Friday 27 November 2009

A BOOK FOR CHRISTMAS


Richard Askwith's book Feet in the Clouds - a tale of fell-running and obsession - Aurum Press ISBN 1-84513-082-0 at 8.99p is the Poet in Residence - Bard on the Run book tip for the winter fireside. It's what it says on the box but it's also more. It's an insight into the human psyche. A study of what makes mountain top fanatics, in this case those craggy athletes the fell-runners, really tick. And what keeps them ticking. What's the motivation? Why the obsession? It's certainly nothing to do with money, as in most other sports. Richard Askwith shakes the nuts in the box. Takes off the lid.

Until 20-odd years ago several great fell-running champions were ostracized for winning twenty pounds here and there and were deemed professionals. At the same time doped-up gladiators known as track sprinters were running all over the globe as AAA amateurs and earning millions.

What others say:
A minor masterpiece - Sunday Times; One of the best books about the extremes of sporting endeavour that you will ever read - Independent on Sunday; A truly superb book - Westmorland Gazette; A wonderful, funny and surprisingly moving tale - Daily Telegraph; A book to stir the spirit - Independent; A book you don't want to put down - Conserving Lakeland.



If Feet in the Clouds is much too energetic for your post-lunch fireside armchair there's always this: Genteel Messages by Gwilym Williams ISBN 978-1-906357-17-7 (5.25p plus 2.00p&p via Poetry Monthly Link with PayPal). The 2008 Purple Patch Awards Best Individual Collection and now 12 months in the Poetry Monthly Best Seller List.

Can't decide? Then why not try both? I found my copy of Feet in the Clouds at Borders. And why did I buy it? Because it was there.

_________
°the top picture (courtesy of Clayton-le-Moors Harriers) shows runners descending Ingleborough in the annual 3-Peaks of Yorkshire Fell Race.

Thursday 26 November 2009

Brief History of Welsh Slate

A new Poet-in-Residence poem with something to say Brief History of Welsh Slate (Gwilym Williams) and a selection of poems by other poets may be found at the latest edition of Pulsar Poetry, now a quarterly webzine (you can go there via PiR's sidebar A-Z LINKS >>>).
There's high praise for Gwilym Williams' one and only poetry book Genteel Messages on the Pulsar Poetry website too. Click on the 'Book Reviews..' section.

[Normal service now resumed]

Sadly, I lost sight of Ernest (see post below). Yes, Hemingway it was that I was following in my imaginary first sentence of my imaginary mystery novel. If you guessed correctly what I was up to you can award yourself a gold star.

Wednesday 18 November 2009

A Novel Idea


And so, an end to cogitation and dither. Finally I'm up for it. Like an Italian approaching a nun I gently salute my cojones. Purely for luck. Shall we now march into the church of pharisaical insanity? Ernest, I'm on your heel ...




[image: courtesy Wikipedia]

Monday 16 November 2009

running along

Quite often on a winter's evening the only companion of the trail runner is the Moon. The runner's shoes striking the path and his own breath may be the only sounds. Not even the owl is abroad. A good runner can catch the Moon.



running along
and the moon runs with me

the cold clear night
and the moon runs with me

over the hill
and down through the trees

over the hill
no cloud in sight

along the path
and the leaves in rime

along the path
and the moon is mine

[...to be continued when time permits]
_______
gw 2009
image: courtesy nasa

Sunday 15 November 2009

Gu Cheng's darkness of the night

The M57 cylinder is 4,000 light years away in the musical constellation of Lyra. See also Poet-in-Residence's poem Eye of God or Ring Nebula Deep Field (via blog searchbox).

Darkness of the night gave me black eyes
I used it to search for light
_______________
image: Hubble
poem: Gu Cheng

Autochthonous Art


The following poem is a first Poet-in-Residence attempt at composing art brut poetry (see the post immediately below this). The poem is dedicated to Vincent van Gogh.







Autochthonous Art

springs out of the soil
and germinates

to generate
in the Earth's
magnetic field:

paint a spring-heeled crow
in a winter forest
or a field of wheat
.

Attraction (and repulsion)
begins
with the spinning
of the planet

and
the unseen
spin
of
the
atomic
part
-ic
l-
-e
fizzling
invisible lightning
into the mind's
cavern.

Dream material
settles deeply in a pool
with hidden chambers

where sinewy stalagtites
grow aureate ears
and eyes.

On gnarled and twisted trees
you may place your doctor's stethoscope
and on the knots
auscultate;

lend your ears
to the trickles of their hearts
and calculate

how
many
gene-
ratio-
n-
-s

________
gw 2009
*image: Wheatfield in Auvers
courtesy of BBC.

Saturday 14 November 2009

Art Brut in Gugging


A poem expresses what comes from the heart by way of the intellect, according to the poet R S Thomas. But what if the intellect is badly damaged? Does that make the poetry, or any work of art for that matter, any less valid?

Pablo Picasso, went further than Thomas. Picasso said that the artist must not seek but find - finding is a letting go and falling into a state beyond intellectual choices. Adolf Wölfi° filled 25,000 sheets of paper with drawings and writings during his 35 years at the Waldau Lunatic Asylum in Switzerland. Artist or madman?

Art is born in the unconscious. The poet's inner ear is open to his inner voice. He doesn't over-employ the intellect but he uses it, to bring order to his work, in almost the same way that a bricklayer uses a string, a trowel and a spirit-level.

