A Love That Involves Evolution

 

Hell 4. Hiroshima - the 4th degree of separation

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָֽרֶץ (Genesis Ii)

Energy exploding from critical mass,

Stasis to kinesis, Noun into Verb,

What God never finished has come to pass.

A chain reaction until All is past

Into fissions whose Noun forever reverbs,

Energy exploding from critical mass.

Atomised, fission-fused corporate Mass, 

The core Fascist State, removed by its Verb: 

What God never finished has come to pass.

Antithesis, thesis, synthesis, gas.

The Sun of its nuclear parts disturbed, 

Energy exploding from critical mass.

Jericho’s heart ignites – mushrooms- shocks - blasts -

Fire-balls – consummates - Death-dusts - its suburbs:  

What God never finished has come to pass.

The End of Beginning, the First that Lasts,

In dust-settled walls scorching these Proverbs:

‘Energy exploding from critical mass;

What God never finished has come to pass.’

Modern 'A' level English students are trained to read in terms of 5 assessment objectives (reprinted at end of this post).  As a former examiner for A level English, grading hundreds and hundreds of papers every year, I got used to reading in this flexible way and it certainly prevents students from two common faults -

1. reading only for text (the I A Richards position - 'practical criticism' which was a necessary corrective when texts were studied as if they were merely versions of the writer's biography or a document of his/her society.  Practical criticism alone tends to undervalue texts which aren't 'art for art's sake' or  'modernist' and whose complexity comes from the way they engage with the worlds they were written for and read in, like Victorian poetry and 

2. reading only for context (a reading that can avoid the text isn't really literary at all, it's history or sociology or psychology or politics or whatever.)

My poem (from my 2016 volume "6 Degrees of Separation; 7 Degrees of Love") above would hardly communicate itself at all if only read for A02 (text) or A03 (context.) It also depends on the reader making connections (A04). 

Critical theory is right to insist that without a reader there is no literature anyway. But it sometimes seems to forget that without a text there's no reader either. Literary texts worthy of the name work at a level that the writer is not fully conscious of and, in Eliot's words, 'communicate before they are properly understood.' What I think I am saying in a text is not necessarily what 'it' is saying - to you or to other readers. (This is where notions of 'inspiration' and the Muse - or we might say the unconscious - come in.) 'Trust the tale not the teller' as Lawrence said. 

My text is a formal villanelle, a lyric poem from the early renaissance, closely connected to rural dance. (Or at any rate an idyllic court version of that peasant pastoral.) So literary context is immediately part of what is said - text and (literary) context combined. I have chosen to describe the ultimate postmodern deconstructive experience - an atom bomb falling on Hiroshima - in the form of an 'innocent' pastoral. The repetition is not the gambol of merry peasant feet but the relentlessness of destruction. The bright dawn of the West haunts its nightmare end. 

The poem is from a series of worsening hells - this one follows Auschwitz - which end in stone; the utter absence of consciousness, not just of others but of our own. The literary context here is Dante's Inferno, of which this is a modern take. Without Dante, the perspective of a deepening hell (and whether there will be a purgatory and heaven beyond) would be lost or at least much reduced. 

The prefix is Hebrew and is the first line of the Bible, which can be translated as 'When God began to create the heavens and the earth' rather than the finished act of the Authorized Version. This Biblical context is revisited throughout in one of the refrain lines. The identifying of the refrain lines as 'Proverbs' near the end repeats this Biblical context - we speak of 'Biblical' rain as a kind of return to an ancient sense of a world at the mercy of God (or for the Ancient Greeks, the gods) and the still reverberating shock of the atom bomb is a reminder of the planet as a place of potential apocalypse.

The poem would mean little without the context of nuclear science, whose language it borrows throughout, and nothing to a reader who did not know about the Hiroshima bomb and the Second World War. More urgently, what your relationship is with both these events is crucial - a Japanese reader might read the Churchillian echo 'The End of Beginning' very differently from the Allied soldier who has witnessed the living hell behind the gates of Auschwitz and seen what a Fascist State was capable of, or endured the atrocities of a Japanese prisoner of war camp - and who because of such horrors believes the bomb was a necessary evil to end the war.  "Atomised, fission-fused corporate Mass, The core Fascist State, removed by its Verb" is a description both of the science of the atomic/nuclear bomb and also of the dreadful warping of Nature required to eliminate the Fascist State. 'Jericho' places Hiroshima in a Biblical universe, a Western moral frame. The power of God destroyed Jericho, which claims God for one side. An Indian Anglophile I once spoke to in India assured me that America had incurred a dreadful karmic debt which Japan would repay them at some time in the future. This is a reminder that not everyone 'reads' history or the Second World War (or texts) in the same way.

