Wednesday 14 February 2024

Rom

A great sadness to hear Nnorom Azuonye has passed away.  Poet and pastor, founder of Sentinel Quarterly he promoted Nigerian literature for more than 20 years and gave many local poets an encouraging lift with SQL and his quarterly competitions which were the model arrangement of such things.  Along the way he published my first submitted poems and then, a few years later, invited and accepted my first manuscript.  He put me squarely on the first stepping stones of my poetry writing. 

A generous, sympathetic and good man. He could talk alright, and I will miss our conversations.

Nnorom died on 21 January and leaves behind his wife Thelma and four children whom he loved very much.

Sunday 31 December 2023

The Party Wall

Pyramus and Thisbe: prompted by last night's rain, a thought led to the marionettes in the oddly poignant 'Being John Malkovich'. One google string leads to another. The Pyramus and Thisbe Society is a body of surveyors and lawyers and, on special occasions, their spouses.

Mari...

full poem once accepted somewhere maybe 

...my bones are dead.
No cell retains a strand of life
to edge me on the infinite...
   a corpse of balsa boxes fixed
with glue and pin

The more i think of it, the more the history of creating the animate comes to mind, from Pygmalion and Galatea to Shakespeare's human statue and Pinocchio, then Shaw's rather awful funny version of improvement, and a thousand cautionary tales current today. Aye, AI.  The captured human heart.


 

Saturday 11 November 2023

November 23


 With other cares aside,  appearances and reviews multiply this month, 3rd of 3 city walk poems accepted by Stepaway Outreach, hard on the heels of By Royal Fort, taken for the inaugural edition, i think, of Engine Idling. Station to Station will be in the Gloucestershire Poetry Prize anthology published sometime over winter.  Gee, Glos is a hard nut to crack.  The Worst Thing appears in the Ofi Press #73. And the Raoul Julia Dracula pictured above is the cover of The Crank #9

This month's Pulsar reviews will / i understand they will / include my splutterings on a book of poems by Matthias Goritz translated from the German by Mary Jo Bang.  I thoroughly recommend it to anyone looking for the current direction in poetry, or for a new direction of their own.  And finally,

ACTIVIST ALPHABET, an exhibition of prints and poems by Christine Felce includes 'A memorable evening of poetry with with Adam Horovitz JLM Morton and Dominic James, plus open mic on the theme of climate change (sign up on the night) 7pm, Friday 17 November, The Museum in the Park, Stroud. 

Friday 20 October 2023

The Sergeant

As i pick my way through bishops and presbyters of the ancient Christian church: a few lighter thoughts on earlier days of sacrifice and excess bubble to the surface.  As a for instance, Alcoholic Husbands is a phrase i hear quite often. Poor men who once were heavy drinkers. 

I have a long picked over, short verse on Achilles - The Sergeant - in this week's dearbooze.com and the young god of wine will soon recline on his drunken ship in The Crank, Back on the Wine Dark Sea.  

Dear Booze eh? This montage includes Bruegel's Tower as i am put in mind of my early and not-unbalanced verse on grog and separation. 'I recall the vaults of Babel, its palm wine jars and mead...' Skol.


 

Friday 11 August 2023

Athelney

This week DG Sentinel published Elf Counsel unexpected and sweet.  One of five presented at the inaugural and short-lived Bard of Hawkwood Mayday eisteddfod 2015.  I’d like to wrastle it into shape, at least insert a dropped ‘in’ around the middle:  but I love the photo sourced by Dweebs Global.  It looks like Saxon pedigree to me, but what I do know? Nuthin. 


Athelney runs: 
Riddle/ The Great Army / Brother Rex / Elf Counsel / Late Home
and starts, with stage direction and intro:

More skald than bard, we-eat together,
I make the same obeisance to the court
[show the Roman tonsure] So:

For an eisteddfod, with rhymes of flood
my bid for bard at Hawkerwood
and should a verse
or two run bad, Speak Out and we’ll move on
through Athelney, that swollen plot of land,
an island, whale-humped on the Levels,
laced about with deep canals, the spot
where Alfred’s cake shop stood.
So pet your nettles & get settled
for a turn on the flood, this river-ish  Riddle…

Saturday 29 July 2023

NFTs

Prompted by the Summer edition of Rattle; an enthralling interview and its showcase of Non Fungible Tokens Poets, I've spent $25 on Tezos and tried a short poem as the basis for content text on AI artworks. Have you tried the controls, the market? I've hardly got started.  

It's a right "Come all ye". 


Friday 28 July 2023

Traffic in Snow

Finding similarities in first line imagery puts me in mind of borrowing, not stealing. Much as a poem written entirely in any particular poet's distinctive style has its own root cause, even if it that is tapped-in to what's come before, to be in that manner of delivery, of vocabulary, acknowledges what has come before. 

In lyrics and in verse there is scope for an allowable, a reasonable sort of plagiarism, particularly when successful imagery stands on experience recreated and shared, whether that experience is in real or in fact only, in some manner recognised.

Then, first images/opening stanzas shape the last. In the example below we find Lowell in Mandelstam, today’s The Friday Poem’s verse by Ian Harker whether knowingly or not drawing on both. And the last lines loop, return to the start, as is common practice. It feels right musically, bar by bar, and as the concluding thought or verse echoes its own rationale by leading back to where it starts. 

That comes off a bit pat. That is, as in any argument in speech we come full circle, addressing the starting point. Which does not mean opening lines show us so how far we can go but they suggest where we return to finish the verse. In this case, traffic in the snow. 

That might suggest my preference for Mandelstam's poem over Lowell's - i'd hesitate to go so far as to say that.  My simple inference and conclusion is Dylan’s line: If there’s an original idea out there I could use it right now.

Three poem tops, then tails follow.

Petersburg Lines

Above the yellow of the government buildings
the murky snowstorm has whirled for a long time
and the jurist settles down again in his sleigh,
with a broad gesture drawing his overcoat tighter.

The ships are hibernating, In the heat of the sun
the thick cabin glass has caught fire.
Leviathan, a battleship in dock,
Russia heavily rests.

For the Union Dead

The old South Boston Aquarium
stands in a Saraha of snow now, Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Snowday

The cars are falling with long sighs
down Monk Bridge Road, their tanks empty
and the beck grinding to a halt

beneath the tarmac. This is how it ends: 
cars slide to a stop in snow that wasn’t forecast 
or if it was, it wasn’t supposed to stick,

vehicle skids into vehicle, voices on speaker 
slur with the cold…

And conclusions:

The file of motor traffic flies into the mist;
odd-man-out Evgeny, touchy,
mild pedestrian, ashamed of his poverty
breathes in petrol fumes and curses fate.

&

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

&

...in the sliding, skittering cars 
and there is beauty in the warning lights
but most of all there is beauty in how you fall.