Beyond Exeter, a refrain we heard
for miles on end
until we sank into a numbness
...........
Lunch was eaten late, the plates unwashed wait
with the cultery
almost correct at the time. Weekend breaks
against, dragging us from the bubble of free
love and free time.
...................
You surprise me, by wearing low heeled shoes
that mark us out
...........
The rattle of cash, rings from the arcade
as we pass.
We both have that glow of soreness, hard gained,
from a weekend gone to quick. The splash
of traffic thickens
.....
The rattling cash, rings from the arcade
as we hurry past.
That certain splash of traffic thickens, frays,
as turning past the closing shops the last
busker counts her change. The shopping centre
clock shows we have the time, but I speed up,
being the gentleman, I don't want you
late for the last bus you need, to enter
back into
.....
26/06/2018
#amwriting #essay #peom #poetry #larkin Whitsun Weddings 2
Whitsun Weddings
Here is a recording of the Larkin reading the poem in 1964... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9eTF6QNsxA
The poem takes the form of eight verses, of ten lines each. The lines have ten syllables, except for the second line of each verse, which has four. The rhyme pattern is A,B,A,B,C,D,E,C,D,E. in form and structure it matches some of Keatss Odes, which Keats stated were written in this manner to seek a 'better' form of the sonnet.
The poem was first published on 28th February 1964.
Larkin began writing the poem in 1957, and there is speculation that it is based upon an actual journey he undertook in 1955, though this has been called into question as there was apparently a rail strike at Whitsun of that year. But for now, we will quote Larkin, "'You couldn't be on that train without feeling the young lives all starting off, and that just for a moment you were touching them. Doncaster, Retford, Grantham, Newark, Peterborough, and at every station more wedding parties. It was wonderful, a marvellous afternoon.'"
The text of the poem can be found here - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48411/the-whitsun-weddings - along with a standard commentary on the poem - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68946/philip-larkin-the-whitsun-weddings - which contains every cliche about Larkin and his work that you could possibly wish.
It is this perception of Larkin, and particularly the standard reading of the poem that this essay seeks to address, and correct: or at least to offer an alternative possible interpretation.
A decent place to start, when considering Larkin, is the 2011 article in the Atlantic written by Christopher Hitchens. - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/05/philip-larkin-the-impossible-man/308439/ - the article is entitled Philip Larkin, The Impossible Man, and subtitled, how the most exasperating of poets met his match.
To some extent Hitchens' misses the chance to allay his exasperation by missing every opportunity that he himself sets up. As, in the opening paragraph, when he relates the tale of Larkin taking Orwell to dinner at a rather less good hotel than the hotel to which he had taken Dylan Thomas the week before, in his role as treasurer of the Oxford University English Club, an event on which Larkin dryly comments, "I suppose it was my first essay in practical criticism." This being the same Orwell, who criticized Auden and Spender as 'sissy poets'.
Rather than ask questions, such as the potential impact upon Larkin of a trajectory which ran from being rejected for the army, going to Oxford - effectively to be a sissy poet - gaining a first class honours degree, and then becoming a librarian in very provincial library - "there swelled....A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower...Sent out of sight." - perhaps? Instead Hitchens' engages in a comparison between Orwell and Larkin, which has more to do with his long running literary battles over the meaning and inheritance of Orwell, and Hitchens' view of himself and the left, than it does about the subject.
The main usefulness of the article, for me at least, is Hitchens coining of the phrase, 'the Terry Eagleton crew', to describe the seemingly increasing numbers of people ready to dismiss Larkin's work, because of their dismal of Larkin as a man.
Which brings me to a video on youtube that was the real spark that ignited this essay. It is of a meeting at the now defunct Philoctetes Centre, - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWNihMubl5E&t - in New York, in 2008. And featured the Larkin biographer, and ex-Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, in discussion with Michael Braziller about two of Larkin's poems, Whitsun Weddings and High Windows: followed by a question and answer session with the audience. The stated purpose of the Philoctetes Centre is, or rather was, the study of imagination.
Among many rather extraordinary statements made by Mr Motion, were that he had never noticed before the line "Like an outdated combine harvester" in High Windows,and that "like an arrow-shower...Sent out of sight" was perhaps a reference to the Laurence Olivier's version of Henry V, that he was, or wasn't, sure Larkin had seen. That Motion described himself a 'friend' of Larkin, suggests nothing more than Motion is a careerist who appears to have used his friendship to feather his own nest, and then like any careerist "I, decent with the seasons, move", when the wind turns and the Terry Eagleton crew moved into queer the pitch, he is happy to paint himself in a new light.
But rather than do unto Motion what the Eagleton crew do unto Larkin, and by extension do unto Mr Braziller, who appeared terrified of the Amazons in the audience, we should move onto the Q&A of this session that provided ample evidence of why the Philoctetes Centre ceased studying imagination. It was less a question and answer, than an invitation for a man to commit the dreaded sin of pointing out that perhaps Larkin isn't a misogynist, and when that failed, their imagination ran riot with quoting the spectrum of feminist slogans that reached its zenith with the claim "shuffling gouts of steam", was somehow proof of violence, probably against women, as opposed to a description of a steam engine puffing smoke.
Hitchens too indulges this line of non-inquiry in his piece. Though in fairness to him after making the obligatory statement of misogyny, he does have the decency to be informed about his subject, and to offer an alternate suggestion of what may have been going on, by quoting from letters written to Monica Jones, whom Hitchens describes thus, " Monica Jones, an evidently insufferable yet gifted woman who was a constant friend and intermittent partner (one can barely rise to saying mistress, let alone lover)." In the letters Larkin says, "“I’m sorry our lovemaking fizzled out,” he writes after a disappointing provincial vacation in 1958. “I am not a highly-sexed person.” This comes after a letter in which he invites her to consider their affair in the light of “a kind of homosexual relation, disguised: it wdn’t surprise me at all if someone else said so.”"
Unfortunately, we will never know if Larkin was hoping for a lesbian or gay relationship with Monica.
But it does rather suggest that the sting of the 'sissy poets' was strongly felt by Larkin, with the star of Auden being particularly attractive.
In an interview given to the Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3153/philip-larkin-the-art-of-poetry-no-30-philip-larkin - Larkin claimed not to be influenced by poets he admired. Yet in the same interview he reveals both his wide literary tastes and knowledge. And, reading Larkin one often picks up echoes of Auden's work, "Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat", could perhaps be references to both When I Walked Out One Morning, and The Night Mail, the latter particularly so when combined with, "I took for porters larking with the mails,....And went on reading."
Given Auden's towering influence on poetry, at the time Larkin - having retrained to master the dewy-decimal system, an honours degree from Oxford not being enough - was starting his career, it shouldn't be surprising that he would be influenced by Auden.
If you would indulge my filthy mind for a moment, I was amused to watch a lecture on Auden, again on youtube, - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcRhInARHFs&t= - given by Langdon Hammer of Yale University, about an Auden poem, sometimes called The Letter, written in 1927 - http://writing.jmpressley.net/papers/auden.html - I would suggest there is more going on behind that sheep pen wall than Auden describing the countryside, particularly when you reach the poem#s conclusion, "I, decent with the seasons, move... Different or with a different love,.... Nor question much the nod,.... The stone smile of this country god... That never was more reticent,....Always afraid to say more than it meant." Especially as saying more than it meant could get you imprisoned, or even hanged.
It is this reluctance to say more than it meant that leads people to queue up to brand Larkin with their favourite 'ism' or 'ist'. Particularly when Larkin so often breaks George Carlin's rules of the five things that cannot be said on television.
It is within this contradiction that so much of the criticism lies.
Larkin in this respect does not help himself. He is variously quoted as stating that his poems are what they are and that they have no hidden or wider meaning. This could be interpreted a number of ways, one of which is simple defensiveness at being asked leading questions by journalists, whom he knows are going to write the piece they were commissioned to write, with or without his input: his quotes serving only to provide more or less rope.
Yet clearly he is being disingenuous, and as mentioned above, not helping himself.
For instance in the poem Church Going, the issue if less about whether he is or isn't religious - he said he wasn't - than it is about an exploration of what remains. He may just as well have visited football stadiums after the match and would perhaps have written a similar poem. The question he asks in so much of his work, is 'if this changes what replaces it?', and 'what will happen to these people?'
In Annus Mirabilis he describes courtship as, "A sort of bargaining, ....A wrangle for a ring" which contrasts with the opening of High Windows, "And guess he’s fucking her and she’s....Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm," Courtship has been replaced by 'Free Love', the ring, in one sense remains, and is now being fucked, just as it was before, but the ring of rubber provided by the state is of less value to the woman in a pawn shop should things turn sour.
That Larkin acknowledges the past, without praising the present, is perhaps his original sin.
Which brings me back to the Terry Eagleton crew, of which I used to be a paid member. When I first encountered the poem Whitsun Weddings, I too had the standard reaction at the preconceived snootiness, the elitism, the snobbery.
The tension contained within my prejudice was less about the what the poem is and says, than what it should be and professes to say. That Larkin chooses not to play this game, but instead plays a rather more subtle game of leaving the reader to interpret, leaves him at a loss, if for no other reason that the past is such other world.
Take an observation like "girls...In parodies of fashion,". If you know that it was possible at the time, and something commonly done, to buy the pattern for a dress you had seen in a magazine, and that the pattern came with a label of the designer that could be sewn in. Then the parody is not a sneering class statement, as the standard interpretation of the poem would have you believe, but a statement about the quality of the cloth, an observation picked up again in the next verse with "The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,".
Or perhaps Larkin is picking up on the themes explored in his poem, The Large Cool Store. Certainly he chooses to echo the colour palette, "Lemon, sapphire, moss-green, rose", of that poem, with the "lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres" of this. And in doing so, he repeats his assertion that there is something ethereal in their expectations: "Marked off the girls unreally from the rest", a sentiment expanded upon in The Large Cool Store, "How separate and unearthly love is,....Or women are, or what they do,....Or in our young unreal wishes.... Seem to be".
Whatever the case, when one sees these people as more than pawns in a game of literary exclusion they become more real and Larkin's observation of them more sharp.
Not that it stops the critics of the poem piling on the stones of the cairn myth they seek to build. My particular favourite in this respect is "mothers loud and fat", which is a favourite trigger for those wishing to push the narrative of the Terry Eagleton crew. Reading various criticisms of the poem the idea that a woman or a mother, can be either loud or fat, or worse both, is something so shocking too many that they must signal their alarm in the broadest terms possible. This led me to wondering what they would think of Ma Larkin in the HE Bates novels, or Mrs Feziwig in Dickens' Christmas Carol, or the countless other loud, fat matrons peppered throughout novels, plays and poems down the ages, who far from being seen as some sinister cypher of class prejudice, are usually seen as a stereotype of kind-heartedness and joviality.
I also found myself wondering if this expression of 'class solidarity' was not rather an expression of pretense. Especially in an age when precisely these type of women are regularly held up to ridicule on various lifestyle television programs, in health campaigns and newspaper stories about the benefits of dieting.
Again we might look at the historical context and delve into reports, such as the Greenwood Committee who examined hunger in the 1930's, to see if there might be a reason for why the mother's described in this poem and in this period might be fat: or if Larkin is simply using the readily available trope of fiction, the kindly-hearted matron.
But given that Whitsun Weddings was first published in 1964, it is perhaps useful to look at a different government report, The Beaching Report, on the future of the railways - first published in 1963, under the title Reshaping British Railways: "sun destroys....The interest of what’s happening in the shade" is surely an apt description for these wedding parties, given that they, like the 30 Foot Trailer of Ewan McColl's song- first broadcast in April 1964, as part of the radio ballad The Traveling People - were soon to be a thing of the past.
Certainly the report inspired Larkin's contemporary John Betjeman, to rail against the closures and reorganisations, which were, it was argued, needed in the name of progress: the car being the transport of the future. It is surely no accident that Larkin includes the lines, "Until the next town, new and nondescript,...Approached with acres of dismantled cars." This could be a reference to motor cars. according to report in Hansard in 1960 - https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1960/may/04/road-accidents - the number of people killed or injured on the roads was running at in excess of 300,000 per year, or it could be reference to rolling stock, as during the period, beginning in 1960, there was a change from steam to diesel locomotives and an accompanying upgrading of carriages.
In the poem the appear to be on a steam train, "shuffling gouts of steam" and the ambiguous line, "An uncle shouting smut". And, "All windows down" and "I leant...More promptly out next time" suggests that Larkin, or the narrator, is in one of the older compartment carriages.
The significance of this becomes clearer if one assumes the train in the poem to be a metaphor for marriage. A metaphor that perhaps can be expanded by the assertion of the transport minister of the time Ernest Marples, to be a relic of the Victorian past.
Another big issue of the day, was reform of the divorce laws. I offer this link - https://www.lawteacher.net/study-guides/family-law/History-Divorce-Law.php - which outlines both the history, and the issues of the debate as it stood in 1964, when the poem was published.
Of significance is that a divorce could only be granted by the High Court in London. And that in order to gain a divorce one of the partners had to be the 'guilty party', which led to the popular notion of 'the dirty weekend in Brighton.' In order to get to Brighton from Hull, where the journey begins, one would have to travel to London and for there take an onward train.
One might also consider the supposed genesis of the poem, with the apocryphal, or not, journey in 1955 until it's publication in 1964. This coincides with the failure of the law commission to make recommendations on the issue of reform of the divorce laws in the mid 1950's, to the joint commissions by the Church of England and the Law Society that began in 1966. The aim of this commission states that their objectives "were to buttress, rather than undermine, the stability of marriage." That marriage required strengthening is a sign of it's weakness, or as Larkin puts it, "fathers had never known....Success so huge and wholly farcical".
The following lines hint at this too, " The women shared... The secret like a happy funeral;" and "While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared... At a religious wounding." For marriage, gave a woman respectability, and being married meant she could no longer be 'spoiled for marriage'.
Larkin's laconic and dry wit has often been commented upon, but the aspect of his satyr of, and about, his key themes of discretion and respectability are often overlooked. Even in his splenetic excesses, that so offend the 'liberated' and 'progressive', it is these themes he returns to - and much of the ammunition for the Terry Eagleton crew is provided by his indiscretion and lack-of respectability when caught singing racist songs, and having the audacity to find them funny - and worse, being dead so as not to be in a position to make the required apology.
But let us for a moment consider the opening line, "That Whitsun, I was late getting away" and ask the question why?
We know from, later in the poem, that the narrator's destination is London. But why are the going there?
