Recipe Poetry - If I Knew You Were Coming I'd Have Baked A Cake

For the past week, I’ve had Blue Mink’s ‘Melting Pot’ going round in my head. It was a good song back in the day, carrying a message in a poetic recipe form. Unfortunately, the lyrics, seemingly harmless in 1969, are inappropriate for our enlightened PC modern times. I decided not to include them here, but they are easy enough to find on Google.

Instead, I share with you my wonderful birthday cake recipe, made the same way for years and years of family members birthdays, even my own. My sister has made me a cake a couple of times. She’s got a birthday this week, one of those with a ‘0’ on the end and she looks so much younger.

Hands washed, pinny on, oven on 180c, and off we go.

Ingredients:  3 eggs, or 2 eggs and a splash of milk; whipping cream, strawberries and chocolate flake to decorate; 6ozs of self-raising flour, 6ozs of caster sugar, 6ozs of margarine.

Give yourself at least an hour,
Gently sift the finest flour.
Caster sugar is the best
Weighed properly, not just guessed..
Use three fresh eggs, nice free-range
Or two with milk for a change.
Margarine, the best is Stork,
Mashed and softened with a fork.
Beat all in the Kenwood, fast,
‘Til a smooth and shiny cast.
Transfer the mix to cake tins
And bake for twenty-five mins.
Whilst they cool, whip up some cream
And prepare the décor theme.
Strawberry halves, chocolate flake,
For this special birthday cake.

Trust me, it is delicious!

Thanks for reading, Pam x

Read More

Are Songs Poetry? - Yes

 Are songs poetry?

 That’s a broad question and something that my late friend and poet Christo Heyworth had an ongoing gentle debate with. It was concerning the songs of the Moody Blues, both Christo and I being ‘experts’ on their work. I was ‘yes’ because I find the lyrics to most of their songs poetic, depending on the writer, and all of their albums contain a poem by the late Graeme Edge, drummer and a founder member of the band. Graeme’s poems were performed or recorded as the spoken word set to music and often by Mike Pinder. Graeme’s poems which became actual songs include ‘I’ll Be Level With You’ from the Octave album. I showed Christo my prized copy of one of Graeme’s poetry books. As for songs being poetry, he was a definite ‘no’. I couldn’t persuade him otherwise, but we had some great conversations about it at poetry evenings. We discussed other things too, like the paintings of L.S.Lowry and Christo’s visits to poetry events in Much Wenlock, Shropshire. Christo was always excellent company with lots of interesting topics to share. I wonder what he might have thought of my other poetic song choices.

The lyrics of The Smiths, Morrissey, Oasis, Liam and Noel Gallagher, I can read as poetry. Their creative use of language appeals to me and really makes me listen. Liam’s ‘Paper Crown’ and Morrissey’s ‘Every Day is Like Sunday’ are just two examples of what would be a very long list. I was about sixteen when I first saw Raymond ‘Gilbert’ O’Sullivan on Top of the Pops singing ‘Nothing Rhymed’. There he was, an odd looking bloke with an over-sized cap, sounding a bit like George Formby. He captured my attention with the poetry of his words.

Not all songs can work as poems but poems can work as songs, and I don’t just mean The Song of Hiawatha by Longfellow – I can still recite the part I had to learn by heart in the first year of high school, but I’ll spare you that. I will complain that schools don’t include learning poetry by heart or even reading a whole book, from what I can gather. Anyway, that aside, Robert Burns wrote ballads and sang them, ‘My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’, two that come to mind.

Radio DJ and musician, Mike Read, wrote music to accompany some of John Betjeman’s poems. Quote from Wikipedia, “…Thirty of these songs were recorded by artists including Cliff Richard, David Essex, Gene Pitney and Marc Almond for the 2006 various artists’ album Words/Music, and subsequently re-released in 2008 as a double CD titled Sound of Poetry. Read’s production of the musical ‘Betjeman’ based on the above has occasionally been staged for charities, including the Royal Marsden Hospital and Children with Leukaemia.”  One of my favourites is David Essex singing Myfanwy.

With an apologetic nod to Christo, though I'm sure he wouldn't mind and would even expect it, I'll finish where I started with the Moody Blues. This time, John Lodge with 'my song', and to me, a poem.

