I wish I could stay later.
I wish I liked the noise.
I wish the acoustics softened
the impact of a voice.
I wish I wasn’t always
the nearly first to leave,
but staying in that clamour
is more than I can give.
I hope you do not consider
my departure as a slight.
If things had been even slightly different,
I would have stayed all night.
So my last business trip of the year is complete and after the four and a half hour commute, I have just turned my key in the lock and opened my front door to the joys of coming home.
And here they are:
A few moments of reshelving favourite books, boxing up adaptor plugs, sliding pairs of shoes into their familiar hidey holes, and walking in my mother’s homecoming footsteps of ‘getting the washing on the go”.
The particular hum of household appliances, the faint squeal of lightbulbs turned down on the dimmer, the strike of a match put to the gas fire tiled with fragments of my great grandmothers china and pebbles from my favourite seaside, the familiar rhythms of the boiler. A symphony.
Settling straight into the routines of my home neighbourhood – tomorrow is recycling collection, so it’s back to me to take it out (my kind neighbour does this when I’m away).
Conscientiously watering plants before they die of neglect.
Warming up cherished cold corners, scented candle on the hearth, hot-water bottles in the bed, scented oils in the bathroom, a spread of chords on the too-silent piano.
Friendly things to eat – favourite tea tonight and tomorrow the prospect of my beloved favourite breakfast.
The smell of laundry.
Everywhere treasure: favourite cards, tea lights, cushions, books, mugs, chair, pillows, cosy clothes.
Catching up with connection, responding, calling, delaying, writing. Being available to my friends and family again after days of intense focus.
Pink (seemingly outlawed from any business hotel I’ve stayed at in the last several years).
Prettyness – in delicate colours, in intricate textures, in contrast, in details, in scent, in light.
Storing my suitcase and turning back into someone who lives in their house, and who does not drag their possessions with them everywhere like a maladapted snail.
‘Pottering’; a mundane but beloved verb that rarely occurs away from home.
Presence, to myself, to my life, to now.
And thankfulness; what riches.
So as you know I have been hesitating on whether to comment on poems or whether to leave them to their own devices. On the one side is the risk of over-explanation (see ‘on leaving things unsaid‘), on the other is my memory of my sixth form project on metaphysical poetry where the explanations of teacher unlocked meaning and allowed me to take part in the poem in a way I would never have done otherwise.
A reader commented about the London found poem that ‘I don’t understand it but of course understanding isn’t a valid expectation to have’, and this has been resonating in the echo chamber of my mind ever since. Is it true? I think understanding is a wonderful thing to have. Understanding brings illumination, and even though it will always be partial, this brings a powerful sense of connection, and warmth and excitement.
So here I am going to put a little bit about what the poem revealed to me, and why the things I saw in London on that adventure turned out to be in the poem. Of course, my own understanding is only partial, but maybe it will provide some interesting light. I will also show where I have changed the poem (in two places) since I originally posted it.
So first of all, I don’t have any agenda in the found poem discovery process. All I do is be on the alert during my time in the city for fragments of text which stand out for some reason. Then, when I get home, I let them all sit around until they form themselves into verses. To be honest, I didn’t really think that the things I’d seen that day in London made a poem. I felt a bit disappointed and I almost didn’t even embark on the discovery process. But once I’d written out the bits of text (recorded on my camera), unexpected connections started to emerge.
What struck me straight away is that there is a theme of restlessness, and design, and home. The theme of design is not a surprise because I was at the design museum, but what came together is the idea for me that our lives are our homes, and that we have a role to play in designing our life-homes.
From this, the verses started to sing to each other. The first question unsettles us as to whether we have become stuck in a rut. And then the answers also have that fretful quality. I have now changed lines three and four around, as I realised that the ‘sheer frustration’ line is an answer to the companion line.
I then loved the mix of very everyday imagery (about the pencils), the idea of story versus limited options, the challenge of designing a home and the emotional power of that, and the fact that are homes-lives are also kinds of monuments of what we value, and the powerful question as to what others might make of our choices.
I was a bit hesitant about allowing the Charity text fragment into the poem; it felt a bit out of place. But I also quite like the out-of-place things intruding. Out-of-place things can put the mind into an interesting state of trying to discover a meaning. So in time this stanza has made me dig. The meaning that has arisen for me is that it links to our own possible poverty (of meaning, of aspiration) in our lives, and how that allows a dynamic where we need charity (also an old word for love) to connect us to abundance.
The poem then connects the idea of home and meaningfulness to belonging, which is expressed through the words about membership and uniting. Our actions to address our inner restlessness may also need hard work (engine rooms), courage (bold moves), and experimentation (hop on hop off). In these verses, the work of life-design is taking shape.
I also hesitated over and then relished the inclusion of the reference to the story of our fall from grace, because it also helps to point to where we may have sewed flimsy ‘clothes’ to cover up the nakedness we feel in our lives. This question cannot be neatly tidied away, so it leaves a lasting vulnerability within the poem itself.