To take the standard reading of the poem, this is Larkin, he is going to the capital for a conference on library matters, or or some poetry do, or maybe he is off to stock up on Bamboo and Frolic.
But supposing it is a fictional Larkin riding a metaphorical train, who is in some alternative dimension and off to seek a divorce from Monica Jones in order to marry Maeve Brennan. Or to meet Maeve Brennan in Brighton to secure the required evidence to obtain a divorce from Monica Jones.
Or perhaps it is simply a living breathing Larkin meeting a large as life Maeve Brennan.
The documentary Love and Death in Hull - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqa6L22m0rY&t=1211s - paints a picture of the relationship between Larkin and Brennan, that is both chivalrous and affectionate. And, the reported timescale of that relationship, they met in 1955, began their affair in 1960, and if one believes Larkin himself, between Love Me Do and the Chatterley trial, he discovered what sexual intercourse was.
And there is something curious about the use of I and we in the poem.
"I was late getting away" "I didn’t notice what a noise", "I took for porters", "I leant.... More promptly out next time," "I thought of London" - and we - "We ran...Behind the backs of houses", "A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept", "Each station that we stopped at", " Once we started, though,.... We passed them, grinning and pomaded.", "And, as we moved,", " We hurried towards London", "And as we raced across.... Bright knots of rail".
This contrasts with the use of 'they' when describing the wedding parties.
Yet, there is something furtive about the opening of the poem, " all sense....Of being in a hurry gone.", which is suggestive of meeting a colleague, who is also a lover. With both keen to be discreet and avoid further fueling office gossip at the university library at which the both worked.
This may seem far fetched, until one considers the last verse of the poem.
Now, this might be a description of the journey into Kings Cross/St Pancreas, or it might be a sensuous description of something rather different: "And as we raced across.... Bright knots of rail.... walls of blackened moss.... Came close.... and what it held.... Stood ready to be loosed with all the power.... That being changed can give.... We slowed again,.... And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled..... A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower.... Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain."
Clearly I have trimmed the verse to make the point, but even the missing lines, "Past standing Pullmans" - a carriage famous for ornate curtains and luxury - "and it was nearly done, this frail...
Travelling coincidence" etc, hardly detract from an interpretation that sexual congress is taking place - perhaps even that nivana of romantic novelists and sex therapists, the mutual orgasm.
This interpretation, also offers a different perspective on "Struck, I leant... More promptly out next time,". Rather than the narrator being a voyeur, the action becomes one of defending his compartment from intruders knowing that if they can maintain privacy, they have the fifty minutes between Peterborough and London to consummate their passions.
In doing so the narrator sees the wedding parties each time, and we get more of a picture of them.
And again there snippets in the detail that paint vignettes of a changing society. "the wedding-days... Were coming to an end" being one such example. The couples are hitched and fed and off on honeymoon by three o clock, and the wedding is over. One explanation could be that the people in these wedding parties are too poor to afford an evening do, or it could be that to them, with regard to the issue of respectability, the important thing is that wedding has happened and now they no longer have to bite their lip, or tell white lies. Whatever the explanation, it is a subtle and well observed point.
That it should be followed with the line, "And, as we moved, each face seemed to define....Just what it saw departing" only emphasizes the clear changes underway in society, that would seek to defend marriage through the discipline of defined boundaries, like "fathers with broad belts under their suits" but in doing so onl make the institution as rank as the "reek of buttoned carriage-cloth", and as thinly protected as "short-shadowed cattle".
Curiously, when one watches newsreel and public information films of the period they share the same jaunty optimism as the Terry Eagleton crew for beat poetry, secondary schools of ubiquitous construction, and all the associated ingredients that went into the Labour Manifesto of 1964 - http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab64.htm - which proclaimed itself, "Impatient to apply the "new thinking" that will end the chaos and sterility".
Not that this 'new thinking' was particularly new. Indeed Larkin was as much of a proponent of modernism as anyone. The form, structure and pattern of the poem, laid out at the beginning of the essay, was done so to point out it was there, since the tone and shaping of the phrasing almost deliberately hides it.
The answer perhaps lays in his not hopping aboard a different train, that of socialism. While Larkin cocks-a-snook at the grammarians by skilled tailoring his verse, "I didn’t notice what a noise....The weddings made....Each station that we stopped at", he lacks the stridency and performance of Adrian Henri, stretching a banner of 'LONG LIVE SOCIALISM' across the sky, in the poem The Entry to Christ into Liverpool, and having done so Henri attracts none of the opprobrium and accusations of lacking 'class awareness' when he describes the working classes thus: "hideous masked Breughal faces of old ladies in the crowd... yellow masks of girls in curlers and headscarves.... smelling of factories."
Thus when Larkin laments to John Betjamin, in the Monitor program, Down Cemetery Road, that he has been described as writing 'a sort of welfare state sub-poetry', he is well aware of why he being described thus. And no doubt, were he to adopt the 'new thinking' of seeking to change the world, rather than reflect it, or observe those things that are disappearing, he would not attract the sneering criticism: or indeed the ongoing criticism with it's related 'ists' and 'isms'.
Here is a recording of the Larkin reading the poem in 1964... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9eTF6QNsxA
The poem takes the form of eight verses, of ten lines each. The lines have ten syllables, except for the second line of each verse, which has four. The rhyme pattern is A,B,A,B,C,D,E,C,D,E. in form and structure it matches some of Keatss Odes, which Keats stated were written in this manner to seek a 'better' form of the sonnet.
The poem was first published on 28th February 1964.
Larkin began writing the poem in 1957, and there is speculation that it is based upon an actual journey he undertook in 1955, though this has been called into question as there was apparently a rail strike at Whitsun of that year. But for now, we will quote Larkin, "'You couldn't be on that train without feeling the young lives all starting off, and that just for a moment you were touching them. Doncaster, Retford, Grantham, Newark, Peterborough, and at every station more wedding parties. It was wonderful, a marvellous afternoon.'"
The text of the poem can be found here - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48411/the-whitsun-weddings - along with a standard commentary on the poem - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68946/philip-larkin-the-whitsun-weddings - which contains every cliche about Larkin and his work that you could possibly wish.
It is this perception of Larkin, and particularly the standard reading of the poem that this essay seeks to address, and correct: or at least to offer an alternative possible interpretation.
A decent place to start, when considering Larkin, is the 2011 article in the Atlantic written by Christopher Hitchens. - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/05/philip-larkin-the-impossible-man/308439/ - the article is entitled Philip Larkin, The Impossible Man, and subtitled, how the most exasperating of poets met his match.
To some extent Hitchens' misses the chance to allay his exasperation by missing every opportunity that he himself sets up. As, in the opening paragraph, when he relates the tale of Larkin taking Orwell to dinner at a rather less good hotel than the hotel to which he had taken Dylan Thomas the week before, in his role as treasurer of the Oxford University English Club, an event on which Larkin dryly comments, "I suppose it was my first essay in practical criticism." This being the same Orwell, who criticized Auden and Spender as 'sissy poets'.
Rather than ask questions, such as the potential impact upon Larkin of a trajectory which ran from being rejected for the army, going to Oxford - effectively to be a sissy poet - gaining a first class honours degree, and then becoming a librarian in very provincial library - "there swelled....A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower...Sent out of sight." - perhaps? Instead Hitchens' engages in a comparison between Orwell and Larkin, which has more to do with his long running literary battles over the meaning and inheritance of Orwell, and Hitchens' view of himself and the left, than it does about the subject.
The main usefulness of the article, for me at least, is Hitchens coining of the phrase, 'the Terry Eagleton crew', to describe the seemingly increasing numbers of people ready to dismiss Larkin's work, because of their dismal of Larkin as a man.
Which brings me to a video on youtube that was the real spark that ignited this essay. It is of a meeting at the now defunct Philoctetes Centre, - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWNihMubl5E&t - in New York, in 2008. And featured the Larkin biographer, and ex-Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, in discussion with Michael Braziller about two of Larkin's poems, Whitsun Weddings and High Windows: followed by a question and answer session with the audience. The stated purpose of the Philoctetes Centre is, or rather was, the study of imagination.
Among many rather extraordinary statements made by Mr Motion, were that he had never noticed before the line "Like an outdated combine harvester" in High Windows,and that "like an arrow-shower...Sent out of sight" was perhaps a reference to the Laurence Olivier's version of Henry V, that he was, or wasn't, sure Larkin had seen. That Motion described himself a 'friend' of Larkin, suggests nothing more than Motion is a careerist who appears to have used his friendship to feather his own nest, and then like any careerist "I, decent with the seasons, move", when the wind turns and the Terry Eagleton crew moved into queer the pitch, he is happy to paint himself in a new light.
But rather than do unto Motion what the Eagleton crew do unto Larkin, and by extension do unto Mr Braziller, who appeared terrified of the Amazons in the audience, we should move onto the Q&A of this session that provided ample evidence of why the Philoctetes Centre ceased studying imagination. It was less a question and answer, than an invitation for a man to commit the dreaded sin of pointing out that perhaps Larkin isn't a misogynist, and when that failed, their imagination ran riot with quoting the spectrum of feminist slogans that reached its zenith with the claim "shuffling gouts of steam", was somehow proof of violence, probably against women, as opposed to a description of a steam engine puffing smoke.
Hitchens too indulges this line of non-inquiry in his piece. Though in fairness to him after making the obligatory statement of misogyny, he does have the decency to be informed about his subject, and to offer an alternate suggestion of what may have been going on, by quoting from letters written to Monica Jones, whom Hitchens describes thus, " Monica Jones, an evidently insufferable yet gifted woman who was a constant friend and intermittent partner (one can barely rise to saying mistress, let alone lover)." In the letters Larkin says, "“I’m sorry our lovemaking fizzled out,” he writes after a disappointing provincial vacation in 1958. “I am not a highly-sexed person.” This comes after a letter in which he invites her to consider their affair in the light of “a kind of homosexual relation, disguised: it wdn’t surprise me at all if someone else said so.”"
Unfortunately, we will never know if Larkin was hoping for a lesbian or gay relationship with Monica.
But it does rather suggest that the sting of the 'sissy poets' was strongly felt by Larkin, with the star of Auden being particularly attractive.
In an interview given to the Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3153/philip-larkin-the-art-of-poetry-no-30-philip-larkin - Larkin claimed not to be influenced by poets he admired. Yet in the same interview he reveals both his wide literary tastes and knowledge. And, reading Larkin one often picks up echoes of Auden's work, "Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat", could perhaps be references to both When I Walked Out One Morning, and The Night Mail, the latter particularly so when combined with, "I took for porters larking with the mails,....And went on reading."
Given Auden's towering influence on poetry, at the time Larkin - having retrained to master the dewy-decimal system, an honours degree from Oxford not being enough - was starting his career, it shouldn't be surprising that he would be influenced by Auden.
If you would indulge my filthy mind for a moment, I was amused to watch a lecture on Auden, again on youtube, - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcRhInARHFs&t= - given by Langdon Hammer of Yale University, about an Auden poem, sometimes called The Letter, written in 1927 - http://writing.jmpressley.net/papers/auden.html - I would suggest there is more going on behind that sheep pen wall than Auden describing the countryside, particularly when you reach the poem#s conclusion, "I, decent with the seasons, move... Different or with a different love,.... Nor question much the nod,.... The stone smile of this country god... That never was more reticent,....Always afraid to say more than it meant." Especially as saying more than it meant could get you imprisoned, or even hanged.
It is this reluctance to say more than it meant that leads people to queue up to brand Larkin with their favourite 'ism' or 'ist'. Particularly when Larkin so often breaks George Carlin's rules of the five things that cannot be said on television.
It is within this contradiction that so much of the criticism lies.
Larkin in this respect does not help himself. He is variously quoted as stating that his poems are what they are and that they have no hidden or wider meaning. This could be interpreted a number of ways, one of which is simple defensiveness at being asked leading questions by journalists, whom he knows are going to write the piece they were commissioned to write, with or without his input: his quotes serving only to provide more or less rope.
Yet clearly he is being disingenuous, and as mentioned above, not helping himself.
For instance in the poem Church Going, the issue if less about whether he is or isn't religious - he said he wasn't - than it is about an exploration of what remains. He may just as well have visited football stadiums after the match and would perhaps have written a similar poem. The question he asks in so much of his work, is 'if this changes what replaces it?', and 'what will happen to these people?'
In Annus Mirabilis he describes courtship as, "A sort of bargaining, ....A wrangle for a ring" which contrasts with the opening of High Windows, "And guess he’s fucking her and she’s....Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm," Courtship has been replaced by 'Free Love', the ring, in one sense remains, and is now being fucked, just as it was before, but the ring of rubber provided by the state is of less value to the woman in a pawn shop should things turn sour.
That Larkin acknowledges the past, without praising the present, is perhaps his original sin.
Which brings me back to the Terry Eagleton crew, of which I used to be a paid member. When I first encountered the poem Whitsun Weddings, I too had the standard reaction at the preconceived snootiness, the elitism, the snobbery.
The tension contained within my prejudice was less about the what the poem is and says, than what it should be and professes to say. That Larkin chooses not to play this game, but instead plays a rather more subtle game of leaving the reader to interpret, leaves him at a loss, if for no other reason that the past is such other world.
Take an observation like "girls...In parodies of fashion,". If you know that it was possible at the time, and something commonly done, to buy the pattern for a dress you had seen in a magazine, and that the pattern came with a label of the designer that could be sewn in. Then the parody is not a sneering class statement, as the standard interpretation of the poem would have you believe, but a statement about the quality of the cloth, an observation picked up again in the next verse with "The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,".
Or perhaps Larkin is picking up on the themes explored in his poem, The Large Cool Store. Certainly he chooses to echo the colour palette, "Lemon, sapphire, moss-green, rose", of that poem, with the "lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres" of this. And in doing so, he repeats his assertion that there is something ethereal in their expectations: "Marked off the girls unreally from the rest", a sentiment expanded upon in The Large Cool Store, "How separate and unearthly love is,....Or women are, or what they do,....Or in our young unreal wishes.... Seem to be".
Whatever the case, when one sees these people as more than pawns in a game of literary exclusion they become more real and Larkin's observation of them more sharp.
