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The moon petals the sea. Rose petals the sea. Stone sea. Stone petals. Rose petals of stone. Stone rising before me. Sea moves. How moves...
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extract from the poem Koi by John Burnside All afternoon we've wandered from the pool to alpine beds and roses ... -
Amazed at the level of interest shown in my recent images of hands and feet, though less so in the question of whether they or the face bes... -
It all depends, you see, how you go about it. And that I cannot tell you, for that will be dictated by you and by you knowing your friends... -
Hello everyone who follows David King (My Father). On behalf of the family this post is to let you know that Dad sadly passed away, peacefu...
Wednesday, 30 June 2010
Tuesday, 29 June 2010
Monday, 28 June 2010
Sunday, 27 June 2010
THE POETRY BUS CHALLENGE
The Poetry Bus Challenge was set this week at that intiruing site Don't Feed the Pixieso. It required an encounter with a sign, road sign or some such, and a response to it involving feelings hard to define.
I actually wrote this poem first in iambic pentameters, but then decided that it might be just the thing for a first experiment with something that had been buzzing around in my skull for some time: a genre all my own - unless you happen to know differently, in which case, bless you, my child or children! Basically it is the graphic novel in written form - and a good bit shorter! Each verse is a translation into written form of one frame. (Yes, I guess it could be thought a trifle ostentatious, but I wasn't going to let that put me off, now was I?) I was only partly correct in thinking it would suit the challenge - hence, for example, the "epilogue" and the difficulty with emotions. Seriously, though, I found it a breath of wind in the old sails, the shift of perspective, and it could be quite interesting to see how far it is possible to go with a purely visual (not to say "graphic") approach.
My thanks to our host and driver for an excellent and very stimulating challenge.
PlayWalking
Two boys - me nine or ten,
Mick early teens -
leaving early in the morning
from a row of seven cottages.
No other habitations to be seen.
They come upon a bird's nest
in bracken by a hedge.
Skylark's! cries Mick triumphantly.
They hide themselves and watch
to see the mother bird's return.
The wait becomes a wait
to see who's using
the dead letter box -
and so the game begins.
They leave their hiding place
and come upon a stile,
beside a way mark arrow
and the words
To Dead Man's Finger.
Mick grins, his finger to his lips.
The next day and the next
they pause beside the stile.
Mick repeats the gesture.
Too far, he says.
I can not pull myself away.
Each evening in the cottage
I draw from my mind's eye
the rock formation: vertical
for climbing to the clouds
or bent and beckoning.
My Aunt inspects my work,
misses the signals in my face
like those from Gran's old-time religion:
excitment, fear and puzzlement?)
Don't be going there!she grumps.
Trudging gloomily the skirts of
empty fields, they reach
another pause... consulting maps,
so obviously lost,
not knowing what to do.
Mick's footsteps lighten
as he points across the field.
A blackened tree beyond the hedge.
Dead Man's Finger, see? he says.
Adds Lightning! with a grin.
Two sticks of charcoal:
thumb and finger
pointing up
beside three stumps
where once a hand would be.
EPILOGUE
A million years and light years later
with the Blitze of London done,
I ask myself who might have thought
to way mark such a thing
away from busy paths -
and why? In war time too!
Late in the day
I'm wondering
if Mick, my cousin,
told me wrong.
I actually wrote this poem first in iambic pentameters, but then decided that it might be just the thing for a first experiment with something that had been buzzing around in my skull for some time: a genre all my own - unless you happen to know differently, in which case, bless you, my child or children! Basically it is the graphic novel in written form - and a good bit shorter! Each verse is a translation into written form of one frame. (Yes, I guess it could be thought a trifle ostentatious, but I wasn't going to let that put me off, now was I?) I was only partly correct in thinking it would suit the challenge - hence, for example, the "epilogue" and the difficulty with emotions. Seriously, though, I found it a breath of wind in the old sails, the shift of perspective, and it could be quite interesting to see how far it is possible to go with a purely visual (not to say "graphic") approach.
My thanks to our host and driver for an excellent and very stimulating challenge.
PlayWalking
Two boys - me nine or ten,
Mick early teens -
leaving early in the morning
from a row of seven cottages.
No other habitations to be seen.
They come upon a bird's nest
in bracken by a hedge.
Skylark's! cries Mick triumphantly.
They hide themselves and watch
to see the mother bird's return.
The wait becomes a wait
to see who's using
the dead letter box -
and so the game begins.
They leave their hiding place
and come upon a stile,
beside a way mark arrow
and the words
To Dead Man's Finger.
Mick grins, his finger to his lips.
The next day and the next
they pause beside the stile.
