Writer Trevor Locke

Category: Literature

  • Poem about Winter

    7th October 2022

    Yesterday was National Poetry Day in the UK. Each year I write a poem in celebration of the UK’s National Poetry Day. Here is what I did for this year:

    Winter, 2022

    The rain beats down
    and the clouds are low,
    black and grey.
    The wind presses hard
    against robust walls.
    Gusts sift weaker twigs from
    strong branches,
    sending sea-like waves
    across the long grasses.
    Among the short grass,
    puddles lay in brown lacunae.

    Deep in the the copse,
    creatures hide in dark holes, asleep.
    Reapers and gleaners have stored
    nuts for the leaner months,
    waiting for spring to
    come back to the world
    (it is always spring somewhere).

    Rain drips constantly
    from leaves shaken to despair,
    clinging in shivering solitude
    above the rotting carpet below.
    Each day the cooling sap
    cools a degree more
    and the sky is
    nearing us, all the time.

    Winter hugs the world,
    just as it grips my soul.
    My mind shivers in its desolate embrace,
    my heart slows down,
    my soul is chilled.
    I yearn for the passionate kiss
    of a summer’s day.

    Trevor Locke.

    See the poem I wrote for 2021.

  • An Administrative Mind

    Tuesday 24th May 2022.

    Preface

    Most of my life has been spent working as an administrator. Following my retirement in 2014, I continued to be an administrator. This article discusses the administrative mindset. It considers what it is like to be an administrator for most of a lifetime and how that activity in one sphere of one’s life affects what one does and how one thinks in other spheres. This was originally written on Thursday 18th November 2021.

    A Tidy Mind

    To be an administrator you have to have a tidy mind and be congenitally prone to being organised. Organisation, systems and pattern must be in your blood. Consistency is the most important thing in one’s behaviour. These are mental attributes and qualities of character that confer upon one the status of being a good administrator. Being good at administration is about being consistent, applying attention to minute detail and applying rules to one’s activities. I am not going to say that I have been a perfectly good administrator but I would argue that most of my administrative duties have been conducted reasonably well. True, I have made some cockups now and again, as we all have. But few of them have been disastrous. Being an administrator is something that flows into other aspects of one’s life. It is not just at the desk that one’s skills are applied. It is frequently the case that being tidy and well organised is a generalised aspect of life. When working on the computer, it is necessary to file things correctly, in a way that will allow them to found easily and efficiently. Setting up folders and arranging files on a computer is up to the operator. This reflects and replicates the way we arrange paperwork in our physical filing systems. My filing cabinet has files that are arranged in alphabetical order. This raises issues of how folders are named. Take for example – insurance. Is that filed under ‘I’ or is it placed in the folder for ‘C’ because it is concerned only with contents insurance. If one has a series of folders appertaining to the same subject – such as manuals – are all of them to be in the section for ‘M’ and all have names beginning with ‘M’ even if concerned with electrical equipment or the equipment in the kitchen?

    A Sense of Order

    A knowledge of how to order items alphabetically is essential. There are rules that must be obeyed. The same applies to assigning names to individual items. The key to successful ordering is being systematic and consistent in the way that systems are operated. This requires close attention to detail. Once such skills are set into one’s mind, they can be applied to many other aspects of one’s life, such as the way I arrange books on my bookcase shelves or the way I store CDs in my case of audio recordings. Even in my wardrobe, all hangers are placed on the rack the same way round. Vests are grouped together, as are shirts and pullovers. Items of clothing are placed in drawers by type – one for underpants and another for socks – bed linen is placed in the chest of drawers according to sets. One drawer per set of duvet covers and pillowcases. In the kitchen, the cutlery tray is similarly ordered – forks in one compartment, knives in another and spoons in their own compartment. All items of cutlery must be placed in the same way, all facing in the same direction. What we see here is the reduction of chaos and a commitment to order. Such an approach is conducive to efficiency. I try to live an efficient way of life as much as possible.

