Christopher James Heyworth: a retrospective

This retrospective on the poetry of Christo (as he was known to us) concludes the occasional Sunday series featuring former Dead Good Poets who are, alas, no longer with us.

On open mic nights Christo would as soon (or rather) read poems by his favourite poets than read his own compositions. And for some reason the guest blogs he wrote for the Dead Good Blog never contained any of his own compositions.

But he was passionate about poetry, read widely, commented constructively and wrote, albeit not prolifically.  It has been a pleasure to read again, curate and present here some of my personal favourites. 

Christopher James Heyworth

Wyred For Sound

From above the thread of stream

silent yet sibilant sidles seaward

Skippool and Wardley's wresting

the shake snake-handled sidewinder.

Over there is where Illawalla dressed

in Hindu glamour as Mumbai let us

dream we were briefly Maharajahs

John Travolta-ing for Saturday Night

Shebas sashaying mouthing medleys.

Falstaff

Sir Anthony sidles into
the little space left in
my memory as the rather
gaunt and sallow History Man
who so horrified us
when so shallow but
costumed and padded
with gross belly and
straining belt commands
this stage as Falstaff
misleader of Hal, liar
personified, but Life-
lover as dimpled as
Dionysus - eat, drink,
make merry one and all
for tomorrow we die.


Thank You Stanley Cornflake

As a uniform, he always wore
the grey ironmonger's coat
immaculately pressed and bore
clipped hair neat as well as a
close shave.

Mr. Cornthwaite (all of us
minions called him only Mr.)
was no "Do It 'Cos I Say So" boss
but with patience would teach
and preach retail folklore:

Cooks' staples stored well inside
our mini-market shop advanced
for its 50s' existence; shelf-stacking
to re-arrange for early use-by at the
front; fast-moving lines checked
hourly if not sooner; trusted staff
becoming the Tasting Squad for
new fresh produce being considered
for supply - The Cornflake (never
uttered in his hearing) circulating
to ensure not only that his ever-clear
commands were reflected in full shelves
but also that staff were coping not
rushed or overwhelmed.

The best Warrant Officer cares
just as much commands as
my de-mobbed Warrant Officer
father used to tell me when I asked.

Warwick Words

Thursday morning and I board
the Preston train, a dumpy DMU,
but less of a cattle-truck today.

Over the bridge or beneath
lines to Platform 5 to wait:
Branson's Scarlet Pendolino
will glide in soon bound
for Birmingham - wonder
who I shall meet and share
travelling moments with ?

At the caverns of New Street
I must wend to Moor Street
and a Chilterns train trundling
me south for Warwick's 1,100th.
birthday weekend and 100 years
since trains of Lancashire PALS
cattle-trucked themselves to
Flanders fields never to return.

Money Talks...

...and what it said back then on the railway bridge
at Bloomfield Road (no longer there of course)
was "You can spare me – it means only one less
penny ice lolly from the corner shop !" (no longer
there of course) and the train will make me huge
(steam no longer here of course) and the others
will laugh and cheer as you scramble down to
the line place me centred and climb back up
here again before the train shoots through to
Central Station (no longer there of course).

Gigantic copper-coloured disc and this recall.
Still talking half a century after.


War Poets

Poulton Library and
Adele & I are here to
share with whoever
arrives some thoughts
concerning War and
Literature. Linda sets
us up with chairs and
table, and first here is
delightful surprise: Pat
who I taught thirty years
ago - there will be no
need for me to dig a
trench and put on a
jacket bullet-proof
with tin hat on my
head - Philip Larkin
Alun Lewis, Sassoon
and Wilfred Owen
give staunch support
to Jon Stallworthy's
World War One tome
Anthem for Doomed
Youth: Twelve Poets
but doomed not us
this century later.

Travel

On the hailed ferry from

Wardley's Creek to jetty

at Cockle Hall I scull back

days to nosing through

ducklings on The Cam punting

past King's College Chapel on

The Backs with puntsman

Eliot reminding us: When

we can see the backs of leaves

rain is waiting in the wings.

