Bethany W Pope at The Keep - 5th June 2014

It was great to welcome Bethany Pope to the Keep this week, her first visit since we moved into this friendly venue in the centre of Guildford. Bethany has read with The 1000 Monkeys once a year since we began our poetry nights, back in 2012, and she never fails to amaze with her imaginative and dynamic delivery of masterful poems whose themes centre on the traumatic times she lived through as a young teenager in the US.
 
Bethany’s eighth collection of poems, Silage (she also has a novel to her name, called Masque) is perhaps her most poignant yet. 

In it she tells her story of being abandoned at the age of twelve in a punitive orphanage, by her mother and her Presbyterian minister father, to be deprived and abused physically and emotionally by the staff and other inmates of the orphanage. Her reactions towards the situation and the people who abused and humiliated her are stark and unsentimental. She says she has gained understanding and something just short of forgiveness by writing them.

Raped by another girl whose own anger was, she maintains, the reason and root of that behaviour, Bethany tells her story in a 10-syllables-per-line form that she invented to express the environment where she struggled to survive for three formative years. As she says, ‘In ten-syllable lines it’s hard to sing, and writing to the form presents a challenge that parallels the challenges I faced, to form friendships and keep my self-respect, in that place all that time.’
 
The miracle of the book is that the poems move easily between the utter brutality of forced labour on the orphanage farm and the physical details of the rape by a girl (since gaoled for other crimes, we’re told) to moments of joy in small daily successes. The fourteen-year-old Bethany learns tricks to outwit the controlling institution for example, to pick the window locks, learned from a James Bond book), enjoys ‘real fights, with blood!’ with Amanda, her friend, and breaks ‘buck-naked’ into the library after her clothes are taken away and she’s been locked in her room.
 
The love of life in this book saves it triumphantly from any accusations of self-pity or mawkishness. She celebrates the hard and dirty labour of the farm,:
 
… I loved the sour, fermented scent of
half-decayed cedar. I loved the fragrance
of silage; dung was an excellent base-
note for sweet Timothy hay. …
 
And under the suffering, her personality persisted in finding the relief she needed, wherever she might find it: the comics; the library books, and singing hymns when the endorphins of exhaustion allowed her a rush of irrational joy.
 
All the richness of Bethany’s unique sensitivity to all her experiences flows through the poems in Silage and on Monday it flowed on her reading into our poetry night. No wonder Nicholas Lezard headed his review of Silage in the Guardian ‘Poetry as Salvation.’  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/16/silage-bethany-w-pope-review-poetry-as-salvation

As it happened, several of our regular readers were away on holiday – including Dónall, who usually hosts the evening, because he was in Ireland dealing with some family business. So for the first time ever, I hosted a 1000 Monkeys evening. I enjoyed it, but we all missed Dónall's exuberant style.

It was very good to welcome some new faces to the Keep, and a big bonus to have Gareth Toms along, who comes up from Portsmouth. Gareth was his usual wryly comic self, with poems about regressing to boyhood on the beach and some shorties that he claimed he had laboured over, long and hard.
 

Karen Izod brought the good news that she has poems in two recently published anthologies: one on the Curlew, an endangered bird these days, and others in a book celebrating Stanley Spencer’s centenary this year.

Eddie Chauncy (right) had been thinking about Veins, about the man who trudges usefully through life, and he wanted to know Will you Show me Where to go? when everything familiar has gone.

Kyle McHale (below) opted to read poems by Bukowski. I hadn’t realised that Bukowsky wrote such cheerful pessimism, and I enjoyed  The Laughing Heart and Ruin very much:
You can’t beat death
but you can beat death in life
sometimes. 

Alex Twyman had poems by Rilke (The Panther) and two poems by Joe Bolton from the American South.

Bob Milton read his poem about Renoir’s muse, Rusty Girl and Alex Josephy, who came along with Karen, read poems about change. Andy Frost delivered an elegiac poem for a friend and recalled his exploits in Scotland last year. Ray Pool got the giggles, and I got a bit schoolmistressy with Mr Twyman and Mr McHale, who were distracting him, I’m afraid! But Ray managed to deliver a respectable five minutes, mostly in his own voice!

Jeremy Loynes read his Surrey poems, including an elegy constructed of lines from the Church of England Book of Common Prayer and Hymns Ancient and Modern. Here is his lyrical poem on Cranleigh.

Richard Hawtree delivered a poem by Francis Ledwidge, the Irish poet who died at Passchendaele in 1917, and followed it with his own poem to Ledwidge. Here is Richard reading those, and his poem to a man aged 101 who recently jumped, sky-diving, from a plane. An interesting juxtaposition of a young man dying before his time in war and an ancient who’s apparently indestructible, I thought.

And finally, Sian plucked up courage and read one of her poems. We're looking forward to hearing more from Sian. ​

Dónall will be back in the hosting seat next month, when we have about 20 of the contributors to our anthology, POEMS TO KEEP, reading at the book launch.