Tnx for yrs

TNX FOR YRS

Time was when I wrote longhand, heard w. glee
praise for this "almost C18",
& wd, to ease the hand strain, which was gt,
C18ly abbreviate,
w/o the aim you charge, of seeming cool.
Altho' I tk to email as a tool,
I'm one whom loss of scope for longhand vexed.
I do it w. predictive when I txt.

This was written in October 2012 for a competition organised by the magazine The liner.  The theme was that of letters.  The poem achieved publication of a sort when I posted it on a friend's Facebook page, as a comment on a picture she had shared; then, being opportunistic, I went to the picture itself, by Julia Quinn, and posted the poem as a comment there.

Three more music poems

These poems were written at various times, and entered in a competition organized by Rhyme and Reason, the poetic fundraising arm of Rennie Grove Hospice Care. They didn't win any prizes, but they were published in the charity's 2016 desk diary.

JAUCHZET, FROHLOCKET

honk and five drum-knocks

flock of strings in flight and dive

voices crunch the snow

MUSIC IN ST EDMUNDSBURY

This church, wool-rich East Anglian, half-built
at Reformation, lit like Dutch paintings,
cathedralled 1914, recomposing,
hears Ulysses awake, hears Europe's strings
sombrely weave, unweave. The programme note
is the composer's own. It gives bare facts.

PHANTASY QUINTET BY VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

The Alla sarabanda's slow rise shows
smoke from a woodland cottage, early morning,
a thin grey line. It fades against the sky.

Can smoke be guiltless? after cattle trucks?
people at stakes? hell and its mirrors? sati?
cancer? emphysema? culled herds? carbon,
carbon we need but get more than the cycle?
carbon too much? carbon a weight, a choking?

That's smoke from fire. So smoking's lately banned.
But smoke without fire, from a sarabande?
Should that line rise, or is it one that ought
to go down with its freight of perished thought?
Maybe; but after worse of our devising,
I hope I see the thin grey line still rising. 

'Jauchzet, frohlocket' evokes the first movement of Bach's Christmas oratorio: "Jauchzet, frohlocket! auf, preiset die Tage" -- "Shout for joy, exult! Rise up, glorify the day" says one rendering I can't improve on.  The image of voices crunching the snow was used by conductor Tim Redmond in a rehearsal exhortation to us of the Cambridge Philharmonic Society, and worked by me into a haiku early in 2011.

'Music in St Edmundsbury' was written after hearing a performance of John Woolrich's Ulysses awakes by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in St Edmundsbury Cathedral in 2002.  Yes, I stoop to pun on the composer's name.  Wealth from wool played a great part in the building or extension of this and many other medieval churches in East Anglia.

'Phantasy quintet by Vaughan Williams' dates from 2007 and arises from a very strong visual image that was suggested to me by the opening phrase of the quintet's Alla sarabanda movement.

Flashes of technology

FLASHES OF TECHNOLOGY

Wireless really explained spurned wavelength dials

in 1923. The rich enthusiast

might want that sort of thing, but you could find

kit in the streets, in costermongers' barrows,

to listen in to the far ends of earth.

A new earth, this, a-twitter with the dawn.

Pyrite was crystal in the radio,

fool's gold, but later, lapsed from top, still up

for faked non-listening near armies. Foxholes,

skill, home-madeness, light tread, a time before –

the cloud of crystal radio's folklore.

Monty Python spoofed stencil duplicates

in 1973. The bigot issue

1 (3), March-November, offered visits

by the Young Bigots' Club to throw appliances

from Grundig down the lavatory. Soaking!

But real life's setting up of anything

used these to print. My nights of radio

(that's DX listening, not ham transmission)

made it to street by them, with other scribbles;

Adrian Mole's life mirrored. Stencils mean

schools, parents, churches, clubs, drums, wheels. And see

the power turn at least one PhD.

Not sure I've watched satellite television.

Has someone spurned or spoofed the dishes? Up

for decades, but I've missed their cloud, their mirrors.

They're still of now, not of the life on Mars

they will become when turned to past like crystals

etcetera cited above, things viewed

in photographs made by a long-dead light,

through years stacked to intolerable height.

This was my entry in the CV2 48-hour competition 2015.  If you've read much from Blurtmetry, you'll know what that's all about: my 'Radio poem' and 'Instead of a minute', both of them written for that competition in earlier years, are neighbouring posts in this blog.  The main constraints of the competition are as follows.  Firstly, entries should be written from scratch in the space of 48 hours -- a weekend midnight to midnight, Central Canadian time, 06:00 Saturday to 06:00 Monday UK time.  Secondly, the poem composed during that time must include all ten of a group of words emailed to registered entrants at the start of that period.  In 2015 the words were: satellite, ham, soaking, lapsed, stencil, mirrored, before, pyrite, faked, and appliances.

