By Katherine

Essay: The Feel of Thinking – Sarah Howe on lyric connections and incisions

Extract

What might it mean for a poet to ‘feel’ his or her ‘thought’? Eliot championed the so-called ‘metaphysical’ poets of the seventeenth century for their efforts ‘to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling.’ Such poets are marked out, for Eliot, by their ‘rapid association of thought’, giving rise to a sensibility that can discern connections between such disparate experiences as falling in love, reading Spinoza, the noise of a typewriter and the smell of cooking. Eliot’s penultimate item always reminds me of those lines from Ashbery’s ‘Paradoxes and Oxymorons’: ‘And before you know / It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters’. It’s just like Ashbery to transform the sound of purposive writerly activity into consciousness’s white noise.

In a fascinating essay on Donne and modern cognitive science, AS Byatt argues that Donne does indeed feel his thought, but what he makes his readers feel is less Eliot’s odour of the rose than ‘the peculiar excitement and pleasure of mental activity itself’. She wonderfully dubs Donne a ‘glassy’ poet, since glass is something you can look at and through simultaneously (incidentally the very property of glass that makes it such a choice vehicle for metaphysical conceits). Among the moderns, Byatt attributes similar qualities to Wallace Stevens – think only of the perceptual conundrums of ‘The Glass of Water’: ‘In the metaphysical,’ that poem claims, ‘there are these poles’. For her, what the poems of Donne and Stevens offer is not sensations per se but the ‘process of sensing’, not concepts but the ‘idea of the relations of concepts.’

Can true love be gained by deception?
Will rage never change our perceptions?
Be thoughtful and pray
Be aware of today
Then  you may need  no correction

Can true love bring harm  in its wake?
Can lovers live purely in cake?
There are no general laws
But think and give pause
We are what we love and we hate.

Does hatred exist  before love?
The eagle may kill  the  white dove
The  child uncaressed
Will never be blest
Oh,God, send sweet rain from above

• Stan was leaning over, cleaning the  new bath.When the doorbell rang,he rushed downstairs and opened the  double front door.
  “Will you take this parcel in for the lady next door?” The postman asked wearily.
  “Oh,fine Stan stuttered.He was trying to avoid Annie but here she was,coming down the road of superior semi detached houses suitable for ex-headmasters ,small businessmen,econometricians,surgeons,pie salesmen and  theologians.
  She was wearing perfume, and green sandals from TK Maxx,light khaki tencel cropped combat trousers with a purple silky over-blouse, not to mention her matching raspberry  and cream underwear .Round her neck hung a miniature grandfather clock on a solid gold chain,and she had three  imitation gold and silver watches on each  of her three wrists making a total of 333 watches according to Carnap’s theory of logic and Russell’s terrible handwriting. Stanley didn’t know that she had a mobile phone stuffed into her bra—one advantage for the larger sized woman.In fact she had 4 down there in her raspberry coloured glamour bra,as she had a phobia about their batteries running down all at once
  The more she had the lower the probability of her being without a phone whilst out and about the town and countryside.So she reasoned in her womanly  way. Just then one  phone rang.She rummaged around to the consternation  and turmoil-uation of Stanley and the postman.She plucked out a pale blue phone.
  “Hi,it’s Annie” she murmured.
  “Hi Annie it’s Dave the paramedic with  carpentry skills. You’ve not rung 999 lately so we were wondering if all was well!”
  “Oh,I’m terribly sorry.I’ll try to phone later on.Thanks,Petal.That was Dave,our ex-transvestite converted paramedic”,she informed the men.The postman galloped off on his donkey, his bags full of undelivered males.It’s a tough but interesting life in Knittingham. Would you like a male delivery?Contact Parcel Force without delay.
  Annie went into Stan’s house and demanded a cup of coffee.
  “Won’t it make you put weight on” Stan quipped ironically.
  “Do you think I’m too plump?” she responded anxiously..
  “Too plump for what?” he quipped amiably.
  “To attract men,of course!”
  “No,my angel,you are just perfect”he quacked definitively.”Nor are you an angel,strictly speaking,as I have good reason to know.Thank you,my beloved for services rendered so generously and freely.”
  “Oh,my goodness I must get home to render the fat from the beef and to make some gooseberry jam.” Stanley looked uneasy.
  “I wonder why babies are left under gooseberry bushes?
  The thorns are so big it’s quite dangerous getting them out,or so Mary told me when Lyra was born. She was covered in scratches and wouldn’t come near me for months.”
  “Why don’t you come upstairs to look at our new purple bathroom suite.Since the Royal Wedding it’s the in colour.The gold taps were expensive but they do go well.”
  “My God,let me out.” she bawled,”It reminds me of the Vatican and that’s no place for a lady”,
  “Not even a gay lady?” Stan muttered parsimoniously, as he licked her eyelashes gently.
  “Stop that.I’ve got my Yves St Laurent mascara on.”
  “I prefer the taste of the Chanel,”he disclosed privately in an internal  secret memo.[available on 50 years]
  “Why not lick my neck instead?” she enquired curiously as she tripped over Emile the cat, who had slipped into the bathroom as usual  to see what they were up to,you know what I mean, you catch my drift?
  She fell floppily into the bath and banged her head on the taps.
  “Oh,gosh,better ring 999” Stan said to Emile.
  “Have you got your catphone warehouse mobile on you?”
  “Yes ,it’s in my y-fronts”, the cat amiably miaowed.
  “Hi Dave,this is Emile.Can you come quick.Annie is unconscious and what is worse,she has scratched the new bath.”
  In fact it was Emile who had scratched the bath that morning but since Stan had not noticed he hoped to, callously, pass the blame onto poor  Annie.How cruel can a cat be?  Ask any mouse! Still in the end God made all of us and what a  terrifying and beautiful world it is.

