I am old now, for a poet
Having four hundred and thirty two poems
Scrawled in my name.
What memory stirred, I wrote down;
Whatever filled my eyes, filled my thoughts
And I wrote that too; whatever I saw,
Stretched from here to the edge of sight,
I looked for the truth of it
And wrote down what I found.
And now, I have made
A database of all my words.
Pitiless, pitiful, words.
I go on with it, adding and adding,
As if any record, any marginal note,
Anything, however obliquely remembered,
Must be better than a string of letters
Chiseled on a headstone.
A fat lot of good. Snuff to a skull.
Words are electronically transcribed,
Consigned by my dancing fingers,
Codified and blogged into the internet night.
Some will glance, maybe,
To fleetingly approve,
Others will skim past with a smirk or nod
Or with a casual click, like…
…or forget.
Some poets have books.
Fame of sorts
Makes them visible
For a time.
Out of sight,
I squirrel away
What I can
When I remember,
While I can.
Everything, though, ebbs away
Deleted by time or accident,
Or just ignored.
Words after all.
© BH, 2016
This followed my writing the poem ‘Boy’ after I heard Simon Armitage reading some of his own work on the radio.
I’d begun to wonder if, like me, he has a database of all his poems. Maybe, maybe not. But he’s well-known and I presume plenty others record his particular gifts to posterity.
For my part, being a complete unknown, I keep track of every scribbled jot.
Before I wrote the last two, I had four hundred and thirty two poems. Two more now! I should reach five hundred by late 2017.
By the way, as if by chance, the title, 432, echoes 4:32, the time at which the village clock in Spike Milligan’s Puckoon was perpetually stuck.
In 1972 several of us held an Exhibition of Modern art in Peterhead Museum. During it’s week-long run, some of us crept up the tower and set the already stopped clock to 4:32. Another homage to Mr Milligan.
Oh, and the line ‘snuff to a skull’ is my preferred translation of the last line of Hans Arp’s poem ‘Kaspar is Dead’ (translatd by Ralph Mannheim) in the Thames and Hudson’s ‘Dada’ (pp24-25).
Click the image to read it.
One of a sequence -
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