Kathleen Jones's Blog, page 39

Tuesday Poem: Black Sun

BLACK SUN

`Where does this black sun come from?  Out
of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic 
rays reach me, pinning me to the ground,
to my bed, compelling me to silence . .'
Julia Kristeva


There is a black sun
that shines on me
sometimes.  Her light
illuminating inner
landscapes;  cadences
of darkness,

every object
newly signified.

Through the black holes
of her eyes
new spectrums of vision
make the nakedness of things
visible.

There is a pause
between one linear moment
and the next.

In its silence
I hear the inter-stellar
static of the universe

alive with volcanic
semiology.

She is a black mirror.
In her face I see
my dark self
dancing.

© Kathleen Jones

This is dedicated to all my friends, and everyone else, who suffers from depression.  If you would like to read more poems around this subject, then please take a look at 'Voicing Shadow, Singing Light,' Carolyn Jess-Cooke's project exploring depression with poems by Ian Duhig, Andrew Forster, Kim Moore, Carrie Etter, Sean Burn and a host of others. 

Real depression isn't just getting 'a bit low' or 'feeling depressed' - everyone feels like that at times. No, real depression blanks out the sun and can even make you question your identity.  Adrienne Rich describes it in 'Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law' - 

"Sometimes she's let the tapstream scald her arm, a match burn to her thumbnail,
or held her hand above the kettle's snout right in the woolly steam . . . since nothing hurts her anymore, except each morning's grit blowing into her eyes."
In episodes of depression I've held my hand over a candle flame in order to see whether I could still feel anything at all.  Suicidal thoughts creep in because you can't see any reason for staying alive and may even believe that your loved ones are better off without you.  But many writers and artists find that in some extraordinary way, the darkness has a creative side to it, though it's also possible that we are more likely to suffer from depression because of the amount of introspection and self-searching that creative activity involves. It's a question I can't answer. 
The Tuesday Poets share a poem every Tuesday.  There are 28 of us from all around the world.  This week Helen Lowe in NZ is sharing Anna Akhmatova's 'July 1914'.    And the Tuesday Poem hub is featuring  'SS Ventnor' by Chinese poet Chris Tse. If you would like to read this and see what else the Tuesday Poets are sharing please click on this link...... 

Comings and Goings

So now I'm back in Italy and struggling to unite body and soul in one place and one time again.  I have a long list of things I need to get done before I go back to England again next week - we're driving the car through Europe to deliver a sculpture and then put the car through its yearly health check.  Then it has to be driven back and a few days later I'm off to New Zealand.  All this toing and froing isn't good for me - I know this - and it isn't good for the planet either.  I dread to think what my carbon footprint looks like and it's no longer possible to argue that the way we live isn't having a major effect on the planet.

Italy is in the grip of turbulent weather - the wettest, coolest summer since records began.  I've only been back a few days and we've had thunderstorms that raged for more than 12 hours, bucket loads of rain, alternating with warm, sunny intervals.  The olive groves, usually brown and crisp at this time of year, are green.  There are very few olives left - most battered from the branches by the wind and rain. And the figs aren't as good as usual -  loads of them but flavourless and not as ripe as they should be. Last night it rained again. This afternoon is sunny, but already the rain clouds are building up on the horizon out over the Mediterranean.  A lot of this is blamed on the unusual behaviour of the Jetstream which is dragging warm air off the Atlantic across southern Europe.  But it's also the case that hot air is regularly coming up from Africa across a warm, wet Mediterranean mopping up the moisture and then shedding it over the mountains.
The jet stream this week - splitting in two directionsThe Med is warming faster (and becoming more polluted) than other seas because it is small, shallow and more enclosed than others.  We've witnessed mass strandings and huge blooms of jelly fish in the past year or so and friends with boats report that  predators like barracuda are beginning to proliferate, and other species of warm water fish have been seen sneaking in from the Red Sea via Suez.  The ecology is changing fast.

