David Riley: a retrospective

I feel I am among the least qualified to introduce this retrospective piece on David Riley, as I barely knew him. He was  Blackpool-born and I understand he was among the early participants in Lancashire Dead Good Poets' Society, but his involvement had pretty much ended by the time I joined in 2014. 

David Riley (extreme right) with early members of LDGPS

He was an historian, a tutor with the Open University, and  a writer of science-fiction, plays and poetry. I saw David read at a couple of open mic nights and prevailed upon him to write a trio of short pieces as a guest blogger but he always seemed to maintain a relatively low profile. The last time we met was at the funeral of fellow Dead Good Poet Christopher Heyworth in the summer of 2017, when David announced that he was relocating to Ireland to undertake an MA in Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre of Queen's Belfast. He passed away in September 2018 just after having completed his dissertation.

Divine Mystery

In Whitechapel, hell clings to brick and stone
Grim residue like smog that never lifts
Blue populace wades, ankle deep in death

Behind a window's bubble-spotted eyes
Bone-handled orphans rest in caskets lined
With velvet. Feathered pens and vessels, cracked.

A desk, marked deep and faded as the day
Is strewn with cups and wands, lovers and wheels
A form, ancient and present, points to change.

Her fingers at the deck, old woman smiles
Reeking of gin and smoke, wrapped tight in tweed
A body's surfaced and she knows the hand.

Emigrant

Alehouse drink was attracting attention

to the ending of things

preceding Skipool's frigate who'd blur all consequence.

"Carried away to Amerikay,"

the stillborn song no one could finish

among the fledgeling emigres.

Anyons, Bambers, Silcocks, Hulls

most busy telling absent Hornbys Stanleys

what they could do with their bulls.

Brave on their last night in Poulton

that gentry at a safe distance

they waited on high tide to follow the sun -

"aye, where it sleeps, just beyond there

they've men with faces for chests

and dogs' heads for their hair.

It's true as I'm standing here

they've got pictures down south somewhere."

The stories were getting as strong as the beer.

They wanted a world of adventure

lied for it, stole for it, lent wives for it

and tomorrow on the shore

they'd look where horizons should be

losing touch, moving on

into the sky and the sea.

Found Blackpool

3am argue blackpool blackpool's cash chair class come cost council day deckchair deckchairs emro end forward gazette go golden happen id including just mile modern move need new other place police process prom pub resort say seaside seem shame sight spent stock talk time town visitor vital working year

Thoughts For Christmas

Is poetry always religious?

Is religion always influenced by the politics of the day?
Therefore, is Christmas poetry always political?
Do you need to understand religion before you can understand most poetry, from Beowulf to the Canterbury Tales to Eliot?
Do you need to know the nativity story to understand Coleridge, Rossetti and Wordsworth?
How much Christmas themed poetry have you seen in the shops recently?
Are poets making Christmas commercial?
Is there extra exposure for poetry at this time of year?
Does it help poetry?
Are Christmas carols poetry?
Are some more Catholic than Protestant (and vice versa)?
Do they all have the same message?
Is Christmas relevant any more? Is Christmas poetry important?
Is it as saccharine as Christmas card verses?
Are these big questions?
Happy Christmas.

Customs Man

The child's wrapped to her

curves reserved for him now,

maybe husband too.

She does the dance of motherhood

soothes the boy

refuses to entangle eyes with me

but I know her secret name

and the one she shares

since she's been goodwife to him.

I add them

to Anyons, Bambers, Silcocks, Hulls

clerk them out of England

a last rite,

pull them up by the roots

throw them out to sea.

I look at the child's red fist

declining to go so easily

catching his mother's impatient hair.

I murmur small pleasantries

close my book

wish them God speed

watch them walk the plank.

I wave. No one turns back,

she doesn't look.

RIP David Riley, 1955-2018

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Uncreative Writing

Guest post by David Riley

Below is something I made using one of the free word shuffling programs that can be found on the web and a couple of entries from recent Blackpool Gazettes, an idea suggested to me when I read about Kenneth Goldsmith, who had created a piece of work out of the whole day's content from one New York Times paper. This isn't found poetry or even collage but possibly related to it. I haven't moved things around so it's still alphabetical. There's scope here for finding new meanings, isn't there? Something worth trying perhaps?

