Our Readers SayPoetryIntroducing 'The Radio Hams' - writing for the 'umpteenager' in all of us. Introducing 'The Radio Hams' - writing for the 'umpteenager' in all of us.
15/05/2008
' The Radio Hams' is a poetry collaboration between J.C. and
S. Burgess, who recently completed a series of twenty co-written poems, entitled “An Unremembered England.” Their central theme is about growing up in the years when the world changed from black & white to colour and now finding theirselves coming of age and experiencing nostalgia, as they become a part of the Mature Times generation.
This is a compact collection, a conversation between disembodied voices, whose half-forgotten memories merge to form an incontestable whole.
In twenty poems the 'Hams' attempt to breathe life into defunct products and bygone entertainment,as they contemplate a time of quieter streets
littered with the odd car and of barely furnished computerless desks.
The recent article "Were YOU in the Tufty Club?" by Jan McGeachie is
right along the lines of what they are writng about, with coverage also extending to the topics of extinct chocolate bars, the heyday of holiday camps, bakelite, blotting paper, thimblettes and the like.
Two of their offerings are published below.
Radio Hams
Emailers of a certain age,
Remember putting pen to page,
Searching the radio dial, the late nights spent
Unearthing disembodied orchestras and spooky signal tests,
Of otherworldly origins, heaven and hell sent.
From fragile far-off places seen
on a bakelite valve set radio screen,
Hilversum, Belgrade bordered with noise
the fanfare that radio Prague employs
to greet each broadcast there - such choices
fishing with magnets for brittle voices.
The lighthouse keeper and the night watchman
Cast light and lines to many a lone yachtsman
Companions in a world deserted, words flow and ebb
Surfing the waves of air not water
Random responses free from the sticky web.
Combing the airwaves for bleeps and code
the copper wire brushes the monotone,
the Tesla coil's tangled tautophony
from alien nations this strange cacophony,
through iron curtains and crystal palaces
come tinfoil voices - their truths and fallacies.
The Radio Hams (J.C. & S. Burgess)
September 11th - 14th 2006
Ritual Or Habitual?
They were
the objects
of a secretarial ritual.
Shaped in metal, rubber, bakelite, ink and card.
Often muddled in a drawer amongst tippex and nail varnish,
paperclips, tags, labels with reinforced rings
and inventions for wetting stamps
that spared her tongue.
Muted, almost camouflage in colour,
this buff, bottle green and dark blue collection seemed
to belong in Churchill's bunker.
But it was for another that she stretched and bent.
Jenkins, the moniker practically a given for a specimen such as he,
A fixture at the concern for longer than the present management,
A relic of another era retaining a blotter well-inked,
Bureau ink-welled and still producing.
On Friday afternoons, she filed nails not documents and snopaked herself,
While he twiddled with his thimblette, endeavouring to regain sobriety,
Gazing down, through a windowed envelope, on Threadneedle Street
And a world populated by the anonymous self-made rich
Who had minted the currency of the office.
The Radio Hams (S. Burgess & J.C.)
February 20th - March 8th 2007