Freeze Frame Anthology – It’s all about…ME! Interviewed by Jo VonBargen

Bard On A Wire I’d like to introduce our fearless leader and Editor of the upcoming Freeze Frame Anthology, Oscar Sparrow! This has been a wonderful project to work on and Oscar has made it so easy for all of us! Oscar’s own work is without peer, in fact, he’s my own favorite living bard! Here, an example from his delicious book of poetry, I THREW A STONE, available at Amazon.com, which has an audio file of him reading the poems accompanying it. Engine Management LightSome semi-conductor keeping time turns his back as half an orchestra falls flat. A filament of existence beyond darkness triggers an enlightenment. I stare into the void of mystery, in the pews of ignorance awaiting the priest, images of invisible strands spinning in unknowable blackness fill my blind imagination. Others speed by down the Damascus Road. On the hard shoulder, facing the question - My question, I open the book and pray. For a little taste of his enormous talent, listen to him read what has been said to be the “worst poem in the world”, written by Theo Marzials. I found it enchanting!A TRAGEDY by Theo Marzials. Read by @Oscar_Sparrow  Unforgettable! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfXSQ9wj3AIWe are all so excited about FREEZE FRAME and offer heartfelt thanks to Oscar and his team at Gallo-Romano for all the hard work they’ve done to come up with what we think is a fantastic result! I had the opportunity to interview Oscar before the release of the book, just as he interviewed us; this is a peek at the character of a very intriguing individual! Oscar Sparrow Interview (by Jo Vonbargen)I appreciate so much that you have been able to put together this unique collection called Freeze Frame. You once said to me, “If we froze the frame – what would we see? A guy taking an order at Burger King and punching the codes on his till? A girl in the line texting her friend the menu choices? A land mine victim smelling a rose? A guy flicking sports channels. So many layers of interface and distraction! Paul Gaugin asked “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” Now that you’re wearing the Editor’s hat, has any of this become clearer to you? What has become clearer to me is that individuals are very capable of focusing on those moving moments of life. In some cases, moments of experience live on forever perhaps and to some extent define those individuals. It is even clearer to me that this IS the work of poetry in terms of how it stands relative to our minds in this multi-channelverse. As for Gaugin’s question – well, the linear idea of an individual life being a flash of light between bookends of oblivion is obviously far too simple. As for what we are, maybe more than ever I see that we are seekers of understanding. Probably we are trying to understand rainbows by eating mud. Poets deal with what they don’t know but they cook the mud before they serve it up. You are my favourite living poet, hands down. You peel a subject down to the quantum level, disassemble the atoms, then rearrange them into a veritable feast of multi-layered meaning and social commentary. I find them absolutely fascinating! When did you first realize poetry would take over your life and be your very breath? What a wonderful compliment – thank you. I suppose that as quite a young kid I did not fit in because I wanted conversation and discussion to go much further and deeper. We use descriptions such as “as hard as stone”. The use of words in this context troubled me and kids and teachers shuffled away when I would ask how you “understood” the hardness of stone. My refuge was poetry – particularly Wordsworth. I bought a copy at a second-hand shop. I hated all that poetry they served up at school – all that dah di dah di dah stuff.  I wandered about a lot, looking at yellow iris and learning the smell of water and advancing snow. I wanted a poem to look out beyond to that place which could not be a place but which my tiny brain can only see in terms of a location. I must say that your own work “From This Far Time” touched me deeply by heading out on this path. That’s very sweet of you, Oscar! Your own response to that work gave me so much encouragement and hope for the future…you have no idea!! I’m curious as to how you actually work in your “poet’s cave”.  