Month: March 2023

Categories
Essay Poetry

The themes of Lost Time

Cover design to follow!

I have just finished curating a selection of my poems into my next collection – Lost Time, and am now pondering the idea of writing a short introduction. Maybe this will be its first draft! The poems are arranged through six themes:

Covid – Place – Sea – Writing – Memories – Time

although it would be fair to say, and intentional, that the edges to the themes are blurred. To the extent that during the process I have once or twice moved a poem from one section to another. It is also fair to say that the distant shadows of lost love and passing time hang over the entire collection – lightly, I hope.

Time has always fascinated me.  Aristotle said that Time is the measurement of change and the idea that, as Professor Carlo Rovelli wrote (The Order of Time, Penguin, 2019) of Einstein’s fourth dimension, “time is memory” and again “time is ignorance” or even, somewhat philosophically, “we are time” was at least in part what underlies the long Elegies of Time which comes near the end of the book. But I will write more about that poem after the book has been published.

If you have been with me over a period of time that is long enough for you to have at least dipped into my other writings, you will have come across my ‘fixation’ with the horizon, a fixation which I have always ascribed to my time at sea. Interestingly, I learn that Heidegger identifies the internal consciousness of time as the horizon of being itself. I like that: in a simplistic way I have seen myself as standing at the horizon (I know, I know – you cannot stand at the horizon as – like an understanding of time – as you move towards it, it remains distant from you)… seen myself as standing at that magical line that does not exist, with my future flowing towards me and my past dropping away behind me over the horizon.

So, Lost Time: a few angry or resigned poems about Covid. Then, moving into the collection, place – mostly Wales but not entirely so – gives way to the largest group – poems about or reflecting the sea. Beyond their horizon (horizons?), you come to poems about writing and about memories, which seem to lead – at least in my mind – to poems on time. The light-hearted Killing Time (which is prefixed, appropriately enough, with a quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies: “For staying is nowhere”) is about waiting to go into the auditorium from a theatre cafe, and leads into the long five-part Elegies of Time. Unredeemable Time picks up the theme and the short Creation combines time with earlier themes: memory and writing. The Departed makes a fitting end to both the theme and the collection.

Categories
Poetry

Creation

As I write, each line reaches for memories
lost, fallen beyond the edge of the world:
kamarupa dwelling in infinity, fading

when my lines do not find them
and my words fail passion and desire.

Eons, lost pasts. Which of them
could dream my frail dream of this
verse? Which, thrown

across the fabric of time, could make
nothing everything?

Categories
Short Stories

The Poetry Reading

I have never really liked giving readings of my poetry. I am not sure why. Perhaps it is partly that I sense that my speaking voice is not the mellifluous voice I hear in my head, does not have the timbre that the poems deserve—that it does not—in my humble opinion, as they say—present them well. I am not a natural performer! Or perhaps it is that I seem to possess a skill, which surely must be unique to any wordsmith: I have the ability to read aloud a line that I have read hundreds of times before, a line which I wrote, for goodness sake, and probably spent some time over—agonising over the perfect word and word order for the sound of the line—for my poems are certainly written for the sound as much as the words on the page—and misspeak the one word on which the line hinges!

Sorry I’ll read that again, I did not mean to say dead, it should be dread!

So begins one of the shorter short stories in When I Am Not Writing Poetry. It finishes – and this was what made me post it here – with a short poem by Malcolm Lowry that seemed to pretty much express the same problem: somehow using the wrong word:

Strange Type

I wrote: in the dark caverns of our birth.
The printer had it tavern, which seems better:
But herein lies the subject of our mirth,
Since on the next page death appears as dearth.
So it may be that God’s word was distraction,
Which to our strange type appears destruction,
Which is bitter.

Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry. Pocket Poets Series Number 17.
City Lights Books, 1962. p.79.

I should add, that all my books – the short stories as well as both of my poetry collections – are available on Amazon as well as from this website.

Categories
Essay Poetry

The Welsh Swagman

I have been working on a poem about a farm. Or perhaps it is about its tenant for some fifty years from July 1848.

In ten years Joseph Jenkins created a farm that was judged to be the best in the county. He had learned everything there was to know about farming from his father and put that knowledge to good use, becoming prosperous and well liked in the community. He had little formal schooling – apart from some early learning he spent only a couple of terms at a school some five miles from his parent’s farm run by the minister of the church – but he learned to write… and so began a lifetime as a diarist.

Despite his initial successes, life on a Welsh farm was hard in the 1800s – he regularly rose before dawn to walk the fields and hedgerows and, although they employed house staff and farm workers both he and his wife worked from dawn until dusk. His successes brought him into contact with the local squirearchy and this in turn led to time away from the farm. Too much time away, particularly as much of it was spent in local hostelries. He repeatedly signed The Pledge but seemed unable to free himself of his liking for drink. Life on the farm became harder… to the extent that on several occasions his wife left him and returned to her father’s farm, sometimes some of the children went too. This seemed entirely wrong to Joseph who felt that he was no longer master in his own house and when, on another occasion, his wife searched his pockets for money from the sale of stock, his pride took a further blow.

Despite his adventures in local inns, he remained someone of note and lent his support and his voice in support of The Milford Haven and Manchester Line – the M&M Line – which would connect the deep water port in South Wales to the English industrial manufacturing centre. He understood the advantages that the line would bring to agriculture and to the rural economy and gave his full support to the project, often delivering speeches and canvassing for support. He was even invited to address a House of Commons committee on the line’s benefit for rural agriculture. Then, when work began on the line it passed through his farm and the work caused chaos in his fields and ruined his carefully laid hedges.

