Category: Poetry

Categories
Art and Photographic History Film Poetry

 Trump story sends criminals to Ballard’s Wharf.

It is always interesting to surmise what was happening in the world when you were a very small child. This intriguing black and white film from 1947, Hue and Cry has some of the answers. It is set in the feral landscapes of bombed out London. However, the spirit and humour of the kids captures some of the trauma of the recent blitz but much more the youngsters resilience. The following clip shows a little of what I mean.

I found this DvD in one of my local charity shops and was intrigued by the fact that the plot revolves around a children’s comic called The Trump. The blurb on the reverse also mentioned that it was the first of the famous Ealing Comedies and there were fascinating shots of post-war London’s exterior locations. In fact as I watched the film it in some parts reminded me of seeing the recent gang wars of Sondheim’s West Side Story as filmed by Spielberg. Indeed some of the visual tropes or tricks were similar too. This second clip gives details about the locations of the film and how they look today.

Passing beyond the psychogeography of “Hue and Cry” I also thought there was a sort of undertext. The working class children with their naïve and energetic enthusiasm overcome the sharks and spivs in their criminal activities. Very much the product of those heroic times when the Atlee government brought so much to recovery. There was something democratic if somewhat frenetic here which vividly contrasts with life here today. The hectic has become frenetic in a Governent of the Posh Boys and what used to be known in Lambeth as Wide Boys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_boy#Fictional_portrayals

To finish on a more upbeat note; this film has amusing glimpses of life in the old Covent Garden Market. It is worth watching for that alone. However, the acting of Lambeth born Harry Fowler, Jack Warner and especially Alastair Sim is superb. Talking of markets let me conclude with these lines from Charlotte Mew’s Saturday Market.

Categories
Literature Poetry

Thoughts inspired by “From a Window” by Charlotte Mew

From a Window 

                  Up here, with June, the sycamore throws 

                      Across the window a whispering screen; 

        I shall miss the sycamore more, I suppose, 

Than anything else on this earth that is out in green. 

             But I mean to go through the door without fear, 

             Not caring much what happens here 

                           When I’m away:— 

How green the screen is across the panes 

              Or who goes laughing along the lanes 

        With my old lover all summer day. 
 

By Charlotte Mew 

The poem begins by locating the poet both in place and time; the high elevation suggests an oracular tone which pervades the poem. The poet is contemplating not just leaving the house or building but also the loss of life- that is to say death itself.

I seem to recall a final interview of the playwright Dennis Potter talking in a moving way about a tree in blossom and the poignant feelings this aroused in him. The poem evoked his memory.

In Mew’s poem however the tree appears as a green screen which might conceivably fill an entire window where foliage whispering might suggest some maternal comforting. Indeed it becomes a kind of screen memory, that is a distorted memory, generally of a visual rather than verbal nature, deriving from childhood. The term was coined by Sigmund Freud, .

Mew talks about not caring much about what happens when she is away. It seems that the word “much” suggests that actually, largely unconsciously, she actually really does care about what happens when she leaves. Indeed the real difficulty in leaving is about what is left behind and perhaps who is left behind doing exactly what. The separation involves a felt loss of control. Her previous lover is laughing along the lanes and perhaps there might be some faint suggestion of the poet feeling perhaps jeered at as well. There is a beautiful melancholy feel to the internal rhythms of the line “How green the screen is across the panes” and the now obvious pane/pain pairing.

This programme is moving about Charlotte Mew and worth a listen-

The Heart of Hidden Things (radio programme)
Categories
Art and Photographic History Poetry West Cornwall (and local history)

Some thoughts on “resilience”

The splendid Penzance Literary Festival has chosen this topic as the inspiration for this year’s event. I have taken out my larger dictionaries and looked a little at its usage and etymology. The latter is not difficult as it derives directly from Latin and basically means something like the capacity to jump back.

