Hex — Ben Wilkinson

These days, the way my mind works, 

when she and I are side-by-side the morning after 

in a bedroom-cum-DIY-disaster 

it takes no more than a number or word 

or her surreptitious hand brushing close to mine 

to set the rhymes racing off 

like inmates that’ve tripped 

the central security system 

and are running like fuck-knows into the distance

the way thoughts might link

hex to text to the lesser-striped Baryonyx of the Early Cretaceous

who, with twice as many teeth

as its nearest relatives and a sharp angle 

near the snout, could hold onto its prey

with twenty times the efficiency of the modern crocodile or shrike.

*

“They say it’s like speaking to snakes,” says Kasia, the Polish language Larkin scholar who I’m meeting in Warsaw. “Really?” So Harry Potter is speaking Polish when he goes all Parselmouth on us? More like the peaks and troughs of radio static, I think; its tonal fluency crashing into the burrs and clicks of consonant clusters so thick you’d need a palate as sharp as a machete to cut your way out of it. And though an Anglikiem playing Polish Scrabble has to grasp the law that every ZED isn’t worth a ten, (there being three of them) and that the hissing ‘sz’ and ‘c’ occur often, it’s slippery only in-so-far as mastering its cases goes, not its noise. That, at least, is my opinion. 

My opinion. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? I suspect I hear Polish as I do because of the interference of the alliterative bent in my first language. And like Richard Carter, quoted in a recent article in the Yorkshire Post, “I’ve learned quite a lot by not being in Yorkshire,” that’s why I think I hear this poem like I do too.

After all, don't Yorkshirefolk, like the Ulstermen in the W. R. Rogers poem Heaney quotes in Feeling into Words (pg. 4) also have a fetish for the hard edges of their speech? We too are 'an abrupt people.' But there's a conflict. Because our regional linguistic habitat has also provided us with the set of famous and well-loved broad vowels and diphthongs. 

And I believe it's precisely this tension between restraint and freedom, singing and stuttering, between being eloquent or tongue-tied, that this poem explores so well. And not just in its thematic preoccupation but in its language as an achieved and condensed expression. Because language, in this poem, is allowed to become mimetic self-knowledge; not merely a way of knowing the world but a more vital intimation of it. 

*

'Hex' is certainly a shapely poem, its four tercet stanzas spilling out onto the page in a pleasingly organic way. The last line insistently separating itself off, and several others stretching out like branches; casually patterned.

How the poem then gathers itself from the first monosyllabic line and riffs off into the rough schwas of 'after'/'disaster' ending l.2 and l.3 into the contrastive 'surreptitious,' it being Latinate and polysyllabic (posh, in other words). Enough stuff unpacked, the poem then loses no time (or words) before going for a tricky crane-shot, the simile of l.6 racing off ahead of us to l.9.

We're already doing pretty well. But then it gets better. We suspected we were going to get bored right about now, but instead something very special happens. Something we couldn't have seen coming and which, we might safely assume, the poem didn't either.

And look, it's visible; it has been preserved. The aural cue for the one big movement of thought in the poem, as l.11 pulls away from the body of it into metaphor, and renders the stretch of the imagination that has been reached for, visible.

As the poem riffs off the bravado consonants of 'fuck-knows', into 'link', 'hex', 'text' and finally onto the brilliant, the unretractable, 'Baryonyx.' And, despite its alliterative density the poem opens up again; the slow panning shot from the long vowel of 'who' moving over a little more unpacking before cutting to that awkward, insistent last line, and that word: /ʃraɪk/ ‘Shrike,’ the dark hush of its initial /ʃr/ into the long fluid vowel of /aɪ/ cut brutally down the middle by the almost ejective final stop consonant, /k/, which makes for a very satisfying finish. 

*

Ben Wilkinson will be publishing his second pamphlet For Real with smith|doorstop next month, after being an overall winner of The Poetry Business's 2013-14 Book & Pamphlet Competition, with the launch on the 31st of May at the Wordsworth Trust's Jerwood Centre.

If the poems in that volume demonstrate a matured fine-tuning, as it's safe to assume they will (The Sparks is six years old, after all, published when the author was 24), of the deft circuit making and conservation of language found in 'Hex' then that's a huge reason to be very excited about the development of this poetic talent.

Make sure you check out Ben's blog for a generous helping of reviews and poems, as well as his author's profile on The Guardian for more articles. You might also want to keep your eyes and ears peeled for events like Spire Writes, where you might be in or a chance of hearing 'Hex' live.

'Hex' also featured way back in the day on the blog 'Surroundings.'

