Poetry Reading #4

Although this poem is not from the Spoken Worlds set, it is a piece I do fairly frequently which always goes down very well.

Poetry Reading #3

In the final section of the Spoken Worlds I did three poems about lost love. This is the rehearsal.

Poetry Reading #2

This is the rehearsal for the second section of the recent performance at Spoken Worlds. In that I moved away from the humour of the first section and did a couple of serious travel pieces followed by a slightly less serious short poem.

Poetry Reading #1

Friends in America have occasionally said that they would like to hear me performing some of my poems so I've decided to record some of my rehearsal performances and put them here.

The first three are the rehearsal performances for my recent set at Spoken Worlds. Spoken Worlds is in three sections. For the first section I did this brace of pub poems.

Sliced Bread Redux

A few days ago I posted a rather slight poem inspired by a rather slight BBC news story about bread. I linked to the story which was about the invention of the method that produces the kind of pasty, uniformly-sliced bread that is the most common form on sale today. (However good or bad that might be!)

I also posted it on wordcraft where a fair bit of protest was raised from all quarters. Most humourously it was raised by Guy Barry.

Here then is a repeat of my poem, followed by Guy's reply.

On the fiftieth birthday of sliced bread

How could I not have known?
Why has no one ever said?
They really should have told me!
I'm older than sliced bread.
Sliced bread is only fifty -
In fact fifty years today -
And me, I'm fifty-four
And beginning to decay.

For four years from the start
Of my still enduring life
People went on cutting
Their bread up with a knife
They managed for themselves
The thickness of a slice
And most people I am sure
Sliced their fingers once or twice.

But four years after me
The sliced loaf was invented
And sandwich makers everywhere
Were happy and contended.
The best thing since sliced bread?
Many things are said to be!
But the best that went before?
Well, clearly, that was me.

                                    Bob Hale

How could you not have known?
No wonder no one said!
Now everyone has told you
You're younger than sliced bread.
Sliced bread is over eighty,
By quite a little way;
At only fifty-four, you seem
A long way from decay.

But four years after you
The folks at Chorleywood
Invented springy, spongy bread
Which didn't taste so good.
Why can't the supermarkets sell
The proper stuff instead?
A loaf from Chorleywood is not
The best thing since sliced bread!

                        Guy Barry

It's very difficult to argue with that.  Thanks, Guy for the permission to repost it.

Ongoing #75

This started life as a sunset poem. The illustration actually shows a turkey in the foreground but has a setting sun behind a fence in the background. The poem mutated in its creation into something rather different.

Cemetery Sunset

there are lights in the sky
above the cemetery gates
above the ranks of standing stones

the colours, as the day begins to die,
shroud its corpse in crimson
gold and purple, hide its bones

and slowly blacken into night
as down among the silent angels
the day is laid once more to rest

amid prayers that perhaps it might
once more be resurrected from the grave
and with its light the world be blessed

A new poem

Since I took my redundancy in January I have been able to go to my writing group, Scribblers, quite regularly again, though of course after one more session it will end again - China to Bilston is a little too far to come.

At every meeting we chat a lot but we also do a writing exercise dreamed up by one of the members. To be honest very little of what I ever produce there is a enough of a standard to progress with. It all stays in the notebooks but rarely gets developed. Tonight was different. Silvia gave us a whole selection of possible topics one of which was to describe someone by describing only his possessions. We usually have about forty minutes to do it. At the end of the forty minutes tonight I knew I had something - a little raw and unfinished true, but something. When I read it out the others thought so too.

So I've spent another hour and a half on it at home and now I really think I have something. 

