Bears and gold

Here are some poems that made it to publication in August 2024.

East Anglia bylines colleague Kate Moore drew my attention to the imminence of Poetry Bears' Picnic Day 2024. I responded with an article showcasing poems I had written at various times between 1985 and 2018 on the subject of bears. Some of them had featured in this blog already.

Allow me to present a couple that haven't.

BEARS

True, bears are solitary and not lovable.

True, I stopped buying teddy bears as the window sill filled up.

True, we did not meet the bears we saw in their sunken field at Whipsnade.

True, most bears live rather a long way away.

True, bears do not cater, and cycle only under duress.

True, 'The 59th bear' by Ted Hughes includes a cautionary tale.

True, Christopher Milne's story casts shadows on tales of Pooh.

True, Britain's way with foreigners, in 1958 and in 2018, adds to the implausibility of Paddington.

True, my childhood behaviour jars on my childhood identification with Rupert Bear.

True, confusion may arise from saying bear to mean lover, partner, or on that spectrum.

True, I wearied colleagues by the conceit.

BUT

It also remains true that Clare rhymes with bear.

I like this sort of bear.

'Bears' was written in 2018 as my response to prompt 26 in Jo Bell’s book 52: Write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going. The brief was actually for an erotic poem, but as chapter author, Neil Rollinson, went on to explain:

Let’s write an erotic poem that’s about other issues: illness, growing old, familial and domestic disappointment perhaps…Let something else carry the focus, or energy, and let the erotic take a back seat.

So, that’s what I did. The conceit in the final five lines explains the other poems presented here. I do not have a fetish about bears, but they supply a vocabulary. Clare, as most readers of this blog will know, is my wife, the lecturer and science writer Dr Clare Sansom.

CLARE CONTRASTED WITH A BEAR

Bears do not cook the food I eat;

bears have enormous claws on their feet;

bears dance to the pain of a metal beat.

Bears cannot bike, or teach, or write;

bearskin offers no gleam of barelight;

and an ursid bear would not incite

a poem to compete.

The idea of exploring the contrast between a bear in our sense of a lover, partner, or on that spectrum, as in the first poem, and a genuine ursid bear, came about after Clare suggested I enter a Valentine poetry competition, I think run by BBC Radio Three, in 2007.

If you read the article, you'll see that Clare herself contributed a recipe to it, for flapjack to feed to participants in such a party as was envisaged. From the golden brown of flapjack and most teddy-bears it's a short step to the gold of jubilees.

Ledbury Carnival celebrated its golden jubilee in August 2024, and Robin Fortune-Hiseman, who was responsible for designing and printing the programme booklet, asked if I had any poems about carnivals or gold that he could use. He wasn't commissioning a new poem, just asking me to search in my poetry back catalogue. I sent him this from 2012, which was written originally for the Keats-Shelley Memorial Competition and satisfies the requirement for gold if not  carnivals. 

BUS HOME FROM WORKING SUNDAY

A golden purchase:

honey cashews bought to draw

pound coins from a note,

with first-class stamps included

as if to be virtuous,

and tweets from the bus

about rules against working

Sunday and against

writing self-impositions.

Twitter's golden not guilty

for exploration

of the gold in little things,

gold found while thinking

of something else; grain harvest

by-product of the searched earth.

Some of you may discern a kinship, in the use of the 'gold' motif, between that piece and Robert Horan's poem 'The queen's face on the summery coin', known to me through Samuel Barber's setting. I believe my use of the motif is different enough for this not to be a matter of plagiarism.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The St Pancras resonances

This is a poem sequence I wrote in 1992-1993.  I have alluded to its origins before: around 1988, in a Guardian interview with Stephen Poliakoff about his film Hidden city, I read 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 became an obsession of mine partly because it made me think of so many other things.  The poem sequence looks at them one after another.

A few disclaimers are in order:

The date in Resonance 3 is incorrect.  It derives from a half-remembered entry in a Nicholson's guide.  The closure of the Chesterfield Canal west of Worksop happened rather later.

In Resonance 7, no link is intended with any real person, living or dead.  Googling the words St Pancras Trust (as one couldn't in 1993) brings up links to several organisations with those words in their name, all of which are concerned with far better projects than the truthifying of an urban legend.  And I had better not give any more time to changing the names of the characters.  The characters bear no resemblance to people of similar names who are known to me.

