In Defence of All We Knew

Morgan Le Fay by Frederick Sandys (1864)

I feel I'm at risk of falling behind in my 28Days28Plays challenge. I finished play #9 and submitted it just 20 minutes before the deadline. Way too close for comfort.

We were asked to respond to a quote from Hemingway, “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”

I somehow felt compelled to re-tell the story of Gawain and the Green Knight with most sympathy for Morgan Le Fay fighting to protect her Pagan world view. Fifteen pages ... and all in rhyming verse!

Ten days into this challenge, I'm beginning to suspect the real me has been abducted by aliens and replaced by an interloper from a more advanced, more literate universe. That story always ends badly for the body snatchers.

I'm loving it but poor Spike Deane is forced to read the lot.

Tally ho ... play #10 awaits.

Daughters of the Dust by Rhiannon Hooson

Daughters of the Dust

There can be no mermaids of the steppe
though its bare hills roll and boom like the sea. Only
some strange creature, lithe in the gelid dust
and furred like a fox: silent, accusing in the eyes,
a deep wind parting fur down to bone coloured skin.
Horizons pile thin as paper one atop the next
and they spin their story into the pinched air: a woman,
and a wish, and a corsac fox. Nights

of the great white zud they might dance away the snow,
leaving paths of grass for the herd to eat, or else
rise like walls to blow across the landscape
stately and slow and sickening, only the chiming ice
singing their welcome with its spare high notes,
each like the prick of a needle. And in the city,
where the nights smell of sweet smoke and milk
and idling traffic, they go walking now:

silent over the glaze of blood frozen to the ground
around the wrestling palace. Silent in the alleys
where stray dogs sleep in the warmth from sewer grates.
Silent past the cafes where soldiers thaw their brows
over salt milk tea. Silent, until they are singing,
each alone in the dim reaches of the night,
each pale as an unlit candle, up through the gers
where the roads falter and the lights go out; up to the mountain
where the wind sings back; towering, and tidal, and old.

Read this poem today in The Guardian; their poem of the week. Love it. To be read out loud, 

Poetry - a living, breathing art

Poet Jackie Kay recites her first commission as Scots Makar at the Opening Ceremony of Scotland's Parliament. (I was at university with Jackie and worked alongside her father, John, in the 1980s. Lucky me.)

I Know A Man

We discussed a poem I had not come across before in this afternoon's writing workshop at the ANU. Robert Creely's I know A Man.

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, -- John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going. 

Written in 1954 or 1955 it inhabits the same world as that of the rest of the Beat poets; a world of jazz, drugs and alcohol, the crisis of confidence of American masculinity, and loss of control. Good stuff. I shall read more.

A vilanelle?

Today I completed the second of three poems I'm required to submit as part of the assessed work for my creative writing course at the ANU. We're asked to submit a free-verse poem and two others with more traditional, formal structures such as a vilanelle or sonnet. I finished and submitted the first, my vilanelle, this morning.  It's called Custodians, and this is how it starts:

Tomorrow is not ours to lose but keep, 
To hold, protect, and save from foolish men
So no dark days may make our children weep.

We shall see what they think.

Dylan Thomas
Source: University of Buffalo

And here - because one can - is the most famous vilanelle ever written. Thank you Dylan Thomas. The rest of us know how high we need to aim.

Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Donne

Done!

I finished my 2,500 words (and maybe then some) on the libertine-era, love lyrics of John Donne and submitted my essay before the 23:59 deadline expired. My argument goes like this:

This essays makes the argument that John Donne’s love lyrics are demonstrably not a rejection of the Renaissance era’s public sphere in favour of a valorized private realm of mutual love between a man and a woman.  Rather, Donne’s early poetic works are best understood as performance pieces by a coterie poet of the late-16th / early-17th Century seeking to be noticed, advanced and raised up in a rigidly stratified world. The love lyrics are concerned at least as much (if not more) with demonstrating Donne’s wit, understanding of, as well as worth within and to, the upper echelons of English courtly society as they are with making esoteric observations on the nature of the romantic bonds and erotic bliss found in heterosexual love in the private, even secret, spaces of his time.

I abandoned my original idea to focus on The Cannonisation as the second poem to be taken apart. So I've written on The Sun Rising and A Valediction: On His Mistress. I thought it might be wiser to look at an aubade and an elegy. We'll know in four weeks or so.

Next, it's on to a close analysis of a scene from Waltz with Bashir, due tomorrow no later than 23:59 for my film studies unit. How much more easy online submission makes the life of an undergraduate student who too often flies by the seat of his pants.

