Reading Scheme

Apropos Rob's comment on Peter and Jane and Me, here's the link to Wendy Cope's poem, 'Reading Scheme'.

Post a poem to win a poem

Regular readers will know that I'm a big, big fan of the Green Chair Press (upon which I have oft times mused: eg see here and here). In fact, landing on Susan's blog and website was, for me, one of the first big rewards of entering the blogosphere last summer, and I am now the proud owner of a number of Susan's beauteous creations - irresistible to the typophile, the letterpress enthusiast and the ampersand lover alike.

To celebrate National Poetry Month in the US, Susan is giving away one of her one-off Pattern Forms broadsides (see pic above). It’s a cut paper collage with a letterpress printed original haiku beneath it.

life forms patterns

haphazard & beautiful -

catch them as they fly by

For a chance to win, all you need to do to is post your favorite poem in a comment to this post on the Green Chair Press Blog by 29 April. The winner will be selected at random from the submitted poems and announced on 1 May.

Why not have a go?

What's the point of reading all this old stuff?

When I read Sean O'Brien's excellent piece in Saturday's Guardian , 'Read poetry: it's quite hard', my first reaction was to memorise it word for word, so I could quote it verbatim at young persons (and, sadly, numerous older persons also) who routinely ask with a sigh what is the point of reading 'boring', 'irrelevant' works of English poetry and fiction when contemporary culture is, like, so much more cool and happening. The 'dead white males (yawn)' argument, in other words.

A quick surf around some of my regular blog-haunts over the past couple of days has revealed a tidal wave of agreement with O'Brien's arguments and general approval for The Guardian's publication (as from tomorrow) of a series of giveaway booklets on 'Great Poets of the 20th Century', including works by TS Eliot, Philip Larkin and Sylvia Plath, accompanied by a CD of the poets reading their work.

Here are some of my favourite bits of O'Brien's article:

'The word "relevance" looms - that contemporary fetish, so often brandished to mitigate ignorance and justify a failure of curiosity. I would argue that my friends' daughter and many young people like her suffer a loss of liberty when the past is in effect closed down and the present becomes the measure of all things. Such young people have, in effect, no history, and this being so, their own significance is diminished. The problem is not whether Shakespeare or the Bible or TS Eliot is "relevant" to them, but whether they can see themselves as part of a continuum, a community extending across history.'

'In fact, the deafening roar of the contemporary is as elaborately rhetorical in its way as any other language-use, but just as readers sometimes mistake literary realism for reality, and find non-realist work intolerable in consequence, so they are encouraged to confuse the banal with the actual.'

'Autonomy and seriousness come under threat because they represent an obstacle to the progress of the kind of ignorance that prefers to suppose that everything can be consumed, excreted and replaced, that one thing is much like another, and that anyway nobody cares or has time to make their own distinctions.'

The Definition of Love

I had stopped bothering to watch Lark Rise to Candleford these past few weeks - it had begun to annoy me too much. Anachronism-spotting was proving far too unchallenging and joyless, and the last time I sat in front of it, I merely fell asleep with boredom.

However, tonight it happened to coincide with my feeling the urgent need to put my feet up with a restorative cuppa and I ended up seeing it. Two good things emerged from the general soup of toshiness: (1) Julia Sawalha - who really is quite wonderful to watch, and (2) The Definition of Love, by Andrew Marvell (1621-78), which I regret to say that I don't remember having read with intent since I was at school.

How silly it is, I often think, that we study at 13 or 14 poems (and plays and novels) which we cannot hope to understand until life and love have bashed us around a bit.

My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by despair
Upon Impossibility.

Magnanimous Despair alone.
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne'r have flown
But vainly flapt its Tinsel Wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended Soul is fixt,
But Fate does Iron wedges drive,
And alwaies crouds it self betwixt.

For Fate with jealous Eye does see.
Two perfect Loves; nor lets them close:
Their union would her ruine be,
And her Tyrannick pow'r depose.

