POETREWS

AND A QUICK LOOK AT TODAY'S NEWS FROM THE POETRY WORLD:

* * *

In a surprise move, Tar Paulin has declined to comment on something;


... another setback for the very concept of spontaneity as Clam Ayres, poet-in-residence for Glade Nice Plugins, has been snapped in a shit dress making exactly the set of gestures you'd expect her to fucking make while near some plants;


Oxford professors rejoiced, a bit, today, at the latest shipment of Geoffrey Krill; three crates of him were extracted from a whale washed up in Henley-on-Thames;


Over in Cambridge, the city centre rose a degree above freezing today, after the discovery of an early work by J. H. Bynne which does not contain the word 'vantage';


SHOCK! Something in the wider world actually impacts upon British poetry, as climate change means carburetor-poet Simon Hermitage is now almost entirely below sea level, versifying "like a seal tiddlywinked by a tractor tyre just to keep his hair dry";


Still on sabbatical in the bee-gardens of Buckingham Palace, poet laureate Skep Ann Duffy is reported to be working on a dramatic prose piece commemorating the 300th anniversary of the rounded bevel;


AND FINALLY! -- further upset from technicians at the forge where Glandrew Notion's verse is extruded -- they claim that since losing the laureateship he is now "usually sesame paste" at room temperature.

Eugene O'Neill

INSTRUCTING MANUEL

Thank you in selecting that device for years, of not troubled, and peace—minded usage, in the office or house or equal hygienic proofed (is recommended) places.


Instantiating:

1) Simplicity re- attach part labeled (1) along part labeled between ‘ankle L shew’ (see list of objects in page 2 of this pamph let) (see diagram pages in page 3 of this pamph let) and ‘between ankle R shrew’ (see list of objects in page 2 of this pamph let) (see diagram pages, in page 3 of this pamph let) keen one’s wrists past the fetlock-foam to trowel L (nominated L) and Right (nominted Right);

2) Sat down to your chair, doff recalcitrate your shoes and encourage the button ’ SLUICE ’ (see page 2 of this pamph let)

3. Dail on the left of that device is for the infreqeunt usage to be tended and Never arrived to ‘dozen’ (12).

FOOTAGE WHICH IT WOULD BE LOVELY TO TRACK DOWN SOMEHOW

1. There's a set of clips in an old documentary on the pyramids of Giza -- I forget its name -- cut from an interview with I. E. S. Edwards, a well-respected Egyptologist who died in 1996. His The Pyramids of Egypt was a favourite book of mine as a child, full of gentle awe and restrained wonder, and to see and hear the man talk was a joy. He was round-faced, old, white-haired, at this point, sat comfortably in a comfortable chair in a comfortable, book-lined room, in a position which made him seem neckless without being particularly overweight. His voice was delicate, without a trace of the Welshness I was expecting from someone called Iowerth Eiddon Stephen Edwards, slightly crumbly and croaky, ever so posh. The programme strays into the territory of people like Robert Bauval, a "pyramidologist", a probably self-coined term for practitioners of a more fanciful realm of totemic theorizing and pseudoscience, understandably viewed with an amount of distrust and scorn by Edwards and his rigorously academic cohorts. The sight and sounds of Edwards, during this interview, mentioning that these people are sometimes referred to among the academic Egyptology community as "pyramidiots", chuckling at it, and then struggling to continue, just because of how amusing he clearly finds this quiet pun, is one of the most delightful things I've seen on television.

2. Along similar lines, there's another documentary I remember on the Nazca lines, which also treads the dodgy path between rigorous anthropological (and, here, mathematical) study, and the slightly batshit work of people like Erik von Daniken, who published about a million books asserting that the enormous trapezoids on the flatlands of the Pampas were constructed as landing strips for alien crafts. There's was a fascinating woman, Maria Reiche, a German mathematician who ended up spending the last few decades of her life living on these flatlands, studying the geometries of the various shapes there, and campaigning to keep them protected (from human intervention, not from weather -- thousands of years have passed and the trapezoids, lines and pictures have remained unaffected by the latter). There are small clips of archive footage featuring Reiche herself, staggering across the flatlands; or sat in her small hut, wizened into resembling an actual Nazca shrunken head, or a figure painted on pottery from the period referred to as "Nazca 5" (stylistically more gruesome, grizzled, warlike, due possibly to severe drought), poring over unimaginably complex mappings of an unimaginably sophisticated, still-unexplained system of markings from thousands of years ago.

3. Yet another documentary, which I actually remember the name of -- basically any scene from Rannoch The Red Deer, which followed either the whole life, or the final year in the life of, this beast in Scotland. Every scene was gorgeous.

