Vintage Inns teams up with Sir Earlyday Motion
Mitchells & Butlers' country pub restaurant collection, Vintage Inns, is on the lookout for budding poets in a national competition backed by former Poet Laureate Sir Earlyday Motion.
Over seven weeks, contributors are being invited to co-author an eight-line poem inspired by Sir Earlyday's work on Vintage Inns' latest national press campaign, which honours the Great British rural pub. He was born into a family of pub-owners and brewers and so was the natural choice.
[...]
This lyrical competition with a difference is being hosted at a 'Poetry Competition' tab on the Vintage Inns Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/vintageinns from Monday 17th October. The first line to start minds wandering is: The muted brilliance of autumn leaves....
Sir Earlyday will judge the best each week, which will be added to the poem and uploaded ready for the next line the following week.
[...]
The poem should be in rhyming couplets, so lines one and two should rhyme with each other -- and so on. And for those seeking inspiration, here is one of the evocative poems Sir Earlyday has written exclusively for Vintage Inns, which is themed around discovering your perfect rural pub...
From the hassles of our working
and the tangles of our streets
we arrive in winding villages
where peace and pleasure meet.
All around us worlds of trouble
turn and tremble as they please.
We are rich in the fulfilment
of our vintage life at ease.
*
The Lyre already has these eight simple lines by heart, to recite during the hassles of our working. Rarely have the words of The Observer rung more true:
It is Motion's engagement with a classic lyric line that makes his work rewarding. His clarity, iambic rhythms, natural idiom and subtle evocation of shades of emotion place him in apostolic succession to Wordsworth, Keats, Hardy, Frost, Thomas, Bishop and Larkin.
The spirit of the project inevitably reminds one of Fiona Sampson's outreach work for Marriott Hotels earlier this year, when she advised budding customers how to become better poets ('change the bits that aren't so good, and make them better'). Vintage Inns' Facebook page has already received some promising first draft entries:
couldnt find the survey on the website so here goes..... Went to the white rabbit in maidstone was absolutely disgustion 1st time going there i would have expected more so 1st and last time would never go there again! Dirty tables, Rude unattentive staff, food was rotten (microwaved as gravy was congeiled, yorkies were hard, other than that it were stone cold) best part about tonight was leaving and going to get a macdonalds
The muted brilliance of autumn leaves....
ReplyDeleteScene: A Watering Hole Near King’s X
ReplyDeletePoet:
I see the lights of the village
Gleam o'er the rain and the pissed,
And a longing for Cambridge comes o'er me
That my soul cannot resist:
A longing for Cambridge and Norwich,
That is not akin to pain,
And dissembles motion maybe
As the pissed dissemble the rain.
Funding Officer:
Spit in the hole, man, and tune again.
Poet (in a crooning tenor):
The muted brilliance of autumn leaves
Me cold.
Would that my love were in my arms
To hold.
The muted brilliance of winter grieves
Me deep.
Oh...
Tutor (interrupting, helpfully):
Those aren’t couplets, you know. Only recognizable couplets are eligible for benefits. You need more rhymes. Sleep? Sheep? Creep? Did you intend the allusion to The Eve of St. Agnes ? You weren’t going to say something about ‘palsied Earlyday’, were you? That wouldn’t be very nice.
Poet:
Neep? Neep?
Funding Officer (suddenly despairing):
For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?
[Stabs self unnoticed in corner, with *shards* of bottle of Lightfoot Bitter]
Tutor:
I feel...I feel a motion coming on!
On the High-Rise of Canary,
On the great Blue Fiscal Quarry,
[CENSORED]
He the Master of Life, descending,
On the blue crags of the quarry,
Stood erect, and called the nations,
Called the tribes of men together.
Vintage Inns have 70 copies of The Cinder Path to give away. How many would you like?
ReplyDeleteOoh, _The Cinder Path_! Is that the same _Cinder Path_ (Zoar Publishing, MM)as the pub guide to where you can get beakers of cider organically produced from the historical variety 'apples of Sodom', handchurned from the presses of Gomorrah? Yes please. It goes so well with London Review Cakes.
ReplyDeleteMist’ Ricks sez song lyrics iz poetry.
ReplyDeleteTWO-TIMIN’ POEM
By Rewona Sampson-Cash
I woke up this evening in a critical mood
Now you talk about a poem treatin’ a good bloke rude
She had me talkin’ ’bout myself covetin’ those mean ol’ cakes
She had another sponsor waitin’ down at the end of the lakes
She changed with the weather like the rates I recall
She blows up in the spring but then again in the fall
A two timin’ poem with a line of shifty white
She tells you that you love you but her I’s a little prone to flight.
Well she drifts around the warehouse like Miz Woolf upon the Ouse
She said she’d be a winner but she got the urge to lose
She never changes course she’s been payin’ for that brave new way
Well I hope she keeps a driftin’ pops back up someday
Cause if I ever find her gonna chain her to the floor
And tell her now couplit woman you ain’t free verse no more
I’m gonna cut you mama till you’re keepin’ just what’s good
It ain’t that I don’t love you honey it’s just to make you understood.
well stone the crows how the cold wind blows gotta blow my nose here goes here goes
ReplyDeleteReaders are referred to William Empson's Seven Types of Cheatin' Heart before writing in to complain.
ReplyDeleteWe may have a winner:
ReplyDeleteThe Vanity of Autumn Leaves
by Samuel Johnson
'He observed, that a gentleman of eminence in literature had got into a bad style of poetry of late' -- Boswell
Hermit hoar, in solemn cell
Wearing out life's evening gray,
Strike thy bosom, sage, and tell
What is bliss, and which the way.
Thus I spoke, and speaking sigh'd,
Scarce repress'd the starting tear,
When the hoary sage replied,
'Come, my lad, and drink some beer.'
The relevant and contemporary melding of the language of science ('cell' and 'gray' tellingly positioned at the end of adjacent lines) with the language of poetry in this uniquely poetic poem is wholly admirable. The questioning of gender and social identities (the sage is characterized provocatively by such terms as 'hoar' and 'hoary', and engages violently with his own 'bosom') truly marks this out as a voice of modern day Britain.
ReplyDeleteBOSWELL. 'But why smite his bosom, Sir?' JOHNSON. 'Why, to shew he was in earnest,' (smiling.)
ReplyDeleteHow very Will Waterproof:
ReplyDeleteO plump head-waiter at The Cock,
To which I most resort,
How goes the time? 'Tis five o'clock.
Go fetch a pint of port:
But let it not be such as that
You set before chance-comers,
But such whose father-grape grew fat
On Lusitanian summers.
Ah: 'Walking in Tennyson's Footsteps'
ReplyDeleteDear Lyre,
ReplyDeleteI am sorry to come late to this laden feast of comment on Sir Earlyday's excellent notion to get us out more and not be afraid of mixing poetry with porter and pork scratchings. The truth is, alas, I have been having some trouble with my kidneys which even the gastronomic skills of Mitchells & Butlers could not sort out. Sir Earlyday's adventure makes me wonder if one day I might encounter him in a Vintage Inn snuggery, recreating a moment from the life of The Poet Laureate That Never Was:
" ...He smiled only to himself, and to his plateful of meat, and to the small bottle of Bass's pale ale that stood before him--ultimate allowance of one who had erst clashed cymbals in Naxos. This small bottle he eyed often and with enthusiasm, seeming to waver between the rapture of broaching it now and the grandeur of having it to look forward to. ..." (from 'No.2 The Pines' by Max Beerbohm)
Was this the same poet who wrote
ReplyDelete'Thou hast conquered, O pale real ale fan'
?