louis macneice

Dublin

Grey brick upon brick,
Declamatory bronze
On sombre pedestals -
O'Connell, Grattan, Moore -
And the brewery tugs and the swans
On the balustraded stream
And the bare bones of a fanlight
Over a hungry door
And the air soft on the cheek
And porter running from the taps
With a head of yellow cream
And Nelson on his pillar
Watching his world collapse.

This never was my town,
I was not born or bred
Nor schooled here and she will not
Have me alive or dead
But yet she holds my mind
With her seedy elegance,
With her gentle veils of rain
And all her ghosts that walk
And all that hide behind
Her Georgian facades -
The catcalls and the pain,
The glamour of her squalor,
The bravado of her talk.

The lights jig in the river
With a concertina movement
And the sun comes up in the morning
Like barley-sugar on the water
And the mist on the Wicklow hills
Is close, as close
As the peasantry were to the landlord,
As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish,
As the killer is close one moment
To the man he kills,
Or as the moment itself
Is close to the next moment.

She is not an Irish town
And she is not English,
Historic with guns and vermin
And the cold renown
Of a fragment of Church latin,
Of an oratorical phrase.
But oh the days are soft,
Soft enough to forget
The lesson better learnt,
The bullet on the wet
Streets, the crooked deal,
The steel behind the laugh,
The Four Courts burnt.

Fort of the Dane,
Garrison of the Saxon,
Augustan capital
Of a Gaelic nation,
Appropriating all
The alien brought,
You give me time for thought
And by a juggler's trick
You poise the toppling hour -
O greyness run to flower,
Grey stone, grey water,
And brick upon grey brick.

napowrimo and the like

it's true the lounge is suffering as i seem to do little else but cycle, write and wobble about in the garden. oh yes there is that pesky work stuff which is reaching new levels of awfulness but maybe it's the arrival of spring because i don't feel like blogging about it lately.

napowrimo this year is dawdling along nicely. it's reached the stage of the month where it's beginning to feel a bit more like a trial but i've more ideas for poems than days to write them in so i'll reach the end okay. i'm happier with what i've done this year which is always a bonus but perhaps i'd a better idea of what to expect this year than last. i have found tho that working does interfere with it, not night shift surprisingly, but day shift. it's not that i'm busier just that the whole getting up early thing seems to weary me and stopper that part of my brain function.

i've also enjoyed picking a napowrimo site to follow. i'm mainly on readwrite tho i've kept an eye on poetry free for all. readwrite i've kept with, somehow they're just a more engaging bunch and i like the format better plus there's always the fall back of the prompt even if i've never actually stuck with it yet! the poetry varies wildly on both sites so there's something for everyone no matter what their taste! and while i've enjoyed many my particular favourites are here, here
and here. i recommend a browse with a cup of tea without hesitation.

not that i haven't been wasting my time. i am gladdened to hear that in this obama era the situation with gay people in the military is at last clear ; )

clement freud

i was saddened to hear of the death of clement freud the other day not least because it struck me that i've been listening to just a minute for as long as i can remember (this link'll take you to the arena documentary), mainly because it's been broadcast as long as i can remember(this'll take you to a proper old school line up!). while it can't have been all that unexpected, and it certainly wasn't by him not least because he was eighty four, and i think most of us would like to keel over at home rather than end up in the care of the likes of me it still must've been a shock to his family. i'm sure he had his moments but my impression of him is as a thoroughly convivial fellow and that will do for me.

thoughts of my own ageing process came to the fore today as, t having thoroughly neglected my head and sporting what can only be described as a scruffy bouffant, i dragged my shabby liberace looking ass down to the hairdresser. not a barber, mind, a hairdresser. no matter it may look like a barber shop a man who cuts hair in a kilt will always be a hairdresser no matter how much he claims otherwise.

the moment of truth when he had shaved my head back into its accustomed no. 3, trimmed and at its fighting weight, when he said ' do you want me to do your eyebrows as well?'