To me, having looked up pyrite and discovered its connection with crystal radio, there seemed no alternative to a poem about modes of communication: crystal radio, stencil duplicating, and satellite television.  But if you followed my link to the 2015 competition results and winners, you'll see that others did not feel that inevitability.

Wireless really explained, by P.J. Risdon (Foulsham, 1923), was for some reason in the house (perhaps from Dad's predecessor as Vicar) when I was a boy in the 1960s.  I probably don't need to explain any of the other allusions.

In August 2015, the site PoemPigeon launched a competition for entries including the word satellite, and 'Flashes of technology' was published by virtue of being posted there.  From a brief survey of my fellow-entrants' work, I get the impression that I am the first to think of the wheeze of re-using a CV2 48-hour entry for this purpose.

Instead of a minute

On 18 May I posted my 'Radio poem' -- my entry in the 2009 CV2 Two-Day Poem Competition .  Today's post was my entry in the equivalent competition for 2013.  It's now found publication in the journal Writers' forum 165, 2015, p. 51.  Many thanks to WF's poetry editor, Sue Butler, who asked me to let her have it for her 'In my own words' slot and has given me permission to reproduce it here.

WF also has a poetry competition, but monthly and without the stringent specifications of CV2'S challenge (see below).  Top prize in the WF competition is £100.  I might yet have a go.  And you?

INSTEAD OF A MINUTE

Neon, the new one, with New Latin name.

We call it noble for its non-reaction,

but garish for its red-light energy,

like one jumped-up, pulling a bogus rank

into trapeze rococo, gambit after gambit

to take the place of record, and we fall

with a sententious relish on the story.

Please don't kick me, being no Stedman expert

(John Stedman, that is, maverick slave-fighter,

not Stedman as in church-bells and bob-changes),

starting to write as if I knew at all

his archive with its scraps and pots and bones

jangling reproach to mine, likewise chaotic

but less alive. His pictures were the draw.

I wrote the Stedman piece, a scrubby growth

unfed by knowledge, but, with help from kin,

meeting the questions, and it went online

to universal silence. In relief,

reporting to Committee, I admitted

imposter syndrome and the agonies

it had imposed on me. Not for the minutes.

  

The CV2 Two-Day Poem Competition required a poem produced in 48 hours and including, in 2013, all ten of the following words: neon, relish, scrubby, bob, gambit, rank, sententious, record, trapeze, and rococo. The competition weekend included, for Clare and me, a journey to Birmingham. The poem was written on trains and in a room of the Premier Inn.

One elusive word got placed when I told Clare I was including a reference to John Stedman. Clare, an aficionada of Dorothy Sayers' novel The nine tailors, thought first of the Stedman whose name is attached to some of the campanological terms in that book – and I remembered enough of those terms to see that this would fit the word 'bob'.

The Brum trip was for a memorial service to a friend, Jo Austen. My mind was in the right place during the service. The poem didn't distract me from the tributes to Jo.

Nothing from the memorial service appears in the poem.  At one level, what that means is that the first draft was probably completed before Sunday afternoon. But the poem's closeness to Jo's memorial does make another point become obvious.  Jo had cerebral palsy from birth. The poem's boasts about an occasional sense of professional inadequacy on my part are in perspective alongside what she had to work with in living well.

Marc Vyvyan-Jones

This is my wife Clare in 1985:

Clare in those days was a physics PhD student at Bristol.  The image is from a new-address card she commissioned from a friend, and it came to light again, many years later, in a clear-out of Clare's room at her parents' house.

The writing embroidered on Clare's leg reads "Please look after this Clare."  That drew from me a limerick, 11 years before we were engaged:

I'd love to look after this Clare,
blonde and plump like a girl teddy-bear.
I just hope that her rump's
not too bruised by the bumps
which arise from the wheels' being square.

The teddy-bear in Clare's lap had been a birthday present from friends, a couple of years earlier.  She believes she passed it on to a child in 1990, when she had to shed so many possessions for her post-doc year in the States, and she cannot now remember its name.

For those too young to have seen floppy disks, I'd better say that they were at least as square as shown in the picture, and not the sort of Daliesque thing the name suggests.  The title of Dali's painting The persistence of memory has acquired a secondary aptness from the transience of floppies.

