A Strange Room

I was listening to the radio recently, where a panel of writers and artists were discussing 'the creative process' as it applied to their specific vocation. One artist, who, in earlier comments had managed to subvert the simplest methodology of applied techniques into Wagnerian complexities, further offered that her Art was a subtext to the experiences of her Life. Apart from the Arts Council-speak in which many writers and artists felt compelled to engage, with its attendant posturing, it became increasingly clear that none of the panelists could demonstrate a core committment without special reference to broadsheet jargon, in the same way that hipster wine-tasters utilise peculiar descriptors, e.g. leather, leaf mulch, pork rind, to communicate to an audience the physical taste sensations one might apprehend in a glass of vintage Merlot.

These sorts of programme, with these sorts of guests, are the result of producers trawling through trendy North London 'eateries' for the Tristans and Didos brunching in that wasteland between Christmas and New Year. It's a curious time, where reflections on the passing year shoal against desires for a new beginning, a clean slate, a second chance. Where these reflections expose one's labours as shallow or wanting, one's natural defensive tendency is to shore-up the tenuous presentations of the last year with leather and leaf mulch, set them in 'distressed' frames, and offer them to Poppy for her gallery as 'something fun'.

Everyone has their own ideals of structure, whether through the application of studied techniques or through associative methods, where a few quick, bold strokes of brush or phrase may reveal a subject in its bones. Every year, between Christmas and New Year, I have established a self-protective tradition of my own. The tradition is that I read WH Auden's 1940 philosophical reflections in prose and rhyming couplets, New Year Letter - at worst a pompous book, but at its best a work of grand ambition. I like it because it makes me think of poetry without having to apply myself to the actual work ethic of writing poetry (It's hard.), and because it offers a once-removed observational platform for a world now as surely extinct as the ritual offerings of bronze and beadwork in a Neolithic grave. Further, it's a way of making myself sit still, and to listen, without pretensions or prejudice.

A friend of Shubert wrote of the composer's last hours of syphilitic delirium, "On the evening before his death, though only half-conscious, he still said to me, 'I implore you to transfer me to my room, not to leave me here in this corner under the earth. Do I, then, deserve no place above the earth?' I answered him, dear Franz, rest assured... you...lie in your bed, and Franz said, 'No, it is not true, Beethoven does not lie here...' He wanted to go out, and seemed under the impression that he was in a strange room."

Between the old year and the new, between festivals and rites, we all wait in a strange room, reflecting on what we should have said or done, the disappointments and terrors, and where, too, we rehearse what we will say and do next, hopefully to allow us to set aside the crutch of jargon, the preposterous, the inane, and find courage in the simple forms, at the window the low winter sun, its beadwork light playing along the glass.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 19

Three Descriptions of the Colour Red

Between baptism and the Outer Darkness,
an impoverishment of time and species
commits to memory
the names of angels in their atomic solitude.

Jorge Luis Borges, blind in Buenos Aires,
considers the eternity of archetypes,
the scavenger model
of the fundamental earth.

He rolls the moonlight in his mouth,
recalling childhood scenes — the gramophone,
its honeysuckle arias and melting hearts,
and beyond the parlour, outside, relentless sun,
raw pampas and, through the dust,
gauchos butchering meat.

The universe is nostalgia, for the comforts of geometry
in the portals of the poorest houses, for each lost second
sunk past red horizons.

The names drift past the fig trees of Buenos Aires,
and the skeletons beneath streetlamps,
and the smallness of the nightingale, across the sea of glass
to Patmos, comprehending alpha and omega,
the scarlet beast, and fierce birds
devouring the flesh of captains.

The Time Machine

I recently bought a record player, otherwise known as a phonograph. For those of you whose experience of music is one of digital downloads, MP3s, iPods and Beat headphones bluetoothed via your iPhone app, record players are belt-driven mechanisms on which vinyl disks rotate. The disks, also known as LPs (long players), are grooved, and these grooves, when set against a diamond-tipped stylus set within an armature, replicate the music recorded in the studio on other machines through which magnetic tapes have passed.

