____ __ _ |--| | \| _ _ _ ____ ____ ____ ____ | |___ |___ -- |--| |--- |--- |=== ____ ___ ____ ___ |___ | |=== |__> _ _ ____ _ _ ____ ____ _ _ |\/| |=== |\/| [__] |--< Y ____ ____ ____ ___ ____ ==== |=== |=== |--' ==== ___ ____ _ ____ ____ __ _ |--' [__] | ==== [__] | \| ___ _ _ ____ ____ _ _ ____ _ _ | |--| |--< [__] |__| |__, |--| ___ _ _ ____ | |--| |=== ____ ____ ___ ____ ____ ____ _ _ ___ |___ |--| | |--| |___ [__] |\/| |==] ____ ____ ____ _ _ ____ _ _ ____ ==== [__] |--- Y [__] |__| |--< _ _ __ _ ____ _ ___ ____ |__| | \| |--< | |--' |=== _ _ _ __ _ ___ _ _ _ _ _ _ |\/| | | \| |__> . |/\| |--| Y ___ _ _ ____ ____ ____ _ _ ____ | |--| |=== ==== [__] |__| |--< _ ____ ____ _ _ _ |___ [__] [__] |-:_ , | ____ _ _ ___ ___ ____ ____ ____ ==== |__| |--' |--' [__] ==== |=== _ _ ____ _ _ ____ ____ ____ Y [__] |__| |--| |--< |=== _ _ ____ _ _ _ -, _ |--| [__] |___ Y . | _ ____ _ _ ____ ___ _ _ ____ |___ [__] \/ |=== | |--| |=== _ _ ____ _ _ _ _ ____ _ _ ____ |/\| |--| Y Y [__] |__| |--< ____ _ _ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ |=== Y |=== ==== |--| |--< |=== _ _ _ _ ____ |___ | |-:_ |=== ____ ___ _ ____ _ ___ ____ ==== |--' | |--< | | ==== _ _ ____ ____ _ _ ____ ___ |/\| |--| ==== |--| |=== |__> ____ _ ____ ____ __ _ |___ |___ |=== |--| | \| _ _ _ ___ _ _ ___ _ _ ____ |/\| | | |--| | |--| |=== ___ ____ _ ____ _ _ ___ |==] |--< | |__, |--| | ____ ____ _ ___ |--| |___ | |__> ____ ____ _ _ __ _ ____ __ _ ___ ____ |--< |=== |\/| | \| |--| | \| | ==== ____ ____ [__] |--- ____ __ _ ____ ____ ____ ___ ____ ____ |--| | \| |___ |=== ==== | [__] |--< ____ ____ ==== , |--| ___ ____ _ _ _ _ ____ __ _ ___ |==] |--< | |___ |___ | |--| | \| | ____ __ _ ___ |--| | \| |__> ___ ____ ____ ____ _ ___ _ ____ | |=== |--< |--< | |==] |___ |=== ___ _ _ _ ____ |==] |___ |__| |=== .
Tag: poetry
A Voicemail for Some Scots Poet
A Voicemail for Some Scots Poet
(scrawled in bed on the morning of Burns Night)
Your thatched roof I hid under with a jar
of rhubarb & custards, birthday gift for a friend
of the old-fashioned sort. Hiding my anxiety
with the pishing rain and roses for eyes,
I tried not to cry with the waiting.
Alloway was never the place for me,
though tourists once snapped my photo
sitting at the bus stop in my pinafore; maybe because
the bus never came as before and I seemed to them
an exhibit of the idle, plaited poet, crouched
and concrete with schoolbag and notebook.
I tried then to draw out my longing
but the salt water was sore and washed
each sketch away. At fourteen I took blackouts in the park
with the help of old Glens and Bell’s whisky.
Now they keep putting pictures of your face
under the hair of Che Guevara but my wi-fi
is shite as I look farther for the secrets
of some revolutionary conspiracy
known only to Twitter.
You were the smell of burnt haggis
in primary school kitchens, the passion
of incompetent, childish longing;
every January blackened for lack of snow
or a coffee topped with Irish cream
and dreams of home.
I’m trying to make you more of a meme
but the birds sing merrily of some Scots
that got tangled in my mouth, made a scandal
of the girls slinging glittery hooks
against the Ayrshire weather, dreich and pitiful
in the stench of manure and nicotine.