    Living Efficiently

    I like to think that I live efficiently. I do waste energy. I not squander time. My behaviour follows a set of procedural conventions designed to achieve the best possible outcome from my endeavours. My whole life, on a daily basis, is devoted to the reduction of chaos. Despite this, there are times when things go wrong and that happens when I am careless and fail to think or plan ahead. Some might argue that I spend too much time worrying about tiny, minor details and fail to get the more important things done at the right time. Be that as it may, I will think my overall approach to daily life works well. I have a great many things to think about and I am, generally speaking, in control of my mind. How long that will last is impossible to say. But I hope my command of my activities will last long enough for me to accomplish some of my goals and ambitions. The one thing I want to avoid, as far as possible, is becoming stressed about my effectiveness. Stress reduces one’s ability to command one’s actions. I think I lead a fairly stress-free life and hope to continue in that vein for as long as I can. Being stressed out about things is inefficient. It wastes energy on being anxious. Not something that affects me at present – but in the future – who knows? If I manage my life successfully, I will be able to live as efficiently as possible for as long as possible. That in itself will be an achievement.

    See this related article: Trevor Locke’s Writings

    and

    A society that allows interruptions

    Trevor Locke

    Poetry using the Iambic Decameter

  • Novels

    Does the Novel Have a Future?

    Tuesday 19th April 2022.

    Introduction

    Another question on Quora (an online forum.) Another of my answers. Having seen a question about the future of the novel, I felt inclined to respond. What I wrote in my response, is set out below. I then go on to develop this theme and discuss the issues it raises.

    The Future of the Novel

    In my respond to the question, I said, ‘Good question. And an optimistic one, if I might say so. It seems to suggest that the novel has a future. Personally, I doubt it. I say that because I doubt that writing has much of a future. The novel is something that is written. What else is there? If people stop writing then there will be no more novels. There might be movies and television-type series. I don’t see that type of media ending any time soon. Movies might continue to be made that are based on novels. No shortage of them, to date. People will continue to read books printed on real paper. That will continue for centuries to come. At least, for a tiny minority of people. We are on the very of the post-literate society. One aspect of that is the decline in the desire to write with a pen. Our age is characterised by the keyboard. Using a pen is regarded as being something peculiar that our parents once did. (I realise I am typing this post on my keyboard.) As electronic gadgets take over our lives, we loose the traditions that made us what we are now. One of those was reading. More and more people can handle text if and only if it is read to them. Very soon, people will abandon the keyboard in favour of the microphone and words will become something that is dictated. That is taking the electronic age to its logical conclusion. Many other things will die off, not only the novel. Ever since the first novel was written, such artistic works were inherently created with the pen; or the typewriter. And later the word processor. Take away the means of production and the product ceases to exist.’

    Writing Responses

    When I respond with an answer, on Quora, I do not try to make it a Wiki-type statement. I have always assumed that this website is a forum rather than a version of Wikipedia. As far as I am concerned, it is a place where people post their thoughts. Not an encyclopedia. Even so, it is more than the average forum and that is why I bother with it. Were it just another forum, it would be full of irrelevant dross. Some of it is, of course, but much is worthy of serious consideration. The way I post my answers to questions is that I generally emphasise my own experience. Even though I might sometimes comment about the world in general, much of what I say is from my own experience and about my experience, as a writer. Most of my comments are about writing and related topics. The weakness of Quora is that young people are allowed to use it without regulation. Some of the questions posted by American high school students are not just semi-literate they are completely ridiculous. Stupid questions that do not make sense. At the other end of the spectrum are people with considerable knowledge who contribute thoughtful and edifying posts that are well worth reading.

    The Novel

    How long have people been writing novels? I read an interesting post recently in which the author examined this very question. He suggested that novels went back to the ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians. Also to the ancient Chinese. In the west, however, the published novel, as a work of entertainment, was a fairly recently invented thing. Early examples include Robinson Crusoe, a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. Jonathan Swift (30th November 1667 to 19th October 1745) Gulliver’s Travels was published in 1726 and is regarded as his masterpiece. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) are also contenders for being the first English language novels. None of this appeared in my comments on Quora. But then, it was not my objective to write about the history of the novel. I was more concerned with its future. Since it started, whenever that was, the novel has endured and still is today an important part of the world of entertainment and literature. Novels aside, books have long been published in this country and abroad. Some religious works were not novels nor were they intended for the entertainment of their readers. Take, for example, The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (1628 to 1688), one of the greatest works in the English cannon. It is described thus: ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come is a 1678 Christian allegory written by John Bunyan. It is regarded as one of the most significant works of theological fiction in English literature, as well as one of the progenitors of the narrative aspect of Christian media. It has been translated into more than 200 languages, and has never been out of print. It appeared in Dutch in 1681, in German in 1703 and in Swedish in 1727. The first North American edition was issued in 1681. It has also been cited as the first novel written in English. According to literary editor Robert McCrum, “there’s no book in English, apart from the Bible, to equal Bunyan’s masterpiece for the range of its readership, or its influence on writers as diverse as William Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Mark Twain, CS Lewis, John Steinbeck and even Enid Blyton.’