And therefore her Decrees of Steel
Us as the distant Poles have plac'd,
(Though Loves whole World on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embrac'd.

Unless the giddy Heaven fall,
And Earth some new Convulsion tear;
And, us to joyn, the World should all
Be cramp'd into a Planisphere.

As Lines so Loves Oblique may well
Themselves in every Angle greet:
But ours so truly Paralel,
Though infinite can never meet.

Therefore the Love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debarrs,
Is the Conjunction of the Mind,
And Opposition of the Stars.

Even Less Eminent Victorians

Two more Limericks from Less Eminent Victorians by Randolph Davies.

Less Eminent Victorians

Here's a curiosity from my chaotic bookshelves which might amuse. Less Eminent Victorians by 'R. D.' (Randolph Davies), published in 1927, pokes fun at the Victorian era in a series of limericks, based around wood engravings from popular periodicals of the time - The Leisure Hour and The Quiver among them., and also from a book called Mary Price: The Memoirs of a Servant Maid.

R. D., who chose his title in mischievous homage to Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, says in his introductory Note:

'On or two of [the wood engravings] have been selected purely for their badness; but for the most part it is their very excellence as artistic and dramatic illustration that temps one to exploit their Victorian habit and gesture for less serious purposes than those for which they were designed.'

Here are couple to be going on with (click to enlarge). I'll post some more on days when I'm devoid of blogging inspiration*.

*'Blogspiration'?
Hmm, perhaps not - sounds more like an unfortunate side-effect of over-enthusiastic blogging rather than the reverse. An application of Antipostpirant would probably sort it out . . .
Ignore me. It's gone midnight and my brain has turned into a pumpkin.

Reading other people's books

One of the great pleasures of staying in other people’s houses is, of course (and with permission), reading other people’s books. It’s a serendipitous thing. Instead of browsing through shelves, one will often pick up the nearest thing to hand, something off the pile of newly acquired books (if it’s Christmas or birthday time), or from the shelves in the guest-room which – depending on the household – often house either the least favoured, unread books, shunted in there to get them out of the way, or a thoughtful selection of light reading compiled with overnight guests specifically in mind. The great thing is that, whatever one dips into, it is quite likely to be something one wouldn’t otherwise have thought of reading.

One of the books which I read in this way over Christmas – lent to me by my brother-in-law (who hails from North of the Border) - was Bill Duncan’s The Wee Book of Calvin. Which is a strange and surprising little volume, whose appearance entirely belies its contents. And this is intentional, as Duncan explains in his Introduction:

'This project started life as a mischievous, ironic take on the plague of ‘Little Book’ publications: you know, the sort of irritatingly positive-looking things that infest the ever-expanding ‘Mind and Body’ section of your local bookstore. Those bland, emotionally glib ‘New Age’, touchy-feely self-help guides . . . offering an instant path to inner peace, the child within and off-the-shelf spiritual enlightenment. And all this, without anything as painful as though, hard ideas or intellectual effort . . . I looked with mounting incredulity and dismay at the promiscuous glut of Little Books . . . Faced with this loathsome onslaught, I was convinced the world needed to hear a different kind of voice . . .’

The voice Duncan presents is the voice of the Kingdom of Fife in the East of Scotland. Here he has collected together aphorisms which sum up the Calvinist outlook of those who toiled for generations in the mines in a cold, grey landscape, or fished in the cold, grey sea.

Hope is the dream o a foolish man.

If it didnae hurt, it wiznae worth daaein.

A glower says mair than a smile.

Dinnae expect onything an yell no be disappointed.

Hang a thief when he’s young an he’ll no steal when he’s aald.

and one which distills the essence of all the rest:

First braith, beginnin o yer daith.

Yet, as Duncan explains in his first essay (which you can read here), the more he pondered these snippets of wisdom, the more he felt the need to put them in context, and here’s what makes this book so much more interesting than it would at first appear.

