Month: June 2017

‘Plastic’ politics. In ‘International Times’

http://internationaltimes.it/plastic-2/

Illustration by Nick Victor copyright Published in International Times

The local MP came to visit today.
He played with his tie, in the half-empty boiling hot classroom.
Nobody offered him water.
He looked outside at the summery fog and
chewed his nails for an hour or so.
I tried to think of a question.
But all of them were already answered.
He paused and smiled at the camera.
I had a name badge around my neck.
He had nothing.
I sat on a tree-legged small plastic chair.
He sat on a piece of cake.

 

Hunger

Photo: @John Stadnicki

 

A great writer said in 1920s that ‘a man did not have to be insane to be sensitive‘, I believe. But there are people who could be wounded by a simple dot and whom a single word could kill. And this, at times, is true about the world itself.

Numbers for One Life

London. Friday afternoon. 2017.

It is summer. And a beautiful bitter one.

A few numbers for a statistical analysis which does not matter.

There are 775 rooms in Buckingham Palace.

There are almost 20,000 homes sitting empty in London. They are called ‘ghost’ homes.

The Crown Jewels have a total value of 44.5 billion pounds.

Stuart Gulliver, CEO at HSBC, will receive 9.7 million pounds as reward for cutting costs. Basically, for making money for others.

Philip May works as a senior executive at investment fund Capital Group that controls $1.4 trillion in assets.

Over 31 million pounds will be given this year in prizes at Wimbledon.

Theresa May promises 5 million pounds. To be shared between hundreds of people without food, clothes and a roof over their heads. Victims of Grenfell Tower fire.

Theresa May gets free food and accommodation wherever she goes. At all times.

An average wedding in the UK costs 20,000 pounds.

One cremation is 1,600 pounds, if it is planned. Otherwise, it is free.

Fire resistant cladding is 24 pounds per square metre.

One life has no price. Nor numbers.

 

 

Questionings, rememberings and imaginings by Rupert Loydell

Imperfect, Maria Stadnicka (52pp, Yew Tree Press)

http://www.yewtreepress.co.uk/Yew_Tree_Press/books.html

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Imperfect-Maria-Stadnicka/dp/095620385X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497303213&sr=8-1&keywords=maria+stadnicka

The simple grey and black cover of this book –texture perhaps taken from a tree or wall, with a white crack or line separating author’s name and book title – is in many ways apt for what the reader find inside: a collection of beguiling, uneasy poems that probe ideas of love, politics and human experience.

The work reminds me of Charles Simic’s and Yannis Ritsos’ poetry (I don’t mean it is derivative), and also the gentler end of Vaska Popa’s work. There is the same clarity of images and voice with little metaphor or allusion. Instead a kind of surrealism is at work in the direction the narratives take, in the thought processes being evidenced with their jumps and asides, their sometimes awkward and surprising conclusions. In ‘Settlement’ the narrator has ‘no further questions’ for God, so instead offers him a ham sandwich; in ‘Bad Luck’ the poem moves from a fall through Googled medical self-assessment to burns and then self-immolation, but even as the house burns a neighbour pops in to talk about the weather and running out of tea bags. In ‘Good Bye Then’ Clara’s ‘giggle melted in a slice of bread’.

As Jay Ramsay points out in his back cover blurb, in many ways this poetry is ‘other’. This may be because of Stadnicka’s experiences growing up in Romania, the effect on her of the Cold War, a slight awkwardness in the details of English (e.g. ‘Good Bye Then’ or ‘it stopped me / understand the real life’) or simply her poetics. Whatever, Stadnicka has now found a home in Stroud, in language, and clings on to a hope that underpins the poems, even if this is belied by poems like ‘The Calais Sea’, where

After weeks and weeks of travels,

for the last time, I put my bags down.

I am done with hope.

The lingering tragedy

of what I could be if

we had the right words for tomorrow.

Elsewhere, in a world of inevitable death, madness, broken families, soldiers, barbaric politics and dehumanization, even when there are ‘no other survivors’, ‘even without a language’, Stadnicka defiantly demands that she ‘go on / being allowed to hope’. And does.

This an exciting and urgent first book of poems, that gives me hope for contemporary poetry. I look forward to the next instalment of Maria Stadnicka’s questionings, rememberings and imaginings.