'my eyebrows?' i said. well, why not. and while i can't be said to even sport a decent pair of spocks, genetics dictates that one day the sleek full owls besported by my dad will be mine. not that i'd ever really considered it until leaving the shop, underwhelmed by the experience, i was suddenly aware of how unhirsute my periorbits were feeling. doubtless no one else will notice. i looked in the mirror and they looked tidy enough if a bit disturbingly blonde. tidy but weird.

what comes next i wonder. i wait with curiosity.

the (slightly smaller) joy of angus

this week i'm happy to find that my twenty mile speed is going in the direction it should be and that's before i'm back on my fast bike. the sun is shining so i decide it must be endurance day. yes, i've had two aerobic days in a row and yes, conventional wisdom dictates that at my silver haired old lady age i need to rest more but who am i to listen? so i ignore the tiredness and head back angus-ward for a 50 loop, this time fully stocked with energy bars, gels and bottles of electrolyte, all of which work a treat, even the generally minging electrolyte drink.

again i take the a94 to meigle, slightly less mellow as it's cluttered with people in their cars. so i detour off towards kirriemuir. as soon as i'm on the road tranquillity descends, the sun is shining if coolly and i'm reminded of just how long it's been since i was up these roads. stupid really as the country is very beautiful, very arable, lots of lambs running about, the buildings that solid red sandstone old school agricultural construction. as is kirriemuir, which is surprising picturesque and seems to have avoided the closing of businesses that has affected many of these wee towns. the roads are narrow, the buildings are higgledy-piggledy, there's even some sandstone cobbles just to make my day.

farther on i make a brief stop at the loch of kennordy to view the bird life. there are ospreys here and active, but not while i'm there. a mellow stop tho, and somewhere i'll come back when i've more time. now that i'm out of kirriemuir i'm aware of my proximity to the cairngorms and can fairly feel the cold air washing down the glen. but who cares, detouring out here os to pass all manner of places with cool names - the kirkton of kingoldrum, bridgend of lintrathen, reekie linn and the slug of auchrannie. i feel like i've got a walk on part in sunset song.

lintrathen is lovely, nature reserve, fishery and water supply for dundee. the road snakes down onto it, thru the village and alongside the water. i say hello to a woman out pushing her grand daughter. i'm pleased to see an honesty box so close (relatively) to dundee. i'm starting to feel the hills in my legs and suspect that my fifty mile loop is somewhat more. either that or the 40/60 mile psychological fragility has come early. i confirm it when i get back to meigle. 50 down, 20 to go and not downhill.

it's murder. i see my average speed tumble, my legs ache and the wind becomes comical. six miles to go and i feel an awful sliding in my left knee. not good. but it's only six miles and i tumble back inti the house shortly after. the stretching is ugly no matter, my knee doesn't blow up and it's been a lovely day. so lovely, i get myself together then take t round the whole route in the car.

it's nice but not the same. folk ask me about the why of it from time to time esp as i;m getting less and less inclined to go anywhere where i can;t cycle from my door. i can always come up with some nonsense but today, as i'm listening to the radio and attempting to stretch, i'm provided with as good an answer as any

Leisure
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?-
No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

W.H. Davies


no, there are no photographs. i should've taken a camera and when i did later of course the batteries weren't working....

karel capek

The End of the Twentieth Century

When this century collapses, dead at last,
And its sleep within the dark tomb has begun,
Come, look down upon us, world, file past
And be ashamed of what our age has done.

Inscribe our stone, that everyone may see
What this dead era valued most and best:
Science, progress, work, technology
And death - but death we prized above the rest.

We set new records, measuring men and deeds
In terms of greatness; thus we tempted fate.
In keeping with the greatness of our needs,
Our heroes and our gangsters, too, were great.

The XXth century, buried; nonetheless,
World, see what eras yet to come will gain:
Great new records, great inventions. Wretchedness.
Dictators. War. A ruined town in Spain.

trans norma comrada

not the translation i'd first seen , i found this here along with a discussion about the translation process. and readings! definitely check out adam and eve. i know little about him other than the robot thing and war with the newts, either of which can be downloaded from the link

a. r. ammons

Treaties

My great wars close:
ahead, papers,
signatures, the glimmering
in shade of
leaf and raised wine:
orchards, orchards,
vineyards, fields:
spiralling slow time while
the medlar
smarts and glows and
empty nests
come out in the open:
fall rain then stirs
the black creek and
the small leaf slips in.

transformative assessment 7

from here

transformative assessment 6

from here

the joy of angus

off out on the bike and away up into angus where i find it's remarkably flat. not only that the a94 is well surfaced an almost empty so i don't keep to the wee roads and find myself ambling along in the sun at a fair old crack. it's true i should have probably looped back at forfar but my legs were okay and i knew i could get a break at rachel's.

