
• Christopher Major is a regular contributor to IS&T and this latest piece will have strong resonances for anyone traveling around the UK during the summer holiday period.
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Saturday, May 31
by
Charles Christian
on Sat 31 May 2008 09:36 AM BST
![]() • Christopher Major is a regular contributor to IS&T and this latest piece will have strong resonances for anyone traveling around the UK during the summer holiday period. Friday, May 30
by
Charles Christian
on Fri 30 May 2008 05:54 PM BST
West End
People huddle in doorways, sharing cigarettes and stories, hugging themselves against the frost, the city and the evening light. Alone as they find that they share the same favourites. Alone as they struggle to find the right laugh to wear. A few hours later, with a lump in his throat, while rattling home at the back of a night-smothered train; Remembering her in the glare of the window, he wondered if she had listened to a word he said. • Simon Freedman lives in the UK, and when he's not scribbling, he's usually strumming. His poetry has been published in The Recusant and The Beat. Visit his website at www.myspace.com/simonfreedman Thursday, May 29
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 29 May 2008 06:53 PM BST
Man With Bread
The face of labour on the street Some days, bread warm from the oven makes it easier to forget I’ve nothing else to eat. But not today. Not after being told to wait while the baker’s wife helped those women in expensive coats who were in a hurry to choose pastries for their tea, as if making a fuss is the same as working hard. I could feel them looking down their noses at my boots and overalls, noticing how dirty they were, which is true this close to the weekend. Probably reckoned I smell bad, too. I could tell from their faces they were asking themselves how someone like me has the brass neck to use the same bakery they do and wondering if they should haggle a discount or threaten to take their custom somewhere else. When I see myself the way people like them see me, grubby from work and needing the shave I can’t have before I go on shift because there’s no hot water till the fire’s alight and I leave home too early for that, it rubs in how hard it is for people who don’t have money to keep their self-respect. It’s every day and all of life This’ll sound ridiculous, it does to me really, but what hurt most wasn’t queue-jumpers making me wait – I know how hard the baker and his missus work, how they need their better-off customers more than the likes of me – it was seeing those women stare at the safety pin I use when it’s cold to keep my jacket closed where there isn’t a button. People like that, they can’t imagine not having the proper clothes for every kind of weather. How did I deal with it? The best way I could. I had enough money for a bread roll, so I jingled the coins as if I had a pocketful while they stood pointing like greedy kids at what they’d decided to buy and I looked straight through them. Not much else I could do, was there? No point mouthing off, it would’ve ended up turning nasty. Anyway, my break’s only half an hour and working outside all day, I needed a piss more than a row, so I let it go. You have to, don’t you? You just have to. People become what they become • Ken Head's poetry weblog is at www.listeningforlight.blogspot.com and he'll appreciate your dropping in to browse and maybe leave a comment if you're passing. Wednesday, May 28
by
Charles Christian
on Wed 28 May 2008 05:15 PM BST
We don't often cover news stories but in the light of my recent departure from a creative writing course, I thought these comments made by the novelist, screenwriter and playwright Hanif Kureishi during an interview at the Hay (Book) Festival, which runs until Sunday...
Kureishi, a research associate on the creative writing course at Kingston University, said: "One of the things you notice is that when you switch on the television and a student has gone mad with a machine gun on a campus in America, it's always a writing student. The writing courses, particularly when they have the word 'creative' in them, are the new mental hospitals. But the people are very nice. "When I teach them, they are always better at the end – and more unhappy." He added that creative writing courses set up false expectations that a literary career would inevitably follow. "The fantasy is that all the students will become successful writers - and no one will disabuse them of that. When you use the word creative and the word course there is something deceptive about it." "I always give people the same mark – 71% – and then you write these reports. I always say they were well-behaved, well-dressed ... But how can you mark creative writing?" Tuesday, May 27
by
Charles Christian
on Tue 27 May 2008 12:13 PM BST
red hair of my wife
flickering in the hot wind, glowing bed of fire ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ crinkly gray strands in the black brush of bristles approaching heir time • Daniel Wilcox, a former activist, teacher, and wanderer, is leaving a vapor trail of poetic debris, see http://seaquaker.com/poetry Monday, May 26
by
Charles Christian
on Mon 26 May 2008 09:49 AM BST
a quiet devastation
Disassociated from life, for a while. The day to day hum of home has been stilled, its equilibrium tilted. A silent deconstruction of routine, just for today, as we patiently wait for time to move us along, from this closeted pause. • Clare Phillips-Barton is a mother of two, living and writing in the Northamptonshire countryside. Sunday, May 25
by
Charles Christian
on Sun 25 May 2008 11:24 PM BST
by
Charles Christian
on Sun 25 May 2008 11:19 PM BST
I'm sad to report that I've become the oldest art school drop out on the planet ...probably. Actually I was doing a creative writing MA at an art school and I decided to sling my hook because I felt the classes were at best a distraction from the work I want to do – I still have a day job, so it's not as if I need to attend courses to occupy my time.