BarracudaBut at least if it's raining I'm not tempted to spend too much time lazing in the sun.  I'm trying to finish my Italian stories - working name 'The Piazza' - before I go off to New Zealand.  Ten of the stories are complete, but there are two more still in bits and pieces of ragged prose.  I write in a patchwork kind of way, scribbling little scenes and then stitching them all together.  The last story is the most difficult, because it has to unite the other eleven and round it all off.
The Piazza, cover painting by Alexander Kleinloh
Then there's the submissions - one of my new resolutions is to try to submit more work to magazines and competitions.  It's good to have deadlines for completion and it's also good to have targets. Magazines and publishers these days tend to have 'windows' for submissions to prevent the editors from being swamped all year round by desperate authors.  So I'm trying to be very organised. Magma is a really good magazine for poetry, and then there's Bare Fiction, which has just begun. I've also recently discovered The Moth.   So far the submissions seem to be paying off - about 50% rejections, but the other 50% is very satisfying.  Two poems in the new issue of Domestic Cherry and a couple of stories in an Australian anthology coming out next year.  I've just got to do more!

Ironically I'm reading The Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, which is an analysis of solitude (though she doesn't distinguish between silence and solitude clearly enough).  At the moment, I could do with more of both, but I have as much chance of getting it as a raindrop does of surviving in hell!.

Tuesday Poem: Seamus Heaney - Blackberry Picking

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

© Seamus Heaney
If you'd like to see a video of Seamus Heaney reading the poem please click on this link. 
The blackberries are ripe here at the moment, just as the northern skies begin to take a silvery tint and the leaves curl at the edges.  There's the nip of autumn in the air, though it's hot enough in the afternoons.   I've been out with my stick, pulling the hedgerows down, spiking my fingers on the brambles, making sure I leave some for the birds and some for others.  I'm covered in scratches,  but they taste so good boiled up with apples and sugar!   Seamus Heaney's poem is about desire and hope and disappointment as much as blackberries;  a remembered childhood idyll that had a 'rat-grey fungus' over it.  I love the images - if you look down into the can you're picking into, it really does look like 'a plate of eyes'.  Favourite lines?  'summer's blood was in it/Leaving stains on the tongue' and 'our palms sticky as Bluebeard's'. 
Blackberry and apple crumble anyone?


We're a group of 28 poets from New Zealand, Australia, USA, Canada, France, Italy and the UK.  If you'd like to see what the other Tuesday Poets are posting, why not click through to the Tuesday Poem Hub for more really great poetry from around the world. 

Cheer up! It's Monday - with the Unthanks

This weekend there were amazing celebrations over in Newcastle for the millionth runner in the Great North Run.  There were parties along the river Tyne, fireworks and a massive live music event.  Sting was performing with the Unthanks.  So I thought I'd share The Unthanks singing 'On a Monday Morning'.  If you haven't heard this folk duo before - they're brilliant.  This is Rachel Unthank singing with Winterset.






I'm on my way back to Italy at the moment and hope to get myself together later this week!

Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?: Uncomfortable Statistics - Kathleen Jones takes a ...

Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?: Uncomfortable Statistics - Kathleen Jones takes a look at the current state of publishing in the UK.



Some uncomfortable Statistics for traditional publishers - Good news for Indies - The Big 6 are not so big any more.  According to the latest figures for 2013, Penguin Random House came top of the table with a 24% share of the market, but its sales were down £342m (15%).  All the others - Hachette, HarperCollins, Pan MacMillan, Bloomsbury, Simon & Schuster and Pearson were also down.  Their total share of the market was only 59% - down from 70% in 2001.  Is this a sign that their dominance of the book trade is fading?  I think it is.  But they won't go down without a fight, so - more turbulent times ahead.



To read more please click on this link ....

Having fun at Seven Stories

Seven Stories, in Newcastle, is the National Centre for Children's Books .  During the school holidays, with a houseful of  bored children and young people aged from 16 years to 10 months we decided to take a day out and go and explore.

Seven Stories, arranged on 7 floors of an old industrial building, is the perfect place to get children involved with books if they haven't tried them already and absolute heaven for everyone - including grown-ups - who loves books.

There are cosy places to settle down with your kids and read some of the thousands of books in the bookshop.


