Please don’t leave me

beached with other lonely ones
like a tombstone rising on a tide line
as a useless see-through windbreak
sucking a billion grains of sand

Please return me to

a machine marrying me to others
the reception of the receptacles
other transparencies
new possibilities for my future

Please don’t leave me

intruding in a sand dune
hidden like a trap
waiting to be drowned
emptied and forgotten

Please return me to

a new grip for drinking
those who’ll see me again and again
tidal waves of conveyer belts
plastic reinvention

Please don’t leave me

scattered by the random wind
with four centuries of dying
swelling whales like Jonah’s cries
digestible as poison

Please return me to

a better environment
seashore hands and filled anew
a broken link in the food chain
fresh thinking

One day to go until National Poetry Day and its theme of Messages, and here is another poem I have been working on using the ‘message in a bottle’ idea, linked to the current Surfers Against Sewage campaign for a national move to deposit return bottles, read here.

On the day it is also reported that discarded take-away coffee cups could each take 30 years to break down, these are no-brainer environmental issues and necessary suggestions for beginning to seriously deal with it.

This is another list poem idea that could be used in the classroom tomorrow, students perhaps engaged and enthused by the issue and expressing their thoughts and feelings in poetic messages.

This picture is of the lawn-damage my current cleverclogs mole is making – not going underground to erupt in mounds of dirt, which is the norm and thus making it easy to place traps to catch and kill, but rather skimming just beneath the grass and causing these random lines of damage without my being able to track or find any spot with a depth where a trap can be set:

The little bastard. I have written about my decades’ old battle with moles and posted about this here and here as well as this haiku about the last mole I caught and killed here. And I have no compunction about getting rid of these creatures because of the extraordinary damage a single one can cause, an aspect I have explored in my ruminating but cathartic poems because I do not normally or easily kill animals.

I think the poems are cathartic…

Mole Au Fait

This new mole is a submarine, a few slight mounds
breaking through the grass-arched tunnels like failed
periscopes, no holes in these with a depth to set my
traps which have caught and finished the others. A wise,
wily skimmer.  I could walk for hours along its winding
protrusions and still not lay the lawn back to its flatter
unevenness from that damage of years ago – and those
poems about give and take, growing older, life and death.
There’s no philosophy in this, but a seeming evolution of
tactic just as I had learned a new skill for slaying, and it’s
the taunting that angers me now the most: ribbed routes
plotting its underground joyrides that I never catch live in
the calculated journeys of insult. I wish I’d made my
gibbet years ago for a killer’s visible if mummified wins.

NB I don’t know if it is a well-known term: the ‘gibbet’ in my poem alludes to a keeper’s gibbet. On the large Suffolk farm where I worked many years ago, the gamekeeper was responsible obviously for raising and managing game-birds for their annual slaughter [I do think this is quite different to a mole invading my garden] but he also had to control the vermin on the farm. To demonstrate he was doing his job, the gamekeeper followed the tradition of hanging dead vermin from a tree where employers/owners could see evidence of his work being done.

[with acknowledgement to nationalpoetryday.co.uk]

I am continuing to plug National Poetry Day and my teaching [or for anyone] resources of creative writing ideas on the theme of messages for the day. I always support this annual event though this year I have put more effort in than ever, and the genuine hope is that as many as possible will be engaged in and encouraged to take part, writing their own poems and/or sharing others’ poems.

My following poem Messing with the Messages on National Poetry Day is a concrete poem that explores and plays around with the theme, and that is, I think, the essence of the day, to have some fun with writing creatively:

That’s fine.

That’s correct.

Yes, OK.

Yep, correct.

Oh my goodness. That’s despicable. That’s nasty.

OK.

No, that’s disgusting! You lying bastard. How could you?

That makes me sick. I want to physically puke.

Probably honest.

That’s an easy one.

You sick fuck! Where does this darkness come from?

Horrible. Horrible. Horrible.

I didn’t think that was possible!

I am appalled. Utterly appalled.

Well, you wouldn’t get that wrong, would you?

Another easy one.

Too easy.

Wow! You are the most contemptable person I have ever tested.

Wicked. Wickedness personified.

The devil incarnate. This is outrageous.

Scandalous!

I am lost for words.

On BBC News yesterday, one of the football agents caught on the newspaper film sting about football shenanigans was interviewed. He claimed the accusations he made on camera were all lies and to prove he was not lying about this now he would willingly take a ‘lie detester test’. He said this twice.