  

One More Time to Live  -  John Lodge

Look out of my window
See the world passing by
See the look in her eye

One more time to live and I have made it mine
Leave the wise to write for they write worldly rhymes

And he who wants to fight begins the end of time...
For I have riches more than these
For I have riches more than these

Desolation
Creation
Tell me someone why there's only confusion
Evolution

Tell me someone that this is all an illusion
Pollution
Tell me someone
Saturation

Tell me someone
Population
Annihilation
Revolution

Tell me someone why this talk of revolution
Confusion
Tell me someone when we're changing evolution
Illusion

Tell me someone
Conclusion
Tell me someone
Starvation

Degradation
Humiliation
Contemplation
Changes in my life

Inspiration
Elation
Changes in my life
Salvation

Changes in my life
Communication
Compassion
Solution

Look out on the hedgerow
As the world rushes by
Hear the birds sign a sigh

One more tree will fall how strong the growing vine
Turn the earth to sand and still permit no crime
How one thought will live provide the others die
For I have riches more than these
For I have riches more than these

(From the album Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, 1971)

Thanks for reading, Pam x

Read More

Circus - Excitement and Anticipation

Piccadilly Circus, 1972. My friend and I felt like we had landed somewhere exciting. We were staying a long weekend with my family in Roehampton. Encouraged to go out and have fun, we took a bus then a tube and eventually emerged from the Underground at Piccadilly Circus. It was the hottest day ever and we went straight to Boot’s the Chemist for deodorant which we liberally applied in the nearby public convenience. My orange loon pants with navy blue pleats and a navy tank-top was my favourite and most fashionable outfit at the time. The trousers were made of stretch towelling – beach clothing, really – too heavy for such a hot day, but I loved them so much. (Except one night when I wore them to go ice-skating and they soaked up gallons of surface water, but that’s another story.) My friend was dressed more sensibly in shorts. We shopped on Carnaby Street, watched a busker, looked around Soho, sat on some grass in the shade and eventually made our way back to Piccadilly Circus and the tube station for the first part of our return journey to Roehampton.

It was fun when I was seventeen, but London like any major city is too busy, too fast moving and loud for me so I’m not a regular visitor. Exceptions have been made to go to see The Moody Blues a few times at the Royal Albert Hall or the O2 Arena. Well, of course I’d go then. There was another time when there was no holding back.

The Prince Edward Theatre, 1978. Evita. Tickets like gold dust, but lucky me. There is only one Che for me and that is David Essex. No one else can sing ‘Oh What a Circus!’ with such passion, giving everything to the exceptional lyrics of Tim Rice who perfectly captured the media circus of the time.

I was a child when my family moved to Blackpool. One of the first places I remember being taken to is the Tower Circus. Mid 1960s and animals were still a big part of the show, horses, elephants and am I imagining sea lions in the water finale? I don’t remember if lions featured. My favourites were always the clowns with Charlie Cairoli.

At around the age of seven, I latched on to books by Enid Blyton. I discovered that I could read something other than ‘the green reader’ or whatever my school reading book was. Still in the infants, I’d moved on from Janet and John and found that I didn’t need to read out loud to understand the text. Book after book came my way, Secret Seven, Famous Five, lots of the Mystery series, fairy stories, and somewhere in the middle, before the boarding school tales from Malory Towers or St. Clare’s, I read the circus stories, Mr Galliano’s Circus, Hurrah for the Circus! and Circus Days Again. They began with the arrival of the circus folk parading through the town and setting up camp. Excitement and anticipation grabbed me in the first paragraph and carried me along the chapter as the author introduced characters, illustrating each one with her vibrant description as she did all her books and I loved it. Circus Days Again is the only one of the trilogy in my possession. All of my Enid Blyton’s are treasured.

On that long weekend in London almost fifty years ago, someone joked about Piccadilly Circus and how wise we were to come home before dark. We didn’t know what they meant and we didn’t ask because we were two worldly, clever, independent seventeen year olds.

I found this poem:

Piccadilly Circus At Night – Street Walkers

When into the night the yellow light is roused like dust above the towns,
Or like a mist the moon has kissed from off a pool in the midst of the downs,

Our faces flower for a little hour pale and uncertain along the street,
Daisies that waken all mistaken white-spread in expectancy to meet

The luminous mist which the poor things wist was dawn arriving across the sky,
When dawn is far behind the star the dust-lit town has driven so high.

