Chalk and Cheese

Found in the Attic

Sometime during my previous life, as part of an investigation into the relationship between the development of language and thought, itself part of my studies for a teaching diploma in special needs, I set up an experiment in an infant school in which a crystal ball on a perforated metal base was placed on the work surface of one of the classroom storage trolleys. The base of the crystal ball concealed a microphone and the line from the microphone was passed through a small hole in the centre of the worktop to a tape recorder in the lockable storage space below. Other items that I thought might catch a child's interest were placed around the globe and the whole was then covered with a large cloth.The tape recorder was set running and the cupboard locked just before the children, chosen for the experiment by the headteacher (I suspect primarily on the basis of dependable behaviour), were admitted. They, and I, sat round the trolley. I introduced myself and gave them an edited version of what we were going to do, before removing the cloth to a muted chorus of "oooh"s. At this point, and by prior arrangement, the school secretary entered the room and, as per our arrangement, pretended to whisper in my ear. I thanked her, she left the room. I apologised to the children and said I had to pop out for a minute. I told them they could talk amongst themselves, but they were not to touch anything on the trolley. I then left the room. Just recently I found the following transcript of what occurred when it became necessary to turn out the attic preparatory to the insulation being beefed-up.

June: Which way ee go?
Janet: 'Wards Mrs Smith's room.
June: Don't go the office that way!
Janet: I know... ssstaff room.
June: Phone's in office.
Michael: So?
June: When she comes in and whispers like she did, is always urgent, 'coss they's wanted on phone.
Michael: No, t'aint.
June: 'Tis
Michael: Aint.
June: Is
April: Anyone hear what she said.
Michael: Nope!
April: Sounded to me like "bananas, bananas, bananas..."
Angela: Would have been rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.
April: I never heard you say you heard what she said.
Angela: Don't 'ave ter.
April Ow you know then, what she said, if you never heard?
Angela: Well, I do know, then, see! I know 'coz I know that's what they say,
April: Who say?
Angela: People who aren't saying things, but want you to think they are.
June: What are you on about? What people saying things?
Angela: No, people NOT saying things.
June: And how comes you happen to know so much?
Angela: My mum's in am dram.
April: Where's that?
Angela: It's not a place, silly, its acting. They dress up and go on stages and do stories and things. Then people pay to go and watch them, and sometimes they like pretend they're whispering to each other on the stages, but really and truly truly they got nothing to say to each other, so they just say "rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb".
Alfred: Incredible absurdity!
April: Could just as easy say bananas, bananas, bananas!
Angela: No they couldn't, then. That's quite wrong!
April: Oh? Is it then? Why?
Angela: Wouldn't sound right. When people whisper, words sound all smooth, like. Like rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, but bananas, bananas, bananas sounds lumpy. Don't sound right.
James: Sounds like rubbish, rubbish, rubbish, if you ask me! What about... What's these things here we mustn't touch?
April: Get orf! Don't touch any of them - not 'till ee comes back
James: I aint!
April: You are - you nearly did!
Michael: It's a crystal ball ...
April: Tells you what's going to happen in your life.
Michael: I was just going to say that! My mum's had hers done.
June: 'Er what?
Michael: Her future. This woman told her all what's going to happen to her.
James: Crap!
Alfred: Incredible absurdity!
June: How?
Michael: She had one of them. We could now. You look into it and you can see the future.
June: All I can see is the windows upside down!
James: They aint upside down, just bent at the edges.
June: Round this side they's upside down!
Michael: You have to cup your hands, see, like this. It cuts out earth light so there's only light in the ball what's came from the future. See, like this... now I can see the future.
James: Crap!
Michael: Yes I can, I see a cloudy path...
Sally: Oh yes, so can I...
and you are walking along it my dear,
things will get difficult for you, I fear!
April: That rhymes, it's like a song.
Michael: That's how they speak, singy-songy - fortune tellers, that is.
June: Had one at the fete last year.
April: Sally's a poet!
Michael: Now it's getting misty!
James: Let's see.
Michael: Don't push!
April: Now see what you've done!
June: Oh! You've moved it! You've done it now. ee'l arf be cross with you now, we wasn't meant to touch it. We never touched it. You did!
Alfred: Incredible maladroitness!
Sally: 'Snot much. 'Ee won't notice that...
Michael: No? Well, I jolly think he will... Hey! Hold on a blinking half a mo'... What have we got here?
Sally: What?
Michael: Only a wire coming out the bottom of it, that's all, my men!
James: What sort of wire? Is it electric?
Sally: Electric! That's why he said not to touch it! We could all get eletrocooted! Shocks an' all - or something!
Michael: Don't think so, not from this, not the sort of shocks thatflings you across the room. It's a thin wire, not dangerous. I know! - Could be a bug, P'raps ee's bugged us!... It's going inter the cupboard... See?
(Long Pause)
Sally: Miss Piper (the head) wouldn't let 'im do that, would she?
Michael: Might.
Alfred: Incredible misdemeanour!
Angela?: ??????????????????? (indecipherable)
James: So lets open the door, see what's inside.
(Long Pause)
Jake: Trying to - it's locked. Dodgy, that. They never ever ever locks these cupboards.
Michael: Oh, well, that's it then, we's all shot. No good pretending we didn't do nothing - eez 'eard it all!
June: I didn't do nothing!
Sally: 'Nor me. Who saw me do what? (long pause) See!

At this point I decided to return - and they all with one accord began to chat about the other articles on the trolley.

---

The Man Born Blind

They built an eye for a man born blind,
they gave him underwear prickly with pins,
with tingles in low resolution, whims
of the software, rogue pixels were there,
dragged like fish from the deep,
mapped from the lens and laid into skin.

Imagine a door or a tree in braille,
the edge of a wall, the shape of your chair,
think of your partner's face in your chest,
and suppose for a moment you took it all in
and imagined the world was exactly like that...
You do that exactly. Every day.

Stumble It!

A Tale for Today

Near where a boy had walked
who had been walking home,
who would never be seen again,
had been other boys, playing with knives.
That is, they said that playing had been the whole of it,
they told the police they had only been playing,
and even as they told the police it was play,
the boy was walking home who would disappear
somewhere between the edge of the wood
and that new monster hotel they are building - and all
while Miss Melissa was playing her violin. (Bliss
themes mostly, from Things to Come and the ghostly
Motifs composition of her own.) Much has been made
of Miss Melissa having played her violin
beside an open window - knowing, his parents now
maintain, that he would pass that way, and knowing
the very disturbing and unprecedented way
her Motifs acted on his fragile mind.
It has been established, almost beyond doubt,
that the boy did pass her open window,
that he passed it as he was walking home,
that he stopped to listen, as she had known he would,
and that he did all this just before he disappeared.

