Today I am sick in bed, though I did drag myself off to my 11am lecture on the suffragette movements, so in many ways the epic amount of sleeping/telly that I filled the rest of my time with was...totally justified? Anyway, I'm beginning to feel better, so that's good.
I have to go read Twelfth Night in a minute, but I'm just going to chuck some prose poetry about birds up here first. I like prose poetry. I remember reading "If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things" a few years ago and being really struck by the realisation that the two things didn't have to be poles apart - that a novel with characters and a plot could read like poetry. I didn't read much poetry at this time, so it was kind of a turning point for you. Also, the first Richard Siken I ever read was a piece of prose poetry called You Are Jeff. I love Siken (the title of this blog comes from a poem of his) and have such a clear memory of reading his writing for the first time and just finding it unspeakably moving. I read You Are Jeff - a bit long to put up here, but I urge you to google it - at about 3am when I was doing my A-levels and a bit overwrought, and I just absolutely bawled my eyes out. Stunning.
Anyway, so here is a short-and-sweet piece of prose poetry, because it doesn't get enough love as a form.
Please Take Back the Sparrows
Suzanne Buffam
Please take back the sparrows. They are bothersome and cute. They are brown and daily all year long. They make a plaything of the wind and the spruce. They come too close. They look right at me with their tiny black eyes. They dart through spaces. They pick up the pieces and the pace. From rooftop to eavetrough to wire to branch — they spring spring spring spring spring spring spring. They are not sorry. They are not singing. Many they are one they are never not somewhere. They are not not singing. They are not slack. They fear the bluejay and the airedale. They drink from the pond! They scatter thinking. They are not asking or telling they are scattering thinking they are shivering. They are awake or they are shivering. Please, take back the sparrows. They bathe in dust.
EDIT: You Are Jeff, in case anyone reading this has a bit of time on their hands & wants to see what I was on about.
Showing posts with label monday words. Show all posts
Showing posts with label monday words. Show all posts
Monday, 22 February 2010
Monday, 15 February 2010
admit that the waters around you have grown.
Well, I hope everybody had a good Valentine's weekend? Slash chinese new year, slash any other holiday I've forgotten, etc. Mine was generally lots of fun, but distinctly odd.
For the first part of it, I went to stay with my best friend, who lives in London, and we had a lovely couple of days of milling about in the capital, which we filled mainly with drinking, comedy and excellent Japanese food. Joy! The always-excellent Karaoke Circus was a particular highlight; I'm never normally a fan of karaoke, but I love every inch of this charming and rambunctious bi-monthly evening, and cannot recommend it enough. Love Will Tear Us Apart (as performed by Robin Ince, with some Smiths lyrics thrown in for good measure partway through, because, as Judge Dan pointed out, Joy Division clearly aren't depressing enough alone) and Two Princes (from Thom Tuck, one third of the Penny Dreadfuls) were perhaps my favourites of the night. Absolutely class.
Got back up to Liverpool in time to be thoroughly puzzled by the state of our kitchen, which took up a lot of my time/energy yesterday. Two of the ten people in our flat are international students from China, and one of them had a gigantic party for new years, which is all very well and good, and we ate dinner at the pub round the corner so we wouldn't have to get in their way trying to cook (the kitchen's our only communal space), which is a whole other story in itself, probably. Still: less cool the next day when nobody cleared anything up, including the vomit on the other corrior's bathroom floor. HMM. A party's a party, but my god, this was something else! There was food everywhere, there were stains over all the worksurfaces, cigarette butts and seeds all over the floor, which itself had been stained black somehow (??), a fish head in a bowl on the windowsill and some very odd smells coming from the bin. So me & two flatmates spent an interesting half-hour or so mopping/sponging/spraying etc, because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to eat in there. An unusual way to spend the afternoon of Valentine's Day, but we're all single anyway so none of us particularly minded, and in the evening I made a jolly good bean & vegetable stew to celebrate.
