Drinker Tune

 Delighted that Anna Steinberg, who did the A Woman in Goggles logo, has illustrated our Drinker Tune song.   

One sentence about music in which lots of conjunctions - as well as choirs and goats - get an unplanned outing

This sentence is attempting to follow music to its logical conclusion, which isn’t logical at all given that the trail contorts, yet the journey, if you can imagine it, is as pre-determined as the route of the number 61 bus in Ottawa taken every Monday and Wednesday on the way to the Ottawa Public Schools Central Choir for which, let’s pretend, you are auditioning, and where you stand on a stage for the first time, looking out to your mother who has her eyes cast down in order not to put you off as you are made to sing God Save the Queen (not even O Canada), and then asked to copy phrases in a lower register, in the alto, which suits better, although you did not know there would be others with richer, stronger voices; Gail, for instance, one of those girls mature beyond her years who immediately gets whichever piece of music is thrown at her and is already the matriarch of the group, notwithstanding others on the sidelines who are bound to attempt a minor coup the way that cats gang up - or goats for that matter when they stare you out on a narrow road in Crete, as if their knack for climbing rocky heights and lounging on narrow ledges gives them inalienable superiority, despite the fact, it has to be said, that when served in stew they can be a little stringy; it all depends on the amount of sauce, preferably a marinade in which the meat has been left to relax, like softening the blow, softening the tragedy whose etymological origin, of course, spookily, means goat song, that wail of goat mothers when they are separated from their kids, the primeval hurt, the hurt of hurts, the howl, the end of all music.

Please Pass Me the Jackhammer

Yesterday at a local café, in walked a person I once compromised by email at our place of work.  My words created a problem and a chain of events from which she had difficulty extricating herself.

Though I did apologise some time later, sadly I was not big enough yesterday morning to ask her how she was, and used the fact of her involvement in deep conversation with someone else to keep my head down.  Perhaps she has forgotten all about it  I told myself.  But I know that I haven’t.

By writing that email and committing my take of events to paper I sidestepped a cardinal rule: to talk first, to hear both sides of a story before anything is set in cement.  Words will stand – even these ones – as a record, and perhaps even in someone else’s record.

A number of years ago I was called to jury service.  I buzzed with excitement and sat ready to memorise all the evidence as it was presented – maps with Xs, photos of secret phonecalls, (this was when people still used public phoneboxes), transcripts of recordings - in order best to argue my point with my fellow jurors when it came time for our verdict.

But I fancied I had an even grander mission.  I noticed how a barrister easily destroyed the evidence of one witness, merely by using the ammunition of armour-plated sentences.  His pronouncements were buttoned up, profiting from a dense and rich vocabulary that created an impermeable structure against which the witness’s clumsier and more threadbare answers made few dents.  And I (smugly) thought that my job amongst the group of jurors, many of whom had fallen under the barrister’s spell, was to break down the clusters of polished words.  His meticulously crafted observations could be persuasive and grandiose but their sheer dazzle, I felt, might be blinding us.   It was the first time I had truly seen the power of clever argument in action, and how persuasive, dangerous  and far-reaching it might be. 

To my great regret, the court case was dismissed early on a technicality, so I never did get the chance, in a locked room overnight with my fellow jurors,  to act as jackhammer and deconstruct the arguments to check the validity of their constituent parts.

But I had seen a living example of how words can on occasions form clumps, intertwine, and ultimately block out the light.  

Just as that email I once wrote at work had been strong, earthquake-proof, but ultimately wrong-headed.

I guess words                   sometimes need     space      in between     them

                   to loosen up         the black              and     white                      and  allow

colours                        

                               colours                         

                                                                              colours

Close-ups and Longshots

Loutro

I’m thinking about blank pages and scrawls, space and containment, yawning horizons and sharp focal points, and how they apply to poetry.  For if a poem ideally is a nugget of experience, how much padding do you include, how much wide angle?  

In Loutro, a former fishing hamlet on the south coast of Crete that can only be reached by boat, I spent a week this last June on a poetry course contemplating such issues.  It helped all thought processes that the sea, only yards away, could be swum in at 7.45 in the morning, that an intensity of blue was everywhere, and that bowlfuls of juicy cherries (and sunhats) could be bought from the shop just below my room.

Led by our tutor, the poet Henry Shukman, we delved into an array of work by Thomas Hardy, Sharon Olds, Robert Frost, Mary Oliver, Tomas Tranströmer.  We attempted to uncover the authorial genius behind decisions about precisely what to include and what to leave out.  There were poems diluted down to a few words yet carrying a full payload of history, such as Dan Pagis's Written In Pencil in the Sealed Boxcar, whose exquisite terseness needs no more than its six explosive lines.  There were more sweeping snapshots in the uncomfortable take on modern America, as  in Hard Rain by Tony Hoagland.  Or dizzying leaps between lines in extracts from Judith Taylor's Curios.