3am argue blackpool blackpools cash chair class come cost council day deckchair deckchairs emro end forward gazette go golden happen id including just mile modern move need new other place police process prom pub resort say seaside seem shame sight spent stock talk time town visitor vital working year

Indeed, in the 21st c., it is difficult to find poetry that does not have some “found” component, the ne plus ultra exemplified by Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day (2003), which is the transcription of the entire text of a single day’s— September 1, 2000— New York Times from beginning to end, consolidating headlines, columns, and ads, so as to make one seamless and surprisingly novel text. Goldsmith himself calls such works “uncreative writing.” His New York Trilogy of 2003– 5 (Weather; Traffic; and Sports) is entirely found text: its transcription of the specific radio broadcasts in a given time period does not include a single word that the poet can call his own.   (The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012), Princeton University Press, Kindle Edition)

 

Goldsmith's thoughts on 'uncreativity' are expanded in his interview, Uncreativity as Creative Practice.

Happy 1000th. Here's to another millennium.

 

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Something helpless

Guest post by David Riley.

I know some who write humorous poetry. Good humorous poetry but only humorous poetry. 

Why? 

Some of these people also don’t read other poets. They give their reasons but what do we think? Are they frightened of what might happen if they try other sorts of poetry? Is it fear - that they won’t be able to do it? Find they have nothing to say? It can’t be because other poets have said more profound things than them - how would they know? They don’t read other poets. Is it that humour is enough, in their eyes, a security blanket that keeps them away from the challenge, keeps them safe?

Does thinking frighten them? A fear that they won’t be up to the task? I’d advise everyone to follow Rilke. Confront those fears.  Try out different styles of poetry and see what your fears are guarding. If that old so and so is right, it’s your most treasured possessions. 

Go on, dig them out. Be a poet.  Don’t just say you are.

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” 

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet 

Portrait of Rilke by Leonid Pasternak

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What we below could not see

A guest post by David Riley

What’s the best poetry about spring? I’ll tell you, it’s my job to pontificate. It’s when humans are, at most, at the edge of things. Take Seamus Heaney’s Rite of Spring, for example. Spring is there and does better than people can, who can only imitate its liberating effects.

Even more, people can be removed from things, as Ted Hughes does in The River in March. His river is an elemental force, it might even be a deity in itself. In Heaney and Hughes there are things the river and Spring can be and do - they don’t stand for something, they are something.

Wordsworth knew it too - his daffodils are beauty on a hillside, whether there are people there to see it or not.

Jane Hirschfield is excellent at showing how nature is really something other. We may dress it up and give it names, develop amnesia every year when the same seasons come around and trot out our same banalities but it is that something of itself, beyond us, that she shows.

Edward Thomas in his many meditations on nature sometimes links human activity and the seasons. At other times, he urges us to take a step back or rather to another position altogether, where we might see nature as other creatures do. Read his Thaw. See what you think. 

Rooks are back again by Alexei Kondratyevich Savrasov

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Not in the now

Here are some more wonderful insights from the fantastic David Riley.

We're the only creatures in the universe with a real humdinger of a sense of the future. That and the past are the places we live in the most, rarely in the here and now. Also, isn't living in the  future always seen as the best? Think of the everyday phrases that have praise for living in the future built in. from forward thinker, planner to "ahead of the curve" and the almost business-speak, "I'm on it." Whole industries are predicated on it, advertising for example, not to mention the multi-trillions in the stock exchanges betting lives on what will happen from the next few seconds to few months. In fact, think of the way time infiltrates language dragging along its simple praise and blame classifications with it. From "he lives in the past" to "old school," there's a whole subtle set of implications as to how labels are placed to sum up others, it's the essence of spin doctoring, sound bites and a modernity based on planning for whatever colour of future your lords and masters think is good for you. They'll indoctrinate you about it on Twitter if that's not out of date yet.

