In a world where news travels slowly, I usually catch up with the weekend paper through the week.  This morning I was reading Carol Ann Duffy’s commissioned Sixty Years Poems, and was reminded of my 1999 poem.  I was asked to write a poem to commemorate 50 years of the Eric Gregory Awards for project Roddy Lumsden organised.  A group of us stood in a pub in London and read our poems, which were inspired by the year we won our Gregory Awards.  These have never been published as a group, so my poem has only had one outing.  Thought I’d put it up here rather than leave it to languish in my computer’s memory any further.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you 1999, with not a hint of Prince in sight.

1999

These are the days before
the days of counting backwards;
planes wait to fall from the sky
as birds eye them suspiciously,
measuring the year
in leaves and twilight hours.

Deep in the heart of every computer
a disease waits for the stroke of midnight
for white mice to turn their wheels
widdershins, and unborn us
without so much as a twitch
of a whisker.

So fireworks will draw hieroglyphs
in the sky, so a dog will bark
from its chained-up place in a yard.
And night-roosting birds
will cast out like swimmers
in a broad open sea.

Just back from StAnza where we launched the Split Screen anthology, edited by Andy Jackson http://www.redsquirrelpress.com/index.php?splitscreen

Here is my Child Catcher poem from the anthology.  I figured the Child Catcher must have been a child once…poor boy.  He was just a little bit different… This is him, in case you’d never met his acquaintance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUnhfvGdmmw

The Child Catcher Child

I was eleven
when my gift was revealed
in a game of hide and seek.

After that, word got around
and I was not allowed to join in
except once, when they tied me to a tree.

A fleshy boy held out a woodcut
of Hansel and Gretel
as they all skipped around me.

I’d uncovered every child,
and winkled out those
who didn’t know they were hiding

behind curtains,  in glory holes,
in the church yard, in attic rooms;
the smell of pork cooked in honey and milk.

I have recently read the proofs for the Norfolk Open Studios, and my listing says  ‘Poem boxes juxtaposing word and image, using found and cast  objects. 6×6, 8×8 inches.’  I only had 15 words to play with. There is also a photo of one of the boxes to give people an idea of what kind of creatures to expect.  It says in the brochure that I will be in my studio, for people to visit from 9-5pm on the 1st-5th, and the 8th-10th June.  That means it’s really happening.  That means I have had the audacity of call myself an artist, and that I have invited everybody who wants to, to come into my studio to decide if that’s true.  Perhaps I am being melodramatic.  It’s still a big step though – considering I’ve only been making stuff seriously for about a year.  Gulp.  I am going to be part of an Art Trail, set up by local artist Emma Hart.  I will be meeting up with some of the other artists soon to talk about how we might promote our particular trail.  It’s all new to me, and I feel something of an outsider, though Emma has been very welcoming and lovely.

The photo below shows a bit of a departure from the box format. I acquired these old Kilner jars from my sister.  They all have ‘Dual Purpose Jar’ on their lids, and I have taken them at their word.   There is an antique/paraphernalia/vintage ephemera market on Magdalen Street in Norwich, in which I have lost many hours.  Even if I don’t buying anything, it keeps me more entertained and enthralled than any walk round a museum or regular shopping trip.  I bought the hand-tinted photograph of the little girl (below) about four years ago from there, and have recently been picking up some more old photographs for this series which I am calling ‘Preserves’.  They are all of women, or girls, and I just find it incredibly moving that the occasion for a lot of them  was quite intimate.  They are often smiling or looking into a camera held by somebody they love and who loves them. (or this is what I imagine)  The moment is held in time, and now I can pick up these images for as little as 75p.

By using them in this way, I feel as if I am saving them, bringing them back to life albeit in a totally different context.  In the jars, I am also putting other objects such as pearls, old medicine bottles, moth wings, and each is labeled with a caption from an Aurthur Mee Encyclopedia.  The little girl in the centre has torn moth wings on the floor of her jar, and her label reads: ‘How can we foretell an eclipse of the sun?’.  I think of these as sketches for whole stories, and while removing images of these people from their original stories, which I can never know, I am creating a new one for them.   And as John Berger says much more eloquently: “Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as through a lens.  This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless.’

