Monday 26 August 2024

Bears and gold

Here are some poems that made it to publication in August 2024.

East Anglia bylines colleague Kate Moore drew my attention to the imminence of Poetry Bears' Picnic Day 2024. I responded with an article showcasing poems I had written at various times between 1985 and 2018 on the subject of bears. Some of them had featured in this blog already.

Allow me to present a couple that haven't.


BEARS


True, bears are solitary and not lovable.

True, I stopped buying teddy bears as the window sill filled up.

True, we did not meet the bears we saw in their sunken field at Whipsnade.

True, most bears live rather a long way away.

True, bears do not cater, and cycle only under duress.

True, 'The 59th bear' by Ted Hughes includes a cautionary tale.

True, Christopher Milne's story casts shadows on tales of Pooh.

True, Britain's way with foreigners, in 1958 and in 2018, adds to the implausibility of Paddington.

True, my childhood behaviour jars on my childhood identification with Rupert Bear.

True, confusion may arise from saying bear to mean lover, partner, or on that spectrum.

True, I wearied colleagues by the conceit.

BUT

It also remains true that Clare rhymes with bear.

I like this sort of bear.


'Bears' was written in 2018 as my response to prompt 26 in Jo Bell’s book 52: Write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going. The brief was actually for an erotic poem, but as chapter author, Neil Rollinson, went on to explain:

Let’s write an erotic poem that’s about other issues: illness, growing old, familial and domestic disappointment perhaps…Let something else carry the focus, or energy, and let the erotic take a back seat.

So, that’s what I did. The conceit in the final five lines explains the other poems presented here. I do not have a fetish about bears, but they supply a vocabulary. Clare, as most readers of this blog will know, is my wife, the lecturer and science writer Dr Clare Sansom.


CLARE CONTRASTED WITH A BEAR


Bears do not cook the food I eat;

bears have enormous claws on their feet;

bears dance to the pain of a metal beat.


Bears cannot bike, or teach, or write;

bearskin offers no gleam of barelight;

and an ursid bear would not incite

a poem to compete.


The idea of exploring the contrast between a bear in our sense of a lover, partner, or on that spectrum, as in the first poem, and a genuine ursid bear, came about after Clare suggested I enter a Valentine poetry competition, I think run by BBC Radio Three, in 2007.

If you read the article, you'll see that Clare herself contributed a recipe to it, for flapjack to feed to participants in such a party as was envisaged. From the golden brown of flapjack and most teddy-bears it's a short step to the gold of jubilees.

Ledbury Carnival celebrated its golden jubilee in August 2024, and Robin Fortune-Hiseman, who was responsible for designing and printing the programme booklet, asked if I had any poems about carnivals or gold that he could use. He wasn't commissioning a new poem, just asking me to search in my poetry back catalogue. I sent him this from 2012, which was written originally for the Keats-Shelley Memorial Competition and satisfies the requirement for gold if not  carnivals. 


BUS HOME FROM WORKING SUNDAY


A golden purchase:

honey cashews bought to draw

pound coins from a note,

with first-class stamps included

as if to be virtuous,


and tweets from the bus

about rules against working

Sunday and against

writing self-impositions.

Twitter's golden not guilty


for exploration

of the gold in little things,

gold found while thinking

of something else; grain harvest

by-product of the searched earth.


Some of you may discern a kinship, in the use of the 'gold' motif, between that piece and Robert Horan's poem 'The queen's face on the summery coin', known to me through Samuel Barber's setting. I believe my use of the motif is different enough for this not to be a matter of plagiarism.

Sunday 12 May 2024

The serpent's shiver

 

THE SERPENT'S SHIVER


Suddenly something came out of the land, some cool shiver of Spring” (Neil Gunn, The serpent)


Reading, I think of

how we come to look back on

a spring with words like

"the optimistic first half

of" some past year, sigh implied.


Reading on, I see

Tom and Janet would never

speak so between them.

February morning tea.

The story darkens its coils.


You read this poem

after I've finished the book.

England and Scotland

another tale uncoiling.

England gambles on its past.



The Scottish novelist Neil Gunn lived from 1891 to 1973. The serpent was published in the 1940s, and you'll have to read it to find out who Tom and Janet are.

The poem was my entry in the 2019 Neil Gunn Writing Competition, run by the Neil Gunn Trust and High Life Highland. It has now found publication in issue 109 of the poetry magazine Acumen.


Monday 1 January 2024

Citizen science and citizen journalism

Believed,

the pensioner

enjoyed brief fame.