The future is a very egalitarian tyranny, gripping most of us. There's the obnoxious middle class idea of the "gap year" (gap between what exactly - and how come they know there'll be a thing for there to be a gap in?) and the ludicrous notion of youthful hedonism - apparently living for the moment but actually built on ideas about the future (the ant and the grasshopper were both creatures tied to the hands of a clock in someone's head). Or if that nonsense doesn't appeal you could be nostalgic (aww bless), or, "yes nice Christmas, quiet but OK thanks." What do you think of them, eh?

We're also the only creatures we know of with a sophisticated language, tied to time. That's not to say that language changes over time, even though it obviously does but to suggest that in all our thinking, time is there allowing us to make judgements about people based on attitude to time.

And in poetry? Time has been there, implicitly and explicitly, the future doing its job as assistant seducer in time's winged chariot or a place for reminiscence where the clocks have been stopped. Not surprisingly poetry too changes over time - but how much are its attitudes to time itself altered, especially the time as aide to implicit judgement mentioned above? It has the possibility to do so, with its inventive approach to meaning it could stretch the tired metaphors of spin, past and future, give us a new language and new attitudes to each other.

Perhaps we could make new year resolutions to see if we could remake language and thought for the future. Don't put it off for another time.

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Thoughts for Christmas

Here is the second post from David Riley as he covers for the Tuesday Blog

Is poetry always religious?

Is religion always influenced by the politics of the day? 

Therefore, is Christmas poetry always political? 

Do you need to understand religion before you can understand most poetry, from Beowulf to the Canterbury Tales to Eliot? 

Do you need to know the nativity story to understand Coleridge, Rossetti and Wordsworth?

How much Christmas themed poetry have you seen in the shops recently? 

Are poets making Christmas commercial?

Is there extra exposure for poetry at this time of year? 

Does it help poetry?

Are Christmas carols poetry?

Are some more Catholic than Protestant (and vice versa)?

Do they all have the same message?

Is Christmas relevant any more? Is Christmas poetry important?

Is it as saccharine as Christmas card verses?

Are these big questions? 

Happy Christmas.

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Numbers are the closest thing to God

This week the Tuesday Blog has been written by the wonderful David Riley


Numbers are the closest thing to God since the old chap's sad demise in the nineteenth century. Or so some would say. They claim the little fellows have a whole realm to themselves in which they exist independent of our minds and no matter what we do they will always persist in this other world - and no, I'm not making this up, I had a logic teacher who believed such an idea (that's been hanging around since at least the time of the ancient Greeks.) Numbers are  then perhaps one of the most familiar and at the same time strangest of our everyday companions. In our trying to work out what they get up to when we're not looking they've also managed to drive quite a few people round the bend. This special favour is particularly granted to those who dealt with infinities. Yes, plural. Some infinities are bigger than others. Don't ask.

I like numbers even though I'm useless at trying to do anything special with them. I do recognize their importance to us, perhaps their transcendence and that they have more and more influence in the modern day from explaining how the world works to computers and e-commerce. They've also been highly influential in the lives of some of the people I've studied. For example the early astronomer Johannes Kepler believed his work using mathematics allowed him to "think God's thoughts after him."

Interesting enough but what about maths, numbers and the arts? Well for a long time (yes, at least the Greeks again) people have recognised how close numbers and music are for example. In mathematics there are special symbols; there are in music too. They are even closer than this, of course. The way strings and things vibrate is the key to the way Western music has been interpreted since Pythagoras experimented on jars containing  various amounts of liquid and discovered what we call beautiful sounds had a specific link to the amount of liquid the jars contained. The same went for strings, stop them in certain places and the sound changes.

And as for poetry one of the most important things about it is rhythm, much more so than rhyming. As Neil Astley says, "the essence of all poetry has always been rhythm." Most of Shakespeare is written in blank verse, which does not rhyme - but it does have metre - whether the dee dum X 5 of much of the Bard's to the feel of the ballad's driving force. People may  not know much about the technicalities but they know the flow. What makes a good football chant? It doesn't have to rhyme but it does have rhythm and rhythm is all about numbers with a  smattering of beauty and truth, Much the same as those who've played with numbers, poets are on the edge of a wonderful world that they explore and guide us lesser mortals in an exploration of it and ourselves. Will you see what you can find?

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It sits in the middle and knows

On Saturday, we Dead Good Poets met for our monthly workshop.  After a fun word game which involved coming up with the most inventive similes (I failed but not miserably as I now have lots of stolen similes - mwah ha ha), David Riley read an excerpt from Seamus Heaney's Seeing Things (XVIII).  The excerpt was written in tercets with a little internal rhyme and, if memory serves, contained ten syllables per line.  The aspect of the poetry which we all observed was the way Heaney managed to allude to magic throughout his narrative of a visiting rope seller without ever overtly naming it.  The devil was very much in the details. 

For our main writing exercise, we set about trying to write short poems in a similar style to Heaney's, i.e. we would have a list of things to include but we should never name them, rather use the details to allude to their existence.  To this end we started by making lists.  I asked everyone to give me one fictional character, location, object and type of magic.  Here are the results:

Fictional characters

• Mr Pickwick
• Batman
• James Bond
• Raffles (the gentleman thief)
• Willy Wonka
• Mr Rochester
• Madame Bovary
• Heathcliffe
• Miss Marple

Locations

• Blackpool
• Hogwarts
• Hawaii
• Andromeda
• Canada
• Glasgow
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
• Coney Island
• London

Object

• Chainsaw
• Blue John Stone
• Paintbrush
• Dagger
• Football
• Cigarette Lighter
• Fish Tank
• Book
• Quill

Type of Magic

• Witchcraft
• Black Magic
• Close Up Magic
• Numerology
• Necromancy
• Conjuring
• Wizardry
• Kaballah
• Tarot

As I then distributed these in order this meant that someone had to write a poem about a gentleman thief with a dagger on Andromeda using numerology.  Someone else was forced to write a poem about James Bond in Hawaii with a paint brush and close up magic.  Everyone rose to the challenge magnificently, weaving the details in with humour (references to the insertion of a three inch Harris had us in stitches) and beauty (the blood red maple leaves in the Willy Wonka necromancy poem were especially vivid).

There was some talk that I had rigged this challenge as I ended up writing about Miss Marple in London with a quill and tarot.  It does seem a particularly favourable set when compared to Batman at Hogwarts with a piece of Blue John and black magic but the poem which that latter set instigated was so creative that I think I might have preferred something more challenging. 

As I'm not going to be at the open mic event on Friday, I thought I'd share my effort from the workshop.  If you would like to use this exercise to create some poetry, please do.  We'd love to read your work in the comments box.


Divine Mystery

In Whitechapel, hell clings to brick and stone
Grim residue like smog that never lifts
Blue populace wades, ankle deep in death

Behind a window's bubble-spotted eyes
Bone-handled orphans rest in caskets lined
With velvet.  Feathered pens and vessels, cracked.

A desk, marked deep and faded as the day
Is strewn with cups and wands, lovers and wheels
A form, ancient and present, points to change.

Her fingers at the deck, old woman smiles
Reeking of gin and smoke, wrapped tight in tweed
A body's surfaced and she knows the hand.

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Ut pictura poesis. What? Precisely.

Never one to miss an opportunity to exploit an online contact, I sent a message to Bloodaxe's Neil Astley back in April to ask him to recommend a book on poetics for me.  I've read Stephen Fry's Ode Less Travelled and Glyn Maxwell's On Poetry (thanks Jamie!) but beside the more academic books which were recommended at Blackpool & Fylde College, haven't read an awful lot around the subject.  I wanted something to get my teeth into.  His response certainly gave me that:

For reading or writing? For writing, Peter Sansom's Writing Poems. For reading and writing, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics which covers everything you could possibly want to know.
Neil

The former is a brilliant resource for its writing games (think workshop planning) and quick guide to some of the best contemporary poets with reasons why they rock.  This book therefore doubles as a bluffer's guide to the British poetry scene in the 21st century.  It has loads of practical tips, some of which are suitable for new writers wishing to learn the craft and others which give an 'Ohhh, yeah -that's what they're doing' moment for those who have been lingering on the scene for a while and wondering how the best poets do what they do.