I'm not a scientist (except if a degree that included a fair amount of linguistics counts as science) but I borrow the language of science throughout. It also borrows the formula of dialectical philosophy but the antithesis -  deconstruction - deviantly comes first, as this is in effect the 'thesis').  The scientific/formulaic language gives the poem a kind of (horrified) objectivity.

If you restrict your reading to text (even if that includes all the purely literary contexts) you will come away with a kind of incantatory poem, a ferocious celebration of the ("Biblical') power of that (atomic atrocity/ necessary evil - the reader's choice) without a moral position. It may even enter the world of the the bomber to the extent of sharing his violent act.  It is a rustic villanelle dance gone mad. A linguistic analysis of a world where what ought to be a noun becomes a verb which is frightening or thrilling, though ultimately only in the poetry laboratory.

If you read only for context, you will come away with a 'isn't war horrid' Munchian scream, a version of the teenage protest poem expressing hopeless horror that doesn't shock the reader into anything more than 'Yes, I knew that. War is bad. Killing people is wrong.' 

Together, something more dynamic hopefully occurs. You feel the power, you note the rationale for the act, you are shocked at feeling the mad power the bomber felt, the playing God.  And the implicit comparison (A04) with the innocent pastoral of the villanelle (albeit an idealised world) is vital, with the 'still quiet voice of humanity' sounding all too still and quiet, but sounding its protest all the more poignantly for that.

That's what the poem 'means' to me at least. Did 'I' the writer know I meant all that when I wrote it? No. But something in me did. I crafted it in a state of furious absorption until I knew it was right, carefully devising the incantations and arranging for the refrains to work semantically as well as musically. And fascinated by the scary science 'I' was 'sculpting' into poetry. 

I didn't record it until I knew it by heart and this also changed, informed and charged my own relationship with it: I understood and felt it more, as anyone who learns a poem by heart will. So the recording dramatises my own experience of it as a reader, another context.

• AO1: Articulate informed, personal and creative responses to literary texts, using associated concepts and terminology, and coherent, accurate written expression.
• AO2: Analyse ways in which meanings are shaped in literary texts.
• AO3: Demonstrate understanding of the significance and influence of the contexts in which literary texts are written and received.
• AO4: Explore connections across literary texts.
• AO5: Explore literary texts informed by different interpretations.

World Poetry Day and Mother's Day

Birth Of A Human Being

for our daughter

My snow soul is slowly taking shape,

Falling from heaven to inherit the earth

And the family features of God and ape,

Angel out of my element from birth…

And this is me, this helpless drop of Man,

This perfect mould of bud and mineral,

Crawling, fight and every earthly thing.

All of it – nothing.

​       Yet I’ll assert I AM

In time by striving upward endlessly;

Inherit here a kiss, to milk, like grist,

The love that made me and by which I’m born;

The word that speaks its perfect mind; the fist

That grasps its imaged God; the whole torn

And bleeding womb of human history.

From “Coming Home”

Written the day she was born (Dec 28 1986) not long after witnessing a long and troubled labour of love- she's (just) married now and living in a house of her own. I just asked her mother what poem of mine she would like to hear on World Poetry Day (there are rather a lot of them now) and this, of course, was it.

Dedicated to her mother on Mother's Day 2017. Euripides, the ancient Greek tragic playwright and  soldier, said he would rather face three battles on the front line than endure one labour. I can bear witness to the second part!

Dereham Times Review of From Creation To Cromer

From Creation To Cromer by Gareth Calway.

Elsing Village Hall, Saturday 26th October.

