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.

Poems to hymn tunes: 'Trentham' and 'Little Cornard'

 

SAM HUGHES (1824-1898)

(To the tune 'Trentham'  .  Acknowledging 'A lament for Sam Hughes: the last great ophicleidist' by Trevor Herbert  )

Trentham where he was born,
Three Mile Cross where he died,
these framed the triumphs of his breath:
he played the ophicleide.

Fanfares, chromatic runs --
he played not only these,
but gentle phrases softly breathed
to bands' strong harmonies.

He could have stayed in Wales,
grown Welsh, you say, secure
in comfort and admirers' love,
a champion and more.

He could have learned the new
smart-prized euphonium,
cheaper and easier, and lived
rich with well-earned income.

Footnote to Trentham's tune.
Not Wales, nor progress, he.
Your prose undims his instrument.
He died in penury.

LITTLE CORNARD

(to the tune ‘Little Cornard’)

Sing of a breaking world!
Nations to strive and part,
points of the compass spin,
nothing is found at heart,
and what you mean by south and north
and west and east has lost its worth.

Sing of a breaking myth!
Dragon on dragon fight!
How did the tale arise,
shouts in a Suffolk night?
No dragon-real time’s known to be,
not even fifteenth century.

Sing of a breaking rule!
Derailment injuries,
horrible grandeur fail,
nothing of that in these:
van bearing matter for a drain
smashed with a level crossing train.

Sing of a breaking sea!
Deep, deep and deep their call,
waves that are high for waves,
boats and a hard landfall.
Our voices falter praying for
all those in peril on the shore.

I mentioned in my blog post on Boxing Day 2019 that I had a Google Maps list of British Isles places with hymn tunes named after them.  The Places of Poetry map, where I'd posted some of my work, was re-opened briefly for posting in October 2020, and I nipped in and put these two poems of mine on it. 

But henceforth my ignorance shows.  I'd like to know why Robert Jackson, a church organist in Oldham, chose to name a hymn tune after Trentham in Staffordshire, some fifty miles away.  Similarly about Martin Shaw and Little Cornard in Suffolk.  Come on, Aidan, you're a librarian.  There's a wealth of published material about these chaps, especially Martin Shaw.  Have a look.

Final places of poetry

I put thirteen poems on the Places of Poetry map, and have so far blogged ten of them. Here are the remaining three.


LOOKING BACK

Centuries to keep
this castle state-of-the-art
that saw no action
till a Civil War slighting
felled its walls into the ground.

Our visit didn't
find the same guidebook as mine
nineteen years before,
but we both together thought
ruins of Cair Paravel.

I liked that guidebook's
leading me through room by time
then on to ramparts
for a vista of the whole.
That was in a work-bad year.


The castle in question is Helmsley Castle in North Yorkshire, and the guidebook that had so pleased me on an earlier visit is by Glyn Coppack.  

The poem was written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going.  The prompt, in a chapter contributed by Helen Mort, was for a poem about a significant place out of doors.


MICHAEL DRAYTON AND I

(on reading Michael Drayton revisited by Jean Brink)

They tell us now that Polesworth never was
remembered village to the poet Drayton.
Move just a little, read him cause by cause,
and see the Goodere idyll first unstraighten,
then vanish like cloud-streets. I spurned the good
in my remembered village at first dare,
age five or six: replanned it new Nutwood,
gave people roles round me as Rupert Bear,
and told them so. But nobody enjoyed
co-option in this way by such a lad.
My parents were embarrassed and annoyed.
I had some explanation from my Dad.
Patrons miscast in myth and golden age;
Drayton did that, older than I, little more sage.


Polesworth is the Warwickshire village where Michael Drayton (1563-1631) may or may not have grown up. In 1580, he was in service to Thomas Goodere at Collingham in Nottinghamshire. Nineteenth and twentieth-century scholars, on the basis of scattered allusions, in his poems and dedications, to Polesworth and its River Anker, conjectured that he might have been intimate with the Polesworth branch of Goodere's family. Jean Brink's book, published in 1990, casts doubt on those speculations.

The poem was written in 2008, my entry in a competition for work to be included in the Polesworth Poets' Trail. Entering a poem on doubts about the basis for that enterprise wasn't really a good idea.

The third poem is a piece of reporting, written in 2004. 

AN ACCOUNT ON A TRAIN

The boys quizzed him about his family:
his sister, twenty-one, brother in prison
for murder, fifteen years, somehow missed thirty,
for a debt of around five hundred pounds –
a gang from Milton Keynes, and gypsies. Who owed whom?
which was which? "Gypsies, they're hard," the boys said.
That on my left, across the carriage. Rightwards,
window, and tracks, and other tracks disused,
with gantries over them, hanging no cables,
then trees between the gantries, then big trees.
Welcome to Northampton, home of the Saints.

An anti-Adlestrop! OK,
I know it happens every day,
but commonly when I'm not there;

excuse my noting it as rare.