The latter is an incredible tome which I dearly wish I'd bought in hard copy rather than for my Kindle.  You know the joy you get from flicking through an encyclopedia and picking out something fascinating at random?  This purchase led to the conclusion that e-books are definitely not superior to print.  There is so much information in this book and flicking through it in order is really unsatisfactory.  I'll try to give you an idea of what it covers:

Yes, that is half of the index page covering Al - An.  It's bloody amazing isn't it?  It gets me all hot and bothered that index.  Blackpool and Fylde doesn't have it in their library catalogue.  Nor does Blackpool Central Library.  I wonder if the wonderful folks at the Library Service could be convinced to order it for their burgeoning population of keen poets? 

As for my own recommendation, I'm going to plump for something a little closer to home.  Sculpted is an anthology edited and devised by the minds behind the North West Poets' group; Lindsey Holland and Angela Topping.  The contents page reads like a who's who of poetry from the north of England and every time I dip into it I end up lost in its pages for an unfeasibly long time.  This list includes Rachel McGladdery, Cath Nichols, David Riley, John Siddique; all poets who have written for the Dead Good Blog at some point.  The many other contributers are on my hit list for the near future.

Honorable mentions must go to the powerhouse of poetry that is Kim Moore (follow her blog for weekly in-depth poetry analysis and why not buy a copy of her book If We Could Speak Like Wolves - it's insightful, funny and full of carefully observed portraits) and V A Sola Smith who I am yet to meet but would love to shake by the hand, if only for the phrase 'the not-yet ghouls, tripping unseen about their fate' from her poem about kids in a seaside town, Poor Fish.  The book has an introduction from David Morley and the front cover bears the following quote from our poet laureate: "The North West is a hotbed of poetry.  If you want to know why, read this book."

Copies of the book can be bought via the Wordpress page.

Now, I don't expect to hear another peep from you until you've read all of the above.  Then we'll talk poetry.

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Viking Blood

 by David Riley

Poets all have Viking blood.

They raid the past as if it were a coastline, digging up the skeletons, making them articulate, singing songs like children playing. They do it with great beauty, rarely looking away from what they find in this history; often from the smallest thing great stories flow. You need look little further than the sections encompassing childhood in Neil Astley's Being Human trilogy of poetry anthologies to scratch the surface of what can be done. They remind us of children and childhood from all sorts of perspectives. Look up Adrian Mitchell's Beattie is Three for eye-watering restrained sentiment and his A Puppy Called Puberty for the laugh out loudness of shared (male) memories.

While these books are full of memories (is that what makes us human?) what passes as recollection there isn't child's play. The stuff of memory is worked and reworked to make it seem as if then is now and is eternal and shared by all. Even when such ideas are born of the uncomfortable or the meaning remains elusive it is something poets won't stop pursuing, showing child's play refracted through their words:

I cannot like the scent
Yet I would rather give up others more sweet
With no meaning, than this bitter one

as Edward Thomas mused on a childhood memory and the mysterious image it recalled. This sort of thing was raised again this week for me, obliquely, at some of the great events at Lancaster Litfest, particularly a talk following a reading by poet and short story writer David Constantine and writer Adam Marek. In response to a question about his writing Adam replied that what people saw in his work was the crust on a great amount that they didn't - but without all of it what was seen would not be as good. Implicitly a lot of what is below the surface was produced in a form of play.

Once again, the idea of memory and reworking surfaced for me. We must have that mass behind us to give rise to what is best. It might be produced in many ways (even play) and can be shared with others - but often it must then be put aside and we must carry on trying to quarry from it the best that we can.

Such things may never be finished but they are rarely ever wasted;Paul Valéry said, "poems are never completed, they are only abandoned." It reminds me of a child's toys and games, left haphazardly while they move on to other things but always there, the skeletons of child's play to support all we go on to do.

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