Poetic mooching like a meerkat, with Cab and Betty Boop

I went for a walk in a nearby nature reserve yesterday. Being the fens it consisted of flooded gravel pit lakes, flat vistas and squalls of midges, but still beautiful. Until relatively recently (the 18thCentury) malaria was actually endemic to the fens and many a poor Scottish or Dutch prisoner of war, used to dig the drainage dykes in the 17th Century) are buried in local churchyards or even unmarked at the sides of the bigger dykes. Anyway at least quinine is now no longer required but insect repellent is handy especially as the weather becomes hotter and the midges grow sharper teeth.

I am not a fast walker, I am an ambler, the purpose is not to get from A to B quickly but to mooch in a contemplative sort of way. Mooching seems to have gone out of fashion and I highly advocate its return. Mooching round the lakes I am passed by four sweating runners (one accompanied by knackered spaniel, obviously dying to be allowed to mooch and sniff) and two older ladies with wristband weights who are striding out at one of those power walk paces that almost but not quite breaks into a slow trot. Power walking seems a sure way of ensuring you neither enjoy the walk or the countryside you are passing through, concentrating as you are on the maximum aerobic experience. There were a gaggle of older children on bikes who seemed to have an innate sense of mooching on wheels as nattering and prodding piles of dirt and bushes with sticks is still a popular past time. There were the MP3/I pod walkers whose eyes seemed slightly glazed and turned in as the country passed by to a soundtrack.

Just because I mooch does not imply being unobservant of course or that I have a desultory sensory experience of the countryside. I can be a very tiring vocal observer for any companion, whether I’m walking in an urban or rural environment, rather like a huge overexcited meerkat, ‘What’s that blue flower called, what sort of bird is that, look at that yellow thing, look at that weird drain cover, that shop sign is odd, why does that building have fancy brickwork that looks like two pencils?’ Of course on my own I merely think these sort of things as talking out loud may ensure the power walkers do break into a trot to get away from the mad lady. I once embarrassed friends on my first visit to America by becoming very over excited in a supermarket and insisting on by-passing a rank of expectant and eager check-out girls when I spotted a self-service check-out where you scanned your own purchases (before they were introduced over here). When I was eleven I tripped over a kerb and gashed my knee very badly when I was taken to London for the first time as a treat for passing my eleven plus. What was the cause of my fall? I was desperate to examine a parking meter, as I had never seen one before. These incidents serve to flesh out the meerkat image somewhat.

It would appear that I am drawing up a contradictory picture, mooching and a compulsive need to question and look at things that catch my eye. I looked up the definition of mooching, ’to wander aimlessly from the 14th century French muchier, to hide.’ Well I think I mooch so more things can actually reveal themselves, the old saying of making sure you sniff the flowers along the way springs to mind. My personal definition of mooching would be ‘to wander reflectively whilst maintaining a keen curiosity in the environment you find yourself in.’ Very John Clare (without the madness), very Lakes poets and Wordsworth (without having to involve daffodils and the sister business), very much part of observed poetic behaviour. I think if there was more mooching life could be a little less fraught for some people. If you are a zipper, however, sustained contact with a moocher could result in blown gaskets. Moochers and zippers rarely make good walking companions or life ones probably, although it may be a case of opposites attract and putting a bit of zip into a moocher and vice-versa could be an example of reciprocity and true compromise. I think I am too much of an entrenched moocher to be zipped successfully.

Before anyone tells me, the song ‘Minnie the Moocher’ (see lyrics below) by Cab Calloway was about a different kind of mooching entirely, mainly drug induced. Note coke-y is exactly what you think it is and we aren’t talking soft drink here and kicking the gong was an idiom for using opium. Calloway wrote a Hepster’s Dictionary to let people access the 1930’s jive talk. I just love reading old and new slang, some of it makes you fully understand what a versatile and organic thing language is.
So I guess now this fen queen better wiggly her jelly roll put her sky piece on put the twister to the slammer and trilly to the sound of mitt pounding.

If you have eight minutes to spare take a look at the original Betty Boop, Minnie the Moocher cartoon, a real classic with Calloway’s movements rotoscoped for the dancing of the ghost walrus.

