investing etc. 0023

The poetic edition: A Flower a Day, A Poem for Every Night of the Year, Calypso, The Perimeter, Futureproof, Dunelm, James Cropper, Games Workshop, Next, PZ Cussons, Renew, Spirax, Tracsis, XP Power

On poetry, and writing

The one poem I know by heart was written as a prayer and framed by my bedside, “A Prayer For A Child”. I recited it every night, it has rhythm, and it rhymes. That is what made it memorable.

Father hear me as I pray,

Thank you for a happy day.

For my parents’ loving care,

For a friend, my fun to share...

A prayerful poem, and “I wish I had brushed my teeth” by Pam Eyres. That was me and poetry, for forty or fifty years.

I returned to poetry when I bought The Lost Words, by Robert Macfarlane, a few years ago.

Unlike Macfarlane’s books about the landscape and our relationship to it, the Lost Words stayed lost to me for a year or two. I read the poems and shrugged.

They were dead to me until I tried reading them aloud. I’ve discovered that, especially if a poem doesn’t rhyme, I am blind to the rhythm, unless I perform it.

My elderly Mum and I are both readers but buying books for her is a challenge. We have different tastes, and I don’t want to foist complicated stories with too many characters on her. Convoluted books can be a jumble (for me too).

Mum’s birthday is in February. Last year I gave her A Flower A Day, by Miranda Janatka. Each page of this book has a picture and a description of a different flower that blooms around that time of year. I hear a lot about those flowers. They bring us both joy.

This year, I gave Mum A Poem For Every Night of the Year by Allie Esirie and, being more interested in poems than flowers, I bought myself a copy. We message each other about them.

Mum dictates messages. One time she messaged to tell me she liked a poem by Carol Ann Duffy, but before she pressed send, Dad walked into the room. She offered to read the poem to him, forgetting that she was in the middle of messaging me. That day I read the poem on WhatsApp, and learned that she’s performing too.

When we read Uppity by Eileen Myles,

Roads around mountains

cause we can't drive

through

That's Poetry

to Me.

Mum’s verdict was: “Not Poetry to me”, which is poetry to me! Even if I perform Uppity with gusto, I can see her point, though. I’m not sure about the poem, but Roads around mountains are poetry. I have run along enough of them to know.

In addition to a poem a day, I have bitten off a bigger challenge:

A ground-breaking, mind-bending and wildly imaginative epic verse revolution in SF. A saga of colony ships, shattering moons and cataclysmic war in a new Eden

It’s Calypso, a science fiction novel written in verse by Oliver K Langmead. Most of it is in four-line stanzas that don’t rhyme. The line breaks are often unpunctuated, and on some pages the type is arranged into shapes.

Had I stumbled on it a year or two ago, I’d have mustered a weary eye-roll. Now I know to read poetry aloud, I am making headway. Although it’s harder work than a novel, the imaginary worlds he describes are vivid (to me).

Here’s a sample.

Left: Calypso book cover. Right: Oliver K Langmead. Source: A brave new world aboard the Calypso puts lecturer in the spotlight.

Two more poetic things. When I draft an article like this I lay down each individual idea in a line, and collect them with related ideas into proto-paragraphs.

It’s an organisational and motivational trick. Atomising thoughts makes it easy to write things as they occur to me, and arrange them as I go. The resulting text looks a bit like a shambolic Calypso, an elongated Uppity.

Maybe once I have written these lists of ideas, or the CFD (Crap First Draft) as I call it, I have a choice to make: whether to turn them into poetry or prose.

That’s exciting. Also exciting, on Substack there are people talking about the creative process of writing poetry.

Maggie “Not the Dame” Smith annotates her poems: “alliteration”, “assonance”, “questions carry across lines with enjambment for suspense, tension, pacing” (enjambment is a word, I looked it up).

Eminem is an atomist. He “stacks his ammo”, clustering words that rhyme until they form rap songs.

Research

• The curious case of the company investing in its worst business
  Spirax, an industrial equipment manufacturer, has spent heavily to build a new division that is less profitable than the mothership. Perhaps it has more potential than we think.

Score

• Star stock might be good value now
  Renew, an engineering company that maintains our national infrastructure, has hit a bump in the road (well, railway but that doesn’t work as well). The shares could be good value.

• Four stocks facing the axe from my top 40
  I reveal four shares I will drop to increase the quality of businesses in the Decision Engine. XP Power, Next, James Cropper and PZ Cussons have their backs against the wall.

• This new stock wins a place in my list
  For each of the shares I drop from the Decision Engine, I need to find a replacement. The first is Dunelm, the furniture and homewares chain. It has been a real steady-eddy.

• The stock I’ve chosen to replace Next
  It’s with trepidation I bring Tracsis back into the Decision Engine. The rail and technology focused transport company is muddling through upheavals in the UK rail network and its own internal reorganisation.

Trade

• Games Workshop trimmed and a contrarian buy
  We live in interesting times but I stuck to the strategy and traded as my scores suggested, trimming the portfolio’s large holding in Games Workshop and adding Renew.

etc.

• Back in my Twitter days, my favourite follow was Quintin Lake. He is an architectural photographer who shared his epic hike around the UK coastline.

• The photos he took during the 11,000km trek are so resonant we bought three. The Perimeter book collects 1,300 photographs with Quintin’s diary entries.

• Judging by the pages he shared on X recently, the book is as majestic as the walk it depicts. I have pre-ordered it for myself. It would also make the perfect gift for an elderly relative...

The Quintin Lake in my office

• I read Futureproof while I was recuperating from a minor operation. It was the perfect companion, an easy and entertaining techno-thriller that built to an unexpected conclusion.

• It is lawyer Stephen Abrecht’s first novel. Set thirty years in the future, the plot combines an existential threat to humanity, artificial intelligence, and a family drama.

• Like a good disaster movie we are caught up in the lives of people as events spiral out of control, while at the same time contemplating how much agency we’d cede for an easy life.

Thanks for reading

Gratuitous photo: Storey’s Field parkrun, 1 March

investing etc. 0024 should be with you on Saturday 12 April.