Poetry

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

New "Poetry Broadcasts and Documentaries" Thread

In response to Stanley's excellent suggestion, and to prevent this Thread from getting overloaded, I've started a new Thread on the "Radio 3 Arts" Forum specifically for discussion of broadcasts of Poetry documentaries and readings, whether on the BBC or elsewhere. The relevant posts originally appearing here have been moved there.

http://www.for3.org/forums/showthread.php?17782-Poetry-Broadcasts-and-Documentaries&p=642265

[Pulcinella]

In response to Stanley's excellent suggestion, and to prevent this Thread from getting overloaded, I've started a new Thread on the "Radio 3 Arts" Forum specifically for discussion of broadcasts of Poetry documentaries and readings, whether on the BBC or elsewhere. The relevant posts originally appearing here have been moved there.

http://www.for3.org/forums/showthrea...aries&p=642265

But perhaps not just Stanley and Pulcinella confused about what goes where.
Even french frank has now started a new thread (Nobel for Ishiguro) under Radio 3 Arts not General Arts!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

But perhaps not just Stanley and Pulcinella confused about what goes where.
Even french frank has now started a new thread (Nobel for Ishiguro) under Radio 3 Arts not General Arts!

In response to a R3 News feature, no doubt.

[un barbu]

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow over Balliol Hall --
As if the Cosmos were controlled
By Dr Jowett, after all.

Mgr R A Knox

[Padraig]

The State of the Prisons is a poem from a book of the same name.

Reading the Greats

Is it for their failures that I love them?
Ignoring the regulation of Selected Poems
with everything in that should be in -
all belted & buttoned & shining -
I opt instead for omnivorous Completes.
For their froth. Their spite. For avoidable mistakes:
Larkin on Empire, say, or Plath on Aunts.

The thrill of when they dip, trip up, run out
of things to write about before they start,
is the consolation of watching
a seascape suddenly drained and stinking
of flies & fishheads & bladderwrack.
And the tide impossibly distant. And no way back.
Yes, I love them for that.

Sinéad Morrissey The State of the Prisons 2005

[Joseph K]

A Pindaric Ode for Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn strikes much fear
Confuting lies the Tories hold dear
The Blairites too and the mainstream media
Whose barons couldn’t get much greedier.
It’s such a novelty –
He cares about poverty
And clamping down on tax avoiders –
That’s why the media embroiders
Such lies, but instead of more austerity
We need investment for prosperity.

Yet Blairites envy his success
And feed their lies to the right-wing press
Who print with glee mendacious rotten stories
Ignoring everything wrong with the Tories
And journos’ ugly smears
Tendentiously causing fears
That Corbyn’s friends with members of ISIS,
Would cause an economic crisis –
Turn England into a Marxist paradise
Though I admit for me that would entice.

Ignore this tedious traducement!
The fallacies from press inducement –
The bollocks spread by conservative hacks
So that their masters avoid paying tax.
For daring to oppose
The Tories, causing their woes
Corbyn will be prime minister!
And justice he’ll administer –
Redistributing funds to help the poor
He’ll bring an end to neoliberal law.

* * *

Tribute to John McLaughlin

The otherworldly moan of his guitar,
emitting dragon screams and feline sound,
conjures the rituals of a distant star
where infinite compassion and awe abound.
Surreal rainbows appear aching across
the sky, their dazzling sempiternal hues
bespeak a timeless realm, as glyphs emboss
grimoires with Mahavishnu’s music, whose
strains fall on every sense, the quivering
vibrato represents unknowable pleasure,
and arcane truths suffuse his shivering
bends, ushering the end of time we measure.
His rhythms bring such bliss for Terpsichore,
and yet his tones redound to worldly glory.

...

These are two of my favourite poems that I wrote over this summer. I wrote quite a few poems but have now stopped - fortunately IMO, I said a fair amount of what I had to say, and generally prefer to spend my time playing guitar.

[Padraig]

Some hard work there, JK. An ode AND a sonnet. Congratulations on mastering the forms.

Your Ode is a challenge to keeping not only the poetic rules, but also, in my opinion, the existing board rules regarding political discussion; therefore I shall refrain from further commenting on the poem. I am not, of course, in a position to rule on this matter, but I think it would be an excellent way round the bar on politics if members who wished could express themselves through the discipline of formal verse.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Hmm. I mainly wondered why Left-Wing ideals were being couched in such Conservative verse structures.

Some years ago, Hornspieler created a Thread for Forumistas to offer their own poetry - I'll see if I can find and resurrect it.

[Joseph K]

Some hard work there, JK. An ode AND a sonnet. Congratulations on mastering the forms.

Your Ode is a challenge to keeping not only the poetic rules, but also, in my opinion, the existing board rules regarding political discussion; therefore I shall refrain from further commenting on the poem. I am not, of course, in a position to rule on this matter, but I think it would be an excellent way round the bar on politics if members who wished could express themselves through the discipline of formal verse.

Thanks!

Yes that did cross my mind actually (about forum rules about not talking politics).