4. The Rotten World About Us was a fascinating and genuinely perturbing documentary on fungi, which must have been repeated a few times since it was apparently made six years before I was born; I've definitely seen it, though. Most of it is incredible, but the clip I really want to find somewhere is time-lapse footage of the 'Octopus Stinkhorn', Clathrus archeri, expanding from its egg into its full form, which presumably takes a few hours. Speeded up it's like the hand of some angered Moloch, springing out of the earth and hooking his way out of hell. Over Christmas, actually, I discovered it's amusing to get extremely drunk on whisky, do a google image search for these organisms, and stare at the page, convincing yourself that every one is the Devil incarnate; not a part, but each one the whole, containing every conceivable threat and warning in solution. Remarkably easy to do, and really quite frightening.

5. Slightly more cheerfully, Les Dawson did one particular performance of his "blowing out the candle" joke which I think's funnier than all the others I've seen, and typically it's none of those which are online.

6. Kenny Everett strides onto a stage covered in scaffolding with green and yellow lights strangely placed, and what looks like dissipating smoke from a special-effects explosion. He's wearing a torn tartan kilt, I think, and a tartan beret which he keeps adjusting. "Hello. I'm Barbara Cartland, and you're all under arrest. I'd like to read you an extract from my latest romantic novel. When Lady Penelope swoons, her bosoms pop out like balloons. The butler stands by with a gleam in his eye, and pops them back in with warm spoons." It's fucking brilliant.

SOUNDS LIKE RAIN

Bacon frying. Sustained applause in a school hall. Seven hundred games of Kerplunk being lost. A basmati spillage on a slack kettledrum. A high-ceilinged warehouse of underpaid pistachio-shellers. Esther Ofarim shaving Abi’s back. Whatever mechanism it was that powered the organ in St. Michael The Archangel Church in Alcombe. An amplified anthill. A hundred or so fruiting bodies of the coprophilous gasteromycete Sphaerobolus stellatus, launching their spore-filled projectiles across Fuller’s laboratory in the thirties; one, apparently, hit his ceiling. As few as four gulls walking across a perspex roof. Dan’s friend Ewan running his double-bass bow through his hair again. A stadium of damp football rattles. The thoughts of a greyhound being dumped. A Besson B-flat piston-valve euphonium full of warm spit. Brown noise, apparently. A chevron-painter in Herefordshire stopping for a sandwich. Eight thousand eggboxes flashmobbing at Kilburn tube. When the stylus skips too far and your turntable starts ‘playing’ the paper label.

The steady pink-pink-pink of a can of Coke Zero that was opened at least an hour ago and has been standing forgotten ever since, while through the oblong window Bruno Lawrence wrestles with the theology and identity politics of finding oneself to be the last man on Earth. The tidal susurrations of all twenty-seven checkouts at ASDA in full service as twenty-seven trolleys are unloaded by the fistful and a further twenty-seven are re-loaded by PVC sacks that sort of hold uniquely unstable arrangements of carefully selected groceries and household goods. Thirty-nine handheld air guns connected by semiopaque tubing to a suspended array of 3/4" pipework in the two minutes or so after the hydrovane compressor is powered down for the weekend. Drumming steadily with fingers on the mattress and one's ear laid on it, stifling pillows pushed away, feeling the sheet creak against the thirteen-year-old ear, cool and smooth, pressing back, much like Antony's chest had felt in the stillness of the afternoon just gone, not having dared to push any further, but now in the certain night, there where he was not.

Sealing Wax

Tad hated wearing his seatbelt. Its purpose never seemed to sink in for more than a few seconds. The people who ran the minibus had stuck four A4 sheets near his seat (the one on its own, at the back), all of them saying, in large Arial, "SEATBELTS MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES!". These were completely ineffectual, and he'd unbuckle himself as soon as he thought nobody was looking; if hindered in this, he might get slightly aggressive, and start jabbing at things with his stick. You were never sure whether he was genuinely forgetting, or was selectively doing so becuase he did, after all, forget everything else, and thought it might go unnoticed. He was ninety-eight, and these trips on the minibus were really the only occasions in any given week on which he left his house, despite his energy and general good health. He could probably have outrun you only a year or two ago, you thought. Certainly his dexterity with a safety buckle was extraordinary.

Ivy, who sat in the seat across, was less well; she was over ten years Tad's junior, but looked like a drawing of Silas Marner, giving "the same sort of impression as a handle or a crooked tube". She was tiny, hunched. Her favourite phrase was "bugger, bugger, bugger!", a catch-all expression of good-humoured but deeply-felt annoyance, usually at her body's inability to move at the speed of her mind.