Blue but no longer 'blue'

Our son
grins from ear........to..........ear
as Kompany
lifts the trophy
for all to see:
blue moon
here but
we are
no longer
BLUE

Ungrown

During this sort of fallow period
my inventiveness has been
hibernating within for the months
that are beginning to feel endless
where are the fresh shoots ?

Do I need a salvo to stir
the soil so that like poppies
long lying in wait under
too undisturbed soil pop their
red clarion call being vivified ?

Here I chop down pen not *****
and loosen the words waiting the
flowering of fresh inspiration.

There - just a flick of the wrist.

All poems (c) the estate of C J Heyworth

Read More

New Shoots

Apologies for this not being posted until afternoon here in Blackpool, NW England, but both Kev and I have been battling with the gremlins affecting the router of our BT Broadband Hub - I think it is either on a work-to-rule, or on a one day strike in sympathy with the Junior Doctors.

Or perhaps Facebook/Gmail are going through one of their periodic nervous collapses necessitating endless changes to the normal routine.

As the vernal equinox was either yesterday or today (because of the leap year), New Shoots sounds most germane, and I'd like to consider how resilient the human race has to be in order never to be defeated by the most crushing and terrifying of human disasters, and how the necessary endeavours force us into being more neighbourly, and to work together towards a common triumph.

I'll begin with a poem by Gillian Clarke which I like very much indeed:

Neighbours

The spring was late.  We watched the sky
and studied charts for shouldering isobars.
Birds were late to pair.  Crows drank from the lamb's eye.

Over Finland small birds fell: song-thrushes                                                                      
steering north, smudged signatures on light,
migrating warblers, nightingales.

Wing-beats failed over fjords, each lung a sip of gall.
children were warned of their dangerous beauty.
Milk was spilt in Poland.  Each quarrel

the blowback from some old story,
a mouthful of bitter air from the Ukraine
brought by the wind out of its box of sorrows.

This spring a lamb sips caesium on a Welsh hill.
A child, lifting her face to drink the rain,
takes into her blood the poisoned arrow.

Now we are all neighbourly, each little town
in Europe twinned to Chernobyl, each heart
with the burnt fireman, the child on the Moscow train.

In the democracy of the virus and the toxin
we wait.  We watch for bird migrations,
one bird returning with green in its voice,

glasnost,
golau glas,
a first break of blue.

(c) Gillian Clarke in her Collected Poems (Carcanet 1997)
and republished with permission in The Nation's Most Treasured
Nature Poems: The Seasons Radio 4 Poetry Please f&f 2015.

For anyone unfamiliar with what happened at the Ukrainian nuclear plant at Chernobyl (at that time part of the Russian Federation) in April of 1985, there is a very detailed article about it and its worldwide effects on Wikipedia.

As with the 2011 nuclear disaster at Fukishima in Japan, at the time of Chernobyl there was general panic at the potential long-term effects on the populations of the West's developed nations, and a real fear that there would never be sight of the green shoots of recovery.

Thankfully, our resilience, the courage of so many and the ingenuity our scientists and technicians have displayed have created circumstances in which there have been new shoots and recovery is being achieved still more than 30 years after Chernobyl and five years after the Japanese disaster caused by a tsunami - Nature The Destructor has morphed into Nature the Restorative, I'm pleased to say.

Thanks for reading, and do have a Happy Easter break.

(c) C J Heyworth (Christo James)
www.facebook.com/christo.james.509

Read More

Some British Isles

Here are some British Isles:

The Scots writer, the late Hugh MacDiarmid states:

I was better with the sound of the sea
than with the voices of men
And in desolate and desert places
I found myself again.

I agree with him about the sound of the sea as I was born and grew up here in Blackpool on the Fylde Coast of Lancashire, but discovered how odd it felt to be away from the sea for any real length of time when I visited the European mainland for a holiday-while with school in the mid-1950s.

I am a believer that No Man Is An Island, and am gregarious, enjoying urban life and the companionship of others I choose to be with.  However the experience of being on or living on one of Britain's many small islands has always interested me, and while researching this piece I have discovered Island Poems by R S Thomas, Kathleen Raine, Douglas Duun, Kathleen Jamie, Seamus Heaney and Edwin Morgan as well as lesser-known poets.