Not that it stops the critics of the poem piling on the stones of the cairn myth they seek to build. My particular favourite in this respect is "mothers loud and fat", which is a favourite trigger for those wishing to push the narrative of the Terry Eagleton crew. Reading various criticisms of the poem the idea that a woman or a mother, can be either loud or fat, or worse both, is something so shocking too many that they must signal their alarm in the broadest terms possible. This led me to wondering what they would think of Ma Larkin in the HE Bates novels, or Mrs Feziwig in Dickens' Christmas Carol, or the countless other loud, fat matrons peppered throughout novels, plays and poems down the ages, who far from being seen as some sinister cypher of class prejudice, are usually seen as a stereotype of kind-heartedness and joviality.
I also found myself wondering if this expression of 'class solidarity' was not rather an expression of pretense. Especially in an age when precisely these type of women are regularly held up to ridicule on various lifestyle television programs, in health campaigns and newspaper stories about the benefits of dieting.
Again we might look at the historical context and delve into reports, such as the Greenwood Committee who examined hunger in the 1930's, to see if there might be a reason for why the mother's described in this poem and in this period might be fat: or if Larkin is simply using the readily available trope of fiction, the kindly-hearted matron.
But given that Whitsun Weddings was first published in 1964, it is perhaps useful to look at a different government report, The Beaching Report, on the future of the railways - first published in 1963, under the title Reshaping British Railways: "sun destroys....The interest of what’s happening in the shade" is surely an apt description for these wedding parties, given that they, like the 30 Foot Trailer of Ewan McColl's song- first broadcast in April 1964, as part of the radio ballad The Traveling People - were soon to be a thing of the past.
Certainly the report inspired Larkin's contemporary John Betjeman, to rail against the closures and reorganisations, which were, it was argued, needed in the name of progress: the car being the transport of the future. It is surely no accident that Larkin includes the lines, "Until the next town, new and nondescript,...Approached with acres of dismantled cars." This could be a reference to motor cars. according to report in Hansard in 1960 - https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1960/may/04/road-accidents - the number of people killed or injured on the roads was running at in excess of 300,000 per year, or it could be reference to rolling stock, as during the period, beginning in 1960, there was a change from steam to diesel locomotives and an accompanying upgrading of carriages.
In the poem the appear to be on a steam train, "shuffling gouts of steam" and the ambiguous line, "An uncle shouting smut". And, "All windows down" and "I leant...More promptly out next time" suggests that Larkin, or the narrator, is in one of the older compartment carriages.
The significance of this becomes clearer if one assumes the train in the poem to be a metaphor for marriage. A metaphor that perhaps can be expanded by the assertion of the transport minister of the time Ernest Marples, to be a relic of the Victorian past.
Another big issue of the day, was reform of the divorce laws. I offer this link - https://www.lawteacher.net/study-guides/family-law/History-Divorce-Law.php - which outlines both the history, and the issues of the debate as it stood in 1964, when the poem was published.
Of significance is that a divorce could only be granted by the High Court in London. And that in order to gain a divorce one of the partners had to be the 'guilty party', which led to the popular notion of 'the dirty weekend in Brighton.' In order to get to Brighton from Hull, where the journey begins, one would have to travel to London and for there take an onward train.
One might also consider the supposed genesis of the poem, with the apocryphal, or not, journey in 1955 until it's publication in 1964. This coincides with the failure of the law commission to make recommendations on the issue of reform of the divorce laws in the mid 1950's, to the joint commissions by the Church of England and the Law Society that began in 1966. The aim of this commission states that their objectives "were to buttress, rather than undermine, the stability of marriage." That marriage required strengthening is a sign of it's weakness, or as Larkin puts it, "fathers had never known....Success so huge and wholly farcical".
The following lines hint at this too, " The women shared... The secret like a happy funeral;" and "While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared... At a religious wounding." For marriage, gave a woman respectability, and being married meant she could no longer be 'spoiled for marriage'.
Larkin's laconic and dry wit has often been commented upon, but the aspect of his satyr of, and about, his key themes of discretion and respectability are often overlooked. Even in his splenetic excesses, that so offend the 'liberated' and 'progressive', it is these themes he returns to - and much of the ammunition for the Terry Eagleton crew is provided by his indiscretion and lack-of respectability when caught singing racist songs, and having the audacity to find them funny - and worse, being dead so as not to be in a position to make the required apology.
But let us for a moment consider the opening line, "That Whitsun, I was late getting away" and ask the question why?
We know from, later in the poem, that the narrator's destination is London. But why are the going there?
To take the standard reading of the poem, this is Larkin, he is going to the capital for a conference on library matters, or or some poetry do, or maybe he is off to stock up on Bamboo and Frolic.
But supposing it is a fictional Larkin riding a metaphorical train, who is in some alternative dimension and off to seek a divorce from Monica Jones in order to marry Maeve Brennan. Or to meet Maeve Brennan in Brighton to secure the required evidence to obtain a divorce from Monica Jones.
Or perhaps it is simply a living breathing Larkin meeting a large as life Maeve Brennan.
The documentary Love and Death in Hull - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqa6L22m0rY&t=1211s - paints a picture of the relationship between Larkin and Brennan, that is both chivalrous and affectionate. And, the reported timescale of that relationship, they met in 1955, began their affair in 1960, and if one believes Larkin himself, between Love Me Do and the Chatterley trial, he discovered what sexual intercourse was.
And there is something curious about the use of I and we in the poem.
"I was late getting away" "I didn’t notice what a noise", "I took for porters", "I leant.... More promptly out next time," "I thought of London" - and we - "We ran...Behind the backs of houses", "A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept", "Each station that we stopped at", " Once we started, though,.... We passed them, grinning and pomaded.", "And, as we moved,", " We hurried towards London", "And as we raced across.... Bright knots of rail".
This contrasts with the use of 'they' when describing the wedding parties.
Yet, there is something furtive about the opening of the poem, " all sense....Of being in a hurry gone.", which is suggestive of meeting a colleague, who is also a lover. With both keen to be discreet and avoid further fueling office gossip at the university library at which the both worked.
This may seem far fetched, until one considers the last verse of the poem.
Now, this might be a description of the journey into Kings Cross/St Pancreas, or it might be a sensuous description of something rather different: "And as we raced across.... Bright knots of rail.... walls of blackened moss.... Came close.... and what it held.... Stood ready to be loosed with all the power.... That being changed can give.... We slowed again,.... And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled..... A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower.... Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain."
Clearly I have trimmed the verse to make the point, but even the missing lines, "Past standing Pullmans" - a carriage famous for ornate curtains and luxury - "and it was nearly done, this frail...
Travelling coincidence" etc, hardly detract from an interpretation that sexual congress is taking place - perhaps even that nivana of romantic novelists and sex therapists, the mutual orgasm.
This interpretation, also offers a different perspective on "Struck, I leant... More promptly out next time,". Rather than the narrator being a voyeur, the action becomes one of defending his compartment from intruders knowing that if they can maintain privacy, they have the fifty minutes between Peterborough and London to consummate their passions.
In doing so the narrator sees the wedding parties each time, and we get more of a picture of them.
And again there snippets in the detail that paint vignettes of a changing society. "the wedding-days... Were coming to an end" being one such example. The couples are hitched and fed and off on honeymoon by three o clock, and the wedding is over. One explanation could be that the people in these wedding parties are too poor to afford an evening do, or it could be that to them, with regard to the issue of respectability, the important thing is that wedding has happened and now they no longer have to bite their lip, or tell white lies. Whatever the explanation, it is a subtle and well observed point.
That it should be followed with the line, "And, as we moved, each face seemed to define....Just what it saw departing" only emphasizes the clear changes underway in society, that would seek to defend marriage through the discipline of defined boundaries, like "fathers with broad belts under their suits" but in doing so onl make the institution as rank as the "reek of buttoned carriage-cloth", and as thinly protected as "short-shadowed cattle".
Curiously, when one watches newsreel and public information films of the period they share the same jaunty optimism as the Terry Eagleton crew for beat poetry, secondary schools of ubiquitous construction, and all the associated ingredients that went into the Labour Manifesto of 1964 - http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab64.htm - which proclaimed itself, "Impatient to apply the "new thinking" that will end the chaos and sterility".
Not that this 'new thinking' was particularly new. Indeed Larkin was as much of a proponent of modernism as anyone. The form, structure and pattern of the poem, laid out at the beginning of the essay, was done so to point out it was there, since the tone and shaping of the phrasing almost deliberately hides it.
The answer perhaps lays in his not hopping aboard a different train, that of socialism. While Larkin cocks-a-snook at the grammarians by skilled tailoring his verse, "I didn’t notice what a noise....The weddings made....Each station that we stopped at", he lacks the stridency and performance of Adrian Henri, stretching a banner of 'LONG LIVE SOCIALISM' across the sky, in the poem The Entry to Christ into Liverpool, and having done so Henri attracts none of the opprobrium and accusations of lacking 'class awareness' when he describes the working classes thus: "hideous masked Breughal faces of old ladies in the crowd... yellow masks of girls in curlers and headscarves.... smelling of factories."
Thus when Larkin laments to John Betjamin, in the Monitor program, Down Cemetery Road, that he has been described as writing 'a sort of welfare state sub-poetry', he is well aware of why he being described thus. And no doubt, were he to adopt the 'new thinking' of seeking to change the world, rather than reflect it, or observe those things that are disappearing, he would not attract the sneering criticism: or indeed the ongoing criticism with it's related 'ists' and 'isms'.
25/06/2018
#amwriting #essay #larkin #poetry #sketchbook Whitsun Weddings
The starting point for this essay, is the Christopher Hitchens' article that appeared in the Atlantic - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/05/philip-larkin-the-impossible-man/308439/ - in 2011.
In this piece Hitchens queries why the Larkin biographer, ex-poet Laureate, Andrew Motion made no mention of Larkin's passion for pornography: apparently he had a prodigious collection, meticulously catalogued. This collection demonstrated a penchant for magazines and periodicals of a sadomasochistic nature featuring what would no doubt be categorized today as 'teen' in school uniforms being flogged and sodomized.
I mention this, not for the frisson, or indeed to provide more fuel to the fire of what Mr Hitchen's calls the Terry Eagleton crew - "who have become so righteously fixated on the later “revelations” of Larkin’s racism and xenophobia." as Hitchen's describes it. But, rather because since we are dealing with stereotypes what could be more prefect for a sexually repressed Englishman, with cryto-racist inclinations, than to find an outlet in the peccadilloes of well spanked pert bottom.
Though I suspect the real crimes of Larkin lie elsewhere, namely in his use of rhyme, his use of form and structure, and his seeming lack of reliance upon the Arts Council - leaving him free to write without their implied agenda for the 'new' and the 'modern', i.e. without rhyme, form or structure. And if one really wishes to truthful, Larkin's greatest crime is that in-spite his rejection of the 'modern', and to some extent the American, he had the impertinence to be popular.
At which point, it is only fair, to say that for the longest time I have been a paid up member of the Terry Eagleton crew, seeing Larkin as snobbish, aloof, hating the working classes and of course the most unforgivable of sins, popular. Add to this that when asked Mrs Thatcher claimed that Larkin was her favourite poet - though perhaps we should see this in much the same way as Tony Blair claiming to have watched Jackie Milburn from the Gallogate - but regardless, to anyone collecting labels, and displaying them like coffee table books, Larkin was not a poet to be liked.
And of course, in addition to the charges of elitism, racism, conservatism, Larkin - in the current year - stands accused of the most grievous of all crimes, misogyny.
It is a curiosity, to me at least, that this 'confirmed batchelor' has not been branded an MRA, or possibly been adopted by that movement's radical wing MGTOW, or it's newly terrified and terrifying adjunct, the Incels. No doubt were I to surf those areas of the internet where the wilder elements of the latter day witch-smellers gather I would find confirmations of my suspicions. No doubt, with critique of why Sunny Prestatyn - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48415/sunny-prestatyn - proves his hatred for women.
And it should be noted that the Hitchens' article indulges in this sort of thing to some extent. However, in addition to Hitchens' undisputed charm and style, he does save himself from being hysterical by having a working knowledge of Larkin's life and work, and not using his knowledge to push his agenda.
The starting point for this essay may have been the Hitchens' article, but the inspiration lies elsewhere in an event in New York at the now defunct Philoctetes Centre, in 2008 - a video of the event can be found on youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWNihMubl5E&t - in which the aforementioned Andrew Motion talked with Michael Braziller about his 'friend' and subject Philip Larkin.
It is easy to be cynical about Andrew Motion, in the past I have referred to him as the 'aptly named' upon reading one of his pieces in his role of Poet Laureate. Which is unfair, since his poetry in his role as poet is rather good.
However during this event Mr Motion made a number of rather odd comments. For instance his claim that the line from the Whitsun Weddings, - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48411/the-whitsun-weddings - "there swelled....A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower....Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain." may be a reference to the Laurence Olivier film of Henry V, which he is sure 'his friend' Larkin would have seen. Perhaps the justification could be the reference to an Odeon in the seventh stanza.
The main subject of the event was the poem, Whitsun Weddings, but to prove some point or another, reference was made to High Windows - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48417/high-windows - which famously begins, "When I see a couple of kids... And guess he’s fucking her and she’s.... Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, ....I know this is paradise", and perhaps leads one to consider if this was really to Mrs Thatcher's taste. During the discussion, Mr Motion remarked as to why the line "Like an outdated combine harvester," should appear in the poem, in such a manner as to suggest he has either never seen the line before, perhaps in much the sameway has he knew nothing about the hardback editions of Bamboo and Frolic.
Indeed when the Q&A session began, I was left wondering if anyone in the room actually had ever read any of Larkin's poems. As the discussion became focused upon unfocused allegations of misogyny, rather than the work they were supposed to be discussing. Leaving me only the consolation of going back to Hitchen's article and his quote from Orwell about "“the W.C. and dirty-handkerchief side of life." and the irony that a body established to study 'imagination' - now defunct - should lack the imagination to perhaps know that women relieve themselves and blow their noses.
It was one comment, from a woman in the audience, that "shuffling gouts of steam." was in someway a violent reference, that sent me back to the poem: if only to escape the Dimension B world in which people gather to express their angst, while pretending to discuss a work of literary art.
Whitsun Weddings
Here is a recording of the Larkin reading the poem in 1964... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9eTF6QNsxA
Firstly, the poem takes the form of eight verses, of ten lines each. The lines have ten syllables, except for the second line of each verse, which has four. The rhyme pattern is A,B,A,B,C,D,E,C,D,E. It is similar in form to some of Keats' Odes.
The poem was first published on 28th February 1964.
