Chance Lead Me

I’m going cycling tonight. I don’t know where but I rarely do. Fellow cyclists, planning their routes in exhaustive detail, regard this behaviour as morally suspect but it’s my normality. I’ll set off around five from Broughton Interchange and, depending which slip-lane is running freer, head north or south on the motorway. After that, it’s down to the way the light plays on the hills – if Pendle catches my eye, I’ll swerve off at the Tickled Trout. On the northbound option, the Kentmere fells might make a pleasing grouping and it’s off at the Kendal turn for a wrestle with the stony Lakeland passes of Garburn and Gatesgarth.

 

That makes logical sense when you’re dodging the capricious weather of Northern England. It would, after all, be foolishly intransigent to head up the rain-sodden and cloud-capped Howgills with some specious allegiance to Plan while the neighbouring Longsleddale Fells bask in sun. But it’s more than practicality – the experiences taste the sweeter for the wrappers being removed with eyes closed. So tonight I might encounter a fox slinking into the bracken, a deer browsing the edges of a cool wood, or a dazzling swathe of red campion. Whatever it is, it will be better, looser, lighter without the dread burden of Expectation.

You’re a grown-up, so you know how these things work: everything’s a metaphor for writing, yes? I’m inordinately fond of Robert Frost’s aphorism, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” and we’ve all encountered over-plotted novels or poems so corseted by form they make you long to scratch in sympathy. So dive in to your poem, take a turn that surprises you, shift register when your reader has just got comfortable and remember that everything is the fleeting, chance result of a trillion caprices. That Dylan fella put it well: "I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me."

 

Here’s a poem from way back, reflecting on a rock-climbing experience and trying to make peace with disorder. The triumph/disaster line is swiped from Kipling, of course. These days, you can’t be too careful with citing sources. 

Pebble

Fingers scrabble upward, Brailing for texture.

On the blank slate: no hyphen of a welcome ledge,

just this full-stop pebble - hard, conclusive,

a goitred eyeball staring, Odin-wise. 

Now I see where necessity leads me:

to tug the world down like a Roman blind,

commit all that I am to this obstinate fragment,

stretch, trembling, into a hopeful sky. 

I ponder how securely this nugget is bonded.

Two futures open: triumph, disaster

(neither impostors, the distinction concrete).

 

To…

 

pluck the jewel between surprised fingers,

catch the critical eye of cartoon gravity

and scatter my flesh among distant boulders

 

or…

 

find it firmly-founded; reach and seize the windswept rim.

 

But spin the clock the other way, watch the birches recede,

see ice sheets pulsate across the land,

oceans spill over and continents cleave

to find this land, Sahara-scorched, Pangaean.

 

A storm-tossed pebble lies loose on a beach.

Emergent from the shimmer: three-horned beasts.

Will they swagger past, snorting stale breath on primitive bromeliads?

Or will one lumber near, impose its thunderous mass,

tamp the pebble down, cemented for a billion frosts?

 

Two pasts converge where two futures part

and here am I,

nailed to the crosshair of decision,

then, now and always.

 

 

In a postscript, chance led me to Troutbeck and Ambleside last night. There was a deer – a young roe fawn curled up in the grass. Also a close encounter with a heron and a cackling yaffing-gale. A pretty good haul on the wildlife front but topped by a human encounter: a last-minute decision to turn down a lane caused me to bump into a Garstang friend (he lives just down my street, in fact).

Norman Hadley

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Direction

If I ask you to get lost, I’ll trust you not to take offence. Nowadays, any smartphone can commune with a secret cabal of satellites to plot your location to seventeen decimal places. But it helps, every now and then, to have no omniscient voice advising you to take the next left. Just as closing your eyes heightens the other senses, unhooking from the safety-line of modernity opens up our awareness of other cues, whether it's keeping Venus dead-ahead or Parlick somewhere to our left.

 

The word "lost" carries so many negative connotations, right up to the euphemistic sense of losing a relative. But writers, of all people, should welcome the exploration of unfamiliar terrain. Do it - really do it.