Interestingly, today the words "disc" and "disk" refer primarily to either CD/DVD ROM-RAM disc media, or floppy disks for computer drives. We're a long way from the Top 40 and "spinning the platters" here.

You may wonder why it is that I'm indulging myself in such pedantic detail for something that's arguably recognised by most people. I do so because such recognition cannot be taken for granted, and in this case, such recognition is vital. After all, there's a substantial minority of the population who don't know the Prime Minister's name.

Record players are time machines. My time journey began a couple of months earlier, when I opened a cupboard and rediscovered a collection of old LPs that my wife and I had been moving around with us for years, even though we hadn't owned a phonograph for decades. In a way, we kept them for the same reasons that people keep old photographs: it helps us remember something of ourselves when we were young.

A 1976 Gordon Lightfoot, a Beatles '65 and Blondie's Parallel Lines, were three albums first dusted down. The latter is a case in point with reference to the "time" theme. The album opens with the sound of a telephone ringing. It's not a retro ring, as one now finds on a list of 'rings' for a mobile phone. Nor is it ringing ironically, as though one wished to make a point about retro rings per se. It rings like a telephone because that's the way telephones rang in those distant days; a tinny, squeezed tone, that's what 1977 sounded like.

Other, still older albums were brought to the light. Tenors recorded in the 1950s, operas, popular crooners in the Sinatra style, all I think belonging first to my wife's parents, both now long dead. To play them now, my wife relives her girlhood sitting evenings in the front room of a council house in Colchester, listening with her father to Wagner's Ring Cycle, or after school to Lou Reed or Wizzard.

Time spools away as the records spin. James Taylor sings, "Nothing like a hundred miles, between me and trouble in my mind," and once again I'm sitting at an old oak table, working over drafts of poems that would in time be published in Poetry and elsewhere.

A vast encompassing arc of words and music set in time, set across time, carries us irrecovably to the world of our past selves, which somehow survives in these turning media, to remind us of our expectations, our evocations, between the grooves these slippery seconds rotating through our dreams.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 18

Ultraviolet
 
Select a life. Imagine it more than work,
semen jolt, credit transfers: my theory hangs
somewhere in the ultraviolet, just in the unseen.
 
The razor opens arm wrist to elbow, so many
bright and intricate patterns, the details,
the elasticity of tendons then sudden bone.
 
Blood vibrates at the far end of the spectrum,
bold as acetates, rigid. Blood packed stiff made you
appreciative, a frequency you escaped through.
 
The witnesses are shaky. None will testify that light
is filleted, further proof that membranes oscillate.
I remain conscious of the task ahead, scour wavelengths.

Review this Product

Recently. a poem of mine was included in an anthology whose theme was 'lost voices'. It is the case that for every theme there will be an equal number of aspirational responses, each individually interpretative.

This thread is replicated in other, more familiar scenarios, where the individual response reveals as much about the "back pages" of the writer as it does the writer's initial thematic contribution to the group.

An example of this phenomenon is in customer online reviews of products and services. The customer has received the product or service and decides to offer a product citation, whether critically positive or otherwise. Curiously, the reviewers seldom limit themselves to the cold facts of the retail experience, e.g., does it work/how well does it work. Instead, they instinctively and, I think, unwittingly, offer insights into their personal lives that in other circumstances they would be loathe to share with strangers. The process probably has its orgins in story-telling and other rituals of tribal sharing, the traits of which are as old as the communal hearth.

From an ebullient 'Mags' we have, "Got as a prezzie for my birthday from my husband. Love it. Took it on holiday to Dubai. Didn't need my phone which was just as well coz I forgot to pack it !!!!" Mags clearly believed she is sharing her experience of her husband's gift to her of a Kindle Fire HD tablet, but cannot help but give the reader an insight into the private moment where the gift is given, together with the further experience of a trip to faraway places, so much so that she confides, too, that her usual method of communication, her mobile phone, is subconsciously relegated to a more mundane fate.