Someone had a video.

Doubt.


Busy, 

the traffic

kills many beasts.

Count those you see.

Understanding.


Disillusioned,

a land 

needs new stories.

Citizen journalism seeks them.

Maps.


Risky.

The firm 

pays its dividend.

Sewage taints its water.

Bacteria.


Thriving,

the company

pays huge bonuses.

But watch its sewers

Fines.


Wild,

the starlings

decline in numbers.

But they keep mimicking. 

Life.





The above things represent a form its inventors call Elfchen, from the German for 'eleven'. It's based on a pattern of words rather than of syllables, feet or rhymes. Eleven words, disposed as follows:

1 Word: An adjective

2 Words: A noun with an article

3 Words: An action of the noun

4 Words: Complement the action

1 Word: A noun that closes the story

This whole thing was the brainchild of the 'Storytelling and other arts' working group of the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA). I heard of the project from my scientist wife Clare.

The links in my Elfchen are to stories in East Anglia bylines, a citizen journalism outlet I've been involved with for a couple of years now. The linked stories are not mine, but I hope writing Elfchen about them gives me a vague sort of association with them.

The Elfchen were included by ECSA in their collection Citizen science through poetry, available both as A3 poster and as a foldable booklet. The plan is to share printed copies at the ECSA 2024 conference in Vienna, 3-6 April 2024.

Copied here with ECSA's blessing -- thanks. They ask that everyone use the hashtags

#PoemsForCitSci and #citizenscience

and tag

@eucitsci, when promoting their work on social media. Done!

Sunday 26 November 2023

The Amazon song

 THE AMAZON SONG


(tune 'Besançon' https://bit.ly/3G2JjhT )


Amazon, pay your workers right, 

have things safe on every site,

have the unions organising,

jobs as jobs, with no disguising.

People, today's Buy Nothing Day --

come and let's make Amazon pay.


Amazon, pay your tax in full,

where you work, and pull no wool.

End your games of profit-shifting

and tax havens' legal grifting.

People, today's Buy Nothing Day --

come and let's make Amazon pay.


Amazon, cool the world that burns,

take less from it as it turns,

open Just Transition trial,

fund no climate change denial.

People, today's Buy Nothing Day --

come and let's make Amazon pay.



Aidan Baker

CC BY 2.0


Written in support of the Make Amazon Pay campaign https://makeamazonpay.com/


For Buy Nothing Day, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_Nothing_Day . If singing on some other day of the year, end each stanza with


People, each day's a boycott day --

that's how we make Amazon pay.


This was sung by a small group of us at two demos for Buy Nothing Day, 24 November 2023. The demos were small but successful -- one with placards and singing in front of Amazon's Cambridge office, one on the city's pedestrianised Burleigh Street with other groups marking Buy Nothing Day.

While we were getting our act together for the Amazon one, we were approached by the site custodian, who asked what our intentions were. We told him we'd be staying outside and singing. "Any chance of a good Christmas carol?" he asked. In fact the tune for the above words is from an old French carol, but I don't know if he was there to hear it.

Burleigh Street involved an extraordinary slow procession through the Grafton Centre, led by members of the Red Rebel Brigade (who dress in that colour for such occasions). Their protests are silent and very dignified. I think they'd have made some impact on me if I'd been a mere spectator, and I hope shoppers felt the same.

We didn't attempt to sing during their part of the proceedings, but we gave the Amazon song a couple of times before and after, while we were out in the sun.


Wednesday 1 November 2023

An imagined community

AN IMAGINED COMMUNITY


Where does the SMERD community exist?

Smokers, Meat-Eaters, Religious and Drivers made

a tactical alliance to resist

the Council in the year the Council had

a Secularisation Task Force. Now

that's morphed to Faith Concerns Committee, some

joke of SMERD Officers and wonder how

any could march to such a plural drum.

Is SMERD the future of the city? Or

is it, so far from being here to stay,

a common cause there's no more reason for?

The Mayor's mourning his son. He cannot say.

We get their leaflets in our neighbourhood.

Good neighbours. It's a tangle being good.


I wrote this sonnet in December 2009, for a competition from 'Many Hands' whose theme I have forgotten. I self-published it in September 2023, as a quote-tweeted response to an observation by the political commentator Chris Grey:

"I'm genuinely puzzled by the emergence of 'the motorist' as a political identity, as if people who drive cars have distinct set of priorities and values."

It's now been retweeted by Kent and Surrey bylines.


