Poetry News

Sent four poetry submissions:

Smiths Knoll - Ceremony, True, Adventures, The Sestina Writer, Summer School, Awake
Tremblestone - Bike, Ration, Pressing the Advantage, There's too much, Try Me, Scenes of Mild Peril
Shearsman - No Distance, Injury, Towing the Line, Flight, Interval
The Rialto - In the next Seat, Prayer Meeting, Do You Want to talk, Adolescence, Process, Through, New Moon

Other poetry submissions out -

Strange Fruit - Repiecing, Orientation, Festivity, Chicago, Maps
Fire - Routine, Sodden Ground, Within, Without, New Pastures, Evening Local, Reassurance
Obsessed with Pipework - Language Class, Chicago, Come Over, Ichthus, Out the Window, Transformations, A Night Transport, Central London
Agenda - Accident, Favour, Miso, Scene, To Plan
The Liberal - Election Day, Half-term, Record, Acquaintance
Magma - Acquaintance, Calling At, Between Stations, Delivery, Quilt, Evening Out
New Welsh Review - Handicap, Exam conditions, Field Trip, The Accident, In a Naval Town

Total - 63 poems

Acceptance by Aesthetica - not sure which poems.
The Reader, Seam and Smiths Knoll rejections.

Dream

Showering with R. I pull on towels, run after her into living room to be seen that way.

Then in house with a Morse-type figure. Down a hatch is where a woman lives. I wake up next to him, he in his vest. Out window, kites etc.

On TV, Big Brother women.

I walk down sloping street. Overtake Graham Cornish. He says something to the effect that the drill looked as if it would topple down the street. As I talk he says he’s meeting Simon at the Café Valentina.

I enter station. There are two people in a booth, I wait in line. On board watch Big Brother. Nudity. The woman I found most interesting.

We drive through Newcastle. I have to change my clothes, inside out. Someone says ‘Good team, eh?’ On the wall is scrawled the wins and defeats in binary. Coach pulls into Victoria. I go downstairs can’t find my wheelie bag in the racks as the lights fade. I crawl to the back of the bus and see a girl with Downs Syndrome strapped against the back. On a mobile ‘There are bumps in her nappy where she’s gone to the loo’.

Dream

On a tabletop, tiny city of buildings
intricate as shale. Below, waves broke.
Inside the building, a toilet. I open
door and student with pale face make up
shakes my hand. It is wet.
Ray Davies, hair a dark shade,
flicks switch and my acoustic has a nice
electric tone. I look at his carpentry,
a small nut has been wound up a thin screw.
I got there when I should have been
supervising a class on the sports pitch.

Harvey Pekar (quoting Shakespeare) - Never a borrower nor a lender be.

Pleurisy and knuckle first things that set me back and are healing.

'Copine' and 'apothein' - no equivalent in English.

Cookery programme, The Best of English Cooking -

'The apotheosis of marine sweetness.'
'a useful series of textures.'

Dream 16/4/06

Ian McKellen figure behind theatre kiosk, go second time, some ad libs. He gives me a refund as I come up onto street. Three fivers, I misplace one. A queue for the bus I cannot find my money. I board and alight. Walk past female student on steps who says help me, there’s no more buses. I walk into shop / supermarket fumbling for lost fiver. The position of the food is being changed.

Ian McKellen there. I tell him I liked the improv. He tells me one time the dog went wild. He has a dog with him, above waist height. It runs amock. Someone punches a hole in the ceiling. Three necks of wine poke through. The dog runs to another counter.

Tell me, or I'll pinch you Mary McGreggor

Lavinia Greenlaw 'An Irresponsible Age' -

Catches that inability to understand what people are saying, eg 'We thought you too.' Takes time to understand the meaning of someone's words.

James Frey -

Arrive at beginning of book all the events are behind him. Nothing in white halls to distract him from it.

Exists in eternal present tense, every five seconds could lose the ground he's gained.

Like being born.

File with Borstal Boy, The Bell Jar and A Scanner Darkly.

-

Radio Four short story every evening this week at 11.30.
Marlborough star of The Flyover, gets bricked up.
Irish man Prody returns to village and blackmails Priest for something he didn't do.
Homeless man keeps being stopped by strangers who know his name, tell him to go home to his wife. He stops in shopfront and sees his name and age on his t-shirt. At a safe house he is led into a room with thousands of men in the same t-shirts saying 'Missing since ...'. He climbs up a ladder to get to his bed on the sixth bunk up. He is scared. A nurse says 'this is a safehouse. In the morning he looks down and sees a splash of urine at the foot of the ladder. He waves to see which one of the reflected faces peering over the bunk is his. Six hands wave back.

