Metroland

I belong to Metroland, a group of poets most of whom live in Buckinghamshire, although some come from much farther afield. We meet monthly in Amersham, and last night I went along for the first time since October. The usual format is to spend about an hour and a half on reading the work of published poets (although occasionally there is a 'forum' in which a member talks about a topic of poetic interest), and then, after refreshments, to devote a similar time to workshopping members' poems. Last night we had been asked to bring copies of poems by poets whose surnames began with T, U or V (we work our way throught the alphabet so as to avoid repetition as much as possible), and I took Edward Thomas's Lights Out, written in 1917 just before he was killed at Arras. I thought most people would know the poem, but nobody did, and it was a popular choice. Later I read an untitled poem I had written for Sue, intending to amend it in the light of friends' comments, but unless people were being tactfully charitable (Yeah, probably, Dad) they reckoned it was fine as it was, and were almost embarrassingly effusive. Some of these people have had much more work published than I have, and really know what they are talking about, in my opinion at least, so their views matter to me. When I got home I gave the poem to Sue with the notes I'd made on others' comments scribbled all around it, but today I've printed a pristine copy and written a little dedication to her. It's given us both a lift. Here it is.

Now it is clear that we reached the highest ground
A while back, although neither of us said so.
For some time I have felt that different muscles
Were taking the strain. We have come by a winding route,
But hardly noticed how far, as we climbed and climbed,
Our upturned faces always searching ahead
To pick out the path, avoid the dangerous scree,
And we rarely stopped to rest or look around us.
Whatever we missed, the flowers to left and right,
The tiny lakes below, the neighbouring crests
Of other peaks we might have climbed instead,
We can tacitly accept it is too late now,
But we shall not soon forget the many moments
That made the climb worthwhile: the frozen pools,
The sudden stag, the eagle, poised to stoop,
Cloud-shadows moving over rock and heather.
And now, as we go down into the valley,
In the hours before the light begins to fail
There will be time to pause and enjoy the way
The grey gives way to green, and the lower crags
Are lit by slanting rays, and we shall know
That we have made the most of the last of the sun.





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The end of Scryfa

This week the twelfth and (probably) final number of Scryfa was published. I received my copies with mixed feelings. As I had hoped, it included my long poem Men of Great Spirit, about the voyage from Newlyn to Australia last year of the Spirit of Mystery, commemorating the 1854 Mystery voyage. It had already been published on the website of Pete Goss, the captain of Spirit, but it was good to see it in hard copy. On the other hand, this was the end of Simon Parker's attempt, for the time being anyway, to publish a series of selections of the best new work by Cornish writers. He and it have done me proud, for I have had a poem or a story in six of the twelve numbers, including the first and the last. I am sad, though, to see Scryfa meet the same fate as the two series of the Cornish Review, and for similar financial reasons. Over a hundred writers, many of them new and/or unknown and otherwise unpublished, have seen a major outlet discontinued. To use the Cornish dialectal expression of a bygone age, 'Woss do wed'n?' ('What can be done about it?') Nothing, I imagine, at least for the foreseeable future. But that doesn't mean that the writing will stop. No doubt other opportunities will arise eventually.

So what is a haiku/

According to Higginson, it is simplistic to say that a haiku has 17 syllables in three lines of 5-7-5. Japanese poets do not count syllables but onji, sound symbols reflecting phonetic characters. For example, manyoshu has three syllables but six onji. Traditional haiku have two rhythmical units, one of about 12 onji and one of about five, the break between them often marked with a kireji, or cutting word. As the break between the two units can occur after the first five onji or the first twelve, the normal rhythm is 5-7-5 onji. The traditional haiku (hokku)form originated in the incomplete opening stanza of a longer poem, a renga, and the haiku form is rhythmically incomplete. Haiku often omit features of normal grammar, such as complete sentences and complicated verb endings. All this means that although there are both Western and Japanese 17-syllable, three-line 5-7-5 haiku, as well as many other haiku-type poems which adhere neither to this convention nor to the strict traditional Japanese form, there is far more to the construction of such a poem than has been assumed by teachers such as me and taught to generations of English-speaking schoolchildren.

correction

So much for 'traditional form'. I omitted a word from my haiku, which should have read:

do not threaten me
with your beautiful ice-sword
you will soon be gone

Haiku

My son gave me Basho's Complete Haiku and Higginson's Haiku Handbook for Christmas and birthday, both excellent reads. The best haiku a pupil wrote for me, years ago, was a riddle:

formed by falling snow/it drifts towards the dark sea/a silver ribbon (a river or stream)

This keeps to the traditional (but now often ignored) 5-7-5 syllable structure and makes the once obligatory seasonal reference. It also avoids repetition of any complete syllable sound. I now have a seven-foot icicle stretching from a drainpipe to the roof of the front porch, so thought I would attempt a traditional-form haiku:

do not threaten me/beautiful ice-sword/you will soon be gone

A haiku master would write perhaps a thousand in his life, of which a dozen might be highly regarded, so maybe I need to do more work on this. I find it remarkable that when Basho was at the height of his powers and output in the second half of the 17th century, Milton was writing Paradise Lost.

Last year I devised a Cornish verse form, the bezant, and will post a few next time.

New year, new blog

Happy New Year to anyone who has stumbled upon the first of an approximately weekly series of posts on my new blog. Only time will tell whether what a 68-year-old Cornishman living in Buckinghamshire has to say will be of interest, but whether you are Cornish or not, there will be a wide variety of subjects week by week. Anyone for whom the mention of Newlyn, the Mennaye Field, Tolcarne (school or pub), H.D.G.S., Scryfa, the Mystery, the Spirit of Mystery or the Rosebud has any meaning is likely to find a kindred spirit here, but equally, those who are interested in writing, Arsenal or the theatre may feel at home. From time to time I shall publish extracts from my own work as a writer or comment on some topic that interests me, and I shall welcome comments, preferably polite but not necessarily agreeing.

As it's New Year's Day, here's a brief nostalgic detail (and I'll try not to include too many of those). Does anyone remember the days when boats welcomed the new year by sounding their horns, as in Newlyn harbour in the 1940s and 1950s? I wonder whether anyone heard such a sound anywhere last night. Next time I'll post some poetry.