All the birds are folded in a silent ball of sleep,
All the flowers are faded from the asphalt isle in the sea,
Only we hard-faced creatures go round and round, and keep
The shores of this innermost ocean alive and illusory.

Wanton sparrows that twittered when morning looked in at their eyes
And the Cyprian’s pavement-roses are gone, and now it is we
Flowers of illusion who shine in our gauds, make a Paradise
On the shores of this ceaseless ocean, gay birds of the town-dark sea.

D H Lawrence (1916)

Thanks for reading, Pam x

Read More

Windmills - Rhyming in my Mind

I was washing glasses in our pub, hidden away in the ‘still room’ on my regular Friday night and Saturday night stint during the busy Illuminations, singing along to the music that drifted in.

There was a song on the jukebox in the front bar, a haunting melody that forced me to listen and beautiful, poetic lyrics that reached out to me. Any meaning in those words was lost on me, but being an impressionable hippy-ish rock-chick in my mid-teens, I’m proud to say that I learnt it off by heart. It is still up there with my favourites, sung by Noel Harrison.

 

The Windmills of Your Mind

 

Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
Like a snowball down a mountain, or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that's turning running rings around the moon
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind.

 

Like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own
Down a hollow to a cavern where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving in a half forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble someone tosses in a stream
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind.

 

Keys that jingle in your pocket, words that jangle in your head
Why did summer go so quickly, was it something that you said?
Lovers walking along a shore and leave their footprints in the sand
Is the sound of distant drumming just the fingers of your hand?
Pictures hanging in a hallway and the fragment of a song
Half remembered names and faces, but to whom do they belong?
When you knew that it was over you were suddenly aware
That the autumn leaves were turning to the color of her hair!

Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
As the images unwind, like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind.

 

Songwriters: Marilyn Bergman / Michel Legrand / Alan Bergman

 

It was the theme song to The Thomas Crown Affair, a major film at that time, and I wonder if the lyrics might make more sense to me if I actually saw the film, or the more recent remake? It will be something else to do in my retirement.

There’s always fun to be found in doing new things. I’ve lived in Blackpool since 1965, a long time in South Shore, but never travelled on a train from Blackpool South until this year. That rail adventure with my friend took us to Lytham for lunch and a pleasant stroll along the front to the fabulous, white windmill which holds centre stage on the green. Another first. The closest I’d previously been to Lytham Windmill was the main road.

I found this poem,

 

The Windmill

 

 

Behold! a giant am I!
Aloft here in my tower,
With my granite jaws I devour
The maize, and the wheat, and the rye,
And grind them into flour.

I look down over the farms;
In the fields of grain I see
The harvest that is to be,
And I fling to the air my arms,
For I know it is all for me.

I hear the sound of flails
Far off, from the threshing-floors
In barns, with their open doors,
And the wind, the wind in my sails,
Louder and louder roars.

I stand here in my place,
With my foot on the rock below,
And whichever way it may blow,
I meet it face to face,
As a brave man meets his foe.

And while we wrestle and strive,
My master, the miller, stands
And feeds me with his hands;
For he knows who makes him thrive,
Who makes him lord of lands.

On Sundays I take my rest;
Church-going bells begin
Their low, melodious din;
I cross my arms on my breast,
And all is peace within. 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882)

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x

Read More

Balladry - John, Yoko and Lorna

Who would ever really want to be a young teenager again? I look fondly back on those years, well, the good bits, and skip right past the embarrassing bits. There was joy and there was sadness, too much sadness. And far too many restrictions imposed upon me. No, I could not have a cow-bell to wear on a ribbon round my neck and I was correct to assume that going to see the Rolling Stones at Hyde Park was out of the question. I tried to reason my way round that by suggesting that I could stay with our family in Roehampton and someone would take me. No.

