Looking up

 

LOOKING UP

Wearisome at-poem acknowledgements --

not "After X" but "hub-gear reference

from X's 1997 play 

The track" -- displagiarise the work, or may.

But if I read with search to hand online,

I joy at how much learning becomes mine:

the play's plot, and its failure, X's switch

from plays to teaching, X's crowd-fund pitch

in 2015, where the scent goes cold,

the 20s German models who first told

the stories in the play, the engineers

they mocked, the fireless basis of their fears, 

the 40s seeming vindication of

the kludge in post-war rebuild some still love,

the 60s doubts.  With all these I withdraw

my charge the lengthy credits were a bore.

This was another poem written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week. The prompt in this case was number 47, for a poem about learning, though the poem is wholly fictitious.

It reached self-publication when I posted it as three tweets among the replies to one by Nina Parmenter on the subject of references in poems.

Counter protest

COUNTER PROTEST 

I do not want to take part in this rally. 

Us against them.  Which one is an Aunt Sally? 

I hope, noticing me and this placard, 

they will not come across and kick me hard. 

I hope no stage will need me to decide 

whether to rescue someone on our side, 

and none remind me, every year I live, 

I was cowardly or provocative. 

I hope for space to let my bladder settle 

not in a crowd, not in a police kettle. 

We'll make the point against the wretched man, 

and get away as early as we can.

This poem was written in July 2018, a response to prompt 38 in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week.  The brief was to write against something.  Reluctance to take part in a counter-protest is about as against as anything can be.

I went on the counter-protest I describe, and my anxieties proved, as usual, to be groundless.  I can supply details of the causes on request.

The poem found publication in the booklet All together now from Babylon Art Gallery, Ely.  The gallery ran a competition for poems to be made into a comic book.  Mine wasn't the winner, but All together now gave a print opportunity to all the submitted work.

Standard class

STANDARD CLASS

The mask of no eye contact, when walking past a beggar,

fits most of us, I reckon, on most streets.

You wore it fixed and you were the still ones

on the train, in other passengers' booked seats.

No selling masks to you whose bad

has pulled your faces into tweets.

Too late. You took a risk against the card,

against the wheels, the racing. Now it's known. Hard.

The above has a very simple publication history.  It was written in October 2019 for the Momaya competition, on the theme of masks, and published in the competition's anthology.

Cambridgeshire bike rides

Here are three more things I posted to the Places of Poetry map in the summer of 2019.

The first was, like some in other recent blog posts, written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going.  This was prompt number 4, for a poem that's an invitation.  The Tins path is a bike route between Cambridge and the village of Cherry Hinton. John Adams' Harmonium was known to me from having sung in a Cambridge Philharmonic Society performance in 2009.  And the invitation to cyclists is still open, though it might need some planning if accepted by many people.


INVITATION TO THE TINS PATH, CAMBRIDGE
If you know John Adams' Harmonium,
and ride a pushbike, let's recall the drum-
roll throbbing in the quiet that will grow
riding a stretch from death to the full throw
of movement 3, 'Wild nights'. Let's do the bike
version along this path, small flat bridge like
the drums, and power in the riding rise
for that crescendo of sonorities.
The bridge won't rumble now as once, I fear,
under one bike, so let us all draw near,
a pedal-strengthened Adams multitude
in mind of that orchestral interlude.

'Chester Road' was written in 2009.  Clare and I have not yet ridden from Cambridge to Chester, but, in the summer of 2011, we did make a bike tour from Chester to Cambridge.  Not sticking to Roman roads, mind.

CHESTER ROAD
Via Devana -- Chester Road -- the name
spurious, eighteenth-century invention
(rhymed, I suppose, retainer not Tirana) --
I rode northwest that turmoiling weekend,
a 90s time of names and letters reversed,
seeing how nothing could be for the best;
we ride southeast over the clunky stones,
a bouncing practice for our next bike tour,
and spend an afternoon admiring beasts.

Perhaps some day we'll take the invitation
in the road's name -- bogus but true enough --
and ride northwest to Chester, the whole way.

