Dodgy dreams burn the toast.
The monkey that burst from my belly
blisters my thumb.
Rasberry leaf tea tones the uterus.
A fox cubs stares back,
sits square in the middle of the drive.
A gull announces traffic, wails for sea.
In the night a lithe and sinuous gymnast
wriggles down the gap
between the bottom of the bump and my hips,
slips behind my rib cage, I struggle
to keep up while it flexes,
swings between bone asymetric bars.
I’ve lost track: the monkey’s stronger than me now.
It is a real monkey
born on a hillside, grey with rocks and English sky.
But not birthed by me.
I wake in the morning
listening for a heart beat
under the screech of the lorakeets.

I am not so fragile to handle with care,
though you may be holding back, scared of hurting me.
No, don’t be afraid.
I am just one half of a cymbal waiting to be struck
to scare off the ghosts of hunger and shyness.

Come. Let’s listen to the gongs and drums.
They are auspicious,
they are friends outside the window;
downstairs the banquet is in progress
beneath the block.
My half of brass is simple and unique
and yet, you may not see
what I have to offer:

luck in love
wealth with enterprise
happiness through children
reunion with the better halves of those who have passed.

By striking me aloud
you could start a long queue of moans,
or a short fight with the screeching banshees
if we disagree.
At least, we would be talking, relating, making love, or pretending.

And there would not be this room of silence.

Do I sound complicated?
In the right hands
I could be the petite modern friend,
sleek as an ipod between your thumb and fingers.
And yet there is no ‘you’.
‘You’ are a Seventh Month ghost.
‘You’ are a pig’s head sitting on the set banquet
waiting to be let out of hell.
‘You’ are the dinner table
and ‘you’ are the glass of wine,
an offering to the love that is not here.

You are abstract, invisible,
a brass voice wave-band broadcasting somewhere
on a mountain lost in mist and time.
You travel between the strikes of the gong
leading me back from history, although
I am just listening to the revelers downstairs
as I pace about in my cuckoo land.

Go out! It’s Saturday night.
Go out, girl! Out!
Time to brave the pedestrian crossings
between the malls after a restaurant meal.
Just don’t step on the prayer offerings of mandarins and joss sticks,
as the paper money burns and flutters in the wind.
That would be bad luck,
that would scare him off.

Trouble is, I have no brass friend.
‘You’ – do not exist,
ghost of my cymbal self.

I am waiting for the thunder clap
to gate-crash in on me.
I ache to be woken up
in the middle of the night,
to be man-handled, with care,
and given due attention
like a silk princess of the court
at midnight with tea
and a tray of chilled raspberries;
to be torn exquisitely like tissue,
to be lit like a joss stick on an altar
before the god of desires,
to be told that I am beautiful,
and that I exist in a world more than incense
and not mere flicker on a computer screen.

7.00am freewrite

Started writing about the Beatles and ended up thinking about lobsters.

Looking at the How to Eat a Lobster mug Z bought me from Maine. I still crack their skins to get to the tender flesh – to suck it – they have exo-skeletons but then in the claws those quill like fine bones. Years ago I read how the lobster can live for 120 years and how they have a long childhood and a painfully shy adolescence…the family hold hands as they cross the seabed – wrote sea bred the… But the idea of mating: biology versus…what? Psychology? Sprituality? The light/life force? Love expressed in so many ways. Do you need a brain to love? Do trees love?

Not quite sure where I’m going with this yet, but this is the pithiest, funniest, most salient and supremely quotable book I’ve read all year. Andy Warhol really was a genius. In a singular, weird, unadjectival Andy Warhol way.

He takes on all the BIG subjects without fear or hesitation: love (prime); love (puberty); love (senility); beauty; fame; work; time; art; success; money; atmosphere…

All are deep and shallow at the same time. Uncompromising. Contradictory yet sharply focused. His style is so direct and readable. He manages to combine absolute frivolity with honest insight. Something you might want for a certain type of poem but can’t quite attain tonally.

One of my favourite chapters is on work.

‘After being alive, the next hardest work is having sex. Of course, for some people it isn’t work because they need the exercise and they’ve got the energy for the sex and the sex gives them more energy. Some people get energy from sex and some people lose energy from sex. I have found that it’s too much work. But if you have time for it, and you need that exercise – then you should do it. But you could really save yourself a lot of trouble either way by first figuring out whether you’re an energy-getter or an energy-loser…It’s just as much work for an attractive person not to have sex as it is for an unattractive person to have sex, so it’s helpful if the attractive people happen to get energy from sex and the unattracitve people happen to lose energy from sex, because then their wants will fit in with the direction people are pushing them in.’

I’ve decided one of my themes over the summer will be love. Summer is the best time for such a theme. Andy Warhol had a lot to say about love. Not sure he got or gave a lot: maybe in his own special way. In fact, he has such a horror of intimacy and being touched one wonders if he was mildly autistic. The brilliant thing is I don’t know much about his biography other than the broadly iconic stuff; so I got to know him through his philosophy.

Sex, though, is not love, but it can be confused with love. I remember my dad warning me about such folly years ago, but I didn’t talk about that sort of thing with him then and I still don’t. I like the way he talks about sex under ‘work’ though. No confusion there. I’ve also been thinking about writing about love in the sixties. Andy Warhol is a 75 degree turn from The Beatles – or thereabouts. Or perhaps 180. More on this later.

So, over the next few weeks, I will blog about the creative process, also I will try to sketch what I write, so deliver images and words, simultaneously doodle out poems…

this may be fun, once I get to grips with WordPress

stay tuned.

I. Out.

Here is a visual note of an observational walk which many readers might recognise as the path down to the river at Lumb Bank. While I was here I took a lot of notes but felt I didn’t really have anything to work with afterwards.

The overwhelming emotion I felt at the time was frustration. This helped make my notes more literal at first and then veer towards a lot of metaphorical imagery I was less keen on. However, in the end, the landscape filtered through. Being near the water calmed me. The bear I was chasing turned up in a lichen overcoat. The rush of the river hummed like a PC.

Here’s the poem. I’ve added notes. Hover over each underlined line to see how I arrived there. As a collage poem set as an exercise it ended up addressing – somewhat obliquely – the issues I was avoiding. The title didn’t come until later – and I arrived at it quite randomly – even if I did write ‘Note: you can’t create successful randomness’ in my lecture notes at Arvon. I think randomness occurs by accident, so the less you focus on the thing that’s blocking you the more likely you are to reach it.

The Weather in the Womb

Upstairs in a room facing north
a summer
       marries immediately.
Our job was to get her to drink.
It took a seismic shift to get changed
        after dinner.

Autumn is head down in the sink.
The trees taste iron and wren
       droppings.
Oh my rustic plectrum!
Your music is
       where the leaf falls.
             Where it
                      falls
the river hums like a PC.

       Take note
of the ice on the water trough in the yard
and the Eskimo oil from deep sea fish
       caught by a bear
whose coat is a lichen of silver tipped hair
fuzzy as alkanet.

There is a God
       and he dwells in the perfect
horse dung on the bridle path.

Evening is the hardest skin we carry.

Evening is the hardest skin we carry. I got this last line for The Weather in the Womb from an exercise that I adapted from the US National Poetry Month 30/30 challenge – writing 30 drafts in 30 days. I didn’t sign up, but I dabbled.

The original exercise replaces every noun from a pre-existing poem with the seventh noun that follows on in the dictionary. I didn’t have a dictionary, so decided to replace nouns consecutively from another poem. I think it’s a good way to generate a new line if you’re stuck, although of course, you benefit (or not, as the case may be) from the syntax of the original.

The original poem is Jane Hirshfield’s Hope and Love from Each Happiness Ringed by Lions . I don’t have permission so I include just an excerpt.

All winter
the blue heron
slept among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
if the solitary habit
is their way…

…I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry…

The ‘replacement’ text was verse 4 of Wild Idyll, by Mexican poet Manuel Jose Othon (1858-1906) translated by Samuel Beckett.

The salt and infinitely bitter plain,
Like a dead ocean’s dessicated bed,
And in the grey distance, by way of haven,
The precipitous crags, forsaken and stark.

On my rigid face the evening spreads,
like unguent, horrible obscurity,
and on your skin, burnt by the sun, the copper
and sepia of the wilderness’s rocks.

And in the hollow where eternal shadow,
beneath the cragy peaks’ enormous frown,
provides a bower and cavern for our love,

the lianas of your body twine
about the virile subugating trunk
in a vast palpitation of our lives.

The translated poem was this:

All salt
the blue plain
slept among the ocean.
I do not know the custom of beds,
do not know
if the solitary distance
is their way
or if he listened for
some missing crags
not knowing even
that was what he did
in the blowing
face in the dark.
I know that
evening is the hardest

skin we carry.
He slept with his long sun
folded, like a rock
put away.

The original ‘hope is the hardest love we carry’, with its confident use of abstract nouns, delivers more, but I liked ‘evening’ here a lot, particularly with ‘skin’: it fit with the summer that marries and the autumn with its head in the sink. The evening as death, and all that we carry with that certainity.

I Heart Vie from Karen McCarthy on Vimeo.

This is a video diary from Arvon with the Complete Works crew that was led by Mimi Khalvati and Pascale Petit. There were many tasks set: one of which was to write a poem exploring animal myths. I was given a bear and had wanted a wolf. I struggled long and hard with the bear poem, then set it aside for a collage poem that had the added incentive of being a competition. Ten hot shots and one Amazon voucher in the offing.

I thought the non-narrative structure a collage poem naturally encourages might relax me, and also, distract me, as the bear poem was addressing two distinct but related subjects I’d been avoiding: my pregnancy and the imminent death of my mother-in-law from an aggressive brain tumour. Both felt too close to really get anywhere with at the time.

This is part of the way through the process. I’ll talk about some of the other decisions and sources for lines and phrases in a separate post. I’m working retrospectively here, as I thought it would be an interesting one to share as the process lends itself to Notebooks so readily. It’s one I prepared earlier as it were. I’m travelling backwards now, in the future I will be hurtling forwards.