Poems from the hobby that gave this blog its name

BLURTMETRY AFTER A YEAR

Yes, capturing the blurts. The first fine power
of bringing down went with blurtmeter one.
The day came when I took the counter off
to turn a key, and dropped it on hard stone.

I don't know where the count had got. The impact
logged one more blurt, a false one. And the ten
seconds elapsed and my lapcounter, my first
blurtmeter, did not start timing again.

And neither pressing buttons, either button,
nor lapse of minutes, hours, let it move on.
The power that went with my first blurtmeter went
no more, after the stone floor. It had gone.

Now, flaunted less, and worn on belt not finger
and keeping up the log's blurtmeter three.
But the blurtrate fumes, rages (not soars -- nothing
soared when its essence was so fidgety).

BLURTMETRY ON WHEELS

Keeping track of blurts
during a white-knuckle ride
in a forest night,
not daring the blurtmeter
so finger-counting through grip

of the handlebars --
over the handlebars light
finds the pale earth track
by the darkness to each side.
The bike bends to the pale line

unexpected, fast
at the steepnesses and turns.
No moon, no water,
but the pale line recalls such
and I keep track of the blurts.


A YEAR AFTER BLURTMETRY

Blurtmeter 4, with self-clip plastic strap,
on day one hit its terminal mishap.
Bright August morning. I biked north and found,
mid-journey, my kit must have hit the ground,
miles back, perhaps. Enough. The game died thus.
Facebook friends wrote: "This is hilarious!"
One more year, and blurtmetry's overgrown
(as in path not schoolboy). The name lives on
in my new blog, the story should I need
to neutralise odd speakings, and instead
of blurts I mark each day's peak breathing flow,
or roads I've gone and how I chose to go.
Knowledge somebody else requires to know.


Yes, blurtmetry. The name of this blog. It's a hobby I invented in 2006, and followed for a little more than three years. The above poems, written between 2007 and 2010, give it as much chronicle as it needs. They have had public utterance insofar as I read them to an online meeting of Enfield Poets, who had us of Ver Poets over as guests on 4 August 2022.

The blurts themselves were the subject of an earlier sequence.

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?

Blurts

This is the sequence of poems I mentioned back in February, the one about the "fragmentary vocalisations, unconnected with their immediate circumstances, that one utters in response to awkward memories." At that time, I made a link to another online manifestation of the work, but that manifestation seems to be not always there when wanted.

'Blurts' was not conceived as a sequence, but written as the individual parts suggested themselves to me in 2003-2004. It was published in the language quarterly Verbatim 30(i), Spring 2005, p. 17, following one of the fastest acceptances I've ever had. 2004 was like that.

Blurts turn out, or at any rate their driver, the sense of living in a perpetual jangle of remembered gaffes and peccadilloes, turns out, to be more widespread than I once thought. I have shown the below sequence to people and found, gratifyingly often, that the response is one of recognition. On the other hand, the counting of blurts, by means of a stopwatch, appears to be an idiosyncrasy of mine. I call it blurtmetry, and have used its name again for the present blog. For an account of the genesis of blurtmetry as a hobby, see the British Science Festival 2011 poetry competition, 15th post; however, it found no other enthusiasts, and my family were relieved when I abandoned it after three years.

Verbatim is in abeyance at the moment, and greatly missed.

BLURTS

(i)

Some gaffe has bubbled in my memory.
"You idiot!" I mutter, meaning me.
Somebody overhears me and feels meant.
Another bubble's on its long ascent.

(ii)

Whispering “DEATH!”
is a waste of breath.

(iii)

My rule -- Don't talk to someone you can't see --
may help me see that one or other hears.
It doesn't stop blurts of apology
to teachers I've not seen in thirty years.

(iv)

Solo,
I bark Sorry! staccato
for an old peccadillo –
a sort of self-vendetta.

Recalling what I can’t recall
finds cracks of resolution
in battering the party-wall
edgeways with noise-pollution.

(v)

A blurt of the usual sort,
in a prayer, would stick out like a wart.
So in church, when an old thing went off in my head,
I converted the blurt to a silent stop dead –
and “The man’s half-asleep,” people thought.

(vi)

Another wordless blurt's the thick-blink wince.
Perhaps it was your music that set ringing
the trigger memories, laid down long since;
I did not mean a slight upon your singing.