    Notice it was said to be a work of fiction. The English text comprises 108,260 words. Quite a big work. My novel The Streets of London currently stands at 219,010 words, at the time of writing. Bunyan’s work was not the earliest to be published; we might also note, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, also known simply as the Arcadia. This is a long prose pastoral romance by Sir Philip Sidney written towards the end of the sixteenth century. Having finished one version of his text, Sidney later significantly expanded and revised his work. Scholars today often refer to these two major versions as the ‘Old Arcadia and the New Arcadia’, published in 1593. Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 to 1400) was an English poet who lived before William Shakespeare. Chaucer was the author of the Canterbury Tales, written in Middle English in 1387 to 1400. Even before him, Piers Plowman was written by William Langland (1332 to 1386) around 1370 to 1386. It was considered to be one of the greatest works of English Literature of the middle ages. Also a poem, it was born of the same ecclesiastical sources as the works of Chaucer. To my mind, medieval times did not have entertainment, as we would recognise it today. The word ‘Entertainment’ derives from the Old French word ‘entretenir’, meaning hold together or support. It was associated with hospitality. When you entertained a guest, you were keeping them happy. From there, it came to mean amuse or distract. Later it came to signify a distraction. Some sources argue that the word came from Latin where its meaning was different again. It is found in the texts of late middle English. The word meaning ‘the amusement of someone’, is from the 1610s; in the sense of ‘that which entertains.’ From the eighteenth century it signified ‘public performance or display meant to amuse.’ Hence, it is a word found in the lexicon of modern English.

    It seems a little trite to describe the novel as being ‘entertainment.’ Great works of literature do much more than that. There are many types of novel, in today’s world. These are referred to as ‘genres.’ They include romance, mystery, horror, crime, science fiction, adventure and fantasy. Some novels fail to meet any known criteria for a recognised genre. Some novels help readers to make sense of the world; others help readers to forget the world of their current reality and enjoy fantasies of worlds that do not exist, never existed or might exist in the future. That, it could be said, is a distraction. I am content with regarding novels as being part of the broad spectrum of entertainment but one in which there is also deepness of thought, the desire to challenge, to invoke a wide range of emotions and to explore issues and concerns in a way that is more sophisticated and nuanced than many works of non-fiction. Literature is, however, just one method of providing entertainment that sits alongside a variety of others.

    Here I stopped for a while. I realised that the word novel is an aggregate. It brings (or should I say ‘lumps’) together a very wide range of fiction works that often share little in common other than their length in words. Novels are long but definers vary in their insistence about the number of words involved. If not long enough then the work is either a ‘novella’ or even a long short story. Can we justifiably bring into one class Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment with a pulp romance by Barbara Cartland? If such a diverse collection of writings are all novels, then is that not something too trite to be taken seriously? Does the very name loose integrity? When I write about fiction, I tend to refer to works of literature and books written simply for entertainment. These are not the same. There are, I am sure, some people who would find reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace entertaining. Even some who would see Cartland’s romantic stories seriously revealing about the nature of human society. We all talk about the novel as though it was something intelligible. Having thought about it (and even about my own use of the word), I have misgivings about it. Works of fiction are just ‘books.’ Other than the way they are published, they share little in common. What might be entertaining about them is a matter of opinion. Or perhaps of literary criticism. At minimum, a novel is simply a type of book. This begs the question, ‘What is fiction?’ This is an issue I played with before. Fiction is imaginary but, as I have previously argued, not all fiction is purely imaginary.

