JULY Challenge 2015

 

I’ve just been looking back over the last six months of challenges and to my surprise see that I’ve already used Paul Farley’s poems twice. And now I’m about to do so for the third time. How extraordinary. I only have one volume of his on my shelf (Tramp in Flames) and it was reading one particular poem that prompted this challenge.

Here’s the poem:

 

Brutalist

Try living in one. Hang washing out to dry
and break its clean lines with your duds and smalls.
Spray tribal names across its subway walls
and crack its flagstones so the weeds can try

their damnedest. That’s the way. Fly-tip the lives
you led, out past its edge, on the back field;
sideboards and mangles made sense in the peeled
spud light of the old house but the knives

are out for them now. This cellarless, unatticked
place will shake the rentman off, will throw
open its arms and welcome the White Arrow
delivery fleet which brings the things on tick

from the slush piles of the seasonal catalogues.
The quilt boxes will take up residence
on the tops of which wardrobes, an ambulance
raise blinds, a whole geography of dogs

will make their presence felt. And once a year
on Le Corbusier’s birthday, the sun will set
bang on the pre-ordained exact spot
and that is why we put that slab just there.

One by one the shopkeepers will shut
their doors for good. A newsagent will draw
the line at buttered steps. The final straw
will fill the fields beyond. Now live in it.

 

I read this poem several times but it wasn’t till I took in the title that I got it. So.

For this month’s challenge I’d like us to consider a title’s value and weight. And then write a poem that relies heavily on it.