Category Archives: Poetry

for   25. 12. 2023

. Poetry, The seasons . ,

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They are out there and high up a long way from the electricity grid, the inspirations for the artificial indoor lights of this season. They are there just as art is — for art’s sake, and no reason we can discern by reasoning. The man-made tributes to them, no matter how ingenious and beautiful, look pointless when considered beside the originals — which can seem to demand that you acknowledge them, as Jupiter beaming into a kitchen window did in 2022 when it came closer to earth than it had for fifty-nine years and dwarfed the rest of the constellation ( top ). It was an irresistible presence in the night sky for months. Vital indoor tasks were dropped to make records of its nearness, and these went directly into a file of personal astronomical treasures which also contains a haiku-like poem for the eyes from earlier this year: a half-moon in a cloudless blue yonder ( scroll all the way down past the moon shining on ponderosa branches ). 

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If only Robert Frost were alive to ask why he singled out China for special mention in setting down a universal truism. (Was it a reference to Chinese philosophy?) In all other ways this poem below, better-suited to a snowless, warm, El Niño Christmas than any carol, is perfect. It is transcendent in spite of its author’s famous insistence on plainer, conversational versifying and in a different poem, preference for terra firma — ‘Earth’s the right place for love/ I don’t know where it is likely to go better.’

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On Looking Up By Chance At The Constellations

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You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much

To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud

And the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.

The sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch,

Nor strike out fire from each other nor crash out loud.

The planets seem to interfere in their curves —

But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.

We may as well go patiently on with our life,

And look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun

For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.

It is true the longest drought will end in rain,

The longest peace in China will end in strife.

Still it wouldn’t reward the watcher to stay awake

In hopes of seeing the calm of heaven break

On his particular time and personal sight.

That calm seems certainly safe to last to-night.

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HAPPY CHRISTMAS

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for 9. 4. 2023

. Artists, Poetry, The seasons . , ,

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The drawings above and below are by Susan Eales

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It should be of the pleasure of a poem to tell itself how it can.

                                         Robert Frost, 1939

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It is of the pleasure of this website to both make and point to superficially improbable links, or those that emerge only from extended mulling.

Here is a poem about the beauty in an inescapable great truth about the making of art. What it has in common with Easter is its appreciation of what matters most, and is acknowledged as such in so many world religions and folk tales. In the Christian tradition, the man on the cross said, in defending himself against that sentencing, ‘To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.’

Religion is not part of this site’s remit. Nor is it the subject of the gently wry, judo- and koan-like, but strictly secular poem by the Anglo-French poet Roy Eales. Yet his poem is written from that same preoccupation with the supremacy of what is both essential and true — in this case, about the purpose and meaning of the lives and work of artists. 

What are these worth? On the Indian subcontinent in the 1600s, the Moghul emperor Jehangir — who was also a consummate art-lover and collector, and a good writer — arranged for artists to receive regular wages roughly equivalent to the pay of soldiers. Unfortunately, he failed to start a trend. Connoisseurs of unlikely connections will want to know that the record of his admirable innovation was gleaned from following a mention in a finely wrought miniature essay on a financial news site, the other day, to a detailed explanation by Polyxeni Potter of the choice of cover art for a 2009 edition of Emerging Infectious Diseases.

‘The essence of a fine idea’ is taken from Roy’s latest collection of poems in Hazy mist on the sea, delicately illustrated by his wife Susan, an artist in her own right, and published this spring by Blackbird-Pawel Editions in a slender volume that looks and feels as if it grew out of a masterclass in exquisite bookmaking. In another expression of the dream of a culturally unified Europe, it includes English, Breton, French, German and Dutch versions of each poem. 

I am placing the English verses after their French rendering in this post because French is the language in which I believe they came to Roy, in the unaccountable way poetry does to all genuine poets. 

My ordering is a matter of sensing more or less music in an arrangement of words. What faculty decided the question? Citing the theories of the neurobiologist Antonio Damasio, the virtuoso Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim has pointed out that we perceive more finely with our ears than with our eyes. A foetus growing in a womb begins to listen forty-five days into a pregnancy, giving hearing a seven-and-a-half month edge over the development of vision. This, Barenboim says — without any bias, naturally — means that the ear is ‘probably the most intelligent organ the body has.’

If nothing else, that makes me wish I could say and not merely write to anyone reading here today or tomorrow:

H A P P Y    E A S T E R  

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L’essence d’une idée admirable

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La poésie n’est pas nécessaire.

Les idées sont essentielles.

La poésie représente les idées du poète.

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Peindre n’est ni utile ni nécessaire.

Les idées sont essentielles.

Les peintures représentent l’idée d’un peintre.

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La musique est abstraite et n’est pas nécessaire

sans paroles pour chanter l’idée du compositeur.

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Les idées sont essentielles.

