Friday, 18 February 2011
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!
Tuesday, 8 February 2011
Awareness weeks
Following the 3rd editorial in today's Guardian, here comes a poem of mine from 2004. It was written for a competition, sponsored by the AlphaGalileo science news service, for science writers and "anyone else who gets to hear of it". I got to hear of it via Clare, whose portfolio career in science includes a fair bit of journalism. The terms were as follows:
> Write a paragraph, poem or even for our broadcast colleagues, short
> screen play, that includes all of the topics from the list of 'misery
> days' identified by Martin Ince from AlphaGalileo's calendar.
>
> These are:
>
> ME Awareness Day
> Cot Death Awareness Week
> World Asthma Day
> Multiple Sclerosis Week
> Cystic Fibrosis Week
> Parkinson's Awareness Week
> National Depression Week
> Mental Health Action Week
> World Tuberculosis Day
In 2004, all of those fell in a block between 20 March and 12 May. My entry was written, as perhaps goes without saying, in the knowledge that everyone reading the poem was likely to have been touched in some way, at some time, by one or more of the afflictions in the list.
AWARENESS WEEKS
Cystic fibrosis, tuberculosis,
asthma, those three you get in the chest;
MS & Parkinson's, in how you move;
depression, not just when you say you're depressed.
Mental health's massively controversial:
its opposite some make a matter for pride,
and some say there's none. ME is more like
keeping on finding your battery's died.
All of them fight for our awareness --
a stretch of two months in late spring --
I've printed the web pages on
backs of The Man born to be King.
They map on to the Christian Lent,
Holy Week, and those floaty days
of Easter sightings; Eliot's
cruellest April; and red Mays
of action, grey with light around
the corner. Darwin's carnival
parade, this street of rival pains;
and one I've left till last of all.
The things I've named might have folk laughing
at themselves, and you're aware.
Cot death can't be funny, even
that way. No, I've not been there.
> Write a paragraph, poem or even for our broadcast colleagues, short
> screen play, that includes all of the topics from the list of 'misery
> days' identified by Martin Ince from AlphaGalileo's calendar.
>
> These are:
>
> ME Awareness Day
> Cot Death Awareness Week
> World Asthma Day
> Multiple Sclerosis Week
> Cystic Fibrosis Week
> Parkinson's Awareness Week
> National Depression Week
> Mental Health Action Week
> World Tuberculosis Day
In 2004, all of those fell in a block between 20 March and 12 May. My entry was written, as perhaps goes without saying, in the knowledge that everyone reading the poem was likely to have been touched in some way, at some time, by one or more of the afflictions in the list.
AWARENESS WEEKS
Cystic fibrosis, tuberculosis,
asthma, those three you get in the chest;
MS & Parkinson's, in how you move;
depression, not just when you say you're depressed.
Mental health's massively controversial:
its opposite some make a matter for pride,
and some say there's none. ME is more like
keeping on finding your battery's died.
All of them fight for our awareness --
a stretch of two months in late spring --
I've printed the web pages on
backs of The Man born to be King.
They map on to the Christian Lent,
Holy Week, and those floaty days
of Easter sightings; Eliot's
cruellest April; and red Mays
of action, grey with light around
the corner. Darwin's carnival
parade, this street of rival pains;
and one I've left till last of all.
The things I've named might have folk laughing
at themselves, and you're aware.
Cot death can't be funny, even
that way. No, I've not been there.
Monday, 31 January 2011
The deal
THE DEAL
"Do not give up this seat if the person next to you needs to talk.
We can all be Samaritans." - Ad on trains, April 2004
Do not give up this seat if the person next to you sounds thick.
We can all be imparters of culture.
Do not give up this seat if the person next to you sounds rich.
We can all be hangers-on.
Do not give up this seat if the person next to you sounds foreign.
We can all be counter-intelligence.
Do not give up this seat if the person next to you is writing.
We can all be publishers.
Do not give up this seat if the person next to you has a heart-attack.
We can all be first-aiders.
Do not give up this seat if the person next to you dies.
We can all be at their funeral.
Do not give up this seat if the person next to you has shot an albatross.
We can all be wedding-guests.
Let them confess, if otherwise they'll burst.
But here's the deal for strangers on a train.
A must assume that A is not the first,
and not the last, to hear B tell B's pain.
The risk is B's: the ear that B has found
might not be dangerous, or, then, it might;
rising no wiser, A will not be bound
to keep B's story dark, nor B's load light.
"Do not give up this seat if the person next to you needs to talk.
We can all be Samaritans." - Ad on trains, April 2004
Do not give up this seat if the person next to you sounds thick.
We can all be imparters of culture.
Do not give up this seat if the person next to you sounds rich.
We can all be hangers-on.
Do not give up this seat if the person next to you sounds foreign.
We can all be counter-intelligence.
Do not give up this seat if the person next to you is writing.
We can all be publishers.
Do not give up this seat if the person next to you has a heart-attack.
We can all be first-aiders.
Do not give up this seat if the person next to you dies.
We can all be at their funeral.
Do not give up this seat if the person next to you has shot an albatross.
We can all be wedding-guests.
Let them confess, if otherwise they'll burst.
But here's the deal for strangers on a train.
A must assume that A is not the first,
and not the last, to hear B tell B's pain.
The risk is B's: the ear that B has found
might not be dangerous, or, then, it might;
rising no wiser, A will not be bound
to keep B's story dark, nor B's load light.
The above poem from 2004 is a runner-up in the Newark Poetry Society's 2010 competition. Not quite published, therefore, but I reckon I have excuse enough for blogging it. The other runners-up include C.J. Allen and Margaret Gleave, so I'm in good company.
Saturday, 8 January 2011
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.
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.
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.
|
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.
Sunday, 26 December 2010
Lines
On Wednesday 29 December it will be thirty years since the onset of my imposition-writing phase.
I had been working three months as a library assistant in the Inter-Library Loans office at the University of Sussex. I have forgotten most of the gaffes I made during that time, and cannot say which of them triggered the imposition. Perhaps it was the cumulative effect of gaffes made in the whole length of the autumn. But on 29 December 1980, having been presented for Christmas with an erasable ballpoint pen, and knowing therefore that I could minimise the waste of paper involved, I set myself the task of writing out, one hundred times:
I must not show off in the Library.
It cannot be said to have worked. I have memories of gaffes that resulted from showing off in Sussex University Library, and even in adjacent libraries, in the spring of 1981. Indeed, the imposition story itself came in time to be a sort of calling card. And the practice of writing impositions began to be habitual. In general they were a hundred lines long, but my most ambitious effort in this genre was five hundred lines, after missing a plane, on the subject of punctuality.
The phase ended as abruptly as it had begun. In 1987, I was involved in 'Walk for the World', an awareness-raising event run by the World Development Movement and, I think, fifteen other agencies. This involved a lot of local media work, and letters to celebrities, and co-ordination of walkers. After it was over, it seemed to me that some action was necessary if I was to come back down to a realistic view of my importance relative to the rest of Cambridge. An imposition seemed to be the very thing; and a text suggested itself:
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I found some paper, and a pen, and settled down to write the above sentence, with 99 repetitions:
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avo
-- at which point, quite unexpectedly, I found the situation so comical that I couldn't hold the pen, and had to admit that I had kicked the imposition habit.
I would like to mark its 30th anniversary in some way. I have toyed with the idea of using it as a fundraising opportunity, perhaps with a sponsored imposition (asking friends to pledge so much line) or a sponsored anti-imposition (pledging to tweet the text of an imposition one hundred times less the number of sponsorships received, so that 33 sponsors wd lead to the text's being tweeted 67 times). But I have not got my act together as regards a fundraising pitch, and so any donations made on 29 December will have to be wholly unconnected with this eccentricity remembered from my twenties. Maybe it's a project to consider for the 25th anniversary of the end of the phase, in June/July 2012.
I had been working three months as a library assistant in the Inter-Library Loans office at the University of Sussex. I have forgotten most of the gaffes I made during that time, and cannot say which of them triggered the imposition. Perhaps it was the cumulative effect of gaffes made in the whole length of the autumn. But on 29 December 1980, having been presented for Christmas with an erasable ballpoint pen, and knowing therefore that I could minimise the waste of paper involved, I set myself the task of writing out, one hundred times:
I must not show off in the Library.
It cannot be said to have worked. I have memories of gaffes that resulted from showing off in Sussex University Library, and even in adjacent libraries, in the spring of 1981. Indeed, the imposition story itself came in time to be a sort of calling card. And the practice of writing impositions began to be habitual. In general they were a hundred lines long, but my most ambitious effort in this genre was five hundred lines, after missing a plane, on the subject of punctuality.
The phase ended as abruptly as it had begun. In 1987, I was involved in 'Walk for the World', an awareness-raising event run by the World Development Movement and, I think, fifteen other agencies. This involved a lot of local media work, and letters to celebrities, and co-ordination of walkers. After it was over, it seemed to me that some action was necessary if I was to come back down to a realistic view of my importance relative to the rest of Cambridge. An imposition seemed to be the very thing; and a text suggested itself:
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I found some paper, and a pen, and settled down to write the above sentence, with 99 repetitions:
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avo
-- at which point, quite unexpectedly, I found the situation so comical that I couldn't hold the pen, and had to admit that I had kicked the imposition habit.
