Category: Thinkings and poems

The words that can make us calmer

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http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170927-the-words-that-can-make-us-calmer

 

  • By Fiona Macdonald

27 September 2017

In the introduction to his new book The Poetry Pharmacy, William Sieghart quotes the British playwright Alan Bennett. “The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

Sieghart’s book is subtitled ‘tried and true prescriptions for the heart, mind and soul’, and it brings the special and particular in 56 poems to bear on anxiety, depression and grief. Whether it’s a poem to read before a party – which “can inject self-belief like a shot of adrenaline” – or 17 lines that remind us “there is a small, wide-eyed animal within each of us that doesn’t understand why we keep kicking it”, the words in The Poetry Pharmacy have replenishing qualities. “This is not a poetry anthology, it’s a self-help book for life,” says Sieghart, who has dispensed more than 1000 ‘poetry prescriptions’ since his Poetry Pharmacy began in 2014.

A Tribute to Solomon Kalushi Mahlangu

A Tribute to Solomon Kalushi Mahlangu. ( Solomon Kalushi Mahlangu (10 July 1956 – 6 April 1979) was a South African operative of the African National Congress (ANC) military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). He was convicted of murder by the brutal Apartheid regime. He was executed by hanging in 1979 ) You were the tip of the spear, the […]

via A Tribute to Solomon Kalushi Mahlangu — Scribbled Verse

Waiter,what’s this fly doing in my soup?

caught-red-handed-2

It’s  a bit of extra protein we give free with all our meals
What makes you think it’s doing something?It might  just be  “being”
If you don’t like that particular fly we have 100 more in the kitchen.
It’s not your soup.You’ve not paid the bill yet.
Shall I get a female one so they can mate?
It doesn’t look like it could compete in the Olympics.
Why ,sir, you ask a lot of questions.Have you ever thought of writing for the newspapers?
Don’t worry.It’s free.

I am tired of people asking that.Look it up on google
If it gets inside you it will make you feel like a new man.Or woman
I wish I were so lucky.I never have time to eat any soup.
It must like your smile.
It will drown soon.Push it under with your spoon.
Well  at least it’s not asking questions
It thought you were lonely.
It’s stuck at the oral stage of Kleinian development and so are you.
At least there’s only one.
We also have them in the carbonnade of beef.And the cottage pie.And the jam sponge pudding with real Bird’s custard.Like that for afters?

I love to kiss

I love to kiss your honey skin at night
When we ‘ve finished strugggling for the day
When we pull the cord,  turn off  our light
I like  caressing your dear skin at night
Although deprived of seeing your eyes bright
And guessing what it is you want to say
I am always grateful for this homely sight
Of ancient skin and hair that’s white not grey
I like to kiss your body with delight
We have loved much in our own sweet play.

Your loving eye

Your loving eye by which my heart is touched
As my eye meets  yours on  a red  bus
Gives my morning  happiness so rich
The sun caresses with  a mother’s fuss

As I walk, the land seems full of grace.
The waitress shows me kindness with intent
I watch the cultural mixtures and embrace
The crowds of strangers and the feelings sent

The sun so low makes patterns  on the ground
Dazzles both my eyes and inner mind
A single pigeon walks but makes no sound
I  wish the sparrows well but see no kind

Happiness  comes best from small events
If our eyes are open and our sense.

Ariel by Plath

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49001/ariel

 

Ariel

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.
God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow
Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,
Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks—
Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else
Hauls me through air—
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.
White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry
Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Poetry gives us the feels

Photo0261 2.jpghttps://www.mhpbooks.com/science-has-now-proved-that-poetry-gives-us-the-feels/

 

 

by 

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
(Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire)

A splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
(William Carlos Williams, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus)

Jenny, your mind commands
kingdoms of black and white
(Lisel Mueller, Reading the Brothers Grimm to Jenny)

 

I’ve always been able to remember certain lines of poetry — words that, once read, imprinted themselves onto my brain without my even trying to remember them. And beyond that, poems that have literally made me shiver, or cry, or tingle, or sob, or reach for my favorite teddy bear to help contain the feelings. (I’m looking at you, Kenneth Koch).

