I have two poems We all are always never going home and Girl with degenerate matter earring in Corporeal, and another in their sibling publication En*gendered, so I recorded this performance of one from each...
I went to a writing workshop, some years back now. One of the exercises was to watch a "British Transport Film" similar if not identical to this:
-and write a poem in response.
It's the "poem" part that may be dubious here. Sometimes my response to something is more to its style than its content and seeing this I was struck by how much it was unique to the period. So I started thinking about how people might present the same information in other styles... and I hit on the idea of an overly abstract and academic study.
So what I am saying is that there may be nobody else in the world except me who gets this...
...but it is a list poem and you could imagine it came from the introduction of some dry-as-bones volume that a tweed clad professor has been labouring over for the best part of a decade..
Possible taxonomies of the 1957 Yorkshire coast
those involving sun hats
those involving beer
those involving knobbly knees
those involving simple foodstuffs : apples, sandwiches, cheese
as above, but also fish and chips
those involving model ships or boats
those involving racquets
those involving balls
those involving young ladies
excluding the most popular of all
those involving sand
with buckets and spades
with towels
with sandwiches
those planned a year in advance
those involving dance with various degrees of skill
the subset involving omnibuses
those involving ice cream
the subset with also small children
and the subset of those in which a seagull features
those involving other creatures:
donkeys
crabs
minute fish
those in which you drink too much, and wish you hadn't
I went to a launch event for Deadly, Delicate by Kate Garrett, who I'd never met before but who is just as interesting in person as she'd seemed via the internet (this is not true of everybody...)
This is a pamphlet of poems centred around the theme of female pirates (with a degree of historical accuracy plus a dollop of poetic imagination; there's a LGBT angle too.) It's a great pamphlet, and I recommend it.
(If you wanted something more solid, I also recommend Kate's previous book The Density of Salt; I reviewed it in Antiphon and it was one I really enjoyed...)
Anyway... there was an open-mic aspect to the book launch and I read Girl, Unaccompanied— which I shall post in a week or so — and also The Man who Ate the World which was in retrospect a mistake, because it's quite a complex poem and the pub (poets in a pub, who'd credit it) was quite noisy by then.
I should have read the following. Hopefully it will mislead you until the very last line.
Courtship
I need you -- she is blushing, closer now;
this is in the limo, en route to the hotel -- to take me in a hostile way. Tell me how
you'll own me. Talk dirty. Say you'll sell
subsidiaries and drive your staff
to penetrate my org chart, stripping
assets and rationalise the hell from chaff
in the top brass. Her breath is hot. She nips
his ear. Expose me in the press
where my practices aren't up to scratch
then tie me with injunctions. I confess
that being in legal knots makes my breath catch. Slap me in jail... He's eager for the deal. It's hard
to think. She has already cloned his credit cards.
The question of whether we go somewhere is more controversial, but let's suppose we did...
...well it is difficult to imagine, in this overpopulated age, that Charon is still ferrying each of us individually and manually.
So... this poem sprang fully formed from the Wikipedia quote that forms the epigram. "Katabasis" is a marvellous word, I can't imagine why I haven't used it in the body of the poem.
—a descent of some type, such as moving downhill, or the sinking of the winds or sun, a military retreat, or a trip to the underworld or a trip from the interior of a country down to the coast.—Wikipedia—"Katabasis"
Would a figure figure in the ending
of the trip? Tired and how archaic,
a gate-warden, perhaps, who spits
half-chewed tobacco,
the spittle flying, off-stage
from the light he has raised
in one arthritic hand
into some outer darkness
to form tiny settlements
of dying, congealing mucus
on a stone so far beyond
mortal concern
that no dust gathers.
And if he had some sort of vehicle,
this warden,
a traditional boat, or perhaps a charabanc
engined in oil and antiquity, and glimmering brass pipes;
if there was such a vehicle
would you take a place
on age-riddled, half-cracked seating? Would you
hesitate at the risk of meeting an old friend
who in later life you came to never like,
or a cleaning woman, freshly slain but not yet
laid out in her beeswax and lavender
encrusted duster? Would you fear the general muster
of folk a touch too keen to chance another world,
having nothing from the last?
Or would you, knowing your place,
take the space between a rapist,
and a collector of second-hand ties;
face forward and grip your expectant ticket so firmly
that your sweat—cold as must be—
will print a ragged patch on the cheap cardboard;
wait for the old man's creaking arm
to pull hard on the handbrake; and wait again
to hear one final, semi-comic honking
from his rubber-bulb horn?
