Contents
Commentary
Preamble	iv
The Writing Journey	iv
1/ Reading	v
2/ Drafting and Tutorials	vii
The Tutorial Journey	vii
3/ Revision – Mulling and Revising	x
Poetry in – poetry out	x
4/ Conferences and Summer School	xii
Conferences	xii
Summer School	xiii
5/ Publishing	xiii
6/ The Portfolio – an introduction	xiv
Bibliography	xvi
Poetry Reading List	xvii
Acknowledgements	xix
Poetry Portfolio
Per Capita	1
Blah Blah Salad	2
Crafty	3
Horizon	4
DOORCURTAIN	5
The Arcade	6
The Flower Shops	7
He	8
this wind	9
A Fresh Pack	10
Such a Bothersome Color	11
Couple	12
Little	13
Poet and Wife-Beater	14
Clear Morning	15
08:15	16
Home 7	17
Identity	18
From Blue Sky	19
Au Paris	20
Little Girl with a Big Camera	21
Sky and Skyline Calling	22
Underground Prayer	23
Wide Open Spaces	24
Polly	25

 

Well-Thumbed Pages	26
Influence	27
Pace	28
Saturday Night on Ludlow Station	29
Ripped Ectoplasm	30
Newgale	31
The outside café table	32
Collider	33
Pre-Modern	34
Wealth	35
Morning	36
Singularity	37
Baby Milk	38
Thames and Benches	39
Embossed	40
South Bay Anchorage	41
Anna	42
Grey Bird	43
Some of Us are Looking at the Stars	44
Today	45
Chocolate Box	46
Bio	47
Icicle	48
Fido	49
outside	50

Commentary

Preamble

I applied to the Lancaster MA to develop my writing and I haven’t been disappointed. For me, poetry is an instinctive form of self-expression which started in my pre-teen years and has continued ever since. In 2002 I decided to explore the excellent, weekly classes run by Cardiff University (Humanities Continuing Education) and six years later I enrolled on the OU A215 Creative Writing Course. Applying for the MA felt like a natural progression.

I use modern form and a colloquial lexicon. I identify with William Carlos Williams and his use of ‘common language’1 and I agree with Berger’s assertion that appreciation of the arts should not be confined to those with ‘a privileged education’2.

The poems in my portfolio, the people, memories, loves, the visits to major cities and the countryside , are my ‘Lunch Poems’3, except I’m now retired - I’m on an extended lunch break.

The Writing Journey

1/ Reading

2/ Drafting and Tutorials

3/ Revision – Mulling and Revising 4/ Conferences and Summer School 5/ Publishing

6/ The Portfolio – an introduction

1 Rosenthal, M.L., Williams' Life and Career http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/williams/bio.htm [last accessed 26/07/2011]

2Berger, John, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books with the BBC, 1972) (p.24)

3O'Hara, Frank, Lunch Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964)

 

1/ Reading

‘If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot’ (Stephen King4). I adapted his words: ‘If you want to write poetry you must read a lot of poetry – and write a lot of poetry’.

I found it enjoyable and invaluable as a means to focus and absorb the poetic medium to read many poems, to identify with the perceptions and the creative drive of the author, to study their work through the lens of being a poet.

If I highlight individual writers to whom I am particularly drawn, in terms of a collected body of work, I’d pick firstly, Robert Creeley for his American, post-beat style and then the gentle, thoughtful work of the English poet Ian Hamilton. The second grouping would include John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Charles Simic and Gary Snyder.

On top of that there are numerous individual poems which have inspired me, for instance ‘Santarém’5, by Elizabeth Bishop:

Of course I may be remembering it all wrong after, after – how many years?

As Longenbach notes, ‘the narrative is wayward, a string of loosely connected observations’6. I can detect this uncertain, rambling style in some of my (mostly early) MA work (e.g. ‘Sky and Skyline Calling’ and ‘Per Capita’).

The end lines of Santarém are also interesting in that they do ‘not provide a metaphor that encompasses all of the poem’7. This reminds me of the ‘disjunctive’8 ending of Robert Creeley’s ‘Water Music’9:

4King, Stephen, On Writing: a Memoir of the Craft (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2001)

5Bishop, Elizabeth, Complete Poems (London: Chatto and Windus, 1983)

6Longenbach, James, Modern Poetry After Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)(p.31)

7Longenbach, James, Modern Poetry After Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)(p.32)

8Longenbach, James, The Resistance to Poetry (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004) [Chapter III – Forms of Disjunction]

9Creeley, Robert, The Collected Poems, 1945-1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)

 

Water Music (Robert Creeley)

The words are a beautiful music.

The words bounce like in water.

Water music,

loud in the clearing

off the boats, birds, leaves.

They look for a place to sit and eat –

no meaning, no point.10

This poem illustrates to me how the end of a poem can add a new dimension to what has preceded it. Indeed, the last lines, and/or the title, can effectively be distant relatives to the body of the poem.11

Another poem that impressed me was Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s ‘Uses of Poetry’12, with its scant punctuation:

So what is the use of poetry these days

What use is it What good is it

At the start of the course I was a touch heavy handed with the punctuation keys, especially the semicolon. This might have been a remnant from prose writing, undertaken in classes prior to the MA, when I was using compound phrases. For the duration of the Masters I decided to not read or write prose – my version of ‘Sois toujours poète, même en prose’ [always be a poet, even in prose].13 Prose had become too long-winded for me, and its forward momentum disrupted the contemplation I associate with poetry. I eventually started using shorter phrases punctuated with line- breaks and the occasional use of commas and full stops.

10Creeley, Robert, The Collected Poems, 1945-1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)

11[The same family, for sure, but for confirmation the reader might have to examine the DNA] (e.g. ‘08:15’, ‘Collider’, ‘Home 7’).

12Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, These are my Rivers (New York: New Directions Press, 1994)

13Baudelaire, Charles, Mon coeur mis à nu, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1976), vol. 1, 670.

