THE POETRY GROUP AND THE SEPTIC TANK

It's the Summer Solstice, the Longest Day, a day for poetry and magic.

For the Poetry Reading Group the brief was simple: bring in some poems about midsummer, about the solstice.

And people did: How the Lovers Found True Love After All by Marvin Bell, set to music and performed as a duet between a singer and a double bass. I brought Strawberries by Edwin Morgan, a beautiful love poem, and Summer Solstice, Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, by Marilyn Krysl:

... small crabs, the bright yellow of a crayon,

had come onto the sand. Their numbers, scattered
resembled the galactic spill and volume of the stars. ...

And there were poems by Vera Rich about midsummer in Orkney, written after a visit in the 1960s. I had never heard of her and have yet to search the archives here for her poems. But I will ...

Once I get my head out of my septic tank!

If you want to write or read, especially about the finer things in life, don't move house. Especially don't move into a new house with a new septic tank, when you have never encountered such things before. The builder says septic tanks are like death: nobody wants to talk about either!

I had to tell the poetry group that my head was elsewhere. They were full of sympathy and advice.

To start off a septic tank, 
get a bucketful from someone else's
and tip it over the sill. Then
throw in some roadkill:
dead rabbit, dead duck, dead rat, 
no matter,
though rats, it must be said, 
can be problematic ...

Well, it might be worth writing a poem about! Though I'd rather shake the similarities to friendship cakes, ginger beer plants and sour dough out of my head first.

While we're mining this scatalogical seam, I might mention that Stewart Bain, after a long absence, made a guest appearance on the Orkney Library Facebook and Twitter pages again this week, with the photo below and the caption: "Panic over. It turns out the staff on duty this morning actually found a Jobey in the book drop box ..."

It is Stewart who put Orkney Library & Archive on the cyberspace map with his Westray wit, gaining him fans from all over the world, including big name writers such as Val McDermid. 

My favourite this week was: "You have to hand it to this lass, looking alluring whilst gutting fish is something not many women could pull off. Jim Dale from the Carry On films doesn't seem one bit interested though.... "

But let me end by wishing all readers of this blog

A Very Happy Summer Solstice!

And here are some skies from my house taken the last few evenings ...

   

A Festival of Many Delights

Like this gem of an exhibition put together by Sarah Maclean of Orkney Archives. 

It features a small selection of the many items in the Margaret Tait Archive. Notebooks, letters, photographs, international driving permit - all the elements that chart a life.

Particularly pleasing are the cards and notes from Gunnie Moberg, whose archive has recently been acquired by Orkney Library & Archive. In her generous cursive script she asks permission to photograph Margaret Tait. 

There are also short notes about the sale of her books. But these notes take on a greater significance when you read the signature: one set comes from Edwin Morgan, Scotland's late, great Makar.

Drop in to the Orkney Library & Archive on the first floor and take a look at this bijou exhibition. 

And then take in the other Margaret Tait events in Orkney Book Festival!

The Poem's the Thing

The second visits to The Poem's the Thing in Kirkwall and Stromness last week saw us looking at three poems about pigs Why? I hear you ask!

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. WN Herbert's latest book of poetry had just come in to the library. It's called Omnesia and as I was flicking through it a poem Facts About Pigs caught my eye. Aha, I thought, I know other poems about pigs. There's Ted Hughes's View of a Pig and Les Murray's Pigs. That'll do. 

WN Herbert

A very diverting discussion ensued. Which poet got under the crackling to view the pig from the pig's point of view? Which was distancing himself from the pig - and from something else - death, perhaps? What about the relationship between humans and pigs? Hard to say anything but, Awhh, to the picture above. My colleague Louise found it and posted it on the Orkney Library & Archive facebook page. But the poems we read were somewhat darker, though not without humour. 

Ted Hughes

But to go back to the original question, why pigs. Without really thinking it through, was I trying to demonstrate that poetry can be about ANYTHING? Possibly.

Les Murray

So what could we follow the pig poems with? Seagull, anyone? We read Edwin Morgan's Gull, a chilling, spine tingling poem about a gull landing on the poet's window sill.

... He eyed my furniture, my plants, an apple.

   Perhaps he was a mutation, a supergull.

   Perhaps he was, instead, a visitation

   which only used that tight firm forward body

   to bring the waste and dread of open waters,

   foundered voyages, matchless predators,

   into a dry room. I knew nothing ...

Edwin Morgan

A scary gull for sure and much admired in the group. A cousin perhaps of this bold thief?

We also read Kathleen Jamie's poem, The Longhouse. You can read it here. 

... This is what happens.
This is why we loosed our grip and fled

like the wind-driven smoke
from the single lum
in the crooked roof that covers
both women and beasts, a roof
low and broken like a cry

It was a sombre set of poems, I guess! But the discussion was far from sombre. 

Kathleen Jamie

  

In Stromness we ended our discussion 

of the pig poems with one member's reading

of DH Lawrence's poem Snake. 

A suitably intense end to an interesting and

engaging discussion. 

Check out the Scottish Poetry Library's excellent
website for information about Scottish poets and
poetry.