Life After Wartime

Some things never change.

The garden bushes wag their beards

like arguing theologians while the orange fists

of passion fruit take cover in the leaves.

The sky aches with unmapped distances

and the sun hides nothing.

At dusk, it surrenders to the moon.

When there’s small-hours muttering in the street

remember it’s only someone deciding to go home or go on,

pushing the night for the last of the great good times

and into a shell-shocked morning after.

At least there’s coffee again.

It takes our minds off the radio,

the smooth-voiced reassurances,

the metaphors encrusted like barnacles

on every announcement, your almost

imperceptible jump at the sound

of a pamphlet shoved through the door.

Things never change.

People wear their silence like a caul.

To bring them luck against drowning.

They were parents. Or siblings. Or both.

They are the ones that nothing surprises,

the ones who no longer look up

when a jet comes roaring in above the city,

framed against the orange sky,

picking its way among the towers. 

Tom Phillips

As originally published in '100 Poets Against The War' (Salt, 2003), then 'Burning Omaha' (Firewater, 2003), Novy Vilag (Budapest, 2003), 'Recreation Ground' (Two Rivers Press, 2012), and Jeta e Re (Prishtina 2013). 'Recreation Ground' is available from Two Rivers Press: http://tworiverspress.com/wp/recreation-ground/

On putting away this year's diary

A year. Well, yes, of course, it’s an artificial construct – a convenient fiction for punctuating time – but then how else to locate what’s been done (or not done), what’s happened (or hasn’t)? On Wednesday, I will put my 2013 diary up on the shelf, alongside diaries from each of the last ten years or so. It contains no great insights, no confessions, no revelations. It’s just a diary with meetings, deadlines, reminders to send someone an email. I doubt that anyone, least of all me, will look at it again. On the face of it, in fact, it’s exactly the same as all the diaries from previous years that it’s destined to sit beside on the shelf. At this moment, however, as the last few days of 2013 tumble into place, I can’t help wishing that, for all the other pieces of writing, the photographs, the comments and conversations stored or alluded to elsewhere, there were other ways in which the events of this year could be preserved, could be revisitable. This isn’t, I hope, just sentiment, nostalgia for the all too recent past. Maybe, on one level, that’s what wanting to be in the writing game is about – turning the past into things, into objects, which can be repeatedly revisited, reviewed. I wonder, though, at the end of this year, whether it might not be about something else entirely. 

From 'Boating with Enver Hoxha'

Lake Bled, Slovenia, August 2009

In the morning, Jani waved off us on what he insisted on calling our ‘boating adventure’. At the lakeside, a man who looked as if he’d completed a triathlon before breakfast took our money and pointed at a mahogany-brown dinghy. We had an hour. I slotted the oars into the rowlocks and dipped them into the water. My first attempt at a hefty pull moved us an inch. The triathlete put our money in his pocket. Out on the lake, other families deftly steered his boats through the lanes marked out for the Slovenian rowing team’s training sessions for the 2012 London Olympics. Another hefty pull got us away from the pontoon at least. A few more and we began to pick up speed, heading for open water where the only danger came from the gondoliers punting groups of tourists across the lake. Someone shouted from the ramparts of the fairy-tale castle, but I couldn’t make out what they said. Others called out from the rowing boats, the gondolas, the lido. Disjointed phrases skimmed across the surface of the water like dragonflies or pebbles. The mountains rose up against the sky like opera scenery. For a moment, it felt as if we were crossing Europe’s duck pond, cradled by alps, surrounded by tracts of territory which, as they stretched out in every direction, became Italy and Austria, Hungary, Serbia and Croatia. Further on again, those same tracts turned into France and Germany, Poland, Romania, Bosnia and Albania. Elsewhere, ferries crossed from Spain to Morocco, boats sailed across the Black Sea to Georgia and the Crimea, and, from Moscow, the Trans-Siberian Express left for Beijing and Vladivostok. When I inadvertently steered us into the boating equivalent of a snarl-up, and bows and oars clunked against each other, embarrassed apologies were exchanged in four different languages.

            At the island church, I shipped oars and we drifted beneath overhanging branches, pale green leaves reflected in the almost still water. Sam dropped his hat and I manoeuvred the boat so that we could rescue it. Sam thought this was so extraordinary that he rang his sister on his mobile phone. Lydia’s voice intermitted as the signal came and went. She asked to be handed over to her mum. Sarra talked her through how to wash a load of woollens. The signal died before I got a chance to speak.

