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.

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.