This poem was written in 2006, as my entry in the DiVerse poetry competition, which was on the theme of co-existence. It was published in 2009 by Fearless Books in their anthology The light in ordinary things ed. D. Patrick Miller and Sari Friedman. Thanks, Fearless!
DELIVERY
The paving stones through leather hit
the pain upwards into the feet.
Church magazines weigh heavy on
strained arms that long to lay them down.
Sensible letter-boxes hold
roughly the same height as a hand,
lie horizontal in the door,
and open outwards into air.
They’ll accept A4 whole and then
let their flaps’ weight drop shut again.
We find such boxes and rejoice,
going like post from house to house.
Others we have to kneel to, fight
aggressive metal, twist to fit.
The force of any letter-box
holds both sides of the paradox
of barriers. We see them be.
We see them open sesame.
We see their need for both of those.
We see them close. Their need to close.
Monday, 22 April 2013
Monday, 11 March 2013
A hit
This had its first submission in the Interpreter's house competition in 2002, but that competition doesn't appear to have had a theme. The poem has now finally achieved publication online, as one of the also-rans in the Little gold pencil competition for writing on the theme of a night walk.
A HIT
The car was speeding and the street was steep
and had no place for feet and we were walking,
north of Salisbury Plain.
Walking at night, winding our clockwork torch --
the music festival a village back,
north of Salisbury Plain.
Walking on sufferance, the road not wide.
The verge was high-stepped and steep fields lay upwards,
north of Salisbury Plain.
The moon steady over the fields. Our torch
lighting the shiny signs. The road dark, silent,
north of Salisbury Plain.
A car a minute. Distant lights, sound, action
(step on to verge), noise, brightness! Darkness, silence,
north of Salisbury Plain.
We reached our village. Walkers were a hazard,
shadows in a red triangle, no footway,
north of Salisbury Plain.
And one car came too fast, the road too narrow.
We hutched against a wall, for want of footway,
north of Salisbury Plain.
And, with respect, I shone the clockwork torch
straight at the windscreen. It worked! The car slowed down!
North of Salisbury Plain,
the clockwork torch was mightier than the car!
A paradox, not always true, by far.
Southwards, the steep fields, and the firing range,
and Porton Down, and moonlit Stonehenge,
on Salisbury Plain.
A HIT
The car was speeding and the street was steep
and had no place for feet and we were walking,
north of Salisbury Plain.
Walking at night, winding our clockwork torch --
the music festival a village back,
north of Salisbury Plain.
Walking on sufferance, the road not wide.
The verge was high-stepped and steep fields lay upwards,
north of Salisbury Plain.
The moon steady over the fields. Our torch
lighting the shiny signs. The road dark, silent,
north of Salisbury Plain.
A car a minute. Distant lights, sound, action
(step on to verge), noise, brightness! Darkness, silence,
north of Salisbury Plain.
We reached our village. Walkers were a hazard,
shadows in a red triangle, no footway,
north of Salisbury Plain.
And one car came too fast, the road too narrow.
We hutched against a wall, for want of footway,
north of Salisbury Plain.
And, with respect, I shone the clockwork torch
straight at the windscreen. It worked! The car slowed down!
North of Salisbury Plain,
the clockwork torch was mightier than the car!
A paradox, not always true, by far.
Southwards, the steep fields, and the firing range,
and Porton Down, and moonlit Stonehenge,
on Salisbury Plain.
Saturday, 16 February 2013
Music about fighting
In 2006, I entered a competition for a piece of writing in Easy-Read English -- the adaptation of language for people with learning difficulties. My entry didn't get anywhere in the competition, and, not seeing any other market for it, I let it stay in the depths of filespace.
Recently, however, I came across an opportunity to revamp it. The Up-Goer Five Text Editor enables you to type text using only the 1000 commonest words in English. I copied my 2006 piece into Up-Goer Five, and was told immediately that many of my words fell outside that thousand.
The list of prescribed words is indeed an amazing one. Block, blonde, and blood are in it, all in a row, but not sing, clap, or war. Does anyone know how far Up-Goer Five matches the vocabulary used by practitioners of Easy-Read? Where I didn't find synonyms, I set about excising passages rather than writing longer explanations. This operation shortened the thing from 674 words to 479.
