Friday 29 February 2008

3 shorts from T E Hulme

Thomas Ernest Hulme's 'Complete Poetical Works' was published by Ezra Pound, whose work Hulme influenced. '...Works' appeared in 1912 as an addendum to Pound's 'Ripostes' and consisted of only 5 short poems. T E Hulme was yet another victim of the so-called 'war to end all wars'. He was killed in Belgium in 1917. Here are 3 of his poems.

The Embankment

Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,
In a flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth's the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

Autumn

A touch of cold in the Autumn night -
I walked abroad
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.

Above the Dock

Above the quiet dock in midnight
Tangled in the tall mast's corded height
Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away
Is but a child's balloon forgotten after play.

T E Hulme (1883 - 1917)

5 years of Poets Against War

'Poets Against War' has been around for 5 years. During this time the website has received over 20,000 submissions from poets around the world. The editorial team has considered all these poems, no mean task when something like 350 poems are arriving monthly, and chosen a few poems for the 'poems of the month' feature.

Poet-in-Residence is humbled and honoured that his poem 'Masao Okabe's Frottage Sites' has been chosen as one of the 'poems of the month' for October 2007. To read this poem and also the other 'poems of the month' for the last 12 months click on the handy P-i-R link. It will quickly take you there.

Of course there's more to the website than poetry, important as the poetry is for it is the glue that holds the site together. The visitor can find news and links, information on various projects, details of publications and also an e-mailed newsletter. Today's newsletter to Poet-in-Residence brings the good news that some young children in Vietnam have been fitted with hearing aids.

P-i-R's climate change poem

The weather is big news. This morning, for example, it was reported on P-i-R's breakfast radio that "hurricane strength winds are heading this way"!
As far as TV-News is concerned, aside from Oil Wars and Stock Markets, the weather is the biggest news around. An assortment of courageous and foolhardy persons can be relied upon to capture the world's dangerous weather scenes for the concerned viewer. Poet-in-Residence has composed a climate change poem - a tribute to the work of the world's weather and natural disaster reporters.

Not a Vivaldi summer

...opening shot - the swelling sea
and closing in - we see Vivaldi
windswept and wet and leaning-in
backed by ruthless waves
monsters rampaging from an unseen place
to somewhere well beyond the promenade
yet he stands firm and hard
at the end of his line of notes
now streaming away from his sodden clipboard
his mike held bravely to starboard, or maybe port,
almost horizontal as he screams the obvious news
coming from the white grey sea that's all jumbled up and twisted
we must imagine his notes
caught now
on the privet hedge of a caravan park of splintered wreckage
and upturned boats
all ragged wet and torn
and flapping themselves to soggy destruction
as he with his channel's icon bravely in his hands
bellows over the raving wind
over the flapping beat of his rain blasted oilskins
bawls forth the unheard to the unhearing
from the rampaging din at the end of the groaning pier
- did it move just now, Vivaldi? we almost want to cry
swiftly unzipping another beer on the sly
and rustling quickly in a packet of salted snacks
as we strain to hear the subtext
in the groaning of the encrusted bolts and barnacles
in the howl of the whirling winds
in the absence of seagulls
in the sea spray's relentless crash
in the fracturing of planks
in the rope squeals and chitterchatter of the stacked racks
of deckchairs - unstacking before our very eyes
canvas frayed and flailing
Vivaldi failing
suddenly sinking with a flickering fairy light exit
an end of the pier bandstand exit
a blurring exit
and just for a moment
almost coming back again
but now definitely gone
gone in a gregarious rush of white noise
an exploding crescendo of photons
a shower of music from the stars...

c) Gwilym Williams (2008)

Thursday 28 February 2008

R S Thomas meets Wallace Stevens - part 1

Poet-in-Residence compares the work of a Nobel Prize nominee from Wales and a Pulitzer Prize winner from the USA, one a priest and the other an insurance man.
Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955) was born in Reading, Pennsylvania. He came to notice, at the age of 35, when four of his poems appearing in a special 1914 wartime issue of 'Poetry' won a prize.
Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913 - 2000) was born in Cardiff, the Welsh capital. He became a priest in 1937. In 1946, at the age of 33, he published his first collection 'The Stones of the Field'.
The following poem is by Wallace Stevens. It comes from his 'Transport to Summer'.

Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit

If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,

Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost

Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;

As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.

It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.

---

The next poem is from R S Thomas's collection 'No Truce with the Furies'.

Homage to Wallace Stevens

I turn now
not to the Bible
but to Wallace Stevens.
Insured against
everything but the muse
what has the word-wizard
to say? His adjectives
are the wand he waves
so language gets up
and dances under
a fastidious moon.
We walk a void world,
he implies for which
in the absence of imagination,
there is no hope. Verbal bank-clerk,
acrobat walking a rhythmic tight-rope,
trapeze artist of the language
his was a kind of double-entry
poetics. He kept two columns
of thought going, balancing meaning
against his finances. His poetry
was his church and in it
curious marriages were conducted.
He burned his metaphors like incense,
so his syntax was as high
as his religion.
Blessings, Stevens;
I stand with my back to grammar
at an altar you never aspired
to, celebrating the sacrament
of the imagination whose high-priest
notwithstanding you are.

---

A promising start then. The connection made. It's a good one. Poet-in-Residence takes up Thomas's poetic cross. The unfolding path will be more than interesting.

Wednesday 27 February 2008

D H Lawrence, poet - a final tribute

In 4 days it will be the deathday of D H Lawrence. Poet-in-Residence has been more than pleased to select and publish here several of D H Lawrence's poems over the last few weeks. The choice of the final poem has proved the most difficult. Should it be 'Ship of Death' or 'Bavarian Gentians' or even something from his youthful years. After much consideration Poet-in-Residence has finally settled for the following. It makes a fitting epitaph.

Lizard

A lizard ran out on a rock and looked up, listening
no doubt to the sounding of the spheres.
What a dandy fellow! the right toss of a chin for you
and swirl of a tail!

If men were as much men as lizards are lizards
they'd be worth looking at.

-----

David Herbert Lawrence (1885 - 1930)

P-i-R's Gustav Mahler poem

Poets are often expected to submit for publication material that has not been submitted or accepted for publication elsewhere. That's the general rule. And woe betide the poet who breaks it; not that Poet-in-Residence would ever dream of breaking it, he adds hastily. But there's another side to this. It's when editors accept submissions subjected to the above rigorous conditions and then sit on them for months or years on end. And then don't use them. The poor poet now has to chase around like a demented detective to discover the fate of his beloved poems. Have they in fact been published? Are they about to be published? Have they been rejected? He must do all this before he can send them elsewhere.
The poem that follows was sent to a publisher in March 2005 and immediately accepted. P-i-R is not aware that it was ever published. Today it has reappeared, almost like a mirage, in the shifting reams of paper through which this humble scribe navigates this poetic caravanserai. The following is a slightly modified version.

With Gustav Mahler in Ordinary Circumstances

The original is something like this
and at the same time it
is nothing like this. It
was carelessly un-scrawled
and set down in lugubrious longhand,
laid out by a long-limbed roguish fellow
too fond of whisky and adjectives
slumped in a comfortable too-easy armchair
in a dusty window
in a rambling house
full of curious spiders
and annoying ants.

To the background of Mahler's 10th
on his crackly radio
the green buds of poetry opened themselves
in that befuddled brain of his
and with his red-inked nib he un-squiggled
and scratched
his bleak verse
with bardic abandon
onto the cardboard stiffner
removed
rather laboriously it must be said
from the inside of his new white shirt
with a snug-brown Ulyssean night
in sight (half-price
due to the recent demise
from natural causes
of an octogenarian shirtshop owner
and his family's subsequent 50% off everything
clear-out sale).

Be all that as it may, and it may be all that and more,
the painful pinpricked point is 'Yes!'
- 'Yes!' it is still possible
to compose a passable poem
on the shiny smooth surface of a half-price shirt insert
with an almost empty pen
and a pinprick of blood
in ordinary circumstances.

And now you may pray
that it may always be so.

c) Gwilym Williams

Tuesday 26 February 2008

R S Thomas, a poet to 'tell us' - part 1

R S Thomas was a Welsh poet writing in English. He was also a priest. His sermons were said to be unmemorable. But R S Thomas the poet was another kettle of fish as the old saying goes. The Welsh landscape affected him, its brooding hills, its rain, its sunshine, its calm and rough sea, its gorse and heather, its crouched trees, its inhabitants, its poor farmers and others barely scraping a living, its sheep, its stones, its age. All this and more is to be found in his poetry. But Poet-in-Residence begins his journey at the church gate. There's no getting away from it -in RST's poetry his God is almost always there; straight up-front as in the poem 'Tell Us', or hovering invisibly somewhere in the background as in other works we will come to. Not very often is the 'Supreme Being' completely Deus Absconditus.

Tell Us

We have had names for you:
The Thunderer, the Almighty
Hunter, Lord of the snowflake
and the sabre-toothed tiger.
One name we have held back
unable to reconcile it
with the mosquito, the tidal-wave,
the black hole into which
time will fall. You have answered
us with the image of yourself
on a hewn tree, suffering
injustice, pardoning it;
pointing as though in either
direction; horrifying us
with the possibility of dislocation.
Ah, love, with your arms out
wide, tell us how much more
they must still be stretched
to embrace a universe drawing
away from us at the speed of light.