As for subject matter, where does your poetry come from and who has influenced you? The poet’s cave is a philosophical place quite often of no thought or input. I have to go there just to be.  The biggest fact of the human mind, the universe and everything that binds them together is something we completely ignore. Intuition is the dark matter of thought and the construction of our picture of existence within our consciousness is intuitive. This intuition is very much there in the child. The “system” both ignores and discourages it. Who says to a scruffy kid “I want you to wander about free, not trying to think anything. If you want to – or if you feel you just have to, come back and tell me what you felt”.  Now that is not just a school for poets – that is a school for the world. The sad thing is that once we did have that power and freedom. We have forgotten where we left ourselves.  As for influences – certainly Wordsworth, the English Movement guys like Larkin. Robert Graves, W.H. Auden, Thomas Hardy, Maggie Huscroft, Elizabeth Browning, Walt Whitman, Les Murray  and so many writers and poets. The work of Gaugin, many films and singers like Jacques Brel. The word play and cleverness of Charles Trenet leaves me dumb with admiration. My biggest influence is that elusive intuition in a scene or moment. Always that question “What words can fit the intuitive signal I am receiving?” You are one of the best spoken word artists I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet. You have a natural talent for dramatizing the written word and leaving us spellbound! Have you ever worked in theatre? No theatre I’m afraid. I think a critic would say that I just love the sound of my own voice. Look – we all have depth and nuances within ourselves. The voice can betray/reveal them. Life and poetry are acting jobs. Shyness and uncertainty make us reluctant to risk the true expression of our spirits. If I’m any good, it is because I have grown old enough to let go and just do what anyone could do if they stepped up and grabbed the microphone.  Remove the editor’s hat and put on the poet’s. What message would you leave the world on your tombstone? Wow – hmmmm. It would be difficult to not appear righteous if I gave advice about how to live when I know nothing more than anyone else. If I were to try to combine the basic selfishness of mankind yet their ability to elude its grip, I would condense everything to:  “Love yourself -  for your kindness.” What direction do you think your own poetry is going and where do you think poetry in general should go? Have you ever been part of the poetry establishment? I have lived through several re-launches, renaissances, second comings and new waves of poetry.  None of them have changed the sales or perception of it. In a rather joking way I dub myself the “Poet Lorry-Park” in order to underline my allegiance to the cause of non-academic people. I feel that poetry was stolen, mystified and separated from the main stream of life by a clique of media connected cronies. They wanted the poetry world to be ten stars and all the rest of us fawning upon their latest style of line break. To me, this is tosh. You can stuff a sonnet in your rhyming bonnet or ride into Jerusalem on your assonance for all I care. What I want is for anyone who feels a surge of joy, who poses an infinite question or who sees a dog peeing on a cabbage AND who really sees it and reflects on it to realise that they themselves are the poet. I do not believe in any regime or form of poetry. It is the naked honest mind seeking to use this heavy toolbox of words to do a job no one will ever complete. The subject and my intellectual/emotional relationship with it dictate the form of what I write. How can I be bigger than the power of the unwritten poem? The poem is the statue unborn, yet living in the stone.   I have skirted around the poetry establishment because I thought I might pick up some electricity from the overhead wires. I felt the current but essentially they only wanted a coin for their trochaic meter. In short, let there be poetry and let all be poets. Those with the best words will be guides, not stars. Finally, Jo – my dear friend, thanks for inviting me to ramble on for far too long. I dreamed that one day I would be a poet.  To be so dubbed by a poet I admire so much is a true honour and happiness.  Thank you so much, Oscar! It has been my distinct pleasure to know and work with you!!

