Tag Archives: Poetry

Posts about or presenting poetry

Light Show

Does the sun know that in eight minutes time

Light from it’s ancient fusion will arrive in my eyes?

Given what I see I assume some level of consciousness

Creativity in the morning on the curtains by my bed

Surely the sun must know

That at a certain angle it will make a show

.

The curtains, closed, help

They are pale, with a light vertical trellis in places

But mostly a rambling rose, with buds and flowers

They too I ascend like the sun

Climb out of winter slumber to follow the light

And set their leaves in air in flight

.

But it is brightly creative and alive and moving

The light moves mostly down and slightly to the left

As the sun, close to mid-summer rises to the right

And beyond the window, trees, branches, leaves

All too in motion, swaying in the breeze

And, in motion too, attached to trees

.

At times there is no show as clouds, I presume, block the light

But wait and it returns

Some singular path joins unjoined growth, in juxtaposition

A pattern and patterns of movement coalesce

And a dance unfolds, of shapes over shapes

Beside our bed, through window and on our drapes

.

A small fluted leaf, a stem, a branch

And what are clearly oak leaves lobed and blunt

Wisteria, filigrees of fine hair on a babies brow

Some, distant and indistinct bit of tree makes a backdrop

To some limb and leaf nearby and in focus, sharp

Plays and upstages the rest, visually like the sound of a harp

.

From a boiling mass far away

Beyond white hot, a creative act

Lyrical and rolling the sound of the thunder of the sun

Made into a light show for our eyes, briefly

Transformed by a passage through space

To our bedroom, to this place

The Garden

The garden

Does not await me

To awake

In the morning

And sit in the my favourite chair

In awe

It waits for no-one

It serves no-one

For no-one was there

At it’s making

It precedes

Us all

It told us

On our arrval

What to do

And is still waiting

For us

To listen

Poems Make Poets

A link to a BBC Radio programme, The Verb, which is described as ‘Radio 3’s cabaret of the word, featuring the best poetry, new writing and performance.’ This week it featured Margaret Atwood and Alice Oswald talking about how we write poetry, and their own process, the natural world, time, and the possibilities of myth.

At around 35 minutes there is an interesting account of how writing poetry changes the poet. This reinforces the idea that it is an act of experiential learning, and it is recursive, the poet makes the poem which makes itself and also makes the maker. The header image reflects this as a self-making pattern of continuity and discontinuity.

Gestate

Sometimes it takes a long time

But be not afraid or downhearted

Like the Celtic day, starts at dusk

And their year, as winter starts

Growth begins in darkness

And, disembodied,

A growth contained

In an others body

A cell

Then two

Then four

Geometric progression

Grains of rice doubling on a chess board

Until a space is filled

The Blastosphere

A yoke sack, an anus and a mouth

A literal visceral vesica pescis

A vessel

A fish

A body of water in water

A boundary and nothing more

It is, and is becoming

Some thing

A boy

A man in body only

In me is spirit

Sexless, disembodied

I don’t care about my pronoun

I am it, he, we

I am legion

I am no thing

Nowhere

And everywhere

My body lets me speak, and act and reproduce

But I am discombobulated, dissociated

Disinterested really in bodies, even my own

And, enjoying inhabiting this mans body yet

I would love to inhabit a woman’s body

Or a fish or a cloud or a body of water

To find out more about consciousness

To remember, after being a mole

About being blind in blackness digging in my garden

So instead I embody things in

The intelligence of materials

Paper, or ink, or words on a page

And speech

To make the air vibrate

In your ear.


About Gestate

This was written for performance. It was a thing that fell out of me and was very personal and was quite an important trail marker on my art as an adventure and research trail. Often artform preempts material emerging into consciousness. It kind of acts like an alchemical process and distils down lots of raw material then allows the product to float up to the surface. In art making this is sometimes called percolation. I call it incubation. But different words for the same thing. Regards this website, it says a lot about what art as research feels like. Regards me, it revealed some personal stuff that was emerging for me.

It is also about poetry and art making and what art therapist Pat B Allen here and here calls, spiritual technology, the latter descriptor being consciously and deliberately and accurately oxymoronic.

As performance, the poem was designed to be heard and not read. So below is the poem as spoken word.

Gestate