Monday 25 February 2008

D H Lawrence, poet - part 10

'Pansies' was a precursor for 'Nettles'. But the so-called establishment had other ideas. They objected to 'Pansies'; but not only that, for a 'magistrate' and 'six fat constables' duly seized 13 of D H Larwence's paintings from an exhibition and 'put them in prison'.
It is very hard to believe today, a mere 80 years on, that all this prim and proper propoganda paranoia was going on so soon after ten million (never mind the wounded and brain-damaged) had forfeited their lives in the so-called 'war to end all wars'.
So what was all the fuss about? The paintings were seized because human genitalia were exposed. And yet as Lawrence points out, the preacher preaches 'in the beginning was the word'...and the word for all we know might have been 'arse'. As far as the poems are concerned it couldn't be that the stiff and proper ruling class, with their cold baths and scrubbed-clean minds, had the idea that pansies might be anything other than little blue and yellow flowers, could it?
Here are 3 poems intended to bloom only briefly, hence the title 'Pansies' - but it seems to Poet-in-Residence that they are more than valid today, nearly 80 years on.

Nemesis

The Nemesis that awaits our civilisation
is social insanity
which in the end is always homicidal.

Sanity means the wholeness of the consciousness.
And our society is only part conscious, like an idiot.

If we do not rapidly open all the doors of consciousness
and freshen the putrid little space in which we are cribbed
the sky-blue walls of our unventilated heaven
will be bright red with blood.


Be still!

The only thing to be done, now,
now that the waves of our undoing have begun to strike
on us,
is to contain ourselves.

To keep still, and let the wreckage of ourselves go,
let everything go, as the wave smashes us,
yet keep still, and hold
the tiny grain of something that no wave can wash away,
not even the most massive wave of destiny.

Among all the smashed debris of myself
keep quiet, and wait.
For the word is Resurrection.
And even the sea of seas will have to give up its dead.


Sun in Me

A sun will rise in me,
I shall slowly resurrect,
already the whiteness of false dawn is on my inner ocean.

A sun in me.
And a sun in heaven.
And beyond that, the immense sun behind the sun,
a sun of immense distances, that fold themselves together
within the genitals of living space.
And further, the sun within the atom
which is god in the atom.

-----

P-i-R has used editorial licence concerning the order of the poems - to gain maximum effect.

The Umbrella Man, a topical poem

The writer, especially the poet, is always on the lookout for the unusual. The following happened this morning.

The Umbrella Man

Glorious glorious sunshine
and not one sign of anything else in the sky
not one sign of a fluffy white cloudlet
or even a single herring-bone
and strange to say not even one vapour trail
in this day's blank blue sunlit sky.

The weather forecast
is on the Sony Walkman
when I take some garden rubbish
to the large green compost bin
at the end of the street -
record temperatures for the time of year
warm wind from Africa
high pressure over the Alps
quicksilver climbing
to a record 21 celsius.

Coming towards me a man about his business
determined stride
confidently swinging his umbrella
carrying a large green shoulder bag.

Mysterious. An umbrella - this weather?
And a large green bag?

The stranger stops at the bottle-bank
and sets down his green bag on the pavement.

Now he starts fishing. Yes, fishing
with his umbrella. Out of the bottle-bank
come the beer bottles -
hanging delicately on the umbrella's tip. One
by one he fishes them out. A catch almost every time.
One, two, three, four, five ...
he lines them up on the pavement.

When he's finished he transfers his catch
to the green bag -
and soon it's bulging with bottles, it takes
a hefty heave to lift it. Now off he goes
with his bulging bag of bottles
rattling gently down the street -
his umbrella casually swinging
pointing the way.


c)- Gwilym Williams 2008

In Austria empty beer bottles are returnable - they fetch 9 (euro)cents each.

Poetry in public places - Aberdaron, North Wales

In this occasional series Poet-in-Residence looks at poetry to be found on various stones and monuments in public locations around the world. Today, P-i-R travels from Singapore (search sidebar) to Wales and the tiny village of Aberdaron at the end of the Lleyn Peninsula where the priestly poet R S Thomas was for a time God's local incumbent. Aberdaron was in fact his last official posting. He retired to live in the grounds of a large house not far away - today a National Trust property. There's a famous photograph of Thomas staring, almost glaring, out of the window - looking rather like a wild goat.
On a piece of Snowdonia slate in the seashore churchyard at Aberdaron can be found an R S Thomas' sonnet. It comes from the 1988 publication 'The Echoes Return Slow'. In 'Echoes' each poem is preceeded by a piece of text. The text is the thought that gives way to the poem.

Minerva's bird, Athene noctua; too small for wisom, yet unlike its tawnier cousin active by day, too, its cat's eyes bitterer than the gorse petals. But at night it was lyrical, its double note sounded under the stars in counterpoint to the fall of the waves.

There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl calling
far off, and a fox barking
miles away. It is then that I lie
in the lean hours awake, listening
to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic
rising and falling, rising and falling
wave on wave on the long shore
by the village, that is without light
and companionless. And the thought comes
of that other being who is awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.

Sunday 24 February 2008

A walk in the spring

This morning Poet-in-Residence took himself for a walk on a hill in summer-like weather. This poem, basically unrevised, is almost straight from the poet's notebook, but serves to give an idea of what Poet-in-Residence gets up to as the weather improves.

Spring on Oak Hill

Between the bomb craters
the grass is flat to the ground and grey
and bursting through
between the grassy straws are furry cowbells
like fluffy mice they are -
most hairy to the touch. Nearby are
scrubby oak trees with pale brown leaves
and tiny spiders throwing lines
and rosehip tangles and old black berries.

Loamy molehills fill a corner of a field
- the moles have been busy building hills
for beetles to trundle up and down - and then suddenly
there on the wooded bank in winter's wreckage
of wood and fencepost
the violets. I stoop to inhale their perfume.

And then I hear the rustling
of the zephyr in the crabby oaks
- that tiny stream of sound like the wings
of a thousand butterflies. It comes and goes
in its intensity.

There's now a ruined shed with its roof caved-in
and the door gone. I look inside at shadows
on a limestone wall and on the floor
inspect a broken window. All around the unseen
birds twitter and gargle with throaty
chirping and warbling - syncopation in trees
and bushes
and somewhere hidden in the grass.

The pale earth path leads through a tangle
of brambles
- only the dog rose in leaf,
through more bomb craters
with mossy stones
and sleeping lizards waiting for
summer.

There's the courting ritual of the great-tit to witness -
hopping from tree to tree with his follow-me song, and
constantly glancing over his shoulder, but he needn't
worry; she tails him quietly - at a suitable distance.

On the top of the hill there's a man
stripped to the waist
flying a colourful kite for a girl. And a woman
with a voice like a squeaky wheel. I crunch
a snail's abandoned shell underfoot as I come to the top,
to the smashed concrete of an old battery and the spent
fireworks of the New Year celebrations.

c)- Gwilym Williams 2008

P-i-R has decided to work on this rough draft in public as it were. The first thing is that it must now cool its heels for a couple of weeks so that it can be revisited with new eyes.

Trying Yeats's shorts...

This morning on the local radio an actor was reading short extracts from the poetry of William Butler Yeats (albeit in the German language). Yeats's poetry appears to lend itself to being pulled apart. Rather like removing pieces one by one from a completed jigsaw if you like. The bits seem to increase in intensity and value when removed from the whole. You know how it is when you have a 2,000 piece jigsaw; how closely you must examine the pieces before you can figure out where they go. It's all a bit like that, only in reverse, examining the pieces and figuring out where they came from, or more to the point - what they are telling us.
Poet-in-Residence has the idea to engage here in a little selecting and sorting of various lines from Yates's poetry, searching for lines that have an almost haiku-like intensity. Lines that invite a little meditation.
And so, like the man in the cubicle, in the Bernhard comedy 'Claus Peymann buys trousers', P-i-R tries Yeats's shorts for size.


from The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


from Sailing to Byzantium

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.


from The Song of Wandering Aengus

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.


from The Lake Isle Of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.


from A Dialogue of Self and Soul

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!


from A Dialogue of Self and Soul

When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.


from When You Are Old

When you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.


from The Circus Animals' Desertion

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.


from Vacillation

No longer in Lethean foliage caught
Begin the preparation for your death
And from the fortieth winter by that thought
Test every work of intellect or faith,
And everything that your own hands have wrought,
And call those works extravagance of breath
That are not suited for such men as come
Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.

Saturday 23 February 2008

Charlotte Mew, poet - part 2

Charlotte Mew published just one collection of poetry during her life; in 1916 a chapbook collection of 16 poems, 'The Farmer's Bride'. A collection of 25 poems was published posthumously.
The title poem from 'The Farmer's Bride', tells the tale of an inarticulate farmer who bemoans the fact that his beautiful young bride will have nothing to do with him. Charlotte Mew liked to write poetry from the point of view of a man. And she could certainly get away from the sentimental platitudes of her predecessors - Elizabeth Barrett Browning & co. - when she set her mind to it. The following is almost Lawrencian in style and flavour with its ear for dialect and its rustic turn of phrase.

The Farmer's Bride

Three summers since I chose a maid,
Too young maybe - but more's to do
At harvest-time than a bide and woo.
When us was wed she turned afraid
Of love and me and all things human;
Like the shut of winter's day
Her smile went out, and 'twadn't a woman -
More like a little frightened fay.
One night, in the Fall, she runned away.