Bright window seats to sprawl on.



A very good selection of young adult fiction as well as books for teeny tots.

There are whole floors devoted to individual books where you walk through the pages.



This was the entrance to Alice



You could downsize for the Borrowers


pose on the film set for Lost and Found


climb into Cinderella's coach



and fool about with Angelina



Some of us were very silly indeed!

At the top there was a room where you could dress up as any kind of fairy tale you fancied


And there was someone to read us all a story

In the basement we coloured and cut out and were generally messy.

This was one of the best days out I've ever had - indulging my inner child (or entering my second childhood!) and the other children all enjoyed it too.  If only there were more book places like this for children and adults.

Seven Stories, Newcastle upon Tyne

Tuesday Poem: Moor Divock

1.  The Avenue

Bog cotton ghosting over hags -
the scattered
skeletons of winter sheep.

A larks’ song runs
like beck-water over stones
in the largeness of the wide sky
opening above me

and the burnt fragments of my ancestors
under my feet.

This is where I want the lime ash
of my own cremated bones
to re-enter the earth.



2.  Kop Stone

A granite singularity

tipped askew

on the sloped contours of the moor

like the rudder of a stone ship




3.  Cairn

Shy among the bracken.
Plundered.
Shelter for predators.
A shooting hide.  One
foxhole tunneled
under the kerb.




4. Cockpit

Princess in the ring
who will you choose?
Man or maiden?

Listen to the wind
the nibbling sheep
their stuttering language.

The larks fall silent
at the buzzard’s call.

Clouds in procession
over the stone avenue.

Do you remember the light?
Cloud shadow staining the fell
like a birthmark?




5.  Altar Stone

A square grey face
staring at the sky.

In the hollowed eye
of rain-water

a single digit of bone.




6.  Cairn Circle

Guess-work and intuition in
an up-turned bowl of stone.

A door slammed
when they rolled the rock
across the entrance for the last time.



6.  Cist

A diagram
of distant galaxies

or sea creatures
coffined in the limestone lid.

I curl myself into
this stone sarcophagus

a cramped space barely
wide enough for shoulders.

Grave goods; rucksack, camera, notebook.
I could be here a long time.

A flask of water.  Sandwiches.
The past broken open

rinsed clean by centuries of rain.



7.  Hut Circles

The wood has rotted away
from the stone foundation
leaving a circle of different green.

Across the bracken
you can see the round houses of the dead
biding their time.

All our lives, all our deaths
bound by a fiery ring of stars.

© Kathleen Jones 2014


This is a poetry and photo diary of a walk across Moor Divock - a bronze age stone avenue and cairn circle site in the fells above Ullswater in the English Lake District. There are also hut circles where people once lived and it is also crossed by an ancient roadway called High Street.  I love to walk there and feel such a strong connection with the distant past.  From the moor I can see the hills where I was brought up on a tiny, isolated farm, and I can look down on my favourite lake.  When you're up there you can't help but think about the cycles of life and death, the rise and fall of civilisations. When I die I want my ashes to be scattered in this ancient place.

If you'd like to see what the other Tuesday Poets are posting, please click here to visit the site.  The Tuesday Poem blog features poetry from around the world every week. 

Tuesday Poem: In That Year, by Kim Moore

In That Yearby Kim Moore
And in that year my body was a pillar of smoke
and even his hands could not hold me.

And in that year my mind was an empty table
and he laid his thoughts down like dishes of plenty.

And in that year my heart was the old monument,
the folly, and no use could be found for it.

And in that year my tongue spoke the language
of insects and not even my father knew me.

And in that year I waited for the horses
but they only shifted their feet in the darkness.

And in that year I imagined a vain thing;
I believed that the world would come for me.

And in that year I gave up on all the things
I was promised and left myself to sadness.

And then that year lay down like a path
and I walked it, I walked it, I walk it.


Copyright Kim Moore
First Published in Poetry News
from The Art of Falling
to be published by Seren in 2015


There are some poems you read and feel a moment of recognition because there's a kind of visceral crunch as they connect with your own experience.  This is one of those poems. I particularly love the final couplet which has been true for me.  I'm still walking it.


