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 more music poems

These poems were written at various times, and entered in a competition organized by Rhyme and Reason, the poetic fundraising arm of Rennie Grove Hospice Care. They didn't win any prizes, but they were published in the charity's 2016 desk diary.

JAUCHZET, FROHLOCKET

honk and five drum-knocks

flock of strings in flight and dive

voices crunch the snow

MUSIC IN ST EDMUNDSBURY

This church, wool-rich East Anglian, half-built
at Reformation, lit like Dutch paintings,
cathedralled 1914, recomposing,
hears Ulysses awake, hears Europe's strings
sombrely weave, unweave. The programme note
is the composer's own. It gives bare facts.

PHANTASY QUINTET BY VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

The Alla sarabanda's slow rise shows
smoke from a woodland cottage, early morning,
a thin grey line. It fades against the sky.

Can smoke be guiltless? after cattle trucks?
people at stakes? hell and its mirrors? sati?
cancer? emphysema? culled herds? carbon,
carbon we need but get more than the cycle?
carbon too much? carbon a weight, a choking?

That's smoke from fire. So smoking's lately banned.
But smoke without fire, from a sarabande?
Should that line rise, or is it one that ought
to go down with its freight of perished thought?
Maybe; but after worse of our devising,
I hope I see the thin grey line still rising. 

'Jauchzet, frohlocket' evokes the first movement of Bach's Christmas oratorio: "Jauchzet, frohlocket! auf, preiset die Tage" -- "Shout for joy, exult! Rise up, glorify the day" says one rendering I can't improve on.  The image of voices crunching the snow was used by conductor Tim Redmond in a rehearsal exhortation to us of the Cambridge Philharmonic Society, and worked by me into a haiku early in 2011.

'Music in St Edmundsbury' was written after hearing a performance of John Woolrich's Ulysses awakes by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in St Edmundsbury Cathedral in 2002.  Yes, I stoop to pun on the composer's name.  Wealth from wool played a great part in the building or extension of this and many other medieval churches in East Anglia.

'Phantasy quintet by Vaughan Williams' dates from 2007 and arises from a very strong visual image that was suggested to me by the opening phrase of the quintet's Alla sarabanda movement.

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.

A couple of wildlife poems

Urban Fox

Seen, racing out of a leafy side-street,
its tail cartoon exhaust fumes (Samson's fox-fires?);
heard, perhaps, in the night, if fox not wind
and drain-pipe made that dog-bark didgeridoo;
tweeted by me, sleepless, asking that question.
Side-street, cartoon, exhaust, Bible, pipes, Twitter,
for me; not the wild Scarp, the branch-caught paw,
the pelt still covering the skeleton.


Ticking the Boxes

Projecting from the rosemary bush,
spaghetti-thin but green,
rigid but with self-moving end --
no other tweeps had seen,

no, nor gardening kinswomen
when I described this growth.
So was it life? and was it wild?
I'm ticking Yes for both.

I'll think about what uses I
can make of that decision.
Is wildlife still what people plead
for watching television?




'Urban fox' was written for the Barn Owl Trust poetry competition at the beginning of 2013, and published in the course of submission to the 2014 Earth Vision contest.  Scarp is the book by Nick Papadimitriou, a remarkable piece of reporting and meditating on a 17-mile ridge of broken land on the edges of North London.  Nick Papadimitriou's power of evoking the place is something I can only envy, but 'Urban fox' is based on something I actually saw.  And I heard the nocturnal dog-bark didgeridoo too.


'Ticking the boxes' was likewise written for the Barn Owl Trust competition and published by Earth Vision.  The first six lines are straightforward reporting.  I genuinely did  see such a thing in our garden, and asked around ("tweeps" are Twitter people, for those who don't know).  Current theory makes the thing a shoot, or possibly a leaf in misleading visual alignment with something else, pulled about by a  spider's web.

In Earth Vision, 'Ticking the boxes' won!

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.