"Out 'mong the sheep, her be," they said,
Should properly have been abed;
But sure enough she wadn't there
Lying awake with her wide brown stare.
So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down
We chased her, flying like a hare
Before our lanterns. To Church-Town
All in a shiver and a scare
We caught her, fetched her home at last
And turned the key upon her, fast.

She does the work about the house
As well as most, but like a mouse:
Happy enough to cheat and play
With birds and rabbits and such as they,
So long as men-folk keep away
"Not near, not near!" her eyes beseech
When one of us comes within reach.
The woman say that beasts in stall
Look round like children at her call.
I've hardly heard her speak at all.
Shy as a leveret, swift as he,
Straight and slight as a young larch tree,
Sweet as the first wild violets, she,
To her wild self. But what to me?

The short days shorten and the oaks are brown,
The blue smoke rises to the low grey sky,
One leaf in the still air falls slowly down,
A magpie's spotted feathers lie
An the black earth spread white with rime,
The berries redden-up to Christmas-time.
What's Christmas-time without there be
Some other in the house than we!

She sleeps up in the attic there
Alone, poor maid. 'Tis but a stair
Betwixt us. Oh! my God! the down
The soft young down of her, the brown,
The brown of her - her eyes, her hair, her hair!

Haiku from zen speug

As Poet-in-Residence sees it, Scotland's new Robbie Burns could be Edinburgh's John McDonald. John, a retired stonemason with an eye for detail and a clutter-free poetry blog aptly named 'zen speug' (see link) has given Poet-in-Residence permission to filch a few more haiku from the 'zen speug' library ... together with their English translations of course!
Enjoy a small glass of your best malt and you make what you can of the following,-


the bank clark gaes steive
gies me the siller -
attercap on the wa


the bank clerk stiffens
gives me the money -
spider on the wall


'ROADWORKS' -
navvies roon the bore
gove doon oan a siller sin


'ROADWORKS' -
labourers round the hole
gaze down on a silver sun


playtime -
the sin hings abuin
the netba skep


recess -
the sun hangs above
the netball basket


on the scrievein-desk
fawin petals
hae beereit the pen


on the writing desk
falling petals
have buried the pen


c)- John McDonald

Friday 22 February 2008

D H Lawrence, poet - part 9

D H Lawrence spent part of his later life in Mexico. He is buried there. His novel, 'The Plumed Serpent', is set in Mexico. The first chapter, a bull-fight, is a terrific under-your-skin read; not at all like Hemingway's technically precise bull-fight scenes in the novel 'Fiesta' for instance. Lawrence almost gets into the minds, such as they are, of the bulls, the horses and somehow squirms into the souls of the crowd in the stadium, through the character Kate.
'The Plumed Serpent' is the deity Quetzalcoatl. There are several Quetzalcoatl poems from the pen of the poet to be savoured. With D H Lawrence it is often a case of what you see you get. When you're in Mexico you get Mexico. But you will always get Lawrence; a poet without a mask, as the University of Nottingham's Professor of English, the late Vivian de Sola Pinto, quite rightly described him.

The Living Quetzalcoatl

I am the Living Quetzalcoatl.
Naked I come from out of the deep
From the place which I call my Father,
Naked have I travelled the long way round
from heaven, past the sleeping sons of God.

Out of the depths of the sky, I came like an eagle.
Out of the bowels of the earth like a snake.

All things that lift in the lift of living between earth and sky, know
me.

But I am the inward star invisible.
And the star is the lamp in the hand of the Unknown Mover.
Beyond me is a Lord who is terrible, and wonderful, and dark to
me forever.
Yet I have lain in his loins, ere he begot me in Mother space.

Now I am alone on earth, and this is mine.
The roots are mine, down the dark, moist path of the snake.
And the branches are mine, in the paths of the sky and the bird,
But the spark of me that is me is more than mine own.

And the feet of men, and the hands of the women know me.
And knees and thighs and loins, and the bowels of strength and seed
are lit with me.
The snake of my left-hand out of the darkness is kissing your feet
with his mouth of caressive fire,
And putting his strength in your heels and ankles, his flame in your
knees and your legs and your loins, his circle of rest in your
belly.
For I am Quetzalcoatl, the feathered snake.
And I am not with you till my serpent has coiled his circle of rest in
your belly.
And I, Quetzalcoatl, the eagle of the air, am brushing your faces
with vision.
I am fanning your breasts with my breath.
And building my nest of peace in your bones.
I am Quetzalcoatl, of the Two Ways.

Poetic directions in North Wales

Poet-in-Residence, on the trail of R S Thomas, approached a local woman hanging out washing in a small village near Aberdaron, North Wales. Aberdaron itself is situated on a bay in a wild and remote location, a lovely and lonely spot on the tip of the long finger of the Lleyn Peninsula. It is a village where R S Thomas served as a priest. Poet-in-Residence's telling poem tells the tale.


Telling Directions

R S Thomas is it?
Famous poet?
We're Chapel here...
Well my husband is.
'nglish he is, that man Thomas;
Lived in Cardiff I believe; once
Painted a church as black as night.
I can't say I liked him very much;
Mind you, I haven't actually read him,
But I've heard things you see.
Welsh, you say? And lived here?
We're Chapel here...
No need for windows in a chapel,
The buggers can't read, he used to say;
And him a priest.
Nominated?
For the Nobel Prize?
I suppose, you could ask
in the village post office -
She's ... 'nglish.

c)- Gwilym Williams

The poem is a little tongue-in-cheek, but contains more than a grain of truth. Having said that, P-i-R found the Aberdaroners to be more than friendly, enjoyed a glass or two with his fish & chip supper in The Ship, and in the mornings took long bracing walks over the hills.

Robinson Jeffers and the wild swan

Robinson Jeffers, the so-called isolationist poet of Carmel, California, reaches for his pencil and tries to get what's going on in his head set down on paper. Never the simplest of tasks; but here, in sonnet form, using the swan as metaphor, he succeeds beautifully. The last line is majestic. An inspiration to us all!

Love the Wild Swan

'I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass blade's curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings.'
- This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast,
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your ... self? At least
Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of wings. Love the wild swan.

Thursday 21 February 2008

Charlotte Mew, part 1

According to Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Mew was the best woman poet of the day. Sadly, due to financial worries and family problems, Mew killed herself on 24th March 1928, at the age of 58, by drinking poison. Poet-in-Residence looks at the intriguing and neglected world of Charlotte Mew, beginning with her poem 'The Call'.

The Call

From our low seat beside the fire
Where we have dozed and dreamed and watched the glow
Or raked the ashes, stopping so
We scarcely saw the sun or rain
Above, or looked much higher
Than this same quiet red or burned-out fire.
Tonight we heard a call,
A rattle on the window pane,
A voice on the sharp air,
And felt a breath stirring our hair,
A flame within us: Something swift and tall
Swept in and out and that was all.
Was it a bright or a dark angel? Who can know?
It left no mark upon the snow,
But suddenly it snapped the chain
Unbarred, flung wide the door
Which will not shut again;
And so we cannnot sit here any more.
We must arise and go:
The world is cold without
And dark and hedged about
With mystery and enmity and doubt,
But we must go
Though yet we do not know
Who called, or what marks we shall leave upon the snow.

Michael Newman revisits a Grimmett

In a recent letter to Poet-in-Residence the Cotswold poet Michael Newman wrote - it is difficult in this consumer age to write poetry that stands apart...I am not so much interested in 'isms' and 'wasms' as speaking what I perceive to be the poetic truth. If only more poets would adopt Michael Newman's philosophy! The world's bookshelves are unfortunately groaning with 'isms' and 'wasms'
Poet-in-Residence readers will be familiar with the work of Michael Newman. There's a wonderful poem on Poet-in-Residence about the Grimmett family photograph (scroll sidebar). In 'Distances', published in the March 2006 edition of the Ligden Poetry Society's journal Pulsar Michael Newman encounters Edwin Grimmett once more - this time somewhere in the Cotswold landscape.


Distances

From the hill's litany of stone,
The wind commands respect,
And intones a mantra
Only the farmworker understands.

Today, that man is Edwin Grimmett,
Back sickle-bent with (too much) ditching,
His face a brazier fuelled
By mulled cider.

*

Did I betray you, Edwin,
When I broke your bread
Among the townsfolk and commuters?

They can admire
From the safety of service station,
Or arrive noisily en masse
In a ramblers' coach.

But you alone are the stained glass
At the entrance of the forest,
On which the figures of history
Are played out.

c)- Michael Newman 2006

The Ligden Poetry Society will be holding a Live Microphone Session on Wednesday the 12th March 2008 commencing 8:00pm at The Goddard Arms, Clyffe Pypard, near Broad Hinton. YOU are invited! Visit the Pulsar website (see P-i-R's links) for more details.

D H Lawrence, poet - part 8

In northern climes spring is appearing in the hedgerows. Small birds are about their business. In gardens and parks snowdrops are shaking their heads, shaking their heads. Daffodils are showing in many parts of England. Retired people are appearing again in their gardens in the sunshine between the sudden showers, picking up the debris of winter storms, raking away old leaves and grass. Activity is once again the order of the day. Violets may be appearing. Mysteriously, in P-i-R's garden a single white rose has survived all the trials and tribulations of winter.
D H Lawrence was fascinated by spring, the season of birth and regeneration. His poem 'Craving for Spring' demonstrates the thrill the poet feels standing on the threshold of spring. Here is the concluding part, the climax, of the poem.

from Craving for Spring

Ah come, come quickly, spring!
Come and lift us towards our culmination, we myriads;
we who have never flowered, like patient cactuses.
Come and lift us to our end, to blossom, bring us to our summer
we who are winter-weary in the winter of the world.
Come making the chaffinch nests hollow and cosy,
come and soften the willow buds till they are puffed and
furred,
then blow them over with gold.
Come and cajole the gawky colt's-foot flowers.

