tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50225838075111500052024-02-18T20:47:33.910-08:00Storing Magicexploring inspiration and the craft of poetryHilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.comBlogger36125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-77665192240104944712017-06-17T10:29:00.000-07:002017-06-17T10:29:11.957-07:00Holocaust Memorial Day<br />
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" 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<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">To
my granddaughters who visited the Holocaust</span></b></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Museum
on the day of the burial of Yitzhak Rabin<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Now
you know the worst</span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">we
humans have to know</span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">about
ourselves, and I am sorry,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">for
I know that you will be afraid.</span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">To
those of our bodies given</span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">without
pity to be burned, I know<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">there
is no answer</span><br />
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">but
loving one another,</span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">even
our enemies, and this is hard.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">But
remember:</span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">when
a man of war becomes a man of peace,</span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">he
gives a light, divine</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">though
it is also human.</span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">When
a man of peace is killed</span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">by
a man of war, he gives a light.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">You
do not have to walk in darkness.</span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">If
you will have the courage for love,</span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">you
may walk in light.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will be</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">the
light of those who have suffered</span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">for
peace.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will be</span></div>
<div class="Body" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">your
light.</span></div>
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</div>
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<span lang="DE" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">~ Wendell Berry ~</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "perpetua" , "serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-87278767015761992822016-03-18T07:34:00.000-07:002016-03-18T07:35:31.640-07:00A Janus Time: Video Poem<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/JMDnQrbLNyA/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JMDnQrbLNyA?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>
<br />Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-66570149662008532802015-12-03T04:18:00.000-08:002015-12-14T09:42:20.099-08:00Review: The First Telling - A Contribution to the Literature of Hope<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The First Telling</span></span></div>
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A few weeks after writing my post on <a href="http://www.storingmagic.blogspot.co.uk/2015_03_01_archive.html">Poems about Rape</a>, I found myself, in a workshop with Pascale Petit, sitting next to Gill McEvoy who showed me her pamphlet which deals with a rape and its aftermath. Naturally I was interested and bought a copy from her. It was the beautifully produced The First Telling, published by Happen<i>Stance, </i>which I'm delighted to say has just won the Michael Marks Award for best pamphlet. It’s a very powerful piece of work which stayed with me long after I’d closed the book.<br />
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From the beginning the reader is engaged and involved in the narrative. We hear the narrator's thoughts and have to orientate ourselves in the story as it unfolds. The language is sparse, sometimes ungrammatical, sometimes inarticulate, which by its very nature reveals something that more eloquent speech would fail to do. The printed poem works well visually - the dashes, italics, repetitions and slashes give a physical dimension to the telling enabling us to hear the incoherence, the sobs, the silences - how does one find the words to express such appalling experiences after all? <br />
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downwards<br />
can’t run<br />
earth/in/my/mouth<br />
can’t breathe<br />
<i>can’t breathe</i><br />
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Birds are present as a motif throughout with some short bird poems becoming a metaphor for what the narrator can’t say, adding texture and dimension to the sequence:<br />
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Magpie<br />
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Stabs itself under its wing<br />
with that great beak…<br />
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Hides the scars with feathers.<br />
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But the sequence moves beyond horror, pain and suffering towards the beginning of hope and healing. And this is more than welcome. All the poems I mentioned in <span id="goog_805604638"></span><a href="http://www.storingmagic.blogspot.co.uk/2015_03_01_archive.html">Poems about Rape</a><span id="goog_805604639"></span>, apart from that of <a href="http://therealmard.org/mard.php">Farhan Akhtar </a>(which calls on men to wake up to the treatment of women and oppose it), document the horror of rape and the way it damages lives. This is a powerful telling because when the knowledge of rape is hidden away and unacknowledged, society can ignore it. Added to that, in the words of John Berger: "Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter to, the experience which demanded, which cried out.” ―<span style="font-size: x-small;"> <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/and-our-faces-my-heart-brief-as-photos/john-berger/9780747576914">John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos</a></span><br />
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But the poems I highlighted do not move beyond this acknowledgement and shelter to offer a way forward, bar perhaps through the unstated hope that society might listen and do something about its treatment of women. The First Telling, however, does show us something more. Through the means of objectifying the experience of rape and its aftermath in language and telling it to a wise listener who hears and understands, rather than being condemned to live in isolation with the raw, unspoken and unedited re-living of what happened, the narrator is able, in small, realistic steps forward, to find a path out of the ever-present prison of the unresolved past; the colours, the images, the thoughts start to change. We are left with the possibility of healing:<br />
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So bright the blue.<br />Like new air rushing in.</div>
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The writer Barry Lopez has said that he wants to “contribute to a literature of hope… to help create a body of stories in which men and women can discover trustworthy patterns. Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader; each story in the end is social. Whatever a writer sets down can help or harm the community of which he or she is a part.” Elaborating, he says he has to believe “that imagining a story will somehow help people to imagine a way around difficulty. And that by encouraging a sense of hope, some woman, some man, will exercise their imagination in a way we could not have foreseen and that will be our blessing and our release from pessimism. Somebody will see a different way to do things. Stories, in some way, work as blueprints for the imagination”. ― <a href="http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0044.405;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mqrg"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Michigan Quarterly Review</span></a><br />
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I recommend The First Telling to you not only as a welcome contribution to poems about rape but also as a contribution to the literature of hope and a blueprint for the imagination. <br />
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Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-47741029981865863342015-08-03T08:16:00.000-07:002015-08-03T08:16:14.537-07:00By the Pool at Gelli Fach: Video Poem<br />
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<br />Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-28548315293995032392015-07-03T06:02:00.000-07:002016-02-04T03:04:15.895-08:00Keeping the Channel of Creativity Open - Martha Graham<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://marthagraham.org/about-us/our-history/">Martha Graham</a> (1894 - 1991), the American dancer, who created a movement language based upon the expressive capacity of the human body, is quoted as saying something I have often thought but ne'er so well expressed. Read it when you need to dispel the demons of self-doubt, feelings of inadequacy and the sense of futility about one's work that most writers seem to visit at some time - it acts as a kind of charm against them:<br />
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There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is
translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all
time, this expression is unique, and if you block it it will never exist
through any other medium and be lost; the world will not have it. It is not
your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it
compares with other expressions, it is your business to keep it yours clearly
and directly to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in
yourself or your work, you have to keep open and aware directly to the urge
that motivates you. Keep the channel open... </div>
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<i>(As told by Agnes de Mille in Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham. A
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And this is helpful too:</div>
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Practice means to perform over and over again in the face of all
obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of
inviting the perfection desired.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-27304334924522044272015-06-13T06:59:00.001-07:002015-06-13T06:59:51.892-07:00The Goddess and The Gardener - now available here<br />
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Poet and writer, Jane Whittle, explored Britain alone on foot for many years before settling on the coast of West Wales, where she began to make a garden from a patch of un-tamed mountainside 'in a place where rainbows land'. The poems in this book arose from that mysterious space between dream and reality experienced in the landscape, first by solitary long distance walking and then by sinking a root in one unspoiled place. They are accompanied by the author's own illustrations.<br />
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The poems are divided into two halves. The first half are in the voice of The Gardener, the woman who has stopped her physical journeying and has settled, finding 'new strength/to stay at home'. We are taken on the Gardener's inner journey through the seasons, from spring when 'New arrivals/crowd their neighbours/budding intermezzos drown in brazen greens' to winter, when 'The earth is hard on new flowers/broken by gales and frost'. Through her we meet the Goddess in different guises as she allows the Gardener to see the magic of the garden emerge and to experience her at the source of much that is around us - in a faltering stream, in the colours of the rainbow, in a leaf uncurling, in the cycle of elderberries from flower to wine.<br />
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In the second half we are privileged to hear the voice of the Goddess herself, first as Eurynome from early Greek myth who created the earth with the help of the serpent Ophion but banished him when he tried to take all the credit, then as she reveals herself in water, in wind, in a poem but above all in the earth. 'Lay yourself down/ and become land' she says, 'Listen - you will hear me'. 'As I turn and re-turn/, I return you to life.../ Remember my story.'<br />
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Jane Whittle's language throughout is skillful, simple with the simplicity of archetype, conveying in a few well-chosen words a depth of meaning that offers us new insights and delights.<br />
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Copies of The Gardener and The Goddess published by Brigit's Forge ( ISBN 978-0-9574106-1-9) are available to buy from this website (see sidebar) whether or not you have a PayPal account.</div>
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Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-72278473053663226642015-05-30T09:44:00.001-07:002015-05-31T04:57:52.769-07:00John Agard: Poetry to Energise the Soul<div style="text-align: center;">
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I was interested to hear the poet John Agard talking to Kirsty Young as a guest on <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04p5m1k"><span style="color: blue;">Desert Island Discs in November 2014</span></a><span style="color: #741b47;">.</span> Born in Guyana, Agard came to the UK in the 1970s with his partner, the poet Grace Nichols. Carol Ann Duffy says of him: “John Agard has always made people sit up and listen. He has done this with intelligence, humour and generosity... He has the ability to temper anger with wit, and difficult truths with kindness... In performance he is electrifying – compelling, funny, moving and thought-provoking. His work in education over the years has changed the way that readers, writers and teachers think about poetry,” </div>
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His poems are often satirical, addressing subjects such as slavery and, as the BBC website puts it "the historical myopia of a shared past judged solely through European eyes". His humour is sometimes achieved by provoking an abrupt change of perception in his audience, a disruption of an accepted way of seeing. His readings are, as Duffy says, electrifying, giving language an almost physical quality in which words are played with, emphasised and delivered for maximum impact. Have a listen to him over on the <a href="http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/john-agard"><span style="color: blue;">Poetry Archive</span></a> if you haven't heard him before.</div>
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Asked about how he felt about being awarded the Queen's Medal for Poetry he says that that the medal is given for your contribution and oeuvre as a poet and that it would be ungracious to reject it. Young people, he says, both black and white, need to be motivated by people who channel the word with positive energy; they need models who can energise the soul, beacons who give them a positive hope that poetry is also something that is worthy of being honoured. For that reason he says he had no qualms in accepting the medal and felt honoured and touched to be in the company of many great poets.</div>
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He talks of the process of writing poetry, how the poet uses the same 26 letters of the alphabet as everyone else but there is "a magical moment when you happen to put the right words in the right order and this can trigger off a verbal chemistry that can touch your depths and language begins to fly". A line might come to you, he continues, like a benediction, like grace, like it's a gift. It has spiritual overtones but is not divorced from the mundane of life.</div>
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He says he believes that "the poet keeps us in touch with the vulnerable core of language that makes us what we are."</div>
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That's certainly something to ponder on.</div>
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Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-54217475574391574602015-03-10T10:58:00.002-07:002015-04-26T10:36:08.442-07:00International Women's Day: Poems about Rape<br>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In the latest edition of <b><a href="https://mslexia.co.uk/">Mslexia</a></b>, the magazine for women
writers, Sarah Hesketh writes that deeply intimate poetry collections are a
form of feminist activism. She mentions the <a href="https://peonymoon.wordpress.com/2013/11/01/against-rape/">series of
poems </a><i><a href="https://peonymoon.wordpress.com/2013/11/01/against-rape/">Against Rape</a> </i>on the Peony Moon blog and, reading the
poems, I remembered that I’d planned to write a post last year for
International Women’s Day on poems about rape. Here it is, a year and a day
late.</span></span><br>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">As Moniza Alvi, writing in in
