Walking around the bay

Written to a prompt of "write something about Cardiff in 5 minutes" at the Cardiff bay writing group meetup last night.

So narrow, the world, recently
Head travels only, thinking
overthinking maybe,
the steps to get to the water

The submerged grid of pebbles outside the flat, blind mans crossing
The herringbone brick pavement with its dips and slants, leading
around the corner, down the street

The bilingual sign posts many ways, mermaids and hamadryads here

Resting on red ironwork, hearing the snick-whoosh of cars
speeding up to the bridge

My leg anchoring me but mind travelling on
across to the Taff

Tomorrow, maybe, to walk that far
to watch the swans, white holes in the pewter glitter
bending their necks at the flightless bird.

edition #7: unwritten language / unnamed places

I hope you all have as much fun browsing through this as I did putting it together!
Edition #8 will be hosted by Walter Bjorkman at "Qwik bake Synthetics".
Thank you for supporting the carnival (homepage here)

Edition #7: Sean Burn

Today I am presenting something different - a guest piece for Edition #7 of the blog Carnival >language>place.

 Artist Sean Burn honours us with an extract from his latest exhibition, semtxt.

semtxt. a sequence of one word visual poems. surrounded, often defined by words, we also use language to free ourselves. and language is alive as this exhibition shows. semtxt is a body of visual poetry in charcoal. it produces a backdrop akin to jackson pollocks drip paintings by furious action-writing and rewriting over and over repetitively to reclaim languages. this produces a layer of 'asemic' language - which you can look at but cannot 'read'. then a new word which collides existing words in new combinations is erased out of this dense layer of charcoal to comment on many aspects of contemporary life including medicine, mental health, media, nationhood, sexuality, warfare, family, environment etc. radical antipsychiatrists, deleuze/guattari talk about the lines of our life - both the formal ones - & also the more subliminal, that mark our unique voyages. i try following these ones in my work, giving voice to alternatives, these strategies for survival 

the exhibition runs 23rd june to 7th july 2011, at oriel beaufort, temple street, llandrindod wells. ld1 5hg. wales. It is open tuesdays and wednesdays 10am to 4pm, other times by appointment; telephone 01597-8222777 for further information.

See also http://www.celfogwmpas.org/www.celfogwmpas.org/Artist_in_Residence.html

Coming soon!

Submissions are open until 24th June!

Look out for the new edition of the carnival here next week!


More info here

Still alive...

Just spending time working on the upcoming >language>place blog carnival (I want it to be perfect!) and the absorbing 100 days project... catch me at either of those places!

Submission call

Still enjoying the blog carnival edition #6, over at Glow Worm. This morning I have gone back and re-read the section Poetry playing at the edge. "Enjoying" again Sharon Cooper's haunting line "daily there is less of me". This afternoon, who knows which one(s) I will dip into. I love holidays, lazy days off work when everyone else is busy, especially if they are not filled with strangely unshiny silver vertical rain, like yesterday.

And now, the call for submissions to edition #7 - the theme for edition #7 is "unwritten language / unnamed places"

• How is spoken language different to the written word? How does an unknown language sound? How do you read the language of the body? How does music dovetail with language? Can pictures speak languages?
• How do you remember places? Many of my favourite places are too small for names, so you have to describe them, "You know, the beach that appears at low tide, in that corner between the house and the pier with the stone steps, up the road from the coastguard station..."
  Sometimes places become synonymous with language, this place is simply "beach" or "moor" or "city" or "home".
  Some places may not have names, or may have too many names.   

The edition is planned for end of June, submissions are open from June 1st to June 24th. Click here for details about how to join in the Carnival. Send an e-mail to me at "langplace AT gmail DOT com", and include the link to your blog entry, and a brief description of your language/place contribution (1-2 sentences) You do not have to send themed entries, but I will prefer them ;)

You can find out more about the carnival here, and more about it's originator, Dorothee Lang at her blog virtual notes. You can also find a complete listing of the editions on the >language>place page here.

if

the edge

Being at the beach should be one of the simple pleasures in life. The best sort of beach has shelving sand dropping steeply into the sea, the waves rush up and tug at your ankles as you try to walk along. Standing still in the swirl of the sand and water results in your feet being buried up to your ankles, deeper each time the surf surges in. The icing on the cake is the rocky outcrops that make the perfect beach, so that the waves crash and send pearled and diamonded droplets into the sky. Spume. And over and over the waves come, in a rhythmn that never gets boring.

The joy of being on the edge, between the elements of earth and water, land and sea is what makes it more complex. I am most at home in the limbo between them, on the beach when the waves crash. Some people are happy at the centre of things, I am an edge person, happier looking in and observing.

The land is a mass where humans live, millions and millions of them, whom I will never know. The humans I meet, talk to, write to, watch on the telly or in films, they belong to this mass. I do not know them, in a Venn diagram of all that we have in common, the two circles barely kiss. I do not feel encompassed by them, I feel a thing apart, I prefer to watch them and carefully pick my interactions.

I feel drawn to the water and its vastness and energy and seeming emptiness (ignoring the scientist part of me that knows the biomass of the oceans is greater than that of the land). I feel drawn to it, I would like to wade into it's depths and swim out away from the shore, I would like to be that bold and adventurous, but I am not. If I stay here long enough, thinking, watching, reflecting, perhaps I will get the strength?

The beach is where land and sea come to interact, where sociability flirts with the empty wet horizon. An edge person needs the land, the mass, as well as the waters that move to their own tides. And so I come to the beach, not such a simple pleasure.



originally inspired by a T10 prompt 3rd June 2010, revised for >language>place blog carnival edition #6 on 21st May 2011 after the world did not end again.

Carnival News (provided the world did not end at 6pm)

I am looking forward to edition #6 of the blog carnival >language>place, to be hosted by Michelle Elvy over at Glow Worm. Each edition seems to get richer and richer, and it is fascinating to see how each host puts the edition together. And daunting too, there is a lot to live up to for me, as I will be hosting edition #7.


The theme for edition #7 is "unwritten language / unnamed places"

How is spoken language different to the written word? How does an unknown language sound? How do you read the language of the body? How does music dovetail with language? Can pictures speak languages?

How do you remember places? Many of my favourite places are too small for names, so you have to describe them, "You know, the beach that appears at low tide, in that corner between the house and the pier with the stone steps, up the road from the coastguard station..."
Sometimes places become synonymous with language, this place is simply "beach" or "moor" or "city" or "home".
Some places may not have names, or may have too many names.   

The edition is planned for end of June, submissions are open from June 1st to June 24th. Click here for details about how to join in the Carnival. You do not have to send themed entries.

You can find out more about the carnival here, and more about it's originator, Dorothee Lang at her blog virtual notes. You can also find a complete listing of the editions on the >language>place page here.

Carnival reflections

What does the >language>place carnival mean to me? I think Michael Solender put it most succinctly when he described it as being about "belonging and connections". It is about linking up with people around the world who have at heart a love of language, and an expression of my admiration for people writing, living in a language not their own. I recognise that although I do not live in my native country, I am far from being fluent in Germany, my adopted country, in either language or culture. Sometimes language is all about barriers, and sometimes I am looking for barriers; this carnival helps me realise that I don't need to build them, that I can connect with people who have similar experiences.

Michelle Elvy is hosting edition #06 over at Glow Worm, with the theme "language and place on the edge" - I am hoping to have something to submit to her shortly - I have a piece in mind but need to check it out first ;)

I've returned from a three week trip to the USA, which has been virtually writing free, and felt the need to be creative again, so I put together a new page here in practice makes perfect to keep track of all the editions, before noticing that Dorothee has done the same thing! (here). Lets hope this kicks off some actual writing!

Be careful what you wish for

This is the technicolour tourist version of my street, on one of the handful of days when the sky is blue and dry and the wind moves only as fast as a cat brushing past my ankles.

Not like the days when the wind from the moors darts its way to the sea through many fingered lanes, and turns the planes of my face to cold metal edges. It does not speak of the weariness inside my elbows from carrying too many shopping bags at once, to save having to make a second, a third trip back to the top of the hill where a car can be parked. In the winter storms, we can be cut off for days on end, safe from the lashing waves behind our thick stone walls, but the windows rattle and I pile old blankets against them, mostly in vain as the drafts will always send their tendrils through to find me. 

Not to mention the icy days, the foggy icy days when to step out is always to risk being whisked to down to the sea wall, bumping over the cobbles.

I first saw this place on a balmy blue day, and had no understanding of its changeable nature in the face of the weather. The streets were full of tourists milling around, looking in windows where people lived. I felt the intrusion and I longed to be here when they were not, to feel the rhythms of a normal life, to call out to the other residents and exchange snippets of gossip, opaque to the visitors. To be a regular in the tiny pub, with its copper surfaced bar, and have the gruff but good natured bearded barman ask if I wanted the usual. 

I am part of the tourist trade now, I searched to find a way to be more involved in this place, and I put my name down for a cottage. The interview went fine, although I was asked to stop dying my hair, as they felt a grey haired lady would be more authentic. I signed a contract for two years to live as a local, and I look at this damn picture every day, every day and count the number of days that are really like the tourist dream. Not quite on one hand. And I count down the days until I can leave

Burren

Stone dykes and stone grykes,
soil disappears down the cracks
along with the grey rain.
Plants scramble to get a hold
before the water trickles away;
running deep down the inside of the hills
and reappearing in lakes and turloughs
miles away, palely reflective.

A human sized landscape, it is barren
only from a distance, up close it is rich.
Turf patches, handfuls of sweet earth.
Men have been here a long time,
they take the stone and make stone things,
tombs, dolmens, crosses, walls and forts;
and yes, shelters for contemplative priests.

The seminarian contemplates, up here alone
he can imagine the sloughing off of sin,
an oyster being rinsed by the rain,
gnarled outside, with a wet pearly interior.

Thoughts of disappearing down the cracks; 
a strange fish swimming underground
through the darkened pewter flow
and sudden silvery streams, brief sunlight
on a karst spring, then back down
into a dark sinkhole.

Swimming ahead of the strange salmon
that has eaten the hazelnuts, Father Dermot
had warned them against the burden
of knowledge that the flesh carries.
Oh, flesh, how could he not have tasted it,
tasted hers, ripe and freckled when the sun
danced the lake water to exuberant sparkles?

He swims with sinuous strokes,
racing the salmon, twisting and spiralling,
grey mercurial water and the Atlantic awaits.
He thinks of the water cycle, imagines
himself rising as droplets of moisture
to rain again on the stark hills.

Rain on him, contemplating, contemplating.
Father told him he should be here for weeks,
and that a priest who has never fallen
into temptation is a priest out of touch with the flock.
He thinks he could stay here, forever, thinking
on the bare bones of the world.




This piece was written for The Camel Saloon (click here)