City rules

CITY RULES

So there's this law that we prefer straight streets,
most of us, at most times, Pareto-fashion,
hitting four-fifths with one-fifth effort; dust
gathering meanwhile on the other fifth.
My other fifth is ancient offprints, gems
in dust: John Gunn's woeful extempore
about a Norfolk ruin, or the Baptists
clinging to the equality of races
despite all science, or the Carey Street site:
four thousand people having been turned out,
and houses cleared away from those prime acres,
the Courts of Justice rose in Carey Street --
public knowledge -- no note of disapproval --
eighteen-sixty-something... seventy years
deeper in dust than Cable Street... forgotten...

I wrote the above poem in 1996, for a competition organised jointly by the Times literary supplement and Poems on the Underground for poems with an urban theme.  Other poems I entered in that competition are here.  The poem was published in Cambridge University libraries information bulletin 40, 1997, p. 16.  You'll find CULIB at http://bit.ly/cpd1pi , but unfortunately its online presence doesn't go back before 2000.

The offprints referred to are in the Pitt-Rivers collection at the Haddon Library of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, where I work.  You're welcome to come and see them in the Haddon!  Failing that, here are the references to the articles concerned.

John Gunn's woeful extempore: 'General meetings and excursions.'  Quarterly journal of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History, January 1869, pp. 2-17.   The excursion in question was the SIANH day out with the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society, 16 September 1868, and the full embarrassment is on page 16:

"Flixton Ruin was the next locality, where the Rev. John Gunn should have read a paper; but owing, he said, to the fact that fifteen years had elapsed since he visited the locality, he was scarcely prepared to trust his memory."

The Rev. John Gunn was vicar of Irstead and Barton Turf.  It would seem the vagaries of his memory were famous -- and so were his kindness and conscientiousness as a parish priest, and his scientific turn of mind.  A good man, and one hopes his memory did not allow recollections of the Flixton Ruin gaffe to torment him for the rest of his days.

  

the Baptists clinging to the equality of races despite all science: Bedford Pim,  The negro and Jamaica.  London: Trübner, 1866.  I believe this is the source.  It seems in 1996 I was exercising a dash of poetic licence.  The quotation I'd been spurred by was almost certainly this:

"I shall therefore speak of the negro as I find him in history and in life, though in so doing I may be compelled to present him in language somewhat different from the maudlin eulogiums bestowed on him of late by the enthusiastic negrophilists of Exeter Hall."

Exeter Hall in London was used as a meeting place by anti-slavery organisations, and the name did not necessarily have the religious connotations I supposed in 1996.  But the science was implicit in the fact that the paper was presented to the Anthropological Society of London.


four thousand people having been turned out: Wilfrid H. Hudleston & F.G. Hilton Price, 'On excavations on the site of the new law courts.'  Proceedings of the Geologists' Association 3(1), 1873, pp. 43-64.  The paper begins:

"It is well known to most of the inhabitants of London that the Government have decided to erect the long-talked-about Courts of Justice in the Strand, upon what is called the Carey Street site.  This site, occupying an area of seven acres, was cleared of its houses about three years ago, when nearly 4000 people were turned out."

Played out

Here comes a poem from 1991. I was reminded of it by Sarah Stamford's tweet, apparently following a presenter's slip of the tongue in the last night of the Proms 2013, about Vaughan Williams making a similar posthumous appearance.  It was published in Cous-cous 8, August 1995, p. 8.

PLAYED OUT

I dreamed it in the autumn: a late work,

Rachmaninov's symphonic miniature,

written in nineteen-seventy-five, The Yawn ...

tired twilit composition, half a minute

of themes long worn ... it had its premiere

in nineteen-eighty-six: Rachmaninov

himself conducted, made a modest speech

faintly across the air: we heard him hope

they would not ask for the Symphonic Dances

as an encore. Laughter, polite applause.

Conducting's such a task when you're a hundred

and thirteen years old, dead for forty-three.

