Red Door #28 - The TYPEWRITTEN issue

SELF
TAUGHT
TYPER
This recent poem from Laurence
tells of youthful adventures in his
early use of a typewriter.
Laurence is the son of a minister
and a shared experience we have
as boys is typing up the weekly parish
newsletter. My typewriter was
electric, Laurence’s never, always
mechanical and, these days, he has
even put aside that technology,
reverting to longhand in his outdated
desk diaries.
A Z makeshift fingering method all my own
I’m ahammering out the alphabet at Dad,
Padres Parsonage desk
which office hours
have witnessed the birth of sermons
underlined prompts for a Lord’s Day airing at
the pulpit launch
of each missal
and once a month the creation via his hand
cranked duplicator contraption of vicar’s
parish notes
hypnotic the power my new medium has to
take a thing out of itself
out of my hand for itself and put it, so to
speak, out there
nice and impersonal like
that sudden readability of it all astounds
soon I’m flying up, down and across the tiers
of letters making those
clarifying marks of the grammarian
playing the numbers game
going through hoops of scale arpeggio and
triad like a training church organist
rehearsing the prentice piece
in due course naturally
as vocabulary selection I can spell
even an entire first line
a bell on the thing going off in recognition
here and there inevitably the family name
appears
and my own three fore names
the last the call name
with a u
Laurence, Lawrence James
black on white needless to write but
using the full two-tone band width one flick
of a colour coded lever also the red
under one spool of eight up ribbon
unreeling it’s twins spool reeling back in
à la Beckett
à la last tape
of crap
and I did notice that loudhailer gizmo of
yours
do you think one day
I could have a go on it?
055