Notes from an Italian Journey

I left Livorno in a sapphire dawn.
White mountains, crumpled like a thrown back sheet
recede; as softly daylight fades to fawn
I sail alone into the sullen heat.
Last night, your dark eyes shone. I remember
reflected in a glass of spicy red,
yellow candlelight—a crimson ember.
You laughed. I conjectured—how soon till bed.
Noon: dolphins leap across the bow wave's foam,
Capraia passes, barren and treeless.
I think of how bewildered Ulysses,
captured by Calypso, still yearned for home.
Beyond love lies no cosy solitude,
just empty chaos, where dark matters brood.

I suppose it might be overstating things to say that the 4th June 2001 was a day that changed my life. Some days do change your life profoundly and irrevocably, like the day you get married or the birth of your first child or a parent's funeral. This June day was not a big day like that. But some small days can change your life in profound and subtle ways too, such as the day I decided to jack-in a boring office job and train to be a teacher or maybe the first time I walked through a rainforest, or snorkelled in the Med. Well what happened on this special small day is that I plucked up courage to post something I had written on an on-line poetry workshop called 'Sonnet Central', prefacing a somewhat primitive version of the above poem with the message, "Wrote this last week...a relatively new sonneteer..certainly have not invited critical comment before...so be gentle!"




Capraia passes, barren and treeless...

Actually I was lying on quite a number of fronts. Firstly I'd attempted to write 14 line quasi-sonnets for years without fully understanding the mechanics of the form. Secondly, I could not have just written this poem the week before since an even more primitive version of it still sits on the 'non-workshop' part of Sonnet Central posted the previous February, written by Alan Wickes aged 37. My real age in February 2001 was 46; in retrospect it seems quite funny how I lacked the courage to shave off an entire decade and plumped somewhat sneakily to be just nine years younger than I really was.

Since it's confession time, by the way, my real name is not Alan Wickes either.

So why the blarney? Well, I guess the age thing and the brooding dark matter in the poem itself do signal, like an car alarm on a rusty old banger, 'mid-life crisis alert'. As for the name change -  that  shows just how much our now familiar virtual world of tweets and facebook 'likes' differs from the on-line zietgeist of 12 years ago. Back then I could not countenance using my actual name; handles and avatars ruled our second lives.

So why 'Alan Wickes'?  as I explained  in the 'Bio' thread that appeared on the Sonnet Board soon after I became a regular....

Re: Short bio
Hi David Quite clearly Stoke Poges is a very welcoming and friendly place, on first name terms after only two years, surely this is quite outrageously familiar by normal English standards! Well done for 'breaking the ice' - a wonderfully evocative phrase summing-up le sang froide Anglais! So, I was born and raised in rural Northumberland. Studied History of Art and English at Manchester and The Open University. After a brief spell in office-work, I have worked in Further and Adult Education for the last 18 years. I am married, have three children, and live in Buxton, Derbyshire - A Spa town high in the Pennines. I enjoy travel, particularly around the Mediterranean. I dabble in gardening, enjoy wine and conversation. There is little else to say really. Oddly, like David I have always read and enjoyed poetry. but stopped writing it for more than twenty years. Alan Wickes is a handle too, derived from a pun on my birthplace's name - Alnwick in Northumberland. I guess a good solid Northern, Presbyterian, working class upbringing has made me shy of openly admitting a tendency towards doing anything as wasteful and self indulgent as writing sonnets! Oh the joys of being English! cheers Alan

Looking now at the members who posted their 'Bios', at the time, quite a few opted to use a pen-name, mainly as it turned out for the same reason as myself, that the business of being a poet did not sit comfortably with the workaday world of management and bureaurocracy that most of us seemed to inhabit in our 'real' lives. Do you really want colleagues to be party to the darker workings of your imagination? Even the fact of being a poet, popularly associated with romantic notions of garrets, consumption and suicide, is hardly going to strengthen staff confidence in your leadership. How does it help staff to know that the person in charge of a multi-million pound budget on which their livelihood depends spends whole swathes of his time brooding over 'dark matters' in fourteen line, heartfelt chunks?

However my own vicarious life pales into insignificance compared to Michael Juster, listed right below my entry. Modestly Mr. Juster mentions that 'he worked in Washington in a variety of government jobs'. It took nine years for people to realise that the winner of the Nemerov poetry prize and tranlsator of Horace and Petrarch was actually Michael J. Astrue, the head of the US Social Security Administration, a high ranking official who reported directly to the president. You never can quite tell on-line who you are rubbing shoulders with.

As for the poem itself, my concerns about posting it were unfounded. People liked the color and richness of the imagery but were pretty scathing about the clunky metre. Over the next few months their suggestions helped me iron out some of these technical challenges and become much more ambitious and serious about my writing. By disconnecting the 'writing me' from the 'everyday me' I was better able to understand that the narrator of the poem is not the same as the author. Poems are not slices of life, but a 'mad other' as Richard Wilbur calls them, a parallel universe which may resemble this one, but distils and transforms the world rather than simply describes it.