This is another poem in tribute to my late father.

by his belongings

we cleared the house today
my brother and I
started with his clothes
filled plastic sacks without ceremony
talking about anything
except what we were doing

suits he'd always worn
suits he'd hardly worn
suits he'd never worn
suits he'd bought new
and suits he'd bought
in charity shops

shirts hung on hangers
shirts folded on shelves
shirts still in cellophane
old shirts secured with pins
new shirts secured
with plastic clips

three pairs of pyjamas
all striped and flannel
one of them unused
"in case I ever have
to go to hospital"
he'd always said

a suitcase full of ties
garish and bright and wide
some silk, some cotton
but he'd always worn
only one, the same one
narrow, plain and brown

we crushed them all into sacks
and moved on

in a drawer we found
nine assorted watches
four wind-up, four battery
one fob watch without a chain
all of them were broken
save that last one

every pair of glasses
he'd ever owned
in almost ninety years of life
and every pair my mother
had ten years ago left behind
never thrown away



more of my mother's things
old costume jewellery
a box of photographs
their wedding album
a pair of her gloves
too small and soft to be his

and then his papers
his army identification
with a cap badge from the HLI
a works ID from 1942
just before he'd gone to war
clock number 694

and still more papers
rent books from before my birth
my certificate for swimming
one width of the baths
my brother's school report
B-minus for his maths

there were a few books
all of them westerns
his progress marked
in precise corner creases
all of them started
none of them finished

outside we tackled the shed
every tool old, rusty, useless
and all the wooden boxes
he'd used the tools
to make the boxes
to store the tools

and then it was done
all the parts of his life
separated into piles
throw these away
give these away
keep these forever

and on top of that pile
the pile of things  to keep
that army ID card
an impossibly young man
with a short haircut
and a smile wider than his face

we cleared out the house today
my brother and I
and then we poured three beers
left one for him and drank
toasting him in silent
memory of his life

Ongoing #74

Another of the doodles in the book shows several pictures showing the procession of the seasons with space for the artist to add some more.
This poem not only follows the doodle AND the same experimental picture technique that the last one had, BUT ALSO is a follow up to my metaphor and simile workshop.

I don't think it works very well but I'll post it anyway.

Unlikely Descriptions of Time

time

rolls like a wheel down a steep hill
freezes like a statue standing still
bounces like a kangaroo
waves in the breeze, red white and blue
crawls slow as an insect on the ground
keeps us tied and tightly bound
displays its peacock progress proud
threads different speeds among the crowd
falls as hourglass grains of sand
breaks like eggshells in my hand
drifts like clouds across the sky

and
then
you
die

Happy Birthday Sliced Bread

On the fiftieth birthday of sliced bread

How could I not have known?
Why has no one ever said?
They really should have told me!
I'm older than sliced bread.
Sliced bread is only fifty -
In fact fifty years today -
And me, I'm fifty-four
And beginning to decay.

For four years from the start
Of my still enduring life
People went on cutting
Their bread up with a knife
They managed for themselves
The thickness of a slice
And most people I am sure
Sliced their fingers once or twice.

But four years after me
The sliced loaf was invented
And sandwich makers everywhere
Were happy and contended.
The best thing since sliced bread?
Many things are said to be!
But the best that went before?
Well, clearly, that was me.

Ongoing #73

Another picture in the doodle book I have used for inspiration shows a page full of blank faces to be drawn in. Only the first one is done and it shows an old man.
I have combined this with an experimental technique using a random section from the huge collection of picture prompts that I use in class.

The poem is called His Masks


he closes his eyes and remembers
all the masks he wore
when he was younger

he was an artist
.........................putting truth on canvas
.........................icebergs to sink complacency
he was a dancer
.........................plucking joy from motion
.........................and motion from joy
he was a musician
.........................trimming the shape of the world
.........................into topiaries of sound
he was a lover
.........................with the wildness of his youth
.........................and then the warmth of his age

he opens his eyes and he wonders
what mask he wears now,
perhaps an anticipatory
death mask

Like a simile...

I thoroughly enjoyed the poetry workshop I went to on Saturday, the awful journey I had to get there notwithstanding. The specific topic was the use of metaphor and simile and there was a lot of very lively discussion about what constitute good and bad examples.

We finished, as we always do at these things, with a writing exercise. There were several different tasks to choose from and I chose one based around writing several smaller observations of a single scene. What I produced on the day was sort of OK - I was probably less happy with it than others seemed to be - but nothing I would have kept in that form.

