Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

St Mary Magdalen

Last night was bell-ringing practise at St Mary Magdalene, the parish church.  With the TV turned down low so as to hear if one of the kids wakes up, the sound of the bells drifts in and out of range on the edge of the wind.  It’s the most beautiful of sounds. It has none of the careful symmetry of music. The order of notes seems almost arbitrary and the spacing between each one has a glorious, organic inexactness about it.  I imagine the six ringers standing in their Masonic circle, bending at the waist as they tug their ropes, united in their conspiracy of Plain Bob Doubles, Stedman Doubles, Grandsire Triples and Surprise Majors. 

...

Walking past the churchyard this afternoon towards our local the Red Lion, I looked over the low wall to the lines of gravestones, reading off the familiar names like a casual litany. I supposed, not for the first time, that some day - should we decide to remain here for at least the next 30 years - I might end up beneath my very own marble slab. In that event, so as to cater for the edification and improvement of future passers-by, I would have to select my epitaph with great care.

Top of the current list is:

Cast a cold eye
on life, on death.
Horseman, pass by.
from 'Under Ben Bulben', W.B. Yeats

But alternatively, if in particularly mordant mood at the time of ultimate selection, I might opt for:

Fear no more the heat of the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
from ‘Cymbeline’, William Shakespeare

or even:

Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps.
from ‘Waiting for Godot’, Samuel Beckett

I might even try for sponsorship for the last one: it would certainly do wonders for trade at the Red Lion.

...

The Red Lion

COULD DO BETTER...

Probably the greatest frustration arising from the writing of school reports is the need always to pull punches. In the vast majority of instances the teacher will find the verbal means whereby to appraise the student fairly and accurately. And for those more delicate evaluations there exists a comprehensive range of euphemisms and figures of speech to soften the blow that passes down time from teacher to teacher via a sort of folk process. And whatever the nature and intensity of any sturm und drang that might have taken place between teacher and student, the professionalism and detachment of the former and the general indifference to adult perspectives and priorities of the latter will prevail.

But every now and then the teacher will struggle to find anything even remotely positive to say. When dealing with authentic demon-spawn and/or the hell-kite parents responsible, euphemism and circumlocution wither and the truth begs to be told. In such relatively rare cases – generally adolescent boys whose emotional maturity was at foetal stage or adolescent girls on massive hormonal overload (and the indulgent, purblind parents of either) – I used to write two reports, one a set of bland admonishments to do better, the other an immoderate fusillade of obscene and lavatorial invective, which I would keep typing until I started to laugh. Then I’d submit the first.

What follows is – allegedly – a collection of excerpts from actual employee performance evaluations. I neither know nor care whether they are the real deal; I just wish that I’d had some of them available to me when writing those second reports.

      
"Since my last report, this employee has reached rock-bottom and has started to dig."

"I would not allow this employee to breed."

"This employee is really not so much of a has-been, but more of a definite won't be."

"Works well when under constant supervision; in fact, when cornered like a rat in a trap."

"When she opens her mouth, it seems that it is only to change feet."

"This young lady has delusions of adequacy."

"He sets low personal standards and then consistently fails to achieve them."

"This employee is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot."

"This employee should go far, and the sooner he starts, the better."

"Got a full 6-pack, but lacks the plastic thingy to hold it all together."

"A gross ignoramus -- 144 times worse than an ordinary ignoramus."

"He doesn't have ulcers, but he's a carrier."

"He's been working with glue too much."

"He would argue with a signpost."

"He brings a lot of joy whenever he leaves the room."

"When his IQ reaches 50, he should sell."

"If you see two people talking and one looks bored, he's the other one."

"A photographic memory but with the lens cover glued on."

"A prime candidate for natural de-selection."
 
"Donated his brain to science before he was done using it."

"Gates are down, the lights are flashing, but the train isn't coming."

"He's got two brains cells; one is lost and the other is out looking for it."

"If he were any more stupid, he'd have to be watered twice a week."

"If you give him a penny for his thoughts, you'd get change."

