Tag: poetry

Week-end: like a mighty tortoise

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A bird of prey on a weathered wooden pergola

The good

Tangible signs of progress. Zooming with the family.

The mixed

I always promise myself that I’m not going to look at Twitter during General Synod week, and I always fail miserably in that resolve. This edition’s drama was centred on same-sex couples, marriage/blessings/prayers for. I was reminded of the Futurama episode where one of the presidential candidates thinks the other’s three per cent titanium tax goes too far and the other one thinks it doesn’t go too far enough. Anyhow, we seem to have not ended up with robot Nixon, so that’s something.

For me, it meant some miserable internalised biphobia in the shape of not feeling that I could say much about it at all, on account of having been able to marry who and where I wanted to thirteen and a half years ago.

However, I went to the cathedral this morning and the Dean opened the sermon by reading from the Bishops’ apology to LGBTQI+ people. Of course this document has itself been controversial, and many people have argued that an apology is more or less meaningless without more change than we’ve seen. In the context of this morning, however, it felt immensely powerful. I don’t think I’ve ever turned up – anywhere – to a regular Sunday morning service and heard the word ‘bisexual’ come from the pulpit. It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes, hearing it spelled out in actual words: you are welcome.

Relatedly, my LGBTQ+ History Month interview with my alma mater went live this week.

The difficult and perplexing

Falling into bits of the internet I’d rather not be in, and staying there longer than I wanted to.

What’s working

Understanding that realistically I am not going to get more than two or three things done in a day, and prioritising accordingly.

Experimenting with

The idea that going round in circles in the dark may in fact be a Swiss spiral railway tunnel in which all that faffing around is necessary to get me a few hundred feet further up the mountain.

Reading

Continuing with These Violent Delights. I’ve got behind on Death in Cyprus. I also read (and subscribed on the strength of) an excellent article in the London Review of Books on Twelfth Night and displacement.

Writing

Some gentle fanfic, and a little more on the writing-while-having-a-job workbook thing.

Watching

Why do all the winter sports have major championships at once? Because there are only so many days of winter, I know. It was a rhetorical question. I have the biathlon on at the moment.

Looking at

Model railways. Some on Twitter Model Train Show, some not.

Cooking

Recommendations from commenters: Instant Pot risotto on Monday, and butternut squash and sweet potato soup on Wednesday.

Eating

Falafel wrap from my favourite stall.

Noticing

An excellent smiley baby on the train. Several handsome cats watching goings on from windowsills. A treeful of starlings.

In the garden

A sparrowhawk! (At least, I think it was, based on the Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Ireland. It was certainly engaging in sparrowhawkish behaviour. Very grainy photo at the top of this post.)

The snowdrops are out, other bulbs are coming up, and I am going to have to pull up a load of wallflowers from between the cracks in the paving stones. This year I’m going to try to remember to save the seeds before more of that happens.

I’ve pruned as much of the last apple tree as I can reach without a stepladder, and hacked off some bits of wisteria in a attempt to keep it to the pergola.

Appreciating

Tony. This week specifically because he has bought me cherry yoghurt, but he’s generally a good thing.

Acquisitions

I managed to buy enough paper tapes in Paperchase’s closing down sale to qualify for a free canvas tote bag. Um.

Yesterday Tony and I went to Cutlacks, the local home and garden shop (Islanders: think Hurst), and bought various things: a shower shelf, some table mats, containers in which to put pearl barley and other grains, a rack to hold the iron. That kind of thing.

I’ve also renewed my subscription to Hidden Europe and pre-ordered Run Away Home.

Hankering

Nothing I didn’t end up buying, I don’t think.

Line of the week

From Devonport (Chloe Honum)

He liked the gulls that stood on the railing,
all puffed up with sky.

Sunday snippet

Sometime’s it’s just nice to be able to do your job, then get to the end of the day and stop. Which sounds insultingly simplistic if you have the kind of job you take home with you, or if you get home and then have to feed five dependant humans and a gerbil and wash up afterwards – but that’s my point.

This coming week

Is a little topsy turvy, due to an appointment and then some frivolity with colleagues. It should all shake down to a quietish weekend.

Anything you’d like to share from this week? Any hopes for next week? Share them here! Or just keep recommending me Instant Pot recipes!