The term resilience was introduced into the English language in the early 17th Century from the Latin verb resilire, meaning to rebound or recoil (Concise Oxford Dictionary, Tenth Edition).

resilience (n.) … 1620s, “act of rebounding or springing back,” often of immaterial things, from Latin resiliens, present participle of resilire “to rebound, 

From Ovid we read  “saepein gelidos resilire lacus, sed nunc quoque turpes” which Loeb gives as  meaning in Metamorphoses Book VI as Often they sit upon the sedgy bank and often leap back into the cool lake. This comes from a rather beautifully poetic passage at https://www.loebclassics.com/view/ovid-metamorphoses/1916/pb_LCL042.315.xml

We get the English expressions ‘Salient’ and ‘To sally forth’ from the Latin verb Salio -to jump. In Cassell’s Latin Dictionary we learn of the Salii who were apparently a college of priests who jumped and leapt about worshipping Mars in a procession accompanied by singers and armed dancers. Instituted bt Numa Pompilius apparently.

Returning to the concept of Resilience we can distinguish its meaning from something like Endurance or Durability; it is more springy, elastic and perhaps energetic. Principally, of course, the concern around the concept relates to the inner resources for coping with Covid and the restrictions consequent upon it. It is the psychology of resilience which makes it a concept current in the zeitgeist. Without much prompting Google asks –

What are the 5 skills of resilience?

Five Key Stress Resilience Skills

  • Self-awareness.
  • Attention – flexibility & stability of focus.
  • Letting go (1) – physical.
  • Letting go (2) – mental.
  • Accessing & sustaining positive emotion.

Additionally it further questions-

What are the 7 C’s of resilience?

Dr Ginsburg, child paediatrician and human development expert, proposes that there are 7 integral and interrelated components that make up being resilient – competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping and control.

Also from the Mayo Clinic-https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/resilience-training/in-depth/resilience/art-20046311

Whilst thinking about this topic, I came across these lines from a poem entitled Women Running, based upon Picasso’s painting entitled Deux femmes courant sur la plage which seem apposite and uplifting-

That arm laid across the horizon,

the racing legs, an unstoppable quartet, pull

me from my skin and I become one of them,

believe I’m agile enough to run a mile,


believe I’m young again, believe age

has been stamped out. No wonder, I worship

at the altar of energy, not the energy

huge with hate which revels in tearing apart,


in crushing to dust but the momentum

which carries blood to the brain, these women

across the plage, lovers as they couple

and tugs at the future till it breaks into bloom.
Myra Schneider

Categories
Literature Poetry

Katarina Brac by Christopher Reid- contemplations and ruminations

–

After several months studying and discussing poetry, Christmas has offered me the opportunity to reconsider the poetry I like and just why I like it. Christopher Reid has been a firm favourite for some time. I find him quite accessible or offering other compensations when he seems harder to understand. As I believe I mentioned previously, I find his slim volume Katerina Brac particularly interesting. Even the plain yellow cover with ionly the author and title in letters seem thrilling.

Here are two stanzas from a poem in this collection which is called Epithalamium–

Something as homely

as a cat or a clock.

But what you leave unsaid

sustains you

like the net of the heavens.

Man and wife

with your life between you

like a chessboard:

a palimsest

of innumerable possibilities.

A very interesting analysis of this book may be found at-

https://dspace.uni.lodz.pl/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11089/14250/41_faActa%20Universitatis%20Lodziensis.%20Folia%20Littereria%20Anglica%2001.%201997.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

However, although this lengthy essay is both fascinating and illuminating in respect of the Eastern European persona of the poetess, Katarina Brac, it may be difficult to accept in one respect. Viz, that the abstract politico-philosophical elements sit uneasily with the personal feminine viewpoint which Reid is attempting to emulate.

Image 1 - Dinky Toys GB N° 34C Loud Speaker Van

One of the best regarded poems in this collection is “Tin Lily”. It is discussed, for instance, in Ruth Padel’s collection of 52 Poems. It is also given a useful interpretation and the poem may be read at

http://greatpoetryexplained.blogspot.com/2020/04/tin-lily-by-christopher-reid.html

I particularly like …..”It is difficult to separate the words from the razzmatazz” and applies here in 2022 as in Eastern Europe in 1985 when this collection was published first in 1985.

Categories
Literature Poetry

Some ephemera on Ernest Dowson, Poet  (2 August 1867 – 23 February 1900) 

https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/theatre-arts/poetry-infatuation-that-inspired-devotion-34297047.html

THE LEWISHAM POET: THE LIFE AND WORKS OF ERNEST DOWSON - Kindle edition by Jones, Kelvin I.. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
Categories
Penwith Poetry West Cornwall (and local history)

In memory of J.M.