Larkin began writing the poem in 1957, and there is speculation that it is based on an actual journey in 1955, though this has been called into question as there was a rail strike. But for now, we will quote Larkin, "'You couldn't be on that train without feeling the young lives all starting off, and that just for a moment you were touching them. Doncaster, Retford, Grantham, Newark, Peterborough, and at every station more wedding parties. It was wonderful, a marvellous afternoon.'"
The reason I use this quote is that those towns, with perhaps the exception of Doncaster, are in the midlands, and hint at a puckish humour of Larkin, that also appears in the poem. Upon first becoming aware of the wedding parties, he claims " I took for porters larking with the mails,", or to put it another way, porters chucking bags on the train.
Before moving on, I wanted to point to a particular piece of poetic skill, in the line, "At first, I didn’t notice what a noise..... The weddings made.....Each station that we stopped at:" Were Larkin to be an aspiring young poet today, offering his work for critique to savageries of an intenet forum, this reliance upon poetic device, rather than grammatical correctness would be slapped down most sternly. As would, "Not till about", and numerous other 'grammatical crimes'.
Perhaps this is one of the more overlooked differences between English and American poetry. With English poetry being less about what is said, than how it sounds, what you hear, and what is implied.
So let us consider the last stanza first.
"And as we raced across.... Bright knots of rail.... walls of blackened moss.... Came close.... and what it held.... Stood ready to be loosed with all the power.... That being changed can give.... We slowed again,.... And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled..... A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower.... Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain."
Obviously I have trimmed the verse to make the point. But I would suggest this is a description, and a rather sensual description of canal sexual congress, more that it is a reference to having seen Larry Olivier crying 'once more into the breech dear friends', or a description of the journey into Kings Cross/St Pancras.
Back to the combine harvester, that so puzzled Mr Motion, "I thought of London spread out in the sun, Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:" Wheat is something referred to in a number of Larkin's poems.
In an interview given to the Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3153/philip-larkin-the-art-of-poetry-no-30-philip-larkin - Larkin claimed not to be influenced by poets he admired. Yet in the same interview it becomes clear that he was very widely read. He is also quoted elsewhere as saying he was influenced by WB Yeats, in his early years. Which is curious, since WH Auden was also influenced by Yeats, and both he and Larkin claim to have stopped being influenced by Yeats at roughly the same time in the late 1940's.
And it is somewhat odd, that one of Auden's more famous poems, When I Walked Out One Evening - https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/i-walked-out-one-evening - begins "As I walked out one evening, .... Walking down Bristol Street,..... The crowds upon the pavement..... Were fields of harvest wheat." And when you chuck into the mix Auden's The Night Mail - https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/night-mail-2/ - it becomes perhaps more arguable that Larkin is at least referencing Auden, with trains, post, wheat etc.
At the risk of stretching a point, and indeed whittling at the divide between English and American English, I was recently watching a lecture on Auden, again on youtube, - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcRhInARHFs&t= - given by Langdon Hammer of Yale University, about the Auden poem The Letter - http://writing.jmpressley.net/papers/auden.html Now forgive my filthy mind, but I would suggest there is more going on behind that sheep pen wall than Auden describing the countryside, particularly when you get to this, "I, decent with the seasons, move... Different or with a different love,.... Nor question much the nod,.... The stone smile of this country god... That never was more reticent,....Always afraid to say more than it meant." Especially as saying more than it meant could get you imprisoned, or even hanged.
Therefore, I would suggest that Larkin was far more influenced by Auden, particularly in his use of hidden meanings, than he is letting on. And given Auden's stature as a poet, especially during the formative parts of his career it is difficult to see how he couldn't be.
But rather than belabour that point, let us consider an issue that was prevalent in the period 1955, when supposedly the genesis of the poem happened and 1964 when it was published, namely divorce.
I would suggest reading this, or a similar, brief history of divorce - https://www.lawteacher.net/study-guides/family-law/History-Divorce-Law.php and to consider that until 1967 only the High Court in London could grant a divorce.
An interesting point is, that poem begins, "That Whitsun, I was late getting away", and then as the journey of the poem continues, it alternates between I - "I didn’t notice what a noise", "I took for porters", "I leant.... More promptly out next time," "I thought of London" - and we - "We ran
Behind the backs of houses", "A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept", "Each station that we stopped at", " Once we started, though,.... We passed them, grinning and pomaded.", "And, as we moved,", " We hurried towards London", "And as we raced across.... Bright knots of rail".
There are numerous possibilities here. The we is the collective we, referring to the passengers on the train. Another is that the we is possessive, referring to the train itself. Another is, if we assume this is not a literal account of train journey, that Larkin is referring to observation and conversations he has had in the past upon seeing such wedding parties: thus "sun destroys.... The interest of what’s happening in the shade,", having seen these wedding parties, they become impossible to ignore.
Or perhaps, the we is an adulterous liaison. Quoting from the website on divorce, "Until 1969 it was impossible for a "guilty" spouse to divorce an "innocent" partner. As long as the innocent spouse took care not to be caught in adultery, he or she could effectively block the other's divorce and remarriage." Which in turn would give a different interpretation to "While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared.... At a religious wounding." beyond the somewhat banal interpretation of women being the victims of sex, and only when sanctified by the church can they be wounded by be penetrated: or perhaps worse, by not being penetrated.
Again if one looks into the social history of the period, it becomes clear that divorce was a big issue, with marriages breaking down at an alarming rate. "fathers had never known....Success so huge and wholly farcical;" is in some ways the key-line of the poem, if one takes this line of assuming that the poem is, or at least in some part, about divorce. For what is the point of spending money, you can perhaps ill afford, when the chances are it will just break down and end in divorce, or dishonour.
I use the word dishonour, for a particular reason, in this context. Because when I was a paid up member of the Terry Eagleton crew, might chief gripe about this poem was that the characters in the wedding party were sneering portraits of the working classes, "The fathers with broad belts under their suits...And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;...An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms, ....The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes," That Larkin could be so course, was all the confirmation I required to buy into all the other cliches, gloomy, racist, misogynist, etc, that effectively acted as excuse not to read his poems. That being the purpose of cliche, it tells you all you need to know without ever having to know anything.
However, when one digs into the gossip - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationships_that_influenced_Philip_Larkin - surrounding him, it would seem that Larkin was quite Ladies man, and chivalrous with it. This is certainly how the documentary Love and Death in Hull - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqa6L22m0rY&t=244s - presents his relationship with Maeve Brennan, that began in 1960. And given that at the time he was already in his more famous relationship with Monica Jones, and if we equate chivalry with honour, it might be argued that Larkin didn't wish to 'spoil her for marriage'.
Two lines in particular, casual scene setting on the face it, interest me. "All windows down" and "I leant... More promptly out next time." This suggests a compartment carriage, that was fitted with a sliding window in order to open the door by using the outside handle. At which point one could become a trainspotter and go in search of what class of carriage was in use on the East Coast Mainline. However, fruitful, and interesting this endevour, it would miss the opportunity to sniff the seats, and hazard a guess as to "then a smell of grass.... Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth" what was going on in those compartments, when the train was between stations and the blinds were pulled down.
And it shouldn't be overlooked that yes, the first and second stanza is a perfect description of that journey from Hull to Doncaster, "thence...The river’s level drifting breadth began,....There sky and Lincolnshire and water meet....All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept...For miles inland,....A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept." But " I was late getting away" and "all sense
Of being in a hurry gone." offers possibilities of something more illicit, such as meeting a lover - a lover from the office, without the embarrassment of being seen together by colleagues.
The closing of the second stanza offers an interesting commentary, "Until the next town, new and nondescript,.... Approached with acres of dismantled cars." The statement with regard to the anonymity of post-war planners and architects is fairly generic of the period, yet the second, with regard to scrapyards of cars is not, especially the timing of the poem being published and the publication eleven months before of the first Beeching report: the premise of which was that rail services should be cut back, stations closed, rail-lines grubbed up, because cars were the future of transport.
Which is in large part why I am no longer a member of the Terry Eagleton crew, because clearly Larkin would have been aware of the Beeching report, and the debates that led up to it's commissioning, since it was no secret that the railways had been losing money for years. Indeed the situation of the railways rather mirrored the debates surrounding marriage, and any number of courses and questions that were raised in the 1950's, reformed in the 1960's, with the effects being felt in the 1970's and 1980's. Thus while Dr Beeching is set on his path of 'just married' being sprayed on the sides of Cortinas, and wedding parties that drag on until midnight, Larkin is recording the people who lived in streets not lined with cars, where " the wedding-days... Were coming to an end" at three in the afternoon.
In this piece Hitchens queries why the Larkin biographer, ex-poet Laureate, Andrew Motion made no mention of Larkin's passion for pornography: apparently he had a prodigious collection, meticulously catalogued. This collection demonstrated a penchant for magazines and periodicals of a sadomasochistic nature featuring what would no doubt be categorized today as 'teen' in school uniforms being flogged and sodomized.
I mention this, not for the frisson, or indeed to provide more fuel to the fire of what Mr Hitchen's calls the Terry Eagleton crew - "who have become so righteously fixated on the later “revelations” of Larkin’s racism and xenophobia." as Hitchen's describes it. But, rather because since we are dealing with stereotypes what could be more prefect for a sexually repressed Englishman, with cryto-racist inclinations, than to find an outlet in the peccadilloes of well spanked pert bottom.
Though I suspect the real crimes of Larkin lie elsewhere, namely in his use of rhyme, his use of form and structure, and his seeming lack of reliance upon the Arts Council - leaving him free to write without their implied agenda for the 'new' and the 'modern', i.e. without rhyme, form or structure. And if one really wishes to truthful, Larkin's greatest crime is that in-spite his rejection of the 'modern', and to some extent the American, he had the impertinence to be popular.
At which point, it is only fair, to say that for the longest time I have been a paid up member of the Terry Eagleton crew, seeing Larkin as snobbish, aloof, hating the working classes and of course the most unforgivable of sins, popular. Add to this that when asked Mrs Thatcher claimed that Larkin was her favourite poet - though perhaps we should see this in much the same way as Tony Blair claiming to have watched Jackie Milburn from the Gallogate - but regardless, to anyone collecting labels, and displaying them like coffee table books, Larkin was not a poet to be liked.
And of course, in addition to the charges of elitism, racism, conservatism, Larkin - in the current year - stands accused of the most grievous of all crimes, misogyny.
It is a curiosity, to me at least, that this 'confirmed batchelor' has not been branded an MRA, or possibly been adopted by that movement's radical wing MGTOW, or it's newly terrified and terrifying adjunct, the Incels. No doubt were I to surf those areas of the internet where the wilder elements of the latter day witch-smellers gather I would find confirmations of my suspicions. No doubt, with critique of why Sunny Prestatyn - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48415/sunny-prestatyn - proves his hatred for women.
And it should be noted that the Hitchens' article indulges in this sort of thing to some extent. However, in addition to Hitchens' undisputed charm and style, he does save himself from being hysterical by having a working knowledge of Larkin's life and work, and not using his knowledge to push his agenda.
The starting point for this essay may have been the Hitchens' article, but the inspiration lies elsewhere in an event in New York at the now defunct Philoctetes Centre, in 2008 - a video of the event can be found on youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWNihMubl5E&t - in which the aforementioned Andrew Motion talked with Michael Braziller about his 'friend' and subject Philip Larkin.
It is easy to be cynical about Andrew Motion, in the past I have referred to him as the 'aptly named' upon reading one of his pieces in his role of Poet Laureate. Which is unfair, since his poetry in his role as poet is rather good.
However during this event Mr Motion made a number of rather odd comments. For instance his claim that the line from the Whitsun Weddings, - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48411/the-whitsun-weddings - "there swelled....A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower....Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain." may be a reference to the Laurence Olivier film of Henry V, which he is sure 'his friend' Larkin would have seen. Perhaps the justification could be the reference to an Odeon in the seventh stanza.
The main subject of the event was the poem, Whitsun Weddings, but to prove some point or another, reference was made to High Windows - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48417/high-windows - which famously begins, "When I see a couple of kids... And guess he’s fucking her and she’s.... Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, ....I know this is paradise", and perhaps leads one to consider if this was really to Mrs Thatcher's taste. During the discussion, Mr Motion remarked as to why the line "Like an outdated combine harvester," should appear in the poem, in such a manner as to suggest he has either never seen the line before, perhaps in much the sameway has he knew nothing about the hardback editions of Bamboo and Frolic.
Indeed when the Q&A session began, I was left wondering if anyone in the room actually had ever read any of Larkin's poems. As the discussion became focused upon unfocused allegations of misogyny, rather than the work they were supposed to be discussing. Leaving me only the consolation of going back to Hitchen's article and his quote from Orwell about "“the W.C. and dirty-handkerchief side of life." and the irony that a body established to study 'imagination' - now defunct - should lack the imagination to perhaps know that women relieve themselves and blow their noses.
It was one comment, from a woman in the audience, that "shuffling gouts of steam." was in someway a violent reference, that sent me back to the poem: if only to escape the Dimension B world in which people gather to express their angst, while pretending to discuss a work of literary art.
Whitsun Weddings
Here is a recording of the Larkin reading the poem in 1964... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9eTF6QNsxA
Firstly, the poem takes the form of eight verses, of ten lines each. The lines have ten syllables, except for the second line of each verse, which has four. The rhyme pattern is A,B,A,B,C,D,E,C,D,E. It is similar in form to some of Keats' Odes.
The poem was first published on 28th February 1964.
Larkin began writing the poem in 1957, and there is speculation that it is based on an actual journey in 1955, though this has been called into question as there was a rail strike. But for now, we will quote Larkin, "'You couldn't be on that train without feeling the young lives all starting off, and that just for a moment you were touching them. Doncaster, Retford, Grantham, Newark, Peterborough, and at every station more wedding parties. It was wonderful, a marvellous afternoon.'"
The reason I use this quote is that those towns, with perhaps the exception of Doncaster, are in the midlands, and hint at a puckish humour of Larkin, that also appears in the poem. Upon first becoming aware of the wedding parties, he claims " I took for porters larking with the mails,", or to put it another way, porters chucking bags on the train.
Before moving on, I wanted to point to a particular piece of poetic skill, in the line, "At first, I didn’t notice what a noise..... The weddings made.....Each station that we stopped at:" Were Larkin to be an aspiring young poet today, offering his work for critique to savageries of an intenet forum, this reliance upon poetic device, rather than grammatical correctness would be slapped down most sternly. As would, "Not till about", and numerous other 'grammatical crimes'.
Perhaps this is one of the more overlooked differences between English and American poetry. With English poetry being less about what is said, than how it sounds, what you hear, and what is implied.