Valentine's Day's causes a lot of discomfort to a lot of single people, but I'm quite lucky in having several close friends up here who are also, as I said, also single, and we plumped for a terribly wholesome night, not of getting drunk & weepy, but rather of popcorn and Casablanca. It was lovely. Valentine's Day is, if nothing else, a perfect excuse to watch good films with good people.
So that's my incredibly shallow thoughts on the day of love, and now on to this week's piece of writing! I realised today that I have literally never posted anything up here by a female writer - and frankly, what the hell is that about? It just won't do. So have a poem I'm rather in love with by an excellent American writer.
Intensive Care
by Heather McHugh
As if intensity were a virtue we say
good and. Good and drunk. Good and dead.
What plural means is as everything
that multiplying greatens, as if two
were more like ninetynine than one,
or one were more like zero than
like anything. As if
you loved me, you will leave me.
You (are the man who) made
roadmaps to the ovaries
upon his dinner napkin.
I(‘m the woman who) always forgot
where she was— in a state,
in a sentence. Absently stirring
my alphabet soup, I remember
childhood’s clean white calendar
and blueprint of the heart.
As if friends were to be saved
we are friends. We talk to ourselves,
go home at the same time.
As if beds were to be made
not born in, as if love
were just heredity
we know the worst, we fear
the unknown. Today we were bad
and together; tonight
we’ll be good and alone.
The last stanza, and the closing lines in particular, give me chills everytime.
For the first part of it, I went to stay with my best friend, who lives in London, and we had a lovely couple of days of milling about in the capital, which we filled mainly with drinking, comedy and excellent Japanese food. Joy! The always-excellent Karaoke Circus was a particular highlight; I'm never normally a fan of karaoke, but I love every inch of this charming and rambunctious bi-monthly evening, and cannot recommend it enough. Love Will Tear Us Apart (as performed by Robin Ince, with some Smiths lyrics thrown in for good measure partway through, because, as Judge Dan pointed out, Joy Division clearly aren't depressing enough alone) and Two Princes (from Thom Tuck, one third of the Penny Dreadfuls) were perhaps my favourites of the night. Absolutely class.
Got back up to Liverpool in time to be thoroughly puzzled by the state of our kitchen, which took up a lot of my time/energy yesterday. Two of the ten people in our flat are international students from China, and one of them had a gigantic party for new years, which is all very well and good, and we ate dinner at the pub round the corner so we wouldn't have to get in their way trying to cook (the kitchen's our only communal space), which is a whole other story in itself, probably. Still: less cool the next day when nobody cleared anything up, including the vomit on the other corrior's bathroom floor. HMM. A party's a party, but my god, this was something else! There was food everywhere, there were stains over all the worksurfaces, cigarette butts and seeds all over the floor, which itself had been stained black somehow (??), a fish head in a bowl on the windowsill and some very odd smells coming from the bin. So me & two flatmates spent an interesting half-hour or so mopping/sponging/spraying etc, because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to eat in there. An unusual way to spend the afternoon of Valentine's Day, but we're all single anyway so none of us particularly minded, and in the evening I made a jolly good bean & vegetable stew to celebrate.
Valentine's Day's causes a lot of discomfort to a lot of single people, but I'm quite lucky in having several close friends up here who are also, as I said, also single, and we plumped for a terribly wholesome night, not of getting drunk & weepy, but rather of popcorn and Casablanca. It was lovely. Valentine's Day is, if nothing else, a perfect excuse to watch good films with good people.
So that's my incredibly shallow thoughts on the day of love, and now on to this week's piece of writing! I realised today that I have literally never posted anything up here by a female writer - and frankly, what the hell is that about? It just won't do. So have a poem I'm rather in love with by an excellent American writer.
Intensive Care
by Heather McHugh
As if intensity were a virtue we say
good and. Good and drunk. Good and dead.