'The St Pancras resonances' was published in Cous-cous 4, March 1995, pp. 10-11.


THE ST PANCRAS RESONANCES

"Underneath St Pancras lies
    bricked up at the end
of the nineteenth century
    like a time capsule
waiting for the other works
    to complete the site
such a darkened terminus."


Resonance 1

The house was old: of course it had a tunnel.
We wished it didn't, but we hoped it did.
We hunted it by tapping on the walls.

    tap    tap    tap

    tap    tap    tap

    tap    tap    tap

    B W A R M ! ! !
  B W A R M ! ! !
  B W A R M ! ! !

which knocked me cold awake.


Resonance 2

The book where Mozart notes the work he's done
is dated seventeen-eighty-four dash one
-- century blank.  Eight years remain unrun.


Resonance 3

Brindley's canal winds level:
north, the remains of brickworks.
West, above Worksop, steeper,
a heavily-locked section,
closed in eighteen-ninety-six.


Resonance 4

Even the twomost years at length
came round again to May,
evening, and they began to end
his time away.

In plain clothes but accompanied
and reading upside down,
Westbourne Park, night in Pentonville,
then fetched through town

by cab to Bloomsbury, fresh clothes,
breakfast, reunion
with many friends, so many, late
into the afternoon,

night passage to Dieppe, spring dawn,
high spirits, Reading charmed
into the castle of a myth,
the King unharmed,

the Queen fêted with strawberries,
sirop de grenadine
for fifteen gamins, and a cake
in pink and green,

much gratitude, much joy in life,
new life, and a new name,
and waiting in the air the plays
that never came:

the work so rich in beauty that
it would shine back the phrase
of those who sneered that such a life
had led such ways

darkened inside him.  Three more years
creaked festering and black
up to November nineteen-hundred,
end of the track.


Resonance 5

Two hundred years apart, and parting two
quite other other worlds, having in view
centuries' ends, the stones torn down by rage
turned round at once and parted age from age.


Resonance 6

The run up to the one hundredth psalm
is a run of mounting exultation:
a run all through the nineties
shouting louder and louder,
the whole run, jubilee, coronation, power
over the thunder of floods,
and the roar of the sea itself
declares the glory of God,
the many coastlands rejoice,
the hills sing together for joy
and worship by his holy mountain,
one whole world joyful in the Lord,
serve him with gladness, come before
his presence with a song,
all generations gathered up
in the Old Hundredth,
all people that on earth shall dwell.
Then the mirror quivers in the sun
at slanderers I will destroy,
haughty and arrogant I will not endure,
I will know nothing of evil,
and again it goes off a little.
And next morning --
oh, it's a bit like the first week in January,
it's almost like the-silver-wedding-and-then-the-countdown-began.
There is a forgetting to eat,
and strength broken in mid-course,
and a long time,
a trudge of psalms,
a limp of inventories,
a c.v. of as many blessings as you can find,
before it will go bright again.
But it has more good to run:
the end of the psalms is in mid-century,
a soaring trajectory of praise.


Resonance 7

Lyn discovered she had been once divorced.
We hadn't touched on it for years, and then,
coming up from a conversation -- oh,
money, my work for the St Pancras Trust --
but coming up from that, you know, and after
the News at Ten, I made some cocoa for us,
not fishing for apologies, and held,
she grimaced as I held her hand a bit, I said,
then or later but that day or that week,
I said We've made it up to fifteen years,
anyway, and still going strong, and then,
tactlessly, stupidly, I don't know, I said
That's five times where you got with Harry.  She said,
Harry?  I don't know anyone called Harry...
As if I'd made some silly accusation.
Harry was her first husband.  And, OK,
I know we've talked about it less and less,
as time goes by all memories get awkward,
but there are documents, old letters, photos,
cuttings even.  I got the box, went through it,
showed her them, wished I hadn't, as I think
it left her rather shaken.  No, it's not
a sort of shadow life, with shadow kids
growing and eating, winning shadow prizes.
Harry and Lyn were married just three years.
They hadn't any children.  Was I right
to resurrect it after all this time?
I think so.  She is a librarian,
she tends, or did tend, I should say, to make
herself the rational, the academic,
married as if by accident, and me
harmless enough with my St Pancras Trust
but -- Well, anyway, I think the raising
of her amnesia -- five years of it --
has let her see that (a) she too can be
deluded -- self-deluding -- and, much more,
there really are enclaves of the unseen,
even in your own life.  Who knows, will Lyn
one day again be helping with the Trust?

