Dreams and Nightmares In A Long Life.

Featured in my new collection, With Such Caution, are poems springing out of elements reflected in my notebooks over the last 50 years. What has emerged from this process of sifting and editing  is  a kind of hybrid of memoir and poetry reflecting the light and shade, the sunshine and shadows all experienced in a long life.

I have found as  the notebook entries were transmuted by the febrile abstraction  of poetry, that I started to recognise - among brighter notions and perceptions - a sprinkling of poems  involving dark dreams and even nightmares in a long life.

  
Possibly because I am a child of World War Two I have remembered dreams I had in the bed which I shared with my sister, in the house where I lived until I was seven.

 In that time, in  that bed, I distinctly remember  dreaming of invasion, in the form of  uniformed hordes coming up the stairs of that house in Lancaster,
 
 This was a dream. It didn’t literally happen!
 
But several of the poems in With Such Caution illustrate the impact of dark dreams successively on the consciousness of the little girl as she grows up to become a teacher, a feminist, a novelist and writer, a mentor, a wife, a lover, a mother -  in various combinations -  through a long life.
 
Of course this dark aspect combines with the lighter elements – light and shade juxtaposed -- and has contributed to perhaps a more abstract notion of a lived life, which makes With Such Caution much more than a straight memoir.

An Example:-

The poem here below - perhaps the darkest in the collection – finally written in 2002 – reflects some of the darkest aspects of the dreaming and the feelings that still haunt me.

 

Tin Drum Beat

 

Lady of shadow, where do you walk?

Come into the light

let me see you more clearly,

 

Grasping existence with your metal fingers

Sitting there hearthside to knit up the world

your face set hard to  the distance of  time,.

Your green-coin head turns this way and that,

viewing the treeless spread of the city..

 

Still you stay there at the edge of the dark

walking the streets with your diamond tread

beating the drum  with your  tough metal fingers -

choosing the child for the next conflagration

 

Lady of shadow, where are you walking?

Come into the light

Let me see you more clearly

 

You turn into an alley, darker than Hades,

and confront a boy whose eyes cannot see.

Your gaze pierces through the husk of his eyelid

igniting his soul to the darkness ahead,

 

Lady of shadows

Come into the light

Let me see you more clearly

 

I’m running before you, afraid of your gaze

afraid of your hands with their tin-drum-beat

afraid of your eyes, those glittering  emeralds,

afraid of the high-heeled click of your feet

 

Lady of shadows why do you follow?

I turn in the dark to meet your embrace.

Nov 29.02

 

Fragments of this poem are in several of the

notebooks. Perhaps this piece shows how

close are one’s dreams and nightmares

in a world where the imagination rules.

 

 

 Wendy Robertson

Blog: www.wendyrobertson.com 

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Finding Myself in My Books,

About Finding Myself In My Books.

The following poem, Finding Myself in My Books , was inspired by the task of organising all of my books as part of the creation of an Archive of all my work

including my notebooks, my novels, and my other published works.

This mammoth task is being spearheaded by the truly Doctor Donna Maynard, a  literary authority on the works of George Elliot, Lewis Carroll and  Charles Kinglsey.  And me now, perhaps.

My contribution to this task has been to survey and organise all the books on all of my shelves. In its turn this exercise has inspired the following short line poem, Finding Myself In My Books. You might be interested to know that this was first drafted while I was waiting in hospital for an eye injection

Finding Myself In My Books will be included in my newest collection of stories, called Kaleidoscope –A View from the Frontier. The short stories in this collection have emerged  from shaking my own life-kaleidoscope and being surprised by the special patterns which have emerged from the virtually random elements locked up in my life-storehouse. This has liberated unique stories to spring out of elements in different times in different places, finally fused  together through the art of fiction - viewed from what  the inimitable Diana Athill called the Frontier of Older Age. 

Here goes 

Finding Myself In My Books.

I am here at the frontier, reorganising

and encouraging my reading self

to revisit all of my books – a lifetime’s

books borrowed, bought and stolen if.

Some, acquired for research, have

driven me to dive into time and power

in order to colonise people, language and places.

Some contain  esoteric matter –

magic, ritual, ghosts, exotic plants

the mysterious powers

of the natural world.

Some explore ways of growing children –

their language and their secret inner selves.

The books remind me of myself, pondering

on society with its inexplicable shifts,

its organic twists and bizarre beliefs, which

out-play solid facts and  iron-clad ideas,

rendering them fluid –identity,

class, perversions, norms –

making imperative the changes

fundamental to our new millennium.

Then there are the stories, written in a lighter fashion

now dusty and dated - yesterday’s dramas.

Alongside these work of great poets and writers

resists the depredations of time;

refreshing me with every reading.

Weighing heavy on the shelves are books laden with

the phenomenally detailed minutiae of war –

gruesome images and experiences laid bare

to enable us to learn anew all about

the horrors perpetuated on our behalf

in the name of nationality at the behest of greed.

And there in the corner stand two cases filled with

my own writing. The books still looking bright and new

despite their long existence. They wait  patiently for me

to open the pages and rediscover some new things

about myself –  things I thought, things I felt, things I thought

I knew and really didn’t know.

