"open-eyed" by John Foggin

By Kim Moore

I’ve spent my morning off January Writing Hours missing January Writing Hours terribly. I’m on the train on my way to the T S Eliots, so thought I’d use the time to post up an exercise that I shared with over 300 people a couple of mornings ago.

My good friend John Foggin died a few years ago now. John was a serial poetry workshopper, who managed to write the most amazing poems in the space of six minutes (or ten - whatever time was available) in beautiful, looping handwriting, usually with a purple pen, between the covers of a book he’d often made himself. John was utterly enthusiastic about poets and poetry he loved - anyone who has found themselves the recipient of this enthusiasm will know it felt like being lifted up high into the air. If John loved your poetry, he wanted everyone else to love it, and for someone like me who finds it hard to take and accept compliments, that sometimes was difficult to believe. And if John loved you, he wanted everyone else to love you too, and that felt like being held up to the light. I am missing him terribly this month- I always do, whenever I’m running workshops because he would have been at every one. And I know he’d have emailed about the T.S Eliots to see what I thought about the poetry - he was less interested in the gossip. It was always the poetry with John - what were poets doing with the language?

The January Writing Hours sent me back to John’s final collection Pressed for Time, published by Calder Valley Press. The editor was John’s good friend Bob Horne, and Bob tells me that after I shared this poem during the January Writing Hours, it resulted in a flurry of orders for John’s collection. One of my biggest regrets is I didn’t do this when John was alive, because he would have been so happy to think of his poetry getting out there into the hands of people who didn’t know him. I hope he’s watching somewhere now with that big grin on his face as we read his words.

It seems amazing to me now that he wrote this poem during those final months when he knew that the end was approaching. The title “open-eyed” could be a manifesto for the way John lived - always open to experience, endlessly curious and fascinated and driven on by a desire to know, to know more - about language, about coal mines, about the landscape, and of course about himself.

But in the poem there are hints of that ending that was approaching. We can see it in the semantic field of the poem, in the language choices. The hawthorns “white as bones” that “close like a noose”. The “violent shadows” of the poplars. The “muttering sea”. And that buzzing - which I think is both the buzz of life, of life going on - after all the dog fox is considering moving in. When human life stops, nature takes over, life in whatever form carries on. But it’s also, I think the buzz of death approaching,

I like to think of John at home in Yorkshire, writing this poem and letting his mind range far and wide to pull those images across time and distance. The “raindark eagle” and the “muttering sea” I suspect is from the Isle of Skye, one of his favourite places in the world. It is a poem of desire. The academic L.Alford defines a poetics of desire as being defined by lack and this lack resides in either time or distance away from the loved one. Is it possible to have a poem of desire for a landscape that you can’t get to anymore, except in your mind? I think so, and I think this poem proves it.

The writing exercise that I set during the January Writing Hours was to write a list of images. I gave people the choice - they could either look out of a window and write down what they see, or they could do what John did, and give themselves permission to range in time and space, and write down the images that stay with them over the years.

And let us all be more “open-eyed” - more present in the world, more seeing, more open, with ourselves and each other.

If you would like to order Pressed for Time, you can do so here at Calder Valley Press. Thank you to all of our subscribers (paid or free). Your presence here means that Clare and I can justify taking time to just sit and write, and that means the world to us.

The next post will be a post for paid subscribers as a thankyou for their financial support with an extra, un-shared writing exercise.

open-eyed
JOHN FOGGIN

a raindark eagle draws 
a line under a white sky, over a muttering sea

a heron drifts on a breeze
lands into the alders like a man falling off a bike

six hawthorns white as bones 
are closing like a noose on that empty croft, its redrust roof

under a full moon, snow falls on poplars 
that shimmer like neon, throw violent shadows on white fields

a dog fox walks along the copings of my boundary wall
he looks as if he’s considering buying the property 

there’s that buzz under everything