It has also been confirmed that the Mallows were arguing.
It is thought that the boy heard their angry voices
and was never heard of again.
From the Mallows' cottage you can see the sea,
and just where the sea is deepest blue
a tall ship taking part in a tall ships' sail-past,
had thrown its canvas to the wind. The boy, who loved the sea
and vessels of every sort, and had perhaps been making for
the jetty (just a small diversion from his journey home)
to get the best view going of the passing ships,
would not have seen its graceful lines - nor any others - glide
out from behind the headland like a dancer from the wings,
would not have seen its bows and curtsies to the tides and winds,
would not have seen it cast its shadow long on sea and dune
as if it cast a net, as if
the fading footprints of the boy
were small fry in its mesh; as if
a crumbling edge of sand was all the world could know
of one strange lad who'd loved its touch-and-see-ness,
then had vanished from it just a breath ago.
The Mallows could no doubt have vouched for what had passed: the boy,
supposing only that he had been found, could have said only that
before the schooner cleared the bluff
they'd watched him disappear for ever.

It might or might not be coincidence
the way they found the bird's egg smashed
beneath the large oak close to Sangster's copse,
and on a bough above the nest, the boy's cap snagged,
and on the smashed egg
two fresh sprigs of mallow - crossed.

Outside The Prince's Arms, not looking where he was going,
the boy was seen to trip and graze his knee.
An old man helped him to his feet. The man, not being
recognized by any locals, has been dismissed by them
as having been a tramp. The boy, thanking him
asked did he like his trainers - they were new.
The old man knew nothing about trainers,
but knew something about sad boys with knives
and earlier had seen the boys who had said they were playing,
throwing their knives at the hares in the Mallows' field -
the field which had the tree, the boy's cap snagged,
the smashed bird's egg and the sprigs of mallow.
The old man warned the boy to take great care
and said the boys with knives had all been smeared with blood
and had been laughing, even boasting of a stray dog they had killed,
some mangy old dog that had strayed their way.
The boy, while maintaining that he could perfectly
well fend for himself, promised to be careful,
then advised the old man to go
and listen at Miss Melissa's window,
to which the old man said he surely would -
and all of that ocurred soon after the boy had disappeared.

The police, who admit to being baffled by his multiple
meltings into thin air - and even more so by
their synchrony, have appealed for witnesses.
The missing link in the evidence, they think,
is being held, all unwittingly, by someone
who didn't see the boy at all that evening.

Stumble It!

The devil's not in Google!

I am about to finish "War and Peace". At last! It has been a mammoth, but totally enjoyable, read. I had read it before, long ago, and found it hard going, but this time I have had the benefit of the new (Penguin edition) translation and that or a greater maturity or both, has made all the difference. Easy to read though I have found it - even the names were no bar to my enjoyment - I have taken an inordinately long while over it, so long, indeed, that I am not giving any clues as to how long. The possible reasons for a slow read are legion, of course. Indeed, there are reasons and there are causes. A reason might be a desire to savour the work and to give due attention to its deeper issues; a cause might be technical or a tendency to nod off. Beyond saying which, I will remain stum - except to point out that reason and cause are not necessarily mutually exclusive and to add that I had been feeling very inferior about my declining reading powers, but that all has now changed, and I am feeling positively superior. And for why? Because I glean from an article by Nicholas Carr in The Independent that Bruce Friedman, a pathologist at The University of Michigan Medical School, a blogger on the use of computers in medicine, has put it on record that his use of the internet (and of Google in particular) has so messed with his mind as to have completely deprived him of the ability to read "War and Peace" at all. His internet searching has changed - and not for the better - the way he reads and, because of that, the way he thinks. It seems that this belief he has is shared by many, and is the basis of a polemic that has been rumbling around on the blogs for some time, though I must admit that I had not come up against it before now.

Back in April in my post One Man's Meat is Another Man's Haiku I discussed the contrasting mental processes involved in the reading of alphabet- and ideogram-based scripts. I also touched upon the consequences that it is thought this has for the brain, for the way we use the brain, for its future development and for the ways in which different parts of the brain are involved and their structures modified by the different demands placed upon them. Subsequently, I gave as a dramatic illustration of this, the case of a bilingual man (speaking Chinese and English) who had a severe stroke, as a result of which he totally lost the ability to read English, though his reading skills remained unaffected so far as Chinese was concerned.

What I did not make clear at that time was the degree to which these structural changes take place right across the brain, and are not restricted to the areas specifically concerned with reading and writing. They occur, for example, in those areas which give us our memory and in those devoted to the interpretation of visual stimulii in general, including those which on the face of it have nothing to do with reading and writing. They have also been shown to affect concentration. It is this more general effect, some now believe, that is the cause of Friedman's inability to read long texts slowly and with the deeper thought they require. To cast doubts on the unalloyed benefits of modern technologies or upon our ways of working with them is to run the risk of being dubbed a Luddite, and no one wishes that upon themselves, yet the Luddites have always been proved right in what they warned against. The machines introduced in the Industrial Revolution did cost jobs; the introduction of printing and even writing -(opposed by no less a person than Plato) did have the detrimental effects they were warning their peers about; computers have not been a total boon. Where they have been wrong, the Luddites, has been in failing to foresee (or to admit) the undoubtedly great benefits that would considerably outweigh their objections. But that is not to say we should close our eyes to the disadvantages and stumble blindly on, ignoring them.

So is there some way we can have our cake and eat it, have the benefits of Google, but perhaps a much enhanced Google capable of opening its doors to the desires of those of us who miss the more joined-up, bookish way of working? At present it would seem not, if only because there are too many vested interests stacked against that idea, too many providers, sponsors and promoters on the internet who would have too much to lose if we were ever to stop bouncing from site to site. The more we bounce, the more the cash tills ring for them.

Carr was simply reporting how Friedman and others now believe that other differences in reading and study methods influence the development of our brains and minds in ways that they see as alarming and of the greatest profundity, that the alphabet/ideogram example I blogged about back in April is just that: just one example of a general effect, that the ways in which we choose to go about our reading, writing, studying and collating, and that whatever tools we decide to use for those purposes will have a profound effect upon the way we think, and through that upon the way in which our neural connections are made and broken. In other words, will have a profound effect upon the way in which our brains are structured. In a small way I have found this for myself: if I am working, let us say on the first draft of a poem, and choose to do so using a ballpoint pen, that will not produce the same result (I am absolutely certain, but have found no way to prove) as attempting the same end using a keyboard. Indeed, Carr gives an illustration involving Nietzsche which points in the same direction: Nietzsche when going blind and unable to read or write without considerable distress and severe pain to his eyes, switched to using a typewriter. Once he had learnt to touch-type, he did so with his eyes closed. The words, which had stopped, flowed again - but differently: where they had previously produced rhetoric, now they were telegrammatic. (read more)

What Friedman is saying is that his own thinking has become "staccato" in that he is regularly scanning short passages of text at speed and from many different sources, but can no longr absorb the information in an extended piece of text. The latter requires the ability to make less obvious connectios at a deeper level, which the former does not. He can no longer read War and Peace, but could presumably read a less demanding paperback. Scott Karp, another blogger, this time on online media, reports the same symptoms, but suggests an even more alarming diagnosis. It may be that some of us have had the same misgivings, have felt that because we skim and read shallowly a lot of the time, we are getting out of the way of reading deeply, as a marathon runner who, for whatever reason, took to training over shorter and shorter distances might soon discover that he could no longer run the full marathon. (Though Karp and Friedman would argue that the analogy is not apt, that what is going on is more profound than that.) Maybe we have felt the truth of that a little, but have comforted ourselves with the thought (reasonable enough so far as it goes) that we do what we do because it is the quickest and most convenient way in which to assemble the information we require. We Google because days of searching dusty books in dismal libraries are replaced by a few moments clicking away on the mouse. The living is easy, and if we no longer have the opportunity to make those deep and rich connections that reading (books) used to allow, well, that is unfortunate, we miss it, but for now such pleasures must wait.

