Writing

Writing was very important to Jack. He did it all the time, it was his evening relaxation (especially if there was a whiskey to accompany it), it was his go to place if he had time on his hands at rehearsals or travelling. It was part of his self education and ability to connect emotionally with his inner self. He wrote stories and plays and poetry. He sometimes scribbled daily diaries on the backs of scripts in fact most of his writing is on the backs of scripts and then typed up on his little portable (portable ? it weighed a ton) typewriter with a carbon copy. 

There are a few plays to his name (which I have just found copies of and am reading), but none were ever produced to my knowledge so maybe they weren’t his métier. They were written in the late 1940s and 50s alongside verse (one play is in verse) and I think he gradually moved to poetry to express himself.

He taught himself to write verse using some of the classical forms such as Sonnet, Triolet, Rondeau and Villanelle. He would move on to blank verse later in life but I prefer his earlier structured pieces, mostly on the theme of love.

A poem was published in the late 40s - he had sent some to an editor of women’s magazines and they forwarded one onto a literary magazine called Argosy where it appeared in print and he received a fee. Then many years later published by the private press of Toni Savage of Leicester who he met when playing Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester. Toni produced the Phoenix Broadsheets for distribution at the theatre and Barwell Broadsides for his folk club. Jack and Toni met and got on very well, a certain love of whiskey and poetry along with Toni's past as an opera singer sealed their friendship and future collaboration in matters poetical.

These triolets were the first Toni published as the New Broom Press, 1975, in a little chapbook, cunningly called Triolets.

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True Love

If you should die and I live on
what other could assuage my yearning?
What should I build a hope upon
If you should die and I live on.
With all my inspiration gone
what use to me my art or learning
if you should die and I live on?
What other could assuage my yearning.


Heart Broken

I shall not seek for love again,
from here I shall go, ever lonely
Only my heart shall know my pain,
I shall not seek for love again,
my senses cannot more attain
completedness, quietude yes, only
I shall not seek for love again
from here I shall go ever lonely.
 

Coquette

She cocked her head and glanced her eye
and said I was a Prince of men.
Upon my word, I do not lie
she cocked her head and glanced her eye
and lured me on with motion sly.
How could I help but kiss her when
she cocked her head and glanced her eye
and said I was a Prince of men?


Learning

How could I know, who loved so well
that love would lie in such a fashion
and yet retain me in its spell.
How could I know, who loved so well
then, that my heart must never tell
the tale of unrequited passion.
How could I know, who loved so well
that love would lie in such a fashion.


Love's Weather

That early mist and jewel dew
may dim the view but not the feeling
was clear to me. My Granny knew
that early mist and jewel dew
proclaimed the Sun would shine anew.
She said to me, 'There's no concealing
that early mist and jewel dew
may dim the view but not the feeling.


Hedge-pig

We found a Hedge-pig fast asleep
in Spring, for he was hibernating.
While digging in the compost heap
we found a Hedge-pig fast asleep
all tightly curled and buried deep.
It seems absurd reiterating
we found a Hedge-pig fast asleep
in Spring, for he was hibernating.