This dialectic
between each person and the
architecture of stone

and dreams;
cladding that ignites at a spark
of individual desire.

Who knew investment
was inflammable? Who knew
how urban uprisings

would fan flames
from an inhabitant’s hope for a life?
Deep feelings

about place
are roadmaps within a sprawl of
construction as solid

as history in
structures that need rewriting.
And anthropomorphism

is no answer to
questions of permanence: the
body dies;

walls crumble –
resuscitation and rebuild are
poles apart

in potential.
The politics of greed have dug
more graves than

built havens.
High rise / swing low / carry
the weight.

National Poetry Day is (or should be) about writing poems rather than ‘choose’ a poem, though with the theme this year being Choice, the verb selection is understandable. I will therefore choose the following poem as a prime example for exemplifying the theme:

But back to writing a poem: I have posted creative writing resources for this year’s NPD on my companion site Copycat Creative Writing here. These focus on the use of erasure for writing poems for the theme and are avalable as free pdf downloads. I may well add a few more over the coming days, but only because I have started producing my own for the theme/day. Otherwise, I have kept the focus quite straightforward and encourage teachers (and everyone) to adapt to their own needs and preferences.

Pleased to have another from my found poem collection &there4 at International Times, with thanks to IT and Rupert. Read the ‘mathematical’ poem here. Check out Paul Sutton’s poem when visiting the site and other postings today.

More single ‘photobook’ copies – an inexpensive way to have a hardback copy of work to keep, and to see what it could look like published (the cheapness is only ever on ‘offer’ for an individual copy, whoever the supplier).

I’d want the internal print size larger, but &there4 would look good.

~

To the main table (see preceding post)

With my thanks to Adrian for the promo in the Ottery Gazette and for placing my memoir in his wonderful local bookshop.

~

I have been looking forward to a collection of these poems from Steve Spence, having followed and enjoyed them online (both in their appearances and within each narrative) in International Times, Stride Magazine and other. I don’t mean I have been looking for, expecting or wanting ‘answers’ – their collages of surprise are wonderfully paradoxical in evasion and anchoring. The ‘he said/she said’ is the one recurring hook in the constantly evolving dialogue, and I think we take this as any and all speakers in a world of disrupted communication.

There are so many ‘themes’: free-market economy, invention of lithography, colouring books, King Kong, bird songs, graphology, log cabins, salmon, self-censorship, surveillance, and bright orange fiddler crabs – to scratch the surface of the poetic preoccupations. In the explorations, nothing is resolved and everything is considered as we move quickly from one captured thought to another.

I take great comfort in the uniformity of each poem’s structure: five stanzas, the first four of four lines each and the fifth with two lines. Perhaps this is as much certainty over which we have control, and this much is therefore familiar and finite. Each poem is

‘…the same storm even if
we’re in different boats’

(An Open Window)

though this could as easily and obviously be ‘different storm in the same boats’.

I think every disruption within any one poem is symptomatic of how reality is impacted and fluid by the nature of things, by the way we experience it, by the way we interpret it, by the way we forget about it (often immediately), and by the way this one and only poem I will quote in full is an example of the whole,

‘One way or another we are
all under surveillance all of
the time. “My concern is that
this is about territory,” he said.

You can always use the studio
as a musical instrument but here
we have a mirrorball and it’s not
for sale*. “Everything in our path

has been obliterated,” she said.
Yet all areas of recording are
happening simultaneously and
we are looking at an increase in

volcanic activity. What about the
headless body? “This is how it
should feel all of the time,” he
said. When magma rises through

the crust it puts pressure
on the surrounding rocks.

(Fixing the Results)

The whole point of reading these poems is to enjoy and maybe to exemplify the human condition – our need to understand, to shape to expectation, to shape to desire, to find humour (there is plenty of this in these), to replicate the confusion, to see poetry as

‘…the beginning of a
full-scale invasion’

(Pub on the Hoe)

To move from the idea of visiting a lake to a consideration of burglars to concern about a dripping tap encapsulates the deception of dancing within seemingly disparate and ordinary fixations, but at every turn, this is living a daily life of experience and anticipation, as well as what is thrown at us, randomly. Like dreaming, but everyday-real.

*And the glitter and shifting refractions in this delightful collection are very much acquirable here.

It would
be stating the obvious to reveal how
apple trees

sprout more often
in a search engine than
clichés,

but at their
core, dark seeds are reminders of
the obvious.

If what
is round will come around again,
there it is

again. The
rot occurs because of how we
leave things,

inevitable,
and the half-eaten worm is not
biblical, but

visual, that
one concrete surprise outside yet in
the platitudes.