Monday, 13 January 2020
Church going 2014
Here are two more poems I contributed to the Places of Poetry map -- arising from a day out that Clare and I spent in 2014, retracing by bike an excursion that antiquarians had made in 1868 to churches on the Norfolk-Suffolk border. For an account of the 2014 trip, see my tweets from the day. For an account of the 1868 trip see
Anon. 1869. 'Haddiscoe, September 16th, 1868' in 'General meetings and excursions'. Quarterly journal of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History, January, pp. 13-16. Available online at http://bit.ly/1AGPUqB [accessed 8 July 2019]
1860s LITE
We aim to follow, not to recreate,
that learned tour in 1868
on horse-drawn omnibuses from the station
Haddiscoe had then (not today's location).
We cannot make the antiquarian
jaunt's mid-September mid-Victorian
quality of light. That we don't know.
Cooler planet. Steam trains at Haddiscoe.
At Oulton, night, earlier then, unlit,
made the last visit rush and shortened it.
'Postscript 1868' ends Possession
with a century-buried uncompletion.
SHADES OF 1860S LITE
We biked after the 1868ers,
tweeting their churches till the juice was low.
September, both day trips, theirs not so late as
ours, and their station nearer Haddiscoe.
Their Reverend John Gunn, at Flixton Ruin,
should have written a paper, but had not.
His ad-lib burns the page -- what not to do in
that case, shot down. I hope he soon forgot.
Had we found Flixton, by day's end? The map's
"Church (rems of)", this track, these beehives, this clump.
Glimpsed stonework under leaves. It was perhaps
church-shaped enough to be the ruin's stump.
Overgrown hulk, church shadow, where what should
have been done and was not has almost cooled.
My 1996 poem 'City rules' was an earlier glance at John Gunn's unfortunate memory lapse.
Sunday, 5 January 2020
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, 26 December 2019
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, 10 November 2019
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!
Saturday, 2 November 2019
Illegal deposits
THE
SEARCH
dare spend night condemned flat. Online I found
no July game of public schoolboys scaling
a tower block's Heras fence, grazed to the ground,
hot on the concrete steps, higher each railing;
no afterwards: not ninepenny rainbow,
not weeping for the darkness in man's heart;
no record of the night -- what aged them so,
a great adventure from or at the start?
No bad deposits made in lack of water,
no newspaper, eerie from being old,
no noises for the night not getting shorter,
no one they met, and nothing they were told.
So probable, this tale, not mine to break.
Do you remember it? What is your take?
dare spend night condemned flat. Online I found
no July game of public schoolboys scaling
a tower block's Heras fence, grazed to the ground,
hot on the concrete steps, higher each railing;
no afterwards: not ninepenny rainbow,
not weeping for the darkness in man's heart;
no record of the night -- what aged them so,
a great adventure from or at the start?
No bad deposits made in lack of water,
no newspaper, eerie from being old,
no noises for the night not getting shorter,
no one they met, and nothing they were told.
So probable, this tale, not mine to break.
Do you remember it? What is your take?
UNFESTIVE
The phrase "a lot of food"
means more food in the sentence
"We've laid in a lot of food for Christmas"
than in "He'd spilt a lot of food down his jersey."
Poignant the difference in tense.
The phrase "a lot of food"
means more food in the sentence
"We've laid in a lot of food for Christmas"
than in "He'd spilt a lot of food down his jersey."
Poignant the difference in tense.
A
SPURIOUS CRIME
Ears pinch "e-legal", and the users know
libraryspeak's not theirs to understand,
when copyright means something else. They go
and make do with the beige-flagged contraband.
Ears pinch "e-legal", and the users know
libraryspeak's not theirs to understand,
when copyright means something else. They go
and make do with the beige-flagged contraband.
CURIOUS
Deposit -- deposition -- kings invite
put-down, counter-claim. Did your sudden flight
involve such terrors? Had someone had sight
of things you'd done that didn't match your fight?
What came? Visit, phone, email, small-hours fright?
Still mystery, twelve years on -- day of night.
Deposit -- deposition -- kings invite
put-down, counter-claim. Did your sudden flight
involve such terrors? Had someone had sight
of things you'd done that didn't match your fight?
What came? Visit, phone, email, small-hours fright?
