Dear Dirty Brighton

I wrote this when I was reading Ulysses, which for those who have not read it, plots the course of one day in Dublin. It's mainly about the hero, Leopold Bloom, walking about the city, with his thoughts narrated in stream of consciousness style.

The author, James Joyce, was rather fond of the phrase "Dear dirty Dublin" - he uses it in a lot of his work. Ulysses can be read lots of different ways (it's over 900 pages long, there's a lot to work with), but I've always seen it as partly a love letter to a city.

This is my very own love letter to Brighton, written somewhere between the ages of 19 and 21. I lived in Brighton for three years while studying for an English undergraduate degree at the University of Sussex. I think that is the longest I've lived anywhere except Surrey, where I grew up.

The reason I chose the University of Sussex for my degree wasn't the English course. It wasn't the faculty. It wasn't the prestige of the university or the job prospects of graduates.

It was the location - four miles outside my favourite British city.

Dear Dirty Brighton

Your breath is a cold slap to the face,
as morning slips slow and bright down the houses
stacked like cards along curled crescents of suburbia.
When I walk, blind breathless alone along your unwound veins,
your love guts me like a fish, like a fist to the chest,
you are so hungry of hands, so hard of heart it hurts
sometimes, often. When we trip, together, down darkly
smirking, stinking streets, I swear, I sweat, I say
I'll never leave or love again, but you're so pretty
when you're unfaithful to me. And so perverse,
cradling regency terraces crushed against the filthy facades
of big business, mixing your pavilions and piers,
your students and stag dos, ethnic cafes and chip shops.
I am so irrational in your arms, so slavish and weakwilled,
needy as the sea washing round your feet. Every night
that fades to day sucks me hollow as the shells
lined up on my windowsill.

Edit: Oh, and I forgot to say - there's a line shamelessly stolen from a Pixies song. See if you can spot it.

Commuters

Time for another poem.

I wrote this one when I was about 20 (I think). I was doing some contracted work during my university holidays and reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

It was terrifying how much the world of work and London seemed to resemble Huxley's dystopia.

I was working with a content management or data entry system and it seemed like I was performing pointless tasks endlessly without questioning them to gain the approval of people I didn't really like. I was terrified that this was what the rest of my working life was going to be like.

It's not quite that bad.

The initial italicised bit is a quote from Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Commuters

Oh brave new world!
That has such people in't!

Roofstacks collapse into the distance,
menaced by smog-cloaked office blocks;
a lacklustre landscape slumped on the horizon.
Was it just weeks ago when we watched dawn uncurl,
burn the mist from the morning and paint the sky blue?
Now, the carriage is suffused with mint from the slack-jawed mouth
of some sleep-walking worker, and I am rattled, repeatedly
by small shocks of reality. I have found
some silent dystopia, where interchangeable bodies
snooze and shuffle, and no-one speaks. Strangeness
ripples out from me as we are disgorged from the doors –
Surely – standing stray on the platform –
Surely everyone knows I am not supposed to be here.

Before The Harrowing

This is my most recent poem - I have a massive backlog of the things that I'll probably publish at some point but at quarter to 12 on a Sunday evening is not the time.

  

This poem formed when I was walking along the north Norfolk coast earlier this year. My family is from Norfolk and I love the landscape there. There's something special about it. A lot of the region is very flat and on the day I was walking along the coast the fields seemed to reach out to eternity - there was a definite feeling that I stood out as something vertical and I felt very very small. 

I was thinking of Sylvia Plath's poem "Wuthering Heights" when I wrote this. It's called "Before the Harrowing" because harrowing is something that's done to prepare agricultural land for the planting of crops and this obviously hadn't happened when I was walking along the cliff, because the fields were full of the remains of the crops from last year. They looked pretty sorry for themselves.

The picture is not actually the bit of coastline I was writing about, but it is a beach. In Norfolk.

Before The Harrowing

The weight of the low-slung, slow-hung clouds

Has flattened sea and land into thin flat bands.

Grey-brown, grey, brown, grey. 

Dead fields sown with dry sticks, I taste

The wind on salt-flecked lips,

And stand, and stand, between sea and land,

Feel it try to whittle me down.

Grey-brown, grey, brown,

Over and down,

To the cliff's ledge, water's edge,

All bound in narrow strips.

The shore shifts, sighs, slips,

And drowns.

Introduction

Hi,

I'm Ellie, as you might know if you read my other blog, which is mostly about cake.

I have a confession to make. So I'm going to take a deep breath, stand up like I'm at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and say: "My name is Ellie and I write poetry".

Quite frequently, it's bad poetry. But occasionally I feel like I write something that seems sort of OK and so I'm starting this blog as a platform for me to share my poetry.

Be gentle people, I haven't really shared any of my poetry since I was 17 and had two poems published in an anthology by Kingston University in association with the bookshop Borders.

It was shortly before Borders went bust, actually. I've always felt slightly guilty about that.

The reason this blog is called "An Imitation of Poetry" is because T.S. Eliot said: "Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal".

I'm a big fan of T.S. Eliot actually, I have the last three lines of his "Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" tattooed on my inner arm, so don't be surprised if you see me imitating him.

Finally, just a word of caution, I write in freeverse. Don't expect sonnets. I never could get the hang of iambic pentameter.

Until the next time.