Truly original artists are the few not touched by convention. They belong to no school. They are as Michel Thevoz says: masters of the unstable, traitors to the guild, intellectual slaves to truth, brilliant bootleggers and double agents.

These then are the art brut artists. And whatever such an artist produces is bound to be autochthonous. The work stems completely from himself. He owes his creation to nobody. You cannot teach him what is taught in your guild. It is pointless. He will ignore it. He is instructed only by his subconscious. By his own letting go.

Jean Dubuffet who coined the term art brut describes the art brut artists and their friends the primitives as being driven by inner forces which draw upon a true source. The artists of the Occident have lost touch with their roots. It might be possible for us to learn something from these so-called savages. It might be that the refinement, spirituality and emotional depth are with them, Dubuffet says.

Johann Feilacher, who regards himself as an artists' assistant, at Gugging Artists reckons that the work of art brut artists such as August Walla (All Kinds of Many Gods) is on the same level as that of household names like Miro, Warhol, Kokoschka and Klee. Art world trends are immune from compassion, he points out. By purchasing works like Net of Roses and Red Zebra museums were admitting that the works were of equal value to those of Miro & co.

In the early 1940's Central Europe's psychiatric wards were cleared out by the Nazis and the patients systematically murdered. After the war the same wards were replenished with greater numbers. By the 1950's conditions were catastrophic.

At Vienna's Gugging Sanatorium there was for a time only one doctor for 1,500 patients. Things gradually improved to a more managable 2 doctors with 500 patients each. One of these doctors was Leo Navratil, a pioneer of diagnostic drawing tests. Conducting the tests he soon recognized a specific symbolism at work and in 1965 he published his Schizophrenia & Art. This and other of his publications exploring the psychological link between artistic creativity and pathological conditions became known as signposts.

At Gugging the focus is on the patients artistic strengths rather than their illnesses. In the Gugging House of Artists each of the 14 artists finds himself a place, a table, a corner, where he can be creative. Some do this of their own accord. Others like a second person to be present when they work. There is no time pressure and no pressure to succeed. Every artist invited to live in the House of Artists is allowed all the time in the world.

Sadly, there have been some recent instances of faked art brut being sold as originals. Gugging art, I was told, is sold on a contract and commission basis. The artist receives 70% of the sale price. The remaining 30% goes to Atelier Gugging and the Gugging Artists' Gallery.

The Blue Star - the society's journal is published twice yearly.

________
°In 1921 Walter Morgenthaler wrote Adolf Wölfi - insane man as artist. Morgenthaler was the first to dare call an insane person an artist.
*The above painting is a Poet-in-Residence attempt at art brut. It's a bird.
'More at 'zen my ass' 16-Feb-2017

Thursday 12 November 2009

Happy Birthday Poet in Residence

The Poet in Residence blog-spot is two this month. How does a blog celebrate its second birthday? The poem below, Sunday Interlude, is an allegory for a birthday. The reader can go there. It will suffice. It may do more.

The philosophy behind the young and upcoming Poet in Residence blog has all to do with the role of the individual as artist. Poet in Residence belongs to no school of poetry. He sub-scribes to and for no palliative. He feels no need or requirement or urgent need to do so. Like Josef Haydn, Dylan Thomas, and Vincent van Gogh, the first three names to spring to mind, the Poet in Residence ploughs his own furrow. Sometimes the furrows cross. But no matter.

That's a way, but it's always the way in which progress is made in the arts. Schools of art or poetry sometimes serve to stint one's progress or stop it altogether.

Naturally schooling is important. Nobody would deny that. After all, it is where foundations are laid. But once the foundations are firm you can almost forget about them. It will take an earthquake to move you.

We can now build our towers. Poet in Residence has just completed the second storey of his. There's a long way to go. But the work has begun.

For the statistically minded:
2 years old (or is it young?)
500 postings (or approaching!)
500 visitors° per week (on average)
°includes visits by universities and educational establishments with more than one computer.

Sunday interlude

Sunday interlude

There is a man
brown as bread

And a woman
black as olives

Or maybe white
as bones

Strolling in a garden
sitting in an arbour

And they are eating fresh fruit
from a bowl

Perhaps a terracotta bowl

And musing
on music
and how many children

The bread brown man
and the olive black woman
or maybe the bone white woman

Are wearing their Sunday best
smiles
in their eyes

The bread brown man is plucking the lyre
it is not a new song

The olive black or maybe bone white woman is plucking an eyebrow
she hums an old song

A little but wrong




_______
gw 2009

Wednesday 11 November 2009

11th November - Poppy Day


In a few moments I will switch on the TV and watch the BBC's Remembrance Day programme. Angela Merkel°, the German Bundeskanzler will be attending a memorial service in France. This will be the first time that a German leader will be there. The year is 2009. It's been a long time coming.

Perhaps now we can put World War I (1914-1918) behind us; finally bury it in the archives along with the Napoleonic wars, the Boer War, the Franco-Prussian War, the War of American Independence, and all the cannon-fodder wars that our various ancestors have been privileged to witness.

In 1916 both my grandfathers found themselves in the trenches at the Battle of the Somme. This crucial battle, as it was called, cost both sides dearly. It is estimated that more than 600,000 men on each side perished. Both grandfathers survived by the skin of their teeth. But neither man could ever bring himself to say very much about the horror of it all. They preferred to bury the memory. And we must respect their right to do so.