Let us begin with my North Eastern friend Valerie Laws letting us live for a few moments on Lindisfarne:

The rainbow arch hangs in space
at Lindisfarne, a cannonball's leap
frozen in stone.  Hail and rain rattle
the walls like shot, the sea keeps up
its cavalry charge.  Cows graze
salt-bleached grass, descendants
of those spared by the monks
who spent more on gunpowder
than parchment.

There is more than 1,000 years captured here as, though Lindisfarne is most famous for the early days of Christianity and the chants of monks, Valerie is interested too in how the brothers not only carried out the painstaking work of creating illuminated pages of The Bible, but had frequently to defend themselves and their settlement against wild Scots known as Border Reivers - these were savage times, and they had an island to defend.

And as is so helpful in poetry, we can now leap to the opposite side of Scotland where there are North and South Uist off the coast,  Stewart Conn takes us there:

II
Uist, a smashed mirror.
I holiday here, to gather
strengths for the winter.
So I fire my peats, gut
trout, rub cold hands together:
reassured that when December
does come, I shall be far
from here.  Like all city dwellers.

This is very much me.  If I visit Oban and the Western Isles it is July or August and I am well aware that there is a long, cold winter ahead, but I do not return to the wild by catching my meals from the bounteous sea, nor huddling over a peat fire: hotel-living for me, a townie to the core.

Having visited North Uist with Stewart, it is only fair to visit South Uist too, again with Hugh MacDiarmid who writes of being on the Western Seaboard of the island:

PERFECT

I found a pigeon's skull on the machair,     (The machair is the land)
All the bones pure white and dry, and chalky,
But perfect,
Without a crack or a flaw anywhere.

At the back, rising out of the beak,
Were twin domes like bubbles of thin bone,
Almost transparent, where the brain had been
That fixed te tilt of the wings.

As the poem's title says, this is PERFECT.

No doubt you have clear recollects of islands you have visited and their effects on you.

Why not write a short poem about it ?

Major source: The Iron Press anthology 100 Island Poems of Great Britain and Ireland edited by James Knox Whittet pub. 2005

Thanks for reading this, Christo Heyworth.

Read More

Meat Is Murder? - Meat Is Life.

As I shall be spending a good deal of Monday 7th. at Preston Royal Infirmary for tests and discussion about my CKF (Chronic Kidney Failure), I'm posting this blog contribution early - thanks for reading, and hope you enjoy it.

I shall turn later to the nervy slap-in-the-face to carnivores by those who choose to be vegetarian or vegan, but, as this is a literary blog, I shall begin with "meat" as a metaphor.

I'll encourage you to consider the various regular poetry magazines to which I subscribe, and, in particular the excellent Under The Radar published by Nine Arches Press, based in Rugby, and edited by the insightful Jane Commane.

On Friday I received the latest issue, Issue 16, which contains lively work by 49 writers of whom the evocative Sophia Argyris is one:

WHILE YOU WERE GONE (no meat)

Your shirt hanging out to dry, gesticulates
in the wind, waving its empty arms like wings.
Inside I've laid out olives, oatcakes, hummus,
things I love that you will not eat - no cheese,
no bread, no meat.

(c) Sophia Argyris

Of course this has a literal significance in that the author's loved one is absent, and therefore cannot partake of the food she lays out, that absence is signified by the empty flapping shirt, but also by there being "no meat" (no him) in the house.  We have not reverted to being cannibals because our physical presence can be seen as the meat in a relationship.

And, of course, the poems in a regular magazine such as Under The Radar for me constitute the meat of each issue.
If you require a single issue or to subscribe for a year, do check out
www.ninearchespress.com/shop.html
or www.inpressbooks.co.uk

Single issue £6.00 or UK annual sub.  £22.00 for four issues (highly recommended).

So to the title Meat Is Murder, this week's theme.

