Today, I read the most heartwarming article in The Guardian, that seemed to be begging me to write this poem. The article was about a batch of letters, that had retrieved from a shipwreck, that was sunk off the coast of Ireland by a German U-boat in 1941. Among the 717 letters recovered from the SS Gairsoppa, were fragments of a 1941 love letter to a woman named Iris.
My favorite piece of clothing back then was my scarlet mohair jumper. I’d called around at Pete Monk’s house one time (Pete was the rhythm guitarist with The Spasms), and his mum was just sewing up a mohair jumper that she’d just knitted for someone. “I’ll make you one”, she said, pointing to a color chart on the table, before adding “pick your color”. It was almost as if I didn’t have a choice in the matter, and I certainly didn’t want to offend her, so I picked scarlet. I was over at Pete’s house again, a week later, when she proudly presented me with the finished item.
This poem dates back to 1997, when I had been living in the US for 2 years. I was feeling lost, and desperately wanted to belong. I’d gone to a local Farmer’s Market, which had a diner-style counter, and I tucked myself in for the duration. Armed with my ever-present notebook, I was listening intently as other patrons came and went around me. As they’d casually catch up on life with the waitress, they’d somehow slip in an order for their usual, in a shorthand exchange that was inaccessible and yet strangely beguiling to me.
This one dates back to 1994. I was still dealing (reeling, more like) with the death of my dad, the year before. Throwing myself deep into my work was always my way of handling loss or pain in my personal life, and I think that at the time of writing, I was excelling myself at doing that. On the outside, I appeared to be on top of the world, but on the inside, I was desperately treading water.
This is another poem from my archives. I think that I probably wrote it in the mid to late 1990s, when I first moved to the US. As such, it precedes flat-screens, and streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Apple+, HBOMax, Peacock, etc. One thing that hasn’t changed however, is that the product isn’t so much the TV shows, but our attention is what’s being bought and sold, whether or not we realize that fact.
Something that I noticed when I first moved to the US, was that terminal illnesses were often handled as chronic illnesses that just needed to be managed. It confused me at first, because I was used to terminal illnesses being about preparing to die, rather than fighting to live.
I’m currently in the process of collating all of my poetry, short stories and general musings, with the intent of publishing a book. It’s proving to be a time-consuming process, because some things exist only online, some in the myriad of journals that I have a penchant for buying on an all-too regular basis, and then also spread across digital archives, that have been moved from computer to computer, over the last 30 years or so. One thing that I’ve learned is that straight text or html files are really the best way to store documents, as many early Word…
As I’ve previously talked about on here, back in 1999, I created and ran an online writer’s collective called The Final Carrot, which lasted for 3 years. Sadly, the platform that it was built on (Geocities) was acquired by Yahoo, which rolled the functionality into Yahoo Groups. With Yahoo’s dramatic decline in recent years, Yahoo Groups was shut down, and all of that content is long gone. I did try searching on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, but sadly, all you can see is a tantalizing list of entry headers, but none of the underlying pages are included in the…
I always find it interesting, to see just what serves to trigger inspiration, and then to watch what we do with it. All too often, we have ideas, but fail to do anything with them The inspiration for the following poem came from a long walk in a cemetery, which has always been something that I’ve enjoyed. The last line of a gravestone inscription, became the first line of this poem. While the grave was from the 1920’s, that line conjured up an earlier time for me, and a story of enduring love. After the night apart the dawn After…
About 20 years ago, I bought a Remington Deluxe Model 5 at a flea market for $6. I have long considered it an object of beauty, and it has been on display in my living room, but I never tried to type with it, as the 80-year old ribbon had long given up the ghost.