I spent a lot of time frowning, sulking and hating everyone. My Nanna hugged me and told me I was at an awkward age and it would pass soon enough. I wasn’t convinced but I didn’t argue with her, I never did. She was my rock. She was one of those strong, salt of the earth, Northern women of my family that I’ve mentioned before. She’d lived through two world wars, personal heartbreak, lost a child in infancy and was soon to lose another daughter. (I thought my mum was getting better at the time.)  She could still put everyone in their place with a steely glare.  I hope she knows how much I loved her. I kept her company watching the world go by from our bay window above the pub. The promenade was full of holiday makers, including groups of ‘flower people’ in bright clothes and bells round their necks. She called them ‘silly daft buggers’, the same as she’d called John Lennon and Yoko Ono when she saw their TV news interviews in bed on their honeymoon.

‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’ seemed to be all we heard from the juke box downstairs.  We always knew what was playing just by the rhythm that thumped through our floor. I would go on to the landing to listen to the words of their story.  The lyrics fascinated me. John and Yoko were doing their own thing and it was ok. 

For a while, I showed my rebellious side more than anything else, but I wasn’t all bad and I could have been worse – I really know that I could have been a lot worse, if not for my Nanna and the ounce of common sense I hung on to.

As an ‘almost rebel’ I would be Lorna in my poem ‘The Ballad of a Lady Jazz Singer’, but I don’t smoke, drink or sing like Janis Joplin and the only bass player I would ever slink off with is John Lodge, an unlikely situation as we’re both happily married to other people.
 

The Ballad of a Lady Jazz Singer

Jazz tempo piano and a bluesy guitar

It’s two a.m. in the Ritzy Bar.

Lorna sips gin through a long, curly straw

As she sits and waits, one eye on the door.

He said he’d be along to see her set

But he’d promised before – never made it yet.

Perched on a bar stool, cigarette in hand,

Minutes away from her spot with the band,

She leans a bit further back in her seat

And her red stiletto taps out the beat.

She’s laughing and swaying, about to begin,

Adrenaline rush, or too much pink gin.

She’s out of her mind, but not really crazy.

Her vision is soft-focus, smoky and hazy.

Tight black dress, short, strapless and low,

Only put on for this kind of show.

She clutches the mic stand, there’s a hint of a smile

Then she bangs out a song in her Joplin-esque style.

Heat and smoke hit hard on her throat

But she stays on key and finds the right note.

Much clapping and cheering, the Ritzy’s alive

Lorna kept singing ‘til quarter to five

Then staggered out happy in the dawning new day

With her bass playing new lover leading the way.

                                                                      PMW

Thanks for reading, Pam x

 

Read More

Cut and Paste

This week on the blog we've been looking at music. I used to think that music had a lot in common with poetry because, at the end of the day, they both have lyrics set to a rhythm but, in trying to piece together the blog today I've noticed that there has always been a lot to learn from music- and that I've always enjoyed learning it, even if I hadn't realised. 

If I told a class of children that poetic analysis might have a lot in common with a club remix, they'd try and eat me alive. I wouldn't get a chance to explain that by unpicking the piece you can work out just what the key parts are and that, given the proper care, they can be highlighted further with an edit. They would probably gawp at me if I asked them whether words have quite the same meaning when not accompanied by a guitar solo, a powerslide or a saxophone. Do these elements of performance translate to poetry and without them, do the lyrics hold true at all or can they be reshaped and take on different values? 

Thinking on these lines led me to compile the kind of list I haven't made since my early twenties. I assembled all the 'influential bands' I could remember, flicked through my records and picked out some of my absolute could not live without artists. Below then, is a compilation of lyrics and words taken from some of my favourite artists- all out of context, all lacking riffs and kicks and all reformed into some kind of cut and paste found, stolen and salvaged poem. 

There are 27 artists in all, with two of them having an extra lyric. I've been nice in alternating the colours when the performer changes so with that in mind, have a go at unpicking the piece below- and don't be using google!

Cut and Paste

I'm so happy 'cause today

I've found my friends ...

They're in my head

Slowly walking down the hall

Faster than a cannon ball

We smoked the last one

An hour ago

I'm pushing an elephant up the stairs

I'm tossing up punchlines that were never there

Get up, stand up

That's how it goes

Everybody knows.

Well, it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe

We gotta move these colour TV's

Smoke some fags and play some pool, 

Pretend you never went to school

We don't need no thought control

The beautiful people

The beautiful people.