And so, one December night, some 20 years after he took over the tenancy, he packed two bags and, without a word, walked out of the yard, over the bridge near the entrance to the farm and onto the railway line, walking north to the nearest station. He travelled to Liverpool and took ship to Australia. His diaries for the 25 years he spent there have been published as Diary of a Welsh Swagman. Bethan Phillips’ book, Pity the Swagman, provides the back story and commentary – the image above is taken from its cover.

And then, it seems, he returned expecting to take over the running the farm from his son, almost as if he had never left. Understandably, especially when his old habits returned, the past arguments between husband and wife resurfaced, and life on the farm must have become well nigh impossible for everyone. Within four years the swagman was dead.

My poem, Trecefel, will not see the light of day yet. I am sure further proof readings will generate some editing! Maybe I am not quite satisfied yet!

Joseph Jenkins. Diary of a Welsh Swagman 1869-1894.
Edited by William Evans. Macmillan Australia, 1977
Bethan Phillips. Pity the Swagman: The Australian Odyssey
of a Victorian Diarist. Cymdeithas Lyfrau Ceredigian, 2002

Categories
Poetry

Consequences

Because I have seen
such small glory as heaven found
Lit translucent in the wing of a dragonfly serene above the dark pond depths
Lit gold in the sunlit pelt of that one white cat still beneath the tree
Lit in Spring’s faint skeleton of Winter’s fallen leaf
Lit in the fractal eternity of each flake that floats snow down
and know the pain each angel hears
Held in a single seadrop soft splashed on some high rock above the surf
Held in that single grain of sand that shapes the sloping beach or curving dune
Held in the horizon haze that surrounds my coast
Held in that seed on which all life is scribed
Held in the single tear squeezed from the duct
Held in each word locked behind my pen,
know that I shall probably pray that time dreams me more
and in that moment thirst for this man’s illusion and that man’s vision
for I can no longer sleep to sleep
to dream to write
of the mountain or of the desert or of the sea, for the world holds
no words again

Categories
Fiction Short Stories

The Sea Stories

A few posts ago, I mentioned the seven short stories from When I Am Not Writing Poetry that are set in the merchant navy: three short snapshots and four longer pieces: The Beginning, Cargo, The Sailing Board and Such Sweet Sorrow. While the snapshots and The Beginning are true stories or are based on real events, the other longer pieces are complete fiction… although heavily based on my experiences.

Cargo tells of the life a third officer on board a general cargo ship bound – as I often was – for New Zealand. Cargo on board, loaded mostly in the UK, varied hugely from trip to trip, although there were usually cars or car parts, possibly agricultural or other machinery, steel in some form or another and a variety of chemicals. All carefully recorded and mapped to their positions in the holds, having been loaded to ensure that they would be accessible in the various discharge ports. The small section of a cargo plan – colours faded after half a century – shows the upper decks of the forward  two hatches. In the secure lockers, there is whisky, paper, some cartons of books, and some personal effects, while in the open space between the lockers and elsewhere are 28 tons of tubes, chemicals, bags of lime, drums of bleach, three cars, pallets of alkathene, steel plate and so on.

It was the second officer’s job to decide where cargo was stored on board. A complicated task as quite often the ship would be loading at three ports in the UK for discharge at a number of ports in Australia or New Zealand! The second officer would be more-or-less ably assisted by the third officer who would be eager to learn the skills of loading cargo. It would be his job next! And the job that always fell to him was the creation of a master cargo plan and a set of smaller copies – all hand written and coloured in the days before computers and photocopiers! It always amazes me that we did not even have a calculator on board and yet, within five or six years of leaving the sea I was using microcomputers – albeit early and very basic ones – in the university!

I do not recall if the third officer had to make deck rounds while the ship was at sea as the story suggests – I suspect that he didn’t. I do not remember ever doing so! Although later, as a second officer on container ships, the metal ‘lashings’ holding in place the containers stacked on deck had to be checked regularly. But, for the story, I needed some means of getting him onto the foredeck each day!

Each ship carried a ‘chippy’ – a carpenter, a senior seaman on board – and one of his daily jobs was to sound the fresh water tanks to determine how much was left for showers and drinking! This was done by dropping a rope with a series of brass segments at its end down pipes from the deck into each tank. By chalking each brass segment, it was possible to see how deep was the water in the tank when the rods were withdrawn. And this simple task formed the basis of a story when it became inexorably linked with something from the cargo plan that the third officer could not forget!

The story of The Sailing Board came from nothing more than the recovered image of a sailing board (above) and is pure fiction! Pure fiction… but so many elements are true… or based on people that I met on board one or other ship. I have just brought them together in a story!

Categories
Poetry

Back to being a poet!

I am working on bringing together my next collection of poems for publication in a few months time. I had made an initial selection some time ago but coming back to them ‘cold’ after a few months when I had not looked at or thought about them made me begin to doubt, to wonder if the selection and ordering was quite right! Some of them no longer seemed worthy of publication! From the vantage point of these few months, the collection looked almost random!

A few days on and about ten percent of the original poems have been removed from the collection and I am in the process of re-ordering the remainder so that the newly emerging themes are cohesive – at least to my mind! And then – mostly yet to come – is the consideration of whether to add other poems. Have I any new poems that fit those themes? I have at least one in mind! Can I add another theme – probably not!

And all of that means that I need a new title.

But I am back to writing poetry again after a couple of months with little inspiration! I have written about eight shortish poems this year so far and have the beginnings of a longer project in mind!