Minnie The Moocher (Lyrics)

Folk's here's the story 'bout Minnie the Moocher
She was a red hot hoochie coocher
She was the roughest, toughest frail
But Minnie had a heart a big as a whale

(hidey-hi's!)

She messed around with a bloke named Smokey
She loved him, though he was coke-y
He took her down to Chinatown
And he showed her how to kick that gong around

(hidey-hi's!)

She had a dream about the King of Sweden
He gave her things that she was needin'
He built her a house of gold and steel
A diamond car with platinum wheels

(fast hidey-hi's!)

He gave her his townhouse and racing horses
Each meal she ate was a dozen courses
Had a million dollars in nickels and dimes
And she sat around and counted 'em all a million times

(hidey-hi's, one mo' 'gain!)

Now Min and Smokey they started jaggin'
They got a free ride in a wagon
She gave him money to pay her bail
But he left her flat in the county jail

(ominous sounding hidey-hi's and ho's)

Now Min met Ole Deacon Lowdown
He preached to her that she ought to slow down
But Minnie wiggled her jelly roll
Deacon Lowdown yelled "Lord save my soul!"

(upbeat hidey-hi's)

They took her where they put the crazies
Now poor Min's kickin' up those daisies
You heard my story this is the song
She was just a good gal but they done her wrong
(yet more hidey-hi's)
Poor Min, poor Min, poor Min!

Feeding the beasts, Penelope Pitstop and Margaret Attwood

So Easter Bank Holiday was gloriously bright all day, and there was heat in the sun, a little frisson that summer is waiting in the wings. However, ‘N’er caste a clout ‘til May be out’ my mother would mutter in the face of April sunshine, worrying that I might prematurely have thrown my liberty bodice and vest to the winds of March. A friend has sent me a photograph of snow currently laying on the blossom of trees on the East Coast of America and as we all know America sneezes and we all catch a cold so best not to put the thermals in mothballs yet may be?

I have been wading through and re-reading the manuscript of THE definite Novel. Three agents sent to so far have loved the writing, loved the book, one goes as far as to say she thought it was a ‘superb mix of very dark humour and incredible sensitivity, I was glued to it’ but all say they are unsure of the market for such a book and hence no thanks. So I re-read it as best I can as if I am, ‘the market’, the person who is prepared to cough up money for a book. Of course I am Jo Public as I do cough up money regularly for books but my tastes are perhaps wide, weird, unrepresentative of ‘the market’, which seems to be referred to as if it is some huge beast that has to be fed just the right thing or it will spit you out or with one sniff turn its mighty back and amble away across the field towards some tastier offering. Of course I am aware there are a number of different ‘markets’ all of which are penned in their own little field, all needing to be fed absolutely the right thing. As the novel is about someone suffering from Alzheimer’s and her daughter I wonder whether I can turn it into ‘The Dementia Code’, some dark mystical secret at the heart of a mad treasure hunt/road movie. Could I turn the novel into forgetful Penelope Pitstop on a zimmer-frame being pursued by a toothless Dick Dastardly in a wheelchair. Peter Perfect coming to her rescue hobbling on his walking stick whilst the Gruesome Twosome and the Ant Hill Mob come careering round the corner on their motorized scooters. Would the market consume whole ‘Wacky Races, The Incontinence Years’?

I wonder then about the market for poetry, how many poets have been turned down solely on the basis that there may not be a market for their work, no matter how good the writing. Poetry is often a break even deal even a loss leader for many publishers (unless you belong to the revered dead poet’s society or the premier league of modern poets). I was told recently that the sales of books about DIY are ten times greater than sales of modern poetry All I can say is God bless the poetry publishers who as yet don’t seem totally driven to watch the market beast and drown under a tidal wave of submissions by the good, the bad and the handwritten in purple ink. I think poems about plastering, radiator replacement and how to strip floorboards could be a real winner.

I’ll leave you with one of my finds as I have become more and more a poetry archive junkie. Margaret Attwood is one of those rare writers that manage to juggle fiction and poetry, feeding the two beasts, very successfully. Her poem King Lear in Respite Care about her father beats any poem I could write about the elderly. Penelope Pitstop wandering the corridors of the Home for Retired Cartoon Characters looking for her Compact Pussycat car or Dick Dastardly calling repeatedly for Mutley, forgetting that he has died years before could make an interesting poem but then again, the King Lear metaphor does gives you a classier more artistic starting point.