What plural means is as everything
that multiplying greatens, as if two
were more like ninetynine than one,
or one were more like zero than
like anything. As if
you loved me, you will leave me.
You (are the man who) made
roadmaps to the ovaries
upon his dinner napkin.
I(‘m the woman who) always forgot
where she was— in a state,
in a sentence. Absently stirring
my alphabet soup, I remember
childhood’s clean white calendar
and blueprint of the heart.
As if friends were to be saved
we are friends. We talk to ourselves,
go home at the same time.
As if beds were to be made
not born in, as if love
were just heredity
we know the worst, we fear
the unknown. Today we were bad
and together; tonight
we’ll be good and alone.
The last stanza, and the closing lines in particular, give me chills everytime.
Monday, 8 February 2010
he walked into the echo.
Far too little time today - have to go to the library in a minute & print tomorrow's lecture notes before the drama social tonight, AUGH - but I didn't want to miss a week. So here, long-promised, is a bit of Larkin. For a while, I thought this was my favourite poem; these days I'm dreadful at picking a favourite anything, and don't have one, but if I bothered to make lists it would definitely still be up there.
Love Songs in Age
by Philip Larkin
She kept her songs, they kept so little space,
The covers pleased her:
One bleached from lying in a sunny place,
One marked in circles by a vase of water,
One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,
And coloured, by her daughter -
So they had waited, till, in widowhood
She found them, looking for something else, and stood
Relearning how each frank submissive chord
Had ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word,
And the unfailing sense of being young
Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein
That hidden freshness sung,
That certainty of time laid up in store
As when she played them first. But, even more,
The glare of that much-mentionned brilliance, love,
Broke out, to show
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.
Monday, 1 February 2010
in the first taxi he was alone tra-la.
The great housing debate seems to have wound itself mercifully down and, though the whole process has been (and continues to be) fraught with bizarre difficulties, we should, SHOULD, be going to sign the contracts in about an hour. I am excited/terrified/convinced that something will go wrong. What an unpleasant thing house-hunting is! The whole fuss was combined with a rotten fortnight of exams and basically I'm pretty freaking excited that January's in the past, not least because February is looking pretty good.
Tonight is the drama society's first meeting of the semester - I can't wait to go and see everybody again - and then this weekend I've a friend coming to stay. The future's bright/orange, is what I'm saying. She arrives on Friday and then the two of us are going, with one of my flatmates, to see Ghost Stories at the Liverpool Playhouse. HMMM. It's supposed to be the Scariest Play Ever to Scare, and we're all gigantic cowards, so I'm sure it will be an interesting experience. Also, gigantic coward I may be, but I love horror (good horror, I mean. I'd take From Beyond the Grave over Hostel any day of the week), and I adore both of the writer-directors' work. Jeremy Dyson's books of short stories are brilliantly creepy and funny by turns, and I do believe he's also adapting my favourite Jonathan Coe novel for telly at the moment, as well as being one quarter of The League of Gentlemen - so, an all-round-excellent chap, then. And Andy Nyman, perhaps best known for his collaborations with Derren Brown, is... Yeah.
So, I've been thinking a lot about scary things, this week, and unnerving things, and (as ever) trying to pick this week's piece of writing. I might've chosen an extract from one of Dyson's short stories - there's a particular one about the London Underground in Never Trust a Rabbit that just ended me when I was fifteen - if I'd not stupidly left my copies at home. In the end, I decided on a piece by Louis MacNeice.
Couldn't find it online anywhere, so I had to type it up, which has slightly cut down the amount of time I have to talk about it, but basically: MacNeice was a successful poet of the 1930s whose work faltered after the war, as happened to many of his contemporaries, and recovered in an interesting and rather melancholic way. He wrote a body of poems belonging to a genre he termed "the thumbnail nightmare": brief, unnerving little pieces, and sparse in explanation. Perhaps my favourite of his thumbnail nightmares is this, written in 1961:
After the Crash
When he came to he knew
Time must have passed because
The asphalt was high with hemlock
Through which he crawled to his crash
Helmet and found it no more
Than his wrinkled hand what it was.