Come quickly, and vindicate us
against too much death.
Come quickly, and stir the rotten globe of the world from
within,
burst it with germination, with world anew.
Come now, to us, your adherents, who cannot flower from the
ice.
All the world gleams with the lilies of Death the
Unconquerable,
but come, give us our turn.
Enough of the virgins and lilies, of passionate, suffocating
perfume of corruption,
no more narcissus perfume, lily harlots, the blades of sensation
piercing the flesh to blossom of death.
Have done, have done with this shuddering, delicious business
of thrilling ruin in the flesh, of pungent passion, of rare,
death-edged ecstasy.
Give us our turn, give us a chance, let our hour strike,
O soon, soon!

Let the darkness turn violet with rich dawn.
Let the darkness be warmed, warmed through to a ruddy
violet,
incipient purpling towards summer in the world of the heart of
man.

Are the violets already here!
Show me! I tremble so much to hear it, that even now
on the threshold of spring, I fear I shall die.
Show me the violets that are out.

Oh, if it be true, and the living darkness of the blood of man is
purpling with violets,
if the violets are coming out from under the rack of men,
winter-rotten and fallen
we shall have spring.
Pray not to die on this Pisgah* blossoming with violets.
Pray to live through.

If you catch a whiff of violets from the darkness of the shadow
of man
it will be spring in the world,
it will be spring in the world of the living;
wonderment organising itself, heralding itself with the violets,
stirring of new seasons.

Ah, do not let me die on the brink of such anticipation!
Worse, let me not deceive myself.

-----
*Pisgah - the peak from which Moses beheld the Promised Land.

Wednesday 20 February 2008

Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

In two days time it will be the 65th anniversary of the death of Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans Scholl and their friend Christoph Probst. The trio spent their last hours in the Gestapo prison at Stadelheim, Munich, before they went to the guillotine.
Sophie Scholl was a 21-year old student. Her so-called crime, and that of the other two, was the distribution of leaflets. Leaflets that went against the philosophy of the Nazi machine. The so-called judge, a cruel man named Roland Freisler, sentenced the 3 young students to death. This was duly carried out on the 22nd February 1943. Sophie Scholl's words on the way to her death were: Look, the sun is shining.
Poet-in-Residence respectfully requests that you consider visiting Alan Morrison's Recusant website (link at left) to read P-i-R's tribute (posted under P-i-R's real identity - Gwilym Williams) to the moral courage and integrity of this young girl who paid for her words so bravely with her life. Sophie Scholl and her friends in the White Rose are real heroes, a much abused word today, for example - in connection with young men who play football for megabucks, in this rather sad and disfunctional world.

haiku

look
the sun
is shining

Sophie Scholl - 1943

George Szirtes, on the current price of poetry

Poet-in-Residence is pleased to feature the following item received from the poet George Szirtes. A considered and timely contribution to the price of poetry debate.

I am not sure anyone has yet accused a poetry publisher of profiteering or cashing in. Almost all of them work at a loss, subsidised by the publishing house through the sales of more popular books. As far as I know, the Penguin Modern European Poets and the Penguin Modern Poets series was subsidised by D H Lawrence's 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', and Secker (my first single-book publisher) ran poetry on the back of sales of Erica Jong's 'Fear of Flying'. Bloodaxe and Carcanet could not operate without public subsidy, which does however insist they contribute by producing broadly popular books too (such as Bloodaxe's anthologies).

I am sure you know that poetry is not priced by the word. The economics of poetry publishing is more complicated (and nevertheless more fraught) than that. I am relieved that publishers publish poetry at all. A popular poet like Wendy Cope or Carol Ann Duffy may sell as many as 30,000 copies off the back of school syllabuses. Most books of poetry sell in their hundreds, and not many hundreds at that. When my own 'Reel' won the T S Eliot Prize it sold some 3,000 copies - which was remarkable but that's a one-off (my usual sales in latter years have been around the 1,000 mark, good for poetry but hardly anything else). I think some fairly recent survey found that 67% of all poetry sales were for books by Seamus Heaney.

Which brings me to Heaney. He has actually won the Nobel Prize for Literature so on the words-per-pence count he is worth a great deal more than, say, I am. And compare the cost of a poetry book to the cost of a meal in a cheap restaurant. There are not many places in England you can have a two course meal plus a glass of wine for under ten pounds per head. Compare to a cheap bottle of wine. The wine goes of course. Heaney is worth two bottles. And he lasts forever as long as you or I live. Compare to any other pleasure people don't think twice about spending on. A train ride to London and back, second class, will cost you more than twice as much as my forthcoming book*.

George Szirtes
-----

*'New & Collcted Poems' by George Szirtes (Bloodaxe Books) pub. date 29th November 2008. GBP 15.00p, paper, 978 1 85224 813 0,

Is Seamus Heaney the most expensive poet?

In a moment of madness Poet-in-Residence, perhaps influenced by the Irish Times blurb which speaks of incontestable weight and majesty Poet-in-Residence parted with a penny short of nine pounds for a volume of poems running to 76 pages, or 20 sheets of trimmed A4 paper.
So what's on these 20 sheets of paper that makes them worth nearly 50 pence a sheet? The book that Poet-in-Residence has before him is 'District and Circle' (faber and faber) by Seamus Heaney.
The first poem in the book is 'The Turnip Snedder'. It is a poem of 20 lines. The 20 lines are laid out in couplets and use up 2 pages in the book. But worse is yet to come. [at this point in the original post there came a lot of mathematics which P-i-R believed to be incorrect - he couldn't believe his own sums! But on checking it seems that 'District and Circle' does run out at a hefty and majestic 12 pence a page. It really does! We've come a very long way pricewise since James Joyce's 'Pomes a Penny Each']
The poem 'In a Loaning' consists of a mere 4 lines of text. It has a whole 12 pence page to itself. No wonder it speaks of -deep coffers.

In a Loaning

Spoken for in autumn, recovered speech
Having its way again, I gave a cry:
'Not beechen green, but these shin-deep coffers
Of copper-fired leaves, these beech holes grey.'

Another poem 'A Hagging Match' consists of 20 words including the title. It has a whole page to itself. It is a six-line poem.

In the book's 'Notes and Acknowledgements' Poet-in-Residence sees that more than 20 of the poems have appeared elsewhere. He has the feeling that he has been duly shoved through 'The Turnip Snedder',-

and turnip-heads were let fall and fed

to the juiced-up inner blades

----

D H Lawrence, poet - part 7

Poet-in-Residence has explored the natural world of D H Lawrence the poet. In earlier posts there were poems about a poisonous snake, a baby tortoise, a bat flying around a room. The bat poem is P-i-R's favourite nature poem from Lawrence. The bat poem demonstrates how animals and humans not only see things differently but perceive things differently from their different and unique standpoints.
In the poem that follows Lawrence turns his attention to the most dangerous beast on the planet - the human animal.

Moral Clothing

When I am clothed I am a moral man,
and unclothed, the word has no meaning for me.

When I put on my coat, my coat has pockets
and in the pockets are things I require,
so I wish no man to pick my pocket
and I will pick the pocket of no man.

A man's business is one of his pockets, his bank account too
his credit, his name, his wife even may be just another of his
pockets.
And I loathe the thought of being a pilferer
a pick-pocket.
That is why business seems to me despicable,
and most love-affairs, just sneak-thief-pocket-picking
of dressed-up people.

When I stand in my shirt I have no pockets
therefore no morality of pockets;
but still my nakedness is clothed with responsibility
towards those near and dear to me, my very next of kin.
I am not yet alone.

Only when I am stripped stark naked I am alone
and without morals, and without immorality.
The invisible gods have no moral truck with us.

And if stark naked I approach a fellow-man or fellow-woman
they must be naked too,
and none of us must expect morality of each other:
I am that I am, take it or leave it.
Offer me nothing but that which you are, stark and strange.
Let there be no accomodation at this issue.

Tuesday 19 February 2008

Alan Morrison being discursive...

With Alan Morrison's kind permission, Poet-in-Residence presents an extract from the lengthy poem 'Daddy-Long-Thoughts'. This poem, like 'Miss Discombobulated' (sidebar) is from Morrison's book 'The Mansion Gardens' (Paula Brown Publishing - 2006)

from Daddy-Long-Thoughts

In the musty existing room of my parents,
crammed full with family mementos, books,
photographs, Styx's toll-fare tokens
or the hold of a Pharaoh's morbid tomb,
crouch Eden's forgotten descendants, once giants
now shrivelled into earthly, miniature size
like two toy-scale figures in a rented dolls' house
sandwiched between a struggling back garden
and windowed partition to the outside world -
ghosts haunting progress's tumbleweeding suburbs,
eyes seamed with crow's-feet, stitched under-shadows
stewed-tea grey, old-shoe-brown pupils
glistening tiredness, penetrating as nerves
jarred between contrapuntal cogs
of thought, strung out by crippling
preoccupations of the moment,
terror's cryptic puzzles, silent shouts
skirting-board-shrunk inversley in size
to towering effect; nerves' stretched piano wires
creaking lost chords, lost notes, lost times;
eyes strained as recycled tea-bags, marbled
as milk-swirling tea, or egg-whites
bubbling in a frying pan shrapnelled with shell-
splinters; ancestral tut-tut of out
-of-kilter clock stuck forever at Six -
tea-time to startch-scented Edwardians -
illustrates to etiquetteless ear
what on some other plane struggles to be heard
in deafening, daytime, stuffy lounge silence,
dins of the taxidermist's inner-ear:
cork-creaking minutes, stone-scraping seconds -
Time is fed up, it's fretting, it's biting
its nails, until the next train comes.

c)- Alan Morrison 2006

P-i-R has a useful link to Alan Morrison's Recusant website. There you can read some amazing poems; not least the Gwilym Williams poem 'On the Feldherrenhalle Steps', Poet-in-Residence humbly adds.