Music, colour, war

These three poems from the 1990s are all responses to war, a subject I don't deal with much, for lack of experience.  Their publishing history is undistinguished.  'An anthem dated 1925' was self-published, in a poetry address book I circulated to friends in 2000.  The other two appeared in what I call payload anthologies: 'The start of the war' in Guardians of the state, edited by Ian Walton (Peterborough: Poetry Now, 1992), and 'Blue' in Best poems of 1995, edited by Cynthia A. Stevens and Caroline Sullivan (Owings Mills, MD: Watermark, 1995).

In 'An anthem dated 1925', the anthem in question is Faire is the heaven by William Harris.


AN ANTHEM DATED 1925

Nostalgia aches for endlesse perfectnesse,
the Archangels and Angels, the eternall
burning Seraphins, bright Cherubins
with golden wings all overdight, the heav’n
where happy soules have place.  John Rutter sees it
as a cathedral window.  I see autumn:
people dwarfed by a cathedral wall,
stones to the memory, and mortal tongue’s
receding semitones, seven years after
war ended war, the twenties still aware
of gaps, and blanks, and overflying silence.


'The start of the war' is a squib I wrote in 1991, following the invasion of Iraq.


THE START OF THE WAR

Admit, if only in a graceless mutter,
America had grace enough to take
a mouthful, anyway, of bread and butter
before rushing on to the cake.


In the immediate aftermath of the war, I was duly humbled to learn that a friend of mine was going to Iraq, with a group of peace activists, to survey the devastation.  This was the artist Caroline Dobson (now Caroline Saltzwedel).  Of the images she produced from her experiences in Iraq, one which particularly moved me was Invasion of privacy, from her visit to a bombed-out hospital. My response was this:


BLUE

Concrete structure, reinforced.
The shelling couldn't break
down the frame.  The lower wards
have creaked back from the ground.
On the top floor, not used, hang
for anyone to see
bits of wall and ceiling, ends
of steel, sky stretching whole
round invaded privacy
again, sky stretching whole,
blue, silent, unearthed.

Through the sky

THROUGH THE SKY

We emerged on to the tower roof:
sky luminous, pale blue, spring afternoon.
Ely Cathedral faint and far away,
a band of drummers, taut, filling the square,
Cambridge around us, with its grit of churches.
And climbing down the spiral steps we passed
woodwork and ropes hung silent, vertical.

Although it was not in my gift
to clear the Earthward trip from Pluto,
I gave the signal to the lift
at the wrong time for me to do so.
The lift once set in that career
would burn its passengers to ash
from friction with Earth’s atmosphere,
or hit the ground a deadly smash.
I called the passengers.  They gripped
survivor hope against all hopes
with hands that bled and chafed and ripped
stopless on solar system ropes.
Was there still time to show a care
by telephoning and confessing
my guilt before it hit the Chair
at second hand from others’ guessing?
O no, the Chair was off that day
in Mozambique, somebody said,
out of all reach that I might say
on this.  Besides, the line was dead.

Waking from that: new file over the botch
(still live, unclosable); the wake of guilt
receding with the tide; less shed than fade;
I lay not lied; Earth was under a cloud:
a weight, a poor fit, something disallowed.


This was my entry in the Lymm Lines competition in 2006.  I am afraid I cannot now remember the theme of that year's competition.  The poem's most recent outing was to the Fosseway competition, judged by Liz Cashdan -- and she was kind enough to give it a commendation.

The poem reports. with a minimum of poetic licence, on a weekend in March 2006: a climb in the tower of Great St Mary's, Cambridge, followed by the dream about Pluto.  I cannot say what lay behind the dream, beyond the guess that it's likely to have involved anxiety over something.

A hit

This had its first submission in the Interpreter's house competition in 2002, but that competition doesn't appear to have had a theme.  The poem has now finally achieved publication online, as one of the also-rans in the Little gold pencil competition for writing on the theme of a night walk.


A HIT

The car was speeding and the street was steep
and had no place for feet and we were walking,
north of Salisbury Plain.

Walking at night, winding our clockwork torch --
the music festival a village back,
north of Salisbury Plain.

Walking on sufferance, the road not wide.
The verge was high-stepped and steep fields lay upwards,
north of Salisbury Plain.

