My insta ego

Well thanks for that update p & g. And for making me sounding like a total ego-head.

In response, I guess that is what insta and possibly being a maker of any kind is all about.  On insta you are making photos and clearly creating an illusion even if counter - intuitively an illusion that everything you put on there is spontaneous. At least one account I follow does appear to do that.

The clash between what appears and what is has been central to everything I write. Blame George Eliot, Hardy, James and above all Dickens if you like. And countless A-level and uni exam questions on Appearance and Reality from Little Dorrit onwards. And then blame life and experience. For example, the idea that the borders was once a highly developed industrial centre exporting wool to Flanders in mediaeval times and cloth globally tends to get lost sight of - especially as the general electorate has gone back to forelock-tugging the Tories. How can rural be industrial? How can empty space - the dull landscape that Dorothy Wordsworth dismissed - be full?

A couple of Sundays ago I was walking around near Harestanes by Ancrum and found more ramsons and bluebells growing just a few metres off the A68 than seemed believable. A burn raced by and growth was luscious. I had come with a friend. All good. But when my eye is in I always catch sight of the old wall overgrown by ivy. The space where a huge beam once rested. And after that it started to be quite easy to pick out channels and pools where the water had once sped through and turned the mill wheel. The random mounds and pits were engineering spaces. The beauty. The lushness. Perhaps at some level they still fed on rich soil from the old mill midden.

So I enjoy insta: for example, the work of Ben Lingard mentioned below, parkour heroes and concrete firms, beautiful cups of coffee and some work going on in general. Everything reduced to a column of boxes and that of course the schematic I also find rather appealing.

And for that final touch of the ego glad to have a poem coming out in Under the Radar in Autumn - thanks guys.

After Norman MacCaig

This is a poem that is playful and terrifying in equal measures.

The deceptive 4 line stanzas with their loose, assonant and ultimately absent abab rhyming scheme provide an initial sense of calm underpinned with something not quite right. The images in the first stanza hint at Thomas Hardy but next quickly swing into a hallucinogenic world of milking sunsets and fiery dew.

Stanza four for me is where the poem becomes truly disturbing - the entrapment of "distance" and its captivity for our pleasure sets a scene of power and oppressive control that is almost Blakean but with no sympathy for the underdog.

And then the killer blow: what is it we are missing who live like this? Find out in the last stanza.

Refer back to title.

Pow. A hit, a very palpable hit.

After

Let’s choose a pretty word, say, evening,
And climb through it into the past,
or stand on a towering If, surveying
The rosy kingdoms we have lost.

From every corner creep a thousand
Boredoms saying, Greet us.  We’re life.
Let’s round the sunset up and milk it
Into a jug and drink it off.

Or in the hawthorn let us tangle
Our dreary look like gossamer
To shudder with that sparrow’s chirping
And when the dew falls be on fire.

Or drag the distance home and chain it
There in the corner of the room
To charm us with its savage howling
And beg for fragments of our dream.

There’s a clue somewhere.  Can you find it?
Can you say it over and over again
‘Love’, till its incantation makes us
Forget how much we are alone?

Norman MacCaig

Darkling darling

New Year's Eve poetry is often ambiguous; what has gone or been let go the year before and only the unknown to come; hard to keep the faith or any faith for that matter.

So let the man of Dorset Thomas Hardy and his hidden joyful thrush wing us into 2014 once more...

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
      When frost was spectre-grey,
And  winter's dregs made desolate
      The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
      Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
      Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
      The century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
      The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
      Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
      Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
      The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
      Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
      In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
      Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
      Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
      Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
      His happy good-night air
Some blessed hope, whereof he knew
      And I was unaware.

December 31st 1900

Coming soon Issue 6 poetandgeek.com

Violet and delicious and dark all wrapped up with string...

Our Issue 6 of poetandgeek.com is creeping up at you from the bare heath of the imagination and features new work from Richie McCaffery, Felino Soriano, Anne Pia, Andrew McCallum, Jennifer Martin, Alistair Noon and so much more...

We'll let you know when.

It was a worn whisper, dry and papery, and it brushed so distinctly across the ear that, by the accustomed, the material minutiae in which it originated could be realized as by touch. It was the united products of infinitesimal vegetable causes, and these were neither stems, leaves, fruit, blades, prickles, lichen, nor moss.

The return of the native Thomas Hardy

Christmas Eve

I feel obliged to rescue this poem from a Christmas carol website and give it some air. If you grew up in a country place or live in one now, the sense of possibility is omnipresent.

Some people consider this a poem of disillusionment but I don't think I am one of them.

The Oxen by Thomas Hardy


Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel,

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so’


I am not the first to think of this obviously. There is a closer reading here http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/dec/16/thomas-hardy-oxen-seasons-readings.

Charlotte Mew tweet poetry

Charlotte Mew (1869 - 1928) was an English poet and writer. Admired by Thomas Hardy, Walter de la Mare, Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon and John Masefield, she battled with depression during her lifetime.

poetandgeek.com @poetandgeek

trees and the high white walls the sun was always on the towers The walls are standing to-day and the gates I have been through the gates

Her best known work remains the ambiguous poem The Farmer's Bride.

