Tuesday 30 October 2012

WE HOLD OUR BREATH


At the time of writing CNN is reporting that 6,500,000 customers in the north-east of the USA have no electricity due to the combined force of Hurricane Sandy and the blizzard known as Frankenstorm.

Nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen, who worked in the area in the 1970's and was present when there was an incident, reports that there are 26 nuclear plants, some of them old, in the affected area.

Obviously as the present scenario unfolds there are going to be problems. We hold our breath, await the dawn, and hope there is not another Fukushima-type catastrophe in the making.

The US elections are due to take place next week. There has been a lot of hot and cold air expounded on both  sides.  The independent candidate appears to have completely vanished from the scene, or to have never existed.

What really concerns me is that we in Europe have not heard much discussion from over the pond about climate change. We have heard much rhetoric about the usual subjects: wars, tea parties, and economic growth etcetera, but we have not heard much discussion about the consequences of the seeding of clouds, of drilling for oil in geologically sensitive areas, of the demise of the bees in the US, although the latter example reminds me that we have recently heard some talk about drones*.

We remember the promises: I will close that place within a year! and so on.

But what are political promises, even though they may be well meant, really worth? Can politicians actually deliver? Or is the US under the influence of other forces, as the late JFK hinted before he was gunned down?

And we in Europe needn't be smug.

Today's news: Germany sells its stake in the Horizon nuclear energy project to Japan.

After the Fukushima disaster, now sliding from one crisis into the next, can you believe the Germans actually did that? No, I can't either.

We hold our breath. What else can we do?



*Did Iran ever return the US spy drone that was brought down on their territory a couple of years ago? I remember President Obama going on the news to demand they return it. There was also news media discussion of Iran doing some back-engineering, or possibly engaging a friendly super power to do it for them, as I recall. We live in extremely dangerous times.


Monday 29 October 2012

BRYN TERFEL WITH DAFFODIL


Several years ago I had the pleasure of meeting the famous Welsh opera singer Bryn Terfel.

It was on a St. David's Day and since Bryn and I are both North Walians I presented him with a small daffodil, one of Wales's two national emblems (the other is the leek) outside the stage door of the Vienna State Opera.

We then went our separate ways. Later, I made this sketch.

BRYN TERFEL

Bryn Terfel is a featured artist on the YouTube sampler at Poet-in-Residence

Saturday 27 October 2012

THE CANDLE


for Dylan Thomas 27th October 1914 - 9th November 1953


this candle

for the poet

who bended

words to wax

with tapered lyric

in the boathouse shed

in laugharne

takes on the role of pen and paper


this crown so lighted

crowned his light

with wisps of smoke

above erratic pulsing blue

and yellow streets

of gold . . .


how quick the candle

flickers out


how quick the heart

grows cold.


c- G. Williams

laugharne is pronounced larne - it is the name of a small village on an estuary in south wales where dylan thomas, who died at the age of 39 in New York, lived in his 'house on stilts' and worked at his poems in the so-called boathouse shed, which was a wooden garage constructed at a slight angle to a narrow lane leading to the house and having fine views of the  the estuary; it's purpose was to garage the owner's  car which, like dylan, had no reverse gear.




Friday 26 October 2012

THE WALL - A FILM BY JULIAN ROMAN PĂ–LSLER




So what did I finally choose to see?

     You can bet your last buck it wasn't the thrills and skills of spezial-effecz-robocops careering around with blahzing poopguns shoooting all before in foreground inferno on cloud 9 etcetera ad nauseum.

The German title of the film I saw and liked is DIE WAND* and it stars award winning actress Martina Gedeck.

The work is based on the novel DIE WAND (THE WALL) by Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer (1920 - 1970). THE WALL is a best-selling novel which has been translated into 19 languages including English. The book was voted a Top 50 Book by 250,000 readers of Spiegel Magazine and in the Austrian Classics for Life list it placed 36. It has twice reached second place in the German best-seller lists; once for 30 continuous weeks. 

In short the story concerns the plight of a middle-aged woman who writes a diary of sorts on scraps of paper and card found in a hunting lodge in a remote valley in the Austrian Alps where she is trapped; this act begins as her attempt to preserve her sanity in her new life of isolation and loneliness. 

She cannot leave her location in the wilderness because of an endless invisible wall which acts as a barrier; the other side of which any human life glimpsed appears frozen in time. 

Just like the outcast white crow which appears each day on a tree outside the hunting lodge she must somehow find the will and the strategy to survive. 

Eventually, she will run out of paper and pencils . . .  

__________________

*from this link you can click on YouTube and find more trailers; even if you don't understand spoken German it's worth a look for the spectacular mountain scenery and the Hitchcock-like atmosphere of some of the scenes; the cawing of the crows is eerily wonderful; and musical in a John Cage kind of way.


Tuesday 23 October 2012

A NIGHT AT THE MOVIES


"They don't make 'em like that anymore"

A Night at the Movies is the title of Poetry Kit's free to download ebook which you can find HERE.

With the evenings drawing in an evening out at your local Kino might beckon. Fortunately for me there is such a cinema and it is one which shows quality films as opposed to the cut-to-the-car-wrecks or boom-bang-here-we-war-again movies playing in that faraway brain comfort zone, the multi-mega-cd-midnightplex-echochamber with its airport sized area of tarmac and floodlights enough to require the probable services of a medium sized power station.

