Of Concrete Design

Of Concrete Design A journal of poetics By Liam Robb Copyright © 2009 Liam Robb 1. DEATH - The Honesty of Death - Teresa - Dark Time of the Day - Creep, Crawl, Stand 2. LIFE - Oh? - On I - Hawkstars and Starhawks 3. SPIRIT - The Deep - The Call - Hemera’s Interruption 4. PLAY - Dada Poem - Má Xaet Viala 5. VERSE - The Matriarch - My Dancers Inside - I Am Yours - Where Crimson Is Touched - Of Concrete Design Chris Martin

Photography by: Liam Robb Benjamin Earwicker Textures: http://struckdumb.deviantart.com/

Ogghoo

DEATH

The Honesty of Death This poem is a strange one in that it isn’t actually a poem, or at least it was never written with the intention of being one. A few years ago I wrote a short play entitled Cassandra in which the title character lost her brother to the Inquisition, and The Honesty of Death was a monologue, her reflection on what death was and what death is to her. The death of her brother forced her to question her beliefs of another world and other incarnations: ‘questionable is the second, third, forth meeting’, something she had always believed in. Though this poem did start out as part of a performance text, I always found it poetic. Whatever that means. When nothing came of the play, I always kept this particular piece because it was still meaningful to me. Though the ‘perspective’ is that of Cassandra, this monologue was written separately from the rest of the play, and was written shortly after a loss in my own family. In many ways it is an amalgamation of the conversations I had with my mother after her sister died and the questioning that followed, of things we thought we knew. Though I try to include only new and fresh work in my collections, I chose to re-use this piece for Terror Jubilation because of the following poem - Teresa - I had written specifically for the collection. As the monologue had been inspired by the same person and event, I thought it was a wonderful way to segue into the next poem, to create a broader picture to introduce the theme of the next.

Teresa This poem is based on a song I wrote a few years ago, but was re-written for Terror Jubilation and bares no resemblance to the song anymore. The song was a very angry response to the death of my aunt, questioning why no one could help her, while this poem I feel is more of a celebration of the feeling that though she’s gone, it’s only a different state of being that separates her from the people she left behind. This is another poem that came about as a result of a series of conversations with my mother, during which I realised that though I’d always thought I believed in the spirit and its ability to carry on after death, I now truly believed that my aunt was still… somewhere. Energy can’t be destroyed, it has to become something else: ‘pain into serenity’. Both influenced very directly by the same event, this poem is much more hopeful than The Honesty of Death and I think the two poems together, as they are meant to be read, provide the two opposing initial reactions and feelings of my family. Teresa Stanford (née Robb) 1961-2007

Dark Time of the Day

This poem is a reflection of death from a different thought and prospective, and is in some ways personal in terms of that feeling you can sometimes get when you realise you’re starting to get older - and what age means in that inevitably, surprise, you die - but in many ways also a poem in which I adopted a character as a process to write it. By which I mean that it’s largely written from the point of view of someone who perhaps doesn’t have much longer to live, and is hearing the ‘creeping buzz of bees’ or the approaching end. I chose the image of bees because I think there’s something faintly intimidating about the buzz of a bee, especially when you consider the irrational effect the sound can have on entire groups of perfectly rational people. And of course, what happens when a bee stings you? Yes, it hurts for a while, but the bee often dies. This poem is also meaningful to me for the fact that it highlights a point that though death may be hard to talk about and think about, it happens every second of every day, everywhere. It is perhaps the most common thing that we know, but the thing that is such a difficult issue in our lives. This is also why I referred to the ‘hum’ of the bees, it’s almost a ‘whistle while we work’ image, one of the everyday.

Creep, Crawl, Stand This poem was written shortly after news first broke about the atrocities in Gaza late last year but though it was inspired by those awful events, it isn’t strictly about them. I felt very strongly about this conflict but couldn’t find the words to express feelings that in the end would be meaningless compared to how those people suffered. This was my attempt at trying to put into words what it must be like to be in a situation of war, and I devised the title from the three stages that emerged; to creep in fear at the realisation of what is happening, to crawl in the attempt to escape without being noticed, to stand when it becomes clear that a cautious escape cannot be had. Of course, I have never experienced anything like this and I’m not professing to. The poem is about war, military conflict, and the horror someone, a civilian, may feel when they’re caught in the middle of it and are forced to hide ‘beneath the caves and hollows deep’. It was one of the last poems I wrote for Hemera's Interruption and was one of the most challenging to write because of how the themes had affected me.

LIFE

Oh? This was the first of the poems I wrote for Terror Jubilation and it was completely a thoughtless concoction, something I wrote just because I felt like writing, something that I didn’t really realise had a meaning until after I’d written it. That happens to me sometimes with my writing; that I’ll write because I need to let some language escape and won’t entirely understand it until afterwards when I can analyse it. I don’t often indulge in copious amounts of planning when it comes to poetry but I usually at least know what I’m writing about. In that respect, this poem is an oddity. Saying all that, this poem has a very strong meaning and message from a personal standpoint. It’s a poem about sexuality and gender attitudes, but specifically it is about negative perspectives I personally experienced within LGBT communities. There is a small subset of people within these communities who deliberately flaunt and exaggerate their beliefs and lifestyles not in a stance of equality, but to antagonise other people. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing some of these people, who cause just as much trouble for the struggle for rights that they say they are fighting for. This poem addresses my feelings towards such people. ‘Don’t choke on your razor bile’, ‘don’t look too close to home’. Sometimes it isn’t just outside forces that further discrimination.

