There more to composing poetry online than this...isn't there?
I don't really like conventional poetry of knowing. I love the poetry of words coming into being.
The Guardian is going to publish a printable book online with our poems in it and the Irish poet, Billy Mills is getting it together with Sarah Crown, the literary editor. Good for them. Let's also remember that Carol Rumens got the ball rolling.
Does Des feature in this anthology? Taboo-busting Steve Augustine decided not to join in. So what are we left with?
In the anthology we will be left with a colourful swatch of well-meant, undeniably conventional, occasionally clever, verses - some of them. But there could be, there should be and there is a lot more to on-line poetry than this. Than agile monkeys, koalas and sad sloths climbing up word trees.
Perhaps we should focus in on translation, because in translation there is a looseness of form and a dynamism such as, it seems, we can't easily encounter in our own language. How can we unbuckle the tight meaning of the belts of words we are born with? And when we play with words-as-corrective lenses then it's still the same old me staring out, no matter how experimental we might try to be, no matter what combination of colours and shapes we claim to see.
"in secret
be quiet say nothing
except the street be full of stars
and the prisoners eat doves
and the doves eat cheese
and the cheese eats words
and the words eat bridges
and the bridges eat looks
and the looks eat cups full of kisses in the horchata
that hides all with its wings
the butterfly the night
in a cafe last summer
in Barcelona"
Picasso (Translator unattributed)
Picasso seems to depend so much on breaking things and then later playing energetically with the shards of what he has broken. But Picasso could not break the shards of his persona. And who was he? His subject was a relatively successful male who lived in the first half of the 20th century. That's who is depicting. Craftsmanship in poetry focuses too much on the object and not the subject.
There is no escape from conventionality.
Certainly Burroughs didn't escape from conventionality for all his disordered senses, his many drugs, his sex and murder, his Morrocan travels. Kurt Cobain killed himself because of the poverty of William Burroughs poetry - Burroughs represented revolt in sterility. I bet you CIA funds went into sponsoring the enfeebled reactionary hopelessness of people like Burroughs (1). I have a visceral hatred of Burroughs. People who like him glory a sociopath.
Burroughs followed Rimbaud - both of them were rotting troubadors - enemies of the communists and communards.
Why is it that people who engage fully in sport are so irritatingly stupid a lot of the time? You would expect someone whose body functions like a Ferrari to have a brain that fired up and spun. Kung Fu fighters, Yoga teachers - so full of nonsense.
It's as if something short circuits when you focus your attention on musculature. And the poems of some of the most enlightened souls who have appeared on this Earth are so bland and stertorous at the same time. You think to yourself.
"Did these enlightened teachers mean to be quite so crass?
Such simple word capes worn by so many spiritually gifted supermen: Rumi's shimmy shammering shamen Shams was just sham-sham-shamming.
The poetry I most enjoy is the poetry of words coming into being.
I don't like Seamus Heaney over-much, but I do like him, and though the gist of what he says in this poem is not edifying, he is a good poet because he is constantly "birthing" language. In Death of a Naturalist you have a "Gauze of sound" over "clotted water" and a "slobber of spawn", "Jampots full" of it. These are examples of the "morsalisation" of an organic language. Oyster shaped words to shift easily around our throat.
My criticism of this Guardian anthology, would be that the poetry contained in it does not help us clarify the dividing lines between self and not-self. The subject is not its subject. It may not even help us develop our "weltenschauung", which is what I want.
There is no escape from conventionality in this anthology is there my fellow bloggers?
My jigsawmen,
ratocinators
spit polishers
peacocks, salt water creatures.
My fresh faced tailors
dumbstruck saviours
carbuncles, doffers
aviators, scoffers.
Billy's Guardian Poetry Anthology will probably include:
alarming "A poem is like an iceberg", "We are the family who wave at the train", "The words froze", and "I love you best"
anytimefrances "Gift", "you are your house" and "a failed housewife deserts the property"
artpepper/arsenelupin "Unlucky At Cards", "On My Sleeping Wife", "Who Makes Men Clumsy", "Sleeping In the Black Mountains" and "A Sestina for Wallace Stevens"
BaronCharlus / SirTopaz "As I walked out one morning", "Not Everyone Gets a Sequel", "An Innocent Child Discovers the Irrevocable Fact of Death, c1980", "To my grandmother it was just a hairnet" and "Dunwich"
CaptainNed "change lobsters" and "An Alien Remembers Its Birth"
CarolRumens "Sunset for the Under-Fives" "Old Crystal Palace Station"
cynicalsteve "These are the wanderings of the poet Wordsworth", "ever since those ur-poeting days" and "The question is: why write in sonnet style?"
