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.

Bears and gold

Here are some poems that made it to publication in August 2024.

East Anglia bylines colleague Kate Moore drew my attention to the imminence of Poetry Bears' Picnic Day 2024. I responded with an article showcasing poems I had written at various times between 1985 and 2018 on the subject of bears. Some of them had featured in this blog already.

Allow me to present a couple that haven't.

BEARS

True, bears are solitary and not lovable.

True, I stopped buying teddy bears as the window sill filled up.

True, we did not meet the bears we saw in their sunken field at Whipsnade.

True, most bears live rather a long way away.

True, bears do not cater, and cycle only under duress.

True, 'The 59th bear' by Ted Hughes includes a cautionary tale.

True, Christopher Milne's story casts shadows on tales of Pooh.

True, Britain's way with foreigners, in 1958 and in 2018, adds to the implausibility of Paddington.

True, my childhood behaviour jars on my childhood identification with Rupert Bear.

True, confusion may arise from saying bear to mean lover, partner, or on that spectrum.

True, I wearied colleagues by the conceit.

BUT

It also remains true that Clare rhymes with bear.

I like this sort of bear.

'Bears' was written in 2018 as my response to prompt 26 in Jo Bell’s book 52: Write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going. The brief was actually for an erotic poem, but as chapter author, Neil Rollinson, went on to explain:

Let’s write an erotic poem that’s about other issues: illness, growing old, familial and domestic disappointment perhaps…Let something else carry the focus, or energy, and let the erotic take a back seat.

So, that’s what I did. The conceit in the final five lines explains the other poems presented here. I do not have a fetish about bears, but they supply a vocabulary. Clare, as most readers of this blog will know, is my wife, the lecturer and science writer Dr Clare Sansom.

CLARE CONTRASTED WITH A BEAR

Bears do not cook the food I eat;

bears have enormous claws on their feet;

bears dance to the pain of a metal beat.

Bears cannot bike, or teach, or write;

bearskin offers no gleam of barelight;

and an ursid bear would not incite

a poem to compete.

The idea of exploring the contrast between a bear in our sense of a lover, partner, or on that spectrum, as in the first poem, and a genuine ursid bear, came about after Clare suggested I enter a Valentine poetry competition, I think run by BBC Radio Three, in 2007.

If you read the article, you'll see that Clare herself contributed a recipe to it, for flapjack to feed to participants in such a party as was envisaged. From the golden brown of flapjack and most teddy-bears it's a short step to the gold of jubilees.

Ledbury Carnival celebrated its golden jubilee in August 2024, and Robin Fortune-Hiseman, who was responsible for designing and printing the programme booklet, asked if I had any poems about carnivals or gold that he could use. He wasn't commissioning a new poem, just asking me to search in my poetry back catalogue. I sent him this from 2012, which was written originally for the Keats-Shelley Memorial Competition and satisfies the requirement for gold if not  carnivals. 

BUS HOME FROM WORKING SUNDAY

A golden purchase:

honey cashews bought to draw

pound coins from a note,

with first-class stamps included

as if to be virtuous,

and tweets from the bus

about rules against working

Sunday and against

writing self-impositions.

Twitter's golden not guilty

for exploration

of the gold in little things,

gold found while thinking

of something else; grain harvest

by-product of the searched earth.

Some of you may discern a kinship, in the use of the 'gold' motif, between that piece and Robert Horan's poem 'The queen's face on the summery coin', known to me through Samuel Barber's setting. I believe my use of the motif is different enough for this not to be a matter of plagiarism.

Three tree poems

 

Picture by Clare Sansom

HAVING BANANAS

Vexed by the appeal's

planting banana seeds line,

our botanist friend

would donate no cash that year.

Someone wrote to Christian Aid.

Wikipedia's

'Banana' discoveries,

rich like one per line:

seeds spiky, hard, cracking teeth,

genes too same, vulnerable,

nomenclature skein,

name-calling for republics,

handy for preaching,

sometimes hanged to make a point,

sometimes matter for fair trade.

SINCE KILMER

Since Kilmer knew he’d never see

a poem lovely as a tree,

and trees get felled, and poems penned,

why have a contest that will tend

to make the skew worse?    Bards, why bother

competing to compose another?

The answer is that words are good

for people who have missed the wood,

or seen the wood and missed the tree.

Maybe you see them both.    Not me.

Faced with a woodland scene, I need

programmes, subtitles I can read.   

TOUCHES OF EARTH

Earth-wild: a tangled query when she'd heard
of fennel children but not seen the word,
and wanted books from this fool who had read
assuming fear in how the word was said.

Earth-soiled: a soiled sheet brought Wilde down.  They cleanse
soil from carrots by acid.  Changing lens,
you see the carrots in their acid skin
endangering the eat of what's within.

Earth-rooted: what I mean by this is not
the waste of being rooted to the spot,
but roots to anchor, roots to store soil food,
roots you can almost hear grow in that wood,
holding the earth as deep as making height,
trees striving from it into air and light,
proud in a mode of growth those who know tell
plants came at independently and well,
neat, robust way through eco-stress.
I'll stop before I wish the trees success.

