet it was the size of a baby,
this one at least I knew was not my husband.

Whether anyone approves of my amendments will be a matter of taste.

I should emphasise, though, that the importance of my mentorship (and I appreciate they are all different) was not simply due to feedback, which I could have picked up in any of a dozen classes available through, for example, the excellent Poetry School. It was more of a fostering, a bit like dealing with one of those baby birds that sits with its mouth open. What I needed was time and encouragement, and that’s what I was given without stint. Emails, particularly in the second six months when we knew each other well, were frequent: some contained feedback, some were more general. I was pointed in the direction of the good poems, and politely advised to forget the bad (‘I don’t think this is a poem that’s at the heart of your work’ Michael once tactfully emailed.) If I needed help, I turned to SK. They sent me emails that said ‘you are a good poet, keep going’; they sent me off to open mic to learn how to read. They were shoulders to cry on, and people to celebrate with. They published ‘The Devil’s Cut’, which was one of the first poems I wrote that I considered original and worthwhile. There is a good chance that I wouldn’t be writing poetry now, if their mentorship hadn’t found me.

And they gave me three memorable days at Goldings, where for the first time someone took me seriously as a poet. The summer visit I remember in particular for the hot weather, for the poems thrown about on the study table, for Joanna’s and Michael’s complete focus. Driving back to the station, Michael recited Czeslaw Milosz’s poem ‘Gift’, which starts ‘A day so happy.’ Now that’s a mentorship.