The moon steady over the fields.  Our torch
lighting the shiny signs.  The road dark, silent,
north of Salisbury Plain.

A car a minute.  Distant lights, sound, action    
(step on to verge), noise, brightness!  Darkness, silence,
north of Salisbury Plain.

We reached our village.  Walkers were a hazard,
shadows in a red triangle, no footway,
north of Salisbury Plain.

And one car came too fast, the road too narrow.
We hutched against a wall, for want of footway,
north of Salisbury Plain.

And, with respect, I shone the clockwork torch
straight at the windscreen.  It worked!  The car slowed down!
North of Salisbury Plain,

the clockwork torch was mightier than the car!
A paradox, not always true, by far.
Southwards, the steep fields, and the firing range,
and Porton Down, and moonlit Stonehenge,               
on Salisbury Plain.

Tidings

This one was written to order for an issue of Streetwise, the magazine of St Matthew's church in Cambridge, devoted to the theme of television. I watch very little television -- a fact I was reminded of recently when a friend asked on Facebook whether watching the recent Olympics coverage had done anything to my figure. I had to admit that most of what I knew about the Olympics had come via Twitter, and that I'd seen almost no television coverage at all.

The poem appeared in Streetwise 62, Spring 2006, p. 8. My other contributions to that issue included a summary of John Naughton's Christmas 2005 talk to Cambridge librarians, entitled 'Life after television', and a review praising Steven Johnson's Everything bad is good for you: how popular culture is making us smarter.


TIDINGS

That April night long, the Trade Justice vigil
at Westminster: candles to light
beneath the barricades, silence to keep,
then noise, whistle, bang, shout, to bruise midnight!
Our stewards' tabards to return, then hours
of night to fill, streets to trudge, finding all
shops shut but one near Charing Cross, St Martin's
through-the-night worship, walk back to Whitehall,
our 3 a.m., the planet most awake,
then streets and feet again, St Martin's queue
down steps, the coffee crypt, seats at a table,
then up to limp, the sky a paler blue
over the demo, numbers vastly more
than planned for, gathering light of the sun
to happen on the London Eye, the streets
where next thing is the London Marathon.
And others besides Wordsworth have said there
Earth had not anything to show more fair.

November daytime, the Trade Justice mass lobby
of Parliament: silence to keep, then shout,
whistle, bang, noise to bruise the early afternoon.
Over the river, the queue moves again.
Cold clouds. Cycle-rickshaws bring hon. Members out
to mud, fliers, questions and relentless rain.
Some in the rain, some in the lobby, space
like a great church. The organization
faultless, but fewer people than April,
MPs busy with the Terrorism Bill,
and news eclipsed by David Blunkett's face,
the story of his second resignation.

And then the January whale,
dark shape in water, nightmare flail,
Thames-bridge-bewildered, and undeft
in the mid channel, muddied left
and right, in front of Parliament,
with no petition to present,
no nourishment of her own deep,
no words to roar, no tears to weep,
no Jonah to denounce the city,
she dies in shallows, held by human pity.

The whale made headline news and died,
and passed into marine biology,
ecology and other human ken.
We lobby made a less splash than we tried,
and keep on plugging on.


You can have fun with Google or DuckDuckGo, or whatever, identifying the news stories referred to. The allusion to "others besides Wordsworth" means Roger Woddis and the readers of his (I think) Radio times poem on the London Marathon, which used the Wordsworth quotation magnificently as its final line.

Canal time

This poem was written in the autumn of 1996 for a themed competition, though I now forget what the theme was. The poem was shortlisted in the 1997 Beehive Press competition, with the result that I got to read it out to a gathering in Merton, South London. The 2006 Bassetlaw Writers competitition commended the poem and published it in the competition anthology.