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Faire des images avec des mots

revient au même

que d’étaler la peinture sur une toile

ou bien de coucher des notes de musique sur le papier.

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Seul, chaque processus n’est qu’un processus, une abstraction,

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dépouillée de l’essence

des idées de l’artiste, 

cachée pour enchanter, 

pour être dévoilée

par nos imaginations.

Les idées sont nécessaires.

Faire quelque chose qui n’est pas nécessaire est une admirable idée.

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The essence of a fine idea

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Poetry is quite unnecessary.

Ideas are the essence.

Poetry represents the poet’s ideas.

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The process of painting is neither useful nor necessary.

Ideas are the essence.

Paintings represent a painter’s idea.

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Music is abstract and quite unnecessary

without words to sing its composer’s idea.

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Ideas are the essence.

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Making pictures with words

is no different

than stroking paint on a canvas,

or penning musical notes on paper.

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Alone each is just a process quite abstract,

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bald without the essence

of the author’s ideas,

concealed to delight, 

to be unveiled,

by our imaginations.

Ideas are necessary.

To do something unnecessary is a fine idea.

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for 1. 1. 2019

. Poetry, The seasons . ,

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red truck, high room postgutenberg@gmail.com

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The Room above the Square

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The light in the window seemed perpetual
When you stayed in the high room for me;
It glowed above the trees through leaves
Like my certainty.

The light is fallen and you are hidden
In sunbright peninsulas of the sword:
Torn like leaves through Europe is the peace
That through us flowed.

Now I climb up alone to the high room
Above the darkened square
Where among stones and roots, the other
Peaceful lovers are.

– Stephen Spender (1909-1995), New Collected Poems

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(2) red truck, high room postgutenberg@gmail.com

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How is such a mystery to be explained. None of the details fit your circumstances, nor does the story to which they belong, yet the poem could not be better suited to your state.

There are bonuses. It softens the world’s unyielding — adamantine — edges, and reminds you of its magnificence. Rare as this is for blank verse, it plays in your inner ear as a melody.

H  A  P  P  Y    N  E  W    Y  E  A  R

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new year's day cactus 2019 postgutenberg@gmail.com

Why O hushed October morning mild … ?

. Poetry, The seasons . , , , ,

autumn leaves (2) 2018 postgutenberg@gmail.com

shadows on the grass postgutenberg@gmail.com

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October

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O hushed October morning mild,

Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;

Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,

Should waste them all.

The crows above the forest call;

Tomorrow they may form and go.

O hushed October morning mild,

Begin the hours of this day slow.

Make the day seem to us less brief.

Hearts not averse to being beguiled,

Beguile us in the way you know.

Release one leaf at break of day;

At noon release another leaf;

One from our trees, one far away.

Retard the sun with gentle mist;

Enchant the land with amethyst.

Slow, slow!

For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,

Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,

Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—

For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

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Robert Frost, A Boy’s Will, 1913

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With apologies to Robert Frost, who probably has no equal as a 20th-century nature poet writing in English, we confess that we have always thought that his tribute to October misses Olympian perfection by a hair’s breadth. What we see as a flaw is a single word, its first word, one letter long. Strapping a frilly bonnet onto a Degas ballerina would have a similar effect. In our frankly inexpert view, the first line scans perfectly well without this archaism. Somehow, it fails to irritate in its repetition in line six, so why not just let it be there?

In some biographical tome or critical exegesis we have no time to look for, there must be an explanation for why Frost chose to begin with ‘O’. Could he have set himself a test, in which he had to try to knock John Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ off its pedestal? Was it both an hommage — Frost’s love of the early Romantic poets is well known — and friendly competition?

Certainly for ears in our time, Frost’s is the greater poem because it is so lean and quirky — deeply felt yet flintily austere; and as true in every detail it observes as the strong, beautiful muscles in Degas’s balletomane bronzes. Nature serves the Keats verses as a backdrop for a passionate reverie. For Frost, it is at front and centre.

But it would be unfair for history — when the 20th century also seems much further away than it does now — to judge Frost to be the better poet, not just because each man wrote for a different era of literary conventions and taste, roughly a hundred years apart. Keats, who would die at 25, only a year after ‘To Autumn’ was published, was 23 when its lines came to him.  It would take a heart of stone to escape an excruciating twinge of sadness, reading or recording these facts. What he managed to accomplish in his firefly’s span certainly warrants his pegging as a young poet of genius.

By contrast, Frost was slow to make his mark as a poet, having ‘allied himself with no literary school or movement.’ He was on the verge of his fifth decade when his October poem appeared in his first collection, A Boy’s Will — which he had to publish himself, after years of having his work rejected by magazines.

Almost no one learns poetry by heart after school, but there must be lots of other people, we suspect, who committed it to memory as adults and recite it this month, year after year, feeling a shiver up the spine at the end of it.