 

Freeze Frame Poetry Anthology. Featured Poet, Paul Tobin.

Paul Tobin

Today I am featuring the poet Paul Tobin who will be appearing in the ‘Freeze Frame’ anthology which Gallo-Romano will be publishing. I came across Paul’s work about a year ago and started to follow his blog, Magpie Bridge. I’ve since had the pleasure of meeting him and having a ‘Dinner With Andre’ session. (Until I met Paul I had been unaware of this film, but he was kind enough to share it with me. I think it says something about him).

Paul is a dedicated and gifted English poet. His work has a quality of depth in construction that shrugs off ornament.   He is one of those guys who is poetry. Everything he comes across and thinks about begins a process of conversion into poetry. When you are around him you begin to see that we are living in a world of unexpressed poems. Much of his poetry centres around his birthplace of Widnes. Here is one of them, taken from his collection ‘Blessed By Magpies’

Widnes Bridge Poem.

Back to the Delta,
Up the Muddy Mersey,
Over the green bridge
Whose struts define the space
Of this gentle arc.
It is never still,
It shudders at the traffic,
Undulates with the volume.
And on a day like this; raw,cold,
That lazy wind would slice through
The cantilever and splay your guts below.

For me, this poem exemplifies Paul’s style. The flesh of the living human, Nature and the bridge engineering flow into an exposure of reality which is just a little edgy and dipped in mortality.   As we get close to the launch of the Freeze Frame anthology, I interviewed Paul about his work.

Long before I had started the Freeze Frame project I was aware of your work. I read one of your poems where some men were working on the roof of some kind of factory. Immediately I realised that you were my kind of writer and that we probably had many experiences in common. Coming from a blue collar life of toil and grease; was it easy to come out as a poet?

I was a poet, well aspiring to be a poet, long before the grease and overalls. I suppose I made an existential decision that I was going to be a poet when I was twelve years old. I heard Songs from a Room by Leonard Cohen that would be about the time it came out. I made the connection between him being a poet and getting the girls. It took about another twelve years before the work was anything but awful. But I kept at it with a mixture of naivety and enthusiasm.

I left school at 16 and served an apprenticeship. I was a fitter for a further four years at the local ICI plant. K Unit Maintenance to be precise, which was the title of the poem to which you refer. I wrote it sixteen years after I had left the tools. At the time I was in engineering it would never have occurred to me to write about what I did at work, at that time I was writing mainly about relationships, with the self-absorption of the young.

Looking at your style I notice an enormous range of references. Nature often blends with anecdotal story. The metaphysical often comes down to the personal. Have you always had a questioning mind about existence? Is there a wider quest always in the back of your mind as you write a poem about the specific subject – even if it be an apparently ordinary moment of life?

I have no idea where poems come from, they appear out of the ether and I just grab them and work upon them. I have this idea that poems are all around us and poets happen to be the people who see them then bring them into our world. This sounds a little odd, pretentious even, but is the only way I can describe the experience. Once the poem is here though, caught on the page, being revised and revised through as many drafts as it takes, then I can see where the ideas have come from. But while I am getting the initial idea down I just let it flow with no attempt to shape it that comes later.

Until recently I was a member of a writing group for about four years and what I liked about it was the challenge of sitting down in a room and having twenty minutes to produce something on a set topic. I like the idea of being put on the spot and see what come out. I facilitate a poetry group here in Taunton: Juncture 25, we meet twice a month and one of the sessions is a workshop (can’t get away from the language of engineering)and I usually run the session. I love the challenge and try not to plan it too far in advance, so as not to give my subconscious a head start.

Some of your work is political in the sense that it raises issues of public behaviour and people’s perception of their society. Are you interested in politics and where do you think the poet should stand – as a neutral reporter or advocate of a viewpoint?

I believe that the poet must stand by their beliefs. That said I am not sure what I believe in these days. I think I am interested in ethics more than politics. I cannot see a way forward politically, I think we went wrong as a society probably before I was born, I certainly think we have taken many foolish steps since then. But that’s another interview I think…

Poets attempt to turn the personal into the universal, that’s what I’m looking to do once I catch that idea on the page. And there are dangers in making a poem too overtly political, one is that it will age badly, but more importantly I don’t want a finger pointing, obvious work, that batters the person over the head.

In my last book Blessed By Magpies, there is a version of a poem I am still working on. End of Species Exam is just that the equivalent of an end of year exam in school. On the page it is about forty hectoring lines, in performance it has reduced to about fifteen. I want people to think, not to bludgeon them with a set of simple slogans.

One of your poems is called “Prayer” which is a conventional religious term. The poem, however, has a searching pantheistic flavour which does not seem to relate to a codified theistic viewpoint. Often in poems and blogs you give thanks for your privileged life. What can you tell us about the spiritual context of your work?

Yes. I think it is important to give thanks for our privileged lives, we have enough to eat, to drink, we are not in danger of losing our lives, and we are better off than many of our fellow humans.

I have been very influenced by a sixteenth century English mystic, Thomas Traherne. He speaks of delighting in the success of your neighbours as much as in your own success, of wanting the best for everyone. His most famous quotation is:

You never enjoy the world alright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars.

It is such an inspiring vision and one I try to live up to. I have no formal codified viewpoint as you point out. I am though influenced by the Tao. I think the idea of Balance is really important. For me it is essential to have a personal relationship with the Creator, and to give thanks for the beauty around us and the privileged life that I have.

