My status is Facebook and the Spiritual Poem

A Facebook Status

Why oh why oh why, is it so difficult to find tights that fit comfortably? I am neither excessively fat nor tall. Who do they make tights for anyway?

My response

Ladies step away from the counter and let an expert on finding tights that fit get through. The motto one size fits all was scribed by a skinny person of restricted growth. If you purchase Xl or XXL tights the length versus width dilemma prevails. They may come up to your chin but they are also so wide they would give Norah Batty a run for her money. Alternatively they are not too saggy but the crutch comes up to your knees. Tights were developed to meet the needs of the sixties, a mini skirt or hot pants with stockings was not seen as cool then (although now I am sure you could get away with it and do as a fashion statement providing you are under 25 or Lady Gaga).

Stockings had their own small agonies a suspender belt can leave huge welts around the hips that Torquemada would find satisfying on a heretic and if the suspenders are not long enough or the stockings too short you have every chance of having to walk like Quasimodo. I became used to stretching up to get something off a shelf in a shop accompanied by the painful ping as a suspender gave way under the strain and hit your thigh with all the recoil of an industrial strength catapult.

Bearing in mind the above I now usually go for jeans or trousers with socks or the comfy top pop sock so beloved of the vascularly challenged and at my age I thankfully no longer require the added contraceptive nature of tights especially in confined spaces such as cars and linen cupboards.

Then of course you do find the perfect fitting tights and discover they are made in factories in third world country manned by small under nourished children or they disappear from the shelves because the manufacturer has gone out of business because there is only a small pool of long legged women and possibly transvestites that love his product. And don’t get me started on leggings and the hybrid bastard jeggings.


What has this got to do with life as a poet and writer you ask dear reader and the answer is everything has something to do with your life as a writer and poet.

I have been thinking a lot about Facebook lately and why we use it; in view of its upcoming floatation on the market there has been much said elsewhere. It may be the spawn of the devil, it may waste the users time when they should be out talking to real people, but it also lets ideas be exchanged, projects floated, information can be sought and gained. It can support the Arab Spring, it can bully teenage girls, it can allow people spread across the world to see a new born baby held by its mother, it can tag someone in a photo of a drunken office party in a pose they deeply regret. We give advertisers their data, their demographs, their potential targeted markets, in return they give us a method of communication and a global forum. It is not compulsory, we choose to use it. We may have to be canny about privacy settings and access but it can allow others a tiny window into a life. Hang onto that thought of a window for later.

I have also been putting together a reading of spiritual poems by women poets over the centuries. Spiritual I have taken in a very wide context but I have been struck by how women write about things we may term as spiritual but how few are often represented in some anthologies. I have managed to find two or three anthologies of Spiritual poems by women that have been intriguing reading in their variety and approach. Spirit comes from the Latin root suspire to breathe, and the breath is the backdrop of all poetry, the silences as much as the words; the full stop, the comma, the dash, the moment of the line break , the white space around the stanza , all this is how the poem breathes. So given that perhaps most poems are spiritual but to that perhaps should be added the dimension of depth, how a poet struggles with their existence, or the why of it all. It is a bit of a cliché that all poetry is ultimately about sex and death, you could add that even sex and death as themes lay upon the foundation of why. Why do we strive for sex and love? What is love and death? What is our place or purpose on this small spinning rock? These questions are the life blood of poems that could be termed spiritual dealt with at a macro or micro level.

So now to draw together the threads of the spiritual and Facebook I am posting a poem by Adrienne Rich the wonderful American poet. Her poem might not be seen by some as spiritual but in my book it breathes it. Read it and then apply it to Facebook , some interesting connections are made, remember I told you to hang onto windows.These lines alone especially resonate with me re Facebook.

‘We see each other daily and in segments’

‘Maybe we shouldn't turn our pockets out
To the last crumb or lingering bit of fluff,
But all we can confess of what we are
Has in it the defeat of isolation--
If not our own, then someone's, anyway.’


The second stanza alone makes me approach Facebook in a new light.

It is, for me, a beautiful poem that demands we look at our own lives, how we take people for granted. That saying good-bye to those we shall see tomorrow places those around us in a different light, enough to make us step back and value them. All around the world at the very moment you are reading this someone, somewhere is saying good-bye to someone they will not see tomorrow but think that they will because they believe life is ordinary like that. Death and leaving are also very ordinary. That thought alone is worth a small breath, a little space to breathe.


Stepping Backward

Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow,
Next year and when I'm fifty; still good-by.
This is the leave we never really take.
If you were dead or gone to live in China
The event might draw your stature in my mind.
I should be forced to look upon you whole
The way we look upon the things we lose.
We see each other daily and in segments;
Parting might make us meet anew, entire.

