Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

And another.

THE TRICK

The trick is
to let slip
the ladder

that brought you
climbing to this
point. Unknot it,

let it fall away.
Then reach up
through the half-

dark and flick
the latch and let
the shutter fall.

No route back
down to how
it never was;

no liar’s light
above on how
it’s never going

to be. Just
this moment,
then the next

and darkness
either side.
Like any trick

worth knowing,
it’s a lifetime
in the learning.

GO WEST…

I wrote a while back about my long-term, long-distance relationship with America, including as metaphorical illustration of the passion a poem called Driving to America. Further reflections were stimulated recently whilst reading a fascinating book by Barry Miles called The Beat Hotel. It depicts an on-&-off six-year period spent by Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso & William Burroughs in a run-down little hotel in the back streets of Paris.  Behind the accounts of their day-to-day lives – Burroughs’ constant quest for exotic drugs, Corso’s womanising & trips into Europe, Ginsberg’s attempts to interest publishers in France, Britain & America in the work the three of them were producing – is a delightful picture of the Europeanising of three very Transatlantic Americans.  There seems little doubt that the breadth, depth & character of the writing that emerged from all three during the late ’50s & early ‘60s owed much to their apprehension of a larger, more cosmopolitan world, experienced within that most cosmopolitan of cities.

For me, middle class & English, the preoccupation with America began in childhood in the ‘50s – an easy obsession in a Britain still under the post-war spell of American culture.  With enormous reluctance, my grandmother took me to see Where The River Bends in a dark & smoky South London cinema.  While I fell in love with James Stewart in a sheepskin jacket, she counted the minutes. 

But from that brief encounter on, I was entranced.  The scrappy back garden of my grandparents’ apartment, the local bombsites, Balham Common all became part of a dreamscape of high bluffs & roaring rivers. Wearing my grandfather’s panama hat & a bright orange cowboy shirt with white piping around collar & cuffs, & packing a golden Lone Star six-shooter, I roamed the range. And then, when pocket money started – in pence first, then shillings – I began the huge collection of Western novels, biographies & histories that still fill shelf space in garden office library. 

Later, the sense of a mighty landmass on which those early settlers made so little initial impression was augmented by a powerful awareness of its urban culture.  New Orleans jazz came first & then shortly afterwards the hurricane impact of rock and roll. I was a porky little boy with a side parting & sensible shoes, transfixed by the barely contained hysteria of Presley’s rockabilly & the thick, glossy shufflebeat of Fats Domino. I wept at Buddy Holly’s death; I rejoiced at the arrival of the 45 rpm disc; I learned E, A & B7 on a Spanish guitar.

The arrival of adolescence & the discovery of the Beats occurred simultaneously.  As if timed to accommodate that first testosteronal rush, a fat little paperback appeared in the station bookstall: Protest – The Beat Generation & The Angry Young Men. I couldn’t identify with the latter – all those disaffected British working class youths who’d just missed the War & were pissed off with absolutely everything in a beer-&-fags sort of way.  But the Beats seduced me instantly.  Where once I had been John Wesley Hardin, hands clawed over my low-slung guns, or Gene Vincent, pop-eyed & skew-legged at a microphone the size of a small icebox, now I was Dean Moriarty & Sal Paradise digging Charlie Parker in Birdland.  I filled school exercise books with appalling pastiches of Kerouac’s laconic, Corso’s manic & Ferlinghetti’s epic verse.  I wore a huge black jumper & tight black jeans. (I drew the line at sandals: my dad wore them all the time, with thick grey socks). By the time that The Beatles arrived & were swiftly superseded by The Rolling Stones & Bob Dylan as icons of cool to die for I was way ahead of the game.

The world turned & turned again.  With bewildering speed we stumbled out of the 20th century, mass-communicating & multi-tasking like professionals so that even the enemy – the old, &, more deadly still, the middle-aged – knew the meaning of zeitgeist. 

But from within this postmodernist intersection of merging & synthesising Anglo-American influences I look back sometimes with a nostalgic frisson to the innocence of my own Wild West, my own jump-jive rockabilly parties, my own Greenwich Village coffee house poetry readings.  Purity & unadulterated essence are what we all seek to restore, I guess.  And that dreamtime America provided both landscape & soundtrack to my childhood & youth.

Well, the overwhelming message is that dreams are dreams & the real world of school, work, ill health & death is where we should spend our days.  But the weirdest of codas to my own dreamtime USA was provided when I visited the States for the first time.  As I stood by the Pacific on the North Oregon coast, or watched the trucks barrelling down through Seattle, I realised that in some strange, prescient way I had anticipated what I now perceived & that dreamtime & realtime America were very close &, without having noticed, I had stepped across the dividing line.