However there is one part of the whole business, for World War I was nothing if it was not a business, that still mystifies me. And it comes to my mind every 11th November or whenever I wander around the remote villages in the Snowdonia mountains, where one of my grandfathers was born and raised, and see the many war memorials with their engraved lists of names, almost every young man in almost every village killed or missing in France. I still have to ask what were they doing in France in the first place?

What was such a naif young man, not much more than a boy really, who lived in a huddled pile of wet slates with just one door and two windows, with no electricity, with no running water, and with hardly any education to his name, a boy who was forced to go to the Methodist chapel in the next village several miles away three times every Sunday, what was such a youth doing in France running around with a .303 rifle in his hands shooting at Germans, or shooting at anybody else for that matter?

Your Country Needs You! lied one side's poster. Your Emperor Needs You! lied the other side's. Lest we forget, the ten million dead could easily have been twenty million if the German Navy had not gone on strike and brought the nonsense to end.

Such is the fog of war; the yellow fog in which the vainglorious generals, the short-sighted politicians, the greedy financiers and their industrialist friends, the press barons and their fogbound editors, the dictators, the various other madmen with too much power, the religious fanatics, the stay-at-home crusaders, the brainwashed mega-multitude, the so-called war criminals, and all the world's two-legged rapacious monsters, nearly all of us that is except for the common soldier and his family, shall safely and conveniently hide and have our being.

Unless mankind finds a safer way to settle disputes and territorial squabbles the war to end all wars will really happen. It will be called World War III.

There will be no need for a World War IV.

________

°"We should rise above the pain of the past"
- Angela Merkel - today in Paris

________

The Poet-in-Residence commemorative poem this year is W B Yeats' poem An Irish Airman Forsees His Death and it is two posts below this one.

Tuesday 10 November 2009

Nourishment for the imagination - currente calamo!

Nourishment for the imagination comes from the written word; books, newspapers, magazines and, dare I say it, blogs such as this and those in the Poet-in-Residence's A-Z Links (see sidebar).
The first point worth making is that reading expands one's vocabulary. This in its turn stimulates the imagination. Here you may safely gormandize yourself to the point of gluttony.
Some might argue for TV and theatre. But with TV especially, and theatre to a lesser extent, the imagination plays a more passive role. With everything conveniently laid out before you and little or no effort required on your part, your imagination might well go to sleep. If you watch TV's Grand Prix Motor Racing after a full dinner you probably will.

The compost of nourishment must be dug into the soil of imagination and given a good forking over. And this takes some effort on the reader's part. More effort anyway than fishing down the side of the armchair for the remote control and flicking through the TV channels like a zombie.

If you want to write, certainly it pays to read something interesting and thought provoking. Newspapers are seriously good at stimulating the imagination. Cheap tabloids, the so-called Boulevard Press, are especially good. Just feel the heat, the anger and passion, simmering in the readers' letters columns.
Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian playwright and novelist, used to race through large piles of newspapers like a maniac schoolboy with a pile of Penny Dreadfuls. The newspapers needn't even be current issues. Somebody, whose identity temporarily escapes me, never read a newspaper before it was a month old. It's not the news you are after, in some newspapers there is no news to speak of, but it's the stimulus.

Another advantage that reading has over TV, theatre, cinema and so on, is that you can take it with you wherever you go. American artist Raymond Pettibon, for example, rips whole pages out of novels rather than carry the book around. He's not interested in reading the book right through. He's after what I'm after. The stimulus, the nourishment, the information, the ideas.

What is it that is handy, convenient, and is fireworks for the imagination? It is, of course, the humble poem. Take a verse by Wallace Stevens. Copy it out. Carry it around with you. Make notes, cover it all over with different coloured inks, as I did last year with one of John MacDonald's haiku books, permanently folded into my raincoat pocket. Better than being on the shelf gathering dust, I'm sure John would agree. Books have to work for their corn in the Poet-in-Residence residence. You won't find many mint condition, pristine poetry books here. Mostly they are ravaged, raped and ripped apart. Mostly they cost one euro or less. What else would I do with them?

Until next time, Currente calamo!°

°with a running or rapid pen

W B Yeats and An Irish Airman Forsees His Death

An Irish Airman Forsees His Death

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate;
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross°,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

___________
Wm Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
°(on the Galway to Ennis road)
- also see post below

W B Yeats' and The Second Coming

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) wrote The Second Coming in January 1919, around the time of the 1st anniversary of the death of Robert Gregory who was killed in action in Italy in January 1918 and who will be remembered and recalled for posterity via Yates' classic poem An Irish Airman Forsees His Death.

In respect of The Second Coming Yeats notes: "All our scientific, democratic, fact-accumulating, heterogeneous civilisation belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not the continuance of itself but the revelation as in a lightning flash, though in a flash that will not strike only in one place, and will for a time be constantly repeated, of the civilisation that must slowly take its place."


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.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

______________
Wm B Yeats (1865-1939)

Monday 9 November 2009

In defence of Dylan Thomas


Today, this insect, and the world I breathe...

Today the free world celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And Poet-in-Residence, having once been to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum (which is well worth a visit) joins with the spirit of the celebrations. It cannot be right that a wall divides communities, families and friends. But as Hillary Clinton reminds us, we should not forget that today there are other walls in the world, walls for people to hide behind.