I wrote the following when away from home for a few days, never able to fully escape…

I watched Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party Conference speech live on TV on Wednesday, and as an incidental but crucial observation I thought it very good, obviously for me wanting to hear socialist principles articulated with conviction, clarity, warmth and genuine belief. This is what I saw and heard, as did most of the conference delegates it would seem, though not according to BBC bloated political commentator Andrew Neil. Almost immediately after Corbyn had finished, Neil as anchor of the BBC programme showing this went to the ‘outside’ reporter in the foyer of the conference centre who conducted a live, impromptu, in-your-face interview/straw pole of delegates exiting the venue. His question to all was quite simple: what was their view of/response to Corbyn’s speech? He managed to get between 6-8 or more people to respond immediately, and almost all were without hesitation positive, some just expressing that simple response, and others expanding on the policies they were pleased to have heard, a number commenting favourably on Corbyn’s delivery and persuasiveness.

Of this admittedly small straw pole – but I repeat, live and immediate and therefore an honest set of responses – there was one dissenting voice. Only one. This was, however, immediately countered by another person who argued quite forcibly against the dissenter. It is worth mentioning also that the crux of the singular negative observation was that the person hadn’t heard how Corbyn intended to deliver his policies/suggestions, so it wasn’t even opposed to the principles of them – not perhaps surprising, I admit, as the person dissenting was still a Labour Party member.

Straightforward then, yes? Not according to Andrew Neil. His immediate summation of that live, impromptu questioning of exiting delegates’ responses – which were all positive, bar one – was that here we TV viewers all were instantly after Corbyn’s speech and witness to the ‘fact’ there was already in-fighting and argument. Apart from being patently untrue (!) this was the most despicable piece of broadcast journalism to generate a negative narrative that simply did not exist on the evidence we had just seen. All of us watching. Saw and heard. Witnessed as a viewing nation. Andrew Neil simply lied.

Two things: (platitude alert for the first) there may well have been more than one dissenting voice from those who watched Corbyn’s speech in the conference hall, but this wasn’t presented in the BBC interviews given live; (prat alert for this second) earlier in the day, Neil had conducted an interview with two guests about Main Stream Media (MSM), obviously including the BBC, and whether this had reported contrarily on Jeremy Corbyn and the conflicts of late within the Labour Party. Fumbling with saying the initials MSM and pathetically even the term Main Stream  Media (how ridiculous), Neil in interviewing the two clearly conveyed his personal view that the BBC did not indulge in such negative reporting.

Pants an inferno.

Having gone from the often aggressive pulp noir of four Jim Thompson novellas/novels to a measured pathos in the campus fiction of John Williams’ Stoner, I am now reading the elaborate, burgeoning prose of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run.

It is my first encounter with his work, and he has the most fastidious, intense descriptive style. I am still relatively early in the story, and yet again I am enjoying this literary learning curve in coming to this famous author’s writing so late in my reading days.

You notice immediately that his describing is compulsively extravagant – though the originality keeps it from being overwrought – and in the beginning that decorative description is attached to the most commonplace things, like a reminiscence that Rabbit has of climbing telephone poles as a boy. There is sumptuous detail about all kinds of ordinariness, but as the novel progresses this grows into insights about people [characterisation] and their thoughts and feelings. But it is also much more than this: it is philosophy and psychology conveyed through layer upon layer of outer and inner observational detail.

I am at the part of the story where Rabbit is getting to know the minister/preacher Eccles, and the verbal exchanges about faith [Rabbit’s and, of course, Updike’s own] are woven into the fabric of the whole narrative, like a description of the golf course where they are having a first game together,

Down in the pagan grooves and green alleys of the course Eccles is transformed.

It is of course much more than this, but that one use of the word pagan demonstrates the crisscrossing of external and internal details. It is genuinely exciting – sometimes exhausting – to read, and one has to be willing to take on wave after wave of narrative tangents. So I’ll close this brief diary-like account of my reading and explaining about it with a longer extract from the text, this one where Rabbit is now doing some gardening work for an elderly woman Mrs Smith that Eccles has arranged for him. The move from knowing description of flowers into the world of nature and onto ‘types’ of women wearing flowers in their hair or hats is a snippet of a continuous narrative roller-coaster ride:

Theresa May’s proposals to allow for the proliferation of grammar schools in state education are based on many things: much just political blindsiding and deflecting from more critical issues, domestic and international, but also the sheer arrogance of attempting to impose her personal feelings as well as the inherent arrogance upon which selective education itself is based.

Her arguments about the promotion of academic achievement through grammar school education are widely reported today as unfounded by the Education Policy Institute [formerly CentreForum] who have stated We find no evidence to suggest that overall educational standards in England would be improved by creating additional grammar schools. The full report can be found and read here.