"What, though," asks Karp, "if I do all my reading on the web, not so much because the way I read has changed" (he might have added 'or because the purpose for which I read has changed'), "ie I am just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?" Studies made into the way people use online facilities in institutions such as The British Library, have found that the vast majority "bounce" from text to text, skimming never more than a page or two at the most, usually a paragraph or two, and hardly ever returning to a previous page. The evidence would tend to suggest that they have become information decoders and rarely progress beyond that. I would love to try an experiment: give to a group of researchers and students the task of studying some topic new to them, and let them cut-and-paste to their heart's content or use whatever technique they might prefer, then give a matched group the same task, but with the proviso that they research it from books. I guarantee that the second group, though they would almost certainly take longer, would be more critically aware and that their resulting text would be characterized by more 'joined-up' threads of thought. Perhaps then we could even give the first group the books to read to see if there were any 'after thoughts'.

That short reverie brings us, I believe, to the heart of the matter: the differences and the relationships which exist between data, information, knowledge and wisdom. Computers work with data, but are the hub of information technology, so we will start there - and at the beginning. The word information from the Latin informatio / informationis means an outline, an idea, and from informare / informatum, to give form to, describe. But it is data that is the most basic element of Information Technology: the ages, test scores and ethnic origins of the children in my class perhaps. We - or the computer - may give the data shape so that it becomes information: say, the average age or the percentage of children being disadvantaged by having to learn in a language that is not their mother tongue, for example. From these we may be able to draw certain consequences, such as the degree to which the non-english pupils are being disadvantaged. This is knowledge. Wisdom might involve the ability to rank in importance the various pieces of knowledge we have gained, to see what can be done to improve the situation, and to establish priorities.

But computers are so good at processing data that they encourage us to stay at that level. They began life as cryptographic machines. That is where they have come from, and where, you begin to feel, they would like to stay, but they have become hugely influential in everything to do with reading, writing, the production of graphics and with printing. It is almost inevitable, therefore, human nature being what it is, that those who use them should tend to stay with what they (the computers) are good at. I could almost draw the analogy of a carpenter who for some reason decides one day that he will no longer choose the best tool for the job, but instead will confine himself to the jobs his favourite tool is good at.

But it doesn't even end with computers and Googling, for since the time when such means of research became all-pervading, the more pernicious aspects of the web's "good life" have spread out through the rest of society: Newspapers have begun to shrink in size and their editors have reduced the length of their articles; T.V. programme-makers have shortened their productions, face-to-face interviews have positively shrivelled and their tone has become less searching and more 'staccato', even when the interviwer is trying to be aggressive - though more frequently now they are shallow and the interviewee's answers are not followed-up, but we are bounced straight to the next prepared question. I can recall when in the '70's and '80's Michael Parkinson might interview no more than three guests at something like depth for anything up to an hour. More recently he would have interviewed half a dozen or more people in that time. Even the news, political and current affairs programmes pander to the quick-dip brigade - which, alas includes myself and, I guess, most of us. But if we cannot do too much to modify the nature of the technology, we could maybe put a little more of ourselves into the way we use it. My own feeling, which is little short of a conviction, is that the devil is not in Google, but in the hyperlinks. They have often been compared to the footnotes in a book. The analogy is apt in some ways, but with one mighty big reservation: when you break off from the thread of an argument in a book to consult a footnote, that footmote does not then present you with a dozen footnotes to the footnote, any one of which might lead you off to another score of footnotes, on and on ad infinitum, further and further from the thread you were following. Perhaps hyperlinks should come with a health warning... Bounce we must, I see that, but maybe we could at least try to bounce with our eyes open and the brain engaged to remind us of where we were before we lost our focus.

Stumble It!

Paul Klee in the Naples Aquarium

I expect to be less active in the blogosphere over the next few days - not absent, just less active. Today (Sunday) we are celebrating our fiftieth wedding anniversary and at the weekend we have our daughter-in-law's fortieth birthday celebrations. In between times we have workmen arriving to beef-up the house's insulation - global warming, don't you know. We shall have to see how it all works out, but please excuse if I don't get round to everyone.

Paul Klee in the Naples Aquarium

In midnight light of heaven behind glass
a silk and damask flower clawed its prey;
a pebble broke apart and swam away...
and rows of dancers became blades of grass.
Waymarking ways along which Klee might pass
on walks with line to metaphor, that fey
old faker, form, the end and death to Klee
of art, had brought him to its masterclass.
The tunes his eyes beheld he'd uncompose
on tesselated staves rewrite, transpose
from world to world. Change and formation,
soul and psychic form were all Creation
gave with which to quicken vacuous space
and shape and shade it to a spirit's face

Paul Klee
Biography and Images

Stumble It!

Bits and Pieces

Well, actually, just a couple of pieces on this occasion, the first one really an update to an earlier post, that on Environmental Art in which I was extremely critical of Mark Wallinger's proposal for a white horse 33 times life size to occupy a currently vacant field on the site of the not-yet-built Ebbsfleet. It will, it is said, do for Ebbsfleet what The Angel of the North has done for the North East: it will regenerate the area by giving it an identity, an iconic image. My reservations mainly concern the scale, and would extend to any other naturalistic sculpture plonked down out of scale and out of context with its surroundings. The other contenders are: Rachel Whitehead's pile of recycled rubbish with a house set on top; Richard Deacon's towering 26 interlocking steel frames; Daniel Buren's disc, rather like a huge T.V. receiving dish, set with wings and Christopher le Brun's tower of cubes of diminishing size. They all, to my mind, qualify as that which Joan Bakewell has called plop art.

I said that my objections relate to naturalistic works out of scale and context. One of the comments levied at my May post raised the example of The Colossus of Rhodes, a valid point. The Colossus was a represention of the Greek God Helios. Unfortunately, we cannot know what the Colossus looked like or how it related to its environment. It is thought that it stood at the entrance to the harbour at Rhodes. Some authorities have it standing astride the entrance, in which case, of course, there would be good reasons for its size, reasons that would put it in some sort of relationship with its environment, as, for example, is the Statue of Liberty.

As also is, I believe from what I have seen and read, the new statue Aspire at Nottingham University. Aspire is meant to emphasize to the students that they may aspire to anything. It was unveiled on the 24th of June, its completion having been delayed by high winds. An inverted cone shape, with a somewhat lacy feel to it (Nottingham is famour for its lace), it marks the sixtieth anniversary of the granting of the university's charter and it stands sixty meters high, and is the first reason for this post. It is, I believe, the perfectly acceptable face of "non plop" art.

To give some comparisons: The Angel of the North is 66 feet high, The Colossus of Rhodes was 110 ft and Christ the Redeemer is 120 feet, Aspire is 197 ft.

But we are not finished: there is more updating to be done as the taste for bigger and yet bigger art works grows apace, for a few days ago Amish Kapoor stepped upon the stage to unveil plans for five colossal works of art, a joint project of himself and Cecil Balmond, a structural designer. This autumn Kapoor will be working on the first of these, Temenos (Here for virtual tour), a £2.7 million steel structure which will dwarf its chosen site in Middlehaven, Middlesborough. A series of circular steel rings and cables, it will weigh in at some 66 tonnes and be almost fifty meters high and a hundred and ten meters long. The plan, the hope, is for these sculptures to go a long way towards regenerating the Tees Valley and "be a potent symbol for the whole of Tyneside".

And the motive for me posting this update? It is to put the other side of the coin. I possibly gave the impression in my previous post that I was "against" all sculpture conceived on a colossal scale, but so far as I can judge from what information is available at present, these latter proposals strike me as being in tune with their surroundings and the very opposite of plop art. I may prove to be wrong in that, of course. Kapoor's proposals have not even receivd planning permission as yet.

---

Dud Novels

A surprise decision by the judging panel of the
Man Booker Prize has been to plant trees for every poor novel submitted for their consideration. The philosophy, it would seem, goes something like this: trees had to be pulped to produce this rubbish, so the least we can do is try to replace them. That is as far as they have yet got in the decision-making. They still have to decide where to plant these trees and how many. Should there be just one tree per bad novel, or a whole copse, perhaps? How many trees does it take, I wonder, to launch a crappy book upon the unsuspecting public? And what sort of tree? A weeping willow springs to mind.
But perhaps the most important decision still to be made is whether or not the offending novel(s) should be named and shamed - as is inceasingly becoming the custom these days in all walks of life. If so, I have a sneaky suspicion that the sales for the duds will soar by at least as much as the long- and perhaps even the short-listed books. Perhaps in twenty-five or fifty years time (or some other Man Booker Prize anniversary) we might even hear of a book winning the "Dud of Duds Award" - maybe having a whole forest to itself?

Stumble It!

Death should be a woman

Some two or three weeks back I mentioned in a comment that the creative juices were running somewhat dry. Jim suggested that maybe I should try to write on the theme "The French have it right, Death should be a woman" (or words to that effect). He further suggested that self-setting would probably not work. So being a contrary old git, I tried the self-setting first and posted the results last week - some "fragments", as I termed them, on the theme of roses, a subject that would not normally have suggested itself to me. This week, however, I got down to working on Jim's suggestion. I did not know the saying, beyond having heard something like it expressed once by an aunt, and I have to say that as a theme or a title it struck me as weird. Working on it seemed even more so - at first. Later it seemed more natural. Here, for what it is worth, is the result. How it compares with last week's effort, and therefore where it leaves the experiment, I have no idea, except that it is arguably more finished.


Death should be a woman

Hush a bye baby, on the tree top,
When the wind blows the cradle will rock;
When the bow breaks, the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby, cradle and all.

But death it is
and thoughts of death
that rock the cradles
of all the people
of all ages.

Life-sickness
is Death-sickness
which is a kind
of motion sickness.

Like my "dead" aunt
reviving on a slab she thought was ice
in what she thought was Heaven --
and ever after thought
the picture books
had erred, the painters
had it wrong, that
angels have a dress code (long
white gowns and masks, white
rubber boots, no wings),
and ever after knew
that though she was not meant for Hell,
Heaven was too cold
to hold the likes of her.

Her "dummy run"
(as she would have it)
reformed her views
of Heaven, left
her thoughts of death unchanged --
and multiplied her fears.

She kept a pub in Islington
and in the pub
a parrot, dumb
until she'd bellow "Time!"
when it would squawk (enough
to wake the dead):
"Aint you buggers got no homes?"

Ever after her trial run
she'd cover the bird over
before she'd call for time.

The only person (until Jim)
I've ever known
or heard, suggest
that death
should be a woman,
who thought a woman's touch
could ease the pain,
the toothache in the gut.

Like an ice-edged wind
on a tooth's frayed nerve,
panic of God in a pounding bowel
hammering both
inside the brain:
"what god ever
severed a life
to amputate pain?"

Or like my dad:
went to church, "high
days and holidays", but sent
us children every week
to church or Sunday school;
saw something - "just
a bit" - of Belsen, after which
he asked to be Confirmed.
The padre came to see us,
to explain
why something so important
was happening out there,
outside the family,
said death had changed dad.
And it had.

I thought his faith would see him through.
But no, the last ride was
white knuckles to the end.

Perhaps if not a woman,
death should at least
be feminine.

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Just for openers...

The other day I picked up my copy of "Lempriere's Dictionary" by Lawrence Norfolk, with the intention of re-reading it. The opening sentence read "The young man dropped the book.". Nothing to write home about there, you might think, except that it reminded me of a talk at the local library that I and the rest of my class were taken to in my youth. It was given by a novelist whose name and details I have long since forgotten. I have forgotten most of the talk as well, and remember only that it was a tips-for-wannabe-writers sort of talk. What I do very vividly recall, though, is the bit about the absolutely primary importance of the opening sentence (or two). He told us he had written his first novel as a youth of about our age, and that its opening sentence had been: "Crash, the captain's head struck the deck!" It was, he assured us, still the best opening he had ever written. He could, he further assured us, tick all the criteria boxes for it: it made the reader want to read on because something was happening from the very first word; it set the tone for the writer to follow, making it that much easier for the story to unfold. There were other plusses, but they, too, have been lost to fading memory.

I suppose that "The young man dropped the book." might seem a little tame beside "Crash, the captain's head struck the deck!", but the one reminded me of the other and furthermore, it started me thinking about opening sentences that have struck me as being among the best, and why that was. We would all produce a different list, of course, and a thought that occurs to me is that I probably remember best the openings to those books that I enjoyed the most. Maybe there are great openings I have forgotten along with the forgettable novels they opened. Another caveat would be that they do not necessarily strike me now as they did then, when I first came to them. I have tried, therefore, to recall what were my feelings then. With that in mind, then, here, in no particular order, are the selections I remember thinking great when I first read them:

"They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide." : "The Sea" by John Banville : A story is all the better, to my way of thinking, for a touch of mystery or a hint of the supernatural. Both are here in the same sentence.

"A war ends in rags and dust." : "A Dance Between Flames" by Anton Gill : Succinct, and at the same time intruiging

"He appeared on the hill at first light. The scarp was dark against a greening sky and there was the bump of the barrow and then the figure, and it shocked." : "Ulverton" by Adam Thorpe : Once again, a touch of mystery in the description, deepening towards the end of the sentence - why the shock?

"Dr Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse." : "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" by Louis de Bernieres : Here it was the humour that got me - what else?

"I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the bike that it is eight-thirty in the morning." : "Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance" by Robert M Pirsig : Unnecessary and apparently inconsequential information from a narrator who yet presents as someone with no time for such frills. Needs resolving.

Rattisbon Arno Domini mense decembri mclv Cronicle of Baudolino of the family of Aulario" : "Baudolino" by Umberto Eco : Well, 'sobvious, innit?

