Wednesday 29 October 2008

cello solo


sudden hacks
nervous like city fox
under the humdrum hush
of the house lights

from lungs and throats
semi-stalled

then the crinkly unwrapping
and the hollow sucks
of the house candy

relentless
bronchial
incompatability

meanwhile
from the female torso
the atonal
grinds on
and on

only to fade
to shivering silence

before the end
and the slow opening of doors

c) Gwilym Williams
2008

Monday 27 October 2008

Happy birthday to Sylvia and Dylan

If they were still alive today they would be celebrating their birthdays this 27th October 2008. Sylvia Plath, who stuck her head in her gas oven, would have been 76 and editing cookery books. Dylan Thomas, who drank himself into a coma in New York, would have been grand old Sir Dylan, 94, with a seat in the House of Lords and a chit in the Lord's bar. It's lovely to dream.
To celebrate this duo of birthdays Poet-in-Residence looks at one of Dylan Thomas's remarkable poems. The following was written at the ripe young age of 19. It's a poem with more wisdom in it than all the world's holy and unholy books heaped together. Poet-in-Residence considers it to be one of the best poems ever written in the English language.

The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell my lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.


Dylan Thomas (27th October 1914 - 9th November 1953)

Friday 17 October 2008

Pendle Hill ~ the finest view in all of England

The above quotation comes from Queen Mary the lady with the famous smile, and not the bitter bloodthirsty queen for whom the cocktail drink is named. It's also the title of a contemplative poem by Poet-in-Residence which debuts today on the front page of INK SWEAT & TEARS (alphabetical LINK in sidebar).
Charles Christian's popular website is always worth a look. Visiting poets and artists often drop by and there are regular contributors too.

Thursday 16 October 2008

Tuim Tin Tassie

Zen Speug aficionados, and Poet-in-Residence is one, are delighted that Edinburgh's John McDonald has published a new collection of haiku; but before coming to Tuim Tin Tassie or 'empty tin cup' here are some lines from Louis MacNeice's Bagpipe Music. Why? Just for the hell of it:

John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,
Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whisky,
Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty.

It's no go for the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.

Tuim Tin Tassie, from the Hub Kaiku Series at Wingland*, is a delight to carry around, to handle, to dip into, to contemplate. It is, as they say, pocket-size. It's a chunky 100 or so unnumbered pages on quality paper with six lines on each side. No distracting drawings of Japanese waterfalls and gourami. Just the empty tin cup and the text.

John McDonald writes haiku that rolls up its sleeves and gets to work. Only rarely does he resort to those worn out traditional images. His stuff must earn its porridge not once but twice; and in two of Scotland's native languages.

a snell wund -
the bodach hunkers
his box souchin

a bitter wind -
the old man sits
his accordion wheezing

There's a deft touch to admire in the writing. Important when the subject is tenderness:

deif tae'm nou
a lou ma guidwife's smile
at bleckie's chirmin

deaf to him now
I love my wife's smile
at blackbird's singing

The haiku may also be dark and sinister:

bawdrons skooks
throuch the sheddaes
bluid on's neb

cat skulks
through the shadows
blood on his nose

And never far away is the crow:

craw's neb
pikes the girse
the hale perk chitters

crow's beak
spikes the grass
the whole field shivers

And there's a dose of topical humour too:

the baunk clark gaes stieve
gies me the siller -
attercap on the wa

the bank clerk goes stiff
gives me the money -
spider on the wall

John McDonald is a retired stone-mason who came to haiku in the mid-nineties. It's clear that the skill and precision with which he persued his workaday craft has been carried over into his haiku:

Highly recommended.

Hub Editions
Wingland
Sutton Bridge
Spalding PE12 9YS
Lincolnshire, UK

Monday 13 October 2008

Thomas Jefferson's unpublished letter

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was the third president of the USA. He was the chief author of the Declaration of Independence and served two terms in office. In private life he founded the University of Virginia.
By a strange coincidence, if that's what it was, and this is what Poet-in-Residence is interested in, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams (1735-1826) who was the second President of the USA died on the very same day; the 4th July 1826, the 50th anniversary of American independence.
As regular readers will know, one of Poet-in-Residence's hobbies is hunting in flea market banana boxes for book bargains. A recent endeavour produced a bargain priced pile of Sotheby's catalogues pertaining to Fine Manuscripts & Printed Americana.
In one of these splendid catalogues, fax-codeword '6553Spangle' (New York sale of Tuesday May 3, 1994, with cover picture of Lot 104: post-battle damage assessment report map of Pearl Harbour, prepared and drawn by Mitsuo Fuchida, the lead pilot of the Japanese air attack, for a briefing of Emperor Hirohito, pen and watercolour on light wove paper $100,000 - $150,000) Poet-in-Residence discovered the unpublished Jefferson letter.
Lot 60 is described as 'Jefferson, Thomas, third president, autograph letter, 1 page on laid paper, Williamsburgh, 26 July 1764, evidently to John Page; a few short fold separations and repairs, mounting remnant on verso. A photocopy of the letter appears in the catalogue. Jefferson's neat schoolbook style of handwriting presents no problems.

