Unquiet Stirrings<\/p>\n
In a small Staffordshire village there is a pub with the disquieting name \u2018The Quiet Woman\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0On the outer wall is a painting of a woman daintily carrying a tray of drinks and pub grub in a perfectly normal manner except for the disturbing fact that she is headless. Across this image\u00a0\u00a0is emblazoned Proverb 15: \u2018Soft Words Turneth Away Wrath\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0The whole effect is sinister and menacing especially on finding out it is based on an actual woman called \u2018Chattering\u2019 Charteris the lady of the inn who was decapitated by her landlord husband for talking too much. The landlord was apparently much applauded for his actions by the locals. It\u2019s not clear exactly when this happened as the truth is hard to ascertain but it is a local legend too close to the bone of reality to hold much merriment.<\/p>\n
The victim\u2019s name \u2018Chattering\u2019 Charteris\u2019 immediately evoked for me the matriarch Mother Chattox\u00a0\u00a0last seen in my\u00a0Interregnum\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Pendle Witch Words<\/em>\u00a0as one of the Lancashire women hanged for witchcraft in 1612. The Quiet Woman pub is the catalyst that has thrown me back into my favourite territory of language, or to be more exact, the suppression of it. And I needn\u2019t trawl the past for examples as it is still ongoing from the women of Afghanistan having their mics turned off when speaking in parliament before the easier solution of silencing professional women by simply shooting them dead in the street to the American politician Ben Carson. He requested the male co-presenter of the British journalist and news anchor Katty Kay to turn off her mic when Carson objected to her questions.<\/p>\n And so I now begin another journey into the realms of the silenced, disappeared and dispossessed dealing not just with historic cases but contemporary ones and the poem presented here is my first completed poem for this prospective collection. For the record an\u00a0\u00a0\u2018unquiet\u2019 is a synonym for a \u2018nag\u2019 or a \u2018scold\u2019 so this is going to be a very unquiet volume indeed.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Unquiets<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Let fly the unquiet tongue<\/p>\n on the tip of their wagging<\/p>\n wisecracks champing at the<\/p>\n raw bit a metal fisted\u00a0\u00a0in the mouth.<\/p>\n Between the teeth a harrying of the<\/p>\n buds over which words slew.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Slewed with lewd and metaphysical.<\/p>\n Startled points of view rarely reaching<\/p>\n beyond the reach of breath. Far too startled.<\/p>\n As if wonder is gendered. Or political. Just saying.<\/p>\n Just saying a weave of stem-sprouting visions are<\/p>\n visions to share. Break bread.\u00a0\u00a0So why the brank?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Brank: the very sound hurts flesh.<\/p>\n Brank. Clamp. Cramp.\u00a0\u00a0Crude<\/p>\n battered\u00a0\u00a0iron pressing head so steep it<\/p>\n mashes mouth meat. Spikes the tongue.\u00a0\u00a0Spiked.<\/p>\n The journalists curse. Impaled articles withering on<\/p>\n the branch. Your you obliterated. Read all about it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n About it: on my bottom lip a venous lake<\/p>\n has formed where words must swim or<\/p>\n drown. The just so bon mot as deep as<\/p>\n marrow purples on my bottom lip a venous lake<\/p>\n has formed in the after-dark of forethought a moat<\/p>\n in which to sigh and sink. Diving into silence.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Geraldine Monk\u2019s poetry was first published in the 1970\u2019s. Her major collections include\u00a0Escafeld Hangings,\u00a0<\/em>West House Books 2005\u00a0\u00a0and Interregnum,\u00a0<\/em>Creation Books 1995 with a rejigging of the monologues in\u00a0Pendle Witch Words<\/em>, K.F.S . 2012.\u00a0Her<\/em>\u00a0Selected Poems<\/em>\u00a0was published by Salt Publishing, 2003 followed by\u00a0The Salt<\/em>Companion to Geraldine Monk,<\/em>\u00a0edited by Scott Thurston, 2007. In 2012 she devised and edited\u00a0Cusp: Recollections<\/em>\u00a0of Poetry in Transition<\/em>, Shearman Books. Her latest book\u00a0They Who Saw the Deep<\/em>\u00a0was published in 2016 in the United States by Parlor Press\/Free Verse Editions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n She lives in Sheffield and is a founding member of the Sheffield based antichoir Juxtavoices for which she has composed several pieces including\u00a0Midsummer Mummeries,<\/em>\u00a0Up & Down at Bishop\u2019s House<\/em>\u00a0(with Alan Halsey) and\u00a0We Talk<\/em>\u00a0Through Walls<\/em>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In 2014 she became an affiliated poet to\u00a0The Centre for Poetry and<\/em>\u00a0Poetics, University of Sheffield.<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Unquiet Stirrings In a small Staffordshire village there is a pub with the disquieting name \u2018The Quiet Woman\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0On the outer wall is a painting of a woman daintily carrying a tray of drinks and pub grub in a perfectly normal manner except for the disturbing fact that she is headless. Across this image\u00a0\u00a0is emblazoned Proverb […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6589,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[59,12],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/Unknown.jpeg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42xiC-1Gp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6473"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6473"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6645,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6473\/revisions\/6645"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}