'A three-year cycle' is my first, and so far only, attempt to write in the form of a pantoum.  This was for a 2010 competition organised within Birkbeck College, though I forget by whom. The idea that events, or at least the emotional colours of events, move in three-year cycles has been present to me since I was about eleven, though it hasn't the importance to me now that it once did.  Reach and Over are villages to the north of Cambridge.  The quality of Psalm 102 in its sequential place is, I admit, a thing I had already explored from a different angle.


A THREE-YEAR CYCLE

But things move on if it's a cycle --
grey as old photos, January, bruises,
with piled-up consequences happened already.
See the sky rhymed with the street

grey as old photos, January, bruises.
Where does the three-year cycle start?
See the sky rhymed with the street
turn red-blue as daring.

Where does the three-year cycle start?
Where put the defining moment's
turn red-blue as daring?
They cycled from Cambridge to Reach.

Where put the defining moments?
They cycled from Cambridge to Over.
They cycled from Cambridge to Reach.
Green-gold as July, O be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands,

they cycled from Cambridge to Over,
we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture --
green-gold as July, O be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands,
they ran into Psalm 102: a bruised forgetting to eat bread.

We are his people, and the sheep of his pasture --
with piled-up consequences happened already,
they ran into Psalm 102: a bruised forgetting to eat bread.
But things move on if it's a cycle.

Illegal deposits

THE SEARCH

dare spend night condemned flat.  Online I found
no July game of public schoolboys scaling
a tower block's Heras fence, grazed to the ground,
hot on the concrete steps, higher each railing;

no afterwards: not ninepenny rainbow,
not weeping for the darkness in man's heart;
no record of the night -- what aged them so,
a great adventure from or at the start?

No bad deposits made in lack of water,
no newspaper, eerie from being old,
no noises for the night not getting shorter,
no one they met, and nothing they were told.

So probable, this tale, not mine to break.
Do you remember it? What is your take?

UNFESTIVE

The phrase "a lot of food"
means more food in the sentence
"We've laid in a lot of food for Christmas"
than in "He'd spilt a lot of food down his jersey."
Poignant the difference in tense.

A SPURIOUS CRIME

Ears pinch "e-legal", and the users know
libraryspeak's not theirs to understand,
when copyright means something else.  They go
and make do with the beige-flagged contraband.

CURIOUS

Deposit -- deposition -- kings invite
put-down, counter-claim.  Did your sudden flight
involve such terrors?  Had someone had sight
of things you'd done that didn't match your fight?
What came?  Visit, phone, email, small-hours fright?
Still mystery, twelve years on -- day of night.

The above poems are my contributions to Illegal deposits, a small anthology of writing by staff at libraries within Cambridge University and the colleges.  The anthology was the brainchild of Simon Halliday and features cover artwork by Clare Trowell. It includes a contribution by Adam Crothers, whose debut volume Several deer (Carcanet, 2016) won the 2017 Shine/Strong Poetry Award and the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize. 

To get your copy of Illegal deposits, contact Simon Halliday on snjh2[at]cam.ac.uk.

70 + 3

This was written in response to Radio 3's appeal to listeners for 3-line poems, to be read out on National Poetry Day in honour of the station's 70th anniversary.  I sent it to them via Twitter.  My poem wasn't read out, so far as I know, and the tweet has had a remarkably low number of views.  However, the tweet amounted to publication, so the poem is now ineligible for entry in most competitions; it earns its place in this blog.  It's another recollection of my teenage mania for listening to foreign radio stations.

70 + 3

Learnt in my teens, the 1970s: 
short-wavers called good wishes 73s. 
At 70, 3, receive all mine of these.

Solids and gaps

SOLIDS AND GAPS

(National Galleries of Scotland)

The bridge, though in no Bible, often makes

a Christian symbol, as in pontifex.

Painting the Forth Bridge, though outfacted, still

means the done staying not done that always will.

Photographing the Forth Bridge in stereo,

when the bridge had had thirteen years' existence,

conjures? allows? depicts? recreates? -- though

monochrome, steel -- a looking in the distance.


The above poem was written early in 2010 for the 'Inspired? Get writing!' competition organised by the National Galleries of Scotland.  Entrants were invited to write poems relating to art works in those galleries.  I did my exploration online.  The image I picked on was a stereoscopic photograph of the Forth Bridge, taken in 1896.  Follow the link in the title note to see it and the NGS notes on it.

