If you see Sidney Road, tell me

You’d think I’d learn, but I’m writing this while listening to Arsenal play a big match; it’s Man City this time. And I’m going to see how far I can get writing this post without us conceding. The game is 8 mins in and we have almost conceded once already, so I’m not hopeful.

The ball was given away by Declan Rice, and I am going to cheat this week and skip straight to the poem by Declan R…yan.

I usually find some sort of way to link the poem choice to something that’s happened this week (or the interim period between posts), but I can’t think of anything this time other than I read Declan’s debut collection, Crisis Actor, this week and I’ve really enjoyed it. And that’s enough for me, so let’s have it

Sidney Road

A lookout on the world: next door’s wisteria,
its purple leaching out, half hides
a railing that needs paint;
nine wooden planks, enough to stand on.
My freedom as a ‘free lance’.

An interstitial age. Hardly neighbourly,
I know fewer names than the years
I’ve been here. Rows of identikit SUVs
line the road in lieu of trees
I’ve seen cut back, then down.

Somewhere between coma and contentment:
well-tended green spaces; a family butcher
embarrassed by its raft of sausage circuit garlands;
too many rugby shirts around to feel at ease –
spring-evening joggers stir from hibernation.

I was the future, for a week, a while ago.
At a summer garden party, I met
a looted favourite poet:
over his empty, one-use flute, he wrangled
about the etiquette of ‘watering the foliage’.

A marginal constituent, I’m more witness
than antagonist to flourishing damp.
The months pile up since my last confession;
wheels spinning slowly, hazards on,
just low enough for running down the battery.

+ + + + + +
Shared with permission of the poet. Taken from Crisis Actor. Faber & Faber, 2023.Previously published in Subtropics 32

NB doesn’t seem to be available via Faber site at the mo, so give your local bookshop a shout.

(NB There have been 2 or 3 shots from either side now and a potential red card via VAR)

I feel like this poem mirrors the sort of road that has echoes of the side streets of West Dulwich (more of which anon)…However, I think this poem feels more north London suburb to me. Notably, we don’t know where it is, and arguably it doesn’t matter, but these are probably not countryside streets or for want of a better way of putting it, poorer streets. They also aren’t super posh. The family butcher, “identikit SUVs” semi place it. The railings that need paint and the trees that have been pollarded and then removed also help as a way of triangulating that this isn’t set in Chelsea or Maida Vale, etc.

Look, I’ve spent ten minutes pissing about on Google Streetview to try and work out which Sidney Street it could be. It hasn’t yielded much than a possible Wisteria sighting in Cambridge, but the street looks too commercial to be the right one. So, let’s look at other things.

There are so many wonderful details in this poem. The line “I know fewer names than the years / I’ve been here” makes me think to a degree of my own poem, Settling, about not knowing neighbours, but this is better. However, what I love the most about this poem and it’s sense of a person out of time, in the wrong place, adrift etc (and you can say this about pretty much every character in Crisis Actor) is the gradual collapse of the area when we get to specific people.

We have our protagonist who is not quite right for the area, a “free lance” that doesn’t fit in (deliberately by choice or not is TBC), but I also find them calling themselves a “free lance” in its more mercenary sense as opposed to a freelance worker. While our protagonist is potentially down on their uppers – “I was the future, for a week, a while ago”, I like them coming into contact with another perhaps more successful poet at a garden party. It provides what I think it is the part of the poem that yields the most return per word.

At a summer garden party, I met
a looted favourite poet…

“looted” is, for me, doing so much work (like Declan Rice in this match), I want to stand up and applaud it. I read it in three ways.

the protagonist has looted the work of the “favourite poet”
the “favourite poet” is dong very nicely for themselves, thank you very much, or perhaps they come from money, but either way, the only thing they are struggling with is the etiquette of pissing in the flower beds (NB I approve of this, as long as it’s after dark and no-one else is in the garden).
I wonder if the “favourite poet” has a look of having been looted about them, do they look like they’ve been ransacked. Are they haggard as a result of a life “well-lived”/a “hard paper round”/

HANG ON…GOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL. Martinelli, you fucking beauty!!!!!

**Dances round kitchen** **waits till game is finished**

Whether it is any, none or all of those readings of the word are correct/intended by the poet sort of don’t matter. That one word is, in among a lot of poetry and a lot of poem, is where the poetry is for me.

And then we get the final stanza, that use of “marginal constituent” makes sense at the start the collection, and it makes even more sense by the end of it. By the end of the poem I start to wonder how much of this is deliberate, the protagonist has avoided trying to fit in, is existing somewhere between “coma and contentment “— is that the place they live or the way they live??? and it’s the final line that has me wondering the most…It’s not to run ‘down the battery’, it’s “for…Are they in the middle of doing so, are they intending to?

I’ve been reading Declan’s work since getting a copy of his early work in Faber New Poets 12 back in 2014. It is most pleasing and interesting to see some of the poems from that slim volume have made it into Crisis Actor. I’ve long been fascinated by the poems that don’t make it into collections or pamphlets, and IMHO there are very strong arguments for the inclusion of five poems in FNP12 that haven’t made it into Crisis Actor to have, er, made it into Crisis Actor.

At least one of them made it into his debut proper pamphlet, Fighters, Losers (Reviewed by some knobhead here. I loved the pamphlet, I don’t love the review. It was one of my first ones and I’d almost certainly do a better job now, I think.Yes, I am the aforementioned knobhead in case you haven’t worked it out).

