That terrible vestry meeting

 That terrible vestry meeting

i.m. Robert Jackson (1840-1914)

1. Before the meeting

(to Robert Jackson's tune for 'A lift on the way' by Edwin Waugh)

For leading the Oldham choir his portrait in oils

is in the town gallery, displayed on the walls;

his other choir, St Peter's, his father and he

successively will have served a Jackson century.

A Jackson century!

A Jackson century!

When Tom and Bob will have played a Jackson century!

For hymns he created new tunes by the score;

one pamphlet has fifty, another boasts of more,

named after midland towns, and southern on sea --

the high points in the Jackson century.

A Jackson century!

A Jackson century!

When Tom and Bob will have played a Jackson century!

His songs in the dialect of his Lancashire,

by Lancashire Burns, Edwin Waugh, do you hear?

'A lift on the way' is praised cheerily:

a touch of earth in the Jackson century.

A Jackson century!

A Jackson century!

When Tom and Bob will have played a Jackson century!

2. The meeting

The congregation's thanks

to the choir for services,

proposed by Mr Green,

told of lack of unity;

the seconding also

looked back to the glory days,

recalled the choir's old fame

Oldham-wide, Lancashire-wide,

the days when people came

drawn by music to the church.

Then Mrs Martland told

how, an old attender, she

had noted worsening, 

hymns as slow as funerals, 

the awful music why

no one in her family

would come to church with her.

Motion carried in the end.

Reporters please ignore --

it's a parish matter. 

SPLASH!

The Oldham standard filled

columns with the vestry row.

3. After the meeting

Who knows how Robert Jackson spent the night?

Widowed two years, so I suppose alone.

Late equinoctial was the dawn's first light. 

Who reflected on what they'd said and done?

By end May he'd resigned as organist.

The choir resigned in solidarity.

Press reports from the next year still exist:

functions were lost then back, apparently,

then stroke, speech lost, paralysed legs and side.

No hymns, no songs, no oratorio.

On Sunday the twelfth of July he died,

a broken no-man, nothing left to know.

His great age, some said. Really? Seventy-four?

Apologies won't cover words that killed.

Twenty-three days before the First World War.

The Jackson century seven years unfilled.

==========================================

Robert Jackson was organist of St Peter's church, Oldham, from 1868 to 1913. He first came to my attention through my interest in hymn tunes named after places. You may recall my words to Jackson's tune 'Trentham'.

I wrote the present poem sequence for a reading organised by Love Mill Road in Cambridge, on the theme of 'Transformation'.

Thanks to Gallery Oldham and Oldham Local Studies and Archives for letting me see relevant materials. 

See YouTube for me performing this work, accompanied in the sung bit by Mike Cole; and for Robert Jackson's song with its original Edwin Waugh words, sung by members of the Edwin Waugh Society in an arrangement by Jim Molyneux.

Red (Westminster Bridge)

Red (Westminster Bridge)

“Earth has not anything to show more fair.”
Our bridge, from decades after Wordsworth wrote,
still sees triumphant uses of that quote —
marathon meets demo, Parliament Square.
Red London bus routes level by the ride.
Let’s think of them as one vast playing field.
Duchess Loelia stole a phrase to wield
(but would confess this guilt before she died),
linking red bus and failure. Yes, to her,
whose ducal marriage failed, that was a thing.
Not to me, pensioner, kidlike venturing
red routes across the Thames at Westminster,
her duchy. Red souvenirs gleam on a stall.
Red hearts mourn Covid levels from their wall.

Loelia Lindsay (1902-1993; Duchess of Westminster 1930-1947) is believed to have popularised the aphorism, originally coined by Brian Howard and often misattributed to Margaret Thatcher, “Anybody over the age of 30 seen in a bus has been a failure in life.”

This is another of my colour poems, and also another of my poems written for projects from 26 Characters. 26 Bridges celebrated the bridges over the Thames in London. Participants contributed written work, and were invited to choose artistic collaborators who would produce visual work to go alongside this. 

My artistic collaborator was Clare Trowell, and she made a fine print of Westminster Bridge with a red London bus crossing it. Early in the project I had noticed that Westminster Bridge was crossed by five Transport for London routes. I explored these, making a list of bus-coloured things I'd seen on them.