Essay deadline looms - John Donne

The Sun Rising

John Donne

              Busy old fool, unruly sun,

               Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?

               Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide

               Late school boys and sour prentices,

         Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,

         Call country ants to harvest offices,

Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

               Thy beams, so reverend and strong

               Why shouldst thou think?

I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,

But that I would not lose her sight so long;

               If her eyes have not blinded thine,

               Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,

         Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine

         Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.

Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,

And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

               She's all states, and all princes, I,

               Nothing else is.

Princes do but play us; compared to this,

All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.

               Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,

               In that the world's contracted thus.

         Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be

         To warm the world, that's done in warming us.

Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;

This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

Rave on John Donne?

Earliest known image of John Donne, around 1590

I'm back with the metaphysical poets, in particular John Donne. This morning's English Literature lecture focused on the social, religious and political context for his work and our course director, Dr. Ian Higgins, gave an impressive, historicist-reading of key poems from the poets early, libertine period.

It's not hard to be seduced by the bravado of the early-period poems, their common tongue, their focus on sex, the irreverence of their implied commentary on the hierarchies of the poet's time. He would lose that outsider's edge as he advanced through Courtly patronage and his misogyny seems never to have been far from the surface in any period. But here we are, more than 400 years later and there is still much to be said for and learned from the inventiveness and daring of a poet who would be dead by my age. 

We looked at one of his post-coital, morning after poems in today's tutorial. As Van Morrison urged, Rave On John Donne.  Well ... up to a point Van, up to a point.

The Good Morrow by John Donne

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?
’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.

Heroism in The Iliad

Ajax carries the body of Achilles

There's a reading group discussion underway on The Guardian web site looking at Homer's Iliad.  Today's topic is considering the heroism or otherwise of Achilles. One of the contributors noted that the literal translation is 'warrior' rather than 'hero' - a modern appellation, which the Greeks of classical times would not have understood as we do today. Here's my two-bob's worth of a response to 'emilyhauserauthor's post.

"the ancient Greek word ἥρως ('heros', usually translated as hero), actually means just a 'warrior'. It doesn't have any of the additional connotations we've come to expect of moral worth, valour, and so on. In a sense, then, expecting 'heroism' of Achilles - to expect him to conform to any of our ideas of what a 'hero' is - is an anachronism." 

This is a persuasive observation / reminder. The modern / romanticised notion of the hero (not just an effective warrior but just, righteous, dare one say almost invariably Christian in English Lit.) simply doesn't fit with either of Homer's works (Odysseus, it seems to me, similarly exhibits none of the attributes of the modern hero when he conspires with Telemachus to ambush the suitors). 

Achilles is a demi-god warrior par excellence who has - like all the invaders around him - been away from home and family for a decade. Three thousand years before the John Wayne caricature of 'the good soldier' fighting 'a just war' stepped on to our screens. What should we expect of such men at such a time in those circumstances? 

As I think someone else suggested too, anyone looking for an Homeric character coming closest to our modern idea of heroic (perhaps I mean courageous) should look to Priam - an old, broken man who at great personal risk sets out to recover his son's body so that the honour and respect due to the rites set out by Gods may be observed and Hector's eternal position secured. 

Is Hector a hero? Reluctant perhaps, possessed of questionable judgement and a problematic war time leader of a doomed nation. One may feel sorrow at his fate and admit his bravery in stepping out to meet Achilles but ... I'm not sure those are either modernity's heroism or the classical warrior.

Burns Night on Australia Day

Robert Burns - 1759 to 1796

There are eleven hours today - between Midnight and eleven o'clock this morning - when my past and present meet, where the miles between the land of my birth and the land I now call home vanish.  Time and space collapsed through the cultural connections I make.  They help shape my identity in ways I don't fully understand.

January 25th is the celebration of the birth and life of Scotland's national poet, Robert Burns.  He was born on the 25th January in 1759 in the village of Alloway, south of the town of Ayr.  Here in Australia today it's our national holiday commemorating - increasingly controversially - the arrival of the 'First Fleet' in the great southern land in 1788.  The vast continent would be claimed as territory for King George III by Captain Arthur Phillip when he and a dozen or so oarsmen and military personnel landed at Sydney Cove from HMS Supply. The other ships in the fleet were marooned in Botany Bay by a fierce storm.  Burns was 29 years old on that very day.