A tall donnish schoolmaster enters the gate

only a little late, dismounts

with a certain characteristic style

steering between the other master’s cars

He holds both bars and stomps,

observed by some third form boys, behind

the staffroom, past the prefect’s den

and parks his velociped in the cycle shed.

Allons enfants! We foregather before him

in serried desks- pupils in pupitres.

and listen to his high voice entreating us

to sing a folk song about a peasant soup.

Pacing the long dias by the grand piano

he encouraged us to belt ’em out. Pronunciation

rather than grammar was his choice forte.

We embraced “Auprès de ma blonde

“Qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon.“, the

Marseillaise and Sous le pont d’avignon

The lyrics he swiftly chalked above

the staves on the board in the Music Room.

Thinking back, he may have been batered

by the War and tough times along

with the Chinese Inland Mission.

Appearing himself like a cross between Ho Chi Min

and Ezra Pound.

Even then I thought he may not

have fitted in with the other masters

being deemed eccentric he would not have minded

entirely blinded to such bourgeois mores.

“China Reconstructs” tucked under his arm

and head full of ideograms, I wonder

just what I might still learn from him now.

Humphry Davy School - Marnick Builders

https://studycli.org/chinese-characters/types-of-chinese-characters/

Categories
German Matters Literature Poetry

New York Fascinates by Rosa AUSLÄNDER

New York fascinates

In the early morning hours when between plaster and the crystal of Heaven the elegant skyscrapers stand like gems on the salmon ground

Beautiful is New York in the morning, most beautiful early Sunday when sirens and wheels sleep, little voices from park trees coo to the Hudson adapting to the ocean

A person comes upon you and you see is really a PERSON and you see it is really NEW YORK; a fable beautifully devised subtle and strong

The eight million sleeping Sunday dreamers have not yet shaken off the nightmare of the week. Too late they seek when already shadows embrace the streets, seek the PEOPLE too late, NEW YORK the azure-dreamed fable New York.

New York faszinert

New York fasziniert in den fruehen Morgenstunden wenn zwischen Pflaster und Himmelskristall die eleganten Wolkenkratzer gemmengleich stehn auf lachsrotem Grund

Schoen ist New York am Morgen am schoensten Sonntag frueh wenn Sirenen und Raeder schlafen kleine Stimmen von Parkbaeumen kollern der Hudson sich anpasst dem Ozean

ein Mensch dir begegnet und du siehst es ist wirklich ein MENSCH und du siehst es ist wirklich NEW YORK ein Maerchen schoen ersonnen subtil und stark

Die acht Millionen schlafenden Sonntagstraeumer haben noch nicht abgeschuettelt den Alpdruck der Woche

Zu spaet suchen sie wenn schon

Schatten die Gassen umarmen den MENSCHEN suchen

zu spaet NEW YORK

das blaugetraeumte Maerchen New York

I really like the sense of place in this poem of a stranger awaking to a new environment and its fairy tale quality. The word “kollern” apparently can mean goobled up – presumably by the flowing Hudson entering the sea. Derek Mahon and of course, W.H.Auden give voice to similar sensations too.

Categories
Book Reviews Literature Poetry

The Poems of Tishani Doshi

I came across my volume of Doshi’s poems, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, in the Oxfam shop and retired to the Cinema’s attatched bar to peruse it. leaving aside the huge question of how we should finance our poets- surely another test of our degree of civilization- I was delighted to acquaint myself with a new poet whose website may be found at http://www.tishanidoshi.com/

Monsoon Poem

Because this is a monsoon poem

expect to find the words jasmine,

palmyra, Kuruntokai, red; mangoes

in reference to trees or breasts; paddy

fields, peacocks, Kurinji flowers,

flutes; lotus buds guarding love’s

furtive routes. Expect to hear a lot

about erotic consummation inferred

by laburnum gyrations and bamboo

syncopations. Listen to the racket

of wide-mouthed frogs and bent-

legged prawns going about their

business of mating while rain falls

and falls on tiled roofs and verandas,

courtyards, pagodas.

