Day: July 6, 2018

Doctor?Hell!

stock-photo-enfield-lock-canal-flyover-773942974Doctor,I feel terrible
You look terrible as well

Doctor I feel grey
Do you mean gay?
No,but if it helps I’ll be anything merry,blithe or gay

Doctor I am grieving
Well,you look charming
So you like crying women?
Not  usually but I’ll make an exception for you
Will it comfort me?
No,but I’ll send you a teddy bear
I want something alive
How about a flea in your ear?
Are you really a doctor?
Yes, but in relativity theory.
So why do you practise?
My bad handwriting got me the job. MADPHIL  written with   a stick
So you are a psychiatrist?
No,I’m just mad,Phil
Be patient.All will pass
That’s what happened in the exams.They added 30 to all our marks so I got a first having scraped 41/100
So that’s why Britain is going down hill,Phil
If you knew more you’d go mad.
I’m mad already.
Are there degrees?
I’m sure there must be…. like Hell

Everyone is blind when they’re in bed

Do you see me with a white stick pass
Are you looking inside your dumb head?
My lover  loves me more without the glass
Everyone is blind when they’re in bed

I’ve loved  so many people I lost  track
Most of them were what are called “ill bred”
I prefer the ones with wit and humour cracked
Yet everyone is blind when they’re in bed

On my  shut eyelids I see sharks blue
I’m glad I no longer see bright ,vicious red
I won’t ask you name your favourite hue
Everyone is blind when they’re in bed

Is it worse to be a fool or toy?
Come,my lady, were you never coy?

 

 

 

Different letters

I thought I’d learn some Japanese,today
I’d write with different letters in my hands
Better then to capture moths and ghosts
Bits of life that fly past my own eyes

Moving places,moving plans  then gone
Another island where strange humans dwell
Yet subtly different like a Plath  and Hughes
The genius of this place is  wide and shrewd

 

But Japanese is tortuous and inturned
No immigrant is citizen at all
Would not learning Russian add more play?
Tolstoy still waiting  here unread

The language  will construct the world out there
Inner tyres are tubes and filled with air.

BBQ held on hill just below the Raging Peat Fire!

36729922_1835371686509308_770284861071032320_n“We are continuing to receive reports of people having barbecues in the #winterhill area! This photo was taken last night when we discovered a family having a BBQ near to Rivington Barn.

We are satisfied there was no malice on this occasion and the family appeared completely unaware of the major incident ongoing above them! This could have had huge consequences! ”

As below.Could some family have a BBQ and not look up the hill? I suppose it may be like Repression……… that we can ignore or hide certain things even what is right in fronrt os us and might kill us /animals etc

Doctor,I’m running up the walls

Doctor,I’m running up the walls
That’s good.Keep going and you’ll be fit as a fiddle

Doctor,I can’t stand it
I can’t understand it.
Who can overstand it?

Doctor,I’m at the end of my tether.
I’ll give you a prescription for a longer one

Doctor, I can’t go on
Well turn round the corner

Doctor,I have no appetite
Try soft porn
What, for my dinner?
No,  have an egg whipped in  brandy
That sounds like porn too.

Doctor,I can’t sleep.
Where is your bed?
My husband has his mistress in it
Tell him to buy a bigger bed then.
I don’t believe my ears
Shall I write it down?
OK

Doctor,I can’t walk
How did you get here?
I ran

Doctor,I am depressed
When you get better you’ll be amazed how good the world is
If I get better it won’t make any difference to Syria or the Yemen
You can donate money
What, and have nothing to spend on cigarettes and gambling?
Well, it won’t bother you so much
But some things we need to be bothered about!
Too many, that;s the trouble.Just pick two and do your best

Doctor, my neighbour is too  noisy.
For what?
It upsets my cat
Get another cat and make them yowl.
Can I get a cat on prescription
Not yet

 

The Oxfam error

pinkcatandsun

A little black cat was staring into Mary’s kitchen through the glass door but when Mary went across the cat ran away

I wonder if that is Emile#s girlfriend .she thought to herself. Then she saw Annie  crossing the garden wearing a lovely purple jumpsuit and black patent leather high heeled shoes.

My goodness Annie you look really amazing full stop where did you buy that jumpsuit?

I got it in the Oxfam shop said Annie it was only £3

Down in the Oxfam shop there was Big Trouble .A lady cold Molly Dolly had been inside a cubicle trying on a dress And her jumpsuit had mistakenly been hung on a nearby rack by one of the staff.
What will I do , she cried. I can’t go naked….. don’t worry said the manager I’ll give you three free dresses instead;the previous day a lady had been in and donated 10 dresses and 10 leather handbags.

Alright Molly Dolly  said. I’ll cope. she put on a blue silk dress and put a  red one and a yellow one in her carrier bag. That jumpsuit was quite old anyway

So Molly went off in a completely different outfit from what she had arrived in

I wish they had stolen my underwear as well she thought…. now there’s an idea!

