Early Attempts

I'm not sure why, but I've just re-read the opening sentence of the first post I made back in December last year.

I've been writing poetry for almost 43 years. Sporadically and in an amateurish fashion for 30 of them; for the last 12 years, in cahoots with fellow cyberpals, regularly, seriously, scoring a few modest successes on the way.

A few of these poems I fashioned in an 'amatuerish fashion' still exist. I don't think I actually wrote that many over the years. Nothing written before 1979 made it into a word processed version; some other material exists in a small exercise book with some loose manuscripts carefully folded into the front, typed-up back in the 70's and 80's on a clapped-out Smith Corona portable. The book, with its garish vinyl cover is stored somewhere or other; it includes most of the poetry written during my teenage years and  twenties.

Not all of of it is totally embarrassing, and even with the most inept and adolescent attempts I was always serious about writing. I walked a lot as a teenager,  a bit of a loner, without access to today's game consoles - games console, the irony never struck me before - I just had, at first, long walks as my consolation, then walks with a poetry book stuffed in into my anorak pocket. No wonder I never managed to find a girlfriend!

Some of these early attempts even got into print and I thought it might be interesting to revisit a few.

1. Alnmouth

Dawn mist shifts
across the ebbing water –

on Bracken Hill
the tang of dew-damp fern
the stink of seaweed.

Stillness darkens
like a wave’s cold edge
the moment before its slow, glittering fission.

From salt reeds
a swan rises
glinting silver in the deepening blueness

a fading star
a dreamed coherence.

This is a 'later' earlier attempt, written well after the 'mid teen meaningful walk' stage. The earliest version is dated September 1979.  Alnmouth is a seaside village in Northumberland where Gill and I rented a tiny terrace house between 1977 - 1978. It was the first place where we had a front door which was not shared and important 'rights of passage'  in our life together occurred here, such as buying our own washing machine, painting the house in colours we chose and making bright red window boxes to cheer-up the narrow alleyway.

Alnmouth is a lovely village situated on a pretty estuary, however, life was not that idyllic. Though I had a permanent job as a trainee book-keeper - which I proved to be seriously inept at and hated - Gill, having qualified as a teacher, due to the mid 70's recession could not find professional work and ended up by turns, unemployed, working as a cook on the breakfast shift at a local hotel, a factory worker, then finally  a 'life skills trainer' with seriously disturbed residents in a long-stay mental institution. We were broke, the winter of 1977/8 was so cold that the North Sea froze along the shoreline, the house was heated by just one small coal fire, we had no transport and were entirely reliant on infrequent buses to shop for food and other essential supplies. Moreover, the older residents in the terrace were clearly outraged by having a young unmarried couple living among them and we became  the target of local gossip; that felt uncomfortable, especially so for Gill. who was more likely to be the butt of  'pre-feminist' attitudes to the role of women in these circumstances.

Vicissitudes aside, Alnmouth was a soulful place to live. I suppose all that wandering about in my teens had lead me to develop a very strong sense of belonging to the landscape and coastal scenery of  Northumberland. One of my set texts at A Level had been The Prelude, so this sense of place was cemented through a growing appreciation of Wordsworth's ideas about Nature. Though I was drawn to the landscape, the culture of the North, illiberal social attitudes, strong class divisions, aggressive and sarcastic modes of communication, these things I found a challenge. It took me years to resolve this ambivalence in my head.

Going back to the actual poem, if it was written in the Autumn of 79, then by that time Gill and I had moved to Manchester, she had just started her first teaching job and I was about to finish off the degree I'd previously dropped out from by enrolling with The Open University. So the poem itself looks back, somewhat nostalgically, to our time in Alnmouth. I think it is quite accomplishes for a writer aged 24 who had developed without any support or contact with other poets. For an amateur, it reads well, though It is quite derivative in style - Plath-lite really. But there is strong observation at its heart and the loose syllabics and chiming slant rhymes are in the main well judged. The final image, which presents some kind of apotheosis which simultaneously is extinguished  reminds me of the final lines of 'Whitsun Weddings:'

A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

'Dreamed coherence' - maybe that phrase reveals a growing sense that as my twenties progressed  I became more sceptical of my earlier, somewhat romanticised, notions of self and my cultural roots based on puerile ideas concerning 'oneness' gleaned from a heady misreading of both Wordsworth and Christmas Humphries. I began to feel that any coherent vision was probably entirely illusory. The world, as Mr. McNeice puts it,

.... is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural.

Even so, a sense of potential coherence, a shadow of faith, a momentary glimpse of the heavenly remains with me even now and turns-up unexpectedly and annoyingly at odd times in my writing. I may assert that nothing exists which can't be accounted for by a combination of quantum mechanics, biology, psychology, socio-linguistics and cultural ritual, but my imagination does not always accept that and I end up with all kinds of mythical creatures in my head, not all of them benign.