her Foreword to the anthology <b><a href="http://samples.sainsburysebooks.co.uk/9781136615856_sample_819752.pdf">Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives</a></b> points out, although rape is increasingly
in the public eye, it still bears the stigma of taboo – “of that about which we
dare not speak or write”. She goes on to say:</span></span><br>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">“Rape is an unsafe subject for poetry, while war is a wholly accepted category, and yet rape is constantly reported as a facet of war. Primarily, rape is considered a women’s issue, though this is, of course, hardly the case, and perhaps this is partly why it is considered a literary taboo, particularly when conveyed from a female viewpoint.”</span><br>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The poems in Alvi’s book <b><a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Europa.html?id=CMEgAQAAIAAJ">Europa</a></b> contain many poems about rape as
well as other trauma. She believes that any subject can be suitable for poetry
and because poetry has potential for “the piercing and memorable” it seemed important
to her that it is used to influence this particular instance of trauma.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Yet there are concerns. If,
as Alvi posits, one aspect of poetry is to give delight, should rape poetry be
a different kind of poetry? Her answer is to use myth to explore rape and
trauma, “giving a kind of delight through the imaginative qualities of the
story”. I find myself uncomfortable with
the word ‘delight’ in this context even though I know what she is getting at. I
think it might be more suitable to say that myth and metaphor are able to make
the poem ‘aesthetically pleasing’. I am aware that some of those who hear
accounts of rape enjoy them salaciously, delight in them, as in Adrienne Rich’s
poem <i><a href="http://hoydenabouttown.com/2012/04/01/sunday-poet-adrienne-rich/">Rape</a></i> where the speaker has gone
to report her rape to a cop who has grown up with her brothers:<br><br><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">…And so, when the time comes, you have to turn
to him,<br>
the maniac’s sperm still greasing your thighs,<br>
your mind whirling like crazy. You have to confess<br>
to him, you are guilty of the crime<br>
of having been forced.</span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And you see his blue eyes, the blue eyes of all the family<br> whom you used to know, grow narrow and glisten,<br> his hand types out the details<br> and he wants them all<br> but the hysteria in your voice pleases him best…</span><br>
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Using myth and image to create distance is a useful device for discouraging such voyeurism and trying “to bring a kind of beauty or artistry to a discordant subject”. Alvi’s poems are beautiful, clear and sparse, sparkling with suggestion, and no less hard-hitting for addressing the subject from a distance. Particularly notable is the poem Mermaid, based not on the Hans Anderson story but on the painting by Tabitha Vever entitled When We Talk about Rape which is the cover image for the Europa collection. Here's an exerpt:<br>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 12.75pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Swiftly <br>
he slit<br><br><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 12.75pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">down the muscular length<br>
exposing the bone in its red canal.<br><br><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 12.75pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">She played dead on the rock<br><br><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">
dead by the blue lagoon<br>
dead to the ends of her
divided tail.<br><br><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 12.75pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">He fell on her, sunk himself deep<br>
into the apex.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Then he fled<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 12.75pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> on his human legs.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 12.75pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Human love</span></i><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> cried the sea,<br>
the sea in her head. </span></span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
<br>
Some poems, however, are more blunt and explicit, as in Marge Piercy’s <a href="http://www.sascwr.org/files/www/resources_pdfs/poetry/Rape_Poem.pdf">Rape Poem</a>:<br>
<br>
There is no difference between being raped<br>
And being pushed down a flight of cement steps<br>
Except that the wounds also bleed inside. <br>
<br>
There is no difference between being raped<br>
And being run over by a truck <br>
Except that afterward men ask if you enjoyed it. <br>
<br>
There is no difference between being raped <br>
And being bit on the ankle by a rattlesnake <br>
Except that people ask if your skirt was short <br>
And why you were out anyhow. <br>
<br>
There is no difference between being raped <br>
And going head first through a windshield <br>
Except that afterward you are afraid not of cars, <br>
But half the human race…<br>
<br>
Alvi thinks it possible for rape poetry to rise above the confessional and quotes Pascale Petit: “When I read out my poems that have very personal and sometimes shocking content, I still concentrate on them as art rather than statements or “confessions”. That’s what I’m interested in, the transformative aspect, the image-making, chant or song of them. Afterwards, when people ask questions or react to the subject matter, I remember that they were rather revealing”.<br>
<br>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">My own poem about rape is packaged in the form of an intimate “confession”; the speaker confiding in the audience. I have crafted it - based on an actual rape - to convey its insidious nature, how its tentacles may reach into language itself even when the survivor thinks she is free of it. I have also given the rapist some individual attention, making him more than the stock shadowy sadistic figure. Not all rapists are the same. I hoped by this to provoke a discussion: What makes a man rape? What is he thinking and feeling? It’s time the focus was turned on men rather than just on the victims of rape. Society teaches ‘Don’t get raped’, not ‘Don’t rape’. If women's behaviour is scrutinised why not men's? We need an honest and searching debate to look at the problem.</span><br>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">A rare poem by a man concerned about rape is this by Farhan Akhtar, a Bollywood film director and actor, who set up a social campaign in India, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/TheRealMard">Men Against Rape and Discrimination or MARD</a>. The poem, with its insistent rap structure, is surely ripe for performance:</span><br>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">What
is this country that I live in?<br>
With no equality<br>
And the quality of life<br>
Differs from husband to wife<br>
Boy to girl, brother to sister<br>
Hey Mister, are you the same?<br>
Contributing to the national shame<br>
Replacing your mothers<br>
With the bent ideology of another's<br>
perception that women have a particular role in society<br>
Fills my heart with anxiety<br>
Where is all of this going?<br>
What will emerge from these seeds that we're sowing?<br>
It makes my head spin<br>
But I'm not giving in<br>
Will keep asking the question <br>
What is this country that I live in?<br>
<br>
What is this country that I live in?<br>
That takes away her right to love<br>
Brutalises her with an iron glove<br>
Rapes her without fear<br>
of there being justice for her tear<br>
We've demeaned our goddesses<br>
Gone back on all our promises<br>
Become a gender distorted nation<br>
Given our conscience a permanent vacation<br>
what do I tell my daughter?<br>
That she's growing up to be lamb for the slaughter<br>
we've got to make a change<br>
Reboot, reformat, rearrange,<br>
and never give in<br>
no matter how much our head may spin<br>
Just keep asking the question<br>
What is this country that I live in? </span><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I am beginning to have some qualms about reading my own poem in public, important though I think it is not to hide these poems away as if they are not a suitable subject and as much as I like the idea of intimate poems being a kind of feminist activism. As Sean O’ Brian has said, “The poem is an event happening in the act of reading” and Moniza Alvi asserts “It is important that the poem itself becomes an experience, rather than being merely a vehicle for something” - with a spoken poem therefore, the audience may be given an experience of rape.</span><br>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I have read my poem at a number of events but the last time I read it I noticed out of the corner of my eye and the corner of my mind that as I introduced it a woman in the audience looked uncomfortable, shifted in her seat and then looked down at the floor, a pained expression on her face. Thinking about it afterwards I realised that she was trapped in the situation, that the poem might have triggered memories she’d rather forget and that she couldn’t simply get up and leave without announcing something she would probably rather not say. My poem starts with the memory of a rape being triggered by an article so I felt I should have thought more about the possibility of this happening through a spoken poem. Even reading poems about rape on the page or screen may be triggers, as the Peony Moon blog warns its readers. </span><br>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">But at least on page or screen the reader has a choice to look away and being silenced is not an option if things are ever to change. I remember what W.H.Auden said, in his poem in memory of W. B. Yeats:</span><br>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">For poetry makes nothing
happen: it survives<br>
In the valley of its making where executives<br>
Would never want to tamper, flows on south<br>
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,<br>
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,<b><br>
A way of happening, a mouth. </b></span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">(My emphasis)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br></span></div>
Scathed <br>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">When I was raped… I discarded certain assumptions I had held about how the world worked and about how safe I was. Alice Sebold (from <i>Lucky</i>)</span><br>
<div>
<br></div>
<div>
Caught by an article in the Guardian <br>
I thought I’d write a poem about a rape<br>
from many years before.<br>
<div>
<br>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I meant to tell how he’d
driven to the Common,<br>
forced my head back when I tried to scream<br>
till I thought my neck would break<br>
and my decision then to just give in<br>
and hope he didn’t kill me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And how he dragged me to the
ground<br>
broke into me and yelled at me to ‘move’ –<br>
as if he thought there could be any rhythm<br>
between his act and me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">How afterwards he fell apart,<br>
became a shrunken thing,<br>
leaning over the roof of his car<br>
like a wilting plant,<br>
crying and begging for forgiveness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And I then standing still
intact</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">
because somehow in the decision to surrender<br>
I had kept possession of myself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">But that night – of the day I
planned the poem –<br>
I had one of those dreams I sometimes get<br>
where there’s menace and someone in the room.<br>
I fight – I always fight – and grab his face<br>
and twist and smash and wake <br>
to hear soft footfalls stalk the bedroom floor.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">So though I kept possession
of myself<br>
something was born of that encounter<br>
that slipped unseen into my future,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br>
insinuates itself between me and safety,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">contaminates innocent words
like<br>'neck' and 'car' and 'common' and' move'<br>
and not so innocent words like<br>
scream and scream and scream.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br></span>
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Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-32656007084824111752014-10-22T05:11:00.003-07:002015-08-01T10:59:00.412-07:00After the Conflict: Video Poem<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/E64jW64vWV8/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/E64jW64vWV8?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>
<br />Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-53991467648627680342014-08-06T04:44:00.000-07:002014-08-06T04:44:33.672-07:00Interview with poet and writer Erynn Rowan Laurie<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcwAmeQLtm1rYNZelzw5osPLba_yLIgGCU-4SoN3jCc-hPzMHF67VLr_MemYt6jXXmFc4XT5CLd-pjZckFnLLtm-oIP5rRAkIhwXZg0AofRKQnjnfszhTL-OVlvvsST-jeK_0KOjk7HVI/s1600/Erynn+Laurie.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcwAmeQLtm1rYNZelzw5osPLba_yLIgGCU-4SoN3jCc-hPzMHF67VLr_MemYt6jXXmFc4XT5CLd-pjZckFnLLtm-oIP5rRAkIhwXZg0AofRKQnjnfszhTL-OVlvvsST-jeK_0KOjk7HVI/s1600/Erynn+Laurie.png" /></a></div>
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Erynn Rowan Laurie is a writer, poet and professional madwoman inspired by the early Irish poetic tradition and the place of the <em>geilt, </em>the mad poet in Irish myth and literature. In an interview with Jory Mickelson she explains why for her the creation of a poem is a sacred act; why she has chosen not to follow the usual grammatical structures; how landscape and art influence her poetry and why birds appear frequently in her poems - all worth reading about.<br />
<br />
Here's an excerpt: <br />
<br />
"If we consider poetry a form of sorcery, then sound sets the mood and pattern for the spells being woven and the realities being created. Some poems have a feeling of breathlessness and rush to them, while others build slowly, layering on their power with repetition and emphasis. In these poems [in her book <a href="http://hiraethpress.com/store/books/fireflies-at-absolute/">Fireflies at Absolute Zero</a>], capitalization can signal a shift in the power being touched and directed, the choice of a line or stanza break might place a breath as effectively as any comma or period.<br />
<br />
In translations of the Greek magical papyri, there are words capitalized as <em>voces magicae, </em>as words of power, that stand out from the text in an emphasis of their potency, and these words or strings of sounds might be recited or chanted in ways distinct from the rest of the text, lending them a particular sense of uncanniness. My poem on Abraxas borrows a couple of these words - ARAI, LAILAM - and in the recitation of that poem those sounds seem to come out of an abyss of magical vibration. <br /><br />Sometimes, when the sounds and the words are just right, I can feel the hair on my arms rise when I recite them aloud. For me there is a liquidity in non-traditional structures that's very appealing, and I find it easier to tap into that electricity, that potency, when I use those techniques."<br />
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You can read the full interview here on <a href="http://jorymickelson.blogspot.it/2014/08/interview-with-poet-erynn-rowan-laurie.html">The Literary Magpie blog</a>.<br />
<br />Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-12001664089292413592014-06-06T10:29:00.001-07:002014-06-11T01:15:52.887-07:00Where Does Poetry Come From?<div class="MsoNormal">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaoY3_I_IzNwkdV-9GnVY93o3SfndvBQE_sF4TcYhcre9MJjsnIwiF5Npvtx0Y3G5PRZC0ffLAdh0onObapWb_kCYQ8o5mbQr_OxziqBTutKXYX9vcrcezYnift2Mn_V-HZkozQTtow6Y/s1600/The+Inspiration+of+the+Poet+Nicholas+Poussin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaoY3_I_IzNwkdV-9GnVY93o3SfndvBQE_sF4TcYhcre9MJjsnIwiF5Npvtx0Y3G5PRZC0ffLAdh0onObapWb_kCYQ8o5mbQr_OxziqBTutKXYX9vcrcezYnift2Mn_V-HZkozQTtow6Y/s1600/The+Inspiration+of+the+Poet+Nicholas+Poussin.jpg" height="274" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB; mso-no-proof: yes;"><br />The Inspiration of the Poet by </span></b><b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Nicolas Poussin<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">In the past, where did people think poetry came from?</span></b><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">For
the Greeks, inspiration came from the Muses, the goddesses of literature,
science and the arts, or from the gods Apollo and Dionysus. Poetry was given to
the poet while he was in a state of divine frenzy. Because of this the
philosopher Plato believed that, as the poet didn’t invent anything himself but
was simply inspired to utter what the Muse gave him, he was dangerous, </span><span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">an imitator rather than someone who used the
faculty of reason to arrive at the truth.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">
</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">In
the Bible God is the source of inspiration and from Anglo-Saxon England we have
the story of Caedmon, who looked after the animals at the monastery of Whitby.
