This poem is by Twyla M. Hansen and she is currently the Nebraska State Poet [2013-2018]. It has a special appeal because it may be about – though I cannot be sure – the hail storm that I recall from around this time which hit, literally, my home town then of Norfolk Nebraska.

Not that I was there at the time. I was staying with my grandparents in Elk Horn, Iowa for a one week vacation in the summer. Whilst I was there, a hail storm had struck Norfolk [and if the poem is about the same event/time, it had a broad sweep] and when I returned home it was as if winter had set in: all of the leaves had been stripped from the trees in the road where my house was and as far as I can recall the rest of the town, and all of the roofing shingles seemed to have been obliterated from the houses – again, certainly on most of the those in my road.

I can’t be sure the Norfolk storm was 1965, but it seems about the time I would have been in Elk Horn [Hansen 16; me 10]. Another reason I can’t be sure is because such hail storms were relatively common [though I must confess, not to my knowledge in Norfolk, though I only lived there for about 1 to 2 years, in two different houses]. That area, and perhaps most of Nebraska/the midwestern states, were subject to tornadoes and similar – Norfolk was in a cyclonic area: this from distant memories – and so again storms were common. Indeed, in the first house I lived in there, all the downstairs rooms were slightly uneven because the house had been flooded on a number of occasions, being near a river, and I do recall my swing-set being destroyed during one heavy storm when a branch was ripped from a large tree in the garden to fall on it.

All of these storm ‘incidents’ have featured in my writing here and there, e.g. here – dramatic moments from childhood and therefore vivid memories. Thus my affinity for this poem, from Hansen’s book Potato Soup published by The Blackwaters Press:

Hailstorm, 1965

Q: What is the largest hailstone in the US?
A: There have been six reports of hailstones eight inches in diameter.
-The Weather Channel

It was the summer I turned sixteen, one brother
was soon to be married and we’d sold the farm.
I remember wanting desperately to be kissed.

Everything wavered on some kind of edge, elm trees
a graceful dome over the dusty streets. Nothing to warn,
only cumulonimbus clouds in the afternoon, intense up—

drafts, sky hazed sulfur-green, hail starting as crystalline
seeds that grew to marble-size, geometrically then,
to the size of softballs, clattering heavy against metal,

wood, glass, against the only small world we knew.
All the west windows in the high school, every roof,
field corn stripped down to stubs, lives shattered

that day by crop failure, gouges, even holes in the ground.
There had never been any guarantee. Always there is
a risk, a gamble, hard choices to make. My oldest brother

and I scooped out stones that ripped through
the ragtop of his ’62 Impala. I can’t imagine hail the size
of a melon. Somehow that day I sensed that youth

had dissipated, that through the vapor of downed leaves
and broken branches, there would always be another crisis,
and another close call, and yet there was something more out there

circling, the open road where I drove west—my oldest brother dozing
in the passenger’s seat, my learners permit in tow—eighty on I-90
toward Missoula, toward the end of what we know now as innocence.

Panties

Panties is a word
hiding all its mysteries
inside haiku

…although that was never my intention – originally posted February, 2015:

Sorbothane Haiku

Sustain the soften
ing: for Shock Stopper Single
Strike, use French semelles

An extension on the Grandpa’ Wallet series, this is a picture/memory I have previously mentioned I would return to describe.

It was the tradition when I was a little boy – here three years old in 1957 – to visit my Grandparents’ house in Elk Horn, Iowa, with the rest of the Carlson family on Christmas Eve. We would always return home that night to Omaha [just across the state line into Nebraska] to have Christmas morning there, enjoying another tradition of sharing a smorgasbord for breakfast/lunch. I won’t have appreciated then, as I do now, how hard my mother will have worked preparing everything around all of this.

Another tradition on Christmas Eve was that Santa Claus would visit. In the second of these pictures of that happening, I would appear to be amazed and delighted. I am sure I was, but this is not the salient memory I have.

Before I get to that, it is hilarious – for a number of reasons – that it never occurred to me that there was something amiss in the fact my Dad would always disappear for a short space of time and therefore miss Santa’s arrival, returning in surprise after Santa’s eventual departure to say he had seen him leaving on his sleigh, or at least hearing sleigh bells ringing as he was flying away.

The other reason is the mask. The memory I do recall with intensity is the one occasion I got too close to Santa’s face and immediately burst into tears because it was so grotesque. I think the whole plastic fakeness will have been enough to strike terror at such a moment of apocalypse, but it will also have been the shock created in that happy and naive expectation by the brutal reality of what I suddenly saw.

I presume it could be the time when the first picture was taken because my face is turned away from the camera. The stare on the Santa face as he enters the room is terrifying. I wonder if it is just after this when I became haunted? I do seem mesmerised and completely fooled by it all in the second: had I completely forgotten about the other visual assault? I am pleased about that latter happiness. I have no problem with the joy of such childhood innocence. The fact this all took place in the warm comfort of my Grandparents’ home, surrounded by a loving family [in the first picture I am sitting on my Uncle Glenn’s lap, and I will write about him too at some stage], is such a solid and fundamental root of the happiness I did have – if not always – in growing up.

I have kept both of these photos quite large for this posting to exemplify the scariness of Santa who clearly hasn’t aged. In this one I have just received my present – here at 5 years old in 1959 – and Santa is about to give one to my cousin who I guess isn’t crying at this time either.

For deliciousness
try fording this rivulet
sandals in one hand

by Buson

I’ve always liked this, and used in my teaching. I first came across this haiku many years ago in an English teaching textbook called Sandals in One Hand by Gareth Boomer and Morris Hood, that kind from the 70s/80s which was simply and richly filled with all kinds of stimulus and activities – from poetry to reading comprehension to writing workshops,

The image I have used of a rivulet just for this posting is called Mother Cummings Rivulet and is by JJ Harrison.

The Archbishop Makeshift has asked me to write a brief review of the book about him, and when you are asked in the way he can, you agree. I like to imagine he urged because he warmed to the poem I composed for the collection, but how does one ever know such things when approbation is all about opinion, and faith?

I did tell Makeshift that I had an affinity for Rupert Loydell’s opening list poem, a catalyst for the other observations that follow, but all I got in response was the corrective that it is a litany poem, an unnecessary nuance to my thinking, though I know where he is coming from. As he tells us himself,

Archbishop Makeshift says there is still room for improvement and we should all keep trying harder,

so I am clinging on to the curve.

It is, however, easy to doubt the assurances from Makeshift and his litany of belief, when

Archbishop Makeshift says austerity measures do not mean he doesn’t love us any more,

therefore I take refuse in the poetry of his many other lines, for example,

Archbishop Makeshift says only memories remain after ten seconds of forever.

I waxed lyrical about a number of Loydell’s expressions in this poem, but Makeshift told me from that moment I was on my own and not to bother him any further with my personal thoughts and feelings. I felt like I had heard this kind of snippet from a sermon before.

The two poem narratives from Daniel Y. Harris and Irene Koronas put all the language of the world before, now and after into a melting pot of explanation and obfuscation to engender a rationale from the pulpit of Lucky’s neverending search for meaning.

Can you contemplate if I had put that exposition to the Archbishop? It would be an interesting mathematical attempt to calculate the distance of explosion projected from the crown of his head to the utmost tip of the mitre.

And I forget – these are the expressions of the Archbishop himself, so such observation is superfluous. But how can we be sure they are? H.L. Hix offers possible forgeries, by a disciple, of the Archbishop’s confessions in Two Fragments from the Makeshift School. And if no more than a mere acolyte writing, it is still the poetry that intrigues as much as the philosophising,

I am dead not as the crow flies, but as the creek meanders.

Philosophising does permeate, thankfully, the bulk of this booklet, though one can never be sure how trained this is. Greg Fiddament asks fresh questions in Given that the universe…. and the answers are plagued by continuing interrogatives.

Paul Sutton too presents uncertainty in his two-parter The Gospel of False Starts; Sarah Cave cuts up further possibilities and perhaps happens upon a glimmer of the truth of these poems, the sparrow chuckling/at his spoof, and Martin Stannard conveys an internal dialogue of madness in Poem (Revolution #19) so that Makeshift’s world is indeed impossible to pin down in the many narratives spoken on his behalf.

As Makeshift demanded brief, this is what I have delivered.

To experience the genuinely enjoyable breadth of this booklet, see further details here.

I am pleased to have a poem in the collection The Gospel According to Archbishop Makeshift [some details here] and recommend this review if you are further interested.

I have just completed marking a school [centre] of a largish number of GCSE English Literature responses on my paper. That’s two essays each on respectively a chosen prose/play and then prose context question.

I mark an H tier paper, so that is notional D to A* grades, or as it is now in actual marking on scripts, levels 2 to 6. I of course have no idea specifically, but my school is quite likely a ‘bog-standard’ comprehensive [and I ape the term from a while back ironically, and sneeringly], and most likely an academy though this accounts for little. All of the students have responded to, respectively, questions on An Inspector Calls and Of Mice and Men.

And it has been wonderful.

The H tier, I acknowledge, targets a certain level of ability [and thus fits into that C/D pass/fail dichotomy to a degree – see previous here and here] and there is an implicit level of competence. For me, it is so much more than this. The students from this one school – replicated up and down the country – to a person write clearly and well and knowingly and convincingly and empathetically and very often exceptionally. At the ‘business’ end [we apply SPaG] they are all eminently readable and accurate, and at the ‘meaning’ end/level are engaged and informed and bright and unbelievably able to say the same kinds of things [how could you not when answering the same questions on the same texts?] in so many differing and nuanced and, yes again, knowing ways. It is phenomenal.

And I love it.

In reference to the two previous posts I have linked immediate above, I am writing this to once again dispel anyone’s belief that GCSE exams – this one certainly – are designed to fail students. Every single one of the 171 scripts I have marked have demonstrated the students’ ability to convey their knowing of and engagement with the texts they have read and studied. The nature of testing does, of course, assert its parameters – the question setting has a focus – but I think it would be at best churlish and at worst obnoxious to argue that this is in any way designed to limit or penalise or diminish in any way the student responses. But I’ll leave that there.

As the final year in which American texts can be responded to in such GCSE English Literature examinations, and in this centre’s case Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, I have been particularly aware of the continued way in which this one text appeals so perfectly to students as readers, understanders, appreciators and responders. This year’s context on the final scene between George and Lennie [spoiler alert in the unlikely event anyone reading this hasn’t read the ending of the novella!] and George’s killing of Lennie has prompted in so many ways the most emotive of empathetic responses. This is naturally the informed response to the power of Steinbeck’s writing. But there is an added puissance to that whole engagement knowing this is the last time there will be such responses.

Considering the quality of responses I have been outlining from this one school – itself a microcosm of all schools, and I couldn’t resist – the quality will be sustained over future years with other texts because it is the teaching and learning and student responses that prevails.

I have written elsewhere [not on this blog] about the intrusion of the literacy strategy on the way students have been taught to write about texts, but I haven’t seen this from this school. The Of Mice and Men context could lend itself to a proliferation of references to ‘pathetic fallacy’, but I have only seen one, thank goodness. And in light of the recent KS2 English GPS tests, I was amused today to read one candidate refer – oddly – to the coordinating conjunction ‘But’ [that is an intrusion from afar at this level now, but one fears for a few years down the line…] yet this again has been an absolute aberration.

This is a celebration of an examination I have enjoyed marking for probably 30 years. There have been changes in Specification, and I started on what was called the Generic paper so open questions asked on any text and tested at all levels, and I have throughout that entire time never ceased to be privileged to read the work of this country’s students. And to feel that as an examiner, and working within the teacher-led spirit of this GCSE, I have been able to reward the students’ responses to the best of their ability and the best of mine within a terminal exam framework that was never my first choice.

As the examination goes online, and for other reasons, I may not be continuing. So I look forward to the other centres I am yet to mark this year.

‘Archbishop Makeshift says he is someone you should admire if you didn’t know better’

‘Sometimes
it is okay to perpetuate the hoax of sincerity’
– Dean Young ‘ Tomas, I’m Still Among the Living’

New poems about the elusive and opinionated Archbishop Makeshift by Greg Fiddament, Daniel Y. Harris, Irene Koronas, Mike Ferguson, H.L. Hix, Paul Sutton, Sarah Cave, Martin Stannard, Aaaron Ken, Charlie Baylis and Rupert M Loydell, with cover images by A.C. Evans.

Available from Analogue Flashback Books, c/o Stride, 4B Tremayne Close, Devoran, Cornwall TR3 6QE, England
UK orders £5 (cheques payable to ‘Rupert Loydell’)
USA orders $12 bills only.

Originally posted February, 2015:

Waiting for the Plumber

Rupert Loydell needs things fixed but he knows this isn’t going to happen. Being broken is a natural order of things in his world and even the poetry – trying to weave the threads of disarray and disintegration into meaningful material – will not cope with the sheer amount of disrepair. Water is leaking in from somewhere, life is getting wet, and the plumber will not come.

But there is a will to make do, to make it better, and even fix what can be fixed as in the poem Broken Circuitry where

‘Now that we know how to fix the car
I keep a spanner under the seat’

As discerning readers we know the car and spanner are obviously a car and spanner and clearly not a car and spanner. Reality and metaphor will not sort themselves out, and the paradox of living with such ennui and triumph [I think I am being figurative/hopeful in overstating the latter] becomes the narrative for all of the poems in this collection that reject the coherence of narrative.

Much of that pervasive ennui is exemplified in the two poems Stay Home and Moodometer, the second an ironic creation because it doesn’t take too complex a gadget to gauge the emotions being consistently expressed. However, I do think an approximation to ‘triumph’ – such mood/feeling/spirituality has to be relative to the suffering – can be found in the poem Staying Afloat:

‘…..Varnish over the screws,
the truth and don’t worry about the small split
in the side of the hull: once in the water
it will swell up and everything will be alright.
There are stripes of pink and blue sky
in the sea towards St Ives, there are spots
in front of my eyes and the sun has not yet
burnt through the morning haze. We will
break our journey here, rest a while and then
move on. At last we are ready to sail.’

The way the poems as a whole express such tensions and occasional resolutions is through the noise and voices that are everywhere, the ‘general hubbub of the world’ [Karaoke Voice Removal]: those from unknown places, in a pub, within his head, the words speaking aloud from a letter, the TV/radio, lyrics in a song, words shouted or suggested from a book of poems, the confused sound of narrative – Loydell extrapolates from this babel the most conversational of heartfelt [though he would reject this term, read here] to apocalyptic truths about love and writing and work and death, and the rest. He writes poems that are ‘Climbing the walls to heaven/gym ropes to hell’ in order to reach those truths [Ill-Matched].

There are patterns in his technique. At times it is subtle, as in O Children where the lyricism moves into the direct observation of everyday, mundane life in the shift of a few lines. Elsewhere it is playful, as in the recurring jokiness of starting lines, for example, ‘I like the idea of siestas/but they only send me to sleep’ [Lipgloss & Shine] – and there are a number of other boom-booms like this; then it is evocation, as in ‘The fat man and his girl are in the angel’s doorway/blocking my line of sight as a moonlight voice/sings about winter’ [Premonition], and there are the teases, as here, ‘….If you think of madness/as not being sane then I am going mad’ [Photosynthesis] where this insertion in the poem of a seemingly off-the-cuff aphorism has a casualness made poignant by the shocking platitude of the line, and what Loydell has revealed about himself – well, whatever self he is occupying at that point from the great variety at his exposal/disposal – in almost all of the poems.

But perhaps he is just angry. Fed up. Bored. Honest.

All the poems in this compelling collection illustrate these opening observations in varying degrees of content and mood. Catching Up is about the collage of writing/life, piecing together extracts and the disconnected found, like piecing together the disparate experiences that make up who we are – but only at the moment of composition? It is making poetic sense of the ‘ghost society that inhabits/our subconscious’, but as fleeting perhaps as the spectre that drifts in and out of what we hear and experience on any ordinary, repeated day [and that, I acknowledge, is quite a pompous line, something Loydell always avoids and why these poems are so convincing in their conversational flow and directness].

Waiting for Luke is about having a drink before a book launch he may or may not attend – such is the uncertainty at every level, it seems, of his life in these poems – but then suddenly he writes ‘….And why/does the depression that so many of us share/break up marriages and tear the world apart?’ That could sound a little trite out of context, but it comes after a series of similar questions that occupy the ordinariness of the event recalled and yet their collective weight of uncertainty is quite – I could say profound, and it is, but it doesn’t sound so which makes it real for the reader and therefore empathetic.

That further empathy for the reader of my age is how the poems concern themselves with the other dissolution – getting older. Under the Radar bothers itself with how things change and how it is harder to keep up with this. It links the world of work that never pays enough, nor rewards enough in other ways, to considering – more implicitly than explicitly – why we endure this and other diminishings in our lives:

‘…..Meanwhile
the door lock became a swipe card
and the whole marking system changed.
The journey toward summer is more
convoluted and confused, no slipping
out under the radar this time it seems.’

There would appear to be the explicit consideration of that link between work, pay and well-being in the poem Fourteen Days to Pay, but it isn’t as simplistic, nor naff, as that. This is a poem again about the passing of time and experiences and the ability to experience, so there is that persistent sense of loss, but also being ‘safe’ in the immediacy of counting the days before pay to settle the bills whilst also being hugely aware within that domesticity of how redundant these pay-offs – literally and figuratively – are in the larger scheme of things. This mix of realities is summed up in the closing lines:

‘…..The trouble with growing up
is growing old and knowing that we do,
the trouble with listing your troubles
is that however many times you read them
you still don’t understand exactly
how they work out the final bill.’

Lest this seem overly morose material – which it is not as a collection, and the humour constantly buffers/counters – there is the next poem to write in full as it defines quite simply, and again without any pretence, a more accepting outlook:

Ahead of the Game

I have already marked
next year’s submissions
but am worried about
timetabling the year after.
I have rehearsed tomorrow
until it has replaced today
and have forgotten to say
goodnight. You do not seem
to think it important, but
I wait for every kiss and touch,
have been visiting the future
to see how it goes. Look:
that’s me, way over there.
I haven’t changed at all,
have decided not to die.

And there’s another boom-boom to remind of the lightness [not that any of these apparent excusing caveats are intended as such, and Loydell is rightly confident in whatever the moodometer wants to hear in his work], the ‘Gravity was everywhere back then/but I didn’t let it get me down’ from The Taller You Are The Shorter You Get, a poem that seems constructed from a variety of sources, as so much of his work always is, presumably the title here from the album by band My Dad is Dead.

It seems to me that the real mix of moods is articulated though the cohesive wrestling with being weary and being creative – a simplistic pole to draw here as near conclusion, but that has been the core dynamic as I have read. I have lived comfortably with these poems over the last few days, always wanting to read more, always seeming to connect with those variously manifesting moods and being compelled to do so by that conversational creativity which informs these poems as a whole [important to state as Rupert Loydell’s work to date is expansive in the way it can be experimental – another term he would reject in the same interview referenced earlier – and stylistically varied]. My actual conclusion will be a mention of the poem On the Other Side of the Mountain – the intention to tempt others to want to read as well – and it is the observation that this poem is perhaps the most lyrically conversational exposition of the existential I have ever read.

Take that to the edge and enjoy.

You can buy the book here.