Pennine Rainbow

Coffee, Bacon & Beans, Insomnia, thanks & marketing

 
Photo © Kate Mitchell-Gears 

Coffee, bacon, beans & toast – it is raining in Hebden, perhaps it’s raining the world over judging from the skies. On the radio they’re talking about Belle de Jour revealing her identity. The town is empty of tourists - it must be a Monday. It’s late for breakfast – it’s been a late start everyday for the last few weeks. As winter progresses its grip the days have become a bit shapeless, like a skinny man in a baggy suit. One cup of coffee leads to another. Questioning my journal – ‘How will the coming months shape up?’

The lunchtime crowd begin to arrive, a couple of ladies in hats from another time, a scarecrow-like man orders chicken pie and chips and gravy. Being creative today involves one foot in front of the other –perhaps not talking too much, just let things be, so that evolution can lift its head like the promise of sun behind these clouds. And if the clouds don’t break I can just enjoy the rain.

~

There is a feature on my book RECITAL over at the SALT BLOG  - please take the time to have a look, and leave a comment on their blog  - let SALT know yr thoughts on the book.

~

Thank you those who have sent such lovely messages since I posted Claire Chambers review of RECITAL – it is so good when one’s work is acknowledged – I have to admit I despair sometimes how in the UK we don’t get behind books and art unless it has a celebrity aspect or is related to controversy in some way – at least that’s how the papers and media seem to deal with ‘culture’ as if it was separate from life rather than the expression of it. So I am chuffed that Claire has taken the time to share her thoughts on my book. And I’m so pleased that many of you have responded positively in the wake of her review. Don’t think we’ll get the media to change now and become supportive of the arts again. But in a way it is interesting when branches of life are ignored as there is so much great stuff going on in plain sight, but hidden, as the big presses and papers etc.. can’t see what is right in front of them and that is exciting and leaves lots of room for great work to be done.

~

Not been sleeping much at Siddique towers – lots of life to be involved with – so find myself often listening to Miles Davis’ ‘Round About Midnight at present in the wee small hours. I was given a copy of the mono edition recently and listening to it makes me want to say words like Yeah, and Man and Dig.. yes it is that groovy….

~

Have moved a lot of my facebook activity to my group page - i only really use FB for work stuff, and for staying in contact with close friends when i’m travelling – it can be easier than email in that instance…

Dr Claire Chambers on ‘RECITAL’ and the works of Siddique

In recent years, much has been written about terrorism and fiction, both by novelists (Amis, Updike, McEwan, Faulks, et al) and literary critics such as Margaret Scanlan, and Stephen Morton and Elleke Boehmer. However, to my knowledge, little has been said about terror and poetry. This is surprising, given the role of public poetry in delivering swift interventions after cataclysmic events. In the wake of the terrorist attacks on London, poetry proved an importance forum for articulating outrage and trauma at the events, as is evidenced in the internet poetry competition set up by All Poetry immediately after the attacks, and Tony Harrison’s ‘Shrapnel’, which was published in The Independent a few weeks later.

In my view, however, the most important and sensitive poetic response to the 2005 London bombings to have been produced so far is the sequence ‘Inside’, in John Siddique’s volume Recital. These poems constitute an urban series at the centre of a largely rural collection, and offer a nuanced, even-handed response to 7/7. In the first poem in the quartet, the narrator expresses anxieties about his right to represent such trauma in poetry:

There are poems to write which I am told should
Not be written, almost as if to think
about a thing condones it (Siddique, 2009, p. 28).

However, ‘an answer’ of a sort is found in the bead of sweat on the face of a loved one, and in the three subsequent poems, Siddique takes a brave and balanced look at the terrible events of 7 July 2005. ‘There is No More Time’ describes the ordinary commuters ‘looking forward /to a cup of tea, or just getting there’, who are decimated in the bomb that explodes at 9.47 am on the Tavistock Square bus, after which ‘time ceases to exist’ (p. 29). In ‘This Is What You Were Born For’, Siddique enters the mind of the teenaged bus bomber, Hasib Mir Hussain, who, like the poet, lived in West Yorkshire. Siddique speculates on the techniques Hussain used to ‘pull[…] inside’ (p. 30), disconnecting from the other passengers in order to create the necessary devastation. Finally, and most movingly, ‘Nobody Knows Why’ is a lyrical meditation on the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, shot dead at Stockwell Tube Station the day after the failed bombings of 21 July 2005. At other points in the collection, the theme of incendiary violence resurfaces in the image of ‘the terrorist in my dreams’ (p. 9) in the poem ‘The Other’, which deals with masculine enmity, lost love, and raw anger. In ‘David’, the poet discusses a friend, with whom he ‘agreed for a decade, then one day we didn’t’ (p. 17), the dissolution of the friendship being played out against the city skyline of pre-9/11 New York.

Elsewhere in Recital’s poetic representations, there are evocative images of the Calderdale countryside from the writer who gave us Poems from a Northern Soul. This new collection is based around the lunar cycle, with thirteen poems, including ‘Birch Moon’ and ‘Ivy Moon’, richly studding the volume. In earlier writing, John Siddique speaks eloquently about his mixture of Anglo-Irish and Indian roots (‘Variola’, from his first collection Prize, centres on his father’s traumatic journey to Pakistan during India’s Partition). Recital is the most astonishing and mature work of his career to date, in which he continues discussion of his parents’ different legacies in poems such as ‘Unintended Loyalty’, ‘Red Line (He Loves Me)’, ‘My Father’ and ‘Annunciation of the Virgin’. These are also hinted at in the poems’ complex references which remake both European and Eastern literary traditions. Examples include the allusion to Eliot’s The Waste Land found in the final line of Hazel Moon, ‘distant thunder’ (p. 40); tropes deriving from Japanese and Chinese myth (‘Promises’), traces of Joyce’s Ulysses and Urdu ghazals. Unerringly humane and unexpectedly tender, John Siddique’s Recital is already benefiting from wide word-of-mouth recommendation, and deserves to become a key text on poetry syllabi for this nascent millennium.

Dr Claire Chambers - BA (Hons), MA, PhD
Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature and Course Leader, MA Contemporary Literatures

Siddique on Joyce's Ulysses

My piece on Joyce's Ulysses and its place in my life is now online at the mighty NormBlog please take a look when you fancy having a cup of tea and a read....

Derbyshire Libraries Poem Of The Month

Derbyshire County Council run a poem of the month scheme for staff w/ almost 200 subscribers & next months poem is ....

Blackpool Gazette Piece

There was a lovely piece in the Blackpool Gazette for National Poetry Day regarding my Residency as the town's poet. The article looks at the effect the work has had on the on the town, and discusses the book and poems that have sprung from it.

Kitying

Kitying
Originally uploaded by John Siddique

Kitying

Becomes Crystal
– changing state at the age of twelve.

Makes a new name with her left hand,
cutting the facets of each letter with intention.

Polishing smooth each cut to gleam in the light.
Puts her foot forward
– changing state, when standing still.

She has made herself, made herself, made herself
become Crystal
- Kitying from Hong Kong.

Helps her mother with the left hand of duty and love.
Gets lost watching Eastenders, letting go of all the making.

Stands in two worlds with two names.
Pausing for breath when the money runs out.

Changing state:
Looking at the sky as the starlings flock and swoop.
To be only flight, the transparency of movement.

Changing state:
Compressing feathers to carbon, carbon to Crystal.

Clear as the light first thing in the morning.
Still and always in flight, she is making herself.

© John Siddique 2009
Part of Lancaster University’s ‘Moving Manchester’ Commission
See www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/writersgallery/commission.html

Jali

Jali
Originally uploaded by John Siddique

Jali

Returning from the sun to return to his son.
Bouncing harp notes from the plate glass
of Superdrug.

Cutting the air with proud chin,
with cigarette smoke, with music passed
from his father’s hands into his fingers.
Returning from Gambia to return to his son.

The kora is life. Life in Piccadilly Gardens
made clean and crystal, lifted spirit,
as we approach and leave.
Intersections of buses and trams;
Altrincham one way, Bury the other.
Cross-cutting the notes of time and pitch
to hold his life together.

Humanity is different here, he says.
People don’t know about each other.
Music penetrates us with imported humanity.
I don’t play for money, I play for our souls.

There are bargains to be had in Superdrug,
two deodorants for the price of one.
Away down Market Street there are other musics,
the loop of a Romanian waltz played on accordion,
a French tango by the escalators near the shoe shops.

If you come here before the music starts,
you have to imagine the life of the city.
Jali with his kora, his amp and car battery
for power, riding in on the silver tram
as the shoppers gather. Chiming in the cold sun,
in the landscaped square where we pass by,
leaving our trails as music on the air.

© John Siddique 2009
Part of Lancaster University’s ‘Moving Manchester’ Commission
See www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/writersgallery/commission.html

Read A Poem And Pass It On

Everything’s picking up speed again after the summer break here in UK, and I need to ask for your help to hit the ground running. A set of poems were commissioned from me by Lancaster University looking at the lives of immigrants in Manchester. These pieces are now online, and on 12th Sept at Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester – I will be giving the pieces their live premiere; I will be reading along with the lovely Jackie Kay. I do hope you can make it along. Where I need your help is that over the next week I want as many people as possible to see the poems, as the press takes little notice of much literary work it’s down to us to help ourselves. All I’d like you to do is to take a look at the pieces (the link is below) and then to show them to someone else – Read A Poem and Pass it on. This could be done by email, by letter, by printing your favourite one out and putting on a notice board, reading it aloud to your kids, reading to your partner in bed, or a friend down the phone; be inventive! – but please share these poems – that’s what they are for. If you use twitter or facebook then use those mediums to bring some notice to the poems. Thank you in advance for doing this.


All the best
John



Kitying

Becomes Crystal
– changing state at the age of twelve.

Makes a new name with her left hand,
cutting the facets of each letter with intention.

Polishing smooth each cut to gleam in the light.
Puts her foot forward
– changing state, when standing still.

She has made herself, made herself, made herself
become Crystal
- Kitying from Hong Kong.

Helps her mother with the left hand of duty and love.
Gets lost watching Eastenders, letting go of all the making.

Stands in two worlds with two names.
Pausing for breath when the money runs out.

Changing state:
Looking at the sky as the starlings flock and swoop.
To be only flight, the transparency of movement.

Changing state:
Compressing feathers to carbon, carbon to Crystal.

Clear as the light first thing in the morning.
Still and always in flight, she is making herself.

© John Siddique 2009

Click Here to go to the full set of poems and photographic portraits, which accompany them.

what can writers do now?

The world, at least our world, seems to be breaking up into small colonies of the saved, as if we were entering a new Dark Age. If so, then perhaps the most important task we can set ourselves from here on out is to sustain, articulate, and preserve through literature the essential human values that early in the evolutionary history of our species distinguished us from our higher primate cousins—loving kindness, protection of the young, the weak, and the elderly, and consciousness of mortality.

Russell Banks;
from Burn This Book

Apollo, The Moon & Dreaming

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is forty years to the day that we stepped onto the Moon. I can recall being five years old watching it on our old black and white TV. The moon has always fascinated us as a race; from ancient times we have turned our faces to the sky to see our only moon looking back at us pale and enigmatic. Fifteen years ago I published my first chapbook called ‘Apollo,’ looking back at it today I remember how excited I was to be reaching out into published space with that little book as my rocket – one of the poems survived my editorial rigours and made it into ‘The Prize.’ Now I have a new book recently out ‘Recital’ linked into sequence with thirteen poems about the moons of the year and their presence in our lives. The cover of Recital is a big red full moon. So here’s to dreaming, to looking at the sky and saying let’s go there.

Car Mirror & Wind-farm & Michael Jackson

Car Mirror & Wind farm
Originally uploaded by John Siddique

Driving above Blackshaw Head we stop at the wind-farm - The sound of the turbines cutting the air, the mesmer of watching the rotations and the clairty of the air up here makes it somewhere we come to as if in a state of prayer. It's even better to come up here at night, perhaps when it is raining. The turbine towers like white spectres stretching out across the hill.

I've driven past this place before, but the night we heard about Michael Jackson's Death we came out for a late drive to break the sombre weight that had settled on our house. I guess we did like so many others, listened to his music, watched the news clips, wondered how such a beautiful looking human could distort themselves so much, and how much crap his poor innocent soul had to put up with over his life, especially his monstrous court-case a few years ago. Perhaps it was such burdens that wrote themselves into his skin, in bleach, and the cosmetic surgeon's knife as he outwardly tried to create himself to deal with them.

I was in the gym in the afternoon, the locker-room talk was the usual 'no smoke without fire' rubbish. The poor man was only just dead and within minutes - this nonsense, I'm sure it was the same the world over - when did we humans loose our humanity so much to the quick quip - the twitterfacespaceemptiness humour of such darkness that it is more important to destroy than touch compassion within ourselves?

We turned off the news, stopped reading the tweets. I silenced the locker room with my own solid silence, and as the night came up we needed to get out of the house, so we took to the car and headed for the moors with the wind-farm and watched the turbine rotors turn like samurai angels, or the bladed messengers of Don Quixote.

The Art of Listening

The Art of Listening
Originally uploaded by John Siddique

Derek Jarman's Garden - Prospect Cottage

Derek Jarman's Garden - Prospect Cottage
Originally uploaded by John Siddique