Big Girl staring at the wing won't fall. "Bumps in the road," the Venusian attendant 'suedes. Big Girl's s- wayed. Dad thinks of falling hard. The carnage he envisions—Big Girl won't near that mental prison. The Venusian knows Dad's shaking hands release the weight of daily en- dangerment. Big Girl looks to clouds below, and space above; to shaking ev- errything. Shook, she asks her dad, look?" and makes her eyes shake, then takes his hands. "Bumps in the road," she feathers (pomp- ostorously, venusi- unbecomingly), and fallinn- -ng from his crow's nest, dropping watch,
looking after then... "ver- rry ff- unny. Thank
y-
ou my good big brave
cc-
llever girl," he
Gives.
OK, Moon I see it now; this world that lays low in forced brightness. We walked in your light over moor, cows' chorus scoring and shushing our chatter; low and shuffling shadows.
I couldn't lie, and cried then. I was comforted. You show me our collections; razor shells, and bone- reachingly bright climbs over Spanish hay, along foot-wide ledges, sweeping swallows, half a long day's hope, and—OK, Dad? This here doesn't move like seaweed… It is animal/animals, and its body lives in rock, in darkness; its long branched limb protruding. OK, Moon
I see it now; night is night. You're thin. You'll soon be new. Little light from that shy world will be left with me. I await illumination; your coming fullness.
San Francisco Sunset Sun setting over the Presidio’s landmark wood sculpture From Jean Beaufort to the Public Domain
Wednesday 20/01/2021
“Leaning into The Wind”, director Thomas Riedelsheimer’s film, follows artist Andy Goldsworthy; his movements, meditations, and manifestations. Here is a trailer: https://youtu.be/BQYGbfVfpm0
Wonderfully Evident and Wildly Affinitive:
Knowing
starts, in this case, with something Andy Goldsworthy: loving that which happens,
looking into cracks and tears,
and knowing the life that there hums from darkness richly—
writhes from darkness richly. Then
who would move—what can move as wildly well as humanity
reintroduced?
I picked up my notes today, with a mind to wonder wanderingly away from the questions I face when I find myself
facing
those unfortunately wrathfully avoidant…
do we know who they are?
…do they?
No thing goes as wildly well as one (and all) quietly
roaring antiphonally,
directly and manually overboarding
Corruptly Gratuitous and Whitely Hooded:
Lies
slaving-men’s underdeck oars of maniacal antinomies:
You still have horns, they say,
You will never make a heap of sand,
You must and cannot know your hooded father (and I am lying);
You must and cannot know your hooded owner
(Even with our oars we won’t reach land),
You still have halos, though.
If I am lying, know I am.
Shan’t get where without their oars?
Freedom in the promised land?
Without progress who will starve? Who holds progress?
…and who takes its reaching hand?
How easy is it to get caught up, and lost in those wordy traps that staunch defenders of their-own-pride contrive? How easy is it to lean into the wind and fall and move through branches and lose and find the woodland’s lost and found?
Underlying what Overlies:
Dusted over cracks and tears — blow — hooded lies richly rise from throats of pits of darkness blow away
Rich in life — be known — loam that underlies — test our eyes, and shafts of light — let them minute.
Hello again. How are we welcoming this year in? I know I haven’t found my flow, or maybe I have found flows, but no sure steady flow. It isn’t always clear what ought to be shared, and with whom, but there is always a tune (an underlying hum at very least), demanding words for its own release.
Rarely have I enjoyed such daunting walls of text so thoroughly. This is flowing, and difficult to pull quotes from, but know…
“This is no longer the world of the painter Titian or even Arthur Rimbaud with its nano-technical prowess and attendant attempts at opening a possible shift into other galactic dimensions.”
Ooooooohhhhhhhh…
Will Alexander Not thought as evolved complexity or psychic definition as philosophical splendour but the reality of both not only as our inner climate, but as our devolved inner climate as well. This is what I will call a coalescing eclipse pattern. Our circumstance seems as more analogous to one of a devolved hull […]
Who ever knew what it felt like to be shot through the heart? Maybe Sharon Olds, or anyone who (in her words) beats the cat skin drum.