So let us consider the last stanza first.
"And as we raced across.... Bright knots of rail.... walls of blackened moss.... Came close.... and what it held.... Stood ready to be loosed with all the power.... That being changed can give.... We slowed again,.... And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled..... A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower.... Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain."
Obviously I have trimmed the verse to make the point. But I would suggest this is a description, and a rather sensual description of canal sexual congress, more that it is a reference to having seen Larry Olivier crying 'once more into the breech dear friends', or a description of the journey into Kings Cross/St Pancras.
Back to the combine harvester, that so puzzled Mr Motion, "I thought of London spread out in the sun, Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:" Wheat is something referred to in a number of Larkin's poems.
In an interview given to the Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3153/philip-larkin-the-art-of-poetry-no-30-philip-larkin - Larkin claimed not to be influenced by poets he admired. Yet in the same interview it becomes clear that he was very widely read. He is also quoted elsewhere as saying he was influenced by WB Yeats, in his early years. Which is curious, since WH Auden was also influenced by Yeats, and both he and Larkin claim to have stopped being influenced by Yeats at roughly the same time in the late 1940's.
And it is somewhat odd, that one of Auden's more famous poems, When I Walked Out One Evening - https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/i-walked-out-one-evening - begins "As I walked out one evening, .... Walking down Bristol Street,..... The crowds upon the pavement..... Were fields of harvest wheat." And when you chuck into the mix Auden's The Night Mail - https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/night-mail-2/ - it becomes perhaps more arguable that Larkin is at least referencing Auden, with trains, post, wheat etc.
At the risk of stretching a point, and indeed whittling at the divide between English and American English, I was recently watching a lecture on Auden, again on youtube, - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcRhInARHFs&t= - given by Langdon Hammer of Yale University, about the Auden poem The Letter - http://writing.jmpressley.net/papers/auden.html Now forgive my filthy mind, but I would suggest there is more going on behind that sheep pen wall than Auden describing the countryside, particularly when you get to this, "I, decent with the seasons, move... Different or with a different love,.... Nor question much the nod,.... The stone smile of this country god... That never was more reticent,....Always afraid to say more than it meant." Especially as saying more than it meant could get you imprisoned, or even hanged.
Therefore, I would suggest that Larkin was far more influenced by Auden, particularly in his use of hidden meanings, than he is letting on. And given Auden's stature as a poet, especially during the formative parts of his career it is difficult to see how he couldn't be.
But rather than belabour that point, let us consider an issue that was prevalent in the period 1955, when supposedly the genesis of the poem happened and 1964 when it was published, namely divorce.
I would suggest reading this, or a similar, brief history of divorce - https://www.lawteacher.net/study-guides/family-law/History-Divorce-Law.php and to consider that until 1967 only the High Court in London could grant a divorce.
An interesting point is, that poem begins, "That Whitsun, I was late getting away", and then as the journey of the poem continues, it alternates between I - "I didn’t notice what a noise", "I took for porters", "I leant.... More promptly out next time," "I thought of London" - and we - "We ran
Behind the backs of houses", "A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept", "Each station that we stopped at", " Once we started, though,.... We passed them, grinning and pomaded.", "And, as we moved,", " We hurried towards London", "And as we raced across.... Bright knots of rail".
There are numerous possibilities here. The we is the collective we, referring to the passengers on the train. Another is that the we is possessive, referring to the train itself. Another is, if we assume this is not a literal account of train journey, that Larkin is referring to observation and conversations he has had in the past upon seeing such wedding parties: thus "sun destroys.... The interest of what’s happening in the shade,", having seen these wedding parties, they become impossible to ignore.
Or perhaps, the we is an adulterous liaison. Quoting from the website on divorce, "Until 1969 it was impossible for a "guilty" spouse to divorce an "innocent" partner. As long as the innocent spouse took care not to be caught in adultery, he or she could effectively block the other's divorce and remarriage." Which in turn would give a different interpretation to "While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared.... At a religious wounding." beyond the somewhat banal interpretation of women being the victims of sex, and only when sanctified by the church can they be wounded by be penetrated: or perhaps worse, by not being penetrated.
Again if one looks into the social history of the period, it becomes clear that divorce was a big issue, with marriages breaking down at an alarming rate. "fathers had never known....Success so huge and wholly farcical;" is in some ways the key-line of the poem, if one takes this line of assuming that the poem is, or at least in some part, about divorce. For what is the point of spending money, you can perhaps ill afford, when the chances are it will just break down and end in divorce, or dishonour.
I use the word dishonour, for a particular reason, in this context. Because when I was a paid up member of the Terry Eagleton crew, might chief gripe about this poem was that the characters in the wedding party were sneering portraits of the working classes, "The fathers with broad belts under their suits...And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;...An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms, ....The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes," That Larkin could be so course, was all the confirmation I required to buy into all the other cliches, gloomy, racist, misogynist, etc, that effectively acted as excuse not to read his poems. That being the purpose of cliche, it tells you all you need to know without ever having to know anything.
However, when one digs into the gossip - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationships_that_influenced_Philip_Larkin - surrounding him, it would seem that Larkin was quite Ladies man, and chivalrous with it. This is certainly how the documentary Love and Death in Hull - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqa6L22m0rY&t=244s - presents his relationship with Maeve Brennan, that began in 1960. And given that at the time he was already in his more famous relationship with Monica Jones, and if we equate chivalry with honour, it might be argued that Larkin didn't wish to 'spoil her for marriage'.
Two lines in particular, casual scene setting on the face it, interest me. "All windows down" and "I leant... More promptly out next time." This suggests a compartment carriage, that was fitted with a sliding window in order to open the door by using the outside handle. At which point one could become a trainspotter and go in search of what class of carriage was in use on the East Coast Mainline. However, fruitful, and interesting this endevour, it would miss the opportunity to sniff the seats, and hazard a guess as to "then a smell of grass.... Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth" what was going on in those compartments, when the train was between stations and the blinds were pulled down.
And it shouldn't be overlooked that yes, the first and second stanza is a perfect description of that journey from Hull to Doncaster, "thence...The river’s level drifting breadth began,....There sky and Lincolnshire and water meet....All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept...For miles inland,....A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept." But " I was late getting away" and "all sense
Of being in a hurry gone." offers possibilities of something more illicit, such as meeting a lover - a lover from the office, without the embarrassment of being seen together by colleagues.
The closing of the second stanza offers an interesting commentary, "Until the next town, new and nondescript,.... Approached with acres of dismantled cars." The statement with regard to the anonymity of post-war planners and architects is fairly generic of the period, yet the second, with regard to scrapyards of cars is not, especially the timing of the poem being published and the publication eleven months before of the first Beeching report: the premise of which was that rail services should be cut back, stations closed, rail-lines grubbed up, because cars were the future of transport.
Which is in large part why I am no longer a member of the Terry Eagleton crew, because clearly Larkin would have been aware of the Beeching report, and the debates that led up to it's commissioning, since it was no secret that the railways had been losing money for years. Indeed the situation of the railways rather mirrored the debates surrounding marriage, and any number of courses and questions that were raised in the 1950's, reformed in the 1960's, with the effects being felt in the 1970's and 1980's. Thus while Dr Beeching is set on his path of 'just married' being sprayed on the sides of Cortinas, and wedding parties that drag on until midnight, Larkin is recording the people who lived in streets not lined with cars, where " the wedding-days... Were coming to an end" at three in the afternoon.
22/06/2018
a#writing #poem #poetry #sketchbook fete again
That summer, the fete, ordinarily
held indoors by rain, spilled across lawns
and circled the drooping willow bows
in the drive. Yet even with cloudless skies
one heard low voices tempting fate, as if
nothing could be trusted in the redistribution
of books and toys, and it could all fall flat.
Cakes, of all kinds were laid on plates,
with the odd swiping away of a toddler's
hand, while in the corner of the tent
the temperamental urn was loaded with teabags
and set to puffing wafts of steam.
....
They do things differently here. It looks
roughly the same, the book stall, the cakes,
an urn for tea puffing steam in the corner.
But for reasons best known, they have singers
and a show or two, by local children.
....
Watching a local dance troupe high-kick
a samba around, lead to a somewhat stitled
conversation about sex. Stood as we
were next the judging of scarecrows
held indoors by rain, spilled across lawns
and circled the drooping willow bows
in the drive. Yet even with cloudless skies
one heard low voices tempting fate, as if
nothing could be trusted in the redistribution
of books and toys, and it could all fall flat.
Cakes, of all kinds were laid on plates,
with the odd swiping away of a toddler's
hand, while in the corner of the tent
the temperamental urn was loaded with teabags
and set to puffing wafts of steam.
....
They do things differently here. It looks
roughly the same, the book stall, the cakes,
an urn for tea puffing steam in the corner.
But for reasons best known, they have singers
and a show or two, by local children.
....
Watching a local dance troupe high-kick
a samba around, lead to a somewhat stitled
conversation about sex. Stood as we
were next the judging of scarecrows
20/06/2018
#amwriting #poem #poetry #sketchbook abbey ruins
Quite unsplendid now, a series of arches
without a roof to keep out the humours
of gout. My eldest asks about the holes,
that once held beams, but wanders off before
it seems I really get going on my schoolboy
historical French - Je suis histoire -
I mutter, pausing a little to study
the dais, where once an abbot ate swan.
We move on, like everyone, not seeing
quite why we would care to look at a thing
not there.
without a roof to keep out the humours
of gout. My eldest asks about the holes,
that once held beams, but wanders off before
it seems I really get going on my schoolboy
historical French - Je suis histoire -
I mutter, pausing a little to study
the dais, where once an abbot ate swan.
We move on, like everyone, not seeing
quite why we would care to look at a thing
not there.
#amwriting #poem #poetry disposed
Disposed
She wasn't there at nine, and ten minutes,
later, she still wasn't there. You took her
from my knee, leaving only the scratch of time
and an angel. She wasn't there at nine.
How clumsy - why say water, when we mean
no, and did I say you or we, press on
and don't look back - but why say water -
when you mean, I don't know, and never did.
I saw God, in this, moving the curtains
with shadows and shadows with curtains
until all that bore colour gained rigor
unless with our tapping finger made real.
Somewhere in love lies the call of pity -
perhaps you'll agree, to agree, that body
and water refers to sea - no - not sea
but pity called out by him - somewhere.
I wasn't there at nine, and ten minutes,
later, I still wasn't there. You took her
from my knee, leaving scratches of angel
and bits of time. At nine, I was not there.
She wasn't there at nine, and ten minutes,
later, she still wasn't there. You took her
from my knee, leaving only the scratch of time
and an angel. She wasn't there at nine.
How clumsy - why say water, when we mean
no, and did I say you or we, press on
and don't look back - but why say water -
when you mean, I don't know, and never did.
I saw God, in this, moving the curtains
with shadows and shadows with curtains
until all that bore colour gained rigor
unless with our tapping finger made real.
Somewhere in love lies the call of pity -
perhaps you'll agree, to agree, that body
and water refers to sea - no - not sea
but pity called out by him - somewhere.
I wasn't there at nine, and ten minutes,
later, I still wasn't there. You took her
from my knee, leaving scratches of angel
and bits of time. At nine, I was not there.
18/06/2018
#amwriting #poem #poetry list
List
Your letter comes laden with moral veils,
more welcome, in what you say in winking
than the words you choose. In fiddling song
a blackbird, somewhat in mood, flies between
the fence and the brushed concrete of the yard.
Not hard, you say, when speaking of love from
yesterday, and a vantage reticent
to see what we have. And weigh that we knot
in faddle, more heavily still. Do you
still wear your hair to the shoulder, I think,
your eyes greenish bright when smiling - I think -
then think no more of love, crumbling crumbs
between thumb and ring finger, scattering
them upon the nothingness of concrete.
When we meet, you excuse everything, your eyes
more willow in tone, as if caught in water.
Your letter comes laden with moral veils,
more welcome, in what you say in winking
than the words you choose. In fiddling song
a blackbird, somewhat in mood, flies between
the fence and the brushed concrete of the yard.
Not hard, you say, when speaking of love from
yesterday, and a vantage reticent
to see what we have. And weigh that we knot
in faddle, more heavily still. Do you
still wear your hair to the shoulder, I think,
your eyes greenish bright when smiling - I think -
then think no more of love, crumbling crumbs
between thumb and ring finger, scattering
them upon the nothingness of concrete.
When we meet, you excuse everything, your eyes
more willow in tone, as if caught in water.
#amwriting #poem #poetry #sketchbook critics auden
Why jump into bed with people who hate you.
I often think this, when I see some second rater,
who could be good, weeping into their hankie,
being consoled by third raters being nice.
As they argue for praise over things that never sell.
Oh well, leave them to it, and never be honest
and if necessary drink somewhere else.
One should count you triumphs on the quality
of places from which you've been barred, or
on the bosomy nature of those lobbying to have
your work excluded from anthologies, for cutting
a little too close. Though, strangely
this objectionable content touches them more
than you, who lived it. Finding suitable homes
to make people homeless is the height
of charity these days.
I often think this, when I see some second rater,
who could be good, weeping into their hankie,
being consoled by third raters being nice.
As they argue for praise over things that never sell.
Oh well, leave them to it, and never be honest
and if necessary drink somewhere else.
One should count you triumphs on the quality
of places from which you've been barred, or
on the bosomy nature of those lobbying to have
your work excluded from anthologies, for cutting
a little too close. Though, strangely
this objectionable content touches them more
than you, who lived it. Finding suitable homes
to make people homeless is the height
of charity these days.
#amwriting #poem #poetry #sketchbook shazam 2
Hang on, I
am writing a
poem. Not really
but if I
do this, you
will think I
am. Of course
some of you
will be thinking
why is this
ill-formed sentence stretching,
and can I
stop
reading.
Now.
am writing a
poem. Not really
but if I
do this, you
will think I
am. Of course
some of you
will be thinking
why is this
ill-formed sentence stretching,
and can I
stop
reading.
Now.
#amwriting #poem #poetry #sketchbook shazam
Hang on, I
am writing a
poem. Not really
but if I
do this, you
will think I
am. Of course
some of you
will be thinking
why is this
ill-formed sentence stretching,
and can I
claim
on
my
insurance
for RSI.
am writing a
poem. Not really
but if I
do this, you
will think I
am. Of course
some of you
will be thinking
why is this
ill-formed sentence stretching,
and can I
claim
on
my
insurance
for RSI.