Daily Decoration: cumulative icicles

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The top portion of a Christmas tree, hung with decorations made from beads threaded on wire and representing icicles

There’s nothing particularly special about these icicles. There are six of them. They always go around the top branches of the tree: their length fills in the gap and they pick up the lights and sparkle pleasingly. They’re made from plastic beads threaded on wire, and they were yet another charity shop find in the penniless Guildford days. The beginning of the collection, if you like. That’s rather appropriate, given the way real icicles form: a drop freezing, another drop running over it and freezing onto it, over and over until it’s an elegant spike. It’s rather appropriate given the way that these were obviously made: a bead after a bead after a bead.

2021 was very much a year to be got through one day at a time. While 2020 is, in my head, a timeless, expansive, almost gentle, stretch of enforced freedom, 2021 seemed to call for gritted teeth and the continual effort of putting one foot in front of the other in front of the other in front of the other…

Early on in the year, someone I follow on the internet mentioned that they were aiming to add one sentence to their work in progress every day. I liked the sound of this. As mentioned elsewhere, I have more than one work in progress, and I thought this seemed like a good way of keeping faith with all of them. It has been. I’ve written short stories, fanfic, an essay, one sentence at a time. I’ve written twenty-six thousand words of one novel. I can’t remember the starting wordcount on the other one, but I do know it’s longer than it was. One sentence, one sentence, one sentence. Maybe two if they seem to come as a pair. Maybe more. Even when I didn’t know what I was doing at all, there’s been something to add. A line of description. A line of dialogue. After a while the thing gathers enough momentum to unspool itself into whole paragraphs, chapters, and I can sit down with it for a couple of hours and finish it off. Or else it runs down again, and once again I add another sentence. Just one today. Just one more tomorrow. Open the document. Add a sentence. Save the document. Close the document.

I decided that I wanted to read more poetry. I have loads of poetry books but the imagined sunny afternoons with a glass of white wine and an hour to dip in didn’t materialise nearly often enough. I started to work my way along the bookcase. The next book along. One poem. Tomorrow, the book after that. Today, Amy Clampitt. Yesterday, Kate Spencer. Tomorrow, Omar Khayyam (translated by Edward Fitzgerald) and the day after, Mary Oliver.

Last year one of my brothers gave me a book called My Year In Small Drawings. I can’t really draw but with a space that’s maybe two inches by three inches it doesn’t really matter. Yesterday I drew a man using a laptop from a stock photo. Today I will draw a picture of a picture. I still can’t really draw but that stops being important.

Duolingo. I can tell you that the boy is eating an apple in Polish, Italian, Spanish, French, and German. (Il ragazzo mangia una mela.) I can tell the cat that she is a cat. (She might not know. It’s best to be sure. Jestesz kotem.) Well, I had an A level in French already (le chat mange une pomme) so that doesn’t really count, but as far as the rest of them go I’m building on, at most, a couple of terms of formal learning plus a couple of months in the country in question. Well, there’s a pandemic on, but I can sort out my verb endings while I make my coffee (le chat ne mange pas des pommes; le chat préfère la nourriture sèche).

Teaching myself the piano. A twenty minute timer, and Michael Aaron’s Adult Piano Method. I have yet to master Home On The Range, but I’m getting there faster than I would if I were doing nothing.

Filling in my diary. I use an ordinary engagement diary, A5, week to view, and it’s part scrapbook, part commonplace book, part record of days. That way I can look back and see when was the last time I gathered the compost and when was the last time my right eye did its funny loss of vision thing and when it was I started reading the book I’ve just finished. And I can write down the quotation I want to remember, and I can stick in the pretty oddment that would otherwise be floating around my desk forever.

It hasn’t been every day. Of course it hasn’t. At present everything to the right of middle C is blocked off by the Christmas tree. Some days I’m too tired to write. Some days it is raining and I do not wish to go out to draw strangers using their phones. Some days I forget to read a poem. The diary tends to get updated all at once in front of whatever’s on Eurosport on a Saturday afternoon. It doesn’t matter. If I miss a day, if I miss a week, a month – no guilt. Any day is a good day to do it again.

A poem.

A phrase.

A drawing.

A sentence.

A drop.

Daily Decoration: deer and cheese

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Playmobil crib scene in which Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus have been joined by a deer and a fawn with a basket of cheese

This one is going to take a bit of explaining.