The doom-laden ‘sayings’ are interspersed with a series of beautifully written autobiographical essays, recounting the author’s childhood life with his grandparents. His grim, sour, stoical grandmother – a staunch Presbyterian, whose world revolved around the themes of Salvation, Damnation and Redemption - and his courageous, whisky-sustained grandfather, who, to his wife’s eternal shame and anguish, was an Unbeliever.

‘From my Grandfather I inherited my love of black clothes, silence, haar, November, cloud formations . . . the sudden lash of rain against a window . . . the first skein of geese arriving across a darkening late-September sky heralding another Winter.’

The book persists with it's 'little book' theme and ends with a rather silly 'quiz', so readers can discover whether they are in fact closet Calvinists: 'You write only in black ink'; 'you feel suddenly and unaccountably sad during moments of pleasure or relaxation with friends'; 'You prefer your own company to that of others'; 'Your favourite confectionery product is Fisherman's Friend - Extra Strong', and so on and slightly tediously so on. Which makes the 'irony' of the enterprise rather too heavy-handed and I wondered whether it was the publishers, rather than the author, who ploughed on with this aspect of the book. (Oh, and it has an entirely hideous cover, which similarly fails to be ironic and indeed inclines one to read this surreptitiously hidden behind another book!)

But the musings on themes of belief and unbelief, climatic and human coldness, and above all the infinitely complex relationship between landscape and language, weather and linguistics are not only completely fascinating but so moving and poetic that I decided to find out more about Duncan.

He is a writer, poet and teacher, now based in Dundee. His collection of short stories, The Smiling School for Calvinists, was shortlisted in the 2002 ‘State of the Nation’ quest for the books which say the most about contemporary England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. An extract from Duncan’s essay in the book Scottishness - a collection of essays on national identity - can be read here .

And, in one of those pleasing bits of circularity in life, I also discovered that Bill Duncan paired up with another of my (relatively) recent ‘lucky finds’ - singer/songwriter, James Yorkston, on the Ballads of the Book album (the project has its own website , which takes an inordinate amount of time to load, and is almost worth the wait).

If you’re not familiar with James Yorkston – here he is singing ‘Steady As She Goes’ – accompanied by a quirky but rather lovely video.

10th December - A Special Birthday

Should it happen to be your birthday today, you share it with one of my favourite poets – Emily Dickinson , born 10 December 1830.

I’ve known some of Dickinson’s poems for years, but have only recently worked my way through the Complete Works - in fact, I haven’t quite finished yet. (As an Eng. Lit. girl, I'm probably a bit of a late-starter in this respect, to say the least.)

Because she’s on my ‘currently reading’ pile, she is constantly to hand on my bedside bookcase. But even when I’ve moved on to other books, there, by my bedside, she will be staying, along with my other favourite ‘dip into’ books.

I’ve found so much in her work that is exquisitely evocative and moving and personal. For anyone who’s a bit ‘scared’ of poetry, one of the best things about her work is that Emily Dickinson is often regarded as ‘coming from nowhere’. She doesn’t belong to any school or tradition of poetry, she simply ‘appeared’. And I wonder whether this doesn’t explain in large measure why her poems – 150 years old – seem so fresh and accessible and have gained her such a huge following. Her poems are completely timeless, it seems to me. Many of them could have been written yesterday. And when you see her handwritten versions, with their incomplete rhymes and unconventional punctuation (she was a great user of dashes and odd capitalisation) – they seem so spontaneous and full of life.

And yet, she was for the greater part of her life a recluse – the ‘Woman in White’ – who shied away from company and even from leaving the house at all.

How the words of a woman who saw hardly anyone, went hardly anywhere and, as far as is known, never consummated any of her loves, can be so alive, so direct and so bursting with meaning for contemporary readers remains a mystery. The enigma of the woman helps make her more accessible. There is so much there that is unknown, obscure, unresolved, that one reader’s response and guess at the true meaning of a Dickinson poems is as good as anyone else’s.