2 . Cap de Chevre

Finistere means 'earth's end'.
gulls cry.
sea, sky,
fractured rock,
 ll crave chaos.

Granite stacks,
obdurate, crumbling,
plunge dizzily into nothing.

sea fret
dank silence,
always the Atlantic surging close,then distant.

Images of Ys
possess our dreams.

Awakening, we see traced in mist,

cracked domes
broken colonnades,
skulls of the drowned
glimpsed through seaweed.

Nothing exists beyond change.

There is a handwritten manuscript version of this dated 10th  September 1980, but the subject matter of the poem, 'Cap de Chevre', a headland on the Crozon Peninsula in Brittany, dates from a month or two earlier when Gill and I. with our friend Bernard Savage, spent two weeks cycle camping in Finistere.


The holiday did not get off to an auspicious start, at least from my point of view. I was part way through year two of my Open University B.A.and struggling to keep up with the work load resulting from my decision to 'fast-track' myself through the degree by studying two, instead of the usual one course per year.The dreaded TMA's'  hand-in-dates came thick and fast at two week intervals which, combined with a full-time job, I struggled to keep up with. In order to catch the  train to Plymouth I had to throw an 'all-nighter' to complete an essay on W.B. Yeats. After cycling across Manchester at first light to pop the essay through the door of my tutor in Chorlton, I spent the day sorting equipment and loading-up my Claude Butler touring bike with bulging panniers topped by our tent. Before setting off for Piccadilly Station a swift couple of beers seemed in order in anticipation of two weeks of freedom.

Time for the off! My fellow travellers, less 'essay-lagged' than me sprinted away at a fair pace and soon I was lagging behind by thirty yards or so. Consequently though they managed to nip through the Plymouth Grove lights on amber, I was stopped on red and had to bide my time as Gill and Bernard disappeared into the distance down Upper Brook Street. Now had common sense prevailed I would have noted that we were in no hurry, we had time in hand before the overnight train departed and that there was good reason why people don't undertake the Tour de France with fully laden panniers. But I was dog-tired, fired by holiday ' joie de vivre', fortified by two cans of Lowenbrau, and bloody determined that Bernard Savage was not going to beat me to the station. The lights changed. As I put pressure on the pedals I reached down and tightened the toe straps. Twenty yards on I had changed up to the front top sprocket and moments later felt with satisfaction the rear Shimano click smoothly into tenth with a satisfying kerchunk. As I leaned into the wind and cranked up speed I could feel the faint. almost elastic flexing that you get with a well built Renolds frame when fully laden and flat out. Sure enough, moment by moment the figures of my compatriots, once a quarter of a mile ahead, grew closer, Bernard first, Gill a couple of lengths behind. At thirty miles per hour going full tilt in urban traffic, the rear end of your nearest and dearest, though lovely to behold, really should not be uppermost in your mind. Better perhaps to at least give some peripheral attention to things like road signs, gravel patches and potholes.

I never saw the pothole, but just felt a sickening judder as the front forks sprang back from the impact. I was not immediately unseated, for a moment it seemed that I might regain control,  then I hit the gravel patch and the back of the bike, laden down by two fully laden Karrimor panniers and the weight of the tent, began to slew about, waggling its behind like Jessica Rabbit on speed. The bike whipped from under me and came to a crashing halt. I continued to travel forward at thirty miles per hours. Unencumbered by technology I achieved, for a few seconds, man's ancient dream to fly like a bird, or in my case, like a brick. I do remember bouncing at least twice, once on my shoulder, once on my hip before skidding to a painful stop some ten feet or so in front of my somewhat mangled bicycle. Given the ferocity of the impact I was pleased to note that all of my limbs were in working order. The whole of my left hand side, however, was badly scraped and bruised. It would be wrong to say that I was bleeding profusely, instead I was bleeding only slightly, but from many places.

I picked myself up somewhat gingerly and began to examine the up-turned bicycle. All things considered it was less damaged than I feared. The panniers on the back had protected the gears and most of the frame - like an airbag for a bike. The side of the saddle was a little scraped, but less so than me!  The handlebars, apart from cosmetic damage to the black sponge 'shock absorbing' covering, were fully functional and even the front forks were not bent at all despite slamming into the pothole at speed. It was the front wheel that had taken the brunt of the impact and though still firmly attached to the forks had lost at least two defining characteristics worthy of that most notable of human inventions, namely roundness and the capacity to spin. This presented me with a problem as a bicycle with only one functioning wheel is not a bike at all, rather a really annoying and dis-functional form of  uni-cycle. Since I was still almost a mile from Piccadilly Station and my fellow travellers, who quite clearly had not heard the somewhat strangled squawk and resulting thud which accompanied my demise, were now were nowhere to be seen. I had no option but to man-handle the machine as best I could balanced on its one functioning wheel all the way to the station, where I arrived bruised, bleeding and breathless some twenty minutes later.

