The intermittent resumption of service

Well, I've been here before.

It is a recurring theme of my writing existence that life gets in the way, to the extent that maybe I could credibly claim that enormous swathes of writing nothing are "integral to my process, actually". Anyone who's kept half an eye on here or Coastalblog over the last (what is it, twenty years now? Blimey), will have heard me sing this song before, long periods of silence followed by penitent blogs about how I need to make more time for writing, this time I mean it, etc etc. But I suppose there comes a point where one has to recognise that no, this isn't a situation which can be easily remedied, this is simply how one is. I'd like to imagine a world where I get up in the morning and make more time for myself to write regularly, start to submit again, maybe publish again, but I think it unrealistic to expect it, based on the evidence of, well, me being me for the last twenty years.

But despite this being a recurring refrain, that doesn't quite mean I'm willing to knock it on the head (another familiar trope of this particular sort of blog post, which I've written so many times now that that it practically qualifies as a sub-genre). To my pleasure, I've recently had the odd fleeting moment where the idea of writing didn't feel impossible, I wasn't immediately required for anything else, I'd done enough housework not to feel guilty, and managed to occasionally get the odd piece done. For the lack of anything better to do with them (for the idea of finding time to research which magazines or websites would be ideal seems far too fanciful right now, baby steps, I'm just pleased I'm writing again) I'll pop them here, as and when, I think. Doing so, even intermittently, is a distant connection to a place I still want to visit more regularly, and for longer periods, some day.

Lacking inspiration, the following were responses to other poems (getting reading again is a whole post by itself), a failsafe standby in times of creative drought. As to their origins, I'll leave it to the reader to guess. Anyway....

Unseen Dance

She moves between instants

then not, before

apparent, insistent, existence

It follows that her movement

is both something of herself and

helping the crowd see 

what it wants

in her steps

are the life histories

of everyone watchings, she

takes them, costumes them

contextualises them

tells them back

when she stops and

theaudience drifts away

thinking about what

they saw in themselves

some elated, some appalled

some disgusted, some afraid

she becomes herself again

her stillness is insistent in

instant the instant ceases 

there is silence

there is a silence

It's like this

i

he said your eyes

are watery, your hair

is seedy and your voice

reminds me of a chorus-line

Guys and Dolls. maybe

(She knew he meant

Like the sea, Flaxen and Musical

so let it slide, he was himself

so seldom, now)

It's good to see, she said

you've not lost touch with your roots

ii

I can't quite get it right

he said, the poem's

out of order

I struggled with the learning

I wanted time

to get my accent back

She said: you're older

than some hills

you've never lost it

a poem's not a puzzle, nor am I

iii

when they came to decipher him

and pick over the bones of his words

there was little left

he'd worked out what he wanted to say

and she'd laughed and said finally

you old fool. I was always here

iv

Love stories are a continuum

start and end points

thoughtless, idiotic, unnecessary punctuation

your eyes are always a part of me

and I have always been here

there's always been the shift of the sun

and what was it I meant to compare you to?

too many poems

he scratched his ear

picked up a pen

started to write

Parker Crescent, 9.25, Sunday

 It's a filled-in morning and the sky

for those that like to read into things

is suitably bleak

for the front pages

are a collage of cyclical death and

trying to write it with reference

to anything but the death

which exists on its own terms

is an obscenity, likewise commentary

the constant flow of takes

entrenched and dumb and you think

as you walk down a suburban street

still-sleeping of how

there's money being made off this death

and scores being settled off this death

and positions being taken

prejudices reinforced

careers advanced

tweets sent

off this death

and how if

you do anything but abhor it

entirely

fuck you

A Cliff Yates Collected? Yes please

I am semi-disconnected from the poetry world these days, but I'm in touch enough to hear that Cliff Yates has got a Collected coming out, which is excellent news. I was privileged enough to, with Cliff, be a member of the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research group back in the noughties, and quickly became a fan of his style. Never showy, but always insightful, with a deep-rooted humanity. I always enjoyed how Cliff's work could move surely from domestic to absurd to beautiful, often in the course of a single line.

So I shall, of course, be getting a copy. And I shall, because I am a monstrous egotist, be wondering why I don't have a lovely artefact with my name on it, and because it's a Sunday morning, and I haven't out anything up on here for a while, I wrote something about it..