While providing vast trough-loads of fodder for academics, she has largely resisted their attempts to explain and confine her. And this she shares with another out-of-nowhere 'Great' – Shakespeare. You could spend your life analysing her work (and indeed millions have), but you’d never nail down that essential ‘yes’-ness which leaps into the reader’s heart when reading certain poems.

And so I’m not at all bothered by the fact that I don’t understand some of her poems, and find scholarly analysis of her rhyming structures (which, incidentally, until surprisingly recently, her editors ‘improved’ before publication) ultimately irrelevant. I don’t really care to explore what makes her poems ‘work’ – I simply know that certain of them tick to the beat of my heart, speak with a voice that I recognise.

Happy Birthday, Emily, and thank you for leaving us your poems (even though you probably didn’t mean to).

Here are a few of my favourites:



THERE is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.

This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!




YOU left me, sweet, two legacies,—
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had He the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.




WILD nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,—
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!





I STARTED early, took my dog,
And visited the sea;
The mermaids in the basement
Came out to look at me,

And frigates in the upper floor
Extended hempen hands,
Presuming me to be a mouse
Aground, upon the sands.

But no man moved me till the tide
Went past my simple shoe,
And past my apron and my belt,
And past my bodice too,

And made as he would eat me up
As wholly as a dew
Upon a dandelion’s sleeve—
And then I started too.

And he—he followed close behind;
I felt his silver heel
Upon my ankle,—then my shoes
Would overflow with pearl.

Until we met the solid town,
No man he seemed to know;
And bowing with a mighty look
At me, the sea withdrew.


There’s so much available on the internet about Emily Dickinson’s life and works, that it’s pretty pointless trying to give a potted version here. There's a huge collection of useful resources here , and her complete poems are available available online here . There’s a fantastic collection of links here for anyone who wants to delve further.

Mud

Mud is Beauty in the making,
Mud is melody awaking;
Laughter, leafy whisperings,
Butterflies with rainbow wings;
Baby babble, lover's sighs,
Bobolink in lucent skies;
Ardours of heroic blood
All stem back to Matrix Mud.

Mud is mankind in the moulding,
Heaven's mystery unfolding;
Miracles of mighty men,
Raphael's brush and Shakespear's pen;
Sculpture, music, all we owe
Mozart, Michael Angelo;
Wonder, worship, dreaming spire,
Issue out of primal mire.

In the raw, red womb of Time
Man evolved from cosmic slime;
And our thaumaturgic day
Had its source in ooze and clay . . .
But I have not power to see
Such stupendous alchemy:
And in star-bright lily bud
Lo! I worship Mother Mud.

(Robert Service)

Compare the photo above with the similar view taken on the day of the surge tide. In the distance is Mersea's historic Oyster Packing Shed.

Another bad Brent geese photo, though slightly better than last night's because taken half an hour earlier. Small snappy camera still couldn't cope, however. I will try to get out and capture them in proper daylight soon!

For a perfectly amazing 'TBTM' photo - taken while I was still tucked up in bed with a cup of tea, reading - see Sam's blog.

A dull, grey day

The sea is flecked with bars of grey,
The dull dead wind is out of tune . . .
And overhead the curlews cry

(Oscar Wilde)

This very poor photo was taken at dusk - 4.40 pm - with my unsophisticated little snappy camera. I'm only including it here because it shows the largest number of Brent geese I've seen at this end of the Muddy Island so far this year. As regular readers of Musings will know, I've got rather a thing about these birds. The noise was tremendous. I took some more snaps as they flew overhead, but those were even worse than this one (can this be possible? unfortunately, yes).

Four of the geese who decided to go for a twilight swim instead of returning to the fields with the rest of the flock.

Dreams to sell, fine dreams to sell . . .

I mentioned in a previous post that I was looking forward to reading Dream Angus by Alexander McCall Smith – his contribution to the Canongate Myths series.