degrus "A true gardener is a man"
dickensdesk "Walking down this lane" and "Everyone's view of the world is invaluable"
elcalifornio "Virginia Dare"
Flarf "LROVSE", "Underneath it all" and "Samhain Eve"
freepoland "City Wind", "Wm Wordsworth leaves Grasmere to Find a Supermarket", "Facade with Milk Bottles", "An Aged Man Waits for the Morning" and "Opus Dei"
floribunda "Cornelius ("He would throw off his donkey jacket")"
graceandreacci "Porthcurno", "Spring comes to the city", and "Invulnerable Children"
HenryLloydMoon "Lottery", "april showers in borrowdale" and "Saturn V"
herdwicktup "After The Funeral Party"
Ishouldapologise "The Forest of Voices", "Swear off nostalgia" and "Approaching Belfast"
JulianGough "Dromineer, December 2007"
MeltonMowbray "the Is this the autumn of our love? trilogy", Untitled ("At Tintern Abbey we sat in the café"), "Dove Cottage", "Utamaro's Beauties", and "Union Street, Saturday night and Sunday morning".
norwegianwood "Houses"
obooki "Our office is very wide" (2 versions)
ofile "Sun Salutation" and "Knocking on the Hull
(a submariners tale)"
parallaxview "The Dashing Good Soldier" and "Laced"
Parisa "Quiet as Snow in the City", "To The Memory Of My Mother", and "Dear ant"
Pinkerbell "Dreaming..."
pinkroom "Fibonacci snowfalls" and "The last pfenning"
RobertLock "Home thoughts from another planet" and "Celsius reaches double figures"
stoneofsilence "Tango", "Sleep tightly in bed" and "for my dear beloved niece"
suzanabrams "Hanging the Laundry" and "Gossip"
thebookofsand "Inward bound", "The Hunter (Villanelle)", "Belle de Jour" and "Salary"
3potato4 "i love the way the sun" and "can i write something"
UnPublishedWriter "Sonnet without a cause"
zephirine "Does madam prefer still or sparkling water?" "Postcard from the Azure Coast", "Memory obstinately keeps" and "I wish that money liked me more"
I don't really like conventional poetry of knowing. I love the poetry of words coming into being.
The Guardian is going to publish a printable book online with our poems in it and the Irish poet, Billy Mills is getting it together with Sarah Crown, the literary editor. Good for them. Let's also remember that Carol Rumens got the ball rolling.
Does Des feature in this anthology? Taboo-busting Steve Augustine decided not to join in. So what are we left with?
In the anthology we will be left with a colourful swatch of well-meant, undeniably conventional, occasionally clever, verses - some of them. But there could be, there should be and there is a lot more to on-line poetry than this. Than agile monkeys, koalas and sad sloths climbing up word trees.
Perhaps we should focus in on translation, because in translation there is a looseness of form and a dynamism such as, it seems, we can't easily encounter in our own language. How can we unbuckle the tight meaning of the belts of words we are born with? And when we play with words-as-corrective lenses then it's still the same old me staring out, no matter how experimental we might try to be, no matter what combination of colours and shapes we claim to see.
"in secret
be quiet say nothing
except the street be full of stars
and the prisoners eat doves
and the doves eat cheese
and the cheese eats words
and the words eat bridges
and the bridges eat looks
and the looks eat cups full of kisses in the horchata
that hides all with its wings
the butterfly the night
in a cafe last summer
in Barcelona"
Picasso (Translator unattributed)
Picasso seems to depend so much on breaking things and then later playing energetically with the shards of what he has broken. But Picasso could not break the shards of his persona. And who was he? His subject was a relatively successful male who lived in the first half of the 20th century. That's who is depicting. Craftsmanship in poetry focuses too much on the object and not the subject.
There is no escape from conventionality.
Certainly Burroughs didn't escape from conventionality for all his disordered senses, his many drugs, his sex and murder, his Morrocan travels. Kurt Cobain killed himself because of the poverty of William Burroughs poetry - Burroughs represented revolt in sterility. I bet you CIA funds went into sponsoring the enfeebled reactionary hopelessness of people like Burroughs (1). I have a visceral hatred of Burroughs. People who like him glory a sociopath.
