Clearness in England

Clearness in England

Humbler than lodestar claims:

citizens fossicking

for water standards,

where it’s made worse than brackish

at each profitable flush,

look downwards for truth

in such a sickly pickle.

Citizens writing,

not verklempt but using words

best true to the findings,

not parrot anger.

The glossy rag now carries

such stories. Let’s be

rational, rational. Let’s

be rational, rational.

The above was my entry in last year's CV2 competition. Some readers of this blog may remember that that competition requires entrants to make a new poem, in a single weekend, that must contain ten specific words emailed at 06:00 Saturday morning, UK time. In other words midnight Winnipeg time, as people living there slip from Friday to Saturday. Have fun guessing which the prescribed words are.

My entry got no success in the competition itself, but it has now found publication in Carole Baldock's poetry magazine Orbis. The work has had a measure of editorial improvement by Carole.

Here's some citizen journalism reporting on sewage, from East Anglia bylines. EAB is one of a network of similar outlets around the country; fun in the same way as the Places of Poetry online map that I've praised before.

Flashes of technology

FLASHES OF TECHNOLOGY

Wireless really explained spurned wavelength dials

in 1923. The rich enthusiast

might want that sort of thing, but you could find

kit in the streets, in costermongers' barrows,

to listen in to the far ends of earth.

A new earth, this, a-twitter with the dawn.

Pyrite was crystal in the radio,

fool's gold, but later, lapsed from top, still up

for faked non-listening near armies. Foxholes,

skill, home-madeness, light tread, a time before –

the cloud of crystal radio's folklore.

Monty Python spoofed stencil duplicates

in 1973. The bigot issue

1 (3), March-November, offered visits

by the Young Bigots' Club to throw appliances

from Grundig down the lavatory. Soaking!

But real life's setting up of anything

used these to print. My nights of radio

(that's DX listening, not ham transmission)

made it to street by them, with other scribbles;

Adrian Mole's life mirrored. Stencils mean

schools, parents, churches, clubs, drums, wheels. And see

the power turn at least one PhD.

Not sure I've watched satellite television.

Has someone spurned or spoofed the dishes? Up

for decades, but I've missed their cloud, their mirrors.

They're still of now, not of the life on Mars

they will become when turned to past like crystals

etcetera cited above, things viewed

in photographs made by a long-dead light,

through years stacked to intolerable height.

This was my entry in the CV2 48-hour competition 2015.  If you've read much from Blurtmetry, you'll know what that's all about: my 'Radio poem' and 'Instead of a minute', both of them written for that competition in earlier years, are neighbouring posts in this blog.  The main constraints of the competition are as follows.  Firstly, entries should be written from scratch in the space of 48 hours -- a weekend midnight to midnight, Central Canadian time, 06:00 Saturday to 06:00 Monday UK time.  Secondly, the poem composed during that time must include all ten of a group of words emailed to registered entrants at the start of that period.  In 2015 the words were: satellite, ham, soaking, lapsed, stencil, mirrored, before, pyrite, faked, and appliances.

To me, having looked up pyrite and discovered its connection with crystal radio, there seemed no alternative to a poem about modes of communication: crystal radio, stencil duplicating, and satellite television.  But if you followed my link to the 2015 competition results and winners, you'll see that others did not feel that inevitability.

Wireless really explained, by P.J. Risdon (Foulsham, 1923), was for some reason in the house (perhaps from Dad's predecessor as Vicar) when I was a boy in the 1960s.  I probably don't need to explain any of the other allusions.

In August 2015, the site PoemPigeon launched a competition for entries including the word satellite, and 'Flashes of technology' was published by virtue of being posted there.  From a brief survey of my fellow-entrants' work, I get the impression that I am the first to think of the wheeze of re-using a CV2 48-hour entry for this purpose.

Instead of a minute

On 18 May I posted my 'Radio poem' -- my entry in the 2009 CV2 Two-Day Poem Competition .  Today's post was my entry in the equivalent competition for 2013.  It's now found publication in the journal Writers' forum 165, 2015, p. 51.  Many thanks to WF's poetry editor, Sue Butler, who asked me to let her have it for her 'In my own words' slot and has given me permission to reproduce it here.

