Categories
Category: Poetry
Three ladies settle in front of the Portugese Coffee House
in Market Jew Street.
I'm glad in a way,they are only taking drinks.
A teapot heralds a certain degree of bourgeois comfort, whilst the lady on the left sips her milkshake like a teenager.
They seem oblivious to the marauding prospect of seagulls.
The effect this sunshine spell on older skin doesn't bother them.
Above pound-stretcher a gull stretches his wings.
The black and yellow pennants flutter wildly in the in the incipient breeze.
A single-decker spreads a cascade of pollutants.
The outspread Guardian announces Johnson to be referred to the police by his own lawyers.
To me it feels like a temporary delicate interregnum.
I have read but a little Samuel Beckett- one play and a novel but his persona I find intriguing and his clearly having studied Joyce interests as well. I found a tome-like collection of his poetry second hand and have been looking at some of his translations from French. He translated Rimbaud, Breton and the surrealist poet, Paul Eluard. I notice that a collection of the latter’s poetry is soon to be published in both French and English. Beckett also translated a poem called “Delta” from Italian by Eugenio Montale. Beckett too wrote fluently in French and demonstrates his fascination for arcane usage. Here is an example-
Tristesse Janale
C’est toi, o beauté blême des subtiles concierges,
La Chose kantienne, l’icone bilitique;
C’est toi, muette énigme des aphasiques vierges,
Qui centres mes désirs d’un trait antithétique.
O mystique carquois! O flèches de Télèphe!
Correlatif de toi! Abîme et dure sonde!
Sois éternellement le greffé et la greffe,
Ma superfétatoire et frêle furibonde!
Ultime coquillage et palais de la bouche
Mallarméenne et emblème de Michel-Ange,
Consume-toi, o neutre, en extases farouches,
Barbouille-toi, bigène, de crispations de fange,
Et co-ordonne enfin, lacustre conifère,
Tes tensions ambigues de crête et de cratère.
Using Google Translate and adjusting this curious poem reads-
Sadness Janale
It is you, o pallid beauty of the subtle concierges, The Kantian Thing, the bilious icon; It is you, mute enigma of aphasic virgins, Who centers my desires with an antithetical trait.
O mystical quiver! O arrows of Telephus! Correlative of you! Abyss and hard probe! Be eternally the grafted and the graft, My superfluous and frail furious!
Ultimate shell and palate of the Mallarméan mouth and emblem of Michelangelo, Consume yourself, o neutral, in fierce ecstasies, Smear yourself, bigène, with mire contractions,
And finally coordinates, coniferous lacustrine, Your ambiguous tensions of ridge and crater.
Essentially this seems difficult although each stanza has a cluster of meaningful concerns. There are many fascinating words with allusions to place names and classical studies. The imperious voice of the poem marked by imperatives is not without a comic undertone or so it seems to me. It has made me aware of Beckett’s command of the French language and his dreamlike imagery.
Categories
Heddy Lamarr (Misconnected)
Communication only partial
the latching you designed
seems to glitch
So that signals disappear
down some tremendous
existential void.
Wires are somehow more
secure than your bluetooth
despite its representation
as a reliable mechanical
gearwheel safely
locked in a Newtonian Universe.
How can I connect
with you? What message
can reach you up there?
Here I remain
with weakened pulses
and unreliable links
living with Beckett and Bion.
Categories
Discovering Levertov
I was thumbing through a copy of Contemporary American Poetry price six shillings, published 1962 that I borrowed from a friend at University. I couldn’t help noticing that there appeared to be only two woman poets in the collection by Donald Hall and of neither had I heard. At first perusal some of the poems by Denise Levertov seemed to be redolent of new perceptions of American springtime and then I read the blurb in the front-
DENISE LEVERTOV (b. 1923) comes from Ilford in Essex, England, and served as a nurse during the Second World War, when her poems were first published by Wrey Gardiner in London. She married an American and has lived in the United States since 1948. She published her first book, The Double Image, in England in 1946. Her American books are Here and Now (1957), Overland to the Islands (1958), With Eyes at the Back of our Heads (1960), and The Jacob’s Ladder (1961).
This delightful poem about origins and identities is immersed in beautiful place names both suburban and sylvan. Rivers run through it and there is the lovely image of the forlorn white statue standing in the old house garden. It is a reflection of childhood innocence and religious thoughts add to the majesty of the poetic voice. ( ” merciful Phillipa”, “multitudes” and “Simeon quiet evensong”) In the meeting and parting she brings together Belarus and Spain, the United States and Wales. It is about the expansion of the world as in the maps of a child’s imagination; the safety and containment of morning sunlight on garden walls.