On I This poem came about as a result of a creative free writing exercise in a performance devising lecture, in which the idea was to answer the following questions as stimulus: Where are you from? What do you care about? How do you say goodbye? How do you want to be remembered? The questions are answered more or less literally except for the first, where instead of the dull and uninspiring answer of where I was born or where I live, I answered more from a spiritual and emotive perspective than a literal one. ‘I come from fire and water’ refers to my temperament, ‘floors unstood, stars unknown’ to my imagination and so on. This is what makes me, this is where I come from. As a result of the stimulus, this poem is much more personal about different parts of myself and my life than I would usually go into detail about. It covers subjects such as my spirituality, my precious nephews, love, my parents’ divorce, and my most inner thoughts about… well, me. As the exercise I was doing was meant to be a meditative one as well as a writing exercise, I found myself writing about subjects that I usually wouldn’t write about as well as some more popular subjects. I think this is why I decided to include it in Terror Jubilation, because I think it’s important for writers to occasionally write outside of their comfort zones.

Hawkstars and Starhawks This is another quite personal poem and one that was written over the Christmas period of two thousand and eight, and I specifically remember that it was triggered after spending a day with my sister and my two young nephews. The poem addresses the subject of having children versus not having children, which may seem like an odd subject but is an important one I think to somebody who won’t ever have a “conventional” family like my sister does. By that I mean I won’t ever fall in love with a woman and have children with her, not unless something in my sexual drive changes drastically in the future. But the possibility of having children is an inevitability I will eventually have to consider seriously; at some point in my adulthood I would like to be a father. This poem addresses my feelings on this. I have two options; the Hawkstar, which is the option of not having children, or the Starhawk, which is the option of having children in a way deemed unconventional. The poem talks about both of these options being destroyed or dangerous: ‘The Hawkstar is dying, fading from sight / The Hawkstar is blazing, consumed’ and this is representative of the struggle between the two that I am already facing, though I don’t expect to deal with the answer for several years yet. The Queen that is referenced is a figure that I sometimes employ to describe myself (there’s some stereotypical gender swapping for you) or people I don’t wish to name, but in this case She refers more to a social position than a personal one. What effect would society have on my choice? Would she cautiously accept a “new” way, or would she lay it to waste?

SPIRIT

The Deep ‘The sea doesn’t know how to respond to me’ - I’ve always felt that I’ve had a special relationship with the sea, that somehow I came from it, or that I belonged to it. That I was some special little sea-baby that found its way onto land by mistake. To say that I love the sea is a mild statement. It really is something entirely spiritual, and this poem is about that primal feeling of a presence older than anything we know, yet constantly renewing and young. But the sea also scares me, and that’s the other reflection of this poem. It scares me because it’s so powerful, and there’s always that awe when you stand and watch waves crashing in a storm, somewhere in between amazement and terror. It scares me because it’s so deep, its far reaches so far down. It scares me because there’s much we still don’t know about its depths. It scares me because, as strange as this may sound from someone so comfortable with their spirituality, it is one of the forces that ruined organised religion for me. This poem is much more personal and story-telling than it seems, and as I’ve shown above is mostly about my journey from organised religion to personal spirituality and my love of the sea. This was the last poem I wrote for Terror Jubilation and is perhaps my favourite of the collection because of its very special meaning.

The Call

This poem is a fairly straightforward one and another that isn’t strictly a poem or at least wasn’t intended to be one when it was first written. However, it was intended to be a poem in the sense of it being poetic. I’m just full of contradictions, aren’t I? The structure and content of this one might be similar to some because it was a very conscious decision for me to write in this way; this poem is an invocation, a welcome, to the elements of earth, air, fire and water that it discusses. This is a common structure in some neo-Pagan practice, used at the beginning of a ritual. The exact structure I was taught by friends was to begin with ‘Spirit of the North, Spirit of Earth’, but I omitted this in favour of a cleaner flow in this instance. I decided to use this poem/invocation for the introduction to Hemera’s Interruption because poetry and writing are almost spiritual events for me, and I wanted to mark the beginning of the collection with something that expresses that. This poem is a welcome to the energies and imaginary worlds that create my work.

Hemera's Interruption This was the last poem I wrote for Hemera’s Interruption, fittingly, and was always intended to be the defining poem of the collection, hence the shared title of the book. This was a conscious decision based on the already highly, though perhaps not all entirely obvious, spiritual references and themes of much of the collection. The sections in italics are actually a full piece when put together, a traditional chant taught to me by a good friend. This poem was inspired by a night I spent in a field a few years ago with a group of friends. We had gone to perform and celebrate a handfasting for two of our friends and after they left we had spent the night camping around a fire, playing games and performing our own rites. If I remember correctly, we were also there to celebrate the solstice. This particular event is the one I would describe still to this day as one of the defining experiences of my life, and one that wholly solidified my spiritual choices. This poem, and the title of the collection, allude to two fairly obscure figures of Greek mythology that I took an interest in around the time I was writing and compiling the poems. Nyx is the primal goddess, the personification, of the night and Hemera is her daughter, the goddess of the day. I was enamoured by brief references of these two figures, particularly an image that mother and daughter pass each other at dusk and dawn, but can never be together because day and night are separate. ‘Hemera’s Interruption’ of course is referring to the night, where Hemera returns home to be replaced by her mother Nyx.