Yet life seemed still going on:
He could hear the signals bounce
Back from the moon and the hens
Fire themselves black in the batteries
And the silence of small blind cats
Debating whether to pounce.
Then he looked up and marked
The gigantic scales in the sky,
The pan on the left dead empty
And the pan on the right dead empty,
And knew in the dead, dead calm
It was too late to die.
Perhaps a little less subtle than Macneice's more well-known "The Taxis", but I still think it's beautifully done and something about it gives me the shivers.
Have to run now, unfortunately, but before I do: people who've been reading for a while (if there are any, etc etc) may remember my friend Celia, who I mentioned I used to talk to a lot about a lot of things, but we'd both gotten terribly busy lately and it was all a dreadful shame. WELL. It turns out, she actually came across this blog, and meant to call me for ages, and yesterday evening we had a lovely catch-up; after we got off the phone, I booked some train tickets to go and visit her in March. Which is rather a nice postscript, I think, for anyone who likes that sort of thing.
Tonight is the drama society's first meeting of the semester - I can't wait to go and see everybody again - and then this weekend I've a friend coming to stay. The future's bright/orange, is what I'm saying. She arrives on Friday and then the two of us are going, with one of my flatmates, to see Ghost Stories at the Liverpool Playhouse. HMMM. It's supposed to be the Scariest Play Ever to Scare, and we're all gigantic cowards, so I'm sure it will be an interesting experience. Also, gigantic coward I may be, but I love horror (good horror, I mean. I'd take From Beyond the Grave over Hostel any day of the week), and I adore both of the writer-directors' work. Jeremy Dyson's books of short stories are brilliantly creepy and funny by turns, and I do believe he's also adapting my favourite Jonathan Coe novel for telly at the moment, as well as being one quarter of The League of Gentlemen - so, an all-round-excellent chap, then. And Andy Nyman, perhaps best known for his collaborations with Derren Brown, is... Yeah.
So, I've been thinking a lot about scary things, this week, and unnerving things, and (as ever) trying to pick this week's piece of writing. I might've chosen an extract from one of Dyson's short stories - there's a particular one about the London Underground in Never Trust a Rabbit that just ended me when I was fifteen - if I'd not stupidly left my copies at home. In the end, I decided on a piece by Louis MacNeice.
Couldn't find it online anywhere, so I had to type it up, which has slightly cut down the amount of time I have to talk about it, but basically: MacNeice was a successful poet of the 1930s whose work faltered after the war, as happened to many of his contemporaries, and recovered in an interesting and rather melancholic way. He wrote a body of poems belonging to a genre he termed "the thumbnail nightmare": brief, unnerving little pieces, and sparse in explanation. Perhaps my favourite of his thumbnail nightmares is this, written in 1961:
After the Crash
When he came to he knew
Time must have passed because
The asphalt was high with hemlock
Through which he crawled to his crash
Helmet and found it no more
Than his wrinkled hand what it was.
Yet life seemed still going on:
He could hear the signals bounce
Back from the moon and the hens
Fire themselves black in the batteries
And the silence of small blind cats
Debating whether to pounce.
Then he looked up and marked
The gigantic scales in the sky,
The pan on the left dead empty
And the pan on the right dead empty,
And knew in the dead, dead calm
It was too late to die.
Perhaps a little less subtle than Macneice's more well-known "The Taxis", but I still think it's beautifully done and something about it gives me the shivers.
Have to run now, unfortunately, but before I do: people who've been reading for a while (if there are any, etc etc) may remember my friend Celia, who I mentioned I used to talk to a lot about a lot of things, but we'd both gotten terribly busy lately and it was all a dreadful shame. WELL. It turns out, she actually came across this blog, and meant to call me for ages, and yesterday evening we had a lovely catch-up; after we got off the phone, I booked some train tickets to go and visit her in March. Which is rather a nice postscript, I think, for anyone who likes that sort of thing.