Back in Mary’s kitchen Annie had put her hands into the pockets of the jumpsuit and found a letter from Mary to somebody called Molly

Dear Molly, I am very fed up with my neighbour Annie because she had an affair with my late husband and even though he is dead she still comes around three times a day Mind you she is very nice but even so I can’t help sometimes feeling a bit cross
bye bye for now  Mary

Good grief Annie called, did you write this letter ,it looks like your handwriting

Oh no it can’t be me I’ll never write with a pen anymore

It is written with a pencil and  her friend retorted

  Stop nitpicking, Mary told her. you are not the only Alnie in the world  and I am not the only Mary. in fact they are very common names in a statistical sense.

I suppose so  Said Annie. would you like some coffee I thought I would go to that new shop at the end of the Market Place

it would be a  change

She opened her  red handbag where she had a powder compact with Max Factor  cream puff written on it

She powdered her nose as it was rather shiny.

Not many women bother to powder rheir noses these days, but men like to watch them doing it.So I have observed.

Valentines

Please be my Valentine
I love you so much
I’m also quite influenced
By knowing you’re rich.

I am anonymous
I bear you no animus
I love you  but I’m shy like the Queen

 

I loved you till my cataracts were done
Now I see you look like Mrs Thatch
She   is now long gone
And you are no man’s catch

 

I saw you looking in the mirror  now and late
Look at me instead and we can mate.

 

I loved you more than Weetabix with cream
You did wonders for my self esteem
Now I’m feeling better
I’m writing you a letter
To  say you’re still my love and my sunbeam.

A rare interview with Philip Pullman

Autumn 2013 064 I recommend this  interview very strongly.

https://aeon.co/essays/a-rare-interview-with-philip-pullman-the-religious-atheist

 

 

“‘I like to say I’m a complete materialist but…’ Pullman allows himself an English teacher’s dramatic pause, ‘matter is conscious. How do I know that? Because I’m matter and I’m conscious.’ Once again, Pullman opts for complexity and nuance, and you can hear the same dislike of hierarchies in his critique of some popular science. ‘What you often get in people of this stripe (and Brian Cox — the TV physicist — goes in for it as well), is a sentence of the formula “X is no more than/just/merely/nothing but Y.” For example: “The world is nothing but the action of molecules” or “Love is merely the movement of electrons in the brains.” Sentences of that sort are nearly always mistaken,’ says Pullman. ‘I would prefer they were put in the form of “Love is a movement of electrons in the brain, among other things.”’

‘Among other things’ would be a great motto for Pullman’s ambivalence (or should that be multivalence?) about matters of belief, fiction and science. He is of the old school of secularism which holds that faith should be kept out of the public sphere, but still refuses the kind of inquisition that seeks to root out mistaken beliefs: ‘What you feel and believe are private to you and belong to nobody else,’ he counters. ‘What you do in the public sphere is what’s important.’

Yet on one thing, Pullman’s faith is profound and unshakeable. He’s now in his mid-60s, and though he thinks about death occasionally, it never wakes him up in a sweat at night. ‘I’m quite calm about life, about myself, my fate. Because I knew without doubt I’d be successful at what I was doing.’ I double-take at this, a little astounded, but he’s unwavering. ‘I had no doubt at all. I thought to myself, my talent is so great. There’s no choice but to reward it. If you measure your capacities, in a realistic sense, you know what you can do.’”

Poems are caught  like music in the air

Poems are caught  like music in the air
Passing by ,they float on a light breeze
To land upon a mountain side  afar
Or in a desert hot and very bare
Written  in stranger’s dreams with seeming ease
They do not come here in a motor car
Nor ride upon a motor bike like man
But on their way to earth they love to  tease
They do  not answer on their way to where
Who knows if they want to talk or can
Oh, lines bizarre

 

Is it hard to write clearly

photo0112https://lithub.com/francine-prose-its-harder-than-it-looks-to-write-clearly/

Francine Prose: It’s Harder Than It Looks to Write Clearly

ASK YOURSELF, WOULD I SAY THIS?

By  Francine Prose

If we are hoping to communicate something—anything—nothing is more important than clarity. The dangers of not being clear are obvious. Is that driver approaching the intersection signaling right or left? Is the brain surgeon asking for a scalpel or a clamp? One could argue that the consequences of writing an unintelligible sentence are not nearly so drastic as a car wreck or a botched operation. But it’s a slippery slope. Which one of the rungs in the ladder were we warned to watch out for? Was it the basement or the bathtub that Auntie Em told us to take shelter in when the tornado hit Kansas?

Explaining what it means to be clear should, in theory, be easy. But in fact it’s surprisingly difficult to define this deceptively obvious concept. The simplest definition may be best: To write clearly means that another person can understand what we mean. Someone (not us) can figure out what we are trying to say.

