Poetry and Morality?

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Don’t get excited, despite the title it isn’t a newly discovered Jane Austen novel where an opium addicted poet moves in next door to the three attractive daughters living in a Hampshire Rectory.

I decided to include a poem a few days ago when I was discussing moral judgements to be made by poets. When I discovered how many days I have missed posting recently, I decided it was definitely time, as republishing poetry is quick and easy.. I don’t think I’ve posted this one before. If I have, my apologies.

One major change has taken place since this poem was written – 18 carat gold was £38 per gram in 2023 when this was written. It’s now £72. At peak it was about £96. That’s the effect of wars, disturbed markets and political panic.

My contribution to the discussion was to say that I didn’t think it was my job to make decisions based on my perception of morality. I was then asked whether or not I made a moral judgement every time I wrote a poem.

I’m fairly sure that I don’t. This one is just a description of one line on the official documentation relating to the valuation of my father’s estate, with a couple of bits of trivia relating to death. Maybe I should. But to be honest, I have enough trouble wrestling words into a poem, without debating the rights and wrongs of it. I’m just shallow. I could, of course, write a second poem based on this one and the new price of gold, but I’m not sure the world needs another poem about war and capitalism.

That of course, was just one of the questions surrounding poetry and morals. Two others are about the morality of supporting right-wing magazines by submitting (it’s always the right-wing that gets questioned, isn’t it?), and I asked about the morality of reading poems by poets with questionable moral stances.

I will leave it there, as it has the potential to develop in a way that is neither useful or interesting. I’m off to read some poetry. Now, should I try the racist Larkin, the incestuous Byron or the fascist Pound? Even Dylan Thomas was overly fond of the bottle and committed a number of crimes against neckwear. Morals can be so confusing.

Does anyone have a view?

On Dunwich beach

 

Weighed in the Balance

The Egyptians believed that Anubis would weigh the heart of the deceased against a feather to see if they were worthy of the afterlife. Later, scientists calculated that the human soul weighed 21 grams.

This morning, preparing the paperwork for my late father’s estate, my heart skipped a beat as I saw the details of his life reduced to a weight – 8 grams of 18 carat gold at £38 a gram. That is the price set on his wedding ring, the value that the tax man places on 63 years of marriage.

his life
persists in memory
—dust floats in the sun

First published in Blithe Spirit August 2023.

Ringlet

Coshed With a Lexicon

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Sorry everybody, we’ve had visitors over the weekend, and added to the heat I’ve not been working very hard. I also had portions of four days last week in the hands of the medical profession. One of them only involved waiting for a parcel of injectable methotrexate, but it all adds to the disruption and lack of concentration.

Then there is the fact that I have become accustomed to idling my days away as two oscillating fans do their best to make my day bearable.

 

It is with considerable horror that I realise it has been six days since I last posted. In that time I have taken delivery of an order of injector pens, looked up possible side effects (I had, I admit, too much time on my hands) ,had a blood test and been comprehensively prodded by doctors. On one day I was forced to sit in a small Perspex cage breathing into a tube. Fortunately they had fans around the room and I was able to avoid melting. The technician working the device said I was lucky to be in at 9.45, as it got considerably hotter by mid-day.

One of the side effects of the methotrexate, by the way, is hair loss. This one, I confess, does not worry me. Drowsiness is no real problem either. I like a nap. My liver disintegrating (I may be exaggerating here, they may have used some weasel words like “Functionally impaired”) does concern me a bit but I have quarterly blood test to check on that. I only take it for arthritis, if I was taking it in the dose necessary for chemotherapy I imagine I would be less inclined to make light of the problems. It can also cause memory impairment (“chemo fog”) and . . . well, to be honest I can’t remember the rest . . .

Sorry, couldn’t resist

Although it’s true, I do have difficulty with this sort of thing.  Some of the words are very long and barely comprehensible. Sometimes it’s like being hit repeatedly with a dictionary, or a sock full of billiard balls.

I keep meaning to take better care of myself, but it can be difficult when you don’t know what the words mean.

The good news is that I passed the blood test. The respiratory test showed decent results. Not good, but a lot better than I feared. Once the results are with the doctor, we will see what happens. Probably not a lot.

Little Egret – Blacktoft Sands

Hot!

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It’s hot by English standards, though I’m sure it’s just pleasantly warm by the standards of many other nations. Fresh from re-evaluating my ambitions to live in New Mexico (due to my growing concerns about the USA), I’m also rethinking the one about moving to Australia. Even in an air-conditioned bubble or a repurposed opal mine, I’m thinking it may be a bit hot for me.

Poppies growing from cracks in concrete

Other parts of the country are either hotter or cooler. Look at Derrick’s blog or Tootlepedal’s. They, I think, represent the two extremes today. Oh dear, I just looked at TP’s blog – he is in hospital after Mountain Rescue had to bring him down after a knee injury.

Not that it’s all bad news, I must “avoid strenuous activity during the hottest part of the day” according to official advice, (I am dedicated to taking that advice), and keep the house cool, whilst drinking plenty of fluids. It’s a good thing we have government to look after us, as I wouldn’t have thought about any of that by myself They also advise people not to leave babies, pets and old people alone in parked cars. Since when have I been reduced to the level of a child or pet?

I’ve actually spent most of the day wondering about one of the great philosophical questions of our times – how does Bradley Walsh get work as an actor? He’s a lovely bloke, I’m sure, and a great question master on The Chase and irs spin-offs. He’s done a number of high-profile roles in Coronation Street and Dr Who and today I’ve been watching him in Law and Order UK.

Poppies with a bee

It’s an adaptation of the American series. It’s OK, but a bit like the Toronto version it doesn’t sparkle quite so much once it’s taken out of its natural habitat, and, as I say, Bradley Walsh in a lead role isn’t quite doing it for me.

That was my day during the Big Heat. My blood test was done quickly today and I am back in the correct range after a dramatic rise caused by the anti-biotics of a few weeks ago. The TESCO checkout broke last night. I always suspect hot weather, though it may be foreign hackers or just inefficiency. They have made a few changes recently, which is never good news. At the moment we are being warned that there might not be enough electricity – high demand for powering fans linked to low levels of wind for the windmills. If we asked President Trump for his opinion on windmills he would generate the extra wind we need. Meanwhile, keep on with building devices to use wave energy. We have plenty of waves.

Poppies in wheat field

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Bad Habits of Old People

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Last night I started a counter-revolution. I deliberately went out to write a long poem and submitted a tanka prose with 289 words of prose. Can you believe it? What would be considered a short WP post may not be selected, I’m told, because of the allocation of space. For some reason 300 words is now a barrier. Isn’t life strange?

My Orange Parker Pen

An old man complains about trends in modern poetry and cuts it short at sixty words. What happened to the old man who used to complain at length about anything and everything? Beaten down by life. I’ve been reading about bad habits old people have. So I’m not going to bang on about it.  It’s another example of modern life being shoddy and young know-it-alls giving us their worthless views whilst drinking chai lattes and scrolling their phone as the walk along the pavement inconveniencing all the other pedestrians.

However, I do have one good habit, although I may mention my knees and hands from time to time I generally don’t discuss my health too much. It is, to be fair, not that I have a good habit, just that I don’t think my internals are any business of strangers.

Refusing to embrace new things is another fault of old people. Failure to embrace new ways for fraudsters to get into your bank account? New ways for companies to make you do more of the work yourself (probably using an “app”) whilst charging more for doing less?

Poetry – creatively stacked but a touch light on stock

If the future was robot butlers and time machines I’d give it a go, but fraudsters and parasites? No thanks.

I mention robot butlers a lot. I should find something new, as repeating yourself is a sign of being boring and old. Having said that, I was boring when I was young, so it’s just a bad habit, rather than being age related.

If only I could call for Robo Lugg to bring me tea and dainty sandwiches. If not Lugg, who is your favourite fictional butler. I don’t think I’ve ever met a real butler. Come to think of it, Lugg isn’t a butler, he’s a gentleman’s gentleman. It’s close enough for my purposes.

 

 

More From My Extensive Stock of Ramblings

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If you want to write, you must read. This is common advice and quite easy to follow when you have a half-formed ambition to write mystery novels. Reading a mystery novel is generally a delight, although the pleasure is somewhat diminished by the lack of editorial discipline revealed now that self-publishing is so easy.

Yes, I read a lot of low-brow books…

I don’t find reading poetry quite so easy. I lack the attention span, or boredom threshold, and the intellectual capacity to process it in a scholarly way. A book of poetry soon blurs, merges and becomes dull.  It becomes an exercise in tenacity. But to read it slowly and apply thought to each individual poem soon exhausts my mental capabilities.

That’s what put me off poetry in the first place, and all English literature, to be honest. I don’t want to read a book of techniques and allegory and cleverness and concealed meaning. I want a book where good triumphs over evil and where you can be sure that after the hero throws the bad man off a cliff he will go home and live happily until he has to throw another dastardly villain from a cliff/into quicksand/out of an aircraft. Some deviation is acceptable with a touch of angst and a little regret and even the possibility of ambiguity.  In general, I read novels because I like a puzzle and I like to see good triumph over evil.

It’s the same with poetry. I read Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, because I want to rave at close of day, and catch the sun in flight and because I know it’s all slipping away from me.  Not because I want to admire his use of repetition. I’ve actually just read a couple of articles on the poem. I suspect the first two were done by AI as they mentioned repetition, but managed to get all the way through without mentioning the word villanelle, which is one of the most notable aspects of the poem. Thomas didn’t get up one morning and say to himself, I think I might write a poem with some repetition in it. He got up, probably with a hangover, and decided to write a villanelle.  I’ve written two. They are not for the faint hearted. I fully intend writing a third, but I’m resting and gathering my strength for what is more like a full frontal assault on the English language than the writing of a poem. One definition of poetry is putting the best words in the best places, in a villanelle you have to select the best words to be put in several places, which have already been selected by the history of the form. They have to make sense and the repetitions have to contribute to the poem and, if you are really good they have to be capable of subtle changes.

Not the Library of an Intellectual

Of course, as poems go, it is much enhanced by a good reader. This is Dylan Thomas having a crack at it.  He’s no Michael Sheen, but to be fair, Michael Sheen is no Dylan Thomas when it comes to writing poetry.

Today I finished off Quantum of Menace, which is an excellent book, though the ending felt a bit rushed. It needed a few more baddies to meet a sticky end, but I suppose Q doesn’t do that sort of thing. It’s by Vaseem Khan – writer of The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra and the Malabar House Series. In Quantum of Menace, Q, who has been made redundant, from MI6 becomes the lead character. That in itself is difficult, but Khan’s Q fits right in with what I would have expected. He also avoids that trap that Richard Osman, I’m afraid, fell right into with his Thursday Murder Club books. Just because you have an ex-spy as a character doesn’t mean they can be used to answer loads of difficult questions. Omnipotence  may come easy for the host of a quiz show but it doesn’t really work in a whodunnit.

Ring-Necked Parakeet

I also watched Chris Packham’s documentary on Ring-Necked parakeets. Ironically, after him saying that we needed more facts and fewer opinions, he seemed to be short of facts and plentifully supplied with opinions of his own. It did feature a scientist who had eaten both pigeon and parakeet to see why urban Peregrines seem so partial to parakeets (100 taken in a month by just one London pair with chicks). She said that parakeet tastes better than pigeon. Frankly, unless we can tell how a Peregrine views palatability, I’m not sure this is science. However, she also said that in the month after fledging she believes that young parakeets are easier to catch than pigeons. Being bright green I imagine they are easier to spot too.

Little Owl in its nest

Anyway, that will probably do for now. I will now find some photos and get on with posting. Parakeet and Little Owl photos are from Wikipedia.

 

 

 

The Seed of an Idea

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Yesterday I switched WP on to find that my Comments screen was subtly different. Not better, not more efficient, not easier to use/read, just different. It is rather like one of those 1950s black and white films where the group of beleaguered actors hear war drums in the distance, or see smoke signals in the sky. You know that things are going to become worse before they got better. At least they did generally get better in the films, there is no such guarantee in modern technical matters.

Summer Pudding

I also blogged a little and, having had a bad night, slept. Mostly I slept, watched TV and read  crime fiction. Having had a slow start I decided to call it a day of relaxation. I did that to differentiate it from all the other days where I slept and watched TV but didn’t give the day a name. My sister called and went shopping with Julia. We had pasta bake garlic bread and summer pudding  in the evening, followed (in my case at least) by a game of “Hunt the Seeds” There were a lot of seeds in the summer pudding but I think I may . . .

No,  a last minute prod with a toothpick/flosser has just brought more to light, despite  two sessions with an electric toothbrush and a previous attempt to floss.

There are two ways I could see this. One would be to discuss age, teeth and the nature of summer pudding. This could go the gastronomy route, the philosophy route or the moaning old man route.

Summer pudding after the first slice

Or I could develop a whole new technology based on the ability of seeds to conceal themselves in dental gaps. I’m not clear how I could harness this property of seeds (super-concealability, I’m thinking of calling it) but I’m thinking if you had the right set of teeth you could conceal a lot of small things. It may have implications for future computer design or AI. Or it may just be a way to set up a joke about the consciences of politicians or the brains of influencers.

Today, the comments screen seems to have returned to normal, leading me to think that there are changes afoot, or that I dreamed the whole thing. Which, I wonder, is the most likely?

I’m going now. I may be back later.

A slice of Summer Pudding

Have you spotted the photographic theme yet?

 

 

Tales of a Small Rabbit

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I’ve not quite made up my mind about my new blogging routine, but I am going to keep to the one a day (on average) plan until the end of the month. I’m thinking I may drop back to a couple of times a week after that. Half of me says that there is no need to change, as 250 words a day shouldn’t be a challenge. The other half of me says that practising longer pieces will be good for me and I should give it a go.

Whatever happens, I do know that I had a rejection yesterday. Rattle magazine runs a monthly ekphrastic poetry competition, amongst other things. It’s a good way of getting my submission numbers up, and giving myself a new challenge. So far, it’s also been a useful lesson in rejection, with me achieving a perfect record of three rejections in three attempts. I don’t mind these rejections, because they reject the poems because they aren’t good enough. Yes, I’m still banging on about editors who reject decent poems because they don’t match up to some wrong-headed vision of what a poem should be.

I will not go further along that line as it’s difficult to explain without becoming tedious. I’m thinking about this more and more because it’s coming up to the time when I will have to select a poem for a best of issue tanka, and I’m still not sure how to do it. I think I’ll just select the one I like the most and be honest about it. I’ll leave scholarly comment to other people.

Meanwhile, I just had two acceptances to balance up the rejection, and we had the woodpecker back on the feeders this morning. We have also got a small rabbit in the back garden. We aren’t sure how it got in, but are hoping it will be able to get out the same way as I wouldn’t want to see it trapped. It seems to have burrowed into the compost bin in search of vegetable scraps, but am not sure there is enough food in the garden to support even a small rabbit. The photo isn’t good, but it was done on a phone and enlarged without mercy.

It’s been a good time for wildlife – all the fledglings, the woodpeckers, a rabbit, a sparrow and the return of the goldfinches.

 

Once, I was a Writer . . .

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Looking back at the blog posts I wrote on this day over the last eleven years (Cracking Open the Time Capsule, as WP has it), I am struck by one thing. I have become dull in all aspects of my life. I no longer go anywhere, I don’t write about interesting things and I certainly don’t see anything in my writing that I feel pleased with. I am, at best, going through the motions. Of course, in those days I had more to write about. Life as a retired man is somewhat deficient in matters of poultry, butterflies and composting toilets. Ah, the glory days . . .

It’s a little better when I look at my poetry, but even that is suffering, and my recent attempts at expanding my horizons have been met with a range of editorial response ranging from apathy to hostility.

I am trying to work out how to move on from here.

Blackpool Tower

More sleep is one thing. I slept well last night and feel full of ideas. I had been intending to take Julia in to wood turning, but she told me to go back to sleep. I was happy to do so, and grateful to wake up well-rested.

In poetry terms, I have become a machine for writing poems. Many of them are accepted for publication, but as I have said before when discussing the numbers posted by other people – quantity is not necessarily quality. The approach has served a purpose, and I will probably carry on like this, as it is a good way to practice and to pursue the, possibly mythical, ideal of writing good poetry.

In terms of writing about numismatics, I have faded out. It’s harder than poetry and blogging and after producing two years of weekly Facebook pieces, plus all the others, it was too easy to take a break when I needed time for the wedding and the funeral. This, I must address, as I have more that I want to do.

Finally, the blog. At one time I was addicted to it and felt uncomfortable if I missed a day. These days I have become very erratic and although I am managing to average a post a day (which I set as a target at the beginning of the year) I am far from blogging on a sensible daily basis.

This is all leading to one of two conclusions. One is that I need to stop writing so much so I can be more relaxed and write things of better quality. Once a week blog posts, less poetry, written to a slower tempo, and a selection of posts on numismatics which will make me a reputation as a scholar.

I probably overdid it with the “scholar” didn’t I? This really isn’t me.

So I’m going to carry on with my frantic blogging (clinging on to my daily schedule by the tips of my fingers), and I’m going to plough ahead with the targets I have set for poetry. Writing more is good practice, and the experience of rejection is forming a nice hard shell to protect me in the future. You can tell I’m getting better, a younger me would have used the word carapace. And finally, I’m going to start back on the numismatic articles. I have a few subjects I’ve been saving until I am researched and ready, but as I may have said before, the perfect time never comes and it is better to write something imperfect than leave a pile of lovely notes.

 

Empire State Building

I am going to do this by reorganising myself. Not only will it release time for my literary projects, but it will give me time to write my memoirs. Not proper memoirs, more like family history notes. My cousins have asked me several times about family members that they vaguely remember. On that side of the family I am the oldest by a few years and am probably the last person alive who met my great-aunts Sarah and Maud. I have very few memories of them, mainly about being intimidated by the street they lived in, and by the ladies themselves. They were both in their 80s when I met them, tall, forbidding and living in a dark three story terraced house built from Accrington brick, which was equally tall and forbidding. I know very little about them, other than what I know from the family tree, but I think I ought to write down what I personally know about the family members who were still alive when I was young. They are, in a fashion, still alive while someone remembers them. Even if that person was a bewildered small boy. My great-grandmother read to me from Rupert books. Her sisters were, in contrast, distant and austere. I never knew why they never married, because they were old enough to have married before the shortage of suitable husbands caused by the Great War. Maud, as far as I can tell, worked in the cotton trade all her life, Sarah started off in domestic service. I wonder if it was something to do with their early lives. In contrast, their brother was an assistant draper in his father’s shop and my great-grandmother was a seamstress and dressmaker. She made my mother’s wedding dress. I must find a photo of that. It was an elegant dress, considering it was made of what was available after the war and before the end of rationing. I remember seeing a piece of it once, it was a rich brocade. I wonder if it is still around. It was in with some family photos. It’s strange how some thoughts on my writing skills end up as a search for memories and a scrap of dress material.

 

Accrington bricks, by the way, are used in the foundations of Blackpool Tower, the Thiepval Memorial and the Empire State Building. They were also used to build the brick sculpture of the Mallard. Hence the photos.

Mallard. It looks fast even when it’s built from bricks. Not any brick, Lancashire bricks, from Accrington.

 

 

The Things They Never Warn You About

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There was a time when I could knock out a blog post in around twenty minutes. It wasn’t necessarily profound, but it was 250 words and it did have some sort of structure. It seems to take longer these days, but everything does, doesn’t it?

A Bear in a Tree

Even getting a tie on is a bit of a performance these days, as I recently found out when I attended both a wedding and a funeral in recent weeks. I hadn’t worn a tie for years. Like riding a bicycle, the basics do not desert you. At least, I believe they don’t. I’ve not checked to see if I’ve forgotten to ride a bike, I’m just assuming you never forget because everybody says so. If I ever find myself on a bike again, I will report back.

The knotting bit is fine. In fact it seemed easier than it used to be. It was the folding down of the collar that proved tricky. My shoulders are not what they used to be and after putting my collar up and tying the tie, I seem to lose the ability to use my arms in a raised position, a combination of stiff joints and tiredness. Yes. my shoulders get tired after a couple of minutes of tying a tie. They keep that one as a surprise. You never think of shoulders wearing out until you start using sticks. It is very frustrating, and one of those things nobody tells you about getting old.

Hair loss yes, grumbling, yes, aches and pains and a vague feeling that things used to be better, yes. But the inability to hold your arms up to put a tie on? When did that happen?

Paddington Bear at St Paul’s

Talking of which, I got stuck trying to put my trousers on last week. I know that socks and trousers get steadily less easy, and am resigned to sitting on the bed to attend to such things, but I didn’t realise that they actually started to actively resist as you got older. The second one seems to be worse. I can usually get one leg in without too much problem, but the second always seems to be at a more difficult angle. Maybe it’s the design of modern trousers, or the Russians/Chinese (they always seemed to get the blame in the 60s, and that seems to be coming back). Maybe it’s just the design of my legs. But it’s definitely a problem of old age that nobody warned me about.

I could write an entire series about this, but I won’t. My older readers already know all about it, and my younger readers won’t believe me.

Time to go to the doctor now. I’m on weekly visits at the moment with one thing and another. It’s nice to be looked after, but it does tend to mess the day up. At least I won’t have to worry about the clutch now.  However, I have no doubt another worry is just around the corner.

Straw Bale Bowie Bear

Yes, pictures are of bears again.

A Blog about What?

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I used to blog about the project on the farm, including baking and apple pressing. I’m not sure how interesting it was, but I had pictures of sheep and goats and poultry and that made up for the deficiencies in the text.

Startled Teddy Bear

Startled Teddy Bear

Then it moved on to what we did on our days off. I used to worry, at that point, that nobody would be interested, but it was variety.

Then, of course, we had to leave the farm and break up the group and I started writing about life in a coin shop, followed by writing poetry, followed by life as a retired man. I’m not particularly interesting, but I have got past the point of worrying about it.

So, I ramble through life, writing about nothing in particular and, it seems, don’t have many followers or people who like me. This isn’t unexpected, the surprise is that I have any regular readers at all.

The new “Blast from the Past” feature on WP was one of the things that brought about this conclusion. The other was the notification that I had increased traffic. There is indeed a hump in my stats and hundreds of people have looked at my posts. About 400 of them were from China and even more were from the USA. None of the Chinese watchers have posted to like or comment and the only comments/likes from the USA are from the normal few people who pop along regularly.

Bear with seed packet from Kew

It looks like I’m being visited by the bots that gather information for generating AI. That is the true indicator of the state of the world. Scientists, if my theory is correct, are visiting my blog to enable artificial intelligence to harvest the information needed to run the world. My blog!

Just think of that. Our future is being decided on the basis of the ramblings of a grumpy geriatric who has an unhealthy relationship with chips and punctuation (not to mention Excessive  Un-necessary Capitalisation).

Rupert the Bear

I have a new way of wasting time, by the way – I read the posts I made on this day over the years, or which link to them, including the one where I pretended to be a bear and the one that has information on the MV Coronia, which I can use elsewhere. It really is a useful resource for people like me who want to move their procrastination to the next level.

A Bear of Very Little Brain

Photos are bears. You probably guessed that though . . .