IMO Writing a Pindaric Ode (which, if anyone's curious, is based on Stephen Fry's rendition in his book on writing poetry, which itself is based on how the form is rendered in English by Ben Jonson) is an act which requires a certain objectivity, it's quite an intricate form. I also use a fair few anapaestic substitutions...

So, if I have annoyed any Tories out there, feel free to write some verse rebutting my Ode.

[un barbu]

Tales of a Grandfather

Like all the braves of Aberdeen, he joined
The 4th Battalion, Gordons.
Whose new gas
Blew back on them at Loos, and got stuck in,
And scorched the whole breathing apparatus.
Speaking by signs and 'faces' after that,
Married, he soldiered on for what was sent--
Four or five operations and a son.
Or that's the story. Maybe it glorifies
What then was a common pulmonary condition.

"He did write once--to the custodians
Of the new memorial, built by subscription,
Up in the castle grounds at Edinburgh,
Which logged the name of every serviceman
Of Scotland killed in the Great War--...
He wrote for those who'd lost their former lives
On active duty, but must die civilian.
They answered sympathetically, but stressed
How delicate the task would be to name
Surviving casualties among the dead."

So says my father--eighty now, who flew
'Ops' in the next-- a boy conceived in dread.

Mick Imlah

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

In her pre-concert talk with Sara Mohr-Pietsche, Canadian composer Linda Catlin Smith mentioned how, as a small child, she used to sit underneath the family piano whilst it was being played by her mother. It reminded me of this:

Piano

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

D H Lawrence.

[Padraig]

If you change to upright piano, and place it in another room...

What a wonderful poem. Thanks for reminding us, fgh, I had quite forgotten it.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Last evening's Choir & Organ ended with a setting of a Spike Milligan lyric, which I found wistfully delightful.

Alice in Wonderland would understand
A little Queen of Hearts like you.
But in my book it said: Off with his head!
And that's exactly what you'd do.

Indeed, I lost my head completely when
On the river one summer's day
All in the golden afternoon
We glided far away.

Oh, Alice, how I loved you.

The fairy cakes you made, the lemonade,
The funny stories that I told:
How Tweedle-Dum and Dee could not agree,
And Father William who was very old,
Mad Hatter on a spree, Doormouse dunked in the tea.
All of that day to me was gold.

We let the silent sand run though our hands,
The setting sun became a glow,
I recall, down the long years between.
Where did my Queen of Hearts go?

Alice in Wonderland,
Where are you now, my love?

[Padraig]

Last evening's Choir & Organ ended with a setting of a Spike Milligan lyric, which I found wistfully delightful.[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]

Ah, ferney, we're getting sentimental in our old age. I'm all for it. Spike could hit the spot.

[Lat-Literal]

In her pre-concert talk with Sara Mohr-Pietsche, Canadian composer Linda Catlin Smith mentioned how, as a small child, she used to sit underneath the family piano whilst it was being played by her mother. It reminded me of this:

Piano

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

D H Lawrence.

And this "takes me back" to English Literature at school.

Probably O'level although it could have been A'level - for I included it in the poetry anthology that amounted to 15% of the marks. I am quite vague about the other inclusions. The number of poetry books we had was rather small and so it couldn't all be as obscure as I would have liked. In desperation, I know I threw in "Daffodils" at the last moment which didn't do me any favours and, worse, one of my own clumsy attempts entitled "Ships That Pass in the Night". If lesson one is don't even try to place yourself on a level with the greats, even in the name of being original, lesson two is not to use a cliché as a title. I got 10 out of 15 and came in sixth of about fifteen when the reasonable expectation had been the top three.

There was also something by Ferlinghetti - I can't remember which one, "The Darkling Thrush", "Not Waving But Drowning" and "Spring and the Blind Children" which was possibly viewed in juxtaposition with the sound based "The Piano". Was there a song lyric too? I do hope not but there might well have been. What I can also recall is that we had to divide the poems into three sections of our choosing and write something of an explanation on each. Other people chose things like "war" "space" and "animals". Entirely intuitively I opted for "colour", "symbols" and "imagery" but, being totally out of my depth, gave myself headaches in trying to justify that choice. They all seemed to blend as I attempted distinctions.

The teacher who was also the assessor was of a certain kind. One who would admit that there was no chemistry whatsoever between him and the overly sensitive pupil but who would consistently mark him highly. Consequently, there was felt to be a distant sense of mutual respect. There were two of us in his class who rarely spoke in those days. We sat next to each other but never exchanged a word, even informally. The other who was later to become very vocal in a famous way had the surname Punt. He did, though, come across as more real.

I am struck by the sentimentality in my selections in regard to the passing of time in one so young. It was, I think, all a bit too much for Sir who marked us and genuinely hoped from me something that was more cutting edge in line with other writing. He was a blunt man of strong army leanings and a fruity humour with whom most felt a degree of incorporation. Many implied that he was in a same-sex relationship and laughed in what always seemed like a good way about that point. I never did know whether it was true or complete fabrication. If it were true it was only later - in the last ten years with google - that I discovered Noyes might not have been the best choice for him either. I still think he was an evocative poet.