Exhibit at 'Inside'

 

EXHIBIT AT 'INSIDE'

Exhibit at 'Inside: artists and writers

in Reading Prison': old release-day shots

of men and women with their hands spread tight as

identifiers, not expressing lots.

The place with the glass roof he thought for taking

photographs, Margate-fashion, later, said

Oscar Wilde, grew hideous on breaking

the news it was the execution shed.

He recognised his poem over-used

'fearful', 'dreadful' for water-closet drab.

His boys were boys. We know, but don't refuse

his door its honoured place on cell-size slab.

We saw his cell, too many there at once,

and some took photos on their mobile phones.

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This was my entry in Cannon Poets' 'Sonnet or not' competition in October 2016.  I think it's pretty self-explanatory.  The online promotion of the exhibition referred to has long disappeared from the web, but its text began:

"HM Prison Reading opens for the first time to the public as artists, writers and performers respond to its most notorious inmate, Oscar Wilde."

I went round it with my wife Clare and a kinswoman.  The poem was triggered by an observation among us, on how many of the visitors had been taking photographs there.  For whatever reasons, none of our small family party felt any wish to do that.

The best part of the exhibition, for us, doesn't get into the poem at all.  It was a 5' conversation with one of the information people, who'd worked for the prison as a locksmith.

Following a well-established pattern, the poem was unplaced in the competition for which it was written, but has now found publication in another outlet. It's appeared in the Fringe999 poetry forum.

More poems of mine in _The punch_

I explained, when blogging an earlier appearance of poems by me in The punch, that this online Indian magazine, with a poetry issue once a year, has no connection with the London-based humour magazine of past centuries. My new appearance there was on 19 October last.

'As we were' was written in November 2018, when I was working my way through Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going. Prompt 50 in the 52 book was for a poem about violence. It begins with a quote within a quote.

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AS WE WERE

"'Fight to uphold it, it's the status quo!'

When I taught, boys defended the career

they'd planned themselves in the armed forces so.

We're here because we're here because we're here."

Newspaper letter, 1982.

Read over someone's shoulder, to my shame,

Stoke Newington, the 73 bus queue.

And then I recognised the writer's name.

Thought of his teaching, and how he hauled one

boy by the hair or ear out from his place,

asked him I forget what. We all looked on.

Each answer got a punch in the boy's face.

Perhaps two teachers shared the name. I'll not

fuss joining dot to thirteen-year-off dot.

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'Beacon Hill' was a response to another prompting from Jo Bell. During Lockdown 2, in November 2020, she led an online poetry workshop called 'Try to praise the mutilated world'. This time, the prompts were for a poem a day! They ran for the four weeks of lockdown, with a 29th and final prompt on Christmas Day.

Participants were invited to post their poems to a closed Facebook group. I succeeded in making something of all the first 28 prompts, albeit over 6 weeks rather than 4.

The first prompt was for poems on the subject of fire. Jo's blog as a whole is at http://jobell.org.uk/ . But 'Try to praise the mutilated world' seems to be now represented there only by the post announcing its launch, and individual prompts have disappeared.

My response to the fire prompt was a poem about Beacon Hill, an
earthwork at the eastern end of the village where I grew up, Gringley
on the Hill, in Nottinghamshire. When I posted it, the setting was
recognised at once by another group member, Seth Crook, who'd spent
holidays in the village as a boy and accounted Beacon Hill one of his
favourite places.

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BEACON HILL

Those towers twenty miles away -- you claim
as I see them they must have seen your flame.
Right. But these towers fifty miles away.

You don’t need them. You had your glory day
when the message was flared across the Trent
in the great Armada alert they sent
nationwide. More than I’ve done, ever. That
should do you. Embroidered, it’s all tat.
You're an earthwork to hold fires on your top.
No, not a volcano either. Stop.

===============================================

'Chichester 950' was penned on Clare's and my bike tour in the summer of 2025. We rode west from Brighton along the south coast, and took a ferry to the Isle of Wight. One of the places we passed through was Chichester, where the cathedral was marking its 950th anniversary.

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CHICHESTER 950

The signs advise entry by the west door 

that's round the campanile to its north.

We walk the church's length in West Street, for 

the city's grid names keep their ancient worth.

My bearings flip cathedrals, see them lie

anti-parallel to most parish churches.

Not here. The tower stands into the sky

per childhood graveyards. How soon done the search is!

Evensong, then the conflict-ridden timeline:

the spire's collapse in 1861

and the abuses later come to light.

We walk the city walls. Scott's spire design,

louvreless windows open to the sun

and space. They're still an unexpected sight.

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'Entitled' is another from 2020. It was my entry in a Holland Park Press competition on the theme of royalty, the deadline being King's Day in Holland.

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ENTITLED

The stately-home guide said the take technique
brought to a fine art by the late Queen Mary –
praise it till it’s a gift – was deemed such cheek
the Firm warned hosts of this through an equerry.

And did they warn Queen Mary? Truth to power?
Power’s excuse is Weak, hide your temptations!
I cannot help myself as I devour.
It is my gift to eat the wealth of nations.

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'Gurney' was written, like a number of my poems, for entry in the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association competition. The theme was 'Exile'. Do I need to explain that Will, in the first stanza, is F.W. Harvey, and Jack, in the second, is C.S. Lewis?

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GURNEY

1916-1917: Ivor Gurney made a song of F.W. Harvey's 'In Flanders'.

From Flanders' huge low prison Will

looked back to years above the war,

homesick for high, and blue, and hill,

kings' cloudlands of the time before.

1913-1914: the Gurney Library sheltered C.S. Lewis from Malvern College.

Malvern Hills healed Jack's England pain;

but a fagged, flogged newbie (the day

stung forty years), again, again,

he begged father take him away.

That terrible vestry meeting

 That terrible vestry meeting

i.m. Robert Jackson (1840-1914)

1. Before the meeting

(to Robert Jackson's tune for 'A lift on the way' by Edwin Waugh)

For leading the Oldham choir his portrait in oils

is in the town gallery, displayed on the walls;

his other choir, St Peter's, his father and he

successively will have served a Jackson century.

A Jackson century!

A Jackson century!

When Tom and Bob will have played a Jackson century!

For hymns he created new tunes by the score;

one pamphlet has fifty, another boasts of more,

named after midland towns, and southern on sea --

the high points in the Jackson century.

A Jackson century!

A Jackson century!

When Tom and Bob will have played a Jackson century!

His songs in the dialect of his Lancashire,

by Lancashire Burns, Edwin Waugh, do you hear?

'A lift on the way' is praised cheerily:

a touch of earth in the Jackson century.

A Jackson century!

A Jackson century!

When Tom and Bob will have played a Jackson century!

2. The meeting

The congregation's thanks

to the choir for services,

proposed by Mr Green,

told of lack of unity;

the seconding also

looked back to the glory days,

recalled the choir's old fame

Oldham-wide, Lancashire-wide,

the days when people came

drawn by music to the church.

Then Mrs Martland told

how, an old attender, she

had noted worsening, 

hymns as slow as funerals, 

the awful music why

no one in her family

would come to church with her.

Motion carried in the end.

Reporters please ignore --

it's a parish matter. 

SPLASH!

The Oldham standard filled

columns with the vestry row.

3. After the meeting

Who knows how Robert Jackson spent the night?

Widowed two years, so I suppose alone.

Late equinoctial was the dawn's first light. 

Who reflected on what they'd said and done?

By end May he'd resigned as organist.

The choir resigned in solidarity.

Press reports from the next year still exist:

functions were lost then back, apparently,

then stroke, speech lost, paralysed legs and side.

No hymns, no songs, no oratorio.

On Sunday the twelfth of July he died,

a broken no-man, nothing left to know.

His great age, some said. Really? Seventy-four?

Apologies won't cover words that killed.

Twenty-three days before the First World War.

The Jackson century seven years unfilled.

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Robert Jackson was organist of St Peter's church, Oldham, from 1868 to 1913. He first came to my attention through my interest in hymn tunes named after places. You may recall my words to Jackson's tune 'Trentham'.

I wrote the present poem sequence for a reading organised by Love Mill Road in Cambridge, on the theme of 'Transformation'.

Thanks to Gallery Oldham and Oldham Local Studies and Archives for letting me see relevant materials. 

See YouTube for me performing this work, accompanied in the sung bit by Mike Cole; and for Robert Jackson's song with its original Edwin Waugh words, sung by members of the Edwin Waugh Society in an arrangement by Jim Molyneux.

Red (Westminster Bridge)

Red (Westminster Bridge)

“Earth has not anything to show more fair.”
Our bridge, from decades after Wordsworth wrote,
still sees triumphant uses of that quote —
marathon meets demo, Parliament Square.
Red London bus routes level by the ride.
Let’s think of them as one vast playing field.
Duchess Loelia stole a phrase to wield
(but would confess this guilt before she died),
linking red bus and failure. Yes, to her,
whose ducal marriage failed, that was a thing.
Not to me, pensioner, kidlike venturing
red routes across the Thames at Westminster,
her duchy. Red souvenirs gleam on a stall.
Red hearts mourn Covid levels from their wall.

Loelia Lindsay (1902-1993; Duchess of Westminster 1930-1947) is believed to have popularised the aphorism, originally coined by Brian Howard and often misattributed to Margaret Thatcher, “Anybody over the age of 30 seen in a bus has been a failure in life.”

This is another of my colour poems, and also another of my poems written for projects from 26 Characters. 26 Bridges celebrated the bridges over the Thames in London. Participants contributed written work, and were invited to choose artistic collaborators who would produce visual work to go alongside this. 

My artistic collaborator was Clare Trowell, and she made a fine print of Westminster Bridge with a red London bus crossing it. Early in the project I had noticed that Westminster Bridge was crossed by five Transport for London routes. I explored these, making a list of bus-coloured things I'd seen on them.

The poem took its present direction after conversation with Clare T., and with my wife Clare. I'd been there before. And it developed, as 26 Characters poems are wont to do, in discussion with its project editor, in this case Wendy Jones.

Sonnet for Ledbury

Last year Robin Hiseman asked me for something from my back catalogue for the Ledbury Carnival https://ledbury-carnival.co.uk/ programme, with its 2024 Golden Jubilee theme of 'Going for gold'. I was able to oblige with 'Bus home from working Sunday', written way back in 2012. I blogged this as the third poem in my post 'Bears and gold', which I put up on the the day of the carnival. 

This year Robin asked again, the 2025 theme being 'Wonders of the world'. I didn't have anything in my back catalogue for that, so I wrote a new one.

SONNET FOR LEDBURY

Wonders of Ledbury. They've printed some --

Ledbury clock tower, Ledbury market hall,

Ledbury viaduct, Ledbury carnival --

stitched to world wonders like Rome's Colosseum.

If wonders come in sevens, Ledbury,

adding St Katherine, Elizabeth

Barrett Browning, John Masefield, in one breath

reaches its quota. It's got seven, see?

But Ledbury doesn't stop counting there.

Its church in Jenkins' England's thousand best,

its annual poem contest and fest,

plus those four cricketers and one darts player

and lots more Wikipedia's noted down.

Wonders of Ledbury. Wonderful town!

Clearness in England

Clearness in England

Humbler than lodestar claims:

citizens fossicking

for water standards,

where it’s made worse than brackish

at each profitable flush,

look downwards for truth

in such a sickly pickle.

Citizens writing,

not verklempt but using words

best true to the findings,

not parrot anger.

The glossy rag now carries

such stories. Let’s be

rational, rational. Let’s

be rational, rational.

The above was my entry in last year's CV2 competition. Some readers of this blog may remember that that competition requires entrants to make a new poem, in a single weekend, that must contain ten specific words emailed at 06:00 Saturday morning, UK time. In other words midnight Winnipeg time, as people living there slip from Friday to Saturday. Have fun guessing which the prescribed words are.

My entry got no success in the competition itself, but it has now found publication in Carole Baldock's poetry magazine Orbis. The work has had a measure of editorial improvement by Carole.

Here's some citizen journalism reporting on sewage, from East Anglia bylines. EAB is one of a network of similar outlets around the country; fun in the same way as the Places of Poetry online map that I've praised before.

Greengrocers and the apostrophe

 

GREENGROCERS AND THE APOSTROPHE

To stop us looking down our noses

at greengrocers, the man proposes

to phase out the apostrophe,

so cuke's and strawberry's will be

no worse than Kings Cross, Potters Bar,

Harrods or Boots. The answer's Ah,

they would. Metric correctness may

deserve to be the light of day;

the niggling point whose rules confuse

by more case law at every use

unclear contraction and possession

may well be ripe for supersession;

apostrophe-free writing might

by twenty years of school be right.

Correct non-users would therefore

look down their noses all the more.

As for greengrocers, they'd maintain

stubbornly their right to remain

writing their way, and stand their ground

to their last tittle-jot and pound.

I appear to have written this poem in the spring of 2001, probably in response to a Guardian article advocating as summarised in the first few lines. I published it over a succession of tweets in December 2019. I occasionally feel the urge to throw it into some online discussion or other, so it might as well be made available here.