footnotes
Guest Contributors Wendy Cope
1
Every and Haiku
Wendy is the author of six poetry collections and many other books. She has received the Whitbread Poetry Award, the Cholmondeley Award, the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse and an OBE for services to literature. Wendy is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Tania Hershman
3
It begins with birds in flight
Tania is the author of two story collections. She is a 2014 Gladstone’s Library Writer-in-Residence, judge of the 2014 Bridport Flash Fiction Prize, and founder and curator of ShortStops, celebrating short stories in the UK & Ireland. Tania is also a Royal Literary Fund fellow at Bristol University.
Don Paterson
5
Aphorism
Don has written six poetry collections and two books of aphorisms. His awards include the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, and the T S Eliot Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has received an OBE and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
Contents A Young Eurasian Obituary Farmers Desire From Dream Sequence Examiners’ Report and Instagram Line from my autobiography Untitled Parrot Poem, 2015 Untitled Scoria Momentary Re-readings and Opposed Communities
7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31
Savannah Adeniyan Oscar Farley Sophia X Gatzionis Enrico Hallworth O Mayeux Duncan Montgomery Adam Napier Matt Neal Lindsay Oldham Florence Oulds Maria Pelugosi Mathilde Sergent Simon Whitaker
Wendy Cope
Every 1
and Haiku
Every ditch or stream or river the train crosses. Every ploughed field, every row of trees. Every square church tower in the distance. Every minute of sunshine, every shadow. Every wisp of cloud in the wide, blue, East Anglian sky. Every day. Every day that’s left.
Willows white with frost: like fireworks that whooshed, sparkled and froze in the air.
2
Tania Hershman
3
It begins with birds in flight
It begins with birds in flight, with birds landing, taking off, and she, the woman, watching trees at the city’s edge. It begins with watching birds, in the trees, and in its middle, later, there is a kitchen, and the woman stands, the teakettle’s small hard tears of water dripping onto her fingers. The woman stands, the kitchen waits, the birds have gone, and the house, struck by the innocent finery of a silent, standing woman, takes itself out for a spell. A spell of rest. The woman pours, the kettle’s whistle quiet now. It ends with the woman, sitting, fine and silent, sitting, straight and awkward, angles and corners pointing towards the sides. It ends with birds, tapping on the window, tapping and scratching, and the woman, her head up, her tea aside. It ends with the woman, birds tapping at the window, smiling.
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Don Paterson
‘Agnosticism is indulged only by those who have never suffered belief.’
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Savannah Adeniyan
7
A Young Eurasian
Your favourite today is a young Eurasian caught by your pen five years from his grave. He will die in a bright-lit alley, well-dressed; alone. First he pays you in flat metal discs with the faces of dead men on them. Then he shapes you a bird from broken things, but it cannot fly for it has no wings. He is training to become a professional atheist at Oxford, but he will drop out before he dies. His eyebrows are thick. When you draw them, you soften them with your pen. When done, he is happy. We leave.
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Oscar Farley
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Obituary
Oscar Farley was a Cambridge-educated barrister whose work with Stover and Ltd. on several high-profile cases (including the ‘Greenwich Scandals’) revolutionised corporate law. He disappeared in October 2013; a widespread search failed to discover a body. All that has been found is this self-authored obituary. Memorial service Tuesday. All welcome.
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Sophia Gatzionis
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Farmers
I like to look at mothers with their children. The skinny ones always seem to go in pairs. Often, the mothers match their makeup to their children’s food. I think the mothers’ makeup is the children’s food. The mothers buy conditioner at Tesco. They fertilize and rake their children’s hair. I also sometimes like to look at farmers. They are many places, if you search hard enough. The banker is a farmer, when he goes home. He cultivates mimosa in his window boxes. He plants raspberry brambles in the sink.
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Enrico Hallworth
13
Desire
I’ve never known whether it’s due to some innate, primitive male desire to compete, or my own indecisive nature and subsequent willingness to comply, but whenever I hear somebody express desire for somebody else — whenever someone acquires a reputation for attractiveness — I suddenly see it. I may have previously been no more aware of a particular person than a chimpanzee is of the Mars Curiosity, then overnight they become the most fascinating human being I’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s universal. That would explain celebrity culture. Anyway, that’s what led to the awkward situation with John’s girlfriend.
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O Mayeux
15
From Dream Sequence
realise the curve or treble
16
Duncan Montgomery
Examiners’ Report 17
and Instagram
Answers to question 7 (b) were mostly shrewd and well-argued. One notable exception came in the form of a candidate who knew it was poetry ‘because it was addressed to a heron.’ If it had been prose, the candidate asserted, this would just have been “a big grey bird.” There is more than a pinch of truth in this, but future candidates for tripos are advised that such intuitions read better when they are dressed up as the product of thematic and/or prosodic analysis.
18 The baby’s head is big and round, like to a lead balloon. It is passing blurred and something badly-lit, like to a photo of a child which must by now be fully grown. Perhaps a man with children of his own.
Adam Napier
19
Line from My Autobiography
“Being a gay narcissist, obviously I fell in love with my stunt double.”
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21
Matt Neal
Doom days dottrel our copse, Warp our holts, turn our closes to slups, Scoff at mere-mark and steal away, Leaving biggin and pinfold erupt, Starm-holms rising like drops Or kingcups astonished at May.
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Lindsay Oldham
23
Parrot
You called because you said you saw a parrot. But I don’t care if you’re sorry and it must have been a mallard or a blackbird or a robin or a vision sent by Jesus or some scratchy old crisp packet and it doesn’t matter what it was you wanted because you don’t get parrots here.
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Florence Oulds
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Poem, 2015
“THE SUMMER HAS ENDED AND WE ARE NOT YET SAVED: YOUR EX-GIRLFRIEND IS WAY COOLER AND PRETTIER THAN I AM, BUT WHEN MY HEAD FILLED WITH SUDDEN BLOOD, I THOUGHT OF YOU.”
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27
Maria Pelugosi
i buy plants now and kill them not on purpose, but by negligence which you once said is just as bad.
28 my kitchen is small and full of dead things. the linoleum is cracking.
Mathilde Sergent
29
Scoria
I deconstruct my bridges stone by stone, the postgraduate handiwork of love, when the furling rain has quieted, its lick on my thighs, burrowing deep I take down the pyramids by hand
30
Simon Whitaker
Momentary Re-readings 31
and Opposed Communities
We have seen the re-reading of history applied at the level of monumental motions; we know that to the victor go the spoils and the records. It is also widely understood that the significance of many lived years can shift in a moment of revelation. And we are familiar with the nagging uncertainty which should accompany this re-reading. But we perhaps overlook the force of the retroactive when it strikes at the last half hour, or the last ten minutes. Too often, I find myself ready to accept momentary re-readings, which on a wider scale I could reject as constructs.
The death of the individual is natural; the death of something communal is always a sign of a theoretical weakness. This is because any one community seems to propose a way of living for all of humanity - if some people can live together in this way, and people are all basically the same, why couldn’t everyone live together in such a way? Of course they could, unless the community itself has some inner weakness. So, to make sense of our way of life, we must forever seek to prove that others’ ways of living together are doomed to failure.
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