Burroughs followed Rimbaud - both of them were rotting troubadors - enemies of the communists and communards.
Why is it that people who engage fully in sport are so irritatingly stupid a lot of the time? You would expect someone whose body functions like a Ferrari to have a brain that fired up and spun. Kung Fu fighters, Yoga teachers - so full of nonsense.
It's as if something short circuits when you focus your attention on musculature. And the poems of some of the most enlightened souls who have appeared on this Earth are so bland and stertorous at the same time. You think to yourself.
"Did these enlightened teachers mean to be quite so crass?
Such simple word capes worn by so many spiritually gifted supermen: Rumi's shimmy shammering shamen Shams was just sham-sham-shamming.
The poetry I most enjoy is the poetry of words coming into being.
I don't like Seamus Heaney over-much, but I do like him, and though the gist of what he says in this poem is not edifying, he is a good poet because he is constantly "birthing" language. In Death of a Naturalist you have a "Gauze of sound" over "clotted water" and a "slobber of spawn", "Jampots full" of it. These are examples of the "morsalisation" of an organic language. Oyster shaped words to shift easily around our throat.
My criticism of this Guardian anthology, would be that the poetry contained in it does not help us clarify the dividing lines between self and not-self. The subject is not its subject. It may not even help us develop our "weltenschauung", which is what I want.
There is no escape from conventionality in this anthology is there my fellow bloggers?
My jigsawmen,
ratocinators
spit polishers
peacocks, salt water creatures.
My fresh faced tailors
dumbstruck saviours
carbuncles, doffers
aviators, scoffers.
(1) Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War
by Frances Stonor Saunders
"Finance was to be set aside from funds already allocated for the Marshall Plan and recruitment was to be in accordance with an strict policy of equal opportunities: in the words of one CIA staffer, "using any bastard as long as he was anti-communist".Billy's Guardian Poetry Anthology will probably include:
alarming "A poem is like an iceberg", "We are the family who wave at the train", "The words froze", and "I love you best"
anytimefrances "Gift", "you are your house" and "a failed housewife deserts the property"
artpepper/arsenelupin "Unlucky At Cards", "On My Sleeping Wife", "Who Makes Men Clumsy", "Sleeping In the Black Mountains" and "A Sestina for Wallace Stevens"
BaronCharlus / SirTopaz "As I walked out one morning", "Not Everyone Gets a Sequel", "An Innocent Child Discovers the Irrevocable Fact of Death, c1980", "To my grandmother it was just a hairnet" and "Dunwich"
CaptainNed "change lobsters" and "An Alien Remembers Its Birth"
CarolRumens "Sunset for the Under-Fives" "Old Crystal Palace Station"
cynicalsteve "These are the wanderings of the poet Wordsworth", "ever since those ur-poeting days" and "The question is: why write in sonnet style?"
degrus "A true gardener is a man"
dickensdesk "Walking down this lane" and "Everyone's view of the world is invaluable"
elcalifornio "Virginia Dare"
Flarf "LROVSE", "Underneath it all" and "Samhain Eve"
freepoland "City Wind", "Wm Wordsworth leaves Grasmere to Find a Supermarket", "Facade with Milk Bottles", "An Aged Man Waits for the Morning" and "Opus Dei"
floribunda "Cornelius ("He would throw off his donkey jacket")"
graceandreacci "Porthcurno", "Spring comes to the city", and "Invulnerable Children"
HenryLloydMoon "Lottery", "april showers in borrowdale" and "Saturn V"
herdwicktup "After The Funeral Party"
Ishouldapologise "The Forest of Voices", "Swear off nostalgia" and "Approaching Belfast"
JulianGough "Dromineer, December 2007"
MeltonMowbray "the Is this the autumn of our love? trilogy", Untitled ("At Tintern Abbey we sat in the café"), "Dove Cottage", "Utamaro's Beauties", and "Union Street, Saturday night and Sunday morning".
norwegianwood "Houses"
obooki "Our office is very wide" (2 versions)
ofile "Sun Salutation" and "Knocking on the Hull
(a submariners tale)"
parallaxview "The Dashing Good Soldier" and "Laced"
Parisa "Quiet as Snow in the City", "To The Memory Of My Mother", and "Dear ant"
Pinkerbell "Dreaming..."
pinkroom "Fibonacci snowfalls" and "The last pfenning"
RobertLock "Home thoughts from another planet" and "Celsius reaches double figures"
stoneofsilence "Tango", "Sleep tightly in bed" and "for my dear beloved niece"
suzanabrams "Hanging the Laundry" and "Gossip"
thebookofsand "Inward bound", "The Hunter (Villanelle)", "Belle de Jour" and "Salary"
3potato4 "i love the way the sun" and "can i write something"
UnPublishedWriter "Sonnet without a cause"
zephirine "Does madam prefer still or sparkling water?" "Postcard from the Azure Coast", "Memory obstinately keeps" and "I wish that money liked me more"
Des is in the anthology; I think he's got three in there; so far under the name of flarf. SA didn't want to be in it - his choice but in mho he's deprived the anthology of its best poem.