Monday, 25 January 2010
detachment of the self from the familiar and the comfortable represented a path to an otherwise unattainable perfection, even to salvation itself.
It's Monday now, even though it's only 1am, but since I'm still up & reading about compulsary pilgrimage, I may as well sullenly update this blog. Sorry for the slew of shitty, exam-season-y updates; I'll try and get back to better habits next week, after this whole sorry ordeal is over. As well as some more considered Monday Words and the second part of that diary rambling, I.O.U. guys one genuine, actual, university-themed post (remember when this blog had a "theme", also known as a "point"? Ah, happy days), about how I appear to have managed to change my degree. Hooray!
Moving swiftly on, so that I can read a few more pages and then SLEEP, this week's thing is a Frank O'Hara poem. It's not terribly cheery, but you know what? It is, as I have said, 1am, and "not terribly cheery" rather appeals to my mindset. Also it is SHORT.
As Planned
After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called
La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that
is all you know words not their feelings
or what they mean and you write because
you know them not because you understand them
because you don't you are stupid and lazy
and will never be great but you do
what you know because what else is there?
okay cool cheers for that frank
Moving swiftly on, so that I can read a few more pages and then SLEEP, this week's thing is a Frank O'Hara poem. It's not terribly cheery, but you know what? It is, as I have said, 1am, and "not terribly cheery" rather appeals to my mindset. Also it is SHORT.
As Planned
After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called
La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that
is all you know words not their feelings
or what they mean and you write because
you know them not because you understand them
because you don't you are stupid and lazy
and will never be great but you do
what you know because what else is there?
okay cool cheers for that frank
Monday, 18 January 2010
et in arcadia ego.
I have minus time right now: back in Liverpool, should be revising, insanely hungry with no food in the house and I must must MUST go out & get some. All of that means that today's Monday words business will be a bit sub-standard, but I hope I get points for doing it anyway.
When I was enjoying the comparatively mild weather this morning (no snow, anyway; haven't the last few weeks been insane?) I found myself wishing it was the summer, for the weather and the freedom and all the excitements we're beginning, already, to plan. Wishing it would be summer always makes me think of my favourite fictional summer, so I knew what I had to pick for this week's text. An extract from a novel at last, instead of a poem! I suppose I'll just leave this here:
'It was about eleven when Sebastian, without warning, turned the car into a cart track and stopped. It was hot enough now to make us seek the shade. On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the strawberries and drank the wine - as Sebastian promised, they were delicious together - and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian's eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-grey smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger's breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.
"Just the place to bury a crock of gold," said Sebsatian. "I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember."'
- from Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
When I was enjoying the comparatively mild weather this morning (no snow, anyway; haven't the last few weeks been insane?) I found myself wishing it was the summer, for the weather and the freedom and all the excitements we're beginning, already, to plan. Wishing it would be summer always makes me think of my favourite fictional summer, so I knew what I had to pick for this week's text. An extract from a novel at last, instead of a poem! I suppose I'll just leave this here:
'It was about eleven when Sebastian, without warning, turned the car into a cart track and stopped. It was hot enough now to make us seek the shade. On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the strawberries and drank the wine - as Sebastian promised, they were delicious together - and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian's eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-grey smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger's breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.
"Just the place to bury a crock of gold," said Sebsatian. "I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember."'
- from Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
Monday, 11 January 2010
and instructions for dancing.