Discovering Cliff Yates has a Collected Poems out

A bit of news I said

Cliff's got a Collected Poems coming out

I wasn't sure she cared, but carried on anyway

I'd nothing else important to say that morning

but do love the sound of my own voice

Why haven't I got a Collected Poems out? I asked

She looked up briefly from her Duolingo

It's because you never write any poems, she said

I mean, look at this, you're trying

to write one now and this

is the first line break you've attempted and

to be frank

I don't think you've pulled it off

I'm getting back into it, I said

I  think, anyway, it's like

riding a bike - there

that one was better

Barely, she said but yes

It's an improvement

I'll give you that

But before you get

ahead of yourself

it's your turn to clean the bathroom

Two years

Dear me, has it really been that long? Well, not quite, but almost.

The last post here was October 2021. In the interim, I've managed a few posts over at Coastalblog, and I've kept up a diary, but that's been the sum total of my writing. My practice has dwindled to nothing.

Well, not quite nothing; intention, but inaction.

I've kept a diary almost as a trail of breadcrumbs back to the idea of writing as a creative endeavour. Hoping that one day the act of making marks on paper might lead to some synapses firing somewhere. Writing as muscle memory.

I have always been too inconsistent with my writing to consider myself serious about it, over the last couple of years that inconsistency has hardened into a consistent nothing. I could make excuses and say that life has got in the way, but it is also true that I have allowed life to get in the way. It is furthermore true that I have separated writing and life, as though it were not part of it.

But it's still in there somewhere.

Keeping a diary has reminded me that I have always regarded writing as a way of looking at existence. My diary entries are broadly factual, an aide memoire, but every once in a while there is a flash of something other, a brief aside into philosophy, and attempt to raise the day above the quotidian (without fictionalising my own existence, which would defeat the object). Recently, I started titling diary entries, a way of inserting a line I'd heard that day (my favourite so far being the day which featured a trip to Southport, where the daytime karaoke by the Marine Lake ensured that day will always be titled "Little bit of Engelbert there, Ladies and Gentlemen") but also a way of contextualising the day. I realised that this was a creative act, it felt like I'd taken a step back down the road.

A few weeks later I started a file for writing bursts, not much, a few words here and there. This morning, I thought about writing a poem, I wondered if I could. I put a few lines down, I broke it back to basics. I'm not going to put it here. But it felt like another step back. This afternoon, I'm doing this.

These are tentative steps at best, but they are steps nevertheless. For a long while I didn't feel I had anything to say any more. Now I feel I might. We'll see. Either way, it feels good to be back.

 

Further alternative realities

The last blog briefly spoke about alternative realities, something of a theme which is always rattling around the back of my head. And as we live in increasingly unreal times, freshly amazed that things could turn out like this, it's an idea which feels increasingly relevant, another poem on that theme:

Hi-ho silver away

 

Crossing between

The parts of years

Seamlessly, as if

 

I have a lengthy series of apologies to make

 

One could only see

the moments between

from a distance

 

mostly for minor infractions

 

the accretion of time

layering, sedimentary

time, ossifying

 

like making you listen to my awful band

 

the unnameable

horror of the depths

the layers of green

 

like only ever projecting

 

the silence of

the midsummer house

its isolation

 

like never listening

 

the headland viewed

from above

a panning camera

 

I’ve only recently learned

 

land undulating in time

with the sea’s swells

a slow echo

 

that every act of indifference

 

an endless ripple

like a slowly shaken carpet

the Earth’s co

 

has consequences

 

-respondent sine waves

Slow, sad, imagined

Shuddering, unstoppable

 

And the land keens at minor slights

 

coursing along an imagined England

shaking it to the core

rattling its raddled heart

 

parched peas in a tin can

 

on a sun-stricken street in Kirby

I saw a three wheeled pram

Pushed determinedly

 

What have I done

 

I saw bombs fall where they’d

Make no sound

I watched the moss absorb history

 Taking the stories down into

The peat which

Rents stories

By the century

 And this arc this

Imagined England

Cutting itself loose from reality

Cutting itself away

From every thing but itself

 Watching its flights of roosting birds

Arrowing in flexing the sky

To hunker down for the night

 

Hold tight, everyone.

Other Englands

A short blog here, as the quotidian is intruding, but it's an idea I hope to come back to.

I've always rejected the idea of consistency in my work, such as it is. I think I've played around in the toy box a bit too much to have anything which could recognisably be considered my voice. Others disagree. But, having been at this for twenty odd years now, I have noticed that there's a few thematic consistencies which bob regularly to the surface.