 

2/ Drafting and Tutorials

‘You just have to go at it until you are saying what you find at the heart of you. Sometimes that's an immense effort and sometimes it’s almost as inconsequential- seeming as a game.’ (George Szirtes14)

The Tutorial Journey

For the first few tutorials I submitted a variety of work to identify my strengths and discover which poets and which styles of poetry I might wish to explore. My tutor, Conor O’Callaghan, suggested that I had a tendency to slip into literalism, that I would try to explain the poem’s meaning and sometimes left no gap at all between a poem’s theme and its subject matter. For instance, a Whitman-esque, anti-theist rant of mine was described as ‘too damn literal’! At the other extreme he felt my early concrete poem ‘Per Capita’ was a success exactly because it couldn’t be paraphrased, yet its structure had real sense. I was encouraged to make metaphysical symbols out of everyday concretes and dwell on Heidegger’s ‘thingness of things’15: remember that a poem is not a letter to The Times: write poetry in which the reader is encouraged to generate their own meaning.

I also tried out playful poems (e.g. ‘The Flower Shops’ and ‘Anna’). Conor contrasted favourably their tonal lightness and bounce to some of my other poems which were ‘bogged down in the grammar of [their] own thematic seriousness’. He suggested it might be possible to use the humour of the simpler poems with more serious topics – this came to fruition later with poetry like ‘Baby Milk’ and ‘He’ and others.

During this early stage of the course, I’d been reading Ruth Padel’s ‘52 Ways of Looking at a Poem’16, enjoying the authoritative way she expanded my appreciation of good poetry and I liked a short poem (10 lines) by Moniza Alvi, ‘Map of India’. In this,

14George Szirtes pers. comm. (email) – December 2009

15Heidegger, Martin, Poetry, language, thought (Perennical Classics, 2001)

16Padel, Ruth, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem: a poem for every week of the year (London: Vintage, 2002)

 

the outline of the country in an atlas is likened to a flap on an advent calendar. Also, in Charles Simic’s ‘Selected Poems 1963-2003’17, within a range of compactly written work, there are some very short poems; these also drew my interest: ‘Watermelons’, ‘Solitude’, ‘Shirt’. (4, 8, 12 lines.) ‘Watermelons’, in particular, with only 16 syllables has concision but also energy, and amusing visual linkages e.g. the melonish, round corpulence associated with the Laughing Buddha and the smile-shaped watermelon segments.

Green Buddhas

On the fruit stand.

We eat the smile

And spit out the teeth.14

I had experimented with writing short poems before the MA, indeed some had been published (e.g. ‘Switchback’, see below), but now that I was writing in a less literal way, and more condensed, I was uncertain how this direction would be received. Would the effort they take be recognised, or would their brevity be equated with throw-away?

Switchback

What you tend to forget now is not so very different from what you forgot

in the past

You know, if

you want to break out of your perceptive loops,

you’ll need a second opinion18

I explored writing short, compact poems which had a keen sense of energy (e.g. ‘Grey Bird’, ‘Home 7’, ‘Horizon’, ‘Bio’). This writing process felt like the construction of a mental geodesic dome. If it was half-built and then I chose the wrong word the whole structure collapsed.

Conor responded favourably that these poems were a strong development in my work and suggested I look at William Carlos Williams’ ‘This is Just to Say’, Robert

17Simic, Charles, Selected Poems 1963-2003 (London: Faber and Faber, 2004)

18Bovan, Ashley, Poetry Monthly International – February 2010

 

Creeley’s ‘I Know a Man’ and the poetry of Ian Hamilton19. ‘Consider how they each use line-breaks to create different emphases’.

I found Hamilton’s work particularly interesting, not only for its concision, but also its deliberation. Consider ‘Biography’18 where the over-night ageing of his terminally ill father (I assume) is likened to the turning of a page, no melodrama.

Who turned the page? When I went out

Last night, his Life was left wide-open,

Half-way through, in lamplight on my desk:

The Middle Years.

Now look at him. Who turned the page?20

Conor and I discussed contemporary poetic practice and looked at how long it was advisable to hold off before writing a first draft; there was an advantage in incubating an idea mentally to see if it would develop or fade away. He recommended the chapter by Don Paterson in ‘How Poets Work’21 where Paterson talks about letting the initial idea for a poem sit and stew for a while before making a start.

I found this very useful and then, later, a significant development for me was that this practice of dwelling on a poem before writing was starting to go to a greater depth.

It may be that this process of contemplation is similar to what Seamus Heaney22 calls ‘a dig’ where you ‘let down a shaft into real life’ (p.41), and make an attempt at ‘Finding a voice [to] get your own feeling into your own words’ (p.43), and ‘raid the inarticulate’ (p.47). This was unfamiliar territory for me and I wanted to give it a try but I had questions. I wrote in my tutorial – ‘is it inherent in the nature of writing poetry that it is always experimental, instinctive, that there is no certainty about the end product?’ Conor replied with an anecdote – a student of the short story writer, James Baldwin, asked for advice on writing – Baldwin replied, ‘whenever you find you can do something as a writer, stop doing it.’

19Hamilton, Ian, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2009)

20Hamilton, Ian, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2009)

21Curtis, Tony, How Poets Work (Bridgend: Seren, 1996)

22Heaney, Seamus, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978, Chapter: ‘Feeling into Words’ p41-60 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980)

 

My most recent work explores the use of an image and/or simple phrases to convey the distilled essence of a poem’s theme, for example, ‘Fido’ and ‘outside’, and ‘Singularity’ of which Conor said, ‘I have not a clue what this poem is about, but I do find it oddly compelling’.

3/ Revision - Mulling and Revising

I write and revise in pen in a notebook which means I always have a record of original versions and margin notes, in context.