Another thought that is in the public mind here in Austria, and over the River Inn in Germany, is that today is the 51st anniversary of the The Night of Broken Glass.
Kristallnacht as it was then called, was the signal for the long-prepared Nazi terror to begin; a terror that depended upon propaganda, false promises of better times to come, and re-education. The signs were: the children forced to spy on their parents, the replacement of schoolteachers with educators, the burning of the books, the terror in the universities, the banned authors, the idea of more living space (Lebensraum) for the chosen - the Herrenvolk, the spreading of fear (the spy next-door or in the place of work), all of which things and ideas led to the enslavement and eventual deaths of millions, mostly Russians, Slavs and Eastern Europeans, and of course to Hitler's Final Solution as far as the Jews were concerned. And so, Poet-in-Residence, as a member of the wider community of writers and poets, and a seeker after the truth, remembers all that too.

And now to the Swansea poet Dylan Thomas who died in New York on this day 56 years ago. He was on his fourth lecture tour of the USA.

In defence of Dylan Thomas

You should have waved goodbye
when they checked you
out of the Chelsea Hotel.

But no,
you strolled into a bar

and a coma.

Too many straight whiskies
they told me.

I think it's a record
they said
you had said -

your famous last words
poured
into the mouth of a tumbler.

And death shall have no dominion.

And so dear Dylan,
you now have your stars
at elbow and foot
and will live in the sun
till the sun breaks down
and with the man in the wind
and the west moon.

Go then! Do as you like.
See if I don't care!
I said.

And you did
like I knew you would.

And now
here you are
dead as nails
and too soon gone.

And soon you will rest in peace
upon your soddin' hill
in Wales
behind the heron-priested bay
and the house-on-stilts
where the gulls will cry and wail
on the westerly wind
that makes the waves break loud
ever loud.

The waves from afar.

The waves
from the mad Manhattan
crowd.

The waves


______
gw2009

Sunday 8 November 2009

The strange world of synchronicity

Regular visitors to Poet-in-Residence may see this blog post chopped and changed as events unfold, for synchronicity is a riddle the answer to which could be hidden just about anywhere.

If synchronicity takes you by the hand you ought sometimes to follow, if only to see where it leads you. Often it leads you to somewhere or something absurd. A silly coincidence. It has no meaning that you can deduce. But now and then the end of the trail will surprise and inform, for it will have led you to somewhere illuminating.

I begin with a definition of synchronicity:

synchronicity: the temporal coincidence of two or more events linked together by meaning, but without any causal connection; meaningful cross-connection between separate causal chains (Trans. of G synchronizität; used by C G Jung (Webster))

The story begins when I was leaving the Thomas Bernhard exhibition. There's a post below about all that. Before long I found myself rummaging in a banana box of bargain books. I chanced upon a paperback book called Those Feet, which I thought might make a suitable present for a football crazy friend of mine. And so I bought it.


[image courtesy of findagrave.com]

The original post began here:

David Winner, in the introduction to his book Those Feet - an intimate history of English football (Bloomsbury) tells a strange story. Here's an extract:

'Those Feet' are the third and fourth words of William Blake's sublime, exalting poem 'Jerusalem' [...] The book's original title had been 'By God They Frighten Me', from the Duke of Wellington [...] Mike Jones and I met to thrash out the question, and it didn't take us long to agree that Blake's line had more going for it than the acid wit of the Iron Duke.
The following day [...] exploring a part of London I didn't know [...] on a whim, I got off the bus [...] the only interesting thing in sight was a small park [...] I became aware of birdsong and greenery and trees covered with blossom, but I paid little attention to anything else [...] After a couple of hundred yards [...] I stopped. I looked down, and found that I was standing beside the grave° of William Blake.



William Blake was the first poet to speak for children in their own right, in their condition of innocence. For Blake, love was innocence; spirituality released from materialism. Churches and chapels belonged to The Beast, the State. His attitude to death was captured in this comment on the death of his friend Flaxman: I cannot think of death as more than going out of one room into another.

Blake said of the following poem: I may praise it since I dare not pretend to be any other than the secretary; the authors are in Eternity.

Blake's poem relates to the persistent legend in parts of Britain, including Wales, that Joseph of Arimathea, the wealthy Israelite who provided the tomb for Christ, departed Judea and sailed for Britain with a small fleet of ships containing some 500 followers (including Jesus himself). It is said that a group of these followers eventually settled in the Glastonbury area.

The Welsh prefix Glas (remember that Cymraeg or Welsh was spoken widely, in fact it was spoken in 2/3rds of Britain in those days) means heaven, sky, blue. According to the legend, Joseph of Arimathea thrust his staff into the earth and it miraculously sprouted white flowers, perhaps it was hawthorn, and so he came to choose Glastonbury as the place to be.

Maybe Blake was right? He certainly believed that he was. And he could be, for when I look at the boundary of the Roman Empire there was practically nowhere else that Joseph of Arimathea and his followers could travel to.

In the east there was desert and the client state of Arabia-Petraea. In the south the Romans controlled the provinces of Egypt (including Alexandria), Cyrenaica, Africa (including Carthage) and the client state of Mauretania. In the west Roman rule extended from Judea over the breadth of Europe to Lusitania in present day Portugal. And in the north, Roman power extended as far as the Rhine, Belgica and Gallia Lugdunensis (present day Northern France) and included the client state of Thrace on the Black Sea. The strategic and important cities of Antioch, Pergamum, Ephesus, Corinth, Actium, Rome, Lugdunum and Gades were in Roman hands.