 

I have form on this, having spent a good deal of time wandering high places in deep snow, often in mist, frequently at night and sometimes all three. This level of risk is clearly not for everyone. But it's taught me a lot about navigation and a little about the companion of my adventuring.

Lost

The hill slunk under a quilt of drizzle

and I within, befogged,

zombie-stomping

towards indecision

The Other voice intoned “I know the way.

I will lead you on; slot within my bootprints.

The harbour that I know will take you in”

I swallowed all that I was told, so

set off at a servile trot,

noticing the prints went further in

to swirling mists and crystalled rocks

and places where the air was whisper-thin

to cut my throat with jags of frost,

admitting, in the vault of higher thoughts,

both I and I are lost.

 

Obviously, finding our way out of an apparently hopeless situation can give us confidence to take risks with our writing. Don't know where your poem is going? Strike out from your familiar paths of form and imagery. Struggling to engage your reader? Swap first-person for third or third for second. Sonnet too plodding? Start at the bottom of the page or the right-hand edge. Unlike unscripted mountaineering, the worst-case scenario probably won't require the RAF to scramble a Sea King.

 

If you're a methodical writer, try hurtling. Insiders of Jo Bell's "52" project will already be familiar with this concept. https://fiftytwopoetry.wordpress.com/ It doesn’t just mean to career wildly down the page with abandon, though that's a vital component. Write a poem, ready to show to other people, in five minutes. What’s that you say? Oh, all right, maybe ten.

 

It’s a remarkable discipline because it forces your inner editor to get the hell out of the room. That just leaves your subconscious armed with a stubby pencil and an innocent blank page. It should go without saying that the subconscious is precisely the part of the reader that you want to reach with your poetry - the purity of peer-to-peer communication.

 

In the “52” Facebook group, we achieve this by releasing prompts into the wild at 7:22 every Thursday, with extra kudos for poems posted before 7:30. "52" is not taking on any more members now but local groups can mimic some of its success in workshops.

 

So go on. Get lost. Somehow, you’ll find your way home.

 

Norman.

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Embracing the Dark

It’s a small shock every year. The leaves rust and fall, the hours of daylight flutter down with them. You can do the maths: it’s all to do with the tilt and sway of our little northern merry-go-round, now shrinking away from the light. As October ends, Greenwich compounds geometry by stealing an hour of evening - a typical London trick.

It’s probably worth pondering a while just how far north we are. We started out as an equatorial mammal, as any competent anthropologist will tell you. Our early years were spent in East Africa, with the sun scorching the tops of our heads as we knapped hand-axes in the Olduvai Gorge.

But we were restless. We wandered. Owing to the imbalanced scatter of the continents, most of us wandered north. Each step we took dragged the noonday sun lower in the sky, until the very northernmost of us lost sight of it for months at a time.

Fleetwood lies at 54 degrees north; from here, the Tropic of Cancer is more than twice as distant as the Arctic Circle. There may be no truly sunless days as there are in Svalbard, but the crazy tilt of the planet makes winter here more than a passing inconvenience.

Now, the following assertion seems to me such a statement of the obvious that I disdain to offer evidence - writers are disproportionately prone to winter blues, often debilitatingly so. Some folk regard the long stretch of dark and cold as an empty, agonising wait for the first daffodil spears to poke from the council beds. So when I say “try not to,”  I know I’m pushing against a Fylde tide.

Look at it this way. Even if you’re not a fan of the cold and the wet, there is every reason to embrace the dark. There’s a stillness, a coolness, a thinkingness about it. Writers trade in the currency of the senses and darkness suppresses the shouty dominance of the visual dollar, allowing the others to swim into the gap. To sit in the dark is to hear the dark, to feel its cool tingle on your cheek, to taste the salt of it and smell its earthy musk.

It’s all right for David Gilmour. With all those Pink Floyd royalties, he can go to a nice warm island. He can probably buy it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWbNmcRO1Tc

But I like his refrain about letting the night surround you. Do it. Few things we encounter are fatter with metaphor. And, if you can make peace with it, write a love poem to the night. Do that, too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-nHUuJH9IQ

Norman Hadley

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