Mick repeats the gesture.
Too far, he says.
I can not pull myself away.
Each evening in the cottage
I draw from my mind's eye
the rock formation: vertical
for climbing to the clouds
or bent and beckoning.
My Aunt inspects my work,
misses the signals in my face
like those from Gran's old-time religion:
excitment, fear and puzzlement?)
Don't be going there!she grumps.
Trudging gloomily the skirts of
empty fields, they reach
another pause... consulting maps,
so obviously lost,
not knowing what to do.
Mick's footsteps lighten
as he points across the field.
A blackened tree beyond the hedge.
Dead Man's Finger, see? he says.
Adds Lightning! with a grin.
Two sticks of charcoal:
thumb and finger
pointing up
beside three stumps
where once a hand would be.
EPILOGUE
A million years and light years later
with the Blitze of London done,
I ask myself who might have thought
to way mark such a thing
away from busy paths -
and why? In war time too!
Late in the day
I'm wondering
if Mick, my cousin,
told me wrong.
Saturday, 26 June 2010
Friday, 25 June 2010
Thursday, 24 June 2010
The Death of this World.
Not unexpected
after a long illness
memory the first to go -
the seasons for example
forgetting when and how
to organise them
in what order
Doctors make
their diagnoses -
dozens by the day -
ingestion
man-made toxins
multiple regimes
prescription drugs
worsen the condition
For starters
far too many boots
have crunched the scree
too many spades
have plunged in peat bogs
too much
pressure of people
Hills belch pumice
smoke and ash
(they call the patient "ashen")
forests bleach
in turn
lungs turn to concrete
gills on sea beds
grilled to taste
Calderas cough their sputum up
among the clouds
to rivers dark with blood
earth rolls in seeming agony
its gastric gases
poisoning the sky
If you believe in Gaia
you might just think it suicide.
We reach a point
maybe
where checks and balances
that must be made
if we will go on living
simply grow too irksome.
Triggered at some point
vast underground brigades -
invisible dark matter
which give the universe
its heft - transport its energies
along their lines of force.
Clumps
of those same energies -
heat light and sound
their absences -
strange darknesses
and one great silence
the consuming cold
in random distributions
gyrate around each other
cheek to cheek
and arse to arse
their borders tight
as those of warring states
Glaciers boil
whose arms
make rain-soft forests
of the trees now
hung with icicles
a thousand rainbows
fill the skies
yet nowhere there
was any compact made by God.
after a long illness
memory the first to go -
the seasons for example
forgetting when and how
to organise them
in what order
Doctors make
their diagnoses -
dozens by the day -
ingestion
man-made toxins
multiple regimes
prescription drugs
worsen the condition
For starters
far too many boots
have crunched the scree
too many spades
have plunged in peat bogs
too much
pressure of people
Hills belch pumice
smoke and ash
(they call the patient "ashen")
forests bleach
in turn
lungs turn to concrete
gills on sea beds
grilled to taste
Calderas cough their sputum up
among the clouds
to rivers dark with blood
earth rolls in seeming agony
its gastric gases
poisoning the sky
If you believe in Gaia
you might just think it suicide.
We reach a point
maybe
where checks and balances
that must be made
if we will go on living
simply grow too irksome.
Triggered at some point
vast underground brigades -
invisible dark matter
which give the universe
its heft - transport its energies
along their lines of force.
Clumps
of those same energies -
heat light and sound
their absences -
strange darknesses
and one great silence
the consuming cold
in random distributions
gyrate around each other
cheek to cheek
and arse to arse
their borders tight
as those of warring states
Glaciers boil
whose arms
make rain-soft forests
of the trees now
hung with icicles
a thousand rainbows
fill the skies
yet nowhere there
was any compact made by God.
Wednesday, 23 June 2010
Tuesday, 22 June 2010
Monday, 21 June 2010
What the Water Gave Me
Poems by Pascal Petit after Frida Kahlo
For the sake of those of you who have not met them, let me introduce you to the two principals before reviewing the book which has become for the time being my constant companion:-
Frida Kahlo the Mexican painter married to Diego Rivera, also a painter, noted for his murals. Kahlo was born with spina bifida, a lesion of the spine which leaves the nerve fibres exposed. The condition was not diagnosed until she was in her twenties. Before that she contracted polio and then at age eighteen she was involved in a near-fatal traffic accident involving a tram. Her pelvis was smashed and a broken handrail from the tram penetrated her abdomen and uterus. As a consequence of that she had to undergo thirty-plus operations and was condemned to spend the rest of her life in pain and encased in a full body-length steel corset, looking more like a cage or a medieval implement of torture than a surgical garment. It would seem from their tempestuous relationship that she remained deeply in love with Diego despite his frequent womanising, which included a long affair with her own sister. She tried repeatedly to have a child with Diego and suffered several excruciating miscarriages as a result. She once referred to Diego as her other accident.
