Tuesday 30 September 2008

Crash

Property speculators, insurers and bankers are not jumping out of the high windows despite the record 777 point fall on Wall Street yesterday and the fact that there are no more golden parachutes, perhaps the windows are double-glazed and sealed and it is no longer possible.
From all accounts it must have looked like a Buster Keaton movie during the famous Wall Street Crash of the 30's with all those certificates and shares only useful for a New York tickertape parade as cops blew their whistles and held back onlookers. These days the financial wizards are more likely to end up on the psychiatrists' couches or in retirement in Zurich.
Of course the red ink has been on the Wall Street ticker ever since Don 'Shock and Awe' Rumsfeld (remember him?) and George 'the Crusader' Bush sent the boys and girls into Iraq. The old WMD trick. But think back. It wasn't exactly a red letter day when Bill 'I've never had sex with that woman' Clinton pardoned America's most wanted swindler who was holed up with his friends, the dodgy gnomes of Zurich*, was it? This current Crash, like the tsunami that begins far under the surface, is now arriving and is breaking on the Wall Street shores.

Crash

they'll be selling
from the bell

the market's weak as hell

across the board

he splutters

through
blue arthritic lips

lumbering from the cooler
vid-phone cigar and poly-cup
in hand

the modern custer

betting

on the big picture
on the broad perspective

it was a labour of love
and damned percentages
he'll tell them later

lying on the couch

-----
from Genteel Messages by Gwilym Williams (pub. 2008)

*book tip - Dr. Fischer and the Bomb Party by Graham Greene

Monday 29 September 2008

Poetry for war artists

War Artist

Artist and nature form
the ultimate
intricate unit
with origin rooted
deep in the earth
and brought to life
in the field
with brown casein
and a scoop of stream
in a rusty soup can.

Note the heightened colour
of the boy
with the horse
and the plough
now ploughing the earth
beyond the tank tracks
when you consider
your best hog bristle
loaded full with ochre.

c-2008 Gwilym Williams

The above was written on attending an Albin Egger-Lienz exhibition. Egger-Lienz was an Austrian WWI war artist who painted with great integrity the scenes in the Alps; the bloody fighting between the Austrians and the Italians. He refused to glorify war in paintings. He was shunned on his return to Austria and went to live in Italy.

Poetry at the Barlow Theatre

An e-mail from Geoff 'Purple Patch' Stevens brings the news that Poetry-mic evenings are to be resumed at the Barlow Theatre in Langley, West Midlands (UK). The first of these will be on Tuesday 7th October at 7.30pm. The venue is 3 minutes walk from Langley Green Railway Station. You may bring your own material to read or just turn up and spend an intriguing hour or two with the beguiling bards of Birmingham. Geoff is the hairy one. Admission FREE!

Sunday 28 September 2008

Cherry Picking Poetry Editors

The rejection of a poem by a poetry journal on grounds of merit, or rather lack of merit, or maybe unsuitability, or any of a host of other reasons, lack of space comes to mind, or not in line with the publication's ethos or style or poetry length or whatever you like is fair enough and expected. But to reject a poem on the grounds that it has not been submitted along with 3 or 4 other poems is no grounds at all. It is merely, as the saying goes, a bit of cherry picking. And this is wrong and unfair.
Why so? Because the single poem submitted is submitted under stringent conditions like the must not be previously published elsewhere or submitted elsewhere rules. Some journals go so far as to insist that a submitted poem must not have appeared on a poet's own blog; and all this for a poem for which in the vast majority of cases no financial payment is made.
So why should poets be expected to submit 4 or even in some cases as many as 8 poems at one time? It can only be that editors want to pick 'n' mix what they perceive as the best and dump all the rest. Poet-in-Residence wondered if Seamus Heaney would receive the following curt response if he sent an editor a single poem:
***Dear xxxxxx xxxxxx
As we do not accept single-poem submissions - we ask potential contributors to send a selection of 4 - 8 poems (please see our submission guidelines) - may I ask you to wait until you can send us a more substantial submission.
Best wishes
A. Editor

