Poems from the hobby that gave this blog its name

BLURTMETRY AFTER A YEAR

Yes, capturing the blurts. The first fine power
of bringing down went with blurtmeter one.
The day came when I took the counter off
to turn a key, and dropped it on hard stone.

I don't know where the count had got. The impact
logged one more blurt, a false one. And the ten
seconds elapsed and my lapcounter, my first
blurtmeter, did not start timing again.

And neither pressing buttons, either button,
nor lapse of minutes, hours, let it move on.
The power that went with my first blurtmeter went
no more, after the stone floor. It had gone.

Now, flaunted less, and worn on belt not finger
and keeping up the log's blurtmeter three.
But the blurtrate fumes, rages (not soars -- nothing
soared when its essence was so fidgety).

BLURTMETRY ON WHEELS

Keeping track of blurts
during a white-knuckle ride
in a forest night,
not daring the blurtmeter
so finger-counting through grip

of the handlebars --
over the handlebars light
finds the pale earth track
by the darkness to each side.
The bike bends to the pale line

unexpected, fast
at the steepnesses and turns.
No moon, no water,
but the pale line recalls such
and I keep track of the blurts.


A YEAR AFTER BLURTMETRY

Blurtmeter 4, with self-clip plastic strap,
on day one hit its terminal mishap.
Bright August morning. I biked north and found,
mid-journey, my kit must have hit the ground,
miles back, perhaps. Enough. The game died thus.
Facebook friends wrote: "This is hilarious!"
One more year, and blurtmetry's overgrown
(as in path not schoolboy). The name lives on
in my new blog, the story should I need
to neutralise odd speakings, and instead
of blurts I mark each day's peak breathing flow,
or roads I've gone and how I chose to go.
Knowledge somebody else requires to know.


Yes, blurtmetry. The name of this blog. It's a hobby I invented in 2006, and followed for a little more than three years. The above poems, written between 2007 and 2010, give it as much chronicle as it needs. They have had public utterance insofar as I read them to an online meeting of Enfield Poets, who had us of Ver Poets over as guests on 4 August 2022.

The blurts themselves were the subject of an earlier sequence.

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.

Fluid

FLUID

The riverside

manor we reached by a wet morning's ride.

They lent us towels as we went inside.

The moistened scene 

of 50s children's stories that had been

more in Clare's childhood than mine, the dark green

leaves sheltering 

our locked bikes from the low sky watering

July, most of the trip, even that thing

when the day cleared

briefly, the undrained bike path by a weird

reflection momentarily appeared

swimmer-deep under-sun waterway-blue;

not bike then but canal boat or canoe.

'Fluid' was written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's book 52: write a poem a week.Start now.  Keep going (Rugby: Nine Arches Press, 2015); the prompt in question was to write a poem about water.

The riverside manor is the old house at Hemingford Grey that was the setting for Lucy Boston's book The children of Green Knowe.  The undrained bike path is the bridleway alongside Cambridgeshire Guided Busway, and the visit is one that wife Clare and I paid to Hemingford Manor by that route in July 2011.

I posted 'Fluid' to the Places of Poetry map in October 2019.  Places of Poetry I strongly recommend to passengers or walkers who are finding a long journey tedious.  Look on PofP and see what poems have been inspired by places you pass through!

Than to arrive

THAN TO ARRIVE

It's partly true.  Arriving at

the bed and breakfast hours too soon,

unsweating, unached, unexhausted,

unthirsty -- that's a lot of un.

But post-concert bike home through snow,

cashless, phoneless, with frozen brakes,

and feet swollen in new shoes,

call-boxes that nobody makes 

for, nobody makes good, the first

dark and stripped of tech, half a mile

with feet and bike to the next (in light --

will it work?).  Reverse charge push-dial

instructions in Australian voice.

Did you, or I, not hear the sound

of the other speaking? Try again.

We had at least one further round

before somehow my phone box got 

your mobile with all this striving.

We fixed to meet at a spot nearby.  

You hung up and started driving.