A new poem.

PETAL IN A BOOK

This is
a bloodspot,
a communion wafer,
a thumbnail manuscript.

It’s a membrane,
a ghost of crimson,
a gauze against
white light.

It lifts
even now under
my down-breath,
lifts like

an insect’s wing.
It was late summer.
The picking
of petals

was idly done.
No loves-me,
loves-me-not.
You laid them,

two of them,
on my eyes
like dead man’s
pennies. I crossed

my arms. The sun
diminished. You
laughed and
fell back beside me

into the perfumed
grass. We murmured
and kissed. Larks
were singing.

Someone called.
We scrambled up.
One petal
sideslipped, scooping air.

The other,
a satin coin,
I placed between
two pages for

Raskolnikov to spend.
Forty summers later
the currency
is undischarged.

LINES ON LINES

Simply to provide some indication of the continuing prevalence in the face of increasing metropolitanisation of real dialect in certain regions of the British Isles, I submit this curiosity. It appeared first in a local newspaper, The Whitehaven News in Cumbria in the North-East of England. Although the colourful piece is from the late 19th century, dialect this dense can still be found in parts of that most beautiful of counties. 

If it’s any comfort to Stateside readers risking dislocation of the jaw in attempts to read this out loud, accents from the North-East are the least penetrable to British outsiders. Read & ponder…

[A] Cumbrian rhyme, written in the 19th century, floated in its now fragile gossamer form out of an 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.

© The Whitehaven News

...

And now, stepping from the populist to the posh, a further series of aphorisms, fireside reflections & general bons mots on poetry. All of these come from a 2004 copy of the estimable & 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

The words of poetry should express what the eye sees, what the ear hears, and what the heart understands.
Lucille Clifton, quoted in Poets & Writers Online, 2004

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, three aphorisms from Quoins for the Chase, New Century Press, 2003

Because poetry depends on familiar life, it belongs in familiar life.
Andrew Motion, The Sunday Times, 30 November 2003

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, Poetry, December 2003

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, The Guardian, 8 November 2003

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, The New Criterion, December 2003

In poetry, you work towards the intense instant. You certainly cannot subordinate poetry to a routine.
Harry Clifton, The Irish Times, 17 December 2003

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, quoted in American Poetry Review, November /December 2003

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, quoted in The Iowa Review, Winter 2003/4

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, Sou'wester, Fall 2003

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, Poetry Wales, October 2003

Opera and poetry are elitist and obscure by nature, and ought to be sold on the joy of difficulty.
Lavinia Greenlaw, The Guardian, 20 December 2003

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, quoted in The Salt Lake Tribune, 4 January 2004

Poetry is the opposite of reality TV.
Niall MacMonagle, RTE Radio 1, February 2004

At a time when energies are being marshaled 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, The Recorder, Fall 2003

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, Voices and Poetry of Ireland, 2003

Reading a poem on a page, in silence, with blank spaces around it, is one of the great experiences.
Ciaran Carson, Fortnight, December 2003

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, The New Yorker, 9 February 2004

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, The Washington Post, 9 November 2003

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.
Sinéad Morrissey, Magma, Summer 2003

A poem needs nervous tension, like an arrow needs a bowstring.
AB Jackson, Poetry News, Winter 2003/4

Often a poet's strength seems to result from, or at any rate to accompany, the reconciliation of two opposing qualities...
Annie Finch, The Kenyon Review, Winter 2003

...

I’ve done a great deal more revising than writing recently, but a poem sprung fully formed into a first draft the other day. I have countless fragments, some of which may proceed at some point, but it’s been a while since product emerged so soon after process.

It intrigues me still how a set of verses can tumble against one another like a spray of playing cards without one having any pronounced sense of their propagation. The phenomenon is no less remarkable in the event of the production of complete crap: it’s that initial process that precedes the craftwork of trimming & honing (or rejecting entirely) that intrigues.

... 

Rik Mayall reads an angry poem...

READWRITEPOEM – PROMPT 10: The transience of humankind.

What can we take on trust in this uncertain life? Happiness, greatness, pride - nothing is secure, nothing keeps.
EURIPIDES (‘Hecuba’)

CLOCKS

Clocks tyrannise. Faces implacable,
long tongues lick away
the hours. Time is all
they know. Obsessed,
they talk of nothing else.

