Is the poet essentially vagrant?

I've been reading George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London for comfort in these gloomy, doomy times. The parallels between poets and tramps struck me - idle wanderings being the primary occupation of both; absence of wages the shared predicament. The Irish tradition has a strong itinerant identification. I thought of Beckett's tramps and then Patrick Kavanagh's Memory of my Father, a favourite poem at school.

Every old man I see
Reminds me of my father
When he had fallen in love with death
One time when sheaves were gathered.

That man I saw in Gardner Street
Stumble on the kerb was one,
He stared at me half-eyed,
I might have been his son.

And I remember the musician
Faltering over his fiddle
In Bayswater, London,
He too set me a riddle.

Every old man I see
In October-coloured weather
Seems to say to me:
'I was once your father.'

Kavanagh's sentiment may evoke a Christian sensibility but an earlier bardic poet, David O' Bruadair, who fell to tramping (thanks to the Cromwellian invasions) packs more of a punch:

Our priests are scarred with
      greed and pride,
and all our poets are cut down
      to size:
but worst of all I realise
that no one poor is considered
    wise.

Blast you, world, you sneaky
     bitch
may our guts and liver in
     agony split!
What's it to you if I become
     rich?
What's it to you if your children
    slip?

The once-proud men of this land
    have swapped
giving for gaining, music for
   crap:
no tunes on the pipes, no music
   on harps -
We ourselves have buried the
   summer at last.

 Written by a tramp in Ireland around 1690 and resonant today as I travel on the Central line beneath the City of London.

 

Great to hear from you Fiona. Where has everyone gone? Maybe, as in James's poem, fallen in amongst lotus-eaters? I shall post something longer soon.

Ashok

Come on, Venteknackers!

Perhaps a certain autumnal mouldering is creeping over us as the bright poets of summer are gently lowered towards their wintry shallow hibernation (like polar bears).

And is it any wonder if we lose heart in these days of Mammon?

Still, there is always the sweet pleasure of reading. This summer my favourite moments were spent reading Anne Carson's Eros The Bittersweet, a book about romantic love beginning with an interpretation of Sappho's famous fragment 31.

Fragment 105 seems right for the season:

As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch,
high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot -
well, no they didn't forget - were not able to reach...

I also loved reading a book found by chance, remaindered in a Kerry pound shop; a recent biography of James Joyce by Edna O'Brien (Irish Independent). The beauty of this book comes from a great writer's particular insight on and recognition of the true artist's necessary ruthlessness and also its price. 'His exile was so complete within himself that interruption could not endanger it, only time could do that. Time in which he would begin his ''book of the dark'', Finnegans Wake, a book in which people were not only people, they were as well rivers, bushes, mounds, boundless embodiments of Irish mythological figures, human longings, human impulses caught in an archetypal sweep. New words, phantasmagoric words ''breathing in upon his breaking brain''. 

What books were other Venteknackers reading this summer I wonder? After the long silence let's share.

And what were we all writing? I was working on an interminable novel. My one poetic effort was this:

Wren in the Holly bushes

spoon spill of song from a Silver Birch,

        crow passages cloud tumble across blue,

throb of a harvester somewhere

        caught by a breeze at the edge of wind,

and the river on my side,

washing all away,

washing all away.

I'd love to hear from you. Fiona

The end of the Plane trees

In the Guardian this week: an article about how within a few years all the beautiful trees we saw on the Canal Du Midi will be gone-decimated by a disease apparently.

I have not been writing I'm afraid. Not been feeling too good of late.

Love to all

Gala Concert in London Wednesday 20th July

Concert in aid of the London Schools Symphony Orchestra. Fiona's daughter, Eorann is organising this event and is offering a FREE glass of wine or champagne for every Ventenacker and guest who would like to come.

For more info click the link below:

https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1r2IhjNUHFxBuO6dieHMkWYv_hM1zH-Yf0TZ-ExkRy3E/edit?hl=en_US&pli=1

Free poetry fun at the Barbican

http://www.barbican.org.uk/education/event-detail.asp?id=12446&utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=CCED140711&utm_content=ChildrenandFamily_140711

shambles at Poetry Soc: are we bovvered?

http://displacement-poetry.blogspot.com/2011/06/poetry-society-and-organisational.html