    Consider the Alternatives

    Novels offer one piece of the minestrone soup of public entertainment. They float in it alongside movies, television series and a variety of other televisual ingredients. We might then ask, ‘What will be the competition?’ With what will the novel compete when it comes to fulfilling the public’s desire for entertainment? The visual media would be, I suggest, the novel’s strongest opponent. When it comes to telling stories, film is perhaps the most commanding media of public choice. Does the novel still occupy the position it once did in the domain of culture and literature? Bear in mind that the novel is a concept rather than a set of physical artefacts (books.) The twenty-first century offers a wide range of devices that set out to deliver culture – computers, laptops, tablets, mobile phones, e-readers – and these compete with paper-based outlets. To what extent is the concept of a novel capable of being provided through electronic media? To some people, reading is tiresome, slow and lacking in immediate impact by comparison to movies and television programmes. The novel has always been made with words. Words require a certain level of linguistic ability. They also require intense concentration. That is not always the case with filmic productions. Electronic gadgets are reducing literacy; not stimulating it. Literacy is more than merely the ability to read and write. It requires an understanding of the unique characteristics of language. It demands a love of language or, at least, a familiarity with it. I have suggested elsewhere, that writing is not likely to exist in our digitally-oriented futures. Not the kind of writing that is done with a pen. Having said that, how a story is composed does not matter as much as why it is composed. If I dictate a novel (which is then turned into words by a piece of software) then it is still a novel, if I have followed a set of rules that defines what a novel is. The way I produce a novel does not impact on its success as a story. Novels can be produced as books with pages printed on paper. They can also be produced by digitising manuscripts for use with electronic devices. Either way, they are the same artistic creations and still works of fiction. All my novels have been written using word processors; some might have started on paper but they were developed on the computer and the latest versions of them are all digital. They are all far too long to be printed, at home, using my own printers. I know not whether any of them will be published by established companies. It is possible that one of them might appear on my blog in a serialised form. My novel Holiday, for example, is one I have considered putting on the Internet if it never gets accepted by a publishing house.

    Conclusions

    The novel will continue to exist and has a future. I argue this because, as a concept, the type of entertainment provided by the novel is one that will continue to attract readers for as long as can be foreseen. Whatever means are used to publish novels, they will always provide a format that will be demanded and continue to be saleable in the commercial realities of the future. There is no reason to believe that story-telling will fade from human interest. Film and movies have become firmly established as means of telling stories. But writing allows consideration of material that has levels of understanding and comprehension beyond what is possible with the filmic media. The pen is mightier than the camera.

    This article was previously published on my old blog.

    Other posts about novels.

  • Does writing have a future?

    Does writing have a future?

    Friday 23rd August 2019

    The story of writing’s evolution includes its origins in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mayan symbols carved in stone and the clay tablets into which Cuneiform scripts were pressed. Through the early printed texts such as William Caxton’s edition of The Canterbury Tales to the art of note-taking by some of history’s greatest minds, and onwards to the digital communication tools we use today.

    Language evolved from the early days of mankind and that evolution played a pivotal role in the development of agriculture and, later, civilisation. The ability of ancient peoples to communicate using a wide range of specific and abstract ideas and to share information was essential to their survival or to their progress as a group. It became increasingly necessary for early man to communicate facts, knowledge and information and to record aspects of the environment and personal history. Verbal communications were inadequate to transmit thought from one generation to another. As people changed from being hunter-gatherers to living in settled communities, it became increasingly possible for people to store artefacts and tools.

    What is writing?

    What was it in existence before the invention of the pen? What other forms of writing do we see in history? Hieroglyphs, Cuneiform, Chinese characters and pictograms were alternatives to writing using letters or symbols, that represented the sounds of speech, through to the use of letters based on spoken phonemes. It is possible that the very earliest writings did not represent spoken words but actions or pictures of the natural world. These would have been pictograms or signals or signs that could be made (on some physical medium) and this lead to the development of writing.

    We should distinguish between the act of writing, using some form of instrument, and the text or script that results from such activity. Writing could mean typing as much as using a pen. Text is written language. The boundary between text and speech is being blurred with the continuing advance of voice recognition software. Writing is likely to become synonymous with the output more than with the activities used to regenerate it.

    Today, writing is largely electronic. Ink is being replaced by the electron. What does history tell us about the technology of writing? Is there something about the art and craft of writing that will ensure its survival into the digital age of multi-media? Will writing be one of those activities that will attract and engage people beyond the changes that will take place in the technology of communication? Even given the prevalence of electronic, digitised literature, many people still cherish reading books printed on paper. For the few, there is still the enchantment of using a pen to write on paper. People who love literature cherish the nostalgia of paper and the hand-written word. For the majority, however, digital communication is the norm and will be in the foreseeable future.

    Does writing have a future?

    Can we foresee a time when humans will communicate with each without the need to write? Science fiction writers have imagined a time when people communicate with each other directly using telepathy. Others have imagined electronic implants in the brain enabling people to send messages to each other without the intermediation of the written or spoken word.

    Will writing survive the increasing prevalence of video? Will we take advantage of technology to talk to each other without the need to learn the written word? Will we lay down the pen in favour of the camera? The development of technologies of communication affects how people communicate. But, does it also affect what people communicate about? Mobile phones have increased the ability of people to engage in communication. Do we see, from this, that what people communicate has also changed?

