Carl Bennett – Page 37 – Writer-insighter

These Are The Last Things

Another day, another cheery poem. I used this to close the night at the Wenhaston Star. It did the job well. Total silence, then clapping. Which was nice.

Then a bald-bloke barring my way out of the pub who wouldn’t let me go past until he’d said how much he liked it. It’s odd, I’m getting a lot of positive feedback (which I’m almost sure isn’t the kind of thing they’d say) from what look to me like the most unlikely people. Mostly with shaved heads. Mostly a lot bigger and tougher-looking than me. All of them visibly moved by my stuff, delivered by me. It’s been described rather flatteringly as raw and hypnotic. I think it’s something to do with telling honest stories about how people feel, in a way that men traditionally don’t tell them, or not in public, anyway.

That’s just my theory. I might be wrong. You could discuss it with my hard-looking fans if you like, out the back of the pub. Because they liked this one.

These Are The Last Things

This house is going now,

Boxes packed, the vans booked,

Exchanging soon and these,

These are the last things

From my garden cooking.

Courgettes from the summer

That we shared sitting

Talking until late.

Until really it was much too late

For either of us to pretend,

Or for you to go home again.

This was my best Summer.

The summer of you and your dogs.

And your nose. And your voice.

And your hair. And your bent toes.

And just you, really. Just you.

And now I don’t have any of those things

With me almost every day.

Now I never know if, when I see you

In the street you’ll say hello or turn away;

It’s not just that it hurts me.

Not just that I don’t think

I deserved that. I make excuses for it

To my friends. It’s the way you are.

The way I was.

You’ve been through a lot, you know?

And yes, of course I talk about it.

It hurts so much too much not to

And I find that if I don’t then I cry.

But often, much more often than men are supposed to,

Alone in what will not be my house,

I cry anyway, for losing you.

In the kitchen, mostly.

Near the place between the oven and the fridge

Where you told me that you loved me.

So these, these are the last things.

(c) Carl Bennett 2014

No, I’m fine, I’m fine. Honest.

It’s not mine

I wish it was. It’s just rather beautiful, when you’ve got through what relationship advisors call the stupid cow/what a bastard stage depending on gender, when you can think without whatever it is making the wrong connections in your brain and making you not you at all, everyone forgets that Icarus also flew; that there were two of you in this, whatever it was. And if it went wrong for you it went wrong for them as well. And that neither of you meant it to.

It’s Spring soon

Things end. But things begin as well, all of the time. Every day. So deep breath. Head up. Shoulders back. No name-calling. And smile. As Nat King Cole used to say.

Failing and Flying, Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights
that anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe that Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

The Co-Dependent’s Valentine

Co-dependency isn’t fun. There used to be a form of duelling in America where the two contenders were tied together by one wrist and given a knife each. Presumably the knife hand was held until the time to start the duel. Usually, obviously enough, both of them died. It always reminded me of a certain kind of relationship.

Roses are red

Violets are blue

I’d rather have nothing

If nothing means you.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Yes, I know it’s late. Well you didn’t give me one at all, so just don’t start on me, ok?

A Modern Valentine

Someone gave me a challenge the other day. Don’t write about love and romance. Show another side of you. But it was Saint Valentine’s Day. I failed.

A Modern Valentine

Roses are red

Like the blood of my heart

Like the lies on our lips

Like the stain of your kiss.

Violets are blue

Like the mould on spoiled food

Like the way we felt

When we knew it wasn’t true.

You held my heart

Like a hostage against the dark

Like a caged bird in the park

I was just a walk-on part.

Be my Valentine

And I’ll be yours

It could be worse

We’ve both been around for a while.

It’s not catchy. And you can’t dance to it.

Dealing with rejection

Despite the fact that it’s St Valentine’s Day and once again, I am officially Less Attractive Than Hitler (Hitler had a girlfriend), the kind of rejection I was thinking of or at least I was until I had to think about that was the kind of rejection that goes like this:

Not in my schloss. — He was right up her strasse, apparently.

We received nearly 2900 scripts, (Why do so many people send us all this crap? I mean, honestly!)

and our team of readers have been working intensively to sift through all submissions. Like rarely, thanks for nothing, yah? We very nearly missed something interesting to do, rather than what we’re paid for every month.

Our readers were asked to consider what the opening of each script demonstrated about the writer’s voice and originality, their understanding of medium, form, genre and tone, and the strength of the world, story, characters and dialogue. Yours was obviously unoriginal and your world frankly isn‘t as good as ours.