Clearly with the Romans in control of almost all of Europe's roads and cities a land route was out of the question. A group of 500 travellers would immediately arouse suspicion. The roads were already lined with thousands of wooden crosses. The way out of Judea would have to be by sea and Brittania, which would not fall to the Romans until 43 AD, was at the time immediately following the crucifixion the safest destination for Joseph and his followers.

The Holy Grail, it has often been argued is only a code name for Jesus. This was probably an idea that Blake had mulled over time and time again. After all, as a ten-year old he had already seen one hundred sparkling angels sitting in a tree.

According to diarist Henry Crabb Robinson, the poet William Wordsworth thought Blake was a madman, but a madman whose work he preferred to the likes of Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. That aside, Blake likely believed that the King Arthur and the Holy Grail legend was rooted in the much older Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Grail legend. He would then have deduced that the two legends were in essence two parts of one legend and then it followed that he could produce the following:

from Introduction to Milton

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

But what has all this to do with synchronicity. This is mildly interesting but in the end pure coincidence surely?

Please be patient dear reader, we are far from finished yet ....

And so, when I first drafted this post and had just finished typing the above poem from Blake's Introduction to Milton, I discovered much to my surprise that today, of all days, in the year 1674 was the poet John Milton's supposed death day. Milton had made his peace with himself and the world, declined to attend church, refused to allow any religious services to be held in his house and then quietly passed away in his bed, aged 66. It was so peacefully done that his expiring was not perceived by those in the room. He was buried in St. Giles' Church at Cripplegate in London.

[to be continued]
[continued]

A few words about John Milton at this point:
By 1651, at the age of 43 or so, Milton was blind. He believed that he had lost his sight by writing treatises in defence of freedom of the press and the English people. He wrote in his sonnet xxii that he had lost his eyes over-plied in liberty's defence. A true martyr to the cause.

And now back to synchronicity. We have followed the links in the chain from the Thomas Bernhard Exhibition in Vienna to a nearby shop and a book about football, and then from there to a graveyard in London and the poet William Blake. Synchronicity then took us from the world of Blake to the world of John Milton and his death on this day exactly 335 years ago.
But there's one more step, and that is via Nicholas Albery's Poem for the Day book where I found the text of the William Blake poem. This book is nothing less than Poet in Residence's bardic bible. And so, looking at today's entry, which is of course a poem by John Milton, I am forced to the conclusion that this was the whole purpose and point of the strange synchronous chain we have followed in this blogpost. It was intended, was it not, to bring me, and you, to this page dated 8th November and to this poem, this message, which I now share with you the reader:

Sonnet xix

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account lest He returning chide;
'Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?'
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, 'God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post over land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.'


Of course, the bold text is mine. And that is done so that I must now ask myself: Where am I in the end, the end of the chain, the end of the journey and what is the message? Where have I arrived as the result of synchronicity? What is the information I must take on board? Is it that Zen Buddhism is just as valid as anything else? That there is no need for us to bomb our way to the tabernacle or to the black meteorite. In fact, as the poem hints, such fanatical behaviour is pointless. The blind man sees best. That's it. That's the information. End.

___________
John Milton (9th December 1608 - 8th November 1674)
William Blake (28th November 1757 - 12th August 1827)

°The location of William Blake's final resting place (see photo) is Bunhill Field Cemetery in the East of London. But, like Mozart in Vienna, the exact location of the great man's bones is unknown. The approximate spot was only rediscovered in 1965.

Friday 6 November 2009

Thomas Bernhard at Vienna's KHM Theater Museum.


[image courtesy of Wikipedia]


The exhibition to mark the 20th year of the death of the writer Thomas Bernhard begins in the courtyard of the KHM's Lobkowitz Palace museum where a loudspeaker blares out the recording of the scandal; the opening night of Bernhard's strongest and most controversial anti-Nazi play Heldenplatz. The audience consists of a dozen black crows who sit on rose bushes wrapped in sacking. The sacks are stamped with 5 and 6 digit numbers, reminding the visitor of the Nazi penchant for numerical tattoos.

Heldenplatz, the large square in front of the Hofburg, is best known to modern historians and viewers of old newsreels as the place where Adolf Hitler addressed the jubilant citizenry of Vienna following his unopposed march into Austria. These days the Hofburg Palace houses, not a royal family or a 3rd Reich bureau, but the office of Dr. Heinz Fischer the President of the 2nd Republic, the National Library Archives and various historical museums.

It is November and it is foggy in Vienna, as it often is. And so in the courtyard of Palais Lobkowitz, on this 20th anniversary of Bernhard's passing, I begin to peer through the slowly dispersing fog into the life and works of the author who was regarded by many Austrians as the nest spoiler, the world famous writer from Austria who was never awarded his nation's highest literary prize, a writer who will always remain an enigma and a thorn in the side to most Austrians.

Ex-Wehrmacht officer Kurt Waldheim, the Hofburg's incumbent at the time of the scandal, who would soon have to deal with his own scandal in respect of his controversial autobiography Im Glaspalast der Weltpolitik promulgated the following: Heldenplatz is an insult to the Austrian people.