For anyone out there like me, we can rest assured that science has our back. A recent study by a quintet of German and Norwegian researchers, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, makes the claim that poetry, when we hear it read aloud, elicits emotional, physical, and neurological responses not too dissimilar from those produced by music. Said another way, poetry can make the hair rise on the back of your neck, and now we can prove it.

 

I took out a new lease on his wife.She’s an agony plant

Husbands & Wifes

Husbands & Wifes (Photo credit: nerosunero)

=She has nerves on wheels,

He’s a male biter despite her

She got a male writer for Xmas.He was faking it as they got laid.So there was a sense of anti-climax
As naked as a ladybird.she has no shame but she got spots all over her face.Did she deserve it?
As wicked as they say when you had horns.
Near and dear to my tart was a cream jug filled with hot gravy.It was only a treacle tart to me but to her it was a hot dinner
Necessary evil is good
Rapacity under the cover of  contention is an invention
Nerves  have weals.Red too.
Who was as nervous as a cat on a hot thin woof?
I am as nervous as a naked Serbo-Croat in a room full of people who speak only Franglsh
Never pull off tomorrow what you can ease off today.Start slowly by taking off your shorts.Keep your hair on!If you never get dressed,you need never undress.How about a bath a day?
I took out a new lease on his wife She is frilled.Can any man police my wife?
You are my ruby,my little JoobieIt was only a google doc to me,but to him it was a hole in the heart
Nice guys finish  off  with the women and the women are full of grate
They are like a fright a day in that office.They can’t use Word, they hate Office suite and now they have burned the Zoho Docs.I never saw anything so like you in all my unborn prayers.What,he cares!He bought me an apron for Xmas so I fried it for his dinner.That will do the trick… next year he may give me a sausage.

And no ,I never bought a  Freudian slip for my wife.

He wants to borrow my life!

Cliche

Cliche (Photo credit: Vermario)

He thinks dreams are the elixir of a man….. not that he was ever conscious in the true sense of the Word.

What was the Incarnation?Was it long life milk?

Why does bread rise in one hour?

Put that in your life and joke about it!

Redact

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redact
rɪˈdakt/
verb
past tense: redacted; past participle: redacted
  1. edit (text) for publication.
    “a confidential memo which has been redacted from 25 pages to just one paragraph”
    • censor or obscure (part of a text) for legal or security purposes.

In no strange land

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/jun/26/poem-of-the-week-in-no-strange-land-by-francis-thompson

 

“The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone and start a wing!
’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.”

 

“William Blake’s visionary transformations of London form the poem’s most important literary ancestry. In Thompson’s work more generally there’s also an occasional, probably coincidental, resemblance to Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), going beyond the shared faith to sometimes tortuous grammatical structures, vivid word-coinings, and unconventional rhythm. While Thompson’s achievements may be more modest than those of Blake or Hopkins, In No Strange Land is a poem I imagine either would have been happy to have written. A “many-splendoured” hymn, it catches more light than any of the Choruses from “The Rock”.”

Ineffable

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ineffable
ɪnˈɛfəb(ə)l/
adjective
adjective: ineffable
  1. too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words.
    “the ineffable mysteries of the soul”
    synonyms: inexpressible, indescribable, beyond words, beyond description, beggaring description;More
    • not to be uttered.
      “the ineffable Hebrew name that gentiles write as Jehovah”
Origin
late Middle English: from Old French, or from Latin ineffabilis, from in- ‘not’ + effabilis (see effable).

All trace was gone

I saw, while half asleep,  her face was gone
She faded, like the mist does at the dawn,
From the gallery of my loved ones

Ungrounded by the loss, fearful, forlorn,
Skinless like a worm  picked off a lawn,
I saw, while half asleep,  her face was gone

Do not leave me, do not my love scorn
Lost and gone are my beloved ones
I  am human in both ghost and form

Heart constricted, lungs  pant out my pain
Haunted and bereft of human warmth
I saw, while half asleep,  her face was gone

I shall have no mother but that one
Now I have become a dried out corm
Lost and gone are all my beloved ones

Like a little leaf from its plant torn
Gnawed by slugs,  fragmented  till unborn
I saw, while half asleep,  all trace was gone
Of the gallery of my lost, loved ones

 

There is no swift repeat

I saw the faded roses on the door
The brave reminders of the summer heat
I thought we’d  come again, but you’re no more

Nothing, no one can that love restore
For love like that, there is no swift repeat
I saw the faded roses on the door

Never ask a lover what love’s for
For love itself is inclined to swift retreats
I thought we’d  love again, but you’re no more

 And who is it that chooses this dark hour,
That offers sadness if not full defeat?
I saw the faded roses on the door.