Although he was unable to compose songs, one night he dreamt of a figure (later
identified with Jesus) who asked him to sing about the beginning of creation. The
next day he remembered the poem and found that miraculously he was also able to
compose more of it. He was taken to see the abbess, Hilda, who believed that the vision
had been a gift from God. Caedmon became a monk and retained the ability to
turn the scriptures into beautiful verse.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">The
17<sup>th</sup> century poet John Milton, echoing the prophet Isaiah who
describes how he is inspired to speak when his unclean lips have been purified
by a seraphim with a live coal, announced that he wrote ‘by devout prayer to
the Eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends
out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar to touch and purify the
lips of whom he pleases’. [Quoted in Press 1955, p 2]</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">In
the Norse sagas, </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">the Mead of Inspiration and Poetry was stolen from the
giants by </span><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">the
god of the Æsir, </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Odin who then gave it to those he thought worthy. In the pre-Christian Celtic world, t</span><span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">here
is evidence that poetic
inspiration was thought to be derived from a cauldron, or from a liquid in a
cauldron brewed by a supernatural being. A rather late medieval source, thought
to be based on a much earlier version, tells the story of Taliesin, the
supreme native poet, receiving </span><i style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">awen </i><span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">or</span><i style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </i><span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">poetic inspiration, from a potion that
the witch Ceridwen had been brewing for a year and a day in her cauldron.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">However,
in one of the poems attributed to Taliesin, he follows the Christian belief
saying: ‘He [God] with his miracle bestowed immeasurable inspiration’. In another poem there is a reconciliation of
the native tradition with current Christian beliefs when Taliesin uses the
magic of words, whereby one thing may miraculously be something else at the
same time. In <i>Kadeir Teyrnon</i>, <span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: border-box; background-image: none; background-origin: padding-box; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: auto;">the word for cauldron, ‘<i>peir</i>’, can also mean ‘sovereign’ which is often used to mean God.
So there is a double meaning: </span>‘there emanated from the cauldron or Sovereign/the <i>ogyrwen</i> of triune inspiration’. [Haycock 2007, page 296, see also p 293 and p
304, note 35]
</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">A
parallel development came about in Ireland. There, an Irish poet in the persona
of the renowned father of all poets, Amergin, singing of the Cauldron of Poesy,
the source of poetic ability, also reconciled the two beliefs although in a
more straightforward manner: ‘warmly God
has given it [the cauldron] to me out of the mysteries of the elements’.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Elsewhere, in the medieval Irish tale Scél na Fír Flatha ('The Tale of the True Lord'), Cormac comes across a shining fountain with five streams flowing out of it. Nine purple hazels hang above the well and drop their nuts into the water where they are then cracked open by five salmon and the husks sent floating down the stream. We are told that ‘… the sound of the falling of those streams was more melodious than any music that men could sing...’ Manannán tells Cormac that the fountain is the Fountain of Knowledge and that the five streams are, ‘…the five senses through which knowledge is obtained. And no one will have knowledge who drinks not a draught out of the fountain itself and out of the streams. The folk of many arts are those who drink of them both.’ [Cross and Slover 1936, p 507]</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Inspiration then could be in the form of a liquid, drunk from the cauldron of poesy, or as Odin’s mead, or the waters from the Greek fountain of Hippocrene, sacred to the muses. But there was also a strong belief that poetry is blown into the poet. <i>Awen</i>, the old Welsh word for poetic inspiration, is derived from the Indo-European root meaning 'to blow', which is also the source of the Welsh <i>awel</i> meaning 'breeze'. In Irish the word,<i> </i></span><i><span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">aí</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, also meaning ‘poetic inspiration’, comes from the same root. Our word inspiration itself is derived from the Latin <i>inspirare</i> meaning ‘to breathe into’.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;"><i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Afflatus</span></i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"> is a Latin word coined by the Roman Cicero to describe the sudden rush of
an idea that appeared like a breath, a powerful force whose origin would be
unknown to the poet. The word meant ‘to blow upon’ and in the 18<sup>th</sup>/19<sup>th</sup>
century, English poets used it to mean the mysterious poetic inspiration that was
a divine wind blown into the poet making him sing, in the same way that the
wind would play on the strings of a harp producing sound.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">The poet Edward Young </span><span lang="EN"> (1681 –
1765)</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">, author of the then acclaimed <b><i>Night Thoughts</i></b>, was
influential in setting out his ideas about inspiration which gave it a mystical
status but didn’t locate it so precisely outside the poet. He wrote in his <b><i>Conjectures on Original Composition </i></b>that genius was the god within. Percy Bysshe
Shelley (</span><span lang="EN">1792 –1822)
</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">and S. T. Coleridge (</span><span lang="EN">1772–1834) </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">believed that the
poet had a special disposition or genius which meant that he was attuned to the
mystical winds and could receive visions and inspiration. (Although Shelley
professed himself an atheist, he wrote in <b><i>The
Necessity of Atheism </i></b>that although there was no God in the sense
of a creative Deity, the ‘hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the
universe remains unshaken.’)</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<b style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">The Experience of Modern and Contemporary Poets</b></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">But
what about in our own time? Surely any concept of poetry arriving from a divine
or supernatural source is well past its sell by date? Maybe - but it seems that
many poets still have the experience of being inspired by something that seems
to be outside themselves. Often it is a question of hearing</span><b style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;"><i> </i></b><span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">the poem. Let’s have a
look at what modern and contemporary poets have said about the origins of some
of their poems:</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">The
Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (</span><span lang="EN">1875 –1926) wrote</span><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">:
‘In a few utterly gripping days when I had actually intended to take up other
work, these sonnets have been given to me.’ ‘…it is late and I can scarcely hold the pen
any more after some days of tremendous obedience to spirit.’ ‘All in a few days, it was an unspeakable
storm, a hurricane of the spirit… I never even thought of eating, God knows who
fed me.’ </span><span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">[Rilke
1972, quoted in the Introduction]</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Similarly,
the Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva (</span><span lang="EN">1892 – 1941</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">)
described: ‘It is as if the whole piece is given to me from the very beginning
– a kind of melodic or rhythmic picture of it; it is as if the work being
written at this moment (I never know if it will be finished) is already written
somewhere, very exactly and completely. And I am only restoring it. Hence this
constant alertness: am I getting it right? am I not diverging? am I not
allowing myself - self-will? To hear correctly is my concern. I have no other.’
[Tsvetaeva 2010, p 51]</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">The Welsh poet Vernon Watkins (</span><span lang="EN">1906 – 1967) </span><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">tells us, speaking
about his poem <b><i>Yeats in Dublin</i></b>: ‘… It [began with] a musical cadence, almost
out of earshot, to which I gradually gave substance.’ ‘I have never heard a poem – not even ‘Griefs
of the Sea’<i> w</i>hich I <i>heard</i> coming out of the grass of the
cliffs of Pennard and Hunt’s Bay – in quite that way. What Yeats called “an
articulation in the air”. It was
momentary and extraordinary. The whole poem took place in less than a second.’
[Watkins 2006, page xvii]</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">Contemporary poet, Alice Oswald (1966 - ), reports something similar: ‘I like
the body to take part in writing a poem… a whole poem which I just can’t quite
hear. It’s a question of trying to take down by dictation what’s already there.
I’m not making something, I’m trying to hear it.’ [Mslexia Writer’s Diary 2012, page December
31-6 January] </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">And
Ruth Padel (1946 - ): ‘It helps to think and speak of poems as having an
urgency and purpose of their own; as if they come from somewhere not yourself.
I don’t want to know why<span style="mso-themecolor: accent2; mso-themeshade: 191;">… </span>The
first stage of a poem is when a phrase or rhythm, a feeling or thought or image
turns up and says: drop everything, work at me now… if you lose that moment you
lose the poem.’ [Padel 2000, p 12-13]</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">All
forms of creative writing have their mysteries I believe. Novels’ mysteries
include the way that events and characters suddenly appear in the writer’s mind
and seem to have a life of their own. But although some prose writers will say
that rhythm in their writing is important and that they read their work out
loud to see if it sounds right and to make the flow consistent, what seems
almost unique and is certainly widely reported by poets though not by novelists
(but see below for an exception!) is the way that inspiration is intimately
connected with rhythm.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">The American poet, Gary
Snyder,<i> </i>writing about how a poem
emerges for him, says: ‘The first step is the
rhythmic measure, the second step is the set of pre-verbal images which move to
the rhythmic measure, and the third step is embodying it in words… ’ [Quoted in
Elder 1996, p ?] <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;"></span><br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">Selima
Hill: ‘I think I start with a rhythm. Once I’ve got that, it begins to take
shape, like water. I’m not one of those A-B sort of poets. I’ve no idea where
I’m off to. Poetry is a big space and I see if I can launch myself into it with
as little baggage as possible… You get to a place where nothing can hurt you.
Time stops… You have to… implicate your whole being - but not impose yourself
on it either’. [Hill 2000, p 26-27]</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">Anne
Stevenson says that rhythm is ‘the unconscious engine of poetry, the pulse or
muscle that governs it and has a physical source in walking, breathing and
heartbeat. For although rhythm is more kinaesthetic than aesthetic, it is felt
and shared like an emotion. Rhythms also matter in prose. But where in prose
the controlling unit is the thought-phrase, the lift and fall of the language
in sentences and paragraphs, the energy that drives poetry is the beat; as in
the drum beat (heart beat) of primitive ritual and dance.’ [Stevenson 2000, p 4]</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"> T. S.Eliot touches on this idea of rhythm
coming from a primitive part of ourselves:
‘What I call the “auditory imagination” is the feeling for syllable and
rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling,
invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning
to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end.
It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary
sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current and the new
and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality.’ </span><span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">[Eliot
1933, pp 118-19</span></span></span><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">]</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">‘For
other poets – at least, for some other poets -
the poem may begin to shape itself in fragments of musical rhythm, and
its structure will first appear in terms of something analogous to musical
form; and such poets find it expedient to occupy their conscious mind with the
craftsman’s problems, leaving the deeper meaning to emerge from a lower level.
It is a question then of what one chooses to be conscious of, and of how much
of the meaning, in a poem, is conveyed directly to the intelligence and how
much is conveyed indirectly by the musical impression upon the sensibility –
always remembering that the use of the word ‘musical’ and of musical analogies,
in discussing poetry, has its dangers if we do not constantly check its
limitations: for the music of verse is inseparable from the meanings and
associations of words.’ </span><span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">[Eliot
1941, p 18]</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">Although
novelists don’t seem to report these visitations of rhythm as being of major
importance in the genesis of their work, a notable exception is this from the
prose writer Virginia Woolf describing beautifully the role that rhythm played
for her in formulating thought and putting it into language:</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">‘Style
is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the
wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning,
crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack
of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is and goes far
deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long
before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one
has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do
with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to
fit it.’ <br />
[Woolf 1977. Letter to Vita Sackville-West, March 1926]</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">This
seems close to the poet’s experience, although a possible difference might be
that for the poet, as for Gary Snyder, the rhythm often comes first before the
image or emotion and it is only after the rhythm has made words to fit it that
the idea or emotion is perceived and identified.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">The Unconscious Mind
and the Collective Unconscious</span></span></span></b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">T
S Eliot refutes any notion that an ‘efflux of poetry’ comes from outside
ourselves, from the gods or a friendly daemon. He believed that it is rather
the product of something that has been incubating in the mind of the poet which
is released when the anxious and fearful concerns of the poet are lifted:
</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">“I
know, for instance, that some forms of ill-health, debility or anaemia, may (if
other circumstances are favourable) produce an efflux of poetry in a way
approaching the condition of automatic writing – though, in contrast to the
claims sometimes made for the latter, the material has obviously been
incubating in the poet, and cannot be suspected of being a present from a
friendly or impertinent demon… to me it seems that at these moments, which are
characterised by the sudden lifting of the burden of anxiety and fear which
presses upon our daily life so steadily that we are unaware of it, what happens
is something negative: that is to say, not ‘inspiration’ as we commonly think
of it, but the breaking down of strong habitual barriers – which tend to
re-form very quickly…” [Eliot 1933, pp
144-8]</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Coleridge was the first person to use the phrase ‘the
unconscious mind’ in English (it had been coined by the 18th-century German
romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling)</span><span lang="EN">. B</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">y the end of the 19<sup>th</sup> century and the
beginning of the 20<sup>th</sup>, psychologists were beginning to describe inspiration
as coming from inside the poets themselves, from the realm of the unconscious.