#amwriting #poem #poetry With Knobs On
With Knobs On
How nice it must be to paint, to squiggle
a bit of colour in the corner and not
need to know it vetch or parsley, just green,
enough to provoke the eye to say, 'yes
that looks like that.' And move on. I hear you.
Not another poem about death or ideas.
Mawkish adolescent pointing at skies,
poking deities, wondering if fingers touch
with divine fire when illuminating
the purchase of this small necessity
or coincidental half remembered barn.
What punned rhymes we do weave when
a broad-brushed tree would do as well
to fit the theme, of cantering to stretch
the lines to match Auden's Limestone in length.
Lord give me strength, and let not the child die.
As we hear the lark sing against the bricks
where once a meadow grew, perhaps you do,
perhaps, almost cry, and consider why
I'm still not courting death. Nor clinging to
some hip new cant of tagging or coffee,
that gets the virgins wet. Some have cunts, and some
have caves, and I have fags and booze
and when I wake up in that disappointment
of failing to paint the scene I saw, I could bore
at the petite slight, or say fuck it. Count
the lines....
No Auden's longer.
How nice it must be to paint, to squiggle
a bit of colour in the corner and not
need to know it vetch or parsley, just green,
enough to provoke the eye to say, 'yes
that looks like that.' And move on. I hear you.
Not another poem about death or ideas.
Mawkish adolescent pointing at skies,
poking deities, wondering if fingers touch
with divine fire when illuminating
the purchase of this small necessity
or coincidental half remembered barn.
What punned rhymes we do weave when
a broad-brushed tree would do as well
to fit the theme, of cantering to stretch
the lines to match Auden's Limestone in length.
Lord give me strength, and let not the child die.
As we hear the lark sing against the bricks
where once a meadow grew, perhaps you do,
perhaps, almost cry, and consider why
I'm still not courting death. Nor clinging to
some hip new cant of tagging or coffee,
that gets the virgins wet. Some have cunts, and some
have caves, and I have fags and booze
and when I wake up in that disappointment
of failing to paint the scene I saw, I could bore
at the petite slight, or say fuck it. Count
the lines....
No Auden's longer.
16/06/2018
#amwriting #poem #poetry Fen - 13
Fen - 13
A mitten on a gate but less - dropped,
ploughed around the old pigsty in the middle
was the place where no one went. To see
the remains of the door, hung at the hinge,
propped in angle, dug in the floor. Rotten
concrete pebbled with age and the attentive lime
of passing birds. With nothing to see but
a few fading scrawled words, of almost love,
for which boar fucked which sow - and when.
Both, like the roof, long eaten - now.
A mitten on a gate but less - dropped,
ploughed around the old pigsty in the middle
was the place where no one went. To see
the remains of the door, hung at the hinge,
propped in angle, dug in the floor. Rotten
concrete pebbled with age and the attentive lime
of passing birds. With nothing to see but
a few fading scrawled words, of almost love,
for which boar fucked which sow - and when.
Both, like the roof, long eaten - now.
#amwriting #poem #poetry #sketchbook pigsty
The old pigsty was where no one went.
It sat in the middle, ploughed around,
like a pill-box, or a barrow, or something
dropped, a mitten on a gate but less.
Occasionally some puppy or wayward dog
would run ahead, veer left, crash through
the overgrown, until called back in the looking.
Even a dog found the rotting concrete
course.
....
A mitten on a gate but less - dropped,
ploughed around the old pigsty in the middle
was the place where no one went. To see
the remains of the door, hung at the hinge,
propped in angle, dug in the floor. Rotten
concrete pebbled with age and the attentive lime
of passing birds. With nothing to see but
a few fading scrawled words, of almost love,
for which boar fucked which sow - and when.
Both, like the roof, long eaten - now.
....
It sat in the middle, ploughed around,
like a pill-box, or a barrow, or something
dropped, a mitten on a gate but less.
Occasionally some puppy or wayward dog
would run ahead, veer left, crash through
the overgrown, until called back in the looking.
Even a dog found the rotting concrete
course.
....
A mitten on a gate but less - dropped,
ploughed around the old pigsty in the middle
was the place where no one went. To see
the remains of the door, hung at the hinge,
propped in angle, dug in the floor. Rotten
concrete pebbled with age and the attentive lime
of passing birds. With nothing to see but
a few fading scrawled words, of almost love,
for which boar fucked which sow - and when.
Both, like the roof, long eaten - now.
....
#amwriting #poem #poetry #limericks #sketchbook banned
There was a young girl with a lisp
too frightened to ever be kissed
she was fine down below
and often gave it a go
but intimacy she would not risk.
....
Women are easily led
by the heart and sometimes the head
just blame their mother
for something or other
and they'll drag you straight into bed
....
too frightened to ever be kissed
she was fine down below
and often gave it a go
but intimacy she would not risk.
....
Women are easily led
by the heart and sometimes the head
just blame their mother
for something or other
and they'll drag you straight into bed
....
15/06/2018
#amwriting #poem #poetry Fen - 12
Fen - 12
Mellow, misty, sort of grey, as tin' pears
in tinned cream, never quite enjoyed but
liked, so came the apple picking time.
Perhaps it wasn't so cut and dried.
For in prelude stubble was burnt away,
and when the wind was wrong, a stench
from the sugar factory pervaded smoke,
that sickened the nose and choked the throat,
and firemen battle untended blazes,
while departing gypsies rob unguarded homes.
Yet, when the winnowed wind caught perfume
in the orchard row, it dragged distended voices
calling from the children below, calling up
to old Jack, or their ring-less mother,
before they danced away to hide, like swifts.
Leaving only the almost of the twist
of ripe fruit, and somewhere, a woman singing.
Mellow, misty, sort of grey, as tin' pears
in tinned cream, never quite enjoyed but
liked, so came the apple picking time.
Perhaps it wasn't so cut and dried.
For in prelude stubble was burnt away,
and when the wind was wrong, a stench
from the sugar factory pervaded smoke,
that sickened the nose and choked the throat,
and firemen battle untended blazes,
while departing gypsies rob unguarded homes.
Yet, when the winnowed wind caught perfume
in the orchard row, it dragged distended voices
calling from the children below, calling up
to old Jack, or their ring-less mother,
before they danced away to hide, like swifts.
Leaving only the almost of the twist
of ripe fruit, and somewhere, a woman singing.
#sketchbook #poem #poetry #amwriting apples
When the misty greyness came mellow, still,
to the unflooding holme, a perfume hung
around the orchards, waiting, for women
to remove their rings so as not to bruise
the apples.
to the unflooding holme, a perfume hung
around the orchards, waiting, for women
to remove their rings so as not to bruise
the apples.
#amwriting #poem #poetry #aketchbook sloes sludge
In that mellow greyness, like tinned pears
in cream, when sludged leaves carry tyre tracks
at the roadside and the last perfume dies
away from the apple crop, she would go
for sloes.
in cream, when sludged leaves carry tyre tracks
at the roadside and the last perfume dies
away from the apple crop, she would go
for sloes.
#amwriting #poem #poetry #sketchbook larkin
I was watching a bunch of women measure Larkin's
words, and enjoying how much he threatened them -
with the casual verb here, or laconic observation
at how a wrinkled cunt is best seen in the dark.
What a lark - and so unlike Keats, who coughs
it up for all to see, and we, can all say, spit
and move on.
....
words, and enjoying how much he threatened them -
with the casual verb here, or laconic observation
at how a wrinkled cunt is best seen in the dark.
What a lark - and so unlike Keats, who coughs
it up for all to see, and we, can all say, spit
and move on.
....
#amwriting #poem #poetry #sketchbook sludge pears
The toy stall was where you found the things.
migrated to the garage when you weren't looking
because you hadn't demonstrated interest in play.
And carrier bags of comics.
....
For years I wondered what specialness lay
beyond the sun and rain of the everyday,
with occasional banking of fog that crawled
inland from the sea, or the sometime snow.
A sort of greyness like pears in tinned milk,
comforting, if not exciting, marks
living in a never flooding holme.
.....
A sort of greyness like pears in tinned milk
appeared with the sludge of roadside leaves.
Comforting perhaps, that the days grow
shorter, and we might have something to look
back upon. Yet being in a place with a name
one has to spell to strangers, only reinforced
the fact of being trapped in hedged roads.
Yes, beyond the ditch the apples grew fat
and within the walking distance of the row
you might perfume your tongue with all
the variety of a graft. But not a library,
not a telephone number of more than three
digits, just the sinking feeling of being
somewhere beyond reach, and just in time
for Christmas.
....
A sort of greyness, like tinned pears in cream,
appeared with the wet sludge of roadside leaves.
Comforting perhaps, to see the days shrink
and offer that we may look back. But there,
in a place with a name one had to spell
to strangers, only reinforced the fact
of being trapped by hedged roads and dikes.
Somewhere beyond, with no need to drive through,
or even to see, though lacking somewhat
the anonymity of a terrace,
for at least there was hope that someone
in search of apples or eggs might stray.
....
A sort of greyness, like tinned pears in cream
appeared with the wet sludge of roadside leaves -
comforting perhaps, like the variated perfume
of the apple's varied graft.
....
A sort of mellow greyness, like tinned pears
in cream, appeared with the sludge of roadside
leaves. Comforting perhaps,
.....
migrated to the garage when you weren't looking
because you hadn't demonstrated interest in play.
And carrier bags of comics.
....
For years I wondered what specialness lay
beyond the sun and rain of the everyday,
with occasional banking of fog that crawled
inland from the sea, or the sometime snow.
A sort of greyness like pears in tinned milk,
comforting, if not exciting, marks
living in a never flooding holme.
.....
A sort of greyness like pears in tinned milk
appeared with the sludge of roadside leaves.
Comforting perhaps, that the days grow
shorter, and we might have something to look
back upon. Yet being in a place with a name
one has to spell to strangers, only reinforced
the fact of being trapped in hedged roads.
Yes, beyond the ditch the apples grew fat
and within the walking distance of the row
you might perfume your tongue with all
the variety of a graft. But not a library,
not a telephone number of more than three
digits, just the sinking feeling of being
somewhere beyond reach, and just in time
for Christmas.
....
A sort of greyness, like tinned pears in cream,
appeared with the wet sludge of roadside leaves.
Comforting perhaps, to see the days shrink
and offer that we may look back. But there,
in a place with a name one had to spell
to strangers, only reinforced the fact
of being trapped by hedged roads and dikes.
Somewhere beyond, with no need to drive through,
or even to see, though lacking somewhat
the anonymity of a terrace,
for at least there was hope that someone
in search of apples or eggs might stray.
....
A sort of greyness, like tinned pears in cream
appeared with the wet sludge of roadside leaves -
comforting perhaps, like the variated perfume
of the apple's varied graft.
....
A sort of mellow greyness, like tinned pears
in cream, appeared with the sludge of roadside
leaves. Comforting perhaps,
.....
14/06/2018
#amwriting #poem #poetry Fen - 11
Fen - 11
The yew tree spilt over the iron fence,
it's roots in the growth unscrewing the black
Hammerited poles from the posts. Holding
true to our secret bond, we lay aside
our bikes, cast a second glance, and slipped
through the squeal of gate into the churchyard.
There, we knew ourselves officially out
of bounds. Our cover story was that we
were brass-rubbing, which caused us to laugh,
and make limp-wristed jokes, as we crunched
our way up the path to the shadows
of the south end nave, where we couldn't be
seen by Mrs Swiggland, who came everyday
to lay flowers for her daughter and tend her grave.
From the pen-pocket of my flying jacket sleeve
you produced a pinched Dunhill, and
insisted I pull hard, which sent the world
spinning so fast, you saw, or claimed to see,
Jesus's brother James in the plain tracery
of the transcept window - left forefinger raised.
This you recanted, kissing away the vision
like butterflies, while the weathered faceless
saint looked down, hands firm against stone
thigh. Then with a sigh it began to rain,
soft raindrops that melted away before
they dampened the skin, And we stood
before what we came to see, the little
headstone tucked away. And I asked if
this was the pageboy holding your mother's
train. And you nodded, and called all women
'whores'.
The yew tree spilt over the iron fence,
it's roots in the growth unscrewing the black
Hammerited poles from the posts. Holding
true to our secret bond, we lay aside
our bikes, cast a second glance, and slipped
through the squeal of gate into the churchyard.
There, we knew ourselves officially out
of bounds. Our cover story was that we
were brass-rubbing, which caused us to laugh,
and make limp-wristed jokes, as we crunched
our way up the path to the shadows
of the south end nave, where we couldn't be
seen by Mrs Swiggland, who came everyday
to lay flowers for her daughter and tend her grave.
From the pen-pocket of my flying jacket sleeve
you produced a pinched Dunhill, and
insisted I pull hard, which sent the world
spinning so fast, you saw, or claimed to see,
Jesus's brother James in the plain tracery
of the transcept window - left forefinger raised.
This you recanted, kissing away the vision
like butterflies, while the weathered faceless
saint looked down, hands firm against stone
thigh. Then with a sigh it began to rain,
soft raindrops that melted away before
they dampened the skin, And we stood
before what we came to see, the little
headstone tucked away. And I asked if
this was the pageboy holding your mother's
train. And you nodded, and called all women
'whores'.
13/06/2018
#amwriting #poem #poetry #sketchbook profane church
When the grass....
....
The Swiggland twins galloped between stalls
hand in hand, the calls to be careful.
...
The had good eyes at mountain view, alpine
plants in the rockery explained somewhat
if it all but ignored the flat field laying
gently beneath the spread of spring barley.
....
They had good eyes at mountain view, to see
anything beyond the alpine rockery,
that hinted of snow of skiing. Catching
the edge of the pit.
....
holding
our prisoner to his bond, we lay down
the bikes.
...
Mountain View overlooked a field of white
flowered potatoes.
...
The yew tree was spilling over the iron fence,
it's roots in the growth unscrewing the black
Hammerited rods from the post. Promising
a secret Carl had brought us to the church
but beyond risky...
...
simpered
....
The Swiggland twins galloped between stalls
hand in hand, the calls to be careful.
...
The had good eyes at mountain view, alpine
plants in the rockery explained somewhat
if it all but ignored the flat field laying
gently beneath the spread of spring barley.
....
They had good eyes at mountain view, to see
anything beyond the alpine rockery,
that hinted of snow of skiing. Catching
the edge of the pit.
....
holding
our prisoner to his bond, we lay down
the bikes.
...
Mountain View overlooked a field of white
flowered potatoes.
