Today is all about poetry. My latest poem, Hummingbird Feeder is published by Every Day Poets,
http://www.everydaypoets.com/  that great and enterprising on-line poetry journal that publishes a new poem every day of the year. This is my second poem they have published this year, so thanks again Every Day Poets. You can read it if you go to this site http://www.everydaypoets.com/ – you can vote for it too if you want.

The poem was written after a trip I made to rural New Jersey, USA, in the summer of 2011. I had a great time discovering that New Jersey isn’t just the home, on the wrong side of the river from New York,  of mafioso bosses like Tony Soprano and other unsavoury members of the criminal elite.  In fact it is a lushly beautiful state and, when I was there, in early July, hot enough without being overwhelmingly humid. Exotic enough though for an Englishman used to temperate climes. One of the most exotic and unexpected pleasures of that trip was my first encounters with hummingbirds who are plentiful in those parts and who are fed in New Jersey gardens with a sugary liquid dispensed  from bright red feeders that are often strung from those other characteristic NJ features, the porch in front of the house. These feeders are garishly red and usually made from plastic – I hadn’t seen anything like it before. They have to be this colour to attract the hummingbirds who are genetically programmed to feed from brightly coloured tropical flowers. I was amazed by these tiny birds, much smaller than I had imagined them and also much faster moving. Frantic in fact to feed whilst their wings flutter manically keeping them in position. Their frenzy was what led me to write the poem.

I had watched them up close on the porches of various friends houses during my stay and felt that it was not only the hummingbirds were receiving New Jersey hospitality. I hope you enjoy the poem. I shall read it tonight at the Fifth Anniversary gathering of Lewes Poetry, a group that meets in the pub just round the corner from my house.

It is also the venue of my first public poetry reading when, beardless after my hospital stay, I was still in the early stages of recovering from my brain haemorrhage and learning to live with the stammer that was one of its side effects.

I was persuaded by a friend to go along to Lewes Poetry’s next meet because it was a mix of well-known featured poets and ordinary newbie poets like me, reading in an ‘open mic’ section. I was very unsure if my stammer would let me read and I also wondered if my poetry was good enough to risk a public outing.

I arrived, armed with a file of poems and was told at the door that there wasn’t any open mic that night because it was a special event featuring the well-known poet John Agard, last year’s winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. I was about to run away and hide but the organisers felt sorry for me and said they would try to find a slot for me to read. So what would have been nerve-wracking enough anyway now became a moment of terror as I realized that I was being thrown into such distinguished company. I survived and my stammer behaved as it now always does when I read poetry. I also learnt a lot from seeing John Agard’s dramatic delivery style. As I sat listening to his funny and furious poems, I thought I have to try and make my readings performances in some way even if I can never match his unique delivery.

So thank you Lewes Poetry for giving me the chance and for making it such a memorable one too. If you’re anywhere near Lewes tonight, come along and celebrate a great Lewes event.

Last night was another performance moment in my family and I was in Brighton for the debut gig of Adam Bell’s new band Octopuses. His old band, Foxes! is hibernating for a while but Octopuses opened a new chapter in Adam’s musical life with songs that are more thrustingly masculine but was also wryly humourous and witty, dramatic, studiedly self-concious and, yes, wiser about life. I was very proud of him and his musical colleagues.

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I wrote a poem, The Blueberry Cage, after a particularly idyllic July day when I was on holiday in New Jersey, USA, in 2011. Today the poem is published online by Every Day Poets, that hard-working publisher that uploads a new poem for every day of the year. You can read it by clicking on this link:  http://www.everydaypoets.com/

I’m told it was a perfect summer’s day for New Jersey – hot but not humid – I really was gathering blueberries in a marvelously rustic blueberry cage deep in the New Jersey countryside. It is great to remember it now that I am back in England with snow threatened by the meteorologists. That July was all the more vivid for my young guide, Ila Pearl, who showed me the best way to navigate the little creek between her house and the one where I was staying without being eaten by monsters. The poem is dedicated to her.

It was a great time and I was given a truly hospitable New Jersey welcome – I’m grateful to Every Day Poets for making my impressions of it available worldwide. They have published some of my other poems over the last two years and there is another one, also written after that American trip, out later this year. I am also to be included in their next anthology Every Day Poets 3. Look out for it here. Thanks Every Day Poets.

