Choose Me

(to the Muse, who may take any gender it chooses, but I think this one is male)

Choose Me

I am as ready as I’ll ever be,

my door unlocks and opens easily

to any visitor, my walls are thin

and breakable, you may as well come in.

Take me - I’m not particular or proud,

(refined by nature, but you can be loud),

I’d love a swineherd better than a fine

thin-blooded prince who wouldn’t throw a line

to save me. Feel how cold I am, I’ve lit

a fire but lack the stuff to throw on it:

something good to burn, if you’ll be so kind,

a high conceit or bawdy joke – don’t mind.

Come now. My sheets are white and I am free.

I am a poet lost for words. Choose me.


            ***

Festival

Heavens, where have I been? I mean a week in Edinburgh, yes, and then a poetry week back on home ground in Sussex, but where have I been? Not in my usual place, that’s for sure – a little bit out of the body; and it was great, folks! And me usually so sparing with exclamation marks! Taxis in Edinburgh are cheap compared to down South (£4 a trip, I mean to say) but on the whole I managed with all the walking this year, mostly drug-free. Mr. Signs and I were situated in the Grassmarket area of Edinburgh old town, right beneath the castle. Last year we struggled to get beyond the haggis, chips and pies but this year we found all kinds of places, including one that served heavenly oysters and a ‘surf and turf’ combination of perfect steak plus pot of mussels cooked in cream and wine. Sorry to bang on about food before culture, but the importance of such to the general wellbeing and disposition of Signs cannot be overstated, especially as I have been doing (my version of) a Stone Age-type diet that seems to be, if not strengthening, a little less enervating than other kinds, and you can do lots of calories without doing extra weight (they ate crème brulee in Stone Age times, right?). I couldn’t keep that up in poetry week as I ate at the college where it was based – healthy vegetarian, with all the grains and pulses that go with it, but my body registered the difference strengthwise; back on home ground, too, the clay soil does tend to exert a gravitational pull – I should live on granite really, it suits me best.

But anyway, culture: I have been doing it, people – I almost said so you don’t have to but of course everyone has to or we will all go to the dogs. Sometimes one suffers, and it wouldn’t be Edinburgh Festival without a turkey or two, or something really dire. Last year it came in the form of a folk concert and this year it was a one-man show, full of sound and fury that signified nothing that I ccould identify, with a guy who looked as though he had taken one too many acid trips in his mis-spent youth and was therefore, despite all the sound, not quite or even remotely in the body from whence it came. And to boot, the show was in an underground vault of a place that absolutely reeked of mould and made the insides of my nostrils prickle, so I had to make an exit before the end, leaving Mr. Signs and a friend to make the best of it while I sat in a bar wishing that I were still a smoker. Absolutely everyone, it seemed, was smoking, even those of a certain age who should know better. I know better and wish I did not. Still, there was coffee and taiblet (they also ate fudge in Stone Age times, I believe).

The good things were many. We saw Jerry Sadowitz again – not as thrilling an experience as last year, but still worth doing, even if only for the quality insults; the comedian Stuart Lee – fabulous and I’ll see him again if I get the chance; a Mighty Boosh-style comedy group from Melbourne called Simply Fancy – so delightful that one forgets to complain about the airless room they performed in (despite relentless rain outside, many of the smaller venues were stiflingly hot); a Russian folk group called Koleso that we only went to see because one of the women caught the eye of Mr. Signs as she waved a flyer and her cleavage at him, and at first I thought it was going to be another turkey because of all the red lipstick and promise of “Russian heartbeat”, but it was thrilling, and we bought the CD afterwards; extraordinary flamenco dancing and singing – the real, unadorned thing; a foot-stomping Blues Brothers cover show suggested by my friend’s daughter. Just some of the things that come to mind.

