The season closes in. Very happy to have confirmation of 2 poems in Jason Conway’s SteelJackdaw #18. An exciting, well-received and still local arts magazine, gradually adapting submission protocols as it spreads its steely wings. And, more locally still, among the bees and the hollyhocks, the Discoveries will be ready to pick in a few days. The long wait.
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.
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.
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…’
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
Jarrell then, sits well with current companions Mandelstam and Rumi. and CGJung. Blessings be among them.
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.
Pyramus and Thisbe: prompted by last night's rain, a thought led to the marionettes in the oddly poignant 'Being John Malkovich'. One google string leads to another. The Pyramus and Thisbe Society is a body of surveyors and lawyers and, on special occasions, their spouses.
full poem once accepted somewhere maybe
...my bones are dead.
No cell retains a strand of life
to edge me on the infinite...
a corpse of balsa boxes fixed
with glue and pin
The more i think of it, the more the history of creating the animate comes to mind, from Pygmalion and Galatea to Shakespeare's human statue and Pinocchio, then Shaw's rather awful funny version of improvement, and a thousand cautionary tales current today. Aye, AI. The captured human heart.
This month's Pulsar reviews will / i understand they will / include my splutterings on a book of poems by Matthias Goritz translated from the German by Mary Jo Bang. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone looking for the current direction in poetry, or for a new direction of their own. And finally,
ACTIVIST ALPHABET, an exhibition of prints and poems by Christine Felce includes 'A memorable evening of poetry with with Adam Horovitz JLM Morton and Dominic James, plus open mic on the theme of climate change (sign up on the night) 7pm, Friday 17 November, The Museum in the Park, Stroud.
As i pick my way through bishops and presbyters of the ancient Christian church: a few lighter thoughts on earlier days of sacrifice and excess bubble to the surface. As a for instance, Alcoholic Husbands is a phrase i hear quite often. Poor men who once were heavy drinkers.
I have a long picked over, short verse on Achilles - The Sergeant - in this week's dearbooze.com and the young god of wine will soon recline on his drunken ship in The Crank, Back on the Wine Dark Sea.
Dear Booze eh? This montage includes Bruegel's Tower as i am put in mind of my early and not-unbalanced verse on grog and separation. 'I recall the vaults of Babel, its palm wine jars and mead...' Skol.
This week DG Sentinel published Elf Counsel unexpected and sweet. One of five presented at the inaugural and short-lived Bard of Hawkwood Mayday eisteddfod 2015. I’d like to wrastle it into shape, at least insert a dropped ‘in’ around the middle: but I love the photo sourced by Dweebs Global. It looks like Saxon pedigree to me, but what I do know? Nuthin.
Athelney runs:
Riddle/ The Great Army / Brother Rex / Elf
Counsel / Late Home
and starts, with stage direction and intro:
For an eisteddfod,
with rhymes of flood
my bid for bard at Hawkerwood and should a verse
or two run bad, Speak Out and we’ll move on
through Athelney, that swollen plot of land,
an island, whale-humped on the Levels,
laced about with deep canals, the spot
where Alfred’s cake shop stood.
So pet your nettles & get settled
for a turn on the flood, this river-ish Riddle…
Prompted by the Summer edition of Rattle; an enthralling interview and its showcase of Non Fungible Tokens Poets, I've spent $25 on Tezos and tried a short poem as the basis for content text on AI artworks. Have you tried the controls, the market? I've hardly got started.
It's a right "Come all ye".
Finding similarities in first line imagery puts me in mind of borrowing, not stealing. Much as a poem written entirely in any particular poet's distinctive style has its own root cause, even if it that is tapped-in to what's come before, to be in that manner of delivery, of vocabulary, acknowledges what has come before.
In lyrics and in verse there is scope for an allowable, a reasonable sort of plagiarism, particularly when successful imagery stands on experience recreated and shared, whether that experience is in real or in fact only, in some manner recognised.
Then, first images/opening stanzas shape the last. In the example below we find Lowell in Mandelstam, today’s The Friday Poem’s verse by Ian Harker whether knowingly or not drawing on both. And the last lines loop, return to the start, as is common practice. It feels right musically, bar by bar, and as the concluding thought or verse echoes its own rationale by leading back to where it starts.
That comes off a bit pat. That is, as in any argument in speech we come full circle, addressing the starting point. Which does not mean opening lines show us so how far we can go but they suggest where we return to finish the verse. In this case, traffic in the snow.
That might suggest my preference for Mandelstam's poem over Lowell's - i'd hesitate to go so far as to say that. My simple inference and conclusion is Dylan’s line:
If there’s an original idea out there I could use it right now.
Three poem tops, then tails follow.
Petersburg
Lines
Above the yellow of the government buildings
the murky snowstorm has whirled for a long time
and the jurist settles down again in his sleigh,
with a broad gesture drawing his overcoat tighter.