Wmsburgh July 26th 1764

I like your proposal of keeping up an epistolary correspondence on subjects of some importance. I do not at present recollect any difficult question in natural philosophy, but shall be glad to have your opinion on a subject much more interesting. what that is I will tell you. in perusing a magazine some time ago I met with an account of a person who had been drowned. he had continued under water 20hours, and upon being properly treated when taken out he was restored to life. the fact is undoubted, and upon enquiry I found that there have been many other instances of the same kind. Physicians say that when the parts of the body are restrained from performing their functions by any gentle cause which does not in any manner maim or injure any particular part, that to restore life in such a case nothing is requisite but to give the vital warmth to the whole body by gentle degrees, and put the blood in motion by inflating the lungs. but the doubts which arose in my mind, on reading the story were of another nature. we are generally taught that the soul leaves the body at the instant of death, that is, at the instant in which the organs of the body cease totally to perform their functions. but does not this story contradict this opinion? when then does the soul take its departure? let me have your opinion candidly and at length on this subject. and as there are doubts which, were they to come to light, might do injustice to a man's moral principles in the eyes of persons of narrow and confined views it will be proper to take great care of our letters. I propose as one mean of doing it to put no name or place to the top or bottom of the letter, and to enclose it in a false cover which may be burned as soon as opened. no news in town only that Sir John Cockler has given Knox L450 for his house and lots here. Orion is 3 Hours in 40' west of the sun and of consequence goes down and rises that much before him. So you must rise early in the morning to see him. the upper star in his belt is exactly in Aequinotical.

(no earlier letter by Jefferson has ever been offered at auction)($20,000 - $30,000)

Is synchronicity the unseen hand in the affairs of man? asks Poet-in-Residence.

Sunday 12 October 2008

The Song of the Ungirt Runners

The Bard on the Run, back from his morning run in the vineyards and woods of Vienna, pays tribute to the Scottish poet Charles Hamilton Sorley killed by the sniper's bullet at the Battle of Loos on 13th October 1915 at the age of 20.
One of Sorley's poems is a favourite with fell runners; that breed of stringy men with hairy legs who run up and down mountains whilst the bagpipes play and sensible people enjoy the scenery and take a wee dram. If there is a Poet-in-Residence raison d'etre this is it:

The Song of the Ungirt Runners

We swing ungirded hips,
And lightened are our eyes,
The rain is on our lips,
We do not run for prize.
We know not whom we trust
Nor whitherward we fare,
But we run because we must
Through the great wide air.

The waters of the seas
Are troubled as by storm.
The tempest strips the trees
And does not leave them warm.
Does the tearing tempest pause?
Do the treetops ask it why?
So we run without a cause
'Neath the big bare sky.

The rain is on our lips,
We do not run for prize.
But the storm the water whips
And the wave howls to the skies.
The winds arise and strike it
And scatter it like sand,
And we run because we like it
Through the broad bright land.


Charles Hamilton Sorley
(1895 - 1915)

Friday 10 October 2008

Anyone for coffee?

Water is the most precious resource on the planet. It should not be wasted.

The following is an abridged translation of an article in the Wiener Zeitung newspaper of 9th October 2008.