But the highlight for me was seeing the performances of the Signs children. True, I’m their mother. Had I not been, I don’t think I’d have gone to see a show like Strippers & Gentlemen, and though the words “physical theatre” and “multi-media” had prepared me for the idea that this was something out of my usual experience, I had no real idea what I would find. We went twice, each time in the company of different friends. It was an astonishing production. The review from Three Weeks called the show “something great” and said “through dance, mime and spot-on dialogue the faultless cast explore ideas of contemporary sexuality, self-respect and morality. Set to a thumping high-octane soundtrack, this perfectly intense promenade performance will have you questioning your own ideals from the word go. Impeccably directed, involving and revealing, this must be one of the secret gems of this year's Fringe.” It had some other sparkling reviews, and a couple that were not quite so enthusiastic, including one by Lyn Gardner in the Guardian who didn’t, to my mind, really get it – but still, three stars in the Guardian for a show devised by people fresh out of drama school is not to be sniffed at. For me, hand on heart, it would have been a highlight whether my daughter had been involved or not. The co-director did wonderful things with sound, lighting and film and at moments I felt as though the experience was like walking into a poem where everything becomes, as it were, illuminated from within. Of course everyone’s experience of a work of art is different. Mine was that it was (in the words of my friend) poignant and beautiful.

We had to leave Edinburgh the day before son’s jazz a cappella group were due to perform because of my poetry week; but we were treated to a special preview performance in the living room of the flat they all shared and it was glorious; not just the music, the arrangements, the fact of all this fabulous sound coming from twelve voices, but the sheer work and discipline, the energy and enthusiasm that went into everything. They performed to full houses most days.

The arts: what would life be like without? I don’t ever want to find out. And so, as my lovely departed Dad might have said at the end of a long letter, here’s hoping that this finds you as it leaves me – in the pink.

More on poetry and stuff anon.

A Field of My Own

Rose Flint recently won first prize in the Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition for her poem The Field. It is a big £5,000 whopper of a prize, and good luck to her, for poets get little enough in the way of money for the work they do; nor would most poets say they do it for financial gain, and if they did they would, let’s face it, need their heads examined. And of course, what stands behind the one poem is years and years of practice and application to the art and craft of poetry-making. I have to say, though, that I am astonished that a poem like this was the outright winner – and delighted; because I never imagined that what is, on the face of it, a simple “List” poem, would be picked as a competition winner. I say it is a simple List poem but it works, of course, on many levels, is beautifully made, powerful in its simplicity. I met her once and we had lunch together when she came to give a reading here, and I had the unusual (for me) experience of feeling the hairs on my neck stand up as she read. Not all poets are able to deliver their work in such a way as to make the hearer feel that they stand in and by their words, or that the poem is, in a sense, in the process of being created afresh as it is uttered, but she was such a one.

So anyway – fields:

Me, with my ambivalent relationship to the natural world, I’d want the field to grow anything at all that isn’t ugly or toxic. But poisonous Nightshade will do, the birds know it for what it is and stay clear of it, and the red is pretty. Or just weeds will do, those sticky, spiky, tangled things that no-one wants in the garden, I don’t mind. Just anything at all that has the push of life in it, a dandelion or two, and grass. Yes, I want the field to have green grass and some of the feathered varieties of wild grasses; wild flowers, tame flowers, yellow flowers that grow on the gorse bush all year long and smell of sweet marzipan, the reeking white dandruff petals of cow parsley, the bastard Spanish bluebell that isn’t really blue and is to the English bluebell what the grey squirrel is to the red, but I’ll have it anyway.

So the field will be a bit on the wild side and people will say it needs weeding or ask what I’m planning to do with it. I’ll shrug and say it is as it is, my field, so long as things grow and it’s not just dry, cracked earth or a swamp of mud where people come and tip their waste and dump the old sofa with the rip down one side of it or the bed with the broken spring. I want the field to be private and by invitation only, with a small sign just visible on a post that says Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted. I do not want the field to be a free-for-all with scavengers raiding the fruit trees and breaking the heads off buttercups and celandines. I want the field to be left in peace until people have learned how to behave themselves.