Earth-bound: not -using, as in house- or bed-;
serious earth, cue Larkin's many dead.
The end of all that rootedness and growing.
Let's call it homeward bound, but it's a going.

I read this set of three poems at an open-air event in Cambridge University's Botanic Garden.  This had originally come to my attention via my wife Clare, who'd seen an announcement on one of her science journalism email lists.  

'Having bananas' is new,  and was written specially for the event.  

'Since Kilmer' was written in 2004, for a competition celebrating the 90th anniversary of Joyce Kilmer's poem 'Trees'.  

'Touches of earth' was written in 2014 for the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association competition, whose theme that year was the Tennyson quotation "Who loves me must have a touch of earth".  Guinevere, in the Arthurian romance Lancelot and Elaine, is scorning Arthur's perfection.  But I made no reference to the original context in the poem.

'Since Kilmer' and 'Touches of earth' were previously published in the booklet for the 'Remarkable world of trees' exhibition at St Albans Museum.

The Botanic Gardens event was the brainchild of Anne Thomas, and others whose work featured there were Rosalind Moran, Ann Gray, and Matt Howard.  An illustrious company to find myself in!

Poems in Orbis

These poems are about to appear in Orbis 158. They have had the benefit, as Orbis poems tend to do, of editorial suggestions by Carole Baldock.

'By degrees' was my entry in the 2008 Keats-Shelley competition, whose theme that year, I seem to recall, was the word 'lost'. Keats-Shelley has a way of giving its entrants one-word themes that are very stimulating. 'A sentence' was written in 2011, probably for the Rhyme and Reason competition on the theme of 'time'.

The competition pattern re-asserts itself!


BY DEGREES

Soon it will be a twelvemonth since you lost,
whether by jump or push, your livelihood,
and ran to earth your heat in online post,
recycled Booker, climate science booed.
I lack much science, but, ad hominem,
am consoled, although saddened, when I see
your posts, the different ways of signing them:
two of them, a matter of geography.
For readers living in the USA,
you sign as ‘Dr’ at your new address;
for audiences here in the UK,
who know you, you still sign doctorateless.

Is this the old tradition of the prophet
honoured abroad, at home less well regarded?
Well-meaning, earnest? Other readings of it
spring up like Jack, and will not be discarded.
I cannot say what method’s best to measure
the profit of this title that you use,

not money, true, but cachet, psychic pleasure,
against what, as it’s false, you stand to lose.


A SENTENCE
The phrase ‘a prisoner doing time’,
tautologous, suggests the hand
of a sub-editor – ‘prisoner’
taking the place of ‘pervert’ (banned)?

I have no proof. Editing good,
censorship bad, I know. What time
changing ‘pervert’ to ‘prisoner’ took
was at worst a minute’s waste, no crime;

if hours, a background process, not
the trial months, the years of jail,
the decades from his bullying
strictness to this shock. And those measures pale

against the time he’s doing time for
against the lives he’s doing life for
against the time against the lives
against against against the lives
against against against against

against against against against

The blurtmeter

When I posted the Blurts poem a couple of months ago, I mentioned another poem that I had posted on Facebook. The Facebook post was to a poetry competition run by the British Science Festival 2011. Not for the first time, I account publication of that sort as excuse enough for inclusion in this blog. Here comes the poem in question.


THE BLURTMETER

(first weeks of an experiment)

Motivation. To count the blurts
jabbed by the jangle of bad memories;
to make them less by x percent;
to unstep the cycle of embarrassment.

Method. A stopwatch on one finger,
with lapcount button in stretch of my thumb.
I set it running when I start the day,
thumb it for every blurt, then write the tally;
and the percent reduction that I seek,
twenty, a moving target week on week,
will be rewarded, on the days it's met,
by an entitlement to chocolate.


Results

20 June 2006: 945 blurts in 7 days
Target for 27 June 2006: 756 blurts in 7 days
27 June 2006: 643 blurts in 7 days


Discussion

I play at science. How define a blurt?
How can my self-reports be verified?
What if repeated thumb-stretch comes to hurt?
What if the madness stacks up more beside?

What are the benefits? I reckon three:
first, something new each time I look. The art is
to wear the stopwatch unobtrusively
(though guaranteed to break the ice at parties).

Second, think fifty blurts for twelve hours eight.
The jabbing jangle of remembered gaffes
is sidelined by the urge to calculate,
its importuning baffled in the maths.

Let's make the third rhyme ho, throw, go, grow, glow:
to have planned anything and found it so.


The poem was written for the Keats-Shelley Association competition in 2006, the theme of which was 'The experiment'. I found myself treating the competition brief as a kind of miniature research project. The experiment described in the poem is one I had long wanted to try. I continued it, with a succession of lap-counters, over three years, and it generated several further poems. But I intend to stick to my rule with these, and not blog them until they have achieved publication elsewhere. Any editors willing to give them a go?