CANAL TIME

Canal time's different from other times.
Canal boats happen at another speed
than bikes and cars and trains and planes. The voyage
Leicester to Stratford can be interrupted,
you can drive to Heathrow and fly to Spain,
come back the same or other ways, rejoin
the Stratford trip, and lose none of the wonder
belonging to a boat and journeys south;
and in itself canal time magnifies,
has Nottinghamshire's flattest full of echoes
from more remembered places, has West Stockwith
the Suffolk coast, has rock a Malham Cove
as high as lost, a Mahler's Resurrection,
has the steady climb west out of Worksop
so steep, so locked, it was unnavigable,
the guidebook says, by eighteen-ninety-six --
and resonances there as well: the last
century's end, Wilde locked behind brick walls,
the urban myth, time-capsule of a station
waiting beneath St Pancras. So I saw it,
those gateless weirs, weedy stretches of water,
overgrown towpaths, not so long ago.

But now they're working on the locks again,
putting new gates in, strengthening the banks,
laying fresh towpaths, clearing weeds. St Pancras
plans a deep-level station now for real.
Strange thing, the past: keeps altering; canals
may prompt, like rivers, elegiac thoughts,
but needn't lie down under them. What is it
that has a century an interruption?


Bassetlaw is the district of Nottinghamshire where I grew up and still have kin. The urban legend about St Pancras is one I came across, around 1988, in a Guardian interview with Stephen Poliakoff about his film Hidden city. It contained the sentence (I quote from memory):

While filming at St Pancras Hotel, he was told of another complete station underneath St Pancras, which was bricked up like a time capsule at the end of the last century and now, presumably, awaits the mega-development of the site.

That buried station became an obsession of mine. I wrote to British Rail for information about it. They knew of no urban legend, but could tell of a low-level depot for beer trains from Burton on Trent. I won't pretend I scoured libraries for books of disused stations and underground curios, but I did touch on the matter in a desultory fashion, when visiting friends who collected such books and such stories. And, be it admitted, with people who didn't collect them. They hadn't heard of this one either. It finally drew from me a sequence of poems in the early 1990s, which I called 'The St Pancras resonances'. I may come to blog that in due time.

The 1996 poem is neater. It dates from when the buried St Pancras was beginning to occupy less of my mind.

Checking a possible emergency exit

I hope this one is self-explanatory. There's nothing metaphorical about it: it's straightforward reporting of an incident in December 1993. In the Haddon Library, where I work, a staircase door was found unexpectedly open. The door had been understood to be locked and its key lost. Finding it open meant checking its security risks and safety possibilities.

The poem was published in Cous-cous 9, 1995, p. 6.

I was reminded of my own poem by tonight's snow -- less my own observations of same than pictures such as this from Cambridge incognito photographer Sir Cam.


CHECKING A POSSIBLE EMERGENCY EXIT

The staircase didn't lead to Uncle Andrew,
mad in his study, with the magic rings,
nor to a wood, all winter, Lantern Waste,
nor upwards through four hours' climb to the cellar,
nor to the same floor, fifty years ago,

but through a cupboard -- lurch to sudden birth --
large, unexpected -- standing in a lab.
A woodcut's demons!
Mythical enough.

Competition poem

This would have been my entry in the Haddon Library's 2009 poetry competition, had I not been ineligible to enter because I was the organiser.

I'd asked entrants to write around one or more of the numbers 800, 1209, and 2009, interpreted freely -- so 1209 could mean £12.09, or 12 September, or some area code. The present poem to my own brief was written shortly before the closing date of this competition and entered in the competition run by Manchester Cathedral. It was one of the runners-up! And published in the competition booklet for 2009.

The reference to "Crediton, Landscore, Cain, Read, and Judge" concerns an incident -- an email indiscretion on the part of a school receptionist -- that made news that year.


AFTER CHURCH

(written around Cambridge University's putative 800th anniversary, 2009)


(i)

Church is over by 12:09, these days;
the sermon's shorter, the service tighter, brisker.
Pretty well everyone prefers it so.
By 12:09 we'd now be having coffee,
or even biking home on Coldham's Lane,
the country highway bit, the airport rise.

