I lost you once before the end, I know.
It was a fantasy of silent love
I accepted not the wastes  of  unthawed snow

If looks can kill, they also cause a glow,
As if another sun  shines from above
I lost you just before the end, I know.

Yet, all in all, it was a worthwhile show
Despite the naked hand inside the glove
I could not master  arctic wastes in snow

Once an innocent, I was betrothed
And we  touched so flew the homeward dove
I lost you just before the end, I know.

To be known, to love and so to laugh
To wander round the hills and ever rove
I could not  last well  in the iron snow

And yet at silhouettes of hills, we gazed
And saw those fierce Rams as they  proudly grazed
I lost you  in the mind’s mountains  I know
I would not choose the  arctic wastes  the snow

If we didn’t learn to speak like animals we would not be offended or wounded by what people said.Because they wouldn’t be able to say it.We could not ruminate and worry nor have low self-esteem.We would just do what we could and sleep when we felt like it.And only have sex once a year if we were deer.More if we were rabbits.And there is no need for courting.In fact sometimes it gets a bit aggressive as in the duck family.In London, female ducks have been killed by too many male ducks fighting over them.That rather defeats the purpose of sex in the animal world.They can’t write love letters nor use sex as recreation.Still who had time for recreation these  days
After you’ve blogged, tweeted been on FB and read the Guardian it’s time for bed

Grammer don’t really exist
Language was oral at  first
The spoken  is necessity
The written, a monstrosity
As we learn  at a poetry fest.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/alan-r-shapiro

“Poet-critic J.D. McClatchy observed in a review of Shapiro’s Dead, Alive and Busy(2000), “Mr. Shapiro is a shrewd and sympathetic moralist. He never trivializes his subjects with high-minded flourishes or stylistic gimmicks.” Shapiro’s later collections address the loss of his two siblings to cancer, the aging of his parents, and the strains on a marriage. In describing the domestic details and loss portrayed in Shapiro’s Tantalus in Love (2005), poet Joshua Clover commented, “Such tightly framed tales of domesticity offer a sense of control parallel to Shapiro’s formal facility, reducing and clarifying the poem’s field of action in defense against an abysmal multiplicity of things.”

In his memoirs The Last Happy Occasion (1997), nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award, and Vigil (1997), Shapiro has written about the death of his sister and the role that poetry has played in his life. Shapiro is also the author of a collection of essays on poetry, In Praise of the Impure: Poetry and the Ethical Imagination: Essays, 1980–1991 (1993).”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/poetryandplaybookreviews/9020436/How-poetry-can-change-lives.html

Source: Grammar- Commonly Misused

Fashion plays with symbols unconcealed
The trench coat, Breton sweater, leather boots.
But sometimes “fantasy” is too near ” real”

We cannot play nor allow art to reveal
Unless there is a space where we can doubt
Fashion plays with symbols unconcealed

We must not  just with  demons do a deal
For we also need the angels who’re about.
Nowadays , our “fantasies” blur ” real”

The biker jacket’s modish in appeal.
The leather  has its Fascistic  clout
Fashion plays with symbols unconcealed

If we cannot waken, dreams will  fool,
As on our monstrous war horses, we mount
I feel it now : our “fantasies” blur ” real”

We never can have everything we want
So we learn that other peoples count
Fashion plays with symbols unconcealed
But fantasising may lay waste to all

l

https://ticer-swim.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/war

II

The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!

The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.

Ezra Pound in 1913
IV
These fought in any case,
and some believing,
pro domo, in any case. . .
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;

Died some, pro patria,
non “dulce” non “et decor”. . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
V
There died a myriad,
and of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered book

http://ticer-swim.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/john-keats-1795-1821-here-lies-one.html

“When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins so to press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated ­ not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children: I know not whether I make myself wholly understood: I hope enough so to let you see that no despondence is to be placed on what I said that day.”

‘Moods of my own Mind’: Keats, melancholy, and mental health

On mindfulness: “The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing — to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.”

To George & Georiana Keats 1819

Negative Capability

“… – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason – Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”

“Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!”

To George & Georgiana Keats, May 1819.

http://userguide.vodafone.co.nz/web/nokia-301/calls-and-contacts/contacts/copy-contacts-between-your-sim-and-your-phone

Drawing by my sister

https://www.poeticous.com/margaret-atwood/precognition

Precognition

Posted in error

https://www.thecut.com/2017/05/new-fashion-trends-normcore-gorpcore.html?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=Paris+Review+Daily+Roundup+20170626&utm_term=Paris+Review+Daily+Roundup+20170626&utm_content=Paris+Review+Daily+Roundup+20170626

“Of course, there may be one other reason these clothes fit our current cultural mood. It’s an overreaching journalistic impulse to attribute every micro-phenomenon to post-election malaise, but the rise of gorpcore — which exalts activities that, in their environmental consciousness, have always been considered hippie-dippie or tree-hugging — is a political act. “It’s crunchy,” says Schlossman. “And in this political climate, these brands we’re talking about stand for good. I’ve not necessarily been someone to vote with his dollar, but it’s the perfect marriage of ideas.” Mother Nature has been how liberals — one famously — have been licking their wounds, and celebrating it is a rebuke of the president’s planned $1.5 billion cutfrom the Interior Department’s budget. To wear Patagonia is to stand in solidarity with the brand’s environmental advocacy. It’s no accident that Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson has worn the same Patagonia vest for nearly a decade. Sporting brands that give voice to your value system is its own form of silent protest.

