Lord Pineapple

aka Terry Cuthbert

Sorry, this site is negletted, but this is reality, and I don’t feel much like reality at present. I thank you all for signing, and those who have not visited my Poem a Day (Poem every TWO days!) site I will return your comment. But otherwise, this entry isn’t much. Why do I write “fiction” poetry? (Fancy word for personae is heteronyms) Well, Lord Pineapple poems are the most near truth, but many of the other user names contain truth, The Rev. Toby for example was based on a real vicar who didn’t really believe in God, but did believe in people. When he died, I wrote in my paper: “He who did not believe in angels, must now surely be one”.

Sophie is a strange personae, I tend to put my poems wrote for children, as children, under her name, though basically Sophie is based on my daughter Rachel, she was like Sophie when a child, caring, creative and witty. (We used to drive my humourless brother mad with our witty double-act!)

The Sarahs’ of course are, sadly, pure fiction. They have calmed down lately, they used to just piss people off, and get me banned from forum after forum. They were great trolls, for example, asking a right-wing Bushite if Bush was “really gay?” But give the Sarahs’ their due, they never upset the very nice people, though some sensitive women here still consider them vulgar.

Some of the personae are older than the net, like Ingar Gorse and Jacques du Lumerie (“his” poems are on Poetry Hunter, don’t know who put them there!) The later once wrote in French, until my stroke screwed up that part of my brain. Bob Smartass is rude, vulgar and is hated by most women and most Americans, but as a punk poet in the early eighties, his “The Immortal Bob” book sold ten thou copies and though so long out of print, I can’t even find a google-reference, once poems from it got onto television and radio and the book was condemned by a right-wing British Newspaper.

Another pre-net name (little used now) was “blackie fortuna” who everyone thought was black. More modern, and created for the Edinburgh Literature Festival is “Wee Duncan D” Where I stand with tartan troosers, a child’s set of bagpipes, a Douglas tartan scarf and a tammy and fool no one (not even Americans!) of my lack of Scottishness. People go there to boo and jeer, (Just as my “mates” from the paper used to when I did local readings around Chesterfield and Clowne in my good old days!)

Tiffy Witherington was my second (next to Ingar) women personae, and was created for poems wrote by a woman’s point of view. “early” poems of her got into “Spare Rib”, a feminist anti-men newspaper! I am still adding user names, and decided this year to attempt to write “Poems by ghosts” using real and ficticious names. Not always with success, for example my “Poem by the ghost of John Lennon” is awful. Better are my fantasy “ghost” names.

Of last year names, Marie St. Denis is a favt. (But the Rev. started off last year too). The Poet known as “Empty Chairs”, has not been quite as successful.

More again.

First Off, Thanks for this:

Written by:  SpecialBunny February 03, 2004 The_Clowne_From_Clown

Postscript. My “Other People’s poems” site is growing, I print each poem out and read the folders when travelling or need inspiration. All the new entries are classics, some modern, others not so. But Nance1 has wrote a great piece of verse-prose, so great that it is better than most poems I have ever read, hope she lets me add in her poem. Oh, and the rest of you, read the “other Poets” site, there are poems there I could not even dream of writing. The one trouble is, I can’t seem to update the contents (index) page I might have to move it.

Sunday evening.

The snows are gone and it was a warm night here in Oxford in merry old England, yet to hear two of the country’s leading poets recite had an audience of 38 people. Are we poets wasting our time writing?

St Columbia’s Church Hall ( a Scottish “Freebe” church) is new and replaced a near ruin. A lovely place, user Strawberry would like it, it does a lot of missionary work and proudly proclaims “we do not teach people about Christ, only about love and happiness”

Ruth Fainlight writes poems about lost childhood and places of her life, even her dentist. She was born in West Virginia in the States and recited a poem about the hot humid summers and how grills replaced windoes and how when a door slammed dropped of moisture sprayed all around the house.
  Ruth is famous for her Soloman and Shebia collection. I have found few examples of her work on the net, here is one.