Copyright: Rupert Loydell 2017

http://stridemagazine.blogspot.co.uk/#!/2017/06/questionings-rememberings-and-imaginings.html

Just Met…A Summer Exhibition with David Hayward, Janet James and Mark Mawer

An event to look forward to in July. ‘Just Met…’ A Summer Exhibition at Rendcomb Manor with David Hayward, Janet James and Mark Mawer.

David Hayward: ‘The images in this exhibition reflect an interest in the delineations of shorelines – of air, water and land and of weather, geology and the detritus of tidelines.‘ http://www.david-hayward.com/

Janet James: ‘Sunlight on lakes and fjords, reflections, the icy lochs and the countryside that surrounds me are my inspiration.‘ http://www.janetjames.co.uk/

Mark Mawer: ‘No doubt it is hard to believe, but we have to believe many things we never saw.‘ Allusive inspiration from Twenty Years A-Growing by Maurice O’Sullivan. (markveremawer@hotmail.com)

The exhibition will be open 7th July – 9th July 2017.

Friday 7th July 2017 – Opening Evening 6pm-9.30pm
Saturday 8th July 2017 – 10am – 8pm
Sunday 9th July 2017 – 10am – 4pm

Rendcomb Manor, Cheltenham Road, North Cerney, Cirencester, GL7 7ER

Inquiries to Joan Davies at joan.sargent@virgin.net or 01452 812399

A donation from this exhibition will go to The Camphill Village Trust.

 

A Thing for Poetry, with David Clarke

Last month, I was delighted to attend the launch of a new book of poems by Maria Stadnicka, a Romanian-born poet living and working in Stroud. Before coming to the UK in 2003, Maria worked as a radio and TV broadcaster, presenter and radio editor. She also won a series of national poetry prizes. In 2010 she became member of the Stroud Writers Group, Gloucestershire.

I first become aware of Maria’s poetry when Yew Tree Press published her beautifully illustrated short collection A Short Story about War (as Maria Butunoi) in 2014 and her new poems, collected in Imperfect (also Yew Tree Press), are a welcome addition to her English-language work. Maria’s poems are restrained and precisely crafted miniatures: enigmatic narratives shot through with dark humour and surreal detail, they are eminently political, but rarely tackle Politics (with a capital P) head on. In all of these respects, they put me in mind of the work of Greek poet Yannis Ritsos, yet there also seem to me to be echoes of Kafka: the poems record fragile surface realities, beneath which lurk the symptoms of violence and oppression. This is a poetry of unease, and all the more honest for that, but also ultimately a poetry of hope, recording the struggle of the subject to maintain its integrity in troubled times.

Maria has agreed to feature as my guest poet in this post, which presents here poem ‘City’. Of the poem, Maria writes:

‘What can I know?’….’What can I know?’…This is not my question. Immanuel Kant answered it already, a long time ago, and many other thinkers answered it in their own way too. As a society, we slowly learnt to get used to ‘knowing’ everything a priori. When there is no obvious difference between ‘freedom’ and ‘dogma’, what is the point in asking? Everything is ‘google-able’, right?

Happy to be given the answer, happy to steer clear of uncomfortable dirt and pain. Happy and safe. But isn’t that called oppression?

Recently I have been thinking about oppression and the subtle nuances revealed by urbanism. The layers and layers of conformity which are impossible to eradicate without consequences. But then… how else shall we build consensus?

And one afternoon, walking through my working class town, out of the blue an answer kept staring me in the face. There was the rain and the shops closing at 5 o’clock and people hurrying to get the dinner ready. There was an English February, defined by our sleepwalking hyperreality. Me and everybody else: surrendered, crushed.

 

City

This afternoon we passed the city prison walls
fighting the wintry wind with a broken umbrella.

It was precisely five o’clock and
a girl on a bicycle overtook an old man
holding a rope.
About the same time,
the ice cream van closed.

The armed police arrived
to disperse the queue with tear-gas.

In the near distance, people ran
between horizontal watermarks
back to their semi-detached
airing cupboards.

We had nothing to stop for and then, I think,
I paused and
I covered my arms with a piece of history.

Imperfect can be purchased by contacting Yew Tree Press (philipalrush[at]googlemail.com) or via Amazon.

David Clarke, poet, thinker and critic. http://athingforpoetry.blogspot.co.uk/p/david-clarke.html