Of course, an intelligent seven-year-old could point out the problems with this. Maybe some people will understand what we mean, but some people never will, and inevitably someone will think we meant something entirely different from whatever we had in mind. Endless variables can affect what, and how, and how much we understand: age, class, language, culture, gender, history, and so forth. And perfect communication can occur without one word being spoken.

But let’s say that you have written something, and it turns out that no one has the faintest idea what in the world you could possibly mean—no one but you, the writer. And in the absence of clarity even the writer may forget the formerly obvious purpose that has somehow managed to burrow and hide beneath a fuzzy blanket of language. On the other end of the spectrum is the sentence or paragraph that the reader cannot only comprehend instantly but see straight through to the writer’s intention, so that reader and writer are communicating directly, brain to brain, like aliens in science fiction.

Obviously, it is easier to write a short clear sentence than a long clear one. One sentence that I (and I think most people) would agree is clear is the opening of Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger: “Mother died today.”

A more recent translation by Matthew Ward begins “Maman died today.” In a preface, Ward argues that Maman, more affectionate than Mother, better expresses the narrator’s feelings. “No sentence in French literature in English translation is better known than the opening sentence of The Stranger. It has become a sacred cow of sorts, and I have changed it. In his notebooks Camus recorded the observation that ‘the curious feeling a son has for his mother constitutes all his sensibility.’ And Sartre went out of his way to point out Meursault’s use of the child’s word “Maman” when speaking of his mother.”

Maybe we should venture deeper into colloquial English and say, Mom died today. Not according to the New Yorker blog post in which Ryan Bloom argues that Ward’s use of the French word may be helpful to younger readers unaware that The Stranger is set in French colonial Algeria. Maman, Bloom claims, somewhat contradictorily, is also preferable because the American reader will “understand it with ease, but it will carry no baggage.” So it won’t affect our opinion about Meursault’s response to the death of his mother. But, Bloom goes on, the translation of “Aujourd’hui Maman est morte” really should be “Today Maman died.” Beginning the sentence with today signals that “Meursault is a character who, first and foremost, lives for the moment.”

Click link for more

Political possiblities

another-insect-bite-3

So I took myself off a writing schedule and just trusted that the poems would come. As I did this, my artistic concerns changed; I was able to approach all the notes I had taken at and about work and use them, judiciously, for new poems. And although there are plenty of strictly formal poems in Proprietary, I have, I hope, a growing sense of ease and trust in my work; I want to employ devices, such as rhyme, as appropriate, but always in order to move the poem as close as possible to the “lineament or character,” to quote Wallace Stevens, of the thing described.

ES: A poem like “Fashion” eschews some of your characteristic formalism. “Order,” too, though it recalls the mirrored form of “Poem Beginning with a Line by John Ashbery” from your first book, and “Fantasy Suite” from Straight Razor. Is such a move a result or a root cause of this relaxing of those formal, lyric restrictions?

RM: It turns out the airtight lyric, all association and inference, is not always now the right vehicle for my narrative; I found too much tension to be, at times, armor against feeling. The poem “Order” is a form, sure—a line-based palindrome, as a reviewer once called it—but the poem, in its mirroring, undoes itself (I hope) carefully, gently, the speaker admitting about his father, “we almost laughed / but not for years.” And “Fashion” is a sort-of-list of grievances against ex’s; I wanted the almost rhyming, almost playful accrual of damning details—damning for the complicit speaker, too—as clear as possible in meaning, but the ensuing pain suggestive, like bitters swirled in a glass.

ES: Undoing, undermining, take down—if the book has a thesis, is this dismantling (of a self, of a city, of a language) it?

The mystical poet who can help you lead a better life

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170109-the-mystical-poet-who-can-help-you-lead-a-better-life

  • By Daniel Ladinsky

9 January 2017

Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz (c. 1320-1389) is one of the most beloved poets of the Persians, and is considered by many – from different cultures – to be one of the seven literary wonders of the world. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe both agreed. As Emerson said of Hafiz: “He fears nothing. He sees too far, he sees throughout; such is the only man I wish to see or be.” And Emerson gave Hafiz that grand and famous compliment, “Hafiz is a poet for poets.”

Hafiz has no peer – Goethe

Both Goethe and Emerson translated Hafiz. And after Geothe’s deep study of him, simply – though remarkably – stated, “Hafiz has no peer.”

Hafiz poems were also admired by such diverse notables as Nietzsche and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose wonderful character Sherlock Holmes quotes Hafiz. Garcia Lorca praised the Sufi poet. Johannes Brahms was so touched by his verse he used several in his compositions. And even Queen Victoria was said to have consulted Hafiz in times of need – which has been a custom in the Middle East for centuries.  The Fal-e Hafiz, is an ancient tradition in which a reader asks Hafiz for advice when facing a difficulty or at an important juncture in their life – treating his books as an oracle and opening them with a deep wish from their soul for guidance.

Read more by clicking on the link