(vii)

Treading two steps in ten on words that trigger
the sort of memory that stops me dead,
I'm glad to find the English language bigger
than lists of what I wish I hadn't said.
Indeed, if I went through the dictionary
on purpose to stain every word with me
and PowerPointed® the resulting story
to seminars on lexicography
(“CLEUGH I illiterately mispronounced,
NOUP I wrote in exams, under-prepared,
PORRET accompanied a cheque that bounced,
DRAN and I've just now realised why she glared”),
the words I'd left unstained would make the thing
so gappy as to be embarrassing.

Blurts

Blurts are fragmentary vocalisations, unconnected with their immediate circumstances, that one utters in response to awkward memories. My 2004 sequence on the subject was published in the language magazine Verbatim in 2005 (30[1], p. 17). I've been wanting to include that sequence here in my blog, but thought best to check the copyright position first -- and found my work already online!

Poetry competitions

I regularly enter poems in competitions. That is why I don't post new poems on my blog: most poetry competitions have a rule against work that has been previously published, including publication online. So, to avoid spoiling any poem's competition chances, I blog only poems that have been already published in some form.

For an idea of the range of poetry competitions that one can enter, see Carole Baldock's regular bulletin Kudos. You will notice that many of the Kudos listings are calling for poems with particular specifications -- a theme or subject, perhaps ("Journeys", "But what am I?", "Found", "A sense of place"), or a form (sonnet, villanelle, pantoum) -- which means, often, that they call for new work written to order.

I've not won many prizes. But in the mid-1990s I began to see a pattern emerging. Poems I wrote for thematic or formal competitions didn't get anywhere in the competitions that called them into being -- but they did seem to have the edge on my other poems when it came to finding later publication elsewhere.

In November 2004, I put that perception to a statistical test. I counted all the poems in my card index (yes, a card index -- some parts of my life remain unwired) and found an astonishingly clear confirmation of what I had sensed. The percentage of published poems that were written for competitions was higher than the percentage of competition poems in the index as a whole. And the percentage of competition poems that achieved publication was higher than the percentage of published poems in the index as a whole.

Since then, my output has been very largely competition-driven, with an average of a dozen new poems a year. But the optimism of 2004 has been impossible to sustain. In the 2004 count, the proportion of competition poems that had achieved publication was 50%. I could not pretend that the dozen new poems a year were yielding half a dozen publications a year.

A more recent count, with the addition of the post-2004 poems making the thing larger and so, presumably, more statistically reliable, gives no encouragement to pretence. Both of the ratios that were so gratifying in 2004 are now reversed. Indeed, despite the concentration on competition poems, the publication rate has not risen.

03 November 2004 08 January 2011 Poems 141 218 Published 45 67 Written for competitions 24 95 Both written for competitions and published 12 25 Proportion of published poems that were written for competitions 27% 37% Proportion of competition poems in index as a whole 17% 44% Proportion of competition poems that achieved publication 50% 26% Proportion of published poems in index as a whole 32% 31%

It's a sobering set of figures, comparable to those one gets when following a weight-reduction programme. Or those I got from the experiment of blurtmetry after a while. I may blog about that some day.

I expect I'll carry on entering poetry competitions. Their themes get me thinking, and reading, in new directions. Clare has sometimes observed that the competitions I enjoy best are those that I can approach as a kind of mini research project. But the biggest rationale for this practice, the evidence that it leads to more publishable poems, has gone.

Anyone else out there had a similar experience?

Oh, and another consolation has been to organise poetry competitions at work. I've done that twice now, and they've called up better poems than anything I could have written myself. It's great to know that I've been involved in that process in some way.

First post on Blurtmetry

This is the blog I am getting up by way of following the 23things programme. I have been writing the Haddon Library's blog for a couple of years now, but Blurtmetry is my personal blog, the first I have created from scratch. Lisa Jeskins' blog last week recorded a similar transition.

I expect to use the blog more or less exclusively for 23things business at first, but I have toyed with the idea of blogging in other directions for some time. Perhaps I will take to it as enthusiastically as I have taken to Twitter.

The name of this blog -- Blurtmetry -- is that of a hobby I invented and then abandoned. Blurtmetry is the counting of blurts, those fragmentary utterances, unconnected with their immediate circumstances, that are triggered by the memory of gaffes and peccadilloes. In my life pretty well every waking moment is a jangle of such memories, and from June 2006 to August 2009 I wore a swimmer's lapcounter in order to count the resulting blurts. I called that piece of kit my blurtmeter, and noted the tallies in my diary every night; some day I might yet complete the spreadsheet transcription of diary with blurts tallies, and see if any sort of pattern emerges.

But such a wannabe Ignobel project had better wait until after the end of 23things. If I persist with blogging beyond 23things, then cod research of that kind will be one possible topic for it.