            On the opposite side of the lake, I recognised what looked like a pair of insect eyes or concrete goggles: Tito’s villa amongst the trees. It had been one of the communist Yugoslav leader’s favourite haunts, and in 1946 he’d twice entertained his momentary ally, Enver Hoxha, in what the Albanian leader regarded as a grotesquely decadent lakeside palace. The second visit had proved particularly awkward. Calling in on his way to the Paris Peace Conference, where decisions about the division of post-war Europe taken at Potsdam and Yalta would be ratified, Hoxha had only brought one decent suit with him. According to his memoirs, he feared that Tito’s villa would be swarming with raven-haired Yugoslav beauties dressed in sexually alluring satin dresses. Hoxha’s worst fear, in fact, was that Tito would force him to take part in a photo shoot in which he would have to pose, draped with voluptuous young women, just like a bourgeois movie star. Not only would this be a propaganda disaster for the ascetic Stalinist, it might also leave his carefully chosen lounge suit smeared with lipstick and smelling of hairspray.

As it turned out, he was right to be anxious. His suit was in danger, but not from Tito’s ‘assistants’. Having lost his favourite hunting dog during the Patriotic War against the Nazis, the Yugoslav had acquired a replacement, and the shaggy-haired mutt enjoyed free rein at the presidential residence in Bled. It also suffered from appalling flatulence and let out ‘a great fart’ with such regularity that Tito had to instruct General Todorović, an ex-partisan who would eventually fall foul of the dictator’s mood-swings, to ‘kick the damn thing out’. Hoxha heaved a sigh of relief and thought that he might now get his chance to discuss the future of communist Europe. Tito wasn’t interested, however. Just as Jani had done with us, he insisted that the Albanian take a boat trip on the lake. To Hoxha’s horror, the dog came too, plunging into the water and swimming behind Tito’s launch with all its might. While the Yugoslav ignored the Albanian’s ever more specific questions about his policy towards the USSR, the dog paddled through the lake, leaving an explosive trail of bubbles. Eventually, it tired and dangled pathetically in the wake of the boat. Tito took pity on his pet, ordered the captain to slam the launch into reverse and whistled. The dog leapt up over the gunwale and vigorously shook itself. The Yugoslav bellowed with laughter, but the Albanian was appalled: his only suit was ruined.

‘Because in fact we did not discuss any weighty problems,’ Hoxha later wrote, ‘I remember almost nothing.’

Copyright Tom Phillips 2013 

Sozopol

To be honest, this is probably an example of a 'source' poem in a very early draft: these rather disconnected, 'snapshot'-style pieces seem to emerge every now and then, destined to be dismantled and reconfigured at a later date, their individual parts becoming the starting point for other things. 

So here then let’s line them up.

Weather happens, through trees,

beyond this path's renovated balustrade
and bus station uncertainties.

It is beautiful.

At the cusp of this expanse,

everyone has some kind of idea.

The bay is a tumble of waves.

I’m waking up not far from Ovid.

The bars stay open.

Over there – and the missed boat – 

it is whoever I choose to overhear

will change how I see it.

“It’s windy,” he says, “perhaps.”

The clean church charges entry.

Footsteps along the beach

and at the great jagged point

we’re all here, in this, together.

Tom Phillips 2013

The government pronounces on the death of Nelson Mandela

At the corner, on the road,

we were there in, maybe, 1985.

First date, but you stuck with me.

‘No platform for racists’ on a banner.

Things changed, but not to do with us.

At the gate, some smart, smug type

in evening dress ... It was easy

to see which side we were on.

Traffic lights went green, amber, red.

The market at the end of a lane.

Blustering epitaphs sweep down.

In this end, the only possible conclusion:

the speeches which miss it,

the opportunistic empathy.

Tom Phillips 2013

What's the Bulgarian for 'scrumping'?

Another UK-Bulgaria collaboration with Marina Shiderova.
http://marinashiderova.com/index.php/portraits/163-grandmotherwithapples

More work across borders

As the launch of the collaborative project Colourful Star approaches (1 December), here is another 'taster' from http://marinashiderova.com/

Marina

Having been trying to reveal,

through eye and hand,

what’s lost and what remains,

it is not without reason

that we should look at ourselves

looking out each day on brave new worlds.

Painting by Marina Shiderova, words by Tom Phillips

Venue: The Last Post

On the final closure of Bristol/Bath what's on institution Venue after 31 years ... 