The result is below (and on Up-goer Five here). Easy-Read and the constraints of Up-Goer Five can be likened to txtspk, Twitterspeak, and the Victorians' telegramese -- adaptations of English for a particular purpose, and most unlikely to be the future of English prose. But constraints can be stimulating. Think of the 14 lines of the sonnet!
I must give credit where credit is due. My coming across Up-goer Five was thanks to Dixe Wills' article in the Christian magazine Third way.
MUSIC ABOUT FIGHTING
We are working on a big piece of music. It is by Mr Britten.
We start working on it in the cold. The music seems strange. Parts of it are not what we expect. We go wrong.
I look over my music book on trains. We are getting there.
As we get closer to the date, we work harder. One evening, we try the music with the band and the kids. We go wrong in new ways. Is it because we are not used to the band?
I ride home very fast. The music feels like the ride. It is under control.
Then we try again, in another building. The stars join us for the first time. I go wrong in more new ways. The ride home is shorter.
On the date, we try the music in the afternoon. Many of us come by car. They are late because of road works. I go wrong in parts of the music that were all right before. The music feels much harder now.
The time comes.
We give the music sitting down to begin with. The music starts quietly, with deep notes and bells and us. We get through the first part and don't go too wrong. But by the end of the second part we have gone wrong in places.
The music has six parts. The last part is the hardest. We know we have gone wrong in many places already. Can we get through this hard part?
We struggle. We know we are struggling. Lots of people have come to hear us. Do they know we are struggling? Will we have to stop? The man waves his stick to lead us. His waves get bigger and clearer.
The music ends as it began. It ends quietly with bells and us.
After our last note the man puts his stick down. Then everyone is silent for a long time. The music has made us all want to be silent.
Then someone makes a noise with their hands. The noise means "We like the music." Then others join in. They make a loud noise with their hands for several minutes. The stars lean forward. Leaning forward means "Thank you for liking us." The kids and the band and the small band all lean forward. And we too get asked to lean. Thank you for liking us.
We walk off the raised floor. My wife comes to meet me with a friend of ours. They tell me how much they liked the music.
Other people are saying the same thing to their friends. They did not notice we were struggling.
We know we were struggling. We know we could have done it better. But the music has worked. It was beautiful. It has made people think about what fighting is like.
Listen to Mr Britten's music if you can!
Recently, however, I came across an opportunity to revamp it. The Up-Goer Five Text Editor enables you to type text using only the 1000 commonest words in English. I copied my 2006 piece into Up-Goer Five, and was told immediately that many of my words fell outside that thousand.
The list of prescribed words is indeed an amazing one. Block, blonde, and blood are in it, all in a row, but not sing, clap, or war. Does anyone know how far Up-Goer Five matches the vocabulary used by practitioners of Easy-Read? Where I didn't find synonyms, I set about excising passages rather than writing longer explanations. This operation shortened the thing from 674 words to 479.
The result is below (and on Up-goer Five here). Easy-Read and the constraints of Up-Goer Five can be likened to txtspk, Twitterspeak, and the Victorians' telegramese -- adaptations of English for a particular purpose, and most unlikely to be the future of English prose. But constraints can be stimulating. Think of the 14 lines of the sonnet!
I must give credit where credit is due. My coming across Up-goer Five was thanks to Dixe Wills' article in the Christian magazine Third way.
MUSIC ABOUT FIGHTING
We are working on a big piece of music. It is by Mr Britten.
We start working on it in the cold. The music seems strange. Parts of it are not what we expect. We go wrong.
I look over my music book on trains. We are getting there.
As we get closer to the date, we work harder. One evening, we try the music with the band and the kids. We go wrong in new ways. Is it because we are not used to the band?
I ride home very fast. The music feels like the ride. It is under control.
Then we try again, in another building. The stars join us for the first time. I go wrong in more new ways. The ride home is shorter.
On the date, we try the music in the afternoon. Many of us come by car. They are late because of road works. I go wrong in parts of the music that were all right before. The music feels much harder now.