The words inside these covers

Differentiate between who I am now

and who I was then.

November 2019

Postcard 4 Poems, Morning and Sounds on the Lagoon,

Morning

Bright silver
morning sun crashing
onto the lagoon
breaking into
shards of
diamond light that shoal together
before breaking onto
the shore

Sounds on the Lagoon

The buzz of the coffee machine
The tap of a joiner’s hammer
The murmur of
considered conversations
Ducks quacking after their ducklings
The murderous shriek of seagulls,
loudest before it
stops
The clanging of a ship’s bell
The click of masts chiming
The whine of wind driving
through a hundred spinnakers
The boom of a boat’s engine
ploughing through the water
the shush of its wake as
it streams through the water
leaving a creamy line
on its pulsing surface
The chirp and chatter
of children in ten  tiny boats,
being towed in a line,
like ducklings in a row.

  

Au Revoir

Wendy

Postcard 6 from Marseillan: Passing Thoughts and Copper Pans.

Being on holiday, unwinding and getting back into mental shape leads to a kind of transient reflection that finds its way into my notebook with various thoughts and inspirations  scattered across various pages.

After making a drawing of some lovely copper pans D found at the bricolage, I gathered a few of these thoughts together last night and put them together in a series of short lines.

These make not-quite-a-poem just as my paintings make not-quite-a-picture.

Here goes:

How do I know that I am

more than my generation

more than my actions

more than my present self?

Under a gibbous* moon

I was thinking of Barbara –

how she would love this

soft wind from the south

how she would relish the sound

of the  sea as it surges up

from Africa and the far south

Of course she did not know these things, except

for the globe in the front room of

her terraced house, haunted

by debt and the urgency of existence.

A bright star follows

the north star of my imagination,

surviving in this sub-blue sky,

charting my affections above

the curling red roofs in this

village by the Mediterranean

The moon here shines

down on the shadow-play

of palm trees, tall pines and

rustling bamboo, all

filtered by the warm Siroccan wind.

Beyond all this I hear the bark of dogs,

the song of birds, the hungry cry of wolves

the clatter of armour clad feet, beneath

the insistent shimmer of the North Star,

pointing the way home.

* The word gibbous comes from a root word that means hump-backed. You can see the hump-backed shape of the waxing gibbous moon.

Poems Found on My Visit to the Oriental Museum in Durham City

Ancient Chinese bowl: a poem in clay

The Scribe

There is nothing better

than a book

There is no profession

without a boss

Except for the Scribe -

he’s the boss.

(Satire on The Trades. Middle Kingdom. Egypt)

Zodiac

I wish I had been born

in the year of the hare:

sensitive but haughty

This is how

I see myself

But I was born

in the year of the snake:

fun-loving but clingy

This, perhaps, is how

others see me.

The Silk Gown

She stands tall, straight backed,

engulfed in pale stiff silk  

all gleaming sea-green,

embroidered with butterflies

and flowers

They say butterflies symbolise beauty

 and romance, even though the

inside her sleeve  the embroidery 

is invisible to the naked eye

of the onlooker 

 ©Wendy Robertson 2015

Picture This: Ways of Writing About Yourself.

It might be fair to say that all writers write about themselves. Even biographers tell us about themselves – their attitudes and values - as they are writing about quite another person.

Poets write about themselves - sometimes in a deeply codified fashion sometimes quite directly. They reveal themselves to you as long as you know the code.

Look at Philip Larkin:

Life is first boredom, then fear. 
Whether or not we use it, it goes, 
And leaves what something hidden from us chose, 
And age, and then the only end of age.

                                       From Dockery and Son.

…And Ted Hughes:

She had too much so with a smile you 
took some.
Of everything she had you had
Absolutely nothing, so you took some.
At first, just a little.

                                               From The Other

And novelists do this too, even if their subject matter is apparently distant from their own lives. When I was writing my writer’s memoir The Romancer (see sidebar) I was quite shocked, looking back over a dozen novels, to see  just how much of my own life is buried in there underneath the fiction, informing it and giving it a touchstone of reality,

In the Romancer I experimented with another approach to writing about myself  across the distance of years. This was a series of cameos called Picture This, where I wrote about this little girl and a  growing your woman (me) in the third person, ‘I’ becomes ‘she’.  This gave me a fictional distance but allows me to tell a truth.

And so I discovered that it’s a great way to write sketches which in later times can inspire and give life to further, longer fiction. A whole novel or a short story can grow out of a single 'Picture This'

Here is a new ‘Picture This’  just written:   

Picture This:

The girl was first a stranger, then a resident in this small town set in a necklace of dusty coal mines with a shiny new brooch of light industry on its lapel. In time she finds herself on a high corridor in a castle, in a room with a coal fire in an Adam fireplace and a bed in each corner where four nearly- grown girls sleep at night.

One of these girls kneels by her bed each night to say her prayers. Another has wonderful bright penny hair and skin like porridge, and tells tales of being punished by her father by being locked in a cupboard . The third, a very merry girl, is quite stout when clothed but looks better when she strips off, taking on the aspect of the prow of a sailing ship.