Poetry in – poetry out

Revision often starts by looking through my journal and assessing what I’ve written. With no prose outlet in my life I found that I was working within a poetry continuum: experience and ideas became digested and then later emerged as poetry – even diary entries:

funny how my notebook was once full of poems

and the odd line of commentary but is now full of commentary and the odd poem23

and also my ear became attuned to overheard poetry:

If you want a sandwich

you buy the first one you like.

You don't have time to find the best.24

and:

Good girls are hard to find and so are good men. That’s what life is like.25

23Journal entry – 15th June 2011 – (towards the end of the MA course)

24Journal entry – overheard – a passerby, in town, talking to his pal

25Journal entry – overheard – a drunken man, in the park, talking to an office worker during her lunch break

 

Some drafts can be set to one side; they’re a passing idea, practice in phrasing and line- breaks, an exercise – or maybe a Facebook status update:

I have a sheet of paper at home with just your name on

I don't know why I printed it out your email

all one page and one line of it26

Other drafts, the ones that show promise, will usually need more work. ‘You may find revision takes more time than writing the piece in the first place’ (W. N. Herbert27). Of course, care must be taken during revision to not destroy the initial subtlety, and avoid those occasions where ‘the poetic intuition becomes a craftsman’s creative idea,

losing its inherent transcendence’28. With each poem, also, a decision has to be made on the balance between the ‘sincerity’ and the ‘objectification’ of language (Louis Zukofsky29).

For a summary of the revision process I’d list the following stages –

∑dwell upon / incubate / the starting words

∑use the unconscious to come up with new words, new ideas and connections

∑use the intuition to assess what’s already written

∑use the critical mind to edit and craft the poem

∑Revision = Compaction

∑repeat as necessary

At some point in a poem’s development I need to type it up so I can assess its shape on the page. Then I print out and carry it around with all the others and revise them in different settings – on the train, in the park, in the library. I find a public place sharpens

26Journal entry – Facebook status update, 16th July 2011

27Anderson, Linda, ed., Creative Writing: a workbook with readings (Abingdon: Routledge with the Open University, 2006) [p.174]

28Maritain, Jacques, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (Princeton University Press, 1953)

29Quoted (p.40) in Longenbach, James, The Resistance to Poetry (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004)

 

the objective faculties. Typically any one particular poem might take from one month to one year before I reckon it’s ‘finished’30.

4/ Conferences and Summer School

Conferences

With many years’ experience of workshopping poems I felt comfortable with submitting incomplete work to the online conferences. For instance, an early version of ‘From Blue Sky’ had this final stanza:

The carriage (boo boo boop boo beep) doors crank shut. Out from Port Talbot, crammed, too-small seats, sun-spiked eyes, nervy stares, flat fields, telegraph poles, blurred hedges, track -side weeds, pylons, greens, houses on slopes, houses

close by, and now, Bridgend – another car-park, passengers

I was happy with the hint of train-like rhythm, and the descriptions, but after much supportive and encouraging discussion decided it was sketchy and incomplete. I split the original in two and used the first of the new stanzas to depict the train’s motion and its arrival at Bridgend:

Passengers, animals, A to B: crammy seat, nervy stares, clackety cataract, track -side greens, blurry weeds… Bridgend. Station. Stop.

The new fourth stanza, though, was not quite resolved. I began to focus and expand on the theme of dehumanised carriages (like cattle trucks) and then the need of commuters to ‘bring home the bacon’. I remembered Les Murray’s poem ‘Pigs’31 and his use of the word ‘us’ to indicate herd mentality:

Us all on sore cement was we.

30"A poem is never finished, only abandoned." Paul Valéry . (n.d.). 1-Famous-Quotes.com. Retrieved Tue Jul 26 10:02:53 2011, from 1-Famous-Quotes.com Web site: http://www.1-famous- quotes.com/quote/840669

31Murray, Les, New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2003)

 

I worked in the words ‘litter, down, pedestrian, flagstones, turnoff, cul’ to accentuate the negative and eventually wrote:

Us trundle through cheeping doors, platform gap, gummed feet tread crusted packet litter, incremental steps down to pedestrian crossing, flagstones, turnoff to cul de sac, trade, market, bacon.

And finally…I submitted this poem to ‘Cake’, Lancaster’s literary magazine, and it was accepted for publication! (Issue#2)

Summer School

Two poems in my portfolio are direct results from the workshops at Summer School (‘Embossed’ and ‘Little’) and another was drafted on the train journey home (‘Saturday Night on Ludlow Station’).

During the residential we had the opportunity to read out work to our fellow students. I found that the more immediate (humorous) ones worked best but not all are included in my portfolio because I believe they don’t transcribe representatively. I write to be read on the page rather than the audible reading of poetry: it’s the way I prefer to appreciate poetry, in print, on the page. The sounds of the words are, however, important to me.

My use of phonetics changed during the Masters from being keen on consonance at the start (e.g. ‘Morning’, ‘South Bay Anchorage’, ‘Chocolate Box’) moving towards more subtle slant/internal rhyme later on (e.g. ‘The outside café table’, ‘Couple’). I do occasionally use full rhyme, though mainly for humour: e.g. ‘Anna’ where, at the beginning, ‘I love you, mange tout’ hopefully flags up that it is a light-hearted poem.

5/ Publishing

As soon as I was accepted onto the MA, (May 2009), I started sending my work out to journals.

 

It is very beneficial, I believe, to be objective about your work and measure your poems up against those contained in a journal to determine if they will be suitable; will they be what the editor wants?

I’m very pleased to say I’ve had 60 poems published in 30 different journals – mostly print-based, some online. (14 of these published poems are included in the portfolio.)

6/ The Portfolio – an introduction

Always carry a notebook and pen

Always carry a camera32

There is a strong visual element in my work: not only the poems that directly reference photography (‘Little Girl with a Big Camera’, ‘Singularity’, ‘The Arcade’, etc.) but also the pictorial descriptions. Several of my peers have remarked that I like to guide the eyes of my readers, as if a video camera were being used (‘Clear Morning’, ‘this wind’ and many more).