However once I mentioned my thinking, I heard similar comments from other people (including a couple of IS&T contributors) to the effect that they were despairing of their creative writing courses, feeling 'short-changed' in terms of what they were getting back in return for their fees etc etc. So has the creative writing bubble burst? Are there too many schools, colleges and universities running creative writing courses with not enough resources to go around. Three common complaints are: • not enough tutorials • not enough workshopping and/or not enough willing participants for workshopping • and a depressing feeling of lack of resources – the one I've just left felt so underfunded as to be threadbare. One final item of home news – our internet server has been down all day but we hope to resume normal postings from Monday. Friday, May 23
by
Charles Christian
on Fri 23 May 2008 02:25 PM BST
ACCEPTANCE
She holds a rose to her throat, the leaves tickle her thoughts, her face like a painter's palette, her legs like easels. She was once the beauty stepping across the red carpet, gracing coffee houses: in an age of grace. Now wrinkle-eyed, she sits and sews and darns her grandson's socks: sitting in a wicker chair. She sees her once dark and lustrous hair, and hears sweet music. Maybe, it is just the trees the summer trees and roses. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ EMAILS FROM U.S.A. If you thought I wanted to cling around your neck? (that was in another dimension). A fine catch? No, with your hands slippery like mackerel, your feet flatter than dabs. And what was in-between? Eels and mussels and little rock pools for catching shrimps. Now silence is your word. The sham? No message on-line again today? So where are the waves I once shivered down your spine? Filleted perhaps? • Maureen Wheldon is currently working on her sixth chapbook, which will be published by Martin Holroyd's Poetry Monthly Press. Thursday, May 22
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 22 May 2008 03:56 PM BST
PUTTING YOU BACK TOGETHER FOR MY SAKE
I want to make you whole again so where are the parts. Haven't the Chinese the pieces? Or was that the open sea? Your lips are intact sure but your tenderness is feeling up slabs of meat at the Stop and Shop butcher counter. And do you really want to be intact anyhow? You've given your heart to the dead, the starving, other people's dogs and babies. That's your throat down there I'm sure of it but the words it broadcasts are from books and newspapers. I still have the glue with me. And I can ace a jigsaw puzzle any time. But there's bits of you scrambling up trees in New Hampshire forests. There's more on your fancy European tour. What if I almost have one section locked into place but some tanager's stole the spirit? Sure I recognize the skull but the thoughts are Michelangelo or squirrels. My blueprints begin and end with me. You've got those pretty sea shell ears but the hearing's off to the races, to Arabia. And pert nose can't smell the scent of me when the wind's blowing from yesterday. But I'm a resourceful carpenter. What I can't find, I'll just use shadow. You can't help casting one. And I can't help being one. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ TAXI DRIVER'S BURDENS There's a woman in a mirror, pecking at her beauty with tweezers, or arguing with gravity. And an older man conning over his bald spot to gift-wrap his face, and a teenager with raw heart beating in his hands, and three girls tottering between high hair and lipstick. Here's someone so hollow she almost floats in the back seat, a man who mutters "I am not dead, I sleep," then dies. Whoever they are, he drives them all past everyone they are not, by all the places they are not going to. It.'s the one monologue that different ones contribute to, the servant speech of one night shift master. One day, a woman gives birth in his rear view. The baby cries like it already knows no mother's driving this baby. • John Grey lives in Providence, Rhode Isand, and has been published recently in Agni, Worcester Review, South Carolina Review and The Pedestal, with work upcoming in Poetry East and Cape Rock. |
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