Summer Break

As usual AppleHouse takes a break in July and August as our family and friends fly into the South of France for their holidays with us. We have a busy few months with people we love and I hope that's how you'll spend your summer too.

Here's a list of 10 things I will do, or attempt to do, this summer. You can add your list too if you like.

1. Write a poem for my nephew's wedding celebrations.
2. Take the cat on her first trip back to the UK.
3. Make soda bread.
4. Write something small every day in July (See my 'open field' blog.)
5. Go swimming in the sea.
6. Try to spend less time on Facebook.
7. Think positively about my possible contract for a new book but cross all available bits of my body too!
8. Be relaxed about sharing the control of my kitchen when I have guests. (Tough one!)
9. Drive our new tractor around the apple farm in Kent.
10. Remember to drink more water than wine. (Another tough one!)

See you in September.
Write well.
L x

Today I want to say something wonderful about...

My niece and her family have been staying with me for a week.
'This potato peeler is amazing,' she said as she was peeling carrots for her little boy. He is three and has a thing for raw carrots and cucumber, even for breakfast.

Last year, a friend over from Kent picked up the same potato peeler and exclaimed, 'Isn't it great?!' He had the same one at home.

It's reassuring to know that you're not completely alone in such extreme appreciation of a kitchen utensil. Although I'm the only one among us to have a written a poem in praise of it.

In Praise of Things

Today I want to say something wonderful
about my potato peeler –
the way the ergonomically designed handle
fits snugly in the curve of my palm as if
it was made for the valley of my right hand.

I want to tell you how it is soul-mate
to thick-skinned vegetables –
cloudy tangerine columns of carrot
knobbly orbs of King Edward
how it slides over them as if it might be
wrapping them not unwrapping them
as if it might be whispering
while secretly stealing their skin.

I love the way the steel head swivels
gently rocking from side to side
accommodating each slight
ridge, bump, lesion. Under the skin

everything glistens new born –
vulnerable, true colours rising.


Write your own celebration of a ‘small thing’. Choose something that is functional. It has to be ordinary, of no real value. It shouldn't have any built in emotional value. You might not even realise how much you appreciate this thing until you start looking around you.
 
Start with the same opening phrase. Tell me just how wonderful this thing is. Be specific about what it does and how it does it. It’s also an opportunity to have fun.
 
Don’t try too hard to get a secondary meaning in the poem. My last two lines emerged unexpectedly after writing about the physical aspects of the potato peeler for some time. 
 
If we work too hard at a ‘sub-text’, what’s going on between the lines if you like, the poem can sometimes come across as too didactic. Writing needs a lighter touch than that, unless you’re writing an instruction manual, in which case you can be as didactic as you want!
 
And the secondary meaning might just be that we should celebrate the small things in life.
 

It was only when I took some photos of the potato peeler for this blog entry that I realised it had a brand-name. I've been using it for years and have never noticed that word written on the underside of the handle. Perhaps because its function is its most important quality I've never even thought of examining it closely - there's never been a need. Perhaps I would have if it had ceased to work properly.
 
I imagine there are lots of things like this in my life, things I take for granted. There are probably praise poems waiting to be written all around me.
 
Write well.
L x

The Beautiful List

I've spoken about and shared list poems a couple of times before but I really don't think we can have too much of a good thing. List poems, done well, sing to us because of their deceptive simplicity: they wear the disguise of an ordinary everyday thing (shopping list, to do list etc) but the poet's choice of form and language lifts them up out of the ordinary and makes them extra-ordinary.

The following poem, by Tim Nolan, (which you can listen to HERE on The Writer's Almanac before you read it), slows our reading down with its short couplets. It asks us to pay the same amount of attention to the 'forgotten'. But this isn't just a poem about a literal change of season. The introduction of the human relationship in the middle of the poem - the flush of your face/ so much - asks me to reconsider the other imagery, the statements at the close of the poem, and the title as metaphor. Here it is and many thanks to Tim for giving his permission:


Long Winter

So much I've forgotten
the grass

the birds
the close insects

the shoot—the drip—
the spray of the sprinkler

freckles—strawberries—
the heat of the Sun

the impossible
humidity

the flush of your face
so much

the high noon
the high grass

the patio ice cubes
the barbeque

the buzz of them—
the insects

the weeds—the dear
weeds—that grow

like alien life forms—
all Dr. Suessy and odd—

here we go again—
we are turning around

again—this will all
happen over again—

and again—it will—

Tim Nolan

If you're in the UK or Europe
then check out the The Book Depository
for Tim's collection, The Sound of It.

