Tuesday 5 June 2012

Lessons in Epic


You’re worried about him.

In this heat, everything moves slowly.

There should be labels for the mistakes
that piled up as he left each room.

We’d had a couple of wraps
and he just kept going on;
his face was one of them weird masks.

Are there dirty roots now
where the tongue once was?

They’re always saying
there’s nothing to do around here.

I am in love with the thought 
of my failing you.

The air is thick with sociology.

I imagine you as a kid
out of your head on Tipp-ex or
asking the court to go easy after your
half-hearted mugging 
in the park.

You’re my favourite narrative
and I want you
to be angry with me.

6 comments:

  1. This one catches on its own truthfulness, swallows hard and doesn't flinch.

    Impossible to say no to a brave rhyme like

    my failing you

    and

    sociology

    and

    want you
    to be angry with me.

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  2. It took such a long while to coalesce. It just wouldn't steady itself. Working with those thoughts and feelings that leave us feeling queasy is hard; sometimes it comes as a compulsion.
    Thanks for your insights again, TC. It's like a good, heavy rain after working in such relative isolation. It all runs into the writing.

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  3. Note to self: I have to stop using that phrase "relative isolation".

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  4. Well, the isolation probably always remains relative, ebbing and flowing, never becoming absolute so long as you are still t/here.

    But more encouragingly, I think perhaps it's the interesting elements of energy and tension and problem that develop out of having "characters" (however shadowy, however vague) -- apart that is from the abiding and indecipherable and ultimately multiple and mysterious and insoluble character of the self at the centre, impossible ever to chase off, and doubtless properly so at that -- that make your poems so very interesting to me, WB.

    I am no longer young, but I could do worse than to go to school to that sort of thing. It's always all too tempting to pretend the world's not there, to spare oneself the complication and pain. Shortsighted and ultimately flawed effort, of course, that.

    (Speaking of company, I have been asked to prove that I am not a robot by saying "42 lacePets". Now that is a goodly collection. But unlike the real kind -- one of which is begging piteously to be fed -- yet again -- as I speak -- animals made of synthetic fabric seem to have virtually no appetite at all. And seem to live in absolute isolation, though there may be 42 in the party.)

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  5. I was very taken by that Stevie Davies quote you'd placed in your post a few days ago (More than Moone)where she talked of Donne's self "...in doubt...". Some years ago, I undertook a course of Spiritual Direction with a local Jesuit. One of the things that kept coming up for me was the sense of being "a subject in question" in relation to God. I don't know where or if God is in my writing at the moment. What I do know is if I don't begin the work in that questionable position, it feels more or less fraudulent to me.

    I've never been able to use poetry - whether mine or other people's - as a means of steadying myself.

    I have a fear your 42 lacePets are going to haunt me for a while. This would be fine if it wasn't for the button eyes.

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  6. It is indeed the eyes. As we do have actual living animals here, I'm not meant by the resident authority to admit to the great flock of stuffed animals picked up out of misplaced pity in night wanderings. (Evidence of dithering senility of course, assigning feelings to inanimate objects -- there's an unfortunate term for it.) Formerly, when I was still young enough to have friends who had grandchildren, there was always great joy for all concerned in the presentation of these stuffed creatres to actual children. But now alas, no more.

    I was schooled first by Dominicans then by Jesuits before escaping into the nonsectarianism. With the Dominicans it was the intellect that counted, with the Jesuits the passion. Of course in Donne's time the family Jesuits had insisted on persisting in the illegal providing of covert religious services & c., and this made little spiritual terrorists of them, and as punishment (reward) the most horrific indignities as well as physical suffering were inflicted upon them. So when Donne set out into the world to find his own spiritual direction it was with the memory of the (however wormy) family armada of belief going up in flames still glimmering on the horizon behind him. The emotional intensities of that. What I mean to say is that there was a lot to have to outgrow before coming to be able to relate in a "healthy" way with others. And of course to then end up as the Dean of St Pauls meant the sort of "conversion" of convenience that recalls the volte-face of someone like Koestler. I think Stevie Davies' comments are useful because she comes at Donne from the angle of an intelligent feminism. There are so many Inquisitions in all our cultures over the years and centuries.

    "One of the things that kept coming up for me was the sense of being 'a subject in question' in relation to God. I don't know where or if God is in my writing at the moment. What I do know is if I don't begin the work in that questionable position, it feels more or less fraudulent to me."

    Something tells me all has not been abandoned. The honesty of the self testing is what brings quality to the enterprise.

    "I've never been able to use poetry - whether mine or other people's - as a means of steadying myself."

    I think it's a basically unstable medium, as practised in the West, beginning perhaps with the Hellenistic Period. "And the God Abandons Antony".

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