The poem took its present direction after conversation with Clare T., and with my wife Clare. I'd been there before. And it developed, as 26 Characters poems are wont to do, in discussion with its project editor, in this case Wendy Jones.

Sonnet for Ledbury

Last year Robin Hiseman asked me for something from my back catalogue for the Ledbury Carnival https://ledbury-carnival.co.uk/ programme, with its 2024 Golden Jubilee theme of 'Going for gold'. I was able to oblige with 'Bus home from working Sunday', written way back in 2012. I blogged this as the third poem in my post 'Bears and gold', which I put up on the the day of the carnival. 

This year Robin asked again, the 2025 theme being 'Wonders of the world'. I didn't have anything in my back catalogue for that, so I wrote a new one.

SONNET FOR LEDBURY

Wonders of Ledbury. They've printed some --

Ledbury clock tower, Ledbury market hall,

Ledbury viaduct, Ledbury carnival --

stitched to world wonders like Rome's Colosseum.

If wonders come in sevens, Ledbury,

adding St Katherine, Elizabeth

Barrett Browning, John Masefield, in one breath

reaches its quota. It's got seven, see?

But Ledbury doesn't stop counting there.

Its church in Jenkins' England's thousand best,

its annual poem contest and fest,

plus those four cricketers and one darts player

and lots more Wikipedia's noted down.

Wonders of Ledbury. Wonderful town!

Clearness in England

Clearness in England

Humbler than lodestar claims:

citizens fossicking

for water standards,

where it’s made worse than brackish

at each profitable flush,

look downwards for truth

in such a sickly pickle.

Citizens writing,

not verklempt but using words

best true to the findings,

not parrot anger.

The glossy rag now carries

such stories. Let’s be

rational, rational. Let’s

be rational, rational.

The above was my entry in last year's CV2 competition. Some readers of this blog may remember that that competition requires entrants to make a new poem, in a single weekend, that must contain ten specific words emailed at 06:00 Saturday morning, UK time. In other words midnight Winnipeg time, as people living there slip from Friday to Saturday. Have fun guessing which the prescribed words are.

My entry got no success in the competition itself, but it has now found publication in Carole Baldock's poetry magazine Orbis. The work has had a measure of editorial improvement by Carole.

Here's some citizen journalism reporting on sewage, from East Anglia bylines. EAB is one of a network of similar outlets around the country; fun in the same way as the Places of Poetry online map that I've praised before.

Greengrocers and the apostrophe

 

GREENGROCERS AND THE APOSTROPHE

To stop us looking down our noses

at greengrocers, the man proposes

to phase out the apostrophe,

so cuke's and strawberry's will be

no worse than Kings Cross, Potters Bar,

Harrods or Boots. The answer's Ah,

they would. Metric correctness may

deserve to be the light of day;

the niggling point whose rules confuse

by more case law at every use

unclear contraction and possession

may well be ripe for supersession;

apostrophe-free writing might

by twenty years of school be right.

Correct non-users would therefore

look down their noses all the more.

As for greengrocers, they'd maintain

stubbornly their right to remain

writing their way, and stand their ground

to their last tittle-jot and pound.

I appear to have written this poem in the spring of 2001, probably in response to a Guardian article advocating as summarised in the first few lines. I published it over a succession of tweets in December 2019. I occasionally feel the urge to throw it into some online discussion or other, so it might as well be made available here.

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.

The serpent's shiver

 

THE SERPENT'S SHIVER

“Suddenly something came out of the land, some cool shiver of Spring” (Neil Gunn, The serpent)

Reading, I think of

how we come to look back on

a spring with words like

"the optimistic first half

of" some past year, sigh implied.

Reading on, I see

Tom and Janet would never

speak so between them.

February morning tea.

The story darkens its coils.

You read this poem

after I've finished the book.

England and Scotland

another tale uncoiling.

England gambles on its past.

The Scottish novelist Neil Gunn lived from 1891 to 1973. The serpent was published in the 1940s, and you'll have to read it to find out who Tom and Janet are.

The poem was my entry in the 2019 Neil Gunn Writing Competition, run by the Neil Gunn Trust and High Life Highland. It has now found publication in issue 109 of the poetry magazine Acumen.