Arthur Scargill — Steve Ely

As posts go you’ll have to squint to see that last one, way back in the mud of May ’13, which is getting on for a year now. Which is probably why it’s a strain to remember much of what went on and why and where, why there has been such a long hiatus. Work, yes. And London. But that time seems, above all else, a good whole to leave behind; a skin to shed, back before I had my VISA and my flights, when moving on was less final. 

Somewhere in there though I happened to say a brief hello to Steve Ely again, after an initial meeting back when I posted about his fellow Yorkshire Arts Circus’s Writer Development Programme graduate Becky Cherriman. 

That second meeting was at the Forward Prize ceremony in London, in October, where I had the pleasure of meeting the lovely Mona Arshi and where Oswald’s Book of Hours was up for the Felix Dennis Best First Collection and ‘Compline: Coronation of the Virgin’ got read by an actor (a feature of the evening Katy Evans-Bush covers expertly). 

It must be gratifying for Steve that Oswald was recently nominated for a prize in the name of the poet he very much admires, Ted Hughes. A fact that’s fairly indisputable, “bet I'm the only nominee who's actually written a book about Hughes,” Steve gleefully wagers on his website. I wish him best of luck at the award ceremony taking place in London this Friday.

*

‘Arthur Scargill’ is the first sonnet of a sequence entitled ‘Memorials of the Saints,’ which concludes Oswald’s Book of Hours, published by Smokestack Books in 2013.  

Arthur Scargill

The lowest of the low and low-paid,

the primary men; farmhands, quarrymen, colliers.

Crude men, of appetite and violence, mumblers,

white-knucklers, averters of eyes. Beasts of burden,

their lives lived out in the rhythm

of the Coal Board’s seasons: days and afters,

Henry Halls, neets reg. Larks orbiting the wheel

and the cold cage falling. Crushed torsoes under splintered 

chocks, amputations on the maingate rip,

blood-streaked phlegm hocked-up. Surface to the land

of cockaigne: egg and chips, beer and the bookies.

You brought them health and Palma de Mallorca,

Cortinas on the drive and kids in college,

reading Marx and Mao and The Wealth of Nations.

‘Here, here,’ rings out the gruff and immediate response to this sonnet in the recording, the politics and the sentiment meeting with approval. But don’t let that make you think this is a poem that shirks the responsibilities of poemhood. Chances are the audience knew they agreed with the politics of the voice before they heard the poem, but this is a poem of a rare muscular affirmation. 

I’ve heard complaints from older poets about my generation for their a-political existence. But even among the elders, politics in poems—at least overtly—isn’t practised widely. Yet this poem isn’t ashamed of its opinion; it sticks its heels in and grinds out its music. Not that it’s just a grim old thing, though parts of it are. It is harsh historical realism married to something sweeter, the Henry Halls, the lark, gloriously, “orbiting the wheel.” It reminds me, if anything, of a folksong in the line of Harry ‘Haywire Mac,’ one that manages to be sternly knowing and affectionate. 

Though the guts of it are grim, the blood in the phlegm, the crush, and the rip, you get the notion that this is because it's got guts. It's got “muscles and enjambments and eight and six,” “a waist and a middle—it is a form.” So as Heaney has it, as opposed to those sonnets “going the rounds in the United States,” this one packs an audible punch and holds true to poetry as “a muscular response,” (Schmidt, Lives of the Poets, 843, 1998) something Hughes would surely have approved of. 

And what impressed me the most initially, that echo, that response from the audience. The guttural grunt of affirmation, the agreement that this is a position to hold on to. I hope Steve soon receives further national and international recognition for hitting the nail on the head for the community he writes in. 

Twenty Two Words for Snow - Helen Mort

The lawn was freezing over

but the air stayed empty,

and I wondered how the Inuit 

would name this waiting - 

our radio playing to itself in the bathroom,

the sound from the street 

of ice-cream vans out of season

in this town where we don’t have 

twenty-two words for anything,

where I learned the name 

for artifical hills, the bridge

where a man was felled by bricks

in the strike. From the window,

I watch the sky as it starts to fill.

In the kitchen, dad sifts flour, 

still panning for something.

(Read the poem with its accompanying neuroscience on Helen's blog.) 

Chances are the reason you’re here at all is because the same thing has happened to you. And maybe you’re a bit sore about it. Maybe a bit bemused like; you’re trying to figure out how it happened. I mean, considering how good your defences were. You might even have tried the same thing: getting stern with it, putting on your best German and holding open the door for it. But all it did was get big-eyed and wouldn’t budge. And you melted. You melted. 