Occasionally, with Tad, there would be a brief moment of clarity. You vividly remember, once, noticing him staring at Julie, who brought the Kenco and the PG Tips, for an oddly long time, and not at all vacantly. He had suddenly turned to you, saying, "she's a kindly soul, she is. Such an unmagnificent lady, but I don't altogether think it will matter."

On one occasion, the first morning you met him, he developed a sudden sprightliness of manner — oddly, posturing himself deliberately more decrepit-looking; more compact, stooped — and, twinkling, he leaned conspiratorially over, and said: The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things...

Then he tailed off. He would, always, tail off. You realised, or were told, that this was something he did every day, often more than once. There would be a pause, and he would tell you where he first heard the poem. He was about ten — "no, nine", he'd say, "and ten months", slightly irritated — and his father had taken him and his family up to Landacre Bridge, on Exmoor, for a picnic. He told you the course of the river Barle, and described in detail the stonework around the five arches of this bridge. They had crossed the river and walked to Cow Castle, a large Iron Age fort on a steep hill. They'd clambered down the other side and swum in a pool; a stiller, wider part of the Barle — you can't remember its name now — and then had sat on the side. You later recalled, though you weren't quite sure why, Nell, struggling to remenisce about a springtime rowing trip to Lake Como, in Samuel Beckett's Endgame: "It was deep, deep. And you could see down to the bottom. So white. So clean."

Tad and his family had walked back over Cow's Castle, back to Landacre Bridge; and they had scraped the insides from reeds and rolled them into small off-white balls, or wrapped them round the thumb-tip and pulled them tightly, so that the seedheads flew off. They'd eaten sandwiches. And Tad's uncle, scouring the riverside for good skimmers, had looked up at him, saying: The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things...

And then, Tad's whole face, from the chin to the scalp, and beyond, into his ears, would break into a bright, glowing smile, and he marked each weighted syllable with a bouncing index finger in the air, as he recited: ... of cabbages— and kings! ...

"No," after a pause, he'd say. "No, thats's not right. There's another bit. Something comes in between."

The first time you met him was the first time you'd heard the poem, so you couldn't help. But he could never remember what it was that came in between, however many times he told the story. Once people caught on, it became a great game, particularly for Ivy. He'd lean over and tap her on the shoulder. "What is it, Ivy?"

"Ooh, I don't know, Tad. It's all a bit higgledy-piggledy in here, now." And she tapped herself on the forehead, giving a knowing grin to somebody nearby. She could recite more than this line; you later discovered she had the entire poem committed to memory. "Is it clogs, is it? Something to do with dancing, or— or walking? Like a walking stick, or a pair of shoes."

Tad would clap his hands together, and keep them together, tilting his head toward her: "Shoes! To talk of many things. Of shoes... of shoes, and..."

Sometimes, he would remember ships on his own; sometimes it would take a further twenty minutes of steering and easing from Ivy. Twenty minutes, at the lower end, deliberately so. Ivy dragged it out as long as possible; she'd figured out that remembering this line, the one thing he could never do, was just about his favourite thing to try to do, even while he weakly feigned grumpiness about it. Sometimes he would be skirting near the word ships (or shoes, or sealing wax, depending on the day's progress); and sometimes, he would even suggest it and then discount it: it was somehow a blind spot, like the signs about the seatbelts, something he simply wouldn't or couldn't see.

—

You felt he was right about Julie having no magnificence to her. The fourth time you met him, he was telling the story again, this time to an old lady from Alcombe called Jean. You saw Julie roll her eyes, entirely affectionately, and without a hint of any real exasperation (this was reserved for the seatbelts; Julie had, as she often said, "done health and safety"); and when Tad reached the inevitable stumbling block in the story, she bumbled over. "Oh, come on love. You always remember in the end! You've told it so many times I know it myself now!". She plucked a piece of paper from her pocket, and wrote in biro, in block capitals:

SHOES AND SHIPS, AND SEALING WAX

"There. You keep that," she smiled.

Tad had thanked her, full of genuine delight as ever to have recalled the line, and she taped it up on the back of the seat in front of him, moving a notice slightly to the right to do so. Whether or not he'd have taken it in or not, or even noticed it at all, didn't really matter: within a few minutes he'd forgotten all about his story and was gambolling out of the bus; it had arrived at a layby near Dunkery Beacon, highest point on Exmoor, and it was time for morning tea or coffee. Tad had mumbled something about custard creams.

Ivy mumbled something to the contrary, also about custard creams. She frowned, pursed her lips, took down Julie's note as delicately as she could, and put it, screwed up, into her pocket.

1. Landacre Bridge, photograph by Catherine W. Barnes, in
Snell, F. J., The Blackmore Country (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1911);
2. Cow Castle, photograph by Keith Stuart;
3. North Hill, Minehead beach, and Blue Anchor Bay, seen from near Dunkery Beacon