Dear Local World, 

So, here we are then. Friday 29 November 2013. Venue’s last day on Earth. Hours from being swept away as part of what you so dreamily term “the development of the what’s on module.” Sometime in December, we learn, venue.co.uk will re-emerge, like butterfly become grub, as www.bristolpostwhatson.co.uk. Because, heck, nothing answers “Hey, where to find what’s happening in town tonight?” quite so snappily as www. bristolpostwhatson.co.uk. Given a firm push, a downhill gradient and a stiff following wind, it just rolls off the tongue. 

It may surprise you to learn we don’t necessarily have a problem with you closing the Venue website. Don’t get us wrong, it is curious timing. As you know, the most recent figures for daily page hits are: August - 44,162; September - 48,544; October - 55,824. Nevertheless, the two remaining of our number, working part-time on alternate weeks, would be the first to admit that Venue is a husk of its former self. Frankly, they’ll be glad to be put out of their misery. Where once they were part of a vast team of journalists delivering informed, first-hand comment from every last facet of city life, today our hapless duo struggle to do much more than pass on received opinion and rehash press releases. Naturally, we don’t have to explain this process to you, Local World, but we’re keenly aware that newcomers to the site might look at recent content and wonder at our concern. 

We’ll come to that shortly, but, this being an open letter, a brief history lesson for the uninitiated (we’re being tactful here, Local World - we’re all too aware you haven’t got a fucking clue yourselves). Venue magazine began life in 1982, covering Bristol and Bath and surrounds, but swiftly fter 18 proudly independent years it was sold to Bristol United Press, owned by your predecessor, the Northcliffe Newspaper Group. Last year, having suffered death by a thousand cuts and a colourful assortment of full-frontal stabbings, the magazine was closed down. Today, it’s fallen to you, Local World, to apply the coup-de-graceless and bring down the final curtain on 31 years of work. 

And hand it all over to the Post. 

The Post, which decreed all street art as vandalism for years, and yet today, having so very belatedly recognised which way the wind is blowing, reaches for Banksy with the same onanistic lust the Express reserves for Diana. 

We’re not going to claim we ever “championed” Banksy. We never really went in for “championing”. We simply covered everything we considered of value. So we might not have “championed” street art, but we did report t. Always. Even before 1985, the year of Arnolfini’s seminal ‘Graffiti Art’ exhibition, featuring work from the UK’s first wave of can-wielders. One of them was called 3D, or Robert Del Naja. He went on to co-found Massive Attack. We put Massive Attack on the cover before they’d even released a single. 

Do you see what we’re driving at here? Have you any idea the number of wonderful bands, and theatre groups, and artists, and voluntary organisations, and filmmakers, and minority groups who had no voice anywhere else, at all, ever, and poets, and DJs, and on, and on, who claim inspiration from something they read in Venue? We make no assertions for the influence of our opinion; we simply did our level best to place a mirror in every last corner of Bristol, no matter how hidden, and allow the city to reflect back on itself. 

And you want to hand over that legacy to a paper whose management - not journalists - are the precise equivalent of those radio stations which promise “your better music mix” and then put the same few songs on repeat. Which claim “the best new music” and fail to add “once it has charted and proved its popularity.” You want to hand over that legacy because, to quote from a staff email you neglected to send us, “The existing Venue website has really good functionality with a real blend of music reviews, listings, restaurant reviews etc, etc. This is a fantastic opportunity to grow our digital audience and a great platform to sell advertising on.” 

Do you have any idea how much that hurts, Local World? Of course you don’t. You who boast all the cultural hinterland of a freshly discarded wet wipe. (Though you do have history, of course: born earlier this year, the helplessly stumbling result of a merger between Iliffe Media and Northcliffe, with a profit forecast of approximately £30 million - that debt-free dowry from the Daily Mail General Trust was a lovely gift, no? And they absolved you of responsibility for the deficit on that pesky old final salary pension scheme. Ah, Local World! You are to localism what urinal cake is to mountain freshness.) 

And now you presume to inherit our work. We were writers, Local World,photographers, not “content providers”. We were bound together not only by our city, but by a love of language, of striking image. Our editors consistently backed our individual judgement and allowed us complete freedom of expression. As a result, Venue inspired a loyalty out of all proportion with the pittance it paid. Local World, we put our very heart and soul into our catalogue of work. And if you think you can now simply walk in and trample on its remains, then you can, with the very greatest lack of respect, fuck the fuck off. 

