Easter, a stone rolled away

Dazzling Spring Aurora over Hudson Bay by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC-BY 2.0

The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine.

Woody Guthrie

Red cosmos poster by Biodiversity Heritage Library is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

…I want to propose an existential creativity. How do I define it? It is the creativity wherein nothing should be wasted. As a writer, it means everything I write should be directed to the immediate end of drawing attention to the dire position we are in as a species. It means that the writing must have no frills. It should speak only truth. In it, the truth must be also beauty. It calls for the highest economy. It means that everything I do must have a singular purpose. 

It also means that I must write now as if these are the last things I will write, that any of us will write. If you knew you were at the last days of the human story, what would you write? How would you write? What would your aesthetics be? Would you use more words than necessary? What form would poetry truly take? And what would happen to humour? Would we be able to laugh, with the sense of the last days on us?

Sometimes I think we must be able to imagine the end of things, so that we can imagine how we will come through that which we imagine. Of the things that trouble me most, the human inability to imagine its end ranks very high. It means that there is something in the human makeup resistant to terminal contemplation. How else can one explain the refusal of ordinary, good-hearted citizens to face the realities of climate change? If we don’t face them, we won’t change them. And if we don’t change them, we will not put things in motion that would prevent them. And so our refusal to face them will make happen the very thing we don’t want to happen.

We have to find a new art and a new psychology to penetrate the apathy and the denial that are preventing us making the changes that are inevitable if our world is to survive. We need a new art to waken people both to the enormity of what is looming and the fact that we can still do something about it.

We can only make a future from the depth of the truth we face now.

Ben Okri

Black and white photographic print, showing the emission of beta-rays from radio-phosphorus (black-and-white print – photograph) by Unknown photographer is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0

staying in the blood beat

of the don’t know

faciebat

(I am still making)

Scourings from an old notebook

April 2022

When the Clocks Go Forward…

…The Whole Place Goes Up

 

Today with Spring here finally we ought to be living

outdoors with our friends.

Let’s go to those strangers in the field

and dance around them like bees from flower to flower,

Building in the beehive air

our true hexagonal homes.

Someone comes in from the outside saying,

‘Don’t play music just for yourselves.’

Now we’re tearing up the house like a drum,

collapsing walls with our pounding.

We hear a voice from the sky calling our lovers

and the odd lost people. We scatter lives.

We break what holds us, each one a blacksmith

heating iron and walking to the anvil.

We blow on the inner fire.

With each striking we change.

The whole place goes up, all stability gone to smoke.

Sometimes high, sometimes low, we begin anywhere,

we have no method.

We’re the bat swung by powerful arms.

Balls keep rolling from us, thousands of them underfoot.

 

Now we’re still. Silence also is wisdom, a flame

hiding in cotton wool.

 

Rumi

 

 

New Moon Renga

Today, as part of the Northern Poetry Library Project, a small group of us gathered in Hexham Library to make a 12-verse renga sparked by our ‘food’ theme – which even after six months seems inexhaustible.

The first verse, or ‘hokku’, is a version of one by the Japanese master, Basho.  It seemed like a good place to start – him knocking back the saké on the day of the new moon (and an auspicious Spring eclipse).

Fennel, Saffron, Silver

 

No blossoms, no moon,

the Master’s drinking saké,

see, all on his own

 

dried fruit sweetens the mouth

picked on a sunlit day from the slopes

 

autumn unfolding

chewing the passing year

bitterness of loss

 

ginger wine, ginger biscuits

home-made, Gran’s spice against cold

 

quickly the mushroom

strives for light under the door

a hint of decay

 

looking down on Crag Lough

we stop to munch dark chocolate

 

who knew such longing

could be poured into a bowl

of apple crumble?

 

my love and [garlic]

a conflict of interest

 

red seeds on your tongue

fennel, saffron, silver

perfumed breath – mukhwas

 

leek, onion, potato, simmered

into soup that opens each cell

 

Café de l’Opéra

coffee and croissant

splash of traffic

 

table, the first noun learnt

in a new language – we eat around it.

 

 

 

A junicho renga

at lunch time

in Hexham Library

on 9^th March 2016.

 

Participants:

Birtley Aris

Jo Aris

Matilda Bevan

Linda France

Patricia Gillespie

Simone Silver Path

Margot Waters

 

New Shoots

For some reason the rabbits seem to be letting my spring bulbs alone this year.  I’d planted everything in pots for easy removal if necessary but, touch wood, no sign of damage so far.  It’s very heartening to see some colour up here after our long subdued winter.  And the sunshine these past few days has softened the blow of returning from Rome and missing its irrepressible light and crumbling grandeur – an unequivocal primavera.

Some bright new things to let you know about – a couple of readings and a new digital publication.

On Thursday 30th April at 1pm I will be reading from another wild at the Robinson Gay Gallery in Hexham for the Book Festival.  My collaborator, the artist Birtley Aris, will be there and Sue Dunne will be playing the Northumbrian pipes.  The Gallery will be showing some of Birtley’s original drawings for the book.

At Burnlaw Centre in Whitfield, near Allendale, on Friday 1st May, three of us will be reading from and talking about our new books connected with the land – Malcolm Green, Peter Please and myself.  It starts at 7.30pm and it is rumoured there will be copious quantities of tea and cake.

Mslexia magazine have just launched the first in a new series of e-books.  Poetic Forms is a revised and extended collection of a sequence of articles on the crafting of fixed forms commissioned back when the magazine started in the late 1990s.  A lot of people have told me how useful they’ve found these pieces and I have continued to use them in workshops and tutorials so I’d definitely recommend you download a copy if you’re at all interested.  A second e-book based on my First Principles series will be available next month.  You can find out more here.

The S Word

 

The S Word

 

The cups and frills of tête-à-têtes

at my door only make me want

more. Deeper. Longer. Your eyes

full of looking. That sweetness

in the light piques my appetite;

a lick of salt, sap knocked back

in a shot glass. Didn’t we both clock

the pussy willow at the same time?

*

I wrap your scent around me

like a shawl, walk out into the stretch

of a lost afternoon, to the tune

of ipod-shuffled finches, Larkin’s

stutter. Your F sharp charm, here

and away, the wink of your eye.