ReplyDeleteat any rate it's a more 'moral' site than the bbc, which claimed copyright 'in perpetuity' over all and any word put on the workshop; and they spent £40 on it a week or so before closing it down; public money - theirs for the burning. copyright, theirs to do as they will with, change adapt produce in any part of the world. global c/w in perpetuity; not a penny to pay...
recently rte did a whole day's broadcasting of heaney's complete works, about twelve hours long. good listening. normally they brainwash about every two minutes about the licence. sick of it otherwise.
atf
Oh. Good. Flarf. Hit them under the water line. Wasn't the reading of the new translation of the psalms wonderful on poetry please. I grew in respect for the psalmists. They were almost existentialists. Just trying to make sense of things, aware of the profound mystery surround them.
ReplyDeleteThat's almost the definition of being human, isn't it. Ants crawling through a clock. One ant looks up. Ses the great hands of the sun and moon sweeping round - writes a psalm.
My bro was on the lash with Branson in Shanghai. Just sent me the pictures. What a strange thing. Because he arranged a charity walk up Fuji and took the money to buy a pump in Kenya for a small village. Part of our parents' inheritance is a strong social conscience. The other part is lying fallow near Swaziland and the Kruger Park.
ReplyDeleteHappy climbing, Kenyan tourism, the smiling grateful poor and party up. Which just goes to show there is a lot of happiness and mileage in doing good. They should do a lot more and then the false note will fade.
Not Chris, heart of gold, but the late adopters.
ReplyDeletewasn't listening to it this afternoon. havn't for quite a while. also put off by something someone on the BB said about mcgough - that when asked to read at a comprehensive said 'I don't do comprehensives'. only anecdotal but still.
ReplyDeletei quite like ants. i used to have them in my flat, in from the garden. couldn't kill them and they used to make caves in my sugar(brown demerara) bowl and I drowned them sugaring my tea. just couldn't help it. not a sikh but still. live and let live. life often seems mysterious.
You drowned them sugaring your tea.
ReplyDeleteLove that.
That's the clinching line from a very good poem.
ReplyDeleteyes, sad, they were interesting the way they'd go in lines in opposite directions, but I didn't like them when they grew wings. all bunched up with wings they were awful, no order, no sense of duty.
ReplyDeleteI've never been to Africa, only to north. morocco. would like to go of course, sometime. it sounds interesting but i think you need to know where you're going there. some part are rough i gather.
In rainstorms in Africa we get flying ants which are very delicious. Ston clad floors govered in small wings like cycamore seeds. But they were so happy those dying ants, that it was contagious.
ReplyDeletewhat's the best part of Africa to go to? i mean - sorry to be so unexotic about it - if you're scared of muggers; and a part that is low cost; probably difficult to reconcile those two...
ReplyDeleteI know East and South. So I would say South Africa. Go to Cape Town. Go to Mpumalanga to the Kruger Park. Go to Natal. I'll give you the address of my uncles's guest house there. Google "Pleasant Places South Africa".
ReplyDeleteAnd if you want, ATF, you can stay at Matumi for a weekend. (Of course that invitation goes out to Wordy, Des, Susan, Iaint and Parisa too).
I would love Matumi to be a poet's and artists colony. We have someone interested in renting at the moment, but if it falls through you are on.
Phil
Botswana is best for wildlife. Namibian desert very spectacular. Ask Susan too. She's been there.
ReplyDeleteup to just now i thought Matumi was someone you knew, an african. it could happen. an artists' colony is an idea. i hope pinkroom is going to be there too.
ReplyDeleteIf I could convince my brothers and I had funding and the agreement of the neighbours I would turn Matumi into an artists colony. It is in the absolute wild, including hills and a river and a valley and part of a greater ecological reserve with well known artists and other ecologically minded people. There is so much I could say.
