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This
is not for everyone. What is? You will find it
helpful if you have an intelligent sense of humour and at least
half a belief that an interpretation of life, the universe and
everything can be had from reading poets as well as
scientists, philosophers and theologians. A streak
of scepticism helps. Glance at some of the extracts below
and you will know if you wish to go further.
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Abbreviations
v(v).= verse(s)
l(l).= line(s)
pt.=part
para(s).=paragraph(s)
Layout
of source
after each item:
SECTION
(top)––Poem,
verse |
At
the head of each extract there are three words which allude to
some of the themes in the extract.
These are not necessarily major to the poem or note from
which the extract is drawn.
Nonetheless, these themes, and others, are major within The
Nature of Things as a whole. |
Memory.
Records. Games.
I know that all maps
lie. Not marked,
the raft
we hid beneath the alders by the dump
where we stole secret Bibles and pram
springs….
MAPS
(top)––Maps,
v.3 |
On
Night Walks.
The original ‘Hermetic literature’ (circa 50–300
AD) in Greek and Latin covered philosophy, theology, the occult,
alchemy and astrology. The
English ‘hermetic’ and the Italian ‘ermetico’
both came to refer to ancient lore, especially alchemy,
and also to anything sealed, mysterious, cryptic.
So the purified image was also a code to be deciphered.
(top) |
On
Gang War. Another
fishing trip into things past.
Kids in war zones play war games.
At the time of writing, refugee children were doing it in
the Balkans; in Africa ten-year-olds didn’t just play: like
dogs sent to tear out throats, to step on mines, they engaged.
An evacuee, I had lodgings to retire to.
The scene: Bishop's Waltham, Hampshire.
War was fantasy. Cowboy
films were real. (top) |
Pariah.
Muddle. Death.
A
junk-fest behind the library!
Cassettes, clothes, curtains, huddle
in trays.
Wasps buzz bananas, the air drizzles.
A dosser dies, a girl aged fifteen.
PEASANT MOON
(top)––Death
in the Morning, v.1 |
Childhood.
Love. Perception.
Stunned by his own created world,
the babe’s surprise is justified;
and so (her arm about him curled)
is her unfazed, seraphic pride.
GRANDMOTHER AND CHILD
––Grandmother
and Child, v.3
(top) |
Analogy.
Metaphysics.
Incomprehension.
Change metaphor.
The All’s a Möbius
or torus skein of gut wound differently
every time round, and in the midmost
layer
there is a knot of gut, and in it: we,
quite
round the twist.
THE NATURE OF THINGS
(top)––De
Rerum Natura, pt.3 v.1 |
On
Chimes. One
admires a fable, like ‘He rose again on the third day’, but
not a Divine Chemist who’s out of his skull.
If the world is not intelligible in principle, what else
but Nature’s ‘insanity’ is responsible?
All right, equating the incomprehensible with insanity is
wrong, a category error, but you might get my drift anyway.
(top) |
On
The Devil and the Devil.
I must have had in mind some vague notion of the history
of Satan in Zoroastrianism.
I could have told you that this creed in ancient Persia
(BC) saw the universe as a place of struggle between a figure of
Darkness and a figure of Light.
That was all I knew and needed.
Dualism. A
split in the universe. However,
the title and the last line speak in terms of a twin-darkness,
not of a Zoroastrian Darkness and Light. (top) |
War.
Pain. Displacement.
Born as a refugee
from fire and bayonet,
my mouth a cellar of smoke,
my father’s worst fear yet,
THE DEVIL AND THE DEVIL
(top)––Balkan
Sacrifice, v.1 |
Time.
Judgment. Decay.
But
years will change, new
colours
will seep in:
the
earth look dull as grout.
The sun will seem to
smoke
like paraffin.
Umpires
will jerk about.
The roof will creak, no one know
what we’ve been;
and
soon we’re really out.
THE KISS
(top)––Prepared,
v.5 |
History.
Vocation. Naming.
Cathedral
and museum have reinforced
the shapes men have to fit.
The
experts name
a way that diode, ogive, hypocaust,
lex, missal, medicine, may
form a game
where men have parts.
As such this
sport is tame,
making toy boats run random in a pool.
Hobbyists do not care, though,
as
a rule.
THE MENTAL TRAVELLER
(top)–––The Hobbyists,
v.4 |
On
Peasant Moon.
‘The one which would efface the many’: there is an
ancient and unresolved problem as to whether ultimately
everything is a One or a Many.
The matter is to be pursued by looking into what has been
written about monism and pluralism. To William James, who
inclined towards the importance of multiplicity, the puzzle
about whether everything is ultimately a One or a Many was
‘the most central of all philosophical problems’, holding
that our view on this subject determines our thinking about many
other philosophical problems. I’m inclined to believe, without sufficient argument, I
might add, that in a Zen-like way Nature is both.