My reception was mixed. From Gill - a kind of 'my God what's happened' combined with let's clean you up and think what we can do. Bernard, unrestrained by any matrimonial obligation to be sympathetic, had a much cooler response best summed-up as - 'bloody idiot'. In the end we bundled all the bikes into the guards' van and decided to try to sort out my mangled bike in Plymouth next day before we caught the afternoon ferry to Roscoff. Somewhere south of Birmingham my travelling companions dozed-off. I spent an uncomfortable night discovering new bruises by the minute and observing gloomily the clattering inactivity of identically uniformed station porters on the platforms of Worcester, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Temple Meads, Taunton and Exeter, before arriving in a grey and chilly Plymouth at first light, stiff, sore and  feeling altogether pathetic, having now suffered a second sleepless night.

In these days of instant access to on-line information we forget how we coped in the age of paper. A quick glance at the Plymouth 'Yellow Pages' identified a good bike shop, the BT phone book had a city map and by 10:00am. I'd bought a new 27" front wheel, re-fitted the tyre and inner tube which were undamaged in the crash and soon was pedalling onto Brittany Ferries, l'Amorique. After a couple of days, although my bruises had blossomed to share a faintly mauve tone with the heathered heathland of Montagne Noire, my aches and pains began to subside and I could enjoy the wild cliffs, big skies and ancient woods of far west Finistere.

Gill and Bernard waiting for the Crozon Ferry, note beautious new front wheel on my bike!

So what has any of this got to do with the poem. Well, the point is, very little.  Experience has shown me that there is at best an oblique relationship between what is happening in life and how poems  turn out. What seems to occur is that a momentary impression, a memorable thing or sight, takes on a magnetic quality and starts to attract associated words and phrases, The poem builds as an extrapolation from a seemingly random impression which for reasons that are not fully explicable becomes blessed with  significance. All writers, I suspect possess this 'magnetic' capacity, and  probably it is the 'core' talent you need to write to a professional standard. In the case of poets, I think imagery, metaphor and telling phrases are the 'objects' of attraction. With storytellers, then, characters, situations and settings  become extrapolated and fictionalised.  Both things happen to me, images more strongly than situations - which probably explains why I write poetry, but often this has a story, or a situation at its core.

The narrative aspect of my poetry is something that developed over time, my earlier work, like 'Cap de Chevre' is more imagist. I put that down to simply being less 'immersed' in social situations. When I became a teacher, then a senior manager, not to mention the parent of three bright, imaginative children, then my whole world become more intensely social and these interactions enriched my writing.

In the current poem it seems to me the core observations were:

Granite stacks, 
obdurate, crumbling,
plunge dizzily into nothing.

and

dank silence,
always the Atlantic surging close,
then distant.

I wonder if the act of me observing the cliff scenery at Cap de Chevre  captured by Gill in a holiday snapshot sparked the images at the heart of the poem. In other words it is remembering a memory that was the trigger.


View from the Cap de Chevre

The surging ocean was an aural memory. It does have a connection to my bruised and battered state at the time. The campsite at Morgat where we stayed for a for a few days was a mile or so from the seashore. Nevertheless, in quieter moments the sound of the ocean was a constant presence, more noticeable at night. I listened to it for hours as the bruises and aches pains from my spill prevented me from sleeping. The only thing cushioning me from the lumps and bumps of the stony ground was a thin, solid foam Karrimat, so I had plenty of opportunity to listen to the sea. If it was breezy or high tide it roared like distant traffic; if it was calm then the surf broke on the shingle beach with a slow, rhythmic scrunch like the footsteps of a sauntering giant. No wonder then, half dozing for hours, my mind drifted amongst images of the lost, mythical city of Ys swallowed by the sea and the ghosts of the drowned wandered among my half dreams.




Just lying still was painful!

So far as the structure of the poem is concerned, it is built around 'units' of seventeen syllables, mainly, but not always making up a stanza. One of the areas I was studying at the time with O.U. was a module on Twentieth Century poetry. I enjoyed particularly the section on imagism and Ezra Pound. In my 'vynl notebook' the following poem appears dated 16th April 1980, I assume around that time I was studying Pound and 'pre Wasteland' Eliot.

Ezra Pound

You images glint
like a blue Ming vase
turned up amongst attic junk.

Around this time I experimented a bit with 'double haiku'. This was written, or at least a fair, handwritten copy is dated two days later on 18th April.

a man rakes barren earth,
overhead the cloud-sruffed sky
tumbles throug pearl dusk.

two sparrows peck at seeds,
close by a pale stoat slithers
through sparse undergrowth.