WF also has a poetry competition, but monthly and without the stringent specifications of CV2'S challenge (see below).  Top prize in the WF competition is £100.  I might yet have a go.  And you?

INSTEAD OF A MINUTE

Neon, the new one, with New Latin name.

We call it noble for its non-reaction,

but garish for its red-light energy,

like one jumped-up, pulling a bogus rank

into trapeze rococo, gambit after gambit

to take the place of record, and we fall

with a sententious relish on the story.

Please don't kick me, being no Stedman expert

(John Stedman, that is, maverick slave-fighter,

not Stedman as in church-bells and bob-changes),

starting to write as if I knew at all

his archive with its scraps and pots and bones

jangling reproach to mine, likewise chaotic

but less alive. His pictures were the draw.

I wrote the Stedman piece, a scrubby growth

unfed by knowledge, but, with help from kin,

meeting the questions, and it went online

to universal silence. In relief,

reporting to Committee, I admitted

imposter syndrome and the agonies

it had imposed on me. Not for the minutes.

  

The CV2 Two-Day Poem Competition required a poem produced in 48 hours and including, in 2013, all ten of the following words: neon, relish, scrubby, bob, gambit, rank, sententious, record, trapeze, and rococo. The competition weekend included, for Clare and me, a journey to Birmingham. The poem was written on trains and in a room of the Premier Inn.

One elusive word got placed when I told Clare I was including a reference to John Stedman. Clare, an aficionada of Dorothy Sayers' novel The nine tailors, thought first of the Stedman whose name is attached to some of the campanological terms in that book – and I remembered enough of those terms to see that this would fit the word 'bob'.

The Brum trip was for a memorial service to a friend, Jo Austen. My mind was in the right place during the service. The poem didn't distract me from the tributes to Jo.

Nothing from the memorial service appears in the poem.  At one level, what that means is that the first draft was probably completed before Sunday afternoon. But the poem's closeness to Jo's memorial does make another point become obvious.  Jo had cerebral palsy from birth. The poem's boasts about an occasional sense of professional inadequacy on my part are in perspective alongside what she had to work with in living well.

Radio poem

RADIO POEM

Today's radio dial's not just a dial.

It's a display: gives you more information

running, but goes to blank at rest. Old-style

analogue dials, over the base gradation

of kiloHertz and metres, still when still

were effervescent with their banded cities.

And when I was a boy, with time to fill,

I could sing at the possibilities

for hours. They belonged with binoculars,

maps, number-plates, star-charts, but came to displace

astronomy, which was the previous

interest. Today I'd call the phase

that happened next addiction. I first found

Radio Moscow's English under June

sunset, and it became a nightly round

by the autumn of 1971 -

Tirana, Moscow, Prague, Warsaw, and later,

drab 1972's political

balance, west dictator for east dictator,

the fifties sound of Radio Portugal.

But why - given ten words to improvise

some verse around, an email parlour game -

pick as a subject for the exercise

the story of a former hobby's claim?

Because the words suggest it. I can say

how new and various the short wave shone,

what pleasures it delivered in its play.

The pleasure of the hunt, the catch, was one.

CBA Moncton, netted from my bed

in Nottinghamshire winter - that was great.

But Radio Tirana, wishing dead

so many, I could only hate,

and hate's a noxious pleasure, lashing sweat.

That was the sour inside the bright kumquat.

Then hate and hunt gave less and less to get.

I scanned the dial for them, and scanned, and that

was the addiction, radio quagmire.

But I have seen the quagmire sink, not me.

I put restraint on radio desire

as early as Lent 1973.

It faded slowly, surged in my French year,

and again more than ten years on, a freak

throwback stunt for One World Week, but there

it ends. The world's got other ways to speak.

And I shall not be one of those who fret

to hear of kids addicted to the net.

The above was my entry in the CV2 2-day Poem Contest 2009.  The key point of the CV2 contest, for those who haven't followed that link, is that the entry has to be written in 48 hours and include ten words specified by that organisers at the start of that period.

My excuse for blogging the poem is that I have recently tweeted the concluding couplet, thereby presumably rendering the poem ineligible for entry in competitions that disallow published material.

Another piece of poetic fall-out from my foreign-radio phase is this haiku of January 2013, 'Tirana's trumpets'. And you might also be interested in this article, published in Cambridge University libraries information bulletin 60, 2007.