Although I dislike the way television governs people's actions (especially mine) I must admit to entering into a very difficult stage of the year. These next two months will find me stretched between the Ashes cricket and the Tour de France, but on top of these is a more peculiar return to an old love. It keeps me awake at night and it makes my eyes go glassy and write interesting phrases into a notebook. It isn't healthy like my love of running, or jogging, or sitting in an armchair eating doughnuts whilst watching cricket. Poetry. Perhaps it was just a combination of factors. Television programme about Eliot and Prufrock, tidying my attic and finding Stephen Fry's "Ode less travelled", and remembering an old friend Christina whose views on poetry depended on the use of rhyme. No rhyme equalled No Poem.
Stephen Fry was alternatively scathing about the belief that Poetry was easy to write because it didn't need to rhyme. He stresses the discipline of the different forms and the difficulty of finding the "write" word. I am intrigued by the fact that as a writer (of whatever quality) I can feel if a word is correct. I can feel that also there is a better word but, at this moment in time I can't remember it. Where does that word live ? Where does it come from ? How does it return ?
This "vocation" also fits in with that strange need to comment on whatever surrounds me. Whether in emails to friends and strangers alike. Whether in comments directed to my colleagues passing by an enquiry point in a deserted catalogue hall. Whether in those occasional times when I exchange diction for drawing and design. I am unsure as to whether I am some sort of detached observer whose failing ears have kickstarted some long-submerged literary and emotional turbine or whether the creativity virus has always infected me and gradually metamorphosed out of dormancy.
Whatever - I thank all those people who made it possible - BBC included (although I still begrudge them the licence fee) and will finish with a poem (as they say, defensively, a work in progress...)
On/Off : the rails
Background noise, loud-mouthed boys
Humming conversations.
Power games, shrill-voiced girls
Expressing complications.
Landscape moving, no-one watching
Visions craving patience.
Tram rails down, approaching town
Arriving platformed stations.
Mobiles waiting, appointments, dating.
Embarrassing situations.
Thinking, writing, avoiding fighting
All possible variations.
Riders dispersing, rarely conversing,
Alighting then into the silence.
Remarking in murmurs, remembering journeys
The walking, the driving, the distance.
Passengers roam, but the writer’s returning
Determined, believing in learning.
Inspired to try, not frightened to pry
In the sound of a voice gently yearning.