Like you I didn’t have a clue what I was letting myself in for, when on the 24^th of April, at Deddington Lane I first read Helen Mort’s ‘Twenty Two Words for Snow’. Skinny thing, I thought. Slight, I thought. Bit of a stray. What I hadn’t thought was that it might have been too late already. That the mangy thing had come in through the back door and was - as I pontificated - already making itself comfortable on the hearth-rug. Don’t be too hard on yourself. It happens to the best of us. Feeling. And now it’s here we might as well help it settle in. Somehow I think this might be a long-term thing. 

But your inspections of the new resident during long nights by the fire make you non-the-wiser. At 94 words and just 10 seconds short of a minute it could be a short, stripped Meredithian sonnet or a whippet. With no full-rhymes and its diction only lifting out of the familiar once with, ‘Inuit’ it’s quiet. How then, since this list seems - if anything - exceptionally dull and uninformative, has it bitten you? 

Well, you can’t help but remember a phrase from the American poet Timothy Donnelly’s recent interview, where he mentions how he likes the way Wallace Stevens’ ‘thoughts fall.’ Trouble is it sounds so beautiful that you don’t think about it much at all. Just do what it wants you to: ‘Thoughts fall. Thoughts fall. The way the thoughts fall. The way the thought falls.’ And now the word ‘fall’ is suspended and as it sinks into print, you savour it. And suddenly what seemed merely well written is now perfectly unparaphrasable

How you’re led by the nose by the past-simple continuous, ‘The lawn was freezing over …’ on by the inoffensive conjunctions ‘but,’ ‘and,’ to the quiet expansion of the clump of independent clauses that follow, ‘ … our radio playing,’ ‘… the sound from the street.’ 5 to 13 are a not uncommon vision, one of those landscapes you come on in the car; everything suddenly big and far, very far away and the best thing about it? That it came upon you silently. Which is a really imprecise way of saying: I like how the thought falls. How it’s bloody ingenious because I feel like I understand it but can’t say how without sounding like an idiot. It’s snow. It - sounds? - sounds like falling snow. How?! 

The first sentence closes on the word ‘strike,’ which is a word that threatens to go supermassive black hole on all of us; to swallow the poem up whole. It doesn’t though. Maybe because of the music. Take the lines that follow for instance, 13 and 14. ‘From the window, / I watch the sky as it starts to fill.’ Can you hear it? What is that? ‘From the window, / I watch the sky as it starts to fill.’ But look, it happened before, take lines 5 − 9, is it just me or do ‘bathroom,’ ‘season’ and ‘anything’ make the same pleasant sort of consonantal hum? ‘Our radio playing to itself in the bathroom, / the sound from the street / of ice-cream vans out of season / in this town where we don’t have // twenty-two words for anything.’ What is it about this that makes it sound so beautiful? 

And then - some how - it has you feeling sorry. Sorry for it. Sorry for yourself too. As if there were good reason to. And even though you’re a little shocked to discover that dad was in the kitchen sifting out his flour; that your family alone must be stuck in a weird time-loop, fallen completely off the WI’s radar. But you don’t feel like making half-hearted crap jokes at the end of this poem. Because it’s got to you. It got to you with that gap you didn’t mind between 8 and 9, ‘this town where we don’t have // twenty two words for anything.’ 

Oh yes. This poem wants to be kept. Remember Ian McMillan’s anecdote? That the difference between going into a barbers in South Yorkshire and the South is 40 or so words? We’re not what you’d call loqacious. But then - maybe - that’s why we want to try for fluency so often. Our accustomed extremes of expression being: I’m just saying like or I’m saying nowt. Well I’m just saying like. I for one hope this poem has pups.

*

Helen Mort performed ‘Twenty Two Words for Snow’ on the 24^th of April at the Guitar Bar's open mic slot in based in Hotel Deux Nottingham. Where were you? Helen Mort's performing at Bridlington Poetry festival on the 15th of June, don't miss it!  

(Poem reproduced with permission of the poet.)

Mine - Becky Cherriman

“Mine,” says my two-year-old niece, plucking the green beanie off my head. “Mine,” she repeats as she slips it over hers, proving it to be hugely - hilariously - too big. “Mine,” she says again, informing me as to the true ownership of her giant inflatable rabbit. “Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine!” We adults smile knowingly at each other, “bless!” But if only we knew how many times we’d chanted the same thing. Hundreds of thousands? A million? And that’s only one generation. How many more back to the mi of Old Saxon, the mik of Old Norse or even the mam of Sanskrit?* And at what point do we convince others that the packet of Cadbury’s Chocolate Fingers really are mine, that the border of a country or a county is?

