Three poems to end the year

i

8:58PM
write poems
x1
x1
x1

I wrote on my week’s to-dos.
It’s 8:58PM on SUNDAY.
The radiator’s cranking up;
Counting down to the bedtime
routine. This isn’t a poem: it’s
a snapshot.

ii.
write poems
x1
x1

The idea was to help me
See each output as a ‘1’;
As a single entity achievable;
As a level in a game. To produce
this isn’t a poem: it’s
an item done.

iii.
write poem
x1

SATURDAY
All the things I had to do before I
could write a poem

Rise from bed by leaving warm duvet.
Eat breakfast, take meds.
Clean plug, thoroughly. Pull out
the hairs.
Dress for gym; catch bus; get there.
Take a class; do some more; stretch. Energy flags.
Buy almonds from Poundland and
have a coffee, write some notes.
Feel ready to do part two:

Groceries.
Buy lots of food. Have heavy bags. Wait for bus
to take them home. Carry the bags,
unpack, cook and eat.
Feel tired; have a shower and wash
hair; juggle doing laundry between – two
loads.

Now late. Make tea with mint
and give up to the day, now
Too late to start a poem.

–
Back in September I set myself the goal, which at that point seemed achievable, of writing 6 poems drawn from inspiration in my daily life. Since then I’ve written endless notes to myself in my weekly to-do lists in a quest to ‘optimize starting’, as they say in the productivity lingo. Some prompts included:

write – commute, 10 mins
poem = just 5 lines!
write just 5 mins!

My procrastination side-stepped all of these suggestions.

This last Sunday evening, I sat on my bed and decided – right, now, write.

Goal accomplished and just in time. The fireworks are going off outside my windows as I type this up on New Year’s Eve.

Thank you, dear reader, for another year of verse.
Wishing you a wonderful start to 2019.

—
Image courtesy of the Old Design Shop and is a detail is from from a small advertising booklet titled Franklin Sugar Candy Book.

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Making letters

Muse, come to this blankness
and take my unrequited offer
to hold and stroke your shape to form.

Rest here where fingertips may take
their pleasured time with you. Today
we have all day

until 6pm when I’m due out.
Muse, come in and be
a while. My page is yours.

—
The poem above started with a warm-up line, “Making letters on a notepad making a swish and swirl that satisfies.” I simply love the action of writing. I live for picking up a pen and pressing it against a cushion of paper, whether in a notebook, or a notepad or just stacked up on my desk. My jotting time is consistently the best moment of my day.

It has been an absolute age since I have posted. Sometimes, offline, during this absence I have scribbled creative bits in fits and jerks. Yet almost every workday I write and write and write: emails, content, copy. The muse is not amused. Perfunctory craft is not an aphrodisiac. Or I haven’t yet found a way to tempt the muse with a subject line or ‘in 150 words outline your planned project’.

When I prepared to log in to the blog (like holding aside the overgrown vines to a long-forgotten treasure cave), an odd click-bait ‘ad’ confronted me:

After Seeing Why He Places
An Ice Cube On His Burger
When Grilling, I’ll Never
Make One Any Other Way

Below was a photo of an uncooked burger patty with a melting ice-cube in its centre. Is this what is supporting the online existence of the visits of my muse? It does not surprise me, this strange poetry.

I have been so self-conscious about returning on my rusty sea-legs and what was waiting for me were uncooked burger patties and melting ice-blocks in the virtual jungle. These were the psychological and virtual landscapes. While I prepared this post and poem, this was the atmosphere outside:

Afternoon.
The grating of
a saw, a far off
siren cries over
the arrival of a breaking train.

And from there I implored, “Muse, come to this my blankness.”

The muse and I started where we were.

Thank you for being here, too. Hope to see you back here soon.

all breakfast?

By Markus Kuhn at en.wikipedia (Transferred from en.wikipedia) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

the people are eating
are wondering
if eating in the morning?

porridge dense in the bowl
raspberries adjoin

a breakfast complete

22/07/2015
—
On Facebook I follow Elle Korea. I can’t read Korean and I seldom read women’s magazines even in English. Yet, for some reason I find Facebook translations about Korean fashion developments and the latest pretty-boy model intriguing. It’s an enrichment of my experience of contemporary global culture.

