Poetry silence - when to start again

I have written hardly any poetry in such a long time now - March was the last time I put anything together which might be called a poem.

I'm inspired by the daily posts on Greg Perry's blog at the moment. He is writing a canto series. Each day sees at least one new poem, and they are well worth a read. Well done Greg - now for some words of my own.....

Great books - Proust

Step One of the 'Big Reads' challenge. I have borrowed 'Swann's Way' from my local library. The first part of 'In Search of Lost Time'.

Podcasts backlog

I've not been listening to podcasts for a little while. It's something I have just returned to - thanks to a little gadget which makes it possible for me to listen to them in the car through my iriver mp3 player. Before I got this gadget the only way to listen to podcasts was by burning them to CD-RW discs which was a real pain. Now I can listen to anything on the iriver through the radio in the car. It is brilliant.

I do, however, have a huge backlog to listen to. I'm ploughing through them, and really enjoying what I am hearing. The best of the bunch are Adam Curry's 'Daily Source Code', Rowland Cutler's 'Dark Compass', Podcast Paul and Lynn Parsons' 'Chalet Show'. There are also a bunch of shows which cover self-development which are excellent. These include Steve Pavlina, Robin Sharma, and a collection of weekly shows on Hayhouse Radio. And the other feed which I am really enjoying is a weekly podcast called Zencast which is about all things buddhist and includes some programmes by Thich Nhat Hanh.

All of this makes the commute to and from work a little less tedious.

The world of podcasting has changed a lot since I last posted on the subject. There are now many legal sources of music for podcasters. More on this in a future post.

Big reads

There are three big books which I have not read in my life:

• Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time
• Leo Tolstoy - War & Peace
• Edward Gibbon - Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Like climbing mountains, I need to read them because they are there to conquer. Do any of you have other suggestions for the 'big books' challenge?

Foundlings Five: Scribbles Underfoot

The cowboys have gone out of business or
Pretend to be self-made commercial heroes,
The fantasy of TV is a bore,
His town and home barely exist in prose.

Scribbles underfoot were rare, too discrete
They left him to his own devices.
He looked for lovers, quiet town, no-one to meet.
Only sources of pleasure were vices.

Salt water on his skin, so the sun burns
Like breaths of healthy old he diverges,
Takes a girl out and watches as she turns
From beauty of which splendour emerges.

His town and home barely exist in prose,
In poetry oft’ times anything goes.

The Open are no more

I wrote about the second album by Liverpool band ‘The Open’ recently. They have produced two beautiful albums, and I was settling in to wait for great albums to come, but that has fallen away now.

Why? Because I have just read in the official forum that they have decided to split. That’s such a shame. If you are unfamiliar with the band, search out their two albums - The Silent Hours and Statues. To be totally blown away, try the first track of the second album, ‘Forever’, and see what you think. The title seems a bit ironic given the fate of the band, but it is a truly stunning piece of music.

Now we just have to wait and see what the members of the band will do next.

BlueWater Books - Series Two - Coming Soon

After nearly two years, I have decided that it is time to begin work on the second series of books from my poetry press. BlueWater Books was launched in 2004 with two books of poems - 'Zen Words' and 'Umbrian Images'.

The second series will be available in the early autumn. More news of the titles that will be available will be posted on the blog soon.

Oh, and if you want copies of the first two booklets I still have a few left, so email me your details and I will send them to you.

Spaces and Gaps

...two months pass. And then... a short posting.

As if nothing had happened!

And the transmissions begin again, from here.

Listening to Robert Fripp, and wondering whether the deep and mysterious messages which are so elusive in Gurdjieff's work are the reason that the 'work' is so resonant, so meaningful and so prolific.

The Friday Playlist 1

The Friday playlist:

The Open – Statues

The Liverpool band’s second album begins with a track recorded in deepest Wales – yearning trumpet and a voice that comes from god knows where. This is a classic track called ‘forever’ which is one of the best album openers I have heard in ages. The second track takes us into more familiar Liverpool music scene. But the rest of the album which was recorded in France, is full of surprises. There’s prog rock, radiohead, jazz and straight-ahead pop. It’s a great album which grows with each play. Their first album “The Silent hours” is one of the best first albums I have heard in years.

Doves – Lost Souls

I’ve spent the last few months working my way backwards through the Doves’ back catalogue. This, their first album from 2000, is fantastic.

Neil Young – Prairie Wind

This is taking a bit of playtime to get to – I have problems with the sound of country, and this album is full of steel guitar. Great songs, as you’d expect. Neil Young reacting to the health scare he experienced in the middle of working on the album. Sometimes the albums that stay on the playlist are the ones that aren’t instant –this could be one of those.

Robert Fripp – Love cannot bear

I love the soundscape albums of Fripp, and this one is the best yet. It gathers tracks from across the years, each a live track from the USA. The result is a journey of immense emotional intensity.

Nitin Sawhney – Philtre

World travelling from the UK – a stunning melding of influences. This is the fourth album by Sawhney that I have bought recently. I find his music fascinating. Sometimes you hear music and think that it sounds like a soundtrack and lacks the visuals of a film. With Sawhney it sounds like a soundtrack that doesn’t need a film.

Also listening to:

The Tears – Here come the tears
Morrissey – Vauxhall and I
Sigur Rós – Takk
The Jam – Snap!
Paul Weller – Stanley Road

Setting goals

“The greatest danger for most of us
is not that our aim is too high and we miss it,
but that it is too low and we reach it”

- Michelangelo

Winter Trees

...another March fragment...

Three are the ways that I have seen you
Gliding across the sky like Jove awakening
Wondering why there are honeyed spaces between
Every field of your vision, every space kept unseen

Remember the secrets you told me, kept separate
Not available for decipher
Un-placed now, re-arranged as though you want
Some bespoke arrangement that only I will understand

Never have I left such distance between as the moments of now
And the time is moving fast and slow all at once
How strange! Take a madman and put him on show
Make him a leader and watch the world glow

RSS Feeds

Just a thought in passing really. It's so easy to assume that everyone knows what an RSS feed is and how to read blogs through a feed aggregator. It sounds mind-boggling. But essentially we are talking about a web-based service which captures updates to a blog and tells you when they are there for you to read. You can then read all of those updates through one browser.

The service I use is www.bloglines.com which is worth looking at. You can 'subscribe' to a blog by clicking on an RSS button on the page, or use a button in your browser which you can download, or within bloglines itself. It's a great way to keep up to date with your online reading!

Austrian landscape

... and here is a photo, which is the working image for the cover of the work in progress mentioned in the previous post:

Out of Hibernation

Coming out of winter hibernation, I have begun a project for the month of March. 31 poems in 31 days. I'm also carrying a camera and capturing images as the month progresses which I may use to complement the poems. Here is the second poem - unedited or worked, just in its raw form:

Whenever she says she does she does
But the light never shines above her head
The way it should – like a veil

I watch the birds, 1028 of them, fly overhead
Like one organism, flexing and changing shape
Creating a mass of darkness in a blue sky surround

The sense of menace is as real as
The sense of plenty that sometimes comes through
Just when I worry about things too much

When the light shines above my own head
I can sometimes pull it down and through
Then the warmth of it all is palpable

Here comes the birds organism again, fifth time around
With each circle of the town, I can feel a little more sense
Understand the way 2056 wings can make a unified sound

Like fingers beating on a microphone as a test –
Pulling patterns together that would be meaningless
Sense, connections, lines between – where the ends meet the means.