FIRSTBORN

for Natasha

It was like opening a waterfall:

a mixture of colours flashed quickly by,

blue skin floated in the slipstream.

Children of light and a spirit of kindness

together under faded hospital bunting –

novice pilots of the future.

Your first toys were your hands,

a personal machinery of dreams.

Baby, you have changed the world.

Other people enjoyed telling me

I was asking the wrong questions.

I have become knowing and resourceful.

Empty rooms wait to be entered –

silent when you are asleep

or gone out with your mother.

Sometimes we all laugh. Otherwise

the house seems merely cluttered.

Choir practice has already started.

CONTINUUM

This January morning is dark,

bluer and colder than yesterday.

However, the scene will change.

An unusual collection of creeps, freaks

and divinely accented characters

are outside making history.

They used to look hostile,

never said anything much;

we just shuffled around them.

There never was any ill feeling;

I found something admirable

about their hanging-on to life.

Sound begins to come from somewhere –

an outcry of birds, the barking of dogs,

a grinding that has music hidden deep within.

What else do we have to listen to?

The noise of heat walking around the walls

after the summer has gone into silence.

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HAVING TO LISTEN

Outside, reality rips across the sky,

but in here we construct patterns

and transmit them to the editor.

There was a time when electronic parts

were replaced by different voices,

but this is not the way it has to happen:

it’s natural to do things in a simple way;

there are serious talks going on.

Criteria help determine what we honour –

it is as much the sound of words as the poetic,

but over the course of the next two days

these can be eliminated and changed.

We imagine more contrast with the cultural order,

have lost interest in writing, hire extra equipment

to help establish quieter and dramatic events.

Equality means a surrender to daily experience.

We tend to be curious about the transparent book –

do we attribute the words but not get too involved?

The adulterous relationship distinguishes it from prose,

gives it a lot of forward motion; effect is reserved

for lines 6-7, form is never more mixed up than here.

Exhalation of breath provides us with an excuse,

chiming is not always matched by aural equivalence;

we still take every opportunity to avoid singing.

Our search for a meaningful existence,

the avoidance of stress and the energy to write

can be said to be hostile disciplines; order breaks down.

Is there a likelihood of anyone else taking an interest?

Even if they do, it belies understanding and influence.

I don’t have space to define experimentation,

am too mixed up with the narrative of disagreement.

Please explain asylum. Take us back to whispered truths.

FIRE

Fire’s first inside you, a flicker of light,

a moment’s passion, sudden heat or spirit sign:

sunflowers against summer blue, shooting stars piercing black.

The blazing camp fire, logs stacked high,

is cold petals, grey ash in your hair,

when you wake up in the morning.

Home’s tame version is the same,

a hearthful of cinders and charcoal;

if you’re lucky a red ember still shining.

Naming is losing. Fire’s a flicker of light,

a moment’s passion, sudden heat or spirit sign:

tongues of fire above the apostles’ heads.

Through fire, through earth, through wind,

we know the world. Sit in the dark and hear

the world hum, watch the electrocuted sky

as fireworks burst and spray above,

explosions of scribbled colour. The night burns;

bonfires collapse, flame, flare and glow.

Naming is losing. Fire’s first inside you,

a flicker of passion, sudden heat or spirit sign;

in partnership with water, earth and air.

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THE STUPIDEST THINGS

A stranger is knocking at the door,

to ask if I know Jesus. My daughter

is out playing with a friend. She’s only

three years old; it feels like she’s left home.

I’ve taken the stair-gate down today

and plastered up the holes. She sleeps

in a big bed now, her room’s filled up

with toys; I’m Dad, not Daddy anymore.

Ten years ago my father was dying of cancer.

Then did. A friend mentioned it on the phone

only yesterday, musing on the visits he made

to say goodbye and talk their lives through.

The stupidest things make me cry now:

the first daffodils in today’s cold light;

and in the paper, burnt out trying to care,

a woman who killed her disabled children.

Strangers try to convince me that only

their beliefs are right, that life is simpler

than it seems. I’m not so sure. Something

I imagined I knew has upped and gone away.

NYCTALOPIA

The house of birth is a complete unknown,

something we possess but can’t remember.