Perspective ,proportion,projection
We need these for our own protection
But sometimes we fail
We are too frail
Can love be obtained via injections?

We  talk to our friends and our foes
Share our insights and our woes
Their point of view
Our thought will renew
We  learn   to  be kind when we’re low

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/04/humor-and-poetry

Extract:

In 1993, I took a left turn one day out of my MFA program and found myself at the National Poetry Slam in San Francisco. There I discovered several poets who were funny for the sake of being funny. Particularly Hal Sirowitz from New York (“don’t stick your arm out the window, mother said” and Matt Cook from Milwaukee (“it was easy to write the Great American Novel, back when there were only five American novels”) Both poets initially delighted me and confounded me: There are no similes, a voice in my head said. What would Tom Lux (my first teacher) say? the voice continued. Despite my resistance, I believe those poets gave me a kind of permission to explore humor a little more vigorously in my second book, The Forgiveness Parade (1998), for “I thought the word loin and the word lion were the same thing. I thought celibate was a kind of fish”. Perhaps in that book there were places where I was too vigorous in my pursuit: looking back there are a few poems that are just a little too jokey somehow, a little one-dimensional.

I am becoming aware of how some humor can set a roadblock for the poetic speaker, making it impossible for the speaker to get back to a serious place. And how some other (less frequent) uses of humor can leave that door open. I want to leave that door open

Tonight I am watching the Eurovision Song Contest without the sound on
There is a certain decadence about the performances
Like end of the Roman Empire
I can’t understand  how money is wasted  like this
When will Nero play his fiddle?
Still, good to see Northern Macedonia.At least I know where that is!
Maybe  Theresa May might like to Remain there
Or make a quick Exit, forensic?
Boris might like to  Trump all
Be careful what you wish for

The bees   are humming by the garden gate
The  dampness  makes the leaves  more green , more rich
As summer comes too early and too late

The ants upon my rowan tree  had faith
Busily they ran,  as if bewitched
The bees   are humming by the garden gate

The rowan tree has died, leaves not a trace
When it was felled, it left an empty pitch
Come  oh  wild flowers, leave no summer base

I watch  more ants, they seem to have no face
The rain leaves puddles in the empty ditch
The bees    will hover by the garden gate

The ants will help  their wounded  under threat
But having not a doctor, they’re  not stitched
Will summer come before it is too late?

From this world, we must try  not to flinch
When we leave it will be with a wrench
The bees   are humming by the garden gate
As summer comes too early by mistake

The Observer, Observed

“For Winter, Gopnik divides the season into five modes: Romantic, Radical, Recuperative, Recreational, and, finally, Remembering. “Romantic Winter” charts the transition from winter as a brutal, dangerous reality—people can freeze to death, after all—to one we can admire as picturesque and stroll through with pleasure and wonder. Throughout, he reflects upon poems by Samuel Johnson, paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, scientific treatises on snowflakes, and the differing ideas about reason from the Enlightenment and the counter-Enlightenment. “Radical Winter” investigates the obsession with reaching the Arctic and Antarctic poles. “The search for that spatial winter, the search for the poles, has become an obsessive subject for modern people. It’s the model of all exploration for exploration’s sake, exploration undertaken with a minimum of national advantage, a marginal economic purpose, and a maximal amount of adventure taken for adventure’s sake.”