-

Want to do Tai Chi with Carrie in October. Offered work in June from Bath Academy. Want to concentrate on hotel poems, and submit to competition.

James Frey (from the tao) - trying to control the future is like trying to take the place of the Master Carpenter. When you handle the Master Carpenter's tools, chances are that you'll cut your hand.

With illness comes real rest.

Auteurs - 'She asked me 'Did you come down in the shower?''

Note - send James Frey to Jon, with Tom Waits bio and Once Upon a Time in the West?

We flew over Torquay, Plymouth, Exeter, Burgh Island and Kate Bush's house.

Dream

Eric drove too fast leading to the crash of his father's car which was behind us. I had to run out and rescue Robin and the rest of Eric's family from the wreckage. As I lifted Giles (first as he was the youngest) he turned into my cousin Andrew and I remember thinking 'this car better not go up in flames now', resenting his having been born last instead of having earnt his right to be saved.

On the Benefits of Teaching


On the first day of class students often sat next to him. His frame thin, he had spent the years from thirteen to twenty-nine pretty much exclusively in hiding. A hand to cover his crotch. A hand to cover his mouth. As a result his face was not as used as most thirty-year olds'. Untried in social situations, he remained unwrinkled by the grins, frowns or surprise that stamp a face. He sat, respectful of the students he taught, grateful for their company.

When he began teaching he found the social contact, being the sudden centre of attention, a thrill. He would laugh, delighted, sometimes so hard that he had to pretend to be about to write something on the board until his laughter could be concealed. The white glinting surface - like a raised shaving mirror - gave nothing back.

He approached his students as people, asked questions out of interest and not specifically to elicit an answer. Not he the jaded, mildly drunk figure muttering about 'pond-life' in the staffroom.

After teaching he didn't feel the need to socialise further.

Teaching made him the centre of attention. He had to talk. There was no room for reticence. He learned to be forthcoming.

Parting


When she stooped to plant
two kisses on my cheeks

I was sat on a chair.
'I loved it! I loved it!' she said,

unspecific like my reply
'Come back! Come back!'

meaning, I told myself,
to England.

Prose

It was during the warm-up exercises at his Tai Chi class that he first noticed it. He had shaken his leg out from the toes, ankle, calf, knee and hip, closed his eyes holding a phantom ball between his hands before his dan te en, meditated while feeling his spine rise like a golden thread lifted from the top of his head to the heavens while rooting through his bubbling wells, breathing deeply through his nose long and thin, through his mouth long and slow, all the while soothed by Siobhan's instructive guidance. And then as he opened his eyes, returned gently to the room, he patted himself down, like a policeman conducting a body-search, and felt two damp patches under his arms, the threads of his shirt stained green, almost black, with sweat.

It was a gym, you were expected to sweat in a gym. But Siobahn taught them to listen to their bodies, and this was only the warm up. He worked through the lesson, went home and bathed. He thought nothing more of it.

The next day in his classroom, light slanting through the shutters, it was 8.05, an hour before class. The Fall were playing on the CD player, separate piles of photocopies tiled the desk before him. The chairs had been lifted off the surface of the tables and placed under the desks. He breathed deeply and caught his own smell. He couldn't be sure it came from him. Placing a fingertip to his shirt he felt dampness. Fabric soaked with liquid over time.

As a child he could not get enough of cotton. His yellow pyjamas, thin as flame, the tag at the inside thigh of a polyester dog. He couldn't keep things out of his mouth. He sometimes sucked his school shirt until the dust and dirt from the surface was all tasted and only a a wetted texture remained, like chewed gum. He soon lost interest and the shirt dropped back down, a ripple gathered inexplicably at his collar, a drool spot dark and asymmetrical like a bad butterfly painting.

He sucked his thumb continuously and then had braces fitted. He painted a transparent solution onto his nails but he only came to endure the taste. Rather than take its slow, sour spreading into his mouth as a reminder, he saw it as something to be savoured. At university, after his braces were removed he started sucking his thumb again to keep his hand from his crotch, to avoid the anonymous knock through the dormitory walls.

Looking back, he couldn't keep his hands out the cookie jar. Half-starved, he ignored the consequences, rifled among the carriers accumulated at the back of the cupboard and, finding nothing, reached for the Lion bar allocated for tomorrow's breaktime.

He peered beneath his arm and inhaled. A whiff brought him up short.
He got up and went to find a newsagent that stocked deodorant.

That evening as he pressed his weight onto his left arm he was left with a dull ache in his bicep, a ball of undispersed pain in his shoulder that would not disperse along the arm even by taking pressure off it. He lay back, breathing deeply, and could not find a comfortable place to rest his limb. It seemed dislocated, separate from his body, yet it was unresolved, unstraightened out. It hung wrong, even when lying down. He could not sleep. It was 2 am. He he got up and watched the Open University. It was a long couple of hours. The fall of the Berlin Wall, Hiroshima and Aushwitz from 'A Day in History', then a programme on recycling and Terry Hall recovering from illness in the country. He went back to bed exhausted.

The next day was the penultimate day of this German group of students. That night he accompanied them to watch Tamburlaine at the Bristol Theatre. There was no fire curtain. A series of gowns and robes hung from hooks at the back of the stage. 'Coathooks weren't invented until the Eighteenth century' said Piers, the principal, sat next to him. 'That's a bad start'. He projected his voice like he was speaking from the royal box.

Afterwards, he walked to the station with the students, marked some papers on the train, and waved them off as they left the train at Bath. He walked home from his station and arrived home at 12.30. He felt something close to despair at the display of the clock radio.

Fri - Saw off Spanish students. Giselle kissed me on both cheeks as I sat like an old man. Good feedback I earned - 17 students in one class.

IELTS class 'we all think you're better than the other teacher'.
Solsbury Hill to Spanish students on Wednesday. 'What do you think?' 'I don't like it' - Cristina, whose pets were poisoned by her neighbour; she stabbed her tyres in retribution.

Drinks with Alex and Steve, who has got me onto Fall discussion group. Ten people voted for me, no one blackballed me. Good drink. Otter's Head. Steve stands his Embassy on the table when he sits down. Called Alex 'Steve' as he was buying me a drink. Kebab on way home.

Sat - Woke up, throat throbbed. Weekend recuperating, sweating into dressing gown, scarf indoors. Fistful of Dollars with Carrie.

Glad to have finished Bukowski 'Women' - worth it for a few moments of perception
Drinking is like fucking and writing. Occasionally it's good to rest the Godhead.
and a few moments of everyday grace.

James Frey 'A million little pieces' - I go back to the Unit and I sit and I watch TV. There is a sitcom about some witty New Yorkers who spend all of their time in one Apartment. One of the men praises the show and he talks about how real it is. The only people I know who spend so much time in one Apartment usually have black plastic taped over the windows and guns in the closet and burn marks on their lips and fingers and huge locks on the doors.

Simon Armitage poem on Radio 2: My brain is the size of a basketball, you should hear me out. Dolphins, those gypsy pickpockets laughing all the way to Atlantis. People who bought books about me also bought books about ... This stuff just tumbles out.

Mon - birthday. Lovely meal, work out of way, at Pizzeria Amici - antipasta spread of meats, Goats cheese and pine nuts pizza, Italian white wine, home to wrapped presents. Luke Haines, Sergio Leone, Van Morrison, Italian dictionary. Wonderful evening.

Tue - Jon called from Australia. He has the plan. Good to hear from him.


Rej - Smiths Knoll, Seam
Post sent - Suki birthday gift back + CD, Milly CD

Last Saturday, Chiara and Laura rushed upstairs to take a photo with me; then rushed downstairs. 'Come again!' 'I am' 'When?' 'To Turkey' 'Turkey?' Torquay.

I flew over Torquay in a four-seater plane on Saturday. We flew over Totnes and turned at Burgh island, setting of Agatha Christie novels. Worn afterwards by West Country air and being on the edge of panic for an hour. Nothing level to hold onto but Julie-anne's seat. Once we were no longer airside we sat in the weird no-quarters of the pilots' lounge, single storey. Turbulence was tricky. I thought something had befallen Rusty, our lucky Cairn terrier, waiting in the car crossing his paws as we flew.

Fantastic hosts provided cheeseboard, port after a salmon and aspargus and roast potato main. As Carrie slept I sat downstairs in the open plan kitchen - the wind chime, the beep of the answerphone, the electrical hum of the wind blowing down the chimney.

Carrie read well at Exeter. I didn't like to be back. Felt on the outside of things again. Spoke to Kenny Smith and Tony Frazer, promised work. Didn't read, too tired. Coolings cellar, the Old Ship Inn. Bought a wok and a carafe with my Debenhams card, a gift from student Minh over a year ago.

Bukowski's 'Women' goes on and on like an Icelandic saga, willing it to end.

No post but birthday cards and presents. Waiting for tomorrow evening.