{"id":855,"date":"2014-12-01T14:11:03","date_gmt":"2014-12-01T14:11:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/?p=855"},"modified":"2014-12-02T06:03:45","modified_gmt":"2014-12-02T06:03:45","slug":"a-new-poetry-collection-from-michael-thomas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/?p=855","title":{"rendered":"A new poetry collection from Michael Thomas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Come To Pass<\/em> – some reflections on group work<\/p>\n

This collection, recently published by Oversteps Books, is the second\u00a0in which I have arranged poems\u00a0by sub-groups. In earlier collections, I think I must have had some sense of variation in subject or tone, so I can\u2019t say that I just slung them in like packages in a delivery van. There was, however, no overt organising principle. Perhaps I had in mind Ringo Starr\u2019s recollections of recording Sgt Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band, <\/em>given in an interview for the Beatles\u2019 Anthology <\/em>documentary. They started, he said, with a kind of military theme in mind for the album, which gave them the opening song, its reprise, and\u2014via the persona of Billy Shears\u2014\u2018With A Little Help From My Friends.\u2019 But after that, \u2018We said stuff it, let\u2019s just do tracks.\u2019<\/p>\n

I\u2019d always liked the idea of just doing tracks in poetry collections: letting different kinds of poems jostle each other and jump out at the reader in haphazardly contrasting ways. But I was aware that, for most poets, having a care for organisation was more important than my cavalier \u2018herd \u2018em up, move \u2018em out\u2019 approach suggested. In one interview, Philip Larkin noted that he saw his collections as akin to an evening at the music-hall: the clowns, the serious tenor, the dancing girls, the magician.<\/p>\n

\"come-to-pass-full\"<\/a>So with my last collection, The Girl from Midfoxfields, <\/em>and this one, Come To Pass, <\/em>I moved towards sub-groupings and saw the advantages that this could have. My first impulse was a simple one: put similarly-themed poems together so they have a bit of company. From this act of cod-altruism, however, grew the realisation that grouping poems might enable me to see them in a new way\u2014possibly even see meanings which I had not intended when I first wrote them (thus sparing me, perhaps, the old experience of trying to catch up with someone else\u2019s interpretation).<\/p>\n

In Come To Pass, <\/em>the sub-groups are \u2018Black Countries\u2019, \u2018Calls and Responses\u2019, \u2018The Gather-man\u2019, \u2018Shelter Poems\u2019 and \u2018Exits.\u2019 Only in \u2018The Gather-man\u2019 were the poems written on a unifying theme, the notion of a character who prepares the soon-to-die. The rest had been written at different times and, while I could see that I was moving back to subject A or B with this or that one, I didn\u2019t immediately think \u2018Ah, that\u2019s another for a group.\u2019 The headings actually came afterwards, but it was interesting to see how naturally different poems fell under them. \u2018Calls and Responses\u2019 turned out to be a home for poems of greater or lesser spirituality, while \u2018Exits\u2019 showed me how many poems I had written on the theme of \u2018goodbye\u2019\u2014from \u2018I Didn\u2019t Mean It,\u2019 about a domestic row, to \u2018Union Junction\u2019, which ends with a boy watching a swan sail away beneath a canal bridge:<\/p>\n

as a child might stand
\nmoon-eyed
\nquiver-mouthed
\nwhile eternity
\nwith patient smile
\nexplains itself<\/p>\n

For this collection and the last, then, subgrouping has been the way to go. Whether I\u2019ll continue it, I\u2019m not sure, but I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll revert to the random business of \u2018doing tracks.\u2019 I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ll write anything else, but then, perhaps you never are after you\u2019ve finished something. Anyway, I take heart from the words that Edward Bond gives Ben Jonson in Bingo, <\/em>his 1973 play about Shakespeare\u2019s final days in Stratford. Jonson is on his way north to torment Drummond of Hawthornden and stops off to see \u2018sweet William\u2019, as he calls him, and find out what he\u2019s writing now. Nothing, insists Shakespeare:<\/p>\n

Jonson: Why not?
\nShakespeare: Nothing to say.
\nJonson: Doesn\u2019t stop others.<\/p>\n

www.overstepsbooks.com<\/a><\/p>\n

www.michaelwthomas.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Come To Pass – some reflections on group work This collection, recently published by Oversteps Books, is the second\u00a0in which I have arranged poems\u00a0by sub-groups. In earlier collections, I think I must have had some sense of variation in subject … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[138],"class_list":["post-855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry","tag-theme"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=855"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":861,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855\/revisions\/861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/WritingTutors\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}