Signs

Shadows of leaves

(post removed)

first draft -

Riensberger Cemetery Sculpture

The waterlilies flower yellow;

(post removed)

I've been tagged!

My most recent purchases of a book, a film, and a sound recording (with accompanying information)

1) Book - my last purchase was a chapbook, Lament of the Wanderer (an Anglo-Saxon elegiac poem) translated by Jane Holland (Heaventree Press, 2008). Not sure if chapbooks count so my last actual book purchase was my holiday reading Windabgeworfenes Licht by Dylan Thomas (Fischer Taschenbuch Press, 1992).

2) Film - Beowulf & Grendel (Starz Home Entertainment, 2007)

3) CD - not sure I can remember the last cd I bought! I think it was Yvonne Lyon's A Thousand Questions Why (2007)

I tag rachel, dave and swiss (because he gives nothing away, lol) - only if you want to, and anyone else who wants to also!

I apologise for being a boring blogger over the summer, I've got lots of notes for poems but the heart of them hasn't come to me yet. Sometimes I think too much and carry the weight of existence on my shoulders, it makes it impossible to write poems.
Looks like I didn't win the five grand Vital Synz poetry competition, that'll be the Baltic cruise out the window, lol! The poem I had entered into the competition I 'translated' into scots and entered it into The Herald McCash competition for scots verse! It's judged by scots Makar Edwin Morgan, I had a funny dream about him the other night!

I'm waiting on several probable rejections but the wait is driving me mad, how long should one wait before writing a 'hurry up' letter, three months, four months, longer?

Before I went on holiday I spent some time reading through James Owens' two fine poetry collections An Hour is the Doorway and Frost Lights a Thin Flame.

I don't know enough about the development of American poetry (as opposed to British, though I'm trying to read up on it) but I do know that in the broad spectrum of poetry I'm more attracted towards the strongly imagistic and that takes priority, for me, over straightforward narrative.

I don't feel the need to comprehend a poem to enjoy it, was it Pound that said a poem should be an event in itself not just the recording of an event. I look for a poem I can experience rather than read and empathise. I loved Plath's poetry long before I knew anything about her life or understood what a good number of her poems were about, for me they were an experience of words on the level of the senses.

I'm not at all saying Owens' poems don't employ narrative or are incomprehensible but that his poems are an experience on the level of the senses and that is what first and foremost attracts me to them. This kind of writing seems, to me, to be more prevalent in American poetry than UK poetry though the pamphlet I read recently by Andrew Philips was very much an experience of the senses in a similar way.

In Owens' collection An Hour is the Doorway there is a kind of Romanticist sense of the beauty of things which is always juxtaposed with the brutality of reality. In 'Movies about Anonymous Women' the scene is set of a woman in an 'ideal meadow' who swims in a stream with 'pearls of cool water clinging to her shoulders'. However, in a very anti-Romanticist ending her imagined lover does not come for her, she gets out of the water and 'bored, / she starts kicking the heads from flowers'. This ending image takes on a brutality beyond itself because of its juxtaposition with the setting up of the poem. The collection is full of startling images such as 'as if in the womb / you ate a match' (World) .

One of my favorite poems 'All-Night laundromat' performs the reverse of 'Movies about Anonymous Women' where the very unromantic, gritty setting of the laundromat is transformed into an Eden. I really love this poem where the whole world becomes the laundromat and the only people that exist are the narrator who is writing and a 'tired, middle-aged woman' who is 'loading her clothes'. I feel a kind of epic sadness for the writer and the middle-aged woman both alone in this laundromat at night, who do not speak, yet the writer states with almost Plathian pathos 'I am free', while the woman 'stares out the window / into herself'. There are so many levels in this poem one could spend hours over it. I love the image 'I could stay as calm and complete / as the monotonous machines'.
Overall these poems are generally very nature-orientated, observant of small detail, yet so much is happening beyond the scene they describe that each poem feels like a little life all of its own.

In Frost Lights a Thin Flame what strikes me from the first reading is the awareness the poems have about themselves as language, words, syntax manipulated into a poem. The very first poem titled 'Elegy for Speech' sets the tone of the poems to come where words become gnats swarming around the wounds of our mouths. Language, conscious of itself, becomes as real and concrete as nature. In 'Your Name in Early Autumn', words again become external, concrete objects where 'your name flutters / from the twigs of your fingers'. I found this approach to language in poetry rather fascinating having not come across it before apart from Plath's 'Words', or if I had I never really noticed.

