Category: Poetry

If music be the food of love then poetry may just be the language of emotion. Home for my own words and those of others who in some way inspire, inform, entertain or educate me.

I say goodnight

A poem for Valentine’s Day

I say: goodnight
I love you.
You say: I love you more
See you in the morning.

But there will be a time
There will be a time
When the night is not good
And I will not see you in the morning

You (or me) mourning
The two of us halved, un-wholed.
Then only our love will hold
On amid the irresistible arithmetic of years.

So until the “until death us to do part” part
If I vow to kiss thee one more lunchtime, or breakfast, or tv dinner for two
You’ll know why I do.

Or in the last-throe afterglow of you know
Ask: are you still alive?
And hope you don’t say no.

Pele’s Pele’s Poetry Podcast: Episode 5 – The Saint Valentine’s Day one

Who first wrote roses are red, violets are blue, honey is sweet and so are you? Who were the lines written for? And when? Plus is poetry the language of love? Just some of the questions Pele Cox and I seek answers to in this special lovers’ edition. Oh and which poet would you take to bed?

Poets
Further reading
Pele writes…

Ovid was Rome’s supreme poet of love so who better to choose for this St Valentine’s Day special? The Amores, a collection of elegies addressed to a mistress named Corinna, sparkled with humour, self-mockery, and erotic candour. He followed this with the Heroides, a daring series of fictional letters written from the perspectives of mythological heroines — Penelope, Dido, Medea — giving voice to women’s desire and suffering in ways that felt revolutionary. His most notorious work, the Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), presented itself as a tongue-in-cheek instructional manual on seduction, covering everything from where to meet lovers to how to maintain their affections. It was playful, subversive, and deeply at odds with Emperor Augustus’s moral legislation promoting traditional family values.

Rich writes…

Iamb, caesura, enjambment… there are loads of fancy words when you look under the bonnet of any poem and, just like the engine of my old Ford Capri, you don’t need to know what every part does to enjoy the thrill of the open road or read. In this episode I mention iambic pentameter and hexameter. Put simply an iamb is a unit of measure in poetry much like a centimetre or inch is a unit on a tape measure. Specifically an iamb is two syllables: the first a short one; the second longer. I am is a good example although I prefer to think of an iamb as a heartbeat ba- boom, ba-boom, ba-boom.… So pentameter is five heartbeats or iambs. And iambic hexameter is six heartbeats. I’d thoroughly recommend THE MAKING OF A POEM – A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland for its easy-to-read approach to all things iambic. Think of it as the poetic equivalent of the Haynes Workshop Manual I still have for that Capri!

Recent podcasts

Pele’s Poetry Podcast: Episode 4 – finding your voice

What is poetic voice? Is it synonymous with style? Or something else? Perhaps the poet’s “take” on the world? Pele Cox and Rich Uridge seek answers from a range of greats including Emily Dickinson, Edna St Vincent Millay and Vernon Watkins who, with a drunken Dylan Thomas, tripped over a feather!

Poets
Further reading
Welsh poet, Vernon Watkins, a contemporary of Dylan Thomas.

You can hear BBC Radio 3’s Sunday Feature on Vernon Watkins here. It was presented by the then Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams and first broadcast in March 2012.

The programme was also referenced in this BBC Wales blog post.

Image credit: Tal Jones

Gemini Books Women in Poetry series is available to pre-order or buy here.

Recent episodes

Pele’s Poetry Podcast: Episode 3 – what is poetry’s purpose?

Pele Cox and I ask: what is the purpose of poetry? With the help of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Thomas Wyatt, we conclude that, in part, poetry’s job is to move readers to virtuous action or “well doing and not well knowing only” as Sidney put it.     

Along the way we notice similarities between 16th century Elizabethan London and 21st century Trump’s America where to speak one’s mind risks losing one’s head – figuratively if not literally these days. But despite the risks poets, we agree, need to be rebellious.

Poems
Recent podcasts

Three kinds of light

A walking stick, a deadly arc
Your face unstitched and come apart.
The dying light’s the deepest dark
It casts a shadow, leaves a mark.

A finger painting just in red
A rainbow arched beside your bed.
No treasured end, a chest of blood
All stuffed with sheets to stem the flood.

While three wards up a different cry
From howls of pain to sobs of joy
A mother chests a swaddled boy

And each lights up the other’s face
Both full of life both full of grace
A summer sun that floods the space.

We are three kinds of spectral light:
The lightning on a summer’s night,
The flash that makes us blinding bright;

The lodestar guiding us from birth
That marks the way and warms the earth
And steers through storms that plash our path;

The dying light’s the deepest dark.
It casts a shadow, leaves a mark.

This is the latest in a series of poems born* from my mother’s violent death at the hands of another resident in what should have been the safety and sanctity of her care home bedroom. Black Hole was the first creative response to the awfulness of it all.