You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that all her paintings spring from, and are the means chosen for, her attempts to come to terms with the pain and trauma of her life. Art and therapy are as one. Initially I found her work understandable - in that I could see the occasion for them and the motivations driving them - but strange and unsettling nevertheless. However, over a relatively short period of time I have found myself responding to them with a deeper understanding, with, in fact, genuine enthusiasm. (Maybe initially there was some embarrassment on my part for her suffering - I don't know, but I keep it in min d as a possibility. At any rate, for me, this book continues the process of the deepening understanding. Whether or not the way these poems work on me is aided by my knowledge of the facts of Kahlo's life, I am not sure, but if it does it re-opens the eternal question of to what extent is it legitimate for a work of art to depend on some external knowledge. The purist would say not at all. I am tempted to say this - like Kahlo's paintings - is one of the exceptions that proves the rule.
I am - and was from my first introduction to it - entirely in sympathy with Pascal Petit's work. We have something in common, she and I - never mind the quality, feel the coincidence - in that she began as a painter and sculptor, studying at The Royal College of art, before deciding that poetry was her metier. Two of her collections have been short listed for the T.S.Eliot Prize. She was drawn to Kahlo's work whilst still at the Royal College, but had changed course and published three collections before she began to write poems after Kahlo's paintings, by which time they had had several years in which to soak in and do their work. But what to my min d makes her the ideal poet to write from Kahlo's work is the fact of her being such a potent interpreter of and creator of the mythical and so adept at handling images from nature. You could be forgiven for thinking that magic realism was invented for her own private and exclusive use.
But now, before I go any further, a couple of buts which seem to me to apply to this book and may be disappointments for some readers. Firstly, this is a very slight book, small enough to go in to a jacket pocket (which can be an advantage, of course) and some sixty-four pages. It contains fifty-two poems, each of which begins on a new page. The other reservation is that the cover - and title - picture of Kahlo's painting, What the Water Gave Me is the only reproduction provided. Obviously, it would have been ideal to have been given reproductions for all the paintings used, though that might represent an unreasonable suggestion. For my part, I have found it useful to look up paintings on the web, though some there may be who would prefer to read the poems in isolation.
However, things are not a b ad as I make them sound, for What the Water Gave Me is not just the title poem, it is more pivotal than that. There are in the collection, six poems written from this one painting. The first poem in the book is What the Water Gave Me (I) , the last is What the Water Gave Me (VI) and the other four are scattered throughout. (There are other paintings, too, that have more than one poem written from them.)
So what did the water give Kahlo? What can be clearly seen is that the painting is of her legs as they lie in the bath. Her toes stick up out of the water and their reflections point down into it, with, as Kahlo says (in Petit's words), my half-drowned thoughts bobbing around my legs. We see, then, her thoughts as symbols (or tokens, icons, we might say) that recount (and maybe reconstruct?) her life so far: a sea-shell peppered with bullet holes, a discarded dress, her parents, a double volcano, a dead bird impaled on a tree, two flowering cacti, a skeleton, a girl like a broken doll floating in the water, two of her lesbian lovers, a man in a loin cloth holding a rope looped around the broken doll/girl's neck and then around two rocks... is Kahlo the broken doll/girl? Is the man Diego? Is the rope her salvation? Or the reverse? In the distance a ballerina is dancing on the rope where it is stretched taut between the two rocks. We see also The Empire State Buildingsspewing gangrene over my shins (Petit again, of course).
Some of the poems are fairly accurate statements of what is in the picture, others use the painting for lift-off, are parallel creations, verbal equivalents of the image.
Below I give a taste or two of what the poems have to offer, beginning with the last three verses of What the Water Gave Me (V)
The water a poured mirror, its song
rising up the chromatic scale
to create land on the surface.
The currents shiver like shaken glass
splashing my legs with shoals of pigment -
the blue sting, the red ache,
how art works on the pain spectrum.
The next poem I quote in full: Diego and I
Diego the glutton, guzzling monkey brains
and hummingbird hearts,
who, after dinner, releases my hair
as if opening a zoo cage
and out fly my eyes on bat wings.
And
all the nocturnal creatures
that live in my mouth
burrow deep inside me, scuttling
into the slaughterhouse of my body.
The following lines are taken from Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (III)
He is my wizard, my precious son.
Every morning he springs fully formed
from my thighs
to battle with my sickness.