Deckchairs as passion killers, Jeffrey Archer and Elizabeth Bishop

I sat in the gardens of the Grantchester Tea Rooms with friends yesterday and pretended to be amongst the literary and artistic. You can be Rupert Brooke, he’ll be Augustus John, she can be Virginia Woolf, the oldest has to be Bertrand Russell . E. M Forster is in the toilet and Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath are canoodling under that tree, or as canoodling as you can get in separate deckchairs. The deckchair was never designed to have passionate possibilities as a piece of garden furniture; it takes too long to get out of one even when your spine and knees are capable of greater flexibility. If you try and lean over in an alluring manner towards someone you also risk tipping ignominiously over into their lap.

Of course no one really wants to be Virginia or Sylvia; it all ended too painfully and badly. If you could just freeze them at their best then maybe but of course if they were frozen at their best they probably wouldn’t be who they were.

No-one wanted to be Jeffrey Archer who lives next door in the famous vicarage but we couldn’t resist peering through the hedge in the car park into his vicarage garden. What we expected to see I have no idea, celebrity doesn’t grow on trees. Many years ago, on another visit to these tea rooms Boo wandered through the adjacent meadow and jumped a small dry ditch and returned to say she had found a rather nice garden with statues and a lawn that was just like a smooth green carpet, she’d taken her shoes and socks off to check. Clean shaven lawns rather fascinated her as a child as I could only summon up a ragged meadow of a back garden. Mr Archer hadn’t fallen from favour then and was Deputy Chairmen of the Conservative party, I imagined hidden cameras tracking my young daughter as she danced barefoot on his lawn and security guards deliberating whether she posed a threat.

I have just done battle with a villanelle. I went to a reading once where a well known poet said that she had been told that a true poet had to have one villanelle in their oeuvre. I ought to try and at least complete one. I did so and I took it to the monthly poetry workshop I attend and they quite rightly said… ‘Ah a villanelle…nice obsessive repetitive form shame about your content.’ So I roll up my sleeves and work at it becoming a better villanelle and I re-read every villanelle I can find. I find Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art stays with me the longest (yes I know there is the Dylan Thomas one that rises like a monolithic structure in the land of this form), a slight subversion of the form a little twist to make that thudding repetition in the skull of the two lines, less like a dog with a bone and more like the turning of an idea over and over to see it from every angle.

One Art
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
– Elizabeth Bishop

Ashes, Inspiration, the Moon and Robert Graves

It was a beautiful bright sunny day yesterday, so I headed into the great blue yonder and decided to go and pull up a few weeds round the tree where my parents’ ashes were scattered. What better way to spend a pleasant early spring day than wandering around the quiet garden and grounds of a crematorium. I am so easily pleased and a cheap night out by the way, a curry and a Tiger beer and I’m a happy individual.

I was very impressed when a few months after my mother’s funeral in 2004, I was phoned by the crematorium staff and asked what I wanted to do with her ashes. I had not collected them, just as I had not collected my father’s; I am not an ash collecting sort of person, despite my usual ability to collect ‘stuff’. A small urn on the mantelpiece was out (no mantelpiece) and there was no football ground, special hill, valley, wood, park, street corner, pub, garden, lake or stretch of sea that seemed appropriate. My parents seemed singularly lacking in favourite geographical places, in fact most of their happiest times were spent in their own front room with family or round the kitchen table and the new owners of my parents bungalow would hardly want a ‘shake and vac’ dance done on their new carpet or laminate flooring with the ashes of a previous owner.