There is so much more to these two collections than I have mentioned, in fact I'm not kidding when I say that an essay could be easily written on each individual poem. I thoroughly recommend both collections and know I'll be frequently dipping in and out of them

I'm back and had a great time - the beer was good, the cakes were even better, the people were friendly, spent a lot of time in gorgeous big parks with loads of giant oaks. In the last minute packing rush would you believe I forgot to pack my French poets, the only poetry book in english I could find was a bi-lingual german/english Dylan Thomas (Windabgeworfenes Licht) so instead of reading the French in Germany I was reading the Welsh! I always meant to pick up a Dylan Thomas at some point anyway.

I'm off to Bremen (North Germany) for a wee holiday next week with my husband, son and six French poets! My holiday reading arrived today from Amazon - Six French Poets of the Nighteenth-Century and the Collected Poems of Stephane Mallarme. Okay so maybe it would make more sense to read the Germans but I hope to pick up a couple of bi-lingual poetry books while I'm out there! Good rest, good food, good beer - hope to come back with good material for poems.

First draft of a bit of an experimental piece!


Voices from the Land

I
Hawthorns form a palisade,

(post removed)

My poem and audio recording are now up on Qarrtsiluni
here!

I recently ordered another Happenstance publication this time by the Scottish poet Andrew Philip. His chapbook Tonguefire is actually sold out on the website but Happenstance have brought out a sampler pamphlet of his poems which I ordered from the poet himself. The pamphlet contains nine pages worth of poems, five of which are devoted to his long poem, and title of his chapbook, Tonguefire.

Tonguefire is a rather strange and image-rich poem with a prophetic, almost visionary, feel to it. The poem takes us into the world of a guy named MacAdam, which I guess is a kind of universal man i.e son of Adam. He’s the kind of man who ‘buys firelighters and matches / cheap beer and lifestyle magazines’, who ‘…sits alone / in the dark with a single malt’ but who mysteriously finds in his compost heap ‘a baby made of glass’ and on his door step ‘a small, delicate book of songs / bound in white heather’, ‘MacAdam swallows the book of songs’. I enjoy the interchange of the odd scots word which appears throughout, for example where MacAdam holds the ‘bairn / in his guddle of arms’. I’m not entirely sure of the meaning of the poem, I’m guessing it has several meanings. The achievement here, for me, is the successful bringing together of the very ordinary with something very extraordinary, other-worldly.

The rest of the pamphlet consists of six further poems, heart-breakingly, about the loss of the poet's first-born son which, in all honesty, I find hard to read because of their subject-matter. In saying that, I’m very impressed with the level of control with which they are written and which makes them the powerful and hard-hitting poems that they are - ‘this is the hand that cradled your cold feet’ (Lullaby), ‘one was gone from us / and one had not yet come to us’ (Dream Family Holiday).
These poems are unlike most of the poems I read these days, there is something very different and at times uncomfortable about them which certainly makes them stand out and difficult to forget. All-in-all these are beautifully written, down-to-earth yet evocative of something supernatural.

I've been mulling over Ruth Pitter's 800 line poem Persephone in Hades recently.
Despite having studied Classics at uni I don't feel that Greek and Roman myths and legends are part of my personal cultural heritage (I preferred the history, architecture and philosophy side), maybe it's because I never got to study it at school where we did the Vikings instead and I feel more of an affinity with Viking mythology.

Anyway, I'm not particularly predisposed to modern poems about Greek mythology but something grabbed me in the section of Pitter's poem available on the Happenstance website where I purchased it.

This poem was first published for private circulation in 1931 (only 100 copies printed) and until now, has never been reprinted. It is prefaced by Helena Nelson ( editor of Happenstance) who doesn't shy from pointing out the archaic language employed by Pitter throughout the poem. Yet despite the subject-matter and, at times, archaic language, this is a beautiful and engaging piece of work.
This is no flowery retelling of an old myth but beautiful, dark and powerful writing.

Here's some of my favorite lines in the poem:

'What is love's counterpart? Answer, Love only'

'The chilly mist that drifted in from the sea / hung in her hair'

'The pale urns of the autumn crocuses / admired her feet'

'upon the sable air
a powdered silver hung, as when the moon
before she rises, sends a herald light
to gild the naked shoulder of the hill.'

'the trees / naked from winter, shining like golden wire'

'and the fire of love
confessed in spangles; then became a sea
carnation-crested, with a myriad waves
each moment in vermilion deeper dyed'

Silly Poem

So I'm struggling to write anything at the moment and that's always a good time to take up a challenge!

This blog challenges anyone to write a poem or short story based on the following statement: 'She was just frying an egg, when she expired!'

This is it in context from the blog -

"Many years ago I overheard an elderly and very genteel lady say, ‘She was just frying an egg, when she expired!’ She uttered these words in an accent which Scottish readers will know as either Kelvinside or Morningside and vous autres, just think ‘elderly genteel posh’."