The poem has now found publication in StAnza's Poetry Map of Scotland, and, for the duration of the StAnza Poetry Festival, in shop and business windows around St Andrews.  I had better say that StAnza was drawn to my attention by music librarian Karen McAulay.

Some readers will have heard me declaim a poem about another Scottish estuarine bridge, at various times in the last forty years.  The Poetry Map of Scotland gives the Tay Bridge a modern Scots poem by Fran Baillie, who accords William McGonagall his rightful place, and nothing more, with a name-check in the opening line.

Tnx for yrs

TNX FOR YRS

Time was when I wrote longhand, heard w. glee
praise for this "almost C18",
& wd, to ease the hand strain, which was gt,
C18ly abbreviate,
w/o the aim you charge, of seeming cool.
Altho' I tk to email as a tool,
I'm one whom loss of scope for longhand vexed.
I do it w. predictive when I txt.

This was written in October 2012 for a competition organised by the magazine The liner.  The theme was that of letters.  The poem achieved publication of a sort when I posted it on a friend's Facebook page, as a comment on a picture she had shared; then, being opportunistic, I went to the picture itself, by Julia Quinn, and posted the poem as a comment there.

Three more music poems

These poems were written at various times, and entered in a competition organized by Rhyme and Reason, the poetic fundraising arm of Rennie Grove Hospice Care. They didn't win any prizes, but they were published in the charity's 2016 desk diary.

JAUCHZET, FROHLOCKET

honk and five drum-knocks

flock of strings in flight and dive

voices crunch the snow

MUSIC IN ST EDMUNDSBURY

This church, wool-rich East Anglian, half-built
at Reformation, lit like Dutch paintings,
cathedralled 1914, recomposing,
hears Ulysses awake, hears Europe's strings
sombrely weave, unweave. The programme note
is the composer's own. It gives bare facts.

PHANTASY QUINTET BY VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

The Alla sarabanda's slow rise shows
smoke from a woodland cottage, early morning,
a thin grey line. It fades against the sky.

Can smoke be guiltless? after cattle trucks?
people at stakes? hell and its mirrors? sati?
cancer? emphysema? culled herds? carbon,
carbon we need but get more than the cycle?
carbon too much? carbon a weight, a choking?

That's smoke from fire. So smoking's lately banned.
But smoke without fire, from a sarabande?
Should that line rise, or is it one that ought
to go down with its freight of perished thought?
Maybe; but after worse of our devising,
I hope I see the thin grey line still rising. 

'Jauchzet, frohlocket' evokes the first movement of Bach's Christmas oratorio: "Jauchzet, frohlocket! auf, preiset die Tage" -- "Shout for joy, exult! Rise up, glorify the day" says one rendering I can't improve on.  The image of voices crunching the snow was used by conductor Tim Redmond in a rehearsal exhortation to us of the Cambridge Philharmonic Society, and worked by me into a haiku early in 2011.

'Music in St Edmundsbury' was written after hearing a performance of John Woolrich's Ulysses awakes by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in St Edmundsbury Cathedral in 2002.  Yes, I stoop to pun on the composer's name.  Wealth from wool played a great part in the building or extension of this and many other medieval churches in East Anglia.

'Phantasy quintet by Vaughan Williams' dates from 2007 and arises from a very strong visual image that was suggested to me by the opening phrase of the quintet's Alla sarabanda movement.

The day thou gavest

THE DAY THOU GAVEST

(after conjectures that the hymn tune 'St Clement', long attributed to the Rev. Clement Scholefield, might be in part the work of Arthur Sullivan)

What part is Clement, what part Arthur,

none now can hope or need to tell.

The hymn the singers love is seamless;

if sewn, then sewn together well.

Whatever zones part eve from waking,

the shadow edge of light in air

moves elegiac in its raising

along the spine and through the hair.

And did the famous aid the cleric,

whose other music fell away?

The question stands, and needs no letters,

no fingerprints, no DNA.

And only wishing tells us Clement,

himself a part of all he'd met,

once only found, once only, music

more great than most, more nearly great.