    There will always be two kinds of communications: those that are made by people as part of their everyday lives, such as communications between family members and between friends and those that are undertaken in a work setting. Given the prevalence of telephones, it is likely that communications will be by spoken language. Sending text messages is very common these days but users are mostly required to type the text into the phone using their fingers. It is likely, I believe, that, in the future, voice applications will be available allowing a message to be spoken and converted to text with voice recognition software. It is also likely that spoken messages will be sent as though they were text. Photos and videos are already being sent in preference to text messages. Speech recognition software has been available for several decades and has become increasingly sophisticated. This trend is likely to continue as people turn from the time-consuming process of typing individual characters on keypads to dictating the content of a message they wish to send. Predictive text messaging is now widely available on smartphones and this has speeded up the composition of written messages.

    The second kind of communication is formal, business or governmental messaging. This is where text is likely to survive over other media because of the legal requirements of accurate transmissions. For communications of this kind, text is preferable because of its accuracy and because it leaves a searchable archive of what has been sent. But, voice recognition software might be more widely used, in such circumstances, than it currently is today. In the world of commerce, government and science, text will continue to offer the best medium through which information can be sent and messages exchanged. One consequence of this is that users will need to speak very clearly and accurately. That is nothing new. Even back in the day when I worked in an office, Dictaphones were used to compose correspondence that would later be sent to a pool of typists. Users who need not speak clearly would find many mistakes in their letters and this would cause lengthy delays while corrections were made.

    Techno-speak

    Is the technology of writing something that changes what is written? Is the mobile phone changing what people say? Is what we say affected by how we say it? Clayton describes how the development of the technology of writing brought about changes to what people wrote about. In fact, he examines the relationship between handwriting, printing and changes to the world including the industrial revolution. As the technology used to make writing became increasingly sophisticated, the way people wrote changed. Authors began to write in a way that suited the printed medium. The layout of a printed book was different from that of one that has been written using a quill pen. The medium has become the message and written communications are gradually being changed by the way in which they are transmitted. This process has been driven more by the demands of the commercial and governmental world than it has by the arts.

    Technology has changed writing over millennia. This will continue as technology becomes increasingly sophisticated. When text messaging became widespread (with the mass adoption of phones and computers) we saw changes to written language. A new vocabulary emerged tailored by the needs of texting from phones. Texting saw users shortening words and using abbreviations to avoid typing lengthy words. Abbreviations such as LOL became universally used. The informality of person-to-person text messaging saw rules of grammar, syntax and punctuation is ignored. The distinction between upper and lower case characters was largely abandoned in the days of the early mobile phones; only later did it become re-established with predictive text. The use of predictive text has improved the quality of written communications.

    Sending text messages (or emails) is a routine activity and few people would approach it as they would a craft or form of art. It is perhaps rather odd that the layout of the English keyboard did not change with the emergence of digital communication. The same QWERTY configuration is used today as that invented for the early manual typewriter. Even on devices that do not have an external keyboard, such as the mobile phone, this standard way of arranging the letters of the western alphabet is used in preference to ordering them alphabetically. People these days know where to find of the letters in a QWERTY keypad even if they have never used an external keyboard.

    Where more substantial changes to written language will be seen is when speech becomes the ubiquitous way of writing. In everyday life, people do not speak in the way they write. Spoken English is different from written English. It is therefore very likely that written English will change as more of it is originated by voice dictation. Dictation, in the world of the office, has been with us for a long time. Following the development of the office typewriter, men would dictate with letters to their (female) secretaries. Office shorthand started to be widely used in the early part of the twentieth century. It became a basic requirement for all secretaries and typists. It was also used by reporters to take notes during interviews and when reporting events. Pitman shorthand was first introduced in 1837. Something approximating shorthand was also known in ancient Greece and in imperial China, where court clerks used an abbreviated form of characters to record proceedings. These were later used to create more formal transcripts. A form of shortened writing emerged in England in the sixteenth century. Thomas Shelton’s Short Writing of 1626 was used by Samuel Pepys for his diary and by Sir Isaac Newton for his notebooks. These developments did not take place because of changes in technology; they came about as a result of the need to make speedy recordings either in courts or in interviews or during scientific inquiries.

    Writing has been with us for the past five thousand years. It is not likely to die out in the near future. It will change as the technology used to do it changes. Written language has changed with the development of printing and digital communications. Spoken language too will also change as people become accustomed to dictating what they want they want to write. Despite these changes in technology, many people will continue to practice the craft of writing with a pen simply because they love it for what it is. By the same token, people will continue to read printed books in preference to digital formats. Nostalgia is a considerable force, in this regard.

