New Tricks and New Frontiers

There are so many things we choose to do to heal our hearts when they feel too much. Poetry has always been my way of making sense of the world. And music that makes my guts hurt, played too loud, always, in the car or through headphones.

I sang for years, all around the country. Competitions, radio, TV, eisteddfods. Part of a mass of beautiful voices. But I've never played, and I can't sight-read. Creating is creating, though, and surely I could learn, I thought. Even at my great age.

It has been a slow process, taking my daughter's lead and learning the piano. Hour after hour of practice, my brain struggling to do two separate things at once. Flying, then crashing to the earth again, my clumsy hands failing to co-ordinate. Then one piece will click, and I'm away. It is beautiful and hurtful and hard and rewarding, like all beautiful and hurtful things are. I still can't sight-read, though...

New Frontiers
More beautiful things: also taking my first small steps into play-writing, with a new theatrical venture with Ashley Burgoyne. Our New Frontiers Theatre Company is in development, with our own one-act plays in the early stages of production. Full details at New Frontiers Theatre Company

Henry Graham

I read only yesterday about the death of poet Henry Graham. As a contributing editor of Ambit, he was responsible for my first professional publication in a journal. A painter, he turned to poetry, as painters often do. Considerably more sweary as a poet than I, he nevertheless picked out some of my poems from the doubtless massive piles of submissions, giving particular notice to Joan of Arc. They eventually took three poems, wanting to give me double page spread, for which I was paid the princely sum of £10. I never cashed the cheque....

Henry Graham's obituary in The Guardian

His reworking of Shelley's Ozymandias is right up my street....

Ozy

I met a traveller in Antiques Land
who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
stand in the desert . . . which somewhat surprised me, and
considering we’d never met before his frown
and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
left me non-plussed, that's not to say filled with dread,
after all buying an antique warming pan with tiny rings
minding my rhyme and meter when this black guy said
without introduction and with a mocking leer:
My name is Ozy man, I dig old ‘tings:
nothing is too unsightly, none beyond repair!
Noting bedside remains, I found I could repay
his colossal neck with a boundless stare
and quite alone he turned and walked away.

Henry Graham

Draft to Publication 2

Some poems arrive fully formed. Some take a more circuitous route. My Found poems take time; from that first jumbling together of my own words and the words of poets and poems I love to making some sense from them. To make them say what I want them to say.

Even at their most metaphorical, they always express something about me, and are never entirely separate. I have to tread carefully, to not overwork and dilute. Sometimes, my final draft undergoes only the tiniest of changes before publication. Sometimes it's for the best, and sometimes I wish I'd left well alone.

Found Poem II from The Sublime & The Ridiculous came to my attention today. My final draft was:

You meet the weather
coming the other way.
I suffer the air.
It is more than love,

this fiery kiss.
This animal sunset.
Words grow in
my silent mouth.

Your stark eyes tell
of the hawk's violence.
The hare's blood.
The bones at the strand line.

And the published piece:

I now wish I'd kept 'Words grow in my silent mouth' as I think this is really what I wanted to say. How so very often you can't say what you want to. I changed 'eyes' to 'pupils' to make the piece more intimate -- to express how it feels to be so close to someone that you see not just their eyes, but the very centre of their eyes and all extreme emotion. The poems say it better than I do. That's why I write them. These poems are raw, and needed to be left. Some poems stand working over. Some just don't.... 

Draft to Publication 1

When I was 16 I read a piece that had made its way into a Faber & Faber anthology by a young poet called Mark Jones. He would become famous as Mark Lamarr, but his 'Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die'  sparked that first idea that poetry wasn't just sonnets and villanelles. I was far too young to appreciate those; I write them now, in my 40s.

Then I read Lady Macbeth, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Poetry began to make sense, and I have been using it to make sense of the world around me ever since.

Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die

I'm the James Dean of the dole queue

You've got to admire my cheek 

Trying to work out how to live fast and die young

On seventeen-fifty a week

A legend in my own cubicle

All alone, never one of the mob

I'm the James Dean of the dole queue

A rebel without a job

New publication, written with Ashley Burgoyne, whose other work can seen on his website (https://ashleyburgoyne.wixsite.com/writerandcomposer).