Untitled by Anonymous

Two years ago the poem that follows arrived at Pulsar Poetry in Swindon, England. The journal's editor, David Pike, published the poem in the March 2006 edition under the heading Untitled.... A brief note attached to the poem indicated that its author was taking shelter in a refuge for women. There is always a way out the note concluded.
Poet-in-Residence admires the courage and fortitude of the anonymous poet. For her and the many other women all over the world in every culture and country who are forced into hiding this poem is now displayed here. P-i-R has taken the liberty of giving the poem its deserving title.

There is always a way out

His demons are destroying you
Taking out his pain on your body;
He is being tortured, now it's your turn.

You love him but can't take much more
You're sick of being the punch bag,
You're looking for a way out.

But it's the way that he kisses you
It's the way he holds you till you fall asleep
That makes you think this isn't so bad.

He is always sorry,
It was just an argument
Just a slap.

You gave up fighting too long ago to care
You're stuck in the give-take and you're the one giving,
You need to leave.

He's no good for you and you know it.
He won't ever change but you wish he would;
Leaving only proves the friends he made you give up right.

You know they're right.
He won't let you go without a fight
He's being tortured and now it's your turn.


Anonymous (2006)

Is George Szirtes the most expensive poet?

Important Notice: The following appears after correspondence with George Szirtes here and elsewhere. It represents the opinions and views of Poet-in-Residence.

P-i-R is fully aware that poets are not the ones making the money, if indeed there is any real money to be made from the publishing of contemporary poetry books. There is no suggestion whatsoever on P-i-R that George Szirtes is in any way responsible for the pricing of his books. Pricing is a matter for the publisher. Publishers carry potential classic winners and non-runners. Szirtes falls into the first category. One day he may even win the Nobel Prize. He is not without a chance. Bloodaxe also supports many unknown poets including a few no-hopers. That sales of these lesser poets works will not be large is putting it mildly. It all costs money -this is clear. P-i-R's concern in raising this debate is that poetry does not become a middle class coffee table sideshow. In other words P-i-R is saying that poetry books MUST NOT price themselves out of reach of the workers, the students, the housewives, the unemployed. Now read on.

George Szirtes' new collection, a 448 page paperback tome, titled simply 'New & Collected Poems' (Bloodaxe), is due out on 29th November 2008. Poet-in-Residence mentions this with some concern because the book weighs in pricewise at a hefty GBP15.00p - plus GBP3.75p p&p for EU residents. This total GBP18.75 (about €30.00 - or getting on for US$38.00) is in Hungary, these days an EU country, where George hails from and where he presumably has something of a following, viel Geld*! (*a lot of money)
A lot of midnight oil has gone into 'New & Collected Poems'. Szirtes is also teaching at East Anglia University and he will soon be judging the Strokestown Poetry Competition so he's a very busy man.
East Anglia is a pleasant but expensive area of Britain - the Queen has her summer residence in that neck of the sand dunes for example. It's an area for people with plenty of folding money or very flexible credit cards.
The point that Poet-in-Residence is coming to, and it has nothing really to do with George Szirtes, is the high price of poetry books these days. Poetry appears to be in danger of becoming a middle-class coffee table hobby. Firms like Bloodaxe appear to be driving the price of poetry books out of the reach of the Man on the Chain Bridge - the ordinary man in the street in Budapest, or even in Vienna where P-i-R is currently ensconced.
The half-page advert for Szirtes' 'New & Collected Poems' in the latest Bloodaxe Catalogue features the following - given as an example of the Szirtes focus on the possibility of happiness and apprehension of disaster which, if the blurb is anything to go by, appears to be the main theme of the book.

Happiness

He watched her skip across the street and take
a moment to look back at him. His heart
stopped in its tracks, as thought it had fallen apart
for a moment then reassembled. It was the ache
remained, as though life had suddenly shrunk
to one thin cord that was being sounded deep
beneath the flesh, like being half-asleep
then awake, like being doped or drunk
yet clear, as if life had been this dizziness
of atoms and molecules and chance events
out of which the towering moments rose
on stilts, on points, balancing on less
than atoms and was a transforming of moments
if only because the floor vanishes, the moment goes.

-----

On an brighter note Poet-in-Residence finds that there are poetic bargains to be found by the man on the 41 tram if he's prepared to be diligent and shop around. P-i-R's latest purchase for example: 'Collected Poems in English' by Joseph Brodsky (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 540 pages, €15.00/US$19.00.

-----

Monday 18 February 2008

A valentine from Ogden Nash

Poet-in-Residence's own poetry has been compared to a mixture of Ogden Nash and R S Thomas; and this by no-less a critic than Alan Morrison (handy link to Morrison's Recusant in the sidebar), himself described as 'a remarkable poetic talent' by Strother Jeremson in the 'New England Gazette'.
But before we all start banging our own or each other's drums who exactly is this Ogden Nash; this failed serious poet, this failed bond salesman, this failed Harvard student...yes, what are his credentials, what are the credentials of this failure?
On looking into all this, Poet-in-Residence discovered that Ogden Nash is the favourite poet of a loved one connected to him (these days by nothing more than a gossamer strand). This loved one oft recited the poem that follows.
But back to the point, can we take Nash seriously? What credence, if any, can we give this New Yorker, this comic versifier, who dares abuse the holy Milton - When I consider how my life is spent / I hardly ever repent...? How can we take seriously a poet who says all women are dictators...?
The point, judging by the poem that follows, is that we needn't take this W C Fields of modern poetry very seriously at all.
Ogden Nash is the spilled glass at the cocktail party, he is the dog who cocks his leg at your gatepost, he is the proverbial breath of fresh air. Above all, he is wonderful off-the-wall entertainment - pure and simple. P-i-R takes much pleasure in coming to know him.

To My Valentine

More than a catbird hates a cat,
Or a criminal hates a clue,
Or the Axis hates the United States,
That's how much I love you.

I love you more than a duck can swim,
And more than a grapefruit squirts,
I love you more than gin rummy is a bore,
And more than a toothache hurts.

As a shipwrecked sailor hates the sea,
Or a juggler hates a shove,
As a hostess detests unexpected guests,
That's how much you I love.

I love you more than a wasp can sting,
And more than the subway jerks,
I love you as much as a beggar needs a crutch,
And more than a hangnail irks.

I swear to you by the stars above,
And below, if such there be,
As the High Court loathes perjurious oaths,
That's how you're loved by me.

-----

Gerald England, sleepless in limbo

The Spring Haiku 2008 blog is now in full swing. There's a link on the sidebar. Before long in the Poet-in-Residence residence, as in millions of other residences, many timepieces will require an obligatory 1 hour adjustment. Will it be 1 hour forward or 1 hour back? Forward or back? P-i-R has an aide-memoire.-
Spring forward,
Fall back
.
Gerald England, widely published poet and editor of the award-winning New Hope International Review website, has kindly given permission for a timely poem to appear on Poet-in-Residence.
A curious thing is that we are always advised by the authorities to adjust our timepieces at 2 o'clock in the morning, or is it 3 o'clock? No wonder then that in the England household, where there are more than 13 timepieces, the poet finds himself in limbo time...he speaks for millions!

Limbo Time

two-thirty in the morning
i am awakened by my wife
with 'do you want a cup of tea?'
a rhetorical question
it is already made.
we sit in bed supping the welcome brew
'the clocks go back,
we can have an extra hour in bed'
mentally i count them,
bedside, microwave, video,
computer, grandfather -
a baker's dozen or more
it will take me at least an hour
to adjust them all
it is two fifty in the morning
or is it only ten to two?
we are living in limbo time
have we lived an hour twice
or did time stand really still?
i turn the pillows over
and try again to sleep.

c)-Gerald England 2005

There's a useful P-i-R link to the world of Gerald England in the sidebar.

P-i-R takes his hat off to anyone who understands the mysteries of the video machine.

Sunday 17 February 2008

Arthur Hugh Clough's Qua Cursum Ventus*

*As the wind blows so the vessel takes its course.

This poem was written by the Liverpool born poet Clough during his time at Oxford. It records the poet's regret at losing many old friends due to the religious ballyhoo going on at the University around 1845 - the so-called Oxford Movement. Clough declined to sign the '39 articles of faith'.
There's another small item with a poem by Arthur Hugh Clough on the site (simply scroll down a few places).

Qua Cursum Ventus

As ships, becalmed at eve, that lay
With canvas drooping, side by side,
Two towers of sail at dawn of day
Are scarce long leagues apart descried;

When fell the night, upsprung the breeze,
And all the darkling hours they plied,
Nor dreamt but each the self-same seas
By each was cleaving, side by side:

Even so - but why the tale reveal
Of those whom, year by year unchanged,
Brief absence joined anew, to feel,
Astounded, soul from soul estranged?