I imagine I would irritate readers if I included explanations of Cair Paravel, Rupert Bear, and Adlestrop.  If you're reading this online, you can look them up there.

Boston's elevation

BOSTON'S ELEVATION

(acknowledging John Beckett, 'The city of Boston?', Lincolnshire past & present 49, autumn 2002, p. 18)

Probably not banking the same river

as Botolph's monastery – waters shifted

more in those days – and not an east coast mainline

station since early routes soon shifted too,

but with its tower and famous namesake, why

should Boston, Lincolnshire, not fantasise

above its neighbours? Spalding, Sleaford, King's Lynn

mere towns, but Boston standing as a city

set on a hill cannot be hid, a city

that is at unity. They tried, you know:

in 1944, for their forthcoming

four-hundred-years-of-Charter celebrations,

with help from newly-citied Lancaster,

Boston put in a bid for city status.

But they hadn't Lancaster's royal connections

of duke and castle, weren't a county town,

had non-citied in documentary.

They were politely ushered out. The Charter's

quatercentenary was in the week

of VE Day. And riverwise, my source

says celebrations had to take that course.

This poem is mostly self-explanatory.  It was written in the autumn of 2015 for a Poetry Kit competition on the theme of cities, and published as one of my 13 postings on the Places of Poetry map of England and Wales.

The documentary in which Boston had non-citied was Country town, directed by Sydney Box in 1943.

My interest in Boston was sufficiently piqued by John Beckett's source article for Clare and me to route our 2016 bike tour through the town.  We found the church building a model of itself in Lego, and supplanting thereby an earlier model of the church in wood, that was still lit up in its humbler place at the back.

Cambridgeshire bike rides

Here are three more things I posted to the Places of Poetry map in the summer of 2019.

The first was, like some in other recent blog posts, written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going.  This was prompt number 4, for a poem that's an invitation.  The Tins path is a bike route between Cambridge and the village of Cherry Hinton. John Adams' Harmonium was known to me from having sung in a Cambridge Philharmonic Society performance in 2009.  And the invitation to cyclists is still open, though it might need some planning if accepted by many people.


INVITATION TO THE TINS PATH, CAMBRIDGE
If you know John Adams' Harmonium,
and ride a pushbike, let's recall the drum-
roll throbbing in the quiet that will grow
riding a stretch from death to the full throw
of movement 3, 'Wild nights'. Let's do the bike
version along this path, small flat bridge like
the drums, and power in the riding rise
for that crescendo of sonorities.
The bridge won't rumble now as once, I fear,
under one bike, so let us all draw near,
a pedal-strengthened Adams multitude
in mind of that orchestral interlude.

'Chester Road' was written in 2009.  Clare and I have not yet ridden from Cambridge to Chester, but, in the summer of 2011, we did make a bike tour from Chester to Cambridge.  Not sticking to Roman roads, mind.

CHESTER ROAD
Via Devana -- Chester Road -- the name
spurious, eighteenth-century invention
(rhymed, I suppose, retainer not Tirana) --
I rode northwest that turmoiling weekend,
a 90s time of names and letters reversed,
seeing how nothing could be for the best;
we ride southeast over the clunky stones,
a bouncing practice for our next bike tour,
and spend an afternoon admiring beasts.

Perhaps some day we'll take the invitation
in the road's name -- bogus but true enough --
and ride northwest to Chester, the whole way.

'A three-year cycle' is my first, and so far only, attempt to write in the form of a pantoum.  This was for a 2010 competition organised within Birkbeck College, though I forget by whom. The idea that events, or at least the emotional colours of events, move in three-year cycles has been present to me since I was about eleven, though it hasn't the importance to me now that it once did.  Reach and Over are villages to the north of Cambridge.  The quality of Psalm 102 in its sequential place is, I admit, a thing I had already explored from a different angle.


A THREE-YEAR CYCLE

But things move on if it's a cycle --
grey as old photos, January, bruises,
with piled-up consequences happened already.
See the sky rhymed with the street

grey as old photos, January, bruises.
Where does the three-year cycle start?
See the sky rhymed with the street
turn red-blue as daring.

Where does the three-year cycle start?
Where put the defining moment's
turn red-blue as daring?
They cycled from Cambridge to Reach.

Where put the defining moments?
They cycled from Cambridge to Over.
They cycled from Cambridge to Reach.
Green-gold as July, O be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands,

they cycled from Cambridge to Over,
we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture --
green-gold as July, O be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands,
they ran into Psalm 102: a bruised forgetting to eat bread.

We are his people, and the sheep of his pasture --
with piled-up consequences happened already,
they ran into Psalm 102: a bruised forgetting to eat bread.
But things move on if it's a cycle.

Three places in Nottinghamshire

These poems were written at various times, and are so closely attached to places that I posted them on the Places of Poetry map. I make that point now, because the place names don't appear in the poem titles.

