Poetry

[Serial_Apologist]

Murray Lachlan Young: After the Jabberwocky

http://www.murraylachlanyoung.co.uk

A pity this is not on youtube.

[Padraig]

I could hardly resist this one:

The Briefcase

for Seamus Heaney


I held the briefcase at arm's length from me;
the oxblood or liver
eelskin with which it was covered
had suddenly grown supple.

I'd been waiting in line for the cross-town
bus when an almighty cloudburst
left the sidewalk a raging torrent.

And though it contained only the first
inkling of this poem, I knew I daren't
set the briefcase down
to slap my pockets for an obol -

for fear it might slink into a culvert
and strike out along the East River
for the sea. By which I mean the 'open' sea.

Paul Muldoon from Madoc: A Mystery 1990

[johncorrigan]

I could hardly resist this one:

The Briefcase

for Seamus Heaney

Paul Muldoon from Madoc: A Mystery 1990

Clingin' on despite the urge to run, Padraig? Wonder if the rain had him back over by. And thanks also for the reminder about obols...I need to start using that term in everyday life...or everyday death.

Fosterage
for Michael McLaverty

‘Description is revelation!’ Royal
Avenue, Belfast, 1962,
A Saturday afternoon, glad to meet
Me, newly cubbed in language, he gripped
My elbow. ‘Listen. Go your own way.
Do your own work. Remember
Katherine Mansfield—I will tell
How the laundry basket squeaked ... that note of exile.’
But to hell with overstating it:
‘Don’t have the veins bulging in your Biro.’
And then, ‘Poor Hopkins!’ I have the Journals
He gave me, underlined, his buckled self
Obeisant to their pain. He discerned
The lineaments of patience everywhere
And fostered me and sent me out, with words
Imposing on my tongue like obols.

Seamus Heaney

[Padraig]

. And thanks also for the reminder about obols...I need to start using that term in everyday life...or everyday death.

'Just lay me down in my native peat
With a jug of punch at my head and feet.'

It Is What It Is

It is what it is, the popping underfoot of the bubble wrap
in which Asher's new toy came,
popping like bladder wrack on the foreshore
of a country towards which I've been rowing
for fifty years, my peeping from behind a tamarind
at the peeping ox and ass, the flyer for a pantomime,
the inlaid cigarette box, the shamrock-painted jug,
the New Testament bound in red leather
lying open, Lordie, on her lap
while I mull over the rules of this imperspicuous game
that seems to be missing one piece, if not more.
Her voice at the gridiron coming and going
as if snatched by a sea wind.
My mother. Shipping out for good. For good this time.
The game. The plaything spread on the rug.
The fifty years I've spent trying to put it together.

Paul Muldoon from Horse Latitudes 2006

[vinteuil]

A Bookshop Idyll


Between the GARDENING and the COOKERY
Comes the brief POETRY shelf;
By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology
Offers itself.

Critical, and with nothing else to do,
I scan the Contents page,
Relieved to find the names are mostly new;
No one my age.

Like all strangers, they divide by sex:
Landscape near Parma
Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,
So does Rilke and Buddha.

'I travel, you see', 'I think' and 'I can read'
These titles seem to say;
But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,
Poem for J.,

The ladies' choice, discountenance my patter
For several seconds;
From somewhere in this (as in any) matter
A moral beckons.

Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart
Or squash it flat?
Man's love is of man's life a thing apart;
Girls aren't like that.

We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff
Can get by without it.
Women don't seem to think that's good enough;
They write about it,

And the awful way their poems lay open
Just doesn't strike them.
Women are really much nicer than men:
No wonder we like them.

Deciding this, we can forget those times
We sat up half the night
Chock-full of love, crammed with bright thoughts,
names, rhymes,
And couldn't write.

[vinteuil]

Tarantella
(1929)

Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the spreading
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the vine of the dark verandah)?
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
Do you remember an Inn?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteeers
Who hadn't got a penny,
And who weren't paying any,
And the hammer at the doors and the Din?
And the Hip! Hop! Hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the twirl and the swirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of a clapper to the spin
Out and in --
And the Ting, Tong, Tang, of the Guitar.
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?

Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.
Only the high peaks hoar:
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound
In the walls of the Halls where falls
The tread
Of the feet of the dead to the ground
No sound:
But the boom
Of the far Waterfall like Doom.

[vinteuil]

Off Cartage he, that worthie warier
Could ouercome, but cowld not use his chaunce;
And I, like wise off all my long endever,
The sherpe conquest, tho fortune did avaunce,
Could not it vse : the hold that is gyvin over
I unpossest : so hangith in balaunce
Off warr, my pees, reward of all my payne;
At Mountzon thus I restles rest in Spayne.

Wyatt was in Mountzon, Spain, in 1537, as an ambassador from England. The poem may be interpreted as a comment on his diplomatic failures, or as a love poem in which he laments his lack of success with his new mistress.

Off Cartage he = Hannibal, who in 218-216 BC defeated the Romans on various occasions, yet failed to take advantage of his victories and capture Rome.

[Tetrachord]

Tarantella
(1929)

Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the spreading
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the vine of the dark verandah)?
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
Do you remember an Inn?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteeers
Who hadn't got a penny,
And who weren't paying any,
And the hammer at the doors and the Din?
And the Hip! Hop! Hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the twirl and the swirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of a clapper to the spin
Out and in --
And the Ting, Tong, Tang, of the Guitar.
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?

Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.
Only the high peaks hoar:
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound
In the walls of the Halls where falls
The tread
Of the feet of the dead to the ground
No sound:
But the boom
Of the far Waterfall like Doom.