That's where we live. Meanwhile, in Devon --


(ii)

After the incident, the email round the church;
and after the email, the concerned reader;
and after the concern, the boss;
and after the boss, the Institute;
and after the Institute, the journalists;
and after the journalists, the bloggers;
and after the bloggers, the hate-mailers;
and after the hate-mailers, the poets.

Poems about the news don't often find
much that the journalists have left behind.
Shirking reporters' legwork, poets tell
what others thought and may have said quite well.
To news that broke on Darwin Day 09
I can add little that will make it mine
in insight, wit, or fit words. If the shame's
that no one's yet made something of those names,
and you succeed in that, I won't begrudge
you Crediton, Landscore, Cain, Read, and Judge.


(iii)

2009 was when Richard Holloway,
nine years an ex-bishop, labelled himself
"after-religionist". That's fair enough.

Three queues

Another slightly dated poem, this; the date this time being 1999.

The queues reported in sections (i) and (ii) of the poem were both on 17 November 1998, though on looking again at a contemporary account I see that I may have erred in linking the second queue to the Lolworth fire. The fire broke out at around 11:00, and the report updated 19:00 mentions tailbacks as far as the M11. The tailbacks would have needed to be twice as long, or more, to stretch into Cambridge itself. But the Cambridge gridlock was -- I have just checked my 1998 diary -- definitely on the evening of that same day.

Wikipedia has a page devoted to the "camera somewhere in the Department", which was a famous web landmark in its day.

The poem was published in Perimeter 7, 1999, p. 16, and again in Streetwise 68, Christmas/New Year 2007-2008, p. 19.


THREE QUEUES


(i)

The first queue was for new computer passwords,
two, perhaps three, a minute. The queue stretched
from the counter, through the double doors,
past the lift, down three sides of stairwell, out
into the freezing afternoon. In front
of me a girl read a film history –
Birth of a Nation and Intolerance.
A camera somewhere in the Department
networked news worldwide of how coffee stood.

An outsider had hacked the system, for fun,
or to find traces of their own existence,
or out of naked spite, doing less harm
than spite dressed up, but gratified with that.


(ii)

And the second queue,
evening of that frozen day,
gridlocked the city
road on road. Bikes could not slip
safely round it for the ice.

It was the result
of a crash ten miles away.
A lorry careered
into a petrol station.
Less bad than it might have been:

someone as she fled
remembered to flick a switch,
isolate the tanks.
There was one death, a man locked
in the toilet at the time.


(iii)

The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam is full.
The stairs lead through the bookcase to the back.
The queue stands long, eerie, improbable.
Hate caused the prison, turned the loving black.

The queue pays its respects, fifty years on,
mixes incomprehension, fear and shame,
where one dead represents six million.
Europe’s other edge smoulders into flame.

The blurtmeter

When I posted the Blurts poem a couple of months ago, I mentioned another poem that I had posted on Facebook. The Facebook post was to a poetry competition run by the British Science Festival 2011. Not for the first time, I account publication of that sort as excuse enough for inclusion in this blog. Here comes the poem in question.


THE BLURTMETER

(first weeks of an experiment)

Motivation. To count the blurts
jabbed by the jangle of bad memories;
to make them less by x percent;
to unstep the cycle of embarrassment.

Method. A stopwatch on one finger,
with lapcount button in stretch of my thumb.
I set it running when I start the day,
thumb it for every blurt, then write the tally;
and the percent reduction that I seek,
twenty, a moving target week on week,
will be rewarded, on the days it's met,
by an entitlement to chocolate.


Results

20 June 2006: 945 blurts in 7 days
Target for 27 June 2006: 756 blurts in 7 days
27 June 2006: 643 blurts in 7 days


Discussion

I play at science. How define a blurt?
How can my self-reports be verified?
What if repeated thumb-stretch comes to hurt?
What if the madness stacks up more beside?

What are the benefits? I reckon three:
first, something new each time I look. The art is
to wear the stopwatch unobtrusively
(though guaranteed to break the ice at parties).

Second, think fifty blurts for twelve hours eight.
The jabbing jangle of remembered gaffes
is sidelined by the urge to calculate,
its importuning baffled in the maths.