Sigmund Freud was influential in seeing the artist as a traumatised or wounded
individual. He formulated the idea that repressed memories of events or thoughts
and ideas deemed unacceptable to the conscious mind were stored in the
unconscious. Inspiration coming from the unconscious would then appear to the
poet as coming from elsewhere since his conscious mind had no knowledge of it.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Carl Gustav Jung has a more in depth and complex
explanation of poetic inspiration. In his lecture ‘On the Relation of
Analytical Psychology to Poetry’ (published in <b><i>The Spirit in Man, Art and
Literature</i></b><u>) </u>he identifies two types of works of art. In the
first type the poet knows what he wants to express and his material is
subordinate to this; he considers the form and style and chooses his words with
complete freedom. He is ‘so identified with his work that his intentions and
faculties are indistinguishable from the act of creation itself’. [Jung 1984, pp 65-83]</span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="color: #444444;"></span><br /></span><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The second type of work Jung describes is of more
interest to our quest. Here the poem springs into the world ‘fully formed like
Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus’. The work forces itself upon the artist so
that ‘his hand is seized, his pen writes things that his mind contemplates with
amazement… he is overwhelmed by a flood of thoughts and images he never
intended to create and which his own will could never have brought into being…
Yet in spite of himself he is forced to admit that it is his own self speaking,
his own inner nature revealing itself and uttering things which he would never
have entrusted to his tongue. He can only obey the apparently alien impulse
within him and follow where it leads, sensing that his work is greater than
himself, and wields a power which is not his and which he cannot command. Here
the artist is not identical with the process of creation; he is aware that he
is subordinate to his work or stands outside of it, as though he were a second
person; or as though a person other than himself had fallen within the magic
circle of an alien will.’ <o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">There may, however, only be a difference of perception
between the two types. In the first instance it maybe that the poet, even
though he thinks that he is in control of his material and producing what he consciously
intends, is actually so carried away by the creative impulse that he is no longer
aware of an “alien” will: as Jung puts it ‘… he fancies he is swimming but in
reality an unseen current sweeps him along’. In the second type, the poet may not be aware of his own will speaking to him
and so experiences it as alien.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Today I think most poets would acknowledge that although
a few precious poems might arrive ‘as if fully formed from the head of Zeus’
and need little or no editing, even those poems which are, as it were, breathed
into the poet, require what Graves has called the secondary process of
composition when the conscious mind sets about editing what has been created in
trance.: This is what the American poet Elizabeth Bishop is referring to when
she says </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">‘I really don’t know how poetry gets to be
written. There is a mystery and a surprise, and after that a great deal of hard
work’.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><br /></span><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">The Creative Impulse and the Unconscious<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></span><br />
<b><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span></b><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">For Jung the creative impulse arises out of the
unconscious. He calls it a living thing, describing it in parasitical terms as
something which lives and grows in the poet like a tree in the earth or, elsewhere,
like a baby in the womb. In the terminology of Analytical Psychology it is an
autonomous complex: ‘… a split-off portion in the human psyche, which leads a
life of its own outside the hierarchy of consciousness. Depending on its energy
charge, it may appear either as a mere disturbance of conscious activities or
as a supraordinate authority which can harness the ego to its purpose’. This
autonomous complex is subliminal until the energy charge becomes strong enough
to make it conscious. The poet has no control over it; it can’t be summoned or
prevented by his will. ‘It appears and disappears in accordance with its own
inherent tendencies, independently of the conscious will’. This is what makes
it autonomous. </span><span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">I think many poets will
recognise in this the way that the poetic process can’t be accessed at will but
appears seemingly randomly - although there are perhaps ways that it can be
wooed.</span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The autonomous complex arises when a part of the psyche
which has been unconscious is awakened (by what Jung declines to say here) and
grows by ‘activating the adjoining areas of association’. The energy needed to
do this is, he says, naturally drawn from consciousness. This explains the way
that the usual conscious awareness of the poet is diminished so that, for
instance, Selima Hill experiences time stopping and being in a space where
nothing can hurt her or Rilke forgets about eating and is unaware of who fed
him during his ‘tremendous obedience to spirit’.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Jung does not identify this artistic process as
necessarily pathological: ‘the divine frenzy of the artist comes perilously
close to a full pathological state, though the two things are not identical’.
Normal people may be subject to the domination of an autonomous complex (indeed
instincts have more or less the same character) and in itself there is nothing
morbid about it unless the manifestations are frequent and disturbing in which
case it is a symptom of illness. This arises because the intensity of conscious
awareness diminishes (drained, you could say, by the autonomous complex) which
can lead to apathy or ‘a regressive development of the conscious functions,
that is they [the artists] revert to an infantile and archaic level and undergo
something like a degeneration… the instinctual side of the personality prevails
over the ethical, the infantile over the mature and the unadapted over the
adapted’. The lives of great artists show, Jung says, how the creative urge can
be so overwhelming in its demands that it ‘battens on their humanity and yokes
everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary
happiness’.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">What is the Unconscious?<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></span><br />
<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span></b><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Jung describes two layers to the unconscious - the
personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious
is close to Freud’s idea. As the name suggests, these are the contents and
processes of the psyche that are personal to the individual and may have been
conscious but have been suppressed. Works of art receive ‘tributaries’ from
this sphere but they are what Jung calls ‘muddy’ and if there are too many of
them the work becomes not art but a symptom. ‘We can leave this type of work…
without regret to the purgative methods employed by Freud’, he says
dismissively.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The collective unconscious is the deeper layer which has
never been conscious and therefore isn’t suppressed. It is a potentiality
handed down to us from primordial times in specific forms or inherited in the
anatomical structure of the brain. ‘There are no inborn ideas’, Jung says, ‘but
there are inborn possibilities of ideas’. The specific forms are described as
archetypes - ‘a figure - be it a daemon, a human being or a process - that
constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative
fantasy is freely expressed..’. These figures are essentially the psychic
residue of innumerable experiences of our ancestors. They represent the psychic
life of human kind, manifest in the many figures of mythological pantheons. ‘In
each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human
fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times
in our human history …’<o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Great art speaks through archetypes, Jung believed.
‘Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals
and empowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express
out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring.
He transcends our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in
us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find
a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night…The creative
process… consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in
elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work. By giving it shape,
the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it
possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life.’ Every
person shares the collective unconscious with the entire human race. [Jung
1984, pp 65-83]<o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">But what about rhythm?<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></span><br />
<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span></b><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Yes, after that rather heady paragraph, let’s get back to
rhythm. Why is rhythm so important to the genesis of poetry? The answer seems
to be that certain repetitive rhythms, perhaps because they reflect physical
processes in the human body we are exposed to in the pre-verbal state before
birth (heart beats, inhalation and exhalation, footsteps), are able to induce a
trance-like state in which the usual everyday survival thought-processes are
suspended and other areas of the brain, other ways of knowing, are accessed. As
John Press has said: ‘One of the functions of rhythm in poetry is to lull
asleep those obstinate mental habits in a reader which prevent him from
accepting what the poem is trying to convey, and to awaken that imaginative
sympathy without which a poem is bound to receive a stony reception from its
readers. The poem can perform its work only when the minds of its readers are
attuned to its mood<i>. </i>It is possible
that a similar process take place in the mind of the poet before the poem can
begin to ripen. The fret and fever of the alert questioning intellect need to
be lulled and the clairvoyant faculty must, at the same time, be awakened.’ [Press 1955, p 80] <o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Robert Graves also linked rhythm and trance, saying that:
‘The nucleus of every poem worthy of the name is rhythmically formed in the
poet’s mind during a trance-like suspension of his normal habit of thought… The
reader too must fall into a complementary trance if he is to appreciate its
full meaning’. [Graves 1995, pp 3-4]</span></span></span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><br />
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span lang="EN" style="background: rgb(255, 247, 247); color: #444444; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">Richard Dawkins has some
interesting things to say about the sound of words and their effect on the
human brain. He takes the beginning of Keats’ famous poem, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ode to a Nightingale, </i></b>and
tells us that if read aloud ‘the images tumble into your brain, as if you were
really drugged by a nightingale’s song in a leafy summer beechwood. At one
level it is all done by a pattern of air pressure waves, a pattern whose
richness is first woven into sine waves in the ear and then rewoven together in
the brain to reconstruct images and emotions’. Try it for yourself:</span></span></span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains<br />My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,<br />Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains<br />One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:<br />'Tis not through envy of they happy lot,<br />But being too happy in thy happiness -<br />That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,<br />In some melodious plot<br />Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,<br />Singest in summer in full-throated ease. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #444444; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">He
continues to say that it’s not totally far-fetched to think of the nightingale’s
song acting like a drug. Although some ornithologists have believed that the
song of the male bird contains information about his territory and his mating status,
Dawkins prefers to see it as a case of the female bird being manipulated by the
song because it acts like a drug on her brain. He cites evidence for this from
research done on female doves and canaries that shows that their sexual state
is directly influenced by the songs of the males. ‘The sounds from a male
canary flood through the female’s ears into her brain where they have an effect
that is indistinguishable from one that that an experiment can reproduce with a
hypodermic syringe. The male’s ‘drug’ enters the female through the portals of
her ears rather than through a hypodermic, but this difference does not seem
particularly telling.’</span><span style="color: #444444; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></span></span></div>
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">Because
of this, Dawkins goes on to suggest that the nightingale’s song may have acted
in a similar way on Keats’ brain. He states that most drugs that work on humans
also work in a comparable way on other vertebrates (and presumably he’s
inferring that this is possible vice versa). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[Dawkins 1999, pp 79-81]</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">Even reading the poem - and certain types of poetry in general <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- silently, and hearing with the inner ear,
can have the same effect I believe. How this might work physiologically I’m
unable to say, since this process does not involve a pattern of air pressure
waves entering the brain via the ear, but it doesn’t seem unlikely to me,
admittedly as a non-biologist, that our brains might be predisposed to respond
to sound experienced in the mind in the same way as it responds to external
sound. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
Certainly this hypothesis creates interesting resonances with the traditional
picture of male poets wooing females with their poems and songs. We’ve tended
to see this as driven by the meaning of their words but this may point to
another aspect. However, the fact that Dawkins himself is susceptible to the
sound of Keats’ poem demonstrates that the effect is - happily - not gender specific.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;">This faculty of poets to manipulate their audience is precisely the reason that Plato was suspicious of poets and would have banished them from his Republic. The poet with his words and phrases is able to influence his listeners who believe he knows what he speaking about, 'such is the sweet influence that melody and rhythm by nature have'.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;">Of course this doesn't throw any light on how the rhythm is formed in a poet's mind in the first place. What causes the 'trance-like suspension of his normal habit of thought' - apart from nightingales? Graves said that for him a cloud descends and he realises that something of importance has to be solved. He realises that a poem is around and then, echoing other poet's whose testimony we've already seen (and to them we could add W. H. Auden according to John Carey in his book <em><strong>The Unexpected Professor</strong></em>), it's as if the poem is already there and he's trying to reconstitute it. [Graves 1965] The problem that Graves has to solve seems to be an emotional problem - and this may be what triggers Jung's 'autonomous complex' - but why this recurrent sense that the poem has already been written and that, in Blake's words, the poet is only the secretary, 'the Authors are in Eternity'? </span></span><br />
</div>
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">
</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<b><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Perhaps we can assume that poetic inspiration simply comes from a part of our brains we’re
unconscious of? From ourselves?</span></b><b><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></b><br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Well, it’s not as simple as that. Scientists still don’t know how the
brain constructs consciousness let alone what the unconscious is. In fact the most they seem to be able to say
with confidence about consciousness is that it is a state of awareness…
something I think you and I already knew. In Jung’s day, research had indicated
that ‘there are all sorts of ways in which the conscious mind is not only
influenced by the unconscious but actually guided by it’. More recently the
American scientist Benjamin Libet conducted experiments which suggest that the
conscious will is an illusion. It appears that unconscious processes in the
brain initiate action before we are aware of having decided to perform the
action. Although the methods and conclusions of </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Libet's
experiments are disputed by some scientists, if true they seem to mean that
what we consciously experience is merely a recording of unconscious processes.
To me, this calls into question not only free-will but also the nature of the
self as we experience it. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Jung had already asked in 1930 in his essay “</span><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Psychology and
Literature”: </span><span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">‘Do
we delude ourselves in thinking that we possess and control our own psyches and
is what science calls the “psyche” not just a question-mark arbitrarily
confined within the skull but rather a door that opens upon the human world
from a world beyond, allowing unknown and mysterious powers to act upon man and
carry him on the wings of the night to a more than personal destiny?’ [Jung.
1984. p 95]</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">It
seems that there are no definite answers to the question I started with. If the nature
of consciousness and the unconscious is still mysterious, maybe attributing poetry
to a divine source - whether a god without or a god within - is as good a
proposition as any. </span><span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">Perhaps
the best thing I can do is leave you with the words of the Irish poet, Michael
Longley: ‘If I knew where poems came from, I’d go there.’ Would you?</span></span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">
</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">***</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">
<span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size: 14pt;">(Apologies for some formatting problems in this article. It appears to be caused by the use of accents in the Irish words which I've been unable to remedy.)</span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #444444; font-family: Perpetua;"></span> </div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;"></span><br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">References</span></span></span></b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Cross,
Tom Peete; Slover, Clark Harris. 1936. <i>Ancient
Irish Tales. </i>London: George G Harrap & Company Ltd.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Dawkins, Richard. 1999. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Unweaving the Rainbow. </i>London: Penguin Books</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">Elder,
John. 1996. Imagining the Earth: Poetry
and the Vision of Nature. University of Georgia Press; 2nd revised edition<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">Eliot,
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<span class="reference-text"><span lang="EN" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Graves, Robert. 1965. BBC Interview with Malcom Muggeridge. <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/writers/12243.shtml">http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/writers/12243.shtml</a></span></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">Graves,
Robert; O’ Prey, Paul ed. 1995. <i>Robert
Graves: Collected Writings on Poetry. </i><br />
Manchester: Carcanet Press<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">Haycock,
Marged. 2007. <i><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: border-box; background-image: none; background-origin: padding-box; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: auto;">Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin. </span></i><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: border-box; background-image: none; background-origin: padding-box; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: auto;">Aberystwyth: CMCS<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">Hill,
Selima. 2000. “God’s Velvet Cushions”.<i> </i>In<i> Contemporary
Women's Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice. </i>Mark, Alison; Rees-Jones, Deryn.