If polar travellers are, as Gopnik puts it, “a kind of ecstatic monk of nature,” Christmas, which he explores in “Recuperative Winter,” is the paradigmatic secularized winter holiday. He uses “Recreational Winter” to briefly review the history of ice skating—ice skating paintings, ice skating poems, including a sublime passage on the subject from Wordsworth’s The Prelude—as well as hockey and his beloved Montreal Canadians”

Do you take this battery operated tin opener to be your lawful wedded mate?
I feel sick
That’s not in the script
I don’t think much of this dream
Just carry on
Yes, alright I’ll marry the  tin opener
In sickness and health
Will it know?
Do you know?
Can’t I marry the fridge instead?
Why?
What’s so special about a tin opener?
It’s possible to put it into your handbag~
With the cake fork I used to comb my hair?
Oh,no.They might get on too well~
Are they magnetically drawn together
Only if you have an induction hob
Where?
In your handbag
Let’s just stop
Why?
I can’t believe it even as a dream.
I’ll try a leopard next time
But not a panther,please.Sylvia Plath has written of that
You are so conceited
Why?
Who is Sylvia?
That’s what we all wonder
Sh might have been better off with a tin opener

We’re living  with the lunatics today
Half the population  burns with rage
Wondering how to edit Theresa May

No longer do the anxious kneel and pray
We hear the verbal missiles wildly  staged
We may be the lunatics today

For this civil war, we all will pay
The British  voters ‘ anger is a plague
Wondering how to  infect Theresa May

Is this a stage and who  has made this Play?
Of the facts we seem to be quite vague
We may be the lunatics today

The stage is set, the tyrant has his say
Who will give the poor a living wage?
Wondering how to   question Theresa May

Shall we too see  immigrants be  caged
They are merely animals despised
We’re living  with the lunatics today
Wondering how to export Johnson,May

A history of the poetry of history

“History and poetry hardly seem obvious bed-fellows – a historian is tasked with discovering the truth about the past, whereas, as Aristotle said, ‘a poet’s job is to describe not what has happened, but the kind of thing that might’. But for the Romans, the connections between them were deep: historia . . . proxima poetis (‘history is closest to the poets’), as Quintilian remarked in the first century AD. What did he mean by that?

From its beginnings, epic poetry in Latin was frequently based on actual historical events – so Naevius’ Bellum Punicum in the third century BC told the story of the first Punic War between Rome and Carthage, whereas the subject of Ennius’ Annales, from the second century BC, was the history of Rome from mythological times down to the poet’s own day. Evidently the Romans had no difficulty with taking a genre used by the Greeks mainly for the retelling of myth and employing it to celebrate their own national past, and indeed present. Even Cicero found the time to write an epic poem (complete with gods) about his own consulship (De Consulatu Suo) – after unsuccessfully attempting to interest some real poets in the job. Barely more than the first line has survived; and that verse, o fortunatam natam me consule Romam, ‘O happy Rome, born when I was consul’, is as inelegant (with its ugly repetition –natam natam) as it is immodest.”

I think I have just failed my IQ test
The apple cart has landed on my chest
I didn’t mean to cause such selfish pain
Writing you a letter once again

I never knew that numbers carried on
To  fall in love and marry they’ve’ begun
Their children are irrational  not whole
Some are transcendental ,I’m  enthralled

The IQ test was far too hard for me
I cannot even read it,don’t you see?
I think they are immoral and in vain
I’ve written to the Queen,I have complained

The apple cart is emptier  today
I ate them all and now I feel quite gay

Install a pocket charger for your brain
Did you  curse the folk who chose Remain?
Wearing out your mind is not allowed
Talking the hind legs off a great crowd

Make a little port between your eyes
Plug the charger in before  you die
Is  the little light now showing green
Good, that shows  the lack can be redeemed

Maybe USB-C is the best
Did you ever pass algebra by text?
These cords have no up and neither down
Charlie Chaplin’s silence will astound

Charge  your brain some rent and do repairs
We’ll follow you on Facebook with our glares

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/margaret-drabble-ageing-literature/