"STATELY, PLUMP, BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed." : "Ulysses" by James Joyce : A touch of humour - and a hint perhaps of something darker. Will there prove to be any significance to the crossed mirror and razor?

"That was when I saw the pendulum." : "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco : We know it is Foucault's pendulum from the book's title, so the question arises: So?

"Up above the wagon rolling along a stony road, big thick clouds were hurrying East through the dusk." : "The First Man" by Albert Camus : Just a workman-like bit of scene-setting which does its job well and leads you to think the rest of the book might be as well written.

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad,Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." : "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez : A rather refined version of "Crash. The Captain's head struck the deck"!

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Poems, mostly roses : fragments and fragrances

Having hit a dry patch recently, I thought I would try challenging myself by setting a weekly topic, preferably one that would not normally suggest itself to me. This is my bag from the week just past. (Don't hold your breath though, the weekly bit will probably not pan out.)


Too many heavy blooms the standard bears,
as though a holy man has bowed his head
beneath too many heavy prayers.

The formal beauty of the rose,
self-replicating in concentric rings,
is neither fractal nor a fractal in a sense -
except the sense that "fractal" has in me.

The landscape changed with every step
and still with every pause for breath it changed
until I came upon the rose and knew at once:
it was the pivot of created things around which turned
earth, stars, and sun and moon and all that was;
that only it was still; that he who sought for stasis
inwardly, must focus on it
and be one with it.

Like many another child I would infuse
rose petals from our garden,
brewing perfume for my mother -
which she'd never use
or give attention to (much less affection),
nor even curiosity. You may conclude
she didn't ever smell of it...
It was the stink, I guess.



If when looking at a rose
you're thinking you have
never truly seen a rose
before, it is most likely
you have meditated
recently or taken drugs -
or found yourself
before great works of art.

My father loved conundrums. "Think,"
he said, "of your electric train...
of going forward on a single track, but then
reversing back without an instant's pause.
Would that be possible?" He drew
the scene so well, I clearly saw
the stationary moment -
and later saw it in a rose:
the way the forward motion
of its growth was stilled
to brief perfection
before decay's reverse.

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Mornings in the Newsagent's

I do not travel by bus or tram much these days. Indeed, I cannot recall when I last did so, unless I am to count the tour of Bath made a couple of years back in one of those open-topped tourist busses. That being so, the nearest I get to hearing the opinion of "The Man on the London Omnibus" (or any other mode of public transport, for that matter) are the conversations that take place in the newsagent's shop each morning. Recently these have (again!) included the thorny topic of what is to be done about our young people and the poor state of their education. In particular the debates have focussed on their inability to read and write and the dumbing down of English exams. The myth of being rewarded with marks for being able to write one's name has surfaced more than once. And then there came this week the news that a candidate was awarded 7.5% for writing "f*** off " on his paper. The mark was given, not by some rookie examiner, but by the chief examiner himself, who then went on to use the paper with trainee examiners as an example to them of how to mark. The principles are quite clear, he maintained: you give marks for correct spelling and for the sequencing of ideas - though as the pupil wrote nothing else against that particular question, and by the examiner's own admission the phrase had no relevance to the question, it is difficult to see what were the ideas he put into sequence... can you have a sequence of one?

I have always been of the opinion that spelling should be tested separately, and not as part of a creative writing excercise, for example. Everyone should be quite clear about what is being marked. But for the majority of the debaters in the newsagent's shop there are no such qualms: "If they can't spell, knock off the marks!" seems to sum up the attitude. But of course, that is not how it works. You do not knock off the marks that you have given for, let us say, developing a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, you just don't give any marks for spelling in the first place. This means that if something (like spelling) is to be taken into consideration, then marks must be allocated for it, guidance given as to how those marks are to be awarded. Furthermore, those marks must be awarded if the criteria are met. After which, it is all down to the examiner's interpretation, just as the application of rules in football hangs, in the last resort, on the referee's interpretation of them. It does mean, though, that marks may be awarded (in this instance, for spelling) in circumstances in which it would seem to most people more appropriate not to award marks at all.

I was reminded again of this issue by a reference on the radio this week to Winston Churchill's own description of his attempt at a Latin prose paper, part of his entrance examination for Harrow: "I wrote my name at the top of the page. I wrote down the number of the question: "1." After much reflection I put a bracket round it. Thus:"(I)." But thereafter I could not think of anything connected with it that was either relevant or true. Incidentally there arrived from nowhere in particular a blot and several smudges. I gazed for two whole hours at this sad spectacle : and then merciful ushers collected my piece of foolscap with all the others and carried it up to the Headmaster's table. It was from these slender indications of scholarship that Mr. Welldon drew the conclusion that I was worthy to pass into Harrow. It is very much to his credit. It showed that he was a man capable of looking beneath the surface of things: a man not dependent upon paper manifestations. I have always had the greatest regard for him."

Strangely, next to the cry of "why can't youngsters spell, these day?", I would guess that the next most common "newsagent moan" (if we stick to those concerned with the English language) is concerned with what a nonsense our spelling system is and how it's a wonder any child ever masters it! Of course, it isn't a system at all: that's the whole point about it. It hasn't come down to us in any sort of pure form, but as a hybrid script, a coming together of Old English and Norman French. The incompatability of these two made it almost inevitable that there would be no coherent system, but then throw in (as they did) heavy lashings of Greek and Latin and confusion was the more confounded. And there was one other event of great importance, what has become known as The Great Vowel Shift. It affected the way words were pronounced (particularly in London and the South of England), and therefore it had great relevance to the way in which spelling related to the spoken word, the cause of so much anguish these days. It is not always remembered that the spoken word is primary, that spelling merely attempts to represent it in some visual form. Until the thirteenth century words were pronounced very much in the Italian or Liturgical Latin way, but from then on, and over the next four hundred years or so there came about a gradual increase in the height of the tongue and a tendency to push it further forward until Middle English speech had become our Modern English version. The rift between spoken and written had become even wider and the ground had been prepared for the many movements that would attempt to reform our spelling - and, indeed other aspects of our language.

I have concentrated on spelling, but the reverse side of the same coin is punctuation, for which much the same arguments and counter-arguments are raised, but which seems to me to be more important than spelling, though punctuation is perhaps more of an art than a science, whereas spelling is but a convention. There is a lot of talk about "correct punctuation" (in the media as well as in the newsagent's), but I doubt that such a thing exists beyond a very minimal framework. Give two or more professional writers - or two or more examiners, come to that - an unpunctuated script and I guarantee that they will all punctuate it differently.

I have long had a hankering to try for the form of punctuation that was in use until the eighteenth century. It was based upon the pauses for breath which occur in spoken English, and not, as in our current system, upon grammatical structure. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries punctuation was heavily applied, though today the vogue is for a lightness of touch. Even so, there are many variations with some authors using different styles for different purposes and various in-house preferences.
Many of the marks and terms we use these days derive from the Greek and originate from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, at which time they were used to mark off sections of text, the comma and the colon being used to mark off sections in a line of verse. The use of the stop, even when grammatically correct, can imply a separation between sections of text that is not always appropriate, I feel. The voice, with its inflections and pauses is more flexible, as was punctuation when it was more closely related to these. Grammarians have much to answer for, maybe.

