Feeling guilty at the continued failure to Catch Up as planned. I went to see a doctor last week, and discussed the after-effects of chemotherapy, and the business of withdrawal from steroids. We talked about the downsides of continuous low-level pain/discomfort. One of them is that to various degrees, you can’t concentrate; in my case it includes not being able to read for any length of time before it all becomes meaningless. Writing is a frustrating slow business…the words simply don’t line up and fall into place. But I’m heartened to find that it’s not just me, and that my doctor has a blanket term for it. She calls it ‘brain fog’. That’ll do for me. It explains why the collections waiting for me to write about (one in particular) are piling up, but it explains why I can do little about it for the time being.

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What I CAN do is to keep the Cobweb ticking over.

I just stopped and stared at what I’d written. Can a cobweb tick? I think not. Mixed metaphors? Jeez. Possibly I meant to say that I’d keep on spinning. I’ll settle for that.

Last week my partner Flo bought me this surprise present to cheer me up. American First Edition, with these stunning watercolours by Baskin. I’d forgotten just how Ted Hughes can knock you sideways; it was like reading him again for the first time. The Sunstruck Foxglove

Her silky body a soft oven

For loaves of pollen

Or in another OTT piece about an Iris …Sketch of a goddess

An overpowered bee buries its face

In the very beard of her ovaries.

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It deafens itself

In a dreadful belly-cry – just out of human hearing

It all just made me feel more alive, more aware of sound and texture and the buzzzing stuff of life. It reminded me just how much Ted Hughes has got into some of my ways of thinking, and so tonight, here’s a kind of thank you .

A lot of stocking-fillers turn up in one-off tasks in poetry workshops. I’ve never sat down with the intention of writing about birds or animals, but when I’m ambushed into it, Ted Hughes is always going to turn up, providing some of the sound and texture.

When my children were small, in the remote past, one of our favourite books was Hughes’ How the Whale became

and that’s the voice I borrowed in this workshop opener: an invitation to write about things that shouldn’t ever be in the x or y…in the sea, say, or the sky, or in a shop, or down your street.

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Heron

When God made Heron, he’d been hard at it,

five days creating day and night, sun and moon

and stars, the oceans and the earth, 

and on the fifth day,the creatures of the sea

and the birds of the air. Let’s see, says God.

What have we not got? A bird that can spear a fish.

I like that. Give him a long sharp beak.

A touch of gold. 

                         But not the fish of the sea,

thought God, who’d spent the afternoon

in a frenzy of invention: Puffin, Gannet, Fulmar,

Skua, Albatross. The fish of slow rivers,

the fish of placid streams. That’s the thing.

He’ll need long thin legs and wide-spread feet.

My words, he’ll need to be a hefty bird

with legs that long, thinks God. 

The wings he’ll need! and a sharp dark eye.

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Now. Where will he make his home?

It had been a long day. He can nest

in a tree like all the rest, says God.

And he breathed life into Heron

who flew off on his great wide wings

and landed in his tree, like a broken kite,

a thin old man falling off a bicycle.

(I think I should acknowledge that U A Fanthorpe was over my shoulder too….have you read that poem about the Creation that she wrote in Northumbrian dialect? I hear God with a Geordie accent.)

I can’t trace the prompt for the next one, but it wasn’t necessarily an instruction to write about a bird. I don’t know what it was. Sometimes the name of a bird is enough to call up stories and images. The owl will do this, obviously,and equally the kite and the crow. But I was surprised to find the St Stephen’s Day hunting of the wren turning up without invitation.

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Wren

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God thought of the smallest coin

he could make, and made the Wren

to fit, neat as a thumb in a thimble,

tail cocked like a feather on a jaunty hat.

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He should have loved the Wren more

than let the boys come smashing down

the thorn, chanting, calling: Wren!

come out! come out! come out and die.

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With her hair trigger call, she can not 

keep silent, the Wren, full as an egg

with alarm and urgency, her voice a tattle

of fingernails on an old tin lid.

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Fragile as a chalice on its thin glass stem.

Why kill a Wren and her mid-winter song?

What did she ask for but a zipwire of air,

a tangle to hide her nest, a May full of flies?

By the way. The farthing ceased to be legal tender on Dec. 31st 1961. Which surprises me. So there you are. If the brain-fog persists there may be more like this. Fingers crossed, then.

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When I started this occasional series of stocking-filler poems, I’d sort of decided that they would necessarily all be the kind I knocked together to perform in folk clubs. I said, quite blithely that:

“They need to be compact and robust. Which is what much oral poetry was, originally. I discovered that writing your own stuff is a lot harder than you’d think, and I think I learned a fair amount about the trade from trying. Sometimes I’d try performing what I thought of as ‘real poems’, but they didn’t work, and once I decided I wanted an audience for them, I shifted my allegiance to poetry open mics. On the other hand, I’d assembled a folder that I called ‘Stand-ups and stocking fillers’. Sometimes I’d use some of them to finish a set at a reading, just to leave the audience with a laugh, or sometimes to relieve what may have been a bleak sequence.”