Because we, the undersigned, do hereby assert our full rights under copyright law. It really would be for the best if you were take a moment to visit this pageon the Venue website. Sit down, take a deep breath, and pause and reflect on this: “This website and its content is the copyright of the individual authors credited.” Please be assured we did not pull this phrase out of our collective arses, but out of legal statute. And if we perceive so much as a single full-stop, a solitary pixel of our work when your shameless hijacking is unveiled, then you in turn can expect to perceive a court summons. We are, to put it in terms you regularly use but cannot hope to understand, passionate about defending our legacy. 

Sincerely, 

Robin Askew

Lesley Barnes

Tony Benjamin

Melissa Blease

Anna Britten

Darryl Bullock

Charlotte Butterfield

Jay Chakravorty

Hannah Chapman

Matt Collins

Marc Crewe (deceased)*

Stephen Dalton

Ellen Doherty (deceased)*

Carl Dolan

Rebecca Ewing

Kristen Grayewski

Elfyn Griffith

Tom Hackett

Mike Harley

Steve Henwood

Gareth Jones

Nic Matthews

Tamar Newton

Huw Oliver

Julian Owen

Emma Parkinson

Kid Pensioner

Tom Phillips

Leah Pritchard

Pat Reid

Jo Renshaw

Andrew Rilstone

Stuart Roberts

Anna Rutherford

Mark Simmons

Delia Sparrow

Joe Spurgeon

John Stevens

Campbell Stevenson

Nick Talbot

Lou Trimby

Tom Wainwright

Cris Warren

Ben Welch

Kirsten Williams

Kate Withers

John Christopher Wood

Adam Workman

Steve D Wright

Nicola Yeeles 

*Because if there is an afterlife, and we don’t add these enduringly lamented names to our treatise, we’ll never hear the end of it.

Working across borders

This weekend, on the 1 December, the Bulgarian artist Marina Shiderova and I are launching an online collaborative project under the name of Colourful Star. Full details of that will follow shortly. In the interim, you can read/see a few early examples on Marina's website here: http://marinashiderova.com/index.php/portraits/160-the-old-pilot and here: http://marinashiderova.com/index.php/portraits/174-love
Marina has recently exhibited at the National Ethnological Museum in Sofia and at the Bansko Mountain Film Festival.
That this collaboration is being launched in the same week that the UK government and much of the UK media have chosen to vilify Bulgaria is - genuinely - a coincidence, but hopefully one which will be go at least a little way to showing that Bulgaria is not some 'wild country, far, far away' - and that xenophobic paranoia is not the only available response to the Europe we happen to be living in.

Home Thoughts

Draft of a poem about not being born somewhere else

In the town where I was nearly born,

elevated lines converge

towards a life I almost led –

here reflected back by silvered blocks,

the windows of an engine shed.

Its proximity to airports drew them,

Mum and Dad, settling down,

at their age, with a child,

but with an eye to taking,

if needs be, quick and easy flight.

As it happens, they went elsewhere,

and these morning streets

with bus stops, bins, barked trees

and overcast but promising sky

are neither more nor less familiar.

In transit and transition,

there is no sense of coming back,

of making a return, accounting

for how I’d see things differently

had they not invested,

called somewhere home,

further west along the track.

Tom Phillips 2013

Jože Plečnik: Poet of Concrete

Ljubljana’s salient architectural features were the work of Jože Plečnik, the so-called ‘poet of concrete’, who’d developed his austere tastes in Vienna and Prague long before communism took hold in Yugoslavia. As well as bringing the Ljubljanica river under control by cordoning it with terraces, he’d built the Cobblers’ and Triple bridges, the colonnaded fish market, several churches, a stadium, the chamber of commerce, a gymnasium, the National and University Library and a cemetery. According to a tourist leaflet, Ljubljanans regarded him as their Haussmann, a visionary who transformed a provincial backwater into an imperious regional capital. Fortunately, Plečnik himself had had other ideas. Rather than altering the entire geometry of Ljubljana by driving grand, Parisian-style boulevards through the centre, he had built into the existing fabric of the city, more often ornamenting than obliterating. You couldn’t miss his stark additions to the Art Nouveau fripperies left behind by the Austro-Hungarians, but while the Triple Bridge formed the centre piece of the riverfront districts he refashioned, the cobbled streets and cottage-like houses on the left bank remained, and weeping willows draped the terraces with which he’d straightened the Ljubljanica.

Tom Phillips 2013

Breakfast at Southville Deli

You don’t know this but last night

I lay awake and watched you sleeping,

Heard the soft scrape and wheeze of your breathing,

Felt the warmth of your body and thought:

‘What on earth are you doing here?