Sunday 14 May 2023

Fording the Humber

FORDING THE HUMBER

Dad said a bowler-hatted gentleman
in 1953 had traced a path
across the River Humber, two wet miles.
Dad was a trainee minister in Brough
in the mid-fifties. Was he an eyewitness
of the flamboyant lord’s achievement? Was this
old news that went on yielding stones for sermons
in his day? Since then, a few feet have trod
the Roman path the peer inferred amid
prevailing depths. And in another distance
the bridge’s towers scare you with their height.

I wrote the poem for a 2022 competition on the theme of byways. I don’t know why that theme stirred half-memories of my father’s recollection, which I must have heard five or six decades earlier. Dad died in 2011.

Revising my memories for the competition entry, I found that the man who’d forded the Humber was Rufus Alexander, 2nd Baron Noel-Buxton of Aylsham (1917-1980). He was invalided out of World War 2 and became a forces lecturer. Other day jobs he held were as radio producer and co-editor of Farmers’ weekly.

His book Westminster wader (1957) has much stream-of-consciousness writing and many overlaid visions of places at different times in history and prehistory. And accounts of his wadings in the Thames and the Severn.

The Aylsham of his peerage title is in Norfolk and he lived in Essex. He was therefore on what is now East Anglia bylines‘s patch.

And I, since 2021, have been a member of East Anglia bylines's editorial team. It seemed to me that the achievement of a man from our patch, in its 70th anniversary year, was worth an article.

The article I wrote was a diary of the brief cycle tour that Clare and I made in April 2023, from Woodall in South Yorkshire to Brough near Hull. And my peers allowed me to get away with including the poem in it.

If you don't already support the Bylines network of publications -- you should. They carry river information far more important than who's walked through the Humber.

Saturday 1 April 2023

Poems in The punch

My appearance in The punch is unconnected with Punch or the London Charivari, the humorous magazine that died twice round about the millennium. The punch is an Indian magazine published online, and it has a poetry issue once a year. 

The contributions of mine that they accepted were all written in response to workshop prompts from Jo Bell.

Aired


The ionosphere's
temperature changes spurred
me in my teens: Europe's
Cold War hate to listen to,
pocket radio by night.

Greenhouse gases lie
miles below that: troposphere,
closest to earth, smeared
with our heat and travelling.
Our smoke turned to a blanket.

See me reading up
which of those two things is which,
the Cold War long gone.
Radio's ways to listen
are more, and the hates they air.


Answers


No, not unlisted, listed in a spreadsheet.
They had to filter lines and hide columns.
They had to copy to a data stick.
They crouched over the screen in a guesthouse bedroom.
They crouched over it Darlington to Peterborough.
They crouched over it in two waiting rooms.
They got the sums ready for off in time.
Best not admonish them to keep spreadsheets
in strict perspective, means to a workplace end. 


On Attempting to Transcribe the Calls of Birds


Sea! Sea! ship ship ship ship
Gulls deep inland feel the nip.
chopakaching? chipakachong!
Phonemes, spelling, away from song.
teeoo chapacheecheechee
The kite sounded like that to me.
teeoo wintu
shwipu shwipu
What birds sound like that to you?
chibatchbrrrrr
Not nailed accurate but nailed tear.
shfwh shfwh shfwh shfwh
The wipe sound has not rhyme enough.

 

Reality Check



Is it rope, or a repurposed something,
hose, say, or heavy-duty power cable?
It’s grey, with thin green line, and holds those bushes
back from the path.  People don’t turn hoses
or power cords to that.  But the reel’s mount –
yes, rope reels can have mounts.  They say at sound
of hoofbeats think horses not zebras.  Mounted
rope reels are horses.  Not real horses, no.
Mounted rope reels horses, repurposed power
cables zebras. Hose repurposed to hold
bushes zebras stroke unicorns.  That’s not
zebras stroking unicorns.  They wouldn’t.
It’s between zebras and unicorns, 
or both zebras and unicorns together.
And reading this are many who have seen
mounted thick grey rope with a stripe of green.
 

Stones


Something to do with photocopying.
Something to do with tapping babies’ noses.
Something to do with social distancing.
Something to do with singing in the street.
“There’s been an allegation made.”
Something to do with bikes and toucan crossings.
Something to do with things on the computer.
Something to do with money, with work money.
Something to do with that self-service checkout.
“There’s been an allegation made.”
Something to do with church and the young people.
Something to do with fifty years ago.
Something to do with social media.
Something to do with XR friends and demos.
“There’s been an allegation made.”