Time theme

Thanks Fiona; very acute. Here is my Easter Sunday diary poem which is about time in a way (but aren't they all?). best wishes to all, James

FOR NOW

If the lack is constant

it is also at a remove

like this Easter haze

lightly marring a clear sky

Imminence has receded

to days of blandness and small treats

This will do for now

Still on the Time theme, written yesterday. Anyone else got one?

                               Being empty

on sun days and other

cast offs by holy obligation

I am at liberty to invent

my memory.

             That couple with baby

shaded in her pram,

      how the father holds the

         mother’s hand:

It is me who is loved,

                      their path is my past

  endowed with memory of her

   tired face, the way

she sits, silent in dawn

    breastfeeding

her cantankerous one

   and how he sees her in

       that beginning light

sees his own time in her

    profile,

         watches, aches.

November review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/10/sean-obrien-november-poetry-review

in case any one missed it ...

Patience

I

Will I know from the way his knuckle raps

on the old oak door, how the wood sings

in the August air as a mockingbird might

or how the Clark’s rubber sole of his boot

beats lightly on the stone step?

If the bell rings clear, he’ll rush the room

and catch me up in his grip, press my nest

to his stomach and kiss my hair, humming

into my forehead the first notes of a lullaby.

II

Mum stitched my blue dress from scraps

rolled and folded, wrapped in wax paper

and tucked between Sunday shoes

and an old oak box locked.

For the neck, she brought out a letter

with preaching tabs between the sheets.

Sister Anne’s austere print signed off

with love and blessings for Confirmation.

I wore the dress that Sunday ceremony,

my slim blue figure a stain in the aisle.

III

Imagine balloons rising from the palms of children

and pitching north on the tide, how easy they drift

without looking down at the bone-pale peaks

of the mountains. Imagine unlocking your box

of wishes. Watch them pull away at the wind’s

hand. Try not to mind where they land.

Last distraction for the day before I get down to some work: Michael's great poem about the Dorothys reminded me of one of mine which I set out below (published in the Interpreter's House a while back)

THE OLD DEARS

(Words in Retirement)

I was drifting through that neighbourhood

In visiting hours for the twilight ward

And thought I should drop in on Myriad.

Will you look at what the cat’s brought in!

She said from her pillows, newly thin.

Not that ill then, Myriad, I grinned.

Better than her, she sotto voce’d,

Nodding her flattened greasy head

At toothless Lest wheezing on the next bed,

And poor Mrs Fain died last Thursday:

She had no visitors, such a shame,

And no-one’s come to take her things away.

All those tests but they still don’t know what’s wrong;

If you ask me, they’re all charlatans.

They dump us here when we’ve lived too long.

Then came their offspring in a burly ruck,

Middle-aged and mostly out of work,

Written off as too telling or too abstract:

Unsafe Peter, worthless Tom, graceless Grace,

Joyless Joy, others I could not place,

Full of anger and self-righteousness -

Mes semblables; there but for the grace …

Better go. You’ll soon be right as rain,

I said, thinking She’ll not see home again

And singing Heigh ho defenceless old dears,

Valiant workhorses of yesteryear,

See-through skin and bare-eyed in the sere.

Can I ask a boring technical question? Is there a way of being alerted when there is a new entry on the blog or does one have to keep checking? Is that what being a "follower" does and how does one become such a thing? By the way please could the followers also tune in? it would be good to hear from them!

Best to all, James

Game

Room is my only measure
stanza of footsteps
my sole parameter

My decks of dust
filter the sunlight
fall in hands of dread

To see me is to hang
inside my frame
and you can never leave

Patience

The girl at the table has not yet revealed her hand.
Her attention is drawn to some other life
Of movement and shadow. Half of her face
Turns to an interior that I cannot enter.

Later,her self-possession is only outline,
A darkness dealt by memory;
The mannered shape of a wrist
Or her fingerprint marking my card.




(I have just realised that line 2 commits Sean's cardinal sin- "some...." and I have used a semi colon to further upset him)

'A Game of Patience' by Meredith Frampton

Here is the painting suggested by Sean O'Brien as part of our exploration of Time.

Glorious

I would certainly endorse Fiona's recommendation of Savage Detectives. Such energy over such a long book.

Here at her suggestion is Gloria. I suppose it's possible for someone savvier than me to post up the picture too. Looking forward to seeing more things here soon.

GLORIA

(after “A Game of Patience” by Meredith Frampton)

I’m not unused to being special,

an only child, now the mistress here

by the terms of my father’s will.