"If you stand close enough to him, you can hear the ocean."

"It's hard to believe he beat out 1,000,000 other sperm."

"One neuron short of a synapse."

"Some drink from the fountain of knowledge; he only gargled."

"The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead

pic: http://www.youvescrewedup.com/Site/About_the_Author_files/DunceRightSide2.jpg

“GOOD MORNING, MR MAGPIE...’

A drink at the Three Horseshoes with Quaker M. and Anglican J. A sideways drift through the topics at the corner table – footballers’ salaries, the prospects for a Socialist renaissance, the best way to poach an egg, superstitions...

“If I see a single magpie”, I say, “I always make an ‘x’ in the air and recite: ‘Good morning Mr Magpie, how’s your wife?’ That and three wishes on a full moon, of course. As for walking under ladders...”
M. grins in the manner of one about to play the ace.
“And what happens if you don’t observe the protocols?”
I shudder.
“I don’t know. I’ve never risked it.”
M. sits back, hands clasped behind his head.
“You’re just a daylight atheist, you bloody fraud”, he snorts. “Come the crisis, you’ll be down on your knees with the rest of us”.

I think not. It’s a bit of a stride from taking out a little providential insurance on a car journey or investing in the harvest moon to the assumption of an entire belief system. In the meantime...

SUPERSTITIONS (3rd draft)

Across my godless sky
a magpie skids,
a barcode flash,
trailing misfortune.

I paint a cross
onto the air.
And then that night
it’s the full moon

bagged in clouds
fat with snow.
I must drop
three wishes into

her milk-heart
before the clouds
hustle her away.
In a last heartbeat

of light, I invest
a trio of dreams.
But silently, as if
to confound negotiation,

snow fills the bowl
of the universe,
the sky falls to meet
the rising earth

and the seams
are drawn tight.
White darkness, a breast

of feathers.  Without

my lodestars, compass
spinning, this sailor
must dead-reckon
his course alone.

pic from: http://www.druidry.org/obod/lore/images/MagpieLand_lg.jpg

A COCKUP...

Whilst trying to delete what looked suspiciously like an attempt to upload a comment bearing unwelcome gifts, I managed to delete all the legit comments from the previous post. Many apologies to all who visited and left word. Sadly, I have been unable to delete the offending comment (appended to a post from 2006), which is worrying. I'm using the new Typepad comment format so I'll seek advice from Typepad High Command.

For two months now – since retirement, in fact - I’ve been spending by far the greater part of my time in the company of women. At home, beleaguered, Reuben and I keep our heads down. Rosie, as a princess in training, has certain standards of deference and service to which we are both required to adhere. Maisie as third child is a cross between free spirit and loose cannon – maybe loose spirit does it best – and she goes her own way. But wild and abandoned though it may be, that way is decidedly distaff in nature. And my partner Emma operates from the cheerful and generally tolerant conviction that the female of the species is superior to the male in all departments except those that involve screwdrivers, changing car wheels and mains electricity.  

And then away from home, it’s the school playground.  Buttoned up against the cold, we mums stand in small groups watching our kids swinging through the branches, discussing eco-friendly nappies, our partners’ failure to understand just how hard we work and the next girls’ night out.

So, on behalf of the homebound mum, I present…

WOMEN ON TOP

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage
and a career.
Gloria Steinem

You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.
Erica Jong

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
Oscar Wilde

Instead of getting hard ourselves and trying to compete, women should try and give their best qualities to men - bring them softness, teach them how to cry.
    Joan Baez   

Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.
Katherine Hepburn

The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being
and woman-being.
D.H. Lawrence

Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.
Margaret Mead

Men are gentle, honest and straightforward. Women are convoluted, deceptive and dangerous.
Erin Pizzey

Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed.  If I fail, no one will say, "She doesn't have what it takes."  They will say, "Women don't have what it takes."
Clare Boothe Luce

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is:  I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
Rebecca West

If the world were a logical place, men would ride sidesaddle.
Rita Mae Brown

Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards
and in high heels.
Faith Whittlesey (attr.)