You asked me once, and I could give no answer,
How far dare we throw off the daily ruse,
Official treacheries of face and name,
Have out our true identity? I could hazard
An answer now, if you are asking still.
We are a small and lonely human race
Showing no sign of mastering solitude
Out on this stony planet that we farm.
The most that we can do for one another
Is let our blunders and our blind mischances
Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion.
We might as well be truthful. I should say
They're luckiest who know they're not unique;
But only art or common interchange
Can teach that kindest truth. And even art
Can only hint at what disturbed a Melville
Or calmed a Mahler's frenzy; you and I
Still look from separate windows every morning
Upon the same white daylight in the square.

And when we come into each other's rooms
Once in awhile, encumbered and self-conscious,
We hover awkwardly about the threshold
And usually regret the visit later.
Perhaps the harshest fact is, only lovers--
And once in a while two with the grace of lovers--
Unlearn that clumsiness of rare intrusion
And let each other freely come and go.
Most of us shut too quickly into cupboards
The margin-scribbled books, the dried geranium,
The penny horoscope, letters never mailed.
The door may open, but the room is altered;
Not the same room we look from night and day.

It takes a late and slowly blooming wisdom
To learn that those we marked infallible
Are tragi-comic stumblers like ourselves.
The knowledge breeds reserve. We walk on tiptoe,
Demanding more than we know how to render.
Two-edged discovery hunts us finally down;
The human act will make us real again,
And then perhaps we come to know each other.

Let us return to imperfection's school.
No longer wandering after Plato's ghost,
Seeking the garden where all fruit is flawless,
We must at last renounce that ultimate blue
And take a walk in other kinds of weather.
The sourest apple makes its wry announcement
That imperfection has a certain tang.
Maybe we shouldn't turn our pockets out
To the last crumb or lingering bit of fluff,
But all we can confess of what we are
Has in it the defeat of isolation--
If not our own, then someone's, anyway.

So I come back to saying this good-by,
A sort of ceremony of my own,
This stepping backward for another glance.
Perhaps you'll say we need no ceremony,
Because we know each other, crack and flaw,
Like two irregular stones that fit together.
Yet still good-by, because we live by inches
And only sometimes see the full dimension.
Your stature's one I want to memorize--
Your whole level of being, to impose
On any other comers, man or woman.
I'd ask them that they carry what they are
With your particular bearing, as you wear
The flaws that make you both yourself and human.


Adrienne Rich

Gazing at Stars, Schrodinger's Cat and Nanomagnetics

So where did January almost go to, same place as Christmas and New Year I expect, same place as that other sock, the biro kept by the phone for messages,that fuse you could have sworn was in the corner of the kitchen drawer for that moment when the kettle plug pops, the same place as that New Year promise 2011 that you can’t even remember now but which at the time you really believed you would keep, the same place as the full stop in this sentence , but then oh no here it comes, glory be there is something finite in this fleeting, constantly moving, fey yet at the same time precise universe.

Perhaps you can see that I am just recovery from Stargazing Live on the TV. I love the way they tacked Live on the end to ensure everyone knows that Professor Brian Cox, the rock and roll, cool astro-physicist will be speaking without the intervention of an editor and some things may be less than exciting if it gets cloudy. I was rather disappointed for the Exmoor Village that consented to put all their lights out so the stars could be seen more clearly in all their glory and alas it rained and the cloud cover was so low even small children were ducking to avoid cumuli concussion.

I like science programmes, I like trying to get my head around concepts that are so huge I need someone to reduce them to the size of an orange orbiting a grape or should that be vice versa? In Cambridge next week I have been invited to an event at Cavendish Laboratory ( home of the split atom) which promises to tick all my boxes for bite sized pieces of fruity knowledge.

It is a competition akin I feel to a slam poetry event but here those involved in physics research of all kinds have three minutes to explain their research in a cogent and hopefully entertaining way and be voted on by a panel of judges, I presume mainly on delivery and content but also maybe on the wow factor.

Having seen some of the research topics I am looking forward to seeing if I understand anything. Some of the research projects up for 3 minute explanation are I gather

Measuring the Evolution of the Universe,
High force magnetic levitation using superconducting bulks,
Making solar cells better with Buddhist singing bowls,
Simulating planet formation,
Extreme Engineering: Nanopillar Lasers
CP violation in D(s)->KS0h decays,
Electrodeposition of Copper Nanowire Interconnects,
Controlling and Understanding DNA Transport with Optical Tweezers
Bacteria and the immune system in the human gut
Plastic Electronics
Multi-target ADSR: an innovative concept for a safer nuclear energy production Nanomagnetics
Mobile Human Monitoring
The Beauty of Bottoms


Personally I think the Beauty of Bottoms may just be a catchy title to hide something quite technical involving probes of some kind and the Solar cells and Buddhist singing bowls may be a bum steer as to what the actual research is. However I will be there trying to grasp with my little grey cells the magnitude of man’s capacity for exploring what is already out there and what could be out there. I am waiting to see if someone can come up with an app that gives you the dummy's guide to the explanation of everything. Some would say that already exists and is called an encyclopaedia or wikipedia or the internet in general.