This tweet poetry is taken from the poem I have been through the gates

His heart to me, was a place of palaces and pinnacles and shining towers;

I saw it then as we see things in dreams,--I do not remember how long I slept;

I remember the trees, and the high, white walls, and how the sun was always on the

towers;

The walls are standing to-day, and the gates; I have been through the gates, I have

groped, I have crept

Back, back. There is dust in the streets, and blood; they are empty; darkness is over

them;

His heart is a place with the lights gone out, forsaken by great winds and the heavenly

rain, unclean and unswept,

Like the heart of the holy city, old blind, beautiful Jerusalem;

Over which Christ wept .

More on Charlotte Mew here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Mew.

Thomas Hardy tweet poetry

Hardy (1840 – 1928) - architect, novelist, fiddle player, poet - never gives up on hope.

poetandgeek poetandgeek.com 

An aged thrush frail gaunt and small In blast-beruffled plume Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom

1 minute ago Favorite Reply Delete

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

You can find out more background here http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/dec/28/poem-of-the-week-the-darkling-thrush-thomas-hardy.

Birling Wood

What with all the shenanigans with the woods and Forestry Commission sell off, my audio tree project has had to take a back seat for a bit. Good news is that the government forest give away sale has been called off (for the moment).

My project has evolved a bit in its scope: I am calling it Birling Wood. I have still yet to evolve a mic set up that doesn't require quite a bit of attendance. Also not sure if I can leave the equipment in the wood where I am working safely. It is quiet place apart from the section we are in the middle of felling. And my kit is not technically impressive stuff but that doesn't mean no one will be taking it.

However the act of checking has its own rewards, I almost ran into a fox the other day. A female it scarpered as soon as it saw me. We had been hidden from each other by a bend in the path. I had been looking at the start of the wild garlic cover. It already smells pungent. Then the cheerful face appeared. The same thing can happen with stoats. I once encountered a family of weasels crossing (probably their regular crossing, it is on my list to go and check this out by observation). Some big dogs had passed with their owner the other way and so my passage went unnoticed. Weasels are like a mini feather boa on a string; they move fast even on their own time. I had time to sense the younger ones playing.

So I need a mindset not dissimilar to Clym Yeobright to sit quietly and listen along with the mic, and I look forward to having it and to composing the words that will go along with the recorded sound. At the moment, I feel my lack of clothing, well the right clothing. It is hard to get things dry where I am living. My jacket has acquired that smell that rainproof material gets when it never drys out. But then you look at the leaf shards of green ramson and smell that oniony smell, the warm earth. It is not warm but something is moving in it.

It is all to look forward to.

Ghazal primer

A ghazal is a love song originally Persian that deals in love gone bad, star-crossed lovers, separation (and sometimes the pleasures of drinking in such circumstances). A little bit of the courtly love troubadour. It can be dedicated to a man or a woman. In essence, a ghazal is an articulation of  the agony of loss or separation but love's beauty in spite of that pain.

In its strictest form, the ghazal has:

·         5 or more couplets.

·         Each couplet's second line uses the same word or phrase ends with the repetition of a refrain of one or a few words, so a ghazal's rhyme scheme is aa ba ca and so on.

·         Lines must be complete in themselves.

·         The poem maintains its metre throughout.

·         Each couplet is complete in itself but a theme can run throughout the ghazal.

·         Sometimes the poet namechecks him or herself (in the last couplet).

 Well-known examples can be found in many languages and in the works of Muhammad Iqbal, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Hardy, Adrienne Rich and W.S Merwin. Orhan Parmuk's work The museum of innocence (2009) might be considered a prose ghazal.

Here is a rather happy version from Mimi Khalvati which you can also listen to  here http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=5140. An altogether more painful but less formulaic version by Federico Garcia Lorca can be found here. Gacela is the Spanish for ghazal, if you prefer to hear it sung http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQo8mOh6AHc

  Gacela del amor desesperado

La noche no quiere venir

para que tú no vengas

ni yo pueda ir.

La noche no quiere venir

pero yo iré

aunque un sol de alacranes me coma la sien,

pero tú vendrás

con la lengua quemada por lluvia de sal.

El día no quiere venir

para que tú no vengas

ni yo pueda ir.

El dia no, no quiere venir

pero yo iré

entregando a los sapos mi mordido clavel,

pero tú vendrás

por las turbias cloacas de la oscuridad.

Ni la noche ni el día quieren venir

para que por ti muera

y tú mueras por mí,

para que tú mueras por mí...

Ni la noche ni el día quieren venir

para que por ti muera

y tú mueras por mí,

para que tú mueras por mí,

para que yo muera por ti...

Tree voice program

Working on a project inspired by Thomas Hardy's description of the night sounds of Egdon Heath - natives of the heath could tell what plant or dried grass the wind is blowing through - it involves miking up trees and making recordings of their voices in various woods in the Scottish Borders, Wooplaw and down by Kelso way and all. And then playing around with the results digitally.

It's fun when you end up with a fox, badger or owl or something in the background too.

Giving trees a voice sounds like poetry to me...