Ideas in fashion and food and design and travel don’t occur in isolation. You can trace the philosophical throughline — that maybe nature holds some secret to self-improvement or emotional deliverance — in the rise of grain bowls and Moon Dust, the comforting, naturalistic principles of hygge and lagom, and the Ranch. Gorpcore’s not fashion for the 1 in 7 billion, nor is it fashion for the one percent — it’s live-good, do-good, feel-good fashion for the ones who care just a little too much.”

The soft flower  shows us love and beauty fine
To give us comfort with its grace divine

Black people living in Kensington will be painted white to make the rich white people forget black  folk exist and need homes.Poor whites will be given cardboard coats painted like mink.I know there’s  heat wave but they have to compromise.
Meanwhile in Tottenham white people can be painted black free of charge in the garage off Bruce Grove where the witch lives with the dentist.
People  who want to protest can be painted in black and white strips and given zebra to ride on.But not if they have red hair.
People with red hair have to move to Scotland or Northern Ireland.Or they could swim to the Irish Republic and ask for asylum.
[If you do this change your name to O’Smith,McJones   or O’Noah  etc before you leave]
All people who are light beige, yellow, green or light to dark brown can stay where they are.Do not put shoe polish or stage makeup on your face.It rains alot and it will ruin your clothes.Still that’s nothing to do with me,is it?
I’m only your new Dictator as foretold by Plato.Jesus wept!

Saturday , another film of war
Shall I read my manly palm instead?
I lost my glasses reading   tripe  on Blair

I see an actress easy on the eye
I’d like to cuddle up with her in bed
Saturday , another film of war

If I want  to marry I must  pay
To buy a house  before we are quite dead
I lost my glasses reading   tripe ,who cares?

I never read that book about things Grey
I hate to see pornography ill bred
Saturday , another film of war

In my youth we had such fantasies
About the kisses and the  marriage bed
I lost my glasses  seeking ecstasy.

Now I can see any act  or deed
Faster than an Eskimo can read
Saturday , another film of war
I lost my glasses,I need social care

Alice in Sunderland
Malice I understand
Alice in Blunderland
All is in, understand?
Walrus tinned under sand.
Sallies by guns unmanned.
Call us in Thunder Band
Phone is in Alice’s hand
iPhone in political scams
Trellis blows down in wind.
Four letter words gave me wind.
Before litter, we all must be banned.
Bellicose man in grandstand
I wish I could do a handstand.
Where was that Alice he stunned?
Algebra made me a man

I bought a brand new A to Z.
I bought a map of Wales.
I roamed around the whole day long
Despite the snow and gales.
I bought the Ordnance Survey too
of all of the UK
I looked at maps on Amazon
and even on E Bay

I studied charts of Greenland
And Africa and France
I talked to expert geographers
Who looked at me askance.

Borneo or Burma?
Malaysia or Spain?
Where does Father Brown say..
I must read his books again

But giving up, I came back home
And lay down for a nap
Suddenly it came to me!
God’s not on a map.

Poetry and the Subconscious

Extract

Charles Simic: “Whatever the eventual subject of the poem is, it emerges in the process of fumbling around.”

You get the point. Fumbling around. Feeling out. Following the trail. Listening for. To quote Robert Creeley, “I think the presumption that one knows what one is writing is pretty naïve, that it’s all planned and everything goes to some specific point of purpose or even understanding.” In other words, poetry isn’t an act of creation, it’s an act of pursuit. It starts with an itch—an image or a phrase, an idea stuck in your head. A poet feels a gust of wind, throws up a sail, and discovers where it leads.

This is why I prefer to use “subconscious,” rather than unconscious. The term subconscious appeared in Freud’s earlier works, but quickly grow out of favor for its ambiguity, yet I don’t think what we’re talking about can be described without ambiguity. Moreover, I feel like the word “unconscious” is inaccurate—we’re never completely unaware of these deeper thoughts that lurk below the surface of our understanding. We’re not randomly plunging our own depths like a trawler at sea casting its net; we’re fly-fishermen throwing our lines into the eddies where intuition and experience tell us a bass might rise. What many call “inspiration” is simply the soft pang of truth from below, a blip on the sonar telling us where to look.

If anything other than subconscious, it might be the preconscious impulse we’re chasing—not in the psychological sense of memories that we haven’t yet accessed—I mean preconscious in the truly precognitive sense—not necessarily seeing the future, but finding some harbinger of a future mental state. Poets press at certain material because they sense a broader understanding, a surprise, hidden beneath it.C

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/serious-art-thats-funny-humor-poetry

Carolyn Forché, someone who has never been accused of being a funny poet, has said “irony, paradox, surrealism . . . might well be both the answer and a restatement of [Theodor] Adorno’s often quoted and difficult contention that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But what did the philosopher and critic Adorno mean by this fatuous statement? No poetry? Or just a very, very serious and earnest poetry? Because, let’s face it–earnestness is almost always bad art. Good art makes us think; it has more questions than answers. Often, but not always, satire does this too. But earnestness almost never does this–that’s not its job. Earnestness is comforting. It wants to hug us. And we want to be hugged sometimes. But sometimes we want to laugh while poking holes in self-righteousness and oppression, whether it be literal political oppression or oppression of a quieter sort – cultural and aesthetic oppression. Irony and satire are such a good antidote to oppression because oppression needs to be earnest (or at least look earnest) in order to be feared by those it seeks to cow. Oppression cannot work alongside irony because it believes in its own righteousness and a monolithic concept of truth that must be asserted to the oppressed with a straight face. Irony and satire are the tools by which the oppressed get to make fun of the oppressors without the oppressors getting it.