You might or might not be familiar with the Christmas carol Past Three A Clock (and a cold frosty morning…) If you are, apologies for the earworm. If not, here’s a video. The tune and the chorus are traditional. The verses, however, were added on at a later date by G. R. Woodward and, while they’re a lovely bit of poetry, I’m not sure that I’d have put some of them quite in the following order.

Hinds o’er the pearly

dewy lawn early

seek the high stranger

laid in the manger.

(Past three a clock, etc)

Cheese from the dairy

bring they for Mary,

And, not for money,

butter and honey…

I assume that the ‘they’ is meant to refer to the dairy workers, perhaps before they get caught up in the Twelve Days of Christmas, but the way it’s written it does look rather like it’s the hinds.

Which when we copped onto this last year meant two things. Firstly, stealing the deer from the royal ice skating Playmobil scene and ordering some Playmobil cheese for them. And secondly, a bred lik poem:

My name is dere

and wen it dawn

and wen the baby

Saviour born

and all the humans

on ther nees

I join them ther

with stolen chees.

Sunday, 5pm, 3rd January

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I was reading about the Herschels:

Caroline, out on the lawn, catching comets by the tail;

and William, stretching a ruler from star to star.


Across the street, my neighbour

climbed a ladder and gathered an armful of light,

wound round his elbow on invisible thread.


(Viewed with attention, like the Herschels’,

the Pleiades become a sisterhood

more inclusive than first thought.)


To see this for myself, I’d have to go out

in the dark garden, unafraid

of what I might learn, of what might

disrupt my preconceptions, require me

to expand my imagination,

and watch, and wait.

Pilgrims

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that’s the way of it: you meet them
over and over, evenings, lunchtimes,
along the road,
at cafés, fountains, benches,
along the road,
you meet them, wish them well,
you move on
or they move on
along the road
you meet them, over and over,
meet them
along the road,
along the road,
you move on
or they move on
along the road,
you don’t know
the last time you meet them
that that
was the last time you met them
along the road

#indiechallenge – Purple Prose (ed. Kate Harrad)

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DSCF8562

The blurb

Purple Prose: Bisexuality in Britain is the first of its kind: a book written for and by bisexual people in the UK. This accessible collection of interviews, essays, poems and commentary explores topics such as definitions of bisexuality, intersections of bisexuality with other identities, stereotypes and biphobia, being bisexaul at work, teenage bisexuality and bisexuality through the years, the media’s approach to bisexual celebrities, and fictional bisexual characters.

Filled with raw, honest first-person accounts as well as thoughts from leading bisexual activists in the UK, this is the book you’ll buy for your friend who’s just come out to you as bi-curious, or for your parents who think your bisexuality is weird or a phase, or for yourself, because you know you’re bi but you don’t know where to go or what to do about it.

The editor

Kate Harrad is  a published fiction and non-fiction writer. She co-edited The Ladies’ Loos: From Plumbing to Plucking, a Practical Guide for Girls (The Friday Project, 2006), and her novel All Lies and Jest was published by Ghostwoods Books in 2011. She has over a decade of experience working in business editorial/writing positions, and has written for the Guardian, the F-Word and the Huffington Post. She has also been a bi activist for several years, and has co-organized numerous UK bi events.

The publisher

Thorntree Press is an independent publishing company that was founded in 2013 by Eve Rickert and Franklin Veaux. They publish non-fiction books about sexuality, love and ethics with a focus on non-traditional relationship models.

How I got this book

I made a donation to the Indiegogo crowdfunder – a paperback copy was part of the reward level I chose.

The bingo card

This could count towards: ‘A crowdfunded book’; ‘A book from your TBR’; ‘Marginalised people’; ‘Non-fiction’; ‘Book from a micro press’; or ‘LGBTQIA’.

My thoughts

I have a soft spot for this book: I’m a contributor to it, in a very minor way (my poem Circles concludes the chapter on ‘Bisexuality and Faith’). And being a contributor, being part of process of putting this book together, was important to my own process of coming to understand who I was, of moving from an ill-defined conviction that I could call myself bisexual if I really had to, but God forbid it inconvenience anybody else, to a sense that I was part of a community.

