Kathy Pimlott on place, poetry, and Elastic Glue

Kathy Pimlott talks about her new poetry pamphlet, Elastic Glue… 

The poems in Elastic Glue are mostly about ownership of place. One of these places is Covent Garden where I, an incomer, have lived for 40+ years, in the corner called Seven Dials.

Most people think of the area as a tourist honeypot of dinky shops, bars and restaurants, with some very expensive flats for short-term lets or foreign investors – and that’s true. But it’s not the whole picture. It’s also home to successive generations of people who worked in the wholesale market, the theatres, the print and their ancillary trades. When two of these mass employers moved out, leaving the area ripe for redevelopment, the residents, who mostly lived in dilapidated social housing, didn’t just quietly submit to ‘relocation’, they stayed to fight a prolonged and complicated community-led battle with developers – both the benign-but-misguided and the opportunistic.

They were successful. Covent Garden was not flattened. The community was not ‘decanted’. Most importantly, a substantial quantity of new social housing was built. But the success was double-edged as the area became an increasingly desirable proposition for profit. The struggle now is to maintain a foot-hold in this heavily-marketed prime real estate and a sense of normality, surrounded as we are by pop-ups and fairylights and bedevilled by late night revellers and crack dealers.

The other place which crops up is an allotment site. I’m very struck by the changes in profile of allotmenteers over the years we’ve had plots and the little England-ness of the activity – how a sense of ownership here comes through an intense and strenuous physical relationship with land and productivity.

The poems are full of people – there’s Lenin and Renzo Piano, the Consultant Placemaker, Chicken Jim, the biodynamic hippy, the Fred Collinses and, amid them, me, owning myself – from a child in the school hall in my knickers and vest, stumbling towards feminism, as a heedless squatter, through to a ruby wedding anniversary. It’s a political pamphlet but channelled through the personal – as I’m a child of my times.

I write about what catches and noodles around in my mind. I still work within community activism, for a small Trust involved in public realm projects in Seven Dials, so engagement with who ‘owns’ the area is always on my mind. Though these are now quite old poems for me, I do like them still. I think they ‘stand up’. And they still make me laugh.

The title of the pamphlet comes from an old enamel sign on what used to be the ironmongers and is now a ‘vintage’ clothes shop. Seven successive generations of Fred Collinses had the business, through to the 1990s, when ill-health forced sale. I think of that continuity as a flexible but tenacious elastic glue which binds a community together – how accumulated place-based memories are as powerful a form of ownership as a freehold.

There are a couple of poems in my first pamphlet, Goose Fair Night, about Nottingham, where I was born and grew up – but they’re a personal history. I use place in other poems as a way to access ideas I want to have a play with or memories I want to tease out. Elastic Glue is definitely further removed from my personal history – though that’s there too, of course. I think, stylistically, the poems are a bit braver, less restricted by what’s of the moment – there’s a ballad!

In theory I set aside a couple of mornings a week for poetry – that might be writing from scratch and /or editing or it might be poetry admin, like submissions. If I’m writing new work or editing, I can usually keep at it for four hours or so at a stretch, interspersed with putting on another load of washing or a quick hoover round – dedicated writing time is the best spur to doing housework. I write new work in bursts – starting by hand and then moving to the screen once I’ve built up momentum, a certain hard-to-define weight. I keep a poetry diary where I write, last thing at night, about readings I’ve been to, the two poetry workshopping groups I’m part of, what I’ve been reading, what acceptances or rejections I’ve had and my notional plans – this sometimes turns into proto first drafts as does my sporadic non-poetry diary in which I moan about life, work and people. And I aim to read some poetry every day, leaving books and magazines lying around to ambush and encourage me.

I’m currently working on another pamphlet. I wouldn’t go as far as to say the poems are confessional but I’m thinking through what passes for an accumulated wisdom of age and trying to set it out. It includes poems about egg and chips, advice to daughters, adjusting to daylight saving, Keats, the Mersey Sound poets and Sammy Davis Jnr. Pending, I have notes waiting for my focused attention on crimes I have committed and an anecdote about a flying pig, which I think might be about the balance between expectation and resignation. I’m looking forward to that – but first, I find I must clean the bathroom.

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You can find out more about Elastic Glue and order your copy (£6.50) here.

Follow Kathy on Twitter @kathy_pimlott and find her website here.

World Book Day with the Emma Press: favourite books from the past year

In celebration of World Book Day 2019, we asked a few of our recent and upcoming authors and poets to tell us the best book they’ve read in the past year…

Aalfred and Aalbert by Morag Hood – Rachel Plummer, poet

‘A book I've really loved sharing with my kids this year is a picture book called Aalfred and Aalbert, by Morag Hood. It is a sweet and funny queer love story for younger children, about two aardvarks who are perfect for each other but need a little push along the way. Sweet and charming, this book is great LGBT representation and a lovely read. What's not to love?’

Don’t miss Wain by Rachel Plummer, a collection of LGBT themed poetry for teens based on retellings of Scottish myths.

The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara – Rassi Narika, author

‘The People in the Trees was my second Yanagihara after I read A Little Life - I was an emotional wreck after reading it. It was so good, I laughed and cried with it. In 2018, The People in The Trees left me with a different kind of wreck. I kept rereading its pages just because I wasn't sure how I feel about the story. I love the book because my interpretation about each character, and their story, was continuously challenged in every turn of events. I had many moments of self-conversation, questioning the social construct of how we see culture, and who decides – or defines the cultural narrative of the Ivu'ivu's world. It made me think about an alternate universe where civilization has a different storyline than one we have today. And, the fact that this fiction was inspired by true events, made me even more obsessed with how Yanagihara beautifully tells such difficult story.’