This poem was written in 2013 for the Mirehouse/Words by the Water competition, whose theme that year was the Tennyson quotation "I am a part of all that I have met." I cannot remember what led me, at about that time, to the Wikipedia page for the hymn tune 'St Clement', so effectively tied to the words 'The day thou gavest'. But here was a story of authorship questioned after more than a century, and blurrings of individual contribution that had become impossible now to determine. I thought it fitted well with the quotation.

I've now entered the poem in a Poem Pigeon competition on the theme 'Awakenings'.

The finest-hour syndrome

The finest-hour syndrome

(A minister became convinced that God was telling him that his wife would die and he was then to marry Samantha)

Perhaps he spoke as other men had,
only the God-talk more;
I don't know if Samantha'd been
through the same pattern before.

I believe the minister had been
a captain of high finance.
Oh, utmost probity, no swindles;
no hint of dalliance...

I suppose, though, he'd told young Alison
Sylvia would soon retire,
and I suppose he took pride
in Alison as she flew higher.

And I suppose a still small voice
said ten years long he should quit
the firm, and voluntary church work
would not silence it,

but I suppose when he gave in
to study for the ministry,
surrender wrenched him like tooth loss,
hard-cold as January.

I believe the finest-hour syndrome
is what happens when
somebody foils a blaze then wants
the buzz all over again,

studding the rest of his career
with unexplained small fires.
Pray God the minister was no worse
than such artless self-liars.  

This poem was written in 2000 and published in Orbis 170, winter 2014, p.69.  The version in Orbis, reproduced here, has benefited from some editorial suggestions by Carole Baldock.

The term 'finest-hour syndrome' is my own invention.  The phenomenon of serial arson by a former fire hero is one I first heard of ca 1996 in the course of training as a Fire Safety Manager at work.  In all the refresher fire training I've had since then, I haven't heard of it again.  Googling in search of more detail, I've had the impression that former heroes are very much a subset of the would-be heroes' subset of serial arsonists.

The minister's error, as described in the title note, is close to events I read of as having happened at a church in London in the early 1990s.  But the poem's prequel to that story is entirely speculative.

A couple of wildlife poems

Urban Fox

Seen, racing out of a leafy side-street,
its tail cartoon exhaust fumes (Samson's fox-fires?);
heard, perhaps, in the night, if fox not wind
and drain-pipe made that dog-bark didgeridoo;
tweeted by me, sleepless, asking that question.
Side-street, cartoon, exhaust, Bible, pipes, Twitter,
for me; not the wild Scarp, the branch-caught paw,
the pelt still covering the skeleton.


Ticking the Boxes

Projecting from the rosemary bush,
spaghetti-thin but green,
rigid but with self-moving end --
no other tweeps had seen,

no, nor gardening kinswomen
when I described this growth.
So was it life? and was it wild?
I'm ticking Yes for both.

I'll think about what uses I
can make of that decision.
Is wildlife still what people plead
for watching television?




'Urban fox' was written for the Barn Owl Trust poetry competition at the beginning of 2013, and published in the course of submission to the 2014 Earth Vision contest.  Scarp is the book by Nick Papadimitriou, a remarkable piece of reporting and meditating on a 17-mile ridge of broken land on the edges of North London.  Nick Papadimitriou's power of evoking the place is something I can only envy, but 'Urban fox' is based on something I actually saw.  And I heard the nocturnal dog-bark didgeridoo too.


'Ticking the boxes' was likewise written for the Barn Owl Trust competition and published by Earth Vision.  The first six lines are straightforward reporting.  I genuinely did  see such a thing in our garden, and asked around ("tweeps" are Twitter people, for those who don't know).  Current theory makes the thing a shoot, or possibly a leaf in misleading visual alignment with something else, pulled about by a  spider's web.

In Earth Vision, 'Ticking the boxes' won!

Snowlines

SNOWLINES

(Written in January 2008, when my part of England had had little snow for some time)

1930s New Jersey, snow.

"Momma, do we believe

in winter?" Alex Portnoy asked,

hopeful, and caught naive.

The joke has turned since then. Winter

the Pole and winter's death

alike bear claim and counter-claim

and evidence and faith.

