tentative zoetrope

[Scrow]

Thank-you merelynn. I'm hugely relieved that some of this writing worked for you - and that the pace came across. It's a real train, and it really does feel like that, travelling in Winter, as if it's hurtling forwards under hills - in real life it also then reaches a Victorian Viaduct which is higher than trees and I always have a slight panic about the train plunging off - when I look at the rails from my local station platform they're date-stamped with 1942 - I worry about the infrastructure of rural transportation links in the UK. Onwards!

Sarah

[Scrow]

Inside the museum of unfinished inventions
Exhibit One - The loom which turns data into cloth

More like a shed than a show space -
boxes and tubs stacked and rammed,
brim-full of the peaty unknown; labels
worn and unreadable. In the spider corner
a woman fiddles with thread. Just
hunch-backed Penelope teasing meanings
from a spreadsheet like they’re pulled candy.
Fragile ideas - the tempestuous or singular
break under her knotted fingers, whilst
other thoughts are twined - strong as fishing line,
truths ready to bind or be unwoven.
Biding time, in the corner of downed vegetation,
a girl plucks ducks, feeds feathers
into the loom, whose one leg
stands as a rooted olive tree,
routing all the world’s data work through this single
room. Odysseus shouts out instruction
from inside the spreadsheet, cries
oar movements, a coxswain singing
the unquiet song of standard deviation.
He calls us when to pull out from the screen
in perfect iambs. Penelope, data
analyst, sole programmer, weaver of words
and threads, makes logic-chains to craft a cloth.
Weave, Penelope, weave. Dream of the leafy touch
of trees in the dying olive groves way back home.

[Jee Leong]

Lovely verse-making, Sarah. Focused, fluent, and refined. The stand-out lines are those that fuse the data and the cloth, such as "Penelope teasing meanings/ from a spreadsheet like they’re pulled candy" and " a coxswain singing/ the unquiet song of standard deviation." I feel the need for more data in the poem.

[kristalynn]

Nice closing on the first one with the word "starwards." Love it!

[Scrow]

Thank-you Jee and kristalynn.

Jee- concise words on what works makes me want to keep on going and your formative comments are also appreciated. Also they're operationally a great idea. I am hugely stuck - I am midway through doctoral research which aims to critically evaluate and articulate a possibility for the 'critical radical rural' and I found out half-way through that I need to write poetry to think. The problem is my writing is stuck and also rooted in a particular tradition, and also it's safe, it hedges bets, errs on the side of tacit. Aaargh!

kristalynn - thank-you and I'm hugely pleased that you didn't find my close dodgy. I liked it, I like the starwards thoughts - and it's lovely to know that it wasn't read as cliche. Onwards!

Sarah

[Scrow]

--the Kaleidoscope through which we view the city

With stares like owls, we watch as morning gasps in
clouds, as silk drifts down to valleys, lines
the steeper ebbs and dips of Powys
to make a temporary camera obscura.
Here, shifting stars are lost like charms,
all jewels or tiny birds in hedges, upside down.
Through blurs and scratches, green like bottle glass,
we see the translucent pasts and scuttle
of the cities. People trapped by pharisees
(another word for fairy rings, or scarabs) -
beetles and brooches pinned out fast in grids,
wandering with the living, or waiting while
the Thames slips by like a scarf, her people
casting spells on the South Bank. Music. Art.
And far from the vast slow weight of grass, where
cows being called to barns sounds like mourning,
or a prayer, patterning the dusk.

[Jee Leong]

Political pastoral! Thanks, Sarah, for explaining what you're working on. I am not surprised that poetry helps you, or any of us, to think through problems in academic research. I am not a scholar, but facts and logic can still seem so fixed and rigid to me until a puff of magic dust is blown on them. In the latest poem, I like very much the lines "Through blurs and scratches, green like bottle glass, we see the translucent pasts." It offers a glimpse, imperfect for sure, of what is gone but perhaps can return, if only we have the eyes of owls.

[Scrow]

Thank-you! I don't think I'm a scholar either to be honest - or if I have to be, I'd hope to be a very imperfect, cross and unruly one. I worry about a world reliance on a 'truth' or truths rooted in facts and logic very much. I work in a world which privileges data - the complex algorithm. And although there are positives to this (older hierarchies, from my perspective, seem equally flawed - privileging Vetruvian Male-based world views instead) facts and logic maybe homogenise the social to the point in which small things of value die. Tacit structures are lost. The magic, unspoken leaps of words and people - bodies, transient moments of joy - trees - mushrooms - they're real too, despite the fact that they can't be reduced to logic-chains.

Anyway, a long Friday, and my offering tonight is one of those that just threw itself out randomly, more word-soup than intellectual engagement (and I do think we need both). I have NO idea why the tiny college where I work turned itself into a bee feeder! I will bring intellectual engagement into the editing process!

Sarah

[Scrow]

Bee feeder

Bee, your half-drunk mazy pathways
stagger strangely in this space. Fool bee.
Always a maker, bringer of fruit
and sweetness lost with the strange metal
birds which live in machine rooms. The drowsy
lecture theatres above workshops drugged
you with theory until you’d cool your sleepy
body, slide downwards, down past
notebooks and into ancient machinery -
Letterpress and looms - an edgy risograph.
Do these soothe those unruly buzzing places
of your unquiet mind? Wandering bee,
dancing through the swift linoleum
of working spaces, skimming into studios -
hives filled with sketches, iron, prototypes.
Outside an office, we string up photographs
of non-history - forgotten rural art school,
the dusty murmur of past students a chorus,
their ancient grade sheets left still in lockers,
locked in attics, fireplaces, and all those abandoned
rooms filled full of old teachers dreaming
of past summers - the lavender, the grass
the warm red of brick walls.
Careful bee, you bring dimensions together,
Deleuzian, create a space to dance, singing of skeps
and hives and tall trees, humming, indefatigable
and always pollen-seeking - exact even
as you enact wavy tracks to outside installations -
caravans filled with herbs, both homely and nomadic.

[Jee Leong]

Someone is hunting nectar and making honey... Lots of lovely details and images. A stand-out is the show of photographs outside the office. "forgotten rural art school" functions well as a meta comment. The ending is satisfying in its location of the right image.

[Scrow]

Thank-you, Jee. I'm looking forward to reading your new book. Thank-you SO much for your company this Seven's so far. Good travelling companions make it less difficult to try to create interesting things. The image at the end alludes to a real, material thing. There are these weird spaces where real meets metaphysical sometimes.

[Scrow]

Onwards!

There are two parts to this as it's not meant to be read just as words on paper but I wanted to experiment in this low-stakes space how far this idea might work as a digital poem. So. Below is both a piece of text but the intention is to combine both digitally using old & new maps. I have not had much time (three hours lol), so the words below don't exactly match the words on the website - I'm still mid-iteration, working a very draft thought.

Six Roads in

Lady with eyes like voles,
a pheasant flies into the road,
dies on your vast car, whilst
Crow lands on a fingerpost
points to different directions
of travel.

Over the brow of the small hill
at Lugwardine, the strangeness
of Wales rises from rain.
Radnorshire, higher than the spires
of Hereford, Hergest ridge
caught in a hard frost.

Hereford, light fingered city held in a palm of hills,
and all the while the Mordiford
dragon sleeps, tail curled
like a snail shell.

The website doesn’t work (yet).

Sarah

[lauriene]

This:

Over the brow of the small hill
at Lugwardine, the strangeness
of Wales rises from rain.
Radnorshire, higher than the spires
of Hereford, Hergest ridge
caught in a hard frost.

is some kind of awesome. I enjoy the Britishness of it. I wondered in S3 if 'palm' would be better served as fists or knuckles. Perhaps not. Anyway thanks for the read!

[Jee Leong]

You make for a very interesting tour guide. There is death, there is frost, there is imagination at home in the landscape.

[5th column]

Hi, Sarah

This month's sevens poems are full or consonance and assonance and resonance and rhythm as well as a truck-load of internal and slant rhyme that suits the setting (Wales), so well; the Welsh language and even the accented English, being so full of song.

If you were looking for a way to refresh the process or outcome - take a look at this poem written by a friend. Hover the mouse over the text for the full reveal.