I hope you all enjoy The Blueberry Cage. If you do, no pressure, you can vote for it online.

http://www.everydaypoets.com/

You can also subscribe to the site (for free) and they will send you a new poem everyday by email. You can also get Every Day Poets on Kindle via Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0029XFNJO

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Even though I have been lucky enough to have spent most of the last weeks abroad on holiday, first in Sicily and just recently the USA, I have been on a determined bid to get back into my martial arts patterns (taught to me by my instructor Neil Johnson of White Crane Fighting Arts – see links) as a primary way of getting, and trying to stay, fit.  Luckily, the friends that I was staying with in rural New Jersey had an excellent and large garden that was perfect for my early morning routine.

For over a month now, I have tried to do a daily session consisting of the moving meditation system named after one of kungfu’s founding fathers, the revered Da Mo. Even though it looks gentle enough, it is actually pretty demanding especially on the legs. It stretches the body gently and subtly, trains the lungs and puts you, if you can control those wandering thoughts, into an inspired state of oneness with your surroundings. It was wonderful doing this here in a woodland New Jersey garden with the sun rising above the trees and a chorus of unfamiliar and exotic-sounding birds and insects.

It was pretty challenging doing my Taichi and Kungfu patterns too as the strong summer sunshine racketed up the temperature.

It was a great deal cooler when I started this regime at home in my small town garden in Lewes, UK.

The great thing about having these patterns to perform every day is that you can really do them anywhere giving you no excuse for not keeping your body strong and flexible even if like me, you are not particularly skilled at them.

Unlike team sports or visits to the gym, you can take your exercise regime with you wherever you go and over the last year, I have done just that. As I now approach the third anniversary of a major illness, dare I say it,  the gradual recuperation and exercise is beginning to pay off. The after-effects of my brain haemorrhage now seem to be near to disappearing all together and the seizure-caused broken back too has benefited all through this period from my regular use of my White Crane Kungfu 66-move Taichi form which I began to practise again, against doctor’s orders, on the hospital ward and that has meant that I needed no physiotherapy as my spine repaired itself. So even though I can no longer take part in those highly enjoyable sparring sessions, I have been able to keep my patterns going – even my weapon patterns – in some unlikely places. All you need is the determination and a certain lack of feeling embarrassed doing the stuff in public places.

Straight sword with a purloined garden cane,  Paros, Greece.

Straight sword with a strip of plastic on a hotel roof, Santorini, Greece.

Seven and a half foot staff pattern with a plastic ventilation pipe, Santorini, Greece.

Sword pattern with a mountain walking stick on the summit of Mount Rigi, Switzerland.

Taichi by the Grand Canal, Venice, Italy

Kungfu in Florence.

Da Mo Meditation on Mount Etna, Sicily.

Kungfu on the beach at Cefalu, Sicily….

and finishing with some Chigong exercises just a few days ago in Princeton, New Jersey. It may seem strange to say this but doing these intense but also at times profoundly contemplative exercises in different lands gives me a deeper sense of the places and, don’t laugh, a feeling that I have connected with them in a special way. It all began in 2008 when I practised early morning Taichi in a park by a lake in Fujian Province, Southern China with a roaring lion breaking the morning silence in a nearby zoo.

The important thing now is for me to keep it up now I am back in old England.

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The only other time that I have been to New Jersey, apart from landing at Newark Airport on my way to New York City, was on a filming trip when I crossed the Hudson river to find a derelict building site to film the Manhattan skyline. I guess I thought, like even some New Yorkers, that New Jersey was just an industrial wasteland on the other side of the river. Well, I have just spent a wonderful and memorable week here in New Jersey and I am happy to admit that I was wrong – this isn’t just Tony Soprano country.

I was staying with friends in rural Hunterdon County in the  Delaware Valley and it was most definitely Summertime as in the song – I really did see fish jumping and the cotton could have been, if there was any, growing high. July can be pretty humid here in New Jersey but after that thunderstorm when I was walking round nearby Lambertville (yesterday’s blog), the air cleared, the skies were blue and the temperature though high was just pleasantly very hot.

I suppose I was just being a tourist to love this typical American post box but, hell, why not. They are great and I always loved them in all those old TV series from my childhood.

These pictures were taken on my iPhone on a walk round what still feels like traditional farming country where I was staying last week and, right from the start, I could see why Europeans dreamt of having these grand open spaces to cultivate. These parts look very much like England but there is so much more room and we in Britain never have hot sunny Sundays like this hot sunny Sunday.

My childhood fantasies about being a farmer were awoken in this fertile but apparently gently farmed landscape….

where the fields are hedged by woodland….

and where farmhouses are approached down dirt tracks….

…and there are painted barns straight from the works of Mark Twain.