You see that I made a distinction between ‘real poems’ and ‘stocking-fillers’ which, when I come to think about it, is as foolish as putting a capital P on Poetry or a capital L on Literature, and thinking that is a tenable proposition. For that, mea culpa. Because sometimes I’ve set out to write a bit of ‘entertainment’ and found that the poem has ideas of its own. I guess this is particularly true of dramatic monologues. There’s a long tradition of the dramatic monologue in music hall performance, and it sort of slips into the folk scene, via Marriott Edgar’s brilliant creations like ‘Albert and the Lion’ which were immortalised in Stanley Holloway’s recorded performances of them . You can hear their influence in some of the work of Pam Ayres and Mike Harding. 

There’s the music hall at one end of the spectrum, and, I suppose, Shakespeare at the other, and in the notional middle, between the two kinds of performance art, there’s the printed poem. So many of them sink into your subconscious sense of how characters can be created, how they can be made to sound, from the appalling duke of Browning’s ‘My last duchess’ to Tony Harrison’s dead Iraqi soldier or David Constantine’s five monomaniacs in ‘Monologue’. If you were to ask about the appeal of the dramatic monologue for me, it’s the liberation of wearing a mask, and the genuine enjoyment of discovering the accent, the ideolect of the persona. 

Discovery. That’s the thing. I was in a poetry workshop where we were asked to improvise on the idea of someone giving advice to another…a tradesman advising an apprentice, say, or a football coach, or a master thief, or a seductress, or…..well, you get the idea. The prompt poem was Emily Berry’s “A short guide to corseting”. Go figure.I wrote the poem that follows in about five minutes, and it didn’t need a lot of altering/editing.

*** see comment below

But as it went along, it surprised me. I thought I knew the voice of the older bloke; I was pretty sure I’d worked with lots like him. It wasn’t as funny as I thought it was going to be. I should have guessed, I suppose.

                               

A proper job

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There’s more to this than people think.

So listen. See, you want to get the build-up right.

That one I took you to last week. All wrong.

What’s the good of flogging a chap

till he can’t carry the thing? He only ends up

dropping it, spectators want to help,

military jump in.  A bloody circus.

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Take my advice. You want to keep them

fit and fed and fresh. They’ll not thank you, 

but just think on. You’re not there to cheer them up.

Just to do a proper job.

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Make sure you order oak

that’s been let to lie a year or two. 

You need to cut a solid six by six, 

one tight lap joint, nice and snug.

Four clean dowels.. olive;,

don’t get palmed off with pine…

If it does get dropped you don’t want

that cross-piece twisting.

Causes too much bother later on.

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Nails? Get them from that blacksmith

by the market. You’ ll want clean-cut, well tapered,

a good nine inch.

Plan to use just the three, but get six.

They can break if you don’t catch them right,

and anyway a big lad might need

a couple in each wrist.                                                                        

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I’ll tell you all about the way

to lie them down, the knots,

the bones to get between,

the hoisting and the dropping in the slot

when we’ve had our snap.

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But just one thing. You get it right.

You don’t want another carry on

like the one last week.

The one it turned out wasn’t dead.

Never hear the last of that.

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[from Much Possessed. smith|doorstop 2016]

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A Postscript: I was rereading this today (Monday) and deeply embarrassed by the apparent piece of throwaway showboating. “I wrote this in five minutes” indeed. I was driven to hunt down the original and found it in a notebook . Poetry Business Whitby Residential, December 2013. Here it is.

As it turns out, I was right about not needing to change very much so it looks like one of those gifted moments when you apparently write without thinking, and everything seems to fall into place without any effort at all. Which is, of course, nonsense. For a start I’d spent a lot of time that year struggling with a whole series of dramatic monologues based on the notion that statues can be brought to speak. I’d been investigating a whole debate about the nature of resurrection (in the body or in the spirit?); I’d been reading a lot of UA Fanthorpe. In short, I’d been unconsciously rehearsing my way towards this moment for ages. Sometimes you’re given the key that opens a door you didn’t know you’d been pushing against.

It turns out that, as we all do, I owe all sorts of debts to all sorts of writers whose work I’ve enjoyed and absorbed, and that I unconsciously/subconsciously exploit. If I had to single out one particular poet and one particular poem it would be Edwin Morgan’s ‘Instructions to an actor ‘.

Because of the intensity of the speaker, I’ve always imagined that Morgan had the idea of Shakespeare doubling as one of the actors in this production of A winter’s tale, explaining to a boy actor how to play one of the most problematic ‘moments’ in English drama. He must be, convincingly, a statue in the course of 80 lines, and then convincingly come to life. And, boy, how the speaker believes in this moment!! He knows just how wonderful and implausibly difficult it’s going to be.

What am I saying? It’s simple, I guess. You learn from the company you keep.

Next week, more voices from more occupations, but probably less serious. In the meantime, I’ll be working on the final ‘Catching Up ‘ post, and I want to do justice to the last poet in this particular sequence. Bear with me.