Equally, the layout of a poem on the page is important, whether it’s the wide lines of ‘Newgale’ (depicting a broad bay) or the small font and tightly-packed lines of ‘Sky and Skyline Calling’ (claustrophobia, sensation follows sensation). Generally, I feel the space around a poem allows the poem to breathe and the primal snapshot when you first turn the page conveys an immediate message about the nature of the poem.

For the portfolio I have chosen what I believe are the most successful poems to represent the range of styles I have investigated. Broadly speaking, the poems fall into two groupings: Landscape and Relationship. The landscape poems are my perspective on how a visit to a particular setting has shifted me out of my routine-based, Cardiff life: a mix of journeys to busy cities (Paris, London) and quiet, rural areas

32 Journal entry – [moments of epiphany demand one or the other – occasionally both]

 

(Pembrokeshire, the Welsh borders). With the people / relationship poems (friends, acquaintances and loves), I’m looking for a story to tell or an axe to grind, revenge poems, poems about disappointments, a touch of tortured soul. I have also included a few concrete poems, a cut-up and some laddish, wit and swagger.

The poems in my portfolio are a selection, not a collection. A collection for me would be poems which were more linked (subject or theme or form) and that is a future project.

*

‘The real world and the lived life are returned to us slightly warped’33

*

33 Tutorial comment re: ‘The outside café table’ – Conor O’Callaghan

 

Bibliography

Anderson, Linda, ed., Creative Writing: a workbook with readings (Abingdon: Routledge with the Open University, 2006)

Berger, John, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books with the BBC, 1972) Bishop, Elizabeth, Complete Poems (London: Chatto and Windus, 1983)

Colvin, Sidney, Walter Savage Landor (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003)

Creeley, Robert, The Collected Poems, 1945-1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)

Curtis, Tony, How Poets Work (Bridgend: Seren, 1996)

Curtis, Tony, How to Study Modern Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1990) Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, These are my Rivers (New York: New Directions Press, 1994) Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, What is Poetry? (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company,

2000)

Gross, Philip and Simon Denison, I Spy Pinhole Eye (Blaenau Ffestiniog: Cinnamon Press, 2009)

Hamilton, Ian, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2009)

Heaney, Seamus, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980)

Hughes, Ted, Poetry in the Making: a handbook for writing and teaching (London: Faber and Faber, 2008)

Kane, Daniel, What is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde (New York: T & W Books, 2003)

King, Stephen, On Writing: a Memoir of the Craft (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2001)

Lamott, Anne, Bird by Bird: some instructions on writing and life (New York: Anchor Books, 1995)

Longenbach, James, Modern Poetry After Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)

Longenbach, James, The Resistance to Poetry (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004)

Maritain, Jacques, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry ( Princeton University Press, 1953)

Murray, Les, New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2003) O'Hara, Frank, Lunch Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964) Padel, Ruth, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem: a poem for every week of the year

(London: Vintage, 2002)

Scully, James, ed., Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (London: Fontana, 1973) Simic, Charles, Selected Poems 1963-2003 (London: Faber and Faber, 2004) Skelton, Robin, Poetry (London: The English Universities Press, 1974)

Whitworth, John, Writing Poetry (London: A & C Black, 2006)

Wilson, Colin, Poetry and Mysticism (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1970)

 

Muldoon, Paul, Selected Poems 1968-1983 (London: Faber and Faber, 1986) Murray, Les, New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2003) O'Callaghan, Conor, Fiction (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2005)

O'Hara, Frank, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler, The New York Poets

– An Anthology, ed. Mark Ford (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2004) O'Hara, Frank, Lunch Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964) O'Hara, Frank, Meditations in an Emergency (New York: Grove Press, 1967) Ormond, John, Emyr Humphreys and John Tripp, Penguin Modern Poets 27

(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979)

Pinsky, Robert, The Figured Wheel, New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997)

Plath, Sylvia, Ariel: The Restored Edition (London: Faber and Faber, 2007) Plath, Sylvia, Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 1989) Prynne, J.H., Poems (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2005)

Richardson, Susan and Pat Gregory, Where the Air is Rarefied (Blaenau Ffestiniog: Cinnamon Press, 2010)

Richardson, Susan, Creatures of the Intertidal Zone (Blaenau Ffestiniog: Cinnamon Press, 2007)

Rilke, Rainer Maria, Selected Poems, trans. J.B.Leishman (London: Penguin Books, 2000)

Rimbaud, Arthur, Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966)

Simic, Charles, Selected Poems 1963-2003 (London: Faber and Faber, 2004) Snyder, Gary, Look Out: A Selection of Writings (New York: New Directions, 2002) Snyder, Gary, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2004) Stephens, Meic, ed., A Cardiff Anthology (Bridgend: Seren, 1987)

Stevenson, Anne, Poems 1955-2005 (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2006) Sweeney, Matthew, Selected Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002) Szirtes, George, New and Collected Poems (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2008)

Whitman, Walt, Selections from Leaves of Grass, ed. L.A.Fielder (New York: Dell Publishing, 1972)

Williams, William Carlos, Collected Poems, volume II 1939-1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan (London: Paladin, 1991)

Williams, William Carlos, Paterson (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1957) Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, Selected Poems, trans. Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi

(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971)

 

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the respective editors of these journals for publishing my poetry: Anastomoo, Anterliwt, Cake, Cambrensis, Counterexample Poetics, Danse Macabre, Decompression, Disingenuous Twaddle, Drown In My Own Fears, Fourteen, Gloom Cupboard, HQ Poetry Magazine, Haiku Presence, Inclement, Neon Highway, Osprey Journal, Ouroboros Review, Poetry Monthly International, Psychic Meatloaf, Reach Poetry, Red Poets, Roundyhouse, Sarasvati, Soul Feathers, Macmillan Cancer Support Anthology, Streetcake, The Cleave, The New Writer, The Welsh Poetry Competition Anthology, Thick With Conviction, Travelling Light, Turbulence, Urban District Writer.