Having stated this, I have actually been prompted to express my consistent disdain for May and her proposals not because of this further contrary report on these, but by the  advertisement I saw today on the rear of a local bus: The academic choice in Taunton, the claim made by Queen’s College in that town. It sums up the endemic arrogance of selective education and those offering it, here emanating from the backside of a bus rather than its usual source.

I’ve written before here about my membership of the Coleridge Memorial Trust and being able to contribute some small snippets of writing to a public lectern and a series of mobile banners, three of the latter which are pictured above.

Not by a long chalk am I a Coleridge scholar, but I enjoyed reading his poetry as a teenager, and then later teaching what I appreciated and knew about his writing to other teenagers, especially my great liking for his poem The Eolian Harp. The following banner contains a public offering of that liking for and interpretation of this important poem:

The illustrations and images and indeed most of the other detailed texts provided by a friend and fellow CMT member across all ten banners is impressive. I particularly like the image for this poem, which I have edited to a closer view:

I’m pleased to have my National Poetry Day resource Writing poems about messages published on Teachit here. The work presented is heavily edited from that submitted, and I understand this entirely. It is a good port of call for the resource, especially if as a teacher you are looking for a concise and student-friendly presentation. There is also a wealth of other English teaching resources contributed by practitioners.

For those who want to see the original, complete detail, I am posting this here now. I will present the teachers’ notes in full and then add a link to download this [a pdf that can be copied and printed]. What the Teachit editing doesn’t do is provide the individual students’ sheets with specific and detailed guidance, though there is a PowerPoint for use with a white board. I will also post these here as links to pdf copies so they can be downloaded.

If I have one urge to make that does not get reflected in the Teachit edit, it is to be adventurous, always, and avoid the literal as much as possible. This is National Poetry Day: I don’t think, in reality, we should be expecting students to suddenly on this day write what I call ‘conventional poems’; it is a day to provide ideas and structures that encourage and guide students to writing imaginatively, adventurously, and as weirdly as they want! One of my ideas Message to Myself is presented in the edit just literally [and this is one aspect of the idea I did provide] but it omits my important caveat but prompts to the lighter and the experimental will likely appeal to most, and the even more direct one I make in my student sheet on this idea, available below: Some of these can be serious – your hopes and aspirations – but this is a chance to be as outrageous as you can. 

Here is the original, full teachers’ guide [right click on links within the following so they open in new window]:

Teachers’ Guide: National Poetry Day, 6^th October, 2016: Messages

This annual celebration is an opportunity to encourage students to write for pleasure and fun, taking the theme – this year Messages – and writing as creatively as possible using poetic ideas and possibly forms that suit interest and ability.

The following prompts are designed to encourage creative writing [and thinking] rather than the production of ‘conventional’ poems, and most of the stimulus guides students to write List Poems. This is a form that is straightforward in providing structure whilst also encouraging creative ideas in continuous runs of lines.

Each idea is linked to familiar ways in which Messages are thought about today and/or conveyed.

All of the ideas are described in detail here as teacher’s notes, and there are accompanying student resource sheets that can be used to help further prompt the students, especially providing ideas for preparations to be made before their actual writing. All too often students attempt to simply write a ‘poem’ from scratch, and this rarely works! List Poems are in essence straightforward to write, but the student preparation and the leap they need to make to being ‘poetic’ will need the teachers’ explanations and encouragement.

1. Text Message List Poem

This idea uses text message abbreviations [an exaggeration of these rather than necessarily in common usage] to prompt students in writing creative interpretations instead of literal meanings of the selected abbreviations.

As with most of these suggestions, the purpose is to provide frameworks in which students are thinking metaphorically and/or obtusely rather than factually and expectedly. In many ways, this is a mental work-out on the theme of Messages to move away from the transactional to the poetic.

Working individually or as pairs/small groups, students will simply need a resource sheet with abbreviations, easily found on the internet. These should be scrutinised and edited to suit school use and/or age range. An example can be found here: http://www.mob1le.com/sms.html

Students should begin each line of their poem with a texting abbreviation, using/explaining it with an original or unexpected interpretation.

The following sample/model may help to get students started:

Text Message List Poem

IMHO this is the best poem you will ever read
SWALK is harder on A4 envelopes
U4E as long as it lasts
OTOH I have five fingers too
ATM I am thinking of the next line……

2. Message in a Bottle Poems

This is the obvious one!

There are a number of possibilities for this, and here are a few suggestions, with examples as starters/prompts for students.