When my painting is done
he hangs himself from my neck
on a garland of thorns.
I am my hummingbird.
And finally, another complete verse: Still Life
The sun and the moon
have shrunk
to the size of an orange
and a pomegranate.
They hover above
my bedside table
daring me to taste them.
Haiku #180
world economies might be
making patients worse.
Polly Toynbee helped me with this one.
Sunday, 20 June 2010
Saturday, 19 June 2010
Friday, 18 June 2010
Thursday, 17 June 2010
Crucifixion
Miraculous, the way
a girl's hem lifts three inches
between home and school
Wednesday, 16 June 2010
Two for the price of one.
his big cigar air-brushed away -
he'd surely feel undressed!
who once improved the Rubens
Lion and the Mouse?
Tuesday, 15 June 2010
Sunday, 13 June 2010
The Etymological Poetry Bus
Recently I have been noting down the spam-slamming code "words" that confront one on some blogs, for some have amused me and the thought arose that with enough to choose from they might naturally fall into a nonsense rhyme of some sort. Then I found that one of two optional challenges set by Revolutionary Revelry for this week's Poetry Bus involved a search for the etymology of one's name and the writing of a poem relating to it. My name, as it happens, derives from Early English and, yes, the cadoodling code words looked and sounded every bit as Anglo Saxon as nonsense - or so I thought. So if you will excuse my (very basic) Anglo Saxon, here is my offering:
Nistram Cyning unmolers his stiessen
in the pheersch heete of the sunne.
Jectigging akrost the skiiy, a skryhork
ovvamann, he phlabbifibbles hisswae
to Trigoch Chlestivvi wharr is Scornordold Horll.
Cyning, fust muddller of linnieaal names,
weel mackhisselv King, as I am King,
for from the Early English Cyning
cummes King - promo
tingim from Tribal Leader
to be krounedd in Scornordold Horll,
wharr is lerkynd to this tyme the menny gosts
of Nistram and his dishprate ckrewe.
I have tried to use only the security "words" I came across and small words, prepositions and the like. I have not been entirely successful in that and have had to raid modern English for "Tribal", for "leader", "Early English" and for "King". "Cyning", of course is the odd one out - it is genuinely Old English. Occasionally I have conflated two shorter "words" to make a longer one.
Tanka
new governments size it up,
ask: Who did this, eh?
Awful job is this, Lady!
But leave it here, I'll fix it!
Friday, 11 June 2010
Thursday, 10 June 2010
Synchronicity
A while back I received an email relating to my Salome post. It was asking did I happen to have any other drawings I could post from the same set. As it happens, I have one or two done at about the same time, though not part of the series to which Salome belonged.
Then came another email saying that the writer had been surfing and had come upon the drawings in question. Furthermore, he had decided that one of the drawings was an illustration to Isaiah. He was not speaking of my blog, but a much older web site which I had thought defunct, not having been able to access it for a few weeks. And indeed, he then went on to say that he seemed no longer able to access it.
The following day I received a third email from another surfer who had hit upon my With Eyes Tight Shut (and here posts and was asking did it ever happen that when I closed my eyes I would see detailed naturalistic images which were not just memories of actual events or objects? Well, yes, as a matter of fact the drawing my previous emailer had thought was an illustration for Isaiah was just such an image seen - very vividly, as it happened - when I had closed my eyes on one occasion. It asked something else, too: do I have any theories about the connection, or lack of connection, between the images we see with our eyes closed and those we see in dreams?
Again, yes, though whether it is enough of a theory to satisfy my friend, I am not sure. I suffer from tinnitus, have done so ever since I went deaf in one ear. The consultant told me it was because the main aural nerve has been destroyed, either by a virus or a blood clot. No signals are reaching that ear, but nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum, so provides spontaneous signals. I guess it might be something similar when we close our eyes, although I realise that it cannot be that simple, as there are no complete images stored in the brain. One part deals with straight lines, another with curves, another with corners and so forth. So there must be some organising influence at work. Whether my "theory" suggests a connection or a lack of connection, I am not sure. The fact that I do sometimes see moving images might help the connection hypothesis.
So, the image above is (was) simply a recreation of a vivid image seen with my eyes closed. I say "was" because my emailing friend has not been the only one to associate it with Isaiah. A Methodist Minister friend once suggested that it would make an excellent illustration for Isaiah 3 16-26 which is concerned with the wanton luxury of women, which I found difficult to follow, for there is no wanton luxury attaching to the figures in my drawing. Doreen (my wife) does not like this image because she saw such images during a traumatic period of hallucinations caused by bacterial meningitis.
The image below is one from my (rather crude and naive) anti-war period.