The ships are hibernating, In the heat of the sun
the thick cabin glass has caught fire.
Leviathan, a battleship in dock,
Russia heavily rests.
For the Union
Dead
The old South Boston Aquarium
stands in a Saraha of snow now, Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Snowday
The cars are falling with long sighs
down Monk Bridge Road, their tanks empty
and the beck grinding to a halt
beneath the tarmac. This is how it ends:
cars slide to a stop in snow that wasn’t forecast
or if it was, it wasn’t supposed to stick,
vehicle skids into vehicle, voices on speaker
slur with the cold…
And conclusions:
The file of motor traffic flies into the mist;
odd-man-out Evgeny, touchy,
mild pedestrian, ashamed of his poverty
breathes in petrol fumes and curses fate.
&
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.
&
...in the sliding, skittering cars
and there is beauty in the warning lights
but most of all there is beauty in how you fall.
From Osip Mandel'shtam, Selected Poems
translated by David McDuff, who wouldn't lose the poetry by emulating its original, stuffed-with rhyme form but tried for the sense and meaning of the work itself. And what touchstone fluid stuff it is. Wonderful. Poor Mandel'shtam: doomed to cross Stalin even trying to placate him.
Take for joy from the palms of my hands
fragments of honey and sunlight,
as the bees of Persephone commanded us.
Not to be untied the unmoored vessel,
not to be heard shadow walking on fur,
not to be mastered terror growing in thicketed life.
We have only kisses now,
furred like the smallest bees
found dead after their flight from the hive.
Bees rustling in translucency of densest night,
their home the sleepy forest of Taigetos,
their food time, lungwort, mint.
Take then, take for joy my wild gift,
a plain dry necklace of dead bees,
bees that changed honey into sunlight.
Feathers in our caps.
Mulling over new direction, this draft of a piece touches on the current world at large, then dives back in to my garden of play. Change will come.
Sweet Mayhem
The clamour of
sweet mayhem lilts
in hue and cry, the argument
of gender rights kickstarts a chorus
of approval for the pronouns, plural,
drowning out the single soul, itself
promotes a Shadow
Song: You are one,
we are legion. Coloured tones
imbued by animus and anima
the dry kingfisher, Philemon
and our mother, Dragon: the whining
of an endless child held in check no more.
The quiet mind, bundled
from a moving car,
thrown from the spinning door of reason:
stoops in shame before AI,
but recovers its organic wisdom –
well-founded on the natural rule –
attests to a chaotic pride, IE
the human will be human.
Confronted with the currents, the magnetic ebb and flow of a world electric, it won't do to have, as in the scornful words of sound recording, preferring the analogue warmth of voice and cat-gut: Digital as the pejorative diminutive.
Longlisted for the Erbacce Prize, short-listed for Exeter Uni, a slot on dodging the rain and another review out shortly on Pulsar... This is the big event of the day: David and Bethany kindly agreed to read a couple of poems, gladly, i think they said, and I am sorting out my themes. Big Trouble in Rochester. OK then.
So far as I can tell, this heretic was a follower of John Wycliffe, a reformer of sorts, burnt at the stake, and the term Lollard derives from a mutterer, ie to be found mumbling over the bible. No mumbler here. It is the defamatory names that stick, apparently "Cathar" is a dirty word, and that for a noble cause. I think.
As times allow the heretic
decries the pulpit from his soul,
flies in the face of common dogma,
and has no truck with blood and bread
with a faith his own.
Close
cousin to the heckler,
objecting to gold ornament,
places trouble before intellect:
Give me Death or give me Honour.
Farewell William Balowe.
‘An herretyke ibrende at the Towre hyll’
railed against his jailers, so:
‘…no priest had no more
power
to hear confession than Jack Hare!
What
means this, Priest? On Goode Fryday
ye fill the sepulchres with gods
but since they cannot rise themselves
at Ester Day you lift them up
and bere them for the, or else they will
lie still in their graves...’
No
passive witch to be upended,
drowned, dunked-in the village pond:
put to the question, bid recant
and all his words recorded.
In
chains before Saint Dominic,
hands en-grimed and eyes upon
a devil’s fire before the church:
whose bell rings out for William?
An
heretic, bridling at icons, sure,
as if in mockery of God
to mimic resurrection.
Digging down for the meaning of the thing – my poem! - Edmund Gosse’s touchstone lines from the Tempest re-occur.
An exhortation to self as much as anything, a piece to keep in mind, like a consequent line in the play on conscience – and where lies that? – I have it by heart. Imperfectly. I tend to confuse the plurals and must tamper with my variations to find the proper meaning, much as the piece incurs.
Finding the twin principles in my verse, and my Ariel, running through Hyde Park, I am at the Tempest again. Miranda to Caliban:
