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

New poem by William Blake

p&g were intrigued by this story as it reminded us of the Missal fragment and its life as a putative book binding.

The new poem was discovered in West Sussex during excavations to return farmland back to reed bed and salt marsh on Selsey Bill . English poet and visionary William Blake of course was a famous Sussex resident for a time.

The poem whose subject matter is politically inflammatory had been roughly bound into a farm ledger and over the course of time forgotten. No information on the poem's contents yet - there is to be a grand unveiling and no doubt a professional will be hired in to read it.

You can find out more here http://www.theguardian.com/books/poetry and about the wetland project here http://www.sussexwildlifetrust.org.uk/reserves/page00024.htm

Angels in trees

I have always been much interested in William Blake's visions especially the angels which I imagine that he saw in trees when staying in Sussex from 1800 until 1803.

Thinking about this while I am planning a workshop inspired by Blake's poem Auguries of Innocence (not to be mixed up with the Songs of Innocence) and especially the opening lines:

To see the world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wildflower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour...

The poem itself is much longer than this extract suggests and worth reading. But I am interested in these zen-like instructions for now as the start of a writing exercise. At its dullest you might call it from the specific to the general! At best poetic contemplation, once learned, allows visions.

Blake would argue the poet as a conduit between god and man. Or maybe a force of nature.

I wrote a poem about this myself but my angels were rather more like Wim Wenders'.

You can find out more about William Blake here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake and you can read the full poem here http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172906

Machine poetry: Gawain and the green knight

Gawain and the green knight as a poem of Arthurian legend written in the late 14th century may not seem the obvious choice for a machine poem. In fact, as Gawain himself discovers its story is held tight by devices - poetical and plot (not to mention the girdle) - that would have been much appreciated by its attentive courtly audience in the Duchy of Lancaster.

My claim rests on the sequence when Gawain finally meets the Green Knight again in the green chapel. Gawain hears a terrible clatter emanating from his destination and compares it to a homely noise - someone sharpening his scythe on a grindstone as one vpon a gryndelston hade grounden a syþe. It is like a little window in the poem. Some have attributed the poem to a monastic source and it is easy to imagine a monk writing in the calm scriptorium suddenly distracted by teenage laybrothers messing with tools and equipment in the steading.

The watermill - as water at a mulne - is equally weighted as an image; is grinding corn terrifying? It is hard to imagine this most pastoral Constable-like vision of England as a threat unless we imagine the mills as more Blakean - gobbling up arcadia. In which case they might be deeply problematic to a certain cast of medieval mind.

The scythe has a biblical significance too - Job 14:2 He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not. The thematic link with Gawain's claim that it is the preparation of armour though is unexplained. What would a monk know about the details of this? But perhaps it is more effective for we infer how the blade is being sharpened from alliterative sounds and fearsome landscape. A masterclass in early horror.

On a lighter note, we can enjoy the fact that Gawain's name is spelt two profoundly different ways - Wowayn and Gawayn to fit in with alliterative scheme. The machine of poetry indeed!

Gawain and the green knight - extract


Stanza 88

now iwysse quoþ wowayn wysty is here
þis oritore is vgly with erbez ouergrowen
wel bisemez þe wy3e wruxled in grene
dele here his deuocioun on þe deuelez wyse
now I fele hit is þe fende in my fyue wyttez
þat hatz stoken me þis steuen to strye me here
þis is a chapel of meschaunce þat chekke hit bytyde
hit is þe corsedest kyrk þat euer I com inne

with he3e helme on his hede his launce in his honde
he romez vp to þe roffe of þe ro3 wonez
þene herde he of þat hy3e hil in a harde roche
bi3onde þe broke in a bonk a wonder breme noyse
quat hit clatered in þe clyff as hit cleue schulde
as one vpon a gryndelston hade grounden a syþe
what hit wharred and whette as water at a mulne
what hit rusched and ronge rawþe to here
þenne bi godde quoþ gawayn þat here at I trowe
is ryched at þe reuerence me renk to mete

Rough paraphrase - Sir Gawain said, 'This is a bleak place. The oratory is ugly, overgrown with weeds, the green knight could easily worship the devil here. Now it is clear that it is the devil himself who will meet me, so that he may destroy me. This is a chapel of mischance, and the most accursed kirk that I have ever seen.' Armed with his helmet high on his head and lance in hand, he veered up to that rocky den. Then a very strange noise came from a rock in that high hill beyond the brook, and it clattered among the cliffs as though it would break them apart, as though someone were grinding a scythe upon a grindstone, and it made a whirring sound like water in a mill, and rushed and sang out and was terrible to hear. 'By God,' said Gawain, 'that is the noise of armour being made ready for that fellow to meet me.

More on the devices in Gawain here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Gawain_and_the_Green_Knight

Machine poets: the movement of big things

Man and machine, a combination that has existed in poetry since classical times; early English examples include John Donne's The Compass

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the' other do.

and Spenser's dissertation in the Faerie Queene on the uses of wood

    The Eugh obedient to the benders will,

    The Birch for shaftes, the Sallow for the mill,

But at the moment I am interested when machines stand for a certain kind of grit and honesty; less renaissance man who has an interest in science and more alpha male who "likes the movement of big things".

W.H.Auden's factories stand for social truth, Work has been stopped on the powerhouse; the wind whistles under/The half-built culverts while The square munition works out on the old allotments/Needs stricter watching (The Orators 1931); a society of which he is an observer and excluded (Stop all the clocks). But what often appeals to me is the more fifties brand of machine poet. Ted Hughes' Tractor is a badge of manhood endowed with all the pain of a rite of passage:

The tractor stands frozen - and agony

to think of...[]

It defies flesh and won't start

hands are like wounds already

Inside armour gloves...

In the end its superhuman power is mastered and it starts like a Blakean engine or mill. Simon Armitage's poem Very simply topping up the brake fluid (Yes, love, that's why the warning light comes on...) takes the process one step further. The chance of failure that in Hughes's poem is contained within the poet himself is split into a male expert and subservient female persona, the love in question. But Armitage's poem is a cry against the feminisation all men feel when they get out of their depth with machines; it is perhaps a logical step to men (and women) bathing in pies to assert themselves (The practical way to heaven) in Armitage's latest collection Seeing stars (something not so far away from D.H. Lawrence's nudity and wrestling).

This has to end for the moment in a call for machine poems and poets; the series is to be continued...

Ghost of a flea

William Blake was one writer who took publishing into his own hands so that he could control how his words and books looked. Not so different from having our hands on the desktop publishing software and checking our word processor's template? Editors and most often publishers of classic works changed the versions that we use today. Sir Walter Scott's Scots language all tidied up, Emily Dickinson's punctuation, all the gory and sexy and sad bits of Shakespeare...