The 14 published poems included in my portfolio are – 'Some of Us are Looking at the Stars', 'Fido', 'Embossed', 'Today', 'South Bay Anchorage', 'Influence', 'Polly', 'The Flower Shops', 'Clear Morning', 'Underground Prayer', 'Per Capita', 'From Blue Sky', 'Chocolate Box', 'Thames and Benches'.

 

Poetry Portfolio

Ashley Bovan

Per Capita
I walked from Café Royal to					Academy Royal
ruing the death of Woolworths					experimenting
with various		abdominal			muscle-tensions
now wishing I was alpha-					male	(even my
bog-paper is super-soft)				Octoberish weather
slept-in hair		New York	espresso			forthwith
a sandwich		westside			wing	Covent
Garden	Thameside park				Second Tier 58
Seat 2	new roof BM			hot courtyard V&A
raw dirty windows			latticed-glass hot-house
regal pergola		cars and cycles rock the cast-
iron bridge		young gangs engage on paved
walkway		ground down			pestle and mortar
yeah		me too

 

Blah Blah Salad

In a field

William works a red tractor harvests cucumber

rests beside the haystack crunches

a sandwich cheese goat-food leaves parsley grass vinegar

WD40

looks up to the sky past sun-yellow salad cream drizzled clouds of lettuce

crows like black olives

 

Crafty

Your poems are all forgeries –

imitations of old masters with your name on.

You say,

laziness has become transfigured into arrogance. You say,

other stuff which is conveniently forgotten.

You run,

escape from shadows, adopt postures, yadda, yadda, despise the dark; despise those who therein tread.

Today,

for a second, for a change, like a friend,

you consider other options… then you stay safe.

You pay the bills – an excellent scheme: status first;

heart second. Good luck.

 

Horizon

I had a mother once. Sweet peach

Who fed me, Washed me, Dressed me,

Is now an old lady.

 

D O O R C U R T A I N

 

y	r	o	o	h	d	e	p	n	t	n
o	e	u	s	r	y	d	e	d	h	g
u	d	b	e	e	a	t	d	d	e	i
r	p	l	w	a	r	o	w	i	w	n
h	l	e	o	d	n	g	i	n	i	p
o	a	f	o	e	t	e	t	i	n	l
m	s	a	d	d	h	t	h	n	d	a
e	t	c	c	o	r	h	m	g	t	t
m	i	e	r	n	e	e	e	r	i	e
a	c	d	e	s	e	r	t	o	n	s
d	r	s	a	t	o	t	a	o	k	o
e	e	a	m	r	r	i	l	m	l	f
d	d	t	p	i	f	n	w	c	i	v
o	b	i	l	n	o	y	i	a	n	e
o	l	n	u	g	u	t	r	t	g	g
r	u	r	m	l	r	u	e	c	a	e
c	e	i	a	i	l	b	i	h	s	t
u	y	b	q	t	e	e	t	i	w	a
r	e	b	u	t	n	s	h	n	e	b
t	l	o	a	l	g	o	u	g	w	l
a	l	n	w	e	t	f	n	t	e	e
i	o	g	o	m	h	b	g	h	n	c
n	w	o	o	i	s	r	b	e	t	u
s	g	l	d	r	o	o	e	l	t	r
t	r	d	e	r	f	w	t	i	o	r
r	e	b	n	o	h	n	w	g	a	y
i	e	u	b	r	i	b	e	h	n	a
p	n	t	e	s	p	a	e	t	d	n
s	h	t	a	o	p	m	n	c	f	d
o	a	e	d	n	y	b	k	a	r	b
f	l	r	s	p	b	o	i	t	o	u
c	f	m	s	l	e	o	t	c	c	t
o	i	i	m	a	l	c	c	h	a	t
l	n	l	a	i	l	l	h	i	t	o
o	c	k	l	t	s	i	e	n	c	n
u	h	r	l	e	t	p	n	g	h	s
.	d	.	t	.	i	.	a	.	i	.

 

 

 

The Arcade

Latex lights eat texture. Corner shadows

stamp love with newsprint. Routine time

soaks

into the flagstones.

Just you and me.

No reverberation.

 

The Flower Shops

on Valentine’s Day make more money than an online casino

but I like to buy you a bouquet even though you left me

ten years ago

for a man with better career prospects who, ironically,

left you

six months later for a woman

with better physical prospects

Today

I walk the streets carrying your bunch

suffering the howls from motorists the twitching net curtains

the CCTV cameras that crank to scan me but I survive

and get to walk past my wheelie bin and in they go –

tarra then, valentine, no hard feelings

 

He

is a hole

in the ground with a cover made of pages

torn from odd magazines and hardened

and stuck together

Maybe you’ll walk nearby get interested

fall in

After grinding your bones

to coarse powder he’ll hide you forget you

If you’re free tonight do come see me

 

this wind

draws squiggles on paper, phonetics to occasion

a harp in the air between us,

hoo-hoos in high C,

shuffles through tower block windows, travels along rail tracks,

ten mile valley, concrete, glass, steel, under bridges

dead leaves clack like castanets.

This wind,

passing strokes of pendulum, the flight of months to nothing.

 

A Fresh Pack

of cards

smooth and glossy against my hands

slightly stick shuffle rattle

flick and plop

onto a table

My father

in New Orleans gambles

the Ace of Spades does not want to live forever

valentine queen of hearts loved Alice

 

Such a Bothersome Color

Give me a good black. Give me a solid white. Gray is so namby-pamby; useless as a friend,

too soft to give a good kicking.

At night,

when I lie down,

I like to know where I stand.

I keep a pistol under my pillow.

 

Couple

Pink scrunchy around wrist butter-kissed tresses fall

to small of back

I’m bad

A sadist

in my forehead twists

his bayonet

She says I love you like a song

 

Little

Zammy Spike never blinks, never

reads a dotted line. He kicks litter, not the rabbit kind.

