New work ahoy

I have poems appearing in the current Honest Ulsterman and upcoming Abridged (the control issue). All extremely satisfying publications and I am really pleased to be in them. You can get physical copies of the two former but Abridged especially runs out very fast so hunt them out if you are in Ireland or Scotland any time soon.

Gutter was the bestselling publication at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this summer thanks in part to the extensive coverage, interest and quality of its special Freedom Papers.

More news to follow but in the meantime please enjoy this picture of me talking about cybersecurity in Daventry.

I had the following quote at the end of my slides from Norman MacCaig for this geeky event: you can click on the picture to get a better look at it. The beautiful lichen on the trees is from a seaside place called Yellowcraigs in Scotland.

More on Abridged here, Honest Ulsterman here and Northwords Now here.

Also worryingly something has happened that I thought never would and I have begun obsessing at moments about Dorothy Wordsworth or Doz as I now call her.

In the bathroom with Norman MacCaig

I seem to hang around with poets in the bathroom.

I follow Carol Ann Duffy's principle of keeping poetry handy to read in those spare moments. And I am probably one of only a handful of people living who can claim to have washed Hugh MacDiarmid's bathroom floor when the cistern flooded.

Hugh MacDiarmid's bathroom sink in Brownsbank Cottage

Today I had an encounter with the poet Norman MacCaig a Scottish poet of whom I am very fond. He was a friend of many including Seamus Heaney. And I like the way he opens up a landscape and shows me how, by drawing its lines, we can see its shapes, patterns and pathways all the better. Something I would aspire to. Plus he used to hang out at nice pubs in Edinburgh such as Milnes Bar with other poets: always a good idea.

Coming across his Collected poems, I used them as a kind of divination tool and I Ching.

The outcome was good. Section 3 of the poem No end, no beginning written in 1968.

When you, in your unimaginable self,
suddenly were there, shut boxes opened

and worlds flew out coloured like pictures books
and full of heavy lethargies and gay dances:

when I met a tree, my old familiar, I knew
this was the first time I was meeting it;

and the birds in it singing - for the first time
I could crack the code of their jargon.

And the boredom and the loneliness
in the lit rooms of monotonous streets became

terrible and pitiful - you made me a member
of the secret society of humanity.

The future that had been failing muscles,
sagging flesh, cindering eyes -

all mine, all only mine - swarmed in the air
and spread its new meaning back

into every yesterday. Flux, revolution
emerged into sense, into their own

explanations. I could understand them,
not wholly, but I could understand them

as I could know, not wholly the meaning
of your still hand, quiet look, a way of walking

that takes you from the first garden to the future
where the apple hangs, still, on its dangerous tree.

Norman MacCaig

The only problem with this poetic dark art is that this poem literally has no end and no beginning. I don't want to know for the moment. I am only going to live in the present.

*****

You can find more on Hugh MacDiarmid's sink here http://www.poetandgeek.net/2014/06/hugh-macdiarmid-sink.html. And more on Norman MacCaig at his Scottish Poetry Library page here http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/norman-maccaig.

After Norman MacCaig

This is a poem that is playful and terrifying in equal measures.

The deceptive 4 line stanzas with their loose, assonant and ultimately absent abab rhyming scheme provide an initial sense of calm underpinned with something not quite right. The images in the first stanza hint at Thomas Hardy but next quickly swing into a hallucinogenic world of milking sunsets and fiery dew.

Stanza four for me is where the poem becomes truly disturbing - the entrapment of "distance" and its captivity for our pleasure sets a scene of power and oppressive control that is almost Blakean but with no sympathy for the underdog.

And then the killer blow: what is it we are missing who live like this? Find out in the last stanza.

Refer back to title.

Pow. A hit, a very palpable hit.

After

Let’s choose a pretty word, say, evening,
And climb through it into the past,
or stand on a towering If, surveying
The rosy kingdoms we have lost.

From every corner creep a thousand
Boredoms saying, Greet us.  We’re life.
Let’s round the sunset up and milk it
Into a jug and drink it off.

Or in the hawthorn let us tangle
Our dreary look like gossamer
To shudder with that sparrow’s chirping
And when the dew falls be on fire.

Or drag the distance home and chain it
There in the corner of the room
To charm us with its savage howling
And beg for fragments of our dream.

There’s a clue somewhere.  Can you find it?
Can you say it over and over again
‘Love’, till its incantation makes us
Forget how much we are alone?

Norman MacCaig