Kim Moore is an award-winning poet living in Cumbria in the north of England where she is a brass music teacher. Her first pamphlet, If We Could Speak Like Wolves,  was chosen by Carole Ann Duffy for the Poetry Business award in 2012 and also selected as one of The Independent's books of the year.    Kim blogs here.

About 'In That Year' - Kim Moore comments: "This poem is from a sequence of poems exploring domestic violence.  The sequence will be in my first full length collection "The Art of Falling" which will be published by Seren in 2015."

If We Could Speak Like Wolves is published by Smith/Doorstop and is available both in paperback and in e-book format from the publisher and  from Amazon.

You can find Kim and more of her poetry on Wordpress at http://kimmoorepoet.wordpress.com/


The Tuesday Poets post great poetry from all over the world every Tuesday.  If you would like to see what other Tuesday Poets are posting today, please hop over to the Tuesday Poem Blog and check it out! 

Tolstoy's Letters to Gandhi

Leo Tolstoy:  Letters to a Hindu
"Tolstoy's letters issue a clarion call for nonviolent resistance – he admonishes against false ideologies, both religious and pseudo-scientific, that promote violence, an act he sees as unnatural for the human spirit, and advocates for a return to our most natural, basic state, which is the law of love. Evil, Tolstoy argues with passionate conviction, is restrained not with violence but with love – something Maya Angelou would come to echo beautifully decades later."

I hadn't realised that Tolstoy and Gandhi had had such an extensive correspondence. But it made me sad to read these letters from an age where someone could write "Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills" and have some hope that it could be achieved.  We live in an age where violence has become the standard reaction to difficult situations, internationally and in our own communities.

I agree with the author of this article, Maria Popova, that Tolstoy's   "words bear extraordinary prescience today, as we face a swelling tide of political unrest, ethnic violence, and global conflict."
 
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/08/21/leo-tolstoy-gandhi-letter-to-a-hindu/

A writer's holiday

This blog has been on holiday for the last couple of weeks, mainly because I haven't had the energy at the end of the day to post anything at all.  It's been a blistering few weeks, jetting backwards and forwards between Italy and the UK, trying to keep the UK house from crumbling into the river bank, seeing the Offspring, and attempting to sell a few books.  What I need is a holiday!  But that got me thinking. . .

Don't look now - I'm writing!
Everyone's heard the expression 'a busman's holiday', ie not really being on holiday at all - but what about writers?  'A writer's holiday' would be a more appropriate saying, because writers have no holidays at all.  We are continually on the receiving end of 'input' even if we can switch off 'output'.

See that bikini clad woman lying on the beach towel, eyes closed behind the shades?  She's eavesdropping a conversation between two people having an argument under a nearby umbrella.  Notice the notebook strategically placed next to the iced drink and the sun tan lotion.

'Spot the Writer' is a good game.  Sometimes they pretend to be listening to music on their i-pods but this is just a ruse to prevent people talking to them - a vain attempt to shut off 'input'.  I've tried everything, but whenever I travel the people next to me, the taxi drivers, the cabin crew, all seem to want to tell me the stories of their lives.  I've got the material for shelves and shelves of novels I will never write.

Then there's the sunsets, the 3am Cosmic Questions, the way the light falls on the sea, a bird at just the right angle above the mountain, the man with the gleaming teeth who appears in the bar every evening with a different woman, the girl selling bracelets on the street outside, a  mysterious note delivered to your cubby hole in the hotel . . .  They all need to be written down by the crazy addict desperate for another fix of Words.

These days, i-pads are making it difficult to spot the scribblers.  They might look as though they're simply texting or updating Facebook, while sneakily editing the Great Novel.  You might even be in it - your appearance and conversation recorded for posterity.  That's what writers do - they steal other people's lives and put them between glossy covers and they are never, never off-duty!

Now I'm off again, this time to take charge of grandchildren who don't want to go on holiday with their parents - and daughter and tiny ones are back from Cuba, so there's going to be a houseful. Probably won't have the energy to blog again until September - but you never know!