Best places in Munnar to visit to watch Neelakurinji flowers bloom after 12 years | Lifestyle News,The Indian Express

The flood of insistent images together with their sounds strikes the reader as with heavy persistent rain. This type of rainfall seems charged too with eroticism from pendulous mangoes to rutting frogs. Throughout this poem this type of rain is held in contrast to the earth itself. It indicates how in one experience and its associated feeling, another mode of being may be temporarily forgotten. It does this with beauty and subtlety.

It ends by speaking of dreams and old poems we forget that –

led us to believe that men were mountains,

that the beautiful could never remain

heartbroken, that the rains arrive

we should be delighted to be taken

in drowning, in devotion.

Old Vintage Postcard With Seascape And Space For Text Stock Photo, Picture And Royalty Free Image. Image 20607974.

Here is the start of another Doshi poem which is engaging:-

Jungian Postcard

Dear Carl, the days here are impossible:

all silence, and the sea. Yesterday we saw

the horizon unstitch itself from the sky

so delicately, and further down the beach,

two stray dogs materialised like lost souls

from a genie’s lamp. I just had to cry.

Our anima and animus! My love cried,

being philosophically inclined and impossible

to argue with. But the way those bony animal souls

took ownership of us – one black, one gold, and saw

fit to flex their paws on that deserted beach,

unmoved by the disentangled sky

that had banished all its birds. The sky

that slumped so languidly into the sea. I had to cry

for all my complexes.

The poem sets up an intuition of homelessness and alienation which only can be overcome by an inner resolution with the poet’s lover.

Categories
Literature Poetry

Found Prose Poem from the LRB

The London Review of Books is a wonderful fortnightly pleasure. I am particularly drawn to articles that have maps and also to any item which elucidates the background to a problem in the world which has escaped my previous attempts to understand it. The problem in this case being the distressing war in Nagorno~Karabbakh. However, in reading this article by Abdul~Ahad, I came across a few lines which I found deeply poetic.

Nagorno~Karabakh Nagorny is Russian for ‘mountainous’;Karabakh Turkish for ‘black garden’~is a region in the South Caucasus with a predominantly Armenian population. It was a province of ancient Armenian kingdoms before coming under the successive suzerainty of Sassanids, Muslim Arabs, Turkmen tribes and the Persian Safavids with pockets controlled by Armenian meliks, prices who used outside powers to bolster their claims to authority. In the mid~18th centuary following the decline of the meliks, a khanate was established with Persian support by the Javanshirs, a Turkic Karabakh clan, who built the city of Shusha. The region was absorbed into the Russian Empire in 1813 after the first Prussian war, and Persia ceded the rest of the Transcaucasus to Russia a decade or so later.

Karabakh maintained a strong Armenian religious and cultural identity through the centuries, but like all frontier regions it was a place where cultures and peoples converged. Armenian, Persian, Arabic and Turkic influences produced a unique cultural heritage, manifest in food, music. art and architecture. Armenian churches and monasteries dotted the hills while Azerbaijani composers and writers flourished in Shusha. Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and Kurds both Yazidi and Muslim, lived side by side in towns and villages set among pine and birch forests, orchards, vineyards and highland pastures, Mulberry groves supported thriving silk industries.

Having just typed it in maybe it is not exactly a poem but it reads very elegantly to my ear. This appeared in an article entitled Each rock has two names in the London Review of Books 17th June 2021. You can read more about this prize winning journalist at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghaith_Abdul-Ahad

and besides this informative article the tragic situation is outlined at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU2v38hRRbg&t=331s

The poet/photographer/journalist talks movingly below:~

Categories
Art and Photographic History Art Exhibition Reviews Poetry

Thoughts about René Magritte – The blank signature, 1965

May be an image of 1 person, horse, tree and outdoors

I don’t understand why I like this painting so much on first glance. The most disturbing element, I suppose is the strip where the horse has simply disappeared giving it the appearance of being a light transparent trunk itself. This, I think adds a joking quality to the overall work which I find a kind of magical forest. The sort that you might well find in a fairy tale or an adventure. The rider does not seem discombobulated by this wooded environment. Indeed she seems to have a sense of purpose and direction quite at variance to the seeming dissolution of her means of transport beneath her. The colours or palette seem to add to a jolly effect and the canopy of branches seems protective.