CHOPS IV

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.

What is at stake? We got a problem.
Not the grammar, not the devil
dangling his knife and jelly,
the binaries of custom,
it is not that: it is the real politik
bubbles into consciousness. 
It might be the collective mind
rears up for our protection,
retaliates against AI:IE
The more than human risen.

Poetry with an Escape Plan

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.

Lollards

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. 

The Heretic  

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.

 

thine own meaning

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:

...I pitied thee.
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble
Like a thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them know…

Abenaki Land

This is Abenaki Land 

Fern bending to the banjo,
voice raised in Appalachian lament...

I was taken along to a folk evening in Corsham, not far, a show with three young women, including Fern Maddie, on tour. Good?  Yes, i'd say so.

The Great Khan

I find reported only words profound and direct from the Mongol Leader. And I am inclined to repeat them.  This from Basil Bunting’s Collected Poems. He notes:

A presumably exact version of Jengiz Khan’s correspondence with Chang Chun exists in Bretschneider’s Mediaeval Researches from Eastern Asiatic Sources… &etc

 

Jengiz to Chang Chun: China
is fat, but I am lean
eating soldier’s food,
lacking learning.
In seven years
I brought most of the world under one law.
The Lords of Cathay
hesitate and fall.
Amidst these disorders
I distrust my talents.
To cross a river
boats and rudders,
to keep the empire in order
poets and sages,
but I have not found nine for a cabinet,
not three.
I have fasted and washed. Come

Chang: I am old
not wise nor virtuous,
nor likely to be much use.
My appearance is parched, my body weak.
I set out at once.

And to Liu Chung Lu, Jengiz:
Get an escort and a good cart,
and the girls can be sent on
separately if he insists.

Prospect

Nudged by a random prompt, it happens, i picked up Bob Creeley again. Although not taken with Black Mountain as a whole, I'd held on to Mirrors through the great bookshelf poetry cull of 22.  And his poems seem quite new to me now, as if, at first reading, what, 10 years ago? they hadn't touched me at all - poor, slow fool.

PROSPECT

Green's the predominant color here,
but in tones so various, and muted

by the flatness of sky and water,
the oak trunks, the undershade back of the lawns,

it seems a subtle echo of itself.
It is the color of life itself,

it used to be. Not blood red,
or sun yellow - but this green,

echoing hills, echoing meadows,
childhood summer's blowsiness, a youngness

one remembers hopefully forever.
It is thoughtful, provokes here

quiet reflections, settles the self
down to waiting now apart

from time, which is done,
this green space, faintly painful.

Robert Creeley