IN the morning, a Sunday morning, shadows of sea and adumbrants of rock in her eyes … horseback in leather boots and leather gauntlets by the sea.

In the evening, a Sunday evening, a rope of pearls on her white shoulders … and a speaking, brooding black velvet, relapsing to the voiceless … battering Russian marches on a piano … drive of blizzards across Nebraska.

Yes, riding horseback on hills by the sea … sitting at the ivory keys in black velvet, a rope of pearls on white shoulders.

I used to be able to recite this whole poem, and to do so for a class of students or any individual would draw immediate, incredulous looks at the performance. Understandable. It happened the other night, not that I could remember the poem completely, but I conveyed the gist, and explained the storyline my flagging memory could not deliver as originally intended.

It is a brilliant concrete poem, using a ‘grid’ of letters and from this restricted, defined parameter constructing a story of a gluttonous anteater who, having spotted a substantial meal, eats and is sated, but blissfully so.

I think it was this and other similar playful poems written by the great Edwin Morgan that initiated my interest in concrete poetry, and over many years of teaching I introduced this poem and its structural idea to students who wrote their engaging own. I have also used similar ideas with my experimental writing.

I buy Mantel’s Wolf Hall from one of the two
charity shops I visit today looking for second
hand books or vinyl, a tome so large it has to
displace the wholemeal tin loaf purchased a few
minutes earlier at the bakery – butcher’s chorizo
bangers secured in another compartment of the
rucksack. On both those recycling reading shelves
was a single and stolen copy of John Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men, this year’s exam over, and there
will never be the need again to read for study so the
school like each discarding student can care less if
future generations know about George and Lennie,
how dreams are futile, loneliness, why it’s the girls
objectified, if there’s any meaning to sausage curls.

When you drive down our river-road,
spare us your talk about our backwardness,
of how mile after unrelieved mile dispirits you,
of how there is nothing, simply nothing to see.

Go back to your homes and work on your eyes,
bring back a sight which can co-create meaning.

Then notice at sunset how our river is on fire,
a long burning vowel running westward,
back to the mountains, those granite consonants
which thrust themselves at the sky.

Slow down. Colorado can wait.
Skiing, of course, will make the cold warmer,
but think of this river, frozen in winter,
as a long silent scream.

To the settlers who waited it out,
who felt their sodhouses thaw,
who survived this place and were scarred,
pay a momentary tribute.

And, in spring, if you’re the right kind,
catch the wind with its invisible fingers
making love to the water.

You’ll never read it in a brochure,
but the only worthwhile rivers
are those which simplify lives.

I posted a sweet, empathetic poem by Welch the other day, but this one is about Nebraska, the State where he lived and worked – at the University of Nebraska – for most of his life. It is about the River Platte and the nature there that meant so much to him.

When they were little I read
to them at night until my tongue
got tired. They would poke me
when I started to nod off after twenty pages
of Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket.
I read (to them) to get them to love reading
but I was never sure if it was working
or if it was just what I was supposed to do.
But one day, my daughter (fifteen then)
was finishing Of Mice and Men in the car
on our way to basketball.
She was at the end when I heard her say,
No, in a familiar frightened voice
and I knew right away where she was.
“Let’s do it now,” Lennie begged,
“Let’s get that place now.”
“Sure, right now. I gotta. We gotta,”
and she started crying, then I started crying,
and I think I saw Steinbeck
in the back seat nodding his head,
and it felt right to me,
like I’d done something right,
and I thought to myself, Keep going,
read it to me, please, please, I can take it.

‘Reading to My Kids’ by Kevin Carey from ‘Jesus Was a Homeboy’. © Cavan Kerry Press, 2016.

There is a sentimentality in this poem’s reflection, but that’s fine, and especially so as I use it to plug away critically and continually at then Education Secretary Michael Gove’s outrageous personal decision to have American authors banned from examination study at GCSE English Literature, thus depriving the nation’s students from encountering the hitherto popular exam text Of Mice and Men. Sadly, the point about parental intention and influence in Carey’s poem, as purposeful and correct as it is, does not translate into reality on that national scale.

Interestingly, Chief of Ofsted Michael Wilshaw has been making interesting comments of late – critical of Theresa May’s grammar school crusade; stating whilst in favour of Academies he wouldn’t have wanted to see all local education authorities destroyed – but he also claimed to support Michael Gove’s curriculum changes and I do wonder if this includes Gove’s singular ideological butchering of American texts from any exam syllabus? Of course, it’s a shame Wilshaw wasn’t more vocal with his apparently ‘reasonable’ views whilst prominently in office and only voices them now as his imminent retirement approaches.

There is an imminent paradox here when I suggest the ether in School Standards Minister Nick Gibb’s head has anesthetised whatever educational knowledge and understanding he possesses, because of course I don’t believe he does have any of this awareness – all he has drifting aimlessly about and knocking against the inside of his thick skull is the stuff of ignorance.

I am prompted to this observation by reports on Gibb’s dismissal of teachers’ detailed – or it seems, any – feedback when marking students’ homework arguing instead that they should simply put a grade/mark on it. One of his compelling reasons for this is teachers could then set more homework!

The ideal, of course, is teachers can speak with each and every student each and every time they are providing feedback on significant pieces of work – but this is not possible. If formative assessment is to mean anything [as it does, and we have certainly over the years proved that in comparison with summative assessment it is far more purposeful and effective] then there has to be teacher feedback.

Gibb makes his stupid claim in the context of appearing to be concerned about the excessive workload [and markload] of teachers. Well, there you go Gibbo: don’t consider reducing class sizes or teacher contact time or the withering and wearying demands placed on teachers to meet exam/performance targets – just tell them not to waste time doing what teachers do in providing supportive and instructive guidance to students through marking feedback.

Gibb claims that the idea of providing written feedback when marking has no substantive history of thought and practice:

This is one of the notions that came from somewhere in the ether, possibly something was said at a conference. It was never a requirement by the government, never a requirement of Ofsted, and so we have to send out the message that it is not required.

The first part of this is dismissive and rude arrogance, the second part about Ofsted is simply wrong, not that Ofsted’s requirements were ever the motivating force for English teachers in particular providing detailed written feedback – though SLTs will for years have been motivated by that actual demand.

I know we should simply ignore the nonsense that comes from the nonsense personified by Nick Gibb, but he is unfortunately – and ludicrously – in a position of some influence, even if this is merely to have his daft comments made public by the media and through this alone appear to have some credence.

If anyone assimilates their formless ideology from the ether it is Gibb and he is in good company with another fellow fantasist and deflector of reality David Icke:

To be shy,
to lower your eyes
after making a greeting,

to know
wherever you go
you’ll be called on,

to fear
whoever you’re near
will ask you,

to wear
the softer sides of the air
in rooms filled with angers,

your ship
always docked
in transparent slips

whose wharves
are sheerer than membranes.

Poem copyright ©2008 by Don Welch. Reprinted from “When Memory Gives Dust a Face,” by Don Welch, published by Lewis-Clark Press, 2008

Another Nebraskan poet, I like Welch’s empathy for teenage life.

for Andy

I didn’t see waterfowl flying when I was either
coming or going, but I heard about them at his
funeral. All I saw while waiting were the backs of
buildings and two lines either side of the station.
In Yarm where he was going to be buried, talk
was of travellers who would soon arrive for the
Fair, and of shops that would or would not be
open for that time. I wanted to see and sit at the
deli where he had his morning coffees and the
chocolate croissant which melted in summer’s heat,
but it had already closed early for the coming week
and my pilgrimage was stopped by expectant fear.

He wasn’t scared and had planned the poems read,
Wild Geese soaring above what the preacher said.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I attended the funeral yesterday of a dear friend. I had not heard of this poem before, one he had chosen to be read out, aware of his impending death, but I am glad I know it now, understanding why he will have selected it.

Iowa flows across the windshield
like a relaxation video; I turn off the radio and listen
to wind rattle the window near my cheek.
Gravel scattered after the last ice popping
in the wheel wells, I daydream about being in Des Moines
already, with you.
The familiar mile-markers pass like hand-holds up a cliff:
Number 31, and six-eighty becomes I-eighty;
66, I’m halfway to Des Moines; 88,
two-thirds; 99, three-fourths; 121, eleven-twelfths…

At number 60, the Purple Martin Train lounges, a primped wreck, zig-
zagging and only a little purple.
On one trip, I stopped
and bought an “It’s Purple Martin Time!” button at the caboose-
made-museum. I only stopped there once;
like I only had one flat sandwich at 4-Sons; only made one trip
up the stairs of the observation tower near the Beebeetown exit,
one look from above at the little crease of interstate,
the thin line of what I know
among all the foreign fields and hills
stretching from it like butterfly wings.

I always mean to follow some of the signs,
detour through someplace
like Persia, Casey, Atlantic, Van Meter, Waukee, Prairie Rose State Park,
all just tin signs and exits to me.
I never go further off the interstate
than the Have A Nice Day water tower smiling from Adair,
never go past the gas stations,
never put my fingers
to the skin of the East
or West Nishnabotna Rivers;
never slow at mile 71,
where that pond, always flat and still no matter how windy,
stretches two drowning elms like bony arms
clinging onto the sky.

As the counties slowly metamorphose
from Pottawattamie to Polk, I watch the trees along the road perform
all their acts: fat, naked, flowering, flaming, green, chainsawed.
I know the corn by name,
fast-motion life flowing from conception by John Deeres
through green puberty, then fading,
then death at the teeth of their own creators;
the bodies removed, their ground left for crows and cows
to tidy and fertilize.

More of you forms
as the white-on-green numbers count upward.
At 14, I see your feet; at 23,
you have hands, a hazy middle, lips;
by 57 or 58, you are female; 85, your eyes
are grey like the sky; 96, the cornfields fade
into your hair. I know every mile ticking by, I know, can drive
by sense of touch.

This poem appears in The Wisconsin Review and in Mason’s Things We Don’t Know We Don’t Know from The Backwaters Press

WordPress seems quite unable to retain the line positions for a poem, even though I transferred first into Notebook and then into this. So, my apologies.

Matt Mason is a poet based in Omaha, my home town, but from a long time ago. I am chasing these nostalgic Nebraska roots, and enjoying it. This is a poem that namechecks many places and I like that, especially as I lived in Iowa too, for a little time. The early line Gravel scattered after the last ice popping/in the wheel wells reminds me of driving on the gravel roads to and around Elk Horn, Iowa as a kid, recalling the noise and rising gravel-dust clouds in the hot summer.

I recently bought Mason’s book The Baby that Ate Cincinnati collection of poems ‘about parenthood and horror movies’ and hope to write about it one day soon.