The artist was Marc Vyvyan-Jones.  It was his first commission, he told me recently; billed then on invoice 0001, and reproduced now with permission.  His career as an illustrator continues to thrive, with an emphasis on the quirky and gallimaufrageous.  Who's next up to offer him a commission?

Radio poem

RADIO POEM

Today's radio dial's not just a dial.

It's a display: gives you more information

running, but goes to blank at rest. Old-style

analogue dials, over the base gradation

of kiloHertz and metres, still when still

were effervescent with their banded cities.

And when I was a boy, with time to fill,

I could sing at the possibilities

for hours. They belonged with binoculars,

maps, number-plates, star-charts, but came to displace

astronomy, which was the previous

interest. Today I'd call the phase

that happened next addiction. I first found

Radio Moscow's English under June

sunset, and it became a nightly round

by the autumn of 1971 -

Tirana, Moscow, Prague, Warsaw, and later,

drab 1972's political

balance, west dictator for east dictator,

the fifties sound of Radio Portugal.

But why - given ten words to improvise

some verse around, an email parlour game -

pick as a subject for the exercise

the story of a former hobby's claim?

Because the words suggest it. I can say

how new and various the short wave shone,

what pleasures it delivered in its play.

The pleasure of the hunt, the catch, was one.

CBA Moncton, netted from my bed

in Nottinghamshire winter - that was great.

But Radio Tirana, wishing dead

so many, I could only hate,

and hate's a noxious pleasure, lashing sweat.

That was the sour inside the bright kumquat.

Then hate and hunt gave less and less to get.

I scanned the dial for them, and scanned, and that

was the addiction, radio quagmire.

But I have seen the quagmire sink, not me.

I put restraint on radio desire

as early as Lent 1973.

It faded slowly, surged in my French year,

and again more than ten years on, a freak

throwback stunt for One World Week, but there

it ends. The world's got other ways to speak.

And I shall not be one of those who fret

to hear of kids addicted to the net.

The above was my entry in the CV2 2-day Poem Contest 2009.  The key point of the CV2 contest, for those who haven't followed that link, is that the entry has to be written in 48 hours and include ten words specified by that organisers at the start of that period.

My excuse for blogging the poem is that I have recently tweeted the concluding couplet, thereby presumably rendering the poem ineligible for entry in competitions that disallow published material.

Another piece of poetic fall-out from my foreign-radio phase is this haiku of January 2013, 'Tirana's trumpets'. And you might also be interested in this article, published in Cambridge University libraries information bulletin 60, 2007.

Kirkconnel's bard

KIRKCONNEL'S BARD

(The bard is Alexander Anderson ('Surfaceman'), 1845-1909)

Kirkconnel's bard sang progress, engines' strength
made greater by the discipline of rails,
his rhymes and grammar sound, his metred length
of line hard-fixed as ever was with nails.

Nick Drake sang questions, ways lost, light flown, blue
of waves and sky the video shows grey,
gates waited at in hope of looking through,
a plea for somebody to show and say.

Kirkconnel's bard praised Whitman's free lines, praised
his fellows, wrote in voice of the bereaved
mothers.  Read in our day, is he appraised
with more along the track than he believed?

Would he have prayed, trusting in God to hear,
that Nick Drake's heaven-signal stood at clear?

The above poem was my contribution to the 26 project 'Under a northern sky' -- the brainchild of two 26 members, Sandy Wilkie and Michelle Nicol , one from Glasgow and one from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and both fans of the singer Nick Drake.  Michelle's account of the proceedings is at http://bit.ly/1PeKO91 .  Project participants were assigned one song by Drake and one station on the Carlisle route from Newcastle to Glasgow, and asked to write poetry or prose, performable in under 3'44", that linked the two.  My station was Kirkconnel and my Nick Drake song 'Way to blue'.  And on 25 April 2015, as many of us as could made that journey by train, reading our own contributions, and those of the people who couldn't be present, at or near the stations in question.

I was lucky in that Kirkconnel has a literary figure of some note in Alexander Anderson.  I won't link to all the poems of his that I allude to, but I should perhaps say that my last line picks up on 'Stood at clear' from his collection Songs of the rail.  A train driver is questioned after a rail crash:

"Speak to him-quick!" they bent and said,
"Did the distant signal stand at red?"

Broken and slow came the words with a moan,
"Stood—at—clear," and poor Jim was gone.

I turn'd my head away from the light
To hide the tears that were blinding my sight,

And pray'd from my heart, to God that Jim
Might find heaven's signals clear to him.

I believe the narrator is deeply disturbed by the probability that signal didn't stand at clear, and that a much-loved friend has died with a lie on his mouth.  Is there more to be said on this by readers who know Alexander Anderson's work better than I?

