Library presentation on the theme of 'The Gift', 2005

The presentation referred to here was the Haddon Library's contribution to the Cambridge University Alumni Weekend, 2005. The poem was written, around the time of the 2008 Alumni Weekend, for the Sefton poetry competition. The Sefton theme that year, reflecting the status of Sefton's neighbour Liverpool, was 'culture'.


LIBRARY PRESENTATION ON THE THEME OF 'THE GIFT', 2005

That year, instead of readings, and to match
our theme, I thought we'd stage our own potlatch.

The anthropology curator, knowing
Canada by research and her own growing,
said no: cross-cultural representation
was strung in certain trouble and vexation,
and the destructive potlatch, as a seam
of thoughts I longed to throw at such a theme,
was controversial: far from all would show
that potlatches meant that, or happened so.

Back to the trusted pattern, then, instead.
Mauss on the potlatch was one thing we read;
and Thorstein Veblen's sneers; and Titmuss' blood;
and a Toronto matron's giverhood;
and Malinowski on the kula ring,
and in more recent women's questioning;
and while the readings went on at the front,
a pass-the-parcel game as running stunt,
every stopped sheet unwrapping one more quote --
Oscar Wilde, Monty Python, Henry Root,
and Miss Manners, and, for one lucky player,
museum postcards wrapped in the last layer,
seeing they were a gift whose best use lay
in the receiver's giving them away.

And all the time, throbbing, the things I did
to presents I had had when younger: presents
I had not thanked for, presents I had sold,
presents I had misused, broken, wholly destroyed.
How stage a potlatch? Who does what to whom?
Better the script, the readings, and the wrapping,
the shelter, the diversion, the cooling, the keeping.


On the poem's allusions: a web search will lead you to far more than I can tell you about the potlatch, the kula ring, Marcel Mauss, Thorstein Veblen, Richard Titmuss, and Bronislaw Malinowski. (And, come to that, about Monty Python, Oscar Wilde, Henry Root and Miss Manners.) I first came across the potlatch, many years ago, in a journal article -- possibly this by Lloyd DeMause -- which linked it with the sort of hang-up that makes you distrust your own good fortune, and destroy what is valuable for fear it goes bad. That, as the poem says, is a controversial view of what the potlatch is about, but it was what stayed with me.

Another of my entries in that Sefton competition won a prize. True to form, my prizewinner had been specially written for an earlier competition, and had no success there. The present poem, specially written for Sefton, has now appeared in Sunrise 3, November 2011, p. 5.

Science whimsy

This poem was written in 2005, evidently for a competition, though I can find no details of the competition other than the entry

"Universe, 2.2.2005 No"

in my poetry card index and

"Submitted sci and Strokestown poems"

in my diary for that date. It's more whimsy than science -- not one of those where I attempt to stumble along behind Clare's work in the field with talk of evidence, statistics etc. -- and it found success the following year, when it was highly commended in the Torbay competition. It didn't get published, but some competitions now rule out even the 'placed' poem from eligibility to enter. So I think this one merits the blog treatment.

The prediction in the final lines proved false. The new kettle needed replacement in a very short space of time.


SCIENCE WHIMSY

OK – lines on Space, Time and Energy,
viewed through a chronic shortage of all three.

Space is our kitchen, with its working ring
of cupboard, cooking, table, sink, draining
and back to cupboard; Energy down metal
has water throb and pound inside the kettle;
and Time's the tale. Where shall I find the words,
kettle of eighteen years now burning cords?
Oh, since a kettle has no feelings, in
consigning cords and kettle to the bin,
and learning the new kettle, swiftly bought,
is hampered by a cord that is too short.
Not shorted, not short-fused, just short of length
to reach the power-point and draw down strength.
Moving the kettle to another place
would interrupt our working ring of space.
So I have gone and bought a longer cable,
greyed for hi-fi not kettles, this, and able
to blank out interfering signals. Well,
the kettle doesn't notice them, can't tell
the worth of this strong silence, maybe hears
discretion as obtuseness. So, for years,
the flex will serve the kettle watts, and dream
of music, pictures, data in the steam –
but know that as a keyboard's power cord,
mere muscle, it would be no less ignored.

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?

The fight

This poem of mine appears in Cambridge University libraries information bulletin 69, 2011.


THE FIGHT

Crowded theatre, people burned next --
why, of all books, was this the cause
the question had become so vexed
that they fired off their metaphors?

Self-published, yes, discarded, yes,
elsewhere, but duplicate not shame;
praised by near-experts. Who could guess
this book would be the one to flame?

What could have kept the tinder out?
You'd need more knowledge than you had
if you could smell the spot and doubt.
Asbestos taints. Firewalls go mad.

Wikipedia on the village

This poem was written for a 2008 competition on the theme of crossroads. It has been published in Sunrise , the magazine of the East of England branch of my professional body.

No one's yet taken me up on my offer of chocolate for the name of the archaeologist whose memoirs I commented on in that previous post. I hereby offer chocolate similarly for the name of the village, though I reserve the right to award it only to people who couldn't be expected to know my remembered village from knowing me.


WIKIPEDIA ON THE VILLAGE

You could see York and Beverley, it stated
(across the Wolds? the Humber?), on clear days.
It said the market cross was desecrated
"some thirty years ago" (how's that for haze?)

-- stones taken to mend roads. (The 1970s?)
It smelt Victorian in every word.
1853, with the history's
claim: "I wikified this till I got bored."

So I have turned the village to my own
site of first wikifying. I stripped out
landmarks that weren't, and bailiffs' names long gone,
all 1853 that was in doubt.

I listed beacon, cross and windmill, showed
where you could find more data with ArchSearch.
Of course I scrapped the tale of cross and road.
I kept the paragraph about the church.

It was my church, when younger. Hence I knew
what you could see and not see from the ridge,
the broken cross, flat northward carrland view
beyond. I grew up in the vicarage.

Dreams that I'm back feel late, disturbed. They are.
By day I run a subject library.
Books, e-books, ArchSearch, Wikipedia
form a crossroads that's work enough for me.

Five legislations

This is another poem of mine from the mid-90s that was published in Verbatim. The reference is Verbatim 25(3), 2000, p. 14.

FIVE LEGISLATIONS

Thirty days hath September:
strictly, of course, the phases of the moon
do not reflect how many days, or nights;
strictly, indeed, letting the moon dictate
the months would give us thirteen in the year.
Unworkable! Instead, we have twelve months,
more or less equal, and September happens
to have got thirty days. No problem. Oh,
and there was one year when eleven went
to make us equal with the continent.

I before E except after C:
we all agree this shall be true.
The rebel words that do not spell
that way are weird and few.
Oh, and some French-descended words as well --
leisure, seize, and such affairs --
the problem's theirs.

How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which kings or laws can cause or cure,
wrote Johnson. That, I think, sums up my feeling
of why there'd be no mileage in repealing
the law that says your age is fixed at birth,
the one that bans cold liquids from congealing,
the one that stipulates the height of ceiling
for footpaths. Would the benefits be worth
all the upheavals that would send us reeling?

The pen is mightier than the sword,
which is why pens cost fifteen hundred pounds
from licensed dealers, lessons in their use
do not come cheap, and ownership is taxed
at eighty pounds a year, while swords are freebies
from charities and banks. Oh, and I worry
when kids leave school functionally unfenced.

Poetry is a verdict, not an occupation,
said Leonard Cohen. Tough, like science:
not the law’s unacknowledged legislation
but its appliance.

Field poems

These three poems were written in 1997 for a competition on the theme of fields.

'The loop' appeared in Streetwise 58, Easter 2005, p. 15. 'Feet and clay' appeared in Streetwise 56, autumn 2004, p. 10. Some readers may know the archaeological memoir to which it refers, and have found themselves, like me, brought up short over the misspelled word. 'Three startles' appeared in Cambridge insider (the predecessor to Local secrets), August 1998.


THE LOOP

Vacation work always meant fields: the rows
of beet under the skyline, with the white stick
marking your limit, and the weeds, the fat hen
to hoe or pull, the bales of straw to stack
in eights on sloping ground as the dark lengthened,
potatoes still in earth from the machine
to bag, and strawberries to crouch along,
and always chuntering: some Monty Python,
C.S. Lewis, Pears' Cyclopaedia,
Macaulay latterly, some of my own --
I had aspirations -- the whole loop run
endlessly over those long rows of hoeing,
stacking, bagging, crouching, chuntering.
I noticed very little and remember
the aspirations and the chuntering
with squirms, with squirms. It's half my life ago.
Since then I've had two dozen? lines in print.
Should I go back to fields? I follow paths
through them; still see too little, hear too little.


FEET AND CLAY

(an archaeological memoir)

Field-walking, you write,
the next best thing to digging,
yields stones: arrowheads,
broken pebbles polished smooth
that once held ploughs together,

flint barbs from fish-spears,
jadeite pierced beads and pendants
from igneous rocks.
"The quarry is elusive,"
you write. The reader stumbles

there, as at your claim
to "a rather difficult
time at the rather
decayed grammer school." Eyebrows??
sic. We pick up what we can.


THREE STARTLES

The day she said look
in place of luck.

The day she needed a literature
search on the war in Bosnia
and it came out she'd been there
ferrying aid from Manchester
during the summer.

The day she said she'd left the road
for a (she switched) to relieve herself, behind
a tree, and later found
she'd walked mined ground.

Not history themselves, just quirks of tact
where huge historic force-fields interact.