I’m not married to you, Audrey Hepburn,

And I’ve never eaten breakfast

Outside a downtown jewellery shop.’

Politely, Miss Golightly tossed and turned

Till the milkman’s electric go-cart squeaked.

It was never meant to be. She spurned

My offer of staying the rest of the week.

Which, all things considered, is just as well.

Manhattan fantasies are nothing but rot

For drunken fools who are over the hill

And believe there’s more than they’ve got.

There isn’t. Love simply changes its hue.

Sometimes, it pulses a deep, vibrant red,

Sometimes it’s insufferably blue.

Whatever. The amorous film stars are dead.

Which means, my love, there’s more to life

Than what passes for it on the telly.

Audrey Hepburn would never be my wife

Or do breakfast at Southville Deli.

Tom Phillips 

A poem from 'Recreation Ground' the book

Fenlanders

Perfectly flat source

of glass-half-empty wisdom

(You never gain without you lose),

these drains and fenland ooze;

unbroken horizontals

bred smallholders quick

to silence, feuds.

Cousins, not on speaking terms,

learnt allegiances, who was who,

precise degrees of indifference to use

in the family’s every orbit.

A lack of generosity in nature, then,

accounting for a hardness of heart?

Well, yes, there was that – breeding fruit

and veg from plots that felt the brunt

of poor winters, North Sea winds,

relentless, giddying skies.

No wonder they took the dim view,

were adamant they knew what they knew,

distrust of water, close observation

of changes, levels and rules,

the fragile treachery of things,

a closed world better off for keeping closed.

From here, though, also, eccentricities of will:

great-grandfather who made do

and the most out of left-overs,

sticks, old hat. Always on the loose,

ditch-strider, habitual trespasser,

or, back home, his having to explain,

if anyone should ask, why the swan

he’d killed was better called a goose.

Such stamina for living on the hoof:

as if each morning, bent-double and running,

he was tempting snipers to shoot him down,

which on such open ground they could have easily done.

Tom Phillips

Copies of Recreation Ground in which 'Fenlanders' appears are available here: http://tworiverspress.com/wp/category/people/tom-phillips-poet/ 

From 'Below Tsarevets'

Excerpt from a work in progress

Chance has been a fine thing.

In Sozopol, in the Bar Small Tequila,

I was ordering bottles of Burgasko

for a friend from home I’d not seen

in months – and not being able

to find my hotel in labyrinthine Nesebar,

who’d have guessed that I’d run into

that Irish Bulgarian after closing time

who was staying in the room next door?

Never mind how we coincided

six months before ...

     *

And so, yes, now I’m sitting below Tsarevets

as lights play over the church, castle walls,

thinking you should be the first to know

that I’ve reached Veliko Turnovo,

that I’m learning to trust to my luck.

Tom Phillips, Oct 2013

100 Miles North of Timbuktu

Originally a ten-minute 'curtain raiser' for Theatre West's first A2Z season at Bristol's Alma Tavern Theatre, an hour-long version of '100 Miles North of Timbuktu' is currently running in A2Z2 at the same theatre (until 12 October). There's an interview in which I talk more about the play and its evolution here: http://www.venue.co.uk/theatre-features/21068-desert-storm

And a review of the current production here: http://www.venue.co.uk/theatre-reviews-0-9/21149-100-miles-north-of-timbuktu

Things that are on

Sat 21 Sept: Balkan Peace Park Project AGM, Kings College, London, from 2pm. Ffi:http://www.balkanspeacepark.org/news.php - all welcome.
Sun 22 Sept: DANSwithMe Bristol 2 - an afternoon of solidarity with the anti-government protestors in Bulgaria on Bristol Harbourside, also from 2pm:https://www.facebook.com/events/507435076008991/ - all welcome again.
Tue 1-Sat 12 Oct: '100 Miles of North of Timbuktu' - Theatre West stage my play about three chancers who accidentally find themselves with the power to play God:http://www.almataverntheatre.co.uk/theatre/what-s-on.html
Wed 16 Oct: a scene from 'Man Diving' gets read as part of BOV's Open Session fortnight.
24 Oct: me talking about travelling in SE Europe at Stanfords bookshop as part of Bristol Festival of Literature: http://unputdownable.org/event/on-the-road-off-the-page
11-15 Nov: 'Deeds Not Words': Ship & Castle debut another new play, this time about the Suffragettes and the Edwardian government.

Bulgarian protests

Running through the centre of Sofia are the 'yellow pavements'. A wedding present for Tsar Ferdinand from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, they're sturdy enough to have supported the rolling tanks of communist Bulgaria's military parades. Now they are the scene of anti-government protests which see thousands of people taking to the streets to demonstrate against the all-too-familiar triumvirate of power, corruption and lies. Even though the protests are soon to reach their 100th consecutive day - on the Monday after the 105th anniversary of Bulgaria's declaration of independence on 22 September - media coverage outside Bulgaria has been, at best, sporadic. This, it seems, is because, in the early days of the protests, the few foreign correspondents that the west European media still employs were engaged with the Edward Snowden story and because editors were unwilling to commissions stories about protests which don't involve 'violent clashes'. Tellingly, media interest peaked on Day 40 when protestors blockaded the parliament building in Sofia, trapping MPs inside - the only action to result in wielded batons and bloodied heads. It would seem that, if you want to attract the west European media's attention, the most effective course of action is to start ripping up paving stones.
Such a course of action, though, is not characteristic of the Bulgarian protests. Despite years of anger and frustration, the protestors remain peaceable, warm, good-humoured. Last Saturday (Day 84), a national holiday, there were fewer people out on the 'yellow pavements' than normal, but the street was still packed with protestors of all ages, from toddlers to students, parents to pensioners. The message to the Bulgarian government is simple: 'Octabka' (resign) - a word chanted over and over, to the accompaniment of drums, whistles and horns, or written on banners, cards or pieces of paper sellotaped to lampposts. People carry umbrellas: in Bulgaria, spitting is a metaphor for lying - and the protestors feel they're being rained on by watery lies. At the protestors' camp outside Sofia's second parliament building, we stop. Beside bubble tents and two pianos, the umbrella contingent line up at the railings guarded by unsmiling police. A stationary crescendo of drumming, whistles, horn-blasts and boos gives way to the Bulgarian national anthem, sung acapella. And then everyone sits down. It might be the start of an urban picnic. What it is is one minute's silence in memory of Georgi Markov - the Bulgarian journalist killed in London in the 1970s by a pellet of ricin delivered by the tip of an umbrella. The centre of Sofia is at a halt. Later there will be beer and ice-cream, and someone playing one of the pianos, a model of a communist-era building made from empty coffee cups. For now, there is silence on the 'yellow pavements' - and soon it will be Day 100.

WWW.NORESHARSKI.COM POSTS REGULAR UPDATES IN ENGLISH ON THE BULGARIAN PROTESTS.

10 July Day 27

For Vasilena

This evening, squabbles on the bridge,

contested rights of way:

wheels locked, one cyclist

mouthes off at another,

a pram’s slewed across the pedestrian lane.

Tempers quickened by seasonable heat

disperse in complaints, muttered protests,

fading after-thoughts. Outgoing,

the tide inches back from algae’d banks.

*

No news again, but photographs online

are reminders of the elsewhere

which friends can see as making good ...

in whose name they have marched:

that much might be deciphered

from mechanical translations.

This evening, boulevards and plane trees,

the hushed rally’s footsteps:

so little for us to go on

in our own “wild country, far away” ...

*

But this evening, the belief,

reparation, an ordinary square

with tables, coffees, laptops,

and, in diminishing light,

the first sound of voices

and bird flocks startled upwards –

unfamiliar words, Facebook updates,

and then, settling in, a rain of doves.

*

In this, my own wild country, far away,

backgarden laughter, this evening,

and those easily forgotten complaints.

Tom Phillips

The girl from the belle époque

 Draft of a poem of sorts

Sometime into a half-hearted summer,

we're still pinning our hopes

on showers clearing

and redemptive sunshine after rain.

Umbrellas flex along the waterfront –

or, collapsed, poke from a bin.

Across Europe, cities are loud with protest,

though you’d hardly know it here.

Sporadic wi-fi connections bring

stray hints, old news, a photograph.

On edge amongst the package tours,

we’re looking down into

perfect reflections of day-trip boats

moored at the quayside,

seeming ghosts of sunk ships.

Or overlooking the city

from a flat warehouse roof.

It’s temptation back to days –

those days – when, stalled

in this same, familiar light,

you were halfway up the garden path

and she was in shade,

arguing the politics,

a few exotic steps across the grass.

Tom Phillips 2013

Reading Poetry Festival 5-9 June

The first Reading Poetry Festival takes place this week, with an Italian poetry day, a children's poetry day, readings, conversations, workshops and exhibitions at the Museum of English Rural Life. The line-up includes Iain Sinclair, John Hegley, Carrie Etter, Peter Robinson, Zoe Skoulding, Mark Ford and poets published by Two Rivers Press. Full details, poems and an online magazine here: http://readingpoetryfestival.com/

On Sunday (9 June), I'll be running a workshop in the morning (10am-12noon) and reading from Recreation Ground (Two Rivers Press, 2013, http://tworiverspress.com/wp/category/people/tom-phillips-poet/) as part of the Two Rivers event in the early evening (5-6.30pm). Again there are more details here: http://readingpoetryfestival.com/

Poem: To the Northern Station

They come at me – and pass

like missed trains, failing

to stop on schedule, trailing

a line of lamp-lit heads.

I used to know them as faces

in remembered scenery,

and how the light fell, or rain

held off, and what was said.

       *

At the fag-end of a long haul

I’m looking out on what’s expected:

mountainous horizon,

boys kicking hard against shale

to swing up and onto

empty carriage stairwells,

while sun glints on minarets,

wrecking yards, apartment blocks.

In the aloof vacancy of a ticket hall

puddled with water, nothing moves.

We push at the door, step outside –

and then everything does.

Tom Phillips

Taken from the e-pamphlet The Dream Library & Other Poems (Various Artists 2013, variousartists986@gmail.com)

London Magazine review

Recreation Ground (the book) is reviewed by David Cooke in the latest London Magazine alongside new collections from James Brookes and Conor Carville - in an issue which also includes Michael Horovitz on Soho Bohemia/the Beat Generation in London, new poems by Helen Dunmore and Philip Gross, Edward Lucie-Smith on Jamil Naqsh and Tom Sykes on Dervla Murphy. Ffi here: http://thelondonmagazine.org/

Philip Glass in Bristol

St George’s Bristol (Tue 14 May)

He may have taken inspiration from Ravi Shankar, but there’s no mistaking the modernist Americana which lies at the heart of Philip Glass’s so-called ‘systems’ music. That’s Americana as in subways, escalators, Time Square, planes, trains and automobiles rather than backwoods Cajun rave-ups and duelling banjos, but there’s an engagement there with both what Don DeLillo called the ‘Cosmopolis’ and the great open spaces of a Beatnik road trip. There’s also an awful lot of ‘aura’ – Glass, after all, has worked with the likes of Martin Scorsese, Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, Woody Allen. He is, in short, the business, a composer and musician whose career has spanned the outer reaches of the avant-garde and Hollywood commissions. Unsurprisingly, his appearance at St George’s sold out months ago.

In person, Glass is engagingly diffident – more Allen than Scorsese. He might have had another life playing misplaced intellectual teachers in films of John Irving novels. For the first half of tonight’s concert, he assaults – and that’s probably precisely the word – his own ‘Etudes’, twenty pieces which, almost inevitably, echo Chopin’s equivalent suite of technique-stretching piano works. We get eight of them, a 40-minute set of exploratory mood-swings, culminating in one of the most recent, which has late-night, whistle-blowing trains written all over it: a Jim Jarmusch movie in less than five minutes.

After the break, it’s pretty much a straight run-through of the 1989 album ‘Solo Piano’, beginning with the utterly beautiful ‘Mad Rush’ (written in 1979 as a welcome gesture to the Dalai Lama on his first visit to New York) and three out of five pieces from the Kafka-inspired ‘Metamorphosis’ (‘The first and last pieces are actually the same,’ admits Glass) before the impeccably Beatnik ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’. With words by Ginsberg, in particularly bonkers mode, played on tape, this last is a jolt, a reminder, that while Glass has effortlessly eased into the mainstream, his origins remain in the American counter-culture scene – more at home with Patti Smith and Steve Reich than others who’ve whipped his ideas and turned them into Classical FM fodder. (Tom Phillips)

Copyright Tom Phillips 2013

Cassettes

For Tom Shakespeare

Did you have a record player in that room?
I had a Sanyo radio-cassette
with aerial, dial, grey plastic keys
for play, rewind, fast forward, record.
Our neighbour was none too pleased,
thought music threatened industry,
complained in his low Canadian drawl,
distraction from serious business.

He wasn't home when we assumed
that her desire disguised despair -
her footsteps receding outside
down that architectural trench -
and couldn't have been more wrong.

Half a shelf of cassettes:
The Fall, The Cure, Red Army Choir,
homemade compilations.
They're in a drawer now,
the one in the dresser I painted blue.
The Sanyo went to the dump.

On the staircase leading down
from a castle's cobbled precinct,
a busker's singing 'No Woman No Cry'.
You did, you played that on vinyl.

Tom Phillips, May 2013

Municipal construction

Given the (relative) popularity of the post about municipal fountains (http://recreationground.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/top-five-municipal-fountains-eastern.html), here's a news story from Macedonia about its current monument-building programme: no mention of fountains per se, but the picture at the bottom apparently shows a partially constructed one: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/new-bach-of-statues-erected-in-skopje

The financial implications of killing children

Quote from today's Guardian (5/4/2013): "David Cameron has strongly endorsed controversial comments by George Osborne in which the chancellor highlighted the killing of six children by Mick Philpott to raise questions about welfare payments." 
Quote from nowhere: 'Tom Phillips strongly invites David Cameron to endorse controversial comments by yours truly in which I would highlight the killing of numerous children (and adults) in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the name of the UK government to raise questions about tax payments to said government.'

Easter in England

In the light of Tory welfare cuts, IDS idiocy, Daily Mail hatespeak and the BBC's inadvertent sparking of class war (amongst the, erm, Facebook classes at least), here's Czech dissident Jan Urban, only months after the Berlin Wall came down: ‘There is much that we want and need from the West but there is one thing which I do not want: carelessness with people.’

On Blog Stats

Although it's obviously flattering to know the overall number of people who've bothered to look at this blog (nearly 10,500, as it happens), what's far more interesting, and indeed intriguing, is where these people have logged on from and what they've been looking at. Curiously, according to the latest figures, Recreation Ground is most popular in Latvia (followed by the UK, Germany and USA), while the most popular post seems to be 'Top Five Municipal Fountains (eastern Europe)' from June last year. Techie types will no doubt be delighted to know that 62% of visitors to this page used Internet Explorer to do so.

Two Rivers Press reading at Oxford Brookes

I'm reading alongside fellow Two Rivers Press poets Kate Behrens and Peter Robinson at Oxford Brookes on Tuesday 19 March, 6pm. The full details are available by clicking here

Fenlanders

Perfectly flat source

of glass-half-empty wisdom

(You never gain without you lose),

these drains and fenland ooze;

unbroken horizontals

bred smallholders quick

to silence, feuds.

Cousins, not on speaking terms,

learnt allegiances, who was who,

precise degrees of indifference to use

in the family’s every orbit.

A lack of generosity in nature, then,

accounting for a hardness of heart?

Well, yes, there was that – breeding fruit

and veg from plots that felt the brunt

of poor winters, North Sea winds,

relentless, giddying skies.

No wonder they took the dim view,

were adamant they knew what they knew,

distrust of water, close observation

of changes, levels and rules,

the fragile treachery of things,

a closed world better off for keeping closed.

From here, though, also, eccentricities of will:

great-grandfather who made do

and the most out of left-overs,

sticks, old hat. Always on the loose,

ditch-strider, habitual trespasser,

or, back home, his having to explain,

if anyone should ask, why the swan

he’d killed was better called a goose.

Such stamina for living on the hoof:

as if each morning, bent-double and running,

he was tempting snipers to shoot him down,

which on such open ground they could have easily done.

'Fenlanders' appears in the collection Recreation Ground (Two Rivers Press, 2012), available here

Balkans Peace Park Project 2013

It's still not too late to volunteer this summer ... teaching English, teaching cricket, making a community play .. . Details here: http://balkanspeacepark.org/ and films from summer 2012 here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIopLoBwDSc and here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyDwFHvtEjE

Iraq: ten years on

Here's the poem written for '100 Poets Against The War '(Salt/Nthposition) on the occasion of the Blair/Bush decision to invade:

Life After Wartime

Some things never change.

The garden bushes wag their beards

like arguing theologians while the orange fists

of passion fruit take cover in the leaves.

The sky aches with unmapped distances

and the sun hides nothing.

At dusk, it surrenders to the moon.

When there’s small-hours muttering in the street

remember it’s only someone deciding to go home or go on,

pushing the night for the last of the great good times

and into a shell-shocked morning after.

At least there’s coffee again.

It takes our minds off the radio,

the smooth-voiced reassurances,

the metaphors encrusted like barnacles

on every announcement, your almost

imperceptible jump at the sound

of a pamphlet shoved through the door.

Things never change.

People wear their silence like a caul.

To bring them luck against drowning.

They were parents. Or siblings. Or both.

They are the ones that nothing surprises,

the ones who no longer look up

when a jet comes roaring in above the city,

framed against the orange sky,

picking its way among the towers. 

Tom Phillips 2003