Unfortunately, your script did not progress beyond the first 10-page sift which was the case with 85% of all submissions we received. Your unoriginal derivative pile of identikit characters, seen-it-before stories and less-than-credible dialogue was dumped along with all the stuff from all the other losers on the first read through .This means that your script will therefore not be considered further and will not receive any other feedback. This means your script was crap.

We hope you will not be too disappointed or discouraged; we appreciate it will be frustrating not to receive specific feedback. This does not mean that your script has no potential – rather, that the standard of the work that did progress was very high, yours wasn’t and we can only focus on the necessarily small proportion of work that most captured our attention and imagination. Maybe you could read it out at a village fete or something. Or a childrens party, so long as they’re not too old or discriminating.

It’s a rejection slip, or a rejection e-mail, anyway.

Compared to some of the non-Valentine rejections I’ve had in the past, quite mild. No throwing stuff. No slammed doors. No going around with that bloke I always had an idea about half an hour later. Nobody’s relations on the phone, no screamy phone calls and no silent weeping, on either side. In comparison there’s almost a thread of logic there, which is a refreshing change given the usual lack of anything apart from the central no-part-of-your-body-is-welcome-in-or-frankly-all-that-near-any-part-of-mine-notwithstanding-any-prior-events logic that accompanies the non-Valentine-type rejection. In my experience, anyway.

This one was from the BBC. I won the BBC Writers Room Screenplay competition last year (M/f as we used to say in journalist college. It means More Follows. I think you’re confusing it with something with more letters.) so I thought I’d send them No Batteries Required, written for radio.

It’s actually really rather good. Even people who take a very let’s say “objective” view of my charm, wit and sophistication say that. At volume, sometimes. The bits about my CW&S, at least.

But the BBC don’t want it. But they want submissions for The Show What You Wrote, their new BBC Radio 4’s comedy sketch show – written by you. Free, obviously.

“This is an opportunity for you to get involved in creating a show that sounds different from any other sketch show out there. The Show What You Wrote is open for anyone to enter, whatever your level of experience. If you have a good idea then write it up and send it to us.

The themes for each episode are:

1) Science and Nature

2) Geography

3) Art and Literature

4) Sport and Leisure

I would. I really would, but this rejection thing has made me wonder. I mean, the BBC comedy bar is set pretty high. It’s going to be pretty hard to beat the Today programme, putting Lord Lawson, whose scientific credentials include being a reporter for the Financial Times and er, that’s it really, against actual climate change scientists and saying that makes the programme balanced. It makes it the fat bloke in the subsidised bar four pints in against someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. Although to be fair, while he doesn’t know any more about what makes it blow than anyone else, like a true Thatcherite daughter of her father Nigella Lawson certainly knows how much blow costs. And suddenly, I don’t mind that particular rejection at all.

The Less Attractive Than Hitler thing, that I do mind. Still. Shower, shave and get out there to do another open mic and another one on Sunday. It might work. Worth a shot, anyway.

Oh and the red type? That was revealed using my patented iMean™ app. I use it regularly. Want to borrow it?

Marriage, the Bishop and me

I couldn’t sleep last night so at 7:15 I turned the radio on. The Bishop of Bath & Wells is moving out of the Palace he lives in, into a house outside the city. Good thing or not. Discuss. It’s Sunday morning Radio 4.

The story rang a bell with me, because I’ve had dealings with the bishop before. Long long ago when if not the world then certainly I was young, and thought I was leaner (turns out I wasn’t, given the jacket I tried on in a shop this week was a bit loose despite being the same size I wore when I was 26) and had a Harley-Davidson, the last of a reasonably long line of Yamaha, Honda, Triumph, Norton, Triton, BMW and then the Sportster motorcycles (pronounced Arlo Guthrie stylee, to rhyme with pickles, as we young people say), I was romantic. In fact, I was incurably romantic and still am.

It’s something women say they want until they get it. Then they seem to find that what they really, really meant was planning a wedding reception at a Best Western, two bottles of Cava per head and a fortnight in Ibiza rather than anything I had in mind, so far as I can tell.

Orchardleigh, under a West Country sky that put a permanent crease in my forehead by the time I was twenty.

My idea for a wedding venue started when I was about fourteen, the first time I went to Orchardleigh. I don’t know why I went. It was just something we did a couple of times a year. It was an old family estate and no, of course it wasn’t my family’s. Ours was called Sycamore Grove, which isn’t really the same thing at all.