I suppose I have been drifting in this direction for most of my life. I like working in groups with other people, I like that energy of creating that you get in groups. I have influenced by my work as a Rieki Master, I think it is that growing sensitivity to the energies that make up the world has brought me to realise how fortunate I am.

Much of your work is cleverly observed human interaction and intercourse – some of it quite conflicted. Were you always an observer of mankind?

I suspect so. I people watch all the time. One of the poems in the anthology For I Keep Watch came about one day when I was just walking about Taunton and on two separate occasions people walked into me. My first thought was that I must be invisible today, then I was struck by the idea of the Stasi, the East German secret police and how they kept files on everyone. Then I thought who follows the follower (to misquote)? I wrote the first draft in a doorway.

As to charting the conflicts within interaction, yes, I do. It is how I see people, we are complex and at times we are in conflict. I write poems about the conflicts I have been involved in to make sense of them.

In a few poems you touch on personal unhappiness and failure of relationships. Do you think that poets need turmoil and sadness to see the truth of things and human nature?

No. As I say I use my poetry to make sense of my life. Even if I am never sure what I am going to write about, when I work on it on the page I can usually chart where the component pieces have originated.

Actually I am an optimist, I can usually see the positive in most situations, though on a few occasions I have become depressed. Then I actually can’t work.

Actually I get many ideas when I am in a calm, contemplative state, when I do Tai Chi or Reiki, or I am meditating. I find as I get older I can turn off the chattering monkeys in my head and just be. First thing in the morning is a very productive time for me. That’s usually when the poems come tumbling out.

You are poet in residence at the Fishguard Folk Festival. To me this is something of a true accolade.  It also sounds like a chance to be out there and beating the drum. Tell us a little about this and what it is like?

What is it like? Well that depends upon the festival. I actually have been poet in residence at a number of festivals, last year at The Purbeck Folk Festival and this year at The Acoustic Festival of Great Britain as well as Fishguard Folk Festival. I have also performed at a number of others around the country. They are all very different, some are more organised than others. Fishguard is a gem of a festival, well organised, with a variety of good venues, friendly audience and its free! There is a marked difference between the way the arts are supported in England and Wales. In Wales they are far more passionate and supportive.

I think my abiding memory of festivals is the communication. I tend to walk around the festival site and engage people in conversation and read them a poem. It’s a good way to contact people.  I feel quite naked when I do it but I usually get a reasonable response. It is always surprising what poems go down well, though I have a small set of poems that I usually save for the end of a festival set.

There is a difference between the audiences I read to at music festivals and those at poetry evenings or poetry festivals. People at a music festival are primarily there for the music, the poetry is an add on. At a poetry event you can take more chances. I suppose in the end that is what all performance is about, taking the chance of baring the soul and speaking from the heart.

I am excited about the Freeze Frame project and Paul has contributed some fantastic material and also an audio track that brings so much out of his voice as a poet. My next interview will feature a very different type of poet who has such a depth of image power that sometimes I just have to stop for a WOW! Of course, I’m talking about  the American poet Jo Von Bargen.

As I’m beginning to shape the show and decide the order in terms of voice and style, I cannot help but having a real sense of joy at bringing these guys together and putting out this collection. The contrasts, juxtapositions and the human voice are adding so much to the mix. OK – head down and editor’s hat on……..

The Dark Side Of The Boon

Caroline, Emma, Gilli and a tall dark stranger (Photo Cara Cooper)

In my self styled role as the ‘Poet Lorry-Park’ I have gotten into some strange positions. Just imagine trying to reverse a fully loaded articulated sonnet on your blind side mirror over two lanes of Faber and Faber editors. Whilst this may sound a surreal event, it is not anything like as far fetched as my attendance at the Festival Of Romance in Bedford over the week-end. Imagine the ageing Sparrow outnumbered  100 to 1 by female Romance writers.

My attendance was encouraged by Emma, who needed a poet to drive the car, carry step ladders, a crate on wheels, a long length of wood and several heavy boxes of books. It transpires that to be a fiction author you also have to be a cross between a travelling circus and a troubadour.

Despite all my reservations I had fantastic weekend. Imagine my joy at standing before a bunch of attractive women reading my poem “Erectile Dysfunction”. One glance was enough for everyone to realise that I was not talking about any kind of personal experience. No one actually told me that, but it must have been quite obvious by my virile demeanour.

