Exhibit at 'Inside'

 

EXHIBIT AT 'INSIDE'

Exhibit at 'Inside: artists and writers

in Reading Prison': old release-day shots

of men and women with their hands spread tight as

identifiers, not expressing lots.

The place with the glass roof he thought for taking

photographs, Margate-fashion, later, said

Oscar Wilde, grew hideous on breaking

the news it was the execution shed.

He recognised his poem over-used

'fearful', 'dreadful' for water-closet drab.

His boys were boys. We know, but don't refuse

his door its honoured place on cell-size slab.

We saw his cell, too many there at once,

and some took photos on their mobile phones.

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This was my entry in Cannon Poets' 'Sonnet or not' competition in October 2016.  I think it's pretty self-explanatory.  The online promotion of the exhibition referred to has long disappeared from the web, but its text began:

"HM Prison Reading opens for the first time to the public as artists, writers and performers respond to its most notorious inmate, Oscar Wilde."

I went round it with my wife Clare and a kinswoman.  The poem was triggered by an observation among us, on how many of the visitors had been taking photographs there.  For whatever reasons, none of our small family party felt any wish to do that.

The best part of the exhibition, for us, doesn't get into the poem at all.  It was a 5' conversation with one of the information people, who'd worked for the prison as a locksmith.

Following a well-established pattern, the poem was unplaced in the competition for which it was written, but has now found publication in another outlet. It's appeared in the Fringe999 poetry forum.

Yellow

YELLOW

Two hundred years ago, Linnaeus saw
the long heath of some English upland, yellow
with tawny blossoms of the common furze,
fell on his knees and wept aloud for joy.

One hundred years on, Gerard Manley Hopkins
saw sky of shires-long pearled cloud under cloud,
each row grey-underlined, in fine July,
beautiful yellow blush of uncut ryefields,
white wheat-ears, light throwing a goldleaf square,
and would not look again, as he had talked
too freely and unkindly over dinner,
and had to do a penance going home.

I saw a strip of lawn the other day,
passed every day, four times, but this new way
showed it way down the street, the morning light
smite it so hard it gleamed into the day
green-gold, a cyclist's belt against the night.

So pleased at having even noticed it,
I chose to match the fluorescent fit
of self-congratulation with a cake.
We had some Chelsea buns for coffee-break,
the second time that week, and swamped the sight
with the reward paid into appetite.



I suppose I had better give my sources.  I hope they're well enough known that my use of them counts as allusion not plagiarism, but I will name them to make sure.

Linnaeus saw the long heath: Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis.  Selected letters (Oxford: OUP, 1979), p.237.  I don't know the date of the story Wilde alludes to, but Linnaeus' English visits were in the 1730s, and he died in 1778; "Two hundred years ago" requires, I know, I measure of poetic licence.

Gerard Manley Hopkins saw sky: Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W.H. Gardner.  Poems and prose (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 131.  The story is in Hopkins' diary entry for 23 July 1874.  I marked the 140th anniversary of the incident with a tweet, and hoped I might blog this poem on the same day, but I am a couple of days late with it.

I saw a strip of lawn: I don't seem to have made any diary entry for this observation, but from references to bike repair at Hayward's I would place it on 21 or 22 November 1989.  The grass was in front of  Cambridge University's  Earth Sciences and Archaeology and Anthropology buildings, on the south side of Downing Street, glimpsed at around 08:55 from the bend in Pembroke Street where they become visible.

I wrote 'Yellow' in December 1989, and it appeared in Streetwise 2, March 1991, p. 18.  For other colour poems of mine see this post and this and this.