What do you take from that penultimate couplet and the final line on its own? Inevitability, acceptance, understanding?

I take comfort from it; repetition in all its guises can be comforting. Although my comfort is tinged by inquietude. I'm not sure I want another long winter, I'm not sure that I want some things to happen over again. But I also know that my experience of life is deepened by living through change.

Poems that make us think, that shift us between different emotions, these are the ones to cherish.

I don't want to be prescriptive with a poetry prompt. Let this poem work on you through several readings then set out on a journey of your own.

Write well.
L
x

The poetry of who and what we are and do

It's natural that we read other poets to inspire us with the writing of our own poems. And healthy too! We should be aware of what's going on in the world of contemporary poetry around us. And I know that when I'm reading poetry, I write more poetry. I also know that if I read more prose, I find it more difficult to write poetry. Perhaps the patterns and rhythms of what I'm reading are absorbed by my unconscious and, when I sit down to write, the echoes of what I've read most recently are the first to emerge.

How about you? Do you write what you read, influenced by the patterns, and perhaps themes, on the page? Or are you able to write in whatever form you choose, regardless of what you're reading?

And have you identified what kind of poetry you write?

When someone asked me that for the first time, in the early 1990s, it took me by surprise. I hadn't long been writing and hadn't developed any measure of objectivity towards my own work. But to know what we're doing, to be aware of what matters to us and how we want to affect an audience, can only help us as writers.

I've always wanted poems I read to make me think and feel, so I've tried to achieve that in my own writing. And feel a responsibility to 'entertain' an audience. But I don't mean that in the sense of superficial laughter and enjoyable trivia. I mean it in the sense of the original meaning of the word, which comes from 'inter' (to be among) and 'tenere' (to hold). Isn't that an amazing thing for us to try and achieve? To be among our audience, to be part of them, and to hold their attention.

Feel free to respond to any of the above questions and points, and extend the discussion too, in the Comments box, in prose or even poetry.

Write well.
L
x

Hearts & Minds

Dali & Captain Moore

There's a story about Salvador Dali, told to me a few years ago by his long-time manager, Captain Peter Moore.

Peter called on Dali at his house and studio in Port Lligat to see how he was progressing with a commission and was alarmed to see that the painting was far from finished.
'No problem, el capitano,' said Dali, 'I have until end of October.'
'But it's already November,' said Peter.
'November!' exclaimed Dali. 'Someone has stolen my October!'

I feel a little like that about March! Although rather than stolen it was filled to the brim with exciting events for the launches of another country, haiku poetry from Wales (Gomer Press).

But I'm back home in France now, catching up with writing and AppleHouse, and I came across this poem, in my Poems on the Underground anthology, which I can't remember ever reading before:

from The Mind is an Ancient and Famous Capital

The mind is a city like London,
Smoky and populous: it is a capital
Like Rome, ruined and eternal,
Marked by the monuments which no one
Now remembers. For the mind, like Rome, contains
Catacombs, aqueducts, amphitheatres, palaces,
Churches and equestrian statues, fallen, broken or soiled.
The mind possesses and is possessed by all the ruins
Of every haunted, hunted generation's celebration...

Delmore Schwartz (1913 - 1966)

Lots of the metaphors make immediate sense to me, particularly the mind being full of monuments 'which no one/ Now remembers' and 'Catacombs', although I'm a little unsure about 'equestrian' statues. I suppose the horse and rider could symbolise war? But I still like the poem a lot.

A few years ago I wrote a poem entitled 'Your Heart' which was published on a poster for a Hospital project:

Write a poem about the mind or the heart. Use metaphor rather than direct explanation to suggest what the mind or heart is, or does.

Write well.
L
x