Wednesday 30 July 2008

Auntie's Favourite Poets *

* footnote to the item Auntie's Favourite Poems found immediately below

The following poets have 3 or more poems in the nation's favourite poems anthology and are therefore representative of the nation's poetic psyche. We, by this means, may judge for ourselves the poetic state of the nation; the nation as defined in the posting under this one.

Rupert Brooke
The Great Lover
The Old Vicarage, Grantchester
The Soldier

T. S. Eliot
Macavity: The Mystery Cat
Preludes
Journey Of The Magi
The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock
La Figlia Che Piange

Thomas Hardy
Afterwards
The Darkling Thrush
The Ruined Maid

Gerard Manley Hopkins
God's Grandeur
Pied Beauty
The Windhover

Rudyard Kipling
If-
The Glory Of The Garden
The Way Through The Woods

Philip Larkin
An Arundel Tomb
The Whitsun Weddings
This Be The Verse

Louis MacNeice
Prayer Before Birth
Snow
The Sunlight On The Garden

Wilfred Owen
Anthem For Doomed Youth
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Futility

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Lady Of Shalott
The Charge Of The Light Brigade
Ulysses

William Wordsworth
Upon Westminster Bridge
The Prelude
The Daffodils

William Butler Yeats
He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven
The Lake Isle Of Innisfree
The Song Of Wandering Aengus
When You Are Old

Auntie's Favourite Poems

In 1996 the BBC published a collection of 100 poems under the title The Nation's Favourite Poems, the nation in this case being the catchment area of ...the nation's favourite book programme The Bookworm...and the winner was (don't hold your breath) Rudyard Kipling's ode to British stiff upper lipness, the infamous poem If, a poem termed jingoistic rubbish by one newspaper when the results were announced; a poem often drummed into the heads of recalcitrant schoolboys of a certain generation.
It is claimed that a copy of If sat on the Kaiser's desk (German or Austrian Kaiser is not stated) and that If was the favourite poem of Marie Stopes, founder of the first birth-control clinic in 1921 and author of such works as Contraception: Its Theory, History and Practice. The unfortunate Antonio Gramsci the Italian Communist Party founder and Marxist theorist imprisoned by the Fascists translated If into his native tongue. His voluminous Prison Notebooks were published posthumously in 1947.
Foreword writer, comedian Griff Rhys Jones, seems almost apologetic for the nation's choice. He conjures up what he calls the nation's favourite poem by proxy, a poem with origins lost in the mists of mystery. Navaho Indian priests are cited as possible authors along with Steven Cummins, a soldier killed on active service. Do not stand at my grave and weep is the first line and the title of the BBC's proxy poem.
Poet-in-Residence's as-new copy of the many times reprinted BBC publication The Nation's Favourite Poems with its 100 poems and Griff Rhys Jones' foreword was a recent €1.00 bargain from a street vendor's banana box. It pays to shop around!

Do not stand at my grave and weep

Do not stand at my grave and weep;
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

Saturday 26 July 2008

Strokestown's poetry dollar bargains

The entry form for Ireland's Strokestown 2009 poetry competition is online. American entrants, with the dollar currently down in the dumps, can enter their finest poems for 5 bucks each. Not so lucky the phlegmatic bards of Blighty who must cough up a hefty 4 quid, the equivalent of 8 US greenbacks. Europoets? A fiver a poem.

Poet-in-Residence's advice to aspiring contestants - Before entering check your copy of the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal for up-to-the-minute information. And to Gaelic poets - double-check the Strokestown website - your poems may/not be judged this time round.

Melancholic Antonio Machado

Today, the 26th July is the 133rd birthday of a spirited if often melancholic poet as Nicholas Albery termed the Seville born Antonio Machado (born 26 Jly 1875). Machado's poetry has been translated by Robert Bly of Iron John fame, and appears in The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart. In Albery's Poem for the Day anthology the following Robert Bly translation appears:

The Wind, One Brilliant Day

The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

'In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I'd like all the odor of your roses.'

'I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead.'

'Well then, I'll take the withered petals
and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain.'

The wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:
'What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?'

Antonio Machado (1875-1939)

Friday 11 July 2008

The monitorial Poetry Society

The Poetry Society's latest e-mail brings news of an annual competition. Poets are asked pretty please to state their age and ethnic background on the entry form. These details are required for monitoring purposes prospective entrants are informed.
Monitoring according to the first dictionary to hand on the Poet-in-Residence Schreibtisch is defined thus: to observe, inspect, listen to, or record esp for a special purpose over a period of time.
Now where have we encountered that modus operandi before? Check out the Gwilym Williams poem On the Feldherrenhalle Steps if you need a large clue. You can find this fine poem at The Recusant website (click on P-i-R's alphabetical sidebar).
So what's really going on? What is Poetry Police HQ really after here? Since when has a poet's ethnic background, whatever that means, been of interest to a poetry competition organizer apart from the award of the bardic chair at the National Eisteddfod in Cymru?
Poet-in-Residence's poetical ethnic background is, for the purposes of the Poetry Police's comprehensive computer records, human being. His age is on the wrong side of 60. He considers that age and roots might be important in village hall horticulture contests.

Wednesday 9 July 2008

Introducing Walter Wordsnot ...

every poet worth his ode
knows the poetry dollar code
pours out his art in 20 lines
making sure the damn thing rhymes
then sends it off to you-know-who
like a million others in the queue

back there comes the glossy letter
well done poet - we never read better -
send us now your handsome cheque
and we'll put you down for a coffee table set

Tuesday 8 July 2008

G8 Summit

running and falling
like water
off a truck's back

A musical offering from Austria where the lame duck government has breathed its last quack

In Roosevelt Platz

formerly Hermann Göring Platz
formerly Mexico Platz
in snow white stone
we now recall to mind
Antonio Vivaldi - lost but not forgotten -
and by the smooth progress
of our pressured thoughts
like an approaching front of inclement notes

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - also lost but also not forgotten -
and Joseph Haydn - lost - but 'twas only his head and 'twas later found -
carelessly
or judiciously lost
or simply nicked
for scientific research

players lean to it
in stone
by the Black Spaniard house - twice demolished -
where Ludwig van B - moved with fuss out of town -
as in life so in death
took his final semi-breath
and lost some of the locks off his head
in the eye of a hurricane storm

well composed
or mildly decomposed

it's best
not to die

just here!

c-2008 Gwilym Williams