ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

Always an auspicious sign, the snail.

This one was living free on Orford Ness, in Suffolk, a blasted landscape in many senses, being a former military testing site and now a valuable nature preserve. A group of poets made a visit there on the weekend in search of inspiration.

It’s made up of 10 miles of seaward-exposed shingle, which we were told comprises 15% of the world’s habitat for coastal vegetative shingle (another 15% is at Dungeness). There are many signs pointing to its military past…

The National Trust man who showed us round told us the bomb disposal squad is still called out to deal with unexploded bombs some 15 to 20 times a year.

After our walk we returned to little Blaxhall

for some tea, and then made our way back to Orford for supper at the Butley Oysterage, where I dined handsomely on griddled squid

and grilled Dover Sole. A poetry workshop followed, accompanied by a very fine smoked salmon terrine with potatoes and leeks, and some of Orford’s best smoked chicken.

Then before I could turn around it was Tuesday, and time to join some of London’s Slow Foodies for a night of wild food from Mark Gilchrist, who shoots, butchers, dresses and cooks all his own game.

He started us off with a plate of assorted duck appetisers: Teal liver pate; Pintail confit; air-dried Pintail; salted, cured and smoked Widgeon, served with fresh brioche and kumquat jam.

Then a pan-fried fillet of Roe deer…

And then he put on his butcher’s coat and demonstrated how to skin and joint a hare, and told us how to make a ragout of hare like the one he was about to serve on freshly-made tagliatelli.

The ultimate dish was Conference pear tarte tatin…

which, containing molten caramel, must be turned onto its pastry base with care…

And of course it must be served with a drop of cream.

I braved the pelting rain to get to the Restaurant Show at Earl’s Court last Tuesday, where I saw lots of stands – including some small food producers I’d been learning about while working on our food producers’ database (which launched on Wednesday, yay!). It was lovely to meet the people and taste the food I’d been writing about. I then sat myself down at The Stage and watched some cooking demonstrations. The first was from Barny Haughton,

who talked about sustainability in the commercial kitchen: inviting people to use less popular, cheaper cuts of meat – if we’re going to be carnivores it’s more responsible to use the entire animal, which is a theme I’ve been hearing for some time – and sustainable fish varieties. He was followed by like-minded Cyrus Todiwala,

who was speaking on behalf of the Greener Food project. He’d been sent a big box of locally-raised, seasonal vegetables and told to make something of them. His beetroot with coconut salad was terrific, as was everything else he made. We were as heartbroken as he that he didn’t have time to make us his pigeon curry…

Then Ian Pengelley, another London chef, took the stage – by this time things were running very late and it got a bit chaotic. His aim was to show us how nicely champagne went with Asian foods, so we got to try a bit with some Thai beef salad, some sushi rolls and some seared scallops. And sure, we agreed! All very nice.

His sommelier was very entertaining – giving us a finale show where he decapitated the last bottle by strategic use of the base of a champagne glass. Definitely not one to try at home.

Then I had a couple of evenings to catch my breath before Friday’s Les Murray reading at Senate House – certainly one building that can accurately be described as neo-brutalist. This grey edifice loomed ahead of me in the dying light, and I sensed trouble ahead as I sought the room which my note to self said was “3rd floor Senate North”.

I entered from a sort of westerly door, I thought, so turned left, looking for north. I found a lift just around the corner, with a notice posted about talks and lectures — including the one I was after, so without anything more to go on, I entered and ascended to the 2nd floor, which was as far as this one went.

On the second floor there was another lift that went up to the 4th floor, but there was a 3rd floor button as well, so I pressed that and pushed my way out through a crowd of students to find myself on a near-deserted floor, where the only open door was to some special library – ancient civilisations or something, with an ominous No Exit sign on the entry.

Not a soul around, so I lugged myself and the bag I was escorting up to the fourth floor, where I found the crowd of students from the lift forming a lengthy queue for library card renewal. Beyond the security gates (only passable by library card holders of course) I spotted and hailed a friendly looking woman in a name badge who told me I wanted room N336. She told me to get back in the lift and go to the ground floor, along the hallway to a different set of lifts.

