103. Going from Bad to Verse!
Last night I had a weird dream. Mind you, most of my dreams are weird. On this occasion I was asked to give a reading of someone else’s very avant-garde poetry. I normally read my own poetry but was interested in the challenge. Unfortunately, these poems made no sense whatsoever. When I woke up, I suddenly thought that I would like to talk about poetry in my blog, so here we go.
At school, like so many other students, I hated poetry. Looking back, it was because I was told what poems to like, and their meanings were examined in detail. I grew sick of wondering why William Wordsworth went on about “A Host of Golden Daffodils” and so on. So, it came as bit of a shock when one day I decided to try to write something of my own. It also seemed to conflict with my obsession with contact sports. How many rugby-playing poets have there been? Nevertheless, I did sometimes sit on the sidelines watching the match before mine, with a pen and notebook, trying to make a poem rhyme.
After I discovered that there was such a thing as free verse, where rhyming was not necessary, I began to write poetry in earnest, well before I really started to write film and television scripts. I’m not a particularly romantic poet and enjoy writing on many different subjects. Although poetry seems to go in and out of fashion, I have always found it to be a wonderfully satisfying form of self-expression. So, as blogging is also a pretty self-indulgent medium, I will inflict upon you a selection of poems written over many years. Please bear in mind that an excellent definition of art is “the quality of communication.” In other words, does any art form communicate to you? That surely can be the only true criterion for appreciation of art. Don’t listen to what the academics and critics say about a work of art. What does it mean to you? That’s all that really counts.
My first poem goes back to 1962 and reflects my depressed and rather confused mood at the time. Fortunately, this did not last. If you don’t fully understand it, neither do I anymore, but it will indicate an evolution in my writing.
Weeping
Walnut tree brown,
quiver of trees softly.
Herded footsteps flattening,
battering smelly compost.
Dirt of human presence
hurt of trees screaming in the wind
Soul-sticks
Weeping.
Much later, I wrote a poem from a point of view of some entity other than my own. This is something I have tried from time to time and find it intriguing to play with it.
Wings? (2017).
I soar high, dancing on the whispering wind,
mindful of towering banks of cumulus
building huge white mountains in the sky,
benign and fluffy in their magnificence,
hiding fierce moods of turbulence within.The sun still caresses me, stretching my wings
catching a thermal, wafting me even higher.
The land below is a distant green quilt
with occasional shrubs where I may choose to rest.In the distance are advance scouts of a massive forest,
where an army of trees have conquered the land,
creating a haven for creatures I would like to eat.
I don’t begrudge their search for leafy safety.
There are still those who foolishly brave the open,
providing me with a perfect target for supper.But I cannot understand those larger creatures,
not content with the use of their two legs,
that propel them slowly across the land
in an endless quest for food and drink.
They have built shiny machines, carrying them
at incredible speeds along narrow black lines,
desecrating the beauty of our land below.I suspect too, that these creatures have made
those huge whistling tubes that fly even higher
than anything we are capable of achieving.
Should I envy their skills in creating machines
or should I pity them for having no wings?
In 2001, I visited Swaziland, a small kingdom on the border of South Africa. My parents lived there from the early 1960s. My mother passed away in 2000. Hero and I visited my dad as often as we could. The highlands of Swaziland vary between scorching sunshine, cold mists and often rain.
Hit or Mist (2002).
The fog lies thick and sullen, wetting the road
leaving unpredictable vaporous touches.
Large ungainly ghosts stand desolate,
oblivious to danger on the black scar
bisecting one of Africa’s grassy plains,
exposing a ruminative world of casual cattle
to a blitz of behemoths crowding the road
in angry defiance of the soft grey intruder
blanketing and blinding traveler’s vision.
Cranky klaxons confuse the cows
congregating, cold, wet, bovinely passive
uncaring about the almost broken line
of massive murderous missiles
looming, booming, zooming at speed
in and out of the foggy, foggy waves.Miraculously, animals and metal monsters
avoid each other by micro millimeters
hoping impatiently for the fierce tropical sun
to burn off the fog, transforming this travesty
of a stark, pseudo-English countryside
into Swaziland’s bleached but beautiful terrain!
I also write about people. I have written love poems, and every year for 57 years I write a poem to my wife Hero on our anniversary. However, I have also explored some of my very mixed feelings about my father.
Thinking about Father (2001).
Eighty-seven years old walks, like a damaged praying mantis
selectively deaf, incredible eyesight, a champ at snooker
at Swaziland’s very British Mbabane club.
Takes on all-comers at bowls but cannot tie his shoelaces.
Can’t remember where the bathroom is, yet discourses
on alternative means of flight, propulsion, magnetic forces
and other remarkable things, all part of his daily diet
of inquisitiveness about life forms and their origins.Sadly, along with this package, comes a man
savagely dedicated to being right every time.
A man who will argue for an hour or more
on the shape of a shadow on a wall
or the color of the eyes of a long dead woman.He will not be wrong and his fabrications
that lend credence to his rigid rightness
are to family and friends the stuff of legends.On the subject of rightness, my wife assures me
that I’m pretty much the same!
Poetry is a wonderful form of expression with the freedom to tackle any subject under the sun or moon and all that counts is “Did it communicate?”
There’s no point in writing poems and hiding them in a drawer as so many timid poets do. Roll them out, share them, you may be very surprised!
I might even attempt a poem about ExoTech one day. Nothing is sacred and, who knows, a poem about a paradigm shift might catch somebody’s eye!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.