Here, to conclude, are a few thinking points:

• How many authors, professional writers and other such are overly concerned with spelling and correct punctuation when getting down the first draft (which an examination answer usually is)?


• For centuries the legal profession managed very well without punctuation of any sort, particularly in such documents as deeds and for conveyancing, considering that punctuation was the cause of much ambiguity. It is only since legal English has become established as the dominant international business language that this has changed. Punctuation has now established itself again in modern legalese.


• James Joyce's Ulysses has an almost complete lack of standard punctuation (being partly based upon the spoken word and partly on "stream-of-consciouness"?), yet despite also lacking the usual narrative flow, is as understandable as any piece of writing can be - for we might well debate whether any work of literature can be completely understandable.


• Is not the main consideration that the reader should be able to plug in to the author's intended (and, depending upon the nature of the writing, his unintended?) meanings?

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All dolled-up and nowhere to go but home

I have had a busy week, mostly away from the computer and mostly for pleasure. We went to Wimbledon, for example, to see something of the tennis championships, and to The Royal Horticultural Society's gardens at Wisley. So not a lot of blog activity, I fear. Apologies wherever they may be appropriate. I will try to catch up. The poem comes from the Wisley visit. It probably needs putting away for a week or two and then some serious work to be done on it, but I post it now for reasons of topicality.

All dolled-up and nowhere to go, but home.

Scarecrows. A magic trail of them. People
are posing with them, photographs are being taken
of them arm in arm, embracing them
or smooching up to them, some
even feigning a meaningful moment,
all glad-eyed and gossippy, down on their knees
with them. Others not feigning, alive in
a fantasy: scarecrows are living;
we, the clockwork copies of ourselves.



"How fresh and original!" someone is saying.
(I think it must be one of the people.)
(Can you see in the figures
some ground-breaking trait?) I fancy
you'll find no unorthodox types.
They are all of conventional breed: punk,
vicar, court jester, spiv, banker, director -
and one Madam Chairman who thrills me to bits,
and looks like a dominant minus her whips.



Bamboozled by appearances,
we cannot resist
the subtle crudities of gaping hole for mouth
and earth-filled stocking for a nose. Like songs
or smells they are connecting us
to home, to where we most belong, where are
the china dog, long-legged doll and fluffy bear,
a place of lost relationships
found for this short while.

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A Question of Gender

The latest - and for a good while, probably the last - in my series on childhood.

The house was different that morning,
the shadows darker, highlights brighter,
people quieter, breakfast just a touch
more special, grandad toasting bread,
thick slices on a long wire fork, the fire
too big, the room too warm, dad not at work,
mum still in bed, and gran (who would have
felt a scandal coming on if she had guessed
how I knew - thought I knew - what lay behind
the fuss) with her large saucepan on the hob.
At which point he appears, the doctor,
in the doorway - and me but half-way
through my toast. His bag a disappointing
flat, looks empty - and too small to ever
hold a baby. Manfully I try
to play it like I do not care. Upstairs
a cry. "Good lungs on him!" my father says.
So now I care, with knees red raw from bed
times praying for a sister. Getting wind
of which, the doctor's ferretting for whys
and wherefores - though too subtle, not in
my face enough to break me down. I keep
my counsel, fob him off: "So we can call
her Sylvia," I lie. They all at this
time - doctor, family, the world at large -
are too ingenuous to comprehend
the full extent of that dark place within
my soul. He rolls himself a cigarette:
"Small problem, simply solved," he muses
to himself... "we call the little lad
Sylvesta." "Over my dead body!"
will growl my mother when she hears. It's all
a great distraction from what lies beneath
that off-white lie (mum always says there are
no truly white ones): my first craving
of the flesh, my first illicit itch,
my twice-repeated, horror-greeted plea
(the voice of old Beelzebub, gran says)
to add a dolls' house to the toys I own.
A sister, though, might bring the longed-for
object in her train, might be prevailed upon
to share it with outlandish beings,
dolls of different kind, long raised in
caves and tunnels underground, all sworn
to games of gross and most ungirlish play.

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Comment with the experts.

The Times newspaper is running a weekly article under the title "modern art explained", which is actually claiming too much for it. The format is that each week (Tuesday) they reproduce a significant work of modern art, together with verdicts by readers and an expert. Interesting though these can be (and so far the readers' have had the edge on the expert), they have not, in my view, amounted to an "understanding" of modern art - or even of the works themselves. There have been two so far. This week it was the turn of the Jake and Dinos Chapman brothers to have their "One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved" put up for scrutiny. It is basically a desicration of a perfectly respectable portrait, such that it now depicts the inevitable decay which the body must suffer. Rachel Campbell Johnston, the expert, considers it the modern equivalent of the traditional image of St Jerome meditating on the skull beneath the skin . Last week's offering was Pablo Picasso's "Woman Weeping", an image which grew out of "The Greek Chorus of women weeping" in the aftermath of Guernica, one of the worst atrocities of The Spanish Civil War, involving the bombing of the Basque village. He produced a series of such images, all related to his great work of that name.

At any time the work for the following week can be viewed at www.timesonline.co.uk/modernartexplained, thereby making it possible to email your views in time for them to be published alongside the expert's. Next Tuesday's offering is to be a Robert Gwathmey print.

This week the views seemed to divide according to whether or not the person commenting considered that art should depict beauty. There certainly have been times when the universal view would have been that beauty was art's business first and foremost, and many even today would be inclined to ask what is art's business if not beauty in some form or other? Possibly a more productive talking point than the work itself?

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The singer, the poet, the actor and the bard

Before I get intp my post proper, a word of apology for my recent absence, and this particularly to any whose comments have not been responded to, the reason being that my hard drive gave up the ghost in the middle of a defrag. The "pooter buff" in whose tender care I laid my machine was initially sure that he could ressurect it; to me it seemed terminal. Alas, I was correct, he was too optimistic. So I now have a much larger drive with acres of empty space - and miles of re-installing to and tweaking and adjusting to do. Still, (Almost) Normal Service is Resumed.

The singer, the poet, the actor and the bard

I am not exactly a devotee of performance poetry and have not attended a vast number of poetry readings, so am probably not the person best equipped to write this post, but I do not accept the oft-stated opinion that performance poetry is related to pop culture rather than to literature, and I have always found it difficult to understand those who suggest that performance poetry is in some measure inferior to the printed form, to what has been termed 'page poetry'. Analysis of this latter attitude will show, I suspect, two basic misconceptions: that performance poetry is mostly produced by would-be "page poets" who feel - or have been made to feel - that there is something lacking in their work which prevents it from standing up to close examination on the page.

