To the grave

I was thinking about this poem today...it's a little one that I've never done much with. As I mentioned yesterday widowhood has been a bit of a theme in some of my family (my maternal Grandmother was widowed four times, my Mum twice...now you know one reason why I've never married!). This poem is about someone specific but I can't go into any more detail than that, I'm afraid. Here it is:


Widows

Widows talk about the war
Their eyes mist
They dance the old steps
Their feet miss
The photos are grey
But the hearts pound
Some widows are half
Buried underground


RF 2005

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Monday music

Singer Corinne Bailey Rae doesn't really need my stamp of approval. Her new album 'The Sea' is being featured absolutely everywhere just now but still...I'm going to mention it too (as much as anything because I'm sure that kind of blanket coverage sometimes puts people off a new release – it makes it seem too pop for some...too easy...too common...).

So, I got the album last week...because I'm a fan...because she's from Leeds (my home for years)... because I LOVE her voice...because I think she's a really good songwriter...because I've always liked rock and soul and so does she (and they get mixed up in her songs). For anyone who doesn't know anything about her there's a good recent interview here and it does cover (as you might expect) how she coped with being widowed at the age of what...29. That's not a reason to buy her album, of course, but coming from a long line of early widows it is something that's likely to make me love her even more than I already do.

Here she is live on Jools Holland's TV show singing 'I'd do it all again':





And here's a rockier one ('The Blackest Lily') - a song with some quite unusual lyrics ('the blackest lily/the blackest pony/won't protect my heart from you'). Well, she did study Eng Lit you know.





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What is the what

I've been reading the most amazing book for the past month or so...this book:



What is the What
The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng
A Novel
by
Dave Eggers
First published 2006

(There are a couple of different editions and covers but my copy looks like the one above - minus the amazon arrow).

'What is the What' is about a young boy living in Southern Sudan, living through the horrors of civil war, living in refugee camps for about a decade (in Ethiopia and then Kenya) and then living as a young man in the USA. You can read more about the book and Valentino here.

I feel really overwhelmed on finishing it to be honest. It is one of those books that once read will never be forgotten. It is gripping, heartbreaking, inspiring, kind of earthshattering...but at the same time it is still the story of an ordinary boy's life. I really can't recommend it highly enough.

Now I feel a bit like I need to go and sit in a cupboard for the next month or so. But I won't.

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Hate the English? Well, some of them...

No, you're not hallucinating - that really is Hugh Grant. And no - I'm not hallucinating either. Well, no more than usual. Read on, read on...


An old poem today and one I was reminded of thanks to a conversation over here about poems in films and TV ads (and which mentioned, as you might expect, 'Four weddings and, thank god, finally a bloody funeral').

I wrote the poem below in 2005 after watching the film 'Love Actually' with my Mum. Why did I watch it, you might ask (if I hate these kinds of films..and I do...) and my answer would be - because it was on, because Mum and I live in the same house so we have to do some things together (but we have very different tastes).

Maybe it was unfair to target Richard Curtis for 'Love Actually's terribleness (as I do in the poem) but then he did direct it and write it so maybe not (you can read more about him here...just in the interests of fairness). It is an excruciating film though and anyone who disagrees with me is going to be locked in a room and forced to watch it over and over and OVER (then see how much you still like it...when you're choking on the saccharine!). One reason I mention Curtis in the poem I suppose is because in fact he has worked on some of my favourite TV shows ('Not the Nine O'Clock News', 'Spitting Image', 'Blackadder'...) but when it comes to films pretty much everything he's been involved with has made me want to SCREAM (though I would say that since I wrote this poem and got it out of my system it's bothered me a lot less...poetry as therapy...hell yes!).

Those of you who aren't English might not get why I find films like 'Four Weddings' (Curtis was writer and producer), 'Bridget Jones' (writer) and 'Love Actually' (writer, director) so annoying but to me it's the ridiculously clichéd idea of England they portray that bugs me so much. And the most annoying things about clichés? That they're true of course! There is this little bubble in England of people who all talk the same, who only know people who went to private school/Oxbridge, who own the land (well, everything the Russians haven't got to yet), who are fairly unaware that there are any other people in England (or indeed the world). They are one of the (OK, many) reasons I don't live in England and in fact the only time I find any of this crop of films bearable is when they bring in Americans (yes, North Americans - you are the good guys again for a change!). Renée Zellweger is charming and funny in 'Bridget Jones', for example, (shame about the rest of the film and indeed the sequel) and Julia Roberts is just adorable in 'Notting Hill' (though she could have done better than Hugh Grant). But you know I don't even hate Hugh Grant – I quite like him in 'About a Boy' - but in the Curtis factory films...EURGH, I want to kill him and wave his scalp on a stick through the streets of London (and boy, will those streets be dirtier than on any of those stupid films).

Scalp on a stick? Maybe it does still bother me a little. Must work on that...although now I live in Scotland I don't have to deal with the annoying English so much and I remember all the nice ones and I only think about the others when reminded (as yesterday). The Scots though...that's a whole other story...maybe I'll write that poem when we move...

In the meantime here's the English poem. It's a bang-bang rhyme number but you won't judge it harshly for that now will you...will you?


Got the Bridget Jones, Love Actually, Four Weddings blues

Richard Curtis
How you hurt us
You know not surely
But you do
London's quiet
Reneé's diet
All this stuff
It's just not true

No-one's poor and no-one's hungry
Everyone has a central flat
Don't forget it snows at Christmas
How could you have forgotten that?

