Ghost train

Having recently ordered the Selected works of the American poet Galway Kinnell, I'm finding myself drawn back to the same poem over and over again, unable to let it be. Appropriate enough: the piece, 'Fire in Luna Park' is about a terrible accident in a theme park and its haunting ending resists clear resolution.

The poem hinges on the idea of 'crying wolf' - the narrator relates how neighbours of Luna Park would often be kept awake by 'the screaming produced by the great freight machines', until 'it seemed the same big-lunged screamer cried out in mock terror / each night across the water, and we hardly heard and took no notice'. I was reminded of the children up the road from my house in Chesterfield, whose screams as they played in the garden would momentarily terrify me, assuming some accident, until I became so accustomed to them I almost blocked them out. Anyone who has ever held on for dear life and screamed on a rollercoaster or been on the kind of ride Kinnell describes that 'holds its riders upside down and pummels them until the screams pour out freely' will know that half-laugh, half-scream that fairgrounds produce.

In this case, it's the Ghost Train, jerking 'through dark tunnels / here and there suddenly lighted by fluorescent bones' that carries its passengers through the ground into a true nightmare, which we presume to be a fire:

'...last night the shrieks of actual terror pierced through our
laughter, and kept at it, until we sat up startled.

The Ghost Train, now carrying seven souls and the baffled grief of families
has no special destination,
but must worm forward, twist, backtrack, looking for forgetfulness,
through the natural world,
where all are born, all suffer, and many scream
and no-one is healed but gathered and used again.'

It's an ending typical of Galway Kinnell's lyrically dexterous style, an almost apocalyptic note that would seem heavy in the hands of another writer, but retains a certain lightness here, though the words themselves are incredibly poignant, appropriately weighty. There's something horrifying about the juxtaposition of fairground glee and mortal terror, an awareness of how the macabre often lurks behind the faintly ridiculous.

Kinnell is a singularly compassionate poet and his work recalls the poems of Robert Frost to me - a poet who he addresses a homage to in his 1964 collection 'Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock'. 'Fire in Luna Park' achieved for me that kind of rare memorability that, paradoxically, has the reader going back to the poem over and over as if they're scared they might forget its essence.

It set me thinking about the way a poem can immortalise its subject or, to take a bleaker view, keep the subject trapped in a kind of purgatory, separated from the real world, occupying the mirror-world of the poem forever. In April this year, I published my pamphlet 'Parallax' with Forest Publications; a series of poems about bidding leave and the secret lives of inanimate things, dedicated to the memory of Justin Wand who died in April 2009. You can never adequately capture somebody's memory in a poem, so I suppose the best the poet can do is to reflect on that - the poetry book becomes a kind of strange, Pandora's box of memories. In a sense, it could be seen as a selfish act, creating a character within the confines of the poem to keep them there, a dull imitation of the person you once new, a kind of Coppelia.

As Seamus Heaney says - far more eloquently - in an interview with Dennis O'Driscoll, memory occupies a strange place in poetry:

"You end up dropping back through your own trapdoors, with a kind of 'they-can't-take-this-away-from-me' feeling. There's a paradox, of course, since the poems that provide the recompense are the very ones that turn your private possessions into images that are - as Yeats once said - 'all on show'. Yet a poem saves as well as shows."

For some far less eloquent (but hopefully interesting) musings, you can buy my new pamphlet, 'Parallax' here.

The Last Barman Poet

I'm growing mildly concerned that 'A Pint for the Ghost' has been a bit heavy on the 'ghost' recently and a bit light on the 'pint'. Relish that sentence - it's probably the only time you'll hear me utter the word 'light' in relation to beer drinking. To redress the balance, I considered going for a heavy session down at Tweedies, (which, incidentally, has my nemesis, Old Rosie on tap again today) but instead I thought I'd plug a fantastic ongoing pub-themed poetry project, organised by Ross Sutherland.

'The Last Barman Poet' is a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the piss-poor poem Tom Cruise performs at the end of the 1981 film Cocktail, gyrating his way around the bar and proclaiming the superior quality of his Sex on the Beach. If you were lucky enough to escape that episode the first time round, you can watch Tom in all his Youtube glory here. Ross has been inviting poets to contribute homages, covers and remixes of the Cruise poem for a special 'Homework' event in London on September 29th.

The idea for the event originally came from the Aristocrats joke. To quote Ross' site, this is "a (pretty unfunny) joke that US comedians use to show off their stagecraft. The joke itself is a test pattern; it’s down to the comic telling the joke to add their own brand of flair, and hopefully make it funny. The organisers of Homework wondered—is it possible to create an Aristocrats for poets? A poem so bad that the writer would have to use all their ingenuity and talent to make it worthwhile?" Only the evening of the 29th will tell...

So far, the project blog has seen an enticing array of poetic cocktails, from poets such as Luke Kennard, Tim Wells, Niall O'Sullivan and many, many more. There's even a Last Barman rap. I couldn't let the opportunity to write about a bar pass me by, so I've contributed a few verses too. My piece is about the Last Poet Bar, narrated in the voice of a grumpy Yorkshire drinking establishment. No idea where the inspiration for that could have come from.You can read my efforts here. And if you're in London on September 29th, you can attend the Homework extravaganza!

What are you waiting for? The bar is open...

Brief ghosts

Thanks to a gift from a friend, I recently became the proud owner of Tony Walker's spooky volume 'The Ghostly Guide to the Lake District', published back in 1999. As well as being a tireless listener (some of the stories related in the book were 'hours old', he claims, at the time of writing) Walker is highly attuned to the connection between landscape and legend; an idea that formed the starting point for 'A Pint for the Ghost' - Derbyshire and Sheffield ghost stories are very much a product of the industries that once thrived there. In the introduction to the Ghostly Guide, Tony sums it up neatly when he says:

'To our ancestors, the world was mysterious and haunted by spirits of all sorts. On a bright day in a city centre, that might be hard to believe, but when you hear the wind in the trees on a dark night, or see the moonlight on a frozen lake, the Otherworld is much closer."

Ghosts are a symbol of the unseen and therefore unknown - those things that could be explained rationally, but invite a compelling alternative story. To me, ghostly tales compliment our understanding of the world in the same way that poetry coexists alongside science - offering a parallel narrative, relying on intuition rather than seeking to offer absolute truth.

Nonetheless, 'The Ghostly Guide to the Lake District' is a very grounded book which acts as a useful guide to the local area too, encouraging the reader to tour around lesser known spots on the periphery of the lakes. It offers a comprehensive catalogue of legends and popular stories which takes in the whole region. Flicking immediately to the section marked 'Ambleside', I was disappointed to see that Grasmere has one of the most anti-climactic ghost stories you could imagine, reduced to a few terse sentences:

"Grasmere is a pretty and much visited village which has a ghost story from one of the local pubs. Gerald Findler records this from the middle 1960s. He says that some locals were in a pub in the village talking about ghosts. A stranger joined in the conversation. The locals said 'We've been talking about ghosts, but we don't believe in them.' At which point the stranger vanished."

Of course, I immediately threw my book aside and started to wonder which local pub this fleeting exchange might have taken place in... It seems like an appropriate excuse to investigate all the bars in the vicinity, and I've already embarked upon this labour of love, visiting Tweedies at the weekend with Andrew and Chris to sample the Grasmere Guzzler beer festival. A good time was had by all (we think) and Friday's beer didn't stop us completing the beautiful 11 mile Fairfield Horseshoe on Saturday.

We started at Rydal Hall and walked the reverse of the route suggested by Wainwright, who waxes lyrical about the beauty of the round, having a sly dig at fell runners along the way: "Fellrunners will complete the whole round in less than two hours without seeing anything other than the track before them. I admire those who can perform such feats. I envy their fitness but not their achievements; racers and record breakers seem to me to be out of place on the high fells. Mountains are there to be enjoyed, and enjoyed leisurely." That's told us runner types, then. The image at the top of this post, taken half way through the route, is a kind of ghost in itself: the pictured scene never actually happened - Andrew took photos of me and Chris separately and this image is a composite. Mind-bending stuff...

We were lucky with the weather on Saturday and enjoyed unusually clear visibility. I've not experienced that too often in the hills since July! Returning to 'The Ghostly Guide...', Tony Walker manages a stirling defence of the Lake District's miserable climate, observing tactfully "parts of the County do indeed see a little rain. There are also blankets of fog that shroud the moors, blizzards that block mountain roads and sea mists which hang over the coastal marshes. For spotting ghosts, this kind of climate is a distinct advantage." I repeated that to myself last night as I huddled at an Ambleside bus shelter in the driving rain, wondering if the whole street was going to float away in the deluge.