Tag: When I Am Not Writing Poetry

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Short Stories

Short Stories #1

I thought that I would introduce the short stories in When I Am Not Writing Poetry one by one. There are 30 in all, so buckle down for a long haul: a month of short stories! I began writing short stories during the Covid lockdown as a break from poems… to make a change… and found that I liked the genre.

The first short story is about a boy – my grandson – who wakes early on a warm summer night and failing to fall asleep again decides on an adventure. It is a story of the night, of noises of the night, of strange noises, of what? Of bravery even. What woke him? What had penetrated his sleeping consciousness? What was there?  Outside his window in the almost dawn? Ghosts? Witches? Was he brave enough…

G. had no idea what had woken him, what had brought him alert and fully awake to the bedroom window in his grandfather’s house in the middle of the night. The gibbous moon lit the garden a little from behind the drifting clouds and a summer breeze ruffled the hedgerow, but apart from that it was completely still and quiet. Now that he had moved to the window—quietly so as not to wake his brother—he felt wide awake and on this hot and stuffy night had no wish to return to his bed. He wondered what it was that he had heard. Had he heard something? He did not remember the sound but that seemed to be the thought in his mind as he found himself gazing out. He must have heard something or he would still be asleep—he didn’t usually wake up in the middle of the night. Despite the heat he shivered!

‘The Den’ can be found in When I Am Not Writing Poetry – available here or on Amazon.

Categories
Fiction Short Stories

The Den

G. had no idea what had woken him, what had brought him alert and fully awake to the bedroom window in his grandfather’s house in the middle of the night. The gibbous moon lit the garden a little from behind the drifting clouds and a summer breeze ruffled the hedgerow, but apart from that it was completely still and quiet. Now that he had moved to the window—quietly so as not to wake his brother—he felt wide awake and on this hot and stuffy night had no wish to return to his bed. He wondered what it was that he had heard. Had he heard something? He did not remember the sound but that seemed to be the thought in his mind as he found himself gazing out. He must have heard something or he would still be asleep—he didn’t usually wake up in the middle of the night. Despite the heat he shivered! Yesterday they had explored the farm again and he now felt that he knew every tree, gate, shed and path—particularly in the little garden that surrounded the cottage. A plan began to form in his mind and he looked out the window carefully examining every part of the garden he could see. Nothing moved. Carefully—very aware of the creaking stair—he crept out of the room, past his grandfather’s room with its open door, the door that would never close again because sometime years ago the old house had flexed its muscles before subsiding back to sleep and the door—or the frame—had warped. He remembered laughing when he had been told—Taid, houses don’t move—and his grandfather had just smiled that quiet smile of his. He reached the top of the stairs. Carefully, one step at a time, keeping his bare feet to the side of each step, he crept down, pushed open the stair door just as much as he had to and arrived in the kitchen. Despite the warm night the stone floor was cold and he tiptoed the few paces to the run of rush matting that led to the garden door. He was surprised at how rough it felt to his bare feet. Whatever had woken him, whatever the house felt now about stretching or yawning, everything was still and quiet. He opened the door quietly and slipped out.

So begins the first short story in my recent collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry: Selected Short Stories. Just one story among 30 – some very short and some quite long… but like the others, I would suggest, (but then I would, wouldn’t I?) worth investigating, worth a further read! The book is available on Amazon.

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
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
Essay

Two Short Stories

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 define

The englyn as originally written in Welsh is:

Wele rith fel ymyl rhod – o’n cwmpas,
Campwaith dewin hynod.
Hen linell bell nad yw’n bod,
Hen derfyn nad yw’n darfod.

Translation from the Welsh by David Llewelyn Williams. The Cambrian News, Society Newsletter, Welsh Society of Vancouver, Canada, July 2012 [p.7]

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.

Categories
Fiction Poetry

My covers and the sea

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 sea

that 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!

Categories
Fiction Short Stories

Latest Curated Lines Title

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”!

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!