PLAY

Dada Poem Goven at al (2007: 22) quote Tzara’s ‘recipe’ for creating a Dada poem: Take one newspaper. Take one pair of scissors. Choose from that newspaper an article of the length desired for the poem you intend to write. Cut out the article. Next cut out with care each of the words forming that article. Next put them in a bag. Mix gently. Take out one by one each excision in the order they fall from the bag. Copy carefully. The poem will resemble you. Voilà, there you are, an infinitely original poet of seductive sensibility. (quoted in Poggioli 1968: 190) So this poem was largely an experiment just to see what would happen, an experiment to see what kind of poem would result from the random construction of language. It was an interesting process to say the least, and the poem is in its entirely un-edited form - yet still made a lot of sense. I was so happy with the result that I used it to replace the unfinished ‘The Matriarch’ which was intended for Hemera’s Interruption. Govan, Emma, Nicholson, Helen, Normington, Katie (2007) Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices, Abingdon, Routledge

Má Xaet Viala Out of the three playful poems in Terror Jubilation - He Is A Lobster Boy - and Hemera‘s Interruption - this one and Dada Poem - this one if my favourite. My playful poems are a chance for me to do something I wouldn’t usually do or just have a bit of fun. Dada Poem was something I wouldn’t usually do. He Is A Lobster Boy and Má Xaet Viala are just plain nonsense. I love nonsense. Though I didn’t want to emulate them, I was inspired by poets and writers such as Edward Gorey and Tim Burton when writing these kinds of poems, though it’s an art I perhaps haven’t perfected yet. But that’s the whole point of these poems; to be an experiment. Specifically, Má Xaet Viala is a poem written in an entirely made up language. Yes, I know what it says. I devised a written language just to create this poem and figured out how it would be said. Will I reveal what it says here? No. Because that isn’t the point. As explained alongside the poem, it is a test of your tongue. Can you figure out how to pronounce these strange words? This is a poem for speaking, not reading or understanding. Have you ever been to a foreign country, or met someone who speaks a different language or taken a new language class, and had trouble saying even the simplest of sentences? I have. I think it’s the curse of the majority of native English speakers. That’s largely what this poem is about, though of course it was also just a little bit of fun.

VERSE

The Matriarch There’s a wall over there That’s where I saw the crown Cogent is the shadow Of that misty afternoon And in the spirit of forgiveness I understand it all And mordant wit is shifted For calm and keen rapport Wasted is that time Now comity is ours And wishful is that ever-lasting Mask of torrid doors It’s on the wall I saw What I thought I’d never see Double crowns of Matriarchs Matriarchs are we

My Dancers Inside It’s the colour inside The blue and the pink The vibrancy that quivers Red unable to think It’s just unthinkable That colour could quake That silver could scorn And white innocence rape That black daring would win But fall victim to gold That purple would smile As its value is sold Orange and yellow Ablaze in my mind Serene is the green All my dancers inside

I Am Yours Catching scents is my favourite pasttime Followed closely by catching colours in the corner of my eyes I see beauty in that which is alive That which wakes with the sun Human skin is far too frail To live and grow and colour Shades of scents become my own I am yours in this discovery I am yours completely I soak up the rain and I am full Bathe in rays of golden light Fight back the frost forever I am still, yet so unnervingly Fixated on motion Shades of scents become my own I am yours in this discovery I am yours completely

Where Crimson Is Touched It’s in this quiet place Where crimson is touched With a cautious finger A fleeting grin Is all that survives An echo to whisper to the others That something is wrong here Inverted to all who seek Willingness Get back, get back Don’t stray here This path is dark and cruel and stung This way is perished It’s in this quiet place Where crimson is touched But those who have dared Ring bells of warning This is where crimson is cold Deemed volatile and corrupt This is where crimson can’t sing Or dance in his exalted way Forbidden is this place Forbidden to this time May children one day enter Where elders have dammed?

Of Concrete Design There is a system in place Of concrete design Desired to net the falling debris A crime rephrased In the lower depths of lasting Minds spin with wild words Of liquid design Lost in desert rhymes Swimming in ease and complexity Debris from another time Melting phrase and spirit Merging, mixing Electric reactions An animal movement Sparking under my skin Sparking until its spent Symphonies are loose From nowhere they’re born Spinning, spun The webs of steel beams Feral fever in my fingers A chorus of ravenous birds Kissing the page Tearing the page Susurrus at the back Of my skull which cannot Function lightly with all this light A lissom contortion of shadow It’s still there, stinging Of liquid design Many times I’ve lived Of concrete design