I want robins and a tree where they can nest and feel safe from anything that might come in and creep on the ground because I want a fox as well, and fox cubs catching the light in their extraordinary tails, and I want a half-wild tabby cat to come, but not often enough to disturb the robins, and if there is a field mouse or shrew in the field then the cat can eat them because that is the way of things and I want the field to be a place where the way of things has place, to some extent, but what I say goes, obviously. So it won’t be entirely natural or red in tooth and claw, but it will have its own vitality.

I want the field to be a good place for me to sit with a rough woollen blanket in the grass, eating a picnic of watercress sandwiches and drinking from a bottle of fresh lemonade, or reading from a book of poems – old Scottish border ballads (O whaur hae ye been, Lord Randal my son?) or Robert Frost (for I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep).

And I beg your pardon: I never promised you a rose garden.

Something Lovely This Way Comes

A brown parcel arrived today with my name on it. What could it be?

A birthday present from Cusp! A live, sentient creature!

The cat is curious. She likes brown boxes very much.

Do you see her? Sitting on the desk of my writing shed with her purple notebook and quill pen, beside a lit candle and a copy of Nathalie Goldberg's Wild Mind. Do you see the label around her wrist? Her name is Fraulein Poesie and she speaks german. She says she is a poet who writes mainly about nuts and forests and likes a glass of wine or two in the evening.

She is wearing her favourite purple trousers and pearl earrings, and look - she has a necklace of variously-coloured glass beads.

Poesie meets a couple of the housemates. They have never met anyone this cool (apart from me).

Poesie is no fool. She keeps a wary eye on the cat, who has already shown an interest in Poesie's tail. They talk, but keep a respectful distance.

Signs puts on her purple "crushed silk" shellsuit trousers. Poesie says, "Wow!" They gaze at each other in mutual admiration. Signs is holding Poesie's writing book which is a beautiful, matching colour of purple. Oh, you should see her lovely button eyes close up (press on pictures to enlarge).

Cusp - I don't know what to say. A beautiful present, such as I have never had before. And she is Real.

How is it that you do not yet have a Creative Blogger Award? Please pick one up immediately from my sidebar.

And Poesie, who is now my writing and blogging partner, has asked that you also pick up a Nice Blogger Award as well. She says you are "ein sehr nettes Madchen" (we had the umlaut but it seems to have got lost somewhere) and she is sending you her love.

p.s. It looks as though there are some of Poesie's relatives (sockmonkeys) up for adoption.

Notes from the Coalface

I’m not complaining, but it’s tough at the old coalface – the novel-writing one, I mean. I am writing, but not yet the kind of writing that feels like yesss, and we have lift-off kind of writing. What I am waiting for is the sense that I have hit a seam, because when that happens one is given wings for a space. Then the thing is to keep going. I made the fatal mistake once of taking a break when I was 30,000 words or more into the work – and this was one where I could see the whole picture, story and characters were alive in me, all I had to do was put pen to paper (which I always did first, typing it up later). Trouble was I took a break, a long one because of the M.E. and so many other things then needing my attention, and the characters began to lose heart and finally they cleared off altogether. I had the memory of them but they weren’t there any more. I could have resurrected the project but it would have been something completely different. After that it was short stories and poems – ok, you can sometimes complete them (first draft) in one sitting, but you need to re-boot each time. At least that’s how it can feel with M.E. energy. I like the feeling you get, with a longer work, of coming back to a place that already exists and comes to meet you.

Anyway, down among the bloggers, I can feel it’s in the air: Ms Pants has completed a significant draft of the novel she has been working on for some time, the novel-racing Mr. Moon has recently become re-inspired, Jane Holland has emerged from an Arvon course and seems ready to go and we have recently had some excellent advice from intrepid thongster and coalface veteran, Chip Dale. And NMJ, who has actually done the deed, is to have her novel published some time (spring?) next year.

If only one were still smoking Camel Lights! But one is a-chewing on Wrigley’s Extra sugar-free peppermint gum and trying not to think of Beryl Bainbridge saying how she can’t write without smoking. And one is taking the prescription drugs, when necessary, for muscle pains.

