04 October 2003

A CLEAR BLUE SKY         My dad was a man of prose – a specialist: words used like gardening tools to conjure shapes, to fashion patterns. Language mattered: correspondence ran to pages – letters to the council; ‘thank you’ notes to nurses that read like testimonials. Even cards to the milkman came across like billets doux to an old and valued friend. And the writing: tiny box-shaped words in biro, whispering in lines, or gathered quietly in the margins, small-voiced but insistent, looking for truths.   When he knew that he was dying, he sat at the edge of his life, scribbling a commentary.  Twinges from a cancer hotspot got a note immediately, draped around the Guardian crossword clues or squeezed between the calculations in his ledger: where it hurt, for what duration, and, in imagistic detail, the character of pain (like a voice, like broken glass, an ache like winter rheumatism).  And, towards the end, in his little diary, potted phrases: “Slept well”, “Insomnia”, “Coughing still”.   For we who sat around his bed, it was the silence that confounded.  To the nurses plumping pillows, lifting cups from which he didn’t want to drink; to waiting family fiddling with the radio, sifting through his laundry, he said nothing.  All his words were spent just days ahead of the breath that carried them.  And then, the afternoon of the day he died, the clouds drew back, late spring appeared. Joan leaned back towards the window, smiled and said: ‘Look - a clear blue sky’, and we turned to see.   My father didn’t turn his head.  Whatever sky he saw was far behind in time, or maybe just ahead.  Whatever sky it was, no messianic veil, no chariots of fire obscured the view. His great abundance, just like ours, was absolutely empty – birdless, sunless, silent and ineffable, mocking the mad commotion down below.  He drew in breath, breathed out and said: ‘A clear blue sky’, floating the words on the sterile air like leaves.  He didn’t speak again; he died that night and, one by one, the stars went out, an alphabet, a lexicon, set free.       11:47:34 PM    Mmm? []       TREAD SOFTLY...       I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.                                                        W.B. YEATS   Thursday night is Poetry ID night.  Ten, twelve, fourteen of us gather in the large, bar/performance area of The Place, the Letchworth Arts Centre premises.  Upstairs the Jazz Appreciation Society shuffle & stamp around to the muted thump of big band swing.  Down below in the street boy racers in baseball caps rev their cars.  We sit around a square configuration of all the little bistro tables pushed together.  Talk is genial.  We catch up on each other’s weeks, cross examine members long absent, joke, tease, flirt.  Thus far this could be a meeting of the Letchworth Labour Party or a local bridge club.   Then a hush falls & this week’s volunteer presents the poetry workshop theme.  Now the sacramental part of the evening’s proceedings begins.  Using a picture, or a group of random words or phrases, or a newspaper cutting we are given twenty minutes within which to write a poem.  (This evening we were given slips bearing Native American mottoes as a stimulus).   We scatter about the room, tucking ourselves in behind the bar, against the grand piano, inside the recessed window.  And for twenty minutes bank clerks & teachers & translators & cabdrivers & housewives scribble in silence.  Then we gather again, draw breath &, one by one, read the products of our labours.   At the conclusion of each reading a thick, deep silence falls.  Some people stare fixedly at a ceiling light fitting through narrowed eyes; others look down at the tabletop, tapping pursed lips with steepled fingers.  Then a whispered voice requests a re-reading &, as if pleasantly surprised, the writer delivers the goods again.  More ceiling scrutinising & finger steepling.  But this time silence is broken – or, more accurately, slightly ruffled – by tiny falling-cadence hums of non-committal appreciation.  And, as the minute chorus dies away, cautious evaluation begins.   I can’t speak for the others but, for all my amusement at the gentle rituals & protocols by which this process must be conducted, I find each time that it matters greatly what gets said.  Criticism is never a problem: this is a craft activity & one wants, indeed needs, advice as to what further crafting should be done.  But when, after a silence that is just three or four seconds too long, only two kind souls weigh in, & then it’s to compliment you on the title, or to locate one lonesome phrase for mild, supportive approval, the tumbleweed blows across the empty street.  Meanwhile, all around eyes remain narrowed & fingers steepled until it’s time to move one to the right for the ritual to be reiterated.   How sad, I reflect, that it should matter so much.  Only last week fulsome praise followed the reading & the validation really ought to last for a bit longer than a mere seven days.  It’s difficult to account for the need, not so much for praise as for acknowledgement – some recognition of where you have been in the gestation of the poem & where you ended up in its final emergence on the page.    I guess it’s down to two things: the absolute solitude of the creative process – the occupation for a period of time of strange territories, half-familiar and half alien, & the delicacy & fragility of that nascent poem that may or may not turn into something of value.  At times – not always – it becomes acutely important that a transmission cast out into the dark is received & acknowledged.       12:53:08 AM    Mmm? []

© Copyright 2004 Dick Jones. Last update: 24/01/2004; 23:10:17.