So back I got in the lift and descended to the ground floor where I found myself facing another set of card-operated barricades and a silver-haired defender of.. of.. whatever it was he was defending seated behind what I’m sure must have been a bullet-proof glass window. He told me I shouldn’t have come to the ground floor in this lift and that I should go back to the third floor as he presumed I was a member of the society for ancient civilisations or whoever it is who lives up there. No, I said, I was looking for the poetry reading in room N336. He said he knew nothing about a poetry reading or any such room, and couldn’t tell me whether I was actually in the north tower or not. After admonishing me again for coming down in that particular lift, and reinforcing his point that this was not an exit, he let me exit through the gate and I was back in the main hallway ready to search out the next set of lifts.

Which I found and ascended to find a big classroom with two doors (one marked 336 and the other 336A) but no other indication there was a reading there. I entered and found a bookseller setting up and three others sitting in wait, which seemed a bit sparse since it was only ten minutes to the reading, but down I sat. The room did in fact fill up nicely by the start time, and Les Murray started his reading. For the next hour, we were entertained by his poems and by the periodic rattling of the door knob closest to the reader (on the door labelled 336, in fact) followed by the covert entry of latecomers through the other door. There followed a wine reception and then it was time to slink off into the night.

I made a nerdy list of the poems he read, and here they are; rather unkindly he read from the Australian edition of his collected poems, so those who rushed the book table afterwards were not always able to find their favourites, but he sold quite a bit and did a little friendly book signing. I was happy he started us off with a food poem, and I liked (and remembered from past readings, I think), his cow poem, which he introduced by saying it was one of his favourite animals, and that he thought he was one of the few real Hindus of Australia. It was a poem from the point of view of the cow, which he observed is a ‘collective creature’ and thus difficult to find a pronoun for.

Beanstock Sermon; Glass Louvres; Words of the Glass Blowers; On Removing Spiderweb; Arial; Cows on Killing Day; Cell DNA; Contested Landscape at Forsayth; The Shield Scales of Heraldray; the Moon Man; Judged Worth Evacuating; Clothing as Dwelling as as Shouldered Boat; Visitor; Jellyfish; Reclaim the Sites; To One Outside the Culture; Melbourne Pavement Coffee; On the North Coastline; Me & Je Reviens; Japanese Sword Blades in the British Museum; The Mare Out on the Road; Birthplace; Sunday on a Country River; and then he finished with a few new poems.

Sunday was another one of those floor-to-ceiling poetry readings, with 10 on the menu. Luckily two were unable to attend (a third likewise but she’d enlisted her sister to read in her place) so it was a little shorter than it would have been otherwise.

I’m sure I’ve moaned about this style of reading before; it is, I feel, far too common in today’s poetry programming to attempt to squeeze as many poets as possible into a single event. The reading turns into a marathon, and the one or two you came to hear are lost in the numbing volume of the whole. You don’t get enough of the ones you want to hear, and perhaps you hear too much of those you don’t. And everyone else just doesn’t register.

Magazine launches – where 5 or 10 people come and read a poem they’ve had published in that issue, with perhaps one other – are one thing, and I’m ok with them as long as someone keeps the readers moving along (when faced with a long list of readers, the eye of the audience turns naturally to the clock).

But on Sunday, we were at this particular two hour event to hear a few minutes each of 10 first collections by 10 different readers. Another problem I have with these events is that the readers are introduced in volume, and if you aren’t familiar with them, as I mostly wasn’t, by the time you’ve heard the list of credentials and the readers take the stage you lose track of who of the five poets this half you’re hearing and what their background is. None of them thinks to say their name, or give the bridge into their work as a well composed introduction is meant to do. I’d rather each poet were treated with singular dignity – introduced one at a time, giving the audience a moment to change gears – instead of being bulk processed. There, that’s my rant done for today.

We did have an impressive list of readers, and – my grievances aside – I can totally understand why these 10 readers were chosen to celebrate the Poetry School’s 10 years; the numbers have a nice symmetry and you don’t have to narrow what must be an enormous list of achievers down quite so much to a more manageable number.

Here’s the list: Chris Beckett, Melanie Challenger (represented by her very able sister), Claire Crowther, Helen Farish (not present), Martha Kapos, Sharon Morris, Roger Moulson, Daljit Nagra, Anne Ryland, Greta Stoddart (not present). A new poem of Stoddart’s, called Drawing Breath, did take my breath away, but with my increasingly taxed powers of concentration I confess that was the only poem I heard that stays with me. And it’s not the fault of the readers or the poetry. I guess I needed to pace myself better. Live and learn.

