Paul Mills
The food's so spiced it tastes of pinemartens
Grilled with pilchards, so hot it burns your feet.
There are restaurants where the flies are cooks.
'Algiers', Voting For Spring
Paul's fifth collection of poems is Voting For Spring (Smith/Doorstop, 2010). His previous collections include Half Moon Bay, (Carcanet, 1993), and Dinosaur Point (2000), winner of the 1999 Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition.
Born in Cheshire in 1948, Paul's first poems were published in Lines Review, Edinburgh, while he was at university there, and during his third year he was given a Gregory Award for poems which appeared in his first book, North Carriageway, published by Carcanet. He stayed on to complete a doctorate on the poems, novels and travel writings of D.H.Lawrence. After a period teaching English in secondary schools in Edinburgh and Birmingham Paul held Arts Council Fellowships at Manchester University and Christs Hospital School, Sussex, and from 1978-80 was Gregory Fellow in Poetry at Leeds University. The university now holds his collection of literary papers and manuscripts (see Leeds Poetry, 1950-80). He taught Literature and Creative Writing at York St John University until taking early retirement in 2005 to concentrate on his own writing. In 1986-87 he and his family lived in California for a year while he was teaching on a Fulbright Exchange Fellowship.
He has also published two books on writing, Writing In Action (1995) and The Routledge Creative Writing Coursebook, (2006) . Two of his plays have been performed: Herod at the National Theatre, and Never at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. He was married to Ruth Evans and they have two children. He lives in Ripon, North Yorkshire.
See more on Paul's website here.
Reviews
Ted Hughes said of Half Moon Bay (Carcanet, 1993):
'It rewards and withstands a lot of rereading. What I especially like is the rather apprehensive feeling that absolutely anything can happen… that means great freedom – and a lot of provisional or mental imaginative systems, a big kit of metaphysical templates. His poems are genuine flying machines – bits and pieces of half the world in the rigging – but they take off, and have that sort of beauty which works in the world, and is meant to.'
Paul Munden on Dinosaur Point (P N Review):
Mature, philosophical and adventurous work… Paul Mills strikes me as one of the few poets writing today who is fully prepared not to play safe. Deeply (if also mischievously) questioning.
Smith/Doorstop titles
BLUE FOOTBALL
The blue football floats on the green river.
Downstream. It has no choice.
It is happy to be this way up.
Or that. It doesn't matter.
It has been kicked out of reach.
Stares under itself, stares up.
No one is running to save it.
It's in its element now.
No one can climb on board.
It sits in the palm of the current.
Fields can pass or a garden.
Gentle rapids make it revolve a little.
Is that a crime? It doesn't care.
Whatever, it says. Whatever.
Will you marry me? Whatever.
Are you about to be recycled? Whatever.
It is a sunny day I think.
I float in it. Green river.
Arrowy leaves, pale ripple barbs.
When I bounced into this place, I adhered
immediately like we were meant.
What a kick!
I'm not like you, little girl.
You, slimy rock. Or you, rapid dazzle.
The blue football floats on the green river,
sings to itself up and down, up-down.
Some things stay as they are.
The moon for instance
bobbling over the deep.
I thought I'd be safe with nobody.
Not long until some child though,
some terrible child — etc, I know it.
Blueness and shine they love, and joy.
Blue and wet together — how I float.
They will put their arms around me.
— From Voting For Spring
Paul Mills on his work
My first experience of poetry was listening to my father reciting from memory 'The Brook' by Tennyson, instead of a bed-time story. The next (again heard aloud) was of countless passages from the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer while I was a choirboy, aged seven, in our local parish church. After that, it was reading T S Eliot's play Murder In The Cathedral, at school, its tones hieratic, but making a sort of bridge to the modern world. It was then, aged seventeen, that I started writing, during a bout of flu. The same year, 1965, it was Robert Graves, then the metaphysical poets: Donne, Marvel, George Herbert, then for me the most prominent contemporary poets were Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, Stevie Smith, Norman MacCaig, who was Writer in Residence at Edinburgh in 1967, and Auden`s ballads, and the poems of Keith Douglas: formal, intelligent, and like speech. I loved the Faber Book of Modern Verse, the Michael Roberts edition. Poetry was first the music, then the bite, the grip on the real – mortal coils being shuffled into rather than off. It was something to do, also, with being in love. I started to read American poetry, Lowell, Plath and Snyder, three different points of a wider compass, later the New York poets, plus Williams, a good antidote to Eliot – as he intended himself to be. I kept going with the others too, and found more. I got to value Geoffrey Hill, then dropped him. I remember finding Larkin's 'Show Saturday' in The Spectator (was it?) at Leeds, and sitting in the National Library of Scotland, finding new Crow poems in obscure limited edition pamphlets from The Rainbow Press. There were poets who passed me by and made little impression. Seamus Heaney was one, compared with Hughes, but I'm not sure why. At that time I felt his English readers were too easily swayed by their taste for the pastoral, something a bit feel-good and genteel.
I often thought of myself as self-taught when it came to poetry, but my English teacher's influence and MacCaig's welded together into a suspicion about a certain (romantic perhaps) love for the extravagant, the apocalyptic – a wariness that acts as a constant check. Poems are things about which very impassioned people disagree. I remember reading Hughes's poem 'A Wind Flashes The Grass' to Norman in his flat in Edinburgh where a group of us used to retreat after his writing class sessions. So what did Norman MacCaig think of Ted Hughes? : "What's he lifting", he said to me when I had finished reading it, "with all his muscle flexing?"
* * * * *
I leaned a lot from Elizabeth Bishop, how to write thoughts as well as observations, how to mix the two as she does in 'In The Waiting Room'. Thought is the glue that holds a poem together, and original thinking of course is very difficult: When I read the poem now it's hard to pick out where the thinking actually occurs, but I have the sense of encountering it in almost every line. Here is Norman MacCaig doing some of his own customary looking and thinking:
SMALL BOY
He picked up a pebble
and threw it into the sea.
And another, and another.
He couldn't stop.
He wasn't trying to fill the sea.
He wasn't trying to empty the beach.
He was just throwing away,
nothing else but.
Like a kitten playing
he was practising for the future
when there'll be so many things
he'll want to throw away
if only his fingers will unclench
and let them go.
* * * * *
I mostly write in the mornings, either at my computer or, when it's not too cold, in my shed by the river, though there is a little wood-burning stove there. I also paint – almost always oil paintings.
* * * * *
About Voting for Spring
As soon as I read the passage which became the epigraph for the title poem of my new book I immediately gained a much clearer sense of the poem I was writing, and of the collection as a whole. Spring is our renewal symbol — politically it's the time for revolutions and uprisings, but also it signifies the drive to continue, to co operate with each other, to engage with nature, to work with the land - the drive lost by the people in the epigraph to the poem and their struggle with winter:
Winter darkness brings on the extreme winter depression the Polar Eskimo calls perlerorneq. According to the anthropologist Jean Malaurie, the word means to feel 'the weight of life'. To look ahead to all that must be accomplished and to retreat to the present feeling defeated, weary before starting, a core of anger, a miserable sadness. It is to be 'sick of life' a man named Imina told Malaurie. The victim tears fitfully at his clothing. A woman begins aimlessly slashing at things in the iglu with her knife. A person runs half-naked into the bitter freezing night, screaming out at the village, eating the shit of the dogs. Eventually the person is calmed by others in the family, with great compassion, and helped to sleep. Perlerorneq. Winter.
— Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams. Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape
Sometimes a passage by another writer can illuminate what you are actually thinking, and where your imagination is taking you. Here it's the sense of cold in the Northern Hemisphere, and my subject was its impact not on Artic cultures of the present but on our ancestors over many thousands of years in Ice Age Europe. Suddenly I knew how it must have felt, before civilisation, when there was nothingness, extreme bleakness, no hope, surrounded by the very substance of your depression: the ice. How do you live? What if those periods stayed with us like a kind of genetic memory? In the poem I am listening to the playback of an imaginary tape that contains the experiences of people from long before the Neolithic, through to the time of the agricultural revolution, with a hint at how things are now. The tape is intermittent, of course, still full of gaps and broken-off messages, hard to get a grip on. It may be that I will have to go back and write more poems until the whole story, or something close to it, becomes clear. References to cold, to the need for belief in and engagement with a future, recur all through the book. We have just experienced one of the most beautiful springs in England I can imagine, and it isn't hard to imagine how spring would have felt to people deprived of what it signified – practically as well as emotionally – for their survival. My latest book leaves me with a feeling that there is, on this subject, a great deal more to say.
* * * * *
Currently I'm writing a group of poems based on film footage taken in North Yorkshire and collected in the Yorkshire Film Archive. These poems to films are an Arts Council funded project: Celebrating Place. The edited film will be shown with the poems as voice-overs, and some are dramatic monologues – it's almost like writing a series of very short plays. The first part of the presentation contains footage from 1937 to 1958, a period of change in social attitudes which I believe is actually visible on screen as we see people in processions, soldiers marching, people collecting money in Wings For Victory week in May 1943, crowds on holiday in Scarborough ten years later, women in a munitions factory in 1941. Social history in the making, a new subject for me, and one, I am finding, very well worth investigating. The second part – still being planned – is about the North Yorkshire coast, its geology, and people's relationship with the sea.
PM April 2011
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