Nobody will ever win the Battle of the Sexes.  There's just too much fraternizing with the enemy.
Henry Kissinger

The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.
Edna O'Brien

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
Timothy Leary

Men weren't really the enemy -- they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.
Betty Friedan

Why are women ... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
Virginia Woolf

A man has every season while a woman only has the right to spring.
Jane Fonda

Woman was God's second mistake.
Friedrich Nietzsche

…

‘Hell hath no fury…’

...

THE GREEN MAN

Trees are so certain,
implacable, even when fallen,
each one a manifesto
proposing stillness around

a slow heart. Philosophers
out of the earth,
they breathe into
the secret sky.

Where they reach
with ease and grace
and find, I reach
to the sinew’s length

and dream. To be
straight and unencumbered,
carrying the shifting cargo
high, neither offering

nor withholding; to lodge
song and let it go;
to save in green
and spend in gold;

to observe impassive like Hydra
from a thousand faces,
each one bearded, lidded,
rimmed in leaves.

pic: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=119384373

RHYMES AND REASONS

During the years leading up to and immediately after the Second World War, strenuous attempts were made in British schools to winnow out regional accents in favour of the inculcation of what was known then as the King’s (and subsequently the Queen’s) English.

Nowadays linguistic variation is celebrated and ‘received pronunciation’ is no longer seen as a necessary precursor to taking up a respectable position in society. For a long time the clipped nasal delivery that is such a risible feature of pre- and just post-war British movies has been confined to a dwindling minority of the English aristocracy. Newscasters, weather presenters and game and talk show hosts are now positively advantaged by possession of a vigorous regional accent.

And we are fortunate that in so small an island such a proliferation of regional accents prevails. Across relatively short distances, very distinct differences between accents can be discerned. Allowing for the tendency for those dwelling within London and the Home Counties to type any accent heard above the Midlands as simply ‘Northern’, enormous variety is evident within county boundaries.  For all their proximity, in terms of accent similarity the cities of Liverpool and Manchester might as well be at different ends of the British Isles.

Equally, there are striking extremes of accent across a broad spectrum from moderate variation in pitch, tone and vowel sound to deep and – to the outsider – impenetrable dialect. Simply to provide some indication of the continuing prevalence of real dialect in certain regions of the British Isles, I submit this curiosity. It was first published in The Whitehaven News, a local newspaper for the Cumbrian coastal town and its surrounds in the North-East of England. Although the curious little rhyme is from the late 19th century, dialect this dense can still be found in parts of the North-East.*  Read and ponder…

[A] Cumbrian rhyme, written in the 19th century, floated in its now fragile gossamer form out of a old tome at Moon’s Lowther Street bookshop in Whitehaven, and fell to the floor. It told the tale of some new church bells.  Proprietor Michael Moon thinks it refers to the present St Nicholas’ Church around the time of its building in the 1880s.

After two centuries the fabric of the old church had greatly deteriorated, and a new one was built of red sandstone quarried from Beggarghyll, near Egremont. The cost was met by one Margaret Gibson of Whitehaven in remembrance of her parents Robert and Elizabeth Gibson, and the new church was consecrated in 1883.

Though there was no author’s name to the poem, entitled ‘A Dirge on t’Old Church Bells’, it is thought it was the work of one Joseph Hodgson, of Queen Street, known colloquially as Putty Joe due to his work as a glazier.

A local character and one-time pit worker, he spent many years tramping round the countryside, eking out a living and in 1850 he published a memoir of his “various itineraries throughout the UK’’. He wrote 33 volumes of songs, lectures, histories and guides’.

In t’year Eighteen Eighty, its truth at I tell,
Sum men nock t’old church doon, and tuk out the bell;
But wat they did wid it neahbody duz no –
Nor any yan cares owt about it ato.

There now is rejoicing all ower the town,
Sen thev gitant church bilt, an t’fynest around;
’Twill please o the fyne fwoak as weel as oursells,
When it is fit up wid a fine peel ov bells.