Next up was a more manageable one-man show, by CK Williams, who led us through umpteen drafts of one of his poems. Fortunately he didn’t bring all 255 versions of this single poem (actually I don’t think 255 was the final count, more of a midpoint) which changed title several times, shape certainly, and whose themes shifted in and out of focus while he tried out different images, many of which he was so fond of he got new poems out of them. There followed a good substantial Q&A; session hosted by Fiona Sampson. One of the last questioners asked for advice about how to – as he’d put it (quoting others) – create the poet who was to create the poem. His answer was simple: read poetry. But not everyday stuff, he added: read great poets.

Well. That was good. Then Monday I wandered over to the Troubadour which has changed so much since my day. Today’s Troub is a young noisy place. Well groomed couples were canoodling over their two-for-one happy hour cocktails (cocktails??) to the sounds of Bob Marley. The dark wood twosome booths are mostly gone. The place is twice as big now they’ve knocked it through and put in a deli next door. There are semi-integrated toilets where the genders meet around a big round sink and take turns watching the skin on their hands flap in the high power wind of the hand dryer. Nothing so new here, really. It’s been like this for a few years, but I sat and really looked at it for a while on Monday.

The most shocking change is the basement, where the poetry happens, and which I reflected I’ve now seen in three incarnations. The first, which I remember from circa 1988, was a dark, smoky room with a blanket hung over the door at the bottom of some steep steps; on poetry nights it seemed to be always dim and full of random crazies. The second was a cleaned-up version with a small stage, but a door down from the kitchen that sometimes opened inopportunely, and a guaranteed interruption by emergency siren on the road above at least once in every reading. Now we have a big L-shaped space with odd little private rooms out of sight of the stage that are – in poetry readings at least – never used. And a bar, so you don’t have to rush upstairs at the break for replenishment. And quite a few benches or chairs with backs nowadays, not just back-breaking stools.

The poetry programming has put on a little heft here too: no more one- or two-poet nights; four readers shared the stage on Monday. The star turn and concluding reader was CK Williams, whose Collected Poems is a serious doorstop not realistically in the purchasing (or more accurately carrying) range of a migrant like myself. Roz Goddard, Birmingham’s Poet Laureate, read first; then a southern voice, Janice Moore Fuller; then Brightonian Jackie Wills.

Saturday I overcame the weekend handicaps imposed by what are generously described as “improvements” on the Underground, and managed to arrive at Victoria coach station in time to welcome my classmate Jenn to London. Off we sped on the trusty number 11 bus, alighting beneath the shadow of St. Paul’s and walked unswayingly across the Millennium Bridge, and along the waterfront until we reached Borough Market,

in good time for the launch of Biodynamic Food Fortnight. We managed to source some fantastic snacks before events began: a toasted Montgomery cheddar cheese sandwich

(watching the cheddar raclette being assembled

made me so faint I was forced to take a native oyster or two from a seventh generation oyster seller.

Revived, we ascended many stairs into the massively crowded Borough Market boardroom. The celebration was all around biodynamic farming methods, which we’d heard about on our trip to Crete. Basically it is to do with sustainable agricultural practices – including respecting the natural seasons of what you grow; organic – chemical free – farming; humane animal husbandry; and some extras that have to do with moon cycles and spirituality which believers say puts the farming back into the earth’s natural cycles. It arises from the work of Rudolf Steiner.

With listeners spilling out the door we had a couple of lively welcomes from guest chefs Michel Roux (Jr.) and Cyrus Todiwala. Roux extolled at some length the beauty of the biodynamic produce and meat he uses, concluding that it was for him a science of respect for the living things we consume. And then Todiwala gave an endearingly sprawling talk which tied together biodynamic farming, Zoroastrianism, poisoned vultures and the omnivores of India. (The poisoned vultures theme was interesting: he was speaking about the use of the anti-inflammatory drug Diclofenac, which is administered to farm animals and which poisons the kidneys of vultures, whose ecological role includes consuming carrion so that wild dogs – who can spread rabies – don’t. He didn’t mention the fact that farmers also deliberately poison vultures, believing them to spread disease among their livestock; and they can be accidentally poisoned by hunters using poisoned bait for other purposes)

We were by this time perishing from heat and overcrowding and too long standing, so we plunged back into the market, which – holy overcrowding! – by now looked like this:

And pushed our way along, glimpsing wistfully a Comté cheese stand…

until we reached the oysters,

where we knocked a couple more back.