In which connection: there was a touch of public tut-tutting a couple of weeks back when the news broke that this year's Cambridge University Final Year English Lit Paper required the finalists to compare a lyric from Amy Winehouse, Love is a Losing Game (I ask you: what are our universities coming to?:

For you I was a flame
Love is a losing game
Five storey fire as you came
Love is a losing game
Why do I wish I never played?
Oh, what a mess we made
And now the final frame
love is a losing game
Played out by the band
Love is a losing hand.)

with a poem by Sir Walter Raleigh, As you came from the Holy Land:

As you came from the Holy Land
Of Walsinghame,
Met you not with my true love
By the way as you came?
How shall I know your true love,
That have net many one,
As I went to the Holy Land,
That have come, that have gone?
She is neither white nor brown,
But as the heavens fair,
There is none hath a form so divine
In the earth or the air...

Extremely interesting to me were the reported reactions of the finalists. These ranged from: "I sat there looking at the paper in shock" and "I wouldn't consider a controversial pop singer a literary figure" (the word 'controversial was intriguing there, I thought: would a non-controversial pop singer have been fine and dandy? Should we avoid controversial poets as well?) through "It was really bizarr," to admiration for the examiner who had set the question: "I think it's cool, poetry doesn't have to be Keats and Byron". (I guess we can assume that he was one candidate who hadn't gone into the examination room with a stock of prepared answers.) I am not sure whether or not the paper asked for differences rather than similarities ( I have not seen the actual question reprinted anywhere), but I doubt it. That, I imagine, is just what the press has fixated upon - at which point my former professional involvement with intelligence testing reminds me that the ability to discern differences precedes that of spotting similarities, which is a higher cognitive skill. So an infant asked to say how a ball is like an apple will likely say "You can't eat a ball, but you eat apples" or "The apple is red, but the ball is blue". however, a year or so later s/he will happily tell you that they are both round. However, to give credit where credit is due, one journalist did spot a similarity, though as between the authors, not the works; he honed in on the fact that both had a penchant for mind-altering substances.

Is there any significance then, I wonder, in the fact that all the adverse comments I have read, be they from the finalists themselves or from the press, relate to teasing out differences, rather than any similarities, between Raleigh's poem and Winehouse's lyric. Typical has been: "The Raleigh poem is a lyrical poem, written to be sung or to be read aloud, whilst the Winehouse lyric doesn't have to exist without the music."

The Guardian made a couple of interesting points, the first being that the finalists were also asked to compare the Raleigh poem with Fine and Mellow, by Billie Holiday and Boots of Spanish Leather, by Bob Dylan, but no voices were raised in protest at their inclusion. It does begin to look as though the devil was in that word 'controversial', do we not think? The Guardian's other point was made by asking readers first to imagine that they had come to these lines blind, not knowing anything about them or where they were from:



"Self-possessed and profound,
'Till the chips were down,
Know you're a gambling man,
Love is a losing hand."

Would we, the Guardian asked us all, be able to say for sure whether these lines were written during the reign of Elizabeth 1 or whether they date from the time of Elizabeth 2? Easy-peasy, I thought: the word "chips" gives it away, but that, apparently is not so.

Quite possibly, I am in danger of making the introduction the longest part of the post, so I will tear myself away from this absorbing topic and move on to the more general one which has been a bone of contention for as long as I can remember, and which the Winehouse controversy revived for me: the question as to whether or not a lyric can be regarded as a poem with music added - and conversely, whether a poem is but a lyric stripped of the music that should rightly belong to it. I say it has been a bone of contention for as long as I can recall, but it is nevertheless a relatively modern dilemma Historically, of course, the song came first. Poems were set to music. Before even there was writing there were what today we might dub 'performance poems', by the recitation of which the history and mores of the tribe or community were passed on from generation to generation. By the fourteenth century (I speak of Britain, though the phenomenon was almost universal) these had become the ballad, an oral narrative poem with no stated author and often sung to a simple musical accompaniment. They relayed the tales and myths of the community and would very often contain a strong element of the supernatural. They had a simple stanza form, usually of four lines rhyming abcb(see here) and were usually characterized by much repetition and direct speech. The heyday of the ballad was the late Middle Ages.

There were national differences. Ireland, for example, was an intensely aristocratic society and as with all such, attached geat importance to the record of its past achievements. It was the duty and purpose of the poet to keep alive the details of its history and the genealogy of those who had made the history, thereby to enhance the reputations and value to the community of the ruling classes. Later, this mnemonic tradition met with the Latin writing tradition and adopted the fixed forms which gave it a greater permanence, with printed poems coming into their own in the sixteenth century as broadside ballads, being printed on one side of a broadside sheet. Both in England and Ireland, they survived until well into the twentieth century. It was Irish society's aristocratic nature that was responsible for ensuring its ballad tradition would be underpinned by a literary one. This was not so in Scotland, where the tradition was basically a non-literate one in which the vernacular (rather than the classical literary language) was used. It would seem that hundreds of songs must have been lost because of this difference, and what survives is mainly what was written down by a few educated Gaels, many of them clergymen, and mostly after the disaster of Culloden had brought home to them the likelihood that the Gaelic world was comng to an end, and that the fragments must be collected. However, bards would continue to exist and ply their trade in Scotland until well into the eighteenth century.

It was the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that saw the appearance of the literary ballad. Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Keats's La Belle Dame sans Merci are excellent examples, as, in Scotalnd, is The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. The U.S. and Australia saw the development of the popular ballad retelling old tales to fit changed circumstances.

What the history of poetry seems to tell us - and it should come as no surprise - is that all poetry, written or otherwise, is essentially a coming together of sound, rhythm and meaning. No doubt some bright spark will find the exception that proves the rule and come up with some poem in which one or more of these elements is missing, but for all practical purposes poetry is a form in which they work together. I would find it difficult to conceive of a poetry that was not, potentially at least, performable. Certainly the best performance poets are craftsmen who would want their work to stand up for itself on the page as well as on the stage. This would be true even when the performance was meant to incorporate theatrical elements, including acting, and it remains true even in the case of a work that is almost universally acknowledged to be more successful on the stage than on the page. \simon \munnery's Deadlines would be such a work:

I do nothing without a deadline.
Without a deadline I do nothing
Until the deadline is almost upon me, and then I panic
Which is doing nothing quickly!
Only when the deadline is past, do I begin work
On my excuses.

Personally, I think it works very well on the page. It is said that it brought the house down when it was performed.

Now, though, is the crunch time. I can put it off no longer. The $64,000 question is: what about the Winehouse lyric? Is it poetry? It had just won an Ivor Novello award for the best musical and lyrical song, but the Cambridge finalists had to rank it, not just against a poem by Walter Raleigh, but against the might of Wordsworth and Milton also. For our purposes, though, it does not have to be great poetry; it just has to qualify as poetry. Do sound, rhythm and meaning gel together? The meter is simple iambic (te tum - a beat or "foot" consisting of one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one) trimeter (3 such beats or feet per line) with some inversions called trochees (tum te - stressed, unstressed) and occasionally at the beginning of a line, something called a spondee (tum tum - two stressed syllables). So that's okay then, nothing wrong there, that would all pass muster - you can invert or tum tum at the beginning of a line! But there's more: the Winehouse lyric is written in rhyming couplets. Not fashionable, maybe (certainly not in the world of The Poetry Society, for example), but it's okay, they can't touch you for it. There is not a lot of assonance (repetition of vowel sounds) - so you want everything in the one poem?