So I've now done some more work on it and the final poem is presented below. Before we get to it, a single note concerning the poem and the day. I said I had a terrible journey there, and so I did, my train was eventually forty minutes late and it was only because I had allowed a lot of time that I was a mere fifteen minutes late. When it came to the poem I decided to get something positive out of the experience.



So here it is.

Wolverhampton Station, 4th June

three teenage girls
bare-shouldered and bare-armed
huddle beneath the station roof
like ducklings beneath the river bank
watching raindrop static in the water

a tattooed man
his arms a map of his soul
chases a bouncing dog  and is
devoured by the open carriage door
before the train slithers down the track

a chinese boy
tries repeatedly to ask
the unresponsive station guard
the way to platform three but he
is grey and graveyard-statue silent

an elderly woman
with chin-high buttoned coat
pulls bulging shopping-trolley luggage
as a child pulls a wooden train
as if she has mistaken here for Tesco

a wire-spectacled man
with food stains on his jacket
and shirt tails bidding for freedom
follows crazy-paving paths
that no one but he can see

and I for my part
look to station board and track
in Wimbledon spectator motions
both inform me of the self-same truth
my train it seems is still delayed

Bilston Voices: My Bit

For those interested, should there actually be any, my complete set from Bilston Voices can be found by following these links in order.

A Safe And Secret Place
The Naughty Chair
Freedom
Games Lessons
First Love In Flashback
Chaos Theory
The Bangkok Hustle  (not the others on this page, just that one!)
The Teddy Bear House

Autobiography

There were of course both mandatory and optional courses at University. The pure maths course and the applied maths course were compulsory as were a number of others not mentioned in this poem. We also had to choose a course taught outside the maths department from a list provided. I chose, because I'd done it at A-level, a physics course but almost immediately regreted it. Almost anything would have been better.

That's because the one thing that all our courses had in common was that they were all delivered by lecturers who, let's be generous, had their distinctive styles.

Lecturers

The pure maths lecturer
Entered the room barefoot
And wearing a Kaftan
As if it were still nineteen-sixty,
And flower-power and peace and love
Held sway on campus.
But it was nineteen-seventy-seven
And punk was in the ascendant.
He sat cross-legged on the desk
And asked a question,
"Why is the set of all left socks
Poorly defined?"
No one answered him.
He seemed disappointed.

The applied maths lecturer
Entered the room in a tweed jacket
With leather elbow-patches
As if he were a geography teacher,
And we were uniformed schoolchildren
In a secondary class.
But we had left all that behind.
He handed out sheets of notes
And lectured with his back to the room
In a droning mumble.
Thankful for the photocopied sheets,
From that day on,
We took turns to collect them.
He seemed not to notice.

The physics lecturer
Was always there before the start
Impatiently waiting for us to sit
Expecting us to listen attentively,
As we all wished we'd chosen differently
From the optional courses.
And he went on past the end,
Frowning at our impatience,
Expecting us to stay through lunch,
Not once, but always,
As we all packed our bags,
Put on our coats,
Drummed fingers on empty desks.
He seemed to be angry.

I entered every room
With diminishing eagerness
As the terms crept slowly past me
And my knowledge edged upwards
In inverse ratio to my enthusiasm
For my chosen subject.
I slowly narrowed my options
As surely as they slowly narrowed me,
Restricted myself to computer courses
Not one, but all of them
Looking for something
That might be useful
From the from the fairground lucky-dip
Of mathematics.

Autobiography

Well, just as I had passed my eleven plus at primary school, I passed my A-levels at secondary school sufficiently well to progress to University. At the time I was still something of a homebody, reflected in the fact that I applied to the five closest Universities and ended up at the closest  of all - which, in those days before the Government decided to rename half the educational establishments in the country as Universities, was The University of Birmingham.

In the first year I had a room on the eleventh floor of High Hall, in the back corner looking down at the bus stop and along the road. Unlike many I didn't find University an especially marvellous experience and I didn't make many friends. I haven't seen, heard from or spoken to a single person I was there with since the day I walked out of the place. That may be partly due to moving away to work in London but frankly if there had been a will there would have been a way. There just wasn't that much of a will.