At dead of night their sails were filled,
And onward each rejoicing steered -
Ah, neither blame, for neither willed,
Or wist, what first with dawn appeared!

To veer, how vain! On, onward strain,
Brave barks! In light, in darkness too,
Through winds and tides one compass guides -
To that, and your own selves, be true.

But O blithe breeze! and O great seas,
Though never, that earliest parting past,
On your wide plain they join again,
Together lead them home at last.

One port, methought, alike they sought,
One purpose hold wherever they fare, -
O bounding breeze, O rushing seas!
At last, at last, unite them there!


-----
Poet-in-Residence has taken the liberty of removing numerous apostroph's to m'ke the th'ng easi'r to read. He hopes Clough appr'ves!

A Mystery Tour

The Spring haiku blog has arrived (see link at left). Can summer be far behind? Coach drivers are cleaning their mirrors and checking their first-aid kits, making ready their vehicles for those day trips to popular Welsh resorts like Tenby and Aberystwyth; and of course ever popular, particularly with senior citizens, is the mystery tour. Passengers compete to be the first to guess the destination. There's often a light-hearted communal flutter - guessing the round-trip mileage. And of course, on the return journey in the dark, lusty song and conversation fades away to be replaced by gentle snoring.

A Mystery Tour

The old souls tripping over the edge
of Wales and over Offa*
and into God's green countryside
on the black ribboned roads
curling through the gentle
rolling hills and dark deciduous dales
and along the winding lanes
hedged-in between the dripping trees
and the steaming fields of new-mown grass
and waving barleycorn
high above the muddy estuaries
filled with stock-still cormorants
stationed like black crosses
drying out on seaweed coated rocks
where the sun has now edged out
will doubtless want to sing
a merry song or two
and pass around the celebratory cap
for the loose-change collection
on the long way back,-
We'll meet again...
Show me the way to go home...
'Jolly good driver, Uncle Jack'
'Every grandma's favourite son'
'Plays the spoons. Plays the lottery'
'Knows all the pubs for miles around'
'And all the tea-shop toilet stops along the way'
'And all the 24 hour garages'
'And all the cop shops'
...along the long way back
from The Land of Song
to the sleepy land of Somnus.

c)- Gwilym Williams

*Offa's Dyke is an earthern rampart which runs along an ancient border of Wales with England. It is named for it's builder, King Offa.

Saturday 16 February 2008

Liverpool City of Culture 2008 project

Poet-in-Residence recently featured an item on 'Arthur Clough, the Liverpool Poet' (scroll January sidebar for details) and more recently an item titled 'City of Culture 2008, poetry contest'.
P-i-R's attachment to Merseyside goes back a long way - to his misspent youth in fact. A long time ago indeed - but P-i-R fondly remembers the Old Transporter Bridge (between Runcorn and Widnes) and such things as if it were yesterday. Tales may be told. Time will tell. Watch this space for details, as they often say at Jodrell Bank...or ought to.

P-i-R's turtle poem

The post below this features one of D H Lawrence's wonderful tortoise poems. To restore the poetic balance, before we all get too carried away, here is Poet-in-Residence's, so-far unpublished, poem about a turtle.
Would any small press editor like to take this one for publication?...P-i-R wonders, with flippers crossed.

Turtle in the Cafe´

The last customer in the cafe´
I'm sitting next to a chelonian
the size of a man's hand
in three inches of water
in striped trousers -
black and yellow.

In his bizarre uniform
he patrols the boundaries
of turtled-existence
suspiciously following intruders
who are his own reflections
in the tank's glass.

Halting at corners
he takes neck-stretching breaths
and plunges in to scare off
submarine images
with a frenzied hand-waving
and shell-rocking
demonstration of power.

His pinball flippers then propel him
in his prune-black boat
with white and orange underside
to where his other enemies lurk -
to more gulps of air
and to more rocking remonstrations.

Quite Larkinesque is his expression:
determination over resignation -
hint of puzzlement.

And when the cafe´ girl
finally turns off the lights
he begins to clonk his rim
bong! bong! bong!
hard like a warning bell
hard against the glass -
hard against the walls
of his turtle universe.


c-2008 Gwilym Williams

D H Lawrence, poet - part 6

D H Lawrence's poems 'Man and Bat' (below) and 'Snake' (also below) show not only what a wonderful poet he was but also how observant of the natural world he was. Continuing with the natural world theme Poet-in-Residence has selected another piece of writing, 'Tortoise Family Connections', to demonstrate Lawrence's craftsmanship and eye for detail.

Tortoise Family Connections

On he goes, the little one,
Bud of the universe,
Pediment of life.

Setting off somewhere, apparently.
Whither away, brisk egg?

His mother deposited him on the soil as if he were no more
than droppings,
And now he scuffles tinily past her as if she were an old rusty
tin.

A mere obstacle,
He veers round the slow great mound of her -
Tortoises always foresee obstacles.

It is no use my saying to him in an emotional voice:
'This is your Mother, she laid you when you were an egg.'

He does not even trouble to answer: 'Woman what have I to
do with thee?'
He wearily looks the other way,
And she even more wearily looks another way still,
Each with utmost apathy,
Incognizant,
Unaware,
Nothing.

As for papa,
He snaps when I offer him his offspring,
Just as he snaps when I poke a bit of stick at him,
Because he is irascible this morning, an irascible tortoise
Being touched with love, and devoid of fatherliness.

Father and mother,
And three little brothers,
And all rambling aimless, like little perambulating pebbles
scattered in the garden,
Not knowing each other from bits of earth or old tins.

Except that papa and mama are old acquaintances, of course,
Though family feeling there is none, not even the beginnings.

Fatherless, motherless, brotherless, sisterless
Little tortoise.

Row on then, small pebble,
Over the clods of the autumn, wind-chilled sunshine,
Young gaiety.

Does he look for a companion?

No, no, don't think it.
He doesn't know he is alone;
Isolation is his birthright,
This atom.

To row forward, and reach himself tall on spiny toes,
To travel, to burrow into a little loose earth, afraid of the
night,
To crop a little substance,
To move, and to be quite sure that he is moving:
Basta!
To be a tortoise!
Think of it, in a garden of inert clods
A brisk, brindled little tortoise, all to himself -
Croesus*!

In a garden of pebbles and insects
To roam, and feel the slow heart beat
Tortoise-wise, the first bell sounding
From the warm blood, in the dark-creation morning.

Moving, and being himself,
Slow, and unquestioned,
And inordinantely there, O stoic!
Wandering in the slow triumph of his own existence,
Ringing the soundless bell of his presence in chaos,
And biting the frail grass arrogantly,
Decidedly arrogantly.


*Croesus - a very rich man, King of Lydia.

P-i-R's Venetian snapshots

Poet-in-Residence has written several poems about Venice. The poem 'Snapshots' is about an interesting exhibition held recently at the Doge's Palace. The poem highlights historical connections that are sometimes overlooked.
The work first appeared about 4 months ago on 'ink-sweat-and-tears'. In the margin there's a handy P-i-R link to Charles Christian's popular and friendly website.

Snapshots

The panel of the Ottoman military tent
is blazoned with a ring of crescent moons
and a six-pointed star.

It is roughly patched and battle weary.

It hangs limply on the south wall
overseeing flanked memories in oil:

Liberi's Battle of the Dardanelles
Belloti's Battle of Albania
Aliense's Conquest of Tyre
Peranda's Victory at Jaffa

It faces the throne of Saint Peter,-
the stone chair with Koran inscriptions
and arabesque motifs.

*

Between the protagonists
are found the antique artefacts:

navigational instruments used in sailing
travel journals of merchants
11th century Islamic glassware
and several ancient carpets.

*

On a canvas a boy leads a monkey
on a long string.

*

And a few steps away
is Byron's misnamed Ponte dei Sospiri.

*

Pigeons avoid dense needle defences
on the window ledges
and settle for a night in the beams.

*

In the Doge's quadrangle the tall figures
of Mars and Neptune stand together
on the wide steps
leading up to the Senate.


c)- Gwilym Williams

Luciano Pavarotti

On learning of that the life of Luciano Pavarotti had been extinguished Poet-in-Residence composed the following small tribute which was published in Poetry Monthly.

Italian Sunset

Luciano, my friend
with your smiling eyes
and unshorn beard
with Italia in your voice -
the language of opera
and amorous dalliances -
sing now of football and of gondoliers
and of the love of well-born ladies
and of Tuscan wine and conversazioni -
sing to us now in the glowering light
of our fading torches and flambeaux -
perhaps of Naples and Venice
and send us your best long notes
down the sunset of your going.


c)- Gwilym Williams

Friday 15 February 2008

Adelaide Crapsey and the great leap forward

When it comes to that wonderful art that is modern American poetry Walt Whitman and his 'Song of Myself', whatever Allen Ginsberg may say tongue in cheek, inspired the great leap forward. With lines like The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom...- the path led away from Dickinson and Longfellow to swerve via Eliot, Stevens, and Bukowski to end up in Sylvia Plath's gas oven. More or less where we, or rather they, are today.
Let us remember lesser lights passed along the way; women like Adelaide Crapsey. They played their part too. The following is from her.

The Lonely Death

In the cold I will rise, I will bathe
In waters of ice; myself
Will shiver, and shrive myself,
Alone in the dawn, and anoint
Forehead and feet and hands;
I will shutter the windows from light,
I will place in their sockets the four
Tall candles and set them aflame
In the grey dawn; and myself
Will lay myself straight in my bed,
And draw the sheet under my chin.

John Harrison's Shutdown Fortnight

Under a back-cover leaning shed in a field, the mudfog poet John Harrison is descibed as the curmudgeonly bard of the East Cleveland bus-stops. John angrily shakes his metaphorical finger at his own poems, accuses them of being some kind of juvenile delinquents - ...the awkward squad...make no effort to better themselves...think they're good enough...just sit there.
The 24 culpable poems have gritty northern titles like 'Mine-Disused', 'Red Sky, Saltburn', 'Phil Verrill and I, Coming off Nights'.
With kind permission of John Harrison, and his editor Gordon Hodgeon, Poet-in-Residence presents his own favourite, the shortest poem in the booklet. It may well have been written when 'the bard of the East Cleveland bus-stops' was working temporarily as a security guard at Boulby Potash Mine.

Guardhouse. 0300 hours

Warmer, as the night wears on,
ambient temp plus four degrees, snow

has turned to muddy water,
slush. It's dead. There's nothing to report.

Days slip by, Christmas, New Year,
nights abuzz with demons.

c-2007 John Harrison

P-i-R has a full review of 'Shutdown Fortnight' on the award winning New Hope International website. Click on the 'geraldengland' link (at left) to go there. The internet address of mudfog is www.mudfog.co.uk

Thursday 14 February 2008

D H Lawrence the poet, part 5

One of Poet-in-Residence's favourite poems is about a creature found in a room one morning. Imagine if this happened to you. What would you do? Events at the Poet-in-Residence residence might unfold much like those described here by D H Lawrence. This amazing poem was written in Florence, Italy.

Man and Bat

When I went into my room, at mid-morning,
Say ten o'clock...
My room, a crash-box over that great stone rattle
The Via de' Bardi...

When I went into my room at mid-morning
Why?...a bird!

A bird
Flying round the room in insane circles.

In insane circles!
...A bat!

A disgusting bat
At mid-morning!...

Out! Go out!

Round and round and round
With twitchy, nervous, intolerable flight,
And a neurasthenic lunge,
And an impure frenzy;
A bat, big as a swallow!

Out, out of my room!

The venetian shutters I push wide
To the free, calm upper air;
Loop back the curtains...

Now out, out from my room!

So to drive him out, flicking with my white handkerchief: Go!
But he will not.

Round and round and round
In an impure haste,
Fumbling, a beast in air,
And stumbling, lunging and touching the walls, the bell-wires
About my room!

Always refusing to go out in the air
Above that crash-gulf of the Via de' Bardi,
Yet blind with frenzy, with cluttered fear.

At last he swerved into the window bay,
But blew back, as if an incoming wind blew him in again.
A strong inrushing wind.

And round and round and round!
Blundering more insane, and leaping, in throbs, to clutch at a
corner,
At a wire, at a bell-rope:
On and on, watched relentless by me, round and round in my
room,
Round and round and dithering with tiredness and haste and
increasing delirium
Flicker-splashing round my room.

I would not let him rest;
Not one instant cleave, cling like a blot with his breast to the
wall
In an obscure corner.
Not an instant!

I flicked him on,
Trying to drive him through the window.

Again he swerved into the window bay
And I ran forward, to frighten him forth.
But he rose, and from a terror worse than me he flew past me
Back into my room, and round, round, round in my room
Clutch, cleave, stagger,
Dropping about the air
Getting tired.

Something seemed to blow him back from the window
Every time he swerved at it;
Back on a strange parabola, then round, round, dizzy in my
room.

He could not go out;
I also realised...

It was the light of day which he could not enter,
Any more than I could enter the white-hot door of a
blast-furnace.
He could not plunge into the daylight that streamed at the
window.
It was asking too much of his nature.

Worse even than the hideous terror of me with my
handkerchief
Saying: Out, go out!...
Was the horror of white daylight in the window!

So I switched on the electric light, thinking: Now
The outside will seem brown...

But no.
The outside did not seem brown.
And he did not mind the yellow electric light.

Silent!
He was having a silent rest.
But never!
Not in my room.

Round and round and round
Near the ceiling as if in a web
Staggering;
Plunging, falling out of the web,
Broken in heaviness,
Lunging blindly,
Heavier;
And clutching, clutching for one second's pause,
Always, as if for one drop of rest,
One little drop.

And I!
Never, I say...
Go out!

Flying slower,
Seeming to stumble, to fall in air.
Blind-weary.

Yet never able to pass the whiteness of light into freedom...
A bird would have dashed through, come what might.

Fall, sink, lurch, and round and round
Flicker, flicker-heavy;
Even wings heavy:
And cleave in a high corner for a second, like a clot, also a
prayer.

But no.
Out, you beast
.

Till he fell in a corner, palpitating, spent.
And there, a clot, he squatted and looked at me.
With sticking-out, bead-berry eyes, black,
And improper derisive ears,
And shut wings,
And brown, furry body.

Brown, nut-brown, fine fur!
But it might as well have been hair on a spider; thing
With long, black-paper ears.

So, a dilemma!
He squatted there like something unclean.

No, he must not squat, nor hang, obsecene, in my room!

Yet nothing on earth will give him courage to pass the sweet
fire of day.

What then?
Hit him and kill him and throw him away?

Nay,
I didn't create him.
Let the God that created him be responsible for his death...
Only, in the bright day, I will not have this clot in my room.

Let the God who is the maker of bats watch with them in their
unclean corners...

I admit a God in every crevice,
But not bats in my room;
Nor the God of bats, while the sun shines.

So out, out you brute!...
And he lunged, flight-heavy, away from me, sideways, a
sghembo!
And round and round and round my room, a clot with wings
Impure even in weariness.

Wings dark skinny and flapping the air,
Lost their flicker.
Spent.

He fell again with a little thud
Near the curtain on the floor.
And there he lay.

Ah, death, death,
You are no solution!
Bats must be bats.

Only life has a way out.
And the human soul is fated to wide-eyed responsibility
In life.

So I picked him up in a flannel jacket,
Well covered, lest he should bite me.
For I would have had to kill him if he'd bitten me, the impure
one...
And he hardly stirred in my hand, muffled up.

Hastily, I shook him out of the window.

And away he went!
Fear craven in his tail.
Great haste, and straight, almost bird straight above the Via
de' Bardi.
Above that crash-gulf of exploding whips,
Towards the Borgo San Jacopo.

And now, at evening, as he flickers over the river
Dipping with petty triumphant flight, and tittering over the
sun's departure,
I believe he chirps, pipistrello, seeing me here on this terrace
writing:
There he sits, the long loud one!
But I am greater than he...
I escaped him...

Wednesday 13 February 2008

D H Lawrence part 4, spiritualistic bits and pieces

Poet-in-Residence's tribute to D H Lawrence, author of almost 1,000 poems, continues. P-i-R offers for consideration a few of Lawrence's spiritualistic ideas.

Relativity

I like relativity and quantum theories
because I don't understand them
and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that
can't settle,
refusing to sit still and be measured;
and as if the atom were an impulsive thing
always changing its mind.


The Church

If I was a member of the Church of Rome
I should advocate reform:
the marriage of priests
the priests to wear rose-colour or magenta in the streets
to teach the Resurrection in the flesh
to start the year on Easter Sunday
to add the mystery of Joy-in-Resurrection to the Mass
to inculcate the new conception of the Risen Man.


Fatality

No one, not even God, can put back a leaf on to a tree
once it has fallen off.

And no one, not God nor Christ nor any other
can put back a human life into connection with the living
cosmos
once the connection has been broken
and the person has become finally self-centred.

Death alone, through the long process of disintegration
can melt the detached life back
through the dark Hades at the roots of the tree
into the circulating sap, once more, of the tree of life.


Name the Gods!

I refuse to name the gods, because they have no name.
I refuse to describe the gods, because they have no form nor
shape nor substance.
Ah, but the simple ask for images!
Then for a time at least, they must do without.

But all the time I see the gods:
the man who is mowing the tall white corn,
suddenly, as it curves, as it yields, the white wheat
and sinks down with a swift rustle, and a strange, falling
flatness,
ah! the gods, the swaying body of god!
ah the fallen stillness of god, autumnus, and it is only July
the pale-gold flesh of Priapus dropping asleep.


Retort to Whitman

And whoever walks a mile full of false sympathy
walks to the funeral of the whole human race.


Retort to Jesus

And whoever forces himself to love anybody
begets a murderer in his own body.


Sense of Truth

You must fuse mind and wit with all the senses
before you can feel truth.
And if you can't feel truth you can't have any other
satisfactory sensual experience.


When Satan Fell

When Satan fell, he only fell
because the Lord Almighty rose a bit too high,
a bit beyond himself.

So Satan only fell to keep a balance.
'Are you so lofty, O my God?
Are you so pure and lofty, up aloft?
Then I will fall, and plant the paths to hell
with vines and poppies and fig-trees
so that lost souls may eat grapes
and the moist fig
and put scarlet buds in their hair on the way to hell,
on the way to dark perdition.'

And hell and heaven are the scales of the balance of life
which swing against each other.

Friendly Florence

Poet-in-Residence, in his new role of Poet Fellow (see below), is just the bard to record a famous incident involving two royal canines for poetic posterity. Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate, probably has enough to do - recording birthdays and so on.

Friendly Florence

Friendly Florence is mostly white.
She has a full set of smiley teeth
in her piggy head and
supports hunting with hounds.

Friendly Florence has a bad memory.
But she remembers the corgis -
those Welsh dwarfs with their fox-like
heads and short legs.

She remembers the one she clamped
in her full set of smiley teeth. It was
grandma's favourite. Blood flowed
redder than a guardsman's tunic.

Tears flowed and upper lips quivered
in the garden when grandma's
favourite was buried to the strains of
The Last Post
and a one gun salute.

Florence is not to be invited for Christmas
said grandma
finally.


c)- Gwilym Williams

Tuesday 12 February 2008

A Poet Fellow, no less!

Poet-in-Residence is pleased announce that he has recently been elected as a Poet Fellow following a high level board meeting at Noble House. This honour arises because your humble scribe's spoof poem 'Searching for Euterpe' reached the semi-finals of the World's Greatest Vanity Poetry Contest (like 12% of all entrants).
The curious thing about the announcement is that it comes only days before the offical announcement of the 2007/8 Grand Prize Winner (not sure if the prize will be $1,000 or $10,000 - quite hard to figure out). The honour includes the opportunity to order a $59.95 18kt gold pin (plus $9.00 p&p).
P-i-R is happy(?) to be known before all the world as a Poet Fellow. He will be declining the opportunity to display his "unique talent" on his lapel.

City of Culture 2008, poetry contest

In connection with European City of Culture 2008 the Poetry Kit website is running an interesting and unique poetry competition. Entry is free, can be made via e-mail or snail, but donations are invited in order to sponsor a worthwhile youth exchange involving young people from the City of Liverpool and the Turks and Caicos Islands. There are various closing dates for entries; basically 2-monthly intervals. The next closing date will be in March 2008.
Winning poems will be posted prominently on the Poetry Kit website, a poetry site with an incredible 10,000 visitors per day. The link in the left margin will quickly take you there.

Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas is buried with 400 others, where he fell in 1917 in the so-called Great War, near Arras (Flanders). The word 'POET' is engraved on his stone. In his introduction to 'The Poems of Edward Thomas' (Handsel Books) Peter Sacks speaks of the sensation of 'utter waste' that he experienced on visiting the spot.
Thomas was a champion of the work of Robert Frost which 'avoids...old fashioned pomp and sweetness...poetical words and forms that are the chief material of secondary poets'.
Sacks provides insight into the mind of Thomas through brief diary notes such as the following -
February 25, 1917: ...morning turns sunny and warm...chaffinches and partridges, moles working on surface...
March 21, 1917: ...road between shell holes full of blood-stained water and beer bottles...larks singing...

Liberty

The last light has gone out of the world, except
This moonlight lying on the grass like frost
Beyond the brink of the tall elm's shadow.
It is as if everything else had slept
Many an age, unforgotten and lost
The men that were, the things done, long ago,
All I have thought; and but the moon and I
Live yet and here stand idle over the grave
Where all is buried. Both have liberty
To dream what we could do if we were free
To do some thing we had desired long,
The moon and I. There's none less free than who
Does nothing and has nothing else to do,
Being free only for what is not to his mind,
And nothing is to his mind. If every hour
Like this one passing that I have spent among
The wiser others when I have forgot
To wonder whether I was free or not,
Were piled before me, and not lost behind,
And I could take and carry them away
I should be rich; or if I had the power
To wipe out every one and not again
Regret, I should be rich to be so poor.
And yet I still am half in love with pain,
With what is imperfect, with both tears and mirth,
With things that have an end, with life and earth,
And this moon that leaves me dark within the door.

Monday 11 February 2008

Heinrich Heine, poetry at a snail's pace

Heine first glimpsed the light of the world in Düsseldorf in 1797. At 19 he was employed in the family banking firm in Hamburg. Two years later he entered Bonn University, followed by Göttingen and Berlin. In 1831 he removed to Paris which became his permanent place of residence. In 1835 his writings were banned in Germany. In 1848 he collapsed in the Louvre and was confined to bed for the rest of his days; he became blind and life moved on at a snail's pace. Finally in 1856 his life, as R K Singh would say, was 'extinguished'. He was duly buried in Montmartre. Alexandre Dumas and other leading lights attended the funeral.
The following was translated by Jim Reed.

Snail's Pace

How very slowly it creeps on
Does time, the hideous gastropod!
But I, entirely motionless,
I stay here on the selfsame spot.

Into this cell there falls no ray
Of sun or hope to break the gloom.
Now only for the grave, I know,
Shall I exchange this dreadful room.

Maybe I died here long ago,
Maybe it's just a pack of ghosts,
These coloured fantasies to which
At night my arid brain is host.

Spectres indeed they well may be
Of the old pagan pantheon -
Where better should they sport than in
A poet's skull who's dead and gone?

Their orgies sweet that thrill the spine,
Mad ghostly revels of the night,
Sometimes the poet-corpse's hand
Tries to write down by morning light.

D H Lawrence, poet - part 3

One of D H Lawrences's best-known poems is 'Snake'. Like D H Lawrence, Poet-in-Residence, has experience of the so-called 'voice of education' that says all snakes 'must be killed'. An otherwise intelligent man in Central Europe, well-educated, killed each and every snake he came across during his long life; bashed them all with sticks and stones until they were dead. And he wasn't the only one, not by a long chalk.

Snake

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the
stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickering his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified
haste,
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross*,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate;
A pettiness.


Taormina, Sicily

*a reference to the albatross killed by the sailor in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. The killing of the albatross brought only bad luck to the ship and crew. Perhaps Lawrence is frightened that he has brought bad luck upon himself?

George Meredith's scientific sonnet

George Meredith was born 180 years ago tomorrow. To mark the event Poet-in-Residence presents the poem 'Modern Love', a work which manages to combine Love, Nature, Science, Theology and Philosophy in one sonnet. Small wonder that Meredith is known as 'the cerebral poet'!

Modern Love

What are we first? First, animals; and next
Intelligences at a leap; on whom
Pale lies the distant shadow of the tomb,
And all that draweth on the tomb for text.
Into which state comes Love, the crowning sun:
Beneath whose light the shadow loses form.
We are the lords of life, and life is warm.
Intelligence and instinct now are one.
But nature says: 'My children most they seem
When they least know me: therefore I decree
That they shall suffer.' Swift doth young Love flee,
And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.
Then if we study Nature we are wise.
Thus do the few who live but with the day:
The scientific animals are they.-
Lady, this my sonnet to your eyes.

George Meredith (1862)

Sunday 10 February 2008

R K Singh's love poems

R K Singh is a poet strangely absent from a forthcoming anthology of Indian poetry in English. See item: Bloodaxe & The Indian Takeaway (below). Poet-in-Residence, on the other hand, has no qualms about publishing R K Singh's work and is more than delighted to present two more delicate and exotic items from the poet's prolific and insightful pen - this time from the poet's love archives. The poems are published here, as always, with R K Singh's kind and generous permission.

Silence

Is it the perfume
of your body
that makes the nights
drunken

your lush lips
ripple fire
in beautiful silence

your fragrance radiates
flowers and water

can I seek
my voice
in your breasts?


Perfumed Bar

They may be arbiters of good taste
and denounce my aesthesis or ignore
what I created all these years

there's poetry in failed ejaculation
or cowardice in a woman's company
not all will dare to talk about

it's weakness which stares in the face
when truth is wrapped in silence and love
is negotiated in a perfumed bar.


c) R K Singh (2004)

Happy birthday Bertolt Brecht - 110

Were he alive today the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht would be 110 years old.
Poet-in-Residence pays tribute with Brecht's famous World War II poem - 'In Dark Times'. The question raised by Brecht in the poem still needs anwering. Translation from the German is by Humphrey Milnes.

In Dark Times

They won't say: when the walnut tree shook in the wind
But: when the house-painter crushed the workers.
They won't say: when the child skimmed a flat stone across the rapids
But: when the great wars were being prepared for.
They won't say: when the woman came into the room
But: when the great powers joined forces against the workers.
However, they won't say: the times were dark
Rather: why were their poets silent?

The house-painter reference is a reference to Adolf Hitler the aspiring artist who failed the entrance exam for the Vienna School of Art and was reduced to painting postcard pictures of playhouses, official buildings and so on. Some of these paintings were sold on Hitler's behalf by Neumann a Jewish resident at a hostel in Vienna where the two were ensconced. He became Hitler's best friend, gave Hitler a coat and also lent him money. In this way Hitler was kept going as he waited impatiently for his inheritance and dodged Austrian military service.

Dylan Thomas, war poet

When we consider war poetry we tend, quick as the rattling machine-gun, to think of Wilfred Owen (Dulce et Decorum Est), Isaac Rosenberg (Break of Day in the Trenches), Siegfried Sassoon (Suicide in the Trenches) etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But then, when we reflect a little more we may recall those less dramatic but perhaps more poignant poems like Dylan Thomas's 'Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred'.

Among those killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred

When the morning was waking over the war
He put on his clothes and stepped out and died,
The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide,
He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stone
And the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor.
Tell his street on its back he stopped a sun
And the craters of his eyes grew springshoots and fire
When all the keys shot from the locks, and rang.
Dig no more for the chains of his grey-haired heart
The heavenly ambulance drawn by a wound
Assembling waits for the spade's ring on the cage.
O keep his bones away from the common cart,
The morning is flying on the wings of his age
And a hundred storks perch on the sun's right hand.