Like a drunk in a midnight choir

I've seen fire and I've seen rain

I could be one of your kids, white America

Don't let it go to waste

I love it but I hate the taste

Commencing countdown, engines on.

I don't need your civil war

It feeds the rich while it buries the poor

So if I can shoot rabbits

Then I can shoot fascists

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth

And anyway I told the truth

This is what you get when you mess with us

He's got morning glory, life's a different story

Everything's going jackanory

They call it paradise, I don't know why

You call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye

And you realise then that it's finally the time

To walk back past ten thousand eyes in the line

I'll show you a picture 

A picture of tomorrow

Paradise put up a parking lot

This is our destiny calling now

Smashing up the woodwork tools

Don't think twice, it's alright

Say you stand by your man.

Thanks for reading, S

Read More

In Your Dreams

By Ashley Lister

Oftentimes, whenever I mention to someone that I enjoy writing poetry, they say: “Oh yes! I write song lyrics. That’s the same as writing poetry, isn’t it?”

Honestly, if you listen carefully after someone’s said that statement, you can hear the enamel cracking from the pressure as I grind my teeth together. The composition of poetry and the creation of song lyrics do not involve the same skills. It’s like comparing Leonardo da Vinci’s Sistine chapel with a newly whitewashed lavvy ceiling. Yes, both involve the application of paint to the top of a room – but it is not the same.

To illustrate this point (and I’m aware I’m in contentious territory here) I’ve taken the liberty of copying some song lyrics:

“Dream, dream, dream, dream
Dream, dream, dream, dream
When I want you in my arms
When I want you and all your charms
Whenever I want you, all I have to do is
Dream, dream, dream, dream.”

All I Have to Do is Dream (1958)

Written by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant

Performed by The Everly Brothers

Q: Is this poetry.

A: No. It’s just drivel.

Whilst this employs many of the devices associated with poetry it is not poetry.

It employs repetition. It employs a rhyme scheme. Some might argue that it uses a metrical structure but they’d be wrong. The word dream (sung most famously by the Everly Brothers as ‘Drea-ea-ea-ea-eam’) is not metrically correct unless the speaker has some sort of larynx problem, or a very unusual stutter that falls on vowels (which would be unusual because the majority of stuttering occurs on consonants). Even so, this would be a sign of disability rather than a metrical scheme.

Q: Does it express a poetic sentiment?

A: Only to imbeciles and the clinically deranged.

The persona of this verse is using the word dream repeatedly. It could be said that he or she is using the word repeatedly to foreground their obsession with an unnamed fetish to the extent where he or she is dreaming their life away as they constantly think about this person.

More accurately it could be said that this is sexist twaddle and indicative of an unhealthy mindset.

The persona is patently male. The persona wants to physically possess the (female) object of the song (I want you in my arms/I want you and all your charms). From this we can see there is no poetic device in use. This is not a metaphor. He simply wants her in his arms. She has no name or identity beyond being the object of his psychotically unwavering lust. In some regards it’s quite disturbing that the persona here is so obsessed. Clearly he wants her in his arms solely for the purposes of sexual exploitation. And I’m assuming here that the word charms (in the second line quoted here) is a euphemism for her fanny.

I could go on to analyse this in further depth but I suspect I’m already annoying fans of the wonderful Everly Brothers so I’ll simply say there are some good songs out there. But writing songs is not the same as writing poems and I think I’ve just proved as much.

Read More

Paradise Oskar: Da Da Dam

Last year, after much persuading from Shaun, I sat down to watch Eurovision (he also likes to watch Mamma Mia! The Movie in sing-along mode). I grumbled and complained, as I usually do when I don’t get things my way, and Shaun made those puppy dog eyes that make me feel guilty.

A year on, and Shaun wishes he’d never forced me to watch 2011’s Eurovision. He wishes that I’d never seen Finland’s entry. That a singer-songwriter with a guitar hadn’t walked onto the stage singing about saving the world. He wishes that I hadn’t heard the lyrics – and loved them. That I’d forget the artist’s name (like you’re meant to). He wishes that I’d never discovered Paradise Oskar. That I hadn’t downloaded the whole album. He wishes that he could delete it from my ipod...

...Because for the last year this is what I’ve been listening to:

Read More