And if we hear, on Christmas Eve,

"Hey, it's begun to snow!"

we turn and look across the room,

hoping it might be so,

earth white, sky dancing, rivers ice,

railways camera-black-

and-silver, faces sunset-red-blue.

Nostalgia wants them back.

In my home city, snow is rare,

these years. Some winters tick

snow-free. Beliefs change, winters change,

old times ache. Homesick. Sick.

The genesis of this poem is explained in the title note, which I added when the joke turned again and snow returned to Cambridge, as it did within months of my writing.  I have just entered the work in PoemPigeon's competition on the theme of winter -- one of those in which, as I have explained before, the mode of entry is by posting on the web site.

You probably recognised the allusions to Philip Roth's novel Portnoy's complaint and Thomas Hardy's poem 'The oxen'.  But I don't think they need any explanation.

And -- yes, of course I know that the impact of climate change goes deeper than playing games with one person's nostalgia for snow.

Yellow

YELLOW

Two hundred years ago, Linnaeus saw
the long heath of some English upland, yellow
with tawny blossoms of the common furze,
fell on his knees and wept aloud for joy.

One hundred years on, Gerard Manley Hopkins
saw sky of shires-long pearled cloud under cloud,
each row grey-underlined, in fine July,
beautiful yellow blush of uncut ryefields,
white wheat-ears, light throwing a goldleaf square,
and would not look again, as he had talked
too freely and unkindly over dinner,
and had to do a penance going home.

I saw a strip of lawn the other day,
passed every day, four times, but this new way
showed it way down the street, the morning light
smite it so hard it gleamed into the day
green-gold, a cyclist's belt against the night.

So pleased at having even noticed it,
I chose to match the fluorescent fit
of self-congratulation with a cake.
We had some Chelsea buns for coffee-break,
the second time that week, and swamped the sight
with the reward paid into appetite.



I suppose I had better give my sources.  I hope they're well enough known that my use of them counts as allusion not plagiarism, but I will name them to make sure.

Linnaeus saw the long heath: Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis.  Selected letters (Oxford: OUP, 1979), p.237.  I don't know the date of the story Wilde alludes to, but Linnaeus' English visits were in the 1730s, and he died in 1778; "Two hundred years ago" requires, I know, I measure of poetic licence.

Gerard Manley Hopkins saw sky: Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W.H. Gardner.  Poems and prose (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 131.  The story is in Hopkins' diary entry for 23 July 1874.  I marked the 140th anniversary of the incident with a tweet, and hoped I might blog this poem on the same day, but I am a couple of days late with it.

I saw a strip of lawn: I don't seem to have made any diary entry for this observation, but from references to bike repair at Hayward's I would place it on 21 or 22 November 1989.  The grass was in front of  Cambridge University's  Earth Sciences and Archaeology and Anthropology buildings, on the south side of Downing Street, glimpsed at around 08:55 from the bend in Pembroke Street where they become visible.

I wrote 'Yellow' in December 1989, and it appeared in Streetwise 2, March 1991, p. 18.  For other colour poems of mine see this post and this and this.

Specs and the bike

This poem won third prize in the 2006 Forest Arts competition.  I seem to remember the competition was sponsored by Dollond and Aitchison, and the theme was 'Vision'.


SPECS AND THE BIKE

Don't scrape your face with chains, don't even dare
ride redesigned wheels fashionably square.
That isn't how it works.  But, if you like:

    Both have two discs, not touching, edge to edge.
    Both have a frame that's set up to engage
    with human flesh.  Both work best in the light.
    And both bring what you'd not have seen to sight.

In those ways, glasses map on to a bike.

What darkness can do

This is a new poem, written for the Paragram Poetry Competition.  In 2013, this competition took as its theme the Emily Dickinson quotation "a slant of light".

Follow the links for the competition shortlist, which my poem just missed, and the winners. 

The poem describes something I remember from childhood, but my brother Hugh says he has no recollection of it.

WHAT DARKNESS CAN DO

Aged six and five, we struggled to ignore

the shape at night light up the cupboard door,

upright with overhang. Then having seen it,

and dared to speak of it, we dared demean it,

called it the Rude Ghost's House, defying fright.