I met some great writers and a good number confessed to the old cock sparrow that they had written poetry. In truth, when you heard them reading their work, you could hear it. There is a lot of tosh talked about romance writers, mainly by the snob literati. These writers give it out from their hearts to serve a big spoonful of desire, passion, comedy and lust to their readers. Tell me a better reason to write.

And now, let me tell all you poets out there of my contact with the dark side of temptation. As poets we do not seek fame, recognition or book sales. We are pure intellectuals are we not? Yet, at the Festival I met with a young lady who, were I to be a writer of Romance, would be cast as the alluring courtesan of an Arabian oilygarch salmon fisherman. I will not name her because perhaps she spoke in a moment of emotional confusion. All the same, this Mills&Boon representative advised me that they would consider any genre of work including poetry for their new e book venture. I would have blinked, but my vanity prevented me from exposing my wrinkles. They don’t call me toxic Beau Brummie for nothing you know. Any poet out there wishing to explore this avenue, please get in touch. Dare the sparrow reach out for a crumb held in such a tempting hand?

Poet at work. (Photo Caroline Bell Foster)

I do want to acknowledge the writers who shared my table at the Book Fair. Not only did they have to endure a hard day on their feet, but also some old geezer rattling on about poetry. Cara Cooper, Caroline Bell Foster and Gilli Allan please accept my thanks and appreciation for your charming company.

Thanks also to the two actors who turned up at intervals to play out scenes from an historical novel. I thought them to be most frightfully good Sir. Also, there were two Thespians dressed as soldiers from a tin of Quality Street. It was immensely surprising to meet such fellows with their swords out in the Gents.

These events take a whole heap of effort to organise. The supremo was the author Kate Allan, but there were several selfless elves and reindeer. It was so kind of them to allow in an old poet with nothing but a few love poems. As if I did not know, the biggest truth to emerge from it all is that writing is a tough game at any level with many setbacks and struggles. These writers really work and try and try again. The market changes, the demographics of readership changes.  Secretly I was glad to be a poet – ethereal and uninterested in worldly success. As an ambition, it is far easier to achieve. I think I’m there.

The Poet Lorry Park Drives On.

I have been working. Poetry calls for periods of intense idleness during which I cut grass, drive lorries, fix bicycles, service cars and test the contents of corner shop beer cans for strength and quality. I talk about football and have opinions about deep or attacking mid-field play. Most of this is pure fake ( re-cycled punditry and remembered phrases) but no one seems to notice or are too polite to say. Poetry is not on the radar of my day to day life and I always feel very self conscious about being one. I think there are quite a few others who are like this.

Imagine then my disquiet at setting out to film my favourite subject (me) reading a poem in a public place where anyone could see me. At any moment some person could start pointing at me and declare that I was that old geezer who mends bikes. I bet the poetic  Greats did not have this issue. All the same, I did it and here is the result

.

My motivation was an invitation from Jeff Hansen to join the team on the at the Altered Scale blog. Here is the man himself talking about his creation. 

Now, for someone like me, this magazine gives me an insight into what artists are doing. The breadth of talent and imagination are staggering. Some of it is on the outer reaches of avant-garde but don’t be shy. Just relax and enjoy. A few days ago I came across Donna Kuhn on Altered Scale. Check this out.

What I love is that this kind of Art gives permissions. We are all squeezed into narrow roles of self consciousness and inhibition. Magazines like Altered Scale open up a whole new trunk. Dip in and dress up.

National Poetry Day

It has been so long since I passed by. Today is National Poetry Day here in the UK. Maybe the wider world did not know that. To be honest, I chanced to hear of it on the radio a couple of days ago. The trouble with being a poet is that I am just not engaged with the world of poetry. I used to try and even joined the Poetry Society. I joined the John Clare Society. I hung out with the National Poetry Foundation.  I went to poetic gatherings and felt entirely out of it. I used to feel as if I should be delivering the wine or looking in while cleaning the windows. I wanted to write poems that were about not being a poet. If I write anything at all which is worthy of the name poetry, it is because I do not feel like one. My ideal reader is someone who does not feel like a poetry reader. This means that my target audience is immense. As a young writer I wanted to say something profound about 10mm and 13mm spanners and their special relationship with nuts. I did not get accepted by editors but I picked up some handy car servicing work. If you are a big tough guy out there and know what I mean about the strange satisfying symmetry of those spanners please get in touch. We could create a special website.

