I am most pleased to have three poems at The Babel Tower Notice Board today: https://www.thebabeltowernoticeboard.com/featured-writing/three-poems-by-mike-ferguson

Thank you Richard.

These are not mud flats, a
boat held instead by a clean
weight of stones.

Wrecks sink to the depths
or display their wear and tear
for amateur snappers.

Is it the alliteration
or proliferation which makes this
so common?

As if the sea has
painted it: old rope here is a
nostalgic attachment,

or the fake news of a tourist trap;
its flaking are colours uncertain of their place
in the composition.

That blue boat in black and white
speaks for knowing or hope
over evidence.

I once hung a black fishing net
in patterns across the cottage’s beams and
orange wall for a similar aesthetic.

I

If a traveller engaged in a search, they can send poetic messages of discovery and disappointment. Being able to connect with the pursuit. The hallmark of managing a threat is in the desire. Or there is an alternative of having been sent for the audacity. When it is a tipo. How the letterbox was transported to a reception far beyond its expectations. As a goal, it would have to be fervent, and that requires a certainty of achieving – this notoriously counter to the source of creativity and failure. Usually involving a storyline, you do not want to nail this to the sticking place. Unlocking a potential for surprise and difference, there is self-promotion embedded in the most generous of offerings.

II

Creativity as a pursuit
to expectations,

fervent for surprises
and messages of self.

When not a discovery it is
a potential to nail difference,

an alternative hallmark for
unlocking disappointment.

Being beyond managing,
wanting to be embedded

is a reception engaged
in the storyline.

III

Uncertainty requires a generous
disappointment in expectations,
unlocking potential and desire in
a quest for the alternative surprise.

As a discovery, to want failure
is achieving audacity in the pursuit
of the poetic connect, managing a
counter to involving a storyline.

Messages are fervent when there
for a difference, desire transported
as a threat beyond the embedded
and offerings in pursuit of a search.

The desire of surprise creativity
from a connect beyond certainty.

There are just so many words that fit on a line
– Peter Dent, ‘Their Forecast Not My Forecast’

I like the ending and then I don’t.
A Mexican ghost town crowds in,
detectives in London are on the case,
trying to pin the moments down,
put them into the correct order
so they can solve the problem and
go home. I am scared of the future
and not very keen on the past:
too many variables and unknowns,
so many ways to join the dots
but none of them make sense.

This new music tries to evoke
a past that never existed,
where everything stood still
and we were in control, able to
relax and confide in one another
face to face. Masks are mandatory,
and if we speak at all it is by video
or phone. The museums are empty,
in pubs we sit apart or in the garden;
everyone sleeps in as late as possible
and fails to submit on time.

Deadlines come and go, guitars
shred the minutes and subside.
In a dream I visited all the places
I never saw, probably never will.
A man with a flashlight illuminates
the rules and tells us what to do.
When we were fewer and healthier
there was less to do and the list
of things pending was shorter,
the agenda quickly dealt with
before coffee and cakes arrived.

It is about to end then it doesn’t.
Even the small bright lights
have gone out, we are in the dark
and alone, afraid of the now.
I jump before I think, weep later
as it all sinks in. It’s our world
and look what we have done.
I am lost in the humming air,
the rain is endless, the last
of my dismantled boat has gone,
collected by a man from Kent.

© Rupert M Loydell

There are two
sunrises and three suns
this morning,

watching one
over a field of pumpkins
not mine

so broadly orange,
this one here rising to the
right, a bifurcation

of orb and
the glass reflecting, an
open chord

and bottleneck
glide from Fred McDowell
counterpointing.

I find the following annoying as well as sad:

At these Covid times and the GCSE debacle of this year [both connected, but the latter’s nonsense caused by algorithmic software and political ineptitude] the last thing we need is a further dreadful encroachment into the year 9 English curriculum.

English teachers with any subject content sensibilities have been aware and critical of this increasing dismantling of, for example, giving time to creativity and exploration at Key Stage 3 [with the driven and obsessional GCSE demands], so touting new ways to further this deforestation is unhelpful and wrong.

