Translation

Here's an excerpt from Mallarmé's 'Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard':

AS IF

                     An insinuation                        simple

                     in silence                                    rolled with irony

                                                                                                         or

                                                                                                         the mystery

                                                                                                         preceding

                                                                                                         howled

                   in some near                                  vortex of hilarity and horror

                   acrobatic                                        circling the void

                                                                                                         without scattering

                                                                                                                            or flight

                                                                             and dandling the virgin indication

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              AS IF

Free poem

Flammable

3am payload

from the interim

of index and middle finger

The white tube

murderous

smoulders, carpet bombing

You roll

in your sleep

smoked as the future comes

As firemen through

the neighbour’s yard

rubber handed, ungentle

Despite your

partial thickness

spirit succoured burning

Inspired by Paula Meehan's 'Six Sycamores' 2

The poem – or perhaps sequence of poems - that I’ve responded to  is ‘Six Sycamores’, which moves through the history of St Stephen’s Green, including, in Number Fifty-One, its pre-history.  I think in a way I’ve just reframed a certain ahistorical tendency in the use of the park which Meehan has already indicated in the wider poem.  I’ve followed the form, more or less, of The Sycamore’s Contract with the Citizens but to a much less resonant effect – I suppose unsurprising given the that the focus of what I’m doing operates explicitly on one, immediate level.  I’m not sure of the efficacy of using a sonnet to reject history, there’s a contradiction there, but Meehan’s sonnets in this sequence are so lovely, it would seem churlish not to acknowledge the formal dimension of what she’s doing.  (I am interested to ask her about her use of form, here and elsewhere).

Inspired by Paula Meehan's 'Six Sycamores'

Stephen’s Green

Trees don’t care about these strictures

least of all the sycamore, the weed tree:

it strews its seeds across planners’ pictures

of tidy flower beds, of green formality.

And the people don’t care, spilling cans,

stubbing out their fags on the statues,

pissing, in passing, in the bandstands:

their park’s in no part home to virtues.

There’s no regard either for the ducks,

those defecators at the water’s edge:

the wildlife here doesn’t give two fucks,

duck-spattering you right off your sandwich.

Not history, nor ordinances, nor metaphors:

forgotten initials and entwinements, under sycamores.

Blank verse

Perhaps we are less verbose, now:  voluble, yes, but in shorter bursts.  I know that I look at the almost always extensive regularity of works written in blank verse, and my heart sinks, slightly.  The more turgid moments of the 19th century come to mind.   And this is a very odd association, given the form’s history, swathes of Shakespeare, all that drama.  But what I think of, to be honest, is Wordsworth, of struggling through the Prelude…  Oddly, in one way I think it’s a visual difficulty that I have with it - those long, regular towers of text – there seems no reasonable way to access them. 

So my own foray into blank verse is only 16 lines: not too exhausting.  I wrote a sort of an obituary to my cat, put to sleep this week.    I thought that the roominess of pentameter would afford space for the sort of descriptive tribute an obituary calls for, even if the achievements of a cat couldn’t stretch it to any great length.  I did my best with the meter, I think it’s more or less iambic.  Here it is:

Obituary

There’s no black cat now at the back window

shouting displeasure at failing doormen,

the vagaries of rain. No more scrape of

claws down the frame.  At last, she has no need

for cushions, laps, for fragments of tuna.

All gloss, a model type, she soothed no-one.

She brought no ambience, she was sullen

as unlit coal. She was a pitch, witching

complaint, fishwife among felines, Hammer

Horror perfect, come perpetually

to stay.  Always standoffish, she kept her

hurts interior: to the end still chased

shed leaves, like mice she could no longer catch. 

Our familiar, never lovable - 

and now she is a black gap at the door,

a silence on the morning’s window sill.

Doorbell journal

Doorbell Journal, Monday to Friday

Hallowe’en

11.34 Danielle, without keys

14.37 Kate, Paul and Karen: one witch, one cowgirl, one man with a beard

18.14 Alice, Marianne, Oscar, Maisie and Ben: witches and skeletons, politely taking one pack of sweets each.

18.29 Two boys: one pirate, one ghost, grabby hands.

18.38 Three children aged about ten: one witch, 2 indeterminate but with white painted faces.  The sweet tin looks bereft.

18.45 Eva and her friend, and Caroline: witches and a ballerina. A polite conversation about Michael running the Dublin City Marathon. 4 hours plus a bit.

19.02 A man touting for a paving company, out weirdly late. Not offered sweets. Paving declined.

19.18 More boys, under ten. Pirates and whatnot.  Remaining sweets plundered.

20.04 Two last boys.  No more fun-size Crunchies.

1st November

11.37 The postman, with some books.

13.04 Another postman, with a plastic wrapped parcel containing running shoes.

2nd November

10.18   Kate and Karen, to play.

14.23 Danielle, no keys.

20.14 Dog’s Trust collector in hi-vis vest.  He’s soaking wet.

3rd November

14.39 My mother, with coconut cake

4th November

11.46 Postman, with a box of children’s toys.  No ungainly pregnant dashes to the shops in the offing. 

13.14 Danielle and Catherine, cold from the bike.

18.16 Me.

Open forms

Open form: I found myself a little at sea, which certainly clarifies the uses of traditional forms – there may be a limit to what you can do with a sestina, but that limit can be fruitful.  I sought a theme, as Yeats has it: the wide open nature of the open form – everything else, as it is – in suggesting everything, suggests nothing as well.  On the other hand, there are, as is pointed out, resonant engagements with the fragmentary remains of form in the anthologised works.   The example of the rag and bone shop is apposite; a form-to-function thing, admirable.  Because he hasn’t entirely deserted traditional scaffoldings, but here they are adapted, a bit shopworn, metre and stanzas but stretched, an engagement in form with questions of form. 


The anthologized poems are, in fact, a serious selection, as though this sort of engagement, this interrogation of the structure of the poem, proceeds in tandem with wider interrogations, large themes. 
It is interesting that so many of the North American poets here write poems addressed directly to America.  Why does an open form lend itself to such address?  Or maybe, why don't more traditional forms?  Why America? Because America represents a break with the old order?  I can't, in all seriousness, address myself to the aul' sod in these terms.  I suppose a long disturbing history of personification to some violent end makes one a little dubious about that sort of formatting. But I thought in the light of these models and that of the national circumstance, that this week’s endeavour should at least skirt around the serious.

And in my mind was another of Wallace Stevens' poems, which fits the brief – a serious piece of work about empty rituals, ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream.’ In terms of form, I like Stevens' recourse to rhyme towards the end (in the ‘dead’ section of the poem).  Ice-creams - I think you can barely use the word, really, without invoking the Stevens' poem - presidents and the shockingly supine, albeit anxious, response of the Irish public to our current travails: these blended.  Waiting for a bus suggested itself, the powerlessness of the public transport user.   Here’s the current draft, still a long way from anything it should be:

The Irish for Ice-Cream

Nine presidents on: the office seems exhausted as the woman at the bus stop who would trade her gas bill for a Cornetto.

Soon it’ll rain.  Our electoral errand melts from memory: ice-creamish, preceding 

a sugar crash.

Nauseous, we’re waiting at this bus stop and all that’s passed has been an ice-cream van on its way home from the Park. 

There’s any number of us waiting, we are exhaling visible air while the ice-cream van still jangles though it’s done with sales for today.

Here’s the rain, sooner than any transport.  We forget Magnums, we forget Orange Splits, waiting in wet furrows for the oncoming

bus.