This dates from 1991. Part of the inspiration was a sentence in journalistic account, I forget whose, of the causes of the 1987 Great Storm: I remember "In 24 hours the depression raced across the Atlantic, deepening as it went." The poem was published in Streetwise 11, June 1993, p. 23.
HOW TO STOP SPILLS
Never nail the cup to the saucer,
never even use a screw,
but attach them sensitively
with a spot of Superglue.
If that doesn't stop the spilling,
fix the saucer to the tray
with a bed of melted candle-
wax and leave it for a day.
What, still spilling? Bind the tray tight
on the table -- every side
has its silver eyelets, or you
punch holes if they're not supplied.
That's three layers of firmness. Spilling
doesn't happen any more.
Whoops, the table isn't stable,
nail the table to the floor.
Nail the floor hard to the rafters,
nail the rafters to the hull,
nail the hull to the Atlantic,
dam the tide to hold it full.
Fill the dam to the brim with ocean,
taut Niagara of wall,
see the trough racing explosive
over spillage in free fall.
Down falls spilling, down fall saucer,
ship, nails, wax, tray, cup and thread.
There's the bad end comes of spilling --
so remember what I've said.
Monday, 26 November 2012
Thursday, 22 November 2012
A hand at reading
My poem 'A hand at reading', emailed from a Yorkshire vicarage on New Year's Eve to the English Association for their poetry competition on the theme of Dickens, is now out! Citation thus:
Aidan Baker. 3rd prize, 'A Hand At Reading'. English (Autumn 2012) 61(234): 213 doi:10.1093/english/efs038
Unfortunately, the publisher has a policy against the blogging of work from their journals, so I'm not giving the poem here.
Aidan Baker. 3rd prize, 'A Hand At Reading'. English (Autumn 2012) 61(234): 213 doi:10.1093/english/efs038
Unfortunately, the publisher has a policy against the blogging of work from their journals, so I'm not giving the poem here.
Sunday, 11 November 2012
A librarian's gift to the Conservative Party
I was showing off in the Haddon Library to a student the other day, and I'm afraid I told him this story. Remind me not to tell it again now it's online.
In March 1986, I was Assistant Librarian at the Haddon, and the other two members of the library staff were both on long-term sick-leave. Working with me were two part-timers.
The end of the Lent Term approached, and with it the end-of-term recall of loans. In those pre-automation days that meant a ridge of activity, daunting even when the Haddon was fully staffed. A wiser person would have looked at the task and the resources, and concluded that it would be a good idea to give the end-of-term recall a miss for once. But in those days I was bolder than I am now, and saw in the situation an opportunity to try something.
I had read of someone who had conducted research into research. He had recruited a number of researchers to act as his subjects, and divided them into two groups. Both groups were asked to report to him regularly on the progress of their own research, but one group was asked additionally to write cheques to organisations of whose aims they disapproved, and leave these cheques with him. If research by the writers of the cheques did not prove verifiably fruitful, the cheques would be forwarded to the organisations concerned. At the end of the experiment, members of the group that wrote the cheques were found to have made better progress than members of the control group, who faced no such financial loss. (In 2011, I tried and failed to track that story down; let me know if you have any leads.)
My exploit did not involve a controlled experiment, or any money but mine. What I did was to circulate to Haddon users, a fortnight or so before the end of term, a notice whose wording I remember as follows:
THREE GOOD REASONS FOR RETURNING YOUR LOANS HERE BY TUESDAY MARCH 11
1. You will not be allowed to borrow any books for the vacation until your loans for the term are back.
2. We are extremely hard-pressed at the moment, with three people's work being done by one and two halves. The fewer overdues we have to send, the better.
3. I intend to donate 1p to Conservative Party funds for every overdue note we send out on Wednesday March 12. Please help me to keep this sum as small as possible by returning your loans on time.
I cannot say whether it worked in terms of persuading people to return their books. The donation I ended up sending to Conservative Central Office came to 86 pence, but, lacking figures for overdues sent at the end of other terms, I had no means of making a comparison.
The biggest flaw in this incentive was its unexamined assumption about the political bias of the Haddon's users. But the student who said, a few weeks later, that he'd kept books back in order to boost the donation made this claim in a funny voice. Was he joking? Irony is the blind spot in my sense of humour.
A kind friend asked if I'd mind him sharing the story with the Times Diary. They rang me to check it. Afterwards I had a major backlash from the left wing of my conscience for talking to Murdoch's paper, and did penance with soap in my mouth for three quarters of an hour.
