More than I can chew

OK. So here it is: a looming deadline of the 16th December, by when I have to submit a final portfolio of poems/writing that counts towards the first part of my MA in Creative Writing. The rules say it needs to be no more than 4,000 words or a collection of X poems. I'm going the poetry route. Why?

Good question. A couple of months back I wouldn't have called myself a poet. A novelist, yes. A poetic writer, maybe perhaps. So why the change? Well I guess it stems from what made me want to be a writer in the first place - way back when I was a rather day-dreamy 14 year old boy and I happened to watch a TV drama about the Lakeland Poets - Wordsworth and Coleridge, and their lives, and oh how wonderfully, well, Romantic it all seemed - how passionate it must be to connect with the landscape, life, the spinning mudball of earth and attempt to make sense of it all. And I relaise now, that this is exactly what I have been struggling to do ever since, but in all forms of writing other than the one that inspired it: namely, poetry. I mean I've written the occasional poem over the intervening years - but at one point I went ten years between poems, my mind was so full of Other Creative Expressions - film, work (the day job is advertising), many attempts at Writing The Next Great Existential Novel and so on, that when I came to write a poem a couple of months ago it felt like it came naturally, from nowhere, it just arrived, conceived, whole, without worry. This was it:

It appeared

It appeared one day, the scaffold.

Cold pipe, claw and buckle,

Board and ladder,

While we slept on, hands unseen

Erected our metal nest

With feet planted into giving mud

At angles, heaving the old house upright,

It seemed, the poles propped stone

And home

Kept all in place, in order.

We grew accustomed to it.

Attached, I’d say.

Our elaborate mesh, this dressing,

It never seemed in the way

Or unsightful.

Then, one morning, the light brought home

The truth:

How brick by brick

And stone by stone

Had gone missing

Leaving us naked before the neighbours,

Kissing.

which I still quite like. Apparently (unknown to me) Seamus Heany has written about scaffold and relationships too, but this is far enough away as to warrant its own space in the world.

So. Back to the portfolio. I've chosen to write about my father. Kenneth John Crampton, who died aged 67 in 1994. Why now? I'm not exactly sure. Perhaps becasue I feel I'm losing sight of him, and I looka round my daily life and there's not much physically there that reminds me of him. I have a photogrpah or two. Some of his old cameras. But I began to feel I was losing him, without trace. This collection of poems, or sketches, whatever it turns out to be is just a way of capturing him as I see him now. Which is to say, it may feel very different in a few years time again, as perspectives always change, so it's not as thought i'm thinking I'm goign to be doign the definitive view of my afther or anything; just a few ideas I have right now. But who am I kidding? I'm writing this blog just to tell myself all this rathet thean anyone OUT THERE. But that's OK. If it helps, it helps. A wrting diary, for me.

So; I have a collection of titles in my notebook - some of which tie directly to specific memories, some are a bit more abstract I guess. The Hand Loom, Ridikerlus, Under Ribblesdale Viaduct, Fishing, Mousaka, Cat Bells, Dog Fights, the Trials Bike, The Mirror, the 50th Anniversary of D-Day, November 2nd 1926, and Oxford Crematorium. I think others will probably come out in the wash - but even those seem liek a mighty mountain to climb in the three weeks I have left to pull the portfolio together.

I've had a go at the Hand Loom last weekend, and started Ridikerlus on yesterday. and reckon on getting first drafts of at least two or three done this week. If I even just have a pile of first drafts complete by the end of the first week in December I'll be happy - and can start to revise and edit up to the deadline. Fortunately the advertsing discipline means I'm not worried about working to the wire on things.

Enough for now.