Day: Sep 19, 2016

Trying to glimpse another through their veil.

I embraced  the ambiguity like a bride
Who fears  disclosing that her face is fake
And while we’re on the subject, I take pride
In stealing water colours  from the lake

Ambiguous  in intentions we don’t know
We send out signals full of first class news
If this rebounds  an artist might then show
Our vision rests  upon our point of view

Seventeen types of clarity are mine
Fifteen from my  mind and two from pride
From this glass I make a view divine
Though Sunday someone said they thought I lied.

Ambiguously ,we hover by the scales
Trying to glimpse another through their veil.

This is very good

 

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/how-read-poem-0

 

Williams admits in these lines that poetry is often difficult. He also suggests that a poet depends on the effort of a reader; somehow, a reader must “complete” what the poet has begun.

But now it is what McCall Smith calls “late”

Sometimes when bereft  I’d love a snail
Though it might wet my bed with silvery trails
Would  snails be lonely  living in my house?
Shall I be but fit to  love some  louse?

I  hugged a rowan tree  and now it’s dead
The council said they’ll give me oak instead
It stood upon the pavement by the gate
But now it is what McCall Smith calls “late”

I  wonder  if self massage is the   thing
Some perfumed lotion stolen on the wing.
I    stroked my arms with Cream E45
Now they say I’m not allowed to drive!

I was sad but now I am at peace
All I needed was a plate of eggs and grease.

But shall I help the blind to lose their creeds?

I empathise  with   ladies  in great need
Though I prefer a cape   where  they like coats
But I have got a crutch and cannot  speed
Nor can I with my smartphone  walk and read
But shall I  help the blind to  lose their creeds?
In my hand I carry a large tote
Full of silken scarves and  hearts that bleed

As I ran off and thousands were in chase

I can’t buy any clothes for I’ve no space
Yet in the autumn women like new coats
I wonder should I transform my pale face
And wear a golden necklace for its grace
Though it might prick a lover in embrace
At least it would sort out  the men  from goats
As I ran off and thousands were in chase

On the road to Dent

On the road to Dent there was a pool
A river in the dale had made a loop
So out your clothes and into it you lept
While  tame sheep  wandered  round me in a group
Eating ginger biscuits as they trooped.
On the road to Dent there  is a pool
To pass it by,you’d have to be a fool

When we feel

I do not wish to feel this sadness now
But who decides,who chooses what we feel?
If I were strong I might use a  large plough
To knock my feelings level  when they grow
Bur  that is not allowed by God and co.
Yet who denies his  measuring  the real?
I do not wish to feel this sadness now
Think, who derides,who cackles when we feel?

Why a poet writes

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/why-i-write

 

 

 

The possibility of suffering being redeemed by art, being made meaningful and thus real (as opposed to merely actual, something that happens to exist, happens to occur), is still vital to me. Art reminds us of the uniqueness, particularity, and intrinsic value of things, including ourselves. I sometimes have little sense of myself as existing in the world in any significant way outside of my poetry. That’s where my real life is, the only life that’s actually mine. So there’s also the wish to rescue myself from my own quotidian existence, which is me but is at the same time not me at all. I am its, but it’s not mine. For most of us most of the time, life is a succession of empty moments. You’re born, you go through x experiences, you die, and then you’re gone. No one always burns with Pater’s hard, gem-like flame. There’s a certain emptiness to existence that I look to poetry, my own poetry and the poetry of others, to fulfill or transcend. I have a strong sense of things going out of existence at every second, fading away at the very moment of their coming into bloom: in the midst of life we are in death, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it.

In that sense everyone is drowning, everything is drowning, every moment of living is a moment of drowning. I have a strong sense of the fragility of the things we shore up against the ruin which is life: the fragility of natural beauty but also of artistic beauty, which is meant to arrest death but embodies death in that very arrest. Goethe’s Faust is damned when he says, “Oh moment, stay.”

Daniel Hoffman, 1923 – 2013

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This is where it is published

Arriving at last

It has stumbled across the harsh
Stones, the black marshes.

True to itself, by what craft
And strength it has, it has come
As a sole survivor returns

From the steep pass.
Carved on memory’s staff
The legend is nearly decipherable.
It has lived up to its vows

If it endures
The journey through the dark places
To bear witness,
Casting its message
In a sort of singing.

From Beyond Silence: Selected Shorter Poems, 1948-2003 by Daniel Hoffman. Copyright © 2003 by Daniel Hoffman. Reproduced with permission

OK you are not Shakespeare, now get back to work

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“If you want to write, or really to create anything, you have to risk falling on your face. How much easier to sit back and snipe at the efforts of yourself and others. How sophisticated you can become, your own contribution unimpeachable, because it does not exist. Sometimes insightful, always acute, the inner critic can become your closest literary friend, the one who tells you the truth, the one who makes you laugh at yourself and punctures your delusions.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Time to Talk By Robert Frost

When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, ‘What is it?’
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.

Source: http://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/a-time-to-talk
#FamilyFriendPoems

We wished to see the flowers when in full bloom

We ‘d  hoped to see the rose gardens in June
But on the 1st he died and travelled on
We  both enjoyed   the roses in  full  bloom

We used the dark to see the stars and moon
But by the 1st  I found that he was gone
We hoped to see the rose gardens in June

As  I tell,  dark death arrived  too soon
And  took away  the  life of   a  dear man
We  wished to see the  flowers when in full bloom

As he  lay,I sang  to him the psalms
I  knew before the doctor’s he was going.
We meant to see the rose gardens in June

Then  there with me he  re-encountered calm
I had not gone there with a plan
We  longed to see the  flowers  enchanting blooms

May was cold and bitter with alarm
That was when he fell , yet rose again
We  hoped to see the rose gardens in June
We    loved the  scent of roses in their time

“Hope” is the thing with feathers 

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This first line is often quoted but often people don’t knpw where it comes from
You might try singing it to the melody of “The yellow rose of Texas”
BY EMILY DICKINSON
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

The basics of iambic pentameter

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Shakespeare Wiki

https://poemshape.wordpress.com/2008/11/30/what-is-iambic-pentameter-the-basics/

A useful point:

Elision

[There are two more commonly used symbol to consider]. One is the symbol for elision. Elision means that instead of pronouncing a word as having, say, two syllables, it is pronounced as having one. Likewise, a word that appears to have three syllables, might be pronounced as two.

elisionThis symbol denotes elision.

Consider the following line:

scansion-with-elision

An extract which is amusing:

Almost every major poet , prior to the 20th Century, wrote Iambic Pentameter when writing their best known poetry.  Exceptions would be poets like Walt Whitman (free verse), Robert Burns (who wrote a variety of metrical lines – mostly iambic), and Emily Dickinson (whose meter is derived from hymn tunes, which is why so many of her poems can be sung to Yellow Rose of Texas).