...
The yew tree was spilling over the iron fence,
it's roots in the growth unscrewing the black
Hammerited rods from the post. Promising
a secret Carl had brought us to the church
but beyond risky...
...
simpered
#amwriting #poem #poetry #sketchbook profane
The yew was spilling over the iron fence
it's roots in the growth unscrewing the black
Hammerite poles from the posts. Holding
true to the bond of our word, we lay aside
our bikes, cast a second glance, and slipped
through the squealing gate into the churchyard.
We knew ourselves officially out of bounds.
Waxy suggested we pretend to be
brass-rubbers, which brought laughter, and jokes,
about being queer, or not, as we made
our way to the shadow of the nave
where we couldn't be seen by Mrs Swiggland.
Waxy had pinched a Dunhill and insisted
we pull hard, which sent the world spinning
so fast that he claimed to see Jesus's
brother James in the tracery of the window -
forefinger raised.
it's roots in the growth unscrewing the black
Hammerite poles from the posts. Holding
true to the bond of our word, we lay aside
our bikes, cast a second glance, and slipped
through the squealing gate into the churchyard.
We knew ourselves officially out of bounds.
Waxy suggested we pretend to be
brass-rubbers, which brought laughter, and jokes,
about being queer, or not, as we made
our way to the shadow of the nave
where we couldn't be seen by Mrs Swiggland.
Waxy had pinched a Dunhill and insisted
we pull hard, which sent the world spinning
so fast that he claimed to see Jesus's
brother James in the tracery of the window -
forefinger raised.
12/06/2018
#amwriting #poem #poetry Fen -10 (revised)
Fen - 10
The bookcase, glass doored above the bottom third,
ran beside the lines of desks. Propped against
the end were the linseed canes. All but one,
the new boy, bore a ring of coloured tape.
When choosing a book, having done your sums,
we would peek and giggle, and discuss
which would hurt the most - the gnarly black, red,
blue or green, or the unseasoned yellow
fraying at the end. Then hurry away.
Of course girls did not get the cane, being
so nice and all, only boys faced the fall.
Faced the green leather of the desk, felt
the un-closed drawer dig into their shin,
the hand in the small of the back, the begging.
And of course you couldn't cry, that was for girls.
So you counted the strokes, and bit your lip,
until by four, hot tears burned more than the biting
of the cane against your buttocks and thighs.
And you would look out to your classmates
to see who was smiling and who looked down,
and who was judging them-self in your place,
as you took the final two. And having thanked Sir,
you would make your way through silence
to your desk, sit in the hot-seat, pretend to do work,
open the lid to rearrange your pens.
The bookcase, glass doored above the bottom third,
ran beside the lines of desks. Propped against
the end were the linseed canes. All but one,
the new boy, bore a ring of coloured tape.
When choosing a book, having done your sums,
we would peek and giggle, and discuss
which would hurt the most - the gnarly black, red,
blue or green, or the unseasoned yellow
fraying at the end. Then hurry away.
Of course girls did not get the cane, being
so nice and all, only boys faced the fall.
Faced the green leather of the desk, felt
the un-closed drawer dig into their shin,
the hand in the small of the back, the begging.
And of course you couldn't cry, that was for girls.
So you counted the strokes, and bit your lip,
until by four, hot tears burned more than the biting
of the cane against your buttocks and thighs.
And you would look out to your classmates
to see who was smiling and who looked down,
and who was judging them-self in your place,
as you took the final two. And having thanked Sir,
you would make your way through silence
to your desk, sit in the hot-seat, pretend to do work,
open the lid to rearrange your pens.
11/06/2018
#amwriting #poem #poetry Fen - 10
Fen - 10
The bookcase, glass doored above the bottom third,
ran beside the lines of desks. Looming pink
above us as we worked our way through arithmetic.
Propped against the end were the linseed canes.
When choosing a book, having done your sums,
we would peek and giggle, and discuss
which would hurt the most. Then hurry away.
Of course girls did not get the cane, being
so nice and all, only boys faced the fall.
Faced the green leather of the desk, felt
the un-closed drawer dig into their shin,
the hand in the small of the back, the begging.
And of course you couldn't cry, that was for girls.
So you counted the strokes, and bit your lip,
until by four, hot tears burned more than the biting
of the cane against your buttocks and thighs.
And you would look out to your classmates
to see who was smiling and who looked down,
and who was judging them-self in your place,
as you took the final two. And having thanked Sir,
you would make your way through silence
to your desk, sit in the hot-seat, pretend to do work,
open the lid to rearrange your pens.
The bookcase, glass doored above the bottom third,
ran beside the lines of desks. Looming pink
above us as we worked our way through arithmetic.
Propped against the end were the linseed canes.
When choosing a book, having done your sums,
we would peek and giggle, and discuss
which would hurt the most. Then hurry away.
Of course girls did not get the cane, being
so nice and all, only boys faced the fall.
Faced the green leather of the desk, felt
the un-closed drawer dig into their shin,
the hand in the small of the back, the begging.
And of course you couldn't cry, that was for girls.
So you counted the strokes, and bit your lip,
until by four, hot tears burned more than the biting
of the cane against your buttocks and thighs.
And you would look out to your classmates
to see who was smiling and who looked down,
and who was judging them-self in your place,
as you took the final two. And having thanked Sir,
you would make your way through silence
to your desk, sit in the hot-seat, pretend to do work,
open the lid to rearrange your pens.
#amwriting #poem #poetry #sketchbook hankies
Via Christmas and birthdays we acquired
hankies with children's prints of rabbits, elves
and flowers, so thin they barely held much
of the undesired and unwanted in a blow.
They would make your pocket's wet, but not damp
like the letters we were forced to write
to say ungrateful thanks. Not like sleeves,
or the that bit of T-shirt reached with the nose
while riding one handed, preparing to jump
the angled kerb.
hankies with children's prints of rabbits, elves
and flowers, so thin they barely held much
of the undesired and unwanted in a blow.
They would make your pocket's wet, but not damp
like the letters we were forced to write
to say ungrateful thanks. Not like sleeves,
or the that bit of T-shirt reached with the nose
while riding one handed, preparing to jump
the angled kerb.
#amwriting #poem #poetry #aktechbook meh
Louder than too loud, we greeted the cold
of water. Wading first first to our knees
and then to our waist, and back our knees
at the chiding of a parent on the picnic rug.
The cut was too deep to ever be warm.
....
of water. Wading first first to our knees
and then to our waist, and back our knees
at the chiding of a parent on the picnic rug.
The cut was too deep to ever be warm.
....
10/06/2018
#amwriting #poem #poetry #sketchbook war
At school we still fought the war. As Germans
we learned it was our duty to die, with curdled
screams, and roll three times, and lie as still
as we could with eyes closed - arms outstretched
like Christ. And like Christ, we would rise again
and be reborn as Englishmen, sloping off
with imaginary Sten guns to our base
behind the toilet block. And, await the call
to battle, while excitedly discussing who
died best. Then out we'd come on the charge,
tossing grenades and spraying anyone who moved
with gutteral machine gun fire and boom of bombs,
never in a straight line, always on the dodge,
just like we knew what war was.
we learned it was our duty to die, with curdled
screams, and roll three times, and lie as still
as we could with eyes closed - arms outstretched
like Christ. And like Christ, we would rise again
and be reborn as Englishmen, sloping off
with imaginary Sten guns to our base
behind the toilet block. And, await the call
to battle, while excitedly discussing who
died best. Then out we'd come on the charge,
tossing grenades and spraying anyone who moved
with gutteral machine gun fire and boom of bombs,
never in a straight line, always on the dodge,
just like we knew what war was.
#amwriting #poem #poetry #sketchbook sloes
Cycling out for sloes - her floral headscarf
at odds with the natural fading flowers,
in that balm of time in late Septemeber
when summer seems to flare again - she rides
by a circuitous route, wary of spies.
She stops by the yew tree, spilling from the church,
to change her scarf to a duller paisley print.
at odds with the natural fading flowers,
in that balm of time in late Septemeber
when summer seems to flare again - she rides
by a circuitous route, wary of spies.
She stops by the yew tree, spilling from the church,
to change her scarf to a duller paisley print.
#amwriting #poem #poetry #sketchbook picking sloes
fingers blue from blackberries gready pick
for the mouth and not the tupperware
bowl
....
Picking prickled fingers lift blackberries
from the bramble bush, but not so fast
as children cram them in their mouth.
Away across the scorched black field stands
the tower of the church, marking up
the stipend, to be counted into purse.
....
Picking prickled fingers lift blackberries
from the bramble bush, but not so fast
as children cram them in their mouth.
Away across the scorched black field stands
the tower of the church, counting out
the stipend with which to fill it's purse.
But not today, with all the crops gathered
they with baskets and bowls come, these
pickers of sloes and berries.
...
picking prickled fingers lift blackberries
from the bramble bush, but not so fast
as children cram them in their mouth.
....
All summer the mole catcher has been round
checking the traps an noting the best place
for sloes.
....
The black greased gear of the tri-speed drum
glisten in the almost warm lat September sun.
The old woman in a headscarf ceases picking sloes
to watch the boys in the river throwing stones.
....
to watch the boys on the bank throw thunking
stones.
....
The black greased gear of the tri-speed drum
glistens in the almost warm late September sun.
The old woman, in the headscarf, ceases picking sloes
to watch the boys on the bank throw, thunking, stones.
....
The black greased gear of the tri-speed drum
glistens in the almost warm of the late September
sun. The old woman in the headscarf ceases picking
sloes to watch the noisy boys on the bank
cheer while skimming stones. Their voices
more than loud, catch the stillness rising
one last time in summer. Weighing a sloe
in her hand against the hard black skin.
...
The voices more than loud. They catch
the last stillness rising, hard as the fruit
she weighs in her hand. Tough as the skin
the turning year moves a little more
as clouded night closes in.
....
Their voices more than loud, haggle
for the flattest stone, as bending the knee
they admire the jolting jump of others.
....
Louder than loud from the whisping reeds
breaks the voices of boys wading into wait-high
water. The glistening gear of the tri-speed
drum catches at the warm late September
sun, as the woman in a headscarf, picks sloes.
She works without watching the boys
her hands taking only the fruit that yields
to her touch.
for the mouth and not the tupperware
bowl
....
Picking prickled fingers lift blackberries
from the bramble bush, but not so fast
as children cram them in their mouth.
Away across the scorched black field stands
the tower of the church, marking up
the stipend, to be counted into purse.
....
Picking prickled fingers lift blackberries
from the bramble bush, but not so fast
as children cram them in their mouth.
Away across the scorched black field stands
the tower of the church, counting out
the stipend with which to fill it's purse.
But not today, with all the crops gathered
they with baskets and bowls come, these
pickers of sloes and berries.
...
picking prickled fingers lift blackberries
from the bramble bush, but not so fast
as children cram them in their mouth.
....
All summer the mole catcher has been round
checking the traps an noting the best place
for sloes.
....
The black greased gear of the tri-speed drum
glisten in the almost warm lat September sun.
The old woman in a headscarf ceases picking sloes
to watch the boys in the river throwing stones.
....
to watch the boys on the bank throw thunking
stones.
....
The black greased gear of the tri-speed drum
glistens in the almost warm late September sun.
The old woman, in the headscarf, ceases picking sloes
to watch the boys on the bank throw, thunking, stones.
....
The black greased gear of the tri-speed drum
glistens in the almost warm of the late September
sun. The old woman in the headscarf ceases picking
sloes to watch the noisy boys on the bank
cheer while skimming stones. Their voices
more than loud, catch the stillness rising
one last time in summer. Weighing a sloe
in her hand against the hard black skin.
...
The voices more than loud. They catch
the last stillness rising, hard as the fruit
she weighs in her hand. Tough as the skin
the turning year moves a little more
as clouded night closes in.
....
Their voices more than loud, haggle
for the flattest stone, as bending the knee
they admire the jolting jump of others.
....
Louder than loud from the whisping reeds
breaks the voices of boys wading into wait-high
water. The glistening gear of the tri-speed
drum catches at the warm late September
sun, as the woman in a headscarf, picks sloes.
She works without watching the boys
her hands taking only the fruit that yields
to her touch.
09/06/2018
#amwriting #poem #poetry Fen - 9
Fen - 9
Often, when half way through the bottle, I offer
to remember the smell of a wrought iron coke stove
or the thrill of sliding in the wild half turn
on knees across a polished floor, knowing
nostalgia ain't what it used be. Though the dull
cling to that faux critique. And so, to foxgloves
and violets, and the green-black hawthorne,
and the rainclouds gathering at ten to three
as we push Walmsley in to bowl out Sir,
because he's the best we have, and he has the ball.
And I stand between gully, and just about there,
and notice the fox emerge from the trees,
browning to red, and up on his toes,
loping across the yet ungrown field. But
what I really see, is that space behind the hedge
when you revealed yourself to me when I
released the snake belt. And you, with your knickers
round you knees, holding the hem of your skirt
and smiling at the naughtiness of being
an only child. Yes, the sexless world of those
who only wear slacks.
Often, when half way through the bottle, I offer
to remember the smell of a wrought iron coke stove
or the thrill of sliding in the wild half turn
on knees across a polished floor, knowing
nostalgia ain't what it used be. Though the dull
cling to that faux critique. And so, to foxgloves
and violets, and the green-black hawthorne,
and the rainclouds gathering at ten to three
as we push Walmsley in to bowl out Sir,
because he's the best we have, and he has the ball.
And I stand between gully, and just about there,
and notice the fox emerge from the trees,
browning to red, and up on his toes,
loping across the yet ungrown field. But
what I really see, is that space behind the hedge
when you revealed yourself to me when I
released the snake belt. And you, with your knickers
round you knees, holding the hem of your skirt
and smiling at the naughtiness of being
an only child. Yes, the sexless world of those
who only wear slacks.
08/06/2018
#amwriting #poem #poetry #aketchbook market and mail
Close, Place and Lane, and the turning Sycamore
dropped spinning for the postal round and three roads
in and out.
.....
Piled high on plastic grass around the theatre
of selling what you could not buy at Woolies.
but if you could he'd sell it cheaper, if you
got your money out quick. Juggled teasets,
don't mind if the plates smash, darling,
how's your husband
.....
dropped spinning for the postal round and three roads
in and out.
.....
Piled high on plastic grass around the theatre
of selling what you could not buy at Woolies.
but if you could he'd sell it cheaper, if you
got your money out quick. Juggled teasets,
don't mind if the plates smash, darling,
how's your husband
.....
