Experiment in Poetry

EXPERIMENT IN POETRY.

THE NEW - a hopelessly defenceless department that's all!
Eliott and rhythm to express thoughts,
or chamber music free of language.
Admittedly the state of the ballad will be fired.
Bill had to replace them,
as music may remain just after innumerable punching, poetry
would be savoured like an opposition government program.
THE NEW - the enclosing of language.
The managerial type of prose
masquerading as inevitable as the encore of folksong,
and the two human errors,
so that it opened the eight mile road from experience
is taking off this century like a flourishing bus service
between history and NOW.
Once upon a few words together is not so many sounds.
Discovering the result of the founding
of yesterday's clothes; it isn't fun.
Knight and his contemporaries discovered that he operated
along the rhythm of Stockhausen et al. and noise.
Just words together is an evocation of language.
Admittedly it opens the fountain.
Items marked thus are timeless stories.
Discarded paraphernalia gave us concrete poetry one day
whose metre was a fast-fading way
to travel from Edwardian poetry.
Everyone lived for much poor prose
masquerading as the song, the years in which the brothers
were busy writing Homeric epics.
Others were sniffing round the ballade.
Based on the board of vocalisation,
poetry retreats from the fountain;
free-verse is not to take themselves into possession
of spoken language in the harvest.
Fred said he gave us much on such nonsense.
Free-verse is not the traditional poetry in another trend;
is not a young gentleman whose residence
is his first consideration;
is not music that has been conceived in January
on the way to his bedroom.
The first achievements began from so many scattered papers,
an intention to move away from the stairs,
from the experiments tending towards the fifties
with him to harvest.
Modern poetry has this inherent aestheticism,
like a violin-player having to drink at the fountain.
Modern poetry could be in the human voice,
somehow a serious case for communication.
But modern poetry can be a curse
endowed somehow with a great anxiety.
It is no robbery to drink some of the real traditional poetry.
Modern poetry has the richness of ten Mars Bars,
the autumn sunlight her mother's,
caught eating an essential fact with no equivalent.
Even poets have succeeded.

© Gerald England

Composed: Gee Cross, 8th July 1992

Publications

1993 TOPS The Toadbird (UK)
1994 Tree Trunk (USA)

National Poetry Convention Reading

Liverpool Garden Festival 

A man on stilts at the entrance the Liverpool Garden Festival. © Copyright Gerald England.

NATIONAL POETRY CONVENTION READING,

FESTIVAL GARDENS, LIVERPOOL,

26th MAY 1985.

(Written and performed at the event)

Two score of poets

under China-painted corrugated roof

bounce words into the Mersey wind

As the waterfall bounces off rocks

into a pebble-shored lake

so we listen,

absorbing liquidity of meaning

While children throw stones into the water

expecting only splashes

we throw our words at you

and await the ripples

© GERALD ENGLAND

Composed: Liverpool, 26th May 1985

Publications

1985 The Old Police Station (UK)

1994 Tree Trunk (USA)

Needs

NEEDS

The choked coughing
of winter's first flu
preventing sleep,
I watch the television appeal
for  "Children in Need"

Rain tap-dances on the roof
and the wind wails through trees

From next-door
rock music is punctured
by shouts I scarcely comprehend

A wife being raped perhaps ?
Or a child beaten ?

I watch the millions being pledged
I hear a husband walking out in anger

Outside the storm still rages

My dozing is disturbed
by sounds of sobbing


© GERALD ENGLAND

Composed: Ashton under Lyne, 13th November 1984

Publications

1990 The Affiliate (Canada)
1992 Outreach (UK)
1994 Tree Trunk (USA)

The Heart of a River

THE HEART OF A RIVER

  Upstream–-
      The bridge,
    The wharf
      The town
    The noise
      Of the throng
        Of factories
      Of fun!

  Downstream---
      out into the coldness of the sea
      a vast emptiness
      of roaring wave!

© Gerald England

Composed: Ackworth, 16th June 1967

Publications

1970 MOUSINGS (Sheffield, Headland)
1986 The Old Police Station (UK)
1986 Bull (UK)
1994 Tree Trunk (USA)
2005 Haiku Scotland (UK)

**********
O CORACAO DE UM RIO

Rio acima----
a ponte,
o porto
a cidade
o barulho
do povo
das fabricas
do divertimento!

Rio abaixo
indo a frieza do mar
uma vasta extensao vazia
de ondas rugindo!

GERALD ENGLAND

(Traducao de Teresinka Pereira)

Publication

1990 International Poetry

**********
INIMA UNUI RAU

In susul apei
Podul
Debarcaderul
Orasul
Zgomotul
Multimii
Fabricilor
De Distractii

In josul apei
in raceala marii
o vasta goliciune
de val furtunos.

GERALD ENGLAND

Romanian translation by Octavian Blaga and Florentin Smarandache

Publication

believed to have been published in a Romanian journal but details not known.