Along with many anthropologists, I believe that how mankind developed to a more advanced state than other great apes came about because by being carnivores, we encouraged our much larger and more complex brains to make us evolve into who we are today.  Of course our bodies require the mass of roughage to aid our digestive systems, and we extract the required vitamins from plants, but, unless our bodies were built to use our carnivorous input, we could not process meats at all.

I am not unusual, I believe, in having been weaned early from a milk diet, a gift from my mother, whose capability to produce the stuff to feed me quit lactation not at all long after I was born, and taught me through experimentation the foods I have come to enjoy, encouraging a balanced diet including cooked fish and meat as well as "my greens".

I do not consider fishing, pork, lamb or beef farming to be murder, though I expect high welfare standards to be maintained.  I love eggs too as they guarantee great nutrition.

The crops we harvest, including the farmed animals, provide us between them with exactly what our bodies are designed to process.  Meat is Life for me, not Murder.

(c) C J Heyworth 07/03/2016

Read More

At The Movies

Going to the pictures is something embedded in me since infancy by Sonia Livesey who is about eight years older than me and who was trusted enough by local mums in the streets of terraced houses in Little Layton where I grew up to round up the tines to go to Saturday morning Cinema Club at what was then the splendid Art Deco Odeon Cinema, and is today Funny Girls - the Odeon of 2016 is now on Rigby Road where Blackpool's then Rugby League and Greyhound Track existed.

I cannot remember any of the films we enjoyed "back then" (the 1950s) being in colour - but b/w was fine.  And it was my introduction to stories being told in episodes, Flash Gordon, of instance, not realising until five or six years later that Dickens, for instance, let his tales play out over numerous episodes in print magazines - stories on an early version of the "Never, Never" as books were expensive, but a magazine could be afforded each week.

The Saturday morning film shows began with a famous sportsman, usually from memory, a boxer, displaying a recently-won title or Lonsdale Belt, then a newsreel (no TVs or 24 hour news, but where  learned the brand Pathe).  Then the latest episode of the serial, a break to buy ice lollies, and a film at the close.  Lots were from The Children's Film Foundation, and featured youngsters playing on bomb-sites which to us in Blackpool looked to be great fun.  Blackpool had escaped major bombing, Central Station and Seed Street being the only recipients of Nazi bombs, probably from planes getting rid of their left-overs from a raid on Manchester or Liverpool.

But what really sticks is the reek of chewing gum and body odour and the inability for an audience of children to keep quiet for longer than a few seconds.

What I only realised later is how much in pain and grief my mother must have felt after the shock of my father's sudden death in the summer of 1953 - and "going to the pictures" was a weekly escape.  She loved Dirk Bogard, Yul Brynner and musicals, and I'm very glad to have been taken along on her Technicolor escapes: everyday Britain was so monochrome in the 50s.

For me the movies have always represented life in different worlds, and as I aged my tastes sought out foreign films - Truffaut, Godard, Sergio Leone - and I began to apply what I had learned in writing about literature to the craft of film-making.  Directors attracted me to their movies as much as *stars* did, and Polanski's Chinatown stands out - I must have seen that at least five times and notice something fresh on every viewing.

Today, of course, I can satisfy most of my desire for film by scouring the many, many, many TV channels and their film offerings - if I visit a cinema itself it is usually to see a "live" performance of a play, often the RSC presenting Shakespeare.

Thank you for reading.

(c) C J Heyworth 29/02/2016

Read More

Lost Blackpool

I was born just after World War II and lived just off Westcliffe Drive in Little Layton

The joke amongst conductors on the Corporation buses which travelled to Bispham & Cleveleys, or to Victoria Hospital or to the new (then) council estate at Grange Park was that Layton was “The Dead Centre of Blackpool”: beside Layton Square was one of the town’s cemeteries.  Slightly further inland next door to Layton Institute is still today the town’s Jewish Cemetery.

So those are two things which remain from my '40s and '50s childhood, but what I remember my parents talking about were the tram services from North Station to Layton, and I experienced myself trams from North Station to Gynn Square along Dickson Road, as well as the route from Talbot Square up Clifton Street towards what was then the General Post Office, turning briefly right along Abingdon Street, then left and out of the town centre along Church Street to Devonshire Square where the line headed along Whitegate Drive as far as Oxford Square before turning along Waterloo Road until it joined Lytham Road near South (railway) Station and what was then The Palladium Cinema.  At that junction the line from Manchester Square to Starr Gate led south with a branch at Station Road to South Pier.

I cannot remember precisely when the inland tram routes ceased to exist, but it must have been in the early 1960s as I remember using a tram along Dickson Road to attend a Town Schools Swimming Gala at Derby Baths (another lost local treasure) in the early 1960s.

I’m glad that unlike so many towns and cities Blackpool did not entirely scrap its “old-fashioned” tramway as we have still the Promenade route at least with swish modern carriages which glide so silently along from Starr Gate to the ferry terminal at Fleetwood.

And that’s a further loss – the Song of The Trams – squeaks, clangs and rumbles.

Thanks for reading, Christo.

Read More

Come Join The Circus

Sorry that my promise to occupy the Monday "blogspot" (which Gmail keeps on correcting to "bloodspot") was not kept in the GENERATION GAP week.

I wrote a piece which I may post later if my iMac starts behaving itself, and have needed help to set up this direct access function.

As you will have seen, this daily "blogspot" occupied by members of Lancashire Dead Good Poets has its source in Blackpool, a most cosmopolitan seaside resort where many people settle after enjoying a holiday here.

So we SandGrown'uns (people actually born in Blackpool) are a relatively small proportion of the population, and are very used to hearing various accents, jargon and dialects - unlike the villages of the Fylde Plain, we tend not to label those who come and settle here as INCOMERS, though holidaymakers are sometimes referred to as "grockles", a local dialect word.

I always think of my birth at the end of World War II as being into a gigantic circus.

The Heyworth clan of my family settled here mainly because Dad saw out his decades in the RAF by being demobbed in Blackpool where my Uncle Frank (married to one of Mum's four sisters) was fortunate to get a regular multi-instrumentalist job with Geraldo, then Head of Music for Blackpool Tower Company.

Uncle Frank had been born and grew up in Jarrow, worked briefly and unhappily in a shipyard, and never lost his North East accent nor his automatic reliance on dialect forms - "gannin" for going; "scannin" for looking around.

And as my aunt and uncle supplemented income by letting out a couple of small rooms during the Summer Season from Easter to The Illuminations, I grew up hearing Irish, Scots, Welsh, Midlands ("mi duck"), and even the occasional cockney speech patterns.

The other great purveyor of language that shaped how I talk was the radio.

It was on permanently with its three BBC channels in my childhood home - The Home Service, The Light Programme and Radio Three - but the delivery was RP (Received Pronunciation) until The Pirates broadcasting in the early 60s made even the BBC wake up to the fact that around our relatively small islands there is a wealth of dialects and accents.

I may add to this in COMMENTS later, but that's it for the first of my pieces to actually make it to the Monday slot even though today it is Thursday.

I hope you will wish to add "Your Twopennurth".

Read More

Family Gathering

c) C J Heyworth December 2015 (with apologies for lateness and brevity)

           As children we get used to family gatherings to celebrate public events (The Coronation in 1953 I remember especially) births, birthdays, engagements, and weddings, and to pay tribute to someone’s life at a funeral with attendant wake.

Until well into my thirties I recall most family gatherings  being of contemporaries (my cousins and friends’ family gatherings), engagements, weddings, births and Christenings - all looked towards the future with only occasional exceptions, but when older family members spoke they were seemingly fixed on recollections of the past. When my maternal grandma, Nan, spoke of The Great War we learnt that she meant WWI, whereas The War to my parents generation meant WWII.

At any family gathering, therefore, it seemed that “wartime” was a given, and well into the 1960s and my late teens, WAR was a fixture in family conversations. But the recollections were cheery, rarely sad. I’m sure all of my relatives survived, as so many of their fellows who had lived through privations and the threat of defeat, by being good-humoured - the Home Front sounded to have been suffered with high spirits and indomitable determination that “Hitler is a twerp”: Dad’s Army captures it very well.

Read More