Still your news is unusual.

Are you sure you’ve come to the right address?

Did you ask for me up at the Hall?

All around is frank fertility

all sowing of seed and bringing forth;

I’m thought too good for the local gentry.

I shelter from the August sun

Laying out patience in the Temple of the Winds

While the estate work broils on.

One might enquire, if he wants a son,

Why he doesn’t get one as a man does

Or as a god would have done –

A swan or a bull could have brought me joy;

I would have relished their rough disrespect.

Instead he sent the errand boy.

Forgive me, that’s most impolite.

I have been preferred and my hauteurs

Must seem paltry in his sight.

I will do as the master wishes

I hereby choose to be his chosen

Frozen at acceptance she loses

her girlish future and her past

dies to her

Most feel it hard

to turn cards they did not deal

but not our Lady Gloria!

[Apocryphal envoi by estate workers:

Marie-Antoinette has had her cake

No more Pomona or playing Lady Bountiful

She’ll cancel her flight to Sharm el-Sheikh.]

Another list - Fiona's first post

'I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.'

So opens Roberto Bolano's novel, The Savage Detectives, which is the story of a twenty year search for a lost poet, possibly a bad one; it is never made clear. Our Ventenac capers repeatedly put me in mind of Bolano. Here's another bit chosen at random:

 'Have you written me my poem yet?' she said, sitting down beside me. Rosario has dark eyes, black, I'd say, and broad hips.
 'More or less,' I said, with an ever-so-slight feeling of triumph.
 'All right, then, read it to me.'
 'My poems are meant to be read, not spoken,' I said...
 'Exactly, so read it to me,' said Rosario.
 'What I mean is, it's better if you read it yourself.'
 'No, you'd better do it. If I read it myself, I probably won't understand it.'
  I chose one of my latest poems at random and read it to her.
 'I don't understand it,' said Rosario, 'but thank you anyway.'
                                                  *
I have to admit I have never contributed to one of these blogs before so if there are conventions or codes of behaviour then I apologise in advance if I do the wrong thing and I welcome advice.

The following are books and links that I mentioned to different people, Andrew, James, Michael I can remember asking about some of them, during the week. I am also curious about other sources mentioned so if anyone would like to post their reading list I'd really appreciate it. Here's mine:

GET THE FUCK BACK INTO THAT BURNING PLANE is by Lawrence Giffin (not Griffin as I said). Its a chapbook published by Ugly Duckling Presse, available on Amazon. There is an interesting recording of Giffin reading another of his pieces which links, I think, to Andrew's inventory poem. http://poetrytimearchive.org/archives/145 It takes a while for him to come onto the recording though - you can move the cursor forward about 10 quarks (or whatever they're called).

Interesting too is that on that poem Giffin mentions a work that links to James' Bubble bath poem. Giorgio Agamben's Infancy and History is by Verso 1993. It is a highfalutin' essay on language and the destruction of experience which looks carefully at the connections between play and time. Looking for the soul in toys, he asks, 'But what, then, is the essence of the toy?' It also has a brilliant riff on the meaning of football - 'in ball games we can discern the relics of the ritual representation of a myth in which the gods fought for possession of the sun.' He develops this idea into a metaphysics on time itself, showing in the etymology of Greek terms aion and chronos a split between two different, opposed notions of time - eternity and diachronic time. Lawrence Giffin's list poem sends him up rotten for this kind of stuff but it all seems spookily connected to our time in Ventenacland.

Another book dealing with phantasies about time is Jean Baudrillard's The System of Objects, Verso 1996, 'A cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society...a theoretical letter-in-a-bottle tossed into the ocean in 1968, which brilliantly communicates to us all the live ideas of the day. Basically, it's a semiotics of furniture.

Finally, my favourite book at the moment, Anne Carson's Eros The Bittersweet, 1998, Dalkey Archive Press. A book about romantic love and the invention of our alphabet, it starts with Sappho and is a beautiful meditation on the imagination.

Finally, finally, the best commentary on the credit crunch to come out of poor old Ireland: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljPFZrRD3J8

Welcome Ventenackers

Here is a site for any musings to come out of the recent Ventenac poetry workshops, 2011, given by the esteemed Sean O'Brien.

Authors discussed on the course and their book titles can be shared as well as details of forthcoming events. Threads can be developed and new ideas introduced. Nascent poems also can be aired. In fact anything at all that may be of interest to the wily Ventenac poets.

More soon,

Fiona.