Interestingly the best made films these days, in my humble opinion, arrive generally from France.

The Poetry Kit front page, updated monthly, is HERE.


Friday 19 October 2012

Skerret by Liam O'Flaherty




 My idea of a good time is to go rooting in boxes for cheap and unusual second hand books. 

The other day I found a small yellow paperback book by Liam O'Flaherty. It was Skerret and it was published by The Albatross Modern Continental Library (Hamburg / Paris / Bologna) in 1933. 246 pp.

An interesting aside is the historical price of the book: 1.80 RM, 12.00 FRS or 9.00 LIRE. 

The story, it begins in 1887, details the life and the times of a beleaguered incomer, the new schoolteacher Skerret; his constant battle with the avaricious and ambitious Father Moclair, and the struggles of both men to educate the superstitious half-wild islanders scraping a living on and off the rugged and almost barren island of Nara situated off the northwest coast of Ireland. 

Skerret is a proud and noble man, but also a man of brute force and misplaced idealism; a passionate individualist who refuses for example to spare the rod in his quest to educate and instruct the islanders' children. They, the next generation, will be his legacy. He has all the qualities you feel must lead to his doom. 

Skerret is, in my opinion, a brilliant psychological novel and a piece of little known history. Find it if you can. I highly recommend it.


Saturday 13 October 2012

Tribute to John Cage 1912 - 1992


1912


the cage door opens               

to silence

for the space of 4' 33"

and the cage door closes



the cage door opens

to rubber duck

whistles

and the cage door closes



the cage door opens

to the music of the toy keyboard

and closed piano

the cage door closes



the cage door opens    
- - - - - to the BANGING! OF LIDS AND SPOONS! 
DON'T CLOSE the cage door - - - - 

the cage door closes  

1992





Monday 8 October 2012

Warflowers


Not poppies
but roses
for one's beloved
marching off to Extinction
when the broad shoulders shadow their land
and the thin men follow
as thin men do
under  
a sun
beating down
like a stick
on
a drum
and
the pipes
falling
down
with
their whistles
thin
as thin men
and
their features
sharp
as the features of wasps
under
thin trees
where ash falls
on the rose
struggling under the scribblings of misguided missiles
backflipping in blue
above
the old warflower's beat.

________

I don't want to unfairly criticize the splendid work done under the label of the poppy flower by such worthies as those currently to be found in the British Legion, but more importantly I don't want to overlook the fact the Earl Haig the founder of the British Legion was the same man who sent millions of men including many from remote villages in North Wales to certain death in the so-called first World War; a war between several inbred royal cousins of the same European ruling clan or dynasty which had very little to do, if it anything at all to do, with the world at large and even less to do with the peaceful and the ancient Celtic peoples of Wales.

It amazes me how warring nations almost always manage to embroil the rest of the us in their local squabbles.

We do well to look closely at the world's leaders and their motives.





Friday 5 October 2012

Newtonian Reflector Telescope


A TUBE OF MIRRORS

Newtonian Reflector Telescope


the universe

in a tube of mirrors 

un-earthed at the church bazaar 


*

and already 

my first discovery! 

*

through clouds

one cannot see far 


*      


The telescope patiently waits for the clear winter nights when we shall together probe the mysteries of the Milky Way Galaxy, our home galaxy which is one of 400,000,000,000 galaxies; each one containing billions of stars and trillions of other objects such as quasars, black holes, comets and planets etc., etc., according to a riveting Discovery documentary I watched on TV the other night.  It's my first telescope. It's a new hobby. One is never too old to learn.

I'm a great believer in the notion that trying and experiencing the new keeps one forever young. And so today, as I anticipate winter's clear nights,  in the spirit of Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Hawking, Patrick Moore, Galileo and others, I say to those others, like me, who stand in awe when they look to the diamonds sparkling in the heavens: Ad Astra!*


*Is this how astronomers greet each other? If not maybe it should be. 

                                                                

Crossing the Bar by Tennyson




   The reader might like to compare and contrast Tennyson's famous poem, published here, with my own poem Last Voyage which can be found in the post immediately below this one. It is said that Tennyson wrote his poem in October 1889 following a serious illness. The poet passed away 3 years later; that is 120 years ago tomorrow. 


Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,
 And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
 When I put out to sea.

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
 Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
 Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
 And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
 When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
 The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
 When I have crost the bar.

______
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
6th August 1809 - 6th October 1892


Wednesday 3 October 2012

Last Voyage


The log
its strength and sense all gone  
it's spine a line of dust 
and broken strings
its crumbly leaves a home to motes 
of dust and on its pages
stains like maps of Empire
and yet those leaves
were once
as true as those now sailing
down the road outside
before  their colours
came to gold 
and brown.

With colours
more transparent
(not so bright as were)
small beings move
without the zoom and zip of yore
float down and up
the tangled shrubs
in search of gold
umbrellas in the blue.

And
when
the low sun sets
those dots and flecks
that may be there
or maybe not
drop into traps
the spider sets around
to trap the inattentive ones
fatigued by season's change.

An admiral unfolds his sails
- a valiant try
to reach some foreign shore.

An old man contemplates
no turning back
or extra hour in bed.