No words, no voice, only breath & scream;

problem pictures with no knowledge.

We’ll never own what our mother knew

nor learn to see in the light of day.

I am happiest in the dark or dusk;

the image in my head has come to stay.

Well, here we are again, swamped with

the slow draining numbness of winter flu.

Time to consider the war and our reasons;

we will soon be running out of world.

Certainty is a wonderful gift,

one I don’t happen to own.

May democracy return to haunt

those always sure of what’s right.

[Nyctalopia: to see in dark or faint light]

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FURTHER THAN WE THOUGHT

We tried to make death look easy

as loss threaded through us.

Nothing, essentially, is forgotten

but silence is easier than memory.

Despite my faith in salvage

I will soon be running out of words.

We walked on the beach afterwards,

couldn’t face the open grave.

Everyone was welcome back at the house,

so we went for tea and said goodbye.

It was further than we thought to home

and when we got there, difficult to stay.

WAITING TO BE REMEMBERED

An email from Grace, someone I don’t know,

offering me 5,000 dollars a week for life,

contrasts with a friend’s poem that states

‘good grace is actual knows its place’.

Memory has abandoned the effort

of tunnelling back into yesterday:

splinters are filed on rough shelves

in the library, days are heavy and slow.

My wooden heart wants to dream again

and head out somewhere else

but joy has shrivelled overnight

like party balloons hanging on the gate.

Now my daughter has gone off to school

it feels like I’m not needed here any more.

I’m all written out, can’t paint, am tired

of the scale of this city that’s only a town.

The house went up for sale today.

All my books will have to be boxed up,

despatched. It’s difficult to keep walking

when you no longer know where you live.

‘Will we take everything?’ asks my daughter.

‘All of it,’ we promise. Everything except

who and what we were when we moved in:

shadows remain. I am still in the dark,

will now have to learn to understand

the slow timber voice of elsewhere.

I walk past the table into the kitchen,

pace backwards and forwards in time.

Grace cannot heal the wounded ego

or sweep dirt up from under the fridge.

Outside, the garden is growing without us;

I might switch off the light and just leave.

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DISCONTINUITY

Faith is just one way

to try and preserve the boundaries

we make from imagination.

We stack up the future

using the present tense,

ignoring other permutations.

The world’s okay but I want change:

living is an exploratory now,

that the twitch of poetry shows us,

a collage of interruption and argument,

multiple voices and stories,

the crackle of other events.

It’s best not to know the way

as we grab out for tomorrow

and trip up over the noise,

best to fabricate discontinuity

and take pleasure in the flow.

Be careful of stillness,

the shift of shadows and light;

beware the darker sense of things.

At day’s edge is the doorway to joy.

AT HOME

To be at home in obituaries,

crematoria and car crashes is one thing.

To want for epiphanic endings, love,

desire and wet dreams is another.

I pile the personal archive high,

lay my moonstruck memories low.

Past my sell-by date, I sense a world

chirpily compact and semi-delirious,

full of the latest hopscotch rumours.

Diamond head exposed to the light,

mind a minefield of unravellings,

I count a billion possible regrets.

I lied in my first paragraph, and have

postponed the tentative exploration

to see if I still am. Your chuffedness

is contagious, though I can’t bear

the thought of icy roads, all that

wear and tear before the start of day.

Messing with the gospel as given,

a deft equator reimagining rhyme,

the merry colours turn to grey, attracting

frou frou artifacts of a fringe subculture.

Adding mystery to mystery doesn’t help,

confusion here goes all the way through.

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BACKGROUND NOISE 3

The Museum of Light

for Bob Garlitz

In search of the ghost of punk; the ecstatic moment,

however minimal; swept up in its incoherence,

I embrace history and try to make it open up.

The fashions of the day scare me as much as anyone.

If there’s one thing more worrying than a survivor

it’s a group of them organised into a network;

the preposterous seriousness of these pedants.

Mass rhetoric continues to be a plausible proposition.

Heroes are uneconomic, with no claims to power.

It isn’t simply a question of taking up old tools

and making towering projections of the human spirit,

there must be a shared ground or area of dialogue.

The extremism I once sought has been edited out.

Having perfected this stance, an exquisite anguish,

I chose epiphany over faith, with a shudder of denial

and a declaration that I would not repeat old mistakes.