And as for ‘knowledge-rich’ – well, that says it all: tapped into the new Hirschian dogma and this government’s [a la The Gibb] philistines’ adoration of it. We should be looking to radically change GCSEs, probably by finishing with them and looking at teacher-led assessment opportunities at age 18. There is plenty of historical insight into this, much surprisingly old as it was always rejected at the time, but still full of intelligent relevance.

…could be turned into a concrete poem, I’m sure.

My review of Edwin Morgan’s Centenary Selected Poems can be read at Stride Magazine here.

With thanks to IT and Rupert for my poem ‘Machine Learning’ here this morning.

On this day 50 years ago I was marooned in the small town of Oakland Iowa with which I had no connection whatsoever, in limbo and nearly in transit out of there back to England. It was also the day Jimi Hendrix died.

I remember the day well because when I heard the news I went down to my basement room and cried on the bed there. Being in this small town where I didn’t know anyone and obviously without the friends I’d recently left in England – those who shared my musical tastes which included a love of Hendrix – that extra layer of genuine sadness added to my deep sense of isolation and loneliness. I was 16 years old.

I can’t remember precisely, but I might have actually just returned to Oakland, having left to fly back to England, but when I had got to Omaha and the airport – the town where I had been born and just over 30 miles away, so a geographical ‘connection’ – I wasn’t allowed to catch the plane because my father had thought it was OK for me on my own to fly on a family passport, and it wasn’t. My aunt, who lived in Omaha had come out to drive me to the airport, then had to return me back to that temporary but now extended-stay home. We weren’t pleased. I can’t remember how long it took to get my individual passport, but I do think I was there waiting for it when Jimi died.

I didn’t have any of my Hendrix albums with me and can’t recall the radio playing his songs. Being desperate and self-absorbed about wanting to flee, I wasn’t very involved with the family so I’m not sure I would have watched any TV.

There is more to this ‘story’ – why I’d been in England, why I’d returned to the States, and why I was anxious to return to the UK – but it is the memory of Hendrix’s passing that reminded me today of that miserable time.

Sorting out the UK exam board offerings for GCSE English Literature 2021 is a bit like working out the variables and logic of covid restrictions across the UK, for example in England you can have just 6 people in a garden but you can have 6 people in a pub x another 6 people x another 6 people x another 6 people to as many 6 people units can be fitted in to be ‘covid secure’. In Wales you can have 30 people in a garden. I think.

And I can’t actually find all of the UK exam board offerings based on the Ofqual decision to reduce the number of optional elements required for study and response at GCSE English Literature in 2021. But here are two of them [in addition to AQA posted earlier],

OCR

This one is simple. Unadventurous and in the Cuprinol Mode of Delivery: this is what was said / this is what it is.

Pearson Edexcel

I hadn’t realised, then I found out, then I forgot, so my apologies, that they too had gone down the maverick route, though this less maverick than the not-quite maverick route of AQA, but I guess it’s AQA I need to apologise to/for as they aren’t alone in being whatever they are. I don’t know why Edexcel has gone for making post-1914 Literature another compulsory element. Unlike Poetry, there wasn’t a post-1914 writers of literature outcry for this to be retained as compulsory, though the insider dealing must be that as this is predominantly An Inspector Calls it was in many ways a no-brainer. But by adding a compulsory element, Edexcel are also reducing the options available to teachers. And if a school has already taught the 19^th century Novel and Poetry, this compulsion is a disadvantage.

Anyway, back to the Covid no. 6 analogy, I do wonder if Jimi Hendrix’s If 6 Was 9 will be making a comeback to top the charts [if there is A Charts these days]? You’d think it would be a shoehorn in. Perhaps the song’s lyrics could be set as AQA’s unseen poetry element with a question about how the apparent indifference stated in the lyrics links to the uncertainties we face today…

Now if 6 turned out to be 9,
I don’t mind, I don’t mind