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.

The day thou gavest

THE DAY THOU GAVEST

(after conjectures that the hymn tune 'St Clement', long attributed to the Rev. Clement Scholefield, might be in part the work of Arthur Sullivan)

What part is Clement, what part Arthur,

none now can hope or need to tell.

The hymn the singers love is seamless;

if sewn, then sewn together well.

Whatever zones part eve from waking,

the shadow edge of light in air

moves elegiac in its raising

along the spine and through the hair.

And did the famous aid the cleric,

whose other music fell away?

The question stands, and needs no letters,

no fingerprints, no DNA.

And only wishing tells us Clement,

himself a part of all he'd met,

once only found, once only, music

more great than most, more nearly great.

This poem was written in 2013 for the Mirehouse/Words by the Water competition, whose theme that year was the Tennyson quotation "I am a part of all that I have met." I cannot remember what led me, at about that time, to the Wikipedia page for the hymn tune 'St Clement', so effectively tied to the words 'The day thou gavest'. But here was a story of authorship questioned after more than a century, and blurrings of individual contribution that had become impossible now to determine. I thought it fitted well with the quotation.

I've now entered the poem in a Poem Pigeon competition on the theme 'Awakenings'.

Snowlines

SNOWLINES

(Written in January 2008, when my part of England had had little snow for some time)

1930s New Jersey, snow.

"Momma, do we believe

in winter?" Alex Portnoy asked,

hopeful, and caught naive.

The joke has turned since then. Winter

the Pole and winter's death

alike bear claim and counter-claim

and evidence and faith.

And if we hear, on Christmas Eve,

"Hey, it's begun to snow!"

we turn and look across the room,

hoping it might be so,

earth white, sky dancing, rivers ice,

railways camera-black-

and-silver, faces sunset-red-blue.

Nostalgia wants them back.

In my home city, snow is rare,

these years. Some winters tick

snow-free. Beliefs change, winters change,

old times ache. Homesick. Sick.

The genesis of this poem is explained in the title note, which I added when the joke turned again and snow returned to Cambridge, as it did within months of my writing.  I have just entered the work in PoemPigeon's competition on the theme of winter -- one of those in which, as I have explained before, the mode of entry is by posting on the web site.

You probably recognised the allusions to Philip Roth's novel Portnoy's complaint and Thomas Hardy's poem 'The oxen'.  But I don't think they need any explanation.

And -- yes, of course I know that the impact of climate change goes deeper than playing games with one person's nostalgia for snow.

Men at arms

MEN AT ARMS

(reflecting Evelyn Waugh's novel of that title)

The thunderbox, where Apthorpe sat to judge

his fellows, pulling all he could of rank,

the box he pulled with Guy, for all the grudge

of charges, and for all it stank,

one morning, in a corner of a field

("obvious what had happened" gives the drift

another novelist would have revealed),

being spiked, blew up under Apthorpe. Biffed.

The thunderflash, the scaled-down training bomb,

and 80s Apthorpe, bored as a cadet –

don't ask me where a dare like this came from –

who mooted and who meant is to forget –

but thunder flashed in 80s Apthorpe's face,

and fixed his shadow till his end of days.

Waugh's novel and its sequels were lent to me by a kinswoman in the summer of 2012, and gave me much relief during the stresses of a project at work.  I wrote the poem rather later, for the 2013 Cannon Poets competition, which favours sonnets.  The poem is now posted on the PoemPigeon site.  PoemPigeon runs a new poetry competition every month, always with a thematic or formal requirement, and the requirement for July 2014 is sonnet form.

Readers of this blog may know all about my penchant for themed or formal poetry competitions.  I don't see myself going for PoemPigeon every month, as that would leave me with no time or creative juices for anything else.  But my poetry card index has, by now, quite a few eligible sonnets in it, and I liked the idea of pulling a recent one out and sending it off.

Two fire poems

Poem Pigeon has been running a competition for poems on the theme of fire.  I posted on the site two from my back catalogue, and entered one of them in the competition.  See my post of 6 October 2013 for my take on this way of entering competitions by web posting.

The poem I entered in the fire competition was 'Testing' from 2004, drawing on my experience as fire safety manager at work.


TESTING

Some have professed they cannot tell
the weekly testing of the bell
from fire alarms. So let's spell out
the difference in case of doubt.

Testing the bell's a burst of clang,
over if it's a second long.