so, onwards and forwards and with the mileometer ticking just over fifty i arrived for coffee. it's true i could describe rachel's residence, the way she floated out in some laura ashley creation, how she showed me round her 'poetry room' with its gingham curtains but as she asked me not to then i shan't. but we did spend a lovely hour in her arbor before i was back on the road home.

coming over the hill to lunan was fantastic but after the climb i was suddenly reminded that although i'd stopped i hadn't actually eaten anything in montrose, not a bad mistake as it turned out, but a mistake nonetheless. the wind had kicked up, being near the coast and all so my speed dropped. then i got lost in arbroath and cold. the whole stretch to dundee all i could think about was food. each house i passed i wanted to be a shop. all along the road i came across empty cans that had once contained sugary stuff. i could just about taste the last hinty of sweet, sweet energy from my final gel. i wasn't ready to bonk but it wasn't good.

and then newbigging. a can of coke, a double mars and a slab of tablet. i practically inhaled them! and with that flew down the road to dundee where t was waiting for me. i could've have forgiven her for short temperedness as i was well over time due to a) being lost in arbroath b) travelling down ncn 1 which had no signs south of arbroath and c) being unable to tell the difference between 'about twenty miles' and forty five on the map.

still, my first 150k of the year. i retire to bed and sleep solidly for thirteen hours!

a year of elvis

a year to the day of elvis....

so i go along to this creative writing group unsure why but i guess to kind of catch the energy of the last one i did back in the islands, except this time i'm just turning up, just attending and after all i'm supposed to be up for this sort of thing.

except i'm so not. all the talk is of publishing, of competitions. there's no constructive discussion at all, just that leaden appreciation that's somehow supposed to masquerade as encouragement. i feel reined in, as if all the dials are turned down low. they have a topic but i daren't write anything because i just know that speed writing is something they're not into. all of which is just about dealable with, except for the joylessness. maybe it's just a bad day. maybe i should keep myself in the world.

and elvis? on it will go. i like the blogulic process. but i must write more fiction this year and i definitely, definitely want to do some more collabortaive work. now if only i could just sleep less....

rabindranath tagore

Guest

Lady, you have filled these exile days of mine
With sweetness, made a foreign traveler your own
As easily as these unfamiliar stars, quietly,
Coolly smiling from heaven, have likewise given me
Welcome. When I stood at this window and stared
At the southern sky, a message seemed to slide
Into my soul from the harmony of the stars,
A solemn music that said, 'We know you are ours -
Guest of our light from the day you passed
From darkness into the world, always our guest.'

Lady, your kindness is a star, the same solemn tune
In your glance seems to say, 'I know you are mine.'
I do not know your language, but I hear your melody:
'Poet, guest of my love, my guest eternally.'

and stanza?

i'd suspected i'd maybe been being a bit curmudgeonly in my response to this years programme and so it proved to be. from the thursday all the things i liked were all in place and, if anything, i liked it even better than last year.

i didn't go to any of the main events. i've found that the daytime provides all the interest i could wish for and from scobie and mccarey onwards this was unchanged. i went to the poetry breakfast about 'young scottish poets' and while i didn't necessarily disagree with many of the points made there was a surprising lack of fireworks. perhaps, suggested the scotsman guy, whose name i forget, because it's a small country we lack the will or desire to criticise beyond a bland 'it's good' or 'i like it'. it was surprising how many times questions such as this resurfaced either at events or in the blethering.

jay parini certainly contrasted it in his highly entertaining homecoming chat when he described evening criticism sessions as a student. i liked his reminiscences re alastair reid and esp those in context of the visit of borges.

we saw young poets at roddy lumsden's session where we particularly liked jay bernard and adam o'riordan. o'riordan claims he's from manchester but it must be a strange polite and faintly posh bit i haven't come across! again tho, i was thinking about those young scottish poets and how they'd fit in. all this bunch were in it for the long haul and that fitted in with a view that poetry was somehow a career in which one would make money and in which validation came with publication which is fine but not a view i share.

listening to foreign poets is the bit of stanza i find i always come away with most from and this year was no different. i heard my first poem read in arabic, frustratingly can't remember who by, and never got the chance to speak to him. we heard lithuanian for the first time, t especially finding the sound of the language entrancing. not having any translations to read at the end of it was a real shame.