#amwriting #poem #poetry #sketchbook fox
The yew oe'rspread the Hammerited rails
unscrewing from the fence posts by the spreading roots.
The dogs ran on. The men with guns discussed
the crop of white flowering potatoes,
while behind and before them trailed boys.
We knew they were after the fox, and smiled,
for we had found the den, in the bank
a mile away, by the school. But said nothing.
unscrewing from the fence posts by the spreading roots.
The dogs ran on. The men with guns discussed
the crop of white flowering potatoes,
while behind and before them trailed boys.
We knew they were after the fox, and smiled,
for we had found the den, in the bank
a mile away, by the school. But said nothing.
07/06/2018
#amwriting #poem #poetry Fen - 8
Fen - 8
To prove we were still English, we still sat
down to Sunday dinner, in that un-English
summer of ladybirds and stand-pipe queues.
Jean Metcalfe sent greetings to Cyprus when
it came, splatting the Windowlene like
a fat bee on a windscreen while over-taking
on the by-pass. What manner of weather
was rain. The sky gave no clue, still fighting
to be anything but blue, though a shadow
hung heavy at the far end of the hall.
And, pummeling the roof, stampeding hooves
slow marched at Coldstream pace across tile.
Cooing, dove-like, leaving our food, we went
to watch from my parent's room, explosions
of raindrops lifting the dust, flattening
the parched white grass. My father opened
the window, and we took it in turns to catch
the blood-warm rain which puddled in our palms
and sipped it like dying men in afternoon
films. The sun-baked soil gave no ground, as inch
by inch the water rose, and we lulled
into silent witness watched, to a background
of love songs on the Robert's radio.
To prove we were still English, we still sat
down to Sunday dinner, in that un-English
summer of ladybirds and stand-pipe queues.
Jean Metcalfe sent greetings to Cyprus when
it came, splatting the Windowlene like
a fat bee on a windscreen while over-taking
on the by-pass. What manner of weather
was rain. The sky gave no clue, still fighting
to be anything but blue, though a shadow
hung heavy at the far end of the hall.
And, pummeling the roof, stampeding hooves
slow marched at Coldstream pace across tile.
Cooing, dove-like, leaving our food, we went
to watch from my parent's room, explosions
of raindrops lifting the dust, flattening
the parched white grass. My father opened
the window, and we took it in turns to catch
the blood-warm rain which puddled in our palms
and sipped it like dying men in afternoon
films. The sun-baked soil gave no ground, as inch
by inch the water rose, and we lulled
into silent witness watched, to a background
of love songs on the Robert's radio.
06/06/2018
#amwriting #poem #poetry #sketchbook Indian summer 3
when it came, the sky, refusing to be less than blue
pummeled the earth like stampeding horses
in vain to raise a shroud of dust to prove
the impotence of water. Resting on elbows
we lined the sill of my parents room
watched as inch by inch the water rose.
...
what manner of weather is rain
....
Jean Metcalf was sending dreetings
to Cyprus when in ones and twos
it came. Cutting through theWindowlene
the expected rain. What manner of weather.
...
Jean Metcalf sent her greetings to Cyprus
from another world.
...
Jean Metcalf sent her greeting from to Cyprus
as we watched in silent awe, and wondered
what manner of weather was rain. The sky,
refusing to be less than blue, pummeled
on the sun-baked soil, which gave no ground
as inch on inch the flood rose. My father
opened the window, and cackling like crows
we caught puddles in our palmed hands.
....
What manner of weather was rain, that came
from a sky refusing to be less than blue.
We lined the window of my parents room,
watching in silence, the inch on inch rise
of impotent water as parched earth.
....
What manner of weather was rain, that came
from a sky refusing to be less than blue.
We lined the window of my parents room
watching in silence, the inch on inch rise
of impotent water, lift the dust from grass.
M father opened the window and we
took turns to catch puddles in our palms
and joke of the flood. Reflected...
,,,
My father opened the window, and we
took turns to catch puddles in our palms
and joke of the flood, for the sun-baked soil
gave no ground to the water.
....
and joked of the flood, for the sun-baked soil
gave no ground to the emergent lake
as it crossed our path with silver
to pool against the house.
....
Jean Metcalf sent greeting to Cyprus
when it came. What manner of weather was
rain. The sky fighting to be less than blue,
pummeled the earth with stampeding hooves
that raised at first a shroud of dust
to hide the impotence of water. My father
opened the window and cackling like crows
we leaned out to catch puddles in our hands -
blood warm, grave thick
....
we leaned to catch blood warm puddles
in our hands, and sipped them like dying men
from afternoon films. The sun-baked earth
gave no ground as inch on inch the water rose
breaking over the breakwater of the path
to mark the wall,
....
that raised at first a shroud of dust to hide
the impotence of water. My father opened
the window and leaned to catch
bloodwarm puddles in our hands, sipped at
like dying men in afternoon films.
....
Jean Metcalf sent greeting to Cprus
when it came. What manner of weather was
rain. The sky, still fghting to be less than blue,
pummeled the earth with stampeding hooves
that raised at first a shroud of dust
to hide the impotence of water. My father
opened the window and we leaned out
to catch bloodwarm puddles in our hands,
sipped at like dying men in afternoon films.
The sunbaked soil gave no ground, inch
on inch the water rose, then broke
over the path to mark the wall
thigh high on Action Man.
....
That raised at first a shroud of dust to hide
the impotence of water. My father opened
the window and leaned out to catch bloodwarm
puddles in our hands, sipped at like dying men
in afternoon films.
....
the window and we leaned out to catch
bloodwarm puddles in our hands, sipped at
like dying men in afternoon films.
...
sycamore
anomolous
...
pummeled the earth like stampeding horses
in vain to raise a shroud of dust to prove
the impotence of water. Resting on elbows
we lined the sill of my parents room
watched as inch by inch the water rose.
...
what manner of weather is rain
....
Jean Metcalf was sending dreetings
to Cyprus when in ones and twos
it came. Cutting through theWindowlene
the expected rain. What manner of weather.
...
Jean Metcalf sent her greetings to Cyprus
from another world.
...
Jean Metcalf sent her greeting from to Cyprus
as we watched in silent awe, and wondered
what manner of weather was rain. The sky,
refusing to be less than blue, pummeled
on the sun-baked soil, which gave no ground
as inch on inch the flood rose. My father
opened the window, and cackling like crows
we caught puddles in our palmed hands.
....
What manner of weather was rain, that came
from a sky refusing to be less than blue.
We lined the window of my parents room,
watching in silence, the inch on inch rise
of impotent water as parched earth.
....
What manner of weather was rain, that came
from a sky refusing to be less than blue.
We lined the window of my parents room
watching in silence, the inch on inch rise
of impotent water, lift the dust from grass.
M father opened the window and we
took turns to catch puddles in our palms
and joke of the flood. Reflected...
,,,
My father opened the window, and we
took turns to catch puddles in our palms
and joke of the flood, for the sun-baked soil
gave no ground to the water.
....
and joked of the flood, for the sun-baked soil
gave no ground to the emergent lake
as it crossed our path with silver
to pool against the house.
....
Jean Metcalf sent greeting to Cyprus
when it came. What manner of weather was
rain. The sky fighting to be less than blue,
pummeled the earth with stampeding hooves
that raised at first a shroud of dust
to hide the impotence of water. My father
opened the window and cackling like crows
we leaned out to catch puddles in our hands -
blood warm, grave thick
....
we leaned to catch blood warm puddles
in our hands, and sipped them like dying men
from afternoon films. The sun-baked earth
gave no ground as inch on inch the water rose
breaking over the breakwater of the path
to mark the wall,
....
that raised at first a shroud of dust to hide
the impotence of water. My father opened
the window and leaned to catch
bloodwarm puddles in our hands, sipped at
like dying men in afternoon films.
....
Jean Metcalf sent greeting to Cprus
when it came. What manner of weather was
rain. The sky, still fghting to be less than blue,
pummeled the earth with stampeding hooves
that raised at first a shroud of dust
to hide the impotence of water. My father
opened the window and we leaned out
to catch bloodwarm puddles in our hands,
sipped at like dying men in afternoon films.
The sunbaked soil gave no ground, inch
on inch the water rose, then broke
over the path to mark the wall
thigh high on Action Man.
....
That raised at first a shroud of dust to hide
the impotence of water. My father opened
the window and leaned out to catch bloodwarm
puddles in our hands, sipped at like dying men
in afternoon films.
....
the window and we leaned out to catch
bloodwarm puddles in our hands, sipped at
like dying men in afternoon films.
...
sycamore
anomolous
...
#amwriting #poem #poetry #sketchbook indian summer 2
When finally the rain came, we lined ourselves,
propped on elbows, to watch from the sanctuary
that was my parents bedroom window. Weeks
had gone by, rumours ran rife, barometers
tapped twice, then thrice, as the grass whitened
in that most un-English summer without end.
When it came, the sky, refusing to be less than blue,
pummeled the dry earth with stampeding hooves
that raised the dust in a shroud to hide
the impotence of water. It is hope
that kills. For one more selfish day. But we
grew drunk upon the heady perfume rising,
as inch on inch the water rose like some
crowd released with nowhere left to go
but down, into autumn.
propped on elbows, to watch from the sanctuary
that was my parents bedroom window. Weeks
had gone by, rumours ran rife, barometers
tapped twice, then thrice, as the grass whitened
in that most un-English summer without end.
When it came, the sky, refusing to be less than blue,
pummeled the dry earth with stampeding hooves
that raised the dust in a shroud to hide
the impotence of water. It is hope
that kills. For one more selfish day. But we
grew drunk upon the heady perfume rising,
as inch on inch the water rose like some
crowd released with nowhere left to go
but down, into autumn.
#amwriting #poem #poetry #sketchbook indian summer
Each morning the Roberts radio would chortle
along to Wogan, as the grass turned as white
as the fabric taut across the speaker. Until
we grew almost tired of this most un-English
summer. And just at the point when we almost
knew, what Sebastian was doing with those horses,
we went back to school to find the early drop
of acorns dry as finger nails and thin
they wobbled in the cup. And the hard field
that cut knees as sharp as tarmac, and bore
no moulded stud.
along to Wogan, as the grass turned as white
as the fabric taut across the speaker. Until
we grew almost tired of this most un-English
summer. And just at the point when we almost
knew, what Sebastian was doing with those horses,
we went back to school to find the early drop
of acorns dry as finger nails and thin
they wobbled in the cup. And the hard field
that cut knees as sharp as tarmac, and bore
no moulded stud.
03/06/2018
#amwriting #poem #poetry Fen - 7
Fen - 7
Between new and old the space was filled
yards to the pound, with all options included.
And so, what from the outside looked the same
contained variation - serving hatches and stone
effect fireplaces, and concrete drives to the garage.
Neat cul-de-sacs of bungalows all with a car
and immature conifers. At night, you might
step out from the backdoor, and stand upon
the pilfered kerbstone of the step and count
each star, unhindered by the streetlights
that hung upon the horizon, of the town we fled
to forget. And hold your arms outstretched
to the luke-warm scent of nettle growing
by the creosote' fence. And then a light
would flick on. Or someone late home from work
would be heard collecting dampened washing.
Or the quiet silence would be broken by voices
saying thank you and goodbye. Until bit
by bit, the old village slowly slipped
unnoticed from view - as if, never having
beech trees.
Between new and old the space was filled
yards to the pound, with all options included.
And so, what from the outside looked the same
contained variation - serving hatches and stone
effect fireplaces, and concrete drives to the garage.
Neat cul-de-sacs of bungalows all with a car
and immature conifers. At night, you might
step out from the backdoor, and stand upon
the pilfered kerbstone of the step and count
each star, unhindered by the streetlights
that hung upon the horizon, of the town we fled
to forget. And hold your arms outstretched
to the luke-warm scent of nettle growing
by the creosote' fence. And then a light
would flick on. Or someone late home from work
would be heard collecting dampened washing.
Or the quiet silence would be broken by voices
saying thank you and goodbye. Until bit
by bit, the old village slowly slipped
unnoticed from view - as if, never having
beech trees.
02/06/2018
#amwriting #poem #poetry Fen - 6
Fen - 6
I half suspect my father acted in spite.
Coming home early one day, and feeling
what guilt he managed, he threatened me
to be less sullen, then tried joking, before
taking me to the shop, without promise.
As the dutiful son, I sided with mummy
in their war. Not that it didn't wound
when the small acts like drawing a picture
of me and him together, were rebuffed.
I can't say I was frightened of him, just
grown tried of trying. And each greased slight
chaffed a little more until I grew as hard
as his hands, ingrained with the soot of oil
from engines that would soon need repairing
again. The day was so hot that a Mivvi
would drip on the second lick. Lightings streaked
sudden thunder as we crossed the road.
In the cool of the shop I place my wrist the glass
of the refrigerated counter, where a single
tray of bacon turned green beside tubbed brawn,
as he chatted with David about this and that,
swiping the coins rasping from the dropped
handful, to pay for the cigarettes and matches.
Then looking down, he nodded, and I ran
like I did in the bean bag race, to the sweets
before he could change his mind, without breath,
without thought, without looking, straight into
the lighted cigarette that burned my left eye.
And I cried. And I cried, and ate Opal Fruits
as we watched the cricket, and I, like Micheal Holding
made him grovel.
I half suspect my father acted in spite.
Coming home early one day, and feeling
what guilt he managed, he threatened me
to be less sullen, then tried joking, before
taking me to the shop, without promise.
As the dutiful son, I sided with mummy
in their war. Not that it didn't wound
when the small acts like drawing a picture
of me and him together, were rebuffed.
I can't say I was frightened of him, just
grown tried of trying. And each greased slight
chaffed a little more until I grew as hard
as his hands, ingrained with the soot of oil
from engines that would soon need repairing
again. The day was so hot that a Mivvi
would drip on the second lick. Lightings streaked
sudden thunder as we crossed the road.
In the cool of the shop I place my wrist the glass
of the refrigerated counter, where a single
tray of bacon turned green beside tubbed brawn,
as he chatted with David about this and that,
swiping the coins rasping from the dropped
handful, to pay for the cigarettes and matches.
Then looking down, he nodded, and I ran
like I did in the bean bag race, to the sweets
before he could change his mind, without breath,
without thought, without looking, straight into
the lighted cigarette that burned my left eye.
And I cried. And I cried, and ate Opal Fruits
as we watched the cricket, and I, like Micheal Holding
made him grovel.
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