The  idea of a double haiku I first came across in J D Salinger's short story 'Seymour An Introduction'. For a while my late teenage self quite fancied himself as a Seymour doomed mystical poet type. Sylvia Plath, A Alvarez' 'The Savage God', Jim Morrison, Janice Joplin - suicide amongst creative types was quite the thing back in the early 70's and I was drawn to such fates. Luckily this mainly manifested itself in moments, as psychologists put it, of 'ideation without intent'. I may have outgrown the 'doomed poet' persona, but my interested in haiku derived verse forms persisted. Even then, though free verse was ascendant, I was drawn to formal structure in poetry.

3. Capability


Imagine his mind this neatly planted parkland,
each vista composed consciously, its loveliness
carefully husbanded; across the lawn peacocks strut
with instinctive sense of artifice.


The mansion crumbles, from a dry fountain, worn gods
spout silence; leaves flutter, small birds and tall grasses
shadow plotted pathways; through trees a starry pool
glitters in the sunlight. Wilderness encroaches.


He walks in the high walled garden:
through wrought gates, distant dusk blue hills promise
impossible freedom; but here is his landscape,
amongst unkempt roses trained across the trellis,
and sharp tang of marjoram and honeysuckle,
velvet scented, he sketches the ruined terrace.

If my memory serves me well, (ting! Julie Driscoll, all waif-like and black eyeshadow, Wheels on Fire, great song...must look it up on You Tube....).  Phew, hole in time/space continuum, well anyway, if my memory serves me well, this poem must date from Summer 1980 too. It was written while I was on Open University Summer School at York University. One of the 'induction' activities involved a trip to Castle Howard Gardens. I got fed up with my fellow students and wandered off by myself. I've just checked the Castle Howard website and it all seems very magnificent whereas I recall it as being quite overgrown and run-down. Perhaps it was back then.




'Natural, planting at Castle Howard Gardens.

The overt subject of the poem is the work of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown who brought to the more formal, classically inspired Eighteenth Century style of country house park a new natural, informal design. I now realise that I got the setting wrong, although there are elements of this style within the Castle Howard park, Capability Brown himself did not work on it. Nevertheless, beauty as re-constructed nature was something I was very familiar with as the landscape to the north of my hometown, Alnwick, was substantially remodelled by Brown. Sometime in my twenties I realised that all my earlier 'Wordsworthian' ideas about being a 'child of nature' were complete stuff and nonsense. Almost all the places I had roamed as a young teenager, the woods, waterfalls, ruined follies, even the meandering river were all Eighteenth Century re-constructions by Brown.

The dialectic within the poem between order and chaos, nature and artifice and the contrast between impossible freedom and the 'wrought gates' of language and perception signal a key moment I think. This moment is accompanied by a change in POV. For imagist poetry to work there needs to be distance between the reader and the 'images' within the poem. They must stand alone, the reader meditates on them, turns them over in mind like a beautiful artifact or piece of jewellery. This poem in engages the readers from the first word - an invitation to imagine. From this point on I did not really write in the 'imagist' mode at all, instead I started to collude with the reader, converse with them, entertain them, tell them stories. Well, actually, when I I say started to collude, actually I took a twenty year break from writing and got on with life instead.

4. Arnolfini on Valentines Day

The scruffy dog's significance is much discussed:
as a symbol of fidelity - ridiculous;
and for the Quattrocento bourgeoisie,
not exactly the emblem of success.

The lovers stand, demure in their Sunday best,
private passion with public ceremony,
in awkward silence, irreconcilable.

Around the grey, echoing galleries,
escaped students and secretaries
embrace baroque bouquets -
on Valentine's day, proud to display,
what privately they feel:

that love matters most, to most of us,
despite the small, cynical world snapping at our heel.

Through all of that time, however, I never stopped reading poetry. The Open University course meant that I had built-up a small collection of Twentieth Century poetry books and from time to time, in amongst developing a love of John Le Carre and re-discovering Graham Greene, I'd dip into Yeats and increasingly Auden. I wrote a couple of poems too for Gill, like this one, for Valentines day. This must have been been written around 1992 or 1993. The occasion was a trip to London to a conference run by The Industrial Society. I had a bit of time to spare before I caught the train home and decided to visit the National Gallery's new Sainsbury Wing. I noticed as I wandered about lots of girls carrying Valentine's bouquets which had been delivered to them at work no doubt. Realising that I had nothing for Gill, I bought a postcard of the 'Arnolfini Wedding Portrait', drafted this poem on the train back home, then copied it carefully onto the postcard.




The scruffy dog's significance is much discussed......

Looking at the poem now, I realise that both this and the previous one are informal sonnets; though written in loose syllabics both are 'fourteeners'. Maybe I was destined to write 'mainly sonnets', I just needed to come across others with the same passion who could show me how to do it properly.