Let's make the third rhyme ho, throw, go, grow, glow:
to have planned anything and found it so.


The poem was written for the Keats-Shelley Association competition in 2006, the theme of which was 'The experiment'. I found myself treating the competition brief as a kind of miniature research project. The experiment described in the poem is one I had long wanted to try. I continued it, with a succession of lap-counters, over three years, and it generated several further poems. But I intend to stick to my rule with these, and not blog them until they have achieved publication elsewhere. Any editors willing to give them a go?

Five legislations

This is another poem of mine from the mid-90s that was published in Verbatim. The reference is Verbatim 25(3), 2000, p. 14.

FIVE LEGISLATIONS

Thirty days hath September:
strictly, of course, the phases of the moon
do not reflect how many days, or nights;
strictly, indeed, letting the moon dictate
the months would give us thirteen in the year.
Unworkable! Instead, we have twelve months,
more or less equal, and September happens
to have got thirty days. No problem. Oh,
and there was one year when eleven went
to make us equal with the continent.

I before E except after C:
we all agree this shall be true.
The rebel words that do not spell
that way are weird and few.
Oh, and some French-descended words as well --
leisure, seize, and such affairs --
the problem's theirs.

How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which kings or laws can cause or cure,
wrote Johnson. That, I think, sums up my feeling
of why there'd be no mileage in repealing
the law that says your age is fixed at birth,
the one that bans cold liquids from congealing,
the one that stipulates the height of ceiling
for footpaths. Would the benefits be worth
all the upheavals that would send us reeling?

The pen is mightier than the sword,
which is why pens cost fifteen hundred pounds
from licensed dealers, lessons in their use
do not come cheap, and ownership is taxed
at eighty pounds a year, while swords are freebies
from charities and banks. Oh, and I worry
when kids leave school functionally unfenced.

Poetry is a verdict, not an occupation,
said Leonard Cohen. Tough, like science:
not the law’s unacknowledged legislation
but its appliance.

Field poems

These three poems were written in 1997 for a competition on the theme of fields.

'The loop' appeared in Streetwise 58, Easter 2005, p. 15. 'Feet and clay' appeared in Streetwise 56, autumn 2004, p. 10. Some readers may know the archaeological memoir to which it refers, and have found themselves, like me, brought up short over the misspelled word. 'Three startles' appeared in Cambridge insider (the predecessor to Local secrets), August 1998.


THE LOOP

Vacation work always meant fields: the rows
of beet under the skyline, with the white stick
marking your limit, and the weeds, the fat hen
to hoe or pull, the bales of straw to stack
in eights on sloping ground as the dark lengthened,
potatoes still in earth from the machine
to bag, and strawberries to crouch along,
and always chuntering: some Monty Python,
C.S. Lewis, Pears' Cyclopaedia,
Macaulay latterly, some of my own --
I had aspirations -- the whole loop run
endlessly over those long rows of hoeing,
stacking, bagging, crouching, chuntering.
I noticed very little and remember
the aspirations and the chuntering
with squirms, with squirms. It's half my life ago.
Since then I've had two dozen? lines in print.
Should I go back to fields? I follow paths
through them; still see too little, hear too little.


FEET AND CLAY

(an archaeological memoir)

Field-walking, you write,
the next best thing to digging,
yields stones: arrowheads,
broken pebbles polished smooth
that once held ploughs together,

flint barbs from fish-spears,
jadeite pierced beads and pendants
from igneous rocks.
"The quarry is elusive,"
you write. The reader stumbles

there, as at your claim
to "a rather difficult
time at the rather
decayed grammer school." Eyebrows??
sic. We pick up what we can.


THREE STARTLES

The day she said look
in place of luck.

The day she needed a literature
search on the war in Bosnia
and it came out she'd been there
ferrying aid from Manchester
during the summer.

The day she said she'd left the road
for a (she switched) to relieve herself, behind
a tree, and later found
she'd walked mined ground.

Not history themselves, just quirks of tact
where huge historic force-fields interact.