My blog draws its name from Burns who wrote a poem To A Louse: On Seeing One On A Lady's Bonnet, At Church (1786). I'm the louse that answered back.

My friend Stuart Hepburn (we met at university where we were political rivals in fiercely opposed left-wing camps) delivered an astonishing, awe-inspiring rendition of Burns's comic masterpiece Tam O'Shanter, written in 1790. I believe you'll not come across a finer interpretation of the poem anywhere than Stuart's rendition. Burns would be the first to raise a glass and cheer.

'Tam O Shanter' by Robert Burns, performed by Stuart Hepburn from Prancing Jack Productions on Vimeo.

So good it does your head in

A gift to myself arrived from England a few days ago.  Today I got round to reading Andrew McMillan's first collection of poems, physical, which won the Guardian First Book Award 2015.  It's not difficult to see why it was a contender.  

I read the short collection in one sitting; read it aloud because poetry like this benefits from being read out loud.  The absence of punctuation wasn't a hindrance.  The rhythm of the poems takes you through the text.  Almost without conscious thought you learn quite quickly, perhaps intuitively, that two spaces between words signifies a comma, three tells you where a full stop might be.  And the lines seem to fit with the simple but profound idea that where you need to take a pause for breath the text requires a break as well.

There are echoes (for me at least) of Marianne Moore in the tightly structured verse (I thought of The Steeplejack and Poetry when I read protest of the physical, a magnificent longer poem).  I heard the whisper of T S Eliot in WHEN LOUD THE STORM AND FURIOUS IS THE GALE. There is even a bit of Billy Collins in THE FACT WE ALMOST KILLED A BADGER IS INCIDENTAL. Best of all though, this a collection from a unique and confident voice. A true poet.

Essay number 2 ...in

English lit essays seem to be a bit like those proverbial buses that you hear about.  You can wait years without seeing one then two come along at the same time.  This time it was a 'short' essay on Modernism and earlier today I submitted my 1,800 words on The Waste Land by T S Eliot.

Ever since I was introduced to Eliot's poetry I've found myself struggling with a bit of a conundrum.  Can you separate the writer from the work?  And if not, what then (if anything) might that tell you about yourself?

T S Eliot may be the greatest poet that ever put pen to paper.  Some of his poems are among the greatest ever written.  Think of Preludes, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, The 

Journey of the Magi, The Hollow Men, Four Quartets.  The list goes on.

Then, of course, there is The Waste Land  I think it truly is the greatest poem ever written in English; one of the most important texts of the 20th Century.  It is an endlessly fascinating, endlessly instructive piece of writing with a depth, complexity and subtlety that sometimes takes your novice breath away.

But what to do about the man?  A deeply conservative, somewhat misogynist, certainly anti-Semitic, high Anglican, Tory.  Those are not unfair accusations but statements of demonstrable fact.

So what does that mean for a trendy old Leftie like me?  I have no idea.

Read the poems,  Judge for yourself.

This much, however, I do know.  My essays are in.

On with the next lot of readings.

First essay in

Spike's Daffodils

Okay, it's not quite a host of golden daffodils but it's evidence enough of spring's arrival here in the nation's capital.  Me and the cat are enjoying a quiet, suburban morning together basking in the balmy heat of the sun in a cloudless sky - all nine degrees but it feels like a Scottish summer's day already.

I wrote about the daffodils - Wordsworth's rather than Spike's - as part of my essay submitted digitally last night. Digital submissions ... who knew?  Gone, it would seem, is the caffeine-fuelled, all-nighter of the 1970s, culminating in the dash across the campus to the English department, the frantic search for a pen that worked to complete the essay cover sheet before slipping it through the gaping mouth at the top of the submission box fixed to the external wall of the departmental office. Five minutes before the deadline expires, a great weight lifts from your shoulders and you think, time for a celebratory beer or three. I wonder who'll be in the bar, like me, bragging about how close we got to that box being shut.

That was then and this is now.  Last night? Check the bibliography, run Microsoft's spelling checker, upload the file ... hit send.

And how does one celebrate?

With a mug of tea and an episode of season four of The Walking Dead.  Avert your delicate gaze Douglas as you not-quite-watch our raggle-taggle band of survivalist heroes at the very limits of their existential tethers finding even more novel ways to stab, smash, crush, squash, slice, dice and decapitate an almost limitless supply of zombies.

That could almost be a metaphor for the intellectual processes of preparing 2,800 words on 18th Century Romantic poets and the gendered pursuit of the sublime.  Or not.  

It's done and in.  Just not like the old days.

