Poems from the Backroom 130: David Kinloch

It seems to me that our initial optimism for the time that the virus would give (for those of us luckily uninfected and unaffected) for a bloom of creativity has been tempered by the awful deadening effect that routine and boredom has on our brains. I mean I'm being creative, I suppose, sitting here typing this but I'm conscious of the rain streaking down the window in that familiar candelabra effect, that the bus is due to go by in a minute in a slow blur, and that the fish van comes the day after tomorrow. When have I ever been bothered about the fish van coming the day after tomorrow?

The cocktail of constraints and boredom is supposed to be a potent trigger for innovation, though of the five stages of boredom revealed in a recent study, two, 'searching' and 'reactant', are annoying but make you do something about it even if that's playing noughts and crosses with the budgie, and two, the more compelling ironically, 'indifferent' and 'apathetic' turn your brain to mush and make you count down the days to the fish van. I've always found stimulation in travel and movement and I find the continual search through the internal landscape for stimulation either a tired old journey, or a journey to places I'm leery of going.

David Kinloch captures some of these issues perfectly, I think, in today's poem about the tyranny of time and numbers in the age of the virus. It answers the question, doesn't it? It's possible to convert the raw data of boredom to a piece that is evocative, lyrical and elegiac.

David Kinloch was born and brought up in Glasgow. For many years a teacher of French and then of Creative Writing, he recently took early retirement from the University of Strathclyde where he is Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing. His books of poetry are published by Carcanet, the latest being 'In Search of Dustie-Fute', released in August 2017. He is currently Chair of The Edwin Morgan Trust. His poetry is wide ranging, innovative and imaginative- the perfect poet, perhaps, for the perfect hyper-unreality of lockdown.

 David's Website:

https://www.davidkinloch.co.uk/

Profile and recorded poems in 'The Poetry Archive':

https://poetryarchive.org/poet/david-kinloch/

An Interview with 'Mumble Words'

https://mumblewords.net/2017/09/01/an-interview-with-david-kinloch/


Welcome, wanderer

I know a bench that the sun strikes
at precisely 10am. At 10.02 I take my coffee
to the garden and sit for fifteen minutes.
these are my minutes. No-one else’s.

A neighbour may come down, stand
gravely hanging washing and comment
from his distance, acknowledging
my freehold of this space and time.

But that is all that he can do. By
10.18 I am back inside and the garden
fills to the sounds of a little girl
chattering to her Dad. New neighbours.

They will reign there for much longer
but I will not grudge this; the young
are made for light. Next, we measure
flour for cakes and feed three spoons

of honey to granola. Later, I walk
the flowering terrace for forty minutes
and wish a beast of trig and math,
a hovering bird with violet eyes

more accurate than mine. It
drinks me from these sums.
Honeysuckle floods the air
with wings. Indoors again,

a bumblebee bumps up
against the pane and we go
straight to bed at 10
to get our eight hours straight.

We dream the same dreams
every night, dreams the same
as days like these, although
there are no numbers;

just the immeasurable space of avenues
empty of cars and buses, people, hummingbirds.


Paris-Forfar

From the window of the Hardie-Condie Café, I see the ghost of a rich friend

of my grandmother drive down Forfar’s Main Street in a Rolls- Royce I was 

sick in as a child. Behind me the watercolours of stick girls walking through 

trees are misted blobs percolating in coffee steam. Mother comes in like 

Scott of the Antarctic carrying tents of shopping. The garçon brings a 

cappucino and croissants on which she wields her knife with the off-frantic 

precision of violins in Hitchock’s shower scene.
Soon I will tell her. Show her dust in the sugar spoon. Her knife gouges craters 

in the dough like an ice-axe and she tells the story on nineteen Siberian 

ponies she queued behind in the supermarket. Of Captain Oates who boxed 

her fallen ‘Ariel’. The chocolate from the cappucino has gone all over her 

saucer. There is a scene and silence. Now tell her. Tell her above the coffee 

table which scrapes with the masked voice of a pier seeming to let in some 

waters, returning others to the sea, diverting the pack-ice which skirts 

around its legs. Tell her a fact about you she knows but does not know and 

which you will tell her except that the surviving ponies are killed and the food 

depot named Desolation Camp made from their carcasses keeps getting in 

the way. From this table we will write postcards, make wireless contact with 

home and I will tell her of King Edward VII Land, of how I have been with Dr 

Wilson and then alone, so alone, in day-blizzards just eleven miles short of 

the Pole and ask her to follow me. I am afraid she has been there already. She 

smiles like the Great Beardmore Glacier and goes out into the street with 

stick girls to the thirty-four sledgedogs and the motor-sledges. You are too 

late. Amundsen is in Forfar. She has an appointment. Behind me I can sense 

the canvases, the dried grasses pressed into their grain like eczema on an 

open palm. Later I will discover her diary and what I told her.

(Reprinted from David's entry in the Scottish Poetry Library Site
https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/david-kinloch/)