Orchrdleigh had a not very attractive early Victorian house, loads of rolling fields, a plaque saying how the house used to be one side of the lake until years and years ago the owners had grown sufficiently rich and more than sufficiently bored with their old house to tear it down and start again the other side of the lake. But where did they live while they did that? No-one could tell me. Thinking about it now they probably built the new house first, but I didn’t think like that then. Still don’t, all the time.

It had an oak tree with a heart carved into the bark of the trunk and a date and two sets of initials. I can’t remember the letters, but the date was 1805. It was almost always sunny when we went to Orchardleigh, except, perhaps predictably, the time I was attacked by a swan. No, it didn’t break my arm. But also no, there was no warning I could see or hear and I didn’t know what had happened, it happened so fast. I don’t think I’m really cut-out for fighting swans, even now. Luckily I’ve planned things so it’s not something I have to do in my life.

We had an old book in the car in those days, an Arthur Mee The Kings England, written in the 1930s, listing the towns and villages of England with a few lines about each. About Orchardleigh there was something about an old war horse living out his days in a field a long way from Flanders. I don’t know now whether it was true or not, given how many horses the Army killed rather than feed them once the war was over. I thought it was true then.

There was a grave by the lake, one of the last owners, with a recent headstone.

And sleep at last

Among the fields of home.

I’m tired as I write this, really tired after just three hours of sleep last night, propped up in bed and about to turn in, but even reading the inscription that’s stuck in my head I feel the same way I always felt when I saw it that time ago, and it’s nearly half my life away that I last went to the lake at Orchardleigh. Moved, respectful, a little something in my eye, just a speck I think, probably. And envious, envious that someone, somewhere, tried to make sure that the person under the headstone was at peace, however fatuously, in a way I’ve never been able to imagine anyone ever doing for me.

As if that wasn’t enough for one place it had a Bath stone Georgian boathouse on the lake, an island and a tiny church on it. Orchardleigh has loads of high trumps and it plays to flush them all out on the table right from the start. Back when I was fourteen I decided I’d get married in that church, if I ever did. And because that’s what I was going to do I didn’t take any girlfriends to Orchardleigh ever, until I met someone I thought I’d like to marry.

We rode down there on the Harley one early summer morning and parked the bike by the gatehouse, then walked up the drive and found the tree, eventually, still there fifteen years after I first saw it. The boathouse was still there and the lake and the plaque and the grave and the house. And of course, the island and the little church. It all sort-of looked like it was working.

We rode back to London at the end of that week and I started trying to find out what you do to get married somewhere you don’t live. I knew Orchardleigh was in the diocese of the Bishop of Bath & Wells and I’d heard about bans and people having to live where the bans are read or something, although I had a feeling that might just be in Hardy or Thackeray. Phone the Bishop’s office, I thought. They’ll know.

The first issue was that Directory Enquiries had just changed from being a nationalised utility staffed by stiff and imperious crisply-spoken authority figures to the Del Boy gertcha customer service model that everything in England has become, where it’s all the pretence of saying ‘sir’ and no service of any kind. The other difference, obviously, is you pay a lot more for the new, rubbish model. Unbelievably and utterly rubbishly, Directory Enquiries pretended (after they’d taken my money of course) that there was no number for the Bishop of Bath & Wells.

I pointed out that the bishopric was 800 years old and although they probably hadn’t had a phone for all of that time, I was pretty sure they had one now. Despite that, Del Boy’s Directories couldn’t give me the number

They had a number for Bishop of Bath though. I took that.

Ring out, wild bells

I was quite impressed when the bishop answered the phone himself on the third ring. More impressed, if a bit disconcerted, to find they’d picked a local man to do the job, judging by the sheepy noises he made bleating ‘Bishop of Bath.’ You have to have heard it to know how that sounds. I could do it now but it wouldn’t help you, reading this. Sorry.

I told the bishop what the problem was, that I wanted to get married at Orchardleigh, that it was in his diocese (‘if you say so’) and the bans and residency qualifications and how long and what was it all going to cost and could it be done at all. And stuff.

Don’t know, the bishop said. He could see the problem and he’d like to help, but he got three calls like this a week.

I thought that even for a busy bishop this wasn’t actually the most helpful thing I’d ever heard.

Me: How come?

BoB: ‘Cuz Bishop of Bath has been a motorcycle shop since 1926.

Tis a sign and/or a portent, I think. I only proposed to one other person. None of the three people I ever talked to about getting married ever took me up on it. I don’t think it’s going to happen now. Looking at this, I don’t think it’s supposed to.

Artwork and soirees

I scribbled Songs Without Music down after my shower on Sunday and used it to introduce the set that night, at The Anchor, Woodbridge, where almost everything started and very sadly, one thing stopped.

As soon as I stepped off the stage I was invited to an afternoon of song and art and poetry that half of Woodbridge wanted to go to. I think that might have been part of it. Pity. But it started the stand-up gigs and it got me this rather lovely artwork that flowed from my reading.

Raw and Hypnotic

I was more than a bit surprised to hear my stuff called this that. I’d done some work on the delivery, making it less converstaional even though I’m always a bit scared it’ll drift into ‘POETRY READING WITH VOICES’ territory, (you see what I mean?) which takes the life out of it and means people feel they have to clap even if it’s utter crap. Although I don’t think they’d do that in the pubs I’d played.

A tough-looking bloke half my age came up to me and said ‘you’re like me’ after this gig. A slightly drunk rocakbilly girl massaged my shoulders while I drank a pint of cider after. Never before. After the gig, you understand. After the gig.

It’s reaching people, somewhere in thier hearts. Poetry isn’t just for books in libraries. It’s for talking, maybe to yourself, or to the thing inside us all. It’s very, very flattering that so many different types of people are hearing this. I’m assuming of course that an entire pub going silent is a good thing. I could always be wrong.

Songs Without Music

I started using my iPhone as a voice recorder. The quality isn’t that great, but it’s good enough to get things down as you think of them and there are times when you just can’t find a pen and paper.

Doing stand-up poetry has shifted my brain into overdrive in some respects; it’s made me think about words a lot more. It’s also made me think about what poetry is and despite Google, I still don’t really know.

I always had problems with rhymes. When I first came to London I bought strange books. One of my first pay-packets got me Betjeman’s Summoned By Bells, which wasn’t his greatest stuff . Anything qualifying as that would have to include Invasion Exercises On A Chicken Farm. There’s a brilliant original recording on Spotify.

I used to hang around Motor Books, a small shop still down an alley off Haymarket, full of odd titles like Sniping Towards the Rhine and The Improvised Munitions Handbook, which they refused to sell me unless I could prove I was in the police or the Army, on Home Office orders, they claimed. I wasn’t, so I left empty-handed. And I still don’t know what poetry is.

Maybe it’s a song without music. I think it is.

Songs Without Music

Some people think that poetry

Should rhyme

But there’s more

To words than that.

Sometimes rhyming

Just produces doggerel

Or worse; very often

You could hardly call it verse.

Poetry was something inaccessible

At school when your least

Favourite English teacher

Used to play the fool

And do his funny voice

For recitation, which bored

Almost an entire generation

At my school.

Poetry my dear,

Poetry simply wasn’t cool.

So I don’t call this poetry;

I call this music without songs

Or songs without music

And just hope it may amuse

If you’re in the right mood for it.

You see what I mean about rhymes?

Let’s get on. It’s getting late.

Besides, we’ve all got other things to do

Like drinking wine and reading poetry to you.

Slightly Foxed

I like Sundays. This one is going to be busy. I’ve got a job interview tomorrow as well as the Lifeboat Party radio show, and I need to make sure all of my stuff, the ironed shirt, the three forms of identity, the polished shoes, are all ready for that.

And today after I get some sleep there’s a music thing at the local pub a mile away, then at four nine miles in the other direction a party and then another open-mic gig at The Anchor in Woodbridge. The big question is cab or car? I don’t drink until after I’m not performing, or only one drink, but I might want a drink afterwards.

I talked to a friend yesterday, someone I’ve known since school. “Do something about living in Tony Blair’s Isington,” she said. “I used to read your email rants and laugh out loud.” She still has them from 15 years ago. Maybe we need to talk but we’ve never quite got around to it somehow.

Her advice was don’t be one-dimensional. Despite describing my stand-up stuff as cathartic and affirming and transformational ( I know, I’ve got to look all that up in a minute as well….) she told me to write stuff not just about my stream of not-quite gelling relationships. Even Wordsworth wrote about daffodils and Coleridge, my West Country dope-addled literary hero above all others, the man who melted and moulded words to create something more akin to a 1980s Tom Petty video than something people in crinolines might read, he wrote about all kinds of stuff. Gardens. Ships. Albatrosses. Crossbows. Caverns, if you’ll pardon the expression, measureless to man.

For years I’ve been fascinated by old photos. At last I think what I meant to write about them has come out properly. Almost. It’ll probably change a little soon but this draft is almost there. I think I’m going to do this one tonight and see how it goes.

Slightly Foxed

Box Brownies, Linda Eastman,

Cartier-Bresson, Fox-Talbot;

Just the names talk of pictures.

Photo-gravures and glass plates,

Fox-Talbot patented film and wrote a paper

For the Edinburgh Journal of Science

In 1826 bewitching “Some Experiments

On Coloured Flame”; To the Quarterly Journal of Science

In 1827 a paper on “Monochromatic Light”;

And to the Philosophical Magazine

“Chemical Changes of Colour.”

What did it mean?

Long exposures, pained expressions

And the blur of a small boy moving,

Too bored and too young to be so still.

It was the only way they could take pictures

Back when cameras were on tripods

And photographers wore a thick black veil.

Some people thought the camera

Stole their souls. Chief Skittiwash

In the Pacific Northwest, remembered now

Not for his photo but for his mention

In another text, “Demonstrating a conceptual

Link between Wilderness and” something else

I hadn’t the time or inclination to read.

The image was fading and blurred, foxed

Before my eyes like Mr Talbot and the rest.

Fading monochromes spoke of the same;

An instant etched for all time

As if we could stop the clock hands turning.

As if the picture of the people we loved

Could stop them leaving or ageing.

As if seeing their smile, or the way their lip

Curved, framing the flash of their teeth

In the streetlight could bring back their laughter

And that thing she said in the garden,

The day before the sleet.

The daguerrotypes of steam-haunted

Railway stations, the double-engined

Monster bomber about as big now

As the average car, if a car had wings.

These pictures become the images of death.

Not in the machines or even the guns

But the uniformed men, the unformed lives;

The old, the young, the not with us now

The blank expressions and glassy eyes

Trapped on tables and mantlepieces,

The charity shop or the skip,

Staring stiff and still at the sky

From where their picture fell.

And sometimes you know they’re still there.

You can see them. You’ll be taken unawares

In a junk shop or a museum, in a place you’ve

Never been before and suddenly

You see them in the place

Where you dropped your keys

Staring past you out of their years:

A dog, a cart, an older man and a girl

Holding the back of a chair,

A woman frowning as she stands

For the photographer with better things

To do before she was fixed forever there.

“The popularity of picture postcards showing Indian women weaving baskets or digging clams attests to a growing nostalgia relating to Indians. Historians have demonstrated a conceptual link between the disappearing American wilderness and a changing attitude toward Native Americas by looking at both popular literature and the federal government’s Indian policies. The Indian came to symbolize America’s lost youth, and his image commemorated that unspoiled past.”

Still Life

I was thinking about old photographs, the way you’ll maybe find a picture of a place you know well, but taken years before you were even born. How sometimes you’ll find a photo of people long, long dead, standing with their dog or a basket of washing on your own front doorstep, this place they knew, this place you know.

Boulevard de Temple, Paris, taken at 8 am by Daguerre, either in 1838 or 1839. We know the time of day but not the year.

And this poem just didn’t come out the way I thought it would. The one I meant to write is still waiting to be written.

Still Life

Louis-Jacques Daguerre

First captured souls

When men wore promade

And greased the anti-macassars

On chairbacks with their hair.

The image is projected onto a silvered surface,

Shone on the fakery of Sheffield plate

Exposed to iodine fumes and

Tobromine and chlorine,

Half the firmament of Victorian chemistry

To produce a halide coating,

Carried to the camera

In a light-tight plate holder.

Sensitive in the dark

Like a tender girl.

Then like a magician’s trick.

The light is let in,

An invisible image on the silver plate

A tarnish of light arrested by sodium thiosulphate

Or a hot saturated solution of common salt,

And uncommon liquid gold

Poured onto the ghost’s face

Heated then drained and rinsed and dried.

Underneath the silver will always tarnish.

The picture must be kept under glass.

You can always tell a daguerrotype

Or teep, more properly, as Louis was

Unfortunately French.

A century and more on

The image is still bright,

The mirrored surface mirroring past lives.

Long after their last goodnight.