Thank goodness.

Time for the first essay

And I'm back to the Romantics.

Wordsworth by William Shuter

                                         For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things

I have been enthralled by those lines and the idea behind them since the first time I read William Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, which you can read here.  But my task in the first essay of my first semester at the Australian National University, following my return to undergraduate study, is to take the poems apart.

Four hundred words or so into my essay, here’s my argument against Coleridge and Wordsworth:

This essay discusses the treatment of gender in the poems.  In contrast to the poets’ claims to be addressing the natural or universal characteristics of the human condition this essay argues that the texts reveal a gendered view of ‘the vast empire of human society’ in which the circumstances, condition and perspective of the male – especially the creative imagination of the male poet – is privileged within the 'natural' world, the poetry that emerges from the male experience of that world and in relation to women who are assumed to be inferior to men.

Sorry guys, although I still love many of your works.

And today's word is ...

DUMPLING

As in, I am one.

Clootie Dumpling ... from Texas, apparently

I submitted two poems as entries to the Fish Publishing poetry competition 2015.  The poems are Come Take The King's Shilling and Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre.  I've been working on the former - which started its life as Blackstrap Molasses - for months.  Throughout that period I have pondered the title as much as anything.

So you can imagine how silly I felt when I received the automatically generated e.mail telling me that my poem Come Take The King's Silling had been received by the organisers.  Silling?  It's not even a word!  Of course, one can't edit an entry after it has been paid for and submitted.  

Precision of language?  I can't even type properly.

Fool.

To A Mouse on Burns Night ... which arrives in Scotland 11 hours later

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry man's dominion,
Has broken nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
What makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't!

Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell -
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me;
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects dreaer!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

Small birds will fly regardless

The day will come, believe me,
when the same old yellow sun
will rise from East as it has always done
to meet another dawn 

but one you will not greet,
old man, for there will no more be
the time remaining, time to wonder 
what it's for, what it is all about.

That sun will rise, the air skip gently 
through another lazy morning 
or blow a gale the likes of which 
you never saw in all your too short days.

So do not linger. Do not pause to speculate
on what might happen, one day, should you wait.

Peace - Burial at sea of Sir David Wilkie by J W Turner

I watched a short arts programme on the BBC iPlayer; Benjamin Zephania (who I saw perform in a small theatre on Mile End Road, Tower Hamlets - where I lived in 1982) was taking us through A Private View of an exhibition of Turner's late works at the Tate Museum.  The poet paused to reflect on Peace - Burial At Sea, painted in 1842 to mark the burial of Turner's friend Davd Wilkie.  Critics didn't take to it at the time.  Too dark.  Too gloomy.

Anyway.  Benjemin Zephaniah ruminated on the painting and the artist.  He drew our attention to the small bird gliding over the water, almost emerging from it.  I wrote my poem.

Camouflage For Beginners

Breathe in.  Breathe out.  Breathe in again.
Try not to think, not think too much.
Try hard to limit what you think or say or write
To careful, cautious words that favour what is right,
Seems right, reflects the way you’ve learned,
The way you taught yourself, to limit what gets out,
What can be said, expressed, exhaled, expelled
Like poison from a fevered body, fevered mind,
A spirit held in self-made, well-worn chains.
Self-made?  Self-mad more like.  A madness so perfected
Others take it for a measured state of mind,
Mistake it for some kind of equilibrium.  Normality, 
The wretched soul’s best hiding place. Out here.
In plain sight where all one needs is mediocrity.

Gnats

Is it true?
Do we only have the attention span of 

Sorry, what was that?
I wasn't really paying

No, I was just saying
there's this thing on 

YouTube.
YouTube?

Not another 
cat

dancing to whatsisname.
Whatsisname? 

Rick
Rick Astley? 

Never Gonna Give You 
Up.

Boy band from the Eighties
- without the band.

But all that other stuff.
What stuff?

Rickrolling.
How enthralling.

Just saying.
Saying what? 

Nothing really.

Old Habits Die Hard

There is science to explain that thunder
"is simply caused

by vibration of the air"
when lightening strikes at speed.

Some say
three thousand, seven hundred

miles per hour
or in a flash

too fast to count,
too quick to measure

but not so fast
we do not run for cover, cower

and watching angry clouds
thank ancient Gods 

we are not 
rent asunder.


Another thunderstorm, our second in two days, hit Canberra. I wrote a poem as the rain fell.


http://www.sciencemadesimple.co.uk/activities/thunder