(2 mins of extra time added. NB I know it doesn’t look like much for 45 mins of work, but I have done other things since starting this)…

Annoyingly, I can’t find my copy of Fighters, Losers—having, for some unknown reason, not put it next to FNP12 on my shelves (the search begins shortly), so I can’t check how many of those poems made it into Crisis Actor, but a significant number is a fair assessment. This means that there aren’t many new new poems in Crisis Actor, and this doesn’t matter if you are new to his work.

Arguably, it doesn’t matter if you aren’t new to his work. These are superbly crafted and thought through poems, that, as ‘Sidney Road shows’ require time and thought to finish. I will wait a long time for more work from Declan Ryan because it will be worth it.

In other news, I was very lucky to have been mentioned in a post by my old mucker, Matthew Stewart. His second collection, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t is starting to turn up in the world and I’m enjoying seeing people enjoying it and savouring it. (Excellent review by Christopher James).

As Matthew himself notes, I’ve

“seen all the poems in Whatever You Do, Just Don’t at multiple stages in their development, and has given me feedback on every single one, from first draft to reassembly after Nell’s ritual dismembering of words, lines and stanza of numerous poems that we had thought finished. Just as I have for him, of course.”

And this is the crux of his poet, it’s not about me, it’s not about him either. It’s about us, as writers (and fuck it, as people) having folks that are friends that support and help each other through encouragement, goading, provoking and supporting. He’s the first to tell me something is shit or good, as I am say something isn’t working.

What changes as a result of this is up to the recipient, but, the space is safe to say this stuff. It’s likely true elsewhere, but I, for one, welcome the trust that comes from it.

I’m less happy that he has texted me to insult me about the Arsenal result by questioning the origins of my fandom, but y’know…it comes with the territory. I will say, however, that I’m honoured and looking forward to seeing the old sod again in the flesh in November. You should come along too on the 7th November. 7pm. The Devereux Pub.

Ah, now I said more about West Dulwich later, but I suspect you’re asleep now, so more on that next time.

THE LAST TWO WEEKS IN STATS

HEALTH STATS
33K running. Some Two-run Tuesdays and my a 10K race in Petts Wood today.
3 days without cigarettes…
0 days since drinking. **Raises gin in your direction**..

LIFE STATS
1 office-based away day (ironic-ish, based on the poem I’m working on)
Drinks with my mate Mike
1 night in the disco shed with my friends Simon and Dunc
1 night out with my mate Mike
1 organisational change to my team at work

POET STATS
0 loose ideas/articles gathered
0 poem finished: TFI Friday
2 poem worked on: TFI Friday…, Last Dance
0 poems committed to the reject pile
0 submissions:
0 withdrawal:
2 acceptances: The High Window
1 Longlisting: Butcher’s Dog
1 readings: Acumen, read: A Short Survey, Sales Patter, Slipping Away, A Foley Artist
0 rejection:
20 poems are currently out for submission. No simultaneous subs
96 Published poems

Reviews
0 review finished: None
0 reviews started:
1 review submitted:
0 review to write: FINALLY!!!

READ/SEEN/HEARD/ETC

Music
r= Radio, A = Audiobook, P=Podcast. The rest is music
The Clientele: I Am Not There Anymore
Bullant: Late Life Circ
Hilary Woods: Birthmarks
Mo Troper: MTV, Dilletante
Emma Tricca: Minor White
Föllkazoid: VThe Clientele: Bonfires on the Heath
Clinic: Fantasy Island
The Twilight Singers: Dynamite Steps, Powder Burns
The Foxhole Companion: Unknown Soldier (P)
The Archers (p)
Faber Poetry Podcast: Victoria Adukwei Bulley & Raymond Antrobus
Dropsonde Playlist
Explosions In the Sky: End
Fugazi: In On The Kill Taker, 13 Songs
Kylie Minogue: Tension
Matthew Halsall: An Ever Changing View
National: First Two Pages of Frankenstein
Various dance tunes with Si and Dunc
Big Thief: Dragon new warm mountain
Slowdive: everything is alive
Smashing Pumpkins: Gish
Four sides of Heaney 3- and 4
SG Goodman: Teethmarks
Duke of Norfolk: A Pebble of the Brook

Week 2
Overmono: Fabric
Hailu Mergia And The Walias: Tche Belew
Gloria Ann Taylor: Love Is A Hurting’ Thing
Kara Jackson; Why Does The Earth Give Us People To love?
HAIM: Days Are Gone
Nino Nardini: Jungle Obsession
Cleo Sol: Heaven
The Breeders: Last Splash
Laura Veirs: Carbon Glacier
The Green Fields: I Dreamed Today was a Day for Daydreaming
Hem: Funnel Cloud
The Walkmen: Bows and Arrows, A Hundred Miles Off
Don Paterson: Toy Fights (A)
The Chemical Brothers; For that Beautiful Feeling
The Archers
Haley Bonar: …the Size of Planets
The Dream Syndicate: Ghost Stories
Emma Tricca: Aspirin Sun
This is the Kit; Bashed Out, Careful of your Keepers, Krulle Bol, Off Off On, Live in New York, Moonshine Goes First, Moonshine Freeze, Of Off On oddities, Where it Lives
Mary Lattimore: Goodbye, Hotel Arkada
10K Running List
The National: Laugh Track, Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers, High Violet
Moonshake: Eva Luna
R5 Live; Arsenal Vs Man City