When I started this blog just over a year ago, I resolved that I would not be one of those  people who doesn’t update it for months and months.  Well, dear reader I have failed, manifestly.  But I won’t tarry you with my contrition.

New paragraph.  Well, I am going to be doing Norfolk Open Studios this year – so for  three weekends in May, anyone will be able to come into my studio to see what I am up to, and hopefully, just maybe, buy some work.  I have been taking advice on pricing, because it’s a whole new thing for me, this making money out of creative work malarky.  I can’t quite believe that anyone will part with any money in return for something I’ve made.  It remains to be seen if they will, of course.

So, just in case  I need to get on with making some more work.  There are pieces that I probably will not sell because I am rather attached to them.  Especially some of the first pieces I made, where I was finding a language for myself.  Now I have the target of Open Studios in mind, I can adjust my attitude as I am making things.   The image which just flitted though my mind, is that I need to think of myself as a surrogate mother – I am making this work with the entire intention of handing it over to somebody else.  So although the care that goes into them will be the same, I will not be the person wiping their noses.

I wondered why this imagery came into my head, then cast my eyes below these words, then right up to heaven.

Here is the other poem which I wrote for the Family Matters Exhibition, and here is the image which inspired it.  This sculpture called to me across a crowded room.  It’s still calling to me now.

The House of Thorns
after Alice Maher

It takes no more than a word
for a flame to stir in its womb
for smoke to rise and push at the walls
like a trapped and injured beast.

There is no chimney, no window,
no gasps of air, so the fire that’s grown
too big for the hearth
will die before it eats up the room.

Here is a bed for the wolf,
here is a chair burst at the seams
and here’s the little pot
that will cook and cook and cook.

*

It’s hard to imagine a path from this house
when you can’t imagine a door.
The roof is braced against all four winds,
you’re swaddled inside a coat of thorns.

There are stories about spring mornings,
about dew-soaked grass,
the signature of your footsteps;
you, the only child on earth.

The house is blind to romance;
makes you pin down your tongue;
rocks you till you fall asleep
hush-a-bye, hush-a-bye, hush-a-bye.

*

When the seeds are planted
and the roses are grown
mature enough for a harvest of thorns
and all the effort of building a home
tattoos neat scratches
on your parents’ hands,
now, think of a house.

Think of another house
a house of your own,
cut from the cloth of your very own skin.
The thought rises up
like a singing clock;
its bird constructed
of feathers and springs.

I’ve recently been commissioned to write for the Family Matters exhibition which is at the Castle Museum in Norwich at the moment, and part of the Great British Art Debate. Today, George Szirtes, Andrea Holland, Martin Figura and myself went along to an event in the Castle to read the poems and talk about the writing of them and the exhibition. I think the poems will also be presented in some way as part of the exhibition.

The two pieces I chose to write about fed straight into my existing work which is inspired by folk tales. Not fairytales which are the versions of the stories presented to children by Perrault as didactic tools, or those versions dressed up by Disney to entertain.

One of the pieces I wrote from is Anna Gaskell’s  photograph Hide, which was part of a series of images born from the Donkeyskin story, which is basically a tale of incest.  The Queen dies, the King casts around to find another wife, and looks no further than his daughter.  In the story, the girl asks for more and more impossible things to stave off the marriage.  I changed the donkey to a dog, because it seemed to fit better in the poem.

And here is the poem:

Hide

My father made me a dress
from patches of sky
on my mother’s old sewing machine.
He stitched them together
with lengths of her hair
and carved all the buttons
from her neat white teeth
but I would not give him my heart.

My father made me a dress
from the light of the moon
pinned into place
with her fine finger bones.
He made me a dress as bright as the sun
and sewed her gold wedding ring
into the hem
but I would not give him my hand.

My father offered me
the pelt of his dog —
how quickly his knife
freed that beast from its skin.
I climbed inside while it was still warm,
zipped it up tight
then walked into the fire
so he could not give me his love.