Mention poetry to most people and the reaction usually garners a whole range of misconceptions and prejudices towards the form. Why does the general public have such a problem with the “P” word? It is, after all, only an imaginative arrangement of words making use of the amazing diversity of the English language, often with some sort of rhyming scheme and definitely embracing a strong sense of rhythmic flow; in fact all the elements found within a pop song, but without the music! So why is poetry seen as being difficult to comprehend or dull and irrelevant to today?
It was therefore possibly a daring idea to promote Gareth Calway’s new show at Elsing Village Hall, From Creation To Cromer, as a “stand up poetry performance” but this was certainly no dry monotone recitation of dusty old verse. The idea behind the show was to start at the beginning; the beginning of everything in fact and to take a journey through time from the first days of creation up to living in Norfolk today.
The show started with a sequence of poems and spoken word pieces centred on the first six days of creation. The poem “Comet” likened the birth of the universe to a sort of cosmic “fart” and saw Calway speaking whilst circumnavigating the hall on a trajectory representing the flight path of his subject. “Animal” was performed on all fours as Calway took on the personas of the creatures he mentioned, even at one stage howling wolf-like at the moon. By the end of the first half the audience were certainly in no doubt what “performance poetry” entailed and responded with appreciative and enthusiastic applause.
After the interval the advance through time continued encompassing a diverse range of themes, mostly with a Norfolk slant. Boudica’s uprising against the might of Rome was portrayed as a punk rock band on tour. The more personal pieces of poetry were introduced with wry and sometimes moving anecdotes and included such diverse subjects as studying at UEA in the 1970s, observations upon the game of football (Calway was club poet for Bristol City FC) and the profession of teaching. Drawing the evening to a close, Calway's love of Norfolk was evident through poems about Sedgeford, Kings Lynn, Walsingham and Great Yarmouth. The poetical journey finally arrived at Cromer upon a stormy night when Fairport Convention played at the end of the pier. Calway’s painstaking observation manages to capture the feel of the county in his poems, from its rural depths to the bright lights of the seafront, evoking that strong sense of place which connects the human spirit to the landscape. Poetry; dull, boring and irrelevant? Not when it’s impassioned, witty, nostalgic and poignant writing performed with a total belief in every word.

Dereham Times

Stand Up Poet at Elsing Oct 26

Review by Tim Chipping published in The Dereham Times

From Creation To Cromer by Gareth Calway.

Elsing Village Hall, Saturday 26th October.

Mention poetry to most people and the reaction usually garners a whole range of misconceptions and prejudices towards the form. Why does the general public have such a problem with the “P” word? It is, after all, only an imaginative arrangement of words making use of the amazing diversity of the English language, often with some sort of rhyming scheme and definitely embracing a strong sense of rhythmic flow; in fact all the elements found within a pop song, but without the music! So why is poetry seen as being difficult to comprehend or dull and irrelevant to today?
It was therefore possibly a daring idea to promote Gareth Calway’s new show at Elsing Village Hall, From Creation To Cromer, as a “stand up poetry performance” but this was certainly no dry monotone recitation of dusty old verse. The idea behind the show was to start at the beginning; the beginning of everything in fact and to take a journey through time from the first days of creation up to living in Norfolk today.
The show started with a sequence of poems and spoken word pieces centred on the first six days of creation. The poem “Comet” likened the birth of the universe to a sort of cosmic “fart” and saw Calway speaking whilst circumnavigating the hall on a trajectory representing the flight path of his subject. “Animal” was performed on all fours as Calway took on the personas of the creatures he mentioned, even at one stage howling wolf-like at the moon. By the end of the first half the audience were certainly in no doubt what “performance poetry” entailed and responded with appreciative and enthusiastic applause.
After the interval the advance through time continued encompassing a diverse range of themes, mostly with a Norfolk slant. Boudica’s uprising against the might of Rome was portrayed as a punk rock band on tour. The more personal pieces of poetry were introduced with wry and sometimes moving anecdotes and included such diverse subjects as studying at UEA in the 1970s, observations upon the game of football (Calway was club poet for Bristol City FC) and the profession of teaching. Drawing the evening to a close, Calway's love of Norfolk was evident through poems about Sedgeford, Kings Lynn, Walsingham and Great Yarmouth. The poetical journey finally arrived at Cromer upon a stormy night when Fairport Convention played at the end of the pier. Calway’s painstaking observation manages to capture the feel of the county in his poems, from its rural depths to the bright lights of the seafront, evoking that strong sense of place which connects the human spirit to the landscape. Poetry; dull, boring and irrelevant? Not when it’s impassioned, witty, nostalgic and poignant writing performed with a total belief in every word.