I blame Roy Fisher, as I have done elsewhere on this blog, for getting me going in this regard, but I always seem to circle round the idea of alternate realities, or histories, or concurrent, different worlds which lie under the surface of this one. L39 was pretty much all about this, and it's an idea I've returned to again and again, I found myself doing it again the other day with this poem (to be continued, when I've a bit more time: 

Hesketh Out Marsh

 

desiring the follow- lines

the nowhere half-stops

the old ghost-walks

 

suggestion of edges

out in the haze

 the shine beneath you

 

a liquid, refractory air

the two dimensional world

rhombuses of daylight

 

the sense of walking

right into a horizon

and asking

 

what do we look for

when we lose ourselves

 in clouds of birds

 

a protective charm

tern-flight as spell

binding the air into knots

 

knitting the world together

stitching the air to the land

 

and

later I realise I’ve

brought something of the

marsh back with me

 

as down streets

elsewhere the gathering dark

bunches and follows

 

the coiled dark circus

rolls over  the cobbles

building and engulfing

 

and the uncertain halo

of marsh light

the memories of curlew cry

of water-spells

of empty skies

hold it back

 

The otherwise engaged

Evening, or morning, or afternoon. In the absence of anything better to do with my time, I humbly present some texts which, quite reasonably, would probably never find a home anywhere else. Been sifting thorough the archives again and Lord, for a lazy man, there's quite a lot of it. Couple of them are  a bit covid-y, so, I'll go with "of their time", yes, that sounds about right. Certainly imports a gravitas and sense of historical place which, well, they may deserve. I like them, anyway. Enjoy! (or not)

Pooled words 

 I couldn’t send anything out because I’m paralysed with

Fear but if you consider how now we can carbon date the whale

Sharks then it’s one more bit of history unlocked the

Bones in their ears the constant shifting of the

Water an argument against complacency as it’s

Always somewhere everything’s always somewhere the

Sort of poundshop wisdom that passes for depth in

Jim Jarmusch films I meant profundity it’s probably

Tom Waits that said it, smoking

 

It’s not a cookie it’s been painted, hah

Says Albert, 4, nude from the waist down, and that’s what passes for profundity

In the world of locked-down four year olds

And who is anyone to say which is the wiser?

I’ve stopped trying to compare, to be

Honest with you at this point I’m mostly

Trying to hit the word-count.

That’ll do, I imagine,

I have

Low standards when nobody’s watching. Shuffling roughly

Off the poetry training pitch in baggy trackies, letting my gut out

(there’s plenty of it)

Sloping off for a fag and a pint before

Puffing my cheeks out

And saying yeah, tough day today

Worked hard, gave 110%

The best part is nobody knows what I’m doing

And nobody reads it anyway, so it doesn’t

Really

Count, does it?

The middle podium

 

The gradual whittling away of advisers

The middle podium

is the power podium

We don’t need graphs any more

We don’t need facts any more

At this point, it’s moot whether we need voters any more

In a sense it’s refreshing

The obvious lack

Of need to for truth

At least you know where

You stand, if you’re lucky

 

Why is this lying liar

Lying to me?

Facts are inconvenient, though,

and the signalling

Of advisers is too much

To keep a straight face

So they have to go.

 

Anyway, cheer up

If I could lie like this

With an adviser stood by me

I’d rule the world

So maybe there’s hope for you all yet

Communist breakfast 

 

You can stuff your lefty breakfasts

Your eggs benedict

Your smashed avocado

Get over it, avocado, you lost

 

We fought our war for the chance to eat  bacon

Now no one can tell us to stop

Black pudding and a fried slice

This is what control tastes like

 

Not this communist breakfast

This roast heritage tomato

This poor imitation

We fought our war

For glorious sausages

The sausages of old England

Full of promise and pig

We took back

Controlof our sausages

We fought our war

Whilst veterans died

Fow the chance to eat

Cheap breakfasts in Spoons

And you

You will not deny us or breakfast

Death to yoghurt

And death to advice

We’ll take no advbice

On our breakfast

Nno words to the wise

About hash browns

Or sly digs about beans

You can keep your elitist

Granola

Hens invented eggs

And the British invented frying them

In good British oil

On good British pans

And now as our good British veins

Slowly contract

We die happy

The taste of freedom on our lips.