#tara bergin

[violettesiren]

Come here little white crow, let me stroke your soft fur. Let me take your white fur and wear it as a long coat. I will wear it for my wedding day. I will make vows in the fire station where bells like sirens deafen: they will warn of burning, on that day of our wedding, and on the hour of our wedding for every year after that.

I am unwell, little crow, I am unwell and far from home where longing lives in my house.

White Crow by Tara Bergin

[billherbert23]

New Defences of Poetry – Celebrating the Bicentennial of Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'A Defence of Poetry'

It occurs to my belated brain that I never did get round to adding a link here to this excellent project in which many folks have done fine things - my colleagues Sean O’Brien and Tara Bergin among them, as well as folk like Linda France, Olivia McCannon, Jane Burn, and luminaries of the like of Daljit Nagra, Philip Gross, Robert Sheppard, and Mona Arshi - all under the excellent editorship of David O’Hanlon-Alexandra.

I’m missing as many fine folk out as I’m including here, so will go back over this post later and add tags. In the meantime, here’s a section from my piece on The Ephemeral:

Not Languishing, But Dormant

‘It seems to me that the reason that so many of us feel like we’re languishing is that we are trying to flourish in terrible conditions.’ This remark by Austin Kleon was a cogent summation of a topic I suspect many of us have been discussing: not what has the pandemic called forth from any individual imagination, but what has it done to the imagination itself?

In a chat with a writer pal, we shared the disorienting sense of our creative processes slowing down, and discussed whether this Slow Thinking movement we had inadvertently joined meant that something deeper was being processed, or if we were just witnessing the actual speed of these deeper currents?

I’ve long tried to realise that I have to take however long I think a creative task will take and multiply by three. And then multiply that by three. Usually, it takes longer than that to realise it’s going to take longer than that. Then, as is happening with this article, I forget all about that and make exactly the same mistake again.

So, if this strange stumbling along is really these processes regaining their true speeds, almost free from the pressures of “real life” (AKA various authority figures yelping at us to hurry up and pretend we’re just “working from home”), could we maintain this when the new illusion is that things have returned to normal?

Many of us feel under huge pressure and so have worked across evenings, weekends, holidays. I wonder how much of this pressure is “only” corporate panic, and how much is managerial anxiety that the nature of work might have changed, and that, once changed, nothing can ever go back to how it was. I’m not sure many events ever have this effect of Absolute Reset, but I do believe that more glimpses behind Capital’s moth-eaten curtain might just facilitate that slippage into new paradigms which we appear to be undergoing.

The thing that fascinates me about this is what Frank Zappa described as xenochrony: that sense we make of two overlain rhythms: whether they appear to us to be clashing or harmonious. If you approach your job from the perspective of your creative life, most times the latter definitely feels like it is being controlled or negated by the former. From this viewpoint, working weekends and holidays is just our attempt to keep in step with both.

The enforced home life of Lockdown has destabilised the work part of this imbalance, so, while that responds by moving into overdrive, the resulting wobble means we’re all seeing through the spokes, as it were, into that other world of Creative Space. It may seem stuck on Pause, but is it really?

Might it help to think about this ongoing doldrum as a type of creative procrastination, reconnecting people with the underlying rhythm of their creativity as the forced rhythm of the workplace is itself forced to, ever so slightly, weaken its grip?

[poem-today]

A poem by Tara Bergin

The Hairdresser

My hairdresser is young and she tells me things no one else can: about the different kinds of straightening tongs; about the war in Afghanistan.

I sit with my hands in my lap, in the ridiculous cape that she fastens for me at the back. She stands at the nape of my neck

and I concentrate.

She tells me about her nan’s hair – which is coarse (“like yours”) – she tells me about colour, and tone; she tells me about her boyfriend, the soldier, who covered his ears at the party, and begged her to take him home.

I watch her in the mirror, as she cheerfully takes hold of my hair, and pulls it high up into the air;

I sit completely still in the swivel-chair, and listen with great care to all the things she has to tell me.

Tara Bergin

Listen to Tara Bergin read her poem.

More poems by Tara Bergin are available through the Poetry Archive.

[don-simon]

A small white wife with a small white face; A thin white groom on a round white base.

They have no shoes because they have no feet: their maker thought them obsolete.

THEY CANNOT RUN AWAY!

The married man and his married wife are stuck this way

LET’S HOLD TOGETHER TIGHT, they say.

So they hold each other all through the day, and all through the frightening night.

by Tara Bergin

[hours]

Water is Difficult

by: Tara Bergin from: This is Yarrow

Oxygen and hydrogen in liquid state, convertible by heat into steam, and by cold into ice (Mr. H. Fowler, Mr. F. Fowler, you do make things sound nice). In summary: water is a liquid consisting chiefly of this. Just one of these things, so the Fowlers say, is due to appetite. But I have a thirst / I have a fear of / I have a sin of — and Lucy is on her knees before you, water, admitting that she might not believe. ‘What does it do, what does it do?’ she asks, ‘except leave?’

Tell her before she herself decides to go: Things break — even water. Water must break if we are to enter and live.

[hours]

Acting School

by: Tara Bergin from: This is Yarrow

Tomorrow is the day of the main performance: I play, not by choice, a spritely, foul-mouthed American. Generally, the cast is following the Strasberg Method: we never try to be jealous, or stirred up for no reason at all. In today's rehearsal we begin, as always, with articulation:

Lips: trill Jaw: spring Palate: soft Tongue: pointing pointing out from the mouth and we are humming all the while,

humming all the time and all the time centring — rubbing the centre and rocking and aligning: pulling the string up from the crown and not the chin and looking out with the eyes not the chin and before speaking, before singing, all the time increasing our capacity for breath.

The Director has told us that exiting well is an art. It will prove no less vital to your life as an artist, he says, than entering. While the good entrance might be slightly more central, exiting well could be a turning point in your career.

And now we must practise how to drink water when there is no water. Once Aoife ceases to argue about the fact that we have nothing in our mouths, we can get on with the task of learning. Swallowing air, as the Director says, might not be the same as swallowing water, but for our purposes at least, there is a sufficient amount of physical truth in what we do.

[carcanetpress]

Next Generation poet Tara Bergin reads 'This is Yarrow' from her collection This is Yarrow. 

nextgenerationpoets.com

[carcanetpress]

BBC Radio 3's The Verb host and poet Ian McMillan on Tara Bergin

nextgenerationpoets.com