Today is World Poetry Day, by a decision of Unesco in 1999.
The UK has its own National Poetry Day, which is observed on the first Thursday in October. But that doesn’t stop us joining in the world version as well.
Next year, we of East Anglia Bylines might do this with due note that it’s about endangered languages and linguistic diversity. This year, we have simply mentioned the 2024 theme ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’, in a late appeal for material by poets across our east of England patch, and we’re happy to showcase their work.
John Mole
John Mole is a poet and jazz clarinettist. For many years a teacher and co-editor with Peter Scupham of The Mandeville Press, he has compiled many programmes for BBC radio and reviewed for various journals including the TLS. He is president of Ver Poets and his latest collection is Keeping in Step (Shoestring Press, 2023)
Notes for a memoir
Home from school for the summer holiday I’d take my father’s walking stick to stride across the Quantocks swiping at heather, often thigh-deep in bracken, with Wordsworth and Coleridge to keep me company as my steady footsteps became the emergent trochee and iambic of a poem in my head then back to replace the stick, to brush myself down and add a few more lines of apprentice work to those already waiting in a surreptitious notebook I kept beside the bed and shared with nobody apart from that romantic pair who looked it over when I searched in dreams for their approval.
Cynthia Kitchen
Cynthia is a member of Ver Poets and has been published in anthologies and magazines over the years plus one slim volume with Headland Publications.
Timelapse
The first trains may be the last and all may fall to dust You have always known, the constancy of steam, the times we were sealed into one carriage, a huge leather belt hanging magnificently under the window fit to hold up a giant's trousers. The woman snuffling, the man smoking swaying scenes of Scottish Highlands token stags above uncut moquette, even a mirror to adjust your hat before the stumble to a seething platform, then your half turn to view the jolting/clanking future/past.
Terry Jones
Terry has been chair of Ver Poets and runs workshops / talks on poetry to community groups. He is now active in Reading Stanza and attends the Reading Poets’ Cafe. The poem, he says, is about important role models in his life who happened to be called Basil.
The Basils
You are as likely to know an Osric As a Basil, but they did exist back then, In the hedgerows, avoiding the raptors, Their frames, in time, sinking into the earth Of which they became a portion, waiting, For a hatted academic to break Daylight in, delighted at a jaw, fragment of brain pan or a tell-all tooth. I could write a learned paper On this sub-species from my own field trips, Observing from my hide as they opened a book On a lectern, spoke, glanced my way, before Leaving in a swish of cassock or corduroy, My abdicated kings: Cottle, Tolputt, Kershaw.
A.C. Clarke
A.C. Clarke has published five collections and six pamphlets, two in collaboration. Her most recent publication isWedding Grief(Tapsalteerie 2021). Her sixth collection, Alive Among Dead Stars, is due to be published by Broken Sleep Books in December 2024.
Disillusion
Loosely based on Paul Éluard’s ‘Je t’aime’ I don’t blame the touts who saw me coming, shoving their fake tickets for total thrill in the Tunnel of Love under my nose – I rose to the bait only to find their patter a lurex jacket hastily flung over a moth-eaten sweater. If I had to choose anyone to blame it would be me for being an easy touch and wanting to be. Oh innocent lusts of my green days when I knew nothing, expended time and tenderness on cut-price counterfeit unable to winnow chaff from wheat, apprehending chime by slow chime the knell of all my fantasies.
David Van-Cauter
David is a personal tutor based in Hitchin, Herts. He is a founder member of Poetry ID (Letchworth). His pamphlet “Mirror Lake” was published by Arenig in 2019. Recent poetry successes online: Ink, Sweat and Tears, Waltham Forest Open, Poetry Society Stanza competition. His film-poem “Smoke & Mirrors” can be viewed here.
The Poetry of Climbing
Rule 1:
Do not take on the mountain
unless you are prepared.
Start small – consider a tree
or a brick wall –
These are more relatable,
easier to quantify.
8000 metres – insurmountable.
10 or 20 – that’s a breeze
and well within parameters.
If you cannot comprehend a brick, a leaf,
you should avoid the distant, foggy peaks
of intangible ambiguity.
Rule 2:
It is not a mountain – it’s a metaphor.
Wordsworth didn’t spin his rowing boat around
for a lump of rock.
It is alive and should be treated with
humility, respect and fear.
Do not hack away with your pick
and kick your spiked boots in – instead
caress and tease its secrets free
with gentle fingertips and whispering –
you might learn something.
Rock is softer than you think.
Rule 3:
Patience. It’s a game you’re destined to repeat
over and over, the path upwards refined
before its revelation.
A vertical cliff lacks all perspective,
you are in the hands of gravity
and time is meaningless.
Stop and breathe, take in the view,
appreciate the journey.
Rule 4:
This is not the poetry of falling –
do
not
fall
Julie Mullen
Julie Mullen is a poet and writer living in Hertfordshire. She spent her working life in a library and loves books and reading. She also sings in a local choir and attempts yoga. She has recently completed an MA and MfA in Creative Writing and has work published online.
Dreaming tracks
The stone road spreads across fields of rain lit by a gingerbread moon, night-dark drips from trees, bends blooms to slumber. Come, take my hand, walk with me under this steep purple sky, hear the owl’s call a taloned blur against the dusk. Now we could be anywhere moving through one skin to the next swapping sleep for dreamscape, familiar scenes recast. It’s the same earth we walk, from pathway to thin pines, thirty years back, three hundred chalk pits lie beneath skyscrapers. Under pavements, hills buried water courses, memories of marshlands wrapped in tissue thin slips of time. Our past falls around us in layers, in drifts along the dreaming tracks.
Aidan Baker
Aidan Baker is a retired librarian, and now a member of the East Anglia Bylines editorial team. His published poems can be found at his Blurtmetry blog. This poem is a respectful parody of W.B. Yeats’ “To be inscribed at Thoor Ballylee”
A long way after Yeats
My wife, the physicist Dr Clare Sansom, by quantities of email for automatic writing, share of her Goodmans midi hi-fi tower, sound of her beating heart, and power of love, restored this shattered male; and may her memory remain when I am ruin once again.
Ver Poets
Ver Poets have been meeting in St Albans since the 1960s and are currently developing a programme of guest readings, workshops and open-mic events in the city. These are open to all and mostly free. Members nationwide can take part in regular online workshops, in addition to receiving three newsletters a year and a monthly e-letter. The well-established Ver Poets Open Competition is currently accepting entries until the end of April. For more information about the events and Competition, as well as membership and the other benefits it brings, see their website at: https://verpoets.co.uk.