Wednesday, 9 June 2010
Tuesday, 8 June 2010
Monday, 7 June 2010
Sunday, 6 June 2010
The Poetry Bus
We were let off lightly this week, The Weaver of Grass being the driver and setting a general topic, our contributions to fall under the general heading of Flora and/or fauna. No excuses then? I turned to a recent memory - tranquility recollected in tranquility, you might say.
The Swans of Abbotsbury
Even clumping together
cloud-forming, there's grace
in their movement -
its movement - no sound
except one
flapping sheets on a line
as, startled, they take to the skies.
Dull ponderous sound
for something so thrilling,
and seeming much lighter
than air.
The grace of their movement -
its movement - is fractal.
A beauty of one.
It divides, subdivides
splits away once again
balletic and perfect
the music sustained.
Infinity must
live somewhere close by -
maybe in the lagoon
or mansion or house on the moon.
Haiku #167
Best title ever?
"Decreasing Infinity" -
Balbir Singh's new ballet
NewVenture
A new venture for me, that is. I have had a story accepted for publication in the on-line magazine Beat to a Pulp. This is entirely thanks to David Cranmer who invited me to contribute and to whom I am massively grateful. The story is called Collision, is in verse form and is - I hope you will agree - Sci-Fi. The link to
Collision is here.
The Swans of Abbotsbury
Even clumping together
cloud-forming, there's grace
in their movement -
its movement - no sound
except one
flapping sheets on a line
as, startled, they take to the skies.
Dull ponderous sound
for something so thrilling,
and seeming much lighter
than air.
The grace of their movement -
its movement - is fractal.
A beauty of one.
It divides, subdivides
splits away once again
balletic and perfect
the music sustained.
Infinity must
live somewhere close by -
maybe in the lagoon
or mansion or house on the moon.
Best title ever?
"Decreasing Infinity" -
Balbir Singh's new ballet
NewVenture
A new venture for me, that is. I have had a story accepted for publication in the on-line magazine Beat to a Pulp. This is entirely thanks to David Cranmer who invited me to contribute and to whom I am massively grateful. The story is called Collision, is in verse form and is - I hope you will agree - Sci-Fi. The link to
Collision is here.
Saturday, 5 June 2010
Friday, 4 June 2010
Thursday, 3 June 2010
The Flowers of Evil - Les Fleurs du Mal
Baudelaire has been called "the founder of modern poetry". No less a person than T.S.Eliot said of him that, "Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language, for his verse and language is the nearest thing to a complete renovation that we have experienced. But his renovation of an attitude towards life is no less radical and no less important."
On that analysis Baudelaire is the giver both of a new sort of poetry and a new life - perhaps I could say a new life form, one that has come to be termed modern. Certainly in his domestic arrangements he showed a clear break from the past. His predecessors, Victor Hugo and William Wordsworth, to take just two examples, had presented themselves - and therefore the figure of the poet - as something akin to today's authors and artists, men whose views on public matters might be sought and trusted. That could never have been so for Baudelaire, who struggled to make ends meet, consorted with prostitutes and other undesirables, was often on the run from creditors or the worse for alcohol.
So what was it that took him to the forefront of modern poetry? The answer to that question is what will put off many - indeed, has put off many - who will not follow to see where it leads.. The truth is that we are talking about the banal as subject matter - and not just the banal, the disgusting. The dregs of society, the worst degradations of the modern world were given a poetic function that they had never had before. What had been regarded as the very antithesis of poetry was what typified the modern world to him and was therefore not to be excluded from its literature. So he could praise his beloved's saliva as easily as her eyes or her ruby (Poison), and he could suggest that we are apt to become as wedded to our feelings of remorse as beggars are to their lice. (To the Reader) Many will find his images harsh and discordant, grating on their sensibilities. They were meant to. They are intended as models for dealing with the modern world's cacophonous and inchoate experiences.
Poison
Wine knows how to adorn the most sordid hovel
With marvellous luxury
And make more than one fabulous portal appear
In the gold of its red mist
Like a sun setting in a cloudy sky.
Opium magnifies that which is limitless,
Lengthens the unlimited,
Makes time deeper, hollows out voluptuousness,
And with dark, gloomy pleasures
Fills the soul beyond its capacity.
All that is not equal to the poison which flows
From your eyes, from your green eyes,
Lakes where my soul trembles and sees its evil side...
My dreams come in multitude
To slake their thirst in those bitter gulfs.
All that is not equal to the awful wonder
Of your biting saliva,
Charged with madness, that plunges my remorseless soul
Into oblivion
And rolls it in a swoon to the shores of death.
and from: Preface
Envy, sin, avarice & error
These are friends we know already —
Feeding them sentiment and regret
I'd hoped they'd vanish.