There’s many esquires an’ lwords o around,
’Ats leevan in t’suburbs of Whitehaben town,
Who cud aid if they choos, as t’newspapers tells,
In gitten for t’new church a fine peel ov bells.

Many tradesfwokes rejoycin’ as weel as oursells
As the gents will replace it wid a new peel ov bells;
And just hung up t’old un, for a short time you no,
Till the new peel arrives – then doon it mun go.

There was sum church vestments presented also,
An’ o weel accepted as far as they go;
An’ one man gav a clock, the time for to tell,
An’ t’other bequests was o good ov there sells.

Greet numbers of toonsmen ats wanting the chime,
Didn’t no at ther cumin’ sud tuk sek a time;
If wee’d thout they’d hev slairde as many one tells,
We’d meade a subscription an’ got them oursells.

There will be a grand gala day o around,
When t’new peel of bells duz arrive in the toon;
Then we will neah meare be annoyed wid its knell –
It was sik a nuisance, was the old kirk bell.

*Any reader wanting a head start, go here for some sound files of the accent in action.

...

Moving from the rich vernacular of the past to some poetic ponderings of the present, here come various aphorisms, fireside reflections and general bons mots from the estimable and distinguished Poetry Ireland Review (once wise/generous enough to publish a poem of mine.) 

Pickings and Choosings:

Recent Pronouncements on Poets and Poetry

Selected by Dennis O’Driscoll for Poetry Ireland Review

The words of poetry should express what the eye sees, what the ear hears, and what the heart understands.
Lucille Clifton

In a good poem as in a good marriage not everything is said.

The dog needs its fleas, the poet his miseries.

Prose adds. A poem multiplies.

Write drunk, but polish sober.
David Burnett

Because poetry depends on familiar life, it belongs in familiar life.
Andrew Motion

I'm not sure I believe in something poetic "in itself". Hasn't most of modern poetry found the poetic in the everyday?
Kevin Young

On the whole the modern poet leads the same kind of quietly exasperated, uneventful life that is the lot of most contemporary citizens.
David Herd

Many poets now write of domestic routines, which may take the adage Write what you know to the point of fallacy, or suicide. In the odd limbo of the suburbs... what's lacking is intensity...
William Logan

In poetry, you work towards the intense instant. You certainly cannot subordinate poetry to a routine.
Harry Clifton

In order to write well, a poet needs to go to that place where energy and intensity concentrate, that place just beyond which chaos and randomness reign.
Gregory Orr

If you write about what you know, you will keep on writing the same thing, and you will never know any more than you do now.
George Bowering

My sense of poems, be they anti-war or pro-diversity, is that the poem's motive is not something I can often know in advance if it's going to be any good. The poem needs to find its own way; it needs to take me along toward where it wants to go.
Robert Wrigley

The worlds of jazz music and poetry have this much in common: the acceptance-winning poet or jazz musician both have to be the best of their kind in an intensely competitive world, where nothing less than the highest order of technique and invention will do. The audience for this brilliance is small, fickle and intensely critical.
John Hartley Williams

Opera and poetry are elitist and obscure by nature, and ought to be sold on the joy of difficulty.
Lavinia Greenlaw

I don't think poetry is a popular sport. Poetry requires a certain amount of solitude and silence and those are not the activities most people are interested in.
Richard Howard

Poetry is the opposite of reality TV.
Niall MacMonagle

At a time when energies are being marshalled in an effort to find a wider audience for poetry, perhaps it is a good thing to remember the almost impenetrably private nature of poetic composition.
Billy Collins

When a voice reads a poem it loves, something unique happens. The voice brings the heart and mind, indeed the very soul of the listener into the complete act and art of listening, and a certain illuminating intensity electrifies the words in such a way that the poem's rhythm and music, meaning and movement, come together in a passionate oneness that is truly mesmeric and memorable.
Brendan Kennelly

Reading a poem on a page, in silence, with blank spaces around it, is one of the great experiences.
Ciaran Carson