My man,my love,my ease, my own sweet flower
For my illusions I am now contrite
I thought we’d  love again, but you’re no more

 

Within the deepest dark,I saw the light
And all this suffering was seen aright
I saw the faded roses on the door
I thought we’d  see and love another hour

 

 

Ambiguity

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Photo by Katherine 2012

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ambiguity/

 

“Ambiguity has excited philosophers for a very, very long time. It was studied in the context of the study of fallacies in Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations. Aristotle identifies various fallacies associated with ambiguity and amphiboly[1] writing:

There are three varieties of these ambiguities and amphibolies: (1) When either the expression or the name has strictly more than one meaning… (2) when by custom we use them so; (3) when words that have a simple sense taken alone have more than one meaning in combination; e.g. ‘knowing letters’. For each word, both ‘knowing’ and ‘letters’, possibly has a single meaning: but both together have more than one-either that the letters themselves have knowledge or that someone else has it of them. (Sophistical Refutations bk. 4)

The stoics were also intrigued by ambiguity (see Atherton 1993). Chrysippus claimed at one point that every word is ambiguous—though by this he meant that the same person may understand a word spoken to him in many distinct ways. Philosophers concerned with the relation between language and thought, particularly those who thought there was a language in which we think, concerned themselves with whether the language in which we think could contain ambiguous phrases. Ockham, for example, was willing to countenance ambiguities in mental sentences of a language of thought but not mental terms in that language (see Spade p. 101). Frege contemplated non-overlap of sense in natural language in a famous footnote, writing:

…So long as the reference remains the same, such variations of sense may be tolerated, although they are to be avoided in the theoretical structure of a demonstrative science and ought not to occur in a perfect language. (Frege 1948 [1892], p. 210 fn. 2)

Frege’s hostility to ambiguity in formal languages remains with us today. Frequently we use formal languages precisely so that we can disambiguate otherwise ambiguous sentences (brackets being a paradigm example of a disambiguating device).”

Paris Review – The Art of Criticism No. 2, George Steiner

Paris Review – The Art of Criticism No. 2, George Steiner.

A fascinating interview

.Quote :For me the personal turning point was Pol Pot. Very few knew at the time about Auschwitz. Yes, there were bastards who knew, there were sons of bitches who knew and who didn’t believe it, but they were a tiny number. Nazi secrecy on this was fantastically efficient. The killing fields were on radio and television while they were going on, and we were told that Pol Pot was burying alive one hundred thousand men, women and children. Now I cannot attach honest meaning to the phrase “to bury alive one man, woman or child.” One hundred thousand! I almost went out of my mind in those days with bitter impotence. I was obsessed with the hope that Russia and America would say, “We don’t know what the rights and wrongs of this incredible geopolitical mess are but forty-five years after the Holocaust or after the gulag, we can’t shave in the morning, we can’t look at ourselves, knowing a hundred thousand people are being buried alive; the razor doesn’t work on the skin. No woman can put on her makeup and think of herself as human. If you don’t stop this, we’ll come in.” I’d hoped ………….

Meanings

When knowledge  and our rituals are thin
The usual symbols’ meanings  seem all gone
Who will show us how to live again?

The emphasis was overtly on sin
The mighty were exempted every one
Now knowledge  and our rituals are thin

As the song says, don’t know where  or,  Oh Lord, when
The breath of angels’  staggers the rich man.
Who will show us how to live and when?

 

Uneasy murmurs through our conscience run.
Anaesthetics now our medium
Knowledge  and our rituals are thin

Like  swarm of bees, archangels pass the sun
Unseeing, we deceive with tedium
Who will show us how to live again?

Power replaces insight with  a gun
Shoot as if the end’s already come
When knowledge  and our rituals are thin
Who might show us how to live again?