He hugs lamp posts, whistles at passing cars.

They won’t stop. He won’t sleep. Won’t go far.

 

Poet and Wife-Beater

(He should, of course, be escorted off to a wood and suitably re-educated)

I’m in poetry class

and this teacher is giving me an ear-bending; no doubt, he reckons, for my own good. He’s gone too far.

He’s forgotten that we only conspire to let him run things because someone has to.

It’s not because we think he’s a superior being or anything other than a tube of meat

full of shit.

I’ve been noticing for a few weeks that his wife has a tilt to her head. It leans over to the right.

Now, I’m getting nightmares. He shouts at her

a lot

and worse.

Who can I tell?

I anticipate shrugged shoulders and turned backs. What should I do?

(Sorry if I’m letting the side down, guys. Sorry if I’m being smug and / or naïve.)

I guess he recognises the signs: someone who’s been knocked about; someone who’s not self-assured;

someone who’s never accepted unquestioning loyalty.

I bet he inherited it from his father.

He never had the balls to say the buck stops here.

 

Clear Morning

still counting waves busy sky fulmars smash centre fly free cross-

leaved spray jagged common razor-wing gull

sandpiper				summer's only home
spring						promising
harbours		touched portals				redshank
still-backed		golden knapweed				wrack-heather
down stream			squill	godwit		dawn
Again the beach waveburst					wave after tremor
mercury lustre			still cool	head		to sun rise
but she haunts			shuffles	spirals
fine cotton		shadow-		children
glide	everywhere
Move here		alluvial		pullover foxglove
clover	canal		errant	heron
picking		chickens		fields	fawning
calves	leatherette			roll over
		all over		now

 

 

08:15

In this carriage we hail each other with diseases. We glance like friends

down the aisle, over seat backs, between gaps and reflections. We don’t hide, or speak in secret. We dress in Bacofoil

let humour crinkle our thoughts.

I dial through phrases of conversation, shuffle cramps from left to right, clunk my knees on plastic angles,

try to wiggle xylophone toes.

Same old view / different weather...

today is snow and absent leaves,

the low-band draught has claimed my ankles, my tickover chills to sitting rate,

blurs my fingerprints.

The conductor clips my ticket, says brilliant,

moves on.

 

Home 7

This is for you

For the times I give you

13p in spare coppers

And you sing with delight.

We both know

I hate a pocket of coins.

You dance and whoop

Rush over to your pot

That looks like a cremation urn, Slide your loot in the slot.

I’m sorry.

I had to cancel the life insurance.

 

Identity

What with having had a few days there and then a daytrip

and a week in a different place coming up

it’s like I’m not really here

If I had volunteered

to be something hunted

then I wouldn’t have been still long enough for them to spot me get my range

take a shot

When you’re going somewhere you’re a moving target

harder to hit

Sorry, Jack, I’m not just passing through This is my planet

as much as it is anyone else’s I can slow down

dig in

lie in wait unmoved for days at the right moment squeeze the trigger

On cold nights

I welcome your warmth the space between atoms

 

From Blue Sky

to green skip clouds to car-park

hills (the other side of the bay) to light industrial units the air is speckled.

Leaves on straggly silver birches, ingrained with dirt, engraved with tracks of condensed acid, rattle

in the draught.

Passengers, animals, A to B: crammy seat, nervy stares, clackety cataract, track -side greens, blurry weeds… Bridgend. Station. Stop.

Us trundle through cheeping doors, platform gap, gummed feet tread crusted packet litter, incremental steps down to pedestrian crossing, flagstones, turnoff to cul de sac, trade, market, bacon.

 

Au Paris

Jenni

-fer you burn me up

with your passion and flowers

in your hair

that tumbles flares

like flames

Madame Jenni

-fer

je t’adore to kiss

your downy skin your strawberry peach

crème fraiche taste

 

Little Girl with a Big Camera

She poached my shot

out of the Pompidou towards Sacré Coeur

framed by window slots white scaffolding slender roof sculptures

I spun away; pocketed my compact, avoided the line

of her telephoto

Later, she smiled. 15 I’d say,

a gingerish plait wrapped around her forehead, freckles,

loose top, blue jeans –

looking for angles, reflections

 

Sky and Skyline Calling

Rat dives into dirty old river, couples and singles

pass engrossed, mangy roses, black taxis, flocking sparrows, roadsign to Dagenham, mobile phones, past the elephant and Castle Underground Station, gratings, wet litter bins,

terrible tent-like white cotton top, wood bench, damp, munching, moping, picnic, not much choice, sit in the shade, atishoo

Spotty tie, potato crisps, twigs, flaky trunks, crinkled shrubs, hubbub, heels and tights, agreeable grey-haired lady kicks

duck, sandwich, coke, concrete steps, wilted ribcage leaves, weevils, old newspaper, sad weeping willow, pallid narcissus,

more pink roses, misshapen ash-sapling, tidy stunted bay tree, remind-me-of-Flintshire golden chaffinch, black bollard, collared dove, ornate lamp, nettles, petals, puppies lollop

Celebrity hairdo, Bardot, exposed shoulder, posh pink T-shirt, shorts, sunglasses, resting, sudden hot sun, thank you, babbling punters, kiddies paddle, daddies dawdle, natter,

riff raff, red-brick façade, brass lock, wall plaque, skirt and leggings, cigarette, college, rucksack, kisses the bod with silver

beard, muscles, blood vessels, dayglo vest, yew tree, gravestone, vine, chained bikes, hotchpotch, neatly pressed jeans, I’m off to the BM

Cosmopolitan, bronze metal statue, marble, rubble, Doric columns, reliable directional arrows,

focussed on gift books, fizzy drink | Zen koan | Chrome steel café.