To mark the occasion, the famous landmark advertising display at Piccadily in London  is carrying a poem by the Cornish writer Charles Causley. It is a wonderful poem and if you check out the Poetry Day web site you can see some great poems awarded prizes in honour of the event.

The only way a poet can celebrate a special poetic day is by producing a poem. I have been working in my poet’s overalls at the back of the cave on some new poems. I am compiling and editing a collection involving a number of other writers. I am so excited by the quality and range of the submissions. I’m also going to feature audio and there’s a couple of tracks that just give me a big WOW.  The great thing is that being the self appointed editor, all my stuff goes in without any tears, hate mail or counselling sessions with my rejection therapist. Just between us, I’ve been thinking of getting rid of him but I’m not sure how he will take it.  Here is my poem.

Falling.

Raindrops hitting the river flow
collision of birth death,
a  coming home to die.
Identity sweeping on and away;
a fluidity of self.
Ripples spreading on
the moving face of time
reaching forward
reaching back
helpless.

We watched the rain
from the river’s edge,
not lovers then,
two selves as yet
un-drowned in each other.

Let us kiss
and fall as raindrops
to be water, time and no one
but our love.

Freezing The Frame

Sometimes you just have to stop. We try to answer more questions in life than we ask. Essentially we try to answer other people’s questions:  questions posed by the bosses and the faceless systems. The hoop-meisters keep us jumping. The time servers steal our time and keep us servile. The image makers hold us up against their images. What survives of us, if we did but know it, is the poetry of ourselves. The true light of life is lost in the glare of packaging, marketing and business. To the dirt poor survivalist, the focus is the next meal or gulp of water. Such a one is the greatest poet. He knows the taste of water. The business man knows only the price per litre and how he can max out his margin.

Amongst all this undergrowth lies the hidden boulder of beauty. It is simply there. Property rights may restrict access, but there is beauty in the smallest of things and moments. I am working on a little project at the moment. It is a collection of short poems that attempt to freeze the frame and give some time to reflect on what we are thinking or simply what we are. Such poems need have no references or belong to any school. Today, I received a poem from the American poet Jo Von Bargen. She certainly has no identifiable posture or influence. She can be transcendently folksy or richly austere. Her poems can be death by a thousand cuts or joy with a single lunge. You always know that the boulder, honey or rapier is there and that it will get you. Here is one of her poems:

Child.

your hand hesitantly tries
the keyboard,
eyes reading impossible signs
on the score so that
every chord is suspended
like a voice grieving

all around you goes tender
at seeing you stop, helpless,
ignorant of the language
most your own

beyond, window ajar,
a breeze murmurs back

hummingbirds hover,
framed in blue sky,then vanish.
a branch rustles in the sun

nothing around us finds words,
and your youthful unknowing
is mine, is ours

******************************

I love that poem. It freezes the frame with the warmth of humanity. So far I have lined up four established poets to contribute to this collection. There are many poets out there and if you feel you could be in it or know someone who might like to be, please let me know. I will be editing the final selection. I am looking for short “beautiful” poems in the sense that they stop time at those moments when we have a transcendence that no one could ever sell you or tell you that your model of beauty has just been outdated by the latest design.

There is no format or fashion to the poems. My own publishers, – Gallo-Romano have agreed to produce the book. All I can say is that it will not cost contributors any money. Anyone expecting to make money as a poet is not one. The loot will be shared. If my own profit on poetry is a guide I think a cola and a pack of straws is about right.

one whole plantimal

I’ve been in haiku mode again. It is about the scene in this photo.

Sun on rose open
to bees transferring life code.
A buzz blooms wholeness.

Mathematics For Poets

Just a few times in life you meet someone a bit special. At a party during Christmas I came across a guy who made a real impression on me. He was not a corporate thruster. He was not a “get out of my way” Mister Important. He appeared to have no interest in Maserati executive cars or money. He was a little old guy, wearing a suit and looked up at folk through his eyebrows. I saw several youngsters chat and smile with him. He knew their names. He knew the names of their brothers and sisters. I wrote a poem about him. I hope the smallness of my work reflects my respect in inverse proportion.

