Showing posts with label Ringo37. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ringo37. Show all posts
Friday, 26 February 2010
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
A Favourite Place: Winter Hill -- by Ringo37
This is Winter Hill in the west Pennines, near Bolton in Lancashire. A desolate spot made more desolate by its history: the murder of a Scottish travelling salesman there in 1838 is commemorated by the Scotsman's Stump, and a still-sadder plaque on the transmitter building marks the site where 38 people died when their plane came down in a blizzard (in February 1958, a month with tragic resonance, to say the least, for the north-west).
Nowadays it can be a popular spot for outdoorsy types. There's a nice triptych of increasingly forbidding hills - Rivington Pike (where Andy Flintoff used to be seen puffing his way up and down during his rehab months), Winter Hill and Great Hill - for a mini-three-peaks ramble, and a 1,000ft telecoms transmitter that people who are interested in telecoms transmitters like to come and look at...
As a Yorkshireman I should probably be beaten to death with cricket bats for suggesting this. But I love it.
photo by Henry Brett at www.flickr.com.
Friday, 8 May 2009
For RJDL, March 2009 -- by Ringo37
.
The city’s empty. Its knackered truths –
Rhubarb sheds, the Trinity, a sandstone civic quarter,
Windblown Justice on the courthouse roof –
Are worth less than ever. The Calder water
Runs clearer than it did – but symbolism’s
Dishonest, and transparency, in any case,
Is just a word for emptiness. Perhaps it isn’t
So empty, then: the sourness is just displaced –
The river runs clear but in the town
The currents aren’t so blameless nor so bright.
It would be nice to think that this was down
To negligence – to a foreman’s thoughtless oversight:
Some lever pulled in error, some sluice or weir
Breached or broken. It would be better, and not so hard to take,
If all of this was inadvertent; there would be less to fear,
And to forgive, if all this – all this shit was just someone’s mistake.
Yes, I could get along in a world unpremeditated and unmeant.
But in the world’s patterns I discern design; I apprehend intent.
.
The city’s empty. Its knackered truths –
Rhubarb sheds, the Trinity, a sandstone civic quarter,
Windblown Justice on the courthouse roof –
Are worth less than ever. The Calder water
Runs clearer than it did – but symbolism’s
Dishonest, and transparency, in any case,
Is just a word for emptiness. Perhaps it isn’t
So empty, then: the sourness is just displaced –
The river runs clear but in the town
The currents aren’t so blameless nor so bright.
It would be nice to think that this was down
To negligence – to a foreman’s thoughtless oversight:
Some lever pulled in error, some sluice or weir
Breached or broken. It would be better, and not so hard to take,
If all of this was inadvertent; there would be less to fear,
And to forgive, if all this – all this shit was just someone’s mistake.
Yes, I could get along in a world unpremeditated and unmeant.
But in the world’s patterns I discern design; I apprehend intent.
.
Sunday, 12 April 2009
Wednesday, 4 March 2009
Prosaic -- by Ringo37
.
Poetry nudges me: you know, poetry says.
You know all of this is irreducible,
Unmanageable, unwieldy, and unfit for prose
(“How about for amateurs?” I want to quip –
But know that poetry, though she loves her puns,
Would fail to see the joke).
Poetry’s relentless: what you feel, now, and what you see –
They’re mine, poetry insists. Where beauty is concerned –
Bandit-masked magpies bounce and glimmer verdigris
In tumbling March light, and clouds, reflected in many-angled windowpanes,
Are copper, now, and cobalt, now, and now the colour of clear tea –
Poetry is proprietorial.
“And what about - ?” – but poetry’s ahead of me.
Yes, all that stuff, too: what’s awful, what’s deep-sunk –
What rolls through you like ocean-currents, riptidal, cold, bonegrey,
Roll through an ocean: over wrecks and bones –
These things that make you (“Me?” I ask – yes, you, she says)
Not weep or sing but, rather, summon something more:
That make you want to answer in a manner consonant in scale with
The way the world expresses things –
These have a sort of beauty too, she smiles – that is, if I say they do.
I smile back at poetry. “And do you say so?” Poetry says she does.
And if they’re beautiful, these things, then poetry
Will take them for her own.
“It’s all the same,” I argue. “Prose and poetry: neither’s real,
Neither’s true, and each is only compromise, is humbug, is a sham,
And furthermore,” I say (for I am drunk and not articulate), “they’re both
Just words, is all they are. Life does not have words –
And nor does life need all that scaffolding
Of scansion, stanzas, rhythm, rhyme and tone – no, life has a high style all its own, and words aren’t worth a damn.”
I fall silent, then, feeling like that Cromwell-era poet who (though Godly) railed against his God,
Until, with gentleness ineffable, rebuked: “Child!”, God says. But poetry
Says nothing –
So I again declare: “Life has no words, and has no need of words”, and poetry says, “Nor has poetry.”
I (being drunk and not articulate) have no quick reply – but think (as I have thought before) that this
Is just the sort of damned confounding thing that poetry often likes to say.
.
Poetry nudges me: you know, poetry says.
You know all of this is irreducible,
Unmanageable, unwieldy, and unfit for prose
(“How about for amateurs?” I want to quip –
But know that poetry, though she loves her puns,
Would fail to see the joke).
Poetry’s relentless: what you feel, now, and what you see –
They’re mine, poetry insists. Where beauty is concerned –
Bandit-masked magpies bounce and glimmer verdigris
In tumbling March light, and clouds, reflected in many-angled windowpanes,
Are copper, now, and cobalt, now, and now the colour of clear tea –
Poetry is proprietorial.
“And what about - ?” – but poetry’s ahead of me.
Yes, all that stuff, too: what’s awful, what’s deep-sunk –
What rolls through you like ocean-currents, riptidal, cold, bonegrey,
Roll through an ocean: over wrecks and bones –
These things that make you (“Me?” I ask – yes, you, she says)
Not weep or sing but, rather, summon something more:
That make you want to answer in a manner consonant in scale with
The way the world expresses things –
These have a sort of beauty too, she smiles – that is, if I say they do.
I smile back at poetry. “And do you say so?” Poetry says she does.
And if they’re beautiful, these things, then poetry
Will take them for her own.
“It’s all the same,” I argue. “Prose and poetry: neither’s real,
Neither’s true, and each is only compromise, is humbug, is a sham,
And furthermore,” I say (for I am drunk and not articulate), “they’re both
Just words, is all they are. Life does not have words –
And nor does life need all that scaffolding
Of scansion, stanzas, rhythm, rhyme and tone – no, life has a high style all its own, and words aren’t worth a damn.”
I fall silent, then, feeling like that Cromwell-era poet who (though Godly) railed against his God,
Until, with gentleness ineffable, rebuked: “Child!”, God says. But poetry
Says nothing –
So I again declare: “Life has no words, and has no need of words”, and poetry says, “Nor has poetry.”
I (being drunk and not articulate) have no quick reply – but think (as I have thought before) that this
Is just the sort of damned confounding thing that poetry often likes to say.
.