Still mystery, twelve years on -- day of night.
The above poems are my contributions to Illegal deposits, a small anthology of writing by staff at libraries within Cambridge University and the colleges. The anthology was the brainchild of Simon Halliday and features cover artwork by Clare Trowell. It includes a contribution by Adam Crothers, whose debut volume Several deer (Carcanet, 2016) won the 2017 Shine/Strong Poetry Award and the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize.
To get your copy of Illegal deposits, contact Simon Halliday on snjh2[at]cam.ac.uk.
Sunday, 27 October 2019
Choice of words
CHOICE
OF WORDS
‘Working’
is shorter,
saves
syllables, characters.
‘Working’
as gerund/
participle/adjective
does
‘profession’ plus most things.
Is
‘professional’
training?
taking payment? class?
viring
between those?
Oh,
the viring. Slippery.
Weasel
word, professional.
I
plan to retire
and
be a working poet.
Working
works, say I.
Mind,
that’s aspirational.
I
am not talking class here.
The above poem made it to the 'Highly commended' list in the 2019 Hastings Litfest competition.
I hope to blog more frequently over the next few weeks, having posted several works to the 'Places of poetry' online map and thus made them ineligible for further entry in competitions. Watch this space.
Wednesday, 17 April 2019
Four haiku and a tanka
GLUM HAIKU
Doubly sad to see
long-buried hatchets dug up
with such clumsy haste.
LIBRARY GRIEF
Sno-pake whites out "Ice"
in the index to one class
of the Bliss schedule.
LIFE-PROCESSING BUGS
Wrong ends, touchiness,
perverse mutability,
and amnesia.
MUSICAL ALLUSION
"Those farewell chords are
from Strauss' Alpine symphony"
-- your note, twelve years back.
COUNTING BATS
Dusk in the garden;
the house like a photograph
of murders or ghosts.
Dimly grouped amid midges
we murmur, thirty-three, -four...
Today, according to the hashtag, is Haiku Poetry Day. The haiku above were written in an access of them in the autumn of 1995, and published in Cou-cous 10. Follow the label for others from the same batch.
The "farewell chords" referred to are the mountain theme of Richard Strauss' Alpine symphony. What I, synaesthetically, see through them is a red sun, probably rising not setting, over a very steep city -- Edinburgh, Bristol, Leeds -- and a small group of people mourning a visionary who has just died.
Another hashtag tells me today is Bat Appreciation Day. The tanka 'Counting bats' is of the same vintage as the haiku. A kinsman had at that time a great enthusiasm for bats, and gathered a number of us in the garden to count them as they flew out from the roof at nightfall. Murders and ghosts, I'm happy to say, were completely lacking from this event, and their presence in the tanka is excused solely by poetic licence. Remembered dusk is two spaces for the imagination.
Doubly sad to see
long-buried hatchets dug up
with such clumsy haste.
LIBRARY GRIEF
Sno-pake whites out "Ice"
in the index to one class
of the Bliss schedule.
LIFE-PROCESSING BUGS
Wrong ends, touchiness,
perverse mutability,
and amnesia.
MUSICAL ALLUSION
"Those farewell chords are
from Strauss' Alpine symphony"
-- your note, twelve years back.
COUNTING BATS
Dusk in the garden;
the house like a photograph
of murders or ghosts.
Dimly grouped amid midges
we murmur, thirty-three, -four...
Today, according to the hashtag, is Haiku Poetry Day. The haiku above were written in an access of them in the autumn of 1995, and published in Cou-cous 10. Follow the label for others from the same batch.
The "farewell chords" referred to are the mountain theme of Richard Strauss' Alpine symphony. What I, synaesthetically, see through them is a red sun, probably rising not setting, over a very steep city -- Edinburgh, Bristol, Leeds -- and a small group of people mourning a visionary who has just died.
Another hashtag tells me today is Bat Appreciation Day. The tanka 'Counting bats' is of the same vintage as the haiku. A kinsman had at that time a great enthusiasm for bats, and gathered a number of us in the garden to count them as they flew out from the roof at nightfall. Murders and ghosts, I'm happy to say, were completely lacking from this event, and their presence in the tanka is excused solely by poetic licence. Remembered dusk is two spaces for the imagination.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)