In this poem I see the One-aspect as crushingly inimical
towards the Many-aspect, and more especially towards the many
tiny spurts of insignificant selfness, i.e. consciousness.
(top) |
On
The Red Poem.
The dolphin was sacred to Apollo, who in the Neitzschean
interpretation stands for lucid detachment.
I don’t know if Rilke meant his Venus to be seeded and
seeding (both sexes in one), or if to him the Apollonian
preceded the Venereal—the Idea creating Creation.
But I’ve assumed here some such poetic logic or
association of ideas. A
wash of ideas in the mind produces a statement.
This is obviously the case, though ‘wash’ and
‘mind’ are metaphors for what I for one do not yet well
understand. (top) |
Oddness.
Stillness. Industry.
Across the land,
reclaimed, a telescope
makes out, this side, sheep.
Across
the river
no common magnifying picks a shape
of any creature, although one gathers
there must be shifts, and crews inside
those ships.
THE CLIFF HOUSE
(top)––Depot,
v.3 |
Corporeality.
Values. Angst.
The
sun-moon reflection is
a solid column, a pine log.
The pine
the totem of this high-class household
of incoherent anguish.
THE WINDOWS
(top)––Edvard
Munch, v.6 |
Fortitude.
Work. Climate.
After
fractured stone, loose scree,
tree-line shelters,
gainly in hailstorms and in
the
branding heat,
he paused, reviving his lungs,
then strode on by cairns, by ruts; ...
PORT ISAAC
(top)––Lunacy,
pt.3 |
On
The Spirit of the Air.
This followed the hurricane of 1987 which most people
thought unprecedented, then weather experts informed us that
winds on this scale struck about every three hundred years.
Nothing to do with global warming.
The tone, rhythm and rhyming are all jocular, of course,
though the theme of us against Nature isn’t.
(top) |
On
Grwyne Fawr
Reservoir.
It reminded me of all the things in the universe which
are never perceived or felt, that is, most of it.
When we think of all the many scales at which things
could theoretically be examined, we know that what is seen, even
if there are many sorts of intelligence out there, must be a
truly negligible part of Nature.
(top) |
Senses.
Instance. Rules.
I’ll not forget
you two hours old,
all of us quitting the birth ward.
Not a nurse
in the night-wide corridor,
all of us lumbered.
…
I’ll not forget
your smell of now,
our promise bundle.
…
we were disobeying the rules!
BERTRAM’S
WAY
(top)–Your
Smell of Now, vv.1,2,6,8 |
Knowledge.
Nature. Successors.
All knowledge is
carnal, no cause lasts
sixty years, a sealed wine dries.
Nature,
they say your beauty is in my mind.
Come the next City they will dispense
with us entirely, both.
GLAMSIGHT
(top)––An
Age Turns, ll.5–9 |
Insects.
Cruelty.
Study.
I expose them from my
black top hat:
one at a time. A
sooty spider
as convulsive as a rabbit, fat
in woozy derricks, drunk on cider
from bluebottles
sipped on the sly.
Here, children, under cover, put this
in your jail jar.
THE
PAIN OF HELENA NAGEL
(top)––The
Conjurer, vv.2–3 |
On
The
Hobbyists.
Poetry isn’t a job or a vocation.
If it doesn’t earn one enough to live on it’s no job.
If a poet is not appointed by his or her nature to
sacrifice all for the craft, it’s not a calling either.
True, a few seem to be called; and a few earn money from
poetry, if we include activities like public readings,
reviewing, contributing to workshops. I’d like not to include other full-time work, even teaching
and writing novels: these steal too much time.
But good and even great poets do have non-poetry jobs.
However, for my own part, earning a living has made me
feel that poetry is a hobby, not employment. (top) |
On
Kosovo 1999.
‘Never was there such slaughter in these Islands’—The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle concerning events after AD 449.
Earlier, the revenge of Boadicea (Boudicca) against the
Romans had been better documented by the Roman historians
Cornelius Tacitus and Dio Cassius.
The mythical tales around the Romano-British stand,
possibly led by a Celtic Artorius (Arthur) against the invading
English of the 6th century, became extensive and
elaborate, and by the 12th century Arthur had become
a national hero to the English themselves.
Hence my terrible but true assertion that ‘some
genocides succeed’. (top) |
Females.
Wit.
Longing.
Where
are the girls of yesteryear
Who rang me round from ear to ear?
Where Moll Flanders, the clever dear,
where Griselda’s uninjured air,
where Florence (her swabs were
regular),
Nell Gwyn, soft-centred Marjorie,
M. Curie and Eva Braun, oh where?
You rode the footlights, caused a stir.