Yesterday I listened to a recording shared by Billy Mills in his blog Elliptical Movements https://wp.me/p3ei8Y-Tt. I was warmed and inspired by Dianne di Prima’s words and wrote three poems: two, which I felt bold enough to rehome (here), and one, which isn’t done with me, yet.
Today I came across a tweet of Dr Kim Moor’s https://twitter.com/kimmoorepoet?s=09that put me on to this recording… https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/154955/leila-chatti-and-sharon-olds-in-conversationof Leila Chatti in conversation with Sharon Olds. I suppose that I (semi-consciously) join the conversation, and that is quiteemboldening. I have more to say about loyalty than I could dance around in a day. Leila Chatti’s response to Sharon Olds’ concise statement “My loyalty is more horizontal than vertical”…
“Could you say more about that?”
…made me hum “Yes, please.”
I found this middle section of the conversation especially enthralling. Sharon Olds says, of her art, that…
“I can’t call it up, but I find that exercise, and taking my vitamins, and reading poems (other people’s poems) is good for that.”
It was good seeing the sun out, and walking, and listening, in agreement, stopping to take a picture
and jot down a mildly affirming observational verse
I keep hearing artists’ dystonic reactions to the adage that art somehow comes from inner madness. There was a seed of this dilemma in my mind.
Leila asked Sharon if she would read her poem Little Things, and Sharon replied that she’d be happy to. They each give an analogy for the virtuosity or benefit of paying attention…”a kind of praise”…a kind of antidepressant”.
I was reminded that I have been without my prescription for two days, and resolved to visit the pharmacy. The pills aren’t preferable to sunshine, exercise, nutrition, taking in other people’s poems/art, making, and the joy of real recognition within conversation; but they do seem to bring these things more readily into the scope of my attention. Shrinking away from the world is never inspiring. Depression is not something I want to write about, but I am inspired to share any thing that sparks, and seeds a dilemma, or answers a cryptic and pertinent allegorical question with a wicked line, and another, and another. Today it was that conversation, both poets’ readings, and then
that one line and the way she read it…
Maybe she beats the cat skin drum
from As if my Mother, from Sharon Olds’ Arias: that made me look up! You’ll have to listen. It’s around 20 minutes in.
The spirit of Christmas found me well, today, after a previously novelly sombre lead up. I wrote cards, and opened cards from friends, and also a card from the local Christian Centre along with a carol sheet for this Sunday’s socially distanced service on the green. O Come, All Ye Faithful!
The National Theatre of Scotland’s Makar to Cracker added a sense of celebration to my evening.
Jackie Kay is Scotland’s Makar, and she describes her role as being “to enthuse about poetry, and to take poetry oot and aboot…”
She MCs Makar to Makar, and this Christmas special, with certain enthusiasm, and I’m already looking forward to the Burn’s Night special, on Thursday 28/01/2021.
Imtiaz Dharker was the first poet to appear, and described her poem Go to the Child as “the closest I’ll ever get to writing a carol”. It can be heard (and enjoyed) here, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07lx8br . I found it to spin a sense of magic and majesty.
Jen Hadfield read A Bad Day For Ice Fishing, the “closest to a snowglobe I’ve got”…a dog makes snow angels. She sees heaven in a rockpool, reads Rockpool, then reads To A Limpet (a glorious ode).
I felt invited into her Shetland home, upon her reading of In the Same Way: a poem from her second collection Nigh-No-Place, published in 2008 by Bloodaxe Books, and winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize. At the centre of this poem is the kitchen door that separates herself, and her adventurous cat from the squalling Shetland winter. Letting her cat out, and then (with the wind) in again, and out, and (there is so much more to it, but) finally
“…the wind canters in, and She, with a wild carol, and all the night hail (melted) gleaming in her furs.” that’s the way I heard it, anyway.
Surely, worth reading and re-reading.
Carol Anne Duffy (kindly, and humorously) shares the story of her birth, and Jackie Kay comments that upon reading her good friend Carol Anne’s book Meantime, she…
“really loved Prayer in it, and the image…the idea that we can have a prayer for the secular, and that prayers or blessings (if you like) are in everything“.