I would like to mark its 30th anniversary in some way. I have toyed with the idea of using it as a fundraising opportunity, perhaps with a sponsored imposition (asking friends to pledge so much line) or a sponsored anti-imposition (pledging to tweet the text of an imposition one hundred times less the number of sponsorships received, so that 33 sponsors wd lead to the text's being tweeted 67 times). But I have not got my act together as regards a fundraising pitch, and so any donations made on 29 December will have to be wholly unconnected with this eccentricity remembered from my twenties. Maybe it's a project to consider for the 25th anniversary of the end of the phase, in June/July 2012.
Saturday, 11 December 2010
Christmas cards
Clare & I have just dispatched our first round of Christmas cards for the year.
We send our Christmas cards in three rounds:
The electronic card can be read without difficulty; its text can be copied and pasted from card to card, with far less labour than in wielding a pen; and it can be totally adapted to suit the individual it's addressed to. So it gets our vote, and we hope the recipients feel the same. We generally use http://www.e-cards.com/, but there are plenty of other sites offering this service.
Not all of our friends and kin are wired, and some have stated a preference for cards hand-written on real card. They represent a sizeable minority, just over a quarter of our card list, and theirs, as you see, are the cards we send first.
I'm not quite sure how long we've been following this system, and its development hasn't left the trace in old diaries that I thought it might. Probably we decided we were going to adopt it after Christmas 2002. In our single days our card practices were widely dissimilar. Clare used to send cards to pretty well everyone in her address book; I used to send cards only in response to those I received. I liked to say, of those I got and answered after Christmas and into January, that they were spreading one of the most enjoyable aspects of Christmas into the part of the year that most needed it. I reckoned, being an obsessive correspondent in those days, that people I didn't write to at Christmas would probably get something from me later on.
The main drawback to Christmas e-cards is this. Whilst our labour-saving approach to Christmas cards is to send them electronically, our labour-saving approach to Christmas decoration is to put up nothing more than our incoming Christmas cards. Sooner or later, as our friends and kin catch on to the benefits of Christmas e-cards, there's going to come a Christmas where we don't get any cards suitable for putting up. Printed-out sheets of A4 will probably not make a good substitute.
Have to work on that one. Any ideas?
We send our Christmas cards in three rounds:
- those that are hand-written on real card (early December)
- electronic cards in response to cards received
- electronic cards to people on our card list we've not yet heard from (final week or so before Christmas)
The electronic card can be read without difficulty; its text can be copied and pasted from card to card, with far less labour than in wielding a pen; and it can be totally adapted to suit the individual it's addressed to. So it gets our vote, and we hope the recipients feel the same. We generally use http://www.e-cards.com/, but there are plenty of other sites offering this service.
Not all of our friends and kin are wired, and some have stated a preference for cards hand-written on real card. They represent a sizeable minority, just over a quarter of our card list, and theirs, as you see, are the cards we send first.
I'm not quite sure how long we've been following this system, and its development hasn't left the trace in old diaries that I thought it might. Probably we decided we were going to adopt it after Christmas 2002. In our single days our card practices were widely dissimilar. Clare used to send cards to pretty well everyone in her address book; I used to send cards only in response to those I received. I liked to say, of those I got and answered after Christmas and into January, that they were spreading one of the most enjoyable aspects of Christmas into the part of the year that most needed it. I reckoned, being an obsessive correspondent in those days, that people I didn't write to at Christmas would probably get something from me later on.
The main drawback to Christmas e-cards is this. Whilst our labour-saving approach to Christmas cards is to send them electronically, our labour-saving approach to Christmas decoration is to put up nothing more than our incoming Christmas cards. Sooner or later, as our friends and kin catch on to the benefits of Christmas e-cards, there's going to come a Christmas where we don't get any cards suitable for putting up. Printed-out sheets of A4 will probably not make a good substitute.
Have to work on that one. Any ideas?
Saturday, 13 November 2010
THE ANTIDOTE
I have a work in progress on the Haddon Library's blog. It's a page for the products of the writing workshop that was the library's contribution to Cambridge University's Festival of Ideas.
That workshop was a collaboration with the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Workshop leader Sue Butler asked participants to write imaginatively in response to books from the Haddon and objects from the Museum.
As of this posting, the blog is a lot thinner than the work Sue led us to. But here's something I prepared earlier that goes with the subject of museums. Written 2002, published in St Matthew's parish magazine Streetwise in 2005.
That workshop was a collaboration with the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Workshop leader Sue Butler asked participants to write imaginatively in response to books from the Haddon and objects from the Museum.
As of this posting, the blog is a lot thinner than the work Sue led us to. But here's something I prepared earlier that goes with the subject of museums. Written 2002, published in St Matthew's parish magazine Streetwise in 2005.
THE ANTIDOTE
Simple procedure you may use
if you are minded to reduce,
when looking at another age,
the psychic risks of heritage:
if you are minded to reduce,
when looking at another age,
the psychic risks of heritage:
nostalgic thoughts are well cured when
you know the way things were back then
is more than half the way that they
took to the way they are today.
you know the way things were back then
is more than half the way that they
took to the way they are today.
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