You made poetry from head-lice and folktales
while I’m starting out on madness and palm trees
and the single best beat to snatch, ecstatic
from a still calm sea. Dylan loved you
and god knows I share your fetish for roses,
though mine are long-glitched out of semantics
or flourishing poesy. The inevitable middle name;
the rose is a dead rose, a broken cable.
Every time they sing Auld Lang Syne
the spell snaps tight like the cutting of tartan
on a slut’s dress as she readies herself legendarily
for bewitching auld Ayr’s errant men. I love her
with the crimson candled extravagance
of the urban occultist, dull and lonely. She’s got legs
enough to kick them in the Doon when she’s finished,
chortling like a slot machine.
A match, perhaps, for the farmers of the toon
who tossed my friend in a hedge when he tried to join them at school
in talk of fags and cattle and the internet equivalent
of cutty sarks. It’s a fell swoon for the rest of us,
with ardent cries for freedom
from the trendy alt-truths of southern politicians
and the armies of bagpipes swarming the park
to practice for every month of fucking summer.
That hot breath steaming the January air,
some promise for Scots blood running cold in the veins
of my milky Englishness. I’d swap it all
to be back there, sugar-tongued and sweeter
in teenage confusion, rain spilling off
the thatched roof, every drop fused
with a purer kind of truth like the shape of your words (Romantic).
Can you call me dear Rabbie,
if you’re able? I’m waiting, but the rose
is a dead rose, a broken cable.
A Crisp Regret
A Crisp Regret
At the intimate fold of the day
you traced the triplet of burns on my wrist
like a clipped ellipsis, faint remainder
of yesterday’s cigarettes
still smouldering the layers of somebody else’s
epidermis.
Moira Buchanan Exhibition: All Washed Up
Last Thursday I had the pleasure of a day trip to Irvine to check about Moira Buchanan’s exhibition ‘All Washed Up’ down at the Harbour Arts Centre. Now I must say, although I was brought up in South Ayrshire I haven’t actually been down to Irvine since I was a kid – the days when we used to go swimming at the Magnum, or on school trips to the Big Idea (which is now sadly closed).
It was a bright and breezy wintery day and as soon as I stepped off the train that lovely clean briny smell filled my lungs and it was a bit like coming home. Irvine’s a fair pleasant town, once a port. You can walk along the harbour where ships still rest and along the front there are little gift shops and cafes with tinsel in the windows and the smell of coffee wafting out onto the street. I unzipped my jacket to feel the sun on my skin. It was midday and hardly anyone was around, but when I got to the Harbour Arts Centre there was a nice wee bustle about the place.
The focus for Moira Buchanan’s exhibition is, as the title suggests, things which are washed up onshore. There is a pleasing openness to the exhibition. It’s light and airy, the pieces nicely balance a white sparseness with the intricate details of natural forms splayed upon the (handmade) page. Actually, it’s quite difficult to differentiate the natural from the unnatural here. Buchanan uses materials found along the beach to make her art, from plastic to twine and string, to seaweed and driftwood. Instead of simply presenting such materials as found objects, Buchanan’s reworking of their unique structures emphasises the beautiful details and aesthetic value of that which we might consider waste – environmental, human or otherwise. She uses an understated, organic palette and a combination of wispy, delicate lines and bold ink blurs to suggest perhaps the swirls of the tide and the sense of being washed out.
The exhibition has a pleasing, nostalgic feel to it; a favouring of simplicity and the fragile loveliness of form, the childlike excitement in finding beauty amongst tiny, insignificant things. Dotted around the exhibition are little poetry chapbooks made from handmade parchment. Each poem feels like a miniature gift, a token gleaned from the coast and the sea and someone else’s memory. I think in today’s world, where global warming feels like something vast, incomprehensible, beyond our understanding, it’s so important to focus on the little things. The material details that remind us that we are part of this environment, that the ocean gives back what we put into it. There’s a feeling of salvage to the pieces, whose composition seems to perfectly balance the artful openness to chance at the same time as reflecting a careful attention to arrangement and applied form and texture. Everything seems precious.
The more monochromatic tones of the video exhibit suggest something starker, more emotionally arresting. The poems on display recount strange dreams, the changing weather and shape of the coastline, the turbulence of time and human perception. Between the poems are black-and-white closeups of items washed up on the shore. There’s a sense of borders overlapping, of the lush fronds of the clear water coming up to drag back the wisps of shadows and words and memories. I think of black ink pouring on a page, printing through layers of paper like the epidermis of skin. Sinking, achieving a kind of sticky permanence. I think of oil spills coating the northwards ocean. Each poem afloat on the water, the black background of oil, achieving purity in white ink as if blanched that way by the sun and the waves, as seashells are bleached by the tide. Moonlight pouring on still waters at night.