At the moment, I have very few hours in the day that are properly available for real work. PWME will just know what I mean and others will just have to take my word for it. Incarnating into the day takes time unless I grab some morning hours and do absolutely nothing else (practically not always possible) afternoons are out of the question till I have got my wings back. Or hit a seam. Sorry about the confusion of images. Goodness, is that the time?

And thank you, Anna Mr, for giving me the Booker Prize Creative Blogger Award.

Something is Illuminated (but I may be mistaken)

Somebody has to do it I suppose, the night watch, but I am hoping this is going to be a temporary run. Knives in the head is not a good feeling to wake up to, well nothing much is at three in the morning. Then, when I’m properly awake, it’s the usual routine: tea, toast, cigarette, trip over cat, read, brood, have illuminating thoughts which I should really write down and turn into a book. I suspect, though, that the Illuminating Thoughts of a Temporary Insomniac might turn out to be the kind of thing that you think is quite brilliant when you are in the process of writing and high on something – and when you take a sober look at it the next morning you find that all you have done is write your name or I love Marmite over and over.

But still, I feel moved to share: I have decided to ditch the Doppelganger woman I have been carrying around as main character in the Thing that I have been sporadically working on. I haven’t killed her off, just replaced her with someone I would rather work with who isn’t quite so much like me in the details. We had no contract so I can do what I want. Characters have no rights – well, this one hadn’t really been around long enough to assert them. I think it was the Australian writer Kate Grenville who said that you didn’t have to like your characters but you had to love them, allow for human complexity, give them respect. I don’t think that this was going to happen with Doppelganger. I say she was like me, but she was a less interesting version, to my mind; and obviously it's my mind that matters as I was writing her, not the other way round (just saying, though I will have to eat my words if I discover that she is the real author and I'm just a figment of her imagination). I liked her enough, but I was never going to love her.

This new one is a different kettle of fish. She likes, for example, shopping, and would never wear something without a name – and not just any name. Even knickers have to come in a perfumed bag from La Senza. Bigger things are Fiorucci, Chloe, Diesel, shoes by Prada. She feels it says something about her, the names she wears (don’t be expecting complexity just now – trust me, it will unfold). Some people will know where I stand with shopping. I am Pricerite and Heart Foundation and do not know anyone who cares as little about brand name as I do and means it*. My pale blue Adidas shell suit which came to me new, was one of the few branded items I have possessed, a gift in the eighties when they were briefly fashionable. I wore it for over ten years (it improved with age, took on a strange, crushed elegance) until the shiny fabric began to crumble. I become attached to my old clothes and wear them until they fall from me of their own accord. It is the reverse with her: once a garment has become part of her, loses the pristine, just-bought, never-been-touched smell of the shop she begins to itch for something else. She has deep cupboards filled with names, all neatly folded, reeking faintly of Shalimar and Donna Karan’s “Mist”. If we went for coffee together we would laugh about all this and secretly feel sorry for each other.

Anyway. These are notes for myself really, the shopping isn’t going to come into it, I’m just saying that she is different – though I am lending her a number of things from my life. The thing is I know her, we have met before. She is a character from something I was writing a few years ago and when she knocked and asked for the part I gave it to her at once because we work together well and she has not really been properly put to the test as we all must be at one time or another, if we can bear it. She seems to be asking for this and I have more confidence in her than in Doppelganger - though of course one can never be sure. The idea has been hovering for the past day or so.

When I spoke about illuminating thoughts, I didn’t necessarily mean for you, dear reader who has read this far and may be expecting something more in the way of epiphany and revelation. I’m just doing the night watch, mulling, thanks for listening. Hope your night was unbroken.

*with the possible exception of Ms Pants - who is currently profiled on Normblog.

