Categories
Essay Poetry

Memories

Catching up on some unfinished reading from last year, I came across a poem by Derek Coyle in the Spring issue of Poetry Salzburg Review. I am guessing from the descriptions of a childhood Christmas that he must be around the same age as I am! More to the point the final lines chimed so closely with comments I have made in this blog about memory that I thought it worthwhile making the link. There was a longish post here: Who is Trystan Lewis? Who am I? starting with another blogger’s apparent desire to erase some of his past (!) I rhapsodised on the importance of preserving our memories, our histories of our past selves to pass on to children and grandchildren, bringing in the poet, Helen May Williams’ blog where she wondered whether the person she was last year was the same as the person she was now, and whether that person would be the same in a year’s time. I finished by suggesting that writers should spare a thought for the generations to follow who may wonder why Grandad had a… or what Grandad did… and what he was like when he was younger… was he the same man then as the man they came to know? Helen May Williams commented:

Memory is selective. An individual may go mad if they have a photographic memory that erases nothing from the record. A culture might die under the burden of excessive memorialization, and it might expire when the archives are totally destroyed. In all things we cultural curators must make choices and critical selections.

But as I said in a earlier post, Some would argue that no genre is more fictitious than a biography,

…memory is a curious thing! As some past event is recounted for the first time a small fact – the colour of a dress or the positioning of a piece of furniture in a grandparent’s house – might be added, perhaps hesitantly, doubtingly, in error… but in the very act of speaking about the event that erroneous image is cemented into the memory – fixed to the extent that on subsequent retellings the blue dress is there, in the picture, as your mother stood in front of her parent’s sideboard. And now there is no question in your mind that you are describing things as they really were! An autobiography is the curated sum of our imagined memories.

The ‘curating’ may be unintentional rather than ‘critical selections’! But back to Derek Coyle’s Christmas! “Dad sits shoeless by the table / the first tea of the day in his hand” while “mother, she is busy about the Brussel sprouts”. So true! Later he catches a younger me:

and me in brown square patterned slacks
before jeans or corduroy.

But it is at the end of the poem that he reflects on tricksy memory! He remembers his father’s mother with her curly hair and spectacles, always smiling, as I suppose grandmothers always do.

But maybe I am lying

and these are all just memories
robbed from photographs I’ll steal later.

Coyle, Derek (2022) Those Christmas Mornings.
Poetry Salzburg Review 38 (Spring 2022) pp.158-9.

Categories
Ceredigion Arts and Craft Trail

Calling All Poets in Ceredigion!

The Ceredigion Art and Craft Trail – of which I am a member – is a not-for-profit body running exhibitions and Open Studio Weeks throughout the county throughout the year. The most recent was at the Bandstand in Aberystwyth in the run up to Christmas. Artists, Writers and Crafters join together to promote their work with shared events and exhibitions throughout Ceredigion. Membership includes an entry in our popular online directory and in the annual printed directory, the possibility of selling your works from the website, feature articles in our Art Trail e-Magazine, and many other opportunities. The website can be visited at https://ceredigionarttrail.org.uk/

Individual membership is just £55 for 2023.

Adding writers and poets to our membership was a recent innovation and at present I am the sole representative of our craft. I am hoping that I may tempt more writers and poets to join. We are hoping to host some book/reading events if enough of you join.

Categories
Poetry

Genesis

Of the Dust of the Ground

Dirt!
We were held between the tangled roots of the tall grasses and the fragrant herbs
and, amongst those pale veins that gave them life,
teased by the whispering white threads of the mycelia,
pushed aside by the harsher muscular cords that gave succour
to the bright pomegranate and the fragrant cinnabar,
we were stretched  and broken as roots grew and gained power
yet we held their tubers softly in place and felt
the rhizomes spread through our mire.
Water fell and we accommodated it briefly
as it gave succour to our burden,
drained, and left us, dust blown in the winds or
muddied clay, sod that found brief form,
as the waters gathered and flowed,
servant to some greater force, to tumble in rill and stream,
to join mighty rivers, seeking their genesis.
We were the loam left.
An afterthought.
Dust!
We were the stuff of clay, without form beneath so much life:
above us we knew verdant vine, meadowland and forest
flourished in the mists as we—slumbering,
nascent among their umbilicals, feeding their growth, were
diminished by the day’s fierce heat to mere loess,
mere powder from dirt’s dust destined for desert or steppe—knew only
the mighty winds that reduced our substance
until at a dawn the brume returned and held the gusts at bay
and we were one, at peace between the green grasses and the purple thyme.
Then there came one great exhalation
and in that breath power came to our ylem soul.

