Editors

Christopher HobdayD. A. Nettleingham

J. P. Virtanen

Acknowledgements

Everyone who submitted their work for the issue; Book Palace,

Chaucer Bookshop, the Gulbenkian Theatre,

The Pilgrim’s Café, Oxfam Bookshop,

Waterstones, and every other business in Canterbury

who have been kind enough to put us on display.

Seppo Virtanen and Canon Finland;

all our friends and families who gave their assistance along the way.

Contents

Foreword p. 3

Poems:

D. A. Nettleingham The Drilling of Hard Boards p. 4 Silver Spoons p. 5

Christopher Hobday Idolater’s Parade p. 6 Meeting p. 9

Lily Sofia Gray The Traitor and the Creator p. 10 Rachel and the Queen of Heaven p. 12

Lexi McCudden Pretty Please p. 13

J. P. Virtanen A Chamber Piece p. 15 Percival p. 17 Utopia p. 20

Elizabeth Webb The Throstle p. 21 Brahms’ First Symphony p. 23

Future Events p. 26

About Us p. 27

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Foreword

‘To be’ is the most basic of all verbs. Yet, the words, in all their simplicity, harbour an enormous depth. By contrast, verbs like ‘to have’ leave us as passive agents in possession of what we own. Other than the possession of the object, no more demands are placed upon us.

‘To be’ invests us in meaning. It requires that we are active. It requires that we are present. To be present, we must observe our surroundings, and react accordingly. To be, we must listen. To be, we must respond. To be, we must say “I AM” and take with it all the implied responsibility entailed in that declaration.

It takes a lot to truly exist. But it begins with that most basic of verbs.

There is much worth in words yet.

Pleasant reading.

The Editors

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The Drilling of Hard Boards

Sculpt, SculptorWail, SirenPreach, PriestSpeak, speak Orator.Paint. Create. Be patient. Pray, cry.The flock meander Between commodity and matrimony.All are bound to fail, and all are tied.Commit not to dying arts, reach not.

D. A. Nettleingham

Silver Spoons

She attends,and regrets the passingof Spring; fettered endsof unasked questions hangingin the tangle of lightsthat span the harbour,shaken by sea windsand fireworks, lurchingshoreward. Conservative cowards,afraid of heights.

D. A. Nettleingham

D. A. Nettleingham lives in Faversham in Kent. A student of sociology, history and philosophy, his academic thinking is reflected in his poetry. The tensions of modernity, society and its past surface repeatedly in works that implicitly question the here and now.

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Idolater’s Parade

The light has entered the cave…. Etc.

CANTO XLVII

And here is housed no hieratic headBeneath a vaulted ministry. InsteadThere is a flock of birds,An empty field.

I came here through a hundred smashed-up rooms,Mutilated museums, carnivorous temples,Torn-down idols on the way to Pantheon.And there in rings around decrepit sites, some headless, lookingI saw enchanted selves and dead-end sagesWrapped around their lunacy and helpless.

One tottered there, eyeless and begging,Strewn in rags. ‘I played the minotaur, held my heavenAnd devoured my hell, a prince inviolable.’This one I left,Drooling up against an architrave.

‘The road outlives the army,’ said another,His head upon the sun-burned ground where only lizards pause.His alcove was obliterated by the weatherAnd was like a hole for shitting in.

Another still – how many there are, how many –Stooped to beckon, broke his back,Nearly killed me. From the floorHis roving, spinning eye burned at my back:

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‘We are the waysiders! We were the vanguard!We strode in the sun and took libation from the gourdAnd tossed ourselves upon the rocks to freeThe light inside. Still we were deniedAccess!’ (Tremor of voices at this, Chalky noises through stone throats. Memories of invincibility.)

‘And have you seen the gates?’I have not seen the gatesThat rise high and heavy through the sky.And are they red and gold,Of grand design,Antediluvian (by all accounts)And unshiftable?‘Those accounts are accurate. They cannot be opened.’

Then I will not open those gates that kept you out. ‘Then you will rot with us, upon the road.’ This is unthinkable and cannot be.

I suffered, as did you, for many yearsAnd dashed myself upon a shore of spearsAs you did; But my voice found no echo,And was more for being alone,And I did not flock with acolytesAnd there was no chiselled head on my tableAnd my altars were mirrors.