Activity takes the form of interpretation and judgement;

I bring up the rear with indeterminable precision.

In such cases my work is merely show, a performance,

an act of surrender as liberating as any act of control.

I want to give up the ghost and be enthralled,

am very much concerned with my own plight;

take full credit for taking conceit on board.

I have no desire to ever lurch into lucidity.

•

Making something implies process as well as object.

Now I can balance I never tire of the familiar,

would enjoy very much seeing what you do with it.

I want to introduce you to voices other than your own.

I like an alluring, oratory voice which is

all the better for discussion and hybridisation.

The question of fusion becomes much clearer

in the light of changing practice.

There are always questions about systems.

Do you want self-revealing process or not?

The poem does not need its own citations,

otherwise it will never surprise you.

Do you know the source of the quotation?

Does it bother you? Have you been keeping quiet?

We experience the otherwise, as well as

fictional paradoxes, within the centre.

Sometimes you will hear a prohibiting voice,

feel overwhelmed. However irrational,

you won’t be able to recall the flux of events,

or remember if time is a flow or an inner veil.

I’m not sure whether I’ve seen the prints, wonder

if painting benefits from walking away from it?

There’s a big mass of stuff to get one’s hands on,

begin to plunder. I hate overblown nostalgia.

•

Suddenly a racket coming from far away

penetrates the surroundings. Presences advance.

Nothing can stop this moment of delight,

these cascading layers of musical expression.

I recognize the process itself – how after a while

a formation returns as though never departed.

With enfolding radiance and affirmation

the music is never less than lovely,

verging on white noise and violent hysteria.

Sound no longer conforms to the norms.

The song becomes a real-time situation,

a delirious out-of-control rollercoaster.

Experience has been installed as something

pretty much out there in the world,

received imagery. Maybe I am just tired,

but I find hardcore drum’n’bass unlistenable,

know little about visceral versions; am constantly

aware that this is a reaction against sophistication.

If noise is the point at which language buckles

and life shatters into fragments, then we must

listen to these prophets of escalating discontent.

Time has no more importance than any other concept.

The creative process is a magpie with shifting eyes,

whose letters home are one of the joys of my life.

•

My search is for a more credible seriousness.

It is about words in the most elastic sense,

a different kind of trance experience,

an attempt to articulate communal space.

The darkness hasn’t necessarily gone

but now I am finding my way unaccompanied.

Apocalypse and repetition, consumer leisure culture

are all different routes to oblivion.

I know the existence of the world,

the social constitution of reality,

but what if the natives are hostile

and see everything differently?

I’ve always had a very negative feeling about

sermons and speeches, the effect of rhetoric.

I need to redefine what is usually meant

by the transmission of images, need a break:

a good weekend drifting, winging it north;

deep and bottomless floods over the land,

a clarity and array of images, space…

My friend points up into the still blue air:

‘I have put the moon into this museum of light.’

•

I move on, head towards summer,

tear out of orbit, the changing lines of light;

so lovely flying full steam ahead…

Who guards the regions of hope?

Keep scribbling in some meaningful way –

I am always intrigued by your amendments.

Don’t worry about sending more money,

just keep the damage within boundaries.

I question the apparent solidity of walls,

the dryness of long prosaic sentences,

paying for a studio I do not use very much.

We have different tastes, or so it seems.

Let’s follow the path between the two,

allowing form to filter forward and back,

keeping it in the dense jungle of words.

I offer you the bowl of my heart.

Back to Rupert Loydell Interview

POETRY LETTERS

Dear Neil

It’s easy, isn’t it? You just

put words in a row until the end

of the line, then do it again

on the next. After a while

your poem grinds to a halt

and you write another one.

There’s no trick to it, no

waiting for the muse

to whisper in your ear.

Words are where it’s at,

language the stuff

to be waded around in

and organised how you will.

Of course, reading as much

as you can always helps:

poems you don’t want to like,

things you don’t understand,

old favourites and what’s

just come out. That’s why

I review and run a magazine –

free books and launch events.

There’s far too much poetry

about, and most of it is bad.

Self-confession, self-expression,

people with something to say.

