I play Radio 3 on TV
And play with my thoughts generally
But I’ve been so tired
I’m being rewired~
Then you can play Radio 3 right off me
I eat food from a white china plate
But it’s been arrested for causing debate
For it has no passport
No hat and no coat
Nor does it feel any hate
Do you think Theresa May may make hay
As she knows how to scythe and display
The car park is full
And here is John Bull
We just need a bellow louche
How like a nest my bed has now become
My favourite books sleep on the duvet edge
I see their titles in the morning sun
And see more falling off the window ledge
I read Ted Hughes’s letters as I doze
I like the Guardian letters and reviews
And glancing at the style page at the clothes
Seems to make my mind run soft and smooth
Thinking of Ted Hughes,my thoughts are these
How one choice can rule an entire life
Was marriage made to quickly or to please,
For who was Sylvia but his fragile wife?
Poetry may be good or bad or naught
I will sleep and not by words be taught
When you struck me,I vibrated like a kettle drum,
then as smaller percussions and repercussions
echoing from all the glassy surfaces
creating a balletic geometry of sound tracks
in space and time.
When you knocked me down,
I fell against her and her and her;
we were like a row of skittles
and we all went down with the lifeboat;
The infinite chain of being is.
When you hit me,the Fall spread across the world
Now there is no Vertical
All is undivine and graceless.
By the Rod it’s ruled
When you left me,I left myself,the world,the rocks,dry land
I weighed down sank to the ocean bed
with coral eyes
gazing.
When you struck my mind
I became an instrument of a foreign power
Singing a song I didn’t know.
When the glass was smashed
the splinters flew into all our hearts.
You didn’t know what we couldn’t see.
I lay on barren ground and gave birth
To my own Creator in the desert.
I thought that I had mended my old lamp
How beautiful it looked beside the bowl
The shade fell off when I was walking past
I’m filled with sorrow,grief and wailing dole.
Everything I break brings thoughts of you
And when I write, I wonder what you’d think
No-one else will criticise my work
And into the quicksands I seem to sink
I burned ten pans and broke a dozen plates
I even broke a vase in the cafe
I think of phrases subtle,erudite
Then lose them in the maelstrom of the day
I will learn to live with broken heart
As humans are not born with such spare parts
Leonardo’s writings about the superiority of painting over poetry and music (and sculpture) are the first important Renaissance contribution to the debate. The texts known as the Paragone today formed the opening part of the Codex vaticanus urbinas latinus 1270, which was compiled from Leonardo’s notebooks in the mid-sixteenth century.
19. How Painting Surpasses All the Works of Man on Account of the Subtle Speculations With Which It is Concerned
The eye which is said to be the window of the soul, is the principal means by which senso comune [a term adopted from medieval scholars, meaning an interior sense or psychology] may so copiously and magnificently confer the infinite works of nature, and the second way is the ear, made noble by being told about things that the eye has seen. If you historiographers or poets or mathematicians, had not seen things with your eyes, badly would you be able to refer to them through your writings. Poet, if you were to figure a narrative as if painting with your pen, the painter with his brush would more easily make it satisfying and less tedious to comprehend. If you claim that painting [is] mute poetry, the painter could say that poetry [is] blind painting. Now consider which is the more damaging monstrosity, to be blind or to be mute. If the poet, like the painter, is free in his inventions, [the poet’s] fictions are not as satisfying to men as paintings [are]. For, while poetry extends to the figuration of forms, actions, and place in words, the painter is moved by the real similitudes of forms to counterfeit these forms. Now consider which is a closer examination of man, his name or his similitude? The name for man varies in different lands, and the form is mutated only by death. And if the poet acts through the senses by way of the ear, the painter [does so] by way of the more worthy sense of the eye. By these [comparisons] I only wish for a good painter to figure the fury of a battle, and for the poet to write something about it, and for both [of these battles] to be put before the public. You will see which will stop more viewers, which they will consider longer, which will be give more praise, and will satisfy more. Certainly the painting, a great deal more useful and beautiful, will please more.
———-
How my heart sings 