Cape Town is a port city and during the later 1980s and early 1990s there were many Koreans connected with the shipping industry that passed through or were in residence. At the time I attended violin lessons with a Korean boy whose father ministered to the sailors. Perhaps we spoke to each other during our lessons, and I remember his name so very clearly, but any recollection of true conversation escapes me. This is odd, as we learnt with the same teachers for nearly six years. I mention this only because the connection is Korea and how one association simply triggers another.

On my Facebook feed a few days ago, Elle Korea posted the most enticing photograph of a simple bowl of porridge supporting a few red raspberries. Of course, it was styled – placed on a dark wooden table-top. To the right was a hand holding a spoon at the ready. (Here be our world ever instagram-able.) Yet the image nourished my desk-bound soul. The muse had sent virtual sustenance.

Food, breakfast in particular and my personal affection for porridge have all featured previously in my oeuvre. It would seem that perhaps – perhaps – this poem heralds the start of new activity, as breakfast does a new day.

For yes, I have not posted fresh work for the last couple of months. Words from Wendy Cope consoled me. (I read them during my tube commute.) She, too, spent months, even years, not writing…

But write the writer must, for without the practise the practitioner is not.

I have another verse ready. I shall post it very soon.

Yours fed by porridge complete,
BeadedQuill

—
Twitter: @BeadedQuill
Facebook: BeadedQuill
Books:
In the Ocean: a year of poetry
Emily’s Poems for Modern Boys
Shining in Brightness: Selected Poems, 1999-2012

5 poems reworked

BBC Radio 3 is my station of choice. I listen to hours and hours of their programming, both on the clock radio that rests on my bedside chest-of-drawers and on iplayer on my laptop. Sometimes I schedule upcoming programmes or concerts into my diary, or mark catch-ups on my to do list.

During these many hours of ‘classical music’ content it came to my attention that composers across the ages have not been afraid of reworking their own material or borrowing material from others. Now alerted to the regularity of creative recycling, I started looking for it in other forms such as art, dance, theatre and literature.

Re-using material seems more acceptable in music than in the realm of writing. Able writers are assessed on their ability to be continually re-inventive. Originality makes for a proficient writer. This is a demanding attitude. I have since warmed to the approach of the related performing and creative arts. Variation on previous output is a legitimate avenue of creative exploration. In many instances I am intrigued by a product where the artist who created the first version reworks the material in its subsequent expression. These examples have given me courage to consciously mine my own writing for material when I am stuck.

While writing up this last Monday’s post, I was reminded that “Making soup again” was not the first poem I had revised. (Nor was it the first time I had revisited themes or motifs, but such general recurrences are considered more acceptable in written creativity.)

Here are five reworked poems from my portfolio:

1) Two versions of ‘Tumbling After‘, a scene based on the nursery rhyme about Jack and Jill rolling down a hill.
I wrote a longer version and then reworked a shorter version.

2) A card from the postman inspired two poems. Each approached the delivery of pre-Christmas mail from a different point of view.
One imagines the poet-recipient; the other gives voice to the postman.

3) In response to a mislaid poem, I wrote “Is it worth it?”
I later found the scrap of paper with the original poem.

4) My poem from 2011 “Jacob’s Dream for crinolined girls” is in many respects the poem that started my recent poetry writing spurt. It was inspired by Dorothea Tanning’s painting Eine Kleine Nachmusik (1943).
In 2014, three years after writing “Jacob’s Dream,” I revisited it in “Exalted thus, we left.”

5) “Making soup again” is a reworking of “In this place I eat butternut soup.”
Food preparation is a recurring motif in my poetry and food features as a metaphor for states of self, relating to others and enacting class or social position.

Visual artists frequently obsess over the same visual motifs and these become their trademarks. Composers are known for a particular sound, even if their music includes phases that are less quintessential. Dancers, singers or actors receive renown for their interpretation of a particular role. I’m intrigued by the creative recycling that might characterize a writer’s broader oeuvre of creative production.
—
Twitter: @BeadedQuill
Facebook: BeadedQuill
Books:
In the Ocean: a year of poetry
Emily’s Poems for Modern Boys
Shining in Brightness: Selected Poems, 1999 – 2012

Comparison

By Swastiverma (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

The lock on the bolt
hung like a coat
flashing its lining
of polished gold.
The weathered door was envious;
Its varnish long sapped
by the sun.