“Would you like your mother’s ashes placed exactly where your father’s ashes were placed?” I guiltily confessed that I have no idea where he had been placed. There was a pause at the other end of the line.
“We do, we have his sector co-ordinate”
Was this like spot the ball competitions, the whole crematorium gardens divided up into a precise grid? Indeed it turned out that it was but luck played no part in spotting the last resting place of my father’s remains; they already had a precise grid reference. It transpired that the crematorium keep an ‘ashes scattering’ map, they knew exactly where they had scattered my father’s unclaimed ashes eighteen years earlier. One metre due north of a particular tree. I was fascinated, thousands of people must have been scattered in eighteen years yet they painstakingly noted where everyone was. I did a rough mental calculation and decided some doubling up on grid references must have occurred but no doubt this was kept from relatives as no-one likes to think a nearest and dearest in merely one strata of the dead. These first thoughts are probably not to my credit but at least honest.
The day I and Boo turned up to scatter my mother’s ashes was cold and windy, there is no high ground between the Urals and the fens if the wind is blowing in a certain direction. A kind and efficient gentleman lead us to the exact spot and my mother’s remains were dispensed from a large lantern affair with bomb bay door underneath that could be opened by pulling a lever. Despite the wind he seemed to have developed a technique that prevented the possibility of blow-back. I and Boo, who insisted on being present, watched as mother and grandmother was scattered. I wondered whether if he was alone was he tempted to make patterns or write letters on the grass with the remains. He told us that many people take the ashes and bury them in the garden and then plant a rose bush on top, then sit back and watch it die.
“Too many calcium phosphates and nitrogen in the ashes,” he informed us “Kills the roots; we’re just too acidic. Only rhododendrons stand a chance and that’s pushing your luck. One woman was going to put her husband’s ashes on their allotment, which she still worked. I hadn’t the heart to tell her it would play havoc with any root crops.” I wondered who would want to eat spuds fertilised by their dead husband’s ashes. However I suppose it could be regarded as the ultimate re-cycling.

As I pottered about yesterday with a trowel I wondered at the whereabouts of the lavender, sage and rosemary I and Boo had planted round the tree. It appeared to have been dug up and shifted by someone to make room for an inscribed stone plaque for a married couple. I had a sudden hot flash of territorial encroachment. Suddenly Boo, who was with me, pointed back the way we had come and looked at her shoes. “Oh God, I think I’ve stepped in someone” There was a trail of gritty white ash across our path across the grass and now white footprints leading towards the tree. The crematorium was empty save for a man way in the distance with a watering can and a small spade.
We began to laugh and the more we thought about it the more we laughed. I think my parents, should they have currently have access to such things, would have been laughing to, they had a keen sense of humour.

I have made a mental note about the ashes map, it will scratch at my brain like a dog desperate to be let out of the house unless it finds some form and shape in a poem. The poet and translator, George Szirtes talked about the nature of artistic inspiration in his news section on his website yesterday. Sometimes we perceive something that we prod and poke with language until some sort of form begins to take shape, which in itself allows us to step back and examine it without drowning in a welter of subjectivity (I summarise clumsily here). I shall have to use my Wallace Stevens allotted thinking time today to ponder on that. What do I make of a map of human ashes, so scrupulously kept and painstakingly documented in a manicured quiet English garden? What do I make of a man who can talk of our calcium phosphates and nitrogen content and the death of roses and potatoes, of our laughter in the face of the macabre?

Think long and hard enough and to quote E M Forster’s forward to Howard’s End..’Only connect’, ideas and thoughts begin to cohere. The perception, the language, the form that takes are not so much linear as an intricate web of constant interconnections that somehow we manage to create. I think this process is what allows us to be surprised by our own work sometimes, we can be caught unawares. That odd paradox can occur, if we are lucky, the discipline of thought setting the idea free.

Of course we could all adhere to Robert Graves’ concept of The White Goddess and the phases of the moon from which she derives her power as the source of poetic inspiration. I am rather proud of the fact that I actually got through reading that book without having to call on a Chick Lit book to cure me of the footnote trauma his works usually bring on. Personally, whilst I know the moon may influence many things, tides, bad songs, were wolves, Apollo moon landings, poor decisions on a mate; I am loathe to see it as a direct source of the muse. However in Cool Web he did have something interesting to say about language being necessary to keep us whole and that it served to make sense of the chaos of the power and immediacy of experience. Of course Graves famously read his own obituary in The Times, when he was presumed dead during the First World War which may account for his more bizarre intellectual eccentricities.