Dr Czaykowski

His name, he said
was a common denominator
In Poland.
He was the numbers guy
swept here by War
and placed in brackets
outside the theorem’s QED.
His people too
were in the numbers game,
marching to the one way algorithm.
Finally he could not go home
but stayed to bless
the countings of children.
No such inversion in his heart
nor in his inner tongue
subtracted by History.
Yet he lived,
smiling uncalculated
love by numbers.

Front-line 2011

Here in the UK the news is that the news is about what happened 30 years ago. Government papers from 1981 have been released and we can see all the secret memos between ministers and know all the things we did not know at the time. 1981 was the year of the riots as all the major cities were swept by mob violence. In London huge fires burned that were clearly visible from Westminster. Mobs looted shops and houses. The Prime Minister was Margaret Thatcher. Police constable L368 was an unknown poet called Oscar Sparrow, stationed at Brixton. One of the main bus routes was and is Railton Road. It was called locally “The Front-line” to denote it was a social frontier. It was never dull. In the picture above the poet is the second cop about to walk into a lamp post if he doesn’t pay attention. I never put on that uniform without feeling that I was in fancy dress.

I have several observations about civil disorder and rioting. It is exciting and terrifying in equal measure for both the good and bad guys. Everyone thinks they are the good guy. Despite all appearances, most people are just helplessly stuck in the middle. Nearly all these folk are poor and have very little themselves. After a while everyone wants it to stop. Then it stops and people turn up at the police station to say they found a wallet or lost their dog. It is not for unknown poets to pontificate on the politics or the social dynamics of inequality, race, unemployment and urban alienation. I could, but it would add nothing to all that has been said since and doubtless will be recycled when, inevitably, it will all re-run for a newer generation. If I were a modern day cop I would almost anticipate a mob throwing iPads, being filmed by officers with smart phones. Alternatively both sides would turn up with such an array of filming equipment to capture one another’s brutality that nothing would happen, except maybe a few aggressive zoom sequences.

I know I should not appear flippant about such serious affairs because people do awful things. There are rapes, murders, ghastly woundings and arson. I was far less of a revolutionary once I had sampled just a little of its flavour. A mob running wild is awesome, but if the batteries on the remote are low, manual control is bruising. The best rampaging mobs are on TV. Petrol bombs burn you. Large fellows with swords can make one very aware of one’s sphincter. 2012 approaches and one can sense certain straws in the wind. We never learn you know………

I was a cop because it was a job that I thought would give me stuff to write about. I loved Brixton and South London. It was a cacophony and a choir, a rhythm and a rag-bag. It was a fist in the face and a handshake. I wrote a poem at that time and it is in my collection “I Threw A Stone”

You can hear it here and read it below:

Frontline ’81

Red London buses
blood corpuscle bustle
past a drinking club
which is a terraced house
with fifty men,
one hundred whites of eyes inside.

Drinkers piss al fresco unperturbed
on pavements trod with butts of blow.
Dead cans of Red Stripe
barber pole along the dismal gutter.
Ragged Bee- Em- Dub-Yews cruise,
boozed bleached whore-cats
pussy sway to reggae beat
subliminal in chest and throat.

On a corner an ambulance.
White cop say
“How d’ it start?”
Black girl say
“Wid slave-ree”.

In the alley a trembling bitch
fucks a pack of sperm rage dogs.
A circling runt denied, accepts.
Sirens down the Brixton Road
announce aloud a further haemorrhage.

By Oscar Sparrow

366YY7NVV75S

Les Choses Insolites

I’m not about to go into those magazine style features about the  New Year. I’m just circling around the infinite poetic plughole.  Luckily it’s more or less blocked with the poet’s mate’s hair so I can still swim against the current of time. Here is the problem. I am a poet. In recent months I have read poetry, published poetry, edited poetry, reviewed poetry, read aloud poetry and I believe added poetry to most forms of alcoholic drink. I can recommend gin and sonnet. What I ain’t done is write any of the bloody stuff. Just imagine if I was on the production line. No productivity bonus. Final written warning from the Stanzaman Corporation. Here is the question. Is it in here OR is it out there? It used to be in a separate somewhere unknown to the corporates, some gulch where no spreadsheet has ever spread. Somewhere Pre-Post-Modernist when modern people were actually future people in comic strips with magic hand-held communicators and ray guns.

