In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk
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Poems for the Wall
I haven’t mentioned this project here for a while.
I started it over twenty years ago, now. Both of the following two statements are true : it remains what it has always been – very much a one-man-band ; but also, and from the beginning, it has received help and support from a wide range of individuals, each excited by the idea of helping poetry reach beyond its usual range – the specialist book shelf, the preserve of the few. I submit that poetry belongs where all of us go and any life uninformed by decent poetry is an impoverished life. Truth is the truer for decent poetry. In fact, we need it to help us properly to see and appreciate the truth.
I am going to bring together a few links here. The first one is also displayed onscreen here, just below :
1/
A recent information sheet on the project as a whole.
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Pictures of an exhibition of the bilingual poems held in Clifton Cathedral about three years ago.
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Pictures of an exhibition (in a quiet village church) of the project’s latest collection. This one is for children and is called “Poems for Rising Ten.” It is rather beautifully illustrated, thanks to the artist Rachel Stevens. Rachel made her work available, free of charge.
More and more, I am thinking that in each case, the combination of the text and the art work come to more than just illustrated words. They make a statement together that is more than each.
I am also wondering now to what extent this is, after all, just a children’s collection. Certainly, it was chosen for them and I hope will find its way to plenty of them. Yet the exhibition proved quite popular with all ages, in that ancient place of assembly, where people have worshipped through the centuries. I am told a few tears were shed at different times, in response to this poem or that, and they weren’t children’s tears.
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This poem is another written recently and pretty fast, though some aspects of it have been fermenting for quite a while, I suspect.
But the immediate catalyst was Prime Minister’s Question Time last Wednesday (November 30th). Starmer talked about Winchester College (public school) and the exemption from VAT enjoyed by these long-established playing fields (and citadels) of wealth and privilege. To be a pupil at Winchester costs your family well over £40,000 a year. It just so happens, of course, that Sunak was a pupil there, and various points were being made and implied by Starmer’s question.
Sunak’s answer leaned heavily on the word ‘aspiration’ as something somehow noble and to do with equality, ie ‘everyone has the right to…’ But right to what, exactly ? A range of perks for a fee of £40,000 per annum ? For whose gain ? What sort of gain ? At whose cost ? What sort of cost ?
Thanks very much, O Lord, that I am not in the same leaky dinghy as all those Others are. Clearly they failed to aspire enough. Thank you for rewarding me for my obvious advantages. Amen.
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Four New Poems
1/ ‘In the Cathedral‘ is in 5 short parts.
2/ ‘Word-Finding‘ is in 5 short parts.
3/ ‘Dancing in a Daze’ is of 1 part, but there are ‘notes’ overleaf.
4/ ‘Rowing‘ is of one part.
I seem to have stopped spluttering helplessly and hopelessly in prose, in response to present-day developments within and without.
Instead, I have been producing quite a lot of poetry recently, on a range of topics, writing at speed and sometimes in quick succession. Are the new poems worth paying attention to – or are they just another symptom and product of the turmoil and malfunction, alongside so much else ? Are they doctor or patient ? Stepping stone or just more of the flood ?
Rather than set out each poem separately as a post, to be followed by another, and then another, I decided to make a little list of links here, each to a separate poem. Sometimes it’s been one a day.
One obvious difference between prose and poetry, I am reminded, is that in prose you are likely to know more or less what you want to say and why you’re saying it. You feel more or less in charge of what is likely to come next. In poetry, it is not the same. The topics, and also the different ways of addressing those topics, come as if on their own accord, like something suddenly bubbling out of the earth. Not dissimilar to a dream, I suppose. And yet the dreamer is largely at the mercy of the dream, or so it feels, even though the dreamer is also creating the thing. The poet does not feel quite so much at-the-mercy as that, but more like some sailor of a small boat. Come the wind, as it will, in terms both of strength and direction, but then you work with it, using tiller and sail and – if you’re lucky – a bit of knowingness. You find the line of the wind, you run with it or across it, and try to trace a course on the strength of it.
For instance, the ‘In the Cathedral’ poem took me completely by surprise. Was I carrying that all this time ? And what is ‘that’ ? And why ?
I have put the links in chronological order of writing.
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