Jane Monson
Biography
Jane lives in Cambridge as a poet, tutor and specialist mentor for students with disabilities at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD is on the prose poetry of Francis Ponge and she has an MA in Creative Writing from UEA. She is the editor of This Line is not for Turning (2011), an anthology of contemporary British prose poetry and more recently British Prose Poetry: The Poems without Lines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Her poetry collections with Cinnamon Press include Speaking Without Tongues (2010) and The Shared Surface (2013) and she is nearing completion of a third, The Chalk Butterfly.
‘Beam of Light’ won 2nd Prize in the Café Writers 2012 Competition and was inspired by an episode of The Clangers, featuring a radio and Soup Dragon’s soup.
Nathalie Sarraute’s 1939 ‘anti-novel’/prose poetry collection, Tropisms is Jane’s Desert Island /Lockdown text, which focuses on what is not seen and not said; the invisible moments hidden behind our everyday conversations and commonplace gestures.
The Poem
Beam of Light
It doesn’t appear to have a mouth, so how do you propose we feed it? The small boy makes his point, hands waving about his head. Today, there is no school and they have time to work this out. The boy sighs, brings his hands down towards his head and scratches; his friend moves his gaze purposefully between the boy and the table. The box in the kitchen has been speaking all morning, its wire grate radiating announcements, music, news, plays, weather, and nature. The words are formed inside, though how do they leave the box and land in the kitchen? They don’t know what to call it, whether to hold it, dissect it, or make it listen. But they do decide it’s hungry. On approach, however, the thing slips between stations and throws out the full charge of a river at storm: they scream, jump,hide under the table and creep out only when the enemy loses consciousness. One tiny hand emerges like a shy puppet, feels a button, turns it anti-clockwise and lands on the weather report. They learn of the sun outside the window, watch the way its light gives the thing a shadow, and hear the clouds that will smother it by the afternoon.