Palgrave Macmillan.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Jung, C. G. 1984. “On the Relation of Analytical
Psychology to Poetry” in <i>The Spirit in
Man, Art and Literature</i>. London: Ark Paperbacks<br />
Jung, C. G. 1984. “</span><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Psychology
and Literature” in <i>The Spirit in Man, Art
and Literature</i>. London: Ark Paperbacks<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">Mslexia
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<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">Padel,
Ruth. 2000. “How and Why in Contemporary Women’s Poetry.” In <i>Contemporary
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<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">Rilke,
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<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="background-color: white;">Stevenson,
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Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-35469837250104545462014-05-26T04:52:00.000-07:002014-05-26T05:42:36.992-07:00Re-emerging and 'The Goddess and The Gardener' book launch<br />
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I've been away from the blog for quite a few weeks now. It's been a very challenging start to the year, one way and another. As the sun rises in the sky and graces us with its presence for longer, I'm very slowly coming back to life.<br />
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Apart from my health, one of the challenges has been publishing another small poetry book under my Brigit's Forge imprint - this time not my own book but the first step in publishing other poets. For various reasons the process has been fraught with difficulties but at long last it's come to fruition. <i>The Goddess and The Gardener </i>by Jane Whittle is a sequence of poems written after she moved to Wales and began transforming a wild space into a garden, working with the energies of the land and of nature and absorbing them to such an extent that she herself grows along with the landscape and the voice of the goddess begins to speak through her.<br />
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We had the book launch at the Penrallt Bookshop in Machynlleth and I'm pleased to say it was a great success. Many books were sold so it was a good night for us and for Penrallt Books while the audience appear to have genuinely enjoyed it - the feedback passed on to us by Diane at the bookshop after the event was lovely to hear: 'enjoyable and enlivening', ' a wonderful evening of words', 'inspiring', 'a special evening'. All I would want for Brigit's Forge!<br />
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The picture above shows the book on display, in very august company. As well as talking about how my very small press, Brigit's Forge, came about, I also read some poems from The Sea Road and tested some new ones which led to selling more copies of The Sea Road. I promptly spent some of the proceeds on the book you can see in the picture, The Art of Robert Frost by Tim Kendall, an action I haven't regretted as it's a fascinating introduction to his poetry which includes 65 of the poems with commentary showing how Frost's poetry and its themes developed.<br />
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I'll be making a page or another blog for Brigit's Forge Press in due course and will say a bit more about the book and offer it for sale here. For now I'm taking things slowly and surely and just saying 'hello again'.<br />
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(Just in case you want to order a copy now, or have a closer look at it, it's on the Waterstones website - <a href="http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/jane+whittle/hilaire+wood/the+goddess+and+the+gardener/10192563/">CLICK HERE</a>)<br />
<br />Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-36285388421122728942013-12-21T03:27:00.003-08:002013-12-22T01:28:24.033-08:00Winter Light<br />
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<b><i><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Winter Light</span></i></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><i><br /></i></span></b><span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">The sun is low and slant,<br />revealing the world from a different angle,<br />what was in shadow is now made bright.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">But the light is visiting less and less:<br />the sleeping dark grows.<br /><br />Now the glory of the trees is gone<br />we see their essence,<br />how the weather has shaped them -<br />this one twisted, that one bent,<br />turning away from the battering wind;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">here one has grown rotten,<br />those two are standing so near<br />they lean together, supporting each other.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">The sun shines through the branches<br />now leaves no longer obscure the view;<br />hidden landscapes open before us:<br />now we can see what is beyond.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Soon only a trickle of light leaks into the days<br />which shuffle on towards the solstice,<br />to the still point<br />where we close our eyes<br />and disappear<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">a short time</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">then we wake again.<br /><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif;"><i><b>Hilaire Wood 2013</b></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Perpetua","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Solstice Blessings! Wishing you all a very merry Christmas and may every good thing come your way in 2014.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-56713090550878777702013-11-17T05:08:00.002-08:002013-12-10T03:54:27.224-08:00Autumn: A Janus Time<br />
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When I opened my curtains this morning I gasped in awe at the scene in front of me. All the different leaves of the trees and bushes (cherry, beech, birch, forsythia, ash, blackthorn) - the flowers and plants (evening primrose, cranesbill, strawberry, iris, lady's mantle) - are decaying in their own time, at different rates and showing different colours, giving the most rich and glorious mottled effect like a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism">Pointillist</a> painting. The picture above, although not of the view from my window, gives you some idea.<br />
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This time last year, on an autumn walk, I was struck by the fact that the path I was walking was thick mud with discarded leaves trampled into it in places and littered here and there were acorns, beechnuts and sycamore seeds; the dying and the promise of new life both abundant. The following poem tries to express my meditation on this.<br />
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<b><i>A Janus Time</i></b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Acorns and beechnuts are gracing the woods<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">while discarded leaves enshroud the land,<br />mulching the pathways yet to be walked<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">This is the falling time, the time of seeds,<br />a Janus-time of living and dying,<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">a threshold season.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">In summer, apple-scented eglantine<br />frolicked in hedgerows,<br />yarrow and meadowsweet<br />brightened the verges,<br />an angelic presence on grey rainy days<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">but the wings of the sycamore fly to the future;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">seeds spin our fate,<br />through them our lives are unfurled,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">by them we are carried,<br />by them we are saved<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">This is the falling time, the time of seeds,<br />a Janus-time of living and dying<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">The offspring of plants will nurture our children,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">so we are seedsmen, trading in hope,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">or gamblers, reckoning the odds:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">‘one for the rock and one for the crow,<br />one to die and one to grow’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">glowing like hearth light, the promise in darkness<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">we live our lives on this juxtaposition,<br />the crux and cusp at the heart of being.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">This is the falling time, the time of seeds</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">and now, like the trees, we are down at leaf,<br />heads heavy, we bend to face our roots,<br />feed on tubers, remember the past,<br />the rich earth opening -</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">what seeds do you carry that must answer the light?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">(I must just comment here since, I am aware that I am cross-posting on my blogs recently, that I don't intend to do this all the time of course but I've been finding it quite difficult to decide which blog to post these last few on (how to split oneself in half?) and so have put them up on both for now. I do have some posts in the pipeline which are more obviously appropriate for one or the other blog but for the time being I'll post to both when I'm undecided, although I might have to revise this in the longer term if the posts continue to converge more often than not.)</span></div>
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Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-40131585305840187602013-11-01T06:05:00.001-07:002013-11-06T11:19:36.040-08:00On the Deaths of Cats and Mothers - Poems by Thomas Hardy and Patrick Kavanagh<br />
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It's been a difficult time recently with some sad and challenging events. One of these was the death of my cat Ash, companion of 20 years. My other cat, Willow, died last year at the age of 17. In the picture above you can see them both in happier times curled up on the end of my bed on a Sunday morning while I read the Saturday Guardian - an enjoyable Sunday morning ritual.<br />
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I remember Chris Hamilton-Emery of Salt Publishing saying in his submission guidelines <span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">to a</span></span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; text-indent: -0.25in;">void sending poems on the death of your cat, mother or Biology teacher. (Or how crap your life is. Or about bee-keeping). Happily some people have written poems when their cats have died - notably perhaps Thomas Hardy who treated the subject with seriousness and in doing so touched on more general themes of dealing with loss and the presence of absence.</span><br />
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<b>Last Words to a Dumb Friend</b><br />
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Pet was never mourned as you,<br />
Purrer of the spotless hue,<br />
Plumy tail, and wistful gaze<br />
While you humoured our queer ways,<br />
Or outshrilled your morning call<br />
Up the stairs and through the hall -<br />
Foot suspended in its fall -<br />
While, expectant, you would stand<br />
Arched, to meet the stroking hand;<br />
Till your way you chose to wend<br />
Yonder, to your tragic end.<br />
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Never another pet for me!<br />
Let your place all vacant be;<br />
Better blankness day by day<br />
Than companion torn away.<br />
Better bid his memory fade,<br />
Better blot each mark he made,<br />
Selfishly escape distress<br />
By contrived forgetfulness,<br />
Than preserve his prints to make<br />
Every morn and eve an ache.<br />
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From the chair whereon he sat<br />
Sweep his fur, nor wince thereat;<br />
Rake his little pathways out<br />
Mid the bushes roundabout;<br />
Smooth away his talons’ mark<br />
From the claw-worn pine-tree bark,<br />
Where he climbed as dusk embrowned,<br />
Waiting us who loitered round.<br />
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Strange it is this speechless thing,<br />
Subject to our mastering,<br />
Subject for his life and food<br />
To our gift, and time, and mood;<br />
Timid pensioner of us Powers,<br />
His existence ruled by ours,<br />
Should - by crossing at a breath<br />
Into safe and shielded death,<br />
By the merely taking hence<br />
Of his insignificance -<br />
Loom as largened to the sense,<br />
Shape as part, above man’s will,<br />
Of the Imperturbable.<br />
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As a prisoner, flight debarred,<br />
Exercising in a yard,<br />
Still retain I, troubled, shaken,<br />
Mean estate, by him forsaken;<br />
And this home, which scarcely took<br />
Impress from his little look,<br />
By his faring to the Dim<br />
Grows all eloquent of him.<br />
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Housemate, I can think you still<br />
Bounding to the window-sill,<br />
Over which I vaguely see<br />
Your small mound beneath the tree,<br />
Showing in the autumn shade<br />
That you moulder where you played. <br />
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<i><b>Thomas Hardy</b></i><br />
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As for the suitability of subjects for poems, surely the quality of a poem depends not on its subject matter but on the skill and inspiration of the poet? In a few days time it will be ten years since my mother died. I haven't written a poem about her death but Patrick Kavanagh's poem in memory of his mother is a fine one I think.<br />
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<b>In Memory Of My Mother</b></div>
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I do not think of you lying in the wet clay<br />
Of a Monaghan graveyard; I see<br />
You walking down a lane among the poplars<br />
On your way to the station, or happily<br />
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Going to second Mass on a summer Sunday -<br />
You meet me and you say:<br />
'Don't forget to see about the cattle ' -<br />
Among your earthiest words the angels stray.<br />
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And I think of you walking along a headland<br />
Of green oats in June,<br />
So full of repose, so rich with life -<br />
And I see us meeting at the end of a town<br />
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On a fair day by accident, after<br />
The bargains are all made and we can walk<br />
Together through the shops and stalls and markets<br />
Free in the oriental streets of thought.<br />
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O you are not lying in the wet clay,<br />
For it is a harvest evening now and we<br />
Are piling up the ricks against the moonlight<br />
And you smile up at us - eternally.<br />
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<i><b>Patrick Kavanagh</b></i></div>
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Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-63675040240119658852013-07-31T10:41:00.000-07:002014-06-29T09:43:25.250-07:00Two Poems for British Polio Month<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">The Polio Pond </span>by Ann Alexander</div>
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Couldn't get there quick enough,</div>
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legs pumping bikes</div>
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down nettled alleys,</div>
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over bomb sites and the dangerous road,</div>
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out of the light</div>
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and into this cool spinney, where</div>
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a pond of standing water waited,</div>
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still as a crouched cat.</div>
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We'd heard the polio lived here,</div>
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biding its time in mottled dark,</div>
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belonging to neither day nor night,</div>
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nor any certain thing.</div>
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That smell. Sharp underbelly stink.</div>
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Breath, in gassy bubbles</div>
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pocked the surface, where</div>
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a dead bird floated, wings outstretched.</div>
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Red ribs of a child's pram, half submerged,</div>
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told their tremendous tale.</div>
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We threw sticks, threw stones.</div>
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Well back, on guard, then inching close,</div>
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we stared into its clouded heart,</div>
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swore we saw the bloody eye,</div>
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the tentacles,</div>