Then on to a whirlwind tour of Covent Garden, including of course Neals Yard Dairy, and a bite to eat at Food For Thought. And then through Chinatown and off into the wilds of Kensington to have a browse through Whole Foods, which – after the high street outside, and Borough Market, and just about everywhere else in London – really wasn’t that crowded. Lots and lots of everything there, but we left relatively unscathed.

It’s been a pretty poetic week all in all. Monday evening I went to the South Bank to see Sean O’Brien and Ian Duhig read. I’d been admiring O’Brien’s latest, The Drowned Book, for the past couple of weeks, so was happy to hear him in person, and it turned out to be an auspicious week for him, winning his third Forward Prize a couple of days later. Ian Duhig won me over a couple of years ago with his wonderful ode to string vests, from The Lammas Hireling, and he gave an entertaining and eccentric reading from his new collection, The Speed of Dark.

Tuesday we went out to Troika, which I hadn’t visited for years, and ate too much (thanks for the cheesecake, Howard).

Wednesday I had a day off while I shifted myself to the next charitable bed, in lovely leafy Turnham Green.

And Friday was a start-to-finish day of culture, with some bee bim bap in the middle. I got to the British Museum, despite a painfully slow District Line, in time to collect my ticket and timed entry to the Terracotta Army exhibition. It was a great show; someone had told me the soldier count was only 17 figures (of a possible 7000) but the selling point – getting nose to nose with those present – was convincing, and it was a good thing to see as it’s been widely promoted and will be much talked about.

It was called The First Emperor, and was intended more as a briefing on the life (rather short – died at 49) and times of China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, and what had led him to have the army – plus civil servants, acrobats and musicians (perhaps they haven’t found the chefs yet) – and his still-buried tomb created on such a scale. Protection, company and entertainment in the afterlife, apparently. Not a nice man, I suppose, but one of awesome ambition. Probably not much liked by the conscripts (over over 700,000) who lived and died making his afterlife a happy one. I wonder where they ended up: let’s hope they are in a kind of eternal beach resort with the likes of those who built the pyramids.

The space chosen for this show was the grand old British Library Reading Room, which had had to be reinforced and rearranged for the occasion. I’d watched a television documentary about the show which gave some useful context for it, so I felt I got as much as I needed and made my way through in about an hour to meet Nancy for some coffee followed by aforementioned bee bim bap, which was good but, really, could not surpass the Bul Go Gi House‘s version, back in Edmonton.

At one of the Poetry School‘s 10th anniversary celebration events on Friday afternoon, there was a good showing for Eavan Boland (introduced by Michael Schmidt) who spoke delightfully and occasionally controversially about the place of the simile in modern poetry. Her first metaphor was a surprising one: she talked about how much she had enjoyed building computers, and how in about 1992 Unix lost its dominance to the appeal of GUI. Unix, she said, had been described to her as a language that spoke to the core of the machine, while GUI spoke to both machine and user. How right, she remarked, to lose a language that was facing inwards.

And went on to argue that the simile was the tool of epic poets, and was no longer relevant; poems and images should be an integrated whole where logic is suppressed and the reader engages to discover meaning instead of being handed it. Though there were some lovely similes in one of the poems she discussed (Sylvia Plath’s “Words“). Her own beautiful example was “The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me“. She provided but didn’t speak to an old favourite of mine: “A Disused Shed in County Wexford” by Derek Mahon. (Which, as I had been talking with Nancy about ekphrasis earlier in the day, I decided could be identified as such, due to the presence of flashbulbs. So there.)

After a break, many of us and some more as well, reconvened to hear Boland in tandem with Robert Potts and Germaine Greer, with Schmidt again hosting events. The topic was Poetry Makes Nothing Happen and the response was, well, pretty much but that doesn’t make it a bad thing. Boland had some sharply phrased things to say about the death of pastoral poetry – gone forever, she observed, in a world where there can be no moral engagement with a nature we have destroyed. And when talk turned to the role of the poet in grappling with the harsh realities of our world, she invoked Seamus Heaney‘s Nobel speech, and the anecdote that speaks of being “caught between dread and witness”. Greer made some good points about the value of poetry that might make nothing happen in a world where too damn much is going on too fast to allow us to make sense of it (shades of Serge Latouche!).