Tag Archives: Poetry

What a waste!

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Hardy’s Well is a pub at the end of Manchester’s famous Curry Mile. The building is 200 years old. As a bet with the landlord in 1994 Lemm Sissay wrote the poem that is on the side wall: a rebellious shout. The pub closed in 2016 and is at risk of being demolished. A planning application has been submitted for a block of 26 flats with shops. The wall with the poem will be retained inside the new building. Below is my reply to Lemm Sissay.

What a waste!

What a waste of wise, witty words, wholly wild, worldwide; wicked, wanton, willful, witless wickedness.
When the watering hole Hardy’s Well is without water, wine, whiskey, whisky,
without Wienerwurst, Wi-Fi, whitebait, wontons, wedges, waffles;
without waiters, white witches, widows, widowers in wellingtons,
women, wheeler dealers, wastrels, wino’s, woodworkers in winklepickers,
white wicket keepers, weightlifter with whippets whining at the window;
Welsh welders in woollen woven wetsuits.

Wretched, wretched, wretched! Wrong, wrong, wrong!

We who wave at weddings, whisper at wakes, we wish to wave wands,
write wry words as ways to wound those wealthy windbags with their weasel words.
When we wander away towards Withington, walk against whipping wind
we weep, watching weeds, wear and tear on wooden wheelbarrows
in a wasteland, we who wage war against wrongs, let’s have a whip round.

Poet Lemm Sissay is philosophical about the development: Things change, and new poems emerge. It’s all part of the march of time. (Manchester Evening News).

 

Refrigerator, 1957

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To help me get back into writing, I got out 52. Write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going. The book originated in the 52 Project by Jo Bell and guest poets. I opened it at random and got to Prompt No. 15 titled Bell, Book and Candle. This is a prompt on writing about the unnoticed object.

The second sample poem Refrigerator, 1957 is by the American poet Thomas Lux. As synchronicity would have it, today is the first anniversary of his death. He was born in 1946 on the dairy farm his father owned. On poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets, I watched a short video In Memoriam 2017 which had a picture and a short quote by each of the US poets who died last year.

Adding that date to an ordinary object already makes it less ordinary. It tells us the perspective is that of an eleven-year old boy. More like a vault – you pull the handle out it starts. There is humour: not a place to go in hope or hunger. Then the poem zooms in, heart red, sexual red, neon red, on that jar of Maraschino cherries. The same jar there through a childhood of dull dinners… Then we go down the timeline to grandparents, pig farm in Bohemia. The poem ends and because you do not eat/ that which rips your heart with joy.

 

 

 

 

 

Joan – writing prompt

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To honour International Women’s Day I’m posting this poem about a woman.  It was first published in The Best of Manchester Poets, vol. 2, published by Puppywolf (2011).  I aimed to give the reader enough clues (the Gauloises cigarettes, the stubborn streak) for them to be able to guess the identity of this woman before they read the final lines.

Writing prompt

It’s a good prompt: with which historical figure (famous or infamous) could you have gone to school, college, university with?  Did you even sit next to them in the classroom?  What were they like then?

Joan
One of the girls I went to college with
was Joan who’d left home early.
She smoked Gauloises, had a stubborn
streak, wanted to study philosophy.
We thought she was depressed; she cut
herself and once put out a cigarette on her arm.
I wish I’d asked her why.  I can see her now
with that hair cropped short, staring straight ahead.
People shouting, the smoke, the crackling fire.
Too hot, I need to step back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paterson

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During the Christmas holidays I went to see Paterson, the delightful film about a bus driver who writes poems.  The poems in the film are by the New York poet Ron Padgett.  Back home I found his work in the New York Poets II Anthology, including the Love Poem that Paterson writes in the film.  The first line is: We have plenty of matches in our house. 

Paterson is also the title of a long poem by William Carlos Williams, so I re-read him.  Seeing Paterson sit in his bus scribbling away each morning before he drives off for the day reminded me of another American poet, William Stafford.  He wrote a poem each day, starting with a brief description of the weather, then a short aphorism, then a poem.  I believe his “hit rate” for acceptances was 1 : 7, or 1: 8.  I’ll settle for that!

May you have a healthy, happy and creative year.  If you’re short on inspiration, you can always write about the matches in your house.  Over Christmas I used up a couple of boxes of good old “Svalan” from Sweden.  Now I’ m on “Flix” from the Netherlands.  The packaging is modern, but the tips are brown…