The time comes.
We give the music sitting down to begin with. The music starts quietly, with deep notes and bells and us. We get through the first part and don't go too wrong. But by the end of the second part we have gone wrong in places.
The music has six parts. The last part is the hardest. We know we have gone wrong in many places already. Can we get through this hard part?
We struggle. We know we are struggling. Lots of people have come to hear us. Do they know we are struggling? Will we have to stop? The man waves his stick to lead us. His waves get bigger and clearer.
The music ends as it began. It ends quietly with bells and us.
After our last note the man puts his stick down. Then everyone is silent for a long time. The music has made us all want to be silent.
Then someone makes a noise with their hands. The noise means "We like the music." Then others join in. They make a loud noise with their hands for several minutes. The stars lean forward. Leaning forward means "Thank you for liking us." The kids and the band and the small band all lean forward. And we too get asked to lean. Thank you for liking us.
We walk off the raised floor. My wife comes to meet me with a friend of ours. They tell me how much they liked the music.
Other people are saying the same thing to their friends. They did not notice we were struggling.
We know we were struggling. We know we could have done it better. But the music has worked. It was beautiful. It has made people think about what fighting is like.
Listen to Mr Britten's music if you can!
Saturday, 2 February 2013
More numbers poems
In 1986, I wrote a poem called 'Values: what the parties think of the number nine'. A couple of years later, I conceived the idea of incorporating 'Values' into a sequence of poems, one for each of the digits 0 to 9. I wrote all of the projected poems, but soon realised that I had to deal with them separately, if I wished for any hope of publication. I evidently came to that decision long before I began keeping my poetry card index in 1994, and I cannot now lay hands on a copy of the sequence as a whole.
The poems for 3 and 4 I put together. They were published in Streetwise 12, October 1993, p. 26.
'Eight' was published in Saint Matthew's church magazine, Cambridge, May-June 1989.
The poems for 3 and 4 I put together. They were published in Streetwise 12, October 1993, p. 26.
3 4
4 4
hard to hold
against pulse and a holding
in balance
in tension impossibly
big for
cohesion and tight for division
three is a
time and a stretch and a way
Four,
plus-minus, fridge, central heating, neat,
clicks over,
give or take, its even beat,
four weeks a
month, an issue every quarter,
four simple
elements, earth, air, fire, water,
four
mind-forms, melancholic, or phlegmatic,
or sanguine,
or choleric, automatic
four strokes
to turn an engine. Give or take,
four is for
things we comprehend or make.
The poem for 7 doesn't explicitly mention the number at all, but it mentions the whole-tone scale, which has seven notes, and the last two lines have seven syllables each. It was published in the Poetry Now anthology Mating rituals, edited by Veronica Hannon (Peterborough: Poetry Now, 1993), p. 142, and is, I suppose, the kind of thing I have had in mind when I've described myself as partly failed puritan and partly failed enfant terrible.
NB
Straights
are major, gays are minor,
transsexuals
bitonal,
and
awkward in their whole-tone
scale
some choose to be alone.
The poem for 8, on the other hand, names the number in the title and first line. It is concerned mainly with visual images; the date in the first line has to do with the figure 8 as a sun and its reflection, not with historical events. The picture that I had in mind when writing the quatrain was the cover illustration of the Unesco Courier for November 1987. It shows the remains of a ship, which went down two centuries ago, caught by sonar imaging on the floor of one of the Great Lakes, with masts still standing.
EIGHT
The eighth of August eighty-eight,
a shimmer of reflected suns,
the water heating back the light.
Sound shudders through, down, octaves down,
echoes the vessel, fathoms drowned,
displays green of years or water,
shadows two masts on a deep ground.
The eighth of August eighty-eight,
a shimmer of reflected suns,
the water heating back the light.
Sound shudders through, down, octaves down,
echoes the vessel, fathoms drowned,
displays green of years or water,
shadows two masts on a deep ground.
'Eight' was published in Saint Matthew's church magazine, Cambridge, May-June 1989.