—

New poems have been a little scarce recently because I have been writing about my dating experiences again. I have yet to find the courage, or fictionalising voice, to share these tales with the general public. Some have said I should; others have cautioned against it. Being a geek, what I have done is turn to research.

From my local library I have borrowed dating memoirs and raunchy books about female sexuality (you know the sort that raises the librarian’s eyebrows to a quiver and the only issue dates to three years back). I’m currently reading a psychologist’s take on infidelity and the difficulties of monogamy. Plus I’ve been on something like 21 dates with 18 men, with another scheduled for 45 minutes from now. For an introvert, this has proved exhausting. Not surprisingly, I have been down with some chest infection, which is now on day 11. I’m not sure if there’s actually any real point to the whole dating enterprise. It has been said that for every 12 ‘nos’ the 13th is a ‘yes.’ I’m also still waiting for that to transpire in my career…

Today’s poem is about a polished, gold lock on a weathered door. Perhaps it’s a meditation on my exhaustion and envy of the seemingly solid. Irrespective of any psychoanalytic interpretation, I hope you enjoyed the short verse.

—
Twitter: @BeadedQuill
Facebook: BeadedQuill
Books:
In the Ocean: a year of poetry
Emily’s Poems for Modern Boys
Shining in Brightness: Selected Poems, 1999 – 2012

It is sometimes easier to siphon off blood on Tuesdays

“Blood letting“. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

“From a Stone” engages with the frustrations of bringing forth a poem when it feels like drawing blood from an inanimate source. Like “Glomurelonephritis” this is one of the rare instances where my personal health experiences feature in a poem. For 31 years I have lived with a chronic renal (kidney) condition. The blood drawing analogy in “From a Stone” touches on my real experiences of ‘having bloods done’ (as they say in some hospital lingo). Putting my arm out to have blood siphoned from a vein still feels easier than many pursuits: writing poetry, doing press-ups or following my dreams.

Forthcoming

In a couple of future posts, I shall be sharing some longer pieces of writing that have been gathering dust. Fear not, the poems will continue to be around. Dear readers, I hope that you’ll enjoy all the words on offer.
Yours, BQ

—
T: @BeadedQuill
F: BeadedQuill
Books by BeadedQuill

On a meander

Carl Larsson (1853-1919) ( [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Let the line commence
with a word other than
I, the usual post to fence in
paths that buoy and bob in
hand-drawn bows

and curving scythes:
a writer’s promenade.
—
If I don’t write on lined-paper or have a guiding template sheet behind any blank page on which I write, my sentences will start to bend and curve like rainbows from left to right across the page.

It’s this, along with the tendency to begin a great many thoughts and sentences with “I”, that precipitated today’s poem.
—
T: @BeadedQuill
F: BeadedQuill
Books by BeadedQuill
—

Cast them together

“Calligraphy.malmesbury.bible.arp” by Adrian Pingstone – Own work. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Words cast spells through the magic that is poetry. Here is today’s verse:

Cast them together

A bra, a bit,
cad bitty, a bra,
bo bitty boo:
read the magic
these words spell for you.
—
Twitter: @BeadedQuill
Facebook: BeadedQuill
Books:
In the Ocean: a year of poetry
Emily’s Poems for Modern Boys
Shining in Brightness: Selected Poems, 1999 – 2012

blushed apricots, green-skinned Hasses

Image from http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/botany/mango-info.htm

Can you believe two years have passed since the London Olympics? I was fortunate enough to attend an evening of paralympic events. It feels as though it was only last year that I was sitting in the massive stadium, with an enormous lion emblazoned across my t-shirt and yelling encouragement at the athletes. Clearly, it wasn’t. That moment was in 2012.

This time last year I posted a loose Pindaric ode to a golden mango.

In the spirit of archives – looking at the back catalogue in the present, possibly to inform the future – I encourage you to read this post about progress. Joanna Penn recommends measuring achievement across the span of four years by asking oneself, where was I during the last olympics? Equally, you can plot your goals by projecting, where would I like to be by the next games?

Where will you be in 2016?

In the meantime, I’m still waiting for this summer’s golden mangoes to appear on the local grocers’ tiers.

—

Find me on Twitter. I’m @BeadedQuill.