Here's my effort:

Heart Failure

Imagine
her last breath
drawn above this shining hub

of marigold in a silver pan.
That she had cracked her last
was unknown to her

or the egg.
Yet the distance between
her heart and head,

in that moment,
was wider than all the eggs
in the known world.

And she had seen them all,
in this one yolk
forever flowering beneath her hand.

Gorbals Highrise explosion

Sorry nothing to do with poetry but there's something immensely therapeutic about watching these two Gorbals flats explode into dust!

I love browsing Poetry Archive - an archive of recordings of major poets reading their own work.

It's fascinating listening and I really like listening to Kathleen Jamie read - she's got a lovely voice and it's nice to have the affirmation of hearing a Scottish voice. Here she reads a beautiful poem called 'The Wishing Tree', it's really worth listening to.
I also love hearing Edwin Morgan read, his voice is very distinctive and once I've heard him read a poem I hear his voice in my head everytime I read that poem.
Unfortunately they don't have Kenneth White whom I heard at StAnza and whose voice sometimes pops into my head at any random point during the day!

The on-line literary magazine Qarrtsiluni (no I don't know how to pronounce it!) have accepted my poem Looking Beyond! Also they requested a sound file of me reading it so I read it into the microphone on my MP3 player and transferred it onto the computer. An interesting experience, I tried reading it a dozen times before I finally decided which one to send in! So keep an eye out on the website for my poem.



Black Tulips

The waxy strap leaves supplicate

(post removed)

I've just finished reading Janice Galloway's acclaimed novel The Trick is to Keep Breathing and I'm in two minds about it.

To give you an idea of what it's about here's a snippet from an Amazon review: "Galloway is writing in a long-established tradition of confessional fiction with mentally disturbed women at its centre". It's been compared with Plath's The Bell Jar which, surprisingly enough, I've yet to read.

'The Trick...' certainly was a good read, in fact I read it in a day. But the ending seemed a bit staid for me. Perhaps I was looking for a suicide or an otherwise dramatic turnabout. The lack of visual imagery didn't lend itself to me either, I think it was on Galloway's website that I read she just doesn't find the Scottish landscape inspiring.
The biggest problem for me was that I didn't warm to the protagonist which begs the question of whether it is necessary to like the main character in order to enjoy a novel.

I don't think it's necessary to like every part of the protagonist, I'm currently re-reading The Awakening and there's certainly a lot to point the finger at about the main character, Edna, but overall I have a fondness for her an a certain level empathy. With Galloway's protagonist, 'Joy', I had no sense of empathy and thus no sympathy for her either, I just didn't connect with her on any level.
As a side note, I'm also reading Virginia Woolf's
To The Lighthouse and pleasantly surprised to come across a character called 'Sorley' which is a novelty!

The Graveyard of the Sea

Through centuries of salt earth
the North Sea seeps

(post removed)

Whoopee!!

Grateful thanks to Rachel for spotting my poem in the Glasgow Herald's poem of the day today. What a nice surprise - sending husband out for a paper right now!!!!!!

Immigrant

Immigrant

1
Oceans drip
from her fingertips,

[post removed]

I've been walking around all day today feeling pretty pleased with myself as the latest Poetry Scotland, which had been overdue, finally came in today with my two poems in it - what a nice feeling! Then tonight I get an email to say I've had a poem (When I Became a Wave) accepted for the poetry webzine Snakeskin which you'll find here! I don't think I'll sleep tonight!

With one day left to go, well done to all those who napowrimo'd all through April!

Two weeks of it was more than enough for me! I did think about joining in for the last week or so but I'd lost the momentum with the circumstantial interruption and when I tried writing again I was boring myself senseless with what I was coming up with and didn't see the point in inflicting it on you.

However I'm more than pleased with the 14 poems I've now got to work on and the whole thing made me realise how much more I can squeeze out of a temporary muse if I force myself to.

Though I live in a beautiful place it's practically impossible for me to make it to any poetry readings. Living on a peninsula and not being able to drive means I'm dependant on ferries.
I'd love to go to The Great Grog poetry readings run by Rob MacKenzie which always has a good line up of poets but being held in Edinburgh in the evenings makes it impossible for me.
Also, even though I'm not really that far from Glasgow I can't even make it to the vitalsynz poetry readings because they are always held on a week night and there are no late ferries during the week. Tonight they have Andrew Greig speaking 'the unofficial Poet Laureate of the mountaineering community' whom I would have loved to have heard.

Going to StAnza 2008 really made me realise how important it is for my own writing to be part of the poetry scene beyond the computer screen. Unless they start holding poetry reading during daytime it looks like I'll need to learn to drive!