Yes, the St Pancras Trust -- just Lyn and me
to start with, she was with Harry still,
but the last ten years have seen such a huge
upsurge of interest that I devote
myself to it full-time -- it aims to settle
the truth about the buried terminus.
Because officially there's nothing there,
just a staff car-park that was once a depot
for beer-trains in from Burton-on-Trent, or some say
the old St Pancras Underground -- you see it
west of King's Cross St Pancras, one dark platform --
when that was closed and bricked off, that must be
the grit inside the buried-station "myth".
Or: is it really there? did funds run out?
were the plans lost when history
derailed everything in nineteen-fourteen?  Who knows?

I sometimes dream about the buried station.
The other night, it was a bright March morning,
I was on Euston Road and walking east.
St Pancras clock tower -- in the dream it looked
like Westminster Cathedral -- had a clock
which showed the time with numbers coming out
like the blades on a large-scale working model
of a Swiss Army knife -- you've seen it too.
And this clock signalled, eighteen-ninety-seven!
I ran across the road -- this was a dream --
hoping the buried terminus was open,
and, you know, what else will it restore?
Lyn and me happier again, or reconciled
with Harry, as it does from time to time
trouble my conscience, or them never married,
Harry not outrageously patronizing
to his own assistants, or to me, or ...?
I reached St Pancras, I could see the platforms,
which I had seen in dreams before, dark, empty,
and they were bright, with trains and people -- people
I could recognize in the dream, and shall
if I should ever meet them, but the blades
moved on again, the radio alarm
was hardening the real world, I was waking.
But it occurs to me, that was the day
that ended with her big discovery,
and I think -- touch wood -- ushered in the spring.
That was it, yes.  That was the dream I had --
that was the day, I'm sure!  That was the day!

For Clare

The librarian's bear is an articulate bear.
The librarian's bear is a biophysicist bear.
The librarian's bear is a Christian bear.
The librarian's bear is a dancing bear.
The librarian's bear is an eager bear.
The librarian's bear is a female bear.
The librarian's bear is a Guardian-reading bear.
The librarian's bear is a happy bear.
The librarian's bear is an intellectual bear.
The librarian's bear is a journalistic bear.
The librarian's bear is a knowledgeable bear.
The librarian's bear is a little bear.
The librarian's bear is a massaging bear.
The librarian's bear is a nominally plump bear.
The librarian's bear is an optimistic bear.
The librarian's bear is a popular bear.
The librarian's bear is a questioning bear.
The librarian's bear is a round bear.
The librarian's bear is a solid bear.
The librarian's bear is a trustworthy bear.
The librarian's bear is an uncommon bear.
The librarian's bear is a valuable bear.
The librarian's bear is a web-whizzkid bear.
The librarian's bear is an extrovert bear.
The librarian's bear is a young bear.
The librarian's bear is a zestful bear.


The above lines were written in 1998, the year Clare and I married, and were published in Streetwise 32, autumn 1998, p. 18.  I should say that I was editor of Streetwise at that time.  I am posting them on the eve of our 15th anniversary.

Strictly speaking, Clare is not much like a bear, and has never been seriously plump.  However, when we met in 1982, she was less slight than the woman I had been told she resembled, and 'plump' is a word I like the sound of.  I draw on that first plump impression for a continuing licence to say it.

Clare is the first person to see my poems and comment on them, and they sometimes reflect her work in science journalism.

Cam23 2.0: Week 12, extra thing: TeuxDeux and other list-making tools

I use the list-making tool within Google Calendar. At least, I do so in cases where the list needs more permanence and accessibility than the back of some other document, which is the natural medium for scribbling things down.

I choose Google Calendar mainly for the reason Becky gives in her post, to keep the number of subscriptions low. It also offers the advantage of displaying the lists alongside the calendar without necessarily integrating them into the calendar. The reminders of things still to do may therefore be kept in sight, but unaccompanied by evidence of how far I am past the date by which I once hoped they would be done.

Had a bash at being whimsical with LinoIt.



And I will bear LinoIt, TeuxDeux and the rest in mind should Google Calendar's list-making facility cease at any time to be available.