The concept of song has gone out of contemporary poetry for the time being, and has been out of contemporary poetry for a long while. And all those attributes, like rhyme, complexity, or rigidity of meter, have gone. If music goes out of language, then you are in bad trouble.
Derek Walcott

All good similes depend upon a certain essential heterogeneity between the elements being compared. The simile asserts a likeness between unlike things, but it also draws attention to their differences, thus affirming a state of division.
Edward Hirsch

Good poems come out of tensions; and by travelling you are deliberately putting yourself into a situation where there's a tension between the new and the old, where you are and where you've come from... In my own poetry, the poems which don't work are the ones I don't feel have enough conflict in them. It's out of the conflict that poetic power is generated.
Sinead Morrisey

A poem needs nervous tension, like an arrow needs a bowstring.
A.B. Jackson

Often a poet's strength seems to result from, or at any rate to accompany, the reconciliation of two opposing qualities...
Annie Finch

This is also is a revised version of a previous post. Not a case of faute de mieux recycling, I promise; there’s plenty of stockpiled material to hand. I’ve returned to the piece because it prefaces a poem on which I have been doing some work and, on reading though the introductory material there was more I wanted to say about its remarkable subject.

One particular alteration I have made is to edit out ‘AIW’s’ actual name. He is a fiercely private man and although two pictures of him are displayed, the appellation process seems, in some less than logical manner, to identify and expose so much more.

...

Mum and A. - c. 1956

AIW

I have known A. all my life.  He lived with us for my first 20 years and remained an integral part of the close family structure even after he moved into his own flat.  Indeed, it was my belief up to the age of 4 that all families contained one and I would query the absence of this third adult in the families of my friends.

As a lodger he took the spare room in our South London flat in 1938, shortly after my parents married.  At 18-years-old, A. was ‘our waif & stray’, as my mother would later characterise the callow youth who moved in.  Joking reference was also frequently made – by A., as often as not – to the ‘wicked stepmother’ who, on her marriage to A’s father, threw A. and his younger brother out of the house to fend for themselves. In spite of these casual euphemisms, which were so much a part of the prevalent English culture of understatement used to conceal real feeling, there lay real distress and sacrifice. Within weeks my parents, compassionate and inclusive even then, drew A. into their tight circle of friends, providing him with the very unconditional approval and regard of which thus far he had been deprived.

A’s unworldliness notwithstanding, he possessed a keen mind and a fearsome intellect and undoubtedly, in more favourable circumstances, he would have gone on to university.  Instead, he was articled to a firm of chartered accountants and was beginning to impress with his thoroughness and attention to detail when war broke out. A. joined the RAF and saw service as a flight lieutenant navigator in Coastal Command seaplanes and flying boats in India, Malaysia (then Malaya) and South Africa.

During the war A. kept in close touch with my mother and father, regarding them increasingly as the family that, to all intents and purposes, he had never had.  Although they were only a few years older than him, he deferred to them very much as parental figures.  To my father he accorded a deep respect and regard, drawing from him a passionate interest in music and theatre and a tolerant and liberal view of humanity unusual in those years of fierce ideological polarisation.  To my mother he gave a love and loyalty that never wavered.  His devotion was such that, although he got close within a number of relationships several times, he never married, and he remains a bachelor now.

Well into my adulthood, I never seriously questioned the nature of the unconventional triangular parenting that I received.  With the wisdom of hindsight, I have no doubt that my mother represented for A. from the start the apogee of the female roles of mother and partner and the domestic potential of such single-minded focus was, of course, disastrous within a stable marriage. And yet somehow a modus vivendi emerged whereby the roles of each of them integrated seamlessly and, on family outings, boarding school visits, annual holidays and at Christmas, A. would be there too.  And when, in his 60s, following retirement from a senior partnership in Arthur Anderson UK, A. bought a villa in the South of France, it followed without question that my parents would be co-resident with him there.