Responding to an ad on Creative Scotland, I sent in a poem I wrote called ‘Fort of the Yew Tree’. It’s kind of channelling a few of the mythical elements of a novel I wrote which is set in South Ayrshire (titled, with some irony, West Coast Forever). ‘Fort of the Yew Tree’ is said to be the Celtic derivation of the name ‘Dunure’, which is a fishing village on Scotland’s south west coast.
I feel very privileged that one of my poems is on that video. This thing that I wrote, a strange and baroque wee baby, has floated out to sea and there it is, somehow washed up in Irvine, travelled through the channels of WiFi and email and typed back out onto some distant slideshow, time cycling in loops and repeating, each image and word again returning like a message in a bottle tossed out to the waves. I wonder who will find it.
Anyway, you can check out my poem along with many others in the video below, made by Moira Buchanan and existing as part of her exhibition. ‘Fort of the Yew Tree’ starts at 2:35 and it spans four slides.
You can find out more about Moira Buchanan’s work on her website.
POVEMBER Week 1: HAIKU
Every year the Glasgow University Creative Writing Society run a wee challenge called ‘POVEMBER’, the cleverly punned name really digging the whole poetic playfulness thing of course. Anyway, the basic point is to set guidelines or prompts to encourage you to up your poetry game during the month of November. Week 1 was Haiku, the Japanese form which is typically constructed as a 3 line poem with 5 / 7 / 5 syllables. Above I’ve written out a bunch of daily haiku which are all unedited and a bit messy and weird but were nevertheless fun to write. I like the idea of haiku having a cumulative effect and I’m not sure how well the above ones fit together but maybe they do something when thrown out on a page like that.
Anyway, it’s a fun process and super easy to have a crack at so encourage everyone to have a try!
You can check out more information on POVEMBER here.
Postcard from the Desert of Reverie
(part of a series of poems written in response to Ella’s paintings)
Postcard from the Desert of Reverie
Dearest, the insects have quivered
long enough in the hole in my heart.
If you were here, you could press
your hand against the skin
where it beats, uselessly.
I have collected enough Mexican sunsets,
enough blood orange dreams
of distant cities, to know
that you are not coming home.
The spider scatters relax
only at night, settling into spasms
like the aftermath of a birth.
In the wee hours, the acids hiss
for a burst of their petulant green.
I have tried to hide my desire
for your eyes of lilac;
I have shined my skin
to the gleam of shellac.
Still it beats.
Time still turns
on the axis of thorns
which circle my chest.
I have tried to confine my thoughts
to shapes, like a rosary;
but the worry bleeds out,
erodes the coating
I have grown to protect
this fragile feeling.
Side by side, with or without,
I know you now
as the virus that spreads in my bones,
the words that swizzle and twist —
and in the darkness without colour,
mean nothing.
— July 2016
Campanology
(...the consequences of becoming nocturnal & the rhythm of headache echoes...) Sithwards in mourning the fragments gather in all honest, most freight of fettered words, the stand-back moving the lilac sky in all smoke and other smells of ethereal peat and parking meters such numbers as sweetness would ring the bell like sparkling to scratch the gravel in bumps upon skinnish silk all dappled pinks still flushed and spiked with light and lime-soured gin the fairies come in original sin and this the last cigarette eked out an emotion ingredient for the summer potion loved by all, the randomness of things in rhythm of night-walked sorrow so narrowed by sharp dark shadows and concrete walls such birth of a cold remainder each day coming for more of the same and cars make out their absinthe stares as if to signal they were never there clanging in the homeward slink of lost epiphanies, the gatherings to such phials of regret cracked fast on the paving to see the people leaving the music spilling and everything a flashing amber ready to be torn asunder.
Strangers in a Bar
We decided to meet in a bar, one where old men gathered for their daily brew and crepuscular women exchanged knitted secrets in the shadowy corners, around time-gnarled tables. I knew you instantly: the Celtic heritage of your red hair, unkempt even now; the cream-coloured Aran sweater, too warm for this time of year—though you were thinner perhaps and therefore colder. Half-way across the bar I could smell your cigarette smoke. I could feel the way it was before, in your fingers, stale and yellowing, chemical; the ash splintered deep beneath your nails, the black clot in your lungs which throbbed as you coughed. I remembered it, the way you would sit up in bed in the middle of the night as if struck by lightning, the thrust of it right up your spinal cord. I would bring you glasses of water; I would stroke your arm as if my fingers were falling leaves.