But here at the turnpike –
short on change, but long
on breath – I watch the sun
bounce like a dropped ball
between solstice and equinox.

pic: http://growabrain.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/old_clocks_3.jpg

OLD PATTERAN, HE SAY…*

Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me either. Just pretty much leave me the fuck alone.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a broken fan belt and a slow puncture.

It's always darkest before dawn. So if you're going to steal your neighbour's newspaper, that's the time to do it.

Sex is like air. It's not important unless you aren't getting any.

Don't be irreplaceable. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.

No one is listening until you fart.

Always remember you're unique. Just like everyone else.

Never test the depth of the water with both feet.

If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of payments.

Before you criticise someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticise them you're a mile away...and you have their shoes.

If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.

If you lend someone £20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

Some days you are the fly; some days you are the windshield.

Don't worry; it only seems kinky the first time.

Good judgement comes from bad experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgement.

The quickest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your pocket.

A closed mouth gathers no foot.

Gaffer tape is like the Force. It has a light side and a dark side, and it holds the universe together.

There are two theories to arguing with women. Neither one works.

Generally speaking, you aren't learning much when your lips are moving.

Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

Never miss a good chance to shut up.

We are born naked, wet and hungry, and get slapped on our arse. Then things get worse.

Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.

There is a fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness."

No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.

There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. Say, around age 11.

Everyone seems normal until you get to know them.

* Courtesy of a whole heap of stuff I nicked from various sources. Apologies if you’ve heard some of these before, but they bear repetition...

...

DOUBLE NEGATIVE

A linguistics professor was lecturing to her class one day. "In English," she said, "a double negative forms a positive.  In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative.  There is, however, no language wherein a double positive can form a negative."

A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

FOOLS OR KNAVES..?

Many times during the four years of the Patteran Pages I have wondered out loud whether the malfeasances of the British & American governments were due more to foolishness than knavery. I have noted too that the arrogance bred of detachment from the clear sound of vox populi is a staple condition of government & that it’s weary disgust rather than cynicism that characterises the informed reaction to the delinquencies of our leaders.

History has demonstrated repeatedly that the very worst kind of government depends upon a potent synthesis of both foolishness & knavery & that, as often as not, the former typifies the essence of the leader & the latter drives those closest to the seat of power.  In a just world (as the wistful old figure of speech has it), the Bush administration would have been impeached long since, collectively & severally, & both the fecklessly stupid & the irremediably rotten would have been held to account before their peers. Equally, in the wake of what was either blatant lying or swivel-eyed stupidity in respect of both foreign & home affairs blunders, Blair & his minions would have followed them down.

If one is being strenuously fair this side of the pond, it’s a little too early to pass comprehensive judgement on Gordon Brown’s administration. Initially he benefited from intense relief at the departure from office of a body of men & women whose time was sullied again & again by clear evidence of spin, chicanery & downright mendacity. But a series of recent calamitous security cockups against a backdrop of yet further accusations of de facto bribery & financial mismanagement has been fully exploited by an increasingly confident & coordinated opposition. So the double-headed spectre of stupidity & crass dishonesty is stalking the corridors of power once again.

Whoever eventually climbs out from under the pile of wrangling presidential candidates in the States, s/he will have to offer an administration that is impeccably clean, keen & capable. A population wearied to the bone by a president so dumb that if threw himself at the floor he’d miss will surely demand nothing less. It remains to be seen whether they choose to opt for one of four Republicans – Huckabee proposing an end to gun control, Guiliani happy to bomb Iran, McCain pro-surge & anti-abortion & Romney pro-war & anti immigration – over a black man or a woman. Interesting times. But just how optimistic do we feel?

As things stand, here, upon this bank & shoal of time, even the most resolute of tree-hugging, open-toed, pacifistic democrats might be forgiven for checking out the price of mail order rocket launchers…
...

 

 

...

NOW HEAR THIS...

Rock hits the spot – dance & dissent with Elvis Costello & The Attractions.

FOR READWRITEPOEM

BIRTHQUAKE

He is hypothesis,
an act of faith, a theory.
He’s rumour without
a name.  What’s the evidence?
Radar graffiti – a splash of
chalk dust in the dark.
“Look, you can see his hand!”
No, it’s just a phantom
caught on polaroid, foam
blown off water,
cuckoospit, thistledown.

And yet we watch,
the two of us, solemnly,
breathing through our mouths,
seismologists on stakeout, waiting
for the independent pulse.
And there, and there again:
a ripple in the skin, miniature
tectonics; something stirring
at the core.  He is on his way
from a dark place to break
the surface of the world.