But wrongs are stubborn
We have our records
and tho it can be struggled with
There's no soft way to a dollar.
On the bedroom's pillows
The leisure senses unravel.
It's too hard to be unwilling
When there's so little to amuse.
The devil twists the strings on which we jerk!
Objects and asses continue to attract us.
Each day it's closer to the end
Without butter on our sufferings' amends.
Like some poor short-dicked scum
Biting and kissing the scarred breast
Of a whore who'd as soon
Drive nails through his nuts
We breath death into our skulls
Afraid to let it go.
Not entirely disconnected from the above is the fact that Baudelaire was first and foremost a poet of the city. He took as his subject the life of the large cities with its flux and flow, the shallow and transitory nature of its relationships, the lives lived among daily strangers. It is a floating, subterranean world of ne'er do wells and the down-trodden, but it is not a descriptive exercise, he does not glory in the muck and evil. Indeed, there is a section called Parisian Scenes which does b begin with a descriptive passage, though not one such as my remarks above may have led you to expect.
This from Spleen from Parisian Scenes
'M like some king in whose corrupted veins
Flows agèd blood; who rules a land of rains;
Who, young in years, is old in all distress;
Who flees good counsel to find weariness
Among his dogs and playthings, who is stirred
Neither by hunting-hound nor hunting-bird;
Whose weary face emotion moves no more
E'en when his people die before his door.
His favourite Jester's most fantastic wile
Upon that sick, cruel face can raise no smile;
The courtly dames, to whom all kings are good,
Can lighten this young skeleton's dull mood
No more with shameless toilets. In his gloom
Even his lilied bed becomes a tomb.
The sage who takes his gold essays in vain
To purge away the old corrupted strain,
His baths of blood, that in the days of old
The Romans used when their hot blood grew cold,
Will never warm this dead man's bloodless pains,
For green Lethean water fills his veins.
And this from Dusk:
Meanwhile, corrupting demons of the air
Slowly wake up like men of great affairs.
And, flying, bump our shutters and our eaves.
Against the glimmerings teased by the breeze
Old Prostitution blazes in the streets;
She opens out her nest-of-ants retreat;
Everywhere she clears the secret routes,
A stealthy force preparing for a coup;
She moves within this city made of mud,
A worm who steals from man his daily food.
One hears the hissing kitchens close at hand,
The playhouse screech, the blaring of the band.
The tables at the inns where gamesmen sport
Are full of swindlers, sluts and all their sort.
Robbers who show no pity to their prey
Get ready for their nightly work-a-day
Of cracking safes and deftly forcing doors,
To live a few days more and dress their whores.
One of the great strengths of Baudelaire's poetry lies in the confrontations that the narrator of the poems has with the evil and sinister denizens of the city, confrontations in which he struggles to find meaning or to uncover the mysteries surrounding them. He sees them rushing like lemmings to their own destruction, yet with such "morbid gaiety" that he is left wondering whether he should not be envying them.
Already hinted at above, is another aspect of Baudelaire's modernity - his rejection of the sentimental, both in theme and image.
There is, though, an aspect that would seem to rule him out as being wholly modern: his use of - even apparent fondness for - the devil.
Truly the Devil pulls on all our strings!
and from To the Reader:
On evil's pillow lies the alchemist,
Satan Thrice-Great, who lulls our captive soul,
And all the richest metal of our will
Is vaporized by his hermetic arts.
Baudelaire said: "Everyone feels the Devil, but no one believes in him. Baudelaire was a Catholic, but an unusual one, to say the least. He seems to have considered the Devil to be some kind of force that influences us to do things against our will. In this he is close to Freud with his Unconscious or Id which impels the conscious to do what, left to its own devices, it would reject as unacceptable. Baudelaire did, though, also write about the great attraction of sex being the absolute certainty it gives that one is doing evil.
There is one oddity, perhaps worth mentioning, about this collection: Baudelaire's first title for it was The Lesbians. There were 149 poems in the first addition. Another 14 were added in the third. Of the 149 only three could be said to fit a general title of the Lesbians. One of these is in fact called Lesbos, the other two Condemned Women: Delphine and Hippolyta. No more were included in the extras added to the third edition. So why would he have thought to use them as a title for the whole collection? It is not believed that he wrote others which he then chose not to include, though it could possibly be that he had intended to write more, but then did not do so. The only theory I have heard raised which I have found at all convincing was that he found it easier to raise certain issues of general applicability under the cover of a group who were generally regarded as living outside the mores of society as a whole.