None of this is the kind of thing I do now.
In March 1986, I was Assistant Librarian at the Haddon, and the other two members of the library staff were both on long-term sick-leave. Working with me were two part-timers.
The end of the Lent Term approached, and with it the end-of-term recall of loans. In those pre-automation days that meant a ridge of activity, daunting even when the Haddon was fully staffed. A wiser person would have looked at the task and the resources, and concluded that it would be a good idea to give the end-of-term recall a miss for once. But in those days I was bolder than I am now, and saw in the situation an opportunity to try something.
I had read of someone who had conducted research into research. He had recruited a number of researchers to act as his subjects, and divided them into two groups. Both groups were asked to report to him regularly on the progress of their own research, but one group was asked additionally to write cheques to organisations of whose aims they disapproved, and leave these cheques with him. If research by the writers of the cheques did not prove verifiably fruitful, the cheques would be forwarded to the organisations concerned. At the end of the experiment, members of the group that wrote the cheques were found to have made better progress than members of the control group, who faced no such financial loss. (In 2011, I tried and failed to track that story down; let me know if you have any leads.)
My exploit did not involve a controlled experiment, or any money but mine. What I did was to circulate to Haddon users, a fortnight or so before the end of term, a notice whose wording I remember as follows:
THREE GOOD REASONS FOR RETURNING YOUR LOANS HERE BY TUESDAY MARCH 11
1. You will not be allowed to borrow any books for the vacation until your loans for the term are back.
2. We are extremely hard-pressed at the moment, with three people's work being done by one and two halves. The fewer overdues we have to send, the better.
3. I intend to donate 1p to Conservative Party funds for every overdue note we send out on Wednesday March 12. Please help me to keep this sum as small as possible by returning your loans on time.
I cannot say whether it worked in terms of persuading people to return their books. The donation I ended up sending to Conservative Central Office came to 86 pence, but, lacking figures for overdues sent at the end of other terms, I had no means of making a comparison.
The biggest flaw in this incentive was its unexamined assumption about the political bias of the Haddon's users. But the student who said, a few weeks later, that he'd kept books back in order to boost the donation made this claim in a funny voice. Was he joking? Irony is the blind spot in my sense of humour.
A kind friend asked if I'd mind him sharing the story with the Times Diary. They rang me to check it. Afterwards I had a major backlash from the left wing of my conscience for talking to Murdoch's paper, and did penance with soap in my mouth for three quarters of an hour.
None of this is the kind of thing I do now.
Friday, 5 October 2012
Past times
PAST TIMES
No, it's a dummy cat – it's not stopped breathing.
Yet asking us has called into the air
the garden funeral there will not be,
homecomings from the vet there never were,
a life that's not, a Larkin's Coventry;
and where your kindness thus remains unspent,
the room's less warm around the non-event.
Above is a picture of the dummy cat in question. And indeed another dummy cat is in the background and yet another is off camera. All of them are presents from kin, the one in the picture bought, I gather, from the nostalgia chain Past Times. No one's ever mistaken any of our dummy cats for a recently-deceased cat, but quite a few people have mistaken them for real cats, and I find that oddly disturbing, in much the same way as misplaced solicitude.
The poem dates from 2003. Its publication was as an entry in an online competition, run by the magazine Your cat. It sank without trace when the competition page was taken down.
No, it's a dummy cat – it's not stopped breathing.
Yet asking us has called into the air
the garden funeral there will not be,
homecomings from the vet there never were,
a life that's not, a Larkin's Coventry;
and where your kindness thus remains unspent,
the room's less warm around the non-event.
Above is a picture of the dummy cat in question. And indeed another dummy cat is in the background and yet another is off camera. All of them are presents from kin, the one in the picture bought, I gather, from the nostalgia chain Past Times. No one's ever mistaken any of our dummy cats for a recently-deceased cat, but quite a few people have mistaken them for real cats, and I find that oddly disturbing, in much the same way as misplaced solicitude.
The poem dates from 2003. Its publication was as an entry in an online competition, run by the magazine Your cat. It sank without trace when the competition page was taken down.
Tuesday, 25 September 2012
Lessons of money
This I wrote in 2001, in response to
training at work before the introduction of a new accounting system.
LESSONS OF MONEY
(recalling Henry Reed)
In the 1940s
a poet could look down his nose
at an NCO, I suppose,
who said The reason being is,
and a capsa’s a vase and the Vasa capsized.
