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.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 16

The Bell

It is a language of remembered forms,
the marsh dawn lemon on emerald
and the day waiting to be named.
 
I have woven the shape of the sound
from stork tracks in tidal silt
and vertical brightness scribbled with windows,
along a path wide enough for the wind only,
and still I hear you, across the shift of thorns
and wild pear, an expectancy.

In the Ether

Recently, I had a selection of poems published in two separate reviews, the first an on-line publication, and the second a publication that has a presence both on the Internet and in print. It's probably fair to say that the latter publication is the more unusual, in that print publications per se are more difficult to fund and to maintain. The reviews in question were not chosen with any particular agenda in mind, simply that they published contemporary poetry, and that the appearance of the review looked professional.

It wasn't always the case. In 2000, I attended a writers' conference in Dorset. At the time, Interent publication, if it was discussed at all, was considered a distinctly poor relation to print-based reviews. To reinforce the fact, I had only to mention 'online submissions' to fellow attendees, and the looks of incomprehension were matched only by those of utter disdain.

Now, 'e-zines' are accepted as part of the publishing milieu, and most writers submit to these as readily as to hard-copy titles. The realisation that even a single poem published in an on-line publication would be seen instantly by tens of thousands of readers (if indeed such numbers of poetry readers actually exist!) as opposed to a few dozen print-based subscribers, provides an even greater incentive for writers to share their work through these means.

The poems mentioned formally are part of a group of poems, Maquettes for a Season of  Fury, arguably a pamphlet-length collection. To date, of the sequence, a quarter have been published individually in either Internet- or print-based combinations.

So the world turns.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 15

English Studies

In the shore tree’s angles,
acid streaks of foliage
mirror bleached, unfurled sarongs of cirrus.

Where the sea grass fades into the headland, rails fuss,
and raucous plovers punctuate the weather’s syllabus.

At the point, a forgotten strategy,
a wartime bunker the tides undermine,
the hexagon of concrete shifted
into crazypaving slabs, the rubble of geometry
an isosceles entanglement of rusting steel
still waiting for the Nazis.

On the wall, the spray-paint scrawl: John Lennon lives.

Crake song evaporates,
in winds driving low along the coast,
in brushwood juniper and the scrub of gorse, in this memory
of the same land, for others, gone now,
in diesel haze and sprays of lilac
a strangeness, courtly in the dusk.

A scratchy Sgt. Pepper plays thinly in the mews—
moonlight wedged against each pane, the room
folding and unfolding, and the barefoot bride
dancing in the flames.

Smalltown Boys

In the summer of 1968, my Mother put me on a train and sent me to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 

There had been strain in our family following my Father's unexpected death in December the previous year, and as I was adrift somewhat both emotionally and mentally, I believe she thought that I would neglect my further education. 

Although it was inevitable in hindsight that I would attend the university local to our home, she and one of my teachers, Reva Chrisman, with whom I had developed an affinity through poetry and creative writing, agreed that a trip to the University of North Carolina might provide an incentive for me to become more involved in my own life once more, which is another way of saying, conversely, that I had become too self-absorbed.

Of the journey itself, all I recall is that it was a "sleeper" train, and that I was awoken the next morning by the noise of the station and a smartly-uniformed black conductor. Other images came back to me years later and were used in the opening lines of an unrelated poem.

Others waved goodbye.

Slow-motion, shoeshine station

a freeze frame of the '40s,

I doze in the sidings - dog-latin phantom

riding high to Dixie.

The sole purpose of my journey was to imbibe the atmosphere of the university attended by American novelist Thomas Wolfe. His first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, thinly disguised local residents of his hometown of nearby Asheville, with the result that when the novel was published the resulting uproar required him to prudently remain absent from the town for the next eight years. 

In his short life - he died just before his thirty-eighth birthday - he wrote four mammoth novels, and in the process redefined American fiction. The Web and the Rock, You Can't Go Home Again, and my personal favourite, Of Time and the River, provided autobiographical insights into my own life and writing at the time.

The visit was a failure. I think I met briefly with someone from Admissions, but nothing came of it. My overriding impression, at the fine old age of seventeen, was that the place was somehow fixed in time, rigid with Wolfe's memory, and without vitality. I found a local bar frequented by students (I think the legal age to consume alcohol must have been eighteen in North Carolina, and, well, I was 'near enough'.), and spent the rest of the day there, drinking bottles of German lager.

I can't recall reading any of Wolfe's work since my first experiences of them between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, but their "atmosphere" remains with me even now. There is, as might be expected, an academic industry around the works, treatises and tomes in support of tenured posts, orbiting around the dark star of Chapel Hill.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 14

Airs, Waters, Places

A ribbon mist off Garda, and thunder
guttering in the Dolomites, across
the lido path a snow of jasmine— toss-turn
weather, the stain of stars we’re under,
confirms the spare conformity of loss.
 
The reds of red façades recall the lake
republic long since sunk past Salò’s port,
sideshow of the Romanesque, last resort
of Mussolini and the higher stake—
steamer routes, each hotel a former fort.

A reedy baffle gates the cut stone quay
against the backwash of the hydrofoils.
‘A week of fish in aromatic oils,
a little wine…’ wrote Pound in 1920,
inviting Joyce: belle-lettres, snug gargoyles.

Heat. Antique towns, screwed down by 30C,
retreat behind a pastel semaphore
of shutters and the weight of pines, restore
a rumour of Catullus to the scree
of broken capitals above the shore.

Under cypress spears, a part-worked torso
rises from a cube of local stone, no
seamless white carrara sculpted verso
to the clouds and water, each mallet blow
a kind of breath, instead, this cold echo.

San Paulo’s shade, a twisting tracery
of bay and bougainvillea, gives way
to blue enamels. Mary floats, a sway
of gold leaf shoaling the baptistery,
apostles fading from the fresco clay.

… sopravvivere alla perdita
della reputazione… to outlive
the loss of one’s reputation— votive,
mantis profile of the hydrofoil “Goethe”
past the terraces of stunted olive…

the driftwood cavities of failing bronze
that replicate these ghosts in time, and screen
the deck chair litter on the mezzanine.
Beyond the bright piazza, doily swans,
their careless whites, engage electric green.