A pint of Guinness sat in front of you, barely sipped. You were reading a book, wearing glasses. I had never seen you wearing glasses. What was the book? I try to recall it. Frank O’Hara, perhaps, a handful of scattered street poems; maybe something by Whitman. You always had a thing for the Americans. It was part of your mythology, the dream of the road, the need to leave the homelands. You hated this city, but still you were here. You had returned.
I pulled up a barstool and for a moment you didn’t even notice me; didn’t blink once from your reading. I grabbed the glass and swilled some Guinness down me, the froth of it coating my lips. It came back to me, old friend: that black, hoppy, toffeeish stout. There were all those nights: the sticky surfaces of bars, voices that rung cacophonies, inane words snatched from strangers. Outside, the brisk March wind that billowed my hair in your face as you smoked and smoked. I tried to deny the way I loved your smoke. I could’ve sucked it in all day, like you were giving me wisps of your soul. Sometimes, when I pass a smoker in the street, I have to cross the road—the tarriness smarts my eyes.
I suppose I was hyperaware of everyone around us. What would they think? Would it seem strange now, to see this thinness of a figure stealing their way to a table and taking a man’s drink? Would they notice at all? We were always conspicuous: it was the black lines drawn thick beneath your eyes, the fox-coloured shock of your hair; my silence, my obvious adoration. The swirling limbs and all the dancing, the clubs we were thrown out of for being violent. You wouldn’t see it now. If someone took a picture of us, we would be two strangers in a bar. They’d have to pick out the way I turned towards you, hoping for your notice. The drink would seem my own, anonymous. How could they know of our entwinement on any number of sofas, the graffiti of our names we sketched on the tables of trains, the countless coffees and cokes and sticks of gum shared as if mouth-to-mouth in our indivisibility?
I watched your eyes follow left to right along the page, so engrossed; as if looking for treasure beneath the lines, behind the lines, at the end of the line, the final line. Maybe you were waiting to finish a chapter. I longed for you to acknowledge me, to make my interruption.
How could they know, the way we would meet every day, in bars like this, and our spirits were the same? The spirits we drank and sank and raised? How could they know?
Just then, you folded the corner of your page. You reached over the table and clasped my hand, the one that still touched the Guinness. I saw your lips raise a smile, the eyes the same, sea-green aglow.
You said: “Hello.”
Sunflowers
The glow of the oil lamp
melts through the misting dust
that coats the light in the kitchen,
all airy, greyish, mossy and ochre
as the painted walls
(…In the evenings and mornings there are the same
slants of sun or moon, geometries of the cosmic
playing games upon the carpet).
Two weeks ago, the gloom was cut
with a bunch of sunflowers, hacked clean with a knife;
their extravagant heads all smiles and brightness.
They lifted the mood when you entered the room,
skin acquiring that olivine hue
from the plants and the shadows;
reflection of the radio, whose channels
remain static, always, in lieu
of music, or a television crackling,
or a body that would clutch
you so tight in its sadness
as to suck away your own.
Crumbs from the dead hours
grow a fur of mould; the pages curl
on a stack of magazines,
whose gloss lacks immunity to dust,
which scuttles and settles
between the pages, closely closing
leaf after leaf, an army of tiny hermit creatures—
Frankenstein splices of insect shells, fragments of lashes,
fibre and skin.
To sweep it would be merely
to cast a new dance of twirling particles.
It is exhausting, keeping things clean;
exhausting
to warm the stove, to watch the hours
unfurling
through the clock on the wall.
The sunflowers fade now; it is properly autumn,
bronze and darkening green.
Their time has been
and I collect the topaz petals, shrivelled slightly
as they catch on the carpet, the stacks of magazines.
September spreads its beautiful disease through the streets
as the leaves begin to fall, oozing soft fire,
the sweep sap of decay.
In the window, the sunflowers have lost their vigour.
They drop; their heads slump down,
defeated, as if shy at their deaths.
Their filaments wither, every yellow floret
sinks, crisp; a victim of gravity.
Every entrance to the room augments their sorrow.
We have forgotten the day we bought them,
or even where they were from.
There is just the slant of light, the green and ochre
smell of cooking, the smoke across the road,
and the knowing that probably
I will throw those flowers away tomorrow.
— 23/9/16
Cut-up poetry: Constantina’s Pearls
Constantina’s Pearls
mariaology 