And then there is our girl under the covers with a torch, reading again and again a letter on yellow paper covered in small black writing: an academic hand. There are pathways in our lives and this might have been one of hers. That was one future that did not happen.

She didn’t cry when she left home to take a train and two buses to reach her castle. And she doesn’t cry when she feels lonely there and out of place. But after three months when she comes home for the first time and turns the corner onto her narrow street tears fall unbidden from her eyes.

 But when she opens her own door she wipes away her tears  with the back of her hand and says hello to her mother. They do not hug or kiss.


Who knows where this might lead?

Why not try a Picture This’ and become she or he in your writing?

Happy writing! W

Spells, Good Intentions and Good Wishes for 2013

I would like to wish a creative, fulfilling and satisfying New Year to all the gentle people who land on this page and take an interest in which particular bit of my writing life I taste for the second time.  In 2012 Lifetwicetasted struck a chord with some lovely people who took the trouble to let me know this. It's so nice to know you care. 

       Being a bit of a Pagan I tend to like the New Year’s Celebration more than the more cosy shores of Christmas. The Winters Solstice, the turn of the year has a resonance outside organised religion and custom: we experience the end of the dark days and a glimpse of brighter days to come. Now we can draw a line under the previous year with its challenges and its disappointments – even its successes and delights. A new day dawns and it seems up to ourselves to make the year work for us – or to work to make the year the best it can be.

       So making ‘New Year Resolutions’ – in Pagan terms casting some spells for the New Year – can be part of this process can’t it? It's one way of summing up your hopes and dreams for the year to come and getting into the right frame of mind to make them come true.  

       So I thought I would share with you ten of my resolutions, wishes or spells for 2013.

1.     I will keep in better touch with my friends. (Not good at this.)

2.     I will make a very big push early in the year to get a proper handle on this new novel. (Sometimes I get lost in and distracted by the fascinating research.)

3.     I will walk outside in the light every day. (I tend to burrow away too much.)

4.     I will have a stab at another set of short stories. This is a lovely diversion from long fiction and allows the flexing of other literary muscles. (Looking forward to seeing my  two sets out in the spring with Audiogo.)

5.     I will meditate once a day every day not just as and when. (I can be erratic about this very positive process.)

6.     I will read more poetry and tackle some five finger exercises in this form. (I'm not a poet but have always enjoyed this kind of play. Have done it less in this last year.)

7.     I will try and be a bit more businesslike about my books on Kindle. There must be a way to do this although I’m uncomfortable with advice that tells you to sell yourself at very opportunity.  I think it could be counterproductive as I myself get irritated by people shouting up their titles all the time. There must be a civilised way to tackle this.

8.     I will put more comments on blogs that I enjoy. I tend to think the writers will not be interested in my opinion, but then I remember how delighted I am if someone posts a positive comment on my blog.

9.     I will go to Wales – crucial and should have an impact on my take on for book research.

10. I will cast a spell for my family that they will grow in health, wisdom and self esteem 

Well there you are! Do you have any spells you wish to cast on 2013?

wx

STOP PRESS for Gardeners, Readers & Writers

Don’t forget to join me this Sunday at Noon on the 3^rd June to The Writing Game  on Bishop FM where Gillian, Avril and I dig into the inspiration of the garden.

This month on The Writing Game we are making the connection between the creative processes of gardening and writing. Many gardeners are writers and many writers are gardeners. Both activities require a combination of inspiration, hard work, creativity and patience. The only way to become accomplished at both writing and gardening is  actually to do it – not think about it or theorise about it but to actually practice the art. Some people would say that in both cases you have to be willing to get your hands dirty!

On this month’s programme we visit the garden in Low Etherley of Mary Smith who is both a great gardener and a member of Wear Valley Writers. ..  – read more  at http://blogs.bishopfm.com/thewritinggame/

Away To France

Away to France at 4am. Here are some not-quite poems that I wrote last time. There will be more this-time writing…

Agde Haiku

The sound of swallows

Clouds salmoning the morning

Coffee steams gently

A Child Stretching

A child stretching

Hauling up the base of her spine

Through her shoulders

Along her arms

Right down

To her fragile wrists

More cat

Than anything

Striding with Bread

They all do it -

Young, not so young

Smart, not so smart

Morning and afternoon

Carrying long loaves

From the artisan baker

Greek Frieze

Trim measured borders

Three figures under arches

Framed with rays of basalt light

Crudely carved and very potent

One is a draped

A pious creature turns to one side

His features all scratched in

A garland on his head

The next one is naked, all

voluptuous, curved breasts

and copious belly

She holds flowers

The third is naked too

But moves briskly to the left

Like a business man in a hurry

To get to work

The Painter

She walks with a cheetah's grace

Her face golden, her drawn back hair

The colour of gleaming putty

Her smile as ancient as the town

She says she paints while keeping shop

Splashes of deep ochre and Agde yellow -

Airy spaces, unfinished figures

Brief encounter

With colour and light.

(Photo Thank you Sean)