So I went out to rake up fallen leaves. Huh! I thought, that’ll get the old poetic sentimental elemental follicles flowing. I thought of Alfred lord Tennyson who wrote a poem about the New Year. I ended up wondering if a lot of the old time “greats” would have got so far up against the Amazon.com legions or the slush pile barons of  editorial feudalism. In fact I love old Alfie Tennyson and if you’ve got the mood for a splash of the old sentiment, here he is in New Year mode.

And also I’ve ordered a dead tree book about some of the great modern poets with an audio CD of the Greats reading their own work. If that doesn’t mesh up my synchro gear box nothing will. The book is edited by a guy called Michael Schmidt who I love dearly. He is a big big poet bazooka yet he wrote me one of the most gentlemanly rejection letters I have ever received. It is a treasure. It made me feel that I was like one of those probes sent to Mars that never made it because they crashed heroically into the surface in a mangle-ism  of metallic metaphors. When I get the book I’ll be banging out a review.

And then there were the leaves. Somehow a red leaf had blown in from somewhere else, bringing with it some quality of a Geisha scampering along a muddy street.

 

A Sacred Cow in the Orchard

How ambitious should a poet be? I think I would be very concerned if the corporate ladder were crammed with poets, other than the versifiers and prose monsters of the marketing maelstrom. And yet ambition is the true focus of the poet. Why speak of a rose if you do not long in some way to stick it, thorns and all, under a nose?.

A couple of days ago I fell upon a poem by an American writer – Jo VonBargen, the scope of which had me taking a deep breath. Quite simply it is a look at human history with a view to providing the opportunity to those ahead of us in time, to do better. We start in the mud of non individualised atoms and molecules of  pre-consciousness (My phrase) and follow through to the conscious manipulation of atoms in the mud of money and politics. It would have been very easy to get this wrong and as I read the foreword I was nervous. I would have taken one look at the tightrope and gone to the bar for a long think, followed by another drink. Then I would have called a cab and gone home.(Actually poets can’t afford cabs but sometimes drive them).

Words are dangerous to art. They are the succubus, the half eaten tray of chocolate. A few more could not hurt could they? Jo VonBargen, I just know by guessing, has been through that cloying land. This poem is not written, it is speared and pruned.Where you could throw more words, she has spiked the one she wanted from the tempting glittering shoal of extra adjectives. It is light and lean, a thin blade, a jab. In a sense it is an old fashioned epic poem but without any grandiosity. The selection of history is from the catalogues of genocide, division and greed. Happily the lusts and delicious passions receive, I suspect, the compassion of the humanist and  largely escape the the list.

A poem is for the reading. Poetry read aloud cannot just be folded back into the book (or switched off on the e reader). For a poem to live on beyond its return to silence it has to stick in the mind and this for me is where this work is very special. Short phrases expressing wisdom jostle with sudden sparks of imagery. There are too many to quote but here are a few. “A glissando of slow subterraneans” – as life evolves,(I could hear Wagnerian trombones). “Do you not see separate gardens?” as property and tribe divide us. “Plowmule of the dragging days” takes us to apartheid, racism and slavery in an inspired brilliance of insight.  When the poet looks rather sadly at the Rule of Law, she gives us a left hook of wisdom “No law can transform what the soul hasn’t learned.” These are just a sample. You could not read this poem without taking away a phrase or two or without pausing to reflect. Luckily as a European, atheist, Buddhist, lighter of cathedral candles, mumbling coin thrower at wishing well grottos and crosser of fingers, I have no sacred cows except for wanting quite often to kiss them for their gentleness and weep for their innocence.

Bref: “From This Far Land” is the  mature work of a deeply intelligent mind. It is wonderful to know that there are folk out there who actually think. It is always tempting to wave the flag and shout the slogan. Once upon a time, the world of published poetry was controlled by just a few editors. Most poets seemed to me to be professors of poetry. Now the savages storm the orchard and all may gorge. A new nobility will arise. Jo VonBargen wields a sword.