Day: June 27, 2018

My husband,ink and blood

photo1796_001-21

Made from a photo of an insect bite  on my leg. Katherine

My husband  was a very kind man ; he did used to like me in bright colours.
Sometimes I even wore clothes.He never mentioned that, of course.Nor ask about how I paid for them.Or if I paid for them.My secret is I am  a criminal.I stole the clothes.Do you believe me?
No,it’s no good.I can’t convince people of my utter depravity.What do I have to do?
I’ve eaten many apples but  not the sort to make God angry. I am too old to suffer childbirth, besides I am asexual or  some other new category like resexual
.I am  not interested in the physical side of life.I even get annoyed  that I have to eat food.Can’t they come up with a Tablet?
I   did love my husband but I have never fancied anyone else.Yet only a month ago a man pursued me down the street and up to my house declaring
“You are too beautiful and charming to live alone.” I think he was a  dotty
I don’t live alone.But why should I tell him?Sometimes I try to tell lies but I can’t disrespect the truth.Even write an alternative narrative.I suppose in mathematics you have to be a genius to do that and  even then some like Godel went mad.It’s not worth it,folk.Better to have fun, love your neighbour  and wear clothes in winter.
What is irritating is, you  have to wash your clothes.At night we should get into the bath with all our clothes on, get into a tumble dryer then go to bed dry and clean.It seems so simple but it would kill us trying to get into a tumble dryer.There’s always a flaw.So far.

Morning blong

On the rug beside my chair
I saw a crumb, that wasn’t  there
I’d been up half the day before
So I could polish and prepare
And now my  squalor’s evident
I think I’ll  move into a tent

My lover is a transient cat
Who likes to sleep upon a bat
He loves my smell and my bare skin
As he sniffs the soul within
I dream of failing/  passing tests
And men who have those tender wrists

I  found some Xmas cards last night
Is this a broader hint to write?
My father drew upon the wall
Before he ended in  his fall
I saw them through the wall paper
I looked again but they’re not there

I liked the humbler  kind of folk
I am modest,I  just quote
I like to guess what they will say
So sit beside them every day
But  now it’s late and I’m not here
You will only see  my tears

What we most fear

How like a monster is my fear of pain
Expanding to fill all my heart and mind
Swelling like a  giant sponge   in the rain,
This fear begets  new  feelings more unkind.

For humans being chased by lions fierce,
Fear gives us the strength to  dash away.
But when by inner turmoil we are pierced
We cannot run  yet need  not be its prey.

Most strange ,we need to do   what we most fear;
Walk towards the pain with curious calm.
As else we may be maddened like King Lear
With no Cordelia to bring us balm.

To  feel in proper ratio to our   pain.
We need perception,grace and all their gains.

Yet spacious in its arts to let me hope

My love was so elliptical it passed
Before the first one realised and grasped
But now I prefer the straight lines to connect
Or perhaps an obtuse angle I’ll bisect

In truth, I  married mental furniture
His mind was  parabolic in its shape
And filled it was by  study and nature
Yet spacious in its arts to let  me hope

He did not know of numbers  past belief
I enlightened him, yet he was filled with grief.
For as the caterpillar eats the very leaf
Learners  are depraved  like common thieves

I made an error beating him at chess
And when he died,  he left me no address.

Poetry and change

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAhttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/31/can-poetry-change-your-life

Extract

The disconnect between what people say about poetry and how people respond to poetry is probably as old as writing.

Illustration by Tamara Shopsin

The first eight pages of Michael Robbins’s new book, “Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music” (Simon & Schuster), make reference to Annie Dillard, Harold Bloom, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Kenneth Burke, Geoffrey Hill, Kenneth Koch, Adam Phillips, Frank O’Hara, Emerson, Boethius, Nietzsche, Freud, and Miley Cyrus. The book is a collection of mostly previously published pieces, some on poetry, some on pop music, some on both, written, as the names suggest, in a critical style that could be called advanced pop.

Advanced-pop criticism would be criticism premised on the belief that you can talk about cultural goods loved uncritically by millions in terms originally developed to talk about cultural goods known mainly to an overeducated few. Advanced pop is Boethius and Springsteen, Artaud and the Ramones, and it yields sentences like “I assume that what Burke”—the literary theorist Kenneth Burke—“says about poetry applies, mutatis mutandis, to the songs of Def Leppard.” It’s erudite but caj, geeky and hip, alienated and savvy—on the inside of the outside. Another word for the attitude might be “Brooklyn,” which is indeed where, as an author’s bio unnecessarily informs us, Michael Robbins lives.

“Equipment for Living” is funny and smart. It does feel a few bricks shy of a tome. The first and last chapters perform the same work: they unpack, uneasily, the claim stated in the title, which is that poems and songs can make a difference. Most of the chapters are essay-reviews, ranging in length from very brief to brief. Robbins has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and an excellent discussion of rhyme in the work of Paul Muldoon is apparently adapted from his dissertation.”