Coffee - and too much water
by Alexa Jirez

Americano, Frappuccino, Caramel Macchiato: Customers at the American coffee-house chain Starbucks know what this means. It means an expensive drink of coffee. But what does one need to make coffee other than coffee beans and milk? Water. The best water is pure drinking water. And Starbucks has plenty.
The British Sun reported a few days ago that Starbucks pours away thousands of litres of perfectly clean water for reasons of 'hygiene'. The coffee-chain has so-called dipper-wells, metal sinks for washing spoons; each with its own tap that runs the whole time.
In Vienna's Starbucks coffee-houses there are such dipper-wells. Local Green politician, Rüdiger Maresch, spoke to an eye-witness. Fact: the water runs the whole time. And that, says Maresch, is environmental craziness.
A spokesperson for Starbucks said, 'The water is only running during opening hours.'
An official from Vienna's Water Department calculated that a small tap with a diameter of 7 mm would give 2,360 litres of water per hour. A normal household tap has a much larger diameter - 1 cm.
Starbucks on Vienna's Kärnten Street is open daily from 6.30 am until 1.00 am. That's 18.5 hours. Should the tap there have a diameter of 7 mm it could mean that 43,660 litres of water is used for washing spoons - per day!
Starbucks claims that fresh running water is required to prevent a build-up of bacteria and dangerous germs. For Andreas Tomenendal, responsible for Vienna's water pipes, Starbuck's argument is nonsense. Tomenendal: The water stands in reservoirs where it is collected. It is tested and is of a high quality. Even the hospitals don't have their water taps running the whole time. An average household in Vienna needs 130 litres of water a day. 1,000 litres of water costs €1.30. To take away 1,000 litres of waste water costs €1.69, he added.

(A quick P-i-R calculation shows that a metered domestic user, with a small 7 mm tap, following the Starbucks' method for washing spoons would need to fork out €120 per day)

*The water wasted by Starbucks comes from the high Alps to the south of Vienna. It originates in springs in the mountains and is collected in reservoirs before being sent to Vienna through a 100 km long pipe. To waste such a resource is beyond folly.

------------

The following rime is based on Part II of Samuel Taylor Colerdge's work of two grains of opium, The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere. Poet-in-Residence finds Coleridge the coffee addict in a city centre Stirbucks...

A Vienna Melange in Stirbucks

The breezes blew, the white foam flew,
The coffee follow'd free:
I had a thirst that ever burst
Into that Stirbuck Sea.

Found spoons diseased, the spoon drops down
'Twas hard as hard could be
And I did sip only to slake
The wisdom told to me.

Day after day, day after day,
Stirbucked with froth and notion,
Wider than my painted lips
Upon that tainted potion.

Water, water every where
And all the broads did wink,
Water, water every where
And running down the sink.

The very drips did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Out of that fine coffee!

'Get out, get out, you heel get out!'
The breath fierce rants on sight
The water, that the witch did boil
Burnt green and black and white.

And some in dreams assured were
Of the spoons that plagued us so:
The watchman sleeps! They have follow'd us
To the Land of Ice and Snow.

Sleep patterns and aliens

Polysomnography the title of Brett Dean's new composition for piano and wind quintet is a scientific term to do with research into sleep patterns. With the help of sensors placed on the human body the various stages of sleep can be monitored. In short, the five elements making up Dean's composition follow the five stages of sleep. Theta Waves signal the first period of light sleep. Myoclonus and Sleep Spindles lead into quiet Delta Wave sleep. Dream Sequence follows. And then, not in Dean's composition, Awakening. On paper it looks like this:
Polysomnography
Music for piano and wind quintet (2007) (15')
Theta Waves (slow, mysterious)
Myoclonus (fast, excited, tense)
Sleep Spindles (slow, spacious, mysterious)
Delta Waves (quiet, flowing)
Dream Sequence (restless)
Performed by Lars Vogt (piano) and the Wien-Berlin Ensemble which had begun de rigueur, conservatively enough albeit with humour and aplomb, a little light Mozart in the Mozart Saal of the Vienna Concert House; Lars Vogt's rapid fingers and his restrained elegance at the Steinway, the musicians leaning backwards and forwards like cafe´ regulars discussing newspapers, it sounded, when they got around to Polysomnography like this:
First it makes the audience nervous. It would fit well to H G Wells' War of the Worlds is the first impression. This is quickly followed by a kind of NY downtown music. Traffic lights stop/start blocks of traffic. Then someone walks alone down a dank dark street with alleys on both sides from which come strange, mysterious sounds. The Martians now emerge from their alien craft parked on a waste lot. A few at first, then a lot of them against a bright light, and then a few again. Small animals, perhaps rats scurry away, some pause to glance back but quickly scurry on. There are more strange sounds. Somewhere someone's cat is being slowly strangled. Some large military vehicles rumble in. A war breaks out. Zoom forward to a sunrise in the future. Only one rat remains. It trots around. Sniffs. It's the hope for the future. The alien craft is long gone. Only dying radio signals remain.

Thursday 9 October 2008

God bless Smarmerica!