Thursday, 10 January 2013
First poem of 2013
My first of 2013 is a haiku, written out of a Twitter conversation
with school librarian Nicky Adkins and, would you believe, BBC Radio 3. I don't know who does Radio 3's tweeting.
You can look on Twitter for the entire conversation. I had recalled that BBC R3 had become my home station even amid my teenage explorations of Radio Tirana and such. Radio 3 replied with thanks and a recording of Radio Tirana's sign-on, at http://bit.ly/UzY1xB , as I remember it from forty years ago. This has just drawn from me the following lines:
Tirana's trumpets
rise from 70s shortwave
like Titanic rails
and I have duly tweeted them.
Those of you who don't remember my 1970s addiction to foreign radio listening might be interested to read this article I wrote about it long afterwards.
You can look on Twitter for the entire conversation. I had recalled that BBC R3 had become my home station even amid my teenage explorations of Radio Tirana and such. Radio 3 replied with thanks and a recording of Radio Tirana's sign-on, at http://bit.ly/UzY1xB , as I remember it from forty years ago. This has just drawn from me the following lines:
Tirana's trumpets
rise from 70s shortwave
like Titanic rails
and I have duly tweeted them.
Those of you who don't remember my 1970s addiction to foreign radio listening might be interested to read this article I wrote about it long afterwards.
Wednesday, 26 December 2012
Haikus
STATUS
So much self-deceit's
called in to guard that story
anything stands now.
NEW HOBBY I
Worst Christmas -- unreal
as the first dream episode
in ageing sitcoms.
NEW HOBBY II
Doubly sad to hear
the old reasonable voice
used for this madness.
POSITIVE HAIKU
It's not wishful thought
or a verbal sleight of hand;
see, the new house works!
My life is a lot less glum now than it was in the mid-90s. Current work in progress, or projected, is for the 'What's your history?' competition from Holland Park Press. A competition entry I wrote under similar circs last year, and entered by email from my brother's house on New Year's Eve, was a great success; I'm not expecting that history will repeat itself, but I can have fun imagining.
Monday, 26 November 2012
How to stop spills
This dates from 1991. Part of the inspiration was a sentence in journalistic account, I forget whose, of the causes of the 1987 Great Storm: I remember "In 24 hours the depression raced across the Atlantic, deepening as it went." The poem was published in Streetwise 11, June 1993, p. 23.
HOW TO STOP SPILLS
Never nail the cup to the saucer,
never even use a screw,
but attach them sensitively
with a spot of Superglue.
If that doesn't stop the spilling,
fix the saucer to the tray
with a bed of melted candle-
wax and leave it for a day.
What, still spilling? Bind the tray tight
on the table -- every side
has its silver eyelets, or you
punch holes if they're not supplied.
That's three layers of firmness. Spilling
doesn't happen any more.
Whoops, the table isn't stable,
nail the table to the floor.
Nail the floor hard to the rafters,
nail the rafters to the hull,
nail the hull to the Atlantic,
dam the tide to hold it full.
Fill the dam to the brim with ocean,
taut Niagara of wall,
see the trough racing explosive
over spillage in free fall.
Down falls spilling, down fall saucer,
ship, nails, wax, tray, cup and thread.
There's the bad end comes of spilling --
so remember what I've said.
HOW TO STOP SPILLS
Never nail the cup to the saucer,
never even use a screw,
but attach them sensitively
with a spot of Superglue.
If that doesn't stop the spilling,
fix the saucer to the tray
with a bed of melted candle-
wax and leave it for a day.
What, still spilling? Bind the tray tight
on the table -- every side
has its silver eyelets, or you
punch holes if they're not supplied.
That's three layers of firmness. Spilling
doesn't happen any more.
Whoops, the table isn't stable,
nail the table to the floor.
Nail the floor hard to the rafters,
nail the rafters to the hull,
nail the hull to the Atlantic,
dam the tide to hold it full.
Fill the dam to the brim with ocean,
taut Niagara of wall,
see the trough racing explosive
over spillage in free fall.
Down falls spilling, down fall saucer,
ship, nails, wax, tray, cup and thread.
There's the bad end comes of spilling --
so remember what I've said.
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