One day we may all be chipped with a small interface with the internet and global wi-fi cover and speeds with be increased to the point where we can be walking around knowing everything almost instantly and then the intelligent will be all of us but the really intelligent will be those with the capacity to use that knowledge well and what well means will still be in the realms of social philosophy and politics …..but wait a minute we are probably there now , only a tiny step from the iphone3 to a chip in the head..

And finally in anticipation of this up coming evening here is a poem by Peter Howard, physicist and poet, a sestina no less, about , Schrodinger's cat, his hypothetical cat in the hypothetical box.

Some Flash Poetry pieces also by Peter can be found here, as we are in the area of technology , science and poetry. I particularly recommend Smoke. You have to have flash on your computer and be prepared to click on the poems and make things happen.

Bread Sauce, Guilty Pleasures and Money

It is the week before Christmas and all round the house not a creature was stirring not even a mouse. Well that is actually a lie because a week before there should be much stirring to ensure everything is done and ready for the holiday. Who am I trying to impress apart from vegetables from the farmers market ( brussel sprouts on the stem have always held tales of freshness for me) and some presents wrapped nothing is stirring much but not in the Christmas eve quiet way. I have had a poem accepted for a really good publication and have made myself sit down and send out some more to competitions and magazines.

There is something can happen to the brain between writing a poem and sending it out. I tend to keep mine after editing, let them compost under the bed for quite a while and sneak up on them and try and take myself and the poem by surprise. I do savour that feeling you can get when you read a poem, think it is someone else’s that you have downloaded decide it’s quite interesting and then recall it is actually one of your poems. This may sound like an exercise in madness and maybe it is but I do think distance rather than the white hot heat of the writing can allow you to re-read your work with fresh eyes. Sometimes you think, “Bloody hell I’m glad I didn’t send this one out..”. Sometimes you get the ‘rubbish’ self- feedback but know something is fixable or can be salvaged from the wreckage . Now and then you think, this one says something I think is worthwhile. There is always that tightrope of retaining the initial energy of the words and ensuring the words don’t pirouette for the reader and draw attention to themselves just for the hell of it.

Language can, of course and should always dance but like a good ballet the experience is in something transcendent that the human body can channel. Think I am sending a bit ‘Ommmm’ maybe and trailing my sixties roots like and old hippy but I do believe all the arts at their very best help the individual transcend the moment or maybe be so in the moment that you can touch something almost inexplicable in its power or beauty. Sometimes in poems the experience of engaging with that power or beauty is when the words are at their simplest and cleanest and without artifice.

So I shall be composting some new poems for a while whilst I make a mountain of bread sauce which my daughter and I think is one of the highlights of Christmas and a bread sauce sandwich on Boxing Day can’t be beaten. Yes I do know, dear reader, that a bread sauce sandwich amounts to a bread sandwich; but mushed bread between two slices of bread maybe with a bit of cranberry sauce thrown in and a little chicken is a guilty pleasure. Then why should I be guilty and what the hell is a guilty pleasure, one that you feel you shouldn’t indulge in? These days it seems to be used as a phrase to describe something that is not exactly ‘good taste’ but you can’t help but like. So who are the good taste police that might catch you pleasuring yourself by watching Extreme House Make Over and crying, listening to Carmina Burana because of that advert. Surely pleasure can only be guilty if it involves hurting or degrading others or if it involves the use of some unsuspecting animal life for sexual purposes?

Guilt can be attached to most things especially if adamant religion of any kind plays a part in your upbringing. Then there is the added twist of guilt becoming a pleasure in itself if you’re not careful. I have decided that maybe my New Years Resolution should be not to use the phrase guilty pleasures I will simply have pleasures and a bread sauce sandwich is fine, just fine….was that the sound of the good taste police knocking at the door?

While we are talking about guilt, now that John Kinsella and Alice Oswald have asked to be removed from the short list for the T S Eliot prize because of the financial support a Hedge Fund is giving it this year I wonder if any money or funding comes guilt free. An Art Council award is the life blood for the arts and its income comes from the tax payer. This is the price society, at this moment in time, deems the tax paying public feel able to allocate towards funding the Arts. Of course the highest tax payers may well be those engaged in businesses that may be less than squeaky clean, they could be engaged in activities that might be less than PC, should the tax derived from such businesses be deemed laundered of guilt because they have come via the public purse? I struggle with that because I am happy for a small portion of my taxes to go not only to social welfare, education the health service, transport infrastructure, national security, but also to the funding of the arts. I suspect a poll amongst tax payers would reveal many less than happy about funding the arts and poetry in particular.