Before the poem closes, there is an appeal not to lose sight of children in our life designs. Children embody our shared vulnerability, and this appeal then also calls us not to create lives that fail to acknowledge this.
The close then returns to mystery, to happenstance, along with searching and intentionality, which resonates back to the idea of design. The first line is lived intensely in the present, emphasising the continuity of the process of life-home creation. The second line evokes total commitment.
Originally the poem ended with the exhortation ‘Go to it’, but on reflection, it feels too heavy handed to address the reader in this way. So this has been edited out, and instead the reader can identify with the speaker in the last lines. Here the ‘you’ is less direct, and the reader then has more freedom to choose to join the speaker in the exploration of ‘everything’.
Since I have understood the poem in this way myself, I have enjoyed the sensation of life-homes being created, amended and adapted, of the importance of our vulnerability and the joy of a ‘hop on hop off’ approach to experimenting with new hobbies, ideas, reading, and so on. I continue to enjoy the challenge of the first line, which reminds me to keep adventuring, to be brave to explore new things, and to be alert to places where my life-home habits and routines become confining.
When was the last time you had a first time?
I forget where we were.
Desire or restlessness?
Sheer frustration inspires new design;
I can’t remember where we were, I mean.
Design solves problems.
Robin Day cleverly extended two short pencils lives
by joining them together
with a piece of metal tubing.
Every stone tells a story;
not a multiple choice.
I had a strong interest in housing,
the relationships between our homes and ourselves being a particular area of fascination.
However, this is an emotive subject and managing the enormity of the scope has probably been
my biggest challenge.
Bringing joy to everyday.
Now my heart turns to and fro,
In thinking what will the people say.
They who shall see my monument in after years,
And shall speak of what I have done.
everything that is letting happy in and other things life don’t give itself
Membership makes a difference.
Charity was born of the marriage of Poverty with Abundance,
and certainly it cannot come into existence
without the presence of the two,
side by side.
Unite in good cheer.
Engine rooms this way.
Make bold moves;
hop on hop off.
And the eyes of them both were opened,
and they knew that they were naked,
and they sewed fig leaves together,
and made themselves aprons.
take extra care of children
You never know what you are going to find.
I had to look at everything.
Notes on locations: This is a more complex poem than the previous found poems. In order, the source texts are from: advert (Bakerloo line, Paddington, southbound), poster for concert, posters at Design Museum (DM), DM, overheard fragment of conversation, Robin Day studio replica at DM, advert, exhibition subtitle, James Christian quoted in DM (abridged), poster, Inscription on Hatsheput’s obelisk (DM), scrawled answer to question ‘What is good design?’ at DM, writing on a wall at Tower of London museum, quotation on fence around building site near Stonecutter Court, Starbucks poster, Sign at Tower Bridge, scrap of paper at DM, Routemaster Bus, Genesis 3:7 quoted at ‘Woman Fashion Power’ exhibition at DM, sign on tube, two fragments of David McCandless’s talk for the Royal Statistical Society, pattern on a scarf (DM).
Yesterday I did something unheard of.
Instead of making my the café where I have gone to write for the last x number of years, a café so well-loved and frequented that I believe I may have worn a groove in the paths from my home to its threshold, I went to the library.
It had been little while coming. First they painted the beautiful big communal room dark blue. It altered the quality of the light, made it always a little bit sombre. Then slowly slowly things changed. The low-energy light bulbs cast less light. The manager moved on and the new one…. Well, these things happen. He introduced fresh flowers but when I visited they were always dead. Then one by one the staff abandoned ship. I saw the way that things were leaning, I made calls, encouraged from the sidelines, Canute-like failing to hold back the approaching tide. The replacement members of the team were sweet, but somehow insubstantial. No history holds them together. And then on Monday, with the wifi more wi-foe, and the toilets neglected and the broken lightbulbs not replaced, and the cookie turned to dust…
That was it. We had broken up. A hastily proffered replacement cookie disintegrated into crumbs on my walk home. There was no more left to say.
My city is not well-provided for cafés with large airy spaces and happy staff and a perfect cup of tea. Too many are haunted by the spirit of the formula. Faith has been put in track-records and not enough in the personal. But insinuating itself into my consciousness had been the reopening of our library.
I hadn’t gone to the opening; couldn’t bear the potential disappointment of seeing old, worn, wabi-sabi beauty trashed by a new-kid-on-the-block. So my visit yesterday was my first. I tiptoed over the threshold, breath held, hands metaphorically in front of my eyes, peeking, and – sigh of relief – it was beautiful. Not quite old-leather-armchairs-beautiful, but really, quite extraordinarily home and familiarity and sit-down-with-your-book-ish.
So armed with tea (yes, allowed in a travel cup), I took my place by a vast window, looking out to a park rustled by autumn winds, and I wonder about the change of seasons.
extraplorer 