I have mused at more length about Alexander McCall Smith – whose Law and Medical Ethics I used to have the pleasure of copy editing and typesetting - in previous posts. Suffice to say for now that I am a very big fan of his fiction and rather wish he were even more prolific than he is, though goodness knows he clocks up novels at a truly amazing rate.

Dream Angus is a character from the Celtic mythology of Scotland and Ireland – a bringer of dreams, and an embodiment of youth and beauty. He features in a haunting Scottish lullaby, the words of which are set out here (scroll to end of post), and also in W B Yeats’s poem ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ (1899):

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Fans of McCall Smith’s Scotland Street, Isabel Dalhousie and No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series may find this offering rather strange. I wasn’t at all sure what to make of it myself for a while. I ended up reading it over a couple of months, rather than straight off. I kept putting it down, rather than picking it up!

It takes the form of a series of individual short stories, set in the recent past or the present day, mainly in Scotland, which are interwoven with scenes from the story of Dream Angus’s life, as handed down in the Celtic myths.

The ‘modern’ stories are vignettes from the lives of people to whom dreams are, or will be, or should be significant in some way. An Angus figure hovers in the margins of each story - sometimes making a definite appearance, sometimes merely alluded to. They are beautifully written, with the kind of wry observation we expect from this author, yet not only are the tales are unrelated to each other, but their connection with Angus can seem fairly tenuous at times. When I’d finished I was a little stumped, in a ‘wassat all abaaat, then?’ kind of a way (not that I would ever give voice to such a phrase, naturally, heaven forbid, etc).

And yet, and yet . . . this is a book about the power of dreams and what gradually formed in my mind as I tried to come up with a coherent ‘opinion’, was a cloud of half-remembered characters and ideas, snatches of place and time. What did that remind me of? Remembering dreams. The book itself is like a series of dreams. Clever. Which of course is nothing more than we expect from McCall Smith. And wise. ‘Wise’ is an old-fashioned word and an old-fashioned notion but it’s one that has always sprung to mind when reading AMcS.

This is a book that sticks in the mind – not at the forefront, but in the place where it belongs, at the fuzzy edge of our conciousness – reminding us that, as the author says in his Introduction, ‘Angus puts us in touch with our dreams . . . there is always an Angus within us’.

You can see Alexander McCall Smith talking about the book here:

'I started early, took my dog, and visited the sea . . .'

I started early, took my dog,
And visited the sea;
The mermaids in the basement
Came out to look at me,

And frigates in the upper floor
Extended hempen hands,
Presuming me to be a mouse
Aground, upon the sands.

But no man moved me till the tide
Went past my simple shoe,
And past my apron and my belt,
And past my bodice too,

And made as he would eat me up
As wholly as a dew
Upon a dandelion’s sleeve—
And then I started too.

And he—he followed close behind;
I felt his silver heel
Upon my ankle,—then my shoes
Would overflow with pearl.

Until we met the solid town,
No man he seemed to know;
And bowing with a mighty look
At me, the sea withdrew.

(Emily Dickinson)

'. . . holding up clouds with three syllables . . .'

Here's another Wild Goose Poem for you (see some of my previous posts).

This one is brand new and hot off the press. It's by Michael Gravel , who's a poet in Edmonton, Alberta. It landed in my email inbox one Friday last month because I'm on Michael's Friday's Poem mailing list (why not sign up yourself? - his poems are brilliant and thought-provoking and they can brighten up a working Friday in a flash).

I didn't publish it here when it first arrived (even though its timing was so very apt), because it's ©, and I couldn't link to it because it wasn't on Michael's website at the time.

But it is now, so click here to enjoy Wild Geese

Life forms patterns . . .

Hooray! Susan Angebranndt's 2008 letterpress-printed calendar is now available over at the Green Chair Press blog.

A year of patterns and poetry, designed by Susan and printed on a hand-fed (and foot treadled) vintage 1890s platen press. You can buy it here.

Each month features a haiku poem written for the season:

life forms patterns

haphazard and beautiful—

catch them as they fly by