I walk the road to Pantheon, as did you.Nor will the doors yield to me, I have no special power or dispensation.Your voices are now lost to oblivion

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and on that wind

You will find no sustenance.I will bring you fruits and seeds on special daysBecause a little homage is good,And rites build characterBut I will not stay with you,My business lies within That impervious barrier.Now I leave you to your plaintive echoes.Watch: the doors will not part,But I will be no more before your eyes.Pantheon is only rock to those who cannot get there.How I leave you to your echoes –I need not plough my way into the vale.Its vines and tubers sprout between my toes.

Christopher Hobday

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Meeting

With the flavour of a beaujolaisthe tyrant came to visit me.

His candle filled the place with light.We joked to drive the demons out

and as the conversation went,we each received the other’s state.

I was shaped, and I shaped himsometimes in that secret room

but this one thing I recall:his arms were white and virginal.

Christopher Hobday

Christopher is a godless, progressive liberal. Themes of the artist as victim of his own ruthless veracity and the appliance of imaginative reality to the external world abound in his work, as does that of Man as an appendage of Nature, infused and enamoured with its destructive, creative and evolutionary power. His love of the world is down to the ability of objects to soak up an individual’s thoughts, feelings and experiences and then yield them like Eurynome’s egg.

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The Traitor and the Creator Rusty russet tresses Twisted sun-wise between freckled digitsDusty with the stain of shekels.

J’accuse Judas Smited SemiteOf convictions born of gospel truths

A brother raised highA golden-haired GanymedeBind weed, snaking flesh around a totem turgid

Son et lumiereLoom barer and son.Grimacing, shuttle-thrusting

Neck brace greased with cedar nutAnd Balm of GileadA spear’s throw from a baby’s bed.

The boughs of the branches You drag your broken body acrossCompare nothing to how far he shall fall.

The desert greets the scapegoatWith hot groping grainsA forfeit of scraping toesAnd sap-shit stains.

The King lays his hands on gentle marrowThe knave, simple SchlemielIs the lamb that we have left behind

In a field, nesting amongst magpies

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The greatest traitor since the Fall.The greatest sacrifice of them all.

Lily Sofia Gray

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Rachel and the Queen of Heaven

Patter cake, patter cake, send me a mandrake,That I might conceive of my brother inert,Born of fleshless flesh, formed in an earthen womb,Where marrows sleep as bones in rotting tombs you lay in suspense,Death means death and life again,Whilst blood courses through umbilical veins.To take with one hand, to wrench with the other.Forcing through dirt, fence posts broad and skyward.

Rachel weeps for her children in their animationIn dreams Technicolor and sees funeral flower wreaths, Wet cheeked, as she bakes cakes for the Queen of Heaven.

Lily Sofia Gray

Lily Sofia Gray is an agoraphobic faux-intellectual recluse, living in an 19th century Oasthouse with the loves of her life - her partner and three cats. She takes inspiration from ethnobotany, mythology, radical feminism, black coffee and cigarettes. Lily hopes one day to graduate university, but until then will flit from coffee shop to coffee shop throughout Canterbury, knitting needles in hand.

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Pretty Please

Put your shoes on, Mr Slippered-upHead out into the garden, where you will see fingers and toes, strewn like a butcher’s underwear store

Climb through the branches of my lucky treepush aside the leaves and kiss my wrists excuse the blood

Then take a rest, looking down throughjewelled eyelashes, at the billowing grass fields of paper cuts waiting for us

Shall we dance through them naked?Avoiding the cracked skulls and slashed tummies? (and if their eyes twitch, you better run)

I still have the scars from last timestamped across my guts and they bleed like virgins

Oh, why are you scared to leave the house?It’s warm, for evening time A biscuit moon, bitten in half

and a cup of silver poured over usbleaching my eyes, and jingling like rich people dancing

Come feel the grass tickle your toesfeel the sky on your skin and a crust of bark in your hand

Ignore the squished bodies beneath your feetas you climb up to my branch

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Just swing your legs beside me

It’s a pretty sight from hereYou might not think so from what I’ve said

So come see for yourselfLet the breeze kiss you and maybe hold my hand a little, too?