What happens to electricity?
ELEKTRA
(top)––Envoi,
v.2 |
Water.
Mourning. Apocalypse.
These half-lights may
soon be over
the sky is at last allowing its purple
to glare on the horizon
sails go by
lick the wind make smacking noises
an earth-light howls in the grass
there have been many victims
a dinghy chained by its nets
the town in the marshes is fading into
itself
nobody is there any more
in the far sky a yellow bird
is freeing its cry
the boats are all heading that way
THE BLOOD RULES
(top)––Light,
pt.4 |
Herbals.
Betrayal.
Revenge.
Against
catastrophe.
Take Wild
Angelica, True-love, Summerlocks,
Sweethearts, Sungreen and Traveller’s
Ease.
Chop fine,
hash with Kisses and Keys of Heaven,
Lady-never-fade and Lily-royal.
Leave them to dry in memory’s sun,
along with Chit-chat,
Confetti and Baby’s Rattle.
Add water
and simmer with
Morning Glory, My Lady’s Lace,
Bunny Rabbit and Sleepyhead.
Then, biting your lip, fling Spindlewood
in, Love-links Snow Toss, Cuckold.
Tasting blood, mash in with White
Robin and Remember-me.
TA HES VISITS HER TOMB
(top)––Charm,
pt.1 |
On
Love Story, pt. 3.
The fact that he calls her ‘dear dunce’ and a
‘vulgarian’, amazed that her ‘stupid eyes’ can
blissfully illuminate the bed they wallow in, should not be
ignored. She is
also a ‘little rich girl’ whom he patronises because she is
more devoted to him than he to her.
In the scenarios for Parts 1 and 2, I offered the types
of encounter which could have sourced those sections.
Here is a good point to dwell on the whole as one story.
Reflect on the history of love poetry: how much of it is
about men lamenting that their love is not requited!
When we get to the 1960s here am I, depicting a woman not
having her love returned. And
I’m being honest about the nature of male grazing.
To him, freebooting infidelity is amusing.
(top) |
From
Hypernotes. (The numbers come from the book's
endnotes. They are not of course necessary in a
hyperlinked web site)
(39)
Inspired by Max Ernst’s The Forest.
(40)
Inspired by Turner’s The Parting of Hero and Leander.
(41)
To most eyes Solpugids (now Solifugae, formerly Solpugida),
pronounced ‘sol-pyew-jids’ and also called Sun
Spiders, Camel Spiders and Wind Scorpions, are swift,
golden, desert arachnids, up to two inches long, with humped
heads and big, hairy, large-fanged appendages.
If you’re curious about naming by categories and
difference, take a look at the history of spider taxonomy.
It has not been easy.
The Athropoda phylum contains the Arachnid class,
which contains the Araneida (spider) order (as well as
the scorpion, mite, tick and solifuga—my solpugid—orders);
one of the spider sub-orders is Labidognatha, which contains the wolf spider Lycosidae family, which
contains the Lycosa genus, which contains species
with large bodies such as the tarantula (Lycosa tarentula).(top) |
Eroticism.
Redemption.
Myth.
Naked
she stepped, tall and supple, her breasts like auriferous pears.
Her hair was a red Devonian loam muted to the oxide
towers of Utah’s eroded canyons. It fell round her tilting
haunches as if the notched spine, the spool of life, were the
only truly erotic thing that must be concealed.
While in front her hair fell helically round the
infinitely studiable, gritty areolae and dugs whose seminal milk
was fuel more for the hard lips of the plagued and scrofulous
than for hardy nurslings.
She was in fact overdue on Terror.
Two predominant life-forms, Gammas and Thetas, had for untold
loops of their two suns grown to knowledge together.
The Gammas were like manx iguanas, but more erect,
more handsome.
The Thetas were large ants, broad of thorax,
metallic-fingered, the nether abdomen a small residual node.
PULP POEMS
(top)––Wych
Hazel, paras.11–13 |
Country.
Churches. Schopenhauer.
Behind
the barn, half-barn-size and
half-seen
between yew crops, it stands low in its
graves. Stone cherubs, blind with time’s
gangrene,
struggle to feed to bones earth still
depraves with nervous roots and slimes
the Hampshire scene, the well-
heeled
lane
contenting beefy families still.
Over the cringing dead behind the times:
Up Marden church—the charged and
empty Will.
EROS
AND THANATOS
(top)––Genesis
at Up Marden, v.1 |
On
Clown.
The lakes which the infant clown balances like plates at
the top of two wands are the lakes of good and evil.
The lake of good exists only in our dreams.
This, the ‘pellucid lake’ of utopias, is not in the
awake world available except via myths and similar imaginings.
The soapy tarn of mundane evils is all too familiar.
On
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