Revisiting Miners at the Quarry Pool after a Decade

Nigel Jarrett ponders his own poetry as Miners at the Quarry Pool, first published a decade ago, is re-presented to the world.

Writing poetry is a different proposition from attempting to get it published. In fact, the experience of publishing any kind of poetry or fiction might lead non-writers to believe that writers were somehow deranged or in need of therapy. Even Oxford Professors of Poetry and winners of the T S Eliot prize will recall the pre-internet experience of sending poems to magazines accompanied by a ‘personalised’ letter and – essential, this – a self-addressed envelope correctly stamped. And then having them returned; over and over, by different editors.

Before e-mailing and digitalising, the exercise belonged to a sensory age: noisy typewriters hit back; manuscripts had to be copied and folded and stamps and envelopes licked; and posting involved a walk to a pillar box. Weeks later, often months, touch induced euphoria or dejection: a thick envelope on which you’d written your name and address (the first alert) would mean the poems had been dismissed, a thin one that they’d been retained for publication. If only one or two had been accepted and the rest sent back, you’d have to remember the width of the original in order to determine your fate, which justified postponing the excitement or disappointment of finding out.

Lampooning

I was once upbraided by a humourless scribe for lampooning these totems and rituals of publication, especially the likely prospect of a magazine’s having a circulation of just 76 or the possibility of its closing down before your poems had appeared – or after they’d been published, a cause-effect relationship likely to make you more of a worrier than you already were. I often imagined an editor occupying a bedsit in Walsall or Shoreditch, and dreamed of a joint editorship resembling ZZ Top lookalikes. Poetry publication is sometimes eccentric; thick skin is a ‘must have’ for those it engages.

Casualties

The relatively small readerships for poetry, even that written by the famous, were the first casualties of cutbacks in book production induced by risen costs. In 1998, Oxford University Press infamously ditched its poets. Bloodaxe and Carcanet were among the first to maintain their status as big-name English – as opposed to Welsh, Scottish or Irish –  publishers of poetry. Even though there are lots of smaller ones, now thriving beside a plethora of website-only poetry magazines, their ‘feeder’ source, the familiar cri de coeur proclaims that ‘poetry doesn’t sell’, making a poetry collection in book form even more distant a goal. Maybe a stint of community service would be better for a writer than therapy.

All this is lengthy preamble to the re-printing by Parthian of my first poetry collection, Miners At The Quarry Pool, which appeared in 2013. On grounds that poetry is incompatible with levity, those solemn scribes will wince when I say the book has nothing to do with miners, quarries or pools. My tongue would be firmly planted in cheek. The critic Hugh Kenner was taught in Canada by Oxbridge MAs who thought any poetry written after Tennyson was incomprehensible peculiarity. Kenner explained Modern poetry to me, or as much as I could reasonably take on without having a university degree. In defending his view, I often resort to negative deprecation, as here. MATQP is about miners only in that it’s dedicated to my coal-miner grandfathers, and, as one commentator suggested, its poems are about excavation of one sort or another. True. Aren’t all poems? But I’ll pocket the compliment.

Unearthing

My grandfathers have one poem apiece, my father and mother also. All four are no longer with us, as poets should never put it. They belong to the past. Poets are good at unearthing what’s gone, but hopefully only as a means of addressing the present and future: Yeats’s what’s passing or to come, its emphasis on stopping events in motion. I’m glad that Parthian has retained the cover image; it’s a portrait I drew in pastels of a coal-miner at the pithead baths. The eponymous poem inside, first published in Poetry Wales, was based on a painting called The Swimming Hole, by the American Thomas Eakins. It’s an idyllic scene, but the poem is a deconstruction, suggesting that an icon of labour can also be flawed – a thief, a bully, a wife-beater, a liar – in different surroundings. It’s just so that we don’t forget, even if we need to establish continuities. I’ve also explored that theme elsewhere.

Invigorated

In ten years, my outlook on poetry hasn’t so much changed as been invigorated. I wouldn’t alter any of the poems in MATQP– well, perhaps a barely noticeable tweak here and there. I’ve read and reviewed a lot of poetry since then. It seems to have been moving in many different directions, with rings of fire always signalling experimentation on the fringes and in the hinterlands. Poetry also competes for my writerly attention with prose, in particular short fiction. But the latest of my eight books is a second poetry collection called Gwyriad, published by Cockatrice, another Welsh independent (the fearsome cockatrice is a  dragon the size of a cockerel, ceiliog neidr). Derek Littlewood, in this newspaper, remarked on the poetry’s ‘ingenuity and cultural allusions’. I was grateful for that, too, and flattered.

I’ve never understood why the populace of a country which has alerted the rest of the world to the buzz of literature and politics – to bright new ways of saying and improving – does not gather in multitudes when poetry is spoken or published and affairs of state are debated. Like the modesty of changes in governance, profit margins in poetry publishing are miniature. But there’ll always be a Speakers’ Corner, however sparse the audience for its orators. And, like ten-year-old poetry collections, they will sometimes return unashamedly with the same messages.

Miners at the Quarry Pool, by Nigel Jarrett is published by Parthian and is available from all good bookshops.