It goes without saying, of course, that regular rhyme and rhythm schemes do not of themselves make a poem. They may produce a verse of sorts, a container to hold the poetry, as it were, but the last thing we want is to go te tumming to infinity with rhymes that dong their merry way the while. What matters is the poetry, which is more than rules and guide lines. Here, though, we have a verse which is simple - and appropriate, you might say - in that it purports to convey the thoughts and feelings of a person of simple, unsophisticated outlook. The comparison with the Raleigh is with a poem that gives the sixteenth century outlook and language of a sophisticated man-about-town, but to my mind the Winehouse lyric makes it as poetry on the page - and although I have not seen her perform - except on the t.v. - I am quite sure that, performed by Winehouse, it makes it as poetry on the stage as well! It maybe doesn't make it as intellectual poetry, which is perhaps why it set so many Cambridge hearts a'pumpin'.

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Intelligence Gathering

The light below,
which was always white in sitting room and hall,
but yellow from my post upon the landing,
could be a wedge to split a wall in two,
and then a horn or speaking tube that filled
the stairwell with a muffled drawl - deep speech


that might have come through water.
My great aunt and my mother speaking late
at night, their voices sounding foreign.
My great aunt's house. My sleeping
brother, five years younger, unaware
of how the world can change its shape and bare


its soul when darkness falls. Evacuees,
our world had changed uncannily; we'd seen
new images replace the old. And there,
in my mind's eye, on my aunt's bureau,
sat code books, two-way radio
and all the many trappings of the spy.


Sometimes above the gurgling, a sun-
lit phrase might leap in distant echo
of a half-forgotten sentiment once tied
to one of my first snapshots of the world -
now mis-identified. Inside my skull,
cold analysts, sifting the intelligence,


uncovered things I swore to carry to
the grave: an uncle whom I loved
kept skeletons in some dark kitchen closet;
my mother loved a man who wore a funny hat;
and, dying of an unknown illness,
I'd only days (or so) to live.

© David King

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Nearly! - True story 2

This is the true story I promised when I posted my poem "A Family Occasion". You may recall that a couple of posts on Ken Armstrong's blog had given me cause to stop and think: a true story in which Ken was himself involved, and a tale about the tale and how he came to write it, leading to a moral, almost a moral imperative, you might say, that this story of mine which I have had for some while asking to be written down, should get its wish. I hesitated long, partly because it reveals the slightly unpalatable truth that I have not always been the exceedingly likeable chap that I have become. So I worried about the details, how it would come out, the spin, if you like. But Ken made the issue clear enough: not to worry about getting it right; get it written. So with a thank-you nod to Ken, here it is:-

It is drawn from my days as an art student. I have mentioned before that sculpture was an ex-curricular activity engaged in at evening classes in a small, rather deep cellar which doubled as a pottery studio. We shared the sessions with further education students and inherited a long tradition of mild hostility between "them" and "us" - a bit like "town" and "gown" at university, I used to think. From our point of view they were not serious about the work, spending much of the time gossipping and fooling around. They also took too much of the lecturer's time. (Though in truth, two minutes would have been too much.) From their point of view we were Bohemian (just because we dressed that way), dismissive of them (can't argue with that!) and pretentious. (Pretentious, nous?)

Well, once upon that far-off time, I had arrived early for the session and was alone in the studio when a newcomer descended the stairs. It was obvious that he was another of "them". Who but an amateur would turn up for modelling or pottery in a lounge suit? Some of the sculptures, including my own, were on turntables or pottery wheels. He walked up to one, removed its cover, the purpose of which was to keep the clay damp and workable, and set it turning very slowly, leaning back to examine it as he did so, and making low, reflective mmmmmmm sounds. I found this very presumptuous of him and was beginning to get a bit hot under the collar when he turned to me and asked "Did you do this?" No," I replied., "not bloody likely!" The model was in point of fact the work of a friend of mine, and I thought very highly of it. It was a huge construction, based upon a motif of seashells, and had been painstakingly built up over a period of many weeks by the patient application of small pieces of clay. "Do you know the person who did it?" came next. "Sure, he's a friend of mine!" "Does he work like this a lot?" "Does he? He'll knock off five or six of an evening!"

There was no response to this last titbit of information, but instead he moved off to the next model, which happened to be mine, a plaster model, built on armatures, also over many weeks, an abstract, but loosely based on various skeletons I had sketched at the Victoria and Albert Museum. "Is this one of his?" "Nope. Mine." "Do you do a lot of this?" "When I can tear myself away from my first love." Which is?" "China dogs and long-legged dolls. Good market for them." At this point there came another figure darkening the stairway, and with it the voice of Mr Henke (not sure about the spelling) the lecturer, bellowing down the stairwell: "Are you down there, Mr Epstein?"

End of story? Nearly. Actually it wasn't the Mr Epstein, but his brother (Harold, I think), a highly respected sculptor in his own right. Later, Mr Henke caught up with me and asked "What the hell have you been saying to Mr Epstein? He asked me who the lunatic was down there!" So passed ingloriously my one (illusory? We'll - I'll - never know) chance of fame.

Stumble It!

Sea Change

I had been told (by reviewers and others) that she is too cerebral; even "cold" and "bloodless" was mentioned by one, and, from a passing acquaintance with individual poems, I was inclined to agree - but then if folk keep telling you that the water is cold, and all you ever do is dangle a toe in it to see if they are right, then you will be almost certain to agree, for it will feel cold. In order to be sure you have to take the plunge. There are some poets who can draw you in and make you theirs for ever, just on the strength of a single poem, but with others it is necessary to immerse yourself. At least, that's how it is for me. Jodie Graham is one of the latter. The effect of her poems on me is cumulative. Partly it may be because of her long lines and the fact that I had read them mainly in reviews. They just do not do what they are meant to do when contracted to three or four column-wide lines. Of course, one should be able to imagine them stretched out and looking as they will look on the book page, but for me it does not work quite like that. I saw the difference as soon as I opened her "Sea Change" in my local book shop. It brought about a sea change in my attitude towards her work. Well, not immediately perhaps, but it was the start of something almost magical.

If you will forgive the pun, one of the things her poems do, and do electrifyingly well, is to bring us to the point where we can see change, and see it for what it is. She has been accused - as was Seamus Heaney - of ignoring the political and social disasters of today's world, but one of the poems in "Sea Change" deals with the collapse of our belief systems - and that surely is a cause at the root of much modern turmoil and turbulence. Already I consider my purchase of "Sea Change" to be one of the most thought-provoking of recent acquisitions. Here, the opening lines from "Nearing Dawn":-

Sunbreak. The sky opens its magazine. If you look hard
                                                        it is a process of falling
                                                        and squinting - & you are in-
terrupted again and again by change, & crouchings out there
                                                        where you are told each second you
                                                        are only visiting, & the secret
                                                        whitening adds up to no
meaning, no, not for you, wherever the loosening muscle of the night
                                                        startles-open the hundreds of
                                                        thousands of voice-boxes, into which
your listening moves like an aging dancer still trying to glide - there is time for
                                                        everything, everything, is there not-
                                                        though the balance is