Dereham Times



The pics shows the poet shortly after the Himalayan-recorded tantric horn making the OM at the start of 'Creation' - 'Creation' is a one-man theatre sequence exploring the first six days of Creation in which (among other things) I orbit like a comet, wriggle like a worm and howl like a wolf on my way to the playing fields of Eden for a sequence of football and teaching poems, all nearer hell and purgatory than heaven but with glimpses of it;
one of Tim's Biblical signs
and finally the poet in media res The Clash Between Boudicca and Rome, an exhortation that Norwich gets a statue of Norfolk's ancient queen not just another 2000 years celebrating the Roman version. Leading into an odyssey of stand up poems from Celtic Norfolk through West Norfolk to Yarmouth, the North Sea - that seaside meeting of sandcastle holiday impermanence and the eternal fathomless ocean - and finally Cromer. One man theatre/stand up poet/one man theatre/ stand up poet. It seems to work.

Particularly prized was the audience participation OM with which the show ended, and over which I pitched the final couplet of the evening. It put the Om into Home.


AS FEATURED ON FOUR COUNTIES RADIO SUE MARCHANT BIG NIGHT IN SUNDAY OCT 20 33minutes in... (Steve Hackett was my warm up man and the show is rooted in Genesis...what can it all mean?)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p001d7sb

October 26 is the day once believed to be the first of Creation (Oct 26 4004, to be precise, and they had calendars which worked it all out.) So, like Creation, I'm going to start from there and see where it goes.

I’ll be ranging through my seven published books of poetry – by heart and off the page – including the ballads and stories that have proved popular around the folk clubs. A chance to hear how the lyrical moments fit together into some kind of overall vision. And a no-repeat guarantee: Elsing has heard none of these – and nothing like these – before!

PRESS RELEASE

FROM CREATION TO CROMER

One man theatre/ poetry performance at Elsing Village Hall Saturday October 26

PRESS RELEASE
FROM CREATION TO CROMER

One man theatre/ poetry performance at Elsing Village Hall Saturday October 26

There are no lonely, wandering daffodils or dust-dry crossword puzzles here, only insightful, impassioned, witty and poignant writing which draws on our collective experiences of living in the modern age. Of Gareth Calway, Ted Hughes (Poet Laureate until his death in 1998) said, "wholesome, strong and to my tastes, simple in the best way, the real way"; The Guardian thought his ‘Tales Out Of School’ ‘very funny...a metaphor for a country in decline’; our very own EDP (reviewing his Norfolk and Norwich festival show House on the River) proclaimed Gareth “an eloquent poet,” The Scotsman described his performance of King Arthur’s legend at the Edinburgh Fringe as “slam poetry with a patriotic twist..... packed full of boyhood glee’ while Three Weeks (the Fringe festival review) called his punk-rock take on Norfolk’s warrior queen Boudicca ‘impassioned ruthless and funny’.
Of From Creation to Cromer Gareth says, ‘This is my first one man theatre/poetry show since I took Arthur and Boudicca to the Edinburgh fringe in 2011 and I’m really excited about premiering it at Elsing Village Hall, where Tom and Harry (Gareth’s play about Anne Boleyn and then men in her life) played to a full and appreciative house last May.
http://www.derehamtimes.co.uk/news/review_lots_of_history_as_cast_serves_up_a_real_treat_in_the_village_hall_1_2228196)
After a series of successful and enjoyable collaborations with actors and musicians across Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, and many well-received individual poems performed at Norfolk folk clubs like The Wolf, Gin Trap Folk, Meet In The Hedge and Folkspot Radio, I want to bring all the music and theatre of words back home to the single poet on stage, acting out his stories - and fitting the heightened moments each individual poem gives into an overall vision.’
‘October 26 4004 was once believed to be the first day of Creation. You could say ‘From Creation to Cromer’ sets the passing fairs of time represented by the sea front against the metaphorical eternity of the North Sea. But not always as seriously as that sounds!
Tickets are on sale now priced £6 advance from The Old Chapel, Elsing, Tel. 01362 637331 or from Sounds Music, Dereham. Entry will be £7.50 on the door. The Mermaid Inn will provide a bar which will be open from 7.45pm when the doors open. Performance commences at 8.30pm.