“Try to meet a poem on its terms not yours. If you have to “relate” to a poem in order to understand it, you aren’t reading it sufficiently. In other words, don’t try to fit the poem into your life. Try to see what world the poem creates. Then, if you are lucky, its world will help you re-see your own.”
The white streaked evening clouds hung like draped sheets
Momentous like a sign of pain and rage
Now night has come embroidered with deceit
And I was filled with dangerous conceit
That I myself created this great stage
The white streaked evening clouds hung like draped sheets
The sun has drowned itself in waters deep
And shines from beds of seas unknown and aged
Now night has come embroidered with deceit
So all is monotone and thus discreet
The man by his wife’s grave in silence prays
The white streaked evening clouds hang like draped sheets
There is no moon , this darkness to complete
And all the colours in the house are greyed
Now night has come embroidered with deceit
Pride and envy have this love decayed
And therefore its offspring are long delayed
The white streaked evening clouds hung like marriage sheets
Thus night has come embroidered with deceit
A kidney infection makes oldies seem crazed
Delirium ,visions and rushes of rage
It’s wonderful being so old and gay
It’s wonderful being so old.
A lack of agility means we can’t dance
And musing all day sends us into a trance
It’s wonderful being so old and gay
It’s wonderful being so old.
We seem to get shorter and fatter as well
I can’t ride my bike as my eyes are unwell
It’s wonderful being so old and gay
It’s wonderful being so old.
I’ve forgotten the topology and shape of a man
I’ve burned the front table and eight non-stick pans
It’s wonderful being so old and gay
It’s wonderful being so old.
The doctor helped me up a when I lay on the couch
He pressed on my kidneys and I gave a shout
It’s wonderful being so old and gay
It’s wonderful being so old.
More polite than the English, more white than the Scots
They come here to help us as we need them lots
It’s wonderful being so old and gay
It’s wonderful being so old.
As poetic as Snowdon, as rhythmic as flow
The Welsh suffered so when they closed the old coal
Is it wonderful being so old and gay?
Is it wonderful being so old?
I don’t feel so well as mi Mam used to say
I can’t kneel down easy so now I can’t pray
Is it wonderful leading old fogeys astray?
Yeah, it’s wonderful being so old
Too old for cold, I stand, now against the hedge,
Watching the snowflakes in the glare of neon street lights.
Darkness has come early, and I think of country uplands and huddled sheep.
On Salisbury Plain, shepherds watched their flocks
Just as in Bethlehem two thousand years before,
And then, exactly when?
“Between the wars” it stopped. Now we know there is no “Between the wars”.
And who decided
To cull the sheep and shepherds and the space for kindness?
Now that same Plain still exists ,but banned
And closed to human-kind,
For bombs , not wombs
Nor for birth of lamb ,nor gypsy child, nor Saviour
Where would He go today
If you go down to Urgent Care, do not be surprised
The doctor’s from Siberia, and he has kindly eyes
Or sometimes they’re from Timbuctoo, and dark as Eden’s wise.
Yet if they flee from our madness, our weekend care may die.
I felt so bad, I thought it’s nerves, but no, my kidney’s tried.
The panic and the nasty thoughts will soon be overlaid
The Trimopethrin will cure me; I will now survive
So no more visits no more stress , thank God I am alive.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n23/tom-paulin/entrepreneurship
“Hughes’s prose in his letters is always urgent and compulsive, but there are moments of tender observation, as in a letter to Edna Wholey in 1950, where he says he
heard a commotion in the hedge, and after a while, out trundled a hedgehog, merry as you like, and obviously out for a good time. I thought he might make a jolly companion for an evening so I brought him in. After a while I noticed he had disappeared and later heard a noise just like the sobbing of a little child, but very faint, and it continued for long enough. I traced it to a pile of boxes, and there was my comrade, with his nose pressed in a pool of tears, and his face all wet, and snivelling and snuffling his heart out. I could have kissed him for compassion. I don’t know why I’m so sympathetic towards hedgehogs.
Such moments are like dummy runs for poems, and they remind us of the animist tenderness in Hughes’s writing, a tenderness that plays against his celebration of feral power. It’s like the last line of a short early poem ‘Snowdrop’ – ‘Her pale head heavy as metal’ – where nature and human artifice come gently together.
Inevitably, though, it is biographical interest that these letters stimulate. We catch Hughes’s early undergraduate life at Cambridge in 1952, when, writing to his sister, Olwyn, he says that sometimes he thinks Cambridge is ‘wonderful’, at others ‘a ditch full of clear cold water where all the frogs have died. It is a bird without feathers; a purse without money; an old dry apple, or the gutters run pure claret.’ This sounds very like Lawrence, except for the balancing, divided attitude. Hughes, it’s clear, is the most important writer to emerge from English Nonconformism since Lawrence. Like him Hughes writes to the moment with a voracious intensity. Yet in an unusually assured comment on the Anglican Swift (he was only 22) he tells Olwyn that Swift is the ‘only stylist’. Swift’s excellence is a talent for ‘clarity simplicity and power’ (note the lack of commas as in ‘mud water fire and air’). Swift’s writing is ‘the bedrock from which every writer must start’.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2007/04/in_praise_of_difficult_poetry.html
This time, let’s take up a serious issue: the stupid and defeatist idea that poetry, especially modern or contemporary poetry, ought to be less “difficult.” Should poets write in ways that are more genial, simple, and folksy, like the now-unreadable work of Edgar Guest (1888-1959)? Guest’s Heap o’ Livin’ sold more than a million copies (in the days when a million copies was a lot), and he had his own weekly radio show. But Guest’s popularity is history, while every day people still read the peculiar, demanding poems of Guest’s approximate contemporaries Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens. People still read the poems of Moore and Stevens because they don’t wear out, because they surprise and entice us—and maybe, in part, because they are difficult?
Check the meaning of what you hear, perceive
For wild emotion alters the eyes’ view
Interpretation un-reflected may deceive
A gift of love can’t always be received.
Some can only give a gift to you
Check the sense of what you hear, perceive
For some of us, the facts can’t be conceived
We cannot notice anything too new
Interpretation un-reflected may deceive
As the wind blows off the autumn leaves
So the mind itself can go askew
I’ll check the sense of what I hear, perceive
So in the web of life, we interweave
Creating patterns from the many hues
Interpretation un-reflected may deceive.
We fear change and thoughts that are unglued
But talk to loved ones,do not merely brood
Check the meaning of what you hear, perceive
Interpretation un-reflected may deceive
Awakening in the light, I saw ripe corn
The silence held us in its gentle peace
A field beside the cottage, lit by dawn
A cat sat on the small and daisied lawn
No cattle grazed nor any horned beast
Awakening in the light, I saw ripe corn
So my heart began to heal where torn
Expanding into gratitude, released
A field beside the cottage, lit by dawn
Just a week, yet this became our home
Cottages of pink and white eyes teased
Awakening in the light, I saw ripe corn
The new perception hit me like a storm
For if I’d never seen would I believe?
A field beside the cottage, gold at dawn
From perception, insight is conceived
And so imagined sights become our dreams
Awakening in the light, I saw ripe corn
A field beside the cottage, beauty dawned
As someone who has needed hospital treatment, I am worried selfishly but also on account of other people.They recruited this American doctor but will not his adopted children in.It seems crazy
How do my blog readers keep a record of bright ideas they get while wakening up? Do you use a notebook or do you speak into your phone? I tried a notebook but didn;t write much into it
You can’t catch God in that butterfly net
You can’t catch God and ask him precisely what he said
Be you any wiser than the tide is high?
God can laugh and God can cry
You know words are metaphors
They unlock that secret door
Be you poor or be you rich
You can’t suppress that nervous twitch
Be you lightning in a storm or a daisy forlorn
You will never be a God who weeps for the torn.
God speaks English, God speaks Greek
He speaks Hebrew as the paralytic creak.
Don’t you go and try to catch
Frogs and toads and baby cats
When you’re in complete despair
You may find that God is there.
You must walk the way of love
Then you will be hand in glove
Yet we envy, we betray
We leave malice on the auto play
God speaks nothing, he’s the word
From all humans it is barred.
When he speaks we all will know
He does not speak it just for show.
It’s more a hint than a logical proof
You can’t leave Mythos off the hook
Logos is and Logos does
Because, because , because, because.
Ted Hughes on How to Be a Writer: A Letter of Advice to His 18-Year-Old Daughter
So suggests the poet Ted Hughes (August 17, 1930–October 28, 1998) in a wonderful letter of advice to his teenage daughter, Frieda, found in Letters of Ted Hughes (public library) — the same volume that gave us Hughes’s immensely moving letter to his son about nurturing the universal inner child.
Frieda had been half-orphaned at the age of three when her mother, Sylvia Plath, died by suicide. Hughes was left to raise the couple’s two children, for whom Plath had written her only children’s books. Shortly after Frieda’s eighteenth birthday, as she stood on the precipice of her own literary career, her father shared with her the most important thing he had learned — from T.S. Eliot, no less — about what it takes to become a poet.
Hughes writes:
T.S. Eliot said to me “There’s only one way a poet can develop his actual writing — apart from self-criticism & continual practice. And that is by reading other poetry aloud — and it doesn’t matter whether he understands it or not (i.e. even if it is in another language.) What matters, above all, is educating the ear.”
What matters, is to connect your own voice within an infinite range of verbal cadences & sequences — and only endless actual experience of your ear can store all that is in your nervous system. The rest can be left to your life & your character.
Don’t watch a lot of TV
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_world_syndrome
Mean world syndrome is a term coined by George Gerbner to describe a phenomenon whereby violence-related content of mass media makes viewers believe that the world is more dangerous than it actually is. Mean world syndrome is one of the main conclusions of cultivation theory. Gerbner, a pioneer researcher on the effects of television on society, argued that people who watch television tended to think of the world as an intimidating and unforgiving place. A direct correlation between the amount of television one watches and the amount of fear one harbors about the world has been proven, although the direction of causality remains debatable in that persons fearful of the world may be more likely to retreat from it and in turn spend more time in indoor, solitary activity such as television watching.[1]
The number of opinions, images, and attitudes that viewers tend to form when watching television will have a direct influence on how the viewer perceives the real world. They will reflect and refer to the most common images or recurrent messages thought to affect their own real lives. Gerbner once said: “You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it’s a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.”[1][2]
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/
“Everything written in self-conscious, writerly prose, on the other hand, is now considered to be “literary fiction”—not necessarily good literary fiction, mind you, but always worthier of respectful attention than even the best-written thriller or romance. It is these works that receive full-page critiques, often one in the Sunday book-review section and another in the same newspaper during the week. It is these works, and these works only, that make the annual short lists of award committees. The “literary” writer need not be an intellectual one. Jeering at status-conscious consumers, bandying about words like “ontological” and “nominalism,” chanting Red River hokum as if it were from a lost book of the Old Testament: this is what passes for profundity in novels these days. Even the most obvious triteness is acceptable, provided it comes with a postmodern wink. What is not tolerated is a strong element of action—unless, of course, the idiom is obtrusive enough to keep suspense to a minimum. Conversely, a natural prose style can be pardoned if a novel’s pace is slow enough, as was the case with Ha Jin’s aptly titled Waiting, which won the National Book Award (1999) and the PEN/Faulkner Award (2000).
The dualism of literary versus genre has all but routed the old trinity of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow, which was always invoked tongue-in-cheek anyway. Writers who would once have been called middlebrow are now assigned, depending solely on their degree of verbal affectation, to either the literary or the genre camp. David Guterson is thus granted Serious Writer status for having buried a murder mystery under sonorous tautologies (Snow Falling on Cedars, 1994), while Stephen King, whose Bag of Bones (1998) is a more intellectual but less pretentious novel, is still considered to be just a very talented genre storyteller.”
Mary had made a Christmas cake with marzipan but no white sugar icing.Stan was diabetic so she had opted for a middle way.Like some Zen Buddhists.You don’t either cut it completely nor have a 6-inch layer of icing.No, you find a middle way.Like 5 inches of icing!
Mary like almonds so she went for marzipan with her home ground almonds and some sugar.The raw egg part was worrying but so far nobody had died after eating her cake.Still if you are dying, enjoy the cake while you can!
Annie arrived for a cup of coffee.
Wow, that cake is large.You will get fat if you eat it
I am not planning to eat it all myself, Mary said merrily.
In fact, if I could find a way of cutting an infinitesimally small piece I could have one every day forever.
Would the cake not shrink ?asked Annie with a puzzled smile
No, because a real number times an infinitesimal is itself infinitesimal Mary answered.
So it must be zero, Annie decided.
No, said Mary.All of the calculus is based on the idea that they are not zero.Then, at the end, we pretend they are zero and cross them out.It’s like magic or sleight of hand
I thought maths was logic, Annie said in an angry voice, tossing her purple hair over her shoulder.Alas it was a wig so it fell off and Emile the littl cat, bit it!
Gosh, Annie why are you wearing a wig? Mary asked.
I am involved with a Jewish man so he won’t make love unless I wear a wig.
Surely if he is Orthodox he should not sleep with you unless you get married.
We can’t get married, Annie said boldly.
Why not?
He is already married….Annie muttered
Well, that seems wrong.
What, being married?
No having an affair.I know Stan is old.Can’t you find a single man?
Women can’t go running after men.Men enjoy the chase.They despise women who run after them.
Well, can’t you ask them if they are married?
No, it seems too cheeky, Annie smiled.Anyway, in fuzzy logic you are not either married or single.You are married to the extent of some decimal number in between 0 and 1
Some folk are 0.999 married and some are 0.34 married.Others 0.1
But who measures it? God ? It’s not much use.
You have to guess, said Annie.I like Jewish men
How many do you know, Mary asked.
Three, said Annie triumphantly.
You can’t generalise from three, Mary said.
If I test a larger sample I shall never get to find one till I am 99, Annie wept.
Think of the fun, though, Mary said teasingly.And you’d have to travel a lot as many live in the USA, France and other places including Israel.How do you fancy Bibi Netanyahu?He is married actually!
Annie was silent, then burst out: life is not science nor technology.It’s an art like watercolour painting.Why do you call him Bibi? Do you know him?
Not biblically, Mary said humorously.I’ve never even met him.He’s just been in the News because of Trumpelstiltschein
Does Bibi know Donald is half German?
No, but the Queen is too.
Where does that take us logically?
Off to Boots to buy some expensive makeup and then to have a manicure and tea in a cafe
If only politicians did this life would be much easier and kinder.
And so say all of us!
Love must be so pliant
like a blade of grass
Bowing to the wind
till the storm has passed.
Love is enigmatic
Like the sphinx’s smile.
Waiting for an answer
Nothing is on file.
Love is often near us
Yet we do not see.
Sometimes where we are
Is just the place to be
I’m lying on the sofa with your photo in my hand
I found it in a drawer with my T shirts and my tops
I don’t want to marry you.Do you understand?
You were like an answer phone, your speech bored me unplanned
You had a lovely profile and your hair had a sweet flop
I’m lying on the sofa with your photo in my hand
At the picture hous , you said you only liked James Bond
You never asked me what I’d like, so I have to put a stop
I don’t want to marry you.Do you understand?
I became more beautiful and a reconquest you planned
I am not a lunatic, I’ve still got my grip
I’m dreaming on the sofa with your photo in my hand
I guess I felt elated but it was just my glands
You never gave me coffee , you only gave me lip.
I will never marry you.Do you understand?
I’m not a sadomasochist, with a riding crop
But one way or another, your wooing has to stop
I’m lying on the sofa with your photo in my hand
I don’t know why I’ve got it, I’ll rip it into strands
Source: Thursday Doors – Tende
Some amazing photographs here.Please take a look
Extract
“Tende is a town on the old salt road from Nice in south east France to Piedmont in north west Italy. It is famous for the Vallee des Merveilles, a remote area in the mountains with thousands of carvings from the Bronze Age. The carvings (petroglyphs) were discovered by a British botanist, Clarence Bicknell, in 1881. The best way to visit the town is by the spectacular railway from the Riviera. But to get to the Valley of the Marvels, you need to hike for 8 hours or take a jeep. However, this blog is about the doors in the town.
“
https://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/402
https://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/402
Excerpt
Techniques Used in PoetryRefer to
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