It's Monday again! Further to last week's post, I wanted to put up some Larkin today; it seemed fitting, because Patten was influenced by him, and also this is my own damn blog and I'll talk about my favourite poets if I want to. Part of me was reluctant to immediately go for it with More Poetry, to be honest, and felt that I should look out something else, but I only really got into it as a form within the last few years and I suppose it's something that I feel I can - as me, now, the way I have become - really...hum. I've tried several times to phrase what I mean and can't seem to manage it. What I'm trying to say is that I think more subjective inferences can come from poetry than most other forms, that I think you put a little of yourself into them just by reading them, and that-- That doesn't really explain it either. I don't know.
Anyway, it's all a moot point because I've left my copy of The Whitsun Weddings in Liverpool: I only own Whitsun and High Windows, and prefer the former (so if anyone has any books of his they want to donate to the cause of Me, do get in touch). Anyway, I didn't want to locate a poem through a combination of my own memory (poor) and The Internets (giant), & thought it better left until I'm back at uni.
I got my predilection for Larkin - and, in fact, the book itself; an eighteenth birthday present - from an ex of mine. We used to talk about literature a lot, although he was far more widely-read and a lot better educated on the subject than I was; I'm embarrassed to think how boring & stupid I must've sounded, looking back. But thinking about him and those conversations, and what I was going to blog about today, made me consider the other very literature-y relationship I have had in my life - although this one isn't a Relationship-with-a-capital-'R', but a friendship.
My friend Celia is one of the cleverest and most interesting people I have ever been priveleged enough to somehow, inexplicably, be liked by and friends with. We've known each other for a little over a year now but only really got close around May 2009, and would send each other these long, rambling messages and emails (to complement our long, rambling, every-Sunday-like-clockwork telephone conversations), full of poems, quotes, bits and pieces of ephemera we thought the other might take a fancy to. Life's gotten in the way a bit of those every-Sunday-like-clockwork telephone calls, though we miss them and still make an effort to stay in touch, but the good thing about emails and messages and letters is that you can kind of - hang on to them.
So! I thought today I would find & post a poem that was sent to me by my good friend Celia. I could have picked any of several, but this one struck a chord with me today; she didn't know the title, so I don't either, but let's imagine it's something pithy. It's by Charles Simic:
"Incurable romantic marrying eternal grumblers.
Life haunted by its more beautiful sister life--
Always, always... We had nothing
But words. Someone rising to eloquence
After a funeral, or in the naked arms of a woman
Who has her head averted because she's crying,
And doesn't know why. A hairline fracture of the soul
Because of the way the light falls on these bare trees and bushes.
Sea-blackened rocks inscrutable as chess players...
One spoke to them of words failing...
Of great works and little faith, of blues in each bite of bread.
Above the clouds the firm No went on pacing.
The woman had a tiny smile and an open umbrella,
Since now it had started to rain in a whisper,
The kind of rain that must've whispered in some other life
Of which we know nothing anymore except
That someone kept watching it come down softly"
yep.
edit:
after several attempts and a bunch of failing, I just managed to locate the poem somewhere other than in an email from my friend. And would you look at it! It has a title (Promises of Leniency and Forgiveness) and stands a whole stanza and three quarters longer than it is replicated here. I thought for a long while about whether or not to edit in the additional parts, but in the end I decided to leave it as it is, as I first read it and have always read it. You see, as so much of this post is about subjectivity and ownership and defining my relationships to people by writing that isn't mine, it would seem oddly, I don't know...hypocritical, or something, to sacrifice the truth of my interaction with the poem for the truth of the poem itself. That's right, Charles Simic, I went there. Suck it.
(no don't)
Anyway, but I've linked it here as a concession, and I must say that I adore the last few lines. "Serious children at play" - that's Nietzsche, I suppose? A reference to Nietzsche, I mean. "A person's maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play," and all that sort of business. What a nice idea.
Anyway, it's all a moot point because I've left my copy of The Whitsun Weddings in Liverpool: I only own Whitsun and High Windows, and prefer the former (so if anyone has any books of his they want to donate to the cause of Me, do get in touch). Anyway, I didn't want to locate a poem through a combination of my own memory (poor) and The Internets (giant), & thought it better left until I'm back at uni.
I got my predilection for Larkin - and, in fact, the book itself; an eighteenth birthday present - from an ex of mine. We used to talk about literature a lot, although he was far more widely-read and a lot better educated on the subject than I was; I'm embarrassed to think how boring & stupid I must've sounded, looking back. But thinking about him and those conversations, and what I was going to blog about today, made me consider the other very literature-y relationship I have had in my life - although this one isn't a Relationship-with-a-capital-'R', but a friendship.
My friend Celia is one of the cleverest and most interesting people I have ever been priveleged enough to somehow, inexplicably, be liked by and friends with. We've known each other for a little over a year now but only really got close around May 2009, and would send each other these long, rambling messages and emails (to complement our long, rambling, every-Sunday-like-clockwork telephone conversations), full of poems, quotes, bits and pieces of ephemera we thought the other might take a fancy to. Life's gotten in the way a bit of those every-Sunday-like-clockwork telephone calls, though we miss them and still make an effort to stay in touch, but the good thing about emails and messages and letters is that you can kind of - hang on to them.
So! I thought today I would find & post a poem that was sent to me by my good friend Celia. I could have picked any of several, but this one struck a chord with me today; she didn't know the title, so I don't either, but let's imagine it's something pithy. It's by Charles Simic:
"Incurable romantic marrying eternal grumblers.
Life haunted by its more beautiful sister life--
Always, always... We had nothing
But words. Someone rising to eloquence
After a funeral, or in the naked arms of a woman
Who has her head averted because she's crying,
And doesn't know why. A hairline fracture of the soul
Because of the way the light falls on these bare trees and bushes.
Sea-blackened rocks inscrutable as chess players...
One spoke to them of words failing...
Of great works and little faith, of blues in each bite of bread.
Above the clouds the firm No went on pacing.
The woman had a tiny smile and an open umbrella,
Since now it had started to rain in a whisper,
The kind of rain that must've whispered in some other life
Of which we know nothing anymore except
That someone kept watching it come down softly"
yep.
edit:
after several attempts and a bunch of failing, I just managed to locate the poem somewhere other than in an email from my friend. And would you look at it! It has a title (Promises of Leniency and Forgiveness) and stands a whole stanza and three quarters longer than it is replicated here. I thought for a long while about whether or not to edit in the additional parts, but in the end I decided to leave it as it is, as I first read it and have always read it. You see, as so much of this post is about subjectivity and ownership and defining my relationships to people by writing that isn't mine, it would seem oddly, I don't know...hypocritical, or something, to sacrifice the truth of my interaction with the poem for the truth of the poem itself. That's right, Charles Simic, I went there. Suck it.
(no don't)
Anyway, but I've linked it here as a concession, and I must say that I adore the last few lines. "Serious children at play" - that's Nietzsche, I suppose? A reference to Nietzsche, I mean. "A person's maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play," and all that sort of business. What a nice idea.
Tuesday, 5 January 2010
i have recently been attempting to construct a bishop.
I started this blog to be a record of my time at university, but am so absolutely dreadful at keeping it up-to-date that, whenever I think about this little patch of the internets I like to call my own, I feel a profound sense of shame. I've thought for a while that what I might be in need of is a little bit of structure, and now I know what it should be.
Firstly, I am an English student (single honours, although looking into becoming joint with history; irrelevent, but sort of worth noting) and secondly, I half-heartedly keep a commonplace book. I say 'half-hearted' because I'm absolutely as rotten at that as I am at blogging, but I have a lot of love for the whole concept of commonplace books and you will be hearing more from me on this subject at some point.
ANYWAY. For this reason, writing that is Not My Own is a very big influence on my life and my brain, so I've decided that every Monday I am going to post something here, like a poem or an extract from something, but not necessarily either of these things, that I enjoyed. I might talk about why I like it or it moved me, or I might not, but it seems like...it seems like a nice e-rendering of my headspace. A sort of cyberspace version of the beautiful commonplace book I left in Liverpool (and miss), a present from my flatmates.
I know that it's techincally Tuesday now, being 2am and all, but I care not! This week's piece of writing is These Boys Have Never Really Grown into Men by Brian Patten:
These boys have never really grown into men,
despite their disguises, despite their adult ways,
their sophistication, the camouflage of their kindly smiles.
They are still up to their old tricks,
still at the wing-plucking stage. Only now
their prey answers to women's names.
And the girls, likewise, despite their disguises,
despite their adult ways, their camouflage of need,
still twist love till its failure seems not of their making.
Something grotesque migrates hourly
between our different needs,
and is in us all like a poison.
How strange I've not understood so clearly before
how liars and misers, the cruel and the arrogant
lie down and make love like all the others,
how nothing is ever as expected, nothing is ever as stated.
Behind doors and windows nothing is ever as wanted.
The good have no monopoly on love.
All drink from it. All wear its absence like a shroud.
I decided to start with this one because the poet comes from Liverpool - he went to school on the Smithdown Road, apparently - and is, in fact, part of a movement called the Liverpool Poets. That's right. He used to pal about with people like Roger McGough, but I hadn't heard of him until I read this, AND he apparently received some kind of encouragement from Philip Larkin - one of my favourite writers.
The reason I like it, I suppose, is complex, and I don't want to deconstruct it on here (not tonight, anyway), because I don't think that would be dreadfully interesting. But it can be summed up with a quote from an Alan Bennett play:
"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours."
Two for the price of one, this week. And now to bed.
Firstly, I am an English student (single honours, although looking into becoming joint with history; irrelevent, but sort of worth noting) and secondly, I half-heartedly keep a commonplace book. I say 'half-hearted' because I'm absolutely as rotten at that as I am at blogging, but I have a lot of love for the whole concept of commonplace books and you will be hearing more from me on this subject at some point.
ANYWAY. For this reason, writing that is Not My Own is a very big influence on my life and my brain, so I've decided that every Monday I am going to post something here, like a poem or an extract from something, but not necessarily either of these things, that I enjoyed. I might talk about why I like it or it moved me, or I might not, but it seems like...it seems like a nice e-rendering of my headspace. A sort of cyberspace version of the beautiful commonplace book I left in Liverpool (and miss), a present from my flatmates.
I know that it's techincally Tuesday now, being 2am and all, but I care not! This week's piece of writing is These Boys Have Never Really Grown into Men by Brian Patten:
These boys have never really grown into men,
despite their disguises, despite their adult ways,
their sophistication, the camouflage of their kindly smiles.
They are still up to their old tricks,
still at the wing-plucking stage. Only now
their prey answers to women's names.
And the girls, likewise, despite their disguises,
despite their adult ways, their camouflage of need,
still twist love till its failure seems not of their making.
Something grotesque migrates hourly
between our different needs,
and is in us all like a poison.
How strange I've not understood so clearly before
how liars and misers, the cruel and the arrogant
lie down and make love like all the others,
how nothing is ever as expected, nothing is ever as stated.
Behind doors and windows nothing is ever as wanted.
The good have no monopoly on love.
All drink from it. All wear its absence like a shroud.
I decided to start with this one because the poet comes from Liverpool - he went to school on the Smithdown Road, apparently - and is, in fact, part of a movement called the Liverpool Poets. That's right. He used to pal about with people like Roger McGough, but I hadn't heard of him until I read this, AND he apparently received some kind of encouragement from Philip Larkin - one of my favourite writers.
The reason I like it, I suppose, is complex, and I don't want to deconstruct it on here (not tonight, anyway), because I don't think that would be dreadfully interesting. But it can be summed up with a quote from an Alan Bennett play:
"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours."
Two for the price of one, this week. And now to bed.
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