Categories
Sitwell at Sea
Sailor, What of the Isles?
TO MILLICENT HUDDLESTON ROGERS
The whole poem with it’s images of islands, sailors and the sea appeals to me- mostly through imagery rather than meaning. A friend comments, not unfairly I think……
She is a great enigma to me. I find her poetry both avant-garde and deeply conservative in its floundering eccentricity, like her life. She epitomises the remnants of a bankrupt class yet gives a voice to pertinent modern concerns. A voice that is both mesmerising in its clarity yet from an alien world.
Was it just show or does it present a living reflection of her/our times?
The Facade poems maybe found at https://www.londonmozartplayers.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Edith-Sitwell-Facade-poems.pdf
and this poem in full at https://www.magyarulbabelben.net/works/en/Sitwell%2C_Edith-1887/Sailor%2C_What_of_the_Isles
where it is also in Hungarian!
In both of these collections the sea and its various moods features. It is not just this that endears me in each case but it is that element that prompts me to write about them today. It is raining once again here in Cornwall and it is as the mists mizzle gather over the bay that I find myself in somewhat melancholy mood to respond to these collections.
Derek Mahon
Essentially this is a collection of essays by different writers together with Mahon’s poems. Here is one example- the poem-“The Sea in Winter” which was written for Desmond O’Grady. There are so many lovely passages in this poem which is fast becoming a favourite.-
Portstewart, Portrush, Portballintrae-
Un beau pays mal habité,
policed by rednecks in dark cloth
and roving gangs of tartan youth.
No place for a gentleman like you.
The good, the beautiful and the true
have a tough time of it; and yet
there is that Hebridean sunset,
The coast in winter, something familiar here in West Cornwall evokes feelings as in these engaging couplets:-
The sea in winter, where she walks,
vents its displeasure on the rocks.
The human factor appears too beside these images or pathetic fallacies-
………………………….; the spite
mankind has brought to this infernal
backwater destroys the soul;
it sneaks into the daily life,
sunders the husband from the wife.
Sunder seems a significant word here, perhaps evoking “thunder” and reminiscent of the biblical separation of “asunder”. ( The chariot and horses of fire “parted asunder” Elijah and Elisha (2 Kings 2:11). So we are situated on the bleak edge of the sea. Though not quite in the same mood state as T.S.Eliot-On Margate Sands./I can connect/Nothing with nothing./The broken fingernails of dirty hands./My people humble people who expect/Nothing.
There is an interesting piece on Mahon as the poet of place at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0895769X.2012.640266?journalCode=vanq20
In his comments on this poem, John Fitzgerald https://gallerypress.com/authors/a-to-f/john-fitzgerald/ says;
“I grew to love the poem’s complicit sense of ennui,bordering on but never quite reaching desolation, ‘living on the edge of space’; the memorable turns of phrase and allusive colour, both classical and contemporary; the sense of redemption just out of reach; the agonizing, trapped uncertainty of the writing life; all balanced against the consolation of confident, impeccable poetry.”
Evelyn Holloway
Evelyn’s book is published in English and German by Edition Sonnberg which is based in Vienna, where Evelyn was born in 1955. Perhaps the most interesting poem, it is for me, is Meeting which tells of Evelyn encountering Samuel Beckett in Oxford where she was a student in October 1973. I find that even with my poor German having the text in both languages somehow broadens the comprehension of the text.
Suddenly I see his face
stepped down from book covers,
a furrowed face, a landscape of thought
I waited for Godot,
saw people stuck in bins,
so many figures of his universe,
Now to return to the sea, a sea of memories- some perhaps repressed…….
ERRINERUNG IST EIN OZEAN OHNE SALZ
Ich kam hier um das Wrack zu sehen,
musste tiefer tauchen, tiefer.
Farben sind dort begraben,
Stimmen von der Zeit verschluckt.
Irgendwo in diesem Chaos,
ich bin irgendwo
verlassen,gefunden, und wieder verlassen
Atmen fällt schwer hier unten
Kunstweke hinter Mauern versteckt
Errinerung ist ein Ozean ohne Salz.
So that the memory can appear like a sea too, but one without salt. Memory and dreams have perhaps links to Vienna but the salty sea is close by in St Ives.
Here are just a few lines from WE ARE DANCING ROCKS (WIR SIND TANZENDE FELSEN)
We will outlast you.
Our salty eternity does not count the years.
We do not mourn the sand swallowed by the sea.
We are dancing rocks.
Her collection Words through Walls is published by Wieser Verlag ISBN 978-3-9504320-8-4
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