Let me say and be senten-

tious that arrival had it then.

This is the first poem I've blogged from the output stimulated by my following Jo Bell's book 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going.  I succeeded in writing 52 poems from the prompts in the book!  I took sixteen months, so this was a poem every 11 days, not one a week, but that represents a tripling of the output rate I'd had before.  I don't expect to keep it up.

The 52 prompts in the book are a most varied yearful.  'Than to arrive' was written in response to prompt 29, for a poem relating to a proverb.  The adventure in the poem took place in England, which is why the  Australian voice in the automated instructions was more or less unexpected.

Long-time readers of this blog will know my fairly strict rule of not putting poems on it unless they have already been published elsewhere.  'Than to arrive' is in The possibility of living: poems from Poetry Space Competition 2018.  Buy it.  I find myself in very good company.

How I learned to ride a bike

THE WALL AND THE STABLE DRIVE AND THE LANE AND THE NEXT VILLAGE

I learned biking late, and later still

heard how aged six, not understanding brakes,

I'd crashed against a wall. Eleven years,

while that unlearn eluded memory,

cycling balance eluded me too, made

bicycles a phobia. But –

"Rode Hugh's moped" is in my diary.

Not why, or who came up with that idea.

A stable drive was long enough for me,

longer than any pushbike I could fear.

For months, I risked no balancing on wheels.

Urged to a Christmas job some roads away,

too far for bus or walk, and to these skills,

I tried my sister's bike on Boxing Day.

The moped ride had not been fluke or fake.

I whizzed to the next village down the lane.

Uphill I found was harder. It would take

longer and the straight line was extra strain.

My ageing feet now say "Walk bad, bike good."

The prequel crash continues to elude.

The above was my contribution to the 26 Memory Maps project.  The map I drew for it is this:

The 26 Memory Maps project was the brainchild of Neil Baker (no relation).  Taking part in it did me a lot of good as I convalesced from a knot of health problems in the summer of 2017.  At the time of blogging, cycle journeys are again out of bounds for reasons of convalescence.  I have been putting this time to good use by following another creative project.  Work produced under that other project will be blogged, according to my usual rule, as and when it gets published.

Meanwhile, take a look at 26 Memory Maps.  50 contributions besides mine!

Marc Vyvyan-Jones

This is my wife Clare in 1985:

Clare in those days was a physics PhD student at Bristol.  The image is from a new-address card she commissioned from a friend, and it came to light again, many years later, in a clear-out of Clare's room at her parents' house.

The writing embroidered on Clare's leg reads "Please look after this Clare."  That drew from me a limerick, 11 years before we were engaged:

I'd love to look after this Clare,
blonde and plump like a girl teddy-bear.
I just hope that her rump's
not too bruised by the bumps
which arise from the wheels' being square.

The teddy-bear in Clare's lap had been a birthday present from friends, a couple of years earlier.  She believes she passed it on to a child in 1990, when she had to shed so many possessions for her post-doc year in the States, and she cannot now remember its name.

For those too young to have seen floppy disks, I'd better say that they were at least as square as shown in the picture, and not the sort of Daliesque thing the name suggests.  The title of Dali's painting The persistence of memory has acquired a secondary aptness from the transience of floppies.

The artist was Marc Vyvyan-Jones.  It was his first commission, he told me recently; billed then on invoice 0001, and reproduced now with permission.  His career as an illustrator continues to thrive, with an emphasis on the quirky and gallimaufrageous.  Who's next up to offer him a commission?

Specs and the bike

This poem won third prize in the 2006 Forest Arts competition.  I seem to remember the competition was sponsored by Dollond and Aitchison, and the theme was 'Vision'.


SPECS AND THE BIKE

Don't scrape your face with chains, don't even dare
ride redesigned wheels fashionably square.
That isn't how it works.  But, if you like:

    Both have two discs, not touching, edge to edge.
    Both have a frame that's set up to engage
    with human flesh.  Both work best in the light.
    And both bring what you'd not have seen to sight.

In those ways, glasses map on to a bike.