And from 'Mr. A' we have the heartfelt, "At eighty one, a lot of my friends have now gone, but now I have found a new friend, my Kindle Fire HDX. Wonderful!" In this brief statement we have a portrait of a lonely man, now elderly, who clearly reflects on a life without friends of long-standing, yet accepts without hesitaton this electronic link to new and wider experiences. 

It's unlikely, if pressed, that Mr. A, or other reviewers, would admit to an actual relation-rich friendship with a Kindle Fire HD tablet, one that would eclipse former friendships with those people now gone from his life, but nonetheless he recognises the importance of connections. These, after all, help us define our own humanity, and provide the compass points by which we navigate sometimes lonely seas.

And 'Karen' offers, "Bought this for my Mum's 70th Birthday. For someone who didn't understand the world of click and download...the Kindle made it so easy for her. She has now become pro. :-)"

Perhaps in the peaks and troughs of cyber-oceans Mr. A might find himself within hailing distance of Karen's Mum.

Ahoy...ahoy there....

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 17

Witness
 
Through dust
twisting upwards in heated columns, by the salt lake a rider
…from the centre of this desperation
O Lord…. war trash of painted shields,
discarded iron weapons, a red tunic
caught in ground thorn
 
half-eaten ghosts leaning heavily against the sun
 
on a day
you are encouraged to remember
 
now every detail called into evidence—
this version of the future,
and the vowels that will not gather to make a name,
and three days of dust, a mouth, this calling to something
just beyond.

Heat

In a recent post, I mentioned a short series of new poems, “Maquettes for a Season of Fury”, without alluding too specifically to the nature of the series. In effect, they're political poems. They are, however, neither chest-thumping diatribes nor maudlin reflections on social issues per se. For the most part detached in voice, they examine real-time issues either through the actions of those people who are directly involved, or through dramatic representations of the issues at hand.

Two of the poems, with Ukraine/Russia themes, went through a number of submission rounds, not dozens, but a few nonetheless, and then an American journal accepted both, stating that they “thought the poems were wonderful and couldn't wait to publish the work”. Comments aside, it's a wry pertinence that acceptances follow the same long route as buses: you don't see one for ages, and then two show up at once.

As such, on a practical level, such writing is a hard sell. Editors tend to shy away from controversial issues, such as sex trafficking, or the 'rightness' of a war, or institutional racism, in favour of neatly turned-out, ironic, observational poems that offer insights into the Interior Life.

A similar charting occurs on the Scoville Scale, which is used to measure units of heat in chillies. Some people state happily that they like spicy food – curries or similar – but clearly there is a differential between expectations in respect of 'heat'.

A splash of Tabasco Sauce rates a respectable 2500 Heat Units on the Scoville Scale. For your poem about said Interior Life, a spice-loving editor may decide your Tabasco-rated poem is just the ticket; congratulations. Unfortunately, much of the world lives at 'the Hot Gates'. If a poem about the lives of those knee-deep in shit and blood is going to offer resonance with these lives, you will have to move up the scale somewhat.

A poem about twelve year-old girls passed around like after-dinner sweets by middle-aged men, for example, may require your writing to sharpen-up to the level of a Dorset Naga, at 923,000 SHUs. And further still, the idea of setting your verses in a torture room in a remote town in Uzbekistan may require the commitment level of a Carolina Reaper at 2,200,000 SHUs.

In the world of chillies, heat is a defence. The plant that is chewed-at and trampled responds by increasing its levels of capsaicin, a potent chemical (pure form 15,000,000 SHUs) that survives both cooking and freezing, but apart from the burning sensation it also triggers the brain to produce endorphins, natural painkillers that promote a sense of well being.

When you're hot, you're hot.