Categories
Fiction Short Stories

A Little Taste

A Time of Plague; a Time of Love

It was strange to think of the poet sitting in his usual chair, drinking his usual espresso coffee and watching the world go by. As usual. She liked to think of him like that—his old scarf still around his neck despite the warmth of the place, his jacket open on the usual black T-shirt and his bag on the floor under the table—although she knew that now—now in this strange time—he would have to be at home. Because he was old—well, old by her standards—and he wasn’t allowed to leave his house—he had told her that…

The beginning of one short story in When I Am Not Writing Poetry (available next month).

Categories
Fiction

The characters behind the characters!

If you have read The Dark Trilogy you may remember three minor characters – Jan, Simon and Neal – friends with whom I walked some of the way home when I left prep school each day. They only get brief, passing mentions – adding some detail from life that serves to add to the picture which hopefully also make the story more real.

I remember that we both used to try to walk some of our way home from preparatory school with the lovely Jan although she turned off our route almost as soon as we reached the end of the school grounds…

and, again,

the pretty and petite Jan with whom – along with Simon and sometimes Neil – we made sure to walk the few hundred yards to her aunt’s bungalow as we left school…

…but in soon-to-be-published When I Am Not Writing Poetry I have created back stories for all three of my friends which gradually build their relationships to me in their adult lives. Of course – although all three children existed (I have not used their real names!) – I do not know their adult lives as well as I pretend.

I wonder if any of them will recognise themselves!

… or the blazer badge!

Categories
Poetry

Annual, again

Amongst
the soggy rotting leaves
or between
the bowed grass blades
thrust
the tips of snowdrop
leaves

Categories
Event Fiction

New Title!

What will the next cover be?

We are pleased to announce that our new title, When I am not Writing Poetry will be available at the end of February. This collection of short stories – some very short and one almost the length of a novella – was written during the latter half of 2020… my only excuse being that I was stuck in front of my computer during the Covid lockdown! And there are only so many poems I can write! I needed a change!

Several of the stories make oblique reference to the Covid ‘plague’ but other tales are a reflection of my earlier life, a half-dozen of them going all the way back to my time at sea! Regular readers – of both my poems and my fiction – may notice a tendency to link themes to the sea! And if not the sea, then the horizon!

The sea is always there!

Don’t forget you can buy the latest titles directly from here!

Chris Armstrong

Categories
Poetry

The Absent Sailor

Sunset

Letters

Those love letters from the seventies
I could not bear to read again
and could not bear to throw

Those airmail forms
those tortured lonely twelve page laments
that I read and read so many times
in my cabin off Cape Town,
in Melbourne and Sydney:
So many words
So  much love

But in the end
They were just ash
And I scattered them

Ashes to her ashes

First published in Mostly Welsh 2019 (Y Lolfa) p.92

Categories
Poetry

A Winter Poem

Winter White

Winter white. The cold wind across the fields

spoke only of snow and wearied him

prisoner in the cottage where his impatience yields

no words on the cold and barren purity of the snow

white paper, no words longing for their page longing

.

for their precise moment to mark the dreadful whiteness

that had come with winter’s snow and the ice that followed it,

their precise moment when reality’s niveous brightness

might be dispelled by their generous rush of verse, of

words spilling sliding rhyming across the paper’s snowy prospect

.

A poem partially inspired by the final word in the final volume – Quinx or The Ripper’s Tale – of The Avignon Quintet by Lawrence Durrell.

Categories
Fiction

Gorillas, Children and Reading

One of the charities that I support is Nkuringo Education & Community Support (NECS) which was set up to support the school and villages of Nkuringo in Uganda – who hosted a group of us when we visited in 2014 to see the mountain gorillas of Bwindi ‘The Impenetrable Forest’. The charity – through its ever increasing membership has supported many, many children through primary and secondary school (which involves providing clothes, shoes, school books, bunk beds, desks and mattresses as well as paying for their education) and has gone on to support the building of further classrooms, a teachers’ block, and water tanks as well as providing medical aid and small loans for villagers to get a business started. There is always more to do! Following Covid-19 when money was terribly short in the village the school buildings have fallen into disrepair as the little money available had to be used for food. It seems endless. And there are always more children wanting to start school!

The page images above are from the group’s newsletter – a bumper issue following the first visit back by the Trustees to assess needs and progress. You can follow the group on Facebook as GO UGANDA NECS where you can read the entire Newsletter (Recent Media in the right hand column).

And please – if you feel the least tempted to buy a copy of The Dark Trilogy, remember that half of the royalties are going to the NECS charity.