President Waldheim's remarks were blazoned across the front page of organs like the Kurier newspaper. Austria's most popular tabloid the Kronen Zeitung printed a full page of carefully chosen text from the play, as if to prove Waldheim's point. Waldheim's reaction was the official line which Austria's press dutifully followed.

I come next to a weather-beaten park bench in the museum foyer. The bench is similar to the one on which Bernhard is sitting in the mist in the Volksgarten, a stone's throw from Heldenplatz, for one of his last photographs. It's theatrical. He sits alone quietly like someone meditating. He wears a scarf covering neck and chest, his weak points. It's the onset of winter. The picture was taken by Sepp Dreisinger in 1988 the year before Bernhard died. The bench may or may not be the actual Bernhard bench. We are not told. But more than likely it's not.

There are two rooms containing the main exhibition. A white room and a black room. The white room is titled Einerseits (On the one hand) and the black room is titled Andererseits (on the other hand).

On the one hand there is a glass box which you can enter to be bombarded with endless shouts of Hitler! Hitler Hitler! from the Heldenplatz crowd of 1938 and on the other hand there is a place where you can read Bernhard's sarcastic opinion on the idea of promoting Salzburg as the German Rome: Rome, Church, German, Nazi. A wonderful mixture.

There are many video-clips of scenes from various plays. I particularly enjoyed watching the 3-minute snippet of conversation between Bruno Ganz as a mad psychiatrist dressed in black (Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige) and Ulrich Wildgruber as the blind man in the fawn mackintosh. Ganz, a superb actor, reminded me of Peter Sellers.

Later I sat at a long dining table set for three and watched two video clips of Ritter, Dene, Voss. On the tablecloth there was some food for thought embroidered along one side: We hate all embroidery, even if grandmother embroidered it and on the other side: The one embroiders and the other philosophises all through life.

There was no problem with accessing the various headphones, videos and using the several chairs in the two rooms since the exhibition, on this its first day following its official opening, was not exactly crowded. During the time I was there (mid-afternoon) there were perhaps just a dozen visitors.

A special treat for me was to view a short extract, featuring Martin Schwab and Kirsten Dene, from the first Thomas Bernhard play it was my pleasure to see (in 1988): Claus Peymann buys trousers and goes with me to eat. Many letters and photographs were on display. It will require another visit to take it all in.

On leaving, I found I was pondering a niggling question: Was it meant to be a tribute or an apology? And I really couldn't answer that. Perhaps it was a curious mixture of both; Einerseits a tribute and Andererseits and apology (of sorts). Whatever it is, or was, at least it is something, and something is probably better than nothing.

Österreichisches Theater Museum
Thomas Bernhard und das Theater
5 November 2009 - 4 July 2010
"Austria is nothing but a stage"
Thomas Bernhard and the Theatre
Exhibition only suitable for German-speaking visitors. No English information.

Eye of God or Ring Nebula Deep Field


Image courtesy of Astronomy Picture of the Day (LINK at Bard on the Run)




Eye of God or Ring Nebula Deep Field

Fireworks and music
implosions and explosions
in Lyra's constellation

and the night drawn down
at the speed of light
the quick kiss and then
the complete shut-down

and soon the waves upon the shore
and are all gone
and one more star and all her children
are no more

2,000 light years distant
and gone
to the ultra violet
gone
to the infra red
gone
to our sensitive instruments
detecting atomic symphony of hydrogen
and gas flung
to the far flung
distance

but Lyra's star is seriously gone,

gone,
gone,
gone

like a vanished bell
in a war
shot from a cannon
and finally
gone
forever.


But Lyra's star repeats
there is no forever
only the moment
of the first word
repeated

fiat-lux

for then
gravity reassembles
from the atomic

and then there is the will
to shine out again
to sing an old familiar song
which comes from the round
molecular tones
of the new star
and the water music
in the the music
of hydrogen
and so there will roar forth
another blast of heavenly
dragon's breath

and the miraculous music
of life!
will be renewed
and will continue
to be forever
reborn

in the lyric
and the music
of Lyra's exploded sun.

______
gw2009

Thursday 5 November 2009

GENESIS


GENESIS

In the beginning was the ROCK

a place to stand

And God saw that the ROCK was good.

And God said: Let there be Algae.
And there was Algae. And the Algae
ruled over the ROCK for three thousand million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Trilobites.
And there were Trilobites. And the Trilobites
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae for fifty million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Fish.
And there were Fish. And the Fish
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites for seventy million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Scorpions.
And there were Scorpions. And the Scorpions
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish for twenty million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Snails.
And there were Snails. And the Snails
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions for fifty million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Ammonites.
And there were Ammonites. And the Ammonites
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions and the Snails for thirty-five million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Amphibians.
And there were Amphibians. And the Amphibians
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions and the Snails and the Ammonites for thirty-five million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Reptiles and Insects.
And there were Reptiles and Insects. And the Reptiles and the Insects
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions and the Snails and the Ammonites and the Amphibians for forty-five million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Dinosaurs.
And there were Dinosaurs. And the Dinosaurs
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions and the Snails and the Ammonites and the Amphibians and the Reptiles and the Insects for forty-five million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Birds.
And there were Birds. And the Birds
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions and the Snails and the Ammonites and the Amphibians and the Reptiles and the Insects and the Dinosaurs for forty-five million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Flowers.
And there were Flowers. And the Flowers
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions and the Snails and the Ammonites and the Amphibians and the Reptiles and the Insects and the Dinosaurs for thirty-five million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there Primitive Mammals.
And there were Primitive Mammals. And the Primitive Mammals
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions and the Snails and the Ammonites and the Amphibians and the Reptiles and the Insects and the Dinosaurs and the Flowers for forty million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Modern Animals and Plants.
And there were Modern Animals and Plants. And the Modern Animals and Plants ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions and the Snails and the Ammonites and the Amphibians and the Reptiles and the Insects and the Dinosaurs and the Flowers and the Primitive Mammals for sixty-five million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And God said: Let there be Man.
And there was Man. And Man
ruled over the ROCK and the Algae and the Trilobites and the Fish and the Scorpions and the Snails and the Ammonites and the Amphibians and the Reptiles and the Insects and the Dinosaurs and the Flowers and the Primitive Mammals and the Modern Animals and Plants for one million years.
And God saw that it was good.