“Mine,” starts up the audience in a mesmeric hum. “Mine,” chants this huddled semi-circle in Nottingham who’ve come only to listen. But Becky Cherriman’s poem wants more from us than silent acknowledgement. It’s choral and quarrelsome, a poem unfashionably out of form (almost all the others we will hear will be written in one traditional form or another), a poem that insists we hear our own internal contradictions: that belonging to a place, coming from a place can never be a simple story, is always instead an inured ambivalence; I want to get away but stay put too. 

That contradiction is in the poem. At 44 lines and roughly 02:15 in performance (not including applause!), occassionally, opportunistically rhymed (l.1-A, l.3-A/, l.7-A, l.9-A-int/; l.30-B, l.31-B; l.44-C-int) relying heavily on a small repertoire of rhetorical techniques, (repetition, paromoiosis, brachylogia) the  poem shuttles between expansive romantic sentiment and direct no-nonsense statement; between waxing lyrical and shutting your trap (very Leeds). 

Take l.17 - l.22, within these five lines we’re circumscribed within what is thoroughly stratified diction, ‘the aria of the tide,’ ‘the opening of the lotus,’ ‘the weave and the weft,’ lucid dreams and yawning caves, we're stifling a yawn too, we've heard it all before. And yet the forward impetus of the repetition (‘Mine is …’) coupled with the sound parallelism (l.18 and l.20) incredibly makes, what would otherwise be pretty dull-dead stuff, come to life. Part of this is its mindfulness of performance; the poem wants to be read aloud.

And why not? It was born for it. Mythic but unpatronizing; allusive but down-to-earth, the poem keeps faith with the primary visceral texture of language. More neat parallelism being built into l.30 − 33, l.43 − 45 comes out in performance as so much savoured language, an appeal which rarely fails to do just that. 

Mahmoud Darwish

Though the poem insists on the right to political statement (being written after controversial Palestine poet Mahmoud Darwish), that the geopolitical divisions that exist the world over necessarily exist here too, its negotiation with performance and its eye and ear for how it will be received demonstrate a sincere wish for, as l.45 has it ‘new beginnings.’ One could do much worse than to make this their mantra.


*If we put one generation at a very approximate 25 years and trust Wikipedia about when Sanskrit first came to India and Pakistan, (in the second millenium BCE), then the sum is fairly straightforward. 4013/25 = 160.52 generations. Ask how many 'mines' or mine-like-utterances were repeated during those generations, multiply and - well - no wonder the word appeals. 

∞

The event took place thanks to the Beeston Poets based in Beetson Library, Nottingham. Check out their up-coming events here. You can find Becky Cherriman at her website, and read her poems. You can listen to the live performance of 'Mine' at Beeston Poets too.

∞

Mine 

(after Mahmoud Darwish’s I Come From There)

1     I walked this land before

2     the moon was torn from the earth

3     in a gnashing of rock and magma.

4     I come from bones stripped bare

5     on an empty plain.

6     Born in a roar of lion cubs,

7     I had the mane of Sif and a legacy to fight for.

8     Mine is the forest and the herb

9     and the terra strata of vineyards.

10    Mine is the hills and the streams,

11    womb song and fire dance.

12    The golden apple is mine
13    and the bubbling stove.
14    Mine is the mangle and mine is the cradle.

15    Mine is the inheritance 

16    snatched by wolves.

17    The aria of the tide is mine.

18    and the opening of the lotus

19    Mine is the weave and the weft 

20    and the welcome interruption 

21    Mine is the lucid dream,

22    the history hidden in the yawning cave.

23    Mine is the holding place.

24    Mine is the inheritance 

25    snatched by wolves.

26    Mine is whalebone 

27    and plucked out toenails.

28    Mine is the stone and the razor, 

29    the red light and the wimple.

30    Mine is size zero and cellulite.

31    Mine is the soldiers in the night.

32    Mine is the girdle and the branding iron.

33    Mine is the language that clamps my tongue.

34    Mine is the inheritance 

35    snatched by wolves.

36    I have sent them away 

37    with torn ears and limping.

38    I learnt their stories only to rewrite them. 

39    I render the poison to the adder, 

40    the gold to Midas.

41    Mine is the ship on the horizon

42    where I net double rainbows like mussels. 

43    Make no mistake, 

44    I would raise the seas and drown the cities 

45    to forge a new beginning.



(Poem reproduced with permission of the author.)