The actual use of a bottle will be an optional part of each [we are generally being metaphoric, after all]. Indeed, the temptation would naturally be to treat this as realistically as we can, especially for those whose schools are near the coast [!], but it might be an important contextual point to refer to the pollution of the world’s oceans and seas, especially with plastic, and the use of plastic bottles would be the immediate and convenient consideration as a receptacle. For those students who want to debate using original glass ones instead…..

For this first idea, however, students can use a bottle and a means to seal this as it is a genuine message to themselves in the future –

Message to Myself Poem

There is a popular writing workshop task of composing letters to oneself, usually as adults reflecting back on and advising themselves when younger. Indeed, a very contemporary example would be Victoria Beckham writing a letter to herself as presented in Vogue magazine [details here http://www.vogue.co.uk/article/victoria-beckham-october-vogue-cover-star]. There are many other examples that can be found on the internet as an extra resource.

Taking this approach, students can write messages to themselves in the future, hoping for and anticipating achievements and experiences. It is difficult to define what the tone should be and many would naturally, and perhaps most productively, want to treat this seriously, focusing on their ambitions. This will be for the teacher to decide – and individual students, obviously – but prompts to the lighter and the experimental will likely appeal to most.

The following example continues the preference for students being creative/imaginary, and the model again is provided and suggested to provide a framework: a structure that can be copied by students. This uses a repeated line I hope you have with four following details, this becoming itself a repeated pattern. There can be many ‘ordinary’ suggestions, but these should be contrasted with the outlandish and therefore poetic!

Message to Myself

I hope you have

been happy
scored a thousand goals
returned from that trip to Mars
passed all your exams, especially English

I hope you have

always washed your hands
invented tasty food without calories
written the book Homework Made a Doddle for your own children
fell deeply in love

I hope you have

made up for that big mistake [you know the one]
run your fastest time
stopped changing your hair colour
or
continued changing your hair colour

…..and so on

Rescue Me Message List Poem

This takes the most obvious ‘message in a bottle’ idea and presents in as a list poem with the repeated opener to each line rescue me….

And it may be sensible to also stick with the most stereotypical place from which to be rescued: the Desert Island [which is near the ocean for the bottle……]. There could be other places, but these can quite quickly become sinister and oppressive – like a dungeon or even house where someone is kept captive – and it is best to keep with the conventional ruse, though even with this, Loneliness would be a common theme. As ever, teachers need to be sensitive to the mood and tone they want or feel they need to set.

This is also a poem where a model as prompt could close down the options for individual creativity as areas for focus are so obvious and nearly finite: sand, heat, food [absence of], shelter, loneliness, and so on.

Therefore, some opening class discussion might build up a collective map of these very details to consider when writing poems, either individually or in pairs/small groups. For example – in talking about what there would be to eat, the students will probably mention fruit, then perhaps fish and wild animals. Discuss what would be missed if fruit was the only thing you do ever manage to eat, and then how this will be conveyed in a line in the poem.

However, if a model is still considered useful/desirable, here is another starter prompt:

Rescue Me Message List Poem

rescue me from the sand and sand and sand and sand
rescue me from the jungle’s silence
rescue me from the jungle’s night-time voices
rescue me from the fruit without fat and gristle
rescue me from the mirage of McDonalds
rescue me from the sound of my own thoughts

…..and so on

More Messages in a Bottle Poems

Two of the more interesting facts about the history of messages in a bottle are:

1. The ‘colourful’ one is that Queen Elizabeth I was so concerned any such bottles washed up on English beaches might conceal the secret messages from British spies and/or fleets sailing the world’s oceans, she appointed an Uncorker of Ocean Bottles and only this person was legally permitted to retrieve the messages from any found. It was also a crime, punishable by the death penalty, if anyone else did this.
2. The ‘functional’ one is that the most common use of messages in a bottle was for Drift Bottle Studies: bottles used for the scientific purposes of measuring the direction and pace of the flow of ocean currents. There are, apparently, many different ways in which bottles were weighted and so on to control the conditions for their drifting. Further study will provide specific examples of interesting results from this activity…

This next idea combines these two facts into a poetic reality. It is another List Poem similar to Message to Myself, but there is an assumption these aren’t all being done with the same students!