I can remember learning that for speech delivery and projection whilst at drama school in the late 1960s. We had to concentrate on the onomatopoeia and the assonance and alliteration. And we had to deliver it very very rapidly without making a mistake! It was also very good for understanding the rhythms of speech.

[Padraig]

Evening in Paradise

Now came still evening on, and twilight gray
Had in her sober livery all things clad;
Silence accompanied, for beast and bird,
They to their grassy couch these to their nests
Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale,
She all night long her amorous descant sung;
Silence was pleased; now glowed the firmament
With living sapphires: Hesperus that led
The starry host, rode brightly, till the moon
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen, unveiled her peerless light,
And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw.

John Milton from Paradise Lost IV

[johncorrigan]

from Elegy One

End of a Campaign

There are many dead in the brutish desert,
who lie uneasy
among the scrub in this landscape of half-wit
stunted ill-will. For the dead land is insatiate
and necrophilous. The sand is blowing about still.
Many who for various reasons, or because
of mere unanswerable compulsion, came here
and fought among the clutching gravestones,
shivered and sweated,
cried out, suffered thirst, were stoically silent, cursed
the spittering machine-guns, were homesick for Europe
and fast embedded in quicksand of Africa
agonized and died.
And sleep now. Sleep here the sleep of dust.

There were our own, there were the others.
Their deaths were like their lives, human and animal.
There were no gods and precious few heroes.
What they regretted when they died had nothing to do with
race and leader, realm indivisible,
laboured Augustan speeches or vague imperial heritage.
(They saw through that guff before the axe fell.)
Their longing turned to
the lost world glimpsed in the memory of letters:
an evening at the pictures in the friendly dark,
two knowing conspirators smiling and whispering secrets;
or else
a family gathering in the homely kitchen
with Mum so proud of her boys in uniform:
their thoughts trembled
between moments of estrangement, and ecstatic moments
of reconciliation: and their desire
crucified itself against the unutterable shadow of someone
whose photo was in their wallets.
Their death made his incision.

There were our own, there were the others.
Therefore, minding the great word of Glencoe’s
son, that we should not disfigure ourselves
with villainy of hatred; and seeing that all
have gone down like curs into anonymous silence,
I will bear witness for I knew the others.
Seeing that littoral and interior are alike indifferent
and the birds are drawn again to our welcoming north
why should I not sing them, the dead, the innocent?

Hamish Henderson

[Padraig]

Scots Wha Hae

Robert Bruce's address to his army, before the battle of Bannockburn.

Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has often led,
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to victorie.

Now's the day, and now's the hour;
See the front o' battle lour!
See approach proud Edward's power -
Chains and slaverie!

Wha will be a traitor knave?
Wha can fill a coward's grave?
Wha sae base as be a slave?
Let him turn and flee!

Wha for Scotland's King and law
Freedom's sword will strongly draw,
Freeman stand, or freeman fa'?
Let him follow me!

By oppression's woes and pains!
By your sons in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins
But they shall be free!

Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty's in every blow!
Let us do or die!

Robert Burns.

[Alain Maréchal]

I can remember learning that for speech delivery and projection whilst at drama school in the late 1960s. We had to concentrate on the onomatopoeia and the assonance and alliteration. And we had to deliver it very very rapidly without making a mistake! It was also very good for understanding the rhythms of speech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmCTfnNvafo&t=78s

[johncorrigan]

This poem by the recently deceased John Montague turned up on Poetry Please today. Sometimes I feel like doing it, though I'd add in something about the teeth.

There are Days

(for Lawrence Sullivan)


There are days when
one should be able
to pluck off one’s head
like a dented or worn
helmet, straight from
the nape and collarbone
(those crackling branches!)

and place it firmly down
in the bed of a flowing stream.
Clear, clean, chill currents
coursing and spuming through
the sour and stale compartments
of the brain, dimmed eardrums,
bleared eyesockets, filmed tongue.

And then set it back again
on the base of the shoulders:
well tamped down, of course,
the laved skin and mouth,
the marble of the eyes
rinsed and ready
for love; for prophecy?

John Montague

[Padraig]

I can't help thinking of a raging hangover John. Not that you would know about those.

PS I'm surprised you did not pick up on #416 seeing the day that was in it.

[johncorrigan]

I can't help thinking of a raging hangover John. Not that you would know about those.

PS I'm surprised you did not pick up on #416 seeing the day that was in it.

I was at a Burn's Supper, Padraig, up in the Village Hall on Saturday night. Mrs C was unconvinced that the so-called Veggie Haggis had never seen a bit of meat; I was unconvinced about the carnie haggis (Nae gushin' entrails here); the tatties were dry as bone, and the neeps mighty weet. The Band who of course rendered us wi' 'Scots Wha Hae' were dreadful and tune free; and to drive matters home, in a moment of weakness I had agreed to do without the drink for a few weeks, e'en though the whisky was flowin'. And for aw that, Padraig, me and Mrs C still managed to enjoy ourselves. One of the highlights was the Address to the Haggis delivered with panache and gusto by a local worthy, e'en though that particular so called chieftain o' the puddin' race didnae deserve it.

His knife see Rustic-labour dight,
An’ cut ye up wi’ ready slight,
Trenching your gushing entrails bright,
Like onie ditch;
And then, O what a glorious sight,
Warm-reekin, rich!

Is there that owre his French ragout,
Or olio that wad staw a sow,
Or fricassee wad mak her spew
Wi’ perfect sconner,
Looks down wi’ sneering, scornfu’ view
On sic a dinner?

(excerpts from 'Address to the Haggis' by Robert Burns)