Autumn


Walking in the square, through the damp and misty still mild
     air of a late October Sunday morning.
Only at the second circuit do I meet another person: a young
     family, parents and children
but otherwise the paths are empty – and the tennis court, the
     sandpit and climbing frame, seven acres
of grass and flowers, shrubs and trees: the delicious colours
     of the leaves and their softened texture
like the gloves and handbag from the wardrobe of an elegant,
     ageing woman; the last few roses, gnarled
buds scentless this late in the year, some stalky toadstools:
     as if all for my sole pleasure.
Suddenly I think it’s raining – not that I feel the drops but
     because of the sound – and watch a shower of
leaves detach from their branch with the same ease, the moment
     come to let go, that I hope for.

Ruth Fenlight.

Alan Sillitoe

Alan, also a novelist writes sim to Lord Pineapple, in the way he writes about the way people battle against the paths and perils of life.

He began his reading by bringing out a morse machine and oscillater, and explained it was the rhymns of morse that had inspired him to write poetry.

Webpage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Sillitoe

Let me preamble, been such a busy week that honestly I have not the time for even one blog, there are weeks like that in all of our lives, when you blink, and hey presto! it’s gone.

What have I been doing? Went away for part of the weekend, I have friends still, not many as you can expect with my bluntless and complete absence of tact or empathy, but some poor sods still find me creative and funny.

i am working hard, I can’t even be bothered to say what I now do, but it is one very long fall down. From a large house to a small flat, from a nine-seater car to a yearly bus ticket. But hey shmucks, am I unhappy? Well, yes, but I accept life as it is, raw, brutal, short and mortal. A lot of more lovely people than I have died whilst I live on, to fear death would only be an insult to their memory, as if to say, I am more worthy to live on.

I have been writing like mad too, you only read a fraction of my poems. A poet Don Paterson, who is winning thousands of pounds in prize money writes about a poem a year, I average a poem a day, that speaks for itself, the old hack writer still keeping to an imaginary deadline.

I have a dvd player too as well as a telly, as well as music everywhere, and in the midst of all that I have to find time to eat and sleep. I do not sleep much but I need a lot of dozing just to rest what is left of my brain, still, that brain has never been that much use to me.

“Why is daddy so busy?” I remember one of my children say, yet they saw a lot more of me as some kids their father, away from the office, I often had one of them in a car, except of course in roles of danger.

People speak to a reporter when they have a child with them, such reporters do not then look heartless beasts like one belonging to a nearby paper. A policeman direct his small son across the road for the boy to be killed by a villian in a van. As the policeman lay on the pavement sobbing over the body this fucking reporter asked the copper if he had a photo of the boy for his paper.

No wonder people hated us, but I was never like that, many an assignment ended in no real story, as I could not write anything cruel except about cruel people. But I had my enemies, boy I had them, and I never used my real name in newspaper print because of this.

Any UK person reading would know who Tony Benn MP is, he was also MP for Chesterfield, and was the only innocent person who tape-recorded what he said to the reporter, not for legal reasons but for his life-collection of his life. It was comical two men in the street both with mikes talking to each other, two mikes at the reporter’s mouth then two mikes at the MP’s mouth.

No wonder I prefered a notebook and pitman’s most of the time.

You have read enough, I would give nuggets of today’s job, but it is not interesting enough, so ttfn.

Terry.

This entry will be over a couple of days.

First Off: Inreractive Stories.

Interactive stories on Xanga? It can be done, start a new site and several of us will share a password and user-name, that way we could write a story between us. Will Xanga mind the sharing of a user name?

Circe and Compassion are among the many of you with another idea, short pieces of prose. In the book world, stories and so on less than a page long makes rather bad reading, as if the writer was just showing off… but small pieces of prose are more and suited to the internet, like blogs, where short-attention span rules if only because of the eyes not being able to focus the same.

My old Texts are similiar, though they were wrote as prose poems.

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