we met loads of people - sorlil was glowing (even when having to wait forever at the open mic), rachel attended with the whole family, claire was there and finally got a face and a name to put to the character of the boy. colin will looked very fresh for a man having to attend and organise so much and was especially resplendent at the market (we bought many things - of them, more later) in his kimono. it was good to catch up with robert alan jamieson even if, like so many others, there wasn't proper time for a blether

favourite session - stephen scobie
favourite thing - the syllabary. for me mccarey was hands down the most original and thought provoking thing i saw. never did get to ask him that queneau question tho!
favourite activity - barbecue on the beach listening to the radio
funniest moment - when rachel revealed her surprise that i wasn't a sixty year old woman
favourite reading - was some guy called john mackie (?) at the open mic reading about his late wife
favourite line - also at the open mic. one of the inklight squad called roddy reading a poem about an ex and combing sports trivia. he got most of the way thru it, then gulled us with the lines ' imiss her, i miss her...' i swear his voice cracked and then he said 'imiss her the way jimmy white missed the black in the 1994 masters final at the crucible...' genius.

so, another great stanza. i still haven't mastered pacing myself and was done by saturday. but, as before, what a great event

books i bought at stanza

so sorlil left us for places rankin but said to us before we parted, as we'd let her know that we'd missed browsing in barnardo's by about three minutes and had to content ourselves gazing fruitlessly thru the window - there's a second hand book shop just up the road.

as everyone knows there are second hand bookshops and then there are second hand bookshops. this was definitely the latter! i suspected as much as i browsed a book on moorish spain outside. once i got in tho, it was a whole different ballgame - this was what i'd been expecting in a second hand book store in a university town, marvellously quirky and full of treasures. my wallet hung heavily in my pocket and i only just avoided a major beckett buying spree by virtue of having selected the following...

nine horses by billy collins
selected poems and fragments by holderlin
the lives and times of archy and mehitabel by don marquis
the embarrassment of riches by simon schama
one art - selected letters of elizabeth bishop

i like billy collins and that's that. holderlin? my shelves feel bare without him and, as i've discovered, his german is just fun to speak. archy and mehitabel i've gone on about at length before but this is a copy, with illustrations, from the twenties and i wasn't going to leave the shop without it! embarrassment of riches i've been meaning to get for a while, mainly on the strength of citizens which, while it has its shortcomings, is still a favourite, along with his british history. so far it seems interesting and is more the schama that was than what we have to put up with now.

the pick of the bunch tho, is elizabeth bishop's letters. what a find! i was specifically interested in her correspondence with robert lowell and it doesn't fail on that front but it's all the rest, that vanished world, that provides the incentive to go back and back to it. the fact of the letters alone - she wrote so many - is difference enough. somehow i can't see the current crop of emails and blogs holding up as well tho distance and time will probably prove me wrong. she is not, as i've heard her portrayed, some sort of recluse but rather someone who's involved with her own time and space. given my own mode of life i can find some sympathy with this. i'm sure it will provide me with many happy hours of reading.

the woman in the shop was lovely. she didn't know elizabeth bishop she said but was sure they had something else. here, she said, a book of her paintings. perhaps, she suggested, bishop was a better poet? i smiled and didn't buy it, but certainly we'll be back across to st andrews sometime soon to buy something else. once we've made the shelf space....

going to stanza

the sun shines and i get myself off to stanza, taking the covers off the bike for the first time this year and indulging myself as the moto poeta. despite not really being as much into the itinerary this year as soon as i'm there all my doubts evaporate. there seems more... poetry this year. people with books, people reading, people just sitting about blethering.

i go to see stephen scobie who reads from his latest collection at the world's end, which is sort of an exploration of robert louis stevenson. he's been living in canada for twenty odd years and you can hear it but as he reads his voice changes, different accents come through. i wasn;t convinced i was going to like it at first, then ended up beguiled

he was reading with peter mccarey, another expatriate who's now teaching in the department of language studies in geneva. i'd already been fascinated by what i took to be an installation called the syllabary in the byre beforehand and hadn't realised that it was him. his poetry was denser, more difficult to reach but i was loving it all the same. the syllabary functions, he says, as a grid
in which sounds are co-ordinates according to function. the syllabary generates these sounds and some half of the five thousand reference points have associated words or text. part of the deal is that it subverts the book - yes, i did mean to ask him about queneau but forgot - so that there's no linearality. all of it appealed to the old burroughs fan in me. cut ups, random-mess, imagination. i'll be back tomorrow to look at it again. in the meantime you can view it here

a note for attendees. if you're buying the cd it isn't compatible with vista and it isn;t the interface that you see at stanza or on the website

transformative assessment 5

from here