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the curled chameleon's tongue.</div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">© Ann Alexander (from the collection <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Too-Close-ebook/dp/B009N0WZQA/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375034166&sr=1-2&keywords=ann+alexander+too+close#_">Too Close</a>)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.66px;">A picture of me from the local paper at the Infantile Paralysis Fellowship party in<br />Wakefield Town Hall 1956, on a rare outing from Pinderfields Hospital.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In 1952 I contracted polio which left me with a paralysed leg. In the 1940s and early 1950s there were major polio epidemics in Britain and naturally there was huge fear around them. The virus was thought to lurk in water and warnings were given out in schools and signs hung in public swimming-pools. As well as The Polio Pond being an excellent poem, a piece of social history and a depiction of the way children are attracted to danger, there was something about the way Ann Alexander portrayed polio as a dangerous beast rather than an invisible virus that I found very empowering.</span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I used to go to a pond in the overgrown garden of a deserted house, with some children from the village, when I was a child and it reminded me of Ann's pond. At a mythic level, a tale began to unfold in which I had been one of the children who didn't get away in time when the beast emerged. So I was wounded by it and also in a strange way tainted by it - which explained the fear I engendered in other children sometimes, their own fear of disability or fear about how to relate to someone who is not like them perhaps. There is a kind of power in being able to make people afraid, but also I felt curiously strengthened by the feeling that I had encountered the dangerous beast and survived - had more than survived. </span><br />
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The poem worked on me on various levels, showing how magical poetry and stories can be. Disability is so often about disempowerment that it's good to have a sense of the opposite in a new way. Here's a draft of my own poem written in response to Ann's (which I have copied here with her kind permission) in which I've taken the story further. I've also implied that hate and cruelty are monstrous too.</span></div>
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<span dir="auto" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Picture by Sulamith Wülfing</span></span></h1>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The Polio Monster</span></div>
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Biding its time, the pond lay watching,<br />
a bright eye in the tangled waste;<br />
the bars of a gate floated<br />
dismembered and useless,<br />
dotted with pondweed like green confetti.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The children threw stones and gobbets of mud,<br />
their eyes gleamed, reverting to feral<br />
and catching their offerings<br />
the pool gobbled them down,<br />
sent up bubbles signalling relish.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Strengthened, the monster emerged,<br />
black slime ribboned his scales.<br />
A dark bridegroom, he leered towards them</div>
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and all valour lost, they turned and fled,<br />
except for the one who was left behind.<br />
In the claws' grasp there's no time for fear,</div>
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there's only surrender, the rushing descent<br />
into the tunnel, the muscular throat.<br />
Claimed by the monster the girl becomes It,</div>
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scales now exchanged for an iron splint,<br />
talons curved to the arch of a wheelchair.<br />
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Disallowed sticks, the children throw insults;<br />
sticks and stones would break her bones<br />
but words as well could harm her.<br />
Yet where there’s fear there’s always power:<br />
to become what is feared is to move beyond fear.<br />
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In the alien form she discovers her might,<br />
feels the rush of sinewy wings<br />
and knows her new world is still the whole world,<br />
the monster now fled to the pools of their eyes.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">© </span>Hilaire Wood</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>If you have enjoyed these poems and would like to know more about the British Polio Fellowship, you can find out <a href="http://www.britishpolio.org.uk/">HERE</a> and make a donation <a href="http://www.britishpolio.org.uk/support-us/donate/">HERE</a>. If you can, please spread awareness of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_poliomyelitis">Polio</a>, a largely forgotten disease which still affects 120,000 people in the UK, and of the work of the Fellowship. Or if you are outside the UK, please find out about how polio affects people in your own country. Thank you!</span><br />
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Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-22401442420499210262013-04-14T05:39:00.001-07:002013-09-03T10:43:34.638-07:00Launching The Sea Road<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Reading from The Sea Road in London at the Poetry Cafe</span></div>
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I'm slowly recovering from a busy few weeks. The launch of my book of poems at the Aberystwyth Art Centre bookshop went better than I could have imagined, I'm pleased to say. None of the disastrous scenarios I'd envisaged came about :-) About 50 people turned up - the result of myself and Ken Jones (my co-launcher) having sent out invites and flyers to our friends and fellow-writers and Simon, the bookshop manager having done a wonderful job of advertising with a piece in the Cambrian News, on the website and posters everywhere. (It was rather unsettling having my face beaming down at me from pillars in the cafe, but eventually I got used to it and ignored them.) I've never read to so many people; it was a great privilege.<br />
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It's also the first time I've had such an opportunity to showcase my work (usually I'm part of a group or just reading one of my poems from a mixed anthology) and that was a good experience, giving me the chance to talk more about what the poems were about and what I was hoping to do in the collection. I'd found a poem by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry">Wendell Berry</a>, that morning which seemed to sum it up and so I started with that as a point of orientation:<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">All the available copies of the book sold out as well as three I had in the car and Simon said he could have sold twice as many. I think my publisher's marketing officer </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px;">(i.e. me with another hat on)</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> had got the marketing strategy right. I'd planned to produce a pamphlet/small book and price it reasonably so that people would find it easier to give it a try and see if they liked it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">The following week I was taking part in an event at the lovely Pen'rallt Bookshop in Machynlleth for World Book Day/International Women's Day. I was on a panel that included poet Chris Kinsey, from Newtown, Caroline Oakley, editor of Welsh Women's Press, Honno (and Ian Rankin's editor), Emily Trehair, editor of Planet and </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Manon Steffan Ros, Welsh language novelist. There was a full house and a full programme - which was interesting and inspiring as each woman talked about her work and read something of it and of another writer she admired. I'd chosen my poems for an audience of women as the event had been advertised under the International Women's Day banner elsewhere. I was aware that if there was a mixed audience I might have to revise that in hurry but in fact the audience was almost a hundred percent women so it worked out all right. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Afterwards there was tea and the most delicious cheese scones and delicate pieces of carrot cake and everyone mingled and made contacts and chatted - it was a great atmosphere. I hadn't had supper so a friend and I (Jane Whittle who will be reading from her inspiring books, along with Ken Jones, at the bookshop on May 2nd) went over to the Wynstay Hotel where they'd finished serving food but very kindly rustled up a leek and potato soup followed by apple tart. We nattered about writing and the time flew so it was 11.15pm before I drove back towards Aber.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The following week I was going up to Sheffield for my granddaughter's first birthday party/naming ceremony. My son and daughter-in-law had invited me to read my poem to her which I was dead chuffed about. I hadn't been nervous about it at all as I was so delighted - until I walked into the public house were it was being held and suddenly thought, I'm going to have to think about how to introduce it, what shall I say! I took myself off to the Ladies and practised to the back of the door - as you do - and it all went ok. Afterwards, we ate the most amazing cake made by Leila's other grandmother. It was called a Red Velvet cake and the sponge was red. I told Dylan and his friends it was dinosaur blood which didn't seem to put them off...</span> <br />
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">After a lovely weekend it was the long drive back to Wales but once I'd negotiated the motorway I listened to T S Eliot reading his Selected Poems and Four Quartets and could have gone on driving for ever. Well, maybe not for ever.</span></div>
<br />Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-50753975154833394852013-02-03T09:37:00.003-08:002013-11-06T11:31:46.980-08:00Writing poetry: Coming at it slant<br />
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I've got off to rather a slow start this year. After ending 2012 full of enthusiasm and ideas for working on my poetry in 2013, during the Christmas break I became ill and exhausted and I've been recovering by centimetres, a little at a time. I think I am almost back to normal - I can at least see blue sky now.<br />
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My plan for the first half of this year was to do Roselle Angwin's <a href="http://www.fire-in-the-head.co.uk/Courses/PoetryCorrespondenceCourse/tabid/1465/language/en-GB/Default.aspx">Poetry Correspondence Course</a> which I thought would suit me very well. Roselle says about it: "While it’s an approach that favours the holistic, I’d like to think however that
authenticity of voice, knowledge of the requirements of poetry & of the
poetry world, & mastery of technique are given equal attention. I’m keen
that literary quality is not sacrificed to the demand that poetry be also a
means of connection, & a vibrant & essential aspect of inner work."<br />
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However, Roselle has decided not to run the course until July and since I'm always busier in the second half of the year and need something now to give shape to my work, I looked at other courses. <a href="http://www.oca-uk.com/subjects/creative-writing/writing-2-poetry-form-freedom.html">The Open College of the Arts</a>, <a href="http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/">the Poetry School</a>... Nothing seemed quite right and so I decided to fashion my own <i>Gelli Fach Poetry Course </i>for myself. I'm structuring it loosely around two books: Jay Ramsay's <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Poet-You-Jay-Ramsay/dp/1846940257/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1359973538&sr=1-1">The Poet in You</a> and Stephen Fry's <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ode-Less-Travelled-Unlocking-Within/dp/0099509342/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1359973485&sr=1-1">The Ode Less Travelled</a>. They cover what for me are the twin aspects of poetry - inspiration and craft. I had started to work with Stephen Fry's book last year (which is an absolute delight to read, erudite, quirky and surprisingly soothing and encouraging). I have to say that, although I did the exercises and felt I was learning an enormous amount, when I tried to apply it to my poetry it was a dismal failure; trying to channel my inspiration into a strict form had the effect of making it dry up. Nevertheless, I'm going to persevere - to a point anyway.<br />
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Jay's book is working with imagination and inspiration and gives a series of 9 exercises to be done ideally over 9 months. I wasn't sure how it was going to be but I have done the first one and although I wasn't expecting to get very much out of it, it was very rich, interesting, inspiring and rewarding. So, a good start. I may write about it at some point but for the moment I am concerned that some of the potency will be lost if I share it here.<br />
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As well as giving time to these two aspects of poetry, I am also reading some books about poetry which have been stacked in a pile by my bed for... well, too long. I've dipped into them but have decided I need to take one at a time and make notes as I go along. I'm starting with <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Imagining-Earth-Poetry-Vision-Nature/dp/0820318477/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1359973961&sr=1-2">Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature</a> by John Elder.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And of course I shall continue to attend the Poetry Reading Group once a month and the Poetry Workshop once a month - so that I am reading published poets, ancient and modern, and gaining from that, and offering my own poetry for feedback and constructive criticism from my peers, as well as offering feedback on theirs. Both of these groups I find invaluable as well as enjoyable.</span><br />
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I also have some readings and performances coming up. At the end of the month I'm launching my booklet, <a href="http://musingsfromgellifach.blogspot.co.uk/p/international-prices-with-postage-uk-6.html">The Sea Road</a>, at the Arts Centre Bookshop, alongside <a href="http://www.literaturewales.org/writers-of-wales/i/130003/desc/jones-ken/">Ken Jones</a>, a Buddhist and writer of haiku and haibun whose book, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bog-Cotton-Haiku-Stories/dp/0957259220">Bog Cotton</a>, has recently been published. At the beginning of March I'm going to be reading at the Pen'rallt Bookshop in Machynlleth for International Women's Day and I'll also be giving a talk on self-publishing poetry. In May, the Word Distillery, the performance group I work with, will be presenting an evening dedicated to Coleridge at the Arts Centre - we'll be reading the whole of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, accompanied by slides of the <a href="http://www.artsycraftsy.com/dore_mariner.html">Gustave Dore</a> prints illustrating the poem, as well as some of Coleridge's other work. I'm very much looking forward to that.<br />
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Making up my own 'Poetry Course' means that I shall miss out on the discipline and the feedback which I wanted, but given the lack of energy so far this year perhaps it's no bad thing. I've discovered before that trying to impose a rigid structure on myself is a sure way to a collapse. I seem to be at my most creative or productive when I come at writing casually- when I'm just having a look at a draft while the potatoes are boiling or jotting down notes which later I realise are nearly poems - or when I'm washing up and thinking about some image or potent experience that has occurred that day. I find I have to come at it slant. "It's as if you have to sneak up on yourself", Eluned in the poetry group said. But that doesn't mean that a more organised approach isn't useful for providing material and word music and improving skills. And practice, of course, makes perfect. I plan to write about this more here another time.<br />
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Wishing you- belatedly - a creative and fulfilling 2013!</div>
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PS - the submission deadline for <a href="http://www.musingsfromgellifach.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/valleys-new-journal-celebrating-writing.html">Valleys</a> has been changed to March 24th 2013. </div>
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Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-66506259930681355472012-11-07T10:00:00.000-08:002012-11-07T10:29:51.195-08:00Honno Poem of the Month: Rapunzel<br />
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I'm pleased to announce that my poem Rapunzel is <a href="http://www.honno.co.uk/potmnov12.php">Poem of the Month</a> on the Honno website.<br />
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Honno was established twenty-five years ago to increase opportunities for Welsh women writers and to bring Welsh women writers to a wider public. It is currently the only independent women's press in the UK. Rosanne Reeves, one of the founders, interviewed in The Cambrian News, gave an account of the situation in Wales which led to the setting up of the press:<br />