Dame Carol Anne Duffy resigned from her role as Poet Laureate in 2019, and is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. She seems to me to (generally) embody gravitas. She chose seven poems to read, with the “spirit of Makar to Cracker, in mind, and also the very difficult year that not least 60 000 families have endured, and that people are continuing to endure.” The seriousness she brought to proceedings was not altogether sombre. After reading Prayer, she reads TheBee Carol, an intimately hopeful creation, possibly inspired by Thomas Hardy’s Oxen and it’s last line“hoping it might be so.”
She goes on to describe Premonitions as a “resurrection poem”, and hopes it can offer comfort. I found a delicate and familiar warmth in the imagery of the poet watching her Mother (who is gaining youth)…
“open the doors to the grace of her garden” where “flowers close to their own premonitions” then seeing Mother’s “magnolia tree marrying itself to may air”.
Carol Anne’s lyrics are beautifully sung by Kathryn Williams, and in fact the singing, throughout the hour and forty five minutes of Makar to Cracker, is all shades of angelic. The whole thing (and Makar to Makar, too) can be found on YouTube.
Jackie Kay’s final special little gift (in her penultimate offering as Makar, before her Burns night farewell) is a special Christmas message from Annie Lennox, but before that, she makes an inspired toast and reads her poem The Promise…
In the new year, I will be publishing a series of posts about the language of movement, with features on the works of creative dance educator Barbara Mettler, and of yoga teacher Vanda Scaravelli (1908-1999), also the works of:
filmmaker Dario Argento,
psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk (and his contemporaries), and
As an overweight (big foodie, clinically depressive, music mag junkie) teen, finding ways to slim through gentle controlled movement (I couldn’t have bounced around the netball court) felt like discovering the holy grail.
I worshipped Judy Alter, author of Stretch and Strengthen, and evangelized about her methods, which taught me to walk! I had “walked” for some time, but had learned (to my own detriment) to sit down for more than half the day, and to drag my feet. Simple practices and principles of rehabilitative stretching and strengthening allowed me to recover the ability to run (comfortably), and to dance.
I’m certainly not athletic, nor a dancer, or a yogi (in any lofty sense), but maintaining or gaining freedom of movement, as a necessity for self expression, and as a way towards feeling free, has (for many years) felt fundamental to my existence.
Barbara Mettler worked on the principle that dance is a basic human need. She referred to dance as the language of movement, the universal language, and the primary art form. In these posts, I’ll explore the meanings behind the movement, as well as the ways we write about movement, and I’ll share some of my own creative writing on this theme.
I haven’t been writing (much), but rewording. My college art tutor (Kevin) said “It’s (all) well and good, you having ideas, but you’ll have to produce some work at some point.”
There are reasons, such as…I shouldn’t say, and other reasons to let the pen dry, and the paint turn (into) tin-wrapped brick;
and it’s been less than half-done for so long now, that’s just the way I’ve learned to like it.
They’re all good reasons. The best laid plans…
The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.
Aft, but not always.
Rabbie (Burns) wished that…
I for poor auld Scotland’s sake
Some useful plan, or book could make
And does he hear the thanks he gets for doing just that? I bet he does.
’till next month, Rabbie.
R. S. Thomas is kind to me, when I have nothing to say. I imagine he could have been less kind to those keen on freely emptying their minds.
The tone of THIS is more wistful, and the poem reveals a desire (for more), that isn’t common in Thomas’s collections of testaments to the goodness of a stoic existence.
I thought, you see, that on some still night,
When stars were shrill over his farm,
And he and I kept ourselves warm
By an old fire, whose bars were bright
With real heat, the truth might ripen
Between us naturally as the fruit
Of his wild hedges, or as the roots,
Swedes and mangolds, he grew then.
I believe ripe truth is a fine thing to wish for.
Bloodaxe’s 1986 publication of R. S. Thomas’s selected poems 1946-1968 was passed to me in Rosthwaite car park, with (needless) apologies for the lack of wrapping,
this time last year, before last Christmas,
after walking my favourite loop, up to Watendlath, down through Ashness Woods, to Grange…
We diverted at Grange, up toward Manesty Woods, and played chess in the Borrowdale Gates, before skirting (back) between the ever-green east side of Castle Crag and the Derwent’s chill and languid waters, in the dusk.
To borrow a question (not too glib) from fellow blogger Bret:
