ACROSS HAMPSTEAD HEATH: Keats' 200th anniversary

For the 200th anniversary of John Keats' death, I've unearthed a long-lost poem (of mine, not his) I committed way back when & prompted a little essay about the day I wrote it & more since then. I'll reprint the poem below, but if you want to know the story behind its writing in 1972, and about Keats' and my relationship, you can get the full package over at Medium. Use this friends link, and you'll get have access to it even if you don't subscribe to Medium. 

 

ACROSS HAMPSTEAD HEATH

He measured the room with a fury of pacing;

It shrunk, more confining, with each angry stride.

His eyes at the window through dim glass were tracing

The flight of a swallow, its leisurely glide.

But he felt no leisure; he was bound to his writing,

And each unfinished line made his solitude worse.

His muse was his torture, each thought fled him fighting

Against being committed to the prison of verse.

Just to be one with nature, footsteps drowning his cry

But the swallow had hidden, in some corner of sky.

Darkened clouds passed him quickly; the words came and went,

He failed to grasp them with his weakening eye,

And could not now write them; his pen gone bone dry.

Words flown away wasted; the energy spent.

URSA MAJOR DANCES: A POEM

Lockdowns appear to induce looking back. I wrote this poem in August and September of 1978, and it was published forty years ago in my first small collection, Winter Lovers, by Bran's Head Press in Somerset, 1981. I was reminded of it by a letter I received recently, saying it was a shame I had not pursued my poetry. I never gave it up, of course, and I have been recently trying to see if it has given up on me, but in memory of those optimistic days, here it is. It was one of the two poems in Winter Lovers not previously published in magazines. With one very small change from the original...

 

URSA MAJOR DANCES

she spins

beneath

stars

looks up

about to

be-

come a

dream, bear

soft

shoes a-

cross

night

sky dark

as fur

light

NURSERY RHYME: A Poem for National Poetry Day

To celebrate National Poetry Day, here's a poem I like a great deal. I wrote it for Tanya one night in Plymouth in September 1990, almost exactly thirty years ago. It it still on the paper on which I typed it up back in London and unchanged since then. But it never felt like something to submit (and I was getting away from publishing poetry anyway). Now I think it could have gone somewhere.  

 

NURSERY RHYME

 

Before we go on

We shall have to decide

Which things are important

& which we will hide.

 

How much we can live with

& how much without;

Equations like these are

What love's all about.

& once we have weighed

Every point in each hand,

We'll listen & talk, but

We won't understand

 

That balance & logic

Are just symptoms of

A different disease,

But not symptoms of love.

 

WISHFUL THINKING: A SONNET

It's hard to explain exactly why I seem to be writing more in traditional verse forms. I think it had something to do with writing the obituary, and re-reading while I did, my college professor Richard Wilbur, though I can't claim what I do is anything like his work. It seems I sometimes try to stick to the formal structures, and play with rhymes, while trying to keep the verse within the breath and rhythms of speech, rather than strict meter, something of the continuing influence of Charles Olson and his Projective Verse theories which have influenced me since the late Sixties. Or, as Robert Creeley put it, 'form is never more than an extension of content' which I took to mean the poem takes its own form, and you just try to keep up with what it is doing. I could be very self-analytical and point out how the rhyme scheme changes after the first verse, just as the position of the two people in the poem does, but that might ruin someone else's MA thesis.

Anyway, this poem (and another, currently lurking as Wishful Thinking II, but searching for its own title) was structured from pages of notes I found in a notebook from 2001. I gathered a number of putative stanzas, unfinished quatrains, couplets, and even some single lines, and then put them together into two sonnets. This one came from notes all done at the same time and place, and seems to have more structure as a result, but it fell together when I found a couple of lines from 2013 which

fit eerily into those that were heard 12 years earlier.

The song by Ralph Towner is what I was listening to as I wrote the current poem, but I am sure I was playing it in 2001 as well....

WISHFUL THINKING

                                         (after a tune by Ralph Towner)

As you or I might try to say,

This empty night does not require

That we express even slight desire.

A breeze might blow us either way,

Together, apart, it's all the same,

Though you proceed as if they were

Distinct, thus called by different names.