Three kinds of light has been a long time coming. It started as a no more than a few lines and a title three months ago and has gradually taken shape – perhaps even subconsciously – ever since. Until it emerged in roughly the shape it is presented here I might have been inclined to call that period a time of writers’ block. But it strikes me now that struggling with the mechanical part of writing – putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard – is really just a sign that you haven’t yet done enough of the rational and emotional stuff that lies at the very heart of poetry.

*I think that’s the right word. It struck me as she departed this world from her A&E cubicle at Luton Dunstable Hospital how, just a few floors away, other souls were arriving in the maternity unit. Arrivals and departures almost like railway terminus.

Pele’s Poetry Podcast: Episode 2 – the poetry of shock

The poet Pele Cox and I discuss the differences between poetry (her world) and journalism (mine). With the help of Ted Hughes and his Birthday Letters we talk about how poetry can tackle shocking subject matter in a way that prose alone cannot. I talk about writing my own shocking experience.      

Plus poetry as a portal to another world or a time machine to another place. And the need for absolute honesty.

Poets
  • Ted Hughes (55 Eltisley; The Blue Flannel Suit, both from The Birthday Letters)
  • Richard Uridge (Tears in a Care Home Car Park)
RECENT PODCASTS

Pele’s Poetry Podcast: Episode 1 – the world premiere one

Delighted to announce that I’m co-hosting a series of talks on poetry with the poet Pele Cox. I’ll make sure I post each episode here as we record it. Or you can check out the programme website or sign up through your usual podcast provider. Just search for Pele’s Poetry Podcast.

Recent episodes

The last bedroom on the right

There is no past
Remembered
Or future
Imagined.
Just the present.

Tense.

A singularity.

You live in the moment. Very on point as they say.
Content (or so I hope) sucking tea from a sippy cup
Or shredding tissues in your lap

While I am walking an imaginary dog (the one I was convinced would persuade you to let me have a real one for my 13th birthday)
Searching for something
Like a long forgotten book
Cursing that it’s always in the last place you look
And hearing you laughing
In that slightly hurtful grown up way of yours:
Of course it is! Because when you find it
You stop searching.

Finding something, I say: Remember that time…
…before trailing off.
Both of us lost to thought.

Three years since my mother, Sheila, died after she was brutally beaten by another resident in her Luton carehome. Memories of happier visits before that day are still vivid. It is possible to live well with dementia. But it’s a bastard disease for those who watch the fading of the light.

Augur

Though August’s barely halfway through
The copse is clad in autumn’s hue
Its summer greens now fading fast
And taking on a rusty cast. 

Embroidered by the evening sun
The trees from threads of gold were spun
But in the furnace split and cracken
And dieback tips of ash twigs blacken.

Limp limbs hang from peels of bark
The heartwood dry and much too dark. 
Blackthorn sloes - peas - shrivelled slim 
Won’t stiffen up the Christmas gin. 

And conkers spilt from cankered cases
Too small for boys to string on laces.
Once shiny pebbles dulled by dust 
The stream bed still, the silt now crust.

Yet though the drouth fires rage infernal 
A shoot of green, spring hopes eternal.

Lorca’s Pencil

Federico García Lorca was one of Spain’s finest poets. Assassinated by Fascists in August 1936 soon after the start of the Spanish Civil War his death should remind us of the dangers of fascism as it rises once again, not just in Spain where I’m writing this but across the world.

So here is a poem for World Poetry Day.

Lorca’s resting place has never been found. But the graves of many who lost their lives under Franco have been and their remains returned to their families. I was struck that among the possessions retrieved from the most recently found bodies was a pencil. So I used that as my starting point for this work of imagination. What last words would Lorca’s pencil have written in the hours – at most days – between his detention and his death?

Lorca’s Pencil

Vete a la mierda, Lorca
Fuck you Lorca
Fuck your words
Fuck your poesia
And fuck your queer ways

The pencil cracked more softly than the bullet though hurt me more. The broken end thrust thus in my poet’s eye.

Yet stabbed and shot
To die I worry not
As I had not worried to be born.
This unmarked grave like my fly-leaved crib
Hojas en blanco continuará
Blank sheets to be filled.
Poetry cannot be stilled.
This pencil unearthed will pick up its path:

In Spain the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country.
And I am more alive than ever
My words illuminate the darkness.
My pencil points the way.

Lee mis palabras
Read my words
Remember my words
Recite my words
But never reject them

My unconcealed weapon is truly mightier than the sword (it’s what scared them so and put me here)
Behold this arch-enchanter’s wand
Itself a nothing (to borrow Bulwer-Lytton)
But taking sorcery from my master hand (as he has written)
To paralyse my seizers.
And to strike them breathless
Take away the sword
Freedom can be saved without it!

El futuro es tuyo para escribirlo
The future is yours to write, so
Escribelo bien
Write it well.