Anyway, this is a poem called Eleventh Floor Solitary Blues. It's a new(ish) poem but I've tried to put myself into the frame of mind I was in while I was there to give an accurate flavour of the experience. It also reflects the fact that I had by then had the "wintertime" and the "party in another town" mentioned in a previous poem in this sequence but never managed, in three years to find anyone else.

Eleventh Floor Solitary Blues

There is music playing softly in another room
A wailing blues guitar
I'm staring through my window at a gibbous moon
And wishing on a star
I wonder where you are
I wonder who you are

I can hear the sound of laughter that's down in the street
Eleven floors below
I've got nowhere to go and I've got no one to meet
And I'm feeling rather low
I really ought to go
But there is nowhere to go

There is a poster of a pyramid hanging on the wall
From an album by Pink Floyd
I make a cup of coffee and I wonder why it all
Gets me so annoyed
That it all seems such a void
A bleak and endless void

And waiting on my desk's a lot of work I ought to do
But I just don't have the will
I take a walk out in the dark and I try to think it through
The lake looks black and chill
As I stroll on down the hill
Just once more down the hill

And in the student houses there are parties going strong
It's what I thought this time would be
But no matter what I thought it seems that I was wrong
I guess that's only me
It's everything I see
It's all the things I see

It's getting rather late and the night is turning cold
So I turn myself around
As I head back to my room I'm feeling much too old
And much too tightly wound
And on unstable ground
On ever-shifting ground

I lie down on my bed and keep on listening to the night
And wonder why I'm here
By the time I fall asleep again it's already getting light
And now that dreams are near
All my troubles disappear
See my worries disappear

Small Stones: Extended Remixes #10

The next of my small stones was a very slight piece called "The Poetry Evening". This extended version is really a variation on the theme rather than a longer version of the same piece. Because Blogger is down at the moment I am having a go at posting this via gmail and so some, if not all, of the formatting will probably get lost. I'll sort it out later when blogger is back to normal.

The poetry evening

The first poet is
    an adult woman.
She
    has no papers
    has no books
    performs with style
            and energy.
Her
    poems are witty
    and clever
    and full of life
            and laughter.

The second poet is
    an adult man.
He
    reads from pages
    kept loose-leaf
    in a folder
            full of dreams.
His
    poems are subtle
    and personal
    and full of sorrow
            and anger.

The third poet is
    an older woman.
She
    reads from a book
    a collection
    of her works.
Her
    poems are thoughtful
    traditional
    and full of rhythm
            and  rhyme.

The last poet is
    a teenage girl.
She
    reads from an i-pad
    virtual words
    from the ether.
Her
    poems are spikey
    angular things
    full of the preoccupations
            of youth.

Autobiography

I pondered whether to put this in "Autobiography" or elsewhere but it is autobiographical so, although it's back at the time of my infant school days again, that's where I've put it.

Today, on a whim, instead of turning left and going to the supermarket I turned right and went down by my old primary school. I had my camera with me and I intended to take a picture of my infant school. Sadly, since last time I went that way, it has been demolished. It was damaged some years ago in an accident and has been closed ever since but I hadn't realised that they had actually demolished it.  I continued down the short walk that I used to have to my home, no more than two or three minutes away. 

When I got back home I decided to put down the experience as a poem. Here it is.

I close my eyes and overlay the past upon the present
trying to be the child who once stood here;
but he is gone, as is the world whose ghost
paints shadow pictures in my head of how it was.

There is an empty lot, surrounded by boards;
signs that say, "Danger", "Keep Out", "No Trespassing"
and a chain link fence to reinforce the message
that this ground is forbidden now to everyone.

But this was where my first school stood
where in my mind the old brick building's standing yet
where I am letting go of my mother's hand
and entering a world of strangeness and strangers.

This was where I was promoted from bystander to king
in the Christmas nativity, when the king got measles;
and where I was the Knave of Hearts in cardboard chains
with two lines of dialogue I remember to this day.

