The forgettory

 

THE FORGETTORY

Prove they were in, twelve years ago, a craze

they claim they've always shunned? Or let the phase

lie back? “I never went there” was more sad

than “You won't let that go” after I had.

This is another poem whose only claim to publication is that I threw it into a Twitter conversation.  That was in 2019, and I have already forgotten what circumstances triggered the action. 

I wrote the poem in 2010, and I've forgotten the reasons for that now, too.  My half-memory is that it was for a competition, and written on a bus journey with the rules out of sight, so that the poem turned out to be in some way unsuitable when I looked at them again.

My memory is not what it was, but I don't see much value in a forgettory. I grew out of nostalgia a long time ago; I regard state-sponsored nostalgia as an abomination; and I consider memory to be a valuable corrective.

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.

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?

Lines

On Wednesday 29 December it will be thirty years since the onset of my imposition-writing phase.

I had been working three months as a library assistant in the Inter-Library Loans office at the University of Sussex. I have forgotten most of the gaffes I made during that time, and cannot say which of them triggered the imposition. Perhaps it was the cumulative effect of gaffes made in the whole length of the autumn. But on 29 December 1980, having been presented for Christmas with an erasable ballpoint pen, and knowing therefore that I could minimise the waste of paper involved, I set myself the task of writing out, one hundred times:

I must not show off in the Library.

It cannot be said to have worked. I have memories of gaffes that resulted from showing off in Sussex University Library, and even in adjacent libraries, in the spring of 1981. Indeed, the imposition story itself came in time to be a sort of calling card. And the practice of writing impositions began to be habitual. In general they were a hundred lines long, but my most ambitious effort in this genre was five hundred lines, after missing a plane, on the subject of punctuality.

The phase ended as abruptly as it had begun. In 1987, I was involved in 'Walk for the World', an awareness-raising event run by the World Development Movement and, I think, fifteen other agencies. This involved a lot of local media work, and letters to celebrities, and co-ordination of walkers. After it was over, it seemed to me that some action was necessary if I was to come back down to a realistic view of my importance relative to the rest of Cambridge. An imposition seemed to be the very thing; and a text suggested itself:

I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.

I found some paper, and a pen, and settled down to write the above sentence, with 99 repetitions:

I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avo

-- at which point, quite unexpectedly, I found the situation so comical that I couldn't hold the pen, and had to admit that I had kicked the imposition habit.

I would like to mark its 30th anniversary in some way. I have toyed with the idea of using it as a fundraising opportunity, perhaps with a sponsored imposition (asking friends to pledge so much line) or a sponsored anti-imposition (pledging to tweet the text of an imposition one hundred times less the number of sponsorships received, so that 33 sponsors wd lead to the text's being tweeted 67 times). But I have not got my act together as regards a fundraising pitch, and so any donations made on 29 December will have to be wholly unconnected with this eccentricity remembered from my twenties. Maybe it's a project to consider for the 25th anniversary of the end of the phase, in June/July 2012.

THE ANTIDOTE

I have a work in progress on the Haddon Library's blog. It's a page for the products of the writing workshop that was the library's contribution to Cambridge University's Festival of Ideas.

That workshop was a collaboration with the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Workshop leader Sue Butler asked participants to write imaginatively in response to books from the Haddon and objects from the Museum.

As of this posting, the blog is a lot thinner than the work Sue led us to. But here's something I prepared earlier that goes with the subject of museums. Written 2002, published in St Matthew's parish magazine Streetwise in 2005.

THE ANTIDOTE

Simple procedure you may use
if you are minded to reduce,
when looking at another age,
the psychic risks of heritage:

nostalgic thoughts are well cured when
you know the way things were back then
is more than half the way that they
took to the way they are today.