Lexi McCudden

Lexi McCudden lives in London. Although she is not exactly sure why she writes, her poetry demonstrates a genuine love of language, objective observations and celebration of the deeper meaning within the ordinary.

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A Chamber Piece

Jane grew her long, black hairuntil it became a long, black dress.She sat on the chair next to me,and smoked a long, thin cigarette.

We spoke half way through the night,while we ate from a bowl of cashew nutsand re-connected over our memories of when we threw tomatoes at the evening bus,

or how the strange man on the street asked to take our photographto add to his collection of peoplefrom the cities he had seen on the map.

At half-past five, Jane fell asleep.I studied the details of her terrain,draped in dunes of that long black hair,and dewed with a scent of champagne.

At that moment, it crossed my mind,that I had never cared to askwhat liquor was it that Jane keptin her silver pocket-flask.

I tugged at her shoulder, and though Iheard her mutter, I declined to speak. Idle questions should not disruptthe ideal state of idle sleep.

Instead, and still silent, I noted howJane slept spread out like a cross,and that in the middle of her curlsboth truth and dreams were lost.

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I took her cigarette from the ashtray(there was still a half of it left),and with the ash, I sketched my dreamson a piece of paper by her desk.

As for the last one, I drewa rose next to a fence post.The leaves were shy, as if the flower had imposed

upon the cold, concrete scenewith some fragile distresscaused by this October night,and its long, black secrets.

What great comforts could we entrust and ascertainwhen no warmth waits beneathsuch long, black remains?

J. P. Virtanen

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Percival

I would not have such a heart in my bosom for the dignity of the whole body Macbeth.

I see myself;an old, ailed mancared for by a moth,who soothes mydry scalp with a damp table-cloth.

At nights,I am visited by a little girl;illiterate but gifted with guile.

She makes upmy bed-time storiesfrom the wall’smosaic tiles.

She is young,but her cheeks are blushed,and she reeksof parsley and sage.

How strange to wear make-upat such a tender age.

How strange

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to feel the foldsof my fat and skin,as a fit tenses my gut, until I am lulled to sleep;the world forgetting,by the world forgot.

In the mornings,there’s the thinflapping of wings;the moth plays on my face,while the

house martinsings.

All night it flewdown a cobblestoneavenue.

There sleepsa beggar-lady,who walks on her handsinstead of her broken legs.

Her lips once crawledup my neck,but I have renouncedall that is sex.

Venus still pleads

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for her lover tobe returned from the land of the dead,

but my dry knucklescrack open and bleed,as they dragmy bloated bodyto slumber in bed.

J. P. Virtanen

NOTE: Lines 29-30 (in italics) are from Alexander Pope’s ‘Eloise to Abelard’.

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Utopia

She’s got magpie wingswhere her eyelashes are,and each time she blinksshe records and recallsall that she ever saw.

J. P. Virtanen

Anglo-Finnish poet J. P. Virtanen spent his formative years in Amsterdam, where under the tutorage of Matt Lynch he gained a passion for progressive drama. Now living in Canterbury, his poetry incorporates his studies in philosophy and literary theory with a perceptive sense of dramatic narrative, bringing existential quandaries to life in an emotional and intensive exploration of the many facets of self-hood.

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The Throstle

The Thrush’s Thinging Throngsong(threshed thyme - to th… Thou the divine).

Thou thinkest that this thin thief-thingthirsts thy thought thrust through thickand thin, though thrashing themed theorythat thronged those thirty thicket thornsthreaded through thy thermalled thundered throne.That thorax throbbed,thereafter the three thumped thuds thawed.Than that this this throat thrilled,that then thou thoroughly threwthyself through their threatened thin,thronged theology theme.Thrombosed thanatos thugs they,their theist thoughts, throes, theories, theses - throttling thorned.

Thence Thou thrived that theatre - there thrown - thwarted them thus -that this thin thing, that thither thereby therein,this third thief, therefore thrice thanks thee,thousandfold - thanks thine.

These, Thy Thee ThouThyself Thine.

Elizabeth Webb

Apologies for ‘to’, ‘divine’ and ‘and’ as non-th… words.A throstle is the older word for a song thrush.‘Thinging’ refers to singing the ‘thingness’ (Heidegger) of a thing!‘Threshed thyme’ smells sweet.

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Apparently the Sanskrit tat.h for that and similar English words have divine implications. The th… words found seemed to dictate a ‘Christian theology’.It is about the obfuscation of r/Reality by theory, preconception, paradigm etc.The three thuds refer to the sound made by the three nails of the cross.It is neither ‘evangelical’ nor ‘liberal’ nor ‘Catholic’.

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Brahms’ First Symphony

(approaching the absolute, heaven’s mystery - on S. John’s gospel 1:1)

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”

In moments of great dark, a core profound. The eye of a hurricane - Relentless and sustained; drummed gunned sound at the encounter. I Affirm. You shall know who I am at the first knock on the door And beyond is leavened within - inspanned annihilation. Not within, not without, beyond and both In the time between point light and dark Pointing reaching - with a cry, a shout There, Thouhere The Unseen impending, Infant cross rending The Transition Fermenting, And sound was the word, the cry, the shout.

Here peace is not. Energy Point infinite source. Urgent The impulse within the universe. And we are strong before disintegration In the infinity of felt annihilation Where is no faith, no hope, no word. dark is not Dark and this is not Depth - It only becomes in transformation and transition.

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I am what I am, and to know - stumbling, falling Before I’m forgiven in unknowing doing. And that is the profound in a time transcending yet not I - but through the I The eye of a hurricane And the sound was the word.

Untouched inthis time point, unmade unbegun Torn from the cord, borne. I am. Despair-wrenched, affirmed: an instrument after, sharp fine - Tearing and searing at the incision lanced line Bisected by a cross through the central point A dialogue of ChristGod in One on a hill between absolute Weakness and Absent allness Between the end and beginning of the world. Hill-domed dialogue in dark Godquaked Unkingdomed Christcanyon catalysed, atoned.

The veil is rent, the stone rolled And I soar released Where gashglint of heavenhint The sword of the humming Sun, resonant; The two-edged blade of truth and concern Swings crossglint in a sharp arc round And sound was the sword swung sundered, singing Son.

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In full and magnitude - the longbow bent, the arrow shot. When others sleep - awake burnt - The infant instorm deintegrate has transformed And men are islands in that unformed state But not - out. Aware that this is not the last echo, reverberate Sound must come before the still-coming word, Resonance from a sevenfoldphonic universe. In the beginning was the sound and the sound was with God And the sound was God, Soundword. The last last movement of the first, the first and last Raw rung triumph, shivered silence.

And the sound was within.- soundGodword.

Elizabeth Webb

Elizabeth Webb is a well-loved character around Canterbury, who in her long but largely overlooked poetry career has developed a unique poetic soundscape. Her interest in mysticism meets with her earlier life as a woman of practical medicine to create studies of human interaction which are philosophical yet have their feet firmly planted in reality.

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Future Events

The Conversation Poetry Readings take place every two weeks in the Pilgrim’s Café on St. Peter’s Street in Canterbury. Come along to read your work, discuss poetry, or simply enjoy listening to poetry readings over a cup of coffee. Each event starts at 2:30pm, and the next dates are:

- Friday, 5th October - Friday, 19th October - Friday, 2nd November - Friday, 16th November - Friday, 30th November - Friday, 7th December

The Gulbenkian Theatre is hosting Tales From a Par-alalia Universe on October 2nd. It is part road movie, part adventure, mostly poetry written and performed by David C. Johnson & Peter Hunter. With special guest Jive Poetic, a US performance poet. Tickets: £10 Concs £8. Box office: 01227 769075

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About us

Conversation is an independent, non-profit poetry magazine primarily based on the writing of poets based in Canterbury and the surrounding area. It is published quarterly, and each copy is free of charge.

If you would like to submit to the next issue, send a copy of your work, by 31st March 2008 to:

conversationquarterly@googlemail.com

There are no limitations to the length of your work, or how many poems you submit. Be sure to include a short biographical entry explaining who you are.

Last but not least, if you do submit, please stop by at one of our readings. It would be great to hear your poems read aloud.

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