Towards the end of the walk, I pressed the wrong button on my iPhone and, without knowing it, made a very short set of moving images instead of still photographs. I have joined them together because you need to see the corn, if not the cotton,  growing high and that deer running out in front of me. It was a memorable day – one that should be set to music by George Gershwin.

Having said George Gershwin, I should play you the music I guess. Here is Summertime recorded in 1958 by the Miles Davis Sextet – it is almost too hot to handle:

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I have been on holiday in rural New Jersey, USA where I was staying with friends for a few days before heading off to the small town of Princeton also in New Jersey which is also home to one of America’s most famous universities. On previous trips, I have been to many of the country’s major cities but, this time, with enormous pleasure, I kept away from the crowds and settled for the calm face of America which still exists if you look beyond the frenzy.

In Princeton, I had a room in a lovely old house in a quiet street run by a generous, intelligent and liberal-minded couple who entertained me with their views on American politics and with copious amounts of gin.

My room, complete with traditional quilt, mosquito net and big brass bed, looked out onto trees, sunshine and visiting humming birds. Rupert Murdoch and his seedy hordes seemed a long way away as I put down the New York Times each morning on that wonderful porch, amazed to see British news on the front page every day and ashamed that those phone hacking journalists had brought Britain to the attention of the World.

This was a vacation so I buried my guilt and turned my attention to America’s rich array of colourful birds, most of which I had never known about before, as they flocked round the garden feeders.

For an Englishman, used to our temperate climate with its currently disappointing weather, New Jersey was astoundingly hot with temperatures up in the 90s fahrenheit and, at times, a humidity that sapped all   my energy.

There was though room in the back yard for my daily Kungfu and Taichi exercises – an invigorating hour performed under the welcome shade of those trees along with the owner’s collection of American street signs.

Each day I got more and more acclimatized to the heat and by beginning with the strangely inspiring Da Mo standing meditation moves, I felt that I was putting down roots in this majestic country’s soil.

The centre of Princeton was a short but exceedingly hot walk down leafy avenues ….

… where to my deep admiration, joggers still managed to keep up a sweaty pace….

….. shirts, by this time, were out of the question….

…. but Princetonians seem immune to the heat.

I have to admit that I walked – heading downtown to the gentle and genteel centre with its, by this time, essential venue….

….my favourite Princeton coffee shop,

…with its welcome shade, reviving air-conditioning, wi fi connections, newspapers and, yes, good strong coffee.

During my time in this town, Alice’s Gourmet Cafe, became my life-saver. Don’t even look at those cheese cakes.

America does these places so well.

Just across the street is the spacious and leafy campus of Princeton University one of America’s most impressive Ivy League colleges and home during his lifetime of Albert Einstein and, after his death, of his preserved and much studied brain.

The students were all on vacation, so I had the place almost to myself and it was difficult to imagine that once, during the American Revolutionary War, British cannons fired on these buildings.

All is forgiven, I hope, and war and revolution seemed like distant history as this Englishman lay under the shade of a tree hypnotised by the thoughts of this place in American intellectual life…

…or, maybe, I was just basking in the beauty of this marriage of architecture and nature.

It has to be noted, of course, that Ivy League colleges really are ivy-clad.

Then it was time to escape to the shade of the Art Museum, with its perfectly accessible, small but impressive collection with some amazingly beautiful ancient Greek and Etruscan vases and paintings by, amongst others,  Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Degas, Cezanne, Courbet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, and the American artists, Thomas Eakins, Willem de Kooning and Andy Warhol with a good selection too of 19th century American landscape paintings on an epic scale.

This humbler work of art, sitting unassumingly in the centre of town, reminded me that I too had work to do.

I was due to give a poetry reading on the last night of my American trip so I headed for the library…

….where I downloaded my poetry computer files and was soon lost in my own world, writing and rewriting poems for the occasion. Princeton Public Library was an easy place to work with some extremely patient members of staff who helped me through various technical problems without making me feel like an idiot. The cafe here also serves excellent unsweetened iced tea – perfection.

working in a place often gives me more of a feel for it than just being a sight-seer and so, for a short time, I felt like I really belonged here in New Jersey.

When I finally did that reading, my first on American soil, at the Barron Arts Center in Woodbridge to a generous audience of New Jersey poets, I was proud that a number of my poems have been published in New Jersey and I like to think that, Englishman that I am, a little bit of me is also a New Jersey poet.

Walking back to my room that hot, dreamy, leafy, cricket-chirping night, I was already thinking of the journey home next morning but I paused in the heat under this street-lit flag and, far from it seeming like a token of aggressive nationalism, for once, at least, it felt like a symbol of hope.

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