Poet-in-Residence is concerned that unless poets resist this trend it will become another general 'rule'. It will become almost impossible to get a single poem published on its own merit. Poets must not give in to these rip-off tactics.
Poet-in-Residence was today contacted by a worried writer; a poet and playwright of high standing, a man who has written drama for the BBC, had plays performed on the stage in London, received rave reviews in The Guardian and other newspapers. The e-mail was, by coincidence, about this very subject. The problem is out there. We poets must NOW deal with it!
***P-i-R replied to the curt missive as follows -
Dear A. Editor
You will notice that the poem is called Cello Solo so it wouldn't make any sense to feature this poem with 3 or 4 others (or however many you care to choose) of mine. Please check with ...... ............ if you don't understand why. I have his '........ ... ...........' by me. I reckon he's pretty smart; could figure it out.
To be frank, I don't like the new policy - that a bunch of poems has to be submitted. You may recall that you published a single poem submission of mine a couple of years ago. I think the new policy is self-destructive.
Dylan Thomas, to mention only one famous poet, posted single poems all over the place. I, a fellow Welshman, send out some poems as and when I complete them. It's a bardic weakness perhaps - but it's not a bad one.
Maybe you should have a rethink about the way forward for ...... ........ ...... . To my mind, with the new policy ...... ........ ...... may beome irrelevant. Simply another exclusive poetry club. And that would be a great pity.
I, as a poet, may also make conditions; promulgate policies along with poetics. But I'm not about to do that. I'll give you the opportunity for a rethink.
With best bardic wishes,
xxxxxx xxxxxx

Thursday 25 September 2008

A Franco-Belgian Symbolist

The Franco-Belgian poet and symbolist Emile Verhaeren (1855 - 1916) in Zweig's opinion (see below), gave Europe what Walt Whitman gave to America - faith in the times and in the future.
In these times when our faith in the times and in the future is constantly tested and sometimes found wanting we may reflect on our life and times using a couple of Emile Verhaeren's poems as candles in the wind.
The poems Tenebrae and Infinitely render an atmosphere reminiscent of some of the best scenes in Zola's epic novel Germinal.
But remember that in this art, scenes from nature and human activity, and all other real phenomena will not be described for their own sake: here they are perceptible surfaces created to represent their esoteric affinities with primordial ideals as the Symbolist Manifesto (Figaro 1886)informs.
Wallace Stevens, a poet insured up to the hilt as R S Thomas famously remarked and previously featured here on Poet-in-Residence, was one who carried the torch prominently onward and in his own inimitable style.

Tenebrae

A moon, with vacant, chilling eye, stares
At the winter, enthroned vast and white upon the hard ground;
The night is an entire and translucent azure;
The wind, a blade of sudden presence, stabs.

Far away, on the skylines, the long pathways of frost,
Seen, in the distance, to pierce the expanses,
And stars of gold, suspended to the zenith,
Always higher, amid the ether, to rend the blue of the sky.

The villages crouched in the plains of Flanders,
Near the rivers, the heather, and the great forests,
Between two pale infinities, shiver with cold,
Huddled near old hearthsides, where they stir the ashes.


Infinitely

The hounds of despair, the hounds of the autumnal wind,
Gnaw with their howling the black echoes of evenings.
The darkness, immensley, gropes in the emptiness
For the moon, seen by the light of water.

From point to point, over there, the distant lights,
And in the sky, above, dreadful voices
Coming and going from the infinity of the marshes and plains
To the infinity of the valleys and the woods.

And the roadways that stretch out like sails
And pass each other, coming unfolded in the distance, soundlessly,
While lengthening beneath the stars,
Through the shadows and the terror of the night.


Emile Verhaeren (1855 - 1916)

Friday 12 September 2008

Advice to young poets...

Poet-in-Residence would be seriously failing in his duty to the world's young poets (and not so young poets) if he failed to pass on the following piece of very sound advice from the writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942).
Stefan Zweig attracted himself to the best minds of his time: Freud, Yeats, Borgese, Pirandello, Gorky, Ravel, Joyce, Toscanini and many more of that ilk. The following advice for a young poet comes from his autobiography The World of Yesterday (c- Viking Press & University of Nebraska Press).
Zweig writes:-
I used my time in translating from foreign languages and even now I hold this to be the best way for a young poet to understand more deeply and more creatively the spirit of his own language [...] because every strange language at first offers opposition in its most personal turnings to those who would copy it. It invites forces of expression which, otherwise unsought, would never come to light; and this struggle to wrest from a strange language its most intimate essence and to mold it plastically into one's own language was a particular artistic desire on my part.

Poet-in-Residence, following Zweig's advice, will now attempt to translate a relatively unknown modern German book into English. This blogspot may soon appear to be quiet - but, as Poet-in-Residence is nothing but industrious when he sets himself to a task - it will only for a short time!