I have had an Arts Council grant, two in fact, one as an individual and one as a group, I have been prepared to accept money from a government whose policy in invading Iraq I marched against, so am I a hypocrite? I don’t honestly know. I can tell myself the story that funds for the arts is untouched or unsullied by other government policies; it lives in the higher cultural planes of social organisation in a so called civilised democratic society. I will continue to struggle about the concept of good money, bad money, good sources of funding, bad sources of funding.

I fully accept these two poets made a personal statement of where their line in the sand was about this particular source of funding. I expect that from now on their sources of funding for future work or projects will be interrogated by some for signs of hypocrisy; if you refuse to sup with the devil once any cup you put to your lips from then on has to be seen as equally ‘clean’ from contamination. Hedge funds may be the spawn of the devil they may not be, they may be various shades of grey veering almost to lily white, I don’t profess to have the expertise to fathom the nuances of ethical financial dealings and of course we all come at such things with belief systems that are deeply rooted in who we are. Judging what is right in these circumstances probably comes down to what you feel to be right and the rest of the short list for the T S Eliot have, I am sure, had to go through the dark night of the soul to know where they stand on the matter. I wish them well, I am saddened for them as whoever wins is going to be seen as being the winner in the year Oswald and Kinsella pulled out because of the stand they were taking against a hedge fund backed prize.

Who wins in this maelstrom? I think free thinking, and a national poetry forum where hopefully it is shown that debate around such things can be pursued without personal rancour. And of course very few people care except those that care about poetry and arts funding and those, dear reader, are few and far between in the great scheme of things, who knows it may in be only you and me and a handful of others.

A Woman of Age

I now feel myself to be 'A Woman of Age'. Such a description holds a certain ring to it, suggests certain virtues as well as vices and hints at losses and strengths that only age may endow you with. I have had a big birthday since we last met dear reader, I can now get free prescriptions and eye tests and may have the ability to make younger people feel guilty on the bus for not surrendering their seat to me. Stop, stop, I don’t require congratulations , unless it is to extend your good wishes at having made it thus far up the slippery pole called life. One wonders how far you can shimmy up before you start slipping back into those years you thought you’d left behind.

I was told the other day by someone that a cure for stress and anger was to squeeze a lemon ( the real variety not the plastic kind as that might result in the top shooting off and hitting some unsuspecting passer-by, although that may in itself be stress reducing). However it is not just the squeezing that helps, afterwards you are meant to smell your hand and this smell then becomes linked with the reduction of stress so thereafter throughout the day ( barring a savage soap and water hand washing session) just sniffing your hand makes you feel a little less angry or stressed. Putting aside the image of people sniffing their hand as their blood pressure rises, which in itself could lead to some encountering a less than positive response, there was a rider added to the advice. One of the early signs of Alzheimer’s is the inability to smell common things such as lemons.

Of course I immediately rushed home and smelt the lemon I had lurking at the back of the fridge but its rather green moldiferous state made it less than fragrant. Then I decided that it would be better to just let the smell of lemons waft my way one day by acident and the smell would be the more fragrant simply for the notion that it may be a sign my noodle is still firing on most pistons.

Ageing is not a bad thing, the longer a writer and poet lives the more they have to write about and the more they can mess up which is usually the source of many a decent poem. A good friend sent me a book of poems by the poet Ruth Stone, who has recently died at the age of 96. Her last collection was published when she was 93. She was sharp, funny, irreverent and had the ability to write poems that touched on the 'big' things with a lightness of touch.

Connections

What my eye sees
Goes into the dark
And passes, packet by packet
Along the ledge over the abyss
Between the lobes.
It goes so far
I think I cannot get it back
And when I least expect
Some of it returns
Not simple
as it was
Or seemed
But now complex
And freighted with the universe.


What we may think we forget may return with something added; now that’s a motto to embrace when next I go upstairs then wonder what I went up for.

I note that the adverts on my Facebook Page seem to have reset themselves to the default position of second guessing what women of a certain age may need or want. Wrinkle creams, dating sites for the over 50s and randomly, coats for dogs, cheese and free coupons for meals at distant cafes. I suspect there is, somewhere, a woman of sixty eating cheese at the kitchen table, cutting out free coupons for dinner in Glasgow and dreaming of meeting someone on a dating site whilst staring at her Chihuahua dressed in a fetching Versace number.