Irritation nowadays
with those whose task it is to train
us would spurn any such disdain
for an unsyntactic phrase,
though a capsa’s a vase and the Vasa capsized,
and they all said it, I think.
Learning computerized accounts
I woke for varying amounts.
Some if not all of it would sink.
And a capsa’s a vase and the Vasa capsized.
History ran up the shore.
Whether money’s grant or profit,
tax or gift, the movement of it
calls on all our powers to track.
We struggled in the wake
and wash of ledgerspeak.
Debt was not cut at Okinawa.
And a capsa’s a vase and the Vasa capsized.
In the run-up, the thing seemed to swell with historical change.
Up and running, not very, it comes to show,
like a blooper of snow-ploughs bought for the wrong sort of snow,
no human trends outside the usual range.
And a capsa’s a vase and the Vasa capsized.
The Henry Reed allusion is to his 1940s sequence 'Lessons of the war', a response to his training in the Army. I suppose I had better specify, since my refrain makes no sense otherwise, that the accounting system in which I, and many others, were being trained in the summer of 2000 was Cambridge University's CAPSA accounting system, since then upgraded and rebranded.
I believe I stretch things rather in conflating a capsa -- a cylindrical container for scrolls -- with a vase. The attraction of the Vasa pun was too great, and is, I hope, covered by poetic licence.
The Okinawa allusion is to the 26th G8 summit, held in Okinawa in the summer of 2000, and the subject of demonstrations by the Jubilee 2000 movement for the cancellation of third world debt.
The poem was published in Cambridge University libraries information bulletin 51, Michaelmas 2002.
LESSONS OF MONEY
(recalling Henry Reed)
In the 1940s
a poet could look down his nose
at an NCO, I suppose,
who said The reason being is,
and a capsa’s a vase and the Vasa capsized.
Irritation nowadays
with those whose task it is to train
us would spurn any such disdain
for an unsyntactic phrase,
though a capsa’s a vase and the Vasa capsized,
and they all said it, I think.
Learning computerized accounts
I woke for varying amounts.
Some if not all of it would sink.
And a capsa’s a vase and the Vasa capsized.
History ran up the shore.
Whether money’s grant or profit,
tax or gift, the movement of it
calls on all our powers to track.
We struggled in the wake
and wash of ledgerspeak.
Debt was not cut at Okinawa.
And a capsa’s a vase and the Vasa capsized.
In the run-up, the thing seemed to swell with historical change.
Up and running, not very, it comes to show,
like a blooper of snow-ploughs bought for the wrong sort of snow,
no human trends outside the usual range.
And a capsa’s a vase and the Vasa capsized.
The Henry Reed allusion is to his 1940s sequence 'Lessons of the war', a response to his training in the Army. I suppose I had better specify, since my refrain makes no sense otherwise, that the accounting system in which I, and many others, were being trained in the summer of 2000 was Cambridge University's CAPSA accounting system, since then upgraded and rebranded.
I believe I stretch things rather in conflating a capsa -- a cylindrical container for scrolls -- with a vase. The attraction of the Vasa pun was too great, and is, I hope, covered by poetic licence.
The Okinawa allusion is to the 26th G8 summit, held in Okinawa in the summer of 2000, and the subject of demonstrations by the Jubilee 2000 movement for the cancellation of third world debt.
The poem was published in Cambridge University libraries information bulletin 51, Michaelmas 2002.
Saturday, 15 September 2012
The subjunctive and a rondeau, after recent Twitter conversations
These two poems tie in with a couple of recent Twitter conversations.
'Lines on the loss of the subjunctive' dates from 2003. I threw it into a recent discussion, on the Language Log blog from the University of Pennsylvania, about the future or otherwise of the subjunctive mood in English. A bit of a sideline to the discussion as a whole, in which many of the participants are dauntingly well-informed -- have a look!
LINES ON THE LOSS OF THE SUBJUNCTIVE
With the subjunctive, we are losing
a way to show the difference
between two thoughts we'd be confusing
as polar opposites in sense.
"She insists that the house is clean"
(she does, despite all evidence)
is strained if also used to mean
she makes you clean it, no pretence.
"She insists that the house be clean"
conveys the other not the one.
This plaintive pedant rests his case,
lest it should tire him in the sun.
'Flip' was written in 1998 for Rondeau revue -- one of several anthologies that Poetry Now (Forward Press in its present incarnation) devoted in the late 90s to verse in established forms. I'm always up for that kind of challenge, and produced my rondeau fairly quickly. It's on page 105 of the book.