Finally, one that is a great favourite of mine:
The Soul of Wine
One night, the soul of wine was singing in the flask:
"O man, dear disinherited! to you I sing
This song full of light and of brotherhood
From my prison of glass with its scarlet wax seals.
I know the cost in pain, in sweat,
And in burning sunlight on the blazing hillside,
Of creating my life, of giving me a soul:
I shall not be ungrateful or malevolent,
For I feel a boundless joy when I flow
Down the throat of a man worn out by his labour;
His warm breast is a pleasant tomb
Where I'm much happier than in my cold cellar.
Do you hear the choruses resounding on Sunday
And the hopes that warble in my fluttering breast?
With sleeves rolled up, elbows on the table,
You will glorify me and be content;
I shall light up the eyes of your enraptured wife,
And give back to your son his strength and his colour;
I shall be for that frail athlete of life
The oil that hardens a wrestler's muscles.
Vegetal ambrosia, precious grain scattered
By the eternal Sower, I shall descend in you
So that from our love there will be born poetry,
Which will spring up toward God like a rare flower!"
And if all this has sounded vaguely familiar, it may be because I have posted on The Flowers of Evil before (2008), though in rather different terms I think. I may even not yet be finished with Baudelaire, though I have no thoughts about any more flowers of evil.
On that analysis Baudelaire is the giver both of a new sort of poetry and a new life - perhaps I could say a new life form, one that has come to be termed modern. Certainly in his domestic arrangements he showed a clear break from the past. His predecessors, Victor Hugo and William Wordsworth, to take just two examples, had presented themselves - and therefore the figure of the poet - as something akin to today's authors and artists, men whose views on public matters might be sought and trusted. That could never have been so for Baudelaire, who struggled to make ends meet, consorted with prostitutes and other undesirables, was often on the run from creditors or the worse for alcohol.
So what was it that took him to the forefront of modern poetry? The answer to that question is what will put off many - indeed, has put off many - who will not follow to see where it leads.. The truth is that we are talking about the banal as subject matter - and not just the banal, the disgusting. The dregs of society, the worst degradations of the modern world were given a poetic function that they had never had before. What had been regarded as the very antithesis of poetry was what typified the modern world to him and was therefore not to be excluded from its literature. So he could praise his beloved's saliva as easily as her eyes or her ruby (Poison), and he could suggest that we are apt to become as wedded to our feelings of remorse as beggars are to their lice. (To the Reader) Many will find his images harsh and discordant, grating on their sensibilities. They were meant to. They are intended as models for dealing with the modern world's cacophonous and inchoate experiences.
Poison
Wine knows how to adorn the most sordid hovel
With marvellous luxury
And make more than one fabulous portal appear
In the gold of its red mist
Like a sun setting in a cloudy sky.
Opium magnifies that which is limitless,
Lengthens the unlimited,
Makes time deeper, hollows out voluptuousness,
And with dark, gloomy pleasures
Fills the soul beyond its capacity.
All that is not equal to the poison which flows
From your eyes, from your green eyes,
Lakes where my soul trembles and sees its evil side...
My dreams come in multitude
To slake their thirst in those bitter gulfs.
All that is not equal to the awful wonder
Of your biting saliva,
Charged with madness, that plunges my remorseless soul
Into oblivion
And rolls it in a swoon to the shores of death.
and from: Preface
Envy, sin, avarice & error
These are friends we know already —
Feeding them sentiment and regret
I'd hoped they'd vanish.
But wrongs are stubborn
We have our records
and tho it can be struggled with
There's no soft way to a dollar.
On the bedroom's pillows
The leisure senses unravel.
It's too hard to be unwilling
When there's so little to amuse.
The devil twists the strings on which we jerk!
Objects and asses continue to attract us.
Each day it's closer to the end
Without butter on our sufferings' amends.
Like some poor short-dicked scum
Biting and kissing the scarred breast
Of a whore who'd as soon
Drive nails through his nuts
We breath death into our skulls
Afraid to let it go.
Not entirely disconnected from the above is the fact that Baudelaire was first and foremost a poet of the city. He took as his subject the life of the large cities with its flux and flow, the shallow and transitory nature of its relationships, the lives lived among daily strangers. It is a floating, subterranean world of ne'er do wells and the down-trodden, but it is not a descriptive exercise, he does not glory in the muck and evil. Indeed, there is a section called Parisian Scenes which does b begin with a descriptive passage, though not one such as my remarks above may have led you to expect.
This from Spleen from Parisian Scenes
'M like some king in whose corrupted veins
Flows agèd blood; who rules a land of rains;
Who, young in years, is old in all distress;
Who flees good counsel to find weariness
Among his dogs and playthings, who is stirred
Neither by hunting-hound nor hunting-bird;
Whose weary face emotion moves no more
E'en when his people die before his door.
