A misreading (misprision)

Msprism

Not the cracking of the light

though that’s how it seemed at the time

our physics all unsettled

Oracular, you bounced

these golds, these blues, magenta

undreamt, that’s how it seemed

But it was my mis-taking, a chemical

not chimerical flux:

not the light breaking, an ordinary

error.

The sonnet

I fiddled about with the sonnet a bit earlier this year: at the time I was thinking of the sorts of sonneteering undertaken by Renaissance English poets, not so much in the specifics of the form but in the uses that it was put to - love lyrics competitively composed, not so much about love as mastery (of form, I mainly mean).  At the time I wrote a couple of unrhymed 14 liners on pornography, more or less in response to this thought - I'll attach one of them (probably best not read in the company of children, as pretty crude in more than the formal sense). 

 Of course, there's far more to the sonnet than this one note reaction, so in the also attached attempt I've made for class, I tried to stay roughly iambic, used the turn and stayed within shouting distance of traditional sonnet subject matter.  I did decide against rhyme (perhaps the villanelle used up my rhyming capacity for October...): I am very fond of the Armitage poem that Paul circulated, so in this, followed his lead.

It is an interesting question, how much of the form is required to retain the classification, though I think jettisoning one element in any outing does it no real injury.  It’s interesting that many of the contemporary versions I’ve looked at do employ some version of a rhyming scheme, at least a slanted one, though they often bear no relation to the traditional sonnet scheme – Paul Muldoon’s Moy Sand and Gravel springs to mind, but then I suppose tricking around with poetry’s parts is his modus operandi, regardless of the form under consideration.  I think in the end, as with other forms, that if it doesn’t have the elasticity required to carry a contemporary poetic impulse, then it’ll fade away except in the context of these sorts of exercises: part of the kit in the poet’s gym, as it were.


Here’s a two part blog on the sonnet I found while I was thinking about this, in case anyone’s interested:
http://www.robertpeake.com/archives/335-The-Trouble-With-Sonnets.html
http://www.robertpeake.com/archives/336-Tactics-For-Contemporary-Sonnets.html
And here’s the Dana Gioia sonnet that’s mentioned in the blog:
http://www.danagioia.net/poems/sundaynight.htm

Here's my sonnet for this week:

When you are a beekeeper

You come in cold from the garden, with rain

blistering your glasses, a blackening

coming under the greens and yellows left

in your wake.  You come in flaring, Autumn’s

rough wind ruddling your skin, drying your lips,

to trip over the traces of your life:

soiled bear, Duplo, discarded sweeping brush.

You come in damp,  prefiguring Winter -

but here’s the warmth of  your house to greet you,

and the space you’ve been clearing in your mind -

gravelled, fenced, softly humming - follows you

and is echoed by us, love, in the early-lit kitchen,

with shrieks, a kiss, tea-steam: your hands’ work like

the coming summer’s bee-song, and  honey.

And here's the earlier, cruder effort:

Pornography 1

The blonde has no name. Best that way. She eyes

the camera or does not eye it, eyed in all time zones,

nameless in every country: offers up a generic, her own

shaved cunt transformed.  Anybody’s.  She does not look directly

at anyone: eyes skate past, maybe to the clock behind you

in your crumpled room, where you are shaded, hunched.

She cannot hear you breathe. The blonde does not care

who you are. She is twenty, or sixteen, or thirty eight:

you do not care who she is, or how long she has been here.

Now she is stalled, cock in mouth, buffering:  if you were

a dentist, you would know that look.  Streaming again,

your breath not eased: it has a wet sound to it. From the screen,

grunts, off-timed: here, the men are machines,

doing work you cannot do with your own hands, for you.

Found poem

Fascinating thing to do - I used line breaks and punctuation to break down a short paragraph from one of the Sunday newspapers.  I'm not convinced it works as a poem but the malleability of the meaning of the same words in different relation to each other is instructive.

Here's the poem, followed by the source:

What happened on 27 October 1986?

What was open? Outcry. Unlike: so many

other types.

Of revolution, the big bang

was characterised by the disappearance of screaming.

Crowds. The practice of share-trading being.

Conducted: verbally. Face to face on one. Market.

Floor was replaced with computer and telephone.

Communications between dealing.

Rooms spread across the city.

An edit, since I failed to explain what I thought I was doing with this on Monday:  
I was interested in what happens when a completely impersonal piece of text like this is subjected to a semblance of the formatting of the modern lyric, the trajectory it takes towards the personal when rearranged in such fashion.   I think it catches, however imprecisely, the inter-personal element - perhaps failures - of the process of changing modes of interaction which the original text outlines, with its references to share-trading being, and the anomie of the spreading separateness of rooms.  Possibly it would work better if I subjected it to further modification rather than just re-punctuating and reformatting it, though.

The villanelle

Perhaps it’s because I am more familiar with Bishop’s breezy toned ‘One Art’ than any other villanelle, but I couldn’t really approach writing in the form in an entirely serious fashion.  I know the Bishop poem actually adumbrates a range of human sorrows, from the trivial to the unbearable, but it does so in an idiom of resilience which is almost cheerful: for me, this sticks to the form. 

On the other hand, its circularity makes it a great vehicle for looking at life’s intractabilities: it lends itself to the Sisyphean.  I thought it would be interesting to use the repetition to look at something repetitious, like most people’s experience of work; to be honest, the regular reiteration of particular lines, around and around, directly reminded me of my repeated failure to successfully circumnavigate  Dublin’s myriad roundabouts the last time I tried to learn to drive, and my deep sympathy for my driving instructor, who had to put up with that and similar on an hourly basis, every day…  Like all of these things, the trick is finding fairly adaptable end-words, words which echo through innumerable other words: it almost felt like cheating to use a word like ‘again’ as an end word, given that so many words in English end with that sound.

