Poetic Champions Compose

I love the works of Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage. 

Simon Armitage was asked to give three pieces of advice to aspiring poets and he said, "Read, read and read".  It's good advice but I think the poetic impulse arises earlier. It made me think about my own history, how my love of words arose.

'The child is the father of the man' (Wordsworth) and for melancholic children there are consequences. I can still recall the first poem that made an impact on my psyche and tapped straight into a rich vein of sadness woven through my DNA. Scarecrow :

My poor old bones, I've only two,

A broom shank and a broken stave,

My ragged gloves are a disgrace,

My one peg foot is in the grave.

Dylan - understood in the heart

Recited by Mrs. Bagley in the second year of primary school it induced such an exquisite sorrow that sent my six year old self off on lone walks down the playing fields to contemplate the daisies and ponder the words that surprised, intrigued and puzzled in equal measure: 'broom shank', 'stave', 'grave'. They had resonance! I berated myself for my previous lack of empathy with these wretched creatures stuck in fields. Here was my muse, encountered in melancholy meanderings through the woods and meadows around home.

At seven I independently found my way to the church choir. Anthems, psalms and hymns ignited my imagination. "Jesus, Jesus, Lo he comes and loves and saves and freeze us" I sang. Bizarre! A little later I found out that nobody was being frozen but freed! What a disappointment! I loved the impenetrable "freeze us"; much more mystery about that. And then:

What peaceful hours I once enjoyed

How sweet their memory still

But they have left an aching void

The world can never fill.

Accessible simplicity: Wendy Cope

I understood this implicitly. I was an old man trapped in an eight year old body. I spent an inordinate number of warm summer days indoors and retreated into books. I remember my mom contrasting me with my slightly younger brother, "He's always got his nose in a book. His brother's a proper lad." The neighbours concurred - I needed to get out and climb more trees. But, I was cultivating my own aching void.

Hills of the North rejoice

River and mountain spring

The great mystery of the brooding dark North – rejoicing streams! This was my world!

Mystic - WB Yeats

Inspired by a sad documentary on the life of French chantuese Edith Piaf, I wrote a sonnet. I pored over the form (in a Shakespeare volume I found in the local library) worked out the rhyme scheme and really laboured. I loved the romance of Je ne regrette rein, that insists so much on regretting nothing that you know the narrator regrets everything! It was the first thing I wrote that ever felt accomplished. The first thing that meant more than the sum of its words. The teacher was sceptical, "Is this your own work?" Maybe Edith Piaf wasn't a fit subject for a boy of eleven? But wasn't everything up for scrutiny?

Forget indulgent prog rock, ignore frivolous glam rock and passing fashion. It was the 70s vogue for solipsistic singer-songwriters that entranced and enchanted: words again. Hejira, Joni Mitchell's gorgeously ethereal pean to the romance of road trips:

There's comfort in melancholy

When there's no need to explain

It's as natural as the weather

As this moody sky today. (Hejira)

My older sister had this penfriend. I remember seeing a photo of him dressed in an Afghan coat with greasy long hair and droopy moustache. I didn't get what she saw in him. Her romantic fantasies were squashed flat one day when she received a cassette tape.

Overlooked: Dory Previn

I stepped into an avalanche

It swallowed up my soul.

When I am not this hunchback

That you see,

I sleep beneath the golden hill. (Avalanche)

Her romance ended but my love affair with the works of Leonard Cohen continues to this day! I took to sublime misery and dark humour like a duck to water. I began a little scrapbook of writing, not so much influenced by as mimicking or plagarising what I was hearing. And then I encountered Bob Dylan.

He became an obsession. I spent hours trying to decode Blonde On Blonde but the mystery only deepened:

I just can't fit,

I believe it's time for us to quit,

When we meet again,

Introduced as friends,

Please don't let on that you knew me when,

I was hungry and it was your world. (Just Like A Woman)

Sylvia Plath

I gleaned two things from this. First that some things are understood in the heart and not the head and second the importance of hearing words - phrasing, timing, rhythm and rhyming. The way Dylan alights the word 'hungry', stretching out the phonemes, 'hungaareeee', whatever he means you know he means it. I heard Dylan was mercurial and decided I would be too and my new policy was never to give a straight or predictable answer to any question. It got me into trouble but it also sharpened the poetic use of language.

1975: Dylan's Blood On The Tracks spoke volumes on the subtle use of words:

Say for me that I'm alright

Though things get kind of slow,

If she thinks that I've forgotten her,

Don't tell her it isn't so. (If You See Her Say Hello)

Why shouldn't she be told? Vulnerability to painful to admit? Embarrassment? One carefully chosen word can encompass so many possibilities. How much better than a simple instruction to "tell her"?

Open your eyes and ears and you're influenced.