In fact it was all curtain and street light.

I can recall no learning of that, no

relief in finding it a shadow show,

but till I came to be indifferent,

seeing the light I would dislike, resent.

Decades apart

DECADES APART

She called herself a chump for having given

men the white feather. She was one of two

women who owned to it on television.

Live with that thought on everything you do.

The above was meant to be my entry in the Poem Pigeon competition, for work including the word 'feather'.  I posted it on the day of the competition deadline, having heard of the competition earlier in the week. 

Entry in the Poem Pigeon competition is by posting on their site, where everyone can see the work.  The poem is up now at http://bit.ly/18saYiR .  I'd have done well to look out the rules first hand.  I understood that the competition was for poems no more than 10 lines long.  In fact, the stipulation was for no more and no less than 10 lines -- so my poem isn't eligible.  But publication in that website makes it eligible for inclusion in this blog.

For much more about the story, see the post 'White feathers: stories of courage, recruitment and gender at the start of the Great War' in George Simmers' research blog 'Great War fiction'.  And, to give further credit where it's due, I heard of 'Great War fiction' via the blog of singer and musical scholar Philip Lancaster.

'Decades apart' was one of four poems I wrote in August 2013.  The others, I hope, will make their way into this blog by the usual process.

LESLIE HORE-BELISHA, 1895-1957

This was my entry in a competition, in Kudos in 2010, for poems containing the word 'beacon'.  The poem was highly commended -- not published, but even commendation in a competition is enough to rule it out of many future contests.  So it gets the blog treatment now.

Leslie Hore-Belisha, the subject of the poem, was, as Minister of Transport in the 1930s, responsible for the introduction of the driving test and the flashing Belisha beacon at zebra crossings.  That by itself was enough to make me write about him in connection with beacons.  My knowledge of him was tiny, but it included the story that he had changed his name from Horeb-Elisha in order to appear less Jewish.  Reading his Wikipedia entry, in preparation for writing the poem, I was most intrigued to see that the story is apparently without foundation; in consequence, it drives the entire poem.

LESLIE HORE-BELISHA, 1895-1957
The crack re-split the livewire's double-
barrelled surname, like rock,
into two Bible names, a trouble-
and thought-free ethnic mock.

And the Horeb-Elisha joke
so wholly stuck to him
it was the truth to many folk,
his name the pseudonym.

But where, joining two sides of road,
a way's stitched black and white,
not crossword play nor Highway Code
but right split names the light.

And somebody's eureka
that gave his name a crack
softens at the Belisha
beacon, steady flash.

Tree poem

This quatrain was written in November 2010 for a competition organised by the Clyde Valley Orchard Group. It has now found publication in connection with another Scottish arboretum: the Redwood Avenue at Benmore Gardens in Argyll.  The avenue is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year, and the Gardens' writer-in-residence, Sue Butler, has put out an appeal for 150 4-line poems on the theme of trees. I am delighted that she has used my contribution.


SORRY

Apology as apple seed.
Some day, a tree, a bough,
and fruit of knowing them again.
Best not risk that just now.

Four gaffes about homelessness

This was written in 2000 for a competition run by the Big issue.  It was highly commended by George Szirtes in the 2006 Norwich Writers' Circle competition, and published in the competition anthology Reverie (p. 30).


FOUR GAFFES ABOUT HOMELESSNESS

(i)
The other news of 1963 –
the Skopje earthquake – was a hoot to me,
age six.  I laughed out loud when first I read
of people sleeping in the street, not bed.

(ii)
In the Guardian
(of all places) by one
who should know better: “How can
homeless people ever complain
of what they see on television?
I mean, where would they find to plug it in?”

(iii)
“Evangelism,” I was keen to note,
“we do not force down anybody’s throat,
but prayer and any needed explanation
happen as part of rehabilitation.”
The answer was, “To rehabilitate
the homeless, what a job, you’re doing great!”
You’ll know she wrote it drily.  I did not;
but irony was always my blind spot.

(iv)
A short history
by my then MP
of the Africans’
building traditions
(this was off the cuff,
he hadn’t read enough –
not familiar
with Paul Oliver):
“Of course, a hundred years ago they were still living in trees.”