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"None of the publishing houses in Wales were particularly interested in promoting women's literature or writers, especially not in English... the thought of going out to look for new female talent and female voices was not a priority. It was in the 1980s that Greenham Common started, when women from Cardiff marched to the base; Welsh Women's Aid extended to rural Wales; the Miners' Strike brought women of the valleys out of their kitchens, to return to their kitchens empowered;... and a political branch of the Women's Section of Plaid Cymru was developed.<br />
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The opportunity to sell women's literature became a possibility - the influence of Virago, The Women's Press, Spare Rib, Onlywomen and the Attic Press in Ireland led the way. But of course Wales was different from England and there was a gap in the market in Wales for books which were relevant to the women of Wales, in both languages."<br />
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Honno's authors have included Sian James, Malorie Blackman, Tessa Hadley, Lindsay Ashford, Patricia Duncker, Kitty Sewell and many others. There have been several high-profile awards, including most recently Bethan Darwin's novel Back Home which won the Aur Pur Award 2010 and Cold Enough to Freeze Cows by Lorraine Jenkin which was shortlisted for the People's Book prize.<br />
Jane MacNamee's anthology of women writing about nature, <a href="http://www.honno.co.uk/dangos.php?ISBN=9781870206969">In Her Element</a>, includes essays
by Christine Evans; Sian Melangell Dafydd; Jane Matthews; Dee Rivaz; Jay
Griffiths; Patricia Barrie and Sue Anderson. The book was serialised on Radio 4.<br />
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Sadly Honno no longer publish poetry books but they have established the Poem of the Month feature on their website to promote the work of women poets in Wales. And one of my favourite books of poetry, <a href="http://www.honno.co.uk/dangos.php?ISBN=9781870206204">Vixen</a>, by Glenda Beagan, is still available. In this, her first collection of poems, "she dips into the world of nature
and myth to draw on themes, which though ancient, still have a powerful effect
on the modern world. Through the central figure of the vixen she looks at the
twin pulls of motherhood and independence, and explores how it feels to be a
woman in Wales today".<br />
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There is also a collection of <a href="http://www.honno.co.uk/dangos.php?ISBN=9781870206549">Welsh Women's Poetry 1460 - 2001</a> which includes brief biographies of each poet, and some daring new translations. The editors have produced "a superbly researched anthology that illustrates the
breadth, power and skill of Welsh women's poetry". "This groundbreaking volume is the first <em>bilingual</em> anthology of Welsh
women's poetry, demonstrating the rich, varied canon of poetry by Welsh women,
in both the Welsh and English languages. It ranges from Gwerful
Mechain, the Welsh women's Chaucer, to acclaimed contemporary poets
such as Menna Elfyn and Gillian Clarke, and
many works which previously existed only in handwritten manuscripts in the
National Library of Wales.<br />
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The Welsh word <i>honno</i> is the feminine form of 'that one' (who is elsewhere).<br />
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<br />Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-70066788746833341252012-10-31T01:56:00.000-07:002012-10-31T01:56:21.781-07:00Join the first Mindful Writing Day on 1st November<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This Thursday the 1st of November is the first<b> </b>ever <a href="http://www.writingourwayhome.com/p/mindful-writing-day-on-1st-of-november.html">Mindful Writing Day</a>, organised by Kaspa & Fiona at <a href="http://www.writingourwayhome.com/">Writing Our Way Home</a>.<br />
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I'm going to be travelling to London on the train in the morning to perform in the evening at the Poetry Place, Covent Garden, with the Word Distillery. I shall have plenty of time to be mindful, gazing out of the train window. I wonder what I'll see?<br />
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To join in simply slow down, pay attention to one thing and write it down (making a <i><a href="http://www.writingourwayhome.com/p/small-stones.html">small stone</a></i>). Read all about it <a href="http://www.writingourwayhome.com/p/mindful-writing-day-on-1st-of-november.html">here</a>. <i>Small stones </i>are easy to write, and they will help you connect to the world. Once you've started, you might not want to stop...<br />
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You can read more about <i>small stones</i> and find out about Lorrie with pea-green eyes in Fiona's free ebook, <a href="http://www.fionarobyn.com/Howtowriteyourwayhome.pdf">Write Your Way Home</a>. If you visit Writing Our Way Home on Thursday you'll find out how to download your free kindle copy of the new anthology, '<a href="http://www.writingourwayhome.com/p/a-blackbird-sings-book-of-short-poems.html">A Blackbird Sings: a book of short poems</a>' (which contains two of my <i>small stones</i>). You can also submit your <i>small stone</i> and see it published on the blog, and be entered into a competition to win one of five paperback copies of the book.<br />
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There's a <a href="http://www.facebook.com/events/374292422646744">Facebook invite</a> here if you'd like to invite your friends, and do feel free to copy this blog onto your own blog. You can tweet this: Connect with the world through mindful writing - join the first Mindful Writing Day on the 1st of November: bit.ly/VjzRKe #smallstone<br />
<br />Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-75773533072656561892012-10-26T04:36:00.002-07:002012-10-26T04:36:09.365-07:00The Sea Road: available soon
My poetry booklet The Sea Road is now in print. I'm very pleased with the way it's come out. There are twenty-five poems and artwork by local artist Jenny Fell. I took down my previous post about it as I had a hitch with the payment details and it seems to have disappeared! As I'm busy again preparing to go away for the poetry performances in London, I'm going to wait until I get back to launch it here. Meanwhile, you can see an image of it on the sidebar.
Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-78085212460469407942012-09-17T08:11:00.000-07:002012-09-17T08:13:08.617-07:00Book Launch: Ruth Bidgood and Matthew Jarvis<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Ruth Bidgood</span></div>
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(I wrote this post back in July and forgot to post it!). </div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I recently attended a book launch at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre bookshop for Ruth Bidgood’s latest volume of poetry <b><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Above-Forests-Ruth-Bidgood/dp/1907090665/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1344872396&sr=1-1">Above the Forests</a> </b>and Matthew Jarvis’s study of her work for the Writers of Wales series, called simply</span><span style="font-size: 16px;"> </span><b style="font-size: 16px;"><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bidgood-Writers-Wales-Matthew-Jarvis/dp/070832522X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1344872357&sr=1-1">Ruth Bidgood</a></b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">. It was also a celebration of the poet’s 90</span><sup>th</sup><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> birthday a few days before.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Ruth Bidgood is an accomplished reader of her own poetry. As the medieval Welsh Bardic Grammars point out, it is rare that a reciter is able to read a poem exactly as the poet composed it and listening to Ruth reading her poems with ‘fluency of expression, elegant sense and full understanding’ was a privilege; especially perhaps, as her full understanding of the poems includes bringing out some of the humour in them which we might otherwise have missed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">The evening included John Barnie, poet and one-time editor of <b><a href="http://www.planetmagazine.org.uk/html/newsite/index.htm">Planet</a></b>, interviewing Matthew about his book with occasional questions passed to Ruth herself. The book is a fascinating study with some interesting and appropriate biographical details and a close examination of many of the poems. It also includes in an appendix an unpublished letter Ruth wrote to the editor of <a href="http://www.poetrywales.co.uk/">Poetry Wale</a>s about her long sequence, Hymn to Saint Ffraid, which throws light not only on the genesis and intent of the piece but also on the poetic process.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Matthew Jarvis</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">However the poems themselves must take centre stage. They address memory, its importance, its effect on the past, its relationship with what is real. Often they engage with the unseen, the numinous, in a delicate and clear-headed way. The ground of their being though is the landscape and communities of the area surrounding Abergwesyn in mid-Wales, Ruth’s ‘home patch’ as she refers to it. Ruth Bidgoood observes in fine detail the life in the locality, past and present. W</span><span style="font-size: 16px;">ritten over four decades, s</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">uch an achievement must be almost unique and, as Matthew suggest, the work amounts to a mid-Wales epic. It is a record of the <i>milltir sgw</i></span><i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">â</span></i><i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">r</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">, the square mile, a Welsh phrase used to describe the patch of land that nourishes, sustains and calls to you. Matthew Jarvis describes it as ‘a bluntly defiant commitment to the region’s memory and its yet-surviving life’. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Ruth says simply:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">It seems important </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">to remember right:<br />know exactly the angle<br />of house to hill, be able<br />to count the pines…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">as though the intensity<br />of my recall<br />ensured the reality<br />of the place, its being…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">as though the existence<br />of a loved place were something<br />to be built, sustained<br />each moment, held to, against<br />the cold and cancelling wind. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">( from Recall) </span></div>
Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-29274807882091939942012-08-21T01:32:00.001-07:002012-08-21T08:57:29.261-07:00Word Distillery Blog<br />
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Tina Warren reading at the Russkiy Mir bookshop, London</div>
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I've been facilitating a blog for The Word Distillery - the poetry group I perform with. There are pages for each poet with a short description and samples of his or her work as well as the latest news, pictures and forthcoming events.<br />
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If you'd like to have a look, click here: <a href="http://word-distillery.blogspot.com/">The Word Distillery</a><br />
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<br />Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-14209738508531558892012-07-27T05:48:00.000-07:002012-08-03T06:48:09.303-07:00Amergin, Keats and Dōgen, Poets and Mystics<span id="goog_1794998249"></span><span id="goog_1794998250"></span><span id="goog_1794998225"></span><span id="goog_1794998226"></span><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/"></a><span id="goog_1794998231"></span><span id="goog_1794998232"></span><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/"></a><span id="goog_1794998233"></span><span id="goog_1794998234"></span><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/"></a><span id="goog_1794998235"></span><span id="goog_1794998236"></span><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/"></a><span id="goog_1794998237"></span><span id="goog_1794998238"></span><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/"></a><span id="goog_1794998239"></span><span id="goog_1794998240"></span><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/"></a><span id="goog_1794998241"></span><span id="goog_1794998242"></span><br />
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<span id="goog_1794998223"></span><img border="0" height="400" sda="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSTeEvIrA9TBXOUpjWYi_4nSs-N9mv41r5i-EUjbT8MDHTBRCJ0bh3neHcqBmNPEKnzXFyIs2KaES94spdRGt4RfFDCQ_2RlvszCqcLaQEhHSkNp0eSfkWQpVJg8vEq5LwTFkWMpXuXdQ/s400/Amergincroft.tif" width="266" /><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/"></a><span id="goog_1794998243"></span><span id="goog_1794998244"></span><span id="goog_1794998224"></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.croft-studio.com/03.11_Prints%20Gallery%20-%20Celtic%20Myths.htm"><span id="goog_1794998229"></span><span id="goog_1794998247"></span>Pamela Budge:The Croft Studio<span id="goog_1794998230"></span><span style="color: black;"> </span></a><br />
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black;">I am Wind on Sea,<br />I am Ocean-wave,<br />I am Roar of Sea,<br />I am Bull of Seven Fights,<br />I am Vulture on Cliff,<br />I am Dewdrop,<br />I am Fairest of Flowers,<br />I am Boar for Boldness,<br />I am Salmon in Pool,<br />I am Lake on Plain,<br />I am a Mountain in a Man,<br />I am a Word of Skill,<br />I am the Point of a Weapon (that poureth forth combat),<br />I am God who fashioneth Fire for a Head.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black;">R.A.S. MacAllister's translation from </span><a href="http://www.archive.org/details/leborgablare04macauoft" target="_blank"><span style="color: black;">Lebor Gabala Erenn</span></a><span style="color: black;"> (Irish Texts Society, 1941)</span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span><br /><span style="color: black;">So sang Amergin <span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Glúingel</span>, poet of the Milesians, when he first placed his right foot on the soil of Ireland. In Wales, the medieval bard Taliesin claimed to have been many things, animals, wild and domestic, the tools of farmers and smiths:<br /><br />I was a blue salmon,<br />I was a dog, a stag,<br />I was a roebuck on a mountain,<br />I was a block, I was a spade,<br />I was an axe in the hand,<br />I was an auger [held] in tongs,<br />for a year and a half.<br />I was a speckled cockerel<br />covering the hens in Eidyn;<br />I was a stallion at stud,<br />I was a fiery bull. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: black;">(<sup><span style="font-size: 10pt;"> </span></sup><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin, edited and translated by Marged Haycock)</span></span><br /><br /><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">S</span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">ome people see these proclamations as evidence of shamanic practices, shape-shifting or time-travelling, while scholars studying the Taliesin texts have sought to demonstrate that they are not the work of an early druidic bard but rather of a medieval professional poet promoting a mystique about the knowledge and talents of his profession, incorporating learning derived from such diverse sources as medieval science, folklore, biblical and continental texts.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">But can we see these particular utterances of Amergin, (‘Born of Song’) and Taliesin (‘Radiant Brow’) in poetic terms as exemplifying the ability or skill of the poet to inhabit other bodies, other times and situations through his imagination or mystical experience?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">Famously John Keats described the chameleon poet who has no colour of his own but takes on those of others, whether good or bad:</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">The poetical character</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">... is not itself — it has no self — it is every thing and nothing — It has no character — it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it fair or foul, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. — It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philospher, delights the camelion poet.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity – he is continually in for – and filling some other Body – the Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; no identity – he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures. [1]</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;">Keats is even able to imagine how an inanimate object might experience its existence, telling his friend Richard Woodhouse that he could conceive of a billiard ball taking a sense of delight in 'its own roundness, smoothness, volubility and the rapidity of its motion’. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Coleridge wrote in a letter of 1819 that he too experienced "a sort of transfusion and transmission of my consciousness to identify myself with the object" and nearer our own time T. S. Eliot has described how the poet continually surrenders himself to something more valuable (in this case an awareness not only of the time in which he lives but also the presence of the past, an experience of the timeless and the temporal) and asserts that </span><span style="color: #000020; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’ (Tradition and the Individual Talent)</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #000020; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="color: black;">There are some similarities between this ‘progress of the artist’ and the Buddhist way. The 13<sup>th</sup> century Chinese Buddhist Dōgen said:</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #000020; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="color: black;">To study the Way is to study the self.