Poem from the 1980s number 3

 

I write about my first recovered poem from the 1980s (and a couple of others that predate them) in the previous two posts, here: Pages: Recovered poems from the 1980s - part one (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) and here:Pages: Recovered poem from the 1980s - number two (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) . The three I’m posting in contiguous posts represent a particular kind of abandonment that accompanies perceived poetic development, or to use my more usual vocabulary, to changes in my poetics.

At the end of the last post containing the poem 'The Mystery Towers' I said I’d explain what the Mystery Towers were. They were floating constructions seen (you couldn't have missed them) in Shoreham Harbour (near where I grew up) that were left over from the First World War. They only exist now in photographs from the 1920s. They did ‘remain a real mystery’ because nobody knew what they were for. (We do now: Shorehams Mystery Towers. | Sussex and the Great War. (wordpress.com).) I'm pleased to see that this image of the Mystery Towers comes from the James Grey Archive; 'Mr Grey' as she called him always, had been my mother's boss at work! She often spoke of his 'hobby' of collecting old photographs and postcards of the Brighton area. Later, we had some of his books; now there is an archive.

BUT the information does not help us to read the poem, particularly. The name was, by 1986, more important than the context I might have put them into in earlier (or, indeed, later) poems. But it still wasn’t advanced enough to survive my rapidly developing poetics. By the time I’ve reached the slightly smug self-assurance of the ‘Flashlight Propositions’ the poetry had moved on again. Pages: Robert Sheppard: Far Language: (Flashlight) Propositions (poetics) And even this third poem was abandoned because it seemed not to be fluxing between coherence and incoherence enough.

 An anthology is to be published soon, edited by Andrew Duncan, Rustbelt Arcadia which is to reflect poetry under Thatcherism (there is a blog of that name on the blogroll to the right of this post: check it out!). But here’s the third lost piece:

 Tilt

The policeman clings to these walls

As the only thing: all is not

All. These days of waving ladders past

Flashes, his torch against the frail curtains

While you’re inside fumbling with the half

Understood machine. A man appears in the doorway;

He shouts some impassioned command and

Raises the alarm. Another cart-load, another examination,

Pencilled dimensions of hinges: scribbled darkness.

A smudged world as usual, but this lack of focus is me:

Dark house, courtyard in grey light, consciousness

Flickering in somebody else’s need. There are new

Reflections for the mystery;

Ignore me, neutralize the grey.

It holds your perception, and the art is born.

Monday morning I could hear footsteps. There

Are objects there, useful in the way objects can be –

Not fitting in, failing disappearance:

Things to trip over in the dark. Halfway

Along the corridor you will scrabble for a side door

You know has a lamp. Ghostly hands as I write.

There is only one place and it’s subject to this law.

The policeman patrols the courtyard. Beware!

He notes the way you say, ‘Good morning’, your

Comings and goings through this synaesthetic draught:

A swinging gas-lamp over a stain

Of light. Skeletal iron cuts the glare, the open

Doorway contrived to fix all

Who stand silently to watch. Crash

Is both the world and not the world; this

Is a gas-lamp and it is not the lamp, but a chance

Move in this apocryphal game. The impossible

Is said to have happened, though it didn’t, but this

House tilts the turning at an angle, tipped

Toward the new which will never arrive. Each

Wash of words leaves this world dry. You

Sense an invitation out into the yard

Or you are inviting the light in, to you.

Something greets you, yet forbids, ‘Come no nearer;

What you project is already mine.’

 

November-December 1987

By the time I’d written it, it seemed too narrative. I did try to condense it, and it seems similar to ‘Internal Exile’. I have a vague memory of a Victorian photograph as the heavily re-configured source material. I write about photography and my work here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Talk for the Open Eye Gallery on Poetry and Photography December 2016 .

I hope all three still bring pleasure. I wonder what they look like to a new reader. One day I hope to 'collect' them. 

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Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com  website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter  latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com