Sublime: John Keats

Pete Brittan & Evelyn Fitzmaurice, two inspirational teachers influenced and encouraged in equal measure. They introduced me to Shakespeare, the Liverpool poets, Wordsworth, Keats, Harold Pinter, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, William Blake, John Betjamen Eliot, Auden, Jane Austen..... a world of words and ideas. Their enthusiasm and breadth of knowledge was infectious. I just absorbed as much as I could and learned many works off by art. I can still recite most of The Wife of Bath's Tale and the Prologue to the Cantebury Tales!

Stevie Smith of pop - Morrissey

Form is a discipline that for me, aids writing. When a poem just isn't working I will often try it in a different form. Changing a sonnet to a villanelle or vice versa sometimes improves the expression of a theme.

The songwriters I loved pointed me backwards to their influences: Lorca, Pound, Woody Guthrie, Whitman, Rousseau, the Bible, Poe, Rimbaud and latterly classical Greek stuff. At different points I wanted to be all of these people – I was good at mimicking style - but the common message of all their lives seemed to be that we should all find our own voice: write what we know.

Occasionally I read my own stuff & I hear echoes of others. Indeed I revised For A Second I Forgot partly because one stanza strayed to close to a Cohen song:

I'm lazy, weak but harmless

this much I admit,

Joni Mitchell

tighten up the harness

you win and I submit. (Me – For A Second I Forgot)

You're weak and your harmless

Sitting in your harness

With the wind going wild

In the trees (Cohen – Light As A Breeze)

But sometimes I only hear the echo in retrospect. 

Take this:

The fine wines of the purple line

Leave a bitter after-taste (Me – Apolide)

and

The snows of the Tyrol and the clear beer of Vienna

Are not very pure or true (Sylvia Plath – Daddy)

I left this in as a kind of a homage, a nod to Plath, but I don't expect everyone will hear it and Plath's line is better anyway. Incidentally, if you have an interest in Plath's work, seek out the BBC recordings from the 1962. Her recitations of Lady Lazarus & Daddy are hugely impressive, her phrasing and stresses bring new layers of meaning. I can recite these too in Plath's voice!!

Morrissey – the Stevie Smith & e.e. cummings of pop – wrote:

If you must write prose and poems

The words you write should be your own,

Don't plagarise or take on loan.

There's always someone, somewhere

With a big nose, who knows (Morrissey - Cemetery Gates)

But Joni Mitchell wrote:

A part of you pours out of me

In these lines from time to time (Mitchell – A Case of You)

Lately I've been re-reading W. B. Yeats, poring over Simon Armitage's back catalogue, mourning the loss of Dory Previn and rediscovering her in the process... revisiting some well known Auden, thinking how much more profound later Roger McGough is, taking in some Wendy Cope whose apparent simplicity conceals depth charges. Read, read and read.

The Absolute Need

Owls hoot in the oaks

the jasmine is heady,

I look from the window

and watch them together

scoop the moon from

the shimmering surface

drunk & unsteady,

I almost believe

we'll be happy forever

I'm 54 and I'm ready.

I almost believe

we are marked,

we are blessed,

so I'm keeping the vigil

to honour the guest,

with my absolute need

to do the right thing -

we've agreed, we've concurred

I've given my word,

you'll accede and comply

we're putting you first,

with my absolute need

my unequivocal thirst.

Hot afternoon fucks

so urgent we must,

absorbed in the moment

abandoned to lust,

Sinews are taut

muscles are rigid,

the gathering tide

resisting its limits,

this is my sacrament -

the body, the blood,

the burgeoning tide

becoming a flood,

only doing

what any man would.

You are appeased

by the pleasure of pleasing,

the pleading, the kneeling,

the wanting, the needing

to do the right thing -

and in doing redeeming.

Your duty is solemn,

the ritual light,

so Godamn you man

don't fight,

just do as I say,

obey my demands,

its not a suggestion

it's a command -

that is the line

this is the measure,

play with my upright sense

of unrepentant pleasure.

There in the shower

Washing your back

caressing your head

With my cock in your crack,

Pressing your face

up to the glass.

Your spine is a river

I'm tracing it's race

through the darkest ravine

to the holiest place

Lapping you up

drinking you in

with an absolute need

to do the right thing -

Slapping your moody

French ass!

Congress of three

divine intimation,

the moon and the jasmine

the men that you are,

I think we are saved

and this is salvation,

for a minute at least

I almost believe.

All of my lovers

romantic and filthy,

you are forgiven

I hope you forgive me,

for now it's implied

that all of creation,

submits and accedes -

and works in accord,

with my absolute need.

Listen to The Absolute Need here

The Absolute Need mp3

CHOICES

Twenty brands of cornflakes

On the supermarket shelf.

A myriad minor choices -

"But is there something else?"

Sixty flavours of jam,

A hundred kinds of pop.

Tons of trivial choices -

But only one place to shop.

CAMERA SHY

I bought you coffee -
always did on Sunday morning at the Clock Cafe.
We'd sit at the window people watching,
sometimes you'd mock me and say,
"Don't you have any mirrors at home",
or "Ooo don't look now, spot the gay".
My retort was just as bad,
"You bitter old queen -
they all think you're my dad!"