When my father died at 89, A. assumed direct responsibility for both the domestic and financial management of my mother’s     affairs and, increasingly as she became more frail, her physical welfare.  In these final offices, he has deferred always to me – not out of any sense of yielding to me family prerogative because of the ties of blood, but from his entirely natural grace and courtesy. For my part, as an only child curiously blessed throughout my life by the presence of this man who came to stay, I cherish these last few rituals and processes of the family life that drew me into being.  And if I have come to question the true character and meaning of A’s unwavering devotion only in recent years and to wonder at the balance between fulfillment and pain that, over time, it has brought, I’m happy to take my place within this final triangle.

...

AIW

Sometimes I see us
as two figures
in a landscape, empty

but for us, Chirico-still,
our long shadows
in alignment at last.

You tended the edges
of my life
from the start

the good steward,
the chatelain. But the
hard, white lighthouse

beam of that
indivisible love shone
high above my head.

Yet, even then,
its cutting edge
cast light enough to read by.

Now my father’s dead
and my mother smiles,
lost in her sheets.

And still you radiate
(burning up hope
and your few years)

that love indivisible whose
fanatic heat draws and binds us
here in this empty place.

...

Mum and A. - c. 1986

I posted the following in a slightly different form to my old Salon blog some years back. I offered it then for adaptation as a response to those savage little rejection notes fired off by the more arrogant poetry mag editors. But with recession now rolling in like some toxic sci-fi fog, its original context may have more relevance.

...

To ward off a feeling of failure, she joked that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejection slips, which she chose not to see as messages to stop, but rather as tickets to the game.
Anita Shreve, from 'All He Ever Wanted'

It is never too late to be what you might have been.
George Eliot

With my current 90% rejection rate, I’m self-administering a couple of drafts of reassurance.

The first is in the form of a rejection letter with a difference.  I present it free of charge to all who might need it.  It certainly beats the hell out of, ‘Kiss my ass, you sad, know-nothing losers!’

Dear...

Thank you for your letter rejecting my application for employment with your firm.
I have received rejections from an unusually large number of exceptionally well-qualified organisations. With such a varied and promising spectrum of rejections from which to select, it is impossible for me to consider them all.

After careful deliberation, then, and because a number of firms have found me more unsuitable, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your rejection.  Despite your company's outstanding qualifications and previous experience in rejecting applicants, I find that your rejection does not meet with my requirements at this time.  As a result, I shall be starting employment with your firm on the first of the month.

Circumstances change and one can never know when new demands for rejection arise. Accordingly, I will keep your letter on file in case my requirements for rejection change.  Please do not regard this letter as a criticism of your qualifications in attempting to refuse me employment. I wish you the best of luck in rejecting future candidates.

Yours Sincerely...

...

The second is a piece of well-turned wisdom from one of my favourite poets, R.S. Thomas.  Fellow poets, have this embroidered into a sampler and hung in a prominent place.

If a poet realises that it has been his privilege to have a certain gift in the manipulation of language (language being the supreme human manifestation) then he is obviously committed from the very beginning to a lifetime of self-discipline, struggle, disappointment, failure, with just possibly the odd success which is greater in his eyes than it probably is in the eyes of anyone else.

But I do I have three poems in the November Snakeskin.

 

...

OFFLEY COPSE, NOVEMBER 11th 1918

(Aubers Ridge, May 9th 1915)

Your path leads you between
great-headed trees – the beeches,
muscle-bound and wearing their may
like burly brides; the ash, rattling

his blades; horse chestnut burning
stacked candles in the face of day.
The bright rain tricks the air into
long strings of light whose lattice

tracks you up to the treeline. Deeper
in the copse blue smoke blows: dim
fumes in a bright season, a rush
of bells whispering, where you walk,

ankle-high. Trodden down, the early ferns,
rise again behind you. Bramble
gateways tugged apart re-form, slow-
motion twisting back in toothy coils.

And now, here, where midnight moss made
a bed for the two of you, you lie alone
and listen for the guns that boomed
somewhere north of Aubers Ridge.

pic 1: http://flickr.com/photos/dave_davies/1063389461/