    Re-inventing writing

    If we try to imagine what might happen to human communications in the far future, what might we see? English is not easy to learn; neither does it have the logicality of a computer programme. English results from history; from invasions and cultural change. Just as shorthand was invented in order to speed up the process of keeping written records (prior to the invention of electronic recording) so too there will be a demand for being able to communicate using something other than English words. What might that something be? Two things could happen in the far future. Firstly, English will become increasingly simplified. That is already happening. It is a process driven by the pace at which communication takes place, in the digital age, and by increasing cultural and ethnic diversification. English is fast becoming a second language for a large section of the population, in this country. This has already started to create new styles of English and to the simplification of English grammar and syntax. I predict that communication will become increasing graphic. Ideas are already being expressed by emoticons and other symbols. Ideas that would take several words to put across. If I were to visit England in two hundred years time, I would find a form of written language that I would hardly recognise as being English and would not be able to understand, at first sight. Written text would appear as a combination of words using a standard alphabet and graphical symbols that are substitutes for phrases or sentences. The purpose of communicating in this way is to speed up the process of sending and reading a message. It is possible that people will begin to use the kind of pictograms that were familiar to our ancestors in the age before formal written language.
    Secondly, thought will become more complex. That will demand new styles of communication that are better able to meet the demands of increasingly sophisticated ideas. In this respect, the use of graphical representations will increase in order to state ideas that would be long-winded in standard English. Already, the internet, with its worldwide web, has given the power to mix together text and graphics in a powerful medium of communication. That medium is now multi-media including sounds and video.

    References

    The Golden Thread: the story of writing, Ewan Clayton, 2013, Atlantic Books.

    Related articles:  Language and evolution.

  • Poetry Day

    Poems for poetry day

    4th October 2018

    Today is National Poetry Day, 2018. To mark this, I publish three of my poems based on history and legend.

    17/12/1965

    Antiochus, 1965

    A thousand slaves on Nemrud’s height did toil and raised a tumulus of such might that snow lay on its body, huge and bare. Six Titans sat, carved from titanic stone, and guarded Antiochus, lord of Commagene, whose mortal ashes, in his tomb, no longer can be seen.

    1966

    Some lines depicting a Greek legend, 1966

    Wild chaos, like a milky void, was there and from it, through the very beats of time, arose a Goddess with a graceful form. She found no solid thing to rest upon and so divided water from the wind. She made the boundless sea with flowing tide and danced upon its ripples and its waves. She danced upon the universe alone and grasped the tameless wind between her hands: she rubbed it and behold! A serpent grew. The star-crowned, black-winged goddess of the night, before whom even Zeus must stand in awe, was courted by the wind and made an egg of silver which she laid in Darkness’ womb.

    24/01/1966

    Artemis, 1966

    Artemis gazes from above with hornéd creatures by her head. She fills the world with stormy love and constellations of red dread lie throbbing on her many breasts above the aching chasm’s floor that once contained her great incests – rise now with human gore.

    This last poem is also included in my 2019 article, Juvenile Poetry.

    All composed during my teenage years when ancient history was a new-found interest of mine. In my teenage years, I was steeped in ancient Western and Eastern religions, mythology and legends. Even today, I find that whole period difficult to understand or even to believe. And yet. All the evidence is there, the manuscripts that have survived for over fifty-five years.

     

    This was previously published on my old blog.

  • Poetry 2017

    Working on Poems

    Sunday 24th September 2017

    Back in March this year, I had my first poetry week – seven days during which I did no other work than editing and transcribing my poetry. It was a successful project and so I marked up another week –  from 18th September to 24th September. As with my last project, much of the work was about transcribing hand-written poems into word-processing documents and printing them out for the Poetry folder. During the week I worked on 80 of my poems, transcribing them into the current anthology.

    The project allowed me to become reacquainted with my early poems, just as it did last time. As before, I was impressed by the quality of some of the pieces I composed in the 1960s through to the 70s; others I just left in place as a record and archive – having looked at them and judged them to be too poor to justify even the work of typing them. In those early days, my approach to writing was spontaneous; there was no planning, no premeditation. I just sat down with some paper and wrote. Whatever came into my brain I committed to paper. That is not something I can do these days. During the ’60s I was very given to writing in decametres – lines with ten syllables. I loved the way the thing flows and its rhythms and I still do. It is, however, an outmoded style of poetry – a bit like a contemporary composer writing a piece of music that sounds like Mozart.