But, although it was published back in 2016, I didn’t read it end to end until this year. And I think that what I really enjoyed about it this time round was that same sense of community. I follow many of the other contributors on Twitter; I’ve met some of them in real life, or recognise them as friends of friends. But even if that weren’t the case, even if I’d picked it from the shelf with no prior knowledge, I think I’d recognise myself in it, and be glad of that. It’s a great book for feeling less like you’re the only one who’s ever felt like this.

It’s a joyfully eclectic book, too – for a group that gets stereotyped as much as bisexuals do, we’re an eclectic bunch – and some parts inevitably feel more relevant (or, which is not the same thing) interesting to me than others do – but that’s a good thing. The multiplicity of perspectives makes it that little bit more representative.

#indiechallenge – Squirt (Kate Spencer)

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DSCF8525

The blurb

Kate made a discovery. She wrote a poem. She writes lots of poems about sex, sexuality, the body and body and bodily functions. She’s filthy, flirty, and funny; saucy, seductive, and sensual; raunchy, ridiculous, and ravishing. You won’t believe what comes out of her lips.

The author

Kate Spencer is co-producer of Poetry in Motion, the Wellington Feminist Poetry Club and Naked Girls Reading NZ. She’s a national slam finalist, a typewriter poet for hire, an editor, a writer, a promoter, a committed Christian, a dichotomy.

The bookshop

I ordered a copy direct from Kate.

The bingo card

I am going to count this for ‘a poetry collection’, but it would also work for: ‘a debut’; ‘a women’s press’; ‘LGBTQIA’; ‘Marginalised people’; and very possibly ‘Favourite’.

My thoughts

I’m somewhat amused by the way that this challenge started out as an earnest attempt to take on the worthy books that hadn’t got to the top of my TBR pile, and has recently become ‘I read this book by a friend and it’s a hell of a lot of fun’.

It would be funny to say that Kate was the one that the Christian Union warned me about, but I never really got into the Christian Union. Still, by all accounts we had far more fun in the Methodist and Anglican Society. (Not like that.)

Anyway, oblique nostalgia for my university years aside, this book is a hell of a lot of fun. It has all the verve and immediacy that I associate with slam poetry. An extensive vocabulary, creatively and joyfully used (‘Don’t expect me to labour over my labia/epilate before a date/or pluck pre-fuck’). In this book there’s a joy in both sex and words that makes me smile. It’s usually funny (‘don’t tell me I’m ovary-acting’), sometimes angry (‘Fucking is supposed to be fucking consensual/if not, it’s not fucking sensual/it’s a fucking con/and you should be fucking convicted’) and always honest.

Form

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My love is older than the rocks:
I planted it when life was young
and watched it bloom with new delight
where a new, hopeful, stream had sprung.
I kept it close through seismic shocks:
betrayal; anger; pain; relief;
then sent it whirling into flight
to take its chance with joy or grief.
Now you can hold it in your hand,
washed clean, worn smooth, by time and tears.
An age of time, a flash of art
brought it to you from dust and sand.
It’s grounded by the weight of years
and rests contented in your heart.

 

*

This is another one written for a Lioness Challenge. There’s something about Elise’s pieces that gets me experimenting with tight forms that I’d usually write off as ‘too much like hard work’ or ‘not for the likes of us’. But in this case, with dinosaur bones for inspiration, it had to be a hoary old form like a sonnet.

A metrical version of the Magnificat, to an appropriate tune for the day

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My soul proclaims God’s mighty glory
and my spirit shall rejoice
in God who saves me and exalts me,
who makes the poor his choice.
God’s bounteous blessings fall upon me
from now and through all years:
the mighty one has raised me upward:
God is holy, and God hears!

So take comfort, who suffer; this good news is for you:
Your trials will be changed to triumphs, and you will receive your due;
So take comfort, who suffer, and claim your rightful place:
God loves you, and has chosen you, of all the human race.

God stands with those deprived of power,
and God’s power will win the day;
He gives the hungry food in plenty
and he sends the rich away.
He empties thrones, and lifts the humble,
brings confusion to the proud;
He remembers those who are downtrodden,
and has saved us, as he vowed:

So take comfort, who suffer; this good news is for you:
Your trials will be changed to triumphs, and you will receive your due;
So take comfort, who suffer, and claim your rightful place:
God loves you, and has chosen you, of all the human race.

 

 

After Luke 1 46-55, obviously. You’re welcome to use this in church if you think you can get away with it.

Happy May Day, everyone!