McCain's latest head-to-head
"Only one heartbeat away..."
Sarah Palin

Friends, have we ever suffered so much smarm?
Was there ever so much smarm my friends
since the days of the harmless smarmer
Hughie Green the Double Your Money Quiz Show Host
of yesteryear. And friends, that unctuous Uncle
was the smarmy master of smarm, friends.

Was there ever so much smarm my friends
since the days of unctuous Uncle Hughie
for the smarm of Bush's fulsome fawning
reserpined friend was smarminess smalminess
smarmy smalmy smarm gone barmy beyond smarm
my friends. God bless Smarmerica!

Tuesday 7 October 2008

Fantasy, Dreams and Nightmares on Wall Street

On Wall Street the happy clappy bell-ringing ride to the golden age is over and the rickety pickety ghost train is coming along the tracks with its rattling cargo of uncloseted skeletons. The doors of the long black limos are firmly locked and the bolt action shotguns are under the seats along with the mandrake roots.
The blackout windowed zoom the clutched briefcase sniff investment snort brigade blurred white powder zoom today zoom blurred along and up and down the avenues and streets in the phantasmagorical red line safety deposit box fanatical ride to the financial cocaine fuelled watershed yacht club is on.
The red line deepens like the Mid-Atlantic trench. There is no way out. No golden lifeboat. No yellow submarine. We and the red listed polar bears and the icebergs have rumbled the game. The band is not going to play on. The blue chips are now down. Hallowe'en and the Election are just round the corner. Fantasy, dreams and nightmares are Phi Beta Kappa on Wall Street. Philanthropy is a dirty word. The cavalry is away in the desert. The Monopoly board is going back in the box.
What Bin Laden, Hitler and H G Wells failed to do, the guts and glory leaders of Wall Street have gone and done for themselves. And may have done for the rest of us.
Blame will be tossed down the line like a bag of corn to land at the feet of young stockmarket adrenalin junkies. The movers and shakers will turn up in the world's sunny resorts for shady dealers and another 6,000,000 US jobless and homeless will be dumped on Skid Row. And the fallout in the rest of the world? We can only hope it's ad valorem and not radioactive.

Finance is a gun. Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger. Mario Puzo (The Godfather)

Will it ever be safe to plunge back into the world's murky polluted financial waters, the rough seas that will need a miracle to calm them?
Here's a timely reminder of the way things really are, and what is at the root of the problem, from the writer who brought us Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-Four:

Why I Write

Part II: Shopkeepers at War

I began this book to the tune of German bombs, and I begin this second chapter in the added racket of the barrage. The yellow gun-flashes are lighting the sky, the splinters are rattling on the housetops, and London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. Anyone able to read a map knows that we are in deadly danger. I do not mean that we are beaten or need be beaten. Almost certainly the outcome depends on our own will. But at this moment we are in the soup, full fathom five, and we have been brought there by follies which we are still committing and which will drown us altogether if we do not mend our ways quickly.
What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism - that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport* are owned privately and operated solely for profit does not work. This fact has been known to millions of people for years past, but nothing ever came of it, because there was no real urge from below to alter the system, and those at the top had trained themselves to be impenetrably stupid on just this point. Argument and propoganda got one nowhere.

George Orwell (pub. 1946)
* here we might add - banks, insurance, property,

Monday 6 October 2008

More banana box bargains

A strange case of synchronicity this last 3 days. Some would call it chance, others coincidence.
In Eisenstadt, formerly Kismarton (Hungarian), the Austrian provincial capital of Burgenland almost on the Hungarian border Poet-in-Residence bought a 1 euro banana box bargain book. It was a copy of Australian author Thomas Keneally's Now and in Time to Be, the story of the author's travels in Ireland.
Today in Vienna a couple more banana box books caught the bardic eye. The first, Trilby by George Du Maurier is the tale of Svengali, the second picked up because it was Schindler's Ark and bargain priced at 1 euro was also thrust into the plastic carrier bag.
On the tram on the way home Poet-in-Residence was surprised to discover that Thomas Keneally also wrote Schindler's Ark. Yes, it was synchronious, or coincidental, or simply by chance; whichever you like you may choose.
But what's significant here is the answer to the question - Why did it need an Australian writer to uncover and tell the world this story?
In Munich a 90 year-old ex-Nazi, a town mayor and public figure, has just now gone on trial for war crimes in Italy. Many Nazi criminals have been allowed to escape justice, in some cases with the assistance of the Vatican, and some have subsequently been lauded with honours, such as the infamous Doctor Heinrich Gross the child murderer here in Austria.
It seems that the European establishment still hasn't got the courage to look recent European history squarely in the eye. In the case of Schindler it required the combined efforts of Hollywood and Australia to do the job.

How can I dream when I can't even sleep at night?

The task I posed myself, and any poet throwing a double-six, was to make a sideways leap from Wallace Stevens and, come what may, to arrive at a new and unrelated destination.
And so, here in these unchartered shark-infested waters, having passed through some cramped and curious rooms above a pizza takeaway, I go from 'swerve of shore to bend of bay' and enjoyce myself, felicitous and overinclined as a Nabokovian speaking Nabokovese.
I have decided that my psychiatrist doesn't need to understand me, sorry Sigmund, and so I now sail forth.
After a few minutes there is a result of sorts. It's a sideways leap from from Wallace Stevens's Tea at the Palaz of Hoon via James Joyce, Damien Hirst, Vladimir Nabokov, Sigmund Freud, George Szirtes, Agatha Christie and the local Drug Store Museum.

Death in the Museum

Twin black frogs
wrinkly in their jar
clasped in joint embrace
s m i l e
into each other's hollow eyes.

Poisonous frogs are we
they say unmovingly
in silent Japanese
and s m i l e
into each other's hollow eyes.

There was nothing more to do
they'd spawned it all
for that's what frogs do best.

And s m i l e
behind the backs of other frogs,
the old curator croaks
his wrinkly hand at rest
upon the jar
now falling from the shelf.


c) 2008 - Gwilym Williams

Saturday 4 October 2008

Fishless Rivers



Ahmad Nadalian
citizen of Poloor
and its fishless rivers,
carver of the fish
for the Horaz River,
is walking
through the Damavand
filling his basket
with stones.

What he hopes to draw
with his chisel
and hammer
is your attention.

c) 2004, 2008 - Gwilym Williams

Nadalian returns to the fishless rivers with his carved stones and leaves them where they might be found. It's a kind of treasure hunt. The prizes are stone fish. Real fish cannot be found in many of the polluted and dried-up rivers in the Damavand region by the Caspian Sea.

The sideways step of poetkind

Poets use other poets' poems as stepping-stones. But stepping-stones, like Tarr Steps in Devon, only go in two directions; backwards, where the poet doesn't want to go or forwards to the far bank; the place where the poet thinks he ought to go. And that's fine as far as it goes.
But what's far more interesting, and worth taking forward, is an idea that came to Poet-in-Residence through George Szirtes' stimulating blog. The idea, if Poet-in-Residence is developing it correctly, that poets move sideways, through invisible space, making almost quantum leaps, to find jumping-off points; not to high places to commit poetical suicide although that is certainly not written out, but to high places where the poets can launch themelves on their bardic broomsticks into some hitherto unknown and unexplored realm. Each poet then is a potential poetical Harry Potter or Columbus. The bardic world is not flat. There is no limiting horizon. We cannot fall over the edge. Poet-in-Residence says Let's go for it!
The poetry of Wallace Stevens, one who may have been there (wherever there is) before us, is Poet-in-Residence's selected place to make a start. We join him for tea.

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The lonliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed inside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

-----

Ok, there's the start line. Now, dear reader, throw your double-six.

Wednesday 1 October 2008

What we see is what we think

October, the month of Hallowe'en, is with us and the light is changing. The title of this post is a poem title from Wallace Stevens who entered this world on the 2nd day of October 1879. 'Poetry,' said Stevens, 'is my way of making the world palatable. It's the way of making one's experience, almost wholly inexplicable, acceptable.'

What we see is what we think

At twelve, the disintegration of afternoon
Began, the return of phantomerei, if not
To phantoms. Till then it had been the other way:

One imagined the violet trees but the trees stood green,
At twelve, as green as ever they would be.
The sky was blue beyond the vaultiest phrase.

Twelve meant as much as: the end of normal time,
Straight up, an elan without harrowing,
The imprescriptible zenith, free of harangue,

Twelve and the first gray second after, a kind
Of violet gray, a green violet, a thread
To weave a shadow's leg or sleeve, a scrawl

On the pedestal, an ambitious page dog-eared
At the upper right, a pyramid with one side
Like a spectral cut in its perception, a tilt

And its tawny caricature and tawny life,
Another thought, the paramount ado ...
Since what we think is never what we see.

----
Wallace Stevens 1879 - 1955