The book is available from Amazon, and it is a beautiful and unusual journey through life. It begins with birth, progresses through life, and after a winter of loss ends with a moment of hope. Here are some poems from the 'Love and Work' section of the book, mine first, then Ashley's...

The Madonna of the Peninsula

I draw up the sea’s whiteness, like litmus.
Its brilliance outstares me. Tidelessly, its
flat face beats back the hammer blows
of relentless midday that press flat

the seared land. Arctic water, homeopathically

dilute, recedes to another shore that spewed
out our dull grey sand. The scurf is shorn off
by weighted men under wicker creels.

The man who lights my candles has eyes

steel-hard that the light rings soundlessly off.
My heart sings in its white carapace for him,
for him. I am a beacon for the ships at sea

and the hopeless insomniac walkers who
stalk the cliffs, becoming weightless, as
the dull brass plaques are shined to the sun’s
brightness; its deadened saltpan stare.

The Thing With Work

 The thing with work

Is it can hurt

The body,

The mind,

The soul.

 It’s supposed to help you

Achieve a goal.

Instead it leaves

Some kind of hole

 Where love was

Is now lost.

The price of earning

Comes at a cost.

Balance,

Where family comes first,

Is gone.

When people thirst

 For more than they need.

Evidence of this,

Proof of that.

An unending greed.

 Some say

Life’s a beach.

Not if

You decide to teach.

'Found' poems

A series of 'found' poems composed using an app that scrambles Facebook posts. I have taken the everyday things that I say and created a new space for them to exist in. I've found this interesting as an exercise in using social media as a tool in what is still seen as a more traditional art form. And to see which words I use a lot. There is plenty of love, sea and weather here....

When we are speaking

Your mouth mirrors the light,
Like rain and soft twilights.

This day cannot stand the constant
Howlings of wind. Nor can the trees,
Or urgent love.

I am more used to my sadness than you are.

The night brings another rose
And eyes the colour of pines.

                        *****

You meet the weather coming the other way.
I suffer the air.

It is more than love; this fiery kiss,
This animal sunset.

Your stark pupils tell of the hawk’s violence,
The hare’s blood. The bones at the strandline.

                        *****

Sea; let me stop now:
The solitude, and this weather.
I’ve begged to be too much better
Than I seemed; dangerously.

Only the hopeless prayers are left.
You balance your lashes, trying
And failing, to leave everything behind.
Mostly rooks in your shut mouth.

I watch as my words become strained
At your pace. Our rendition of love,
Vast and grey, yearns silently over the house.
You are choral; gregarious at the least.

This more than qualifies me your sweetness.

                        *****

You come now and then
Bringing your face before you.
I eat what little you give me.
My smallness grows.

In the woods, where we settle,
Nobody knows us.
We play at love.

Foxes gnaw at my grown nails.

                        *****

I will know tomorrow if it has been too long.
Hunger makes me sharp; it is my version of wildness.

The moon keeps the men in her wake
From their feral yowlings.

My meanings are blurred.

Yours are more pure.

Your eyes are fine, like mist and clarity.

I eat from them gladly.

                        *****

I love with the punctuality of a rainstorm,

Watching your eye’s dismay. Oh, but the song
On the sunny beach, made up as you walked
By the rims of anguish. Thinking
I’d go into an endless ecstasy for your boozing stride.

I wait to explain to his face in a photograph.

The others stand still around. I’d hold all the sea;
A snake coiled in the history of forever.
Love – the lungs stretch their intricate wings.

Memories of the evening;
The weft of my lifelong ailment,
The length of our lightening.
A wind still still hauls on them

Held in by the blackbirds.

                        *****

Today I leave the house for the others.
Lovely things tear my eyes,
But they bleed through the weather – through the sea.

I love the eyes of these stubborn hedges –
No more yours.
What kind of green blood
Swam to your good wishes?

Word and image...a new take on Little Red Cap. I've often reworked fairytale images -- and I like to twist them a little. This is a word and image piece I made for an exhibition at the Nicholson Gallery, Holt, Norfolk.