Henry used aspects of meditation to kickstart - or perhaps infuse - the day, drawing on his experience as a teacher at the Mountain Cloud  Zen Centre in Santa Fe.  But then came business, ten-minute exercises with the rules: write, don’t stop, don’t edit, use concrete images, and if you find yourself heading into uncomfortable territory, advance fearlessly and go for the jugular.  Spurred by his encouragement, we sat scribbling around a table outside the Scirocco Café, drinking tea and coffee (Henry swearing by Nescafe Frappé) and into my notebook sprang unexpected items about crossroads, fishing nets, wartime collaborators, and parrots.  

We were only four in the group - Hugh, already published, with his keen observation and perceptive critiquing, Mary Ann with her sensual poems about Greece, Juliana with a natural flair for rhyme, who also was the only one to attempt a piece based on the Fibonacci sequence (which she called Fiberace, conjuring up visions of the mathematician’s and Liberace’s lovechild).  One morning we welcomed an infiltration by the course’s enthusiastic prose tutor David Swann and his two students - Leandra (Juliana’s sister) bringing tales of life below the surface in the Bahamas and Dave with his raw stories of Liverpool and Toxteth.  As the sun crept higher through the awnings, we swapped ideas and considered whether examples of flash fiction, with syntax tweaks and different line breaks, might claim kinship with narrative poems.  

But back at my desk in the afternoons the ponderings continued.  The holy grail of all students on such courses is, quite simply, how to write brilliant poems.  What exactly are the tricks?  And how can I use them?  What can I learn from the greats, what can I absorb of their originality while at the same time unlocking my own?  Answers do not come easily, yet from the work we had seen it seemed to boil down to this - success apparently lay in the power of the emotional or philosophical charge, which could be conveyed in all manner of styles - concise, conversational, strictly adhering to form or more relaxed.  In essence, it appeared that the authenticity of the poet's voice mattered above all, and if, behind it, further layers could be discerned, so much the better. 

Well, duh, I've always kind of known this but now, with my own work and drafts more under the microscope, I began to notice that my, at times, over-zealous editing can beat the air out of an idea.  Efforts to slash and burn the 'extraneous' can run the risk not so much of creating hiccups in understanding as severing a reader's possibility of empathy or connection.  

Or so I think, for the moment.  

Between times we took canoes out in the bay, worried about the goat marooned on the rocky outcrop, and (the hardier) walked down the Samaria Gorge and spotted griffon vultures on the wing.  

On the last night, in an even tinier hamlet named Phoenix, we dined on a terrace and read selections of work as the sun set.  The close-up?  The bloom of bonhomie and wine on faces as we boarded a boat back to Loutro.  The longshot?  A night sky above us, punctured by stars.

I booked the course through Espirita, a not-for-profit organisation with intriguing trips on offer.  Check it out!

Ten Words for Sorrow

Ten Words for Sorrow

When my great-grandmother

discovered she was the last speaker

of the mid-west dialect,

she ditched her songs

of wind and tumbleweed

to mime for me

ten words for sorrow.

Her garments were eased

to show a sorrow that salted

deep folds in her skin.

That rose and hooked

the back of her throat.

That contoured

into an hourglass,

squeezing the very rasp

out of her. And how

the same word, with new

inflection, connoted a type

that dripped slowly,

tipped her over,

then trickled again.

She taught me

the word for sorrow

that out-shrieks darkness.

That descends like gauze,

yet no beast can rip through.

A kind that fastens itself

to the span of just one day

or to a rusted peg

where cast-off jackets droop.

And when her hands

measured empty space, I saw

it made a difference whether sorrow

remained the vehicle,

or became the entire road.

© Katie Griffiths

A High Five To...

 ...Fingers

Two fingers of a left hand are mending, after they unsuccessfully went one round with the pavement in London.

The little finger, still a swollen cocktail sausage, is recovering from an operation in which a pair of  tiny divining rods were inserted into the bone to pull it back into line.  Now, it snuggles close to the ring finger, its bigger and functioning sister, copying and sheltering.  

But it's reverted to toddlerhood, learning to walk, to talk, to go to the park, to demand the swings.  

Each day it sucks in its paunch, stiffens its stooped back to pull itself up to its full height, blend in with the crowd.

Each day it strives to work in community - to grow nails, tie a shoelace, open a tin, search out a spoon, hold an octave.  

With its siblings, it has a go at making shapes.  A gate.  A rake.  A limping dinosaur.

It struggles to fan outward into the kind of delta where a continent’s river system disgorges and over-wintering herons land.

And it religiously does the drill; to bow deeply forward in the belief that the top of its head can indeed touch the palm’s outstretched skin.