An impromptu imitation of Edward Lear

How this one came about represents the best of Twitter (yes, I'm aware that Twitter is not always at its best). The gardener and writer Harriet Rycroft tweeted a video showing her attempts to get a fledgling goldcrest out of her hair. I saw it when it was retweeted by Cambridge rare books librarian Emily Dourish. It drew the comment that the adventure was "like something from an Edward Lear limerick". This spurred me to the following, which appears here very slightly altered: 

There was a young Cotswold goldcrest 

Who mistook someone's hair for a nest 

When they said "You belong 

In an Edward Lear song" 

He flew off, that presumptuous goldcrest.


I'm not copying and pasting other people's entire poems into the blog, so follow this link for Harriet's own limerick on the adventure. You might also like her blog post about it, and about garden encounters with wildlife more generally.

Marc Vyvyan-Jones

This is my wife Clare in 1985:

Clare in those days was a physics PhD student at Bristol.  The image is from a new-address card she commissioned from a friend, and it came to light again, many years later, in a clear-out of Clare's room at her parents' house.

The writing embroidered on Clare's leg reads "Please look after this Clare."  That drew from me a limerick, 11 years before we were engaged:

I'd love to look after this Clare,
blonde and plump like a girl teddy-bear.
I just hope that her rump's
not too bruised by the bumps
which arise from the wheels' being square.

The teddy-bear in Clare's lap had been a birthday present from friends, a couple of years earlier.  She believes she passed it on to a child in 1990, when she had to shed so many possessions for her post-doc year in the States, and she cannot now remember its name.

For those too young to have seen floppy disks, I'd better say that they were at least as square as shown in the picture, and not the sort of Daliesque thing the name suggests.  The title of Dali's painting The persistence of memory has acquired a secondary aptness from the transience of floppies.

The artist was Marc Vyvyan-Jones.  It was his first commission, he told me recently; billed then on invoice 0001, and reproduced now with permission.  His career as an illustrator continues to thrive, with an emphasis on the quirky and gallimaufrageous.  Who's next up to offer him a commission?

A couple of limericks

CATS AND THE BELFRY

St Matthew's church, known as St Matt's,
defies imitation by cats.
Though the man who designed
it had sewers in mind,
it gets pigeons and bats but no rats.



Picture (c) Clare Baker 2012

St Matthew's church is where Clare and I are most Sundays.  I have no business imputing to it a defiance of imitation by cats, an attitude suggested only if one is expecting an English parish church to have a tower, topped by pinnacles, at one end.  Not everyone shares that expectation.  The architect of St Matt's was Richard Reynolds Rowe (1824-1899), designer of Cambridge Corn Exchange.

The poem appeared in the church's magazine Streetwise 45, Christmas 2001, p.5.

Here comes a more recent limerick, which made an appearance spread over a couple of tweets on 22 January 2014 -- my first poem of the year.


THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS

No selfie depicts the librarian
fighting doors, lights and stairways to ferry an
array of files, books
and sack, but it looks
most textbook unhealth-and-safetarian.


I'd like to say I knew better than to take a selfie in such a situation, but in truth the idea did not occur to me until later.

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.