<br />To study the self is to forget the self.<br />To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.<br />To be enlightened by all things<br />is to remove the barriers between one’s self and others.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="color: #000020; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">But, although Dōgen himself was a poet, he taught that the Way led beyond language to a state of being fully present and enlightened. The way of the poet and the way of the mystic share steps on the journey but lead to a different place. </span><span style="color: #000020; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">When I was 16, sitting by a tree-lined lake with my cat, I had the classic mystical experience that we are all One. This was no conscious musing or reaching after meaning; there were no pictures, no words at the time, it was a sudden, unexpected and involuntary shift of perception - one which hasn’t recurred to date, although I suspect that my sense of the world and my being-in-the-world has been informed by it. But it's an experience that is impossible to put into words beyond 'We are all One'; impossible to describe of what that consists, how it feels, how it looks - because it is outside the usual bounds of perception and therefore of our usual modes of description which rely upon the senses. We may try to use words to describe it further, but in my experience they taint and dilute it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #000020; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="color: black;">In her essay Two Secrets: On Poetry’s Inward and Outward Looking [2], Jane Hirshfield considers poetry’s relationship with the outer world. She suggests that poems which carry reflective and indirect meanings take one of three stances: the subjective in which a ‘human-centered consciousness [is] dominating’; the reflective in which ‘the poet and the outer world stand face to face in mutual regard’ and the objective in which ‘the poet becomes an intermediary, a medium through whom the world of objects and nature beyond human consciousness may speak’.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="color: #000020; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">But is it possible for the world of objects and nature beyond human consciousness to speak to the poet and for the poet to communicate it to others? As Hirshfield herself says, ‘The earth does not speak our language’ (and Wittgenstein thought “</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">if a lion could talk, we could not understand him”)</span><span style="color: #000020; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">. Miriam Gamble points out in her <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/17/mara-crossing-ruth-padel-review">review of Ruth Padel’s recent poetry collection Mara Crossing</a>, </span><span style="color: #000020; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">that ‘Padel tussles…with the paradoxical truth that we can gain access to other perspectives only by filtering them through the networks of our own’. We cannot ‘conjure the experience of animals without sinning through usurpation’.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #000020; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="color: black;">I think there are two ways in which we endeavour to engage with the consciousness of other beings and objects. One is through a mystical communion with nature, with aspects of reality that are normally beyond human perception – an experience which is beyond words and is often corrupted if an attempt is made to communicate it in language. The other is through the imagination.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #000020; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="color: black;">What is the imagination? It is the faculty which gives “the power to visualize and build mental images; dream about things that have never happened; feel intuitively; and reach beyond sensual or real boundaries” </span><a href="http://www.cfisd.net/dept2/curricu/elart/Glossary.htm"><span style="color: black;">(Elementary Art - Glossary of Art Terms</span></a><span style="color: black;">)</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: #000020; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> Colderidge defined the Primary Imagination</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> as “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”. James Volant Baker thought that for Coleridge, "the creative act… is a godlike-act-of-<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">power and causing-to-be, imagination being the divine potency in man”. (James Volant Baker, Sacred River: Coleridge’s Theory </span><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">of the Imagination) The Primary Imagination says Coleridge, is the necessary imagination as it "automatically balances and fuses the innate capacities and powers of the mind with the external presence of the objective world that the mind receives through the senses".</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">“</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">I am God who fashioneth Fire for a Head” said Amergin, the pronouncement often taken to mean that he is the god who kindles the fire of creative imagination. But is that what he said? The original says “</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Am dé delbas do chind codnu" </span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">codnu </i>is obscure. It may be a plural form of the noun <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">conn / cond</i> which could mean a 'protruberance, bulge'; so 'horns, antlers', or it could mean 'intelligence, sense', or even 'chief, leader, sensible person'. The meaning ‘fire’ (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tene) </i>only comes from a later gloss on the text. Dennis King has questioned, could the line read "I am a god who shapes/creates horns/antlers for the head" - which might link it, perhaps, with Cernunnos, the antlered god. John Carey (The Celtic Heroic Age), meanwhile, translates the line as “</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">I am a god who forms subjects for a ruler”. </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Problems of translation are not only between nature and ourselves…</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="color: black;">But if Amergin is saying that he is a god that shapes intelligence or sense (meaning), then that is perhaps not a bad way of describing the consummate poet who uses his imagination to engage with the external world and filter his vision through language and form to his or her audience, enabling us to expand our perception of the world, its diversity and its wonders.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">[1]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></sup><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Selected Poems and Letters of John Keats, edited with commentary by Robert Gittings, Heinemann, 1966, p 87</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[2] </span></sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><em>Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, by Jane Hirshfield, Harper Perennial, 1998, pp 127-152</em></span></span></div>
<br />Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5022583807511150005.post-54664924950756450242012-05-29T03:03:00.002-07:002012-05-29T03:27:58.914-07:00Poetry at Strata Florida Abbey<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> The church next to Strata Florida Abbey.<br />Dafydd ap Gwilym's yew tree is to the left of the picture.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: small;"> </span> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Recently I went to the Open Day of the Centre for Advanced Celtic Studies at <a href="http://cadw.wales.gov.uk/daysout/stratafloridaabbey/?lang=en">Strata Florida, or <i>Ystrad Fflur</i></a>, the site of a Cistercian abbey. Although the weather was cold and grey, it was a truly lovely and inspiring day. Just what I needed as I had been decidedly lacking in <i>hwyl </i>(enthusiasm, humour) lately. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"></span>The abbey is about a mile from the village of Pontrhydfendigaid, Ceredigion, some 15 miles from where I live. Originally founded in 1164, many important manuscripts are thought to have been written there, namely <i><span lang="EN">Brut y Tywysogion, </span></i><span lang="EN">The Chronicle of the Princes, a major source for early Welsh history; <i>Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch</i></span><span lang="EN">, The White Book of Rhydderch, which contains the stories of the Mabinogi,<i> </i>and the Hendregadredd Manuscript which contains an anthology of poems of the 12<sup>th</sup> and 13<sup>th</sup> century <i>Beirdd y Tywysogion</i> (the Poets of the Princes) or <i>Y Gogynfeirdd</i> (the Not So Early Poets). Around 1330 a number of poems by contemporary poets were added and there is one poem of Dafydd ap Gwilym’s which is probably written in his own hand. </span></div>
<span lang="EN">Dafydd ap Gwilym was born not far away in the village of Penrhyncoch and it is likely that he was educated at Strata Florida by the monks and was buried in the churchyard there when he died. A fellow-poet, Gruffydd Gryg, wrote an elegy to him, addressing the yew tree which grew over his grave. It was the custom then, however, for poets to write elegies to each other when they were still alive so it isn’t certain that he is buried there. However it is thought that the yew is old enough to have existed in his time and there is a memorial to him placed there.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWDXgEJmMHRGAsMIHJ4GKzsaBO_pwzBjSvPqWYNZINRAFUf8uDyPUSFWSLWejSy4LSUYa6W1JX9Qhom4eZDRUiMMdFw11r3UCNniUAjjbjgoboAh30tIHnrAgIG09ii5rAz1T0N7D74_pl/s1600/001.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" rba="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWDXgEJmMHRGAsMIHJ4GKzsaBO_pwzBjSvPqWYNZINRAFUf8uDyPUSFWSLWejSy4LSUYa6W1JX9Qhom4eZDRUiMMdFw11r3UCNniUAjjbjgoboAh30tIHnrAgIG09ii5rAz1T0N7D74_pl/s320/001.JPG" width="240" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><em>Yr ywen i oreuwas<br />Ger mur Ystrad Fflur a’i phlas;<br />Da Duw wrthyd, gwynfyd gwŷdd,<br />Dy dyfu yn dŷ Dafydd.</em></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><em></em><br />This yew-tree for the best of men, <br />Near the walls of Strata Florida and its hall;<br />God’s blessing on you, happy tree, <br />For growing as a house for Dafydd.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">In an earlier exchange of funeral odes with Dafydd, Gruffydd had written:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><em>Tristach weithian bob cantref,<br />bellach naw digrifach nef.</em></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Sadder now is every area of land,<br />but heaven is nine times more joyful.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Dafydd Johnston gave a talk among the ruins about the poets of the abbey, quoting from the medieval poet Dafydd Nanmor’s poem about Strata Florida. He tells how the Abbot </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> Rhys ‘cut ten complete windows, half the cost of this went in glass’; the abbey had roofs of 'heavy lead', 'so woven as to leave no holes for ice, water, snow or rain'. Between her walls were 'acres for burying lords' and there was music too – he heard the fair sounds of treble, mean (the refrain or chorus of a song) and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_(music)">burden</a> there. He related how there was a great belfry, lime dressed, huge and white, with a cock on top of it. It was so large that if Noah’s flood were to come again, all the saints inside would be protected.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">The talk filled the empty spaces of the abbey with the words of the poets and thoughts and images of how magnificent it had been once… </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">No sun<br />but the stones<br />shine with history</span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">After this it was time to go and learn about <em>cynghanedd</em> from Eurig Salisbury who perched on top of the wall by the garden. It had a rather medieval feel to it – being taught something in the open air, the words blown on the cold wind. Not so much a hedge school as a wall school perhaps… It was a very clear and concise introduction to complicated Welsh metres with an excellent handout. I was motivated the next day to try a few lines of (rather clumsy) <em>cynhanedd sain </em>to give an image of the day:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Sitting in the cold in the fold of Strata Florida<br />hearing the tale of the travail of the venerable<br />I catch sight of the flight of the falcon<br />which soars in the sky like the sigh of a soul</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Ideally the lines should have 7 syllables (such as in 'Make fish the dish of the day' - remember that ad?) although I think more are permitted.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">And then back to the impressive West Gate to hear poems about Strata Florida by the Welsh poet, <a href="http://www.gwynethlewis.com/biography.shtml">Gwyneth Lewis</a>. CADW commissioned her to write them in recognition of its literary and cultural associations and to celebrate the re-opening of the abbey. The poet said that</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> this was for her the high point of her career and she planned later to light a candle at Dafydd ap Gwilym’s memorial ‘in gratitude and humility’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">The English poem had, at times, a bare, somewhat staccato feel to it, and it wasn’t until I saw it written down that I felt I understood the concept underlying it (although who knows whether it is what the poet intended). To me it seemed to contain, in almost concrete fashion, some of the feel of the abbey. Its incomplete sentences were fragments, like the surviving stone fragments of the abbey... only the great West door remaining intact, offering us through through absence rather than presence an opening into something greater, an expanding universe. But the poem ends by reminding us that we have to find our own door; a gateway to all ages, to the timeless in the temporal. Perhaps the picture below will give you some idea of what I mean.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> …Pass<br />Through this door<br />Into Christ, the expanding<br />Universe. Dimension:<br />Wonder. Uplands bare,<br />Riches below…</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">… This<br />Door. Find your own elsewhere.<br />Now. The future. Then. Then now.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">I remembered that the medieval Welsh poets were sometimes referred to as builders and their poems were not composed but built... </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">The Welsh poem was quite different, the poet asking for her ashes to be scattered in Ystrad Fflur (which in an article in CADW's magazine <em>Etifeddiaeth Y Cymry </em>she describes as being a cornerstone and frame of her life) and ending:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><em>...Gwisgaf y gwynt, fy nghorff<br />Ac, mewn munud daw awel lem<br />O'r mynydd gan iasu'r glaswell yn emau byw.</em></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">(I'll wear my body, the wind, and in a moment a cold breeze from the mountain will thrill the grass into living gems.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> ***</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Lunch was a cream cheese and salad roll I’d prepared earlier, finished off with digestive biscuits and a flask of tea. I ate it sitting in the car which was consolingly warm, looking out over one of the fields. Then it was a spell of finding out how to add shapes to a mosaic of an archway with the words STRATA FLORIDA above it. Rob Turner is the artist commissioned to display the poems in a permanent setting at the abbey. You can read about his design and progress <a href="http://returner62.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/strata-florida.html">HERE</a> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">There was a final talk on manuscripts and princes by Ann Parry Owen with a very useful illustrated booklet she had produced (I only managed to get one of the Welsh copies but it is proving very good for me having to translate it). Before going home, I went into the visitors' centre to’ make my own tile’. This consisted of buying the tile which resembles unset plaster of paris (but has dried into something that feels very light, rather like polystyrene) and then choosing one of the designs from the several tiles which have survived at the abbey and impressing it on the tile. I decided on ‘the man with the mirror’ – perhaps a symbol of vanity although other interpretations suggest he is a hunter. I like to think he’s a poet of the green wood holding up a mirror…</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">And finally, not to be forgotten, the Flowers - bluebells and the promise of foxgloves .</span></div>
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<br /></div>Hilairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12698057844619063857noreply@blogger.com1