Jo Casling Video

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. 

Gloucester Poetry Cafe, 26 June

Dead chuffed to be invited along by Josephine Lay to test the rafters and peddle my wares at Gloucester Library on Tuesday week. The Poetry Cafe are a nice bunch. I visited for an anniversary meeting with cake in April with Peter reading from Yellow over the Mountain and some lighter pieces. The cafe has a good format for open micers, a divided 90 minutes and a reading in both halves. 

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.

Anand Prahlad

‘dreaming of endangered species.’ 

by Anand Prahlad. This beautiful book.  

I have been lucky – there maybe more to it than that – to get some first class poetry from the US via David Pike’s pulsarpoetry.com, for which I have been reviewing for a couple of years now.  This collection is as good as any new work I’ve come across. A rare piece of writing.  Review out in a few weeks, fanmail in the post. 

18.May.Unluckily formatting issues have left the pulsar review in poor shape. So: 

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…’ 

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 

Randall Jarrell

 A Chekhov fan, a good poet. I came back to 'Randall Jarrell Selected Poems' looking for a humorous lesson from the master that might inform my review-writing with pulsarpoetry. I had forgotten the impact and delicate precision of his verse, also the quantity of childhood recollection this slim, green volume contains... that dual perspective, so popular now - Tim Rice on the radio saying it's all happened by 10 - offers a way of engagement used here with the stable, keen-edged vocabulary of a passing age.  

Jarrell then, sits well with current companions Mandelstam and Rumi. and CGJung.  Blessings be among them.

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.