 

 

Their infants’ eyes

Both blinded  and enchanted by the light,
Sidelong like the glances of a spy.
I saw a flock of geese high on their flight

The Hebrew slaves from Egypt in their plight
Left with little but their infants wise,
Wandering in the desert’s heat and light

 

Oh, easy is it for the birds to reach the heights
While refugees can suffer, drown and die
I saw a  dozen swans pass on their flight

For the poor,  there are few equal rights
And mothers with their little children cry
Both blinded  and diminished in the light

Will the Lord enchant us with delight,
Or punish our false greed till hearts ignite?
I saw a cloud of  angels show His might

As we live on the earth like parasites
Forgot not that revenge may come by night.
Both wounded and entreated by the light,.
I saw  that we conformed without a fight

 

Fitting the within

When your world cracks open and  throws your body down
When your world evaporates and turns you into steam
When your world disfigures you and you seem like a clown
Don’t be quick to build again, there’s value in these schemes.

Many worlds are possible and here’s the pattern book
Don’t be hasty in your ways, better far to look
Fearful on the precipice and fearful on the hill
Fearful of the loneliness, yet cold lovers can kill

Stand alone on trembling legs and see  a different view
When you find your destiny, you feel renewed.
Everything is blurry now,  poor eyes cannot adapt
But when the legs get steadier, vision will correct.

No mother dear nor father strong can help you with their care
We must be quite separate for our new world to bare.
The world is new inside the gap where symbols grow and swirl
And across the sky above the stars dance all a whirl

Safety and security if taken on too soon
Lessen the alternatives and may lead down to doom
Courage to the child we are, courage in our hearts
In the forms now visible we will find new shape.

Less like armour plating,  more like pliant skin,
Fitting us externally and fitting the within

Life etc

Soul making is a phrase from Keats.

{ link to article by Jeffrey C. Johnson in Paris Review]

We saw Wolf Hall on TV recently and it is so wonderful.I am just writing down a few of my thoughts not about that but about Anne Boleyn… I meant it to be funny but I could n’t manage that after seeing the play.

ANNE BOLEYN

Anne Boleyn withheld to win
As Henry lusted in his sin.

Once a virgin, sweet Madonna;
Henry turned in rage on her.

She bore him but one living child,
For her quips, she was reviled.

Henry knew not the fault was his
It seems the king had syphilis.

Or Anne was rhesus negative
then just her first born child would live.

We, women, make our worst mistake
When power for love we wrongly take

Our strength lasts but till we submit.
We need less love and far more wit.

Whatever lusty men may say,
their “love” dies when they get their way.

And they will take their wife by force
As cannons pound on oaken doors.

As for women, we must not
Promise gold we have not got.

Conception is a game of chance;
We come to be by happenstance.

We sin in pride in promising
What only God or Nature bring.

We deceive and trick and charm
At last our hearts bang in alarm

The man who begged upon his knees
Chops off our heads when we displease.

For Emperors and Kings and Lords
Wield fearful power by the sword.

Yet when for judgement they shall stand
How will point the knowing hand?

And just like us they’ll ashen be
When true majesty they see.

Into dust and crumbled ruin
They will go by their own doing.

Each day create with grace your soul.
Cracked shall be the golden bowl.

Keats wrote this extract below [read all by clicking on soul above[ and he died when aged  only 25 years:

I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read—I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School—and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. 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!

Go elsewhere

Life’s   for  strangers in the city here,
Who left their birthplace wanting  better pay
So many  people’s faces look afeared

The mass of crowds  brings on this paranoia
While Georgian buildings,  beautiful, decay
Life’s   an  alien in the city here

From the doorways ugly faces leer
Like evil children,  tantalised dismayed
Many people,  nobody is near.

The birds don’t sing, sometimes I hear them jeer
They fly in circles in a  bold display
Life’s as hot as Hades, living here.

My eye is dry, it lacks a single tear
While I become more static with despair
Many people,  nobody who’s near.

Why can’t I be merry, like cards say?
Why do thoughts so savage my heart flay
Life is  lonely in the city’s lairs
If you like kind and calmness, go elsewhere