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.

City rules

CITY RULES

So there's this law that we prefer straight streets,
most of us, at most times, Pareto-fashion,
hitting four-fifths with one-fifth effort; dust
gathering meanwhile on the other fifth.
My other fifth is ancient offprints, gems
in dust: John Gunn's woeful extempore
about a Norfolk ruin, or the Baptists
clinging to the equality of races
despite all science, or the Carey Street site:
four thousand people having been turned out,
and houses cleared away from those prime acres,
the Courts of Justice rose in Carey Street --
public knowledge -- no note of disapproval --
eighteen-sixty-something... seventy years
deeper in dust than Cable Street... forgotten...

I wrote the above poem in 1996, for a competition organised jointly by the Times literary supplement and Poems on the Underground for poems with an urban theme.  Other poems I entered in that competition are here.  The poem was published in Cambridge University libraries information bulletin 40, 1997, p. 16.  You'll find CULIB at http://bit.ly/cpd1pi , but unfortunately its online presence doesn't go back before 2000.

The offprints referred to are in the Pitt-Rivers collection at the Haddon Library of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, where I work.  You're welcome to come and see them in the Haddon!  Failing that, here are the references to the articles concerned.

John Gunn's woeful extempore: 'General meetings and excursions.'  Quarterly journal of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History, January 1869, pp. 2-17.   The excursion in question was the SIANH day out with the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society, 16 September 1868, and the full embarrassment is on page 16:

"Flixton Ruin was the next locality, where the Rev. John Gunn should have read a paper; but owing, he said, to the fact that fifteen years had elapsed since he visited the locality, he was scarcely prepared to trust his memory."

The Rev. John Gunn was vicar of Irstead and Barton Turf.  It would seem the vagaries of his memory were famous -- and so were his kindness and conscientiousness as a parish priest, and his scientific turn of mind.  A good man, and one hopes his memory did not allow recollections of the Flixton Ruin gaffe to torment him for the rest of his days.

  

the Baptists clinging to the equality of races despite all science: Bedford Pim,  The negro and Jamaica.  London: Trübner, 1866.  I believe this is the source.  It seems in 1996 I was exercising a dash of poetic licence.  The quotation I'd been spurred by was almost certainly this:

"I shall therefore speak of the negro as I find him in history and in life, though in so doing I may be compelled to present him in language somewhat different from the maudlin eulogiums bestowed on him of late by the enthusiastic negrophilists of Exeter Hall."

Exeter Hall in London was used as a meeting place by anti-slavery organisations, and the name did not necessarily have the religious connotations I supposed in 1996.  But the science was implicit in the fact that the paper was presented to the Anthropological Society of London.


four thousand people having been turned out: Wilfrid H. Hudleston & F.G. Hilton Price, 'On excavations on the site of the new law courts.'  Proceedings of the Geologists' Association 3(1), 1873, pp. 43-64.  The paper begins:

"It is well known to most of the inhabitants of London that the Government have decided to erect the long-talked-about Courts of Justice in the Strand, upon what is called the Carey Street site.  This site, occupying an area of seven acres, was cleared of its houses about three years ago, when nearly 4000 people were turned out."

Communication amongst librarians

How serious is the problem of non-communication amongst Cambridge librarians? The means of communication are there — a whole heap of them, in varying degrees of activity, including CULIB, the Cambridge Library Group, the Camtools Cambridge Librarians site, the Facebook Cambridge Liibrarians group, the ucam-lib-discuss email list, the brownbag lunches, the Arcadia seminars, the libraries@cambridge annual conference. So if we don’t communicate it’s not for lack of opportunity.

I raised this question in the early days of the Facebook Cambridge Liibrarians group. I sought people’s favourite instances of things within the Cambridge library landscape that

• should have been communicated & hadn’t been, & the consequences
• had been communicated particularly badly, & the consequences
• needed to be communicated now, & weren’t being, & the actual or potential consequences
• had ever been communicated particularly well

I’m trying to remember what examples of any of the above have been cited in the course of the communications arising from recent Cam23 activity.

Perhaps what’s needed is not new channels of communication, just bolder use of the existing ones. As Cam23 is showing, when we’ve something to communicate about, we do communicate.