April 2017 - 'Believe me. Stories are real.' - John Foggin and NaPoWriMo

All of the above...

I am not procrastinating. I am living. I am trying to survive! Nearly five months since my last blog entry and here I am. I am doing NaPoWriMo, where you're meant to write a poem everyday in April, and apart from a few blips have managed most days. Some are bad, some have legs and may run somewhere. Hopefully not into a wall. The photo above depicts one of my doodling daydreaming moments in which I cover all four of my feelings on writing poetry at the moment.

I'm going to break my blogging silence with a poem by John Foggin. John is a friend. He is very dapper. He smokes roll-ups and makes his own books. He seems to be in a constant state of exploration; travelling across challenging terrain, going on residentials, writing poems, standing back and contemplating the view. I know him from my jaunts to Writing Days in Sheffield. He won last year’s Smith/Doorstop pamphlet collection and, they thought, no let’s have a book not a pamphlet! That's how great he is. Here's a poem from that collection, Much Possessed, which I loved. It's painful. It’s about a parent hearing the news of an adult child’s suicide.

It was a morning like this

a Sunday morning. The sun shone.

It was July. It was a morning like this,

your ex-wife at the back door,

and why would she tell you

your son was dead, or had died,

or had been in an accident

on a morning like this still

not fully woken, a morning of sun

to drive into Chapeltown to drive

to a police station that’s called

The Old Police Station now, that’s

a bijou gastropub but then was just

a police station full of Sunday morning

sadness, and a morning something

like this and two young coppers

who thought we’d need somewhere

quiet at the back which turned out

to smell of smoke, that had a pool table

and coffee rings, and no-one knew

how to start or what to ask but

it was a morning much like this

they asked if we knew a tower block

behind the Merrion Centre or if

we had a connection to a tower block

and a ring with a skull and a brown

leather case and did we know if

our son had friends in a tower block

behind the Merrion Centre and

we might as well have been asked

about tree rings or chaos theory

or fractals on a July morning and

one young copper saying that

he didn’t think it made sense

for cannabis to be illegal and

what harm did it do really and

how it wasted everybody’s time

and I don’t know why I’d remember

that except it was a morning like this

I learned what waste might mean.

A month or so ago, I asked John Foggin for this poem to share on my blog. I keep going back to it. Maybe because I actually experience the sensations within the poem; it seems to capture a terrible, dizzying moment when life is turned over. The ending is perhaps the only firm sensation to be experienced, you 'come-to' as a reader here. It's a painful realisation though. Elsewhere, I feel a sense of disorientation whenever I read the poem. Skillfull as well as a 'spontaneous overflow' of feeling. This poem deals with the exact moment when something terrible is conveyed. It’s not a poem of reflection, it’s about being plunged straight into the moment. This is ironic as the poet is reflecting. The words create a sense of being in a maelstrom.

To me this poem captures  a physical sensation of suddenly losing your balance and needing to hold onto something, whatever you’ve got. I find the mention of those concrete places, like the repeated Merrion Centre, like driftwood. But they’re not permanent or indeed supportive, places change:

The Old Police Station now, that’s

a bijou gastropub but then was just

a police station full of Sunday morning

sadness,

Notice how the building is wiped out as soon as it’s mentioned, ‘The Old Police Station now’ that ‘now’ is the ‘now’ of the past. We’re time-travelling in two directions at once.You can do that in a poem. What's real is no longer tangible. The tenses also convey that sense of disorientation, ‘your son was dead, or had died,’ things are always shifting.

It’s been said John is a landscape poet. He doesn’t often ‘do’ urban places. To me this is a terrific landscape poem, not just for the urban references, but for the sense of personal landscape, the inner map if you like, being challenged and altered forever. Thank you John, for allowing me to share this fabulous poem.

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In other news...I am behind in coming up-to-date with my own poetic dealings. I appreciate this is mainly of some importance to me and not the world. My aim is to use the blog as a cross between scrapbook and poetic journal. Poetry is a place I go to in my head right now, as I haven’t been to as many readings as I could have done. That does not mean I won’t be back. I have quite a few readings of my own coming up soon! I am going to aim to write in little bites rather than cover the lot.

Stay tuned.