Tuesday 9 September 2008

Donald Maciver and the Scottish Clearances

The poet, Donald Maciver, was born in 1857 in Lewis which is in the Western Isles (Outer Hebrides) of Scotland. He was the son of a tenant farmer. In 1896 he became the headmaster of Bayble School and encouraged his pupils to be bilingual in English and Gaelic. He won many prizes for his poetry and many of his poems were turned into song and set to music. The following atmospheric poem tells of the Scottish Clearances, a period when tenant farmers and their families were simply thrown off their land to become exiles in misery in order that the gentry might exercise its power and desire and have some blood sport to boot.

The Sea's Lofty Roar

Endless surge of the sea,
Hear the sound of the sea's lofty roar,
The thundering swell
That I heard as a child long ago -
Without change or compassion
Dragging the sand of the shore:
Endless surge of the sea,
Hear the sound of the sea's lofty roar.

All the waves crashing down
Are trembling, loud-sounding and white,
So hurried and cruel,
Grim and spuming without taking fright;
But their speed falls away
At the same destination each time
As the people have perished
Who once dwelt in this village of mine.

In the forests of the west
I've never requested to stay,
My mind and ambition
Set firm in the hollow of the bay;
But those who were generous
In effort, in friendship and fame
Are scattered defenceless
Like birds in their enemy's way.

Rushes and willow,
And thistle, and marram and grass
Have choked up the springs
Where I'd find many thirst-quenching draughts;
The ruins are so cold
With ragwort and dockens growing high
While the red nettle swarms
Where warm is the ghost of the hearth.

But I've seen an age
When the place was both snug and alive,
With youngsters unbowed
Whose manner was proud but polite,
Their mothers serene
Well pleased with their partners in life
With sheep and with cows
Setting out at the morning's first light.

But looking around
My spirits are bound to be low:
I don't see the tenants
Whose warm generosity flowed -
As exiles in misery
They've been driven away from our shores
And they'll never now hear
The great sound of the sea's lofty roar.

Those who've wielded the lash
Won't outlast the folk they have cleared -
Lusting for glory
They drove us out for no reason
But power and desire;
The prize they've won for their deed
Is disgust and ill fame,
The grave with the curse of the seed.

But I must go away,
I can't stay with you any more:
My age and appearance
Reveal that I've not far to go;
When I'm finally seized
By the sleep of perpetual cold,
In my bed lay me down
To the sound of the sea's lofty roar.

Donald Maciver (1857 - 1935)

Monday 8 September 2008

Free poetry and stuff

This coming Saturday, 13th September, Geoff 'Purple Patch' Stevens, a poet whose work has appeared here on Poet-in-Residence will read/perform some of his bardic stuff at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra Centre in Birmingham (UK). Joining Geoff will be Brendan 'Man About Town' Hawthorne and Keith 'Sedgley Beacon' Melbourne. Proceedings begin at the quaintly curious time of 6.50pm. Admission is FREE! But don't be late - the bardic bash lasts only half an hour.

Under Milk Wood in the Pub

Excerpts from Dylan Thomas's play for voices Under Milk Wood will be served up by the poet's daughter Aeronwy Thomas and poetrymonthly.com's Martin Holroyd tomorrow evening, Tuesday 9th September, in Bristol (UK) as part of the Bristol Poetry Festival. Aeronwy Thomas will also read some of her own poems. And there will be a presentation of work by the Lansdown Poets. Bristol's beery bards begin proceedings at 8pm. May go on a bit.
The venue for anyone fortunate enough to be in the Bristol area tomorrow is the Lansdown Pub in Lansdown Road. Admission is a fiver, but doubtless well worth it. Charles Thompson (tel: 0752 870 3422) is the man for the tickets.

Latest: Ticket sales going well. See 'comments'.

MONOCHROME PARROT up and flying...sort of!

Poet-in-Residence's brand new off-the-wall blog - MONOCHROME PARROT - takes a look at what grabs the bard's 30 second attention span in this bemused, quirky, zany, madcap human jungle where everything goes and we have our being.
The PARROT kicks-off today with a curious screech! A million quid for a wrecked car?
Check out MONOCHROME PARROT without further ado via the alphabetical sidebar link!

Sunday 7 September 2008

Earwigging in Poetry Archives

Seamus Heaney may be the President of the Poetry Archive but the archive was the brainchild, in 1999, of the current Queen's Canary, Andrew Motion.
Today the archive contains recordings of many famous and not-so-famous poets and bards, from Abse to Yeats. Curiously no Benjamin Zephaniah in there as yet!
It's an interesting exercise to imagine the voices of the poets reading their own words and then to listen to them and compare the imagined voice with the real thing. You will not believe that Allen Ginsberg wrote such a great work as 'Howl' when you listen to him shyly mumbling his way through his California Supermarket poem - 'Which way does your beard point tonight Walt Whitman?'
Dylan Thomas may be heard with a small plum in his mouth failing to quite make it. Larkin is positive and clear, not in a fog as P-i-R had supposed he would be. T. S. Eliot's dulcet tone is pretentiousness itself. And so on, and so on. But please listen for yourself. Take the alphabetical sidebar link to the Poetry Archive.
In addition to listening you may offer your own suggestions. Which other poets' voices should be preserved in the Poetry Archive? And if by chance you have a recording of Thomas Hardy or A.E. Housman the Poetry Archive would be more than pleased to hear from you.

Tuesday 2 September 2008

What became of Lu Xun's cat?

The following Poet-in-Residence poem was composed on viewing colour photographs of the back yard and the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant in a busy international city. The poem is dedicated to the world's unfortunate creatures; those which all too often suffer at the hand of man.

Lu Xun's Cat

Lu Xun beams brightly from the lanterned doorway
- his golden teeth flash morning greetings
to pin-striped suits striding office-bound
or on the way to shops or polished haircuts.

Lu Xun's albino cat, the shirt on the stick
with steaming hams, now fished from the pot
by Lu Xun's wife will be chopped and diced
and the pelt set aside for the boy on the bike.

White rabbit, brown dog and little bear
are safe today in the chicken-wire cage
out back where they smell the veg and curry
cooking; and wonder what became of the cat perhaps.

---

***Please visit Poet-in-Residence's Austrian Times Newslink and read about Dr Martin Balluch, jailed animal rights campaigner, 100 days in an Austrian prison without charge or trial.

Choosing the Queen's Canary ...and the winner is...

As Poet-in-Residence holds his bardic breath awaiting the decision from the office of PM Gordon Brown as to who will be the new Queen's Canary following the departure of Andrew Motion in 2009 at the end of his ten-year tenure he can't help but think of Dylan Thomas's spoof poem (or did John Davenport write it? - we cannot be sure), the poem which swayed the decision of the PM in the Thomas/Davenport novel The Death of the King's Canary.

...he picked up the last volume. It was called A Time to Laugh and was by Hilary Byrd. He emptied the last drop of brandy into his glass, and drained it before he began. The book seemed to be a loosely connected narrative, using different poetic forms. A young man looking for a Leader. The Leader, when found, proved to be living at the top of a mountain. The final poem was called:

MANMOUNTAIN

This was my test: not by the easier route
But through the gentians and the rocks to hurl
My adolesence; the glacier bruised my foot
and I laughed despite at the icy wind's up-curl.
My goal was there, poised on the peak's white winter
As an eagle's eyrie breasting the burning blast,
And though the old world round me cruelly splinter
Not was for me in my pride to be downcast.

'Mountains,' he said, 'are only high in space:
Make the Andes your molehill and below
Map in the valleys lofty continents,
Plan power-houses for your island race.
Take a divining rod, and boldly throw
Alpenstock down; use plainsman arguments.'

This would do. It was frightful, but it would do. A sort of sonnet, but bringing in power-houses - 'striking a note of modernity throughout'. He hoped he might see Max in London. When they were sufficiently civilized, human beings were scarcely people at all. He felt that the stuff he'd been reading through the night wasn't likely to appeal to anybody except people. Well, he'd give them what they wanted. He steadied himself by the table, fumbled for Faraday's notes, which had fluttered to the floor.
'Hilary Byrd. b 1907. Eton and Trinity. Son of Sir Austin Byrd. Airman. Possibility. Dymmock Hall, Suffolk.'
Possibility, indeed! Old Austin Byrd's son. Funny thing he should write poetry; but still he was a poet; and he would be the next Poet Laureate!


- educational link to the current poet laureate in Poet-in-Residence's alphabetical side bar

- Syd the Satchel's latest odds - 11/10JF Simon Armitage, Seamus Heaney, 3/1 Ruth Padel, 4/1 Jo Shapcott, Tony Blair 5/1 U A Fanthorpe, 10/1 George Szirtes, Don Paterson, Carol Ann Duffy, Moniza Alvi, 33/1 Hilary Byrd, 100/1 bar