England is a picture postcard
A chocolate box, a pastel scene
Full of men like Hugh and Colin
Every high school prom queen's dream

The England I knew didn't match yours
It always rained more than it snowed
Hughs and Colins - all obnoxious
The spacious flats - all gone, been sold

Now you can say it's just a fiction
A happy world for Saturday night
But all those larks with perfect diction
Make for a strange unsettling sight

It's like the sixties never happened
The seventies, eighties, nineties too
England stuck in post-war limbo
Jolly chaps and work to do

I don't think you mean to do it
You seem a human sort of bloke
You were carried on a moment
But just saying 'fuck' is not a joke

So let's have no more Bridget Joneses
Let's have no more love times love
Whatever happened to Blackadder?
What would he make of this guff?

And look at all your charity work, sir
If you really care at all
Stop polluting life with drivel
False impressions, stories tall

So can you stop please
All this film cheese
Can you stop it
Kill it dead
England's story
Needs less glory
Honest hope
It needs instead


RF 2005


And then he made 'The Boat that Rocked'. I have managed to avoid that so far.

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Change of mood (but more about the brine)

Talking about brine...as we were in the comments to the last post...here's one of my favourite ever film clips:




The film, of course, is 'Bedknobs and Broomsticks' (based on two books by Mary Norton), the song is 'The Beautiful Briny' and it was written by the Sherman brothers (also songwriters for 'Aristocats', 'Mary Poppins', 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' AND 'The Jungle Book'). According to wikipedia 'The Beautiful Briny' was written for 'Mary Poppins' (1964) but not needed in the end and so carried over to 'Bedknobs' (1971). I never knew that...did you?

See what a difference a day (and an underwater dance sequence) make? Not a care in the world...

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News and heavy metal

First, the news...

Details of the next poetry & music event I'm organising are now up here. Go and have a look – it's all very exciting.

And speaking of poetry Dominic Rivron put up a poetry challenge thing last week (see how good I am with language...'thing'...so unexpected...) and I've been working on it a bit this week. I struggled with it to be honest – at one point I started to just hate words which is a totally new state for me...where poetry is concerned anyway...but it seems to have passed for now. The task was to go and listen to the track 'Ghost Road Berlin' over at this myspace page, to write as you listened, go away, fiddle a bit and then post the results. And my goodness have I fiddled! The music/sound on the track is fairly sparse and that was part of the problem I suppose but Dominic likes that kind of thing and I like him so I'm willing to give it a go. Here's the piece I came up with.


Heavy Metal

Deep in the ocean in an old diving suit
An aquatic astronaut with no sky to see
Dull boots on my feet to weigh me low
I'm waiting

Hanging by a rope to nowhere fast
Adrift for dead and falling by degree
I see no-one and the sea sees me
I'm looking

It could be an ocean or a giant's swimming pool
How would I know - no clues on me
Day upon day filled high with brine
I'm tired

Harsh metal noises – clunks and scrapes
I hear all wrong and I cling to free
My head rattles hard in its helmet jail
Still waiting


RF 2010


Go gently.
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p.s. Photo above was looking out towards Scurdie Ness, by Montrose on 1st January this year.

Anti-phallic?

TFE's writing prompts are always so fruitful. I would say that the poems I've written to his prompts have been some of the best I've done in the last 6 months. Also he's such a good nudger...I think I've been wanting to write the poem below for ages, for example, but I only got round to it this week thanks to his latest idea.

This week TFE has Nuala Ní Chonchúir and her book 'Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car' at his blog (she was here last Friday or so, remember) and so he's asked us all to try and write something to the 'red car' theme. It's not something I would have thought of doing myself (cars have been a real problem to me in the last 10 years) but OK...he says 'do'...so I do. (Though it was only after writing the poem that I reread TFE's post and realised that the task was "have the words 'red car' in it"...mine only has 'red' and not 'car' but I can't change it now...and anyway what's a little rule-bending between friends?).


Luckily I had a red car once...back in the mid 1990s (back in the days when I drove regularly and with pleasure). Here's a tiny picture of one just like it (and yes, mine was that dirty too):





It was a Volvo 340, quite middle-of-the-road and staid and that was weird because this was during one of the very non-staid phases of my adult life (much clubbing, much madness, very little sleep). My DJ partner and I (for visuals of us back then see here and nip down a bit) used to turn up at the trendiest places in this very untrendy car and god knows what other people thought of us for it. I suppose in retrospect it was some kind of anti-fashion statement but I didn't really think about it at the time. It was just a car. It was cheap. We were never stopped by the police in it (though the fashion police...well...).

Anyway, here's the poem. There are several references in it that you won't get if you weren't around that particular clubscene at the time (Vague at the Leeds Warehouse) and really I suppose there are some references that only Daisy & Havoc will understand (that was me and her). It was a funny old time – wild and free...in so many ways. The club was run by eejits with overblown senses of their own importance of course...but then what nightclub isn't? You can't have everything.

This poem's for Georgia.


Here come the girls (DJ memory mix)

It's the coolest club in town
And we arrive hot
And safe
Cushioned in red volvo
OAP sofas for seats

We slam the old boot down
Stride past the panting queue
And drop those metal boxes
BANG
To the cobbles with attitude


RF 2010



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p.s. I would have posted a pic of my old record box at the top (covered in stickers and all that of course) but I can't find it to photograph. I think it may be buried in the garage somewhere (apt I suppose).