    Reading through my teenage poems put me in touch with myself, the self I had some fifty years ago. Having edited a large number of pieces, I began to think like my teenage alter ego. A couple of pieces were turned into metrical versions just so they would fit more into the flow of the work of that period. In doing this I had to be careful not to alter what the piece was about or to add new material that was not in some way or another present in the original. An example of this is The ever dying men, 1968, where I gave each line ten syllables but took great care not to doctor the content. It is still the same poem; it is just presented differently.

    Some pieces I looked at and thought it was not worth the effort of typing them; they were just so bad. A few poems were transferred to my Journals – these were written like pieces of prose and lacked either poetic form or style. Now, much of the Poetry folder has been committed to typescript and only a small number of pieces remain in their handwritten format. When I was working on some of the poems, I thought they were worthy of a complete re-edit and that I might one day compose them again, afresh. Several of my early works went through a number of versions before being placed in one of the anthologies.

    Reserving time for a project – setting aside days for working on something specific – has been, I think, useful and beneficial. These two weeks of poetry time have seen a lot done that would otherwise not have been done. It is an approach I might use for other aspects of my work.

    It might be some time before I work on poetry again. In a life spent doing many other things, there are few opportunities for making poems; there is little now that inspires me and rouses my passions. Too little in today’s life to be passionate about. I rarely write poetry these days because I cannot seem to find subjects, as once I could. I would not sit down and write poetry for the sake of writing poetry – I must have something to be poetic about. My youth was full of poetry; not something that one finds in old age, quite so much. I have one work in progress – The age of starlight – a poem that contemplates the history of the cosmos from its birth through to its final end and all that means for humanity and the world we cherish so much. It is the last of my ‘cosmological poems.’

     

  • Published work

    Trevor Locke

    § means that I have a copy in my possession.

    Books

    New Approaches to Crime in the 1990s: Planning responses to crime. 1990. Longman Group (UK) Ltd. 292 pages. ISBN 0-582-05124-X Now out of print

    Organised Responses to Urban Drug Problems. Masters Dissertation. November 1990. Leicester Polytechnic Business School. 91 pages.

    Local Area Profiles of Crime: neighbourhood crime patterns in context (with Norman Davidson, University of Hull), Chapter 3 in: Crime, Policing and Place: Essays in environmental criminology. Edited by David J Evans et al. 1992. Routledge.

    Participation, inclusion, exclusion and netactivism: how the Internet invents new forms of democratic activity, Chapter 13 in Digital Democracy, Discourse and Decision Making in the Information Age, Edited by Barry N. Hague and Brian D. Loader, Routledge, 1999. (Based on a talk that I gave at the Electronic Democracy Conference, Teeside University, 17th to 18th September 1997.)

    The Heroes… in golden times – the story of a band. July 2015. ArtsIn Publications, Leicester (Copies available by post)

    Papers

    A Bibliography of intermediate treatment 1968 to 1976, with Jim Thomas, 1977, National Youth Bureau. §

    One Night a Week? Aspects of Group Work in Intermediate Treatment, 1981, National Youth Bureau, Leicester. §

    The involvement of the voluntary sector in intermediate treatment in Doncaster (Intermediate Treatment Field Reports). 1981. National Youth Bureau §

    The involvement of the voluntary sector in intermediate treatment in Southwark. (Intermediate Treatment Field Reports). 1981. National Youth Bureau §

    The involvement of the voluntary sector in intermediate treatment in Cambridge  (Intermediate Treatment Field Reports). 1981. National Youth Bureau §

    Planning: strategic and practical options in work with young people in trouble, 1981, ITRC Ideas Exchange. §

    Strategies for action. 1983. Scottish IT Training Group. §

    Report on the design of a monitoring scheme. Presented to the monitoring group of the Durham County Youth Trust, 23rd July 1984. §

    Policy and planning in juvenile justice, 1987, NACRO Juvenile Crime Section, London

    An analysis of the juvenile justice policies of Durham Social Services Department and Durham Probation Service, April 1987, NACRO, Juvenile Crime Section, London.

    Policy and information in juvenile justice systems, with Britton, Hope and Wainman, 1988, Save The Children Fund and NACRO, London.