But that was another Sunday thirty years ago.
Today the repartee has worn a little thin,
resting on the counterpane,
the silent testimony to your years with him.

I'm in so few of those casual snaps,
fact is I took them all -
except the one you sneaked unposed,
where I was naked and stretched
across the rocks, Cretan boys were diving
from the docks and came out
blurred into the background.

An obvious eye for the boys
you'd always qualify it and say,
"you're not a flash-in-the-pan
you're up there among the men,
you're special to us". I wanted to ask
was that picture of me or them?
But I already knew the answer -
It was probably both! Such an appetite
for love. An infinite capacity
for mayhem.

I didn't quite see it like that back then.
You could say my position has evolved,
because now I believe everything
you said - the jealousy dissolved.
And I don't know if it's the medicine talking
because you ask if I loved you
equally. I thought you deserved the truth
and when I said I loved him more -
You put it down to callow youth,
"but thanks for sticking around!"

then so generously added,
"he loved you too, you know"
He gripped my hand as if his
life depended on what was coming next
"you're not in the album much
and I see why?", and you know what
he's right. "We always let you take the pictures.
You were camera shy".

For A Second I Forgot #2

I counted my achievements

there were not too many,

on dismal mornings such as this

I cannot think of any.

The ticking of the clock

at the centre of my drama

for a second i fogot

its arbitrary measure

For a second I forgot

in the expanding minute

my burden might be heavy

but there is nothing in it.

For a second it's accepted

with complete concession

the contingent and connected

empty of all mission

For a second there resigned

all urge and aspiration,

no weight or value was assigned

no number or ambition.

For a second i forgot

and there was no resistence

for a moment I was locked

within the flow of all existence

Listen to For A Second I Forgot here

For A Second I Forgot mp3

Apolide ~ (For Gregg)

On Carmel beach he saunters

where turquoise meets the border,

His arms outstretched

His upturned palms

Seek signals of a different order,

Eyes the milky horizon line

For signs of calmer water.

His sullen self numb

to the laughter of companions,

neither one thing, the other or either,

Frei nor Frum, Jew nor 'Goy,'

Mount Hermon broods over Babylon.

Why does he push the bar?

What does his heart desire?

Brittle as bone char.

He's out of sorts with the desalinated state,

Where love finds it's expression

As jealousy and hate, and the fine wine

Of the purple line leaves a bitter after-taste.

Assassins dispatch, contradictions confound,

tired aspirations rake the frontiers flat.

What's the itch he can't scratch?

Golan Magic propaganda grates,

And the Jesus Trail – for Christ's sake!

From Haifa to Nice, Nice to Montone,

Where his voice wormed it's way through

One dark winter night stateless and lonely,

Somehow he knew this was home.

Mornings of defeat, the triumphs of the evening,
The ebb and flow of feeling set the tone,
Welling up of passion, advancing, retreating,
this lying down mute and alone. 
Forging our agreements, fuelling our dispute, 
exposing the raw rootless discontent -

A wound so sore it bleeds,

'Too much', he says, 'don't touch, don't touch,

I need you'.

In Haifa now he rediscovers

His life in the eye of the tempest,

He has his lover and the love of his friends,

Boundaries, edges, crises and endings. All this -

Why swap high-security for uncertainty and risk?

He calls from his confinement

Intimate and cold, waves over verges

and marches, across unbridgeable distances

In space and time – a thousand miles

and two decades if truth be told,

But we are connected, fingers through fences,

at the perimeter of his heart,

where sentries forbid entry

to his soul.

On Carmel beach he wonders

What would happen if next,

He abandoned himself to the moment

Relinquished his grip on the rest,

Let limits slip and barriers lift,

He types out a text

He holds up his phone in his palm,

But the signals adrift.

It's no cause for alarm.

My message is already clear,

For now and whatever, for love and for honour,

“My heart is a harbour

You can shelter here”


Listen to Apolide here: Apolide mp3

Camp

By the dull electric lamp

arose a vision so intense,

undimmed by squalor, stench and damp

in that Polish prison camp.

Emblems of their offence,

pink triangle and yellow star,

tattoo just below the sleeve

a hunger for tomorrow,

for reprieve. A hope that 

what began in sorrow

would not end in grief.

A fantasy, the sweet relief of human touch,

the longing that grew so much,

became so great -

the lightest brush seemed profligate.

For dignity of those involved, for all -

they did what dignity demands,

resolved that when their names were called

to go together hand in hand.

In the furnace in the flame

Each heard the others name,

And as the flames burned brighter still

their grip grew tighter

till their fingers intertwined,

tight as their desire

in the furnace in the fire,

Flesh and bone combined.

The heat intensified

then tempered, they found 
release that was denied
and they were one

with ash and embers,

and their hearts were unified.

Listen to Camp here

Camp