The impact of Jo's poetry sinks in as the depth and accuracy of its imagery takes hold. It was Jo's idea to film at the abandoned factory at Thrupp: which smacks of loss and is better than the viaduct in Stroud, a bend in the Severn we had discussed. Doves cooed, flapped, a dog walker and some adolescents kicked around the edges but it's a good, even grounded spot to film, while it lasts.
Dominic James
Event diary and other news on the poetry front
Thursday 1 August 2024
Saturday 15 June 2024
Gloucester Poetry Cafe, 26 June
Monday 20 May 2024
good night sweet ladies
Less highbrow than eyebrow, or both. Even if you wanted to, it would be hard to shake-off Hamlet, 3.1.
I have heard of your paintings too well enough. God
has given you one face, and you make yourselves another: you jig, you amble,
and you lisp, and nick-name God’s creatures, and make your wantonness, your
ignorance. Go to, I’ll no more on’t, it hath made me mad.
I recall the bonny Richie, from Wexford, sharing the
Highbury flat, lower his shaking head into his hands to softly declaim: ‘they’re
all tarts.” And for what? Poor Ophelia. Bloody Hamlet, and Richard – for the young it all ends tragically well.
Claire Bloom also excellent in Richard III: you bottled spider.
Monday 29 April 2024
Anand Prahlad
‘dreaming of endangered species.’
by Anand Prahlad. This beautiful book.At first we meet with the poet embraced on a bed of pain, on
the cusp of consciousness, articulating a sarcoma which he finds, at times,
articulating him. Prahlad’s acutely worded dream-states strike the reader as risen
images still directed to their source; in memory, or the memories of ancestors,
the prophets and ‘hostile/ tribes / roaming jungles / of my marrow.’ As Lucifer
appears in ‘My Bladder’s Dementia:’
You must be
the orchid
lipped one,
mad man lunatic
once favorite
prodigal cast out
you must be
the nimbus
cloud steam
in the kitchen
a kiss, a clap
of thunder,
the wronged witness
the desperate one
my heart
warned me about
so far away
from home.
The verse bristles with insight and turmoils of the ‘f lesh’.
Cocoon finishes:
…Am I still
here for real, am I dreaming,
are those wings I hear, an engine
turning, a drill, a door, is this sand
in the dry roof of my mouth, a hand
brushing against my arm, warmth?
At the halfway ‘Bridge,’ there is surgery, the amusing conceit
of ‘My Life as a Banned Book’ then we surface in the world. Prahlad’s
essentially generous disposition introduces a child’s beating, slave ghosts,
the malicious, awful crime of ‘The Platoon’ ‘with whispers in my ears / of
freckled boys / in bathroom stalls.’ Here are no vested rights, only realities
of experience: sex, death, life in terms of wolves and junkyard, of diagnosis.
No hurry of direction in ‘dreaming of endangered species.’ If
a restlessness emerges in the second half – the first so out of time one
wouldn’t notice – perhaps it reflects speed of thought, a symptom of living which
only makes the verse more human than sublime. The appetites and food on the kitchen
table are universally shareable. It’s very fine work.
‘in the shadows / of my hand / a leaf / on bark / on your
thigh / i see myself / in a dream / paralyzed / but i think / i can get up / and
then / i think I am up. / i think i’m walking…’
Wednesday 24 April 2024
Rattling good read
I’m reading the latest pamphlet sent with Rattle, George Bilgere’s ‘Cheap Motels of my Youth.’ At the half way point, here’s a mildly acid report on a collection George picked up, with an airgun, from a cardboard moving box unopened for half a century. “An astonishingly debut” says the blurb. Hmm. The new poem, “Insult to Injury” has just the right tone for dealing a blow to, or taking a shot at, a brother poet. Very funny.
Coincidentally trying something like that for a dusty
pamphlet I have just found in the bookcase, mildly disliked from years ago, I’m
reminded the promotional excerpt on the new Rattle pamphlet was misleading. Perhaps
I had been outmanoeuvred. The chapbook prize winner is better than the out-of-context
lines taken from “Misting”
Each day brings more bad weather,
which is another way of saying
I’m in my sixties. But here, in the
frail
September morning, my hands tipped in fog,
the flowers lift their faces to me
with bright, mystifying questions,
and for once I have an answer.
It reads better when you understand misting, means… misting:
a nozzle setting for watering flowers. I had failed the meaning and missed the ‘mystifying’
echo and pun, I thought we had a poetic device not followed through. Too quick to judge.
Following ‘At the Carwash’ by Arthur Russell, here is another collection of blank verse, commonplace
reminiscences from a middle aged man. The
brutal thing itself! And again it is at times,
very touching and in all, totally worthwhile. A privilege to read. Right up the editor’s street I guess.
Rattle’s Timothy Green is a hard-working editor and a powerfully
good essayist on poets. His interview pieces in the journal keep me entering
the competitions while pretty sure my only success will be the subscription
that comes with the fee.
God knows, accessible, clear-headed writing should be lauded
above the common stock. Still, better than the straightforward, confessional
writings of mature men, I would submit, if I dared, that Poetry offers something
more spiritual, more universally embracing, when it is on track, that is more mystical.
And this sort of thing is not. Hey ho, I send submissions, regret my failings
at leisure, happy with my lot.
See Rattle Chapbooks
Wednesday 3 April 2024
Randall Jarrell
Jarrell then, sits well with current companions Mandelstam and Rumi. and CGJung. Blessings be among them.
Wednesday 14 February 2024
Rom
A great sadness to hear Nnorom Azuonye has passed away. Poet and pastor, founder of Sentinel Quarterly he promoted Nigerian literature for more than 20 years and gave many local poets an encouraging lift with SQL and his quarterly competitions which were the model arrangement of such things. Along the way he published my first submitted poems and then, a few years later, invited and accepted my first manuscript. He put me squarely on the first stepping stones of my poetry writing.
A generous, sympathetic and good man. He could talk alright, and I will miss our conversations.
Nnorom died on 21 January and leaves behind his wife Thelma and four children whom he loved very much.