The first place is Gringley on the Hill, where I grew up. The poem was written in 2004, for a competition organised, my card index says, by Pedal Power. Several relevant bodies bear that name, and I can't be sure which of them it was.


THE BIKE RHIMES


Imagination? Oh, for me,

with one bound Jack was always free.

When I was ten, I planned a fleet

of home-made go-karts down the street,

no, down the hill, down the A1,

sail-driven, with tin-telephone,

each kart wood-covered, a land-ark.

A good idea that might not work.

Truth is, I was late learning to ride a bike.


For my eighteenth, the choice I had

was typewriter or bike from Mum and Dad:

that's typewriter to exercise

my play-writing fantasies,

or bike, the more since biking skill

for me was six months brand-new still,

with view to riding out thus wheeled

to earn typewriter's cost in field.

I chose the bike, and hoed the weeds,

and typed the plays with the proceeds.

The plays were rubbish, I admit,

but bike -- I've not regretted it.


Truth is, I was late earning.


So now we do our long bike rides,

planned with good-bed-and-breakfast guides,

self and wife (I was late marrying)

and mobile phones, not tins and string.

And is the bike the bound or free?

If not, what should the question be?

With one bound, Jack was out of bounds.

The bike best covers solid grounds.

Let's be smart-kitted, then: the bike

rhimes are round, sound, bound and the like;

the bike through turn by turn of wheel

strengthens the work of getting real.

The second place is Walkeringham, a few miles from Gringley. The poem is one of those I wrote while following Jo Bell's splendid book 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going. It was my response to that book's prompt number 30, for a poem on the theme of friendship.



WALKING


A little out of synch. You'd graduated,

I'd had my year abroad, this was the Christmas

vac of my final year. You visited

us (me, parents and sibs) after some weeks

teaching at an experimental school.

You joked you were a retired schoolmaster. The day

would fade, but we set out that afternoon

walking the three miles I had often walked.

The next village had trains and a closed station.

Beyond the tracks, a lane and the big Trent.

There the lane stopped, matching the other bank.

An ex-ferry. Later, a shared joke had

a girl of nine write to a retired colonel:

lure trendy lefties here with bogus demo,

stand to one side, watch the procession drown.

Was this when you told me you'd introduced

people to your inseparable pet

Gozo, a wodge of folded newspaper?

Walkeringham, the village. The road home

passed a wood on a low hill. You took off

coat and jersey, walked in shirt sleeves. Less light.

The third poem is another 52-driven piece. The book's prompt 33 is for writing about machinery. I responded by reporting a conversation Clare and I had had, riffing on a that shared joke referred to in the poem above. It was a spoof I had self-published in more than one place before. The place -- the scene of the hypothetical mass drowning achieved by the use of a bogus demonstration -- was Walkeringham's Marsh Road. The ex-ferry is Walkerith Ferry, dead under so much water that even Wikipedia's list of River Trent crossings offers no date for when it closed.



UNCLE MARK’S TYPEWRITER

“Dear Colonel Sixty-Biff,


“I refer to your recent letter to the Daily Telegraph.


“I have got a plan to help you to get rid of all the trendy left-wing sociologists in your letter. I have thought the plan up myself, but am doing it on Uncle Mark’s typewriter. About three miles from our house there is a bit where the road comes down to the river and it comes to a dead end. If you say you are having a protest march, all the trendy sociologists will want to come with you, and when you get to the river, you can stand to one side and they will all walk over the edge.


“Best wishes

“Sonia Bingham (age 9)”


That was my spoof, from around 1980.

Here in 2018 we speculated

on Sonia and her now nine-year-old daughter.

We found the variations generating

so fast the film stopped. Of course we started

with the typewriter. Would that be a laptop?

Borrowed now? Or the girl’s phone, or smarter?

Also, we did a spot of calculating:

nine-year-old daughter or grand-daughter?

And would Sonia today, in her forties,

cringe at her childhood project of mass slaughter?

And/or is she the sort of Brexiteer

that studs their talk with calling people traitors?

And reading that eighties Telegraph letter –

her parents’ choice, or seen while visiting

Uncle Mark? The only certainty

was 2018 has no typewriter.

Not even pushbike-versus-car metrics

(car gives six bikes’ worth, takes a cost far greater)

can plea-bargain away the typewriter’s

limiting against e-possibilities.


Past the ex-ferry’s dead end has been much water.



News at the time of blogging is that Places of Poetry -- currently a rich read-only source of poems, a thing to lighten long journeys -- will re-open for posting during a fortnight in the autumn of 2020.  News from me is that my Google Maps list of places in the British Isles with hymn-tunes named after them has borne its first fruit, a poem by me to be sung to the tune and with passing reference to the town in question.  No details at this stage, as I want to preserve the poem's anonymity in case I enter it in competitions.  But Places of Poetry and my list of hymn tune places might well be brought together.