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?
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.
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
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
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!
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!
There are two stories in When I Am Not Writing Poetry that are linked – the one relating the ideas behind, and the birth of, the other.
The original ideas behind The Endless Border was to write about escaping from, and searching for life beyond, Covid. A journey made by two friends into the unknown. And I wanted to use their contrapuntal conversations – a little like Beckett’s Mercier & Camier – as a means of adding a further dimension to the story. At the same time it was to be a journey of discovery, and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress [from This World], to That Which Is to Come came to my mind.
As a poet I was also interested in experimenting with the text on the page. I was aware that the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam had written of The Inferno and especially the Purgatorio as “glorifying the human gait, the measure and rhythm of walking, . . . In Dante philosophy and poetry are forever on the move, forever on their feet” and I wanted my text to move along at a slow walking pace and for the conversations to be at the same leisurely pace. Both inconsequential and significant, casual yet intrinsic, in time and timely. Seamus Heaney wrote of stepping stones – those “stations of the soul” – that venturing out on them into the middle of a fast running stream left you on your own, at once giddy and rooted to the spot, moving yet stationary, and I saw my little pieces of text as the stepping stones on our journey: we were never quite still yet we balanced on our path, pausing, walking, stopping, ambling aimlessly yet crossing a divide. We were:
“attracted at one and the same time to the security of what is intimately known and the challenges and entrancements of what [was] beyond us”
Seamus Heaney. Something to Write Home About. (in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001. Faber & Faber, 2002)
A similar suggestion of slowing down the reader was voiced in an interview in November 1980 with the poet Helen May Williams, when the poet Lee Harwood said:
“I like a few words scattered around the page. The idea is that you should just say the few words that are a block, and then a silence, and then the next block. And hopefully, the way you lay it out on the page will suggest the length of silence and so on. One can never notate completely accurately; you can try to hint at it…”
Lee Harwood Interviewed in Leamington Spa, on 29th November, 1980 Link
I tried to slow down the reading of my story to walking pace by inserting random spaces into the text slowing us down as we were aware of all life flowing past. Slowing down the reader. I suppose it may work for some readers but perhaps not for others. We were looking for a future. Searching for the horizon so as to stand on the edge of the past and see a life ahead. This picks up a theme from my long (as yet unpublished) poem, The Elegies of Time (watch for my next collection of poems!) and from many of my other poems, as well as creating a connection – explicit in my title – with my favourite englyn (a traditional Welsh short-form poem): Y Gorwel, by Dewi Emrys.
Behold an illusion like a wheel’s rim,
A magician’s work surrounds us.
An ancient distant non-existent line,
An endless border it cannot defineThe englyn as originally written in Welsh is:
Wele rith fel ymyl rhod – o’n cwmpas,
Translation from the Welsh by David Llewelyn Williams. The Cambrian News, Society Newsletter, Welsh Society of Vancouver, Canada, July 2012 [p.7]
Campwaith dewin hynod.
Hen linell bell nad yw’n bod,
Hen derfyn nad yw’n darfod.
The second story, The Birth of a Story is about the writing of The Endless Border. In structuring The Birth of a Story, as with the first story, I wanted to experiment with form and parallel discourses, exploring the boundary between prose and prose poetry/concrete verse; and also to explain the thinking and ideas of the original, The Endless Border. Once again, I was experiment with structure and voice, bringing in other voices and thoughts to the writing process. My walking companion, my Reader, is ever present and I imagined editors and other commentators watching the text grow and, in some small way, contributing thoughts that influence the writing.
Some of the original references are explained (for example, the banjo!) and there is further exploration of the process of writing, of the source of what Philip Larkin would have called “words of my inner mind”:
“another author’s experience of writing, an experience he had related to and understood, but at the same time, thought that it didn’t quite describe it as he felt it. The idea of a dog inside his head pushing his thoughts out onto the paper…”
The dog inside his head came from: Kamel Daoud: ‘February 7 – While it’s snowing outside: the real secret to being a columnist’ In Chroniques. NY: Other Press, 2018.
In The Birth of a Story I was exploring the processes and the influences that brought about The Endless Border: for example, I recognised religious overtones in the suggestion that ‘the word’ (and thus the process of writing) and ‘the way’ are synonymous (both the process of writing the original and the walking of the path were voyages of discovery) and perhaps, in consequence, one of the voices came from the doubting disciple, Thomas:
“Lord,” said Thomas, “we do not know where You are going, so how can we know the way?”
John 14:5-6.
Dhyāna in Hinduism means contemplation and meditation as a means to self-knowledge.
By now some readers will probably have noticed that there is a theme linking all of my covers: the sea, that “watery part of the world”(Moby Dick) that for some ten or so years was both the foreground and the background to my life as I served as a Navigating (or Deck) Officer in the New Zealand Shipping Company and Overseas Containers Limited, travelling mostly to New Zealand and Australia. Before that, my love of the sea was confined to teenage years of swimming, fishing and surfing on the Gower in South Wales. It was a good start!
Many of my poems (such as The Voyage in Mostly Welsh) deal explicitly with my time at sea while others in that collection simply use the sea as a metaphor (for example, Ocean and Lost). Even in Book of the Spirit, a poetry pamphlet focussing very closely on words, writing and love, the sea – and the horizon, another recurring them – find a way in. The first poem ends:
for a future, a new future, a better future, aware of time only in our memory until –
watching the sun sink below the horizon, time’s illusory rim, and the vast seathat is the circle of our future existence wash its unknown waves to our feet –
we understand the futility of the search, we understand each splash of destiny
And there will be – of course – sea poems in my next collection too. Heatherslade, previewed here, is specific to those Gower years while others – Tides, Shell, The Estuary and Thálassa, Thálassa are of other seas, other coasts, other horizons. The most recent poem published here – Life Tercets – brings together my life as a poet, memory, and my life at sea.
During Covid lockdown, my writing moved on to fiction and to The Dark Trilogy, which is autobiographical fiction: much of Book I is concerned with sea voyages and Book II is a play for voices covering my early years at sea as a Deck Cadet and young officer, from joining my first ship – an experience, like the first few trips, that was quite unnerving to someone who had never left home before (see Innocence. posted here last November) – and ending when I left the sea forever.
And then there is my recent short story collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry Here there are a total of seven short stories set in the merchant navy: three short snapshots and four longer pieces: The Beginning, Cargo, The Sailing Board and Such Sweet Sorrow. I may speak a little more about these in a future post.
So I hope that you will begin to understand the inevitability of my covers – they could only reflect my innate connection with the sea! Even Braiding Brexit is a deep sea blue! For the rest, there are waves, the vastness of the sea and the horizon!
1
A story about
an old poet
and his cottage
2
A dream of an old mariner
lost in Wales
adrift on his words
3
A memory of
a young boy
on his maiden voyage
4
A memory of
innocence
lost at sea
5
A line on a chart
between a girl
and loneliness
6
A communion
between an affair
and marriage
7
A vigil by a wife
waves on a beach
memory of a ship’s wake
8
A night on watch
with a ghost
of a girl above the horizon
9
A night at sea
under the southern stars
a sailor dreams of heaven
10
A tear on the cheek of a girl
writing urgently of love
letters unseen for weeks
11
A union of words
sadly disrupted
by world time
12
A memory in the Welsh sky
a poet sees dolphins
in a bow wave of cloud
13
A murmur
between life
and rhyme
14
A dialogue
between time and
loss
15
A line of verse
between loneliness
and memory
16
A reflection of a man sitting
beside a fire
memories in embers
17
A poem about
an old sailor
in his cottage
Published yesterday, Chris Armstrong’s When I Am Not Writing Poetry is a selection of the short stories – some very short and one almost the length of a novella – that he wrote during the latter half of 2020 while he was locked down in front of his computer during Covid! And there are only so many poems a man can write! Several of the stories make oblique reference to the Covid ‘plague’ but other tales are a reflection of the author’s earlier life, a half-dozen of them going all the way back to his time at sea! Several of the stories also bring to life and give a fictional back story to three minor characters from The Dark Trilogy.
Anyone who has read either his poems or his fiction – may notice a tendency to link themes to the sea! And if not the sea, then the horizon! The sea is always there! Short snapshots such as Ladies of the Port or There’s Whiskey in the Jar are complemented by stories such as Cargo or The Sailing Board. Moving away from the sea there are snapshots from teenage years (such as The Call) and longer works of fiction such as Three Characters in Need of Their Writers. The final work, a short novella – A Writer’s Life – creates a fictional past life in both his place of birth – Brighton and in Swansea where he grew up.
As the Kurt Vonnegut epigraph notes, the book “is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders”!