The day thou gavest

THE DAY THOU GAVEST

(after conjectures that the hymn tune 'St Clement', long attributed to the Rev. Clement Scholefield, might be in part the work of Arthur Sullivan)

What part is Clement, what part Arthur,

none now can hope or need to tell.

The hymn the singers love is seamless;

if sewn, then sewn together well.

Whatever zones part eve from waking,

the shadow edge of light in air

moves elegiac in its raising

along the spine and through the hair.

And did the famous aid the cleric,

whose other music fell away?

The question stands, and needs no letters,

no fingerprints, no DNA.

And only wishing tells us Clement,

himself a part of all he'd met,

once only found, once only, music

more great than most, more nearly great.

This poem was written in 2013 for the Mirehouse/Words by the Water competition, whose theme that year was the Tennyson quotation "I am a part of all that I have met." I cannot remember what led me, at about that time, to the Wikipedia page for the hymn tune 'St Clement', so effectively tied to the words 'The day thou gavest'. But here was a story of authorship questioned after more than a century, and blurrings of individual contribution that had become impossible now to determine. I thought it fitted well with the quotation.

I've now entered the poem in a Poem Pigeon competition on the theme 'Awakenings'.

The finest-hour syndrome

The finest-hour syndrome

(A minister became convinced that God was telling him that his wife would die and he was then to marry Samantha)

Perhaps he spoke as other men had,
only the God-talk more;
I don't know if Samantha'd been
through the same pattern before.

I believe the minister had been
a captain of high finance.
Oh, utmost probity, no swindles;
no hint of dalliance...

I suppose, though, he'd told young Alison
Sylvia would soon retire,
and I suppose he took pride
in Alison as she flew higher.

And I suppose a still small voice
said ten years long he should quit
the firm, and voluntary church work
would not silence it,

but I suppose when he gave in
to study for the ministry,
surrender wrenched him like tooth loss,
hard-cold as January.

I believe the finest-hour syndrome
is what happens when
somebody foils a blaze then wants
the buzz all over again,

studding the rest of his career
with unexplained small fires.
Pray God the minister was no worse
than such artless self-liars.  

This poem was written in 2000 and published in Orbis 170, winter 2014, p.69.  The version in Orbis, reproduced here, has benefited from some editorial suggestions by Carole Baldock.

The term 'finest-hour syndrome' is my own invention.  The phenomenon of serial arson by a former fire hero is one I first heard of ca 1996 in the course of training as a Fire Safety Manager at work.  In all the refresher fire training I've had since then, I haven't heard of it again.  Googling in search of more detail, I've had the impression that former heroes are very much a subset of the would-be heroes' subset of serial arsonists.

The minister's error, as described in the title note, is close to events I read of as having happened at a church in London in the early 1990s.  But the poem's prequel to that story is entirely speculative.

A couple of wildlife poems

Urban Fox

Seen, racing out of a leafy side-street,
its tail cartoon exhaust fumes (Samson's fox-fires?);
heard, perhaps, in the night, if fox not wind
and drain-pipe made that dog-bark didgeridoo;
tweeted by me, sleepless, asking that question.
Side-street, cartoon, exhaust, Bible, pipes, Twitter,
for me; not the wild Scarp, the branch-caught paw,
the pelt still covering the skeleton.


Ticking the Boxes

Projecting from the rosemary bush,
spaghetti-thin but green,
rigid but with self-moving end --
no other tweeps had seen,

no, nor gardening kinswomen
when I described this growth.
So was it life? and was it wild?
I'm ticking Yes for both.

I'll think about what uses I
can make of that decision.
Is wildlife still what people plead
for watching television?




'Urban fox' was written for the Barn Owl Trust poetry competition at the beginning of 2013, and published in the course of submission to the 2014 Earth Vision contest.  Scarp is the book by Nick Papadimitriou, a remarkable piece of reporting and meditating on a 17-mile ridge of broken land on the edges of North London.  Nick Papadimitriou's power of evoking the place is something I can only envy, but 'Urban fox' is based on something I actually saw.  And I heard the nocturnal dog-bark didgeridoo too.


'Ticking the boxes' was likewise written for the Barn Owl Trust competition and published by Earth Vision.  The first six lines are straightforward reporting.  I genuinely did  see such a thing in our garden, and asked around ("tweeps" are Twitter people, for those who don't know).  Current theory makes the thing a shoot, or possibly a leaf in misleading visual alignment with something else, pulled about by a  spider's web.

In Earth Vision, 'Ticking the boxes' won!