A Doctor For All Seasons

No, really, I will not have a word said against him. What, in any case, is not to love about a man with two hearts who faces all personal and actual demons and has, on more occasions than I can number, saved the world? The fact that he remains unreconstructed in the ersatz feminist sense of the word is only to his credit. He is constantly updated and re-generated, give the man a break. You can’t be fighting Daleks and Cybermen one moment, settled and domesticated the next. He may be dashing and sexy (I say may be, the Doctor takes many forms) but that isn’t the point. If it were the point, he would just be boring.

The Doctor takes on the demons and the monsters so we don’t have to and more, he does it joyfully. Each battle is, for him, an adventure and an opportunity to overcome death in all its manifestations. “He is made of fire and ice,” said someone or other in the last episode. He also loves his enemies. Sounds familiar? No, well, I am not saying he is the messiah, but he does go out of his way to give them the benefit of the doubt and the possibility of redemption.

And he has fun; he knows stuff and he has a Tardis that can take him anywhere in time and space, he can travel without passport – as we can, dear reader, as we can (didn’t you know this was coming?) in our imaginations. You are thinking that I am one of those who is secretly building a Tardis made of stickyback plastic in my garden shed. Well, it may come to that and if it does, no blame, there are worse things to be doing – like sitting in front of the one-eyed troll watching the ghastly monster that is Big Brother (down with him, I say), having your vision of the world and its inhabitants made meaner and smaller. I choose adventures in time and space in the small-on-the-outside, big-on-the-inside Tardis of the actual and imaginary.

There was a friend my son once had who spent all summer and autumn building a spaceship in his garden. He was, to put it bluntly, considered backward, had a number of “learning disabilities” and not many children wanted to play with him. My son, being a couple of years younger than him and willing to engage in the business at hand, remembers how they built the spaceship piece by piece and how the unshakeable belief of this boy made it then and forever real. With the power of the imagination they created the ship and overcame something that would diminish us, make us smaller and less than we are. They acquired, you could say, a faculty.

Of course, it’s also in the blood. I myself made a door into Narnia for me and my sister to go through from the built-in wardrobe in our bedroom. Childish escapism, you say, but I say there are more possibilities than any of us can begin to imagine and we are braver and more wonderful than we are led to believe. And if the Doctor (who admittedly is not human, but has some of the attributes) reminds us of this – who can be against him?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Iona (or Look at My Snaps)

Across Mull to get the Iona ferry. The only place en route to get petrol.

ok, I just want to make it absolutely clear that I am posting these up because certain people (naming no names) are homesick for Scotland and at least one of them has never even been there. Can you be homesick for places you have never been to? Discuss. Then click on the pictures to get the full effect - almost, but not really, like being there.

And posting up pictures of my holiday is cool. As long as that's understood.

Next instalment:

Mull - the director's cut.

What It Is

Every so often I am reminded of the things I love. I am not about to list “my favourite things” (though actually why not? It’s the kind of thing Natalie Goldberg gives as a creative writing exercise and what I do like about her is she doesn’t pretend to be highbrow). Top of my list is poetry. It makes me better. It doesn’t, in my case, make physical illness go away, but poetry, when it’s the real thing, revitalizes the spirit by naming the world truly and re-creating it. It is, for me, a proper recreation, but sometimes I forget, am stopped in my tracks, reminded.

A poet friend has just emailed me something she has written. She works for a farm project and one of her tasks is to provide freshly-written poems for the organic vegetable boxes that are sent out. The one she sent me has as its focus apples in midwinter. It’s about loss, grief, intense desire – and sexual fulfilment. All that from a few lines, words, apples. Why this should uplift and inspire me as it does is mysterious.

Less mysterious is the enjoyment I get from a cup of pretend latte. I have run out of real coffee and am using granules. I have them with one third hot water, two thirds hot milk and a spoon of sugar. It tastes much better than it ought to, is more than the sum of its ingredients. I may even have another as I look through the stories posted for Mr. Moon’s short fiction competition. I have already made my shortlist of six. I find sustained reading of fiction very hard, but it helps that each one is short, and I want to give it my best shot – seems only right as I am one of the contributors.