ReplyDeleteAn arts and crafts colony for top South African artists, poets, philosophers, political theorists and writers and visiting outsiders.
Of course, all of this would pend from the natural environment of the place, and it's preservation.
ReplyDeletepinkroom's in the dumps. her soulful despairing yoofs have made a last desperate attempt to 'have a life' by voting for the bnp. i think we should get together and work out a plan for the slavation of gg.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you mean?
ReplyDeleteHi Phil,
ReplyDeleteNo, not Botswana but I did go to Zimbabwe when things were already bad.
I met many people especially in troubled villages like Hatcliffe who told me that they often crossed over to Botswana where life was better and much more peaceful, to sell hawker ware, vegetables, trinkets and other homemade items.
They enjoyed Botsawana!
A hairdresser even told me that she would go over and offer shampoos and the like at makeshift salons.
Zimbabweans would often make a weekend of it and that's how so many survived the wretched hardships.
I mostly hang about East Africa. Kenya, Nairobi, Kilamanjaro...those parts.
Hi Susan,
ReplyDeleteHaven't been round there for about 30 years, though my family have quite often. Even Teresa who has stuff going on in Tanzania.
But would you recommend that ATF go to Kenya - Tanzania now. How safe is it?
Not safe in many parts currently, Phil!
ReplyDeleteFor atf and first-timers, go through a legitimate tour agent. Be picked up directly from the airport, be looked after by a hotel and any tour company. For anyone going the first time, this is the best and only safe option. Unless you have friends or family coming to the airport to meet you.
You have to know the territory. Otherwise, not safe at all. Could be conned out of a few hundred euro or sterling as soon as you come out of the airport on your own if not careful. Robberies are rife and their methods of thievery are different.
Which is why SA is probably a safer bet, don't you think?
ReplyDeletehi isa
ReplyDeletei did thank you for the offer of your place ISA but it didn't appear. I wondered if it got stuck in the works.
thanks also to Suz for her wise advice. I read a few travel books some years ago that were enjoyable by I think a 'thoreau' or summat and the impression i had was that the world was not so much beautiful as full of muggers. sad. I'm sure S is right and one needs to be experienced or under the wing of tour operators.
anyway here is the one that didn't appear - hope it hasn't any forbidden words in it! but I think my computer needs more memory; my own isn't great either.
"thanks for the offer. it would be good to take it up sometime. just now it's only a dream but I think you're very lucky to have something like that. sometimes I feel like going away, getting out of here, but then, just as soon this place then seems cosy, convenient and a haven of peace. all sorts of hassles crop up once you leave, but I did enjoy the last bit of travelling i did and if i ever get round to doing any more i'd like it to be outside of europe.
I remember when my brother came home having been in SA showing me a leaflet they used to pass out to sailors/ship's officers telling them they must not have relations with the natives and I remember how it enraged me and did so for years afterwards. that's all changed now though. i suppose it must be a happier place now. i remember enjoying Buchi Emechata's novel at uni. her husband went back to nigeria and she followed him and was his second wife and much the lesser one... she is a great comic writer, but it also had a sad side to it, she having been used to a west style marriage. also we did one by a writer whose name I can't remember which also had a very comic undertone, can't remember the name but Daram - something, about two teenage girls and the different attitudes they had to study and to style. suzan would probably them them. there was another one that was written a lot earlier, I think in the 30s, about a black community living outside a mining town and working in the mines, and about how they used to have these parties and dances and the police would occasionally raid them, something to do about alcohol; wish I could remember but my head's like a sive. i enjoyed the module on the african novel and got a good mark for it. not boasting or anything but the black lecturer said it was a 'formidable piece of work' - i think he read it, not sure about that one. There was also ngugi; he was very political and i liked him. i made a little sketch for one of his poems. i wonder what he's up to now as I havn't heard anything of him. i think his tribe was the one led by kenyata but am fuzzy on the politics."
Hi Anony, (posted at 11.51)
ReplyDeleteWill return here later today and give you some useful tips for if you do go to that part of East Africa which is beautiful. If you know how to move around, it should be alright. I can always connect you with good hoteliers, a guide or someone to take you around and show you the sights/safaris if you like...later on when you want to go.
regards
hi suz
ReplyDeleteyes, that's fine. i've always thought you'd be helpful in this sort of way. if it ever looks like become a reality i'll in touch with you for advice. but will wait as i'd get everything lost if I had it now.
atf