And we still linked, not sliding further

Away. Confusion's just a slight delay

Til things are meant to work out well.

You pay no notice to what I say.

What you say, well, I’ve no way to tell

What a single word means; your eyes are blanks.

You insist someday I'll tell you thanks.

July 2001, St Jean de Luz/2013 Haslemere

BEDTIME STORY: A POEM

I wrote this one in the late summer and early fall of 1975, soon after I'd moved to Montreal. I have a fondness for it, mostly for the darkness underneath its innocence; I have the feeling I was beginning to experience my first real being on my own in a place that was, well, different. It was published in 1977, along with four other of my new poems from a new city and country, in a newspaper format magazine called The Lance, which was published somewhere in Ontario, I think. Return with us now to those stirring days of yesteryear.....

BEDTIME STORY

All the shadows (those

      friendly faces at the top of

      the stairs

      peeking out of the closet

      you’d never dare open

when you were a kid

                          (those

paranoid playmates

had you

whistling

      to yourself

to assure you

you were

      still alive

When you knew all along

deep

       down

                inside

that you shouldn’t

be

scared,

             all

the demons seemed

the same,

                their faces

flew together

like migrating birds

lost &

shrieking

a chorus

 

ended

in silence

echoes 

 

              (those

major themes

of your life.

                     (& still does.

PARLOUR GAME: a sonnet

I like to think of Parlour Game as a mini-sonnet, but it didn't start off that way. I originally jotted down lines way back in 2010, at a time of some upheaval beginning in my life; these included the closing couplet. I went back to it in 2018, and had it virtually finished. But it still needed a title. I think it was in the summer that I got an email from Jenny Scheinman's mailing list with a track from her and Alison Miller called 'Parlour Game', which was also the name of their new quartet.

I listened to about three bars and realised I'd found the title. Not because of the music; this isn't a poem inspired by the sounds, but the title just works too well on its own. The music had a certain back and forth to it, like much of Scheinman's work, a sense of being just off the main track, tangential one moment, ethereal the next, and like the poem itself, moving from one short motif to the next, edgy but still rhythmic. It did get me reading the poem out loud again, and that brought two small but I think crucial changes. So thanks to Parlour Game, the band.

I'd come to Jenny Scheinman's violin playing in Bill Frisell's 808 quartet, and then her own wonderful Crossing The Field, whose title appealed to me because it suggested Robert Duncan's classic poetry book The Opening Of The Field, and whose 13 tunes seem like a progression through all sorts of indigenous American music, with elements of classical, jazz, country and bluegrass. It's one I play often. Credit synchronicity. Here's a mini-sonnet with a jazz violin title.

PARLOUR GAME

I ponder it

Repeatedly.

What is the point

Of heatedly

Debating why or not you care,

If what was there's no longer there?

You like to say

Responsibly,

Your sad clichés

So lovingly,

With words whose shadows signify

The door's already shut, goodbye.

Illusions die when truth impinges,

Drowned out by groans of rusty hinges.

A DARK SPELL: a poem

I wrote this poem in 1983. It had been germinating since a Christmas a few years before, but it was  listening to Eberhard Weber's 'A Dark Spell', from his 1980 album Little Movements, that helped it coalesce. Here's a link to the tune, see if you can feel how. It hasn't changed very much since then, but I also don't seem to have considered it for publication anywhere in the ensuing decades. But I am putting together a collection of poems I've written inspired by ECM records, so here it is now, for the first time....

A DARK SPELL
                                   after Eberhard Weber

between now &
closing we
both could lose

this unmeasured
sense of
freedom, which

is freedom it-
self. A fire
might die in

our faces be-
fore we reached
its flame, be-

fore we saw
each other
by its light.

SPRING EQUINOX: A poem for my niece's wedding

Last week my niece got married in Miami, and at the reception, taking a break from the dancing to music of a newer generation, I sat thinking and some moments from the past week put themselves into my mind. I picked up my place-card and on the back wrote a few lines, then sat for a while playing with them and thinking it through. What I was thinking about was the spring equinox, looking for the super-moon a couple of days before in Key Largo. I was thinking about Magnolia Warblers, and their migration, discovered in those few days in the Keys and Everglades. I was thinking about W.S. Merwin, whose obituary I had just written for the Guardian, as you will see just below. And of course the lovely wedding we had just witnessed. It all came together rather quickly, and after a few more days of thinking and tinkering, this is what I finished. I wrote it without punctuation, perhaps in homage to Merwin, but the unseen punctuation seemed self-evident, so I put some of it back. 

SPRING EQUINOX
                                      for Julia, Donald & Camilla

Mark that momentary loss of a sense of direction:
magnolia warblers circle, midway through their migration
while we pass the sun's centre, spinning station to station
seeking signs of devotion, stopping short of salvation

Miami, 23.3.19

BETWEEN US (LOGATO): a poem from Italian Sonatas

I've been working a series of small poems, titled Italian Sonatas. This is one of them; they originate in little notes I've discovered in my notebooks and files, from the early Eighties. There is a theme....

Between Us (Logato)

There is nothing

soft, except

the way that night

Escapes your eyes

& drapes itself,

laughing light,

Round the arcs

Of shooting stars

Lost in their flight.






 

OSSIPEE LAKE HAIKU

When I was a boy, from ages 7-10, I spent my summers at my great-uncle Andy's boys camp on Lake Ossipee, in New Hampshire. As an adult, I would visit my uncle Jack and aunt Jane at their cottage on the other part of the lake (it was Jane's family's cottage; they had met when Jack canoed past one day, a counselor with some young campers,
and spotted her on the shore.) For a few years I would always manage to visit in early September, when the lake was quiet, the nights were cool, and the pine needles were thick on the ground.

This is for Jack and Jane...
 
OSSIPEE LAKE HAIKU

Pine needles fallen
Soft scent of past beneath my
Stepping silently home

HUMAN INTERFERENCE: A POEM

In honour of National Poetry Day, let me offer a poem I wrote thirty years ago, just after my birthday, in Geneva. The event it depicts had just recently happened to me, right down to the pigeons jumping on the carriage at Baker Street and off at Edgware Road, where we were being held. It didn't take much revising, and was published in my 1989 Northern Lights pamphlet Homage To Gibbon and then, after some delay, in Tokyo, in the summer 1990 issue of Edge: International Arts Interface. Both times I misspelled Edgware, adding an e, which was appropriate enough given the magazine's title. It is reprinted here for the first time with the name of the station spelled correctly. I've tried out a few other small changes.  TFL, or whatever they call London Transport these days, no longer uses the phrase 'human interference.' 


HUMAN INTERFERENCE

A few pigeons exit the car at Edgware Road.
The platform seems to soften & melt as
We finally pull away. The walls of the tunnel lose
Their blur, become clear as we come to a stop.
We sit. After a while faces move into focus,
Take on expressions, search the car for room or air
Or pigeons or something to read. Eventually
A disembodied someone talks. A person
Has fallen in front of the train. We will have to wait.
London Transport regret this delay, which they say
Is the result of "human interference".
We get in the way.
Many of us are already late.
We are getting later all the time.

CIPHERS: a poem

I'm not sure exactly when I wrote this poem, probably some time in 1983. It was published in an English magazine, The Rialto, in Norwich. I sent it to them in March of 1985 and it was published in issue 3, in July 1985. If I find any of my notes or drafts I'll amend this post, especially if I discover what city it was that may have inspired it. At some point in the past couple of years I made one small but substantial change; my buddy August Kleinzahler suggested another more substantial one. I like it much more the way it is now.

CIPHERS

A window, cracked at the edge, bends inward,
Making room for the wind. If it were colder
We might have snow. Until we do
We can sit and wait
For the raindrops to grow smaller.
In the street, the movement takes on patterns.
The sky changes. We are not so alone.

THE WORD (MONTREAL 1976: A DREAM)

I was poking through an old notebook the other day, and found

this. I scribbled it down a year ago, and hadn't thought of it since,

but when I re-read it the actual dream came back to me. I've changed

the words a little, mostly to include details I took for granted in 

my sleep. I couldn't find a photo that looked right, though I did find

one of the building where I lived. The Word was a wonderful bookshop

just around the corner; run by Adrian and Lucy. It's still there, looking

a lot smarter than it does in that relatively contemporaneous photo.

The Star is long gone. I finally met August Kleinzahler at The Word 
one day in 1981, when I arrived to do a poetry reading at McGill,

after years of missing him in various places. He's not the badly dressed guy in the suit.
I do think the dream may reflect as much about my present circumstances in Britain as it does about Montreal in 1976. Though I note April 15th is the day US taxes are due.

The poem is published here for the first time. 

THE WORD (A DREAM, MONTREAL, 1976)

A man in a cheap gray gabardine suit, black

Fedora and a thin black undertakers' overcoat

Hanging off him like a shroud stops me 

As I clump through the icy drifts interred

On the corner of Milton & Lorne, by The Word.

It's 30 below. I'm wearing desert boots, fleece

Lined denim jacket, my Canadiens toque. He asks,

In flat declarative Midwestern American
English, to see my papers. Qui etes vous? I say.

Your papers, he says. I was just on my way,
I say, to pick up a paper. The Star, or maybe

The Gazette if the Star's sold out. He shivers.

You think you're funny? We know who you are. 

15 April 2017

 

IN THE WAKE: A STUDENT POEM

Writing and speaking about Richard Wilbur over the past two weeks, I was drawn to search through my files looking for work I might have done for him. I found this poem, which I wrote in the fall of 1970, which must have been for his verse writing class. I was 19. I seem to have revised it, only slightly each time, in 1976 and 1977, in Montreal, then in Connecticut, and finally after I moved to Britain, and sent it to at least one magazine each time (I can tell by the return addresses; and I used onion-skin paper in those days, remember that?).

I've done a little more revision now, but it's still basically the same poem. I wish I had the copy I submitted to Wilbur, with his comments; it may be in a box somewhere in my brother's attic. I share it because I think one can sense the influence of Wilbur, and I can feel the awkwardness with which I approach rhyme and particularly meter. In The Wake has never appeared in public before...

IN THE WAKE
 

The funeral procession plodded by

in single-file cars,

headlights struggling to be seen

against the morning sun.

In front the hearse, the limousines,

behind them black gave way

to cars in motley disarray

until the line was done.

And down the road a flower-painted

old Volkswagen van,

just-married signs and tied-on shoes,

tin cans and blaring horn,

Chugged past like dawn's cacophony.

I stopped and looked both ways to view

Their circling my boundaries

That sunny summer morn.

Sept-Oct 1970, Middletown

RIDDLE: A POEM FROM RICHARD WILBUR'S CLASS

I mentioned that I could recall one exercise I did for Richard Wilbur's poetry writing class. This was in the fall of 1970; I was 19, beginning my third year of college, and as I wrote in the previous post, the student strike had convinced me that if I was going to stay in college, I was going to study what I wanted to study. Though I'm not sure this sort of thing was my ultimate goal. If I can find any others from that time which are a bit more, well, you know, I may post them here.

The assignment was to write a riddle in verse.  I was quite pleased when I came up with this one, and if I remember correctly he of course guessed it right away (it ain't hard) but said something nice about the originality of the metaphor, or some such.

I couldn't find a copy of it, but I did find its index card in my files, because it was actually published, in Frank Denton's magazine Ash Wing, in 1977. I hadn't remembered that at all. But I've written it below, from memory. I think I'd get rid of jaundiced in this context and maybe reverse 'around the world' and 'over the top', which I'd originally done writing in logical progression, though the phrases sound better ordered as they are.


RIDDLE

Blood blue yellow yo-yo
What tricks can you do?
Around the world, over the top
And a wicked all-day sleeper too.

Motion (Imprint A Poem

Back in the summer of 1977 I wrote a poem called Imprint (Motion. It was supposed to be published in a British magazine which then folded, so it appeared in November 1977 in the Canadian magazine Moosehead Review. It was, I saw in retrospect, about the way I perceived changing and perhaps frightening relationships. But when I was looking at it this summer, I came across the manuscript of an earlier poem, out of which, or in reaction to which, it sprang.

Motion (Imprint was originally written in November 1976, when I was still in Montreal, then worked on over Christmas in Connecticut. I reworked it in 1982, in London, then apparently set it aside and forgot about it. I can see how Imprint (Motion, which I wrote the following summer, relates to it, but right now I much prefer this new older one, which seems more innocent and indeed hopeful. I did some revising of it this summer, including in South Dakota where somehow the imagery came clearer to me.

So here it is, published for the first time, in somewhat seriously different form from when it was written 40 years ago.


Motion (Imprint

The living are those

Whose chill breath we can see

When atmosphere conspires

To reveal their traces

Hands that froze find steamy

Mouths, hiding faces

Behind voices, emerging desires

Bide silent, bide invisibly

BLUEBERRY EYES: a poem from Franz Kline

In yesterday's post, linking to my Guardian obituary of Jean Stein, I mentioned that I had published two poems based on paintings by Franz Kline in her magazine, Grand Street (issue 54: Fall 1995). I did have a query asking if I might make them available. So here is 'Blueberry Eyes'.

Because the issue was themed 'Space', the first of those poems was 'Torches Mauve', which began with a mention of space, and was concerned with the space within the frame. I think that was the hook I used to pitch it to the managing editor, Deborah Treisman, whom I had met. Coincidentally, I had been rewriting 'Torches Mauve' recently, after seeing the painting again in the Abstract Expressionist show at the Royal Academy, but looking at it today I started clawing the original back, with only a few changes. I will sit on that one for a while.

The other was 'Blueberry Eyes'. I liked it a lot, and thought they worked together well, but it had actually been published already, in my 1991 Northern Lights pamphlet Chump Change. As that was a limited edition of 300 copies, I figured I was on safe ground.

The poem was inspired when I saw Kline's 'Blueberry Eyes' in March of 1989 in Washington DC, where I was attending a world broadcasters' conference sponsored, I think, by the EBU. I took time off to hit the galleries, and I believe this was in the National: I can still recall the wall and the placement of the painting, I'm slightly less sure of the building itself. I wrote it out as a poem over the next two years and Chump Change appeared in May 1991. I still like the way it moves, with a rhythm I still see in the painting, and the tension between colour and black. Kline was so good painting with colour, and he did so few of them before he died. 16 years later, here it is again

BLUEBERRY EYES
                                           

Let's fight to hold
the darkness off

somewhere, the other
side of, the river

the shadow of a
bridge, let's let

the night begin
to echo & watch

as flashes of light
bounce off the flow

of water below.
On board a train

New York is
wilderness

bridges connect
deserted islands

remain as sun dis-
appears behind the

Palisades, greens
turn to yellow

red & swirls to
stop at Spuyten Duyvil

& in that instant
train & landscape

intersect &
sunlight dies

THEM PUSSY GRABBERS: a Presidential poem (after Mason Williams)

How about them pussy grabbers

Ain't no wussies

Gettin around just

Grabbin they pussies

Grabbin them young uns

Grabbin them old

Grabbin lotsa pussies

Takin they hold

Them Presidential pussy grabbers
Walkin down the street

Chompin they tic tacs til

They breath smell sweet

Sayin they TV stars

Really nothin to it

Walkin up to wimmens

Always let em do it

How to be a pussy-grabber?

Wanna take a stab?

Find yourself a pussy

Say 'I'm President!' & grab!

Note: It occurred to me recently that our current President, who may well destroy satire along with the rest of the world, had walked himself right into a Mason Williams 'Them' Poem. Williams, best known for his song Classical Gas, is a multi-talented musician, writer, and stand up comic. He was head writer on The Smothers Brothers comedy show, where he conceived the Pat Paulson for President campaign (which seems prescient now), and gave Steve Martin his first break as a writer. He wrote poems and suchlike, and in 1969 published The Mason Williams Reading Matter, which included a section called 'Them Poems', which all began with 'them'. The most famous was Them Tummy Gummers, which I think became a song, but my favourite was the shortest of them Them poems: Them Hors d'oeuvres (pronounced whores doovers), which I have repeated at countless receptions and parties over the decades. I reprint it below. If I stole Mason Williams' Trumpian thunder in any way, I apologise.

from Them Poems

LII  

Them Hors d'oeuvres 

How about Them Hors d'oeuvres,
Ain't they sweet?
Little piece a cheese,
Little piece a meat.

COACHWHEEL YELLOW: a poem for National Poetry Day

Apparently today is National Poetry Day in the United Kingdom. Because I've just been to see the Abstract Expressionist exhibition at the Royal Academy, I was looking for a poem I've done called 'Zinc Door' after the Franz Kline painting which is hanging at that show. I found two other Klines, 'Torches Mauve' and 'Blueberry Eyes', but not 'Zinc Door' on which I've been working intermittently for years, since seeing the painting in, I think, Washington. But while I was looking I came across the manuscripts of this poem, 'Coachwheel Yellow'. I wrote it in May and June of 1978, and it has some personal resonances that go back to that time. Reading it now, I also feel a bit of Robert Creeley it in, which I'm sure I didn't realise at the time, but I now wonder if that influence is exactly why I chose a villanelle; I haven't done much in such strict forms (for good reason, you may say, as I improvised on the secondary rhyme, rather than sticking to just one pair). It may or may not have been published in a magazine called Rogue Raven sometime in 1979....if anyone knows, I'd appreciate a heads-up...

COACHWHEEL YELLOW: A VILLANELLE 

I always wanted to be able to draw.
Have something made solely by eye and hand.
There were paintings in my poems you never saw,

You heard my dreams, but couldn't understand
That my frustrated fingers felt useless, dead weight.
I always wanted to be able to draw:

Those nights in the greenhouse, working late
To convince myself, despite what you said,
There were paintings in my poems. You never saw.

"Your words are your body. Your body's dead,"
You told me, and because it was true that
I always wanted to be able to draw,

I continued to write what I could, but knew that
It was not what you wanted. In words you despised
There were paintings. In my poems you never saw

There were paintings of you. Reflected eyes,
Which, if you'd seen, you'd have recognized
I always wanted to be able to draw.

There were paintings in my poems you never saw.

LAST STAGE OF A LONG JOURNEY: A Poem After Eberhard Weber

The Last Stage Of A Long Journey is a song by Eberhard Weber which first appeared on his 1980 ECM album Little Movements. You can listen to that version here. It's a slow builder, but I especially like Charlie Mariano's moves from harshness to sweetness, and Rainier Bruninghaus' piano, and the way it seems to swirl around with Weber's bass. The song also appears, and lends the title to, Stages Of A Long Journey, another ECM disc recorded in 2005, for Weber's 65th birthday. This version features Jan Garbarek on sax, Gary Burton on vibes adding extra texture to Bruninghaus' piano, and a full orchestra in the background.
I was listening to that version a couple of years ago, and thinking about the stroke in 2007 which left Weber unable to use one hand, and thus play the bass, when the poem below appeared to me. I haven't made many changes in those two years, and I feel like the texture is somewhere between Weber's song and the rhythms of Woodmont beach, where I grew up.

Weber's since released two albums of bass solos he recorded in live performance over the years with the Garbarek group, with edits and improvisations, including his own one-handed keyboard playing; there has also been another tribute concert in Stuttgart, this one for his 75th birthday, where Garbarek and Burton returned, along with Pat Metheny, Paul McCandless, Danny Gottlieb, and composer/arranger Mike Gibbs. This time he plays one mallet with Burton on the vibes, worth a close listen if you can hear it. I've told the story elsewhere of my one meeting with Weber, he remains an inspiration to me. Here is part of my appreciation.


THE LAST STAGE OF A LONG JOURNEY

(after Eberhard Weber)

Snow falling on the Sound, wind scrapes like a dinghy on shore,

Off the jetties blowing sand across the beach into my face &

Forcing my eyes shut. It's winter

Where I grew up,

Winter in the place I would remember forever

If I could.

                    I turn

My back to the wind & without needing

To open my eyes I walk home, up & down the Central Avenue hill.

The back door is open; my mother & father never

Leave it locked. I float through the kitchen &

Just to the right of the hall is their desk. I open it, take

Some pictures from the middle drawer, to show my son

So he will remember the grandparents he never met

Then

My eyes open & I cannot remember

Who or what or where or when anything was

Or is. I show him the pictures; ask him to try

To remember for me. He is not there. The desperation

In my voice calling for him echoes down that narrow hallway

Full of far-off music I move through
Searching for him.