And then a voice
whispered in God's ear:
Why stop now?

_______
gw2009

Felicia Dorothea Hemans' Pilgrim Fathers

Poet-in-Residence discovered Felicia Dorothea Hemans' poem The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England in Bill Bryson's entertaining and informative book Made in America with which he is currently engrossed. Only the first two verses of the poem appear in Bryson's book. There's a lot to cram into 470-odd pages of Made in America and therefore Bryson is quite right merely to point the reader in a direction from where he can undertake his own research should he wish to do so.

Hemans, the daughter of a Liverpool merchant, wrote her poem, or as Bryson says: 'dashed it off', in 1826 after reading of the Founders' Day celebrations on a piece of newspaper from Massachusetts which had found its way to North Wales and in which her groceries were wrapped. The style of the poem written by the 'mediocre poet' ,as Bryson labels Hemans, is in his words, 'vigorously grandiloquent'. Mediocre or not, the poet counted William Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott amongst her friends and sponsors, it fired the American public's imagination and became: 'an instant classic and formed the image of the Mayflower landing that most Americans carry with them to this day,'

The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England

The breaking waves dashed high
On a stern and rock-bound coast,
And the woods against a stormy sky
Their giant branches tossed;

And the heavy night hung dark,
The hills and waters o'er,
When a band of exiles moored their bark
On the wild New England shore.

Not as the conqueror comes
They, true-hearted, came;
Not with the roll of stirring drums,
And the trumpet that sings of fame;

Not as the flying come,
In silence and in fear;
They shook the depths of the desert gloom
With their hymns of lofty cheer.

Amidst the storm they sang,
And the stars heard and the sea:
And the sounding aisles of the dim wood rang
To the anthem of the free!

The ocean eagle soar'd
From his nest by the white wave's foam
And the rocking pines of the forest roared -
This was their welcome home!

There were men with hoary hair
Amidst that pilgrim band: -
Why had they come to wither there,
Away from their childhood's land?

There was woman's fearless eye,
Lit by her deep love's truth;
There was manhood's brow serenly high,
And the fiery heart of youth.

What sought they thus afar?
Bright jewels of the mine?
The wealth of seas, the spoils of war? -
They sought a faith's pure shrine!

Ay, call it holy ground,
The soil where they first trod.
They have left unstained, what there they found -
Freedom to worship God.

_______________
Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835)

Tuesday 3 November 2009

The Bard Anonymous's Egyptian Poem

The bard Anonymous is a bard who cannot be silenced by the Copyright Police. His uncensored, and in the following instance illuminating words will continue to be heard or be seen wherever poetry has not died.
The poem which follows, on the theme of death, was a favourite of the writer Aldous Huxley. In 1932 the poem appeared in Huxley's anthology Texts and Pretexts. Huxley's books were always controversial and subject to censorship and contention. His novel Antic Hay was burned in Cairo.

Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-1963) died at his home in Hollywood on the day President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated.

Egyptian Poem

Death is before me to-day,
Like the recovery of a sick man,
Like going forth into a garden after sickness;

Death is before me today,
Like the odour of myrrh,
Like sitting under the sail on a windy day;

Death is before me to-day,
Like the odour of lotus flowers,
Like sitting on the shore of drunkenness;

Death is before me to-day,
Like the course of the freshet,
Like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house,
When he has spent years in captivity.

______
anon.

Sven De Swerts at Cafe´ Kafka

Gothic bard Sven de Swerts (http://spinyopaat.blogspot.com) will be at the Vienna International Film Festival, the Viennale, with his short film Beijing Story scheduled to be screened tomorrow 4th November.

On Friday evening, the 6th, Sven de Swerts is scheduled to take centre stage, as special guest, at the Labyrinth Poets poetry mic(see A-Z LINKS). Labyrinth poets always meet on the first Friday monthly at Cafe´ Kafka commencing shortly after 8pm. According to his blog he's due at Kafka on the 7th. Sven you've got it wrong.

Poet-in-Residence, who unfortunately can't make it to Kafka, has flagged-up the error at spinyopaat and also e-mailed Labyrinth organizer Peter Waugh.

Hope that sorts it out.

Sven de Swerts' other advertised appearance for November is at the Bru Slam, VUB, Brussels, on the 21st.