FLIP
Credit discredit. Like some board
game battered in a long-stay ward,
but it's played everywhere. The game
flicks pain to good and good to blame
or power or weakness or reward.
Both sides of this game's cards record
the moves, but how each player's scored
turns on which side lands up, which name,
credit discredit.
Fine honesty, or mere discord;
beauty, or waste; faith's risks, or fraud;
thankless unstinting, as you claim,
or blackmail; discipline, or maim:
make up the rules, play them when bored,
credit discredit.
For the rondeau as a form see Wikipedia here; for what looks like its Scottish cousin, see Wikipedia here. The Twitter conversation that brought all this up was with Karen McAulay, who has blogged an eighteenth-century poem, possibly by an ancestor-in-law of hers, in a metre that's close kin to that Scottish cousin.
Head, Andrew (ed.). 1998. Rondeau revue. Peterborough: Poetry Now.
'Lines on the loss of the subjunctive' dates from 2003. I threw it into a recent discussion, on the Language Log blog from the University of Pennsylvania, about the future or otherwise of the subjunctive mood in English. A bit of a sideline to the discussion as a whole, in which many of the participants are dauntingly well-informed -- have a look!
LINES ON THE LOSS OF THE SUBJUNCTIVE
With the subjunctive, we are losing
a way to show the difference
between two thoughts we'd be confusing
as polar opposites in sense.
"She insists that the house is clean"
(she does, despite all evidence)
is strained if also used to mean
she makes you clean it, no pretence.
"She insists that the house be clean"
conveys the other not the one.
This plaintive pedant rests his case,
lest it should tire him in the sun.
'Flip' was written in 1998 for Rondeau revue -- one of several anthologies that Poetry Now (Forward Press in its present incarnation) devoted in the late 90s to verse in established forms. I'm always up for that kind of challenge, and produced my rondeau fairly quickly. It's on page 105 of the book.
FLIP
Credit discredit. Like some board
game battered in a long-stay ward,
but it's played everywhere. The game
flicks pain to good and good to blame
or power or weakness or reward.
Both sides of this game's cards record
the moves, but how each player's scored
turns on which side lands up, which name,
credit discredit.
Fine honesty, or mere discord;
beauty, or waste; faith's risks, or fraud;
thankless unstinting, as you claim,
or blackmail; discipline, or maim:
make up the rules, play them when bored,
credit discredit.
For the rondeau as a form see Wikipedia here; for what looks like its Scottish cousin, see Wikipedia here. The Twitter conversation that brought all this up was with Karen McAulay, who has blogged an eighteenth-century poem, possibly by an ancestor-in-law of hers, in a metre that's close kin to that Scottish cousin.
Head, Andrew (ed.). 1998. Rondeau revue. Peterborough: Poetry Now.
Monday, 3 September 2012
Irrationally sinister
This dates from 2004, and was published in Streetwise 59, summer 2005, p. 6.
IRRATIONALLY SINISTER
A jib-crane and an England flag.
Strong breeze, November dusk,
the crane still, the flag flying,
the building site in its betweenness.
Irrationally sinister:
a jib-crane and an England flag.
Perhaps it was the web report --
BBCi, from Iran,
the jib-crane's engine starting up
in early dawn, the killer hoist,
choking, twitching, in the wind.
Irrationally sinister:
a jib-crane and an England flag.
Perhaps it was the TV thriller --
a man fixed high up on a boat,
brush in hand, hasn't painted once
in the last hour. A dressed-up corpse.
Irrationally sinister:
a jib-crane and an England flag.
Perhaps it was the photograph --
a boat-train and a Swedish flag,
not sixties-new, as I thought then,
but from before the First World War.
And we know what old photos are.
IRRATIONALLY SINISTER
A jib-crane and an England flag.
Strong breeze, November dusk,
the crane still, the flag flying,
the building site in its betweenness.
Irrationally sinister:
a jib-crane and an England flag.
Perhaps it was the web report --
BBCi, from Iran,
the jib-crane's engine starting up
in early dawn, the killer hoist,
choking, twitching, in the wind.
Irrationally sinister:
a jib-crane and an England flag.
Perhaps it was the TV thriller --
a man fixed high up on a boat,
brush in hand, hasn't painted once
in the last hour. A dressed-up corpse.
Irrationally sinister:
a jib-crane and an England flag.
Perhaps it was the photograph --
a boat-train and a Swedish flag,
not sixties-new, as I thought then,
but from before the First World War.
And we know what old photos are.
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