    Juvenile Justice in the 1990s: a strategic approach, 1988, NACRO Juvenile Crime Section, London

    Policy development and its implications for practice, 1988, NACRO Juvenile Crime Section, London

    Young adult offenders (series of statistical analyses, papers I to V), 1988 to 1989, NACRO Young Offenders Team, London.

    Beer and ideas: report on a visit to the Bass brewery at Burton on Trent by the East Midlands Group of the Strategic Planning Society, 1988. NACRO, Juvenile Crime Section. §

    Crime in the inner city, report of a one day conference at the University of Birmingham, 1988. NACRO Juveile Crime Section. §

    Successful strategy making in public and non-profit making organisations, conference report, 1988. §

    Leicester Case Study: the economic impact of crime on a local area, 1989, Leicester Polytechnic Business School (extended student essay)

    Strategic planning of responses to crime, alcohol and other drugs, 1989, occasional paper.

    Policy developments in juvenile crime and justice, 1990, NACRO Young Adult Offenders Project, London

    Planning and co-ordination of responses to drugs, 1990, Occasional paper.

    Customer orientation in local government services, 1990, Coventry City Council.

    Responding to comments, compliments and complaints (guidelines manual), 1992, Coventry City Council.

    Public access to the city council (a report on customer care), 1993, Coventry City Council.

    What do you want? Interim report to the Lancashire Probation Service on the needs for specialist resources and partnership development, 1994, Divert Trust, London.

    What you can get. Final report to the Lancashire Probation Service on the voluntary sector in Lancashire, 1994, Divert Trust, London.

    Final report to the Bedford Pilgrim Housing Association (development of an anti-poverty strategy and report on an area audit) with Ian Chappell, 1995, Divert Trust, London

    Teleworking and new technology: current trends and future prospects. Talk given to the British Computer Society, 1995. §

    Beyond Joy Riding: the future of car related youth work in Milton Keynes. Final report to the Wheelwright Project from the Centre for Social Action, De Montfort University. 1996. Centre for Social Action and Buckinghamshire County County Council. 34 pages.

    Teleworking today and tomorrow, 1998, notes for a talk.

    Articles

    Policy, management and practice must relate, with Chris Batty, Social Work Today, 31/8/87.

    History of Music in Leicester Series

    Music and the rise of the Internet – 1990 to 2005 part 2. Arts in Leicester magazine, August 2015.

    Music and the rise of the Internet – 1990 to 2005 part1. Arts in Leicester magazine, August 2015

    Music of Today – 2005 to 2014. Arts in Leicester magazine, August 2015

    Music and technology, Arts in Leicester Magazine, August 2015

    Where is live music now? Arts in Leicester magazine, 2014

    Self publications

    Working with databases: practical information and monitoring schemes, 1995, The Events Service, Leicester §

    Policy and information in local crime prevention and justice systems, 1995, The Events Service, Leicester. §

    Routes into work: the use of teleworking for rural young people, 1997, Event and Project Services, Leicester. §

    Telecentres and teleworking: workshop on telecentres and community networks in action, presented to LEDIS conference The Knowledge Economy, Nottingham, 1997. §

    Teleworking

    Why Teleworking? A Study and Resource Pack, circa 1996

    There are two editions of this loose leaf pack: a general one and a special edition for those in local government. The pack contains a variety of briefing papers, study notes and OHP slides on working at home with computers.

    E&PS published a range of Briefing Papers on Teleworking. Paper versions of these papers were available individually or as part of the larger resource pack called Why Teleworking? which was only available by post.

    Briefing Paper 5 A place to live: a place to work. Teleworking from home: the implications for planning and house design. 4 pages. 2122 words.

    Briefing Paper 6 Teleworking and local government: opportunities and strategies. 4 pages. 1957 words.

    Briefing Paper 7 How to develop telecottages and teleworking in rural areas. 6 pages. 2851 words

    Briefing Paper 8 Teleworking, telematics and the environment: policies and practices. 4 pages. 1409 words.

    Briefing Paper 9 Teleworking and the Probation Service. 4 pages. 1962 words.

    Briefing Paper 11 Flexible working practices for business. 4 pages. 1514 words.

    Briefing Paper 22 Introduction to teleworking and telecottages. 4 pages. 1802 words

    Briefing Paper 23 Teleworking and new technology: current trends and future prospects. 7 pages. 2748 words.

    Briefing Paper 24 Teleworking and the Internet.3 pages. 705 words.

    Blog articles

    Teleworking and the growth of community networks, 2015, on Writer Trevor Locke (on this blog)

    See also articles published in this blog.

    § means that I have a copy in my possession.