The PK Featured Poet - Ted Slade

 

"I love the compactness of poetry, it's Tardis quality of being

much bigger on the inside than it appears on the outside." Ted Slade

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The first Featured Poet is Ted Slade, who is the owner of the Poetry Kit and someone who’s contribution to poetry on the internet is immeasurable.  Ted also has the distinction of posting the very first piece of post to the PK List on 26th October 2000.

He is also, as you will see from the pieces below, a fine poet.  We are very pleased that he has taken the time and agreed to be the first in this series.

 

JJ Howard

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TED SLADE

 

I was born in Hull in 1937, but in 1939 my parents moved to the nearby

seaside town of Withernsea. So I spent my early days playing happily on

the beach, and the nights being entertained by the sight of German

bombers flying into the searchlights and anti-aircraft fire over my

birthplace. At age 11 I spent one term at the local comprehensive, which

I loved, then we moved back to Hull and I got a place at the old and

venerable Grammar School, which I hated. From there I went to university

in Nottingham (BSc Metallurgy), then in 1959 to London, where I have

lived and worked more or less ever since. In 1976 I married Maria Teresa

from Portugal.

Although I was born with a severe kyphoscoliosis my parents and teachers

never encouraged me think of it as a handicap, and so until 12 years ago

I led an active working life - technical writer, PR, journalist, market

analyst, businessman, globe-trotter. Then my health began to

deteriorate. I had to slow down. For 8 years I worked as a computer

network manager at my local university, finally taking early retirement

in 1997.

I have always read and written poetry, although for many years I binned

all that I wrote. Only when my working life slowed down did I begin to

write regularly and with some purpose. Apart from the unworldly material

we were obliged to learn at school - poems about highwaymen and heroic

admirals - my first real contacts with poetry came via T S Eliot, W H

Auden, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Tom Gunn

and the Beats. Then one day in Foyles bookshop in London I picked up a

new collection by a poet living in Hull - Philip Larkin's "The Whitsun

Weddings". Standing in the shop I read the first poem. It described a

train journey I had made many times as a child, from my grandparents'

home town to my home by the sea. I recognised every detail, and it was

then that I knew that poetry really could be about the everyday

experiences of everyday people like me.

Today there are many influences. The most thumbed books on my shelves

are collections by Elizabeh Bishop and William Carlos Williams, but

there are many others. Most prominent I suppose are those poets I've

worked with in workshops - especially Matthew Sweeney, Jo Shapcott,

Sujata Bhatt, Katherine Gallagher. But I'm an ecelectic reader, and the

true list is long.

I try to write every day. Usually it's on some unfinished piece, or

reworking an old poem. If I need to start something new, then it's

enough if I get a first line, phrase or image. I'm a very slow writer,

often just one or two lines a day. These days I never start with the

subject of a poem. I start with a seed and see where it grows, working

one line at a time until I think I've finished. This means a single

short poem can take days or weeks to complete.  It also means less

rewriting. I hardly ever get a poem fully formed, out of the ether.

Why do I write poetry? One answer is that having tried novels, short

stories and plays, I find I can't write anything else. The true answer

is that I love the compactness of poetry, it's Tardis quality of being

much bigger on the inside than it appears on the outside.

 

 

****************************************************

The Poems:

 

For years I couldn't write about my physical deformity. Now I don't

because I don't find it interesting. But here's one of my efforts.

 

On First Seeing Olivier's Richard III

 

I wondered how he'd do it

- how would he get that knotted mass

of cartilage and bone to hang

from his shoulder, dragging his spine

into a lazy S?  Which shoulder

would he choose?  Or would it be

one of those Mr Punch jobs,

dead centre and rising

like a mountain peak behind his ears?

 

Then there were the legs.

How would he get those elegant pins

- the ones he'd used in Hamlet

and Henry V - to twist and lope,

lose inches from the thighs?

And would both hands be the same size?

Or would one be shrunken and cramped,

inadequate to the holding of swords,

the balancing of crowns

or the wooing of maidens?

 

My schoolmates knew, of course,

as they showed me, aping my jagged

shape and halting gait

when the teachers drilled us into line

outside the Regal.

 

Olivier, in the end, chickened out,

stuffed a cushion up his tunic,

stuck putty on his face,

and kept the legs as neatly turned

as ever.

 

**

 

This was the first poem I ever had published. It was written just after

a hurricane struck South-East England, but has echoes back to those

war-time days.

 

Wind Of War

 

All night the wind screamed out its pain,

shaking the elms in the back field,

rattling the tin roofs of allotment sheds,

iron-clad warriors

crossing the face of the moon.

In the blacked-out house we lay entwined,

safe in our tent of flannel

bedsheets, woollen blankets,

hearing the wild sounds

as from the mountains of Titan,

seeing only the glow

of our own pale eyes,

feeling the touch of warm flesh,

the heat of close bodies,

faintly trembling.

 

In the morning all was still.

We could see to the far horizon,

ships of war riding the grey estuary.

Silently we climbed upon broken elms

strewn about the back field,

remembering the ends of days.

 

***

 

One of my favourite places in Hull was the ferry terminal, watching the

busy comings of goings of the old paddle-steamers that crossed the

Humber to god-knows where.

 

Corporation Pier, Hull

 

From here the ferries shuffled over there

and back, thrashed the Humber

with the broad bats

of their side-hung paddles.

 

This is where we stood,

rose and fell with the pier,

observing those who came to ride

to the pale grey line

that was another place.

 

What fools we thought them,

sailing daily to nothing.

"Who needs it?" we said,

confirmed in our knowledge

that over there was nowhere,

over here was everywhere.

 

Then one day you bought a ticket

and rode south, one way, declared:

"There's got to be something."

First angry, I called you by an unfamiliar name;

then within the month I'd done the same.

 

There's a bridge does the ferrying now,

while we continue to shuffle to and fro,

sometimes passing in the middle,

never quite meeting,

never once arriving on this pier together.

 

****

 

I enjoy writing in strict forms, making the loose structure of natural

language flow seamlessly over a well-defined skeleton - something I

learned from Larkin.

 

A Letter to Philip Larkin

 

Just a line or two to say hello,

I'm home again.

Too many years of life 'down South' can throw

you out of kilter with this world - resign

you to acceptance of self-interest,

a disregard for family and friends.

So here I am, back where I began

on the edge of nowhere, not quite depressed

but feeling low, ready to make amends

for years of silence, making out in London.

 

There's not much new about arriving here -

the same wide sky

blurring to a distant, watery smear

over a grey, slow-drifting estuary.

There's the bridge, of course, unmissable, a skeletal arch

of steel: 'Bridge for the Living' you called it, lying.

But no more smell of fish, no ships up streets.

While I was skipping round the world in search

of life, you watched this city's dying,

the trawlers gone, the docks filled in. It waits

 

now for some fresh beginning, resurrection,

a change of luck,

anything to stop the creeping dereliction

of a city without purpose. Coming back

to this reminds me why I left. And yet

you stayed, caught in this unpoetic place

and found it tolerant of verse. Perhaps

I could have found the same, become a poet,

no mere versifier, learned to express

some feeling for my roots among the back-to-backs.

 

Maybe I chose the wrong pub to frequent -

drank in the Tiger

instead of the Duke, in the lounge where you spent

your lunchtimes. Would I have seemed too young, too eager

to interest you in my schemes? Such are the might-have-beens

that make us what we're not. Too late now.

You're gone and all I can do is follow your trail

around the city streets and village greens,

the churches and the cemeteries, and wonder how

my life would be if we'd shared a jar of ale.

 

 Best not to think of that - what might have been.

We are what we are.

You said yourself there's no escape. Dream

as we may of flying off to some place far

from present tensions. So here I am, back

where I began, on the edge of nowhere,

ready to rejoin the world I left behind,

seeing through your verse the poetry in this bleak

terrain. Perhaps this time I'll leave aware

of what I missed, instead of flying blind.

 

****

 

Nowadays I try to escape from the directly autobiographical. Here's a

poem from a series I wrote about episodes in the history of science, in

my favourite form, the sonnet.

 

The Last Testament of Giodarno Bruno

 

Roast my broken body on your pyre

and feed my guts as offal to your hounds.

Tear out my limbs and throw them in the mire

 

and set the rats to gnaw my naked wounds.

Show me no mercy. Gouge out my eyes.

Rip out this tongue from which the sounds

 

that so offend you rise. And from the skies

call down the crows to gorge upon my bones.

There are no tortures genius can devise

 

will change the motion of the Earth. As stones

must always fall, so will this planet spin

about the Sun. So as you listen to my groans,

 

hear them as the death-cries of your doctrine.

Think where lies the guilt of mortal sin.

 

******

 

But in the end poetry, like life, is there to be enjoyed. Here's the

title poem from my forthcoming pamphlet, due from Flarestack in January

2001

 

The Last Arm Pointing

 

Al said he didn't need my maps.

"Got a tongue in my head

ain't I - can't I ask?

What use is a map

when where you're at

is nowhere?

What use a compass to a man

with no sense of direction?"

So we drove on up

into blind barren hills,

asked the way as we went

till we ran out of old folk,

followed the last arm

pointing into the wilderness,

stopped when the road forgot

where it was going.

 

"That's the way with bloody roads.

Like people. Just

when you think

you've got them sussed

they run out on you."

what had we left

but to sing our way down

from that hill

like a couple of aborigines

or old Van Morrison wannabees

until we arrived

where the land died away

and we danced on the sand

to the beat of the moon and sea?

 

"So who needs your maps!?" cried Al,

as he swung Darcy Bussell

into a brisk pas-de-deux.

 

 

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