His favourite Jester's most fantastic wile
Upon that sick, cruel face can raise no smile;
The courtly dames, to whom all kings are good,
Can lighten this young skeleton's dull mood
No more with shameless toilets. In his gloom
Even his lilied bed becomes a tomb.
The sage who takes his gold essays in vain
To purge away the old corrupted strain,
His baths of blood, that in the days of old
The Romans used when their hot blood grew cold,
Will never warm this dead man's bloodless pains,
For green Lethean water fills his veins.
And this from Dusk:
Meanwhile, corrupting demons of the air
Slowly wake up like men of great affairs.
And, flying, bump our shutters and our eaves.
Against the glimmerings teased by the breeze
Old Prostitution blazes in the streets;
She opens out her nest-of-ants retreat;
Everywhere she clears the secret routes,
A stealthy force preparing for a coup;
She moves within this city made of mud,
A worm who steals from man his daily food.
One hears the hissing kitchens close at hand,
The playhouse screech, the blaring of the band.
The tables at the inns where gamesmen sport
Are full of swindlers, sluts and all their sort.
Robbers who show no pity to their prey
Get ready for their nightly work-a-day
Of cracking safes and deftly forcing doors,
To live a few days more and dress their whores.
One of the great strengths of Baudelaire's poetry lies in the confrontations that the narrator of the poems has with the evil and sinister denizens of the city, confrontations in which he struggles to find meaning or to uncover the mysteries surrounding them. He sees them rushing like lemmings to their own destruction, yet with such "morbid gaiety" that he is left wondering whether he should not be envying them.
Already hinted at above, is another aspect of Baudelaire's modernity - his rejection of the sentimental, both in theme and image.
There is, though, an aspect that would seem to rule him out as being wholly modern: his use of - even apparent fondness for - the devil.
Truly the Devil pulls on all our strings!
and from To the Reader:
On evil's pillow lies the alchemist,
Satan Thrice-Great, who lulls our captive soul,
And all the richest metal of our will
Is vaporized by his hermetic arts.
Baudelaire said: "Everyone feels the Devil, but no one believes in him. Baudelaire was a Catholic, but an unusual one, to say the least. He seems to have considered the Devil to be some kind of force that influences us to do things against our will. In this he is close to Freud with his Unconscious or Id which impels the conscious to do what, left to its own devices, it would reject as unacceptable. Baudelaire did, though, also write about the great attraction of sex being the absolute certainty it gives that one is doing evil.
There is one oddity, perhaps worth mentioning, about this collection: Baudelaire's first title for it was The Lesbians. There were 149 poems in the first addition. Another 14 were added in the third. Of the 149 only three could be said to fit a general title of the Lesbians. One of these is in fact called Lesbos, the other two Condemned Women: Delphine and Hippolyta. No more were included in the extras added to the third edition. So why would he have thought to use them as a title for the whole collection? It is not believed that he wrote others which he then chose not to include, though it could possibly be that he had intended to write more, but then did not do so. The only theory I have heard raised which I have found at all convincing was that he found it easier to raise certain issues of general applicability under the cover of a group who were generally regarded as living outside the mores of society as a whole.
Finally, one that is a great favourite of mine:
The Soul of Wine
One night, the soul of wine was singing in the flask:
"O man, dear disinherited! to you I sing
This song full of light and of brotherhood
From my prison of glass with its scarlet wax seals.
I know the cost in pain, in sweat,
And in burning sunlight on the blazing hillside,
Of creating my life, of giving me a soul:
I shall not be ungrateful or malevolent,
For I feel a boundless joy when I flow
Down the throat of a man worn out by his labour;
His warm breast is a pleasant tomb
Where I'm much happier than in my cold cellar.
Do you hear the choruses resounding on Sunday
And the hopes that warble in my fluttering breast?
With sleeves rolled up, elbows on the table,
You will glorify me and be content;
I shall light up the eyes of your enraptured wife,
And give back to your son his strength and his colour;
I shall be for that frail athlete of life
The oil that hardens a wrestler's muscles.
Vegetal ambrosia, precious grain scattered
By the eternal Sower, I shall descend in you
So that from our love there will be born poetry,
Which will spring up toward God like a rare flower!"
And if all this has sounded vaguely familiar, it may be because I have posted on The Flowers of Evil before (2008), though in rather different terms I think. I may even not yet be finished with Baudelaire, though I have no thoughts about any more flowers of evil.
Wednesday, 2 June 2010
Tuesday, 1 June 2010
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