I shake my head and walk away, cross the old railway bridge
and turn into a cul-de-sac where memory tricks me
and the overlay is scarcely altered from the present
and I pause a moment, startled by the lack of change.

There, at the closed end,  is the entrance to the alley
that led me back home each day from school;
that was the limit of my infant explorations
and the very edge of the world in which I lived.

The alley leads me out into a world of change.
The houses standing here are in the world but not my head
and overlain upon the scene is just one house
that filled the whole ground where now a dozen stand.

In that house, with its gas mantle lights,
with its long thin garden and separate wash house,
with its high walls and fences and its guardian trees;
in that house I breathed my first breath, cried my first tears.

I close my eyes and overlay the past upon the present
trying to be the child who once stood here;
but he is gone, as is the world whose ghost
paints shadow pictures in my head of how it was.

New Book

One thing I have so far neglected to mention is that I have, after giving it a lot of thought, put out a second book of poetry. I realise that this makes a total of three books in as many months but I wanted to get them out before I disappear to China and I wanted to have time to try to sell a few. The new book is called Chaos Theory: A Collection of Poems. Personally I think it's the best collection yet.

As with the other two books - Anyone Can Do It and The Hitting The Road Again Blues it is available from www.lulu.com. You could go there and search for it or you could just follow this handy link. A few of my friends have bought copies of these books but A LOT OF YOU HAVEN'T!

No names, no pack drill as my Dad always used to say (he had some odd sayings), but you all know who you are. Go and buy them all NOW! Or you could save the postage and come and see me perform at Bilston Voices at the Cafe Metro, Bilston on the 26th May - my farewell performance in the Midlands - where copies of all three books will be on sale, subject to availability.

(And yes David, I'm talking to you!)

Small Stones: Extended Remixes #2

The 2nd January small stone was The Invisible People of Prague which already has a longer version. The 3rd January poem was this one, written while sitting having tea after visiting the Roman baths at Bath. One of the more interesting things about them is that they were lost. Bits of the stone were cannibalised for other buildings, much of the site was buried and subsequently forgotten. It was centuries before they were rediscovered and redeveloped.

Lunch In Bath
We sip green tea
And eat crumpets
In the Pump Room.
The trio is poised to play a waltz.

Based loosely on this small poem, and on the idea that our civilisation is built on top of theirs and as likely as theirs to survive, I wrote this.

The Romans And Us

We are so very civilized:
we eat crumpets and sip tea,
and listen to a trio play a waltz.
We converse on many topics,
but, oh, so quietly.
We do not number noise among our faults.

We are so very civilized:
We eat dormice and sip wine,
and listen to a minstrel pluck a lyre.
We converse on many topics,
both the earthly and divine.
Our erudition could surely not be higher.

We are so very civilized
that our society
will surely last at least ten thousand years,
before we reach the end
and our civility
fades away at last and disappears.

Small Stones: Extended Remixes #1

My small stone poem for 1st January was

View from a Train

Snow hides the ground;
Fog hides the sky;
A whole white world with no horizons.

Here is the extended version of it, where I have taken the essential idea of the piece and expanded it into a proper full-length poem.

View From A Train

The snow hides the fields

as the fog hides the skies.

I race through a world

where horizons are lost.

The shapes of the trees

where the wintertime lies

are painted with diamonds,

bejewelled by the frost.

The fences that follow

each dip and each rise

tear rows of black holes

in the covering sheet,

their jagged incisions

a constant surprise,

in a landscape that, elsewhere,

is pristine and neat.

A tractor, abandoned,

throws red in my eyes;

a solitary crow

takes to flight as we pass;

and, cocooned in the carriage,

I breathe out my sighs,

held apart from the world

by a panel of glass.

Get out your money!

Both of my books are now available.

You can buy The Hitting The Road Again Blues here.

You can buy Anyone Can Do It here.

Or if you have any problems you can go to www.lulu.com, click "BUY" and search for the title.

Prices are £7 for The Hitting The Road Again Blues and £8 for Anyone Can Do It. Lulu do charge postage and packing on top of that.