Two fire poems

Poem Pigeon has been running a competition for poems on the theme of fire.  I posted on the site two from my back catalogue, and entered one of them in the competition.  See my post of 6 October 2013 for my take on this way of entering competitions by web posting.

The poem I entered in the fire competition was 'Testing' from 2004, drawing on my experience as fire safety manager at work.


TESTING

Some have professed they cannot tell
the weekly testing of the bell
from fire alarms. So let's spell out
the difference in case of doubt.

Testing the bell's a burst of clang,
over if it's a second long.

But clang that bursts and goes on bursting,
doors swung to, opened, swung to, swung to,
voices, feet, then no feet, no voices,
and clang goes on, and through the window
flashes of orange, knots of people,
and clang goes on, and clang goes on,
that means get out, the clang's a drill
for real, burst dress-rehearsalful,
get out, the clang's a clang for fire,
or drill for fire, get out for real,
find the fresh air, get out for real.

Let that become the meme of bells.
Let people know it in bones and bowels.


And the one I posted on Poem Pigeon, without, in the end, entering it in the competition, was the fourth from a sequence of seven that I wrote in the late 1990s, exploring animal metaphors.   The title of the sequence was 'Beasties'. Maybe I had no business co-opting fire into the animal kingdom, but it seemed to work at the time.


BEASTIES

(iv)

Another beast -- it rhymes with liar --
will suit our purpose, namely fire,
fire, the old process, virtual
spirit, virtual animal:
from her straight yellow stream of hair
like candlewax half-dried in air,
through all the risks attending paper
when file or bin did not escape her,
down to the glee she took in blame
and fanning issues into flame,
she was a fire; even the one
leak that she sprang quite early on,
by way of an experiment
in trouble (should she reinvent
her problem as incontinence?),
does nothing to put out the sense
of fire -- no, still retained from school,
a Latin verb is pungent fuel:
uro, burn, worry, chafe, annoy.

For traceless killing, hear the ploy
that gangsters used: a cylinder
of CO2 against one ear,
release the pin and squeeze the handle,
and blow the brain out like a candle.

Death loss of eyes/limbs

This is a song that I've been singing at times of moderate distress -- glumph and peeviour level -- since 1982.  Its starting point is a line from an insurance policy, which became a surrogate oath of mine.  The song lyrics achieved publication of a sort recently, in that I posted them in the course of a Twitter exchange with Phil Lucas.  I was delighted to find that a single tweet would encompass the whole lot.


DEATH LOSS OF EYES/LIMBS

Death loss of eyes/limbs, face and hands
Sellotape glue elastic bands.
 
Heartbreak and shattered memory
coffee tea smiles and sympathy


Oh and here's the tune.  

The closest affinity of this sort of thing is with the wilfully vacuous ditties from Monty Python, though I admit that the Python specimens are funnier.  Unlike the blurts, 'Death loss of eyes/limbs' did not go into hibernation during a time of acute anxiety over a work project.

Uploading the tune, by the way, was my first experiment with uploading a video to the blog, but what you see is several experiments later.  I made the mistake of using Freemake to reduce the video to an uploadable size.  I quickly found, after downloading Freemake, that I had lost control of Firefox, in frequent crashes and unexpected links.  Freemake appears to be every bit as bad as described at Keep Browser Safe, and removing traces of it is a protracted business.  Avoid.  Or sing 'Death loss of eyes/limbs' over it.

How to get rid of trendy left-wing sociologists

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)


The  above composition made its first public appearance in UCAS 12: Upper Class Action Sussex bulletin 12, a spoof broadside that I distributed, with the help of the accomplice who typed it, in the refectory at Sussex University on 1 April 1981.  I may blog other UCAS passages if the mood takes me.

I met the accomplice again in April 2012, at her father's funeral.  She had no recollection of the escapade!

Even without a great blow

This is a new poem -- written for a Poem Pigeon competition on the theme of autumn.

EVEN WITHOUT A GREAT BLOW

"Dark November nights!" I said,

too eagerly too often,

as I anticipated

in the year I was seven

nights as they'd been, November

of the year before,

the first when year was number,

month name. I remembered fire,

headlights, clouds, coke stove, sparklers.

Written recall of childhood

memories, having less loss

than mine in the writer's head,

and set forth with greater skill,

makes old autumns evergreen.

Nostalgia I first felt at school.

It's something I've since outgrown.

Entry in Poem Pigeon competitions is by posting on the Poem Pigeon site.  In other words, a poem entered there is automatically a published poem.  Most poetry competitions, meanwhile, continue to favour a set of rules in which entry is anonymous and published work is ineligible.  But the 'entry by web publication' model is one I've encountered increasingly often -- in the 2012 English National Opera Mini-Operas contest, for example -- and it'll be interesting to see how these two systems co-exist.  

And what effect will the growth of the web-entry model have on my output and on this blog?  Much of my poetry is unashamedly written for competitions, and my rule is to blog only poems that have achieved publication.  The web-entry model will let me blog poems much closer to the time of writing than I have often done.  

The anon-unpublished-entry model, on the other hand, has some effect of quality control.  For this blog, that effect is limited.  Some of the poems I've accounted as published (and therefore bloggable) have been self-published, or published in outlets where I was a member of the editorial team.  I'm not a member of any editorial teams at the moment; will Poem Pigeon take their place?

I have no quarrel with the winning poem in the Autumn competition, 'Autumnal wish' by Deborah Kellogg.  It's a good 'un.  What do you think?

What darkness can do

This is a new poem, written for the Paragram Poetry Competition.  In 2013, this competition took as its theme the Emily Dickinson quotation "a slant of light".

Follow the links for the competition shortlist, which my poem just missed, and the winners. 

The poem describes something I remember from childhood, but my brother Hugh says he has no recollection of it.

WHAT DARKNESS CAN DO

Aged six and five, we struggled to ignore

the shape at night light up the cupboard door,

upright with overhang. Then having seen it,

and dared to speak of it, we dared demean it,

called it the Rude Ghost's House, defying fright.

In fact it was all curtain and street light.

I can recall no learning of that, no

relief in finding it a shadow show,

but till I came to be indifferent,

seeing the light I would dislike, resent.

Library Camp East, Harlow College, 7 September 2013

I attended the Library Camp East unconference and learned a great deal.  But my notes from the sessions, including the sessions I had myself pitched, were extremely sketchy.  In consequence, this write-up consists mainly of nuggets and links.

Get creative with your CPD - Claire Sewell (@ces43). 

This group discussion on continuing professional development for librarians called up a number of resources that I shall investigate:

Claire's blog post 'CPD for free!'

The International Librarians Network -- penpals with an agenda

Barbara Allan's No-nonsense guide to training in libraries (London: Facet, 2013)

I offered my own fourpenn'orth about courses.  After taking time out and spending money on a seminar that hadn't helped me in proportion, I was advised by my mentor to sign up to email lists that would throw many course advertisements at me.  I'd thus be forced to adopt 'No' as a default response.  In time, I came to refine that into a 3-grade escalation:

plan A: ignore the course altogether
plan B: if course seems worthwhile, look out writings by course presenters, whether online or print on paper, and read those in preference to attending
plan C: attend the course

Sticks and carrots - Aidan Baker (@AidanBaker)

This was the session I pitched on reward and punishment in libraries.  I was daunted to find it attended by librarians of the seniority of Liz Jolly and Andrew Preater.

I had hosted a discussion by librarians from around Cambridge, a few days earlier, on the subject of library fines.  No one at that discussion worked in a library that rejected the idea of fines.  At the Library Camp session, on the other hand, the voices in favour of scrapping fines were many and strong.  An anecdote that was cited was from Freakonomics, and concerned not libraries but nurseries: the introduction of a charge for parents who were late in collecting their children was followed by a rise in the number of late collections, as the guilt that might have driven early collection found another channel in the paying of the late fee.

The Library Camp discussion also touched on the setting up of friends' groups for libraries.  A good insight from public libraries was that friends' groups that were integrated into the work of the library, and able to see themselves as partners with it, thrived better than friends' groups whose origin was in campaigning.  The latter tended sometimes to see themselves almost as rivals to the library.

Fifteen years in libraries - Group discussion led by Anna Martin (@AnnaLMartin) 

Anna led this discussion around her own life story.  See Anna's blog for what she is prepared to make public about this.  Her questions in the session drew some interesting comments.  A mobile library manager ruminated on the havoc that love could wreak in a well-run system.  And there were tears; not seen by me at the time, but found in a tweet afterwards: a participant told the world she was "Failing not to cry because session facilitator just talked about having mental health issues AND being successful and employed".
 
How do I get the hang of ...? - Aidan Baker (@AidanBaker)

This discussion of current developments in the library/information world -- e-books, open access, RDA -- I had envisaged first as drop-in/surgery-type sessions.  In the event, we were perhaps a couple of dozen people in a ring, some of whom were brave enough to answer questions. 

Daphne Dashfield took that role with regard to open access.  She explained the difference between gold and green OA.  The Open Access requirement is that papers (not books) reporting research funded by Research Councils UK must be made freely available online.  Gold OA has that business being handled by a mainstream publisher, whose charge to the author for this service may be as large as £3000.  Green OA is author's online self-archiving; often where the paper appears in a mainstream journal, and the journal's publisher allows the author to self-archive, sometimes with many conditions.  Daphne referred us to the Sherpa/Romeo database for more information on this, and to the training pages at her workplace.  And why was I so unconfident as not to cite the equivalent pages at my own workplace, which I had circulated to academics earlier in the year?

Claire Sewell answered questions about RDA, beginning with the expansion of the abbreviation: Resource Description and Access.  It's a compromise between what is needed and what is compatible with its predecessor AACR2.  She too cited her workplace's training material.

Finally, in this session, Katherine Rose (not on Twitter) of Regent's University, London, served as the ebooks expert.  I solicited her opinion of a prediction in an article I had read in the spring of 2012, that ebooks were likely to be superseded by pdfs.  Wrong question, perhaps.  Pdf is one format for the publication of ebooks, sometimes considered the laziest one; it is part of ebooks already, and can't be considered as their future.  Indeed, several in the group considered that publishers were exploring the possibilities of ebooks far too enthusiastically to be shoe-horned back into something as basic as pdf.

And there was a postscript.  A member of the circle asked how best to keep up with developments -- the three that had been discussed being only part of the changes to the profession.  A reply that I scribbled down was to follow the blog Librarian by day from Bobbi Newman.

I is for Idea... S is for Support... A Creative Library Alphabet - Gary Green (@ggnewed)

This was the last session I went to.  The aim was to gather words that would make a publicity alphabet for libraries.  There was some contention about the inclusion of the word 'books', but I think it eventually went in.

The day was a great one for all concerned, and I've seen a lot of well-earned tweets thanking Lisa Hutchins, Andy Darley, and Jo Harcus for pulling it all together.  You bet!

We all contributed food.  I brought pork pies from the Co-op and cakes made by Clare, who was sadly unable to attend in person.  They were popular.

 

Played out

Here comes a poem from 1991. I was reminded of it by Sarah Stamford's tweet, apparently following a presenter's slip of the tongue in the last night of the Proms 2013, about Vaughan Williams making a similar posthumous appearance.  It was published in Cous-cous 8, August 1995, p. 8.

PLAYED OUT

I dreamed it in the autumn: a late work,

Rachmaninov's symphonic miniature,

written in nineteen-seventy-five, The Yawn ...

tired twilit composition, half a minute

of themes long worn ... it had its premiere

in nineteen-eighty-six: Rachmaninov

himself conducted, made a modest speech

faintly across the air: we heard him hope

they would not ask for the Symphonic Dances

as an encore. Laughter, polite applause.

Conducting's such a task when you're a hundred

and thirteen years old, dead for forty-three.