But clang that bursts and goes on bursting,
doors swung to, opened, swung to, swung to,
voices, feet, then no feet, no voices,
and clang goes on, and through the window
flashes of orange, knots of people,
and clang goes on, and clang goes on,
that means get out, the clang's a drill
for real, burst dress-rehearsalful,
get out, the clang's a clang for fire,
or drill for fire, get out for real,
find the fresh air, get out for real.

Let that become the meme of bells.
Let people know it in bones and bowels.


And the one I posted on Poem Pigeon, without, in the end, entering it in the competition, was the fourth from a sequence of seven that I wrote in the late 1990s, exploring animal metaphors.   The title of the sequence was 'Beasties'. Maybe I had no business co-opting fire into the animal kingdom, but it seemed to work at the time.


BEASTIES

(iv)

Another beast -- it rhymes with liar --
will suit our purpose, namely fire,
fire, the old process, virtual
spirit, virtual animal:
from her straight yellow stream of hair
like candlewax half-dried in air,
through all the risks attending paper
when file or bin did not escape her,
down to the glee she took in blame
and fanning issues into flame,
she was a fire; even the one
leak that she sprang quite early on,
by way of an experiment
in trouble (should she reinvent
her problem as incontinence?),
does nothing to put out the sense
of fire -- no, still retained from school,
a Latin verb is pungent fuel:
uro, burn, worry, chafe, annoy.

For traceless killing, hear the ploy
that gangsters used: a cylinder
of CO2 against one ear,
release the pin and squeeze the handle,
and blow the brain out like a candle.

Even without a great blow

This is a new poem -- written for a Poem Pigeon competition on the theme of autumn.

EVEN WITHOUT A GREAT BLOW

"Dark November nights!" I said,

too eagerly too often,

as I anticipated

in the year I was seven

nights as they'd been, November

of the year before,

the first when year was number,

month name. I remembered fire,

headlights, clouds, coke stove, sparklers.

Written recall of childhood

memories, having less loss

than mine in the writer's head,

and set forth with greater skill,

makes old autumns evergreen.

Nostalgia I first felt at school.

It's something I've since outgrown.

Entry in Poem Pigeon competitions is by posting on the Poem Pigeon site.  In other words, a poem entered there is automatically a published poem.  Most poetry competitions, meanwhile, continue to favour a set of rules in which entry is anonymous and published work is ineligible.  But the 'entry by web publication' model is one I've encountered increasingly often -- in the 2012 English National Opera Mini-Operas contest, for example -- and it'll be interesting to see how these two systems co-exist.  

And what effect will the growth of the web-entry model have on my output and on this blog?  Much of my poetry is unashamedly written for competitions, and my rule is to blog only poems that have achieved publication.  The web-entry model will let me blog poems much closer to the time of writing than I have often done.  

The anon-unpublished-entry model, on the other hand, has some effect of quality control.  For this blog, that effect is limited.  Some of the poems I've accounted as published (and therefore bloggable) have been self-published, or published in outlets where I was a member of the editorial team.  I'm not a member of any editorial teams at the moment; will Poem Pigeon take their place?

I have no quarrel with the winning poem in the Autumn competition, 'Autumnal wish' by Deborah Kellogg.  It's a good 'un.  What do you think?

Decades apart

DECADES APART

She called herself a chump for having given

men the white feather. She was one of two

women who owned to it on television.

Live with that thought on everything you do.

The above was meant to be my entry in the Poem Pigeon competition, for work including the word 'feather'.  I posted it on the day of the competition deadline, having heard of the competition earlier in the week. 

Entry in the Poem Pigeon competition is by posting on their site, where everyone can see the work.  The poem is up now at http://bit.ly/18saYiR .  I'd have done well to look out the rules first hand.  I understood that the competition was for poems no more than 10 lines long.  In fact, the stipulation was for no more and no less than 10 lines -- so my poem isn't eligible.  But publication in that website makes it eligible for inclusion in this blog.

For much more about the story, see the post 'White feathers: stories of courage, recruitment and gender at the start of the Great War' in George Simmers' research blog 'Great War fiction'.  And, to give further credit where it's due, I heard of 'Great War fiction' via the blog of singer and musical scholar Philip Lancaster.

'Decades apart' was one of four poems I wrote in August 2013.  The others, I hope, will make their way into this blog by the usual process.