This again provides the clear structure of repetition and prompt lines, and the imaginary details that are added to these should be just that: adventurous and metaphoric. It is worth stressing here too that as well as providing a framework for all students to write, but especially those who find it difficult to work in any detail [with significant detail therefore provided already in the repetitions] these are ideal for reading aloud – once more because of those repeated rhythms:

Uncorker of Current Flow Messages in a Bottle Poem

I uncorked the bottle and discovered

this drift current flows from a blue whale’s travels
this drift current flows from plastic palpitations
this drift current flows from the Titanic’s echo

I uncorked the bottle and discovered

this drift current flows from flowing
this drift current flows from sharks chewing
this drift current flows from an unbreakable code

…..and so on

3. Mixed Messages Poem

This is the most complex idea, and would be for older students and/or those who have a particular interest in writing creatively, being keen to experiment. It also requires access to tablets/PCs and will need careful research and preparation from the teacher. Accessing word-generator and randomiser sites will also require testing with school networks and ease/acceptability of access.

It could very sensibly be done as a singular, whole-class activity with the teacher using the white board and generating a randomised text for all individual students [or again as paired/small group work] to produce a Mixed Messages Poem. This will be clear from the following instructions.

This will also necessitate practise from the teacher [though all of the ideas collected should be attempted before taught]. Two word-generator sites can be found and used here:

http://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/cutup/text-mixing-desk

http://www.languageisavirus.com/text-mixer.html#.V8vc461b9vp

By feeding in a text – written by a student/or researched – that original is then randomly mixed to from a jumbled ‘new’ text. Students find new organisations of their original and re-present these as a fresh text, shaped poetically: narrow, minimal stanzas do seem to work best here. This is, of course, the very essence of Found Poetry, and these devices acting as electronic cut-up machines.

Students can feed in:

• any of the poems already written about Messages
• original writing that purposefully mixes content/detail/attitudes to a subject
• text about Messages in any context selected from search engine results [cut and paste into generator]
• research specific content about Messages in a Bottle [Wikipedia Message in a Bottle, Historical examples is excellent for suggesting other texts/details] and cut and paste in as immediate above

The following is a quick and simple example, though encouraging students to take that poetic leap of finding and then shaping a text that transforms itself from the original. As with all experimental writing, a useful maxim/moto would be: it doesn’t need to make literal sense, but it must make grammatical sense. Therefore, grammatical words can be added to make the writing ‘accurate’.

The following example used the Lazarus Corporation Text Mixing Desk and fed in the Uncorker of Current Flow Messages in a Bottle Poem from above. What follows is the newly generated text and a short poem written from this. One imagines that a longer poem/text would be fed in to generate more text and variety, but this still demonstrates the interesting possible outcome:

Mixed Text

This drift current flows from sharks blue whale’s travels this drift current this drift current flows from a chewing this drift current flows from this drift current flows from flowing flows from plastic palpitations this drift I uncorked the bottle and discovered current flows from the Titanic’s echo I uncorked the bottle and discovered. Bottle and discovered.

Crafted Poem from Mixed Text

Bottle and
discover
the Titanic’s
echo

chewing this drift.

This current
flows from
flowing’s flow

uncorked.

Another Example

If useful, here is one more example. The resource for this was taken from information on this site   http://www.theamericansurveyor.com/PDF/TheAmericanSurveyor_Penry-MessageInABottle_March2007.pdf  and this contains interesting pictures of Drift Cards [really!] and other information about Messages in a Bottle.

Original text

This bottle was released at sea as part of a large-scale study of ocean currents. Information on the date and time of release is on file at the Coast and Geodetic Survey in Washington D.C. You can add to the knowledge of ocean currents by returning the addressed card with the requested information on the date and place where you found the bottle. You will receive by return mail information as to where the bottle was released. Your cooperation in giving accurate information will be of great assistance.

Text generated from Lazarus

On file at the Coast and where the bottle was released. Bottle was released. Your Geodetic Survey in Washington D. In Washington D. C. You card with the requested information on of ocean currents. Of ocean currents. Information on the as part of a large-scale study can add to the knowledge of found the bottle. Found the bottle. You will receive cooperation in giving accurate information will ocean currents by returning the addressed the date and place where you date and time of release is by return mail information as to This bottle was released at sea. Released at sea.

Poem

Released at sea
you will receive
the cooperation
of ocean currents.

By returning
you will receive
knowledge of the
ocean’s release.

NB There is no student resource sheet for this idea. It will need careful introduction and illustration by the teacher if being used for individual student writing. Otherwise, as a whole-class activity these teacher’s notes will be most usefully shown on a white board [the examples, at least], edited if required.

PDF Downloads:

national-poetry-day-writing-ideas

message-to-myself-poem-resource-sheet

rescue-me-message-list-poem-resource-sheet

text-message-list-poem-resource-sheet

uncorker-of-current-flow-messages-in-a-bottle-poem-resource-sheet