 

Underground Prayer

If you forgive those who fail	come thine, a whirlpool
look out and forgive us	heaven, the power
get hit by the kingdom	daily bread, power
come for a new fool	amen, glory
hit, hit, forgive	daily glory
don't watch in heaven	forgive the glory
jump to the glory	tell evil and name us
the power, the braille	the glory, amen
deliver the father
the fool, the cheaters	*
the glory in heaven
our heaven, a whirlpool	And the losers forgive
an army, a jump	forgive as bread
temptation hallowed	hallowed name
hallowed and jailed	hang against name
glory daily	the name is done
power to evil	forgive the glory
forgive daily	amen, the hallowed
forgive we forgive	as ever, get name
hang 'round, be evil	done name, hit losers
forgive the losers	hang from done daily
thy name, a temptation	from meters, get power
be evil 'gainst glory	the bread, hang daily
forgive the glory	and ever forgive us
be power 'gainst will	hit us, hang us
ever is thine	forgive us temptation
look out in heaven	an underground prayer

ever and ever

this is a cutup (edited) of stanza 3 Subterranean Homesick Blues (Bob Dylan) and the KJ version of the Lord’s Prayer.

 

Wide Open Spaces

The egg-timer in your bedsit trickles

grain by grain

You and me on Porth Mawr the beach

touched by ocean stopwatching the waves

In my heart I do not have

to not waste paper when I write to you from Big Sky down to pinpoint then out to circle the equator

 

Polly

Damn lambs, ratty,

dressed in flem, fluff,

weather in sky,

wiggly piglets grub in sties on banks of stream

where fallen trees rest and rot, bugs bug, sing to calves

and surprise! Hey! Donkeys! Clouds like painting,

path like map,

water very cold today, dog with muck stuck on fur

shakes eyes and teeth with gummy grin, rattle of leash, buckles and clips,

wave my arm, chop the air, do kung fu,

do not tread in dog pooh,

boat putt putts past birds that fight, flit through fences, bushes, logs, books stacked beside the fire, tired, chair, glass of wine,

toasty feet and there’s a dog I must have got

earlier

when I was out walking.

 

Well-Thumbed Pages

I hint that I may leave her alone with him

for a few minutes.

Electricity sparks through circuits

in his wolfish forebrain.

Blue flames burn along wires strung between knots in his feeling matrix.

His chin is littered with stubble.

He drinks too much.

An overhung telephoto thrusts out

the front of his Canon.

He hopes he’ll charm her to pose for him

pull her into focus.

Later

he’ll tweak her with Photoshop

swankily morph and warp

her pixels.

One part

he’ll never get – her eyes.

 

Influence

In the blur

the blur of people out there busy people

anonymous people

.milliseconds.fuse.details.blister.viral. a crack

in the time-track –

A welcome reunion

A candied ballerina delicacy cheesily free

happy

Do come see me she hints

Carmarthen Community Arts Centre Summer Season

And maybe she hints

I’ll grant you an audience

Yeah

Like I could ever be so indifferent

I cooled my hopes trusted fate

trekked to Carmarthen found her

relocated

 

Pace

This break-neck Is craziness

At night Events

Flash back and twist A digest of endless

Old babble Encounters

Climbing up the long slope Onto the Beacons

I fall forwards

Into the silence My own voice

 

Saturday Night on Ludlow Station

Because I love to be near you I sit on a bench in a box made

of concrete blocks on the platform next to you

and the others

We don’t have an awful lot of spare cash between us There is a club

but it’s two quid which is fair enough but there’d be

a coke on top of that

I love to listen to your voice and your laugh

We sort of touch every now and then

but I’ve seen you with Danny and he’s in work now

and will get a car soon

It’s not like I would want to lay any sort of claim on you

me being what I am and likely to always be I wouldn’t want

to hold you back from happiness

 

Ripped Ectoplasm

Pockets full of sand dig me down

into the floor

Round my belly a weight of earth like death

Let me bring you gifts – apples, grapefruit honey

I crave your kitchen

to drink coffee, get warm,

release the private chapters of my diary

 

Newgale

Clouds follow us. Solemn oil tankers turn slowly in a bay the size of London. Masses of sunlight sparkles on water;

angel-light. Sometimes the wind gets my neck; drives the moisture from my tonsils. Sometimes the swallows swish so close – like flies.

A mixed bag of weather today. I’m still tired from yesterday’s hike; my legs drained; doing robot. It’s my last day here for a while; saying goodbye; missing you already; trying not to think of home.

 

The outside café table

near the steps down

to the Gents

is shadowed by men who loiter

in the aroma of disinfectant and bacon

Jesus once

wrote psalms here blessed air

Later

he crossed over from Pembrokeshire to Ireland

 

Collider

I wanted to talk time-travel but you flipped to sci-fi as if I had no heart,

as if it wasn’t real.

I wanted to talk guts and eyes, not tired opposites.

I wanted to tell you everything, maybe I’ve done something wrong.

I wanted to remember when I was psychic.

 

Pre-Modern

I sat with Steve beside the Thames 1965

and talked Jesus…

We’d done the Tate gloomy

jaded shadows

but the light was good

Something was missing from school

from TV from home

I watched the river chapter by chapter roll towards the coast I felt its foggy history in my guts

Clouds teased apart

waxing sun cut to the horizon

I imagined dreams that would fire a beacon not for Steve or me

but for some ill-defined discarnate traveller

Somehow that day

a decision was made

 

Wealth

Your smile is a spell. Your eyes smile. Your words Entrance.

Outside your flat Inflated with desire, Smoking,

I wait for a glimpse, A chance to talk Like we used to

Before you stuck me On a list,

In a box,

On your shelf.

 

Morning

Wandering boot-heels crunched cockleshells, razors and mussels.

Shoes and toes and paws

printed the tideline.

Cracks of twiggy driftwood blended with slips and pops

of bladderwrack. A souvenir oyster -shell ashtray,

an oil-drum litter-bin.