Which usually means a long

lecture on a favourite cause

or details of some epiphany,

an emotional response which

I’m sure was very moving

at the time, but not now,

least not the way it’s been

described. And what is it with

bad design and scruffy booklets

in this day and age? I mean

computers are two a penny,

you’d think people would try!

But then you’d think people

would think, and they don’t.

If people haven’t got the nous

to read about what they are

trying to write, it’s no wonder

the stuff turns out so bad. We all

had to start somewhere, I know,

but not like that, surely?

•

Dear Neil

It’s my book launch tomorrow,

which means buying drinks

for everyone and trying to flog

enough copies to pay the bill.

I guess if I was truly ruthless

I wouldn’t give away freebies,

I’d insist everyone must pay,

but I prefer to have friends

than unwilling customers,

readers than boxes of books.

Of course, it will be good

to see some of those who turn up;

it’s always surprising who does.

But there’ll also be the writer

who wants to corner me for advice;

an author who ‘happens to have’

several unpublished books with her,

in handwritten loose-leaved form;

the bloke whose work I’ve refused

to publish, wanting to know why;

and worst of all, the local loony

ready to argue for free booze.

•

Dear Neil

Well, I didn’t sell many books

but I wasn’t really surprised –

I couldn’t hear myself speak

over the noise in the bar.

There were three things

all on at once, so no-one

was really quite sure what

they were there for. Except

for the open-mike brigade,

who knew exactly what:

to read poems to one other.

Heaven forbid that they’d

buy a book! What would

they want to do that for?

Still, they didn’t drink much;

our table had to deal with

the bottles of leftover wine

after they’d trooped back in

for part two of their event.

And I only got asked once

what my work was about.

‘Language,’ I said. ‘Would you

like a drink? I know I would.’

That seemed to do the trick,

she didn’t hang around.

•

Dear Neil

I haven’t sat behind a table

trying to flog poetry books

for over a decade now.

Today reminded me why.

The sunniest day of the year

and I’m upstairs in the library.

All the publishers knew each other

and grunted hello if they were on

speaking terms. If they weren’t,

they didn’t. The ‘extra publicity’

was a handwritten sheet of paper

sellotaped to the wall with an arrow

pointing up; perhaps a dozen people

took note throughout the day.

And some bright spark decided

we needed poetry readings to

liven things up. I sloped off

and after lunch traded for

some books I’d had my eye on,

packed up early and came home.

•

Dear Neil

When I start moaning about

editors producing pedestrian

anthologies, or reviewers

who miss the point, or just

poetry in general, it’s best

to ignore me, or just buy me

another drink. I soon run out

of steam and quieten down.

Andy’s right when he says

he can’t be bothered listening

to us all ‘shouting at each other

in the playground’. The poetry

world’s too small, but somehow

tempers and hackles get raised.

‘A bitch of poets’ is one of those

true clichés, we’re simply made

that way. On a serious note though,

why are so many writers happy

to churn out the stuff they do?

There’s so much to be excited by,

so many ways to write, such

brilliant books to read. And yet

if you believed newspaper reviews

or what’s on bookshop shelves,

you’d soon give up on poetry,

which is exactly what readers

have done. It’s nothing to do

with relevance, accessibility

or rhyme, they’re just bored.

Me too. And probably you.

•

Dear Neil

The latest issue arrived. What

is the editor on? More letters

and chat than poems, and his

wife gets another article in,

as she does every time! I’ve

tried to suggest things when

he occasionally asks for ideas,

but it seems like they’re always

ignored. You or I couldn’t make

a magazine duller if we wanted to.

You’d think free verse hadn’t been

invented, that there is only one

way to write… On these pages

the empire never ended, and

the country’s never been to war.

William Burroughs wrote about

words being a time machine –

this limp paperback’s the proof.

I’m ashamed to be in it, but

no-one else would take the poem.

I won’t be sending them anything

else again, you can be sure of that!

Although that squib about the dark

might fit, or the one about me lost

at sea and listening to the waves.

You know the one? You didn’t like it

at all, but then what do you know?

You don’t edit a magazine like me

or know the right kind of people.

It’s who you know that matters

far more than what you write.

You must have learnt that by now?

•

Dear Neil

My tongue

is firmly

in my cheek.

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