RAISING SAND

Instead of tucking the Now Hear This link at the bottom of the post as a sort of take-it-or-leave-it extra (& it’s generally leave-it!), I’m leading with a couple of much admired items.

During the ‘70s I was never caught up in the mighty testosteronal backwash that followed in the wake of Led Zeppelin. By the time that the band roared onto centre stage, I was already losing interest in stadium rock, favouring more the vigorous ripple of high energy but low-wattage bands beginning to emerge through the music pubs of North London. 

And I could never get on with Robert Plant’s plangent wail, which, it seemed to me, represented perfectly the inability of most British white boys to get within a country mile of the vocal characteristics of their black American heroes.

So the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss album Raising Sand came as a very pleasant surprise. Since the demise of Led Zeppelin Plant has tirelessly promoted a number of the more recherché areas of world & folk music, continuing in the spirit of the fearless eclecticism that was one of Zeppelin’s strongest suits. On Raising Sand he moves into Alison Krauss’ territory & together they have produced an album that demonstrates triumphantly the continuing relevance & progression of American country music.

With T-Bone Burnette at the desk & Marc Ribot on guitar, the album shimmers & burns & - as in the Everly Brothers’ Gone, Gone, Gone – rocks. And (one or two plangent wails notwithstanding) Plant sings up a storm. Herewith Gone, Gone, Gone & Please Read The Letter.

...

Good to note that the United States of America is demonstrating through its legislature the same passion for democratic equity & justice that recently had the United Kingdom deporting a Ghanaian woman dying of cancer.

District judge Kenneth Karas has just sentenced two children, one them nursing, to six-months maternal deprivation while their mother, Olympic athlete Marion Jones does time for lying about steroid use. She’s been stripped of her five medals, has picked up two years probation alongside 800 hours of community service, but Karas feels that only a custodial sentence will properly drive home the message to her & to the rest of us that lying is a bad thing.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C.S. Lewis

...

As they say in Yorkshire, sometimes you just have to laugh because if you didn’t you’d cry. Let me share with you from my stats a small collection of Google searches that my name has garnered over time.

limp dick in jar of cricket

rude space dick

pig dick in girl

tiny boy dicks

long flapping dicks

dicks meaning and photo

dick in loaf of bread

horse dick

holy dicks

dick stretcher

really old dicks

far eastern twink dicks

milky dick

Forty pieces of silver & my daughter’s hand in marriage to anyone who can adequately explain ‘limp dick in jar of cricket’...

...

Finally, check out the post entitled The Wedding on Roberta's Elusive Abstractions.

TOTALLY OPTIONAL PROMPTS

HURRICANE

I wake into
obsidian,
my mouth
tasting the pillow.
Still dreambound.
Queen Mab tells me
I am suckling
a great white bird.

Spitting feathers,
I fight against
cobweb sleep,
bucking sheets.
Eyes gape
for light in a night
of beating wings
and flocking voices.
What cavalcade of owls
could make this din?

I slip from reverie
to realisation:
a bully wind
is loose outside,
booted and mouthy,
shouting the odds.
Mischief abroad,
wet and wicked;
there’ll be tiles
loosened, branches
in the wires
come morning.

But now the night
conspires to hide
the carnage:
undercover dirt
flies in the dark;
secret leaves flurry
in barmy swarms.
I scramble to decipher
this garbled code.
Sleep-shod but
keen and dauntless,
I grab a handle.
The door runs away
with my hand
and I stagger,
flapping like a phantom,
into a godless din
of elemental voices.
I am intruding
on plans for
Armageddon;
I am feet first
into a wooden
whirlpool tugging
at the world’s end.
Sandblasted white,
stripped bare,
I clamber back
into a tilting house
and tuck my
animal hide
back into my bed’s
old pocket. The night
rings like bells:
the wind chimes
the hours; I
sleep into its din.

Dawn punches light
out of a sky
unnaturally clear
and I claw
the curtains wide
onto a new horizon.
Smacked onto
its back, the mighty beech
is down. Spread-
legged and scrambled
out of shape,
it chokes the lane
a shock-haired
Gulliver, once-feared,
now brought low.
A sudden philosopher,
I contemplate mortality:
this was, I suppose,
a warrior’s death, back-
broken, breath
against breath.

I say as much
to neighbours
busy in the boughs
with saws and axes,
to motorists idle
at the new frontier,
to myself at noon,
adrift in a Valhalla
of branches, tree bones.

pic: http://www.nationalgalleries.org/media_collection/6/D%205023.48.jpg