The Poetry Thread

Under her brow the snowy wing-case
delivers truly the surprise
of days which slide under sunlight
past loose glass in the door
into the reflection of honour spread
through the incomplete, the trusted. So
darkly the stain skips as a livery
of your pause like an apple pip,
the baltic loved one who sleeps.
[...]

I mean, wow.

Just as good, and half as long!

As white is she
And to my touch as choice and briefly satisfactory
As whitebeam leaves that the wind whips aloft,
That tell to the eye their texture soft:
Sweet message sent
To fingertips, and sweetness quickly spent.

Where she goes
Sliding curtains of the rain on rods of sun her ways enclose,
River-whirling gulls her gay sky recieves,
Road, their hostile posters furled,
Bless with arching eaves;
She my love by London gentled as by space the spinning world.

- Anne Ridler, Young Man's Song

Now, not that there's anything wrong with the poem for using those words -- they do slide into one another nicely, and it's well crafted enough and it doesn't seem to be trying to hit you over the head with some obvious meaning -- but where the poem gets interesting (for me) is where it leaves the obviously poetic words behind and finds poetry someplace I haven't seen before, such as the phrase "an apple pip". "Pip" and "slide" are both great onomatopoetic [sp?] words, but "slide" has been in a jillion poems and "pip" hasn't.

And "baltic" is such a nice change after "apple pip" -- /b/ being so similar to /p/, the /aw/ and /i/ in "baltic" so similar to the /a/ and /i/ in "apple pip", with the "tic" really lauching you off into new sonic territory -- but then it just goes back to more obviously poetic terms again.

Well, the index doesn't list any but it does have an entry for "sled":

Glass was the Street -- in tinsel Peril
Tree and Traveller stood --
Filled was the Air with merry venture
Hearty with Boys the Road --

Shot the lithe Sleds like shod vibrations
Emphasized and gone
It is the Past's supreme italic
Makes this present mean --

[1498, c. 1880.]

[Hm, it came out a sort of Christmas-in-July offering.]

I was, as they later confirmed, a very sick boy.
The star performer at the meeting-house,
my eyes rolled back to show the whites, my arms
outstretched in catatonic supplication
while I gibbered impeccably in the gorgeous tongues
of the aerial orders. On Tuesday nights, before
I hit the Mission, I'd nurse my little secret:
Blind Annie Spall, the dead evangelist
I'd found still dying in creditable squalor
above the fishmonger's in Rankine Street.
The room was ripe with gurry and old sweat;
from her socket in the greasy mattress, Annie
belted through hoarse chorus after chorus
while I prayed loudly, absently enlarging
the crater that I'd gouged in the soft plaster.
Her eyes had been put out before the war,
just in time to never see the daughter
with the hare-lip and the kilt of dirty dishtowels
who ran the brothel from the upstairs flat
and who'd chap to let me know my time was up,
then lead me down the dark hall, its zoo-smell,
her slippers peeling off the sticky lino.
At the door, I'd shush her quiet, pressing
my bus-fare earnestly into her hand.

Four years later. Picture me: drenched in patchouli,
strafed with hash-burns, casually arranged
on Susie's bed. Smouldering frangipani;
Dali's The Persistence of Memory;
pink silk loosely knotted round the lamp
to soften the light; a sheaf of Penguin Classics,
their spines all carefully broken in the middle;
a John Martyn album mumbling through the speakers.
One hand was jacked up her skirt, the other trailing
over the cool wall behind the headboard
where I found the hole in the plaster again.
The room stopped like a lift; Sue went on talking.
It was a nightmare, Don. We had to gut the place.

I think this is definitely a 'working class poem' despite his protestations, to the contrary, that he's written only one of those ('an elliptical stylus'). again, this, like that, challenges the reader's (or writer's) impulse towards indentification and is actually more emetic than angering, I think. the first 7 lines of the second stanza are quite flat I think, clichéd almost ('strafed', 'mumbling', the careful breaking), perhaps it's intent made apparent. you can almost feel the rhythm of the poem stop, with its lift, as if your body, your thoughts have ceased to progress but yet your eyes, drawn in by the poem, on rails now, your eyes read on and, on surface, take in what the rest of you doesn't take in. that shift into italics, a shift into another person's voice heard rather than spoken. god, what a poem.

what does it mean? thread?

Cozen, you should! I don't know what yours means either, but I'd love to hear what people thought, it's pretty extraordinary.

I wish I had written that. *sigh*

From Cardigan Bay (by Leslie Norris)

For those who live here
After our daylight, I
Could wish us to look
Out of the darkness
We have become, teaching
Them happiness, a true love.

What more could we (or anyone) wish for on a Sunday morning than happiness, a true love?

I am going to read Don Paterson's sonnets anthology, myself. I have it, here.

And Edwin Morgan's take on Cage is great, the pure form of that pleasing squareness of sonnets than DP talks about in the intro.

Archel, I have written a few sonnets where I have tried to make the break between A and B be at the golden mean point in the sonnet -- towards the end of the 9th line.

A golden mean point in a sonnet is an interesting idea. I'm trying to imagine how that works.

The proportion of a sonnet's 14 lines that divides it up along the golden mean is approximately 8.75:5.25. So three-quarters of the way through eighth line, you can introduce the second part. Most sonnets are divided 8:6, which is fairly close, and allows for your traditional ABBACDDCEFFEFE type rhyme scheme.

Here's a topping 14-line one though:

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

- RS Thomas

I have added a batch of new stuff to the webzine/ongoing collection of writing that I edit, and I think some of it's rather good:
http://www.buzzwords.ndo.co.uk

And if any writing ILBers want to contribute, that would be nice :)

Please come and post here instead!
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wordshare/

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 a 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?

I have read and written a fair bit of poetry lately. Not having Ilx obviously agrees with me.

Jist ti Let Yi No

(from the American of Carlos Williams)

ahv drank
thi speshlz
that wurrin
thi frij

n thit
yiwurr probbli
hodn back
furthi pahrti

awright
they wur great
thaht stroang
thaht cawld

---Tom Leonard

I do not want to be reflective any more
Envying and despising unreflective things
Finding pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting
And young girls doing their hair and all the castles of sand
Flushed by the children's bedtime, level with the shore.
[...]

(when I say for PF I mean because he mentioned Macneice, not because the particular poem is somehow relevant to him. Though it may be. It is to me.)

Brazil? He twirled a button,
Without a glance my way:
"But, madam, is there nothing else
That we can show to-day?"

...
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

--Mary Oliver

--

If You Had Two Husbands

If you had two husbands.
If you had two husbands.
Well, not exactly.
If you had two husbands would you be willing to take everything and be satisfied to live in a large house with love and a view and plenty of flowers and friends at table and the young ones and cousins who said nothing.
This is what happened.

She expressed everything.
She is worthy of signing a will.
And mentioning what she wished.
She was brought up by her mother or her father. She had meaning and she was careful in reading. She read marvelously. She moved.
She was pleased. She was thirty-four. She was flavored by reason of much memory and recollection.

[...]

[Michael Coffey, from "Sweet Suite: Gertrude Stein"]

I am not certain about that pome - what MacNeice is saying; whether he is being more original and searching than he looks.

Cozen, when are we going to discuss Don Paterson?