With videos of David Cooke and Adam Horovitz joining Katie Lloyd-Nunn (on the brink of 1,000 hits), another of my own slips through as i prowl the internet for more candidates. This film touches on a walk in the Welsh Hills, with a picnic in a hayfield, a paddle in the river Lugg, the core of it being my old buddy David's guitar.
If you are in reach of Gloucestershire and interested in making a poetry video, I still have time and resources available, get in touch
To keep him in mind something else will do, this from,
Pig Island Letters.
From an old house shaded with macrocarpas
Rises my malady.
Love is not valued much in Pig Island
Though we admire its walking parody,
That brisk gaunt woman in the kitchen
Feeding the coal range, sullen
To all strangers, less one should be
Her antique horn-red Satan.
Her man, much baffled, grousing in the pub,
Discusses sales
Of yearling lambs, the timber in a tree
Thrown down by autumn gales,
Her daughter, reading in her room
A catalogue of dresses,
Can drive a tractor, goes to Training College,
Will vote on the side of the Bosses,
Her son is moodier, has seen
An angel with a sword
Standing above the clump of old man manuka
Just waiting for the word
To overturn the cities and the rivers
And split the house like a rotten totara log.
Quite unconcerned he sets his traps for 'possums
And whistles to his dog.
The man who talks to the masters of Pig Island
About the love they dread
Plaits ropes of sand, yet I was born among them
And will lie some day with their dead.
The first in a planned series on Poet and Place, this was filmed at local pal Katie's wild swimming spot.
Burnside's essays made me look at Marianne Moore, I don't quite see the how or why I was turned away from her before, perhaps it was a concussion from the following generation's positively putting a gap between her and them: although the elder her corrected the younger one severely. I am enjoying the younger self in "New Collected Poems". But here is a later revision of the subject in hand:
Poetry
I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.
In black and white, Women of the Wild West
inhabit, by and large, a world of fur and blankets,
hair piled up and laughs piled on and all:
stiff resolution. Guns hitched-high for saddle work.
A brothel girl is shooting pool in wool fishnets
with bloomers to her thighs – a long limbed blonde and
glorious,
more or less, the outdoor kind. Her looks are free,
I daresay wild. She’d make an awesome
granny.
The
Job Hunt
University of Worcester:
Creative Marketing Officer
I see a job for £30K, or roundabout,
enough to keep a man around that age, 30 odd,
in wine and clothes, available for love.
A bachelor is a happy thing,
not quite the finished article,
but, no doubt, he has the looks,
medium ambition, he might go far or might
become the comfortable one:
slow moving, good with children.
At this remove it appears to me, besides the work
itself,
somewhere between Gorillas in the Mist,
Jane Austen.
The Music of Time, John
Burnside's recent collection of poetic essays, is entertaining enough for a
poetry buff and I enjoy the man's verse: coming to terms with his prose.
We ran swimmingly with Sassoon and Everyone Sang, but our little boat hit a snag
with L'Infinito.
Each passage is framed in time
and place. Here we have the young JB wiling away an afternoon, in the
summertime? I digress. He fancies a college friend, Louise, will ride along and
save him from an exam, the tediousness of Sartre, and as he hopes she... will
cycle by with good things from Arjuna or Basil's Bakery... he comes
across: Le néant hante l’être. A phrase that will haunt him
for years. Okay.
 |
| John Burnside |
I like this negative epiphany -
Burnside's reckoning an abundance of epiphanies - his Hidebehind and poetic
dread of nothingness. But the scholar in him doesn't have the breadth, to
weigh with this awful nothingness the clear light of the void. The word
'sublime' appears but we do not find the Divine Ground, despite JB telling
us they were all mystics back in 76. And yet, to have written this, he was
so close to the affirmative epiphany that would have been Arjuna's reply from
the Bhagavad Gita, perhaps, if Louise had appeared that day.
 |
| Arjuna and Sri Krishna |
In short, to my jaded gaze, in this chapter the dominie has taken over from the seeker after truth. There is some loose talk of the isolation of the soul, loose - from a man given to quoting Mandelstam - and I see philosophers listed, with other sources... I anticipate a courtly bow to Freud. That's all very well. It's standard fare. For poetry, i'd also recommend the great religions and Carl Jung. [Not that I've managed any verse for a month, or since Christmas or so, ho-hum].
As the younger man catches up with me - late fifties - there are more glorious days. And we have passed through shared experience of death, loss of friends, dealing with the young, even some shared time - in a long-range kind of way - with Michelangelo and the Medici Chapel. There's always overlap with these guys. I thought he might have written more of or to WCW in Heaven, he may: I've another generation to go. ALSO, special commendation of the poetry book society.