Monday 2 November 2009

Letts' August: Osage County at Vienna's Akademie

Tracy Letts' August: Osage County performed under its German title Eine Familie (a family) is now to be seen at Vienna's Akademietheater.

August: Osage County, a Pulitzer Prize for Drama award-winning play, is something not to be missed; especially recommended for Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee aficionados.

T S Eliot's poem The Hollow Men is the hook from which the more than 4-hour long play, directed by Alvis Hermanis, and three generations of the Weston family will have to hang until death us do part.

Beverly Weston, the family patriarch, opens the first scene ensconced in his favourite chair, a battered and worn leather chair with the filling bursting out of the splits, and recites and repeats the famous Eliot line: Life is very long. He bemoans the fact that his wife is a pill-popper and reflects that he is a worn-out alcoholic and a poet with nothing more to say.

Unfortunately actor Michael König was a shade too quiet in his musings and reflections. At times I struggled to hear him. And this is an important monologue and should be clearly heard for the play, as the audience will anticipate, must come full circle and end with another character sitting in the battered and torn old chair.

The life of the drunken poet is soon at an end. Other characters invade the stage on which a complete little house on the prairie with 7 claustrophobic rooms has been constructed.

The strongest and best performance, in fact it's a truly amazing performance, is that of Dörte Lyssewski who plays Barbara Fordham, one of the poet's 3 daughters. Another strong piece of acting, as always, from Kirsten Dene who plays the chain-smoking drugged-to-the-eyeballs family matriarch Violet Weston. It was lovely to see Dorothee Hartinger back on the stage after her period of maternity leave. She's a fine actress with a refreshingly clear and audible articulation.

Lines from The Hollow Men serve to describe role of the long-suffering and ineffective males caught-up in the Weston family tragedy:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!


The family maid Johnna Monevata (Anna Starzinger) is the only one who keeps her head when all around, as the saying goes, are losing theirs. Insults and crockery fly through the air at the poet's wake and from then on everything runs quickly downhill. The family skeletons, the bloodline secrets, all is dragged from the closets. Will the family fall to pieces like the poet's old chair and will it all end as Eliot's poem ends?

Not with a bang but a whimper.

As one might expect, it was all too much for some of the audience who wandered away during the two intervals, perhaps to deal with family dramas of their own. For those of us who remained to witness the play's bitter-sweet ending it was a theatrical moment to savour.

With this play Letts joins the icons Albee and Williams in the fine tradition of an American theatre that scrutinizes closely the American dream and investigates exactly where it's going and where it's going wrong.

Sunday 1 November 2009

The Monkey Emperor

The Monkey Emperor
Every attempt to make us uniform, biologically, emotionally or intellectually, is a betrayal of the evolutionary thrust that has made man its apex. J Bronowski - The Ascent of Man

The Monkey Emperor
Closed his eyes
And ears
And from his mouth
Came ignorance
And dogma.

In awe
The other monkeys
Opened their minds
To propaganda
Became regiments
Of robot monkeys.

They had programmed themselves
To march and sing
To the Monkey Emperor's
Dogma
And that is the tragedy
Of Monkey Emperor arrogance.

But then one day
on the edge of error
one small monkey
stopped
and tried to think

and then he lightly touched
a fellow
gently on the arm.

It was an almost human act.

_______
gw 2009

Wolfgang Rihm's Grave

On the 4th July 2005 Thomas Kakuska, a bratschist with the Alban Berg Quartett died after a long illness. The composer Wolfgang Rihm was working with students in Metz when the news reached him. Nevertheless he immediately agreed to Günter Pichler's request to compose a Requiem for Tommy.
Rihm produced a moving atonal piece to be performed by 2 violins, a viola and a cello. The requiem, titled Grave, begins with a period of silence and ends after the faint sound of a distant funeral bell is heard. It was first performed in the Vienna Konzerthaus on 28th January 2007 by the Alban Berg Quartett.
Last night, Hallowe'en, it was performed at the same venue by the Arditti Quartet - Irvine Arditti (violin), Ashot Sarkissjan (violin), Ralf Ehlers (viola) and Lucas Fels (violoncello).

Wolfgang Rihm's Grave

in memoriam Thomas Kakuska
for string quartet
12 minutes


In the balcony the acoustic is good
and I look across to the source
of the disturbance
the blue-rinsed perm
the smile
the ice-blue eyes
the operation of the hinged chatterbox
and I sense more than hear
the groans
of her neighbours
for it has already begun
and they are missing the beginning
for it begins with silence
a chromatic silence
which tonight wasn't there
in the balcony at least

but the acoustic is brilliant up here ...

you listen to spasmodic modulation
of phlegmatic debris
moving in the bronchial tubes
of damaged organs
whenever irritation builds up
and you listen to the long note
prior to the sneeze
of winter's chill
and to the paper-hankies
whispering
to be gently unfolded
and the crinkly sweet wrappers
begging to be noisily unfolded
and refolded
and the hard clunks
of the boiled cough-sweets
on ill-fitting dentures
and the zippered mouths of handbags
screaming
to be opened and closed
at periodic intervals

you even hear
the gentle ticking
of the second
hand on your neighbour's wrist
-watch
when it's quiet

and all the while
your ears cry
for eternity in the atonal
and the Arditti Quartet
and the clinical nurse patrolling the wards of your ears
folds Rihm's Requiem
into a place
already too full of noise
and so it was

Kakuska was buried

______
gw2009