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.

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'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.