A mono community

of crows and catchers got the try-out

of my new 8x42

but the sun

was low, in my face. I didn’t register

the lack of wind – not until now, three days later.

 

Singularity

The light here cuts black and white

Wet morning sticks to air old walls

Droplets grip

like gelatine

A gentle blur needs your earth.

Where are you?

 

Baby Milk

His bravado Is Elastoplast Used to mask

Snicks inflicted In his chest And wrists. His epidermis Is too thin.

Each eye Slit wide Like an infant Is fixed

On the jagged Edges of Razors

That cut His breast: A heart Without ribs.

Two fingers. Pulse.

 

Thames and Benches

The museum gates clank shut in silence and no wind

is heard in corridors

just the cries of lost children biscuits crushed into carpet

wardens touching fossils and smoking

Holidays soon

but sailing the lake, back and forth, year on year, waiting for pension, is nowhere

Curtains of dust hang like walls. Doors open, close, and get locked.

Sandwiches hide in drawers next to coins and relics some wine, left over from Christmas, is still OK

The queues are long this morning A dirty suitcase, left by a tramp,

is kicked by a visitor from the Netherlands

 

Embossed

First night, we both fell asleep, half-dressed, half juiced,

in a corner of my bedsit;

a youthful focus kept a clean sheet.

Night Two: a blood-letting role-play; gammy efforts at him and her.

An exam marked by monosyllables. A pattern on the wall.

 

South Bay Anchorage

From the harbour, up a short flight of steps past lime-kilns and flowering gorse,

take the bridleway alongside a wooded church then the wetland boardwalk towards the north coast, clergy and mermaids, yellowhammer, shearwater, kittiwake, tussocks of fescue, windy.

Follow the path around the peninsular, head downhill, cromlech and warren, shortcut through the quarry (disused),

a lowland track, cross an embankment, rugged stile, cattle-grid meadow, livestock, woollen thicket.

A gush of flight –

colonies of guillemots steep-nested on distant headland-cliffs set out towards heath and moor, cut diagonally across the settlement,

the burrows, a ribbed, wicker fence.

Stop, pay homage at the well,

turn west, Porth Alun, port and quay. Pick your way across the rocky beach,

crag and archway, chough, porpoises, puffins. Take heart – a boat will arrive to carry you across the channel.

 

Anna

I

love you, mange tout. Your lips fix

my eyes, my prize; my bliss, to kiss you.

You

are fond of me, probably, and allow me to show you servitude;

and that’s cool, perhaps you’ll come to love me.

You,

let me be bad

under bedspread and duvet, then say I disgust you.

So, can I continue?

I,

presumptuous,

get my comeuppance; my incompleteness penalised; downsized

for a day or two. What would I do without you?

 

Grey Bird

A grandchild, posterity, Balanced on your knee.

Banked,

40 years work, Well-digested neutrality.

I’ll be around later.

 

Some of Us are Looking at the Stars

The Plough, Orion, Sirius…

It does mean that this is a cold night – no clouds.

Such is winter.

You can’t avoid seasons; pushed into the flow from here to there

and back again.

Wish I was in bed with you

wrapped around me

just because we’re both outside,

not insulated enough to feel comfortable, but not frozen enough to not care.

It gets worse as the years go by; the craziness drives you mad; the loneliness, the isolation.

From one island to another – Hey! I love you

this cold and starry night. Love that is timeless. Love that has no distance.

 

Today

in the park

I hear an organ grinder

Nellie the Elephant leaves the circus

the corner shop has 3 for 2

on chocolate milk

from this bench

I see the clouds drift away for a couple hours of sun

 

Chocolate Box

Now that the leaves have left and the winter chimneys

rock upwards from the black brickwork, the sooty steelworks blank

against the sky, scaffolding, cages, iron ladders, morning sun cuts over the horizon, reveals a quiet sculpture that puts nature to shame, to the bottom drawer,

with pillowcases, nuptial nightie, ribbons red and blue. Down

in the hallway, a safety helmet, working gloves, shadow of pickaxe, tin lunchbox, communal bath,

a single note sung by many… Sketches and photographs lie on a mahogany desk, with carpet and leather, inkwell, blotter, half a ton of combination safe.

On a hillside a lad sings, scans the kites and kestrels,

follows a sheeptrack to Blowden Pool, finds the worms and maggots

in the carcass of a fox then looks to tomorrow and the next day, and on, like it was all guaranteed, like it was up to him

to choose or deny,

yes or no a million times over.

Inside the safe, wodges of banknotes, other papers, signatures, bonds,

a point four five revolver.

 

Bio

She got a first

From Chester University, Theology,

Caught the eye

Of Professor Jaguar.

He took her

To Casanova

For an Italian

Then back

To his spouse

And detached.

 

Icicle

Nice icicle

catches rainbow sun: a spike to kill with. Bridge 71, Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal.

A wound

from a previous life weeps, wets my crotch. Maybe I was Jesus once, born to heal the sick.

Jesus sells sex to the impotent, the innocent, the sleepwalkers.

The prophet of love sharpens your snout on the whetstone, the grind for bread. You buy what you’ll never possess.

Just one bomb.

A useless old woman in gum boots

stamps through snow, lays a curse on

the filthy, the sweet. Just the blood

of a lamb

in the wilderness.

 

Fido

Loyalty

like a dog always hungry unbrushed damp

pulling at the neck-chain straight-tailed patch-eyed fucking rubbish

You face into the mud bundle on top

dodge

alert for the first sign of a moving hand

prop up your spirit with laughter

scan the trees for pictures of missing persons

remember

tunnels hacked out years ago

feel them start to subside

It doesn’t matter

It doesn’t matter now

 

outside

Me and Alice have tea with balloons

red pink green tied by tinsel

to bone

My walls are flat black toffee like Persian carpets

The oak tree

(stumps for cricket)

the parkland and the buildings

are now miles of grey