So here’s my villanelle:

Driving School Villanelle

Second gear, indicate, change lane:

halfway across, this one always stalls.

We go around the roundabout again.

Eleven o’clock’s old dear is all inane

chatter and jumping at mobile calls.

Second gear, indicate, change lane.

Fourth lesson, in the driving rain:

enthusiasm falters, interest palls.

We go around the roundabout again.

After lunch, jerking along, the strain

shows; time and traffic crawls.

Second gear, indicate, change lane.

Four o’clock: today’s last boy’s insane,

brake-shy, he swerves, he swears, he bawls.

We go around the roundabout again.

The Accident’s, I endlessly explain,

a discordance of timidity and balls.

Second gear, indicate, change lane:

we go around the roundabout again.

 

Pastoral 2

A few further comments:  I’m actually quite interested in the pastoral mode.  I think it can be used to explore the sorts of displacements that are inherent in contemporary life.  I’m posting a (kind of over-written, now that I think about it) poem I wrote earlier this year which to my mind functions at its core as a pastoral: it has, I think, that integral distancing which I think is arguably the  central method of pastoral, a division between the speaker’s vantage point and the natural phenomenon s/he’s ostensibly examining, where the poem’s ultimate focus is the vantage point.  This distancing is more eloquently demonstrated in the James Wright poem ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota’ (The Making of a Poem, p219) where the speaker identifies himself as separate from the landscape he observes, despairingly so, in the last line.

Certainly, where it is interesting, it is often for uses far more varied and often political than simply eulogising the natural world: it never was that simple a thing, even in its earliest Classical manifestations, which have a highly political, conservative bent as I understand it, as have later manifestations – Renaissance country house poems, for example, are pastorals which function to sustain the status quo.  Then there’s John Clare’s 19th century quite contrary use of the pastoral to bemoan the enclosure of the land, there’s the use it has been put to in a post-colonial context by poets like Derek Walcott and of course, in Irish twentieth century poetry: it’s more or less a default mode for Heaney, for example.  It is an efficient mode to use where questions of identity and place arise, of course, so it’s not surprising that Irish poets would have used it, even if they have often done so in quite an ‘anti-pastoral’ fashion (think Kavanagh’s ‘stony grey soil’). 

My own earlier effort:

What we know of the desert we learned from TV: elegy for the Saharan cheetah caught by a camera trap in the deserts of Termit, Niger, January 2011

Those wastes harbour part-ghosts, on night-japes both

serious and seldom, photographed once

or perhaps twice, staring baldly backwards. 

Here’s what the light caught: this flash-lit mirage. 

The desert stock flees. Till now there has been

only a Bedouin indication,

old drawings’ odd symmetries –  here at last,

the desert’s beast, its grey imperative

shadowed by scientists and for its

eco-audience, by the BBC.

A trade of cold nights, hot days we imagine,

the unrelenting grit.  We are prepared

for snakes curvate crossing the sands, we are

braced for tenebrous rattlings: scorpions,

insects.  But what the desert smells like and

whether it has bird song and what fabulous,

unexpected carnivores it flashes,

once, for the desk-bound and then not again, 

is fading, too lovely, kin to a curse.

Pastoral

In the poem I’m working on for this session, I’ve tried to incorporate a number of themes directly from the pastoral tradition – the shepherd, an indication of a rural idyll, a distance in the perspective which I’m hoping recalls the particular urban to rural gaze which has been a key perspective in pastoral through most of its history, an intimation of elegy and also the more contemporary concern of pastoral as it shades into eco-poetry. It’s based on a memory I have from when I was perhaps six or seven, of taking a herd of sheep to be dipped in what must have been a public sheep dip with my uncle and my father.  I think the practice must have been discontinued not that long afterwards, since it was basically a large concrete tank of organo-phosphates and I certainly remember in other years that the sheep were treated on the farm with some sort of (no doubt equally noxious) powder.

Here's the current draft (I'll circulate it by mail tomorrow in case that's easier for printing purposes):

Dipping the sheep

Summer, balmy: here’s a milk bath for the ewes,

phosphorescent under the horse chestnut trees.

We funnel them down the hill for this,

their grey blur of panic spilling into the margins,

the green ditches. Bird alarms answer sheep-shouting.

I sang and bounced all the way on the sun-softened tarmac,

near-English child loosed in a tunnel

of hawthorn, wild carrot, cloud-piled sky -

but kept well back from Rose, her teeth under that velvet lip:

a good dog for the sheep and my uncle, the brown cudgel,

emanation of tree roots and cow dung

who drives them into the concrete bath and wades after,

no way soft as a shepherd.

I stand under the horse chestnut trees holding my breath.

The ewes thrash through it, swim-jumping,

the whites of their eyes no whiter

than the fluid they’re trying not to choke in.

No maggots this season.  My uncle hauls them out,

gloveless. You won’t have maggots either

my father says, but he’s not smiling, well clear with the dog.

The blackening trunks of the horse chestnut trees

lean away from this roadside parlour.

Somewhere further up the hill, a magpie rattles.

 

26 words

Memento mori

After birth comes death.

Everything’s finite:

gravity, hope,

ill-considered jokes

kill

like malaria, napalm or polonium.

Quick-silver, relentless,

some terror,

undoing vigilance,

will

x-out your zen….

Ode

After last week's sestina, I find I don't have much of a taste for writing in too defined a form this week - no Pindarics here.  I though my subject wanted a fairly loose touch anyway - am hoping the run on from 'of' and the general listiness of the thing gives it a reasonable momentum - perhaps too much alliteration though, admittedly.

An ode I like - and I'm taking the ode now to mean a work honouring something, not a formal animal in even the irregular, Romantic sense - Matthew Dickman's 'Public Parks'