Publishing later this month, When It Rains by Rassi Narika is a children’s picture book that spins a story of hope and discovery to brighten even the rainiest of days.

Keats: A Biography by Andrew Motion – Kathy Pimlott, poet

‘My favourite book during 2018 was the only prose book I read, Andrew Motion’s biography of John Keats, published in 1997 and given to me, I see from the inscription, in 2002. I’d started it two or three times but had always been distracted. In 2018 I was just finishing an 18-month Writing School with the Sheffield-based Poetry Business and one ‘homework’ was to read a poet’s biography. Keats was my schoolgirl crush (along with Micky Dolenz of The Monkees, Simon & Garfunkel and Hamlet), the book was on the shelf, so it was a no-brainer. Though, of course, I knew Keats’ short and tragic story, I wasn’t ready for the emotional undertow of the book, how it would drag me into the deeps over and over again. It sent me straight back to the poems I thought I knew so well, to the house on Keats Grove, and prompted four new poems of my own. What more could you ask?’

Newly released, Elastic Glue is a poetry pamphlet by Kathy Pimlott exploring the ways we own and are owned by land – how we both make and are made by the places we inhabit. 

The Bubble Wrap by Dean Parkin – Ieva Flamingo, author & poet

‘It’s so hard to choose! Because all of them are really interesting and special to me. The Bubble Wrap is a poetry book, written and illustrated by Dean Parkin. I choose this book because the author not only writes for children, but also thinks and lives in these poems like children. The poems are vivid, funny, cheerful and heart-warming.’

Ieva Flamingo’s The Girl Who Learned All The Languages of The World is an illustrated story for children exploring the joys of language learning.

Snail, Where Are You? by Tomi Ungerer - Rūta Briede, author & illustrator

‘Sometimes there are books with not a lot of text in them. And sometimes silence and observing is the best state of mind when nothing really happens but everything happens. In Snail, Where Are you? by Tomi Ungerer, there aren’t too many lines to read. Only two. But can a story be told by a good question? Can one feel the author’s bright and playful mind by seeing some illustrations and reading one question and one simple answer? Yes, it’s possible if the author is Tomi Ungerer. This is a book where simplicity is done by a true master and one question is exactly the one that must be asked and the answer is truly simple. Can you guess it?’

Don’t miss Rūta Briede’s latest children’s picture book, The Dog Who Found Sorrow, a beautiful, resonant story about sadness and healing, suitable for all ages.

Insectopedia by Hugh Raffles – Lenni Sanders, poet

‘Last year I really loved reading Hugh Raffles' collection of essays Insectopedia. It's a fantastic book that I read slowly from summer through to winter, dipping in, reading an essay here and there. This means for months at a time in 2018 I was saying "Oh look, a bee! Hey, did you know...?" and things like that, to anyone around. His style is captivating and clear as he explores our various relationships to insects. I was especially into 'My Nightmares', a poetic and incantatory piece about what it is about insects that can be so frightening to us - 'There is the nightmare of putting the shoe on and of taking the shoe off. There is the slithering nightmare and the one that walks backwards. There is the squirming nightmare and the squishing nightmare.'’

Publishing in May this year, the wryly funny Poacher by Lenni Sanders is influenced by magical realism and puts strange characters in mundane places.

The Book of Clouds by Juris Kronbergs – Reda Gaudiamo, author

‘This is a book I cannot stop talking about. The Book of Clouds by Juris Kronbergs showed me that Indonesian children need to read and enjoy poetry — the format often considered the most serious one compared to other formats. Poems are seen as being the type of text for adult, the rhymes we know are so old, and forgotten. Little do we know that poetry is the type of format that helps children to read, love reading, helps their articulation... and much more. This book makes me want to pursue a new project: working with Indonesian poets to write poems for children.’

Launching at the London Book Fair, The Adventures of Na Willa by Reda Gaudiamo is a collection of stories of curious adventures and musings of a multicultural girl growing up in Indonesia.

The Carrying by Ada Limón – Jeffery Sugarman, poet

‘Ada Limón's newest collection, The Carrying, is one for these times, and I think, for the ages. Her poetic speakers are most always astonished and bewildered in, and by, this troubled world; yet they won't be stopped by it, nor let us be stopped. She's a poet whose very flesh seems composed of compassion—the poems of incandescent feeling, wrought in simplest words. Seeing and feeling with, and through, the flesh—often in emotional and physical pain—she captures essences, in poems which, nonetheless, cast outward toward timeless reflection, resolutions on the desire and will to survive, indeed flourish. She's also a master at "saying the thing", and plays few linguistic games. I marvel at her directness and clarity, how it conjures the profound; and gain great pleasure too from the jewel-like epiphanies that rise up within, and often end, her poems with fresh insight, but seem also inevitable! In this new collection, especially, she's unflinching in her effort to understand and describe the world, even if her methods become ruthless; thus she's able to live in this world, I think, for the better—and so might we. In "Killing Methods" her speaker, reflects— "I'm thinking of how we make stories, / pluck them like beetles out of the air // I don't know how to hold this truth, / so I kill it, pin its terrible wings down / in case, later, no one believes me." The Carrying, helps me to see how we might hold the truth, and believe.’

Jeffery Sugarman’s pamphlet Dear Friend(s) is due to publish in April. Its long title poem is an elegy, to a specific “Dear Friend”, dead from AIDS in its earliest years.

What's your favourite book from the past year? Comment below or tag us @TheEmmaPress on social media. We'd love to know what you're reading!